Word: calley
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...third Nixon omission was even more significant. The President did not explain that Army machinery was already under way to spring Calley to house arrest, initiated at the request of the defense by Major General Orwin C. Talbott, commanding general of Fort Benning and the convening authority for Calley's court-martial. Many officers greeted Nixon's intervention with bitter dismay. One said of the President: "He knew all along that Calley was coming out. He just beat us to the punch...
Within the military, Calley friend and Calley foe alike agreed that the President's motives were political. In Viet Nam, SP/5 Willy Rowand of Sunshine Harbor, N.J., observed: "Nixon is playing politics, of course." Said Captain Leroy Saage of San Antonio: "It is a political decision, coinciding in part with the mail he's been getting. Nixon has also implied that he feels the verdict is unjust. It gives the public an impression that Nixon has no faith in military jurisprudence...
Morale and Outrage. No one made that point better than Calley's prosecutor, Captain Aubrey Daniel III, who wrote President Nixon an indignantly eloquent letter that belongs among the classic defenses of the precept that the U.S. must be a Government of laws, not of men (see box). Calley's lawyer, George Latimer, naturally found Daniel's views "entirely wrong," and added: "I believe the President was exactly right in what he did." The President dealt only indirectly with the Calley case in his TV address. He said he felt he should "speak...
...Daniel letter stood in stark contrast to the hesitant response of most political figures to the Calley verdict and to Nixon's interference. To be sure, anyone of political prominence could legitimately duck the question by pleading that he did not wish to repeat the President's error of influencing the appellate process. Among the 1972 Democratic presidential possibilities in the Senate, only Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts spoke up for the verdict before the Daniel letter was made public, though his mail has been running solidly pro-Calley. Later, Maine's Edmund Muskie said that Nixon appeared...
Republican Senator John Tower of Texas confided to a dinner companion: "The Calley case could become the best thing that's happened to us politically in years." A colleague, Ohio's Robert Taft Jr., defended what Nixon did as a proper exercise of his powers as Commander in Chief; Taft argued that it was necessary to restore morale in the armed forces and to calm outrage among the civilian populace...