It was less than a year since Allison Krause had graduated from John F. Kennedy High. But when the Washington Post’s reporter came round to ask about her, the staff had to pull out her file to have anything to say. They listed the courses she’d taken, the grades she’d received, and her score on the SAT. And they showed him the recommendation letter the counselor had written when she was applying to college. “Allison is a very stable and mature young woman,” it read. “She possesses a very positive approach to life. . . .”1 Beyond that the only thing anyone seemed to recall was how pretty she’d been, though they might have just been thinking of her yearbook photo, which had already made it into the papers by the time the reporter arrived.
Not that they should have remembered her. The Krauses had come to the area the way families sometimes did, trailing behind a father’s corporate career. Her dad had started with Westinghouse in Cleveland in 1949, a couple of years before Allison was born. In 1963 the company brought him to Pittsburgh, where Westinghouse had its headquarters. Three years later he was transferred again, this time to the Baltimore plant. Her parents did what they could to make the latest move work, settling into a nice split level on a curving street in Wheaton, Maryland, barely beyond the Capital Beltway. Her dad got the daily drive up to Baltimore, while Allison and her little sister Laurie got glistening new suburban schools; Kennedy High had been open all of two years when Allison enrolled. For whatever reason, though—maybe because she was already a sophomore, maybe because she was fifteen—she didn’t join any of the activities that made a kid stand out. Nor did she get the sort of grades that drew a teacher’s attention. And when it came time to think about colleges, her only application went to an obscure state university in Ohio, a place she’d seen on Sunday drives in the countryside with her family when she was small. A place closer to home.
Her family left Wheaton shortly after her graduation in June 1969, when Westinghouse decided it wanted her dad back in Pittsburgh. Since then the staff had heard from her just once, in April 1970. She’d written to ask that her transcript be sent to the University of Buffalo, where she was hoping to transfer come summer. It wasn’t an obvious move to make, but she didn’t explain it and they didn’t ask. So they had no idea that she was planning to go with her new boyfriend, a quiet young man from Long Island whose roommates called him “a fag” because he wore his hair too long and cared about politics more than football.2 He had a few friends on the Buffalo campus and wanted to join them there. She was going to follow him, like her mom had followed her dad over the years. They were together when she was shot, crouching side by side in the parking lot below the National Guardsmen, the bullet tearing through the Kennedy High T-shirt she wore that day.
The next morning some of the kids gathered in front of the high school to lower the flag to half-staff in her honor, others to stop them. Already there’d been clashes on college campuses across the country. Emotions surged out on the Kennedy High lawn too, the kids screaming and shoving each other, until the principal stepped in to impose a compromise. The flag on the main pole would be lowered, he said, but they’d raise another flag outside the building to its full height. That got everyone back to class. But a little while later someone went out to the pole again, pulled the first flag down, and burned it in a trash can.
The Post reporter showed up that afternoon. After he talked to the staff he wandered the halls to ask the kids what had happened. They talked about the school and the war and whether it was right to honor a dead protester when no one honored the GIs who were killed in combat. “Why wasn’t the flag lowered then?” one of them said. “They’re in there fighting to keep the flag up.”3 As for that pretty girl whose picture had run in the morning’s paper, a few kids thought they’d seen her once or twice. But the truth of it was nobody really knew her at all.
Anarchy
RICHARD NIXON WAS up early on the first full day of the Cambodian incursion, almost giddy with the thought of pressing the fight. He started by telling Bob Haldeman and Henry Kissinger how he wanted the day’s news spun. “Cold steel, no give, nothing about negotiations,” he said. “Stay strong, whole emphasis on ‘back the boys,’ sell courage of [the] president.” Then he went off to the Pentagon to deliver the message himself. Officially he was there for another briefing. But the critical moment came in the hallway, when a secretary whose husband was in Vietnam stopped him to say how much she’d loved his speech. “Oh, how nice of you,” he replied. “You finally think of all those kids out there. I say kids. I’ve seen them. They’re the greatest. You see these bums, you know, blowing up their campuses. Listen, the boys that are on the college campuses today are the luckiest people in the world, going to the greatest universities, and here they are, burning up the books, storming around about this issue,” loosing anarchy upon the world.4
Already there’d been a few demonstrations, the worst at Stanford in the hours after his speech. On Friday and Saturday, May 1 and 2, the resistance swelled. Some of it came from the congressional doves outraged by the president’s blatant abuse of his power as commander in chief. The deeper fury roiled the nation’s colleges and universities, from the Ivies through the big state schools to places that hadn’t seen much activism before. Most of it was peaceful. But there was violence too, at Rutgers, Maryland, UC Berkeley, Wisconsin, and Kent State in northeast Ohio, where two nights of clashes between protesters and the police—and a fire at the ROTC building—led the governor to send in the National Guard.
All weekend there was talk of the opposition solidifying, maybe through a nationwide student strike or another march on Washington or a renewed push by the doves to defund the war. It didn’t matter, Nixon told Haldeman on Sunday afternoon, because this time there’d be no backing down. “Don’t play a soft line—no aid and comfort here,” he said. “Congressmen, really put it to them, sticking the knife in the back of US troops, not supporting the president. . . . Giving aid and comfort to the enemy—use that phrase. Don’t worry about divisiveness. Having drawn the sword, don’t take it out. Stick it in hard. . . . Hit ’em in the gut.”5
On the fourth day, Monday, May 4, he spent the morning in the Oval Office before heading off to his hideaway for the afternoon. He was still there three hours later, coming out of a nap, when Haldeman brought over the news. The National Guard had been moving away from an angry midday rally on the Kent State campus, tramping up a little hill overlooking the college green. Then, for reasons Haldeman couldn’t explain, some of the troopers had pivoted around and fired down into the crowd. Thirteen students had been hit. Four of them—two young men and two young women—had been killed.
Bob Haldeman saw it right away. Not the full depth of it, but enough to note it during that long afternoon in the hideaway, while he listened to the president talk through how the killings might be handled, how the story might be spun, and what his condolence letter ought to say. That evening Haldeman turned his notes into his diary entry, as he did almost every night. Maybe it wasn’t the most generous way to describe what he’d seen. But it wasn’t a generous day. “P is troubled by all this,” he wrote, “although it was predicted as a result of the Cambodian move.”6
On Tuesday the spiral set in. They’d known since the previous evening that a student strike was coming. Still it was a shock to see it surging across the country: fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty schools shut in a rush of walkouts and boycotts and barely planned protests, most of them swirling around their campuses, some of the largest spilling into the streets, the most volatile edged with the anarchic violence of the mob—windows smashed, cars overturned, a handful of ROTC buildings burned—and the repressive power of the policemen and guardsmen sent out to stop them.
But it wasn’t the strike alone that made the day so dangerous. It was also the organizers of the previous November’s march on Washington promising to bring 30,000 protesters to a Saturday rally at the White House gates. It was the congressional doves saying again and again that the president’s war-making power had to be constrained. It was the stock market plunging to its lowest point since the summer of 1963 in a panic that looked an awful lot like the one that brought down LBJ. And it was those devastating few minutes on the nightly news, when David Brinkley showed millions of Americans the faces of the dead—four clean-cut kids smiling for their yearbook photos—followed by footage of the youngest victim’s hollowed-out father in his suit and tie, struggling through the statement he’d written for the president to hear. “She resented being called a bum because she disagreed with someone else’s opinion,” Arthur Krause said. “She felt war in Cambodia was wrong. Is this dissent a crime? Is this a reason for killing her?”7
On Wednesday the strike shut another 150 schools. More walkouts meant more confrontations, more clashes, more injuries, and another death, this one at tiny Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, where twenty-seven-year-old Rex Vice drenched himself in gasoline and, like Norman Morrison five years before, set himself aflame. “As the day went on, concern from outside about the campus crisis built rapidly,” Haldeman wrote that night. “Very aware . . . that goal of the Left is to panic us, so we must not fall into their trap.”8 By then the secretaries of state and defense had already leaked to the press details of Nixon’s rush into Cambodia so as to make it clear that they weren’t to blame, and the secretary of the interior had quietly passed to reporters a supposedly private letter he’d sent Nixon, pleading with him to reach out to the kids in the streets, whose rebellion he compared to the founding fathers’. As for the president, he spent the evening with his wife and daughters—his Julie having been brought home from shuttered Smith College—watching Sunrise at Campobello, a ten-year-old movie about vibrant young Franklin Roosevelt waking one morning to find himself paralyzed.
He’d finally gone to bed around half past four. Three hours later he was up again, pushing through a schedule so packed it dragged on to 10:45 that night. Thursday was harder still. In the morning he had a tense meeting with a select group of university presidents, the first in a series of events his aides had organized to show that he had the crisis under control. Afterward Haldeman had him whisked off to Camp David so that he could get some rest before the next event, a Friday night news conference the television networks had agreed to carry live. But Nixon wouldn’t let himself relax. Between 5:00 and 8:00 p.m. Thursday he phoned the White House eight times, with calls to Ronald Reagan and Nelson Rockefeller pressed in between. Most of Friday he spent with his briefing books, though he kept the calls coming too: Haldeman at 9:49 a.m., Kissinger at 10:06, Haldeman again at 10:38, Kissinger again at 11:36, back to Haldeman at 11:48 and 1:01 p.m., as reports of the day’s violence started filtering in and the evening’s stakes began to rise.
There’d been signs of a mounting backlash throughout the week. On Wednesday somebody had fired buckshot into a crowd of protesters at the University of Buffalo. On Thursday a gang of club-wielding men had stormed across the University of Washington campus. On Friday the violence reached Manhattan. Right around noon, 200 construction workers from the new World Trade Center site descended on an antiwar rally on Wall Street, chanting, “All the way, USA!”9 As they closed in, the protesters tried to scatter. But the workers chased them down, pummeling anyone too slow to get out of the way. When they were finished they marched on city hall, where they forced the deputy mayor to raise to full height the rooftop flags his boss, a liberal Republican, had lowered in mourning. Then they turned on nearby Pace University to find more college kids to kick around before heading back to work, public order having been righted by a rampage fascism’s bully boys would have been proud to call their own.
Nixon helicoptered to the White House at half past six on the evening of May 8. The first lady and their daughters had followed him to Camp David that afternoon, presumably to protect themselves from whatever Saturday’s protest might bring. So he ate dinner alone, then hid away in the empty family quarters until 10:00 p.m., when he walked into the East Room to face the nation.
He stood stiffly in front of a single microphone, his hands clasped behind his back, the beads of sweat on his forehead glistening under the television lights, his voice carefully modulated to project a calm he clearly didn’t feel. The first round of questions focused on his reaction to the week’s turmoil. No, he wasn’t surprised by the protests’ intensity, he said. Yes, he welcomed the weekend rally, in fact was pleased that it’d be so close to the White House. No, he didn’t think the United States was lurching toward revolution. Finally someone asked about the invasion. Everything was going so well, he said, the first American units would be pulled out of Cambodia within a few days, the vast majority within a month, the remainder—every last American—by June 30.
A reporter asked the obvious follow-up. Now that he’d set a hard date for a complete withdrawal, wouldn’t the North Vietnamese simply wait for the troops to be gone and then rebuild their sanctuaries? If that was the case, had the invasion been worth the cost? Nixon replied with a measured statement about the attack having bought the South Vietnamese army six more months of the intense training it needed to assume full responsibility for the war: the incursion suddenly turned into another way of bringing the boys home, the previous week’s test of will abandoned for a barely disguised retreat.
He’d told Haldeman that after the press conference he’d be going straight back to the family quarters, where he wanted to be left alone. But as soon as he was upstairs he started making phone calls. The first went to Haldeman at 10:37 p.m. By midnight he’d made sixteen more, all but one back-to-back. In the next two hours he made another twenty-three, his only break the eleven minutes he spent trying to reach people who didn’t answer. The frenzy ended at 2:00 a.m., only to start again an hour and a half later. He spent six minutes talking to a California television producer, one minute with his press secretary, three minutes with Kissinger, and a rambling four minutes with UPI’s longtime White House correspondent. Then he took a half-hour break to listen to Sergei Rachmaninoff’s relentlessly romantic Piano Concerto No. 2 before calling his valet, Manolo Sanchez, to ask if he’d ever seen the Lincoln Memorial at night.
It was still dark when the limousine left—Nixon, Sanchez, and three panicked Secret Service agents slipping past the barricade of buses that had been placed around the White House overnight for the quick drive to the Memorial. When they arrived a few minutes before 5:00 a.m., Nixon took Sanchez up the steps to read the inscriptions on either side of the statue, both of them meditations on a time of civil war. As they turned back a small group of students in Washington for the day’s protests came up to shake hands. Nixon responded with the sort of casual conversation starters he’d never mastered. But they seemed a bit nervous, so he just started to talk.
Once he got going he couldn’t stop. For almost an hour he roamed from topic to topic—from Vietnam to the nation’s racial divisions to his own troubled childhood to the importance of travel—while the gradually growing cluster of students tried to make sense of what he was saying. “He wouldn’t look anyone in the eyes,” one of them said afterward. “He was mumbling. When someone asked him to speak up he would boom one word and no more.” Eventually someone cut in. “I hope you realize that we’re willing to die for what we believe in,” he said.
“I certainly realize that,” Nixon replied. “Many of us when we were your age were also willing to die for what we believe in and are willing to do so today. The point is, we are trying to build a world in which you will not have to die for what you believe in,”10 as if that’s what he’d been trying to do when he extended the war he’d promised to end. As if he hadn’t told his aides that he wanted the nation divided. As if he didn’t know what he had done.
Secrets
HALDEMAN LEARNED THAT the president was at the Lincoln Memorial in a 5:00 a.m. phone call. By the time he got into the White House at 6:15, Nixon had moved on to the Capitol for a meandering tour that culminated in the House’s empty chamber, where he sent Sanchez up to the Speaker’s podium to give an impromptu speech while he sat in his old seat and applauded. They came out to find Haldeman waiting for them, desperate to get him back to the White House. But Nixon insisted that they get breakfast first. Off they went to the dining room of Washington’s most exclusive hotel for another hour of the president’s ramblings, until Haldeman finally convinced him that it was time to go home. “The weirdest day so far,” he told himself that night, a phrasing that left open the possibility of worse to come as Nixon buckled under the crisis he’d created.11
In fact the crisis had peaked. Saturday’s rally passed with a shapelessness to be expected of an event that had been organized so quickly. Over the next few days the student strike faded too, its reach undermined by the inevitable problem of sustaining passions that had reached such an intense pitch. There were still protests and counterprotests, some of them fiercely confrontational. But by the end of the week only a dozen campuses were shut and the nation’s streets were largely clear—except in New York, where the city’s suddenly militant hard hats were drawing thousands of supporters to their now daily marches through Wall Street.
Only then did Nixon start to recover. A long weekend in Florida helped. The polls helped more. Though Americans hadn’t rallied behind him as they usually did when a president sent troops into combat—a striking 43 percent thought he’d been wrong to push into Cambodia—the invasion hadn’t damaged his approval rating. And despite all the agonies that had followed the Kent State killings, public support for the anti-war movement had clawed up only a few points, to 27 percent of Americans, ten points below the share who thought anti-war activism ought to be made illegal. Haldeman saw the effect on the flight back from his weekend away. “P had me up alone for the first hour,” he wrote once they were in Washington. “He was in a good mood, relaxed, confident, optimistic, not driving hard,” a month of frenzy finally behind him.12
He spent the next few weeks worrying his wounds with more early-morning action items, brooding sessions in his hideaway, and occasional backsliding into the Old Nixon. The most public came in late May, when he had the hard hats’ leaders in for a photo op; they handed him a yellow helmet with “commander in chief” stenciled across the front, in case he wanted to join them the next time they stomped some doves. The more dangerous turn came in early June, when he authorized a deeply conservative young staffer he liked, twenty-nine-year-old Tom Huston, to prepare a highly classified plan for undermining the anti-war movement. Huston returned with a proposal packed with illegalities, among them a suggestion that the government break into activists’ offices to rifle their files and tap their phones. Nixon loved it. But he wasn’t willing to meet FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s insistence that he sign off on every illegal activity he wanted the bureau to undertake, a classic bit of bureaucratic self-preservation that put the Huston Plan on the shelf, waiting for someone to revive it.
The remaining American soldiers were withdrawn from Cambodia at the end of June, just as Nixon had said they would be. He marked the moment by announcing a new peace initiative, though the real negotiations remained hidden in the apartment on Paris’ rue Darthé, where Kissinger and the North Vietnamese resumed their secret meetings on September 7. A month later the Pentagon reduced the number of troops in South Vietnam by 50,000, the first step toward meeting the 150,000-man withdrawal Nixon had set as a goal in April, while it intensified the air war against Cambodia under the president’s direct order. So the administration slipped back into the strategy the incursion had broken, May’s horrific miscalculation having been wiped away by the declining casualties the drawdown produced and the brutal bombing Americans didn’t see.
It wasn’t as if the counterpressures dissipated. Congress’s leading doves kept hammering away at Nixon’s inability to end the war, while the protesters kept coming into the streets. In their most powerful moments the two intertwined. A generous count gave Vietnam Veterans Against the War about 12,000 members, a minute fraction of the millions of soldiers who’d cycled through Vietnam since 1965. Of that number, only a few thousand made it to Washington in April 1971. But for the better part of a week they dominated the news with scalding demonstrations, capped by two dramatic events on Capitol Hill. First, a line of 800 vets marched, one by one, to a fence that had been put around the Capitol to keep them out, and tossed over it the medals they’d been awarded for their service. Then their spokesman went inside to talk to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John Kerry was that rare young man who’d set aside the protections of privilege to go to Vietnam, in his case straight from Yale. He’d come back with two Purple Hearts and a deep conviction that the war had been a terrible mistake, as he told the committee’s doves in the relentlessly articulate, profoundly moving televised testimony they’d arranged because they knew he’d say exactly what they wanted the nation to hear.
The further Nixon got from Cambodia, though, the more confidence he had in his ability to hold the center. He’d decided on another major drawdown in early 1971, this one to bring the total number of troops in Vietnam below 200,000 by the end of the year. But he waited until early April to announce it, so as to undercut the spring protest season. When the federal courts ordered the veterans to be removed from their encampment on the Mall, he refused to enforce the ruling. But when radical activists tried to shut down the city a few weeks later, he had 12,000 of them arrested. And he made his own appeal to vets in the final act of the My Lai massacre. A year of legal procedures had dwindled the army’s fourteen indictments down to a single court-martial, of Lieutenant William Calley, the lowest-ranking soldier it had charged. On March 30 he was convicted of murdering twenty-two civilians—a fraction of those he’d actually killed—and sentenced to life imprisonment. Nixon let him serve three days. Then he publicly ordered the army to move him from his cell to his apartment at Fort Benning, pending a presidential review of his conviction.
Together those moves set a floor beneath the public’s support for his handling of the war; only once in the first half of 1971 did it drop below 40 percent, and by spring it was closer to 50. On particular policies his support spiked. Seventy percent of Americans approved of his latest troop withdrawal. Seventy-six percent approved of May’s mass arrests. And 80 percent approved of his putting a convicted war criminal into a comfortable house arrest, two and a half times the number who approved of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
There were also promising signs in the peace process. From his secret Parisian meetings Kissinger brought back hints of progress, some of them substantive, others purely symbolic: he returned from one session thrilled to report that the North Vietnamese had set the apartment’s chairs around a table they’d covered with a green tablecloth, an arrangement diplomats traditionally considered the mark of formal negotiations. The more significant possibilities came from another direction. For two years Kissinger had been quietly working his back channels to Moscow and Beijing, in pursuit of Nixon’s grand strategy for pressuring the North Vietnamese into a settlement. In January 1971 the Soviets finally sent word that they were willing to discuss the details of a presidential visit. On April 27 the Chinese did the same with a personal note passed through the Pakistani ambassador. Kissinger read it to the president with a coda to match the moment’s significance. “We have done it now,” he said over the brandy Nixon had brought out to toast their triumph. “We have got it all hooked together.”13
Nixon insisted that the opening be wrapped in absolute secrecy until the arrangements were complete; not even the secretary of state was to be informed. There it stood two months later—Kissinger still feeling his way through the opaque diplomacy the Chinese had placed around the process, Nixon still waiting for confirmation—when the first of the summer’s crises hit. Timing was everything. In his last year as secretary of defense, Bob McNamara had commissioned a tiny group of high-level staffers to conduct a study of the United States’ disastrous path into Vietnam. They produced a forty-three volume, two-and-a-half-million-word history of the presidential decisions and deceptions that had shaped America’s Vietnam policy from 1945 to mid-1968. When they finished they made fifteen strictly classified copies. On Sunday morning, June 13, 1971, the New York Times announced that it had a copy too, and would be publishing detailed analyses and key excerpts day by day on the paper’s front pages.
The White House knew that the stories would reveal a great deal, from Jack Kennedy’s complicity in Ngo Dinh Diem’s death through the manipulations LBJ used to draw the United States into a war he knew to be unwinnable. But the study stopped half a year before Nixon took office, so at first no one seemed particularly concerned about its release. Then Kissinger called from his weekend away in Los Angeles. It wasn’t the study’s details that mattered, he insisted. It was the fact that someone had leaked to the press forty-three volumes of classified material just as Nixon was in the most delicate negotiations of his presidency. How were the Chinese supposed to trust him now that his government had shown that it couldn’t keep its secrets? How was his foreign policy supposed to survive now that he looked so weak?
If Kissinger was baiting Nixon, as Haldeman later claimed, it worked. Within a day and a half the administration was in federal court, seeking to stop the Times from running the rest of its series. From that first motion the case spun into an epic two-week battle over the press’s right to publish free of government constraint, the fight spreading from the Times to the Washington Post, which started to run its own series based on the copy it had obtained, and then to almost a dozen papers as the original leak turned into a flood. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case on June 25, held oral arguments on the 26th—for a while Nixon thought of presenting the government’s side himself—and handed down its ruling four days later: a six-to-three decision clearing the Times to resume its publication of the Pentagon Papers under the First Amendment’s protection.
That was only half the fight, though. It took Kissinger about a day to decide who’d leaked the study to the Times. Daniel Ellsberg was an ex-marine with a Harvard PhD, a specialist in game theory who’d spent most of the Johnson years in the Pentagon’s proudly analytical inner rings, first as an aide to McNamara and then—after a stint as an expert adviser in Vietnam—as a researcher on the Pentagon Papers. Along the way he’d turned against the war, as Kissinger knew from the couple of months in 1969 that Ellsberg had spent on his staff before he moved to the RAND Corporation, the Defense Department’s favorite think tank. According to the government’s records RAND had two of the study’s fifteen copies, which gave Ellsberg the perfect combination of motive and opportunity. The FBI put him under investigation three days after the Times’s first story appeared. The following week he was charged with theft of government property and possession of documents relating to national defense, crimes that carried a ten-year prison term.
Nixon wanted more. From the start he was convinced that the leak had come through some sort of conspiracy, likely leading up from Ellsberg to the study’s director, Leslie Gelb, another Harvard PhD who was now working at Washington’s Brookings Institution, an even more prestigious think tank than Ellsberg had managed to find. Nixon’s first thought was to expose him to the press as a threat to the nation, just as he had Alger Hiss all those years before. But on June 17, halfway through the first week of the leak, Haldeman happened to mention a rumor that Gelb was holding another file, this one detailing the peace deal LBJ had almost put in place in October 1968. And Nixon’s thinking lurched back to the spate of illegal actions he’d wanted to pursue after the Cambodian demonstrations. “Bob, now you remember Huston’s Plan,” he snapped. “Implement it. . . . I mean, I want it implemented on a thievery basis. Goddamn it, go in there and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.”14
Haldeman let it go, as he often did with presidential orders he considered too preposterous to pursue. When the Supreme Court ruled against the government a week later, Nixon brought it roaring back. At 9:00 the next morning he gave Haldeman three hours to find someone to head the new unit he wanted to run the Huston Plan’s covert operations. Not just anyone would do. “I want a son of a bitch,” he said. “I want someone just as tough as I am for a change. . . . These goddamn lawyers, all whining around about, you know. . . . Do you think, for Christ’s sake, the New York Times is worried about all these legal niceties? . . . We’re up against an enemy, a conspiracy. They’re using any means. We are going to use any means. Is that clear?” Then he swung back to Gelb’s supposed files. “Did they get the Brookings Institute raided?” he asked, though he knew they hadn’t. “No? Get it done! I want it done! I want the Brookings Institute safe cleaned out,” a crime to cover up his role in extending the war that had already come close to breaking him; secrets in defense of secrets; the beginning of the end.15
De Jure
VIRDA BRADLEY’S SUIT started with her frustration that things weren’t the way they ought to be. When she’d moved into her house in the mid-1960s there’d still been plenty of whites in the neighborhood: factory workers and their families mostly, living in the solid little homes their union wages bought them; people no different from Bradley really, except for the color of their skin. Most mornings from the day after Labor Day to early June their younger kids would troop into the grade school across the street from Bradley’s house, a brown-brick pile of a place opened in the 1920s, during Detroit’s great building boom. Her youngest two would troop in too—Richard right away; Ronnie, her baby, in September 1969. That was one of the reasons she’d settled on her house, so her boys could go straight out the front door into school.
By the time Ronnie started kindergarten most of Bradley’s white neighbors were gone. They’d cleared out the way they always did, selling their houses as quickly as they could once the color line was broken—always to Black buyers of course—tripping over each other on their way to the city’s fringes or out to the suburbs. The pace had picked up after the rebellion of 1967, the flight turning into a flood, not because the looting and burning had reached into their area but because the fear and anger had. It was startling how quickly things changed, even by Detroit’s fevered standards. The year Bradley arrived in the neighborhood about half the people living there were white. In the autumn of 1969 more than 80 percent of them were Black, as were 97 percent of the kids in the school across the street.
It didn’t bother Bradley that the whites had left. What rankled was the way the money followed them. She could see the cost of it in the books that didn’t get replaced; the supply shelves that were never restocked; the bathrooms that ran out of toilet paper; the dingy portable classrooms the district slapped up behind the school when the influx of Black kids made it too crowded inside the building; the snow that nobody shoveled off the playground anymore, and the mud pits they’d stopping filling now that the color line had been redrawn. There was no denying that the situation was complicated, as tangled as it was in falling property values and failed millage votes, indecipherable funding formulas and convoluted politics. But for Bradley the bottom line was simple enough. When she was a girl back in Jim Crow Tennessee she’d gone to schools whites had stripped bare, and it wasn’t right that her little boys were going to do the same. That’s what drew her to the integration suit the NAACP’s lawyers were putting together in the spring of 1970: the injustice across the street and the intimate history behind it.
As for the attorneys, they saw the case as an obvious addition to the association’s surging school campaign. They already had a number of test cases underway to extend integration to cities in the north and west, led by the sprawling Los Angeles litigation. The really dramatic movement, though, was coming in the South. Despite the resistance that the latest round of court orders had faced, the 1969–70 academic year ended with almost 75 percent of southern districts having integrated at least some of their schools. Six hundred more districts would be added to the list when the new year began in September, among them Strom Thurmond’s hometown of Aiken, South Carolina, and bloody Birmingham. And there was good reason to believe that the Charlotte case was about to break in just the right way. In late May the circuit court upheld Judge McMillan’s integration order, albeit with a few alterations. Both the school board and the NAACP immediately appealed to the Supreme Court, which set oral arguments for October 12, 1970. But the justices refused to delay the order’s September implementation date. So Charlotte would get its chance to stop the racial transformation of its schools—five weeks after the court-ordered buses started running.
The promise of progress met a fierce reaction. When George Wallace lost Lurleen to cancer in May 1968 he also lost Alabama’s governorship to her successor, Albert Brewer. Wallace wasn’t particularly interested in governing the state again, but he needed the base the office provided to make another run for the presidency. So as soon as Brewer announced that he’d be seeking the Democratic nomination in the June 1970 primary, Wallace launched a challenge drenched in the most savage race-baiting of his career. Out came the television ads warning of Black domination, the radio spot hinting at Black rapists about to stalk the state, and the campaign flyer—spread from Selma—featuring a white girl of four or five surrounded by seven Black boys of roughly the same age. “This could be Alabama four years from now,” read the accompanying text, the racists’ nightmare of radical rule revived with a photo of eight little kids sitting side by side.16 Brewer still managed to win half a million votes. Wallace won 30,000 more.
To Alabama’s east and west the politics of rage gave way to repression. On the May 1970 weekend that the Cambodian protests peaked, African Americans in tiny Perry, Georgia, mounted a series of marches against the county’s tepid desegregation plan. State troopers arrested 430 of them, crammed them onto buses, and shipped them to a prison farm the state had closed because it wasn’t fit for human habitation, where some of them were brutalized in the course of their processing. Two days later the Savannah police killed six African Americans after a demonstration against police brutality turned into a night of looting. Three days after that the Mississippi highway patrol met a student protest at Jackson State College with a fusillade of buckshot that killed two more young men. “This is war,” Georgia’s rabidly segregationist governor Lester Maddox told 800 cheering members of the Georgia Peace Officers Association shortly thereafter, though he forgot to mention that the war ran only one way. None of the week’s eight victims had been armed. Six had been shot in the back, five of them multiple times.17
After a summer of such brutality, there was no telling what might happen when the new school year began. Through much of August districts were swept by talk of crippling boycotts and pledges of defiance in defense of the parental rights the courts were trying to rip away, threats Washington took so seriously that the Justice Department sent a hundred lawyers down South to deal with the confrontations to come. But beyond a few ugly incidents—a predawn bombing of an African American grade school in North Carolina, a brawl in a Mobile high school, race-laced protests in a number of towns and cities—nothing much happened. Even the boycotts faded within a couple of weeks: a sign, said the Times, of white southerners’ weariness with a struggle that many of them secretly wanted to put behind them, though it was just as reasonable to see in September’s success whites’ grudging capitulation to orders the courts wouldn’t let them circumvent any longer.18 And white schools could be very grudging places, shot through with assertions of white superiority and Confederate pride. Still, the change was striking. In 1968 68 percent of southern African American children attended all-Black schools. By December 1970 18.4 percent did, a rate the rest of the country couldn’t come close to matching.
Not yet, anyway. Charlotte’s lawyers went into their October appearance before the Supreme Court arguing that their city’s schools had been segregated exactly as Chicago’s or Detroit’s had. The courts hadn’t ordered those systems to integrate, they said, because the de facto discrimination that had segregated them was beyond the court’s reach. So they had no right to integrate Charlotte’s schools either. The NAACP attorneys turned that argument in the other direction. The courts had every right to integrate Charlotte’s schools, they insisted, as Judge McMillan had realized once he’d accepted the association’s broadened definition of de jure discrimination. By that standard they’d have every right to integrate Chicago’s and Detroit’s schools too.
The justices handed down their decision in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education on April 20, 1971. It was a carefully hedged, often convoluted opinion, written by the chief justice to wring a unanimous vote out of colleagues who couldn’t agree on how far the definition of de jure ought to be extended. But on the particulars it was decisive. McMillan had acted within the law when he’d ordered Charlotte’s schools to integrate, the ruling read, and when he’d required kids to be bused as the best way to achieve that end. The next morning’s papers laid out the obvious implication: if Charlotte’s school system had to bus its kids to achieve integration, then other southern cities had to do the same. The director of the NAACP’s legal team pushed the logic further. The federal court in northern California had just ruled in an association suit against the segregation of San Francisco’s public schools. The Tenth Circuit’s Court of Appeals was about to rule on an NAACP challenge to Denver’s schools. Behind them loomed the Los Angeles case, with its enormous reach. Once the Supreme Court affirmed one of those decisions, he told the Times, the rest of the nation’s cities would have to start busing too.
The thought of it appalled a huge swath of the population. According to the polling that followed the Charlotte ruling, 85 percent of whites and 65 percent of African Americans opposed busing kids to integrate their schools. By the summer that opposition was feeding another wave of protests, more intense than the previous year’s, the South’s swirling around the busing that would begin in September, the North’s and the West’s around the possibility that the buses would soon start rolling in their cities too. Much of it was driven by whites’ enduring opposition to integration. But the thought of moving huge numbers of kids around their cities raised all sorts of fears. In Florida’s Broward County Black parents objected to the danger of sending their children into hostile white communities. In San Francisco Chinese-American parents vehemently objected to their kids losing the Chinese culture classes that their neighborhood schools provided. Denver’s Latino parents raised a similar warning about the fate of the bilingual education they’d fought to secure in their neighborhood schools. And at a mass rally in Nashville a white mother raged against racial mixing while another told a reporter that what really scared her was the thought of her nine-year-old getting sick at a school fifty minutes from home.
Then there was Virda Bradley’s suit, which in the spring of 1971 went to trial in the federal courthouse in Detroit, the Honorable Stephen J. Roth presiding. It seemed like a far from perfect fit. Born in Hungary and raised in blue-collar Flint, sixty miles north of Detroit, Roth had reached the federal bench through the political pathways the New Deal had created for sons of the immigrant working class. He’d never given much thought, he said later, to how government power had served a very different purpose on the other side of the racial divide. Over the next three months the NAACP’s lawyers led him through a painstaking reconstruction of Detroit’s systemic segregation. Roth took another two months to process what he’d heard. When he finally issued his decision in September, he swept past the Supreme Court’s caution with the assurance of someone who’d seen the truth revealed.
From the stack of evidence the NAACP had presented it was clear that the school board had manipulated some of its rules to maintain the system’s color line. But the problem stretched far beyond those specific offenses, Roth said. In Detroit, school segregation was inextricably linked to neighborhood segregation, which had been driven by a fusion of public policies and private actions so complete it turned the entire process into an overpowering case of de jure discrimination. Whatever segregation government entities had imposed the courts were obliged to undo. Detroit’s schools therefore had to be integrated just as southern schools had been.
How that was to be done Roth would determine through another set of hearings. But he’d be working under one obvious constraint. Detroit’s schools were already losing about 40,000 white kids a year. If his implementation order stopped at the city limits those losses would reach such an intensity the entire system would soon be segregated as the Bradleys’ school had been, by the overwhelming force of white flight. So, Roth told the press, any integration plan was likely going to require the busing of Black students out to the all-white suburban schools that ringed Detroit and the busing of suburban kids into the city schools, as a matter of practicality, law, and justice. Within a week almost 20,000 families in suburban Warren had joined a boycott of their schools, triggered by a rumor that Judge Roth was about to send buses full of kids like Mrs. Bradley’s little boys across the suburban color line.
Appeals
ON JUNE 17, 1970, a week or so after Norma McCorvey gave birth to her baby, the circuit court’s three-judge panel issued its ruling on Roe v. Wade. In nine precise pages it aligned with Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee on almost every point, including the decisive one that a woman’s decision to have an abortion was protected by the right of privacy Griswold had created. Even its one major reservation broke their way. For reasons that weren’t completely clear, the judges declined to stop Dallas County from prosecuting abortion providers, a decision that—through the technicalities of federal law—gave Weddington and Coffee the ability to appeal their entire case directly to the Supreme Court. They submitted the required paperwork on October 6, as the politics of abortion was spiraling through its most ferocious phase yet.
The turmoil was sparked by a turn no one saw coming. Reformers had been trying to liberalize New York’s restrictive abortion law since 1966. Every year they brought a bill to Albany. Every year the legislature rejected it on the order, people said, of the state’s enormously influential Catholic bloc. That’s what everyone was expecting to happen in 1970 too, until the Senate majority leader put before his colleagues a proposal not to soften the state law but to repeal it altogether, without the residency requirements or strict time limits that Hawaii, the only other state to repeal its abortion law, had put in place. Pro-choice supporters saw it as a cynical maneuver, meant to kill reform by replacing it with a bill so extreme it couldn’t possibly pass. But it did pass, after three brutal weeks of debate, the decisive vote coming from a conservative Democrat—and former marine—so agonized by what he’d just done he slumped at his desk on the House floor and buried his head in his hands.
He had good reason. Half a decade of reform had broadened the circumstances under which women could have abortions in a dozen states. The procedure was still wrapped up in layers of regulations, though, mostly controlled by medical professionals. Now New York was going to allow any woman who wanted an abortion in the first twenty-four weeks of her pregnancy to have one, no questions asked or reasons demanded. Because it hadn’t adopted any residency rules, it was also extending that possibility to the millions of women who lived within a bus-ride’s reach of the state. Only the courts could establish a woman’s right to an abortion. But on the day the repeal took effect, July 1, 1970, New York’s legislature had moved the United States as close to that standard as it had ever been.
“The new law should offend the conscience of no man,” said the Times’s editorial board on the day the bill was passed. But it did, profoundly. From their chanceries New York’s Catholic bishops condemned it as a desecration of the founding fathers’ principle that life was an inalienable right. Billy Graham’s influential monthly magazine Christianity Today followed with a methodically searing piece denouncing the state’s “war on the womb,” a first step toward evangelicals’ embrace of what they had considered a Catholic cause. At the grass roots, passions moved in even more visceral ways. “It is difficult to describe one’s feelings as a resident of New York City during those days before July 1,” a woman involved in Catholic action wrote late in the year; “. . . the passage of each twenty-four hours was bringing closer the killing of the children, atrocities in which one could not avoid being implicated oneself,” as the faithful were when they failed to stand against society’s sins.19
Atrocity and complicity. That was the connection Martin Luther King Jr. had made from his Birmingham jail cell in 1963, that Norman Morrison had made in his last letter to his wife in 1965, and that Bobby Kennedy had made in his anti-war speech from the Senate floor in 1967. Pro-choice activists had made it too in the run-up to the repeal vote, when they’d rallied in front of midtown Manhattan’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral with blood-red coat hangers in their hands, to lay the brutality of back-alley abortions at the steps of the Church. In the months after the New York breakthrough anti-abortion activists embraced the politics of moral confrontation with a fury.
The idea of publicizing the disturbing details of abortion procedures had started to gain traction in more militant anti-abortion circles in early 1970. That spring a scattering of Catholic newspapers published vivid descriptions, most of them wrapped in the most lurid language the authors dared to use. Then the photos of aborted fetuses began to appear on the anti-abortion lecture circuit, images so wrenching that the first speakers to employ them reported audience members fainting at the sight of them. From there they passed to right-to-life flyers and fundraising appeals. And in 1971 two of the leading lecturers—a gynecologist and his wife, a former nurse, both long involved in Catholic sex education—reprinted a set of photos in a 141-page handbook meant to confront its readers with the only choice they faced. “Is this unborn being, growing within the mother, a human person?” it read. “Judge it to be a mass of cells . . . ? Then vote for abortion-on-demand. Judge it to be a human person? Then join us in fighting for his right to live, with all the energy and resources at your command.”20 Within a year they’d sold about a million copies.
The movement had its quieter strains, to be sure, shaped by a range of ideas on the complex obligations that a right to life imposed. But it was the furious version that raged through the legislative fights that followed New York’s repeal. Twenty-five states took up bills to change their abortion laws in 1971. Out came the photos, for the rallies the pro-life forces mounted, the expert testimony they put before the considering committees—more anti-abortion doctors with shocking slides to show—and the postcards that flooded into legislators’ offices, a graphic image on one side, a personal demand for a vote on the other. Down went the bills, every single one.
Weddington and Coffee spent much of that spring lobbying for Texas’ version, a repeal bill that was sliding toward defeat when the Supreme Court ruled on jurisdictional grounds that the Dallas court had been wrong to overturn Texas’ sodomy law. For a while they feared that the justices would do the same with their case. But on May 3 the Court announced that it would indeed hear Roe, with oral arguments to be held sometime in the Court’s fall term. And suddenly there was a chance that abortion’s place in American life could be settled not by a brutal slog through the states but by nine aging men sitting in judgment of a case created by two young women barely out of law school.
The movement’s legal experts had already started to press them on preparations, in anticipation of the Court taking their appeal. Coffee didn’t have time to spare from her firm’s work. So it was Weddington who gave up the job she’d finally secured for a minuscule stipend from a New York legal institute that promised her the help she needed; Weddington who holed up in the broken-down Manhattan office the institute provided for the summer, writing the case’s brief with the makeshift staff its director assembled; and Weddington who made the rounds of the movement’s leading figures—Planned Parenthood’s powerhouse doctors and lawyers, the woman with ties to the Rockefeller fortune, the prickly law professor from NYU—to lock down the supporting briefs she had to have and cover the costs the institute couldn’t manage. On August 17 she submitted every document the Court required, a foot-high stack of paper, and headed home to wait for Roe to be assigned an argument date.
She was still waiting a month later, when two of the justices announced that their collapsing health made it impossible for them to continue on the Court. Insiders told her that their resignations would probably put arguments off for a year, since an issue of such importance shouldn’t be settled by a shrunken bench, much less by one tangled up in another round of political warfare over the president’s search for just the right replacements. So it was something of a surprise when the clerk of the Court finally sent word in mid-November that the justices would be hearing the case on December 13, and even more of a surprise when the director of the New York institute promptly informed the Court that he’d be making the argument on Roe’s behalf. The justices would expect their side’s most skilled attorney to appear, he told Weddington, though she ought to be “relatively well-prepared on all the issues” in case some terrible accident prevented him from taking the place he clearly deserved.21 She didn’t reply. But Linda Coffee did, with a sharp-edged letter to the clerk reminding him that her client had the right to be represented by a lawyer of her choosing. And Jane Roe wanted Weddington.
The chief justice opened the session at 10:07 a.m. on the 13th, with Weddington standing at the podium, the youngest woman ever to appear before the Court. In the half hour she’d been given she made a quietly impassioned plea for a woman’s right to an abortion as “fundamental,” the word she and Coffee had used in their original filing. She walked the justices through the constitutional bases of that claim, which she rooted in individuals’ right “to determine the course of their own lives.” And she tried to sidestep their questions about whether the state had a compelling interest in protecting the fetus at any point in a pregnancy.22 It was a solid, at times eloquent presentation, an impressive achievement by any measure. And when her thirty minutes expired she had no idea how she’d done with those seven aging men sitting in front of her.
Calculations
NIXON DIDN’T GET anyone to burglarize Brookings in the summer of 1971. But he did get the covert team he wanted to implement the most far-reaching parts of the Huston Plan. On the White House organizational chart it was listed as the Special Investigations Unit, though its small collection of political operatives and former federal agents preferred to call themselves the Plumbers, since it was their job to plug the administration’s leaks. Once they were up and running they gave the president a different break-in—at the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, where they spent the better part of a night rifling through the filing cabinets in search of something damning to bring back to their boss. Later Nixon said that he didn’t remember hearing anything about it. More than likely no one told him, on the principle that the president shouldn’t know about the felonies his staff committed on his behalf, though it’s possible that the memory of it just got lost in the sweep of events that were moving in Nixon’s direction.
Kissinger put the final pieces of the China opening into place during a secret three-day visit to Beijing in early July, a suitably clandestine way to seal the deal. He left with a two-paragraph communiqué simply stating that Nixon would visit China at some point before May 1972 as a step toward reopening the diplomatic relations the United States had severed in 1949. It took two days of circuitous travel for him to bring it back to Nixon, and another two days to reach the agreed-upon release date of July 15. The president used just seven minutes of the networks’ time to read it to the nation and offer a couple of comments about his commitment to securing world peace for generations to come. Then he took Kissinger, Haldeman, and a couple others off to one of his favorite restaurants to celebrate with dinner and a very expensive magnum of wine in anticipation of the reviews coming in.
The announcement brought the inevitable attacks from the far Right, including a grandstanding condemnation from Nixon’s Orange County congressman, a devout member of the John Birch Society, who said that by going to China the president was “surrendering to international communism.”23 Almost everyone else lined up behind it: the Senate’s leading hawks and doves, the television anchors, the most prominent newspaper columnists, and the major editorial boards, among them the Post’s and the Times’s, which set aside the bitterness of the previous month’s battles for glowing pieces in praise of the president’s breakthrough. But the most important response arrived almost a month later. On August 10 the Soviets privately invited the president to follow his China trip with a Moscow summit in May or June 1972. It had taken almost three years of painstaking diplomacy. But now he really did have the pieces of his grand global strategy hooked together.
The next day the international financial system pitched into its third crisis in a dozen years. The problem had started in the winter of 1971, when the economy began to improve after two sluggish years. The numbers weren’t exactly spectacular: between January and April the unemployment rate fell by 0.2 percent, the inflation rate by 1.0 percent. But that was enough to intensify the flow of dollars out of the country. And that was enough to make the international money markets nervous. By May Western Europe’s central bankers had traded in so many dollars that the American gold supply had reached its lowest point since 1936.
Over the next few months the trades slowed down, in the mystifying ways of high finance. Then a congressional report supporting the devaluation of the dollar turned the spring’s unease into a run. Between August 9 and August 12 the gold supply fell by at least $200 million, with the British government hinting that it might draw down $750 million more. Suddenly Nixon was facing the same choice Eisenhower had faced in 1960 and Johnson in 1968: salve the investors’ fears by pushing the American economy into recession a year before the next election, or let the nation’s gold reserves drain away—which was to say that he had no choice at all.
Except the one his predecessors would have thought anathema. The secretary of the treasury, a hard-headed pol from Texas, had raised the possibility after the spring gold drain. As Friday’s rush mounted he raised it again. Avoid the political devastation of another recession, he said, by abandoning the gold exchange and letting the dollar’s value float to whatever level the global markets thought it might be worth. The chairman of the Federal Reserve—an old Eisenhower hand—countered with a reminder that the exchange anchored an international order that the wartime generation had built to prevent the world from tumbling into the catastrophic economic conflicts of the 1930s. Currency wars, trade wars, political friction: we risk them all, the Fed chair told the president, by allowing the order to fall. It was a powerful presentation, shaped by the most fearsome specter he could raise, and it never stood a chance.
At 3:00 a.m. Saturday Nixon was up sketching out the speech he’d have to give before the markets’ Monday opening: something “concise, strong, confident,” he thought, without any “gobbly-gook about [a] crisis in international monetary affairs.” He finally decided to say that he was ending the gold exchange to create “a new era of prosperity” to accompany the “generation of peace” he was building abroad—to suggest that he was working from a master plan rather than political calculation—and then hope that the markets would absorb the shock.24 They did, in the United States at least, though European and Japanese currencies took a terrible hit, the first hint of the volatile new order that would replace the old. But most Americans weren’t worried about the value of the franc and the yen. In the late August polls Nixon’s approval rating hit 56 percent, his best showing in almost a year, while 70 percent thought he’d done the right thing by freeing the dollar from gold.
In September Nixon heard that he’d have two more Supreme Court seats to fill. It was an opening created by the accidental timing of age and illness: eighty-five-year-old Hugo Black was dying when he stepped down on September 17, and seventy-one-year-old John Marshall Harlan was wracked with cancer when he resigned on the 23rd. Harlan had been willing to delay his departure as long as he could, to keep the bench from narrowing to seven justices. But Nixon sent word that he’d prefer he resign immediately. That way, Haldeman wrote on the day Harlan made his offer, “the P [would be in] the unique position of appointing two justices at once, which will give him his four on the Court and darn near control of it” just as busing was bearing down on him.25
In his first statement on the Charlotte decision Nixon had said that as president he was obligated to enforce the Court’s order no matter what he thought of it. But he hadn’t anticipated how severe the backlash would be. By midsummer Republicans across the South were telling him that any administration support for busing was going to be politically devastating. Worse, George Wallace was telling Alabama’s urban districts to defy the Court and daring Nixon to stop him in what everyone could plainly see was the first flamboyant act of his next presidential campaign. Nixon tried to counter by threatening to pull federal funding from busing plans that his own administration was backing, a move so contradictory even Haldeman couldn’t defend it. Then Black and Harlan tendered their resignations.
He devoted about a month to floating the names of potential nominees. Almost all of them were southerners, mostly respectable segregationists like the ones he’d tried to put on the Court in 1969 and 1970. He also threw in a few inflammatory possibilities, among them the lawyer who’d represented Little Rock’s schools in 1957 and Democrat Harry Byrd, the senator from West Virginia who’d started out his public life as a recruiter for the Klan. Some of them Nixon actually wanted to appoint. Others were just for show, a way to enrage the civil rights forces while playing to all those folks who wanted the Court reined in.
In mid-October he finally made his nominations. One seat he offered to yet another courtly southerner, a sixty-four-year-old corporate lawyer from Richmond named Lewis Powell; the other to William Rehnquist, a forty-seven-year-old assistant attorney general who’d come into the Justice Department through the intercession of his old friend Barry Goldwater. Compared to some of the other possibilities they were impeccable choices, with perfect legal pedigrees, sterling connections, and almost no records on civil rights. Neither in fact had much of a public record at all, which made it highly unlikely that anyone could uncover the sort of damning material that had toppled Nixon’s previous nominees. What made them most attractive, though, was the depth of their conservatism: Lewis’s in his view of the law as a bulwark of proper order, Rehnquist’s deeper still. “Bill Rehnquist makes Barry Goldwater look like a liberal,” said one of his White House supporters in a private aside, the ideal endorsement for a president who saw in his two new nominees his chance to change the Court’s sense of racial justice rather than flail against it.26 In December 1971 the Senate confirmed them both by comfortable margins.
Shortly thereafter Nixon approved a major round of bombing in North Vietnam, to coincide with the Christmas holidays. The hopes that Kissinger had carried out of his clandestine meetings with the North Vietnamese had faded over the summer. There were occasional sessions through September, but the negotiations deadlocked over the administration’s support for the current government in Saigon, which was in the midst of reelecting its president in a blatantly fraudulent fashion. Once the October results were in—the president having squeaked by with 94 percent of the vote—the talks shut down. Shortly thereafter military intelligence picked up signs that the North Vietnamese were preparing for a major assault on the South sometime in early 1972, in hopes of winning on the ground what they couldn’t get in negotiations.
The possibility of attack didn’t slow Nixon’s drawdown. On November 12 he stopped by the White House press room to say that he’d be withdrawing another 45,000 soldiers by February 1, 1972, which would bring the total number of Americans in Vietnam down to 140,000, its lowest level since 1965. A few days later a Pentagon source told the Times that the president planned to pull out another 100,000 by the end of June, leaving behind a force so small it couldn’t really fight at all. Even as the news went out, Nixon was quietly adding to the United States’ already enormous air forces in Thailand, Guam, and South Vietnam. On December 26, 1971, he unleashed them for five days of sorties deep in the North, a brutal reminder of the power he wielded and a vicious conclusion to what had turned out to be a very good year for the president.
The Campaign Season
THE CAMPAIGN APPARATUS was set well before the new year began. The unfortunately named Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP) had opened its offices across the street from the White House gates. The cabinet was being reshuffled to give the committee the senior leadership Nixon wanted it to have. Corporate donations were pouring in. And the West Wing was freeing up whatever additional resources CREEP would need. Even the Plumbers unit would have its place, working on the dark side of a campaign whose candidate planned to present himself as the statesman he’d become, floating above the slightly unseemly world of politics much as Eisenhower had always managed to do.
Two steps got the campaign underway. On January 25, 1972, Nixon went on national television to reveal Kissinger’s two years of secret talks with the North Vietnamese, the latest installment of the dramatic announcements he’d come to love, this one meant to eviscerate the doves’ claims that he wasn’t committed to pursuing peace. Three weeks later he went to China, trailing a planeload of reporters, anchormen, and cameramen behind him. Back flowed seven days of brilliant images: Nixon at the Great Wall; Nixon at the Ming tombs; Nixon at the opera; Nixon trading banquet toasts with Premier Zhou Enlai in the Great Hall of the People; Nixon sitting alongside an aging Mao Zedong in his book-lined study next to the Forbidden City, quietly talking politics. What the world was seeing, Time said in its breathless report from Beijing, was Nixon freeing the nation’s foreign policy of the anti-Communist obsession that he’d once helped to start, a perfectly crafted story of transformation to begin the campaign season.
The Democrats were changing too, though without a sense of where they wanted to go. After 1968 the party had reformed its rules to open up its nominating process. No longer could a candidate take the nomination as Hubert Humphrey had, by lining up the party’s leaders. Now he or she would have to run through a series of primaries that would select well over half of the convention’s delegates, a far more democratic system that gave the party plenty of opportunity to splinter, which was precisely what it did.
Two of the first five primaries, in New Hampshire and Illinois, went to Humphrey’s running mate in 1968, Senator Ed Muskie. The son of a Polish-born tailor who’d settled in a Maine mill town, Muskie had risen through the political world the New Deal created. There he stayed, a pro-life Catholic with an abiding faith in the virtue of government action whose greatest appeal was to the working-class ethnics who saw him as one of their own. Muskie followed his wins with two losses, in Massachusetts and Wisconsin, to the race’s most prominent anti-war candidate. South Dakota’s George McGovern had been one of the first senators to turn against LBJ’s escalation in Vietnam, a position he’d built from the deep faith he’d inherited from his father, a Methodist minister; his nightmarish experience of flying almost two years of bombing runs over German-occupied territory in World War II; and the nuances of global politics he’d learned while earning his PhD in American history in the late 1940s. He brought to the race an earnest, cerebral style that allowed him to re-create the coalition Eugene McCarthy had put together for his anti-war campaign in 1968—young liberals providing its energy, progressive suburbanites providing its votes. Down in Florida the last of the first five primaries went to George Wallace, back in the Democratic fold after his 1968 run and furiously trading on the anti-busing fervor that had exploded the year before.
Muskie was the first to fall, brought down by the fractured field and the vicious acts of sabotage CREEP’s operatives secretly launched to smear his record, his character, and his family. For a short stretch of the spring it seemed that Humphrey might step into his place. But the polarization was too strong to counter. By early May the party was split down the middle, with McGovern solidifying his hold on its left wing, Wallace gripping its right, and Nixon perfectly positioned to claim its crumbling center.
Nixon staked his claim in a swirl of presidential actions. There was the bill he sent to Capitol Hill, linking a proposed yearlong moratorium on court-ordered busing that Congress had no right to impose with a $2.5 billion increase in federal funding for public schools in poor neighborhoods. The bill would allow those Democrats who couldn’t stomach Wallace’s white supremacy to wrap their opposition to busing in something suitably progressive. There was the supposedly private letter he sent to New York City’s cardinal praising the Church’s defense of the unborn—a position that as a mildly pro-choice Republican he didn’t share—duly leaked as a direct appeal to the working-class Catholics Muskie’s defeat had set adrift. And there were the two new justices he’d put on the Court, making their presence felt.
Toward the close of its term the Court announced that instead of handing down its ruling in Roe it would rehear the case now that the bench was back to full strength. No one knew precisely what the delay meant, not even the justices who, a couple of days after the December oral arguments, had voted, five to two, in Sarah Weddington’s favor. But the papers were filled with speculation that Nixon’s appointees were tipping the balance against abortion rights. Around the same time the Court issued its first integration decision with the new justices in place. It wasn’t a major case except for the signal it sent. Since Brown the justices had unanimously supported every integration ruling. This time they split five to four, with Nixon’s appointees all in dissent, an unmistakable sign that his remade Court was close to bringing the age of integration to an end.
Of all the actions Nixon took that spring, though, none mattered more than the violence he unleashed in Vietnam. The warning he’d tried to send with his Christmas bombing hadn’t worked; by early January the evidence of a North Vietnamese buildup was so strong that the Pentagon warned the offensive could come within a month. But the North Vietnamese couldn’t afford to embarrass the Chinese with an attack while Nixon was in Beijing, nor the Soviets during his Moscow summit, set for late May. So they squeezed it in between, starting with a massive artillery barrage in the closing days of March—the heaviest since the Tet offensive four years before—followed by 150,000 troops in motorized units pouring into South Vietnam from the North, with supporting divisions striking from Cambodian and Laotian bases to the west.
Kissinger delivered the news to Nixon in the middle of a morning meeting in the Oval Office on March 30. Almost immediately he ordered the bombing strikes he’d built up the air forces to deliver. Most of them served as support for the South Vietnamese troops who were doing the frontline fighting in place of the American boys he’d brought home. But he also insisted on hitting North Vietnam harder than he had before: for the first time in his presidency he turned loose the military’s biggest bombers, the devastating B-52s, for a mid-April assault on Haiphong, the North’s major port, while fighter jets struck military sites around Hanoi in yet another warning of the damage US forces could inflict.
It wasn’t enough. Quang Tri City, on South Vietnam’s northern coast, fell to the Communists on the first of May. Hue could go next, the American commander told the White House that afternoon; already refugees were streaming out of the city amid credible reports that the South Vietnamese army was losing its will to fight, a danger so great Nixon decided he had to escalate. Over the next few days he settled on his strategy. Hue he’d defend with waves of B-52s. And the North he would break by severing its access to the military materiel Hanoi had to have to wage its war. The sea routes he’d shut by seeding North Vietnam’s harbors with mines, the land routes by blanket bombing of its roads and rail lines, switching yards and fueling stations. He expected precision, he told the Joint Chiefs. But if the bombing “slops over” to civilian targets, “that’s the way it’s going to be, because we—I’ve made the decision and we now have no choice . . . but to avoid the defeat of the South” whatever the costs might be.27
He told the nation of the escalation on the evening of May 8. It was a careful speech, the specifics of the assault surrounded by another explication of failed negotiations and repeated declarations of his desire to end the war. As soon as he went off the air the leading doves fired off their condemnations—from the campaign trail McGovern called it “a reckless . . . flirtation with World War III”—while the universities braced for a repetition of those terrible May days two years before.28 There were certainly protests through the balance of the week. But the numbers weren’t big enough for anyone to imagine turning them into a student strike, much less a revolution. Only one governor bothered to call up his National Guard. And the requisite Saturday march on Washington drew just 2,000 people.
The escalation drew far more public support. On the night of Nixon’s speech the White House switchboard was overwhelmed by the congratulatory calls pouring in. Western Union delivered some 40,000 telegrams, the vast majority of them supportive. And the first poll to reach the president’s desk put public support for the attack at 72 percent, almost exactly the share of Americans who’d said they were in the silent majority during those tense days of protest in November 1969. Almost none of them thought that the assaults would end the fighting. But that wasn’t the point. With his latest turn Nixon had given much of the nation the Vietnam War they’d always wanted: a sharp, decisive, devastating strike at the enemy that didn’t require them to sacrifice their sons—four weeks into the North’s offensive only thirty-five Americans had been killed in action—and didn’t put the consequences of the military’s ferocious power on the nightly news for everyone to see. By the end of May, Nixon’s approval rating had reached 62 percent, ten points above where it had been before he’d ordered in the bombers.
In the intervening weeks the violence had lurched in another direction. Wallace swept the last two southern primaries in early May. After a quick swing out to the Plains he moved on to the May 16 contests in Maryland and Michigan, the testing grounds for the northern stage of his campaign. Wallace already had a base in Maryland, where he’d run up the vote in his 1964 primary drive to embarrass LBJ. This time he had an opening in the suburbs too, roiling as they were with talk of busing. The possibilities in Michigan were stronger still. In late March Judge Roth handed down his long-awaited ruling on the integration of Detroit’s schools. It read exactly as Wallace thought it would. The city’s system couldn’t be integrated, Roth said, without integrating the suburban systems too. The details weren’t yet settled. But whatever emerged was going to encompass Detroit’s entire suburban ring: fifty-three districts linked to the center city in a comprehensive plan that on any given day would be busing more than 300,000 children. Into the ensuing panic strode Wallace, his anti-busing pitch polished to a hard-edged sheen. For a while it was like the glory days of 1968, the governor on the stage slashing away at the judges, the liberals, and the bureaucrats who didn’t give a damn for the rights of the working man while his overflow crowds stomped and cheered.
He was back in Maryland on the day before the primaries, shaking hands along a rope line in a suburban shopping center, when a young man with a handgun and a deep psychosis pushed to within a couple feet of him and opened fire. Wallace couldn’t tell how many times he was shot. But even in the first horrifying moments—before the race to the hospital, the hours of emergency surgery, the months of rehabilitation, and the years of withering pain—he knew that one of the bullets had hit his spine. Otherwise he’d have been able to feel his legs.
Wallace won both of the next day’s primaries, Maryland with a solid plurality, Michigan with a clear majority. Afterward the experts said that he would have done about the same had he not been shot, because it wasn’t sympathy that had driven the vote but the strength of his appeal. Where his campaign might have gone next wasn’t clear: maybe to another win or two, and from there to a convention fight split along the divides he’d been exploiting since the Wisconsin night eight years before when the Herbstreiths phoned to offer him a national career shaped by hate and fear. Without him the race was essentially done. McGovern took six of the seven remaining primaries, capped by a victory in California that all but made the Democrats’ leading dove the party’s nominee.
The results were everything Nixon wanted them to be. The last week of May he spent in the Soviet Union, piling up more fabulous images of his statesmanship to go with the nuclear arms agreement he signed as the summit’s culminating achievement. He came home to a 15-point lead over McGovern in the polls. Behind that gap lay even more promising numbers. Americans favored his position on abortion over McGovern’s by 11 points; his position on the economy by 23 points; his position on busing by 26 points as Wallace’s voters swung his way. Best of all, he had a 19-point advantage on his Vietnam policies, a devastating deficit for McGovern to overcome with a campaign rooted in an anti-war movement that most Americans had never trusted. In that opening Nixon saw the rest of the election unfolding. “Get McGovern tied as an extremist,” he told Haldeman on June 9, “while we go for the all-out-square America.”29
The balance of the summer went almost perfectly to plan. It was true that in the middle of June they had a serious scare from those sons of bitches Nixon had wanted hired in the Plumbers unit. On the night of May 28 five of its operatives had broken into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in Washington’s Watergate complex to plant bugs on the office’s phones. They’d planned it as another search for dirt on the president’s enemies, a high-tech version of the Ellsberg break-in crosscut with the sabotage they’d been committing throughout the campaign. But one of the bugs didn’t work. Early on the morning of Saturday, June 17, they’d gone back to replace it. In the middle of the operation they managed to get themselves arrested.
Nixon hadn’t known about the burglary beforehand. But he knew that the Plumbers’ reporting lines ran up to the Oval Office. So he plunged into his inner circle’s attempts to contain the damage. They unfolded as Nixon’s crises always did, in obsessive Oval Office conversations and long rambles in his Executive Office Building hideaway. Out of them flowed a series of orders to impede the FBI’s investigation and get the story out of the papers. By the end of June he was confident enough in what they’d done to call a prime-time press conference. He used it to announce that the North Vietnamese offensive had stuttered to an end and that the peace talks would be resuming, though the bombing would continue for as long as he thought necessary. From there the session spun through twenty-one questions, not one of them on Watergate.
Two weeks later McGovern formally received the Democratic nomination in a high-minded, occasionally chaotic convention broadened by the party’s reforms. Gone were many of the old pols who’d dominated in 1968—Dick Daley didn’t even get a seat—replaced by more women and people of color than ever before, many of them embedded inside the anti-war bloc McGovern had assembled. The principle that had put them there was the right one for a party that called itself democratic. But the television coverage of a convention floor filled with unexpected faces reinforced the message Nixon wanted to send, as did the platform they produced, with its promise to end the bombing of North Vietnam immediately and the war within ninety days, its explicit embrace of busing, and its subtle nod to the abortion rights and gay rights that a share of the Democratic base couldn’t abide. Shortly after the convention closed Lou Harris put out a poll asking whether McGovern had too many ties to radicals and protest groups. Fifty percent of his respondents said he did.
August was even better for the president. Watergate bubbled up a few times, mostly through revealing reporting from the Washington Post and the New York Times. But it didn’t seem to have much of a hold; according to the White House’s polling, 40 percent of Americans hadn’t even heard of the break-in, and only one percent of those who had thought the president had anything to do with it. McGovern ate up a huge portion of the media’s attention by stumbling through a series of missteps—the worst choosing a running mate he then had to remove from the ticket eighteen days later—while Nixon quietly worked to seal him off from much of his own party; for weeks he courted LBJ, just to convince him not to give McGovern his endorsement. At the end of the month the Republicans swung into their perfectly stage-managed convention: an opening-night tribute to Ike that ended with his widow praising the president from her Gettysburg farm; a second-night tribute to the first lady, narrated by Jimmy Stewart; and on the final night Nixon’s triumphant acceptance speech, built around his invitation to both Republicans and Democrats to “come home to the great principles we Americans believe in together.”30 By the time he was done his lead had swollen to 34 points.
He barely campaigned in the fall, having decided that he was better off staying in the White House: an “Eisenhower father figure,” as Billy Graham called him in September, too busy caring for the nation to devote any time to his reelection.31 But he made a few carefully controlled appearances, at the Statue of Liberty on September 26 for a celebration of immigration with a multiethnic contingent of school kids, in Chicago to lead the Columbus Day parade, at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall on October 19 to sign a revenue bill. On October 23 he spent an afternoon barnstorming through the upscale suburbs of New York’s Westchester County. On the 28th he went to Ohio for one of the last campaign swings of his career.
Two days before, the press had reported that Kissinger and the North Vietnamese had reached a settlement that would finally bring the Vietnam War to an end. Hanoi said they had. Kissinger said they were working on it, though in fact he had a deal in hand. And Nixon said nothing at all, for fear that an agreement announced before the election would leave him open to attacks from the Right that he’d appeased the Left by selling out the South—the same fear that had coursed through America’s Vietnam policy for more than twenty years. Still, there wasn’t much harm in having the news packed with talk of impending peace.
From Cleveland his motorcade headed southeast into the rolling countryside. He stood in the back of the limousine for the entire afternoon, the first lady at his side, the two of them waving to the small-town folks who’d come out to greet them. At tiny Mantua Corners he saw a couple holding a sign saying that they’d lost their son in Vietnam. It was a hook he often took from the campaign trail, spotting a homemade sign that moved him; he had put the story of one, also from Ohio, into his victory speech back in 1968. This time he had the limo pull over so he could offer his condolences. What he noticed was the mother’s rough hands, he told his cabinet the next day. A workingwoman’s hands that reminded him of his mother’s, which he always thought were beautiful. There was another detail of that moment that he didn’t mention. Maybe he didn’t even know it. As he was standing on the roadside talking to those grieving parents, he was just fourteen miles from the Kent State campus, where the war had claimed another mother’s child two years before in what he’d come to consider the darkest day of his presidency. He remembered writing her family a condolence letter and seeing her father on the nightly news, struggling to read the statement he’d written on his daughter’s death. He even seemed to remember how pretty she’d been. But he couldn’t remember her name.