ONE WINTER DAY in early 1970, Everett Alvarez and a few other American prisoners were loaded onto a jeep and driven to downtown Hanoi. They had no idea where they were being taken.
The jeep stopped outside the Museum of the Revolution. The prisoners were led inside and shown exhibits celebrating Vietnam’s bloody victory over the French and the ongoing fight against America. There were large photos of downed planes and captured pilots. Alvarez was stunned to see his own flight helmet and uniform on display, clearly labeled with his name.
But the real shock came when he was given permission to use the bathroom. The urinal was an almost unimaginable luxury after five and a half years of crusted buckets. Then, while washing up, he looked at himself in the mirror for the first since becoming a prisoner.
“My God!” he gasped. “Could that be me?”
The torture had let up in the past year, but Alvarez could see the damage on his face. He ran fingertips over his bony cheeks, over lines around his eyes that looked like those of a man of middle age. His hair was streaked with gray. He was thirty-two.
* * *
On February 21, Henry Kissinger sat in the small living room of a house on the outskirts of Paris. This was the first of many secret meetings between Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, a high-ranking member of the North Vietnamese government. Nixon and Kissinger were still looking for a way to pressure North Vietnam into concessions. These talks were their latest effort.
Kissinger and Le Duc Tho sat in red easy chairs, a few feet apart. Tho, fifty-nine, had gray hair and manners Kissinger later described as “impeccable.” Yet Kissinger could see right away he’d met his match. Tho had joined the anti-French rebels at age sixteen, and had spent ten years in French-run prisons in Vietnam. His entire life had been dedicated to revolution.
In his opening remarks, Tho referred to the Saigon government as an American “puppet,” one that could never stand without a foreign power holding its strings.
“Although we have suffered great sacrifices and losses,” Tho said, “and undergone a great deal of hardship, we have won.”
“You have won the war?”
“Before, there were over a million U.S. and Saigon troops, and you failed,” Tho explained. “How can you succeed when you let the puppet troops do the fighting?”
This was precisely the question that had been tormenting Kissinger. It was the weak point of Nixon’s Vietnamization strategy. Still, Kissinger cautioned Tho not to underestimate President Nixon, not to test his will too boldly. The men agreed to meet again the next month.
Nixon stuck with Vietnamization, announcing his decision to withdraw another 150,000 soldiers from Vietnam over the next twelve months. This would drop American troop strength to half of what it had been when he took office.
At the same time, he did not abandon hope of finding some way to budge the North Vietnamese. “We had to think,” he later wrote, “about initiatives that we could undertake to show the enemy that we were still serious about our commitments in Vietnam.”
* * *
There was no news from Senator Fulbright. In the months after his meeting with Fulbright, Ellsberg called Norvil Jones over and over. Jones kept putting Ellsberg off, saying the senator was still weighing options. In fact, Fulbright was having serious doubts about being the one to release top secret documents to the public.
On April 7, Ellsberg’s thirty-ninth birthday, Carol Cummings called to tell him FBI agents had just come to her door. They had asked if she knew anything about a classified report her ex-husband may have been copying. She had told them she did not.
Ellsberg could not imagine how the FBI had found out. He drove to Carol’s house.
“Have you been talking to people about it?” he demanded.
“No,” Cummings said.
Mary was there, listening to the argument.
“Mary, you must have told somebody,” Ellsberg said.
“We didn’t tell anybody, Daddy,” Mary said, badly hurt by the unfair accusation.
That’s when Cummings found out that Mary, too, had been involved in the copying.
It was only years later that Ellsberg found out what had actually happened. The previous Christmas, at a visit to her father’s house, Carol Cummings had told her stepmother what Ellsberg was up to. Cummings was just trying to release some stress by confiding in someone; she assumed it would go no further. But as soon as she headed home, her stepmother called the FBI.
Ellsberg didn’t know how seriously the FBI was taking this investigation, but he figured time was short. He hid the copies he’d been making at friends’ houses, and made the decision to leave his job. “The sheriff would soon be at my door,” he later explained, “and I didn’t want the door to be Rand’s.”
Ellsberg called a friend at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was offered a position, at half his current salary, at MIT’s Center for International Studies.
“It’s too bad it has to end like this,” said Harry Rowen, Ellsberg’s friend and longtime boss at Rand.
Ellsberg agreed, though he knew it was far from over. He thought about a quote from the novelist E. M. Forster: “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”
It was the exact dilemma Ellsberg faced. Releasing a secret document he had essentially stolen from Rand was a betrayal of Rowen’s trust and would hurt him, both personally and professionally. But not releasing the document was, in Ellsberg’s view, another form of betrayal: a betrayal of the country he loved, and the people who were still dying in Vietnam.
In this case, he decided, Forster was wrong.
* * *
Nixon tossed and turned, unable to sleep. Finally he gave up and walked down to the Lincoln Sitting Room. He sat alone until dawn. It was April 30, 1970.
He had a major announcement to make that day, and was expecting trouble. Four of Kissinger’s top staffers, including Mort Halperin, had already resigned in protest over the president’s decision. Nixon was particularly anxious about his daughter Julie, a student at Smith College. “It’s possible that the campuses are really going to blow up after this speech,” Nixon told his secretary.
That night, sitting beside a large map of Southeast Asia, Nixon addressed the nation. “To protect our men who are in Vietnam,” he said, “and to guarantee the continued success of our withdrawal and Vietnamization programs, I have concluded that the time has come for action.”
Pointing to Cambodia on the map, he explained that communist forces were using this territory to store supplies and stage attacks in South Vietnam. For this reason, he had decided to send American soldiers across the border into Cambodia.
“We will not be humiliated,” Nixon told Americans. “We will not be defeated.”
* * *
Nixon’s Cambodia invasion sparked the biggest protests to date. And he was right—college campuses absolutely erupted.
Philip Caputo, the marine-turned-journalist, was home when his editor at the Chicago Tribune called. There was a major disturbance on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio, his editor told him. Protestors had smashed windows and set fire to a building used by the military. The National Guard had been called out to occupy the campus.
Caputo flew to Cleveland and rented a car. While driving to Kent, the news came on the radio—the guardsmen had opened fire at Kent State. He sped the last few miles.
May 4, 1970. A woman reacts with horror on seeing the body of a student shot dead by National Guardsmen during protests at Kent State University.
The campus looked like a war zone. There were no students in sight. Caputo saw the ruins of the burned building. Guardsmen crouched behind trees, holding rifles with bayonets fixed. In a parking lot, patches of asphalt were soaked with blood.
He got the story from another reporter: protestors had assembled for a demonstration that morning. Guardsmen in gas masks shot tear gas at the crowd. Some students threw rocks at the guardsmen. Most were just shouting. A platoon of guardsmen fired their rifles. Four students had been killed, two women and two men.
Caputo couldn’t believe it. “To answer stones and bad language with a random volley of .30-caliber bullets was not imaginable in America,” he later reflected. “Or maybe it was, because America had changed.”
* * *
“Those few days after Kent State were among the darkest of my presidency,” Nixon later said. “I could not help thinking about the families, suddenly receiving the news that their children were dead.”
The protests grew even more intense. Furious students completely shut down 450 college campuses, and protestors poured into Washington, D.C. When a rowdy crowd circled Henry Kissinger’s apartment, he moved into the White House basement to get some sleep. But the president’s home was under siege. A young White House aide, Egil Krogh, came up with the idea of parking sixty buses around the building, bumper to bumper, to form a makeshift barricade. “The purpose,” he later explained, “was to keep over 100,000 angry protestors from storming the White House.”
Demonstrators sat in the streets, blocking access to the White House. Canisters of tear gas came arcing out from behind the bus barricade, landing among the protestors. Everyone inside was exhausted and on edge, Nixon in particular.
“He’s very disturbed,” Haldeman noted in his diary. “I am concerned about his condition.”
At four fifteen in the morning on May 9, Egil Krogh was at his desk in the Secret Service command post across the street from the White House. He was preparing for another day of mayhem.
A voice on the loudspeaker announced: “Searchlight is on the lawn!”
Krogh looked up from his work. Searchlight was the Secret Service’s code name for President Nixon.
“Searchlight has asked for a car.”
Krogh was seriously alarmed. It was the middle of the night. Wasn’t Nixon asleep in bed?
He ran out of the building, across the street to the White House, through the first floor and out the back door to the Rose Garden lawn. He got there just in time to see the taillights of Nixon’s limo disappear through the gate.
* * *
Nixon’s limo pulled to the curb about five minutes later. The president got out and looked up at what he considered the most beautiful sight in Washington—the Lincoln Memorial at night. He climbed the monument’s white marble steps and stood in front of the imposing, seated figure of Abraham Lincoln.
Protestors were camped all around. Eight or ten sleepy students walked up to see who the visitor was. Nixon shook hands and introduced himself. At first the students thought he was a celebrity impersonator.
“I know that probably most of you think I’m an SOB,” Nixon said, “but I want you to know that I understand just how you feel.”
Intensely frustrated with his inability to connect with young people, Nixon tried to get a conversation started. He talked of the pacifist views he’d held before World War II. He talked of his love of world travel and the environment and college football.
May 9, 1970. President Nixon made an unnanounced late-night visit to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, where he spoke with antiwar protestors.
The group of students grew to about thirty. The top of the Washington Monument picked up the day’s first rays of faint pink light.
“I hope you realize that we are willing to die for what we believe in,” one student said.
“I certainly realize that,” Nixon replied.
More students were walking up. Nixon’s valet, Manolo Sanchez, pleaded with him to come back to the car.
Nixon shook hands with a few of the students. “Remember,” he said, “this is a great country, with all its faults.”
He got in the limo, but the bizarre journey was not over. Nixon told the driver to take him to the Capitol building, where he got out and led Sanchez to the House chamber. A custodian unlocked the door. Nixon walked in and sat in the seat that had been his when he’d served in the House as a young man. He told Sanchez to go up to the Speaker’s chair and make a speech.
“No, no, Mr. President. I shouldn’t do that.”
“Yes,” insisted Nixon, “go on up, Manolo, and give a speech!”
Egil Krogh arrived in time to see Sanchez walking sluggishly to the Speaker’s podium. Sanchez spoke very briefly about how glad he was to be an American.
Nixon’s applause echoed in the cavernous chamber.
“I was too dumbfounded to react,” Krogh later said of the president’s behavior. “I saw him in an exposed, emotionally raw state.” It only strengthened his loyalty to Nixon.
“I felt more devoted to him than ever before,” Krogh said. “I had seen behind the mask.”