My place card at the White House dinner said: “Thanks much for what you are doing for your country—LBJ.” I think that upset some people because they thought it was like a pat on the head for helping cool off the riots. I don’t think they understood everything I had been doing—the stay-in-school campaign, the lobbying with the vice president about job programs, and things like that. And in less than a month—the dinner was on May 8—I was going to Vietnam to entertain the troops.
I also had a song, a patriotic song, about to come out called “America Is My Home.” I called it my contribution to “the long cool summer.” I didn’t know it at the time, but that record was going to disturb a lot of people. They were going to get very heavy with me over that song. Today, all anybody says about it is that it was the first rap record.
The state dinner was in honor of the prime minister of Thailand. Besides him and President Johnson, there were senators, congressmen, and other government officials: Vice President Humphrey, Sentator Birch Bayh, Senator Sam Ervin, Representative John Anderson, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford, Eugene and Walter Rostow, William Bundy, General Maxwell Taylor, Cyrus Vance, and a lot more. Edward Bennett Williams, Earl Wilson, Allen Drury, and a few other private citizens were also there.
I was standing in a group with the president and others when Earl Wilson, the columnist, said, “Won’t they call you Uncle Tom for doing this?”
“No,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not.” And Mr. Johnson winked his eye.
I didn’t talk to Mr. Johnson very much. He was eating a lot of food. That man was hungry. I was honored to be there, but mostly I was just interested because I was getting ready to go to Asia and most of the people at the dinner were concerned with what was going on there. The president had just said he wouldn’t run for re-election. He had stopped the bombing and was about to send some people over to start peace talks. I think he really wanted peace, but I think he wanted to reassure Thailand, too. He got up to toast the prime minister and said, “We will never abandon our commitment or compromise the future of Asia at the negotiating table.”
During the meal I was seated on the other side of the room from Mr. Humphrey. Afterward, a Secret Service man came to my table and said, “The Vice President of the United States would like to see you at his table.” It sounded like an order.
“Please inform the vice president,” I said, “that James Brown is not his boy. I will not walk across the room to his table.” The Secret Service man looked shook up now. “But you can tell him,” I said, smiling a big crocodile smile, “that I’ll meet him halfway.”
The Secret Service man looked like he didn’t believe what he was hearing. He stood there for a minute, then walked across the room, with me watching him the whole way. He leaned down and whispered to Mr. Humphrey. When he was finished, Mr. Humphrey caught my eye and started laughing. We met halfway.
It was all in good fun, but I was not his boy. I had been thinking about the election a lot since Mr. Johnson withdrew. Mr. Humphrey hadn’t really jumped into it that strong yet, and I had just about decided to endorse Senator Robert Kennedy. He was a good man and was doing very well in the primaries, and I thought he was going to get the nomination eventually. He was a young man with young ideas, and at that time we needed a leader that young people could identify with. I didn’t discuss my plans with Mr. Humphrey that night, but I intended to explain it to him before I went public with it.
The only other entertainer at the White House that night was Bob Hope—one of the finest men I know. I think he was partly responsible for my finally getting to Vietnam. I had volunteered a long time before and offered to pay my own way and everything, but the government kept putting me off. Mr. Hope told some of the USO people, “If you’re going to get anybody to perform for the troops, James Brown is the man.” Not long after that, I received the word to go.
When I got the dates for the Vietnam trip, I cancelled $100,000 worth of bookings. We left at the beginning of June and went to Korea first. I took the whole revue over there. We stayed near Seoul and did a couple of shows a day for several days all around the country. When we went to Vietnam we could only take seven people—five musicians, me, and Marva Whitney. The musicians were Maceo Parker on sax, Waymond Reed on trumpet, Jimmy Nolen on guitar, Tim Drummond on bass, and Clyde Stubblefield on drums.
Tim was a white bass player I had used on some sessons in Cincinnati at King. I’d been asking him to join the band, and when he heard we were going to Vietnam he said yes. He told me he wanted to show the soldiers over there that some white and black people back home were getting along. He was a playing cat—good God a’mighty, I never could get enough of Tim.
Marva was a singer on the show, and she was also my girlfriend at the time. Deedee and I had broken up by then, and she’d left. Another woman named Florence had become my girlfriend, and she was with me in New York. We lasted about two years, until Deedee and I got back together. But Marva was my girlfriend, too. She was a fine woman. I wrote a song for her called “It’s My Thing and I Do What I Want to Do and You Can’t Tell Me Who to Sock It To.” I think she was the strongest of all my girlfriends. Any time a woman can go to Vietnam and go through what she went through, she must be stronger than anybody else.
They gave us a bunch of shots, fatigues to travel around in, and steel-reinforced boots in case of booby traps, and then they put us on a plane for Saigon. The funny thing was the identification cards they gave us that said we were noncombatants. If we somehow got captured by the Viet Cong, we were supposed to show them these cards and everything would be cool. We laughed about that the whole time we were there.
We got there not too long after Tet, and the day before, the Viet Cong had launched the biggest attack on Saigon up to that time. They shot something like 135 rounds of 122-millimeter rockets into the city. Flying into Saigon you could see all the blown-up buildings and damage that had been done. Except for the gun emplacements and the sandbags everywhere, though, Saigon was a beautiful city. They put us up at the Continental Hotel, I believe, not too far from the presidential palace. The day we got there, a mortar shell hit a few doors down the street and killed seventeen people. They dropped ten rockets on Tan Son Nhut Air Base, right outside the city, that morning. We performed there that afternoon. From Saigon we traveled around the country by helicopter, did our shows, and then came back there to sleep. At night you could hear the American bombs hitting a few miles out in the countryside: You could feel ’em, too—the bed would shake.
We did two, sometimes three, shows a day—one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and one at night. Really, it was harder than any tour I’d ever done. For one thing, it was unbelievably hot. Being up on that stage dancing and singing in 100 degrees, the jungle sun beating down, I’d be so depleted that I’d get my intravenous after almost every show. Clyde lost a lot of fluid, too, working out on those drums. After one really hot show I said to him, “Try this.” He said okay. They brought in an old field nurse who was used to seeing worse things than dehydrated musicians, and she took the needle and jabbed it into him. She didn’t have any finesse at all. Clyde let out a holler, jerked the needle out of his arm, and ran out of the tent. He didn’t want any more intravenous.
The reception we got was incredible, they were so glad to see us. The shows all kind of ran together, but I’ll never forget the one we did for the Ninth Infantry Division. It was called Bearcat, I believe. They had the place dug out of the side of a hill—like the Hollywood Bowl—and there must have been forty thousand people there. Around the rim, at the top, tanks were pulled up like at a drive-in, with guys sitting in the hatches looking down on the show.
It must have been 115 degrees on the stage. We didn’t care. Those guys went wild, all forty thousand in full field gear. About halfway through the show we heard this ack-ack-ack-ack, boom, boom, BOOM coming from somewhere behind the stage. It turned out Americans were firing at somebody. I didn’t have any thoughts of stopping the show, but we must have looked concerned because the guys in the front yelled, “Don’t worry, we won’t let Charlie get you.”
After a show we mingled with the troops for a little while, then we jumped in the helicopter and headed for the next show. A soldier always sat in the open door of the helicopter with a grenade launcher watching the ground to see if anything moved. Sometimes we drew some small-arms fire. One night we were choppering back from a show and tracers came at us. It was kind of pretty if you didn’t think about the fact they were meant to kill you.
When we got back to the airfield at night, they took us off the chopper and put us in a bus. The windows on the bus had screens so no one could throw a grenade in while we were riding along. One night we were standing by the chopper and overheard a guy on a walkie-talkie yell, “Get ’em out of there. A mortar attack is coming in.” They hustled us onto the bus and made us lie on the floor as we drove away. I started laughing, thinking about the time in North Carolina when all those people chased us out of town, shooting at us, and we had to lie on the floor of that bus.
Another time we had to take a plane instead of a helicopter because we were going to an air base way up north. That’s the only time we traveled by plane. They put us in one of those planes you always see go down in a Tarzan movie, an old prop job. They could tell we didn’t like the way it looked because they said, “Don’t worry, this plane’s a workhorse. It’ll go anywhere.” We weren’t in the air ten minutes when one of the engines caught fire. We came limping back, about fifty feet off the ground. We made an emergency landing—barely making the end of the runway. They ran out to the plane and got us off quick. While we were waiting in a Quonset hut for another plane, we heard this BOOM, BOOM, KABOOM. An officer in the hut said, “Hmmm, must be an air strike.” Our planes were attacking the area we’d just brushed over. I guess we’d aroused some Viet Cong.
The whole time in Vietnam there was always a chance we’d get shot down or mortared, but nothing I did was as hard as what our soldiers had to do. Every day. For months. Some for years. A lot of ’em looked like seventeen- and eighteen-year-old kids, but they weren’t kids. They were men. They had to be.
Before we left for Vietnam I had instructed Bob Patton, one of my promotion men, to make contact with Senator Kennedy. They met in the Ambassador Hotel the day of the California primary. Mr. Patton told the senator that I wanted to endorse him. He said, “That’s great. Tell James I appreciate it. I’ll talk to you about it a little later, but right now I have to make a speech.” Mr. Patton left; I think he went to see the Righteous Brothers who were doing a show nearby. When he came back to the Ambassador later that night, he ran into a big commotion. Senator Kennedy had been shot. He died the next day. I don’t remember where I was when I got the news from Mr. Patton but, for some reason, after that, Vietnam didn’t seem so dangerous to me.