A cast of millions—including Daniel Ellsberg, John and Yoko, Country Joe and the Fish, students, trade unionists, housewives—star in this stand-up-and-cheer documentary about peace crusaders versus a president pleading insanity.
While President Richard Nixon publicly decried and downplayed protests to end the war in Vietnam in 1969, Stephen Talbot’s new documentary The Movement and the “Madman” exposes how, behind closed doors, the then-largest anti-war demonstrations in American history thwarted Tricky Dick’s secret scheme to drastically escalate hostilities, including nuking North Vietnam. In reality, despite Nixon’s bravado, the Quaker president was quaking in his boots as hundreds of thousands marched and sang within earshot of the White House, as legendary folk singer Pete Seeger shouted: “Are you listening, Nixon?”
Indeed, he was—loud and clear—as The Movement and the “Madman” breathtakingly chronicles. So was Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security advisor, who “knew there was no hope in Vietnam,” according to his aide, Morton Halperin, a Defense Department official who had attended Harvard University with Kissinger and may be the most quoted person in Talbot’s nonfiction film. Halperin was also friends with military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, who advised Kissinger before leaking The Pentagon Papers. The whistleblower is another of the most frequent interviewees in Talbot’s documentary, primarily heard via audio in an almost ninety-minute film consisting largely of creatively edited archival footage and news clips.
What Halperin and other insiders reveal in The Movement and the “Madman” is that in 1969, after taking office that year, Nixon clandestinely plotted to escalate the Vietnam War—including the possibility of nuking North Vietnam. This was despite the fact that during the 1968 White House race Nixon had vowed he would not use nukes in Indochina. In a desperate gambit to win the war, Nixon concocted a bizarre ploy called the “madman” strategy to intimidate Hanoi (which was then holding secret talks with the United States in Paris) and Moscow. According to Halperin, “His secret plan was to threaten the North Vietnamese with nuclear weapons. He was convinced that the way to make the threat credible was for the North Vietnamese to fear that he was crazy and might actually do this.” Nixon even clandestinely staged a global nuclear alert, including deploying the Strategic Air Command, in his mad bid to cow Ho Chi Minh and Brezhnev.
Tricky Dick’s deadline for Hanoi to accept Washington’s conditions for ending the war before launching the drastic U.S. escalation codenamed “Operation Duck Hook”—which included bombing North Vietnam, mining Haiphong harbor, and deploying tactical nuclear weapons—was November 1, 1969. “Nixon assumed that he could bend Cold War adversaries to his will by making them fear that he was crazy enough to launch a nuclear attack,” said William Burr, co-author of Nixon’s Nuclear Specter: The Secret Alert of 1969, Madman Diplomacy, and the Vietnam War.
What stopped Operation Duck Hook from wreaking havoc on Vietnam, including possibly dropping the big one near Vietnam’s borders with the People’s Republic of China (which was also nuclear-armed) and Laos?
The answer is “Volunteers for America,” as Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane sing about in one of the many rock songs that rousingly punctuate The Movement and the “Madman.” As the film shows, anti-war organizers sought to channel the growing disenchantment of ordinary Americans with the raging Vietnam War into direct actions on a nationwide basis—which included a series of “moratoriums,” when masses of everyday people nationwide took time off from work or school to publicly display their opposition to the immoral conflict.
The campaigners expanded the base beyond New Left dissidents, reaching out to trade unionists such as president of the United Auto Workers union (UAW) Walter Reuther, civil rights activist Coretta Scott King, church groups including clergymen like the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Congressmembers like Shirley Chisholm, concerned mothers, and other common citizens tired of the countless body bags returning home after being killed in a seemingly endless, senseless war.
A recurring theme in Talbot’s film is eschewing the more militant wing and tactics of anti-war radicals in favor of a more mainstream, “fighting-within-the-system” approach.
The first moratorium of local demonstrations across the United States on October 15, 1969, drew up to three million people. ABC News’ Howard K. Smith comments in the documentary: “The word protester generally evokes an image of long hair and love beads. But today, the crowds that marched and chanted and cheered the speeches looked more like a cross-section picked by the Census Bureau.”
A recurring theme in Talbot’s film is eschewing the more militant wing and tactics of anti-war radicals in favor of a more mainstream, “fighting-within-the-system” approach. The New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (New MOBE) worked with Old Left organizations like the Communist Party U.S.A. and the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, but not with the more confrontational Students for a Democratic Society and Yippies.
This broad-based coalition proceeded with a second moratorium to take place simultaneously in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, California, on November 15. The Mobilization Committee rallied at least half-a-million people to demonstrate in the nation’s capital, and another quarter million in the Bay Area. Up to that point, these were the largest one-day protests in American history—and while Nixon may have been insane, he was a shrewd politician who realized that the increasingly war-weary public would not support escalating the conflict, let alone nuking North Vietnam. Tricky Dick was keenly aware that peace protesters had knocked LBJ out of running for reelection in 1968, and he later wrote: “Although publicly I continued to ignore the raging antiwar controversy, I had to face the fact that it had probably destroyed the credibility of my ultimatum to Hanoi.”
The Movement and the “Madman” resonates in our own time. Nixon’s two-faced character is similar to the revelations emerging from the current Dominion Voting Systems defamation lawsuit, in that what Fox “News” was publicly stating about President Donald Trump and the 2020 presidential election was quite the opposite of what was being said (via texts and emails) behind closed doors.
For those like myself who attended those 1969 moratoriums, Talbot’s period piece will bring back a flood of memories with shots of Dr. Benjamin Spock, U.S. Senator George McGovern, New York City Mayor John Lindsay, Dave Dellinger, and other notables. At times almost a “rock-umentary,” the film’s canny use of music shows the essential role folk and rock played in inspiring the cause, which, New MOBE leader David Hawk says was “successful because of music.”
But in addition to youthful reveries, participants in those earthshaking protests will also learn important lessons. The Movement and the “Madman” reveals how the massive moratoriums were painstakingly organized. And although the Vietnam War grinded on for about another six years, as Ellsberg points out: “The demonstrations did not appear to change anything. But no one knew that the war was within weeks of erupting—[using] the first nukes since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Susan Miller-Coulter, co-coordinator of the March Against Death in Washington, D.C., November 13 to 14, 1969, adds: “Nobody knew at the time that we stopped the escalation.”
But we know it now, largely thanks to The Movement and the “Madman.” Filmmaker Stephen Talbot, a former child actor on the sixties Leave It to Beaver sitcom, grew into a gifted Emmy, duPont and Peabody award-winning documentarian who has produced, written, or directed more than forty documentaries for public television, primarily for the PBS series Frontline, including News War: What’s Happening to the News. Talbot directed the PBS history special 1968: The Year That Shaped a Generation, and produced and wrote PBS biographies of authors Dashiell Hammett, Ken Kesey, Maxine Hong Kingston, and John Dos Passos. He made his first documentary film about the November 1969 anti-war protests in Washington while he was a student at Wesleyan University.
The engaging, well-made The Movement and the “Madman” is tremendously good fun, capturing the quintessence of that sixties “we can change the world” ethos. The film’s most essential lesson is the enormous power of the people when we are organized to resist the ruling class and fight for a just cause. Even if we may not realize it at the time, the organized masses of people, united, can never be defeated.
On March 28, PBS series American Experience will broadcast and simultaneously stream The Movement and the “Madman” on all station-branded PBS platforms, including PBS.org and the PBS App, available on iOS, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, Android TV, Samsung Smart TV, Chromecast, and VIZIO.