One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (33 page)

Nixon called Moorer again “to stiffen his back.” He warned the admiral, “I don’t want any more of this crap about we couldn’t hit this target or that one. This is your chance to use military power effectively to win this war, and if you don’t I’ll consider you responsible.”

On December 18, at 7:15 p.m., Moorer sent a message to every senior American military commander in the theater of war: “You will be watched on a real-time basis at the highest levels here in Washington. We are counting on all hands to put forth a maximum, repeat maximum, effort in the conduct of this crucial operation. Good luck to all.”

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That night, the B-52 bombers struck the capital of Hanoi and the port of Haiphong in three great waves. Over twelve days at Christmas, 714 B-52 sorties dropped fifteen thousand tons of bombs in and around the capital and the port—a force greater than each of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war planes inflicted immense damage, killing and wounding thousands, damaging or destroying North Vietnam’s biggest railways and power plants, and terrorizing the two cities.

Nixon micromanaged the bombing, demanding more and more strikes on specific targets; Kissinger enforced his orders. “Now that we have crossed the bridge let’s brutalize them,” Kissinger told Moorer on the night of December 19. “You’ll have massive problems with the President” if the attacks subsided.

North Vietnam struck back with surface-to-air missiles. They brought down a total of fifteen B-52s. Forty-two pilots and crewmen were killed and twenty-four captured. “The P kept coming back to the B-52 loss problem,” Haldeman recorded. “It’s going to be very tough to take.”

On December 20, Nixon, Kissinger, and Haldeman met in the Oval Office. The president had sent Al Haig back to Saigon, just before the Christmas Bombing started, to try to strong-arm Thieu. “He got kicked in the teeth,” Kissinger reported, referring to Haig. Thieu kept Haig waiting for five hours and then rejected any talk of peace. “What that son-of-a-bitch Thieu has done to us is criminal,” Kissinger said. “There’s almost no way we can get Thieu to go along without doing a Diem on him”—that is, overthrowing him, which was precisely what Hanoi wanted. “Thieu is an unmitigated, selfish, psychopathic son-of-a-bitch,” Nixon said. Nevertheless, “we’ve got to continue the bombing of the North.”

That same afternoon, ever restless, Nixon flew to Key Biscayne with Kissinger. Nine B-52s were downed over the next forty-eight hours. On December 22 the air force cut its sortie rate to sixty a day, trying to regroup its planes and rest its crews. Nixon was furious.

“I just came from the President and I have not seen him so outraged since I got in this job,” Kissinger said in a telephone call to Admiral Moorer. “We have got to get the maximum shock effect now!” The admiral wrote in his diary, “This is a helluva way to run a war.”

Nixon remained in the warm sun of his Florida retreat while Kissinger immediately returned to Washington to watch over the war. Seventy-five B-52s hit Hanoi on December 23; all returned safely. A larger attack was set for Christmas Eve. Kissinger called Nixon that afternoon. “Moorer is preparing a big strike,” the president said.

“All-out,” Kissinger replied. “We just got a report that they are totally evacuating Hanoi.” Nixon hoped the enemy’s will to fight and “the morale of their people” would be crushed.

Sleepless, Nixon opened his diary on Christmas Eve and wrote, “This is December 24, 1972—Key Biscayne—4 a.m.”

“On this day before Christmas it is God’s great gift to me to have the opportunity to exert leadership, not only for America but on the world,” Nixon wrote. “This, on the one hand, imposes a great responsibility but, of course, at the same time the greatest opportunity an individual could have … the glorious burden of the presidency.”

On December 26 the bombing resumed. Hanoi buckled under the immense force of the B-52s. Its leaders sent word through Paris that peace talks could resume as soon as the bombing ended. But Nixon wanted to inflict more punishment on the enemy. He did not relent. The B-52 attacks intensified to 115 sorties that day. The president took satisfaction in a readout sent by the French Foreign Ministry from its consul general in Hanoi: “I’ve just lived through the most terrifying hour of my life. An unbelievable raid has just taken place.”

Nixon returned to the White House. On December 27 he spoke in the Oval Office with Col. Richard T. Kennedy, a senior officer on the National Security Council staff. Colonel Kennedy said he thought North Vietnam might settle, but it would not fall to its knees begging to surrender.

“Never!” Nixon said.

“To give the devil his due, the North has come down there, time after time, under the most incredibly difficult circumstances and done well. Now, that’s all a matter of just plain will,” Kennedy said.

“Sure,” Nixon said. “They’ve got a greater will to win.”

“We’ve done our best,” the colonel said. “At considerable cost.”

“God, yes,” said the president. “God, yes. At great cost.”

That night, Kissinger called to say North Vietnam had said again that it would talk peace if the bombs stopped falling. Nixon and Kissinger agreed that if Hanoi sent a third plea, they would ground the B-52s in thirty-six hours.

“We gave them a hell of a good bang,” Nixon said with satisfaction. “We’re punishing the hell out of them, aren’t we?”

On the night of December 28, Colonel Kennedy called Admiral Moorer to report that Hanoi had “swallowed the hook.” On December 29, sixty B-52s struck Hanoi and Haiphong for the last time. Twenty-four hours later, the Nixon administration proclaimed that the Paris peace talks would begin again as early as January 3, 1973—the day Congress reconvened in Washington.

And on that day, Richard Nixon learned, to his lifelong sorrow, that he had another war to fight.

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The trial of the Watergate burglars would begin the next week. The White House counsel John Dean had been keeping a very close eye on the case.

Nearly a year had passed since Dean heard G. Gordon Liddy present his plans for espionage and sabotage to John Mitchell and Jeb Stuart Magruder, Haldeman’s prot
é
g
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and Mitchell’s deputy at CREEP, in the attorney general’s office at the Justice Department. Almost six months had gone by since the raid at the Watergate. The federal grand jury that indicted the seven burglars had heard testimony from Magruder, who had committed perjury, as Nixon knew, to protect himself and his superiors from prosecution.

Magruder was the director of the president’s impending inaugural. He would have to decide whether to keep lying when called to testify at the trial. He was terrified. And he knew he was not the only false witness.

On the morning of January 3, Haldeman had a gut-wrenching conversation with Magruder. At 11:00 a.m., Haldeman walked into the Oval Office. “Colson could be in some real soup,” he told Nixon. “Colson and Mitchell have both perjured themselves under oath,” as had Magruder, before the grand jury.

“You mean Colson was aware of Watergate?” Nixon said.

“Not only was he aware of it, he was pushing very hard for results,” Haldeman said bluntly.

“Who was he pushing?” the president asked.

“Magruder and Liddy,” Haldeman answered. Liddy would rather die than testify. But Magruder now was caught in a perjury trap. If he kept lying under oath at the trial, he might stay out of jail—or he might ensnare himself. And if he told the truth, he could bring down Mitchell, Colson, and others very close to Nixon.

Nixon tried to absorb what he had just heard. “Does Mitchell know that Colson was involved?” he asked. “Does Colson know Mitchell was involved?”

“I think the answer is yes to both of those,” Haldeman replied.

At that hour, Howard Hunt’s criminal lawyer called John Dean and said that Hunt was about to crack at the prospect of prison. The federal judge in the case was John Sirica, a stalwart law-and-order conservative widely known in Washington as “Maximum John,” for the severity of his sentences. The Watergate defendants were looking at decades behind bars. As Nixon learned two days later, Hunt craved a promise of presidential clemency. Hunt’s wife had been killed in an airplane crash four weeks earlier; she was carrying ten thousand dollars in cash, a small part of the money that had been paid to Hunt and his coconspirators by some very senior members of the White House staff.

Many tens of thousands of dollars, much of it campaign cash held in White House safes, already had gone to keep the Watergate defendants silent and their lawyers solvent.

Winding up his conversation with the president, Haldeman said the key figures in the case would require care and feeding. “Liddy we’re taking care of in one way” (stacks of hundred-dollar bills) and “we’re taking care of Magruder the right way” (with a promise of a new job after the inauguration). But there would be problems galore in the days to come, during and after the trial.

“It gets down to undeniable specifics,” Haldeman said. These specifics were, as the president knew within a matter of days, not merely perjury but also hush money, a multitude of felonies, and a chain of evidence reaching into the Oval Office. The strongest links in that chain were the reels of tape spinning beneath his feet.

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White House staffers distant from the Oval Office saw strange things happening in the days between the election and the inauguration.

Michael B. Smith, a staunch Republican and, later, President Reagan’s global ambassador for trade, was chief of presidential correspondence, in charge of 230 people who answered every letter addressed to Nixon, making each word seem convincing. “Gordon Strachan, who was one of Haldeman’s young assistants, came over to me” before the inauguration, Smith remembered; Strachan had been Haldeman’s liaison to CREEP. “He was carrying a black bag. He said, ‘The President wants to thank everybody for what they did in the election campaign.’ Strachan opened up the black bag and there was $300,000 in cash. Now, you tell me what a 28-year-old kid is carrying around $300,000 in cash for.”
*

“Watergate,” Smith concluded, “involved arrogance, rather than malevolence. These were ruthless people. They were not corrupt in the slightest. I believe that the Nixon White House staff was probably the most pristine or puritanical staff you could ever imagine. But some of them were zealots to an extreme.”

The zealot in chief was Chuck Colson. On Friday, January 5, Colson had a deep talk with Nixon about Howard Hunt, his friend of twenty years’ standing.

The president wrote in his diary the next day, “Colson told me on Friday that he had tried to do everything he could to keep Hunt from turning state’s evidence. After what happened to Hunt’s wife, etc., I think we have a very good case for showing some clemency.” Colson continued, as Nixon wrote, that Haldeman and Ehrlichman were more deeply involved in Watergate than the president realized.

On January 8, Nixon and Colson talked again in the president’s Executive Office Building hideaway. “I know it’s tough for all of you,” Nixon said, “for you, John, Bob, and all the rest. We’re just not going to let it get us down. This is a battle. It’s a fight.”

Richard Nixon turned sixty the next day. How great a burden did he feel? He wrote in his diary that, ten years before, he’d felt that his life was “at an end.” Now it had “turned completely around.” But he knew a time bomb was already ticking for his second term, before the first one ended.

Nixon was sworn in for four more years as the thirty-seventh president of the United States on January 20, 1973. He concluded his last inaugural by saying, “We shall answer to God, to history, and to our conscience for the way in which we use these years.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

“You could get a million dollars”

T
HE PRESIDENTIAL
chalice was poisoned, drop by drop, days after the inaugural ball was over.

The Vietnam Peace Accords were signed in Paris. “After the cease-fire there will be inevitable violations,” Nixon said on January 23, 1973, the day Kissinger initialed the pact. All sides broke the agreement. The war went on.
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The armies of Hanoi and Saigon clashed. B-52 bombers pounded North Vietnamese troops in Cambodia and Laos. “Whack the hell out of them,” Nixon commanded.

“We have a stick and a carrot to restrain Hanoi,” the president told South Vietnam’s foreign minister on January 30. The B-52s were a big stick.

That same day, the Watergate jury returned verdicts after deliberating for ninety minutes. Liddy and McCord were convicted on all counts. Hunt and the Cubans had pleaded guilty. All were facing decades behind bars. Judge Sirica held a post-trial hearing February 3. He bluntly stated that justice had yet to be served. He strongly doubted the government’s witnesses, and he openly called on Congress to look into the case.

Nixon was outraged. “Here’s the judge saying I did this,” he railed to Colson in the Oval Office. “His goddamn conduct is shocking.… He’s trying to prod the Senate into conducting a big investigation.”

The Senate heard Sirica loud and clear. On February 7, it voted unanimously to create a select committee to investigate Watergate. Its chairman would be Senator Sam Ervin, a conservative Democrat from North Carolina given to country-boy maxims and constitutional admonitions. Ervin had a Harvard law degree to go with his down-home humor. His mandate was to investigate the Watergate break-in, any cover-ups, and “all other illegal, improper, or unethical conduct occurring during the Presidential campaign of 1972, including political espionage and campaign finance practices.” He would receive half a million dollars to hire investigators—and the power to subpoena anyone save Richard Nixon.

The president flew to San Clemente the next day to spend a long weekend plotting to counter the Senate Watergate Committee. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean joined his strategy sessions. “We should play a hard game,” Nixon said. He had two goals. He would maintain “the outward appearance of cooperation.” But, in the meantime, “our objective internally should be maximum obstruction and containment, so as not to let this thing run away with us.”