by Tim Weiner
In all, nearly 9,000 South Vietnamese soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured during the forty-five-day Lam Son operation. The Americans sustained 102 dead, 215 wounded, and 53 missing in action, losses due largely to the fact that 92 U.S. helicopters and 5 fighter jets were destroyed by the enemy. General Hinh concluded that Lam Son 719 was no more than “a bloody field exercise” that destroyed men and morale for no military gain. Hanoi’s official history of the battle bluntly called it “a concrete demonstration … that our army and people were strong enough to militarily defeat the ‘Vietnamization’ strategy of the American imperialists.”
Nixon said the opposite in an address to the nation on April 7. “Tonight I can report that Vietnamization has succeeded,” he said, and so he would withdraw one hundred thousand more American soldiers from combat by the end of 1971. But Lam Son 719 was a political defeat for the United States and a public relations disaster for Nixon’s presidency—and he knew it. His popularity ratings fell 13 percent during the invasion.
“The war has eroded America’s confidence,” Nixon said to Kissinger. “The people are sick of it.”
Kissinger told him that his domestic enemies “want to destroy you and they want us to lose in Vietnam.” Those goals were identical, Nixon said. “If they destroy me,” they would destroy the chance for victory on the battlefield. “Everything has to be played, now, in terms of how we survive.”
He was speaking of his own political survival in the 1972 elections. Vietnam, he said, was the only issue that counted. When Kissinger tried to make Nixon focus on nuclear arms control talks with the Soviet Union, the president brushed him off. “All of this is a bunch of shit, as you know. It’s not worth a damn,” Nixon told him.
“Let’s forget the Russian thing and the rest at the present time,” the president said. “The game is where it is. All that matters here is Vietnam now.”
His gamble in Laos forced him to realize that the ground war was a lost cause. That left him with a stark choice. Either Kissinger would have to strike a peace deal in Paris or Nixon would have to bomb North Vietnam into submission. He thought the latter a more likely way out of the war.
“We’ll bomb the goddamn North like it’s never been bombed,” he told Kissinger on the eve of his April 7 speech, every word recorded on tape. “We’ll bomb those bastards, and then let the American people—let this country go up in flames.”
* * *
A week before, Lt. William Calley had been sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor for premeditated murder at the My Lai massacre, where more than five hundred men, women, and children were killed. His jurors were six military officers, all but one Vietnam veterans. Within hours, over the strong objections of the secretary of defense, President Nixon ordered Calley moved from a military stockade to a more comfortable confinement: house arrest at the barracks of his home base of Fort Benning, Georgia. Three years later Nixon commuted his sentence. Calley went free.
Calley’s crimes were not unique; there had been many My Lais. No one knew better than the twelve thousand members of a burgeoning group called Vietnam Veterans Against the War. On April 22, 1971, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee heard testimony from the group’s spokesman, who had served as a navy lieutenant in Vietnam. In time the witness became the chairman of that same committee; at this writing, he serves as the U.S. secretary of state. John Kerry, in his well-bred Ivy League voice (Yale ’66; Skull and Bones), told the senators that his group had taken statements from more than one hundred fifty honorably discharged veterans about war crimes they had committed in Southeast Asia. “They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do,” he said. “Raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam.”
Kerry continued:
Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese … the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam … so that the United States doesn’t have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can’t say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won’t be, and these are his words, “the first President to lose a war.”
We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?
“Where are the leaders of our country?” he concluded. “Where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy … now that we, the men they sent off to war, have returned? These are the commanders who have deserted their troops. And there is no more serious crime in the laws of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The marines say they never even leave their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude.”
Haldeman himself told Nixon that the witness had been highly impressive. He predicted, “You’ll find Kerry running for political office.” At that very hour, Kerry was hurling the medals he had won in Vietnam (the Bronze Star, the Silver Star, and three Purple Hearts) on the ground before the Capitol, inaugurating a week of protests that drew at least two hundred thousand marchers to Washington.
* * *
Another Vietnam veteran, Daniel Ellsberg, had determined that he had a way to end the war. Ellsberg, once a hawk, had become a dove with talons, and he had gotten his grip on a copy of a highly classified seven-thousand-page study known as the Pentagon Papers. At the time of Kerry’s testimony, Ellsberg was trying to convince members of Congress to put the Papers into print. He scared off committed antiwar senators such as the Foreign Relations Committee chairman, J. William Fulbright, and George McGovern of South Dakota. They thought that placing forty-seven volumes of top-secret documents in the Congressional Record might not be illegal but it was surely impolitic.
The Pentagon Papers, commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert Strange McNamara in 1967 and completed just before Nixon took office in 1969, detailed the history of the Vietnam War, beginning with the first American involvement in the conflict in 1954. They explicitly described the decisions of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, along with the national security advisers whom John Kerry had called out by name, Walt Rostow and McGeorge Bundy. The gist was that America’s military and civilian leaders had been lying to one another, and to the American people, about the course and the conduct of the war. The greatest lie was that there was light at the end of the tunnel. Tens of thousands of Americans had died in the darkness, searching for the illusory illumination of peace.
McNamara himself put it this way in 2003: “Any military commander who is honest with himself, or with those he’s speaking to, will admit that he has made mistakes in the application of military power. He’s killed people unnecessarily—his own troops or other troops—through mistakes, through errors of judgment. A hundred, or thousands, or tens of thousands, maybe even a hundred thousand.… The conventional wisdom is don’t make the same mistake twice, learn from your mistakes. And we all do. Maybe we make the same mistake three times, but hopefully not four or five.”
The lessons contained in the Pentagon Papers were that Americans might not have to suffer through three, four, or five more Vietnams. But those lessons had not been learned. Almost no one had read the Papers.
Ellsberg had taken a copy from his workplace at the RAND Corporation. The pleasantly situated Pentagon-backed institute, across the street from the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica, California, had been formed after World War II to connect military officers with defense intellectuals to create war plans. RAND (short for “research and development”) was in effect the unofficial West Coast branch of the National Security Council.
Ellsberg knew his wa
y around Washington. He had been a marine lieutenant with a Harvard degree and had served two years in Vietnam. As a Defense Department analyst and a key contributor to Henry Kissinger’s first major presentation to President Nixon on national security, he had traversed the vast pastel halls of the Pentagon and perched in the suites of the NSC. But now his trip from the corridors of power to the counterculture of the peaceniks took on the fervor of a religious conversion. He believed the Pentagon Papers had the power of a talisman. If the American people read them, the scales would fall from their eyes and they would rise up as one and demand peace in Vietnam.
After byzantine negotiations that left both men embittered, a New York Times reporter named Neil Sheehan obtained a set of Ellsberg’s photocopies of close to six thousand pages of the Papers. Sheehan was a passionate and painstaking reporter who had covered Vietnam going back to 1962. He had only one flaw: he wrote with the speed of a stonecutter. He needed help to get the story out.
At about the same time that John Kerry was testifying before the Senate, the editors of the newspaper recruited a team of reporters sworn to secrecy, rented a suite of rooms at the Hilton hotel on Sixth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan under assumed names, and went to work trying to turn thousands of pages of documents into hundreds of column inches of newspaper stories.
Word got out. Two men deeply familiar with the Pentagon Papers learned that they had been leaked to the Times: Leslie Gelb, who had directed the report at the Pentagon, and Morton Halperin, who had worked with Gelb, and then under Kissinger at the National Security Council. Kissinger had wiretapped Halperin, without a judge’s warrant or a court order, from May 1969 to February 1971. The taps never caught a leak of classified information but, fatefully, they recorded some of his conversations with Daniel Ellsberg. This would prove to be a signal moment in the annals of government wiretapping—and in the presidency of Richard Nixon.
Gelb and Halperin were ensconced at the Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank in Washington, in late May 1971, when Gelb got a call from a Times reporter asking about the origins of the Pentagon Papers. Gelb immediately went to Halperin’s office down the hall. Both had no doubt who had given the Papers to the paper; nor did Kissinger and Haig. And they all knew there would be hell to pay. The biggest leak of classified information in the history of the United States was about to hit the front page of the New York Times.
Only one man thought he knew how to play this potential catastrophe of national security to the president’s advantage, and that was Richard Nixon himself.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“It’s a conspiracy”
RICHARD NIXON woke up a happy man on the morning of Sunday, June 13, 1971. The day before, he had given away his beloved daughter Tricia in marriage in the White House Rose Garden. Gray skies had threatened, but the rain never fell. A photo of a beaming president, the bride on his arm, filled the left-hand columns above the fold of the Sunday edition of the New York Times.
There was more good news, though it did not appear in print. After two years of secret entreaties, the Communist leaders of China had sent word that they were ready for a rapprochement. They had telegraphed through diplomatic channels that they would receive Nixon and Kissinger. The two fought privately over who would go first but settled on a secret mission by Kissinger, to take place in a few weeks, laying the groundwork for an official state visit by Nixon. The president hoped that this breakthrough would change the world—alter the architecture of the Cold War, compel the Soviets toward détente, convince Hanoi to make peace.
At 12:18 p.m., Al Haig spoiled Nixon’s day of rest with a telephone call. Had the president seen the story to the right of the wedding photo?
“This goddamn New York Times exposé of the most highly classified documents of the war … is a devastating security breach of the greatest magnitude,” General Haig said. Nixon had not read the story, the first in a series that was set to run for ten days, but Kissinger had. The Pentagon Papers were in part a devastating indictment of the presidents who had driven the United States into covert operations and armed combat in Vietnam. The conduct of the war since Nixon lost to Kennedy in 1960 had been a series of blind stabs and blunders.
“It just shows massive mismanagement of how we got there. And it pins it all on Kennedy and Johnson,” Kissinger told the president three hours later. Nixon laughed with pleasure. Then his mood darkened. He said, “This is treasonable action on the part of the bastards that put it out.”
Attorney General Mitchell wanted to go to court to stop the presses. “Hell, I wouldn’t prosecute the Times,” Nixon told Ehrlichman on June 14. “My view is to prosecute the goddamn pricks that gave it to them.” Among the pricks, Nixon told Haldeman on June 15, was probably Daniel Ellsberg. But, he said, his anger building, this leak was part of a larger plot. “Goddamn it,” the president roared, pounding his desk, “somebody’s got to go to jail.”
“It’s a conspiracy, Bob,” the president said. “We’re going to fight with everything we’ve got.”
* * *
Mitchell’s view on prosecution prevailed. The Justice Department sent a telegram to the newspaper demanding that it cease publication. It threatened a criminal indictment of the Times under the Espionage Act of 1917, a law used chiefly, since World War I, against political dissenters, not spies. On June 16 it won a temporary restraining order barring the Times from running the series on the grounds that publication would cause “immediate and irreparable harm” to American national security. The injunction moved swiftly toward the Supreme Court.
The president and his aides, having read what had been published before the injunction, now had a fuller grasp on the potential political power of the Pentagon Papers. “You can blackmail Johnson on this stuff,” Haldeman told Nixon in the Oval Office on June 17. He was sure the Papers contained the inside story of the October 1968 bombing halt and the confrontation over Nixon’s suspected sabotage of Johnson’s peace plan. The Papers, as the Sunday Times story had noted, also revealed that the Kennedy administration had aided and abetted the military coup that led to the killing of President Diem of South Vietnam in November 1963, only three weeks before JFK was assassinated.
Nixon wanted a copy of the Papers, but no one in his administration seemed to know how to find one. The White House intelligence staffer Tom Charles Huston, the man behind the highly illegal Huston Plan for break-ins and bugging, was convinced that the Papers’ principal author, Les Gelb, had a set locked away at the Brookings Institution, along with a study of LBJ’s October 1968 bombing halt.
“Do you remember Huston’s plan? Implement it,” President Nixon ordered Haldeman and Ehrlichman, in Kissinger’s presence. “I mean, I want it implemented on a thievery basis. Goddamn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.” Brookings never was burglarized, but other plans to commit crimes in the name of national security began taking shape within a few days.
On June 28, Ellsberg gave himself up at the federal courthouse in Boston. He faced up to 115 years in prison under the Espionage Act. He said, “As an American citizen, as a responsible citizen, I could no longer cooperate in concealing this information from the American public. I did this clearly at my own jeopardy and I am prepared to answer to all the consequences.” He was the Edward Snowden of his day, with a crucial difference: he chose not to flee but to stand and fight.
On June 30 the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 for the Times. “Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government,” Justice Hugo Black wrote in his concurring opinion. By then, Nixon had already taken the first steps to create a White House task force to carry out the purpose of the Huston Plan: the Special Investigations Unit. As the president ordered, it would implement the plan: break-ins, burglaries, bugging. Assigned to stop the leaks that exposed deception in government, the unit inevitably became known as the Plumbers.
* * *
“You need a commander” for these missions, Nixon told Haldeman on July 1. It could n
ot be John Mitchell: “It just repels him to do these horrible things.” It could not be John Ehrlichman: “He’s got to decide whether we’re going to pollute Lake Erie or some damn thing.”
Then Nixon had an inspiration: “It could be Colson.”
Nixon called Ehrlichman and Chuck Colson into the Oval Office. Colson told the president he had just the man for the job. “He’s hard as nails,” Colson said. “His name is Howard Hunt.” Colson’s friend since college, E. Howard Hunt was fifty, graying, and washed up after two decades at the CIA. His career in the world of covert operations had gone off the rails after the Bay of Pigs invasion, when 1,189 Cuban exiles trained by Hunt and his colleagues died trying to overthrow Fidel Castro in 1961. He had made a second living writing spy novels and working as a shadowy security consultant.
Colson said Hunt had admired Nixon since the investigation and prosecution of Alger Hiss. Nixon approved heartily: he said he wanted to go after Ellsberg “just like I took on the Hiss case.” Hunt would become a White House consultant, effective immediately, with a desk and a safe in the Executive Office Building, under Colson’s command.
“We’re up against an enemy, a conspiracy,” Nixon declared. “They are using any means. We are going to use any means. Is that clear?” That was Richard Nixon at his worst, playing politics as a game without rules.
The world was about to witness the president at his best, a political genius and grand strategist, bringing secrets to light, and to immense acclaim.
On that same day, July 1, Nixon gave Kissinger his marching orders for his secret mission to China.