by Gerard Colby
During the presidential campaign, Kennedy would try to awaken Euro-Americans to the plight of Native Americans, but the smugness of middle America was hard to shake. To a sullen audience at Purdue University, he tried to explain what Indian children faced on a reservation, “where suicide is the most frequent form of death among adolescents.” Reporter Jack Newfield saw him later on the campaign plane, sitting “alone by the window for a half hour, tears in the corner of his eyes, the familiar ravaged look on his face, unapproachable.”5
If Lyndon Johnson was troubled by having such a sensitive rival, so, too, was one of his strongest supporters on Vietnam, Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Nelson also had felt Bobby Kennedy’s sting. Migrant laborers—whether Indians, African Americans, or Mexican Americans—were one of Kennedy’s special concerns. The orchards of Rockefeller’s New York were no more spared Kennedy’s senatorial investigations than were the vineyards of Governor Ronald Reagan’s California.
Rockefeller did not appreciate Kennedy’s calling for a state investigation of health conditions at migrant labor camps. Reagan had even less use for Kennedy’s urging labor leaders to unionize migrant farmworkers.
Kennedy supported Cesar Chavez’s striking grape pickers and sponsored legislation to grant migrant farmworkers collective bargaining rights. This struck at the foundation of the cheap-labor code of agribusinesses.
If all this were not bad enough for business, Martin Luther King, Jr., had begun to see wealth and poverty as being interrelated phenomena rather than separate, contradictory ones. His projected Poor People’s March to Washington struck terror in the hearts of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his admiring superior, President Johnson. King was speaking about hypocrisy in the United States, including the goals and methods of the Vietnam War, exactly when the Johnson White House was suffering from a growing “credibility gap.”
Still, Nelson Rockefeller was reluctant to take on Johnson. For one thing, he was still licking his wounds from 1964. Rockefeller also feared appearing “soft” on Vietnam, especially after his stalking horse candidate, Governor George Romney, was brutalized by the press for suggesting after a tour to Vietnam that he had been “brainwashed” by the Pentagon.
Besides, Nelson genuinely liked Lyndon Johnson. Nelson and Happy often visited the president and Lady Bird at their West Texas ranch on the Perdernales River. It seemed a strange match between an old-wealth Manhattan sophisticate and a nouveau riche cowboy.
But that difference missed the essential point of agreement: Both were glad-handing politicians, who, beneath it all, had never given up their New Deal belief that government could make a positive difference in society and advance private enterprise, including big business, at the same time. They were just what the conservative right wings of their respective parties called them: corporate liberals. For those who understood the historic role of foreign economic policy in promoting the prosperity that passed for domestic reform, there was no mystery to corporate liberals like Rockefeller and Johnson accepting dictatorship in Latin America as easily as a war against communist nationalists in Vietnam.
With Nelson vacillating and Kennedy still unannounced, only one man seemed certain about his future: Richard M. Nixon.
THE RETURN OF RICHARD NIXON
High above New York’s Fifth Avenue, in an apartment just a few floors beneath Nelson Rockefeller’s luxurious three-story penthouse, Richard Nixon was making a decision about 1968. He had been carefully laying the foundation for this campaign ever since he moved to New York in 1963 to join the Mudge, Rose law firm. He had become involved with a new financial group, organized around the mutual funds and railroad fortune of Alan and Fred Kirby of Texas and their allies, including Donald Kendall, head of PepsiCo. Nixon was now on the boards of six companies, where he rubbed shoulders for the first time with the Eastern Establishment in its own lair.
Even though he had lost his races for the presidency in 1960 and California’s governorship in 1962, Nixon continued to play the loyal Republican. Even during the 1964 Goldwater debacle, he traveled the rubber-chicken circuit, boosting local candidates and collecting IOUs in the process. He did the same in 1966. Now he was ready.
So were a large number of Republican moneymen.
Nixon’s globe-trotting in the Kendalls’ jet on behalf of PepsiCo’s international sales expansion and his success in promoting Pepsi franchises—including those in Saigon and Bangkok—earned him high marks on Wall Street and a regular six-figure income. It also convinced many business leaders that Nixon was a suitable safe alternative to the besieged Lyndon Johnson.
Nixon was not only a political alternative to Johnson; he was also a means of escape from the scandals and indiscretions surrounding Johnson. Foremost was the famous Bobby Baker scandal, which had erupted during the Kennedy administration when Attorney General Robert Kennedy conducted a bribery investigation against Johnson’s former Senate aide. Baker’s ties to land-development schemes involving Texas oil moneymen surfaced during the investigation. In October 1963, the U.S. Senate began holding hearings on the scandal. Some of the same Texans had been named in Senate Rules Committee hearings in connection with payoffs and loans to Baker in a land-development scheme tied to Jimmy Hoffa’s Teamster Pension Fund. Johnson had cause to worry that his name would be smeared, and he was not the only one. Years later, it was revealed that one of the Texas real estate firms active in the Dallas–Fort Worth area in 1963—a firm that was partly owned by the family of Bedford Wynne, one of the named “Bobby Baker set”—had a second controlling interest: the Rockefeller family. Through Rockefeller Center, Inc., the Manhattan real estate firm now owned by Nelson and his brothers, the Rockefellers had become partners with the Wynne family in the Great Southwest Corporation.6
Should Robert Kennedy run for president and be elected, there was the likelihood of renewed federal investigations of organized crime and of Baker and those linked to him. Who knew where this could lead? Lyndon Johnson, his power wrecked on the shoals of Vietnam, could not protect his friends or even himself.
The movement of conservative Texas money toward Richard Nixon took on the appearance of a stampede. Some leading figures, like Governor John Connally, eventually would follow the herd right out of the Democratic party.
Of great importance to Nixon was the backing of Barry Goldwater, rendered publicly as early as 1965. This backing brought in Christian Fundamentalists and the money behind Fundamentalism. Both the new money and the old money had a symbolic center in Billy Graham. Graham’s ministry, in turn, offered Nixon a mass base of conservative, middle-of-the-road voters.
In January 1968, Richard Nixon decided to move beyond his preoccupation with courting the Goldwater ultraconservative wing and to begin capturing the moderately conservative center by inviting Billy Graham to his Florida home. Nixon asked for Graham’s help in deciding whether to run. Graham had known Nixon since the 1950s. They were golfing buddies. Both were hawkish on Vietnam, although Nixon hoped that those who were tired of the war would support him over Johnson. An endorsement from Billy Graham, a registered conservative Democrat, would be a hard blow to Johnson.
Graham prayed, and Nixon joined in. Graham read the Bible, and Nixon read it, too. They watched football. But still no word from Graham about the race. Finally, as Graham prepared to depart, Nixon’s patience ran out.
“You still haven’t told me what I ought to do,” he said.
Graham turned back, a smile on his face. “Well, if you don’t run, you’ll always wonder,” he said.7
Nixon had no intention of wondering. With Graham’s support, God would appear to be on his side.
A thousand miles to the north, Robert Kennedy’s mind was also on Nixon and Johnson. He had decided to enter the race. But when North Korea suddenly seized the U.S.S. Pueblo and its crew during an electronic spying mission off the Korean coast, Kennedy thought it could only benefit Johnson: A wave of sympathy for the crew and patriotic fervor would overwhelm any efforts to launch a challenge to the pr
esident.
A week later, suppressing his anguish, he announced that he “would not oppose Lyndon Johnson under any foreseeable circumstances.”
That same night, as Kennedy slept, coffins were being unearthed in Saigon’s cemeteries and guns were being taken out and distributed. Throughout Vietnam, the scene was being repeated. The Tet Offensive, which would dramatically change the course of the war and throw Robert Kennedy back into the fray, was about to begin.
TET
The New Year’s firecrackers kept SILers awake. Radê tribesmen living nearby had warned the American missionaries that they had better leave Banmethuot. Rumors about a big attack during Tet had been circulating for weeks, and far to the north, the village of Khe Sanh was already overrun by North Vietnamese troops.
But the Fundamentalist missionaries at Banmethuot were unmoved. “Don’t you know we are immortal until our work is done?” one wrote her children. Another, nurse Betty Olsen, told a journalist, “I have no fear because I am in the will of God.”8
The Saigon military regime had built an army base just behind the Christian and Missionary Alliance compound nearby, and on the northern outskirts of Banmethuot the U.S. Military Command had established bases for Green Berets and the 155th Helicopter Company. SIL’s Hank Blood felt safe.
In the middle of the night, the Christian and Missionary Alliance compound was caught in a crossfire between Saigon’s troops and guerrilla forces of the communist-led National Liberation Front (NLF). Four missionaries were killed; several were wounded; and two, Hank Blood and Betty Olsen, were taken prisoner by the NLF, along with an AID official.* Only the AID officer would survive the long march north through the jungle.
At the Bible translation center at Kontum, SIL missionaries fared better. Twelve fled in U.S. helicopters while a C-47 “dragon” spewed down a hailstorm of bullets to cover their escape. The fighting between the Americans and their Vietnamese enemy was often at close range. “The Americans cranked their big guns down to zero and aimed them point bank at the waves of shrieking soldiers,” one evangelical wrote, as if reporting a scene out of the American West. “The missionaries inside the bunkers could clearly hear the screams of the wounded and dying.”9 When, after two days and nights of fighting, the attack ended with 960 Vietnamese bodies counted by the Americans, the missionaries sang hymns.
In Saigon, a group of NLF guerrillas tried to storm Diem’s National Palace, demanding “Open the Gates! We are the Liberation Army!” But the palace, perhaps because of the ever-present possibility of coups, was prepared for attackers. The assault failed.
But the attack on “Bunker’s Bunker,” the fortified new six-story white U.S. Embassy, was more effective. Blasting a hole through the nine-foot-high wall surrounding the embassy compound, nineteen guerrillas charged toward the main chancery building. A marine guard managed to slam and bolt the building’s giant Thai teak doors just in time.
By early morning, General Westmoreland’s MPs had stormed the embassy grounds and overwhelmed the attackers. Shortly afterward, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker arrived with reporters and joined in Westmoreland’s declaration of victory. But to the reporters and the world that saw their photographs, the attack on the embassy had shattered the illusion of U.S. invulnerability. For millions, the picture of Premier Ky’s power broker and National Police director, General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, coldbloodedly executing an NLF suspect with a gunshot to the head shattered the carefully orchestrated image of the Saigon regime as a guardian of democracy, due process, and human rights. The regime’s worth in American blood plummeted in U.S. opinion polls. For above it all was the stark fact that more than a hundred cities and villages throughout South Vietnam had been struck at once, and with the obvious sympathy, if not collaboration, of a sizable proportion of the Vietnamese population.
For the next four months, the attacks would continue, with two major offensives, including one enormous one in May, proving that Westmoreland’s gleeful claims about an exhausted enemy were really wishful thinking. Instead, the destruction that accompanied the American counterattack, the killing of thousands of civilians caught in the cross fires, bombings, and assassinations by both sides, appalled the American people and undermined their confidence that this war could be won, or that it was even worth winning. A young American major’s Orwellian doublethink explanation for the U.S. destruction of Ben Tri, a major commercial center in the Mekong Delta, with napalm and 5,000-pound bombs, seemed to sum up where it was all leading to: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”
If the genocidal nature of the war was not clear yet to the American public, it was to the Vietnamese civilians of My Lai hamlet. The frightened GIs of Charlie Company had already learned to despise the Vietnamese with racist slurs like “gook” when they were given orders to massacre civilians. It took less than two hours, but when it was over, 347 men, women, and children, including babies, were dead. Although news of the massacre would not leak out for another year, the moral force of the American intervention had been fatally wounded. From then on, its symbol would not be the GI with candy for kids, but My Lai and the assassins of CIA’s Operation Phoenix.
The Tet Offensive proved the folly of General Westmoreland’s insistence that the real battle would be at Khe Sanh, that the mounting conflicts in the cities were only a planned diversion from the long-anticipated invasion from the north. In fact, the real diversion was in such highland strongholds as Khe Sanh. British General Robert T. Thompson, the antiguerrilla expert who had masterminded the successful British counterinsurgency campaign in Malaysia, warned just that: “These battles within the cities are the decisive ones, and the larger scale battles which have, and are, being fought in the Annamite Mountains chain are the diversion.” To Thompson, the U.S. tendency to believe that Tet was a desperate “go for broke” tactic demonstrated “a complete lack of understanding of the war and the stage it has now reached.”10
By allowing Westmoreland to withdraw troops from the countryside at Khe Sanh’s rear, Johnson and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had opened the door to the NLF’s reemergence in the villages, where the CIA’s own arrests, assassinations, and installation of collaborators in official posts inadvertently had identified Saigon’s network of supporters.
The NLF now struck back, executing collaborators and destroying the social infrastructure of the CIA’s pacification program. Johnson’s obsession with the highlands as the barrier to the war’s being brought to the cities ironically had ensured that the final staging ground would, in fact, be the cities. Trapped by their own Cold War ideology into thinking that they were fighting a proxy Soviet and Chinese foreign invasion of Vietnam, Johnson, Walt Rostow, and the Joint Chiefs could not admit they were deeply involved in a civil war in Vietnam.
General Thompson, on the other hand, was not confused; he, as President Kennedy had said before him, knew that the regime in Saigon could not be saved if it did not gain popular support. And popular support could not be gained by U.S. military escalation. That was why Kennedy had begun the withdrawal of U.S. Marines just before his death. “Now obviously withdrawal means losing,” Thompson explained, “but massive escalation equally means losing.… If you escalate massively, it would mean that the rest of the world would want to have very little to do with you as a people. And I think that, quite possibly, the United States as a result of all this would have lost its soul and would tear itself apart.”11
Even SIL’s Asia director, Richard Pittman, was unnerved by Tet: “The devastation of our center is like a scene of judgment day,” he wrote Cam from Kontum.
But his faith was not shaken. The Hand of God was in evidence even in body counts. The low number of SIL casualties seemed to indicate that God’s thumb was on the scales of justice.
Reassuring Cam that all SIL teams had moved “near American military facilities,” Pittman was “happy to say that morale is high.”12
In Washington, however, it was more difficult to see the Lord at work in anything in Vietnam. The Nor
th Vietnamese siege of Khe Sanh had not yet been broken, and despite massive bombings of North-Vietnam, General Giap’s buildup around Khe Sanh had not been hindered. If anything, “on balance, North Vietnam’s a stronger military power today than before the bombing began,” aide Townsend Hoopes reported to the new defense secretary, Clark Clifford. In the south, meanwhile, the Americans now had lost much of the countryside to the NLF.
“Johnson can’t get away with saying it [Tet] is really a victory for us,” Robert Kennedy said in a speech. “The Viet Cong … have demonstrated despite all our reports of progress … that half a million American soldiers with 700,000 Vietnamese allies, with total command of the air [and] sea, backed by huge resources and the most modern weapons, are unable to secure even a single city from the attack of an enemy whose total strength is about 250,000.”
Then Kennedy struck the chords of the past, echoing his dead brother:
We have misconceived the nature of the war.… We have sought to resolve by military might a conflict whose issue depends upon the will and conviction of the South Vietnamese people.… This misconception rests on a second illusion—the illusion that we can win a war which the South Vietnamese cannot win for themselves.… Government corruption [in Saigon] is the source of the enemy’s strength.… The third illusion is that the unswerving pursuit of military victory, whatever its cost, is in the interest of either ourselves or the people of Vietnam.… Their tiny land has been devastated by a weight of bombs and shells greater than Nazi Germany knew.… More than 2 million South Vietnamese are now homeless refugees.… Whatever the outcome of these battles, it is the people we seek to defend who are the great losers. The fourth illusion is that the American national interest is identical with—or should be subordinated to—the selfish interest of an incompetent military regime.… The fifth illusion is that this war can be settled in our own way and in our own time on our own terms.
