Nixon's Savage Attack on the Greatest Anti-War Movement in U.S. History

By Rick Perlstein, AlterNet. Posted May 12, 2008.

The following is excerpted from Nixonland, by Rick Perlstein.

It was the idea of a Boston envelope manufacturer, the kind of figure Richard Nixon was used to approaching for political contributions: a one-day nationwide general strike against the war. Most antiwar leaders were skeptical. One who wasn't, who knew something about quixotic successes, was Sam Brown, the organizer of the McCarthy "Children's Crusade" in 1968. The usual spots where dissidents gathered, he realized -- New York, San Francisco, Washington -- were foreign territory to most Americans. This action would be determinedly local. Get pictures on the AP wire of antiwar butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers in Schenectady, Cincinnati, and Bakersfield, and a new antiwar narrative might emerge. Since "strike" sounded like something bomb-throwers did, they adopted, instead, a Nixon word: moratorium. A moratorium from everyday life, smack dab in the middle of the week.

The first press release went out: "On October 15, 1969, this nation will cease 'business as usual' to protest the war in Vietnam and for the Nixon administration to bring the troops home." (Nixon issued a dictate to John Ehrlichman on June 24, using a favorite football metaphor: come up with an anti-Moratorium game plan by July. What was significant about that order was that the protest was not announced publicly for another week.) The Vietnam Moratorium Committee organized on a scale never attempted before. The core was the 253 student government officers and student newspaper editors who had signed an anti-draft pledge in spring. The spring clashes on campuses actually worked to their advantage. People wanted desperately to talk to these clean-cut kids knocking on their doors -- to grasp the baffling events just past. That was the conversation starter, the opening to points like: "Isn't 25,000 a rather token amount of troops for Nixon to withdraw, given that there were over 500,000 American boys in Vietnam? Didn't that rate of withdrawal mean we would still be in Vietnam in nine years?"

John Ehrlichman named as the anti-Moratorium game plan's quarterback Nixon's favorite football coach, Bud Wilkinson, late of the University of Oklahoma. What Wilkinson proposed, since "no one likes to be used," was that he jawbone the kids into realizing the Moratorium as "an attempt to exploit students for the organizers' own purposes." "It's easy to manipulate kids," Haldeman agreed, "because they love to get excited. You can foment them up for a panty raid, or in the old days, gold-fish swallowing." But six weeks after Bud Wilkinson started meeting with student leaders to shame them into the realization that they were cats' paws, he apologetically reported back: kids were laughing in his face. "The problem of dealing with the Vietnam Moratorium Committee," Wilkinson noted, with understatement, "is difficult."

Some Establishment leaders surveying the anti-war disruptions began concluding that the best way to end the anti-war was to end the war. Notre Dame's Father Hesburgh earned an Oval Office audience for his get-tough policies against student protesters and took the opportunity to beg the president to reform the draft and end the war "as soon as possible." The president of the most violence-wracked campus in the country, the University of Michigan, practically thundered against the war in the opening convocation. Word came down from the President: "not to be included in any White House conferences."

Simultaneously, the White House launched an anti-Moratorium Plan B: leaking word that they were responding to demonstrations. The New York Times printed the testimony of an anonymous "critic" within the administration that there would soon be "a temporary suspension of the draft for an unspecified time" and that when conscription resumed men would only be eligible for a year after their 19th birthday instead of the present six, and only professional soldiers and draftees who volunteered would be sent to Vietnam.

Nixon started making mistakes. On September 26 he held his first press conference since June. Aides urged him not to sneer at something so obviously broad-based as the new antiwar surge. Asked first about the proposal of Charles Goodell, the Republican senator Nelson Rockefeller had appointed to fill out the late Bobby Kennedy's term, to cut off funding for the war after December 1, 1970, he responded like something out of 1984: "that inevitably leads to perpetuating and continuing the war." The third question was a softball: "What is your view, sir, concerning the student moratorium and other campus demonstrations being planned for this fall against the Vietnam War?" He replied, with monarchical bluntness, "under no circumstances will I be affected whatever by it."

Mistake.

The remark was the next day's lead story. VMC leaders put on a press conference timed for the Sunday papers. Dozens of reporters showed up instead of the usual five or six. They had done what Nixon had done in 1948 with Truman, and 1966 with Johnson: massively inflated their stature by making themselves debating partners of a president. They also played skillfully into the emerging media narrative: that the stresses of the job were getting to Nixon. They said what distressed them about his statement "is the degree of isolation which it reflects. It is the kind of rigid stance which contributed so much to the bitterness of debate during the last days of the Johnson administration."

See more stories tagged with: perlstein, nixon, nixonland

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »