American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity

by Appy, Christian G.

  Phillip Gibbs was a twenty-one-year-old junior at Jackson State, married with an eleven-month-old son. Growing up in the small town of Ripley, Mississippi, Gibbs was among the first to integrate Renfrow’s Café, the public swimming pool, and the Dixie Theatre. But at Jackson State, Gibbs had not been involved in political activism. On the night of May 14, he dropped off a friend at Alexander Hall just before the midnight curfew and encountered the crowd of students jeering the blue-helmeted state troopers. When the troopers began shooting, Gibbs tried to run. He was hit in the face and killed.

  James Green was a high school student who ran track and worked almost every night from four to ten providing curb service for people stopping at a small grocery store called the Wag-A-Bag. When James was five his father had died of a stroke and James helped support an extended family of fourteen people, all of them crammed into a three-room shotgun house near Jackson State College. Late at night, when his job was done he would cut across campus to go home. On May 14 he was walking home through a park across the street from Alexander Hall. When the shooting began, some of the patrolmen fired into the park. James Green was shot in the chest and killed.

  A delegation of civil rights activists, congressmen, and reporters flew in from Washington, DC, to attend Green’s funeral. Senator Edmund Muskie from Maine, then considered the top presidential prospect for the Democrats, was among them: “From the facts at hand today,” he said, “we seem to have yet another example of black lives not being valued.”

  After the funeral, Green’s stepfather went back to his job at a grocery wholesaler, where he had received high praise for his seven years of work. His white foreman asked, “Matt, was that your stepson that got killed?”

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “You must feel pretty big with all those senators and reporters coming to the house.”

  “No, I feel like just regular people.”

  Later that day, Green’s stepfather was fired without explanation.

  The Jackson State killings were quickly relegated to the status of historical footnote. And the killing of three Latinos that summer has received even less attention. Those shootings came in the aftermath of a Chicano antiwar demonstration in East Los Angeles on August 29, 1970. The rally was organized by the National Chicano Moratorium Against the Vietnam War, a group that led dozens of Latino antiwar protests in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The only Time magazine article about the moratorium came under the headline “Los Angeles: The Chicano Riot.”

  “It was supposed to be a quiet rally of Mexican Americans against the war in Viet Nam,” the article began, “but it ended in violence and tragedy.” Time attributed the violence to a new and growing “hostile spirit” among “angry Mexican Americans.” The police are presented as blameless peacekeepers responding to rampaging rioters. Only one death is mentioned and no responsibility is assigned. Time says the police simply found a dead body in the Silver Dollar Café. It was Ruben Salazar, “a militant journalist.”

  Salazar was, in fact, one of the most distinguished Latino journalists in the nation, and the only one writing for a major U.S. newspaper. He had been a reporter for the Los Angeles Times since 1959, went to Vietnam in the mid-’60s to cover the war, and then was made bureau chief in Mexico City before coming back in 1969 to L.A., where he wrote a column for the Times while serving as a news director for a Spanish-language television station. He covered the growing Chicano labor, civil rights, and peace movements, and had just published some articles on police brutality in Latino neighborhoods of L.A. The city’s police chief had complained to the L.A. Times about Salazar’s articles and even sent two officers to warn Salazar about the “impact” of his work on “the minds of barrio people.” The night before the antiwar demonstration, Salazar told march organizers that his sources indicated that the police and FBI provocateurs were planning to incite violence.

  The three-mile march was large and peaceful. As many as thirty thousand people participated. One demonstrator’s sign read “Murdered in Vietnam, Murdered at Home! Ya Basta! [Enough Is Enough!].” Another read “Traiga a mis carnales ahora [Bring my brothers home now].” Another: “A mi me dieron una medalla y $10,000 por mi único hijo [They gave me a medal and $10,000 for my only son].”

  When the marchers arrived at Laguna Park (now named Ruben Salazar Park), about ten thousand remained to hear speeches and musical performances. There was a family atmosphere as people of all ages gathered around the stage. Participants remember the moment as festive, jubilant, and peaceful. Then, they recall, they were attacked by police. It was, from their perspective, a “police riot.” After authorities received reports that some beer had been stolen from a nearby liquor store and taken over to the park, scores of police and county sheriff’s deputies marched into the park. A group of march organizers approached the cops and were immediately clubbed. Then the police began firing tear gas. A helicopter soon hovered overhead and dropped more gas. Some of the crowd fought back with anything they could get their hands on—sticks, cans, bottles, rocks.

  The police eventually drove everyone out of the park. Most were forced onto Whittier Boulevard. Enraged, some began to trash and burn. A liquor store theft had been used as a pretext for a massive show of police force that then produced a full-scale riot. Hundreds of people were arrested and dozens injured. Two Chicanos died in the melee—Angel Díaz and Lynn Ward.

  Ruben Salazar had been covering the event. In late afternoon, he went to recover and have a beer at the Silver Dollar, blocks away from most of the turmoil. Sheriff’s deputies suddenly arrived at the tavern, claiming they had received a report of an armed man inside. Before allowing patrons to leave, a deputy fired a tear gas projectile directly through an open door of the crowded tavern. The weapon used was not a typical tear gas gun that shot cardboard-encased canisters, but a high-velocity gun that fired a ten-inch torpedo-shaped metal projectile with fins and a point designed to pierce through doors or walls to flush out barricaded suspects. The projectile struck Salazar in the temple and penetrated his skull. The deputy claimed it was an accident, that he had not targeted Salazar. Many in the community, then and now, believe he was assassinated. In any case, the police did not immediately search the bar. After clearing the bar of patrons, they sealed it for three hours. Only then did they go inside and find Salazar’s corpse.

  President Nixon read the daily news accounts of home front strife as if they were dispatches from a war zone; for him, domestic turmoil was equivalent to war. He divided the nation between those who supported him and those who were his domestic “enemies.” And at the top of his list were those most vehemently opposed to the war in Vietnam. He often told aides that his presidency depended on crushing his enemies—not just defeating them politically, but destroying their influence, smearing their reputations, locking them up if possible, and threatening worse. And from the start of his presidency in 1969, Nixon used the agencies of government, often illegally, to attack them. Wiretaps, tax audits, smear campaigns, spying, infiltration, provocation, threats, intimidation, and a bottomless bag of dirty tricks were employed. This was the real beginning of Watergate, not the 1972 break-in at Democratic headquarters. That election-year crime and cover-up were only the tail end of a three-year abuse of power.

  As the FBI, CIA, and White House operatives waged their secret war against dissenters, Nixon also understood the value of presenting a softer public face. Amid the turmoil of May 1970 he pushed his men to go forward with a plan to create a large Fourth of July pageant of patriotism to be called Honor America Day. Two of the official sponsors were comedian Bob Hope and evangelical preacher Billy Graham, but most of the direction and supervision came from the White House. As Jeb Magruder later wrote, “To us, it was a political event, one in which honoring America was closely intertwined with supporting Richard Nixon, and in particular with supporting his policy in Vietnam.”

  Bob Hope and Billy Graham were particularly important polit
ical assets for Nixon. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s both men were enormously popular and widely regarded as essentially nonpartisan icons of Americanism. By the late 1960s, however, many people—especially young antiwar activists—viewed Hope and Graham as narrow, conservative mouthpieces for Nixon and the establishment.

  With good reason. Bob Hope was particularly close friends with Spiro Agnew and Ohio governor James Rhodes. The wealthy comedian even paid his staff of eight writers to churn out jokes for the vice president. “We hate writing for a repressive reactionary like Agnew,” one of the writers told a journalist, “but when you work for Hope these days, that’s part of the job.” Hope was also a staunch defender of Nixon’s Vietnam policies. “If we ever let the Communists win this war,” he told the press, “we are in great danger of fighting for the rest of our lives and losing a million kids, not just the 40,000 we’ve already lost.”

  Billy Graham was a frequent guest at the White House. On May 28, 1970, Graham returned the favor, inviting Nixon to appear with him at an enormous revival meeting in the University of Tennessee’s football stadium. Nixon accepted, hoping to prove that he could go to a college campus in the wake of nationwide student strikes. The conservative, evangelical crowd guaranteed a positive reception, but even they could not drown out a contingent of protesters who chanted “Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!” after Nixon said that America was the “greatest nation in the world” that had “made progress as a nation under God.”

  On the Fourth of July, 1970, Graham and Hope presided over Honor America Day. Graham led a prayer service at the Lincoln Memorial and Hope hosted the evening’s entertainment, televised by CBS. Though the entire event had been planned by the White House to build support for Nixon’s war policies, the controversial war was never mentioned explicitly. The plan was to support the president and his war by rallying around the flag. It was an evening of patriotic anthems, provided by a lineup that included Jack Benny, Dinah Shore, Dorothy Lamour, the New Christie Minstrels, the Young Americans, the CenturyMen, Glen Campbell, and Jeannie C. Riley singing Merle Haggard’s “The Fightin’ Side of Me.” The song takes on critics who are “Harpin’ on the wars we fight / An’ gripin’ ’bout the way things oughta be.”

  When they’re running down my country, man

  They’re walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me

  Yeah, walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me

  Runnin’ down the way of life

  Our fightin’ men have fought and died to keep

  If you don’t love it, leave it

  The last line had already become a well-known bumper sticker: “America—Love It or Leave It.” A surprising number of Americans were doing just what the slogan suggested. More than fifty thousand left the country because of their opposition to the Vietnam War. Many were draft evaders and military deserters, but about half were women.

  Bob Hope shared the “love it or leave it” position, but his craving for national appeal often curbed his most partisan impulses. His popularity remained enormous and rested to a large degree on his annual Christmas tours to entertain U.S. troops at foreign posts. Sponsored by the United Service Organizations (USO), Hope began these trips during World War II and made them an annual ritual in the 1950s. Starting in 1965, CBS began offering a ninety-minute TV special every January with highlights of the Christmas tour. From 1965 to 1973, the Bob Hope Christmas Special was always among the year’s most widely viewed TV specials. The image of Hope hamming it up in front of huge crowds of GIs in Vietnam became one of the era’s most indelible collective memories.

  There he was, with his famous ski-slope nose, jutting jaw, and leering smile as he sauntered onto the stage twirling a golf club, so casual and confident he looked like he was strolling into his own backyard, his cockiness immediately softened by a stream of self-mocking jokes about his cowardice. Wearing ever more outlandish military jackets covered with patches, stripes, and insignia, he appeared with Les Brown and His Band of Renown and a troupe of female singers, dancers, actresses, starlets, go-go dancers, and beauty pageant winners.

  Even as Hope became increasingly identified as a pro-Nixon establishment figure, the shows themselves did not lose their appeal. The 1970 show was watched by 46.6 percent of American households, slightly higher than the percentage tuned in to the Beatles’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

  Most GIs loved Hope’s shows because he told genuinely funny jokes about the war, because the performers displayed obvious affection for the troops, and because it was an opportunity to see sexy stars like Ann-Margret, Joey Heatherton, and Raquel Welch. Home front viewers had the double pleasure of watching an entertaining show and seeing GIs laugh and cheer (a great contrast to the troubling images of GIs in body bags or GIs burning down Vietnamese homes).

  The shows also contained many jokes that poked fun at official claims about the war. Hope and his writers understood that their topical humor would fail if it didn’t acknowledge some of the ways the GIs’ day-to-day experience of the war was laughably contrary to government press releases. Hope’s jokes never insulted the powerful enough to jeopardize his coveted place on presidential invitation lists, but they were more subversive than might be expected from the host of Honor America Day.

  On his first visit to Vietnam in 1964, at a time when the government still denied direct American participation in combat, Hope came onto the stage at Bien Hoa and shouted out, “Hello, advisers!” The troops roared with laughter and applause, thrilled that Hope had immediately skewered the phony euphemism. He also made fun of the American-backed government in Saigon, which had been replaced by one military coup after another. “I know quite a bit about Vietnam,” Hope said. “For instance, it’s a very democratic country [some derisive laughter]. It really is. Everyone gets to be president! [big laughs and applause]”

  A year later, Hope addressed twelve thousand troops in Saigon. Setup: “I’m happy to be here. I understand everything’s great, the situation’s improved, in fact things couldn’t be better [loud jeering].” Punch line: “Well who am I gonna believe—you, or Huntley and Brinkley [the NBC news anchors]?” No one appreciated the dark humor of “progress” better than GIs.

  Hope also scored easy laughs at the expense of draft-card burners and protesters. “Hey, can you imagine those peaceniks back home burning their draft cards? Why don’t they come over here and Charlie’ll burn ’em for ’em.” But he got just as many laughs with jokes that assumed nobody wanted to be in Vietnam. “Miniskirts are bigger than ever,” one joke began. “Even some of the fellas are wearing ’em. Don’t laugh. If you’d thought of it, you wouldn’t be here.” Or: “I don’t know what you guys did to get here, but let that be a lesson to you.”

  Hope ended many of his TV specials with a tribute to the soldiers and some pro-war propaganda. To close the 1965 show, he showed footage of American soldiers handing out gifts to Vietnamese kids (“That’s the story of our country—giving. Let’s face it, we’re the Big Daddy of this world”). And then he reassured viewers that the troops were fully committed to the war: “They’re not about to give up because they know if they walked out of this bamboo obstacle course it would be like saying to the Commies, come and get it.”

  That was for home front consumption. In front of the troops, he generally avoided mouthing the official line. One time, in 1969, he tried it and was booed. In Lai Khe, Hope told troops that President Nixon had personally assured him he had a plan to bring peace to Vietnam. It may have sounded like a setup for a joke, but he was serious. The boos poured in. “They were the coldest, most unresponsive audience my show had ever played to,” Hope later recalled. “They didn’t laugh at anything . . . I just couldn’t get through to them.”

  It was a wake-up call for the sixty-three-year-old comedian, who had been slow to recognize the disillusionment of American soldiers. By 1968, many GIs in his audiences flashed the peace sign, but Hope stubbornly insisted that the sign
meant V for victory.

  TV viewers did not see the booing soldiers at Lai Khe. And when Hope starting telling marijuana jokes in 1970, NBC censored those as well, despite their getting the loudest laughs of the tour. Before fifteen thousand soldiers, Hope asked: “Is it true that you guys are interested in gardening? The security guards said you are growing your own grass.” Then the joke that got the biggest cheers and laughs: “Instead of taking [marijuana] away from the soldiers, they ought to give it to the negotiators in Paris.” Hope was finally acknowledging that almost everyone, including the troops, wanted the war to end. On his 1971 trip, in the midst of a downpour in Da Nang, he opened with this: “I want to ask you one thing: How long does it have to rain before they call off this war, huh?”

  Hope’s Vietnam shows were the culture’s best attempt to make the nation’s most divisive war look like World War II. But in the end, none of the gags could reunite the nation or make it forget the war’s cruelty and deceit, failure and shame. Yet Hope’s yearly homage to U.S. troops was forward-looking in one respect. It anticipated a powerful post-Vietnam impulse to cultivate national unity around controversial and divisive foreign policies by honoring the service and sacrifice of American troops. Hope said, in effect, whatever you think of the war, everyone should thank our soldiers. Of course, then and since, the injunction to “support the troops” has often been used as a club to dampen antiwar dissent. American presidents have routinely said, or implied, that public opposition demoralizes the troops and emboldens their enemies.