THE MORNING after the speech was May Day. The storm already had started on the nation’s campuses. College newspapers called for a national student strike. A new march on Washington was set for the coming week.
After suffering another insomniac night, Nixon went to the Pentagon, where the Joint Chiefs showed him maps detailing where Communist forces occupied Cambodia. They depicted four major sanctuaries far beyond the targets of the invasion. “I made a very uncharacteristic on-the-spot decision,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs. “I said, ‘I want to take out all those sanctuaries. Make whatever plans are necessary, and then just do it. Knock them all out so that they can’t be used against us. Ever.’”
To some of the officers at the Pentagon, the president seemed unhinged. Haldeman concurred. “P was really beat,” he wrote in his diary a few hours later. “Really needs some good rest.”
Leaving the briefing, trailed in the lobby of the Pentagon by a few reporters with tape recorders, Nixon compared American soldiers (“They’re the greatest”) with American students (“these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses”), a statement that he later realized only “added fuel to the fires of dissent.”
On Monday, May 4, Haldeman went to Nixon’s Executive Office Building hideout with some bad news. “Something just came over the wires about a demonstration at Kent State,” Haldeman said. “The National Guard opened fire, and some students were shot.”
“Are they dead?” Nixon asked.
“I’m afraid so,” Haldeman said. Two protesters and two passersby had been killed, and nine injured, by the salvo of gunfire at the Ohio campus.
Haldeman’s diary recorded the president’s distress: “He’s very disturbed. Afraid his decision set it off.… Really sad to see this added to his worries about the war. He’s out on a tough limb, and he knows it. This makes it a lot worse, as he has to take the heat for having caused it.… Obviously realizes, but won’t openly admit, his ‘bums’ remark very harmful.”
In a telephone conversation later that day with Kissinger, Nixon stiffened his spine. “We have to stand hard as a rock,” he said. “If countries begin to be run by children, God help us.”
Kissinger played the tough guy: “K. wants to just let the students go for a couple of weeks, then move in and clobber them,” Haldeman recorded. How they could be hit with anything harder than the bullets of the National Guard was not the question: “K. very concerned that we not appear to give in in any way. Thinks P. can really clobber them if we just wait for Cambodian success.”
* * *
“The Cambodian incursion was an unmitigated disaster,” begins a National Security Agency history of the battle, declassified in 2013.
“The most famous (or infamous) event of the incursion was the attempt to ‘get COSVN,’” the NSA history reads. In April, the small, mobile Communist intelligence headquarters’ radio antennae were located just inside the Cambodian border, about ninety miles northwest of Saigon, targeted by U.S. aircraft equipped with a multitude of electronic components. But COSVN was constantly on the move—“usually to get out of the way of B-52 strikes (which, as we know, were predicted with great accuracy by North Vietnamese intelligence), and repeated air strikes over the years had never succeeded in doing any effective damage,” the NSA report records.
William Lloyd Stearman, later Kissinger’s in-house expert on Hanoi and the longest-serving staffer in the history of the National Security Council, remembered vividly when he first heard that Nixon was going after COSVN, in the early hours of the invasion. “By the time I had stopped laughing, I almost felt like crying,” Stearman said. “I then wondered who in the hell had briefed the President on this.”
It turned out to be Kissinger.
“COSVN was a floating crap game,” Stearman said. “There was simply no way you were going to be able to go in and capture COSVN. What, I wondered, did he think COSVN was all about anyway? COSVN mostly consisted of a bunch of huts and some files which could be moved quickly.”
“The press got hold of the COSVN story” within two weeks, the NSA report continued, and it “became common knowledge to the American people.” The pressure from the White House and the Pentagon “to locate and overrun (or at least bomb) COSVN became considerable” as the press picked up the theme of an elusive enemy. “But the military system moved too slowly. COSVN was able to evade every B-52 strike and every ground maneuver.”
After five years of combat, American military commanders still did not comprehend that SIGINT (signals intelligence, the NSA’s unique capability) could fix the location only of the enemy’s antenna: “The transmitter, to say nothing of the headquarters itself, could be miles away. Moreover, the military targeting system seemed inflexible—SIGINT reports that COSVN had pulled up stakes from location A and was now at location B were not enough to get a strike cancelled or diverted.”
The NSA report concludes, “American bombs tore up miles of jungle, and troops floundered through a trackless quagmire of Cambodia in pursuit of COSVN. They never caught up with the headquarters, which moved safely to central Cambodia ahead of the advancing allies.” The invasion killed many enemy soldiers and destroyed large stocks of their weapons and rice. But it did not change the course of the war.
Protest against the invasion erupted nationwide—not only students but university presidents, not only scraggly leftists but Wall Street lawyers, not merely three NSC staffers but hundreds of State Department employees now openly opposed Nixon’s conduct of the war. With a national day of protest (Saturday, May 9) looming, Nixon knew he had to mobilize public support from his political allies.
* * *
Enter Charles W. Colson. The thirty-eight-year-old lawyer had signed on as a White House counsel in November 1969, a liaison with labor unions and other special interests, and he quickly caught the president’s eye.
“His instinct for the political jugular and his ability to get things done made him a lightning rod for my own frustrations,” Nixon wrote. “When I complained to Colson, I felt confident that something would be done. I was rarely disappointed.”
Colson’s job, as he himself put it, was “attack and counterattack.” And in that role, “he’ll do anything,” Nixon later said on tape. “I mean anything.” Colson now received his first assignment as the point man for domestic political warfare. He joined a meeting of an “Action Group on Cambodia” convened by Nixon in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. Taking action in the spirit of Kissinger’s encouragement to “really clobber” the president’s political enemies, Colson telephoned his contacts at the New York City construction union council led by Peter J. Brennan.
On Friday, May 8, hundreds of hard hats carrying lead pipes and crowbars attacked antiwar protesters at Broad and Wall Streets, cracking heads and breaking bones. More than seventy people were injured. The hard hats got an invitation to the White House that month, and Brennan later became Nixon’s labor secretary. As footage of the fracas ran on the evening news, tens of thousands of protesters were gathering in Washington from across the country, trucks were transporting soldiers to batten down in the Executive Office Building for the night, and two rings of buses barricaded the White House.
* * *
Nixon called a White House press conference at the unusually late hour of 10:00 p.m. On deadline, with minutes to write and file their stories, the White House reporters went brain-dead. Nothing about Cambodia and COSVN, nothing about the hard hats, thank you and good night. No one asked about the president’s mood and motives at a moment of national crisis.
Nixon was on the verge of a nervous breakdown: he stayed up all night again, “agitated and uneasy,” in his own words, frantically making more than fifty telephone calls and finally calling upon his valet, Manolo Sanchez, to accompany him to the Lincoln Memorial so he could rap with the young people protesting the war. Word spread quickly that the president was on the loose amid the hippies. The White House aide Egil “Bud” Krogh was on duty that night. Krogh vividly recalled:
Four-thirty in the morning, I was in the Secret Service command post, and over the loudspeaker came the words, “Searchlight is on the lawn”—Searchlight being the President’s Secret Service code name—and I immediately punched in Ehrlichman’s home number … and said, “The President is out and about, and I think he’s on the lawn in the Rose Garden.” And he said, “Go over and render assistance right now.” And so I did … and found out where the President was going and followed him up to the Lincoln Memorial. Couldn’t have gotten there more than two or three minutes after he got there, went up the stairs to see what was going on, and found him in discussion with, at the start, 10 to 15 young people, students who had come in from all over the East Coast.
The only reliable record of the president’s words on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial exists in the real-time accounts of three young women who talked with him face-to-face: Lynn Schatzkin, Ronnie Kemper, and Joan Pelletier.
“He didn’t look at anyone in the eyes; he was mumbling,” Schatzkin said. “As far as sentence structure, there was none.”
“Somebody would ask him to speak up,” Kemper said. “And that would jolt him out of wherever he was and he’d kind of look up and shake his head around, but then he’d go back to looking at his feet and he was gone again.… There was no train of thought.”
“Nothing he was saying was coherent,” Pelletier said. “At first I felt awe, and then that changed right away to respect. Then as he kept talking, it went to disappointment and disillusionment. Then I felt pity because he was so pathetic, and then just plain fear to think that he’s running the country.”
Nixon was “flushed, drawn, exhausted,” Krogh said. “I saw him in probably the most psychologically exposed, raw period of his presidency.”
Nixon went to the Capitol; he wanted to show its chambers to Sanchez, who had never been inside. Haldeman corralled him there at 6:15 a.m. The president demanded a plate of corned beef hash at the Mayflower Hotel; he got it. Haldeman urged him to get some rest, but Nixon still could not sleep, and he rattled around the White House all day without purpose as a peaceful protest of about one hundred thousand people swirled about him.
“The weirdest day so far,” Haldeman wrote in his journal entry for Saturday, May 9. “Very weird. P. completely beat and just rambling on, but obviously too tired to go to sleep.… I am concerned about his condition.… He has had very little sleep for a long time.” Over the next days, Haldeman added ominous notes. He demanded that the president take a five-day weekend in Key Biscayne. But that proved futile. “The unwinding process is not succeeding,” he wrote during the Florida retreat. “More of the same. He just keeps grinding away.” And this: “P. won’t admit it, but he is … letting himself slip back into the old ways.” That meant hitting the bottle: Nixon, desperate for respite, was drinking heavily night after night.
Kissinger, keenly aware of the precarious presidential state of mind, the recent revolt of his key staffers, and the wiretaps he and Haig maintained on government officials and newsmen, kept note takers away from every White House decision on the conduct of the war for the next month. Yet these decisions can be reconstructed from documents declassified in the past three years.
Nixon commanded new covert actions by the CIA against the Communists in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Nixon approved secret support for a regiment of Thai soldiers, unfortunately named the Black Panthers, to fight in Cambodia. Nixon ordered both B-52 and fighter-bomber attacks far deeper inside Cambodia than he ever admitted. The Communists staged a disciplined withdrawal from the bombardments.
The Senate, now increasingly well informed by the Pentagon and the State Department, voted on June 30 to cut off funds for the war in Cambodia and Laos. Though the measure was symbolic—Nixon would have vetoed it—it marked the first time that the president’s power as a commander in chief at war was challenged by a vote in Congress. The invasion of Cambodia also drew the first calls for the impeachment of Richard Nixon.
In the United States, his most dangerous enemy now was not the armies of citizens marching in the streets, but a handful of senators sitting in the Capitol.
* * *
For more than a year, ever since the first press reports that the United States was bombing Cambodia, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and its staff had been conducting a highly classified investigation of America’s conduct of the war. They were asking themselves a fundamental question: what were the limits of the war powers of the president?
The president commanded that strict rules be set for the Senate’s closed-door hearings, curtailing the testimony of witnesses and censoring the committee’s final report on the grounds of national security. The Senate’s probing so worried Kissinger that he held Situation Room strategy sessions about counteracting Senate investigators who had been “scooping up secret data all over the world,” Haldeman noted in his diary. “Question now is how to avoid having our key people testify, big question of executive privilege.”
It became the big question for Richard Nixon. Executive privilege was the dubious idea that a president could disregard any demand by Congress or the courts for evidence or testimony. It presumed he was above the law. In his escalating confrontations with Congress, Nixon’s counsel ultimately asserted in court that “the President wants me to argue that he is as powerful a monarch as Louis XIV, only four years at a time.”
But the president was no monarch. The Constitution made him commander in chief of the army and the navy, not the American people. It said that only Congress could declare war, only Congress had the power to make treaties, and only Congress could spend the money that the Treasury collected in taxes from American citizens.
Over the course of their yearlong investigation, the senators were discovering that the United States had spent many hundreds of millions on secret military and intelligence operations in Thailand, Laos, and the Philippines—all devoted to winning in Vietnam and all based on pacts far beyond what the Senate had approved and financed. In effect, they were secret treaties, struck without the knowledge of Congress, supporting a war Congress had never declared. Congress had abdicated power; the president had usurped it.
The few senators privy to this growing body of knowledge began to contemplate cutting back the president’s use and abuse of his war powers. Slowly and cautiously, in the summer of 1970, they started to sharpen a sword against him.
These hearings were led by Stuart Symington, the secretary of the air force when Nixon first came to Washington in 1947, the man who helped get the B-52 bomber off the ground in the early years of the Cold War, and a senator from Missouri since 1953, when Nixon became vice president. Symington’s sole colleague in charge of the proceedings was Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1959 to 1974.
The senators were startled and ashamed to discover how they had ceded their power to presidents—and Nixon was not the first. The story traced back through Presidents Johnson and Kennedy, as the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the war in Vietnam, would soon reveal.
Explosive classified testimony from the CIA detailed the personal corruption of American-backed strongmen in Asia. The White House demanded the deletion of evidence on the dirty dealings of President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, where the United States had major air and naval bases for the Vietnam War. Marcos had been skimming American aid since 1965. The passage read, “Marcos and his wife … have accumulated approximately $100 million during his term in the presidential palace.” He accumulated billions before he was overthrown by a popular revolution after twenty years in power.
Some of the report’s most sensitive sections dealt with the use of American power in Thailand and Laos. America’s dealings with the Thai military traced back to 1954. They included hundreds of millions of dollars in military spending, the coordination of secret bombing campaigns, and the financing of combat operations by paramilitary forces, all based on secret pacts going back to 1965.
The Pentagon had paid $702 million to construct military bases in Thailand for fifty-five thousand American troops. It had laid out $80 million a year to the Thai military junta for the services of an eleven-thousand-man combat division in South Vietnam. The CIA had fixed elections and financed the junta to keep the military in power. It had armed and trained Thai paramilitary forces for combat in Laos, where an indigenous tribe called the Hmong had worked with CIA officers for many years to fight North Vietnamese forces from mountain redoubts near the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Those payments were among many that President Nixon, and President Johnson before him, had approved to conduct covert paramilitary operations, support allied leaders, and swing elections in nations throughout the world. They had thought it especially important to provide the appearance of democracy among America’s authoritarian Asian allies.
Tens of millions in political payoffs flowed annually via the CIA’s cache of classified funds for this purpose. President Nixon had personally approved cash payments to the Thai generals in 1969 and 1970. They pretended to hold elections, but they soon suspended their constitution, disbanded parliament, and reimposed martial law. The generals told their friends at the American embassy that “democracy doesn’t work.”
The CIA had shored up President Thieu of South Vietnam with millions designed to create the illusion of a democratic government in Saigon, including supposedly independent political parties, citizens’ groups, and a free press. But Thieu clearly preferred bullets to ballots. He had pocketed the CIA’s cash, and when he ran for reelection he was unopposed. Although Kissinger and the NSC staff despaired over the political situation in Saigon, the White House and the CIA kept the secret subsidies flowing to Saigon. The hope that democracy could be created with dollars never died.
The Senate hearings, in their classified sessions, revealed in detail how American ambassadors in Thailand and Laos coordinated secret bombing raids around the clock. In tense proceedings, the senators closely interrogated Leonard Unger, the American ambassador in Thailand. James Marvin Montgomery, Unger’s chief political and military officer, sat by his boss’s side, flanked by Richard Helms, the CIA’s chief.
“The dominant emotion that came across that green baize table was one of embarrassment,” Montgomery recalled. “These Senators had voted for these authorizations and appropriations all of these years and never asked any questions” about where the money went or how it was spent. “They had been content, up until this point, to let the President of the United States act like a Prime Minister with a solid Parliamentary majority behind him,” Montgomery said. “We are a Congressional democracy, which is something different. In many ways these Senators had sort of abdicated their responsibilities since the beginning of World War II and they never really took them back until this set of hearings.… This was the beginning of Congressional reassertion of its prerogatives and authority—not just in Southeast Asia but in the conduct of foreign policy as a whole.”
In Thailand, for example, Ambassador Unger received a telegram every day from the Seventh Air Force headquarters in Saigon laying out the missions carried out in Laos by bombers based at U-Tapao, a huge Thai airfield built with American funds. “The Thai let us do just about whatever we wanted to do,” said Montgomery. “However, this arrangement drove the Pentagon nuts, because none of it was written down.” It wasn’t written down because it was secret. Congress had known nothing about the bombing. The CIA’s payoffs to the Thai junta had helped keep it that way.
But Senators Fulbright and Symington were now “aware of our attacks and will press for an answer,” President Nixon told Prince Souvanna Phouma, the prime minister of Laos, according to a written memo of their October 1969 conversation in the White House. “President Nixon said he completely approved the bombing and would do more but the problem is a domestic political one—whether the US will become as deeply involved in Laos as in Vietnam.… This is a very delicate political issue and we have been trying to dance around it as much as possible.”
The Senate hearings, published in heavily censored volumes during the summer and fall of 1970, compelled Congress to ban the introduction of U.S. combat troops into Laos and Thailand. The fact that the United States was bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos was the only classified aspect of the hearings that leaked. It had become an open secret in the Senate, and Nixon admitted it after the press reported it months later. But there he drew the line on public disclosure of secret warfare.
The line would not hold for long.
* * *
On Friday, June 5, 1970, Nixon called all his intelligence chiefs to the White House—Richard Helms, J. Edgar Hoover, Adm. Noel Gayler of the National Security Agency, and Lt. Gen. Donald Bennett of the Defense Intelligence Agency. “The President chewed our butts,” General Bennett vividly recalled.
Nixon said that “revolutionary terrorism” was now the gravest threat to the United States. Thousands of Americans under the age of thirty were “determined to destroy our society” through their “revolutionary activism,” and “good intelligence,” he said, was “the best way to stop terrorism.”
But he was not getting good intelligence. Nixon demanded “a plan which will enable us to curtail the illegal activities of those who are determined to destroy our society.”
Nixon had been complaining about this intelligence gap for a year, obsessed with the idea that American radicals were being financed and directed by America’s foreign enemies. In March 1970, Haldeman had ordered Tom Charles Huston, a twenty-nine-year-old army intelligence veteran and, in his own words, “a hard-core conservative,” to act as the White House liaison to all the intelligence services, to convene them, and to write the plan Nixon demanded. Huston went to Hoover’s intelligence chief, Bill Sullivan, who had the outlines of the plan already in hand. He had been working on it for two years, partly in the hope of winning Nixon’s approval to succeed J. Edgar Hoover, who was seventy-five years old and starting to falter.
The program that quickly emerged was called the Huston Plan. The FBI’s agents and their counterparts would be free to intensify the electronic surveillance of American citizens, read their mail, burglarize their homes and offices, step up undercover spying on college campuses—in short, keep on doing what the Bureau had been doing for decades, but in closer coordination with the CIA and the NSA, and with the secret imprimatur of the president of the United States.
Nixon knew, and Huston reminded him in writing, that many of these acts were clearly illegal. But Nixon believed that if a president did it, it was not illegal.
The president said he approved the plan. But Hoover flew into a rage when he realized that it would have to be carried out with his signature and on his authority—not Nixon’s. The president had not signed it; his approval was verbal, not written. “I’m not going to accept the responsibility myself anymore, even though I’ve done it for many years,” Hoover said. “It is becoming more and more dangerous and we are apt to get caught.”
Hoover demanded a meeting with Nixon, and he stared the president down. Though Nixon believed that “in view of the crisis of terrorism,” the plan was both “justified and responsible,” John Mitchell convinced him that Hoover would find a way to leak the plan if ordered to sign it.
The new White House counsel, thirty-one-year-old John W. Dean, took charge of preserving the essential elements of the plan. Huston recalled, “Haldeman basically gave him the portfolio to try and work out with the Attorney General whatever they could salvage.” They salvaged much of it. Undercover operations against the left expanded. Electronic surveillances and surreptitious entries increased. These operations sometimes took place at the command of Attorney General Mitchell, sometimes on orders from the president himself. And in months to come, they would come on the orders of White House aides who had arrogated these powers to themselves.
* * *
Nixon wandered in, unannounced, to one of Kissinger’s crisis meetings on Cambodia in the White House Situation Room on June 15, 1970. To Kissinger’s distress, the president’s rambling speech there was recorded by a note taker. Kissinger sent a summary of Nixon’s remarks to the participants at the meeting, warning that it was “absolutely for your own personal use and should not be distributed elsewhere.”
The president used the words psychological and psychological warfare repeatedly, almost compulsively, as he stressed the political impact of the invasion. He proclaimed that, despite the edict of Congress to end American involvement in Cambodia after July 1, “we would continue our interdiction,” using airpower as freely as possible.
“This interdiction, the President stated, should be interpreted broadly, and it was very important that everybody in Defense knew this. The President reiterated that he believed it necessary to take risks now regarding public opinion, so as to see that Cambodia maintained its neutrality and independence. Perhaps there were those who would disagree, but the president himself felt that we should take these risks.”
He wanted to see a report every day on “what we are doing in the Cambodia area on the diplomatic, intelligence, military, and supply sides, and would watch closely the developments in these fields. It was his judgment that it was no good going way out, but it was worth taking risks.”
At 7:45 that evening, the president called Kissinger. “I just hope they got it,” he said. “We’re going to take some gambles.”
He repeated four days later: “There were a great number of people in the press and in Congress who have a vested interest in seeing us fail,” he said. “This was a game for them, and we should counter-play.” He would see to it that the war went on, Congress or no Congress. Though American ground forces were withdrawn by the end of June, American bombers and fighter jets flew their deadly missions in Cambodia until August 1973.
The Nixon administration drew from all its military assistance programs worldwide to find money to support the war in Cambodia; direct military aid to Lon Nol rose from $8.9 million in 1970 to $185 million in 1971. Nixon had sent Al Haig, now a one-star general, as his secret envoy to Cambodia to coordinate the delivery of weapons. One of the few Americans stationed in Phnom Penh, Andrew Antippas, the political officer at the American embassy, vividly remembered his arrival on a CIA aircraft.
“We were instructed to receive him and take him to visit Lon Nol,” Antippas said. “We were all wondering who this brigadier general was. Brigadier generals in the Vietnam War were as common as doughnuts. In fact, they went out to get the coffee. We went out to the airport and met the aircraft. The brigadier general who arrived—very recently promoted to brigadier general—was named Alexander Haig.… This was his first big assignment under Henry Kissinger. He was told to ‘go out and find out what the hell’s going on in Cambodia.’”
A straightforward assessment came from Emory C. Swank, a distinguished Foreign Service officer whom Nixon named as ambassador to Cambodia in July 1970. “Phnom Penh did not need an Ambassador,” he said, “but a worker of miracles.”
An equally grim report by the CIA arrived on August 6, shortly after Swank’s appointment. “The communists have overrun half of Cambodia, taken or threatened 16 of its 19 provincial capitals, and interdicted—for varying periods—all road and rail links to the capital, Phnom Penh,” the report began. North Vietnam’s soldiers and guerrillas “move at will, attacking towns and villages in the south and converting the north into an extension of the Laos corridor and a base for ‘peoples’ war’ throughout the country and in South Vietnam as well.”
But Nixon remained delusional on the subject of the Cambodian invasion. His disturbing opinions were shared by few if any American soldiers or spies. He thought the invasion a triumph of presidential power that would demoralize the enemy, destroy a potential Communist attack on Saigon, shore up morale among American troops, and turn the tide of the whole war.
He said explicitly, if inexplicably, to Kissinger on October 7 that it would prove the decisive battle, the bold decision that would lead to an imminent American victory in Vietnam.
“Listen, Henry,” Nixon said, “Cambodia won the war.”