RICHARD NIXON 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.”
This theme, “a generation of peace,” became Nixon’s mantra in foreign affairs. The old cold warrior was wise enough to know he had to talk with his enemies to win in Vietnam. But he did not know the language of peace and reconciliation.
* * *
Ten days later, Nixon met with Soviet foreign minister Gromyko for more than three hours, first in the Oval Office with their aides, then alone with their interpreters in the president’s Executive Office Building hideaway. Gromyko, who had held his post since 1957 and had served as ambassador to the United States during World War II, was perfectly diplomatic, but deeply pessimistic about Vietnam. He said there was no prospect for peace “unless the United States was willing to work out the timing for withdrawal of its troops, and agreed to the establishment of a coalition government for South Vietnam.” Both men knew the government of South Vietnam would refuse a coalition with the Communists unless coerced. But the men emerged from their face-to-face encounter in a friendly mood, having secured an informal agreement for a summit meeting at an undetermined future date.
“P. obviously enjoyed the confrontation,” Haldeman wrote. “Says talking with Communists is easier than others because they are hard, tough, blunt, direct—no diplomatic flummery. Coming out of EOB they started down opposite sides of the center hand rail—Gromyko moved over & said ‘we should have no rail between us.’”
Kissinger advised Nixon that the meeting with the Soviet foreign minister had come at “a moment of unusual uncertainty in both capitals concerning the intentions and purposes of the other side.” He saw little promise of real progress. Nixon’s own handwritten notes of the day reflect that uncertainty. “Put the past behind,” he scribbled—and then, in the next line: “where do we go from here?”
He put the question more directly to Kissinger: “The US—what it will be like for the next 25 years depends on whether we have the guts, the stamina, the wisdom to exert leadership.… People may want to put their heads in the sand; they may want to clean up the ghettos. All right, we will get out of the world. Who is left?”
He answered his own question: Russia and China. Richard Nixon would not let them run the world. “We are going to continue to be competitors as long as this generation lives,” he had said. That struggle was playing out on all corners of the earth.
* * *
On October 22, at the hour Nixon and Gromyko sat down in the White House, a fusillade of gunfire rang out on the streets of Santiago, Chile, five thousand miles south of Washington. A gang of assassins murdered Gen. René Schneider, the commander of the Chilean army.
The killing was the denouement of a desperate CIA covert action in Chile, ordered by Nixon himself, to stop the democratic election of a leftist president named Salvador Allende by any means necessary. Ever since Nixon became vice president in 1953, the United States had run coups, backed right-wing dictators, and sought to subvert leftists throughout Latin America, from Bolivia to Brazil and from the Texas border down to Tierra del Fuego. In the last months of the Eisenhower administration, as Nixon knew all too well, these plots included the attempted assassination of Cuba’s Fidel Castro.
Many members of Chile’s political establishment and military leadership knew the CIA had been working against Allende and his allies for years. But Chile had been a democracy for decades. The election of Allende, who counted Castro among his allies, would be proof that a left-wing leader could take power with political legitimacy in Latin America. The fact that Allende had won a plurality of the popular vote in September infuriated Nixon. On September 15, 1970, after hearing that Allende had won, despite millions already spent by the CIA against him in conventional political warfare, Nixon personally ordered Richard Helms to stop him from taking office.
The CIA director told eight of his most senior officers that Nixon had ordered the Agency to stop Allende (if necessary, by backing a military coup) and to keep their plans hidden from the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the American ambassador to Chile.
Under law, the Chilean Congress was to ratify Allende’s election on October 24. The CIA had seven weeks to reverse the results of a democratic election. The Agency divided the task into Track One and Track Two. Track One’s main tactic was to buy enough votes in the Chilean Senate to block Allende’s confirmation. Track Two was a coup. The CIA’s covert action chief, Thomas Karamessines, kept Kissinger posted at the White House. David Atlee Phillips, a twenty-year veteran of covert operations, led the Chile task force at CIA headquarters. He thought the operation was doomed from the start.
“Anyone who had lived in Chile, as I had, and knew Chileans, knew that you might get away with bribing one Chilean Senator, but two? Never. And three? Not a chance. They would blow the whistle,” Phillips said in classified testimony to the Senate five years later. “They were democrats and had been for a long time.” As for Track Two, Phillips said, “the Chilean military was a very model of democratic rectitude.” Their commander, General Schneider, had proclaimed that the army would obey the Constitution and refrain from politics.
An apoplectic Kissinger had commanded Karamessines to send a flash cable to the CIA station chief in Santiago on October 7: CONTACT THE MILITARY AND LET THEM KNOW USG [U.S. government] WANTS A MILITARY SOLUTION, AND THAT WE WILL SUPPORT THEM NOW AND LATER … CREATE AT LEAST SOME SORT OF COUP CLIMATE.… SPONSOR A MILITARY MOVE.
Assassination plots against political leaders had been anathema to Helms ever since the killing of President Kennedy. He would not allow American fingerprints on a rifle aimed at Allende. But the CIA could find an ambitious Chilean general willing to carry out the military solution Nixon and Kissinger commanded. Using the time-honored tactic of bribery, the CIA suborned Gen. Camilo Valenzuela, chief of the Santiago garrison, and developed a coup plot that looked like a three-cushion pool shot.
First, soldiers would kidnap General Schneider and fly him to Argentina, removing the constitutional commander of the army. Then the military would order the Chilean Congress to dissolve before Allende’s election was affirmed. Finally, they would take power in the name of the armed forces.
The CIA gave Valenzuela fifty thousand dollars, three submachine guns, and a satchel of tear gas canisters—all approved by Karamessines and the hidden hand of Henry Kissinger. But word of the plot spread within the Chilean military. By October 13, Washington’s intentions were so widely known that one of the South American nation’s few right-wing generals, Roberto Viaux, widely regarded by his fellow officers as a dangerous fool, was ready to commandeer a coup on his own. The CIA’s station chief in Santiago, Henry Hecksher, cabled Washington: A VIAUX COUP WOULD ONLY PRODUCE A MASSIVE BLOODBATH.
That provoked the following response from the White House, via the CIA’s channels: IT IS FIRM AND CONTINUING POLICY THAT ALLENDE BE OVERTHROWN BY A COUP.
On October 22, General Schneider lay mortally wounded. Shortly thereafter, Salvador Allende was confirmed by Congress as the constitutionally elected president of Chile by a vote of 153 to 35. It took days before the CIA discovered, to its collective relief, that Viaux’s thugs were the assassins, not the Agency’s hirelings in Valenzuela’s garrison. The CIA did not have General Schneider’s blood on its hands. But the Agency left the scene of the crime with Allende in political triumph and the president of the United States in a profound fury. Nixon would have his revenge. Three years later, on September 11, 1973, the coup he’d commanded would come, inaugurating seventeen years of dictatorship in Chile, a generation of political repression, and thousands of deaths.
* * *
The president returned to campaigning, crisscrossing the country on behalf of the nation’s Republican candidates. He loved the details of politics, the private machinations and the cold calculations. But he often loathed the business of being a politician, pressing the flesh in public, glad-handing, backslapping. More than once he said that being president would be a great job if you didn’t have to deal with people.
When he left Washington, traversing twenty-two states in seven days, he found the political climate cold and the mood of the nation grim.
Nixon had accomplished little in foreign affairs thus far. His domestic policy team had “come up with nothing,” as he told Haldeman and Ehrlichman in September—no new ideas, no impelling initiatives. Unemployment was rising to 6 percent, the highest in a decade. Nixon’s own popularity ratings were falling toward 50 percent. His private polls predicted that the Republicans would lose thirty seats in the House and perhaps a senator or two as well.
He had neither wanted nor planned to hit the stump in 1970, but he felt impelled to go out into the country, knowing he would confront hostile faces in the crowd. In New Jersey, a young man shook his hand, then shouted, “You’re guilty of murder every day you fight this war.” After a speech at the Municipal Auditorium in San Jose, California, on the evening of October 29—a grueling day that had started at a breakfast in Chicago and encompassed five cities—a crowd of two thousand demonstrators surrounded Nixon’s motorcade chanting, “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war!” Haldeman recorded, “We wanted some confrontation and there were no hecklers in the hall, so we stalled departure a little so they could zero in.”
Nixon later wrote, “I could not resist showing them how little respect I had for their mindless ranting. I stood on the hood of the car and gave the V-sign that had become my political trademark. It had a predictable effect.… Suddenly rocks and eggs and vegetables were flying everywhere.” The Secret Service went into emergency evacuation mode, and the motorcade moved on, behind what Haldeman described as “a terrifying flying wedge of cops.” Safely back in San Clemente that night, Nixon reflected, “As far as I knew this was the first time in our history that a mob had physically attacked the President of the United States.”
* * *
Nixon knew that Vietnam and its war-damaged veterans were the main source of the nation’s anger and despair. Each day of the war remained dreadful; four hundred Americans were dying in Vietnam every month. The peace talks in Paris were at a stalemate. The court-martial of William L. Calley was imminent. A lieutenant at the My Lai massacre, when American soldiers slaughtered South Vietnamese civilians suspected of harboring Communists, Calley was in a military stockade awaiting trial for premeditated murder. A conviction could lead to a death sentence. The case was emblematic of a war in which the moral imperative had gone AWOL.
Reenlistment among officers was falling, along with the morale of combat troops. Insubordination was rising. So was the use of 95 percent pure heroin among American soldiers.
The dope flooded Saigon in the summer of 1970. A potent dose was available for two dollars in bars, brothels, and barracks, thanks in part to America’s allies, crucial go-betweens in the drug trade. In September 1970, army medics questioned and tested more than three thousand soldiers of the Americal Division, where Lieutenant Calley had served. They found that 11.9 percent had tried heroin and 6.6 percent continued to use it. Larger government studies estimated that perhaps one-third of American soldiers tried heroin in Vietnam; among those, roughly half came home hooked. Though the statistics and the studies were arguable, tens of thousands of heroin addicts coming home was a war wound America was ill-equipped to handle.
Nixon’s response was to create a White House task force to attack the heroin trade. John Ehrlichman told his young aide Egil Krogh to take the assignment. Bud Krogh was thirty-one years old; he had worked for Ehrlichman at his Seattle law firm before coming to the White House and saw his boss as a mentor and a family friend. He had been hired to handle domestic legal affairs; he knew nothing about global narcotics smugglers. But after visiting Vietnam and Thailand, he would come to understand that some of the traffickers—Golden Triangle warlords who grew the poppies, government ministers and military commanders who helped turn opium into the heroin that hit the American bloodstream—were ostensibly on our side in the war on communism. These same men helped carve the heroin trail. Our allies had become our enemies.
* * *
The November 1970 vote left President Nixon with an increasingly hostile Congress, including several senators who could be strong candidates against him in two years. Postelection punditry painted the 1970 election as “a significant political failure for me and a serious setback to my chances for being re-elected,” he wrote. “The problems we confronted were so overwhelming … that it seemed possible that I might not even be nominated for re-election in 1972.”
He felt he had reached the lowest point of his presidency. To be defeated in reelection would be akin to death for Richard Nixon. He began planning strategies that would keep him in the White House for six more years. He determined to be “absolutely ruthless” in his pursuit of an overwhelming reelection in 1972.
Nixon dictated political orders that ran to hundreds of pages, and he held strategy meetings with Haldeman, Mitchell, and Colson that rambled on for six hours. Haldeman was astounded at the “amazing array of trivia” and the “obsessive boring-in.”
By November’s end, Nixon made some fateful decisions. John Mitchell would leave the Justice Department and run the 1972 campaign. Covert surveillance and “dirty tricks” would intensify against Nixon’s strongest potential rivals, Senators Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts and Ed Muskie of Maine. Chuck Colson had a private detective following Kennedy twenty-four hours a day. Haldeman was organizing reams of phony mailings under Muskie’s name that were designed to offend conservative Democrats. Nixon intensified the “Townhouse Operation,” where meetings were held in Washington to collect and distribute three million dollars in secret campaign funds. Haldeman, overseeing the operation, noted on November 19 that Nixon’s lawyer Herb Kalmbach had been retained to spend half his professional time for the next two years “handling super fat cats and special assignments” to finance Nixon’s reelection.*
Even Nixon staffers at a remove from the Oval Office noticed the change coming over the White House. David C. Miller Jr., later an American ambassador under President Reagan, had worked for Attorney General Mitchell at Justice for eighteen months, serving as his confidential assistant. Then he went to the White House, where he worked with John Dean, the counsel to the president. Shortly after he arrived, Dean presented him with a startling proposal.
“John Dean asked me if I would set up a safe house here in Washington for the use of the president,” Miller recalled. Why? Miller asked; the CIA did that kind of thing. Dean answered, “He wants this to be a completely covert White House operation.”
“I knew at that point that I was going to have to leave. I just said to myself: ‘This is insane,’” Ambassador Miller recounted in 2003. “The challenge that John faced, and it was a challenge that sunk any number of youngsters at the White House, was the question of loyalty to their principal: Mr. Haldeman in John’s case, Mr. Ehrlichman in Bud Krogh’s case.”
Bud Krogh had performed with aplomb on the drug task force. Perhaps his most spectacular achievement in December 1970 was handling Elvis Presley’s unsolicited visit to Nixon at the White House, where Elvis sought an appointment as a “Federal Agent-at-Large” in the war on drugs and presented the president with a Colt .45 pistol. The reward for Krogh’s dedicated service was a far more astonishing assignment. At Ehrlichman’s command, Krogh was soon running a secret White House intelligence unit called the Plumbers.
“Their principals asked them to do things that were unwise and ultimately illegal,” Ambassador Miller said. “It was a lack of judgment, of wisdom, more than a lack of intelligence. That was really a catastrophe.” And, as a consequence, “most of my friends eventually wound up in the Watergate affair, and of course, many went to prison.” The president—the ultimate principal—was at times “a very wise man.” He also was “quite dangerous.”
The dangerous side soon became the dominant side of the Nixon White House. In the coming months, the stoic and staunch Haldeman began to strain against the six-hour sessions of political trivia with the president. When Nixon’s mind was wandering, his discourse was like a dog walking in circles before it lay down. Haldeman, to his credit, recorded every one of Nixon’s ideas before the installation of the White House tapes. Both the journals and the tapes depict a president who was brusque and brutal, often witty and wise, but at times interminably indecisive. When his mind was made up, often in a state of rage, he issued irrational orders—fire all the Jews at the Internal Revenue Service, cut the CIA’s budget in half immediately. Haldeman would carefully note the president’s ill-considered ideas and make sure they died stillborn.
Catastrophically, Chuck Colson began to supplant Haldeman as the president’s sounding board. “He started vying for favor on Nixon’s dark side,” said Bryce N. Harlow, a White House counselor and congressional liaison for the president. “Colson started talking about trampling his grandmother’s grave for Nixon and showing he was as mean as they come.”
“It was the ‘in’ thing to swagger and threaten” as the president’s reelection campaign geared up, Harlow said. “Everybody went macho.” Colson lacked judgment and wisdom. He would, as Nixon said approvingly, do anything.