Being Nixon: A Man Divided (27 page)

De Gaulle paused for a long time before he spoke. “What is it you
expect me to do, Mr. President?” he asked. “Do you want me to tell you what I would do if I were in your place? But I am not in your place!” Even de Gaulle did not have an answer to Vietnam.
⁵⁵

There was no
good answer. Lyndon Johnson had been consumed by the war and was driven from office by it. During the election Nixon had talked about “peace with honor,” a phrase borrowed from Disraeli, and hinted vaguely that he had a plan, but he did not.
⁵⁶
He had gut responses, geopolitical theories, and innate political savvy, but these could be contradictory and lead to muddle and spasms.

Nixon hoped, unrealistically in retrospect, to end the war quickly. In November, at the Hotel Pierre, shortly after J. Edgar Hoover falsely told the president-elect that LBJ had bugged his campaign plane, Nixon seemed more forgiving to LBJ than angry, according to Haldeman. Nixon stared into his coffee cup for a while and said, “Well, I don’t blame him. He’s been under such pressure because of the damn war, he’ll do anything.” Nixon went on: “I’m not going to end up like LBJ, holed up in the White House, afraid to show my face on the street. I’m going to stop that war. Fast. I mean it.”
⁵⁷

Walking on a foggy beach with Haldeman earlier that summer, Nixon had said, “I’m the one man that can do it, Bob.” Nixon believed that the communists feared him above all other American politicians, and he wanted to manipulate this perceived fear to end the war. “They’ll believe any threat of force that Nixon makes because it’s Nixon,” he said.

Nixon loved unpredictability and surprise, and he didn’t mind being seen, under the right circumstances, as a little unhinged. “I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do
anything
to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed with Communists. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button’—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”
⁵⁸

Nixon was drawing inspiration from President Eisenhower, who
was widely believed to have bluffed with nuclear weapons to end the Korean War. The real truth about the end of the Korean War was more complicated, and in other ways Eisenhower’s model wasn’t transferable. Eisenhower, the former Supreme Allied Commander and conqueror of Europe, possessed a credibility and an understated confidence that Nixon lacked. Nixon’s “Madman Theory” would surface now and again in his frustrated attempts to bring the North Vietnamese to heel, but he would never show a willingness to go all the way—to flood North Vietnam by destroying its dikes or to actually use nuclear weapons.

Kissinger, too, believed that the war could be ended quickly—in a matter of months, he told various acquaintances and friends.
⁵⁹
He had faith in diplomacy backed by the threat of force, in carrots and sticks, and in his own skill. In his many strategic musings with Nixon, he spoke of “linkage.” Reduced to its essentials, “linkage” meant persuading the Russians that they were more likely to get arms control and trade agreements if they put pressure on their allies in Hanoi to end the war. The State Department was not keen on linkage, since it placed Kissinger as the spider at the center of the web.
⁶⁰
Nor were the Russians, nor were the North Vietnamese. Moscow had some influence over Hanoi, which it was supplying with weapons. But Kissinger overestimated the degree to which the Soviets could control their ally.

The North Vietnamese were willful, stubborn, patient, and intransigent, not to mention wily and deceitful. In time, Kissinger would be reduced to ranting that they were “tawdry, filthy shits.”
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The apparatchiks in Hanoi could wait. They had been fighting the Japanese, then the French, then the Americans, for decades. They could see that the peace movement was gaining strength in the United States. Washington could ignore the noise from the campuses and, increasingly, the hinterlands, but not forever; possibly, not much longer.

Nixon’s secretary of defense, Melvin Laird, was listening to the political signals. Foxy, crafty—a “rascal, but our rascal,” according
to Kissinger, who was half-amused, half-exasperated by him—Laird had been one of the most respected Republican members in the House of Representatives.
⁶²
Nixon valued Laird’s political judgment and skills, but he understood that Laird was a double-edged sword, a skilled infighter against his bureaucratic foes, a group Laird sometimes construed to include the president.

Asked about Vietnam, Laird once declared that Nixon “had no plan. I developed the plan.” That was not entirely accurate, as historian Melvin Small has pointed out, but more than anyone else, it was Laird who tried to cover the president’s political flanks while the war raged on.

Laird’s plan was called “Vietnamization.” It was not original—the Johnson administration had already begun work on “de-Americanizing” the war. But Laird was clever enough to see that American voters wanted to turn the fighting over to the South Vietnamese and bring the boys home—and that if they did, then America could reduce and ultimately end the draft, the source of so much student dissent.
⁶³

Nixon knew he had to do something. He inherited 530,000 American troops in Vietnam, dying at the rate of roughly two hundred a week. The Johnson strategy, such as it was, could be called middle-of-the-road. Johnson had stopped the bombing of North Vietnam right before Election Day, and all sides were talking in Paris. But the talks were going nowhere.

O
n February 22, 1969, the North Vietnamese launched an offensive into South Vietnam. Nixon took it personally. “It was a deliberate test, clearly designed to take the measure of me and my administration at the outset. My immediate instinct was to retaliate,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs.
¹
According to Henry Kissinger, Nixon was “seething” as he read the briefing books on Air Force One on the flight to Europe the next day. The president, who as a politician had often favored military intervention but was brand new to the role of commander-in-chief, “suddenly ordered the bombing of the Cambodian sanctuaries,” Kissinger recorded.
²

For years, the military had wanted to bomb the communist sanctuaries in Cambodia. The North Vietnamese moved supplies and men down the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail, the ever-shifting web of jungle roads and paths just across the border from South Vietnam in neighboring Cambodia and Laos. From Cambodia, the North Vietnamese and their Vietcong allies could mount attacks on nearby Saigon. In the first weeks of the administration—even before Nixon’s order—Kissinger instructed Air Force Colonel Ray Sitton, whose Pentagon nickname was “Mr. B-52,” to plan for bombing attacks on what the United States had heretofore regarded as neutral territory. In the view of the new administration, lines on the map in this region had not much meaning; the North Vietnamese controlled Cambodia’s bordering territory.

With Kissinger.

Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum

But then Nixon reversed course. Tugged and pulled by advisers, he rescinded the order, then changed his mind and reordered the bombing, then rescinded the order again. His decision was extremely difficult. “Hot pursuit” into neutral territory is an old military doctrine. But bombing Cambodia seemed sure to set off international protests and inflame the antiwar movement at home. Nixon’s immediate solution would become familiar: to do it secretly. Impractically, the White House even requested that the pilots of the B-52s not be informed they were bombing a different country.

Nixon’s desire to bomb was opposed by both Secretary of State William Rogers and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, though for different reasons. Laird was for the bombing, but he wanted to be open about it, figuring that the news would leak anyway and just cause a bigger flap. Rogers followed the State Department’s line that the bombing was morally and legally wrong. Rogers had been excluded from the original decision to bomb; Kissinger was already trying to get him fired.
³

On Saturday, March 15, the North Vietnamese fired five rockets into Saigon. At 3:35
P.M
., National Security Adviser Kissinger received a call from the president. He was ordering the B-52s to bomb the Cambodian sanctuaries. “State is to be notified only after the point of no return….The order is not appealable,” Nixon announced, speaking impersonally and emphatically. In his memoirs, Kissinger noted that “not appealable” was a favorite Nixon phrase that meant “considerable uncertainty” and, in the end, served to encourage appeals.
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A student of Eisenhower, Nixon tried to play the commander-in-chief, but he did not exactly convey Ike’s command presence. William Safire recalled a “stray order from the ‘Boss’ ” to press secretary Ron Ziegler: “That’s an order. No discussion, unless of course you disagree.”
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On Sunday afternoon, March 16, Nixon assembled Kissinger, Rogers, Laird, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Earle Wheeler, in the Oval Office. It was the first time he would confront
an international crisis, but it was a strange meeting, since he had apparently already decided on the outcome.

Kissinger had just brought in a new assistant, Colonel Alexander Haig, a much-decorated and phenomenally ambitious army officer at the Pentagon. One of Haig’s duties was to pass messages from his boss to the president late at night. The colonel would find Nixon slid so low in his favorite easy chair that he was essentially lying on his spine, feet up on the ottoman, writing, crossing out, inserting words on his yellow legal tablet. Haig also sat against the wall at important national security meetings at the White House like the one on March 16. Haig recognized that Nixon was “the best informed, best prepared, most articulate, and least predictable person present. It was clear from the earliest moment that this was a man who did not respond to the system but dominated it.” But Haig also observed that Nixon was painfully shy, “with an almost pathological distaste of confrontation.” Haig was “puzzled” by this flaw, but as he wrote in his memoirs, he “could not yet see that it was fatal.”
⁶

Over Cambodia, sixty B-52s unleashed their thirty-ton payloads over a “box pattern” 1.5 by 2 miles long. In the jungle, a Vietcong official was jolted awake by “thunder…the concussive
whump-whump-whump
came closer and closer,” he recalled. The North Vietnamese soldiers hugged the ground, some were “screaming quietly.” But, “miraculously,” the official recalled, “no one had been hurt.” A U.S. Special Forces team was sent in to the area to mop up. The unit was wiped out. A second Special Forces unit was ordered to go but mutinied.

The B-52 operation was called “Breakfast.” It would be followed by “Lunch,” “Snack,” “Dinner,” and “Dessert.” During the course of these “Menu” bombings, 3,825 B-52s dropped 103,921 tons of munitions. Historians still debate whether the bombing had any effect, other than to widen the war.
⁷

On the evening
of March 16, within hours of his contentious non-meeting on the Cambodia air strike, the president hosted a surprise
fifty-seventh birthday party for the First Lady. He had ordered the Army’s Strolling Strings to play Pat’s favorite Broadway show tunes and invited eighty guests. Nixon was excited about the party. White House social secretary Lucy Winchester recalled that he got so involved in the planning that he sang to her the entire “Happy Birthday” song.
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But when the night came, he was understandably distracted. At dinner, he stood to raise his glass but said nothing about his wife, just that he wanted Mamie Eisenhower to give the toast. Pat’s smile froze, and Mrs. Eisenhower appeared to be caught off-guard. “To a great friend and girl,” said the former First Lady and sat down.
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Cynthia Helms, who was at the dinner, remembered how hard it was to speak to Nixon and that Mrs. Nixon looked “numb.” “It dawned on me that he had never mentioned her name,” Mrs. Helms recalled.
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In later years,
Nixon’s aides would laugh about the boss’s helplessness with anything mechanical and his almost comic clumsiness—the time, on a campaign swing to Maine, when he picked up a lobster and it clawed on to his suit lapel; the time he clunked heads with Anna Chennault at a state dinner; the time he dropped the ball throwing out the first pitch on Opening Day; the many times he dropped medals he was awarding soldiers. (They did not laugh when they recalled how Nixon would weep with the families of the dead ones.) Nixon had to have a specially made Dictaphone with as few buttons as possible, and he could not open pill containers or, according to his wife, hammer a nail.
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Jeb Magruder, a PR man brought in by Haldeman, described a bill signing ceremony:

A pen had been placed in front of the President on his desk with the top off. Nixon picked it up, put its top on, and tried to sign the bill with the top on the pen. Realizing his mistake, Nixon took the top off the pen, started to sign his name, but only managed to jab himself in his left hand. At that he dropped the top of the pen on the floor, and total chaos ensued, as half the Cabinet dropped to its knees trying to find the top of the pen.
¹²

At 10 Downing Street on his European tour in February, Nixon spilled sauce on his tuxedo, then overturned an inkwell when he tried to write in the guest book. At his first state dinner, for Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, on March 24, he spilled soup on his vest. The next morning, he told Haldeman, “We’ve got to speed up these dinners. They take forever. So why don’t we just leave out the soup course.” Haldeman hemmed, “Well….” Nixon cut him off: “Men don’t really like soup.”
*
¹

Nixon was meeting
with Mel Laird in the Oval Office shortly after noon on March 28 when the president received word that Dwight Eisenhower had died. Nixon stared out the window and “started to cry, just standing there,” Haldeman wrote in his diary. The crying became sobs. The president stepped into a small side office and returned, red-eyed, and sat on the edge of the desk, “half-crying.”
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Eisenhower had asked Nixon to deliver his eulogy, not surprising given Nixon’s position, but still a deep honor after all of Nixon’s years of longing to please and to live up to Ike, who had never quite reciprocated.

Feeling suddenly ill and feverish, Nixon headed to Camp David, the presidential retreat named for Ike’s grandson, now Nixon’s son-in-law. Sitting by the fire on a cold early spring evening, Nixon began to muse to his speechwriter, Ray Price, about one particular quality that set Eisenhower apart. “Everybody loved Ike,” Nixon said, not a little enviously. “But the reverse of that was that Ike loved everybody.” Nixon went on: “He never hated his critics, not even the press. He’d just say, ‘I’m a little puzzled by those fellows.’ ”

Price could “picture Nixon’s mind working, catching himself.” Nixon knew that what he had said was not quite true. It was too much to believe that Ike never felt anger. The difference was that, after a blowup, the anger passed, while Nixon let it fester.
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At some
level, Nixon might have wished to emulate Eisenhower.
*
²
But he couldn’t. Possibly, he did not want to; resentment, though toxic, was vital to Nixon.

Nixon’s desire to
control—and to be seen to be in control—dominated his first nine months in office. He was not so naïve as to believe that he could truly control either events or perceptions, but his realism did not stop him from making heroic, sometimes overly theatrical, attempts to dominate the world stage and all who stood upon it. He was helped and hindered by Kissinger, whose acting skills matched his own.

Nixon, like all presidents, leaked, and, like all presidents, complained about leaks. On April 25, he brought J. Edgar Hoover up to Camp David to ask him what he could do to catch leakers, and Hoover, as expected, told him he could use the FBI to wiretap. Every president since FDR had done so, said Hoover, usually glad to be of service in such matters.
¹⁸
On May 9,
The New York Times
disclosed the secret bombing of Cambodia. Kissinger howled loudest, stomping around the presidential bungalow in Key Biscayne shouting, “We must do something! We must crush these people!”

Kissinger called Defense Secretary Laird, getting him off the course at Burning Tree, the men’s golf club just outside Washington. The national security adviser raged, “You son of bitch, I know you leaked that story, and you’re going to have to explain it to the President.” Laird hung up on Kissinger.
¹⁹
Kissinger was protesting too much. He was anxious about the leakiness of his own staff, which was heavy with Harvard liberals. The FBI was put to work.

Over the next twenty months, the FBI electronically eavesdropped on thirteen staffers and four newsmen, seventeen wiretaps in all. In
1973, Nixon would grumble that the taps “never helped us. Just gobs and gobs of material. Gossip and bullshitting.” Nixon blamed Kissinger: “He asked that it be done.”
²⁰
Curiously, the
New York Times
story disclosing the secret bombing of Cambodia, which was highly classified information, caused no stir. The wiretaps, on the other hand, were evil seeds. They started the White House down a path that would lead to the White House Plumbers and the Watergate break-in.

The president ordered an eighteenth wiretap—not installed by the FBI, which was sending the transcripts to Kissinger—but by a former New York City cop named Jack Caulfield, who did odd jobs for Ehrlichman.
²¹
Caulfield tapped the phone of
Washington Post
columnist Joe Kraft. The
Post
columnist was regarded suspiciously as a Kissinger conduit. As Kissinger left the White House one night, Nixon, who liked to needle, called out, “There goes Henry, out to call the
Washington Post
!” The irony, noted Kissinger biographer Walter Isaacson, is that “when Nixon had some line he wanted to push, he would send a memo to Kissinger telling him to leak it to Kraft.”
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Nixon was often
restless.
²³
Lyndon Johnson had been a prisoner in the White House, he believed, besieged by antiwar protesters. The protesters were still there, and their chants kept Nixon awake at night. So he escaped—on foreign trips and often to Camp David or Key Biscayne or, beginning in the summer of 1969, to a fourteen-room house overlooking the Pacific in San Clemente, California. The Spanish-style Casa Pacifica, adjacent to a compound of offices called the Western White House, was financed with the help of Bebe Rebozo and Robert Abplanalp, the Aerosol magnate (“Let us spray!” joked Nixon’s staff). Nixon spent about half his first year away from the White House, and Pat accompanied him about half of that time.
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