Calley’s trial was held in 1971 at a military base in Georgia. On March 29, he was found guilty of the murder of 22 Vietnamese civilians.
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Enter Jimmy Carter, the governor of Georgia—make that, as I was learning, the very ambitious governor of Georgia. He pronounced Calley a scapegoat. Calley’s conviction, he said, was “a blow to troop morale.”
By this time, I had already published my book on My Lai and spent months giving speeches about the massacre and the war at colleges and universities all over America, but not in Georgia or elsewhere in the Deep South. I was beginning a quest that continues today—asking: Why My Lai and why was it covered up? I would learn that killings were reported, via South Vietnamese channels, and CIA channels, to the American high command in Saigon, and were known within a day to the staff of General William Westmoreland, the man in charge of the war.
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[1976] … as recorded by Charley Mohr, who spent years reporting from Vietnam for the New York Times, [Carter] denied that he had ever supported Calley or condoned his actions. He explained that he had never thought Calley was anything but “guilty”: “I never felt any attitude toward Calley except abhorrence. And I thought he should be punished, and I still do.” But the candidate said that he also thought that “it was not right to equate what Calley did with what other Americans were doing in Vietnam.”
Mohr quoted from a 1971 report in the Atlanta Constitution revealing that Carter had proclaimed the Monday following Calley’s court martial conviction to be “America’s Fighting Men’s Day.” He asked the citizens of the state, Mohr wrote, “to display the American flag and to drive with their headlights on to show their complete support for our servicemen, concern for our country and rededication to the principles which have made our country great.”
Carter was a weak president and more of instinctive hawk than he let on. After winning the presidency he named Cyrus Vance, who had been McNamara’s deputy and fellow liar about the Vietnam War, as his secretary of state. His secretary of defense was Harold Brown, who has served as President Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of the Air Force from 1965 to the swearing in of Richard Nixon in January of 1969 with no known complaints as Johnson intensified the bombing of North Vietnam and consistently refused to respond to North Vietnam, which was willing to discuss an end to the war but only after a bombing pause. Johnson refused to authorize the pause that he thought, so I would learn years later, would be a sign of weakness.
The Carter years came after Daniel Ellsberg’s revelation in 1971 of the Pentagon Papers that told in chilling detail how rational, intelligent senior officials—men with the probity of McNamara, Vance, and Brown—lied to the American people and the world about what was really going in the Vietnam War. The deaths of ours, and others, were a lesser consideration. McNamara would later publish a memoir in which he noted that he knew the war was lost by 1965 but could not bring himself to share that knowledge with the American people.
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I always had contacts in important places in the intelligence and military community, and after Carter’s death I asked a senior official what it was like being on the inside in the Carter presidency.
He was someone who had reason to attend many high-level White House meetings dealing with military, strategic, and intelligence issues during Carter’s four years in office. He told me he thought Jimmy Carter’s years in the Naval Academy and his subsequent active-duty service working with Admiral Hyman Rickover, the eccentric submariner who is credited with developing the Navy’s first nuclear-powered submarine, had limited his view of the world. Rickover was renowned for interviewing most Navy Academy grads who wanted to serve in the submarine command and being arbitrary, at worst, and demanding, at best, of those he selected.
He concluded early on, he told me, that Carter was “a naïve Academy grad. Never understood DC politics or real-world hard-ass power struggles. Strategic issues were a complete mystery. Rickover was his ideal of a military leader: the perfect nerd. Technically a wizard but a self-important ineffective arrogant leader.” In his view, Jimmy Carter had many of Rickover’s worst attributes, “hiding behind a fundamental religious piety for the poor and downtrodden. Calley was in his view just doing his best to follow orders.”
At one point, the senior official said, he challenged the president on that view, and told him that a secret Pentagon working group on Vietnam war crimes a few years earlier uncovered seven other massacres—none at the My Lai level—that were never prosecuted. The president’s response was that “bad things happen every now and then in war. Our senior Army leaders like General Westmoreland”—who ran the war from 1964 to 1968 and later served as the Army Chief of Staff—“are hardly to blame for a few bad apples like Calley.” History may provide a much more caustic assessment of the responsibility of the generals who ran a war that murdered millions of Vietnamese innocents.
These recent words, which came a few days after Carter’s death, among many glowing newspaper obituaries that focused on the often extraordinary good works Carter did after leaving office, are the words of an old Vietnam combat hand who, like me, has been unable to come to terms with the American lack of respect for the Vietnamese civilians whose slaughter should ever be a black mark on the US.
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