One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon

by Tim Weiner

  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.”

  Nixon agreed. He was ready to recalibrate the balance of terror.

  One week later, on the afternoon of Saturday, March 15, back in Washington, Nixon took a fifty-five-minute swim in the heated White House pool. He got out of the water and called Henry Kissinger three times.

  Each call evinced an escalating state of fury.

  The first call lasted six minutes. “The President ordered the immediate implementation of the Breakfast Plan,” Kissinger’s notes read.

  The second call lasted one minute. The president commanded that the secretary of state and the American ambassador in Saigon be kept in the dark until the B-52s had passed the point of no return.

  The third call to Kissinger was as blunt as it could be. “Everything that will fly is to get over to North Vietnam,” the president said. Kissinger’s notes read, “There will be no appeal” from the Pentagon or the State Department. “He will let them know who is boss around here.”

  The full scope of the destruction the United States unleashed on Cambodia remained unrevealed for three decades, due to the deliberate falsification of the bombing records, authorized by Nixon and executed by Kissinger, Haig, and General Abrams. The falsification violated the military laws of the United States. The bombing of a neutral nation arguably violated the laws of war.

  In November 2000, Bill Clinton became the first American president since Nixon to visit Vietnam. To help in the search for unexploded bombs, which remained a lethal threat there and in Laos and Cambodia, Clinton made public an air force database that contained a staggering statistic.

  Between March 1969 and August 1973, America dropped 2,756,727 tons of bombs on Cambodia. That figure was nearly five times greater than previously known, exceeding the tonnage of all Allied bombing during World War II, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No one knows how many Cambodian civilians were killed, perhaps one hundred fifty thousand.

  Kissinger told Defense Secretary Laird that the president had approved the bombing of Cambodia on March 16, the night after the first B-52s attacked. He said the decision was one that Nixon could never avow.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “The center cannot hold”

  GENERAL ABRAMS was outraged. One week after the great waves of B-52 attacks began, a wire service reporter in Saigon named Jack Walsh filed a story saying Abrams was “seeking permission” to bomb enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia. It ran on the front page of the Washington Star on March 25, 1969.

  Abrams fired off a top-secret cable to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Earle Wheeler, calling the story a disaster. His fury was mild compared to Richard Nixon’s.

  Leaks plague every president, but none more than Nixon. His passion for secrecy equaled his hatred for reporters—a high standard. One month after the story appeared, on April 25, Nixon met with J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General John Mitchell in the Oval Office. Mitchell sat quietly, as was his habit, puffing clouds of smoke from his pipe, listening as Hoover told the president that there was only one way to deal with leakers. And that was to wiretap them. As Nixon put it, wiretapping was “the ultimate weapon.”

  Nixon immediately called Henry Kissinger into the meeting and told him to take responsibility for stopping the leaks—starting by tapping members of his own NSC staff. “Henry himself was, in a sense, the target of all this suspicion,” said Kissinger’s aide Peter Rodman. “He was under pressure to show nobody on his staff” was leaking information. “Here he was in this room with J. Edgar Hoover, John Mitchell, Richard Nixon, and they’re saying, ‘Let’s do some taps.’”

  On the morning of May 9, Kissinger called Hoover, furious over a front-page story in the New York Times. The reporter, William Beecher, based at the Pentagon, had filed a careful report stating that B-52s had struck several of the enemy’s camps inside Cambodia. No public outcry resulted. No congressional hearings ensued. What was really happening—a massive attack on a neutral nation, concealed by falsified Pentagon reports—did not come out until 1973.*

  Kissinger told Hoover that the Times story was “extraordinarily damaging” and “dangerous.” He hoped Hoover would help him “destroy whoever did this” by wiretapping reporters and their suspected sources at the NSC, the Pentagon, and the State Department; Kissinger would select the targets. The taps also remained secret until 1973. Their targets included thirteen American government officials and four newspaper reporters. Daily summaries of the White House wiretaps went from the FBI to the president’s closest aides. This continued for twenty months—until Nixon installed his own secret taping system in the White House.

  The taps revealed nothing but “gossip and bullshitting,” as Nixon inelegantly put it on his own tapes. “The tapping was a very, very unproductive thing. I’ve always known that.” But it was Nixon’s first clear step over the line of the law. The president could order warrantless wiretaps against suspected foreign spies. But these were American citizens. Nixon and Kissinger later argued that the tapping was within the realm of the president’s national security powers. It was not.

  Some of the targets of the taps had long assumed they were spied upon by foreign intelligence services. “But I didn’t think it was being done by the White House,” said Ambassador William H. Sullivan, a distinguished diplomat who helped Kissinger open a secret channel of communication with the leaders of North Vietnam. When Sullivan later found out that his own government was tapping him, he assumed that Nixon had ordered the surveillance in a fit of drunken rage. “It probably came from Nixon personally,” Sullivan said. “He was given to exploding—particularly in the course of an evening—if he had had a few drinks.” Sober or not, Nixon had “an almost paranoid fear that people were not trustworthy,” said Col. Richard Thomas Kennedy, the National Security Council’s staff director for planning and coordination from 1969 to 1974.

  Winston Lord, one of Kissinger’s most devoted aides, was among those tapped. “You cannot square a personal friendship and total trust and intimacy with his authorizing of tapping your phone,” Lord later reflected. “You can’t run a government that way.”

  Nixon’s spying on Americans went far beyond these taps, as a National Security Agency history declassified in 2013 disclosed. An NSA “watch list” began growing in October 1967, the result of LBJ’s suspicions that antiwar activists were being financed by Moscow. It kept growing under Nixon: sixteen hundred Americans appeared on the list by 1973. The official NSA history states bluntly that the program was “disreputable if not outright illegal.”

  The NSA is a military intelligence service whose charter was to target foreign spies and suspected terrorists, not American citizens who questioned the president’s foreign policies. The watch list was an antecedent to the far more extensive NSA surveillance program ordered by President George W. Bush; the distinct difference was the direct targeting of high-profile American citizens as opposed to high-value foreign terrorists.

  The NSA history notes that the watch list grew to include the Washington Post humor columnist Art Buchwald and New York Times journalist Tom Wicker—both fired words, not weapons—“and even politicians such as Frank Church and Howard Baker.” Church and Baker were U.S. senators. Church was a liberal Democrat who sponsored the first major bipartisan moves against the war. Baker was the Republican who famously asked at the 1973 Watergate hearings, “What did the president know and when did he know it?”

  The FBI and NSA taps, like so much that would come to torment Nixon, were all about the war abroad and the war at home. No one ever said it better than Haldeman himself: “Without the Vietnam War there would have been no Watergate.”

  * * *

  Nixon’s greatest domestic enemy was the peace movement, which rose with every American who fell in Vietnam. By the end of March 1969, that death toll had reached 33,641, surpassing that of the Korean War.

  That same week, Nixon devoted one of his first major public statements to the growing demonstrations on college campuses across the countr
y. “This is the way civilizations begin to die,” Nixon said. “The process is altogether too familiar to those who would survey the wreckage of history: assault and counterassault, one extreme leading to the opposite extreme, the voices of reason and calm discredited.

  “As Yeats foresaw, ‘Things fall apart. The center cannot hold,’” he warned. “None of us has the right to suppose it cannot happen here.”

  Many knew by heart the next lines of the Irish poet’s “The Second Coming,” written months after World War I ended.

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

  The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

  The best lack all conviction, while the worst

  Are full of passionate intensity.

  The president and his speechwriters rarely wove poetry into their political rhetoric, but this verse was apt. Nixon really did fear anarchy in America. The American people truly were weary of the blood-dimmed tide. And the four-star generals genuinely feared Nixon would fall apart in the face of the growing opposition to the war.

  “The subject of U.S. casualties is being thrown at me at every juncture: in the press, by the Secretary of Defense, at the White House and on the Hill,” General Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote to General Abrams in Saigon on April 3. “I am concerned that decisions could be made in response to strong pressure inside and on the administration to seek a settlement of the war.” Both men had been commanders in World War II under General Eisenhower, who had died the week before, on March 28. Like Ike, they wanted to fight and win. But these were men who had won their stars commanding soldiers in a war of unconditional surrender; their tanks and their artillery and above all their thinking about how to fight a war were rusty. America’s generals were confounded by Asian guerrillas. They did not trust Nixon to lead them to victory. The mistrust was mutual.