One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (7 page)

Nixon agreed. He was ready to recalibrate the balance of terror.

One week later, on the afternoon of Saturday, March 15, back in Washington, Nixon took a fifty-five-minute swim in the heated White House pool. He got out of the water and called Henry Kissinger three times.

Each call evinced an escalating state of fury.

The first call lasted six minutes. “The President ordered the immediate implementation of the Breakfast Plan,” Kissinger’s notes read.

The second call lasted one minute. The president commanded that the secretary of state and the American ambassador in Saigon be kept in the dark until the B-52s had passed the point of no return.

The third call to Kissinger was as blunt as it could be. “Everything that will fly is to get over to North Vietnam,” the president said. Kissinger’s notes read, “There will be no appeal” from the Pentagon or the State Department. “He will let them know who is boss around here.”

The full scope of the destruction the United States unleashed on Cambodia remained unrevealed for three decades, due to the deliberate falsification of the bombing records, authorized by Nixon and executed by Kissinger, Haig, and General Abrams. The falsification violated the military laws of the United States. The bombing of a neutral nation arguably violated the laws of war.

In November 2000, Bill Clinton became the first American president since Nixon to visit Vietnam. To help in the search for unexploded bombs, which remained a lethal threat there and in Laos and Cambodia, Clinton made public an air force database that contained a staggering statistic.

Between March 1969 and August 1973, America dropped 2,756,727 tons of bombs on Cambodia. That figure was nearly five times greater than previously known, exceeding the tonnage of all Allied bombing during World War II, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No one knows how many Cambodian civilians were killed, perhaps one hundred fifty thousand.

Kissinger told Defense Secretary Laird that the president had approved the bombing of Cambodia on March 16, the night after the first B-52s attacked. He said the decision was one that Nixon could never avow.

CHAPTER FIVE

“The center cannot hold”

G
ENERAL
A
BRAMS
was outraged. One week after the great waves of B-52 attacks began, a wire service reporter in Saigon named Jack Walsh filed a story saying Abrams was “seeking permission” to bomb enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia. It ran on the front page of the
Washington Star
on March 25, 1969.

Abrams fired off a top-secret cable to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Earle Wheeler, calling the story a disaster. His fury was mild compared to Richard Nixon’s.

Leaks plague every president, but none more than Nixon. His passion for secrecy equaled his hatred for reporters—a high standard. One month after the story appeared, on April 25, Nixon met with J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General John Mitchell in the Oval Office. Mitchell sat quietly, as was his habit, puffing clouds of smoke from his pipe, listening as Hoover told the president that there was only one way to deal with leakers. And that was to wiretap them. As Nixon put it, wiretapping was “the ultimate weapon.”

Nixon immediately called Henry Kissinger into the meeting and told him to take responsibility for stopping the leaks—starting by tapping members of his own NSC staff. “Henry himself was, in a sense, the target of all this suspicion,” said Kissinger’s aide Peter Rodman. “He was under pressure to show nobody on his staff” was leaking information. “Here he was in this room with J. Edgar Hoover, John Mitchell, Richard Nixon, and they’re saying, ‘Let’s do some taps.’”

On the morning of May 9, Kissinger called Hoover, furious over a front-page story in the
New York Times.
The reporter, William Beecher, based at the Pentagon, had filed a careful report stating that B-52s had struck several of the enemy’s camps inside Cambodia. No public outcry resulted. No congressional hearings ensued. What was really happening—a massive attack on a neutral nation, concealed by falsified Pentagon reports—did not come out until 1973.
*

Kissinger told Hoover that the
Times
story was “extraordinarily damaging” and “dangerous.” He hoped Hoover would help him “destroy whoever did this” by wiretapping reporters and their suspected sources at the NSC, the Pentagon, and the State Department; Kissinger would select the targets. The taps also remained secret until 1973. Their targets included thirteen American government officials and four newspaper reporters. Daily summaries of the White House wiretaps went from the FBI to the president’s closest aides. This continued for twenty months—until Nixon installed his own secret taping system in the White House.

The taps revealed nothing but “gossip and bullshitting,” as Nixon inelegantly put it on his own tapes. “The tapping was a very, very unproductive thing. I’ve always known that.” But it was Nixon’s first clear step over the line of the law. The president could order warrantless wiretaps against suspected foreign spies. But these were American citizens. Nixon and Kissinger later argued that the tapping was within the realm of the president’s national security powers. It was not.

Some of the targets of the taps had long assumed they were spied upon by foreign intelligence services. “But I didn’t think it was being done by the White House,” said Ambassador William H. Sullivan, a distinguished diplomat who helped Kissinger open a secret channel of communication with the leaders of North Vietnam. When Sullivan later found out that his own government was tapping him, he assumed that Nixon had ordered the surveillance in a fit of drunken rage. “It probably came from Nixon personally,” Sullivan said. “He was given to exploding—particularly in the course of an evening—if he had had a few drinks.” Sober or not, Nixon had “an almost paranoid fear that people were not trustworthy,” said Col. Richard Thomas Kennedy, the National Security Council’s staff director for planning and coordination from 1969 to 1974.

Winston Lord, one of Kissinger’s most devoted aides, was among those tapped. “You cannot square a personal friendship and total trust and intimacy with his authorizing of tapping your phone,” Lord later reflected. “You can’t run a government that way.”

Nixon’s spying on Americans went far beyond these taps, as a National Security Agency history declassified in 2013 disclosed. An NSA “watch list” began growing in October 1967, the result of LBJ’s suspicions that antiwar activists were being financed by Moscow. It kept growing under Nixon: sixteen hundred Americans appeared on the list by 1973. The official NSA history states bluntly that the program was “disreputable if not outright illegal.”

The NSA is a military intelligence service whose charter was to target foreign spies and suspected terrorists, not American citizens who questioned the president’s foreign policies. The watch list was an antecedent to the far more extensive NSA surveillance program ordered by President George W. Bush; the distinct difference was the direct targeting of high-profile American citizens as opposed to high-value foreign terrorists.

The NSA history notes that the watch list grew to include the
Washington Post
humor columnist Art Buchwald and
New York Times
journalist Tom Wicker—both fired words, not weapons—“and even politicians such as Frank Church and Howard Baker.” Church and Baker were U.S. senators. Church was a liberal Democrat who sponsored the first major bipartisan moves against the war. Baker was the Republican who famously asked at the 1973 Watergate hearings, “What did the president know and when did he know it?”

The FBI and NSA taps, like so much that would come to torment Nixon, were all about the war abroad and the war at home. No one ever said it better than Haldeman himself: “Without the Vietnam War there would have been no Watergate.”

*   *   *

Nixon’s greatest domestic enemy was the peace movement, which rose with every American who fell in Vietnam. By the end of March 1969, that death toll had reached 33,641, surpassing that of the Korean War.

That same week, Nixon devoted one of his first major public statements to the growing demonstrations on college campuses across the country. “This is the way civilizations begin to die,” Nixon said. “The process is altogether too familiar to those who would survey the wreckage of history: assault and counterassault, one extreme leading to the opposite extreme, the voices of reason and calm discredited.

“As Yeats foresaw, ‘Things fall apart. The center cannot hold,’” he warned. “None of us has the right to suppose it cannot happen here.”

Many knew by heart the next lines of the Irish poet’s “The Second Coming,” written months after World War I ended.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

The president and his speechwriters rarely wove poetry into their political rhetoric, but this verse was apt. Nixon really did fear anarchy in America. The American people truly were weary of the blood-dimmed tide. And the four-star generals genuinely feared Nixon would fall apart in the face of the growing opposition to the war.

“The subject of U.S. casualties is being thrown at me at every juncture: in the press, by the Secretary of Defense, at the White House and on the Hill,” General Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote to General Abrams in Saigon on April 3. “I am concerned that decisions could be made in response to strong pressure inside and on the administration to seek a settlement of the war.” Both men had been commanders in World War II under General Eisenhower, who had died the week before, on March 28. Like Ike, they wanted to fight and win. But these were men who had won their stars commanding soldiers in a war of unconditional surrender; their tanks and their artillery and above all their thinking about how to fight a war were rusty. America’s generals were confounded by Asian guerrillas. They did not trust Nixon to lead them to victory. The mistrust was mutual.

*   *   *

The president led a National Security Council meeting the week of Eisenhower’s death, seeking a way to end the American role in the war before the year was over. The CIA’s director, Richard Helms, gave his unvarnished analysis. Two weeks of nonstop B-52 bombing in Cambodia had had no visible impact on North Vietnam’s military capabilities. The leaders of South Vietnam were not leading their own soldiers. It was pointless to send more American troops into battle without a strategy.

“We need a plan,” the president said. “We are working against a time clock. We are talking six to eight months.”

“We must get a sense of urgency in the training of the South Vietnamese,” Nixon continued. “How do we de-Americanize this thing?” De-Americanize meant using Asians to fight Asians while pulling out Americans, changing the color of the anticommunist corpses on the battlefield.

Secretary of Defense Laird thought it was the wrong word, too negative. He said, “What we need is a term—
Vietnamizing
—to put the emphasis on the right issue.” Thus began Vietnamization, a spur-of-the-moment strategy to turn a hopeless war over to our hapless allies.

“We should agree to total withdrawal of U.S. forces but include very strong conditions which we know may not be met,” Nixon said. “There is no doubt that U.S. forces will be in Vietnam for some time, something like a large military assistance group, but our public posture must be another thing.”

Our public posture must be another thing
—that was classic Nixon, the trickster with two faces, as Martin Luther King Jr. had seen him. If sincere, a genius; if not, dangerous.

He would slowly pull American troops out of the Vietnam War—and then try to proclaim peace. As he drew down American forces, he would train and equip the army of South Vietnam. He would send Kissinger in secret to negotiate with Hanoi for a cease-fire. But if that strategy failed, the Communists could be victorious. In the end, “Vietnamization” could doom South Vietnam. And if it failed and Saigon fell, the long war would end in the death of one nation and the disgrace of another.

On April 3, the same day that General Wheeler put his worries about an American withdrawal into words, Kissinger wrote to Nixon: “We must convince the American public that we are eager to settle the war, and Hanoi that we are not so anxious that it can afford to outwait us.”

“Our best course would be a bold move of trying to settle everything at once,” Kissinger proposed. He would sit down in secret with the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, and say that a settlement in Vietnam and a pact on limiting the superpowers’ nuclear arsenals were inextricably linked. He was going to try to enlist the Soviet Union, Hanoi’s most powerful ally, as a partner for peace in Vietnam. If this tactic succeeded, it could alter the course of the Cold War. Kissinger now understood the president’s passion for the big play, the grand bargain.

He put this in writing to Ambassador Dobrynin.

The President has reviewed the Vietnam situation carefully. He will not be the first American President to lose a war, and he is not prepared to give in to public pressures which would have that practical consequence. The President has therefore decided that he will make one more effort to achieve a reasonable settlement.…

U.S.-Soviet relations are therefore at a crossroads. The President is eager to move into an era of conciliation with the Soviet Union on a broad front. As a sign of this, he is willing to send a high-level delegation to Moscow to agree with the Soviet Union on principles of strategic arms limitations. He is also willing to consider other meetings at even higher levels.

The President will give this effort in Moscow six weeks to succeed.

Kissinger concluded that this was “the only way to end the war quickly and the best way to conclude it honorably.” But he warned Nixon it would work only if the president were prepared “to take tough escalatory steps if Moscow rejects the overture.”