One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon (15 page)

In Thailand, for example, Ambassador Unger received a telegram every day from the Seventh Air Force headquarters in Saigon laying out the missions carried out in Laos by bombers based at U-Tapao, a huge Thai airfield built with American funds. “The Thai let us do just about whatever we wanted to do,” said Montgomery. “However, this arrangement drove the Pentagon nuts, because none of it was written down.” It wasn’t written down because it was secret. Congress had known nothing about the bombing. The CIA’s payoffs to the Thai junta had helped keep it that way.

But Senators Fulbright and Symington were now “aware of our attacks and will press for an answer,” President Nixon told Prince Souvanna Phouma, the prime minister of Laos, according to a written memo of their October 1969 conversation in the White House. “President Nixon said he completely approved the bombing and would do more but the problem is a domestic political one—whether the US will become as deeply involved in Laos as in Vietnam.… This is a very delicate political issue and we have been trying to dance around it as much as possible.”

The Senate hearings, published in heavily censored volumes during the summer and fall of 1970, compelled Congress to ban the introduction of U.S. combat troops into Laos and Thailand. The fact that the United States was bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos was the only classified aspect of the hearings that leaked. It had become an open secret in the Senate, and Nixon admitted it after the press reported it months later. But there he drew the line on public disclosure of secret warfare.

The line would not hold for long.

*   *   *

On Friday, June 5, 1970, Nixon called all his intelligence chiefs to the White House—Richard Helms, J. Edgar Hoover, Adm. Noel Gayler of the National Security Agency, and Lt. Gen. Donald Bennett of the Defense Intelligence Agency. “The President chewed our butts,” General Bennett vividly recalled.

Nixon said that “revolutionary terrorism” was now the gravest threat to the United States. Thousands of Americans under the age of thirty were “determined to destroy our society” through their “revolutionary activism,” and “good intelligence,” he said, was “the best way to stop terrorism.”

But he was not getting good intelligence. Nixon demanded “a plan which will enable us to curtail the illegal activities of those who are determined to destroy our society.”

Nixon had been complaining about this intelligence gap for a year, obsessed with the idea that American radicals were being financed and directed by America’s foreign enemies. In March 1970, Haldeman had ordered Tom Charles Huston, a twenty-nine-year-old army intelligence veteran and, in his own words, “a hard-core conservative,” to act as the White House liaison to all the intelligence services, to convene them, and to write the plan Nixon demanded. Huston went to Hoover’s intelligence chief, Bill Sullivan, who had the outlines of the plan already in hand. He had been working on it for two years, partly in the hope of winning Nixon’s approval to succeed J. Edgar Hoover, who was seventy-five years old and starting to falter.

The program that quickly emerged was called the Huston Plan. The FBI’s agents and their counterparts would be free to intensify the electronic surveillance of American citizens, read their mail, burglarize their homes and offices, step up undercover spying on college campuses—in short, keep on doing what the Bureau had been doing for decades, but in closer coordination with the CIA and the NSA, and with the secret imprimatur of the president of the United States.

Nixon knew, and Huston reminded him in writing, that many of these acts were clearly illegal. But Nixon believed that if a president did it, it was not illegal.

The president said he approved the plan. But Hoover flew into a rage when he realized that it would have to be carried out with his signature and on his authority—not Nixon’s. The president had not signed it; his approval was verbal, not written. “I’m not going to accept the responsibility myself anymore, even though I’ve done it for many years,” Hoover said. “It is becoming more and more dangerous and we are apt to get caught.”

Hoover demanded a meeting with Nixon, and he stared the president down. Though Nixon believed that “in view of the crisis of terrorism,” the plan was both “justified and responsible,” John Mitchell convinced him that Hoover would find a way to leak the plan if ordered to sign it.

The new White House counsel, thirty-one-year-old John W. Dean, took charge of preserving the essential elements of the plan. Huston recalled, “Haldeman basically gave him the portfolio to try and work out with the Attorney General whatever they could salvage.” They salvaged much of it. Undercover operations against the left expanded. Electronic surveillances and surreptitious entries increased. These operations sometimes took place at the command of Attorney General Mitchell, sometimes on orders from the president himself. And in months to come, they would come on the orders of White House aides who had arrogated these powers to themselves.

*   *   *

Nixon wandered in, unannounced, to one of Kissinger’s crisis meetings on Cambodia in the White House Situation Room on June 15, 1970. To Kissinger’s distress, the president’s rambling speech there was recorded by a note taker. Kissinger sent a summary of Nixon’s remarks to the participants at the meeting, warning that it was “absolutely for your own personal use and should not be distributed elsewhere.”

The president used the words
psychological
and
psychological warfare
repeatedly, almost compulsively, as he stressed the political impact of the invasion. He proclaimed that, despite the edict of Congress to end American involvement in Cambodia after July 1, “we would continue our interdiction,” using airpower as freely as possible.

“This interdiction, the President stated, should be interpreted broadly, and it was very important that everybody in Defense knew this. The President reiterated that he believed it necessary to take risks now regarding public opinion, so as to see that Cambodia maintained its neutrality and independence. Perhaps there were those who would disagree, but the president himself felt that we should take these risks.”

He wanted to see a report every day on “what we are doing in the Cambodia area on the diplomatic, intelligence, military, and supply sides, and would watch closely the developments in these fields. It was his judgment that it was no good going way out, but it was worth taking risks.”

At 7:45 that evening, the president called Kissinger. “I just hope they got it,” he said. “We’re going to take some gambles.”

He repeated four days later: “There were a great number of people in the press and in Congress who have a vested interest in seeing us fail,” he said. “This was a game for them, and we should counter-play.” He would see to it that the war went on, Congress or no Congress. Though American ground forces were withdrawn by the end of June, American bombers and fighter jets flew their deadly missions in Cambodia until August 1973.

The Nixon administration drew from all its military assistance programs worldwide to find money to support the war in Cambodia; direct military aid to Lon Nol rose from $8.9 million in 1970 to $185 million in 1971. Nixon had sent Al Haig, now a one-star general, as his secret envoy to Cambodia to coordinate the delivery of weapons. One of the few Americans stationed in Phnom Penh, Andrew Antippas, the political officer at the American embassy, vividly remembered his arrival on a CIA aircraft.

“We were instructed to receive him and take him to visit Lon Nol,” Antippas said. “We were all wondering who this brigadier general was. Brigadier generals in the Vietnam War were as common as doughnuts. In fact, they went out to get the coffee. We went out to the airport and met the aircraft. The brigadier general who arrived—very recently promoted to brigadier general—was named Alexander Haig.… This was his first big assignment under Henry Kissinger. He was told to ‘go out and find out what the hell’s going on in Cambodia.’”

A straightforward assessment came from Emory C. Swank, a distinguished Foreign Service officer whom Nixon named as ambassador to Cambodia in July 1970. “Phnom Penh did not need an Ambassador,” he said, “but a worker of miracles.”

An equally grim report by the CIA arrived on August 6, shortly after Swank’s appointment. “The communists have overrun half of Cambodia, taken or threatened 16 of its 19 provincial capitals, and interdicted—for varying periods—all road and rail links to the capital, Phnom Penh,” the report began. North Vietnam’s soldiers and guerrillas “move at will, attacking towns and villages in the south and converting the north into an extension of the Laos corridor and a base for ‘peoples’ war’ throughout the country and in South Vietnam as well.”

But Nixon remained delusional on the subject of the Cambodian invasion. His disturbing opinions were shared by few if any American soldiers or spies. He thought the invasion a triumph of presidential power that would demoralize the enemy, destroy a potential Communist attack on Saigon, shore up morale among American troops, and turn the tide of the whole war.

He said explicitly, if inexplicably, to Kissinger on October 7 that it would prove the decisive battle, the bold decision that would lead to an imminent American victory in Vietnam.

“Listen, Henry,” Nixon said, “Cambodia won the war.”

CHAPTER TEN

“Only we have the power”

R
ICHARD
N
IXON
restored a measure of calm to his troubled mind after a two-week retreat to San Clemente during August and early September 1970. He was determined to rebuild his reputation as a master of politics and his self-regard as a great statesman.

He returned to the White House on September 8 thinking as he had at the start of his presidency: he would make a move toward Moscow in his search for a way out of Vietnam. He thought the Soviets might be amenable: they had been seeking a summit meeting from the start of his administration.

Nixon decided to invite the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, to Washington in late October 1970—two weeks before the American midterm elections—to plan a summit conference with the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Nixon would propose a cease-fire in Vietnam in return for a negotiated political settlement of the war. The Soviets somehow would have to support Nixon’s stance despite their alliance with Hanoi.

“Plan is for P to meet Gromyko the 22nd, then announce Summit for next year,” Haldeman wrote. “Another good maneuver before elections.” But the summit would be a long time coming. So many differences separated the Soviets and the Americans that it would take the better part of two years before they signed treaties and drank toasts.

Nixon toured Europe in late September and early October, his itinerary shaped in part by getting out the Catholic vote in the coming elections. He met with the pope. He made a pilgrimage to the graveyard of his ancestors in County Kildare, Ireland. And he conferred with the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, the neofascist who had fought communism since 1936 and imposed Catholic values on Spaniards ever since.

He and Franco talked mainly about the Soviets. Generalissimo Franco warned that they were “seeking to trap and weaken us. We could play the game with them but we should remember this.”

Nixon concurred. “We should bear in mind that—though the leadership had changed—their aims were still the same,” he said to Franco. “They had the same missionary zeal to expand Communism all over the world and we should not forget this.”

*   *   *

On October 12, as he got ready to hit the campaign trail, the president spoke his mind with unusual clarity. He delivered a speech—billed as “deep background, not attributable in any way,” and thus never reported—to a small group of news executives selected from states where Republicans hoped to pick up Senate seats.

Nixon rarely spoke this forthrightly in public. A transcript of his remarks remained sealed in the Nixon archives until 2011.

“The differences between the United States and the Soviet Union are so deep and so profound that they are not going to be resolved by the two top leaders of the countries sitting down and getting to know each other better, not by smiles, not by handshakes, not by summit conferences,” Nixon said. Though “we are going to continue to be competitors as long as this generation lives,” the president continued, “we can have a sound basis for a meaningful settlement of major differences.”

Foremost was the war in Vietnam. “They would prefer to see the Communists prevail,” he said. “That does not mean, however, that the Soviet Union and the United States, because we differ as to how it should be settled, will allow that difference to drag us into a major power confrontation.” For if that confrontation ever came, “whoever pushes the button may kill 70 million approximately, and the other side will also kill 70 million.” No president had ever stated the human consequences of nuclear war quite so precisely.

Nixon saw three realms of common interest to negotiate with Moscow: “avoid war, reduce defense expenditures—at least don’t see them go up—and third, the whole area of trade.” These would be the basis for the beginning of his dialogue with the Soviets, if and when that dialogue began.

Finally he turned to the home front. “A very substantial number of Americans,” he said, “are very tired of America’s playing an international role. They want to get out of Vietnam.… Looking at the enormous problems at home—the problems of the cities, the problems of the country, the problems of the environment, the problems of the educational system, the problems of taxes, the problems of prices—a number of American people say, ‘Look at all we have done since World War II. Let’s concentrate on our problems at home, build a strong America, not worry about the rest of the world.’”

Nixon would have none of that. “If we are going to the sidelines,” he said, “there are going to be only two major contestants left on the field. The one will be the Soviet Union and the other will be Communist China.”

“Leadership in the free world is still ours. Only we can do this. Only we have the power, only we have the wealth to play this role,” he concluded. “We have ended three wars in this century. We have ended World War I, we have ended World War II, we have ended Korea. We have never had a generation of peace. What we are trying to do is to end this war and to avoid other wars in a way that we can have a goal that all Americans want, a generation of peace for the balance of the century.”