by Tim Weiner
Nixon told the ambassador that Mitchell and Chennault would be his private liaisons to the embassy of South Vietnam. Nixon wanted Bui Diem to serve as his direct back channel to President Nguyen Van Thieu in Saigon. He wanted to make sure that a clear message was conveyed in private: whatever peace deal the Democrats were offering, South Vietnam would be far better served if the staunchly anticommunist Richard Nixon were in the White House.
Ambassador Diem left this meeting “increasingly attracted to the Republican side,” he wrote thirty years later. Nixon made a convincing argument that he would be the man to settle the war on terms most favorable to America’s allies in South Vietnam. And the ambassador was delighted with the offer of entrée to the court of the Dragon Lady. “As far as courting Republicans went, there were few places in Washington like Anna Chennault’s penthouse apartment at the Watergate.”
The courtship intensified as the election approached. “I am regularly in touch with the Nixon entourage,” Ambassador Diem reported to President Thieu. Diem kept Mitchell closely apprised of Thieu’s aversion to the peace talks in Paris.
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Nixon’s foreign intrigues extended to fund-raising. He raised thirty million dollars from Americans that summer and fall, more than any presidential candidate before him. But he also had secret sources of foreign money. Illegal and unreported funds started flowing into the campaign during September and October 1968. Nixon had learned through his associations with the CIA and the FBI during his years under Eisenhower that suitcases stuffed with cash were instruments of foreign policy for an American commander in chief. He now applied the methods of covert operations to obtaining campaign contributions.
One source of his clandestine cash was the military junta in Greece. Its leaders were pleased by Nixon’s surprising choice of a running mate, the governor of Maryland, Spiro T. Agnew, born Spiros Anagnostopoulos, raised in the Greek Orthodox Church. The junta contributed $549,000 to the Nixon campaign through Thomas Pappas, a Boston businessman who ran the largest oil company in Greece. Pappas was a personal friend to Nixon and the colonels; he became known in the White House as “the Greek bearing gifts.”
A coalition of right-wing leaders in Italy served as another source of covert contributions to Nixon. They kicked in hundreds of thousands of dollars through Pier Talenti, an Italian American industrialist with fascist tendencies and a vast family estate in Rome. Nixon himself instructed his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, to help handle “this contribution from the Italian.” Nixon liked to reward his contributors when he could: as president, he personally approved millions of dollars in covert support to right-wing Italian politicians through the CIA and tens of millions in weapons sales to the Greek colonels through the Pentagon. American corporate executives who gave at least four million dollars to the campaign off the books knew whom to call when delivering their contributions: Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s personal secretary since 1951, fiercely loyal and famously tight-lipped. She made the appointment when the president of Phillips Petroleum personally delivered fifty thousand dollars in cash to Nixon at the candidate’s Fifth Avenue apartment in New York City. She told Nixon about an off-the-record “seven-figure contribution” collected by Wiley Buchanan, a Texas millionaire who had served as Eisenhower’s White House chief of protocol. And she privately recorded a fifteen-thousand-dollar donation from the former Cuban ambassador Nicolás Arroyo Márquez. “He was in Washington when Castro took over,” she noted. “RN knows him.”
The 1968 Nixon campaign also had the ability to tap wellsprings of cash whose ultimate source is still a mystery. Robert C. Hill, the Republican National Committee’s foreign policy chairman, reported to the Nixon campaign on September 29, 1968, that “RN’s Committee in Mexico” had access to a cache controlled by Win Scott, the CIA’s station chief in Mexico City since 1956. Scott had personal ties to Mexican presidents, the nation’s security ministers, and wealthy Republicans with haciendas in Mexico. Hill said the station chief had “between three and five million dollars to play with.” Hill had been Eisenhower’s ambassador to Mexico; Nixon would make him ambassador to Spain. The millions remain untraceable. Four years after the 1968 election, campaign cash in Mexican banks would provide a link in the chain of events that began the agonies of Nixon’s downfall.
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These transactions were only one cog in the Nixon machine. The candidate’s days were consumed with the ceaseless grind of politics: recording television ads, making stump speeches, calibrating the vote in every state. In early October, with the election a month away, Nixon held a solid lead in the polls. He knew of, and feared, only one thing that could derail him: a dramatic development in Vietnam. Vice President Humphrey’s campaign had been hamstrung by his loyalties to Lyndon Johnson; antiwar liberals were loath to support him. But if Johnson stopped the bombing of North Vietnam, brokered a cease-fire, or brought a peace deal in the Paris talks, the Democratic nominee might garner millions of votes from war-weary Americans. A peace agreement could swing the election.
“Many Republican friends have contacted me and encouraged us to stand firm” against a bombing halt, Ambassador Diem reported to President Thieu on October 23. Thieu responded that South Vietnam might indeed oppose it; he believed that Nixon, the staunch anticommunist, would cut a better deal than any Democrat.
The National Security Agency, spying on America’s allies as it had done since its creation, intercepted these cables in Saigon and reported their gist directly to President Johnson. The NSA and the FBI also monitored the embassy of South Vietnam in Washington, so LBJ knew what transpired in the telephone calls and diplomatic cables on both ends of the conversation.
But Nixon had his own spy in the White House, “someone in Johnson’s innermost circle,” in his words. The next day, the candidate learned without question that the United States had struck a secret pact with North Vietnam to stop the bombing and seek peace. The election was ten days away. “I immediately decided that the only way to prevent Johnson from totally undercutting my candidacy at the eleventh hour was for me to make public the fact that a bombing halt was imminent,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs.
He went public on October 26 with a classic phrase of political language: he suggested that the pact might be “a cynical last-minute attempt by President Johnson to salvage the candidacy of Mr. Humphrey. This I do not believe.” Those last five words were false.
Johnson and Nixon had hated each other since they first met as senators in 1951. Both were hardened veterans of political warfare. For this battle the president had more firepower (the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI), but Nixon had the guerrilla’s edge of sabotage and sneak attacks.
On October 28 an NSA intercept from Saigon landed at the White House, direct from the agency’s headquarters in Maryland. It quoted President Thieu word for word: “It appears Mr. Nixon will be elected as the next President, and he thinks it would be good to try to solve the important question of the political talks with the next President.” The intercept was unambiguous: Nixon was in contact with Saigon, and he was trying to undermine the peace deal.
At dawn on October 29, Johnson read a memo from his national security adviser, Walt Whitman Rostow, quoting a Wall Street executive very close to Nixon. His inside information matched the NSA’s intelligence reporting: “Nixon was playing the problem,” trying to “incite Saigon to be difficult,” sending a message to Thieu to hold out for a better deal in the next administration.
His fury mounting, the president ordered the FBI to place Anna Chennault under surveillance and to monitor the telephone lines of Ambassador Bui Diem at the embassy of South Vietnam.
The FBI immediately picked up their conversations. On October 30, Diem told the Dragon Lady to come see him immediately. The FBI’s deputy director, Cartha “Deke” DeLoach, had the report in the president’s hands within hours. After reading it, Johnson conveyed a clear warning to Nixon through the Republican leader of the Senate, Everett Dirksen of Illinois. LBJ advised, “He better
keep Mrs. Chennault and all this crowd tied up for a few days.”
On Thursday, October 31, Johnson announced a bombing halt. The national polling networks recorded an immediate and immense shift, measured in millions of votes, away from Nixon and toward Humphrey.
But Thieu had balked. He proclaimed that he would not go to the Paris peace conference alongside the Americans. He would not negotiate with the Communists. He would not accept any deal in the name of peace. He would not consider a coalition in pursuit of a cease-fire. Nor would he see the American ambassador or take his urgent calls. “South Vietnam is not a truck to be attached to a locomotive which will pull it wherever it likes,” he told reporters in Saigon.
Peace was on hold.
* * *
LBJ, certain that a Nixon plot was afoot, telephoned his closest friend in the Senate, Richard Russell of Georgia, the longtime chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, on the day he announced the bombing halt, October 31. “The Republican nominee—our California friend—has been playing on the outskirts with our enemies and our friends,” LBJ told the senator. “He’s been doing it through rather subterranean sources. He has been saying to the allies that ‘You’re going to get sold out … You better not give away your liberty just a few hours before I can preserve it for you.’”
LBJ’s top aides huddled on Saturday morning, November 2, to assess the situation. “It’s clear as day!” said the deputy secretary of defense, Paul Nitze. “Thieu is scared that Humphrey & Democrats will force a coalition on him & the Republicans won’t,” read the minutes of their meeting. That night, the president had the proof in hand. Rostow sent an urgent teletype from the White House to the president at the LBJ Ranch in Texas. The FBI had overheard Chennault delivering “a message from her boss” to Ambassador Diem. The message was “Hold on. We are going to win.”
The president was sure who the boss was: Richard Nixon.
“This is treason,” said the president of the United States. “They’re contacting a foreign power in the middle of a war.” If not treason, it was a federal crime for a citizen to conduct private diplomacy with a foreign government against the interests of the United States.
“We know what Thieu is saying to them,” LBJ rasped, his tobacco- and whiskey-cured voice thickened by a cold. “They ought to know that we know what they’re doing. We know who they’re talking to. I know what they’re saying.… If Nixon keeps the South Vietnamese away from the conference, well, that’s going to be his responsibility. If they don’t want it on the front pages, they better quit it.”
Nixon got the word from Republican allies in the Senate that LBJ was on to him. He telephoned the president at 1:54 p.m. on Sunday, November 3, and denied everything. “My God,” Nixon said, “I would never do anything to encourage Saigon not to come to the table.”
* * *
The Paris peace talks were scuttled. Philip Habib, a senior State Department diplomat at the peace table, thought that the war in Vietnam would have ended if Nixon had not sabotaged the talks.
“The deal was cooked. And then something happened. Somebody got to Thieu on behalf of Nixon and said, ‘Don’t agree, don’t come to Paris,’” Habib, who went on to serve loyally under Nixon, recollected years later. “I’m convinced that, if Humphrey had won the election, the war would have been over much sooner.”
Had the election been held that Sunday, Humphrey might well have won, as the polls reflected. But peace was no longer at hand. On Monday, November 4, preelection polls showed the pendulum of popular opinion swinging back to Nixon.
That afternoon, the president conferred with Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford, and National Security Adviser Walt Rostow. The voting booths would open in a matter of hours. The question was whether to reveal Nixon’s treachery. The problem was twofold: the charge was explosive and the evidence secret. Could the nation handle the disclosure that Nixon was playing a double game with the lives of American soldiers? Or that the U.S. government was spying on the president of South Vietnam?
“I do not believe that any President can make any use of interceptions or telephone taps in any way that would involve politics,” Rusk told the president. “The moment we cross over that divide we are in a different kind of society.”
Nor could the electorate tolerate a last-minute political bombshell of this magnitude. If Nixon won, the revelation could destroy him before he was sworn into office.
“Some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I’m wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story,” Clifford said. “It could cast his whole administration under such doubts that I would think it would be inimical to our country’s interests.”
The president and his advisers kept their silence. Election Day came and went. Not until dawn the next day did the result become clear. Nixon had won by a margin of fewer than half a million votes, a narrow plurality, not a ringing majority: 43.4 percent of the vote to Humphrey’s 42.7 percent, with the racist ex-governor of Alabama, George C. Wallace, putatively a Democrat, winning 13.5 percent. Not since 1912 had a president been elected with less of a popular mandate.
The price of victory was immeasurable. Nixon had scuttled the chance for peace in Vietnam in order to win.
The president confronted Nixon in a telephone call on November 8. “These messages started coming out from here that ‘Johnson was going to have a bombing pause to try to elect Humphrey’ and that they ought to hold out because ‘Nixon will not sell you out,’” LBJ told the president-elect. “Now, that is the story, Dick. And it is a sordid story.”
Nixon always maintained—apparently because J. Edgar Hoover suggested the possibility a few weeks later—that the president had eavesdropped on him personally in the last days of the campaign, with bugs or wiretaps. “We were tapped,” he averred on his own White House tapes. “Johnson tapped us.” Though it was not so, that would have made a far more sordid story, he believed.
All decided to keep the affair under seal in the name of national security.
Walt Rostow wrote the last chapter of the story in 1973, shortly after Nixon was reelected and Lyndon Johnson died. Rostow had smuggled out of the White House the key documents that told the tale. He had copies of the NSA’s reports, the FBI wiretaps, and a cable from the CIA station in Saigon that directly quoted President Thieu saying “he had sent two secret emissaries to the U.S. to contact Richard Nixon” in response to Johnson’s “betrayal.”
Rostow placed the documents in a folder and wrote, “The ‘X’ Files,” on the cover. He sent it to the LBJ Presidential Library, with a request that it remain secret for fifty years. Before he sealed it, he added some personal reflections in a postscript.
“I am inclined to believe the Republican operation in 1968 relates in two ways to the Watergate affair,” he wrote. “First, the election of 1968 proved to be close and there was some reason for those involved on the Republican side to believe their enterprise with the South Vietnamese [provided] the margin of victory. Second, they got away with it.” As Rostow concluded, “There were memories of how close an election could get and the possible utility of pressing to the limit—or beyond” in the pursuit of power.
A measure of deep bitterness remained in Nixon after his hour of triumph, over his suspicion of LBJ’s spying and his unshakable belief that the bombing halt in Vietnam was a ploy to deny him the presidency. Nixon would always remember that his victory depended on deception, duplicity, and acts of dubious legality.
CHAPTER THREE
“He was surrounded by enemies”
NIXON’S SENSE of siege started minutes after he was sworn into office on January 20, 1969, the president of a nation as deeply divided as it had been since the end of the Civil War.
The war at home began on Inauguration Day, said Tom Charles Huston, a young White House aide charged with intelligence gathering. When Nixon rode from the Capitol to the White House, he confronted thousands of “radical people tha
t were throwing rocks,” hurling obscenities at the president’s black limousine, “screaming and carrying on.” No president had ever arrived in office under a hail of garbage and curses, mocked by middle-finger salutes.
Nixon would have his vengeance; Huston would help him seek it. A former military intelligence officer, by the end of the year he had become Nixon’s in-house consultant for domestic spying. When Nixon created the special investigative unit later known as the Plumbers, the group that carried out the president’s orders for gathering intelligence on his political enemies, he looked for a leader. He said, “I really need a son-of-a-bitch like Huston who will work his butt off and do it dishonorably.” But by then, he had a multitude of White House staffers willing and able to perform those tasks.
A generation of the American right arose with Nixon; through them, his influence resounds down the decades. A future president, George H. W. Bush, was his steadfast Republican National Committee chairman. Seven future secretaries of defense served Nixon, including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who labored mightily to destroy the foundations of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, at Nixon’s command. Six future secretaries of state came up through the Nixon White House; so did six directors and deputy directors of central intelligence.
The hard-right views of a young Justice Department attorney, William Rehnquist, caught Nixon’s eye. Rehnquist would spend thirty-two years on the Supreme Court, nearly two decades as the chief justice, reshaping the law in Nixon’s image, until he died in 2005. Nixon named Antonin Scalia as a successor to Rehnquist, as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel—the first real taste of power for the man who has been the most consistently conservative voice in the Supreme Court for the past three decades. Every 5–4 Supreme Court ruling with their names on it—notably, Bush v. Gore, which handed the disputed 2000 election to the candidate who had lost by more than half a million votes—bears the trace of Nixon’s fingerprints.