A Bright Shining Lie

John Paul Vann and American in Vietnam

by Neil Sheehan

Jesse decided he would give his father a parting gift, the gift of his honesty and his willingness to take a stand for what he believed to be right. He would leave half of his draft card on the coffin with his atiare as a token of the gift. Then he would complete the gift by handing the other half of the card to Richard Nixon hen the family drove to the White House in a little while for a ceremony at which Nixon was to honor his father with a posthumous award of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Jesse had always refused to accept the draft, but there was no longer any need for him to go to jail because of his refusal, other than to be honest and to take a stand. He was immune now from actually being drafted. Several years earlier, he had been in danger of going to prison for draft resistance. Jesse's draft card in Colorado had classified him as delinquent then for his refusal to cooperate. Delinquent status meant that he would shortly have been faced with the choice of prison or induction into the Army. (He had ruled out fleeing to Canada.) John Allen had put on his college ROTC uniform, gone to the draft board office, and told the middle-aged women who was the clerk that their father was serving in Vietnam in an important position. He had talked her into changing Jesse's status to 1-Y, temporarily unfit for service, because Jesse was seeing a psychiatrist. John Allen had acted without consulting either Jesse or their father. He has by then assumed the role of the man in he family because of Vann's absence. John Allen had known that Jesse would continue to resist the draft and that their father was unsympathetic to Jesse's argument that his conscience forbade him to serve in Vietnam. A few months before his father's death, Jesse had received a new draft card in the mail. The board had reclassified him as 4-F, permanently unfit for service. Jesse didn't know why the board had exempted him in this way. He had stopped seeing the psychiatrist after a few months in 1969, and he had no physical or mental disability.
Someone handed Jesse a rose to leave on the coffin. He took out his draft card, ripped it i half, put Nixon's half back into his pocket, and tucked the half he was giving his father under the rose, between the bloom and a branch of the stem, to try to to conceal what he was doing. He laid both on top of the silver-gray coffin alongside the other roses his mother, his brothers, and his father's relatives had placed there. "Here, this is all I can give you now; this is all i can do," he said to his father. He turned away d went over to talk to Dan Ellsberg for a few minutes before it was time to leave for the White House. Jesse thought of what he would do when the family walked into the Oval Office for the ceremony and Nixon put out his had to shake Jesse's. Instead of shaking hands, Jesse would silently present Nixon with his half. Half of a draft card would speak to him. It was a crime to refuse to carry one's draft card and an additional crime to mutilate one. Jesse wondered if it was a third crime to present a mutilated half to the president. He did not look forward to going to jail, but he believed his act of protest would be worth it. One of his friends had already gone to a federal prison for refusing to be drafted.
Jesse's younger brother Tommy, eighteen, saw him tear the draft card in two and asked him what he was doing. Jesse reluctantly explained what he had in store for Nixon. Tommy could not keep Jesse's exciting plan to himself and told Peter about it on the way to the White House. The sirens of two police motorcycles cleared the way for the limousines to run the red lights, because the ceremony was scheduled to begin at noon and the men in charge of the funeral did not want to keep the president waiting. Tommy approved of Jesse's scheme. He had a theory that Nixon was not bothered by the dying and the maiming and the other suffering f the war because none of it had ever personally touched Nixon or anyone close to him. Nixon had never experienced the war as the Vanns and other families Tommy knew had felt it, families who had lost a son or a father to death, or feared for one wounded, or grieved over a son who had made the opposite choice of resistance and jail or exile. Neither of Nixon's sons sons-in-law had gone to Vietnam to fight as Johnson's sons-in-law had done. He was anticipating the expression on Nixon's face when Jesse handed him half of a mutilated draft card. The war might at last come home to Richard Nixon, Tommy thought.
Peter said that Jesse's plan was stupid. Peter had been looking forward to this opportunity to meet the president.
At the White House the family was shown to the Roosevelt Room, about five paces across the hall from the Oval Office, for what was supposed to be a wait of a few minute. Nixon was finishing a high-level discussion of welfare reform begun while the funeral was taking place at Arlington. Vann's half sister, Dorothy Lee, a housewife from Norfolk, Virginia, and his half brothers, Frank, a carpenter and construction supervisor, and Eugene, a senior master sergeant in the Air Force, had also ridden over from Arlington to witness the award of the medal.
Jesse tried to ease the strain within himself by inspecting the rust-colored wall-to-wall carpet. He was observing that the Roosevelt Room carpet had been shoddily installed and that he could have done a better job when John Allen confronted him. Jesse's older brother had also noticed him doing something odd beside the coffin. The conversation between Tommy and Peter in the limousine, which John Allen had overheard, had given him the explanation.
"Don't do it, Jesse!" he said.
"Why not?" Jesse asked.
"This day is not for you, Jesse," his brother said, keeping his voice low and controlled to try to prevent anyone else in the room from overhearing them. "This is for Dad. This is what Dad lived for and what he died for. Don't belittle him by doing this."
The day that John Allen saw as the vindication of their father would be destroyed. The White House press corps would be covering the ceremony. The spectacle of the long-haired son of a legendary American warrior in Vietnam handing the president half of his draft card, after leaving the other half with his father on top of the coffin, would make quite a story.
Tommy guessed what they were arguing about and came over to defend Jesse. "But this is what Jesse believes in," he said. The three of them began to argue over whether Jesse's right to express his opposition to the war took precedence over the public vindication of their father's career. Jesse's uncles overheard the argument and joined in the attempt to dissuade him.
"If you're thinking of doing that, I won't go in there," his Uncle Frank, a balding, stocky man, said.
"Well, you do what you want," Jesse replied. "I have to do what I have to do."
His Uncle Eugene, the Air Force senior master sergeant with the seven stripes of his rank on the sleeves of his tunic, resembled Jesse's father in the way his face got red when he was angry. He was called Gene in the family.

"Jesse," he said, " your father was my brother and I've known him a hell of a lot longer than you have. He believed so strongly in what he was fighting for that to do this to him would be a slap in his face."
" Leave me alone," Jesse said to them all. "I have my own conscience to obey."
John Allen walked over to his mother. After a trip to the powder room, Mary Jane had been chatting in another corner of the Roosevelt Room with Dorothy Lee. She had taken a small dowse of Valium at the hotel before the funeral to try to control her emotions. The drug was having only a partial effect. She looked composed in a simply tailored state-blue dress. She was wearing her glasses, however, to hide her red-rimmed eyes.
"Mom," John Allen said, " Jesse wants to give Nixon half of his draft card. We can' t let this happen."
Mary Jane started sobbing again as she had in the chapel when they wheeled in the coffin. She went to Jesse and leaded with him. "Please Jesse, please, for your father, don't do this. This is your father's day, not yours, or mine, or anybody's else's. You would disgrace him." his mother's pleading trouble Jesse, but he would not relent.
The Department of the Army civilian official who was supervising the funeral and a captain assisting him rushed out of the room to find someone on the White House staff. They met Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, an Air Force officer who was then a brigadier general and the president's military assistant, in the hallway. He was heading toward the Roosevelt Room to see if the family was ready, because one of his duties was to supervise such ceremonies. He had known Vann slightly and liked him. They warned Scowcroft what was happening and then one of them brought out John Allen to relate what Jesse intended.
"That's impossible," Scowcroft said.
" We really don't know how to stop him," John Allen said. "He's determined to do it."
Scowcroft walked into the Oval Office, gave the president the briefest possible explanation of what was occurring, and said there would be a slight delay while he handled the problem. A career staff officer, Scowcroft was known of his businesslike approach to crises large and small.
He went into the Roosevelt Room and drew Jesse aside from the group that was haranguing him. Scowcroft spoke to Jesse in a calm voice.
"Listen," he said "whatever you think about the war and whatever you want to do about it, this ceremony is to honor your father. There is no way you can do this and not ruin the ceremony. Unless you promise us you won't give your draft card to the president, unless you promise us you won't do this, we'll have to cancel the ceremony."
Jesse had already begun to weaken under his mother's continued pleading and because his Uncle Frank, in contrast to the others, had quoted down and tried to reason with him in similar fashion. The calm tone of this man made a further impression on him. He decided that he might be exploiting for his own ends a situation in which he was present only because of his father. He might not have a moral right to do that. Since he couldn't act with a clean conscience, he wouldn't act at all. Anyway, he wasn't being given much choice. "Okay, okay," he said to Scowcroft, "I promise not to do it."
Scowcroft squeezed Jesse's forearm and gave him one of those "Good boy!" looks. He turned to John Allen. "Will he or won't he?" Scowcroft asked.

"If he says he won't do it, he won't do it." John Allen answered.
Scowcroft returned to the Oval Office and told the president that the ceremony could go forward.
John Allen escorted his mother into the Oval Office, followed by his brothers and his aunt and two uncles. As the family entered, the president was sitting at his desk, which had been cleared of work except for a stack of looseleaf folder he had been reading. He closed the folder, rose, walked around the desk, and met them halfway into the room. The cleared desk, the last bit of work put aside to give full attention, the rising and the meeting halfway were Richard Nixon's ritual for greeting visitors to the president's office. He expressed his sympathy to Mary Jane and John Allen and then shook hands with each in turn. Tommy overheard Nixon say "Thanks" to Jesse when the president shook his hand. Jesse was so disturbed by the sensation of actually touching the hand of Richard Nixon that he did not hear this word of presidential gratitude. He noticed only that Nixon had a large hand.
Rogers and Laird followed them into the president's office. Mary Jane was surprised to see Alsop with them and wondered, because she did not understand Alsop's position in the Washington constellation, why a newspaper columnist was being treated like family. Knowing of Alsop's affection for Vann, Nixon had invited him to join the ceremony ahead of the ordinary press and to hear Nixon's private remarks to the family.
The White House photographer lined up everyone except Alsop for the official photograph. He arranged them in a semicircle in front of the drapes of the bay windows behind the desk where the Stars and Stripes and the presidential flag rested on poles topped by gilded eagles. The president stood between John Allen and Mary Jane. At the moment the photographer pressed the shutter button, he smiled slightly, but he looked a bit queasy in the subsequent photograph.
After the official photograph had been taken, the president spoke briefly to the family. He said that Vann's death had been a personal loss to him as well as a loss to the country. He extended sympathy to them on behalf of the entire nation. He had felt friendship toward Vann and great respect and appreciation for Vann's work in Vietnam. Last time he had seen Vann had been right here in this office during one of Vann's home leaves. Nixon said there had been a shared understanding of the war in that meeting and that Vann had given him new insights into the conflict and into the desires of the people of South Vietnam.
Peter had read Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People." Carnegie recommended sincerity in dealing with others. Peter did not give Nixon a high score for sincerity. Richard Nixon was attempting to be gracious to the Vanns His apparent nervousness over Jesse and his personal mannerisms got in the way. As he talked, he smiled too much for what was not a happy occasion. His eyes moved constantly, without ever focusing on anyone in particular. John Allen had acquired his father's habit of wanting to look someone he was meeting directly in the eyes. The president's eyes seemed to avoid his, sliding off whenever their glances met. The family's impression of insincerity was heightened by the makeup Nixon was wearing to cover his heavy beard for the television cameras that were shortly to appear. They had never seen a man wearing makeup before except on a stage and were surprised to go to the White House and be greeted by a president with pancake makeup on his face. The family got the feeling that this was some sort of theatrical performance, that Vann's death had created an opportunity for Richard Nixon to do some public relations work as the bestowed of a medal on a war hero.
The president irritated them most by saying twice in the course of his remarks that he had wanted to give Vann the nation's highest award, the Congressional medal of Honor, but that the law prevented this because Vann had technically been a civilian official. Therefore, Nixon said, he was reluctantly limited to bestowing the second-highest honor on Vann, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. No one in the family believed that John Vann rated anything less than the highest award. Peter thought that the president should either have made a special arrangement to give his father the Congressional Medal of Honor or have had the good taste not to mention it.
The president's aides let the reporters and television cameramen into the room. John Allen received the medal for his father, because Mary Jane was no longer Vann's legal wife. He stood in front of the president at the right side of the desk, where the colors and battle streamers of the country's armed services hung from another row of flag poles crested by gold-plated eagles.
Scowcroft kept his eyes on Jesse.
Before handing the medal to John Allen, the president tread the citation praising Vann:
"Soldier of peace and patriot of two nations, the name of John Paul Vann will be honored as long as free men remember the struggle to preserve the independence of South Vietnam."His military and civilian service in Vietnam spanned a decade, marked throughout by resourcefulness, professional excellence and unsurpassed courage; by supreme dedication and personal sacrifice.
"A truly noble American, a superb leader," the president read, "he stand with Lafayette in that gallery of heroes who have made another brave people's cause their won."
Mary Jane resented being forced to watch from the side, She resented more the staged manner of the ceremony. She resented most that Nixon was giving Vann a second-best medal.
"This is a dirty damn shame, John," she said silently to him now, just as she had told him she loved him when she put a rose on his coffin. "He's going to bury you second. The whole bag is still keeping you down."