Kindle Notes & Highlights
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August 27 - September 6, 2025
As a short-term fix, on September 20 Nixon had announced that he was reducing draft calls for the coming year by 50,000 men. He also urged Congress to amend the draft law so that in the future he could implement a lottery system that would apply only to 19-year-olds or to those out of college who had not yet participated in a lottery. The great advantage of this system was that it would limit to one year, rather than seven, the time a young man was subject to the draft.
Seething over Goodell’s perfidy, Kissinger claimed that his action “is almost treason,” and Nixon warned the Republican leadership that “dovish” members of the House and Senate were creating new barriers to peace.
The size and scope of the protests caused editors and station managers to treat the Moratorium as major news, while many of the reporters covering events were palpably moved by the experience.
However, the Moratorium also attracted serious opposition, especially in the white South, in small-town America, and among white working-class voters in the metropolitan areas, including New York City. In New York, the dissension exposed a deep social cleavage. When Mayor John Lindsay proclaimed October 15 a “day of mourning” and ordered that the flag be flown at half-mast, the Policemen’s Benevolent Society, which loathed the protesters and the mayor in equal measure, called on all precinct houses to fly their flags at full staff.
the inclusiveness of the Moratorium was without precedent—so inclusive that two Ehrlichman children, Susan Haldeman’s boyfriend, and John Laird, son of the Secretary of Defense, all participated.
In the aftermath of the Moratorium, the president concluded that plans for DUCK HOOK would have to be indefinitely shelved.
Both men took some comfort in the fact that the bombing of Cambodia was proceeding apace, with the American public unaware of its occurrence.
In Dobrynin’s reports the Soviet government, he reflected on how strange it was that they were being blamed “for the fact that the United States invaded Vietnam and now finds itself in the current serious predicament.”
According to his briefing, the White House had gotten word “to the other side that we would have to review the entire situation around the first of November. Within three weeks of that warning the level of activity declined sharply.”
The description of North Vietnamese behavior was false, which Kissinger well knew, but his supposedly inside news was sufficient to cow the Democratic leadership in both the House and Senate.
He was therefore calling upon “the great silent majority of my fellow Americans” for help.
“let us understand . . . North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.”
Back in the residence, the president phoned Haldeman 15 to 20 times over three hours that night, peppering him with questions and demands.
If they only did one thing, they should get supporters to make “100 vicious, dirty calls” to the two papers slamming their editorials (although as Haldeman wryly noted in his diary, this was before they had any idea what the editorials would say).
labor operative Jay Lovestone declared that the president had “restored dignity to the American people.”
According to Gallup, 80% of those Americans who were listening said they supported the president’s plan, 77% claimed they were satisfied with his plan for troop withdrawals, and 72% believed that the upcoming Moratorium Day protests would be harmful to the attainment of peace.32 Whatever sophisticated critics might say, millions of Americans had appreciated what they saw as the president’s moral gravity and his calm assurance that there really was a plan to get the country out of the war.
much of Congress fell into line too, and members who had intended to oppose him lost their nerve.
Despite network claims that they would not be threatened by the administration, the somber, moving March Against Death received no live coverage, although there was a 40-hour opportunity to get the footage. Nor was there live coverage of the nonviolent demonstration involving hundreds of thousands of people on Saturday, despite its massive size. What they did run was film of the hooliganism at the Justice Department.
Unfortunately, what had happened was not an isolated case. Spurred by the confessions of Charlie Company, other witnesses came forward with fresh atrocity stories. These included reports that Bravo Company, which had also participated in the Song My operation, had entered the nearby hamlet of My Khe and, finding no resistance, had proceeded to kill all 90 civilians in the area including local children who had rushed up to see their first US helicopter.
While many peasants were indifferent or even hostile to the Saigon government, the coercive tactics of the revolutionaries had also alienated many.29 Peasants who had benefited initially from their land reform policies were forced to pay taxes, to perform compulsory labor, and to surrender their sons to a military draft.
Ewell, whose relentless pressure for more enemy deaths earned him a reputation as the “butcher of the Delta,” boasted that within a period of six months the Ninth Infantry Division had slain more than 10,000 soldiers, and that its “kill ratio” was the highest in the war theater. Some of these deaths were the result of ground operations. But most were the consequence of indiscriminate artillery fire and air strikes—a total of 3,381 strikes by fighter-bombers, many concentrated on the single province of Kien Hoa.32 “Death is our business and business is good,” was a slogan painted on one
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He had helped produce the original directive for Phoenix and fervently believed in its fundamental premise: that it was acceptable to round up, imprison, and possibly kill Vietnamese civilians who were suspected of loyalty to the Provisional Revolutionary Government. Even on paper, the safeguards against abuse of the system were few.
The more lethal and perhaps the most common stratagem was to accuse innocent people or people who seemed vaguely suspicious to bulk up the numbers.
Members of the Fulbright Committee were naturally curious about how many members of the VCI had been killed. Colby replied that during 1969, a total of 6,187 had perished, approximately one-third of the number of the VCI who had been “neutralized.” But if there were no assassinations, how did all these people die? According to Colby, many were slain during military firefights. This was peculiar, since the Phoenix program was supposed to target individuals who were part of the civilian infrastructure, not soldiers. Why then were people dying in firefights, and not just a handful of people but
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In early 1970 Nixon and Kissinger were on one of their periodic highs about prospects for settling the war. Encouraged by signs from Moscow of eagerness for an improved relationship with the United States and by evidence that the Chinese were possibly moving in a friendly direction, they entertained the hope, however remote, that the USSR and the People’s Republic might pressure Hanoi into a more tractable stance in the Paris peace talks.
By dispatching Haig, Nixon and Kissinger were purposefully giving themselves an alternative pipeline to General Abrams as a hedge against Secretary Laird, whose bi-monthly visits to the South and reports they had come to thoroughly distrust.
It was an arresting metaphor, but Laird was unwilling to wait as Americans died for Saigon’s houseplants to become rugged trees.
In light of his own observations in South Vietnam, Haig was unwilling to “sanction a steamrolled, optimistically glossed propaganda ploy by a Secretary of Defense who has every intention of getting out of Vietnam as quickly as possible.”
At Abrams’ headquarters, there was a reluctance to state the obvious: true pacification might well require years of American and South Vietnamese effort, and for the foreseeable future hundreds of thousands of US troops would still be needed.
For Henry Kissinger, this was a non-issue because in his view the unhampered use of military power was a prerequisite for diplomatic success. For that reason, he had opposed Vietnamization from the outset, and at each turn of events had tried to argue for some dramatic military action. In its absence the peace negotiations seemed stalled.
While acknowledging that his nation had suffered many hardships, Le Duc maintained, “We have won the war. You have failed.”
Nixon’s Vietnamization strategy made no sense, he continued. “Before, there were over a million U.S. and puppet troops and you failed.” How did the United States expect to succeed after they withdrew their troops and only the “puppet troops” were left to do all the fighting?
If the president could just hold the country, Kissinger anticipated there would be a peace agreement within the next two to four months.
In his department’s budget for 1971, Laird had craftily reduced the funding for Southeast Asia from $14.7 billion in fiscal year 1970 to $10.5 billion. By so doing he was virtually insuring a more rapid removal of troops, along with greater restrictions on B-52 and tactical air strikes in Vietnam and its environs.
It was difficult for Nixon and other top officials to recognize that people fighting at the behest of a foreign power on behalf of a government many viewed as corrupt had less motivation than those who were fighting for their homeland.
During that year 11,000 American soldiers had died, along with larger numbers of Asian fighters and civilians.
Instead of reducing the overall level of violence, its officials redirected the planes to Laos. When Richard Nixon assumed the presidency, the rate of bombing was approximately 15 to 20 sorties a day.12 Yet by early 1970, American planes were striking Laos roughly 300 times a day, making it the most heavily bombed country in history relative to its population.
For the Laotian peasants, squeezed between the demands of the Pathet Lao and the American bombing, life was unbearable. The greatest threat was from the air, as US bombs eradicated whole villages and prevented farmers from tilling the soil except at night.14 In order to protect themselves, the inhabitants dug large holes in which entire families burrowed for months on end.
the B-52s struck —too late to prevent the return of enemy soldiers to the Plain of Jars. However, the attack caught the attention of several senators, who were quick to express their alarm at what they regarded as an unwarranted intervention in another country’s civil war. Yet, by failing to prohibit the use of air power in the 1970 defense appropriations bill, they had left the door open to such activity.
With the principals all focused on the tactical situation, there was little discussion of a fundamental question: what was the rationale for greater American involvement in the internal affairs of Laos?
it was no coincidence that the CIA was pushing the hardest for B-52 bombers and the use of Thai troops. The agency had spent years building up Vang Pao’s secret army and developing the base at Long Tieng, and was simply unwilling to accept its loss.
Nixon’s and Kissinger’s expectation that an American display of air power in Laos would gain them a satisfactory peace in Vietnam was belied by past experience. No matter how much force American officials had utilized, in this and previous administrations the enemy had not been cowed.
On March 18 while he was receiving medical treatment at a clinic on the French Riviera, his prime minister Lon Nol and deputy Sirik Matak engineered a coup. The overthrow of the prince was accompanied by an upsurge of nationalist sentiment, much of it directed at the Vietnamese.
President Nixon saw this regime change as a new opportunity to satisfy the generals by doing something about the sanctuaries. Sihanouk’s overthrow came at a moment when his war policy was again in trouble. The Nixon administration was taking a beating over Laos in the press, in Congress, and in the court of public opinion.
As a military novice, Kissinger was more dependent on the opinions of General Haig than he liked to admit.
The Americans should learn from their experience, Le Duc Tho suggested. After fighting for so long and “suffering defeat in Laos and Vietnam, how can you fight in Cambodia?” The United States had “sowed the wind and you must reap the whirlwind.”
Within one day of the coup, Nixon had ordered the CIA to produce a plan for “maximum assistance” to Lon Nol.
As Anson and Allman neared the building, they could see walls covered with blood, but there were no more than 50 people. What happened to the others, they asked an elderly Vietnamese man. “They killed them all last night. They will kill us all tonight. They say we are Vietcong. But we are just shop-keepers.”
To handle their public relations problem, the two hit upon a clever trick. While Secretary Laird had been pushing for another cut of 40,000 troops in the next four months, Nixon would go on television with the announcement that over the next year, he planned to bring home 150,000 soldiers. Hopefully this unexpected news would obscure the fact that the withdrawals would be backloaded: in the immediate future, no troops were coming home.
When men write the history of this Nation, they will record that no people in the annals of time made greater sacrifices in a more selfless cause than the American people sacrificed for the right of 18 million people in a faraway land to avoid the imposition of Communist rule against their will and for the right of these people to determine their own future.
