One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (21 page)

Kissinger interjected: “The war would be history.”

“And with a victory,” Nixon said with a sigh.

On September 20, as the new bombing runs began, Nixon led a National Security Council meeting in the Cabinet Room. He continued to reflect on the killing of Diem. “The behavior of the U.S. in Vietnam has not really been all that bright,” the president said. “After the murder of Diem, for us to say that Thieu is out because he didn’t do what we wanted—I can see the whole thing unravel starting from Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and Thailand, and all the way to Japan. What we really confront is what has been a long and terrible trial for U.S. foreign policy: will it fail or succeed?”

At that moment, next door in the Executive Office Building, Howard Hunt was using an old typewriter, a copying machine, a razor blade, and Scotch tape to forge a set of diplomatic cables that could directly pin the Diem killing on President Kennedy. He had been unable to find damning classified documents that lay hidden in the files of the CIA and the State Department and the JFK Presidential Library.

JFK and some of his advisers had in fact given their tacit support to a regime change in South Vietnam. But the driving force behind the 1963 coup had been the newly appointed American ambassador in Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, Richard Nixon’s running mate in the 1960 presidential election.

On his sixth day in Saigon, Lodge had cabled Washington:
WE ARE LAUNCHED ON A COURSE FROM WHICH THERE IS NO TURNING BACK: THE OVERTHROW OF THE DIEM GOVERNMENT
. At the White House, JFK approved, overruling his closest advisers. On November 4, 1963, alone in the Oval Office, President Kennedy dictated a tape-recorded memo about the Diem assassination. “We must bear a good deal of responsibility for it,” he said mournfully, eighteen days before he himself was murdered.

But Hunt had been unable to produce the evidence Nixon wanted. So he fabricated it. Colson attempted to leak the fake cables to a reputable journalist, without success. Then Hunt showed them to an old CIA colleague, Lucien Conein, who had been an eyewitness to the 1963 coup. Conein shortly thereafter appeared on a two-hour NBC television documentary about Vietnam. A review of the program in the
New York Times
by Neil Sheehan, the reporter who had obtained the Pentagon Papers, said Conein’s interview in particular left little doubt that “the Kennedy Administration was deeply implicated in the coup plot” that had led to Diem’s death.

Faking diplomatic cables was a dangerous business. But it was child’s play compared to trying to fire J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s director since 1924.

Nixon had Hoover to breakfast at the White House on Monday, September 20, 1971, a few hours before the NSC meeting on Vietnam. He was furious at the director’s reluctance to perform break-ins for the White House, but he was afraid Hoover would wreak his revenge if Nixon demanded his resignation. Nixon quailed, not for the first time, in fear of Hoover’s wrath.

For weeks thereafter, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and Dean all pushed the president to force the old man out. “We have those tapes, [the transcripts of] wiretapping we did on Kissinger’s staff, the newspapermen and so forth,” Mitchell told the president on October 8, 1971. “Hoover is tearing the place up over there trying to get at them.”

Ehrlichman explained, “Hoover feels very insecure without having his own copy of those things because of course that gives him leverage with Mitchell and with you—and because they’re illegal.” The possibility of Hoover’s blackmailing the president hung in the air.

Mitchell continued: “Hoover won’t come and talk to me about it. He’s just got his Gestapo all over the place.… I’ve got to get him straightened out, which may lead to a hell of a confrontation.”

Nixon once again tried to steel his resolve. “He ought to resign,” the president said. “He’s too old.”

“He’s getting senile, actually,” Mitchell said.

“He should get the hell out of there,” Nixon replied, but “he’s got to go of his own volition. That’s what we get down to. And that’s why we’re in a hell of a problem.… I think he’ll stay until he’s a hundred years old.”

Nixon concluded, after reconsidering the question for the fourth time on October 25, that he had too much to fear from Hoover, the man he had called his closest personal friend in his political life. “We’ve got to avoid the situation where he could leave with a blast,” Nixon said. “We may have on our hands here a man who will pull down the temple with him, including me.”

*   *   *

With the 1972 election now a year away, Nixon finally settled on a military and political strategy of sorts. John Mitchell would resign soon as attorney general, for a last hurrah as Nixon’s campaign manager. Many of Haldeman and Ehrlichman’s best and brightest aides would move to campaign headquarters, one block away from the White House.

The boys in the basement at the Executive Office Building, the Plumbers, would develop a war plan against all Nixon’s opponents, using all the tricks in the book, financed in part by the slush fund of campaign cash held by Nixon’s lawyer, Herb Kalmbach; operating in secrecy; run in theory by the reelection committee but in reality overseen by no one.

And in Vietnam, the president would use all the force at his command to bring the enemy to sue for peace by Election Day. “We will bomb the bejeezus out of them,” he told Kissinger in the Oval Office on November 20. “To hell with history.… Just knock the shit out of them.”

“That’s the best—I had not thought of that,” Kissinger said. He was a master at telling Nixon what he wanted to hear.

“Do they realize that they have to deal with, here, a man who if he wins the election will kick the shit out of them, and if he loses the election will do it even more?” Nixon went on, his voice becoming more and more forceful. “Did that ever occur to you?”

“I—I have to say, honestly, it did not,” Kissinger replied, in a tone more admiring than aghast.

“I’d finish off the goddamn place,” Nixon said. “Knock the shit out of them—and then, everybody would say, ‘Oh, horrible, horrible, horrible.’” And he laughed with pleasure at the thought.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“It is illegal, but…”

R
ICHARD
N
IXON
believed he was at his best in a crisis—sharper, stronger, tougher. When India and Pakistan went to war at the end of 1971, he armed the outgunned Pakistanis: a very tough call, utterly illegal, in blatant violation of an international weapons embargo.

But the president hated India with a passion: “These people are savages,” he said bluntly. And as Kissinger put it, Nixon had “a special feeling” for Pakistan’s military dictator, Yahya Khan: the general who had created the crucial link to China.

The long and unhappy alliance between the United States and Pakistan went back to the Eisenhower administration, when Pakistan provided secret airfields for flights of the CIA’s U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union. The United States provided military assistance in return. Pakistan itself was created by the catastrophic British Partition of India in 1947, which led to hundreds of thousands of deaths as Muslims and other minorities fled to the newly created West Pakistan and East Pakistan. The two Pakistans, flanking India and separated by twelve hundred miles, never were one nation in reality; that fiction was created by partition. Their deep political differences exploded into violent conflict in the spring of 1971, after the first free elections in East Pakistan gave General Yahya’s opponents a measure of power.

General Yahya, who ruled from West Pakistan, imposed martial law on the East. His soldiers indiscriminately killed his opponents; the death toll ran well upward of one million. As late as December 2014, his political allies were still being convicted of war crimes. “The Pakistani army was just murdering people,” said Nicholas A. Veliotes, then a State Department official, later ambassador to Egypt under President Reagan. “There was a genocide plan there: anyone who was educated, the Paks were going to kill.” American diplomats who witnessed the onslaught bluntly called it genocide in a rebellious report to Washington on April 6, 1971, signed by the American consul general in East Pakistan, Archer Blood. The “Blood Telegram” boldly condemned the Nixon administration’s failure to denounce the atrocities.

Nixon deliberately did nothing. “
Don’t
squeeze Yahya,” he wrote in a note to Kissinger on April 28, underlining the first word three times.

India, the world’s most populous democracy, had received billions in American economic assistance over the years. But in August 1971, shortly after Nixon announced the opening to China—the Chinese and the Indians had fought a vicious border war nine years before—India signed an alliance with the Soviets. This infuriated Nixon. “If they’re going to choose to go with the Russians, they’re choosing not to go with us,” he told Kissinger. “Goddamn it, who’s giving them a billion dollars a year? Shit, the Russians aren’t giving them a billion dollars a year.”

India’s prime minister, Indira Gandhi, received a politically correct reception when she visited the president on November 4, 1971. But the next day, Nixon and Kissinger said what they really thought of her.

“She is a bitch,” Nixon said.

“Well, the Indians are bastards anyway,” Kissinger replied. “But, Mr. President, even though she was a bitch, we shouldn’t overlook the fact that we got what we wanted, which was we kept her from going out of here saying that the United States kicked her in the teeth.”

President Nixon met at the White House with the Pakistani foreign secretary, Sultan Khan, on November 15, 1971. “We will do everything we can to try to help you in your cause,” Nixon pledged. But a war was coming, with India’s forces supporting the separatists in East Pakistan and Yahya Khan mobilizing against India.

“Yahya is beginning to feel cornered,” Ambassador Joseph Farland reported to Kissinger from Islamabad on November 19. “This thing could blow.” Three days later, it did. Yahya told Farland that India had attacked and that he was declaring a national emergency. The dictator sent President Nixon the message that Pakistan was at the point of no return.

“Is Yahya saying it’s war?” Nixon asked Kissinger in the Oval Office.

“Yeah, they’re saying it’s war.”

“The Indians say it isn’t?” the president said.

“That’s right,” Kissinger replied.

The White House “didn’t have any confirmation” one way or the other, Haldeman noted in his diary that night: “Our vast intelligence network doesn’t seem to be able to tell us when a couple of major nations are at war, which is a little alarming, to say the least.”

Kissinger sent a back-channel cable to Ambassador Farland on November 24, saying that he was convening daily meetings of his crisis team: the Washington Special Actions Group. These meetings, he wrote, led to
STRICTEST PRESIDENTIAL INSTRUCTIONS TO TILT TOWARD PAKISTAN
.

Nixon made this explicit in an Oval Office conversation with Kissinger and Secretary of State Rogers that same day. “To the extent that we can tilt it toward Pakistan, I would prefer to play that,” Nixon said. He cautioned them: American military aid had to be completely clandestine. “I don’t want to get caught in the business where we take the heat for a miserable war that we had nothing to do with,” the president said.

*   *   *

The miserable war went ballistic on December 3, 1971. Prime Minister Gandhi charged that Pakistan’s air force had bombed six Indian airfields in Kashmir and the Punjab and that artillery shells were striking Indian positions from West Pakistan.

India, Gandhi said, was going to crush its enemy.

The president was trying to unwind in Key Biscayne. “Pakistan thing makes your heart sick,” he told Kissinger. “And after we have warned the bitch.”

Kissinger called the next morning. “We have had an urgent appeal from Yahya. Says his military supplies have been cut off,” he told Nixon. “Would we help through Iran?” The shah of Iran was a key American ally. Placed in power by a CIA coup under President Eisenhower, he bought billions in weapons from the United States. Nixon asked, “Can we help?” Kissinger replied, “I think if we tell the Iranians we will make it up to them we can do it.”

The CIA station chief in Tehran met with the shah on December 5 and encouraged him to send arms and ammunitions to Pakistan. The shah indicated that he would be glad to help, on the condition that the United States replace what he sent. On the same day in Amman, the capital of Jordan, King Hussein showed the American ambassador, Dean Brown, a telegram from Yahya asking for at least eight American F-104 fighter jets from the Jordanian air force.

On December 6, back at work in the White House, Nixon authorized the arms transfers to Pakistan, on the condition that they were conducted under the strictest cover. The shah was ready and willing to help, and apparently so were the Saudis. But Nixon double-checked on the transfer of fighter jets from Jordan.

“The way we would do that is to tell the King to move his planes and inform us that he has done it,” Kissinger said. “We would have to tell him it is illegal, but if he does it we’ll keep things under control.”

“All right,” Nixon said. “That’s the way we play that.”

The president and Kissinger met in the Oval Office that night, after another meeting of the Washington Special Actions Group, to discuss Indira Gandhi, General Yahya, and the war. “I was too easy on the goddamn woman when she was here,” Nixon said. “She suckered us.… But let me tell you, she’s going to pay. She is going to pay.”

“This has been a great operation for the Indians,” Kissinger replied. “It’s going to lead to the overthrow of Yahya.”

“Such a shame,” said Nixon. “So sad. So sad.”

*   *   *

Nixon, Kissinger, and Attorney General John Mitchell had a long talk about the crisis on the afternoon of December 8. All three were tense and tired, Haldeman recorded. Kissinger was threatening to resign, as he often did. Mitchell was dismayed at the prospect of running Nixon’s reelection campaign. The president was once again suffering his dreadful insomnia, sinking into dark moods.