The Arrogance of Power

by Anthony Summers

  The “boy scouts” failed to please. Four months into the presidency Nixon issued an edict that was patently impractical: There was to be no more White House contact with the New York Times—one of whose editorials had annoyed him—the Washington Post—had broken news of an upcoming meeting he had hoped to announce himself—or with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which had run an inside account of the administration’s problems.

  A few weeks later, when U.S. astronauts returned from the first moon landing, Nixon told the British prime minister that, should rocks they brought back turn out to be laden with lethal germs, he would dole them out as presents to journalists.

  At first it seemed that the new president might be making an effort to improve conditions for the press. On Nixon’s personal initiative the old and filthy White House press room was replaced with grander quarters. More than half a million dollars were spent on a briefing room and lounge in the style of an English club, with plush chesterfield sofas and stylish prints on the walls. The room had been moved, however, to a new location—one that prevented reporters from observing the movements of key personalities. “You cannot see who is coming and going to see the President,” Hugh Sidey observed. “The whole purpose is to cut the press off from the flow of visitors to the White House.”

  Nixon held no televised press conferences in his first eight months as president and only thirty-one in his first four years. Kennedy had held more than twice as many in less than three years, and Johnson four times as many in his five.

  Nixon claimed to be indifferent to what the press said about him. It was he, however, who put Agnew up to making his infamous tirade against television’s “small band of network commentators and self-appointed analysts.” The commentators’ offense in question was “instant analysis,” deemed impertinent criticism, of a Nixon speech on Vietnam.

  Covering the White House by talking to its staff, Sidey decided, was pointless. “It’s a non-news operation, a laborious waste of time. . . . This crowd came in like an occupying army. They took over the White House like a stockade. . . . They have no sense that the government doesn’t belong to them, that it’s something they’re holding in trust for the people.”

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  “Without the Vietnam War,” Haldeman came to think, “there would have been no Watergate. Without a Vietnam War, Richard Nixon might have had the most successful presidency since Harry Truman’s. . . . But the Vietnam War destroyed Nixon. . . .”

  On his first morning at the White House, while shaving, Nixon remembered a safe Johnson had shown him after the election, a small security box concealed in the bedroom closet. It turned out to contain only a single document, the most recent tally of U.S. dead and wounded in Vietnam. Nixon perused the figures, then returned the folder to the safe “until the war was over.”

  His campaign promises of bringing a swift end to the war were now a thing of the past. “Who knows?” Nixon said airily to Theodore White within weeks of the election. “One year, two years, six months? I can’t put any time limit.” “Peace cannot be achieved overnight,” he told the nation in May, 1969, “cannot be settled at a single stroke.”

  As indeed it would not be. The North Vietnamese kept up their attacks. The South’s President Thieu, believing Nixon to be in his debt for having blocked the Democratic peace initiative on the eve of the election, came away uneasy from their first meeting of the presidency. Asked to agree to the withdrawal of twenty-five thousand American troops, he worried that it might be the start of a full-scale pullout. Nixon insisted that the pullout was only “symbolic,” a “public opinion ploy,” to help him placate domestic opponents of the war. “Strong support,” he promised, “would continue for years.”

  Nixon withheld from Thieu the fact that Kissinger was about to open secret talks with the North. Not that it made any difference. Kissinger was to liken dealing with the two Vietnams to being an animal trainer cracking a whip to get two obstinate tigers to sit on stools. “When one is in place, the other jumps off.”

  Nixon did brief Thieu on Vietnamization, the push to make South Vietnam capable of surviving on its own. The French colonialists had used the same term, and critics claimed that the policy was a fallback: using Vietnamese to fight Vietnamese. Others argued that it was a maneuver not to accelerate peace but to buy time to keep the war going. Meanwhile, behind the meetings and the public rhetoric, another clandestine scenario was developing.

  Within two months of becoming president, Nixon approved a massive B- 52 bombing strike, code-named Breakfast, on an area around and beyond Vietnam’s border with Cambodia. Breakfast was to be followed by Lunch, Dessert, Snack, Supper, and Dinner, an extended series of strikes over a period of fourteen months, under the umbrella designation Menu. Menu’s purpose was to pulverize enemy concentrations and arms dumps near the frontier, in areas from which Communist forces had previously launched attacks with impunity.

  Intrinsic to Menu, though, was a problem. Cambodia was a neutral country, and the bombing campaign marked a significant expansion of the war. On Nixon’s personal instructions, therefore, it was carried out under conditions of extraordinary secrecy. A few press leaks aside, the truth about Menu would not emerge for nearly five years. When it did, at the height of Watergate, outraged critics would accuse the president of having exceeded his constitutional powers.

  One congressman, Robert Drinan, was to characterize the bombing as “presidential conduct more shocking and more unbelievable than the conduct of any president in any war in all of American history.” Nixon would retort that the strikes had had the effect of saving the lives of U.S. soldiers and hastening the peace settlement. Twelve members of the House Judiciary Committee, on the other hand, would deem them a “deception of Congress and the American public,” serious enough to add to the articles of impeachment.

  While that proposal was ultimately voted down, the fact remained that Nixon had publicly lied. In a solemn speech during the election campaign he had spoken of the people’s “right to know,” of a president’s duty to “lay out all the facts.” “Only through an open, candid dialogue with the people,” he had declared, “can a President maintain his trust and leadership.”

  During the period of the bombing he had reassured the nation that he was presenting the facts on the war “with complete honesty.” In another speech, referring directly to the Cambodian border area, he said the United States had never “moved against these sanctuaries because we did not wish to violate the territory of a neutral nation.” This assertion was made after some three thousand B-52 sorties had been flown and a hundred thousand tons of high explosives had been dropped.

  Nixon’s mood, as much as tactical planning, was a factor in the bombing. He ordered the attacks initially while aboard Air Force One, en route to Europe. He then twice rescinded the order, on Kissinger’s advice, before finally giving the go-ahead. He ordered a second phase of the bombing, in Kissinger’s view, “because of an event far away . . . in North Korea. . . . Nixon looked for some other place to demonstrate his mettle. There was nothing he feared more than to appear weak. . . .”

  The faraway event in question was the shooting down of a U.S. spy plane by a North Korean jet fighter, on April 14, 1969. All thirty-one American crewmen on board were killed. According to a Haldeman diary entry, Nixon at first wanted a “strong reaction.” When aides advised prudence, he held back, “suppressing his instinct for a jugular response,” as Kissinger put it. A few days later, however, he ordered the Lunch bombing of the Cambodian border.

  Nixon’s private language about Vietnam remained bellicose. Behind their back, he reportedly referred to anyone he thought dovish as “sweet-ass.” He used extreme verbal threats to illustrate how he would make North Vietnam submit. “I’ll turn Right so goddamn hard it’ll make your head spin,” he told Kissinger in a recorded phone call. “We’ll bomb the bastards off the Earth.”

  Nixon professed shock when, in late 1969, the horrific story of the worst atrocity in modern U.S. military h
istory broke in the press. The previous year, it emerged, troops of the Eleventh Light Infantry Brigade of the Americal Division had slaughtered at least 350 unarmed Vietnamese civilians. American soldiers and junior officers had shot and bayoneted old men, women, and children, even babies. Some of the women had been beaten and raped before being killed. All dwellings had been burned to the ground, the carcasses of the villagers’ cattle tossed into wells to poison the water.4 The massacre, in and around the village of My Lai, had been carried out without provocation. There had been much enemy activity in the area, but the brigade had met no hostile fire that day.

  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.5 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.6 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.7

  “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.8

  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.