Forces now are converging that make possible, for the first time, the hope that many of man’s deepest aspirations can at last be realized.
—RICHARD NIXON, INAUGURAL ADDRESS, JANUARY 20, 1969
The pledges of each new Administration are leaves on a turbulent sea. No President-elect or his advisers can possibly know upon what shores they may finally be washed by that storm of deadlines, ambiguous information, complex choices, and manifold pressures which descends upon all leaders of a great nation.
—HENRY KISSINGER, White House Years
Major challenges faced Nixon and Kissinger at the start of their first term—Vietnam, Soviet relations, the Middle East, and China. They believed that if Nixon were going to win reelection and make a mark on history, these were the crucial foreign policy problems they would have to solve or at least make less threatening to America’s national security.
Vietnam and advances in Soviet-American relations came first. In the “short range,” Nixon recorded in January 1969 about China, “—no change. Long range—we do not want 800,000,000 people living in angry isolation. We want contact.” He intended to restart secret diplomatic meetings with the Chinese in Warsaw, and told Kissinger to give private “‘encouragement to the attitude that this administration is exploring possibilities of rapprochement with the Chinese.’” It was a striking departure from Nixon’s harsh attacks on “Red China” prior to 1969. As president, however, he no longer saw any domestic political value in bashing Democrats as soft on the Chinese Communists. He was focused instead on how unproductive continuing Sino-American tensions could be in the reach for greater international stability and peace. It was an initial demonstration of what Nixon and Kissinger sensibly thought of as foreign policy realism.
As for the Middle East, it “is a powder keg” he intended to make “every effort to defuse,” beginning with Soviet-American talks, but not ruling out four-power negotiations, including Britain and France, and possible initiatives through the UN. Nixon and Kissinger told American Jewish leaders that it would make “many moves” to solve the region’s problems, but the means to a sensible solution were unclear. As events would demonstrate, it was a gross understatement.
Achieving an “honorable” end to the Vietnam War was America’s most compelling need. The emphasis was on “honorable.” Kissinger believed that the United States could settle for nothing less. “What is involved now,” he wrote in a January 1969 Foreign Affairs article, “is confidence in American promises…Unilateral withdrawal or a settlement which, even unintentionally, amounts to it could therefore lead to the erosion of restraints and to an even more dangerous international situation.” Though Kissinger and Nixon believed this, they were also mindful that Johnson’s inability to end the war had forced him from the presidency and seemed likely to cast a pall over his historical reputation. They were determined to withdraw from Vietnam to spare the United States from further losses and ensure against their political defeat.
Although Nixon had implied during the presidential campaign that he had a plan for ending the war, it was nothing more than an election ploy. Once he was elected, however, he began trying to find a formula to end the conflict. A month before he took office, he told Hanoi that he was prepared for “serious talks,” but would accept only “an honorable settlement,” meaning an autonomous South Vietnam, which vindicated U.S. sacrifices.
Hanoi’s initial reply to the president-elect discouraged hopes of an early settlement: The North Vietnamese insisted on the withdrawal of U.S. troops without saying anything about their departure from South Vietnam. They also insisted on an end to Thieu’s rule in Saigon. Because Hanoi was so unforthcoming, Nixon initially refused to discuss troop withdrawals in the Paris negotiations. In February, after he had used his first press conference to announce U.S. insistence on mutual withdrawal of forces and a POW exchange, and Hanoi had rejected these conditions, the Paris talks seemed hopelessly stalled.
But the stalemate did not particularly worry Nixon. He believed it would take at least a year to get a settlement and that the public needed to hear this as a counter to press demands that Washington be more flexible in the negotiations. Though there was little truth to it, Nixon and Kissinger agreed that they should tell the public, “We know where we are going, [a] plan exists, some progress has been made.”
In time, Nixon believed that he would be able to intimidate Hanoi. A report from Paris that the North Vietnamese saw Nixon as under less domestic pressure than Johnson to reach a quick settlement pleased Nixon. He told Haldeman that he was relying on what he called “the Madman theory.” He believed that the North Vietnamese would see him as ready to “do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain him when he is angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button’—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.” Nixon’s assessment was no more realistic than Johnson’s belief in 1965 that Ho couldn’t say no to a billion-dollar development program Johnson proposed in a speech at Johns Hopkins University.
Nixon, like Johnson, misread the resolve of Ho and his colleagues in Hanoi. Decades of struggle to oust the French and unify all of Vietnam under Communist control insulated the North Vietnamese from favors and threats. The seventy-nine-year-old Ho was the symbol not only of Vietnam’s struggle for self-determination but also of Communist rebellion against colonialism. Although he would die in September 1969, Ho’s acolytes would not betray his resolve to maintain the struggle against Western intruders in their domestic affairs. Nixon was aware of the French and American failures in Vietnam. Instead of chalking it up to Vietnamese effectiveness, he laid the blame on Western irresolution. He would avoid the mistakes that the French and Johnson had made—they weren’t tough enough. He assumed that he could scare the Communists into believing that he would exert enough force to compel an acceptable end to the war for the United States. And if need be, he would apply sufficient power to compel a settlement.
To give credibility to his “Madman theory,” Nixon believed it essential to increase the military pressure on the Communists in South Vietnam at once, but without provoking a break in negotiations. He told Kissinger to encourage press reports that the administration “‘at the highest levels’ is considering an air strike on North Vietnam, designed to show the war will take a very tough new direction if the Paris talks collapse.”
Kissinger pressed Laird and the Joint Chiefs to come up with something that could signal our determination to pressure the enemy during the initial negotiations in Paris. But they also needed to guard against provoking domestic repercussions in the U.S. Offensive operations in Laos and Cambodia were all considered as well as renewed air attacks on North Vietnam, but no one thought any of this would make a strong impression on Hanoi.
Although Nixon said later that they considered and summarily rejected “knockout blows”—destroying North Vietnam’s dikes or using tactical nuclear weapons—there is no documentary evidence that such extreme action was ever discussed. Nixon and Kissinger knew that any substantial escalation of the conflict would touch off an explosion of domestic opposition that would undermine the administration’s ability to govern and its prospects for a second term. The truth is that Nixon and Kissinger had no good alternative for ending the war except the application of more force. It was no different from what LBJ had tried before accepting in 1968 that a combination of Hanoi’s resilience and American public opposition made military escalation an unproductive alternative.
On February 22, 1969, the Communists began an offensive in South Vietnam’s central region from sanctuaries in Cambodia. Nixon was determined to identify something—anything—that could be seen by the Communists as an effective response to the renewed aggression. He agreed to a Kissinger proposal for B-52 air attacks on the South Vietnamese side of the Cambodian border and to a contingency plan for a B-52 strike against “the central committee of the communist party in South Vietnam (COSVN)—the controlling headquarters of the North Vietnamese,” which was supposedly located in what was described as the “fish hook” area of Cambodia northeast of Tay Ninh in South Vietnam.
Increased U.S. casualties and the belief that Hanoi was testing his resolve to maintain the U.S. commitment to Saigon convinced Nixon that he must retaliate with secret air strikes. He and Kissinger believed that “absolute secrecy” was essential to the success of any attack inside Cambodia—not only to ensure destroying the target but also out of a concern not to undermine peace talks by putting Hanoi “in a public position of seeming to negotiate under pressure.” The unspoken reason for secrecy was White House fear of stirring antiwar protests that gave the lie to Nixon’s campaign promises to end the war and domestic strife.
Reluctance to alienate the Phnom Penh government and fears of peace marches at home persuaded Nixon to hold back from an immediate assault on Cambodia. The country had long been a Communist supply route: the Chinese sent matériel through the port at Sihanoukville on the southwest coast in the Gulf of Thailand; and Hanoi supported their troops and the Viet Cong via the Ho Chi Minh Trail running south through Laos and eastern Cambodia. But hopes of convincing Prince Norodom Sihanouk to side with the U.S. and South Vietnamese had given the country immunity from attack, and Nixon was reluctant to abandon this strategy. In February 1969, moreover, Laird and Rogers warned that if U.S. air raids on Cambodia became public knowledge—the Cambodians or the North Vietnamese might reveal them—it would touch off fresh antiwar demonstrations in the United States and deepen Hanoi’s conviction that U.S. domestic opposition would force a settlement on its terms.
With little reason to think that an air assault would produce a prompt end to the conflict, Nixon decided to make an attack on Cambodia a contingency rather than an immediate reality. Besides, Nixon and Kissinger had some hope that the CIA might be able to use “bribery” to curtail Sihanouk’s collaboration with Hanoi. “K[issinger] asked if H[elms] could get him a formal reply as to whether anything can be done—bribery, etc.—re Cambodian assistance to the North Vietnamese,” the summary of a February Kissinger telephone conversation with Helms reads. Helms promised him a prompt answer.
The CIA considered offering bribes to Cambodian officials to halt the flow of arms through its country to Vietnam, but concluded that it could not match the profits accruing to the officials from the arms traffic. Nor would these officials be willing to take the political risks involved in working with the United States.
Nixon and Kissinger resorted to other means to gain Sihanouk’s cooperation. They viewed him as a “vain and flighty” but masterful politician who had miraculously managed to preserve his country’s independence. Appealing to his well-honed survival instincts, U.S. representatives convinced Sihanouk that he could benefit from the reopening of a U.S. diplomatic mission in Phnom Penh and from turning a blind eye to air attacks on North Vietnamese forces in eastern Cambodia, from which his countrymen had been expelled.
Before expanding military action, however, Nixon and Kissinger wanted to try convincing Moscow to pressure Hanoi into a settlement. In December, before Nixon took office, Kissinger had a conversation with an unamed Soviet diplomat in which he explained that Moscow’s interest in strategic arms talks would be reciprocated if it cooperated on Vietnam and the Middle East. Arms control without political agreements would not significantly reduce tensions, the Soviets were also told.
At a meeting with Nixon on February 17, Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin assured the president that the Soviet government shared his interest in starting a new era of negotiations rather than confrontation. Nixon expressed the view that Vietnam would be a good place to start and asked the Soviets “to get the Paris talks off dead-center…Progress in one area is bound to have an influence on progress in all other areas,” he said.
Dobrynin’s receptivity to negotiations with the United States suggested to Nixon and Kissinger that they might be able to link arms control talks to peace arrangements for Vietnam. But it was wishful thinking. As with hopes that the “Mad Man theory” could push Ho into a peace agreement, the Nixon-Kissinger assumption about prospects for what Kissinger called “linkage” was no more realistic.
Malcolm Toon, the state department’s director of Soviet Affairs, told Kissinger that Moscow understood Nixon’s eagerness to link progress on political problems to advances on arms control, but that they were reluctant to make the connection. Dobrynin dismissed administration expectations in a conversation with Averell Harriman, saying Moscow “would not be bribed or intimidated.” His comment spoke volumes about Soviet understanding of what limited influence they held over their Middle East allies and North Vietnam.
Toon’s cautionary note went unheeded. It was part of the Nixon-Kissinger effort to isolate the state department from direct involvement in negotiations with the Soviets. Before the meeting with Dobrynin, Nixon had asked Haldeman to inform Rogers that he would not be invited. When Rogers objected, Nixon, against Kissinger’s advice, agreed to have Toon present at the conversation. After Toon and Kissinger had left the meeting, Nixon told Dobrynin that in the future he wanted him to discuss sensitive issues with Kissinger before there was any contact with Rogers or the state department.
Dobrynin was happy to agree. An astute diplomat with a substantial knowledge of American politics and personalities honed during four years as head of the American division of the Soviet Foreign Office and seven years in Washington, Dobrynin understood from the first that Nixon intended to make Kissinger his principal negotiator. Let us address each other by our first names, Anatoly told Henry at their initial meeting in February 1969. Kissinger described him as “subtle and disciplined, warm in his demeanor while wary in his conduct, Dobrynin moved through the upper echelons of Washington with consummate skill.” Henry saw him as an ambassador who, unlike the many ciphers Moscow had representing it abroad, could make a valuable contribution to reduced tensions in Soviet-American relations.
The relationship with Dobrynin “formally established” what Kissinger called “the Channel.” Nixon and Kissinger feared a loss of control over policy making if they included Rogers and the state department in discussions with the Soviets, but their concerns seem overblown and less than a full explanation of their motives. They not only considered Rogers and state’s bureaucracy an impediment to fresh diplomatic initiatives, they also saw the arrangement as a way to guard against sharing accolades for administration successes. Yet by cutting themselves off from the expertise someone like Toon brought to the analysis of Soviet-American relations, they overinvested in hopes of a major Soviet part in forcing an end to the Vietnam conflict.
Nixon and Kissinger certainly had identified the greatest challenges facing the United States when they gave priority to ending the war, reducing tensions with Moscow, establishing official relations with China, and promoting Middle East peace talks. But their shared belief that they were able to address these problems without significant help from the state and defense departments or the CIA was a serious mistake. Their assumption that press leaks from the departments would undermine and even destroy their initiatives is unconvincing. True, these agencies could waste time and energy in bureaucratic turf wars and were notorious for less than imaginative thinking. But treating other U.S. government officials as if they were enemies who could not be trusted created resentments and forestalled internal discussions with experienced diplomats and national security authorities that might have produced a greater realism about international challenges. Their failure to consult members of the Senate and House committees on foreign affairs was as pronounced.
Because their rationalization for barring others in the administration and Congress from a central role in policy making is so questionable, it suggests that Nixon and Kissinger had a hidden agenda that they themselves did not fully glimpse. Both men were painfully unsure of themselves. They put up bold fronts that masked inner uncertainties and made them all too prone to guard against self-doubts by insisting on the greatest possible control. It was as if they couldn’t bear criticism or open themselves to advice that might conflict with their views. Nixon needed constant reassurance that he was performing effectively. After the meeting with Dobrynin, for example, Nixon repeatedly asked and received Kissinger’s assurances that he had struck all the right notes in the conversation.
Walter Isaacson got it just right when he wrote that the Nixon-Kissinger style of governance was more the result of “their personalities than because it suited the security interests of the nation. They both had a penchant for secrecy, a distaste for sharing credit with others, and a romantic view of themselves as loners…Neither believed he had much to learn from professional diplomats or congressmen. Nor did either have any faith that public input and the messiness of public debate might lead to wiser decisions.” Roger Morris says that “the brutal truth was that, at heart, neither man had a steadfast faith in the democratic process, least of all as applied to the conduct of foreign policy.”
Kissinger himself acknowledged that “less elevated motives of vanity and quest for power [may have] played a role” in what he and Nixon did. “It is unlikely that they were entirely absent,” he conceded. But neither he nor Nixon seemed to have enough self-awareness to accept the extent to which such impulses governed their behavior and reduced their receptivity to outside judgments that might have made them more successful in managing foreign affairs.
BECAUSE NEITHER VIETNAM, Soviet-American relations, China, nor Middle East problems offered any prospect of a quick advance in international relations, Nixon decided to make a late-February trip to Europe, where he could demonstrate his interest in and relative mastery of foreign policy. He wished to impress himself on everyone at home and abroad as the leader of the free world, he told Haldeman. The eight-day trip between February 23 and March 2, with stops in Brussels, London, Bonn, Berlin, Rome, and Paris, was a whirlwind of ceremonies largely devoid of substance. As Nixon acknowledged to reporters at the start of the trip, the discussions would not produce “any spectacular news” about the successful negotiation of existing problems. “He was under no illusions that grand tours or…a ‘new spirit’ would resolve basic differences between adversaries, or even allies,” he told congressional leaders. Nevertheless, he expected the trip to underscore his standing as an American statesman intent on advancing international harmony.
The most telling moments of the trip came in France when Nixon met with President Charles de Gaulle, the West’s most prominent political figure. De Gaulle was ending a thirty-year public career dating from the French defeat early in World War II. Nixon remembered a lunch with him on an outdoor patio at the Elysée Palace in 1962, at which de Gaulle gave an “eloquent toast,” remarking on Nixon’s “difficult defeats” and predicting that “at some time in the future I would be serving my nation in a very high capacity.” It was a flattering comparison to the arc of de Gaulle’s own career.
During the February meeting in de Gaulle’s Elysée Palace office, de Gaulle declared himself “entirely at the President’s disposal to discuss anything he wished.” It was an expression of his self-confidence that he could instruct the Americans on all the major issues of the moment. “He exuded authority,” Kissinger recalls. When he came to Washington four weeks later for Eisenhower’s funeral, he was the most impressive head of government in attendance.
Nixon asked his advice on the Soviet Union. De Gaulle forcefully encouraged Nixon’s inclinations to work out differences with them. “There was Russia and there was Communism and…they were not always the same thing,” de Gaulle said. While he did not think “the danger of communism was over…it can no longer conquer the world. It is too late for that.”
De Gaulle saw the possibility for a “rapprochement,” by which he meant not “full confidence and trust” in the West but an arrangement that would assure against any Western attack. He was also confident that the Soviets had no intention of marching west. They knew this would lead to a war that they could not win. A policy of détente toward Moscow “was a matter of good sense…. In a world of détente, liberty would be the gainer” in Eastern Europe and possibly Russia as well. Nixon embraced de Gaulle’s advice on Soviet Russia as sensible realism.
What would de Gaulle suggest about equally perplexing problems in the Middle East? The 1967 war, in which Israel had occupied the West Bank of the Jordan River, the Sinai, and Syria’s Golan Heights, had left a legacy of rage that provoked intermittent violence. While the United States and some European countries supplied Israel with weapons to meet the attacks, the Soviets equipped Egypt and Syria, making the Middle East, in Nixon’s words, “an international powder keg” that could provoke a crisis between the United States and the U.S.S.R.
De Gaulle had limited sympathy for Israel. He described France as friendly to the Israelis before their attack in the recent war. He believed that a prompt settlement was essential to international stability, which should include a return of occupied territories, recognition of Israel’s existence, freedom of navigation in the Gulf of Aqaba and the Suez Canal, and a return of Palestinian refugees to their homes “insofar as this could be done.” Without a settlement, he expected the Israelis to “become more and more imperialistic.” They would “go to the Nile, to Beirut and to Damascus.” But then they “would face colossal difficulties…There would be assassinations and concentration camps, the [oil] pipe lines would be blown up.”
Nixon assured de Gaulle that unlike other presidents, he would not be influenced by the Jewish vote in the United States. He intended to make decisions about the Middle East based on strict considerations of national security.
Nixon described himself to de Gaulle as “somewhat pessimistic on the Middle East.” He was fearful that even with a settlement “Radical Forces” could scuttle any agreement. In addition to the likely intransigence of the Arabs and Israelis, he knew that, despite his talk of indifference to internal political pressures, American domestic politics would have a significant impact on decisions about the Middle East. In a mid-February meeting with six pro-Israeli congressmen, Nixon had assured them that the administration would not urge a settlement that jeopardized Israel’s basic interests. Before his meeting with the congressmen, Kissinger had told Nixon, “Your response will be important in setting the tone of our relationship with the [American-Jewish] community on Mid-East policy. They can make it very difficult for us to pursue a sensible policy.”
Not surprisingly, a brief discussion about China did not come up until the following day, when de Gaulle urged improved relations and Nixon described China as a long-range problem which could not be resolved in the short term.
Vietnam, by contrast, which was an urgent, immediate dilemma, was left for consideration at a final third-day meeting. Nixon may have assumed that de Gaulle’s advice would not be very helpful or that he would urge ending U.S. involvement in the fighting without offering constructive suggestions on how to do it.
Nevertheless, Nixon asked for de Gaulle’s counsel. Although he did not view the Algerian war as “a parallel situation,” de Gaulle replied, it was “a similar one.” Unlike Algeria, however, where France had a million settlers and had been for 130 years, the United States had a limited involvement with Vietnam. And though a settlement would produce “attacks at home and needles from the outside,” it was better to conclude U.S. involvement than to continue a struggle that was bound to end badly. Ending the war would free the United States to advance toward normal relations with Moscow. Moreover, “the U.S. could make such a settlement because its power and wealth were so great that it could do this with dignity. It would be better to let go than to try and stay.”
It was not what Nixon wanted to hear. He told de Gaulle that if the United States did not end the war “in a responsible way,” it would erode America’s credibility. De Gaulle was too polite or too doubtful that it would help to tell him that continuing the war was causing greater injury to America’s international standing than finding a rapid exit.
De Gaulle was more direct with Kissinger. At the end of a formal dinner, de Gaulle privately asked Henry: “Why don’t you get out of Vietnam?” Kissinger replied: “Because a sudden withdrawal might give us a credibility problem. ‘Where?’ the general wanted to know. I mentioned the Middle East. ‘How very odd,’ the general said from a foot above me. ‘It is precisely in the Middle East that I thought your enemies had the credibility problem.’” As Nixon and Kissinger would learn in time, de Gaulle had it right: a quick exit from Vietnam would have helped, not undermined America’s credibility.
It is surprising that neither Nixon nor Kissinger said anything about the Domino theory—namely, that a Communist victory in South Vietnam would topple other Southeast Asian states. But by 1969, this was an argument that had little continuing credence in the United States. What Nixon and Kissinger understood was that an ongoing U.S. presence in Vietnam would have to be tied more directly to American national security; hence, the credibility argument. A loss of U.S. credibility with its allies and adversaries would undermine the country’s ability to battle communism in the Cold War.
It was an argument that left de Gaulle and others abroad unconvinced, but many Americans were reluctant to summarily reject it. It is surprising that neither the president nor Kissinger saw fit to inquire how other governments would view America’s prompt end to the war. One can only assume that they thought the answer would not have been to their liking, and so they plunged ahead on a Vietnam strategy that they saw protecting U.S. credibility by preserving Saigon’s autonomy. And, not incidentally, giving them an assertion that made domestic critics seem all too casual about national defense.
The European trip gave Nixon what he wanted: a positive public reaction describing him as “a man of stature and wisdom. We could not have asked for more,” Pat Buchanan told him. Kissinger privately echoed the praise: “It is an understatement to say that the trip was an overwhelming success, both in reinforcing a positive public image of yourself and the United States.”
Such hyperbole made Nixon feel good, but it did nothing to foster his understanding of how difficult it would be to reach his foreign policy goals. True, there were domestic political benefits from the trip, which Nixon was happy to exploit. But the more important measure of whether the trip had changed international relations was rationalized. “We should have ‘no illusions’ that a trip of this nature can solve basic disagreements between nations,” Nixon told congressional leaders. “However, on this trip we ‘did set a climate which can settle the close ones’ and help us toward settlement of the more difficult disagreements.”
Kissinger was less happy with the trip’s impact on his control of foreign policy. To be sure, Nixon asked de Gaulle to ignore the usual diplomatic channels whenever he wished to reach him, and instead communicate through Kissinger. But Rogers’s presence on the trip pushed Henry off center stage. Protocol dictated that Rogers be more often at Nixon’s side than the national security adviser. Kissinger complained to Haldeman that his diminished status would weaken his ability to deal with foreign officials. “Henry swings from very tense to very funny,” Haldeman recorded during the trip.
AFTER THEY RETURNED FROM EUROPE, Kissinger criticized Rogers for telling Dobrynin that the administration was ready to enter into four-party political discussions on Vietnam with the North and South Vietnamese and the Viet Cong. Kissinger described this to Nixon as a serious error that would undermine the administration’s negotiating maneuverability in Paris and relations with Saigon.
Kissinger fought Rogers’s initiative by telling Dobrynin that we remained in favor of bilateral discussions with Hanoi about withdrawal, with political matters left to Saigon and the NLF. In a telephone conversation with Nixon, Henry predicted that Rogers’s proposal would injure relations with Thieu, and warned against the state department turning “itself loose again.”
A scant month into the administration, Kissinger told Haldeman that he couldn’t work with Rogers and was considering resigning. Haldeman counseled against any such talk, and the president appeased Henry by acknowledging Rogers’s mistake. But Nixon did not think that Rogers realized “the tremendous significance of tying political with military matters,” and recommended that they educate him.
Kissinger was less forgiving: He complained to Haldeman that “Rogers’ self-interest is so paramount that he can’t adequately serve the President.” (Rogers, whose affinity for intrigue and self-promotion was no match for Kissinger’s, might have lodged just this complaint against Henry.) Kissinger’s solution was to urge the president to appoint Rogers Chief Justice when Earl Warren resigned at the close of the Court’s term in June.
DURING THE FIRST TWO WEEKS of March, Nixon had bigger worries than making peace between his secretary of state and national security adviser. During his European trip in February, the North Vietnamese offensive, which more than doubled the number of American troops killed in a week to 453, outraged Nixon. As the journalist Seymour Hersh argued, the attacks were probably in retaliation for stepped-up American ground operations between November 1968 and February 1969. The state department, as a Nixon-Kissinger telephone conversation released in 2004 makes clear, put this argument before Nixon, but he rejected it. “State Department people never see these things with any realism,” Nixon said. He chose to interpret the attacks as a personal slap in the face: He saw Hanoi saying that the new president had no leverage to negotiate an honorable settlement and that the only U.S. recourse was to withdraw its forces and leave Vietnam’s fate to the Vietnamese—North and South.
Nixon now spent close to a month agonizing over how to respond. He and Kissinger continued to believe it desperately important to hide any air attacks on Cambodia lest they touch off an explosion of domestic opposition. Consequently, at a news conference on March 14, he coolly declared his intention to proceed with private talks in Paris that could lead to a settlement. “My response” to the Communist offensive, he added, “has been measured, deliberate, and some think, too cautious. But it will continue to be that way, because I am thinking of those peace talks every time I think of a military option in Vietnam.”
His only public indication of a heightened resolve to fight the war to a satisfactory conclusion was a response to a reporter’s question about troop levels: “There is no prospect for a reduction of American forces in the foreseeable future,” he said. For those who hoped to see a prompt end to American involvement, it was a troubling signal that Nixon had no clear idea of how to bring peace.
In fact, Nixon knew he couldn’t sustain the war effort at current levels without destroying his presidency, as Johnson had. And so plans were already being made to withdraw troops from Vietnam. But Nixon felt “very strongly,” Kissinger told Laird, that this “has to be kept to a small circle—there can be no leaks beforehand.”
As for bombing Cambodia, Nixon privately seethed and ran an erratic course. “All his instincts were to respond violently to Hanoi’s cynical maneuver,” Kissinger recalled. On the way to Brussels, his first European stop, Nixon excitedly instructed Kissinger to direct the Pentagon to implement plans to bomb the Cambodian sanctuaries. Haig and an Air Force colonel were ordered to fly at once to the Brussels airport for a secret conference with Kissinger and Haldeman on Air Force One. A concern for “total secrecy” about the plan was reflected in instructions to the colonel that the Strategic Air Command be kept in the dark and that B-52 pilots be misled into believing that they were bombing targets in South Vietnam.
It would entail an astonishing act of duplicity. The colonel later told Seymour Hersh that if the operation “leaked to the press and led to antiwar and anti-Nixon protests…he would be…saddled with the blame.” Since it would take time for the colonel to devise a means to hide the operation from Air Force chiefs and since Rogers opposed the whole idea and Laird favored doing it openly, Nixon delayed a final decision.
For two weeks after he returned from Europe, Nixon struggled over whether to proceed. But he was eager to hit hard at the Communists. “There is not going to be any de-escalation,” he told Kissinger in a phone conversation on March 8. “We are just going to keep giving word to [Joint Chiefs Chairman General Earl] Wheeler to knock hell out of them.” He also told Kissinger that he didn’t like being in the position of saying “No, yes, no, yes, or maybe.”
But Henry added to Nixon’s hesitation by warning that if private talks they favored outside the established venue began in Paris, an attack on Cambodia would jeopardize them. Nixon insisted, however, that he would not allow the Communists to kick us without a response. “We cannot tolerate one more of these [assaults in South Vietnam] without hitting back,” he said. “…However, if they don’t hit us, we are screwed,” meaning he badly wanted a rationale for bombing. He was avid to show the Communists that they were dealing with a president who was ready to beat them into submission.
A Viet Cong attack on Saigon on March 15 settled the issue. Still, Nixon was unsure about an effective course of action. Despite ordering an attack on North Vietnam’s Cambodian base, Nixon manifested continuing doubts in repeated telephone calls to Kissinger. “State is to be notified only after the point of no return,” he shouted into the receiver at 3:35 on the afternoon of the fifteenth. “The order is not appealable.” Calling back nine minutes later, he excitedly declared that orders were to go out to all officials prohibiting any comment on the Communist attack. “No comment, no warnings, no complaints, no protests…I mean it, not one thing to be said to anyone publicly or privately without my prior approval.” One minute later, he called again: “Everything that will fly is to get over to North Vietnam…There is to be no appeal from that either. He will let them [the Communists and the doubters in his administration] know who is boss around here.”
Hyperbole was Nixon’s response to doubts and indecision: “The ‘order is not appealable’ was a favorite Nixon phrase,” Kissinger said, “which to those who knew him grew to mean considerable uncertainty.”
The air raid became a moment for self-congratulation. Code-named Menu, with a March 18 attack dubbed Breakfast (“as meaningless as it was tasteless,” Kissinger said), the bombing three miles inside of Cambodia was hailed at the White House as a great success. It apparently hit ammunition and fuel depots, which allegedly produced seventy-three secondary explosions. Kissinger told General Wheeler, “Psychologically, the impact must have been something.”
Although they had no evidence that the North Vietnamese headquarters, which had been the principal target of the raid, had been destroyed, Nixon and Kissinger took satisfaction from Communist and Cambodian silence. Instead of loud protests, which they feared and had planned a public response to, neither Hanoi nor Phnom Penh said anything. The North Vietnamese apparently kept quiet out of a reluctance to acknowledge their presence in Cambodia and the possibility that it might become an excuse for a U.S. ground assault, which could deprive Hanoi of a useful sanctuary.
Nixon and Kissinger also believed that the air attack advanced the Paris peace talks. Two days after the attack, Hanoi’s acceptance of bilateral private talks in Paris seemed connected to the raid. “Now we know how badly they need” the negotiations, Henry told the president, implying that because of the bombing, the North Vietnamese felt compelled to come to the peace table.
Nixon agreed. He told Kissinger that North Vietnamese complaints to Moscow about the air action was a response to the attack. Henry replied: “If Hanoi weren’t in trouble, they would never have agreed so fast” to private talks. “If our domestic critics would leave us alone for six months, we could get something accomplished,” he added.
It was all wishful thinking. “Domestic critics” in the Congress, the press, and a growing body of public opinion made it impossible for the White House to enjoy an extended period in which war protests would be suspended. Over the next month, the Paris talks also demonstrated that Hanoi was unyielding in its resistance to U.S. peace plans.
For the moment, however, Hanoi’s willingness to engage in secret talks after the air attacks encouraged Nixon to assume that his tough action was having the desired effect. He was ready to keep hitting them. “There will be no de-escalation except as an outgrowth of mutual troop withdrawal,” Nixon declared after a March 28 NSC meeting. Hence, on March 31, when the Communists staged another rocket attack on Saigon, Nixon told Kissinger, “We should let them have it again—crack the hell out of them…Our major problem is for them not to have a sign that we are caving in.” Henry wanted to hit a different area in Cambodia.
Despite a nonresponse to the March 31 attack and ongoing North Vietnamese insistence on unilateral U.S. withdrawal, Nixon and Kissinger continued to talk as if they were prepared to break Hanoi’s will through expanded military actions. On April 3, Kissinger told Dobrynin that “the President was determined to end the war one way or the other.” He wanted Dobrynin to understand that he “did not speak idly.” He also raised the possibility that an ongoing conflict in Vietnam could provoke a Soviet-American conflict. On the fifteenth, he warned Dobrynin that U.S. actions in Vietnam might complicate Soviet-American relations and impede strategic arms and Middle East peace talks.
The Nixon-Kissinger threats were empty talk. They had no intention of forcing a showdown with Moscow over Vietnam; nor did they feel free to buck American public sentiment by openly escalating the war against Hanoi. A Kissinger plan, which had been discussed during LBJ’s presidency, to mine North Vietnam’s Haiphong harbor unless there were results in Paris was more posturing. The threat was also a way to pressure Rogers and Laird, to whom Nixon sent a tough memo emphasizing their need to support White House policy.
Nevertheless, Nixon and Kissinger continued to see military action as essential to an honorable peace in Southeast Asia. In April, they unleashed additional air attacks on Cambodia code-named Lunch. In raids on April 23 and April 24, they increased the number of B-52s hitting Cambodia from forty-eight to ninety. The attacks caused “150 secondary explosions and 44 secondary fires.” The chiefs told Henry that “this is the most successful thing of this kind they have ever done.” The hyperbole about the raids and the continuing lack of a public Cambodian or North Vietnamese response encouraged Nixon to authorize additional attacks over the next five weeks—callously titled by someone at the Pentagon, Snack, Dinner, Dessert, and Supper.
Reports from General Abrams and Ambassador Bunker that “Menu has been one of the most telling operations in the entire war” encouraged White House hopes that the air campaign would make Hanoi more flexible in the Paris discussions. It was a false assumption. Whatever one may say about the legality and morality of such secret raids—and much critical comment would be made when they were revealed in 1973—they did not produce a significant change in North Vietnam’s determination to fight.
Although the administration would consistently hide attacks on Cambodia by listing them as raids on South Vietnam and though neither Hanoi nor Phnom Penh made them public, they became news nevertheless. On May 9, 1969, William Beecher, the New York Times Pentagon correspondent, ran a front-page story describing the B-52 raids on Communist supply dumps in Cambodia.
Nixon and Kissinger were outraged and refused to comment on the report. Henry called Laird, who he believed had leaked the Cambodian story: “You son of a bitch,” Kissinger shouted at him on the telephone. “I know you leaked that story, and you’re going to have to explain it to the president.” Laird, who had not given the story to Beecher but had confirmed the bombing, hung up on Kissinger.
Nixon and Kissinger had no categorical objections to leaks per se: they saw them as inevitable and were happy to use them to promote their own agendas, including impressions that they would act decisively in Vietnam. Moreover, within a month of becoming president, Nixon had told Henry, “I believe in controlling the news—but not in the sense of curbing anything—but in what you put out. Just find what you want to say and say it.”
Nixon’s response to a negative newspaper account belied his words: “What is this cock-sucking story,” he exploded. “Find out who leaked it, and fire him!” From the start of his presidency, Nixon had obsessed about using the media to create positive images of himself and the administration. He wanted aides to orchestrate letters to newspaper editors and calls to TV stations. He felt that letters attacking various columnists who “unfairly” criticized him would be especially useful. When the television comedians, the Smothers Brothers, poked fun at him for thinking he could solve national problems, he wanted administration supporters to flood the producers with complaining letters and calls.
Henry initially announced his intention to avoid dealings with the press. But he quickly learned how much Nixon would rely on him to explain administration policies and purposes. Within days of becoming national security adviser, he began talking to leading members of the Washington press corps. Nixon repeatedly used him to plant stories with a few key columnists about the president’s effectiveness in making foreign policy and winning public approval. Henry was happy to satisfy Nixon’s requests, and at the same time, establish good relations with journalists who could help create a positive public image of himself. His staff, however, was warned against press contacts, especially those that led to unauthorized leaks or took the limelight away from their boss.
In April, after press stories appeared about Soviet missile deployments based on “highly classified information,” plans to withdraw troops from Vietnam, and negotiations for arms sales to Jordan, Nixon and Kissinger tried to find the sources of these leaks. They were particularly angered by what they saw as pressure on the administration to act prematurely in pulling out of Vietnam and by stories that might demoralize the South Vietnamese.
On April 18, Henry “expressed dismay” to Rogers about a leak “and said so help him if he finds out who that man is.” In a conversation with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, Henry promised to “destroy whoever did this if we can find him, no matter where he is.” Henry also described one story to Joe Alsop as “totally untrue.” Reports that they were planning to withdraw “200,000 troops is absurd.” On April 25, Nixon discussed means of reining in leaks with Attorney General John Mitchell and Hoover. Hoover said that wiretaps were “the only really effective means of uncovering leakers.” Every president since Franklin Roosevelt had used them to defend the country against the unauthorized release of sensitive information. Ten days later, Kissinger conferred with Hoover at FBI headquarters as a follow up to a Nixon decision to have Henry “supply Hoover with the names of individuals who had access to the leaked materials and whom he had any cause to suspect.” Kissinger named Al Haig as his go-between to Hoover.
When Nixon and Kissinger told Hoover that the May 9 and earlier leaks “were more than just damaging; they were potentially dangerous to national security,” Hoover began tapping the phones of three national security officials identified by Henry—Daniel Davidson, Morton Halperin, and Hal Sonnenfeldt—and one defense department officer, Colonel Robert Pursley, a Laird assistant. Within days, two other NSC staff members came under scrutiny as well: Richard Moose and Richard Sneider. FBI agents also began listening to the phone conversations of four journalists—Beecher and Hendrick Smith of the Times, an English correspondent based in Washington, Henry Brandon of the Sunday Times of London, and CBS newsman Marvin Kalb.
“From early 1969 to early 1971,” Nixon said seven years later, seventeen individuals were wiretapped by the FBI. The group included four newsmen and thirteen White House, state, and defense department aides. An eighteenth tap was put on the syndicated columnist Joseph Kraft. He came under suspicion because he “had very good sources in the White House and NSC staffs and at the State and Defense Departments,” and also had “direct contact with the North Vietnamese,” with whom he spoke when he traveled to Paris.
The irony is that the taps on Kraft may have been aimed as much at Kissinger as at Kraft. Nixon came to believe, with good reason, that Henry was a prime source of Kraft’s inside information. Nixon said later that he could not remember why he authorized all these taps and acknowledged that “unfortunately none of these wiretaps turned up any proof linking anyone in the government to a specific national security leak.” In a 1973 taped conversation with White House counsel John Dean, Nixon was more graphic about the pointlessness of the taps: “They never helped us,” he said. “Just gobs and gobs of material. Gossip and bullshitting.”
Partisan politics may have partly motivated the tapping. Hoover advised Nixon, Kissinger, and Haig that many of the leaks were coming from Democrats eager to undermine a Republican administration. During their April 25 conversation at Camp David, Hoover, according to Haldeman, talked about “all the bad guys” who had “infiltrated into everywhere, especially State. Hoover full of hair-raising reports about all this.” After receiving “a very sensitive report” from Hoover, Haig told Kissinger, “I suspect that many of these individuals [civil service Democrats] are the sources of our leaks to the press and some of the problems we have experienced in enforcing and implementing Presidential policy.”
Although Nixon justified the taps as legal and essential to the national interest and in line with what earlier presidents had done—“the average number of warrantless wiretaps per year during my presidency was less than in any administration since FDR’s”—they had less to do with national security or even politics than Nixon acknowledged.
The principal motives for the taps were the Nixon-Kissinger compulsion to exercise as much control over foreign policy as possible, and Nixon’s long-standing animus toward the press. (“The press is the enemy,” Nixon never tired of telling his aides and supporters.) Specifically, by the spring of 1969, he and Henry were frustrated at the limits of their control over international affairs. Neither the Soviets nor the North Vietnamese were responding to the administration’s pressure for productive peace talks; the Middle East and Latin America presented insurmountable barriers to gains.
If they couldn’t master developments overseas, Nixon and Kissinger hoped at least to control foreign policy making at home. In brief, if they couldn’t bend other governments to their will, they became all the more insistent on forcing their bureaucracies and the American press to follow their lead. It was hardly a reason to wiretap fellow citizens, but foreign policy making by Nixon and Kissinger was never as rational as they pretended it was or hoped it might be.
Vietnam was the prime case in point. During the first four months of the administration, a tone of confident optimism ran through all the private and public discussion about bringing the war to a satisfactory conclusion. When Nixon met with Time magazine executives and CEOs of major corporations on March 11, he brimmed with enthusiasm: America’s military commanders and diplomats in Vietnam were “an especially fine team…the best yet,” while “Thieu was the best leader the South Vietnamese people have had to date.” Things were “going far better in Vietnam than most Americans realize. Press stories do not convey our current military advantages. If we are losing the war, we are losing it in the U.S., not in Vietnam…. Militarily, there is light at the end of the tunnel,” though “a long-term U.S. military presence will be necessary.” Thieu was ready to accept a fifty-thousand U.S. troop reduction in 1969. The Time representatives and businessmen who had recently visited Vietnam shared Nixon’s positive outlook.
Nixon’s optimism partly rested on a report from Laird describing what he had found during an early March visit to Vietnam: the success of the pacification program, bringing expanded Saigon control over rural areas, and the likely increased effectiveness of a South Vietnamese military receiving the best possible equipment and training from U.S. advisers. It was what the administration, led by Laird, now agreed to describe as Vietnamization—Saigon’s assumption of growing responsibility for the war.
U.S. public opinion and American missionaries in Vietnam encouraged Nixon’s attraction to the idea. A Louis Harris survey reported in the Washington Post and Philadelphia Inquirer showed a 49 to 34 percent approval for a fifty-thousand troop recall from Vietnam. The Reverend Billy Graham told the president that American missionaries, who had been in Southeast Asia for five to twenty years and had spoken with “hundreds of Vietnamese officials” urged “a full enlistment of our Vietnamese allies in their own defense.” Vietnamization needed to replace the Americanization of the war. In fact, it was the only way Nixon saw to escape from the war. Would it work? Nobody could be sure, but it was the most sensible means the White House saw for ending what was no longer a politically viable war—no matter which party or individual held the presidency.
But Nixon believed that Vietnamization could not be rushed. Hanoi and the American public would have to be convinced that this was a workable plan. After eight years of trying to mold the South Vietnamese military into an effective fighting force at a cost of billions of dollars and over thirty-five thousand American lives, there was justifiable skepticism.
Vietnamization partly rested on a cynical calculation that the policy might turn out to be nothing more than a fig leaf for American and South Vietnamese defeat. As Nixon had told Richard Whalen, a speech writer, during the 1968 election campaign, “I’ve been saying, ‘an honorable end to the war,’ but what the hell does that really mean?” Nixon understood that the war couldn’t be won, but he also believed he couldn’t say this. It was essential, not only for the administration’s political survival but also for reasons of national morale, to maintain the fiction that America had fought a successful war and that Saigon would now stand on its own.
Consequently, in mid-April, when Newsweek published an article describing divisions between the state and defense departments over Vietnam, Nixon told national security advisers that “criticism has reached a dangerous point where the President seems to have lost control of his team and everyone seems to be going off in different directions.” He believed it essential to have “a consistent line with no deviation whatever.” At the beginning of May, when Kissinger gave a background briefing to the press, he assured reporters that the president was “following a carefully thought-out strategy” on Vietnam. The Paris peace talks were proceeding “approximately as we had expected them to go.” The message, in short, was: The administration is in control of events, knows where it is heading, and expects to reach a satisfactory settlement in due course.
Nixon’s design for Vietnam was self-evident. Like Johnson before him, he wanted to ensure that the war ended with guarantees of South Vietnam’s autonomy. To achieve this, Hanoi would have to agree to mutual troop withdrawals, and Vietnamization would have to be the result not of American determination to withdraw from Vietnam but of Saigon’s genuine ability to defend itself. Vietnamization would be “accomplished as an act of strength rather than weakness,” Nixon advised Rogers as he prepared to visit Saigon in mid-May. Rogers needed to take this line with the South Vietnamese, U.S. embassy and military officials, and the press. “In Saigon the tendency is to fight the war to victory,” Nixon told Henry during a phone conversation on May 12. “But you and I know it won’t happen—it is impossible. Even General Abrams agreed.” Kissinger was to hide Nixon’s candor.
Nixon and Kissinger faced three insurmountable problems in trying to leave behind an autonomous South Vietnam: Hanoi had no intention of ending the war with less than Communist control of the country, North and South; the South Vietnamese were incapable of effectively defending themselves; and a majority of Americans were unwilling to fight an open-ended war—the cost in blood and treasure was exceeding the price the country was disposed to pay for South Vietnam’s freedom from Communist control.
Leonard Garment, a Nixon White House counsel, advised the president in mid-May that the word which best described the national mood on Vietnam was “impatience.” The country wished “to turn away from excessive world involvement and back to the solution of social problems at home.” Garment also warned against asking for patience. “Words alone have a way of causing even greater impatience,” he told Nixon. It was a “Helpful, good analysis,” Nixon wrote Kissinger, signaling that he understood how essential it was to end America’s military involvement in Vietnam.
Nixon’s sensitivity to public impatience with losses in the war registered forcefully in a White House announcement on May 13 describing plans to reform the military draft. He intended to end conscription and replace it with an all-volunteer armed force. Because a draft would still be essential for the immediate future, however, Nixon said he would continue the present call-up procedures but wished to alter them to minimize the disruption to young men’s lives. He asked that the period of prime vulnerability to the draft be reduced from seven years to one year between the ages of nineteen and twenty. The objective, as Nixon freely acknowledged, was not only to make the system fairer and less uncertain for young men but also to quiet public unhappiness with military conscription.
The nation’s growing impatience with the war dictated that Nixon promise more than changes in the draft. On May 14, six days after the NLF announced a ten-point plan for ending the conflict, Nixon outlined U.S. conditions for a settlement in a nationally televised speech. Although Kissinger assured reporters and senators that the president’s speech had been in the works for quite a while, Hanoi’s initiative, coupled with congressional and public pressure for some explanation of how the administration intended to end the fighting, moved Nixon to speak out at once.
Nixon and Kissinger focused the speech on how to get the Paris negotiations “off dead center. This is not a take it or leave it proposal,” Nixon said to Henry. “This is an honest attempt—a starting point.” Kissinger didn’t want the speech “to sound as if you can’t hardly bear the sound of the war anymore. Because we have to keep the other option [of increased force] open.” Nixon agreed: He wanted the Communists to understand that if they continued their military actions, we would “bang them and bang them hard.” In speaking to senators, Nixon warned Henry against “playing it too dovish.” He wanted him to leave the impression that force remained a serious option. At the same time, however, it seemed unwise to agitate the country’s antiwar advocates with belligerent language. Veiled threats were unnecessary, Kissinger said. “The other side will get the point anyhow.”
The Communists’ ten points and Nixon’s speech, which featured an eight-point agenda, gave little hope for a quick settlement. True, Nixon agreed to a more flexible troop withdrawal arrangement: U.S. forces could be withdrawn at the same time as North Vietnamese forces instead of after them, as Johnson had proposed. But beyond this, the two sides remained deadlocked over a U.S. refusal to withdraw without North Vietnamese concessions or to abandon the Thieu-Ky government.
Despite declaring that the “time has come for new initiatives,” Nixon’s rhetoric was familiar. There would have to be an “honorable settlement,” not “a disguised defeat,” which would threaten Saigon’s self-de-termination and “our long-term hopes for peace in the world. A great nation cannot renege on its pledges,” Nixon declared. He predicted that “the time was approaching when the South Vietnamese forces would be able to take over some of the fighting fronts now being manned by Americans.” He ended with a “blunt” warning: “Our allies are not going to be let down.”
Some in the United States saw Nixon’s speech as a “bitter disappointment.” They accurately described the eight-point plan as nothing more than warmed-over Johnson proposals. The response from Hanoi offered no hope that Nixon had found a path to peace. “The plan of the Nixon administration,” a North Vietnamese spokesman declared, “is not to end the war but to replace the war of aggression fought by US troops with a war of aggression fought by the puppet army of the United States.”
Despite Hanoi’s response, Nixon and Kissinger believed that they had taken a significant step forward. Nixon was convinced that if the speech had no impact, it was the fault of the press. He lamented the fact that he had not appointed a high-level PR operator who worked at promoting Nixon’s image “all day, every day.”
Kissinger also deluded himself about the value of the speech. After a press briefing, he told Nixon that reporters “thought it was a very meaty speech.” Nixon wanted reassurance: “Did you think it was worthwhile?” he asked Henry. “Tremendous success,” Kissinger replied. He believed there was now a serious prospect for a mutual withdrawal. Either Kissinger was fooling himself or uncritically telling Nixon what he wanted to hear, probably the latter.
Hindsight demonstrates how unimportant the speech was. But the president and Kissinger were reluctant to confront harsh realities—that the United States was being forced into an unconditional withdrawal and Communist control of South Vietnam. If Kissinger was falsely encouraging Nixon’s hope of making an honorable peace, he was undermining the national well-being and Nixon’s grasp of international realities. It would have been better to confront hard truths: North Vietnam believed that Saigon would not be able to defend itself after the Americans left; and that American public opinion would force Nixon to wind down the war. Hanoi was confident that rumors about U.S. troop withdrawals would prove correct and that Nixon’s implicit threats of military escalation were essentially a political ploy to wrest concessions from it in Paris. Ho Chi Minh assumed that he could outlast the Americans and Thieu’s regime.
In the second half of May, Hanoi responded to Nixon’s peace initiative with stepped-up attacks on South Vietnam. In response, the president agreed to further Cambodian air raids. He also instructed everyone to take a hard line on Vietnam. A White House press aide told a Soviet contact that public opinion wasn’t going to pressure the president into a withdrawal from Vietnam. The White House leaked a story that increased attacks would delay troop withdrawals for at least several months.
The administration’s tough talk was partly meant to appease Thieu, who publicly called for a Summit meeting with the president to discourage U.S. troop reductions. Thieu asked Nixon to meet him at Midway Island. He was eager to be seen as an ally rather than a supplicant. When they met on June 8 and Thieu saw that Nixon had a larger chair than his, he searched the U.S. commandant’s house for a chair of equal size and personally carried it into the meeting room.
Despite the tough talk on Vietnam and Thieu’s pressure, Nixon told him that he would announce a 25,000-troop reduction in July. A story in the Washington Post on June 3 made it clear that Nixon had no choice: “Vietnam ‘may be one of those things that destroys everyone who touches it,’” the Post quoted someone at the White House, “and although the president ‘knows how desperately people want to get out, wanting isn’t enough.’”
At a June 3 cabinet meeting, Rogers, who had just returned from Saigon, encouraged hopes that the South Vietnamese could take over a major share of the fighting; Vietnamization could work. Nixon also took hope from a Kissinger report on June 4 that the North Vietnamese were showing some give in Paris.
On June 7, Nixon met with his national security team in Honolulu. Kissinger records that the American military “approached the subject [of a withdrawal] with a heavy heart.” It seemed certain to “make victory impossible and even an honorable outcome problematical.” The withdrawal rested on a combination of hope and illusion—the hope that Vietnamization would actually work and the illusion that after eight years of advising and training Saigon’s forces to fight the insurgency, they could finally stand on their own.
However reluctant both Nixon and Thieu were to have Vietnam assume full responsibility for the war, neither felt he had a choice. Five months into his term, Nixon understood that his political credibility and freedom to achieve other things in foreign and domestic affairs depended on acceding to public pressure to end U.S. involvement in the fighting. In March, Senator J. William Fulbright, Democratic Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and an outspoken critic of the war, had predicted that Nixon’s “honeymoon” on the war would not last long, and warned the president against allowing the conflict to turn into “Nixon’s War.” Fifty-two percent of the public thought the war was a mistake. By early June, Fulbright declared that the administration had only another month before the country would lose confidence in Nixon’s willingness to change U.S. policy in Vietnam. “I knew that time was running out for us because the public wasn’t going to support the war any longer,” Laird said.
Thieu also understood that he had no way to hold off a shift in U.S. policy and so publicly described a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops as his idea. In return for Thieu’s cooperation, Nixon, according to Thieu, promised to compel Hanoi’s withdrawal from the South, provide continuing military support during the next three and a half years, and economic help during a Nixon second term. There is no hint of how Nixon expected to accomplish any of this, especially North Vietnam’s departure.
Kissinger recalls that at the conclusion of the meeting, “Nixon was jubilant.” He saw “the announcement as a political triumph.” Thieu’s acceptance and the likelihood that Nixon had at least temporarily quieted antiwar activists elated him. “Henry,” Nixon noted on a daily news summary, “virtually all the press are crying in their beer because their dire predictions of RN-Thieu troubles did not surface.”
Nevertheless, Nixon had doubts about his freedom to withdraw most U.S. troops without a South Vietnamese collapse. When Newsweek expressed skepticism about the results of the Midway meeting, Nixon told Ehrlichman to “cut Newsweek out of any backgrounder.” He instructed aides to say nothing about future troop withdrawals, for fear it would encourage the belief that the United States was now ready to quit the fighting without Communist concessions. Nixon also urged Kissinger to warn Dobrynin that if nothing happened in Paris, we were going to consult our self-interest. It was largely posturing that made Nixon feel better about what he saw as a likely losing strategy.
On June 19, after Nixon learned that former defense secretary Clark Clifford was publishing an article implying that the “war is lost” and that the United States would do well to unilaterally withdraw 100,000 troops by the end of 1969 and the rest of its combat forces by the end of the following year, he publicly took issue with Clifford’s analysis. During a press conference, Nixon stated his intention to beat Clifford’s timetable. Not because we were fighting a lost cause, but rather because Vietnamization was working.
Nixon’s promise to withdraw sooner than Clifford suggested badly shook Kissinger. He thought it foretold South Vietnam’s collapse in the near future and would be interpreted by Thieu and others in Southeast Asia as a “unilateral withdrawal.” Henry worried that Nixon had secretly decided to pull out, but Haldeman told him it was more a case of Nixon hitting back at Clifford.
Haldeman was right. Nixon “couldn’t sleep” and “stayed [up] late last night calling people about [the] press conference,” Haldeman noted in his diary. Kissinger echoed his contemporary concern in his memoirs, saying that efforts to put a positive spin on the president’s remarks were useless; Nixon had destroyed any likelihood that Hanoi could be pressured into a mutual withdrawal.
From the perspective of 1969, it is understandable that Kissinger thought Nixon’s remarks undermined chances for a favorable settlement. But it is difficult to explain why he held to this view ten years later. A wish to still believe that they had alternatives—that they might have saved South Vietnam from its fate—seems like another example of wishful thinking. For someone who prided himself on his unblinking realism, it is hard to understand why Kissinger believed that training South Vietnamese troops or expanded U.S. military action would bring any better results than Johnson had achieved in the previous four years.
At the time, Kissinger hid his skepticism about the wisdom of troop withdrawals from Nixon and the public. Kissinger did not wish to discourage hopes that a satisfactory peace settlement remained possible; nor was he willing to tell Nixon that his pronouncement was a blunder. Instead, he gave Nixon continuing public and private support.
When Washington Post journalist Chalmers Roberts asked Henry whether the president wasn’t “serving up to Hanoi…a unilateral withdrawal,” he replied, “It depends on how you read the statements.” Defending Nixon before the press was part of his job. But giving the president solace in private was another matter. He told Nixon that “It was a very effective press conference,” and praised his handling of Clifford’s article. The reassurance pleased Nixon. He believed that “The press conference had solid impact from the standpoint of style,” whatever style may have meant. He was sure that “If in 1970 we are at the [reduced troop] level Clifford suggests, we have had it.” It was an acknowledgment that unilateral withdrawal would mean defeat for Saigon.
Kissinger understood that Nixon could never accommodate himself to those who took issue with him. Opposition opinion made him angry and brought out the worst in him—impulses to repress critics. In the middle of June, in response to criticism by administration insiders, he told Haldeman and Ehrlichman, “‘White House staffers privately’ were raising questions about some of my activities…I want the whole staff in the strongest possible terms to be informed that unless they can say something positive about my operations and that of the White House staff they should say nothing.” He also wanted a list of friendly and unfriendly journalists attending his news conferences. He intended to follow the FDR-Eisenhower practice of calling on sympathetic press people, however few they might be. He received the list before the end of the day.
His response to antiwar students and organizations was more draconian. Some of this opposition was committed to violence, and investigative agencies were justifiably acting to preserve law and order. But Nixon had few qualms about using executive powers to go after legitimate dissenters as well as rule breakers. In March, after 549 San Francisco State students receiving federal financial assistance were arrested at an antiwar rally, Nixon wanted to know what action the department of health, education and welfare was taking to punish the “rioters.” He was apocalyptic about the dangers to the country from campus dissidents, who had disrupted and, in some instances, shut down universities in 1968. In a March 22, statement on student disorders, he declared that “this is the way civilizations begin to die…As Yeats foresaw: ‘Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.’”
When the economist Dr. Arthur Burns, a White House adviser on domestic affairs, told Nixon that student protestors led by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) were intent on “destruction of the university (and other institutions) rather than reform,” the president wanted an investigation to determine “the exact nature of this new, rather frightening, movement.” When intelligence agencies told Nixon that there was no “specific information or ‘ironclad proof’ that Red China or Cuba is funding campus disorders,” Nixon ordered Ehrlichman to have Tom Huston, the White House coordinator of domestic intelligence, “keep after this; give Huston (or someone of his toughness and brains) the job of developing hard evidence on this.” In response to a Huston report that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) would be looking at the activities of “left-wing” tax-exempt groups, Nixon told Burns: “Good—but I want action—have Huston follow up hard on this.”
Why was Nixon so determined to strike out against the antiwar movement? No doubt, as the historian William Gibbons says, he feared its effects “both on the conduct of the war and effort to negotiate an end to the fighting.” But he knew that the Johnson administration had also tried unsuccessfully to establish a connection between antiwar groups and Communists, and that in 1967 and again in 1968 the CIA reported “no convincing evidence of control, manipulation, sponsorship, significant financial support of student dissidents by any international communist authority.” On June 30, 1969, the CIA told Huston that there was still no evidence of “foreign communist support to revolutionary protest movements in the United States.” Yet Nixon, like Johnson, could not let go of the idea that international communism was behind the opposition to the war and his administration. In fact, the most effective way to have combated domestic antiwar efforts was not through using the IRS against dissidents or people the White House put on an “Enemies List,” but by promptly ending U.S. involvement in the war.
But a quick withdrawal from Vietnam was too much a confession of defeat. And even though Nixon could have laid the disaster at Johnson’s doorstep, he didn’t see this as a viable solution to the problem. It was less because his political scruples would not allow him to assign blame to LBJ than because he and Kissinger genuinely feared the international consequences of such an action. As subsequent events would demonstrate, they falsely believed that abandoning Saigon to its fate would have terrible consequences for U.S. foreign policy all over the globe, especially in its ongoing struggle against communism. It was a mistaken assumption, and the consequences for the United States and the Vietnamese, North and South, in blood and treasure were disastrous. (Over twenty thousand U.S. troops would lose their lives during Nixon’s presidency.) It was a lesson in the heavy price nations pay when their leaders are held fast by unrealizable hopes that morph into illusions.