One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (11 page)

The instruments in this orchestra included plans for an all-out attack in Vietnam, a worldwide nuclear alert aimed at the Soviets, and a speech to the American people scheduled for Nixon’s new D-day for the war, November 1.

The president met with Kissinger, Rogers, Laird, Mitchell, and Helms at the White House on September 10 to talk about Vietnam. Kissinger had prepared a deeply pessimistic report for Nixon. “The pressure of public opinion on you to resolve the war quickly will increase—and I believe increase greatly—during the coming months,” it read. “The plans for student demonstrations [beginning] in October are well known, and while many Americans will oppose the students’ activities, they will also be reminded of their own opposition to the continuation of the war.” Nixon underlined that sentence.

“I do not believe that with our current plans we can win the war within two years, although our success or failure in hurting the enemy remains very important,” Kissinger continued. “Hanoi’s adoption of a strategy designed to wait us out fits both with its doctrine of how to fight a revolutionary war and with its expectations about increasingly significant problems for the U.S.” The president underlined those words, too.

Kissinger recommended bombing the enemy so hard that they would sue for peace. He and his staff had been drafting an attack plan code-named Duck Hook, with a “sharp escalation” of violence and “sharp military blows” aimed to force Hanoi to capitulate. An unsigned memo of a Duck Hook meeting Kissinger held in the White House Situation Room showed that Soviet perceptions of Nixon’s rage were part of the plan: “If USSR thinks President is a madman, then they’ve driven him to it and they’d better help calm him down.”

Duck Hook included attacks against twenty-nine major targets in North Vietnam: bombing and mining the country’s main port city, Haiphong, and obliterating six central electric power stations, four airfields, the nation’s major factory plants and warehouses, its principal bridges and rail yards, and the levee system in the Red River Delta, which irrigated the rice fields that fed the nation.

Nixon, Kissinger, and Haldeman flew down to the Florida White House in Key Biscayne to weigh the plan on October 3, the day after the president received it. Haldeman’s handwritten diaries recorded four hours of talks, in which “P” is the president and “K” is Kissinger.

[Nixon held] one of those mystic sessions, which he had obviously thought through ahead of time.… Wants large free chunks of schedule time to work on Vietnam decisions.…

Then had session with K, and he is of course very concerned, feels we only have two alternatives, bug out or accelerate, and that we must escalate or P is lost. He is lost anyway if that fails, which it well may. K still feels main question is whether P can hold the government and the people together for the six months it will take. His contingency plans don’t include the domestic factor.…

It’s obvious from the press and dove buildup that trouble is there, whatever we do.

The dove buildup was imminent and immense. Hundreds of thousands of Americans across the country were about to join peaceful antiwar protests in October. A huge march on Washington would follow in mid-November. Nixon set his speechwriters working on his address to the nation set for November 1. He did not know if he would speak about war or peace.

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Three days after the Key Biscayne meeting, on October 6, Kissinger called Secretary of Defense Mel Laird with a highly unusual request: “Could you exercise the DEFCON?” he asked. “The President will appreciate it very much.” The orders went out to the Joint Chiefs on October 9: immediately prepare “an integrated plan of military actions to demonstrate convincingly to the Soviet Union that the United States is getting ready for any eventuality on or about 1 November 1969.”

As often happened when Kissinger issued orders in the president’s name, Laird wondered what the hell was going on. DEFCON was no exercise: it was a worldwide alert with hundreds of aircraft, thousands of military officers, and many megatons of nuclear weapons placed on high readiness. Nixon wanted to convince the Soviet Union and North Vietnam that the United States was ready to go nuclear to end the Vietnam War by November 1. The global mobilization ran from October 13 to October 30, climaxing in a squadron of B-52 bombers carrying nuclear weapons out of Alaska to the edge of the North Pacific.

Laird, born in 1922, is alive at this writing, as is Kissinger, born in 1923—the last surviving members of Nixon’s inner circle. The documents on the alert were declassified in 2011, but Laird gave an interview about the DEFCON test a decade before. Nixon was playing a gigantic bluff. “This was one of several examples of what some referred to as the ‘madman theory,’” Laird said. The test was intended to show that “you could never put your finger on what he might do next.”

The madman theory’s proofs include the DEFCON test, Haldeman’s memoirs, Kissinger’s instructions to Len Garment to tell the Russians that Nixon was crazy, and the Duck Hook plans, which aimed to show the president as “a madman.”

Nixon believed that Eisenhower had ended the Korean War in 1953 with a secret signal sent through diplomatic channels that he might nuke Pyongyang unless the Communists sued for peace. Hard proof of that harsh threat is lacking, but brinkmanship was at the core of American foreign policy for much of the Cold War.

Nixon was probing for a reaction from Moscow that would signal a stand-down by their comrades in North Vietnam. But Hanoi’s leaders, the Politburo that succeeded Ho’s death, showed no sign that their will to win had changed. Nixon’s idea that he could coerce peace through violence started to crumble. He rejected twelve drafts of the war speech he intended to give on November 1. A late draft announced punishing bombings against North Vietnam, promised more if the enemy would not talk peace, and pronounced the attacks the most inescapable decision of his life. Nixon ripped up all his speechwriters’ drafts, canceled Duck Hook, wrote an entirely new speech, and delivered it to millions of people on television on November 3.

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He read from a typed text, grim-faced, a golden curtain behind him, a television camera’s eye staring at him.

“Tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support,” he said. “I pledged in my campaign for the Presidency to end the war in a way that we could win the peace. I have initiated a plan of action which will enable me to keep that pledge. The more support I can have from the American people, the sooner that pledge can be redeemed; for the more divided we are at home, the less likely the enemy is to negotiate at Paris. Let us be united for peace. Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.”

The “silent majority” was a phrase with a long provenance. For centuries, it had been used to eulogize the dead. In 1902, Supreme Court justice John Marshall Harlan spoke of the Civil War combatants who “long ago passed over to the silent majority.” The peace marchers were coming to Washington in memory of the dead in Vietnam—and they forced Nixon to cancel the planned attacks at the last minute.

The three-day gathering in Washington culminated in a candlelight march on the evening of November 14, each of tens of thousands of silent protesters carrying a small flame and the name of an American soldier killed or a Vietnamese village destroyed in the war; on the following day, 325,000 people gathered around the Washington Monument, the largest political protest in the history of the United States.

On the night of the candlelight march, three of Kissinger’s staff were down in the basement of the White House working late on another speech about the war. One of them, William Watts, stepped out of the Southwest Gate one flight up to light a cigarette. He looked out at the silent line of illumination in the street. He saw his wife and his three daughters, holding candles, marching against the war.

He thought, “I am on the inside, the enemy.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

“Don’t strike a king unless you intend to kill him”

N
IXON BELIEVED
that the fate of the United States depended on defeating the nation that Kissinger called “a fifth-rate agricultural power.” It was a question of national survival.

“If we fail we have had it,” the president told the Joint Chiefs, Kissinger, Mitchell, and Laird on October 11, as the big antiwar protests began. Adm. Thomas H. Moorer of the Joint Chiefs wrote in his diary after the meeting, “The President stated that a great power must go on this basis: ‘Don’t strike a king unless you intend to kill him.’” Nixon did not intend to be killed by skinny guerrillas in black pajamas.

When Nixon took the oath of office, Vietnam had been LBJ’s war. It was Nixon’s now. Seeing no path to peace with honor, he was looking for ways to win it and demanded new plans for victory through firepower. At the start of 1970, he contemplated sending the fearsome fleets of B-52s (each equipped to carry sixty thousand pounds of bombs) to strike North Vietnam’s soldiers as they traveled south along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The Ho Chi Minh Trail was the Communists’ essential supply line—a network of hundreds of interwoven pathways running from North Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia into South Vietnam. Soldiers moved on foot, on bicycles, oxcarts, horses, and occasionally elephants, carrying food, weapons, and military materiel. The trail kept the Communists armed and fed as they went into battle against South Vietnam. As American involvement in the war escalated, the trail system moved westward, away from the border of South Vietnam and deeper into Laos and Cambodia, where canopied jungles provided cover from air attacks and concealment for camps.

The U.S. Air Force had struck the trail since 1965, to little avail. The CIA had been fighting a secret war, alongside Laotian paramilitary fighters, using the tribesmen’s knowledge of the steep terrain and dense forests. They sought to sever the trail, with little success. American war planes had been bombing the Communists’ Cambodian encampments for months. Returning pilots reported that they were blowing holes in the jungle, which seemed an apt image for the air war. The U.S. embassy had no ambassador or CIA officers in Cambodia, so information on what was happening there was scant.

The Ho Chi Minh Trail might have looked like nothing more than a network of primitive footpaths, but it proved to be one of the most potent factors in the war. To sever the trail, and kill the enemy soldiers who traveled on it, American aircraft would have to drop many more bombs in disguised raids beyond the battlefronts of Vietnam, the CIA would have to step up paramilitary missions in Laos, and Communist camps in Cambodia would have to be attacked with ground troops.

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Nixon’s decisions balanced on a knife edge. He could make tangible military gains on the battlefront at an incalculable political cost on the home front. There would be hell to pay if Congress and the American people found out that the war was being fought far beyond the borders of Vietnam.

“We have the following problem,” Kissinger told President Nixon on January 26, 1970. “The North Vietnamese are building up a large concentration in Northern Laos. There are 14,000 troops.” But, Kissinger warned, “we have not used B-52s in Northern Laos before. There were no targets there.”

“What if it comes out?” Nixon asked. Then he answered his own question: “Fighting the war in Laos … that’s the problem.”

Nonetheless, Nixon approved B-52 strikes on February 17. U.S. Air Force bomb-damage assessment teams reported the next day that the dead were too many to count; drinking water was scarce for many square miles as “rotting cadavers had contaminated the region’s streams.” Thousands of soldiers and villagers died; a biblical flood of refugees walked many miles from their homes seeking food, water, and shelter. But “the bombing was basically ineffectual,” said Charles E. Rushing, then the political counselor at the American embassy in Laos. Though the Communists suffered “stunning casualties,” Rushing remembered, “it didn’t stop them.”

The American press in Saigon quickly reported the attack, citing Pentagon sources. Nixon’s wrath at this leak was immense; he tongue-lashed Admiral Moorer, the incoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The president was so angry that the admiral feared Nixon would never authorize another carpet bombing. He was dead wrong.

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One secret stayed secret during 1970: Kissinger’s private negotiations in Paris with Le Duc Tho, a senior leader of the Politburo of North Vietnam, which had accepted the American proposal for clandestine peace talks. No one in the Nixon administration outside the president, Kissinger, and a handful of aides was aware that these meetings, held at a villa outside Paris, were taking place—not the secretary of defense, not the secretary of state, not the director of central intelligence.

Le Duc Tho became, through these talks, the chief representative of North Vietnam after the death of Ho Chi Minh. He was fifty-nine years old, white-haired, black-suited, battle-hardened. He had been a revolutionary for forty years, serving as a soldier, a politician, and a diplomat. On February 21 he made the most straightforward declaration to Kissinger that would take place during their talks, which would continue for three more years.

“In this war we have had many hardships,” Tho said. “But we have won the war. You have failed.”

Kissinger was shocked. “What?” he sputtered.

“We have won the war,” Tho repeated. “You have lost the war, the longest and most costly in your history. This is not just our own view. Americans also think that.”

“If you prolong the war, we have to continue to fight,” he told Kissinger. “If you intensify the war in South Vietnam, if you even resume bombing North Vietnam, we are prepared. We are determined.”

“This is our iron will,” he said. “We have been fighting for 25 years, the French and you. You wanted to quench our spirit with bombs and shells. But they cannot force us to submit. You have threatened us many times.… President Nixon also threatens us.”