The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality…
DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
“A Time to Break the Silence”1
George Wallace flew with LeMay. In later days, when political pundits questioned how and why the presidential candidate selected the general as his running mate, it came back to that simple fact. Curtis LeMay commanded the Twentieth Air Force in the great 1945 fire-bombing campaign against the cities of imperial Japan. And Staff Sergeant George Corley Wallace Jr. flew as a flight engineer and gunner on a B-29 named Li’l Yutz.2 Like Charles Dean Hagel, Wallace had been in on the fiery finale. He idolized the grim-visaged general who set the pace in those desperate times. When Wallace thought of a leader, he thought of LeMay. For the campaign of 1968, there could be no better choice to join Wallace’s ticket as a candidate for vice president.
For the rest of his days, Wallace proudly touted his war record. Yet we don’t remember George Wallace as a staff sergeant on a B-29 bomber crew. What we know instead is a man who began his tenure of office as governor in Montgomery, Alabama, bellowing: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Even as Wallace said those words in 1963, and stood in the doorway at the University of Alabama a few months later in a vain attempt to block racial integration, he was way behind the mood of the country.3 Fellow southerners Harry S. Truman of Missouri, Dwight D. Eisenhower of Kansas and Texas, and Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas saw the future. Wallace stood in the door, but he looked only backward, to a past steeped in America’s original sin of slavery.
By 1968, the angry little man from Alabama wanted to be president himself. Neither his own Democrats nor the opposition Republicans would have him. So he struck out on his own as the standard-bearer of the American Independent Party, which amounted to George Wallace and those who thought like him. In the tormented, fractured America of 1968, there were millions. Enough to elect Wallace? Probably not—even Wallace understood that.4 But there were enough to get attention, maybe even force the 1968 election into the House of Representatives. The peace marchers and the civil rights activists had their day and their say. Wallace and his ilk demanded to be heard, too.
By Wallace’s calculations, made with the care of an experienced B-29 flight engineer juggling fuel rates, his crooked road to the White House ran through the Corn Belt, notably Nebraska. Most of America saw that prairie state as farmland, Alabama with less cotton, more corn, and a folksy twang rather than a mellifluous drawl. But George Wallace saw Nebraska, Omaha especially, as the place he intended to make a point. Like the cagey old lawyer he was, he chose his venue with care. Wallace wasn’t coming back to see Lincoln, where he met his bomber crew, or Offutt Air Force Base, where his former commander Curtis LeMay once ran the show in the house that SAC built. No, Wallace went to Omaha for one reason. He knew that North Omaha was a very restive African American neighborhood. And he aimed to do what he did best—stir the pot.
THERE WERE BLACK PEOPLE in Nebraska. They had been there from the beginning, with the first free African American arriving in Omaha in 1854, the year the city was incorporated. In 1968, African Americans amounted to a true minority, about 39,000, a bare 2.7 percent of the 1.4 million Nebraskans. Two-thirds of those black Nebraskans lived in Omaha, about 9 percent of the city’s populace. Almost all of them resided in North Omaha.5 It was de facto segregation, never done by law, but by practice. Officially Jim Crow never made it to the free soil of Nebraska. But Mr. Crow was alive and well in Omaha.
To hear the white citizens talk, African Americans lived in North Omaha because they just did. Why, some of white people’s best friends were black. They came to visit all the time. Sure they did. They just happened to bring along mops and brooms and lawnmowers. But as for working with black people, going to church with black families, socializing with black folks, well, that pretty much happened… never. The city’s cemetery was integrated, which boded well for the next life.6 There was that.
In this life, before the 1960s, Omaha had endured one particularly vicious race riot. An enraged white mob attacked the Douglas County courthouse and lynched an African American man accused of rape. Somebody—rioters, police, soldiers—killed two white miscreants. Seven police officers suffered wounds. An unknown number of white and black people went to local hospitals for injuries. Black homes and businesses had been burnt.7 After 1919, African Americans stayed in North Omaha: separate, but as in the southern states, hardly equal.
The realtors steered black families to North Omaha. Schools, churches, and businesses developed accordingly. African Americans in 1950s Omaha might aspire to a brand of genteel poverty, as long as they knew “their place.” Americans celebrated jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong and baseball greats like Jackie Robinson. But look at pictures of American police officers, judges, astronauts, college alumni, or business executives from the era. Every face is white. A century after the violent emancipation of the American Civil War, that didn’t cut it anymore.
One son of Omaha, Malcolm Little, took the name Malcolm X. He advocated violence to secure civil rights for African Americans, separate and truly equal by revolution.8 Although he moderated his views prior to his assassination in 1965, a figure like Malcolm X terrified men like George Wallace. What if black Americans didn’t know their place? What if they decided they wanted white America’s share, and decided to go after it lock, stock, and barrel?
Fortunately for the people of Nebraska and America, black and white, the influence of firebrands like Malcolm X remained marginal. The civil rights movement took its lead, instead, from Doctor Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister dedicated to advancing the cause of African Americans within the law when he could, by agitation when he must, but consistently by nonviolent means. King brought his soaring rhetoric to the Salem Baptist Church in North Omaha in 1958.9 Like that other Baptist named John, King prepared the way for big things to come.
A brutal, bloody 1965 riot in the Watts district of Los Angeles marked a new wave of racial unrest in America. Chicago and Cleveland burned in the hot summer of 1966, with a hundred more cities to follow the next year.10 Omaha did not escape.
On July 4, 1966, temperatures reached 103°. That evening, a thousand-plus young men gathered at North Twenty-fourth and Lake Streets in North Omaha. When about a hundred Omaha Police Department officers showed up to disperse the crowd, trouble erupted. Rowdies trashed two police cruisers, then went on a rampage up and down the streets. Men tossed Molotov cocktails into vacant buildings and looted storefronts. Damage cost owners millions of dollars. Governor Frank Morrison rolled in six companies of the Nebraska National Guard. When he later visited shot-up North Omaha, he called it “unfit for human habitation.”11 Morrison blamed the violence on unremediated poverty.
Omaha mayor Axel Vergman “Al” Sorenson disagreed. He attributed the entire situation to outside agitators, notably the Black Panthers, a violent nationalist organization in the tradition of Malcolm X at his most radical. It’s unclear how big a part, if any, the Panthers played in the riot. But by August, Black Panthers guarded some key buildings in North Omaha.12 That got attention in Washington.
To those concerned with American national security, Omaha wasn’t just a city in Nebraska. The Strategic Air Command’s headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base controlled the bulk of the country’s nuclear deterrent force. A riot in Cleveland was a problem for the state of Ohio. A riot in Omaha threatened America’s ability to keep the Soviet Union at bay. So the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) paid very close attention to matters in Omaha.
Long-time FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, an institution unto himself in Washington, made his reputation busting gangsters in the 1930s, Nazi saboteurs in the 1940s, and Soviet spies in the 1950s. That last bunch remained only too active, and in Hoover’s view, the red tentacles extended into the anti-war movement, such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and to disaffected African Americans like the Black Panthers. It only made sense, at least to Hoover. If the Moscow leadership wanted an uprising, an American equivalent of the Bolshevik revolution, why not allocate some expertise and money to the disaffected? The Soviet Union’s active KGB foreign intelligence officers, joined by the GRU’s military intelligence operatives, did just enough to convince Hoover he had it right.13 That attribution of some kind of master plot gave comfort to Hoover and those of similar mind, but it didn’t match reality. In truth, Soviet intelligence people dealing with the various disparate American underground groups, including the SDS and Black Panthers, resembled ants atop a log rushing down whitewater rapids. The ants thought they were steering. Evidently, so did the FBI.
A far better understanding of the real problem behind the racial tension roiling Omaha could be found in a fifty-eight-minute documentary entitled A Time for Burning. Director William C. Jersey of San Francisco chronicled the efforts of the white Augustana Lutheran Church to reach out to embittered, embattled African Americans in North Omaha. In a telling comment, one minister quoted a parishioner: “This one lady said to me, ‘pastor,’ she said, ‘I want them to have everything I have, I want God to bless them as much as he blesses me, but,’ she says, ‘pastor, I just can’t be in the same room with them, it just bothers me.’”14
That’s why George Wallace came to Omaha in 1968.
WALLACE ARRIVED IN Omaha on Sunday, March 3, 1968. About fifteen hundred supporters met him at the airport. In a follow-on press conference, Wallace stated that riots reflected the work of “militants, activists, communists, and revolutionaries” and that in his judgment “leaders and sympathizers of militant civil rights organizations are communists.”15 Expecting trouble, Mayor Al Sorenson assigned four uniformed police officers to Wallace, who also brought his own security team. The police added both uniformed and off-duty officers to the rally set for Monday night at the Omaha Civic Auditorium.
When it came time for the gathering, the house was rocking. A thousand Wallace supporters occupied folding chairs on the auditorium’s main floor. Thousands more filled the balcony. Into this scene marched fifty young protestors, most of them black men, carrying anti-Wallace signs. The Wallace people let in the demonstrators and ensured they found a place in front. The Alabama governor relished the upcoming confrontation. Wallace delayed his speech for an hour as the crowd shouted at the interlopers. The protestors held their positions but did not reply. That seemed to upset many of the Wallace faithful. The rain of insults continued, more and more vicious, and full of vile epithets heard today only in certain unsavory rap songs. It was like letting a pressure cooker build up steam. Both sides knew it, too.
When Wallace came out, the crowd responded with an enthusiastic wave of applause. The governor raised his arms for quiet, then began his address. Down to his front, the fifty objectors waved their signs, but Wallace kept right on going. His American Independent Party needed 750 signatures to get on the Nebraska ballot for president. It looked like Wallace would get them.
He got more than he bargained for. Ignored and frustrated, their chants unheeded, some of the protestors tore up their signs and began throwing the pieces, to include the wooden sticks, at the podium. That did it.
On the dais, Wallace stopped speaking. He covered his face. His guards stepped up to shield him. Young African American reporter David Rice, representing the rather sketchy underground publications Asterisk and Buffalo Chip, tried to quell the rain of debris. For his troubles, he earned a faceful of mace from an undercover police officer. Other police began to usher the protestors out of the hall. Enraged Wallace enthusiasts swung their metal folding chairs, whacking the greatly outnumbered young men as the police tried to get them outside.16
Within an hour, North Omaha rose up. Looting became widespread, with a dozen plate-glass storefronts shattered and ten shops aflame. Two city buses had windows knocked out. The night rang with gunfire, sirens, and tinkling glass. Caught by surprise, the Omaha Police Department scrambled to get officers into the neighborhood.
Inside one darkened pawnshop, off-duty police officer James Frank Abbott confronted Howard L. “Butch” Stevenson, age sixteen. Stevenson appeared suddenly, hopping in through a smashed front window. Abbott hollered, “Hold it.” Stevenson kept right on going. The officer pumped out one 12-gauge shotgun shell at point-blank range. Hot pellets punched fatal holes in young Stevenson’s torso. The looter was unarmed.17
Stevenson’s death kept the kettle bubbling the next day. Students at Horace Mann Junior High (95 percent African American) smashed windows and set fire to shrubbery and grass as police stood by. At Central High School, police officers broke up a demonstration, arresting several students, including star basketball player Dwaine Dillard. On March 9, Central had to play short-handed for the state championship in a final game moved at the last minute to more tranquil Lincoln. Central lost, another casualty of the unrest.18
This time, the National Guard never left their armories. The fires burned out. The police tallied one dead, thirteen injured (two of them Wallace backers), and nine arrests.19 For his part, George Wallace got his signatures and his media exposure and scuttled off.
The FBI Omaha Field Office dutifully reported its version of the unrest.20 That unhappy summary went directly to President Lyndon B. Johnson. Already wrestling with the quagmire in Vietnam, LBJ faced the front end of yet another long, hot summer on top of the urban horrors of 1965, 1966, and 1967. Wallace reminded him of the political threat from the reactionary right. Others in his own Democratic Party outflanked him to his left. Johnson lamented: “I sometimes felt that I was living in a continuous nightmare.”21 He was. And so were the rest of those he routinely addressed as his fellow Americans.
LYNDON JOHNSON RESPECTED the experts. He didn’t always listen to them, but he had long ago determined that the most difficult policy decisions worked best when underwritten by the opinion of a blue-ribbon panel. Even as LBJ’s hand-picked wise men contemplated the way ahead in Vietnam, the bad news from Omaha had the president reaching back to the last set of recommendations he’d gotten from a previous line-up of great American minds. The findings landed on Johnson’s desk on February 29, 1968, a few days before Omaha blew up again.
The president had been expecting it, and knew the report would not be good. In the summer of 1967, as Detroit and Newark smoldered, LBJ tapped Governor Otto Kerner Jr. of Illinois to form the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. In World War II, Kerner proved himself as a major in the 34th Field Artillery Battalion under the command of then-Lieutenant Colonel William C. Westmoreland. Now he stepped forward to try to figure out why America’s cities burned every summer. Ten other prominent Americans joined the effort. The Kerner Commission represented a nice balance of America’s sensible center, balancing white and black members, Democrats and Republicans, labor and industry, and city, state, and federal levels. The fringe nuts, the George Wallace people and the ghetto rabble-rousers, did not receive invitations.
The group’s verdict proved stark. “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”22 The only answer appeared to be a massive commitment of government resources to remedy the problem. Anything less than an urban Manhattan Project, an inner-city Apollo moonshot program, promised more of the same for decades.
For LBJ, it amounted to another kick in the teeth. If Tet upended the president’s war in Vietnam, the Kerner Commission’s pessimistic conclusion reflected abject failure in the war on poverty. Like the damn North Vietnamese, poverty looked to have the upper hand. And as in Vietnam, the underlying conditions played America false. Johnson’s 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act finished de jure racial segregation. The administration’s Great Society—Head Start for little children, Medicare for seniors, Medicaid for the poor, decent housing for the cities—seemingly struck at de facto racial divides. But as in Vietnam, the metrics all represented U.S. resources going in. What came out? Watts 1965. Chicago 1966. Detroit 1967. And now Omaha 1968. Laws and spending couldn’t change hearts and minds in middle America, any more than bombs and bullets could do so in Southeast Asia.
In his very public turn against the war on April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. had warned that the fixation on Vietnam forestalled necessary reckoning at home.23 He spoke as America’s best self, the national superego telling us what we should be. And George Wallace surely croaked as the country’s rotten id, demanding a return to a past that never really was. In the middle stood LBJ, U.S. ego personified, a man who consistently projected strength, yet harbored an inner character fissure as big as the jagged channel of the Pedernales River near his south central Texas roots. All the bills came due that grim March of 1968.
ON MARCH 10, the New York Times exposed the military’s 206,000 troop request. The fine print mentioned ideas about ground incursions on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the need to mobilize the national guardsmen and service reservists. Half of the requested troops would go to Vietnam, with the rest slated to meet U.S. worries about other hot spots like Korea, NATO’s central front, and the Middle East. Nobody read any of that. All they saw were those huge black screaming headlines: “Westmoreland Requests 206,000 More Men, Stirring Debate in Administration.”24 More. More. More.
On March 12, the Democrats of New Hampshire cast 42 percent of their votes for a little-known Minnesota senator named Eugene McCarthy. LBJ won—of course he did, he was the sitting president, the architect of the massive 1964 Democratic Party landslide. But this guy McCarthy, backed by hundreds of earnest door-knocking young men and women shorn of long hair and love beads, “clean for Gene,” made his point. McCarthy ran explicitly as “not Johnson,” and implicitly on getting the United States out of Vietnam.25 McCarthy was his own man, a quixotic figure in every way.
Yet in the returns coming from New Hampshire, LBJ saw not the Minnesotan, but the smiling countenance of Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York. The dead JFK, and now the very live RFK, hovered just out of reach, dogging Johnson, rebuking him, mocking him. The debonair Harvards would have done it right. The Harvards would have done it better. They’d have wrapped up Vietnam, soothed the stewing black ghettos, and gotten a U.S. flag on the moon already, and likely put one on Mars to boot.
The day after New Hampshire, RFK told reporters: “I am now reassessing my position.”26 Of course he was. Johnson felt vindicated—he’d long expected Bobby Kennedy to jump into the race—but that offered nothing to help him meet the upcoming challenge to his presidency. Wallace loomed to the right, Kennedy to the left, and out on the other end, the Republicans turned to the wily Richard M. Nixon, back from the political graveyard.
The polls, notably the respected Gallup survey, also augured peril. In 1967, as MACV sought the casualty crossover point, us versus them, Americans continually backed the war about 60/40, with some erosion over the year. After Tet, war support briefly spiked as the citizens rallied around the flag. But by mid-March, that surge dissipated. About 40 percent, the doves, wanted peace. Another 60 percent, the hawks, wanted to “win,” whatever that meant. And more than 60 percent, both hawks and doves, thought LBJ had bungled the whole shebang.27 Any way you cut it, Johnson and his administration were slowly sinking.
By mid-month the president knew he had to act. He waited on the wise men to tell him the right answer, but he sensed what was coming. New secretary of defense Clark Clifford already had LBJ’s ear. Clifford convinced the president that the Westmoreland strategy was bankrupt. The MACV commander had to go. On March 22, without fanfare, Johnson announced that Westmoreland would report back to Washington in June to take over as U.S. Army chief of staff.28 Announced as a promotion, the press reported it as a relief, not a good thing in military circles. LBJ let it ride.
On March 25–26, the wise men gathered to report out. They told Johnson what he expected. Get out. The interim steps would be a bombing halt up north, negotiations, and “Vietnamization,” turning the war over to ARVN, the exceedingly unexpected heroes of the Tet Offensive.29 But those measures all amounted to temporizing, making the best of a bad bargain. Essentially, the United States had failed. Now it remained to be seen what might be salvaged.
On March 31, 1968, Johnson went on television to announce the change in strategy. He looked like he’d been horsewhipped. “Tonight” he intoned, “I want to speak to you of peace in Vietnam and Southeast Asia.” He then calmly and slowly reviewed his stillborn prior peace initiatives, each rebuffed by Hanoi. But this time, the United States would act “unilaterally, and at once.” “We are reducing,” he said, “substantially reducing—the present level of hostilities.” He explained the bombing halt. There would be no big troop influx, nor any ground attacks into Laos or Cambodia, and certainly not any thrusts into North Vietnam. He emphasized that America had “no intention of widening this war.”
Johnson stated that he anticipated these U.S. actions would allow for peace talks, and he named the U.S. envoy, Averell Harriman, one of the wise men. The president mentioned a few more forces already tapped to deploy, including a small call-up of reserves. He also noted that even a war held to the new limits required additional taxes, never popular, especially in an election year. Finally, he turned to his own role. He saw resolving Vietnam as his key duty: “Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”30 Not only was America quitting, albeit in slow motion—Johnson, too, had thrown in the towel.
Four days later, it got worse.
DOCTOR MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. enjoyed the rare distinction of being tracked and vilified by both the Soviet KGB and the American FBI.31 These rival organizations kept tabs on King. They didn’t quite understand all he meant to America, especially black America. But they sure knew he was important.
So did James Earl Ray, a white petty criminal and drifter born in Alton, Illinois. Ray had once volunteered for the George Wallace campaign in North Hollywood, in Los Angeles, California. He didn’t like African Americans. And he hated King. So on April 4, 1968, he killed him.32
Ray got away cleanly from Memphis, Tennessee, and he remained on the run for two months. The FBI’s inability to say immediately who shot King, and the lengthy manhunt that followed, satisfied few across America. Many anguished African Americans suspected all manner of conspiracies, and the well-known antipathy of the FBI, George Wallace, and way too many white Americans offered fertile ground for speculation. President Lyndon Johnson and the other white American leaders said all the right things. Even George Wallace called the shooting a “senseless, regrettable, and tragic act.”33 But in restive inner cities, people weren’t listening anymore.
Within hours of King’s death, unrest spread across southwest Memphis. Baltimore, Chicago, and Washington followed suit, as did over a hundred other cities. State governors mobilized more than 50,000 guardsmen. The regular army sent in more than 23,000 soldiers.34 America burned.
North Omaha went up, too. It didn’t rate any regular army troops, but the Nebraska National Guard took to the streets. Nobody died, although there were injuries and property damage. The already beaten-up Twenty-fourth Street business corridor lost more stores. Up and down the thoroughfare, seemingly in every other building, plywood replaced plate glass. Burnt storefronts marked the path of the looters.35 Twice in two months—when would it end?
Across the nation, the great riots of April 1968 cost 31 dead and 3,129 injured. Police arrested 16,268 suspects and fire departments responded to over 2,000 conflagrations. Along with Baltimore, Chicago, Memphis, Omaha, and Washington, the biggest disturbances occurred in Cincinnati, Detroit, Kansas City, Louisville, New York City, Pittsburgh, and Wilmington, Delaware.36 Bad as things got—and they got very bad—this awful wave ended the grim annual cycle of inner-city riots that marred the 1960s. There’d be exceptions: Omaha in 1969, for one. The country’s underlying racial distress had been suppressed, not resolved. And there were other societal demons, way too many, still unsatisfied.
In the halls of power in Washington and in divided, damaged cities across America, anxious civil authorities prepared for the worst. On the campaign trail, Bobby Kennedy called for understanding among all Americans. George Wallace demanded a crackdown on the affluent white hippies and belligerent black urban rioters. And Richard Nixon? He planned “to restore order and respect for law in this country.”37 He didn’t mention race. But most Americans, black or white, got the message.
AFRICAN AMERICAN SOLDIERS in Vietnam got the message, and they didn’t need to hear it from Richard Nixon, either. The United States might not be able to appoint a single black cabinet secretary, nor find a black federal district court judge, nor select even one black Apollo astronaut. But by God, those Selective Service draft boards sure made their numbers, right in accord with the population percentages. If you looked around any firebase in Vietnam, that became obvious. Thanks to de facto segregation—and not just in Omaha, Nebraska, either—most American communities might not look like America in a racial sense. But the army in Vietnam sure did.
The army even had a role in LBJ’s Great Society, doing something for equal opportunity. In 1966, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara introduced Project 100,000, designed to “rehabilitate” those he labeled the “subterranean poor.” When measured on standardized tests—admittedly geared for those with the advantage of a good education—most Project 100,000 candidates hailed from the bottom third of the available manpower pool. Some were accepted from the bottom 10 percent of all recruits. By dropping the standards, to include waiving minor legal infractions, underprivileged youth could put on a uniform, get some discipline, and learn a skill, such as automotive repair or electronics maintenance. It amounted to the Job Corps with a GI haircut. Had America’s army been at peace, or just pulling Cold War duties in West Germany and South Korea, that might have worked out. But with the Vietnam War going full tilt, it sent a lot of these marginal youths right into the line of fire. Of 354,000 inducted under this policy, 41 percent were African American. A post-war study rated the program as “less than successful” and noted that military service “doesn’t appear to be the panacea for struggling youth.”38
Chuck Hagel, an acting NCO by April of 1968, described the results of such assignments. He recalled: “You were having drafted into the Army guys that had their options. Either go to jail in Texas or New York or New Jersey or whenever, or go into the Army. So you didn’t have the model soldier in the Army in 1968. And it showed.”39 The excesses of Project 100,000 gave credence to the often cited beliefs that the poor and the black fought the war while the wealthy and white stood aside. It wasn’t so. But well-intentioned do-gooding like Project 100,000 led directly to these perceptions. Young African Americans in Vietnam drew their own conclusions about the war and “the Man.”
The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. shook Americans in uniform no less than those at home. Most soldiers, white and black, found it shocking, another indicator that the country was going mad back on the other side of the Pacific. Chuck Hagel remembered how it hit him and his fellow soldiers: “Everyone was silent.”40
But even as these understandable reactions rippled across the force, it’s important to keep in mind that MACV’s battalions daily exhibited a casual degree of racism unthinkable in the U.S. military fifty years later. Many vehicles and bunkers flew Confederate flags, and few white men thought anything of it. Not often, but enough, the word “nigger” served as just another noun. Even certain sergeants and officers, not all from the south, either, resorted to the slur in speaking to or about African American troops. The majority, the decent leaders, didn’t use the term or permit it. The less aware kept right on blabbing. And those who thought themselves slick split the difference, eschewing the insult in public and employing it when they guessed the black soldiers were out of earshot.41 But combat troops have excellent hearing.
All too often, the official army didn’t seem to notice that one in eight U.S. troops was African American. Photographs in field manuals and on instructional posters consistently displayed white males demonstrating the proper use of weapons and equipment. Soldiers of color usually didn’t make an appearance, and if they did, their placement was clearly subordinate. Supply sergeants and those running the little post exchange huts hardly ever stocked magazines, hair care products, and hygiene items of interest to young black men. Even the USO shows rarely featured black entertainers—plenty of Joey Heatherton and Wayne Newton, not enough Lola Falana or James Brown, and certainly no Jimi Hendrix.42 It all added up. It all grated.
There was more for those inclined to look, and after King’s death, many young African Americans did. A lot of “dark green” troops appeared to get tagged for more than their share of work details: digging trenches, filling sandbags, and burning human waste. A notable fraction of “light green” soldiers seemed to end up shuffling papers in the headquarters. The officers would say such assignment choices reflected education, and maybe they did.43 That simply rubbed jagged salt in a raw gash.
When frustrated African Americans looked up the chain of command, the number of black officers amounted to a fraction, a mere 4 percent of the entire U.S. Army officer corps, and almost all them lieutenants and captains.44 There were higher-ranking officers of color like Major Colin Powell (G-3 for the Americal Division). There were even senior leaders like Brigadier General Frederic E. Davison, who commanded the 199th Light Infantry Brigade in Saigon during Tet. But there weren’t many.
A good number of African American soldiers took the news about King very hard. Right on its heels came press reports, then letters from home, and phone calls for a few, all emphasizing neighborhoods in turmoil. In 2-47th Infantry, the body of John Summers, killed in action in the firefight on March 28, made it back to his hometown of Baltimore in the shadow of columns of smoke. His funeral became one more in the sequence of seven men killed in the riots of April 6–11, 1968.45
At Bear Cat, 2-47th felt the backlash. As Chuck Hagel explained, in Company B “there’s no question that the King assassination set off a real powder keg that had been simmering under the surface.” Over the previous months, thoughtless officers and NCOs had allowed troops to self-segregate into black tents and white tents. The company’s few senior sergeants, both black and white, cautioned against it. But the company had been busy with field operations since Tet, and seen three different captains in command in just over three months. After losing the competent Captain Robert G. Keats at Tet, the replacement struggled. He let the privates do as they wished, not usually a good idea in a rifle company. When the news broke about King’s death, the company’s African American soldiers refused to go out on a mission. Some loudly defied the white officer. The rest apparently agreed. 46
A young lieutenant from Chicago thought otherwise. Jerome “Skip” Johnson, age twenty-three, went through Officer Candidate School, earning a commission as an armor officer. With 3-5th Cavalry detached almost two months earlier, the 9th Infantry Division didn’t have tanks anymore, so a personnel officer assigned Johnson to 2-47th Infantry, mechanized on their M-113 tracks and thus close enough. Johnson served as a platoon leader and, due to the endemic officer shortage, also acted as company executive officer, second in command to the captain. Johnson knew his business. Chuck Hagel considered him “steady, careful, never excitable—and in combat, that’s who you want leading.”47
With the white captain flummoxed, it fell to Skip Johnson to sort it out. His older brother had been killed in country in 1967. His home city of Chicago burned in 1966 and ignited again after King’s killing. America had asked a lot of Johnson, and given him damn little in return. Even his officer’s rank, something honored even on the West Side of Chicago in 1968, wore heavy on his collar in those days after King’s death.
Skip Johnson did not hesitate. He went to the tents that housed the African American soldiers. Every face turned his way. He didn’t say much—just enough. “We are all Americans,” he said. “We’re going to live together, we’re going to take care of each other, we’re fighting together, we’re going to get each other’s backs. Let’s get it done.” He went to leave, but then stopped, turned back, and stood there.
“This is not just an order from your commanding officer,” he said. “This is from me, Jerome Johnson. You will deal with me personally on this.”48
That ended it—for now.
IT’S UNLIKELY THE FLINTY OLD MEN in Hanoi knew of the confrontation in the tents of 2-47th Infantry. At their level, the U.S. mechanized infantry battalion might have rated a dot on a map. The internal doings of one of about 120 such American outfits didn’t rise to the top. In the wake of the Tet Offensive, the northern politburo had bigger fish to fry.
In the short run, Tet and its blood-soaked aftermath—most notably at Khe Sanh and in Hue city, but also in the Central Highlands, the towns and jungles around Saigon, and in the rice paddies of the northern Mekong Delta—exacted a horrendous price for minimal gain. Not one liberated town center had been held. In the weeks after the initial wave of attacks, the NVA sent more than 80,000 new troops south to refill their depleted ranks. Tet had torn the guts out of the VC. After the great offensive, northerners predominated, even in many nominally local guerrilla units.49 In a military sense, the North’s Tet Offensive failed. Both sides knew it.
And yet, the NVA generals also recognized that the comparative body count, while slanted dramatically against the communist cause, only went so far in determining the long-term result. General Westmoreland might have proclaimed victory, but clearly his Washington leadership did not agree.50 They sent few reinforcements. They announced Westmoreland’s departure. Then, in a development that surprised even the North Vietnamese, President Johnson altered the U.S. strategy: no wider war, a unilateral bombing halt, and a plea for negotiations. Finally, in an example of the supposedly inevitable consequences of the class struggle between haves and have-nots so beloved of Marxist-Leninist true believers, some alienated loser killed Martin Luther King Jr. America’s cities burned. So much for a U.S. triumph.
Even the 9th Infantry Division staff, thoroughly and rightly averse to commenting on U.S. domestic politics, saw it. In their operational summary of the post-Tet situation, an unnamed intelligence officer soberly wrote: “The Viet Cong offensive failed militarily, but it must be viewed as a psychological success.”51 Hanoi’s inner circle smiled.
Although crippled by Tet casualties, the North Vietnamese knew what to do. Pursuant to the American request, peace talks in Paris would start on May 10. The NVA generals wanted to put their markers on the table, to continue the political struggle from the barrel of a gun. The solution came right from the guerrilla creed. Enemy tires, we attack.