Being Nixon: A Man Divided (28 page)

Camp David, the mountain retreat created by Franklin Roosevelt, who had called it Shangri-La, was rustic and a little seedy when the Nixons arrived. Nixon told Haldeman to fix it up, and the chief of staff spared no expense, installing a pool over the bomb shelter and a
bowling alley.
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Shabby genteel was not the Nixons’ style. “FDR, born to wealth, appreciated rusticity; Nixon, born poor, appreciated a heated swimming pool right out front,” observed William Safire. It suited Nixon’s self-image as a Man of Mystery to be on mountain-tops and remote beaches, noted Safire—a little out of reach, though never out of touch.
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Haldeman was almost always in attendance. On one dog day in summer, he sat in the humid sunshine with the president, who was in his bathing trunks. Haldeman was, as usual, wearing a tie out of respect. “I darn near melted,” he wrote in his diary that night. “Was dripping and had a horrible time trying to take notes.”
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Nixon graciously invited Haldeman to bring his wife and children to Camp David, but Haldeman, ever conscious of the president’s privacy, instructed his family to scatter whenever the president or his family drew near. More difficult, Haldeman tried to protect the president from Kissinger’s insecurities. The latter railed against his rival at State, Secretary Rogers, calling him a “threat to world peace.” “Kissinger is on Rogers kick again….Comes in 2–3 times a day. Insists Rogers is trying to get him….Just keep this stuff off his [Nixon’s desk],” Haldeman noted at a meeting in San Clemente in August. “The President got into a snit and asked us to form a Henry-Handling Committee to deal with it.”
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In July, Kissinger had persuaded Nixon to go on a round-the-world trip that was a classic of diplomacy, showmanship, and intrigue. The trip was code-named Operation Moonglow, in honor of the American astronauts who were the first men to walk on the moon. On the first leg of the trip, from the deck of an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Nixon watched the splashdown of Apollo 11.
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“P was exuberant, really cranked up, like a little kid. Watched everything, soaked it all up,” wrote Haldeman in his diary. When the astronauts came on board, Nixon ordered the band to play “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean” (the spacecraft was named
Columbia
).

The press sniped that Nixon was a little too eager to bask in the reflected glory of a moon-launch program started by JFK, but the
president was genuinely energized by the example of American cando spirit. Borrowing from NASA jargon (“All systems go”), Nixon had the idea of using the word
go
as a theme for his presidency. “Means all systems ready, never to be indecisive, get going, take risks, be exciting,” Haldeman recorded in his diary. “Must use the great power of the office to
do something
.”
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Nixon paid a surprise visit to cheering troops in Vietnam and was moved by their resiliency. As Air Force One continued westward, Nixon instructed Haldeman “to never let the hippie-college types in to see him again.”
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In Saigon, President Thieu had greeted Nixon less enthusiastically. To him, “Vietnamization” and the withdrawal of American troops loomed like a potential death sentence. Earlier that summer, at a meeting on an American air base on the Pacific island of Midway, Thieu arrived to find only one big chair flanked by several smaller chairs. Thieu went and found an equally big chair and placed it directly opposite the chair intended for President Nixon.
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In Pakistan, Nixon was impressed by the bluff military bearing of President General Yahya Khan.
*
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Always thinking, Nixon began imagining a role for his new friend General Khan—as a secret go-between to the Red Chinese. In Romania, in a first-ever visit to a communist country by an American head of state, Nixon was overwhelmed by the roaring, freedom-hungry crowds, just as he had been a decade earlier on a vice-presidential trip to Poland. In Romanian strongman Nicolae Ceauşescu, “a strong, independent leader who had cultivated good relations with the Chinese,” he found another potential ally in a plan that was taking more distinct form in his mind.
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In his vision, Nixon was way ahead of his closest foreign policy adviser. Aboard Air Force One, Haldeman came and took an empty seat beside Kissinger. “You know,” said Haldeman, “he actually seriously intends to visit China before the end of the second term.” In
Haldeman’s retelling, Kissinger took off his glasses and polished them. A small smile spread on his face. He turned to the president’s chief of staff and said, “Fat chance.”
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With a peculiar
blend of affection, admiration, and pity, Kissinger regarded Nixon as a kind of Walter Mitty character, after the funny-sad James Thurber short story “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” about a meek, mild man who fantasizes about becoming a hero—a combat pilot, an emergency room surgeon, a death-defying explorer—to escape his ordinary life. On August 29, at San Clemente, Nixon was having a drink with his pals Rebozo and Abplanalp when he received word that Palestinian terrorists had kidnapped a TWA flight and flown it to Damascus. “Bomb the airport,” Nixon ordered. Kissinger was not sure what to do, but he decided the best option was, as he later put it, “to give the president the opportunity to have second thoughts.” To strike Damascus, an aircraft carrier had to be moved closer to Syria in any event, buying time. (Defense Secretary Mel Laird recalled that he planned to cite “weather delays” to stall some more.) At the morning briefing, Kissinger reviewed the steps taken to get the carrier in launch position. Nixon asked, “Did anything else happen?” Kissinger replied, “No.” “Good,” said Nixon. “I never heard another word about bombing Damascus,” said Kissinger. (The passengers, except for two Israeli hostages, were released.)
^36
,
*
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The day before
the astronauts landed on the moon, Senator Edward Kennedy drove off a bridge in the middle of the night on Chappaquiddick, an island connected to Martha’s Vineyard. The young girl who was with him, a former secretary to Robert Kennedy named Mary Jo Kopechne, did not survive. Nixon’s interest in the case was
constant as he flew to greet the returning astronauts and continued on around the world. “Wants to be sure he doesn’t get away with it,” Haldeman wrote in his diary. “Obviously (P feels) he was drunk, escaped from the car, let her drown, said nothing until the police got to him. Shows fatal flaw in his character, cheated at school, ran from accident.”
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Nixon allowed himself to be hopeful, for a moment, that the press would uncover the true story. “It’ll be hard to hush this one up; too many reporters want to win a Pulitzer Prize,” he told William Safire. (“In the back seat!” he added, in an apparent sexual reference.)
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But, before long, he suspected the fix was in. “Check out police chief—Mafia,” Haldeman cryptically wrote in his notes while talking to Nixon the day of the accident.
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Nixon ordered Ehrlichman to use his man, the ex–New York cop Jack Caulfield, to investigate.
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(Caulfield sent his sidekick, Tony Ulasewicz, who, posing as a reporter, was unable to dig up any new dirt.) Rattling off these orders, Nixon’s mind seems to have darkened, as it sometimes did when he thought of the Kennedys. He still bristled over JFK’s comment after the 1960 election—“No class”—when asked to describe Nixon, the same Nixon who had shown the grace not to challenge the shady election results.
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On July 21, two days after the accident, Haldeman wrote in his notes while meeting with the president,

Reg meetings—dirty tricks dept.

use of power of WH more ruthlessly

in deadly battle—use all weapons
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Nixon was already using some dirty tricks on Kennedy. On March 26, after little more than two months in office, Nixon had ordered “a tail” put on Senator Kennedy, hoping to catch him “girling,” as he put it.
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Alex Butterfield later revealed that he had, to his ultimate regret, carried out a presidential order to use a Secret Service agent as a spy on Kennedy.
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And yet, the empathetic Nixon soon emerged. On August 4, meeting
with congressional leaders after his global tour, Nixon took aside an obviously shattered Ted Kennedy and talked to him out of earshot of the others for about ten minutes. In his diary, Haldeman, who had asked Nixon what he told Kennedy, wrote:

Told him he understood how tough it was, etc. Said he was surprised to see how hard the press had been on him, especially because they like him, but have to realize they are your enemy at heart even if they do like you, because their prime motivation is the story.
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Safire watched the political rivals from across the room. “Nixon, who had experienced premature political burial himself, was talking gently and reassuringly, and Kennedy was listening,” he recalled. Safire could not hear what Nixon was saying, but he could guess from a note Nixon had jotted down, scrawled on a scrap of paper as he prepared to be asked about Kennedy’s troubles at a press conference. The note read:

Defeat—doesn’t

finish a man—

Quit—does—

A man is not finished

when he’s defeated

He’s finished

when he

quits.
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On September 7,
as he flew back to Washington from the Western White House, Nixon once again pulled out a yellow pad and described the man and the president he wanted to be:

Most powerful office

Each day a chance to do something memorable for someone

Need to be good to do good

Need for joy, serenity, confidence, inspirational

Goals: Set example, inspire, instill pride

1. Personal image of Presidency—Strong, compassionate, competent, bold—Joy in job

2. Nation is better in spirit at end of term
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Twice, he used the word “joy” to express a feeling he only rarely showed, usually in moments of high pomp. But he needed to believe, to find sources of optimism and confidence. He was gearing himself up to face his biggest, most intractable problem: ending the war in Vietnam.

It was becoming “Nixon’s War.” In June, polls suggested that the country was evenly divided on Nixon’s performance on Vietnam, but by September, 52 percent disapproved while only 35 percent approved.
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Nixon was trying to bluff, covertly. On July 15, Nixon sent a secret letter to Ho Chi Minh, warning that if no peace breakthrough came by November 1, the president would be obliged to resort to “measures of great consequence and force.” On August 25, the North Vietnamese leader, who was on his deathbed, coldly rebuffed Nixon’s threat.
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On October 3, on a hot humid morning in Key Biscayne, Nixon, dressed in trunks and a sports shirt, summoned Haldeman and Ehrlichman. In his diary, Haldeman, in his mildly sardonic way, described the scene: “Sort of one of those mystic sessions, which he had obviously thought about ahead of time.” Nixon informed his top aides that he wanted to set aside large chunks of time to work on Vietnam. Then Nixon called in Kissinger, and according to Haldeman’s diary, told them that “we have only two alternatives, bug out or accelerate, and that we must escalate or P is lost.”
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Kissinger was already agitating to step up the war. He had pulled aside a “trusted group” of aides to work on war plans code-named “Duck Hook.” (The origins of the code name are murky—according
to one mock-serious account, it stood for “all the ducks of American power circling in for the kill”; in another, it was borrowed from golf slang for a wicked shot that curves violently off line.)
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Kissinger told his staff, “I refuse to believe that a fourth-rate power like North Vietnam doesn’t have a breaking point,” and set no preconditions on finding it. The staff came up with plans for a four-day blitz in early November, after the expiration date of Nixon’s six-month ultimatum to Ho Chi Minh: the bombing of cities and dikes, the mining of harbors, an invasion of North Vietnam, and, possibly, the use of a nuclear device to close the railroad pass to China.
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If Hanoi didn’t sue for peace after four days, America would repeat the punishment.

Kissinger was playing to the president’s “madman” side. Although it’s very unlikely he would have ever used nuclear weapons, Nixon wanted his foe to fear that he might.
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While he had no “secret plan” to end the war, Nixon had been heavily influenced by Dwight Eisenhower’s stratagem for ending the Korean War in 1953—to let it be known, through subtle signals—that the new Eisenhower administration was seriously contemplating the use of nuclear weapons. The Korean War was probably ended less by nuclear threats than war-weariness in communist capitals, but Nixon believed that Ike’s bluff had paid off.

As vice president, Nixon had spent considerable time observing Eisenhower at national security meetings. Ike’s practice was to encourage vigorous debate by asking provocative questions, including whether the time had come to end the “taboo” on the use of nuclear weapons.
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But Eisenhower never shared with anyone whether he would actually use the weapons and indeed may not have known himself. Eisenhower came to the presidency with years of experience as a wartime commander after a long apprenticeship as a peacetime staffer. Nixon, who had served as a low-ranking supply officer and
reached high office after a brief apprenticeship (elected vice president before he turned forty), was much less seasoned and prepared for the loneliness of command. Eisenhower had learned to keep an iron grip on his hot temper and always projected calm. Nixon was
usually
calm in crisis, almost preternaturally so at times. At other times, he allowed his emotions to take control and seemed to lurch unsteadily.