by Larry Berman
The Kitty Hawk’s commander, Captain Marland Townsend, had assumed command on June 5, 1972, and his executive officer (XO), Commander Benjamin Cloud, had been aboard since August 11, 1972. The Kitty Hawk resembled the Great White Fleet of times past.16 Of the 348 officers, only 5 were black, including XO Cloud. Of the 4,135 enlisted men, 297 were black (7.2 percent); none of the 219 officers in the Air Wing were black. “White crewmen worked in glamorous jobs such as aircraft maintenance, intelligence, and communications while blacks toiled mainly on the mess deck.”17 Moreover, by design and agreement, blacks and whites lived in segregated quarters, creating safe havens, but also institutionalized ghettos.18
The extension of deployment meant that there was no time for traditional liberty in Hong Kong or Japan. The only available location was Olongapo at Subic Bay, Philippines. Olongapo was a town of whorehouses, cheap bars, and tattoo parlors divided into a black zone, “the jungle,” and a white zone, “the strip.” Olongapo had a midnight curfew, strictly enforced by Philippine authorities. On October 10, 1972, the Kitty Hawk’s final evening in Subic Bay Naval Base before departing for the Tonkin Gulf, a fight broke out at a local bar that was hosting “soul night” for black sailors from the Kitty Hawk. There had been a series of minor fights between blacks and whites all evening, culminating in a brawl that required the marine riot squad to stop it. Several sailors from the Kitty Hawk were seen running back to their ship in order to avoid being arrested, arriving just before the midnight curfew.
The next day, Kitty Hawk resumed air operations against North Vietnam while also initiating an investigation into possible misconduct charges for what had transpired onshore the night before. A black sailor summoned for questioning brought nine other black enlisted men with him for support. The tagalong group was belligerent, leading the investigator to ban them from sitting in on the questioning. The sailor was read his rights, refused to make a statement, and was excused. Tensions from the night before continued to build between black and white sailors, and by nine fifteen that evening a group of black sailors had assaulted a white messman.
The group of nine had grown to over fifty and had assembled on the afterdeck, one of the two enlisted dining areas. The chief master at arms called for the ship’s sixty-man marine detachment reaction force, whose onboard responsibilities usually involved guarding nuclear weapons, the brig, and other high-security areas. Captain Townsend had been asleep in his cabin when he received a call about a potential mutiny. “My main concern was the airplanes on the flight deck and the airplanes on the hangar deck. I put out the word to the master-at-arms to get out there and make sure we had people protecting the airplanes.”19 He then left the bridge to see for himself what was happening, hoping that his presence might help calm things down. Tensions ran high between the all-white marines and the group of black sailors. Commander Ben Cloud, who was of African American and Native American descent, tried defusing the situation, telling the sailors to go about their business and stop trying to make more trouble.
The group released by Commander Cloud from the mess deck returned via the hangar deck. The marines had been instructed to break up and disperse any group of three or more sailors who appeared on the aircraft decks. The marine guard was trained in riot control procedures. The group of black sailors refused to disperse, and the marines sought to contain them. The blacks began taunting the marines, raising their fists, overturning tables, and arming themselves with makeshift weapons. When a few blacks were handcuffed, all hell broke loose. Arming themselves with aircraft tie-down chains, black sailors marauded about the ship attacking whites, pulling many sleeping sailors from their berths and beating them with fists, chains, dogging wrenches, metal pipes, fire extinguisher nozzles, and broom handles. Many were heard shouting, “Kill the son-of-a-bitch! Kill the white trash! Kill, kill, kill! They are killing our brothers.” The ship’s dispensary was the scene of intense activity, the doctors and corpsmen working on the injured personnel. Alarmingly, another group of blacks attacked the dispensary.20
Cloud heard one sailor cry out, “They got the captain. They killed the captain. Oh my God.”21 Thinking that Captain Townsend was dead or wounded, Cloud made a shipwide announcement declaring an emergency, beseeching his “black brothers” to assemble at the mess deck. Marines were ordered to the forecastle. “I ask you, I implore you, I order you to stop what you are doing. All black brothers proceed immediately to the after mess deck. . . . This is an emergency.”22
Townsend was not dead, but he was also not on the bridge, the place he should have been. Instead, he was with injured sailors in the infirmary. The captain did not understand why his executive officer was taking over the ship. He also did not want the marines to leave their areas. Townsend then also made a shipwide announcement, reporting that he was alive and that he was countermanding Cloud’s previous order. “Cool it, everyone. Break up peacefully and proceed back to your spaces. The Marines will not use any weapons and will leave you alone. There will be no weapons used unless I call for it on this box. Those of you who have grievances I will meet with you right now on the forecastle. The rest of you, I want you to cool it. Knock off this senseless behavior before more of your shipmates are seriously injured. I know everybody is hot under the collar. I know you are disappointed about not going home as planned. So am I, but we’ve got to live with it, so cool it.” Townsend later said, “Attica was always in the back of my mind. I did not want to ignite the situation any further by ordering a violent overthrow of the riot.”23
When Townsend finally found Cloud in the ship’s damage-control central, he said, “If anybody ever writes a book about this, this is going to be the most fucked up chapter.”24 Indeed, the conflict in command between Cloud and Townsend emboldened those bent on hurting people.25 There were scores to settle for blacks against whites, but by now the white sailors were organizing themselves for retaliation against blacks. As Townsend’s message was being broadcast, Cloud observed black sailors “indiscriminately beating all whites they encountered in passageways and berthing.’26 Cloud soon encountered an angry mob of about 150 men intent on tearing the ship apart. They threatened to throw him overboard because he was not a real brother. Someone yelled out, “Kill, kill, kill the motherfucker.”27 Cloud believed that had he not been black, the mob would have killed him. Invoking the words of Martin Luther King and Gandhi, Cloud offered the black-power salute: “If you follow the practices of a Gandhi, and of Martin Luther King, Jr., you can live tomorrow and the next day in pride and respect, but if you continue to use the tactics that you are using here tonight, the only thing that you can guarantee is your death.” Tearing off his shirt and grabbing a steel pipe, Cloud said that any man who doubted his sincerity could beat him. “If anyone in this crowd does not believe my sincerity, I hold this weapon and bare my back for you to take this weapon and beat me into submission right here.”28 The crowd went silent and began chanting, “He is a brother! Let’s do it your way.” Cloud returned another black-power salute. The sailors began throwing their makeshift weapons overboard and dispersed.
Meanwhile, Townsend had to deal with another war—air strikes against North Vietnam scheduled for the next morning. If the ship went to general quarters, the strikes would have to be canceled. He made the command decision not to go to GQ so that air operations could resume against North Vietnam the next morning.
On the same morning that air strikes resumed, Admiral Clarey, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet (CINCPACFLT), stationed in Hawaii, called Bud to bring him up to speed on the Kitty Hawk. “You know that is the ship that we have a black XO on.”29 Clarey had been on the ship two weeks earlier and had seen no signs of trouble. His impression was that Cloud was “a really capable young man.” Clarey thought that “the Marines sent in to restore order overdid it—that’s too bad.” Bud wondered why the racial tensions were getting more play than the war itself, saying, “It had been a bad week and I was very concerned about effects of long deployments.”30
With order restored on the Kitty Hawk, Bud expected to devote attention to the war effort. Yet the biggest test lay just ahead, aboard the USS Constellation. “Connie was sort of a floating testimonial to the more occasional pertinence of Murphy’s law: everything that can go wrong, probably will.”31
The sixty-thousand-ton aircraft carrier Constellation had been deployed to Southeast Asia six times between May 1964 and June 1972, averaging almost nine months per cruise. She had been involved in the early Rolling Thunder bombing of North Vietnam and interdiction attacks in Laos, and in 1972 she joined the carriers at Yankee Station responding to the Easter Offensive.32 In July, the Connie returned to San Diego for a two-month major overhaul, including a turnover of 1,300 people in a crew of 5,000. Repair work on the Connie was expedited so that she could return to the Seventh Fleet for the war effort.
By early October, the Connie was out for maneuvers and refresher training under the command of Captain J. D. Ward. Upon returning to port, the crew heard rumors about what had transpired on the Kitty Hawk. On the evening of October 17, five days after the riots aboard the Kitty Hawk, a group of approximately fifty black sailors on the Connie met in the barbershop area to support “the cause of their brothers on the Kitty Hawk.”33 The next day, a larger group met in the “sidewalk café,” a safe haven on ships for black sailors, where sounds of Marvin Gaye and Motown filled the air. The sidewalk café doubled as a place for organizing and electing representatives under the new human resources system Bud had put in place for identifying examples of discrimination aboard ship. At this particular meeting, a long list of grievances was assembled, including allegations of biased quarterly marks in comparison to whites, assignments that were considered discriminatory, unequal general discharges, and unjust mast punishments (penalties ordered by officers without a court-martial) for blacks. When the meeting ended, a small group of black sailors, without any provocation, attacked a white cook and broke his jaw.34
Captain Ward’s primary concern was not for perceptions of discrimination, but rather for training the air wing and maintaining a training schedule for Pacific Fleet rotations. The Connie returned to sea for maneuvers. His staff did not respond in a timely manner to the list of grievances. However, nothing in American naval history compared to what happened in San Diego during the first two weeks of November 1972.35 On November 3, a group of 50 young black sailors staged a sit-in on the forward deck of the Connie and then reassembled at the after-mess deck. The group soon increased to 130, with 10 whites joining the majority of blacks demanding to see the commanding officer. Captain Ward refused to meet with the group because night air operations were in progress. He would not leave the bridge for a meeting at the mess deck; instead, the captain said that representatives of the group were welcome to visit him at the bridge.
Two representatives carrying a list of their demands came to meet Ward. They also issued a threat. “If the Captain don’t come down, his ship isn’t going to be together much longer.”36 Others threatened “a blood bath worse than the Kitty Hawk.”37 The captain reiterated that he could not leave the deck, but said he was open to discussing all grievances. The representatives returned to the mess deck and told the larger group that Ward would not talk with them on the mess deck. Ward sent off a message to Admiral Clarey advising that a “cadre of blacks were working very hard to create a confrontation or racial incident and that twelve apparent ringleaders had been identified.”38 Fearing for the safety of his ship and his ability to conduct operations, Ward decided that the best strategy was to get the dissidents removed from the Connie. As they headed back to San Diego, the captain took special precautions, ordering his security detail to guard equipment from sabotage.
The Connie returned to San Diego early on the morning of November 4. The dissident group again presented Captain Ward with a petition, this one signed by eighty-two sailors, “from the oppressed people of this command, who after constant attempts to resolve our problems, request an immediate conference with the commanding officer.”39 Ward rejected the advice of NAVAIRSYSCOM (Naval Air Systems Command of the Pacific) that the group remain on board. He formed a shore detail and had the dissidents removed and moved into barracks at North Island Naval Air Station, where they now had access to the media, NAACP lawyers, and members of the congressional black caucus. This beach detachment was made up of 132 persons, 120 blacks and 12 whites. Most of those in the beach detachment were nonrated seamen; few had more than a high school education, and “most fell into the category III or IV of the AFQT.”40 More than two dozen had prior offenses. Also joining the group were senior supervisory personnel and members of the Human Resources Council (HRC).
With the dissenters on shore duty, the Connie returned to sea. What Ward had not anticipated was that, once the dissidents had been put ashore, the media would jump on the story as “a symbol for the Navy’s racial problems.”41 Three thousand miles away, tensions in Washington were running high. Ward’s primary concern had been to continue shipboard operations; he removed the sailors because he feared for the safety of his ship.42 A flurry of top-secret exchanges among Bud and Secretary of the Navy John Warner in Washington and Admiral Clarey in the Pacific focused on devising a strategy for getting the situation cleared up fairly and quickly.43 Warner and Zumwalt feared that the incident could affect the November 7 presidential election, in which President Nixon appeared to have an insurmountable lead over George McGovern.
Bud saw the Kitty Hawk and Constellation incidents as symptoms of the unevenness with which the navy had implemented “enlightened leadership” in race relations. This issue was best enunciated in a letter Bud received that week from Rear Admiral Draper L. Kauffman, commandant of the Ninth Naval District. Draper addressed the lack of understanding that “ ‘we,’ the white power structure of the navy, have for the problems, the beliefs, the aspirations of ‘them,’ the young blacks in the Navy. . . . One thing it took me a long time to understand is that race relations are vastly more important to the black sailor than to the white Admiral.”44
Bud shared Draper’s perspective but also realized that making the wrong move could jeopardize the navy’s progress on the race front over the past two years. “I had to make my judgment in the light of my responsibility to the entire Navy, a responsibility that obligated me to find a way of combining the maintenance of discipline with the maintenance of progress in racial matters.”45 Bud thought Captain Ward was not part of the enlightened leadership program. “The picture back here is that he is operationally sound, the problem I think is he is a person who has not discovered the race problem and doesn’t understand the depth and he has overlooked the human relations concern. There is some indication before the ship sailed there was some unrest.”46
Bud wanted the sailors returned to the ship. He did not think the men should have been put ashore, and he felt it was essential they return quickly. He also thought there was little to be gained from taking a hard stance in getting them back, especially because they were involved in a nonviolent sit-in protest. To that end, he was willing to promise to create small focus groups to look into grievances and make recommendations for improving the situation aboard the Connie. He also promised to drop all charges. The only condition was that the sailors return to the ship. They were given one day to decide.
The problem was that the majority of dissenters had hardened their positions. They did not want to return unless their conditions were met. By this time, the NAACP was actively involved, demanding that the protesters have outside counsel. Captain Ward did not want a blanket amnesty under which all of the dissenters could come back to his ship; instead, he offered to interview each one of them to decide who was safe to allow back. This was rejected by the beach detachment. Ward then offered a compromise—he would allow any man who wanted to return to do so; those who did not return would receive a discharge or transfer to another ship. He also agreed to have each general discharge reviewed by an independent body.
Captain Ward soon received final instructio
ns from Bud and Tom Moorer. They said he should meet with the protesters and present a final offer, giving them all twenty-four-hour liberty with orders that they must then return to the ship or be considered unauthorized absentees. Ward was advised to separate the sailors from the newsmen and lawyers and address them at the pier. He should review the steps being taken to resolve their grievances and urge them to return following liberty. Failure to return would mean they were absent without leave, and by violating repeated orders to return, they would also be in violation of direct orders. Ward went to the pier to carry out his instructions. When he asked for a show of hands on who was planning to return to the ship, in a photo broadcast worldwide, the sailors of the Connie raised clenched fists in a black power salute of protest. In interviews with the media shown on the evening news, sailors quoted Z-66 and demanded that their rights be honored by the navy.
This television and media coverage infuriated Nixon, partly because it was detracting from his election victory but also because he was old-school navy, believing that all orders needed to be obeyed and that no coddling or negotiating with dissenters could be tolerated. Nixon instructed Henry Kissinger to tell Bud that his commander in chief wanted the Constellation protesters to receive immediate dishonorable discharges, an order that Bud knew was in violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ)—the military law of the land.
In a November 8 telephone conversation with Admiral Clarey, Bud said, “I like this better because it avoids the public appearance of a mutiny.” Bud thought that Ward had handled this situation appropriately: “That permits the CO to say we have these discussions and made every effort to understand each other, we think we have the best possible insight into what is being done on the ship, what the circumstances are, we understand your problems better, this ends the period of discussions, you are all free to go on liberty which will expire at 0700 tomorrow morning onboard ship and we expect to see you there. They do not have to put it in the form of a threat. They can stress that there will be no disciplinary action for the fact that the people have gotten together up until this point.”47
