Having grown up with a mother and father
who both served in World War II,
for me, war was like the John Wayne movies.
We're gonna hold this town till the link-up does come,
whenever it is.
Today, tomorrow, till hell freezes over.
It was your duty, and it was a privilege,
and we were always fighting on the side of right.
America was always the good guys.
But the harsh reality of what war really was
was very different from what I'd seen in my mother's Army scrapbooks,
where my mother was the football queen at the Army-Navy game.
War is a very scary thing,
especially as we faced high school graduation.
Gee, I wish…
I could name one name after another
of my brother's friends who went off to fight.
And their letters to my brother and to me were very, very different.
To me, the letters always had the number of days left.
They were counting the days before they would come home.
For my brother, they were describing the realities of what they were doing.
Horrific realities.
And the reality of what that war represented,
and what conversations about the war resulted in,
began to hit us.
Things were just not right in America.
Everything that I admired about our country,
everything that I associated with the American dream,
everything I associated with America, right or wrong, it was just disappearing.
And it made it a lot easier to take a stand against my own government.
At that point, you had to make a choice.
Are you willing to put your life on the line?
And for many of us, it was.
It was worth the risk.
The United States did an incredible job
keeping track of the amount of bombs it dropped on Vietnam.
That's how we know the United States dropped more bombs
on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia
than it did in all of World War II on Europe.
You have around seven million tons of bombs dropped
over the countries of Indochina.
This included anywhere from 500,000 to 600,000 tons of bombs
dropped over Cambodia,
two million over Laos,
one million over North Vietnam,
and over four million dropped over South Vietnam.
I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party
for another term as your president.
After Lyndon Johnson announces
that he's not gonna seek another term,
he announces that he is going to stop bombing North Vietnam
if the North Vietnamese will agree to prompt, productive peace talks.
In May, the negotiating team meets in Paris.
And in October,
Johnson finally gets the North Vietnamese to accept his conditions.
On the afternoon of October 27,
word came from Paris
that Hanoi would accept the terms for a bombing halt.
So Johnson agrees to halt the bombing.
Good evening, my fellow Americans.
I have now ordered
that all air, naval, and artillery bombardment of North Vietnam
cease… as of 8:00 a.m.,
Washington time, Friday morning.
Those of us who served in Vietnam,
we obviously were hopeful.
Every day, young men getting killed,
young men getting wounded.
We just want to get out of here now.
We were fighting not for victory, we were fighting to go home.
Peace!
- When do we want it? - Now!
- What do we want? - Peace!
- When do we want it? - Now!
Americans get excited
about there being a bombing halt and peace talks.
…now! Peace now! Peace now!
Peace now! Peace now! Peace…
This is shortly before the 1968 election.
The President of the United States and his ambassadors
are making a determined…
major, massive effort to find an honorable peace in Paris.
At this point, the major candidates
are Hubert Humphrey, Johnson's vice president,
as the Democratic nominee,
and Richard Nixon for the Republicans.
Richard Nixon had run for president in 1960
and been defeated by President John Kennedy.
But he had slowly and meticulously fought his way back
into prominence in the Republican Party.
It's a heartland state.
Uh, whoever wins Indiana has a good chance to win the rest of the heartland
and therefore the country.
But the biggest thing that Nixon had to sell,
and he sold it very well,
was that he would end the war.
I say the time has come
for the American people to turn to new leadership,
not tied to the policies and mistakes of the past.
I pledge to you, we shall have an honorable end to the war in Vietnam.
But he really is not forthcoming
with-- with any, um, strategy for ending the war
throughout the course of the '68 campaign.
If a candidate for president who might be president says
that, "If negotiations fail, I will do this or that,"
the people on the other side of the negotiating table
will say, "Well, we'll wait for him,"
rather than negotiate with President Johnson.
But peace is too important for politics as usual.
So I say, let's let the President of the United States…
At the start of October,
Nixon was 15 points ahead of Hubert Humphrey.
He was winning a landslide.
But the more news came out of Paris
that these peace talks were going to start,
the more people's hopes got up for the prospect
of getting some sort of settlement of the Vietnam War.
And then Johnson learns
that Richard Nixon might be secretly trying
to torpedo the bombing halt negotiations.
Right!
We have found that our, uh, friend,
the, uh, Republican nominee, our California friend,
has been playing on this outskirts with our enemies and our friends, both,
our allies and the others.
One of his associates said to a businessman
that we're going to say to Hanoi, "I can make a better deal than he has
because, uh, I'm fresh and new,
and I don't have to demand as much as he does
in the light of past positions."
Johnson is stunned.
He thinks that Nixon was trying to sabotage the peace talks.
He starts checking his sources of intelligence.
The CIA has a bug in the office of the President of South Vietnam,
Nguyễn Văn Thiệu.
And Johnson orders the FBI
to put surveillance on the South Vietnamese embassy
to tell him the names of everybody who enters and exits
and to tail a lady named Anna Chennault,
who is a unique figure in Republican politics at that time.
She was the widow of a very famous World War II aviator
who knew President Thiệu.
The people are very much concerned.
And the number one question they ask is this,
"Who is going to win this war?"
She was one of a few Asian-American delegates
to the Republican convention that year.
And she was Richard Nixon's top female fundraiser.
Mrs. Chennault is contacting, uh,
their ambassador from time to time.
Seems to be kind of the go-between.
Chennault is telling the South Vietnamese government
to stay away from these peace talks,
that Nixon can give them a better deal
once he's elected president.
The net of it was that, uh, if they just, uh, hold out
a little bit longer, that, uh, he is a lot more sympathetic,
and he can kinda-- they can do better business with him
than they can with their present president.
I rather doubt Nixon has done any of this.
But there's no question but what folks for him are doing it.
Mrs. Chennault never saw President Thiệu.
Nor did we take it seriously.
Because, hey, we go through the US Embassy, okay?
That's the official conduit.
The Vietnamese knew their future was being decided in Washington, DC.
Thiệu always thought that the Americans are going to screw him somehow,
that they would, you know, they would sell him out to Hanoi.
And frankly, the reason the South Vietnamese did not send
a delegation to the Paris talks at that time was this.
We said to the US, "What's the strategy between allies?"
"We cannot go there and you guys just take over,
thinking that, 'This is what is the best for South Vietnamese.'"
"We need to be aligned."
We never got a good answer.
And on the Saturday before the election,
November 2nd,
Nguyễn Văn Thiệu announces
that he will not send a delegation
to the Paris peace talks.
Up until that point,
Nixon's lead over Humphrey has been narrowing.
By the time of the weekend before the election,
Humphrey and Nixon were only two points apart.
But after Nguyễn Văn Thiệu's public announcement
that he was boycotting the peace talks,
all of Hubert Humphrey's momentum stalled.
Here now at CBS News Election Headquarters is Walter Cronkite.
What emerges is that Richard Milhous Nixon,
in a stunning political comeback
almost denied him in the closing days,
perhaps even the closing hours of the campaign,
has been elected the 37th President of the United States.
And that's as close as any election in our history.
Nixon wins the second-closest election
of that century so far,
and changes… changes American history.
Having lost a close one eight years ago,
and having won a close one this year, I can say this,
winning's a lot more fun.
Ladies and gentlemen…
Richard Nixon said that he had a plan to end the war honorably.
But as soon as he got into office,
he and those around him, including Dr. Henry Kissinger,
were finding ways to escalate the war
with the belief that they could "win" it.
Henry Kissinger,
who comes in as national security advisor for Richard Nixon,
is a very important figure in the latter stage of America's war.
Kissinger is a Harvard PhD
and a Harvard professor
and a renowned foreign policy thinker.
You think American strategy should be reevaluated
to restore war as a usable instrument of policy.
American strategy has to face the fact
that it may be confronted with war,
and that if Soviet aggression confronts us with war
and we are unwilling to resist,
it will mean the end of our freedom.
Nixon and Kissinger were incurably covert.
Both were inveterate manipulators.
Nixon used Kissinger to provide intellectual heft to his worst impulses.
And Kissinger used Nixon to accrue unimaginable power.
We wish you well personally.
More than that,
the people of the United States wish your people well.
We look forward to the day when they can live in peace together.
Thank you. Thank you, Richard Nixon.
After Nixon comes into power,
he knows at some point
he's going to have to begin withdrawing American troops.
He wants to manage that process
in a way that just doesn't leave South Vietnam hanging.
We know, eventually, that the US will pull out troops.
We realize that it is our duty
to shoulder the responsibility to fight the war.
But we need help.
Nixon asks all of the relevant agencies
how long it will take to train and equip the South Vietnamese Army
so it can defend South Vietnam without American combat troops.
The State Department, the Pentagon, the CIA, the US Embassy,
they all agree,
South Vietnam will never be able to stand up to the Việt Cộng
and the North Vietnamese Army
without American combat troops
and American military support.
So Nixon decides to deceive the American people.
He says that his Vietnamization program
will train and equip the South Vietnamese Army
to stand on its own,
and he will only keep American troops in South Vietnam
long enough to make South Vietnam capable of standing on its own.
In the previous administration, we Americanized the war in Vietnam.
In this administration,
we are Vietnamizing the search for peace.
The policy of the previous administration not only resulted in our assuming
the primary responsibility for fighting the war,
but even more significant,
did not adequately stress the goal of strengthening the South Vietnamese
so that they could defend themselves when we left.
Now, this is basically fraud.
Nixon has reason to think
that Vietnamization is never going to work.
But he was able to announce troop withdrawal
so that it would look like American boys would come home
and no longer fight this war.
The Americans proclaim it as "the Vietnamization."
It's a catchy phrase to explain everything,
but in my view, it's pretty offensive to the South Vietnamese.
of the "Vietnamization" of the war was not accurate.
The war started with us,
and we gradually scaled up
and matured through and in battles
that built up a force, relying more on ourselves.
President Thiệu knew the benefits
of having American troops fighting on the ground,
but he also knew the disadvantages.
He knew the problem of legitimacy
in the eyes of the world and in the eyes of their own people.
They were seen now as the Communists depicted them,
as puppets of the Americans.
Because American go in there, just like in the cowboy movie,
"Here is the cavalry. They are-- We're going to do the job for you."
"Hey, we will just bomb the living daylight out of it,
and we're done."
But they don't understand the country, the attitude,
even the disposition of enemy forces.
The Vietnamese generals understood that,
but they find that American really didn't want to listen.
Some of the young military leaders felt like now we are independent,
now we can prove ourselves.
We will no longer be in the shadow of the Americans.
The Việt Cộng, they bombed my family.
I was angry, and I vowed to fight those people who harmed my family.
I was trained to become a helicopter pilot.
My mission was to insert and extract the Special Forces.
It was a hazardous mission.
We got shot. We caught the ground fire every day.
So they named us the Kingbees because we were not scared of anything.
But many people did not know the truth
because they never followed our troops into the battlefield.
They said, "The South Vietnam Army, they are so coward."
"They didn't want to fight themselves."
But the main forces, they-- they fought very fiercely.
I volunteered as an advisor to a combat unit of Vietnamese
because I bought into the notion
of helping those who wanted to help themselves.
In my view,
they were worthy of air support, artillery support, logistic support.
They just didn't need our soldiers.
There were plenty of young Vietnamese who could do it just as well as we could.
They achieved a lot of victories in battles after battles
against the Vietnamese Communists in the North.
They were the true future of the country.
They were the future.
But I see the danger lurking ahead.
Many people were concerned about the possibility
of American discontinuation of assistance to South Vietnam
because the Communists were receiving assistance
from the Soviet Union, China, and the Soviet Bloc.
So if the Americans left,
South Vietnam would be left alone to fight the whole Soviet Bloc.
They needed weapons
so that they could have a balance with the Communists in the North.
But we realized the pressure in the US politics.
We are in serious danger of being alone.
US out of Vietnam, for they're being murdered!
This was an extremely tense and toxic time in terms of American public opinion.
When Nixon came in, there were 550,000 troops,
increasing casualties,
and tremendous demonstrations in the war,
which put great pressure on Nixon.
Thousands gathered in Chicago, New York, Boston, San Francisco,
Ann Arbor, New Haven, and many other cities.
There were thousands, then there were tens of thousands,
and then there were hundreds of thousands of people marching against the war.
I was there. I was 13 years old. I went with my dad.
For you young folks have come to the nation's capital today,
using the greatest weapon ever been used in the history of the world,
a pure moral dedication…
Entertainment, politics, and rhetoric proceeded nonstop.
At the time, music was really powerful.
There were a lot of musicians who went to anti-war rallies.
John Lennon wrote a song with his wife, Yoko Ono, called "Give Peace a Chance,"
which he sang at an anti-war demonstration.
Everybody now! Come on!
All we are saying
Is give peace a chance
The fact that a member of the most popular singing group
in the world at the time, The Beatles, was siding with the anti-war movement
seemed to give us, kind of, legitimacy as anti-war people,
which we thought was kind of impossible.
Country Joe and the Fish wrote a very popular song, "Fixin'-to-Die Rag."
What are we fightin' for?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn
The next stop is Vietnam
And he sang that song at the Woodstock Festival
in the fall of 1969, with 200,000 people present at the time.
Glimpses of…
We were listening to protest songs
by people like Crosby, Stills and Nash & Young.
I'm from England, of course. I didn't come to America
until December of 1968.
A lot of people,
particularly the young people in the United States,
were very much against the Vietnam War.
It was just a mess, and we all knew it.
Music brings peace to people, it enrages people,
it makes them love more.
We have to help people wake up to what's really happening.
That's what protest is about.
I, I, I, I, I'm gonna
I'm gonna kick 'em out
Yeah!
At the same time, anti-war protesters had grown weary
of petitioning and marching and waving the peace signs.
The war kept going on,
so there was a sense of disbelief, frustration.
There's nothing we can do peacefully anymore, it seemed,
to stop the war.
We're gonna have to escalate our tactics. "We have to bring the war home."
That's one of the Weatherman slogans.
Right on!
The Weathermen were inspired by the words
of the Bob Dylan song that says,
"You don't have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing."
And they felt they had to go to war at home.
Shortly after yesterday's explosion,
a letter was received by the Associated Press in New York
taking credit for the bombing and signed "Weatherman."
Weatherman was a group of people who said,
"We have to emulate the Black Panther Party."
They were a group that were in favor of Black nationalism,
building their own institutions to get freedom for Black people in America,
who supported the Việt Cộng, the North Vietnamese,
who took up arms themselves.
They see our struggle as being, uh, the beacon light for peace
within the confines of fascistic America.
And on the other hand, we see their struggle
as being the guiding light for peace on an international level
to put an end to, uh, US imperialism.
I was not gonna be a soldier for the United States,
but I was willing to be a soldier for the revolution, if you will.
We decided we have to think about arming ourselves
to try to stop the United States
from being able to continue the war in Vietnam at home.
Blow up ROTC buildings, maybe blow up draft boards, for example.
12:56 a.m., the explosion that ripped through a restroom
on the third floor of the State Department.
No one was hurt by the blast.
Police who were summoned to the scene described the bomb as being a big one.
Some people were talking about getting guns
and fighting the police in the streets with guns.
Total resistance to mind-controlling maniacs,
a culture of high-energy sisters getting it on,
of hippie acid smiles and communes
and freedom to be the farthest-out people we can be.
Weatherman began in the summer of 1969.
Just nine months later, they went underground
because there was a bomb that some Weather-people were making
in a townhouse in Greenwich Village in New York,
which blew up in their faces and killed a couple of them.
I only stayed in Weatherman for six weeks, to be honest,
because I continued to support their politics,
but I was afraid of dying.
At this point, the polls showed
that even though most people were against the war,
even more people were against the anti-war protesters.
Commies run like rats! Go ahead, commies! Run!
Did you ever do a day's work in your life?
I don't think so. You didn't have to! If you woulda been working,
you wouldn't have had time to grow that there hair on top of you.
Hồ, Hồ, Hồ Chí Minh!
Many objected to the disorder…
Bring them home now!
…the vandalism, and some criminal civil disobedience.
If he cancels his trip because of this…
Nixon just knew that if he was attacking
the anti-war protesters,
he would be appealing to a majority of Americans.
Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon after him,
were both convinced that the anti-war movement in this country
were directed and financed by Moscow and Beijing.
First Johnson, and then Nixon, directed the American intelligence community
to find the Communist conspiracy that drove the anti-war movement.
They were bugging phones,
spying on Americans,
warrantless wiretapping,
black bag jobs, burglaries, break-ins, buggings,
some of it directed by J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI.
FBI agents came to my dorm room in college
and questioned me about my anti-war activities.
This is what an FBI file looks like.
This was something released to me in 1978 under the Freedom of Information Act.
What it shows is there were undercover agents
who were infiltrating the anti-war movement,
trying to find out what we were doing in advance.
There were people in our meetings,
even meetings as small as nine or ten people,
who were FBI agents.
This went on for years under LBJ and Nixon.
Did they find the international Communist conspiracy
that was driving the anti-war movement?
Nope.
Because it didn't exist.
They were willing to violate the Constitution
and to violate the civil rights of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
We may now take it for granted
that mass surveillance of our everyday activities
is standard operating procedure.
The right to privacy, the rule of law…
Our individual acts used to be considered private affairs.
That all began to corrode during the Vietnam War.
The war was unpopular.
The drain on the budget was unpopular.
But I think,
foremost, the draft was unpopular.
And Nixon understood that.
By 1969, Nixon has decided
to change the draft system to a lottery,
to tamp down on concerns that the process is inequal.
And all of a sudden,
the conscription system
becomes a roll of the dice based on your birthdate.
April 24th.
A bunch of little plastic balls would be in a canister.
And the first number that came up, whatever the birthdate was,
you were among the first to be called to your draft board, to be drafted.
…31st, February 16th, March 8th, February 5th,
January 4th, February 10th.
March 30th, April 10th, April 9th.
I was with my brother and his friends.
Watching all of their numbers called was just an eerie sort of thing.
When you actually saw this visual representation of,
"Guess who's next?"
December 30th.
December 30, 003.
More people were burning their draft cards.
And more people were leaving the country.
And more people were willing to go to jail for defying an order to serve.
Hallelujah
His truth is marching on
We began to get the draftees and replacements.
Now these young men began to protest.
It was a different type of soldier.
Not all, but a lot of them just couldn't wait to get out,
and every day was agitated for being there.
When I arrived in Vietnam in 1970,
the drawdown of troops probably meant
that there were around a couple hundred thousand left.
It wasn't war in the sense that you could go be a great hero.
It was a slog.
And so it was a troubled time in the morale of the American GI.
It was obvious to even the lowest soldier
that we're getting out. You know, we're leaving.
"Why should I be the last guy killed on the way out the door?"
You started wondering, "Damn, well, why are we even here?"
You develop a whole different attitude once you've been in-country for a while.
You know, when you hear about somebody getting wounded or killed,
the guys would say, "Well, hey, better him than me."
And I thought, "Damn, that's-- that's pretty cold-hearted."
As cold-hearted as it sounds,
you start to understand and get that mentality,
that "Hey, I'll do whatever it takes to get my ass out of here in one piece."
The discipline, the blind following of orders,
everything had changed.
It's the Woodstock generation coming to Vietnam.
Killing for peace just doesn't make sense.
One day, I heard a couple of members of the squad that we were with
talking to each other,
and I just started rolling on it.
Killer, I see…
First time we'll ever be walkin' down a road.
I'm not gonna walk down there.
I was talking to 'em, we're gonna do it. Gonna walk down the trail.
My whole squad ain't walkin' down that… trail.
- No! - That's it.
The men were taught by Captain Jackson,
their former commander,
never to move down a trail, much less a road.
They weren't going to obey the new captain's orders,
which was to walk down a road.
And they just said, "No, we're not gonna do it."
We gonna move out on the road, period.
Either we gonna move out and they gonna get left behind,
or I'm gonna take point and they can follow me if they want to.
Now, it's that simple. Now, we got a job to do, we gonna do it.
It's not half as dangerous as the crap we've done out here in the boonies,
walking through 'em. Least we can see what we're doing.
We don't use trails. We-- We try to do things, you know, with logic.
And, uh, if you want to find gooks, there's no problem finding, uh, the enemy.
You can just walk right down a trail, and you-- you'll eventually find him,
but it'll be on his terms.
We're just gonna refuse to do it.
'Cause it's, uh… You may be in jail, but you won't be dead.
Some called it the war between the lifers and the grunts,
usually verbal, but sometimes violent,
involving the older men making careers of military work
and the young draftees committed to a year of military service in Vietnam.
The guys you served with, it's like a family,
and you're looking out for that family.
So anybody who's going to come from the outside
and jeopardize the safety of your family,
I don't care if it's a first sergeant,
somebody's going to have to teach you a lesson about that.
And if it takes a fragging to do it,
well, it's gonna take what it's gonna take.
Fragging is essentially assaulting your officer one way or another.
Killing them, basically.
Or certainly very badly injuring them.
"Grenade, hand, fragmentation, M26A1," it says.
The GIs call it simply "the frag."
The core of explosives sends thousands of tiny metal fragments in all directions.
It's very effective against the enemy.
But in recent months, all too often,
GIs have been using them against their superior officers.
There is even, uh, a pool of money that gets collected too.
So people are, like, putting up 50 bucks, 30 bucks,
and… you get enough people,
that's enough incentive for somebody to pull the pin.
It happened a couple times while I was there.
There was a, uh, high-ranking enlisted,
I think he's a top sergeant,
somebody put a Claymore mine underneath his tent,
and three guys split the money.
No one knows which one did it,
but he was no longer in existence after that night.
You could kind of call it justice.
So many people were getting killed because of these guys.
I just don't believe in anything we're doing here.
I don't like anything that's going on.
And the lifers are shoving all this shit at me, and…
and, uh, I don't like to play their games.
Most estimates agree
that there are over 90 incidents of fragging in the US Marine Corps.
There are 600 to 800 incidents in the US Army, if not more.
What about… drugs in the field?
Drugs in the field?
Uh, gee, can I say this without getting busted or anything?
Orangutan! Get your hair cut!
Many American servicemen were using drugs
as a form of self-medication,
as a way to-- to get through this.
I started smoking marijuana literally every day, all day…
to help mask and hide the pain and the fear.
Paul, let me borrow that bowl from you.
Cool.
I hope this-- This is probably all CIDs and we're getting busted,
but I don't care.
Shotgun.
That's pretty good schwag, though.
Opium was, um… was legal in Laos or Cambodia
and accepted in Vietnam.
With opium, it kills all pain, psychological and physical,
and you're just in this state of semi-dreaming.
So a lot of us, myself included, got very serious opium addiction.
And then heroin became popular,
and in Vietnam, for five dollars,
you could buy, like, a jam jar full of 99% pure heroin.
I had never had any experience with drugs
before the military.
No pot, no nothing. I didn't even smoke.
When I was wounded, they gave me the morphine, right?
And when they stopped the morphine,
I was introduced to heroin,
and it completely ruined my life.
The GIs are plagued by low morale,
drug abuse, and drunkenness.
A Congressional investigation reveals
10 to 15% of all US troops in Vietnam are using heroin.
Other reports show as many as 50% are using marijuana.
This phenomenon is worrying to senior military commanders.
Drug testing becomes, uh, part and parcel of the Army experience.
And it's still in existence today.
In Vietnam, they're bringing in medical officers and psychologists
to try and get a sense of-- of what the problem is.
I was there all of '70 to evaluate the mental health
of soldiers in the field.
There were about 15 mental health people, psychiatrists, social workers, in-country
for all these combat vets.
There was just so much chaos.
So much of the hospital,
when I went flying around to different units,
was heroin overdose, speed, hashish.
The chances of you coming home in one piece are getting less and less.
So what can I do?
And then you started wondering,
"What's going on with the Paris peace talks?"
To me, and some of the other guys I was with,
well, we didn't understand.
"Well, if they're having peace talks, why are we still fighting?"
"Shouldn't there be a ceasefire while they're doing this?"
So the Paris negotiations to end the Vietnam War had begun,
but it became just another theater of battle in the Vietnam War.
There was a lot of discussion about, "How are we gonna hold the talks?"
"Who's going to be there? What're we gonna talk about?"
And so the Communists really began to string the talks out.
Already official peace talks were underway in Paris,
but only after a ten-week dispute about the shape of the table,
who would sit where at the table.
The answer was to make it round.
Everyone was equal, the United States, South Vietnam,
North Vietnam, and the Việt Cộng.
They spent months arguing
where people were going to sit at this table.
And our attitude was, "That's bullshit."
"I'll go over there, I'll make you sit wherever the fuck I want you to sit."
"We're dying over here, and you're arguing where you're gonna sit?"
Nixon recognizes
that the peace talks are largely dead in the water.
He understood that the attention afforded to the four-party public talks
was too great,
that nothing could actually be decided while all four sides are posturing,
that there had to be secret bilateral talks in conjunction.
And these secret talks would only be
between the United States and North Vietnam,
cutting out South Vietnamese parties entirely.
We were not told.
Suddenly, you went on-- on your own, and, you know, "negotiated"
what you Americans think is best for South Vietnam.
It's a betrayal between allies.
Richard Nixon and Lê Duẩn could only send men they trust
to negotiate the end of American military intervention.
Kissinger is Nixon's man.
Lê Duẩn sends Lê Đức Thọ.
He's Lê Duẩn's right-hand man, and had been since the 1950s.
It took a miracle to keep these things secret.
It'd just be Kissinger, myself, one or two others.
And from what we know of these talks,
they were highly contentious,
neither of them really wanting to compromise.
"You have only one mission."
"Just one mission."
"At the end of negotiations,
the US must withdraw its troops, and Northern soldiers stay."
The North Vietnamese always insisted
not only did we have to get out unilaterally,
we had to overthrow the Saigon government
and put in a coalition government at the same time.
We were not prepared to do that.
We wanted an agreement that would at least give
the Saigon government a chance to survive in the future.
And we certainly weren't going to say to the world, as an ally,
that not only will we withdraw unilaterally,
but we'll overthrow our friends as we exit the scene.
The North Vietnamese were sitting there
saying that we were withdrawing these troops gradually.
It was happening anyway, so why should they negotiate?
Why not just wait us out?
But Kissinger had this theory that every now and then
you have to convince people you're gonna go apeshit.
You know, you're a superpower, you've got all this equipment,
and you-- you might annoy us enough
that we respond in an absolutely extreme way.
The "madman" theory. He believed in it.
And I guess Nixon believed in it too.
One of the first things that Nixon does is to start the bombing of Cambodia.
While Cambodia, as well as Laos,
had been drawn into the Vietnamese War
from the very start in the late 1950s,
this is really the start of the deadliest chapter
in terms of Cambodian history.
I can't tell you how unprepared this place was for war.
Cambodia had managed to remain neutral up until 1970.
It was headed by a very popular, charismatic, and smart, sly leader
named Prince Norodom Sihanouk,
who realized if Cambodia gets involved in that war,
it's gonna ruin the country.
So he let the Vietnamese Communists use the eastern border
for the famous Hồ Chí Minh Trail.
But he also looked the other way
when the South Vietnamese chased the Communists into Cambodia.
So the Communists had used that,
and built base areas in Cambodia where they stored weapons.
They had hospitals.
They had recuperation. They had training centers.
We had a difficult time,
especially after the series of Tết Offensive battles.
There were groups we had to meet with
in the Cambodian jungles during those years.
They'd come over the border,
kill South Vietnamese and American soldiers,
and then go back to these safe bases in Cambodia.
So Nixon and his military advisors felt
that this was obviously inflicting huge damage on us.
The secret bombing of Cambodia goes on for months
after month after month.
Ultimately, over 100,000 tons of bombs are dropped on Cambodia.
Now, one can argue that the bombing runs were necessary,
but to keep them secret, for what reason?
The reason being they didn't want the American public to know
that the war was spreading.
Nixon kept this bombing secret from the public and from Congress.
The idea was that the bombing would interfere
with the smuggling of soldiers and supplies into South Vietnam.
What he did was inadvertently drive the North Vietnamese
farther into Cambodia,
where they started to clash with the Cambodians,
destabilized the Cambodian government,
and accidentally precipitated a coup,
a military coup in Cambodia,
that removed their neutralist leader, Prince Sihanouk,
and replaced him with a pro-American leader.
And now, in the spring of 1970,
Nixon and Kissinger authorize sending
not only South Vietnamese but American troops into Cambodia
to go after the North Vietnamese Việt Cộng bases.
Tonight,
American and South Vietnamese units
will attack the headquarters
for the entire Communist military operation in South Vietnam.
It's hard on all of us. I know we're all tired of this.
Tired. But--
You want to get back to Vietnam?
Ah! I never thought I'd be saying that either.
I want to go to Vietnam for a change instead of staying in Cambodia.
This was the single most unpopular escalation of the war.
It brought out the largest demonstrations against Nixon.
Out now! Out now! Out now! Out now!
College campuses just went… berserk.
Leave now! Leave now! Leave now!
Leave now! Leave now! Leave now! Leave now!
Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia on the 30th,
which was Thursday night.
Friday night, students had started to march
in the streets of downtown Kent, right outside the bars.
There was an action against the ROTC building
on Saturday night.
It was an old army barracks at Kent State that was scheduled for demolition.
And it went up in flames.
It was then that the Ohio National Guard came in.
On Monday, we were going to join a national student strike…
Strike! Strike! Strike!
…to end the war in Vietnam.
Strike! Strike! Strike! Strike!
A National Guard commander drove up in a Jeep
and started reading the Riot Act.
Leave this area immediately!
And students just started taunting them back.
"This is our campus. This is our home."
"You're the invaders. You leave. We're not leaving."
The National Guard opened fire with tear gas.
The more militant students, including my brother and I,
were in the Prentice Hall parking lot
at a time when some students picked up some rocks
and started throwing them in the direction of the Guard.
Students then started throwing tear gas canisters back.
Eventually, one troop got down on their knees,
it was Troop G of the Ohio National Guard,
and started aiming in our direction.
It was the first time we had seen them look through the scopes of their rifles.
My first instinct was to stay back.
But I saw my brother doing the opposite. He was carrying a black flag.
And he began to walk in the direction of the Guard.
When I saw the rifles then all kind of line up and point toward him,
I came up behind my brother, and I said,
"Alan, they're aiming right at you."
"Please come back to the parking lot with me."
And just as I said that to my brother,
Troop G got up,
and then they formed this kind of circle, a huddle,
and the next thing I knew,
turned in unison and started firing.
My brother's roommate pulled me behind a parked car,
and that's when I realized it was live ammunition.
We could hear bullets zipping past our heads
and thumping into the ground.
And…
…they continued firing for 13 seconds.
Three feet behind me was Bill Schroeder, who was an ROTC student.
He wasn't involved in the protests, but he was following along.
And there was blood all over his shoulder and his neck.
To my left, I saw a group of students carrying a girl into the dorm yard.
I saw one boy lying face down.
He was lying in a pool of blood that was streaming down the pavement.
A friend of mine came up behind me
and said, "Alan and Tom both got hit."
That was my brother and his roommate.
I learned hours later that he survived the wound,
and so did Tom.
Four students were killed, and nine were injured.
Can you imagine going to school,
joining a protest that many other people were joining,
and ending up dead?
Awful.
Those four students went to school one day and never went home.
You know, we were just four kids, just like them.
Crosby called me. He said, "Well,
I showed Neil this picture."
"I saw him take his acoustic guitar out into the woods."
"And an hour later, he came back with this song called 'Ohio.'"
"And we need to record it now."
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming
We're finally on our own
This summer I hear the drumming
Four dead in Ohio…
We were angry.
A lot of people were very angry about what was happening.
Should have been gone long ago…
US out of Vietnam, for they're being murdered!
Well, the appalling thing is that lots of people said the students deserved it.
When I signed up, I accept the responsibility
that I would be out there quelling any riot
or any particular situation that they needed me in.
And when those kids came out there
and just were involved in that particular situation,
they also accept the responsibility on their shoulders
that they might also be shot.
…of the United States.
But that was part of the attitude
that Nixon was promulgating.
When they engage in violence,
when they break up furniture,
when they terrorize their fellow students
and terrorize the faculty,
then I think "bums" is perhaps too kind a word
to apply to that kind of person.
This seemed to be really a sign
that the government was willing to do anything
to stop the anti-war movement from growing.
Nixon seemed to have realized that this frightened protesters
because he said to one of his aides,
"You know, it really dampens protests if you kill a few."
Remember Kent State?
Didn't that have a hell of an effect, the Kent State thing?
Sure did. Gave them second thoughts.
The right to dissent, the duty to dissent, is necessary
for a democracy to function in any kind of healthy way.
And that's something I think the Vietnam War helped to legitimate
in a way that had not been true before.
I was angry about what happened at Kent State.
They were exercising their constitutional rights.
But veterans not only inherited those rights,
but we fought and bled for those rights.
If I'm gonna go halfway around the world to defend the Constitution,
you better believe that I'm gonna fucking defend it right here.
After I came back from 'Nam, I went to the University of Florida.
I had professors that said, "You know, we're the aggressor in Vietnam."
And they gave me stuff to read.
And so now I'm reading the information that I didn't have before.
And that information was actually making me believe
that, "Wow, we are the aggressors."
"We're the bad guys. We're not the good guys."
It made me lose my respect
for my high school teachers who said the war was right,
my parents, who said the war was right,
the recruiters who said the war was right,
and my government, who said the war was right.
All of those institutions that I trusted,
they led me astray.
There was a beginning of a realization
that this government was not on our side as veterans.
I started hearing about, and running into, veterans
who were now coming back.
They were really bitter.
It made me really angry
because my idea of how war is supposed to be
is World War II films.
And you come home, and there's marches,
and-- and you're a hero, and people are throwing flowers
and are very happy to see you.
We didn't have any of that.
To me, that's one of the biggest tragedies
of the Vietnam War,
the treatment of the troops.
A lot of the guys were telling me that people would call 'em names.
You know, "Oh, you're baby killers." And, you know, "You're murderers!"
I got spit on coming back.
And, uh, people got that right to protest.
But I didn't thinks
that they should be protesting against me, against us.
They sent us out there, they paid for the taxes,
they put the guns in our hands,
they-- they reveled in all the life we took and everything.
And we came home,
and they literally and figuratively spit on us.
Gonna need the elbow straighter than it is now…
I felt very sorry for them.
To tell the truth, I always appreciate
the Americans who came to Vietnam to fight for the South Vietnam.
Even if we're from two different countries,
we can empathize with each other.
You brothers have regained the dignity of being a soldier,
not only as soldiers protecting your country,
but also as soldiers defending another country.
Your spirit is very noble and respectable, no matter the circumstances.
When I got out of Vietnam,
the plane pulled up to the tarmac, and I come down the stairs.
And then my mom and my dad and all my brothers and sisters…
…they came running out…
…on the tarmac
and start hugging me and kissing me.
And I was so happy to see them, and they were so happy to see me.
But I wasn't the same person anymore.
The first couple of nights that I was back,
my brother said I tried to kill him.
I don't remember.
He said he woke up, and I was choking him.
How can you be subjected
to what you've been subjected to for a year
and then come back and be normal?
So I was at my mom's house again.
I'm-- I'm back home.
I'm fighting in my sleep. I'm hollering in my sleep.
She heard my nightmares.
It had everything to do with where I just came from, back from doing.
So she cried out.
She suffered with me.
And that is the truth
of every combat veteran
that don't want to talk about it, that won't talk about it.
And, you know, the inhumanity of it all, who'd wanna listen to it?
A lot of times, it-- that-- that-- those issues leads to suicide
because they feel like they have failed… themselves,
they have failed their families, they have failed their communities.
When I came back in '71, after I left Vietnam,
they hired me to develop a unit,
the Vietnam Vet Resocialization Unit, I called it.
I came out to California.
At that time, there were thousands of Vietnam Air Vets in LA County.
I went all over the city,
and they kept describing this thing, which we now call PTSD,
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
The symptoms were very obvious. It's traumatic stress.
It's delayed, and when it hits, you see violence from the anger.
You see isolation. You see divorce.
You see alcoholism.
You see drug addiction.
We had to battle to get that definition.
I was diagnosed with PTSD in prison.
And that was because of the people that started being concerned
about the number of Vietnam veterans
that's wound up in prison and on drugs and homeless.
I was robbing banks.
But now, my rehab started in prison.
I was able to apologize to my family and to my community.
And accept responsibility for my… conduct.
And the only way you going to change is you've got to face facts.
You've got to be able to tell the truth.
You can face the truth, and you can change things.
After I had been home a while,
the vets that I was interacting with decided,
"We gotta organize this in such a way people can understand us."
Father of all life…
Vietnam Veterans Against the War was made up of people
who'd been to Vietnam,
who came back from Vietnam during the war,
and protested the war.
We spent years trying to convince the public
to listen to GIs who had been in Vietnam.
And then in 1971,
so they started having what were called Winter Soldier Hearings.
The Winter Soldiers Investigation
was to expose what was happening in Vietnam,
what really was going on.
I got a telephone call inviting me to go to Detroit
to testify at the Winter Soldier Investigation.
And they said, "If there are any Vietnam veterans that would be willing
to tell the truth about what they did in Vietnam, come forward."
So I went forward.
Whatever we could say or do to-- to hopefully end this war
would be a good thing.
We wanna get into the atrocities, but we also want
to get into, you know, "What are we doing over there in the first place?"
How do these atrocities get to be committed?
You know, they just don't happen.
I saw one case where there were two prisoners,
and one prisoner was, uh, staked out on the ground,
and he was cut open while he was alive, and part of his insides were cut out.
And they told the other prisoner,
if he didn't tell them what they wanted to know, that they would kill him.
I don't know what he said because he spoke Vietnamese,
but then they killed him after that anyway.
I came home from Vietnam in-- in November of '67.
I became against the war in '71.
And I'm embarrassed that it took so long.
You have to be able to live with yourself.
I couldn't live with myself supporting a lie. How could I do that?
When I heard his story,
burning houses with people inside,
cutting off their ears and wearing them on his belt,
decapitating people,
it was a horrible, horrible story.
And one that I felt needed to be spoken about,
and that's when I wrote "Oh! Camil."
Oh, Camil
Tell me, what did your mother say
When you left those people Out in the fields
Rotting along with the hay…?
My mother hated it,
uh, because there's a line that says, "What did your mother say
when you left all those people in the fields dying along with the hay?"
Something like that.
I just couldn't believe it,
that this famous person is singing a song about me.
I'm a nobody, and he's singing a song about me.
It was Scott Camil, who was a very decorated American soldier,
who finally realized that his heart was telling him that it was wrong.
What incredible courage to make that change.
And being able to realize,
"What I did, as horrible as it was,
can be somewhat rectified if I fight with all my might against it."
If you have demonstrations, if you block the streets,
if you raise hell,
you can get your word out.
And so we decided to march in Washington.
- What do we want? - Peace!
- When do we want it? - Now!
- What do we want? - Peace!
When do we want it?
We're trying to bring home the fact that the Vietnam veterans
who served in that war are disgusted with it, are sickened by it,
and want it ended now before another person dies,
before any more Vietnamese die, and before any more GIs die.
…United States Marine Corps…
Vietnam veterans marched on their capital, denounced the war,
and threw their medals away.
Tim Bagwell from Sacramento, California,
still on active duty, and I say, get the hell out!
Yeah!
One Purple Heart.
This is for the brothers and sisters at camp.
We had each other, and we had each other's backs,
but our country didn't have our back.
This weekend, portions of a highly classified Pentagon document
came to light for all the world to see,
brought cries of outrage from Washington.
The New York Times began publishing parts of a voluminous report
that the Pentagon had drawn up
on the causes and conduct of American involvement in Vietnam.
Back in 1967,
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered up the Pentagon Papers,
as we know them…
which was a massive study,
an encyclopedia,
of the history of American involvement in Vietnam.
And it concluded that the United States was not going to win the war in Vietnam.
And then in 1971,
some of that information began to leak out.
I think the, uh, publication of those documents is long overdue,
and to my mind it indicates that, uh, something far from the truth
has been disclosed to the American public in the last, uh, decade.
For journalists, it was the kind of solid information
that's almost impossible to come by on a regular basis.
The Pentagon Papers demonstrated the fact
that those in power had continually been lying to people
about what they knew was the situation in Vietnam.
I feel like everybody should know what's going on,
and I don't like the idea of our government having
all these, um, secrets, separate secrets from the people.
We-- The people that repre--
that are in the government are supposed to represent us.
We learned how big the gap was
between what presidents were saying and what they believed.
That every American president, from Truman on,
lied to the American people.
The thing, though, that, Henry, that to me is just unconscionable,
this is treasonable action on the part of the bastards that put it out!
Exactly.
Doesn't it involve secure information,
a lot of other things?
What kind of people would do such things?
In 1971,
Nixon becomes the first president to have really wall-to-wall recording
of all his conversations in the Oval Office.
H.R. Haldeman decides that Nixon needs a voice-activated system
'cause Nixon just will never remember to turn it on
and will never remember to turn it off.
So this is a great boon for historians
because Nixon put in the system and more or less forgot about it.
The prime suspect, according to your friend Rostow you're quoting,
is a gentleman by the name of Ellsberg,
who is a left-winger that's now with the RAND Corporation,
who also has a set of these documents.
Subpoena them. Christ, get them.
Daniel Ellsberg was one of the authors of the Pentagon Papers.
In Boston, Dr. Daniel Ellsberg,
the man named as the source of the Pentagon copy
that appeared in the New York Times,
turned himself in today to federal authorities.
How can you measure the jeopardy I'm in,
whether it's 10 years, 20 years, 115 years,
rather ludicrous, uh, amounts like that,
to the penalty that has been paid already by 50,000 American families here
and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese families?
And it also was a test of journalists' freedom and independence
because the Nixon administration made a tremendous effort
to keep the Pentagon Papers from being known.
How do you characterize this suit by the government?
As a suit for censorship.
And in a famous court decision,
the Supreme Court ruled that the papers could be published in newspapers.
We're up against an enemy, a conspiracy.
They're using any means.
We are going to use any means. Is that clear?
Nixon was paranoid.
Now, even paranoids have enemies, and he certainly had them.
He made lists of his enemies.
Nixon sets up his own little bucket shop, the White House Plumbers,
to conduct political warfare against the American people
through espionage, through sabotage, through bugging, through burglaries.
Plumbers break into the office
of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist in California…
in order to steal Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatric files,
which would then be used to blackmail Daniel Ellsberg.
Fortunately for Ellsberg, the, uh, Plumbers found nothing.
Ellsberg releasing the Pentagon Papers to the public
was an extremely important event.
I think we live with the consequences today.
We don't believe a word the government says.
When you have American leaders admitting that the war was unwinnable,
it's a bitter pill to swallow that they knew.
They knew all along.
We realized that our heroes were just liars.
I think we recognized we'd lost our moral compass,
and we haven't recovered.
The Pentagon Papers helped turn the tide in the war.
It also leads directly to Watergate.
Well, Nixon sets up the Plumbers to go after Ellsberg,
and then the Plumbers are involved
in the break-in at the Watergate.
On the sixth floor of the building behind me,
five men with electronic gear
were caught in the offices of the Democratic National Committee.
Less than a year later is the Watergate break-in.
Many terrible things happen in the interim,
but that's when the clock starts ticking.
The Army One, the helicopter, just before the Nixons appeared…
So, the road to Watergate begins in Vietnam.
It's the empire crumbling.