by Nancy Gibbs
“I know, Dick,” Johnson replied. “We politicians are just like lawyers who get together for a drink after fighting each other like hell in the courtroom.” Then he got up and went into his dressing room, and returned with a premonitory gift: a pair of presidential cuff links.
Nixon had the midterms mapped out like a field general; he focused on helping Republican challengers in those districts where Democrats had just swept in as part of the 1964 landslide and were vulnerable now. That way he’d get credit for helping victors who would have won anyway. And all the while, he meticulously laid a trap for Johnson.
By this time the Vietnam War was such a confusing issue to most Americans that Nixon could take as many positions as he liked and find support somewhere for them all. Roughly equal numbers wanted to expand the war as negotiate a peace. Nixon had privately told aides he did not think the war could be won militarily. But he was all over the map on the value of negotiations. At one point he said negotiations would only prolong the war—yet in the summer he endorsed the idea of an all-Asia peace conference. Maybe voters didn’t notice mixed messages because their own feelings were so conflicted. Loving one’s country while hating the war it was fighting? Supporting the commander in chief but doubting his honesty? And most people weren’t paying Nixon much attention: “It took someone with the eye of a hawk and the obsession of a neurotic to mark all the twists and turns,” observes historian Rick Perlstein. That would be Lyndon Johnson, who every time he turned around found Nixon taking the opposite position as he: If you escalate, it will lead to World War III. Fail to escalate, and you’ll end up with World War III. It was the perfect way to get under the skin of an insecure president in an impossible situation, fighting a war no one wanted that he could not afford to abandon.
In October, when Johnson flew to Manila for a regional summit, Nixon’s worst fears ripened. All his hard work to retire his loser image by helping orchestrate a great Republican rebound would be wasted if Johnson somehow managed a breakthrough on Vietnam right before the 1966 election. “Pull the peace rabbit out of a hat” was the way Nixon and his aides talked about it; but the most he could do was gently raise doubts about Johnson’s timing and motives. “Is this a quest for peace or a quest for votes?” he asked in a newspaper column. As voices of protest rose, Nixon gigged Johnson for that as well: “He is the first president in history who has failed to unite his own party in a time of war.”
With election day approaching, and Eisenhower cheering him on from the bleachers (“Keep hitting!” Ike urged him), Nixon saw his opening. His inventive young aide William Safire studied the communiqué that emerged from the conference like a sacred text: Nixon’s team drafted a statement denouncing the Manila proposal for a mutual drawdown of forces in Vietnam. This would leave South Vietnam at the mercy of the Vietcong, Nixon warned: the United States “should never rely on communist promises—but should always insist on guaranteed deeds.” The statement was clear, cogent, and unremarkable, but for the fact that Safire called in a favor. He reached out to his friend Harrison Salisbury at the New York Times; you’ve been neglecting Nixon, he argued. Nixon had always supported the administration’s goals in Vietnam, so his challenging the tactics counted as big news. He managed to persuade the New York Times to print the entire thing, as though it were a presidential address.
That was a crucial first step in elevating Nixon as Johnson’s peer, the Republican statesman taking on the president. And it got deep under LBJ’s skin. At a press conference on November 4, 1966, just days before the midterm voting, the president was snide and cutting; he brushed Nixon off as “a chronic campaigner” whose “problem is to find fault with his country and with his Government every two years.” The former vice president, he added, “doesn’t serve his country well” by leveling such criticism “in the hope that he can pick up a precinct or two.” He even invoked Eisenhower to back him up: Nixon, Johnson said, “never did really recognize and realize what was going on when he had an official position in the Government. You remember what President Eisenhower said: that if you would give him a week or so, he’d figure out what Nixon was doing.”
Through it all, Lady Bird Johnson sat against the wall, shaking her head, trying to catch her husband’s eye, get him to stop. Not since Truman had flayed the music critic who dared dismiss his daughter’s singing had a president leveled an attack so personal.
“I don’t know what got into him,” Johnson’s aide Jack Valenti later told Safire. “I never saw him like that in public before. It was so obvious that Nixon had gotten his goat and that he was just playing into Nixon’s hands.”
Nixon, campaigning in New England, heard from his pugnacious aide Pat Buchanan how beautifully the Safire lure had worked. “He hit us,” said an amazed Buchanan. “Jesus, did he hit us.” All Nixon had to do now was act the part of statesman, and the title would be his once more. The president, he remarked, had been guilty of a “shocking display of temper,” adding, with a more-in-sorrow-than-anger tone: “Now President Johnson and I can disagree . . . but let’s disagree as gentlemen.” It was a classic Nixon move: goad an opponent into attacking, then ride a wave of sympathy as you defend your honor. He’d been running this play since 1946, but seldom to such effect. “In the space of a single autumn day,” Newsweek reported, “the 1,000 day reign of Lyndon came to an end.”
“I suddenly found myself the center of national attention,” Nixon marveled. Eisenhower called from Gettysburg: “Johnson has gone too far on this, and there will be a very strong backlash in your favor.” The Republican Congressional Campaign Committee handed over its half hour of television time so Nixon could twist the knife again. “I was subjected last week to one of the most savage personal attacks ever leveled by the President of the United States against one of his political opponents,” he declared, and ended by looking sagely into the camera and addressing Johnson directly: he recalled their fourteen years of service together. “I respected you then, I respect you now . . . and my respect has not changed because of the personal attack you made on me. You see, I think I understand how a man can be very, very tired and how his temper then can be very short.”
Nixon emerged now as his party’s senior Republican spokesman, and the Republicans went on to pick up forty-seven House seats. “The political equivalent of the batting championship for the 1966 campaign,” announced the New York Times, “went to . . . Richard Nixon.” This would have implications for 1968: “The Republican Party pros know today Richard Nixon is the only man in their party to date who has lured Lyndon Johnson in open combat and whipped him hands down. Lyndon Johnson knows who won the first round,” declared the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.
Maybe. But Nixon too was dealing with a professional. So you had to wonder who really sprang the trap. Johnson knew the rules: never, ever lose your temper in public—except on purpose. Johnson’s aide Bill Moyers recalled how calm the president had been before the press conference began, how he had planned to hit Nixon as a chronic campaigner. “Johnson thought that Nixon was the most vulnerable man in American politics,” Moyers recalled. “He said so that morning.”
Johnson knew exactly whom he wanted to run against in 1968. So why not help him along the way?
The Search for Peace
Of course it turned out that Johnson wouldn’t be running at all. On March 31, 1968, having faced the humiliations of the Tet Offensive and the New Hampshire primary, he announced that he would not be a candidate after all. This ensured that from this point on, Johnson had only one mission: the campaign for his own redemption, a historic figure rescuing his reputation from the damn, thankless, no-win war that was destroying it.
The North Vietnamese were a shrewd and patient enemy; Johnson’s resolve to get a deal to end the war with honor was probably doomed from the start. But even had it not been, there was, in any case, no way Nixon was going to let that happen.
In the spring of 1968, when Johnson announced his withdrawal from the race and a partial bombing halt as a prelu
de to peace talks, his approval rating jumped thirteen points. This war will not be won militarily, Clark Clifford, now the defense secretary, told Johnson in May, and so the only hope for resolution lay in the secret negotiations under way in Paris. The North Vietnamese leaders in Hanoi had long demanded that genuine peace talks could not begin as long as the United States was bombing the North. Nor were they willing to negotiate with the South Vietnamese government in Saigon—only with the United States. Johnson meanwhile had refused to consider a bombing halt so long as enemy troops and supplies from North Vietnam were pouring south to help the communist Vietcong. General Creighton Abrams, the U.S. commander in Vietnam, warned that a bombing halt would permit a fivefold increase in communist strength within a matter of days.
Saigon meanwhile demanded no halt until all North Vietnamese troops had withdrawn. Clifford traveled to Saigon in mid-July, and reported to Johnson that he was now “absolutely certain” that the weak, corrupt government there did not want the war to end—not while President Nguyen Van Thieu’s regime was protected by 500,000 U.S. troops and the “golden flow of money.” It was an impossible puzzle—and that was even before you counted the pieces held by the Chinese, the Soviets, and Richard Nixon.
Campaigning for his party’s nomination, Nixon struck a righteous, statesmanlike stance: “Let’s not destroy the chances for peace with a mouthful of words from some irresponsible candidate for President of the United States,” he said in May in Evansville, Illinois. “Put yourself in the position of the enemy. He is negotiating with Lyndon Johnson and Secretary Rusk and then he reads in the paper that, not a senator, not a congressman, not an editor, but a potential President of the United States will give him a better deal than President Johnson is offering him. What’s he going to do? It will torpedo those deliberations. . . . The enemy will wait for the next man.”
The scenario was presented as a warning: but it was actually more like a plan. And as the next months unfolded, Nixon would meticulously lay the pieces in place. His first task was to make sure that Johnson did not lift a finger to get his faithful vice president, Hubert Humphrey, elected. That turned out to be simpler than you might think.
To have any chance of winning, Humphrey needed to forge an identity beyond Johnson Apologist, which would not be easy with a president who had relished through the years telling reporters about how he had Hubert’s “pecker in my pocket.” But any hint, any feint or whiff of breaking with Johnson over Vietnam or anything else would send Johnson into a rage. He called Humphrey “weak” and “disloyal” to his aides; he was so suspicious he had the FBI tap Humphrey’s phones.
A vice president can’t attack his own administration, but Humphrey couldn’t win if he didn’t; it was a dynamic that Nixon, as a veteran second fiddle, was uniquely well positioned to understand and exploit. Already reporters had concluded that L.B.J. was more concerned with his own place in history than with the question of succession. Clark Clifford saw the fallout: “His anger at Humphrey led him toward his old adversary, Richard Nixon.”
So whoever was more likely to exalt Johnson’s place in history would get his blessing. “I want to sit down with Mr. Nixon to see what kind of world he really wants,” Johnson told Clifford, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and National Security Advisor Walt Rostow at the end of July. “When he gets the nomination he may prove to be more responsible than the Democrats.”
It’s just another reminder of how much our politics have changed, that what unfolded over the next few weeks was not seen as anything out of the ordinary. Nixon and Johnson met twice, on either side of the Republican convention in Miami: once at the White House for an intelligence briefing, then even more intimately down at Johnson’s Texas ranch. On July 26 at the White House, Johnson laid out his conditions for a bombing halt in Vietnam: the North had to agree to let the South Vietnamese government take part in the peace talks, rather than dealing only with the United States; they had to respect the Demilitarized Zone; and they had to cease their attacks on the cities. Nixon promised not to do anything that would undercut the U.S. position.
It was a promise he’d repeat two weeks later, when, fresh off his nominating convention, he shared steak and corn and Lady Bird’s cookies down at the ranch; Johnson personally drove Nixon back to his helicopter, showing him on the way the modest house where he was born, and the site where his parents were buried. By the time they had finished, the two men had come to an understanding: Nixon promised to refrain from attacking Johnson, so long as Johnson promised to maintain a hard line on Vietnam and not soften his negotiating position in Paris as Humphrey and many Democrats would have liked. To Clifford, this meant to “freeze poor Hubert out in the cold.”
“I was as appalled as the President was pleased,” Clifford recalled.
In their phone calls, Nixon made it clear to Johnson that they saw eye to eye.
“I don’t give a goddamn what the politics is,” Nixon told Johnson later in August. “But we’ve got to stand very firm. And I won’t say a damn word that’s going to embarrass you. You can be sure of that.”
“Oh, I know that. I know that,” Johnson said. But then Nixon added, “just talking very candidly—can you keep your Vice President and others to keep them firm in this thing? Because, you know, to hell with the goddamn election, we must all stand firm on this.”
“Very frankly, I don’t know,” Johnson said. “That’s the honest answer. I just plain don’t know.”
Nixon was not a man to take chances. He knew how much he stood to lose if Johnson succeeded in the Paris peace talks. “If there’s war, people will vote for me to end it,” he told his aides. “If there’s peace, they’ll vote their pocketbooks—Democratic prosperity.”
And so he took out some insurance. He needed to know what Johnson was offering Hanoi, how he was selling it to Saigon, and whether, after all this time, all this trouble, the way out of this benighted war might open up just in time for election day.
Anna Chennault was the cochair of Republican Women for Nixon. The Chinese-born widow of General Claire Chennault, who commanded the Flying Tigers in China in World War II, she was petite, striking, and at forty-three nicknamed the “Little Flower” or, alternatively, the “Dragon Lady.” She and Nixon had met in 1954, when he made a vice presidential trip to Taiwan. She was close to President Thieu’s brother, Nguyen Van Kieu. On July 12, Chennault and South Vietnamese ambassador Bui Diem, a popular, affable, and extremely well-connected diplomat, met with Nixon and his campaign manager, John Mitchell, in Nixon’s New York apartment. According to Diem’s account, the purpose was to open a secret back channel between the Nixon campaign and Saigon.
“Anna is my good friend,” Nixon told Diem. “She knows all about Asia. I know you also consider her a friend, so please rely on her from now on as the only contact between myself and your government.” If you have a message, send it though her, and he would do the same, Nixon said. “We know Anna is a good American and a dedicated Republican. We can all rely on her loyalty.” He promised to make Vietnam a top priority if he won, “and to see that Vietnam gets better treatment from me than under the Democrats.”
Thus had Nixon put in place a way for him to send his own messages, apply his own pressure, make his own promises to Saigon, while staying on top of Johnson’s moves. He had laid the groundwork for what historian Robert Dallek calls “a fall campaign that would produce as much skullduggery and hidden actions as any in American history.”
Humphrey’s Hell, Nixon’s Parade
In the back of his mind—and much of the front, for that matter—Johnson hoped that the Democrats might come to their senses and draft him back into service when they met to nominate their candidate in Chicago. He had picked the Windy City because he had faith in Mayor Richard Daley, who kept order like a warlord and had proposed that police shoot arsonists on sight. “Nixon can be beaten,” Johnson would say. “He’s like a Spanish horse who runs faster than anyone for the first nine lengths and then turns around and runs backwar
ds. You’ll see, he’ll do something wrong in the end. He always does.”
The president had even planned a huge sixtieth birthday party for himself in Chicago. Protesters held an “un-birthday party” hosted by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, decorated with photos of butchered Vietnamese civilians. By the night of Humphrey’s nomination in a convention hall ringed by barbed wire, Johnson’s hopes for a political resurrection were crushed—by demonstrators hurling bricks, bottles, and nail-studded golf balls at the police lines, by cops beating and clubbing the peaceful and the protester alike.
There would at least be no softening of the party’s position on Vietnam. Johnson, whose two sons-in-law were serving there, made sure of that. Many Democrats wanted the platform to endorse an unconditional bombing halt. “No way,” Johnson told an aide in a call from his ranch. He was still the commander in chief: “I’m not about to stop this bombing unless they arrest me and take my power away from me,” he said. “Because I’ve got some of my own right there and I’m not gonna shoot ’em in the heart. Not for a bunch of goddamn draft dodgers.”
Humphrey was trapped on Vietnam, his campaign out of money. The commentariat, meanwhile, saw the emergence of a New Nixon, “a maturer and mellower man who is no longer clawing his way to the top,” as Lippmann put it, loose enough to appear on the must-see TV of its day, Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.
The opposite was closer to the truth. Nixon understood better than most politicians that year the new suspicions and fierce anxieties that all that fun and freedom unleashed in his Silent Majority: the people who had been rejected by their own kids with their psychedelic certainties, by Hollywood with its libertine extravagance, by the commentariat that celebrated this as “progress,” cheered the revolution, disdained the heartland, and promoted social justice while sending their own kids to private schools.