Being Nixon: A Man Divided (22 page)

It was not like Nixon to take success for granted, to count on any sure bet. In early October, Humphrey, inevitably, started to come back, as angry blue-collar voters who had favored the spoiler candidate,
Wallace, began to “come home” to the Democratic Party. As the race tightened, Nixon fretted. Kissinger was not Nixon’s only source reporting on Lyndon Johnson’s foreign policy machinations. The campaign began to hear from a source inside the White House that Johnson was close to declaring a bombing halt to spur peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese. On October 22, Nixon adviser Bryce Harlow received information “from a source whose credibility was beyond question…from someone inside Johnson’s innermost circle.” The report read:

The President is driving exceedingly hard for a deal with North Vietnam. Expectation is that he is becoming almost pathologically eager for an excuse to order a bombing halt and will accept almost any arrangement….

Careful plans are being made to help HHH [Hubert H. Humphrey] exploit whatever happens….

Nixon read Harlow’s memo several times, and with each reading, he recalled, he became “angrier and more frustrated.”
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Here it was: the ultimate dirty trick. The president was playing politics with national security to enable his vice president to overcome the lead of the Republican challenger. Nixon could hardly be blamed for feeling a surge of rage and vexation. He felt that it was happening again: In 1960, he had been the true winner, but his opponents had conspired to steal the election and deny him the presidency.

Nixon was not going to roll over. He had “done the right thing” in 1960 and, in the name of national unity, held back his supporters who had wanted to go to court to challenge the voting returns. This time would be different. The political equation was not hard to balance: Any rough stuff was more than justified by the rougher stuff of his enemies. Fighting back was the only way to go; that was his most basic life lesson. Pat was a believer; if anything, she and the girls wanted him to be more defiant toward his adversaries.

Nixon, it’s true, did not tell his wife everything about his campaigns,
particularly the harsher or seamier sides. (
Nut-cutting
was a term he sometimes used, though never with her; he did not even swear in front of her.) He knew that she disapproved of Murray Chotiner and did not care for Haldeman, and he more or less condoned their efforts to cut her out of the day-to-day campaign. Nonetheless, he was convinced that Pat, more than anyone except possibly Julie and Tricia and his “sainted” mother, wanted him to go all-out to win—no compromises, no equivocating, no turning back.

It was the women in Nixon’s life who gave him the determination to go on and to do what it took to win. It is true that Nixon often professed to admire manly men. He was a fan of John Wayne, who had supported him in his first campaign against Jerry Voorhis, and he wished to emulate the strong and silent type of the westerns he liked to watch. Nixon liked to lower his voice when he was in tense situations; he prided himself on never getting sick or even having a headache, which he somehow saw as a feminine malady.
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But, from his mother to his wife to his daughters, he was drawn to examples of feminine strength. His father may have fervently waved his arms at revival meetings, but it was his mother who truly kept the faith. Nixon’s self-image was hardly as a trickster who trimmed and hedged. Rather, he saw himself as a grand and noble figure. At the same time, he saw the need to dare greatly in his ambition. He was not going to fritter away his life’s dream if he could act boldly and decisively.

By mid-October, Nixon could not afford to wait. His lead in the Gallup poll had fallen to eight points. Nixon knew that an “October surprise” could vault Humphrey past him into the White House.

Nixon could see his redemption from 1960 and ’62, his vindication by the polls, slipping away. Still, he was not powerless. He had made plans; he was, as usual, prepared.

He knew that South Vietnam, America’s ally and client state, would have to agree to the peace talks. Nixon had his own agent, his own way of reaching out to the government of President Nguyen Van Thieu in Saigon, in the form of stylish and flamboyant Anna Chennault, well known around Washington as the “Dragon Lady” (from
the comic strip “Terry and the Pirates”). The widow of World War II General Clare Chennault of the “Flying Tigers” (he had been fifty-seven and she was twenty-two when they married), Chennault gave lavish parties at her Watergate apartment and used her charm and money-raising ability for the so-called China Lobby supporting Taiwan. Nixon had once instructed an aide, “Keep her away from me, she’s bad news,” but he began to see that she was useful after she raised $250,000 for his 1968 campaign.
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Among the friends of the “Dragon Lady” was Bui Diem, the South Vietnamese ambassador to the United States.

Months before Nixon learned that a bombing halt was imminent, he had set up his own back channel to Saigon. On July 12, 1968, three weeks before the Republican Convention, Nixon had met with Mrs. Chennault, Ambassador Diem, and John Mitchell in New York. Nixon expressly asked for a secret meeting—no Secret Service (lest their “boss,” Lyndon Johnson, find out). With the South Vietnamese ambassador, Nixon supposedly designated Mrs. Chennault as “the sole representative between the Vietnamese government and Nixon campaign headquarters.”
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What happened next—what transpired over the four months between that first meeting and election day, November 5, 1968—has been a source of fascination and mystery to historians for decades. The Chennault Affair has loomed as one of the great litmus tests in the history of Richard Nixon—in understanding his character and his methods, in measuring just how far he would go to attain power. Did Nixon, through Chennault, secretly conspire to persuade the South Vietnamese to thwart LBJ’s “October Surprise” that would halt the bombing and bring peace negotiations—and possibly hand the November election to Hubert Humphrey?
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Nixon had trained himself to expect the worst from his enemies, but he was caught slightly off guard by Johnson’s perceived gambit. Nixon’s relationship with LBJ was a complex mix of respect, empathy, and suspicion. LBJ “personally liked” Nixon, he wrote an aide in 1966, and earlier, in 1956, he told another aide that Nixon had “stuck
his neck out” by praising the majority leader when he returned to the Senate from a heart attack. In September of 1968, Nixon summoned Billy Graham to send President Johnson a private promise that he would never “embarrass” Johnson. On October 14, speechwriter Bill Safire asked Nixon why he had excised a pointed reference to the Johnson-Humphrey administration and penciled in “the past eight years” of Democrats in the White House. “He fudged,” wrote Safire. “Not fair to LBJ,” Nixon said. Safire speculated in his diary, “I wouldn’t call this a mariage de convenance, but I’d compare it to two fighting roosters, circling each other, the knives attached to their spurs. Nothing will happen unless one makes the first move. Each is waiting for the other to knock the chip off his shoulder. RN doesn’t want to knock it off, because LBJ can be vindictive and who knows what he might pull off on an international scale.”
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By the last
week of October, rumors and reports were surfacing in the press that President Johnson had agreed to halt the bombing of North Vietnam and open peace talks. Knowing that such a diplomatic breakthrough would be a boon to the Humphrey campaign, Nixon on October 26 put out a statement that remains a classic of political doublespeak:

In the last 36 hours I have been advised of a flurry of meetings in the White House and elsewhere on Vietnam. I am told that top officials in the administration have been driving very hard for an agreement on a bombing halt, accompanied by a cease fire, in the immediate future. I have since learned these reports are true.

I am…told that this spurt of activity is a cynical, last-minute attempt by President Johnson to salvage the candidacy of Mr. Humphrey. This I do not believe.
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This I do not believe
. Nixon, the injured but still-trusting innocent—determined to stay on the high road no matter how low
his opponents stooped. In fact, Nixon absolutely believed that LBJ’s motives were political and that the bomb halt was a desperate attempt to rob the front-running Republican nominee of the election.

Nixon’s suspicion that Johnson was politically motivated seems perfectly sound, given LBJ’s own reputation as a ruthless master of the game. But the historical record shows that Johnson initially
opposed
the bombing halt and had to be persuaded to go along by the military and his own hawkish advisers. Johnson was so resistant that he made his Vietnam commanders fly home and brief him in the middle of the night to assure him that a bombing halt would not cost American lives.
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Ironically, it was not LBJ but the Soviet Union that wanted to see Humphrey win and Nixon lose. The Kremlin pushed the North Vietnamese to accept U.S. terms for peace talks because Humphrey was regarded as a less formidable Cold War foe than Nixon.
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By October 29, a deal appeared to be in the works: The bombing would stop, and a few days later the peace talks would begin. But then, at the last moment, South Vietnam backed away from the table and refused to sign off on the peace talks in Paris.

Johnson smelled a double cross. Nixon had publicly and privately promised not to undermine any chance for peace. In Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on October 17, Nixon had told voters that only the president could decide whether to stop the bombing and start talking. “We will support him,” Nixon said, “because he wants peace and we do not want to play politics with peace.”
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But now President Thieu, who had seemed amenable to the peace talks, was suddenly balking. Why?

Johnson had his own intelligence sources, and he was getting reports that Nixon was trying to sabotage the peace process before it even began. A Wall Street source had picked up from a banking friend in Nixon’s inner circle that Nixon was finagling with the Thieu government. “It all adds up,” grumbled the conspiracy-minded LBJ. His suspicions were reinforced when he was shown an intercept by the National Security Agency, the government’s top-secret gatherer of
“signals” intelligence, of a cable from Ambassador Diem to President Thieu. “I am still in contact with the Nixon entourage,” Diem told Thieu, “which continues to be the favorite despite the uncertainty provoked by the news of an imminent bombing halt.” The “entourage” included Mrs. Chennault and John Mitchell.
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Johnson wanted hard proof that Nixon was directly trying to block the deal. The Logan Act, a two-hundred-year-old law, made it a crime for private U.S. citizens to interfere in negotiations of the U.S. government with foreign powers. The president ordered the FBI to wiretap and physically monitor the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington and to tap Mrs. Chennault’s phone in her Watergate apartment. The FBI duly recorded Mrs. Chennault visiting the South Vietnamese embassy for thirty minutes, then going to an unmarked Nixon campaign office on Pennsylvania Avenue (her phone was apparently never tapped).
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To Johnson, who didn’t need much convincing, Chennault’s mere presence at the South Vietnamese embassy was proof enough of meddling by the Nixon camp. He got Senate Republican Minority Leader Everett Dirksen on the phone and ranted. “It’s despicable, and if it were made public I think it would rock the nation,” LBJ stormed. “Now, I rather doubt Nixon has done any of this, but there’s no question but what folks for him are doing it.” LBJ vented to Dirksen about Nixon’s sanctimonious “This I do not believe” line: “I thought Dick’s statement was ugly the other day, that he had been told that I was a thief, and a son of bitch and so forth, but he knew my mother and she really wasn’t a bitch….” He went on fulminating, in his vulgar LBJ way, about Nixon “fartin’ under the covers” and “getting his hand under somebody’s dress.”
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When he spoke by phone with Nixon and Humphrey later that evening, the president played it cool. He mentioned some “minor problems” from the “China Lobby” (code to Nixon, he knew, for Mrs. Chennault) and said, with the same unctuous insincerity Nixon had shown him, “I know that none of you candidates are aware of it or responsible for it.”

Nixon craftily played the last-minute glitch in the peace initiative as a Johnson blunder, one more bulge in Johnson’s “credibility gap.” Nixon had his adviser, Robert Finch, speaking as a “Nixon confidant,” tell the press, with feigned surprise, “We had the impression that all the diplomatic ducks were in a row.” Johnson was furious when he called Nixon on this charade, referring to Finch as “Fink.”
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Johnson became even more indignant when the FBI supplied him with the latest report from the wiretap on the South Vietnamese embassy. Mrs. Chennault was delivering a message from “her boss.” The message was: “Hold on, we’re gonna win.” The report did not identify “her boss,” but LBJ had no doubt: Nixon was telling the South Vietnamese to hold on, he was going to win the election. Johnson called Senator Dirksen and did not mince words: “This is treason.”
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Dirksen frantically called Bryce Harlow, who awakened Nixon in his hotel room in Los Angeles to let him know the depth of the president’s anger. Nixon had to scramble—and he did, brilliantly. The next morning, November 3, the final Sunday before Election Day, Nixon went on
Meet the Press
and offered to be the solution to the problem he had created. He offered, if elected, to go to Saigon to persuade Thieu to join the peace talks. Calling Johnson, he was all wounded innocence. “My God,” he told LBJ, “I would
never
do anything to encourage Hanoi—I mean, Saigon not to come to the table….”

The phone call ended, and “Nixon and his friends collapsed with laughter,” reported the
Sunday Times
of London in a post-election reconstruction of the episode. “It was partly in relief that their victory had not been taken from them at the eleventh hour.”
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Humphrey’s surge slowed over the final weekend. But that laughter was nervous; the polls generally saw the race as too close to call.