Todd Brewster & Peter Jennings Read online

  In the fall of 1959 we started going to restaurants downtown and trying to get served. When we were refused service, we would ask to see the manager, ask him why we were being refused service, and then tell him we thought it was morally wrong. We called that testing. In February of 1960 we heard on the radio that sit-ins had begun in other southern cities, and then we decided to have our sit-ins at the same chains that the students were targeting in other cities.

  By 1962 I had left Fisk University to devote all my time to the civil rights movement. In May I was in Mississippi, where the bus system was still legally segregated, encouraging black young people to sit at the front of the bus and conducting workshops on nonviolence to prepare students for the things they needed to know in order to join the Freedom Riders. I was twenty-three at the time, and since I was encouraging these minors to do something illegal, a warrant was issued for my arrest, charging me with contributing to the delinquency of minors. I faced a two-and-a-half-year jail term, and I was about six months pregnant with my first child. My husband drove me down to Jackson and I surrendered to the sheriff, and the following Monday I surrendered to the court. I sat in the first bench in the first row and refused to move to the rear when the bailiff ordered me to do so, so I was put in jail for ten days for contempt of court.

  Those days were really hard. The jail had so many cockroaches that I soon learned to sleep during the day so that I could sit up at night and dodge them as they dropped off the ceiling onto my cot. One night there was an insect that was so large I could actually hear it walking across the floor. I had taken a toothbrush, comb, and my vitamin pills (since I was expecting), a change of underwear, and an extra skirt and blouse, because I knew I was going to jail. But the prison officials would not let me have anything, not a toothbrush, not toothpaste, nothing. I remember combing my hair with my fingers and working out a way to brush my teeth. I emerged from the experience even stronger because I learned that I could get along with nothing if I had to—except food and water, perhaps.

  When you are faced with a situation of injustice or oppression, if you change yourself and become somebody who cannot be oppressed, then the world has to set up against a new you. We students became people who could not be segregated. They could have killed us, but they could not segregate us any longer. Once that happened, the whole country was faced with a new set of decisions. I think most of the students that were participating were confident that we could change the world. I still think we can.

  Martin Luther King had not given up hope of a better America. On August 28, 1963, he addressed nearly a quarter of a million demonstrators at the March on Washington, the first massive display of sixties “people power.” The people in the audience—many of them the great-grandchildren of slaves—had come together in one of the crowning moments of the civil rights movement. King stood at the Lincoln Memorial, beneath the statue of Abraham Lincoln, and gave one of the most stirring speeches in American history. “I have a dream,” he said, describing his vision of America as it could be and as it should be. “When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will all be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we are free at last!’”

  King’s words were electrifying. For the first time, many white Americans understood that the civil rights workers were patriots, challenging the nation to live up to its best traditions. The March on Washington was a grand, hopeful spectacle. But only two weeks later a bomb exploded in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young black girls as they were putting on their choir robes.

  On Friday, November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was in Dallas, Texas, trying to smooth his relationship with members of the Democratic Party there. Many white southern Democrats had felt he was too supportive of the civil rights movement, and with an election coming up, JFK wanted to repair his image in the South.

  The president and the First Lady, Jackie Kennedy, were in the backseat of an open convertible, waving to the crowds lining the parade route in downtown Dallas. The president smiled and waved, raising his right hand to push back his hair, when he suddenly slumped forward, clutching his throat. Almost immediately his head was thrown back by a second impact. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been shot. Secret Service agents flung themselves toward the dying president and his wife, who was unhurt but covered with her husband’s blood. John Connally, the governor of Texas, had also been shot, though not fatally.

  Reporter Richard Stolley, born in 1928, covered the assassination of the president for Life magazine.

  On November 22, 1963, one of my colleagues, who was watching the AP [Associated Press] ticker, suddenly shouted to me that Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. I got on the phone to the New York office, and they told me to get to Dallas as fast as I could. I set up a bureau office in a downtown hotel. At about six o’clock I got a phone call from a Life [reporter]. She had heard from a cop that a Dallas businessman [Abraham Zapruder] had been in Dealey Plaza with a movie camera and had photographed the assassination from beginning to end. If that film actually existed, I just knew I had to get it, but I wasn’t sure where to look. So I picked up the Dallas phone book and just ran my fingers down the Z’s, and God, there it was: Zapruder, comma, Abraham. I called the number every fifteen minutes for about five hours, but no one picked up. Finally, late that evening, around eleven, this weary voice answered, and I said, “Is this Abraham Zapruder?” He said, “Yes.” “Is it true that you photographed the assassination?” “Yes.” “Have you seen the film?” “Yes.” And then I said, “Can I come out and see it now?” And he said, “No. I’m too upset. I’m too tired. Come to my office at nine.”

  I got there at 8:00 A.M. Saturday. Zapruder was slightly annoyed that I was an hour early, but he let me come in anyway. Inside the room were four very grim-faced Secret Service agents who had also come down to see the film. Zapruder got out this creaky old projector, with, of course, no sound, and he beamed the film up on a plain white wall. Within just a few seconds I knew that I was experiencing the most dramatic moment in my entire career. I was sitting there with these Secret Service agents as they watched a film of their failure at their number one job, which was to protect the president. We watched the motorcade snake around onto Elm Street around Dealey Plaza. It went behind a sign and Kennedy was briefly out of the scene. The next time we saw the president, his hands were up around his throat, and Connally’s mouth was open and he was howling in pain—they had both already been shot. Jackie turned her head and looked quizzically at her husband. Less than two or three seconds later, without warning, the whole right side of President Kennedy’s head just exploded in pink froth. Everyone watching the film in the room, including the Secret Service agents, just went, “Ugh!” It was like we had been gut-punched. Zapruder, who had already seen the film, turned his head away just before the image of Kennedy getting shot appeared on the screen. It was an absolutely astounding moment. There was Jackie crawling up onto the trunk, and Secret Service agent Clint Hill leaping up onto the car, pushing Jackie back in, and holding on for dear life as the limo sped away to the hospital. The camera ran out of film just as the limo disappeared under the underpass.

  The assassination of President Kennedy stunned the nation. A rush of events followed: On Friday Vice President Lyndon Johnson was sworn in as president on the plane carrying Kennedy’s body back to Washington. That same afternoon the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was arrested in a Dallas movie theater. On Saturday, while it poured rain in Washington, the body of the president lay in state in the East Room of the White House. On Sunday, in front of live television news cameras, Oswald was shot dead in the police station by a nightclub owner named Jack Ruby. On Monday came the funeral itself, with the heart-wrenching image of JFK’s small chil
dren mourning their dead father.

  America’s young were in shock. The president had formed a special bond with them, a bond that had helped them to feel that these times were particularly theirs. With his leadership gone, young people experienced a feeling of both freedom and responsibility. The decade now appeared to pass even more completely to them. A youth-oriented subculture emerged around the arrival of more sophisticated rock groups such as the Beatles, and a growing political awareness was centered around protest over American participation in the Vietnam War.

  Vietnam, once the French colony of Indochina, had won its own war for independence in 1954. It ended with the country’s being split into two halves: Communist North Vietnam and South Vietnam, which America would come to support. The war had also ended with an agreement that both North Vietnam and South Vietnam would hold elections on reunification. But when it became clear that the Communists would win the election, South Vietnam put off the referendum. Over the next few years, Vietnamese Communist guerrillas gradually infiltrated South Vietnam, eventually renewing the war.

  Like Cuba, Vietnam was of little actual importance to the United States. But as with Cuba, Vietnam’s embrace of Communism would be a serious blow to American prestige. And it was argued that if Vietnam became Communist, other nations in Asia might also fall under Soviet influence, like a tumbling row of dominoes. At first Americans gave their wholehearted support to South Vietnam in its struggle against the Communist North Vietnamese.

  But in June 1963 several Buddhist monks burned themselves to death in protest against the brutally oppressive government of South Vietnam. Suddenly Americans began to wonder what they had gotten into. Perhaps the conflict in Vietnam was more complicated than it had seemed. Exactly what sort of government was the United States supporting in South Vietnam? As President Johnson intensified America’s military presence with troops and arms, the antiwar movement intensified as well. For many of the young soldiers who went to Vietnam, the experience was baffling: They went into battle without really knowing what they were fighting for.

  The way this war was fought was different, too. American GIs in Vietnam were not prepared to fight against smiling villagers who hid grenades behind their backs, or an army of snipers who fired on the Americans and then quickly dissolved into the jungle greenery. The GIs were supposed to be soldiers of democracy. But it wasn’t at all clear that the government of South Vietnam had much support from its own people. What the people of Vietnam seemed to want most was a future free from domination by any foreign power, even the United States, which said it was trying to help them. For lack of any other cause, many American GIs fought for their fellow soldiers.

  Larry Gwin, who was born in 1941, received a Silver Star for extraordinary heroism. He described the soldier’s experience in Vietnam.

  I arrived in Vietnam in July of ’65. I landed with a group of soldiers on an airstrip just outside Saigon. Walking out of the airplane, the heat hit everyone in my entourage simultaneously, and everybody started to sweat. The roads into Saigon were dirt, and en route we passed homes which were nothing but tar paper and aluminum shacks with pigs and chickens in every yard. I thought, “This is the Third World.” After an hour and a half, the school bus crossed a bridge into the teeming capital of Saigon. There were two traffic lights, and only one was functioning, so it was absolute bedlam between the jeeps, the trucks, the taxis, the buffalo carts, and the people on bicycles. Just before we pulled into headquarters, someone smashed a bottle against the bus. This person obviously didn’t care about Americans and really didn’t want us there. It was my first indication that maybe our presence wasn’t quite as welcome as we had been led to believe.

  I was sent to a base at An Khe to prepare for the arrival of fifteen thousand troops in mid-September. The troops arrived, and by early October had constructed a defensible perimeter around the base, and then we began our operations. On the afternoon of the fourteenth of November, we heard that the first battalion was engaged in heavy contact at a landing zone code-named X-ray in the Ia Drang Valley. My company was quickly sent in, in three waves of six helicopters each. We lifted up over the tall trees of our landing zone and we could see the clouds of smoke drifting from Chu Pong Mountain, where we were headed. I thought, “Oh, my God, we’re not going to fly into that mess, are we?”

  The helicopter set me down in the midst of chaos. There were air strikes against the mountain, and the pop-pop-pop of rounds in the air sounded like firecrackers. I saw three or four Americans huddled around a tree saying, “Get down, get down, man, they’re all around us.” I had been on the ground for all of ten seconds when a fellow jumped up next to me and said, “I’m hit, sir.” Carrying our wounded guy, we dodged and weaved forward for about a hundred yards until we got to where we could see the battalion commander’s post. In between there was nothing but burnt grass, where napalm had killed some people, stacks of empty ammo crates, and bent and broken weapons scattered around. There was a row of American dead covered with ponchos, but we had to spring past it and get ready to fight.

  On the morning of November 17 we received orders to move to another landing zone about three miles due north. We knew there were North Vietnamese in the area. The temperature was maybe a hundred, and everybody was exhausted because we’d been awake for two days and were weighed down with our equipment. We set up in a clump of trees, waiting for the other platoons to go around and secure the area. All of a sudden we heard some shooting from the vicinity of our first platoon. After two or three single shots, the whole jungle opened up in one massive crescendo of fire. It seemed that everybody I knew and everybody behind us was firing every weapon they had. We had run into the North Vietnamese, and they had attacked us immediately.

  I remember jumping up to go to a tree for some cover when the firing got bad, and as I was looking at the tree, right in front of my eyes, this chunk of wood came out at me, and I realized it was a bullet and that it had almost taken my nose off. I crunched down in the grass and ran back to where my company commander and radios were. The guys I was with were all down in the grass, hugging the dirt. Since I was lieutenant and had to know what was going on, I stuck my head up and saw about forty North Vietnamese soldiers coming across the grass at us. All I did was say, “Here they come,” and start shooting at them. Everybody got the message and we cranked out a lot of fire, killing all the North Vietnamese. I remember those were the first men I ever killed, and I remember each one of them very distinctly. But if we hadn’t killed them, they would have killed us. The Vietnamese came back that night and killed a lot of our wounded lying in the grass. Most everybody I knew was dead, and the stench of the battlefield was just unbelievable. It took us two days to clean up our dead and wounded and get us out of there.

  We lost 70 percent of our men in the battle. General Westmoreland came down for Thanksgiving a week later to congratulate us on what he called our “distinguished victory,” and as he did every one of us looked around and counted our losses. We thought, “Is that a victory, General?”

  The Battle of Thanh Son 2 in May 1966 was a turning point for me. On the morning of May 6 we attacked a village complex surrounded by trees. We didn’t really know what was behind the trees, because we followed a walking artillery barrage. It wasn’t until we got to the site that we realized we had devastated a village, killing many civilians. We saw children and little kids with their legs blown off and old couples under smoking wreckage. It broke my heart, and it broke the hearts of the guys I served with. I know after we left that village, none of us could talk and none of us could look back.

  There was no point during my year in Vietnam when I realized that the U.S. had made a mistake and that we shouldn’t have been there. But I also know in my heart that any American soldier who went to Vietnam didn’t have to stay there long before he knew that there was something wrong with our presence there, either by the look in the Vietnamese eyes or in the way that we were treating them or what we were doing in the countryside.


  In 1964 Martin Luther King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. His efforts had helped convince Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and his moving speeches had brought many white Americans to his cause. But within the black community, impatience with the white establishment was growing, as well as impatience with King’s turn-the-other-cheek leadership. Now, in the mid-sixties, other voices rose up, not from the South but from the northern ghettos, asking: Why should we strive so hard to join a white community that doesn’t welcome us? Why shouldn’t we embrace our own heritage? The writings and teachings of Malcolm X offered a powerful alternative to King’s message.

  Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little (the X was his way of refusing the name given to his ancestors by white slaveholders), turned to the teachings of the black Muslim movement for guidance. He began to describe America in a deliberately provocative way, saying that southern whites were morally superior to northerners because at least they were honest about their racism. He mocked the image of the North as free. Preaching separation of the races, he urged African Americans to use the term black to describe themselves instead of the then common term Negro. Malcolm X’s speeches set off alarm bells throughout white America.