During the early morning of January 30, 1968, the first day of Tet, the Vietnamese lunar New Year, the Vietcong and North Vietnamese forces attacked every important urban area and many key military installations across South Vietnam. The largest military operation of the war to that time, the Tet Offensive was the conflict’s decisive turning point. Although Hanoi failed to spark a general uprising against the South Vietnamese government or to capture and retain control of any South Vietnamese cities, Tet prompted first President Johnson and then President Richard M. Nixon to opt for US withdrawal from Vietnam. As the two administrations reluctantly made decisions and initiated policies that pointed toward ultimate withdrawal, majority opinion in Dixie and key southern legislators remained doggedly supportive of US military involvement and adamantly opposed to an outcome that could be construed as a dishonorable American defeat.
This regional perspective became particularly important to President Richard M. Nixon when Democrats from other US regions abandoned the deference they had shown LBJ, a fellow party member. In a pattern that had pertained since the US decisions for war in 1965 and 1966, a vocal southern minority and several key legislators continued to question the rationale for US involvement; press for a negotiated, compromise settlement; advocate an accelerated withdrawal schedule; and demand a greater role for Congress in the conduct of US foreign and military policies. Although Senators Fulbright and Gore remained prominent Dixie doves, John Sherman Cooper assumed an increasingly important role as he and Frank Church (D-ID) cosponsored a series of important measures during the Nixon presidency designed to stop funding of the war. Other facets of the South’s experience during the three years after Tet help to explicate these broad public opinions and political trends. The hostile responses of southern communities to antiwar GI coffeehouses reflected the region’s prowar proclivities and intolerance of dissent. Dixie’s support for the military and the war and impatience with restraints on either were similarly apparent in the section’s response to the My Lai massacre and the prosecution of Lieutenant William Calley and in the failure of Senators Gore and Ralph Yarborough to gain reelection in 1970.
Upon receiving reports of the Tet Offensive and the primarily Vietcong attacks across the South, Walter Cronkite, the highly respected anchor of the CBS evening news, exclaimed, “What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning the war!” Much of the nation shared Cronkite’s dismay. If the United States had been making steady progress and victory were in sight, as the Johnson administration and General Westmoreland had asserted in late 1967 in a concerted public relations campaign, how could the Vietnamese communists mount such a sustained campaign, one that even imperiled the American embassy in the heart of Saigon? This final blow to Johnson’s credibility sent his public approval rating for conducting the war to a new low of 26 percent, and he soon faced challenges to his reelection from Senators Eugene McCarthy (D-MN) and Robert F. Kennedy (D-NY). The beleaguered Texan also confronted a mid-March economic crisis in which Great Society– and war-induced deficits threatened the stability of the dollar and the gold standard. As if these collective troubles were not sufficiently unsettling, the “wise men,” a group of highly placed and influential advisors with whom Johnson had been consulting periodically, recommended on March 26 against increased troop levels or continued bombing of North Vietnam and in favor of US disengagement and a negotiated settlement of the war. Although Johnson feigned outrage that these “establishment bastards” had “bailed out,” the president, with coaching from Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford and Secretary of State Dean Rusk, had reached similar conclusions.1
In the wake of Tet and its strategic and domestic fallout, Johnson rejected the military’s call for an additional two hundred thousand troops and restricted the bombing of North Vietnam to the area immediately above the demilitarized zone at the seventeenth parallel. Later in October, he extended the bombing halt to all of North Vietnam. With these cumulative strategic moves, LBJ “initiated what turned out to be an irreversible process of de-escalation.” At Clifford’s behest, the president also launched what came to be called “Vietnamization” by seeking to shift more of the combat burden to the ARVN while linking ongoing US assistance to South Vietnamese political and military performance. In a nationally televised speech on March 31, Johnson announced his initial bombing restrictions and proclaimed his readiness to begin peace talks with North Vietnam if American “restraint” were “matched by restraint in Hanoi.” He concluded this dramatic talk by declaring that he would not seek reelection in the upcoming presidential campaign.2
Significantly, Rusk, a fellow southerner in whom Johnson placed great trust, played a central role in convincing the president to reject a troop increase, to implement the partial bombing halt, and to pursue peace talks. The secretary and president met daily during March, and according to White House news secretary George Christian, “it was Rusk’s judgment” Johnson “wanted in the end, and Rusk’s judgment he followed.” The same personal and regional affinities that had drawn these two southerners together during the Kennedy years remained intact as the Johnson presidency effectively ended. While pressing for the bombing restrictions, Rusk contended persuasively that they entailed no military downside. Bad weather over North Vietnam during the ensuing months would impair bombing effectiveness regardless of the bombing’s geographic scope. Regarding negotiations, the secretary judged the prospects for substantive progress “bleak” but deemed the offer worth the risk, if only to demonstrate North Vietnamese insincerity.3
As these arguments suggested and as events over the next seven months confirmed, neither Rusk nor Johnson had suddenly been converted to the Fulbright-Gore-Cooper agenda for a negotiated, compromise end to the war. To the contrary, Johnson and Rusk’s Vietnam objectives remained unchanged—mutual North Vietnamese–US troop withdrawals from South Vietnam and an independent, noncommunist South Vietnam in which the NLF had no political role. In essence, as Fulbright and Gore asserted, the president and secretary of state continued to demand that North Vietnam and the Vietcong give up their military and political goals. LBJ made this clear by declaring he “was not about to run out on his commitments, his principles, or his friends.” The United States, he emphasized, would “never . . . compromise the future of Asia at the negotiating table.” Rusk, who believed the United States had won the war militarily by mid-1968, agreed completely with his president and announced that successful peace talks hinged on North Vietnamese “concessions.” Despite their new strategic initiatives, the two southerners remained committed to personal and national honor and credibility and to military pressure as the key to defeating communism in Vietnam.4
Southern responses to Tet and subsequent 1968 developments followed well-established patterns. While often reiterating objections to Johnson’s military restraint and citing the pitfalls of negotiating with communists, Dixie’s hawks sustained their support for the war. Herman Talmadge asserted that the United States could not “sit idly by and watch the world swallowed up piece by piece by Communist aggression”; Sam Ervin continued to oppose any US withdrawal not accompanied by an “honorable. . . . settlement”; and John Sparkman voiced the common southern refrain that this blatant “instance of Communist aggression” should be opposed “vigorously” by bombing all military targets in North Vietnam. The ever-flamboyant Russell Long endorsed Westmoreland’s troop request, reiterated the need for a naval blockade of Haiphong harbor, and reasserted his usual demand that the United States employ all “conventional force necessary to defeat the enemy.” Richard Russell opposed all bombing pauses or restrictions and agreed with Long that the United States should use all its “conventional military power . . . to bring this war to an honorable conclusion.”5
John Stennis, who would become the most important southern Democratic conservative during the Nixon presidency, agreed wholeheartedly with these hawkish perspectives. In a prominent Senate speech on February 28, 1968, and several other public appearances, Stennis remained critical of Johnson’s limited-war strategy. Although Stennis declared, as had become the habit of southern hawks, that the United States should “choose between a hard-hitting war or no war at all,” neither he nor other backers of the war were prepared to press for US withdrawal. To the contrary, he contended an American “pull-out” would inform US enemies worldwide that the United States “can be defeated” and invite “trouble for us in every part of the world which we are . . . committed to defend.” Reflective of the senator’s growing conviction that US commitments abroad had outpaced American resources, he also declared that if Asia were “to be defended against Communism, it must be defended by Asians.” Along with this foreshadowing of what became known as the “Nixon Doctrine,” the crusty Mississippian offered a version of Vietnamization by emphasizing that the South Vietnamese should be informed that “the American commitment” was “not . . . open-ended.” The United States could not remain in South Vietnam “indefinitely,” and the South Vietnamese should be expected “to assume and carry an increasing share of the load in the fight for their own independence.” Texas senator John Tower endorsed this prowar argument, albeit from a partisan Republican perspective. He pronounced Tet “a major military defeat for our enemy” and proclaimed the war “could be ended in a reasonably short time” if Johnson abandoned the “self-defeating policy of ‘gradualism.’”6
Tower’s fellow Republican Senator Thruston Morton also denounced the Johnson administration, but from the Kentuckian’s recently adopted antiwar stance. On February 4, Morton accused Johnson and his advisors of “hoodwinking” the American people through their optimistic assessments of US prospects in Vietnam. In contrast to the administration’s misleading pronouncements, Tet had demonstrated that the Vietcong could “inflict terrible damage . . . at any time and any place.” Given the enemy’s strength and the weakness of the “unpopular and corrupt regime in Saigon,” Morton saw “no chance of military victory in Vietnam.” Negotiations and a “dramatic initiative to disengage at the earliest . . . feasible date” constituted the preferable course for ending the war.7
Tower might have had Morton in mind when the Texas hawk sounded the repeated lament of prowar figures that dissenters undermined the national “interest” by suggesting to “the enemy . . . that we are divided or are ready to throw in the towel.” If not addressing Morton, Tower certainly was targeting Dixie’s most important doves, Senators Fulbright, Gore, and Cooper, who maintained their critique of the war during two sets of SFRC hearings in early 1968. In the first of these hearings, held on February 20, Secretary of Defense McNamara faced seven and one-half hours of interrogation regarding the Gulf of Tonkin incidents of August 2 and 4, 1964. The defense secretary unyieldingly contended that the “essential facts” were unchanged. The US destroyers had been operating in international waters; both attacks had occurred; and the commanders of the US vessels were unaware of and “not associated” with the clandestine South Vietnamese commando raids being carried out simultaneously against North Vietnam. When Fulbright and the SFRC staff produced naval cables impugning McNamara’s contentions, the North Vietnamese PT boat attacks of August 1964 no longer appeared so unprovoked, and the claims of an August 4 attack seemed spurious.8
Cooper, Fulbright, and Gore played important roles in these hearings, whose ostensibly closed proceedings were widely discussed in the press; further damaged Johnson’s credibility; helped undermine the rationale for the war; and intensified the bitterness among Johnson, Rusk, and their fellow southerners. Cooper, who had renewed his standing call for a US bombing halt and negotiations in mid-January, carefully led McNamara through the principal administration positions. Although the senator refrained from directly disputing any of the key points, the understated Kentuckian questioned the wisdom of taking “risks” that resulted in incidents that “humiliate[d]” the United States and left it in “a position where there is danger of deeper involvement and not of our choice.” Fulbright and Gore were less restrained. The SFRC chairman was convinced that Johnson, McNamara, and Rusk had intentionally misled him and the Congress into voting precipitously for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Fulbright felt a “very deep responsibility” for this national misstep and considered it “very unfair” for the administration to have asked the Senate “to vote upon a resolution when the state of the evidence” was so “uncertain.” Gore agreed that the American people had been “misled.” Given the uncertainties surrounding the August 1964 events, the Johnson administration had “acted precipitately, inadvisably, unwisely,” and “out of proportion” to the supposed “provocation.”9
Fulbright closed the long day of charged exchanges at nearly 7:00 P.M. with the observation that under President Johnson, “the executive branch” operated as if “Congress has no function to play in foreign relations and in making war,” a theme to which he returned two weeks later on the floor of the Senate. Responding specifically to press reports of the military’s request for an additional two hundred thousand troops for service in Vietnam, the Arkansas dissenter declared the “Senate and the country” were “entitled to know” the administration’s plans and “to have the opportunity” to offer opinions.10
Spurred by the newspaper accounts that Westmoreland had requested an additional two hundred thousand US troops for the war, the SFRC hearings of March 11 and 12 again concentrated on the role of the committee and Congress in formulating Vietnam policy. Secretary of State Rusk testified publicly before the SFRC for the first time since his bitter confrontation with Fulbright in February 1966. As they once again appeared on national television, the chairman assured the secretary of state that he harbored no “personal animus,” that to the contrary, he had “profound respect” for Rusk’s “intelligence and integrity” and “sense of duty.” Pleasantries aside, Rusk knew better, and the sharp disagreements that followed during his more than ten hours of testimony demonstrated that these two centrally placed southerners remained bitter adversaries.11
Rusk’s essential views on the war and its centrality to US international standing had not changed since 1966. North Vietnamese and Vietcong aggression had to be repulsed. US failure to fulfill its SEATO “responsibility” to preserve South Vietnam’s independence as a noncommunist country would undermine US credibility, shift the international balance of power, and imperil the “peace of the world.” When asked about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the secretary echoed McNamara’s prior testimony. Both attacks took place in international waters, and both were unprovoked and “unwarranted.”12
When Fulbright, Cooper, and Gore contested virtually all facets of the secretary’s brief, a Gore constituent sympathized with Rusk’s plight. The “poor man” was “stuck between the intransigence of Ho Chi Minh and LBJ!” Fulbright was most direct. He rejected Rusk’s “version” of the Gulf of Tonkin incident and refused to accept the Georgian’s portrayal of US actions in Vietnam as “accurate.” Having challenged Rusk’s perception and veracity, the SFRC chairman turned to his central concern—congressional “consultation” as the administration considered whether to “enlarge the war.” While repeatedly refusing to make such a commitment, Rusk asserted that Johnson had “attempted to consult with Congress more than any recent President” and complained that no secretaries of state during World War II or Korea had been forced to publicly alert the enemy to “future” US plans. As had become administration practice since 1964, he reminded his tormentor that Congress had voted overwhelmingly for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.13
These rejoinders were akin to waving a red flag before an enraged bull. Fulbright curtly dismissed the claim of “satisfactory” and substantive consultation and asserted the SFRC could no longer accept just “anything the Administration sends down without question.” Fulbright was equally emphatic regarding Rusk’s reference to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. The senator had come to view the resolution as “null and void,” like “any contract based on misrepresentation,” and he was convinced the administration had used it “to prevent” the very “consultation” he sought. When the chairman asked in exasperation if Rusk were “saying in a very polite way . . . that you have no intention of consulting with this committee,” Rusk essentially agreed by emphasizing that consultation was unnecessary since “the views of this committee . . . are pretty well apparent.” This final exchange between the chairman of the SFRC and the secretary of state tellingly captured the deep personal hostility between them and the tension between the two branches of government they represented.14
Neither Cooper nor Gore garnered greater satisfaction from Rusk’s responses to their queries. Apprehensive that dispatching another two hundred thousand US troops to Vietnam would markedly reduce the “possibility of . . . settlement by peaceful or political means,” Cooper repeated his persistent call for meaningful negotiations. In response to Rusk’s rejoinder that Hanoi would only use a US bombing halt and negotiations to gain military advantage, the Kentucky Republican emphasized that the United States needed “to take a first initiative” and test North Vietnam’s “sincerity.” After all, he noted, North Vietnam was not bombing the United States or South Vietnam. Agreeing with Fulbright’s and Cooper’s arguments, Gore termed the administration’s offer to “negotiate without conditions” as “an offer to talk to anybody, any time, anywhere” if they were willing to accept a “pro-Western democracy in South Vietnam.” When he was no more able than Fulbright or Cooper to elicit substantive responses from Rusk, Gore groused that the secretary had a “way of leaving things dangling.”15
Gore, like Fulbright, had long since irritated Johnson with his “goddamn [Senate] speeches,” but the Tennessee maverick ensured the president’s antipathy by delivering a passionate antiwar address to the Democratic national convention in August. Unlike other convention speakers, Gore directly attacked LBJ, who in 1964 had “promised . . . that American boys would not be sent to fight in a land war in Asia.” The American people had voted for Johnson and “peace” but “got the policies of Senator Goldwater” instead. In return for twenty-five thousand American deaths, the nation had received “an erosion of the moral leadership, a demeaning entanglement with a corrupt political clique in Saigon, disillusionment, despair here at home, and a disastrous postponement of imperative programs to improve our social ills.”16
Although the majority of southerners remained supportive of the war, they shared Gore’s disillusionment with President Johnson as his presidency ended. Throughout 1968, Gallup polls found that Dixie continued to disapprove most strongly Johnson’s handling of his “job as president.” In January the South’s approval was 11 percent less than the national average and 10 percent less than in the Midwest, the next most negative region; by December, the polling margins were essentially equivalent to the January figures, 9 and 8 percent, respectively. Much of this regional disapproval emanated from the South’s ongoing perception that LBJ was “pushing integration too fast.” In April 59 percent of southerners voiced this opinion, a response 20 percent greater than any other American section. Southern evaluations of the president’s war policies were also unchanged, polling 8 percentage points fewer than the national average and that of the closest regional critic in January, although the Midwest and West, two more Republican regions, became equally negative over the course of the Tet Offensive.17
As the year began, Dixie remained the section most confident of an “all-out” US victory, with 25 percent of southerners foreseeing this outcome versus no more than 19 percent in any other region. This figure fell essentially to the national average of 10 percent following Tet. The South, by a margin of 5 percentage points fewer than the national average of 40 percent, also continued to be the region least supportive of bombing halts to induce peace negotiations. Consistent with these responses, the South was at least 9 percent less inclined than all other regions to vote for a presidential candidate pledging to begin withdrawing US troops as of January 1, 1969. Other facets of the polling in the South yielded more ambiguous results and were indicative of Dixie’s and the nation’s agony. For much of the year, residents of the West were more inclined to describe themselves as hawks and most likely to respond that the US commitment of ground troops to Vietnam had been a mistake. By October, the South reclaimed its position as the leading region on both issues, with the latter reflecting Dixie’s disproportionate number of war deaths and preferences for bombing and the use of technology to subdue the enemy.18
Like the opinions of key southern political figures and the results of Gallup polling, previous patterns among prominent daily papers remained largely unchanged, a stance that contrasted with that of many metropolitan papers across the nation that came to oppose the war in 1967. Ralph McGill, the publisher of the Atlanta Constitution, and Eugene Patterson, its editor, sustained their solid support for President Johnson and his war policies. Patterson applauded Johnson’s and Senator Russell’s defense of American honor, endorsed the “U.S. obligation” to aid “formerly colonial people” in Vietnam, and contended that Rusk in his appearance before the SFRC had provided “the most persuasive explanation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam yet recorded.” McGill castigated Senator Fulbright’s “selective morality” since he simultaneously questioned US motives and actions in Vietnam and adopted a “racist” opposition to civil rights legislation. The Dallas Morning News and Montgomery Advertiser remained prowar. The Morning News recommended that the United States “persevere” in Vietnam and sounded the common southern refrain that the enemy should “be made to understand” that the United States would “take whatever steps are needed to end the aggression.” The Advertiser’s observations were less strident, while warning against overreaction to the Tet Offensive and predicting “old Lyndon might not look so bad after all—considering the alternatives” such as McCarthy and Kennedy. At the other end of the spectrum, the Louisville Courier-Journal retained its far more moderate, even liberal, perspective. Under its editor and publisher, Barry Bingham, the Courier-Journal continued to favor negotiations, noted that Tet demonstrated the failure of US–South Vietnamese efforts at pacification and land reform, opposed compulsory ROTC, and praised the University of Kentucky president’s “courage” in defending the right of a “leftist student” group to hold a conference on the war.19
While responding to Tet, the SFRC hearings, and Johnson’s March 31 speech, individual southerners articulated most of the pro- and antiwar positions they had expressed over the previous four years. For some, Tet pushed them into opposition to the war. A Winston-Salem resident told Senator Ervin, “Until recent months I have ‘waved the flag’ and stoutly defended our role in Viet Nam. However, I am now convinced that it has turned out to be the greatest miscalculation in U.S. history.” A Charlotte physician agreed. This “conservative” World War II veteran had previously “felt that we would have to stay in Viet Nam until a stable government could be established” but concluded in May 1968 that Thieu’s corrupt “cesspool” regime rendered that objective unobtainable. For others, Tet and its aftermath reinforced the war’s importance and the necessity of a US–South Vietnamese victory. The United States had “damn well better not abandon this area to the mercies of Red China.” Indeed, to sacrifice American lives in a “limited war” or by “sitting down at the peace table” with “a bunch of criminals” was “immoral.” Two Georgia fathers elaborated. One deemed it “criminal” to restrict the bombing and thereby pull the “rug from under” American troops, and the second was convinced that the post–March 31 bombing cutbacks had led to his son’s death in the Mekong Delta.20
Other southerners voiced even more peculiarly regional concerns. Cognizant of the South’s disproportionate representation in the military, if not Dixie’s benefits from defense spending, a Durham man feared that “northern industries” were “making money off this war, not people in North Carolina or the South,” even though it was “southern boys, both white and black, who are dying there.” An Atlanta resident cited more specific “facts and figures” regarding Georgians recently called to active duty—Georgia’s 2.75 percent of the US population versus 7.5 percent of the troops activated. “Why,” he asked, was “the South still fighting this nation’s battles?” Was it “some form of martyrdom still clinging from . . . the Civil War? [or] over volunteering from the Southern states”? As residents of the nation’s least prosperous region, southerners remained sensitive to the overrepresentation of poor men in Vietnam. A rural Kentuckian asserted correctly that “poor boys” were “forced to carry the burden of the national defense” simply “because they can’t afford to attend college.” Writing from Bethlehem, Georgia, a former sharecropper and World War II veteran offered a telling commentary on why he was “a very bitter man.” He and his wife had struggled to provide their only child a “home and an Education,” only to have him promptly drafted following his graduation from high school. Had he been a “man’s son with money he could have gone on to school and stayed out of the army. . . . Why,” he asked, “must it always be the poor man that has to fight wars? And these bearded people that burn their draft cards and cause so much trouble, why aren’t they in the army?”21
This Georgia father’s discomfort with antiwar protestors was representative of the broader southern and national concern over disorder, crime, and protestors of all stripes who were often lumped together whether they objected to the war, racial oppression, or established social and sexual mores and whether they did so peacefully or violently. A Fort Smith critic of Senator Fulbright’s 1968 hearings emphasized that it was “far more important . . . to rid our Cities of crime and to make our streets a safe place” than to determine who was “responsible for the error in the Gulf of Tonkin.” Other southerners were appalled that “commie inspired students mostly Negroes & Hippies” were “allowed to wreck our colleges.” Was the nation going to “allow rioters and looters to destroy our cities and our right to safe streets while our boys die overseas? Will we make a national hero out of a man [Martin Luther King Jr.] who encouraged violence while he spoke of nonviolence?” Public polling confirmed these individual expressions. Sixty-five percent of southerners favored expelling students who violated laws during campus demonstrations, a figure that surpassed the next highest region by twelve points. Dixie residents were also most in favor of jailing or forcing draft resisters to serve in noncombat units.22
Conservative southern politicians from both parties echoed these sentiments. Senator John Tower detected a “sickness of heart . . . in all law-abiding citizens when they see their cities, their homes, their businesses go up in smoke while looters and arsonists cavort for the benefit of television.” Herman Talmadge agreed that “civil disorder,” which had begun “with the sit-in syndrome about 8 years ago,” had led to a “rebellion against all authority, whether it emanates in the home, the church, the schools, or from legally-constituted government.” While arguing for domestic unity and the mobilization of the nation “on a wartime basis,” including the drastic reduction of domestic social spending, Senator Stennis cited “crime and violence in the streets” as the “most serious problem facing our government at home.” The Mississippi senator, who regularly locked protestors out of his committee hearings, had asserted that antiwar dissidents were in league with the American Communist Party and that the government should “jerk” the Students for a Democratic Society “up by the roots and grind it to bits”23
As the 1968 presidential election approached, it was George Wallace, the former governor of Alabama notorious for his opposition to racial integration, who formed a third-party movement by capitalizing on the national discomfort with the rapidly changing social and governmental environment of the 1960s. Wallace appealed particularly to southern whites and northern ethnic voters through overtures to their racial fears, fiscal conservatism, opposition to an activist federal government, and concern over altered social and sexual mores. While fulminating against “pointy-headed intellectual morons” and liberals who could not “park their bicycles straight,” he deftly tied race to social disorder by asserting it was a “sad day in the country when you can’t talk about law and order” without being “called a racist.” Wallace consistently linked “red-baiting” to his “anti–civil rights rhetoric,” as he typically cited defenders of King and his “pro-communist friends” as defenders of Fidel Castro and Mao Zedong.24
The Vietnam plank of Wallace’s American Independent Party and his comments on the war differed little from majority southern opinion. He sought an “honorable conclusion” to the war, preferably through “peaceful negotiations” but, if needed, via a “military” victory directed by military commanders rather than inept civilians. Wallace said nothing about nuclear weapons; but to his chagrin, his vice-presidential running mate, General Curtis Le May, declared on October 3, 1968, that he would use “anything that we could dream up—including nuclear weapons if it was necessary” to end the war. Wallace and Le May were immediately dubbed the “bombsy twins,” and the campaign quickly lost momentum nationally.25
While maintaining an apprehensive eye on Wallace, Richard Nixon, the GOP presidential nominee, ran a shrewd campaign that included particular emphasis on the Upper South and South Carolina, where Senator Strom Thurmond provided decisive support. By making law and order his principal domestic theme, Nixon skillfully appealed to the very discontent and insecurities that Wallace had identified. To the law-and-order portion of his “southern strategy,” Nixon added assurances that he would pursue minimalist enforcement of civil rights legislation and oppose forced busing to achieve racial integration of schools. Herman Talmadge later observed, “Nixon would always be a Yankee, but he was trying awfully hard to be like a Southerner.” In another adroit maneuver, the formerly hawkish Nixon presented himself as far less dangerous than Wallace and Le May and their possible use of nuclear weapons but far more assertive than Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic nominee whose liberalism on race and domestic issues and association with Johnson’s Vietnam policies crippled his chances in Dixie. While emphasizing that he had a “program” for an honorable peace but remaining persistently vague on its details, Nixon took advantage of the nation’s and the South’s war weariness. In early October polling, southerners, when asked who would “do a better job” managing the war, favored Nixon by 47 to 24 percent over Humphrey; by late October, the margin had widened to 51 to 26. In an election decided by 43.4 to 42.7 percent of the popular vote and 301 to 191 electoral votes, Nixon’s performance in the South was decisive. Without carrying Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, and their sixty-six electoral votes, he could not have been elected. That Wallace carried five of the remaining six southern states, all in the Deep South, left no doubt of the region’s preferences on domestic issues and inclination toward a Vietnam policy likely to be more aggressive than Johnson’s.26
Nixon’s crucial southern backing was not confined to Strom Thurmond and Dixie’s voters. Working with Anna Chennault, Senator John Tower, whom Chennault described as “my very good friend,” helped to covertly assure South Vietnamese President Thieu that he and his nation would fare better under a Nixon administration. This assurance reinforced Thieu’s refusal to sanction a full US bombing halt over North Vietnam or to participate in peace talks with Hanoi and the Vietcong. Chennault, the widow of air force general Claire L. Chennault, had long been associated with the anticommunist China Lobby and active in Republican politics. She had extensive contacts in East Asia, including the Thieu administration and its ambassador in Washington, Bui Diem. Over the course of the campaign, Chennault maintained ongoing communications with Tower and the Nixon election team. She kept the latter well informed of Thieu’s intentions, especially on the eve of the election, when Johnson took the belated but potentially decisive step of halting all bombing over North Vietnam in hopes of getting peace negotiations off dead center. Although it is unlikely the canny Thieu would have agreed to participate in peace talks under any circumstances in the fall of 1968, both he and Nixon were able to move forward with a clear understanding of their mutually beneficial intentions because of the intercession primarily of Chennault, but also of Tower.27
Just as the South was essential to Nixon’s election, Dixie provided critical support for his Vietnam policies over the ensuing five years. The backing of the majority of the southern public and conservative southern Democratic politicians became crucial after 1969 as Democrats continued to control both houses of Congress. With a Republican in the White House, a growing number of Democrats cast aside any deference they had shown to Lyndon Johnson out of party loyalty. From July 1966 through July 1973, Congress took 113 recorded votes on measures designed to curtail the war, and 94 of them came during the Nixon presidency. Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, did nothing to mollify this congressional opposition. To the contrary, Nixon and Kissinger believed that only the executive branch generally and the two of them specifically possessed the knowledge and perspective to formulate a viable foreign policy. On issues ranging from US actions in Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam to defense spending and anti–ballistic missile policies, Congress mounted its “first wholehearted congressional challenge to executive authority” since the early 1950s and, in so doing, exhibited a level of “assertiveness in foreign affairs” that “represented a sea change in the deference lawmakers had accorded presidents during the Cold War years.”28
The broader southern public also played an important role in sustaining Nixon’s Vietnam policies and his southern Democratic allies. Despite his contentions to the contrary, Nixon “cared deeply about public opinion” and “realized that the American public possessed a limited amount of patience when it came to Vietnam.” Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird accurately described the post-1969 public sentiment on the war as a “time bomb ticking,” and the administration’s careful focus on public and congressional attitudes remained prominent from its inauguration in January 1969 through the US exit from the war in early 1973. This focus yielded a determinative insight by the fall of 1969—that “peace through escalation was not a viable option.” Only by continuing and building upon Johnson’s decisions for withdrawal through peace talks and turning the war over to the South Vietnamese could Nixon retain public support. This delicate balancing act rendered dependable backing from a strong majority of southerners crucial to the president’s search for an acceptable outcome to the war from 1969 to 1973, particularly when Nixon’s search threatened to widen the conflict through periodic, aggressive strikes into Cambodia and Laos and against North Vietnam.29
When combined with Nixon’s domestic agenda, his Vietnam policies garnered majority support in Dixie. To his electoral southern strategy, the president added the nomination of two southern, but poorly qualified, judges for the Supreme Court and further appealed to majority southern opinion by condemning the “revolutionary spirit” and attempts at “insurrection” plaguing college campuses. Nixon’s determination to achieve “peace with honor” and to use aggressive military actions, especially bombing, also accorded nicely with southern attitudes toward the war. Like all of his predecessors since World War II, Nixon was acutely concerned about US credibility and stressed that the United States must not act like a “pitiful, helpless giant” or, as Kissinger stated, be “humiliated” in Vietnam. To avoid such an outcome and achieve an honorable peace, which included an independent, noncommunist South Vietnam, Nixon assumed that “decisive actions” on the military front were “the only way to move negotiations off dead center.” By envisioning the application of superior US military force to coerce North Vietnam and the Vietcong into accepting an American-dictated and therefore honorable peace, Nixon adopted an approach long preferred by southern hawks.30
The new Republican president implemented three related tactics while searching for opportunities to inflict decisive military pressure on North Vietnam: linkage, the “mad-man theory,” and Vietnamization. Linkage described the Nixon-Kissinger attempt to induce the Soviet Union and China to pressure Hanoi into an acceptable settlement. Declaring privately that he knew “the fucking Commie mind,” Nixon confidently expected to end the war within six months. The president boasted that he was “not going to end up like LBJ, holed up in the White House afraid to show my face on the street. I’m going to stop that war. Fast.” When neither the Soviets nor the Chinese fundamentally altered their North Vietnamese policies, Nixon relied primarily on cultivating an image of “unpredictability” and on the threatened use of “excessive force.” He explained to an aide, “I call it the Mad-man Theory. . . . I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war.” By informing Hanoi that Nixon had “his hand on the nuclear button,” the president predicted that “Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”31
To gain time in the United States for his policy of coercion to take effect, Nixon, pressured relentlessly by Secretary of Defense Laird, continued and greatly expanded Vietnamization, which included the progressive withdrawal of US combat forces and the shifting of responsibility for the war to South Vietnam. In theory an ever stronger, better-equipped South Vietnamese military would assume the responsibilities of the departing Americans. A brilliant domestic political strategy, Vietnamization steadily reduced US casualties and appealed to the powerful American desire to find a way out of the increasingly unpopular war while clinging to the false prospect of victory. Far “too clear-eyed” in their assessment of the Saigon regime to expect South Vietnam to progress sufficiently to ward off North Vietnam and the NLF, Nixon and Kissinger recognized that withdrawing US troops was an “implicit admission of defeat,” a realization shared by many other Americans. By August 1972, Nixon admitted explicitly that South Vietnam was “never gonna survive” the US departure. Kissinger agreed and sought only a “decent interval,” a period of “a year or two, after which . . . Vietnam will be a backwater,” and “no one will give a damn.” Hanoi proceeded with a similar calculation of winning after the US departure. If North Vietnam could survive the US military onslaught, there was little incentive to make political concessions and every expectation the NVA and NLF would prevail against ARVN forces bereft of American aid.32
Nixon initiated these interlocking strategies in the spring of 1969 by announcing the first troop withdrawals and by ordering the secret bombing of communist sanctuaries and supply routes in Cambodia. Both a response to North Vietnamese–Vietcong offensives in early 1969 and an alternative to resuming the bombing of North Vietnam, the Cambodian campaign was meant to signal the president’s unpredictability and willingness to take aggressive measures. To Nixon and Kissinger’s disgust, the bombing was quickly reported in the American press, and the attacks had no effect in Hanoi. The president also sought to implement his madman approach during the summer of 1969 by privately threatening the North Vietnamese with the “Duck Hook” operation, which envisioned the bombing of major population centers, the blockading of Haiphong, and even the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons. When these threats failed the bring Hanoi to heel, Nixon had no policy, save Vietnamization, linkage, and repeated, futile attempts to intimidate North Vietnam through other aggressive, but temporary, military actions. Ultimately, neither such actions nor the hope of Chinese or Soviet influence convinced North Vietnam to stop fighting, and Nixon and Kissinger acquiesced in a negotiated settlement, but only after conceding the long-standing US demand for a North Vietnamese troop withdrawal from the South and the assurance of an independent, noncommunist South Vietnam.33
Given this anomalous US strategic position, the American public’s mounting war weariness, and the more assertive, Democratic-controlled Congress, southern public and congressional support was essential to Nixon’s ability to sustain US military involvement and to pursue his various policies. In polling patterns that would persist through the end of the war in early 1973, the South was the region consistently most approving of Nixon’s performance as president. Dixie frequently responded most positively to his handling of Vietnam, particularly at crucial junctures such as May–June 1970, April–June 1972, and January–February 1973; and the South was always the Democratic region most solidly behind the Republican president. For example, in the midst of the US invasion of Cambodia in early May 1970, 66 percent of southerners approved of Nixon’s work as president, and 59 percent endorsed his Vietnam actions, compared to national averages of 57 and 53 percent. Similarly, in June 1972, following the president’s aggressive military responses to North Vietnam’s Easter Offensive, southern responses on these two key questions revealed 68 and 57 percent approval and ran 7 and 4 points ahead of poll results for the nation. Nixon’s civil rights policies, calls for law and order, harsh denunciation of protestors, and appeals to patriotism account for much of this support; but his pledge to achieve peace with honor and his periodically more aggressive military actions also resonated in Dixie—the region whose residents continued to be most inclined to self-identify as hawks, most convinced that war was “sometimes necessary to settle disputes,” and least willing after October 1969 to acknowledge that the “U.S. made a mistake” in dispatching troops to Vietnam.34
Although Nixon’s domestic racial and Vietnam policies garnered the support of a majority of southern whites, they alienated most African Americans. Black civil rights leaders and the black press were much more inclined to denounce the war after 1969. Reluctant to criticize LBJ’s war policies and alienate the executive who had done so much to advance civil rights, black leaders and editors who had refused to join Reverend King and other dissenters during the Johnson years exhibited no such restraint regarding Nixon. Unsurprisingly, given Nixon’s southern strategy and close political alliance with both Strom Thurmond and southern Democratic segregationists, an April 1970 poll found that only 3 percent of blacks expected the new president to bolster African American interests. In a revealing example, Whitney M. Young Jr., the head of the Urban League and a sharp critic of King’s anti-Vietnam stance, admitted in June 1969, “Dr. King was probably more right than I was because it is hard to separate the war from the domestic problems”; and four months later, Young sounded much like King while arguing that Vietnam had “sharpened the divisions and frustrations” at home. In 1971 the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, who had succeeded King as head the SCLC following the former’s assassination in 1968, was more harsh in characterizing the conflict as “an attempt to destroy poor people of color in Southeast Asia, at the expense of black and poor at home,” all in the “interest of maintaining the largest military-economic empire in history.”35
Among southern black papers and opinion leaders, the Atlanta Daily World and its editor, C. A. Scott, and the Birmingham World provided the conspicuous exceptions to majority black criticism of Nixon and the war. Scott and his Republican paper consistently praised the president for his “wise and courageous” handling of the conflict and featured pro-Nixon columns, letters to the editor, and interviews with black residents of Atlanta. The Birmingham World, also a GOP paper, was equally supportive, lauding Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, criticizing end-the-war legislation as “absurd and most deplorable,” and endorsing the president’s bombing of North Vietnam in 1972. Indeed, these black Republican papers’ perspective on the war was remarkably similar to that of the Dallas Morning News, Montgomery Advertiser, and New Orleans Picayune.36
Consistent with the editorial positions of these papers and their polling responses, the majority of white southerners argued that President Nixon should be given time to implement his policies. Several Arkansans made this point to Senator Fulbright. In March 1969 a Lakeview woman emphasized that it had taken “the Democrats seven years” to get the country into “the mess.” A Little Rock couple concurred, declaring that “after so many dark years of being bogged down in Vietnam,” Nixon had begun troop withdrawals and “made every effort . . . to reach a diplomatic accommodation with the North Vietnamese.” Other Dixie residents expressly lauded Nixon’s “efforts to bring the war . . . to an honorable conclusion.” Prowar “tax-paying, God-loving and country-loving” southerners also echoed their established objections to negotiating with communists, calls for the use of unrestrained military force, and condemnation of dissenters as traitors for aiding the enemy.37
Unimpressed with South Vietnamese military capacity, other southern hawks recognized Vietnamization’s inherent flaws and the ways this strategy could undermine US morale. An outraged Georgian declared, “Nixon’s policy in Vietnam is one of surrender and gradual ‘bugout’; nothing less than pure treason.” Another Russell constituent agreed and opined, “Who ever heard of reducing forces until the battle was won? Would any of you like to be on the front lines and have your country withdrawing help from you?” How were “our young men being sent TO Vietnam” going to respond as others were withdrawn? Would it be “possible to maintain” their “patriotism and . . . capability” under such circumstances? A third Georgian identified the fundamental fallacy in ongoing US troop withdrawals. This “dangerous plan” might “satisfy some people” at home, but it was “unrealistic to believe that once the bulk of our forces are out of Vietnam, the enemy will not try a swift and complete take over.”38
Southern opponents of the war disparaged the troop recalls as a ploy to “‘sweeten public opinion’ and slow down the . . . the growing opposition . . . to . . . a ‘Futile-No Win War.’” Dixie’s doves also greeted Nixon with many of their previous arguments. Vietnam was of no strategic importance; the Thieu government was oppressive and corrupt; the war was diverting precious resources better employed at home; the conflict was injuriously dividing the nation; and Congress needed to reclaim its proper role in the making and implementing of foreign policy. Critics of the war continued to offer moral and ethical objections, to contend it was “morally wrong . . . to sacrifice our young men” while seeking “ways to save face,” or to proceed as if communist nations and Vietnamese peasants were “not our neighbors.” In an especially emotional conclusion to a letter to Senator Ervin, a Raleigh surgeon proclaimed, “Dove am I, and proudly. Hawks are not brave, but cowards; they are not patriots but traitors; they are not smart but fools. What in God’s name can be the matter with our government and with our people who tolerate this continuing murder?”39
Whether hawks or doves, many southerners, like Americans more generally, were exceedingly frustrated and conflicted by 1969. A Georgia bank president confessed to “feeling completely frustrated because of my own inability to do anything about this situation.” From Albermarle, North Carolina, near the home of outspoken dissenter Frazier Woolard, a physician condemned participation in the October 15, 1969, Vietnam Moratorium against the war and asserted that the United States had gone to Vietnam “for the right reason . . . to stop the expansion of Communism.” While endorsing Nixon’s policies, he also understood the national concern “over the apparently endless blood-letting of Americans,” who were fighting for a country that could not attract the loyalty “of its own people.” Therefore, he concluded, “we cannot fight this war to win . . . and should withdraw all American Troops.” Like so many Americans, this southern rural doctor was strongly anticommunist, endorsed the mission in Vietnam, despised protestors, but also recognized that traditional military victory was unlikely. He was left supporting Nixon and Vietnamization, but out of resignation rather than enthusiasm.40
If support from the southern public was important to sustaining President Nixon’s Vietnam policies, the backing of Dixie’s conservative legislators was crucial. Given southern legislators’ satisfaction with the president’s civil rights policies, unbending anticommunism, acute concern for US honor and credibility, commitment to military strength as the basis for a viable foreign policy, clear understanding of the regional benefits of defense spending, and racially tinged doubts that South Vietnam could survive on its own, their backing of Nixon was predictable. Southern conservatives’ aid for the GOP president was especially important in two areas: first, the ongoing funding of the war; and second, the fending off of efforts to set a certain date for ending US involvement in Vietnam. Key committee chairmen, such as George Mahon, Mendel Rivers, and Edward Hebert in the House and Richard Russell and especially John Stennis in the Senate, and southerners more generally helped block these antiwar measures until near the end of 1972 and thereby afforded Nixon the time to apply his various strategies.
Even as they continued to help sustain the war effort, important southern Democrats implicitly acknowledged the greatly increased antiwar sentiment by emphasizing their prior opposition to US intervention in Vietnam. For example, Stennis stressed he had “continually opposed our intervening in . . . Vietnam as far back as 1954.” Sam Ervin underscored that he had “never favored the stationing” of American troops in Vietnam,” but, since Nixon was “doing everything within his power to end” the war, he merited American support. Richard Russell also reminded constituents that he had “opposed initial entry” into Vietnam and also continued to advocate aggressive, strategic bombing rather than “weak-kneed and cowardly policies.” Other southern Democratic hawks, such as Russell Long, reiterated their accustomed call for the United States to “fish or cut bait” by fighting to “win.” Despite their collective lament that even Nixon’s more aggressive military posture was insufficient, the overwhelming majority of southern Democrats extended the same deference to Nixon that they had provided his three predecessors.41
For southern Republicans, partisan politics reinforced their regional rationale for backing Nixon and the war. Strom Thurmond considered an independent, noncommunist South Vietnam “our only hope for defending our interests” in Southeast Asia and offered his customary prescription of increased bombing as the way to achieve victory. John Tower agreed that “intensification of military pressure” was essential to ensure “an honorable, just and lasting peace” in which the South Vietnamese could “freely develop” their country. The Texas senator contended that the US “posture in Vietnam” was “the best it has been . . . since 1965”; therefore, Americans needed to “remain calm and patient” as Vietnamization progressed. Only American impatience and pressure for precipitate withdrawal could derail Nixon’s policies and produce a “camouflaged surrender.” Even John Sherman Cooper, Dixie’s most important Republican dove, initially lauded Nixon’s policies as a “clear break” from Johnson’s. Unlike LBJ, Nixon intended “to end participation in combat by United States forces,” offered “realistic, definitive proposals as a basis for negotiation,” and sought “an honorable solution to the war.”42
Among southern hawks, John Stennis was the most influential during the Nixon years. The Mississippi Democrat assumed the chairmanship of the Senate Armed Services Committee in January 1969 as Nixon took office, a leadership position that became even more important when Stuart Symington, a long-term defender of the military and US policies in Southeast Asia, moved to the antiwar camp. Stennis thereafter became the Senate’s “number one champion of the military” and defense appropriations. The courtly Mississippian also continued to grant the commander in chief wide authority and latitude, particularly if that commander in chief sought to prosecute the war more aggressively than his predecessors. Nixon impressed the SASC chair as “conscientious and honest” in his efforts to end the war on honorable terms. Stennis solidly backed Vietnamization and Nixon’s “refusal to withdraw precipitously.” Based on these policy agreements and Nixon’s careful cultivation of the Mississippi senator, Stennis became a confidant of the new president, who informed the SASC chairman prior to initiating the secret bombing of Cambodia in March 1969, the invasion of that country in April 1970, and the US–South Vietnamese incursion into Laos in February 1971. In the latter two instances, Stennis appears to have been the only legislator to whom Nixon gave advance notice.43
Although Stennis afforded Nixon indispensable backing, the Mississippi hawk’s views on the war and US obligations abroad continued to evolve. In March 1969 the senator told a national television audience that the United States could not “drag on half in and half out of the war. . . . without us having to stay there ten years.” Although he continued to advocate more aggressive military measures, other comments suggest that he was becoming reconciled to the fact that even under Nixon the United States would not be “going all out to win.” By fall he was reemphasizing his post-Tet position that the “South Vietnamese must take over the fighting in the shortest time possible,” and he essentially endorsed the enclave strategy that he had previously disparaged as overly timid. In October Stennis recommended that the United States “secure sufficient” territory “to protect” the loyal South Vietnamese and “turn the real fighting” over to the ARVN. Stennis also began the policy analysis that would lead by 1971 to his cosponsorship of the War Powers legislation designed to restrict US overcommitment abroad and to revitalize Congress’s foreign policy and war-making roles. The senator was determined to avoid intervention in another limited war such as Vietnam. Future US assistance, he argued, should be limited to those situations and nations where American security was directly involved and where the people were willing to “commit their all to preserve themselves.” The United States should intervene only when prepared “to use the military forces necessary to prevail,” and any decision to use such force should come “only after Congress has given its approval.”44
The Mississippi hawk’s emphasis on a reinvigorated congressional role in decisions for war and US foreign policy accorded with the views of Dixie’s most prominent doves, Senators Fulbright, Gore, and Cooper. In February 1969 Fulbright had created an SFRC subcommittee chaired by Stuart Symington and charged with providing “a detailed review” of US “international military commitments . . . and their relationship to foreign policy,” and later in the spring, he worried that the United States had “committed . . . to the defense of ‘freedom’—very loosely defined—in almost fifty countries.” With these concerns in mind, Fulbright initially hoped that Nixon’s campaign promises to end the war quickly were sincere and that he might “establish a relationship” with the president and Kissinger that enabled him to have “some influence.” The senator met with Nixon and Kissinger in March 1969 and urged them to restrict “military action” to the “requirements of American security” and to emphasize instead “the political approach to a settlement.” When the president’s more militant proclivities began to emerge, Fulbright bluntly warned Secretary Laird that the conflict would quickly become “Mr. Nixon’s war.” Convinced by the fall that Vietnamization was a political ploy, Fulbright rejected Senator Hugh Scott’s (R-PA) call for a sixty-day moratorium on criticism of the president. The Arkansas dissenter replied that Nixon had been granted “nine months . . . , the normal period of gestation for humans to bring forth their issue,” to “give birth to his plan to end the war.” With no such plan in sight, the nation needed a “moratorium” on “killing” rather than on criticism.45
Entertaining no illusion of exercising personal influence with Nixon or Kissinger, Albert Gore never considered a moratorium on his vocal criticism of the war. In a series of Senate speeches from March through June and a letter to the New York Times, Gore dismissed Vietnamization as a formula for “prolonged war and indefinite involvement,” rather than a road to peace. The senator’s analysis and policy preferences were consistent with the unwanted advice he had imparted to President Johnson. Since “white westerners” could not win “a revolutionary political war in Asia,” the United States needed to discard its persistent “self-deception” regarding potential “progress being made in the military effort” and accept limits on American power. Only by putting aside the demand for a Thieu-Ky-led, noncommunist South Vietnam and agreeing to actual “self-determination” could the United States hope to end the war. And, he concluded sharply on June 19, the war had to end because it was “immoral and . . . wrong.”46
The revealing juxtaposition of Senators Stennis’s and Fulbright’s shared concern over US commitments abroad and their mutual search for a reinvigorated congressional role in foreign affairs was embodied in the Senate’s passage of the National Commitments Resolution on June 25, 1969. Fulbright had introduced an earlier version of this nonbinding resolution in 1967 and brought it forward again in February 1969. The final version stated that a “national commitment” through the use or promise of US “financial resources” or “armed forces” to “assist a foreign country” required “affirmative action taken by the executive and legislative branches.” Although the resolution excluded Vietnam, the Washington Post correctly observed that “throughout the debate, it was apparent it [the resolution] was the Senate’s answer to U.S. involvement in Vietnam.” It was also an effort, according to Fulbright, to restore “a proper balance” between Congress and the executive and for Congress “to reassert its own constitutional authority.” While “whole-heartedly” endorsing the measure, Stennis agreed that the “primary purpose” was “to reassert the congressional responsibility in any decision to commit our Armed Forces to hostilities abroad.” Despite the opposition of the Nixon administration, the resolution passed by a 70–16 vote, with all southern senators declared or voting for its passage, save Republican hawks Thurmond and Tower.47
Much to the consternation of Fulbright, Gore, and antiwar forces more generally, measures such as the National Commitments Resolution and even the massive Vietnam Moratorium of October 15 failed to alter Nixon’s determination to avoid being the “first American president to lose a war.” Described as the “largest public protest” in the nation’s history and the “single most important one day demonstration of the entire war,” the moratorium included at least two million participants nationwide. Moratorium activities, marked primarily by a “spirit of sadness and loss,” included silent vigils, the planting of memorial flowers and trees, quiet prayers, speeches and discussions, and disciplined marches and demonstrations.48
Although the moratorium helped dissuade Nixon from executing the still-secret Duck Hook operation, the president skillfully countered the potential political impact of these unprecedented demonstrations with his nationally televised speech of November 3. While appealing for the patriotic support of the “great silent majority” of his “fellow Americans,” the president sounded themes that were especially popular in the South. Nixon pledged to “win the peace” and reserved the right “to take strong and effective measures” to safeguard American soldiers and gain a US victory. Southerners considered peace through strength and the pursuit of victory essential foreign policy assumptions, and they were equally committed to the preservation of national honor and credibility, a concern that Nixon also addressed. Were the United States to fail, this “first defeat in our nation’s history” would devastate “confidence in American leadership” and yield “more war.” Only patriotism and national unity, as opposed to protest and dissent, would impress upon Hanoi the necessity to compromise. If the nation were “united against defeat,” North Vietnam could not “defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.”49
The president’s pledge to win the war while phasing out US combat participation and reducing American casualties generated an overwhelmingly favorable public response. When combined with Vice President Spiro Agnew’s vitriolic attacks on student protestors and other dissenters such as Senator Fulbright, the administration’s effective intimidation of the press, and the initiation of the draft lottery in December, Nixon had gained the upper hand politically on the domestic front. But, as had been true since the 1940s, no American president could control either events in Vietnam or their ultimate impact on the US public and politics.
The president had hardly begun to savor the response to his dramatic speech when the New York Times published an account of the March 16, 1968, My Lai massacre, in which an American infantry unit had killed more than five hundred unarmed Vietnamese civilians, virtually all of whom were old men, women, and children. In late November the US Army announced that First Lieutenant William L. Calley Jr., the leader of the platoon responsible for the killings at My Lai, was being charged with the premeditated murder of more than one hundred of the Vietnamese who had perished in the massacre. The debate over this horrific event extended into 1971 and graphically reminded Americans of the war’s ferocity, human costs, and moral implications. In March 1971 a military court convicted Calley, the only soldier successfully prosecuted for the events at My Lai, of twenty-two counts of murder and sentenced him to life in prison. President Nixon promptly directed that he be held under house arrest at Fort Benning, Georgia, rather than in a military prison. In August a military authority reduced his sentence to twenty years, and Calley ultimately served only three and one-half years of house arrest after additional judicial proceedings and a pardon from President Nixon.
The majority of Americans sympathized with Calley, but nowhere more so than in the South, where the reaction provided further evidence of Dixie’s prowar, promilitary perspective. Perhaps reflecting Nixon’s assertion that “most people don’t give a shit whether he killed them or not,” both telegrams to the White House and national polling deemed Calley’s guilty verdict unfair, contended he was being made a scapegoat, and favored clemency. When compared to the remainder of the nation, southern politicians were particularly outspoken. Senator Allen Ellender from Louisiana declared that the Vietnamese villagers “got just what they deserved”; and Representative John R. Rarick, also from the Pelican State, proclaimed Calley a “true soldier and a great American” who should be granted an immediate presidential pardon. “What is war,” Rarick asked, “if not premeditated murder?” Senator Ernest F. Hollings (D-SC) wondered if Calley’s fate meant that all soldiers guilty of a “mistake of judgment” in the heat of battle “were going to be tried as common criminals.” South Carolina congressman Mendel Rivers, the powerful chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, first doubted that “our boys would . . . do anything like that” and subsequently declared that none of the soldiers at My Lai should have been charged with crimes.50
Others contended that Calley was being made a scapegoat for national and institutional failings. Senator Herman Talmadge asserted the Florida soldier was “assuming the burden for the entire war, including the errors of his superiors,” and the senator was “saddened to think that one could fight for his flag and then be court-martialed and convicted for apparently carrying out orders.” Representative Ben B. Blackburn (R-GA) maintained that it had been a national decision “to destroy” the Vietnamese enemy. “If unconscionable acts” ensued, “the blot is upon the nation’s record, and no one man should be singled out for special punishment.” John Tower approved of President Nixon’s pro-Calley actions and worried that the guilty verdict would “undermine morale” among US soldiers and impede future volunteers. Significantly, none of these southerners expressed outrage at the murder of unarmed Vietnamese civilians.51
In addition to these pro-Calley pronouncements, Alabama governor George Wallace visited the young soldier at the Fort Benning stockade and joined Governor John Bell Williams of Mississippi and Lieutenant Governor Lester Maddox of Georgia in speaking on Calley’s behalf at a rally in Columbus, Georgia. Similar rallies followed in Jacksonville, Florida, and Dallas. Georgia governor Jimmy Carter proclaimed an “American Fighting Man’s Day” and suggested that Georgians “honor the flag as ‘Rusty’ had done” while driving with their lights on for a week to demonstrate support for the American military; Governor Williams declared Mississippi was “about ready to secede from the union” in defense of Calley. The Arkansas legislature passed a resolution calling for clemency; and the Texas Senate and South Carolina legislature called for Calley’s release from prison. Draft boards in Georgia and Tennessee resigned or refused to process additional inductees if Calley’s verdict were upheld.52
The treatment of three key witnesses before a US House of Representatives subcommittee charged with investigating My Lai provided additional perspective on the South’s responses to the tragedy. Appointed by House Armed Services Committee chair Rivers, Louisiana congressman F. Edward Hebert chaired the subcommittee and oversaw the hearings, which began on April 15 and concluded on June 22, 1971. First elected to Congress in 1940, the colorful Hebert referred to himself as the last of Dixie’s “unreconstructed rebels,” was said to have had the “most luxurious” office on Capitol Hill, and was a strong defender of southern racial practices and states’ rights. As a member of the Armed Service Committee since 1941 and Rivers’s successor as chair in 1971 following the latter’s death, Hebert had exhibited typically strong southern patriotism and support for the military.53
Under the direction of the Louisiana Democrat and the subcommittee’s chief counsel, John T. M. Reddan, the hearings assumed the tenor of court proceedings, during which Lieutenant Hugh Thompson, the helicopter pilot who had landed during the My Lai incident to rescue Vietnamese civilians and later reported the massacre to his superiors; his door gunner, Lawrence M. Colburn; and Ronald L. Haeberle, the army photographer who had sold pictures of the massacre to the US and foreign press, were all interrogated as if they were guilty of crimes, rather than Calley and the members of his platoon. Both Thompson and Colburn were grilled over the exact wording of military awards they had received for their actions at My Lai and whether Thompson had issued an order for Colburn to shoot American ground troops if they threatened him as he attempted to save Vietnamese civilians. Although Hebert stressed that the committee sought only to ascertain what had happened at My Lai, the interrogation of Thompson and Colburn appeared more like an effort to impugn the credibility of the men who had attempted to stop and report the atrocity. Thompson, who had become apprehensive that he was being set up for a perjury charge, often answered with qualifiers such as, “To the best of my knowledge” and “I don’t remember” or took the Fifth Amendment to avoid self-incrimination. Ronald Haeberle also endured extensive questioning and comments suggesting that his principal motive for taking and selling the My Lai pictures had been personal gain and that he had sold government property belonging to the army.54
In assessing the work of Hebert and the subcommittee, historian Mark D. Carson notes that their treatment of Thompson “reeked of simple vindictiveness” and that the extent and manner of Haeberle’s questioning “reflected the congressman’s personal displeasure with those who publicly disclosed the massacre.” Following the hearings, Hebert suggested that US soldiers facing criminal charges as a result of their actions at My Lai should plead temporary insanity—a recommendation that reflected both his genuine sympathy for the dilemmas facing American ground soldiers in Vietnam and his reluctance to believe that young Americans could commit such heinous crimes. His comment following Calley’s conviction said much about these attitudes and his racial perspective as well. It was, he asserted, “terrible to let Cassius Clay walk the streets of America, while William Calley, who was trying to do his duty, is incarcerated.”55
Numerous southerners shared the perspectives of Talmadge, Rivers, and Hebert and expressed these sentiments to their representatives. Three thousand constituents wrote Congressman Jim Broyhill (R-NC); 3,500 sent letters to Senator Bill Brock (R-TN); and 2,944 (97 percent opposing the conviction) contacted Senator William B. Spong Jr. (D-VA). Some Dixie residents blamed “left-wing reporters” and the “liberal news media,” who sought to “discredit our own Army” in Southeast Asia. Many feared that Calley was being made a “scapegoat”; if any US soldiers were “to be tried for errors of judgment” in battle, “then surely some of our Military Brass, Pentagon officials, Senators and Representatives” should be tried for similar errors committed “in environments lacking the physical pressures of combat.” Two Atlanta women declared it a “shame indeed that one person has been singled out to assume the responsibility for all the atrocities of this horrible, senseless war.” An irate Texan declared, “Only a gutless, sniveling coward of a government would even think of allowing the Armed Forces and their personnel to be subjected to the debasement of trial for doing their duty in time of war.”56
Just as they opposed the war, minority voices in the South denounced US actions at My Lai and supported Calley’s conviction. For some southerners, the news and pictures detailing the massacre were the “traumatic” shock that prompted “people who had never before questioned the war . . . to not only question the morality of it all, but . . . to say let’s . . . get out now.” A Presbyterian minister pointedly informed Senator Talmadge, “It is strange how those who support law and order can be opposed to his [Calley’s] conviction.” Numerous southern combat veterans endorsed the outcome of Calley’s trial. A former NCO who had spent fifteen months in Vietnam felt “sure,” as subsequent studies have substantiated, that My Lai was “far from one isolated case,” since the “general attitude of the American G.I. is to look down on the Vietnamese as a sub-human race.” Another Dixie vet believed that Calley had “disgraced the uniform I wore proudly, and the nation I love and have fought for.” A retired lieutenant colonel favored the prosecution of US “officers at every level of command who committed, condoned, ignored or covered up such atrocities.” Other southerners asked how the United States could expect the “humane treatment of our own POW’s” while condoning Calley’s actions. “People who have surrendered,” a Georgian emphasized, “are not to be slaughtered.”57
Despite the national anguish occasioned by the My Lai revelations in late 1969, President Nixon had seemingly solidified public support behind his Vietnam policies. In late April the Montgomery Advertiser perceptively observed that Vietnamization had “been successful, at least politically”; the president’s supporters were “pleased,” and his antiwar critics “almost muted.” But, the Advertiser continued, Nixon “would probably lose the advantage he has garnered from his troop withdrawal policy if he deeply involved the U.S. in Cambodia.” When the president dispatched US troops into that nation on April 30, the outraged national response more than fulfilled the Alabama paper’s prediction. As a facet of the mad-man strategy, the Cambodian incursion was meant to signal Nixon’s toughness and unpredictability. The extension of the war to another Southeast Asian country was justified publicly on the grounds of defending a recently installed, noncommunist government in Cambodia, as necessary to eliminate immediate cross-border sanctuaries for enemy supplies and personnel, and as crucial to sustaining Vietnamization and protecting remaining US troops in South Vietnam. The two-month operation yielded some two thousand enemy dead, the destruction of eight thousand bunkers, and the capture of eighty-two hundred tons of rice and twenty-five thousand weapons. Still, enemy operations were set back by no more than six months.58
The public and congressional responses to Nixon’s decision easily offset these military gains. More than one hundred thousand protestors descended on Washington during the first week of May, and unprecedented demonstrations erupted on college campuses, including many across the South. After four students were killed at Kent State University in Ohio and two at Jackson State College in Mississippi in confrontations with National Guard troops and police, more than two million students demonstrated, and some 450 colleges and universities experienced student strikes or closures.
Even more disturbing to President Nixon and his administration, the Cambodian operation also “provoked the most serious congressional challenge to presidential authority since the beginning of the war.” Two congressional measures particularly embodied this challenge. Sponsored by John Sherman Cooper and Frank Church, the Cooper-Church Amendment to the 1971 Foreign Military Sales Bill sought to block funding for US military operations in Cambodia after June 30, 1970. The more expansive McGovern-Hatfield Amendment to the 1971 Military Procurement Authorization required the withdrawal of all US troops from Vietnam by December 31, 1971.59
Nixon interpreted these measures as a challenge both to the office of the presidency and to him personally. Sounding much like LBJ, he confided to Kissinger on the eve of the Cambodian incursion, “Those Senators think they can push me around, but I’ll show them who’s tough. The liberals are waiting to see Nixon let Cambodia go down the drain just the way Eisenhower let Cuba go down the drain.” To the president’s acute discomfort, the negative response to the Cambodian invasion and its aftermath was not confined to liberal legislators. Nixon’s decision, and especially his failure to consult or notify in advance any senators other than John Stennis, had alienated Hugh Scott, the Republican minority leader, and conservative southern Democrats Harry F. Byrd Jr. (VA), B. Everett Jordan (NC), and Herman Talmadge. When added to the more general Democratic opposition, these potential Republican and conservative southern defections enhanced the importance of the president’s support from Dixie’s legislators and public. Recognizing this political reality, Nixon told Kissinger in August, “We’ve got the Left where we want it now. All they’ve got to argue for is a bug out, and that’s their problem. But when the Right starts wanting to get out, for whatever reason, that’s our problem.”60
Faced with this volatile political situation, Nixon moved quickly to repulse Cooper-Church. With an overall strategy of extending the Senate debate sufficiently to render the amendment meaningless, the president announced his intention to withdraw all US troops from Cambodia by June 30, the same deadline stipulated by the amendment. According to White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, the administration also recruited “inflammatory types to attack Senate Doves” by emphasizing their “disloyalty” and “lack of patriotism.” With these aims in mind, several Republicans, including Robert Dole (R-KS) and Paul Fannin (R-KS), gladly accepted the charge to “really ram” Cooper and Church.61
Southern Democrats John Stennis, Sam Ervin, and Spressard Holland and Republicans John Tower and Strom Thurmond augmented the efforts of these GOP attack dogs and in the process articulated majority southern assessments of President Nixon and the war. Stennis, the member of this contingent who spoke most often against Cooper-Church, presented a comprehensive condemnation of the measure. As the only member of the Senate to have received advance notice of the US military operation, the Mississippi senator argued there were times during war when “secrecy” was essential. The SASC chairman considered Nixon “experienced and tough minded” and praised the president’s “courage” in implementing “the first big thing,” the first aggressive action “in a long time.” Stennis backed the Cambodian invasion unreservedly since that country had long since become an “arsenal” for the enemy. To this strategic argument, Stennis added a constitutional brief for rejecting Cooper-Church. The amendment, he contended, sought to restrict inappropriately the president’s authority and discretion as commander in chief. The senator could find “no precedent in all history for Congress to . . . define the perimeter of a battlefield” in the midst of a war. To do so would set an unconstitutional “precedent that would plague . . . future presidents,” “repudiate” Nixon’s pledge to withdraw by June 30, and indicate the US intention to “cut and run”—all of which would foster “great glee” among American “enemies.”62
Ervin, who would come to national and international prominence as he chaired the Senate Watergate hearings during the summer of 1973, described himself as just an “old country lawyer” and was portrayed as a “genial blend of con law and corn pone” and possessed of a “down home voice that drawls from a pair of cheeky jowls that appear to be stuffed plumb full of grits.” Behind this folksy exterior was a keen legal mind and a well-educated former associate justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, who had graduated from the University of North Carolina and attended Harvard Law School following infantry service in World War I. Although Ervin was a consistent hawk on Vietnam, his opposition to government interference with “an individual’s constitutional rights” led him to uphold the distribution of antiwar literature on US military bases and to oppose army surveillance of peace protestors.63
Ervin reinforced Stennis’s arguments on May 18 in an extended Senate speech and in response to a series of leading questions from Senators Holland and Jordan. Ervin maintained that Nixon acted on sound “constitutional and legal” grounds in ordering the invasion. The Gulf of Tonkin constituted a de facto “declaration of war,” and Cambodia’s inability to “protect its neutrality” provided Nixon international legal sanction. As commander in chief, the president had not begun a “new war”; instead, he had prosecuted the “same war with the same enemy,” which had employed Cambodia as a strategic sanctuary over the previous five years. Since the war was legally and actually in progress, Nixon had the constitutional authority as commander in chief to direct the military’s “tactical operations.” By asserting that Congress had the same powers, Cooper-Church sought unconstitutionally “to usurp and exercise” the “powers of the president.” Holland and Tower offered similar perspectives, with the former endorsing an editorial that characterized “much of the criticism” of the Cambodian invasion as “a literal echo of the condemnation” emanating “from Moscow, Peking, and Hanoi” and the latter upholding Nixon’s authority and accusing critics of “giving comfort to the enemy.” Characterizing the Cambodian invasion as the “most courageous” presidential action of the Vietnam War, Thurmond warned that Senate passage of Cooper-Church would cast “Cambodia into the jaws” of “Communist expansion.” While strongly backing President Nixon, these southerners aided Nixon’s GOP stalwarts in forcing Cooper-Church advocates onto the defensive.64
Through his bipartisan work with Frank Church, Senator Cooper had moved to the forefront of antiwar legislative efforts in 1969 and 1970. This antiwar work was not the only way in which the senator had defied constituent sentiment. The liberal Republican had also demonstrated persistent political independence while opposing segregated schools and supporting federal aid to education and Medicare. Cooper’s maverick political inclinations had prompted Senator Robert Taft (R-OH) to ask in the early 1950s, “Are you a Democrat or a Republican?” and a GOP Baptist in Kentucky to remark that Cooper had “a fine name but very little religion and no reliable politics at all.” Still, Kentuckians appreciated his common touch, his integrity, and his genuine concern for his constituents.65
Cooper was initially willing to await the results of the incursion, rather than rushing to judgment, but he admitted, “I would have been happier” if Nixon “had not chosen this” operation. Acting on his long-standing fear of an expanded war involving the possible use of nuclear weapons, Cooper had joined Church in sponsoring an amendment passed in December 1969 forbidding the use of US ground troops in Laos or Thailand. This measure marked the first time since the outbreak of World War II that Congress had employed the “appropriations power” to dictate military operations; and the two senators had announced on April 12 their intention to extend this ban to Cambodia, only to have Nixon preempt the issue.66
This same fear of a wider war prompted Cooper and Church to sponsor their 1970 amendment. Cooper emphasized that he had supported Vietnamization because it constituted “an irreversible policy to bring our forces home.” Invading Cambodia contradicted this policy. The Kentucky Republican acknowledged the president’s authority to “protect our forces” through air power or temporary border crossings but contended that Nixon needed congressional approval to “engage in a major operation or war in Cambodia,” where the United States had “no treaty obligations.” In response to Tower and Robert Griffin (R-MI), the temperate and mannerly Cooper came as near to outrage as he could muster. He dismissed their repeated assertions that he and backers of the amendment were “trying to undermine” the president’s “power to protect the troops” as “incorrect” and a “disservice” to the American people. Cooper challenged such accusations “from the bottom” of his “soul” and dismissed this debating tactic as disingenuous. If such arguments were to be employed “every time Members of the Congress believe in honesty” and acted from a sense of “duty” as legislators, Congress would be paralyzed.67
Fulbright and Gore sharply criticized the Cambodian operation and provided predictable support for their fellow southern dove and his amendment. Both were appalled at still another blatant executive disregard for the SFRC’s and the Senate’s role in foreign policy. With considerable hyperbole, Fulbright pronounced Nixon’s actions, “next to the civil war, . . . the most serious constitutional crisis we’ve ever faced,” and he pointedly asked Stennis how one of “the strongest advocates of a strict construction of the Constitution” and the Senate’s “proper constitutional role” could “arrogate” to Nixon “the right” to make such “grave decisions” while ignoring Congress. Gore warned that the “pattern” of events surrounding the invasion of Cambodia was eerily reminiscent of US entry into Vietnam, a commitment made “without treaty obligations” or congressional “authorization.” The senator asserted that critics of US actions in Cambodia were the true “strict constructionists” and dismissed as “deplorable” the charges by Nixon’s “propaganda minions” that dissenters were “unpatriotic.”68
When the Senate passed the Cooper-Church Amendment on June 30, the exact date that Nixon had set for the withdrawal of all US troops from Cambodia, Senator Cooper’s staff admitted the measure was of largely “symbolic value.” Still, what the Washington Post called the first congressional attempt “to limit the deployment of American troops in the course of an ongoing war” had caused great consternation in the Nixon White House and among backers of US military efforts and had built on prior attempts to reassert congressional war-making powers. The debate and the vote on Cooper-Church II also clearly demonstrated the importance of southern support for Nixon’s Vietnam policies. The Senate adopted the amendment by a 57–38 vote, with Democrats voting 42 to 11 in favor and Republicans 16 to 26 against. Of the 11 Democratic “no” votes, 10 came from the South, compared to only 6 southern votes in favor. Of the 5 Dixie Republicans voting, only Cooper voted in favor. Therefore, within the 57–38 vote in favor, southerners voted 7 to 13 against. When the House tabled the amendment on July 9, southern voting was equally revealing. The tabling motion was adopted 237–153, with southern Democrats voting 67 to 8 in favor and southern Republicans agreeing 27 to 0.69
Southern congressional opposition to the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment was even more decisive. This “Amendment to End the War” proposed to halt all funding for the war after December 1970 and required the withdrawal of all American forces by June 30, 1971, unless Congress were to declare war in the interim. By the end of the summer, one poll found 55 percent of Americans favoring McGovern-Hatfield; but in an earlier poll, only 21 percent of southerners had endorsed setting that precise date for the US exit from Vietnam. When the Senate voted the amendment down by 39–55 on September 1, only Senators Fulbright and Ralph Yarborough voted in favor, and Yarborough was a lame duck, having lost to Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. in the Texas Democratic primary in May. Fifteen southerners, including Cooper and Gore, voted against McGovern-Hatfield.70
Fulbright contended that only a “willingness to commit ourselves to a phased but total American military withdrawal . . . by a specific date” would yield a negotiated settlement. As usual, Stennis spoke for the majority of southerners when he objected to providing the enemy “the precise nature of our plans” and thereby enabling Hanoi and the NLF to “sit down and wait” for the American departure. Cooper added that Congress lacked “the authority to tell the President” to withdraw US “troops on a certain day where they might be in mutual danger”; and Gore, who was in the midst of an ultimately unsuccessful reelection campaign, explained his vote with the assertion that a “forced timetable withdrawal” would undermine the US negotiating position.71
Agreeing with Stennis, Ervin, and the decisive majority of southern legislators, the Montgomery Advertiser, Dallas Morning News, and New Orleans Times-Picayune applauded Nixon’s actions and harshly criticized student protestors. The Advertiser was pleased that the president had rejected “appeasement and surrender” and maintained US “credibility.” By mid-May, the paper’s editors pronounced the operation “overwhelmingly” successful, thereby “heaping more shame” on the “self-righteous, pompous” campus radicals who had defamed Nixon as a “bloodthirsty warmonger.” The Morning News agreed that President Nixon had proved to Hanoi and the American “peace-at-any-price crowd” that his pledge “to take strong and effective measures” was sincere and credible. The paper also endorsed Nixon’s criticism of students at Kent State University and sided with the National Guard troops. The Morning News concluded, “The continued use of violence and force by one side sooner or later will provoke a violent reaction from the other side.”72
Consistent with its prior opposition to the war, the Louisville Courier-Journal was much more critical of Nixon. The Kentucky paper viewed the US movement into Cambodia as a “decisive escalation and expansion of the war” that contradicted the president’s stated policy of withdrawal and demonstrated his “lack of candor.” In decided contrast to majority opinion in the South and the nation, the Courier-Journal defended protestors and criticized Nixon and his administration for appealing to “the darkest emotions of society” and “expressing haughty contempt” for students and their concerns. Letters to the editor, which overwhelmingly supported the president and savagely attacked student protestors, reconfirmed that the paper’s editorial stance on the war and related issues was, like that of Senator Cooper, a decidedly minority perspective in Kentucky and the South.73
In a significant development, the Atlanta Constitution joined the Courier-Journal as an important southern daily opposing the war. With Reg Murphy replacing Eugene Patterson as editor, the Constitution termed the Cambodian invasion “a reckless decision” and a “major escalation” of the war that broke Nixon’s “promise . . . to cool off the war, to get us out and turn it over to the South Vietnamese.” The Constitution also refrained from attacking student dissenters and lectured the Nixon administration that “those who call for guns and bullets to deal with student dissent are more dangerous to America and its institutions . . . than the dissenters ever could be.” Despite these criticisms, the Constitution criticized the Cooper-Church and McGovern-Hatfield Amendments for giving “advance notice” to Hanoi that “they have won and we have lost.” True Vietnamization, a “long view” that held out “hope for a solution that is realistic and honorable,” was preferable to escalation or an abrupt withdrawal. Although the paper, like most southerners, still hoped for an honorable outcome, the Constitution’s altered position was another indication that the war was taking its toll in Dixie.74
Southern politicians had only to read their mail to find that Stennis, Ervin, Tower, the Montgomery Advertiser, and the Dallas Morning News continued to speak for majority southern opinion. Senator Cooper’s correspondence from across the South ran heavily in favor of President Nixon and the Cambodian invasion and strongly opposed to Cooper-Church and antiwar protestors. Critics of the senator and his amendment emphasized that President Nixon had “inherited” the war, was making steady progress in reducing US involvement, and deserved united American backing. A Paris, Kentucky, couple berated Cooper and cited a Lexington Herald Leader poll in which 73 percent of responders backed Nixon and only 22 percent opposed the Cambodian operation. By failing to align himself with that 72 percent, Cooper had joined the “H.H. camp,” or “Hanoi Helpers,” and sided with the “liberals” aiding a “Communist take over” in the United States. Southern Republicans expressed “disgust” that Cooper opposed their GOP president. Was the senator “really and truly a Republican or . . . a Democrat wearing Republican clothing?” Cooper’s actions so infuriated a Sarasota, Florida, resident that he dismissed the senator as “dirty rotten scum” to whom he would “love to give . . . a mouthful of knuckles.” Nixon supporters had no empathy for antiwar protestors and little sympathy for the students killed at Kent State. Cooper’s critics often equated his policies with those “vastly overgrown children,” “STUPID COLLEGE COWARDS,” and “All American Brats,” who “scream, ‘PEACE, PEACE,’ and then bomb and burn, [and] hurl rocks and bottles,” or “bearded, long haired unwashed bastards, who . . . wreck our colleges and universities.”75
While opposing the war generally, southern supporters of the Kentucky senator and Cooper-Church especially objected to President Nixon’s “unilateral decision,” which “usurped” Congress’s “constitutional authority,” and to the president’s response to “attempts at peaceful dissent . . . with armed intimidation and official violence.” A Florida couple with a son in Vietnam declared, “No One MAN Should Have The Power To Commit Our Boys To Combat And Sometimes Death.” They did not sanction “Looting, Burning, Or The Long Hair,” but did “Approve and Support Our Young Men FOR NOT WANTING TO Die.” A Lexington woman, who admitted, “I voted for Nixon and Agnew, God forgive me,” decried “the invasion of Cambodia” and sympathized with the student protestors: “I do believe protestors should be peaceful but, when peaceful protestors are ignored and the participants belittled and insulted, I can understand why violence has erupted.” Others noted that the president’s actions contradicted Vietnamization and the withdrawal of US troops and agreed with Cooper that Nixon appeared to be opting for a “military rather than a negotiated settlement.”76
Both the arguments and the deep emotional divisions evident in the letters to Senator Cooper echoed across Dixie. Senator Fulbright, still the most prominent southern dove, was castigated as the “boob from Arkansas” who was “a professional ‘aginner’ . . . against just about everything except” his “campaign of assistance to the enemy.” A rural Mississippian advocated the “round up” of “the Fulbrights . . . and others of the same breed” and their banishment to a “concentration camp.” Antiwar southerners were often equally caustic. An irate constituent berated Senator Ervin’s support for the war, Nixon’s decision to invade Cambodia, and the National Guards’ actions at Kent State. This Chapel Hill minister was aghast that his senator could “condone the shooting of students who were at worst throwing rocks at soldiers dressed for battle.” He further accused Ervin of “aiding and abetting the murder of thousands of our young men, . . . hundreds and thousands of innocent people in Southeast Asia, . . . the destruction of this country’s economy, and the final and complete loss of America’s credibility, prestige, and respect abroad.” Ervin was “one hell of a lousy American, and a lousy Constitutional scholar” to boot.77
Two other opponents of the war, a Mississippi mother and a Georgia businessman, added perspectives particularly relevant to southern attitudes on the war and foreign policy. While urging Senator Stennis to vote for Cooper-Church and asserting she did not want her young son to be sent to Vietnam, this woman was certain “that all other mothers feel the same, although some feel (have been made to feel) unpatriotic and traitorous about it and dare not admit their feelings even to themselves.” The Atlanta businessman also spoke to the region’s growing ambivalence about the war juxtaposed against Dixie’s pervasive patriotism and intolerance of dissent. He advised Senator Talmadge that all of the “conservative business men” with whom he had spoken over the “past few months” had come to favor “getting out of Vietnam as soon as possible,” although some were “reluctant to express their views publicly” out of “fear of being grouped with . . . radicals who automatically oppose anything the government is doing.”78
Talmadge’s reaction to the Cambodian operation afforded additional evidence that even some of the most hawkish southerners were tiring of the war and its agony; but the harsh responses from his Georgia constituents demonstrated the residual strength of the region’s backing of Nixon and the war. Although Talmadge opposed Cooper-Church as an inappropriate restriction on the commander in chief and voted against both this measure and McGovern-Hatfield, his criticism of President Nixon provoked extensive discussion and considerable consternation in Georgia. The senator continued to favor a more aggressive prosecution of the war and was hopeful in mid-May that “moving into Cambodia” indicated the United States “at last” intended “to prosecute” the war appropriately and “destroy the Communist war effort.” When the operation proved only transitory and US withdrawal remained “just a question of time,” Talmadge advocated doing so “as fast as possible.” Were this advice not sufficiently alarming to his militant constituents, he added that Nixon had “made a grave mistake by not consulting Congress on Cambodia.”79
The Atlanta Constitution applauded Talmadge’s call for a prompt ending to the war and interpreted his statements as a “major sign of the general disillusionment” over US involvement in Vietnam. Sharing the Constitution’s hopeful view, antiwar Georgians wrote to “congratulate” and “wholeheartedly” support their hawkish senator’s partial change of heart. Even more revealing were the outraged Georgians who were “shocked” and “dismayed” at Talmadge’s “shameful” censure of Nixon and at the senator’s willingness to “join the Fulbrights . . . in giving comfort to the enemy.” One of these constituents lectured, “We here in Georgia may be a little war weary . . . , but we are a long way from being ready to throw away (by withdrawing) what we have fought so long for and are perhaps now on the verge of winning.”80
The failure of Senators Albert Gore and Ralph Yarborough to win reelection in 1970 provided additional evidence of the South’s persistent support for the war. Close personal friends, both of these senators had received warnings from backers that their opposition to the war endangered their chances for remaining in office. As early as 1968, Yarborough’s relatively muted criticism of the war prompted an old Texas friend to remind the senator he might be signing his “political death warrant”; and on the eve of the Democratic primary, another pro-Yarborough constituent predicted his “support of the Peace Movement” would “hurt the Senator.” Gore had received similar admonitions that he was “committing political suicide” by joining Fulbright in “crawling into bed with the ‘Eastern Liberals.’” A Memphis attorney who had backed Gore since the early 1950s reluctantly advised the senator that “the paramount importance of the war question” made “it impossible” to vote for him in 1970.81
These predictions proved accurate when Lloyd Bentsen defeated Yarborough in the Texas Democratic primary and Gore lost to Republican William Brock in the general election. Although Yarborough claimed in an emotional Senate speech that his defeat demonstrated “the price one risks in voting against those who make billions off this unwise, stupid war,” and Texas liberal Maury Maverick Jr. suggested the Bentsen victory in part reflected the state’s “sock-it-to-’em Vietnam attitude,” the Democratic senator had not openly opposed the war until after Tet and was far less vocal than Fulbright, Cooper, and Gore. Still, his antiwar stance after Tet enabled Bentsen to brand him a “dove,” hardly a favorable appellation in Texas. By comparison, Gore’s public opposition to the war had provoked the ire of Presidents Johnson and Nixon and prompted a flood of hostile, post-1964 correspondence from his Tennessee constituents. Gore fully understood that his dissent went “against the grain of prevailing sentiment in Tennessee,” where if people were shown a war, “they will fight it.” Therefore, Vietnam played a much greater role in his defeat than Yarborough’s.82
Senator Gore’s opposition to the war was not the only family tie to Vietnam in 1970. Albert (Al) Gore Jr. was about to begin his tour in Vietnam as a military journalist. Following his graduation from Harvard University in May 1969, Al had bypassed an opportunity to join the National Guard and enlisted in the army in August. Part of his motivation was quite southern, part more political. Having remained registered for the draft in the small town of Carthage, Tennessee, he believed that if he did not go, another young man he had likely known for many years would be summoned. Were this the case, the younger Gore did not believe he could face his Carthage neighbors “without feeling small and guilty.” He also feared that avoiding the draft and military service would further imperil his antiwar father’s chances for reelection, and he often appeared with Albert at campaign rallies—sometimes in uniform. Following his dad’s defeat, Al Gore served for five months in Vietnam in 1971. Although he “never claimed to have been in combat,” he was one of approximately ten (of twelve hundred) members of the 1969 Harvard class to serve in Vietnam, and he traveled widely into clearly dangerous areas as a correspondent. Even though he, like Senator Gore, opposed the war, Al served honorably and later recalled feeling “more alive” in the war zone and fondly recalled the “intense and powerful” “camaraderie” established with fellow soldiers.83
In addition to defying majority southern opinion on the war, both Gore and Yarborough carried costly liberal political baggage. Both had voted consistently for black voting rights and most recently for the 1968 Fair Housing Act, had backed LBJ’s Great Society legislation, had opposed school prayer and two of Nixon’s southern nominees to the Supreme Court, and were significantly outspent by their opponents. The Nixon administration had targeted Gore. Nixon made two trips to Tennessee to campaign for Brock and funneled funds, some illegally, to bolster the GOP challenger’s effort. Therefore, opposition to the war was not the only reason for Gore’s and Yarborough’s losses, but straying from Dixie’s martial inclinations appreciably compromised their electoral prospects.
Unlike the outcome of these two elections, the South’s promilitary and prowar proclivities were clearly responsible for Dixie’s hostility toward GI coffeehouses. Located close to major military installations, these coffeehouses provided soldiers an environment to relax beyond military jurisdiction and became centers for antiwar activities. Although none of these Dixie soldiers who wrote to their senators from 1968 to 1970 became active in the antiwar movement within the US military, their disillusionment reflected the deteriorating morale and antiwar attitudes that permeated the coffeehouses. A combat medic informed Senator John Sparkman, “We were the fighters, the muddy and sweaty ones.” This soldier was appalled at how “little” the South Vietnamese “people cared for the cause of freedom.” In fact, he had “more respect for a draft dodger or war protestor than for a [South] Vietnam soldier.” A marine veteran, just back from Vietnam in December 1968, agreed that the South Vietnamese would “never be able to defend their . . . homeland” or “support a democratic system.” This Arkansas native lamented the costs of pursuing these “hopelessly unachievable goals.” He had gone to Vietnam with “ten other Marines.” Nine of them were killed, and the tenth was a “helpless paralytic. And nothing in Vietnam is changed.” Still, the “worst thing” was “what we are doing to the Vietnamese people in the name of our national prestige.” This soldier knew “from personal experience that more civilians are dying by far than either the NVA or Americans combined.”84
The following year, a veteran of two combat tours, one as a member of the 101st Airborne and the second in the US Special Forces, urged Senator Talmadge to promote “every possible effort to END THIS WAR IMMEDIATELY.” This ground soldier assured the senator: “I know this war. I know the mud, the heat and the rain; I know the jungle nights, the dreariness and the terror. I have seen the mountains and the valleys, the cities and the villages—on foot, from trucks and jeeps; and from helicopters and airplanes. I have talked with the people, and have shared meals with them in their homes. I have seen bodies stacked like lumber and bomb craters big enough to hold a house. I have heard my buddies shriek with pain, and have heard the loud silence when the shrieks stopped.” According to this veteran, the United States was waging a futile campaign on behalf of the “venal and self-aggrandizing” Thieu government and against an enemy who “consider themselves super patriots” and “see us as an occupying force on their country.”85
Based on such disillusionment and antiwar sentiments, the first GI coffeehouse, the UFO, was opened in late 1967 in Columbia, South Carolina, near Fort Jackson. Until it was closed under intense local pressure in January 1970, the UFO was frequented by soldiers, antiwar students from the University of South Carolina and Columbus College, and other antiwar dissenters. The UFO served “coffee, tea, soft drinks, fresh fruit, music, and anti-establishment propaganda, much of which was pointedly antimilitary.” The owners of neighboring businesses and local authorities charged that the UFO was also a center for the sale and consumption of illegal drugs, particularly marijuana. Other, similar coffeehouses were founded across the South—the Oleo Strut in Killeen, Texas, near Fort Hood; the GI Coffee House in El Paso, near Fort Bliss; and the Muldraugh GI coffeehouse near Fort Knox. The latter offered services similar to those at the UFO and featured “a painting of an upside-down American flag” and Mao Zedong, Che Guevara, and Black Panther posters. All of these houses were associated with underground antiwar newspapers: the Short Times in Columbia, FTA (officially, Fun, Travel, and Adventure) in Muldraugh, the Gigline in El Paso, and the Fatigue Press in Killeen. Such papers were “dedicated to building a movement of GIs who no longer will accept being messed over in the army and being used to mess over other people around the world.” These coffeehouses also hosted touring antiwar speakers; provided organizing centers for local antiwar demonstrations, which often included off-duty soldiers; served as refuges and way stations for draftees and deserters fleeing to Canada; and afforded GI wives the opportunity to comment on women’s issues and the difficulties facing military families.86
Given the South’s overt patriotism, disdain for antiwar protestors and members of the counterculture, and dependence on defense spending, the region’s aggressively negative reaction to these establishments was predictable and revealing. In the face of intense local hostility, the Muldraugh house survived for only a year. The elderly landlord refused to accept rent payments and then demanded that the coffeehouse be closed for failure to pay. When challenged by the proprietors’ attorney, the eighty-one-year-old declared, “You’re a Communist, the same as the rest of them.” Military intelligence officers complemented this local hostility by infiltrating the coffeehouse and regularly harassing off-duty GIs.87
The UFO and Oleo Strut endured similar experiences. After being hounded daily by the local police, both uniformed and plainclothes, and by undercover agents from the military and the FBI, five operators of the UFO and the coffeehouse itself were indicted on January 13, 1970, for actions “detrimental to the peace, happiness, lives, safety and good morals of the people of South Carolina.” Three days later the UFO was permanently closed. Held under unusually high bail and tried before an openly biased judge, who described the defendants as prone to “rebel against our form of life” and having “come to South Carolina . . . for the sole purpose of causing trouble,” the five UFO defendants were convicted and sentenced to six years in prison, and the UFO was fined $10,000. After appeals, these sentences were reduced and suspended on the condition that these antiwar activists leave South Carolina immediately. The Strut outlived both the UFO and the Muldraugh houses, but only while experiencing, according to a Texas Observer contributor, jail time for staff members and broken windows, smoke bombs, and even a shooting courtesy of the “local shitkickers.”88
Although the Quaker House in Fayetteville, North Carolina, outside Fort Bragg, did not exactly fit the GI coffeehouse mold, local hawks, the FBI, and military intelligence responded just as they had in Kentucky, South Carolina, and Texas. Founded in 1969 by soldiers, many of whom were Vietnam vets, and Quakers from Chapel Hill, Durham, and Greensboro, the Quaker House held religious services, distributed information regarding conscientious objection, and afforded space for soldiers who opposed the war. In the wake of the US invasion of Cambodia, local antiwar demonstrations, and a speaking appearance by Jane Fonda, arsonists burned the Quaker House on May 20, 1970. Resistance from local government and landlords prevented its reopening until October 1970, when William Carothers, a veteran, used his VA benefits to buy a house, which he donated to the Quakers. Thus, like the Strut, this antiwar center survived the events of 1970 and local southern hostility, but the travails of the operators of both establishments testify to Dixie’s majority opinions on the war.89
These majority public and congressional opinions in support of the war afforded both Presidents Johnson and Nixon vital political space as they reluctantly made decisions leading toward US withdrawal from Vietnam. This political space was especially crucial to Nixon as Democrats from other regions were much less deferential toward the new Republican president. Responding to Nixon’s southern domestic strategy, which deemphasized civil rights and accentuated law and order, and his more assertive Vietnam policy, with its declared goal of peace with honor, Dixie’s residents viewed the Republican president as a kindred spirit in the areas of both race and foreign policy. Southerners indicated their approval of the president in the 1968 elections, through their letters to Dixie’s editors and political leaders, and with their responses to Gallup pollsters. By vocally supporting Lieutenant Calley, attacking GI coffeehouses, and denying Senators Yarborough and Gore reelection, southerners amplified their promilitary and prowar preferences. These collective responses indicated that the South was the region most approving of Nixon’s overall performance as president and his handling of Vietnam. Consistent with the majority views of their constituents, conservative southern Democratic congressmen and senators proved essential to Nixon and Kissinger’s success in repulsing efforts by antiwar forces to curtail Vietnam funding or legislate an end to the war. For these southern Democrats, constitutional, racial, and war-related concerns trumped partisan politics. Acting on the same regional racial and foreign policy considerations, as well as partisan political calculations, southern Republicans, such as Senators Thurmond and Tower, also provided Nixon unwavering support.
As had been the case since 1963, a hardy antiwar minority of southerners continued to denounce the war. While helping lead a key antiwar legislative initiative, Senator Cooper remained allied with Fulbright and Gore in their persistent, if unsuccessful, battle to promote negotiations and compromise and to recapture a greater role for Congress in the making of foreign policy and war. Although the Cooper-Church Amendment targeting US operations in Cambodia did not yield immediate results, it caused great apprehension in the Nixon White House and reflected the nation’s and the South’s growing agony and war weariness. The latter was also evident across the southern public as the percentage of antiwar letters to Dixie’s political leaders increased; as southern Democratic hawks began to emphasize their initial opposition to the commitment of US troops in Vietnam; as Senator Talmadge argued for a more rapid American withdrawal; and, most significantly, as John Stennis joined the campaign to reassert congressional foreign policy prerogatives, sought to reduce US commitments abroad, and called on the South Vietnamese to bear a greater war burden.