Our poor children. There seemed to be no middle crowd or ground. They were either violently for or violently opposed.
KATHERINE VAN DEUSEN WESTMORELAND1
Stay out of the middle of the street, the veteran sergeants warned the privates. The NCOS had been in this dangerous neighborhood before, and knew the deal. Even in darkness, it wasn’t safe out there. Flickering light from burning storefronts cast long shadows, but also served to silhouette men who didn’t watch where they walked. Snipers loved to pick off guys who wandered out in the open. So the wise heads spread the word. Use the buildings as cover. Move near them. And watch the roofs. Shooters lurked up there.
Even under concealment of night, hugging the first-floor walls didn’t work too well, either. The file of rifle-armed troops worked deliberately from doorway to doorway. But they had to be careful. Bright flames licked out of gaping window frames.2 Avoid the light, men. The sergeants kept saying it. So the privates tried to thread the needle, near the structures, but not too near. Wary soldiers hopscotched in slow motion from one dim spot to another. None hesitated in front of the lit-up stretches.
Oily smoke lingered at ground level, making it tough to breathe. The book told troops to don gas masks, but as usual in the oppressive summer, it was way too hot for that. Plus, who could see anything from inside the rubber mask? Rifles up, eyes raised, the soldiers coughed and stepped slowly, placing their boots with care. Smashed wood, garbage, and glass chips covered the broken sidewalks. Who knew what other unpleasant surprises waited underfoot? Experienced NCOs cautioned all. Take your time. Stay alert.
Along both sides of the street, a long row of riflemen, a company of them, worked west. Here and there, dotted along the street, bashed automobiles squatted on flattened tires. Some of the wrecks flared up, too. Other cars sat askew on the cracked pavement, gutted and blackened, stinking of burnt gasoline.3 Like napalm. It smelled just like napalm.
Overhead, a pair of helicopters kept watch. They wove between the columns of smoke as their crews looked down into the maelstrom of choking soot lit by golden spots of fire. Aviators called out sightings on the radio.4 Two men moving together one block south, paralleling the dismounted infantry column. One unidentified person on the next corner to the west—can’t tell if he’s armed. With the gloom of night and all the obscuration drifting in the summer evening air, any aerial reports at all amounted to a miracle.
This wasn’t south Saigon, but Twenty-fourth Street in Omaha, Nebraska, on the evening of Tuesday, June 24, 1969. A month later to the day, three Americans returned from space. During their eight-day voyage, two walked on the moon for the first time in human history. The Apollo 11 astronauts thought they’d seen “magnificent desolation” and left it behind, a quarter million miles away from earth.5 But they were wrong. Just ask the citizens of ravaged North Omaha.
IN THE WORDS of Chuck Hagel: “I knew what America had just gone through in 1968 when we were in Vietnam: the assassination of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the riots and upheaval.” But Omaha? The long hot summer of 1966 came first, then the in-your-face Wallace visit of 1968, the violence after King’s assassination, and now this. Times in Nebraska had changed, all right, and in the worst possible way. “It was a different place,” offered Chuck.6
Yet in too many ways, North Omaha wasn’t different enough, and therein lay the true problem. National Guard sergeants knew exactly what to instruct their men to do because the older guys had been there in 1966 and in 1968. The riots came and went. People died. Shops and homes burned. Yet underlying conditions of poverty and discrimination persisted. In 1969, another dreadful incident sparked violence.
Heat, overcrowding, and indigence characterized the Logan Fontenelle public housing complex, which crammed more than two thousand people into 550 small units. But after fifty-one years of hard use, the cookie-cutter brick housing and its neat grid of streets had long since degenerated into a trash-strewn hellhole. Plagued by criminals, dejected residents named it “Little Vietnam.”7
In an alley in Little Vietnam on the warm afternoon of June 24, 1969, a nervous white Omaha police officer mistakenly shot and killed fourteen-year-old African American resident Vivian Strong.8 Word went around right away. A white cop shot a young woman. People gathered, and few argued for restraint. Instead, things escalated, and fast. Within an hour, neighborhood rabble-rousers smashed open liquor store windows. White-owned shops on Twenty-fourth Street ignited. Gunfire echoed across a ten-block area. For hours, unchecked mayhem ensued.9 As usual in these terrifying episodes, innocent law-abiding citizens found themselves caught up in the violence. No reasonable person in North Omaha or anywhere else condoned the death of Vivian Strong. But burning, looting, and shooting up the neighborhood only added to the pain. Yet it went on.
The National Guard mobilized. Along with the Omaha police, the guardsmen had only too much experience in the Twenty-fourth Street community. It took three days to quell all the unrest. When the last fires flickered down to ashes, eighty-eight residents had been injured, sixty-six arrested, and fifty businesses torched, just under a million dollars in property damage.10 Looking up and down the ransacked streets of the business district, distraught citizens stared at the charred remnants of hardware stores, groceries, dry cleaners, restaurants, gas stations—all gone. Like Ben Tre in the Mekong Delta, and with some unwelcome “help” from uniformed Americans, North Omaha destroyed itself. Whether or not it would be saved remained to be seen.
BY 1969, THOUGHTFUL OBSERVERS of the American urban scene believed that the worst had passed.11 Compared to the height of inner- city disorders in 1965–68, culminating in the nationwide swath of arson and bloodshed after the death of Dr. King, the Omaha disturbance of June 1969 barely registered. But people in Washington paid attention. As long as the headquarters of Strategic Air Command, mighty SAC, remained at Offutt Air Force Base, any dissension in Omaha topped the agenda at the FBI and the Pentagon. If the high tide of America’s racial strife had subsided, why did discontent endure in Nebraska?
The standard excuse by municipal authorities pinned rioting on the usual suspects, which is to say the infamous “outside agitators.” From Watts 1965 to Chicago 1968, self-assured mayors and chiefs of police told themselves and their worried citizens that the local African American communities could be trusted, but imported activists showed up with money, guns, and bad attitudes. And then hell followed.
In Omaha, right on cue, newly elected mayor Eugene E. Leahy invoked the traditional culprits.12 Of course, that argument allowed city officials to avoid the more intractable conditions that brought on violence. In this case, an Omaha police officer’s fatal error set off long-building passions. If any distant manipulators could arrange such a thing, their powers bordered on the supernatural.
Yet Omaha was tied so closely to the direction of America’s nuclear forces that those paid to think about the unthinkable had little choice but to consider the worst. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover recognized that Soviet KGB and GRU intelligence officers enjoyed unique skills and resources. They could well be behind the Omaha riot. Hoover studied reports of uniformed, armed Black Panther Party members standing guard in North Omaha during the June 1969 disturbance. Since the Wallace imbroglio in March of 1968, Hoover had ordered special interest in the Black Panthers of Omaha.13 The FBI chief suspected a Russian link, tied to designs on Offutt Air Force Base.
Accordingly, Hoover promoted FBI efforts in Omaha to the top of the clandestine, quasi-legal domestic surveillance and preemption enterprise called COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program). This high-priority undertaking originated back in the Eisenhower administration. Along with full use of lawful investigatory measures, the FBI’s COINTELPRO relied all too often on warrantless searches, illicit wiretapping of telephones, interception of U.S. mail, and recruitment of undercover informants. When dealing with perceived threats to national security, the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution evidently could be honored in the breach. For J. Edgar Hoover and a number of U.S. presidents, the Cold War nuclear stand-off justified it all. By the 1960s, the Bureau paid special interest to student anti-war groups and militant elements like the Black Panthers.14
Active as COINTELPRO had been under LBJ, things really took off under President Richard M. Nixon. When FBI director Hoover pointed out the hazards of possible Soviet-backed anti-government conspiracies, he found a very willing listener in Nixon. Both men displayed morbid suspicion of all entities with any trace of communist ties. They also had no love for white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, but in the hothouse of 1969, the KKK carried little weight.15 But the Black Panthers? Those self-proclaimed revolutionaries deserved a long, hard look, and the most vigorous application of law enforcement.
The disorder in North Omaha, right on SAC’s doorstep, seemed ripe for quashing. In his 1968 presidential campaign, Nixon ran on putting an end to this kind of rioting. He talked of providing “law and order,” a phrase lifted from the rhetoric of the odious George Wallace, but certainly in line with what almost all Americans, black or white, hoped to see.16 Nixon, buttressed by Hoover’s FBI, did a great deal for domestic order. Law sometimes suffered in the pursuit of public calm.
The Black Panthers of North Omaha didn’t hide themselves. In the street clashes after the killing of Vivian Strong, the Panthers protected key locations, including the office of the Omaha Star, the African American community newspaper. Photographer Rudy Smith took their picture. Eddie Bolden carried a rifle with a bandolier of ammunition across his chest. David Rice and Edward Poindexter also stood there. All three men offered forbidding scowls and wore black berets. “They served a valuable community service that night,” said Smith.17 The Omaha Star sustained no damage.
After the fires went out and calm returned, the Panthers moved to consolidate their role in the North Omaha community. They organized the Vivian Strong Liberation School.18 The little gathering, held in the group’s headquarters, aimed to raise consciousness among the youth. It attracted some interest from the neighborhood teenagers and a lot of notice from the FBI and the Omaha police.
One instructor at the school, David Rice, described himself as a “blippy,” a black hippie who often spent time with a white girlfriend. Back in March of 1968, Rice found himself swept up in the unrest spurred by George Wallace’s visit. Rice earned some money working for the government-funded Greater Community Action organization, a product of President Lyndon Johnson’s anti-poverty legislation. But that kind of job training and self-esteem building only went so far. Rice thought it to be a dead end. A poet, performance artist, and free spirit, the small, slight Rice didn’t match the typical profile of a menacing Black Panther. But he believed in the struggle for revolutionary justice at the expense of the Man. He concentrated on developing propaganda flyers, exhorting potential sympathizers, spreading the latest party line in the community, and maybe changing some minds.19
Another teacher at the Vivian Strong Liberation School, Edward Poindexter, made a more immediate impression. Six feet, five inches tall, Poindexter exerted a presence, all right. Despite his imposing frame, he was soft spoken, and worked days as a post office letter carrier. A six-year U.S. Army veteran, Poindexter served in Germany, Vietnam, and then Fort Benning, Georgia. He believed racial discrimination denied him promotions. The Black Panthers gave him an outlet to go after such institutional injustice.20
The FBI Omaha special agent in charge, Paul Young, took note of Rice, Poindexter, and the other Black Panthers.21 Running a small discussion circle grandiosely labeled as a liberation school didn’t mean much by itself. But if these guys tried anything else—sabotage, shootings, bombings—then the FBI would move. In the meantime, the Bureau fed information to the Omaha police. The men in blue had enough to keep busy already.
THE OMAHA POLICE paid a call on Chuck and Tom Hagel one night. The brothers had nothing to do with the Black Panthers, but they did live together in a modest rental home in North Omaha, not too far (but far enough) from the squalid Logan Fontenelle housing project. They both attended the nearby University of Nebraska-Omaha, an institution that welcomed veterans. Chuck majored in history. Tom chose a pre-law curriculum, aiming to become an attorney. The GI Bill paid for college, but with no family largesse, both men worked. Chuck tended bar. Tom, like Ed Poindexter, worked as a mailman. And after a long day, the Hagel brothers liked to relax with a drink or two.22 Or more.
One evening, the alcohol pulled the brothers over the dam. Well along in his cups, Tom started ranting about Vietnam. He pulled the pins and flung the loaded words like grenades. Foolish. Losing. False. Chuck tried to argue that the U.S. policy made sense, that South Vietnam deserved a chance to be free of communism, but the military strategy had been flawed. Tom went right back at his brother. Senseless. Immoral. Murder. Face to face, voices raised, hands clenched…
Then came the punches. Chuck carried more muscle. Tom was taller and had the reach. And both hit hard. “We were in a fistfight,” Tom recalled, “smashing beds, knocking doors off.”23 They didn’t stop.
The tumult alarmed a neighbor. An older person living nearby apparently didn’t care for indoor boxing. “Someone called the cops,” Tom said. Not long after, two taciturn Omaha police officers showed up at the front door, fortuitously still on its hinges.
That sobered up the two Hagels. “We were immediately all buddy- buddy,” Tom remembered.24 Their hard-learned military courtesy shone through. Yes, sir. No, sir. Just a misunderstanding, officers. The police left. No harm, no foul—and no formal citation was issued.
After the run-in with the law, the Hagel brothers learned not to talk about the war with each other. Mother Betty, remarried to E. J. Breeding, moved with Mike and Jimmy to Hastings, Nebraska. She categorically forbade any Vietnam fireworks when the two college students came home to visit. “Enough of this,” she commanded.25 Her word held. No first sergeant ever spoke with more authority.
On campus, Chuck paid no attention to the student rebels clamoring about Vietnam. Tom agreed with many of the sentiments of the peace movement, but found the anti-war people to be ridiculous. He guessed that 10 percent really cared. “The rest, some dressed in their ‘regulation’ hippie uniform, were far too busy in the social-recreational activities,” said Tom. “I was particularly impressed by the individuals who verbally attacked ‘this filthy, capitalist system’—and then got into their Corvettes and drove off to rage in their fraternity houses.”26 Compared to the height of 1960s college activism, the shenanigans at University of Nebraska-Omaha hardly wiggled the needle.
The university students lost interest in the war for a good reason. As with the dissipation of urban disturbances in response to the carrots of civil rights legislation and LBJ’s Great Society programs and the sticks of Nixonian “law and order,” plus the likes of COINTELPRO, so conscious government actions gradually reduced, and then removed, the major issue that made American campuses seethe. Nixon rose to the presidency promising to end the war in Vietnam and, coincidentally, the unfair and unpopular military draft.27 Upon inauguration, he acted immediately on both points.
With regard to the Vietnam War, Nixon began troop withdrawals in the same summer that saw Americans walk the moon and Vivian Strong die in North Omaha. The first increment of 15,712 came from the 1st and 2nd Brigades of the 9th Infantry Division. Officially, regiments of ARVN soldiers took over security across the Mekong Delta.28 In reality, the communists continued to hold the countryside. Except for all those killed and wounded, ours and theirs, it was as if the Americans never showed up at all. You had to wonder what Chuck and Tom Hagel thought. But they didn’t dare discuss the war anymore.
Nixon justified the pull out of the 9th Infantry Division as the opening round of “Vietnamization,” in which reequipped South Vietnamese forces backed by U.S. air and naval support would hold the line in country.29 Could the South do it? Nobody knew. But the pattern had been set. Every few months, another division’s worth of Americans departed. Each reduction lessened the need for draftees.
As draft calls decreased, slowly at first, but faster over time, Nixon pressed the U.S. Armed Forces to transition back to volunteer recruiting, the usual method for most of American history. Nixon announced the plan to end the draft within the next few years. He also sharply curtailed almost all deferments, substituting a birth-date lottery for the vagaries of local Selective Service boards. The call-up numbers ramped down, nearly halving each year: 283,586 in 1969, 162,746 in 1970, 94,092 in 1971, 49,514 in 1972, and a final 646 in 1973.30 Except for those still being inducted, the draft ceased to be a huge bogeyman for many American males. Although most students still decried the war, the incentive to pour blood on military records, burn draft cards, or flee to Canada dwindled proportionately.
The war in Vietnam limped on. The North Vietnamese backed down, checked their calendars, and awaited the final U.S. farewell. Bombs still dropped. Men still died. Nixon allowed shallow cross-border incursions into Cambodia in 1970 and Laos in 1971. Neither worked. By 1972, the refurbished North Vietnamese, to include tanks and heavy artillery, charged south in force, took terrain, and held it. ARVN could not eject the communists. And America lacked the stomach to do anything that stuck. Nixon tried overtures to the Soviet Union. He broke decades of strict American sanctions and visited Mao Zedong’s Red China. He unleashed B-52s full of conventional munitions to rain death on Hanoi at Christmas of 1972.31 None of it mattered. Only the U.S. withdrawal clicker counted. Both Hanoi and Washington knew it. Vietnam would soon be in the rearview mirror, a screw-up, a fiasco, a horrific mistake, never to be repeated.
One-time B-24 bomber pilot Senator George McGovern ran against Nixon in 1972 and lost—did he ever, humiliated in a forty-nine-state rout. The South Dakotan ran on the slogan “Come Home America.”32 But for all his foreign policy intrigues, Nixon was already there. A country that had dared to go to the moon, declare war on poverty, and bear any burden in the Mekong Delta gave up on every bit of it. Come home America.
But as the Hagel brothers learned in Omaha, home wasn’t what it used to be.
THE TELEPHONE RANG at 5:30 a.m. on Sunday, November 16, 1969. Both Hagels rose early, but not on Sunday. This couldn’t be good.
It wasn’t. E. J. Breeding sounded gruff, choked up. Jimmy Hagel had died in a car crash. Breeding asked Chuck and Tom to come to Fullerton, Nebraska, to identify the body.
James Joseph Hagel dead? It didn’t make sense. “It seemed so bizarre,” Chuck said. “Tom and I went through what we did, and came back in good shape.” Now this. Their youngest brother, only sixteen, achieved top grades and quarterbacked the football team at St. Cecilia Catholic high school.33 But if Vietnam taught the brothers anything, they’d learned that it could all go in an instant. For Jimmy, it had.
After the sad trip to Fullerton, the brothers and their stepfather talked to Nance County sheriff Richard Shepoka. His police report covered the facts. After midnight, Jimmy Hagel drove his vehicle through a country road junction. The sixteen-year-old missed the turn and piled into a ditch. The automobile flipped. Three other high schoolers, one from Hastings and two from Columbus, suffered whiplash and abrasions, but made it out okay.34 Just like a bad night near Binh Phuoc: there it is.
Betty didn’t take it well. After the funeral, she began drinking, rivaling Tom on intake. It went on for a few months, but after a while her religious faith won out. “Maybe God’s testing me,” she thought. She checked into rehabilitation and never touched another glass of alcohol. In admiration, son Chuck wrote proudly: “She hit things straight up.”35
Chuck took after his mother. Jimmy’s death might have made anyone rethink the last few years, especially that long twelve months with 2-47th Infantry. Not Chuck Hagel: “I never regretted it, never looked back, never thought about it.” Like his mom, Betty, he’d made his choice and lived with it. “Once you made the decision, you go forward.”36
Tom, however, followed his father’s less sure route. Like Charles Dean Hagel, Tom never missed a day of school or work. And like his father, in the evening, Tom often found himself sitting in a tavern and pounding ’em down. “If anyone said anything to me, I’d just go crazy,” he said.37 Dad Charles at least had the American Legion, and other men who understood, even though few words passed between them. Tom lacked even that.
Anyone who sees combat—not just hanging around in the theater of operations, but real fighting—will experience post-traumatic stress. It’s baked into the cake. Gruesome wounds, arbitrary cruelty, and chance encounters with mortality all combine to generate an inordinate degree of psychological pressure.38 Whether that stress manifests itself as a disorder, PTSD, depends on the individual, the immediate group (family or unit), and society as a whole.
In Tom’s case, he took his battle experiences very hard. Jimmy’s shocking accident only underscored the dark forebodings of horrid things half glimpsed, searing macabre scenes, and unrelenting survivor’s guilt. Even with a pretty strong upbringing, those last few empty weeks in Vietnam did Tom no good at all. The Hagel family, Chuck in particular, had no desire to hear about combat or talk about it. Tom’s older brother shared almost all of Tom’s most awful moments in country. Yet Chuck didn’t want to discuss those disquieting matters. He would have to reach a reckoning with his own hard memories in the decades to come. But in the years right after Vietnam, Tom’s older brother settled on denial. He homed in on school, on work, and, as he put it, moved forward, not looking back, but “all about tomorrow.”39
And the army? Well, the random individual assignment policy torpedoed unit cohesion, atomizing the band of brothers. Coming and going to war alone bred PTSD like the Mekong Delta rice paddies bred mosquitoes. The U.S. Army of that era, run at the highest levels by World War II veterans who should have known better, took no ownership of this psychological wasteland.40 The military saw it as an individual weakness, not an institutional challenge, even as the era’s prevalent personnel policies sped the evil plow.
As for American society, most turned their backs on Vietnam veterans like Tom. Neither Hagel dealt with outright hostility in Nebraska, even on the university grounds where some self-styled peaceniks abided. But indifference did its own harm. At a university social gathering, when a faculty member asked if he had served in combat, Tom answered. From those around Hagel, “there was just, simply, silence. Everyone got real uncomfortable.”41 People looked off into the distance. They refused to go there. But Tom had done so, whether or not these students cared to acknowledge it.
In the end, Tom sorted himself out. He drew on enough innate character to do it. He took up veteran counseling, helping guys secure benefits. Next came working with the mentally challenged. Leaning left politically, Tom took his convictions well beyond words. He consistently worked with and represented the downtrodden, the powerless, and the forgotten. Tom started law school in Lincoln. The booze dried up. And the nightmares grew less frequent.42 The terrible visions never wholly disappeared. But the inner angst faded the more Tom Hagel looked out.
Chuck Hagel, for his part, also faced outward. He drew on his education at Brown Institute of Radio and Television and applied for a job at Omaha radio station KBON. Chuck became an on-air host. When management switched to call letters KLNG and tried a new all-talk format, his long interests in history and politics made Chuck the natural choice to handle the current events show. “It was a great experiment,” Hagel said.43 And it paid, too.
Talk radio in 1970–71 hadn’t yet degenerated into today’s all-too-common swamp of sharp-edged, opinionated hooting and hollering. Although on the conservative end himself, Chuck interviewed people from across the political spectrum. He let them talk, and allowed callers time to express themselves, too. Among those Chuck interviewed, former governor Frank B. Morrison, a Democrat, made a strong impression.44 It intrigued Chuck that after losing a senatorial bid in November of 1970, the former governor had chosen to serve as the Douglas County public defender. Morrison sure as hell didn’t do it for the meager salary. The three-term governor’s dedication to public service also impressed Tom Hagel, who saw the self-effacing pragmatic liberal as a role model.45
As it happened, Frank Morrison’s tenure as public defender would begin with a bang. The calendar indicated that the turbulent 1960s had ended. But from the disheartened populace of racially divided Omaha, the cruel decade demanded one more blood sacrifice. Frank Morrison would be right in the middle of it. And this time, white society in Omaha, the Hagels among them, could not avert its gaze.
NORTH OMAHA AGAIN—2:23 a.m., August 17, 1970, and few warm fuzzy things unfolded in that sullen area at that unholy hour. The dispatcher notified a unit to respond to trouble at an empty house. Three other police cruisers in the area closed in, too. On a summer night in a crime-ridden community, numbers mattered.
When four policemen entered the abandoned structure, a bomb detonated. Officer Larry D. Minard died; the other three were injured.46 Anguished people from up and down the block, many in pajamas, gathered to offer condolences, prayers, and tears. None of the residents had any inkling who emplaced the fatal device.47
The city cops had no clues, no tips, and no idea of how to find Minard’s killer. But the FBI knew. Thanks to COINTELPRO, the Bureau had a human source inside the North Omaha Black Panther cell. “We have excellent informer coverage of the Panthers,” the FBI man said. So the Panthers did it. That tracked with trends seen in other cities. The FBI had seen a very similar dynamite bombing on May 13 at a police station in Des Moines, Iowa.48
But then the FBI representative threw a curve ball. “And our key source advises us that two white males were observed running from the scene shortly before the blast.”49 Two white males? Student radicals? Russians?50 The Omaha police superiors took it all down.
Despite the otherwise uncorroborated lead about two white men, the balance of the FBI’s information, some of it gathered by highly questionable methods, pointed right to the Panthers. The militants had bomb-making expertise—the device was pretty elementary—and access to materials, and the national Black Panther Party included many belligerent elements with track records of similar attacks. The local Omaha chapter alleged it had quit the Black Panther Party, and in mid-1969 rebranded itself as the National Committee to Combat Fascism. That fooled nobody, not even the members. Key figures in the chapter remained Ed Poindexter, deputy chairman, and David Rice, deputy minister of information, both well known to the FBI and Omaha police.51 On the morning of August 17, 1970, law enforcement officials agreed that Poindexter and Rice must be part of the bombing.
If they hoped to avoid suspicion, the two Panthers said and did all the wrong things. Although Poindexter and Rice held government jobs, as a postal carrier and anti-poverty counselor respectively, each spent hours regaling various North Omaha citizens, expressing utter contempt for the United States, Nebraska, and city governments. Law-abiding neighbors all heard the usual Panther slogans. “Freedom by any means necessary!” “The power of the people is found in the gun.” “Off the pigs!”52 That last one sure didn’t help when Omaha police started questioning people in the neighborhood.
It took almost six days to unearth a witness willing to finger Rice. Once that occurred, the police raided Rice’s home, which also served as the headquarters for the National Committee to Combat Fascism, complete with a large identification plaque helpfully mounted over the door. The law enforcement team recovered fourteen sticks of dynamite, four blasting caps, a six-volt battery, and pliers. Forensic examiners tied the pliers to residue from the bomb that killed Officer Minard. In addition, when the police arrested Rice, then Poindexter, they found dynamite residue on their clothing, although none on their skin.53 Game. Set. Match. The police assumed they had their bombers.
The pair’s trial began with ill portents. Proceedings started on an incongruous date, April 1, 1971, and at an unfortunate place, the venerable Douglas County courthouse, site of Omaha’s first major race riot in 1919. The senior Douglas County public defender, former governor Frank Morrison, assessed the judge as fair and the jury of eleven whites and one black as about the best possible in Omaha at the time. But he also would have preferred a change of venue. “I’m convinced they just set out to get some evidence on Rice and Poindexter ’cause they didn’t like the way they talked,” Morrison observed.54 Much of the city, white and black, followed the proceedings. Those interested included KLNG talk-show host Chuck Hagel, who covered the trial for his station. Pre-law student Tom Hagel also followed the proceedings with interest. “We were very aware of it,” Chuck said later.55 So were most people in Omaha, black and white.
Both Rice and Poindexter pled innocent and insisted they did not construct, plant, or direct setting the bomb. Defense attorney Frank Morrison didn’t know about the FBI informant’s supposed sighting of two white guys. All evidence from COINTELPRO remained unacknowledged. The physical evidence and some witness statements proved very compelling. Former governor Morrison did what he could. But the outcome was never really in doubt.
The jury deliberated four days. They found both Poindexter and Rice guilty of first-degree murder. The judge sentenced both men to life in prison. Rice (who renamed himself Mondo we Langa) died in the penitentiary in 2016. Poindexter continues to serve his time and maintain his innocence.56
Frank Morrison stayed at it, filing appeals that emphasized technical failings. In support of the Douglas County public defender, the Nebraska chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (including Tom Hagel) and even Amnesty International all took up the cause of the pair they titled the “Omaha Two.” When other events in the 1970s revealed the extensive scope of COINTELPRO, subsequent Freedom of Information Act petitions exposed some of the FBI’s machinations surrounding the case.57 For those convinced the system is rigged and the Man will always find a way, the Rice-Poindexter case offers an object lesson.
From the perspective of the local citizenry, black and white, the case ended the cycle of riots and violence in North Omaha. The Black Panthers disbanded. Former members drifted into oblivion, remembered, if at all, as the grainy subjects in stark photos from another era. Racism didn’t go away, but outright segregation did. While there’s been undeniable progress, North Omaha today remains less affluent and more violent than other neighborhoods in the city.58
The Rice-Poindexter trial affected both Hagel brothers. As he finished law school, Tom followed the course charted by former governor Frank Morrison, standing up for those unable to stand up for themselves. While offering no excuse for cop killings, he strongly believed that those accused deserved a fair trial. As a public defender in Lancaster County, Tom decided to do his part even when it got really sticky. “He had these real toughies that people just felt like hanging,” his mother recalled.59 Not on Tom Hagel’s watch—he spoke up for them all with passion and skill. By his lights, America demanded equality before the law and due process. As he’d done in Vietnam, Tom waded right in there.
As for Chuck, although he embraced the Nixon-era law and order ethos more fully than his brother, he also believed in fairness. People in America were innocent until proven guilty, and had a right to an impartial trial. Many years later, as a U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel took action to release to the public more than a thousand pages of FBI documents related to the Rice-Poindexter investigation.60 Political pundits, especially those on the right end of the table, wondered why a conservative Republican legislator would get embroiled in such a mess. But anybody who really knew Chuck Hagel wasn’t surprised at all.
“LOOK WHAT’S FLYING OVER IT NOW.”
Tom pointed to the Binh Phuoc pole, the same one that stood there in 1968. Chuck glanced up. A red banner with a yellow star fluttered in the warm breeze.61 The flag belonged to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
That standard did not get there by accident. The North’s tank battalions and infantry regiments stormed Saigon one fine spring only six years after Tom Hagel departed Binh Phuoc. Those victorious NVA troops didn’t wear black pajamas or skulk in the underbrush. They brushed aside the ARVN, hapless to the last, and rolled right down Highway 1 like they owned the place. As of May Day, 1975, they did.62
On that sunshine-drenched, humid afternoon of August 14, 1999, professor of law Tom Hagel and his brother, U.S. senator Chuck Hagel, walked their former firebase. They did so as guests of the politburo in Hanoi. The next day, Senator Hagel represented the United States at a ceremony at the new American consulate in Ho Chi Minh City. Except for some Vietnamese Communist Party hacks and the authors of official correspondence, the population still referred to their city as Saigon.63 They always would. All the reeducation in the world couldn’t erase that traditional name.
For three days, the Hagels visited their old haunts. With them went some escort officers from the U.S. Army, a Vietnamese “minder” (after all, they were communists), and Brad Penner and his able video production team from Nebraska Educational Television Network. Cameras and microphones captured hours of discussion, as well as a few staged interviews and ceremonial events. Thirty-one years on, the sights, sounds, and smells of Vietnam brought back many memories. When edited and aired on Nebraska public television as Echoes of War, the half-hour documentary told quite a story.64
In the film, both brothers seemed relaxed and happy: Tom the self-deprecating academic with his trimmed salt and pepper beard, Chuck the optimistic political leader, husky and smiling, shaking hands all around. Although the two men were in their fifties, they exuded health. Tall, forceful, alert, and vigorous in short-sleeve shirts, they both looked like they could shoulder up M60 pig machine guns and go tramping off through the bush. When accompanying U.S. Army officers pulled out maps, operational reports, and unit radio logs, both Hagels lapsed immediately into grunt-speak. The two former sergeants knew their business, and the Hagels’ depth of recall caught a few of the young officers by surprise. The earnest active- duty types hadn’t seen enough combat, if any, to grasp just how deeply ingrained those searing experiences can be.
Aboard a tidy Vietnamese minibus, Chuck and Tom traveled all across the 9th Infantry Division’s former area of operations. At one halt, they walked through a village on the edge of the Binh Son rubber plantation, not far from where they were wounded in both the March and April 1968 firefights. The blue-trimmed white motor transport carried them around the perimeter of Long Binh Post, converted by the not-so-communist Vietnamese to a commercial warehouse complex. In south Saigon, they went right down bustling Route 320, to the Y-bridge, through Xom Ong Doi, to the Y-bridge, and on to Xom Cau Mat, all heavily contested during Mini-Tet. In south Saigon, the brothers dismounted and noticed how little had changed in those once deadly streets. Tom pointed to former sniper posts on the roofs. Chuck nodded knowingly. And finally, they stopped at Binh Phuoc.65
While the rust-red dust hung in the afternoon sun, the brothers stood together, quiet. It’s uncertain if the brisk military escorts or the busy television team, let alone the Vietnamese communist chaperone, picked up Tom’s distant gaze or noticed the tinge of mist in Chuck’s eyes. But the unblinking camera saw it all, a shadow over the pair, like a cloud crossing the sun. Then it passed, and the brothers let it go. The ghosts faded away. Tom and Chuck moved on.