by Tim Weiner
“The battle has begun?” asked the president. “Should we start bombing right now?” He continued: “I’m not concerned about the attack, but I am concerned about the counterattack. By God, you’ve got the Air Force there. Now, get them off their ass and get them up there and hit everything that moves.”
North Vietnam surged south across the demilitarized zone with troops, tanks, artillery, and a few Soviet-made fighter jets. American soldiers and their allies based in northern outposts of South Vietnam (Quang Tri, Hue, Da Nang) began facing a murderous barrage. As the enemy advanced, a U.S. Marine growled at a reporter, “I don’t know any more if I’m in northern South Vietnam or southern North Vietnam.”
The ground war turned grim as thousands of ARVN, the troops of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, deserted their posts and fled. Reports of a rout at Quang Tri reached the White House in seventy-two hours.
“We lose if the ARVN collapses,” Nixon told Kissinger on April 3.
“If the ARVN collapses a lot of other things will collapse around here,” Nixon said. “We’re playing a much bigger game. We’re playing a Russian game, a Chinese game, an election game—and we’re not going to have the ARVN collapse.”
Nixon faced fateful, fatal decisions. Bombing North Vietnam, along with inflicting death and destruction, promised dangers on political battlefronts at home and abroad. Yet the merest chance of an American military defeat could devastate his power to negotiate with Russia and China from a position of omnipotence. He feared that this would destroy his dream of creating, as he put it, a new generation of peace. Above all, he was afraid he could lose the election if it looked like he might lose the war.
“For the President, battlefield success became paramount,” said Frederick Z. Brown, the American consul general in Da Nang at the time of the 1972 attack. “If that meant relying primarily upon U.S. air power rather than upon the South Vietnamese armed forces, so be it.… The United States replied in massive form, in a way that nobody, nobody expected.”
The diaries of Admiral Moorer and H. R. Haldeman recorded the president’s commands on April 4. “There will be no consideration of restraints,” he told Moorer. “Everything we do must be concentrated on breaking the back of the enemy.… We are not going to lose this one no matter what it costs.” Haldeman wrote, “The P’s massing a huge attack force, naval ships for gunning from the sea, tremendous number of additional bombers, and he’s going to start using B-52s for the first time to bomb North Vietnam as soon as the weather clears.”
American gunships approached the coast of Quang Tri Province, prepared to bombard North Vietnam. Nixon ordered the USS Midway and the USS Saratoga into the battle. Six great warships carrying fighter jets, the most formidable naval force assembled since World War II, gathered in the Gulf of Tonkin. The president commanded that every available B-52 bomber in the air force be readied to strike the enemy’s biggest cities and military targets in saturation bombings—up to nine planes, flying wing to wing, dropping seventy-five to one hundred tons of bombs each. That was the most powerful force in the American arsenal, save nuclear weapons.
Nixon demanded the maximum number of B-52 attacks (more than eighteen hundred a month) as soon as possible. But cloud cover kept the war planes waiting for clearer skies. “God Almighty, there must be something, something, something that son-of-a-bitchin’ Air Force can do in bad weather. Goddamn it!” the president yelled at Kissinger.
“Mr. President,” Kissinger replied, “our major thing now is to get across to the Russians, to the Chinese, and to Hanoi that we are on the verge of going crazy.”
“Goddamn it,” Nixon said again, praying in his blasphemous way for the clouds to part over Hanoi and the port city of Haiphong, “get that weather cleared up.” Then he laughed, a low rumble from deep in his gut. “The bastards have never been bombed,” he said. “They’re going to be bombed this time.”
The clouds broke. On April 7, seventeen B-52s hit targets near Haiphong, the first time in seven years of warfare that American bombers struck that far north and that close to Hanoi, sixty-five miles west. Three more B-52 raids followed the next week.
Nixon asked General Haig to describe a B-52 bombing. “An enormously potent ordeal, isn’t it?”
“It’s a frightening weapon,” Haig said. “God, you know, you just see these shockwaves…”
“And the ground shakes?” Nixon asked.
“And the whole ground shakes,” Haig said.
* * *
“I cannot impress upon you too strongly how intensely involved the president is in this operation,” Admiral Moorer cabled his top commanders in Vietnam on April 8. Two days later, a newly appointed four-star air force general personally selected by Nixon, John Vogt, arrived in Saigon to take charge of the air war.
The president had given Vogt his marching orders upon his departure, as Haldeman recorded on April 6: “The P called him and really laid it to him, saying that he was making this change because it had to be done and that he was very upset with the military.… He then made quite a dramatic point of the fact that this may very well be the last battle that will be fought by the United States Air Force, since this kind of war probably will never happen again, and that it would be a tragic thing if this great service would end its active battle participation in a disgraceful operation that this Vietnam offensive is turning out to be.”
The United States could “break the North Vietnamese,” Nixon told Kissinger on April 10, as Haldeman took notes. “We might get something settled by summer. On the other hand, if the North Vietnamese take Saigon … we have to admit that we’ve lost the war, we pull out and as the President says, he doesn’t care what the domestic reaction is, because sitting in that office next year won’t be worth it anyway. American foreign policy will have been destroyed.”
On April 13, Nixon ordered a more massive B-52 attack, aimed at targets in and around Hanoi and Haiphong. General Abrams, the top American commander in Saigon, postponed the strike, citing the urgent requirements of the ground war. Kissinger told Moorer, “When I showed the President Abrams’ message he practically went into orbit.” Moorer sent a top-secret cable to Saigon the next day: THERE ARE OTHER VERY HIGH LEVEL CONSIDERATIONS WHICH DICTATE A FIRM REQUIREMENT FOR A HEAVY AIR STRIKE IN THE HANOI/HAIPHONG AREA DURING THE COMING WEEKEND. The B-52 raids began hours later and lasted for two days.
Nixon intended to blockade the port of Haiphong with mines, to prevent more Soviet arms shipments to the enemy. He wanted the bombings and the blockading to send a blunt message to the Soviets: stop arming Hanoi and support his push for peace with honor.
Kissinger was about to go to Moscow to plan the upcoming summit with the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. “Any sign of weakness on our part might encourage the Soviets to provide more arms in hopes of giving the North Vietnamese a military advantage,” the president told him. “What the Russians wanted to do was to get him to Moscow to discuss the summit. What we wanted to do was to get him to Moscow to discuss Vietnam.” Nixon warned that he might cancel: “It was hard to see how I could go to the summit and be clinking glasses with Brezhnev while Soviet tanks were rumbling through Hue.”
Nixon and Kissinger debated the next move on the morning of April 17 in the Oval Office. Kissinger reported that Moscow was still eager to receive him, even after American bombs had hit Soviet ships and injured Soviet sailors in the port of Haiphong. Nixon was dead-set on convincing the Soviets to help him settle the war. “I have to leave this office in a position as strong as I possibly can because whoever succeeds me—because of lack of experience, or because of lack of character, guts—heading a weaker United States would surrender the whole thing,” he said. This pronouncement was prophetic.
Nixon said he had to think of his legacy. He wanted to be the “Man of Peace,” as he put it. He wanted to create the “Generation of Peace.” Tragically, the war was his only path to peace.
* * *
Kissinger was set to fly to the Soviet Union to plan
for the summit on April 20. But Nixon still balked at striking bargains with the Communists. In the Oval Office, he bluntly told Kissinger to set the terms by which he would talk with his enemies. The president was explicit: if Moscow did not help him end the war, he would obliterate North Vietnam.
“I’ll destroy the goddamn country, believe me. I mean destroy it, if necessary. And let me say, even the nuclear weapon,” Nixon said. “We will bomb the living bejeezus out of North Vietnam, and then if anybody interferes we will threaten the nuclear weapon.… We are not going to let this country be defeated by this little shit-ass country.”
“It’s a gamble, one of these wild things,” Kissinger said. “No other man in this country would have bombed Hanoi and Haiphong having an invitation to Moscow in his pocket.”
Nixon concurred. “There’s no President who could go to Moscow at this time, at a time Moscow is fueling a war that has cost 50,000 Americans. No President could go at this time and come back with an arms control agreement and so forth and sell it to the American people except this President.… This President can deliver.”
Kissinger flew to Moscow with the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, leaving shortly after 1:00 a.m. on April 20 on a presidential aircraft from Andrews Air Force Base, outside Washington. The trip was clandestine: the American ambassador to Moscow, Jacob Beam, never knew Kissinger was coming. Nixon awoke at 3:00 a.m. and began dictating a message to be sent from the White House Situation Room to Kissinger’s aircraft before it landed: “Brezhnev is simple, direct, blunt and brutal. The sophisticated approach we used with the Chinese is neither necessary nor wise with him,” Nixon said. “Brezhnev must directly be told that as long as the invading North Vietnamese are killing South Vietnamese and Americans in the South the President will have to resort to bombing military installations in the North that are supporting that invasion.”
Five hours later, Nixon and Haldeman mulled over the message to Kissinger and the mission to Moscow. “I put this brutally to him, very tough,” Nixon said. He began pounding on his desk. “Goddamn it, he’s got to get it simple, and he’s got to be direct, and he’s got to get them on the subject of Vietnam.… I know these bastards. These people are too smart. And Henry will get his pants taken off.”
“He ends up playing their game instead of ours,” Haldeman said.
“Bob, his eight meetings with the North Vietnamese are not examples of good negotiating,” Nixon said. “Very early in the game you’ve got to hit them in the solar plexus. You’ve got to get their attention. Stick that knife in deep and turn it. Well, that’s what I was doing last night.”
As soon as Haldeman left the Oval Office, Treasury Secretary John Connally entered. He was a unique member of Nixon’s Cabinet. A Democrat, elected governor of Texas in 1963, Connally had been riding in President Kennedy’s limousine when JFK was assassinated in Dallas and was himself shot and grievously wounded that dreadful day. Charming, cunning, silver-haired, silver-tongued, and tough-minded, he had become Nixon’s confidant—so much so that Nixon thought Connally should switch parties and succeed him as president. In June 1972, Connally would resign after only sixteen months at Treasury to raise millions under the banner of “Democrats for Nixon.”
Nixon immediately revealed Kissinger’s secret trip to Moscow and launched into a strategy session, including his plans for blockading Haiphong and bombing Hanoi if the Soviets did not help strike a peace deal. “If they don’t give anything, then we’re going to be up against a hard spot,” Nixon said. “If we go to a blockade, there will be all hell to pay … riots and all that sort of thing. But we will put it on the basis that we’re going to remain until they withdraw their forces from South Vietnam and return our POWs.”
“I think it’s wise,” Connally said. “Tough.”
“They thought that because of the political situation, that I would cave—”
“Right.”
“—as Johnson did.”
“That’s right.”
“But what they didn’t realize is that I know that nobody can be President of this country, and have a viable foreign policy, if the United States suffers a defeat fighting this miserable little Communist country, fueled by Soviet arms, and that the world is going to be a very dangerous place to live in,” Nixon concluded. “This is the supreme test.”
* * *
Kissinger sent an encoded cable from Moscow on April 21. Haig read it to Nixon, who was at Camp David, at 9:35 that night.
“Had 4½ hour meeting with Brezhnev. Atmosphere was extremely cordial, almost effusive. His protestations of eagerness to have the summit no matter what the circumstances was at times almost maudlin, certainly extremely strong. Brezhnev is very forceful, extremely nervous, highly unsubtle, quite intelligent but not in the class of other leaders we have met. His mood can best be summed up in the following concluding quote … ‘I would like very much for you to convey to President Nixon that I can confirm and reconfirm our views and the desire of our government to hold the Soviet-American summit meeting.’”
“That doesn’t mean a thing,” Nixon said. “All that is bullshit.”
On April 26, President Nixon delivered a televised address to the nation on Vietnam. “I have flatly rejected the proposal that we stop the bombing of North Vietnam as a condition for returning to the negotiating table,” he said. “They sold that package to the United States once before, in 1968, and we are not going to buy it again in 1972.” In his memoirs, he writes, “It was a tough speech, and afterward I wished that I had made it even tougher.”
The president left Camp David, flew to Key Biscayne, then took off with Bebe Rebozo to the Bahamas for a bit of respite—swimming, rest and relaxation, drinking. On April 28, reports reached Washington that Quang Tri City was about to fall to North Vietnam. Nixon, from his idyllic retreat, sent a flash message to Kissinger. He ordered the bombing of the North increased to a thousand sorties per day—requiring around-the-clock attacks, with flares illuminating the battlefield at night. Nixon added, “There are to be no excuses and there is no appeal.” He then flew to John Connally’s luxurious ranch outside San Antonio, Texas, to talk about fund-raising for his reelection.
Quang Tri was the first province in South Vietnam to fall. The will of South Vietnam’s military leaders shattered under fire from the Communists. More than five hundred thousand refugees fled south toward Da Nang, the coastal city where marines first landed when the Vietnam War began in 1965. American military barracks became refugee camps. The North Vietnamese pressed south, killing civilians on the road. “People didn’t want to hear about it” back home, said Frederick Brown, the American consul general in Da Nang; the suffering was “overlooked by the American side. We wanted to get the hell out.”
Nixon heard about Quang Tri while at the Connally ranch, on April 30. He dictated orders to Kissinger, who was stopping in Paris for another secret meeting with Hanoi’s delegation: “I intend to cancel the Summit … unless we get a firm commitment from the Russians to announce a joint agreement at the Summit to use our influence to end the war,” Nixon wrote. “We have crossed the Rubicon and now we must win.” He ordered Kissinger to tell the North Vietnamese that “the President has had enough and now you have only one message to give them—Settle or else!” But the peace talks once again went nowhere.
Nixon returned to the White House on May 1. Kissinger gave him a grim report from General Abrams in Saigon. It concluded, “As the pressure has mounted and the battle has become brutal the senior military leadership has begun to bend and in some cases to break. In adversity it is losing its will and cannot be depended on to take the measures necessary to stand and fight.” Kissinger began to read it to the president. Haldeman recorded: “The P kept telling him to get to the point of the summary. Henry finally did. Then the P took the report, read it himself, and we spent quite a little time just talking over the various questions of how the Vietnamese have fallen apart.”
Vietnamization had become a tragic farce. Only American
airpower could turn the tide of the war now. And if the tide did not turn, Nixon said, the fate of his presidency was at stake: “We will lose the country if we lose the war.”
* * *
J. Edgar Hoover died in his sleep before the next dawn. He had run the FBI with an iron hand since 1924, but he had lost his grip in the last year of his life. The president pushed him aside when he refused to carry out the bugging and break-ins that the Plumbers then undertook in his stead. In 1972, the White House logs record, Nixon spoke to Hoover three times for a total of eight minutes. As the end neared, “Hoover experienced loneliness and a fear that his life’s work was being destroyed,” wrote his number three man at the Bureau, Mark Felt.
“He died at the right time, didn’t he?” Nixon said on May 2. “Goddamn, it’d have killed him to lose that office. It would have killed him.”
Hoover’s closed casket lay on a black catafalque in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on a rainy afternoon. Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt sent their Cuban henchmen to beat up antiwar demonstrators who had gathered outside the building to mark Hoover’s passing.
On the morning of May 4, a few minutes after Hoover’s memorial service, the head of the Justice Department, Richard Kleindienst, telephoned a loyal assistant, L. Patrick Gray.
“Pat, I am going to appoint you acting director of the FBI,” he said.
“You have to be joking,” Gray replied.
Gray, crew-cut, bullet-headed, a former naval commander, had known Nixon since 1947. Gray had been chosen for one reason: he was fiercely loyal to the president. He revered him. He soon learned to fear him. He immediately went to the White House, where Nixon gave him some wisdom. “Never, never figure that anyone’s your friend,” the president said. “Never, never, never.… You’ve got to be a conspirator. You’ve got to be totally ruthless.… That, believe me, is the way to run the Bureau.” Gray would learn what Nixon meant by ruthlessness.
