This article also appeared in the 10/95 issue of Z Magazine.
It is almost to be expected that everybody who lived through the era would take exception in some way or another to Oliver Stone's "Nixon." After all, Nixon came to represent the government at a time when the nation was deeply polarized and emotions were running civil war high. Movie-goers arrive at the theater to see Stone's movie with their own personal history of the times etched as deeply and indelibly upon them as the names on the Viet Nam Memorial.
By focusing on the presidency the movie reveals much about what went on in the White House. Though it suggests what motivated Nixon, it really couldn't show what motivated those who opposed him. And while it was a bleak period for the White House, for much of the citizenry those same years constituted some of our "finest hours."
Perhaps no better example of moral courage can be found than that of Ron Ridenhour, the GI whose letter to Congress exposed the My Lai massacre in Viet Nam. He did not personally participate in the murder of the 500 women and children at My Lai. But when his buddies told him over beer back at base camp what they had done, he felt that merely knowing about the crime made him complicit unless he did something about it.
The real question for Ron Ridenhour and for many Americans-myself included-during the Nixon years wasn't the legalistic "what did he know and when did he know it" of the Watergate investigations. The pivotal question for so many of us was what did we know, and what were we going to do about it.
Although dirty tricks, lying politicians, and endless hearings to determine "what did he know and when did he know it" seems to have become politics as usual since Nixon, many of us in the Viet Nam generation grew up believing in America the Beautiful. But at some point the accumulated weight and sordid details of outrages, atrocities, and lies plagued us like the Raven in a Poe poem. I was partly raised in the legally segregated South, and had been disturbed by the atrocities inflicted on African Americans. Then, shortly after enlisting in the Army, I discovered by talking to returning GIs that the Viet Nam war was not just wrong, but immoral. Later, as I was waiting for shipment to Viet Nam, supposedly to defend freedom and democracy, I watched the police gas and club in the belly a pregnant anti-war demonstrator.
For me a pivotal moment occurred during the summer of 1968. We were gathered around a kitchen table listening to live coverage of the police riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention. Sitting under the bare bulb that day, I thought of the images I grew up with of people on the other side of the Iron Curtain huddled around the radio tuned to Radio Free Europe. Now we listened as a reporter described the melee in Chicago. "Oh God, they're really beating these kids!" he exclaimed. The reporter started coughing into the microphone as the police gassed the area, but was still trying to continue his on-the-spot coverage. Then in the background, between the reporter's coughs, we could hear the thunk thunk of police batons amid shouts and curses. Horrified, we listened as the police turned on the reporter and began beating him, even as he broadcast live across the nation.
Each in our own way, we learned that it was "Amerikkka the Unbeautiful." We were angry. We felt betrayed, cheated. They stole our dream, our pride in who we were. And they forced us, before we were prepared to do so, to make moral decisions based on what we learned. Because, like Ridenhour we had to either accept this ugly Amerikkka and be complicit in it or we had to act. Each American, in their own way, faced that dilemma of knowing too much. Those of us who chose to go up against the way things were hated the revelations which motivated us. We didn't like the price we had to pay in doing the right thing. But all Nixon and politicians like him really offered was blind patriotism. Those who closed ranks with Nixon and his increasingly isolated government found themselves in the uncomfortable position of following open scoundrels and pathetic losers. Like many others, I chose the path of most resistance.
Elected on the basis of a "secret plan to end the war," Nixon escalated the war mercilessly and still couldn't defeat the Vietnamese. In addition to presiding over the defeat of the U.S. in Viet Nam, Nixon also had to preside over the defeat of more than 20 years of a U.S./China policy which had systematically tried to prevent, limit, weaken and destroy the People's Republic of China. After failing to crush the Chinese revolution, and having unsuccessfully made a run at invading China during the Korean War, U.S. policy makers continued to pretend that Chiang Kai-shek, who fled mainland China to Formosa (Taiwan) was the ruler of the mainland. Then they tried to say that there were "two Chinas." They tried to isolate mainland China economically. They tried to keep Maoist China out of the UN. Each effort failed, and by the time Nixon was president, China had managed to turn the tables on the US, spearheading the non-aligned movement among Third World nations, not only gaining admission to the UN in 1971, but often isolating the U.S. in vote after vote.
When Nixon withdrew U.S. ground troops from Viet Nam, he was just facing the fact that the U.S. was miserably losing the ground war and that the U.S. ground forces were, in the words of the Pentagon, "unreliable" and in near or actual rebellion. When Nixon went to China, it was a similar situation. He cried "Uncle" but peddled this defeat back home as a great diplomatic victory.
Those years were the test of fire for all of us, separating the steel from the slag. While Nixon, born a Quaker, became widely hated as a habitual and heartless liar who ordered the invasion of Cambodia and the Christmas bombings of North Viet Nam, I changed too. Raised in a military family, conservative, Eagle Scout and enlistee in the Army, I became a Quaker, and later a radical leftist.
I was sitting in the Friends Meeting in San Francisco one Sunday morning in 1970. In traditional Quaker Sunday Services there is no preacher, no sermon. The membership sits quietly meditating but anyone can speak out at any time if moved to do so by the Spirit. That particular Sunday the Meeting had been one of unbroken silence until finally one man stood up. His voice tremulous with sorrow and emotional pain, he blurted out "Nixon is a Quaker!" and sat down again. Heads bowed, and the bitterness in the once again silent room was a tangible force. Nobody spoke for the rest of the meeting. Nixon was indeed a Quaker, and so was I. While he became the Icon of Evil, the personification of all that was wrong with the country, I went to prison for crimes of conscience. The American people had to confront not just Nixon, but ourselves. We couldn't avoid it, we knew too much.
Nixon and the bureaucratic details of Watergate are really just a footnote to the heroic and much more positive story of conscience, resistance, and rebellion that characterized that era. For the government, it was an era of defeat and disgrace, for the people a moment of morality, tested by fire.