One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (12 page)

“You talk a great deal about peace,” Tho said. “President Nixon talks about peace.… You talk peace, but you make war.”

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The president led a full-scale National Security Council conclave at the White House on February 27. The war council resembled a game of liar’s poker.
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“I want to run through the Laos situation,” Nixon said. “There are no present plans to put in troops.” Laird corrected that misstatement: “We do insert some from time to time on the Ho Chi Minh trail,” he said, referring to highly classified operations that Congress had unearthed but not disclosed.

“That is all right,” Nixon said. “We bomb the Ho Chi Minh trail and we will continue to do so. I say that categorically.”

But the question of combat operations in Laos remained. “Have we lost anybody there?” Nixon asked. Helms replied, “Five CIA men have died; four in helicopters shot down and one by accident.” This was a major misrepresentation of the human costs of the secret war.

The president asked Laird about the level of American bombing in Laos; Nixon did not have the facts at hand. The defense secretary said the number of tactical air raids by fighter-bombers had increased fourfold from 1968 and now stood at 3,428 a month, at a cost of two billion dollars a year.

“We don’t have to stop,” Nixon said. “I don’t care what they say.… There is no problem about getting into a deeper involvement in Laos.”

The president turned to Rogers: “Where do we stand?” he asked him.

“We are heading to a serious problem with Congress,” said the secretary of state. “They are looking for an issue, and this is it. They see in it a repetition of Vietnam. A replay in escalation is occurring. Our sorties have been doubled. B-52 strikes have taken place.”

“We have refused to make anything public,” Rogers said. “How can I defend keeping this secret?”

Mitchell argued against any testimony to Congress: “That just opens Pandora’s box,” he said.

Laird offered a compromise: a presidential statement on the extent of the American war in Laos. “How we handle this is a major issue of credibility of this Administration,” he said. “If we tell a good story here it will quiet down. Why hide everything?”

“We must lay it out,” the president concurred. “There are no ground forces, and there will be none without going to Congress.… We must write in a simple way. There is a lot of confusion on this. I don’t want any questions left.”

After the NSC meeting broke up, Kissinger warned Nixon that it would be difficult to “lay it out” in “a simple way,” given the long and deadly history of covert American operations in Laos. But Nixon waved him off.

“We won’t mention that,” he told Kissinger. “I’ll have to fuzz their capacity. Non-combative and none killed.” Winston Lord, newly appointed as Kissinger’s special assistant, was assigned to draft the presidential white paper on Laos. Kissinger vetted it. On March 6, 1970, President Nixon released it from the Florida White House in Key Biscayne.

“There was a phrase in that paper that no American had ever been killed in combat in Laos over the previous 20 years or so,” Lord remembered. This was an utter falsehood, which Lord blamed on the CIA. But responsibility for this lie ultimately lay with Nixon, who had decided to “fuzz” the issue, and with Kissinger, who knew better.

“I knew it wasn’t true,” Kissinger told Haldeman on March 9. “The President should have never made the statement.”

The truth was that, at that time, American casualties in Laos totaled close to three hundred soldiers, airmen, covert operations officers, and civilian support staff killed, captured, or missing.

America’s secret war in Laos involved a multitude of CIA officers commanding tribal warriors, a chain of CIA civilian contractors who saw combat, and special operations soldiers who planted motion-detecting sensors where they thought the North Vietnamese would be coming south. And, lost to memory, “a lot of very young and very able Air Force officers” were assigned to attack enemy convoys along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, as Kissinger’s trusted aide John Holdridge later recounted. “A lot of these poor guys got shot down, and nobody seems know what happened to them. Out of all the POWs or people who were MIAs I think we only recovered a handful, 10 or 12, something like that, from Laos.”

“The rest just disappeared,” he said. “This is one of the great tragedies of the whole war.”

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Kissinger returned to Paris on March 16 to resume his secret talks with Le Duc Tho. This time he delivered a clear warning that the war might intensify to include American attacks on Communist troops and camps in Cambodia.

“We regard the presence of non–South Vietnamese forces in sanctuaries in neighboring countries as having a direct impact on the war and as being part of the problem—particularly those in camps along and near the borders of South Vietnam,” Kissinger said. The American negotiating position now included a demand that “all the bases in Cambodia and Laos along the frontier and the infiltration trails should be closed.”

Tho was defiant. “It is our firm conviction that so long as you prolong and intensify the war, you will meet defeat,” he said. “If you failed in Laos and Vietnam, how can you succeed in Cambodia?”

President Nixon answered with brute force.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“A pitiful, helpless giant”

N
IXON WAS
sleepless, soul-searching. His demonic insomnia returned. “I don’t think he ever slept,” Haig recalled. He dealt with it at night by drinking. The president by day fell into a dark state of portents and omens. Talking with Haldeman about past presidents’ auras of omnipotence, he suddenly started planning the precise details of his own funeral.

He had predicted that 1970 would be the worst year of his first term. He again proved prescient. The president’s popularity plummeted eleven points in public opinion polls taken in March. The endless war was the cause. The toll Vietnam was taking was measured not only in military caskets but in wounds of the mind; an increasing number of veterans were shell-shocked or heroin-addicted. When they returned, they found the war had come home with them, a battle within the American body politic. And all the while, Americans were still dying in combat, a thousand every month.

On March 19, 1970, Kissinger told a trusted colleague about a brutal telephone conversation he had just held with the president. Kissinger told Nixon that “there wasn’t much we could do militarily” to force North Vietnam to settle or surrender. The president “went through the roof.” He demanded a new set of war plans—a “hard option”—and he wanted it on his desk that day.

Kissinger became frantic. He had been meeting daily with the nation’s military and intelligence chiefs. LBJ’s October 1968 decision to stop bombing North Vietnam had frustrated and infuriated them. But no one had any hard options. No one had any new ideas.

The written notes of a White House war council convened on March 23 convey their conundrum: “Mr. Helms said that if the enemy believed we might bomb North Vietnam, something might be achieved. Mr. Kissinger asked how this message could be conveyed to North Vietnam. General Wheeler said it would be clear if we actually did some bombing.”

Then came a coup out of nowhere. That week, a right-wing military junta took power in Cambodia. Battle-hardened Communist forces started moving toward the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, two hundred miles northwest of American military headquarters in Saigon.

The Cambodian army was hopeless—“totally unprepared for combat” against the Communists. “It lacked experienced leaders, corruption was prevalent among its officers, and pay was low,” according to a recently declassified American military history. Its principal active duty in the past decade had been draining swamps and digging ditches.

A clash between these mismatched armies was certain. Cambodians and Vietnamese had hated one another—politically, tribally, racially—for centuries. Soon the bodies of four hundred massacred Vietnamese were found floating down the Mekong River in Cambodia.

Nixon instinctively embraced the right-wing leader of the Cambodian coup, a general no one knew well, but with a name no one could forget: Lon Nol. “President Nixon asked me to draft several personal Nixon-to–Lon Nol telegrams containing rather extravagant expressions of friendship and support,” recalled Marshall Green, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia. “I was concerned that Lon Nol would read into these messages a degree of U.S. military support and commitment that exceeded what our government could deliver on—given Congressional attitudes in particular. I also regarded Lon Nol as lacking the qualities needed to lead his country out of its mess.”

As the mess deepened daily in Cambodia, Nixon ordered the CIA into the fight. “I want Helms to develop & implement a plan for maximum assistance to pro-U.S. elements in Cambodia,” he instructed Kissinger in writing. That meant untraceable money and guns, preferably Swiss gold and an arsenal of Communist-bloc weapons such as AK-47 assault rifles, which the Cambodians could claim they had captured from the Vietcong.

The CIA director promised to support Nixon’s “military effort against the Viet Cong in Cambodia … by the provision of covert economic and political support.” This proved difficult in the short run. Cambodia, with no American ambassador, no CIA station chief, and no CIA or military intelligence officers on the ground, was terra incognita as a war zone. The American embassy was in the hands of a few Foreign Service professionals—diplomats, not warriors.

Casting around the world, Helms called upon John Stein, a veteran CIA officer with plenty of paramilitary experience in Africa but none in Indochina. Stein reported back to the CIA and the White House shortly after his arrival in Cambodia. He got straight to the point: “Here was another small Southeast Asian country where nobody knew what was going on.” The new Cambodian regime “had come to the conclusion that somebody had to help them, and that this somebody was the U.S. With more fighting on their hands, their morale needed bucking up. The only way at the moment to give this bucking up was to give the AK-47 package and provide a Swiss bank account.”

Nixon approved fifteen hundred assault rifles and ten million dollars in untraceable CIA cash for Lon Nol, a down payment on a far greater commitment coming soon.

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That same week, America’s central outpost in Laos faced a deadly siege by a gathering of North Vietnamese soldiers at the CIA’s mountain redoubt in Long Tieng. If it fell, Laos itself could collapse into chaos or face the threat of Communist control. The crisis demanded immediate action but offered no easy solution. Kissinger had to plead for the president’s attention.

“Poor K,” Haldeman noted sardonically in his March 24 diary entry, “no one will pay attention to his wars, and it looks like Laos is falling.”

On March 25, Nixon met for three hours with Kissinger, Helms, and key members of the National Security Council. The president, Kissinger noted drily, wasn’t inclined to let Laos go down the drain. Helms was blunt: the United States had to ask the right-wing military junta in Thailand to send battalions of troops into Laos, widening the covert war without telling Congress.

The CIA director wrote for the record, “Apologizing for my vulgarity, I told the president that I realized this was a ‘shitty’ decision to ask a President of the United States to make, but in light of all the factors it seemed a desirable thing to do. Nixon commented that it had been necessary to do a number of unpleasant things recently and that this was one more that could be taken on as well.”

The next afternoon, Kissinger called Nixon in Key Biscayne, at the start of a four-day Easter weekend.

“The Thai battalion, are we going to get them in there?” Nixon asked.

“That’s done,” Kissinger replied.

“There’s going to be no announcement,” the president said. “We are just going to do it. We don’t have to explain it.” With that, Nixon tried to take his mind off life-and-death issues. He spent the next three days sailing, sunbathing, and drinking in Key Biscayne and the Bahamas with Bebe Rebozo.

Kissinger sent an attention-getting intelligence report to Key Biscayne on Friday morning, March 27: North Vietnam had placed its military forces on alert in Cambodia. Nixon’s immediate response was to order the air force to step up the bombing of Communist targets in Cambodia. His nightmare was that Cambodia would fall, providing a permanent base for the armed forces of North Vietnam. If Laos fell, too, American soldiers would face Communist forces on three fronts. The United States, with all its military might, could lose the war, the American embassy in Saigon a garrison encircled by Asian guerrillas.

The political situation at home was no better than the military situation abroad.

Secretary of Defense Laird warned Nixon on Tuesday, March 31, that the Senate was prepared to cut off funds for American air strikes in Laos and Cambodia. Nixon responded that he would “fight such a limitation to the death.”

The Senate also rejected the nomination of Judge G. Harrold Carswell, the second of two third-rate conservatives whom Attorney General Mitchell had personally selected for Nixon to elevate to the Supreme Court. A ranking Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee famously said in support of Carswell, “There are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they?” Not on the Supreme Court, the Senate decreed. Nixon privately blamed Mitchell for the politically tone-deaf nominations—the attorney general’s prior selection, Judge Clement Haynsworth, was rejected for his record of racism—but he took his wrath out on the Senate.

“Multiple unsolvable problems bearing in,” Haldeman noted.

Nixon responded to the Senate’s resistance with unalloyed rage. “Set up political attack,” he commanded Haldeman. “Have to declare war.”

The president ordered two retired New York City police officers, overseen by Ehrlichman, to conduct undercover investigations of his Senate opponents—notably, Teddy Kennedy, Edmund Muskie, Birch Bayh, and William Proxmire, four prominent Democrats who fought Nixon’s military policies and his Supreme Court nominees—as part of what Nixon called “an all-out hatchet job on the Democrat leaders,” including the use of the Internal Revenue Service to investigate their finances.