The Arrogance of Power (52 page)

In the weeks preceding the election, Nixon postured as a candidate who put the issue of the war above partisan politics. “In the spirit of country above party,” he said before the bombing halt, the peace effort had his full support. “The pursuit of peace,” he told voters, “is too important for politics as usual.”
Pointing to Agnew, seated near him at a rally in Madison Square Garden, Nixon assured the nation that neither of them would make any remarks that might disrupt the negotiations. “Neither he nor I,” he told the crowd, “will destroy the chance of peace.”

Neither Nixon or Agnew of course did say anything publicly to derail the talks. It is what they did in secret that matters. It now seems clear that with John Mitchell, through one or more go-betweens, Nixon not only encouraged President Thieu to believe he would get a better deal from a Nixon administration but actually urged him to boycott the talks. They were apparently still doing so just three days before the election, when hopes for peace, boosted by Johnson's bombing halt announcement, sent Humphrey surging ahead in the polls.
¹⁶

Stephen Ambrose, professor of history at the University of New Orleans, has stated the charge succinctly. “In private,” he wrote, “Nixon made contact with President Thieu in an effort to scuttle the peace prospects.” Clark Clifford, who had replaced McNamara as secretary of defense, thought Nixon's action “probably decisive in convincing President Thieu to defy President Johnson.”
¹⁷

At the time, to dispel rumors about his role, Nixon sent word to Johnson through Senator George Smathers that there was “not any truth at all in this allegation.” In his memoirs he dealt with the accusation by leaving it out entirely.

The facts about the incident have emerged only gradually. Not until 1995 did researchers gain access to the “X” Envelope, a redacted collection of sensitive documents on the affair deposited at the Johnson Library, originally with the recommendation that it remain sealed for fifty years. Relevant FBI documents were released to the author only in 1999. With these documents, the first scholarly studies, and new interviews with a key protagonist, a fuller picture has emerged.
¹⁸

The key protagonist in the episode was Anna Chennault, the Chinese-born widow of the American World War II hero Claire Chennault.
¹⁹
By 1968, when she was forty-three, she was established as a wealthy Washington hostess, living in a new apartment block named Watergate. She was deeply involved in Southeast Asian affairs and had regular access to regional leaders like Taiwan's Chiang Kai-shek and the Philippines' Ferdinand Marcos. A 1966 letter examined by the author suggests that she may that year have had some contact with the CIA.
²⁰

Chennault had joined the Republican cause in 1960 and by 1968 had become vice-chairman of the Republican National Finance Committee and cochairman of Women for Nixon-Agnew. She and Nixon had first met in the early fifties, when he visited Taiwan as vice president. In the wilderness years, as Vietnam became a dominant American issue, they stayed in touch.
²¹
Chennault had contacts at the top levels of the Saigon government and tough views on how to deal with Hanoi. Her line, as surviving letters to Nixon show, was that an increase in bombing was the way to get the North to “bow down for peace.”

The intrigues of 1968 really began the previous year. While Chennault was traveling in Asia, she received a spate of telegrams asking her to visit Nixon in New York. Robert Hill, a Republican foreign policy specialist, met her at the airport and escorted her to Nixon's Fifth Avenue apartment. While Hill waited in another room, Nixon introduced her to John Mitchell.

Chennault agreed that day to provide Nixon with advice on Vietnam in the coming months, working through Hill and Texas Senator John Tower. “When we do things,” Nixon told her as the meeting ended, “it'll be better to keep it secret.” He seemed even then, Chennault recalled, “conspiratorial.”

In July the following year, as the election drew nearer, Chennault went to the Nixon apartment with South Vietnam's ambassador Bui Diem—a visit documented by both their diaries. A surviving internal staff memo addressed to “DC,” Nixon's campaign pseudonym, pointed out that it “would have to be absolute [
sic
] top secret.” “Should be,” Nixon replied in a scrawled notation, “but I don't see how—with the S.S. [Secret Service] If it can be [secret] RN would like to see. . . .”

Nixon had told Chennault he wanted to “end this war with victory,” a sentiment he now always repeated at the meeting with her and Bui Diem. “If I should be elected the next President,” Chennault recalled his telling Bui Diem, “you can rest assured I will have a meeting with your leader and find a solution to winning this war.” Nixon had met with Thieu in Saigon the previous year. Now, he told Thieu's ambassador that Chennault was to be “the only contact between myself and your government. If you have any message for me, please give it to Anna, and she will relay it to me, and I will do the same. . . .”

According to Chennault, she met more than once that year with President Thieu in Saigon. He complained about the pressure the Johnson administration was putting on him to attend peace talks and told her: “I would much prefer to have the peace talks after your elections.” He asked her to “convey this message to your candidate.” She did. From time to time President Thieu also sent her word through Ambassador Diem. He also used other messengers, including a colonel on his military staff, apparently because he did not entirely trust his own ambassador.
²²

In the weeks that followed Chennault had several more meetings with Nixon and Mitchell in New York. They told her to inform Saigon that were Nixon to become president, South Vietnam would get “a better deal.” “The message,” she told the author, “was relayed.”

Asked if Nixon and Mitchell were trying to cut a deal to help win the election, Chennault nodded. “They worked out this deal to win the campaign,” she said. “Power overpowers all reason.”

“It was all very, very confidential,” in Chennault's description. The air of intrigue was pervasive. At the July meeting Bui Diem remembered, Mitchell had been “silent, didn't say a word.” Chennault noted that he worried constantly about wiretapping and kept changing his private telephone number. Chennault meanwhile told Nixon she could always be reached through Robert
Hill, the party official who had arranged the first meeting, Rose Woods, or another prominent Republican, Patricia Hitt.

In the weeks before the election, with growing signs of an impending bombing halt and the acceptance of peace talks, Nixon publicly voiced support for President Johnson. Privately, he admitted years later, he seethed with resentment. Today any objective reading of the notes and minutes of Johnson's meetings that fall reveals a president sometimes too hesitant in going forward for the taste of his own aides but genuinely devoted to the cause of peace. Nixon, however, was convinced the peace initiative was at least in part a political ploy, designed to swing the election to Humphrey.

Chennault stoked this resentment, apparently flying to Kansas City to meet with Nixon on October 16, the very day that Johnson briefed Nixon and the other candidates on his Vietnam plans, urging discretion in their public statements.
²³
She bore with her a long written presentation that deplored the rumored bombing halt and recommended a long-term approach to the conflict. The same day Agnew received a briefing on the coming halt, originating with unnamed sources. Two days later Chennault saw the South Vietnamese ambassador again. A few days after that there was another meeting with Mitchell.

She and Mitchell were now in touch by phone almost daily. “Call me from a pay phone. Don't talk in your office,” he would urge her. When she joked about possible wiretaps, he was not amused. Mitchell's message, she said, was always the same: If peace talks were announced, it was vital to persuade President Thieu not to take part.

In the last week of October Thieu's ambassador, Bui Diem, sent two encrypted radio messages from Washington to Saigon. The first, he wrote in his memoirs, noted: “Many Republican friends have contacted me and encouraged us to stand firm. . . .” The second—again, this is Bui Diem's account—mentioned that he was “regularly in touch with the Nixon entourage.”

The former ambassador repeatedly told the author he would let him see the full text of those messages, but never produced them. His published version of the second cable, it seems, was almost certainly an exercise in damage limitation. The actual message was more troubling, according to the former State Department executive secretary, the late Benjamin Read.

Read's notes cite Saigon's ambassador as reporting that he had “explained discreetly to our partisan friends our firm attitude” and “plan to adhere to that position.” “The longer the impasse continues,” Bui Diem told Saigon, “the more we are favored,” and Johnson would “probably have difficulties in forcing our hand.” The ambassador also advised Saigon that if elected, Nixon would send an emissary to see President Thieu and consider visiting Saigon himself before the inauguration.

John Mitchell's concern about electronic surveillance was more justified than he knew. The National Security Agency was intercepting and deciphering South Vietnam's cable traffic—hence the State Department's access to the true text of the ambassador's message about “partisan friends.” The CIA
meanwhile was tracking the ambassador himself and had tried to install bugs in his office and living quarters.

In Saigon the agency had successfully placed a device in Thieu's own office at the presidential palace. The same week the intercepted embassy messages were sent, he was overhead saying: “Johnson and Humphrey will be replaced and then Nixon could change the U.S. position.”

President Johnson was subsequently briefed on both the embassy intercepts and the transmission from the bug in Thieu's office. But more was to come. In the dawn hours of October 29, after an all-night meeting at which he finally decided on a bombing halt, came appalling news: President Thieu was backing out, raising pretexts to avoid committing Saigon to the peace talks.

Fifteen minutes later the president informed his most senior advisers—the secretaries of state and defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the director of the CIA—of another development, something that could “rock the world.”

In addition to the South Vietnamese cable intercepts, Johnson now had fresh information from a human source about Nixon's “conniving”—Johnson's characterization—with the Thieu regime. From Alexander Sachs, an eminent Wall Street banker who had once counseled President Roosevelt, came word that Nixon was “trying to frustrate the President, by inciting Saigon to step up its demands.” He was “taking public positions intended . . . to block. They would incite Saigon to be difficult.”

“It all adds up,” President Johnson snapped to the assembled advisers. Through the grueling hours and days to come, amidst rising anger, the White House frantically tried to get Saigon back on board while simultaneously attempting to pin down precisely what the Nixon side was doing. Johnson ordered FBI wiretaps and physical surveillance of the South Vietnamese Embassy and a day later, after she had been seen entering the mission, surveillance of Anna Chennault.

On the evening of the thirty-first, during a conference call to the presidential candidates to brief them on the bombing halt, Johnson dropped a heavy hint that he was aware of the machinations to undermine his efforts. Nixon merely joined the opponents in promising the president his full support.

Behind the scenes, however, panic and pantomime gripped the Nixon camp. Mitchell went through the motions of interrogating campaign staffers—none of whom was in the know—asking if they had been “in touch with any embassies.” Then he “reassured” administration contacts that his people had not been talking to the South Vietnamese.

Chennault suddenly found she could no longer get through to Mitchell. Certain now of the wiretapping he had always feared, Nixon's closest aide was avoiding direct contact with her. That night, however, as she was finishing dinner at the Sheraton Park Hotel, Chennault was called to the phone.

It was Mitchell, tension in his voice, asking her to call back on a safer line. When she did, he picked up on the first ring. “Anna,” he said, “I'm speaking
on behalf of Mr. Nixon. It's very important that our Vietnamese friends understand our Republican position, and I hope you made that clear to them. . . . Do you think they really have decided not to go to Paris?”

Realizing that the administration was working around the clock to change Thieu's mind, Nixon's man wanted to make sure he remained firm in his refusal.
²⁴
Thieu duly obliged. On November 2, only three days before the election, he announced publicly that his country would not take part in peace talks under present conditions.

In the United States meanwhile Nixon found a devious way to insinuate that the bombing halt had been premature, designed purely as a ploy to help the Democrats win the election. He did so by getting a senior aide to make the accusation and then claiming the aide's views were at odds with his own. It was a barefaced lie; reporters on the campaign plane had actually seen Nixon briefing the aide who made the remarks.

As President Johnson grew angrier, his national security assistant, Walt Rostow, reminded him that there was still no really hard evidence that Nixon personally was involved in the chicanery with President Thieu. (The FBI agents watching Anna Chennault, for example, knew nothing of Mitchell's late-night call to her at the Sheraton Park. While they had seen her enter and leave the hotel and had trailed her home that night to the Watergate, they had no way of knowing about the compromising conversation held on secure phones.) So far as the public was concerned, that is how things have remained ever since: a very strong suspicion of perfidy but—Anna Chennault's statements aside—no conclusive proof.