Hell No by Tom Hayden

Author:Tom Hayden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-08-20T04:00:00+00:00

PRESIDENT: I still think we ought to take the dikes out now. Will that drown people?

KISSINGER: About 200,000 people.

PRESIDENT: No, no, no . . . I’d rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry?

KISSINGER: That, I think, would just be too much.

PRESIDENT: The nuclear bomb, does that bother you?

. . . I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christ sakes.

In a later exchange, Nixon told Kissinger, “The only place where you and I disagree . . . is with regard to the bombing. You’re so goddamned concerned about the civilians and I don’t give a damn. I don’t care.” Kissinger replied: “I’m concerned about the civilians because I don’t want the world to be mobilized against you as a butcher.” Kissinger’s estimate of 200,000 deaths from an attack on the dikes exceeded the initial death toll from the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima at the end of World War II, which, according to Howard Zinn’s 2010 book The Bomb, was 140,000; the immediate toll from the Nagasaki bombing was 70,000.

Our younger generation today should know these were times in twentieth-century America when, in the words of Reinhold Niebuhr, our foremost theologian, writing in the February 8, 1965, issue of Christianity and Crisis, “We are making Vietnam into an American colony, ruining an unhappy nation in the process of saving it.” It was a time when nuclear strategist Herman Kahn was encouraging us to think about the unthinkable and use nuclear weapons. For today’s youth, the unthinkable has become the inconceivable—yet we still exist on the brink of disaster.

The most important lesson of these traumatizing experiences is the paradoxical one that, as I once told my friend Marshall Gans, “Social change happens very, very slowly,” and yet change comes suddenly and unexpectedly in the form of the future itself. The movements for civil rights, peace, justice, and women’s rights all arose at the extreme margins of society and were ridiculed and harassed by the Machiavellian class until they gained support from the wells of our progressive history, became majority movements, created new norms, and elected national leaders. Even in triumph they were forced to contend with countermovements within our culture, our political system, the corporations, and the military. They faced everything from assassination to co-optation to venal corruption and clashing egos, in an unending cycle. Thus do movements of reform and radical change rise and fall, and rise again. The alchemy of change isn’t a science. It is elusive and unpredictable. What is certain, however, is that the yearning for justice and dignity is inextinguishable, for it defines us as a species seeking to give meaning to our otherwise inchoate lives.

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