by Tim Weiner
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The president led a National Security Council meeting the week of Eisenhower’s death, seeking a way to end the American role in the war before the year was over. The CIA’s director, Richard Helms, gave his unvarnished analysis. Two weeks of nonstop B-52 bombing in Cambodia had had no visible impact on North Vietnam’s military capabilities. The leaders of South Vietnam were not leading their own soldiers. It was pointless to send more American troops into battle without a strategy.
“We need a plan,” the president said. “We are working against a time clock. We are talking six to eight months.”
“We must get a sense of urgency in the training of the South Vietnamese,” Nixon continued. “How do we de-Americanize this thing?” De-Americanize meant using Asians to fight Asians while pulling out Americans, changing the color of the anticommunist corpses on the battlefield.
Secretary of Defense Laird thought it was the wrong word, too negative. He said, “What we need is a term—Vietnamizing—to put the emphasis on the right issue.” Thus began Vietnamization, a spur-of-the-moment strategy to turn a hopeless war over to our hapless allies.
“We should agree to total withdrawal of U.S. forces but include very strong conditions which we know may not be met,” Nixon said. “There is no doubt that U.S. forces will be in Vietnam for some time, something like a large military assistance group, but our public posture must be another thing.”
Our public posture must be another thing—that was classic Nixon, the trickster with two faces, as Martin Luther King Jr. had seen him. If sincere, a genius; if not, dangerous.
He would slowly pull American troops out of the Vietnam War—and then try to proclaim peace. As he drew down American forces, he would train and equip the army of South Vietnam. He would send Kissinger in secret to negotiate with Hanoi for a cease-fire. But if that strategy failed, the Communists could be victorious. In the end, “Vietnamization” could doom South Vietnam. And if it failed and Saigon fell, the long war would end in the death of one nation and the disgrace of another.
On April 3, the same day that General Wheeler put his worries about an American withdrawal into words, Kissinger wrote to Nixon: “We must convince the American public that we are eager to settle the war, and Hanoi that we are not so anxious that it can afford to outwait us.”
“Our best course would be a bold move of trying to settle everything at once,” Kissinger proposed. He would sit down in secret with the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, and say that a settlement in Vietnam and a pact on limiting the superpowers’ nuclear arsenals were inextricably linked. He was going to try to enlist the Soviet Union, Hanoi’s most powerful ally, as a partner for peace in Vietnam. If this tactic succeeded, it could alter the course of the Cold War. Kissinger now understood the president’s passion for the big play, the grand bargain.
He put this in writing to Ambassador Dobrynin.
The President has reviewed the Vietnam situation carefully. He will not be the first American President to lose a war, and he is not prepared to give in to public pressures which would have that practical consequence. The President has therefore decided that he will make one more effort to achieve a reasonable settlement.…
U.S.-Soviet relations are therefore at a crossroads. The President is eager to move into an era of conciliation with the Soviet Union on a broad front. As a sign of this, he is willing to send a high-level delegation to Moscow to agree with the Soviet Union on principles of strategic arms limitations. He is also willing to consider other meetings at even higher levels.
The President will give this effort in Moscow six weeks to succeed.
Kissinger concluded that this was “the only way to end the war quickly and the best way to conclude it honorably.” But he warned Nixon it would work only if the president were prepared “to take tough escalatory steps if Moscow rejects the overture.”
He called the president in Key Biscayne on April 5 to get the go-ahead to meet with the Soviet ambassador. He got it. But Nixon already had determined to “take tough escalatory steps.” Before hearing what the Soviets had to say about strategic nuclear weapons or making plans to withdraw ground troops from Vietnam, he first would increase the military pressure on the enemy. He wanted to apply the stick before dangling the carrot. As a committed cold warrior, he believed that the Communists understood the logic of force far better than the language of reason.
“Even without a reason, we ought to go ahead and crack them pretty hard in the North,” Nixon said. “Crack this one, and crack another one. Plenty of places to hit.… The necessity for the North Vietnamese to know that there’s still a lot of snap left in the old boys is very important. And I don’t know any other way to do it.”
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As Kissinger was talking war and peace with the Soviet ambassador on April 15, Nixon learned that North Korea had shot down an American spy plane in international waters over the Sea of Japan. Thirty-one Americans were killed aboard the navy EC-121 aircraft operated by the National Security Agency. Another newly declassified NSA history and other recently released documents show that the Pentagon proposed to strike back with nuclear weapons.
Nixon first weighed seizing a North Korean ship sailing the high seas under a Dutch flag, which the State Department ruled an act of piracy. “The President said to find a way that international law can be breached,” Haig’s notes from an April 15 conversation with Kissinger read. “The U.S. became a great nation by breaking international law. The President said we certainly have concluded that we won’t just sit here and do nothing.”
But that is what he did—nothing. The next morning, he presided over a full-scale National Security Council session in the White House Cabinet Room, which included the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who rarely attended such meetings. Haig’s notes are the sole record.
General Wheeler reviewed the military options, one of which was to attack North Korea with “Honest John” missiles, artillery rockets carrying atomic warheads with a payload of thirty kilotons each, roughly equal to two and a half Hiroshimas. This act “would trigger retaliation,” the general noted. The prospect of that attack, and the retaliation, gave everyone pause. The United States had fought the Korean War before.
“That is a very tough one to bite,” Kissinger told the president after the meeting. “We might have to go to tactical nuclears.”
Nixon stared into the abyss of nuclear war and turned away. He considered other acts of war, such as bombing North Korea’s military bases. As Haig recollected in a 2007 oral history for the Nixon Presidential Library, the hawks on the NSC staff recommended “immediate military action against the North by taking out one of their airfields, and, at the same time, to tell Moscow that our toleration days were over. This included the determination to settle Vietnam immediately, with or without the Soviet Union and if the Soviet Union were to join the other side, we were prepared for that contingency as well.” This, like the nuclear option, raised the possibility of a Third World War.
Kissinger, as he often did, played a double game. He said he sided with the hawks, but he warned the president that Secretary of State Rogers would openly oppose an attack, a revolt that the new administration could ill afford. That left Nixon with no option but a meager show of force: sending a flotilla of navy ships into the Sea of Japan. It was only a show. North Korea went unpunished. Nixon had frozen in the face of a Communist attack. “We do not do a thing with 31 lives missing,” he sighed.
The president later regretted this decision bitterly. Haig recounted, “Nixon told me it was the worst mistake of his presidency not to respond early on in a decisive way to convince both Moscow and whoever else, Hanoi, Pyongyang, or any one of the camp that this was a different America.”
One consequence of the EC-121 calamity was Nixon’s near-complete loss of faith in his secretary of state, Bill Rogers. Thereafter, Kissinger became the president’s diplomat in chief, opening secret negotiations with the Soviets, the North Vietnamese, and, th
rough interlocutors, the Chinese in 1969. Rogers was to know nothing about such talks.
“Nixon did not trust the State Department,” said Kissinger’s Russia hand, Peter Rodman. “There were a number of issues—whether it was Vietnam or relations with the Soviets—where the first few things that Rogers did were the exact opposite of what Nixon wanted.… Nixon decided that he would rather do these things himself. He had Henry there to do it. Henry and he had an ideological affinity. They both looked at the world in the same way.”
“The price you pay,” Rodman said, “is a demoralization of the rest of the government.”
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Nixon had another reason for wanting complete control over the State Department. It had nothing to do with diplomacy. It was about dollars. The wealthiest Nixon campaign contributors were well aware that “ambassadorships were being sold to the highest bidders,” said Samuel F. Hart, a Foreign Service officer for twenty-seven years who himself served as an ambassador under President Ronald Reagan.
This practice did not start with Nixon, but it was during his presidency that it became blatant and dangerous—another step down the road to Watergate.
Vincent de Roulet arrived as the newly appointed ambassador to Jamaica in 1969, sailing in on his ninety-foot yacht, Patrina, soon to be joined by seventeen of his racehorses. He was a ne’er-do-well who’d married rich; his mother-in-law, an immensely wealthy heiress, was a major Nixon fund-raiser. He had contributed $75,000 to the 1968 Nixon campaign (a sum equal to $513,000 today).
The chief political officer at the American embassy in Jamaica, Kenneth Rogers, remembered Ambassador de Roulet’s tenure as a series of political disasters and racist jibes, ending only when the government expelled him and the president of Jamaica told the U.S. Department of State that “Vincent De Roulet was no longer ‘persona grata.’ He was not permitted to return.”
Nixon appointed Turner B. Shelton, a crony and contributor of long standing, as ambassador to Nicaragua. Shelton had been the American consul general in Nassau, the Bahamas, where Nixon was a frequent visitor during the 1960s. His appointment shocked the career Foreign Service officers who served with him.
“I think he had something on them, on the White House and on Nixon,” said James R. Cheek, a senior American envoy who became President Clinton’s ambassador to Argentina. Strong evidence suggests that Shelton was a go-between for secret cash contributions to Nixon from donors, including the deeply eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, who sojourned in the Bahamas and moved to the Nicaraguan capital during Shelton’s tenures.
Shelton had “contributed heavily to the Richard Nixon political trajectory over many years,” said Charles Anthony Gillespie Jr., later the American ambassador to Chile under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush. “Turner B. Shelton was called a Hollywood producer. Now, I’m not an expert on Turner B. Shelton, but my understanding is that what Turner really produced best were what were called ‘blue’ movies. Whatever else he did … he contributed chunks of this money to Richard Nixon’s campaigns over the years. He obviously merited an appointment and he got the Embassy in Nicaragua.”
Shelton’s shady reputation was exceeded by his devotion to the crooked dictator who ran Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza. “Shelton didn’t want any of our cables or reports to go in to Washington,” said Ambassador Cheek, then Shelton’s underling at the embassy. “Somoza’s corruption and suppression and disappearing people … was supposed to be all censored out.”
“He was very close to Somoza,” Cheek said—so close that the dictator put the American ambassador’s image on newly issued Nicaraguan currency, the twenty-córdoba bill—but “Shelton’s toadying to Somoza and almost worshiping him didn’t bother the White House at all.”
At the start of the Nixon administration, Sam Hart was based at the American embassy in Costa Rica. “We had a career Foreign Service officer as ambassador there,” he recalled. “He was told that he was not going to be kept on, and was moved out, anticipating the arrival of Mrs. Ruth Farkas. She and her husband owned Alexander’s Department Store in New York and pledged a quarter of a million dollars to Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign in ’68”—equal to almost two million dollars today.
But “word got out that Ruth Farkas was not coming, because she and her husband had major-league problems with the IRS,” Ambassador Hart said. “And even Richard Nixon couldn’t fix that.” Nixon’s personal lawyer and political bagman, Herbert Kalmbach, fixed things for Farkas: after she pledged three hundred thousand dollars to his ’72 reelection campaign, the president appointed her ambassador to Luxembourg, a far more luxurious post.*
The going price rose as the reelection neared. “Anybody who wants to be an ambassador must at least give $250,000,” the president instructed Haldeman in June 1971.
This conduct had consequences. Kalmbach later pleaded guilty to selling ambassadorships for Nixon’s benefit. He had several million dollars in unspent campaign cash on deposit in 1969, and some of that money wound up in a secret reelection fund Nixon began building shortly after he first took office. The cash helped finance an undercover private eye who worked for the White House, Jack Caulfield, who began spying on Nixon’s political enemies in July 1969—days after Nixon commanded his aides to activate “dirty tricks” against the president’s political opponents, as Haldeman’s diary records. And three years later, some of the slush funds Kalmbach controlled would serve as hush money for the Watergate burglars.
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Contributors who wanted something for their money often were received at the “Florida White House,” in Key Biscayne, or the “Western White House,” also known as LaCasa Pacifica, in San Clemente, California. Nixon escaped to these retreats frequently for long weekends and, increasingly, for weeks on end.
The Key Biscayne compound contained five well-appointed waterfront bungalows. Nixon flew there fifty-nine times as president, spending 198 days and nights. He passed almost as much time at San Clemente. Both of Nixon’s hideaways were built with help from C. G. “Bebe” Rebozo, a Cuban American banker, and their mutual friend Bob Abplanalp, known as the spray valve king. Both men had been Nixon’s financiers for years. Nixon liked to bend an elbow with Rebozo whenever time permitted, relaxing his mind, sometimes past the realm of reason. When Nixon really wanted to unwind, he and his drinking buddy Bebe took a helicopter from Key Biscayne to Walker’s Cay, Abplanalp’s private island in the Bahamas. What went on in the cay stayed in the cay.
San Clemente was far more formal, an elegant ten-room mansion built in the 1920s, on a twenty-eight-acre estate with flowering gardens and a seven-hole golf course overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It stood forty miles south of the tiny town where Nixon was raised, but light-years away from its dusty poverty.
Nixon would reside there for a month at a time. He liked to invite world leaders and Hollywood celebrities, laying charms on conservative stars such as John Wayne and Clint Eastwood and Governor Ronald Reagan of California, though he regarded the governor as an amiable dimwit with no political future. Nixon summoned his senior military and diplomatic officers to San Clemente, where they delivered the latest grim reports on Vietnam. He frequently ordered White House aides to fly in from Washington on a moment’s notice to confer on the crisis of the day.
He tried to relax in his retreats, but he remained a restless man. Aides who met with Nixon in California and Florida often found him seething in self-imposed isolation. While light sparkled on the water and warm winds stirred the air, Nixon drew the blinds against the sun in Key Biscayne, and set a fireplace blazing in an air-conditioned room sealed off from the Pacific breezes in San Clemente. He sat in the shadows, communing with the only man in whom he could confide: himself.
“He had no hobbies,” said Alexander Butterfield, a senior Nixon aide, one of only four men who knew about the president’s secret taping system at the White House, installed in February 1971. “The Presidency was his hobby. He meditated, he thought, he pondered. He worked on his yellow
pad. He thought things over.… He seemed to me preoccupied with the Presidency … preoccupied with his place in history, with his Presidency as history would see it.”
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Nixon believed beyond doubt that history would record his presidency as a great turning point. America would either be resurrected as the world’s singular superpower or fall on the sword of Vietnam.
“This country could run itself domestically without a President,” Nixon told the most prominent presidential biographer of the era, Theodore White. “You need a President for foreign policy.”
His Cabinet and his White House staff soon realized that Nixon cared little about domestic affairs, least of all housing, health, education, welfare, and civil rights. Unless an issue could be leveraged for political advantage leading to Nixon’s reelection, it was a waste of time. “He believed in nothing,” said James Farmer, assistant secretary at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and one among very few black Nixon appointees. “He was neither moral nor immoral, but was amoral; he made decisions based on how they would affect him politically, not based on whether they were right or wrong.”
Nixon made a halfhearted attempt to create a Domestic Council that could be a counterpart to the National Security Council. Much of the work initially fell to his White House aide Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a future Democratic senator from New York. But Nixon agreed wholeheartedly when Moynihan, in despair, told him he “can’t have a Domestic Program.” The president had defined no domestic agenda; his Cabinet officers were in constant conflict over everything from economics to education; Congress rejected more than two-thirds of the new legislation proposed by the White House in 1969. The president concurred that it was “politically impossible” to tackle the nation’s domestic problems in his first term. Far better, he concluded, “to get rid of things that don’t work, and try to build up the few that do.”
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.