The first time she became pregnant Norma McCorvey was living in Los Angeles with her husband, a drifter with a vicious streak who’d won her over by saying he wanted to be a rock star. On the night she told him she was expecting, he beat her unconscious. The next morning a friend drove her to the airport, put a roll of cash in her hand, and sent her up to the counter to buy a ticket on the first flight to Dallas, so she could get back to her mother’s house, though that had never been a safe place either. Seven months later, in May 1965, she gave birth to a girl she named Missy. McCorvey was seventeen.
She and her mother tried to make a go of it. But there was too much history between them, too much anger, too much alcohol, and far too many complications. In McCorvey’s telling the fissures began to crack open at a gay bar called Sue’s, where she finally admitted to herself that she was more attracted to women than to men. When she brought the truth home, she says, her mother claimed custody of Missy and threw McCorvey out of the house. Her mother told the story a different way. She never could stand Norma’s defiance. “I beat the fuck out of her,” she said much later. “You can only take so much of nerviness. She was wild. Wild.”1 But it wasn’t her daughter’s lesbianism that made her take Missy from her, she insisted. It was the drinking, the dope, and the sleeping around. She told her she had to straighten out. But McCorvey didn’t listen.
She got pregnant again in 1967. She was living with a woman she’d met in a bar, working a job her partner had gotten her on the night shift at the Baylor University hospital, when one of the orderlies started hitting on her. She told him she was gay. He said it didn’t matter. They spent a week together while her girlfriend was out of town, long enough for the sex to lose whatever allure it had. McCorvey thought he’d taken up with her for the thrill of being with a bad girl. What she was looking for she couldn’t say. But it wasn’t a baby. That much she knew.
She delivered her second child alone, her partner having broken off their relationship and tossed her out of the apartment as soon as she’d heard what had happened, the hospital having fired her once her supervisor discovered that she was expecting out of wedlock, her mother having decided that there wasn’t any point in trying to salvage her. By arrangement the medical staff whisked away the baby before McCorvey came out of the anesthetic, so that the adopting family wouldn’t have any contact with the young woman who’d given them their newborn. Afterward the doctor said she’d had a son, though one of the nurses was sure it was a girl.
As soon as she could she went back to the bars, working days at a gay place, evenings at a straight one, still drinking, still smoking weed, and now dropping and occasionally dealing acid too. From there she took to hustling pool alongside yet another drifter, this one a middle-aged good old boy who drove a two-year-old Olds, drank as hard as she did, and made a living reeling in the marks. Eventually she “shacked up with him and his liquor and his music,” she said. “And a few pills of course.”2 It lasted just a week; in her version of events relationships with men always seemed to last a week. Then he left for Vegas.
Somehow she hooked on to a roadside carnival, the sort of operation that set up for a couple of days in a parking lot, selling rides on the whirligig, thrills at the motor dome, and a look at the five-legged cow, before moving on to the next town. The last stop was Fort Lauderdale, where the carnival shut down for the season. The owners told the hands who had nowhere else to go that they could stay with the flatbeds as long as they wanted, though they wouldn’t be paid for their time. That’s where she was in September 1969, a twenty-one-year-old nobody, as she put it, living in a truck on a Florida blacktop, sharing joints with her fellow carnies, drinking what little savings she had, too scared to admit that she was pregnant again.
Nixon Now
RICHARD NIXON KNEW that Dwight Eisenhower was dying. The old man had been admitted to Washington’s Walter Reed Hospital in May 1968 with congestive heart failure. There he’d stayed through the election, the December marriage of his grandson David to Nixon’s younger daughter Julie, and the January inauguration of the man he’d set on the path to the presidency back in 1952. Nixon had gone to see him twice, the first time just hours after Hubert Humphrey’s concession—it was his first official visit as president-elect—and again on Thanksgiving Day, when the Nixon and Eisenhower families had gathered together in the hospital cafeteria for the turkey dinner the army made for them. After that there’d been any number of phone calls and messages, interspersed with an expanding set of reports on the general’s gradual decline.
Still, his passing, in the early afternoon of March 28, 1969, came as a shock. The president was in the Oval Office with the secretary of defense when Bob Haldeman came in to give him the news. Nixon started to talk about funeral arrangements. But partway through he got up from his desk, turned his back to the room, and started to cry.
After a couple of minutes he slipped into an anteroom off the Oval Office for some time alone. When he returned, still half-crying, a handful of aides were waiting for him. They stood around awkwardly, Haldeman wrote in his diary that evening, until one of them thought of the perfect thing to say. Eisenhower had seen “all his checkpoints, the nomination, the wedding, the inaugural, the P[resident]’s success,” he told Nixon. “So he could go freely now,” as dying fathers do when they know that their sons have secured their legacy.3
Nixon wove that legacy through his new administration as thoroughly as he’d drawn it through the campaign. Some of his most important appointments came straight from the Eisenhower years—his secretary of state had been Ike’s last attorney general, his secretary of commerce Eisenhower’s budget director—and he filled almost every other cabinet post with the moderate Republicans Ike had always favored. Inside the White House he re-created the organizational structure Eisenhower had imported from the military, with strict lines of authority leading up to a chief of staff who controlled access to the president. JFK and LBJ had reverted to the somewhat looser structure previous presidents had used. But Nixon liked the precision—and isolation—that Ike’s system offered.
Its operation turned out to be a grim business. According to the White House’s PR machinery, the New Nixon was running his administration with the same quiet reason he’d brought to his campaign. His staffers knew better. Most days he bunkered himself into the Oval Office or the hideaway he claimed in the Old Executive Office Building next to the West Wing, alone with the stack of memos funneled through the only three aides whose company he cared to keep: Haldeman, the campaign’s leading ad man, as chief of staff; domestic affairs adviser John Ehrlichman; and Henry Kissinger, the ruthlessly ambitious and relentlessly manipulative Harvard professor he’d made his national security advisor. Out of his seclusion flowed a stream of “action items,” some scrawled in the memos’ margins, others embedded in the rambling, brooding, often angry soliloquies he delivered, mostly to Haldeman and Ehrlichman, who’d been protecting him for years—though Kissinger also heard his share. He’d settle into his favorite chair and talk, sometimes late into the night, obsessing over appearances, raging against slights, slashing away at the enemies he saw all around him, the Old Nixon through and through.
He took a few months to settle on a domestic agenda, but its guiding principles were set from the start. He’d tinker around the edges of the Great Society, moving a handful of programs from one spot in the bureaucracy to another and changing up their funding streams. But the key programs would stay in place, as he’d said they would during the campaign. And from the pile of proposals LBJ had left behind he’d pick out a few to extend, just as Ike had expanded the New Deal’s public works programs to build the nation’s freeway system. Nixon found two he liked. One of them would remake the New Deal’s piecemeal welfare state by replacing the mix of monthly support poor families received with a guaranteed annual income. The other resurrected a mandatory hiring program Lyndon Johnson had put in place to combat racial discrimination in Philadelphia’s congenitally discriminatory construction work. There’d been so much pushback from the building trades that Johnson had abandoned it. In June 1969 Nixon revived it, under the legalistic name of “affirmative action.”
When it came to his broader racial policies, though, Eisenhower’s moderation wouldn’t do. Postelection studies showed that two-thirds of Wallace’s voters would have supported Nixon in 1968 had the governor not been in the race. With those returns Nixon would have won 52.3 percent of the popular vote, less than three points shy of Ike’s percentage in 1952. And he probably would have carried every southern state he failed to carry, from Georgia all the way through Texas. Losses that serious couldn’t be allowed to stand. So Nixon spent the winter and spring piecing together a robust racial agenda, the process shaped by his furious marginalia, occasional racist rants—“Went through his whole thesis re: blacks and their genetic inferiority and the hopelessness of any early change in the situation,” Haldeman wrote after one session with the president, “have to wait for in-breeding”4—and an abiding fear of being outflanked by George Wallace again.
The civil rights movement’s most dynamic centers were already struggling. Its southern wing was still reeling from the loss of Martin Luther King, while Black Power had suffered a serious blow from Stokely Carmichael’s December decision to abandon the United States for a new life in Guinea. A sudden surge in membership had turned the Black Panther Party into the new face of African American radicalism. But it also strained the leadership’s ability to control the party they’d created; in January its Central Committee launched what would turn into a series of purges, a sign of fierce conflicts to come. Nixon wanted to speed the spiral. King’s successors should be discreetly marginalized, he said, and Black Power broken by a dramatic intensification of the clandestine operation the FBI had launched against it in 1967. Those quiet moves would then be coupled with two very public ones, the first aimed at the inner cities, the second at the Supreme Court’s assault on segregated schools.
The 1968 Safe Streets Act had given Nixon a hundred million dollars to distribute to states and cities to intensify policing. But it hadn’t given him the ability to tell state and local authorities what form the intensification should take. At the end of January 1969 the White House offered them a model to follow by submitting to Congress a bill to combat crime in the District of Columbia, where the federal government set the rules. The details were draconian. The district police would be given the right to enter suspects’ homes without announcing themselves. Judges would be allowed to detain arrestees for up to sixty days without bail whenever they thought the suspects posed “a danger to the community.” Anyone convicted of an armed crime of violence was to receive a mandatory minimum sentence of three years; a second conviction carried a mandatory minimum of twenty years; and a third, life imprisonment. The counting could begin as early as age fifteen, since prosecutors would be given the discretion to have kids that young tried as adults. This wasn’t an anti-crime bill, said a Senate critic. It was “a blueprint for a police state,” to be imposed on the only major American city with an overwhelmingly African American population: a terrifying escalation of the racalized law and order that had already done so much damage to the nation.5
In the summer Nixon turned to the Supreme Court. A scattering of rural southern school systems had already integrated in accordance with the previous year’s New Kent County decision. But most had preferred to plod through the cases Black parents had brought to force their compliance. Not that the districts had decent defenses to mount, since the vast majority of them had been sustaining their color lines through the same disingenuous transfer plans the justices had declared unconstitutional in New Kent. All through the year the rulings came down as the law required, so that by the time classes let out in June 1969 a substantial portion of the southern countryside was facing the imminent integration of its schools.
In the cities the legal question grew more muddied. Many of the South’s urban school systems also had deceptive transfer programs. For the most part, though, they just assigned students to their neighborhood schools. That policy produced segregated systems, their lawyers argued, but not because of any discriminatory intent. It was simply a matter of geography: neighborhoods were segregated, so their schools were too. That put southern cities on what had long been thought of as the northern side of the de facto/de jure divide. On that side, the southern lawyers said, the courts had no right to require schools to integrate.
The NAACP’s attorneys knew the argument far too well: by 1969 the association’s legal files were full of failed attempts to bring court-ordered desegregation to schools outside the South. In the summer of 1968 they’d tried again, with a filing against Los Angeles’ sprawling system. This time they handed the court a new argument. LA’s segregated neighborhoods had indeed produced segregated schools, they said. But that connection wasn’t simply a matter of geography. Government officials had actively divided neighborhoods through a host of programs, from redlining to highway construction. The LA school board then reinforced the division by manipulating ostensibly neutral processes like the drawing of attendance zones. Los Angeles’ schools therefore weren’t segregated by de facto discrimination, the argument ran. They were segregated by law. And the courts had every right to demand their immediate integration.
The LA case was still underway in the winter of 1969, when the NAACP brought the argument south on behalf of a long-standing suit against the Charlotte, North Carolina, schools. At first the presiding judge, James McMillan, a farmer’s son trained at Harvard Law, wasn’t convinced that the definition of de jure discrimination could be stretched so far. But the more he heard the more sense it made. The courtroom phase ended in March. The next month he dismissed Charlotte’s de facto defense—“the neighborhood school theory has no standing to override the Constitution,” he said—and ordered integration so thorough that every school in the district was to have a balance of Black and white students equal to the racial makeup of the city as a whole.6
It was only a district court decision, sure to be appealed. But its implications were enormous. New Kent County had about 1,300 students in its schools, a reasonable number for a rural system. Charlotte had 85,000. To meet McMillan’s order, the school board would have to move a substantial portion of them across the color line, busing white children into Black neighborhoods and Black children into white ones. Some of those moves would run between abutting communities. Others would stretch across Charlotte, from its northwest corner where 90 percent of African Americans lived to the leafy subdivisions of the southeast, where there were no Blacks at all. When the buses rolled into that section of the city—as the court expected them to do in September 1969—the NAACP’s lawyers would have finally breached the barriers that had protected middle-class whites from any personal experience of the civil rights revolution. They’d have done it, moreover, by flipping the formula SCLC had used to shatter Jim Crow in the spring of 1963. Then the movement had put African American children into the streets. This time the movement would bring white kids into the center of the struggle.
The protests started as soon as the ruling came down. Some of them embraced the explicit racism that had infused the massive resistance campaigns of the 1950s. But the largest rallies ran in a different direction. We have nothing against integration, the parent organizers told the families who filled the church halls and high school gyms of Charlotte’s suddenly imperiled subdivisions. But they’d worked hard to get their kids into decent schools close to home. And it wasn’t right for the courts to wrench them away solely because of the color of their skin. So the organizers flipped the movement’s formula too, appropriating its promise of a color-blind America to defend those long-standing barriers the neighbors who were packed onto the bleachers had never even noticed.
The school board filed its appeal in June, late enough that the superior court couldn’t possibly rule in time for integration to begin by the deadline Judge McMillan had set. A few weeks later the Fifth Circuit Court ordered thirty-three Mississippi districts to integrate when their schools reopened in September, as Charlotte was supposed to do. Thirty of them asked that they be given until December 1 to comply, a request the Department of Justice quickly and very publicly endorsed. On its face a three-month delay seemed a minor concession. But the NAACP feared that the administration was actually signaling to every school system under court order—from New Kent to Charlotte—that it should stall integration with whatever legal means it could find. When the Fifth Circuit gave the schools the extension they wanted, the association’s lawyers appealed its decision to the Supreme Court. And the White House announced that at oral arguments the Justice Department’s lawyers would stand with Mississippi.
Nixon combined that subtle move with a far blunter one. He’d come into office knowing that he’d have one Supreme Court seat to fill, thanks to the Senate’s conservatives blocking Abe Fortas’s ascension to chief justice the previous September. In May 1969 the conservatives drove Fortas from the Court altogether, forcing him to resign over financial improprieties, with the threat of a homosexual scandal tossed in. For the new chief justice, Nixon nominated longtime circuit court judge Warren Burger, who’d come to his attention by publicly embracing the administration’s defense of law and order. For Fortas’s seat he went with Clement Haynsworth of the Fourth Circuit, a fifth-generation South Carolinian with an imposing pedigree, impeccable manners, and a judicial record unequivocally in support of segregated schools. Haynsworth had already ruled in the mid-1960s to protect Charlotte’s segregated school system, which was clearly part of his appeal. Two appointments weren’t enough to break the bench’s liberal bloc, but once they were confirmed, Nixon would have begun to build a counterweight.
Vietnam required a long game too. He was facing short-term pressures, to be sure. LBJ’s dramatic moves in March 1968 had calmed the international markets. But in the course of the year the inflationary spiral had hit 4.7 percent, its highest level since 1950. In response the Federal Reserve was starting to raise interest rates, which would likely push the economy into a recession, all because of the economic tangle the war had created. Then there was the inescapable fact that Nixon had spent the campaign promising that he would bring the war to an honorable end. When reporters pushed for details at his first press conference as president, he stumbled a bit. But the fundamental point came through clearly enough. He wanted to reach a settlement with North Vietnam that preserved South Vietnam’s independence, the same goal LBJ had pursued for five blood-soaked years.
The difference lay in the details. Like Johnson before him, Nixon assumed that the North Vietnamese wouldn’t begin serious negotiations until they were convinced that a brokered peace was in their best interest. He saw two ways to push them to that conclusion, one strikingly strategic in its conception, the other brutal. For years the North Vietnamese had exploited the tension between the Soviet Union and China, playing the two nations off each other to maximize the support they drew from both. Nixon wanted to turn that dynamic around with a stunning bit of realpolitik. He’d quietly offer the Soviets improved relations on a number of fronts, while simultaneously probing the possibility of opening relations with China for the first time since the 1949 revolution had brought Mao Zedong to power. Each side would be anxious to cut off his overture to the other, for fear that if it didn’t it would be isolated in a superpower realignment. From that fear Nixon could wrench concessions on various issues, from nuclear weapons to trade. But most of all he could insist that both Moscow and Beijing push Hanoi toward a settlement.
Such a grand strategy would take time to develop. Within a month of his inauguration Nixon had established a secret channel to the Russian ambassador, to be run through Kissinger, who shared the president’s love of the clandestine. China was harder to reach. Not until midsummer did Nixon manage to even hint at the possibility of an opening, and then only through an intermediary. In the meantime he put the more brutal piece of his Vietnam policy into place. He came into office with the military still fully engaged in South Vietnam, its troops still slogging through the countryside in search of Viet Cong to destroy, its bombers still pounding the nation it had pledged to protect. That clearly wasn’t enough. So he ran through other options. For a while he considered launching a Curtis LeMay–style air assault on North Vietnam, far more vicious than anything LBJ had tried. But having promised Americans peace he was hesitant to give them an intensified war. Or at least one they could see.
Since 1965 the military had been running a covert bombing campaign against the supply lines the North Vietnamese snaked through Laos, the tiny country on North Vietnam’s western border. On March 17 Nixon extended that campaign to Cambodia, immediately west of South Vietnam, ordering the first of what would be almost 4,000 American bombing runs against the supply lines’ southern stretch. It was a fourteen-month assault on a neutral nation meant solely to intimidate Hanoi, just as LBJ had believed Rolling Thunder would do back in 1965, the entire operation wrapped in a secrecy so complete Nixon didn’t even tell his secretary of state what he’d done until the bombers were airborne.
There the war remained for the next three months, to all appearances the fighting precisely where Johnson had left it—1,316 Americans were killed in combat in March 1969, 847 in April, 1,209 in May—the peace talks as deadlocked as they’d ever been. Then, on June 8, Nixon announced that he was going to start bringing the boys back home. He couched his decision in long-standing policy. The United States had always intended the South Vietnamese to assume responsibility for their own defense, he said. Now they were ready, and the Pentagon could begin to draw down its troops. The reductions would be handled with the utmost caution, he insisted: the first round would shrink the American force in South Vietnam by 25,000, less than five percent of the number in-country, with more to follow as circumstances allowed. Even his closest advisers were surprised by the decision, which seemed to run counter to his intention of battering the North Vietnamese into a settlement. But really it was all of a piece. Nixon was slowly pulling the troops out of combat so as to drive down the casualties Americans couldn’t stand to see, while hiding the violence he’d unleashed by turning it into covert action. He was still going to fight LBJ’s bitch of a war, in other words, but he was going to do it the way Dwight Eisenhower had taught him.
Nixon mixed in a bit of McCarthyism. Under the president’s prodding, the FBI’s covert campaign against the Panthers reached a feverish level, fueled by the informants and provocateurs the bureau flooded into the Panthers’ chapters across the country. Official repression quickly followed, nowhere more brutally than in Chicago, where the police used the FBI’s subversions to justify their murder of the city’s most prominent Panther, twenty-one-year-old Fred Hampton, in an early morning raid on his apartment three blocks west of Vacuum Can. The cops shot him two times in the head before he could even get out of bed.
To the bureau’s secret crusade against the Panthers, Nixon added a public show of force aimed at the anti-war movement’s militant wing. A week after the inauguration the White House had a letter out to college presidents, reminding them that Washington had the right to withdraw federal funding from any student who committed a crime during a campus protest. That small slap was followed by a tougher blow: in March the Justice Department indicted the seven radicals who’d organized the Chicago convention actions, with an eighth—Black Panther Bobby Seale—added in for symmetry’s sake. They were charged with conspiracy to incite a riot, a tough case to make, since the week’s worst violence had come not from the protesters but from Chicago’s rampaging police. But the point wasn’t to secure a conviction, or even to make prospective radicals think twice before taking to the streets. In fact Nixon hoped for a spike in campus unrest come spring. Or so he said in another of his marginal notes, this one written the week the indictments were handed down, presumably on the assumption that any disruption would play in his favor now that he’d proved to those Americans who couldn’t stand anti-war protesters that he was on their side.
He got what he was looking for. Through April and May, confrontations swept across the country’s colleges and universities, some fed by the war, others by race, still others by administrators’ determination to assert their authority. There were hundreds of small-scale protests, larger ones at some of the nation’s best-known schools. Down went Harvard, shut by a three-day student strike that started as a campaign against the campus military training program the university had long run. Down went Stanford, crippled by student protests over military-funded research. Down went Cornell, paralyzed by an armed occupation of the student union by Black students demanding that the university create an African American Studies Department. And down went two of the campuses that had given student activism its shape—North Carolina A&T and the University of California, Berkeley, both hit with massive state repression after student-led marches went horribly wrong. Hundreds of students were injured in the fighting that followed, two of them killed: a twenty-one-year-old farmer’s son gunned down at A&T in a drive-by that may or may not have involved the police, and a twenty-five-year-old in Berkeley hit in the back by a load of buckshot the Alameda County sheriff’s department was using in lieu of bullets. This wasn’t dissent, Nixon told the 10,000 people who came to his only campus appearance, at South Dakota’s placid little General Beadle State College. This was insurrection.
SDS promised worse to come. At the end of June its most devoted members swept into Chicago, of all places, for their annual convention. Their aim was to set the nation’s surging students on the road to revolution. But they couldn’t agree on which road to follow. For four fevered days they argued over principles, tactics, comportment, and the finer points of revolutionary thought. On the fifth day they split, one faction claiming the hall for the student-worker alliance that would topple the capitalist order, the other stalking out to build the vanguard that would lead the masses of radicalized youth into the anti-imperialist war raging among the world’s oppressed.
Theorizing a revolution wasn’t the same as delivering it. For the first time since 1964 the summer passed without any major urban unrest, except for a few tense nights in the streets around a Greenwich Village gay bar called the Stonewall Inn. Talk of building a “gay power” movement had been circulating around the edges of gay and lesbian communities for a couple of years. On the West Coast there’d been a scattering of actions too, mostly protests against police harassment of homosexual social spaces and public demonstrations of gay pride. But it wasn’t until eight New York cops raided the Stonewall early in the morning of June 28 that the movement started to surge. It was the force of the response that did it—crowds of young gay and trans people filling the streets for three nights of clashes with the cops—and the media attention that dramatic events in the heart of Manhattan inevitably drew. Within a few weeks activists had formed the Gay Liberation Front, the first decisive step in a national mobilization that didn’t fit neatly into any of SDS’s radical categories.
As for the surging students, their greatest show of force came on a dairy farm a hundred miles north of New York City, a world away from the anti-imperialist struggle. Since 1967 the hippie ethos had seeped into popular culture as a pastiche of rebellion for sale in the record stores and on the edgy end of Broadway—its allure heightened by the drug panic that refused to give way, though the most careful studies showed that while marijuana use was rapidly rising, only about six percent of Americans younger than twenty-five had ever tried a harder drug. That was the combination that the summer’s most successful promoters put together. They called it the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, though it wasn’t in Woodstock and there was no fair: just three days of rock and roll, much of it transplanted from the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival, the best of it mesmerizing, even without the pot and the pills passing through the crowd. It was a late-summer revival of the Haight’s hippie glory for 400,000 kids to share, an appeal SDS’s splintered vanguards couldn’t come close to matching.
They tried, most provocatively with a call on young militants to join them for three “Days of Rage” to mark the October opening of the Chicago conspiracy trial. The organizing cadre, rebranded as the Weathermen, imagined “a huge action,” as one of its leading figures put it. “Thousands upon thousands will be on hand, and the whole wide world will see what a radical fighting force in the mother country can look like.”7 They got 300 militants smashing windows on Chicago’s upscale North Side and a bit of the Loop until the cops beat them into submission. The news gave it heavy play. But the White House paid almost no attention, preoccupied as it was by another demonstration scheduled for the following week, to be led not by Maoists-in-the-making but by the Democrats’ growing number of doves.
Nixon had always assumed that the most prominent liberals would take him on. And they had, in bits and pieces. Some of them had objected to his crime bill’s most aggressive provisions, more to his nomination of Judge Haynsworth, who it turned out had some financial indiscretions of his own to go with his troubling racial record. Vietnam built more slowly. At first almost everyone was willing to give the president time to put his policy into place. But the spring was so violent—and the administration’s initial troop reduction so small—that the doves decided they couldn’t wait any longer. Since 1965 they’d centered their dissent on the extent of American bombing and the desperate need for negotiations. In the summer of 1969 they coalesced around a far more fundamental demand, built on Nixon’s June drawdown. It was time, they said, for the United States to bring its entire force home in a single sustained withdrawal, to be completed within a year or two, and by so doing to shut down the American share of the war altogether.
But beyond the occasional op-ed, some sharply argued speeches, and hollow threats of congressional action, they had no way to pressure the president—until they joined the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. The idea had come from a progressive businessman in suburban Boston, who imagined a national day of peaceful protest to demand that the war be brought to an end, centered on the sort of moral witness that had seemed to slip away since the mid-1960s. He passed it on to two protégés of Allard Lowenstein, the liberal provocateur who’d brought Eugene McCarthy into the previous year’s presidential race. Together they gave the protest a sophisticated-sounding title, picked a date for it to run—October 15—used the businessman’s cash to open an office in Washington, DC, and set to organizing along the networks Lowenstein provided. First they brought in liberal student groups, then those segments of the radical anti-war movement that had no interest in SDS’s rush to the barricades, and finally, at summer’s end, the liberal portions of the middle and professional classes that had sustained the McCarthy campaign.
The leading liberals started signing on when it became clear that the moratorium’s organizers were taking anti-war protest into the mainstream. In poured offers of support from New York’s celebrity mayor, the NAACP’s executive director, the leaders of the nation’s two largest unions, the president of Yale, Harvard’s entire faculty, Congress’s most outspoken doves—McCarthy, Ted Kennedy, William Fulbright, Albert Gore, Frank Church, George McGovern—and a coterie of notables from the Johnson administration who wouldn’t have dared to be seen in such company the year before. Together they’d give the day a great deal of respectability, wrote an administration analyst as the momentum mounted, and maybe even a claim to patriotism.
That was exactly what Nixon feared they’d do. For weeks beforehand he scrambled for ways to undermine the moratorium’s reach. He tried dismissing it, deflecting it, preempting it, and in the final rush dispatching handpicked proxies to say that it was aiding and abetting the enemy. Nothing worked. Somewhere around a million people turned out for one or another of the day’s events, ten times the number who’d marched on the Pentagon in 1967, a hundred times the number who’d gone to Chicago to confront the Democrats in 1968, and five hundred times the number who’d joined SDS’s Days of Rage. Most of their gatherings were small and somber—a nationwide sprawl of prayer vigils and anti-war lectures, well-mannered marches and memorials to the dead—though there were massive rallies as well: 10,000 at Rutgers, 15,000 at the University of Wisconsin, 20,000 at the University of Michigan, 25,000 on Wall Street, 30,000 on the New Haven green, 35,000 at midtown Manhattan’s Bryant Park, 50,000 for a candlelit procession around the White House, 100,000 overflowing the Boston Common. And everywhere the crowds came out there were liberals up on the stage, demanding that the president bring the war to an end.
Nixon spent the day running through an unusually intense round of meetings meant to show that he was far too busy with matters of state to notice the 50,000 Americans marching around his home. In private the White House staff was badly shaken by the staggering number of people the moratorium had mobilized. But no one was sure how to react. “Great debates rage on the tactics for the future,” Haldeman wrote in his diary, with one faction urging the president to mount a vigorous defense of his policies, another pressing for a conciliatory gesture, maybe even a concession or two. At first Nixon seemed torn too. The moment didn’t last. A couple of days after the marchers went home he sat down with a yellow legal pad to start sketching out his response, already scheduled as a major address to the nation on Monday, November 3. “Don’t get rattled,” he wrote on the top of the page. “Don’t waver. Don’t react.”8
From there the drafts developed. Nixon wrote at least a dozen over the next two weeks, mostly in the long blocks of private time he insisted Haldeman carve into his schedule. The final version he finished over a secluded Halloween weekend at Camp David, alone in his cabin in the Maryland woods, writing late into the night. He waited until Monday afternoon to return to the White House, then immediately went off to his Executive Office hideaway, his only contact until the evening a series of phone calls to Haldeman obsessing over the networks’ plans for makeup and lighting. When he went live at half past nine Eastern time, seventy million Americans were watching.
He spoke for thirty-two minutes, almost perfect timing for the television age. The first two-thirds of his address he used to construct the contrast he wanted Americans to see. The fundamental question facing the nation wasn’t whether the United States ought to continue the war or seek peace, he insisted, but rather what sort of peace it ought to pursue. On one side of the divide lay those who wanted the United States out of Vietnam immediately, on the other his administration, working methodically to extract the nation from the slog of a war he’d inherited from his predecessors. He walked through the steps he’d taken, though there were a few details—his disruption of LBJ’s October agreement and his secret bombing of Cambodia—he failed to mention. When he reached the end of that recitation he acknowledged that some “honest and patriotic Americans” disagreed with what he’d done. Then the speech abruptly shifted. Not the tone, which remained as calm and reasonable as it had been from the start, but the message.
He made the pivot with a variation of the story he’d told on election night, another sign in another rally, this one a world away from the Ohio teenager pleading with Nixon to bring the nation together. “In San Francisco a few weeks ago,” he said, “I saw demonstrators carrying signs reading ‘Lose in Vietnam, bring the boys home.’ Well, one of the strengths of our free society is that any American has a right to reach that conclusion. . . . But as President of the United States, I would be untrue to my oath of office if I allowed the policy of this nation to be dictated by the minority who hold that point of view and who try to impose it on the nation by mounting demonstrations in the street.” All of a sudden his opponents weren’t patriotic Americans anymore. They were subversives undermining the Constitution he’d pledged to defend, radicals and liberals together, rooting for the nation’s defeat. To complete the turn he reached back to the campaign again, to the pitch his handlers had given him to undercut George Wallace’s appeal. “And so tonight,” he said as his half hour closed in, “to you—the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support. . . . Let us be united for peace. Let us be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.”9
It worked even better than he’d hoped it would. Fifty thousand telegrams poured into the White House the following day, almost all of them supportive, the largest number of wired messages any presidential address had ever drawn, followed by 30,000 letters. Shortly thereafter CBS asked a representative sample of Americans what they thought of the war now that the president had spoken. Sixty-two percent of them said public protest harmed the administration’s search for a settlement. Sixty-seven percent said that they opposed the immediate withdrawal of American troops. And 74 percent said that they considered themselves to be in the silent majority.
Norma
WHEN MCCORVEY FINALLY told the other carnies she was pregnant, they said she needed a plan. She spent a little time making the rounds of the nearby restaurants in hopes of finding some waitressing work. But no one was willing to hire a vaguely strung-out twenty-one-year-old whose only address was a parking lot. That left her no choice, really, but to fall back on the one set of connections she had left. So she put together a pile of dimes, planted herself at a pay phone, and called every gay bar she knew in Dallas until she reached someone willing to wire her the money to buy a bus ticket home.
She got back to Dallas, she said later, with three dollars in savings, two packs of cigarettes, and a sense of failure so severe she spent the next five days in the bus station, because walking out the door seemed way too hard. On the sixth day she called the bar that had paid her way home. The manager sent a friend round to pick her up, get her a decent meal, a shower, and a clean set of clothes. Once they had her looking better, the manager offered her a couple of shifts a week and a lead on a room to rent. A lifeline, McCorvey called it, which seemed about right.
A few weeks later she grabbed hold of what she thought might be another. It was an ordinary evening, in her telling, a handful of regulars sitting in the bar drinking Lone Star, McCorvey sharing her troubles with one of her customers, telling her how unhappy she was to be expecting again. If you don’t want another baby, the woman said, why don’t you get rid of it? McCorvey was stunned. “Get rid of it?” she remembered thinking. “Get rid of it? How?”10 For most of her shift she left the question hanging for fear of sounding stupid. Come closing time she took aside another regular, a nurse’s aide, who she knew wouldn’t laugh at her when she asked whether it was true that she didn’t have to see her pregnancy through. The next day she asked the doctor who’d delivered her first two children to abort the fetus she was carrying.
He turned her down, as Texas law required him to do. So she found another doctor, a younger one who handled unwanted pregnancies as something of a specialty. It turned out he didn’t perform abortions either; he simply referred his patients to one of several adoption lawyers with whom he’d made arrangements. But the attorney he suggested refused to take her case, on the assumption, she said later, that she might be carrying a biracial baby no white family would want to adopt. From there she went searching for back channels. Somebody told her about an illegal clinic on Dallas’ ragged West Side, someone else that she could self-induce with a mix of castor oil and peanuts. But the clinic had been shuttered—the cops had raided it, she was told when she showed up at its door—and the castor oil just made her sick. That’s when she circled back to the second doctor to see if he knew another lawyer she could talk to. He sent her to Henry McCluskey.
McCorvey went over to McCluskey’s office sometime in January 1970, early in her second trimester. From the start she liked him. He was younger than the other lawyer had been—barely older than her, in fact—less buttoned-down, and much more willing to listen. But when she asked him to help her get an abortion, he turned her down too. For a while he talked to her about adoption, gently enough she thought, until she said that if he wasn’t going to help her she was going to find another back-alley place. He stopped for a second, as she remembered it. Then he told her about a lawyer he knew who was looking for a woman like her for a court case she was hoping to file. The rest McCorvey didn’t really understand, except for a couple of things. McCluskey wanted her to talk to his lawyer friend. And more than likely she was going to have this baby.
Linda Coffee told her that too, when they met a few days later. She and another young attorney, a woman named Sarah Weddington, were indeed preparing a lawsuit, just as McCluskey had said: a case designed to challenge the constitutionality of Texas’ abortion law. They wanted to argue that women had a right to end their pregnancies for whatever reason they chose—or no reason at all. But to get a hearing they had to have a client who’d been denied that right. There’d be no cost, Coffee said, no demands on McCorvey’s time, and no trouble: they could even keep her name out of the official documents they’d be filing. But they needed her to be pregnant.
What Coffee didn’t say was how preposterous it was that she and Weddington were doing such a thing. They’d known each other since the summer of 1965, when they’d both started at the University of Texas Law School, two of five women in an incoming class of 120. It was one of the first cohorts admitted after the 1964 Civil Rights Act had prohibited job discrimination on the basis of gender. But most Texas law firms still wouldn’t consider hiring a woman, no matter what the law said. So when Coffee and Weddington finished they didn’t receive any offers. Coffee took a state job instead and then, with a bit of luck, landed a clerkship with one of the few female judges in the federal judiciary, Sarah Hughes, who happened to be based in Dallas. Weddington never made it out of the law school: two years after getting her JD she was still working as a research assistant to one of her professors, the only position she could get. That’s where she was on a November afternoon in 1969, tucked away in her little office on UT’s campus, when a law student she vaguely knew stopped by with a proposition. A tiny group of radical grad students was interested in trying to overturn Texas’ abortion law in federal court. They were hoping that Weddington would be their lawyer.
She heard him out—a preacher’s kid from small-town Texas wasn’t raised to turn people away—though a proposal so naive didn’t really deserve the time she gave him. It had been five years since the measles scare had intensified talk of reforming the nation’s abortion laws. In the measles’ aftermath the groups willing to back change had expanded dramatically. The American Medical Association had endorsed the idea, on the principle that doctors ought to decide what was best for their patients. The ACLU signed on too, timidly at first and then with growing conviction. Planned Parenthood offered its support after a long struggle to decide whether abortion was, in fact, a form of birth control. The fledgling National Organization for Women did the same after a divisive debate over whether abortion was a women’s issue. And a number of mainline Protestant denominations declared reform a moral imperative, as did some of the nation’s most influential news sources, from CBS’s Walter Cronkite to the New York Times. “Obviously there is latitude for expert medical judgement,” the Times’s editorial board wrote in 1965. “The present barbarous law ought to be revised to permit that judgement to be exercised.”11 The reformers couldn’t have agreed more. The next year they used their momentum to launch a series of campaigns meant to soften state laws by giving doctors permission to abort pregnancies that had been caused by rape or incest or were going to result in disabled babies.
Mobilization bred resistance. A few prominent pastors broke with their brethren as the campaigns got underway, a scattering of doctors with the AMA, a handful of feminists with NOW. But the most powerful opposition came from the Catholic Church, which mobilized its thick network of parishes, hospitals, and schools, confraternities, sodalities, guilds, and social clubs in defense of what Los Angeles cardinal James McIntyre called “the right to life,” the fundamental conviction that from the moment of conception a fetus was a human being, which made abortion nothing less than infanticide, even in those devastating circumstances the reformers had targeted.12 In state after state the battle ran, two intensely powerful blocs clashing over a tangle of law, morality, philosophy, and mercy. The results were mixed. Between 1967 and 1969 ten legislatures added the exemptions the reformers wanted. But when they pushed into states with a strong Catholic presence—among them some of the nation’s largest—they were beaten back. Three times the reformers tried to amend New York’s abortion laws. Each time the Church stopped them.
Then the battle lines shifted. There was no defining moment. But in 1969 reformers began to set aside modification of abortion law and put in its place outright repeal. The change came partly from some of the campaign’s established supporters, who’d long felt that governments had no right to regulate abortion; partly from a couple of high-profile court cases working their way through the legal system; and partly from a new wave of feminists, inspired by the revolutionary fervor and deep-seated misogyny of the student Left, who injected into the campaign an often searing analysis of oppression and liberation centered on a woman’s right to control her own body. As the stakes rose, so did emotions. “We are tired of paying for the sins of men,” declared one of the new wave’s leading figures, Shulamith Firestone. “So we must say to those bishops and pompous lawmakers and self-righteous men, we will no longer be shoved around. We will no longer submit to your definitions of what we should not be or do. . . .” The bishops replied with their own broadsides. To claim that a woman had a right to choose, said Washington’s formidable cardinal, was to endorse “murder on demand.”13
Behind their fierce rhetoric lay complicated alignments. By 1969 most Americans—whatever their religion—had come to approve of a woman’s right to abort her pregnancy when it threatened her health or when she was carrying a malformed fetus. But only 19 percent of Americans, and 15 percent of Catholics, supported abortion as a matter of choice. The strongest backing for that position came not from young women, 82 percent of whom opposed the idea, but from non-Catholic, college-educated white men: a solidly Republican demographic that would have been appalled to think of itself standing alongside feminists like Firestone. Into that convoluted politics stepped UT’s little radical group, somehow imagining that a twenty-four-year-old attorney with no money, no staff, no standing, and no commitment to the cause could topple Texas’ abortion laws.
Weddington tried to tell them that they needed someone better positioned. But the truth is she wanted the case, out of ambition to be sure, maybe even hubris, but also because of the abortion she’d hidden away, a half-day trip to a clinic just across the Mexican border sometime in 1967, her last year in law school. So she agreed to think through how a legal challenge could be shaped. There were the obvious questions of precedent and standing. And there was the practical problem of navigating the federal court system, which Weddington had never done. She had a classmate who’d clerked in the United States District Court in Dallas, though, and would know its procedures inside and out. A couple of days into December 1969 she gave Linda Coffee a call.
As soon as Weddington explained the idea Coffee started making connections. She’d recently read an important September decision from the California Supreme Court concerning a doctor’s right to refer a patient to an abortion provider. The ruling had centered on the imprecision of the state law’s language. But in its opinion the court had suggested that abortion fell under the right to privacy the Griswold decision had created in 1965. Coffee also knew of a case before the court for which she had clerked, this one filed by her friend Henry McCluskey. It had been five years since Bruce Scott had challenged the federal government’s ban on hiring gay employees. Washington’s Mattachine Society had followed his small victory with a set of cases that in 1969 toppled the government’s ability to fire gay employees too. The judges had based their decision on the equal protection arguments embedded in Brown, a striking extension of gay rights. In his case, McCluskey was pushing for an even more fundamental turn. He was using Griswold to challenge the constitutionality of the state sodomy law Dallas’ authorities had used to convict his client, a gay man who’d been caught having sex in a public bathroom. The court had yet to rule. But if it sided with McCluskey there’d be every reason to believe that it would be open to a matching challenge to Texas’ abortion law. Weddington was so impressed she asked Coffee to consider taking over the case. Coffee suggested that they work on it together.
That still left a couple of potentially crippling complications. There was a very good chance that the court would deny Weddington’s clients—those radical grad students—the standing to bring suit, since Texas’ abortion law hadn’t affected them directly. What’s more, a case coming out of UT wouldn’t go before Coffee’s court, whose jurisdiction didn’t reach down to Austin. What they needed was a pregnant woman in Dallas who’d been prevented from getting the abortion she wanted by the state’s restrictive rules, a profile so precise they had no idea how to find her, until McCluskey called Coffee with word of Norma McCorvey.
Later McCorvey said that she didn’t follow Coffee’s talk about plaintiffs and constitutional tests any more than she had McCluskey’s. But she agreed to be their client on the off chance that when the case was over she could have her abortion. Then nothing happened, as far as she could tell. She had no idea that in mid-January Henry McCluskey won his sodomy case in Dallas’ federal court; that in late February the Hawaii legislature became the first in the nation to repeal its state’s abortion laws and by so doing made the procedure freely accessible to its residents; that in the same month a Republican state representative introduced a repeal bill in New York’s legislature; and that on March 3, 1970, Linda Coffee filed a three-page complaint on McCorvey’s behalf with the clerk of the federal court in downtown Dallas, alleging that by enforcing state law the county’s district attorney, Henry Wade, had infringed upon her client’s “fundamental right . . . to choose whether to bear children.”14 But McCorvey did know that when the case went to court she’d still be a nobody, her identity hidden behind Coffee’s decision to call her Jane Roe.
Nixon Redux
THE NIGHT OF his “silent majority” speech the president was too excited to sleep. The next day he spent reading through the stack of congratulatory telegrams Bob Haldeman piled on his desk, the day after that laying plans for a PR blitz on behalf of national unity and an assault on the liberal press for not giving him the credit he deserved. Then the siege began again. On November 13, 1969, the anti-war forces returned for two days of demonstrations in DC. Up went the defenses: troops stationed in federal buildings around the capital, plans in place to circle the White House with a fleet of buses parked bumper-to-bumper so that the culminating march couldn’t get too close, Haldeman directing operations from the White House’s bomb shelter, Nixon marking the opening event—a candlelight procession from Arlington Cemetery to honor the 40,000 Americans killed in the war—with two hours in the basement rec center, bowling alone.
That same day the My Lai massacre broke in the press. The secretary of defense had told the White House in September that a court martial was coming. But the news had arrived just as Nixon was trying to suppress an army investigation that had already made the front page of the Times, a potentially explosive story of a Special Forces unit having assassinated a South Vietnamese official. In the middle of that tangle—the president pressing the Pentagon to back off, the generals pushing back, the CIA caught in between—no one in Nixon’s little circle had the time or inclination to deal with a case that wasn’t drawing any attention. Now here was this thoroughly sourced piece from a young freelancer, Seymour Hersh, reporting that the army had recently charged twenty-six-year-old Lieutenant William Calley of Waynesville, North Carolina, with murdering 109 civilians in a South Vietnamese village, a total so shocking that thirty-five newspapers had picked up the story, though it had come to them through an obscure wire service.
Over the next six days the story inched forward. On the seventh it exploded. After his first report appeared Hersh tracked down three men who’d served under Calley. In his second installment he used their accounts to piece together exactly what had happened in My Lai. On the morning of March 16, 1968, while the Tet Offensive was raging, their company had been helicoptered into what they’d been told was a Viet Cong hot zone in Quang Ngai Province, on South Vietnam’s northeast coast. They’d trooped into a cluster of hamlets, rounded up as many villagers as they could find, and slaughtered them. “They just started pulling people out and shooting them,” said Michael Terry. “They had them in a group standing over a ditch—just like a Nazi-type thing. . . . One officer ordered a kid to machine-gun everybody down, but the kid just couldn’t do it. He threw the machine gun down and the officer picked it up. . . . I don’t remember seeing any men in the ditch. Mostly women and kids.” There were “piles of people all through the village, all over,” Michael Bernhardt told Hersh. “The whole thing was so deliberate. It was point-blank murder and I was standing there watching it.”15
From there the revelations mounted. There hadn’t been 109 casualties in My Lai, said the Times; there’d been 576. The killing hadn’t been restricted to Calley and a few of his men. Much of the company had joined in, Private Paul Meadlo told CBS’s Mike Wallace in an interview made all the more disturbing by the young man’s utter lack of affect. On the day of the massacre a helicopter pilot had reported the savagery to his commanding officers, but instead of punishing the perpetrators or passing the information up the line, they sat on it. Had it not been for a recently discharged GI sending his congressman the details months later, the slaughter never would have been exposed.
The pictures made it even worse. Alongside Hersh’s second story the Cleveland Plain Dealer ran eight photos of the massacre taken by one of the company’s men. But the paper didn’t have the right to distribute them to other publications. So almost no one beyond Cleveland saw them until November 30, when they were published in Life, the nation’s fabled news magazine. A couple of the images were standard shots from the war: troops scurrying out of a helicopter, a GI burning a villager’s thatch-roofed house. The rest were absolutely appalling. One showed a mother frantically trying to block a group of soldiers from assaulting her teenage daughter, the first time an American news outlet had suggested that a share of the men had raped some of their victims before gunning them down. Another showed a father and his four- or five-year-old son lying side by side, the little boy’s blood pooled beneath him; yet another a jumble of bodies on a road leading out of My Lai, the corpses of a toddler and two infants among the dead.
The shock of it reverberated through the country as none of the war’s previous reporting had done. Most public analyses stressed that something systemic had led to the slaughter, though they struggled to say what it was. “My Lai—those women and children are in our consciousness now,” ABC’s highly respected anchor Frank Reynolds told his audience, “and they are also on our conscience. The national soul is wounded and because those men came from us and acted for us, the wound is self-inflicted.”16 Public opinion seemed more pointed. By mid-December 94 percent of Americans had heard of the massacre. Twenty percent thought that Calley and his men bore primary responsibility for what they’d done, while 55 percent thought that the government was turning them into scapegoats for its policies.
The president’s public response was as muted as the New Nixon was supposed to be. He made his first public comment—an anodyne statement about American virtue and justice—on December 8, almost a month after Hersh’s initial report came out. A week later he announced he’d be bringing home another 50,000 soldiers, enough to reduce troop levels to where they’d been in the summer of 1967, and hopefully to contain the damage the slaughter had caused to his handling of the war.
His larger move he wrapped in absolute secrecy. The Paris peace talks had been meandering along since the middle of 1968 without any meaningful progress. On January 1, 1970 Kissinger sent word to the North Vietnamese that he’d be willing to open a parallel set of negotiations, hidden from public view, so that their governments could speak to each with a frankness that the formal talks didn’t provide. Not quite two months later they held their first session in the sitting room of a little house the North Vietnamese quietly maintained at 11 rue Darthé, in a working-class neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris: Kissinger on one side, the high-ranking diplomat Le Duc Tho on the other, a chasm of mistrust between them.
In the meantime a new round of revelations hit. The trouble started at home. The Senate had confirmed Warren Burger as chief justice in June. At the end of October he joined with his seven new colleagues in rejecting the Justice Department’s argument that Mississippi’s segregated school systems be given more time to erase their color lines. The districts could still appeal specific portions of the lower courts’ orders, the justice said. But they had to integrate while those appeals were pending, a move that obliterated the administration’s strategy of stalling integration through endless legal maneuvers. The following month the Senate voted against the confirmation of Clement Haynsworth, whose nomination had been crippled by his less-than-ethical finances. Nixon responded by doubling down. His administration had to make it perfectly clear that it didn’t support forced integration, the president told his closest aides shortly after the Mississippi decision. “We do what the law requires, nothing more,” he said. “This is politics, and I’m the judge of the politics of schools.”17 As for the Court seat, he wanted his staff to find him a new nominee even more southern and more conservative than Haynsworth had been.
They came back with G. Harrold Carswell, a forty-nine-year-old Georgian who’d spent the previous decade on the U.S. District Court in northern Florida. The White House scoured through his finances to make sure there weren’t any improprieties. They were clean. So, on January 19, 1970, Nixon announced him as his nominee. Two days later CBS News uncovered a speech young Mr. Carswell had given in 1948. “Segregation of the races is proper and the only practical and correct way of life,” he’d said. “I have always so believed and will always so act.”18
All the major civil rights organizations immediately denounced him as unacceptable, the NAACP furiously so. Nixon waved them off. “I’m not concerned about what Judge Carswell said twenty-four years ago,” he told the press as the confirmation hearings got underway. “I’m very much concerned about his record [since then] . . . a record that is impeccable and without a taint of any racism.”19 That wasn’t quite the case. Carswell had created an all-white booster club at Florida State in 1953, his former law partner told the confirmation committee. In 1956 he’d helped a Tallahassee golf club beat back demands that it desegregate, said another witness. He’d maneuvered to get voter registration workers arrested in 1963 and berated the lawyers who tried to defend them, said a third. Still he managed to get through the committee, which sent him on to the full Senate by a surprisingly strong margin on February 16. But no one was thinking of him as impeccable anymore.
That same week the Laotian revelations started to appear. The story had almost cracked open the previous October, when the Times had published a short series describing the United States’ covert support for Laos’ decade-long war against its Communist insurgency. But the White House had managed to seal it up with a vigorous application of obfuscation and denial. There it remained, hidden away in the Eisenhower style, until Nixon decided to extend the bombing campaign from the Laotian border to the country’s central plateau. The first assault was launched in secret—Cambodia again—on the Monday that Judge Carswell slipped through committee. By Thursday all the major papers had news of the Laotian bombing on their front pages. With that wedge reporters pried open the rest of the story: the fifty-odd military bases the CIA operated deep in the Laotian countryside; the private air force the agency ran, its pilots so engaged in the fighting they received combat pay; the five years of continual bombing along the border, more extensive than the bombing of North Vietnam had been; and the 200 American airmen who’d been lost in the process, their place of death never acknowledged. A secret war, the reporters called it, passed from president to president, newly intensified by the sorties Nixon had ordered without a word to the American people.
He knew they’d be coming for him. He’d known it since the My Lai firestorm, when he’d sat in the serenity of the Oval Office, his inner circle ringed around him, and ranted against the massive conspiracy that was driving the coverage, its tentacles stretching from those suspicious vets who’d exposed the massacre to the Jewish media moguls who wanted nothing more than to undermine his presidency. He scrawled it in the margins of an article John Ehrlichman had put in his briefing book shortly after CBS had dug up Carswell’s speech, an angry little note about the pressure “the professional civil-righters” were going to bring to bear. And he’d said it to Haldeman two weeks before the Laotian secrets came crashing in. The “establishment” was getting ready to reopen the autumn’s anti-war offensive, he told Haldeman, and they had to be prepared to hit back.20
But the White House wasn’t prepared. Otherwise Nixon’s congressional liaisons would have pushed the full Senate to approve Carswell’s nomination immediately after he’d gotten through committee, instead of letting the liberals delay the vote for more than a month, long enough for more revelations to surface and the opposition to expand—from the NAACP to the AFL-CIO, the American Bar Association, dozens of law school deans, and 200 former Supreme Court clerks. In the first week of March the liberals thought they had about twenty colleagues opposed to Carswell’s confirmation. By the middle of the month their count was up to thirty-one, a bloc of them moderate Republicans, with the final vote still weeks away.
Laos caught the White House off guard as well. As soon as the bombing made the news the doves started slashing away. There was Mike Mansfield, the Senate majority leader, telling reporters that Americans were “up to our necks” in the fighting; and George McGovern claiming that the road Nixon was following into Laos looked an awful lot like the road that had led the United States into Vietnam; and William Fulbright, the powerful chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, raising the possibility of a resolution requiring congressional approval for any additional moves into Laotian territory, a direct attempt to reclaim the war-making powers LBJ had usurped with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.21
For almost two weeks the White House didn’t respond, a delay almost as long as the one following the news of My Lai. Finally, on March 6 the president issued a 3,000-word statement acknowledging much of what had been reported, a show of candor to quiet his critics. But the details he revealed didn’t mean that the United States was fighting a secret war in Laos, he said. How could it be, when not a single American had ever been killed in combat there? Two days later the Los Angeles Times published a detailed account of what turned out to be one of twenty-seven American deaths on Laotian soil since 1965, seven of them in the previous year alone: another revelation to add to the pile, another sign that the president couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth. Three days after the story appeared, Fulbright put his resolution before the Senate.
Over the next few weeks the pressures escalated. The administration had already angered some of the Senate’s most powerful southerners by pushing past them a dramatic extension of its singular civil rights initiative—affirmative action—from its narrow base in Philadelphia’s construction trades to almost every company that held a government contract, a move that put about a third of the nation’s workforce under its provisions. The growing federal threat to segregated schools heightened the tensions. Since the Supreme Court’s Mississippi ruling the previous October, the White House’s attempt to contain integration had crumbled. The thirty districts that had triggered the case had fallen first, on the December deadline the justices had imposed. The circuit courts ordered another forty to follow on February 1. After that there was supposed to be a lull until the start of the next school year—August 31 in most of the South—when 600 districts were to integrate, among them a number of major urban systems.
But the February integration didn’t go to plan. Some of the affected districts shut down rather than break their color lines. Others were crippled by white boycotts. Several simply refused to comply with their court orders. And in rural Darlington County, South Carolina, a white mob attacked two buses filled with African American children on the way to their new school. In the midst of the resistance the two most consequential integration cases flared again. On February 5 Judge McMillan used the Supreme Court’s Mississippi ruling to reinstate his comprehensive busing plan for Charlotte’s schools, though the circuit court had yet to say whether it should stand. Six days later the Los Angeles Superior Court finally ended its two-year-long litigation by ordering LA to integrate the 674,000 students in its system, a decision that—if it withstood the inevitable appeal—would obliterate the distinction between southern schools and the rest of the nation.
Suddenly the old Dixiecrats were down in the well of the Senate, thundering against the “educational butchery” of forced integration, as if it were 1954 all over again. And the letters were pouring into the White House, 5,000 from Charlotte alone, pleading for the president to block the buses from running come September, because “the white majority has civil rights too,” as one parent put it, “and we can’t be expected to keep turning the other cheek forever.” And LA’s school superintendent was telling the press that the court’s new ruling would require him to bus a quarter million kids every day, at a cost that would bankrupt his district within a year. Nixon’s aides battled over how he ought to reply. The most conservative thought he should condemn the courts outright. “The second era of Reconstruction is over,” his young speechwriter Pat Buchanan told him. “The ship of integration is going down . . . and we ought not to be aboard.” The moderates pushed back, arguing that the president couldn’t align himself against the courts any more than Eisenhower had after Brown. Nixon was too torn to choose between the sides, so the fight dragged on. “School statement still in great agony,” Haldeman wrote in mid-March, both the president and his staff split between enforcing the law and defying it.22
Then Vietnam twisted again. On March 17 the army shattered the administration’s efforts to keep the My Lai story under control by indicting fourteen officers for covering up the massacre, the highest ranking a major general then serving as commandant of West Point. The next day Cambodia’s long-serving monarch, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was toppled in a coup virtually no one saw coming, not even the CIA, though the coup’s central figure, Prime Minister Lon Nol, had been working with the agency since the 1950s. From the capital the new government pushed its precarious power into the countryside, looking to root out the North Vietnamese bases Sihanouk had tolerated. The North Vietnamese struck back with a wave of counterattacks. As the fighting accelerated, talk of a widening war intensified in the press—the Washington Post came dangerously close to exposing Nixon’s still-secret bombing of the Cambodian countryside—and up on the Hill, where Fulbright ordered closed-door hearings on the administration’s intentions toward the new regime. It reached into Kissinger’s clandestine Parisian talks too, which the North Vietnamese cut off after an angry exchange over the new fronts that seemed to be opening.
Nixon released his school statement on March 24. In the end he settled on a lawyerly warning to the Supreme Court not to blur the de jure/de facto divide, coupled with an emotional defense of the neighborhood school as “the focal point of community life . . . a place not only of learning but of living” that shouldn’t be sacrificed “in a tragically futile effort to achieve in the schools the kind of multi-racial society which the adult society has failed to achieve for itself.”23 The NAACP replied with a scalding statement of its own, promising more suits to come. Through it all Carswell kept bleeding out. The Senate finally scheduled his confirmation vote for April 8. In the run-up, the New York Times put the number of senators opposing him at forty-nine, two shy of the total needed to reject the president’s second straight nominee, a humiliation that had last been inflicted on Grover Cleveland almost a century before.
Nixon’s inner circle could see the tension mounting. At times the president seemed cool and collected, even happy to have crises to confront. But he was also hiding away more than he ought to, Haldeman thought, brooding over his shrinking support—at the end of March his approval rating fell to 53 percent, the lowest of his presidency—and seething over his staff’s shortcomings. “No one takes the offensive, all just lie down,” he told Haldeman in a long harangue the day before Carswell’s nomination went before the Senate. “[N]o fire except after [the silent majority speech] and then didn’t follow up.”24
Still they were surprised by how furiously he responded to a vote everyone knew could go against him. The news came on the afternoon of April 8: forty-five senators in favor of Carswell’s confirmation, fifty-one opposed, the last two votes lost on the final day. The president spent the rest of the afternoon raging in the Oval Office. An evening cruise down the Potomac with the attorney general only seemed to make him angrier. The next morning he stormed into the West Wing, canceled the day’s cabinet meeting, and put in its place an off-the-record session with the handful of staffers who knew how to get things done. He wanted Buchanan to get him a scalding statement denouncing the Senate for its malicious assault on his nominees’ character when their only real fault was to be southern-born. He wanted a strong statement on crime too, something he could give on television, to start squeezing the Senate on his next nominee. But speeches weren’t enough. He wanted his political operatives brought in for a private meeting so he could fire them up. He wanted investigators out in the field digging for dirt on the liberals and the groups that backed them. He wanted to hit his contributors for the cash he’d need for a full-out assault. He wanted, he said, to go to war.
The Incursion
FOR TWO WEEKS after his day of rage Nixon acted with the calm assurance he was supposed to exude. On April 14 he conceded the court fight by naming as his new nominee Harry Blackmun, a sixty-one-year-old U.S. Court of Appeals judge from Minnesota whose opinions were so circumspect the Senate couldn’t conceivably object to him. Six days later he announced yet another Vietnam drawdown, this time of 150,000 men, to be completed by the end of the year. Then he reached the third week.
The Joint Chiefs had already urged him to couple his withdrawal announcement with a ground assault across the Cambodian border to destroy the North Vietnamese sanctuaries Lon Nol’s teetering regime had failed to clear. It remained nothing more than a provocative proposal, though, until Nixon went to Hawaii for a weekend photo op with the recently rescued astronauts of Apollo 13. He was scheduled to leave Sunday afternoon, April 19, which left just enough time for a breakfast briefing from the commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Nixon had met John McCain once or twice. But he hadn’t experienced the passion McCain brought to his briefings, a style rooted in a devotion to the military’s mission that stretched across three generations, from his admiral father to his pilot son, then in his third year as a prisoner of war in Hanoi. Here was the commander’s plan laid out in detailed maps of the Cambodian borderland dripping in Communist red, the specifics of the American thrust draped in duty, sacrifice, and the defense of the West. It was a patriot’s mission to be fought by hard-driving men like McCain and the president he’d enthralled. On the flight home Nixon announced to the staffers traveling with him that he was putting Cambodia at the top of his agenda.
Nixon spent the rest of the week relentlessly reviewing his options, his focus so intense even his most devoted aides found it unnerving. “P roars on . . . with little sleep,” Haldeman wrote in his diary on Wednesday, April 22. “He was up at 5:00 this morning dictating. Really in high gear when got to the office, wanted everything possible cancelled so he could concentrate on Cambodia decisions.” But Nixon cut out of the process anyone likely to oppose a strike—from the State Department, through the civilian leadership of the Defense Department, to Congress—while making it obvious to those on the inside the conclusion he wanted to reach. They read the early morning memos he filled with talk of “bold strokes” and “lily-livered diplomats” too scared to fight. They took his angry late-night phone calls demanding action. And they sat through the week’s soliloquies. “Everyone comes into my office with suggestions on how to lose,” he said to Kissinger on Wednesday. “No one ever comes in here with a suggestion on how to win.”25 Kissinger came away convinced that Nixon wasn’t thinking through the consequences of a strike across the border. But he didn’t dare say that to the president.
Nixon told his closest aides of his decision on Friday morning, April 24. Later that day, he made a single surreptitious contact on Capitol Hill, with Mississippi’s John Stennis, the reliably hawkish chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. On Sunday evening he brought in the secretaries of state and defense for what turned out to be the first in a series of angry meetings that ended only when Nixon said that they had no choice but to fall in line. Early in the week he put the White House staff to work on the details, Buchanan to draft his speech announcing the move, his press secretary to get him network airtime and to plant fake stories in the media so as to throw reporters off track. At 8:15 Thursday evening, April 30, 1970, he finally informed the congressional leadership. Forty-five minutes later he told the American people.
He started by trying to channel McCain, pivoting between his text and an oversized map of Cambodia, Laos, and South Vietnam propped next to his desk, the sanctuaries set off in the admiral’s red. But he struggled to explain how sending 35,000 US soldiers into yet another southeast Asian country fit into his pledge to bring the war to an honorable end. He tried an Orwellian turn. This wasn’t an invasion of a neutral country, he insisted. It was an incursion into enemy territory, a constricted unleashing of American power to secure the peace he’d promised.
Then he lurched in a different direction entirely. “We live in an age of anarchy,” he said, marked by “mindless attacks on all the great institutions which had been created by free civilizations in the last five hundred years.” In the United States those attacks targeted the great universities, in other countries a nation’s very right to exist. In the face of those threats some of America’s most influential figures call for caution and retreat. Standing against them might make him a one-term president, he said. But he had no choice, because “it is not our power but our will and character that is being tested tonight.”26 His own will and character pitted against enemies that stretched far beyond those vivid red sanctuaries.
Delivery
AT SOME POINT or another Norma McCorvey lost track of her pregnancy. Maybe it was in the spring of 1970, after she’d gotten into a fight with the manager at the bar, walked out on the only job she was likely to find, gave up the apartment that went with it because she couldn’t pay the rent without some work coming in, and shuttled between her father’s place and wherever she could crash after a night of smoking dope and drinking cheap wine. It might have been years later, when she tried to bring some order to her memories and got the facts all jumbled up. She was in her sixth month when Linda Coffee and Sarah Weddington first argued her case in court, she said then, and was still clinging to the hope that once the judges ruled in her favor she’d finally get her abortion. In fact she was halfway through her eighth month when the district court held its hearing in May 1970. And she’d already agreed that as soon as her baby was born the hospital would hand it over for adoption to the couple Henry McCluskey had found, exactly as she’d handed over her second baby back in ’67.
But she also got some details right. She was right when she said that between the time she became Jane Roe and the initial hearing she saw Weddington and Coffee only once, when they needed her to sign an affidavit they’d written on her behalf. She was right when she said that they didn’t want her in the courtroom on the day they argued her case because she was so visibly pregnant. And she was right when she said that after the hearing no one called to tell her how it had gone, as if she didn’t matter. It’s possible that she got the more intimate details right as well, the ones only she could know, though with Norma McCorvey it was always hard to tell where the truth ended and the stories began.
Her water broke in the middle of the night as she remembered it, amniotic fluid and blood together on the bed her father let her use whenever she slept over. She stumbled into the bathroom to clean herself, terrified that the blood was a sign of serious trouble. Then she woke her father, who gathered her up, led her out to his truck, and drove her to the emergency room. By the time they got there she was having intense contractions, “by far the worst I’d ever felt,” she said. “The pain was horrible, and my clothes were soaking wet. . . . I could feel the baby coming out of my body. The baby was being born. And I was bleeding to death.”27
The rest she remembered in snatches. The nurse taking down her vital information—her name, her address, her arrangement with Henry McCluskey—the orderlies prepping her, the rush into the delivery room, the final contractions, the last moment of the baby inside her, more pain, more blood, the exhaustion sweeping over her as they moved her out of delivery and into recovery, the baby gone to wherever it was supposed to go. When she woke up she was in an ordinary room in the maternity ward, the daylight streaming through the window.
How long she lay in bed before the nurse came in she couldn’t recall, though she thought it was a couple of hours. “Feeding time,” the woman said in the insistently encouraging way of maternity wards, and handed McCorvey an expertly swaddled newborn.28 She might have objected, might have raised her hands or crossed her arms or told the nurse not to get within a foot of her. But she didn’t. For a moment she just sat there, cradling the baby, feeling it breathe, forcing herself to stare straight ahead because she knew that the worst thing she could do was look down and see its face. Then she started to cry—to keen—and the nurse realized what she had done. Within a minute or so the baby was gone, hustled out of the room by one of the orderlies who’d rushed in at the sound of her wailing. Gone forever, McCorvey wrote a quarter century later, when the memory of her third child nestled in her arms had yet to ease.