One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon

by Tim Weiner

  “A swift collapse in South Vietnam would seriously endanger your effort to shape a new foreign policy role for this country. The impact on friends, adversaries and our own people would be likely to swing us from post–World War II predominance to post-Vietnam abdication,” Kissinger warned. “An ignominious rout in Vietnam would leave deep scars on our society, calling into question the heavy sacrifices and fueling the impulses for recrimination.”

  Nixon had to win a war in which his enemies seemed inexhaustible, his allies undependable, his generals incompetent, and his aims scattershot. He wanted to bring the fight to the Communists, but at the same time he wanted American combat deaths to go down—irreconcilable goals. His troops kept in a defensive crouch. He raged at his top commander in Saigon, Gen. Creighton Abrams, for publicly discussing the pace of the American pullout of combat forces. “I think we have to consider withdrawing the son-of-a-bitch,” Nixon told Kissinger on September 14, 1971, or “get someone second in command that will keep him from drinking too much and talking too much.”

  But if Nixon had trouble with his commanders in Vietnam, the trouble among the officers and conscripts who served them was deeper. As American combat soldiers pulled out of Vietnam—troop levels fell from 539,000 in June 1969 to 239,000 in June 1971—morale among those remaining plummeted, too.

  “Having been in the military, I could see the signs,” said Howard H. Lange, a State Department official who worked closely with American combat and intelligence officers in Hue, a base for the disastrous Lam Son 719 operation. “The kids showed no pride in appearance and they weren’t disciplined. I saw written in the dust on the back of a truck in Da Nang: ‘Get me out of this hell.’” Lange was dismayed by the despair among American soldiers “who saw the war in the bitterly memorable phrase as ‘unwanted and unending, pursued by the unwilling, for the ungrateful.’ It was a grim picture.”

  Nixon was equally embittered by the unending war, a battle begun by President Kennedy and intensified a hundredfold by President Johnson. He wanted out of that hell as badly as that soldier in Da Nang. He deeply desired to be done with Vietnam, to have some kind of peace deal, when he ran for reelection in 1972. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and a Congress controlled by Democrats had started the war, Nixon reflected in anger, and now he had the burden of ending it. If he did not, he feared, any antiwar Democrat might defeat him—a dove like McGovern or, worst of all, Teddy Kennedy, a prospect he found personally and politically appalling, a dirty trick that history might play on him.

  * * *

  President Nixon addressed the war with unusual candor at a White House news conference on Thursday, September 16, 1971.

  Did the one-man race for the presidency in South Vietnam affect his war strategy? “We have to keep in mind our major goal,” Nixon said: ending the war “in a way that will leave South Vietnam in a position to defend itself from a Communist takeover.”

  What about the Senate bill to cut off aid to South Vietnam unless President Thieu held a fair election? “We presently provide military and/or economic aid to 91 countries in the world,” Nixon said. “In only 30 of those countries do they have leaders who are there as a result of a contested election by any standards that we would consider fair.”

  Would Thieu’s reelection do anything for American hopes for a democratic Vietnam? “No,” Nixon said bluntly. “That objective will not be met, perhaps for several generations.”

  He added an ominous note. Senators were suggesting “that the United States should use its leverage now to overthrow Thieu. I would remind all concerned that the way we got into Vietnam was through overthrowing Diem, and the complicity in the murder of Diem; and the way to get out of Vietnam, in my opinion, is not to overthrow Thieu.”

  A more inquisitive press corps might have wondered aloud why Nixon was digging up America’s role in the November 1963 assassination of President Diem. They would have been astounded at the answer.

  * * *

  Over the next seventy-two hours, the president made three bold decisions. Each deepened the connection between Watergate and Vietnam.

  He told Ehrlichman to have the details of the Diem assassination on his desk within a week. Nixon believed that President Kennedy was directly complicit in the murder of Diem, and that the killing was the original sin that had drawn America into Vietnam. He was convinced that proof of the crime lay somewhere in classified CIA cables, and that Howard Hunt was the man to find them, leak them to a reporter, and use the leak to destroy Teddy Kennedy’s political career by smearing President John F. Kennedy as an assassin.

  “He started the damn thing!” Nixon said in a taped telephone conversation with his spiritual adviser, the Reverend Billy Graham. “He killed Diem!” The story was not quite that simple.

  Then the president told Haldeman to set up a meeting in which he intended to fire J. Edgar Hoover for refusing to conduct illegal bugging and break-ins against Nixon’s political enemies. Nor would that prove an easy matter.

  Finally, he ordered the bombing of North Vietnam, north of the demilitarized zone, to resume immediately. Not all these conversations were taped, but in those that were recorded, Nixon was at his most intense.

  The president was pleased when Kissinger told him that the Pentagon was prepared to send “everything that flies in a stretch of 20 miles north of the DMZ” in an intense raid against North Vietnam.

  “Good,” Nixon replied. “They’ve been asking for it.”

  “You think of this miserable war—and, first of all, Henry, it isn’t a miserable war,” said the president, contradicting himself before coming to his point. “The goddamn war was fought for a great cause,” preserving America’s global power by fighting communism in Asia. “We didn’t have to get into it, to begin with. But once in it, this war could have been ended in a year or two years,” Nixon continued. “Using our air power we could have knocked those bastards right off the lot—”

  Kissinger interjected: “The war would be history.”

  “And with a victory,” Nixon said with a sigh.

  On September 20, as the new bombing runs began, Nixon led a National Security Council meeting in the Cabinet Room. He continued to reflect on the killing of Diem. “The behavior of the U.S. in Vietnam has not really been all that bright,” the president said. “After the murder of Diem, for us to say that Thieu is out because he didn’t do what we wanted—I can see the whole thing unravel starting from Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and Thailand, and all the way to Japan. What we really confront is what has been a long and terrible trial for U.S. foreign policy: will it fail or succeed?”

  At that moment, next door in the Executive Office Building, Howard Hunt was using an old typewriter, a copying machine, a razor blade, and Scotch tape to forge a set of diplomatic cables that could directly pin the Diem killing on President Kennedy. He had been unable to find damning classified documents that lay hidden in the files of the CIA and the State Department and the JFK Presidential Library.

  JFK and some of his advisers had in fact given their tacit support to a regime change in South Vietnam. But the driving force behind the 1963 coup had been the newly appointed American ambassador in Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, Richard Nixon’s running mate in the 1960 presidential election.

  On his sixth day in Saigon, Lodge had cabled Washington: WE ARE LAUNCHED ON A COURSE FROM WHICH THERE IS NO TURNING BACK: THE OVERTHROW OF THE DIEM GOVERNMENT. At the White House, JFK approved, overruling his closest advisers. On November 4, 1963, alone in the Oval Office, President Kennedy dictated a tape-recorded memo about the Diem assassination. “We must bear a good deal of responsibility for it,” he said mournfully, eighteen days before he himself was murdered.

  But Hunt had been unable to produce the evidence Nixon wanted. So he fabricated it. Colson attempted to leak the fake cables to a reputable journalist, without success. Then Hunt showed them to an old CIA colleague, Lucien Conein, who had been an eyewitness to the 1963 coup. Conein shortly thereafter appeared on a two
-hour NBC television documentary about Vietnam. A review of the program in the New York Times by Neil Sheehan, the reporter who had obtained the Pentagon Papers, said Conein’s interview in particular left little doubt that “the Kennedy Administration was deeply implicated in the coup plot” that had led to Diem’s death.

  Faking diplomatic cables was a dangerous business. But it was child’s play compared to trying to fire J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s director since 1924.

  Nixon had Hoover to breakfast at the White House on Monday, September 20, 1971, a few hours before the NSC meeting on Vietnam. He was furious at the director’s reluctance to perform break-ins for the White House, but he was afraid Hoover would wreak his revenge if Nixon demanded his resignation. Nixon quailed, not for the first time, in fear of Hoover’s wrath.

  For weeks thereafter, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and Dean all pushed the president to force the old man out. “We have those tapes, [the transcripts of] wiretapping we did on Kissinger’s staff, the newspapermen and so forth,” Mitchell told the president on October 8, 1971. “Hoover is tearing the place up over there trying to get at them.”

  Ehrlichman explained, “Hoover feels very insecure without having his own copy of those things because of course that gives him leverage with Mitchell and with you—and because they’re illegal.” The possibility of Hoover’s blackmailing the president hung in the air.

  Mitchell continued: “Hoover won’t come and talk to me about it. He’s just got his Gestapo all over the place.… I’ve got to get him straightened out, which may lead to a hell of a confrontation.”

  Nixon once again tried to steel his resolve. “He ought to resign,” the president said. “He’s too old.”

  “He’s getting senile, actually,” Mitchell said.

  “He should get the hell out of there,” Nixon replied, but “he’s got to go of his own volition. That’s what we get down to. And that’s why we’re in a hell of a problem.… I think he’ll stay until he’s a hundred years old.”

  Nixon concluded, after reconsidering the question for the fourth time on October 25, that he had too much to fear from Hoover, the man he had called his closest personal friend in his political life. “We’ve got to avoid the situation where he could leave with a blast,” Nixon said. “We may have on our hands here a man who will pull down the temple with him, including me.”

  * * *

  With the 1972 election now a year away, Nixon finally settled on a military and political strategy of sorts. John Mitchell would resign soon as attorney general, for a last hurrah as Nixon’s campaign manager. Many of Haldeman and Ehrlichman’s best and brightest aides would move to campaign headquarters, one block away from the White House.

  The boys in the basement at the Executive Office Building, the Plumbers, would develop a war plan against all Nixon’s opponents, using all the tricks in the book, financed in part by the slush fund of campaign cash held by Nixon’s lawyer, Herb Kalmbach; operating in secrecy; run in theory by the reelection committee but in reality overseen by no one.

  And in Vietnam, the president would use all the force at his command to bring the enemy to sue for peace by Election Day. “We will bomb the bejeezus out of them,” he told Kissinger in the Oval Office on November 20. “To hell with history.… Just knock the shit out of them.”

  “That’s the best—I had not thought of that,” Kissinger said. He was a master at telling Nixon what he wanted to hear.

  “Do they realize that they have to deal with, here, a man who if he wins the election will kick the shit out of them, and if he loses the election will do it even more?” Nixon went on, his voice becoming more and more forceful. “Did that ever occur to you?”

  “I—I have to say, honestly, it did not,” Kissinger replied, in a tone more admiring than aghast.

  “I’d finish off the goddamn place,” Nixon said. “Knock the shit out of them—and then, everybody would say, ‘Oh, horrible, horrible, horrible.’” And he laughed with pleasure at the thought.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “It is illegal, but…”

  RICHARD NIXON believed he was at his best in a crisis—sharper, stronger, tougher. When India and Pakistan went to war at the end of 1971, he armed the outgunned Pakistanis: a very tough call, utterly illegal, in blatant violation of an international weapons embargo.

  But the president hated India with a passion: “These people are savages,” he said bluntly. And as Kissinger put it, Nixon had “a special feeling” for Pakistan’s military dictator, Yahya Khan: the general who had created the crucial link to China.

  The long and unhappy alliance between the United States and Pakistan went back to the Eisenhower administration, when Pakistan provided secret airfields for flights of the CIA’s U-2 spy plane over the Soviet Union. The United States provided military assistance in return. Pakistan itself was created by the catastrophic British Partition of India in 1947, which led to hundreds of thousands of deaths as Muslims and other minorities fled to the newly created West Pakistan and East Pakistan. The two Pakistans, flanking India and separated by twelve hundred miles, never were one nation in reality; that fiction was created by partition. Their deep political differences exploded into violent conflict in the spring of 1971, after the first free elections in East Pakistan gave General Yahya’s opponents a measure of power.

  General Yahya, who ruled from West Pakistan, imposed martial law on the East. His soldiers indiscriminately killed his opponents; the death toll ran well upward of one million. As late as December 2014, his political allies were still being convicted of war crimes. “The Pakistani army was just murdering people,” said Nicholas A. Veliotes, then a State Department official, later ambassador to Egypt under President Reagan. “There was a genocide plan there: anyone who was educated, the Paks were going to kill.” American diplomats who witnessed the onslaught bluntly called it genocide in a rebellious report to Washington on April 6, 1971, signed by the American consul general in East Pakistan, Archer Blood. The “Blood Telegram” boldly condemned the Nixon administration’s failure to denounce the atrocities.

  Nixon deliberately did nothing. “Don’t squeeze Yahya,” he wrote in a note to Kissinger on April 28, underlining the first word three times.

  India, the world’s most populous democracy, had received billions in American economic assistance over the years. But in August 1971, shortly after Nixon announced the opening to China—the Chinese and the Indians had fought a vicious border war nine years before—India signed an alliance with the Soviets. This infuriated Nixon. “If they’re going to choose to go with the Russians, they’re choosing not to go with us,” he told Kissinger. “Goddamn it, who’s giving them a billion dollars a year? Shit, the Russians aren’t giving them a billion dollars a year.”

  India’s prime minister, Indira Gandhi, received a politically correct reception when she visited the president on November 4, 1971. But the next day, Nixon and Kissinger said what they really thought of her.

  “She is a bitch,” Nixon said.

  “Well, the Indians are bastards anyway,” Kissinger replied. “But, Mr. President, even though she was a bitch, we shouldn’t overlook the fact that we got what we wanted, which was we kept her from going out of here saying that the United States kicked her in the teeth.”

  President Nixon met at the White House with the Pakistani foreign secretary, Sultan Khan, on November 15, 1971. “We will do everything we can to try to help you in your cause,” Nixon pledged. But a war was coming, with India’s forces supporting the separatists in East Pakistan and Yahya Khan mobilizing against India.

  “Yahya is beginning to feel cornered,” Ambassador Joseph Farland reported to Kissinger from Islamabad on November 19. “This thing could blow.” Three days later, it did. Yahya told Farland that India had attacked and that he was declaring a national emergency. The dictator sent President Nixon the message that Pakistan was at the point of no return.

  “Is Yahya saying it’s war?” Nixon asked Kissinger in the Oval Offic
e.

  “Yeah, they’re saying it’s war.”

  “The Indians say it isn’t?” the president said.

  “That’s right,” Kissinger replied.

  The White House “didn’t have any confirmation” one way or the other, Haldeman noted in his diary that night: “Our vast intelligence network doesn’t seem to be able to tell us when a couple of major nations are at war, which is a little alarming, to say the least.”

  Kissinger sent a back-channel cable to Ambassador Farland on November 24, saying that he was convening daily meetings of his crisis team: the Washington Special Actions Group. These meetings, he wrote, led to STRICTEST PRESIDENTIAL INSTRUCTIONS TO TILT TOWARD PAKISTAN.

  Nixon made this explicit in an Oval Office conversation with Kissinger and Secretary of State Rogers that same day. “To the extent that we can tilt it toward Pakistan, I would prefer to play that,” Nixon said. He cautioned them: American military aid had to be completely clandestine. “I don’t want to get caught in the business where we take the heat for a miserable war that we had nothing to do with,” the president said.

  * * *

  The miserable war went ballistic on December 3, 1971. Prime Minister Gandhi charged that Pakistan’s air force had bombed six Indian airfields in Kashmir and the Punjab and that artillery shells were striking Indian positions from West Pakistan.

  India, Gandhi said, was going to crush its enemy.

  The president was trying to unwind in Key Biscayne. “Pakistan thing makes your heart sick,” he told Kissinger. “And after we have warned the bitch.”

  Kissinger called the next morning. “We have had an urgent appeal from Yahya. Says his military supplies have been cut off,” he told Nixon. “Would we help through Iran?” The shah of Iran was a key American ally. Placed in power by a CIA coup under President Eisenhower, he bought billions in weapons from the United States. Nixon asked, “Can we help?” Kissinger replied, “I think if we tell the Iranians we will make it up to them we can do it.”