John B. Connally (Secretary of the Treasury): " "bomb for seriousness, not just as a signal. Railroads, ports, power stations, communication lines " and don't worry about killing civilians. Go ahead and kill "em " People think you are [killing civilians] now. So go ahead and give "em some."
Richard Nixon: "That's right."
[Later in same conversation]
Richard Nixon: "We need to win the goddamned war " and " what that fella [?] said about taking out the goddamned dikes, all right, we'll take out the goddamned dikes " If Henry's for that, I'm for it all the way."
The administration wanted the American public to believe Nixon was winding down the war because he was bringing our ground troops home. (At the time I went to Hanoi, there were only approximately 25,000 troops left in South Vietnam from a high of 540,000 in early 1969) In fact, the war was escalating " from the air. And, as I said, monsoon season was approaching. Something drastic had to be done.
That May, I received an invitation from the North Vietnamese in Paris to make the trip to Hanoi. Many had gone before me but perhaps it would take a different sort of celebrity to get people's attention. Heightened public attention was what was needed to confront the impending crisis with the dikes. I would take a camera and bring back photographic evidence (if such was to be found) of the bomb damage of the dikes we'd been hearing about.
I arranged the trip's logistics through the Vietnamese delegation at the Paris Peace talks, bought myself a round trip ticket and stopped in New York to pick up letters for the POWs.
Frankly, the trip felt like a call to service. It was a humanitarian mission, not a political trip. My goal was to expose and try to halt the bombing of the dikes. (The bombing of the dikes ended a month after my return from Hanoi)
The only problem was that I went alone. Had I been with a more experienced, clear-headed, traveling companion, I would not have allowed myself to get into a situation where I was photographed on an anti-aircraft gun.
The Spin
My trip to North Vietnam never became a big story in the Summer/Fall of 1972 -- nothing on television, one small article in the New York Times. The majority of the American public, Congress, and the media were opposed to the war by then and they didn't seem to take much notice of my trip. After all, as I said, almost 300 Americans had gone to Hanoi before me. There had been more than 80 broadcasts by Americans over Radio Hanoi before I made mine. I had decided to do the broadcasts because I was so horrified by the bombing of civilian targets and I wanted to speak to U.S. pilots as I had done on so many occasions during my visits to U.S. military bases and at G.I. Coffee houses. I never asked pilots to desert. I wanted to tell them what I was seeing as an American on the ground there. The Nixon Justice Department poured over the transcripts of my broadcasts trying to find a way to put me on trial for treason but they could find none. A. William Olson, a representative of the Justice Department, [4] said after studying the transcripts, that I had asked the military "to do nothing other than to think."
But from the Nixon Administration's point of view, something had to be done. If the government couldn't prosecute me in court because, in reality, I had broken no laws, then the pro-war advocates would make sure I was prosecuted in the court of public opinion.
The myth-making about my being responsible for POW torture began seven months after I returned from North Vietnam, and several months after the war had ended, and the U.S. POWs had returned home. "Operation Homecoming," in February 1973, was planned by the Pentagon and orchestrated by the White House. It was unprecedented in its lavishness. I was outraged that there had been no homecoming celebrations for the tens of thousands of men who had done combat. But from 1969 until their release in 1973, Nixon had made sure that the central issue of the war for many Americans was about the torture of American POWs (the very same years when the torture had stopped!). He had to seize the opportunity to create something that resembled victory. It was as close as he would come, and the POWs were the perfect vehicles to deflect the nation's attention away from what our government had done in Vietnam; how they had broken faith with our servicemen.
I became a target the government could use, to suggest that some POWs who had met with me while I was in Hanoi had been tortured into pretending they were anti-war. The same thing was done to try and frame former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, whose trip to North Vietnam followed mine.
According to Seymour Hersh, author and journalist who uncovered the My Lai massacre and, later, the Abu Ghraib Prison scandal, when American families of POWs became alarmed at the news that there was torture in North Vietnam prisons, they received letters from the Pentagon saying: "We are certain that you will not become unduly concerned over the [torture] briefing if you keep in mind the purpose for which it was tailored." [5]
But, according to what the POWs wrote in their books, conditions in the POW camps improved in the four years preceding their release -- that is, from 1969 until 1973. Upon their release, Newsweek magazine wrote, "the [torture] stories seemed incongruent with the men telling them -- a trim, trig [note: this is actually the word used in the article] lot who, given a few pounds more flesh, might have stepped right out of a recruiting poster." [6]
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