Nixon Vietnam War Quotes

A nation forgetting its own laughter is in a sad state of affairs

As well, they used their B-52 bombers to drop thousands of tons of bombs which included napalm and cluster bombs. In a particularly vile attack, they used poisonous chemicals on our base regions of Xuyen Moc, the Minh Dam and the Nui Thi Vai mountains. They sprayed their defoliants over jungle, and productive farmland alike. They even bull-dozed bare, both sides along the communication routes and more than a kilometre into the jungle adjacent to our base areas. This caused the Ba Ria-Long Khanh Province Unit to send out a directive to D445 and D440 Battalions that as of 01/November/1969, the rations of both battalions would be set at 27 litres of rice per man per month when on operations. And 25 litres when in base or training. So it was that as the American forces withdrew, their arms and lavish base facilities were transferred across to the RVN. The the forces of the South Vietnamese Government were with thereby more resources but this also created any severe maintenance, logistic and training problems. The Australian Army felt that a complete Australian withdrawal was desirable with the departure of the Task Force (1ATF), but the conservative government of Australia thought that there were political advantages in keeping a small force in south Vietnam. Before his election, in 1964, Johnston used a line which promised peace, but also had a policy of war. The very same tactic was used by Nixon. Nixon had as early as 1950 called for direction intervention by American Forces which were to be on the side of the French colonialists. The defoliants were sprayed upon several millions of hectares, and it can best be described as virtual biocide. According to the figure from the Americans themselves, between the years of 1965 to 1973, ten million Vietnamese people were forced to leave their villages ad move to cities because of what the Americans and their allies had done. The Americans intensified the bombing of whole regions of Laos which were controlled by Lao patriotic forces. They used up to six hundred sorties per day with many types of aircraft including B52s. On 07/January/1979, the Vietnamese Army using Russian built T-54 and T-59 tanks, assisted by some Cambodian patriots liberated Phnom Penh while the Pol Pot Government and its agencies fled into the jungle. A new government under Hun Sen was installed and the Khmer Rouge’s navy was sunk nine days later in a battle with the Vietnamese Navy which resulted in twenty-two Kampuchean ships being sunk.

The conflict between corporations and activists is that of narcolepsy versus remembrance. The corporations have money, power, and influence. Our sole weapon is public outrage. Outrage blocked the Yuccan Dam, ousted Nixon, and in part, terminated the monstrosities in Vietnam. But outrage is unwieldy to manufacture and handle. First, you need scrutiny; second, widespread awareness; only when this reaches a critical mass does public outrage explode into being. Any stage may be sabotaged. The world’s Alberto Grimaldis can fight scrutiny by burying truth in committees, dullness, and misinformation, or by intimidating the scrutinizers. They can extinguish awareness by dumbing down education, owning TV stations, paying ‘guest fees’ to leader writers, or just buying the media up. The media—and not just The Washington Post—is where democracies conduct their civil wars.

We’re not going to lose it. That’s all there is to it,” Richard Nixon said to Kissinger on February 18, as Lam Son 719 became a debacle. “We can’t lose. We can lose an election, but we’re not going to lose this war, Henry.… North Vietnam can never beat South Vietnam. Never.

The 1968 bugging issue revolved around a Republican initiative to undermine Johnson's Paris peace talks that could have ended the Vietnam War and brought home 500,000 American soldiers then fighting in Indochina. The Nixon-Agnew campaign, however, feared that this 'October Surprise' would catapult Vice President Hubert Humphrey to victory and again deny Nixon the White House.

A month after it ended, President Johnson decided not to seek reelection, and Westmoreland would shortly thereafter be removed as its commander. Richard Nixon was elected president eight months later mendaciously promising not victory, but a secret plan to bring the war to an “honorable end.

In response to suspected leaks to the press about Vietnam, Kissinger had ordered FBI wiretaps in 1969 on the telephones of 17 journalists and White House aides, without court approval. Many news stories based on the purported leaks questioned progress in the American war effort, further fueling the antiwar movement. In a tape from the Oval Office on February 22, 1971, Nixon said, “In the short run, it would be so much easier, wouldn’t it, to run this war in a dictatorial way, kill all the reporters and carry on the war.” “The press is your enemy,” Nixon explained five days later in a meeting with Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to another tape. “Enemies. Understand that? . . . Now, never act that way . . . give them a drink, you know, treat them nice, you just love it, you’re trying to be helpful. But don’t help the bastards. Ever. Because they’re trying to stick the knife right in our groin.

So many of the professional foreign policy establishment, and so many of their hangers-on among the lumpen academics and journalists, had become worried by the frenzy and paranoia of the Nixonian Vietnam policy that consensus itself was threatened. Ordinary intra-mural and extra-mural leaking, to such duly constituted bodies as Congress, was getting out of hand. It was Kissinger who inaugurated the second front or home front of the war; illegally wiretapping the telephones even of his own staff and of his journalistic clientele. (I still love to picture the face of Henry Brandon when he found out what his hero had done to his telephone.) This war against the enemy within was the genesis of Watergate; a nexus of high crime and misdemeanour for which Kissinger himself, as Isaacson wittily points out, largely evaded blame by taking to his ‘shuttle’ and staying airborne. Incredibly, he contrived to argue in public with some success that if it were not for democratic distempers like the impeachment process his own selfless, necessary statesmanship would have been easier to carry out. This is true, but not in the way that he got newspapers like Rees-Mogg’s Times to accept.

When the president does it, that means it is not illegal. Actions which otherwise would be unconstitutional could become lawful if undertaken for the purpose of preserving the Constitution and the nation. This nation was torn apart in an ideological way by the war in Vietnam, as much as the Civil War tore apart the nation when Lincoln was president.

There was something else amusing about the house: the irony that the most important battle of the American Revolution--the shoot-out at the Old North Bridge--had taken place just outside the residence of the pacifist Ralph Waldo Emerson. True, Emerson was born after the battle in 1803, but his grandfather had been living in the house at the time of the Revolution, and the juxtaposition of such pacifism against such violence struck Paul as a symbol of an eternal truth about American history: Nixon, that goofy Vietnam War mortician, was right: the silent majority ruled (not the rebellious, pacifist fringe); the majority killed for their property; and there was nothing really revolutionary about the minutemen , who won a war and took over the entire country to ultimately build fast-food restaurants and Disneyland while abolitionists, pacifists, hippies, and environmentalists were left to make well-intended flatulent noises--to write poems such as Ginsberg's "Howl"--in books for other defeated noisemakers.

Of the things I had not known when I started out, I think the most important was the degree to which the legacy of the McCarthy period still lived. It had been almost seven years since Joe McCarthy had been censured when John Kennedy took office, and most people believed that his hold on Washington was over. ... among the top Democrats, against whom the issue of being soft on Communism might be used, and among the Republicans, who might well use the charge, it was still live ammunition. ... McCarthyism still lingered ... The real McCarthyism went deeper in the American grain than most people wanted to admit ... The Republicans’ long, arid period out of office [twenty years, ended by the Eisenhower administration], accentuated by Truman’s 1948 defeat of Dewey, had permitted the out-party in its desperation, to accuse the leaders of the governing party of treason. The Democrats, in the wake of the relentless sustained attacks on Truman and Acheson over their policies in Asia, came to believe that they had lost the White House when they lost China. Long after McCarthy himself was gone, the fear of being accused of being soft on Communism lingered among the Democratic leaders. The Republicans had, of course, offered no alternative policy on China (the last thing they had wanted to do was suggest sending American boys to fight for China) and indeed there was no policy to offer, for China was never ours, events there were well outside our control, and our feudal proxies had been swept away by the forces of history. But in the political darkness of the time it had been easy to blame the Democrats for the ebb and flow of history. The fear generated in those days lasted a long time, and Vietnam was to be something of an instant replay after China. The memory of the fall of China and what it did to the Democrats, was, I think, more bitter for Lyndon Johnson than it was for John Kennedy. Johnson, taking over after Kennedy was murdered and after the Kennedy patched-up advisory commitment had failed, vowed that he was not going to be the President of the United States who lost the Great Society because he lost Saigon. In the end it would take the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the election of Richard Nixon (the only political figure who could probably go to China without being Red-baited by Richard Nixon) to exorcise those demons, and to open the door to China.

Johnson, taking over after Kennedy was murdered and after the Kennedy patched-up advisory commitment had failed, vowed that he was not going to be the President of the United States who lost the Great Society because he lost Saigon. In the end it would take the tragedy of the Vietnam War and the election of Richard Nixon (the only political figure who could probably go to China without being Red-baited by Richard Nixon) to exorcise those demons, and to open the door to China.

1 and 2. The United States represents less than 5 percent of the world’s population; it consumes more than 25 percent of the world’s resources. This is accomplished to a large degree through the exploitation of other countries, primarily in the developing world. Point 3. The United States maintains the largest and most sophisticated military in the world. Although this empire has been built primarily through economics—by EHMs—world leaders understand that whenever other measures fail, the military will step in, as it did in Iraq. Point 4. The English language and American culture dominate the world. Points 5 and 6. Although the United States does not tax countries directly, and the dollar has not replaced other currencies in local markets, the corporatocracy does impose a subtle global tax and the dollar is in fact the standard currency for world commerce. This process began at the end of World War II when the gold standard was modified; dollars could no longer be converted by individuals, only by governments. During the 1950s and 1960s, credit purchases were made abroad to finance America’s growing consumerism, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. When foreign businessmen tried to buy goods and ser vices back from the United States, they found that inflation had reduced the value of their dollars—in effect, they paid an indirect tax. Their governments demanded debt settlements in gold. On August 15, 1971, the Nixon administration refused and dropped the gold standard altogether.   Washington

Richard Nixon was elected president mendaciously promising not victory, but a “secret plan” to bring the war to an “honorable end.” The secret plan prolonged the conflict seven more years, spreading misery and death throughout Indochina. Nixon began gradually drawing down the number of Americans fighting there in 1969, and— catastrophically, as it turned out— began shifting the military burden to Saigon. General Abrams threw greater and greater responsibility for prosecuting the war to the ARVN [South Vietnamese military], shifting his efforts to disrupting and destroying Hanoi’s delivery of troops and matériel. This is what prompted the raids into the neighboring countries of Laos and Cambodia, where North Vietnam had long sheltered troops and supply routes. The bombing of Communist sanctuaries in Cambodia destabilized that neutral country, leading to the overthrow of Prince Norodom Sihanouk in 1970 and the rise of the murderous Khmer Rouge, which would be responsible for the deaths of millions of Cambodians in ensuing years.

Nixon was not entirely wrong when, in his typical fashion, he attributed the opposition to straightforward self-interest and selfishness. The students simply did not want to fight for their country—and he could point out that the demonstrations fell off after he stopped sending draftees to Vietnam. But then one had to explain why previous generations had willingly, even enthusiastically, gone off to do battle in World War I, World War II, and the Korean war while the generation opposing the Vietnam war did not. Those war supporters who followed the logic of their argument through were left complaining about a coddled and spoiled generation so different from what came to be known as the “Greatest Generation,” a growing decadence, an America gone soft, accompanied by Spenglerian laments about the decline of the West. Nixon thought that modern education was undermining the national spirit. “The more a person is educated, he becomes brighter in the head and weaker in the spine,” and he said he thanked God that there were still “uneducated people” around to support him and the war. They were “all that’s left of the character of this nation.” Abraham Lincoln would have been “ruined” if he had had more education, Nixon said.

President Nixon and Kissinger were joined for the promotion ceremony by CIA director Richard Helms and Defense Secretary Laird; all the men were in a good mood, even Nixon was smiling and laughing. They’d just pulled off one of the great nuclear scares of the Cold War—and only the Soviets had noticed, just as intended. Over the months ahead, though, it became clear the feint had done little either to move forward peace talks in Vietnam or alter the U.S. balance with the Soviet Union. The government never received a single inquiry from an allied nation, nor did any reporter ever ask about it; the feints would remain secret until the 1980s. •

Integrating the military and diplomatic track is essential for success. . . . Nixon and Kissinger encountered this problem, and were defeated by it; when they began negotiating with Hanoi in 1969 there were 550,000 American troops in Vietnam, but under domestic pressure, Nixon unilaterally drew down to about 135,000 while Kissinger negotiated for almost five years. By the time they cut the final deal in later 1973, the two men were like the losers in a strip poker game, naked. They had no chips—or clothes—left with which to bargain; the result was a communist takeover of our South Vietnamese ally less than two years later. Roughly the same thing happened to the Soviets in Afghanistan, without even the negotiating.

In a profile of Robert Kennedy, Morgenthau explained how emotion, even in the best of causes, could obscure reason and rationality, and what he said about Kennedy applied to the student demonstrators as well: “Robert Kennedy was not reflective but emotional,” Morgenthau remarked. When he saw evil and suffering in the world, he felt he had to do something. “But since he was unaware of the ambiguity of moral judgments, he was also unaware of the moral and pragmatic ambiguity of the political act performed in emotional response to a moral judgment. His approach was morally fundamentalist and politically simplistic.” Much like the student protesters, many of whom became Kennedy followers after he came to share their passion about the war. Moral fundamentalism and perfectionism were their credo. Emotion, not reflection, determined a policy of resistance that was no-policy. Except for a shared opposition to the Vietnam war, the stern, Nietzschean, hyperintellectual Morgenthau and the idealistic, impassioned students had almost nothing in common. Their intellectual premises barely overlapped; their mind-sets functioned in different universes. As Morgenthau had written in Politics Among Nations, “A man who was nothing but ‘moral man’ would be a fool.” The students were “moral men” and proud of the fact. And then in 1968, as if to pound his point home, Morgenthau took a step that would have been incomprehensible to most of them. He came out in support of Richard Nixon for president.

After initial annoyance about the surprise drills, the Pentagon quickly saw value in the president’s interest. “It is the first time in years that they have a president who takes his role as Commander-in-Chief seriously,” a White House aide bragged. “They’re ecstatic.” Amid Vietnam, Watergate, and a relatively calm period of the Cold War in general, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford had shown little interest in the emergency procedures, which for the most part had continued to chug along far off the White House’s radar. Carter’s administration, on the other hand, ran the only full-scale activation of the Greenbrier congressional relocation facility—on cue, the Forsythe Associates team hauled hundreds of desks out of their warehouse on the resort grounds and—while the conference facilities were closed to the public—set up the exhibit hall as if Congress had successfully relocated there. Outside the small Forsythe Associates crew, none of the resort guests or staffers noticed. •

The Oreo cookie invented, the Titanic sinks, Spanish flu, Prohibition, women granted the right to vote, Lindbergh flies solo across the Atlantic, penicillin invented, stock market crashes, the Depression, Amelia Earhart, the atom is split, Prohibition ends, Golden Gate Bridge is built, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, the Korean War, Disneyland, Rosa Parks, Laika the dog is shot into space, hula hoops, birth control pill invented, Bay of Pigs, Marilyn Monroe dies, JFK killed, MLK has a dream, Vietnam War, Star Trek, MLK killed, RFK killed, Woodstock, the Beatles (George, Ringo, John, and Paul) break up, Watergate, the Vietnam War ends, Nixon resigns, Earth Day, Fiddler on the Roof, Olga Korbut, Patty Hearst, Transcendental Meditation, the ERA, The Six Million Dollar Man. "Bloody hell," I said when she was done. "I know. It must be a lot to take in." "It's unfathomable. A Brit named his son Ringo Starr?" She looked pleasantly surprised: she'd thought I had no sense of humor. "Well, I think his real name was Richard Starkey.

Is more committed to being honest about his or her mistakes and apologizing when necessary than in defending his or her ego. A partner who can’t admit he was wrong but instead loudly insists he was justified in his unkind behavior is not a good candidate for intimacy. Imagine that same kind of ego in a doctor—or a president. (I recall an interview in which Henry Kissinger said that Richard Nixon did not end the war in Vietnam early on in his terms because “he did not want to be remembered as the president who lost a war.” Imagine having a son in the army with that attitude in the White House.) We can take both trustworthiness and untrustworthiness as information about whether a relationship can go on but never as an incentive to hurt back if we are betrayed or to stay put if we are hurt. We can also do an audit of our sex life:   How interested am I in being sexual with you?   How delighted am I by seeing you, being with you, or thinking about you?   How is our sexuality contributing to our intimacy?   Can we be intimate without having to be sexual every time?

In 1969 the Khmer Rouge numbered only about 4,000. By 1975 their numbers were enough to defeat the government forces. Their victory was greatly helped by the American attack on Cambodia, which was carried out as an extension of the Vietnam War. In 1970 a military coup led by Lon Nol, possibly with American support, overthrew the government of Prince Sihanouk, and American and South Vietnamese troops entered Cambodia. One estimate is that 600,000 people, nearly 10 per cent of the Cambodian population, were killed in this extension of the war. Another estimate puts the deaths from the American bombing at 1000,000 peasants. From 1972 to 1973, the quantity of bombs dropped on Cambodia was well over three times that dropped on Japan in the Second World War. The decision to bomb was taken by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger and was originally justified on the grounds that North Vietnamese bases had been set up in Cambodia. The intention (according to a later defence by Kissinger’s aide, Peter W. Rodman) was to target only places with few Cambodians: ‘From the Joint Chiefs’ memorandum of April 9, 1969, the White House selected as targets only six base areas minimally populated by civilians. The target areas were given the codenames BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER, SUPPER, SNACK, and DESSERT; the overall programme was given the name MENU.’ Rodman makes the point that SUPPER, for instance, had troop concentrations, anti-aircraft, artillery, rocket and mortar positions, together with other military targets. Even if relatively few Cambodians were killed by the unpleasantly names items on the MENU, each of them was a person leading a life in a country not at war with the United States. And, as the bombing continued, these relative restraints were loosened. To these political decisions, physical and psychological distance made their familiar contribution. Roger Morris, a member of Kissinger’s staff, later described the deadened human responses: Though they spoke of terrible human suffering reality was sealed off by their trite, lifeless vernacular: 'capabilities', 'objectives', 'our chips', 'giveaway'. It was a matter, too, of culture and style. They spoke with the cool, deliberate detachment of men who believe the banishment of feeling renders them wise and, more important, credible to other men… They neither understood the foreign policy they were dealing with, nor were deeply moved by the bloodshed and suffering they administered to their stereo-types. On the ground the stereotypes were replaced by people. In the villages hit by bombs and napalm, peasants were wounded or killed, often being burnt to death. Those who left alive took refuge in the forests. One Western ob-server commented, ‘it is difficult to imagine the intensity of their hatred to-wards those who are destroying their villages and property’. A raid killed twenty people in the village of Chalong. Afterwards seventy people from Chalong joined the Khmer Rouge. Prince Sihanouk said that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger created the Khmer Rouge by expanding the war into Cambodia.

From the perspective of nearly half a century, the Battle of Hue and the entire Vietnam War seem a tragic and meaningless waste. So much heroism and slaughter for a cause that now seems dated and nearly irrelevant. The whole painful experience ought to have (but has not) taught Americans to cultivate deep regional knowledge in the practice of foreign policy, and to avoid being led by ideology instead of understanding. The United States should interact with other nations realistically, first, not on the basis of domestic political priorities. Very often the problems in distant lands have little or nothing to do with America’s ideological preoccupations. Beware of men with theories that explain everything. Trust those who approach the world with humility and cautious insight. The United States went to war in Vietnam in the name of freedom, to stop the supposed monolithic threat of Communism from spreading across the globe like a dark stain—I remember seeing these cartoons as a child. There were experts, people who knew better, who knew the languages and history of Southeast Asia, who had lived and worked there, who tried to tell Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon that the conflict in Vietnam was peculiar to that place. They were systematically ignored and pushed aside. David Halberstam’s classic The Best and the Brightest documents this process convincingly. America had every right to choose sides in the struggle between Hanoi and Saigon, even to try to influence the outcome, but lacking a legitimate or even marginally capable ally its military effort was misguided and doomed. At the very least, Vietnam should stand as a permanent caution against going to war for any but the most immediate, direct, and vital national interest, or to prevent genocide or wider conflict, and then only in concert with other countries. After

By this time the Vietnam War was such a confusing issue to most Americans that Nixon could take as many positions as he liked and find support somewhere for them all. Roughly equal numbers wanted to expand the war as negotiate a peace.

Richard Nixon had made a fatal error in ignoring the politico-meteorological dimension when he announced the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia on April 30, 1970. The invasion of Laos, on the other hand, happened in February 1971, and the campuses were quiet. Who wants to stage a walkout in February?

Horwitt describes an occasion in the spring of 1972 when Alinsky organized a student protest at Tulane University’s annual lecture week. A group of anti–Vietnam War protesters wanted to disrupt a scheduled speech by George H. W. Bush, then U.S. representative to the United Nations, and an advocate for President Nixon’s Vietnam policies. While the students planned to picket the speech and shout antiwar slogans, Alinsky told them that their approach was wrong because it might get them punished or expelled. Besides, it lacked creativity and imagination. Alinsky advised the students to go hear the speech dressed up as members of the Ku Klux Klan—complete with robes and hoods—and whenever Bush said anything in defense of the Vietnam War, they should cheer and holler and wave signs and banners saying: “The KKK Supports Bush.” This is what the students did, and it proved very successful, getting lots of media attention with no adverse repercussions for the protesters.17 On

K [Kissinger] called from New York all disturbed because he felt someone had been getting to the P [President] on Vietnam... Henry's concerned that the P's looking for a way to bug out and he thinks that would be a disaster now.

What would have happened had he not been killed? He would certainly have had a rocky road to the nomination. The power of the Johnson administration and much of the party establishment was behind Humphrey. Still, the dynamism was behind Kennedy, and he might well have swept the convention. If nominated, he would most probably have beaten the Republican candidate, Richard M. Nixon. Individuals do make a difference to history. A Robert Kennedy presidency would have brought a quick end to American involvement in the Vietnam War. Those thousands of Americans—and many thousands more Vietnamese and Cambodians—who were killed from 1969 to 1973 would have been at home with their families. A Robert Kennedy presidency would have consolidated and extended the achievements of John Kennedy’s New Frontier and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The liberal tide of the 1960s was still running strong enough in 1969 to affect Nixon’s domestic policies. The Environmental Protection Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act with its CETA employment program were all enacted under Nixon. If that still fast-flowing tide so influenced a conservative administration, what signal opportunities it would have given a reform president! The confidence that both black and white working-class Americans had in Robert Kennedy would have created the possibility of progress toward racial reconciliation. His appeal to the young might have mitigated some of the under-thirty excesses of the time. And of course the election of Robert Kennedy would have delivered the republic from Watergate, with its attendant subversion of the Constitution and destruction of faith in government. RRK

The majority of the American population had questioned the justification for the war in Vietnam. They did not appreciate the government’s rationale for sending American boys to die halfway around the world; communists in Vietnam had absolutely nothing to do with them.

Then, in the wake of one poor decision, the world he had built for himself had begun crumbling around him. Because he was the leader of the Free World, his fall didn’t just affect him. It was another black eye for a nation that was still reeling from the war in Vietnam.

Nixon applied the stick, authorizing Operation Menu, the bombing of Cambodia, targeting the North Vietnamese supply sanctuaries located along the border.

Nixon’s view was that the operation was soundly based in International Law, specifically the Hague Convention of 1907: “A neutral country has the obligation not to allow its territory to be used by a belligerent. If the neutral country is unwilling or unable to prevent this, the other belligerent has the right to take appropriate counteraction.”22

Not only had Congress passed the Case-Church Amendment, but in November 1973, over Nixon’s veto, Congress enacted the War Powers Resolution. It required that the president obtain congressional support within ninety days of sending American troops abroad for military action. The North Vietnamese knew that no such support would be forthcoming.

Let us all understand that the question before us is not whether some Americans are for peace and some are against peace...The great question is: How can we win America's peace? —Richard Nixon

IN 1971, as the Vietnam War was heading into its sixteenth year, congressmen Robert Steele from Connecticut and Morgan Murphy from Illinois made a discovery that stunned the American public. While visiting the troops, they had learned that over 15 percent of U.S. soldiers stationed there were heroin addicts. Follow-up research revealed that 35 percent of service members in Vietnam had tried heroin and as many as 20 percent were addicted—the problem was even worse than they had initially thought. The discovery led to a flurry of activity in Washington, including the creation of the Special Action Office of Drug Abuse Prevention under President Nixon to promote prevention and rehabilitation and to track addicted service members when they returned home. Lee Robins was one of the researchers in charge. In a finding that completely upended the accepted beliefs about addiction, Robins found that when soldiers who had been heroin users returned home, only 5 percent of them became re-addicted within a year, and just 12 percent relapsed within three years. In other words, approximately nine out of ten soldiers who used heroin in Vietnam eliminated their addiction nearly overnight. This finding contradicted the prevailing view at the time, which considered heroin addiction to be a permanent and irreversible condition. Instead, Robins revealed that addictions could spontaneously dissolve if there was a radical change in the environment. In Vietnam, soldiers spent all day surrounded by cues triggering heroin use: it was easy to access, they were engulfed by the constant stress of war, they built friendships with fellow soldiers who were also heroin users, and they were thousands of miles from home. Once a soldier returned to the United States, though, he found himself in an environment devoid of those triggers. When the context changed, so did the habit. Compare this situation to that of a typical drug user. Someone becomes addicted at home or with friends, goes to a clinic to get clean—which is devoid of all the environmental stimuli that prompt their habit—then returns to their old neighborhood with all of their previous cues that caused them to get addicted in the first place. It’s no wonder that usually you see numbers that are the exact opposite of those in the Vietnam study. Typically, 90 percent of heroin users become re-addicted once they return home from rehab.

What happened in 1970 in Los Angeles was the worst economic episode I’ve ever had to fight through. Unlike the post–Cold War Recession, we did not have the waves of in-migration from Mexico, nor were drug sales as great. I believe the underground economy was a silent savior of Los Angeles during 1990–94. The Kent State Massacre and the Pentagon Papers scandal didn’t help the 1970 scene. Furthermore, things didn’t get better in the early 1970s. The sharp recession of 1970 was followed by a sudden inflation caused by Vietnam spending. Nixon “slammed the gold window shut.” From 1945 to 1971, the U.S., under the Bretton Woods Agreement, had agreed to back its currency to a limited extent with gold at $35 per ounce. Other nations’ central banks were withdrawing our gold so fast that Nixon had to renege on the promise. This was followed in 1973 by the end of fixed currency exchange rates. The dollar plummeted. Traveling to the wine country of France in the summer of 1973, I was unable to cash American Express dollar-denominated traveler’s checks. Inflation jumped with the 1973 Energy Crisis. Nixon imposed wage and price controls. Then Watergate, accompanied by the Dow Jones hitting bottom in 1974. Three Initiatives to Turn the Tide Against all this, Trader Joe’s mounted three initiatives. In chronological order: We launched the Fearless Flyer early in 1970. We broke the price of imported wines in late 1970 thanks to a loophole in the Fair Trade law. Most importantly, in 1971, we married the health food store to the Good Time Charley party store, which had been the 1967–70 version of Trader Joe’s. Together these three elements comprised the second version of Trader Joe’s, Whole Earth Harry.

Nixon bombed the hell out of Cambodia at the end of the Vietnam War. The Khmer Rouge seized the moment of chaos, took power, and killed anyone they thought represented corrupt Western culture: lawyers, teachers, artists, people who spoke French, anyone who wore glasses. More than a million civilians died. It was one of those Maoist purges, inspired by the Cultural Revolution in China. I never understood in college exactly what that meant, ‘Maoist,’ but I think it means kill everything that moves.

Across America, more and more people felt a gut-level tension—a sense that the country was coming apart. The Vietnam War was finally over, and Watergate was finished, but there hadn’t been any closure. Nixon had fled to California and was living in splendor, shielded by an executive pardon. North and South Vietnam had become a single Communist power, exactly what the US had spent fifty-eight thousand lives to prevent. The dollar was falling, jobs were scarce, and inflation was nearing double digits. Overseas companies like Honda, Sony, and Volkswagen, from nations the US had bombed into powder, were surging ahead, shaping the future and setting the rules. What did Americans do with this mounting, irresolvable anger? They turned on each other, splitting down the middle over “values,” a catchall way to judge complete strangers. Gay rights, affirmative action, school prayer, pornography—everywhere you looked, the ground was shifting, and the old customs wobbled. Was it progress or calamity? It all depended on your view, and on your vision of America. By decade’s end, a violent populism had spread to the airwaves, where it postured as the voice of God. Overwhelmingly white, male, and southern, the new evangelists harnessed a growing resentment: the sense that families were under assault. “I believe this is the last generation before Jesus comes,” said the Reverend Jerry Falwell, leader of the Moral Majority political-action group. “All this homosexuality, unisex, the women’s movement, pornography on movies and television . . . I see the disintegration of the home.

‪The Eichmann trial taught the world the banality of evil. Nixon is teaching the world the evil of banality.

Nixon began his presidential term by trying to appeal to Movement Conservatives without undermining the liberal consensus. But his vague promises of “peace with honor” in Vietnam caught up with him when instead of ending the war, he escalated it. Protesters called him out, and he responded by conflating loyalty to America with loyalty to the president.

Lieutenant Calley, who herded many of his victims into an irrigation ditch and filled it with their corpses, was the only officer or soldier to be convicted of a crime. He was charged with personally killing 109 Vietnamese. A court-martial convicted him of the premeditated murder of at least twenty-two, including babies, and sentenced him to life in prison at hard labor. President Nixon intervened for him. Calley was confined for three years, most of the time under house arrest in his apartment at Fort Benning with visitation rights for a girlfriend.

In 1968, the Tet offensive in Vietnam took the lives of thousands of GIs and made it clear to a lot of Americans that we were fighting an unwinnable war.  Meanwhile the people of Prague, Czechoslovakia rose up against their Soviet oppressors and the United States did nothing to help them, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, there were riots in the streets of major cities, and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago featured the police beatings of peaceful anti-war demonstrators.  Oh! and yes, as if that wasn't enough, Richard Nixon was elected President.  Otherwise things were fine.

This book is about the real CIA and its allies around the world. It is based upon personal experience generally derived from work in the Pentagon from 1955 to 1964. At retirement, I was Chief of Special Operations (clandestine activities) with the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. These duties involved the military support of the clandestine activities of the CIA and were performed under the provisions of National Security Council Directive No. 5412/2. Since this book was first published in 1973, we have witnessed the unauthorized release of the “Pentagon Papers,” “Watergate” and the resignation of President Nixon, the run-away activities of the “Vietnam War,” the “Arab Oil Embargo” that led to the greatest financial heist in history, and the blatantly unlawful “Iran-Contra” affair. All of these were brought about and master-minded by a renegade “Secret Team” that operated secretly, without Presidential direction; without National Security Council approval—so they say; and, generally, without Congressional knowledge. This trend increases. Its scope expands . . . even today.

President Nixon’s first reaction when he heard the story was to investigate those who reported the killing. He demanded to know who was backing them: “It’s those dirty rotten Jews from New York who are behind it,” he was sure of it. He instructed his aides to “discredit witnesses,” investigate Seymour Hersh and Mike Wallace, “get ring-wingers with us,” and “get out the facts about [communist] atrocities at Hue.

THE MAIN POINT STEMS from the fact that I’ve always acted alone,” Kissinger told Italian journalist and war correspondent Oriana Fallaci, in a revealing 1972 interview. “Americans admire that enormously. Americans admire the cowboy leading the caravan alone astride his horse, the cowboy entering a village or city alone on his horse….. Kissinger suggests that “there are two kinds of realists: those who manipulate facts and those who create them. The West requires nothing so much as men able to create their own reality.” He thought that he could construct such a world from the Nixon White House if the president gave him the power to do so. Kissinger created a small foreign policy empire inside the National Security Council by cutting Defense and State out of most important foreign policy issues. Even in his own office, he concentrated power. His subordinates were denied direct access to the press, to diplomats, and, most important, to the president.

When Nixon won the nomination on the first ballot, James Reston of The New York Times called it “the greatest comeback since Lazarus.” For his running mate Nixon picked Spiro Agnew, the once-moderate governor of Maryland, who had won conservative support for the hard and dismissive line he’d taken toward African American leaders after the Baltimore riots following the death of Dr. King.

The editors of The Boston Globe wrote that there really was a “new Nixon.” “Gone is the lack of self-confidence, gone the scarcely concealed conviction that he was just a political accident who really did not belong in the Big Time, gone the almost self-evident apprehension that he would be found out sooner or later as an upstart tyro….What Mr. Nixon has done and done superbly is to list the problems confronting the nation. His testing period will come when (and if) he spells out what he proposes to do about them.

Walt Rostow encouraged Johnson to “blow the whistle” and “destroy” Nixon. Dean Rusk urged him to keep silent: since the story came from someone in Saigon, the White House need say nothing, he argued, and to confirm it would expose the “special channels that we don’t make public.” Clark Clifford shared Rusk’s concern, and added another: he found “some elements of the story…so shocking that I’m wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story, and then possibly have a certain individual elected. It could cast his administration under such doubt that I would think it would be inimical to our country’s interest.

On election day, Nixon was elected president with 43.4 percent of the vote to Humphrey’s 42.7 percent, a margin of just seven-tenths of 1 percent. Clandestine maneuvering may have helped him win that narrow victory—“Nixon probably would not be president if it were not for [President] Thieu,” his speechwriter William Safire once admitted—but Nixon’s fear that the maneuvering might someday be exposed would eventually help bring about his undoing.

Twenty months had now gone by since Nixon’s inauguration, and peace seemed no nearer. Thwarted in his desire to strike a bold blow against the North, frustrated at the continuing impasse in Paris, and angered by the antiwar demonstrations that had undermined his ultimatum, the president searched for another opportunity to make the kind of dramatic show of force he thought would force Hanoi to make the concessions that would lead to peace. Cambodia would provide it.

Nixon became tense and agitated, had trouble sleeping, drank heavily in the evenings, and wrote himself notes to keep his courage up—“Need for Self-Discipline in all areas. Polls v. right decision. Dare to do it right—alone.” He repeatedly watched the film Patton, in which George C. Scott, playing the World War II hero and standing before a giant American flag, intoned lines he especially liked: “Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. I wouldn’t give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That’s why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war…because the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans.