One Man Against the World

GENERAL ABRAMS was outraged. One week after the great waves of B-52 attacks began, a wire service reporter in Saigon named Jack Walsh filed a story saying Abrams was “seeking permission” to bomb enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia. It ran on the front page of the Washington Star on March 25, 1969.

Abrams fired off a top-secret cable to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Earle Wheeler, calling the story a disaster. His fury was mild compared to Richard Nixon’s.

Leaks plague every president, but none more than Nixon. His passion for secrecy equaled his hatred for reporters—a high standard. One month after the story appeared, on April 25, Nixon met with J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General John Mitchell in the Oval Office. Mitchell sat quietly, as was his habit, puffing clouds of smoke from his pipe, listening as Hoover told the president that there was only one way to deal with leakers. And that was to wiretap them. As Nixon put it, wiretapping was “the ultimate weapon.”

Nixon immediately called Henry Kissinger into the meeting and told him to take responsibility for stopping the leaks—starting by tapping members of his own NSC staff. “Henry himself was, in a sense, the target of all this suspicion,” said Kissinger’s aide Peter Rodman. “He was under pressure to show nobody on his staff” was leaking information. “Here he was in this room with J. Edgar Hoover, John Mitchell, Richard Nixon, and they’re saying, ‘Let’s do some taps.’”

On the morning of May 9, Kissinger called Hoover, furious over a front-page story in the New York Times. The reporter, William Beecher, based at the Pentagon, had filed a careful report stating that B-52s had struck several of the enemy’s camps inside Cambodia. No public outcry resulted. No congressional hearings ensued. What was really happening—a massive attack on a neutral nation, concealed by falsified Pentagon reports—did not come out until 1973.*

Kissinger told Hoover that the Times story was “extraordinarily damaging” and “dangerous.” He hoped Hoover would help him “destroy whoever did this” by wiretapping reporters and their suspected sources at the NSC, the Pentagon, and the State Department; Kissinger would select the targets. The taps also remained secret until 1973. Their targets included thirteen American government officials and four newspaper reporters. Daily summaries of the White House wiretaps went from the FBI to the president’s closest aides. This continued for twenty months—until Nixon installed his own secret taping system in the White House.

The taps revealed nothing but “gossip and bullshitting,” as Nixon inelegantly put it on his own tapes. “The tapping was a very, very unproductive thing. I’ve always known that.” But it was Nixon’s first clear step over the line of the law. The president could order warrantless wiretaps against suspected foreign spies. But these were American citizens. Nixon and Kissinger later argued that the tapping was within the realm of the president’s national security powers. It was not.

Some of the targets of the taps had long assumed they were spied upon by foreign intelligence services. “But I didn’t think it was being done by the White House,” said Ambassador William H. Sullivan, a distinguished diplomat who helped Kissinger open a secret channel of communication with the leaders of North Vietnam. When Sullivan later found out that his own government was tapping him, he assumed that Nixon had ordered the surveillance in a fit of drunken rage. “It probably came from Nixon personally,” Sullivan said. “He was given to exploding—particularly in the course of an evening—if he had had a few drinks.” Sober or not, Nixon had “an almost paranoid fear that people were not trustworthy,” said Col. Richard Thomas Kennedy, the National Security Council’s staff director for planning and coordination from 1969 to 1974.

Winston Lord, one of Kissinger’s most devoted aides, was among those tapped. “You cannot square a personal friendship and total trust and intimacy with his authorizing of tapping your phone,” Lord later reflected. “You can’t run a government that way.”

Nixon’s spying on Americans went far beyond these taps, as a National Security Agency history declassified in 2013 disclosed. An NSA “watch list” began growing in October 1967, the result of LBJ’s suspicions that antiwar activists were being financed by Moscow. It kept growing under Nixon: sixteen hundred Americans appeared on the list by 1973. The official NSA history states bluntly that the program was “disreputable if not outright illegal.”

The NSA is a military intelligence service whose charter was to target foreign spies and suspected terrorists, not American citizens who questioned the president’s foreign policies. The watch list was an antecedent to the far more extensive NSA surveillance program ordered by President George W. Bush; the distinct difference was the direct targeting of high-profile American citizens as opposed to high-value foreign terrorists.

The NSA history notes that the watch list grew to include the Washington Post humor columnist Art Buchwald and New York Times journalist Tom Wicker—both fired words, not weapons—“and even politicians such as Frank Church and Howard Baker.” Church and Baker were U.S. senators. Church was a liberal Democrat who sponsored the first major bipartisan moves against the war. Baker was the Republican who famously asked at the 1973 Watergate hearings, “What did the president know and when did he know it?”

The FBI and NSA taps, like so much that would come to torment Nixon, were all about the war abroad and the war at home. No one ever said it better than Haldeman himself: “Without the Vietnam War there would have been no Watergate.”

Nixon’s greatest domestic enemy was the peace movement, which rose with every American who fell in Vietnam. By the end of March 1969, that death toll had reached 33,641, surpassing that of the Korean War.

That same week, Nixon devoted one of his first major public statements to the growing demonstrations on college campuses across the country. “This is the way civilizations begin to die,” Nixon said. “The process is altogether too familiar to those who would survey the wreckage of history: assault and counterassault, one extreme leading to the opposite extreme, the voices of reason and calm discredited.

“As Yeats foresaw, ‘Things fall apart. The center cannot hold,’” he warned. “None of us has the right to suppose it cannot happen here.”

Many knew by heart the next lines of the Irish poet’s “The Second Coming,” written months after World War I ended.

The president and his speechwriters rarely wove poetry into their political rhetoric, but this verse was apt. Nixon really did fear anarchy in America. The American people truly were weary of the blood-dimmed tide. And the four-star generals genuinely feared Nixon would fall apart in the face of the growing opposition to the war.

“The subject of U.S. casualties is being thrown at me at every juncture: in the press, by the Secretary of Defense, at the White House and on the Hill,” General Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote to General Abrams in Saigon on April 3. “I am concerned that decisions could be made in response to strong pressure inside and on the administration to seek a settlement of the war.” Both men had been commanders in World War II under General Eisenhower, who had died the week before, on March 28. Like Ike, they wanted to fight and win. But these were men who had won their stars commanding soldiers in a war of unconditional surrender; their tanks and their artillery and above all their thinking about how to fight a war were rusty. America’s generals were confounded by Asian guerrillas. They did not trust Nixon to lead them to victory. The mistrust was mutual.

The president led a National Security Council meeting the week of Eisenhower’s death, seeking a way to end the American role in the war before the year was over. The CIA’s director, Richard Helms, gave his unvarnished analysis. Two weeks of nonstop B-52 bombing in Cambodia had had no visible impact on North Vietnam’s military capabilities. The leaders of South Vietnam were not leading their own soldiers. It was pointless to send more American troops into battle without a strategy.

“We need a plan,” the president said. “We are working against a time clock. We are talking six to eight months.”

“We must get a sense of urgency in the training of the South Vietnamese,” Nixon continued. “How do we de-Americanize this thing?” De-Americanize meant using Asians to fight Asians while pulling out Americans, changing the color of the anticommunist corpses on the battlefield.

Secretary of Defense Laird thought it was the wrong word, too negative. He said, “What we need is a term—Vietnamizing—to put the emphasis on the right issue.” Thus began Vietnamization, a spur-of-the-moment strategy to turn a hopeless war over to our hapless allies.

“We should agree to total withdrawal of U.S. forces but include very strong conditions which we know may not be met,” Nixon said. “There is no doubt that U.S. forces will be in Vietnam for some time, something like a large military assistance group, but our public posture must be another thing.”

Our public posture must be another thing—that was classic Nixon, the trickster with two faces, as Martin Luther King Jr. had seen him. If sincere, a genius; if not, dangerous.

He would slowly pull American troops out of the Vietnam War—and then try to proclaim peace. As he drew down American forces, he would train and equip the army of South Vietnam. He would send Kissinger in secret to negotiate with Hanoi for a cease-fire. But if that strategy failed, the Communists could be victorious. In the end, “Vietnamization” could doom South Vietnam. And if it failed and Saigon fell, the long war would end in the death of one nation and the disgrace of another.

On April 3, the same day that General Wheeler put his worries about an American withdrawal into words, Kissinger wrote to Nixon: “We must convince the American public that we are eager to settle the war, and Hanoi that we are not so anxious that it can afford to outwait us.”

“Our best course would be a bold move of trying to settle everything at once,” Kissinger proposed. He would sit down in secret with the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, and say that a settlement in Vietnam and a pact on limiting the superpowers’ nuclear arsenals were inextricably linked. He was going to try to enlist the Soviet Union, Hanoi’s most powerful ally, as a partner for peace in Vietnam. If this tactic succeeded, it could alter the course of the Cold War. Kissinger now understood the president’s passion for the big play, the grand bargain.

The President has reviewed the Vietnam situation carefully. He will not be the first American President to lose a war, and he is not prepared to give in to public pressures which would have that practical consequence. The President has therefore decided that he will make one more effort to achieve a reasonable settlement.…

U.S.-Soviet relations are therefore at a crossroads. The President is eager to move into an era of conciliation with the Soviet Union on a broad front. As a sign of this, he is willing to send a high-level delegation to Moscow to agree with the Soviet Union on principles of strategic arms limitations. He is also willing to consider other meetings at even higher levels.

The President will give this effort in Moscow six weeks to succeed.

Kissinger concluded that this was “the only way to end the war quickly and the best way to conclude it honorably.” But he warned Nixon it would work only if the president were prepared “to take tough escalatory steps if Moscow rejects the overture.”

He called the president in Key Biscayne on April 5 to get the go-ahead to meet with the Soviet ambassador. He got it. But Nixon already had determined to “take tough escalatory steps.” Before hearing what the Soviets had to say about strategic nuclear weapons or making plans to withdraw ground troops from Vietnam, he first would increase the military pressure on the enemy. He wanted to apply the stick before dangling the carrot. As a committed cold warrior, he believed that the Communists understood the logic of force far better than the language of reason.

“Even without a reason, we ought to go ahead and crack them pretty hard in the North,” Nixon said. “Crack this one, and crack another one. Plenty of places to hit.… The necessity for the North Vietnamese to know that there’s still a lot of snap left in the old boys is very important. And I don’t know any other way to do it.”

* * *

As Kissinger was talking war and peace with the Soviet ambassador on April 15, Nixon learned that North Korea had shot down an American spy plane in international waters over the Sea of Japan. Thirty-one Americans were killed aboard the navy EC-121 aircraft operated by the National Security Agency. Another newly declassified NSA history and other recently released documents show that the Pentagon proposed to strike back with nuclear weapons.

Nixon first weighed seizing a North Korean ship sailing the high seas under a Dutch flag, which the State Department ruled an act of piracy. “The President said to find a way that international law can be breached,” Haig’s notes from an April 15 conversation with Kissinger read. “The U.S. became a great nation by breaking international law. The President said we certainly have concluded that we won’t just sit here and do nothing.”

But that is what he did—nothing. The next morning, he presided over a full-scale National Security Council session in the White House Cabinet Room, which included the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who rarely attended such meetings. Haig’s notes are the sole record.

General Wheeler reviewed the military options, one of which was to attack North Korea with “Honest John” missiles, artillery rockets carrying atomic warheads with a payload of thirty kilotons each, roughly equal to two and a half Hiroshimas. This act “would trigger retaliation,” the general noted. The prospect of that attack, and the retaliation, gave everyone pause. The United States had fought the Korean War before.

“That is a very tough one to bite,” Kissinger told the president after the meeting. “We might have to go to tactical nuclears.”

Nixon stared into the abyss of nuclear war and turned away. He considered other acts of war, such as bombing North Korea’s military bases. As Haig recollected in a 2007 oral history for the Nixon Presidential Library, the hawks on the NSC staff recommended “immediate military action against the North by taking out one of their airfields, and, at the same time, to tell Moscow that our toleration days were over. This included the determination to settle Vietnam immediately, with or without the Soviet Union and if the Soviet Union were to join the other side, we were prepared for that contingency as well.” This, like the nuclear option, raised the possibility of a Third World War.

Kissinger, as he often did, played a double game. He said he sided with the hawks, but he warned the president that Secretary of State Rogers would openly oppose an attack, a revolt that the new administration could ill afford. That left Nixon with no option but a meager show of force: sending a flotilla of navy ships into the Sea of Japan. It was only a show. North Korea went unpunished. Nixon had frozen in the face of a Communist attack. “We do not do a thing with 31 lives missing,” he sighed.

The president later regretted this decision bitterly. Haig recounted, “Nixon told me it was the worst mistake of his presidency not to respond early on in a decisive way to convince both Moscow and whoever else, Hanoi, Pyongyang, or any one of the camp that this was a different America.”

One consequence of the EC-121 calamity was Nixon’s near-complete loss of faith in his secretary of state, Bill Rogers. Thereafter, Kissinger became the president’s diplomat in chief, opening secret negotiations with the Soviets, the North Vietnamese, and, through interlocutors, the Chinese in 1969. Rogers was to know nothing about such talks.

“Nixon did not trust the State Department,” said Kissinger’s Russia hand, Peter Rodman. “There were a number of issues—whether it was Vietnam or relations with the Soviets—where the first few things that Rogers did were the exact opposite of what Nixon wanted.… Nixon decided that he would rather do these things himself. He had Henry there to do it. Henry and he had an ideological affinity. They both looked at the world in the same way.”

“The price you pay,” Rodman said, “is a demoralization of the rest of the government.”

* * *

Nixon had another reason for wanting complete control over the State Department. It had nothing to do with diplomacy. It was about dollars. The wealthiest Nixon campaign contributors were well aware that “ambassadorships were being sold to the highest bidders,” said Samuel F. Hart, a Foreign Service officer for twenty-seven years who himself served as an ambassador under President Ronald Reagan.

This practice did not start with Nixon, but it was during his presidency that it became blatant and dangerous—another step down the road to Watergate.

Vincent de Roulet arrived as the newly appointed ambassador to Jamaica in 1969, sailing in on his ninety-foot yacht, Patrina, soon to be joined by seventeen of his racehorses. He was a ne’er-do-well who’d married rich; his mother-in-law, an immensely wealthy heiress, was a major Nixon fund-raiser. He had contributed $75,000 to the 1968 Nixon campaign (a sum equal to $513,000 today).

The chief political officer at the American embassy in Jamaica, Kenneth Rogers, remembered Ambassador de Roulet’s tenure as a series of political disasters and racist jibes, ending only when the government expelled him and the president of Jamaica told the U.S. Department of State that “Vincent De Roulet was no longer ‘persona grata.’ He was not permitted to return.”

Nixon appointed Turner B. Shelton, a crony and contributor of long standing, as ambassador to Nicaragua. Shelton had been the American consul general in Nassau, the Bahamas, where Nixon was a frequent visitor during the 1960s. His appointment shocked the career Foreign Service officers who served with him.

“I think he had something on them, on the White House and on Nixon,” said James R. Cheek, a senior American envoy who became President Clinton’s ambassador to Argentina. Strong evidence suggests that Shelton was a go-between for secret cash contributions to Nixon from donors, including the deeply eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, who sojourned in the Bahamas and moved to the Nicaraguan capital during Shelton’s tenures.

Shelton had “contributed heavily to the Richard Nixon political trajectory over many years,” said Charles Anthony Gillespie Jr., later the American ambassador to Chile under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush. “Turner B. Shelton was called a Hollywood producer. Now, I’m not an expert on Turner B. Shelton, but my understanding is that what Turner really produced best were what were called ‘blue’ movies. Whatever else he did … he contributed chunks of this money to Richard Nixon’s campaigns over the years. He obviously merited an appointment and he got the Embassy in Nicaragua.”

Shelton’s shady reputation was exceeded by his devotion to the crooked dictator who ran Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza. “Shelton didn’t want any of our cables or reports to go in to Washington,” said Ambassador Cheek, then Shelton’s underling at the embassy. “Somoza’s corruption and suppression and disappearing people … was supposed to be all censored out.”

“He was very close to Somoza,” Cheek said—so close that the dictator put the American ambassador’s image on newly issued Nicaraguan currency, the twenty-córdoba bill—but “Shelton’s toadying to Somoza and almost worshiping him didn’t bother the White House at all.”

At the start of the Nixon administration, Sam Hart was based at the American embassy in Costa Rica. “We had a career Foreign Service officer as ambassador there,” he recalled. “He was told that he was not going to be kept on, and was moved out, anticipating the arrival of Mrs. Ruth Farkas. She and her husband owned Alexander’s Department Store in New York and pledged a quarter of a million dollars to Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign in ’68”—equal to almost two million dollars today.

But “word got out that Ruth Farkas was not coming, because she and her husband had major-league problems with the IRS,” Ambassador Hart said. “And even Richard Nixon couldn’t fix that.” Nixon’s personal lawyer and political bagman, Herbert Kalmbach, fixed things for Farkas: after she pledged three hundred thousand dollars to his ’72 reelection campaign, the president appointed her ambassador to Luxembourg, a far more luxurious post.*

The going price rose as the reelection neared. “Anybody who wants to be an ambassador must at least give $250,000,” the president instructed Haldeman in June 1971.

This conduct had consequences. Kalmbach later pleaded guilty to selling ambassadorships for Nixon’s benefit. He had several million dollars in unspent campaign cash on deposit in 1969, and some of that money wound up in a secret reelection fund Nixon began building shortly after he first took office. The cash helped finance an undercover private eye who worked for the White House, Jack Caulfield, who began spying on Nixon’s political enemies in July 1969—days after Nixon commanded his aides to activate “dirty tricks” against the president’s political opponents, as Haldeman’s diary records. And three years later, some of the slush funds Kalmbach controlled would serve as hush money for the Watergate burglars.

* * *

Contributors who wanted something for their money often were received at the “Florida White House,” in Key Biscayne, or the “Western White House,” also known as LaCasa Pacifica, in San Clemente, California. Nixon escaped to these retreats frequently for long weekends and, increasingly, for weeks on end.

The Key Biscayne compound contained five well-appointed waterfront bungalows. Nixon flew there fifty-nine times as president, spending 198 days and nights. He passed almost as much time at San Clemente. Both of Nixon’s hideaways were built with help from C. G. “Bebe” Rebozo, a Cuban American banker, and their mutual friend Bob Abplanalp, known as the spray valve king. Both men had been Nixon’s financiers for years. Nixon liked to bend an elbow with Rebozo whenever time permitted, relaxing his mind, sometimes past the realm of reason. When Nixon really wanted to unwind, he and his drinking buddy Bebe took a helicopter from Key Biscayne to Walker’s Cay, Abplanalp’s private island in the Bahamas. What went on in the cay stayed in the cay.

San Clemente was far more formal, an elegant ten-room mansion built in the 1920s, on a twenty-eight-acre estate with flowering gardens and a seven-hole golf course overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It stood forty miles south of the tiny town where Nixon was raised, but light-years away from its dusty poverty.

Nixon would reside there for a month at a time. He liked to invite world leaders and Hollywood celebrities, laying charms on conservative stars such as John Wayne and Clint Eastwood and Governor Ronald Reagan of California, though he regarded the governor as an amiable dimwit with no political future. Nixon summoned his senior military and diplomatic officers to San Clemente, where they delivered the latest grim reports on Vietnam. He frequently ordered White House aides to fly in from Washington on a moment’s notice to confer on the crisis of the day.

He tried to relax in his retreats, but he remained a restless man. Aides who met with Nixon in California and Florida often found him seething in self-imposed isolation. While light sparkled on the water and warm winds stirred the air, Nixon drew the blinds against the sun in Key Biscayne, and set a fireplace blazing in an air-conditioned room sealed off from the Pacific breezes in San Clemente. He sat in the shadows, communing with the only man in whom he could confide: himself.

“He had no hobbies,” said Alexander Butterfield, a senior Nixon aide, one of only four men who knew about the president’s secret taping system at the White House, installed in February 1971. “The Presidency was his hobby. He meditated, he thought, he pondered. He worked on his yellow pad. He thought things over.… He seemed to me preoccupied with the Presidency … preoccupied with his place in history, with his Presidency as history would see it.”

* * *

Nixon believed beyond doubt that history would record his presidency as a great turning point. America would either be resurrected as the world’s singular superpower or fall on the sword of Vietnam.

“This country could run itself domestically without a President,” Nixon told the most prominent presidential biographer of the era, Theodore White. “You need a President for foreign policy.”

His Cabinet and his White House staff soon realized that Nixon cared little about domestic affairs, least of all housing, health, education, welfare, and civil rights. Unless an issue could be leveraged for political advantage leading to Nixon’s reelection, it was a waste of time. “He believed in nothing,” said James Farmer, assistant secretary at the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and one among very few black Nixon appointees. “He was neither moral nor immoral, but was amoral; he made decisions based on how they would affect him politically, not based on whether they were right or wrong.”

Nixon made a halfhearted attempt to create a Domestic Council that could be a counterpart to the National Security Council. Much of the work initially fell to his White House aide Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a future Democratic senator from New York. But Nixon agreed wholeheartedly when Moynihan, in despair, told him he “can’t have a Domestic Program.” The president had defined no domestic agenda; his Cabinet officers were in constant conflict over everything from economics to education; Congress rejected more than two-thirds of the new legislation proposed by the White House in 1969. The president concurred that it was “politically impossible” to tackle the nation’s domestic problems in his first term. Far better, he concluded, “to get rid of things that don’t work, and try to build up the few that do.”

Getting rid of things was the heart of Nixon’s domestic policy—especially erasing Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs for the poor and politically dispossessed. When Moynihan advised that the issue of race relations could benefit from “benign neglect,” the phrase fit the president’s thinking perfectly. But these were ill-chosen words. “Regarding domestic policy, which Nixon dismissed as ‘building outhouses in Peoria,’ his disdain for the subject did not, alas, produce benign neglect,” the conservative columnist George Will noted. It proved malign and malevolent. The war on poverty proved to be more of a war on the poor.

“If it’s called racism, so be it,” Nixon told Haldeman; he said he could not communicate with black people, “except with Uncle Toms.” The blacks, the liberals, the college kids and their professors would not vote for him no matter what he did, Nixon thought, so it was pointless to appease them.

Nixon and Attorney General Mitchell pushed constantly for Congress to pass war-on-crime laws (harsher drug penalties, expanded wiretapping statutes), and they won some of those battles. But with few exceptions, new laws that changed America passed in spite of Nixon, not because he fought for them. He signed sweeping legislation such as the National Environmental Policy Act with gritted teeth; he believed “that we’re catering to the left in all of this and that we shouldn’t be. They’re the ones that care about the environment, and that they’re trying to use the environmental issue as a means of destroying the system.” The president spent far more energy trying to destroy the cornerstones of the Great Society, particularly LBJ’s grandest endeavor for the poor, the Office of Economic Opportunity. He ordered two young eager-beaver staffers, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld (two future secretaries of defense), to attack the OEO, which included Head Start, for schooling young children; Legal Services, providing lawyers to the poor; VISTA, or Volunteers in Service to America, created as a domestic Peace Corps; and a wide array of health and education projects.

Rumsfeld was Cheney’s boss at the OEO. “He didn’t know anything about the war on poverty,” Cheney said, laughing, in a 2000 oral history interview, shortly before he became vice president. Neither, it must be said, did Cheney.

Nixon gave these men their first taste of executive power, and they liked it. They were proud foot soldiers in an army of young conservatives doing battle for the president.

“The Nixon administration came in disliking OEO intensely and I could never understand why Don took the job,” said Frank Carlucci, another future secretary of defense recruited by Rumsfeld. “They kept calling me and telling me to kill it, to kill this or kill that.”

Carlucci believed the OEO had achieved one major success: “to provide upward mobility for the people who were poverty-stricken and in the low-income brackets. An awful lot of the leadership came up through these programs,” leaders who were not white men, “including people who became subsequently members of Congress.” A program that helped to produce black leaders was anathema to Nixon; the informal compendium of his political opponents that came to be known as “the enemies list” contained every black member of Congress. The “OEO was the enemy,” Carlucci concluded. “There’s no question there was a very strong emotional feeling on the part of the president. He did not like the Great Society.”

Nixon found fighting that enemy far easier than the one he faced half a world away.

* * *

“I want to end this war,” President Nixon said in his first televised address to the nation about Vietnam, on May 14, 1969. He said he would not accept a peace settlement amounting to “a disguised American defeat.” Nor would he try “to impose a purely military solution on the battlefield.”

So how would he end the war or win the peace? His speech was “totally unintelligible to the ordinary guy,” Haldeman wrote in his secret diary. Nixon still searched for a strategy.

“Our fighting men are not going to be worn down,” the president vowed. But the American people were worn out by four years of lethal combat; public support for the war was falling. As Nixon spoke, one of the more vicious clashes of the war was raging. The Battle of Hamburger Hill left 113 American soldiers dead and 627 wounded, all for control of a strategically pointless mountain.

His audience had heard empty words, and Nixon sensed that the speech was a flop. Six days later, on the Senate floor, Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, the slain president’s brother and sole political heir, spoke in language that seemed clearer to the citizenry. He called it “senseless and irresponsible to continue to send our young men to their deaths to capture hills and positions that have no relation to ending the military conflict.”

The president convened a joint meeting with his Cabinet and the National Security Council the next day to make his position perfectly clear: North Vietnam was hell-bent on victory, and he would never let that happen. “We are talking to an enemy whose first objective is not peace,” he said. “We need to threaten that if they don’t talk they will suffer.” The path to peace would have to be blazed by bombs.

“What is on the line is more than South Vietnam,” Nixon warned: America’s standing in the world was in peril. “If a great power fails to meet its aims, it ceases to be a great power,” he said. “The greatness fades away.”