by Tim Weiner
* * *
Nixon called a White House press conference at the unusually late hour of 10:00 p.m. On deadline, with minutes to write and file their stories, the White House reporters went brain-dead. Nothing about Cambodia and COSVN, nothing about the hard hats, thank you and good night. No one asked about the president’s mood and motives at a moment of national crisis.
Nixon was on the verge of a nervous breakdown: he stayed up all night again, “agitated and uneasy,” in his own words, frantically making more than fifty telephone calls and finally calling upon his valet, Manolo Sanchez, to accompany him to the Lincoln Memorial so he could rap with the young people protesting the war. Word spread quickly that the president was on the loose amid the hippies. The White House aide Egil “Bud” Krogh was on duty that night. Krogh vividly recalled:
Four-thirty in the morning, I was in the Secret Service command post, and over the loudspeaker came the words, “Searchlight is on the lawn”—Searchlight being the President’s Secret Service code name—and I immediately punched in Ehrlichman’s home number … and said, “The President is out and about, and I think he’s on the lawn in the Rose Garden.” And he said, “Go over and render assistance right now.” And so I did … and found out where the President was going and followed him up to the Lincoln Memorial. Couldn’t have gotten there more than two or three minutes after he got there, went up the stairs to see what was going on, and found him in discussion with, at the start, 10 to 15 young people, students who had come in from all over the East Coast.
The only reliable record of the president’s words on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial exists in the real-time accounts of three young women who talked with him face-to-face: Lynn Schatzkin, Ronnie Kemper, and Joan Pelletier.
“He didn’t look at anyone in the eyes; he was mumbling,” Schatzkin said. “As far as sentence structure, there was none.”
“Somebody would ask him to speak up,” Kemper said. “And that would jolt him out of wherever he was and he’d kind of look up and shake his head around, but then he’d go back to looking at his feet and he was gone again.… There was no train of thought.”
“Nothing he was saying was coherent,” Pelletier said. “At first I felt awe, and then that changed right away to respect. Then as he kept talking, it went to disappointment and disillusionment. Then I felt pity because he was so pathetic, and then just plain fear to think that he’s running the country.”
Nixon was “flushed, drawn, exhausted,” Krogh said. “I saw him in probably the most psychologically exposed, raw period of his presidency.”
Nixon went to the Capitol; he wanted to show its chambers to Sanchez, who had never been inside. Haldeman corralled him there at 6:15 a.m. The president demanded a plate of corned beef hash at the Mayflower Hotel; he got it. Haldeman urged him to get some rest, but Nixon still could not sleep, and he rattled around the White House all day without purpose as a peaceful protest of about one hundred thousand people swirled about him.
“The weirdest day so far,” Haldeman wrote in his journal entry for Saturday, May 9. “Very weird. P. completely beat and just rambling on, but obviously too tired to go to sleep.… I am concerned about his condition.… He has had very little sleep for a long time.” Over the next days, Haldeman added ominous notes. He demanded that the president take a five-day weekend in Key Biscayne. But that proved futile. “The unwinding process is not succeeding,” he wrote during the Florida retreat. “More of the same. He just keeps grinding away.” And this: “P. won’t admit it, but he is … letting himself slip back into the old ways.” That meant hitting the bottle: Nixon, desperate for respite, was drinking heavily night after night.
Kissinger, keenly aware of the precarious presidential state of mind, the recent revolt of his key staffers, and the wiretaps he and Haig maintained on government officials and newsmen, kept note takers away from every White House decision on the conduct of the war for the next month. Yet these decisions can be reconstructed from documents declassified in the past three years.
Nixon commanded new covert actions by the CIA against the Communists in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Nixon approved secret support for a regiment of Thai soldiers, unfortunately named the Black Panthers, to fight in Cambodia. Nixon ordered both B-52 and fighter-bomber attacks far deeper inside Cambodia than he ever admitted. The Communists staged a disciplined withdrawal from the bombardments.
The Senate, now increasingly well informed by the Pentagon and the State Department, voted on June 30 to cut off funds for the war in Cambodia and Laos. Though the measure was symbolic—Nixon would have vetoed it—it marked the first time that the president’s power as a commander in chief at war was challenged by a vote in Congress. The invasion of Cambodia also drew the first calls for the impeachment of Richard Nixon.
In the United States, his most dangerous enemy now was not the armies of citizens marching in the streets, but a handful of senators sitting in the Capitol.
* * *
For more than a year, ever since the first press reports that the United States was bombing Cambodia, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and its staff had been conducting a highly classified investigation of America’s conduct of the war. They were asking themselves a fundamental question: what were the limits of the war powers of the president?
The president commanded that strict rules be set for the Senate’s closed-door hearings, curtailing the testimony of witnesses and censoring the committee’s final report on the grounds of national security. The Senate’s probing so worried Kissinger that he held Situation Room strategy sessions about counteracting Senate investigators who had been “scooping up secret data all over the world,” Haldeman noted in his diary. “Question now is how to avoid having our key people testify, big question of executive privilege.”
It became the big question for Richard Nixon. Executive privilege was the dubious idea that a president could disregard any demand by Congress or the courts for evidence or testimony. It presumed he was above the law. In his escalating confrontations with Congress, Nixon’s counsel ultimately asserted in court that “the President wants me to argue that he is as powerful a monarch as Louis XIV, only four years at a time.”
But the president was no monarch. The Constitution made him commander in chief of the army and the navy, not the American people. It said that only Congress could declare war, only Congress had the power to make treaties, and only Congress could spend the money that the Treasury collected in taxes from American citizens.
Over the course of their yearlong investigation, the senators were discovering that the United States had spent many hundreds of millions on secret military and intelligence operations in Thailand, Laos, and the Philippines—all devoted to winning in Vietnam and all based on pacts far beyond what the Senate had approved and financed. In effect, they were secret treaties, struck without the knowledge of Congress, supporting a war Congress had never declared. Congress had abdicated power; the president had usurped it.
The few senators privy to this growing body of knowledge began to contemplate cutting back the president’s use and abuse of his war powers. Slowly and cautiously, in the summer of 1970, they started to sharpen a sword against him.
These hearings were led by Stuart Symington, the secretary of the air force when Nixon first came to Washington in 1947, the man who helped get the B-52 bomber off the ground in the early years of the Cold War, and a senator from Missouri since 1953, when Nixon became vice president. Symington’s sole colleague in charge of the proceedings was Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1959 to 1974.
The senators were startled and ashamed to discover how they had ceded their power to presidents—and Nixon was not the first. The story traced back through Presidents Johnson and Kennedy, as the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the war in Vietnam, would soon reveal.
Explosive classified testimony from the CIA detailed the personal corruption of American-backed strongmen in
Asia. The White House demanded the deletion of evidence on the dirty dealings of President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, where the United States had major air and naval bases for the Vietnam War. Marcos had been skimming American aid since 1965. The passage read, “Marcos and his wife … have accumulated approximately $100 million during his term in the presidential palace.” He accumulated billions before he was overthrown by a popular revolution after twenty years in power.
Some of the report’s most sensitive sections dealt with the use of American power in Thailand and Laos. America’s dealings with the Thai military traced back to 1954. They included hundreds of millions of dollars in military spending, the coordination of secret bombing campaigns, and the financing of combat operations by paramilitary forces, all based on secret pacts going back to 1965.
The Pentagon had paid $702 million to construct military bases in Thailand for fifty-five thousand American troops. It had laid out $80 million a year to the Thai military junta for the services of an eleven-thousand-man combat division in South Vietnam. The CIA had fixed elections and financed the junta to keep the military in power. It had armed and trained Thai paramilitary forces for combat in Laos, where an indigenous tribe called the Hmong had worked with CIA officers for many years to fight North Vietnamese forces from mountain redoubts near the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Those payments were among many that President Nixon, and President Johnson before him, had approved to conduct covert paramilitary operations, support allied leaders, and swing elections in nations throughout the world. They had thought it especially important to provide the appearance of democracy among America’s authoritarian Asian allies.
Tens of millions in political payoffs flowed annually via the CIA’s cache of classified funds for this purpose. President Nixon had personally approved cash payments to the Thai generals in 1969 and 1970. They pretended to hold elections, but they soon suspended their constitution, disbanded parliament, and reimposed martial law. The generals told their friends at the American embassy that “democracy doesn’t work.”
The CIA had shored up President Thieu of South Vietnam with millions designed to create the illusion of a democratic government in Saigon, including supposedly independent political parties, citizens’ groups, and a free press. But Thieu clearly preferred bullets to ballots. He had pocketed the CIA’s cash, and when he ran for reelection he was unopposed. Although Kissinger and the NSC staff despaired over the political situation in Saigon, the White House and the CIA kept the secret subsidies flowing to Saigon. The hope that democracy could be created with dollars never died.
The Senate hearings, in their classified sessions, revealed in detail how American ambassadors in Thailand and Laos coordinated secret bombing raids around the clock. In tense proceedings, the senators closely interrogated Leonard Unger, the American ambassador in Thailand. James Marvin Montgomery, Unger’s chief political and military officer, sat by his boss’s side, flanked by Richard Helms, the CIA’s chief.
“The dominant emotion that came across that green baize table was one of embarrassment,” Montgomery recalled. “These Senators had voted for these authorizations and appropriations all of these years and never asked any questions” about where the money went or how it was spent. “They had been content, up until this point, to let the President of the United States act like a Prime Minister with a solid Parliamentary majority behind him,” Montgomery said. “We are a Congressional democracy, which is something different. In many ways these Senators had sort of abdicated their responsibilities since the beginning of World War II and they never really took them back until this set of hearings.… This was the beginning of Congressional reassertion of its prerogatives and authority—not just in Southeast Asia but in the conduct of foreign policy as a whole.”
In Thailand, for example, Ambassador Unger received a telegram every day from the Seventh Air Force headquarters in Saigon laying out the missions carried out in Laos by bombers based at U-Tapao, a huge Thai airfield built with American funds. “The Thai let us do just about whatever we wanted to do,” said Montgomery. “However, this arrangement drove the Pentagon nuts, because none of it was written down.” It wasn’t written down because it was secret. Congress had known nothing about the bombing. The CIA’s payoffs to the Thai junta had helped keep it that way.
But Senators Fulbright and Symington were now “aware of our attacks and will press for an answer,” President Nixon told Prince Souvanna Phouma, the prime minister of Laos, according to a written memo of their October 1969 conversation in the White House. “President Nixon said he completely approved the bombing and would do more but the problem is a domestic political one—whether the US will become as deeply involved in Laos as in Vietnam.… This is a very delicate political issue and we have been trying to dance around it as much as possible.”
The Senate hearings, published in heavily censored volumes during the summer and fall of 1970, compelled Congress to ban the introduction of U.S. combat troops into Laos and Thailand. The fact that the United States was bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos was the only classified aspect of the hearings that leaked. It had become an open secret in the Senate, and Nixon admitted it after the press reported it months later. But there he drew the line on public disclosure of secret warfare.
The line would not hold for long.
* * *
On Friday, June 5, 1970, Nixon called all his intelligence chiefs to the White House—Richard Helms, J. Edgar Hoover, Adm. Noel Gayler of the National Security Agency, and Lt. Gen. Donald Bennett of the Defense Intelligence Agency. “The President chewed our butts,” General Bennett vividly recalled.
Nixon said that “revolutionary terrorism” was now the gravest threat to the United States. Thousands of Americans under the age of thirty were “determined to destroy our society” through their “revolutionary activism,” and “good intelligence,” he said, was “the best way to stop terrorism.”
But he was not getting good intelligence. Nixon demanded “a plan which will enable us to curtail the illegal activities of those who are determined to destroy our society.”
Nixon had been complaining about this intelligence gap for a year, obsessed with the idea that American radicals were being financed and directed by America’s foreign enemies. In March 1970, Haldeman had ordered Tom Charles Huston, a twenty-nine-year-old army intelligence veteran and, in his own words, “a hard-core conservative,” to act as the White House liaison to all the intelligence services, to convene them, and to write the plan Nixon demanded. Huston went to Hoover’s intelligence chief, Bill Sullivan, who had the outlines of the plan already in hand. He had been working on it for two years, partly in the hope of winning Nixon’s approval to succeed J. Edgar Hoover, who was seventy-five years old and starting to falter.
The program that quickly emerged was called the Huston Plan. The FBI’s agents and their counterparts would be free to intensify the electronic surveillance of American citizens, read their mail, burglarize their homes and offices, step up undercover spying on college campuses—in short, keep on doing what the Bureau had been doing for decades, but in closer coordination with the CIA and the NSA, and with the secret imprimatur of the president of the United States.
Nixon knew, and Huston reminded him in writing, that many of these acts were clearly illegal. But Nixon believed that if a president did it, it was not illegal.
The president said he approved the plan. But Hoover flew into a rage when he realized that it would have to be carried out with his signature and on his authority—not Nixon’s. The president had not signed it; his approval was verbal, not written. “I’m not going to accept the responsibility myself anymore, even though I’ve done it for many years,” Hoover said. “It is becoming more and more dangerous and we are apt to get caught.”
Hoover demanded a meeting with Nixon, and he stared the president down. Though Nixon believed that “in view of the crisis of terrorism,” the plan was both “justified and responsible,” John Mitchell
convinced him that Hoover would find a way to leak the plan if ordered to sign it.
The new White House counsel, thirty-one-year-old John W. Dean, took charge of preserving the essential elements of the plan. Huston recalled, “Haldeman basically gave him the portfolio to try and work out with the Attorney General whatever they could salvage.” They salvaged much of it. Undercover operations against the left expanded. Electronic surveillances and surreptitious entries increased. These operations sometimes took place at the command of Attorney General Mitchell, sometimes on orders from the president himself. And in months to come, they would come on the orders of White House aides who had arrogated these powers to themselves.
* * *
Nixon wandered in, unannounced, to one of Kissinger’s crisis meetings on Cambodia in the White House Situation Room on June 15, 1970. To Kissinger’s distress, the president’s rambling speech there was recorded by a note taker. Kissinger sent a summary of Nixon’s remarks to the participants at the meeting, warning that it was “absolutely for your own personal use and should not be distributed elsewhere.”
The president used the words psychological and psychological warfare repeatedly, almost compulsively, as he stressed the political impact of the invasion. He proclaimed that, despite the edict of Congress to end American involvement in Cambodia after July 1, “we would continue our interdiction,” using airpower as freely as possible.
“This interdiction, the President stated, should be interpreted broadly, and it was very important that everybody in Defense knew this. The President reiterated that he believed it necessary to take risks now regarding public opinion, so as to see that Cambodia maintained its neutrality and independence. Perhaps there were those who would disagree, but the president himself felt that we should take these risks.”