One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (10 page)

Kissinger immediately enlisted an unlikely warrior: Leonard Garment, a Nixon confidant from the New York law firm that had employed the president and John Mitchell, now a White House counselor. Garment was a genial oddball among his straitlaced colleagues: a liberal, a hipster, a musician. He was headed to Moscow to represent the United States at an international jazz festival set for July 14 when Kissinger called him in for a talk.

Kissinger told Garment that, since he was known to be close to Nixon, he would be buttonholed by Soviet intelligence officers seeking insights into the president’s mind. “Convey the impression that Nixon is somewhat ‘crazy,’” Kissinger said, “unpredictable and capable of the bloodiest brutality.” Sure enough, shortly after arriving in Moscow, Garment was invited to meet a delegation led by a senior adviser to the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, including several men whom he assumed to be KGB spies. As directed, Garment told them that Nixon was a madman: “a dramatically disjointed personality … capable of barbaric cruelty … predictably unpredictable, a man full of complex contradictions, a strategic visionary but, when necessary, a coldhearted butcher.”

And “strange to say,” Garment wrote three decades later, “everything I said about Richard Nixon turned out to be more or less true.”

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On July 22, 1969, Nixon took off on an around-the-world tour, beginning with a flight to the South Pacific to witness the return of Apollo 11, the spacecraft that had carried the first men to walk on the moon. After seeing the landing capsule streak like a meteor across the starry night sky, and greeting the astronauts aboard a World War II aircraft carrier, the exuberant president described their journey as “the greatest week in the history of the world since Creation.”

Nixon was embarking on a journey that he hoped would change the geopolitical globe. The next day, July 25, at the Top o’ the Mar officers’ club on the island of Guam, an American territory sixteen hundred miles south of Japan, the president delivered an informal briefing to reporters. He proclaimed a policy soon known as “the Nixon Doctrine.” He said that, apart from nuclear weapons, the military defense of America’s Asian allies would increasingly be the responsibility of those nations themselves, not the United States. This was Vietnamization writ large.

The doctrine was more a public relations play than a master plan. But Nixon emphasized it with foreign leaders and American ambassadors during the first three stops on his tour: the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand. Each nation was ruled by reliably pro-American autocrats. Each played its role in the Vietnam War, providing military bases, combat troops, and weapons.

“We are going through a critical phase for U.S. world leadership,” Nixon told ten American envoys convened at the U.S. embassy in Bangkok. “The American people never wanted to be world leaders in first place and maybe that’s why we have never had a world policy,” he said. “What really rides on Vietnam is whether the U.S. people are going to play a big role in the world or not.”

Stopping next in Saigon, Nixon met with President Thieu again. Thieu wondered if the president’s pronouncement could encourage Russia and China to persuade their comrades in North Vietnam to sign a peace settlement at the Paris peace talks. “We have been using every diplomatic and other device we know to bring pressure on the Soviets,” Nixon said.

China, he said, was another question.

The president’s entourage aboard Air Force One included Haldeman, Kissinger and members of his National Security Council brain trust, and a few trusted senior State Department officers. The president and Kissinger had plans so clandestine, so tightly compartmented, that seatmates had to keep secrets from one another. The Nixon Doctrine had come as “a complete and utter surprise,” said John Holdridge, Kissinger’s top East Asia hand at the NSC. “I was astonished”—even though his close friend and State Department counterpart Marshall Green was on the trip and had drafted the doctrine.

But then, Holdridge had a secret of his own to keep.

“Between Jakarta and Bangkok,” Holdridge recalled, “Henry asked me to draft a cable to the Chinese, proposing that we get together to talk.”

“I very happily sat down and worked. I said that we should not look to the past, but look to the future. There were many things that we had in common. There were many issues that were of mutual value, and we should address them, and let’s get together. I gave the draft to Henry. He looked at it, gave his characteristic grunt, said nothing, turned around, and went back into the Presidential compartment.”

Three days later, on August 1, Nixon met Yahya Khan, the president of Pakistan, a professional soldier who had been his army’s commander in chief. Nixon asked for his help in delivering the cable to China requesting a meeting at the highest levels. Yahya said he would convey the message personally to China’s prime minister, Zhou En-lai.

This was Nixon’s first knock at the door to the Great Wall. As we now know, China was unlocking the door that same month. The heavens were in alignment.

In 1969, Chairman Mao had tasked four senior military marshals to study China’s strategic policy. Throughout the spring and summer, Chinese and Soviet armies had been skirmishing. Moscow was debating whether to bomb China’s nuclear arms facilities. That August, Beijing faced a huge new deployment of Soviet forces massing at China’s border at Kazakhstan. At the very moment Nixon was seeking a secret American rapprochement with China, two of the marshals on Mao’s task force, Chen Yi and Ye Jianying, proposed playing “the card of the United States.” Marshal Chen specifically recommended high-level talks with Washington. Mao accepted their report.

Nixon played the next card on the penultimate stop of his world tour: a meeting with the ruler of Romania, President Nicolae Ceau
ş
escu. Huge crowds chanting, “Neek-zon! Neek-zon!” lined the streets of Bucharest to greet his motorcade. Nixon had a soft spot for the Communist dictator, because he believed Ceau
ş
escu might serve as a mediator between the United States and China. “In 25 years, China will have a billion people,” Nixon told Ceau
ş
escu on August 2. “One billion Chinese fenced in is a bomb about to explode,” he added, “a terribly explosive force that may destroy the peace of that time.” The Romanian agreed to tell his Chinese comrades that, as Nixon put it, the Americans wanted “to open communications channels with them, to establish relations.”

Nixon also asked Ceau
ş
escu to be a diplomatic broker between the United States and the Soviet Union, in part so Moscow could help him deal with Hanoi. “There is nothing more important to me than to end this war on a fair basis,” he said. “It could make possible U.S.-Chinese relations, and would help relations with the Soviet Union. All this is possible.”

Nixon strongly suggested he would escalate the war if North Vietnam did not agree to a peace deal soon. The enemy’s leaders “continue to fight in Vietnam, thinking that public opinion will force us to capitulate,” he told Ceau
ş
escu, speaking more frankly than he did with the American people. By November, Nixon warned, there would be hell to pay if North Vietnam did not make peace: “I never make idle threats; I do say that we can’t indefinitely continue to have 200 deaths per week with no progress in Paris.”

Kissinger split off from the president’s traveling party and went to Paris the next day, delivering through diplomatic channels a letter from Nixon addressed to Ho Chi Minh, the leader of North Vietnam since World War II. The message proposed a new set of negotiations in Paris, to be conducted in a completely clandestine manner by Kissinger himself.

The Pentagon, the State Department, and the CIA were to know nothing about this; Nixon and Kissinger alone would negotiate an end to the war with Ho’s personal emissary from North Vietnam.

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After Nixon’s world tour ended, he retreated to spend a month at the Western White House, La Casa Pacifica in San Clemente. The president tried to relax, but war and crisis kept him anxious and ever restless; twice during August, he awoke in the middle of the night fearing he was having a heart attack.

On August 14, 1969, Nixon convened the National Security Council in San Clemente. Those gathered at the Western White House included Nixon, Kissinger, Rogers, Laird, Helms, and Mitchell.

The main subjects were China and the Soviet Union, whose armies were clashing in a border battle and whose leaders had nuclear weapons at hand. Nixon startled his national security team by taking China’s side. Moscow “may have a ‘knock them off now’ policy,” the president said. “We must think through whether it is a safer world with China down.” Nixon believed it was best to see that the largest Communist nation in the world survived.

Nixon’s fear of a cataclysmic clash between China and Russia was a remarkable foresight. Four days later, William L. Stearman, the State Department’s ranking intelligence expert on Hanoi, who was about to join Kissinger’s staff, sat down to lunch at a Washington hotel with Boris N. Davydov—officially a diplomat, in reality a spy stationed at the Soviet embassy. Such conversations, often stranger than fiction, were part of the unwritten code of conduct between the Cold War combatants.

“Davydov asked point blank what the US would do if the Soviet Union attacked and destroyed China’s nuclear installations,” Stearman wrote in a top-secret memo that went straight to Kissinger. “What would the US do if Peking called for US assistance in the event Chinese nuclear installations were attacked by us?”

Kissinger called a crash meeting in San Clemente with Attorney General Mitchell, CIA covert operations chief Thomas Karamessines, and the handful of senior State and NSC experts he trusted.

If the border battle went nuclear, “the consequences for the US would be incalculable,” Kissinger said. “We must make this very plain to the Soviets despite the US nuclear policy in Europe,” which included an all-out attack with thousands of nuclear weapons if Soviet troops crossed into West Germany. “It would be helpful to know something about what DEFCON should be entered into,” he added, if “the Soviets were to knock out the Chinese nuclear capacity.”
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Three weeks later, both the Soviet Union and China conducted nuclear weapons tests. The cataclysm never came, but it was now clear to all that Moscow and Beijing were implacable enemies.

On August 30, Nixon passed an almost completely pleasant day at San Clemente, swimming and walking on the beach with Bebe Rebozo. Then came a message from Kissinger.

Ho Chi Minh had answered his letter proposing secret peace talks. The reply was defiant.

“The longer the war goes on, the more accumulates the mourning and burdens of the American people,” Ho wrote to Nixon, who underlined the last sentence of this passage.

I am extremely indignant at the losses and destruction caused by the American troops to our people and our country. I am also deeply touched at the rising toll of death of young Americans who have fallen in Vietnam by reason of the policy of American governing circles. Our Vietnamese people are deeply devoted to peace, a real peace with independence and real freedom.
They are determined to fight to the end, without fearing the sacrifices and difficulties in order to defend their country and their sacred national rights
.

Ho Chi Minh—an adopted name meaning “he who enlightens”—was born the son of Vietnamese peasant farmers in 1890, the same year as Eisenhower. He moved to Paris and joined the Communist Party after World War I. He had been an agent of the Soviet Comintern, the global Communist alliance created by Lenin. Moscow helped him establish the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930. At the time of his contact with Nixon, Ho had been fighting for independence for four decades. France had occupied Vietnam and Cambodia and called their colonial land Indochina. Ho defeated the French in May 1954, with military aid from China. That same year, the Americans took up the fight against communism in Vietnam, with small groups of military advisers and intelligence officers. By the time American combat forces invaded Vietnam in 1965, the Soviets, not the Chinese, were Ho’s main military suppliers.

Ho was now seventy-nine, an international symbol of revolutionary warfare, an icon in the Communist world, and, as he wrote to Nixon, “determined to fight to the end” to defeat the United States.

He died three days after Nixon read his letter.

Would Hanoi lose its resolve without its legendary leader? Who would emerge as the enemy’s chief strategist? No one in the White House, the Pentagon, or the CIA had the slightest idea whether Ho’s death would change the course of the war or increase the chance for peace. American intelligence on North Vietnam’s political intentions was at best informed speculation, a fact that drove Richard Nixon mad with rage.

“We tried every operational approach in the book, and committed our most experienced field operatives to the effort to get inside the government in Hanoi,” CIA director Richard Helms wrote long after the war was lost. “Within the Agency, our failure to penetrate the North Vietnamese government was the single most frustrating aspect of those years. We could not determine what was going on at the highest levels of Ho’s government, nor could we learn how policy was made or who was making it.” At the root of this failure was “our national ignorance of Vietnamese history, society, and language,” Helms admitted. Know your enemy is the oldest rule in the book of war; America broke it. Without knowing the enemy’s intentions and capabilities, America’s soldiers and spies were fighting a ghost army in Vietnam—Helms used the word “incubus,” a demon that comes in nightmares—and it stayed shrouded in darkness during a decade of slaughter.

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By the time Nixon returned to Washington on September 9, his resolve to defeat North Vietnam by any means had steeled. “I was ready to use whatever military pressure was necessary to prevent them from taking over South Vietnam by force,” he wrote in his memoirs. “Kissinger and I developed an elaborate orchestration of diplomatic, military, and publicity pressures we would bring to bear on Hanoi.”