One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon

by Tim Weiner

  The political situation at home was no better than the military situation abroad.

  Secretary of Defense Laird warned Nixon on Tuesday, March 31, that the Senate was prepared to cut off funds for American air strikes in Laos and Cambodia. Nixon responded that he would “fight such a limitation to the death.”

  The Senate also rejected the nomination of Judge G. Harrold Carswell, the second of two third-rate conservatives whom Attorney General Mitchell had personally selected for Nixon to elevate to the Supreme Court. A ranking Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee famously said in support of Carswell, “There are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they?” Not on the Supreme Court, the Senate decreed. Nixon privately blamed Mitchell for the politically tone-deaf nominations—the attorney general’s prior selection, Judge Clement Haynsworth, was rejected for his record of racism—but he took his wrath out on the Senate.

  “Multiple unsolvable problems bearing in,” Haldeman noted.

  Nixon responded to the Senate’s resistance with unalloyed rage. “Set up political attack,” he commanded Haldeman. “Have to declare war.”

  The president ordered two retired New York City police officers, overseen by Ehrlichman, to conduct undercover investigations of his Senate opponents—notably, Teddy Kennedy, Edmund Muskie, Birch Bayh, and William Proxmire, four prominent Democrats who fought Nixon’s military policies and his Supreme Court nominees—as part of what Nixon called “an all-out hatchet job on the Democrat leaders,” including the use of the Internal Revenue Service to investigate their finances.

  The ex-cops Nixon hired were Jack Caulfield, a member of the White House staff handling “special assignments” such as launching IRS audits, and Tony Ulasewicz, who was paid off the books with secret 1968 campaign cash doled out by Herb Kalmbach, Nixon’s political bagman. “Tough Tony” trailed Kennedy for nearly two years. The Department of Dirty Tricks was on the case.

  * * *

  On April 4, 1970, Kissinger reconvened in Paris with Le Duc Tho, who grasped America’s strategic problems as acutely as Kissinger and described them with greater accuracy.

  “We have no intention of using Laos to put pressure on you in North Vietnam,” Kissinger falsely asserted. The CIA and its Lao tribesmen were running cross-border sabotage attacks into North Vietnam at that very moment. “As for Cambodia, we have no intention of using Cambodia to bring pressure on Vietnam.” That was not true.

  Le Duc Tho responded: “This does not conform with reality. The Vietnamese have a saying that you can’t use a basket to cover a lion or an elephant.”

  “I like that,” Kissinger replied.

  “It is quite true,” said Le Duc Tho. “While you are suffering defeat in Laos and Vietnam, how can you fight in Cambodia? You have sowed the wind, and you must reap the whirlwind.”

  By April 19, the Communists were twenty miles from the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. President Nixon, in Hawaii to greet the astronauts returning from the nearly fatal Apollo 13 moon mission, was briefed by Adm. John McCain, the commander in chief for the Pacific. McCain, whose son was still a prisoner of war, captivated Nixon with a hair-raising report. The president ordered McCain to return with him to San Clemente on April 20 and meet with Kissinger.

  The gist of McCain’s briefing was grim: if the Communists took Cambodia, South Vietnam might be next, and the war would be lost. McCain emphasized “the need for speed in view of the precarious situation.” He thought the United States should send every weapon it could find to Phnom Penh, South Vietnam’s troops should attack across the Cambodian border, and squadrons of B-52s should bombard the Communists.

  The Joint Chiefs of Staff claimed to have located the enemy’s headquarters inside Cambodia: what the United States was calling the Central Office for South Vietnam, or COSVN. American war planners envisioned it as the Communists’ nerve center, a bamboo Pentagon concealed beneath the jungle’s canopy. They thought that if you could blow up COSVN, you could cripple the enemy’s capacity to command and control attacks on American forces in South Vietnam. And McCain said the United States should destroy it and win the damn war.

  Nixon’s meeting with Admiral McCain amid the blooming springtime gardens of the Western White House was a fatal turning point. American boots were about to hit the ground in the bomb-cratered wastelands of eastern Cambodia.

  Nixon, Kissinger, and McCain “discussed possible cross-border attacks into Cambodia,” reads a unique account in a recently declassified Joint Chiefs history. “If such operations were mounted, the President asked, what would be the best mix of US and South Vietnamese forces? Or should only [South Vietnamese] troops be used, with the United States furnishing air and artillery support from within South Vietnam? Admiral McCain assured the President that plans were being prepared on an urgent basis and would be submitted to the Joint Chiefs of Staff as quickly as possible. The President … already sanctioned the provision of financial support to the Cambodian Government as well as the supply of captured weapons for the Cambodian forces.”

  The Joint Chiefs quickly assembled tons of weapons for the Cambodian army. Scouring the arsenals of every American ally in Asia for captured Communist weapons—Indonesia was especially helpful in supplying fifteen thousand AK-47 assault rifles—dealing in black markets to procure the proper bullets, and stripping shelves of carbine rifles from stockpiles in Saigon, American military officers in Saigon assembled ten packages, each sufficient to arm a thousand soldiers, containing eight hundred carbines, fifty pistols, thirty light machine guns, one hundred submachine guns, thirty rocket launchers, twenty light mortars, and ammunition.

  That was the easy part. Now the president needed a plan for the invasion of Cambodia and the destruction of COSVN.

  But Nixon never understood that COSVN was not a place. It could not be bombed. It had no address. It was a small mobile group of Communist officers. They could be located only by the radio signals they transmitted. Yet even that location was fixed only by the antennae they used for their transmissions, which could be miles away from the men who were on the air.

  And the enemy always seemed to know when the B-52s were coming. North Vietnam’s intelligence on America’s intentions was far better than America’s intelligence on its enemy’s plans.

  * * *

  Nixon did not sleep for more than an hour or two on the night of Tuesday, April 21. Before dawn, he dictated a disturbing note to Kissinger: “I think we need a bold move in Cambodia, assuming that I feel the way today (it is five AM, April 22) at our meeting as I feel this morning to show that we stand with Lon Nol. I do not believe he is going to survive. There is, however, some chance that he might and in any event we must do something.”

  The aforementioned meeting was a National Security Council conclave. Nixon demanded that no staff attend and that no one take notes. But Admiral Moorer and General Wheeler left detailed accounts of the meeting in the files of the Joint Chiefs.

  Nixon immediately authorized large cross-border attacks by South Vietnam into Cambodia, with support from American artillery and fighter jets. He said that he had not yet decided the question of American ground forces attacking Cambodia.

  The war council was split three ways. Laird and Rogers wanted the invasion limited in depth and restricted to the soldiers of South Vietnam. Kissinger favored an attack on the two Cambodian sanctuaries, in areas called the Parrot’s Beak and the Fishhook—but without American ground troops. The military wanted an assault on the Communists in Cambodia and the spectral COSVN headquarters, with American soldiers leading the charge. So did Vice President Spiro Agnew, whose personal qualities included a lack of tact. Agnew said he objected to “all the pussyfooting.” Nixon resented the implication that he was not being tough enough. The “pussyfooting” remark provoked Nixon to go for an all-out attack with American ground forces.

  The Joint Chiefs of Staff never drew up a formal plan for the Cambodian operation. There wasn
’t enough time. But three of Kissinger’s most loyal NSC staff members, Winston Lord, Tony Lake, and Roger Morris, knew of the coming invasion. They warned Kissinger that it would create “a political storm here, as it would be the most shocking spur to fears of widening involvement in U.S. ground combat in Southeast Asia.”*

  At 7:20 a.m. on April 24, Nixon, still sleepless, summoned Kissinger, Moorer, and Helms to the White House. In a fury, the president said that Secretary of State Rogers and Secretary of Defense Laird were sabotaging plans for the invasion. “P is moving too rashly without thinking through the consequences,” Haldeman noted in his diary that evening. Kissinger called Helms to ask him what he thought of Nixon’s decisions. Helms replied, “It seemed to me that if he is prepared for the fallout, then it is the thing to do. He obviously was.”

  “It is worth it?” Kissinger asked. Helms hoped so.

  Rogers and Laird continued to object to the invasion of Cambodia until April 28. That morning, the president ordered them into the Oval Office, where the attorney general laid down the law: there would be no arguments, no dissent. In silence, they were dismissed from the room. Mitchell wrote: “The President stated that the purpose of the meeting was to advise those present of the decisions he had reached.… .There was no discussion.”

  * * *

  On Thursday, April 30, after another night with one hour of sleep, the president made a nationally televised speech to the American people announcing the invasion of Cambodia.

  “This is not an invasion of Cambodia,” he said, a classic Nixon contradiction.

  “I say tonight: All the offers and approaches made previously remain on the conference table whenever Hanoi is ready to negotiate seriously. But if the enemy response to our most conciliatory offers for peaceful negotiation continues to be to increase its attacks and humiliate and defeat us, we shall react accordingly.

  “My fellow Americans, we live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home. We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last 500 years. Even here in the United States, great universities are being systematically destroyed. Small nations all over the world find themselves under attack from within and from without.

  “If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.”

  Secretary of State Rogers was in his hideaway office on the seventh floor of the State Department headquarters that night with Marshall Green, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia. Green remembered: “As Nixon concluded his maudlin remarks about the US otherwise appearing as a pitiful, helpless giant, Rogers snapped off the TV set, muttering, ‘The kids are going to retch.’ He clearly foresaw how the speech was going to inflame the campuses. That was several days before Kent State.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  “An unmitigated disaster”

  THE MORNING after the speech was May Day. The storm already had started on the nation’s campuses. College newspapers called for a national student strike. A new march on Washington was set for the coming week.

  After suffering another insomniac night, Nixon went to the Pentagon, where the Joint Chiefs showed him maps detailing where Communist forces occupied Cambodia. They depicted four major sanctuaries far beyond the targets of the invasion. “I made a very uncharacteristic on-the-spot decision,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs. “I said, ‘I want to take out all those sanctuaries. Make whatever plans are necessary, and then just do it. Knock them all out so that they can’t be used against us. Ever.’”

  To some of the officers at the Pentagon, the president seemed unhinged. Haldeman concurred. “P was really beat,” he wrote in his diary a few hours later. “Really needs some good rest.”

  Leaving the briefing, trailed in the lobby of the Pentagon by a few reporters with tape recorders, Nixon compared American soldiers (“They’re the greatest”) with American students (“these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses”), a statement that he later realized only “added fuel to the fires of dissent.”

  On Monday, May 4, Haldeman went to Nixon’s Executive Office Building hideout with some bad news. “Something just came over the wires about a demonstration at Kent State,” Haldeman said. “The National Guard opened fire, and some students were shot.”

  “Are they dead?” Nixon asked.

  “I’m afraid so,” Haldeman said. Two protesters and two passersby had been killed, and nine injured, by the salvo of gunfire at the Ohio campus.

  Haldeman’s diary recorded the president’s distress: “He’s very disturbed. Afraid his decision set it off.… Really sad to see this added to his worries about the war. He’s out on a tough limb, and he knows it. This makes it a lot worse, as he has to take the heat for having caused it.… Obviously realizes, but won’t openly admit, his ‘bums’ remark very harmful.”

  In a telephone conversation later that day with Kissinger, Nixon stiffened his spine. “We have to stand hard as a rock,” he said. “If countries begin to be run by children, God help us.”

  Kissinger played the tough guy: “K. wants to just let the students go for a couple of weeks, then move in and clobber them,” Haldeman recorded. How they could be hit with anything harder than the bullets of the National Guard was not the question: “K. very concerned that we not appear to give in in any way. Thinks P. can really clobber them if we just wait for Cambodian success.”

  * * *

  “The Cambodian incursion was an unmitigated disaster,” begins a National Security Agency history of the battle, declassified in 2013.

  “The most famous (or infamous) event of the incursion was the attempt to ‘get COSVN,’” the NSA history reads. In April, the small, mobile Communist intelligence headquarters’ radio antennae were located just inside the Cambodian border, about ninety miles northwest of Saigon, targeted by U.S. aircraft equipped with a multitude of electronic components. But COSVN was constantly on the move—“usually to get out of the way of B-52 strikes (which, as we know, were predicted with great accuracy by North Vietnamese intelligence), and repeated air strikes over the years had never succeeded in doing any effective damage,” the NSA report records.

  William Lloyd Stearman, later Kissinger’s in-house expert on Hanoi and the longest-serving staffer in the history of the National Security Council, remembered vividly when he first heard that Nixon was going after COSVN, in the early hours of the invasion. “By the time I had stopped laughing, I almost felt like crying,” Stearman said. “I then wondered who in the hell had briefed the President on this.”

  It turned out to be Kissinger.

  “COSVN was a floating crap game,” Stearman said. “There was simply no way you were going to be able to go in and capture COSVN. What, I wondered, did he think COSVN was all about anyway? COSVN mostly consisted of a bunch of huts and some files which could be moved quickly.”

  “The press got hold of the COSVN story” within two weeks, the NSA report continued, and it “became common knowledge to the American people.” The pressure from the White House and the Pentagon “to locate and overrun (or at least bomb) COSVN became considerable” as the press picked up the theme of an elusive enemy. “But the military system moved too slowly. COSVN was able to evade every B-52 strike and every ground maneuver.”

  After five years of combat, American military commanders still did not comprehend that SIGINT (signals intelligence, the NSA’s unique capability) could fix the location only of the enemy’s antenna: “The transmitter, to say nothing of the headquarters itself, could be miles away. Moreover, the military targeting system seemed inflexible—SIGINT reports that COSVN had pulled up stakes from location A and was now at location B were not enough to get a strike cancelled or diverted.”

  The NSA report concludes, “American bombs tore up miles of jungle, and troops floundered through a trackless quagmire of Cambodia in pursu
it of COSVN. They never caught up with the headquarters, which moved safely to central Cambodia ahead of the advancing allies.” The invasion killed many enemy soldiers and destroyed large stocks of their weapons and rice. But it did not change the course of the war.

  Protest against the invasion erupted nationwide—not only students but university presidents, not only scraggly leftists but Wall Street lawyers, not merely three NSC staffers but hundreds of State Department employees now openly opposed Nixon’s conduct of the war. With a national day of protest (Saturday, May 9) looming, Nixon knew he had to mobilize public support from his political allies.

  * * *

  Enter Charles W. Colson. The thirty-eight-year-old lawyer had signed on as a White House counsel in November 1969, a liaison with labor unions and other special interests, and he quickly caught the president’s eye.

  “His instinct for the political jugular and his ability to get things done made him a lightning rod for my own frustrations,” Nixon wrote. “When I complained to Colson, I felt confident that something would be done. I was rarely disappointed.”

  Colson’s job, as he himself put it, was “attack and counterattack.” And in that role, “he’ll do anything,” Nixon later said on tape. “I mean anything.” Colson now received his first assignment as the point man for domestic political warfare. He joined a meeting of an “Action Group on Cambodia” convened by Nixon in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. Taking action in the spirit of Kissinger’s encouragement to “really clobber” the president’s political enemies, Colson telephoned his contacts at the New York City construction union council led by Peter J. Brennan.

  On Friday, May 8, hundreds of hard hats carrying lead pipes and crowbars attacked antiwar protesters at Broad and Wall Streets, cracking heads and breaking bones. More than seventy people were injured. The hard hats got an invitation to the White House that month, and Brennan later became Nixon’s labor secretary. As footage of the fracas ran on the evening news, tens of thousands of protesters were gathering in Washington from across the country, trucks were transporting soldiers to batten down in the Executive Office Building for the night, and two rings of buses barricaded the White House.