13    Sifting Out the Hearts of Men (1972)

As the Easter offensive began, Hanoi’s final directives envisioned reaching a decision on the battlefield, then making progress in negotiations—some in the summer, but more before the U.S. elections. Le Duc Tho followed that scheme in meeting Kissinger in Paris on May 2, a session the latter found especially frustrating. Hanoi’s envoys rejected halting the offensive, and the United States held fast to its refusal to unseat Thieu. After this deadlock, Nixon ordered the diplomats to break off the official talks too, and Hanoi countered, canceling the next scheduled Kissinger-Tho conversation. Despite Linebacker and the Haiphong mining, it was Washington that blinked.¹ The Nixon-Brezhnev summit included an exchange on Vietnam, where Kissinger offered an important concession: the commission created to supervise South Vietnam’s election of a new president could serve as an interim coalition government. The Soviets passed this on to Hanoi during a mid-June visit by Soviet president Nikolay Podgorny. As LBJ had done during other diplomatic initiatives—to much criticism—Nixon expanded the Linebacker exclusion zones around Hanoi and Haiphong. The Chinese took a hand as well, encouraging Hanoi to consider an arrangement that did not require Thieu’s immediate ouster.²

It was also the United States, not the DRV, that issued the invitation to new talks. This led to a pair of meetings on July 19 and August 1 at which the long impasse began to break. Kissinger insists that Hanoi’s military weakness forced it to deal and that he offered no concessions. By his own account, the U.S. presentation on August 1 “consisted mainly of cosmetic modifications.”³ Historian Jeffrey Kimball analyzes the evidence in some detail and argues otherwise.⁴ Declassified transcripts of both sessions are now available and show the United States here agreed to include both political and military elements in an agreement—something Washington had resisted strenuously up to this point. The United States hoped to minimize this concession by reserving most political questions for a second stage of talks between the Vietnamese parties (in a commission created by the agreement). Kissinger also dangled the possibility of a bombing halt to advance the negotiation. He specifically said, “We believe that we have made a significant proposal.” Nixon had already conceded a cease-fire in place, shortened—and here further reduced—the schedule for the U.S. troop withdrawal, and offered reparations. On August 1 Hanoi relented on its demand that Thieu be forced out (with the understanding he would resign before elections) and presented an outline framework of an agreement.⁵

After this, diplomacy began to move quickly. By August 10 the NSC staff had a draft Vietnam cease-fire agreement on paper, and further conversations took place on August 14, where there were workmanlike efforts to hammer out acceptable language. Ten days later Dr. Kissinger visited Saigon to confer on the arrangements with President Thieu. Suddenly the sides were moving toward accommodation.

Why this agreement? Why now? Who was compromising with whom? The argument that Hanoi dealt from weakness founders on the military realities. Even though its bid for decisive victory had failed, Hanoi now held a strong position in the South, sustained in the face of U.S. mining and bombing as well as Saigon’s counterattacks. It would be the American president who ran out of options. Mr. Nixon had no sharp tools left. Bombing was what it was. Without it, the battle lines would have been even worse. Withdrawal had run its course: Nixon had cleared the way for the mining with another increment in April, and two more afterward to still the disquiet. When they were complete, the U.S. force level would be 12,000. That card had played out. The public opinion spike Nixon gained from Haiphong itself was soft and evaporated when mining and bombing failed to produce visible results. Humanitarian concern over attacking North Vietnam’s dikes influenced the falling poll numbers. The ARVN bogged down in Quang Tri. Nixon had played out his string in Congress too. In late July a bill that would have strengthened his hand by locking the United States into the war, making exit contingent on an internationally supervised agreement, failed in the Senate. Another resolution, one that ordered withdrawal if Hanoi simply returned U.S. prisoners, passed. The folly of justifying the war merely on the basis of the American prisoners stood revealed. Progress in the negotiations themselves became Nixon’s only remaining card.

The key differences on the American side were between President Nixon and Dr. Kissinger. The national security adviser wanted to use the U.S. election as a cudgel to extract from Hanoi the best terms for a settlement. Kissinger actually told Le Duc Tho on August 1 that Nixon would be stronger after the election, implying a need to settle beforehand. Mr. Nixon also counted on being stronger after the election, so he preferred to string out the negotiations past then. For him, the election meant drawing a new hand he could play to his advantage. If agreement were achieved before the election, the president could use that to sway voters, but that was not his preferred outcome. Suddenly American politics took center stage.

Marchers and Voters

By the summer of 1972 the presidential election had become a source of immense confidence at the White House and the object of intense hope, perhaps wishful thinking, among many others. Richard Nixon had done everything that was legal—and a lot that was not—to ensure his reelection. From his first day in the Oval Office, a great deal of posturing, staff work, public gestures, private maneuvering, assorted chicanery, and ultimately covert operations had been aimed at this very goal. President Nixon remains the only American chief executive ever forced to resign precisely because of the methods he used to seek office. With George W. Bush, Americans today have a new example of excessive zeal in a president, though it remains to be established whether irregularities in the 2000 and 2004 elections were parts of an orchestrated campaign. In 1968 observers spoke of advertising, public relations, and the selling of the presidency. And there was the matter of the October Surprise. But this time around Nixon spared no effort to choreograph the entire election. The campaign unfolded with a scripted quality. Richard Nixon wanted not only the greatest landslide in American history; he wished to have a procession to his reinauguration. This is not the place for a lengthy accounting, but a few points are in order to set the context for the disruption of his careful script by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

First, Nixon enjoyed unprecedented success in determining his opponent, and he eventually faced the weakest available Democratic candidate. This goes beyond the actions of acolytes of the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP) and the political “dirty tricks” of his campaign staff. The notorious “Canuck letter” was a dirty trick that led to the self-destruction of Nixon’s most viable opponent, Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine. That was a CREEP activity, and one of its operatives was Muskie’s driver. Much of the rest the president did himself. White House political records tell the story. The president had sharp analysts such as Patrick Buchanan compile in-depth summaries of the strengths and vulnerabilities of his opponents; then he acted to compromise those persons. For example, analysts pictured Hubert Humphrey, Nixon’s 1968 adversary, as vulnerable on Vietnam. When Humphrey loyally made a statement backing U.S. action, Nixon telephoned to thank him and to encourage more of the same—then he had political operatives target Humphrey on those statements. Edward Kennedy might have been a strong opponent, but Kennedy was vulnerable due to his behavior in the Chappaquiddick incident, an accident resulting in the death of Kennedy’s friend Mary Jo Kopechne. Nixon had Chuck Colson investigate Kennedy, and one of Howard Hunt’s first White House assignments was to dig for dirt on Kopechne’s death.⁶

Alabama governor George Wallace, a conservative, could have drawn off southerners and the blue-collar voters Nixon counted on. That is what he had done as a third-party candidate in 1968. John Mitchell’s Justice Department developed a bribery case against Wallace’s brother, after which a Nixon operative leaked the news to columnist Jack Anderson. The president had also had campaign contributions made to Wallace’s gubernatorial opponent in the primary in 1970. When that failed to stop Wallace, Nixon tried to ensure that he stayed within the Democratic Party. In early 1972 the Justice Department dropped its investigation against his brother, and the next day Wallace entered the presidential lists as a Democrat. On May 15 Wallace suffered critical gunshot wounds from a would-be assassin. He would be paralyzed from the waist down and withdrew from the race. That left South Dakota’s George McGovern, a liberal, as the leading Democratic contender, which was fine with the president.

Nixon’s Watergate excesses stunned Americans later, but the important points here are their roots in Vietnam—the Plumbers formed to take out Daniel Ellsberg—and their commonality with other measures. The warrantless wiretaps ordered by the Nixon White House and the NSC against a variety of administration “enemies,” plus some of its own officials, were not much different from the CREEP taps put on the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate building. Their discovery began the affair and gave it its name. The illegal cash collected for a slush fund, in excess of $2 million, was a massive extension of the tactic used against Wallace. Some of that money paid for the Haiphong mining telegrams. More of it went to finance the Plumbers.

The Republican nominating convention represented the start of Nixon’s procession toward the inaugural, and he wanted it to be just right. The first fly in that ointment came when plans to hold it in San Diego collapsed. Miami became the new locale.

Nixon was highly concerned with image. His campaign events and rallies were a constant source of friction between White House and CREEP staff and the Secret Service. The Secret Service spent almost $6.4 million on security during the 1972 campaign, most of it for the president. At one point Bob Haldeman kicked up a ruckus with White House detail chief Bob Taylor over restraining ropes, which Haldeman wanted to drop so a crowd could surge forward in a “spontaneous” show of delight with the candidate. Taylor threatened to arrest the president’s chief of staff, and he won that round. At the next rally, in Greensboro, North Carolina, CREEP advance people dropped the ropes themselves. Agents literally had to manhandle SEARCHLIGHT onto Air Force One. In Cleveland, Haldeman wanted Nixon’s motorcade to pass only cheering crowds, bypassing protesters, so enthusiasm would be the only emotion the TV cameras could record. Haldeman asked for a Secret Service radio in his limousine so he could monitor the post reports and direct the motorcade away from demonstrators. Logistics chief Dennis McCarthy refused. When the motorcade began, the White House detail discovered that a Haldeman aide with a walkie-talkie had been assigned to ride in their lead sedan. The Secret Service countered by having its agents use earphones, turning off the radio speakers. Taylor, jaundiced by Haldeman’s animosity, eventually left the Secret Service.

The Secret Service also crossed swords with White House staff when Nixon’s advance team wanted a checkpoint to keep protesters out of a Nixon rally. The Secret Service agreed to check for weapons but not to turn people away based on appearance. The campaign set up its own checkpoint beyond the real one and funneled protesters into a parking lot. Some of those denied entry sued the Secret Service, but legal proceedings established that White House staff had been the culprits. The Nixon campaign played it both ways. For a September rally at the Statue of Liberty, a package of fifty tickets appeared anonymously at VVAW offices. When a couple of dozen veterans attended, they were howled down by hundreds of Nixon partisans, and six were escorted away. That would be the televised image.

Various antiwar groups, including VVAW, announced their intentions to protest at the political conventions, particularly the Republicans’. Both the FBI and the CIA began frenzied efforts to divine Movement plans. James McCord of the White House Plumbers told Watergate investigators he had received almost daily reports. CIA records show that Project CHAOS began issuing evaluations as early as March 6. Given its charter, the CIA’s reports purported to discuss “foreign support” for activities to disrupt or harass the conventions, but day after day they found “no direct indications” or that “indications remain limited.” Instead, CHAOS analysts discussed American groups’ activities. On March 21, when the Republican convention was still slated for San Diego, the focus was on “Expose 72,” a multifaceted exhibit the San Diego Convention Coalition had planned at demonstrators’ campsites. On April 24 CHAOS reported the protesters had received a letter of solidarity from North Vietnam but, more concretely, that the coalition had made an alliance with Mexican migrant workers and that the SDS had decided to participate. The next day the CHAOS situation report’s lead read, “The spring fires of protest have been ignited on college campuses across the nation triggered in large part by the resumption of American bombing in North Vietnam.” The analysts included a lengthy calendar of antiwar activities scheduled in various parts of the country through late May and observed: “American revolutionaries it seems will not pass up an opportunity to use the collective college protests as an additional lever to redress their grievances.”⁷

The reporting ranged across the board. In May the CIA covered a visit to China by members of the Concerned Committee of Asian Scholars. In June the CIA noted that a Hanoi delegate to the Paris talks had expressed interest in learning about conditions in the United States from a traveler. In July there were reports on the New York–based People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice’s plans for the Republican convention, now moved to Miami. In general, the CIA’s reporting represented a hodgepodge of items, some relevant, many not.

Conspicuous for its absence was VVAW. Yet in his Watergate testimony, McCord singled it out as the “violent” organization of most concern as the convention neared. Hunt, who had taken his action team of Miami Cubans to check out McGovern campaign headquarters before doing the Watergate, undoubtedly would have been let loose on VVAW, except that the fumbled Watergate break-in of June 17 led to the Plumbers’ arrest and the unraveling of the CREEP intelligence operation, eventually linked to the White House. Two Miami individuals, one in a sworn statement, later acknowledged being approached by the Plumbers’ Barnard Barker in April and asked to sign on for an attempt to discredit VVAW. There is also evidence that, a month later, John Dean attempted to recruit a Department of the Interior official for undercover work on the Miami convention.

Veterans were honored guests at the Democratic convention that nominated George McGovern in July. Although the Nixon White House could not take the spotlight away from the Democrats, they did mount diversions. This would be the moment that Justice Department official Guy Goodwin chose to indict eight members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War for allegedly conspiring to attack attendees at the upcoming Republican convention. Southeast regional coordinator Scott Camil, already the subject of bogus drug and kidnapping charges, would be the lead defendant. At best, the indictment might preclude VVAW action in Miami. In any case, it would be an impediment and promised to bankrupt the organization by forcing it to spend money on legal fees.

The vets had long intended to put their weight into the balance. There had been many ideas about what to do. Some fantasized about a grand demonstration—a “triphibious” one—in which a few vets would parachute onto Miami Beach while others landed from the sea and a contingent marched onto the beach from the landward side. No one talked about attacking people. What they came up with was the “Last Patrol,” the brainchild of Chicago members Bart Savage and Greg Petzel, in which road convoys of vets would converge on Miami from throughout the United States. Others would get there however they could, and the whole group would camp together and hold marches. The Midwest convoy departed Milwaukee led by John Lindquist, who had served with the Marines in the DMZ and had driven in road convoys to Khe Sanh. He left with fifteen vehicles, picked up more from Kansas City, St. Louis, and Chicago, and soon had forty. The East Coast convoy had thirty cars before it reached Maryland. The West Coast convoy was slowed by police, who stopped it in Arizona and Texas. The Secret Service, FBI, and local police shadowed them every step of the way. Lindquist continued to lead the main group, which grew to be a mile long. Some police harassment in Florida did not impede them. At Fort Pierce a party of vets dismounted for a “March Against Death” into the city.

Arrangements in Miami were made by Barry Romo, who secured a campsite at Flamingo Park, where other protesters also encamped. The place proved so chaotic that the vets closed their camp to the others and kept to themselves. The worst feature of the counterculture grab bag at the park was the presence of several dozen members of the American Nazi Party. The Nazis had swaggered around Miami Beach and now took over the stage, refusing to permit anyone else on the podium. Camp organizers begged VVAW to help. About forty vets responded and surrounded the stage, and Del Rosario of the national office asked the Nazis to leave. One of them hit Rosario from behind with a chair. Rosario struck back. The veterans overpowered the Nazis and passed them along a human chain to the edge of the park, where vet Fred Rosenthal, a really huge fellow, threw them out by the scruff of the neck. VVAW became the darling of Miami’s Jewish community, many of them Holocaust survivors. Suddenly it was fine for the vets to move to a different part of the park to escape the chaos. Baskets of food, beer, and wine materialized as if by magic. When the Nazis tried to return later, the Jews themselves barred their way—little old ladies with garden hoses and men with shovels.

On the next day, August 21, VVAW marched to Miami Beach High School, being used to bivouac some specialists from the 82nd Airborne Division and 750 troops of a Florida National Guard battalion. Once again, the Nixon administration was treating the event as a threat to the nation. Almost 6,000 troops were deployed to Miami, including 500 Marines and 2,000 men of the 82nd Airborne. More than 1,000 state troopers had also been mobilized.

There was a definite potential for conflagration at the high school demonstration. California veteran Ron Kovic, a wheelchair-bound former Marine paralyzed in the war, made an impassioned speech, his message that in Vietnam the vets had discovered that America was on the wrong side of the war, and if it happened again, they would side with the people. The Guardsmen appeared to waver. Officers herded them back inside the school and shut the blinds so no one could see the street theater VVAW then staged. But the police log shows two servicemen appeared on the roof and flew the American flag upside down, a recognized distress signal. The Florida Guard’s after-action report commented favorably on VVAW’s conduct and discipline.

Discipline would be manifest the next day, too, when the vets mounted a “Silent March” up Collins Avenue to the Fontainebleau Hotel, where the president and many top Republicans were quartered. There were no shouts, no slogans, just vets arrayed in serried ranks, platoons arranged by state and guided by hand signals from disabled VVAWers who had been designated the leaders. Three vets in wheelchairs led the march—Kovic, Bobby Muller, and Bill Wyman. It was a haunting passage. Asked why there were no slogans, one vet replied, “There’s nothing left to say.”⁸ In front of the hotel came another face-off, this time with Florida state troopers. The vets wanted to enter. Serving as march leader, Barry Romo ordered the group, consisting of 1,200 to 1,500 veterans, to sit down and block Miami’s main street. They did. Mayhem was averted when California congressman Pete McCloskey arrived and invited the wheelchair-bound vets to come inside and await the president’s arrival. Romo led the rest of the marchers through their planned speeches and a return to the campsite. Mr. Nixon actually arrived by helicopter, avoiding the vets altogether.

The Secret Service had rushed agents through training to have more of them in the field at the convention. It also went to the CIA to obtain the use of a Miami safe house for its operations, along with television recording equipment, special cameras, and half a dozen sets of false ID for undercover agents to use. A year later, Justice Department sources would leak that L. Patrick Gray, Hoover’s successor at the FBI, had also yielded to demands for Bureau infiltrators among the protesters. By this time, Robert Mardian had left Justice’s Internal Security Division and had joined CREEP. As a campaign official, he had no business in security planning for Miami, but it was Mardian who made the demand. According to the leak, infiltrators helped plan and foment the demonstrations put down by security forces. Miami assistant police chief Larry Cotzin, who actually controlled overall security at the convention, confirmed the infiltrations but denied knowing of provocateurs.⁹

Miami police responded to a variety of other incidents involving everyone from the SDS to Cubans to “Zippies” to the Nazis, who had moved their show to Key Biscayne. Larger groups numbered probably a thousand each, and there were a variety of smaller ones, somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 activists. One night demonstrators attempted to harass delegates, and VVAW actually protected them, as well as a bus that seemed about to be set afire.

The Miami action climaxed on the night of August 23, when Richard Nixon accepted the nomination. Courtesy of Congressman McCloskey, there were four vets in the audience—Kovic, Muller, and Wyman, plus Mark Clevinger—assisted by some of McCloskey’s staff. They were thrown out by security guards when they tried to shout out their opposition as Nixon began his speech. That was bad enough, but outside was pandemonium. VVAW tried to hold a march and a rally, but other demonstrators removed barricades, slashed tires, turned over a Volkswagen, blocked a street with sandbags, staged another sit-down on Collins Avenue, and threw rocks. Delegates on their buses going into the convention center rolled down their windows and shouted at state troopers to “get” the protesters and “Gas ’Em!” By 5:00 PM police were asking for reinforcements, by 7:30 they had begun using tear gas, and by 9:00 they were barricading Flamingo Park, surrounding it with a barrier of tear gas. The Dade County jail estimated 680 arrests; others put the number at 1,000. In the midst of the clubbing and gassing, members of the Miami Beach Jewish community threw their doors and hotel lobbies open to shelter the vets from the mayhem. Vet Danny Friedman recalled, “Some people think the only war we had to fight was over there—actually the one here was tougher.”¹⁰

VVAW’s strongest action involved nothing more than wire cutters and motor oil, a brainstorm of the California contingent. They chopped through a chain-link fence surrounding the convention center, then spread oil on the ramp going into it. The next bus promptly stalled. The ones following it crowded in, and the convention’s entire entry system collapsed. The hall’s garage door had been opened in expectation of the buses, then ground-level doors to admit delegates whose buses could not make it up the ramp. A remarkable thing happened: the wind changed direction, blowing tear gas right into the convention hall. VVAW had gotten inside after all. Spiro Agnew stopped halfway through his introduction speech, tears in his eyes. Richard Nixon later wrote, “My eyes burned from the lingering sting of tear gas as I entered the hall.”¹¹ No doubt the president was furious.

By the summer of 1972, Nixon had arranged his White House processional to his satisfaction, and the opposition had been quieted by the demise of the draft and the seeming progress of the peace talks. At that point, the president still thought he could have his way. Refusing to view his tools of force as blunted, Nixon counted on a succession of triumphal images to give him the election, and he thought success at the polls would give him a free hand in Vietnam. A small band of veterans stood up to say it was not so, and they did that against the heaviest blows Nixon justice could throw at them. It would be an exaggeration to say that only VVAW stood between Richard Nixon and his Vietnam war, but it would not be far from the truth.

To me, the most important political task facing the country remained stopping the Vietnam war. That meant defeating Richard Nixon. The president negotiated with Hanoi but simultaneously hit North Vietnam hard, which looked like a policy of force majeure, not one of peace. Quite simply, George McGovern represented the best avenue to end the war. McGovern had captured the hopes of many of the nation’s young people, including me. I became one of the multitude who made McGovern’s campaign happen, at every level, everywhere. If ever there were a grassroots mobilization, this was it. Theodore White, who wrote a book on the 1972 elections, called us “McGovern’s Army,” a national mobilization of irregulars. “The army had an idea that could snare souls,” White noted. “The idea was that politics could bring peace and justice, and the soldiers of the idea were pure.”¹²

I would not go that far—I had no illusions that a McGovern win would solve all the nation’s problems. But the war had to be stopped, and McGovern would do that. Vietnam was, however, just one among many issues, for the campaign became a joint enterprise of crusaders with a bewildering array of crusades, from working-class mobilization to Democratic Party reform to gender politics. In New York City there were feminists, a nascent gay political activism, major concerns among Jewish and African American groups (“black power” was more than a slogan in the City), and any number of other “isms.” A succession of shifting coalitions, odd alliances, earnest debates, and minor headaches afflicted the campaign. For all the silliness, the level of honest motivation and adherence to political principles were among the highest I have ever seen. If all the wheels had been pulling in the same direction, and if we had had better traction, the result of the 1972 election might have been different. At least, that is the dream.

For New York State, the dream was probably just that. Embedded in the social topography of the place were factors that counted against McGovern. The same things that made him attractive in New York City were negatives in the conservative counties upstate. Even worse, Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island favored Nixon heavily and had many voters. Spillover of that population into the City’s outer boroughs meant difficulty obtaining an overwhelming McGovern vote within the City itself. The liberal McGovern faced the absurd necessity of obtaining a plurality from upstate New York to balance the likely result on Long Island. The sole alternative was a huge McGovern win in New York City, which made the campaign there critical. The eventual result demonstrated the validity of that view.

Apart from this simple analysis, I cannot supply much of the big picture. I was just one of the unwashed masses of grassroots insurgents, a student from Columbia College who showed up one day at campaign headquarters. Like numberless others, I stuffed envelopes, reproduced leaflets, staffed telephone banks, and all the rest. I progressed to working with middle-level managers. Somehow it came out that I had experience with storefront political offices—in 1970 I had worked for candidate Joseph Duffy in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Such was the need in the McGovern campaign that my time at Bridgeport counted for something. At any rate, headquarters received numerous demands for help from all over the City. Sometime around mid-October I was sent to the Upper West Side of Manhattan to coordinate campaign efforts in a portion of the Sixty-ninth Assembly District, part of Representative Charles R. Rangel’s congressional territory. My section amounted to a quarter of the whole. If memory serves (and since I have no records, it will have to), it ran from 65th Street to 79th and from Central Park West to the Hudson River. This was a solidly Democratic district, but McGovern needed maximum votes to offset losses elsewhere.

The nerve center for the effort would be the office of a reform Democratic club, the Park-Lincoln Democrats, a second-floor walkup on the south side of 72nd Street between Broadway and Amsterdam. What I remember most was the unusual picture window—an elongated oval shape that opened across half the width of the building and overlooked 72nd.

Almost immediately I discovered the truth about McGovern’s Irregulars. There were cleavages everywhere. One, probably the most important, was between reform Democrats and more traditional members of the party machine. Party rules changes that had taken effect during the 1972 electoral season had helped McGovern win the nomination but angered many of the traditionalists. Some had no time for us now, and some of them held the keys to important levers of power in New York City or to data vital to our campaign. Some deliberately held back in ways that benefited the Nixon campaign. A few of the better folks put the past aside and worked hard; others, not willing to be seen helping, provided aid in quiet ways.

At the level of an assembly district, the absence (or lukewarm presence) of machine Democrats meant that we lacked a lot of know-how. The Park-Lincoln reformers were great on pressing for a modernist, honest party but weak on nuts and bolts. Efforts before I arrived had centered on voter registration and leafleting subway exits at rush hour. Eighteen-year-olds would be able to vote for the first time in 1972, and we presumed that much of the youth vote would go to McGovern. The machine people, who knew the political topography much better than we did, were an important missing link. Park-Lincoln volunteers could tell me how many hours we had people in the street and how many votes there had been in the last election but knew little about the relevant community groups, the buildings in the neighborhood, old versus young people, and so on.

It seemed clear that the McGovern campaign needed both better knowledge and a stronger presence in the streets. I lived on the Upper West Side myself, though not in that area, and I knew the physical layout as a result of driving a cab in the City. The obvious solution was a large-scale canvassing effort, going right into the apartment buildings and giving McGovern some visibility to voters other than those who commuted to work. I also asked volunteers to tell us about community groups they knew of or events they learned of. We tried hard to place people at those events to give McGovern visibility and learn the lay of the land. We did not rise to the level of Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 “Get Clean for Gene” primary effort in New Hampshire, but we were aware that even on Manhattan’s Upper West Side some of our more opinionated volunteers could potentially do more harm than good. I ended up developing different sets of volunteers for the canvassing, events, and leafleting and table activities.

I had experience canvassing in Bridgeport, but as a coordinator in the Sixty-ninth District, there were problems I had never imagined. In Connecticut we had worked in a neighborhood of single-family homes; here, McGovern Irregulars needed to access large apartment buildings. In some places this was simply a matter of getting past locked doors, but other buildings were large enough or exclusive enough to feature closed-circuit monitors and doormen. Then, as now, New Yorkers were very security conscious. The Irregulars resorted to a variety of subterfuges.

By far the best situation was where we had volunteers canvass their own buildings. Other tenants might know the person approaching them, or at least our Irregular could say, “I live here too!” Access became automatic. Once volunteers learned the technique in a familiar setting, they would have some idea what to do when working a different locale. The next best alternative was to have McGovern supporters who let Irregulars into their buildings. Beyond that, there were the excuses: that the volunteer was conducting an unspecified “survey” (only slightly disingenuous), making a delivery, doing a repair, providing consulting services, and so on. Several Irregulars who were students successfully combined the McGovern canvass with academic projects that involved sampling public opinion. Others proved successful with open declarations that they were working for George McGovern. Some Irregulars enlisted the aid of friends who lived in the buildings they were canvassing, which sometimes produced another Irregular for us. In addition, a number of folks simply showed up at the Park-Lincoln office and said they had decided to come in when canvassed by one of us.

Of course, there were times when nothing went right. One of our headaches was Lincoln Towers, a huge complex of a half dozen or so high-rise buildings west of Lincoln Center. These had television monitors and guards with a view of every floor. Our Irregulars were challenged repeatedly, often after working only a few floors, one floor, or just a few doors. But there were so many voters in the Towers the effort just had to be made. One of our people got in by telling guards she was selling magazine subscriptions to raise money for school. Another Irregular disarmed the guards by convincing them to accompany him, at least long enough to be reassured that the McGovern volunteer posed no threat. Still, coverage there remained the least satisfactory in our district.

I cannot say enough about the McGovern Irregulars. They were willing to move heaven and earth to turn the course of America. I got little sleep, and in the final week or so I virtually abandoned Columbia classes. I did not care a whit. Many student volunteers did the same. Two of our best Irregulars were “Gold Star Mothers.” They had tremendous credibility and got past every challenge. Others brought their children to work with them. In fact, our best teams were parents accompanied by their children. High school students turned out in numbers. Not yet able to vote, these kids were nevertheless willing to leaflet or picket at any hour, in any weather. As election day neared our activists for particular “isms” even gave up their internal bickering and consciousness-raising to focus with one mind. The dedication of the Irregulars thrilled me. Their principle proved an inspiration.

Our major organizing tool would be a large wall map I made, with spaces for every building. While continuing to staff information tables and leaflet subway entrances, I set the goal of getting canvassing teams into every building in our portion of the district before election day. Ideally, we wanted to cover every building at least once a week during the final period. Neither goal was practical, but they gave us something to aim for.

Though we never quite achieved the coverage we wanted, the effort made a huge difference in every way. As we acquired data it became apparent there were buildings, even whole blocks, of especially strong support. New volunteers could be started in those places to break them in gently. There were also pockets where Nixon looked to be running well. I put my best people into those buildings and made sure leafleteers covered them, right outside the door. The results were inked on our wall map for all to see. More and more the Irregulars arriving at the office would cluster around the map, exchanging ideas about what to do and how to cover the ground. As the Irregulars saw concrete evidence of what they were accomplishing, morale rose perceptibly, despite McGovern’s continuing weakness in national opinion polls. Some Irregulars approached me directly, asking to cover buildings to which they had access, even where this lay outside the scope of their usual campaign work. There were also very creative ideas about how to further the canvassing.

I posted the results in gross terms on the wall—so many apartments for McGovern, so many leaning, these buildings split, those for Nixon. The details—apartment numbers canvassed, voters’ names and telephone numbers—went onto file cards. When we got another volunteer into a certain building, he or she was instructed to visit the apartments not yet canvassed or to return to those with leaning voters and provide particular information relevant to concerns those people had expressed earlier. It became possible to target our activities. For example, the intersection closest to one block with strong Nixon support became the object of a sustained information table and leafleting operation.

As far as City headquarters was concerned, as we derived data our reports sent downtown could add substance to the raw political polling results headquarters was getting for our district—data the City office had but we never saw. We also did a lot of work in response to New York headquarters. Many times we went out to encourage voters to turn out for rallies. The climax came a few days prior to the election, when George McGovern appeared at a rally in Manhattan’s Garment District. There was also a big rally for vice presidential candidate Sargent Shriver. McGovern returned to New York the day before the election, but that time he appeared in other boroughs, Brooklyn and the Bronx.

As the campaign wound down to its final days, there came the incident of the abortive Vietnam cease-fire (discussed in the next section). In my district, people saw the exchange of charges between Hanoi and Kissinger on who was responsible for the breakdown primarily as a last-minute play for votes. It had echoes of the maneuvers just prior to the 1968 election, which I knew, but my Irregulars largely did not. When asked about it on the street, they discussed these events as a ploy. The Vietnam revelations did not have much of an impact in my district, but I suspect they helped Nixon in some of the other boroughs, especially conservative areas in Queens and Staten Island.

For the most part, the campaign in our area of the Sixty-ninth District proceeded straightforwardly. Given what was already known about Nixon campaign “dirty tricks,” not least the Watergate break-in, there was gossip about what might happen at our level. As far as I recall, there were a couple of incidents in which leaflets were grabbed or the Irregulars were shoved. There was another episode in which one of our tables was overturned and the staff harassed. Those could have resulted from just random annoyances and altercations. There was also a problem with the rally for Shriver. We were supposed to boost turnout for the event, but the buses hired to carry people downtown were unaccountably canceled. Hundreds of potential attendees were without transportation in our district, and older voters in particular, left to their own devices, went home. City headquarters insisted it had laid on the buses and never changed the order. I have no evidence this represented the other side in action, but it could have been.

Nevertheless, enough happened around the country and the state to fuel speculation among my Irregulars. A storefront headquarters in Croton-on-Hudson was vandalized no fewer than three times, another in New Rochelle hit twice. In several parts of Westchester, people reported physical attacks, in particular, McGovern demonstrators holding placards who stood along the route of a Nixon motorcade. Democratic Party officials and a town committeeman were beaten by persons they believed to be taking orders from men wearing red lapel pins. This kind of news sent shudders through our Manhattan volunteers. The jitters climaxed a couple of days before the election when we learned that, as far away as Kentucky, the state party headquarters had been broken into and its records scattered.

Years later at a convocation marking McGovern’s seventy-fifth birthday, attended by many top officials from his national campaign, I asked whether they had seen any pattern of Republican dirty tricks in the actual electoral operation. None of the senior people recalled local harassment of McGovern organizations as a serious problem. My Irregulars would have been grateful to know that for a fact before election day.

That Tuesday, November 7, brought yet another manifestation of the McGovern grassroots mobilization. In New York City the day dawned clear, crisp, and cool. We had to keep up our street presence, get out the vote, mount a telephone drive to contact voters identified in our canvass, provide poll watchers at an array of individual precincts, and furnish transportation for those who needed assistance getting to polling precincts. In Manhattan, where having a car is actually a major hassle, the latter posed a real challenge. Given the hours the Irregulars kept and the need to do all this until the polls closed at 8:00 PM, scheduling was a massive headache. But that proved the only headache. Getting the necessary bodies, which I had expected to be our greatest difficulty, turned out to be a breeze. The cars? No problem. McGovern’s Irregular Army rose to the occasion in splendid style. We had more than enough volunteers—enough, in fact, to mount a last-minute leaflet blizzard into every one of the pro-Nixon pockets we had identified. We had so many vehicles that four times over the course of the day I was able to commandeer a car just to carry fresh supplies and leaflets to each of our polling places and check in with the Irregulars on the front line. There were no special problems at our precincts. Questioning of voters as they exited the polls indicated strong McGovern support. The Nixon campaign workers were very subdued, ours exuberant. Voters seemed to be turning out in good numbers.

My impressions of a perfect day would be shattered that night. That would also be the closest I ever came to the real powers in the New York City organization—I shared an elevator up to the McGovern reception with Robert F. Wagner Jr., whose father, the former mayor of New York, headed the City campaign. Of course, because of the poll work and scheduling it had been impossible to head downtown until fairly late, and the television networks had already projected Richard Nixon as the victor more than an hour before I arrived. The reception felt worse than a funeral wake, and I could not abide it. Very quickly I left.

I remain very proud of our work in the Sixty-ninth Assembly District and of the McGovern Irregulars who made it possible. George McGovern outpolled Richard Nixon in our district by a margin of more than 3–1, 37,388 votes to 11,099. Only three other Manhattan districts (one including Columbia, another Harlem), all with smaller voter lists, turned in better pluralities. For Manhattan as a whole, McGovern tallied 353,847 votes to 179,867 for Nixon. McGovern also carried the Bronx comfortably (245,757 to 197,941). But there it ended. The outer boroughs of New York City were too close to give McGovern the margin he needed. Brooklyn went for McGovern by just 10,000 votes, and he actually lost Queens and Staten Island. Overall, George McGovern won New York City by 1,341,164 votes to Nixon’s 1,259,244. Still, the last New York Daily News opinion poll prior to election day had shown Nixon ahead in the City by 53 to 47 percent. I believe the McGovern Irregulars made the difference.

Nixon ran as strongly as predicted in Long Island and the suburbs, where he led by more than half a million votes. Upstate, McGovern fell short of hopes, if not expectations, and lost by more than 800,000. The Republican lead ultimately dwarfed whatever we had managed to accomplish in the City. In the end, Richard Nixon carried New York State by almost exactly the same number of votes he had gotten in the City itself.

None of these results should be held against the selfless and tireless efforts of McGovern’s Irregular Army. The ingenuity, dedication, energy, and raw intelligence of the Irregulars were incredible. Coming out of nowhere they became a band of sisters and brothers who carried out a national campaign despite the absence, in places, of the traditional machine. I have wondered many times over the years what became of the Irregulars. But the day after Nixon’s reelection, more bombs fell on Vietnam. The war had not been solved. That struggle continued and still demanded our efforts.

No Truce from Terror

Days before the election came a new kind of October Surprise—a peace that did not happen. This followed the breakthrough in the Kissinger-Tho private meetings that had begun in August. Who is to blame for the fiasco remains disputed, but what is certain is that somewhere in the middle of the president’s triumphal procession to return to the White House, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger realized the game was up in Vietnam, for the climax took place within weeks of the vote. All this set the stage for yet another Nixon Shock.

This play centered around the prospect of a cease-fire, and it began with Kissinger, outline agreement in hand, visiting Saigon on August 17. Dr. Kissinger had no doubts about Nixon’s strength in the presidential campaign. During their photo op, Kissinger mentioned that he had run into George McGovern. Beyond mere distress at the jet lag, Henry joked that McGovern had never recovered from his own Saigon visit in 1971. When they spoke privately, Kissinger told Thieu, “I have made a record that we are prepared to have a ceasefire. Now I will move off that . . . We believe it would be better for us not to have one.” Nixon’s emissary reviewed the talks, arguing that Hanoi had made a serious error by stalling in anticipation of the U.S. election while its military situation deteriorated. Now Washington would stall too. Kissinger presented a strategy to draw the talks out beyond the U.S. election and described how provisions in an agreement would benefit Thieu. After the vote, Kissinger said, “We will step up our air campaign and force a resolution.” It was a point to which he would return. In describing the details of the proposal, the emissary said, “We will not have to go through another year of good will with our opponents.” The situation would be totally new. “If we win the election,” Kissinger declared, “we will settle the war one way or another.” The next round of U.S. withdrawals got brief mention. There he affirmed that no naval forces would be sent home. “We want them for the campaign after November 7,” Kissinger noted. “We don’t want to bring them back.”¹³

The next day, in a detailed response, Thieu exhibited his perennial concerns. He rejected any political commission, because that might evolve into some kind of coalition government. And Thieu, aware that “cease-fire” meant that troops would remain where they were—that is, Hanoi would not withdraw from the South—wanted one only “when the war is completely finished, everything is settled.” In fact, Thieu specifically asked how the agreement would force Hanoi’s withdrawal, and aide Nguyen Phu Duc recommended that the word “standstill” in the agreement be replaced. Kissinger preferred not to, though he let it seem that Duc had convinced him with some mumbo jumbo about Cambodia. Henry wished to leave ambiguous a phrase about “foreign” troops returning to their countries, which could then be claimed to include the North Vietnamese (but which the United States had separately agreed with Hanoi did not refer to its own forces, just as it had agreed that the political commission could serve as interim government). To reassure Saigon, Nixon’s emissary then offered to continue the bombing through the U.S. election and asserted again, “Our strategy is that we are prepared to step up the military pressure on the DRV immediately, drastically and brutally one or two weeks after our election.” Thieu was to be President Nixon’s hole card. “We need your help to construct an ambiguous proposal,” Kissinger told him. Dr. Kissinger also reassured Thieu that nothing here dismantled any part of the South Vietnamese government and that the other side could be stymied in the proposed committee on reconciliation. Kissinger encouraged Thieu to think about launching amphibious landings and commando raids into North Vietnam. The Saigonese could hardly believe their ears. “We saw it as a . . . lollipop treatment, you know,” Thieu aide Hoang Duc Nha recalled for an associate. “It was a kind of joke to us.”¹⁴

Kissinger also raised the possibility, twice, that Saigon could react to a U.S. proposal at the talks by declaring that Kissinger had gone beyond his authority. “I do not mind your attacking me,” the national security adviser commented. “In this instance the choreography requires the impression of excessive reasonableness.”¹⁵

Both Kissinger and Thieu expressed the belief that Saigon (and the United States) had nearly won the war. They agreed Hanoi would be even weaker in a year. The “brutal” escalation Kissinger spoke of would ensure that. Saigon accepted unquestioningly the complementary notion that the South Vietnamese army was capable of defeating Hanoi on its own. But the ARVN had not stopped the Easter offensive by itself, and even if it had, this was not the same as destroying Hanoi’s military capability. Thieu and his national security advisers considered the U.S. proposals and delivered a response on August 28: they rejected U.S.-DRV talks as a valid forum to discuss political questions; no change in the Saigon government was acceptable, North Vietnamese withdrawal mandatory; and they were ambiguous on a Thieu resignation prior to a referendum on a new constitution. Such terms could be imposed only by force. Was this wishful thinking, belly talk? Perhaps.

Washington’s calculations were complex. The new MACV commander, General Fred Weyand, had briefed Kissinger in Saigon that Hanoi’s forces would have exhausted their capability in six months’ time. But the CIA’s appraisal continued to be that the DRV had absorbed the losses from the bombing and mining in its general economy; it would be able to fight on. The Joint Chiefs agreed, as Admiral Moorer confirmed to Congress in January 1973. About that time, a senior CIA official visited Saigon, convening a dozen or so of the agency officers who knew Vietnam best or had the closest contacts among the South Vietnamese. The group held nearly unanimously that without U.S. airpower, the ARVN was lost. In short, the Vietnam data problem persisted.

At the White House the president held to what had been his mantra since April—that Hanoi and Haiphong should be hit hard by B-52s. Kissinger can only have been reflecting Nixon during his talks in Saigon. But at this late date, the notion that one more round of bombing, however brutal, would break Hanoi’s will can only be described as an opium dream—or the impression that Hanoi already hung on the ropes. Important people believed their own spin. Note also that choosing to bomb meant going outside the envelope of Nixon’s diminished freedom to act. Thieu’s adviser Nguyen Phu Duc, who constructs his retrospective of the entire negotiation around the assertions that Nixon and Kissinger engaged in duplicity and made preemptive concessions to Hanoi, fails to include the conversations described here, in which Kissinger and Thieu agreed on Hanoi’s frailty and then Kissinger promised the bombing. Duc thus cannot explain why, if the Nixon White House was so hell-bent on a Vietnam agreement, Kissinger remained steadfast on a brutal bombing. The duplicity was real enough, but it seems more reasonable to conclude that Kissinger thought he could deliver Saigon because it had no alternative, while stalling Hanoi long enough to deliver a powerful blow that would leave Vietnam in some kind of shaky equilibrium as the United States exited the war.

The received history of these last months of negotiations is that Kissinger and Le Duc Tho held more talks and came to a draft accord, to which Saigon demanded a multiplicity of changes, ones that Hanoi rejected. Kissinger scrapped an itinerary in which he would have gone to Saigon to obtain Thieu’s final clearance; to Hanoi, where he would initial the agreement; and then to Paris for a ceremonial signing. At that point Hanoi went public, releasing the text of the accord on October 26, and Kissinger answered with his own news conference. After a hiatus for the U.S. election, there were new exchanges in which Hanoi proved intransigent, and then the United States unleashed the destructive Christmas Bombing. Afterward North Vietnam meekly accepted changes to the agreement, which all parties signed in Paris on January 27, 1973.¹⁶

This version is a construct. Behind it lies a deeper story that involves Richard Nixon’s longings plus inducements for South Vietnam. A fairly well-known part of this tale would be open shipments of military equipment to South Vietnam, which could be replaced on a one-for-one basis under the agreement. Operation “Enhance”—followed by “Enhance Plus”—aimed to put gear in South Vietnamese stockpiles—even if useless—on the principle that this would justify military aid after an agreement. For example, from Okinawa the United States shipped 63 working trucks to South Vietnam, but 1,350 that were broken. Similarly, none of the 175mm guns sent to Saigon were in working order. Aircraft additions included 80 jet fighter-bombers, 280 helicopters, 500 helicopter engines, 11 C-119 gunships, and 17 transport aircraft. There were supposed to be enough M-48 medium tanks and armored personnel carriers for a new ARVN armored brigade, plus guns, radios, mortars, quadruple .50-caliber machine guns, rifles, bombs, munitions, and more. All this was to be in place before anything was signed. The inducement was plain.

Less well known is Thieu’s eleventh-hour attempt to head off the deal. When Al Haig visited at the end of September to check with Saigon on the latest evolution of the agreement, Thieu tried to break its momentum. He queried Haig on the U.S. response to his August note and the questions it had raised, pressed on why Washington had not kept South Vietnam better informed, and handed Haig a fresh memorandum with additional objections. Nixon’s envoy could only bluster that the talks had gone beyond Saigon’s concerns of August. Thieu tried to cobble together an alternative, using his proposition that a comprehensive agreement must encompass all the nations of Indochina as a basis to propose an international conference of Asian nations to negotiate the settlement, and incidentally demand withdrawal of foreign troops from those nations, neatly getting rid of the North Vietnamese in Laos with their Ho Chi Minh Trail, their troops in Cambodia, and potentially those in South Vietnam as well. Thieu’s formula for a “Bandung-like” meeting would have stalled an agreement, by returning the dialogue to first principles, and it would have marginalized the United States. But Saigon could not interest anyone in the formula, even after Thieu publicized it in the New York Times. “We are not afraid of a cease-fire, nor do we evade it,” he wrote.¹⁷ But developments had isolated Saigon, whose only remaining bargaining chip was its signature on the settlement documents, with Kissinger on his way to Saigon even then, stopping in Paris for one last session with Hanoi diplomat Xuan Thuy.

One piece of the story has remained invisible and is reported here for the first time: the Christmas Bombing amounted to the same operation Kissinger had referred to in August and Nixon had demanded that spring. When Haig arrived in Saigon his briefcase contained a plan for bombing Hanoi from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Worked out by Vice Admiral John P. Weinel of the Joint Staff, and so sensitive that Weinel hand-wrote it, this provided for “steady pressure air strikes concentrated on [northeast lines of communication] and [the] Hanoi-Haiphong complex,” potentially lasting through May 1973.¹⁸ An analysis for Haig by Jonathan Howe of the NSC staff noted that the plan “has the advantage of being [in] a period when the President will have a tremendous election victory and a Congress out of session.”¹⁹ Haig saw General John Vogt of the Seventh Air Force to discuss the plan privately. This all happened before any snags had developed in the peace talks.

A few weeks later Dr. Kissinger returned to Saigon himself, on the first leg of the trip that was supposed to take him to Hanoi to initial the agreement. In painful sessions with Thieu and his national security council, the South Vietnamese rebelled, refusing the cease-fire, demanding the same changes Thieu had insisted on previously. In a cable on October 20 Kissinger wrote of the South Vietnamese objections, “none of them [is] capricious,” and “they are probably even right.” A couple of days later he changed his mind and said of the demands, “almost all of them are nitpicks.” At that point Kissinger was arguing that the entire top U.S. team—including Bunker and Abrams—considered the agreement the best that could be gotten. For days Kissinger maintained he should go on to Hanoi for the initialing, pressing the DRV for a few cosmetic concessions for which Saigon could then claim credit. On October 22 Kissinger referred directly to the Hanoi-Haiphong bombing plan: “While we have a moral case for bombing North Vietnam when it does not accept our proposals, it seems to be really stretching the point to bomb North Vietnam when it has accepted our proposals and when South Vietnam has not.”²⁰

Nixon had been pressing for this bombing for months. The military foreshadowed it with limited B-52 strikes in early and mid-November near the DMZ and in the North Vietnamese panhandle. The NSA’s declassified history of the Vietnam war reveals that in Thailand, where Air Force radiomen had the task of following North Vietnamese air defense activity and warning the bombers, some airmen considered the strikes improper because the United States had announced a bombing halt. Their frustration would lead to difficulties not long afterward.²¹

Meanwhile, Nixon and Kissinger both knew that Saigon’s basic objections were deal breakers. Moreover, Thieu was now furious. On October 17 he received a document the ARVN had captured in Quang Tin that contained Hanoi’s instructions to its cadres for explaining the cease-fire agreement. Thieu saw that even low-level enemy cadres knew more about the accords than he did. He also discovered problems with the Vietnamese versus the English version of the text, with the Vietnamese one containing more sweeping provisions. Nixon had now thrown in his lot with Kissinger—or not. Nixon’s letters to Thieu conflicted with his secret bombing preparations. But Kissinger, who admits to falling into the trap of advocating his own negotiation, hoped to initial the accord prior to the election. Afterward, at some point in November, it became clear to both men that an agreement had to be made. Why Nixon changed his mind remains shrouded in the welter of murky evidence. Publicly, his election was spun as a huge success owing to the 60.7 percent vote tally. But this landslide did not yield a Republican Congress. Nixon’s party gained only a dozen seats in the House, leaving it under solid Democratic control, and actually lost two in the Senate. Within a week Nixon was demanding analyses of what he saw as a weak Republican campaign. And Watergate festered, a land mine that could explode at any moment. Kissinger calls this “the strangest period in Nixon’s Presidency.”²² Far from Nixon being stronger after the election, his position remained tenuous. “The option of escalation—implied in going for broke after the election—was dramatic but not realistic,” Kissinger wrote. “Shortly after our election Hanoi would rediscover not only our domestic fragility but also the budgetary pressures that would force us to reduce our forces unilaterally.”²³

By the hand of Al Haig, Nixon sent Thieu a letter commending the agreement. Haig’s orders were to underline Congress’s power to stop the war and argue that the time had come to settle. Nixon objected to Thieu’s “continuing distortions of the agreement, and attacks upon it” as “unfair,” and he warned, “We are in any event resolved to proceed on the basis of the draft agreement and the modifications which we are determined to obtain from the North Vietnamese.”²⁴ He pictured Saigon starkly as playing into Hanoi’s hands. Thieu rejected this advice, clear proof of the lack of U.S. leverage. The Pentagon Papers authors would have understood.

By Kissinger’s analysis, the Saigon leader had either engaged in a game of chicken or set himself on a collision course. Replying on November 14, another Nixon letter argued the impossibility of obtaining Thieu’s terms, specifically citing the withdrawal issue. Mr. Nixon also declared, “You have my absolute assurance that if Hanoi fails to abide by the terms of this agreement it is my intention to take swift and severe retaliatory action.”²⁵

This declaration, repeated orally and in several subsequent letters, underlies the claim that Richard Nixon secretly promised intervention during the talks. It is also the real reason that Hanoi would be bombed at Christmas, as a demonstration to Saigon of Nixon’s sincerity. The president’s long-standing demand for heavy B-52 bombing of the Hanoi-Haiphong complex also figured into the equation. The war would not end without Nixon exercising that option.

On November 18 Nixon told Bob Haldeman that he had instructed Kissinger to get the best deal possible “and then let Thieu paddle his own canoe.”²⁶ On the twenty-third Nixon wanted to cable his emissary, now back in Paris, and reiterate the order to reach agreement no matter what. Haig’s role is critical here, but obscure. After reconsidering, the president instead threatened new measures of force—alluding to the bombing plans—and recalled Kissinger. The envoy recited the darker portions of Nixon’s cable to Le Duc Tho to induce Hanoi to cave. The DRV negotiator rejected the threat. The North Vietnamese were predictably outraged at the extent of the changes now being demanded. Although Hanoi itself reopened previously settled matters, the United States had opened the door by its actions on behalf of Saigon.

Henry Kissinger returned to the White House, where a series of meetings took place between November 29 and December 1 that defined the true diplomatic terrain of these events. Nguyen Phu Duc, whom Thieu had sent to oversee the Paris talks, came to Washington for these meetings. At the first of them, at midafternoon on the twenty-ninth, Nixon did most of the talking. He reiterated both the need to agree and, several times, his promise to retaliate.²⁷ President Nixon also laid out the bald fact that consultations with congressional leaders had convinced him that if agreement were not reached within ten days of the opening of the new Congress on January 3, 1973, America’s lawmakers would defund the war. Republicans agreed with the Democrats. No alternative existed. Duc repeated Thieu’s objections, also contained in a letter from the Saigon leader, and pleaded that an agreement would be politically acceptable in Saigon only if it were a victory. Kissinger pressed home the U.S. arguments in a discussion that continued into the evening.

This face-off resumed the next morning when the president again met with Duc. Prior to that Nixon had convened the Joint Chiefs plus Secretary Laird. With the Chiefs too, the president admitted the political realities. “The fact is,” Nixon observed, “that the U.S. has stayed one step ahead of the sheriff, just missing fund cutoffs.”²⁸ After January 3 that would no longer be possible. He ordered the Chiefs to prepare military options if the Paris talks broke off, plus retaliatory actions in case of violation. These became the specific instructions for the Christmas Bombing, issued (again) before any breakdown of talks with Hanoi. At his noontime meeting with Duc, the president reaffirmed his promise to use force and said he had just met the JCS on the subject. Mr. Duc argued repeatedly over these days that if the United States was so determined to leave the war it should simply make a deal with Hanoi for the POWs and get out. Collecting his thoughts on the plane back to Saigon, Nguyen Phu Duc says he was “not convinced by the presentation of the U.S. Government.”²⁹

Like adviser Duc, the American arguments moved neither Nguyen Van Thieu, his national security council, nor the key Saigon jurists and legislative leaders called on to consider the prospective accord. Space does not permit detailed recounting of the debate that raged in Saigon, the additional letters between presidents Thieu and Nixon, or the part played by supporting casts on both sides. Suffice it to say that Nixon became more strident on moving forward, and South Vietnamese objections changed not a whit. Saigon apparently never accepted the reality that if the Nixon administration halted aid, its refusal to accept would not matter. Available sources indicate that Saigon approached the issue as one of showing who bore responsibility for the demise of the regime. Thieu made some moves to lend weight to the Duc proposition that the United States should make its own deal, offering to release DRV prisoners in exchange for Americans, and calling for a lengthy Christmas stand-down. But then Thieu went before his National Assembly and put down a marker, publicly rejecting the Paris provisions he disliked.

Henry Kissinger had additional conversations with Le Duc Tho. The North Vietnamese yielded little and revisited more items that had seemed settled. Kissinger terminated the talks. On December 13 he recommended that Nixon approve massive bombing of the DRV. Haig concurred. Kissinger describes himself as melancholy, turning to military options reluctantly. Nixon never was. In his memoir Mr. Nixon retails the conventional wisdom: the bombing was Hanoi’s fault, he had carried out a survey of lucrative targets and ended up with Hanoi and Haiphong, and says this was his most difficult decision of the war.³⁰ None of this is true. The president had plumped for B-52s on Hanoi-Haiphong since April, obtained a draft plan by September, mulled it over in November, and ordered the Chiefs to produce the final plan on December 1. The real audience sat in Saigon, not Hanoi. The president approved this Nixon Shock well aware of its cost in public opinion, a concern he had raised with Kissinger a month earlier.

The Christmas Bombing began on December 18 (east zone date) with 129 B-52 sorties supported by many fighter-bombers and missions by Navy A-6 aircraft. The lead bomber, piloted by Captain Hal Wilson, reported wall-to-wall SAMs ahead. His would be one of three lost that night, for Hanoi had made preparations of its own and fought the attackers. As early as 1968, during a visit to air defense headquarters, Ho Chi Minh had predicted the B-52s would come to Hanoi someday. The Central Military Party Committee concurred in the forecast and put specialists to work on finding ways to fight the big bombers. Concrete preparations, including a notice for troop training, began with the Easter offensive. Vo Nguyen Giap records they were largely complete by September 1972. General Van Tien Dung approved the final air defense plan for Hanoi on November 24 and ordered that everything be ready by December 3. On that day the mayor of Hanoi began to evacuate civilians from the city. The general staff daily briefing on December 18 noted an ominous stand-down in B-52 activities in the South, as well as interception of the report radioed by an American weather reconnaissance plane flying above Hanoi. Air defense forces went on high alert, and shortly after 7:00 PM General Giap learned that B-52s had taken off from both Guam and Thailand, the latter detected flying northward along the Mekong River. Slightly over an hour later Giap heard that a B-52 had been shot down by a unit of the 261st Missile Regiment. The battle was joined.

Day after day, with a brief thirty-six-hour pause on Christmas itself, massive B-52 formations and associated warplanes flew against Hanoi. The president recalled that he stunned Admiral Moorer when, on the second day, he phoned to say, “I don’t want any more of this crap about the fact that we couldn’t hit this target or that one. This is your chance to use military power effectively to win this war, and if you don’t, I’ll consider you responsible.”³¹ The North Vietnamese did everything they could to resist—mass SAM firings, missile launchings in unguided mode, fighter intercepts, even a fighter that deliberately collided with a B-52. Fifteen B-52s were lost and nine more damaged; most of these were the newer B-52G model, which, despite being designed to fly nuclear strikes against Soviet air defenses, had less effective electronic countermeasures than the older B-52D model. Seven tactical aircraft were also lost from 640 strike sorties. The losses added thirty-nine prisoners to Hanoi’s cages, and thirty-five crewmen died or disappeared. In all there were 795 B-52 sorties that dropped more than 15,000 tons of ordnance, to which the smaller planes added their bombs.

Crews from the units most affected by the B-52 losses became restive at the pressures exerted by commanders. Some airmen reported that mutinies, or at least the refusal of orders, took place. The Air Force has repeatedly denied this contention. But an actual work stoppage did occur within air intelligence, as confirmed by the NSA’s official history. Radiomen at two different bases, including both Air Force and Army operators, stopped processing the information that would warn the B-52s of North Vietnamese air defense activities. The incidents were hushed up.³²

Among the factors adding to the political upheaval over the Christmas Bombing were charges that American planes were killing civilians and causing what officials euphemistically termed “collateral damage.” Claims of damage to the Bach Mai hospital, on the outskirts of Hanoi, and to certain neighborhoods were rife. The Air Force piously insisted it was making precision strikes and even contrived accuracy estimates that it shared with Congress.

A few Americans could speak directly to that, including Barry Romo of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Romo, along with singer Joan Baez and former Nuremberg prosecutor Telford Taylor, arrived in North Vietnam just as the bombing began. Driving south from Phuc Yen airfield, they stopped at the village of Duc Noi, where they were greeted by the inhabitants and entertained by local schoolchildren. The visitors wondered how the peasants could tell them from Russians. “Would Russians wear blue jeans and carry a guitar?” came the rejoinder. Beyond a stone wall that set off the village lay a rail yard, partly destroyed. “See? Precision bombing works,” Taylor told Romo. The group continued into Hanoi, where their visit basically ended. They spent the next days in a bunker as the bombs fell, emerging in the daytime to view Bach Mai and a few other places that had been heavily damaged. Baez spent most of her time playing guitar. Taylor drank. Before the visit ended he was putting away nearly a bottle of bourbon every night. They left North Vietnam during the brief bombing pause, passing the same village on their way back to the airfield. Duc Noi had been completely obliterated, including the stone wall, nothing left except dead bodies and wreckage. Romo said nothing, but he saw a single tear well up in Taylor’s eye. For months after they returned to the United States, in every public talk he gave, Telford Taylor—already noted for his commentaries on the law of war, My Lai, and allegations of U.S. atrocities in South Vietnam—spoke incessantly of the brutality of indiscriminate bombing of North Vietnam.³³

It has become almost an article of faith among war supporters that Linebacker II, as this aerial offensive was nicknamed, broke Hanoi. In particular, there have been claims that the DRV disarmed its own air defense forces, firing off all their SAMs, leaving only what could be brought in from the Soviet Union. Sir Robert Thompson has been quoted as saying that the United States won the war at that moment, even supplying a precise number of SAMs expended, 1,282 (most authorities cite figures between 800 and 1,000). Former pilot and Linebacker II veteran Marshall Michel has made the most careful study of this issue. He found North Vietnamese accounts that recorded firing only 239 SAMs and reports from U.S. support aircraft that generally support that number. He concluded that DRV forces had only about 420 missiles.³⁴ But, like stopping the Easter offensive, disarming Hanoi’s air defenses, if it happened, did not equate to winning the war. Moreover, the true results were difficult to discern. Aerial photography posed a continuing problem throughout, making damage assessment difficult. In addition, the bombers focused on air defenses plus rail and industrial facilities, identical to the Rolling Thunder target lists, which had not defeated Hanoi in the 1960s any more than Linebacker II did now. The DRV’s roads remained unaffected, as did its troops in the South. Linebacker II was intrinsically incapable of winning the war.

The other side of the equation is also frequently downplayed. The North Vietnamese believe they destroyed 31 B-52 bombers. They view Linebacker II as an “Air Dien Bien Phu.” Their estimates for both aircraft shot down and the rate of loss are excessive, but the overall point is accurate: the United States could not afford strategic aircraft losses at a high rate over a long term. There were slightly more than 200 B-52s dedicated to the war in Southeast Asia, and the loss of 15 aircraft meant a rate of 7.3 percent. Many of the planes had been diverted from nuclear strike forces. General Giap records that in the weeks before Linebacker II Hanoi had sent hundreds of SAMs down to the North Vietnamese panhandle, missiles that could be recalled regardless of whether the Soviets delivered new ones. The Strategic Air Command could not tolerate either the diversion of B-52s or the losses for very long—even if the latter were at a much lower rate—before Vietnam affected its nuclear warfare capabilities.

At a 2006 conference at the Kennedy Library, Alexander Haig asserted that the Vietnam war could have been won, stating, “I saw it first-hand in the Christmas Bombing.” Haig recounted that he had discussed this with Richard Nixon before his death, and the former president had replied that his greatest regret was not to have acted more forcefully. Another three or four months of B-52s (that is, the exact plan prepared by the JCS in September 1972), and Hanoi would have been ready to go back to the 1954 Geneva accords.³⁵

Haig went on to say that Nixon had given up on the Christmas Bombing because his cabinet deserted him and there were threats of impeachment. But that was the point, of course. The bombing triggered a firestorm of dissent in the United States. Commentators charged the president had lost his mind. Protests surged. If Mr. Nixon thought Congress was about to defund the war—as he had told the South Vietnamese—what would it do in the face of an extended Linebacker II? The truth is that the Christmas Bombing was not politically sustainable. Beyond that lies the question of whether the B-52 raids were militarily sustainable. With aircrews and intelligence specialists restive in December 1972, who can say what their attitude would have been after months of going against Hanoi’s air defenses?

Carrying out the bombing earlier in the war—the “perfect strategy” of some of the neo-orthodox—had not been diplomatically feasible because the United States had not detached Hanoi from its allies. The Joint Chiefs had proposed that “sharp blow” in the fall of 1965, and Lyndon Johnson had thrown them out of the Oval Office, specifically citing the danger of war with China. During the intervening time there had been no rationale for this go-for-broke measure because American officials and generals thought they were winning. Once more the Vietnam data problem intrudes.

The Christmas Bombing cost President Nixon at least as much in political support as he gained in military benefit. By early 1973 Gallup polls showed that more than two-thirds of Americans believed Nixon was not telling the truth about Vietnam, and 60 percent thought the war had been a mistake, with the majority favoring bombing by only a single percentage point (46–45), less than the poll’s margin of error. The White House had no running room left.

Hanoi did return to the negotiating table. But the notion it agreed to whatever Kissinger proposed is a myth. A line-by-line comparison of the Paris agreement signed in January 1973 with the text Hanoi made public the previous October reveals minimal changes. The most significant was Hanoi’s agreement that the new national council would not be an “administrative structure”—minimizing the possibility it could emerge as a coalition government—but Le Duc Tho had agreed to that on December 8, before the bombing. The other major change, language that assigned the Saigon-Hanoi committee responsibility for dealing with armed forces in South Vietnam, essentially punted the question of a DRV withdrawal to a committee that would predictably deadlock. Kissinger secured a change in format that would avoid Saigon’s signing an agreement with the Provisional Revolutionary Government (thus not recognizing the NLF). Other changes were cosmetic. Insofar as Hanoi was concerned, the Christmas Bombing accomplished very little.

When the agreement was adopted, Nixon’s standing in the Gallup poll instantly jumped fourteen points. After the Nixon Shock, President Thieu saw little alternative but to sign the accords. Entering the ground floor conference room at Independence Palace, where he customarily met with his national security council, Thieu complained to Nguyen Xuan Phong, the deputy chief of South Vietnam’s Paris delegation. The Saigon leader told Phong of the agreement, “It is a sellout to the Soviets.”³⁶ Richard Nixon coined his own slogan for the settlement. The White House called it “Peace with Honor.”

There were a number of demonstrations against the war during the summer and fall of 1972. But having seen the dedication and discipline of VVAW, I was less and less happy with the amorphousness of the antiwar movement in general. At one protest in Union Square there were so many speakers on so many divergent issues that I wondered what the Movement had become. At one demonstration during the Christmas Bombing there was another confrontation with an NYPD horseman. Mostly, the protests accomplished an assertion of a presence, valuable, but frustrating to demonstrators who wanted results. By contrast, VVAW had mounted at least three coherent protests: at Dewey Canyon III, in the “Peace on Earth” series, and in Miami at the political convention. Early in 1973 VVAW created a nonveterans’ section called the Winter Soldier Organization, and I joined. (Here, I continue to refer to this group simply as VVAW.)

Meanwhile, the VVAW’s national office pulled up stakes and moved to Chicago. The New York chapter met at the former Washington Square Presbyterian Church at 137 West 4th Street in Greenwich Village, now converted into a condominium. There I encountered any number of unforgettable characters. There was Danny Friedman, hulking but jovial, a veteran of the armored cavalry who lived in Brooklyn. Mike Gold, another Brooklyn man, was quiet but efficient. Jim Duffy, a fiery redhead from the Bronx, had a virtual one-man campaign going against the VA hospital in his borough. Brian Matarese and Joe Hirsch had a strong veterans’ effort under way at the SUNY campus at Old Westbury on Long Island. Joe Urgo, whom I already knew from the national office, stayed behind to continue his work in New York City.

The vets, along with many other groups, prepared for demonstrations to take place at Nixon’s second inauguration on January 20, 1973. The plans were hurried, with just five days to concoct the final scenario before beginning practical preparations. Inauguration day proved cloudy and windy, though the thermometer reached forty-two degrees. The event turned into VVAW’s largest ever, with about 5,000 rallying at Arlington Cemetery, where this time they gained access. Then they marched across Memorial Bridge to join a larger crowd massed on The Mall. The vets staged a symbolic signing of the Vietnam peace agreement, still to be finalized in Paris. As usual, the FBI furnished advance information, not difficult, since the vets in Washington to coordinate for the New York region were Brian Matarese from the City and John O’Neill from Buffalo, and both those chapters had been infiltrated. Some of the FBI’s “Code Yellow” messages went right to the White House. Special agents in Cincinnati, Philadelphia, New York, and elsewhere were authorized to take direct action.

The vets tried to keep their march separate from other inaugural protests, but confusion abounded that day. There were separate demonstrations by the Yippies, the SDS, the National Peace Action Coalition (this NPAC demonstration was the largest, attracting upward of 45,000), and the Zippies. The Yippie-Zippie group brought a float, a huge papier-mâché rat they intended to burn in effigy. Around noontime police moved in and seized the rat, destroying it in front of the crowd. Police had also harassed a vigil meeting at the All Souls Unitarian Church the previous night. The vets expected trouble, and their arrangements for parade marshals went awry. At the end of the march a VVAW contingent mistakenly joined the NPAC crowd. Eventually the rest did too. No one ever knew whether they had been diverted by infiltrators. Some of the VVAWers wound up at 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, where hundreds of protesters milled around. Police arrested a number in an attempt to deter them, but they were unable to clear the area. When the presidential motorcade passed, it would be pelted with eggs and rotten tomatoes. Mr. Nixon’s limousine sustained several hits.

Within VVAW there were visible signs of the Nixon administration’s continuing efforts to disrupt the Movement. There was the itching chemical incident at national headquarters, of which I myself had been a victim. I had to go home, shower, and change. I could never use those clothes again. Tapped telephones were routine. Years later an FOIA request to the FBI produced thousands of pages of surveillance reports on VVAW. Among them were accounts of the monthly meetings of the New York chapter. The FBI records were better than those of the VVAW chapter.

The other thing that happened was my entry into the publishing side of war gaming. That, too, was about Vietnam. There was a New York company called Simulations Publications Incorporated (SPI), which published board games plus a magazine, Strategy & Tactics, each issue of which contained articles and a new game. One day at a Columbia dormitory I found a leaflet advertising this publication. Having long been a gamer, having designed my own, and having once contacted a publisher with some of my ideas, I thought it would be fascinating to see what a real game company looked like. So I decided to visit the SPI offices on 23rd Street. It so happened that a new multivolume edition of the Pentagon Papers (the Gravel edition) had just been published by Boston’s Beacon Press. The day I visited SPI, I brought one of the Gravel volumes to read on the subway. When I arrived, one of SPI’s acolytes saw me with the Pentagon Papers under my arm. Instead of pushing me out the door, this fellow pulled me into a back room, where we had a long conversation about what was happening in Southeast Asia.

The editor of Strategy & Tactics had been trying to convince the publishers to do more on Vietnam, something completely unknown to me. At some point he entered our conversation and was impressed with my knowledge of the subject. It also emerged that I knew about board games, and the editor asked whether I had anything I could show him. The game I had designed on the French Indochina war was just the direction this editor was trying to pursue. The upshot would be that I demonstrated my French Indochina game and ended up with a contract for a game plus an article on the Easter offensive. The resulting material appeared in the November 1972 issue of Strategy & Tactics. It was my first published war game. I saw the project as part of my effort to bring information on Vietnam to Americans.

In keeping with everything about that war, my game proved one of the most controversial ever published by SPI, generating more editorial mail than anything before or after. I was pleased that virtually every letter from a Vietnam veteran or active-duty serviceman was very positive, but there was also a great deal of hate mail. The most odious piece, signed “Comrade Z,” consisted of one line: “Madame Binh must be very proud of you.” This had all the characteristics of the FBI’s COINTELPRO red-baiting. Suddenly I was on someone’s radar screen. That winter while I was in San Juan, the apartment I shared with four other Columbia students was burgled. The place contained a television, three stereos, typewriters, and several good cameras—great stuff to fence. But nothing was taken. Only my files were rifled. And my telephone began behaving weirdly too. Listening to someone on the line was like hearing them speak from the other end of a tunnel.

From my perspective, three other hopeful developments came out of the publication of my game. All emerged only later. The first was that elevator operators at the State Department played the game and had it set up where American diplomats could not fail to see it. Second, U.S. personnel with the military advisory group in Thailand played the game, substituting their classified knowledge for my open source information, but reaching the same conclusions. The third was that Canada, which sent personnel to Vietnam as part of the International Commission for Supervision and Control of the Indochina cease-fire that came out of the Paris accord, acquired copies of that issue of Strategy & Tactics for the briefing of its team.

In early March 1973, New York was the locale for a “Home with Honor” parade to mark the end of America’s Vietnam war. High school bands, veterans’ groups, police, and firefighters made up the parade. VVAW could not reasonably be denied a place in this procession, so it received a marching permit but was stuck at the tail end. The parade route started at Herald Square, passed through Times Square and the theater district, then went up through Columbus Circle and past a reviewing stand on Central Park West at about 60th Street. The unit of Army troops on the stand turned their backs on the vets, but the Color Guard of the Army Special Forces that had led the parade was also on the stand, and contingents of the procession passed it in review. A thrill went through our group when the Green Berets dipped their colors to VVAW marchers. On orders the Color Guard then turned their backs to the antiwar vets. But one of the Green Berets made the peace sign behind his back.