One Man Against the World

THE COURSE of the war in Vietnam and the conduct that led to Watergate merged in a conversation between President Nixon and his ambassador to South Vietnam, Ellsworth Bunker, three days after the Pentagon Papers became public.

“Our goal is clear,” Nixon said. “Our goal, now, is that, as we come to the—near the end of this long road is to succeed. We can succeed. You agree?”

“But, on the other hand, we must not give our enemies—and I’m not referring to our enemies in North Vietnam, but our enemies in this country—we cannot give them the weapons to kill us with,” the president warned.

Nixon’s most powerful enemies in this country were the U.S. senators trying to stop the war by cutting off the billions needed to sustain combat forces. One such bill had come to a vote in the Senate in September 1970. Its main sponsor was Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota, who had flown thirty-five bombing missions against Germany during World War II. Minutes before the vote, McGovern rose to speak:

Every senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave. This chamber reeks of blood. Every Senator here is partly responsible for that human wreckage … young men without legs, or arms, or genitals, or faces, or hopes.

There are not very many of these blasted and broken boys who think this war is a glorious adventure. Do not talk to them about bugging out, or national honor or courage.… We are responsible for those young men and their lives and their hopes. And if we do not end this damnable war those young men will someday curse us for our pitiful willingness to let the Executive carry the burden that the Constitution places on us.

Congress was not ready to carry that burden—not yet. McGovern’s words shocked the sensibilities of some senators. His measure was defeated by a 55–39 margin. The strongest antiwar legislation enacted in 1971 was a call for an end to American military operations in Vietnam at “the earliest practicable date,” subject to the return of all American prisoners of war. But a dozen more stop-the-war amendments were under consideration in the fall of 1971. One in particular demanded a free and fair vote in South Vietnam, where President Thieu was running unopposed.

“There are no fair elections in Southeast Asia,” Nixon told Bunker and Kissinger. “You know that.”

The primary goals of the CIA’s covert action program for South Vietnam were to “re-elect Nguyen Van Thieu,” to elect “twenty individuals to the Lower House … responsive to CIA direction,” and to create pro-American political leaders “to play a vital role in the political struggle on the ground against North Vietnamese political agents,” the Agency reported to Nixon and Kissinger. The CIA already had spent millions financing seemingly independent political parties, newspapers, unions, and other facades of democratic institutions—all for naught, with most of the money wasted or stolen by Thieu and his ministers. Two months before the October 1971 elections in South Vietnam, it was clear that Thieu would be the only candidate.

North Vietnam’s negotiators in Paris had demanded that Thieu step down or form a coalition government with the Communists as a key to any peace deal. Their strategy was to try to get Nixon to do what they wished: to overthrow the government of South Vietnam.

But he could not “turn on Thieu,” Kissinger told Nixon.

“Turn on him? Never, never,” Nixon said. “We must never do that.… Never, never, never, never.”

That would be surrender. Yet the fixed election troubled Thieu’s American sponsors. “Unless there is a real contest,” Ambassador Bunker reported to the White House from Saigon on August 20, “his moral and legal authority to govern will come into question. Divisiveness, not unity needed to face a determined enemy, will result.” Two weeks later, on September 2, Thieu reaffirmed that he would run unopposed.

When Kissinger held another clandestine negotiating session with North Vietnam’s representatives in Paris on September 13, the two sides had nothing of substance to say. “For the hundredth [sic] and twentieth time I tell you the question is not whether to support or give up Thieu, but what process will shape the future of Vietnam after the settlement,” Kissinger told the Communists, his frustration mounting. After “the shortest meeting on record,” he told Nixon, they acknowledged they were at an impasse and made no plans to meet again.

On his return from Paris, Kissinger composed a deeply pessimistic report to the president. Hanoi, he wrote, in a passage Nixon highlighted in pen, would soon demand a rapid American military withdrawal from Vietnam—and link Thieu’s removal to the release of America’s prisoners of war. “The heart of the problem,” Nixon wrote in the left-hand margin of the paper.

“A swift collapse in South Vietnam would seriously endanger your effort to shape a new foreign policy role for this country. The impact on friends, adversaries and our own people would be likely to swing us from post–World War II predominance to post-Vietnam abdication,” Kissinger warned. “An ignominious rout in Vietnam would leave deep scars on our society, calling into question the heavy sacrifices and fueling the impulses for recrimination.”

Nixon had to win a war in which his enemies seemed inexhaustible, his allies undependable, his generals incompetent, and his aims scattershot. He wanted to bring the fight to the Communists, but at the same time he wanted American combat deaths to go down—irreconcilable goals. His troops kept in a defensive crouch. He raged at his top commander in Saigon, Gen. Creighton Abrams, for publicly discussing the pace of the American pullout of combat forces. “I think we have to consider withdrawing the son-of-a-bitch,” Nixon told Kissinger on September 14, 1971, or “get someone second in command that will keep him from drinking too much and talking too much.”

But if Nixon had trouble with his commanders in Vietnam, the trouble among the officers and conscripts who served them was deeper. As American combat soldiers pulled out of Vietnam—troop levels fell from 539,000 in June 1969 to 239,000 in June 1971—morale among those remaining plummeted, too.

“Having been in the military, I could see the signs,” said Howard H. Lange, a State Department official who worked closely with American combat and intelligence officers in Hue, a base for the disastrous Lam Son 719 operation. “The kids showed no pride in appearance and they weren’t disciplined. I saw written in the dust on the back of a truck in Da Nang: ‘Get me out of this hell.’” Lange was dismayed by the despair among American soldiers “who saw the war in the bitterly memorable phrase as ‘unwanted and unending, pursued by the unwilling, for the ungrateful.’ It was a grim picture.”

Nixon was equally embittered by the unending war, a battle begun by President Kennedy and intensified a hundredfold by President Johnson. He wanted out of that hell as badly as that soldier in Da Nang. He deeply desired to be done with Vietnam, to have some kind of peace deal, when he ran for reelection in 1972. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and a Congress controlled by Democrats had started the war, Nixon reflected in anger, and now he had the burden of ending it. If he did not, he feared, any antiwar Democrat might defeat him—a dove like McGovern or, worst of all, Teddy Kennedy, a prospect he found personally and politically appalling, a dirty trick that history might play on him.

* * *

President Nixon addressed the war with unusual candor at a White House news conference on Thursday, September 16, 1971.

Did the one-man race for the presidency in South Vietnam affect his war strategy? “We have to keep in mind our major goal,” Nixon said: ending the war “in a way that will leave South Vietnam in a position to defend itself from a Communist takeover.”

What about the Senate bill to cut off aid to South Vietnam unless President Thieu held a fair election? “We presently provide military and/or economic aid to 91 countries in the world,” Nixon said. “In only 30 of those countries do they have leaders who are there as a result of a contested election by any standards that we would consider fair.”

Would Thieu’s reelection do anything for American hopes for a democratic Vietnam? “No,” Nixon said bluntly. “That objective will not be met, perhaps for several generations.”

He added an ominous note. Senators were suggesting “that the United States should use its leverage now to overthrow Thieu. I would remind all concerned that the way we got into Vietnam was through overthrowing Diem, and the complicity in the murder of Diem; and the way to get out of Vietnam, in my opinion, is not to overthrow Thieu.”

A more inquisitive press corps might have wondered aloud why Nixon was digging up America’s role in the November 1963 assassination of President Diem. They would have been astounded at the answer.

* * *

Over the next seventy-two hours, the president made three bold decisions. Each deepened the connection between Watergate and Vietnam.

He told Ehrlichman to have the details of the Diem assassination on his desk within a week. Nixon believed that President Kennedy was directly complicit in the murder of Diem, and that the killing was the original sin that had drawn America into Vietnam. He was convinced that proof of the crime lay somewhere in classified CIA cables, and that Howard Hunt was the man to find them, leak them to a reporter, and use the leak to destroy Teddy Kennedy’s political career by smearing President John F. Kennedy as an assassin.

“He started the damn thing!” Nixon said in a taped telephone conversation with his spiritual adviser, the Reverend Billy Graham. “He killed Diem!” The story was not quite that simple.

Then the president told Haldeman to set up a meeting in which he intended to fire J. Edgar Hoover for refusing to conduct illegal bugging and break-ins against Nixon’s political enemies. Nor would that prove an easy matter.

Finally, he ordered the bombing of North Vietnam, north of the demilitarized zone, to resume immediately. Not all these conversations were taped, but in those that were recorded, Nixon was at his most intense.

The president was pleased when Kissinger told him that the Pentagon was prepared to send “everything that flies in a stretch of 20 miles north of the DMZ” in an intense raid against North Vietnam.

“Good,” Nixon replied. “They’ve been asking for it.”

“You think of this miserable war—and, first of all, Henry, it isn’t a miserable war,” said the president, contradicting himself before coming to his point. “The goddamn war was fought for a great cause,” preserving America’s global power by fighting communism in Asia. “We didn’t have to get into it, to begin with. But once in it, this war could have been ended in a year or two years,” Nixon continued. “Using our air power we could have knocked those bastards right off the lot—”

Kissinger interjected: “The war would be history.”

“And with a victory,” Nixon said with a sigh.

On September 20, as the new bombing runs began, Nixon led a National Security Council meeting in the Cabinet Room. He continued to reflect on the killing of Diem. “The behavior of the U.S. in Vietnam has not really been all that bright,” the president said. “After the murder of Diem, for us to say that Thieu is out because he didn’t do what we wanted—I can see the whole thing unravel starting from Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and Thailand, and all the way to Japan. What we really confront is what has been a long and terrible trial for U.S. foreign policy: will it fail or succeed?”

At that moment, next door in the Executive Office Building, Howard Hunt was using an old typewriter, a copying machine, a razor blade, and Scotch tape to forge a set of diplomatic cables that could directly pin the Diem killing on President Kennedy. He had been unable to find damning classified documents that lay hidden in the files of the CIA and the State Department and the JFK Presidential Library.

JFK and some of his advisers had in fact given their tacit support to a regime change in South Vietnam. But the driving force behind the 1963 coup had been the newly appointed American ambassador in Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, Richard Nixon’s running mate in the 1960 presidential election.

On his sixth day in Saigon, Lodge had cabled Washington: WE ARE LAUNCHED ON A COURSE FROM WHICH THERE IS NO TURNING BACK: THE OVERTHROW OF THE DIEM GOVERNMENT. At the White House, JFK approved, overruling his closest advisers. On November 4, 1963, alone in the Oval Office, President Kennedy dictated a tape-recorded memo about the Diem assassination. “We must bear a good deal of responsibility for it,” he said mournfully, eighteen days before he himself was murdered.

But Hunt had been unable to produce the evidence Nixon wanted. So he fabricated it. Colson attempted to leak the fake cables to a reputable journalist, without success. Then Hunt showed them to an old CIA colleague, Lucien Conein, who had been an eyewitness to the 1963 coup. Conein shortly thereafter appeared on a two-hour NBC television documentary about Vietnam. A review of the program in the New York Times by Neil Sheehan, the reporter who had obtained the Pentagon Papers, said Conein’s interview in particular left little doubt that “the Kennedy Administration was deeply implicated in the coup plot” that had led to Diem’s death.

Faking diplomatic cables was a dangerous business. But it was child’s play compared to trying to fire J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI’s director since 1924.

Nixon had Hoover to breakfast at the White House on Monday, September 20, 1971, a few hours before the NSC meeting on Vietnam. He was furious at the director’s reluctance to perform break-ins for the White House, but he was afraid Hoover would wreak his revenge if Nixon demanded his resignation. Nixon quailed, not for the first time, in fear of Hoover’s wrath.

For weeks thereafter, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and Dean all pushed the president to force the old man out. “We have those tapes, [the transcripts of] wiretapping we did on Kissinger’s staff, the newspapermen and so forth,” Mitchell told the president on October 8, 1971. “Hoover is tearing the place up over there trying to get at them.”

Ehrlichman explained, “Hoover feels very insecure without having his own copy of those things because of course that gives him leverage with Mitchell and with you—and because they’re illegal.” The possibility of Hoover’s blackmailing the president hung in the air.

Mitchell continued: “Hoover won’t come and talk to me about it. He’s just got his Gestapo all over the place.… I’ve got to get him straightened out, which may lead to a hell of a confrontation.”

Nixon once again tried to steel his resolve. “He ought to resign,” the president said. “He’s too old.”

“He’s getting senile, actually,” Mitchell said.

“He should get the hell out of there,” Nixon replied, but “he’s got to go of his own volition. That’s what we get down to. And that’s why we’re in a hell of a problem.… I think he’ll stay until he’s a hundred years old.”

Nixon concluded, after reconsidering the question for the fourth time on October 25, that he had too much to fear from Hoover, the man he had called his closest personal friend in his political life. “We’ve got to avoid the situation where he could leave with a blast,” Nixon said. “We may have on our hands here a man who will pull down the temple with him, including me.”

* * *

With the 1972 election now a year away, Nixon finally settled on a military and political strategy of sorts. John Mitchell would resign soon as attorney general, for a last hurrah as Nixon’s campaign manager. Many of Haldeman and Ehrlichman’s best and brightest aides would move to campaign headquarters, one block away from the White House.

The boys in the basement at the Executive Office Building, the Plumbers, would develop a war plan against all Nixon’s opponents, using all the tricks in the book, financed in part by the slush fund of campaign cash held by Nixon’s lawyer, Herb Kalmbach; operating in secrecy; run in theory by the reelection committee but in reality overseen by no one.

And in Vietnam, the president would use all the force at his command to bring the enemy to sue for peace by Election Day. “We will bomb the bejeezus out of them,” he told Kissinger in the Oval Office on November 20. “To hell with history.… Just knock the shit out of them.”

“That’s the best—I had not thought of that,” Kissinger said. He was a master at telling Nixon what he wanted to hear.

“Do they realize that they have to deal with, here, a man who if he wins the election will kick the shit out of them, and if he loses the election will do it even more?” Nixon went on, his voice becoming more and more forceful. “Did that ever occur to you?”

“I—I have to say, honestly, it did not,” Kissinger replied, in a tone more admiring than aghast.

“I’d finish off the goddamn place,” Nixon said. “Knock the shit out of them—and then, everybody would say, ‘Oh, horrible, horrible, horrible.’” And he laughed with pleasure at the thought.