by Tim Weiner
“I just want to make that big play,” he told Kissinger.
“Mr. President,” Kissinger replied, “it’s the big play.”
The mission was to set a meeting in Beijing in 1972. The Soviets would then be compelled to invite Nixon to a Moscow summit, and to settle their differences on everything from nuclear weapons to the war in Vietnam. Finally—and this was the greatest hope—Moscow and Beijing together would help the United States end the war in time for Nixon’s reelection in November 1972.
Nixon ordered Kissinger to emphasize “fears of what the president might do in the event of continued stalemate in the South Vietnam war.” Nixon said, “We’re not going to turn the country over—17 million people—over to the Communists against their will … with the bloodbath that would be sure to follow.”
The two had agreed earlier on using the “madman” gambit in the next round of negotiations with North Vietnam. “You can say ‘I cannot control him.’ Put it that way,” Nixon said.
“Imply that you might use nuclear weapons,” Kissinger responded.
“Yes,” the president said.
The China trip had been two years in the making. On August 1, 1969, on a visit to Pakistan, Nixon had asked President Yahya Khan to deliver the proposal for a meeting to China’s prime minister, Zhou En-lai. On October 25, 1970, the two presidents had met again, at the White House. “I understand you are going to Beijing,” Nixon said to Yahya. “It is essential that we open negotiations with China.”
On May Day 1971 a message from Zhou En-lai had arrived, sent through Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States: “The Chinese Government reaffirms its willingness to receive publicly in Beijing a Special Envoy of the president of the U.S. (for instance, Mr. Kissinger) or the U.S. Secretary of State or even the president of the U.S. himself for a direct meeting and discussions,” it read. “It is entirely possible for proper arrangements to be made through the good offices of President Yahya Khan” of Pakistan.
Who would go first, Nixon or Kissinger? “President Nixon was ambivalent,” said Kissinger’s top assistant, Winston Lord. “It might take away from the drama” if his national security adviser made the first contact. “Of course, from the beginning, Kissinger wanted to go. He thought that he was the best person to handle it, and I think that he was. Not to mention Kissinger’s ego, sense of history, and so on.”
Hours after the message from Zhou En-Lai arrived, Kissinger sent a cryptic cable to the American ambassador in Pakistan, Joseph Farland, summoning him to a meeting in Palm Springs, California. The ambassador was familiar with foreign intrigues—a former FBI agent, he had served on sensitive diplomatic and intelligence missions for many years—but “this was about as mysterious as you can get,” he recounted in a State Department oral history.
He flew across the Pacific to Los Angeles, where he was met on the tarmac by a twin-engine jet. “I was trying to figure out whose plane this was,” said Farland. “I was looking in the ashtrays to see if there were any paper matches or anything else. It appeared that it was [Frank] Sinatra’s plane.” In Palm Springs, at the home of a wealthy Republican campaign contributor, Farland met Kissinger, relaxing on the patio in a sport shirt with a drink in his hand.
“I was anything but relaxed,” the ambassador recounted. “I said, ‘Henry, I’ve come halfway around this damn earth and I don’t know why.’”
Kissinger said he had plans for an around-the-world trip, first stop Saigon, then India and Pakistan, then Paris. Once he got to Pakistan, “I want you to put me into China,” he told Farland. The ambassador had two months to figure out how to smuggle Kissinger into Beijing undetected by the press.
“On the way back, I thought of nothing else but how to do it,” Farland said. He devised an elaborate scheme to allow Kissinger to seem to disappear for two to three days, using a cottage controlled by his embassy in the town of Murree, a former hill station of the British Raj outside the capital. The question remained: how to fly him into China in secret, keeping the possibility of an American rapprochement under cover.
Ambassador Farland went to see President Yahya after many a sleepless night. “I have something very serious to talk to you about,” he said. Yahya grinned. “I said, ‘Do you know what I’m going to talk about?’ He said, ‘I think I do.’ I said, ‘Has somebody been talking to you?’ He said, ‘Somebody has been talking.’ I said, ‘I need one of your airplanes to fly to China.’ He said, ‘You have it.’”
Kissinger back-channeled a message to Zhou En-lai saying he would be flying in a Pakistani aircraft to Beijing at dawn on July 9. Ambassador Farland issued a statement the night before, saying Kissinger had “Delhi belly” (food poisoning) and would be recuperating in Murree. At 4:00 a.m., Kissinger and his party, including his NSC aides Winston Lord and John Holdridge, boarded their jet. To their surprise, four Chinese officials, including Chang Wenjin, a foreign ministry official and later the Chinese ambassador to Washington, already were on board. One of the two Secret Service agents accompanying the American delegation was so shocked he almost drew his gun.
The plane took off and rose over the Himalayas. Holdridge said, “We were stepping into the infinite.”
Lord recalled: “As the sun came up, we were passing K-2, the second highest mountain in the world.… We were going to the most populous country in the world, after 22 years, and there were all of the geopolitical implications of that. There was the anticipation of meeting with Zhou En-lai, this great figure, and there was the excitement and anticipation of those talks. There were the James Bond aspects of this trip, since it was totally secret.”
They landed at a military airport south of Beijing. They debarked into black limousines and, with blinds drawn and red flags flying, sped past the Great Hall of the People to the Dayoutai guesthouse for VIPs. They sent a one-word message to Washington: EUREKA.
* * *
Zhou En-lai came to greet them. The premier was seventy-three, elegant, and charming. His intelligence and cunning had made him a leader in the Chinese Communist Party for fifty years. He had lived through hardships barely known to the Americans, who saw Chairman Mao as a mysterious emperor, not a murderous monster. They knew little of his regime, which had killed tens of millions of people over two decades through deadly politics and disastrous economics.
Over the next two days, Kissinger and Zhou talked for seventeen hours, mostly haggling over the wording of the forthcoming communiqué. Kissinger wished it to appear that the Chinese wanted Nixon to come. Zhou wanted it to appear that Nixon wished to come. After a full day, they were at an impasse. Frustrated, both sides broke off.
“Kissinger and I and the others walked around outside, because we knew that we were being bugged,” said Lord, the future American ambassador to China. “Probably the trees were bugged, too. Who knows? I remember that we waited for hours and hours. The Chinese were probably trying to keep us off-balance.… Most likely, Zhou En-lai had to check with Mao.”
Finally, they worked it out: the Chinese were inviting Nixon because they had heard about his interest in visiting China. It had taken twelve hours to arrive at this formulation.
In the hours that followed, Zhou was “as forthcoming as we could have hoped” on the subject of Vietnam, Kissinger reported to Nixon. “For ideological reasons, he clearly had to support Hanoi. On the other hand … he did not wish to jeopardize the chances for an improvement in our relations, especially after I explained the positions we had taken in Paris and warned of the danger of escalation if negotiations failed.”
Before they left, the Americans were treated to a banquet hosted by Zhou. “Here we saw just how clever Zhou En-lai was,” said Lord. Zhou managed to criticize the excesses unleashed by Mao without actually criticizing Mao. Zhou himself had been imprisoned in his office by Mao’s shock troops, the Red Guards, during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.
The Americans, exhausted but exhilarated, finished drafting the communiqué, returned to Pakistan, resumed the charade worked out
by Farland, and immediately flew to Paris, where Kissinger held another round of secret talks with Hanoi’s delegation on July 12. He reported to Nixon that the North Vietnamese “repeatedly stressed—in an almost plaintive tone—that they wanted to settle the war. They expressed a great desire to reach agreement quickly, and voiced what appeared to be genuine concern about the delay which might result from debate about a withdrawal date.”
On July 15, Nixon announced that he had sent Kissinger to the People’s Republic of China, that Zhou had invited the president to visit China, and that Nixon had accepted. “I have taken this action because of my profound conviction that all nations will gain from a reduction of tensions and a better relationship between the United States and the People’s Republic of China,” he said in a nationally televised address. “It is in this spirit that I will undertake what I deeply hope will become a journey for peace, peace not just for our generation but for future generations on this earth we share together.”
The proclamation was wildly popular throughout the world. As Nixon had anticipated, it shocked the Russians into proposing their own 1972 summit meeting. It raised hopes in the White House that Beijing and Moscow would pressure Hanoi into a peace deal. And it made Nixon appear, in the eyes of millions of Americans, a master of global strategy—not merely the leader of the free world but the world leader. The big play looked as if it had gone according to plan.
“Kissinger and I thought, somewhat naively, that we had pulled off two historic encounters in one trip: the opening toward China and moving toward settling the Vietnam War,” Lord recounted. “That latter idea was a wildly premature judgment.”
“I remember that we debated which was the more historic and important, getting the war over with or arranging for the opening to China. We said, ‘Wasn’t it a great achievement to do both in one trip?’”
* * *
Five days after his proclamation that he would go to China in the name of world peace, the cold warrior within Richard Nixon went back to work.
He formally set the Plumbers in motion against the political conspiracy that threatened his power on the home front. John Ehrlichman had delegated the task of assembling a team to his trusted aide Bud Krogh, whose official title was deputy assistant to the president.
“Krogh and his guys are going to pull together the evidence,” Ehrlichman assured Nixon in the Oval Office on July 20.
Krogh selected G. Gordon Liddy as a key member of the Plumbers. A former FBI agent, Liddy was forty, mustachioed, politically ambitious, and, putting it politely, hotheaded. He joined forces with Howard Hunt, the reticent retired CIA officer recruited by Colson. They made an ill-suited team. Liddy was loud, flamboyant, and reckless. Hunt was quiet, cautious, and covert.
Two weeks after Ehrlichman’s assurances to the president, Krogh met with Liddy and Hunt in Room 16, in the basement of the Executive Office Building, across from the White House. Hunt proposed a burglary to steal derogatory information about Daniel Ellsberg from the office of his psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding, in Beverly Hills, California. The goal was to defame him and destroy him in the Pentagon Papers case. Liddy said such black-bag jobs were standard operating procedure in the FBI’s national security investigations. He said he had pulled off a few in his day.
“I listened intently,” Krogh wrote in 2007. “At no time did I or anyone else there question whether the operation was necessary, legal or moral. Convinced that we were responding legitimately to a national security crisis, we focused instead on the operational details: who would do what, when and where.… The premise of our action was the strongly held view within certain precincts of the White House that the president and those functioning on his behalf could carry out illegal acts with impunity if they were convinced that the nation’s security demanded it.”
Krogh sent a memo to Ehrlichman recommending that “a covert operation be undertaken to examine all of the medical files still held by Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.” Ehrlichman gave his approval in writing—“if done under your assurance that it is not traceable”—and labeled the job “Hunt/Liddy Special Project No. 1” in his notes. The team, aided by Cuban Bay of Pigs veterans, hit Dr. Fielding’s suite on the night of September 3. They trashed the office but found nothing on Ellsberg.
“Where does Krogh stand now?” Nixon asked Ehrlichman in the Oval Office on September 8. He was investigating Ellsberg and other national security matters, the president’s chief domestic adviser reported, and aiming to undermine antiwar Democratic senators whom Nixon saw as likely opponents in the 1972 election.
Ed Muskie of Maine already was the target of political sabotage overseen by Chuck Colson; Teddy Kennedy of Massachusetts was under full-time surveillance by Colson’s operatives. Nixon himself had ordered the “permanent tails and coverage on Teddy and Muskie.”
“We ought to persecute them,” Nixon told Ehrlichman. “On the IRS, if you can do it, are we looking into Muskie’s returns?” he asked. “Teddy?” Ehrlichman assured the president that there would be persecution aplenty.
“We had one little operation. It’s been aborted out in Los Angeles,” Ehrlichman told the president. “But we’ve got some dirty tricks under way. It may pay off.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“I can see the whole thing unravel”
THE COURSE of the war in Vietnam and the conduct that led to Watergate merged in a conversation between President Nixon and his ambassador to South Vietnam, Ellsworth Bunker, three days after the Pentagon Papers became public.
“Our goal is clear,” Nixon said. “Our goal, now, is that, as we come to the—near the end of this long road is to succeed. We can succeed. You agree?”
Bunker did. He always saw the light at the end of the tunnel.
“But, on the other hand, we must not give our enemies—and I’m not referring to our enemies in North Vietnam, but our enemies in this country—we cannot give them the weapons to kill us with,” the president warned.
Nixon’s most powerful enemies in this country were the U.S. senators trying to stop the war by cutting off the billions needed to sustain combat forces. One such bill had come to a vote in the Senate in September 1970. Its main sponsor was Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota, who had flown thirty-five bombing missions against Germany during World War II. Minutes before the vote, McGovern rose to speak:
Every senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This chamber reeks of blood. Every Senator here is partly responsible for that human wreckage … young men without legs, or arms, or genitals, or faces, or hopes.
There are not very many of these blasted and broken boys who think this war is a glorious adventure. Do not talk to them about bugging out, or national honor or courage.… We are responsible for those young men and their lives and their hopes. And if we do not end this damnable war those young men will someday curse us for our pitiful willingness to let the Executive carry the burden that the Constitution places on us.
Congress was not ready to carry that burden—not yet. McGovern’s words shocked the sensibilities of some senators. His measure was defeated by a 55–39 margin. The strongest antiwar legislation enacted in 1971 was a call for an end to American military operations in Vietnam at “the earliest practicable date,” subject to the return of all American prisoners of war. But a dozen more stop-the-war amendments were under consideration in the fall of 1971. One in particular demanded a free and fair vote in South Vietnam, where President Thieu was running unopposed.
“There are no fair elections in Southeast Asia,” Nixon told Bunker and Kissinger. “You know that.”
The primary goals of the CIA’s covert action program for South Vietnam were to “re-elect Nguyen Van Thieu,” to elect “twenty individuals to the Lower House … responsive to CIA direction,” and to create pro-American political leaders “to play a vital role in the political struggle on the ground against North Vietnamese political agents,” the Agency reported to Nixon and Kissinger. T
he CIA already had spent millions financing seemingly independent political parties, newspapers, unions, and other facades of democratic institutions—all for naught, with most of the money wasted or stolen by Thieu and his ministers. Two months before the October 1971 elections in South Vietnam, it was clear that Thieu would be the only candidate.
North Vietnam’s negotiators in Paris had demanded that Thieu step down or form a coalition government with the Communists as a key to any peace deal. Their strategy was to try to get Nixon to do what they wished: to overthrow the government of South Vietnam.
But he could not “turn on Thieu,” Kissinger told Nixon.
“Turn on him? Never, never,” Nixon said. “We must never do that.… Never, never, never, never.”
That would be surrender. Yet the fixed election troubled Thieu’s American sponsors. “Unless there is a real contest,” Ambassador Bunker reported to the White House from Saigon on August 20, “his moral and legal authority to govern will come into question. Divisiveness, not unity needed to face a determined enemy, will result.” Two weeks later, on September 2, Thieu reaffirmed that he would run unopposed.
When Kissinger held another clandestine negotiating session with North Vietnam’s representatives in Paris on September 13, the two sides had nothing of substance to say. “For the hundredth [sic] and twentieth time I tell you the question is not whether to support or give up Thieu, but what process will shape the future of Vietnam after the settlement,” Kissinger told the Communists, his frustration mounting. After “the shortest meeting on record,” he told Nixon, they acknowledged they were at an impasse and made no plans to meet again.
On his return from Paris, Kissinger composed a deeply pessimistic report to the president. Hanoi, he wrote, in a passage Nixon highlighted in pen, would soon demand a rapid American military withdrawal from Vietnam—and link Thieu’s removal to the release of America’s prisoners of war. “The heart of the problem,” Nixon wrote in the left-hand margin of the paper.