One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon

by Tim Weiner

  “I very happily sat down and worked. I said that we should not look to the past, but look to the future. There were many things that we had in common. There were many issues that were of mutual value, and we should address them, and let’s get together. I gave the draft to Henry. He looked at it, gave his characteristic grunt, said nothing, turned around, and went back into the Presidential compartment.”

  Three days later, on August 1, Nixon met Yahya Khan, the president of Pakistan, a professional soldier who had been his army’s commander in chief. Nixon asked for his help in delivering the cable to China requesting a meeting at the highest levels. Yahya said he would convey the message personally to China’s prime minister, Zhou En-lai.

  This was Nixon’s first knock at the door to the Great Wall. As we now know, China was unlocking the door that same month. The heavens were in alignment.

  In 1969, Chairman Mao had tasked four senior military marshals to study China’s strategic policy. Throughout the spring and summer, Chinese and Soviet armies had been skirmishing. Moscow was debating whether to bomb China’s nuclear arms facilities. That August, Beijing faced a huge new deployment of Soviet forces massing at China’s border at Kazakhstan. At the very moment Nixon was seeking a secret American rapprochement with China, two of the marshals on Mao’s task force, Chen Yi and Ye Jianying, proposed playing “the card of the United States.” Marshal Chen specifically recommended high-level talks with Washington. Mao accepted their report.

  Nixon played the next card on the penultimate stop of his world tour: a meeting with the ruler of Romania, President Nicolae Ceauşescu. Huge crowds chanting, “Neek-zon! Neek-zon!” lined the streets of Bucharest to greet his motorcade. Nixon had a soft spot for the Communist dictator, because he believed Ceauşescu might serve as a mediator between the United States and China. “In 25 years, China will have a billion people,” Nixon told Ceauşescu on August 2. “One billion Chinese fenced in is a bomb about to explode,” he added, “a terribly explosive force that may destroy the peace of that time.” The Romanian agreed to tell his Chinese comrades that, as Nixon put it, the Americans wanted “to open communications channels with them, to establish relations.”

  Nixon also asked Ceauşescu to be a diplomatic broker between the United States and the Soviet Union, in part so Moscow could help him deal with Hanoi. “There is nothing more important to me than to end this war on a fair basis,” he said. “It could make possible U.S.-Chinese relations, and would help relations with the Soviet Union. All this is possible.”

  Nixon strongly suggested he would escalate the war if North Vietnam did not agree to a peace deal soon. The enemy’s leaders “continue to fight in Vietnam, thinking that public opinion will force us to capitulate,” he told Ceauşescu, speaking more frankly than he did with the American people. By November, Nixon warned, there would be hell to pay if North Vietnam did not make peace: “I never make idle threats; I do say that we can’t indefinitely continue to have 200 deaths per week with no progress in Paris.”

  Kissinger split off from the president’s traveling party and went to Paris the next day, delivering through diplomatic channels a letter from Nixon addressed to Ho Chi Minh, the leader of North Vietnam since World War II. The message proposed a new set of negotiations in Paris, to be conducted in a completely clandestine manner by Kissinger himself.

  The Pentagon, the State Department, and the CIA were to know nothing about this; Nixon and Kissinger alone would negotiate an end to the war with Ho’s personal emissary from North Vietnam.

  * * *

  After Nixon’s world tour ended, he retreated to spend a month at the Western White House, La Casa Pacifica in San Clemente. The president tried to relax, but war and crisis kept him anxious and ever restless; twice during August, he awoke in the middle of the night fearing he was having a heart attack.

  On August 14, 1969, Nixon convened the National Security Council in San Clemente. Those gathered at the Western White House included Nixon, Kissinger, Rogers, Laird, Helms, and Mitchell.

  The main subjects were China and the Soviet Union, whose armies were clashing in a border battle and whose leaders had nuclear weapons at hand. Nixon startled his national security team by taking China’s side. Moscow “may have a ‘knock them off now’ policy,” the president said. “We must think through whether it is a safer world with China down.” Nixon believed it was best to see that the largest Communist nation in the world survived.

  Nixon’s fear of a cataclysmic clash between China and Russia was a remarkable foresight. Four days later, William L. Stearman, the State Department’s ranking intelligence expert on Hanoi, who was about to join Kissinger’s staff, sat down to lunch at a Washington hotel with Boris N. Davydov—officially a diplomat, in reality a spy stationed at the Soviet embassy. Such conversations, often stranger than fiction, were part of the unwritten code of conduct between the Cold War combatants.

  “Davydov asked point blank what the US would do if the Soviet Union attacked and destroyed China’s nuclear installations,” Stearman wrote in a top-secret memo that went straight to Kissinger. “What would the US do if Peking called for US assistance in the event Chinese nuclear installations were attacked by us?”

  Kissinger called a crash meeting in San Clemente with Attorney General Mitchell, CIA covert operations chief Thomas Karamessines, and the handful of senior State and NSC experts he trusted.

  If the border battle went nuclear, “the consequences for the US would be incalculable,” Kissinger said. “We must make this very plain to the Soviets despite the US nuclear policy in Europe,” which included an all-out attack with thousands of nuclear weapons if Soviet troops crossed into West Germany. “It would be helpful to know something about what DEFCON should be entered into,” he added, if “the Soviets were to knock out the Chinese nuclear capacity.”* Three weeks later, both the Soviet Union and China conducted nuclear weapons tests. The cataclysm never came, but it was now clear to all that Moscow and Beijing were implacable enemies.

  On August 30, Nixon passed an almost completely pleasant day at San Clemente, swimming and walking on the beach with Bebe Rebozo. Then came a message from Kissinger.

  Ho Chi Minh had answered his letter proposing secret peace talks. The reply was defiant.

  “The longer the war goes on, the more accumulates the mourning and burdens of the American people,” Ho wrote to Nixon, who underlined the last sentence of this passage.

  I am extremely indignant at the losses and destruction caused by the American troops to our people and our country. I am also deeply touched at the rising toll of death of young Americans who have fallen in Vietnam by reason of the policy of American governing circles. Our Vietnamese people are deeply devoted to peace, a real peace with independence and real freedom. They are determined to fight to the end, without fearing the sacrifices and difficulties in order to defend their country and their sacred national rights.

  Ho Chi Minh—an adopted name meaning “he who enlightens”—was born the son of Vietnamese peasant farmers in 1890, the same year as Eisenhower. He moved to Paris and joined the Communist Party after World War I. He had been an agent of the Soviet Comintern, the global Communist alliance created by Lenin. Moscow helped him establish the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930. At the time of his contact with Nixon, Ho had been fighting for independence for four decades. France had occupied Vietnam and Cambodia and called their colonial land Indochina. Ho defeated the French in May 1954, with military aid from China. That same year, the Americans took up the fight against communism in Vietnam, with small groups of military advisers and intelligence officers. By the time American combat forces invaded Vietnam in 1965, the Soviets, not the Chinese, were Ho’s main military suppliers.

  Ho was now seventy-nine, an international symbol of revolutionary warfare, an icon in the Communist world, and, as he wrote to Nixon, “determined to fight to the end” to defeat the United States.

  He died three days after Nixon read his letter.

  Wou
ld Hanoi lose its resolve without its legendary leader? Who would emerge as the enemy’s chief strategist? No one in the White House, the Pentagon, or the CIA had the slightest idea whether Ho’s death would change the course of the war or increase the chance for peace. American intelligence on North Vietnam’s political intentions was at best informed speculation, a fact that drove Richard Nixon mad with rage.

  “We tried every operational approach in the book, and committed our most experienced field operatives to the effort to get inside the government in Hanoi,” CIA director Richard Helms wrote long after the war was lost. “Within the Agency, our failure to penetrate the North Vietnamese government was the single most frustrating aspect of those years. We could not determine what was going on at the highest levels of Ho’s government, nor could we learn how policy was made or who was making it.” At the root of this failure was “our national ignorance of Vietnamese history, society, and language,” Helms admitted. Know your enemy is the oldest rule in the book of war; America broke it. Without knowing the enemy’s intentions and capabilities, America’s soldiers and spies were fighting a ghost army in Vietnam—Helms used the word “incubus,” a demon that comes in nightmares—and it stayed shrouded in darkness during a decade of slaughter.

  * * *

  By the time Nixon returned to Washington on September 9, his resolve to defeat North Vietnam by any means had steeled. “I was ready to use whatever military pressure was necessary to prevent them from taking over South Vietnam by force,” he wrote in his memoirs. “Kissinger and I developed an elaborate orchestration of diplomatic, military, and publicity pressures we would bring to bear on Hanoi.”

  The instruments in this orchestra included plans for an all-out attack in Vietnam, a worldwide nuclear alert aimed at the Soviets, and a speech to the American people scheduled for Nixon’s new D-day for the war, November 1.

  The president met with Kissinger, Rogers, Laird, Mitchell, and Helms at the White House on September 10 to talk about Vietnam. Kissinger had prepared a deeply pessimistic report for Nixon. “The pressure of public opinion on you to resolve the war quickly will increase—and I believe increase greatly—during the coming months,” it read. “The plans for student demonstrations [beginning] in October are well known, and while many Americans will oppose the students’ activities, they will also be reminded of their own opposition to the continuation of the war.” Nixon underlined that sentence.

  “I do not believe that with our current plans we can win the war within two years, although our success or failure in hurting the enemy remains very important,” Kissinger continued. “Hanoi’s adoption of a strategy designed to wait us out fits both with its doctrine of how to fight a revolutionary war and with its expectations about increasingly significant problems for the U.S.” The president underlined those words, too.

  Kissinger recommended bombing the enemy so hard that they would sue for peace. He and his staff had been drafting an attack plan code-named Duck Hook, with a “sharp escalation” of violence and “sharp military blows” aimed to force Hanoi to capitulate. An unsigned memo of a Duck Hook meeting Kissinger held in the White House Situation Room showed that Soviet perceptions of Nixon’s rage were part of the plan: “If USSR thinks President is a madman, then they’ve driven him to it and they’d better help calm him down.”

  Duck Hook included attacks against twenty-nine major targets in North Vietnam: bombing and mining the country’s main port city, Haiphong, and obliterating six central electric power stations, four airfields, the nation’s major factory plants and warehouses, its principal bridges and rail yards, and the levee system in the Red River Delta, which irrigated the rice fields that fed the nation.

  Nixon, Kissinger, and Haldeman flew down to the Florida White House in Key Biscayne to weigh the plan on October 3, the day after the president received it. Haldeman’s handwritten diaries recorded four hours of talks, in which “P” is the president and “K” is Kissinger.

  [Nixon held] one of those mystic sessions, which he had obviously thought through ahead of time.… Wants large free chunks of schedule time to work on Vietnam decisions.…

  Then had session with K, and he is of course very concerned, feels we only have two alternatives, bug out or accelerate, and that we must escalate or P is lost. He is lost anyway if that fails, which it well may. K still feels main question is whether P can hold the government and the people together for the six months it will take. His contingency plans don’t include the domestic factor.…

  It’s obvious from the press and dove buildup that trouble is there, whatever we do.

  The dove buildup was imminent and immense. Hundreds of thousands of Americans across the country were about to join peaceful antiwar protests in October. A huge march on Washington would follow in mid-November. Nixon set his speechwriters working on his address to the nation set for November 1. He did not know if he would speak about war or peace.

  * * *

  Three days after the Key Biscayne meeting, on October 6, Kissinger called Secretary of Defense Mel Laird with a highly unusual request: “Could you exercise the DEFCON?” he asked. “The President will appreciate it very much.” The orders went out to the Joint Chiefs on October 9: immediately prepare “an integrated plan of military actions to demonstrate convincingly to the Soviet Union that the United States is getting ready for any eventuality on or about 1 November 1969.”

  As often happened when Kissinger issued orders in the president’s name, Laird wondered what the hell was going on. DEFCON was no exercise: it was a worldwide alert with hundreds of aircraft, thousands of military officers, and many megatons of nuclear weapons placed on high readiness. Nixon wanted to convince the Soviet Union and North Vietnam that the United States was ready to go nuclear to end the Vietnam War by November 1. The global mobilization ran from October 13 to October 30, climaxing in a squadron of B-52 bombers carrying nuclear weapons out of Alaska to the edge of the North Pacific.

  Laird, born in 1922, is alive at this writing, as is Kissinger, born in 1923—the last surviving members of Nixon’s inner circle. The documents on the alert were declassified in 2011, but Laird gave an interview about the DEFCON test a decade before. Nixon was playing a gigantic bluff. “This was one of several examples of what some referred to as the ‘madman theory,’” Laird said. The test was intended to show that “you could never put your finger on what he might do next.”

  The madman theory’s proofs include the DEFCON test, Haldeman’s memoirs, Kissinger’s instructions to Len Garment to tell the Russians that Nixon was crazy, and the Duck Hook plans, which aimed to show the president as “a madman.”

  Nixon believed that Eisenhower had ended the Korean War in 1953 with a secret signal sent through diplomatic channels that he might nuke Pyongyang unless the Communists sued for peace. Hard proof of that harsh threat is lacking, but brinkmanship was at the core of American foreign policy for much of the Cold War.

  Nixon was probing for a reaction from Moscow that would signal a stand-down by their comrades in North Vietnam. But Hanoi’s leaders, the Politburo that succeeded Ho’s death, showed no sign that their will to win had changed. Nixon’s idea that he could coerce peace through violence started to crumble. He rejected twelve drafts of the war speech he intended to give on November 1. A late draft announced punishing bombings against North Vietnam, promised more if the enemy would not talk peace, and pronounced the attacks the most inescapable decision of his life. Nixon ripped up all his speechwriters’ drafts, canceled Duck Hook, wrote an entirely new speech, and delivered it to millions of people on television on November 3.

  * * *

  He read from a typed text, grim-faced, a golden curtain behind him, a television camera’s eye staring at him.

  “Tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support,” he said. “I pledged in my campaign for the Presidency to end the war in a way that we could win the peace. I have initiated a plan of action which will enable me to keep th
at pledge. The more support I can have from the American people, the sooner that pledge can be redeemed; for the more divided we are at home, the less likely the enemy is to negotiate at Paris. Let us be united for peace. Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.”

  The “silent majority” was a phrase with a long provenance. For centuries, it had been used to eulogize the dead. In 1902, Supreme Court justice John Marshall Harlan spoke of the Civil War combatants who “long ago passed over to the silent majority.” The peace marchers were coming to Washington in memory of the dead in Vietnam—and they forced Nixon to cancel the planned attacks at the last minute.

  The three-day gathering in Washington culminated in a candlelight march on the evening of November 14, each of tens of thousands of silent protesters carrying a small flame and the name of an American soldier killed or a Vietnamese village destroyed in the war; on the following day, 325,000 people gathered around the Washington Monument, the largest political protest in the history of the United States.

  On the night of the candlelight march, three of Kissinger’s staff were down in the basement of the White House working late on another speech about the war. One of them, William Watts, stepped out of the Southwest Gate one flight up to light a cigarette. He looked out at the silent line of illumination in the street. He saw his wife and his three daughters, holding candles, marching against the war.

  He thought, “I am on the inside, the enemy.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Don’t strike a king unless you intend to kill him”

  NIXON BELIEVED that the fate of the United States depended on defeating the nation that Kissinger called “a fifth-rate agricultural power.” It was a question of national survival.

  “If we fail we have had it,” the president told the Joint Chiefs, Kissinger, Mitchell, and Laird on October 11, as the big antiwar protests began. Adm. Thomas H. Moorer of the Joint Chiefs wrote in his diary after the meeting, “The President stated that a great power must go on this basis: ‘Don’t strike a king unless you intend to kill him.’” Nixon did not intend to be killed by skinny guerrillas in black pajamas.