Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion.
—RICHARD NIXON, 1988
In August 1972, as Nixon prepared to accept renomination at the Republican convention and face voters in the fall campaign, he ensured that everything during the next three months revolved around his reelection. More than ever, foreign policy—whether about Vietnam, Russia, China, or the Middle East—became the captive of domestic politics. As he had told Kissinger at the end of March, trips to China and Russia would greatly enhance his political prospects. “It’s good to go to China and good to go to Russia, because we’re going to have to use everybody in the campaign.” He expected Henry to do “a television thing” after each trip. “We need foreign policy up front and center in that period too,” he added.
None of this was for public consumption. On the contrary, the strategy was to attack McGovern for trying to politicize national security. Nixon intended to quote Harry Truman’s admonition that politics should always be kept out of foreign policy. “We are not Republicans, we are not Democrats, we are Americans,” Nixon told the American Legion in August. Reverting to the theme he had used so effectively throughout his political career, he wanted everyone in his campaign to say that “the Democrats are unpatriotic”; they should be described as putting political gain ahead of national security.
Because Nixon actually did believe that the Democrats were using foreign affairs for political advantage, especially Vietnam, he intended to outdo them in the same game. He publicly subordinated détente, for example, to appeal for Polish-American votes with anti-Soviet gestures, which he and Kissinger privately cleared with Moscow. They promised not to directly attack the Soviets and explained that unlike the president’s visit to Romania, a stop in Poland on the way home from Moscow was the product of “domestic considerations.” Dobrynin saw no problem with a Nixon visit to Warsaw, and said that Nixon’s promise not to embarrass them would greatly impress Brezhnev. “We’ve got a lot of mileage out of checking that Polish visit with” the Soviets, Kissinger told the president.
Where trolling for ethnic votes was standard election year politics that foreign governments largely ignored, they saw suspended efforts to resolve overseas conflicts for domestic political reasons as irresponsible. Brezhnev, for example, complained that they could not afford to delay confidential discussions about the Middle East. But the White House resisted for fear that leaks would have negative repercussions on the president’s popularity. And this, despite warnings from Sadat that “if RN thinks he is going to have a quiet time in the area as he is running for re-election, he has another surprise coming.”
Similarly, when Moscow placed a $25,000 educational fee on Jewish émigrés, “a major issue in Israel,” the White House refused to comment. “The Russian issue is flooding my desk,” Leonard Garment, a special consultant to the president on Israel and Jewish affairs, told Kissinger. “Is there a more self-serving group of people than the Jewish community?” Henry replied. “None in the world,” Garment said. “You can’t even tell the bastards anything in confidence because they’ll leak it,” Henry complained. Garment thought that “between now and November a certain amount of theater is needed to keep the lid on.” Kissinger saw this as the proper strategy.
No foreign policy issue was more beholden to domestic politics than Vietnam. As in July, Nixon and Kissinger remained at odds over how best to end the war. Nixon continued to believe that Hanoi would never settle without the additional use of U.S. military power and that a peace agreement before November would be seen as a cave in jeopardizing support from his conservative base. “On this whole business of negotiating with North Vietnam,” Nixon told Haldeman, “Henry has never been right.” He described Kissinger’s Vietnam dealings as “folly.” Nixon confided to his diary: “I am inclined to think that the better bargaining time for us would be immediately after the election rather than before.”
Kissinger was anything but indifferent to the president’s political judgment and reach for a second term. But he was confident that as Nixon’s reelection became more apparent to the North Vietnamese, they would be receptive to a settlement that spared them from savage attacks Nixon would be free to mount after November 7.
Because Nixon believed it was also good politics to continue the Paris talks, he allowed Henry to resume the negotiations. In an eight-hour meeting on August 1, the longest ever, the North Vietnamese appeared to be more forthcoming than before. Although the two sides remained far apart on political matters, Kissinger saw another meeting in thirteen days as a good idea. Nixon agreed to let Henry keep at it, and congratulated him for a “splendid job on what must be a very tedious exercise.” On August 3, when Nixon read a UPI assessment of the negotiations saying “critics doubt that the administration would turn much tougher in Vietnam peace bargaining after November,” Nixon wanted the assertion disputed.
At the August 14 meeting, around a beige-covered table in the same shabby apartment in the Paris suburb, the discussion over seven and a half hours produced no breakthroughs. Henry believed that Hanoi now faced an agonizing choice—either to settle now and take its chances on winning political control in the South or wait and face Nixon’s wrath after the election. He was confident the North Vietnamese would make peace before November.
Despite Henry’s optimism, Nixon remained determined to wait until after the election. In a note to Haig, Nixon declared: “Al—It is obvious that no progress was made and that none can be expected.” Nixon thought the Democrats would attack him for failing to end the war. But John Connally urged Nixon to discount their criticism: “The war isn’t hurting us…We want to keep the issue focused on Vietnam, because [alongside of McGovern’s statements calling for a rapid pullout] it’s to our benefit.”
Nixon saw the Paris negotiations as a way to blunt complaints from the peace camp. He told Haig, “The talks are fine” for the time being, because it was restraining the left or what Haig called “these bastards here at home.” Nixon said, “This is a brilliant game we are playing,” and “Henry really bamboozled the bastards.”
The closer they got to November, however, the more reluctant Nixon became to reach a settlement—it “could be interpreted as a politically motivated pull-out or a less than satisfactory compromise…for which McGovern could claim credit.”
In his opposition to a preelection settlement, Nixon had an unacknowledged ally in Thieu. The South Vietnamese president was incensed that Kissinger had not provided him with fully accurate reports of the Paris discussions. Eighteen years later he would tell Walter Isaacson that Henry had treated South Vietnam like an American puppet. “There was no effort to treat us as an equal, for he was too arrogant for that. We wanted to be part of the negotiations, but he was working behind our back and hardly keeping us informed.”
Kissinger understood that Thieu would neither agree to leave North Vietnamese troops in the South nor concede the Communists a part in overseeing national elections through a Committee of National Reconciliation. Consequently, he had kept Thieu in the dark about these proposals. When they came to the surface during a Kissinger visit to Saigon in August, Thieu obliquely rejected them. Undiplomatic rudeness—canceling meetings and coming late to others—demonstrated his unhappiness. Thieu was as frustrated by his dependence on the Americans as by their concessions. “Insolence is the armor of the weak,” Kissinger said later. “It is a device to induce courage in the face of one’s own panic.”
Kissinger remembered that he “left Saigon with a false sense of having reached a meeting of the minds.” Henry rationalized Thieu’s obstructionism as more the product of cultural differences than genuine Vietnamese resistance to his concessions. Nixon, however, read Thieu’s opposition for what it was—a determination to avoid an agreement with the North Vietnamese until they were militarily defeated.
Nixon shortly sent Thieu a letter, which could only have encouraged him to block any compromise with Hanoi. He assured Thieu that “the United States has not persevered all this way, at the sacrifice of so many American lives, to reverse course in the last few months of 1972. This I…will never do.” Thieu assumed that Nixon was as intent on making Hanoi cry uncle as he was.
Despite his determination to wait until after the election to make peace, Nixon agreed to let Henry return to Paris in September. Polls persuaded him not to abandon the talks: Eighty-one percent of a Gallup survey favored a candidate ending the war. McGovern’s promises to that effect made Nixon nervous about abandoning the negotiations. Another Gallup poll revealed that a breakdown of the talks over keeping Thieu in power appealed to only 29 percent of Americans. Forty percent were ready to see a coalition government and 21 percent were indifferent to who ruled South Vietnam.
To woo voters, Nixon told Stewart Alsop on August 22 that “the war won’t be hanging over us in a second term.” Is this “just politics or is there substance to it?” a reporter bluntly asked the president at an August 29 news conference. There was no breakthrough in the negotiations, Nixon acknowledged. But he emphasized that Saigon’s success in blunting Hanoi’s offensive had increased prospects for a settlement. Moreover, he announced another twelve-thousand-troop reduction that brought U.S. forces in Vietnam down to twenty-seven thousand. Was he falling short of his promise to end the war before the close of his term? Was there any likelihood that the United States would still be bombing North Vietnam in two or three years? he was asked. He had largely satisfied the aim of ending U.S. involvement, he answered. He called suggestions that we would continue bombing “ridiculous.” The South Vietnamese were fully capable of defending themselves.
DURING THE FIRST WEEK in September, despite White House reluctance, the focus shifted back to the Middle East. The state department wished to restart a dialogue with the Israelis about possible ways to reduce tensions, but Kissinger and Haig moved to shore up White House efforts “to keep a lid on things for the present.”
The assassination of Israeli athletes by Arab guerrillas at the summer Olympics in Munich on September 5 made Arab-Israeli tensions an issue the White House could not continue to ignore. At an Oval Office meeting on the following day, Nixon urged walking a delicate line between sympathy for Tel Aviv and warnings against excessive Israeli retaliation. Because the New York Times and McGovern favored U.S. withdrawal from the games and because such a move seemed likely to heighten international tensions over the Middle East, Nixon and Kissinger agreed to oppose it. Nixon emphasized the need for an effective public relations response to the crisis both to reduce chances of a Middle East explosion and to satisfy domestic opinion.
After Marvin Kalb reported that the “White House seems worried about the Munich tragedy giving McGovern a chance to enhance his stature with U.S. Jews,” Nixon scribbled on his news summary, “H[aldeman]—a very good example of why K[issinger] must never do Kalb interview.”
IF THE WHITE HOUSE expected to come back to Middle East problems after November 7, it hoped to put a permanent end to the Watergate break-in investigation. During an August 29 news conference, when a reporter asked whether it would be a good idea to appoint a special prosecutor, Nixon cataloged the inquiries by the FBI, Government Accounting Office (GAO), Senate Banking Committee, and a full-scale investigation by White House Counsel John Dean that would make a special prosecutor superfluous. These investigations, he said, allowed him to offer categorical assurances that no one at the White House was involved in “this very bizarre incident.” Dean, who was watching Nixon’s televised news conference in a hotel room, said later that he “damn near fell off the bed…I had never heard of a ‘Dean investigation,’ much less conducted one.”
In the first half of September, Nixon became increasingly confident that Watergate was becoming a nonissue. Forty-eight percent of a Gallup survey said they knew nothing about the “scandal.” In August and September, only between 2 and 3 percent of Americans saw “corruption in government” as the country’s most compelling problem. More important, on September 15, the Justice Department announced seven indictments for wiretapping and theft, and predicted that no one else would be charged. Five days later, the judge in a civil suit brought by the Democratic National Committee against CREEP delayed the case until after the November election. Two weeks later, Chief U.S. District Court Judge John Sirica issued a gag order prohibiting public comments about the Watergate burglars’ trial. On October 3, Pat Buchanan and Mort Allin, who prepared the daily news summaries, told the president that “Watergate is out of the news.”
Because he knew that the full story of Watergate, especially White House involvement in trying to hide CREEP’s connections to the break-in, could destroy his presidency, Nixon could not forget it. He described in his memoirs “a rather curious dream” he had in October “of speaking at some sort of a rally and going a bit too long and Rockefeller standing up in the middle and taking over the microphone on an applause line…It is a subconscious reaction. It is interesting.”
Clearly, he had premonitions of being ousted or replaced by someone more popular. And it’s reasonable to speculate that Rockefeller was a stand-in for Kissinger, whose prominence was beginning to match the president’s. In a conversation about Henry’s possible presence at the Republican convention, NBC’s John Chancellor predicted that reporters would besiege him for interviews. “You are probably the most interesting news story aside from the Vice President and the President himself in terms of personality,” Chancellor said.
When Stewart Alsop wrote a column saying it was in the national interest for Henry to become secretary of state, “because…a Nixon without Kissinger is a scary prospect,” Henry complained to Joe Alsop, “If he wants to get me out of here this month, he could not have written a better article.” At the end of 1972, when Gallup asked Americans to name the most admired men in the country, Kissinger stood fourth behind Nixon, Billy Graham, and Harry Truman.
WITH WATERGATE ostensibly out of the way in September, Vietnam was the one issue Nixon saw jeopardizing his reelection. He continued to fear a peace agreement that could raise complaints of a cynical sellout to ensure his victory. For entirely different reasons, Thieu shared Nixon’s determination to avoid a quick settlement. In this alliance of strange bedfellows, Kissinger and the North Vietnamese lined up in behalf of peace. As Henry had anticipated, by September Hanoi had concluded that a preelection settlement would serve it better than a post-November arrangement forced on it by a U.S. air campaign.
Between September and November, Kissinger found himself waging a two-front political war for peace against Saigon and the White House. As he moved toward the next Paris meeting on September 15, Henry tried to persuade the president to dismiss Saigon’s objections to a settlement.
Haig informed Kissinger that Nixon was “extremely reluctant” to follow his advice. Nixon’s resistance rested on polls telling him that Americans wanted to leave Vietnam with a sense of victory (or so Nixon wanted to believe). He was willing to let Henry resume peace talks, but on the condition that he made a record that would appeal to hawks more than doves.
Kissinger saw the September 15 meeting with Le Duc Tho as the prelude to a final settlement. Henry told Nixon that Tho suggested completing a deal by October 15. When Henry agreed to that, “Tho came across the table, shook hands…and said, ‘We have finally agreed on one thing, we will end the war on October 15.’”
News accounts raising doubts about the president’s ability to make an honorable peace before the start of a second term made Nixon receptive to additional talks in Paris. He was afraid of an October surprise engineered by McGovern and Hanoi that could cost him the election. Specifically, he thought that the North Vietnamese might invite McGovern to Hanoi, where they would turn over half or more of the POWs, indicating that the Democrat would be better able to reach a settlement. Nixon’s concern said more about his suspicious nature and affinity for unprincipled politics than about political realities.
At a September 20 NSC meeting, Nixon said there would be no break with Thieu and “we will end this war with dignity.” The NSC did not miss the point—Henry could keep talking in Paris, but they would not sell out Thieu nor would they likely reach a settlement until they had brought the North Vietnamese to their knees in the days after the election.
Kissinger’s return to Paris increased tensions between him and Nixon. Henry came away from a two-day meeting in late September with a heightened sense of optimism. Not only did the conversations take place in a more congenial setting—a suburban house given to the French Communist party by famed Cubist painter Fernand Léger—but Tho and Thuy were insistent about completing an agreement within a month’s time, hopefully during three days set aside for additional discussions beginning October 8.
Kissinger understood that Thieu would not find the prospect of an October settlement to his liking. But he hoped that a face-to-face meeting might weaken or even end his resistance. Believing Thieu would foil Henry’s plans, Nixon agreed to let him go back to Saigon. The president “feels strongly,” Haldeman recorded, “that, as far as the election’s concerned, we’re much better off to maintain the present position.”
Nixon’s worries about a settlement jeopardizing his reelection mystified Henry—an unpublished September poll that Time’s Hugh Sidey gave Kissinger put Nixon thirty-nine points ahead. Also, potential problems with domestic opinion and the Congress from any postelection air campaign gave an October agreement some appeal to Nixon, but not enough to sell him on a “quick peace.”
Nixon wanted Thieu to block an October agreement, but he also wanted to assure that his obstructionism would not extend to a postelection settlement. He told Kissinger and Haig that Thieu shouldn’t “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. Goddamnit, we can’t do it…We can’t let it hurt our relationship with the Russians and the Chinese…We’ve got to get the war the hell off our backs in this country.”
Nixon hoped that a new offensive against the North would convince Thieu that he was secure from any immediate assault by Hanoi. Nevertheless, Nixon wanted assurances that Thieu would follow his lead. On October 4, in a meeting with Haig and Bunker, Thieu and his National Security Council refused to support a settlement that left North Vietnamese troops in the South and created a commission giving the Communists a possible say in South Vietnam’s political future. Reports that Thieu carried on like some frustrated child, shedding tears at what he described as a betrayal of his country, bothered Nixon less than Thieu’s warning that if the Americans went ahead “we shall be obliged to clarify and defend publicly our view on this subject.”
Nixon and Kissinger were entirely cynical about any settlement reached with Hanoi and future U.S. relations with Saigon. If a peace agreement were ever signed, Henry told the president, “I believe that the practical results will be a ceasefire and…a return of prisoners.” Nixon interjected: “Then we’ll say screw them.” Henry didn’t disagree: “And then they’ll go at each other with Thieu in office. That’s what I think.”
Nixon offered Thieu firm assurances that we would not jump at an immediate settlement in October. But he also made clear that Thieu would not dictate the ultimate terms and timing of a settlement. Nixon threatened his political, if not his personal, demise. “I would urge you to take every measure to avoid the development of an atmosphere which could lead to events similar to those which we abhorred in 1963,” he wrote Thieu. The message to Thieu could not have been clearer: If you defy me, I will not hesitate to subject you to a political coup like the one that ousted President Ngo Dinh Diem and took his life in November 1963. The additional unspoken message was: You can help me block an agreement now, but when I ask you to sign one later, you had better comply.
Kissinger remained at odds with Nixon’s resistance to an October settlement. On October 3 and 4, as news came in of Thieu’s opposition to an agreement, Henry had “a complete tantrum” over suggestions that Nixon hold a press conference to clarify the negotiations, Haldeman recorded. “Henry actually believes that we still have a 50-50-chance of pulling something off with the North Vietnamese this weekend and he’s scared to death that the P will louse it up…The P doesn’t feel there’s any chance of settling, and that probably it’s not desirable anyway, because any possible interpretation of a sellout would hurt us more than it helps us.”
When Kissinger resumed the Paris talks on Sunday, October 9, it was the culmination of a four-corner clash over settling the Vietnam War. Kissinger functioned as a surrogate president, making all the negotiating decisions without seeking Nixon’s direct approval. To head off White House objections, he had brought Haig with him. “I had Haig in Paris because I didn’t trust him behind my back anymore,” Henry wrote later. He sent Nixon cables urging against any “public statements” about the substance of the talks. “We are at a crucial point.”
Kissinger’s distrust of Haig was well deserved. As ambitious as anyone in the administration, Haig’s hard work and effective manipulation of Nixon, Haldeman, and Kissinger himself had brought him rapid advancement. After only nine months at the NSC in October 1969, he had been promoted from colonel to brigadier general. He had brought himself to the president’s attention not only by tireless work but also by keeping the president and Haldeman informed about Henry’s machinations, occasionally showing them transcripts of Kissinger’s telephone conversations. Lawrence Lynn on Henry’s NSC staff, who developed an intense dislike for Haig, described him as “excessively ambitious, manipulative, ingratiating, crafty, not at all intelligent, a dissembler, and untrustworthy.” Yet Haig’s one-upping of Kissinger rested on more than ambition; he also had strong differences with him on Vietnam, encouraging Nixon’s affinity for military actions over Henry’s commitment to negotiate an end to the war.
Nixon agreed that no one in the administration should say anything. But he bristled at Henry’s failure to tell him what was happening. Haldeman recorded on October 9 that Nixon was “adamantly opposed to Henry going on to Saigon and Hanoi from Paris. He wants him to come back to Washington for a progress report first.”
In response to a request that Henry provide more details about the discussions, he sent a one-paragraph message: “The negotiations during this round have been so complex and sensitive that we have been unable to report their content in detail…we know exactly what we are doing, and just as we have not let you down in the past, we will not do so now.”
Nixon did not dispute Kissinger’s insistence on a free hand in the negotiations. He had no intention of getting into a public fight with him. Had he abruptly brought Henry back from Paris, he believed it would jeopardize his appeal to voters as a peacemaker. Nor did he need to assert direct opposition to a Kissinger-crafted peace. He was confident that he could rely on Thieu to block anything Henry produced in Paris.
Kissinger believed that North Vietnamese concessions in meetings between October 8 and October 11 assured a settlement before the U.S. election. After hearing on October 8 what the North Vietnamese were offering, Henry asked for a recess. He and Winston Lord “shook hands and said to each other: ‘We have done it.’” Kissinger saw it as his “most thrilling moment in public service.” (But Vietnam, he told me thirty-two years later, turned out to be the greatest disappointment of his eight years in high office. This of course would not become apparent until he witnessed the takeover of South Vietnam by Hanoi in 1975. He may have been disappointed, but his contemporary comments about the possibility of a South Vietnamese collapse make it difficult to believe that he was surprised.)
Henry and Haig arrived back in Washington on October 12, where they met Nixon in his EOB office. Kissinger triumphantly announced, “Well, you’ve got three for three, Mr. President (meaning China, the Soviet Union, and now the Vietnam settlement)…The P was a little incredulous at first,” Haldeman recorded. Nixon asked for the details of what Henry had achieved. “The net effect,” Kissinger explained, “is that it leaves Thieu in office. We get a stand-in-place cease-fire on Oct. 30 or 31.” It was to continue until a political settlement definitively ended the war. There was also to be a National Council of Reconciliation, but it had to operate by unanimous vote, which meant that Thieu had a veto over anything it proposed. Sixty days after a cease-fire the United States would withdraw all its troops and all POWs would be returned. The American government would also provide an unspecified aid program of reconstruction to Hanoi.
Nixon focused not on the terms of the agreement, but on Hanoi’s willingness to accept U.S. aid as the most significant development in the talks. He thought it signaled an implicit Communist acknowledgment that their system was inferior to ours.
Despite an outward show of satisfaction, Nixon continued to believe that South Vietnam’s future security depended on continuing air attacks that would limit Hanoi’s freedom to launch a post-agreement offensive. He revealed his resistance to Henry’s peace deal by showing no interest in its “details.” Every time Henry tried to plow through a description of the agreement, Nixon kept interrupting, asking Haig “if he really was satisfied with the deal, because he had been basically opposed to it last week.” Haig thought the settlement was okay, but worried about winning Thieu’s approval. Nixon saw it as unlikely. In “the cold gray light of dawn” the next day, Haldeman recorded, Nixon believed that Thieu would probably kill the agreement.
Thieu remained the key to delaying a settlement until after November 7. With Henry scheduled to go back to Paris to cement the agreement and then on to Saigon to see Thieu, Nixon wanted Kissinger to take Haig or Haldeman with him to prevent Henry from browbeating Thieu. But Kissinger resisted and talked Nixon into letting him take William Sullivan from the state department, who Haldeman described as “Henry’s man.”
Nixon and Haig were convinced that “Henry is strongly motivated in all this by a desire for personally being the one to finally bring about the final peace settlement.” They saw this as “a major problem in that it’s causing him to push harder for a settlement.” Haig thought the best way to handle it was to give Henry “every possible evidence…of total support so that he won’t feel that he has to prove anything.”
After Kissinger returned to Paris on October 17 and told Nixon that he and Tho had resolved almost every problem, Nixon made his opposition to Henry’s push for an agreement clearer. “Our leader is adamant,” Haig cabled Henry that night “about the next leg…not taking place unless a firm agreement with full support by Thieu is assured.”
On October 19, as Kissinger arrived in Saigon, Nixon sent him a follow-up message that was a masterful attempt to serve both his reelection campaign and an autonomous South Vietnam. He instructed Henry to tell Thieu that he endorsed the peace agreement as in the best interest of his country. (Should this cable become public knowledge, no one could deny Nixon’s eagerness for peace.) At the same time, Nixon assured Thieu that if Hanoi broke the agreement in the days ahead, “I will without hesitation take all appropriate steps to rectify the situation.” (No American conservative could accuse Nixon of abandoning a staunch anti-Communist ally.)
Yet Henry was also put on notice that he could not force the agreement on Thieu. Nixon had no intention of allowing McGovern to claim, as his campaign was saying, that a settlement before the election “would be a great confirmation of McG’s campaign for peace.” Nixon told Kissinger, “Your mission should in no way be construed by him [Thieu] as arm-twisting…which might have been undertaken in conjunction with my own domestic elections.” If there were to be a peace agreement now, Thieu would be joining “with us as equal partners” in ending the war.
Kissinger ran into a predictable explosion of opposition from Thieu. When Henry arrived at Thieu’s office, he was ushered into the military operations room, where Thieu had assembled his National Security Council, which had received an advance copy of the peace agreement in the form of a captured North Vietnamese document. Thieu was incensed at having to learn about Henry’s settlement from the Communists, and even angrier at the provisions of the agreement that left North Vietnamese forces in the South. Kissinger described the session as “tense and emotional.” Henry put the best possible face on the three-and-a-half-hour conversation, reporting that “I cannot yet judge whether Thieu will go along with us.”
In fact, Thieu, as he later said, “wanted to punch Kissinger in the mouth.” Thieu’s nephew and press assistant, Hoang Duc Nha, gave voice to Thieu’s anger. A young man in his early thirties, American educated, with affectations learned from watching Hollywood movies (“the early Alan Ladd in a gangster role,” Kissinger said), Nha, after listening to a half-hour “seminar” by Kissinger, indignantly objected to being given a copy of the treaty in English. “We cannot negotiate the fate of our country in a foreign language,” he declared. He insisted on a Vietnamese translation of the document. After reading it, he asked for sixty-four points of clarification, especially about North Vietnamese forces in the South, the Reconciliation Council, and likely U.S. responses if the agreement collapsed.
Seizing on Thieu’s demands, Nixon cabled Henry that there could be no settlement before the election. It would have “a high risk of severely damaging the U.S. domestic scene, if the settlement were to open us to the charge that we made a poorer settlement now than what we might have achieved had we waited until after the election.” After November 7, they would be in a strong position to force matters with Thieu if need be.
Nixon wanted Kissinger to tell Thieu that “if he persists in resisting all efforts to settle the conflict…we will be forced to work out bilateral arrangements with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam which could risk all that we have worked so diligently to achieve.”
Because Nixon feared that Kissinger might yet disarm Thieu’s resistance and force him into a prompt settlement, he instructed Haldeman “to poll quickly on whether people expected to see a Vietnam settlement before the election.” In the run-up to November, Nixon’s greatest interest was not in the terms of the settlement ending the war but in what impact they might have on his appeal to voters.
“What are the things” Thieu is insisting on? Nixon asked Haig on October 22, as if he knew nothing about the points of contention between Thieu and Kissinger. “Well, Thieu wanted some changes which got the troops out of the South,” Haig replied. “Well, we can’t get that,” Nixon said, suggesting that he had never paid much attention to a central condition of the settlement that seemed certain to agitate Thieu’s opposition. Although Haig put most of Kissinger’s cables from Saigon before Nixon, “more often than not,” Haig told Kissinger, the president did not choose to read them. Nixon’s principal interest was in a settlement that assured Saigon’s independence for the short run or until he could be reelected and in an outcome that did not appear as a defeat for him or the United States.
Nixon’s inattentiveness to the discussions in Saigon combined with Thieu’s resistance to a settlement to frustrate and enrage Kissinger. At a meeting with Thieu on October 22, Thieu unequivocally refused to sign the Paris agreement. “Thieu has just rejected the entire plan or any modification of it,” Kissinger cabled Nixon. “His demands verge on insanity.”
In private, after he got back to Washington, Henry had nothing but contempt for all the Vietnamese. He told Nelson Rockefeller, “Those maniacs in Saigon are not playing…There are two explanations: either they have lost their minds or they will eventually give in, but only after they prove…I can’t arrive there and hand them something.” Henry did not spare the North Vietnamese: “The Vietnamese, North and South, are really maniacs…You never can be sure that one of them won’t do something suicidal.” He said to Rogers, “They’re both insane.”
Thieu’s resistance had provoked threats from Kissinger. “If you do not sign, we are going to go out on our own,” Henry warned. “Why does your President play the role of a martyr?” he asked Nha, who was translating. “I am not trying to be a martyr. I am a nationalist,” Thieu replied. “This is the greatest failure of my diplomatic career,” Henry said, revealing his concern with the personal defeat attached to Thieu’s decision. “Why?” Thieu asked contemptuously. “Are you rushing to get the Nobel Prize?”
Kissinger also attacked Haig, who Henry now saw as a significant rival for influence with Nixon. He criticized him for taking a narrow, military man’s view of the war. “Many wars have been lost by untoward timidity,” Henry told him. “But enormous tragedies have also been produced by the inability of military people to recognize when the time for a settlement has arrived.”
The object now was to encourage public impressions of progress, despite the collapse of prospects for any immediate settlement. Henry talked Thieu into a brief meeting on the morning of October 23 as he prepared to return to Washington. It would encourage press speculation that they had “a solution in hand,” he said. When a reporter at the airport asked Henry if it was a productive trip, he replied, “Yes, it always is when I come here.”
As he headed home, Kissinger suggested to Nixon that he offer Hanoi the chance to meet again in Paris to iron out problems raised by the South Vietnamese. The schedule Henry proposed would now carry the talks beyond the election. Haig replied at once that Nixon was comfortable with Henry’s timetable. He hoped that “we can maintain the aura of progress through November 7.” Reports that Democrats would attack a preelection settlement as no better than what could have been arranged three and a half years ago reinforced Nixon’s aversion to an immediate agreement.
Within hours of returning to Washington on October 23, Kissinger launched a press campaign. Since he refused to give the journalists any details about the current state of the negotiations, the only purpose in talking to them was to encourage the view that the talks remained on track and would produce a settlement in the near future. “We should look optimistic,” Henry told press secretary Ron Ziegler, when they agreed to set up a photo-op on October 24. Nixon urged Henry to speak with Bill Buckley, because “our problem is on the right.” Buckley was to be told that “the issue now is ‘peace with honor’ or ‘peace with surrender.’” They were making substantial progress toward the first alternative, Henry told him.
Kissinger gave an off-the-record interview to Max Frankel, Washington bureau chief of the New York Times. Frankel reported White House sources as predicting that “a cease-fire could come very soon.” Only “a supreme act of folly in Saigon or Hanoi” could stand in the way. Charles Colson remembers that when Henry told Nixon that he had briefed Frankel, the president “was so mad his teeth clenched.” But Nixon was angry not at Henry’s conversation with Frankel, but at the possibility that “now everybody’s going to say that Kissinger won the election.”
On October 24 and 25, Saigon and Hanoi revealed the terms of the negotiations. Thieu railed against a false peace, while Hanoi demanded that Nixon honor a commitment to sign the agreement by October 31. The pronouncements from the Vietnamese gave Nixon the chance to assert that he had made substantial progress toward ending the war. He instructed Henry to hold a televised press conference on October 26, which was a departure from administration practice. (Henry’s German accent had been a reason to keep him away from a mass TV audience.) But Nixon couldn’t resist getting Henry before the press and the public trumpeting their advance toward peace. As he shortly wrote Thieu, “Dr. Kissinger’s press conference was conducted on my detailed instructions.”
Henry used the conference to answer both the South and North Vietnamese and convince voters that the administration was about to make peace. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he declared, “we have now heard from both Vietnams, and it is obvious that a war that has been raging for ten years is drawing to a conclusion.” He said that he was speaking at the president’s direction and then famously announced: “We believe that peace is at hand.” His objective, Henry explained later, was to compel Thieu and American conservatives to accept the agreement and to reassure Hanoi that the remaining differences were relatively minor.
He had nothing to say, however, about serving Nixon’s election prospects by convincing voters that the president had honored his promise to end the war. More than two years later, Kissinger would try to convince McGovern that his remarks were not motivated by political considerations but strictly foreign policy concerns.
It was a continuation of the attempt to portray himself as above the political battle. No one can question his sincere interest in ending the war as quickly as possible, but electoral politics was a central consideration as well. Charles Colson, Nixon’s principal White House election strategist, told Henry that his press briefing was nothing less than brilliant. The results were “spectacular,” Colson said, “no matter what happens now for the next ten days, the election is settled. You’ve settled it.” McGovern’s “dead. He’s gone, you finished him; you killed him.” Henry responded, “Aren’t you nice? I appreciate that.”
When Colson suggested that Henry call the pollster Lou Harris, who’s been “awfully helpful to us,” Henry said, “Okay.” Colson added, “It will influence his poll over the next week…And the poll for this weekend, if it says any closing [by McGovern], he will not print.” Henry laughed. “That’s not bad. To have him on our side like that,” Colson said. “That’s not bad,” Henry echoed. Again, there is no clear evidence beyond Colson’s characterization to indicate wrongdoing on Harris’s part.
Scali called Henry to tell him how pleased the president was with all the briefings; “he thought that you did a good job” today. Nixon himself told Henry that it was most important to convince people that “we’re not going to a Communist coalition” and that “we won our objectives.”
Yet Haldeman describes Nixon as unhappy with Kissinger’s performance, but not because he thought voters would interpret Henry’s remarks as indicating that an agreement would be signed before November 7. Nixon was angry that Henry was getting credit for the peacemaking rather than him. According to Haldeman, he told Ziegler that “K was getting the play…where the P had hoped that he could go before the nation and make the announcement.” Yet Nixon feared any pronouncement from him about peace would be attacked as cynical politics.
While Nixon didn’t want to risk a political backlash by taking personal credit for a settlement, he couldn’t privately repress feelings of rivalry with a subordinate who was eclipsing him as the administration’s peacemaker. Celebrations in the press of Kissinger’s brilliance as a master diplomat, who had “cajoled, wheedled, lectured, using all the arts of negotiation,” increased Nixon’s anger.
Yet not everyone was ready to praise Kissinger and the administration’s accomplishment. Given the details of the agreement, allowing North Vietnamese troops to remain in the South and the Communists a say in South Vietnam’s political future, reporters at Henry’s press conference wanted to know why this settlement could not have been made in 1969. Henry dismissed the suggestion as unrealistic. But the question would become a constant point of attack by critics complaining that Nixon and Kissinger got no more in 1972–1973 than they could have had four years before.
Haldeman recorded on October 28, “The big problem now is for the next ten days, to keep the thing from blowing up either on the North or the South, so that we don’t have an adverse reaction set in prior to the election.”
To keep Saigon quiet, Nixon wrote Thieu an appeasing letter. Kissinger’s press conference was meant to discourage talk of Thieu as an “obstacle to peace with an inevitable cut-off by Congress of U.S. funds.” He warned against “constant criticism from Saigon…Disunity will strip me of the ability to maintain the essential base of support which your government and your people must have in the days ahead.” Kissinger instructed Bunker to reinforce the president’s message. In short, cooperate with us in ending the war and we will be able to respond to any renewed aggression by Hanoi. Thieu was too dependent on U.S. help to break entirely with Washington.
Hanoi was more of a concern. Nixon tried to appease the North Vietnamese by limiting bombing to below the twentieth parallel, but he and Henry worried nevertheless that they would publicly denounce Washington’s failure to end the fighting. With polls showing public skepticism of White House explanations that an agreement needed final tweaking before it could be signed, Nixon and Kissinger were greatly relieved on November 4 when Hanoi agreed to another private meeting in Paris on November 14.
Because they had to keep the agreement to the meeting secret until after it occurred, Nixon was eager to find some other way to refute charges from McGovern that talk of additional negotiations was a ruse. With pollster Lou Harris telling the White House that “once you’ve gotten hopes up, you want to keep…the public expecting that we’re on the verge of it all being over,” Nixon suggested leaking a story that Kissinger would be returning to Paris, and that they say “no comment” when asked about it.
On November 1, Henry told NBC’s Richard Valeriani that “we are in the pre-private meeting stage. But this is not for quotation.” On November 6, Nixon told Kissinger that his final campaign speech would “hit the peace issue, because it’s the only one that really matters…Some of the Washington boys are jittery because of his [McGovern’s] last-minute charges that we never did have peace and it’s a fraud.” Henry thought it was a proper response to that “filthy son-of-a-bitch,” McGovern, whom he also described as “despicable.” Nixon told the country that he had “complete confidence” that they would “soon” end the war on honorable terms. If Hanoi wouldn’t cooperate after November 7, Nixon told Kissinger, “we’ll bomb the bastards.”
On November 3, in a “totally off-the-record” meeting with foreign correspondents, Kissinger offered a defense of U.S. actions on Vietnam that was part realism, part fantasy, and part deception. Despite having lots of information about U.S. politics, Henry asserted that Hanoi did not have “a coherent understanding of how our system works.” Yet they knew enough about U.S. conditions to see that domestic opinion forced Nixon into a settlement, and that his eagerness for another military offensive against them was as much behind the refusal to sign before November 7 as Thieu’s resistance. “Hanoi knows very well what we want,” Henry acknowledged. But he refused to concede that Thieu stood in the way of an agreement. He misleadingly blamed Hanoi for refusing to help clarify some linguistic ambiguities that he was confident could be overcome in another Paris meeting.
“Why then is Thieu so nervous?” a correspondent asked. Henry said it was his anxiety about being forced into “a political contest rather than a military one…He and his colleagues are much more comfortable in a military contest than with the unknowns of a political one. And of course he is also trying to show that he is not a U.S. puppet. Now, when we have people who have been slaughtering each other for 25 years, we cannot expect them to approach a settlement with exactly western rationality.” Never mind that Thieu was genuinely concerned about the continuing presence of North Vietnamese troops in the South and whether the U.S. would reassert its military power should Hanoi launch a fresh attack.
Henry discounted Thieu’s fears as greatly overdrawn. He saw “no uncertainty about the military situation at present.” Saigon had a million-man army and a huge police force, which far outstripped the weakened North Vietnamese forces in the South. Events during the next three years—Saigon’s inability to resist Hanoi’s military might without massive U.S. bombing—make Kissinger’s assessment seem either purposely misleading or profoundly mistaken.
Asked at the briefing whether he and Nixon were thinking of the peace settlement as providing a “decent interval,” Henry assured the journalists “that there is no hidden agreement with North Vietnam for any specific interval after which we would no longer care if they marched in and took over South Vietnam.” It was as if Nixon’s suggestion to Brezhnev in May 1972 that he pass this idea along to Hanoi had never been made. Since the North Vietnamese distrusted such a proposal, believing it a trick to get them to settle, Henry apparently saw it as a moot point.
ON NOVEMBER 7, as the country was voting, Kissinger sent Nixon a note of appreciation, telling him “what a privilege the last four years have been.” He was confident that Nixon would win. But whatever the outcome, “it cannot affect the historic achievement—to take a divided nation, mired in war, losing its confidence, marked by intellectuals without conviction and give it a new purpose and overcome its hesitations…It has been an inspiration to see your fortitude in adversity and your willingness to walk alone.”
The note was part of a Kissinger pattern of flattering the president with unqualified praise, which Kissinger himself described as “obsequious excess.” He accurately saw that Nixon needed the flattery and that his influence with the president partly depended on providing it. But Kissinger did have genuine regard for Nixon’s talents. He viewed him as a man of considerable intelligence whose foreign policy skills produced important achievements, reduced international tensions, and offered a more stable world with diminished risks of a great power confrontation and possible nuclear war.
Yet Kissinger also understood that he was making a deal with the devil. His comment in 1970 that he had “never met such a gang of self-seeking bastards” or “real heels” as the men around Nixon; his knowledge of the administration’s illegal wiretapping, which he had actively supported; his understanding that Nixon fostered an atmosphere of dirty tricks in which subordinates abused presidential power, including Colson’s uncorroborated claim just a few days before the election that Lou Harris was ready to hide unfavorable poll numbers, made him a collaborator in what he knew was a corrupt administration. “It is the part of my public service about which I am most ambivalent,” he said later about his involvement in the wiretapping. But he took no responsibility for a contribution to “the mind-set that had bred the [Watergate] scandal.”
Henry complained to Nixon about “intellectuals without convictions,” but he could not have been thinking of the many academics across the country who spoke, wrote, and marched against the Vietnam War. These intellectuals described Henry as the one without convictions or as someone whose personal ambitions overwhelmed his integrity. When a correspondent asked him his personal plans for 1973 and beyond, he denied giving it any thought. “I just haven’t had time to think about it or make plans.” But like so many others in Washington, his ambition, as was said of Lincoln, was a little engine that never ceased running.
Henry wanted to be secretary of state; he “let me know that he would resign if he didn’t get it,” Nixon said later. He saw compromising principles for the sake of his ambition as an acceptable price. He rationalized the compromise with thoughts of all the good he could do. But if his later ambivalence is to be trusted, he seems to have paid a small price for what others with greater integrity think was a Faustian bargain which should cast a long shadow over his historical reputation.
On November 7, Nixon won a massive electoral victory. He beat McGovern in the popular column by 60.7 percent to 37.5 percent. It was the third widest margin in presidential history. Only Johnson with 61.1 percent in 1964 and FDR with 60.8 percent in 1936 eclipsed him. Nixon won forty-nine of the fifty states; Massachusetts alone voted against him. As Joe Tumulty, Woodrow Wilson’s secretary, said after Warren Harding thumped James Cox in 1920, “it wasn’t a landslide; it was an earthquake.”
Yet Nixon seemed to take small satisfaction from his landmark victory. The day after the election, he predicted that opponents would see the outcome as the result of McGovern’s weaknesses rather than his strengths. They would point to a diminished voter turnout of 54 percent, a fall off of over 6 percent from 1968 and 10 percent from 1960. They would mock him for being the only twice-elected president who couldn’t win a majority for his party in either house of Congress.
After all his years in public life as a divisive figure, Nixon had not suddenly morphed into a popular hero. His victory in 1972 was largely the consequence of voter inclination to back an incumbent against someone who seemed too “liberal” on domestic policy and too soft on foreign affairs. His suggestion for a 50 percent cut in the defense budget particularly troubled voters. The Watergate break-in had raised fresh concerns about Nixon’s integrity, but nothing led directly to him at the time of the election and, more important, he had all but ended the war. The troops were home from Vietnam and a settlement seemed within reach. Moreover, as president, Nixon had shown himself to be less doctrinaire than many feared: He supported some liberal domestic reforms and sensibly moved toward a generation of peace with dramatic shifts in Sino-American and Soviet-American relations. To a majority of voters, he had earned another four years.
Yet Nixon couldn’t pause to savor his triumph. His conviction that his opponents would now double their efforts to disrupt his second term or make his next four years a disaster, as he said was the case with most second terms, made him almost morbid about his victory. He saw the price of reelection as a fresh round of conflict with domestic enemies. He predicted that unless he brought in new staff his administration would be like an “exhausted volcano…We can’t climb to the top and look down into the embers,” he told Haldeman, “we’ve got to still shoot some sparks, vitality, and strength, and that we get some of that from new people, both in the Cabinet and here in the staff.” Hopes of putting Watergate accusations and other complaints of dirty politics aside by giving his White House a new look also animated his efforts to appoint people who could not be seen as responsible for earlier behavior.
Haldeman suggested that Nixon let Ehrlichman and him go, “that both of us are tarnished, not just with the campaign scandal question, but more importantly the problems of the isolation of the P, riding roughshod on Congress and on the press.” Nixon said that he had considered Haldeman’s points, but saw him and John as indispensable. He would “have a major shakeup at State and Defense,” though he would need “to keep Henry for a while because of the ongoing foreign policy activities.” He wanted “total discipline on the press, they’re to be used as enemies, not played for help.” As for the Republican party, he thought its members would blame him for the poor showing in the congressional elections. “Make sure that we start pissing on the party before they begin pissing on me. Blame bad candidates and poor organization.”
Specifically, he gave Haldeman and Ehrlichman marching orders about a host of concerns. The new personnel should not necessarily be brainy or impressively competent, but loyal. He wanted a smaller staff, which would mean less time talking to aides. He said, “Eliminate the politicians, except George Bush. He’d do anything for the cause.” Nixon wanted ethnic quotas, which he opposed as public policy, but suited his private political purposes. There were too many Jews and not enough Italians and Mexicans in his administration, he said, but he doubted if they could find any of the latter who would meet their requirements. They needed “plenty of blacks,” even if some of them were “incompetent.” He conceded that “Genius needs to be recognized—e.g. HAK. Henry is a rag merchant, starts at 50 percent to get 25 percent. That’s why he’s so good with the Russians.” Nixon’s intelligence never deterred him from applying ethnic stereotypes to anyone he considered an enemy or just a rival.
The restaffing of the administration registered on Kissinger as a sort of purge that would make few members of the government happy. “There’s a White House dinner tonight…for the old and new Cabinet—it’s going to be a happy little group,” he told Katharine Graham of the Washington Post. Some of the participants would be there with “daggers in their backs and some with knives in their fronts.” He undoubtedly wondered which group he might end up in.
IN THE WEEKS between the election and the start of his second term, Nixon planned to end the Vietnam War. Unless he rid himself of the Vietnam muddle, he was sure it would continue to divide the country and consume administration energy that could be expended in more productive ways.
The challenge remained to close out the war in a way that made good on his promises to bring home the POWs and secure Saigon’s future. Since Thieu was the principal impediment to a settlement, Nixon instructed Haig to carry a letter to him in Saigon. Haig seemed like a better choice than Henry since Thieu was so angry at him. Henry weighed in by telling Haig that Nixon would not stand for a repetition of Thieu’s obstructionism. Specifically, Thieu should understand that antiwar liberals would dominate the next Congress, which would deny Saigon future support unless it agreed to end the war.
Nixon’s letter was a warning and an admonition. He expressed “deep disappointment” at the rift in their relations and declared Thieu’s attacks on the agreement “unfair and self-defeating.” Although they would try to pressure Hanoi into revisions, he considered the settlement “excellent,” and believed that Thieu should endorse it and describe their accomplishment as “the military victory the agreement reflects.” Continuing opposition to the settlement would likely result in “disaster” for Thieu’s country.
Thieu was unyielding. “Have you ever seen any peace accord in the history of the world in which the invaders had been permitted to stay in the territories they had invaded?” he asked Haig. Thieu directly answered Nixon in a letter on November 11, asserting that the continuing presence of North Vietnamese troops in the South would defeat the cause of an independent South Vietnam and make their mutual sacrifices “purposeless.” Nixon replied at once that “more important” than anything stated in the agreement was “what we do in event the enemy renews its aggression.” Nixon promised “swift and severe retaliatory action” if Hanoi broke the agreement. Thieu remained skeptical that he could rely on future U.S. military support.
Kissinger’s return to Paris on November 19 for separate meetings with the North and South Vietnamese produced predictable frustrations. During the four days between November 20 and November 23, both sides impressed him as more maniacal than ever. Le Duc Tho and Xuan Thuy railed against Saigon’s demands for revisions in the settlement. “We have been deceived by the French, the Japanese, and the Americans,” Tho complained to Kissinger about Vietnam’s long history with its occupiers, “but the deception has never been as flagrant as now…You told us this [was a done deal] and you swallowed your words. What kind of person must we think you to be?”
Henry advised Nixon that the North Vietnamese “demonstrated absolutely no substantive give and in fact drastically hardened their position…” He added in another cable: “It is obvious that…we do not have an acceptable deal…It is very possible that we will have to face a breakdown in the talks and the need for a drastic step-up in our bombing of the North.”
With Hanoi proving to be so unyielding, Kissinger tried to persuade the South Vietnamese to be more flexible. Although he reminded Pham Dang Lam, the chief of the South Vietnamese delegation in Paris, of Nixon’s intention to proceed without them if they would not compromise, it was to no avail. “If you think a clash between Washington and Saigon is in your interest, you are in for a surprise,” Henry said. He predicted “an endless civil war in which you will end up with nothing—with no agreement and no U.S. support.”
On November 24, as the discussions reached a stalemate, Nixon instructed Henry to renew threats to the North and South Vietnamese of dire consequences. He was to tell Tho and Thuy that the president was calling him back to Washington for consultations and that he was “prepared to authorize a massive strike on the North in the interval before the talks are resumed.” When Henry delivered the message, Tho responded, “Threats have no effect on us! We have been fighting against you for ten years…Threatening is a futile effort!…Our people will never give up.”
Nixon repeated his now familiar message to Thieu that the United States would abandon him and his country to its fate if he did not accept the negotiated settlement. “You must tell Thieu that…either he trusts me and signs…or we have to go it alone and end our involvement in the war.” In a last-ditch attempt to salvage the talks, Henry convinced the North Vietnamese to postpone another meeting until December 4, while Nguyen Phu Duc, Thieu’s special assistant for foreign affairs, traveled to Washington to meet directly with the president.
The North and the South Vietnamese saw the Nixon-Kissinger warnings as empty rhetoric. Hanoi did not dismiss the likelihood of renewed bombing, but it continued to assume that the same public pressures that had compelled Washington to accept a settlement would limit Nixon’s freedom to rely on military power for very long. A likely domestic uproar against fresh attacks would force Nixon back to the peace table. Nixon did not disagree. On November 24, he described “a massive strike on the North” to Kissinger and Haig as “a high risk option” that would put them in “a public relations corner…The cost in our public support will be massive.” Nevertheless, “we must take our lumps and see it through.”
Nixon’s message did not resolve Thieu’s dilemma. If he signed an agreement that left Hanoi with a military advantage, U.S. domestic opposition would probably make it impossible for Nixon to give more than limited military support. Thieu’s doubts about his army’s capacity to meet another North Vietnamese assault without substantial U.S. backing put him in an impossible position. If he didn’t sign the agreement, the U.S. would probably abandon him. If he did, Washington wouldn’t be able to give him the sustained help his government and country needed to survive. It seemed best to take his chances on blaming Hanoi for the failure of the talks and the possibility that the Americans, after all their losses, would not walk away and allow a South Vietnamese–American defeat.
THE DEADLOCK in the negotiations made Nixon angry and provoked renewed tensions with Kissinger. As a part of the constant discussions in November about revamping his administration, Nixon wanted to get rid of Rogers, who presided over a state department Nixon thoroughly distrusted. The prospect of Rogers’s removal raised immediate questions about Henry’s future. But reluctant to have it appear that Kissinger was displacing him, Rogers refused to leave until June. It incensed Henry, who lamented his fate in having to live with someone he considered incompetent and an impediment to his policies and ambitions.
Nixon, in fact, was inclined to rid himself of Rogers and Henry as well. “I’m going to fire the son-of-a bitch,” Nixon told Admiral Zumwalt at the time. “P really feels that he [Kissinger] should leave by midyear,” Haldeman noted in his diary on November 21.
Nixon directed Haldeman to meet with Haig about the “K problem.” Haldeman told Haig “that we’d probably have to bite the bullet soon, but in the meantime we had to get things under control. Al said he understood perfectly, he was very concerned. Henry, in his view, is completely paranoid…was in absolutely terrible shape in Paris last week and handled things very badly…the screwup was Henry’s fault, in that he committed to final negotiation and settlement before he really should have, which really screwed things up with the North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese.” With associates like Nixon, Haldeman, and Haig, Kissinger had reason to be paranoid.
As much as anything, Kissinger’s growing prominence provoked Nixon’s hostility. Henry’s pronouncement that “peace is at hand,” coming after the successful Summits in Peking and Moscow, gave him public standing equal to, if not above, the president’s. When rumors circulated in the fall that Henry would be named Time’s man of the year, Nixon pressed Ehrlichman to make sure that his “genius” was “recognized, vis-àvis HK.” If Time made Henry the man of the year instead of him, Nixon told Haldeman, it “would really create a problem.”
Henry was sensitive to public demonstrations that he was eclipsing the president. “The publicity I received caused him [Nixon] to look for ways of showing that he was in charge,” Kissinger said later. “I was beginning to sense an emerging competitiveness that was certain sooner or later to destroy my effectiveness as a Presidential Assistant and that was accelerated by the emotions of the concluding phase of the Vietnam War.” Henry tried unsuccessfully to head off shared billing with Nixon on Time’s end-of-the-year cover. He joked with a Time reporter, “Well, I didn’t want this job after all. Can you sort of make my picture infinitesimal?” Seriously, he said, “it’s going to make my life unshirted hell.” Nixon angrily described the Time cover as “another self-serving grab for publicity by Henry.” The editors at the magazine saw a cover with both the president and Kissinger as a reasonable answer to the rivalry that Henry made clear to them was a part of White House life.
In November, an interview Kissinger gave to Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, which Henry described as “the single most disastrous conversation I ever had with a journalist,” intensified differences with Nixon. Although several colleagues warned him against talking to Fallaci, the allure of speaking with a reporter who wrote about international celebrities was irresistible.
Because Fallaci recorded the interview, Kissinger found it impossible to deny embarrassing quotes and paraphrases. Fallaci described Henry as saying, “China has been a very important element of the mechanics of my success. And yet that’s not the main point…The main point arises from the fact that I’ve always acted alone. Americans like that immensely. Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town with his horse and nothing else…This amazing, romantic character suits me precisely because to be alone has always been part of my style.”
When the interview became public knowledge in the middle of November, it opened Henry to Nixon’s increased resentment and public ridicule. “The notion of Henry Kissinger as Clint Eastwood had a certain goofy charm,” Walter Isaacson said. “He had never been on a horse in his life, and he could be merciless in ridiculing Nixon’s own Walter Mitty fantasies…Still, it was not a portrait destined to appeal to the other man in the White House who was proud of being a loner.” Henry made fun of himself, asking a Time reporter about his man-of-the-year cover picture. “Can I be on a horse? There’s one part of a horse’s anatomy that I’ve learned very well here.” He added, “She sure killed me.”
Nixon didn’t mind that a cunning journalist had “shafted” Henry. But the suggestion that Henry was taking credit for the China initiative or that he had acted “alone” enraged him. He wanted Haldeman to tell Henry that “the EOB and the Oval Office and the Lincoln Room have all been recorded for protection, so the P has a complete record of all of your conversations.” They would show that “Henry doesn’t make the decisions, and when they are made, that he wavers the most.” Moreover, Nixon had “written the total China story for his own file from before the Inaugural.” Nixon also ordered Haldeman to “get from K’s office all the memoranda from and to the P, and get them into the P’s files.” It should be made clear to Henry who was going to write the authentic history of this administration. “We’ve got to quit paying the price for K,” Nixon told Haldeman.
Kissinger’s return from Paris on November 25 brought him and Nixon into fresh tensions over Vietnam. Duc’s arrival in Washington compelled them to reach some definitive conclusions on whether they could salvage the peace agreement. Nixon favored an unequivocal message to Thieu that either he accepted the agreement or the United States would proceed without him. Henry agreed that they needed to be tough, even “brutal” with Duc, whom he described as someone who “moved from abstract definition to irrelevant conclusion with maddening, hairsplitting ingenuity.” But where he clung to hopes of pressuring Saigon and Hanoi into a settlement, Nixon saw little prospect that either of them would compromise. Henry refused to accept that the talks were irretrievably deadlocked.
Nixon was more realistic about Thieu’s opposition to a settlement. Thieu, “a shrewd, paranoiac mandarin,” Henry called him, gave Duc a letter for Nixon. It repeated his refusal to leave North Vietnamese troops in the South, and implored Nixon to convince the Congress not to cut off aid. Nixon responded by telling Duc that without a settlement he could not control the U.S. Congress. More important, he assured him that an agreement would lay the groundwork for renewed military operations should Hanoi break the treaty. Having heard all this before, Duc was not impressed and repeated Saigon’s insistence on a North Vietnamese evacuation. Kissinger assured Duc that they would make the president’s commitment a part of the formal record of their talks.
Nixon saw the meeting as unproductive. He told Haldeman that at the end of the day, the South Vietnamese seemed determined to go it alone. Nixon thought it was now impossible to change Thieu’s mind. It was confirmed for him the following day when Thieu suggested through Duc that Nixon proceed bilaterally with Hanoi, and Saigon would continue on its own. Duc reported that “Thieu felt it would be preferable to die now than to die bit by bit.” Nixon described Duc’s theatrics to Kissinger as “just nonsense.”
In response, Nixon emphasized to Duc the importance of closing ranks, or how “fatal” a split between our two countries would be. He said that failure would be “disastrous” and would amount to Thieu’s “suicide.” His warnings were aimed more at the historical record than at Thieu, who wouldn’t budge.
As demonstrated by a meeting Nixon held with the Joint Chiefs on November 30, he was convinced that his only alternative now was to blame Hanoi for the stalemate and then launch a massive bombing campaign that could force a settlement. Polls showed that while the American people “do not like the war, they…reject surrender and humiliation,” he told the Chiefs. Nixon ordered them to review and strengthen contingency plans for three-day and six-day strikes against the North. The plans should “include the resumption of mining and the use of B-52s over Hanoi.” He wanted an “all-out” attack. “It cannot be a weak response but rather must be a massive and effective one.” Nixon “asked Laird for his views on congressional support if the agreement on Vietnam failed. Laird replied that further congressional support would be impossible.” Nixon predicted that “our aid would be cut off in two weeks.”
If he had read the Gallup polls carefully or filtered out his bias that Americans put some kind of victory ahead of withdrawal, he would have seen how little support he could expect from the country for renewed bombing to keep Thieu in power and fend off a North Vietnamese takeover in the South. A September survey showed that only 21 percent of Americans favored Thieu’s continuation as president, with 32 percent opposed to him and 47 percent holding no opinion. When asked what kind of government Americans wanted to see in Saigon after U.S. troops left, only 29 percent favored a South Vietnamese regime; 40 percent preferred coalition rule, and 21 percent said it made no difference.
At the end of November, 47 percent of a survey thought the South Vietnamese would lack the wherewithal to resist Communist pressure after America withdrew, while 31 percent hoped that Saigon would be able to stand up to North Vietnam. Thirty-seven percent of Americans wanted to continue postwar military aid; but pessimism about Saigon’s future and weariness with U.S. expenditures in what seemed like a hopeless cause moved 52 percent to favor a cutoff.
Nixon’s plans to bomb the North should they fail to reach a settlement or should Hanoi violate peace terms rested not on the popular will but on questionable convictions about America’s national interest. What Nixon banked on, as he told Kissinger, was that most of the American people “don’t give a damn.” He assumed that “no draftees to Vietnam, low casualties, etc, means the American people are not going to be shocked. They’re just disappointed, not enraged, by the settlement not coming off…This is the right track on public opinion.” However small the cost of continued bombing might be, Americans had no enthusiasm for more U.S. military action that seemed to promise no better result than in the past.
As Kissinger prepared to return to Paris for the December 4 meeting, Nixon saw only domestic political reasons for holding more talks. He candidly told Henry that another meeting, in which they took a hard line with Hanoi, would be a way to counter all that right-wing “crap” that “we sold out.” He also worried that news reports from Saigon saying that Nixon had presented them with an ultimatum would add to difficulties getting any kind of continuing support from Congress. If he had to resort to renewed bombing, he thought it would be seen as a concession to Saigon, which all along had wanted to continue the war.
Kissinger arrived in Paris still hoping that he could wring commitments to a treaty from both sides. He intended to tell the North Vietnamese that if they didn’t settle, the United States would continue to expand the bombing, and warn the South Vietnamese that if they didn’t agree to peace, we would abandon them. “So, it’s a little touchy to play both sides against the center,” Haldeman noted.
When Henry reported to Nixon that the first day’s meeting with the North Vietnamese went nowhere and that he thought Nixon should go on television to rally the American people for expanded attacks on Hanoi, the president privately described Henry as out of “touch with reality.” Nixon saw Henry’s suggestion as putting the blame on him for the failed negotiations. “K is trying to cover his own mistakes,” he told Haldeman. “He can’t bear to come back and face the press, because he knows they’ll attack this time…It’s clear that he wants the P out as the blocking back to clear the way.” Instead, Nixon instructed Henry to keep the talks going, so as to make “the record as clear as possible…that the responsibility for the breakdown rests with the North Vietnamese.” If the talks collapsed, he wanted Henry to return and make it public through a direct report to the press. It was his way of assuring that Kissinger and not he would be seen as the central figure in the failed negotiations.
Nixon resisted additional suggestions from Henry declaring the negotiations over. He thought it was better to suspend them, blame Hanoi for the impasse, and use expanded bombing to force the North Vietnamese back to the peace table. Once an agreement was reached, he believed he would have stronger public backing for renewed attacks on the North Vietnamese should they violate the treaty. If the U.S. simply walked away from the talks, Nixon assumed that the left would condemn him for rejecting peace and would assure substantial congressional and public opposition to additional air attacks against Hanoi.
Yet Nixon believed that bombing the North would not be enough to secure a settlement. He would have to bring Thieu into line. He directed Agnew to go to Saigon. This was “not a negotiating mission,” he told Agnew. “You are to convince Thieu, as the leader of the hawks, that there will be no support for him unless he goes along.” Agnew was then to describe Nixon’s bombing plans to Thieu. Should Hanoi renew its aggression against the South, Nixon promised “to use the B-52s to take out the power stations, communications, and the rest. And that is my maximum plan for knocking them out—even including the dikes,” Nixon said.
Before Agnew could go, Thieu responded to indications of additional U.S. pressure with a speech to his national assembly. On December 12, he announced that he would never sign an agreement leaving North Vietnamese troops in the South. Privately, he expressed doubts about Nixon’s pledge to meet treaty violations with an expanded air war.
Thieu’s defiance fueled Hanoi’s intransigence. Kissinger cabled Nixon that the North Vietnamese had become “more ludicrous and insolent” in their talks. “Hanoi is almost disdainful of us because we have no effective leverage left.” In response, Nixon ordered Henry to suspend the discussions and return home for consultations. He was to tell the North Vietnamese that with no “political considerations” to hold him back, the president would not be deterred from whatever course of action he considered appropriate. “There are no understandings now during this period of recess—each side will…do what its interests require.”
The collapse of the negotiations increased the Nixon-Kissinger tensions. Nixon blamed the failure on Henry. “The South Vietnamese think Henry is weak now because of his press conference statements,” the president told Haldeman and Ehrlichman. “That damn ‘peace is at hand’! The North Vietnamese have sized him up; they know he has to either get a deal or lose face. That’s why they’ve shifted to a harder position.”
Nixon and his two aides thought that the failure was playing havoc with Henry’s stability. “Henry was very down when he left for Paris,” Haldeman said. “He’s been under care. And he’s doing some strange things.” After reading The Will to Live, a book by Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, his former physician and therapist, Nixon recommended it to Haldeman as providing a road map to what Nixon called “K’s suicidal complex. He also wants to be sure I make extensive memoranda about K’s mental processes and so on for his files,” Haldeman recorded.
As Henry returned from Paris, Nixon complained about a James Reston column in the New York Times, which “had to come from K.” Nixon took exception to Henry’s suggestion that they “just increase the bombing below the twentieth parallel.” He told Haldeman that “if we want to step it up, we’ve got to make a major move and go all out.” When Haig reported that Henry “was very touchy in a phone conversation,” Nixon said that “K is showing too many signs of insubordination.” He told Haig that Henry’s outlook is “half rational and half irrational.” He and Haig agreed that they ought to keep Henry away from the press and send him “for a rest…to Mexico or any place where it’s hard to get on the telephone.”
Kissinger was frustrated and depressed by his inability to bring the negotiations to a successful conclusion. He felt “isolated and devastated” on the return plane trip from Paris. At Andrews Air Force Base, when a reporter asked if he thought peace was at hand, he resorted to comic self-deprecation: “That’s a good phrase. Wonder who used it?”
He was furious at all the Vietnamese. “They’re just a bunch of shits,” he told Haig. In a telephone conversation with a journalist friend that afternoon, when she urged him to get peace for her sake, he replied: “At this stage, I have to do it for me or I’ll lose my mind. You know, when you meet with two groups of Vietnamese in the same day, you might as well run an insane asylum.” The next morning, when he met with Nixon to discuss their options, he called them “Tawdry, filthy shits. They make the Russians look good.” He subsequently described Thieu to Nixon as “this insane son-of-a-bitch.” As for the North Vietnamese, they were a bunch of “bastards” who “have been screwing us.”
Nixon’s concerns about Kissinger had less to do with his emotional state than with their rivalry. Nixon saw Henry as using the press to defend himself against criticism for the breakdown in Paris and to position himself to get the lion’s share of the credit for any settlement. He worried that Henry was selling the press on the idea that he had peace in his grasp and that the president had pulled back from the settlement. After Henry met with the president in the Oval Office on the morning of December 14, Haldeman confronted him about press leaks. “It was really kind of hysterical,” Haldeman wrote. Henry denied talking to reporters and “didn’t understand why we didn’t trust him when he says he doesn’t talk to these people.” After Haldeman read him direct quotes from a story, Henry “hemmed and hawed a bit” and acknowledged phone conversations with the journalists.
Nixon’s objective with Kissinger was not to isolate him—that would have implied a total collapse of the talks and White House disarray—but to make him an instrument of the president’s purposes. Nixon instructed Henry to hold a press conference on December 16. He sent him two detailed memos, totaling seven pages, on exactly what to say. To ease Henry’s embarrassment at his “peace is at hand” statement, Nixon instructed him to assert that the press had “gone overboard in being more optimistic than they really should have been…and failed to recognize adequately the caveats” about the several “sticky matters that had to be worked out.”
He also directed Henry to make clear that the president had set the goals for a settlement that was within reach, but still needed working through if we were to get a stable, long-term peace rather than one leading to another war. Henry was to explain that Hanoi was making preparations to continue the fighting. Nixon then wanted Henry to say that both the North and South Vietnamese shared responsibility for the slowdown in the negotiations and to announce the president’s intention “to step up pressure on both sides for a faster settlement.”
The news conference was a prelude to a massive bombing campaign begun on December 18. Nixon insisted that the air attacks start while Congress was in recess for the Christmas break. If it was in session, he would have to explain his action to Senate and House leaders, and risk an explosion of opposition. “One of the beauties of doing it now,” he told Henry, “we don’t have the problem of having to consult with Congress.” We need to “move on it right now, move, move, move,” he told Haig, “get the damn thing going.”
They did, and over the next twelve days, with a stand-down on Christmas, U.S. air forces led by B-52s blasted Hanoi and Haiphong with around-the-clock attacks. The objective was to break North Vietnam’s will to fight and convince Thieu that Nixon meant what he said about responding to any future violations of a peace agreement.
The assault was a capstone to an eight-year air war in which the United States unleashed more tonnage on Vietnam than it had used in all theaters during World War II. A hundred B-52s was “like a 4,000-plane raid in World War II,” Kissinger told the president. “It’s going to break every window in Hanoi.” And, of course, much more: The Washington Post described the assault as “the most savage and senseless act of war ever visited, over a scant ten days, by one sovereign people over another.” It was “a stone-age tactic,” Democratic Senator Mike Mansfield said. The United States paid a price for the air assault, losing fifteen B-52s during the Christmas bombing, as opponents sarcastically dubbed the attacks, fourteen more than had been lost in the war to that point. The devastation from the raids, however, forced the North Vietnamese to agree to return to the peace table in January.
By contrast, despite Nixon’s hopes, the bombing had little impact on Saigon. Thieu remained unreceptive to renewed pressure from Washington. When Barry Goldwater was quoted in the press as saying that “if Thieu bucks much more, the U.S. should adopt a ‘hell-with-him attitude,’” Nixon instructed that Thieu should see this. More directly, Nixon sent Haig back to Saigon with a personal letter that he asked Thieu to “treat with the greatest secrecy.” Nixon’s letter, underscored by Haig’s oral comments, told Thieu that the bombing was a message to Hanoi that they could expect more of the same if they broke the peace treaty. Thieu was also urged to understand that his refusal to end the war was encouraging Hanoi’s resistance to an agreement and that a failure to join in a settlement would mean a definitive end to U.S. support. Collaboration with Washington in ending the conflict would assure Thieu of future U.S. military aid.
Thieu signaled his continued resistance to Nixon’s demands by keeping Bunker and Haig waiting for over four hours before meeting with them on December 20 and by characterizing Nixon’s letter as an “ultimatum.” In a written reply, Thieu asked Haig to carry to Washington, he refused to settle without an evacuation of North Vietnamese troops and a U.S. commitment to oppose Communist claims to a role in governing South Vietnam.
Kissinger advised Nixon that Thieu’s letter was the last straw. It “seems to leave us little alternative except to move toward a bilateral arrangement.” At a meeting with Kissinger and Haldeman, Nixon concluded that we would have “to go out alone.” During the discussion, Henry “said with some glee that Haig has now joined the club—that he got kicked in the teeth by Thieu.” He repeatedly “blasted Thieu as a complete SOB” and referred to the “South Vietnamese as SOBs, maniacs, and so on.” They agreed that they should go ahead with the North Vietnamese and not give Thieu another chance. When Hanoi agreed to resume talks on January 8, the White House, without consulting Saigon, announced a bombing halt above the twentieth parallel on December 30.
Haig thought it was a terrible mistake. He believed that the only chance to save South Vietnam was an unrelenting bombing campaign that forced Hanoi to evacuate its troops from the South. Nixon, however, told Haig that if he kept up the air assault he would face impeachment. Besides it was difficult to imagine that more bombing of the North would compel it to do what it had resisted for the last eight years.
As the year came to an end, Nixon and Kissinger could look back on an impressive record of improved relations with Peking and Moscow, an extraordinary electoral victory, and the likelihood that the Vietnam War, after many false starts, would be coming to a close. But the New Year seemed freighted with ongoing concerns: A settlement promised little assurance of Saigon’s autonomy; the simmering Watergate scandal could turn into a distracting problem; the Middle East might erupt in a regional war that could undermine Soviet-American relations; and Allende’s government in Chile could destabilize Latin America, or so Nixon and Kissinger believed.