One Man Against the World

AT 12:45 A.M. on Saturday, June 17, CREEP’s security chief, James McCord, and his crew of four Cuban Americans tiptoed into the offices of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate Hotel.

The air hung thick and heavy in Washington. The skies started trembling from the faraway force of Hurricane Agnes, which passed by Florida and began sweeping up the Eastern Seaboard of the United States that weekend, killing 119 people and inflicting billions of dollars in damage—at the time, the most devastating storm in American history.

The president and his men were far-flung: Nixon was in the Bahamas, and Haldeman in Key Biscayne, where both felt the hurricane’s lashing wind; Mitchell and his CREEP chieftains were in California, gathering millions at a campaign fund-raiser; John Dean was somewhere over the Pacific, flying back from a junket in the Philippines. Only Ehrlichman stood watch at the White House.

All these men told so many lies in the weeks and months ahead that it took two years of federal investigations, congressional hearings, and criminal trials to establish the essential elements of the Watergate story. But Nixon knew in a matter of days that the break-in would afflict him and his closest aides. He began trying to stop the wheels of justice from turning.

The four Cuban Americans accompanying McCord had been anticommunist activists for years: Bernard “Macho” Barker, a longtime Miami real estate agent; Eugenio Martinez, a legendary sea captain still on a CIA stipend; Virgilio Gonzales, a locksmith who ran the Missing Key Company in Miami; and Frank Sturgis, a soldier of fortune. All four were recruited by the CIA veteran Howard Hunt, all had played bit parts alongside Hunt in the Agency’s attempts to overthrow Fidel Castro, and all believed the Watergate job was part of the effort by the United States to stop the spread of communism in the Western Hemisphere.

The burglars, under the command of CREEP counsel Gordon Liddy, had rented rooms at the Watergate hotel and office complex and at the Howard Johnson Motor Lodge across the street. Liddy and Hunt had a clear line of sight out their windows at the Howard Johnson to the Democratic National Committee’s Watergate office. They had bugged the DNC’s telephones three weeks earlier; one of the bugs malfunctioned, and the information gathered from the other was all but worthless.

Their objective on June 17 was to enhance the electronic surveillance and to photograph or steal as many files as possible at the DNC. Had all gone smoothly, their second target that night would have been George McGovern’s campaign headquarters.

Shortly after 2:00 a.m., a squad of plainclothes police officers, alerted by a Watergate security guard, entered the DNC with guns drawn and arrested McCord and the Cubans, all neatly dressed in business suits and wearing thin rubber gloves. Hunt and Liddy, hearing urgent walkie-talkie warnings from McCord that the jig was up, fled as fast as they could.

McCord was carrying electronic eavesdropping gear. Wiretapping was a federal crime; the police called in the FBI. Special Agent Angelo J. Lano was on the case at 8:00 a.m. Together, armed with search warrants, the police and the FBI started collecting evidence. They found $5,900 in $100 bills and, in Macho Barker’s pocket, the keys to the Howard Johnson hotel rooms. Barker’s and Martinez’s address books were at the Howard Johnson, and inside both books were Howard Hunt’s telephone number at his White House office.

McCord and the break-in crew were arraigned that afternoon. The five men had given false names—all belied by FBI fingerprint files. The risk that they would flee if released was high; so, thus, was their bail. The judge asked their occupations. Anticommunist, said one of the Cubans. Retired, said McCord. From where? asked the judge. CIA, McCord mumbled.

On Monday, June 19, John Dean had a very unpleasant talk with Gordon Liddy. They met by prearrangement as Liddy skulked past the western edge of the White House grounds, across the street from CREEP headquarters, where he had spent the weekend shredding files.

Liddy confessed that he had recruited McCord for the Watergate burglary, linking the crime to CREEP. Worse yet, he and Hunt had used two of the Miami Cubans now jailed for the Watergate break-in to ransack Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office—which connected the Ellsberg job to Watergate and the White House. Liddy had violated an essential element of espionage by entwining two separate covert operations. Any close investigation of one could uncover the other.

Dean reported all this to Ehrlichman—who relayed the bad news to Haldeman in Key Biscayne—and he strongly suggested, not for the last time, that the White House hire an experienced criminal lawyer.

Nixon delayed his return to the White House until after Hurricane Agnes was well past Florida. Late on Monday evening, June 19, flying north on Air Force One, Haldeman told Nixon the disturbing news about McCord’s arrest—and McCord’s connection to Liddy and CREEP. The next day, Nixon and Haldeman had an eighty-minute talk—the tape with the infamous “eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap,” deliberately erased, a destruction of evidence only the president or a close aide could have committed. Haldeman’s diary for Tuesday, June 20, fills in part of the gap: “We got back into the Democratic break-in again. I told the P about it on the plane last night.… The more he thought about it, it obviously bothered him more, because he raised it in considerable detail today. I had a long meeting with Ehrlichman and Mitchell. We added Kleindienst for a little while and John Dean for quite a while. The conclusion was that we’ve got to hope the FBI doesn’t go beyond what’s necessary in developing evidence and that we can keep a lid on that, as well as keeping all the characters involved from getting carried away with any unnecessary testimony.”

Haldeman walked into the Oval Office at 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday, June 21. The president did not say good morning. “What’s the dope on the Watergate incident?” Nixon asked. Haldeman had learned a great deal of inside dope in the past hour: Liddy had talked to Mitchell’s lieutenant Fred LaRue, at LaRue’s apartment at the Watergate Hotel, and added alarming details to what he had told Dean. The gist was that if anyone ever looked inside the campaign’s ledgers, they would see that the Watergate money trail went to the top of CREEP. And Liddy had hinted at blackmail. He said CREEP had an obligation to pay for the bail, the legal expenses, and (by implication) the burglars’ silence.

Trying to protect Nixon from the worst of it, Haldeman simply explained that Liddy and Hunt had masterminded the Watergate break-in. “Does it involve Mitchell?” the president asked. He answered his own question. “Probably did. But don’t tell me about it.… If Liddy’ll take the rap on this, that’s fine.” Haldeman thought Liddy would take the fall but that scapegoating him might not suffice.

If Mitchell, as campaign manager, was implicated in the crime, the consequences could be incalculable. Mitchell wanted the FBI’s acting director, Pat Gray, to force the Bureau to back off the case. Nixon concurred.

That afternoon, Gray convened his first Watergate meeting at FBI headquarters. Mark Felt, his number-two man, was at the table, along with the special agent in charge of the Washington field office and the chief of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division. Gray instructed his men to go slow on interrogating White House personnel. He also said he had agreed to John Dean’s demand that Dean sit in on the FBI’s interviews.

Gray did not inform his top officers that he would secretly feed Dean dozens of daily summaries of the FBI’s Watergate investigations and interrogations.

On Thursday, June 22, FBI agents questioned Charles W. Colson, special counsel to the president, with Dean sitting by his side. Colson mentioned that Howard Hunt had an office safe in the White House. Dean denied knowledge of it. Safe? What safe? He had lied to the FBI, a felony punishable by five years in prison. In fact, Dean had already ordered a team of government locksmiths to open the safe. He knew what was inside: a bagful of McCord’s wiretapping equipment, psychological profiles of Ellsberg prepared by the CIA at Hunt’s request, phony cables Hunt fabricated on the 1963 killing of President Diem, and a loaded .25-caliber revolver.

That evening, Gray told Dean that some FBI agents, looking at the CIA connections of five of the six burglars, suspected they had stumbled on a covert Agency operation. Dean shared this information with Mitchell, who had a flash of inspiration: suppose the White House could convince Gray that Watergate was indeed the CIA’s work? Then the Bureau, under protocols designed to keep it from tripping over the Agency, would have to back off.

Since this supposition was false, using the CIA to block an investigation by the FBI constituted a criminal obstruction of justice.

Dean relayed Mitchell’s brainstorm to Haldeman, who passed it on to the president shortly after 10:00 a.m. on Friday, June 23. Nixon thought it sounded like a great idea. The newly appointed deputy director of central intelligence, Lt. Gen. Vernon Walters, a Nixon crony of long standing, would tell Gray to stand down the FBI investigation in the name of national security.

Walters was in Gray’s office by 2:30 p.m. brandishing the shield of secrecy. Gray agonized for days, a roiling battle raging in him between his loyalties and his respect for the law. Then, on June 28, he answered a call from the White House.

John Dean handed Gray two white manila envelopes: documents taken from Hunt’s safe. “These should never see the light of day,” he told Gray. “They are such political dynamite their existence can’t even be acknowledged. I need to be able to say that I gave all Hunt’s files to the FBI. That’s what I’m doing.” Gray chose his course: he eventually destroyed the evidence.

That same day, June 28, Nixon arrived at his desk exhausted; he had been unable to fall asleep until dawn. He had resolved overnight that John Mitchell would have to resign. He hated to do it, but he had to keep the taint of a third-rate burglary from touching his campaign. Mitchell officially stepped down three days later, pleading the pressures of caring for his increasingly deranged wife. The story was that he did it for love.

Under the delusion that he had contained the political consequences of Watergate, Nixon returned to his great passion: destroying his enemies at home and abroad.

The tone and tenor of Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign was reflected in a written report that Al Haig submitted to the president on June 28. The day before, at Nixon’s direction, Haig had visited former president Lyndon B. Johnson at his Texas ranch.

“President Johnson told me that he considered a McGovern Presidency a disaster,” Haig recorded. “He noted that McGovern supporters had totally devastated the Democratic party machine in Texas by employing the most irresponsible and revolutionary campaign tactics.” Expanding on what LBJ had said during their seven-hour conversation, Haig wrote to the president:

I think we must be very, very wary of the strong possibility that Hanoi has been in close touch with McGovern or McGovern elements.… I have never for a moment doubted the total and complete collaboration between Hanoi and the McGovern camp and especially those individuals around McGovern. If we proceed under any other assumptions, we are totally naive.

Haig’s accusation of treason resounded throughout the Nixon White House. “This arrogant son of a bitch is a traitor,” Colson wrote of McGovern. “Instead of running for President, he should be running from the gallows.” Pat Buchanan, one of Nixon’s favorite speechwriters, put together what he called an “Assault Book,” containing “enough McGovern statements, positions, votes, not only to defeat the South Dakota Radical—but to have him indicted by a Grand Jury.”

Senator McGovern was no radical, though he had been steadfast against the war. He pledged to withdraw all American forces from Vietnam within ninety days of his inauguration. But the chance of his being inaugurated evaporated shortly after he won his party’s Democratic nomination on July 12, 1972.

The Democratic convention in Miami was the most disorganized event of its kind in modern times. McGovern gave his acceptance speech at 2:48 a.m.—prime time on Guam, as Nixon noted—after a political circus in which thirty-nine people were nominated for vice president, including Chairman Mao. “It was a nightmare for me,” McGovern said years later; “it was one of the most costly mistakes of the campaign that we frittered away that prime time when the country, for the first time, could have seen me on my turf, in control.”

McGovern, without much forethought, chose Sen. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri as his running mate. It was soon revealed that Eagleton’s medical history included twenty years of manic depression and extensive bouts of electroshock therapy. First McGovern said he stood behind Eagleton “one thousand percent.” Then he forced him off the ticket.

Even without these fiascoes, McGovern’s campaign was doomed before it began. On May 15, a lunatic with a handgun had shot and nearly killed George C. Wallace, the right-wing racist who, running as a Democrat, had won the Maryland and Michigan primaries that same day. Now Wallace was in a wheelchair; he could not run for president. Nixon had won 43.4 percent of the vote in 1968, Wallace had won 13.5 percent, and every Wallace voter then was a likely Nixon voter now. Presidential polls in August reflected those numbers almost exactly. Nixon was heading for a landslide in November—unless the Watergate story came out.

“We’re sitting on a powder keg,” Haldeman told the president in the Oval Office on August 1, and “it’s worth a lot of work to keep it from blowing.” But the damage was being controlled. Liddy had sworn a blood oath of silence. The Cubans were out on bail. Hush money had started flowing.

Kissinger told Nixon on August 2 that Hanoi might settle the Vietnam War before the election—“if you stay ten points ahead.” Both men wanted to believe that North Vietnam would rather sign a peace deal than face the wrath of a reelected president.

“Frankly, I’d like to trick them,” Nixon said. “I’d like to do it in a way that we make a settlement, and then screw them in the implementation, to be quite candid.”

“We could promise something, and then, right after the election, say Thieu wouldn’t do it,” Nixon said. “Just keep the pressure on.”

The president was unsure South Vietnam could survive until November. If the war was still on, he would destroy Hanoi and Haiphong after the election, he vowed. But “the advantage, Henry, of trying to settle now, even if you’re ten points ahead, is that then you assure a hell of a landslide,” he said. “You’d have a mandate.”

“It is a nightmare. It’s a nightmare being there,” Nixon said. “This war is over by the end of this year,” no matter what it took. “Vietnam poisons our relations with the Soviets, and it poisons our relations with the Chinese. We have suffered long and hard—and God knows how do we get out of it?”

“They are bastards,” Kissinger said. “They would love it best if you got defeated.”

“They hate you, and they hate me,” Kissinger said. “But the question is now: how can we maneuver it … so that it can look like a settlement by Election Day?”

For the next three months, under Nixon’s direction, Kissinger worked nonstop to find something that would “look like a settlement” before the election. That, Kissinger promised, would “finish the destruction of McGovern” and give Nixon the mandate he desired. The destruction of McGovern was uppermost in Nixon’s mind the next morning, August 3. “What in the name of God are we doing on this score?” he yelled at Haldeman and Ehrlichman in the Oval Office. “What are we doing about their financial contributors?” he asked. “Are we running their tax returns?”

“We’d better forget the goddamn campaign right now,” Nixon raged. “We have all this power, and we’re not using it.” The president recorded in his diary that night: “All of our people are gun-shy as a result of the Watergate incident and don’t want to look into files that involve Democrats.” Nixon was chagrined that he had not used his “enormous powers” to dig into the Internal Revenue Service records of his political enemies. He promised himself that would change after the election.

Nixon flew to the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach on August 22, 1972. He had been renominated by a vote of 1,347 to 1. He wrote in his memoirs, “My eyes burned from the lingering sting of tear gas”—police had confronted thousands of antiwar protesters outside the convention center—“as I entered the hall to accept my fifth and last nomination.” The delegates shouted, “Four more years! Four more years!”

Eight days later, Haldeman walked into Nixon’s office at the Western White House in San Clemente. “Bad news,” he said glumly. “I really mean it—it’s really bad.” He handed the president the latest Gallup poll. Nixon: 64 percent. McGovern: 30 percent. Undecided: 6 percent. The two men smiled with pleasure.

The future of Richard Nixon’s second term pivoted on two fateful conversations on September 15, 1972: first with Dean, then with Kissinger.

That day, a federal grand jury had indicted Liddy, Hunt, McCord, and the Cubans for the break-in and bugging at the DNC headquarters. But the charges stopped there. The Watergate prosecutors had hit a stone wall.

John Dean joined the president and Haldeman in the Oval Office at 5:27 p.m. Richard Nixon later denied he had ever met Dean until 1973.

“Three months ago I would have had trouble predicting where we’d be today,” Dean said. “I think that I can say that fifty-four days from now that not a thing will come crashing down to our surprise.” He was referring to the time left until Election Day.

The president was well pleased with Dean. “The way you’ve handled it, it seems to me, has been very skillful, because you—putting your fingers in the dikes every time that leaks have sprung here and sprung there.…” With Watergate seemingly stanched, Nixon warmed to the prospect of revenge in days to come. “All of those that have tried to do us in … are asking for it and they are going to get it,” he said. “We haven’t used the Bureau and we haven’t used the Justice Department, but things are going to change.”

But at “the Bureau,” the FBI, the number-two man, Mark Felt, and his colleagues were convinced they had to do something regarding the government of Richard Nixon.

They suspected a conspiracy to obstruct justice was going on at the White House. They thought the president had placed Pat Gray in charge of the FBI as part of that conspiracy. Gray’s appointment “hurt all of us deeply,” said Charles Bolz, the chief of the FBI’s accounting and fraud division. Felt was Hoover’s rightful heir. “Felt should have moved up right there and then,” Bolz said. “And that’s what got him into the act. He was going to find out what was going on.… And, boy, he really did.” Felt was “Deep Throat,” the Washington Post’s best source on Watergate. “I knew somebody would break,” Nixon would say bitterly after the first piercing newspaper articles started appearing in late September.*

Six hours later, Kissinger sat down with the president. Kissinger had spent much of the past month traveling the world—to Saigon, to Moscow, and to Paris, where he held another clandestine meeting with the top representative of North Vietnam, Le Duc Tho, a member of the enemy’s Politburo.

“He said: ‘You have to tell us if you want to settle it,’” Kissinger reported to the president. “I said: ‘Yes, we want to settle it.’ He said: ‘Give me a day.’ I said: ‘Well, October 15th.’ He took my hand and said: ‘Our first agreement. We’ll settle it October 15th.’”

“I think they are terrified of you getting re-elected,” Kissinger replied. “I said: ‘You and your friends have turned this election into a plebiscite on Vietnam.… The President is going to have a majority for continuing the war.’”

But Kissinger also reported that what “Thieu is really afraid of is a cease-fire.” Somehow the president would have to negotiate an end to the war with his allies as well as his enemies.

“We set up dinner on the Sequoia tonight, Kissinger, Haig and I with the President,” Haldeman recorded on the night of September 28. Kissinger was convinced that “the North Vietnamese do want to settle. The hang-up still is dumping Thieu.… What he wants to do is send Haig to Saigon tomorrow, have him meet with Thieu, and get an agreement from Thieu to secretly agree to step down, sometime around January.”

For days on end they wrestled with the Vietnam dilemma. “I know we have to end the war,” Nixon said on September 29. “But if we end it in the wrong way, we’ve got a hell of a problem—not in the election. Forget the election. We’ll win the election. We could surrender in Vietnam and win the election.”

“What do we require Thieu to do?” he asked. “If he does get out, does it unravel in South Vietnam?”

Kissinger predicted, presciently, that even if there were an official cease-fire and American troops withdrew, the fighting between North and South Vietnam might have no end in sight. “Thieu doesn’t want a cease-fire,” Kissinger said. “He doesn’t want us out. I mean, let’s face it: the real point is that our interests and his are now divergent. We want out. We want our prisoners. We want a cease-fire. He wants us in. He thinks he’s winning. And he wants us to continue bombing—”

“For another two or three years,” Nixon said. “Jesus Christ, it’s a hell of a choice.”

Haig was about to go to Saigon as a special envoy to President Thieu. “Make it very clear to him,” Nixon told Haig later that day. “He can’t just assume that because I win the election that we’re going to stick with him through hell and high water. This war is not going to go on. Goddamn it, we can’t do it.… We’ve got to get the war the hell off our backs in this country. That’s all there is to it.”

Haig pointed out, “Of course, if it looks like it could cause a public break…”

The president finished the thought: “That would be bad,” he said. “A public break would hurt us. That’d hurt us in the election.”

Kissinger then said, in so many words, what Nixon knew all too well. After twenty thousand American combat deaths on his watch, the president could be accused of imposing a deal on Thieu that could have been struck back in October 1968.

Nixon weighed this possibility. Then he continued to instruct Haig on how to talk to Thieu: Nixon had stood by South Vietnam in the face of overwhelming opposition. Nixon had “no support. The House was against him. The Senate was against him. The media was against him. The students had rioted. All sorts of hell-raising. He’s made these tough decisions.” Now Thieu had to give him something in return.

“We have a major crisis with Thieu,” Kissinger told Nixon at Camp David on October 4. “He rejects every proposal we’ve made, every last one of them.”

“We can’t have a huge bust-up with Saigon before the election,” Kissinger said. “Afraid not,” Nixon replied. “Of course Thieu knows that.… What is his line?”

“His line is that he’s the government of South Vietnam, that the North Vietnamese are the aggressors and they’ve got to leave,” Kissinger said. “He is playing ’68 all over again.… He figures if he can survive now ’til the 7th and just dig in then we’ll have to yield.”

“He’s got to trust the President. He’s never let him down,” Nixon said, referring to himself, as he did more and more often, in the third person.

Kissinger was set to talk to North Vietnam’s Paris delegation in four days. “Supposing we don’t get to an agreement,” he suggested. “We are in good shape as far as Thieu is concerned. If we do get to an agreement I will just have to go out and…”

“And cram it down his throat,” said the president. “After the election we’ll do what we goddamn well please.”

“We must concentrate our efforts on doing whatever it takes to resolve our first objective, which is to fight to force the Americans to withdraw,” Le Duan, North Vietnam’s Politburo chief and the nation’s top decision maker since Ho Chi Minh’s death, wrote in a formal decision in September. Le Duc Tho received his orders in Paris shortly before Kissinger arrived. The Politburo told its chief negotiator to give the Americans the concessions they sought. Thieu could stay in office. The South Vietnamese government could remain as well. A cease-fire in place, with Communist forces controlling some of South Vietnam, would take hold. An election commission, with Communist representation, would reach a political settlement.

These were simply tactics to Hanoi, all aimed at achieving their strategic goal: an American military withdrawal. The North Vietnamese calculated that without American support Saigon would fall.

At 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, October 12, after a sixteen-hour session in Paris, Kissinger, accompanied by Haig, returned to the White House. They walked into the president’s Executive Office Building study, outfitted with leather armchairs, a wet bar, and hidden microphones. Nixon and Haldeman were waiting. The president made Kissinger a scotch and soda, Haig a martini. Whatever Nixon made for himself, he was soon high.

“Well, you got three out of three, Mr. President,” Kissinger said—China, Russia, Vietnam.

“I’m going to ask Al, because you’re too prejudiced, Henry. You’re so prejudiced to the peace camp that I can’t trust you. Don’t you think so, Al?”

HAIG: It isn’t done.

KISSINGER: Well, that’s the problem.… Here is what we have to do: I have to go to Paris on Tuesday to go over the agreed things word-for-word.… Then I go to Saigon to get Thieu aboard.…

NIXON: Won’t it totally wipe out Thieu, Henry?

HALDEMAN: Yeah.

KISSINGER: Oh, no. It’s so far better than anything we discussed. He won’t like it because he thinks he’s winning, but here is the deal, just to give you the main points.…

NIXON: We can do that after.

KISSINGER: All right, afterwards.… We are getting out of this with honor.

NIXON: Henry, let me tell you this: it has to be with honor. But also it has to be in terms of getting out. We cannot continue to have this cancer eating at us at home, eating at us abroad.… You use that term … “with honor”?

KISSINGER: “With honor.”

NIXON: Do you use it? Apprise me, Al. “Honor”?

HAIG: Sure.… Thieu’s got his rights.…

KISSINGER: Thieu can stay. No side deals.

NIXON: Why can he? How? Under what conditions?

KISSINGER: There are no conditions. Thieu can stay. The only thing we agreed was that Thieu will talk to the other side—

NIXON: Um-hmm.

KISSINGER: —about setting up something that will be called the National Council for National Reconciliation and Concord.…

NIXON: They’re leaving Thieu in. They’re in. And they’re supposed to negotiate a National Council? Thieu will never agree, they’ll never agree, so they screw up, and we support Thieu, and the Communists support them, and they can continue fighting, which is fine.… Let me come down to the nut-cutting, looking at Thieu. What Henry has read to me, Thieu cannot turn down. If he does, our problem will be that we have to flush him, and that will have flushed South Vietnam. Now, how the hell are we going to come up on that?

Over dinner, the three men drank the president’s best wine, a ’57 Château Lafite Rothschild. (A rare event, noted the abstemious but ever observant Haldeman. The president almost always saved the finest vintages for himself, the bottles discreetly wrapped in a white linen napkin by his valet, while others were served California vin ordinaire.)

Haldeman soberly recorded in his diary that night, “The P kept interrupting Henry all through the discussion. He obviously was all cranked up and wasn’t listening to the details.… The real basic problem boils down to the question of whether Thieu can be sold on it and if he doesn’t buy it, there’s no option but to flush him, because we can’t turn down the offer: we’re trapped now.” Haldeman’s entry for the next day reads, “Both the P and Henry are realizing in the cold gray light of dawn today that they still have a plan that can fall apart … although Henry’s convinced that he’s got it settled and that it will work out and that we can talk Thieu into it.”

On October 18, Nixon sent Kissinger to Saigon carrying a handwritten note in which the president pledged his devotion to Thieu and the survival of South Vietnam as a free country. Over the next seventy-two hours, Kissinger tried to convince Thieu to sign the Paris Peace Accords. It was futile. Communication between the two men broke down. So did the secure communications system in the embassy, forcing Kissinger to use a bulky scrambling machine in Ambassador Bunker’s bedroom to send increasingly frantic bulletins to Haig. Coding and decoding their conversations took hours; their messages overlapped; their signals were crossed; anger and frustration between Kissinger and his military aide mounted.

* * *

On October 22, Haldeman recorded: “The Vietnam deal blew up this morning. Thieu stonewalled Henry. We’re back in the soup.”

Kissinger wrote in a cable from Saigon that day: “Thieu has just rejected the entire plan or any modification of it and refuses to discuss any further negotiations”; he demanded instead “total withdrawal of North Vietnamese forces, and total self-determination of South Vietnam.”

“It is hard to exaggerate the toughness of Thieu’s position. His demands verge on insanity,” Kissinger wrote in a second message. “He stated that we have been colluding with Moscow and Peking for months against him.”

The ambassador sent a third report. Thieu had said, “The South Vietnamese people will assume that we have been sold out by the U.S. and that North Vietnam has won the war.… If we accept the document as it stands, we will commit suicide—and I will be committing suicide.”

On October 26, 1972, Kissinger returned to Washington, where he convened an unusual public press conference. In one of the most striking statements in the history of American warfare and diplomacy, he said, “We believe that peace is at hand.”

Nixon, Kissinger, and Haig wrote of this moment in their memoirs.

Nixon: “I knew immediately that our bargaining position with the North Vietnamese would be seriously eroded and our problem of bringing Thieu and the South Vietnamese along would be made even more difficult.”

Kissinger: “‘Peace is at hand’ would provide a handy symbol of governmental duplicity in the continued bitter atmosphere of the Vietnam debate.”

Haig: “The President regarded Kissinger’s gaffe as a disaster.”

* * *

Richard Nixon was reelected president of the United States on Tuesday, November 7, 1972. Though it was the first election in which eighteen-year-olds could vote, the turnout was a mere 55 percent, one of the lowest recorded in the twentieth century. Nearly thirty-four million eligible voters did not bother to cast a ballot for president. But neither the spreading stain of Watergate nor the bloodshed in Vietnam stopped the second-greatest landslide in the history of the presidency. Nixon took forty-nine of the fifty states and won 60.7 percent of the popular vote to McGovern’s 37.5 percent.

At 2:30 a.m. on Wednesday, Nixon ordered up some bacon and eggs from the White House mess for himself, Haldeman, and Colson. They had a quiet celebration. Later that day, he sent Haig to Saigon to hand-deliver a letter for Nguyen Van Thieu.

Dear Mr. President:

On this day after my reelection I wish to reopen our dialogue about the draft agreement to end the war.… For you to pursue what appears to be your present course … would play into the hands of the enemy and would have extremely grave consequences for both our peoples and it would be disaster for yours.

Not long thereafter, Thieu’s ambassador to the United States, Tran Kim Phuong, came to see Henry Kissinger in the White House. “Your Government has managed to enrage the President almost beyond belief,” Kissinger told him. “Saigon has attacked me as betraying you, and I am attacked here as being a murderer.… Saigon thinks, that clever Kissinger, he wants the Nobel Prize. We will wear him out and get to President Nixon.”

“It is a tragedy,” Kissinger said. “We have produced a horrible tragedy.”