One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (19 page)

The president and his aides, having read what had been published before the injunction, now had a fuller grasp on the potential political power of the Pentagon Papers. “You can blackmail Johnson on this stuff,” Haldeman told Nixon in the Oval Office on June 17. He was sure the Papers contained the inside story of the October 1968 bombing halt and the confrontation over Nixon’s suspected sabotage of Johnson’s peace plan. The Papers, as the Sunday
Times
story had noted, also revealed that the Kennedy administration had aided and abetted the military coup that led to the killing of President Diem of South Vietnam in November 1963, only three weeks before JFK was assassinated.

Nixon wanted a copy of the Papers, but no one in his administration seemed to know how to find one. The White House intelligence staffer Tom Charles Huston, the man behind the highly illegal Huston Plan for break-ins and bugging, was convinced that the Papers’ principal author, Les Gelb, had a set locked away at the Brookings Institution, along with a study of LBJ’s October 1968 bombing halt.

“Do you remember Huston’s plan? Implement it,” President Nixon ordered Haldeman and Ehrlichman, in Kissinger’s presence. “I mean, I want it implemented on a thievery basis. Goddamn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.” Brookings never was burglarized, but other plans to commit crimes in the name of national security began taking shape within a few days.

On June 28, Ellsberg gave himself up at the federal courthouse in Boston. He faced up to 115 years in prison under the Espionage Act. He said, “As an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public. I did this clearly at my own jeopardy and I am prepared to answer to all the consequences.” He was the Edward Snowden of his day, with a crucial difference: he chose not to flee but to stand and fight.

On June 30 the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 for the
Times
. “Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government,” Justice Hugo Black wrote in his concurring opinion. By then, Nixon had already taken the first steps to create a White House task force to carry out the purpose of the Huston Plan: the Special Investigations Unit. As the president ordered, it would implement the plan: break-ins, burglaries, bugging. Assigned to stop the leaks that exposed deception in government, the unit inevitably became known as the Plumbers.

*   *   *

“You need a commander” for these missions, Nixon told Haldeman on July 1. It could not be John Mitchell: “It just repels him to do these horrible things.” It could not be John Ehrlichman: “He’s got to decide whether we’re going to pollute Lake Erie or some damn thing.”

Then Nixon had an inspiration: “It could be Colson.”

Nixon called Ehrlichman and Chuck Colson into the Oval Office. Colson told the president he had just the man for the job. “He’s hard as nails,” Colson said. “His name is Howard Hunt.” Colson’s friend since college, E. Howard Hunt was fifty, graying, and washed up after two decades at the CIA. His career in the world of covert operations had gone off the rails after the Bay of Pigs invasion, when 1,189 Cuban exiles trained by Hunt and his colleagues died trying to overthrow Fidel Castro in 1961. He had made a second living writing spy novels and working as a shadowy security consultant.

Colson said Hunt had admired Nixon since the investigation and prosecution of Alger Hiss. Nixon approved heartily: he said he wanted to go after Ellsberg “just like I took on the Hiss case.” Hunt would become a White House consultant, effective immediately, with a desk and a safe in the Executive Office Building, under Colson’s command.

“We’re up against an enemy, a conspiracy,” Nixon declared. “They are using any means.
We are going to use any means.
Is that clear?” That was Richard Nixon at his worst, playing politics as a game without rules.

The world was about to witness the president at his best, a political genius and grand strategist, bringing secrets to light, and to immense acclaim.

On that same day, July 1, Nixon gave Kissinger his marching orders for his secret mission to China.

“I just want to make that big play,” he told Kissinger.

“Mr. President,” Kissinger replied, “it’s the big play.”

The mission was to set a meeting in Beijing in 1972. The Soviets would then be compelled to invite Nixon to a Moscow summit, and to settle their differences on everything from nuclear weapons to the war in Vietnam. Finally—and this was the greatest hope—Moscow and Beijing together would help the United States end the war in time for Nixon’s reelection in November 1972.

Nixon ordered Kissinger to emphasize “fears of what the president might do in the event of continued stalemate in the South Vietnam war.” Nixon said, “We’re not going to turn the country over—17 million people—over to the Communists against their will … with the bloodbath that would be sure to follow.”

The two had agreed earlier on using the “madman” gambit in the next round of negotiations with North Vietnam. “You can say ‘I cannot control him.’ Put it that way,” Nixon said.

“Imply that you might use nuclear weapons,” Kissinger responded.

“Yes,” the president said.

The China trip had been two years in the making. On August 1, 1969, on a visit to Pakistan, Nixon had asked President Yahya Khan to deliver the proposal for a meeting to China’s prime minister, Zhou En-lai. On October 25, 1970, the two presidents had met again, at the White House. “I understand you are going to Beijing,” Nixon said to Yahya. “It is essential that we open negotiations with China.”

On May Day 1971 a message from Zhou En-lai had arrived, sent through Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States: “The Chinese Government reaffirms its willingness to receive publicly in Beijing a Special Envoy of the president of the U.S. (for instance, Mr. Kissinger) or the U.S. Secretary of State or even the president of the U.S. himself for a direct meeting and discussions,” it read. “It is entirely possible for proper arrangements to be made through the good offices of President Yahya Khan” of Pakistan.

Who would go first, Nixon or Kissinger? “President Nixon was ambivalent,” said Kissinger’s top assistant, Winston Lord. “It might take away from the drama” if his national security adviser made the first contact. “Of course, from the beginning, Kissinger wanted to go. He thought that he was the best person to handle it, and I think that he was. Not to mention Kissinger’s ego, sense of history, and so on.”

Hours after the message from Zhou En-Lai arrived, Kissinger sent a cryptic cable to the American ambassador in Pakistan, Joseph Farland, summoning him to a meeting in Palm Springs, California. The ambassador was familiar with foreign intrigues—a former FBI agent, he had served on sensitive diplomatic and intelligence missions for many years—but “this was about as mysterious as you can get,” he recounted in a State Department oral history.

He flew across the Pacific to Los Angeles, where he was met on the tarmac by a twin-engine jet. “I was trying to figure out whose plane this was,” said Farland. “I was looking in the ashtrays to see if there were any paper matches or anything else. It appeared that it was [Frank] Sinatra’s plane.” In Palm Springs, at the home of a wealthy Republican campaign contributor, Farland met Kissinger, relaxing on the patio in a sport shirt with a drink in his hand.

“I was anything but relaxed,” the ambassador recounted. “I said, ‘Henry, I’ve come halfway around this damn earth and I don’t know why.’”

Kissinger said he had plans for an around-the-world trip, first stop Saigon, then India and Pakistan, then Paris. Once he got to Pakistan, “I want you to put me into China,” he told Farland. The ambassador had two months to figure out how to smuggle Kissinger into Beijing undetected by the press.

“On the way back, I thought of nothing else but how to do it,” Farland said. He devised an elaborate scheme to allow Kissinger to seem to disappear for two to three days, using a cottage controlled by his embassy in the town of Murree, a former hill station of the British Raj outside the capital. The question remained: how to fly him into China in secret, keeping the possibility of an American rapprochement under cover.

Ambassador Farland went to see President Yahya after many a sleepless night. “I have something very serious to talk to you about,” he said. Yahya grinned. “I said, ‘Do you know what I’m going to talk about?’ He said, ‘I think I do.’ I said, ‘Has somebody been talking to you?’ He said, ‘Somebody has been talking.’ I said, ‘I need one of your airplanes to fly to China.’ He said, ‘You have it.’”

Kissinger back-channeled a message to Zhou En-lai saying he would be flying in a Pakistani aircraft to Beijing at dawn on July 9. Ambassador Farland issued a statement the night before, saying Kissinger had “Delhi belly” (food poisoning) and would be recuperating in Murree. At 4:00 a.m., Kissinger and his party, including his NSC aides Winston Lord and John Holdridge, boarded their jet. To their surprise, four Chinese officials, including Chang Wenjin, a foreign ministry official and later the Chinese ambassador to Washington, already were on board. One of the two Secret Service agents accompanying the American delegation was so shocked he almost drew his gun.

The plane took off and rose over the Himalayas. Holdridge said, “We were stepping into the infinite.”

Lord recalled: “As the sun came up, we were passing K-2, the second highest mountain in the world.… We were going to the most populous country in the world, after 22 years, and there were all of the geopolitical implications of that. There was the anticipation of meeting with Zhou En-lai, this great figure, and there was the excitement and anticipation of those talks. There were the James Bond aspects of this trip, since it was totally secret.”

They landed at a military airport south of Beijing. They debarked into black limousines and, with blinds drawn and red flags flying, sped past the Great Hall of the People to the Dayoutai guesthouse for VIPs. They sent a one-word message to Washington:
EUREKA
.

*   *   *

Zhou En-lai came to greet them. The premier was seventy-three, elegant, and charming. His intelligence and cunning had made him a leader in the Chinese Communist Party for fifty years. He had lived through hardships barely known to the Americans, who saw Chairman Mao as a mysterious emperor, not a murderous monster. They knew little of his regime, which had killed tens of millions of people over two decades through deadly politics and disastrous economics.

Over the next two days, Kissinger and Zhou talked for seventeen hours, mostly haggling over the wording of the forthcoming communiqu
é
. Kissinger wished it to appear that the Chinese wanted Nixon to come. Zhou wanted it to appear that Nixon wished to come. After a full day, they were at an impasse. Frustrated, both sides broke off.

“Kissinger and I and the others walked around outside, because we knew that we were being bugged,” said Lord, the future American ambassador to China. “Probably the trees were bugged, too. Who knows? I remember that we waited for hours and hours. The Chinese were probably trying to keep us off-balance.… Most likely, Zhou En-lai had to check with Mao.”

Finally, they worked it out: the Chinese were inviting Nixon because they had heard about his interest in visiting China. It had taken twelve hours to arrive at this formulation.

In the hours that followed, Zhou was “as forthcoming as we could have hoped” on the subject of Vietnam, Kissinger reported to Nixon. “For ideological reasons, he clearly had to support Hanoi. On the other hand … he did not wish to jeopardize the chances for an improvement in our relations, especially after I explained the positions we had taken in Paris and warned of the danger of escalation if negotiations failed.”

Before they left, the Americans were treated to a banquet hosted by Zhou. “Here we saw just how clever Zhou En-lai was,” said Lord. Zhou managed to criticize the excesses unleashed by Mao without actually criticizing Mao. Zhou himself had been imprisoned in his office by Mao’s shock troops, the Red Guards, during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.

The Americans, exhausted but exhilarated, finished drafting the communiqu
é
, returned to Pakistan, resumed the charade worked out by Farland, and immediately flew to Paris, where Kissinger held another round of secret talks with Hanoi’s delegation on July 12. He reported to Nixon that the North Vietnamese “repeatedly stressed—in an almost plaintive tone—that they wanted to settle the war. They expressed a great desire to reach agreement quickly, and voiced what appeared to be genuine concern about the delay which might result from debate about a withdrawal date.”

On July 15, Nixon announced that he had sent Kissinger to the People’s Republic of China, that Zhou had invited the president to visit China, and that Nixon had accepted. “I have taken this action because of my profound conviction that all nations will gain from a reduction of tensions and a better relationship between the United States and the People’s Republic of China,” he said in a nationally televised address. “It is in this spirit that I will undertake what I deeply hope will become a journey for peace, peace not just for our generation but for future generations on this earth we share together.”

The proclamation was wildly popular throughout the world. As Nixon had anticipated, it shocked the Russians into proposing their own 1972 summit meeting. It raised hopes in the White House that Beijing and Moscow would pressure Hanoi into a peace deal. And it made Nixon appear, in the eyes of millions of Americans, a master of global strategy—not merely the leader of the free world but
the
world leader. The big play looked as if it had gone according to plan.

“Kissinger and I thought, somewhat naively, that we had pulled off two historic encounters in one trip: the opening toward China and moving toward settling the Vietnam War,” Lord recounted. “That latter idea was a wildly premature judgment.”

“I remember that we debated which was the more historic and important, getting the war over with or arranging for the opening to China. We said, ‘Wasn’t it a great achievement to do both in one trip?’”