One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon

by Tim Weiner

  * * *

  Nixon knew that Vietnam and its war-damaged veterans were the main source of the nation’s anger and despair. Each day of the war remained dreadful; four hundred Americans were dying in Vietnam every month. The peace talks in Paris were at a stalemate. The court-martial of William L. Calley was imminent. A lieutenant at the My Lai massacre, when American soldiers slaughtered South Vietnamese civilians suspected of harboring Communists, Calley was in a military stockade awaiting trial for premeditated murder. A conviction could lead to a death sentence. The case was emblematic of a war in which the moral imperative had gone AWOL.

  Reenlistment among officers was falling, along with the morale of combat troops. Insubordination was rising. So was the use of 95 percent pure heroin among American soldiers.

  The dope flooded Saigon in the summer of 1970. A potent dose was available for two dollars in bars, brothels, and barracks, thanks in part to America’s allies, crucial go-betweens in the drug trade. In September 1970, army medics questioned and tested more than three thousand soldiers of the Americal Division, where Lieutenant Calley had served. They found that 11.9 percent had tried heroin and 6.6 percent continued to use it. Larger government studies estimated that perhaps one-third of American soldiers tried heroin in Vietnam; among those, roughly half came home hooked. Though the statistics and the studies were arguable, tens of thousands of heroin addicts coming home was a war wound America was ill-equipped to handle.

  Nixon’s response was to create a White House task force to attack the heroin trade. John Ehrlichman told his young aide Egil Krogh to take the assignment. Bud Krogh was thirty-one years old; he had worked for Ehrlichman at his Seattle law firm before coming to the White House and saw his boss as a mentor and a family friend. He had been hired to handle domestic legal affairs; he knew nothing about global narcotics smugglers. But after visiting Vietnam and Thailand, he would come to understand that some of the traffickers—Golden Triangle warlords who grew the poppies, government ministers and military commanders who helped turn opium into the heroin that hit the American bloodstream—were ostensibly on our side in the war on communism. These same men helped carve the heroin trail. Our allies had become our enemies.

  * * *

  The November 1970 vote left President Nixon with an increasingly hostile Congress, including several senators who could be strong candidates against him in two years. Postelection punditry painted the 1970 election as “a significant political failure for me and a serious setback to my chances for being re-elected,” he wrote. “The problems we confronted were so overwhelming … that it seemed possible that I might not even be nominated for re-election in 1972.”

  He felt he had reached the lowest point of his presidency. To be defeated in reelection would be akin to death for Richard Nixon. He began planning strategies that would keep him in the White House for six more years. He determined to be “absolutely ruthless” in his pursuit of an overwhelming reelection in 1972.

  Nixon dictated political orders that ran to hundreds of pages, and he held strategy meetings with Haldeman, Mitchell, and Colson that rambled on for six hours. Haldeman was astounded at the “amazing array of trivia” and the “obsessive boring-in.”

  By November’s end, Nixon made some fateful decisions. John Mitchell would leave the Justice Department and run the 1972 campaign. Covert surveillance and “dirty tricks” would intensify against Nixon’s strongest potential rivals, Senators Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts and Ed Muskie of Maine. Chuck Colson had a private detective following Kennedy twenty-four hours a day. Haldeman was organizing reams of phony mailings under Muskie’s name that were designed to offend conservative Democrats. Nixon intensified the “Townhouse Operation,” where meetings were held in Washington to collect and distribute three million dollars in secret campaign funds. Haldeman, overseeing the operation, noted on November 19 that Nixon’s lawyer Herb Kalmbach had been retained to spend half his professional time for the next two years “handling super fat cats and special assignments” to finance Nixon’s reelection.*

  Even Nixon staffers at a remove from the Oval Office noticed the change coming over the White House. David C. Miller Jr., later an American ambassador under President Reagan, had worked for Attorney General Mitchell at Justice for eighteen months, serving as his confidential assistant. Then he went to the White House, where he worked with John Dean, the counsel to the president. Shortly after he arrived, Dean presented him with a startling proposal.

  “John Dean asked me if I would set up a safe house here in Washington for the use of the president,” Miller recalled. Why? Miller asked; the CIA did that kind of thing. Dean answered, “He wants this to be a completely covert White House operation.”

  “I knew at that point that I was going to have to leave. I just said to myself: ‘This is insane,’” Ambassador Miller recounted in 2003. “The challenge that John faced, and it was a challenge that sunk any number of youngsters at the White House, was the question of loyalty to their principal: Mr. Haldeman in John’s case, Mr. Ehrlichman in Bud Krogh’s case.”

  Bud Krogh had performed with aplomb on the drug task force. Perhaps his most spectacular achievement in December 1970 was handling Elvis Presley’s unsolicited visit to Nixon at the White House, where Elvis sought an appointment as a “Federal Agent-at-Large” in the war on drugs and presented the president with a Colt .45 pistol. The reward for Krogh’s dedicated service was a far more astonishing assignment. At Ehrlichman’s command, Krogh was soon running a secret White House intelligence unit called the Plumbers.

  “Their principals asked them to do things that were unwise and ultimately illegal,” Ambassador Miller said. “It was a lack of judgment, of wisdom, more than a lack of intelligence. That was really a catastrophe.” And, as a consequence, “most of my friends eventually wound up in the Watergate affair, and of course, many went to prison.” The president—the ultimate principal—was at times “a very wise man.” He also was “quite dangerous.”

  The dangerous side soon became the dominant side of the Nixon White House. In the coming months, the stoic and staunch Haldeman began to strain against the six-hour sessions of political trivia with the president. When Nixon’s mind was wandering, his discourse was like a dog walking in circles before it lay down. Haldeman, to his credit, recorded every one of Nixon’s ideas before the installation of the White House tapes. Both the journals and the tapes depict a president who was brusque and brutal, often witty and wise, but at times interminably indecisive. When his mind was made up, often in a state of rage, he issued irrational orders—fire all the Jews at the Internal Revenue Service, cut the CIA’s budget in half immediately. Haldeman would carefully note the president’s ill-considered ideas and make sure they died stillborn.

  Catastrophically, Chuck Colson began to supplant Haldeman as the president’s sounding board. “He started vying for favor on Nixon’s dark side,” said Bryce N. Harlow, a White House counselor and congressional liaison for the president. “Colson started talking about trampling his grandmother’s grave for Nixon and showing he was as mean as they come.”

  “It was the ‘in’ thing to swagger and threaten” as the president’s reelection campaign geared up, Harlow said. “Everybody went macho.” Colson lacked judgment and wisdom. He would, as Nixon said approvingly, do anything.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “We’re not going to lose this war”

  TWO DAYS before Christmas 1970, President Nixon determined once again to “break the back of the enemy,” as he told Admiral Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  His idea was to invade Laos and sever the Ho Chi Minh Trail. But Congress had barred Nixon from deploying American combat troops in Laos. So Nixon commanded the South Vietnamese Army—trained, equipped, and supported by the military might of the United States—to conduct the invasion and capture a crossroads of the trail. If the plan worked, it would vindicate Vietnamization.

  Nixon sent General Haig to Saigon to sell President Thieu on the
hastily conceived operation. Thieu would have to mobilize his forces rapidly in coordination with the American commanders in Saigon. Haig returned with high hopes, still seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

  The three-part plan was set by the morning of January 26, 1971. Phase one: American soldiers would set up a base near the Laotian border in South Vietnam. American helicopter gunships would bring South Vietnam’s troops into battle and back them with the firepower of B-52s, fighter-bombers, and artillery. Phase two: those troops would drive into Laos and seize the town of Tchepone, described by American intelligence as a military nerve center for the Communists. Phase three: South Vietnamese soldiers and American firepower would destroy the enemy’s forces and supply lines along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, slicing the enemy’s lifeline like a knife cutting an artery.

  But by that evening, a potentially fatal problem emerged.

  The enemy had discovered the invasion plan through its intelligence agents in South Vietnam. It was well prepared for the attack. The looming disaster was laid out in a page from Haldeman’s daily journals declassified in November 2014.

  Tuesday, January 26th. Henry got me into the office just as I was going home, to go over the general plan that they’re really up to. They’re planning a major assault in Laos which, if successful, and Henry fully believes it will be, would in effect end the war, because it would totally demolish the enemy’s capability. The problem is that it will be a very major attack, with our troops massed heavily on the Laotian border. And … we’ve discovered that the enemy has our plan and is starting to mass their troops to counteract.

  The president knew this. The next day, in the Oval Office, with Kissinger, Laird, Rogers, and Helms all present, Admiral Moorer said that “we had received intercepts yesterday which confirmed that Hanoi was aware of the general plan,” according to Haig’s written notes of the meeting. But Nixon disregarded the danger. He would depict the operation as a defensive raid on an enemy stronghold; thus “there could be no perception of defeat.”

  The secretary of state dissented: “He did not agree with the connotation that the Laos operation was merely a raid. The public would want to know why we were disturbing the balance in Southeast Asia and we should inform them that it was a massive attack.” Rogers went on to say, “The risks appear very high. The enemy had intelligence on our plans and we were now asking the South Vietnamese to conduct an operation that we refused to do in the past because we were not strong enough. If they were set back in the operation we would be giving up everything we had achieved.”

  Nixon ignored him. Haig’s notes conclude, “The President directed that the situation be played out.”

  The confrontation was among the most intense during Nixon’s first two years in the White House. “The pressure back here is up to explosive proportions,” Admiral Moorer cabled from the Pentagon to Gen. Frederick C. Weyand, the deputy commander of American forces in Saigon. Weyand responded that the clash would be “the real turning point of the war.”

  The United States and its allies had not engaged in a set-piece battle—clashing at a chosen time and place—in two years. Nor had the South Vietnamese Army ever conducted any attack of this size and scope.

  The operation was prepared with excessive speed. American and South Vietnamese military commanders received operational plans on February 2. They had four days to get ready. They mistrusted the judgment of their leaders in Washington and Saigon, they were deeply skeptical of one another, and they knew it was folly to proceed with the knowledge that the enemy had the plan. Nevertheless, “prodded remorselessly by Nixon and Kissinger,” as Haig put it, they bowed to the will of the White House.

  “The best legacy we could leave,” Nixon told Kissinger, “is to kick the hell out of Vietnam.”

  * * *

  The South Vietnamese Army code-named the attack Lam Son 719, in tribute to a legendary warrior who had routed Chinese invaders five centuries before. It began with a bad omen: death by friendly fire. A U.S. Navy fighter-bomber struck a South Vietnamese brigade at the Laotian border on the evening of February 6, killing six soldiers and wounding fifty-one.

  The plan did not survive contact with the enemy. Once inside Laos, America’s allies were outclassed and outnumbered. On the battlefield, they met a superior North Vietnamese force that had been prepared for eight months. The command group that oversaw and defended the Ho Chi Minh Trail had amassed sixty thousand troops—including five main force divisions, eight artillery regiments, three tank battalions, six antiaircraft regiments, and eight sapper battalions. The heavy artillery, the antiaircraft guns, the tanks, and the troops were dug into caves and concealed in killing field formations along the only main route westward into Laos. North Vietnamese military historians called it “our army’s greatest concentration of combined-arms forces … up to that point” of the war.

  A harrowing, horrifying series of firefights and helicopter flights finally brought elements of the First Infantry Division of the South Vietnamese Army close to their strategic objective: the supposed Communist stronghold at Tchepone. What they found was described in a report by a South Vietnamese infantry commander, Maj. Gen. Nguyen Duy Hinh.

  Tchepone, a tiny town whose civilian population had fled long ago, now had only scars and ruins left. By this time, it had become more of a political and psychological symbol than an objective of strategic value. There was nothing of military importance in the ruined town; enemy supplies and war materiel were all stored in caches in the forests and mountains.

  To save face, President Thieu ordered his First Infantry troops to secure Tchepone, “primarily for its propaganda and morale value,” General Hinh reported. “At the price of 11 helicopters shot down,” Thieu’s soldiers created an operations base ten miles distant from the town. The enemy waited until the base was established, then began raining heavy artillery down upon it. President Thieu, having created the illusion of taking Tchepone, started to retreat almost immediately.

  * * *

  “We’re not going to lose it. That’s all there is to it,” Richard Nixon said to Kissinger on February 18, as Lam Son 719 became a debacle. “We can’t lose. We can lose an election, but we’re not going to lose this war, Henry.… North Vietnam can never beat South Vietnam. Never.”

  This was one of Nixon’s first conversations recorded on his Oval Office tapes, installed two days before. The Secret Service had placed five hidden microphones in the president’s desk and two more near the sitting area by the fireplace. The Oval Office telephones were linked to the taping system; two more mikes were hidden in the Cabinet Room. The tapes revolved on reel-to-reel decks in the White House basement. Two months later Nixon also bugged his hideaway office in the Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House. Four people knew: Nixon and Haldeman, along with Alexander Butterfield, deputy assistant to the president, and Al Wong, the Secret Service agent who oversaw the tapes.*

  Kissinger, as was his wont, concurred with the president’s resolve. “We can win in ’72,” he said. “Yeah, maybe,” Nixon replied. “But right now, the important thing is to see this miserable thing through.”

  On February 26, less than a month after Nixon authorized the invasion of Laos, Admiral Moorer said, “This is the moment of truth for South Vietnam.” And the truth was, as Nixon said, miserable. The battle had become a rout. THE PRESIDENT’S DECISION TO SUPPORT LAM SON 719 WAS BASED ON HIS CONFIDENCE THAT THE LAOS TRAIL NETWORK WOULD BE DISRUPTED, Kissinger cabled Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker in Saigon on March 1. FRANKLY, I AM BEGINNING TO WONDER WHAT IF ANYTHING HAS BEEN ACHIEVED IN THIS REGARD.

  The answer was nothing. The U.S. Air Force already had bombed eastern Laos so hard that it looked like “the surface of the moon,” said Richard C. Howland, then the State Department’s political counselor in Laos, later an American ambassador under President George H. W. Bush. “Yet the Ho Chi Minh Trail was still operating.”

  Nixon now began bombing North Vietnam again, in violation of the bombing halt LBJ had
ordered as part of his peace talks in October 1968—the same negotiations Nixon had helped to sabotage. These strikes were intended in part to destroy Communist surface-to-air missile attacks against B-52s flying in support of Lam Son 719. But they were also part of President Nixon’s deepening determination to carry the war to the enemy with airpower.

  Kissinger asked his covert action committee, “Why is it that Hanoi doesn’t get tired?” No one knew. “They’ve now fought for ten years against us. They must’ve lost at least 700,000 men,” he told Nixon on March 18. “They’ve had a whole young generation that are neither productive in North Vietnam or, for that matter, even breeding.”

  “Why, good God,” Nixon replied. “There’s no men.”

  But there were. North Vietnam concentrated forty-five thousand soldiers for a counterattack to drive their foes out of Laos in mid-March. President Thieu unilaterally decided on a complete withdrawal, without telling the Americans, after losing three thousand soldiers going into battle. “It would be hard to exaggerate the mystification and confusion caused here by [Thieu’s] rapid pull-out from Laos,” Kissinger wrote in a back-channel message to Ambassador Bunker. Haig reported from Saigon that the South Vietnamese Army had “lost their stomach for Laos and the problem isn’t to keep them in but rather to influence them to pull out in an orderly fashion.”

  The retreat was worse than the assault. The Communists turned the one road out of Laos into a highway of death, blowing up the first and last vehicle of each escaping convoy and then picking off the troops trapped between. An American airlift saved thousands of lives; its unforgettable image is a photo of South Vietnamese infantrymen desperately clinging to the skids of an American helicopter evacuating the battlefield. New York Times reporter Gloria Emerson interviewed survivors: “What has dramatically demoralized many of the South Vietnamese troops is the large number of their own wounded who were left behind, begging for their friends to shoot them or to leave hand grenades so they could commit suicide before the North Vietnamese or the B-52s killed them.”