Introduction

The month after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968, I enlisted in the Army’s Intelligence Branch for three years. President Lyndon Johnson had just sent the Regular Army simultaneously to Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Chicago to help control the ensuing violence and riots that had overwhelmed police and National Guard. This was a very strange and violent time. We’ve been lucky the country has largely been free of this kind of large-scale mayhem and destruction until the recent looting and riots we saw during the pandemic in the summer of 2020.

After eight weeks Basic Training and 16 weeks Advanced Individual Training at its Intelligence Branch school in 1968, the Army put me in the middle of the race-related and antiwar violence of that earlier time. I was assigned to the Pentagon and almost immediately found myself tasked with providing estimates of civil disturbances likely to involve the Army.

Having learned something about the intelligence aspects of controlling civil disturbances when I was in the Army, I was asked to testify before Congress in 1974 on the subject of military surveillance. My testimony was before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights. Testimony on Military Surveillance In the course of preparing for the hearings on military surveillance, I met privately with Committee Chair Senator Sam Ervin (D-NC) and had a chance to discuss the issues with him in some depth. Meeting with Sen. Ervin For a person of such gravitas, he was as personable and down to earth as they come. Just the year before, I had been transfixed like most of the country watching Ervin chair the most important hearings of his career, the Senate Watergate hearings. His cross examination of John Dean and the other Watergate witnesses helped bring about President Nixon’s resignation.

These reflections on my Army tour of duty between 1968 and 1971 not only touch on the broad civil disruption afoot at the time. They also provide a snapshot of what I saw of some of the era’s advanced military technology at isolated atolls in the Pacific Ocean. The closest I got to Vietnam during my service was when I was asked to undertake a counterespionage and counter- sabotage threat assessment that took me to Johnston and Kwajalein Atolls in the Pacific.

If the Atomic Age can be said to have begun with the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, the Space Age can be said to have begun with the Soviet Union launching the first Sputnik satellite in 1957. Sputnik was akin to a beeping medicine ball in that it was round, about two feet across, and chirped proof of its presence back to earth. Nobody was then thinking of shooting it down in 1957. By 1962, however, Nike-Zeus anti-ballistic missile rockets had already been tested on Kwajalein Atoll to see if they could perform an anti-satellite mission. The perceived threat was the U.S.S.R. orbiting satellites with nuclear weapons aboard. The Nike-Zeus rockets of the day literally fell short in this task. They couldn’t fly high enough.

By 1969, when I stopped at Johnston Atoll in the Pacific on my way to Kwajalein, I saw recently modified Thor missiles that could kill satellites. The Thor-based anti-satellite system of the Defense Department’s secret Project 437 was mothballed the year after my visit. Beyond budget constraints, tests showed the nuclear detonations it would use to eliminate hostile satellites were destroying useful satellites. Among Program 437’s unintended test victims was Telstar, the world’s first telecommunications satellite. I had a chance to talk about some of these Ballistic Missile and Satellite Defense issues at The Cliff Dwellers right before the pandemic lockdown in early 2020.

Though I didn’t appreciate it at the time, the development of offensive and defensive military satellite systems of the sort I saw and thought about in 1969 in a way marked the dawn of space emerging as a distinct and novel war theater. The evolution of warfare to a non-terrestrial platform has taken a while since then and was not formally recognized until 2019. That was the year the U.S. Space Force was created and given the primary missions of defending our cities from a space-based attack and protecting our military and navigation satellites from being attacked from space or earth.

In a postscript to this account of my Army days, when I was General Counsel of United Press International in 1985, I had the unlikely opportunity of having Lunch with Gen. William Westmoreland (USA Ret.), the then retired commander of U.S. troops in Vietnam and former Chief of Staff of the Army during my time in the Pentagon. He had just settled his $120 million libel lawsuit against CBS. At the time, this was regarded as his throwing in the towel on a losing proposition. Our conversation proved Winston Churchill’s adage right on target, “Generals always fight the last war.”

Map of Washington, D.C. and Northern Virginia

After Army Intelligence School training at Fort Holabird in Baltimore, I was assigned to the 902nd Military Intelligence Group. Its headquarters occupied office space above stores in a Bailey’s Crossroads, Virginia strip mall.

My Counterintelligence Analysis Division work in the 902nd was at first in converted warehouse space nearby in Bailey’s Crossroads. Later I had office space in the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff of the Pentagon, the newly built duplex war room called the Army Operations Center, and the Hoffman Building in Alexandria, Virginia. For several weeks in 1969, I attended a CIA school in a building in Arlington, Virginia then known as The Blue U.

My living arrangements were first in an Annandale, Virginia apartment with two 902nd roommates, and then on my own in a Capitol Hill apartment in the District of Columbia. Throughout, I was technically assigned to Ft. Meyer, just to the north of the Pentagon.

My enlisting in the Army during the Vietnam War years was in part influenced by my knowledge of other family members who had served in the military.

Both sides of my family had members in the military. My mother’s grandfather, Richard Lawrence Gwinn, Sr. lived in Covington, Georgia and served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. Among my mother’s family memorabilia was a picture of him decked out in his uniformed regalia. Army Picture Gallery.

In my immediate family, my father, William John Bowe, Sr., enlisted as a part time soldier in the Illinois National Guard shortly after graduating from Loyola Law School in Chicago in 1915. He trained at Camp Grant, near Rockford, Illinois, before the U.S. entered World War I. In time he became a supply sergeant in the Quartermaster Corps . When President Woodrow Wilson called the National Guard into federal service to fight in World War I, a massive influx of draftees came into Camp Grant for training. The Camp exploded in size and in short order my father went to France with the other doughboys. Not long after his arrival in France, while trying to board a moving troop train, he slipped and his left foot was run over by the train. The good news was that he never made it to the front, but the bad news was that he did make it to French hospitals in Blois and Orleans. The amputation of part of his foot required a long convalescence, and the war was over before he could get home.

The summer of 1967, right after my law school graduation, the young French hospital nurse who had cared for my father in Orleans, came to Chicago for a visit. She missed seeing her former patient, as my father had died in 1965. Nonetheless, my mother, my brother Richard Bowe and I had a pleasant moment as Mme. Marie Loisley reminisced about that time in the Great War.

As a young child in the 1940s, I of course noticed his stump and the fact he was missing his toes on one foot. When I got older, I asked him about it. He answered in a matter-of-fact way and showed me the lead insert he wore in one of his high-topped laced shoes and explained its purpose. He also let me play with his cane without complaint.

In the early 1950s, as my father entered his sixties, his cane had fallen into disuse and largely remained in an umbrella stand inside the front hall closet. Perhaps it was because he was no longer out and about as much. But later in the 1950s, as I was going through high school, it certainly reflected the inexorable progress of his Alzheimer’s disease and its accompanying dementia.

When World War II came along, my Uncle John Dominic Casey, recently married to my mother’s sister Martha Gwinn Casey, also served in the Army. As a child I remember visiting my Uncle John when he was recuperating from a broken leg at a military hospital in Chicago at 51st Street and the Lake. After the War, the building served as the 5th Army’s Headquarters before the command was moved in 1963 to Ft. Sheridan.

In the mid-1950s, my older brother Dick, like my father, enlisted in the Illinois National Guard. While my father had caught World War I, Dick was luckier. He was too late for the Korean War and too early for the Vietnam War. Between Dick and my father, I had observed that wars of one sort or another tended to engage American men each generation. However, as I turned 18 and headed off to college in 1960, I thought it unlikely that I would have to follow in either Dick or my father’s military footsteps.

Family in the Military 

My enlisting in the Army during the Vietnam War years was in part influenced by my knowledge of other family members who had served in the military. 

Both sides of my family had members in the military. My mother’s grandfather, Richard Lawrence Gwinn, Sr. lived in Covington, Georgia and served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. Among my mother’s family memorabilia was a picture of him decked out in his uniformed regalia. Army Picture Gallery. 

In my immediate family, my father, William John Bowe, Sr., enlisted as a part time soldier in the Illinois National Guard shortly after graduating from Loyola Law School in Chicago in 1915. He trained at Camp Grant, near Rockford, Illinois, before the U.S. entered World War I. In time he became a supply sergeant in the Quartermaster Corps . When President Woodrow Wilson called the National Guard into federal service to fight in World War I, a massive influx of draftees came into Camp Grant for training. The Camp exploded in size and in short order my father went to France with the other doughboys. Not long after his arrival in France, while trying to board a moving troop train, he slipped and his left foot was run over by the train. The good news was that he never made it to the front, but the bad news was that he did make it to French hospitals in Blois and Orleans. The amputation of part of his foot required a long convalescence, and the war was over before he could get home. 

The summer of 1967, right after my law school graduation, the young French hospital nurse who had cared for my father in Orleans, came to Chicago for a visit. She missed seeing her former patient, as my father had died in 1965. Nonetheless, my mother, my brother Richard Bowe and I had a pleasant moment as Mme. Marie Loisley reminisced about that time in the Great War. 

As a young child in the 1940s, I of course noticed his stump and the fact he was missing his toes on one foot. When I got older, I asked him about it. He answered in a matter-of-fact way and showed me the lead insert he wore in one of his high-topped laced shoes and explained its purpose. He also let me play with his cane without complaint. 

In the early 1950s, as my father entered his sixties, his cane had fallen into disuse and largely remained in an umbrella stand inside the front hall closet. Perhaps it was because he was no longer out and about as much. But later in the 1950s, as I was going through high school, it certainly reflected the inexorable progress of his Alzheimer’s disease and its accompanying dementia. 

When World War II came along, my Uncle John Dominic Casey, recently married to my mother’s sister Martha Gwinn Casey, also served in the Army. As a child I remember visiting my Uncle John when he was recuperating from a broken leg at a military hospital in Chicago at 51st Street and the Lake. After the War, the building served as the 5th Army’s Headquarters before the command was moved in 1963 to Ft. Sheridan. 

In the mid-1950s, my older brother Dick, like my father, enlisted in the Illinois National Guard. While my father had caught World War I, Dick was luckier. He was too late for the Korean War and too early for the Vietnam War. Between Dick and my father, I had observed that wars of one sort or another tended to engage American men each generation. However, as I turned 18 and headed off to college in 1960, I thought it unlikely that I would have to follow in either Dick or my father’s military footsteps. 

Vietnam Generation Draft Statistics

While I had no desire to be drafted, I was not adverse to military service. Both my father and brother had entered the military as volunteers. They both seemed proud to have stepped up in the service of their country. I

also thought if I wasn’t killed, I might enjoy the military or at least gain valuable experience of some sort. Having watched my uncle Augustine Bowe enter public life as a judge late in life and seem to enjoy it, I also thought Army service such as my father’s or Dick’s couldn’t hurt if I later wanted to pursue that path in some fashion. In my third year of law school, I had unsuccessfully applied for a direct commission as an Army officer. As I had waited for that process to run its course, the Army Reserve and National Guard openings for enlisted men grew far and few between. In any event, these half-in, half-out alternatives were not remotely appealing choices for me.

With the draft and these military service options off the table for one reason or another, I graduated from law school in June 1967 at the age of 25 and started working downtown at a Chicago law firm. The firm represented the Northwestern Railroad and various gas and electric utilities. The mid-sized firm of Ross, Hardies, O’Keefe, Babcock, McDugald & Parsons had its offices in a National Register of Historic Places classic. The building was architect Daniel Burnham’s 21-story, 1911 Beaux-Arts building at 122 South Michigan Avenue, just across the street from the Art Institute of Chicago.

During law school I had bypassed living in Hyde Park near the University of Chicago to help my mother care for my father in his declining health. He had died halfway through my time in law school, so after graduation I left my then widowed mother and moved into the Hyde Park apartment of my college and law school friend Bob Nichols. I traveled to my new lawyering job on the Illinois

Central commuter train from the 56th Street Station in Hyde Park to the Van Buren Street Station by the Loop. That left me a short walk to the Ross, Hardies office.

The main military option that still seemed open to me, other than the draft, was to enlist in the military in a way that might improve my odds of living long enough to get discharged. If I didn’t enlist in the military in the ensuing year, and got drafted as a result, it would be most likely mean service in the Army’s infantry and I’d be out of the military in only two years. A big negative of the draft was that I be out even earlier if I was killed in Vietnam.

Of course, why didn’t I think of it sooner! Forget joining the military the way my father and Dick did. Instead of the Army or National Guard, join the Navy or Air Force. Or better yet, join the Army, Navy, or Air

Force as a lawyer. I was pretty sure those folks weren’t getting killed much in Vietnam. With a law degree and admission to the Illinois bar in hand, I could enter the Judge Advocate General branches as an officer and gain directly pertinent experience for my chosen profession.

The unappealing part of this choice for me was the time commitment. With demand high to stay out of the infantry, these slots typically required a minimum four-year commitment. The other problem I had with being a military lawyer was the great danger I saw of being bored. The possibility of being assigned to spend several years of my life defending or prosecuting AWOLs, handling damage claims brought about by tanks taking too wide a turn, or otherwise spending my time in mind- numbing tasks, was completely abhorrent to me.

My solution to this quandary, six weeks before I turned 26, was to enlist for three years in the Amy Intelligence Branch on May 13, 1968.

Fort Holabird and Intelligence Training

One of the first things I noticed once I had stepped out of civilian life was that I had stepped into a world of acronyms I never knew existed.

After two months of Basic Combat Training (BCT) at Fort Leonard Wood, in western Missouri, I was assigned to Fort Holabird in my mother’s hometown of Baltimore, Maryland. There I did my Advanced Individual Training (AIT) at the United States Army Intelligence School (USAINTS). At Fort Holabird I would complete a 16-week course in my Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) and become an Army Counterintelligence Agent (97 Bravo).

At Fort Holabird I was taught the general difference between what an intelligence agent did and what a counterintelligence agent did. I learned the job of an intelligence agent is to find out an enemy’s secrets, often through espionage. The job can also include disrupting an enemy through sabotage or psychological warfare. The job of a counterintelligence agent is to prevent an enemy from finding out your secrets, and to secure critical assets from attack or degradation. It’s a spy, counterspy, sabotage, counter-sabotage kind of thing.

All of us at the Intelligence School knew that wherever the Army might have troops stationed around the world, the bulk of our graduating class

of 97 Bravos would be headed to Vietnam, Germany, or South Korea. Most others would likely be assigned to one of the U.S. Army areas in what the Army called CONUS (Continental United States). Being assigned to duty in the U.S. usually meant spending most of your Army days doing what all counterintelligence agents coming out of USAINTS were trained to do. That meant conducting background investigations of Army personnel being considered for a security clearance. Since I had been investigated this way for my enlistment into the Intelligence Branch, if I ended up assigned to do this kind of work, I feared I would have a safe, but terribly boring, circular trip in the Army.

Towards the end of my time at Intelligence School, a major assigned to the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence at the Pentagon addressed our class. His job was to describe the organization of the Army’s Intelligence Branch worldwide and the nature of available counterintelligence assignments.

When the major wound up his tour d’horizon of the Intelligence Branch realm, he closed by saying that if anyone needed to know anything further, he’d be happy to talk to them after he returned to his Pentagon office. I’m sure he thought nobody would ever actually pick up telephone and try to take him up on his offer. However, I was so unnerved by the prospect of terminal boredom for the better part of the next three years that several days later I called his office from a Fort Holabird pay phone. The phone was answered by a sergeant in the major’s office. I explained that I was a student soon to graduate from the Intelligence School and that I was taking up the major’s offer to personally discuss my assignment options. I was no doubt the first student that ever tried to take the major up on his offer, because the sergeant was clearly taken aback. However, he couldn’t very well tell me the major had made a mistake and now couldn’t be bothered seeing me.

The upshot was that when I hung up the phone, I thought that I had secured an appointment with the major in the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence the next week. I also thought it was going to be easy getting there, as the major’s Pentagon office was relatively convenient and only an hour down the turnpike from Baltimore. However, I still needed permission from my Fort Holabird superiors to absent myself from class and leave the fort. Up the chain of command I went with my request for a temporary leave. It turned out to be one hurdle after another. There were probably four or more levels that had

to clear this and it went all the way up to the fort commander himself.

It was a struggle at each level. Normally, they all would have instinctively squashed my request just because it was unusual, and hence out of bounds. Didn’t I know there was a war on? However, every approval step ultimately caved. I had been careful to note the major’s promise in my request for a temporary leave of absence, so, like the sergeant, they all grudgingly acceded to the request rather than buck their own higher ups.

Needless to say, with my fate in the immediate years ahead completely up in the air, I allowed plenty of time to drive my second-hand 1964 Volkswagen bug down the Baltimore-Washington turnpike to the Pentagon. The last thing I wanted to do was be late for my appointment. Unfortunately, I hadn’t given thought to how and where I might park when I got there. There is no street parking at the Pentagon, which is encircled by intersecting and confusing freeways. To accommodate members of the 26,000 Pentagon workforce that drive their cars to work, the building is surrounded by massive parking lots on several of its five sides. As I quickly discovered, almost all of this parking was clearly marked as reserved for those with parking permits, and it took a long time for me to finally find that there were only two or so aisles reserved for visitors. To make things worse, there was a long que of cars in line waiting for the occasional space to open up. With the clock ticking and eating away at my time cushion, I got in line and began to inch forward.

It seemed like forever, but I finally to got to the head of the line of cars waiting their turn to pull into the visitors’ aisle. As another car finally left and I began turning into the aisle to park in its space, a car driving by in the opposite direction on the lot’s perimeter rudely swung in front of me and attempted to jump the line. As I rolled down my window to yell at the selfishly mean, thoughtless twit, I recognized the driver. It was my good friend from graduate school days at the University of Chicago, Jan Grayson. My anger quickly dissipated as we both pondered the oddness of our meeting. He told me he was in the Army Reserves in a biological warfare unit that had a meeting at the Pentagon. Under the circumstances, I decided to forgive him when I understood he knew even less than I did about the parking challenges at the Pentagon. I took him at his word when he promised to never cut me off in the visitors’ parking lot again. Further proof of my charitable nature came when I asked him years later to be my son Pat’s godfather.

When I finally got inside the Pentagon for my meeting, the sergeant said something had come up and the major was tied up. He told me he would be meeting with me in his stead. My argument to the sergeant was simple. I told him I was older than almost all of the Intelligence School trainees and had college, law school and a year of private law practice under my belt. I said it might benefit both me and the Army if there was an assignment for me that could make use of this specialized training. He pulled my class roster tacked to a bulletin board behind him and found my name on the list. Then he gave me the bad news. He said all the assignments were pretty much computer driven and there was really no way my ultimate assignment could be predicted at that point. He politely thanked me for driving down to chat and told me to drive safely on my return to Fort Holabird.

While I was disappointed that I had been left still swimming in a sea of uncertainty, I did have the satisfaction of having at least taken a shot at influencing the nature of my next two and a half years in the Army.

Assignment to the 902nd Military Intelligence Group

Before long assignment day arrived. Next to my name on the class roster was “902nd MI Group.” All I could find out about the 902nd was that it was an organization attached to the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence of the Army and was located at Baily’s Crossroads in Virginia, just west of the Pentagon. I found out it was also a stabilized tour. I then knew I would be working in the Washington, D.C. area until I left the Army and that I would wear civilian clothes to work each day. Being in mufti instead of a uniform was an unexpected perk.

Not long before graduation at USAINTS, I drove down to Baily’s Crossroads to where I was told the 902nd’s offices were. All I could find there was a small L- shaped suburban strip mall at a crossroads. I was certain I’d been given bum instructions either accidentally or on purpose as a ruse. After graduation I got a better address for the 902nd Headquarters where I was to report. Strangely, it was the same L- shaped strip mall I’d been directed to earlier. This time I noticed there was a second story to the building on the mall’s west side with unusual antennas on the roof.

I noticed a there was one nondescript entrance on the lower level with a glass door, but no store behind it. Instead, there was a narrow staircase

leading up to who knows what on the odd second story. I passed multiple surveillance cameras as I climbed the stairs. At the top I found a Mr. Parkinson. He was a Department of the Army civilian, and the administrative chief of the office. I was welcomed and told I would be technically attached to nearby Fort Meyer, assigned to the Counterintelligence Analysis Division of the 902nd, have an office elsewhere, and could rent an apartment with two other 902nd enlisted men anywhere we chose within commuting distance. This was my introduction to the world of Army spooks.

CIAD in the CD of OACSI at DA in DC

In November 1968, the Counterintelligence Analysis Division (CIAD) of the Counterintelligence Division (CD) of the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence (OACSI) of the Department of the Army (DA) in the District of Columbia (DC) was located in an obscure warehouse building off the beaten path of Baily’s Crossroads. The adjacent space was taken up by a Northern Virginia Community College automotive repair training workshop. A traditional mission of the 902nd MI Group, of which CIAD was a part, was maintaining security at the Pentagon. This had taken on greater importance following the October 21, 1967, antiwar march on the Pentagon. The march had followed a rally on the Mall by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. This large demonstration against the Vietnam War was immediately chronicled when Harper’s Magazine published Norman Mailer’s 25,000-word article “The Steps of the Pentagon” in March 1968. This piece later appeared as the epilog to Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize winning antiwar book of New Journalism, “The Armies of the Night.”

Apart from physical security issues, since the Pentagon was the center of the nation’s military establishment, the building always housed a motherload of military secrets the Soviet Union and other bad actors of the day were always targeting. As a result, part of the 902nd was colloquially referred to as “the night crawlers.”

This group was largely made up of enlisted men who spent their nights patrolling the Pentagon corridors and offices looking for security violations such as filing cabinets left unlocked. This was the kind of boring drudgery I mostly escaped at CIAD. However, I did get assigned once to one of these nightcrawler details. As soon as the day workers at

the Pentagon departed, I began the rounds of a section of deserted offices looking for filing cabinets left unlocked and collecting the large special paper trash bags filled with all the classified documents people had thrown out during the day. That was the night I learned the way to the Pentagon’s municipal grade furnace for daily classified document disposal.

The Counterintelligence Analysis Division, as the name suggests, didn’t directly run any spies. It was instead in the business of digesting the production of pertinent intelligence gathered primarily by other Army and service intelligence units, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The goal was to sift through this production and cull out what pertained directly to performing the Army’s designated counterintelligence missions.

A number of CIAD analysts were assigned to read and evaluate counterintelligence reports from Vietnam. During my time there, a young analyst with this job had the time to put two and two together in a way that wasn’t possible for his time-pressed counterparts in Saigon. Though the details of his breakthrough were as usual kept under “need to know” wraps, the CIAD chief organized a small party to celebrate and honor my colleague. Thanks to his careful analysis of the counterintelligence traffic crossing his desk, he had pretty much single- handedly caused a North Vietnamese spy ring in Saigon to be rolled up.

Some parts of the 902nd’s duties, like Pentagon security, never changed much. But race riots, which had racked the country in 1919 and 1943, were back recently back on the Army’s agenda. In the summer of 1967, right before the march on the Pentagon, Detroit had been the scene of a race riot that had grown beyond the control of local police and the Michigan National Guard. The Regular Army had been called in by the Michigan Governor and the President to help quell the violence.

After the Detroit riot and the march on the Pentagon, the takeaway from 1967 for the Army was that it needed to be much better prepared for a continuing period of civil and racial unrest.

The Vance Report

Following the Detroit riot, former Secretary of the Army Cyrus Vance (then serving as Special Assistant the Secretary of Defense Concerning the Detroit Riots), prepared a study to reassess the Army’s preparedness for this new role. The Vance Report had concluded that the use of the Army to help control antiwar demonstrations and racial disturbances wasn’t an isolated, one- off mission, and the requirement wasn’t going away any time soon.

An abstract of the Report’s lessons learned reads:

Based on the experiences in Detroit, where rioting and lawlessness were intense, it appears that rumors are rampant and tend to grow as exhaustion sets in at the time of rioting. Thus, authoritative sources of information must be identified quickly and maintained. Regular formal contact with the press should be augmented by frequent background briefings for community leaders. To be able to make sound decisions, particularly in the initial phases of riots, a method of identifying the volume of riot- connected activity, the trends in such activity, the critical areas, and the deviations from normal patterns must be established. Because the Detroit disorders developed a typical pattern (violence rising than falling off), it is important to assemble and analyze data with respect to activity patterns. Fatigue factors need more analysis, and the qualifications and performance of all Army and Air National Guard should be reviewed to ensure that officers are qualified (National Guard troops in Detroit were below par in appearance, behavior, and discipline, at least initially). The guard should recruit more blacks (most of the Detroit rioters were black), and cooperation among the military, the police, and firefighting personnel needs to be enhanced. Instructions regarding rules of engagement and degree of force during civil disturbances require clarification and change to provide more latitude and flexibility. Illumination must be provided for all areas in which rioting is occurring, and the use of tear gas should be considered. Coordination at the Federal level to handle riots is emphasized. Appendixes include a chronology of major riots, memos, a Detroit police incident summary, police maps of Detroit, and related material.

Secretary Vance’s Report came out in early 1968, just before race riots had exploded in Black neighborhoods in many cities after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4. Many states

called up their National Guard troops to join police in bringing the rioting and looting under control. Simultaneously Regular Army troops had to be flown or trucked into Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Chicago from various Army bases. In all cases, they had to back up overwhelmed police and National Guard security forces. In the middle of the Vietnam War, this was not a mission the Army was structured or prepared for.

I was familiar with the problem of the Army, since right before I enlisted, I had watched Chicago’s west side erupt in flames from my Loop office window, and later witnessed some of the rioting firsthand with my brother Dick, who worked for the City’s Human Relations Commission. I also had monitored bail and other court proceedings involving rioters at the Criminal Courts building at 26th Street and California Avenue.

During this period, Regular Army troops were bivouacked near the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago’s Jackson Park. The next month I was in the Army, and six months after that I was again engaged with civil disturbances. In this interim during the summer of 1968, Chicago remained in turmoil. Though Regular Army troops had left and returned to their barracks, violent anti-war demonstrations continued to wreak havoc on the city. Rampaging groups of demonstrators before the Democratic National Convention that August brought out the Chicago police in full force as well as the Illinois National Guard.

My brother Dick in his work was in the middle of this activity. His Report to the Director of the Chicago Human Relations Commission provided a detailed account of the events he witnessed between August

24 and 28, 1968. The Report gives a street level view of the disturbances in both Lincoln and Grant Parks. The final confrontation between the demonstrators and police and National Guard in front of the Hilton Hotel took place during the Democratic Convention’s proceedings and provided a violent backdrop to its nomination of Hubert Humphrey to run against Richard Nixon that fall.

From 1965 to 1968, there had been race related riots in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark, Baltimore, Washington and Chicago. Now, with the nationally televised violence directly in the political realm at the Democratic Convention, President Lyndon Johnson created the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. The Commission had delegated to Daniel

Walker, later Illinois governor, the job of undertaking a study of the violence surrounding the Convention.

The Walker Report (formally Rights in Conflict: The Violent Confrontation of Demonstrators and Police in the Parks and Streets of Chicago During the Week of the Democratic National Convention of 1968), found there had been a “police riot” in addition to violence on the part of anti-war demonstrators. On page 205 of the Walker Report, you will find a picture of my brother Dick Bowe about to remove a burning trash basket blocking traffic in the middle of LaSalle Drive at the south end of Lincoln Park. If not for Dick’s ever-present pipe sticking out of his mouth, I might not have recognized him or taken him to be one of the demonstrators, rather than an observer from Chicago’s Commission on Human Relations.

Department of Civil Disturbance Planning and Operations

One of Vance’s recommendations after Detroit was to create a joint Service command unit to oversee the mission of controlling civil disturbances when the Army was called to deploy troops by a Governor and the President. Thus was born the Department of Defense’s Department of Civil Disturbance Planning and Operation. DCDPO had an Army Lieutenant General in command, with an Air Force Major General as his Deputy. Immediately prior to my arriving at CIAD, the then classified Department of the Army, Civil Disturbance Plan (Code Name- Garden Plot), was published on September 10, 1968.

When I began my work at CIAD in November 1968, I was given the

task of reviewing domestic intelligence relating to the likelihood of the Amy being asked to again deploy troops to American cities. With this background in mind, I was assigned to provide intelligence needed by DCDPO for both planning and operational purposes. My reading diet for this task included classified government documents which were primarily and voluminously produced by the FBI, and to a lesser extent the Army. I found open source, non-classified material was usually of more utility than the classified sources in making judgements about whether and when Regular Army troops needed to be alerted for deployment and possible employment.

By the mid-1970s, I was back in civilian life, and the country had become considerably calmer. I imagine DCDPO withered away with the changing times, and a half-century would have to pass before the country again saw the widespread civil unrest of the early 2020s.

The Army Operations Center (AOC)

The 1967 emergency deployment to Detroit had caught the Army by surprise, and Secretary Vance had also recommended that a new war room in the Pentagon be built to coordinate up to 25 simultaneous deployments of Regular Army troops to American cities. And so was built the new Army Operations Center (AOC).

I remember being on duty in the new AOC in January 1969 when President Richard Nixon was being sworn in. With the country on edge in the aftermath of the riotous Democratic Party convention in Chicago the preceding fall, the seat of the federal government was a constant target for antiwar demonstrators, and the frequency and size of their gatherings in Washington were increasing. The AOC was in a subbasement Pentagon space. Built as a duplex war room with ancillary offices, its entrance was guarded day and night and restricted to those with proper security clearances. Above the large, rectangular lower- level of the main room was a large atrium-like opening. On one side of the two-story atrium was a glassed-in command balcony where civilian and military decision makers sat. From this perch they could look down upon the military worker bees at their desks on the floor below or they could look straight across the atrium at the wall opposite. This wall was filled with several large projection screens. Apart from showing maps and troop positions, screens could also display any live television coverage of ongoing demonstrations.

In standard military fashion, operational briefings in the AOC began with a uniformed Air Force officer giving the weather report. Addressed always as Mr. Bowe, with no indication of rank, I would follow in civilian dress with the intelligence report. As you might expect, the most useful intelligence had to do with the expected size and likely activity of demonstrators. For this purpose, widely available, non-classified newspaper and other common publications were a primary source I used to build my estimates.

The Air Force weather officer and I would precede the operations portion of an AOC briefing. All speakers would deliver their remarks from glass briefing booths on either end of the upper level of the AOC. The briefers were visible to the adjacent command balcony, and, because the pulpit- like booths jutted out a bit over the lower level, briefers were also visible to the joint service officers coordinating information on the lower level. The only thing I had seen before that was anything like this was the isolation booth Charles Van Doren was in when he answered questions on the rigged Twenty-One television quiz show in the late 1950s, and the bulletproof glass cage where Nazi Adolph Eichmann stood when he was on trial for war crimes in Israel in 1961.

I always thought Van Doren and I did better than Eichmann after we left our respective booths. Eichmann of course got the noose, but both Van Doren and I later in life both worked for Encyclopaedia Britannica. I discovered this in the 1980s, when I spent time working on a Greek language publishing project that Van Doren had initiated shortly before he retired and I arrived. I mentioned this to him when he came to Chicago in 2001 for his mentor Mortimer Adler’s funeral.

The AOC could be a strange place at times. In December 1968, I saw accused mass murderer Lieutenant William “Rusty” Calley, Jr. in the AOC. I had my desk at the time in the AOC and one day after lunch, as I came in past the security desk at the entrance and entered the complex, I happened to glance to my left