One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon

by Tim Weiner

  Yet three men, and only three, formed the core of Nixon’s inner circle. Two went to prison for crimes committed on the president’s behalf. The third won both the Nobel Peace Prize and condemnation as a war criminal.

  * * *

  Harry Robbins Haldeman had been at Nixon’s side as an advance man in the 1960 presidential campaign; he had managed the disastrous 1962 California race; he had remained loyal throughout Nixon’s years of exile. His devotion to the president was superhuman. He worked hundred-hour weeks. He served for 1,561 days as White House chief of staff; in that time, he was physically apart from Nixon for fewer than thirty of those days. Nixon spent more time with Haldeman than with his own wife. No president, and no king, ever had a more devoted servant.

  Haldeman knew his man in intimate detail. He went on full alert when Nixon flagged, stayed sharp when Nixon had had one drink too many, executed the president’s orders when Nixon lacked courage, and scuttled them when they lacked wisdom. Haldeman handled everything. He had a martial air of discipline and order that fitted his military brush cut and his stern and steely gaze. You had to go through him to get to the president. His loyalty was ironclad. But when Nixon let him go, firing him as the Watergate flood tides rose, Haldeman recalled, it was the first time the two men ever shook hands.

  John Newton Mitchell had no experience in law enforcement when he became attorney general of the United States. But he had shown total discipline as Nixon’s campaign manager. From their first meeting at Nixon’s New York law firm, where Mitchell was a named partner, he became fiercely devoted to the man and his ambitions. He would do anything the president asked.

  Mitchell was the unsmiling face of law and order in America, the national police chief. He became a symbol of the power of the government to suppress dissent. He believed that police and federal agents should be able to enter the homes of suspects without warning—“no-knock” laws, as they were known. He pushed for warrantless wiretaps, preventive detention, and other tactics associated with police states. In his most famous political pronouncement (a prophecy fulfilled), he predicted, “This country is going so far right you won’t even recognize it.”

  Nixon wanted Mitchell to strike fear in liberals and leftists with subpoenas and indictments brought by federal prosecutors and grand juries at the command of the Justice Department. Like President Woodrow Wilson during World War I, Nixon sought to use conspiracy and sedition laws against his most vocal political opponents in the name of national security. One of Nixon’s first orders to Attorney General Mitchell was to indict the best-known leaders of the antiwar and Black Power movements. They were tried on political charges that juries found unconvincing.

  To crush Nixon’s left-wing enemies, Mitchell needed the investigative powers of J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI since 1924. The Bureau was in theory subordinate to Mitchell. But “Attorneys General seldom directed Mr. Hoover,” Nixon said. “It was difficult even for Presidents.” His increasing inability to command and control Hoover created political frictions fundamental to the disasters that befell his presidency. Mitchell was a lawyer whose specialty was municipal bonds, not covert action. But Nixon trusted him deeply in the realm of secret operations; Mitchell had displayed utter discretion in the sabotage of the Paris peace talks. The president placed him on the National Security Council, which met in the cloistered basement office that served as the White House Situation Room. The membership of the NSC and its six subcouncils included the director of central intelligence, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the deputy secretary of defense, and the undersecretary of state.

  But they all would have one chairman: the national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. And Nixon wanted Mitchell to keep an eye on him, for he hardly knew Kissinger when he hired him.

  Kissinger had met Nixon once, at a Christmas party in 1967; small talk with strangers was not Nixon’s strong suit. But Kissinger had shown a talent for conspiracy in the crucial moment of the 1968 campaign. A politically ambitious Harvard professor, Kissinger was seeking high office in the next administration no matter who won. He was dealing with both parties, trading in the hardest political currency: secret information. He had two contacts among the American delegation at the Paris peace talks; they never dreamed that Kissinger would back-channel their conversations to Republican headquarters. On October 9, 1968, Kissinger called Mitchell with a report that LBJ would stop the bombing of North Vietnam and offer a cease-fire to the Communists. Kissinger’s tip proved accurate; with that inside information, Nixon began to plan his counterstrategy to lure South Vietnam away from the peace talks.

  Nixon decided to take Kissinger on board as national security adviser after a three-hour meeting at the president-elect’s Pierre Hotel command post in December 1968. “I had a strong intuition about Henry Kissinger,” Nixon wrote ten years later. “The combination was unlikely—the grocer’s son from Whittier and the refugee from Hitler’s Germany.” But Nixon recognized something of a kindred spirit.

  Nixon was the grand strategist, Kissinger the great tactician, and this working relationship between two strangers grew quickly and powerfully. Together they set out to destroy and re-create the foreign policy architecture of the United States, to break and remake the Pentagon and the State Department and the CIA, to bend and reshape the instruments of American power at their will. These were not figures of speech for Nixon and Kissinger, but the daily reality in their relationship.

  Both men had clandestine minds. Both had a brittle brilliance. Both were talented liars; both saw that talent as crucial to diplomacy and politics. Both shared a sense that history was a tragedy.

  Both wanted to change the world they had inherited from Presidents Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, and Truman. Nixon and Kissinger ripped out the wiring mechanisms of power, destroyed structures that had served those four presidents since World War II, and created a system that placed the powers of statecraft in their hands and theirs alone. They overhauled the National Security Council system and usurped the powers of State and the Pentagon. Every important decision, and every document, on the foreign policy of the United States would henceforth flow to Kissinger as the NSC chairman. All power and all decisions regarding war, foreign policy, diplomacy, and covert operations would be concentrated in his hands.*

  Then Kissinger would consult the president on the crises of the moment. Kissinger’s aides joked that world-shaking decisions would go to Nixon with three options: (1) unconditional surrender, (2) nuclear war, or (3) Kissinger’s recommendation. Nixon invariably chose option three. The intent was to immensely increase the power of the president to make life-and-death decisions in secret.

  Nixon presented this radical reorganization over cocktails in Key Biscayne, Florida, on December 28, 1968, to the men he had chosen to serve as the secretary of state, William Rogers, and the secretary of defense, Melvin Laird.

  Bill Rogers, who had advised Nixon since the first Eisenhower campaign in 1952, and who had served Ike as attorney general, was a genial man and an honest broker, but not a diplomat or a strategist. Mel Laird, a Republican congressman since 1953, was equally affable, and he knew the intricacies and intrigues of Washington politics, but he was no commander. Nixon selected them for their weaknesses, not their strengths. Neither man could conceive what lay ahead in the world of political warfare that Nixon and Kissinger would create. The president would seek to make them figureheads, in charge of little beyond the edges of their desks.

  “It was a bizarre way to run a government. I think we all knew it was bizarre. But this is how Nixon wanted it,” said Peter Rodman, Kissinger’s Soviet specialist at the NSC and a key Rumsfeld aide at the Pentagon after 9/11. “Nixon decided that he would rather do these things himself. He had Henry there to do it. Henry and he had an ideological affinity. They both looked at the world in the same way.”

  Nixon knew what he was doing: striving for greatness. And greatness could be won only on a global scale, by making war and peace with honor. He cared about
law and order, he cared deeply about his own reelection, but above all he cared about the war. The war touched everything, at home and abroad, and if it went on, it would break him as it had broken Lyndon Johnson. He was so bold as to predict he could make peace in a matter of months. “There was an absolute conviction on Nixon’s part that, by the fall of 1969, he would have Vietnam settled,” Haldeman said.

  To do so, he would have to concentrate all the powers of government in his hands.

  Nixon was the first president in one hundred twenty years who confronted a Congress controlled by his political opponents. Democrats held the Senate 57–43 and the House 243–192. Thus, he decided, when it came to the conduct of the war, he would have to circumvent Congress.

  Since the start of the Eisenhower era, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren had expanded civil liberties and curtailed police powers. So Nixon would have to find ways to bend or break the law to fight his enemies at home—or stack the court with conservatives. He was the only Republican president, save Eisenhower, since 1933. Thus, he believed, the State Department, the CIA, and even the Pentagon were riddled with a generation of liberals and leftists appointed by Democrats. These centers of power would have to be purged of enemies and replenished with allies.

  Nixon thought that a permanent government, the Establishment—led by eastern elitists and Ivy League intellectuals, Kennedy men and Johnson loyalists—would fight him on every front. He foresaw their strategy. The liberals, working with their allies in Washington, would use the law to tie his hands in Vietnam. The leftists, working with like-minded friends at think tanks and universities, would organize massive demonstrations against the war. Increasingly frustrated with the powers of the Justice Department and the FBI to investigate and indict his enemies, Nixon soon conceived and executed eavesdropping and espionage operations that would be run by his most trusted aides at the White House.

  * * *

  Each of the three men in Nixon’s innermost circle had a highly ambitious aide who gained great power through proximity to the president. Like their patrons, two of these three protégés would go to prison.

  Kissinger’s right-hand man was Alexander M. Haig, his military assistant at the National Security Council. Haig rose in rank from colonel to four-star general under Nixon without leading troops in combat. The White House was his battleground. He won his stars through tireless service; if a light burned in an office at 3:00 a.m., it was likely Haig’s. By turns charming and mercurial, but consistently a martinet, Haig worshipped Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the vainglorious commander relieved for insubordination by President Truman during the Korean War. In 2007, Haig called him “the greatest military man I had ever met.” Like his hero, Haig was a rarity in American history: a political general.

  He had a unique way with words, a never-ending battle between politics and the English language. A classic example: “I’ll have to caveat my response, Senator.” Caveat is Latin for “let him beware.” In English, it is a noun meaning “warning.” In Haigspeak, it signaled he was saying something that might or might not be true.

  Mitchell’s contribution to the White House staff was another man who had his struggles with the truth: John Wesley Dean III, a thirty-one-year-old Justice Department lawyer whom the attorney general had relied on to conduct background briefings for reporters. Dean served as Nixon’s legal counsel and liaison with federal law enforcers. His first assignment from Nixon was to order an IRS tax audit against Scanlan’s, a short-lived satirical monthly magazine that had published a patently absurd article claiming that Vice President Agnew had a secret plan to repeal the Bill of Rights. Using the IRS as a political weapon was at best unethical, arguably a felony. Dean got it done. “I had clearly crossed the line for the first time, and it had been very easy to do,” he said in 2006. “With hindsight, I can see that it was an abuse of presidential power.”

  Dean had replaced John D. Ehrlichman as the White House legal counsel; Ehrlichman was Haldeman’s indispensable man. The two invariably were twinned in the eyes of the public and the press for their rhyming names, their unsmiling demeanors, their Teutonic bearing. But their roles and their characters were utterly different. Haldeman had far more clout as the White House chief of staff. Ehrlichman was not his counterpart in rank or influence. But they relied on each other to make the machinery of the White House hum.

  They had been close friends for more than twenty years, since their days as undergraduates at UCLA after World War II. Haldeman had recruited Ehrlichman as an advance man for Nixon’s 1960 presidential campaign, the thankless but vital role of planning and setting up rallies and speeches so a candidate’s days and nights run without disasters.

  Nixon himself had asked Ehrlichman to coordinate the advance work for 1968. Ehrlichman agreed—on one condition. He was “convinced that Nixon’s drinking could cost him any chance of a return to public life.” He had seen Nixon drunk during the 1960 and 1962 campaigns and the 1964 Republican convention, and he made him take the pledge: “If he wanted me to work for him he would lay off the booze.”

  Ehrlichman became the president’s chief adviser on domestic policy, handling the problems the president found the least pressing, such as health care and welfare. His powers were thus limited during Nixon’s first years in office by the president’s lack of interest in the lives of the poor and the dispossessed. But he became essential in Nixon’s campaign for reelection; he called himself the president’s “house detective” in matters of political intrigue. The record reflects that Ehrlichman had daily access to Nixon, a privilege shared only by Kissinger and Haldeman; he met with the president on 1,005 occasions over the course of five years and three months. So he knew Nixon’s mind as well as anyone. And he saw its dark side with clarity.

  “From the first time he ran for office, as a young Congressman, he was engaged in combat,” Ehrlichman said late in his life. “There were them and there was us; and he never ever saw it any differently. He was surrounded by enemies.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “He will let them know who is boss around here”

  NIXON AGONIZED daily over how to use diplomacy and deception, bombast and bombs, in Vietnam. Grasping every detail of his war strategy was essential “to understand the situation, so he could make what he believed—in his heart—to be the right decision, because these were horrible decisions,” Haldeman said. Each military maneuver was a search for a way to end the nightmare of Vietnam, an act of war intended to make peace. Each sought to change the tragic course of history. Each led to death and destruction.

  “Go for the big play,” Nixon always said, as if war were a football game. The big play was Nixon’s plan for a way out of Vietnam—“to the extent he had a plan,” said Winston Lord, Nixon’s ranking National Security Council staffer, who became ambassador to China in 1985. Lord said that Nixon believed from the start that “he could use the Russians and maybe the Chinese to pressure Hanoi, to bring the war to an end by trying to improve relations with them, and cornering Vietnam in that way.”

  Nixon would use the art of diplomacy with Moscow and Beijing, and the art of war in Indochina, in a radically new way to create a rapprochement between the most powerful Communists on earth and the United States. The grand bargain would work if Nixon could persuade the leaders of China and Russia to help pursue peace in Vietnam.

  This audacious stratagem began to take shape before the inauguration. The first moves were encoded messages woven into Nixon’s inaugural address.

  On January 2, 1969, after checking with J. Edgar Hoover, Kissinger met with Boris Sedov, officially counselor at the Soviet embassy in Washington but better known as a KGB spy. “Sedov said that the Soviet Union was very interested that the inaugural speech contain some reference to open channels of communication to Moscow,” Kissinger told Nixon. “I said that all this would be easier if Moscow showed some cooperativeness on Vietnam.” The KGB’s proposal to ghostwrite a passage of the inaugural address gave Nixon the inspiration to send a
n equally subtle message to China. In 1967, Nixon had written an article for Foreign Affairs that touched on America’s need to establish political and diplomatic relations with China. “There is no place on this planet for a billion of its potentially able people to live in angry isolation,” he wrote.

  Nixon’s inaugural directly addressed Moscow with the words suggested by the spy Sedov: “Our lines of communication will be open.” Then, aiming his words at Chairman Mao Tse-tung, Nixon repeated his “angry isolation” lines from Foreign Affairs. Mao noticed: on his orders, the Beijing People’s Daily took the unprecedented step of printing the complete translated text of Nixon’s inaugural on its front page. Nixon had told Kissinger about sending signals to Mao. Haig recounted, “In the second week of the administration, Henry came back from the Oval Office and said to me, ‘Al, this madman wants to normalize our relations with China.’ And he laughed. And I said, ‘Oh, my God.’” It seemed inconceivable. And yet, when Nixon began a more direct approach to China later that year, he would find out that he was pushing on an open door.

  But how to get the attention of the Soviets, and how to persuade them to help pursue peace in Vietnam? At his first National Security Council meeting, on January 25, 1969, Nixon suggested a carrot: talks on a nuclear weapons treaty. “This will be a great symbol,” he announced. Kissinger proposed a big stick: the threat of a nuclear attack.

  Kissinger had made his name with a 1957 treatise titled Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, a book often cited, if rarely read, by the high priests of Pentagon war planning. Its thesis was that nuclear weapons had a political and diplomatic utility: to coerce enemies. The challenge was translating their immense military power into coherent foreign policy. Now he put his theories into practice.