One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon

by Tim Weiner

  “To preclude … military actions”: Haig to Kissinger, Washington, March 2, 1969, “Memorandum from Secretary Laird Enclosing Preliminary Draft of Potential Military Actions re Vietnam,” FRUS XXXIV: National Security Policy, 1969–1972. The memo describes the war plans developed by the Joint Chiefs in response to Kissinger’s request on January 27, including the nuclear option.

  “What is the most effective way to bring the war to a conclusion?”: Minutes of National Security Council Meeting, Jan. 25, 1969, Washington, FRUS VI: Vietnam, January 1969–July 1970.

  “Mr. Kissinger questioned”: Minutes of the 303/40 Committee Meeting, Feb. 12, 1969, FRUS VI: Vietnam. The 303 meetings, later known as the 40 meetings, were where Kissinger and high-ranking intelligence, military, diplomatic, and national security officials made decision on CIA covert operations.

  “I believe it is absolutely urgent”: Memorandum from President Nixon to Kissinger, Washington, Feb. 1, 1969, Washington, DC, in Box 64, Vietnam Subject Files, Reappraisal of Vietnam Commitment, vol. 1, Nixon Presidential Materials, NSC Files, National Archives, Washington, DC.

  “The question that arises”: Laird to Nixon, March 13, 1969, “SUBJECT: Trip to Vietnam and CINCPAC,” March 5–12, 1969, FRUS VI: Vietnam.

  “lobbing a few shells into Saigon”: Kissinger to Nixon, March 10, 1969, “SUBJECT: Dobrynin–Rogers Conversation on the Paris Negotiations,” FRUS VI: Vietnam.

  “so secret … entire new world”: Feb. 24, 1969 (Brussels), entry in Haldeman Diaries.

  “In order to set the stage”: Kissinger to Nixon, “Consideration of B-52 Options Against COSVN Headquarters,” Feb. 19, 1969, Top Secret, declassified 2006, FRUS VI: Vietnam.

  “an extraordinary amount of detailed planning”: Oakley oral history, FAOH. Nixon’s obsession with detail was everyday life at the White House. The scripting of the presidency was a daily burden, part of the immense pressure Nixon imposed on himself and his inner circle. He would stop in the midst of deliberations over the war to demand that soup and salads be banned from White House dinners. His highest-ranking staffers took orders in the Oval Office about “whether or not the curtains were closed or open, the arrangement of state gifts, whether they should be on that side of the room or this side of the room,” his aide Alexander Butterfield said; before every ceremonial occasion at the White House, the president needed to know “whether the military would be to the right or the left, which uniforms would be worn by the White House police, whether the Secret Service would salute during ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ and sing”—and this level of preoccupation applied to “all Presidential activities.”

  “Must convince them”: Notes by President Nixon of a meeting, Paris, March 2, 1969, FRUS VI: Vietnam.

  “We are not going to double-cross you”: Telegram from the embassy in France to the Department of State, Paris, March 2, 1969, memorandum of conversation among the president, Vice President Ky, Ambassador Lam, the secretary of state, Ambassador Lodge, Ambassador Walsh, and Dr. Kissinger, FRUS VI: Vietnam.

  “Hit them”: March 8, 1969, Kissinger Telephone Conversations.

  “Our military effort”: Kissinger to Nixon, March 8, 1969, “SUBJECT: Reflections on De-escalation,” FRUS VI: Vietnam.

  “The President ordered”: Memorandum for the record, March 15, 1969, “SUBJECT: March 16 Rocket Attack on Saigon,” Nixon Presidential Materials, NSC Files, National Archives, Washington, DC.

  5: “The center cannot hold”

  Abrams was “seeking permission”: Surprisingly, this important story languished for six weeks until the New York Times followed up on it. “Although President Nixon became concerned over these two stories and the threat they posed to secrecy … Nixon need not have worried,” a declassified U.S. Air Force history of the Vietnam War reflected. “Possibly put off the track by the lack of reaction from military leaders and civilian authorities, the press failed to pursue the matter. As it turned out, more than four years elapsed from the first Menu bombing in 1969 until Maj. Hal Knight, a former Air Force officer, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1973 that, while serving at a Combat Skyspot radar site, he had destroyed records of strikes in Cambodia and substituted reports of attacks on cover targets in South Vietnam.” Bernard C. Nalty, Air War over South Vietnam 1968–1975, Air Force History and Museums Program (Washington, DC: U.S. Air Force, 2000), pp. 127–32.

  “the ultimate weapon”: Nixon deposition, recorded in San Clemente, CA, Jan. 15, 1976, Halperin v. Kissinger, U.S. District Court, Washington, DC. Nixon gave this deposition in connection with the White House wiretaps. Kissinger finally settled the case in 1991, when he wrote an apology to his former aide Halperin, whom he had selected as a wiretap target in 1969.

  “Here he was in this room with J. Edgar Hoover”: Rodman oral history, FAOH.

  “destroy whoever did this”: Hoover memorandum of conversation with Kissinger, May 9, 1969, FBI.

  “gossip and bullshitting”: Feb. 28, 1973, NWHT.

  tapping was within the realm: The taps were clearly illegal. The prevailing law, the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, dealt specifically with the issue. While prohibiting all wiretapping and electronic surveillance by persons other than law enforcement authorities (and even then, under strict rules), it stated that “nothing … shall limit the constitutional power of the President … to protect the nation against actual or potential attack or other hostile acts of a foreign power, to obtain foreign intelligence information deemed essential to the security of the United States or to protect national security information against foreign intelligence activities.” I have emphasized the passages with the word foreign. Nothing in that law allowed the wiretapping of Americans who were not foreign spies.

  “But I didn’t think it was being done by the White House”: Sullivan oral history, Strober and Strober, Nixon, p. 99.

  “an almost paranoid fear”: Kennedy oral history, FAOH.

  “You cannot square a personal friendship”: Lord oral history, FAOH.

  “disreputable if not outright illegal”: Thomas R. Johnson, American Cryptology During the Cold War, 1945–1989: Book III: Retrenchment and Reform, 1972–1980, Center for Cryptological History, National Security Agency, p. 85. This unique National Security Agency history was written in 1998 and declassified, with significant deletions, in 2013, available online at https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/cryptologic_histories/cold_war_iii.pdf.

  “Without the Vietnam War”: H. R. Haldeman, The Ends of Power (New York: Times Books, 1978), p. 117.

  “This is the way civilizations begin to die”: Nixon statement on campus disorders, March 22, 1969, Public Papers of Richard Nixon.

  “The subject of U.S. casualties”: Wheeler cable to Abrams, April 3, 1969, Abrams Papers, U.S. Army Center of Military History. Cited in History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the War in Vietnam, 1969–70, Historical Division, Joint Secretariat, JCS, p. 51, available online at http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/doctrine/history/jcsvietnam_69_70.pdf.

  “We need a plan”: National Security Council meeting, March 28, 1969, Box TS 82, NSC Meetings, Jan.–March 1969, Top Secret; Sensitive, in Kissinger Papers. These minutes were based on notes taken by Haig that were typed by a White House secretary; Haig made corrections by hand to the typed transcript. CIA director Richard Helms gave Nixon the Agency’s collective opinion that the United States had no strategic concept or coherent policy in Vietnam, the outlook there was for five or six more years of continuing war, it would be pointless for Washington to send more U.S. troops to Vietnam, and if South Vietnam’s leaders could not make it on their own the United States “ought to get out.” Helms notes, Job No. 80B01285A, DCI, Box 11, Folder 5, CIA.

  “We must convince the American public”: Kissinger to President Nixon, April 3, 1969, “SUBJECT: Vietnam Problem.” This document contains the message delivered to the Soviet ambassador, FRUS VI: Vietnam.

  “the only way to end the war quickly and the best way to conclude
it honorably”: Ibid.

  “Even without a reason”: Telephone conversation between President Nixon and Kissinger, April 5, 1969, 9:45 a.m., Kissinger Telephone Conversations, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  Another newly declassified NSA history: United States Cryptologic History, Crisis Collection, Vol. 3: The National Security Agency and the EC-121 Shootdown, NSA, 1989, declassified May 13, 2013. Online at https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/cryptologic_histories/EC-121.pdf.

  “The President said to find a way”: Telephone conversation between President Nixon and Kissinger (notes by Haig), April 15, 1969, FRUS XIX: Korea, 1969–1972.

  “Honest John”: Minutes of NSC meeting, April 16, 1969, ibid.

  “That is a very tough one”: Telephone conversation between President Nixon and Kissinger, April 17, 1969, ibid.

  “immediate military action against the North”: Haig Oral History Interview, Nov. 30, 2007, Nixon Library.

  “We do not do a thing”: Telephone conversation between President Nixon and Kissinger, April 17, 1969, FRUS XIX: Korea.

  “Nixon told me”: Haig Oral History Interview, Nov. 30, 2007, Nixon Library.

  “Nixon did not trust”: Rodman oral history, FAOH.

  “ambassadorships were being sold to the highest bidders”: Hart oral history, FAOH.

  “Vincent De Roulet was no longer ‘persona grata’”: Rogers oral history, FAOH.

  “I think he had something”: Cheek oral history, FAOH.

  “contributed chunks of this money”: Gillespie oral history, FAOH.

  “We had a career Foreign Service officer”: Hart oral history, FAOH.

  “Anybody who wants to be an ambassador must at least give $250,000”: June 23, 1971, NWHT, Oval Office.

  “He had no hobbies”: Butterfield testimony, House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearings, July 2, 1974. Transcript on line at http://watergate.info/judiciary/BKITOW.PDF.

  “This country could run itself domestically”: Nixon interview cited in Margaret MacMillan, Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2008), p. 8.

  “He believed in nothing”: Farmer oral history, Strober and Strober, Nixon, p. 110.

  he “can’t have a Domestic Program”: Moynihan quoted in March 11, 1969, entry in Haldeman Diaries.

  “Regarding domestic policy, which Nixon dismissed as ‘building outhouses in Peoria’”: Will quoted in “Up Front,” New York Times Book Review, May 11, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/books/review/Upfront-t.html.

  “If it’s called racism, so be it” and “Uncle Toms”: Feb. 27 and April 2, 1970, entries in Haldeman Diaries.

  “that we’re catering to the left”: Feb. 9, 1971, entry in ibid.

  “He didn’t know anything about the war on poverty”: Cheney oral history, Miller Center, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, recorded March 16–17, 2000.

  “The Nixon administration came in”: Carlucci oral history, FAOH.

  “to provide upward mobility” … “OEO was the enemy”: Ibid.

  “I want to end this war”: Nixon address on Vietnam, May 14, 1969, Public Papers of Richard Nixon, full text online at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=2047.

  “totally unintelligible to the ordinary guy”: May 14, 1969, entry in Haldeman Diaries.

  “Our fighting men”: Nixon address on Vietnam, May 14, 1969.

  “senseless and irresponsible”: Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Cong. Rec., May 20, 1969.

  “We are talking to an enemy”: Nixon meeting with Cabinet and NSC, May 15, 1969, Nixon Presidential Materials, White House Special Files, National Archives, Washington, DC.

  6: “Madman”

  Hoover himself began to draw up a blueprint: Hoover’s plans are detailed in an FBI document, “CIA Requests for Information Concerning Aliens,” dated November 19, 1948, and declassified under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) nearly sixty years later. Despite the document’s title, 97 percent of the people listed as potential candidates for preventive detention by the FBI were Americans.

  Congress … had passed: The long-forgotten Emergency Detention Act of 1950 became the subject of congressional hearings in 1971 after the mass arrest of six thousand protesters in Washington. While six detention camps were established and funded by the Congress, none of them was ever used.

  “I think there is a much deeper conspiracy”: Nov. 14, 1969, Kissinger Telephone Conversations.

  “everything depended on the war in Vietnam”: Memorandum from Kissinger to President Nixon, June 13, 1969, Washington, DC, FRUS XII: Soviet Union.

  “We have a difficult political problem”: Memorandum of conversation, June 8, 1969, Midway Island, FRUS VI: Vietnam.

  “a sagging of spirit”: Ibid.

  “if not handled carefully”: Ibid.

  “He feels it will probably mean collapse of South Vietnam”: June 19, 1969, entry in Haldeman Diaries.

  “discouraged because his plans” and “He wants to push for some escalation”: July 7, 1969, entry in Haldeman Diaries.

  “until about October”: History of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the War in Vietnam, 1969–70, Historical Division, Joint Secretariat, JCS, pp. 56–57: “On the evening of 7 July the President met with his key advisers to review Vietnam policy.… Political climate was considered at some length, and General Wheeler later told CINCPAC [Adm. John S. McCain] and COMUSMACV [Gen. Creighton Abrams] that ‘the political situation here is not good.’ The President considered that public opinion would hold ‘until about October,’ when some further action on his part would be required.” The complete text of this history is online at http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/doctrine/history/jcsvietnam_69_70.pdf.

  “Convey the impression that Nixon is somewhat ‘crazy’”: Leonard Garment, Crazy Rhythm (Boston: Perseus Books, 1999), pp. 174–77.

  “We are going through a critical phase”: Nixon remarks, July 29, 1969, U.S. embassy, Bangkok, FRUS XX: Southeast Asia, 1969–1972.

  “We have been using every diplomatic and other device”: Memorandum of conversation, Nixon and Thieu, July 30, 1969, Saigon, FRUS VI: Vietnam.

  “a complete and utter surprise”: Holdridge oral history, FAOH.

  “Between Jakarta and Bangkok”: Ibid.

  Yahya said he would convey the message: Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, Agha Hilaly, met with Kissinger’s NSC aide Harold H. Saunders after Nixon returned to Washington in August 1969. Ambassador Hilaly had a ten-page memo from his president on the meeting with Nixon in Pakistan—a unique record. It said that “President Nixon stated it as his personal view—not completely shared by the rest of his government or by many Americans—that Asia can not move forward if a nation as large as China remains isolated. He further said that the US should not be party to any arrangements designed to isolate China.” He asked President Yahya to convey his feeling to the Chinese at the highest level: “When President Yahya said it might take a little time to pass this message, President Nixon replied that President Yahya should take his own time and decide for himself the manner in which he would communicate with the Chinese.

  ”Hilaly said that Zhou En-lai had been invited to Pakistan and had accepted, but that it was not clear when he would come. He said President Yahya might, in a conversation with the Chinese Ambassador, simply say that the United States had no hostile intent toward Communist China but he would wait until he saw Chou En-lai to convey President Nixon’s specific views.”

  Saunders told the ambassador: “We would like to establish a single channel for any further discussion of this subject should President Yahya have any questions about what President Nixon intended or any impressions of Chinese views which he might wish to relay to President Nixon. We would like to see Ambassador Hilaly and Dr. Kissinger as the two points of contact.” Memorandum of conversation, Aug. 28, 1969, Washington, DC, FRUS XVII: China, 1969–1972.

  “the card of the United States”: Xiong Xianghui published the first
documented records of Mao’s task force. Xiong Xianghui, “The Prelude to the Opening of Sino-American Relations,” Chinese Communist Party History Materials, no. 42 (June 1992), excerpts online at http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB145/.

  “In 25 years”: Private meeting between President Nixon and Ceauşescu, Aug. 2, 1969, Bucharest, FRUS XXIX: Eastern Europe, Eastern Mediterranean, 1969–1972.

  “All this is possible”: Memorandum of conversation between the president and President Ceauşescu, Aug. 2–3, 1969, Bucharest, FRUS XXIX: Eastern Europe.

  “continue to fight in Vietnam”: Ibid.

  Nixon convened the National Security Council: President Nixon’s notes on a National Security Council meeting, Aug. 14, 1969, San Clemente, CA, FRUS XVII: China.

  “may have a ‘knock them off now’ policy”: Minutes of meeting of the National Security Council, Aug. 14, 1969, San Clemente, CA, FRUS XII: Soviet Union. Kissinger, in his memoirs, called Nixon’s tilt toward China in its clash with the Soviets a “revolutionary thesis”: the president had declared that “we had a strategic interest in the survival of a major Communist country, long an enemy, and with which we had no contact.”

  “Davydov asked point blank”: William L. Stearman, memorandum of conversation, Aug. 18, 1969, Washington, DC, “SUBJECT: China: US Reaction to Soviet Destruction of CPR Nuclear Capability,” FRUS XII: Soviet Union.

  “the consequences for the US would be incalculable”: Memorandum for the record of the Washington Special Actions Group meeting, Sept. 4, 1969, San Clemente, CA, FRUS XII: Soviet Union.

  “The longer the war goes on”: Kissinger to President Nixon, Aug. 30, 1969, “SUBJECT: Response from Ho Chi Minh,” FRUS VI: Vietnam.

  “We tried every operational approach in the book”: Richard Helms, A Look over My Shoulder (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 310–11.

  “I was ready to use whatever military pressure was necessary … to bear on Hanoi”: Nixon, RN, pp. 393, 398.