One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (25 page)

The Shanghai communiqu
é
had to address the issue of the two Chinas. A dramatic break in the U.S. diplomatic relationship with Taiwan would appall millions of Americans, including prominent members of the Nixon administration. Among those who had declared unswerving support for Taiwan was the American ambassador to the United Nations, George H. W. Bush.

“The conventional way,” Nixon said to Zhou in a brief meeting before the night’s grand banquet, was “to have discussions and discover differences, which we will do, and then put out a weasel-worded communiqu
é
covering up the problems.” Zhou responded, “If we were to act like that we would be not only deceiving the people, first of all, we would be deceiving ourselves.”

Through five days of pomp and pageants, featuring a visit to the Great Wall of China—“It truly is a great wall,” Nixon famously said—Kissinger and Lord labored long nights with their Chinese counterparts on the wording of the communiqu
é
. Secretary of State Rogers remained on the sidelines, shut out by Nixon’s orders, at Kissinger’s demand.

Nixon and Zhou spoke at length about Vietnam. The president asked the prime minister several times to send a message to Hanoi stating that Nixon wanted a military and political settlement, but without overthrowing the Saigon government. He pounded away, hoping the Chinese would help him end the Vietnam War. But that hope was an illusion.

“Why not give this up?” Zhou told him. “You should adopt a most courageous attitude and withdraw.” China and North Vietnam were not the closest allies, but if the war went on, “we will, of course, continue our aid to them.”

Zhou insisted time and again that “the Taiwan question is the crucial question.… Once agreement is reached on that, all others can be solved easily.” Nixon replied, “My goal is normalization with the People’s Republic. I realize that solving the Taiwan problem is indispensable to achieving that goal.” But he could not allow his opponents “a chance to seize upon the communiqu
é
and say that the President of the United States came 16,000 miles in order to repudiate a commitment to the government on Taiwan.”

The president said he would have to “sell” his own secretary of state on a solution. “That is our problem.” Kissinger worked all night to resolve it. The only solution, he concluded, was to allow China to call for “the liberation of Taiwan” and the withdrawal of American military forces from the island. The document was drafted. The president read it and approved.

Nixon allowed Rogers to meet Zhou at a brief meeting at the Beijing airport on February 26. But he did not allow Rogers to see the communiqu
é
itself until some hours later, at an overnight rest stop in Hangzhou, a resort town one hundred miles outside Shanghai. Rogers showed the text of the communiqu
é
to Marshall Green, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific.

Green immediately saw a fatal flaw. The communiqu
é
had a paragraph saying that the United States reaffirmed its commitments to all its allies in Asia—with one exception. It did not even mention America’s Cold War treaties with Taiwan.

“This would almost certainly be seized upon by the world press, and especially by those in the Republican party who were opposed to the President’s trip,” including members of Nixon’s own Cabinet, who would charge that the President had sold Taiwan down the river, Green wrote in a privately published State Department memoir. The language could be interpreted as saying Beijing “could attack Taiwan without involving the U.S.” The secretary of state immediately called the president’s guesthouse. He got Haldeman on the phone instead. Haldeman refused to put Nixon on the line. He said the president had already approved the statement.

Hours later, after 1:00 a.m., Green was awakened by the news that “all hell had broken loose in the Presidential suite.”

The mild-mannered secretary of state finally had gotten through to the president to warn him in the strongest language: do not sell out a long-standing ally. Rogers said that “this communiqu
é
was a disaster” and that “President Nixon was going to get killed at home and around the world,” Winston Lord vividly recalled many years later, and now Nixon had to make “a terrible decision.”

The Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party had already approved the communiqu
é
—and so had the president. But now Nixon feared that the press would surely ferret out the essential fact that the United States was betraying Taiwan. That could turn his great achievement abroad into a political disaster at home.

“He said: ‘Henry, you’ve got to go back to the Chinese,’” Lord recounted, which was “embarrassing, to say the least. It was our own fault for having cut out the State Department in the negotiations.… The omission of Taiwan would have been glaring.”

Kissinger dreaded telling Zhou En-lai that the United States needed to reopen the Taiwan issue. The public release of the announcement in Shanghai was set for that evening, Sunday, February 27—and it was already well past midnight.

*   *   *

The presidential party flew to Shanghai in the morning. Zhou En-lai was there, and a farewell banquet was set to take place after the formal release of the communiqu
é
. Zhou made the rounds at the high-rise Ching Kiang government guesthouse, where the Americans were ensconced, making a point of dropping in on Secretary of State Rogers and Marshall Green, whom he had barely seen in the course of the week.

After Zhou left, the secretary of state again demanded to see the president. Haldeman recorded the confrontation: “Rogers arrived at the suite and said he wanted to see the P. The P originally first said, tell him I’m asleep or something, then he agreed to see him, and had him come in. Rogers made the point that he wasn’t trying to undercut the communiqu
é
, that he would support it, but Rogers did want it understood that there were, in his mind, some real problems.… P clearly hit Bill hard, and said he expected him to tell his bureaucracy to stay behind us 100 percent.”

Green recalled twenty-five years later that Nixon had the penthouse suite, Kissinger was one flight below, and Rogers was on the next one down—on the thirteenth floor: “The symbolism escaped no one.” He was perplexed when Kissinger invited him to join an off-the-record briefing for American reporters that afternoon. “I was not happy about the prospect of being conspicuously identified with a communiqu
é
I found badly flawed, and it was left unclear whether that flaw would remain,” he recounted. “Kissinger never told me.”

Not until the briefing was under way, and copies of the communiqu
é
circulated, was it clear that the flawed passage had vanished.

Kissinger had been up all night, working in secret to avoid a disaster of his own making, and winning Zhou’s tacit approval to rework the statement. At the last minute, “Zhou En-lai handled the matter very skillfully,” Lord said. “He tried to avoid making this situation any more awkward and embarrassing than it really was.” And Kissinger, answering a planted question from a reporter, verbally reaffirmed America’s commitment to Taiwan.

It was weasel-worded, to quote Nixon, but it worked. The president privately acknowledged, in an Oval Office talk three weeks later, that the communiqu
é
“had very little to do with substance.” The symbolism, the pictures of Nixon and Zhou feasting together, was what would endure. As Haldeman wrote, “The network coverage of four hours, live, of the banquet … got all the facts the P wanted, such as his use of chopsticks, his toast, Zhou’s toast, the P’s glass-clinking, etc. So that came off very well.”

One last banquet, and many more toasts, and Nixon sat in his Shanghai penthouse, drinking a bottle of Chinese firewater and talking for hours after midnight to the exhausted Kissinger. The tireless teetotaler Haldeman took it in with his gimlet eye: “Henry sitting on the couch just itching to go to bed, which I tried to bring about several times, but the P made the point that Zhou En-lai stays up all night, so will he. He ordered some
Mao Tai
and had several of those, which he had also done at dinner, and had at least half a dozen before and during lunch today. He did finally let us go out on his terrace and take a look at Shanghai at night.… Obviously, he was feeling the historic nature of the occasion.”

*   *   *

Shanghai looks east over the Pacific, toward America, and as Nixon cast his gaze over the night sky, he could foresee good fortune. In eleven weeks, he would travel to Moscow for a summit with the Soviets, signing treaties, sealing his status as a great statesman. At home, his Democratic opponents were in disarray. Only one cloud darkened his horizon.

Zhou En-lai warned Nixon on the morning of February 28, just before he left on Air Force One, “If the war in Vietnam … does not stop, no matter what form it continues in, it will be impossible to relax tensions.” And China would continue its military, economic, and political support for America’s enemy.

Twelve hundred miles southwest of Shanghai, Hanoi’s leaders were preparing their biggest military campaign against the United States in four years. They had been planning the attacks for nine months. Their official military history laid out their ultimate goal: to force the United States “to negotiate an end to the war from a position of defeat.”

Nixon knew the offensive was coming—and that it would come at the time and place of the enemy’s choosing. He knew only one way to strike back.

“We’ll bomb the hell out of the bastards. There’s not going to be anymore screwing around,” Nixon told Kissinger in the Oval Office on March 14. “If they think … I am just going to roll over and play dead, they’re crazy.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“This is the supreme test”

N
IXON HAD
only a month to savor the glory of his China trip. On March 30, 1972, he and Kissinger were thinking over May’s summit meeting in Moscow when a news flash hit the Oval Office.

“It looks as if they are attacking in Vietnam,” Kissinger said.

“The battle has begun?” asked the president. “Should we start bombing right now?” He continued: “I’m not concerned about the attack, but I am concerned about the counterattack. By God, you’ve got the Air Force there. Now, get them off their ass and get them up there and hit everything that moves.”

North Vietnam surged south across the demilitarized zone with troops, tanks, artillery, and a few Soviet-made fighter jets. American soldiers and their allies based in northern outposts of South Vietnam (Quang Tri, Hue, Da Nang) began facing a murderous barrage. As the enemy advanced, a U.S. Marine growled at a reporter, “I don’t know any more if I’m in northern South Vietnam or southern North Vietnam.”

The ground war turned grim as thousands of ARVN, the troops of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, deserted their posts and fled. Reports of a rout at Quang Tri reached the White House in seventy-two hours.

“We lose if the ARVN collapses,” Nixon told Kissinger on April 3.

“If the ARVN collapses a lot of other things will collapse around here,” Nixon said. “We’re playing a much bigger game. We’re playing a Russian game, a Chinese game, an election game—and we’re not going to have the ARVN collapse.”

Nixon faced fateful, fatal decisions. Bombing North Vietnam, along with inflicting death and destruction, promised dangers on political battlefronts at home and abroad. Yet the merest chance of an American military defeat could devastate his power to negotiate with Russia and China from a position of omnipotence. He feared that this would destroy his dream of creating, as he put it, a new generation of peace. Above all, he was afraid he could lose the election if it looked like he might lose the war.

“For the President, battlefield success became paramount,” said Frederick Z. Brown, the American consul general in Da Nang at the time of the 1972 attack. “If that meant relying primarily upon U.S. air power rather than upon the South Vietnamese armed forces, so be it.… The United States replied in massive form, in a way that nobody, nobody expected.”

The diaries of Admiral Moorer and H. R. Haldeman recorded the president’s commands on April 4. “There will be no consideration of restraints,” he told Moorer. “Everything we do must be concentrated on breaking the back of the enemy.… We are not going to lose this one no matter what it costs.” Haldeman wrote, “The P’s massing a huge attack force, naval ships for gunning from the sea, tremendous number of additional bombers, and he’s going to start using B-52s for the first time to bomb North Vietnam as soon as the weather clears.”

American gunships approached the coast of Quang Tri Province, prepared to bombard North Vietnam. Nixon ordered the USS
Midway
and the USS
Saratoga
into the battle. Six great warships carrying fighter jets, the most formidable naval force assembled since World War II, gathered in the Gulf of Tonkin. The president commanded that every available B-52 bomber in the air force be readied to strike the enemy’s biggest cities and military targets in saturation bombings—up to nine planes, flying wing to wing, dropping seventy-five to one hundred tons of bombs each. That was the most powerful force in the American arsenal, save nuclear weapons.

Nixon demanded the maximum number of B-52 attacks (more than eighteen hundred a month) as soon as possible. But cloud cover kept the war planes waiting for clearer skies. “God Almighty, there must be something, something, something that son-of-a-bitchin’ Air Force can do in bad weather. Goddamn it!” the president yelled at Kissinger.

“Mr. President,” Kissinger replied, “our major thing now is to get across to the Russians, to the Chinese, and to Hanoi that we are on the verge of going crazy.”

“Goddamn it,” Nixon said again, praying in his blasphemous way for the clouds to part over Hanoi and the port city of Haiphong, “get that weather cleared up.” Then he laughed, a low rumble from deep in his gut. “The bastards have never been bombed,” he said. “They’re going to be bombed this time.”