“As you all know,” he began, “we have been anxious to reach an agreement with North Vietnam on a bombing halt and the beginning of real negotiations. I have also been concerned that an agreement from the North could be part of an effort to deceive me; we know that with the Communists, they frequently do that. What I just must never do, however, is to agree to anything that would jeopardize the safety of the men in the field—whether a total bombing halt, the partial halt I ordered last March, or any other action. I have recently received a communication from our commander in the field, General Creighton Abrams, who has advised me”—he paused to look pointedly at the paper—“who has advised me that he can no longer assure me that his men are not endangered by the cessation of bombing at the nineteenth parallel.”
“Mr. President,” Clifford interjected, “as Secretary of Defense, I must note that this communication directly violates the chain of command that—”
“Clark,” the President said, “as Commander in Chief, I believe I have the authority to request and receive information from anyone up or down the chain of command. Now,” he said, returning to the paper, “I cannot and will not permit the safety of our fighting men to be put in danger by the continued actions of the North in bringing men and arms into the South under the protective umbrella of our bombing halt. Accordingly, I intend to announce tonight the immediate resumption of bombing. I will be holding a conference call with the three candidates for President, and I will once again urge them not to play politics with our country, and to be awfully sure they know what they’re talking about before they throw themselves into the intricacies of these negotiations.”
Perfect, Clifford thought. This is a dagger right at the heart of Bobby’s campaign. Wallace is irrelevant; nobody cares what he thinks about Vietnam. Nixon will piously agree to protect our fighting men, which means he can still be as vague as ever. And Bobby is out there with a policy the President and his general says will endanger our troops.
And Clark Clifford, now certain that President Johnson was determined to see Richard Nixon win the Presidency, now certain that the lives of countless more Americans and Vietnamese were about to be lost in the cause of a domestic political power struggle, did what the wise men who serve Presidents never do.
He got up and walked out of the room.
THEY WERE A CONTINENT away from each other when the news broke, and at opposite ends of the emotional calculus as well. A half hour earlier, President Johnson had told them of his decision on a conference call. For Richard Nixon, moving through Bergen and Essex counties in New Jersey, it was a godsend, putting him on the side of America’s armed forces. For Robert Kennedy, campaigning in suburban Los Angeles, it was the strike he had feared from the beginning, the power of the President to shape events to his will. Not only would the resumption of the bombing put him directly at odds with the commanding general, it would surely trigger a massive wave of demonstrations from the most militant, radical protesters. The TV images would dominate the airwaves in the last forty-eight hours of the election.
Kennedy was in the manager’s office of the Los Angeles Farmers Market with a handful of campaign aides, waiting to speak to a huge outdoor crowd, when one of his advance men burst in.
“Turn on the TV!” he yelled.
They looked around and saw a ten-inch black-and-white portable with rabbit ears. When they turned it on, the reception was so bad that there were half a dozen blurry figures on the screen.
“Who is it?” Kennedy asked impatiently.
“Clark Clifford!” the advance man said. One of the aides grabbed the set and held it over his head, frantically moving the set back and forth.
“Perfect!” Kennedy said. “Don’t move!”
“This decision reflects admirably on the President’s willingness to listen, even to change his mind in the face of compelling evidence,” Clifford was saying to an auditorium in the Pentagon packed with reporters and cameras. “My hope now is that it can help lead to the just peace we all seek. Thank you,” he said, and walked off the stage.
“What did he say?” Kennedy asked. “What did he do?” At that moment, there was a frantic pounding on the door to the manager’s office; a dozen reporters were trying to jam their way in.
“Your comment, Senator!” “What’s your reaction?”
“I’d be happy to comment, if—this is off the record, please—if someone could tell me what the hell just happened?”
“Johnson changed his mind!” “He’s stopping the bombing completely!”
There was a long moment of silence.
“Give me ten minutes,” Kennedy said.
In fact, it took the Kennedy campaign half an hour to learn all that had happened. Defense Secretary Clifford had told the President he would resign effective immediately; he would publicly declare that he could not execute a policy he believed would lead “only to more death, more destruction, more war.” For the master of the insider game to threaten such a move was not just unheard of; it was near unthinkable. (The last time a Cabinet member had “resigned on principle” was when William Jennings Bryan had quit as Woodrow Wilson’s Secretary of State in 1915 to protest Wilson’s war policies.) More startling was that Clifford told the President that his two lead Paris negotiators, Harriman and Cy Vance, would also be announcing their resignations—just as Harriman had told Clifford he would do if he thought President Johnson was shaping his Vietnam decisions to help Richard Nixon win the Presidency. (“The very idea of that vile man in the White House chills me to the marrow,” Harriman had said.)
And then Clifford had called Richard Nixon directly, telling him in cryptic language that he knew of the dealings between the Nixon campaign and the South Vietnamese government.
“I just cannot believe,” Clifford said to Nixon, “that you would have anything to do with undermining your government’s negotiations to end this war. . . . I just know that there is no way you would countenance any of your subordinates committing what is damnably close to treason. So I know I can rely on you to support your President in this effort.” Nixon assured Clifford of his complete innocence; then as soon as he rejoined the campaign, he gathered campaign aides John Mitchell, Bob Haldeman, and John Erlichman, and snapped, “When we get to the White House, you guys have got to learn how to cover your tracks!”
The President’s reversal dominated every front page, every news broadcast on the Monday before Election Day. And all three candidates confined themselves to bromides, telling the nation that we only have one President at a time. Had Johnson resumed full-scale bombing, Kennedy would have found himself pushed onto the defensive, pushing back against the perennially potent charge that he was undermining American unity. Thanks to three consummate men of the Establishment, Kennedy would not be heading into Election Day bearing that burden.
SHORTLY BEFORE NOON, on January 20, 1969, the incoming President of the United States walked out onto the Inaugural platform on the East Front of the Capitol. It was cloudy and cool, about 35 degrees, a sharp contrast from the day, eight years ago, when he’d sat on the same East Front platform watching John Kennedy take the oath of office. A massive snowstorm had blanketed Washington the night before, and on Inauguration Day, it had been so cold that a heater had been placed under the podium. (It had started to smoke during Cardinal Richard Cushing’s endless invocation.) The sun had been so blinding that Robert Frost could not read the special poem he had written for the day.
The new President could almost hear the television commentators reaching back to 1960, noting how many of those who had been on that platform had returned today: Ike, Johnson, Humphrey, and Nixon, the once and former Vice President. He remembered how incredibly close that 1960 election had been, how it could have been altered by any one of a dozen small twists of fate. As he took his seat, acknowledging the cheers, he smiled at the thought of how close this second Kennedy-Nixon contest had been, and how large the role of simple, random chance:—If Steve Smith had not been there to repel Sirhan;
—If the Soviet Union had not invaded Czechoslovakia just before President Johnson’s attempt to reclaim the nomination;
—If the TV cameras hadn’t recorded that confrontation in Chicago;
—If Clark Clifford had not turned so strongly against the Vietnam policy he had helped to shape.
And as in 1960, it had been another long Election Night. New Jersey’s 17 electoral votes fell narrowly into Nixon’s column, its heavy suburban electorate too unsettled by Robert Kennedy’s intensity. The major Midwestern states were solid for Kennedy: Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois, where Kennedy’s 150,000-vote plurality stilled the idea of “another stolen election!” In Ohio, concern over John Kennedy’s Catholicism had helped Nixon to a comfortable victory eight years earlier; this time, a huge push by labor put the state on Kennedy’s side. He also captured Missouri, a state that almost always went with the winner. There, as in Ohio, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, TV ads featuring his whistle-stops through small towns and farm communities proved to be the difference. In each of those states, the small towns and rural areas had given Kennedy a surprising share of their votes, replicating the pattern of the primaries, underscoring what NBC’s Charles Quinn had found months earlier: voters with deep hostility to Negroes and peace demonstrators “willing to gamble on this man, maybe, who would try to keep things within reasonable order, and at the same time do some of the things that they knew should really be done.” Elsewhere, the news for Kennedy was bleak: Nixon and Wallace divided the South, and the Republicans swept the plains and almost all the mountain West. (Kennedy won only in Colorado, where a thirty-one-year-old lawyer named Gary Hart led an unprecedented organizing effort.)
In the end, it came down to California, where the voters had revived Robert Kennedy’s campaign, where that campaign, and his life, had almost ended back in June. In 1960, his brother had lost California by the narrowest of margins, 35,000 votes out of 6.5 million, barely half of 1 percent of the total vote. Because it was so likely that the state’s 40 electoral votes would decide the outcome, both the Nixon and Robert Kennedy campaigns broke with tradition and spent Election Day in California. All that day, Kennedy campaigned one last time through the streets of Watts and South Central Los Angeles, through the barrios of East Los Angeles, cheering on the enormous lines massing outside the polling places. And that night, as the returns reported the record-high turnouts in the poorest neighborhoods and towns of the state, as the TV analysts explained that their computer models had been rendered worthless by the flood of new voters, that they would have to wait for the votes to be counted, he knew . . .
AS KENNEDY GLANCED OVER at President Johnson, seated on the other side of the podium, he grudgingly acknowledged an unaccustomed emotion: gratitude. In the first days after the election, Johnson had averted what could have been something of a Constitutional crisis. He’d invited Kennedy and his closest aides to the White House. The threatened resignations of his Defense Secretary and his Paris negotiators had stunned him, infuriated him, but with the campaign over, the prospect of a division between the present and future President was simply too dangerous to permit—which is why Johnson had Clifford and Harriman at the White House meeting. Johnson began by greeting Kennedy as “Mr. President,” then asserting bluntly, You know, for all our differences, we did have one thing in common: Neither of us wanted the other fellow to occupy this office. But that’s yesterday. I’m going to do everything I can to get this war off your back before you take office. And then he had looked at Kennedy and said, I need your help. We will get nowhere if Hanoi thinks it can just wait ten weeks and get everything they want from you.
If Kennedy was at all angered by the implication in Johnson’s challenge, he didn’t show it, most likely because it was a concern he shared. Indeed, one of the lessons the often-impulsive Kennedy had learned in his White House years was the critical need to imagine yourself in the shoes of an adversary, and to help a potential adversary understand the pressures on you. As Attorney General, Kennedy had often met secretly with Georgi Bolshakov, the Washington head of Moscow’s military intelligence unit, to ensure that Moscow fully understood President Kennedy’s thinking. It was that ability that had resolved the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Faced with a conciliatory first message from Soviet leader Khrushchev, and a belligerent second one, Kennedy had followed Soviet expert Tommy Thompson’s idea, and convinced his brother to reply to the first letter . . . and as he thought back to those anxious days and nights, he remembered another step he had taken, a step that few in the room, including President Johnson, ever knew had taken place.
In the most dangerous days of that 1962 missile crisis, Robert Kennedy had kept open a back channel to Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, meeting him in Dobrynin’s third-floor sitting room of the Soviet Embassy near Dupont Circle, then in Kennedy’s massive Justice Department office. In anxious, urgent tones—“I’ve never seen him like this before,” Dobrynin cabled Moscow—Kennedy argued that yes, U.S. missiles would be removed from Turkey in exchange for the removal of Soviet missiles in Cuba, but the U.S. could not publicly acknowledge that because of political considerations. Kennedy had also cautioned Dobrynin that a swift resolution was a matter of supreme urgency, that pressures from the military, and from hawkish politicians, might force President Kennedy’s hand if a resolution could not be reached quickly. Kennedy even fed the Soviet paranoia about the right-wing military, vaguely hinting at the possibility of a coup if the military thought that John Kennedy was weakening.
Now the newly elected President reached out to Dobrynin once more, inviting him to his Hickory Hill home, on conditions of the strictest secrecy. Hanoi, he knew, was far closer to Moscow than Peking, given the thousand-year enmity between Chinese and Vietnamese, and given Moscow’s significant assistance in arms and materiel to Hanoi. It is imperative, Kennedy said, that Hanoi understands my position. This was a close election. Between Nixon and Wallace, the conservative forces won as many votes as I did. You have been here long enough to understand the risks any President takes in dealing with any Communist country. In some ways, I have less room to reach an agreement than Johnson does. In the short term, there will be no agreement that does not preserve the security and independence of South Vietnam, and Hanoi should be under no illusion about my willingness to preserve that independence. (Left unspoken was the footnote: If Saigon can’t protect itself in two or three years, so be it.)
That silent sentiment was the same message that George Ball, Robert Kennedy’s special envoy to Saigon, delivered to the Saigon government: Do not make the mistake of thinking Lyndon Johnson can protect you from a negotiated settlement with the North. But the leaders of that government had already gotten the message, or read the handwriting on the wall. On November 8, General Thieu and Air Marshal Ky resigned as President and Vice President. An interim government was cobbled together, composed of several figures who had led one regime or another since the fall of Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. At the Paris peace talks, the Saigon government sat with the Americans, and the insurgent National Liberation Front sat with the North Vietnamese.
JUST AFTER NOON, he rose from his seat on the Inaugural platform, shook hands with a beaming Chief Justice Earl Warren (“If I’d had to swear in Nixon, I might have thrown up,” the Chief Justice later said), and took the oath of office. He began by breaking precedent, thanking—on behalf of himself and the nation—the President who did so much to make this a more just land. (“I left out the part about how much he did to divide and weaken us,” he said to Senator McGovern at the post-Inaugural Capitol lunch.) The speech itself was short, blunt, shaped by Adam Walinsky, Dick Goodwin, and Ted Sorensen, deliberately stripped of any stylistic or substantive link to John Kennedy’s 1961 classic. His brother had spoken almost exclusively to the wider world in 1961; President Robert Kennedy was speaking to his own country.
“This is a great nation and a strong people,�
�� he said, then deliberately evoked FDR’s Inaugural promise to speak candidly. “Any who seek to comfort rather than speak plainly, reassure rather than instruct, promise satisfaction rather than reveal frustration—they deny that greatness and drain that strength. For today as it was in the beginning, it is truth that makes us free . . .”
“Our ideal of America,” he said, “is a nation in which justice is done; and therefore the continued existence of injustice—or unnecessary, inexcusable poverty in this most favored of nations—this knowledge erodes our ideal of America, our basic sense of who and what we are. It is, in the deepest sense of the word, demoralizing—to all of us.”
When he spoke of the wider world, it was to argue that the world will heed America because “we are a people pursuing decency and human dignity in its own undertakings, without arrogance or hostility or delusions of superiority toward others; a people whose ideals for others are firmly rooted in the reality of the society we have built for ourselves.
“More than three hundred years ago,” he concluded, “on a ship sailing to England, John Winthrop gathered the Puritans on the deck and said, ‘We must consider that we shall be as a city set upon a hill, and the eye of all people will be upon us.’ My fellow Americans, let us climb that hill, and build that city.”
(“Son of a bitch!” Governor Ronald Reagan said as he watched the speech with his Kitchen Cabinet in his Pacific Palisades home. “‘City on a hill’? That’s my line!”
“Not anymore,” grumbled Lyn Nofziger.)
ON INAUGURATION DAY, the new President issued an executive order that went largely ignored in the news of the day, an order proposed by a frequent visitor to Kennedy’s Senate office. Daniel Ellsberg was a thirty-seven-year-old ex-combat Marine, ex-State Department civilian in Vietnam. He had then worked for the RAND Corporation, helping compile a series of papers for the think tank that detailed America’s conduct of the Vietnam War. Late into the transition, Kennedy had summoned his new foreign policy team and asked them about the papers.
Then Everything Changed Page 28