Return to the Charles A. Thomas Papers (KSU May 4 Collection)
MISSION BETRAYED: Richard Nixon
and the Scranton Commission Inquiry into Kent State.
CHAPTER
ONE: Nixon Cunctator.
According to the Memoirs of President Richard Nixon, the early afternoon of May 4, 1970 was quiet. He was planning a vacation for the coming weekend in Florida. He took a nap after lunch and then called in his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, to discuss plans for the trip. He noticed that “Bob” looked uneasy. “Something just came over the wires about a demonstration at Kent State,” Haldeman explained, “The National Guard opened fire and some students got shot.”
“Are they dead?” Nixon asked.
“I’m afraid so. Nobody knows why it happened.”[1]
According to Nixon’s account, written eight years after the fact, this was all that was said. Haldeman, as usual, took notes during the conversation and wrote them up in journal form that evening. According to his version, the President had quite a bit more to say – and was less concerned with the human implications of the bloodshed than with the political ramifications for his administration. The journal entry also betrays more than a hint that he hoped this show of force might help achieve a primary goal of his presidency: to crush the student antiwar movement that had driven his predecessor Lyndon Johnson from office:
He…kept
after me all day for more facts. Hoping
rioters had provoked the shooting…
There’s an opportunity in this crisis as in all others – but it’s very hard to identify & know how to handle it. Main need right now is to maintain calm & hope this serves to dampen other demonstrations rather than firing them up.[2]
At 5:30 p.m. – after Wall Street, already on the decline
since the President’s invasion of Cambodia four days before, closed on its
single worst day’s finish since the Kennedy assassination – White House press
secretary Ronald Zeigler read the official administration statement on the
killings in Ohio:
This should remind us all once again that when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy. It is my hope that this tragic and unfortunate incident will strengthen the determination of all the Nation’s campuses – administrators, faculty, and students alike -- to stand firmly for the right that exists in this country to dissent and just as firmly against the resort to violence as a means of such expression.[3]
The statement’s callous tone struck some as a verbose paraphrase of the reflexive response of Nixon’s Middle American supporters: “They had it coming.” Some of the younger White House staff members “refused to believe that the president had seen the statement before it was issued, much less written it.”[4] Actually, Nixon had personally dictated it, in even more brutal terms than the official issuance used:
every Am feels deepest
sympathy for families of those who died in these incidents
This should give added impetus to the efforts of resp. ldrs in coll and U fac & stud. to stand firmly for princip & right of peaceful dissent & just as firmly against the resort to violence.Violence can only result in tragedy.[5]
These notes included
comments that Haldeman was too discreet to include even in his personal
journal: “The need to mobilize
Congress now to stand up don’t
waffle under student riots resist gov.
by demonstrations.”
Later that evening, Nixon’s chief rhetorical surrogate, Vice President Spiro Agnew, amplified on the administration’s lack of remorse. Kent State, he told the American Retail Association, had been “predictable and avoidable”. He had “called attention to the grave dangers which accompany the new politics of violence and confrontation which have found so much favor on our campuses.” The college antiwar movement was no more than a front for a “calculated, consistent, and well-publicized barrage of criticism against the principles of this nation.”[6]
But the President, when newly elected and anxious to pull the mantle of statesman over his accustomed garb of political street fighter, had appointed more sensitive men to his cabinet, whose presence he was by now coming to regret. Two of them, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird and Secretary of State William Rogers, had been so obviously opposed to his illegal invasion of Cambodia that he had cut them completely out of the preparations for it. Others knew as soon as they heard what had happened at Kent State that the White House “get tough” on campus dissent policy had gone way too far. Secretary of Labor George Shultz watched the television news coverage of the killings in his office with presidential speechwriter William Safire. The network ran the footage of the Guard firing twice. The first time, Shultz asked, “Did that sound like a salvo to you?” After the rerun, the former Marine officer answered his own question: “That was a salvo.” “Shultz actually seemed groggy after the second running of the news film.”[7] Shultz was one of several cabinet officers who received frantic calls about the killings from their college-aged children .[8] But the most fated of those filial pleas went to John Ehrlichman, the President’s chief domestic advisor, for he would become determined to prevent Kent State from ever happening again, and risk his future in the administration in the process.
Some time before, Ehrlichman had befriended Joseph Rhodes Jr., the student body president at the California Institute of Technology. When a confrontation between demonstrators and Governor Ronald Reagan over the People’s Park at Berkeley seemed about to erupt in bloodshed, it was a call from Rhodes to Ehrlichman had gotten the White House to block Reagan’s designs. Thereafter the two men resolved that, despite their widely differing views and associations, they would work together in any cause that would prevent the loss of life. But as the administration’s attitudes had hardened through the spring of 1970, Rhodes had let his ties with Ehrlichman and his assistant Egil Krogh languish. Now, watching the news from Ohio on television at the headquarters of the National Student Association, Rhodes was overpowered by the guilty sense that, if he had maintained those ties, he somehow could have prevented Kent State. This agonizing conviction was further entrenched as the father of slain coed Allison Krause appeared on the screen, tear-streaked face contorted with grief as he asked why his daughter had to die because she disagreed with the Nixon Administration.[9]
As the sun set, and throughout that darkest of nights, the students of America replied to Nixon and Agnew. By the next dawn, the national student strike – an almost tentative gesture begun at a few colleges and universities in response to the invasion of Cambodia – was spreading so fast the wire services could not keep up with it. Nixon “did not even faintly envision the emotional torrent that the Kent State incident would set off across the country.”[10] The horror in Ohio was spread across the front page of virtually every newspaper in the country and the world. Photographs – most usually of a young girl screaming, arms akimbo, over the bloody corpse of one of the victims, or of the Guardsmen deliberately leveling their weapons to fire – shouted even louder than the headlines.
The Guard had immediately circulated the story that the men had fired because a sniper had fired on them. This was a non-defense: Army and Guard doctrine both called for a formation under sniper attack to retire until teams of marksmen could suppress the sniper fire. That aside, a reporter standing with the students during the shooting “did not see any indication of sniper fire nor was the sound of gunfire audible before the Guard volley.”[11] Reaction very tough to the four killed at Kent State yesterday,” Haldeman noted glumly, “All our people trying to figure out how best to handle.” He hoped that the shock and outrage could be defused by news of spectacular victories by the American invasion force in Cambodia. “If not, we’re in for a bundle of trouble.”[12]
By Wednesday the 6th the White House had patched together some public relations gambits to demonstrate “concern”. John Ehrlichman, as the “show liberal” in the administration, arranged for six Kent State students to get an interview with the President. It was the first of his many gambits to ameliorate the crisis that would fail:
They were mostly tongue-tied before the president. During one full hour, the communication hardly went beyond halting, embarrassing exchanges. The students, despite their obvious agitation, remained frozen in the presence of the chief executive. Nixon himself found the session trying and unproductive, a test of patience rather than a valuable encounter.[13]
Part of the reason became obvious at a staff meeting a
little later in the day. Here Nixon
made it obvious that he didn’t care about communicating with students. The campus demonstrators were the enemy and
the question was not whether to crush them, but when. “Very aware of the point that the goal of Left is to panic us –
so we must not fall into their trap.
P. realizes he’s up against a real tough
one. K[issinger] wants to just let the
students go for a couple of weeks, then move in and clobber them. E[hrlichman] wants to communicate –
esp.symbolically. All agreed to the
plan – but K. very concerned that we not
appear to give in in any way. Thinks P.
can really clobber them if we just wait for Cambodian success.[14]
Ehrlichman had an idea of how to elicit the kind of
communication that might cause both sides to draw back, perhaps gotten from
press accounts of an interview with Kent State’s hapless president Robert White
(who had been out of town during the key events leading up to the shootings and
who had, twenty-five minutes before the fatal gunfire, gone off-campus to
lunch) interrupted what he admitted were protracted ramblings to suggest the
incident should be investigated by some kind of independent commission. Nixon was immediately wary. “Wants to hold off on apptg special
commission re Kent State Feels it may
be a mistake – so wait a little.”
The President expanded on his dislike for the idea to
Haldeman later that afternoon:
EOB [Executive Office
Building]
1445 [2:45 p.m.] re student crisis
q. of what to do
consider the Comm
but not as Kent State
whole matter of unrest re: ROTC,
war, curriculum, environment, Black
Panther,
&
Cambodia
find more eff. way to communicate –
in view of tragedy K State, Yale, Ohio State….
-- get bkgrd of reasons for riots at
various campuses.[15]
Aside from which, he scheduled a whole series of public
relations initiatives: he would meet with university presidents (of his
choosing), hold a press conference Friday evening, and meet with the nation’s
governors on Monday. He appointed
Alexander Heard, universally-respected chancellor of Vanderbilt University, as
his special advisor on colleges and youth.
But a series of events now conspired to play on the President’s paranoid
tendencies and harden his attitudes toward his young critics. The front page of the New York Times
for Thursday May 7th headlined the story that his own Interior
Secretary, Walter Hickel, had charged his administration with failing the
country’s youth. Hickel was ostracized
and fired after the matter had lapsed from the public’s truncated attention. But Nixon now felt confirmed in his belief
that he could not even trust his own cabinet members. On Thursday the head of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice
Department advised that, on the basis of information that the FBI had already
developed at Kent State, it might be necessary to indict the Guardsmen and
others for conspiring to violate the civil rights of the slain students.[16] That evening on the David Frost television
program, his impetuous Vice President Spiro Agnew blurted out that, if no
sniper had fired on the Guardsmen, and they had killed the students in “the
heat of anger”, he as an attorney would have to assess it as second-degree
murder.[17]
By that time, people were already entering Washington to
participate in a rally on Saturday to protest the invasion of Cambodia and the
killings at Kent State, for which they also blamed him. As their numbers swelled, the denizens of
the White House succumbed to something akin to hysteria. Its grounds were completely surrounded by
two concentric rings of D.C. transit buses parked bumper-to-bumper. According to the newly-appointed Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, this was done because “this same group that was at
Kent” was plotting to get a student killed on the White House grounds.[18] As the president’s press secretary recalled
it, “If some made it over the bus wall in numbers, they could be met by
National Guardsmen who had been brought into the White House and bivouacked in
our halls and offices.”[19] In case the militiamen were overwhelmed by
the mob, regular troops from the U.S. Third Army were stationed in the nearby
Executive Office Building.
The President fled before the invaders to Camp David,
there to immerse himself in briefing books preparatory for the Friday evening
press conference, which he now dreaded.
(“Had said absolutely no phone calls after [because he was really
concerned and unsure after this one].)”[20] From that distance, he rejected Ehrlichman’s
latest conciliatory gestures – particularly using the press conference to
present his new youth advisor. “not go
thru w/ Heard thing – shldn’t rush too fast
hold til Mon P. wants to be
there when he comes.”[21]
Then two dramatic episodes occurred that suggested to the
President that he need not even bother negotiating with the Enemy. The press conference he had dreaded turned
out to be a walk-over; the timidity of the reporters rendered it a “pallid…
synthetic ritual… a pale shadow of the passion and trauma of the nation… a
fusillade of spitballs at 50 paces.”[22] And the great demonstration that assembled
on the Ellipse across from the White House the next day disintegrated into
chaos while the preliminaries were still in progress, neutralized by the
discord among its organizers (assiduously sown by government agents in their
midst) and the numbing dread in the minds of all present evoked by the bloody
example of Kent State (“These people here understand that we are surrounded by
fully armed troops, and that if we started anything we’d be destroyed.”)[23]
Between the two fell the shadow that led Haldeman to
label May 9th “the weirdest day so far”.[24] Manic with relief at his easy victory over
the press, the President countermanded his own order that no phone calls be
taken. He stayed on the phone from the
time the conference ended until the next dawn, fifty calls in all. Then he disappeared from the White House,
throwing the Secret Service into a panic.
Accompanied only by his valet, he sallied out into the darkest hour
before dawn, into the midst of a hundred thousand demonstrators gathering for
the rally. He would communicate with
the young himself, without any advisors or commissions, and show them the error
of their ways (“lift them a bit out of the miserable intellectual wasteland in
which they now wander aimlessly around.”)[25]
By the time the Secret Service caught up with him, he was
wandering alone and unmolested through the sea of protestors around the Lincoln
Memorial, chatting with some of them aimlessly and even dissociatively, without
drawing so much as a sharp retort. His
demeanor – rambling softly, frequently inaudible, eyes locked on his own feet –
elicited not a single hostile impulse, but something like concern from his
young listeners (“I felt pity because he was so pathetic, and then just plain
fear to think that he’s running the country.”)[26] For his part, Nixon could be excused for
forming the impression that the students were nothing he need fear, and he
interpreted this as a sign of weakness.
The following day, the Gallup Poll – a source the
President consulted before any major decision – reported that a slender
majority of Americans continued to support Nixon even after the invasion of
Cambodia. The field work was done on
May 2nd and 3rd, and did not reflect the impact of the
Kent State incident.[27] But he now decided that the people – the
“real Americans” – were with him. That
and the weakness he had seen first-hand in the ranks of the student protestors
may explain why, when Alexander Heard arrived at the White House for the first
meeting with the President and his aides, he was more tolerated than consulted:
Had our first meeting w/
Chancellor Heard of Vanderbilt who the P. let himself get snookered into
appointing as a
special advisor re campus situation for sixty
days. A bad choice – cause he’s clearly
not on our side in any way… Pure window dressing of a questionable nature – but
it did get pretty good publicity.[28]
Haldeman, who realized that his chief was locked into a
downward spiral of insomnia, overwork, and obsession with his Enemies, was
hanging on until he could get him away for a vacation in Florida. “This whole period of two weeks of tension
and crisis preceded by two weeks of very tough decision making has taken its
toll. P. won’t admit it – but he’s
really tired, and is, as some have observed, letting himself slip back into the
old ways.”[29] The President did let himself be talked into
spending the following weekend in Florida but, as Haldeman fretted, once there,
he never did relax. The evening he
returned to Washington, Monday May 18th, during a dinner with his
aides aboard the presidential yacht, he showed enough of the dark side now
emerging to dominate his personality to appall the toughest of his aides:
The President’s finger
circled the top of his wineglass slowly.
“One day we’ll get them – we’ll get them – we’ll get
them on the ground where we want
them. And we’ll stick our heels in,
step on them hard and twist – get them on the floor
and step on them, crush them, show
no mercy.[30]
Such was the President’s mood when Ehrlichman tried to
revive the idea of a commission inquiry into Kent State. He wrote to Bernard Segal, President of the
American Bar Association, asking the A.B.A. “to determine and report to the
President how campus violence can be avoided in the near future.”[31] The following day Nixon met with Segal and
the Board to pursue the idea. But he
didn’t want an inquiry, but a condemnation.
Rather than an investigation of “campus violence”, he wanted one into
“student violence”. Furthermore, he
already knew what it should find out:
Campus disorders were caused by the plotting of a handful of radicals
who exploited the neuroses of spoiled students until they erupted in violence,
which “weak” college administrators were too spineless to contain. The radicals were members of a national
conspiracy – “the roots of the Kent State incident lie in Berkeley, Ohio State,
and Michigan” – funded by sinister foreign powers (it went without saying,
communists). Although the “educators”
blamed the unrest on the war in Southeast Asia, there was really no connection. The protests would continue after all the
troops were withdrawn, because the real aim of the radicals was to destroy
America and the Free World. The
majority of the students really supported him, but were “silenced, terrorized”
by the “totalitarianism of the left”.[32]
Joe Rhodes, the Harvard graduate fellow who had blamed
himself for Kent State because he hadn’t stayed in touch with White House
figures like Ehrlichman, had since been making the rounds of cabinet officers,
trying to persuade them to resign en masse to protest the murders. He was in George Romney’s office at Housing
and Urban Development when he heard of Nixon’s plan for a commission on
“student violence”. He immediately
wrote a memo based on his visceral reaction to the idea: “This is a cruel trick
to play on the American people, to take their pain and aim it at their
children.” In it, he counter-proposed a
commission on “Equal Justice Under the Law”.
He sent it to the White House, got on immediate response, and assumed it
had been ignored.[33]
On “Face the Nation”, one of the Sunday morning gamut of
news/public affairs television programs, presidential spokesman Herbert Klein
announced that a commission was being formed “to get to the bottom of the Kent
State tragedy”.[34] There was no immediate followup. Meanwhile and in secret, the regime was
assessing its preferred responses to the outbreak of student protest. On the West Coast, seventeen hundred
military, government, and corporate executives met to weigh the results of
Operation Cable Splicer III, the latest in a series of war games simulating the
armed suppression of mass demonstrations at high schools and colleges like the
student strike of that month.[35]
The President’s greater faith in such alternatives may explain why his advisor on academic affairs was being allowed to languish unconsulted. A week after Klein’s hint about a presidential commission, and with still no sign of action on any phase of the crisis, Alexander Heard went public with his concerns on ABC’s “Issues and Answers” program. His plea for the country’s youth – “They not only have to have a voice, but they have to feel they have a voice”[36] – could as easily have been for himself. If Nixon took any note of this, he gave no clue except for a terse order to Haldeman: “put Heard ‘til next week.”[37] There were no further references to a commission during the rest of the month. Nixon felt that national sentiment was swinging against the demonstrators and that all he needed to do was play for time.
CHAPTER
TWO: Mission Impossible.
As of the first day of June, major newspapers like the Wall
Street Journal were still voicing shock and horror at the bloody events of
the previous month. This was a
journalistic trend that had already peaked and, as the papers responded to
pressure from corporate owners and major advertisers, would sharply reverse
itself. But as of June 1st,
the Journal’s editorial page was still bold enough to compare Kent State
to the British massacre of Indian demonstrators at Amritsar, which had marked
the beginning of the end of the Empire’s rule over the subcontinent. It warned that “the Nixon administration has
not seemed especially concerned about the dangers inherent in the situation to
traditions of individual liberty.”[38]
The White House was very much less than “especially
concerned”. The President was convinced
that “real Americans” were with him.
Events in the middle of the country did not contradict him. The next day the Ohio House of
Representatives passed Bill 1219, providing for fines and arrests for students,
and automatic dismissal for faculty members, “proven” to have taken part in
demonstrations. The Bill provided for
removing the standard of what constituted “proof” from the university
administrations and vested it in the same Ohio state attorney general’s office
that had maintained undercover agents on the Kent State campus.[39] Ohio thus became the first state to enshrine
the conservative moral axiom of Kent State – that it was all the students’
fault that they had been killed – in legislation. Part of its ongoing tradition of reaction, this act may have
been one of the reasons that Nixon considered making his first campus
appearance after the killings at Ohio State, before rejecting the move as too
risky.[40]
Meanwhile the President was proceeding with his own
solution to the problem of demonstrations against his policies. On June 5th, he assembled the
heads of the mega-intelligence services – the CIA, the FBI, the Defense
Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency – and marshaled them for
a coordinated campaign of spying on American citizens. “Certainly hundreds, perhaps thousands, of
Americans – mostly under 30 – are determined to destroy society,” he told them.[41] Nixon was so riveted on this grand design he
never even intuited the supreme irony of the situation: the plan only consisted
of what the intelligence chiefs had been doing all along, and would continue
doing after it had been abandoned.
As he emerged from the meeting with the superspies, he
imparted some on-going advice to Haldeman about the off-year elections due in
four months, which he hoped would give him a solidly Republican Congress. He was so sure the nation was turning
against student demonstrators that he urged every attempt should be made to
identify them with the Democrats:
1330 [1:30 p.m.] hang all Dem cands w/ youth deal
make them be for the young
radicals
esp T Kennedy
affirm
or deny[42]
Two days later, he thought
he had confirmation in another Gallup Poll. This one showed he had risen 2 points, from 57 to 59%, from his
pre-Cambodian approval rating. Part of
the increase was based on “overwhelming (5-to-1) opposition of the adult
population to recent student strikes that focused on Mr. Nixon’s Cambodian action.”[43]
But he received unwelcome news from within his own House
almost as soon. The month before he had
dispatched eight young staff members to “sample opinion” on the American
campus. They were all his partisans and
good Republicans, so perhaps he was expecting them to ratify his beliefs. But – “They reportedly told the President
that the extreme opposition to the Cambodian operation and the Vietnam War was
not a fringe phenomenon but a widespread condition in the universities.” That and the savage reception that had
greeted the opponents at Kent State had driven “many moderate students into the
arms of the radicals.”[44] This was not what the President wanted to
hear; most of the eight found their prospects within the administration
suddenly dead-ended. Ironically, one of
the survivors of such candor, Hugh Sloan – who made one of the most alarming
reports – went on to serve as treasurer for the Committee to Re-elect the
President. His refusal to play an
active role in covering up the Watergate debacle was a major factor in ending
the Nixon Presidency.
Joseph Rhodes was in his office at the Ford Foundation in
New York City on the 10th when he took a call from Egil Krogh at the
White House. Krogh said “someone” there
wanted Rhodes on the “campus violence commission” because of the memo he had
written on May 20th. That
“someone” feared that if a student with Rhodes’ credibility was not on the
commission, the nation’s youth would regard the whole initiative as a sham,
despair of any hope that the administration would deal with the crisis
honestly, and as a result, “major civil disorders” would cost more lives in the
fall. Rhodes and Krogh set up a meeting in Washington two days later.
The next day Harvard – regarded by many contemporary
historians as the principal exponent of the American imperium in Academe[45]
-- held its commencement exercises. The
proceedings were fraught with frustrations for President Nathan G. Pusey. Some graduating seniors refused to wear
traditional gowns. Many who did adorned
them with red strike or white-dove peace armbands. Law graduate James Foster urged attending parents to “join with
us to wake a sleeping nation” from its deadly peril. Around thirty residents of surrounding neighborhoods threatened
by Harvard’s expansion interrupted the proceedings to protest.[46] By the time Pusey got his turn at the
rostrum, it was as much to vent his spleen as to wish the graduates luck. After a very brief preamble, in which he
saluted himself for his minor stand against Senator Joseph McCarthy twenty
years before, he launched into a lengthy attack on those he nominated as
McCarthy’s successors: “But this time the attack comes not from the outside but
from within, from extremist splinter groups of the New Left made up of students
and – I am sorry to acknowledge – also of some faculty who for reasons not
quite clear to me would like to see our colleges and universities denigrated,
maligned, and even shut down.[47] He went on to rail against the “Big Lie”
and how the SDS had allegedly used it at Harvard over the past four years.
Pusey’s views, never recklessly progressive, had hardened
the previous spring when the SDS had seized the administration building. The faculty condemned the action, just as
unanimously as they did Pusey for sending club-swinging police in to clear the
building without considering any alternatives.
Some thought it the panic move of a man who knew the radicals would find
exactly what they did – and what they published in the underground Old Mole
newspaper – files laying bare the extensive ties of the Harvard faculty with
the Central Intelligence Agency.[48] But in Pusey’s case it seems much more
likely the action of a distant, mean-spirited old man who had no empathy with
the generation he was supposed to teach.
He had summarized his own academic philosophy by saying “it has always
been and remains a primary responsibility of universities to work to protect
individuals and societies against mistaken ideas.”[49] “To most of the liberal faculty, he was a
patrician pighead”; as Martin Peretz put it, “The smug sense of order in Nat
Pusey’s placid face may have encouraged the kids to think that chaos was more
fun.”[50]
Whatever his motives, the decision to send in the police
at the moment of crisis finished him as President of Harvard. His scheduled retirement was moved up to
the spring of 1970. As a lame duck, all
he could do was wander the landscape looking for fora from which to denounce
the radicals. Richard Nixon was eager
to provide them. Long before the volley
at Kent State and the upheaval it triggered, Pusey – along with former campaign
aide turned amateur demographer Kevin Phillips, who had “turned” Nixon “on” to
ethnic division and the “incorrigible meanness of the American voter”[51]
– had become the cynosure of Nixon’s academic strategy:
1230
E[hrlichman]
“L”* Pusey report to Ray Price – copy
1615 [4:15 p.m.]
…also Kevin Phillips talk at Yale
have everyone read it – political people…
“L” get me all three – and Pusey
also get Pusey thing out to these same people[52]
[DOCUMENT REMOVED FROM
FILE BY NATIONAL ARCHIVES/NPM]
P. absorbed in basic & philosophical
problems – as outlined in Phillips thesis re lack of a conservative elite – and
the Pusey report re the problems at Harvard. Trying to figure where to put together our base. Broods frequently over how we communicate
with young and blacks.[53]
Perhaps unsurprisingly,
the administration would invite Pusey to testify before the new “campus
violence” commission. Unstinting praise
for Pusey’s commencement diatribe by columnist James Reston – and for a similar
address on the same occasion by student anti-communist Steven Kelman (see
below) – was the first major sign of
the rightward swing by the prestige press after Kent State. Reston saw these addresses as an indication
that “the moderates are beginning to challenge the extremists” for control of
the universities.[54] (Reston’s calling these two “moderates” is
easier to understand if recalling that five years before, he had denounced the
first tentative teach-ins on Vietnam as subversive exercises producing
“propaganda of the most vicious nature”.)[55]
While lining up academicians like Pusey and Kelman (who
would also be called as a witness), the White House was also giving some
thought to the commission’s staff.
Gordon Liddy suggested
useful guy in Admin –
not in W.H.
Bob King – great
hand-holder – conspirator
not a manager
good for a commission
our man –
completely loyal…
valuable
relationship w/ FBI…
need some
one in the intelligence apparatus
more real
loyalists around[56]
King, an ex-FBI agent and
former aide in Nixon’s 1956 campaign, was also an assistant to Richard Bissel,
the CIA architect of the Bay of Pigs fiasco,[57]
and implicated with Bissel and Nixon in the plots of assassinate Fidel Castro.[58]
The same day Joe Rhodes arrived in town, feeling not
unlike a secret agent himself. He went
to see Egil Krogh at the Executive Office Building; the coast was clear because
Nixon and his entourage were in the act of leaving for Key Biscayne. Rhodes told Krogh that he would agree to
serve on the commission if it was understood that he would speak his mind no
matter how it reflected on the Nixon Administration. Krogh replied, fine, that’s why Ehrlichman wants you
included. (Off the probably-tapped
White House phone line, Krogh had no qualms about identifying the “someone”
they had talked about on the 10th.) Rhodes must cry foul if it even looked like the commission were
going to perpetrate a whitewash of Kent State.
If he didn’t speak out, “Haldeman will win. That’s off the record. On
the record, if you do say what you feel, we’ll crush you.” Rhodes understood. Ehrlichman had already placed himself in deep jeopardy by pushing
the commission in the first place. He
and Krogh were behind Rhodes, but could not let on – and neither could Rhodes.
The next day, from the presidential retreat in Key
Biscayne, the White House announced the formation of the President’s Commission
on Campus Unrest. Ehrlichman would
later assert that he had solicited the names of the members from Bernard Segal,
with inputs from Robert Finch, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Leonard Garment, John
Mitchell, “and others.”[59] The final selections, in addition to
Rhodes, were
-- James F.Ahern, chief of the New Haven police.
-- Benjamin Davis, a retired Air Force general currently
serving as Public Safety Director, Cleveland, Ohio
-- Bayless Manning, dean of the Stanford Law School
-- James Cheek, president of Howard University
-- Martha Derthick, a political science professor from
Boston College who had done her dissertation on the National Guard.
-- Revius Ortique, president of the all-black National
Bar Association.
-- Edwin Canham, editor of the Christian Science
Monitor.
Four of the eight were black, a possible concession to
the murders of black students at Jackson State and black civilians in Augusta
in the weeks since Kent State (the press counted Joe Rhodes, who was actually
half Filipino-Chinese.) But Davis had
been widely excoriated by black militants as an “Uncle Tom”. Cheek’s Howard University was fatally
dependent on federal funds. Only
Ortique, a veteran of the southern anti-poverty advocacy wars – and currently
front-line witness to Nixon’s illegal agenda for destroying the anti-poverty
agency through his agents Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney – might be in a
mood to resist the administration (or might be too burned out to try). After doing her dissertation on the National
Guard, Derthick seemed to have lost interest in the subject, and any other
phase of the current crisis, and may have been selected as the “show
woman”. Manning and Canham were
unknown quantities. The only sure ally
Joe Rhodes might have was Jim Ahern, the seminarian turned up-from-the-ranks
police chief who more than anyone else had thwarted the White House scenario
for crushing the student movement at Yale on May Day. His was another selection that must have been run past the
Haldeman-Mitchell axis while it was otherwise occupied.
Suddenly Joe Rhodes was a celebrity: the only student on
a presidential commission on campus unrest, now acknowledged as the nation’s
number one problem.[60] Reporters descended en masse on his untidy
bachelor suite at the Harvard graduate school.
Krogh (and by implication Ehrlichman) had encouraged him to speak his
mind, and this was the obvious occasion:
My
responsibility is not to the President, but to the people. I have a solemn responsibility to find out
what is going on…
One
of the things I want to try to figure out is who gave what orders to send
police on campus, and were they thinking about ‘campus bums’ when they pulled
the trigger. If the President’s and
Vice President’s statements are killing people, I want to know that.
The reference could not
have been more loaded. President Nixon
had stoked student resentment three days before Kent State by referring to
protestors as “these bums, y’know, blowing up the campuses”. The epithet, coming in the wake of the
Cambodian incursion, had the effect of gasoline poured on a lit flare. Outside the morgue where he had identified
his daughter’s corpse, Arthur Krause had defiantly told reporters, “My daughter
was not a bum.” Five days later, Jane
Fonda had welcomed the throng to the May 9th rally by shouting,
“Greetings, fellow bums!” That said,
Rhodes pressed on; citing the experience at the People’s Park in 1969 that had
cemented his relationship with John Ehrlichman, he pointed to Governor Ronald Reagan
as a typical of an official “bent on killing people for his own political
gain.”[61] He made these statements in the full
knowledge of their implications, and still, never dreamed of the furor they
would touch off.
Bob Reinhold, the reporter who had interviewed Rhodes,
dallied at Harvard another day to record what was billed as the last public
utterance of Dr. Nathan Pusey. “He
stepped down two years earlier than expected in the wake of sometimes
tumultuous student demonstrations in 1969 and 1970.” It proved anti-climactic.
Pusey inveighed against demonstrators for so long that he was finally
reduced to attacking those who “tack posters on trees, spray paint walls and
public monuments, break down bushes, trample grass, and discard trash by the
roadside.”[62] And that would have been his last public
word on the subject if not for the appearance the President would arrange for
him before the Commission.
Reinhold’s editors made their statement on the Commission
in the same edition. They charged that
it was redundant, duplicating the work of previous commissions that had studied
the injustices inhering in American society.
“The need now is to act on what is already known.” This commission was even more superfluous
because the cause of the crisis in Academe was already obvious:
It ought to be clear to
Mr. Nixon by now that the disastrous combination of the Cambodian adventure and
the tragedies at Kent and Jackson --
and not the hallucinations of a
fringe of extremist students – has aroused hitherto moderate students to a new
level of anger and frustration.
Can the President be b lind to the harm
done by the divisive rhetoric with which members of his official family have
tried to turn the so-called ‘silent majority’
not just against violent dissenters but against concerned young people who want
their Government to end the war and to fight injustice at home?[63]
But the big news about the Commission was, appropriately,
on the front page the following morning.
Vice President Agnew, in Detroit for a Republican fund-raiser, charged
that Rhodes did not “possess the maturity, the objectivity, and the judgement”
to serve on it, based on his statements of the day before. He accused Rhodes of a “transparent bias
that will make him counterproductive to the work of the commission”, and
charged that he had misused “a relationship of mutual trust” with John
Ehrlichman. He was “no longer entitled
to the cloak of dignity that a Presidential appointment would throw around him”. The Commission “can bear no fruit where the
investigators, acting with a limited Presidential mandate, enter the field of
their inquiry with preconceptions and the kind of verbal posturing that Mr.
Rhodes reveals to clearly in his statements.”[64]
Ehrlichman had taken the domestic policy staff with him
to Camp David, hoping for a day of undisturbed discussion and planning. Instead, he spent much of the day on the
phone. Agnew flew in from Detroit and
immediately called Ehrlichman to announce “Ronald Reagan is furious at
Rhodes”. He called back a short while
later demanding to know if Rhodes was going to be removed from the
Commission. Ehrlichman said no, and
called Rhodes. Rhodes had been roused
out of bed that morning by Bill Zimmerman of the United Press International,
one of a swarm of reporters re-descending on his quarters now that the
celebrity was even bigger news. Plagued
by them for a reply, Rhodes kept putting them off, with the help of the other
graduate fellows, and trying to reach the White House. Everyone was out of town. By one o’clock, he gave up and turned to
face the press. By then he had adapted
the “Fulbright approach” – well, we all know that the Vice President is prone
to these outbursts and we know how seriously to take it. No one who counted had asked that he resign. “I serve at the pleasure of the President.”
As the reporters departed, a call came in from
Ehrlichman. “Are you that famous Joe
Rhodes?” he asked. “I guess I am,”
Rhodes replied. Ehrlichman asked him
what he had just told the press. Rhodes
paraphrased it. “Fine. We’ll play it that way,” Ehrlichman said, “Don’t
mention we talked. You are on
the Commission.” Meanwhile Nixon had
called Ehrlichman, trying to find out what the flap was about. Ehrlichman provided a synopsis from his
viewpoint, emphasizing that Agnew had cleared neither his press conference nor
his statement on Rhodes with anyone, and had left the President in the position
of having to rebuff his vice president, or remove the only student from the
commission on student unrest. He asked
Nixon what he was going to do. Nixon
said he would sleep on it.[65] The next day Ron Zeigler made the terse
announcement that the President had no plans to change the makeup of the
Commission, and added that Agnew had not cleared anything he had said with the
White House.[66]
Rhodes spent the afternoon of the his second press
conference talking at length with one of the reporters who had stayed behind
after her colleagues had left. China
Altman, at that point doing lightweight pieces for Life magazine, was
fascinated by the depth of the young man’s commitment to his mission and the
seeming hopelessness of his mission.
The following morning, Life had her resignation and she went to
work full time for the Rhodes Seminar.
This was the deliberately innocuous name for a cadre of students who
would serve as Rhodes’ volunteer field investigators for the rest of the
summer, as his certainty grew that he could not depend on the investigators on
the Nixon-appointed staff. The
Seminarians lived a particularly vivid version of the sense many students now
had, of being “underground” in their own country. Operating on no appropriation, they hitched rides to and from
campus hot spots, “crashed” with sympathetic students and faculty, and dodged
rube cops and campus security in order to send back unvarnished reports on
academic America under siege. Altman
collected them and forwarded them to Rhodes in Washington, where all save the
report on Isla Vista disappeared – shredded, both came to firmly believe, by
someone on the Commission’s staff.
Haldeman’s commentaries raise some recurrent questions
about the Agnew-Rhodes controversy.
Throughout Agnew behaved as if the affront to Reagan were of far greater
concern than the one to Nixon. Then for
whom did Agnew really speak? Why was
the dignity of a state governor to be guarded more jealously than that of a
President? The incident had obviously
caught everyone in the White House off-guard:
Creates awkward
situation as Z has to repudiate VP in effect.
P. concerned that VP would cut loose like this w/o checking first. Actually hurts
him more than anyone.
And builds up the guy he attacked – a militant black – from
Harvard. E. in the middle as it’s his
boy – and he staunchly defends the appointment.[67]
Nixon
called Haldeman at 11:00 p.m. to emphasize that he did not disagree with
Agnew’s assessment of Rhodes, only in the way he had gone after him.
must not end up
being soft o kids
the whole commission is
purely therapy action
even Kent State showed
people against students
people are fed to teeth
w/ rioting kids…
the public is not
with students
so we should
not get on the wrong side
don’t get anyone emoting
about kids any more
have to handle prob w/o
positioning P. on side
of
radicals.
don’t want Agnew
hard on radicals & P. soft on them[68]
Even as Nixon and his
aides sought to calm the controversy, “Governor Ronald Reagan supplied Agnew
with quotes from Rhodes’ public statements”[69]
to use against him and kept calling back to demand his removal from the
Commission. Ehrlichman told his aides
he didn’t have time to return the calls.[70] Nixon at any rate had made up his mind.
talk to Agnew
was not
a rebuff
his
judgement was correct
but can’t
remove now
our strat. is to
stonewall
say no more
about the boy – build[s?] him up.[71]
VP seemed to accept this – but still
feels very strongly that Rhodes should be dropped. Makes good point re the disaster the comm. report will be this
fall – and Rhodes will surely make it worst possible.
P. refuses to meet w/ the comm.. – will
meet with Scranton but not the others.
E. pretty upset at all this – since he put the whole thing together &
it has backfired. VP esp. distressed w/
E because he feels he told John several times of his concern re the appts. to
the comm..[72]
Although he couldn’t have known that the President’s men
had now classified Rhodes as a “black militant”, Robert Reinhold did a followup
interview with the embattled young Commissioner that might have been tailored
to refute the charge. One of his main
sources was Professor Lyman Bonner, Cal Tech’s director of student
relations. Bonner explained the “Rhodes
Revolution” at the school: as a two-term student body president, Rhodes had
gotten the administration to agree to involve the students in every phase of
the decision-making process on campus.
Although this coup had left him “despised by radicals and black
militants”, Cal Tech had been the scene of no major disruptions during the
traumatic years of 1969-1970.[73] Meanwhile Bernard Segal blasted Agnew,
asking pointedly if Rhodes had forfeited his rights under the First Amendment
when he had agreed to serve on the Commission.[74]
The White House had lost a key round, and that left the
President the more determined to control the Commission through his
appointments to its staff. “don’t be
fair on Comms – “ he told his inner circle, “use only our people…
ride tight herd on the staff don’t
be objective”[75] That was in private. In public he was all objectivity and
disinterest. He met with Scranton, and
suggested that the Governor meet with Agnew.
“He does have some ideas about this, and he doesn’t have horns. At all costs you don’t want him in an
adversary position. And you know,
Rhodes was wrong about Reagan. No one
in California has been killed on a campus by an officer.”
Swallowing the obvious point (that it wasn’t for lack of
Reagan trying), Scranton replied, “I’ve told Rhodes to say nothing more to the
press, but I’m sorry the Vice President said what he did about Rhodes.”
“I am too,” Nixon said, “Reagan called me and he was very
mad. John Mitchell called me
twice. I don’t rebuff my Vice President
– I don’t do that –
but before he had a press
conference, he should have called Ehrlichman or someone. He didn’t, did he?”
“No, sir, he didn’t,” Ehrlichman replied.
Nixon’s final injunction to Scranton was, “Just don’t let
higher education off with a pat on the ass.”[76]
Then they emerged to face the press with Bob Finch, the
newly designated White House liaison with the Commission. Finch promptly announced that the
Agnew-Rhodes controversy had given the Commission greater “legitimacy and
visibility”. Scranton refused to discuss
it: “I am not interested in personal comments one way or another.” Of the President, he claimed that “The very
first thing he said to me, practically as I entered the door, was that he
wanted me to know that he wanted this to be an independent group, and that he
was glad it was widely diverse and with different backgrounds.” He added that he had just spoken with Rhodes
on the phone and, “I think he, too, feels very strongly that we should go into
this with open minds. I think one of
the reasons he made some of the statements he did was that he was very fearful
that might not be the case.” Finally he
stated that his Commission would “not make any investigation into violations of
law.”[77] He did not explain how this could be done in
cases involving murder.
Nixon said nothing whatever. Then he parted from Scranton and Finch, went back into the White
House, and resumed trying to get his own people named as Commissioners, despite
Zeigler’s assurance that the membership would stand as it was:
put Dewey on Prod Comm
as pub. member
or member of
Scranton
put him on Scranton
first…
called Scranton
re Dewey on
Comm – told S to talk to him
also Herb
Brownell (already talked to him)[78]
Nor had the statesman-like
guise Nixon had assumed with Scranton and Finch fool two veteran brother
political commentators. Roscoe and
Geoffrey Drummond warned that “[w]hat
some fear a desperate President Nixon might do is to turn sharply to the right
and exploit the explosive distrust and fear of campus unrest and student
violence.” They claimed that Murray
Chotiner, Nixon’s “dirty tricks” master since 1946, was designing his fall
off-year election strategy ‘to campaign against student militancy”, and quoted
Chotiner as saying, ”Campus unrest is a very good issue to run against. It will get results.”[79]
Deprived of follow-ups to his first meeting with the
President, Alexander Heard had begun putting his concerns in memo form,
apparently meant to be shared with Governor Scranton as well as the
President. “The condition cannot be
conceived as a temporary, aberrational crisis by the young, or simply as a
‘campus crisis’ or a ‘student crisis’,” he warned in mid-June, “ …the condition
we face must be viewed as a national emergency.”[80] A copy of this memo was not released to the
Commission for two weeks and only then with an unsigned note from the White
House asking that it be “kept private”.
The appendix quoted here was not released at all.
In the Sunday edition, the Times published the
results of a survey of five thousand students at thirty-nine “randomly
selected” schools by Swathemore psychologists Kenneth and Mary Gergen. Two findings in particular contradicted
major tenets of Nixon’s faith on the subject: that the protestors were just
trying to evade the draft, and that they were radicals trying to destroy the country.
The psychologists found little
relationship between the students’ draft lottery numbers – a measure of pure
self interest – and their positions on the war and politics.
An overwhelming majority
of the students were found to place a high value on traditional American
ideals. They expressed particularly
strong
positive feelings about the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights.[81]
Another survey, by the
Urban Research Corporation, found that “without the Kent State deaths, there
would have been no national student strike”.
Begun as a protest against the Cambodian invasion, the walkout had
recruited schools at the rate of perhaps twenty a day between April 30 and May
3. After May 4th, the rate
was a hundred a day – and for the first time, college administrators as well as
faculty joined the strike.[82] Nixon aide Roger Freeman – in transit to
California to work on Governor Reagan’s campaign – replied for the White House,
in a speech to the Washington State Research Council: “What makes the
dissidents think that they can run the country? What the leaders of this movement really want is, of course, not
to run the country but to ruin it.”[83]
As such studies continued to dispute the Nixon Version,
and his surrogates responded with language ever harsher if more simplistic,
Ehrlichman’s efforts to keep the lines of communication open only continued to
rankle the chief executive and his more conservative aides further
Mtg w/ college Ps as usual did no
produce much of any value – although as a group they were much more
constructive & favorable than past ones have been. Problem is they all seem to feel the P. or
the govt. should solve the problems they have created by their own lack of
ldshp.
The Agnew q. again. The college men raised it as they always do. An easy scapegoat. P. wondering if we are all wrong – is he really polarizing the
youth? Really hard to figure whether he
does more harm or good.[84]
The next day, Senator Stephen Young (D., Ohio) charged
that there were fifty FBI agents planted on the Kent State campus, “some of
them, perhaps all of them” enrolled as summer session students. The number was to be increased to two
hundred for the fall session, and other contingents of Bureau moles would be burrowing
on other Ohio campuses. Their mission
was to catalogue the opinions expressed, books assigned, and guest speakers
invited to class. Young said he based
his charges on statements he had received from the Kent State students:
“whenever a commission is appointed to investigate the tragedy at Kent State, I
shall turn the originals over to them.”[85]
Meanwhile the administration added another academic
spokesman. Continuing the rightward
drift of the prestige press, which would become a flood by fall, the editors of
the Wall Street Journal published extensive quotes from Yale law
professor Alexander Bickel’s attack on student activists in The New Republic. The Journal hailed “[t]his and some
of the other strong liberal statements coming from the campuses as
evidence that “there is increasing recognition among the liberals that they are
partly at fault” for the crisis of the spring.[86] Bickel’s piece alternated between Puseyesque
clucking about graffiti (“These stenciled and spoken slogans and threats are
called dissent. But they are in truth
vandalism.”) to bald absurdities (“What repression there is is imposed, as
often as not, by the young in the universities.”)[87]
turned out to be nowhere near as wide of the mark as the Journal’s
characterization of the author as “liberal”.
According to his faculty colleague Professor Fred Rodell, Bickel was the
same kind of liberal as “John Mitchell, Spiro Agnew, and Strom Thurmond”;
others suggested he had published his polemic in the Republic in lieu of
sending his resume to the Nixon White House for the next Supreme Court vacancy.[88]
Nor could the Journal plead ignorance of Bickel’s
orientation because he was unknown. The
professor had already published an article in the National Review
warning that federal pressure for desegregation was ruining public education in
the South.[89] Bickel would go on to defend the New York
Times in the “Pentagon Papers” case before the Supreme Court, a choice that
suggested the editors of the Times hadn’t read any of his articles
before they made it. His conduct –
“conceding ground to the government that the Post’s attorney… hastened
to recover” – was the legal equivalent of “taking a dive” in the boxing
ring. He would go on to defend Nixon’s
firing of Archibald Cox over the Watergate tapes and blame Watergate on the
“undisciplined liberalism” of the Warren Supreme Court.[90] Representing him as a “liberal” meant the Journal
had him confused with someone else, or had shifted so far to the right that its
perspective had become unreliable.
The evening before the opening meeting of the Commission,
Joe Rhodes arrived at the Department of Justice to review the FBI’s report on
Kent State. He quickly realized how
wildly he had underestimated the task; in two hours, he could do no better than
skim some of the volumes of single-spaced interview reports and memos to the
record. “I find the report strong on
some points – variety, type, etc., of rocks allegedly thrown at the Guard – but
weak on points like what was the sequence and persons involved in the original
call for the Guard.” He looked at the
autopsy photos of the slain students, for which he would be rewarded with years
of nightmares. When he was finished, a
female aide of Jerris Leonard’s drove him to his usual D.C. “crash pad”, the
home of NSA president and friend Charles Palmer. On the way the lady attorney plied him with belligerent questions
such as “What do you mean, you
will determine whether a federal grand jury should be convened?” My, she’s taking it personally, he thought.
The next morning Palmer dropped Rhodes of at the
now-leaderless HEW Building (where Bob Finch had been caught between the Nixon
response to the spring crisis and his own sense of decency) so he could discuss
the Commission’s prospects with Stan Thomas, a savvy survivor (thus far) of
Nixon’s purge of the Great Society holdovers in federal service. Thomas warned Rhodes to focus his attention
on Nixon’s choice for the Commission’s executive director. The man who controlled the staff and
services could make or subvert the whole investigation. He also warned Rhodes not to rely on Howard
President James Cheek, given his school’s total dependence on the
appropriations process.
Rhodes arrived at the Indian Treaty Room of the Executive Office Building at five past noon. When the press had asked their questions and then departed, Governor Scranton called the first meeting to order. He began by emphasizing the time constraints on their investigation. Bob Finch added that “something was needed to help with the problem that would arise in the fall” – i.e., what would the students do