The Arrogance of Power (58 page)

Nixon had his press spokesman declare the mass murder “abhorrent to the conscience,” promising that it would be “dealt with in accordance with the
strict rules of military justice.” Behind the scenes he ordered the army to spy on the young veteran who had exposed the atrocity by writing to Nixon and other politicians about it. The president griped to an aide about the negative publicity for hours, saying, “It's those dirty, rotten Jews from New York who are behind it.”

While twenty-five soldiers were eventually charged with involvement in the attack, the focus of attention was Lieutenant William Calley, the twenty-four-year-old platoon leader who admitted to having played a leading role. Calley was charged with the deaths of 109 civilians and was convicted of the premeditated murder of 22. He told the judge he thought it had been “no big deal.”

When Calley was sentenced to life imprisonment, Nixon ordered that he be released pending an appeal and said he would personally review the case before any sentence was carried out. Calley was eventually confined for only three years, spent mostly in a comfortable apartment at Fort Benning, Georgia, with permission to receive visits from a girlfriend. A record entitled “The Battle Hymn of Lieutenant Calley,” sung to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” proved immensely popular. A publisher paid the soldier a hundred thousand dollars for his life story.

The military prosecutor in the case, Captain Aubrey Daniel, sent Nixon a four-page letter protesting his intervention. The president's action, the prosecutor wrote, had enhanced Calley's image as “a national hero” and “damaged the military judicial system.” The White House declined to comment.
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In his memoirs, Nixon defended his decision on the ground that he had acted on the advice of others.

Within weeks of the first My Lai story appearing in the press, Nixon was presented with a budget proposal to cut spending on the provisional reconnaissance units, small American-led teams that targeted the Viet Cong infrastructure. Their activity is better remembered today as the Phoenix program, under which between twenty and forty thousand Vietnamese were killed.
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National Security Council aide Laurence Lynn recalled the president's reaction to the proposed reduction to the Phoenix funding. “Nixon went into his reverie,” Lynn said, “that strange reverie. It may have lasted for thirty seconds. ‘No,' Nixon said. ‘We've got to have more of this. Assassinations. Killings. That's what they're doing [the other side].' ” The allocation for Phoenix was maintained.

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According to a report never officially investigated, the U.S. military in Saigon was told in early 1969 that there was “exceptional interest” at the “highest levels of government” in a plan to send a U.S.-trained team to assassinate Cambodia's head of state, Prince Sihanouk. The prince, whose ambiguous diplomatic position had kept Cambodia out of the Southeast Asia conflict, was ousted, though not killed, the following year.
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“Highest level,” of course, is a time-honored code for a national leader or his most senior associates. The possibility that Nixon may have been involved in plotting against the Cambodian head of state again raises the question of his attitude to political assassination, probed earlier in connection with the Castro murder plots. It demands a brief diversion from Southeast Asia to an event that was to take place on the other side of the Pacific.

In the fall of 1970 democratic elections had brought the Marxist Salvador Allende to power in Chile. He would remain in office for three years, then die violently in a military coup. That Nixon ordered the CIA to oppose and obstruct Allende is a matter of historical record, but exactly what actions he authorized and whether the United States was implicated in Allende's death are issues that remain unresolved.

Nixon's personal effort to thwart the Chilean president began at the urging of his old supporter Donald Kendall, the head of PepsiCo and a key member of a business group known as the Council on Latin America. It was the day after meeting with Kendall and a Chilean associate, a newspaper magnate, that Nixon ordered CIA director Helms to act against Allende.

Trying to reason with Nixon on Chile, Helms recalled in 1999, was “like talking into a gale.” One of the director's senior colleagues characterized the president's mood as “furious.” Another called his instructions “aberrational and hysterical.” What exactly did Nixon order, then or at a future date?

Five years later, according to verbatim notes of a conversation with President Ford, Kissinger said that William Colby, by then heading the CIA, was “blackmailing me on the assassination stories. Nixon and I asked Helms to look into the possibilities of a coup in Chile in 1970. Helms said it wouldn't work. . . .” The next two lines of Kissinger's remarks remain censored.

All sources agree that Nixon's ukase triggered a dual approach toward Allende. Track I authorized political maneuvering and propaganda designed to prevent Allende's election from being confirmed by the Chilean Congress. Track II, which was kept top secret, involved using the CIA to provoke and assist a military coup that would oust Allende.

Nixon “wanted something done,” Helms was to tell the Senate Intelligence Committee, “and he didn't much care how. . . . This was a pretty all-inclusive order. . . .” Asked by a senator if assassination was included, Helms replied, “Well, not in my mind. . . .”

In his written response to the committee's questions after his resignation, Nixon distanced himself from any coup planning. Eleven times he claimed not to remember key points. He offered a brief, vague account of the affair in his memoirs, not stating clearly whether Track II was ever stopped or not.
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Allende's overthrow and death in 1973 would follow an assault on the president's palace by forces under the command of General Augusto Pinochet. United States senators were told by a State Department official days later that the Nixon White House had had advance warning of the coup but decided on a “hands off” policy.

Recently released documents establish that the administration was immediately sympathetic to the new regime, and offered economic assistance. Nixon received its first ambassador only two months after the coup, by which time Washington well knew that Pinochet's forces had begun “severe repression.” This was the reign of terror, including summary executions and torture, that a quarter century later would lead to an international effort to put the general on trial.

Nixon dealt with Allende's death in his memoirs in two lines, saying merely that “according to conflicting reports,” Chile's leader “was either killed or committed suicide during the coup.” The reports do indeed conflict. Pinochet's people alleged that Allende “shot himself once in the head with an automatic weapon that was a gift from Premier Fidel Castro of Cuba. . . .” The president's widow, however, said there were also “several bullet wounds” to the stomach, and she believed he had been “murdered.”

Vague reports have long circulated of American involvement on the day of the coup, of a U.S. electronic intelligence airplane relaying communications for the plotters, of U.S. naval ships off the Chilean coast, of liaison during the coup planning between a Chilean admiral and a Marine Corps officer. The marine, Colonel Patrick Ryan, denied this. His own report on the coup, however, released in 1998, is a triumphalist account of a “close to perfect” operation by Pinochet's soldiers, among whom he counted one senior friend. The report ends in a paean of praise for the new regime.

The author here contributes two items of related information. A former CIA officer and undercover agent, David Morales, whose career background was established during a congressional probe, reportedly confided after he had retired that “he was in the palace when Allende was killed.” Morales, described by a former House Assassinations Committee investigator as a “hit man for the CIA,” had worked closely with David Phillips, the CIA officer assigned to run the Nixon anti-Allende project at its inception.

Phillips was also head of the CIA's Western Hemisphere Division, which supervised operations in Chile at the time of Allende's overthrow. Later, as a result of his congressional testimony on another matter, he became a controversial figure. Two chief counsel doubted the truth of his testimony, and staffers wanted him charged with perjury. His specialty, during his rise in the CIA, had been black propaganda and disinformation.

Phillips asserted in his memoirs that the Track II effort on Chile had been closed down long before Allende's death. In a public letter to the Chilean president's widow, he stated that accusations of CIA involvement in the death were “untrue and the evidence tainted.” Whatever the truth of that claim, the former Western Hemisphere chief admitted in a previously unpublished interview that the full truth about Chile had yet to be told. His comments about Nixon's role were startling. “The Senate Intelligence Committee left an imperfect record,” Phillips said. “There was no question . . . to those of us in the
trenches that the Nixon administration wanted a violent coup, since all previous efforts—the elections—had gone bad. . . . This meant Allende's death by supportive Chilean military officers.

“There was no doubt they would kill him in any coup attempt. There was never a time then in which we were not in very friendly contact with officers who wanted to assassinate him. . . . With the pressure on Helms from Nixon and Kissinger, there was no doubt that we were to give the green light to whoever in the military could carry out such a coup. . . . They wanted Allende removed and were fully aware that would entail his murder. . . . The people who would do it would not take him alive. They probably would not have taken him alive even if we had asked for that, which we did not.

“And the National Security Council knew that. . . . There was no squeamishness in Richard Nixon on that score.”

As reported earlier, in the account of the Castro assassination plots, Nixon told the Senate Intelligence Committee—on oath—that assassination of a foreign leader was “an act I never had cause to consider.”

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Chile, though the subject of prolonged plotting, was a sideshow compared with Vietnam, which remained the nation's agony and the president's preoccupation. Haldeman, who kept a scribbled record of every meeting with Nixon, made this note in 1969:

However strong his resolve, “the Man,” as aides sometimes referred to the president, found his military and diplomatic efforts constantly frustrated. Secret contacts with the North Vietnamese seemed to lead nowhere. Attempts to negotiate through the Soviets, who were supplying Hanoi with arms, did not bring a breakthrough, nor did a deliberate leak, designed to make the enemy believe Nixon was considering invading the North. In his memoirs Nixon pinned the blame for the impasse on those known in the Oval Office as “the bad guys,” the domestic opponents of the war.

In the fall of the first year two massive demonstrations were held in Washington. During the first, in October 1969, a quarter of a million people took to the streets. “Don't get rattled—don't waver—don't react,” Nixon scribbled in a note to himself.
Time
magazine reported that the president seemed “unconcerned and aloof from it all.”

His public posture notwithstanding, Nixon was in fact consumed by both the war and the domestic opposition to it. With another huge demonstration
looming, he decided to address the nation. “Three of us worked on a first draft,” recalled National Security Council aide William Watts. “The line we took would have had us out of Vietnam in six months. Then, voom, it was gone. The speech he gave had nothing to do with what we wrote.”

Nixon made a note to himself to “talk softly and carry a big stick.” In early November, after days of writing and rewriting, on one occasion working through the night, he went on national television to ask for the support of “the great silent majority of my fellow Americans” to fulfill the U.S. commitment in Vietnam. The route to peace, Nixon insisted, was to continue fighting. He would not be deflected by the protesting “minority.”

In a White House staffed at the top by advertising men, Vietnam policy was largely conceived and measured in public relations terms. “The important thing” in rallying Republican support, Haldeman aide Larry Higby had said in a recent memo, was to get out a headline reading
WORLD WIDE ACCLAIM FOR NIXON
'
S PEACE INITIATIVES
. The big speech more than achieved that—or so, until very recently, it seemed.

“The White House switchboard,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs, “lighted up from the minute I left the air. . . . More than 50,000 telegrams and 30,000 letters poured in, and the percentage of critical messages among them was low. . . . For the first time, the Silent Majority had made itself heard.”

Nixon claimed he had barely slept the night he made the speech, so “keyed up” was he over what the reaction might be. Only in 1999 did Alexander Butterfield, the aide who handled the flow of paper in the Oval Office, reveal the truth: The positive reaction, he maintained, was “largely contrived. It was manufactured.”

Weeks before the address, Butterfield said, he was told “to make damn sure that the response was fantastic.” A high proportion of the telegrams and letters was generated in advance by contacting Republican state chairmen, the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the like. Future presidential candidate Ross Perot, then a billionaire businessman mustering support for Nixon's war policy, promised a trainload of mail and did not fall far short of his pledge.