by Tim Weiner
“Hunt’s happy,” Haldeman said.
“At considerable cost, I guess?” said the president.
“Yes,” said Haldeman.
“It’s worth it,” Richard Nixon replied.
Kissinger told Nixon on August 2 that Hanoi might settle the Vietnam War before the election—“if you stay ten points ahead.” Both men wanted to believe that North Vietnam would rather sign a peace deal than face the wrath of a reelected president.
“Frankly, I’d like to trick them,” Nixon said. “I’d like to do it in a way that we make a settlement, and then screw them in the implementation, to be quite candid.”
“Well, that we can do, too,” Kissinger said.
“We could promise something, and then, right after the election, say Thieu wouldn’t do it,” Nixon said. “Just keep the pressure on.”
The president was unsure South Vietnam could survive until November. If the war was still on, he would destroy Hanoi and Haiphong after the election, he vowed. But “the advantage, Henry, of trying to settle now, even if you’re ten points ahead, is that then you assure a hell of a landslide,” he said. “You’d have a mandate.”
“And you have the goddamned nightmare off your back,” Kissinger replied.
“It is a nightmare. It’s a nightmare being there,” Nixon said. “This war is over by the end of this year,” no matter what it took. “Vietnam poisons our relations with the Soviets, and it poisons our relations with the Chinese. We have suffered long and hard—and God knows how do we get out of it?”
“They are bastards,” Kissinger said. “They would love it best if you got defeated.”
“Sure,” Nixon said. “Or shot.”
“They hate you, and they hate me,” Kissinger said. “But the question is now: how can we maneuver it … so that it can look like a settlement by Election Day?”
For the next three months, under Nixon’s direction, Kissinger worked nonstop to find something that would “look like a settlement” before the election. That, Kissinger promised, would “finish the destruction of McGovern” and give Nixon the mandate he desired. The destruction of McGovern was uppermost in Nixon’s mind the next morning, August 3. “What in the name of God are we doing on this score?” he yelled at Haldeman and Ehrlichman in the Oval Office. “What are we doing about their financial contributors?” he asked. “Are we running their tax returns?”
“Not as far as I know,” Ehrlichman said.
“We’d better forget the goddamn campaign right now,” Nixon raged. “We have all this power, and we’re not using it.” The president recorded in his diary that night: “All of our people are gun-shy as a result of the Watergate incident and don’t want to look into files that involve Democrats.” Nixon was chagrined that he had not used his “enormous powers” to dig into the Internal Revenue Service records of his political enemies. He promised himself that would change after the election.
Nixon flew to the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach on August 22, 1972. He had been renominated by a vote of 1,347 to 1. He wrote in his memoirs, “My eyes burned from the lingering sting of tear gas”—police had confronted thousands of antiwar protesters outside the convention center—“as I entered the hall to accept my fifth and last nomination.” The delegates shouted, “Four more years! Four more years!”
Eight days later, Haldeman walked into Nixon’s office at the Western White House in San Clemente. “Bad news,” he said glumly. “I really mean it—it’s really bad.” He handed the president the latest Gallup poll. Nixon: 64 percent. McGovern: 30 percent. Undecided: 6 percent. The two men smiled with pleasure.
* * *
The future of Richard Nixon’s second term pivoted on two fateful conversations on September 15, 1972: first with Dean, then with Kissinger.
That day, a federal grand jury had indicted Liddy, Hunt, McCord, and the Cubans for the break-in and bugging at the DNC headquarters. But the charges stopped there. The Watergate prosecutors had hit a stone wall.
John Dean joined the president and Haldeman in the Oval Office at 5:27 p.m. Richard Nixon later denied he had ever met Dean until 1973.
“Well, you had quite a day today, didn’t you?” Nixon said.
“Quite a three months,” Dean replied.
“How did it all end up?” Haldeman asked.
“Three months ago I would have had trouble predicting where we’d be today,” Dean said. “I think that I can say that fifty-four days from now that not a thing will come crashing down to our surprise.” He was referring to the time left until Election Day.
The president was well pleased with Dean. “The way you’ve handled it, it seems to me, has been very skillful, because you—putting your fingers in the dikes every time that leaks have sprung here and sprung there.…” With Watergate seemingly stanched, Nixon warmed to the prospect of revenge in days to come. “All of those that have tried to do us in … are asking for it and they are going to get it,” he said. “We haven’t used the Bureau and we haven’t used the Justice Department, but things are going to change.”
But at “the Bureau,” the FBI, the number-two man, Mark Felt, and his colleagues were convinced they had to do something regarding the government of Richard Nixon.
They suspected a conspiracy to obstruct justice was going on at the White House. They thought the president had placed Pat Gray in charge of the FBI as part of that conspiracy. Gray’s appointment “hurt all of us deeply,” said Charles Bolz, the chief of the FBI’s accounting and fraud division. Felt was Hoover’s rightful heir. “Felt should have moved up right there and then,” Bolz said. “And that’s what got him into the act. He was going to find out what was going on.… And, boy, he really did.” Felt was “Deep Throat,” the Washington Post’s best source on Watergate. “I knew somebody would break,” Nixon would say bitterly after the first piercing newspaper articles started appearing in late September.*
Six hours later, Kissinger sat down with the president. Kissinger had spent much of the past month traveling the world—to Saigon, to Moscow, and to Paris, where he held another clandestine meeting with the top representative of North Vietnam, Le Duc Tho, a member of the enemy’s Politburo.
At long last, Le Duc Tho wanted to talk peace.
“He said: ‘You have to tell us if you want to settle it,’” Kissinger reported to the president. “I said: ‘Yes, we want to settle it.’ He said: ‘Give me a day.’ I said: ‘Well, October 15th.’ He took my hand and said: ‘Our first agreement. We’ll settle it October 15th.’”
Nixon was stunned and skeptical. October 15 was one month away.
“What do you think his reason is?” the president asked.
“I think they are terrified of you getting re-elected,” Kissinger replied. “I said: ‘You and your friends have turned this election into a plebiscite on Vietnam.… The President is going to have a majority for continuing the war.’”
But Kissinger also reported that what “Thieu is really afraid of is a cease-fire.” Somehow the president would have to negotiate an end to the war with his allies as well as his enemies.
* * *
“We set up dinner on the Sequoia tonight, Kissinger, Haig and I with the President,” Haldeman recorded on the night of September 28. Kissinger was convinced that “the North Vietnamese do want to settle. The hang-up still is dumping Thieu.… What he wants to do is send Haig to Saigon tomorrow, have him meet with Thieu, and get an agreement from Thieu to secretly agree to step down, sometime around January.”
For days on end they wrestled with the Vietnam dilemma. “I know we have to end the war,” Nixon said on September 29. “But if we end it in the wrong way, we’ve got a hell of a problem—not in the election. Forget the election. We’ll win the election. We could surrender in Vietnam and win the election.”
“What do we require Thieu to do?” he asked. “If he does get out, does it unravel in South Vietnam?”
Kissinger predicted, presciently, that even if there were an official cease-fire
and American troops withdrew, the fighting between North and South Vietnam might have no end in sight. “Thieu doesn’t want a cease-fire,” Kissinger said. “He doesn’t want us out. I mean, let’s face it: the real point is that our interests and his are now divergent. We want out. We want our prisoners. We want a cease-fire. He wants us in. He thinks he’s winning. And he wants us to continue bombing—”
“For another two or three years,” Nixon said. “Jesus Christ, it’s a hell of a choice.”
Haig was about to go to Saigon as a special envoy to President Thieu. “Make it very clear to him,” Nixon told Haig later that day. “He can’t just assume that because I win the election that we’re going to stick with him through hell and high water. This war is not going to go on. Goddamn it, we can’t do it.… We’ve got to get the war the hell off our backs in this country. That’s all there is to it.”
Haig pointed out, “Of course, if it looks like it could cause a public break…”
The president finished the thought: “That would be bad,” he said. “A public break would hurt us. That’d hurt us in the election.”
Kissinger then said, in so many words, what Nixon knew all too well. After twenty thousand American combat deaths on his watch, the president could be accused of imposing a deal on Thieu that could have been struck back in October 1968.
Nixon weighed this possibility. Then he continued to instruct Haig on how to talk to Thieu: Nixon had stood by South Vietnam in the face of overwhelming opposition. Nixon had “no support. The House was against him. The Senate was against him. The media was against him. The students had rioted. All sorts of hell-raising. He’s made these tough decisions.” Now Thieu had to give him something in return.
He gave Nixon the back of his hand.
“We have a major crisis with Thieu,” Kissinger told Nixon at Camp David on October 4. “He rejects every proposal we’ve made, every last one of them.”
“We can’t have a huge bust-up with Saigon before the election,” Kissinger said. “Afraid not,” Nixon replied. “Of course Thieu knows that.… What is his line?”
“His line is that he’s the government of South Vietnam, that the North Vietnamese are the aggressors and they’ve got to leave,” Kissinger said. “He is playing ’68 all over again.… He figures if he can survive now ’til the 7th and just dig in then we’ll have to yield.”
“He’s got to trust the President. He’s never let him down,” Nixon said, referring to himself, as he did more and more often, in the third person.
Kissinger was set to talk to North Vietnam’s Paris delegation in four days. “Supposing we don’t get to an agreement,” he suggested. “We are in good shape as far as Thieu is concerned. If we do get to an agreement I will just have to go out and…”
“And cram it down his throat,” said the president. “After the election we’ll do what we goddamn well please.”
* * *
But Hanoi was thinking one step ahead of the next election.
“We must concentrate our efforts on doing whatever it takes to resolve our first objective, which is to fight to force the Americans to withdraw,” Le Duan, North Vietnam’s Politburo chief and the nation’s top decision maker since Ho Chi Minh’s death, wrote in a formal decision in September. Le Duc Tho received his orders in Paris shortly before Kissinger arrived. The Politburo told its chief negotiator to give the Americans the concessions they sought. Thieu could stay in office. The South Vietnamese government could remain as well. A cease-fire in place, with Communist forces controlling some of South Vietnam, would take hold. An election commission, with Communist representation, would reach a political settlement.
These were simply tactics to Hanoi, all aimed at achieving their strategic goal: an American military withdrawal. The North Vietnamese calculated that without American support Saigon would fall.
At 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, October 12, after a sixteen-hour session in Paris, Kissinger, accompanied by Haig, returned to the White House. They walked into the president’s Executive Office Building study, outfitted with leather armchairs, a wet bar, and hidden microphones. Nixon and Haldeman were waiting. The president made Kissinger a scotch and soda, Haig a martini. Whatever Nixon made for himself, he was soon high.
“Well, you got three out of three, Mr. President,” Kissinger said—China, Russia, Vietnam.
“You got an agreement?” said Nixon. “Are you kidding?”
“No, I’m not kidding,” Kissinger said.
Nixon laughed with pleasure and turned to General Haig.
“I’m going to ask Al, because you’re too prejudiced, Henry. You’re so prejudiced to the peace camp that I can’t trust you. Don’t you think so, Al?”
“Yes, sir,” Haig said. He was not laughing.
NIXON: What about Thieu?
HAIG: It isn’t done.
KISSINGER: Well, that’s the problem.… Here is what we have to do: I have to go to Paris on Tuesday to go over the agreed things word-for-word.… Then I go to Saigon to get Thieu aboard.…
NIXON: Won’t it totally wipe out Thieu, Henry?
HALDEMAN: Yeah.
KISSINGER: Oh, no. It’s so far better than anything we discussed. He won’t like it because he thinks he’s winning, but here is the deal, just to give you the main points.…
NIXON: We can do that after.
KISSINGER: All right, afterwards.… We are getting out of this with honor.
NIXON: Henry, let me tell you this: it has to be with honor. But also it has to be in terms of getting out. We cannot continue to have this cancer eating at us at home, eating at us abroad.… You use that term … “with honor”?
KISSINGER: “With honor.”
NIXON: Do you use it? Apprise me, Al. “Honor”?
HAIG: Sure.… Thieu’s got his rights.…
KISSINGER: Thieu can stay. No side deals.
NIXON: Why can he? How? Under what conditions?
KISSINGER: There are no conditions. Thieu can stay. The only thing we agreed was that Thieu will talk to the other side—
NIXON: Um-hmm.
KISSINGER: —about setting up something that will be called the National Council for National Reconciliation and Concord.…
NIXON: They’re leaving Thieu in. They’re in. And they’re supposed to negotiate a National Council? Thieu will never agree, they’ll never agree, so they screw up, and we support Thieu, and the Communists support them, and they can continue fighting, which is fine.… Let me come down to the nut-cutting, looking at Thieu. What Henry has read to me, Thieu cannot turn down. If he does, our problem will be that we have to flush him, and that will have flushed South Vietnam. Now, how the hell are we going to come up on that?
Over dinner, the three men drank the president’s best wine, a ’57 Château Lafite Rothschild. (A rare event, noted the abstemious but ever observant Haldeman. The president almost always saved the finest vintages for himself, the bottles discreetly wrapped in a white linen napkin by his valet, while others were served California vin ordinaire.)
Haldeman soberly recorded in his diary that night, “The P kept interrupting Henry all through the discussion. He obviously was all cranked up and wasn’t listening to the details.… The real basic problem boils down to the question of whether Thieu can be sold on it and if he doesn’t buy it, there’s no option but to flush him, because we can’t turn down the offer: we’re trapped now.” Haldeman’s entry for the next day reads, “Both the P and Henry are realizing in the cold gray light of dawn today that they still have a plan that can fall apart … although Henry’s convinced that he’s got it settled and that it will work out and that we can talk Thieu into it.”
On October 18, Nixon sent Kissinger to Saigon carrying a handwritten note in which the president pledged his devotion to Thieu and the survival of South Vietnam as a free country. Over the next seventy-two hours, Kissinger tried to convince Thieu to sign the Paris Peace Accords. It was futile. Communication between the two men broke down. So did the secure communication
s system in the embassy, forcing Kissinger to use a bulky scrambling machine in Ambassador Bunker’s bedroom to send increasingly frantic bulletins to Haig. Coding and decoding their conversations took hours; their messages overlapped; their signals were crossed; anger and frustration between Kissinger and his military aide mounted.
* * *
On October 22, Haldeman recorded: “The Vietnam deal blew up this morning. Thieu stonewalled Henry. We’re back in the soup.”
Kissinger wrote in a cable from Saigon that day: “Thieu has just rejected the entire plan or any modification of it and refuses to discuss any further negotiations”; he demanded instead “total withdrawal of North Vietnamese forces, and total self-determination of South Vietnam.”
“It is hard to exaggerate the toughness of Thieu’s position. His demands verge on insanity,” Kissinger wrote in a second message. “He stated that we have been colluding with Moscow and Peking for months against him.”
The ambassador sent a third report. Thieu had said, “The South Vietnamese people will assume that we have been sold out by the U.S. and that North Vietnam has won the war.… If we accept the document as it stands, we will commit suicide—and I will be committing suicide.”
On October 26, 1972, Kissinger returned to Washington, where he convened an unusual public press conference. In one of the most striking statements in the history of American warfare and diplomacy, he said, “We believe that peace is at hand.”
Nixon, Kissinger, and Haig wrote of this moment in their memoirs.
Nixon: “I knew immediately that our bargaining position with the North Vietnamese would be seriously eroded and our problem of bringing Thieu and the South Vietnamese along would be made even more difficult.”
Kissinger: “‘Peace is at hand’ would provide a handy symbol of governmental duplicity in the continued bitter atmosphere of the Vietnam debate.”