One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (6 page)

Dean had replaced John D. Ehrlichman as the White House legal counsel; Ehrlichman was Haldeman’s indispensable man. The two invariably were twinned in the eyes of the public and the press for their rhyming names, their unsmiling demeanors, their Teutonic bearing. But their roles and their characters were utterly different. Haldeman had far more clout as the White House chief of staff. Ehrlichman was not his counterpart in rank or influence. But they relied on each other to make the machinery of the White House hum.

They had been close friends for more than twenty years, since their days as undergraduates at UCLA after World War II. Haldeman had recruited Ehrlichman as an advance man for Nixon’s 1960 presidential campaign, the thankless but vital role of planning and setting up rallies and speeches so a candidate’s days and nights run without disasters.

Nixon himself had asked Ehrlichman to coordinate the advance work for 1968. Ehrlichman agreed—on one condition. He was “convinced that Nixon’s drinking could cost him any chance of a return to public life.” He had seen Nixon drunk during the 1960 and 1962 campaigns and the 1964 Republican convention, and he made him take the pledge: “If he wanted me to work for him he would lay off the booze.”

Ehrlichman became the president’s chief adviser on domestic policy, handling the problems the president found the least pressing, such as health care and welfare. His powers were thus limited during Nixon’s first years in office by the president’s lack of interest in the lives of the poor and the dispossessed. But he became essential in Nixon’s campaign for reelection; he called himself the president’s “house detective” in matters of political intrigue. The record reflects that Ehrlichman had daily access to Nixon, a privilege shared only by Kissinger and Haldeman; he met with the president on 1,005 occasions over the course of five years and three months. So he knew Nixon’s mind as well as anyone. And he saw its dark side with clarity.

“From the first time he ran for office, as a young Congressman, he was engaged in combat,” Ehrlichman said late in his life. “There were them and there was us; and he never ever saw it any differently. He was surrounded by enemies.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“He will let them know who is boss around here”

N
IXON AGONIZED
daily over how to use diplomacy and deception, bombast and bombs, in Vietnam. Grasping every detail of his war strategy was essential “to understand the situation, so he could make what he believed—in his heart—to be the right decision, because these were horrible decisions,” Haldeman said. Each military maneuver was a search for a way to end the nightmare of Vietnam, an act of war intended to make peace. Each sought to change the tragic course of history. Each led to death and destruction.

“Go for the big play,” Nixon always said, as if war were a football game. The big play was Nixon’s plan for a way out of Vietnam—“to the extent he had a plan,” said Winston Lord, Nixon’s ranking National Security Council staffer, who became ambassador to China in 1985. Lord said that Nixon believed from the start that “he could use the Russians and maybe the Chinese to pressure Hanoi, to bring the war to an end by trying to improve relations with them, and cornering Vietnam in that way.”

Nixon would use the art of diplomacy with Moscow and Beijing, and the art of war in Indochina, in a radically new way to create a rapprochement between the most powerful Communists on earth and the United States. The grand bargain would work if Nixon could persuade the leaders of China and Russia to help pursue peace in Vietnam.

This audacious stratagem began to take shape before the inauguration. The first moves were encoded messages woven into Nixon’s inaugural address.

On January 2, 1969, after checking with J. Edgar Hoover, Kissinger met with Boris Sedov, officially counselor at the Soviet embassy in Washington but better known as a KGB spy. “Sedov said that the Soviet Union was very interested that the inaugural speech contain some reference to open channels of communication to Moscow,” Kissinger told Nixon. “I said that all this would be easier if Moscow showed some cooperativeness on Vietnam.” The KGB’s proposal to ghostwrite a passage of the inaugural address gave Nixon the inspiration to send an equally subtle message to China. In 1967, Nixon had written an article for
Foreign Affairs
that touched on America’s need to establish political and diplomatic relations with China. “There is no place on this planet for a billion of its potentially able people to live in angry isolation,” he wrote.

Nixon’s inaugural directly addressed Moscow with the words suggested by the spy Sedov: “Our lines of communication will be open.” Then, aiming his words at Chairman Mao Tse-tung, Nixon repeated his “angry isolation” lines from
Foreign Affairs
. Mao noticed: on his orders, the Beijing
People’s Daily
took the unprecedented step of printing the complete translated text of Nixon’s inaugural on its front page. Nixon had told Kissinger about sending signals to Mao. Haig recounted, “In the second week of the administration, Henry came back from the Oval Office and said to me, ‘Al, this madman wants to normalize our relations with China.’ And he laughed. And I said, ‘Oh, my God.’” It seemed inconceivable. And yet, when Nixon began a more direct approach to China later that year, he would find out that he was pushing on an open door.

But how to get the attention of the Soviets, and how to persuade them to help pursue peace in Vietnam? At his first National Security Council meeting, on January 25, 1969, Nixon suggested a carrot: talks on a nuclear weapons treaty. “This will be a great symbol,” he announced. Kissinger proposed a big stick: the threat of a nuclear attack.

Kissinger had made his name with a 1957 treatise titled
Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy
, a book often cited, if rarely read, by the high priests of Pentagon war planning. Its thesis was that nuclear weapons had a political and diplomatic utility: to coerce enemies. The challenge was translating their immense military power into coherent foreign policy. Now he put his theories into practice.

In the secretary of defense’s dining room, on January 27, Kissinger and Laird discussed “military actions which might jar the North Vietnamese into being more forthcoming at the Paris talks.” Kissinger proposed that the Joint Chiefs of Staff prepare a plan of nuclear brinkmanship, designed to convince the Soviets that President Nixon was ready to launch a nuclear attack against North Vietnam over the coming weeks. The idea was to startle Moscow and Hanoi into settling the war. “To preclude prolonged stalling tactics by the communists in Paris,” the plan read, the United States would “create fear in the Hanoi leadership that the United States is preparing to undertake new highly damaging military actions”—including “actual or feigned technical escalation of war against North (nuclear).”

Nixon had asked his ranking generals, spies, and diplomats at that first National Security Council meeting, “What is the most effective way to bring the war to a conclusion?” No one at the table had any new ideas—except Kissinger. He proposed immense, prolonged, and unprecedented attacks by B-52 bombers against North Vietnam’s encampments in Cambodia. The planning began immediately.

*   *   *

On February 11, 1969, Kissinger convened the NSC to weigh covert operations and secret bombing campaigns to help win the war.

The CIA had been shoring up President Thieu with cash payments designed to create the appearance of democracy in the Saigon government, some intended to support supposedly independent political parties. The secret subsidies, amounting to millions of dollars, had been flowing since 1965, and they would keep flowing under Nixon. Thieu, in power thanks to a rigged election, was at best dubious about democracy, the CIA reported, and he was putting a substantial amount of the Agency’s cash in his pocket.

“Mr. Kissinger questioned if anyone in the United States really knows what a viable political structure in South Vietnam is,” read the minutes of the covert action meeting. Yet the group kept the secret subsidies going on and on, in the enduring hope that democracy could be created with the CIA’s dollars.

Kissinger quickly turned the discussion to the question of attacking North Vietnamese troops in their Cambodian sanctuaries along the border with South Vietnam. If it could not be done with guerrilla operations, he concluded, it would have to be done with bombs. The Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed an immense and sustained attack on targets in Cambodia. Nixon agreed. He had made up his mind earlier that day.

“I believe it is absolutely urgent if we are to make any kind of headway in Vietnam that we find new ways to increase the pressure militarily,” Nixon had told Kissinger. Nixon wanted to launch the bombers immediately. But Secretary of Defense Laird and Secretary of State Rogers strongly opposed the attacks. Rogers thought that widening the war would create a diplomatic disaster. Laird argued that airpower alone would not change the course of the war. The United States already had dropped more bombs in Vietnam (2.8 million tons) than in World War II and Korea combined.

“The question that arises is not whether we should do more in South Vietnam,” Laird told the president, “but rather whether we should do less.”

After three weeks in office, Nixon had decided to do more, much more. But it would best be done in secret. He would henceforth work harder to keep his war plans hidden. Dissent would be suppressed by deception.

*   *   *

In these early days, the White House aides who served Nixon and Kissinger loyally were awestruck at the lying and skullduggery surrounding and concealing the plans for the secret bombing of Cambodia.

The war plans took shape as Nixon prepared for his first foreign tour in February. The code name for the bombing of Cambodia was Menu; its components were Breakfast, Lunch, Snack, and so on. Kissinger would concede it was a tasteless choice.

On February 19, four days before his departure for Europe, Kissinger told the president how the Menu attacks would be carried out and assured him that they could be concealed from the American people.

Nixon approved the plan in principle. He held off on launching the attacks until, as Kissinger put it, a suitable pretext could be found. On his flight from Washington in the early morning of February 23, Nixon learned that the Vietcong had started “lobbing a few shells into Saigon,” as Kissinger phrased it. The president ordered Kissinger to put the plan into motion—and to keep it secret. Nixon delivered this order to Kissinger while they sat on Air Force One, parked on the tarmac at the Brussels airport—and then Nixon went off to lunch with the king and queen of Belgium.

Haldeman stayed on the plane, making sure that Nixon’s orders were executed. Even Haldeman, who knew Nixon’s taste for intrigue as well as anyone, was amazed. The plans Kissinger carried out that day were “so secret at the time that I was afraid to say anything,” Haldeman wrote in his personal diary. He felt he was “entering an entire new world.”

The flight records for the B-52 bombers carrying out the attacks would be falsified by the top American commander in Saigon, Gen. Creighton Abrams. His accomplice would be the commander of American forces in the Pacific, Adm. John McCain, whose son, later a senator, was a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

“In order to set the stage for a possible covert attack, and clear the books on this matter within the Bureaucracy, we should send a message to General Abrams authorizing him to bomb right up to the Cambodian border,” Kissinger told Nixon in writing before the plans were executed. A routine request for a B-52 strike on a Communist target in South Vietnam would serve as a cover for a Menu strike in Cambodia. The B-52 pilots and navigators (not the rest of the crew) would receive secret orders from ground controllers directing them to strike targets inside Cambodia. On the bombers’ return, two sets of flight reports would be filed, one true, one false.

The execution of the Menu plan was three weeks away.

*   *   *

Air Force One flew on from Brussels to London, Bonn, Berlin, Rome, and finally to Paris, where Nixon had meetings set with one of his heroes, President de Gaulle of France, and the far less stalwart Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky of South Vietnam.

In his role as the leader of the free world, Nixon loved the pomp of red carpet receptions and state dinners with democrats and dictators alike. He was obsessed with the tiniest aspects of these trips. He demanded “an extraordinary amount of detailed planning, making the visit seem more like a movie script than a spontaneous visit,” remembered Robert Oakley, later the State Department’s counterterrorism chief. Oakley was stationed at the American embassy in Paris when Nixon arrived to meet de Gaulle. One among a thousand questions from the White House: How many steps would the president have to walk from the entrance to a table at Versailles? “We would have to chart the room that the president was going to enter and then describe—step by step—exactly how he would proceed to his seat.”

At the CIA station’s secure conference room inside the American embassy in Paris, Nixon sat down face-to-face with Vice President Ky, a flamboyant air force officer who had led a military junta in South Vietnam and evinced no taste for democracy or the rule of law. Nixon sought to reassure Ky of America’s commitment to Vietnam.

“Must convince them & American people we have an earnest desire to end the war,” read Nixon’s handwritten notes of the March 2 meeting. He told Ky to trust him. He would not sell out South Vietnam to the Communists. “We are not going to double-cross you,” Nixon said. “We honestly are your friends.”

Nixon returned to the United States and retreated to Key Biscayne to brood over the decision to bomb Cambodia. Kissinger urged him to pull the trigger. “Hit them,” he told the president in a telephone call on March 8.

“Our military effort leaves a great deal to be desired, but it remains one of our few bargaining weapons,” Kissinger wrote in a memo to Nixon that same day. “The guerrillas operate by terror or assassination; our side requires massive military effort.… De-escalation would amount to a self-imposed defusing of our most important asset and the simultaneous enhancement of this most important asset—terrorism. We would, in effect, be tying the hands of our forces in Vietnam.”