One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon

by Tim Weiner

  “I cannot impress upon you”: Moorer to Admiral McCain and General Abrams, April 8, 1972. Nixon called Admiral Moorer into the White House the following week and told him, “American foreign policy is on the line, as I’m sure you know … and putting it in melodramatic terms, the honor of the armed services of this country. The United States with all of its power has had 50,000 dead. If we get run out of this place now, confidence in the armed services will be like a snake’s belly. So we can’t let it happen.… Don’t lose. That’s all. It’s the only order you’ve got” (April 17, 1972, NWHT, Oval Office).

  “The P called him and really laid it to him”: April 6, 1972, entry in Haldeman Diaries.

  “break the North Vietnamese”: April 10, 1972, entry in Haldeman Diaries.

  “When I showed the President Abrams’ message”: April 15, 1972, entry in Moorer Diary, FRUS VIII: Vietnam, January–October 1972.

  “Any sign of weakness on our part”: Nixon, RN, pp. 588–91 and 601.

  “I have to leave this office”: April 17, 1972, NWHT, Oval Office.

  “I’ll destroy the goddamn country”: April 19, 1972, NWHT, Oval Office.

  “Brezhnev is simple, direct, blunt and brutal”: FRUS XIV: Soviet Union, October 1971–May 1972. Rose Mary Woods transcribed the memorandum from Nixon’s taped dictation. Copies of the final version are on file in the Nixon Library. A stamped notation indicates that the White House Situation Room sent the message at 12:03 p.m. on April 20, 1972. Kissinger was on the plane heading for Moscow when the president’s memorandum arrived.

  “I put this brutally”: April 20, 1972, NWHT, Oval Office.

  “If they don’t give anything”: Ibid.

  “All that is bullshit”: Transcript of telephone conversation between President Nixon and Haig, April 21, 1972, FRUS XIV: Soviet Union.

  “It was a tough speech”: Nixon, RN, p. 593.

  “There are to be no excuses and there is no appeal”: Kissinger to Laird, April 28, 1972, FRUS VIII: Vietnam. The president had spent the day in the Bahamas and Key Biscayne. The full text of the message from Kissinger to Laird reads:

  We have just received the following flash message from the President:

  Immediate

  From: The President

  To: Henry Kissinger

  1. The absolute maximum number of sorties must be flown from now thru Tuesday.

  2. Abrams to determine targets.

  3. If at all possible 1,000 sorties per day.

  4. This will have maximum psychological effect.

  5. Give me report soonest by message as to how this order is being specifically executed.

  6. There are to be no excuses and there is no appeal.

  “People didn’t want to hear about it”: Brown oral history, FAOH.

  “I intend to cancel the Summit”: Nixon to Kissinger, April 30, 1972, from Connally ranch in Texas, FRUS XIV: Soviet Union.

  “As the pressure has mounted”: Kissinger to Nixon, “SUBJECT: General Abrams’ Assessment of the Situation in Vietnam,” May 1, 1972, Washington, DC, FRUS VIII: Vietnam.

  “The P kept telling him”: May 1, 1972, entry in Haldeman Diaries.

  “We will lose the country if we lose the war”: May 4, 1972, entry in ibid.

  “Hoover experienced loneliness”: Mark Felt and John O’Connor, A G-Man’s Life (New York: Public Affairs, 2006), p. 160.

  “He died at the right time”: June 2, 1972, NWHT, White House.

  “Pat, I am going to appoint you”: L. Patrick Gray III with Ed Gray, In Nixon’s Web: A Year in the Crosshairs of Watergate (New York: Times Books, 2008), pp. 17–18.

  “Never, never figure that anyone’s your friend”: May 4, 1972, NWHT, White House.

  “We were now faced with three alternatives” … “The more the P thought about it”: May 4, 1972, entry in Haldeman Diaries.

  “Admiral, what I am going to say to you now is in total confidence”: May 4, 1972, NWHT, Old Executive Office Building.

  “The P very strongly put the thing”: May 4, 1972, entry in Haldeman Diaries.

  “We’ve had a damned good foreign policy”: May 5, 1972, NWHT, Oval Office.

  “I still think we ought to take the dikes out now”: April 25, 1972, NWHT, Old Executive Office Building.

  “The best way to assure that we could win was to pick our opponent”: April 29, 1972, entry in Haldeman Diaries.

  “The real question is whether the Americans give a damn anymore”: Memorandum for the president’s files, May 8, 1972, “SUBJECT: National Security Council Meeting,” FRUS VIII: Vietnam.

  “We now have a clear, hard choice”: President’s Address to the Nation on the Situation in Southeast Asia, May 8, 1972, Public Papers of Richard Nixon.

  “I have determined that we should go for broke”: Memorandum from Nixon to Kissinger, May 9, 1972, Washington, DC, FRUS VIII: Vietnam.

  “the biggest dogfight since World War Two”: Washington Special Actions Group meeting, May 10, 1972, Washington, DC, “SUBJECT: Vietnam,” FRUS VIII: Vietnam.

  “The record of World War II”: Helms to Kissinger, Aug. 22, 1972, “An Assessment of the US Bombing and Mining Campaign in North Vietnam,” FRUS VIII: Vietnam. The full text of the cover note Helm wrote on this assessment reads: “The record of World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam since 1965 strongly suggests that bombing alone is unlikely to transcend the realm of severe harassment and achieve true interdiction in the sense of stopping the movement of supplies a determined, resourceful enemy deems essential and is willing to pay almost any price to move.”

  “I want you to convey directly”: Nixon to Kissinger and Haig, May 19, 1972, Washington, DC, HAK/President Memos, Top Secret/Eyes Only, NSC Files, Nixon Library.

  18: “Palace intrigue”

  “guide the course of history”: Churchill quoted in Raymond A. Callahan, Churchill: Retreat from Empire (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1984), p. 185.

  “The problem with the relationship”: Toon oral history, FAOH.

  “Pretty scary”: May 11, 1969, entry in Haldeman Diaries.

  “I read last night the whole SALT thing.… There’s an awful lot still left to be worked out”: May 19, 1972, NWHT, Oval Office.

  “We have a few snags”: May 19, 1972, Kissinger Telephone Conversations.

  “indispensable”: Conversation among President Nixon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary of Defense Laird, and others, Aug. 10, 1971, Washington, DC, FRUS XXXII: SALT I, 1969–1972.

  “there would be no limitations on MIRVs”: Memorandum, July 31, 1970, Washington, DC, “Detailed Statement of the Provisions of U.S. SALT Position,” FRUS XXXII: SALT I.

  “Never before have nations limited the weapons on which their survival depends”: Kissinger to Nixon, Tuesday, May 23, 1972, “SUBJECT: Your Moscow Discussions,” FRUS XIV: Soviet Union.

  “The fact that the two great adversaries could sit down”: Garthoff oral history, FAOH.

  “P was whisked off”: May 22, 1972, entry in Haldeman Diaries.

  “The war which the United States” … “a confidential talk”: Memorandum of conversation, Brezhnev and Nixon, May 22, 1972, Moscow, FRUS XIV: Soviet Union.

  “We are great powers”: Box 75, President’s Speech File, “May 22–29, 1972, Russia,” President’s Personal Files, White House Special Files, Nixon Library.

  “We are both civilized men”: Memorandum of conversation, Brezhnev and Nixon, transcribed from Kissinger’s notes, FRUS XIV: Soviet Union.

  “That the President of the United States”: Gerald C. Smith, Doubletalk: The Story of the First Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (New York: Doubleday, 1980), p. 414.

  “the single most emotional meeting”: June 2, 1972, NWHT, Oval Office.

  “Why don’t we go see it right now?”: Nixon, RN, p. 612.

  “all of a sudden the P and Brezhnev”: May 24, 1972, entry in Haldeman Diaries.

  “Followed by Nixon’s own car”: Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1223.

  “We certainly did
not choose,” “We want to sign important documents,” and “Our people want peace”: Memorandum of conversation, May 24, 1972, “SUBJECT: Vietnam,” Moscow, FRUS XIV: Soviet Union.

  “after the motorcade”: Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 1228–29.

  “The real problem”: Back-channel message from Haig to Kissinger in Moscow, May 25, 1972, Washington, DC, FRUS XIV: Soviet Union.

  “There is no room for additional compromise”: Memorandum of conversations, May 25, 1972, 5:20–6:35 p.m. and 11:30 p.m.–12:32 a.m., Moscow, “SUBJECT: SALT,” FRUS XXXII: SALT I.

  Kissinger wrote in his memoirs that before the SALT discussions resumed at 5:20 p.m. (with, as usual, only a half hour’s warning), he and his staff were “frantically analyzing various combinations of figures; the permutations seemed endless, but [they] had to ensure that the Soviets dismantled the maximum number of missiles. The numbers game of submarine baselines—how many could be traded in, and when they would reach different levels by various combinations of twelve-tube and sixteen-tube boats—forced us into numerous computations on long yellow pads, drawn up between sessions and then quickly scratched up and consumed during meetings.” After the midnight meeting, Kissinger went to Nixon’s Kremlin residence and reported that the talks had reached an impasse that only the Soviets could break. But he was “fairly confident” that the Soviets would accept the final U.S. proposal: “They could not permit a negotiation that lasted nearly three years to go down the drain” over the issues of silo dimensions and submarine missiles (White House Years, pp. 1236–40).

  “There are two questions left open from yesterday”: Memorandum of conversation, May 26, 1972, Moscow, “SUBJECTS: SALT; Communiqué,” FRUS XIV: Soviet Union.

  “In his compulsive need to control events, Kissinger had deceived everybody”: Jaeger oral history, FAOH.

  “Not one U.S. program was stopped by SALT”: Minutes of a meeting of the Verification Panel, April 23, 1974, Washington, DC, FRUS XXXIII: SALT II, 1972–1980.

  “The MIRV explosion”: William G. Hyland, Mortal Rivals: Superpower Relations from Nixon to Reagan (New York: Random House, 1987), p. 54.

  “I wish I had thought through the implications of a MIRVed world”: Kissinger background briefing, Dec. 3, 1971, cited in Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), p. 322.

  “an explosive one”: Memorandum of conversation, May 22, 1972, Moscow, FRUS XIV: Soviet Union.

  “There are in the world today” … “whose are being cut”: Memorandum of conversation, May 26, 1972, Moscow, FRUS XIV: Soviet Union.

  “The Americans really are miracle workers!”: Nixon, RN, p. 616.

  “not for a summit of one summer”: President Nixon’s notes for an address to a Joint Session of the Congress on June 1, White House Special Files, Nixon Library, and President’s address to a joint session of the Congress on return from Austria, the Soviet Union, Iran, and Poland, June 1, 1972, Public Papers of Richard Nixon.

  “How would you see it” and “It would be very constructive”: Memorandum of conversation among Brezhnev, Nixon, and Kissinger, May 29, 1972, Moscow, FRUS XIV: Soviet Union.

  “the President agreed to furnish Iran with laser bombs and F-14s and F-15s”: Memorandum of conversation, May 31, 1972, 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m., Saadabad Palace, Tehran, Iran, Participants: Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, shah of Iran; the president; Dr. Henry A. Kissinger, FRUS E-4: Documents on Iran and Iraq, 1969–1972.

  “all available sophisticated weapons short of the atomic bomb”: Harold Saunders of the National Security Council staff to Kissinger, June 12, 1972, Washington, DC, FRUS E-4: Documents on Iran and Iraq.

  “That was a fateful, disastrous step”: Killgore oral history, FAOH.

  “He wanted a conversation with His Imperial Majesty”: Farland oral history, FAOH.

  19: “We have produced a horrible tragedy”

  “We got back into the Democratic break-in again”: June 20, 1972, entry in Haldeman Diaries.

  “What’s the dope on the Watergate incident?”: June 21, 1972, Nixon White House Tapes, Oval Office.

  “Good deal!”: June 23, 1972, NWHT, Oval Office.

  “These should never see the light of day”: Gray, In Nixon’s Web, pp. 81–82. Dean corroborated Gray’s account in his Watergate testimony.

  “President Johnson told me”: Haig to Kissinger, June 18, 1972, FRUS VIII: Vietnam.

  “This arrogant son of a bitch is a traitor”: Colson personal letter to Jay Lovestone, April 29, 1972. Lovestone, once a leader in the Communist Party of the United States, had become the fervently anticommunist director of the international division of the AFL/CIO; his office was jokingly called the AFL/CIA because Lovestone had worked closely with the Agency in the 1950s.

  “Assault Book”: Memorandum from Patrick Buchanan (with Ken Khachigian) for Nixon and Haldeman, June 8, 1972, Subject: “Assault Strategy,” reprinted in From: The President: Richard Nixon’s Secret Files, edited by Bruce Oudes (New York: Harper and Row, 1989), pp. 463–74.

  “It was a nightmare for me”: McGovern oral history, Strober and Strober, Nixon, p. 264.

  “We’re sitting on a powder keg”: Aug. 1, 1972, NWHT, Oval Office.

  “if you stay ten points ahead” … “a settlement by Election Day”: Aug. 2, 1972, NWHT, Oval Office.

  “What in the name of God are we doing on this score?” … “We have all this power”: Aug. 3, 1972, NWHT, Oval Office.

  “All of our people are gun-shy”: Aug. 3, 1972, entry in President’s Daily Diary.

  “My eyes burned from the lingering sting of tear gas”: Nixon, RN, p. 678.

  “Bad news”: Ibid., pp. 679–80.

  “Well, you had quite a day today, didn’t you?”: Sept. 15, 1972, NWHT, Oval Office.

  “hurt all of us deeply”: Bolz oral history, FBI.

  “I knew somebody would break”: Oct. 19, 1972, NWHT, Oval Office.

  “He said: ‘You have to tell us’”: Ibid.

  “We set up dinner on the Sequoia”: Sept. 28, 1972, entry in Haldeman Diaries.

  “I know we have to end the war” … “He’s made these tough decisions”: Sept. 29, 1972, NWHT, Oval Office.

  “We have a major crisis with Thieu” … “And cram it down his throat”: Transcript of a telephone conversation between President Nixon and Kissinger, Oct. 4, 1972, Library of Congress, Kissinger Papers. The President’s Daily Diary says Nixon was at Camp David when he placed the call, and Kissinger was in Washington.

  “We must concentrate our efforts on doing whatever it takes to resolve our first objective”: Doan Huyen, “Defeating the Americans: Fighting and Talking,” in The Diplomatic Front During the Paris Peace Talks on Vietnam, edited by Vu Son Thuy, translated by Merle Pribbenow (Hanoi: National Political Publishing House, 2004), pp. 138–40.

  “Well, you got three out of three, Mr. President”: Oct. 12, 1972, NWHT, Old Executive Office Building.

  “The P kept interrupting Henry”: Oct. 12, 1972, entry in Haldeman Diaries.

  “The Vietnam deal”: Oct. 22, 1972, entry in ibid.

  “Thieu has just rejected the entire plan”: Back-channel message from Kissinger to Haig (Hakto 37/215), Oct. 22, 1972, Saigon.

  “It is hard to exaggerate”: Back-channel message from Kissinger to Haig (Hakto 41/219), Oct. 22, 1972, Saigon.

  “The South Vietnamese people will assume that we have been sold out”: Bunker to Haig, Oct. 22, 1972, Saigon.

  “I knew immediately”: Nixon, RN, p. 705.

  “Peace is at hand”: Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1400.

  “The President regarded Kissinger’s gaffe as a disaster”: Haig, Inner Circles, p. 302.

  “Your Government has managed to enrage the President”: Memorandum of conversation: Henry A. Kissinger; Winston Lord; Tran Kim Phuong, ambassador of the Republic of Vietnam to the United States, Jan. 3, 1973, Washington, DC.

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

  “I am at a loss to expl
ain”: Nixon, RN, p. 717.

  “We’ve got to really do something regarding a new government”: Sept. 20, 1972, entry in Haldeman Diaries.

  “It was done in an appallingly brutal way”: Schultz oral history, Strober and Strober, Nixon, p. 272.

  “it was a mistake”: Nixon, RN, p. 769.

  “ruin the Foreign Service”: Nov. 13, 1972, NWHT, Oval Office.

  “That goddamn Thieu”: Nov. 15, 1972, Kissinger telephone conversations, Nixon Library.

  “The list was so preposterous”: Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1417.

  I WOULD BE PREPARED TO AUTHORIZE A MASSIVE STRIKE: Back-channel message from Nixon to Kissinger in Paris (Tohak 78), Nov. 24, 1972.

  “It’s just a hell of a way to end the goddamn war”: Nov. 30, 1972, NWHT, Oval Office.

  “Above all” … “Start bombing the bejeezus”: Haig memorandum, Nov. 30, 1972, “SUBJECT: The President’s Meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” FRUS IX: Vietnam, October 1972–January 1973.

  “really agony” … “keep the hopes alive”: Dec. 5–8, 1972, entries in Haldeman Diaries.

  “only one viable realistic choice”: Memo from Secretary of Defense Laird to President Nixon, Dec. 12, 1972, Washington, DC, “SUBJECT: Ceasefire Agreement.”

  “definitely on the front burner”: Dec. 13 and 14, 1972, entries in Moorer Diary.

  “They’re shits” … “and never forget it”: Dec. 14, 1972, NWHT, Oval Office.

  “the P”: Dec. 16, 1972, entry in Haldeman Diaries.

  “The whole thing that counts”: Dec. 17, 1972, Kissinger Telephone Conversations.

  “He emphasized that ‘the strikes must come off’” … “‘damn certain everybody understood’”: Dec. 17 and 18, 1972, entries in Moorer Diary.

  “to stiffen his back” … “any more of this crap”: Nixon, RN, pp. 734–35.

  “You will be watched on a real-time basis”: Dec. 18, 1972, entry in Moorer Diary.

  “Now that we have crossed the bridge let’s brutalize them”: Telephone conversation between Moorer and Kissinger, Dec. 19, 1972, entry in Moorer Diary.

  “The P kept coming back to the B-52 loss problem”: Dec. 20, 1973, entry in Haldeman Diaries.