by Tim Weiner
President Richard M. Nixon, June 23, 1972—the day of the “smoking gun” tape
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To Kate, Emma, and Ruby Doyle, with everlasting love
Author’s Note
Balzac once wrote that politicians are “monsters of self-possession.” Yet while we may show this veneer on the outside, inside the turmoil becomes almost unbearable.
—Richard M. Nixon, Six Crises, 1962
RICHARD NIXON led the United States through a time of unbearable turmoil. He made war in pursuit of peace. He committed crimes in the name of the law. He tore the country apart while trying to unite it. He sabotaged his presidency by violating the Constitution. He destroyed himself and damaged the nation through deliberate acts of folly.
He vowed to bring the tragedy of Vietnam to an honorable end; he brought death and disgrace instead. He practiced geopolitics without subtlety; he preferred subterfuge and brutality. He dropped bombs and napalm without remorse; he believed they delivered a political message beyond blood and fire. He charted the course of the war without a strategy; he delivered victory to his adversaries.
His gravest decisions undermined his allies abroad. His grandest delusions armed his enemies at home. “I gave them a sword,” he said after his downfall, “and they stuck it in.”
That sword was a weapon he forged and sharpened himself. His conduct in office bent the Constitution to its breaking point. The truth was not in him; secrecy and deception were his touchstones.
Yet he had an undeniable greatness, an unsurpassed gift for the art of politics, an unquestionable desire to change the world. He wielded power like a Shakespearean king.
In his eyes, he stood above the law, and that was his fatal flaw, for he fell like a king fated to die in the final act of a tragedy. His arrogation of power created the criminal conduct that his White House counsel warned him was “a cancer within, close to the presidency, that’s growing. It’s growing daily.”
This book is a history of Richard Nixon’s anguished presidency. It concentrates on the intertwined issues of war and national security, because Nixon spent so many of his hours and so much of his power wrestling with those twin demons.
Nixon was the first president I remember vividly. I saw the anger in his eyes and I heard the anguish in his voice as he spoke to the nation about the war in Vietnam. His dark scowl, radiating from our black-and-white television, was an image as indelible as the bloody battles broadcast on the nightly news. I witnessed hundreds of thousands of citizens marching against the war in Washington, while I read that hundreds of American soldiers were dying every week. I talked with my parents about what I would do if drafted into battle. I gasped when National Guardsmen killed four kids at Kent State in Ohio during a protest against Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia. It dawned on me that dissent could be dangerous, even in a democratic country.
Nixon’s grasp on power began to slip soon after he won reelection in 1972 by a margin of almost eighteen million votes, the largest in American history. He was undone by the slow but steady revelation of “the White House horrors,” in the immortal words of John N. Mitchell, Nixon’s former attorney general and campaign manager, one among many once-honorable men who went to prison to protect the president. The Watergate break-in was only one of those horrors, and hardly the worst.
I was riveted by the televised congressional hearings that forced his closest aides to lie about the dirty tricks he had deployed to secure his overwhelming victory. I was transfixed by the intensity of the struggle as the White House battled Congress and the Supreme Court over the president’s prerogatives. At first Nixon seemed to fight under the rule of law rather than the laws of war. Then he fired the attorney general and the special prosecutor in charge of the Watergate investigation; he would risk impeachment and ponder imprisonment rather than release his secret White House tapes. His days were numbered after that blunder. I recall the last throes of his doomed presidency, the pathos of his farewell to the nation.
Nixon has fascinated me ever since. I wrote about his command and control of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in two books, Legacy of Ashes and Enemies. As a reporter for the New York Times, I interviewed some of his right-hand men, among them Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser and secretary of state. I have discussed Nixon’s legacy with the presidents who succeeded him, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. I covered the continuing debate over the disgraced president’s reputation and his rightful place in history. So I thought I knew something of the man when I began this work.
Then I dug into a treasure trove of top-secret records from the Nixon years, recently released from the vaults of the government of the United States. This book is based in great part on documents declassified between 2007 and 2014. I read them with a growing excitement. I felt like an archaeologist unearthing the palace of a lost empire.
Tens of thousands of files from his White House, his National Security Council, the CIA, the FBI, the State Department, the Pentagon, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were newly unsealed. So were minutes of the secret White House committees that controlled military and intelligence operations under Nixon. The transcripts of federal grand jury testimony by Nixon himself, the only president ever compelled to answer questions under oath in a criminal case, were now public records. Hundreds of hours of his infamous tapes finally came out in 2013 and 2014, along with previously classified entries in the daily diary of Nixon’s closest aide, H. R. Haldeman. Together, they ensure that every quotation and each citation herein is on the record: no blind quotes, no unnamed sources, and no hearsay statements.
We have laws governing the declassification of documents and freedom of information, and they endure despite all that has been done in the name of government secrecy in the United States. Without them, the acts that President Nixon hoped to conceal forever would remain state secrets.
What compelled him to commit crimes—secretly collecting campaign cash from foreign dictators and aspiring American ambassadors, wiretapping his loyal aides and distinguished diplomats as if they were foreign spies—and then conspire to conceal them? Why did he drive the nation deeper into Vietnam, at a cost of tens of thousands of American lives, only to accept a settlement no better than the one he could have signed on his first day in office? Why did he lie about his war plans to his secretary of defense and his secretary of state? What were the Watergate burglars seeking? Why did Nixon tape-record the evidence that proved his complicity in the cover-up? Why did he undertake the unconstitutional actions that led to his resignation?
Now we have answers, straight from the president and his closest aides. The story is richer and stranger than we ever knew.
For those who lived under Nixon, it is worse than you may recollect. For those too young to recall, it is worse than you can imagi
ne.
“Always remember,” Nixon said on the day he resigned, “others may hate you. But those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.” This story is the tragedy of a man destroying himself.
CHAPTER ONE
“A great, bad man”
RICHARD NIXON saw himself as a great statesman, a giant for the ages, a general who could command the globe, a master of war, not merely the leader of the free world but “the world leader.” Yet he was addicted to the gutter politics that ruined him. He was—as an English earl once said of the warlord Oliver Cromwell—“a great, bad man.”
In Nixon’s first State of the Union speech, he said that he was possessed by “an indefinable spirit—the lift of a driving dream which has made America, from its beginning, the hope of the world.” He promised the American people “the best chance since World War II to enjoy a generation of uninterrupted peace.”
But Richard Nixon was never at peace. A darker spirit animated him—malevolent and violent, driven by anger and an insatiable appetite for revenge. At his worst he stood on the brink of madness. He thought the world was against him. He saw enemies everywhere. His greatness became an arrogant grandeur.
By experience deeply suspicious, by instinct incurably deceptive, he was branded by an indelible epithet: Tricky Dick. No less a man than Martin Luther King Jr. saw a glimpse of the monster beneath the veneer the first time they met, when King was the rising leader of the civil rights movement. “Nixon has a genius for convincing one that he is sincere,” King wrote in 1958. “If Richard Nixon is not sincere, he is the most dangerous man in America.”
Nixon had that genius, a genuine conviction that he could change the world. He was also a most dangerous man.
He had vowed all his political life to fight communism; then he clinked glasses with the world’s foremost Communist tyrants in China and Russia. He gambled on their good faith; he had hopes that they would help him out of Vietnam. He lost that bet. Had he won, he might have remade the political map of the planet. In the long run, at best America broke even after Nixon went to the capitals of world communism. He returned with treaties and statements signifying comity and coexistence, but these liaisons were fragile. They were political communiqués, not peace deals. Russia and China were our greatest foes then; they remain America’s strongest opponents today.
Nixon was realistic about America’s relations with them. “We are still dealing with governments that are basically hostile to us,” he said in May 1971, each word recorded on tape. “Those Chinese are out to whip me.” As for the Russians, he called their leaders gangsters. He predicted that mutual mistrust would prevail. “They particularly won’t believe me,” he said in the Oval Office that same spring. “You see, they really think I’m a tricky bastard. And they’re right.”
But Nixon wanted to give the American people what he had promised: an honorable end to the war in Vietnam. If he achieved that goal, he calculated that he could win reelection by a landslide so enormous that the landscape of American politics would be forever altered. And that was why Nixon went to China.
Nixon’s geostrategic gambits were a great success with the majority of the American people. “Nixon went to China” remains a catchphrase for politics as the art of the possible. If America’s cold warrior in chief could champion détente, easing tensions with the United States’ nuclear-armed adversaries, then anything was possible.
* * *
The political and social crises Nixon faced still confront the country today. He faced them with his genius for appearing sincere.
Equal justice under law, words engraved on the entrance to the Supreme Court, was an elusive ideal. The civil rights laws of the 1960s were barely four years old. Nixon was given to making racist remarks in private; he tried with all his might to dismantle the new federal agencies designed to enforce racial equality and social justice. He supported desegregation in principle, because the Supreme Court demanded it, but in practice, and in detail, he resisted it.
Nixon confided in private that he would always favor the economic interests of corporations over the environment. But when Americans realized they were ruining the air they breathed and the water they drank, they marched in great numbers in the name of saving the earth. In response, Congress passed the strongest environmental laws in American history. To his credit, Nixon signed them, along with rules and regulations to enforce them. Yet he believed, as he said, that “the environment is not an issue that’s worth a damn to us.”
Nixon said time and again that he really didn’t give a damn about the domestic issues of the day. He contended that the country could run itself without a president to watch over every picayune political problem. He embraced economic policies that were “in the long run … a catastrophe,” in the words of George P. Shultz, his treasury secretary. Unemployment and inflation nearly tripled during the Nixon years; this led to the longest recession in four decades.
His clashes with the courts left lasting wounds on the American body politic. He had an abiding contempt for Congress, and he treated most of his Cabinet with cool disdain. His conferences with congressional leaders and Cabinet members and the National Security Council were show-and-tell sessions, not the time or place for policies to take shape. These full-dress meetings were shadow plays. He had reached his life-or-death resolutions before they convened.
Nixon would appear to hear out his most senior military, diplomatic, and intelligence chiefs. But he didn’t want advice or counsel from the Pentagon or the CIA, where there were men who had devoted their lives to Vietnam since Americans first left footprints in the mud back in 1954. The sword of war and the shield of national security were his alone to wield.
“Nixon never trusted anybody,” wrote Richard Helms, his CIA chieftain, one among the many leading figures of his administration who would face the prospect of prison for protecting the president from the consequences of his secrecy and deception. “He was constantly telling people that the Air Force in their bombings in Vietnam couldn’t hit their ass with their hand, the State Department was just a bunch of pinstriped cocktail-drinking diplomats, the Agency couldn’t come up with a winning victory in Vietnam.”
The president’s harangues went “on and on and on,” Helms remembered. Nixon ranted: “They are dumb, they are stupid, they can’t do this, and they can’t do that.” These same generals, spymasters, admirals, and ambassadors were America’s point men in an increasingly impossible war. Nixon’s lack of faith in them was immutable—and, ultimately, mutual.
This mistrust led him to deceive his Cabinet, the Congress, and the citizenry about the course of the war as he charted it. He saw himself as commander in chief not only of the army and the navy, as the Constitution says, but of all the American people. He was the leader of a worldwide battle where the future of the nation was at stake. His enemies abroad and his enemies at home, he felt, were conspiring to bring the United States to its knees.
Nixon believed to the marrow of his bones that the Soviets, the Chinese, the North Vietnamese, and the Cubans were secretly financing the American antiwar movement, which could mobilize a million marchers at a month’s notice. These people were mainstream citizens, not mad bombers. Yet while Nixon was still getting his bearings as president, a small faction of the radical left, a few hundred people, broke away to form a revolutionary gang called the Weathermen. The marchers carried placards; the Weathermen preferred Molotov cocktails. They set off small bombs inside the Senate and the Pentagon; the FBI never caught the bombers. The Weathermen declared war on the government; Nixon called them terrorists. The response he demanded—a series of illegal break-ins and warrantless wiretaps—would result in the indictments of the leaders of the FBI, not the bombers they pursued.*
Nixon insisted that the CIA and the FBI discover the sources of underground Communist support for American peace groups. Where was the evidence? His intelligence chiefs reported that none existed. Yet Nixon convinced himself that the capital w
as besieged by Americans who had formed enemy battalions financed by Moscow and Beijing and Hanoi and Havana. He saw the antiwar movement as the fifth column of international communism.
Washington became a combat zone when the radical left confronted Richard Nixon. Tear gas hurled by police against protesters wafted through the windows of the Justice Department headquarters, gagging Attorney General Mitchell. Army soldiers in full combat gear camped on the fourth floor of the Executive Office Building, next door to the White House, to protect the president from attack. The days of rage and fear passed for the protesters. But not for Nixon: he was scarred by a quarter century of political warfare against his enemies. He stayed on high alert.
* * *
Nixon saw the clashes he faced in Washington and around the world as a continuing constitutional crisis. He compared them to the Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln suspended the law of habeas corpus, the ancient writ that allows anyone under arrest to appear before a court. Lincoln’s act was unconstitutional, but he believed—and Nixon agreed—that there were times when a president had to break the law to save the nation.
“When the president does it, that means it is not illegal,” Nixon insisted. “Actions which otherwise would be unconstitutional could become lawful if undertaken for the purpose of preserving the Constitution and the nation,” he said. “This nation was torn apart in an ideological way by the war in Vietnam, as much as the Civil War tore apart the nation when Lincoln was president.”
So no one could question Nixon’s actions in the name of national security—not the courts, not the Congress, and certainly no citizen. And Nixon defined national security as far more than the powers of America’s soldiers and spies to fight their enemies abroad. It included the powers of a secret police, the power to spy on American citizens, to break into their homes, to tap their telephones, to burglarize their offices, seeking evidence of sedition and treason. For Nixon, every American citizen and every elected official who opposed the war in Vietnam was an enemy, no less than a soldier of the army of North Vietnam, and he stood surrounded by foes left and right, the lone warrior.