One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (9 page)

Getting rid of things was the heart of Nixon’s domestic policy—especially erasing Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs for the poor and politically dispossessed. When Moynihan advised that the issue of race relations could benefit from “benign neglect,” the phrase fit the president’s thinking perfectly. But these were ill-chosen words. “Regarding domestic policy, which Nixon dismissed as ‘building outhouses in Peoria,’ his disdain for the subject did not, alas, produce benign neglect,” the conservative columnist George Will noted. It proved malign and malevolent. The war on poverty proved to be more of a war on the poor.

“If it’s called racism, so be it,” Nixon told Haldeman; he said he could not communicate with black people, “except with Uncle Toms.” The blacks, the liberals, the college kids and their professors would not vote for him no matter what he did, Nixon thought, so it was pointless to appease them.

Nixon and Attorney General Mitchell pushed constantly for Congress to pass war-on-crime laws (harsher drug penalties, expanded wiretapping statutes), and they won some of those battles. But with few exceptions, new laws that changed America passed in spite of Nixon, not because he fought for them. He signed sweeping legislation such as the National Environmental Policy Act with gritted teeth; he believed “that we’re catering to the left in all of this and that we shouldn’t be. They’re the ones that care about the environment, and that they’re trying to use the environmental issue as a means of destroying the system.” The president spent far more energy trying to destroy the cornerstones of the Great Society, particularly LBJ’s grandest endeavor for the poor, the Office of Economic Opportunity. He ordered two young eager-beaver staffers, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld (two future secretaries of defense), to attack the OEO, which included Head Start, for schooling young children; Legal Services, providing lawyers to the poor; VISTA, or Volunteers in Service to America, created as a domestic Peace Corps; and a wide array of health and education projects.

Rumsfeld was Cheney’s boss at the OEO. “He didn’t know anything about the war on poverty,” Cheney said, laughing, in a 2000 oral history interview, shortly before he became vice president. Neither, it must be said, did Cheney.

Nixon gave these men their first taste of executive power, and they liked it. They were proud foot soldiers in an army of young conservatives doing battle for the president.

“The Nixon administration came in disliking OEO intensely and I could never understand why Don took the job,” said Frank Carlucci, another future secretary of defense recruited by Rumsfeld. “They kept calling me and telling me to kill it, to kill this or kill that.”

Carlucci believed the OEO had achieved one major success: “to provide upward mobility for the people who were poverty-stricken and in the low-income brackets. An awful lot of the leadership came up through these programs,” leaders who were not white men, “including people who became subsequently members of Congress.” A program that helped to produce black leaders was anathema to Nixon; the informal compendium of his political opponents that came to be known as “the enemies list” contained every black member of Congress. The “OEO was the enemy,” Carlucci concluded. “There’s no question there was a very strong emotional feeling on the part of the president. He did not like the Great Society.”

Nixon found fighting that enemy far easier than the one he faced half a world away.

*   *   *

“I want to end this war,” President Nixon said in his first televised address to the nation about Vietnam, on May 14, 1969. He said he would not accept a peace settlement amounting to “a disguised American defeat.” Nor would he try “to impose a purely military solution on the battlefield.”

So how would he end the war or win the peace? His speech was “totally unintelligible to the ordinary guy,” Haldeman wrote in his secret diary. Nixon still searched for a strategy.

“Our fighting men are not going to be worn down,” the president vowed. But the American people were worn out by four years of lethal combat; public support for the war was falling. As Nixon spoke, one of the more vicious clashes of the war was raging. The Battle of Hamburger Hill left 113 American soldiers dead and 627 wounded, all for control of a strategically pointless mountain.

His audience had heard empty words, and Nixon sensed that the speech was a flop. Six days later, on the Senate floor, Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, the slain president’s brother and sole political heir, spoke in language that seemed clearer to the citizenry. He called it “senseless and irresponsible to continue to send our young men to their deaths to capture hills and positions that have no relation to ending the military conflict.”

The president convened a joint meeting with his Cabinet and the National Security Council the next day to make his position perfectly clear: North Vietnam was hell-bent on victory, and he would never let that happen. “We are talking to an enemy whose first objective is not peace,” he said. “We need to threaten that if they don’t talk they will suffer.” The path to peace would have to be blazed by bombs.

“What is on the line is more than South Vietnam,” Nixon warned: America’s standing in the world was in peril. “If a great power fails to meet its aims, it ceases to be a great power,” he said. “The greatness fades away.”

CHAPTER SIX

“Madman”

T
HE PRESIDENT
and his political opponents began preparing for a long battle on the home front as the summer of 1969 approached. Feelings on college campuses were already so fevered that President Nixon canceled his commencement speech at Ohio State University—an institution far better known as a football powerhouse than as a radical hotbed—for fear of student protests. His decision came on the strong recommendation of Attorney General John Mitchell.

In turn, Nixon ordered Mitchell to take extraordinary measures against the campus activists, the liberals, and the leftists planning to mount national protests against the war, including a march on Washington. Mitchell already had demanded and received a federal indictment against some of the most vocal leaders of the antiwar movement on charges of conspiracy to riot. During Mitchell’s years as attorney general, the Justice Department brought many such political conspiracy charges, but in the end nearly every case came to nothing; the defendants were acquitted or the cases dismissed, often due to the unconstitutional conduct of the government.

Some of the steps Nixon and Mitchell took matched the harshest government crackdowns of the McCarthy era. The attorney general revived the Justice Department’s Internal Security Division, which had been all but dormant for a decade. Its leader was J. Walter Yeagley, who had been an FBI agent chasing the nation’s top Communists on sedition charges in 1948 when the young Richard Nixon was in hot pursuit of Alger Hiss. Twenty years after its heyday, the red hunt was renewed. Working closely with his old boss J. Edgar Hoover, Yeagley and his Internal Security force, along with a new Justice Department squad aimed solely at campus radicals, began compiling and cross-indexing files on nearly seven hundred fifty thousand potentially subversive American citizens and organizations.

Mitchell’s number two man at the Justice Department, Richard Kleindienst, testified to Congress on May 22 that the government would round up radicals and revolutionaries and put them in detention camps if necessary. Few knew that Director Hoover himself began to draw up a blueprint for that drastic action back in 1948; Congress, at his urging, had passed an emergency detention law allowing suspected American subversives to be imprisoned without trials or hearings.

The first big antiwar marches were still months away. But they would come in waves, hundreds of thousands of people, the great majority among them ordinary citizens who had never before challenged the government or questioned its authority. Come the fall, there would be more protesters in the streets of America than soldiers at arms in Vietnam.

“I think there is a much deeper conspiracy than any of us realize,” Nixon told Kissinger in a conversation about the coming march on Washington. “I will have to nail these people.”
*

*   *   *

On June 7, 1969, President Nixon flew from Washington for a face-to-face meeting with his partner in the war, President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam. Meanwhile, Kissinger held another secret meeting with Soviet ambassador Dobrynin in Washington. The ambassador asked what he should tell his superiors about the state of U.S.-Soviet relations.

“I said that everything depended on the war in Vietnam,” Kissinger reported to Nixon “If the war were ended, he could say that there was no limit to what might be accomplished”—including an end to twenty years of nuclear weapons tensions.

Nixon and Thieu met at Midway Island, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where the United States had struck back at Japan six months after Pearl Harbor, in one of the greatest naval battles in history.

Thieu, a career military officer, had survived a series of political plots and coups; he had reasons to be suspicious of the intentions of the United States. Only three weeks before President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, the United States had tacitly backed the military revolt in which Thieu’s predecessor, Ngo Dinh Diem, was murdered. Thieu suspected that Nixon would not be bearing glad tidings, and his instincts were precise.

The president said he soon would withdraw twenty-five thousand U.S. troops, less than 2 percent of the American combat force in the war. “Vietnamization” was about to begin.

“We have a difficult political problem,” Nixon explained, according to the written memorandum of their private conversation. “The U.S. domestic situation is a weapon in the war.” The troop withdrawal was required as a political gesture to Congress and public opinion; without popular support, America could not deploy more soldiers.

Thieu said he had the same problem, but in a mirror image. If American forces flagged, his government might fall. “What made the middle ground in Saigon so uncertain was the fear that the U.S. would withdraw support,” he said. “Hence, many politicians were holding themselves available for a coalition government” with the Communists of North Vietnam. Hanoi’s generals understood how political pressures and public opinion shaped war plans in Washington and Saigon.

Thieu warned of “a sagging of spirit in Saigon” and a rising belief that America would impose political concessions on his people. He recognized that Americans desired peace. He understood the difficulties for the president of a large army abroad incurring constant casualties. “We have kept saying the war is going better. We must now prove it,” Thieu said. “The war in Vietnam is not a military one and neither side can win militarily.” Political warfare trumped firepower; the support of the people of America and Vietnam mattered more than military might. The policy of slowly withdrawing American troops, “if not handled carefully, could be misunderstood by the North Vietnamese and their allies.”

Nixon did not handle it carefully.

On June 19, at a news conference at the White House, a reporter asked the president to respond to the assertion of LBJ’s last secretary of defense, Clark Clifford, that one hundred thousand American troops ought to be withdrawn by the end of 1969 and that all ground troops ought to be out by the end of 1970. “I would hope that we could beat Mr. Clifford’s timetable,” Nixon said.

He had no reason for raising such hopes. He had made a purely political statement; little would please the American people more than bringing the boys back home. But no such plan and no policy existed.

Nixon went on to say that, in addition to withdrawing ground troops in eighteen months, he was not politically “wedded” to the Thieu regime or opposed to a cease-fire. Kissinger despaired at the potential political consequences of these off-the-cuff comments. “He feels it will probably mean collapse of South Vietnam government in near future and will result in South Vietnamese troops fighting us,” Haldeman wrote in his secret diary that night. “Thieu will consider it a betrayal, as will all South East Asia, and it will be interpreted as unilateral withdrawal.”

Nixon had come to office hoping to end the war in a matter of six months. Kissinger was “discouraged because his plans for ending war aren’t working fast enough and Rogers and Laird are constantly pushing for faster and faster withdrawals,” Haldeman noted on July 7. “He wants to push for some escalation, enough to get us a reasonable bargain for a settlement.… Big meeting about this tonight on the
Sequoia
.”

The
Sequoia
was the presidential yacht, built by a wealthy Philadelphia family in 1925 and then sold to the government during the Depression. Every president since Herbert Hoover had used it, usually for pleasure. The July 7 cruise was all business: four hours of Nixon thinking out loud with Kissinger, Rogers, Laird, Mitchell, and the president’s top military and intelligence officials, covering every aspect of American policy and strategy in Vietnam. Though no formal record of the meeting exists, General Wheeler of the Joint Chiefs of Staff noted that the president said that public support for the war would hold “until about October,” when the big antiwar protests were set to start. By then, he believed, the United States would either have to strike a peace deal or strike North Vietnam with great force.

As Nixon recalled in his memoirs and on tape, that night on the
Sequoia
was when he decided to go for broke. If bargaining would not end the war, then bombing would. He had a new deadline in mind: November 1. On that date in 1968, LBJ had stopped the bombing of North Vietnam and established the peace talks in Paris. Nixon decided that November 1, 1969, would be the right time to start bombing North Vietnam again. He seemed indifferent to the fact that the date fell two weeks before the planned climax of the peace protests, a nationwide march on Washington.

Now Nixon, the great strategist, and Kissinger, the great tactician, started making new plans. They would devise a shock-and-awe bombing campaign. They would use diplomatic subterfuges. They would play with public relations. They would undertake secret operations. And they would use psychological warfare, playing mind games with Moscow and Hanoi.