One Man Against the World

TWO DAYS before Christmas 1970, President Nixon determined once again to “break the back of the enemy,” as he told Admiral Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

His idea was to invade Laos and sever the Ho Chi Minh Trail. But Congress had barred Nixon from deploying American combat troops in Laos. So Nixon commanded the South Vietnamese Army—trained, equipped, and supported by the military might of the United States—to conduct the invasion and capture a crossroads of the trail. If the plan worked, it would vindicate Vietnamization.

Nixon sent General Haig to Saigon to sell President Thieu on the hastily conceived operation. Thieu would have to mobilize his forces rapidly in coordination with the American commanders in Saigon. Haig returned with high hopes, still seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

The three-part plan was set by the morning of January 26, 1971. Phase one: American soldiers would set up a base near the Laotian border in South Vietnam. American helicopter gunships would bring South Vietnam’s troops into battle and back them with the firepower of B-52s, fighter-bombers, and artillery. Phase two: those troops would drive into Laos and seize the town of Tchepone, described by American intelligence as a military nerve center for the Communists. Phase three: South Vietnamese soldiers and American firepower would destroy the enemy’s forces and supply lines along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, slicing the enemy’s lifeline like a knife cutting an artery.

The enemy had discovered the invasion plan through its intelligence agents in South Vietnam. It was well prepared for the attack. The looming disaster was laid out in a page from Haldeman’s daily journals declassified in November 2014.

Tuesday, January 26th. Henry got me into the office just as I was going home, to go over the general plan that they’re really up to. They’re planning a major assault in Laos which, if successful, and Henry fully believes it will be, would in effect end the war, because it would totally demolish the enemy’s capability. The problem is that it will be a very major attack, with our troops massed heavily on the Laotian border. And … we’ve discovered that the enemy has our plan and is starting to mass their troops to counteract.

The president knew this. The next day, in the Oval Office, with Kissinger, Laird, Rogers, and Helms all present, Admiral Moorer said that “we had received intercepts yesterday which confirmed that Hanoi was aware of the general plan,” according to Haig’s written notes of the meeting. But Nixon disregarded the danger. He would depict the operation as a defensive raid on an enemy stronghold; thus “there could be no perception of defeat.”

The secretary of state dissented: “He did not agree with the connotation that the Laos operation was merely a raid. The public would want to know why we were disturbing the balance in Southeast Asia and we should inform them that it was a massive attack.” Rogers went on to say, “The risks appear very high. The enemy had intelligence on our plans and we were now asking the South Vietnamese to conduct an operation that we refused to do in the past because we were not strong enough. If they were set back in the operation we would be giving up everything we had achieved.”

Nixon ignored him. Haig’s notes conclude, “The President directed that the situation be played out.”

The confrontation was among the most intense during Nixon’s first two years in the White House. “The pressure back here is up to explosive proportions,” Admiral Moorer cabled from the Pentagon to Gen. Frederick C. Weyand, the deputy commander of American forces in Saigon. Weyand responded that the clash would be “the real turning point of the war.”

The United States and its allies had not engaged in a set-piece battle—clashing at a chosen time and place—in two years. Nor had the South Vietnamese Army ever conducted any attack of this size and scope.

The operation was prepared with excessive speed. American and South Vietnamese military commanders received operational plans on February 2. They had four days to get ready. They mistrusted the judgment of their leaders in Washington and Saigon, they were deeply skeptical of one another, and they knew it was folly to proceed with the knowledge that the enemy had the plan. Nevertheless, “prodded remorselessly by Nixon and Kissinger,” as Haig put it, they bowed to the will of the White House.

“The best legacy we could leave,” Nixon told Kissinger, “is to kick the hell out of Vietnam.”

The South Vietnamese Army code-named the attack Lam Son 719, in tribute to a legendary warrior who had routed Chinese invaders five centuries before. It began with a bad omen: death by friendly fire. A U.S. Navy fighter-bomber struck a South Vietnamese brigade at the Laotian border on the evening of February 6, killing six soldiers and wounding fifty-one.

The plan did not survive contact with the enemy. Once inside Laos, America’s allies were outclassed and outnumbered. On the battlefield, they met a superior North Vietnamese force that had been prepared for eight months. The command group that oversaw and defended the Ho Chi Minh Trail had amassed sixty thousand troops—including five main force divisions, eight artillery regiments, three tank battalions, six antiaircraft regiments, and eight sapper battalions. The heavy artillery, the antiaircraft guns, the tanks, and the troops were dug into caves and concealed in killing field formations along the only main route westward into Laos. North Vietnamese military historians called it “our army’s greatest concentration of combined-arms forces … up to that point” of the war.

A harrowing, horrifying series of firefights and helicopter flights finally brought elements of the First Infantry Division of the South Vietnamese Army close to their strategic objective: the supposed Communist stronghold at Tchepone. What they found was described in a report by a South Vietnamese infantry commander, Maj. Gen. Nguyen Duy Hinh.

Tchepone, a tiny town whose civilian population had fled long ago, now had only scars and ruins left. By this time, it had become more of a political and psychological symbol than an objective of strategic value. There was nothing of military importance in the ruined town; enemy supplies and war materiel were all stored in caches in the forests and mountains.

To save face, President Thieu ordered his First Infantry troops to secure Tchepone, “primarily for its propaganda and morale value,” General Hinh reported. “At the price of 11 helicopters shot down,” Thieu’s soldiers created an operations base ten miles distant from the town. The enemy waited until the base was established, then began raining heavy artillery down upon it. President Thieu, having created the illusion of taking Tchepone, started to retreat almost immediately.

“We’re not going to lose it. That’s all there is to it,” Richard Nixon said to Kissinger on February 18, as Lam Son 719 became a debacle. “We can’t lose. We can lose an election, but we’re not going to lose this war, Henry.… North Vietnam can never beat South Vietnam. Never.”

This was one of Nixon’s first conversations recorded on his Oval Office tapes, installed two days before. The Secret Service had placed five hidden microphones in the president’s desk and two more near the sitting area by the fireplace. The Oval Office telephones were linked to the taping system; two more mikes were hidden in the Cabinet Room. The tapes revolved on reel-to-reel decks in the White House basement. Two months later Nixon also bugged his hideaway office in the Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House. Four people knew: Nixon and Haldeman, along with Alexander Butterfield, deputy assistant to the president, and Al Wong, the Secret Service agent who oversaw the tapes.*

Kissinger, as was his wont, concurred with the president’s resolve. “We can win in ’72,” he said. “Yeah, maybe,” Nixon replied. “But right now, the important thing is to see this miserable thing through.”

On February 26, less than a month after Nixon authorized the invasion of Laos, Admiral Moorer said, “This is the moment of truth for South Vietnam.” And the truth was, as Nixon said, miserable. The battle had become a rout. THE PRESIDENT’S DECISION TO SUPPORT LAM SON 719 WAS BASED ON HIS CONFIDENCE THAT THE LAOS TRAIL NETWORK WOULD BE DISRUPTED, Kissinger cabled Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker in Saigon on March 1. FRANKLY, I AM BEGINNING TO WONDER WHAT IF ANYTHING HAS BEEN ACHIEVED IN THIS REGARD.

The answer was nothing. The U.S. Air Force already had bombed eastern Laos so hard that it looked like “the surface of the moon,” said Richard C. Howland, then the State Department’s political counselor in Laos, later an American ambassador under President George H. W. Bush. “Yet the Ho Chi Minh Trail was still operating.”

Nixon now began bombing North Vietnam again, in violation of the bombing halt LBJ had ordered as part of his peace talks in October 1968—the same negotiations Nixon had helped to sabotage. These strikes were intended in part to destroy Communist surface-to-air missile attacks against B-52s flying in support of Lam Son 719. But they were also part of President Nixon’s deepening determination to carry the war to the enemy with airpower.

Kissinger asked his covert action committee, “Why is it that Hanoi doesn’t get tired?” No one knew. “They’ve now fought for ten years against us. They must’ve lost at least 700,000 men,” he told Nixon on March 18. “They’ve had a whole young generation that are neither productive in North Vietnam or, for that matter, even breeding.”

But there were. North Vietnam concentrated forty-five thousand soldiers for a counterattack to drive their foes out of Laos in mid-March. President Thieu unilaterally decided on a complete withdrawal, without telling the Americans, after losing three thousand soldiers going into battle. “It would be hard to exaggerate the mystification and confusion caused here by [Thieu’s] rapid pull-out from Laos,” Kissinger wrote in a back-channel message to Ambassador Bunker. Haig reported from Saigon that the South Vietnamese Army had “lost their stomach for Laos and the problem isn’t to keep them in but rather to influence them to pull out in an orderly fashion.”

The retreat was worse than the assault. The Communists turned the one road out of Laos into a highway of death, blowing up the first and last vehicle of each escaping convoy and then picking off the troops trapped between. An American airlift saved thousands of lives; its unforgettable image is a photo of South Vietnamese infantrymen desperately clinging to the skids of an American helicopter evacuating the battlefield. New York Times reporter Gloria Emerson interviewed survivors: “What has dramatically demoralized many of the South Vietnamese troops is the large number of their own wounded who were left behind, begging for their friends to shoot them or to leave hand grenades so they could commit suicide before the North Vietnamese or the B-52s killed them.”

In all, nearly 9,000 South Vietnamese soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured during the forty-five-day Lam Son operation. The Americans sustained 102 dead, 215 wounded, and 53 missing in action, losses due largely to the fact that 92 U.S. helicopters and 5 fighter jets were destroyed by the enemy. General Hinh concluded that Lam Son 719 was no more than “a bloody field exercise” that destroyed men and morale for no military gain. Hanoi’s official history of the battle bluntly called it “a concrete demonstration … that our army and people were strong enough to militarily defeat the ‘Vietnamization’ strategy of the American imperialists.”

Nixon said the opposite in an address to the nation on April 7. “Tonight I can report that Vietnamization has succeeded,” he said, and so he would withdraw one hundred thousand more American soldiers from combat by the end of 1971. But Lam Son 719 was a political defeat for the United States and a public relations disaster for Nixon’s presidency—and he knew it. His popularity ratings fell 13 percent during the invasion.

“The war has eroded America’s confidence,” Nixon said to Kissinger. “The people are sick of it.”

Kissinger told him that his domestic enemies “want to destroy you and they want us to lose in Vietnam.” Those goals were identical, Nixon said. “If they destroy me,” they would destroy the chance for victory on the battlefield. “Everything has to be played, now, in terms of how we survive.”

He was speaking of his own political survival in the 1972 elections. Vietnam, he said, was the only issue that counted. When Kissinger tried to make Nixon focus on nuclear arms control talks with the Soviet Union, the president brushed him off. “All of this is a bunch of shit, as you know. It’s not worth a damn,” Nixon told him.

“Let’s forget the Russian thing and the rest at the present time,” the president said. “The game is where it is. All that matters here is Vietnam now.”

His gamble in Laos forced him to realize that the ground war was a lost cause. That left him with a stark choice. Either Kissinger would have to strike a peace deal in Paris or Nixon would have to bomb North Vietnam into submission. He thought the latter a more likely way out of the war.

“We’ll bomb the goddamn North like it’s never been bombed,” he told Kissinger on the eve of his April 7 speech, every word recorded on tape. “We’ll bomb those bastards, and then let the American people—let this country go up in flames.”

A week before, Lt. William Calley had been sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor for premeditated murder at the My Lai massacre, where more than five hundred men, women, and children were killed. His jurors were six military officers, all but one Vietnam veterans. Within hours, over the strong objections of the secretary of defense, President Nixon ordered Calley moved from a military stockade to a more comfortable confinement: house arrest at the barracks of his home base of Fort Benning, Georgia. Three years later Nixon commuted his sentence. Calley went free.

Calley’s crimes were not unique; there had been many My Lais. No one knew better than the twelve thousand members of a burgeoning group called Vietnam Veterans Against the War. On April 22, 1971, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee heard testimony from the group’s spokesman, who had served as a navy lieutenant in Vietnam. In time the witness became the chairman of that same committee; at this writing, he serves as the U.S. secretary of state. John Kerry, in his well-bred Ivy League voice (Yale ’66; Skull and Bones), told the senators that his group had taken statements from more than one hundred fifty honorably discharged veterans about war crimes they had committed in Southeast Asia. “They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do,” he said. “Raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam.”

Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese … the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam … so that the United States doesn’t have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can’t say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won’t be, and these are his words, “the first President to lose a war.”

We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

“Where are the leaders of our country?” he concluded. “Where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy … now that we, the men they sent off to war, have returned? These are the commanders who have deserted their troops. And there is no more serious crime in the laws of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The marines say they never even leave their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude.”

Haldeman himself told Nixon that the witness had been highly impressive. He predicted, “You’ll find Kerry running for political office.” At that very hour, Kerry was hurling the medals he had won in Vietnam (the Bronze Star, the Silver Star, and three Purple Hearts) on the ground before the Capitol, inaugurating a week of protests that drew at least two hundred thousand marchers to Washington.

* * *

Another Vietnam veteran, Daniel Ellsberg, had determined that he had a way to end the war. Ellsberg, once a hawk, had become a dove with talons, and he had gotten his grip on a copy of a highly classified seven-thousand-page study known as the Pentagon Papers. At the time of Kerry’s testimony, Ellsberg was trying to convince members of Congress to put the Papers into print. He scared off committed antiwar senators such as the Foreign Relations Committee chairman, J. William Fulbright, and George McGovern of South Dakota. They thought that placing forty-seven volumes of top-secret documents in the Congressional Record might not be illegal but it was surely impolitic.

The Pentagon Papers, commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert Strange McNamara in 1967 and completed just before Nixon took office in 1969, detailed the history of the Vietnam War, beginning with the first American involvement in the conflict in 1954. They explicitly described the decisions of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, along with the national security advisers whom John Kerry had called out by name, Walt Rostow and McGeorge Bundy. The gist was that America’s military and civilian leaders had been lying to one another, and to the American people, about the course and the conduct of the war. The greatest lie was that there was light at the end of the tunnel. Tens of thousands of Americans had died in the darkness, searching for the illusory illumination of peace.

McNamara himself put it this way in 2003: “Any military commander who is honest with himself, or with those he’s speaking to, will admit that he has made mistakes in the application of military power. He’s killed people unnecessarily—his own troops or other troops—through mistakes, through errors of judgment. A hundred, or thousands, or tens of thousands, maybe even a hundred thousand.… The conventional wisdom is don’t make the same mistake twice, learn from your mistakes. And we all do. Maybe we make the same mistake three times, but hopefully not four or five.”

The lessons contained in the Pentagon Papers were that Americans might not have to suffer through three, four, or five more Vietnams. But those lessons had not been learned. Almost no one had read the Papers.

Ellsberg had taken a copy from his workplace at the RAND Corporation. The pleasantly situated Pentagon-backed institute, across the street from the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica, California, had been formed after World War II to connect military officers with defense intellectuals to create war plans. RAND (short for “research and development”) was in effect the unofficial West Coast branch of the National Security Council.

Ellsberg knew his way around Washington. He had been a marine lieutenant with a Harvard degree and had served two years in Vietnam. As a Defense Department analyst and a key contributor to Henry Kissinger’s first major presentation to President Nixon on national security, he had traversed the vast pastel halls of the Pentagon and perched in the suites of the NSC. But now his trip from the corridors of power to the counterculture of the peaceniks took on the fervor of a religious conversion. He believed the Pentagon Papers had the power of a talisman. If the American people read them, the scales would fall from their eyes and they would rise up as one and demand peace in Vietnam.

After byzantine negotiations that left both men embittered, a New York Times reporter named Neil Sheehan obtained a set of Ellsberg’s photocopies of close to six thousand pages of the Papers. Sheehan was a passionate and painstaking reporter who had covered Vietnam going back to 1962. He had only one flaw: he wrote with the speed of a stonecutter. He needed help to get the story out.

At about the same time that John Kerry was testifying before the Senate, the editors of the newspaper recruited a team of reporters sworn to secrecy, rented a suite of rooms at the Hilton hotel on Sixth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan under assumed names, and went to work trying to turn thousands of pages of documents into hundreds of column inches of newspaper stories.

Word got out. Two men deeply familiar with the Pentagon Papers learned that they had been leaked to the Times: Leslie Gelb, who had directed the report at the Pentagon, and Morton Halperin, who had worked with Gelb, and then under Kissinger at the National Security Council. Kissinger had wiretapped Halperin, without a judge’s warrant or a court order, from May 1969 to February 1971. The taps never caught a leak of classified information but, fatefully, they recorded some of his conversations with Daniel Ellsberg. This would prove to be a signal moment in the annals of government wiretapping—and in the presidency of Richard Nixon.

Gelb and Halperin were ensconced at the Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank in Washington, in late May 1971, when Gelb got a call from a Times reporter asking about the origins of the Pentagon Papers. Gelb immediately went to Halperin’s office down the hall. Both had no doubt who had given the Papers to the paper; nor did Kissinger and Haig. And they all knew there would be hell to pay. The biggest leak of classified information in the history of the United States was about to hit the front page of the New York Times.

Only one man thought he knew how to play this potential catastrophe of national security to the president’s advantage, and that was Richard Nixon himself.