RN

by Richard Nixon

  I told Haldeman that I wanted to have the film of this speech rebroad-cast as my election night address to the nation.

  What happened next was one of those mistakes that it is hard to believe could actually have been made. The film we had of the Phoenix speech turned out to be a poor quality black-and-white videotape. The picture was grainy, and the sound, bouncing from the walls of the huge airport hangar, was shrill and occasionally slightly garbled. Everyone who worked on it remarked that it was terrible; some of the TV technicians wondered whether it was even of minimum broadcast quality. But election eve was two days away, there was no time for lengthy debates, and no one wanted to assume the responsibility for saying that we should not use it. The editing was completed just in time for the tape to be rushed to the studios for broadcast.

  The result was a disaster. The quality was so bad that many TV stations received calls from outraged Republicans who were convinced that the program must have been sabotaged by the Democrats. Even worse, it was followed immediately by Senator Muskie’s election eve broadcast on behalf of the Democratic candidates. In contrast to the harsh tone of my Phoenix speech, Muskie sounded calm and measured as he spoke from the homey setting of his summer house in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. What should have been a comparison based on substance thus became a comparison based on tone, and there was no doubt that Muskie emerged the winner. As John Mitchell put it, the Phoenix speech made me sound as if I were running for District Attorney of Phoenix, rather than the President of the United States addressing the American people at the end of an important national campaign.

  In a postelection memo I dictated to Haldeman dissecting our performance in the 1970 election, I talked about the ill-fated Phoenix broadcast:

  There is a good lesson out of this. . . . It is that in this age of television, technical quality is probably more important than the content of what is said. We learned this from the first debate with Kennedy, and now we have had to relearn it in fortunately a less decisive forum in our handling of this particular matter. The important thing is for us not to brush it off as something that “wasn’t all that bad” but to recognize that it was a mistake and to be sure that kind of mistake is not made again.

  Election Day was November 3. We lost nine House seats and gained two in the Senate. In fact this was an excellent showing because in past election years in which unemployment was on the rise the average loss of seats by the party controlling the White House was forty-six. In that respect we had defied overwhelming historical trends. It was also particularly gratifying to me that some extreme liberals were among those senators retired by the voters. The greatest disappointment was the drubbing we took in the gubernatorial contests, where we lost eleven state houses and ended up with only twenty-one Republican governors in the fifty states.

  The most important result of the 1970 election was that the shaky coalition of support we had to rely on in the Senate was now replaced by a slim but more dependable majority on foreign policy and national defense issues.

  Despite this fact and despite the fact that our losses in the House were substantially smaller than the off-year defeats of previous administrations, the postelection media analysis, led by the TV networks and the news magazines, treated the election as a significant political failure for me and a serious setback to my chances for being re-elected. News-week’s cover featured Senator Muskie and the story inside reported that the Democrats now dared to dream that I might be “retired” in 1972.

  Although our first efforts to consolidate a constituency based on the Social Issue had met with only mixed success, I still felt that the basic strategy was right.

  In the lengthy post-mortem I dictated for Haldeman, I turned my sights toward 1972. I said that we should start now to weed out lackluster Republican House, Senate, and gubernatorial candidates, help them get other jobs, and replace them with candidates who could win.

  At least two major candidates had been defeated in 1970 because of their involvement in political scandals, and I urged that we take precautions against this particular hazard. The personal ethics and conduct of our candidates had to be above suspicion or reproach. I wrote: “We cannot afford to have anybody on our ticket in 1972 who will pose this problem to us. We must be absolutely ruthless in bringing such matters to the attention of candidates and getting them cleaned up, or getting the candidate off the ticket if he has such a problem and cannot clean it up.”

  I said that I thought it was imperative that we get politics out of the White House either by introducing dynamic campaign management into the Republican National Committee or by setting up a special presidential re-election committee. I wrote, “I want to be in the position where I can honestly say the White House does not have its hand in the political maneuvering that is going to begin the moment the new Congress comes in session.”

  Agnew, I said, should “de-escalate the rhetoric without de-escalating the substance of his message.” He should be shown fighting for something, rather than just railing against everything.

  I wrote that I hoped we could get some enthusiasm into the RNC, and I urged that people be “upbeat and act as if they were having some fun in carrying out assignments.” This extended to my own schedule, where I wanted more spontaneity and less gimmickry. Somehow we weren’t getting across to people all the activities at the White House—the social evenings, the worship services, the special parties. I added, “This must be done, incidentally, without trying to make the President a laughing boy, and without having Martha Mitchell appear to be the only one who seems to enjoy being in Washington!”

  Finally I wrote that I was going to take the advice of nearly all those around me and firmly and flatly keep out of my re-election campaign until as late as possible in 1972.

  In fact my determination to keep politics out of the White House was short-lived. I should have known that the attempt would be futile. As each day brought the election closer, and as the competition heightened, the need for action and information became irresistible. Democratic Presidents since FDR had excelled—and reveled—in flexing the formidable political muscle that goes with being the party in the White House. I planned to take no less advantage of it myself. So I ended up keeping the pressure on the people around me to get organized, to get tough, and to get information about what the other side was doing. Sometimes I ordered a tail on a front-running Democrat; sometimes I urged that department and agency files be checked for any indications of suspicious or illegal activities involving prominent Democrats. I told my staff that we should come up with the kind of imaginative dirty tricks that our Democratic opponents used against us and others so effectively in previous campaigns.

  John Mitchell was going to be my campaign manager, but he would have his hands full organizing and running the Committee to Re-elect the President. Increasingly I turned to Chuck Colson to act as my political point-man. Colson had joined the administration in late 1969 in the role of White House liaison with special interest groups. He worked on policy matters with energy and devotion. He spent hours with labor groups, veterans’ organizations, ethnic minorities, and religious groups. He was positive, persuasive, smart, and aggressively partisan. His instinct for the political jugular and his ability to get things done made him a lightning rod for my own frustrations at the timidity of most Republicans in responding to attacks from the Democrats and the media. When I complained to Colson I felt confident that something would be done, and I was rarely disappointed.

  I was confident that I could win re-election in a contest on the issues in 1972. That only reinforced my determination not to let the other side be politically tougher than we were.

  1971

  The first months of 1971 were the lowest point of my first term as President. The problems we confronted were so overwhelming and so apparently impervious to anything we could do to change them that it seemed possible that I might not even be nominated for re-election in 1972. Early in January it was announced that unemployment had reached 6 percent—the highest p
oint since 1961. In February we became involved in the Laotian operation, which turned out to be a military success but a public relations disaster. In May 200,000 antiwar demonstrators converged on Washington and, led by hard-core agitators who had been openly encouraged by the North Vietnamese, mounted a violent but unsuccessful attempt to close down the government for a day. In June the publication of the Pentagon Papers assaulted the principle of government control over classified documents. The economy was in bad shape and did not look like it was going to get better very soon. On the foreign exchange markets the dollar hit its lowest point since 1949. As the opinion polls registered my losses, they marked Muskie’s gains. The Soviets had set back détente by their adventurism in Cuba and the Middle East, and the likelihood of a breakthrough in SALT or the other outstanding issues between us seemed remote. Similarly our tentative approaches to Communist China appeared to have fallen on deaf ears. Without these levers to bring pressure to bear on Hanoi it looked as if the war could drag on indefinitely, although the increasing strength and confidence of the antiwar forces in Congress might mean a sudden termination vote or cutoff of funds at almost any time.

  Having hit the lowest of low points in 1971, we suddenly rebounded with a series of stunning successes, among them the announcement of the China trip, a breakthrough in the SALT negotiations, an extremely popular and apparently effective economic program including a freeze of wages and prices, and the scheduling of a Soviet summit. These and other things gave us a momentum that carried right into the presidential election year of 1972.

  The year 1971 proved the political maxim that one should never despair until the votes have been cast and counted. Something can always turn up, often from an unexpected source or quarter, that utterly transforms one’s situation and one’s prospects.

  LAM SON

  Before our successful Cambodian operation in 1970, it was estimated that 85 percent of the heavy arms used by the Communists in South Vietnam had come by sea through the port of Sihanoukville. Once we closed that route, everything had to come overland through Laos down the Ho Chi Minh trail. By mid-December 1970, Laos was clogged with men and supplies, the bulk of which would be moved into Cambodia for a 1971 spring offensive.

  On January 18, 1971, in a meeting with Laird, Rogers, Helms, Kissinger, Colonel Alexander Haig, Kissinger’s deputy, and Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I authorized a major military operation to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail by attacking enemy forces in Laos. Because of the problem of American domestic opinion and because the South Vietnamese wanted to prove how successful Vietnamization had been, we decided that the operation would be an ARVN exercise; the United States would supply only air cover and artillery support. The principal American contribution would be ferrying troops and supplies by helicopter, gunship support, and B-52 raids. Even the operation’s codename was Vietnamese: Lam Son 719.

  On February 8, a 5,000-man ARVN force crossed the border into Laos. The Communists put up stronger resistance than had been anticipated, and the American military command in Saigon failed to respond to this unexpectedly intense level of combat with the necessary increase in air cover for the invading forces. The resulting ARVN casualties were heavy, but they continued to fight courageously.

  The South Vietnamese forces quickly recovered from these initial setbacks, and most of the military purposes of Lam Son were achieved within the first few weeks as the Communists were deprived of the capacity to launch an offensive against our forces in South Vietnam in 1971.

  In view of the operation’s substantial success and because of signs that the Communists were trying to prepare a major counteroffensive, the ARVN commanders decided to withdraw early. On March 18 they began what was to have been a strategic retreat. Our air support was inadequate, however, and under severe enemy pounding some of the ARVN soldiers panicked. It took only a few televised films of ARVN soldiers clinging to the skids of our evacuation helicopters to reinforce the widespread misconception of the ARVN forces as incompetent and cowardly.

  The net result was a military success but a psychological defeat, both in South Vietnam, where morale was shaken by media reports of the retreat, and in America, where suspicions about the possibility of escalation had been aroused and where news pictures undercut confidence in the success of Vietnamization and the prospect of ending the war.

  Sir Robert Thompson wrote to Kissinger from Vietnam shortly after Lam Son ended. He praised its military success and stated that the major factor in the war was now the question of South Vietnamese psychology and confidence. Thanks to Lam Son there was no Communist offensive in 1971 despite the largest influx of matériel in the history of the war. American and South Vietnamese casualties were reduced, and Vietnamization continued at a steady pace.

  I still agree with Kissinger’s assessment of Lam Son at the end of March 1971 when he said, “If I had known before it started that it was going to come out exactly the way it did, I would still have gone ahead with it.”

  On March 29, 1971, just days after the withdrawal of ARVN troops from Laos, First Lieutenant William Calley, Jr., was found guilty by an Army court-martial of the premeditated murder of twenty-two South Vietnamese civilians. The public furore over Lam Son had just begun to settle down, and now we were faced with still another Vietnam-related controversy. This one had been simmering since the fall of 1969, when the murders were first revealed.

  It was in March 1968, ten months before I became President, that Calley led his platoon into My Lai, a small hamlet about 100 miles northeast of Saigon. The village had been a Vietcong stronghold, and our forces had suffered many casualties trying to clear it out. Calley had his men round up the villagers and then ordered that they be shot; many were left sprawled lifeless in a drainage ditch.

  Calley’s crime was inexcusable. But I felt that many of the commentators and congressmen who professed outrage about My Lai were not really as interested in the moral questions raised by the Calley case as they were interested in using it to make political attacks against the Vietnam war. For one thing, they had been noticeably uncritical of North Vietnamese atrocities. In fact, the calculated and continual role that terror, murder, and massacre played in the Vietcong strategy was one of the most underreported aspects of the entire Vietnam war. Much to the discredit of the media and the antiwar activists, this side of the story was only rarely included in descriptions of Vietcong policy and practices.

  On March 31 the court-martial sentenced Calley to life in prison at hard labor. Public reaction to this announcement was emotional and sharply divided. More than 5,000 telegrams arrived at the White House, running 100 to 1 in favor of clemency.

  John Connally and Jerry Ford recommended in strong terms that I use my powers as Commander in Chief to reduce Calley’s prison time. Connally said that justice had been served by the sentence, and that now the reality of maintaining public support for the armed services and for the war had to be given primary consideration. I talked to Carl Albert and other congressional leaders. All of them agreed that emotions in Congress were running high in favor of presidential intervention.

  I called Admiral Moorer on April 1 and ordered that, pending Calley’s appeal, he should be released from the stockade and confined instead to his quarters on the base. When this was announced to the House of Representatives, there was a spontaneous round of applause on the floor. Reaction was particularly strong and positive in the South. George Wallace, after a visit with Calley, said that I had done the right thing. Governor Jimmy Carter of Georgia said that I had made a wise decision. Two days later I had Ehrlichman announce that I would personally review the Calley case before any final sentence was carried out.

  By April 1974, Calley’s sentence had been reduced to ten years, with eligibility for parole as early as the end of that year. I reviewed the case as I had said I would but decided not to intervene. Three months after I resigned, the Secretary of the Army decided to parole Calley.

  I think most Americans understood
that the My Lai massacre was not representative of our people, of the war we were fighting, or of our men who were fighting it; but from the time it first became public the whole tragic episode was used by the media and the antiwar forces to chip away at our efforts to build public support for our Vietnam objectives and policies.

  THE WHITE HOUSE TAPES

  From the very beginning I had decided that my administration would be the best chronicled in history. I wanted a record of every major meeting I held, ranging from verbatim transcripts of important national security sessions to “color reports” of ceremonial events. Unfortunately the system proved cumbersome, because it was not always convenient or appropriate to have someone in the room taking notes. In many cases it inhibited conversation. We also found that the quality of prose varied as much as the quality of perception, and too many of the reports ended up more hagiography than history. Finally, during the period that Lam Son was being planned and discussed, I decided to reinstall a tape recording system.

  The existence of the tapes was never meant to be made public—at least not during my presidency. I thought that afterward I could consult the tapes in preparing whatever books or memoirs I might write. Such an objective record might also be useful to the extent that any President feels vulnerable to revisionist histories—whether from within or without his administration—and particularly so when the issues are as controversial and the personalities as volatile as they were in my first term.

  The first President known to make tapes of his conversations was Franklin Roosevelt, who reportedly had a microphone placed in a lamp in the Oval Office. There is evidence that Eisenhower taped some of his conversations. President Kennedy taped some of his office conversations and phone calls, and more than 180 such recordings are now in the Kennedy Library kept under restrictions imposed by the Kennedy family.