One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon

by Tim Weiner

Nixon spent the rest of the day conferring with his innermost circle: Kissinger, Haldeman, Haig, and Connally. He had decided that he would again address the nation in a broadcast on the following Monday, May 8. He was going to announce a major escalation of the war in Vietnam. The secretary of defense and the secretary of state knew nothing of his plans.

  For six long hours, Nixon thought aloud. Haldeman’s diary and a short taped conversation are the only records of this fateful day.

  “We were now faced with three alternatives,” Haldeman recorded. “One was to do nothing, and in effect back down on our bluff; second would be to bomb the North, and Hanoi and Haiphong, with the attendant risks, including the great risk of the cancellation of the Summit; and the third would be to cancel the Summit ourselves and then follow it up by bombing the North.”

  Then “Connally leaped in,” telling Nixon that “we’ve got to make it clear to the Russians that we are not going to be defeated, and we are not going to surrender.” Connally thought nuclear weapons were the best option in Vietnam. Nixon loved his bluster and bombast. But big talk about dropping the Bomb was no strategy.

  Kissinger favored mining Haiphong harbor and placing a naval blockade across the entire coast of North Vietnam. “The more the P thought about it, the more he liked Henry’s ideas, as long as it was followed up with continued bombing. So that became his conclusion,” Haldeman wrote. The president would announce an escalation of the air war, along with the mining and blockading, in a nationally broadcast speech on May 8. The blockade would end when America’s prisoners of war were returned and a cease-fire took hold in South Vietnam.

  Now Kissinger summoned Admiral Moorer to the president’s Executive Office Building hideaway, where a tape was rolling.

  NIXON: Admiral, what I am going to say to you now is in total confidence.… I’ve decided that we’ve got to go on a blockade. It must—I’m going to announce it Monday night on television. I want you to put a working group together. Start immediately with absolutely the best people that you’ve got.… Can it be in place Tuesday?

  MOORER: Oh, yes, sir.

  NIXON: Now, what we have in mind, in addition to blockade, is that I want as much use of our air assets as we can spare … take out the railroad units … the power plants … the docks … destroy everything that you possibly can … in the Haiphong area. You are to aim for military targets. You are not to be too concerned about whether it slops over.… If it slops over, that’s too bad.… I’ve made the decision and we now have no choice.… We will avoid the defeat of the South.… And that’s the way it’s going to be. Now, can you do that?

  MOORER: Yes, sir.

  Much of the tape is inaudible.* Haldeman’s diary fills in the blanks. “The P very strongly put the thing to Moorer that this was his decision, that it was to be discussed with no one, especially not the Secretaries or anybody at State, or anybody over in Vietnam.… He hit Moorer [by saying] this is a chance to save the military’s honor and to save the country.”

  As night fell, all departed save Nixon and Haldeman. The president concluded that his speech would be “quite a dramatic step, because it is a basic decision to go all out to win the war now.”

  * * *

  Nixon thought, above all, about his place in history.

  “We’ve had a damned good foreign policy,” he told Kissinger after breakfast on Friday, May 5. “This whole great, big, wide world, everything rides on it.”

  “If there were a way we could flush Vietnam now, flush it, get out of it in any way possible, and conduct a sensible foreign policy with the Russians and with the Chinese,” he said, “we ought to do it, because there’s so much at stake. There’s nobody else in this country at the present time, with the exception of Connally, in the next four years, that can handle the Russians and the Chinese and the big game in Europe and the big game in Southeast Asia.”

  “Who else could do it?” he asked. “How the hell can we save the Presidency?”

  “We must draw the sword,” Nixon said. “I want that place, whenever the planes are available, bombed to smithereens during the blockade. If we draw the sword out, we’re going to bomb those bastards all over the place.”

  “No question,” said Kissinger.

  “Let it fly,” the president said. “Let it fly.”

  Now Nixon changed the subject to a very sensitive question. “Would you please still study the dike situation?” he asked Kissinger.

  Nixon was thinking of destroying the earthen dikes in the Red River Delta of North Vietnam. They had served for centuries to irrigate crops and sustain the food chain and to protect the people from floods. Bombing the dikes arguably would be a war crime. He had discussed the question with Kissinger in another hard-to-hear Executive Office Building tape ten days before.

  “I still think we ought to take the dikes out now,” Nixon had said. “Will that drown people?”

  Kissinger had replied, “That will drown about 200,000 people.” His voice then lowered to an inaudible mumble.

  “I’d rather use a nuclear bomb. Have you got that ready?” Nixon had said. His voice was loud and clear. “I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christ’s sake!”

  Returning to the question that morning, Nixon said, “I need an answer on that. I don’t think it’s 200,000.”

  “I’ve been up to Hanoi,” Nixon continued. “Have you ever been to Hanoi?” Kissinger had not. “I have, in ’52,” Nixon said. The dikes, he said, served “the rice lands and the rest. The people could get the hell out of there. It isn’t—it isn’t a huge dam. The torrents of water will go down and starve the bastards. But it’ll do it. Now if that’s the case, I’ll take ’em out.…”

  “I ask this question before you go,” Nixon said. “A blockade, plus surgical bombing, will inevitably have the effect of bringing North Vietnam to its knees?”

  “Unless the South Vietnamese collapse,” Kissinger said.

  “So the South Vietnamese collapse, but they still have to give us our prisoners. We’ve got something. America is not defeated.”

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s my point,” Nixon declared. “America is not defeated.”

  The president went to Camp David that afternoon to spend the weekend writing his address to the nation on Vietnam. His thoughts ranged over the dangers and opportunities he confronted. The war had to be settled by Election Day to guarantee his victory. Early public opinion polls showed him far ahead of the potential Democratic nominees, who were committing fratricide in their party primaries. Nixon wanted to run against the ardently antiwar senator George McGovern of South Dakota. The week before, the president had ordered Haldeman to produce fake polls showing McGovern gaining strength. “The best way to assure that we could win was to pick our opponent,” Haldeman wrote. “We were much happier with McGovern than other possible foes.”

  The president tried to unwind Sunday night by watching a British movie, Funeral in Berlin, starring Michael Caine as an intelligence officer handling a defecting Soviet spymaster. But he walked out midway through the second reel, got in his helicopter, and flew back to the White House.

  At 9:00 a.m. on Monday, May 8, Nixon convened an extraordinary meeting of the National Security Council. It was then and there that Secretary of State Rogers, Secretary of Defense Laird, and Director of Central Intelligence Helms learned of the president’s new war plans.

  “The real question is whether the Americans give a damn anymore,” Nixon said. “We must play a role of leadership. A lot of people say we shouldn’t be a great power.… ‘Let’s get out; let’s make a deal with the Russians and pull in our horns.’ The U.S. would cease to be a military and diplomatic power. If that happened, then the U.S. would look inward towards itself and would remove itself from the world. Every non-Communist nation in the world would live in terror.”

  Twelve hours later, the president addressed the nation.

  * * *

  “We now have a clear, hard choice among three courses of action:
Immediate withdrawal of all American forces, continued attempts at negotiation, or decisive military action to end the war,” he said on the evening of May 8. “Abandoning our commitment in Vietnam here and now would mean turning 17 million South Vietnamese over to Communist tyranny and terror. It would mean leaving hundreds of American prisoners in Communist hands with no bargaining leverage to get them released.

  “An American defeat in Vietnam would encourage this kind of aggression all over the world, aggression in which smaller nations armed by their major allies, could be tempted to attack neighboring nations at will in the Mideast, in Europe, and other areas,” he said. “World peace would be in grave jeopardy.”

  “What appears to be a choice among three courses of action for the United States is really no choice at all,” Nixon continued. “There is only one way to stop the killing. That is to keep the weapons of war out of the hands of the international outlaws of North Vietnam.” He laid out his next steps: seeding every port in North Vietnam with mines; sending an armada into enemy waters, including aircraft carriers ferrying fighter jets; and escalating the bombing to the utmost.

  He set the terms for peace: “First, all American prisoners of war must be returned. Second, there must be an internationally supervised cease-fire throughout Indochina.” Then and only then, he would “proceed with a complete withdrawal of all American forces from Vietnam within 4 months.”

  Nixon wrote to Kissinger the next morning: “I have determined that we should go for broke. What we have got to get across to the enemy is the impression that we are doing exactly that.… We must punish the enemy in ways that he will really hurt. He has now gone over the brink and so have we. We have the power to destroy his war-making capacity. The only question is whether we have the will to use that power.… I have the will in spades.”

  Nixon, finding no hope in talking to Hanoi, was delivering his message with the most punishing attacks of the war. In the next five weeks, the United States launched 14,621 air strikes and 836 naval gunfire attacks against North Vietnam. The bombing campaign, code-named Linebacker, escalated throughout the summer. The ferocious waves of B-52s grew to a peak of more than 110 sorties a day. The Pentagon estimated that the attacks killed or seriously wounded a hundred thousand people in North Vietnam.

  The American political divide deepened. The bombing of North Vietnam set off protests all over the United States. They swept across almost all the nation’s cities and hundreds of college campuses. All began as peaceful demonstrations (marches, sit-ins, silent vigils), but police also arrested demonstrators, sometimes in violent confrontations, in at least a dozen cities, including New York, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, and Washington.*

  May 10 saw what Admiral Moorer called “the biggest dogfight since World War Two” over the skies of Vietnam. “The enemy sent up 24 MiGs, seven of which we shot down,” he reported, but the United States lost four F-4 fighter jets. All but two of the Americans shot down died in action. President Nixon still believed that American airpower would win the war (a misplaced faith), and he became infuriated when it did not break the enemy’s will to fight. “The record of World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam since 1965,” Helms warned at the height of the Linebacker attacks, “strongly suggests that bombing alone is unlikely to [defeat] a determined, resourceful enemy.” Nixon was incredulous when he saw intelligence reports from the Pentagon and the CIA saying that North Vietnam could keep fighting for at least two more years.

  “I want you to convey directly to the Air Force that I am thoroughly disgusted with their performance in North Vietnam,” he wrote to Kissinger on May 19, three days before the summit meeting in Moscow began. “I do not blame the fine Air Force pilots who do a fantastic job in so many other areas. I do blame the commanders.”

  He then issued a breathtaking order: “I have decided to take the command of all strikes in North Vietnam in the Hanoi–Haiphong area out from under any Air Force jurisdiction whatever.” Nixon said he would henceforth run the air war himself, through a naval commander of his choosing. “I want you to convey my utter disgust to Moorer which he in turn can pass on to the Chiefs,” Nixon concluded. “It is time for these people either to shape up or get out.”

  At war with his own military leaders, the president boarded Air Force One, bound for Moscow, where he would drink toasts and sign treaties with the men who were arming his enemies.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “Palace intrigue”

  RICHARD NIXON and Leonid Brezhnev talked of war and peace in the Kremlin. Their meetings were the first between American and Soviet leaders since 1945, when Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin met with Winston Churchill at Yalta, the summer home of the last czar of Russia, Nicholas II, seeking, as Churchill had said, to “guide the course of history” after World War II.

  Now the great hope was that the Moscow summit could guide the world out of the Cold War. It might slow the arms race (the mad dash for military dominance) and allow détente (the relaxation of tension) to determine relations between the United States and the USSR.

  But it was not to be. “The problem with the relationship when Nixon and Kissinger were in office was that détente was oversold to the American public,” said Malcolm Toon, the American ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1976 to 1979. “The idea got across to our fellow Americans that we were dealing with a basically changed Soviet Union. That was not the case at all.”

  Brezhnev—beetle-browed, chain-smoking, sixty-five years old, gruff and brusque but capable of charm—had been a major general in the Russian army when Nixon first ran for Congress in 1946. A political commissar, he succeeded his patron, Nikita Khrushchev, as the Soviet leader in 1964. He sought to affirm Russia’s standing as a superpower—no easy matter when harvests rotted in the field for want of fuel to truck them to markets while the Politburo’s military spending starved the Soviet state. Brezhnev wanted détente to bring concrete benefits (such as trade deals for grain) and significant symbols (such as a linkup between U.S. and Soviet spacecraft).

  Nixon saw the summit through another lens: as one more stab at a peace deal in Vietnam. He had gone to China. He was breaking bread with Brezhnev. If only he could somehow end the war by working with his enemies, he would go down as one of the greatest presidents in history.

  But the formal centerpiece of the summit was a proposed strategic arms limitation treaty (SALT, for short) intended to curb the growth of the two nations’ immense nuclear arsenals. The arms race had accelerated through the 1950s and ’60s. Both nations could blast the world into radioactive ruins in a matter of minutes. Nixon knew that a major arms control agreement could help enshrine him as a great statesman.

  Nixon, like all presidents since Eisenhower, had seen the Pentagon’s plans for nuclear war. They were terrifying. In May 1969 he had been through a dress rehearsal of the first day of World War III. He had flown from Key Biscayne to Washington on the Airborne Command Post, the “White House in the Sky,” a military version of a Boeing 707 converted into a flying war center, equipped to launch thermonuclear weapons across the world. “Pretty scary,” Haldeman noted. Nixon had “a lot of questions about our nuclear capability and kill results. Obviously worries about the lightly tossed-about millions of deaths.”

  Full-scale SALT negotiations had started in November 1969. American and Soviet delegations regularly held talks in Vienna and Helsinki on how to curb the power of nuclear weapons technology: intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarines armed with city-busting bombs, and the dream of a missile defense—a prologue to President Reagan’s multibillion-dollar “Star Wars” boondoggle.

  Ambassador Gerald Smith, chief of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, led the talks for the United States. But Nixon personally disliked Smith. So Kissinger took control of the agenda through one of his six NSC subcommittees, the Verification Panel, which met in the Situation Room; its members included CIA director Richard Helms and Attorney General John Mitchell. Kissinger set up a back channel to the S
oviets with Ambassador Dobrynin; Secretary of State Rogers and Ambassador Smith were not informed of these private talks.*

  On the eve of the summit, Nixon realized that many devils lurked in the details of the proposed treaty.

  “I read last night the whole SALT thing and I think it’s going to be a tough titty son-of- a-bitch,” he told Kissinger on May 19, the day before their departure for Moscow. “There’s an awful lot still left to be worked out.”

  “The way it stands now, unintentionally, you will have to break some deadlocks,” Kissinger admitted. “We have a few snags.” The thorniest might be MIRV.

  MIRV was the multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle—a warhead within a missile. A “MIRVed” missile could hold as many as fourteen nuclear warheads in its nose cone, each warhead aimed at a different target, multiplying each missile’s destructive power immensely. The United States had a decade’s head start on MIRV; the Soviets still were striving to test the technology. This constituted a huge American advantage in the arms race. Nixon called MIRVs “indispensable.” He had signed a secret National Security Decision Memorandum, drafted by Kissinger’s Verification Panel, flatly stating that “there would be no limitations on MIRVs” in any arms control agreement with the Soviets.

  Kissinger prepared a grandiloquent list of talking points on SALT for Nixon to read on the flight to Moscow. “Never before have nations limited the weapons on which their survival depends,” one passage read. There were five words about MIRVs; Kissinger would ensure they would not be limited.

  “The fact that the two great adversaries could sit down and seriously discuss something as sensitive to their security as strategic arms was something of an accomplishment,” said Ray Garthoff, executive secretary of the SALT delegation and deputy director of the State Department’s Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs. But he said it was tragic that “no serious attempt was made and no agreement reached, of course, to limit MIRVs.”