One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon

by Tim Weiner

  He wanted to see a report every day on “what we are doing in the Cambodia area on the diplomatic, intelligence, military, and supply sides, and would watch closely the developments in these fields. It was his judgment that it was no good going way out, but it was worth taking risks.”

  At 7:45 that evening, the president called Kissinger. “I just hope they got it,” he said. “We’re going to take some gambles.”

  He repeated four days later: “There were a great number of people in the press and in Congress who have a vested interest in seeing us fail,” he said. “This was a game for them, and we should counter-play.” He would see to it that the war went on, Congress or no Congress. Though American ground forces were withdrawn by the end of June, American bombers and fighter jets flew their deadly missions in Cambodia until August 1973.

  The Nixon administration drew from all its military assistance programs worldwide to find money to support the war in Cambodia; direct military aid to Lon Nol rose from $8.9 million in 1970 to $185 million in 1971. Nixon had sent Al Haig, now a one-star general, as his secret envoy to Cambodia to coordinate the delivery of weapons. One of the few Americans stationed in Phnom Penh, Andrew Antippas, the political officer at the American embassy, vividly remembered his arrival on a CIA aircraft.

  “We were instructed to receive him and take him to visit Lon Nol,” Antippas said. “We were all wondering who this brigadier general was. Brigadier generals in the Vietnam War were as common as doughnuts. In fact, they went out to get the coffee. We went out to the airport and met the aircraft. The brigadier general who arrived—very recently promoted to brigadier general—was named Alexander Haig.… This was his first big assignment under Henry Kissinger. He was told to ‘go out and find out what the hell’s going on in Cambodia.’”

  A straightforward assessment came from Emory C. Swank, a distinguished Foreign Service officer whom Nixon named as ambassador to Cambodia in July 1970. “Phnom Penh did not need an Ambassador,” he said, “but a worker of miracles.”

  An equally grim report by the CIA arrived on August 6, shortly after Swank’s appointment. “The communists have overrun half of Cambodia, taken or threatened 16 of its 19 provincial capitals, and interdicted—for varying periods—all road and rail links to the capital, Phnom Penh,” the report began. North Vietnam’s soldiers and guerrillas “move at will, attacking towns and villages in the south and converting the north into an extension of the Laos corridor and a base for ‘peoples’ war’ throughout the country and in South Vietnam as well.”

  But Nixon remained delusional on the subject of the Cambodian invasion. His disturbing opinions were shared by few if any American soldiers or spies. He thought the invasion a triumph of presidential power that would demoralize the enemy, destroy a potential Communist attack on Saigon, shore up morale among American troops, and turn the tide of the whole war.

  He said explicitly, if inexplicably, to Kissinger on October 7 that it would prove the decisive battle, the bold decision that would lead to an imminent American victory in Vietnam.

  “Listen, Henry,” Nixon said, “Cambodia won the war.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “Only we have the power”

  RICHARD NIXON restored a measure of calm to his troubled mind after a two-week retreat to San Clemente during August and early September 1970. He was determined to rebuild his reputation as a master of politics and his self-regard as a great statesman.

  He returned to the White House on September 8 thinking as he had at the start of his presidency: he would make a move toward Moscow in his search for a way out of Vietnam. He thought the Soviets might be amenable: they had been seeking a summit meeting from the start of his administration.

  Nixon decided to invite the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, to Washington in late October 1970—two weeks before the American midterm elections—to plan a summit conference with the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Nixon would propose a cease-fire in Vietnam in return for a negotiated political settlement of the war. The Soviets somehow would have to support Nixon’s stance despite their alliance with Hanoi.

  “Plan is for P to meet Gromyko the 22nd, then announce Summit for next year,” Haldeman wrote. “Another good maneuver before elections.” But the summit would be a long time coming. So many differences separated the Soviets and the Americans that it would take the better part of two years before they signed treaties and drank toasts.

  Nixon toured Europe in late September and early October, his itinerary shaped in part by getting out the Catholic vote in the coming elections. He met with the pope. He made a pilgrimage to the graveyard of his ancestors in County Kildare, Ireland. And he conferred with the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, the neofascist who had fought communism since 1936 and imposed Catholic values on Spaniards ever since.

  He and Franco talked mainly about the Soviets. Generalissimo Franco warned that they were “seeking to trap and weaken us. We could play the game with them but we should remember this.”

  Nixon concurred. “We should bear in mind that—though the leadership had changed—their aims were still the same,” he said to Franco. “They had the same missionary zeal to expand Communism all over the world and we should not forget this.”

  * * *

  On October 12, as he got ready to hit the campaign trail, the president spoke his mind with unusual clarity. He delivered a speech—billed as “deep background, not attributable in any way,” and thus never reported—to a small group of news executives selected from states where Republicans hoped to pick up Senate seats.

  Nixon rarely spoke this forthrightly in public. A transcript of his remarks remained sealed in the Nixon archives until 2011.

  “The differences between the United States and the Soviet Union are so deep and so profound that they are not going to be resolved by the two top leaders of the countries sitting down and getting to know each other better, not by smiles, not by handshakes, not by summit conferences,” Nixon said. Though “we are going to continue to be competitors as long as this generation lives,” the president continued, “we can have a sound basis for a meaningful settlement of major differences.”

  Foremost was the war in Vietnam. “They would prefer to see the Communists prevail,” he said. “That does not mean, however, that the Soviet Union and the United States, because we differ as to how it should be settled, will allow that difference to drag us into a major power confrontation.” For if that confrontation ever came, “whoever pushes the button may kill 70 million approximately, and the other side will also kill 70 million.” No president had ever stated the human consequences of nuclear war quite so precisely.

  Nixon saw three realms of common interest to negotiate with Moscow: “avoid war, reduce defense expenditures—at least don’t see them go up—and third, the whole area of trade.” These would be the basis for the beginning of his dialogue with the Soviets, if and when that dialogue began.

  Finally he turned to the home front. “A very substantial number of Americans,” he said, “are very tired of America’s playing an international role. They want to get out of Vietnam.… Looking at the enormous problems at home—the problems of the cities, the problems of the country, the problems of the environment, the problems of the educational system, the problems of taxes, the problems of prices—a number of American people say, ‘Look at all we have done since World War II. Let’s concentrate on our problems at home, build a strong America, not worry about the rest of the world.’”

  Nixon would have none of that. “If we are going to the sidelines,” he said, “there are going to be only two major contestants left on the field. The one will be the Soviet Union and the other will be Communist China.”

  “Leadership in the free world is still ours. Only we can do this. Only we have the power, only we have the wealth to play this role,” he concluded. “We have ended three wars in this century. We have ended World War I, we have ended World War II, we have ended Korea. We have never had a generation of peace. What we
are trying to do is to end this war and to avoid other wars in a way that we can have a goal that all Americans want, a generation of peace for the balance of the century.”

  This theme, “a generation of peace,” became Nixon’s mantra in foreign affairs. The old cold warrior was wise enough to know he had to talk with his enemies to win in Vietnam. But he did not know the language of peace and reconciliation.

  * * *

  Ten days later, Nixon met with Soviet foreign minister Gromyko for more than three hours, first in the Oval Office with their aides, then alone with their interpreters in the president’s Executive Office Building hideaway. Gromyko, who had held his post since 1957 and had served as ambassador to the United States during World War II, was perfectly diplomatic, but deeply pessimistic about Vietnam. He said there was no prospect for peace “unless the United States was willing to work out the timing for withdrawal of its troops, and agreed to the establishment of a coalition government for South Vietnam.” Both men knew the government of South Vietnam would refuse a coalition with the Communists unless coerced. But the men emerged from their face-to-face encounter in a friendly mood, having secured an informal agreement for a summit meeting at an undetermined future date.

  “P. obviously enjoyed the confrontation,” Haldeman wrote. “Says talking with Communists is easier than others because they are hard, tough, blunt, direct—no diplomatic flummery. Coming out of EOB they started down opposite sides of the center hand rail—Gromyko moved over & said ‘we should have no rail between us.’”

  Kissinger advised Nixon that the meeting with the Soviet foreign minister had come at “a moment of unusual uncertainty in both capitals concerning the intentions and purposes of the other side.” He saw little promise of real progress. Nixon’s own handwritten notes of the day reflect that uncertainty. “Put the past behind,” he scribbled—and then, in the next line: “where do we go from here?”

  He put the question more directly to Kissinger: “The US—what it will be like for the next 25 years depends on whether we have the guts, the stamina, the wisdom to exert leadership.… People may want to put their heads in the sand; they may want to clean up the ghettos. All right, we will get out of the world. Who is left?”

  He answered his own question: Russia and China. Richard Nixon would not let them run the world. “We are going to continue to be competitors as long as this generation lives,” he had said. That struggle was playing out on all corners of the earth.

  * * *

  On October 22, at the hour Nixon and Gromyko sat down in the White House, a fusillade of gunfire rang out on the streets of Santiago, Chile, five thousand miles south of Washington. A gang of assassins murdered Gen. René Schneider, the commander of the Chilean army.

  The killing was the denouement of a desperate CIA covert action in Chile, ordered by Nixon himself, to stop the democratic election of a leftist president named Salvador Allende by any means necessary. Ever since Nixon became vice president in 1953, the United States had run coups, backed right-wing dictators, and sought to subvert leftists throughout Latin America, from Bolivia to Brazil and from the Texas border down to Tierra del Fuego. In the last months of the Eisenhower administration, as Nixon knew all too well, these plots included the attempted assassination of Cuba’s Fidel Castro.

  Many members of Chile’s political establishment and military leadership knew the CIA had been working against Allende and his allies for years. But Chile had been a democracy for decades. The election of Allende, who counted Castro among his allies, would be proof that a left-wing leader could take power with political legitimacy in Latin America. The fact that Allende had won a plurality of the popular vote in September infuriated Nixon. On September 15, 1970, after hearing that Allende had won, despite millions already spent by the CIA against him in conventional political warfare, Nixon personally ordered Richard Helms to stop him from taking office.

  The CIA director told eight of his most senior officers that Nixon had ordered the Agency to stop Allende (if necessary, by backing a military coup) and to keep their plans hidden from the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the American ambassador to Chile.

  Under law, the Chilean Congress was to ratify Allende’s election on October 24. The CIA had seven weeks to reverse the results of a democratic election. The Agency divided the task into Track One and Track Two. Track One’s main tactic was to buy enough votes in the Chilean Senate to block Allende’s confirmation. Track Two was a coup. The CIA’s covert action chief, Thomas Karamessines, kept Kissinger posted at the White House. David Atlee Phillips, a twenty-year veteran of covert operations, led the Chile task force at CIA headquarters. He thought the operation was doomed from the start.

  “Anyone who had lived in Chile, as I had, and knew Chileans, knew that you might get away with bribing one Chilean Senator, but two? Never. And three? Not a chance. They would blow the whistle,” Phillips said in classified testimony to the Senate five years later. “They were democrats and had been for a long time.” As for Track Two, Phillips said, “the Chilean military was a very model of democratic rectitude.” Their commander, General Schneider, had proclaimed that the army would obey the Constitution and refrain from politics.

  An apoplectic Kissinger had commanded Karamessines to send a flash cable to the CIA station chief in Santiago on October 7: CONTACT THE MILITARY AND LET THEM KNOW USG [U.S. government] WANTS A MILITARY SOLUTION, AND THAT WE WILL SUPPORT THEM NOW AND LATER … CREATE AT LEAST SOME SORT OF COUP CLIMATE.… SPONSOR A MILITARY MOVE.

  Assassination plots against political leaders had been anathema to Helms ever since the killing of President Kennedy. He would not allow American fingerprints on a rifle aimed at Allende. But the CIA could find an ambitious Chilean general willing to carry out the military solution Nixon and Kissinger commanded. Using the time-honored tactic of bribery, the CIA suborned Gen. Camilo Valenzuela, chief of the Santiago garrison, and developed a coup plot that looked like a three-cushion pool shot.

  First, soldiers would kidnap General Schneider and fly him to Argentina, removing the constitutional commander of the army. Then the military would order the Chilean Congress to dissolve before Allende’s election was affirmed. Finally, they would take power in the name of the armed forces.

  The CIA gave Valenzuela fifty thousand dollars, three submachine guns, and a satchel of tear gas canisters—all approved by Karamessines and the hidden hand of Henry Kissinger. But word of the plot spread within the Chilean military. By October 13, Washington’s intentions were so widely known that one of the South American nation’s few right-wing generals, Roberto Viaux, widely regarded by his fellow officers as a dangerous fool, was ready to commandeer a coup on his own. The CIA’s station chief in Santiago, Henry Hecksher, cabled Washington: A VIAUX COUP WOULD ONLY PRODUCE A MASSIVE BLOODBATH.

  That provoked the following response from the White House, via the CIA’s channels: IT IS FIRM AND CONTINUING POLICY THAT ALLENDE BE OVERTHROWN BY A COUP.

  On October 22, General Schneider lay mortally wounded. Shortly thereafter, Salvador Allende was confirmed by Congress as the constitutionally elected president of Chile by a vote of 153 to 35. It took days before the CIA discovered, to its collective relief, that Viaux’s thugs were the assassins, not the Agency’s hirelings in Valenzuela’s garrison. The CIA did not have General Schneider’s blood on its hands. But the Agency left the scene of the crime with Allende in political triumph and the president of the United States in a profound fury. Nixon would have his revenge. Three years later, on September 11, 1973, the coup he’d commanded would come, inaugurating seventeen years of dictatorship in Chile, a generation of political repression, and thousands of deaths.

  * * *

  The president returned to campaigning, crisscrossing the country on behalf of the nation’s Republican candidates. He loved the details of politics, the private machinations and the cold calculations. But he often loathed the business of being a politician, pressing the flesh in public, glad-handing, back
slapping. More than once he said that being president would be a great job if you didn’t have to deal with people.

  When he left Washington, traversing twenty-two states in seven days, he found the political climate cold and the mood of the nation grim.

  Nixon had accomplished little in foreign affairs thus far. His domestic policy team had “come up with nothing,” as he told Haldeman and Ehrlichman in September—no new ideas, no impelling initiatives. Unemployment was rising to 6 percent, the highest in a decade. Nixon’s own popularity ratings were falling toward 50 percent. His private polls predicted that the Republicans would lose thirty seats in the House and perhaps a senator or two as well.

  He had neither wanted nor planned to hit the stump in 1970, but he felt impelled to go out into the country, knowing he would confront hostile faces in the crowd. In New Jersey, a young man shook his hand, then shouted, “You’re guilty of murder every day you fight this war.” After a speech at the Municipal Auditorium in San Jose, California, on the evening of October 29—a grueling day that had started at a breakfast in Chicago and encompassed five cities—a crowd of two thousand demonstrators surrounded Nixon’s motorcade chanting, “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war!” Haldeman recorded, “We wanted some confrontation and there were no hecklers in the hall, so we stalled departure a little so they could zero in.”

  Nixon later wrote, “I could not resist showing them how little respect I had for their mindless ranting. I stood on the hood of the car and gave the V-sign that had become my political trademark. It had a predictable effect.… Suddenly rocks and eggs and vegetables were flying everywhere.” The Secret Service went into emergency evacuation mode, and the motorcade moved on, behind what Haldeman described as “a terrifying flying wedge of cops.” Safely back in San Clemente that night, Nixon reflected, “As far as I knew this was the first time in our history that a mob had physically attacked the President of the United States.”