Then, within a few years, we all disappeared from its pages. I
think what happened is that the editors wanted to keep ahead of the
game. They knew their audience and couldn’t fail to see that the
young intellectuals who constituted a large part of it were changing.
It ended for me personally in late January 1973. Nixon and
Kissinger’s “peace treaty” with Hanoi had just been announced. The
New York Times published a big supplement that included the text
of the treaty and a long interview with Kissinger in which he went
through the treaty paragraph by paragraph. The war is over, he said,
everything is just fantastic.
I was suspicious. Something similar had happened about three
months earlier, in October 1972, when Radio Hanoi had announced a
peace agreement the US had been keeping secret. It was the last
week of Nixon’s re-election campaign. Kissinger went on television
and said, Peace is at hand. Then he went through the peace
agreement, rejected every single thing in it, and made it very clear
that the US was going to continue bombing.
The press only picked up Kissinger’s first line, Peace is at hand.
Wonderful. It’s all over. Vote for Nixon. What he was actually
saying was, We’re not going to pay any attention to this, because
we don’t want this agreement, and we’re going to keep bombing
until we get something better.
Then came the Christmas bombings, which didn’t work. The US
lost a lot of B-52s and faced big protests all around the world. So
they stopped the bombings and accepted the October proposals
they’d previously rejected. (That’s not what the press said, but
that’s essentially what happened.)
The January farce was the same. Kissinger and the White House
made it clear and explicit that they were rejecting every basic
principle of the treaty they were compelled to sign, so that they
could go on with the war, seeking to gain what they could.
I was pretty angry. I happened to have a talk scheduled for a
peace group at Columbia that evening. I called Robert Silvers, a
friend who was the editor of the New York Review, and asked him if
we could meet for dinner. We spent an hour or two going through
the texts in the Times special supplement. It was easy enough to
see what they meant.
I said, Look, I’d like to write about this. I think it’s the most
important thing I’ll ever write, because you know as well as I do
the press is going to lie flat out about it. The destruction and killing
ann
(Ann)
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