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In 1973, Tony Russo (right) listens as Daniel Ellsberg talks to reporters during the Pentagon Papers trial in Los Angeles. |
RICHMOND
--Two Virginia men who became famous for their roles in the Vietnam War, one from Radford and one from Suffolk, died last year. They would never have known each other, and each would have had little admiration for the other's role in the war.Just three years in age separated them. Their deaths were reported in major U.S. newspapers, including The New York Times, as well as by the news services. The obituaries reported that each died of "unknown causes," but Vietnam and what it did to their lives were doubtless among the causes.
John Ripley has been described as legendary for the selfless, heroic, and almost unbelievable single-handed blowing up of a bridge in Dong Ha, which stopped an onslaught of 20,000 North Vietnamese. His act, remembered as "Ripley at the Bridge" in a diorama at the U.S. Naval Academy, occurred in 1972. John's fabled feat--three hours hanging from a bridge while he attached explosives to the undergirding--is captured in a book, "Bridge at Dong Ha," by John Grider Miller (Naval Institute Press, 1989).
Nearly every possible military honor except the Medal of Honor was awarded to Col. Ripley: Navy Cross, Silver Star, two Legions of Merit, two Bronze Stars, and a Purple Heart resulted from his two tours in Vietnam. He was the first Marine to receive the Distinguished Graduate Award of the Naval Academy.
He was also the first Marine to be inducted into the U.S. Army Ranger Hall of Fame. According to his sister, Susie Ripley Goodykoontz, John said that Ranger School was where he learned about explosives--the skill that would embolden him to carry and attach 500 pounds of explosives while he hung below the bridge. He is credited with keeping the North Vietnamese out of South Vietnam for about three years.
Just days after his death in Annapolis at age 69, the city of Radford, where we both grew up, was to have celebrated John Ripley Day on Veterans Day. Instead of attending his hometown event, John was remembered by about 2,500 who packed the Naval Academy's chapel for his funeral. With full military honors, a salute by the Corps and a flyover, John's life and his military exploits were memorialized. The Academy band played "Abide With Me" as John's flag-covered casket was carried down the chapel steps to a waiting hearse. The Naval Academy gave John honor beyond anything our small town could have managed.
Radford held John Ripley Day anyway, and his sister said the city's ceremony couldn't have made her more proud of our hometown.
A SMALLER AFFAIR
Tony Russo's memorial service was a sad little affair at St. Mary's Catholic Church in Suffolk. His only survivors were a few cousins. The Polish priest, who didn't seem to know much about Tony, kept referring to him as "Anthony" throughout the service, which I attended with Tony's Virginia Tech roommate. (That's where I met Tony--in Blacksburg--in 1959.) The only personal comments at the service came from a Tech classmate. He recalled that Tony hated being in the Corps of Cadets at Tech, and got out of that duty after one year. He didn't seem to know much about Tony, either.
There was no mention of Tony's role in contributing to the end of the Vietnam War, nor the part that he played in the resignation of President Richard Nixon.
Tony helped Daniel Ellsberg copy what came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. He urged Ellsberg to offer them to The New York Times, where excerpts were published in 1971. The copying of the papers and their publication created a national uproar as the Nixon administration tried to stop newspapers from printing them. Nixon was unsuccessful. In 1972, The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for public service for publishing the papers, which revealed years of lying about Vietnam by governmental and military leaders.
In his book about the Pentagon Papers, "Secrets," Ellsberg wrote that his secret Rand Corp. work for the government studying the origins of the war led him to see the war as a crime--a moral and political disaster. As he and Tony made the decision to release the top-secret papers, they both knew that they could be imprisoned for the rest of their lives.
Ellsberg didn't attend Tony's funeral, but he wrote a eulogy on his anti-war blog. Ellsberg wrote of Tony: "I knew that he was the one person with the combination of guts and passionate concern about the war who would take the risk of helping me."
Lengthy reports of Tony's death in The New York Times, The Virginian-Pilot, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and more, recounted the role in history that Tony and Daniel Ellsberg played. After the discovery of the break-in at Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office, U.S. District Court Judge William Matthew Byrne Jr. declared a mistrial in May 1973. The break-in and government wiretaps led him to dismiss the eight charges of espionage, theft, and conspiracy against Tony and Ellsberg for copying and leaking the Pentagon Papers. His decision ended what Time magazine called "one of the most extraordinary legal--and in many ways, illegal--proceedings in the history of American justice."
THE GREAT DIVIDE
The Beverly Hills break-in had been conducted by Nixon's covert team, whose tactics were also used at Watergate. The Nixon administration's acts took their toll, and he resigned from office in August 1974.
Like John Ripley, Ellsberg and Russo went on to fame for their very different contributions to history and Vietnam. Ellsberg's book was inspiration for a made-for-TV movie in 2003 ("The Pentagon Papers"). Tony was portrayed by Paul Giamatti.
After years in California, Tony returned to Virginia; he was ill with complications resulting from a heart attack.
Both John and Tony were found dead in their homes. Tony was 71.
John Ripley and Tony Russo will be remembered for their very different responses to the Vietnam War. Each earned the admiration of those for whom he made sacrifices.
It would be hard to find starker examples of the divide in our country in the 1960s and 1970s than in the lives of these two men.
Nancy St. Clair Finch grew up with Col. John Ripley in Radford and came to know Tony Russo when they were college students, he at Virginia Tech and she at Radford University.
