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As Kerry prepared to come to Washington, one story in particular fueled the antiwar movement. On March 29,1971 a jury convicted Lt. William Calley of killing twenty two civilians in what became known as the My Lai massacre. Nixon had order Calley released pending his appeal. The news coverage of the case stirred questions about how many more My Lais had been committed.
On April 18,1971 in his biggest interview to date, Kerry appeared on NBC's Meet the Press to discuss the scope of American atrocities in Vietnam. Behind the scenes the White House was trying to steer questioning. A Colson memo noted 'a number of tough questions have.... have planted with Vietnam Veterans Against the War questioners for Meet the Press." Kerry's media star began to shine. A few days later the New York Times ran a profile titled "Angry War Veteran: John Forbes Kerry." Kerry was as saying he was "still a moderate. I'm not a radical in any sense of the world. I guess I'm just a angry young man."
Indeed, it was Kerry's appeal as a sober sailor, instead of being one of the "bearded weirdos" that Nixon privately disdained, that most concerned the White House. One day after Kerry's TV appearance, Colson fired off a memo expressing exasperation that more wasn't being done to undermine Kerry and the other VVAW organizers. He ordered administration officials to show that Vietnam Veterans Against the War "a fringe group, that was financed from questionable sources, and it doesn't represent the veterans movement, and that the guys involved are a pretty shoddy bunch... There must be more we can be doing."
The Nixon White House tried to prevent the veterans from camping on the Washington Mall. But the move backfired when it brought the protesters the kind of media attention they could only dream about back in Detroit. Despite the White House efforts, the protesters were granted permits, and they set up their tents and banners. Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts came down to meet Kerry, drawing even more attention to the effort.
Although Kerry had worked briefly for Kennedy's 1962 campaign, this was the first extended meeting between the two. "I remember very clearly, walking up to the tents, him taking me around , meeting with some of the troops. I remember sitting down and talking to them, that night there....for a period of a hour or so," Kennedy said.
With Kennedy in Kerry's corner the meeting was arranged between the VVAW leaders and some of the senators sympathetic to their cause. Kerry, and Camil who delivered the grisly testimony in Detroit, and six other veterans met the senators at a fundraiser at the home of Senator Philip A. Hart, a Michigan Democrat who was familiar with the Winter Soldier hearings and sympathetic to the cause. One of the guests that evening was Senator William Fulbright, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
April 22,1971 the hearing room of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was jammed, as twenty seven year old Kerry was dressed in green fatigues and wearing his Silver Star and Purple Heart ribbons approached the witness table. Television cameras lined the walls, and veterans packed the seats. Kerry sat at the witness table and delivered the most famous speech of his life.
"How do you ask a man to the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? The Nixon administration has done us the ultimate dishonor. They have attempted to disown us and the sacrifices we made for this country.... Someone has to die so President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, 'the first president to lose a war'."
Kerry wondered, where the architects of the war were, where were Robert McNamara and Bundy. Kerry looked up at the senators and asked:
"Where are they now that we, the men whom they sent off to war, have returned? These are the commanders who deserted their troops, and there is no more a serious crime in the law of war."
For many observer's the most shocking part of Kerry's testimony was that of what he heard at the Winter Soldier hearings. He told what 150 other veterans had testified to during the Winter Soldier hearings.
"they personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country."
President Nixon watched the televised reports about Kerry with a mixture of anger and admiration. The "real star" of the hearing was Kerry, Nixon told his chief of staff H.R. "Bob" Haldeman and national security adviser Henry Kissinger the day after Kerry testified, according to the secretly taped White House recordings. "He did a hell of a great job," Haldeman said. "It was extremely effective," Nixon agreed. "He did a superb job on it at Foreign Relations Committee yesterday. A Kennedy-type guy, he looks like Kennedy, and he talks exactly like Kennedy," Haldeman said.
Kerry had emerged as one of the most recognized veterans in America. And clearly understood the emphasis that the media placed on the imagery. So he put a exclamation mark on the events by lining up the veterans to "return" their medals on April 23. Kerry said he suggested that the veterans place their medals and ribbons on a table and return them. But other members of the antiwar group wanted to throw the medals and ribbons over the fence in front of the Capitol, and Kerry went along with the idea. Video footage of the scene shows hundreds of veterans angrily gathering in front of the Capitol. One by One the veterans threw their medals over the fence. Kerry is showed in the footage saying "I'm not doing this for any violent reasons, but for peace and justice, and try to make this country wake up once and for all."
The week's events had a unquestionable impact.At the beginning of the week, a band of 800 or so Vietnam veterans gathered to protest the war, followed by Kerry's April 22 testimony, then the medal tossing ceremony on April 23. By the following day, the publicity helped swell the crowd at the previous planned rally on the Mall to at least 250,000 people. Kerry wearing a blue button down shirt under his combat jacket, addressed the rally from the Capitol steps. "We came here to undertake one last mission, search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war," Kerry told a cheering crowd of at least 250,000.
In one week, Kerry had gone from little-known former swift boat skipper to becoming the face of the protest movement. "The transformation was instant," said Kerry friend George Butler, who sat behind Kerry during the Senate testimony. "Eight hundred people had turned to 250,000," said Kerry's then brother-in-law, David Thorne, who stood beside Kerry in the rally.
Inside the White House, Nixon was furious, and so was his secretary Rose Mary Woods. "Don't dare go around these people because I just want to hit at em'," Woods told the president. "Umph!" Nixon responded "These clever left-wingers who're, uh, the Communist's and basically a lot of this is Communists. It is all the fault of those liberal senators like Teddy Kennedy. "They were going to try to lose this war, "well, well, we're not gonna lose it!"
Then they focused on Kerry. Nixon said,"Of course the real, one of the real problems, this is goddamn press is so unintelligible and unfair. They, they don't give our Republicans who are tryin' to answer these people and they don't put em'on. Apparently the guy thats really good, the only good one out of the damn veterans group, only from a PR standpoint, is Kerry....the news is all Kerry. There a funny bunch, but uh well I tell you we're going to stand firm against em'. I got Henry in here... I said, now look, just, they're not gonna rattle us one bit. We're gonna stay on our course. This country's not gonna be run by a bunch of goddamn rabble."
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