Return to the Charles A. Thomas Papers (KSU May 4 Collection)
Blood of Isaac
an e-book by Charles A. Thomas
Chapter Nine: The Defeated; The Protestors.
President
Nixon did not like reading the morning papers; they just upset him. By now he just had his staff prepare
“digests” of what the press had said, and they knew how to make the news
palatable to him. On the morning of
Neither would the accompanying text have calmed the president’s breast. It quoted General del Corso to the effect that his men had fired because a sniper had fired on them. But as John Kifner went on to write,
This reporter, who was with the group of students, did not see any indication of sniper fire, nor was the sound of any gunfire audible before the Guard volley. Students, conceding that rocks had been thrown, heatedly denied that there was any sniper.[1]
An
There
is a lot of disgust among the troops that
The Guardsman asked not to be identified in print.[2]
Nor
was
To
add insult to journalistic injury, a telegram arrived at the White House from
the American Civil Liberties Union, announcing its intention to conduct its own
investigation of the
Insulated
though he was, the shock waves were powerful enough for him to feel in the Oval
Office. “Reaction very tough to the
four killed at
But
the trip and the speech were too important to cancel completely. Vice President Spiro Agnew would go
instead. “Agnew say nothing at all re student unrest in
Agnew
has to go to
NE is thru, NW in trouble, W ok
but other hope long haul is the South
sell one-nation strategy
welcome So. Back into country -- [7]
Meanwhile, the President could try to dismiss the press; they were the Enemy, anyway. Congress would be no trouble. They would make speeches, which would earn the Members and Senators favor or reprisal. Senator William Saxbe (R., Ohio) – former ONG officer and future Attorney General – led for the right with his party’s version of the confrontation: “[H]ere were 30 guardsmen surrounded by over a thousand rioters.”
I suppose that these four people will go down in history as martyrs, and perhaps they should. But martyrs to what? Martyrs to the very force ignorance or violence that we form governments to try to get away from.[8]
That established the rhetorical line the Republicans and southern Democrats would never veer from: it was the students’ fault for getting killed. What did they expect? Jeffrey Cohelan (D., California) agreed ironically on the House floor, those “who would dare to protest… who would dare to confront an armed establishment?”[9] Saxbe would be rewarded for affirming official murder with the highest law enforcement position in the land; Cohelan would be defeated for re-election that fall and would never hold office again. The students were unpopular with the voters and those who wanted to continue holding elective office forgot that at their peril – so Congress would be no trouble.
Perhaps the last place the president expected to find opposition was within his own cabinet, particularly after the cavalier way he had ignored its two most powerful officers in making the Cambodian decision. And who in the cabinet would be less likely to speak out for the antiwar movement that the Secretary of the Interior, Alaskan developer J. Walter (Wally) Hickel. Hickel’s record as a despoiler of wilderness was secure enough to make his appointment a deliberate affront to the environmental movement. But unlike his president, Hickel was a genuine extravert who enjoyed people and listened to them when they talked. He had listened to the college students who had invaded Interior over the winter holidays and on the first Earth Day in April – and he had become convinced that his generation had better listen to them.
When Hickel convened his regular 8:30 a.m. staff meeting at Interior on May 5th, the usual light banter was entirely absent and his aides found it impossible to concentrate on the agenda. Finally Mitch Melich said what was on everyone’s mind:
I had a phone call from my daughter at the University of Utah last night. She said the students out there are desperate. They’re lost and angry. She’s afraid her campus will explode like Kent State. Could we ask Mike Levett how he assesses the situation?
Levett reviewed the latest intelligence from Academe. Interior’s painfully-crafted program of student outreach was in ruins, laid waste by the administration’s loss of what pitiful quantum of credibility it had enjoyed. In the air of crisis, everyone in the room spoke freely for once, even in the presence of Lawrence Dunn, Assistant Secretary for Administration, who “sat like a stone statue, saying nothing but taking it all in. Dunn had come to his position in Interior from the White House staff.”[10] After the meeting Hickel cancelled the rest of his appointments and spent the rest of the day trying to see the President, or at least John Ehrlichman. He was told that he couldn’t see the President and that Ehrlichman was out of town (he wasn’t). He finally sat down to draft a letter to Nixon, but he couldn’t get the wording right. He circulated copies among his staff for suggestions. They couldn’t think of words to do justice to the depth of the crisis either.
In the dark first hours of May 6th, Hickel sat up in bed and told his startled wife that he knew what the letter had to say: that the lesson of the American Revolution, fomented by young men like Thomas Jefferson, was that all governments must perish unless they remained flexible enough to listen to those still young enough to have ideals. He charged into his office the next morning and dictated the letter, circulated the draft for – this time, a brief – round of comments, then signed it. His aide Dave Parker hand-delivered it to the White House twenty minutes later. “Haldeman called me back about eleven-thirty or twelve and said, ‘I have the letter, but it’s already on the AP wire.” Hickel realized that one of the drafts he had circulated the previous day must have been leaked to the press. He had some presentiment, but no idea, of how Nixon would react, but hoped that he would be able to explain – demonstrating that he might have agree to serve in this administration without any perception of the real Richard Nixon at all.[11]
Hickel’s plea for the young dissenters fell on particularly hostile ears that morning. Since the news from Ohio had come in, the president had been in a “dejected and lachrymose state, downing scotches with the reproachful refrain, ‘Everyone misunderstands me’” – and then rallying to fire off new orders to attack his Enemies. Sometime on the 6th, he had a “secret unlogged meeting with Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker,” [12] who at that point had been denying for several years that he had treated Nixon in the 1950s for psychiatric problems[13] (he claimed he had just been an internist then).
Just before Hickel called the White House, John Ehrlichman had gotten six Kent State students in to see the president, after they had driven all night from Ohio. Upbeat as ever, Haldeman decided that “The Kent State 6 were a good group and meeting went very well.” Ehrlichman remembered it differently:
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[14]
The meeting could have hardly helped the president prepare for a crisis which gave every indication of getting out of hand. “As day went on, concern from outside re campus crisis built rapidly. [Nixon] Obviously realizes – but won’t admit it – his ‘bums’ remark very harmful.” Instead of planning for the trip West and South, the staff orchestrated a gamut of defensive measures: a meeting with selected university presidents the next day, a press conference Friday evening, and a meeting with the nation’s governors on Monday. That afternoon Nixon convened a war council with his real cabinet, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Kissinger, in the Executive Office Building. Its theme: “Very aware that the goal of the Left is to panic us – so we must not fall into their trap.”
P realizes he’s up against a real tough one. K wants to just let the students go for a couple of weeks, then move in & clobber them. E 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. I disagree – because then there’ll be a new excuse.[15]
Haldeman knew that the Hickel letter had been leaked to the press (how is a matter of some interest, but there is no documentation on it); it is unrecorded whether he told Nixon. At any rate, few in the White House could have been prepared for the play it was given in the morning editions of May 7th. The Times proclaimed in multiple headlines: “Hickel, In Note to Nixon, Charges Administration Is Failing Youth; Protests Close Over 80 Colleges” – beneath that, “Agnew Criticized” and “Discontent Is Spreading in Ranks of Government.” Hickel called the White House again to try to explain. Ehrlichman reassured him: “The President understands. Don’t worry, Wally.”
But meanwhile White House apparatchik John Whitaker had called Pat Ryan, an aide of Hickel’s, demanding, “You find the son-of-a-bitch who leaked that letter and fire him!” Ryan replied, “You find the son-of-a-bitch who wouldn’t let Hickel see the President and fire him!” Meanwhile, sinister changes at Interior warned of the depth of the president’s understanding: “In the Interior Department’s seventh floor press office, orders were circulated – at Herb Klein’s direction – that any queries about the letter, or even Hickel, were to be ignored or referred to Ron Zeigler’s presidential press office.”[16]
Back at the White House, Nixon was beside himself. He brooded on Hickel’s treachery the more he thought of it. “This led to a rising ‘anti-Cabinet’ feeling as he thought more about it. Went back to deep resentment that none called him after speech & none rose to his defense on this deal. So he struck back by ordering the tennis court removed immediately.”[17] (Haldeman explains in a note in his published Diaries explaining that Nixon didn’t play tennis but had let cabinet officers use the White House courts. Now he would rip them out to spite them. He also added the curt order: “no more Cab. use of C.D. [Camp David].”[18]
While the president was railing at his chief of staff about the tennis courts, Ehrlichman was receiving the grimmest news yet from Kent State. The FBI had been conducting interviews with the Guardsmen, including those who had shot individual soldiers, and their forthright admission of what they had done squarely raised the possibility that there would have to be a federal grand jury impaneled to investigate violation of the students’ civil rights under 18 USC 242.[19] This came from the head of the Civil Rights Division, Jerris Leonard, and he was no flaming liberal; during this same period, he was developing legal theories to prosecute reporters who wrote stories based on leaks by government officials.[20]
Leonard tasked the FBI with probing the killing by “Unknown Subjects, Ohio National Guard” of Allison Krause [et. al], Victims, Summary Punishment, CIVIL RIGHTS.” His request for a investigation of the ROTC fire ran a page and a half; that of the murders, six. (Clearly, in terms of what had been demanded by the Internal Security memo of the 4th, he had his priorities reversed). “[B]ecause of the widespread public concern and the request of the President to be kept currently informed,” he wanted interim results by Tuesday, May 12th, “and periodically thereafter.[21]
No one knew better than Nixon the attorney that a federal grand jury investigation could lead anywhere, including back to him. Now the Kent State matter was really getting out of hand. There was an urgent need to get it away from the question of who killed whom and back on the track outlined by Internal Security: discovering a “radical conspiracy” behind the ROTC fire – and, not so incidentally, finding “radicals” in the KSU student body and on the faculty. Ehrlichman called the FBI immediately “concerning the Kent situation. He said that he now has to get something to show what was being done and have it by early afternoon tomorrow, May 8, 1970, because they were pushing for it.”[22]
What happened next demonstrates the difficulty in establishing the CIA’s role in any of these events. The man dispatched to Kent to take over the investigation on the 7th was known to the world as the number three man in the FBI, and Hoover’s designated heir apparent: William Cornelius Sullivan. But he was widely suspected within the Bureau of being a CIA “mole.” He had been Assistant Director for Intelligence since 1961 and the agency representative on the U.S. Intelligence Board. More significantly, he was the chief of the three FBI representatives on the HONETOL apparat. (HONETOL was a combination of HO[OVER] and ANATOL[Y] Golitsyn, a Soviet defector, the acronym designating the witchhunt for double agents conducted by CI chief James Angelton.) Sullivan provided Angleton with the foot soldiers – bugging and tapping specialists, foot and mobile surveillance – to shadow suspected traitors (all of whom turned out to be innocent.) In the process, he became a zealous convert to Angleton’s “sick-think” world view.[23]
Angleton had also been converted to a pet CIA project: getting rid of J. Edgar Hoover, who was fighting a rearguard action against the use of spies against American citizens. (In the process, Sullivan recruited Tom Huston, Nixon’s in-house CI master, for the same effort[24] -- although Nixon always remained too intimidated by Hoover’s legendary files on everyone to make the final move.) Hoover was scarcely a champion of civil liberties. But in his zeal to protect the Bureau’s image and legend, he foresaw that extreme violations of American rights such as the CIA and the White House were espousing would backfire before long and tarnish the reputation of all involved. He opted out of the secret war, and in the spring of 1970, cut the CIA off from all Bureau cooperation.
Sullivan fought him doggedly, if behind his back. “A few months after Hoover outlawed the use of ‘illegal’ investigative techniques, I began to receive complaints from the rest of the intelligence community.”[25] One senior FBI official suspected Sullivan of plotting to “undermine Hoover’s position with the President and succeed to the position of Director himself”[26] – others, of wanting to turn the Bureau into the domestic fact-gathering arm of the CIA,[27] subordinate by reason of its collective intellectual inferiority and bureaucratic timidity. This project was so central to the Agency’s agenda – and to the president’s, to the extent that Nixon wanted the CIA to function as his personal enforcement arm – that it is difficult to see how Sullivan could have been diverted from Washington at a moment like this, unless the Agency’s role in the events in Ohio had been much more decisive than has always been believed.
At 11:12 a.m., the White House hosted eight university presidents in a meeting that lasted for an hour and a half. When they emerged, the academicians indicated to reporters that they had extracted a pledge from the President to halt incendiary attacks on students by “administration officials” (i.e., the Vice President). They said that the president had agreed that Agnew’s callous remarks a few hours after the murders had finally gone too far.[28] They failed to even mention the most remarkable aspect of the conference: an early but fairly complete explication of Nixon’s personal theory of campus unrest, into which he would retreat more and more stubbornly as the summer wore on and which would be uncritically assimilated by many opinion makers. He claimed that this theory had been inspired by what the Kent State students had told him the day before (despite Ehrlichman’s recollection that the students had said scarcely anything). He claimed that Cambodia had not been the trigger of the crisis at Kent: “The students said that the issue of Black Power had actually started the demonstration at Kent State, although Cambodia and Vietnam were soon added as issues.” (This appears to have been a garbled reference to the BUS rally, which had actually occurred hours after the noon protest on May 1st. “He stated that it would be a mistake to consider that solving the war problem would solve the campus problem, and that we must get to the more fundamental roots of campus turmoil.”[29]
That afternoon he took Haldeman on a tour of the south grounds, ostensibly to emphasize his new obsession with tearing out the tennis courts. Actually, he seemed to want his sense of depression with “life in general.” Everyone expected him to do something about the national crisis and he asserted he was “basically helpless to deal with it.” He was hamstrung by the media, “as they build up everything to look as bad as possible.” He claimed that, at the late morning meeting, “the Univ. presidents were all scared to death – feel that this now includes the non-radical students.”[30] (Haldeman presumed, and Nixon’s later expansion on this themes would bear him out, that they had been “scared” by the radical students and that was why they had not rallied behind the Cambodian invasion.)
There is no objective indication that the college presidents had said anything of the sort.
Thence he flew up to Camp David to immerse himself in briefing books, prepping for the press conference scheduled for the following evening – an encounter which he already dreaded, as events would prove, with little to no cause.
That afternoon in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the Republican Governors’ Conference cancelled out. Only four of the 29 invitees had shown up. The president’s critics among them, from the shrinking moderate wing of the party, might have used the occasion to blast the policies of an administration which was jeopardizing their re-election chances. But they were too busy conferring about the civil wars in their states. Even the president’s partisans declined to support his recent actions, since “the Republicans’ chances of victory in November’s Congressional elections have been drastically curtailed.” But all fifty governors, regardless of party, had been invited to the White House to discuss the national crisis as of 1:30 p.m. on Monday, “and a spot check indicated that nearly all of them were planning to attend.”[31]
With the president on retreat again, the men in the Oval Office were left to struggle with preparations for the great antiwar rally scheduled for Saturday. There were those who wanted to defuse it. Some of the younger staff members were detailed to go out and talk to the protestors “and a telephone center would be set up to take calls from student groups arranging for them to meet with administration spokesmen.”[32] The prevailing impression retained by those who were then present is that it was Ehrlichman and his younger assistants like Egil Krogh who were behind these efforts.
In retrospect Henry Kissinger tried to claim he was a part of this outreach. After all, he allowed, the student were just misguided, naïve idealists whose perceptions had been warped by permissive “skeptics, relativists, and psychiatrists…. they were rudderless in a world from which they demanded certainty without sacrifice. My generation had failed them by encouraging self-indulgence and neglecting to provide roots.”[33] The two ranking members of the team have dismissed this as entirely spurious:
Ehrlichman urged that we make whatever gestures of communication were possible. Kissinger, however, took a particularly hard line on the demonstrators… He felt strongly that I should not appear flexible until after the Cambodian operation was successfully completed. As he put it, we had to make it clear that our foreign policy was not made in the streets.[34]
“Henry Kissinger took a very hard line,” Spiro Agnew agreed, “saying that if we backed off, the Soviets would decide they could control our policies by influencing public opinion in the United States.”[35]
Unfortunately for the president’s peace of mind on the evening of the 7th, particularly if he had decided to watch talk television, Spiro had more to say, specifically on The David Frost Show.
DAVID FROST: What if it is discovered there was no shot fired at them by a sniper and they just opened fire without a warning shot or anything? Not having been fired at in any way; in that sense, what is the word for that, murder?
SPIRO AGNEW: Yes, but not first degree… when there is no premeditation but simply an over-response in the heat of anger that results in a killing, it’s murder. It’s not premeditated but it’s murder and certainly can’t be condoned.[36]
Murder. There was doubtless no word the president loathed more to hear, particularly in this context. In the second degree, it was enough of a shock. But he had been asked to keep constantly informed of the progress of the FBI investigation at Kent State and by the evening of the 7th, the FBI knew that there could well have been premeditation. And Nixon the attorney knew full well there was no statute of limitations on murder – for those who committed it or for their accessories.
On the morning of May 8th, the enemy began appearing on the field. They were greeted with a sneer by Hackworth’s “pasty-faced” desk general as they filed past the White House fence, “waving their Viet Cong flags and shouting their slogans and obscenities… the scene was a combination of demonic ceremony, class picnic, collective tantrum, and mating ritual… They were a herd.”[37] But he stayed inside the fence.
Some of those also inside it thought that it might not be enough. When Wall Hickel arrived, still looking for a chance to explain his letter, he had to use the side door; the main entrance had been sealed to prevent the “mob” from pouring in. (The only person he could find who would speak to him was Herb Klein, who recalled, “[I] said there was little he could say in clarification which would help. He had jumped from the team.”)[38] Nor was barricading the doors deemed enough protection. D.C. transit buses were being parked in two giant, concentric rings around the White House grounds. As Klein explained it,
If a mob got out of hand, it would be difficult for it to scale a wall of buses and march intact toward the diplomatic entrance to the White House. 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.[39]
According to the newly-appointed Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the bus wall also buffered the executive mansion from a more programmed threat:
And they ordered this same group that was at Kent to come to Washington to have a student killed on the White House grounds, charging the White House from Lafayette Park. So what we did was to take practically every bus in Washington and put them down on Pennsylvania Avenue… bumper to bumper. We had two rows of them… so that you couldn’t run between the bumpers.
I’m not sure what [group] it was, but you could look it up.[40]
But could this invading army have anything like the Teutonic fury and the sophisticated planning and organization that the president’s men expected of it?
The
antiwar movement, or at least its prime mover the New Mobe,
had shut down its Washington office on April 19, 1970, the same day the
president was getting his panic briefing from Admiral McCain, for lack of money
and support. As noted above, the
antiwar movement had flickered back to life with the leak about the South
Vietnamese invading Cambodia, then spread like a grass fire as soon as the
Americans had joined in. But the leadership
had had nothing to do with this resurrection, which was as spontaneous as if
the grass fire had been started by lightning.
They were taken as much by surprise by the national student strike, as
by its quantum jump after
There were major campus demonstrations at the rate of more than a hundred a day, students at a total of at least 350 institutions went out on strike, and 536 schools were shut down completely for some period of time, 51 of them for the entire year. More than half the colleges and universities in the country (1350) were ultimately touched by protest demonstrations, involving nearly 60 per cent of the student population – some 4,350,00people – in every kind of institution and in every state in the Union. Violent demonstrations occurred on at least 73 campuses (that was only 4 per cent of all institutions but included roughly a third of the country’s largest and most prestigious schools) and at 26 schools the demonstrations were serious, prolonged, and marked by brutal clashes between students and police… The nation witnessed the spectacle of the government forced to occupy its own campuses with military troops.[41]
The overnight recruitment of this mass army necessarily adulterated its quality. The most of the new adherents had taken no previous part in demonstrations. “Their roots in the antiwar movement were shallow and easily severed.”[42] The older students from the professional[43] and business[44] colleges did not respond to the flamboyant when not incendiary exhortations of a Jerry Rubin or an Abby Hoffman. The veterans of the antiwar movement, although young themselves, had been annealed through the six-year struggle to the point of – inevitably, some felt – “an endorsement of Marxist-Leninism.”[45] Once holding the same belief as the fledglings, that the war had been an aberration in a fundamentally just society, they by now realized that Vietnam was the logical consequence of American capitalism. As cofounder of the Moratorium Sam Brown experienced it,
I remember attending a march in 1965 at which both Norman Thomas and Carl Oglesby spoke. Thomas spoke in terms of moral outrage, about rescuing the national soul. As the son of a religious, Midwestern family, I could identify with his ministerial pleas. Oglesby talked about U.S. imperialism with language that set my teeth on edge. Within a year, I read Oglesby’s speech in essay form and found myself agreeing with it. Within two years, I found it hard to restrain myself from using his language. I had come to believe it but feared it would be offensive to potential supporters.[46]
These leaders now had five days to bring their new followers through the same kind of perceptual evolution, or find some language that would bridge the gap.
Even more fundamentally divisive was the natural affinity of those who were challenging the military-industrial colossus with the political left. Given America’s natural tendencies toward fascism, that left had always been small, insular, beleaguered, and periodically decimated by political purges such as the Palmer Raids at the end of the First World War and the McCarthy terror of the early 1950s. Its survivors had been retreated from the center of the political stage to fight among themselves as factions too small to have played basketball against each other, and vituperative tracts in periodicals with non-existent circulations. The war in Vietnam gave them “the first issue with a potentially mass appeal since the 1930s. Every aging group fully intended to capture the opposition to the war, so that victory of the antiwar movement would also mean the triumph of their own.”[47]
“There was an innumerable number of groups, each of which thought, ‘This is our opportunity. If we can take charge of this thing, we’re really going to make it.”[48]
Of these discordant groups, none was more adept at setting the others’ collective teeth on edge than the Trotskyists, or Trotsyites, or just “the Trots,” represented in the march on Washington by the Socialist Workers’ Party. “The Trotskyists were certain they knew how to organize an end to the war and drove many of their allies half-crazy with their takeover attempts.”[49] One of the FBI’s major “dirty tricks” campaigns against the antiwar movement involved “exploiting the ‘hostility’ among the SDS and other New Left groups toward the SWP”[50] naturally engendered by the Trots’ abrasive approach to communal action. The Bureau allocated so many resources to this that
in 1975 when a federal district judge ordered the FBI to keep its informers away from the national convention of the SWP, the government appealed the matter all the way to the Supreme Court. The FBI explained that its informants were such senior officials that if they did not attend the convention their identities would immediately become obvious.[51]
Whatever their motives, the Trots were clearly counter-producing by Wednesday the 6th, as the march organizers began sparring with the Justice Department over the logistics of the Saturday rally. Justice had been suspiciously willing to waive the usual fifteen days’ notice required for a parade permit (lack of which had landed Dr. Spock and his clerical colleagues in jail a few days before). Now William Ruckelshaus (fresh from his aborted mission to New Haven with John Dean) informed them they would have to use the Washington Monument grounds for the rally. Lafayette Park would be closed to them. The protestors had hoped to gather in the Park, right across from the White House, because the whole point of the march was to confront Richard Nixon.
The only other spot on the president’s doorstep was “H” Street, on the north side of the White House. Co-marshals Brad Lyttle and (SWP’s) Fred Halstead objected that, confined in an urban canyon like that, the demonstrators would be unable to hear the speakers. Ron Young realized it was a cul-de-sac as well as a canyon. After nightfall – when embarrassing pictures were less likely to be taken – the police would be able to trap the protestors on H Street and attack them (much as they had the students against the Library at Kent). But, he observed philosophically, “If they gas us and beat us, then it will be their demonstration, their violence.”[52]
David Dellinger had insisted since arriving in town that this march must be a final triumph of civil disobedience. Now Halstead and Lyttle used the obvious fact of the trap on H Street to argue against it.
A… combination of Trotskyites (Socialist Workers’ Party) and some pacifists argued on the one hand that angry protestors would not hold to a nonviolent discipline and, on the other hand, that the mood of the government and the police was such that some of the protestors (usually referred to as women and children) would be killed.[53]
Halstead and Lyttle claimed to have inside information “from officials in the mayor’s office and other sources” that the government planned to “trap the crowd between a double horseshoe of police and troops”[54] on H Street and magnify the example made in Ohio. Even if the demonstrators remained non-violent, “A student organizer who asked not to be identified said, ‘There are always crazies. We don’t even know sometimes who they are. The question is not whether they will be there but whether we can contain them.”[55]
The air of doom was hardly lightened when Mobe attorney Phil Hirschkopf brought author Norman Mailer to one of the meetings. Still shaken by Kent State, the World War II combat veteran assured the marshals they were just providing Nixon and Mitchell with an excuse to amplify on the horror of Monday noon on a mass scale, and advised them to forget the whole thing and go home. But the activists sensed what some literary critics had also concluded, that Mailer’s rebel spirit had cooled with success and age. “The revolution – the march on the Pentagon, the bloody riots in the Chicago streets carried on by students who had been influenced by his writing – had come too late for him.”[56]
But his message had underpinned the urgings of the Trots and pacifists to keep the proceedings safe and innocuous – as Dellinger noted in disgust, an empty ritual of “folk songs, anti-war speeches, and tight marshaling.” He told his colleagues that, like Mailer, they were suffering from a “failure of nerve.” This did not make the proceedings more harmonious:
It hardened their resistance to civil disobedience. From that point on, one important Mobe leader, neither a Trotskyist nor a pacifist, felt compelled to prove his opposition to civil disobedience was based on overwhelming political evidence, not on a failure of nerve…
I was told by the cochairmen of the marshals, one a member of the Socialist Workers Party, one a pacifist, that if I advocated civil disobedience, the microphone would be cut off until they could gain control and denounce the call.[57]
By Friday afternoon, the opposing positions had hardened to the point of ossification. The crowning act of paranoia by the White House, the circling double wall of buses, only reconfirmed the paranoia of Dellinger’s opponents.
[T]he Trots were opposed to the sit-in. The White House was already encircled with buses. If we circled it with people, they said, there could be provocateurs who would set the buses on fire and blame it on us. So the marshals (who had been trained by Bradfore Lyttle and the Socialist Workers Party’s Fred Halstead) labeled CD as violent. They violence-baited it.[58]
Dellinger walked out. He pled prior speaking commitments, but it is as possible that he had decided there was no further point in staying. His absence removed the prime advocate of civil disobedience. Now two of Halstead’s marshals, Carl Zietlow and Bob Levering, claimed that they “could not in good conscience proceed” if the crowd on H Street numbered over 20,000. If the police fired tear gas in such a confined space, so many people would be killed in the stampede that a fatal volley would be superfluous.[59]
Now, almost as if the authorities somehow knew the Dellinger faction had been neutralized, Hirschkopf called and told them that Justice had relented: the demonstration could be held on the Ellipse, the grassy mall right in front of the White House. Was it a trap? Or was it a ploy to throw what was left of the planning into complete chaos? If the latter, it worked. Dazed by lack of sleep, bludgeoned by hundreds of hours of angry, jargon-numbed debate, the protest leadership had to reallocate all their resources at the last minute: microphones and sound systems, press releases and first aid stations, police liaison and portable toilets -- A debacle on the morrow was practically insured, and would not disappoint.
Meanwhile, to the north, the regime unveiled another, more direct tactic against antiwar demonstrators than infiltration and bureaucratic sabotage: direct physical attack. There had been harbingers of this approach all week in New York City. The day after the Kent State murders, a construction worker, or “hard hat,” at a City College of New York building site grabbed a student “apparently bound for a rally,” shouting, “’I was in Vietnam and I love to kill gooks.’ The other hardhats on the project joined in pummeling the student, who astonished them by reaching into a book bag, pulling out a large conch shell, and hitting an antagonist hard enough with it to gash his forehead.”[60] The next day seven hundred medical students gathering at Battery Park and carrying signs reading “Peace” and “Nixon and Agnew Are Sick Men” were assaulted by “a number of workers from a nearby unfinished building.”[61] The police made no attempt to arrest or interfere with the assailants in either case. On Thursday more numerous attackers charged into a larger group of high school and college students, this time at Broad and Wall Streets in the heart of the downtown financial district. “No arrests were made.”[62]
Late
on the 7th and through the early hours of Friday the 8th,
the New York Police Department received calls from persons warning that
construction workers were planning to attack student demonstrators the next
day. The most explicit of these warnings
came from one of the hardhats themselves, who said that on the 7th a
group of steelworkers had left their job site on the Bowery and had marched to
Wall Street to beat up antiwar demonstrators.
“Then they came back and said that everyone had to go out Friday – all
the workers from the World Trade Center, the U.S. Steel Building, and 2
At
around 7:30 a.m. on the 8th, students from New York University,
Hunter College, and area high schools began to collect at Broad and Wall
Streets to listen to speakers on withdrawing U.S. troops from Southeast Asia,
release of political prisoners in America, and an end to the militarization of
the American campus. As the morning
wore on – a light rain yielding to muggy warmth – around a thousand people
wound up sitting on the pavement. When
attorney Charles Appel told the crowd, “You brought
down one President and you’ll bring down another,” he was answered by a hellish
anvil chorus, “the hollow clamor of a thousand men beating the naked girders of
a 30-story building with hats, hammers, and heavy pieces of steel,” chanting
“Lindsay is a queer!”[64] – their response to Mayor John Lindsay’s
order that the city’s flags be lowered to half-staff in honor of the
As
if signaled by Appel’s statement, men dressed as construction
workers converged on the intersection from all four directions, swiftly but
with precision, behind standard-bearers waving American flags. As they brushed the unresisting police
cordon aside, a mob of onlookers filled in behind them, chanting, “All the way,
[Y]oung Americans in blue jeans, particularly males with long
hair, became the objects of hatred as senseless as that directed at those in
1938
When an elderly woman, near the steps of a church, shouted at a worker who was kicking a young man on the ground to stop, she was knocked to the ground and spat on by several men… a typist on her way to lunch was struck on the head and fell bleeding to the pavement. Her blue jeans and cotton blouse, like a yellow star, marked her for assault.[65]
At
A man who came to
the aid of Mr. Bernhard was himself attacked by a worker and struck with a pair
of pliers. Bleeding from a head wound,
the man was taken to
Near City Hall, a
Wall Street lawyer, Michael Belknap, a Democratic candidate for the State
Senate, was beaten and kicked by a group of construction workers yelling, ‘Kill
the Commie bastards!’ He was treated at
Mr. Belknap said the police had stood by and made no attempt to stop the assault.[66]
According
to other witnesses, the police did not just stand by, but actually yelled
encouragement to the attackers.[67] Their cordon on the steps of the
The mob reacted in a fury. Workers vaulted the police barricades, surged across the tops of parked cars, and past a half a dozen mounted policemen. Fists flailing, they stormed through the policemen guarding the barred front doors.
Uncertain whether they could contain the mob, the police asked city officials to raise the flag…
As the flag went up, the workers started singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ A construction worker yelled to the police: ‘Get your helmets off.’
Grinning sheepishly, about seven of the 15 police who were on the City Hall steps Removed their helmets.[68]
Even
before taking City Hall, the hardhats had stormed
Riding in from the airport that evening, Abbie Hoffman got a “grim” briefing on the situation:
That afternoon
truckloads of hard hats carrying meathooks had
descended on a demonstration at nearby
The “walkie-talkies” were just one sign that the hardhat attack was under tactical control by men who have never been identified. Even from his thirty-second floor office overlooking Wall Street, stock broker Edward Shuffo could see two men “in gray suits and gray hats” who were stage-managing the mass battery through his binoculars. “These guys were directing the construction workers with hand signals.” On the street, a non-participating construction worker told City Hall, “I turned around and happened to see men in business suits with color patches in their lapels – the color was the same on both men, and they were shouting orders to the workers.”[70] That summer, Scanlan’s magazine would reproduce a memo from the desk of Vice President Spiro Agnew identifying these hardhat-riot organizers as operatives of the Central Intelligence Agency[71] – a revelation for which the administration would drive the magazine out of business.
At
that time – years before the first Watergate revelations about the Nixon
penchant for commiting felonies in the pursuit of
political power – Americans tended to discount any suggestion that a President
of the
HALDEMAN: …they’re going to stir up some of this Vietcong flag business as Colson’s gonna do it through hard hats and Legionnaires. What Colson’s gonna do on it, and what I suggested he do, and I think that they can get… away with this, do it with the teamsters. Just ask them to dig up… their eight thugs.
PRESIDENT: Yeah.
HALDEMAN: Just call… what’s his name.
PRESIDENT: Fitzsimmons.[72]
HALDEMAN: Is trying to get – play our game anyway, is just, just tell Fitzsimmons –
PRESIDENT: -- they’ve got the guys who’ll go in and knock their heads off.
HALDEMAN: Sure. Murderers. Guys that really, you know, that’s what they really do. Like the steelworkers have and – except we can’t deal with the steelworkers at the moment.
PRESIDENT: No.
HALDEMAN: …they’re the regular strikebuster types and all that… and then they’re going to beat the [obscenity] out of some of these people. And… hope they really hurt ‘em. You know, I mean, go in with some real – and smash some noses [tape noise] some pretty good fights.[73]
Given this mindset,
it is scarcely astonishing that this “law and order” president never uttered a
single word acknowledging that “Bloody Friday” had ever happened, let alone one
of condemnation – or that the Mitchell Justice Department never even
acknowledge this wholesale and most fundamental kind of violation of civil
rights. The organizer of the attacks,
Peter J. Brennan (president of the Building and Construction Trades Council)
paused long enough to assert that none of his members had participated, and
then launched into exculpatory praise for what they had done. “Any child,” he proclaimed, who desecrated
the American flag or threw bricks should be warned by what had happened in
In such absence of
any consequences, his membership thronged the streets of
Two
weeks later, Brennan and other heads of construction and longshoremen’s unions
were invited to the White House, although Ziegler told the press that it was
the visitors’ idea. “Later, a reporter
asked Ronald Ziegler how the hard hats could get in to see the president so
easily, when not even Congressmen could get past the East Gate. Ziegler replied only that it was ‘kind of a
loaded question.’”[78] The gathering was devoted exclusively to
mutual protestations of support and common patriotism. Nixon assured his guests that the invasion
of
Brennan pinned an American flag medal on the president’s lapel and presented him with a hard hat labeled “Commander in Chief” (also presenting Abrams with one bearing four stars). “The President did not pose for pictures wearing the hard hat that had been presented to him.”[80] But he did, after a discreet interval, appoint Brennan U.S. Secretary of Labor.
Brennan and his street gangs were only the point troops of George Meany’s vast union empire, the AFL-CIO. Meany promptly verified this by omitting to condemn the attacks on May 8th. This surprised no one acquainted with the ossification and corruption of the American labor movement. “Understandably, Meany shows no more shock over violence by union members than he does over violence to Asian peasants,” the leading Catholic periodical said, “As a product of the swamp of the New York building trades, he is not about to put down the unions that have always been his power base.”[81] The majority of the country’s union workers had developed bourgeois life styles and aspirations, and viewed Nixon as their champion against the threatening aspirations of minorities.
By 1970, the only American labor leader who could be accused of anything like democratic ideals was the United Automobile Workers’ Walter Reuther. He could be expected to mobilize his membership against Nixon and the war in the fall elections – and lead a devastating strike against General Motors, a prime war contractor.[82] He had broken with Meany four years before over the war as well as fundamental labor issues, amid accusations – particularly by his firebrand brother Victor – that the AFL’s overseas outreach programs were mere fronts for the Central Intelligence Agency.[83]
Walter
had seen the carnage at