Ron Kovic
Kovic, a paralysed Vietnam veteran, gate-crashed the 1972 Republican Convention to make an anti-war protest. To do so, he had to quell two of humanity’s great fears: speaking in public and making a fool of oneself. Kovic’s story was later filmed by Hollywood as Born on the Fourth of the July starring Tom Cruise.
It was the night of Nixon’s acceptance speech and now I was on my own deep in his territory, all alone in my wheelchair in a sweat-soaked marine utility jacket covered with medals from the war. A TV producer I knew from the Coast had gotten me past the guards at the entrance with his press pass. My eyes were still smarting from teargas. Outside the chain metal fence around the Convention Center my friends were being clubbed and arrested, herded into wagons. The crowds were thick all around me, people dressed as if they were going to a banquet, men in expensive summer suits and women in light elegant dresses. Every once in a while someone would look at me as if I didn’t belong there. But I had come almost three thousand miles for this meeting with the president and nothing was going to prevent it from taking place.
I worked my way slowly and carefully into the huge hall, moving down one of the side aisles. “Excuse me, excuse me,” I said to delegates as I pushed past them farther and farther to the front of the hall toward the speakers’ podium.
I had gotten only halfway toward where I wanted to be when I was stopped by one of the convention security marshals. “Where are you going?” he said. He grabbed hold of the back of my chair, I made believe I hadn’t heard him and kept turning my wheels, but his grip on the chair was too tight and now two other security men had joined him.
“What’s the matter?” I said. “Can’t a disabled veteran who fought for his country sit up front?”
The three men looked at each other for a moment and one of them said, “I’m afraid not. You’re not allowed up front with the delegates.” I had gotten as far as I had on sheer bluff alone and now they were telling me I could go no farther. “You’ll have to go to the back of the convention hall, son. Let’s go,” said the guard who was holding my chair.
In a move of desperation I swung around facing all three of them, shouting as loud as I could so Walter Cronkite and the CBS camera crew that was just above me could hear me and maybe even focus their cameras in for the six o’clock news. “I’m a Vietnam veteran and I fought in the war! Did you fight in the war?”
One of the guards looked away.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” I said. “I bet none of you fought in the war and you guys are trying to throw me out of the convention. I’ve got just as much right to be up front here as any of these delegates. I fought for that right and I was born on the Fourth of July.”
I was really shouting now and another officer came over. I think he might have been in charge of the hall. He told me I could stay where I was if I was quiet and didn’t move up any farther. I agreed with the compromise. I locked my brakes and looked for other veterans in the tremendous crowd. As far as I could tell, I was the only one who had made it in.
People had begun to sit down all around me. They all had Four More Years buttons and I was surprised to see how many of them were young. I began speaking to them, telling them about the Last Patrol and why veterans from all over the United States had taken the time and effort to travel thousands of miles to the Republican National Convention. “I’m a disabled veteran!” I shouted. “I served two tours of duty in Vietnam and while on my second tour of duty up in the DMZ I was wounded and paralyzed from the chest down.” I told them I would be that way for the rest of my life. Then I began to talk about the hospitals and how they treated the returning veterans like animals, how I, many nights in the Bronx, had lain in my own shit for hours waiting for an aide. “And they never come,” I said. “They never come because that man that’s going to accept the nomination tonight has been lying to all of us and spending the money on war that should be spent on healing and helping the wounded. That’s the biggest lie and hypocrisy of all – that we had to go over there and fight and get crippled and come home to a government and leaders who could care less about the same boys they sent over.”
I kept shouting and speaking, looking for some kind of reaction from the crowd. No one seemed to want to even look at me.
“Is it too real for you to look at? Is this wheelchair too much for you to take? The man who will accept the nomination tonight is a liar!” I shouted again and again, until finally one of the security men came back and told me to be quiet or they would have to take me to the back of the hall.
I told him that if they tried to move me or touch my chair there would be a fight and hell to pay right there in front of Walter Cronkite and the national television networks. I told him if he wanted to wrestle me and beat me to the floor of the convention hall in front of all those cameras he could.
By then a couple of newsmen, including Roger Mudd from CBS, had worked their way through the security barricades and begun to ask me questions.
“Why are you here tonight?” Roger Mudd asked me. “But don’t start talking until I get the camera here,” he shouted.
It was too good to be true. In a few seconds Roger Mudd and I would be going on live all over the country. I would be doing what I had come here for, showing the whole nation what the war was all about. The camera began to roll, and I began to explain why I and the others had come, that the war was wrong and it had to stop immediately. “I’m a Vietnam veteran,” I said. “I gave America my all and the leaders of this government threw me and the others away to rot in their V.A. hospitals. What’s happening in Vietnam is a crime against humanity, and I just want the American people to know that we have come all the way across this country, sleeping on the ground and in the rain, to let the American people see for themselves the men who fought their war and have come to oppose it. If you can’t believe the veteran who fought the war and was wounded in the war, who can you believe?”
“Thank you,” said Roger Mudd, visibly moved by what I had said. “This is Roger Mudd,” he said, “down on the convention floor with Ron Kovic, a disabled veteran protesting President Nixon’s policy in Vietnam.” . . .
Suddenly a roar went up in the convention hall, louder than anything I had ever heard in my life. It started off as a rumble, then gained in intensity until it sounded like a tremendous thunderbolt. “Four more years, four more years,” the crowd roared over and over again. The fat woman next to me was jumping up and down and dancing in the aisle. It was the greatest ovation the president of the United States had ever received and he loved it. I held the sides of my wheelchair to keep my hands from shaking. After what seemed forever, the roar finally began to die down.
This was the moment I had come three thousand miles for, this was it, all the pain and the rage, all the trials and the death of the war and what had been done to me and a generation of Americans by all the men who had lied to us and tricked us, by the man who stood before us in the convention hall that night, while men who had fought for their country were being gassed and beaten in the street outside the hall. I thought of Bobby who sat next to me and the months we had spent in the hospital in the Bronx. It was all hitting me at once, all those years, all that destruction, all that sorrow.
President Nixon began to speak and all three of us took a deep breath and shouted at the top of our lungs, “Stop the bombing, stop the war, stop the bombing, stop the war,” as loud and as hard as we could, looking directly at Nixon. The security agents immediately threw up their arms, trying to hide us from the cameras and the president. “Stop the bombing, stop the bombing,” I screamed. For an instant Cronkite looked down, then turned his head away. They’re not going to show it, I thought. They’re going to try and hide us like they did in the hospitals. Hundreds of people around us began to clap and shout “Four more years,” trying to drown out our protest. They all seemed very angry and shouted at us to stop. We continued shouting, interrupting Nixon again and again until Secret Service agents grabbed our chairs from behind and began pulling us backward as fast as they could out of the convention hall. “Take it easy,” Bobby said to me. “Don’t fight back.”
I wanted to take a swing and fight right there in the middle of the convention hall in front of the president and the whole country. “So this is how they treat their wounded veterans!” I screamed.
A short guy with a big Four More Years button ran up to me and spat in my face. “Traitor!” he screamed, as he was yanked back by police. Pandemonium was breaking out all around us and the Secret Service men kept pulling us out backward.
“I served two tours of duty in Vietnam!” I screamed to one newsman. “I gave three-quarters of my body for America. And what do I get? Spit in the face!” I kept screaming until we hit the side entrance where the agents pushed us outside and shut the doors, locking them with chains and padlocks so reporters wouldn’t be able to follow us out for interviews.
All three of us sat holding onto each other shaking. We had done it. It had been the biggest moment of our lives, we had shouted down the president of the United States and disrupted his acceptance speech. What more was there left to do but go home?
I sat in my chair still shaking and began to cry.