The last American soldier leaves Vietnam on March 29, as new songs reflect both the country’s joy and the veterans’ struggle to readjust. On March 19, a Watergate burglar confesses perjury and all the president’s men begin to fall.
On January 23, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger initialed the Paris Peace Accords with Le Duc Tho, a leader of the Vietnamese resistance since 1929. Tho had fought the French colonial powers, then Japanese occupiers, then the French again, and finally the US and South Vietnamese governments. The following evening, President Nixon told TV cameras in the Oval Office, “We today have concluded an agreement to end the war and bring peace with honor in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.”
The organist of Trinity Church in Lower Manhattan hurried to the tower to ring the ten three-thousand-pound bells.1 At Madison Square Garden, a roadie handed Neil Young a note, and he announced, “The war is over.” “The audience of eighteen thousand exploded, cheering, crying, and screaming for the next ten minutes,” Linda Ronstadt wrote in her memoir Simple Dreams. Young’s set that evening included “Lookout Joe,” which some fans assumed concerned a vet returning home to an America that had lost its innocence. Twelve blocks northeast, Times Square was quiet,2 a marked contrast to the day World War II ended, when two million people poured into the area to celebrate.
The US agreed to remove its 23,500 troops and advisers from South Vietnam within sixty days, and North Vietnam agreed to return all prisoners of war. The North was allowed to leave 150,000 soldiers in South Vietnam and hold on to the South Vietnam territory it had won.
The death toll for Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians was estimated to range between 1,326,494 and 4,249,494. The US lost 58,318. Three million Americans had served. Nixon and Kissinger hoped South Vietnam would survive like South Korea, with the help of economic and military aid. That would make the war a stalemate and not a loss.
POWs began returning to the States on February 12 in Project Homecoming. They included future senator John McCain, who had been shot down on a bombing mission and imprisoned at the “Hanoi Hilton” for five and a half years, two of them in solitary confinement. Injuries and torture left him unable to lift his arms above his head for the rest of his life.
Associated Press photographer Slava “Sal” Veder captured the moment on March 17 in his Pulitzer-winning “Burst of Joy” photo. He snapped it at the Travis Air Force Base in California. Fifteen-year-old Lorrie Stirm ran with arms outstretched to greet her father, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Robert L. Stirm. The rest of the family beamed behind her. Like McCain, Stirm had been shot down in 1967.
“Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” ascended to the No. 1 position on April 21, although it would not become overtly affiliated with the military until the 1991 Iraq War. The song had its roots in English folk songs from earlier centuries, such as “Round Her Neck She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” which inspired a 1949 John Wayne movie.3 There was also a folk tale about a prisoner returning home who wrote to his wife to cover the tree in ribbons if she wanted him back. Some variations changed ribbons to handkerchiefs. Songwriter L. Russell Brown suggested to his partner Irwin Levine that it could make a good song. They had scored a No. 1 a few years earlier with Tony Orlando and Dawn’s “Knock Three Times.” That song shared a similar scenario; the man asks the girl downstairs to let him know if she wants him by knocking on the ceiling.
They played their new ditty to the A&R man who ran the New York office of the Beatles’ Apple Records, Al Steckler, as a possible song for Ringo Starr. Steckler told them the composition was ridiculous.4 Thus they returned to Tony Orlando and his backing singers, Telma Hopkins and Joyce Vincent Wilson. Their rendition sold three million copies in three weeks and became the bestselling single of the year in the States. It was No. 2 worldwide behind the Stones’ “Angie”;5 eventually it became the No. 37 bestselling song of all time.6 The following year, CBS gave the trio their own variety show to replace Sonny and Cher when that couple divorced. In 1979, the song was revived when Iranian revolutionary college students took hostages at the US embassy in Tehran. The wife of one of the hostages, Penne Laingen, tied a yellow ribbon to a tree in the front yard until her husband returned.
The O’Jays’ “Love Train” did not directly reference the war either, but it was no doubt cranked in many a welcome-home party. Philadelphia International writer-producers Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff drew upon both the Impressions’ “People Get Ready” and Cat Stevens’s “Peace Train” in their invitation to “people all over the world”—from Russia, China, Israel, Africa, and England—to join hands and climb on board. It debuted on the pop chart three days before the treaty was announced and peaked at No. 1 the week the last combat soldier, Master Sergeant Max Beilke, left Saigon on March 29.7
Beilke’s sister Lucille Johnson told the press, “We could see him leaving [Vietnam] on television. We all just beamed, because we knew he’d soon be home safely.”8 (Beilke was also a veteran of the Korean War. He died in the Pentagon on 9/11 when one of the planes hijacked by terrorists crashed into the building.)
Bette Midler’s cover of the Andrews Sisters’ “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” originally from the Abbott and Costello movie Buck Privates (1941), also hit the Top 10 that spring. It was intended to be the flip side of Midler’s “Delta Dawn,” but when Helen Reddy’s “Delta Dawn” beat her to the market, the label turned the B side into the A side. Had the war not been over, a song about a bugler who good-naturedly assents to the draft might not have done so well.
The year’s tracks that directly addressed the war were considerably darker. “Somebody gotta save my soul,” screamed Iggy Pop in the Stooges’ “Search and Destroy,” about a “forgotten boy with a heart full of napalm” in the middle of a firefight. With typical Stooges timing, it came out two weeks after the war ended. The New York Dolls, meanwhile, roared, “Now that it’s over, what ya gonna do?” in “Vietnamese Baby.”
In “March to the Witch’s Castle,” Funkadelic’s George Clinton gloomily intoned that for the returning soldier “the real nightmare had just begun; the nightmare of readjustment.” To horror-movie organ accompaniment, Clinton’s protagonist arrives back home with a “habit he still cannot break” and a wife who’d remarried, assuming he was dead. Curtis Mayfield sounded more upbeat in “Back to the World,” with his signature “Superfly” groove, but in that song the soldier’s wife has also left him. “The doggone war just lasted too long.”
The songs echoed the real-life experience of “Burst of Joy” soldier Stirm, who received a Dear John letter from his wife the day he was released from the POW camp. She’d seen other men while he was gone, and though she wanted a divorce, he still had to pay her 43 percent of his retirement pay.9 Stirm’s children kept the “Burst of Joy” photo on their walls, but he didn’t. The movie Coming Home later dramatized a similar dilemma.
Some of the returning POWs had last seen America when it was still in wholesome American Graffiti mode. Many soldiers found their wives no longer content to play the docile, subservient homemaker. Veterans returning to urban areas found masculinity had undergone a sea change as well—cities were “burnin’ with wolfman fairies dressed in drag,” as Bruce Springsteen’s veteran song “Lost in the Flood” put it. The Pentagon offered classes to the veterans on how to reorient themselves.
Many vets felt alienated from their fellow Americans on both sides of the political divide. They believed some viewed them as “good German” baby killers, while older vets looked down on them for not winning. Most people were just indifferent. Relatively few parades were held, in contrast to the massive victory celebrations World War II soldiers enjoyed.
“It was the spookiest thing…,” veteran Jamie Bryant told Arnold Isaacs, author of Vietnam Shadows. “There has really never been anyone who has asked me: ‘What happened to you over there? What was it like?’ It’s like having a whole year of your life that didn’t exist. When you first get back, you don’t think about it much. Then you begin to wonder why no one asks the questions. Then you begin to feel like maybe it really isn’t something you should talk about.”10
The Veterans’ Readjustment Assistance Act of 1974 offered affirmative action for vets and $200 a month, but it was not comparable to the GI Bill, which gave soldiers living expenses and full college tuition. Veterans hospitals remained notoriously underfunded.
“Father, we pray that we might understand what has happened to his mind,” Clinton uttered, echoing the experience of future secretary of state John Kerry, who recalled, “There I was, a week out of the jungle, flying from San Francisco to New York. I fell asleep and woke up yelling, probably a nightmare. The other passengers moved away from me—a reaction I noticed more and more in the months ahead. The country didn’t give a damn about the guys coming back, or what they’d gone through. The feeling toward them was, ‘Stay away—don’t contaminate us with whatever you’ve brought back from Vietnam.’”11
The VA itself did not acknowledge the existence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) until 1979.12 In 1986, 60 Minutes reported in the segment Vietnam 101 that more than 100,000 vets had killed themselves, almost double the death toll from combat.
“Lost in the Flood” was Springsteen’s dry run for “Born in the USA,” about the rage of a discarded vet. Onstage he dedicated “Flood” to “the guys who made it back from ’Nam.” A gunner with ankles caked in mud returns only to get stuck in quicksand (perhaps an allusion to heroin). “I had some friends, very close friends of mine … guys who came home in wheelchairs, and then, I didn’t go. I was a stone-cold draft dodger.… I did everything in the draft-dodger’s text book. So, perhaps, I felt guilty about that later on.… I had friends who went and died.”13
Springsteen later got the title “Born in the USA” from a script by Paul Schraeder. In 1973, Schrader was living in his car in Los Angeles writing the script for Taxi Driver, the ultimate film about a veteran adrift with PTSD.14 He was inspired to write it when An Assassin’s Diary, by Arthur Bremer, the man who shot segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace, was published in April.15
Taxi Driver wouldn’t make it to the screen until 1976. It wouldn’t be until 1978 that major directors started dealing with the war, in The Deer Hunter and the aforementioned Coming Home—a fact that indicates how ambivalent the US had been about the conflict since its inception. A casual count of war movies made during World War II on Wikipedia lists 154 from 1942 to 1945, whereas Wikipedia lists only four Vietnam-themed movies released between 1964 and 1973. Even the much shorter Korean War had sixteen US films made about it from 1951 to 1953, again per Wikipedia.
The most resonant representation at the time wasn’t even about the Vietnam War per se. The TV adaptation of Robert Altman’s hit film M*A*S*H was set during the Korean War, though star Alan Alda (Hawkeye Pierce) maintained, “I think [creator] Larry Gelbart saw a connection very clearly.”16 The show’s first season ran from September ’72 to March ’73. Gelbart said, “We all felt very keenly that inasmuch as an actual war was going on, we owed it to the … audience to take cognizance of the fact that Americans were really being killed every week.”17
The episode “Sometimes You Hear the Bullet” aired on January 28, the day after the Paris Peace Accords were signed. In it Hawkeye must operate on a soldier who was a childhood friend—and fails to save him. “The network went nuts,” said Alda. “The guy who was in charge of programming said, ‘What is this, a situation tragedy? What are you doing to me here?’ Larry Gelbart thinks it’s when we really realized what we could do. Really go all the way with the tragedy of the situation, the horror of the situation and be funny too, both in the same scene.”18
Another honest portrayal of the war came unexpectedly from the funny pages, in Doonesbury. Twenty-four-year-old Garry Trudeau cranked out the strip, with the help of inker Don Carlton, while he got his graphic design degree from Yale. One of the plot lines concerned Doonesbury’s college roommate B.D., who goes to fight in ’Nam and is captured by Phred the terrorist, perhaps the first sympathetic portrayal of the Viet Cong in US mass media. Phred tells B.D. about Vietnam history, endures bombing campaigns on his village (“How many tons were dropped in Vietnam? 93,470 tons is absolutely right!”), and brings B.D. to his mother’s refugee camp. (“I didn’t know commies had mothers,” says B.D.) The strip also featured the “Heartless Air Pilots,” who absently bomb villages while talking about the Knicks or Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
Polls recorded Nixon’s approval rating at 67 percent when he was sworn in for his second term on January 20. But under the surface, “the cancer on the presidency”—as White House counsel John Dean called Watergate—was rapidly metastasizing.
Ten months earlier, Attorney General John Mitchell had approved a plan for a covert special investigations unit nicknamed “the Plumbers” to break into the Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel to wiretap the phones in order to gather information for the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP). The bugs they installed malfunctioned, so on June 17 five Plumbers—ex-CIA officer James McCord and four men he had worked with in efforts to overthrow Fidel Castro—returned to fix them and take pictures of documents.
The Plumbers duct-taped the lock on the headquarters door so it appeared closed but remained unlocked. Around midnight, security guard Frank Wills noticed the tape and took it off. An hour later, he saw someone had stuck the tape back on and called the police. At 2:30 a.m. officers arrived and arrested the Plumbers, charging them with breaking and entering, burglary, and attempted interception of telephone and other communications.
Nixon instructed Dean to perform a cover-up by shredding files and paying off the burglars with hush money from the Nixon reelection campaign fund so that they wouldn’t talk to FBI investigators. Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein doggedly pursued the case and revealed that the Plumbers had been paid by Nixon’s reelection campaign. But voters nevertheless reelected Nixon in the third-biggest popular-vote landslide in American history, underscoring how unnecessary the entire break-in had been in the first place.
Still, Woodward said, “What you have to remember is that while maybe everyone wasn’t reading about Watergate, we had two subscribers who were reading every word.”19 One was Democratic senator Sam Ervin, who requested a $500,000 budget to fund a Special Senate Committee to investigate. The other was John Sirica, chief judge of the US District Court for the District of Columbia, known as “Maximum John” for his propensity to dole out the harshest sentences possible.
On January 8, the trial opened for the five burglars and two leaders of the Plumbers, ex-CIA agent E. Howard Hunt and ex-FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy. Five of the men pleaded guilty. A jury convicted McCord and Liddy on January 30. The men insisted they acted alone, but Judge Sirica didn’t believe them and warned that the length of their prison sentences would depend on whether they cooperated with investigators.
On March 20, McCord gave Judge Sirica a letter admitting, “There was political pressure applied to the defendants to plead guilty and remain silent. Perjury occurred during the trial.” Five days later, McCord testified before the Senate, naming Mitchell as the “overall boss” behind the break-in, while also incriminating Dean and others.
On April 28, the acting head of the FBI, Patrick Gray, admitted that he had followed instructions from Dean and counsel John Ehrlichman to burn documents from Hunt’s White House safe, then resigned. Nixon pushed Ehrlichman and chief of staff H. R. Haldeman to resign on April 30 so that he could blame the cover-up on them and say he never knew about it until they told him in March. Dean encouraged them all to confess, so Nixon fired him. Attorney General Richard Kleindienst also resigned to avoid a conflict of interest with the Watergate investigations.
On May 17, the networks began broadcasting the Senate Watergate Committee hearings live. Tom Brokaw, NBC’s White House correspondent, recalled, “I don’t think there’s ever been a moment in American nonfiction television history that is as riveting as the Watergate hearings were.”20
Talk show host Jon Stewart was ten years old that spring. “The Watergate hearings were an absolute unifying television experience for the entire country. I can remember watching and thinking, ‘Man, they’re interrupting soap operas, wow.’ You just figured that this must be something enormously fundamental to our democracy.”21
People crammed into the congressional hearing room, or rushed home from work and school to catch the afternoon testimony. Others watched in bars and airports. Even Rolling Stone’s cynical reporter Hunter S. Thompson conceded, “For the first time in memory, the Washington press corps was working very close to the peak of its awesome but normally dormant potential. The Washington Post has a half-dozen of the best reporters in America working every tangent of the Watergate story like wild-eyed junkies set adrift, with no warning, to find their next connection.”22
Until now Trudeau had turned in Doonesbury strips six weeks in advance, but things were unraveling so quickly he had to trash a whole week of strips and switch to a new schedule, turning strips in ten days in advance.23 He eventually won the Pulitzer for his coverage. Doonesbury’s campus radical Mark Slackmeyer (based on Weather Underground member Mark Rudd) began running “Watergate profiles” on his radio show. “Today’s obituary—John Mitchell! It would be a disservice to Mr. Mitchell and his character to prejudge the man, but everything known to date could lead one to conclude he’s guilty. That’s GUILTY! GUILTY, GUILTY, GUILTY!!” The Washington Post refused to run that installment, and a number of papers dropped the strip. The Lincoln Journal compromised by moving it to the editorial page. Slackmeyer continued unabated: “If you’ve got a favorite Watergate conspirator, phone in your request. Profile of John Dean going out to Joey with hugs from Donna.”
Dean began his four-day testimony on June 25. He told the committee that he had informed Nixon that Hunt was blackmailing them for hush money, and Nixon authorized paying him to keep quiet.
Nixon dismissed Dean’s claims. His representatives insisted that Dean was bitter because Nixon had not offered him immunity. So Dean told the committee that he suspected Nixon tape-recorded their meetings. He had noticed the president sometimes moved to different parts of the room before replying softly. “I don’t know if a tape exists,” Dean said, “but if it does exist, and if it has not been tampered with, and if it is a complete transcript of the conversation that took place in the President’s office, I think this Committee should have that tape because it would corroborate many of the things this Committee has asked me.”
Author James D. Robenalt observed, “There are few times in American history where the entire country is focused on one television event. One of them was the Kennedy assassination, one of them was the moon landing, one of them was 9/11, and the other one is John Dean’s testimony.”24
Soon the world would learn that Nixon did indeed have voice-activated microphones in his desk and in the lamps on the fireplace mantel. One person particularly delighted with this turn of events was John Lennon. For part of Dean’s testimony he sat with Yoko Ono behind Dean’s wife, his head shaved, perhaps to draw even more attention to himself than usual. Three months earlier, a frazzled Lennon had called a press conference to request that the Nixon administration cease its effort to deport him over his antiwar activism.
The week after Dean’s testimony, Lennon began recording the album Mind Games in New York, which included the last of his protest anthems. In the nonchalant “Bring on the Lucie” he cast himself as a sergeant leading his men over the hill to face the paranoid Lucifer of the title.
Your time is up you better know it
You were caught with your hands in the kill