the peers inquiry had a specific mandate: not to establish guilt and innocence in the alleged massacre at My Lai on March 16, 1968, but to determine whether a cover-up had occurred following it. Lieutenant General Peers’s instructions were explicit: “The scope of your investigation does not include … ongoing criminal investigations in progress.”1 To do this, Peers headed a large investigating team, consisting of personnel from the army joined by two attorneys from law firms in New York: Robert MacCrate, a senior partner in Sullivan and Cromwell, and Jerome Walsh, associate special counsel for the commission and a partner in his own firm.
The army’s Criminal Investigation Division, or CID, would continue the work it had begun the previous August, meaning that together the two inquiries would attempt to answer parallel questions. CID would investigate whether a massacre had occurred, and the Peers commission whether it was followed by a conspiracy of silence. Peers intended to present the inquiry’s findings in March 1970; CID aimed for a few months after that.
Despite its instructions, the Peers panel soon realized the impossibility of assessing the reports and investigations with any eye toward a cover-up without examining all parts of the Task Force Barker operation in Son My Village. Testimonies began in the Pentagon on December 2, 1969, but soon expanded to include almost two weeks of on-site investigations and interrogations in Son My of Vietnamese civilians and military officials as well as U.S. military and civilian personnel, followed by another round of questioning in Washington that resulted in the interrogation of more than four hundred witnesses (some appearing more than once). The targeted completion date was March 7, 1970—about a week before the expiration of the two-year statute of limitations on military crimes on March 15. The investigative team also explored possible atrocities in three other subhamlets of Tu Cung—Binh Tay, Binh Dong, and Trung Hoa—and in three other hamlets of Son My Village: Co Luy, My Lai, and My Khe.2
Even if the Peers commission had had authorization to gather information aimed at criminal prosecutions, its discoveries would not have guaranteed court-martial proceedings for everyone accused. The Pentagon insisted that former servicemen were not subject to military tribunals for alleged crimes committed while in uniform. But this claim was not entirely accurate, according to an argument made on the same day the panel began work. The army’s lead counsel, Robert Jordan, sent a memo to the U.S. attorney general’s office, asserting that former soldiers were in fact subject to courts martial for alleged crimes committed while in the service. The problem, Jordan explained years afterward to Deborah Nelson, quoted in Nick Turse’s book, was that such action could come only from a White House directive. “We would have needed the president’s support to proceed, and the president of [the] United States didn’t support prosecution of Vietnam War crimes.”3
The reasons behind Nixon’s stance on this issue became evident from his reaction to My Lai over the Thanksgiving holidays. On November 27, he invited Alexander Butterfield, a White House assistant who was also the architect of the taping system that would later play a large part in Nixon’s resignation, to accompany him to his Key Biscayne retreat in Florida to discuss strategy. Nixon had a yellow legal pad with three pages of notes outlining his plan to minimize the impact of My Lai on his Vietnam policy.
Essentially, the president sought to undermine the credibility of those who had called it a massacre. “Check out the Claremont man,” he declared, referring to Ronald Ridenhour, now a student at Claremont Men’s College in California. Wasn’t he Jewish and a liberal? In fact, Nixon added, according to quotations in Bob Woodward’s book on Butterfield, who supplied them, “Check out talkers”—those publicly criticizing what happened at My Lai. What about Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes? “He’s far left.” “The Army photographer” (Haeberle) who had sold his pictures to Life magazine and the Cleveland Plain Dealer? “How much?” His parents, thought Nixon, were “Cleveland peaceniks.” Meadlo was “too smooth for a farmer.” The Pentagon was “too scared” to investigate this matter, which left it to the White House. Nixon wanted his domestic adviser, John Ehrlichman, to head this effort.4
Nixon then called for congressional support, according to Woodward’s book. “We need some ammo in the hands of some Senators… . We need a big senator—a gut fighter—a stand up senator.” Perhaps drawing from his own experience uncovering communists while on the House Un-American Activities Committee, the president wanted “some congressman who could dig into this one on a personal basis. We can feed info to them.” Expose the backgrounds of everyone involved. “Discredit witnesses, discredit Time and Life for using this. Get right-wingers with us.”5
Butterfield took careful notes on this session and marked them “Top Secret.”6
On the plane back to Washington on November 30, Nixon revealed himself, as Butterfield told Woodward, as “a Calley advocate.” “I think this fellow Calley,” the president asserted, according to Butterfield, is “probably a good soldier” who might be “getting a bum rap.” This “Goddamn what’s his name”—Ridenhour—had told his story to Seymour Hersh. “We ought to get someone on that guy. What is that guy? Learn more about him.” The president added that Ehrlichman would handle this situation. “John’s got people that can get on this guy’s tail. Tell Ehrlichman, I want the guy tailed. I want to know everything about him, tail him, put a tail on him.”7
Butterfield told Ehrlichman what the president wanted, and he agreed to “take care of it.”8
A week or so before Christmas, Butterfield informed the president that Ehrlichman had sent someone posing as a journalist to interview Ridenhour and show that he and Hersh were “the apparent driving force behind the non-government release of alleged massacre information.” Ridenhour considered Hersh, Butterfield told the president, a “no-good son of a bitch” who had left the mistaken impression that he was a “government official” and then inflated Ridenhour’s conversations with My Lai participants into exhaustive interviews and made a financial profit. Butterfield recommended connecting a “good lawyer” with him to exploit his “bitter feeling” toward Hersh.9
Butterfield further told the president that Hersh was a leftist, antiwar reporter who had worked as press secretary for Eugene McCarthy’s presidential antiwar campaign in 1968 and had later secured a thousand-dollar grant to write the “My Lai story.” The money came from the Edgar B. Stern Family Fund, which was “clearly left-wing and anti-Administration.”10
On the day before the Peers commission began work, Nixon ignored the information he had on My Lai and instructed Haldeman to set up a secret “Task Force–My Lai” to undermine the efforts by the press to show that a massacre had taken place. At one point he groused about the negative publicity and declared, according to Robert Dallek and other writers, “It’s those dirty rotten Jews from New York who are behind it.” The makeup of the task force demonstrated its importance to the White House: Vice President Spiro Agnew, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, White House Press Secretary Herb Klein, speechwriter Patrick Buchanan, and Franklyn Nofziger, a congressional liaison and chief propagandist for the administration. Their responsibility, the president made clear to Haldeman, was “to control the whole problem” by “dirty tricks” at “not too high a level.” Among those measures he suggested were to “discredit one witness” (Thompson) and highlight the atrocities committed by the Viet Cong at Hué. The administration’s friends in Congress might help—perhaps “a Sen[ator] or two.”11
Rather than a senator, the president turned to the chair of the House Armed Service Committee, Mendel Rivers, who as noted earlier was a hawkish supporter of the war and an outspoken skeptic of the massacre charges. Just days earlier, Rivers had launched a full committee investigation into the My Lai case. Nofziger met with Rivers soon after the White House meeting to urge him to “vocally” support the president in all policies and “attack those who attacked him.”12
Nixon’s chief concern, of course, was that the news stories about a mass killing would further increase the opposition to America’s involvement in Vietnam and undermine his program of phased withdrawal. In early September 1969, Laird had sent the president a plan to “Vietnamize the war” by withdrawing half of the American troops over the next forty-two months while leaving the remaining 267,500 forces there as long as the enemy threat persisted. The press, he complained, virtually ignored the Viet Cong’s terrorist methods in focusing on such alleged events as My Lai.13
The president opposed the recommendation offered by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, his domestic affairs adviser, to appoint a special commission to investigate the My Lai incident. But in early December, the pressure to do something grew when Senators John Stennis of Mississippi and Margaret Chase Smith of Maine informed the White House of their joint recommendation to the president to appoint a special commission on the My Lai atrocities. They feared that congressional involvement in the affair, as they wrote in a memo to Nixon, was “rapidly leading toward a number of garish and overlapping investigations” that would interfere with the soldiers’ right to a fair trial. Furthermore, they believed that the news media was “turning the entire affair into a Roman circus.”14
Nixon nonetheless agreed with Kissinger: no commission was necessary if the issue remained only My Lai. It would be another matter if news of another incident arose. Indeed, Kissinger had recently received a report of another atrocity and referred to it in a memo to the president. A former infantryman (not identified) claimed he “witnessed many civilians shot down like clay pigeons” in the Chu Lai area—at least “sixty dead bodies—women, children and maybe a few old and decrepit men.” He and others in his platoon had seen at least one hundred villagers shot in the rice paddies, including “women taken for intercourse and then shot.” The Defense Department could not substantiate this report, but Laird expected more allegations “by individuals of various motives.”15
At a televised news conference on December 8, Nixon announced that he would not consider a civilian commission to investigate My Lai unless the military’s judicial process did not “prove to be adequate in bringing this incident completely before the public.”16
“What appears was certainly a massacre,” he assured the press in the same news conference, “and under no circumstances was it justified… . We cannot ever condone or use atrocities against civilians.” However, he also called the My Lai massacre an “isolated incident” that did not reflect national policy and could obscure the good achieved by Americans in the war. “That is why I am going to do everything I possibly can to see that all of the facts in this incident are brought to light and that those who are charged, if they are found guilty, are punished.”17
In the meantime, the president’s secret My Lai task force would seek to sabotage that judicial process by undermining the credibility of all those making the massacre charges. With Rivers’s help, Nixon hoped to cover up or at least minimize the impact of My Lai.18
The administration nonetheless found it impossible to quiet the media flurry over Hersh’s revelations. The day before the Peers commission began its proceedings on December 2, an army major had told the New York Times, “We are at war with the ten-year-old children. It may not be humanitarian, but that’s what it’s like.” Newsweek magazine asserted that the Viet Cong’s barbarities during the Tet offensive had fueled what it called a “dink syndrome” among U.S. soldiers. About a third of the Americal Division’s casualties that year had come from exploding booby traps “probably made by meek-looking farmers and grandmothers.” Some soldiers held the Vietnamese in contempt and had become “casual” about killing. An American civilian official summed up the feeling: “Psychologically and morally, it’s much easier to kill a ‘dink’ than it is to shoot a ‘Vietnamese.’ ”19
Life magazine intensified the growing national debate in early December by publishing Haeberle’s photos in color. Some of the photos had already appeared in the newspapers and on television, but none of these had the impact of color photographs.20
The popular reaction to the story and illustrations was emotional on both sides, further charging the atmosphere in which the Peers commission conducted its work. A college professor in Alabama wrote the magazine that “the whole thing has been blown up out of all proportions” in an effort “to show the United States as immoral.” A veteran of World War II and Vietnam declared, “Even if this incident happened as alleged, it is an isolated incident and not American policy.” But a California correspondent wrote in, “Those pictures will haunt me the rest of my life. I weep for the children murdered, and I weep for the men that murdered them.” There was now a “shadow cast” on every American soldier, nationally acclaimed journalist Hugh Sidey wrote.21
On December 4, two days into its hearings, the Peers commission called Captain Medina to the stand. He denied ordering the killings and said he was not aware of a massacre, did not shoot a child, and shot a woman only in self-defense. The next morning, on Mike Wallace’s CBS morning news radio program, Medina remarked that he had had problems with Paul Meadlo, who accused him of not being in the village and doing nothing to stop the alleged massacre. Medina admitted that he did not go “all through My Lai 4” and did not investigate the number of bodies because he received no reports of an “atrocity” from his men. “I was not there,” he said, but “if I had been there and had known that any such thing was taking place, I would have stopped it.”22
Meanwhile, in the early afternoon of December 5, Lieutenant Calley flew from Fort Benning with his military counsel, Major Kenneth Raby, to appear before the Peers panel. After he arrived in Washington, he tried to enter the Pentagon from the side entry, where he confronted about a hundred reporters, photographers, and spectators. As his plane’s pilot and an army officer cleared the way through the crowd, Calley said nothing and stared straight ahead as he climbed the steps, only to hear a TV reporter calling out, “Lieutenant Calley! Are you sorry you couldn’t have killed more women and children?” Calley said nothing as he hurried through the corridor of the Pentagon and down three flights of stairs to the Army Operations Center, where the Peers commission was holding its hearings.23
The highly anticipated session ended quickly: in view of the charges against him, Calley chose to remain silent on My Lai. When the commission emphasized that its major task was to decide whether the investigatory process after My Lai had been thorough, Calley agreed to make one statement only: that neither Colonel Henderson nor Lieutenant Colonel Barker had questioned him about the My Lai operation.24
Calley’s silence meant that the Peers commission was unable to ask whether he talked with Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson. Nor could it determine the number of casualties reported to Medina by his three platoon leaders. Lieutenant Stephen Brooks had died in battle, and Lieutenant Jeffrey LaCross had guessed that his men had killed “about fifty.” How did Medina justify his reported figure of ninety Vietnamese casualties?25
But Calley’s statement raised an important question: If Henderson and Barker actually investigated what happened at My Lai, why hadn’t they talked with Calley?26
The Peers commission was less than a week into the testimonies when it learned of Mendel Rivers’s plan to have an investigating subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee look into the alleged massacre and cover-up. Within a month, the fourteen-member subcommittee had collected enough testimony to convince Rivers to hold closed hearings.
At the subcommittee’s first session on December 9, Peers and Robert MacCrate appeared at Rivers’s invitation to explain their responsibilities—and perhaps ease the concern of those legislators who questioned the reliability of the army investigating itself. As Peers left the room, Rivers invited him to his office two days later for a private meeting early in the morning.27
Rivers’s objective became evident after the first day’s hearings, when he told reporters he was not yet prepared to agree with the president’s assertion the night before that a massacre had taken place in My Lai. “If he knows that,” Rivers remarked in a quote reported in the New York Times, “he knows more than I do… . I’ve seen some pictures of dead bodies, but I haven’t seen any pictures of anybody shooting anybody.”28
Hugh Thompson testified on the second day and initially repeated what he told Colonel Wilson in his inquiry for the inspector general’s office—that he had ordered his two crewmen to fire upon the American soldiers if they attempted to shoot the Vietnamese civilians he was trying to evacuate. But under the pressure of an openly skeptical congressional panel, Thompson tried to protect himself against charges of unlawfully threatening fellow soldiers by adding that he had also told his men to have their machine guns ready in the event of a Viet Cong attack. The result was that his story leaked out in two versions, opening the way for Rivers (one of the few congressional leaders briefed about Colonel Wilson’s findings and thus aware of Thompson’s original testimony) to tell the press that Thompson was concerned about the enemy and “didn’t give us any information that would lead us to believe anybody ever committed a massacre.”29
Other subcommittee members, stifled by Rivers’s order not to talk with reporters, were shocked by his assertion that no massacre had occurred. “I don’t know how he could say that,” said one unidentified by Hersh.30
The next morning, December 11, Rivers surprised Peers at their meeting by remarking about My Lai 4, “You know our boys would never do anything like that.” Peers respected Rivers’s longtime support for the war in Vietnam but assured him that the investigation would be objective and thorough, warning the congressman that numerous signs pointed to an ugly incident in which U.S. soldiers murdered a large number of civilians and suggested that something went awry within the command structure in reporting these killings. Rivers’s attitude made it clear that the Peers commission would face a difficult task.31
Later that same day, Medina appeared before the Rivers subcommittee and received a warm reception. He dismissed the talk of massacre, expressing confidence that Lieutenant Colonel Barker “believed that there was no incident of war crimes or atrocities committed at My Lai 4.” Medina drew a standing ovation from the subcommittee when he asserted that he spoke “on behalf of Mrs. Barker” in calling her deceased husband “an outstanding task force commander, an outstanding soldier.” Medina returned the compliment, praising the work of Rivers and his “outstanding committee.”32
Afterward, Rivers refused to reveal what went on in the subcommittee meeting to a gathering of about fifty reporters in the corridor. But as he turned toward the elevator, someone referred to an article in the previous day’s Washington Star that quoted an unidentified subcommittee member who claimed former Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson had testified to ordering his two crew mates to train their guns on American soldiers during the evacuation of a small group of Vietnamese civilians. Didn’t that contradict your statement to the press yesterday? Rivers, now in the elevator, called the anonymous source a “damn liar” just as the doors closed.33
Later that afternoon, the Pentagon left the impression that no massacre had occurred by releasing a copy of the citation written in support of the Distinguished Flying Cross awarded to Thompson in July 1968. Its wording made it appear that the enemy was there and that there had been no confrontation with American soldiers. Instead, according to the citation, Thompson’s heroics had saved fifteen Vietnamese children hiding in a bunker between “Viet Cong positions and advancing friendly forces” and a few moments later evacuated an injured Vietnamese child from a ditch in the midst of “intense crossfire.”34
This award had of course come a year and a half before the army realized that a massacre had taken place and that no Viet Cong had been in My Lai 4 on March 16.
After this third day of testimony, according to Hersh, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird (clearly not privy to the president’s secret task force on My Lai) convinced Rivers to conclude the hearings in light of the furor among high department officials over his unwarranted claim to the press that there was no evidence suggesting a massacre. Secretary of the Army Stanley Resor had already admitted to a mass killing by American troops, and Rivers’s public statement left the impression that a congressional whitewash was underway. “If he’d read those papers on his desk,” one Pentagon official bitterly remarked sometime afterward, “he’d know what went on.”35
At any rate, Rivers had heard enough testimony by then to appoint Democrat F. Edward Hébert of Louisiana to investigate My Lai.36
Rivers directed Hébert to head a special four-member “Subcommittee on the My Lai Incident,” which would operate in closed executive session and independently of the Peers Inquiry. The other members of the bipartisan subcommittee were Democrat Samuel Stratton of New York and two Republicans, Charles Gubser of California and William Dickinson of Alabama. Like Rivers, Hébert was an outspoken hawk on the war in Vietnam and at one point called for a nuclear solution.37
Rivers told the press that his committee had gathered enough evidence to make it necessary for the subcommittee to “go into this matter in depth.” When a reporter asked about the “whitewash” rumors, he indignantly denied any effort to squelch the My Lai allegations. “I ought to count to ten before I answer this,” he declared. “I’m not in that business, but neither am I in the business of catering to some people who want to gut the military and destroy it at a time we should be backing them up.”38
Hébert promised in a television interview that he would uncover the facts, “no matter where the chips fall.” More than once he had privately warned Westmoreland, according to Mark Carson, against interfering with the subcommittee’s work, whether holding back documents or preventing witnesses from testifying. “If this ever breaks out in the newspapers it will be a horrible mess… . If I don’t get these answers, I can’t stop it.”39
Less than a week before the hearings began, in mid-April, Rivers set the tone for the subcommittee’s work by lashing out at the army in a speech before six hundred people in Altus, Oklahoma. His intention, he declared, was to put a halt to the string of courts martial looming ahead. If any crimes occurred, it was the army and not the soldier who was responsible. The Pentagon was “not going to get by with this.”40
The veneer of congressional cooperation with the Peers commission was no more than that. The two investigative teams quickly came into conflict over several procedural matters. Peers asked Hébert not to question witnesses until after the panel had taken their testimony. To placate the subcommittee members, Army Secretary Resor offered to provide the information and recommendations compiled by the Peers commission, along with the transcript of the interviews. But nearly every military and civilian figure Hébert’s subcommittee wanted to question was involved in one way or another with the impending trials, and Resor requested that the subcommittee delay interrogating these potential defendants to protect their rights in the judicial process. Hébert denied the request. Almost two weeks into the subcommittee’s work, Resor asked for copies of its hearings, but Hébert refused this request as well, declaring that “frank and complete statements from some of our witnesses could not be obtained without first assuring them that their testimony would not be disclosed voluntarily to anyone outside the subcommittee.”41
It appeared that Hébert had violated the Jencks Act of 1957, which required a government agency questioning principals in a criminal investigation to make their testimonies available to the federal courts on request. Hébert had a different slant on that act. Knowing that without the transcript the army could not bring in those witnesses, he arranged to have it classified and closed for national security reasons. He then issued subpoenas to every person he and his subcommittee wanted to question. Eighteen congressional members protested Hébert’s actions as an attempt to “whitewash an alleged horrible violation” of law, and Democrat Abner Mikva of Illinois wrote a lengthy legal letter chastising “the foremost lawmaking body in the land” for “obstructing administration of the very laws it writes.” Hébert ignored the criticisms, determined to let nothing stand in the way of his and Rivers’s plan to undermine the government’s case for the massacre charges.42
Meanwhile, of course, the president was publicly admitting that a massacre had occurred while privately attempting to discredit this claim by means of a clandestine task force.
In the course of its proceedings, the Peers commission had discovered that another massacre may have taken place on March 16, 1968—at neighboring My Hoi (or Khe Hoi), which appeared on American maps as My Khe 4. Bravo Company, under the command of Captain Earl Michles, had killed about ninety civilians in this small coastal settlement in Co Luy Hamlet.43
Michles had died in a helicopter crash, and there was no record of his version of what happened. Of the twenty-two platoon members who either witnessed or took part in the operation, two had died in battle, eight refused to answer questions, and most of the others claimed not to remember the event. Furthermore, U.S. forces had destroyed the abandoned settlement soon afterward, leaving no traces of homes, trails, and vegetation. Finally, the few survivors of the assault had moved elsewhere, making it impossible to flesh out the story.44
The destruction in My Khe 4 suggests that the allegations were likely true. The day after the assault, Bravo Company burned down three of Co Luy’s subhamlets, but on the next day it dropped the search-and-destroy policy to engage in a pacification effort based on the establishment of a Medical Civic Action Program supported by the task force. Concern about an investigation or perhaps a sense of remorse led to these unusual changes.45
In any case, due to a lack of any evidence that the victims had been enemy forces, the Peers commission put no faith in Michles’s report from Lieutenant Thomas Willingham, who claimed his platoon had killed twelve armed Viet Cong.46
Peers later noted that Colonel Henderson did not mention My Khe 4 in his report of April 24, 1968—probably because he was not aware of what happened. And yet someone in the army at the company level or higher (or both) had “more deeply suppressed”—in Peers’s words—information about these killings than those in My Lai 4. One could sense his frustration when he called My Khe 4 “an almost total cover-up.”47
One possibility is that Resor had conceded that U.S. forces committed war crimes in My Lai 4, making it necessary for the army to keep the My Khe 4 story quiet to uphold its claim that My Lai 4 was an isolated occurrence. My Khe 4’s exposure could suggest a connection to My Lai 4 as part of the combat plan and point to a higher command culpability. “When they get finished shaking this hen house, there will be a lot of big roosters falling out of the rafters,” Ridenhour had told Newsweek magazine.48
In the course of its investigation, the Peers commission suggested a wider responsibility when it cited “many indicators of unusual events” that leaders and staff officers in the divisional chain of command should have recognized and then followed up with formal investigations and reports of possible war crimes. But no officer at any level took proper action, which left the appearance of widespread wrongdoing.49
Major General Koster and Colonel Henderson had insisted that artillery fired onto villages was a violation of their policy and yet did nothing to enforce that policy at My Lai 4. Captain Medina and his men had thought the artillery plan called for hitting its outer edge as a means for rooting out enemy emplacements in the tree lines. The Peers commission conceded that this action was technically in accord with the rules of engagement, but it showed no concern for civilians and “was clearly in violation of the spirit of the policy.”50
According to the Peers panel, Lieutenant Colonel Barker bore the chief responsibility for turning My Lai 4 into a free-fire zone. Most important, he had “intentionally or negligently” furnished “false intelligence” to company commanders that all civilians would have left the village prior to the assault. The army had attempted to minimize civilian casualties by MACV Directive 525-3, which asserted that where a noncombatant lived “depends to a large extent upon factors and forces beyond his control.” In the words of the Peers commission, this meant that Vietnamese “personnel living in VC-controlled areas [would] not be considered VC solely on the basis of their presence in these areas.” Barker violated this directive by failing to provide for the evacuation and safety of civilians living in a combat zone and by planning and executing an “unlawful operation” that led to massive destruction of private property. He did not specifically order the killing of civilians, but “he may have created a belief” by some commanders that “they were authorized to kill any persons found there.”51
Furthermore, the Peers commission concluded, Barker had failed to perform his duties after the operation. Despite knowing early in the morning that nearly thirty civilians had died, he “probably conspired” with Major Charles Calhoun and others to hide these casualties by submitting a “false report” that artillery fire had killed sixty-nine Viet Cong, by helping to “suppress information” regarding war crimes, and by not reporting “suspected war crimes” in accordance with MACV Directive 20-4. Finally, Barker did not report the burning of dwellings, the civilian casualties he knew about, or the allegations of war crimes sent him by Major Frederic Watke. Instead, Barker submitted “a deliberately false and misleading combat after action report” that did not mention civilian casualties and “falsely depicted a hotly-contested combat action,” all apparently in “an outright effort to suppress” the truth about a massacre.52
Other discrepancies became evident regarding Barker’s 8:40 a.m. report that Charlie Company had “counted 69 VC KIA” by small-arms fire near the center of My Lai 4. Even though his journal indicated that he had informed the 11th Brigade of this figure, the brigade’s journal did not record any information pertaining to this matter until nearly an hour later, when, in two surprising changes, the cause of the deaths was switched to “artillery fire” and the location of the kills shifted to a spot nearly two thousand feet northwest of the village center and hence outside the settlement.53
The Peers commission noted that no one had explained the reasons for these two alterations in the brigade’s journal, which division commanders should have noted as critical to establishing an enemy threat and the absence of a massacre. By nine o’clock a journal entry showed that “30–40 VC had departed the area at 0700 hours”—a half hour before the first American soldiers arrived at My Lai 4. The result was that after 9:40 a.m., every officer in the chain of command had been given a doubly fabricated figure: that artillery fire had killed sixty-nine Viet Cong outside My Lai 4.54
Thus the only Viet Cong forces in the targeted area had left before the assault began, a number far fewer than the sixty-nine enemy forces allegedly killed in action less than an hour later. Lieutenant Dennis Johnson, the Military Intelligence officer with Charlie Company, insisted that “the VC had departed the village prior to the combat assault.” Lieutenant John Alaux was the company’s forward artillery observer and concurred with Johnson’s statement. According to the Peers commission, “the most probable source” of the inaccurate report was Captain Medina, who knew by 9:15 a.m. that no enemy forces were in the village and yet did not forward this information to division headquarters. Even though the Americal Division Operations Journal for March 16 made no reference to the Viet Cong leaving the village, it did receive one obviously “erroneous and/or altered” report referring to “lots of VC” at the same locations where Charlie Company interrogated its Vietnamese detainees.55
Barker, of course, had died in a helicopter crash in June 1968 and could not present his case. Nonetheless, the commission declared, Task Force Barker purposely distorted the truth by calling the civilian casualties Viet Cong, and this should have been clear to all the officers—Barker, Henderson, Watke, and Koster—who were flying over the site and saw the large number of women and children along with elderly men evacuating the area. All “references to enemy action” on that day were “entirely inconsistent with the evidence before this Inquiry, including the testimony given by these individuals.”56
More signs of a cover-up appeared in a file containing recommendations that led to the awarding of medals for heroism to Thompson’s crew member Glenn Andreotta (Bronze Star with “V” Device, posthumously), Lawrence Colburn (Bronze Star with “V” Device), and Hugh Thompson (Distinguished Flying Cross). The records indicated that Thompson had written “Eyewitness Statements” on behalf of his two crew members, and Colburn had written one supporting Thompson. The higher command, including Major Frederic Watke and Lieutenant Colonel John Holladay, had endorsed the awards as recognition of bravery in risking death in a crossfire to save fifteen Vietnamese children and for rescuing a child discovered in an area between Viet Cong and U.S. forces.
The Peers commission had no doubts about the three pilots’ valor, but it did question the descriptions of their actions, along with the motives and the procedures behind the awards. On the basis of erroneous accounts of what happened that day in My Lai 4, Koster’s chief of staff, Colonel Nels Parson, wrote the orders awarding the medals to the three men for courage in saving sixteen children (some were adults) while in the face of enemy fire. But the preponderance of evidence showed no enemy presence, making it appear that the officers dispensing the awards had resorted to flattery in an effort to silence those pilots making the massacre charges.57
The Peers commission found that between March 16 and 19, American troops “massacred” a minimum of 175 but perhaps more than four hundred civilians in the two subhamlets of My Lai 4 and My Khe 4. The mass killings stemmed from “the nature of the orders” from Lieutenant Colonel Frank Barker, who presented his officers and their men with “a false and misleading picture of the Son My area as an armed enemy camp, largely devoid of civilian inhabitants.” A “permissive attitude” toward the treatment of civilians had developed from the top down within the 11th Brigade, which led to “an almost total disregard” for “lives and property.”58
According to the Peers panel, the blame started at divisional command headquarters, where Major General Samuel Koster failed to ensure the proper treatment of noncombatants and was ultimately responsible for what happened that day. When he learned of nearly thirty civilian deaths, he did not inform other command and staff members. At noontime of the following day, he still took no formal action after Brigadier General George Young told him of Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson’s charges made to Major Frederic Watke and Lieutenant Colonel John Holladay. Three days later, Koster received an oral report of Colonel Oran Henderson’s investigation alleging that Thompson’s claims had no basis in truth, but he failed to assure its thoroughness. About mid-April, Koster again failed to act after learning from two Vietnamese sources—a report from the Son Tinh district chief based on information from the Son My Village chief, along with Viet Cong propaganda broadcasts—that U.S. forces had killed about five hundred civilians in two subhamlets. Koster thought Henderson’s “so-called report of investigation” of April 24, 1968, was incomplete and yet did not reject it and demand more information. Koster claimed he ordered a formal inquiry, but the Peers commission found no record either of his appointing an officer to handle this responsibility or of a report prepared or submitted. No testimony suggests that he tried to determine what happened that day.59
The Peers commission therefore concluded that Major General Koster had “suppressed information” and “may have falsely testified” on several issues before the Inquiry. By confining knowledge of the incident, the investigations, the reports, and reviews to Brigadier General Young and Colonel Parson, he “may have initiated a conspiracy to withhold the facts.”60
The Peers panel held Young accountable for failing to provide Koster with all available information. On the morning of March 18, when Young met with Henderson and three other officers in Barker’s van, he did not provide “appropriate instructions” to Henderson to guarantee a full investigation. Furthermore, Young did not keep Koster apprised of its progress and “may have contributed to the impression” that Henderson was carrying out an exhaustive investigation, thus encouraging Koster to accept its findings. Young, along with Koster, failed to keep the division staff informed of these developments and “may have contributed to a conspiracy to suppress information.” These divisional and task force failures led to “ambiguous, illegal, and potentially explosive orders” by Lieutenant Colonel Barker, Captain Medina, and perhaps Captain Michles, who all failed, “either deliberately or unintentionally,” to prepare for the possible presence of civilians in the target area. Finally, the implementation of these orders “ultimately became the task of generally weak and ineffective leaders at the platoon level and below.”61
The Peers commission also concluded that Henderson and at least one major staff officer (unnamed but probably Parson) “may have conspired to suppress information in an effort to deceive the division commander.” Henderson had possessed “substantial knowledge” about the mass killing of noncombatants but never sent this information to Koster. Henderson’s “most significant action” in hiding the truth was his “Report of Investigation” of April 24, 1968, which was “false and misleading” and continued the “original deception” played on Koster that no war crimes had occurred. Henderson “concealed the existence of war crimes” and convinced Koster there was no reason to file a report beyond the division level.62
One of the most critical pieces of evidence enclosed in Henderson’s report was, of course, the unsigned “Statement” of April 14 that was apparently Vietnamese in origin. It asserted that Lieutenant Tran Ngoc Tan had withdrawn his atrocity charges against Americans made in his April 11 letter—a claim supporting Henderson’s conclusion that no war crimes had occurred. Tan’s insistence that he had not changed his stance convinced the commission that Henderson had concocted this supposed reversal of position with the help of one or more members of his command and perhaps the Province Advisory Team. If so, this action further demonstrated that Henderson “conspired to withhold and suppress facts” relating to My Lai 4.63
When the Peers commission brought Henderson back for further questioning less than three months later, he claimed to have forgotten where he got the “Statement.”64
The Peers commission switched its focus from Henderson to Koster, its members mystified over his failure to question the validity of a report based on an unsigned statement referring to two documents accusing the Americans of atrocities but not included in the package of materials supporting his conclusions. Koster understood their skepticism but maintained his position that he did not know where the statement had come from.65
In short, both Henderson and Koster claimed to have forgotten the source of a vital piece of evidence—the unsigned statement—contained in the April 1968 Report of Investigation that gave them what they wanted: the exoneration of American soldiers of all atrocity charges.
Then came Lieutenant Colonel Barker’s turn, posthumously. His decision not to have a written plan of action contributed to what the Peers panel called “widespread confusion” among both officers and men about the “purpose and limitations” of a search-and-destroy mission. As the battle orders made their way down to the company level, they were “embellished and, either intentionally or unintentionally, were misdirected toward end results presumably not foreseen during the formative stage of the orders.” Nothing indicated that the plan contained either “explicit or implicit provisions” for deliberately killing civilians. Rather, it rested on “faulty assumptions” regarding a large enemy presence and the “absence of noncombatants.”66
The Peers commission held Captain Medina responsible for numerous war crimes. Like Barker, Medina helped plan and execute an “unlawful operation” against the hamlets that included the destruction of private property. He also contributed to the mass killing of civilians by adding a “revenge element” to the operation that made it a “grudge match” between Charlie Company and the enemy. Medina had assured his men that on their arrival in the village the only Vietnamese there would be Viet Cong or their sympathizers. He never changed his position, even though he learned before nine o’clock that morning that about forty Viet Cong had left My Lai 4 before the assault began. Furthermore, Medina mistreated a Vietnamese prisoner under interrogation and might have killed as many as three civilians. He admitted shooting a woman, but the Peers commission could not make a judgment regarding his plea of self-defense, because the act lay “outside the scope of this Inquiry.”67
Medina, furthermore, “probably conspired” with Barker and others to “suppress information.” He told his men not to discuss what happened that day and specifically advised one member of his company (PFC Michael Bernhardt) not to write his congressman. Medina’s “permissive and calloused attitude” put noncombatants in danger and may have come from his attempt to run “a one-man show” in which he proved “incapable of exercising single-handed control of 100-plus soldiers.”68
Medina’s three platoon commanders—Lieutenant Calley, Lieutenant Brooks (deceased), and Lieutenant LaCross—were responsible for a large number of war crimes that included murder. Calley’s 1st Platoon shot more than a hundred civilians—mainly women and children on the trail along the southern side of My Lai 4 and in a ditch on its eastern edge. Calley “directed and supervised” and “personally participated” in the “systematic killing” of these noncombatants. Brooks “expressly or impliedly” ordered his 2nd Platoon to shoot villagers as they evacuated their bunkers or in small groups of up to ten. At his direction and supervision, his platoon engaged in the “systematic killing” of perhaps one hundred elderly men, women, children, and babies in My Lai 4 and Binh Tay. He also “observed, did not prevent, and failed to report several rapes” by his men—including sodomy, rape/killings, and gang rapes. LaCross also “expressly or impliedly” ordered his 3rd Platoon to kill civilians. In the initial stages of the operation, he and his men were approaching Highway 521 when they fired on a group of Vietnamese moving southwest, killing three to fifteen. He then “directed and supervised” the “systematic killing” of many civilians in and around My Lai 4.69
The Peers commission also determined that the 1st Platoon leader from Bravo Company, Lieutenant Thomas Willingham, had committed war crimes in My Khe 4. By ordering “indiscriminate fire” and the use of explosives in the living areas, he opened the way for his men to kill more than ninety women and children. Although knowing that most of the victims were civilians, he submitted three phony reports to his company commander stating that his platoon had killed a total of thirty-eight Viet Cong.70
The result was that American soldiers at the platoon level “murdered noncombatants while under the supervision and control of their immediate superiors.” The commission found no evidence of marijuana or other narcotics affecting their behavior. Their crimes were a matter of choice and “included individual and group acts of murder, rape, sodomy, maiming, and assault on noncombatants and the mistreatment and killing of detainees.”71
And responsibility went up the chain of command. “At every command level within the Americal Division,” concluded the Peers Report, “actions were taken, both wittingly and unwittingly, which effectively suppressed information concerning the war crimes committed at Son My Village.”72 A vast number of rules, regulations, and policies were in place to reduce the chances of war crimes, but the officers in charge did not enforce them and were therefore culpable for charges of dereliction of duty.
As correctives, the Peers commission recommended that the army modify its directives and training programs. Admittedly, its policies “expressed a clear intent” to assure the humane treatment of civilians, prisoners of war, and private property, but its directives were ambiguous about what a subordinate should do when his commander took part in or approved a war crime. Furthermore, the directives stated that the soldier was to report war crimes to his superior, and yet he had not received adequate training on whether to obey an order he thought “palpably illegal.” America’s soldiers needed more training in the procedures for reporting atrocities, as well as knowledge of the Geneva Conventions’ statements on the treatment of prisoners of war and civilians.73
In mid-February 1970, Peers sent a preliminary summary of the panel’s findings to Secretary Resor and General Westmoreland. He had hoped to lighten the shock of the revelations, but in explaining what happened at My Lai 4 and My Khe 4, he admitted to using “abrupt and brutal terms” that hit Resor “like a bolt out of the blue.” The Secretary of the Army did not want to either diminish the tragedy or manipulate the final report released to the public, but he hoped to soften its language. Instead of referring to the victims as elderly men, women, children, and babies, could he say “noncombatant casualties”? Might he also be less graphic in describing the rapes?74
After making numerous revisions, the Peers commission beat the March 15 expiration of the statute of limitations by one day when it submitted The Report of the Investigation (known as the Peers Report) as the first of four volumes of its work to the army. The last three volumes of the collection, titled The Report of the Department of the Army Review of the Preliminary Investigations into the My Lai Incident, were not yet available for public perusal, but CID could use them in its ongoing investigation.75
On the eve of the press conference set for the morning of March 17 to announce the conclusions of the Peers Inquiry, the Pentagon raised an objection to the use of the term “massacre” in Peers’s prepared statement. Peers resisted. As he explained in his own account years afterward, “I was not about to present a watered-down version and in effect said that if that was what they wanted, please leave me out.” Less than a half hour prior to the conference, however, he reluctantly agreed to replace “massacre” with “a tragedy of major proportions.”76
The Pentagon press conference began with Peers, Robert MacCrate, and Jerome Walsh seated behind a table while Resor opened the proceedings, with Westmoreland standing beside him, all of them facing a sea of cameras and newspeople jammed into the room. The army had distributed copies of the 225-page final report, extensively censored to protect the legal rights of the defendants.77
After Resor furnished background on the formation of the commission, he noted that The Report of the Investigation contained some “minor deletions.” Everything was there except the footnotes referring primarily to the contents of volumes 2 and 4, which were not yet released.78
Resor then introduced Peers, who briefly summed up the inquiry’s work before taking questions.
One of the first questions, of course, involved the central task of the commission from the beginning. Was there a cover-up at higher levels? “No,” Peers replied. He explained that the panel had collected sufficient “testimony and evidence to indicate that certain individuals, either wittingly or unwittingly, by their actions, suppressed information from the incident” and kept it from passing up the chain of command. Ordinary daily reports went all the way up the command ladder—even to the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon—but “as for the knowledge of what might have transpired at Son My itself, we have no indication that this got beyond the Americal Division itself.”
Peers was then asked whether evidence had been destroyed. The lieutenant general preferred not to answer that question for fear of jeopardizing the legal rights of individuals possibly going to trial. “Information was available,” he explained, but “there were failures to report, there were failures in the investigations, there were failures in reviewing investigations, and these are all part of the charges.”79
How many officers were charged? Peers referred the press members to the copy of the report in their hands and declined to go into detail about anyone named, as that might threaten that officer’s legal rights. The panel did not file any charges but referred them to a group of officers, headed by Colonel Hubert Miller, the staff judge advocate of the Army Air Defense Command. They reviewed the testimony and drafted the charges before submitting them to the judge advocate general. Peers added that he was deeply concerned about what had happened and emphasized that all officers “must have extremely high standards.” But this did not condemn every officer; it was “quite an isolated incident.”80 He added, using the Pentagon-approved nomenclature, “Our inquiry clearly established that a tragedy of major proportions occurred there on that date.”81
Peers notably did not mention the massacre at My Khe 4. He had originally been willing to discuss that matter at the press conference, but high-ranking military officials thought it advisable not to do so. A senior Pentagon official involved with the report later told Hersh, “We were very much afraid of scaring off some of the B[ravo] Company witnesses.” The Peers commission agreed that “the full story must await the completion of ongoing criminal investigations and any resulting prosecutions.” Doubtless the Pentagon was more concerned that a second massacre would suggest that My Lai 4 was not an isolated incident and that commanders in places higher than the Americal Division were responsible for what happened.82
Whatever the Pentagon’s wishes, however, there was no chance for keeping the story of My Khe 4 quiet. Two weeks earlier, on March 2, 1970, Newsweek published a story exposing the massacre and tying it to the charges recently made by the army against Thomas Willingham, who in March 1968 was a lieutenant in Bravo Company. NBC-TV followed with a report that Willingham’s company had operated more than a mile to the east of My Lai 4 and that evidence suggested another mass killing. In a story confirmed by other Vietnamese, Ngo Thi De told NBC reporters that she had survived an American assault in which the soldiers had slaughtered nearly everyone in the small village. Two massacres at the same time and in the same area: Had orders come from farther up the chain of command?83
The issue of additional massacres came up in the Peers question-and-answer period on March 17. Asked whether similar killings had occurred on “other days” or in “other places,” Peers was less than forthright in his response: “If there is, I have no knowledge of it.” Based on the evidence brought before him in the investigations and his own two and a half years of experience in South Vietnam, he said, “I had no knowledge of anything that would approximate this.”84
Another reporter pushed the issue, asking specifically about the charges made against Company B (Bravo), which did not operate in My Lai 4. Peers recognized the implications of the question and attempted to conflate the two massacres into one. Company B, he asserted, was just a short distance away to the east from the targeted village. All events of that day were “encompassed within the greater area of Son My village” rather than in My Lai 4 itself.85
No one followed up on the question.
The next day, an array of newspapers, including the Baltimore Sun, Chicago Tribune, New York Times, and Washington Post, published the names of the fourteen officers charged with dereliction of duty, false swearing and false testimony, failure to follow regulations, and failure to report suspected violations to higher authorities. If the officers were convicted, the penalties were up to three years of hard labor and dismissal from the army.86
The highest ranking officer was Major General Koster, who in June 1968 had left his command of the Americal Division to follow Westmoreland’s footsteps in becoming superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy. He immediately assembled the 3,700 cadets (his son Samuel among them) in the mess hall to announce from its stone balcony that “action has been initiated against me” and he was resigning his position in an effort, he said, “to separate the Military Academy and you of the corps from the continuing flow” of bad publicity. “I wish to say that throughout my military career, the cherished principles of our motto—Duty, Honor, Country—have served as a constant guide to me. I shall continue to follow these principles as long as I live.”
Koster received a standing ovation that lasted almost two minutes. The next day all the cadets paid tribute to him by marching before his home overlooking the Hudson River.87
The other thirteen officers charged were 1st Lieutenant Kenneth W. Boatman, Major Charles C. Calhoun, Major David C. Gavin, Lieutenant Colonel William A. Guinn, Colonel Oran K. Henderson, 1st Lieutenant Dennis H. Johnson, Lieutenant Colonel Robert B. Luper, Major Robert W. McKnight, Captain Ernest L. Medina, Colonel Nels A. Parson, Major Frederic W. Watke, 1st Lieutenant Thomas K. Willingham, and Brigadier General George H. Young. The press had left out Captain Eugene M. Kotouc. Second Lieutenant William L. Calley and Captain Medina already faced court-martial proceedings.88
The panel also listed thirty officers believed to have deliberately suppressed information about that day. No one brought charges against Chaplain Francis R. Lewis because, Secretary Resor argued, to do so would hurt the chaplain corps and its pledge of confidentiality. The secretary also considered the charges debatable. Peers disagreed but accepted the decision.89
The press had named the numerous officers and enlisted men involved in the alleged massacre and cover-up, and it had included murder, massacre, and assault with a deadly weapon among its list of crimes; but only Time and the New York Times specifically referred to rape, torture, and maiming. Resor called the deletions in the report “minor,” but the New York Times insisted the released volume contained nothing new and that the censors had removed entire chapters along with scattered pieces of classified information. The only parts remaining were histories of the Americal Division and the region in Vietnam in which the events took place.90
Thus the testimonies containing the details of these events along with the accusations and evidence crucial to court decisions had to remain sealed until the judicial process had run its course. In the spring of 1970, the commission had released enough information to support the arguments on both sides of the issues of massacre and cover-up.
The press stories and the skeletal version of the Peers Report heightened popular suspicions of an army cover-up. The lack of access to the testimonies and specific details confirmed the skepticism of many Americans that their soldiers and officers could commit war crimes. Two earlier Lou Harris polls, one taken in early December 1969 and the other in mid-January 1970, suggested the nation’s attitude toward charging its soldiers with war crimes: 67 percent of respondents thought the GIs deserved no punishment for killing civilians if acting under orders, and only 22 percent felt “moral repugnance” toward the deliberate killing of unarmed women and children.91
The military’s reactions to the report ranged from “shock” to “pride.” A Pentagon officer was not surprised by the charges, “But my God,” he added, “I didn’t think they would involve General Koster and General Young.” Most officials at the Pentagon felt confident that nearly all the accused would go to trial and that most of those tried would be convicted. Most soldiers thought the accused were “probably guilty.”92
Field officers were likewise split in their assessments. Battalion commanders in Vietnam praised the army for charging high-ranking officers, but one officer expressed concern that the revelations might produce a new kind of soldier who asked “Why?” in combat. A captain about to return to Vietnam worried about the next time he led his infantrymen into battle. “Do I think about tactics or do I start thinking about laying a court-martial defense?” A major with more than thirty years of experience regretted the collateral deaths but admitted to their unavoidability in war where “it’s kill or be killed.”93
The press generally praised the army for the Peers investigation. A New York Times editorial lauded its decision to face the atrocities at My Lai and make sure soldiers knew it would not tolerate such behavior. The Washington Post was even more outspoken in its support. “Those who feared a ‘whitewash’ by any investigating group other than a non-military one” should realize that the army had acted with “dignity and sobriety” in pursuing the facts “behind this hideous affair.” The Baltimore Sun was more guarded in its praise. It likewise commended the army for taking action but considered what happened in My Lai predictable in a war without clear rules of conduct and purpose. “The shocking thing is that it does not come as a shock.”94
The president, however, was not pleased with either the army or with Peers. In a phone conversation with Kissinger, Nixon accused the army of “a pretty cheap shot” in permitting its generals “to be put on the rack for the delay business.” Reports of the mass killings were “covered up because it was in the interest of the country.” Kissinger agreed, although inadvertently exposing his lack of knowledge of the affair by remarking that “nearly 400 people were killed there and it [went] on for days.” Peers, the president remarked, was “trying to make himself look good while he kick[ed] his colleagues around.” As for the massacre, Nixon added, “We know why it was done. These boys being killed by women carrying that stuff in their satchels.” The best response to the Peers Report was silence. “Tell [White House Press Secretary Ron] Ziegler not to comment on it.”95
But ignoring the Peers Report could not, in the president’s words, “get it out of the way.”96
not to be outdone by the Peers Inquiry, the Hébert subcommittee rushed into print a preliminary report on its findings that attempted to dispel the allegations of massacre and turn the critical focus onto Hugh Thompson and Lawrence Colburn, who had first reported them.
The Peers panel members could not have known it at the time, but their suspicions of the subcommittee’s intentions were substantiated by its treatment of Thompson and Colburn when they testified in mid-April 1970. The transcript of the hearings did not become public for another six years, but at a press conference in Washington on July 15, the Hébert subcommittee released a report of its findings, which contained excerpts aimed at undermining the credibility of both Thompson and Colburn by showing that the army had awarded them and Glenn Andreotta (posthumously) medals for bravery in combat when no enemy was present. The army was handing out medals “like it got them out of a cracker jack box,” Congressman Hébert remarked. The Distinguished Flying Cross was “sacred,” and Thompson was “wearing it on his chest” for an act of valor he did not perform. The report was fifty-three pages long, more than a third of it devoted to the testimonies of Thompson and Colburn from a pool of 152 interviewed. Nixon had used his influence and his reliance on congressional friends to “discredit one witness”; Hébert and his subcommittee had decided on discrediting two.97
A bitter confrontation ensued in the legislative chamber, characterized by personal attacks on Thompson and Colburn by Hébert as well as other committee members. The hearings led to the revelations that someone in the Americal Division had forged the eyewitness statements allegedly written by Thompson and Colburn on behalf of each other and Andreotta for saving Vietnamese civilians during a firefight between U.S. soldiers and the enemy. If a firefight took place, no massacre had occurred, making it appear that the medals given by the army were an effort to silence Thompson and Colburn. Thompson realized during the hearings that someone had forged his signature on an eyewitness statement, which he did not write; Colburn confirmed a second forgery more than four decades later when he was sent a copy of the statement, which he had never seen before, let alone signed.98
In the meantime, national and international reaction to the Peers Report created a strongly charged atmosphere around the approaching courts martial of Lieutenant Calley and Captain Medina. All the while, CID quietly continued its investigation with all the Peers materials at its disposal, building a case for bringing criminal charges against a yet undetermined number of officers and enlisted men in a judicial process that soon threatened to involve the White House.