Being Nixon: A Man Divided (32 page)

Nixon set about emulating Patton, a decision that would do much to create a lasting image in pop culture of Nixon as unhinged as he plunged the nation into the Cambodia “incursion” (the White House term to avoid using the word
invasion
). Nixon was not Patton—fortunately, for Patton would have been a terrible chief executive. But nor was he Hamlet, dithering helplessly, or Captain Queeg, so possessed by his demons that his officers felt compelled to mutiny. Nixon was faced with very difficult choices; disloyal and feuding advisers; massive civil unrest; and the extreme loneliness of command. His decisions on Vietnam may not have been the wisest ones—wisdom was, generally speaking, a rare commodity on the subject of the war—but they were hardly delusional. He was trying to keep faith with his vision for the country and to make hard calls with resolution. Nonetheless, it is true that he was increasingly swept up in his own emotionalism, carried away by his fondness for crisis, blind to his own weakness for self-drama.

On March 18,
a coup by a right-wing general set off a civil war in Cambodia, and, within two weeks, the communists, backed by Hanoi, were winning. The North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia had remained a sore point in the Vietnam War; the mysterious and mobile communist headquarters, COSVN (Central Office of South Vietnam) in the Pentagon’s acronym, continued to elude the secret “Menu” bombing campaign launched by Nixon the year before.

Nixon began thinking of a bold move: a combined U.S.–South Vietnamese sweep into Cambodia to clean out the sanctuaries. He was inspired by a tough, wiry ex-submariner, Admiral John McCain (whose son, a naval aviator, was a prisoner of war). On April 19, as CINCPAC, commander of Pacific Forces, Admiral McCain gave the president a lurid briefing, with red arrows pointing into the heart of Vietnam from the sanctuaries, known as Parrot’s Beak and the Fishhook.
McCain warned that unless the sanctuaries were eliminated, Vietnamization—pulling out U.S. troops and turning the fight over to the South Vietnamese army—was likely to fail.
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The next day, Nixon was scheduled to announce on national TV that 150,000 American troops would be coming home from Vietnam in the next year. He gave the speech from the Western White House after seeing McCain in Hawaii, but as Air Force One continued eastward into the night, Nixon was having more hawkish thoughts. He told Haldeman, “Cut the crap on my schedule. I’m taking over here.” He meant personally taking over the military response in Cambodia. “Troop withdrawal was a boy’s job,” he said. “Cambodia is a man’s job.”
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Nixon was fed up with his own military-intelligence establishment. When the CIA missed the coup in Cambodia in March, Nixon snorted impatiently to Secretary of State Rogers, “What do those clowns do out there at Langley?”
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Now he ordered Haldeman to set up a back channel to issue orders from the White House directly to the military commanders in Vietnam—not through the secretary of defense, the normal chain of command. He knew that Laird would oppose his attempts to escalate. So would Rogers at State.

As usual during a crisis, Nixon was having trouble sleeping. On April 24, he repaired to Camp David with Bebe Rebozo and apparently had a drink or two while watching the movie
The Cincinnati Kid
, which was about a poker sharpie. As a Kissinger aide (who had been listening on the line) later told the story, Nixon got on the phone to Kissinger to discuss sending troops into Cambodia. “Wait a minute,” Nixon said suddenly. “Bebe has something to say to you.” A new voice came on the phone. “The President wants you to know, Henry, that if this doesn’t work out, it’s your ass.” Kissinger, who could be indiscreet with his aides, told them, “Our peerless leader has flipped out.”
²⁹

Kissinger was summoned to Camp David. While the president paddled around his heated pool, he suggested going even further and implementing Duck Hook. Kissinger wasn’t sure if Nixon was just
bluffing and testing him, as he sometimes did. “I replied that we had enough on our plate,” he recalled in his memoir. In the late afternoon, Kissinger, Nixon, Rebozo, and John Mitchell, whom Nixon liked to have around when things were tough, went on a cruise down the Potomac on the presidential yacht, the
Sequoia
. “The tensions of the grim military planning were transformed into exaltation by the liquid refreshment,” wrote Kissinger, “to the point of some patriotic awkwardness when it was decided that everyone should stand at attention while the
Sequoia
passed Mount Vernon—a feat not managed by everyone with equal success.” Back at the White House, Nixon invited everyone to see
Patton
with him, again.
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Nixon signed the military orders to send U.S. and South Vietnamese troops into Cambodia—a two-pronged attack into the Parrot’s Beak and the Fishhook—with his initials “RN,” but then, as if to show that he really meant it, wrote out his full name, “Richard Nixon.” He was gathering himself. On a notepad, he wrote, “Bebe at the elevator—‘This is the big play.’ Need for self-discipline in all areas. Polls v. right decision. Dare to do it right—alone.”
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Nixon wanted his address to the nation, scheduled for Thursday night, April 30, to feel historic, so he proposed making it from the Map Room, where FDR had conducted World War II. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Haldeman wrote in his diary.

Nixon’s secretaries of state and defense were not on board. “Rogers obviously quite upset, emotional,” recorded Haldeman. Both Rogers and Laird felt that they had not been properly consulted and worried about high casualties for low gain. Nixon distracted himself by worrying over minutiae. He was upset when the CBS program
60 Minutes
agreed to allot only 20 to 30 minutes—not the full hour—to a Tricia-led tour of the White House. “Really mad, and said so,” Haldeman wrote, “chewed me out worse than he ever has as P. Basically, a release of tensions on the big decision, but potentially damaging if he starts flailing in other directions.” Haldeman was less understanding the next day when Nixon “called again to discuss problem of locating his new pool table. Decided it won’t fit in the
solarium, so wants a room in EOB. Absolutely astonishing he could get into trivia on brink of biggest step he’s taken so far.”
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On Thursday, the day of his speech, Nixon went to bed at 1
A.M
., got up at 2
A.M
., went to bed again at 5:30
A.M
., gave up, and sat in his darkened office in the Executive Office Building, listening to Tchaikovsky.
³³
He worked and reworked the speech, bringing in Pat Buchanan, whom he used when he wanted to write speeches, as he put it, “with the bark on.”
³⁴

Nixon gave the speech from the Map Room, invoking Woodrow Wilson in World War I, FDR in World War II, and JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis. A large map, showing the Parrot’s Beak, loomed behind him. He told the American people that “this is not an invasion of Cambodia.” Rather, South Vietnamese and American troops were going in to knock out communist headquarters and clear out the sanctuaries. Then his tone darkened:

We live in an age of anarchy. We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last five hundred years. Even here in the United States, great universities are being systematically destroyed. Small nations all the world over find themselves under attack from within and without….If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.
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After the address, Nixon joined his family for a “light supper” in the Solarium. He had summoned Julie and David down from Smith and Amherst, where they were shortly scheduled to graduate, because he feared a violent campus reaction to his speech. He had also told his daughter that it would be too provocative for him to attend her graduation. She had trouble holding back the tears.
³⁶

Her father was “still keyed up from the speech” when he entered
the Solarium, Julie recalled. “Mother, with unmistakable intensity, led the way in reassuring him of rightness of the decision.” Nixon repaired to the Lincoln Sitting Room to be alone. Oddly, but touchingly, he was later visited there by the Chief Justice of the United States, Warren Burger, a Nixon appointee, who drove to the White House to offer words of support. “I think anyone who really listened to what you said will appreciate the guts it took to make the decision,” Burger told the president.
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Ehrlichman escorted the Chief Justice to see Nixon. “P looped,” he wrote in his diary. (The teetotaling Ehrlichman may have been observing the effect of one drink on the exhausted president.)
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The Eastern Establishment press unloaded on him. His old liberal nemesis,
The New Republic
, began a front-page editorial with the sentence, “Richard Nixon is going down in history, all right, but not soon enough.” The speech was “insensitive,” “phony,” “a fraud,” and “dangerous.”
The New York Times
opined that Nixon was “out of touch with the nation.”
³⁹
Quietly, Nixon asked Kissinger to find out how the speech had played with his “Georgetown friends.” The national security adviser called the Alsops and got Susan Mary on the phone—she and Joe had just come back from a dinner attended by Senator Edward Kennedy. How was the “atmosphere,” Kissinger wanted to know. “It was very bad,” answered Mrs. Alsop. “Everyone was in a rage.”
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Some of Nixon’s critics were in-house. William Safire, Nixon’s moderate speechwriter who had been excluded this time around, later said, “Nixon had done what only Nixon could do—make a courageous decision and wrapped it in a pious and divisive speech.”
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But Nixon could not hear the jeers or even the cautions, not at first. He went to a Pentagon briefing in the morning and fulminated, “Let’s blow the hell out of them,” as Kissinger and Laird looked at each other in embarrassment.
⁴²
In the hallway outside the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the president was “mobbed by people cheering and trying to shake my hand,” he recalled in his memoirs. “ ‘God bless you!’ ‘Right on!’ ‘We should have done this years ago!’ they
shouted.” By the time Nixon had reached the Pentagon lobby, where he was thanked by a weeping woman with a husband in Vietnam, he was in full flight. “I have seen them,” he said, talking about the soldiers in Vietnam. “They’re the greatest. You see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses. Listen, the boys that are on the college campuses today are the luckiest people in the world, going to the greatest universities, and here they are burning up the books, storming around about this issue.”
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Widely and quickly reported, the line about “these bums” was a mistake. But Nixon did not realize it right away. Instead, he went for another cruise on the Potomac, this time with just his family, Bebe Rebozo, Rose Mary Woods, and one of his military attachés, Marine Colonel Jack Brennan. Woods was a little worried about the president, who was more wound up than she had seen him in twenty years. The presidential yacht went through its usual ritual of playing the national anthem when it passed the George Washington tomb at Mount Vernon. “Really blast it out,” Nixon ordered the captain. He stood at rigid attention and then smiled and shot his right thumb in the air.
^44
,
*
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Nixon was sitting alone in his hideaway, EOB 175, on the afternoon of Monday, May 4, when Haldeman came in, “looking agitated,” Nixon recalled. He had just read over the wires that National Guardsmen had opened fire on some antiwar protesters at Kent State University in Ohio. Nixon was “stunned.” “Are they dead?” he asked. Haldeman answered that he was afraid so. “Is this because of me, because of Cambodia?” Nixon asked.
⁴⁵

Nixon opened the newspaper the next day and saw the photograph.
A kneeling girl, arms outspread over a dead student, a Vietnam-era pietà. The father of one of the dead girls was quoted as saying, “My child is not a bum.”

“Those few days after Kent State were amongst the darkest of my presidency,” Nixon recalled. “I felt utterly dejected.” He asked Rose Woods to set up an appointment with Dr. Hutschnecker, who flew down to Washington from New York for a meeting that was kept off of the Secret Service log. An ardent dove, Hutschnecker told Nixon that he should rename the Department of Defense the Department of Peace. That was not the conversation Nixon was looking for. He excused himself after a few minutes. “Our old intimacy was not there,” Hutschnecker later told Jonathan Aitken.
⁴⁶

Demonstrations rocked over a thousand campuses. Almost five hundred of them closed. More than two million students went on strike. At Harvard, student protesters threatened to trash Pat Moynihan’s house. His wife hung a giant peace symbol over the porch to assuage the students, then warned her husband. President Nixon sent “some burly men in unmarked cars,” she recalled. (They were probably FBI agents.)
⁴⁷
A “March on Washington” was called for Saturday, May 9. Around the White House, city buses were lined up bumper-to-bumper in protection, like covered wagons in a circle against the Indians. Hundreds of troops from the Third Army bivouacked in the Executive Office Building. Henry Kissinger slept in his West Wing office to avoid demonstrators. Tape was put on the White House windows to keep them from shattering.
⁴⁸

Nixon bravely held a press conference on the night of Friday, May 8. He was visibly anxious and sweating. Of the twenty-six questions, twenty-four were about Cambodia and the protests. Nixon gave an indirect but eloquent apology for his “bums” remark. Of college students he said,

They are trying to say that they want peace. They are trying to say that they want to stop the killing. They are trying to say that
they want to end the draft. They are trying to say we ought to get out of Vietnam. I agree with everything that they are trying to accomplish.
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