NIXON WAS sleepless, soul-searching. His demonic insomnia returned. “I don’t think he ever slept,” Haig recalled. He dealt with it at night by drinking. The president by day fell into a dark state of portents and omens. Talking with Haldeman about past presidents’ auras of omnipotence, he suddenly started planning the precise details of his own funeral.
He had predicted that 1970 would be the worst year of his first term. He again proved prescient. The president’s popularity plummeted eleven points in public opinion polls taken in March. The endless war was the cause. The toll Vietnam was taking was measured not only in military caskets but in wounds of the mind; an increasing number of veterans were shell-shocked or heroin-addicted. When they returned, they found the war had come home with them, a battle within the American body politic. And all the while, Americans were still dying in combat, a thousand every month.
On March 19, 1970, Kissinger told a trusted colleague about a brutal telephone conversation he had just held with the president. Kissinger told Nixon that “there wasn’t much we could do militarily” to force North Vietnam to settle or surrender. The president “went through the roof.” He demanded a new set of war plans—a “hard option”—and he wanted it on his desk that day.
Kissinger became frantic. He had been meeting daily with the nation’s military and intelligence chiefs. LBJ’s October 1968 decision to stop bombing North Vietnam had frustrated and infuriated them. But no one had any hard options. No one had any new ideas.
The written notes of a White House war council convened on March 23 convey their conundrum: “Mr. Helms said that if the enemy believed we might bomb North Vietnam, something might be achieved. Mr. Kissinger asked how this message could be conveyed to North Vietnam. General Wheeler said it would be clear if we actually did some bombing.”
Then came a coup out of nowhere. That week, a right-wing military junta took power in Cambodia. Battle-hardened Communist forces started moving toward the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, two hundred miles northwest of American military headquarters in Saigon.
The Cambodian army was hopeless—“totally unprepared for combat” against the Communists. “It lacked experienced leaders, corruption was prevalent among its officers, and pay was low,” according to a recently declassified American military history. Its principal active duty in the past decade had been draining swamps and digging ditches.
A clash between these mismatched armies was certain. Cambodians and Vietnamese had hated one another—politically, tribally, racially—for centuries. Soon the bodies of four hundred massacred Vietnamese were found floating down the Mekong River in Cambodia.
Nixon instinctively embraced the right-wing leader of the Cambodian coup, a general no one knew well, but with a name no one could forget: Lon Nol. “President Nixon asked me to draft several personal Nixon-to–Lon Nol telegrams containing rather extravagant expressions of friendship and support,” recalled Marshall Green, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia. “I was concerned that Lon Nol would read into these messages a degree of U.S. military support and commitment that exceeded what our government could deliver on—given Congressional attitudes in particular. I also regarded Lon Nol as lacking the qualities needed to lead his country out of its mess.”
As the mess deepened daily in Cambodia, Nixon ordered the CIA into the fight. “I want Helms to develop & implement a plan for maximum assistance to pro-U.S. elements in Cambodia,” he instructed Kissinger in writing. That meant untraceable money and guns, preferably Swiss gold and an arsenal of Communist-bloc weapons such as AK-47 assault rifles, which the Cambodians could claim they had captured from the Vietcong.
The CIA director promised to support Nixon’s “military effort against the Viet Cong in Cambodia … by the provision of covert economic and political support.” This proved difficult in the short run. Cambodia, with no American ambassador, no CIA station chief, and no CIA or military intelligence officers on the ground, was terra incognita as a war zone. The American embassy was in the hands of a few Foreign Service professionals—diplomats, not warriors.
Casting around the world, Helms called upon John Stein, a veteran CIA officer with plenty of paramilitary experience in Africa but none in Indochina. Stein reported back to the CIA and the White House shortly after his arrival in Cambodia. He got straight to the point: “Here was another small Southeast Asian country where nobody knew what was going on.” The new Cambodian regime “had come to the conclusion that somebody had to help them, and that this somebody was the U.S. With more fighting on their hands, their morale needed bucking up. The only way at the moment to give this bucking up was to give the AK-47 package and provide a Swiss bank account.”
Nixon approved fifteen hundred assault rifles and ten million dollars in untraceable CIA cash for Lon Nol, a down payment on a far greater commitment coming soon.
* * *
That same week, America’s central outpost in Laos faced a deadly siege by a gathering of North Vietnamese soldiers at the CIA’s mountain redoubt in Long Tieng. If it fell, Laos itself could collapse into chaos or face the threat of Communist control. The crisis demanded immediate action but offered no easy solution. Kissinger had to plead for the president’s attention.
“Poor K,” Haldeman noted sardonically in his March 24 diary entry, “no one will pay attention to his wars, and it looks like Laos is falling.”
On March 25, Nixon met for three hours with Kissinger, Helms, and key members of the National Security Council. The president, Kissinger noted drily, wasn’t inclined to let Laos go down the drain. Helms was blunt: the United States had to ask the right-wing military junta in Thailand to send battalions of troops into Laos, widening the covert war without telling Congress.
The CIA director wrote for the record, “Apologizing for my vulgarity, I told the president that I realized this was a ‘shitty’ decision to ask a President of the United States to make, but in light of all the factors it seemed a desirable thing to do. Nixon commented that it had been necessary to do a number of unpleasant things recently and that this was one more that could be taken on as well.”
The next afternoon, Kissinger called Nixon in Key Biscayne, at the start of a four-day Easter weekend.
“The Thai battalion, are we going to get them in there?” Nixon asked.
“That’s done,” Kissinger replied.
“There’s going to be no announcement,” the president said. “We are just going to do it. We don’t have to explain it.” With that, Nixon tried to take his mind off life-and-death issues. He spent the next three days sailing, sunbathing, and drinking in Key Biscayne and the Bahamas with Bebe Rebozo.
Kissinger sent an attention-getting intelligence report to Key Biscayne on Friday morning, March 27: North Vietnam had placed its military forces on alert in Cambodia. Nixon’s immediate response was to order the air force to step up the bombing of Communist targets in Cambodia. His nightmare was that Cambodia would fall, providing a permanent base for the armed forces of North Vietnam. If Laos fell, too, American soldiers would face Communist forces on three fronts. The United States, with all its military might, could lose the war, the American embassy in Saigon a garrison encircled by Asian guerrillas.
The political situation at home was no better than the military situation abroad.
Secretary of Defense Laird warned Nixon on Tuesday, March 31, that the Senate was prepared to cut off funds for American air strikes in Laos and Cambodia. Nixon responded that he would “fight such a limitation to the death.”
The Senate also rejected the nomination of Judge G. Harrold Carswell, the second of two third-rate conservatives whom Attorney General Mitchell had personally selected for Nixon to elevate to the Supreme Court. A ranking Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee famously said in support of Carswell, “There are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they?” Not on the Supreme Court, the Senate decreed. Nixon privately blamed Mitchell for the politically tone-deaf nominations—the attorney general’s prior selection, Judge Clement Haynsworth, was rejected for his record of racism—but he took his wrath out on the Senate.
“Multiple unsolvable problems bearing in,” Haldeman noted.
Nixon responded to the Senate’s resistance with unalloyed rage. “Set up political attack,” he commanded Haldeman. “Have to declare war.”
The president ordered two retired New York City police officers, overseen by Ehrlichman, to conduct undercover investigations of his Senate opponents—notably, Teddy Kennedy, Edmund Muskie, Birch Bayh, and William Proxmire, four prominent Democrats who fought Nixon’s military policies and his Supreme Court nominees—as part of what Nixon called “an all-out hatchet job on the Democrat leaders,” including the use of the Internal Revenue Service to investigate their finances.
The ex-cops Nixon hired were Jack Caulfield, a member of the White House staff handling “special assignments” such as launching IRS audits, and Tony Ulasewicz, who was paid off the books with secret 1968 campaign cash doled out by Herb Kalmbach, Nixon’s political bagman. “Tough Tony” trailed Kennedy for nearly two years. The Department of Dirty Tricks was on the case.
* * *
On April 4, 1970, Kissinger reconvened in Paris with Le Duc Tho, who grasped America’s strategic problems as acutely as Kissinger and described them with greater accuracy.
“We have no intention of using Laos to put pressure on you in North Vietnam,” Kissinger falsely asserted. The CIA and its Lao tribesmen were running cross-border sabotage attacks into North Vietnam at that very moment. “As for Cambodia, we have no intention of using Cambodia to bring pressure on Vietnam.” That was not true.
Le Duc Tho responded: “This does not conform with reality. The Vietnamese have a saying that you can’t use a basket to cover a lion or an elephant.”
“I like that,” Kissinger replied.
“It is quite true,” said Le Duc Tho. “While you are suffering defeat in Laos and Vietnam, how can you fight in Cambodia? You have sowed the wind, and you must reap the whirlwind.”
By April 19, the Communists were twenty miles from the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. President Nixon, in Hawaii to greet the astronauts returning from the nearly fatal Apollo 13 moon mission, was briefed by Adm. John McCain, the commander in chief for the Pacific. McCain, whose son was still a prisoner of war, captivated Nixon with a hair-raising report. The president ordered McCain to return with him to San Clemente on April 20 and meet with Kissinger.
The gist of McCain’s briefing was grim: if the Communists took Cambodia, South Vietnam might be next, and the war would be lost. McCain emphasized “the need for speed in view of the precarious situation.” He thought the United States should send every weapon it could find to Phnom Penh, South Vietnam’s troops should attack across the Cambodian border, and squadrons of B-52s should bombard the Communists.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff claimed to have located the enemy’s headquarters inside Cambodia: what the United States was calling the Central Office for South Vietnam, or COSVN. American war planners envisioned it as the Communists’ nerve center, a bamboo Pentagon concealed beneath the jungle’s canopy. They thought that if you could blow up COSVN, you could cripple the enemy’s capacity to command and control attacks on American forces in South Vietnam. And McCain said the United States should destroy it and win the damn war.
Nixon’s meeting with Admiral McCain amid the blooming springtime gardens of the Western White House was a fatal turning point. American boots were about to hit the ground in the bomb-cratered wastelands of eastern Cambodia.
Nixon, Kissinger, and McCain “discussed possible cross-border attacks into Cambodia,” reads a unique account in a recently declassified Joint Chiefs history. “If such operations were mounted, the President asked, what would be the best mix of US and South Vietnamese forces? Or should only [South Vietnamese] troops be used, with the United States furnishing air and artillery support from within South Vietnam? Admiral McCain assured the President that plans were being prepared on an urgent basis and would be submitted to the Joint Chiefs of Staff as quickly as possible. The President … already sanctioned the provision of financial support to the Cambodian Government as well as the supply of captured weapons for the Cambodian forces.”
The Joint Chiefs quickly assembled tons of weapons for the Cambodian army. Scouring the arsenals of every American ally in Asia for captured Communist weapons—Indonesia was especially helpful in supplying fifteen thousand AK-47 assault rifles—dealing in black markets to procure the proper bullets, and stripping shelves of carbine rifles from stockpiles in Saigon, American military officers in Saigon assembled ten packages, each sufficient to arm a thousand soldiers, containing eight hundred carbines, fifty pistols, thirty light machine guns, one hundred submachine guns, thirty rocket launchers, twenty light mortars, and ammunition.
That was the easy part. Now the president needed a plan for the invasion of Cambodia and the destruction of COSVN.
But Nixon never understood that COSVN was not a place. It could not be bombed. It had no address. It was a small mobile group of Communist officers. They could be located only by the radio signals they transmitted. Yet even that location was fixed only by the antennae they used for their transmissions, which could be miles away from the men who were on the air.
And the enemy always seemed to know when the B-52s were coming. North Vietnam’s intelligence on America’s intentions was far better than America’s intelligence on its enemy’s plans.
* * *
Nixon did not sleep for more than an hour or two on the night of Tuesday, April 21. Before dawn, he dictated a disturbing note to Kissinger: “I think we need a bold move in Cambodia, assuming that I feel the way today (it is five AM, April 22) at our meeting as I feel this morning to show that we stand with Lon Nol. I do not believe he is going to survive. There is, however, some chance that he might and in any event we must do something.”
The aforementioned meeting was a National Security Council conclave. Nixon demanded that no staff attend and that no one take notes. But Admiral Moorer and General Wheeler left detailed accounts of the meeting in the files of the Joint Chiefs.
Nixon immediately authorized large cross-border attacks by South Vietnam into Cambodia, with support from American artillery and fighter jets. He said that he had not yet decided the question of American ground forces attacking Cambodia.
The war council was split three ways. Laird and Rogers wanted the invasion limited in depth and restricted to the soldiers of South Vietnam. Kissinger favored an attack on the two Cambodian sanctuaries, in areas called the Parrot’s Beak and the Fishhook—but without American ground troops. The military wanted an assault on the Communists in Cambodia and the spectral COSVN headquarters, with American soldiers leading the charge. So did Vice President Spiro Agnew, whose personal qualities included a lack of tact. Agnew said he objected to “all the pussyfooting.” Nixon resented the implication that he was not being tough enough. The “pussyfooting” remark provoked Nixon to go for an all-out attack with American ground forces.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff never drew up a formal plan for the Cambodian operation. There wasn’t enough time. But three of Kissinger’s most loyal NSC staff members, Winston Lord, Tony Lake, and Roger Morris, knew of the coming invasion. They warned Kissinger that it would create “a political storm here, as it would be the most shocking spur to fears of widening involvement in U.S. ground combat in Southeast Asia.”*
At 7:20 a.m. on April 24, Nixon, still sleepless, summoned Kissinger, Moorer, and Helms to the White House. In a fury, the president said that Secretary of State Rogers and Secretary of Defense Laird were sabotaging plans for the invasion. “P is moving too rashly without thinking through the consequences,” Haldeman noted in his diary that evening. Kissinger called Helms to ask him what he thought of Nixon’s decisions. Helms replied, “It seemed to me that if he is prepared for the fallout, then it is the thing to do. He obviously was.”
“It is worth it?” Kissinger asked. Helms hoped so.
Rogers and Laird continued to object to the invasion of Cambodia until April 28. That morning, the president ordered them into the Oval Office, where the attorney general laid down the law: there would be no arguments, no dissent. In silence, they were dismissed from the room. Mitchell wrote: “The President stated that the purpose of the meeting was to advise those present of the decisions he had reached.… .There was no discussion.”
* * *
On Thursday, April 30, after another night with one hour of sleep, the president made a nationally televised speech to the American people announcing the invasion of Cambodia.
“This is not an invasion of Cambodia,” he said, a classic Nixon contradiction.
“I say tonight: All the offers and approaches made previously remain on the conference table whenever Hanoi is ready to negotiate seriously. But if the enemy response to our most conciliatory offers for peaceful negotiation continues to be to increase its attacks and humiliate and defeat us, we shall react accordingly.
“My fellow Americans, we live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home. We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last 500 years. Even here in the United States, great universities are being systematically destroyed. Small nations all over the world find themselves under attack from within and from without.
“If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.”
Secretary of State Rogers was in his hideaway office on the seventh floor of the State Department headquarters that night with Marshall Green, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia. Green remembered: “As Nixon concluded his maudlin remarks about the US otherwise appearing as a pitiful, helpless giant, Rogers snapped off the TV set, muttering, ‘The kids are going to retch.’ He clearly foresaw how the speech was going to inflame the campuses. That was several days before Kent State.”