by Nancy Gibbs
His great specialty was reaching the newly wounded or resentful, uniting groups that had never united before. The union hardhats who reviled the hippie peaceniks—the “beardos and weirdos” as Nixon called them—joined politically with the Republican regulars and the Southern rejectionists and the country club moguls and the suburban strivers. This was not like an FDR coalition of labor and urban machines and minorities and the South: Nixon would cut across blocs, speak to cultural needs that didn’t line up with political interests.
It was all working perfectly—so long as Nixon could keep Johnson on the sidelines. So he decided it was time to open yet another back channel. One way to persuade Johnson that he didn’t need to sell the store for a peace deal would be to assure him he would get credit whenever it came—even if it came after the election. In mid-September, Nixon enlisted one of the club’s honorary members to help. Evangelist Billy Graham was that rare world figure who could claim a genuine, personal relationship with both Johnson and Nixon, as he would with other presidents, past and future. He and Nixon had been close for nearly twenty years; he’d been in the room at the Republican convention in Miami as Nixon weighed his options for a running mate, before ultimately settling on Spiro Agnew. But he also delivered the invocation at the Democrats’ convention in Chicago and had spent many nights and weekends at the Johnson White House. He wanted to be the bridge builder for a divided country; so in early September, when Nixon asked to meet him at the Hilton in Pittsburgh because he had a confidential message for Johnson, Graham was glad to oblige.
Graham took careful notes as Nixon talked about Johnson. “I will never embarrass him after the election,” Nixon dictated. “I respect him as a man and as the president. He is the hardest working and most dedicated President in 140 years.” Nixon wanted a close working relationship, drawing on Johnson’s advice, sending him on special assignments, possibly overseas. And when the war was finally settled, he would make sure that Johnson received the full measure of credit he deserved.
Nixon would “do everything to make you . . . a place in history because you deserve it.” He was dangling the club’s sweetest benefits: you will stay in the game, I will raise you up, secure your place in history, for we will be partners in peace.
Graham flew to Washington on September 15. “It was one of the few times I had ever asked him for an appointment,” Graham recalled, “and I told him it was of a private nature.” Sitting in the Oval Office, he went over his notes point by point. Johnson asked him to read some of them twice. He even took the paper from Graham and studied it, struggling with Graham’s angular, backward handwriting. He still intended to support Humphrey, Johnson said; but “if Mr. Nixon becomes the President-elect, I will do all in my power to cooperate with him.”
Graham’s message, of course, echoed what Nixon had been promising Johnson all along; but Nixon understood how much extra weight it would have coming from someone Johnson loved as much as he loved Billy Graham. Two days later, Nixon called Graham for a report. Johnson, Graham said, was “deeply appreciative of his generous gesture.” It was a measure of Johnson’s ego and needs that he did not realize how Nixon’s courtship of him was a cunning piece of political marksmanship. Of course, if LBJ missed this, maybe it was because the message was delivered by Graham, whose enduring belief that Nixon was sincere surely helped a willing Johnson to believe likewise.
Through the month of September, even when Johnson received potentially devastating ammunition to use against Nixon, he held his fire. Johnson aide Charles Roche passed on a rumor that some Greek shipping magnates were donating $5 million to Nixon for having put Spiro Agnew on the ticket. “My source thinks the information is probably true,” Roche advised. “If so, any disclosures—even the mere fact that a group of shipping representatives had met clandestinely—would be of inestimable value to Humphrey.” Humphrey’s campaign manager, Larry O’Brien, told Johnson about contributions to Nixon from Greece’s military dictators and asked for the CIA to investigate—but Johnson refused even to leak it to reporters. When Humphrey’s advisor—and Johnson’s friend—James Rowe asked Johnson to make some speeches in key states, Johnson declined: “You know that Nixon is following my policies more closely than Humphrey,” he told Rowe.
By the end of September, Humphrey finally tried to make a getaway. He labored over a speech he would deliver in Salt Lake City for national broadcast, working through seven drafts, typing it six times before he felt he had it right. For this was an especially delicate operation he was about to perform: somehow he needed to convince disgruntled liberals that he was separating himself from Johnson, willing to take greater risks for peace, without alienating moderates—or Johnson himself. Gone from the podium was the Vice Presidential Seal; Humphrey spoke as the Democratic Party nominee for president. “As President, I would stop the bombing of the North as an acceptable risk for peace,” he declared, “because I believe it could lead to success in the negotiations and thereby shorten the war.” But while the halt was unconditional, it was not irreversible: “If the Government of North Vietnam were to show bad faith, I would reserve the right to resume the bombing.”
The actual proposal, advisors like Clark Clifford, George Ball, and Ambassador Averell Harriman realized, was what they had been proposing to Johnson for weeks; it was a policy departure measurable only in angstrom units, and they pointed this out to Johnson in hopes of preventing an eruption. Humphrey himself called the White House to give Johnson a heads-up. “I think I’ve done it carefully here,” he said, “without jeopardizing what you’re trying to do.”
Johnson’s response was cool, noncommittal. He already knew all about the speech—not because he’d read it, but because Nixon had called him and spun him blind. What better opportunity to suggest to a suspicious president that his vice president had betrayed him, personally and politically?
Nixon asked Johnson if Humphrey’s speech represented a change in the official White House position—which he knew very well it did not. “It has not been discussed with me,” Johnson said. “I say this in strict confidence.”
“I understand.”
“I don’t want you to quote me or repeat me, so I’ll talk freely,” Johnson went on.
“I won’t. I won’t,” Nixon assured him. “I’m not even letting anybody know I called you.” Since Johnson had not had a chance to study the speech, it was easy for Nixon to portray it as both naive and treacherous. They bonded in frustration over Humphrey’s foolishness in dealing with the enemy. Johnson even put Walt Rostow on the line, with the latest assessment from General Abrams. The bombing runs, Abrams reported, “have reduced the enemy’s detected flow of troops from the mid-July high of 1,000 per day to less than 150 since that time. . . . If the bombing in North Vietnam ceases, a return to the level of a thousand per day would have to be expected.”
Nixon needled Johnson. “I’m just seeing the AP dispatch here,” he said, and noted how the wires portrayed the speech as “a dramatic moving away from the Johnson administration war policy,” even though Humphrey did say his actions would depend on communist restraint in the Demilitarized Zone. “You know,” Nixon said, “the press always tends to play the biggest part of the story.”
But he, Nixon assured Johnson, would remain a loyal supporter. “It’s my intention not to move in that direction,” he said. “I think that my position has to be, in good conscience, that unless and until there is some evidence of a reciprocal step, that we could not stop the bombing.” Johnson even gave him the language to use with reporters: there is only one president, one secretary of state. “They’re going to be responsible until a new President is elected. Therefore, that you’re not going to try to look over their shoulders without all the information and tell them what is best.”
Nixon did not mention that his own double agent at the Paris peace talks had told him that Johnson too was looking for a way to announce a breakthrough sometime in October.
The Salt Lake speech marked a turning point. Liberal Ho
use Democrats finally announced their support for Humphrey, the money began flowing, and the polls started to swing in his direction. IF YOU MEAN IT, WE’RE FOR YOU read the signs now.
But relations with Johnson went downhill: the president refused to campaign for Humphrey in Texas. When the vice president proposed a meeting to make amends, he ran late and Johnson refused to see him. “That bastard Johnson. . . . I saw him sitting in his office,” Humphrey told an aide. “Jim Jones [a member of the White House staff] was standing across the doorway, and I said to him: ‘You tell the President he can cram it up his ass.’”
And then, things started to get really interesting.
October Surprise
On October 9, word came of progress in Paris: Hanoi was prepared to accept representatives from Saigon at the talks. Soviet embassy officials in Paris confirmed the move; Harriman, serving as the chief U.S. negotiator, suggested that Moscow wanted to prevent a victory by the Republicans and their old Cold War nemesis Nixon, and so was ready to push the peace process forward in ways likely to help the Democrats. Meanwhile intelligence reports revealed that between forty thousand and sixty thousand North Vietnamese troops had withdrawn from South Vietnam, many of them slipping into Cambodia and Laos from the northern provinces. “They just seem to have disappeared into the woodwork,” said a U.S. officer.
Everyone was finally ready to talk; the question was, were the South Vietnamese? Thieu had much to lose from a peace deal that would lead to an American withdrawal. It was now three weeks before the U.S. election: on October 13, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker met with Thieu in Saigon in a high-pressure session. For now, Thieu went along; as long as the United States would resume bombing if the DMZ or cities were attacked, he was on board. “After all,” Thieu said, “the problem is not to stop the bombing but to stop the war, and we must try this path to see if they are serious.”
“I thought this a statesman’s view,” Bunker said in his report. Back in Washington, Clifford, Rusk, and the Joint Chiefs all agreed that this was, at long last, a chance to turn the corner.
Just before noon on October 16, Johnson placed a conference call to the three candidates. Humphrey, who was still in the doghouse from Salt Lake City, got no advance warning; he took the call in the men’s room of the Christian Brothers High School gymnasium in St. Louis. Nixon was in Kansas City, Wallace in L.A. He was calling, Johnson said, “so that I might review for you a matter of the highest national importance.” He swore them to secrecy, assured them he had not gone soft on the communists, and warned them not to speak out of school about what he was about to tell them: Hanoi had agreed to U.S. conditions for a bombing halt and immediate talks, which would include both Saigon and the Vietcong. “I would bear in mind constantly that the enemy is looking at everything that’s said in this country,” he said. “I know you don’t want to play politics with your country.”
Humphrey had no comment. Nixon repeated his previous promise: “I’ve made it very clear that I will make no statement that would undercut the negotiations. So we’ll just stay right on there and hope that this thing works out.” They agreed to tell reporters who got wind of the call that it was a routine update on how there was no agreement yet, though all sides were still negotiating. Nixon warned his men about provoking Johnson by attacking him. “LBJ can be just as vindictive as hell,” Nixon’s well-sourced advisor Bryce Harlow explained to Safire, “and who knows what he might pull off on an international scale.”
Over the next two weeks the plot kept twisting. First Hanoi dug in: negotiators insisted that any bombing halt be called “unconditional,” and the talks be referred to as a “four power conference” to elevate the Vietcong and diminish Saigon. At the same time Thieu got tougher with Bunker, insisting that the Vietcong come to Paris only as part of a North Vietnamese delegation. Within the Nixon camp, the concern grew that Johnson was going soft, desperate for a breakthrough that would throw the election to Humphrey. “Johnson had promised to keep politics totally out of foreign policy in the campaign,” explained Harlow. It was vital that they know what was going on behind the scenes, so they could plan accordingly.
Fortunately, Nixon was an able spymaster; he knew all about what Johnson and his negotiators were saying and doing. For one thing, Henry Kissinger, who had become a trusted Johnson advisor the year before, was working both sides of the game. Never mind that he referred to Nixon as “a disaster,” “unfit to be President,” “the most dangerous of all men running.” He contacted Nixon aide Richard Allen, noting that he had close friends on the U.S. negotiating team in Paris and offering to keep Nixon informed of the progress of the talks; he was so cautious about exposing his role that he would call Allen from pay phones and once suggested they speak in German.
“It is not stretching the truth,” Harriman’s aide Richard Holbrooke later told Kissinger biographer Walter Isaacson, “to say that the Nixon campaign had a secret source within the U.S. negotiating team.”
Harlow, who had “a double agent” working in the White House, wrote Nixon a memo about how quickly things were moving: “Expectation is that he is becoming almost pathologically eager for an excuse to order a bombing halt and will accept almost any arrangement. . . . Careful plans are being made to help HHH [Humphrey] exploit whatever happens. . . . White Housers still think they can pull the election out for HHH with this ploy.”
This lit a fire in the Nixon camp. They were convinced Johnson was orchestrating the ultimate October surprise to swing the election in the final days. Harlow picked at an old Nixon scab, the dramatic October events of 1962, which had bolstered support for the Democrats when Nixon was running for governor of California. “They’re going to do it to you just like they did in 1962 in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Identical. It’s just a question of timing.”
Two could play that game. Nixon’s strategy of keeping Johnson neutral had worked nicely through the summer and into September; but now the time came to go on offense. If he thought Johnson was prepared to do anything to get a peace deal, Nixon was willing to do just about anything to stop him. Among others who were well informed on the progress of negotiations was Ambassador Bui Diem, who was briefed both by Saigon and the State Department. Anna Chennault meanwhile maintained her back channel with Nixon campaign chair John Mitchell, the former semipro hockey player and PT boat commander who had made his fortune in municipal bonds. They were now talking nearly every day: “Call me from a pay phone,” Mitchell told her. “Don’t talk in your office.”
A warning came into the Johnson White House from the Soviets: our protégés—meaning Hanoi—are under control; are you sure yours are? With each passing day the race was tightening: even in London the bookmakers were giving the Democrat better odds, from 12 to 1 against in September to 7 to 4 now. Eugene McCarthy finally came out for Humphrey, and other dissident liberals returned to the fold.
In Washington and Paris, Hanoi, Saigon, Moscow, the signals and countersignals were flying fast. As negotiations entered their final stage, White House officials refused to give interviews, even take calls. “Fewer men are fully clued into these contacts than were involved in the Cuba missile crisis,” one explained to a reporter. Diplomats in Paris were reported to be renting nondescript cars so that they could meet discreetly with North Vietnamese negotiators at various hideaways. When the White House got a crucial message from Moscow, Johnson told Clifford, Rusk, and General Wheeler to meet in the State Department basement and drive to the White House in a plain Chevrolet sedan; unfortunately CBS News reporter Marvin Kalb happened to spot them, pulled a U-turn, and followed them. His report just confirmed Republican suspicions that Johnson was preparing an October surprise.
Nixon concluded that his only course was to raise suspicions that Johnson was manipulating events to give Humphrey an edge. Having been on the record supporting the president’s efforts, he could not level so cynical a charge—though other Republicans certainly could.
He had one of his allies level the accusation—which he then r
ighteously disputed. “In the last 36 hours I have been advised of a flurry of meetings in the White House and elsewhere on Vietnam,” Nixon said in a statement released on October 25. “I am also told that this spurt of activity is a cynical last minute attempt by President Johnson to salvage the candidacy of Mr. Humphrey. This I do not believe.” He noted Johnson’s fairness in dealing with all three presidential candidates, and praised him for resisting pressure from within his party to “contrive what he has aptly described as a ‘fake peace.’”
It was a beautiful thing—a candidate praising an opponent for not doing something in a way that fueled the rumors that he was, and then making a hero of himself for not piling on. Nixon also knew that the charge that Johnson was playing politics with the war was false; Johnson had not lowered the bar or changed the conditions he had laid out privately for Nixon in July; it was Hanoi, encouraged by Moscow, that drove the timing, not Johnson. But Nixon was increasingly desperate, because the polls continued to tighten.
Indeed two days later, on October 27, word came from Paris that Hanoi had met all Johnson’s conditions. If Johnson ceased bombing on October 29 then all parties could convene for talks in Paris on November 2—three days before the election.
“What do we do?” Johnson asked his top advisors that night.
“We go ahead with it,” Secretary Rusk said flatly.
“Why?”
“I smell Vodka and Caviar in it,” Rusk replied. “The Soviets have moved in.”
“If ten steps separated us,” Clifford affirmed, “they have taken eight and we have taken two.” Rusk put it at nine and one; the North Vietnamese had come around.