Tale of two soldiers
The strange story of young John Kerry's prowar doppelganger
IN 1971, THE HANDSOME young US Navy veteran John Kerry was establishing himself as a leading foe of the Vietnam War. That same year, another charismatic, well-born Navy vet emerged from the ranks to speak out in favor of the war on the public stage. Who was this young anti-Kerry? None other than the future bestselling gay novelist and outspoken champion of the swinging San Francisco lifestyle, Armistead Maupin.
Not long after Kerry and the Vietnam Veterans Against the War led Operation Dewey Canyon III -- a week-long protest in Washington, D.C -- the White House selected a group of young ex-GIs to serve as alternative representatives of youth culture. Among them was Maupin, a North Carolina native and descendant of the Huguenot general Gabriel Maupin who had fought on behalf of Americans in the revolutionary war.
Maupin's path to celebrity was circuitous. After dropping out of law school and working briefly for an executive named Jesse Helms at a North Carolina TV station, he joined the navy in 1967. He attended the same Newport, R.I., officer candidate school that Kerry attended, and then found himself attached to the destroyer tender Everglades, which sailed to Naples and Malta. "Can you believe my ship was named after a swamp?" Maupin would later joke. "That says something, doesn't it?"
In 1969, Maupin was transferred to Saigon to serve as a protocol officer. At the time he was still in the closet, and he speculated later that he gladly went to Vietnam as a way of demonstrating his manliness. "My mother said I had a Lawrence of Arabia complex," Maupin recalled. "She didn't know how true that was."
Among Maupin's duties was squiring officers' wives to tourist sites around Saigon. Bored with his job as an erudite tour guide, he sought a new assignment as a communications officer with the River Patrol Force at Chau Doc. There, his primary function was keeping the US Army from accidentally shooting at the US Navy vessels that suddenly appeared in the Mekong Delta river system.
After his year in Vietnam, Maupin got a job as a reporter in South Carolina. Shortly thereafter he got a phone call from Melville L. Stevens, a recently retired lieutenant working in the White House. "John Kerry had gotten under their skin," Maupin explained, "so Nixon's dirty-tricks squad decided to orchestrate a concerted strategic assault on him. They wanted my advice on how to do it."
On April 22, 1971, Kerry asked the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in his now-famous testimony: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to die for a mistake?" Shortly thereafter, Maupin came up with an idea. Why not organize a group of US veterans who supported Nixon's policy of Vietnamization -- turning over American combat duties to South Vietnamese troops -- and have them return to Southeast Asia on a goodwill mission? "I'll find the veterans to do some good in Vietnam," he wrote to Admiral Elmo R. Zumwalt on June 3, "if you can give us a project and get us over there." On June 28 he received a positive reply.
The White House thus hatched a plan to recruit 10 all-American Vietnam veterans, including Maupin, to go to the village of Cat Lai, 15 miles east of Saigon, in order to build a 20-unit housing project for disabled South Vietnamese veterans.
"We wanted to demonstrate our sincere concerns for Vietnamese veterans," one of the selectees, Charles P. Collins III of Dallas duly informed The Washington Post, "and we wanted to counteract the negative image of American veterans as presented by a portion of the media. John Carey [sic] doesn't speak for all 3 million veterans. The media takes a small minority of veterans and implies that the majority are drug addicts or war criminals. I don't feel bad about anything I did over there."
On July 3, 1971, Maupin and the other envoys found themselves aboard a C-140 military transport flying out of Alaska for Vietnam, along with a load of helicopter parts and a ton of blood. "The whole point for the White House was to show these fine young anti-Kerrys doing good deeds as part of Vietnamization," Maupin recalled. "We were a high-profile, right-wing Habitat for Humanity club."
Taking a swipe at the counterculture back home, Maupin began referring to the housing project as the Cat Lai Commune. In the end, the 10 veterans erected a rickety concrete-and-cinder-block apartment complex that looked like a particularly ugly and poorly constructed American motel. "We knew nothing about construction," Maupin explained. "Nothing fit its frame; everything was off-kilter."
Upon the anti-Kerry squad's return to the United States, the then-proud Goldwater conservative penned a ringing endorsement of Nixon's Vietnamization program for like-minded publisher William F. Buckley's National Review, headlined "The Ten Vets Who Went Back."
"We lived in shelters for two months without rank, pay or guns to prove a point to ourselves and, perhaps, to our countrymen," Maupin wrote. He also imagined the future prosperity of Vietnam: "Someday I'll go back to Cat Lai to see the houses. I'll arrive at dusk when the sky over Saigon is amber and people are coming home from the rice fields. There will be children then, laughing and running and playing in the mud by the road. Their clothes will be white, not olive drab, and the watchtower on the edge of the village will be empty."
At around the same time, Maupin, temporarily located in New York, secured a job as a reporter for the Associated Press in California, so he loaded up his Opel GT and set off for the Golden State. He stopped in Clinton, Iowa, on the Mississippi River, to look up fellow Cat Lai veteran Tom Nielsen. In the middle of dinner the phone rang. "It was Bob Haldeman, inviting Tom to the White House. When they heard I was there they invited me, too."
Maupin immediately telephoned the San Francisco AP bureau to let his new office know he would be late reporting in for his job because President Nixon wanted to see him. "They weren't impressed," he laughed, looking back. "You could hear their minds asking: `Who is this little fascist?"'
On Oct. 26, 1971, limousines bearing the Cat Lai goodwill ambassadors pushed their way through a crowd of protesters for their White House meeting with Nixon. "My chief memory is having to put Nixon at ease," Maupin recalled. "I was a 27-year-old closeted gay veteran. Of course, Nixon didn't know. So he tried to talk guy talk and was just miserable at it."
The transcript of the White House tape recording of this meeting makes for memorable reading. First, the president explained why he had not yet ended America's military involvement in Vietnam. "Now, let us see what would happen if we were to get out just a little bit too soon -- a month too soon, three months too soon, four," he said. "One of the things that would happen for certain is that everything that you have served for and some people have died for would be lost. But let's forget that; what's it do to them? You could be sure that in a matter of a few months what had happened to occur in North Vietnam would be unstoppable in South Vietnam."
Then Nixon edged into the bizarre. After one of the vets remarked how the South Vietnamese women who cooked and cleaned at the US bases would warn the Americans when VC activity "was going to get hot and we might get in trouble," the president of the United States replied: "Don't you like those little Vietnamese dresses they wear?"
After the young veterans nervously laughed their assent, Nixon continued: "It's quite a sight. They told me when I was there in `56 that a Vietnamese mother tells her daughter that she is to carry herself like a swan. And I don't mind saying, just among our . . . and I'm not an expert on this thing, but the Vietnamese women are actually not all that attractive. But I have never seen clothing that does more in, shall we say, a spectacular way than it does for the Vietnamese. But you all know that!"
After their White House session, a press conference was arranged for the Cat Lai Commune civilian volunteers. Maupin served as lead spokesperson. "The most immoral thing you could do in a war," the Navy veteran proclaimed, "is to pull props out from under people." While Kerry and his VVAW cohorts were singing John Lennon's "Give Peace A Chance," Maupin and the other Cat Lai veterans were spouting slogans like, "All Vietnam Veterans aren't potheads" and "Building instead of bombing."
Over the next few years, Maupin remained proud of his unofficial role as the anti-Kerry. His status remained such at the White House that he was invited to sit in the presidential box right behind Julie Nixon and David Eisenhower at the reelected president's 1973 inaugural celebration concert in Washington. "The Republicans played bad rock to prove they were hip," Maupin recalled. "And I'll never forget Mamie Eisenhower sticking her fingers in her ears to drown out the noise."
Even though he considered Nixon a "dorky, insecure man," Maupin proudly displayed a photo taken of him with the commander-in-chief. Only later, in 1974 when he came out of the closet, did Maupin feel ashamed of having once served as a prowar flunky for Nixon. "The guys I brought home from the bars freaked out at my picture with Nixon," Maupin observed. "Their entire attitude toward me changed. They figured I was Jeffrey Dahmer, or something."
Soon the picture came down. In 1978, the novel "Tales of the City" established Maupin as one of America's bestselling writers. And over the years he learned to respect John Kerry's courage. "People are shocked when they learn I worked for Nixon," Maupin averred of his political progression from right to left. "Kerry, as it turns out, was dead right about Vietnam. These days, of course, I'm a lot more antiwar than Senator Kerry, so I hope he takes a tougher stand against Bush's invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. Just as important, he also needs to lead on the issue of allowing gay people in the military."
Douglas Brinkley is professor of history and director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans. Portions of this article are adapted from his forthcoming book, "Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War" (William Morrow).
