RN

by Richard Nixon

  On the plane back to Washington I asked Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Kissinger to come to my cabin. When they arrived, I thanked them for all that they had done. “In fact,” I said, “you deserve something like the Purple Heart for all the wounds you have sustained in the line of duty over the past few weeks.”

  They all laughed and said that they had only done their jobs.

  “No,” I continued, “you have done more than your jobs, and I have devised a new award—a Blue Heart, for those who are true blue.”

  I gave them each a small heart made from blue cloth. “This will be our secret,” I said, “but I wanted you to know how much I appreciate what you have done.”

  Public opinion seemed to rally during the weeks after Kent State, when the military success of the Cambodian operation became increasingly apparent.

  On May 20 the New York Building and Construction Trades Council sponsored a parade to City Hall in support of the President. There had already been scattered incidents of scuffling between the hardhats and various groups of antiwar demonstrators, especially after Mayor John Lindsay had ordered the flag on City Hall to be flown at half-staff as part of a “Day of Reflection” about the Kent State tragedy. The hard-hats decided to show their support for our war aims, and more than 100,000 people came out to march with them.

  I invited the leaders of the construction workers’ unions to come to the White House. A photograph was taken of their hard hats on the Cabinet table. I gave a short briefing about the background of the Cambodian operation, and as I shook hands with them, one man said, “Mr. President, if someone would have had the courage to go into Cambodia sooner, they might have captured the bullet that took my son’s life.”

  In the middle of May, Newsweek published a remarkable Gallup poll. It showed that 65 percent approved of my handling of the presidency; 30 percent of these described themselves as “very satisfied.” Fifty percent approved of my decision to send troops into Cambodia; 39 percent disapproved; and 11 percent had no opinion. In response to the question, “Who do you think was primarily responsible for the deaths of four students at Kent State?” 58 percent blamed “demonstrating students” while only 11 percent blamed the National Guard.

  On May 30, one month after the Cambodian operation began, I made a televised report to the nation on the progress to date. After conferring with General Abrams, I could state that this had been the most successful operation of the Vietnam war. We had already captured almost as much in enemy arms, equipment, ammunition, and food during the past month in Cambodia alone as we had captured in all of Vietnam during all of 1969.

  On June 30, exactly on schedule and exactly as I had promised, we announced the departure of the last American troops from Cambodia. The operation had been a complete success. We had captured enough individual weapons to equip seventy-four full strength North Vietnamese infantry battalions; enough rice to feed all the Communist combat battalions estimated to be in South Vietnam for about four months; 143,000 rockets, mortars, and recoilless rifle rounds—equivalent to the amount used in about 14 months of fighting; 199,552 antiaircraft rounds, 5,482 mines, 62,022 grenades, and 83,000 pounds of explosives; 435 vehicles were captured and 11,688 bunkers and other military structures were destroyed.

  Most important, the Cambodian operation had destroyed the Communists’ capability of launching a spring offensive against our forces in South Vietnam. Our casualties had dropped from 93 a week in the six months before the operation to 51 per week in the six months after; and the performance of the ARVN had demonstrated that Vietnamization was working. The 150,000-man troop withdrawal I had announced on April 20 could go forward on schedule. And, finally, the pressure against Lon Nol had been reduced, and he was now expected to be able to survive. That would mean that Sihanoukville, the major port of entry for Soviet and Chinese heavy weapons into the Cambodian sanctuaries, would remain closed.

  On the day of the previously announced departure from Cambodia the Senate passed the Cooper–Church amendment, the first restrictive vote ever cast on a President in wartime. In essence it demanded that I remove all American troops from Cambodia by July 1. The symbolism of the timing was as serious as the action itself was meaningless, since all Americans had already left Cambodia.

  Kissinger’s first secret meeting with the North Vietnamese since the Cambodian operation took place on September 7. Instead of the propaganda and vituperation he had expected, he found the friendliest atmosphere of any of the sessions so far. Summing up the meeting for me, he wrote, “Not only did they change their tone, but they also indicated a readiness to move on substance. They in effect dropped their demand for a six-month ‘unconditional’ withdrawal schedule, made no mention of the ten points, and indicated that they would reconsider their political proposals. They are very anxious to continue this channel, coming back repeatedly with proposals to meet again when I insisted that this channel required major progress.”

  I was somewhat skeptical about his optimism, because beneath the friendly atmosphere and the new elements of accommodation, the North Vietnamese still insisted that a settlement could be reached only if we deposed President Thieu. On Kissinger’s memo, next to the reference to Thieu, I wrote, “This is probably the breaking point unless we can find a formula”—and it was hard to see how even Kissinger’s negotiating skill could find a middle ground on that particular issue.

  A follow-up meeting was scheduled for September 27. On Kissinger’s memo describing the approach he planned, I wrote: “I would only suggest that I would try to get sooner at the heart of the question. Do they mean business—or is this just another rehash?”

  The meeting of September 27 dashed all hopes of a breakthrough. The North Vietnamese were argumentative and repetitive. They made it clear that their tactic would be to isolate Thieu as the man who stood in the way of peace. Kissinger broke off the meeting without setting a date for another one.

  Since it seemed unlikely that the secret talks were going to produce any solid progress, I decided to present publicly a significant new peace plan.

  Because of the success of the Cambodian operation, I felt that now, for the first time, we could consider agreeing to a cease-fire in place in South Vietnam without first requiring that the North Vietnamese agree to withdraw their forces. As long as the Communist troops in South Vietnam could not depend on the Cambodian sanctuaries for supplies, ammunition, and reinforcements, I felt that the ARVN forces, which had been greatly improved and strengthened by more than a year of Vietnamization, would soon be able to defend themselves and their country.

  In addition to a cease-fire in place throughout Indochina, the other key points of my new plan were an all-Indochina peace conference to be followed by a negotiated timetable for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops, a political settlement which reflected “the existing relationship of political forces in South Vietnam,” and immediate release of all prisoners on both sides.

  I presented this plan on television on October 7. Five days later I announced that 40,000 more troops would be withdrawn by Christmas. These two moves went so far toward removing the obstacles to a settlement that they effectively silenced the domestic antiwar movement by placing the burden squarely on the North Vietnamese to begin serious negotiations. But Hanoi stayed silent, and the secret channel in Paris remained closed.

  THE HUSTON PLAN

  By 1970 the evolutionary cycle of violent dissent spawned an ugly offshoot: the urban underground of political terrorists urging murder and bombing.

  The most prominent of these groups were the Black Panthers and the Weathermen. The Black Panthers was founded in 1966 by Bobby Seale and Huey Newton while they were working for the Office of Economic Opportunity. Newton said they would exert power not through political channels but through a capacity for destruction. Eldridge Cleaver, the Panther “Minister of Communication,” urged that the masses be spurred toward “revolutionary temptation to kidnap American ambassadors, hijack American airplanes, blow up American pipelines and buildin
gs and to shoot anyone who uses guns and other weapons in the bloodstained service of imperialism against the people.”

  The Black Panthers had bases in urban areas all around the country. Because their organization was small and highly disciplined, it was extremely difficult to obtain advance information about their plans or the places they intended to strike. In 1969 and 1970 two members pleaded guilty to the murder of a suspected informant.

  In 1969 police said they found a cache of Panther weapons that included a submachine gun, thirteen rifles, a handmade grenade, and thirty firebombs. Five policemen were wounded in a Chicago gun battle in July; in November, again in Chicago, two policemen were killed and six wounded, and one Black Panther was killed in another shoot-out. In December, Los Angeles police and Panthers engaged in a four-hour gun battle. In 1969 alone, 348 Panthers were arrested for serious crimes, including murder, armed robbery, rape, and burglary. “Off the Pig” was the Black Panther slogan.

  The Weathermen were a terrorist offshoot of the Students for a Democratic Society. At their National Council meeting in 1969, the Weathermen decided to begin a new campaign of underground warfare, police murder, and bombing. “Revolutionary violence is the only way,” they stated subsequently in their first public communiqué. With as many as a thousand estimated members, the Weather Underground separated into secret floating commando-type units. As with the Black Panthers, there was no way of knowing where or how they were going to strike.

  Terrorists caused no fewer than 174 major bombings and bombing attempts on campus in the school year 1969–70. Cities were now targets as well. On March 6 a large townhouse in Greenwich Village exploded. Three bodies were found in the wreckage, along with fifty-seven sticks of dynamite, plumbing pipes stuffed with dynamite and roofing nails, and fragmentation bombs. It was a Weatherman bomb factory. There was evidence of Weatherman involvement in the planting of two bombs that same day in police facilities in Detroit. On March 12 explosions in three midtown Manhattan buildings caused the evacuation of some 15,000 people. A terrorist group calling itself Revolutionary Force 9 took the credit. In one twenty-four-hour period, there were more than 400 bomb scares in New York City. On March 30 police found dynamite in a Weatherman bomb factory in Chicago.

  Fear was increasingly generated throughout the country. It was accompanied by demands for effective government action. A New York Times editorial stated, “The actual and threatened bombings of the past few days must not be glossed over as the action of idealistic if misguided revolutionaries; they are the criminal acts of potential murderers. . . . The mad criminals who threaten and bomb must be recognized for what they are and prosecuted with the full force not only of the law but of the community they would rule and ruin.”

  J. Edgar Hoover informed me that FBI agents had begun to pick up rumors of a calculated nationwide terrorist offensive by radical student groups using arson, bombing, and kidnaping of university and government officials. Violence was increasing in the high schools. Plane hijackings were up from 17 in 1968 to 33 in 1969.

  From January 1969 through April 1970 there were, by conservative count, over 40,000 bombings, attempted bombings, and bomb threats—an average of over eighty a day. Over $21 million in property was destroyed. Forty-three people were killed. Of these 40,000 incidents, 64 percent were by bombers whose identity and motive were unknown.

  On March 25 I sent Congress a message asking for urgent legislation to mete out the death penalty in cases where bombs caused the death of others. But weeks passed, and nothing had been done.

  On May 25 the New York Times published excerpts from a “Declaration of War” issued by the Weathermen: “Within the next 14 days,” it said, “we will attack a symbol or institution of Amerikan injustice.” Two weeks and one day later a dynamite time bomb exploded in New York police headquarters. A handwritten communication signed “Weatherman” was sent to the Associated Press claiming that they had planted the bomb because “the pigs in this country are our enemies.”

  The Black Panthers were closely affiliated with North Korean groups and with radical Arab terrorists. We knew that Weathermen identified with North Vietnam, Cuba, and North Korea. I was eager to learn whether the foreign support went beyond ideological sympathy. I was sure that it did; the patterns were too clear. But the intelligence community never had a conclusive answer. Not until 1977 would the New York Times report that the FBI had developed evidence of direct support for the Weathermen from both Cuba and North Vietnam. Cuban and North Vietnamese agents counseled them, and the Cuban intelligence agency guided and paid for their escape from the FBI. Cuban military officers instructed them in “practical weaponry.”

  Now that this season of mindless terror has fortunately passed, it is difficult—perhaps impossible—to convey a sense of the pressures that were influencing my actions and reactions during this period, but it was this epidemic of unprecedented domestic terrorism that prompted our efforts to discover the best means by which to deal with this new phenomenon of highly organized and highly skilled revolutionaries dedicated to the violent destruction of our democratic system.

  I turned for assistance in this effort to the various intelligence agencies. Working together, they developed a program to counter revolutionary violence. Three years later this program would be publicly revealed and labeled the Huston Plan. It was attacked as an authorization of Gestapo tactics bent on violating personal liberties. In the light of more recent revelations, we now know that this program did not involve the use of any measures not previously employed by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

  J. Edgar Hoover had become director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924 and over the next forty years was hailed as a national hero. In the mid-sixties, however, he sensed that the temper of the times was turning against him. A new liberalism was fashionable, in which there appeared to be more concern for the rights of the accused than for the protection of the innocent. Now that his career was nearing its end he was determined not to give anyone ammunition in his last years to damage him or his organization. He had always been rigidly territorial when it came to the functions and prerogatives of the FBI. He totally distrusted the other intelligence agencies—especially the CIA—and, whenever possible, resisted attempts to work in concert with them. He was sensibly reluctant to go out on a limb for anyone, lest he find himself suddenly alone.

  For more than twenty years, FBI agents had, when necessary, gathered foreign intelligence and evidence of foreign subversion and intelligence about domestic violence by secret break-ins. Between 1942 and 1968, apart from the foreign targets, domestic groups suspected of subversive or violent illegal activities were the targets of over 200 of these break-ins, which were known as “black bag” jobs.

  In 1966, threatened with a congressional investigation and liberals in control of the Justice Department, Hoover summarily canceled all FBI black bag jobs and secret mail-opening operations. He also drastically decreased the use of room bugs since they, too, required surreptitious entry, and in 1967 he also cut back the recruitment of student and campus informants.

  Just as Hoover cut back on these practices, domestic violence began increasing at an alarming rate. The Johnson administration reacted with great concern. Top administration officials put pressure on the FBI to obtain information about the potential rioters and their activities and even developed extraordinary additional programs of their own.

  For example, whereas his predecessor restricted the role of the FBI in racial demonstrations exclusively to investigating “subversive involvement,” in 1967 the new Attorney General, Ramsey Clark, ordered the FBI to “use the maximum resources, investigative and intelligence, to collect and report all facts bearing upon the question as to whether there has been or is a scheme or conspiracy by any group of whatever size, effectiveness, or affiliation to plan, promote, or aggravate riot activity.” Clark’s Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, John Doar, went even further: he expressed concern that the FBI was not taki
ng a “broad spectrum approach” to intelligence collection and evaluation, and was instead focusing too narrowly on “traditional subversive groups” and on persons suspected of specific statutory violations.

  Clark and Doar set up a central unit for coordinating riot intelligence from informants in the Great Society poverty, community relations, and legal services programs. By 1968 they had over 3,000 people reporting on their neighbors.

  In the late 1960s, under pressure from the White House and from Ramsey Clark at the Justice Department, the small domestic intelligence division at the Pentagon, which had been created in 1963, was dramatically expanded. By 1968, 1,500 Army intelligence agents were monitoring various civilian groups, ranging from the Poor People’s March and the Mobilization Committee to protests by welfare mothers and classes in black studies. Later, in 1971, Mel Laird, with my approval, abolished the military intelligence program. By that time it had amassed files on more than 100,000 people.

  In 1970 the already uneasy relationship between the CIA and FBI was exacerbated when the CIA refused to give Hoover the name of an FBI agent who had assisted them on a case without first having sought Hoover’s permission. Hoover retaliated by cutting off all liaison between the FBI and the CIA. I received reports that Hoover’s action, coupled with the general lack of coordination among the various intelligence agencies, had left us with an insufficient intelligence capability at a time when terrorist violence was at fever pitch. Weeks later, reportedly irritated further by criticism within the intelligence community, he proceeded to cut off all liaison with all other intelligence agencies, retaining communication only with the White House.