The Word from Washington
The Word from Washington The banner behind the speakers' table identified it as the "Veterans Inquiry Into U.S. War Crimes." The setting was a Washington hotel ballroom. For three days early in...
...Both are more vigorous than many men thirty years their juniors...
...It was quite effective," he said...
...Lieutenant Calley is a victim of national war policy," he declared...
...Some wore beards and GI fatigues...
...Johnson insisted that the court martial of Lieutenant William A. Calley, charged with murdering 102 Vietnamese civilians at My Lai, should be halted at once...
...Those burdens have recently been increased by an occasional word of public criticism, to which the Eternal Director is utterly unaccustomed...
...Without the help of an investigative staff or the power of subpoena, Williams has been the Senate's foremost guardian of the public interest against malfeasance and corruption...
...He is a very special public servant, and it is difficult to imagine who would replace him—who would fill the Hoover vacuum, so to speak...
...J. Edgar Hoover will be celebrating his seventy-sixth birthday about the time this issue of The Progressive reaches its subscribers...
...All he wanted was the body count...
...Nixon's office is set up to function normally from San Clemente or Key Biscayne...
...I told him I thought I could serve him best by serving all the people, and . . dealer, a Mason, a Shriner, a Rotarian, an old-fashioned conservative, whose mumbled speeches can hardly be heard in the Senate chamber...
...The Word from Washington The banner behind the speakers' table identified it as the "Veterans Inquiry Into U.S...
...POTOMACUS...
...Robert J. Lifton of Yale University, a psychiatrist and authority on war crimes, said he felt that "much of the country is coming to realize that there is something terribly dirty happening" in Vietnam...
...Hoover told The Washington Post...
...He wrote his famous letter of last May, warning against the danger of alienating the nation's youth, because he believed what the President had said about bringing Americans together...
...Peter Martinsen, who was a POW interrogator with the Eleventh Armored Cavalry Regiment, was one of several veterans who told of torturing prisoners by driving bamboo splinters under their fingernails, or by applying shocks from a crank-operated field telephone...
...The prayer was: "Help us, O Lord, to fulfill the standing order of this Regiment...
...Give us the wisdom to find the bastards and the strength to pile on...
...There's no room for such a simpleton on the Nixon team...
...About forty veterans told their stories in the course of the three days...
...It would make sense from the President's point of view," our source confides...
...Most Presidents lose touch with the Government, as you know...
...He complained publicly about the Agnew campaign last fall because he believed what the President had said about lowering our voices...
...Fortunately, the question is academic...
...that they are the logical consequences of our war policies...
...The facility is there, and it could be used at very little additional cost to the taxpayers...
...I 'm told it's just a matter of clearing the cobwebs out of the Oval Office and the bats out of the upstairs bedrooms...
...More recently, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark had the temerity to suggest that the FBI was "ideological," that its preoccupation with the Black Panthers was "patently absurd," that its perennial penetration of the Communist Party was "terribly wasteful," and that it has been less than diligent in conducting investigations of civil rights violations and unlawful police conduct...
...Nixon to make one or more extended visits to the White House in Washington, D.C...
...T. Griffitts Ellison, twenty-four, a "military brat" whose father recently retired as a Navy captain, a business administration major at the University of Virginia, a former lance corporal with the Twenty-sixth Marine Division, told of being ordered to dig up Vietnamese civilians' graves to increase his unit's body count...
...He believed right up to the moment when the axe fell that if he could only talk to Mr...
...Some wore neckties and business suits...
...Those who have been privileged to see him plain in recent months report that he is hale and hearty and ready to carry the heavy burdens of his office into the indefinite future...
...On "search-and-destroy" missions, Ellison testified, "we were instructed to shoot every moving civilian, whether he was armed or not, and to destroy every hootch...
...A few seemed ready to weep...
...He is, as Ramsey Clark notes in his new book, Crime in America, endowed with "self-centered concern for his own reputation...
...Robert B. Johnson, a former infantry captain (West Point 1965), one of the organizers of the Veterans Inquiry, told what it was all about: "We have developed substantial evidence that the war crimes in Vietnam are not aberrant, isolated acts...
...Why doesn't somebody do something...
...There just wasn't any trace left of him...
...that war crimes are a way of life in Vietnam...
...In his own way, each of the retiring Senators represents the best in the American political tradition—impeccable integrity, fierce independence, an unqualified commitment to the welfare of their constituents as they perceive it, and to the welfare of all the people of the United States...
...Always mindful of pragmatic political considerations, the President's aio!es are pondering the possibility that Washington experience might be a strong selling point in Mr...
...They are retiring not because they have been rejected by the voters of their states, but because they decided to make way for younger men...
...Clark was "like a jellyfish . . . a softie...
...Hoover's specialty, of course, and has been since the days of Alvin Karpis and the Dillinger gang...
...Hoover became the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation forty-five years ago...
...Most gave their testimony clinically, without emotion...
...Two of our favorite Senators will not be back when the new Congress convenes this month...
...That's what they were really for...
...None came...
...There was an inquiry but nothing came of it, because "gooks were gooks, and you killed them...
...They were three days of unrelieved horror...
...Nixon man to man, everything would be all right...
...It would be difficult to find two men more different in style, in temperament, in political philosophy, than Fighting Steve Young and Whispering John Williams...
...If the latest Census Bureau statistics are to be believed, more than 140 million Americans now alive had not yet been born when Mr...
...We shall miss them very much...
...People got five to ten years at Nuremberg for doing what I did in Vietnam...
...It wasn't news any more...
...The President said, 'Stand by your guns,' " Mr...
...He is a scapegoat for national policy...
...Hoover is not one to take such charges lying down...
...By the third day of the hearings, it was repetitious, and much of the press lost interest—more indiscriminate killings, more tortures...
...But our source assures us that almost instantaneous communications with Washington could be established...
...Hoover scotched that scheme by going straight to President Johnson...
...That's status...
...I must have been temporarily insane to be doing something like that," he said, "but the whole thing was insane—it was common procedure...
...Standing by his guns is Mr...
...convoy fired into a village after hearing firecrackers exploding in celebration of Tet in February, 1969...
...He enraged the oil barons and other special interests— interests with whom he himself had once been closely identified—because he believed the President really meant to do something about the environmental crisis...
...Ask any Vietnam veteran...
...He's really an extraordinary guy...
...He is as immutable a fixture on the Capital's landscape as the Washington Monument—more so, in fact, for we are told that the Monument is gradually sinking into the squishy Potomac soil...
...A source close to the President advises us that the absence of major political activity in 1971 may make it possible for Mr...
...Yet those speeches have time and again exposed egregious scandals in the Federal Government—and in the Congress —regardless of the party of interest that may have been involved...
...The Calley trial must be stopped until there is a full-scale national investigation into our war policies, which inevitably and daily lead to the slaughter of civilians...
...As a Congressman- elect who had not even been sworn, in yet, Mitchell acknowledged that his influence in arranging such hearings would be slight...
...He didn't care about anything else...
...He had to go, of course...
...It works this way: "You take a field telephone and wire him up around the genitals...
...Eighteen civilians were murdered...
...But the Boss is determined to keep up with things...
...he kept asking...
...We're thinking of calling it Creative Federalism," our source said...
...Many had volunteered for military service, had been decorated in Vietnam and honorably discharged...
...Nixon's inaugural address, and always kept a copy of it handy...
...Be the first on your block to buy a mink during a recession...
...Robert Osman, twenty-four, who served as a corporal in northern I Corps with the Third Marine Division, testified that his company was lined up to witness the execution of a captured North Vietnamese soldier...
...The prisoner was nailed to a tree, wired with detonation cord leading to a pack of C-4 plastic explosive...
...Hoover isn't...
...Gary Battles, twenty-one, who drove an armored personnel carrier with the Americal Division, recalled the day—June 10, 1969—when his commanding officer gave the order to throw an old woman and a child into a well with two M-26 fragmentation grenades...
...The tens of thousands of Vietnam veterans must be allowed to tell their story without fear of reprisal, without fear of being made yet other scapegoats for our national war policy...
...No firm plans have been made, but it is known that the Secret Service is checking out the suitability of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as a possible residence for the Chief Executive...
...I am told you are regarded as the backside of a jackass," he recently wrote to an Ohio Republican leader who had urged him to resign before the end of his term...
...I can't sleep at night for thinking about it," he said...
...Kenneth Campbell, twenty-one, who served as a lance corporal in the First Marine Division, said he took part in the massacre of about twenty civilians —men, women, and children—at two small villages north of Con Thien in August 1968...
...John J. Williams, Delaware Republican, is sixty-six, and has served in the Senate for twentyfour years...
...We were a new unit in Vietnam," he explained, "and we had to make our name known...
...Stephen M. Young, Ohio Democrat, is eighty-one years old, a veteran of the first and second world wars and of three terms in the House of Representatives and two terms in the Senate...
...Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign...
...Battle was one of those who found it difficult to testify...
...The Washington Monument will probably be gone by then...
...All 100 members of the U.S...
...So go ahead...
...Clark, the Eternal Director added, delivering the coup de grace, was an even worse Attorney General than Robert F. Kennedy, who once had the gall to propose that the FBI hire more black agents...
...Hoover can be confident that President Nixon—and his successors—will keep him on the job, as Presidents have from time immemorial...
...And so he granted a rare press interview to announce that Mr...
...Phil Wingenbach, twenty-four, a former medic with the 173rd Airborne Brigade and the Seventeenth Cavalry, told how an armed U.S...
...Hoover and his agents might not be infallible...
...Who's doing anything about this...
...The State of The Economy (Plain Republican Cloth Coat Division): The Emba Mink Breeders Association offers this word of encouragement in a double-truck advertisement in the Sunday New York Times Magazine...
...What's more, a stay at the White House would give the President a rare opportunity to come into direct contact with the Government...
...But Hickel's whole trouble was that he had too much confidence in Richard Nixon...
...Chaim Shatan of New York, also a psychiatrist, heard the testimony and commented, "You have to ask whether, given sufficient stress, every man has his Eichmann point...
...He voiced the "fervent hope" that a Congressional committee would schedule hearings for the veterans to provide "a formal forum acceptable to the vast majority of Americans...
...Hickel believed the President, and believed in him...
...We want to take this opportunity to remain in his good graces—or get back into them—by wishing him many happy returns...
...Young is an outspoken liberal, an early and noisy critic of the Vietnam war, a master of invective on and off the Senate floor, who is best known for his sulphurous letters to misguided constituents...
...You ring him up and he always answers," Martinsen said...
...Gordon Livingston, a West Point graduate and former Army doctor (whose article, "The Enemy Is Us," appeared in the November, 1970, issue of The Progressive), recalled that when he served in Vietnam under Colonel George S. Patton III in the Eleventh Armored Cavalry, "even the chaplain was asked to pray for a big body count—and he did so...
...They detonated the gook...
...Kenneth B. Osborn, twenty-five, a former intelligence specialist with the 525th Military Intelligence Group, described how Vietnamese prisoners were thrown to their deaths from American helicopters so as to persuade other prisoners to talk...
...It just wasn't true...
...Parren Mitchell, newly elected to the House from Baltimore, came and listened and was appalled...
...I didn't speak to Bobby Kennedy the last six months he was in office...
...The only good gook is a dead gook,' our C O said...
...Senate, all 435 members of the House of Representatives, had been invited to attend...
...He believed in Mr...
...There was, to be sure, a lack of confidence on the President's part in Wally Hickel...
...There were few radicals or "movement people...
...For three days early in December, American veterans of the Vietnam war testified to atrocities they had witnessed—or committed...
...A Presidential visit to Washington would pose some difficulties, of course, since Mr...
...The most unfair thing about the unceremonious dumping of Walter J. Hickel from President Nixon's Cabinet was the official White House explanation that there was "a mutual lack of confidence" between the President and his Secretary of the Interior...
...He can look forward to the year 2000, when he will be rounding out his first seventy-five years as director of the FBI...
...But the recitations of the veterans overshadowed the theories of the experts...
...A few who had indicated they would be there sent word that they were busy or indisposed...
...Last fall he found it necessary to withdraw FBI agents from training programs at two different universities because instructors gently hinted that Mr...
Vol. 35 • January 1971 • No. 1
