Johnson simply brushed that aside and he said as though what McGovern was afraid of was that the military were being given their head and that’s what he had to be reassured about. And Johnson told him this famous line that’s often quoted. He said it to lots of people, he said don’t worry about that. He said, “They don’t bomb a shithouse in North Vietnam but I control it. I decide they don’t have their way.” And, thinking he was being reassuring, he went on to say that he wasn’t enthralled of the military men, he knew what was happening and he was skeptical of them, and he said, “You know they don’t do lots of things that they could be doing that they oughta do over there. I’m always having to tell them things that they haven’t thought of. You know the way we hunt rabbits in Texas? We hunt them from a plane with a shotgun.”As I heard this anecdote from McGovern, the hair began to rise on the back of my neck all of a sudden. "You see, we fly over in a light plane and we see the rabbit down there and we pick up a shotgun and we give it to them. That’s the way we hunt them. See, the VC are like rabbits, they sorta crawl on the ground in the reeds there.” And he said, “We’ve got lots of light planes, we’ve got lots of machines would do it the same way. The generals haven’t realized that.”Well that that, this memory. This was pretty late in the game, this was a year ago. It was after I’d seen Frank and some other things. You see, that was the kind of thing that brought back this memory of the Plain of Reeds to me—the kind of thing that perhaps you take as one of the costs of war, the horrors of war, in a war that you think could be justified, or at least that somebody thought was justified. But once you see it all as murder, then the question that I raised earlier becomes, how did we get in the position of gook hunters, as Donaldson’s accused of being? Of seeing the people as less than human, really.A number of years earlier, I think it was in ’68, I’d seen Tom Hayden, as a matter of fact, at a conference, and he said we should use Vietnam as a mirror. If you want to know how we treat counterrevolution in this world, watch what we do in Vietnam. Well, I thought at that time that that was an arresting thought, but it was exaggerated. Vietnam was unique. Vietnam was not the place to look to find us as we were. Vietnam was where you shouldn’t be. But obviously as the years have gone by, I see more and more in that.And I see some other analogies—Attica {prison riot}, for example, as a mirror of the U.S. There are some fairly strong relations that I think bring out the essential point here. In both cases, officials acting with authority to use violence in secret to cover it up. In prison it doesn’t even take the form of cover-up. There are no records of these things. The power is almost absolute, the question is not raised. You don’t have reporters with television, videotape in prisons; you can’t get in them to question the inmates as to what really happened in Attica. What really happened with George Jackson in San Quentin? The prison is the ideal bureaucracy, totally invisible in its use of violence against the inmates. And so Attica as a mirror tells us what Vietnam as a mirror tells us, what Americans in authority do when they have this power to use violence in secret to achieve their coercive aims against people who are less than human. Asians, in the one case, blacks, or in any case convicts—Frank may be shortly, or as I may be shortly in the other case. Our vice president made that very clear. He said, how could we compare the life of a prisoner in its value or worth to the life of the guards that might have been jeopardized. One was human, the other wasn’t. So it is a mirror. It does tell us a lot about who we are and what we’ve been up to.I saw one other thing struck me on this. The date September 5, 1969—that was the date that the {Lt. William} Calley trial was…the Calley charges were brought, and that struck me because it was September 30, 1969. It was a day I remember very well when a very similar process ended while the Calley one was starting, and that was that the president—or rather it was announced, not the president but the Secretary of the Army, {Stanley} Resor, who was also involved in this, of course, dropped all charges against the Green Beret murder case, where a subhuman Asian counteragent, counterspy, had been weighted down with tire irons and dropped in the waters off Vietnam. And that one was dropped without testimony in circumstances where again, just as in this case, it was clear from the story that everybody had lied. The president had lied in saying he had not dropped the case. The secretary of the army had lied in saying that it was he and not the president who had dropped the case. {Creighton William} Abrams had lied clearly about his reasons for bringing the charges in the first place so unusually. And his real reason for doing it was clear in the story, was that Colonel Rhode, the head of Special Forces in Vietnam, had lied to General Abrams, and had in turn been lied to by his sergeants and majors.