One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon

by Tim Weiner

  Haig: “The President regarded Kissinger’s gaffe as a disaster.”

  * * *

  Richard Nixon was reelected president of the United States on Tuesday, November 7, 1972. Though it was the first election in which eighteen-year-olds could vote, the turnout was a mere 55 percent, one of the lowest recorded in the twentieth century. Nearly thirty-four million eligible voters did not bother to cast a ballot for president. But neither the spreading stain of Watergate nor the bloodshed in Vietnam stopped the second-greatest landslide in the history of the presidency. Nixon took forty-nine of the fifty states and won 60.7 percent of the popular vote to McGovern’s 37.5 percent.

  At 2:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Nixon ordered up some bacon and eggs from the White House mess for himself, Haldeman, and Colson. They had a quiet celebration. Later that day, he sent Haig to Saigon to hand-deliver a letter for Nguyen Van Thieu.

  Dear Mr. President:

  On this day after my reelection I wish to reopen our dialogue about the draft agreement to end the war.… For you to pursue what appears to be your present course … would play into the hands of the enemy and would have extremely grave consequences for both our peoples and it would be disaster for yours.

  Not long thereafter, Thieu’s ambassador to the United States, Tran Kim Phuong, came to see Henry Kissinger in the White House. “Your Government has managed to enrage the President almost beyond belief,” Kissinger told him. “Saigon has attacked me as betraying you, and I am attacked here as being a murderer.… Saigon thinks, that clever Kissinger, he wants the Nobel Prize. We will wear him out and get to President Nixon.”

  “It is a tragedy,” Kissinger said. “We have produced a horrible tragedy.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “A hell of a way to end the goddamn war”

  THE DAY after his overwhelming reelection, Richard Nixon summoned every member of his Cabinet to the White House. The president was in a dark mood for a man in a moment of triumph. “I am at a loss to explain the melancholy,” he wrote five years later, but on reflection, he thought the incubus of Vietnam and the impending trial of the Watergate burglars were haunting him.

  Quoting Benjamin Disraeli, Britain’s prime minister a century before, Nixon told his Cabinet that he wanted no “exhausted volcanoes” in his government. He left abruptly. Haldeman rose and told everyone to turn in their resignations, effective by the end of Nixon’s first term in January 1973.

  The president had been planning this for a long time. “We’ve got to really do something regarding a new government,” Nixon had told Haldeman seven weeks before. “Tear the State Department to pieces.… The Treasury bureaucracy is bad and so is Justice.… Helms has got to go and we should get rid of the clowns [at the CIA] by cutting personnel forty percent. The information they develop is worthless.… The real problem is, of course, Defense.… He wants to tell all hands that everybody should resign” the day after the election.

  “It was done in an appallingly brutal way. It just left people stunned,” said George P. Shultz, who served Nixon as secretary of labor and secretary of the treasury. “It was cruel.” Nixon realized in retrospect that “it was a mistake. I did not take into account the chilling effect this action would have.… The situation was compounded by my own isolation at Camp David, where I spent eighteen days in the four weeks after the election.”

  In the solitude of his mountain retreat, Nixon planned to tear down the pillars of the political establishment, rebrand the Republican Party in coalition with conservative Democrats, create what he called a New Majority to last until the end of the twentieth century, and destroy the remnants of LBJ’s Great Society once and for all.

  He began by dismantling his national security team. He fired CIA director Richard Helms. He started to “tear the State Department to pieces” by replacing the career diplomats of the Foreign Service with politically loyal appointees. Nixon vowed to “ruin the Foreign Service. I mean ruin it.” He intended to remove Secretary of Defense Laird and Secretary of State Rogers as soon as possible. Laird was ready to leave—but Rogers was unwilling to resign. “Wants me to talk to Rogers, make the point that … anyone who’s been in for four years should go,” Haldeman noted in his November 14, 1972, diary entry. “Finish in a blaze of glory with the Vietnam peace signing.”

  Nixon even reconsidered the wisdom of retaining Kissinger—whose psychological stability he questioned in solitary conversations with Haldeman and Haig—for the peace he had promised was nowhere at hand.

  “That goddamn Thieu,” Kissinger said in a telephone call to the president at Camp David on November 15. “I don’t see how he can continue to stall,” the president replied. “What in the hell is he going to do?” Thieu’s intransigence had put Hanoi’s leaders in “a very tough frame of mind,” Kissinger said—but “I think at this moment they are less of a problem than Thieu.”

  If Nixon recalled his own conspiracy with Thieu to scuttle the peace talks in 1968, such thoughts went unrecorded.

  * * *

  With grim resolve, Kissinger returned to Paris and presented North Vietnam with a list of sixty-nine proposed changes in the Peace Accords, all intended to mollify America’s ally in Saigon. “The list was so preposterous, it went so far beyond what we had indicated both publicly and privately, that it must have strengthened Hanoi’s already strong temptation to dig in its heels,” Kissinger later admitted.

  Hanoi did so. In response, Nixon dictated a back-channel cable to Kissinger on November 24 with a dramatic threat: I WOULD BE PREPARED TO AUTHORIZE A MASSIVE STRIKE ON THE NORTH if the talks broke off, the president said. The war would go on.

  Nixon knew this was a great risk. WE ALL MUST REALIZE THAT THERE IS NO WAY WHATEVER THAT WE CAN MOBILIZE PUBLIC OPINION BEHIND US. THE COST IN OUR PUBLIC SUPPORT WILL BE MASSIVE, he predicted in the cable. Congress might cut off all funds for combat, Nixon feared; the American people would likely be appalled.

  “It’s just a hell of a way to end the goddamn war,” the president told Haig in the Oval Office on November 30. “I didn’t want the goddamn thing,” the president raged, referring to Kissinger’s “peace is at hand” proclamation. “But you know why he did that? He wanted to make peace before the damned election.”

  That day, the president called the Joint Chiefs, led by Admiral Moorer, to the White House. He told them to develop a plan to bomb North Vietnam as never before if the peace deal did not take hold.

  “Above all,” he said, “B-52s are to be targeted on Hanoi.”

  Nixon saw only one way out: an unprecedented attack by squadrons of B-52 bombers aimed directly at the capital of North Vietnam, civilian casualties be damned.

  “Start bombing the bejeezus out of them,” the president said. “We can go ’til the Congress comes back” from adjournment—after the New Year. “I don’t see any other way we can survive this whole goddamn thing.”

  * * *

  On December 5, Nixon gathered his innermost circle at Camp David—Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and his favorite hard-charging counselor, Chuck Colson—for five days of deliberation over Vietnam. Haldeman wrote that their long talks were “really agony.” The question was “who is to blame for the breakdown? K wants the P to blame North Vietnam” in a televised address to the American people. “The P’s concern is that this just ties him in with a failure.”

  The consensus at Camp David was that Kissinger was on the edge of sanity. Nixon said that “the real problem is we have a weak link as a negotiator,” Haldeman wrote. “He wanted to be sure I read Hutschnecker’s book The Will to Live.” (Arnold Hutschnecker was a psychotherapist whom Nixon had consulted off and on for twenty years.) “He thinks the thesis … is clearly related to K’s suicidal complex.”

  They decided to reject Kissinger’s advice on the Paris talks and tell him “it would be a mistake to break it off and the P to go on TV with chapter and verse as to why the negotiations have failed,” Haldeman recorded. “We’re in the Christmas season now, people feel good, and so on, they do
n’t want to hear all this.” Nixon still had a shred of hope: “The President feels we just can’t spend any more; any more money, lives, time, effort, agony on the war. That we can get out now.… We should keep the hopes alive.”

  * * *

  Hopes were dashed. On December 12, in Saigon, Thieu gave a speech to his legislature flatly rejecting any peace agreement. In Paris, the talks broke off. In Washington, Nixon faced a seismic split within his government.

  That day, Secretary of Defense Laird sent a long and impassioned message to the president arguing for an immediate cease-fire. Laird said he and Admiral Moorer had agreed that Nixon had “only one viable realistic choice. That choice is to sign the agreement now.” Nixon could end the war before Christmas, bring American prisoners of war home, receive an accounting of soldiers missing in action—and let Thieu fend for himself. Otherwise, Laird warned, the president would lose more than support from Congress and the American people: “I am concerned that you are putting in jeopardy your reputation as a world leader and your future effectiveness on the world scene.”

  Nixon did not reply to Laird. At 10:45 a.m. on Thursday, December 14, Admiral Moorer sent word to the air force high command that major attacks against North Vietnam were “definitely on the front burner.”

  At that same hour, Kissinger returned to the White House from Paris, cursing the Vietnamese. “They’re shits,” he said. “Tawdry, miserable, filthy people. They make the Russians look good.”

  “And the Russians make the Chinese look good, I know,” Nixon reasoned with his enraged aide. “You’ve got to remember who the enemy are. The enemy has never changed. The election didn’t change it. The only friends we’ve got, Henry, are a few people of rather moderate education out in this country, and thank God, they’re about 61 percent of the people, who support us,” the president said. “Looking back, we probably should have let it wait ’til the election, and the day after the election: Whack!”

  So began the countdown to the Christmas Bombing of 1972. There would be only one respite once it began. “I don’t want anybody flying over Christmas Day,” Nixon said. “People would not understand that. There’s always been a truce: World War I, World War II, and so forth.”

  The commander in chief said to Kissinger, “Get rested and get ready for all this and go out there and just remember that when it’s toughest, that’s when we’re the best. And remember, we’re going to be around and outlive our enemies. And also, never forget, the press is the enemy.”

  “On that, there’s no question,” said Kissinger.

  “The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy,” Nixon said. “Write that on the blackboard 100 times and never forget it.”

  * * *

  On Saturday night, December 16, Nixon held a Christmas dinner at the White House for his Cabinet heads, for whom he had sharpened the guillotine blades to fall in a few weeks. Anne Armstrong, a Republican National Committee chairwoman newly appointed as a counselor to the president, rose to give a toast. In one breath, she praised Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, and “the P … the man who has done the most for peace in our history,” Haldeman recorded. “A potential awkwardness didn’t seem to develop.”

  The president spoke to Kissinger on December 17. “The whole thing that counts is how we look four years from now and not how we look four weeks from now,” he said. “You see, one of the beauties of doing it now is we don’t have the problem of having to consult with the Congress. Nobody expects me to consult with the Congress before doing what we are going to do tomorrow.”

  “The ’52s will shake them,” Nixon predicted.

  “They are double-loaded,” said Kissinger. “That’s like a 4,000-plane raid in World War Two.… It’s going to break every window in Hanoi.”

  “Just the reverberations? Well, that should tend to shake them up,” Nixon said. “They are going to scream. They always do. They would have screamed otherwise but for the fact that the talks were broken. Now we’ll give them something else to scream about.”

  Nixon went to Camp David at 4:46 p.m. Forty minutes later he telephoned Admiral Moorer at home to give the green light. Moorer wrote in his diary, “He emphasized that ‘the strikes must come off’ and that he did not expect any excuses. I carefully explained to the President … we were constrained in the selection of targets and tactics because of the weather.… He told me he wanted to be ‘damn certain everybody understood this is for keeps.’”

  Nixon called Moorer again “to stiffen his back.” He warned the admiral, “I don’t want any more of this crap about we couldn’t hit this target or that one. This is your chance to use military power effectively to win this war, and if you don’t I’ll consider you responsible.”

  On December 18, at 7:15 p.m., Moorer sent a message to every senior American military commander in the theater of war: “You will be watched on a real-time basis at the highest levels here in Washington. We are counting on all hands to put forth a maximum, repeat maximum, effort in the conduct of this crucial operation. Good luck to all.”

  * * *

  That night, the B-52 bombers struck the capital of Hanoi and the port of Haiphong in three great waves. Over twelve days at Christmas, 714 B-52 sorties dropped fifteen thousand tons of bombs in and around the capital and the port—a force greater than each of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war planes inflicted immense damage, killing and wounding thousands, damaging or destroying North Vietnam’s biggest railways and power plants, and terrorizing the two cities.

  Nixon micromanaged the bombing, demanding more and more strikes on specific targets; Kissinger enforced his orders. “Now that we have crossed the bridge let’s brutalize them,” Kissinger told Moorer on the night of December 19. “You’ll have massive problems with the President” if the attacks subsided.

  North Vietnam struck back with surface-to-air missiles. They brought down a total of fifteen B-52s. Forty-two pilots and crewmen were killed and twenty-four captured. “The P kept coming back to the B-52 loss problem,” Haldeman recorded. “It’s going to be very tough to take.”

  On December 20, Nixon, Kissinger, and Haldeman met in the Oval Office. The president had sent Al Haig back to Saigon, just before the Christmas Bombing started, to try to strong-arm Thieu. “He got kicked in the teeth,” Kissinger reported, referring to Haig. Thieu kept Haig waiting for five hours and then rejected any talk of peace. “What that son-of-a-bitch Thieu has done to us is criminal,” Kissinger said. “There’s almost no way we can get Thieu to go along without doing a Diem on him”—that is, overthrowing him, which was precisely what Hanoi wanted. “Thieu is an unmitigated, selfish, psychopathic son-of-a-bitch,” Nixon said. Nevertheless, “we’ve got to continue the bombing of the North.”

  That same afternoon, ever restless, Nixon flew to Key Biscayne with Kissinger. Nine B-52s were downed over the next forty-eight hours. On December 22 the air force cut its sortie rate to sixty a day, trying to regroup its planes and rest its crews. Nixon was furious.

  “I just came from the President and I have not seen him so outraged since I got in this job,” Kissinger said in a telephone call to Admiral Moorer. “We have got to get the maximum shock effect now!” The admiral wrote in his diary, “This is a helluva way to run a war.”

  Nixon remained in the warm sun of his Florida retreat while Kissinger immediately returned to Washington to watch over the war. Seventy-five B-52s hit Hanoi on December 23; all returned safely. A larger attack was set for Christmas Eve. Kissinger called Nixon that afternoon. “Moorer is preparing a big strike,” the president said.

  “All-out,” Kissinger replied. “We just got a report that they are totally evacuating Hanoi.” Nixon hoped the enemy’s will to fight and “the morale of their people” would be crushed.

  Sleepless, Nixon opened his diary on Christmas Eve and wrote, “This is December 24, 1972—Key Biscayne—4 a.m.”

  “On this day before Christmas it is God’s great gift to
me to have the opportunity to exert leadership, not only for America but on the world,” Nixon wrote. “This, on the one hand, imposes a great responsibility but, of course, at the same time the greatest opportunity an individual could have … the glorious burden of the presidency.”

  On December 26 the bombing resumed. Hanoi buckled under the immense force of the B-52s. Its leaders sent word through Paris that peace talks could resume as soon as the bombing ended. But Nixon wanted to inflict more punishment on the enemy. He did not relent. The B-52 attacks intensified to 115 sorties that day. The president took satisfaction in a readout sent by the French Foreign Ministry from its consul general in Hanoi: “I’ve just lived through the most terrifying hour of my life. An unbelievable raid has just taken place.”

  Nixon returned to the White House. On December 27 he spoke in the Oval Office with Col. Richard T. Kennedy, a senior officer on the National Security Council staff. Colonel Kennedy said he thought North Vietnam might settle, but it would not fall to its knees begging to surrender.

  “Never!” Nixon said.

  “To give the devil his due, the North has come down there, time after time, under the most incredibly difficult circumstances and done well. Now, that’s all a matter of just plain will,” Kennedy said.

  “Sure,” Nixon said. “They’ve got a greater will to win.”

  “We’ve done our best,” the colonel said. “At considerable cost.”

  “God, yes,” said the president. “God, yes. At great cost.”

  That night, Kissinger called to say North Vietnam had said again that it would talk peace if the bombs stopped falling. Nixon and Kissinger agreed that if Hanoi sent a third plea, they would ground the B-52s in thirty-six hours.

  “We gave them a hell of a good bang,” Nixon said with satisfaction. “We’re punishing the hell out of them, aren’t we?”

  On the night of December 28, Colonel Kennedy called Admiral Moorer to report that Hanoi had “swallowed the hook.” On December 29, sixty B-52s struck Hanoi and Haiphong for the last time. Twenty-four hours later, the Nixon administration proclaimed that the Paris peace talks would begin again as early as January 3, 1973—the day Congress reconvened in Washington.