1968 - Mark Kurlansky [120]
A rival demonstration led by the archbishop of New York, Terence Cooke, who had been installed only three weeks earlier in the presence of President Johnson, promised to rally sixty thousand in support of the war but managed to attract only three thousand war-supporting demonstrators.
In Chicago organizers said that twelve thousand antiwar protesters marched peacefully from downtown Grant Park, but the Chicago police, who attacked with Mace and clubs, said there were only about three thousand marchers. In San Francisco about ten thousand demonstrators marched against the war, including, according to organizers, several dozen servicemen in civilian clothing and several hundred veterans wearing paper hats that said “Veterans for Peace.” In Syracuse, New York, an outstanding high school student, Ronald W. Brazee, age sixteen, who on March 19 had ignited his gasoline-soaked clothing near a cathedral as protest against the war, died. He had left a note that said, “If giving my life will shorten the war by even one day, it will not have been in vain.”
In the meantime, the United States began a massive assault by Airmobile Division helicopters into South Vietnam’s Ashau valley. Ten aircraft were lost in a single day of fighting. At almost the same time as the assault began, the siege of Khe Sanh ended. Six thousand U.S. Marines who had been dug in and cut off on a plateau since January were relieved by a thirty-thousand-man force of U.S. and South Vietnamese troops led by the helicopters of the 1st Air Cavalry in what was called Operation Pegasus. Correspondents with the relief force described the hills around Khe Sanh as “a moonscape.” The earth had been churned into craters by the most intensive aerial bombing in the history of warfare—110,000 tons of U.S. bombs. It was not known if the two North Vietnamese divisions holding the marines in Khe Sanh had been driven off by the bombing or if the North Vietnamese army had never intended a costly final assault. In either case they were thought to have retreated to the Ashau valley, where they could strike Da Nang or Hue. In addition to the assault on the Ashau valley, an attempt to clear enemy troops from the Saigon area was mounted with the optimistic label Operation Complete Victory. Khe Sanh, where two hundred U.S. Marines died during an eleven-week siege and another seventy-one Americans were killed during the relief operation, was to be abandoned by the end of April.
That brief moment of optimism at the beginning of April when Johnson announced he would not run had already vanished by the end of the month. What had happened to the peace talks and the bombing halt? North Vietnam quickly announced that it would appoint representatives to begin talks. The United States then announced that W. Averell Harriman, seventy-six, a onetime Roosevelt liberal and cold war diplomatic veteran, would head up a U.S. team in Geneva or Paris. The United States also let it be known that New Delhi, Rangoon, or Vientiane would be agreeable sites for negotiating. The United States did not want the talks taking place in a communist capital, where the South Vietnamese and South Koreans had no diplomatic mission. On April 8 North Vietnam proposed the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. On April 10 the United States rejected this even for preliminary talks, because there was no U.S. embassy there. Then, on April 11, North Vietnam proposed to have the talks in Warsaw and the United States promptly turned down the offer. By chance this was the same day that Johnson finally signed the Civil Rights Act in the hopes of calming black America; it was also the day 24,500 reserves were called up, bringing U.S. troop strength in Vietnam to a record 549,500—a day in which the United States claimed to kill 120 enemy and lose 14 American soldiers in fighting near Saigon. The next week the United States proposed ten sites, including Geneva, Ceylon, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, Malaysia, and India. But Hanoi rejected the ten and once again proposed Warsaw.
Diplomacy was not working