Mr. President, it was about this month, in this year of his tenure, that President Kennedy said: “This is the winter of my discontent.” And President Johnson…felt the same way about the same time in his tenure. How are you feeling these days?
—ABC’s HOWARD K. SMITH, INTERVIEW WITH PRESIDENT RICHARD NIXON, MARCH 22, 1971
My God! What is there in this place that a man should ever want to get into it?
—PRESIDENT JAMES A. GARFIELD, 1881
In the winter of 1970–1971, Nixon believed that his two years as president had been a bust. “The first months of 1971,” he said, “was the lowest point of my first term as President. The problems we confronted were so overwhelming and so apparently impervious to anything we could do to change them that it seemed possible that I might not even be nominated for re-election in 1972.”
There was little likelihood that the Republicans would deny Nixon a chance at a second term (even as abject a failure as Herbert Hoover won renomination in 1932). When a journalist wrote that “the prediction of RN not running again is pure nonsense,” Nixon instructed that the columnist be given a thank-you call. Nevertheless, it was clear that foreign and domestic problems had eroded his public standing. Pat Buchanan, a conservative speechwriter, told Nixon in January 1971 that his administration was “neither liberal nor conservative” but “a hybrid, whose zigging and zagging has succeeded in winning the enthusiasm and loyalty of neither the left nor the right, but the suspicion and distrust of both.”
Public opinion polls bore out Buchanan’s judgment. Nixon’s approval ratings, which had stood in the sixties and high fifties throughout 1970, had fallen to the low fifties by December and continued their downward slide to 48 percent by June 1971. Straw votes pitting Nixon against Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine, the likely Democratic nominee in 1972, put them in a dead heat. When eighteen-to-twenty-one-year-old students, who would be first-time voters in 1972, were asked to identify the most admired men in recent history, only 9 percent chose Nixon. During a TV interview at the start of 1971, Nancy Dickerson of the Public Broadcasting Service asked the president what had happened to the “lift of a driving dream” he had promised the country in 1968. Nixon defensively replied that “before we can really get the lift of a driving dream, we have to get rid of some of the nightmares we inherited.”
Nixon’s diminished popularity had occurred in spite of intense efforts in the fall of 1970 to improve his public standing. The president instructed Kissinger to “develop a plan for the more effective presentation of our accomplishments in Foreign Affairs.” He especially wanted Henry to promote an image of the president as a great peacemaker. “The President should become known next year as ‘Mr. Peace,’” Haldeman told Kissinger. “Here we go again,” Haig wrote Henry. “I suppose our best bet is to play along, but I must say some of the rhetoric is a little sickening.”
In November and December, Nixon bombarded Haldeman with memos on how to polish his image. Yet all the attempts at improving public impressions of the dour Nixon netted little gain. Nixon blamed his problem on “a basically antagonistic television and press corps.” Time’s Hugh Sidey, however, believed that “the doubt in the country over RN’s stewardship is deeper than statistics…it comes down to the mystifying business of the man himself.”
Nixon also thought that White House aides were tarnishing his reputation. By February 1971, he was so distrustful of almost everyone around him that he began recording all his conversations. He had originally asked Kissinger and others to make memos of discussions so that no one in the administration would be able to offer distorted accounts of what he had said and directed. It was a way of not only holding people to their word but also of ensuring historical accuracy when he wrote his memoirs.
When Henry fell hopelessly behind in providing the memos, Haldeman suggested that Nixon imitate LBJ’s habit of secretly taping telephone and office conversations. Nixon agreed. Over the next twenty-eight months, he recorded more than 3,700 hours of conversations on the telephone and in seven locations, including the Oval Office, the Executive Office Building, where he principally worked, the cabinet room, and at Camp David. To avoid involvement in the mechanics of taping, he principally relied on a voice-activated technology, which triggered recording machines placed in the White House basement. Only in the cabinet room did he use manual switches to capture discussions. “The conversations,” the historian Erin Mahan, who spent countless hours listening to them, writes, “are extended, multi-topical, raw, often repetitious, and sometimes incoherent.” Deciphering them, she might have added, was a Herculean task. But well worth it: The tapes provide an extraordinary chance to hear Nixon’s honest thoughts about the personalities and issues central to his presidency, demonstrating in 1971–1972 his obsession with being reelected at the same time he established a foreign policy record advancing international peace that would be the envy of all future presidents.
Nixon believed that the tapes would allow him to make instant refutations of any distortions surfacing in the press from leaks. “The whole purpose, basically,” Nixon said to Haldeman and Alex Butterfield, a retired air force colonel who served as a Nixon aide and who helped install the system, “there may be a day when…we want to put out something that’s positive, maybe we need something just to be sure that we can correct the record.” Nixon was also eager to have verbatim accounts that would later be useful in countering assertions that others, especially Kissinger, were the driving force in initiating successful policies. Only two years into his presidency, Nixon was thinking about the claims and counterclaims likely to surface in future memoirs. Although he saw the tapes as a useful historical tool, he had no intention of sharing them with anyone else. When Haldeman asked whether he wanted transcripts made, Nixon replied, “Absolutely not…No one is ever going to hear those tapes but you and me.”
Nixon also thought that clashes between Rogers and Kissinger undermined public confidence in his leadership. The competition between the two for control of foreign policy had produced press leaks, which suggested that the administration was in disarray.
Rogers’s repeated efforts to promote more accommodating policies on Vietnam, Cambodia, the Soviet Union, the Middle East, and Chile angered Nixon. The issue became particularly acute at the end of 1970 when Nixon complained to Haldeman that the state department was leaking like a sieve and that this represented an effort to undermine him. Nixon asked Haig to compile a list of “press leaks attributable to State which undercut White House policy.” He told Kissinger and others that the bureaucracies at state and defense were “deliberately trying to sabotage not only our policy but particularly the Presidency itself.”
Kissinger weighed in against Rogers and the state department at a January 1971 meeting with Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, and Budget Director George Shultz. Haldeman recorded that Henry “walked into the meeting with huge thick folders…documenting his case on the terrible things State has been doing in the public press, and how they’ve been undercutting him [Kissinger]…and…disobeyed Presidential orders.”
Nixon privately vented his irritation with Rogers. “We all know that on this foreign policy thing—I take Rogers’s advice on the PR aspects, but I do not have confidence in [his] judgment on the tough ones,” Nixon told Kissinger. But he couldn’t bring himself to fire Rogers, partly because of the political consequences. Getting rid of his secretary of state before the 1972 election would reflect poorly on Nixon’s judgment in having chosen him in the first place.
But Nixon wouldn’t say this to Henry. He defended Rogers by telling Kissinger, “He’s valuable.” And however difficult it was for Kissinger to accept this, Nixon meant it. Rogers reflected Nixon’s wish to be remembered as a peacemaker. Ending the Vietnam War and establishing a more stable world order were central to Nixon’s vision, as they were to Rogers’s view of what he hoped to achieve as secretary of state. Nixon never tired of saying that American power “is wholly committed to the service of peace.” Nixon also knew that encouraging the peacemaker image was good politics. When an editor asked him at the annual Society of Newspaper Editors dinner what he thought about if he woke up at two or three o’clock in the morning, Nixon replied, “Working for peace.” What he really wanted to say, he told Haldeman, was “going to the bathroom.”
Yet international realities and Nixon’s image of himself as a warrior president trumped his pacifism. General George S. Patton was his ideal, however simplistic Patton’s militaristic views had become in the nuclear era. Kissinger and Haig, tough-minded realists, as they saw themselves, appealed to Nixon’s conviction that a firm response to adversaries was the best route to a stable world. And in that context, Haig understandably found the rhetoric about peacemaking “a little sickening.” Henry thought that such talk was “dangerous…We will have the Soviets coming into Europe,” he told Safire. “Why do you think we have the Soviets hardlining? Because they think we are weak kneed,” Safire responded. “Exactly,” Henry said. But the “peacemaker” image represented Nixon’s other side, which best expressed itself in having Rogers as secretary of state.
The conflict between Rogers and Kissinger, then, was a natural outgrowth of Nixon’s contradictory impulses. And so, in mid-December 1970, when the Christian Science Monitor published a lengthy article about the Rogers-Kissinger rivalry, it reflected the outlook of a president who was simultaneously drawn in two directions.
Nixon didn’t anticipate that the tensions between the two sides of his foreign policy outlook would become a source of public controversy. While he had no expectation that either Rogers or Kissinger would be docile lieutenants following his every order, he did not foresee the intensity of their bureaucratic war.
Nor did Nixon anticipate the extent to which his national security adviser, whom he barely knew in 1969, would be a prima donna with insatiable demands for attention and approval and exclusive influence over foreign policy. Nixon had a running dialogue with Haldeman about “the Kissinger problem.” Henry craved “the ego satisfaction of…having people reassure him that he’s in good shape,” Nixon told Haldeman. Haldeman, who had become a sounding board for Henry’s constant complaints about Rogers and the president’s inattention to him, would tell Henry when he would “frequently” threaten to resign that “he is indispensable to the P, and that both he and the P know it, and he’s got to stay here.”
Nixon’s recorded conversations with Haldeman and Ehrlichman are a window into “the Henry problem.” Kissinger is “hard to deal with, as you well know, Bob,” Nixon said. “He’s a goddamn hard man to deal with…Henry is just very bad at not letting Haig…or [Joint Chiefs chairman Admiral Thomas] Moorer or Laird or anybody else come in and report on anything. He wants to report on everything.” In a conversation later that same day with Haldeman, Nixon mimicked Henry’s German accent, and said, “He comes in with predictions,” and offers ponderous comments on “this one or that or the other one.” And there was no arguing with him: He took every challenge to his assertiveness as a personal assault, as if it were an attack on “his integrity or his intelligence or something.”
Nixon complained that “Henry’s personality problem is just too goddamn difficult for us to deal with. Goddamn it, Bob, he’s psychopathic about trying to screw Rogers—that’s what it really gets down to.” Haldeman believed that the conflict was “insurmountable,” but “Henry is clearly…more valuable than Rogers.” Nixon agreed, but they feared that if Henry “wins the battle with Rogers,” he might not be “livable with afterward.” Nixon thought he would “be a dictator.” If only Henry would cease what Nixon described as his “psychotic hatred” of Rogers.
Henry’s competition with Rogers over what went into the annual foreign policy report, for example, incensed Nixon. He saw Henry making “a crisis out of a damn molehill…Day after day after day after day.” Henry had NSC discussions about “every goddamn little shit-ass thing that happens…He has too many meetings. They go on and on and on and on about crap,” Nixon moaned. He also complained that Henry liked to “agonize about problems.” Henry’s habitual lateness also bothered Nixon and Haldeman. “Frankly,” Nixon said, “it’s Jewish. Jewish and also juvenile…It really is as Jewish as hell, isn’t it?”
The next day Haldeman noted in his diary that “the K-Rogers problem continues.” Nixon wanted him to come up with a plan to deal with it. “Of course, I don’t have any,” Haldeman conceded. Kissinger and Rogers “just stay on a collision course.”
Two weeks later, Nixon had another long conversation with Haldeman and Erhlichman about his continuing difficulties with Kissinger. Henry “was in talking about his problems,” Nixon said. Apparently, Newsweek ran an article that “talks about his being Jewish,” Haldeman interjected. Nixon continued, “Well, he’s terribly upset. He feels now that he really ought to resign.” But Nixon said that he refused to talk about it. “We’ve got several big things in the air,” he told Henry. Nixon was determined to keep Kissinger on: “He’s somewhat more honest than Rogers, in that Henry knows…his ego problem. He says, ‘I’ve got an ego.’ Rogers is a different fellow [with] a vanity problem,” Nixon told Haldeman.
What had set Henry off was his exclusion from Mideast policy discussions. Didn’t he understand that if he was involved and something went wrong, Haldeman said, “They’re going to say it’s because a ‘goddamned Jew’ did it rather than blame the Americans.” Nixon agreed. Henry, Nixon said, had “an utter obsession with having to run everything.” Nixon tried to reassure him by saying, “Henry, look, now listen to me for Christ’s sake. Don’t you realize that when I make a decision on Laos or for that matter on the Mideast, or SALT, I will talk to you about it? And what the hell do you care how it gets to me? I’m going to make the decision myself, and I’m not going to be influenced one goddamn bit by Rogers.”
Nixon was exasperated by both men. “I’m not going to have a couple of crybabies acting like this,” he complained. He had all sorts of other miserable things to deal with, including a vice president, who, “I got to go over and butter his ass up this afternoon—tonight when I should be sleeping.” Nixon described the Henry-Rogers conflict as “a shit-ass” business that had to be stopped, but he conceded that it might be impossible. “Did you know that Henry worries every time I talk on the telephone with anybody?” he told Ehrlichman and Haldeman. “His feeling is that he must be present every time I see anybody important.”
Nixon couldn’t understand Henry’s discontent. He “gets first priority on time…always coming in—he knows that. Evening or morning.” But even that didn’t seem to be enough. “I think he deeply feels that he’s the only one that knows anything about foreign policy,” Nixon said. Erlichman thought that something else was involved: Working in the government as national security adviser, “this is his being,” Erlichman said. “This whole process is what he really was created for, and he’s got to be in a certain relationship to the President.”
No doubt, Nixon and Erlichman had identified elements of what drove Henry’s behavior. But he simply needed to be top dog. Despite all his success, he remained fiercely competitive. Being treated as less than the best, the most important, the wisest, indeed, the only counselor worth hearing, frustrated and angered him. Arnold Weiss, his childhood friend in Germany who had also fled to America and served in the Army with Kissinger, recalls being introduced to Henry’s second wife. “‘Arnie and I were in the Army together,’” Kissinger said. “‘Yes,’” Weiss, who was a lieutenant, teased. “‘I outranked Henry.’ ‘Yeah, but not anymore,’” Kissinger shot back.
Although newspaper articles appeared about the Rogers-Kissinger battles, most of their struggles were a well-kept secret. Besides, Nixon believed that the ultimate success of his administration rested less on settling internal discord than on ending the Vietnam War and resolving or easing tensions with Soviet Russia and China, between Israel and the Arabs, and, in 1971, Pakistan and India.
VIETNAM STILL CAME FIRST. After the Cambodian incursion, the country was more eager than ever to end its involvement in so costly and demoralizing a struggle. The U.S. military, paying more attention to realities on the ground than to White House rhetoric, acknowledged that “progress in many areas of the war remained elusive.” Army commanders told the Joint Chiefs that “time was running out…Although there was some hope that the destruction of base areas in Cambodia and Laos might forestall a collapse, the net effect would probably be an eventual Communist victory…The war had become a bottomless pit.”
Throughout the second half of 1970, Nixon and Kissinger struggled to keep up morale among the American military and the South Vietnamese until they could find a formula for ending the war. In June, Nixon sent a confidential message to national security officials through Henry of how crucial it was to “think in positive terms, particularly on the military and supply fronts, where we have been thinking too defensively.” In September, after “NBC had a sharply negative film report” about South Vietnamese troops stripping an evacuated U.S. base and selling everything on the black market, Kissinger was pressed to counter the report. “The scrawled sign over the base…Goodbye and Good Luck” seemed to signal a final chapter in a South Vietnamese-American defeat.
Worse, by 1970–1971, the U.S. military in Vietnam was badly demoralized. All ranks suffered from the belief that they were fighting a lost cause. Thousands of troops had become heroin addicts. It embarrassed the U.S. government, and Nixon wanted the White House PR machine to combat the bad publicity with positive accounts about the U.S. military in the war. “Get our story out fast by the inspired leak route (talk to Safire),” Nixon directed Haldeman.
Although Nixon commissioned a study of drug addiction in the military, no one had a remedy short of ending U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In the spring, when Nixon spoke to West Point cadets, he candidly declared it “no secret that the discipline, integrity, patriotism, self-sacrifice, which are the very lifeblood of an effective armed force…can no longer be taken for granted in the Army in which you serve. The symptoms of trouble are plain enough, from drug abuse to insubordination.” The task of these future officers was to give “the military ethic…new life and meaning for the difficult times ahead.”
Nixon understood that ending the war was essential to save his presidency, preserve domestic tranquility, and rebuild the U.S. military. But after twenty months of trying, there was still no end in sight. It had become clear to many observers that Hanoi simply intended to wait until the exhausted Americans left. Yet Nixon and Kissinger clung to the conviction that they could use military pressure to force the North Vietnamese into an agreement that would deliver an autonomous South Vietnam—peace with honor.
By September 1970, Nixon had a greater sense of urgency than ever about finding a peace formula. After a conversation with two conservative senators, Democrat Harry F. Byrd, Jr., and Republican Gordon Allott, who warned of the need to end the war quickly, the president told Kissinger, “We’ve got the left where we want it now. All they’ve got left to argue for is a bug-out, and that’s their problem. But when the Right starts wanting to get out…that’s our problem.” Because Nixon believed that the Cambodian incursion had “gravely undermined” Hanoi’s capacity for immediate offensive operations, he had some hope that the North Vietnamese might now be ready for decisive talks. Consequently, in August, when Hanoi agreed to another Kissinger meeting, Henry secretly traveled again to Paris to see Xuan Thuy on September 7.
Kissinger was prepared to hear familiar demands for a unilateral U.S. withdrawal and a coalition government without Thieu or Ky. The absence of Le Duc Tho from the meeting made Henry all the more skeptical of good results. But instead of “vituperation,” the North Vietnamese surprised him by their friendliness. They “stated their desire for a rapid settlement.” Nevertheless, Kissinger warned Nixon against excessive optimism. It was “difficult to judge whether they are just trying to keep us talking or have real intent of moving on to substantive negotiations.”
Kissinger’s skepticism was well advised. A Communist peace proposal for discussion at a September 27 meeting contained “no real breakthrough on any issue.” Hanoi continued to demand unconditional U.S. evacuation of its forces and an abandonment of Thieu’s government. The four-and-a-half hour discussion “was thoroughly unproductive and we adjourned without setting a new date,” Henry told the president. But he advised against breaking off the channel. He held out hope that this might be the next to last round. Henry couldn’t explain why the North Vietnamese had been so friendly at their last meeting, but he concluded that “they are in an undecided state…They project a Micawber-like mood of waiting and hoping something good will turn up.” It sounded like a better description of Kissinger’s outlook than theirs.
To advance the talks, Nixon agreed to make his October 7 offer for a cease-fire in place. The proposal was principally aimed at domestic opinion in the midst of a congressional election: Kissinger doubted that the North Vietnamese would accept it, he told Joe Alsop. “However, it might shut up some in this country.” At the same time, Nixon and Kissinger thought the proposal would test Hanoi’s willingness “to settle for anything less than total victory. Their demands are absurd,” Henry told Safire. “They want us to withdraw and on the way out to overthrow the Saigon Government…If we ever withdraw,” he grumbled, “it will be up to them to overthrow the Saigon Government—not us.”
In making his proposal, Nixon declared that “we are ready now to negotiate an agreed timetable for complete withdrawals as part of an overall settlement.” He and Kissinger understood that it could be interpreted as a unilateral pullout. But Kissinger cautioned Bruce and Habib in Paris that “we will not go for…a unilateral withdrawal.”
With the peace talks deadlocked, Nixon hoped to pressure Hanoi by announcing a speedier pullout of U.S. troops. “The continued progress of the Vietnamization program has made possible an accelerated rate of withdrawal,” he announced on October 12. By Christmas, total U.S. forces in Vietnam would stand at 240,000—305,500 fewer “than when I took office.” The announcement was aimed not only at American voters but also at the North Vietnamese, who were being told that the South Vietnamese were growing better able to defend themselves. Unless Hanoi agreed to a peace settlement in the near term, it would face protracted fighting against well-equipped U.S. surrogates.
A conversation Nixon and Kissinger had at the White House on October 21 with Laotian Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma, as well as current reports from U.S. intelligence agencies about Hanoi’s fighting capacity, encouraged administration hopes of an early U.S. departure from Vietnam. Phouma and NSC analysts concluded that the Cambodian operation and Lon Nol’s government had impaired North Vietnam’s ability to supply its forces in South Vietnam and was compelled to rebuild its logistics network.
In December 1970, Nixon met with John Paul Vann, a former military officer and a current pacification coordinator in South Vietnam. Kissinger described him to Nixon as “one of the most experienced American officials in Vietnam.” Vann, he reported, “is very encouraged by the progress the allied side is making. Like Sir Robert Thompson [the British anti-insurgency expert], he believes we have achieved a ‘winning position.’”
Reports from the field added to Nixon’s hopes. In December, the U.S. mission in Phnom Penh described a Cambodian military that was holding “the enemy reasonably at bay and…improving steadily.” Despite cautioning “against any unwarranted optimism,” the mission was “encouraged about Cambodia’s ability to weather through.”
It played perfectly to Nixon’s bias. “K—a brilliant analysis,” he scribbled on the report. Nixon also told Henry, “If we had not gone into Cambodia, it would not be there. It would be a puppet government. It would be down the tube.” Nixon believed that they could win the war if they just had sufficient willpower to focus on the big picture. “Right now there’s a chance to win this goddamn war,” he told Henry on December 9. “But we aren’t going to win it with the people—the kind of assholes come in here like today saying well now there is a crisis in Cambodia.” He complained that they were too preoccupied with “crap” about Chile and Biafra and Guinea. They needed “to concentrate on what can make or break us.”
Columnist Joe Alsop further encouraged hopes of victory. The U.S. Senate can “snatch defeat from victory,” he told Kissinger. South Vietnam could also be its own worst enemy. “The danger is no longer in Hanoi.”
A visit to Cambodia and South Vietnam by Haig later in the month strengthened Nixon’s belief that he was making gains in Southeast Asia. Kissinger reported to the president that Haig was “greatly encouraged by the progress since his last visit and especially impressed by the continuing benefits of the Cambodian operation.” As for South Vietnam, Haig saw “indications everywhere that the military and overall security situation was improving.” Haig told Kissinger that “we are within an eyelash of victory.”
Despite all the “good news,” Hanoi showed no inclination to concede anything, which should have been an indication of the realities in Vietnam. At the end of October, when Bruce requested a private meeting with Xuan Thuy, the latter said “his schedule is now completely filled.” A meeting between them on November 16 underscored their insurmountable differences.
On December 10, Nixon held his first news conference in four months. He emphasized his determination to continue the Paris talks, despite having to deal with “an international outlaw that does not adhere to the rules of international conduct.” In a private conversation with Ambassador William Sullivan, who was a member of the U.S. delegation in Paris, Kissinger was more graphic about the North Vietnamese: He called them “barbaric” for refusing to release the names of American POWs. It was “unconscionable” of them to be “playing blackmail with human lives.” For diplomacy’s sake, Henry agreed to have Sullivan describe their behavior as “inhuman” rather than “barbaric.”
Kissinger also had a low opinion of the South Vietnamese. When Ron Ziegler asked him about the president’s meeting with Ky, Henry sarcastically replied, Ky promised not to brief the press and “you know that the Vietnamese never lie.” “Bull shit,” Ziegler exclaimed.
When someone told Henry that Nixon could not be reelected because of Vietnam, Kissinger disputed it, and added that “anytime we want to get out of Vietnam, we can, and that we will get out of Vietnam before the [1972] election.” Nixon wanted to plan the removal of all U.S. troops by the end of 1971, but Henry cautioned that if North Vietnam then destabilized Saigon in 1972, it could have an adverse effect on the president’s reelection. He recommended a pullout in the fall of 1972, “so that if any bad results follow they will be too late to affect the election.” He had nothing to say about the American lives that would be lost in the service of Nixon’s reelection. After two years serving Nixon, Kissinger was as cynical about politics as his chief.
Kissinger’s greater concern with Nixon’s reelection than South Vietnam’s independence was evident in a conversation with Dobrynin in January 1971. Kissinger asked him to tell Hanoi that the U.S. was ready to consider a unilateral withdrawal of forces. In return, “the North Vietnamese should undertake to respect a cease-fire during the U.S. withdrawal plus a certain period of time, not too long, after the U.S. withdrawal; that is the important point,” he said. “If the Vietnamese can agree among themselves on a reasonable compromise and if thereafter, war breaks out again between North and South Vietnam, that conflict will no longer be an American affair; it will be an affair of the Vietnamese themselves, because the Americans will have left Vietnam…Such a process will spare the Americans the necessity to carry out a protracted and practically unfruitful negotiation about a political solution for SVN when the U.S. forces have withdrawn.” In short, the U.S. was asking a decent interval between its withdrawal and the collapse of South Vietnam, if Hanoi could engineer it.
WITH THE PEACE TALKS stalled and the dry season coming on, Nixon anticipated another North Vietnamese offensive in early 1971 comparable to the Tet campaign in 1968. The president wanted something “dramatic in North Vietnam,” NSC aide Winston Lord told Kissinger, “that maybe will make the other side negotiate.” As a result, in mid-December, Haig carried a proposal from Nixon to Thieu for an offensive that could blunt a stepped-up Communist campaign in the coming months. Thieu and U.S. military and diplomatic chiefs in Saigon had been discussing a more elaborate plan—a bold thrust into Laos at the northern end of the trail, just below the DMZ, against the key town of Tchepone.
Nixon was enthusiastic and sent Laird and Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Moorer via Paris, where they were to discuss the state of the peace talks, and then on to Saigon to discuss an offensive. On January 18, after the trip, Laird reported that the Paris delegates had “no specific hope” of progress. But they all thought the negotiations remained a useful “posturing” vehicle. In Saigon, Thieu told Laird that talk of ending the war in 1972 was premature. He predicted that “the war would go on for many years and that we should be talking about U.S. participation.”
As for a South Vietnamese attack on the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos, all hands were optimistic that it would bring good results. “On balance,” Laird reported, “South Vietnamese competence was especially high.” Admiral Moorer believed that “the South Vietnamese forces were getting better all the time.” Nixon and Rogers agreed on the need to exclude U.S. ground forces and advisers from the operation, but endorsed the use of bombing, airlifts, and artillery support. Nixon predicted that despite our limited role, “we would get some real heat” for “expanding the war into Laos.” Nevertheless, he believed that such an operation might “prove decisive in the overall conduct of the war.”
Despite the numerous failures that had plagued past U.S. military planning, only Helms raised serious questions. He predicted that “the ARVN would run into a very tough fight in Laos” that would defeat the mission. Moorer agreed, but said “that it would probably be the enemy’s last gasp.” Kissinger forecast that “it would take the enemy a long time to recover.” Rogers warned that “an ARVN defeat would be very costly to us.”
Nixon refused to entertain any concept of loss. “The operation cannot come out as a defeat,” he said. He wanted to hedge his bets by setting “very limited goals such as interdicting the trail.” He wanted it “pack-aged as a raid on the sanctuaries.” Still, he had every hope that the South Vietnamese could carry it off. But “if they were not able to do it, then we must know that also.”
U. Alexis Johnson at state warned about the risks to the United States from a failed assault. Johnson told a meeting of the WSAG that he was “very skeptical” of Saigon’s ability to succeed. He feared an offensive would cause the collapse of the Laotian government and possible Communist control of northern and central Laos. The operation also risked an outburst of opposition to the administration in the Congress and at the UN.
Speaking for Nixon, Kissinger refused to be deterred. The operation “would block the North Vietnamese from launching a major offensive until the end of the dry season of 1972…That means that we would gain an extra dry season to continue our Vietnamization program and protect our withdrawals.” The assault “would in effect end the war, because it would totally demolish the enemy’s capability.” Nixon matched Henry’s optimism. “The enemy’s situation had deteriorated badly,” and they “had been taking a beating as the ARVN grew stronger. This spring’s campaign could have a major impact,” he told Kissinger, Moorer, and Haig on January 26. Their optimism was as unwise as it was boundless.
Rogers also refused to fall in line. At a meeting with the president on the following day, he seized on a Nixon statement, supported by Laird, that Vietnamization would probably succeed “with or without the operation.” Then why do it? Rogers asked. The risks were considerable. The enemy already knew that an attack was coming. If the South Vietnamese were “set back in the operation…it would serve as a defeat for both Vietnamization and for Thieu.”
Nixon and Kissinger still thought the risks worth taking. “It was a splendid project on paper,” Kissinger said later. “We allowed ourselves to be carried away by the daring conception, by the unanimity of the responsible planners in both Saigon and Washington, by the memory of the success in Cambodia, and by the prospect of a decisive turn.”
The “chief drawback” of the plan, Kissinger candidly wrote later, “was that it in no way accorded with Vietnamese realities. South Vietnamese divisions had never conducted major offensive operations against a determined enemy outside Vietnam and only rarely inside.” After ten years of training by American military advisers and billions of dollars in military equipment, Kissinger acknowledged that “the South Vietnamese divisions were simply not yet good enough for such a complex operation as the one in Laos.” It seems astonishing that the White House failed to understand this at the time.
“Lam Son 719,” the code name for the invasion of Laos, proved to be a disaster. The South Vietnamese forces were no match for the North Vietnamese, who inflicted substantial casualties on the ARVN. Armed with Russian-supplied shoulder missiles, the North Vietnamese also took a heavy toll of U.S. helicopters, which ferried ARVN troops in and out of battle. After a month’s fighting, Thieu, disturbed by the heavy losses, ordered a withdrawal from Tchepone, which had been evacuated by the North Vietnamese as a way to draw ARVN into a trap. The “retreat,” William Bundy wrote later, “quickly turned into a rout. Forces returning by road were mercilessly strafed and shelled, and many had to be taken out on U.S. helicopters. The exhausted South Vietnamese panicked, forcing their way onto helicopters or clinging to their skids. As these landed at the American base at Khe Sanh, in South Vietnam, journalists and photographers could see and depict vivid pictures of demoralization and defeat.”
Nixon later called the attack a “military success but a psychological defeat, both in South Vietnam, where morale was shaken by media reports of the retreat, and in America, where…news pictures undercut confidence in the success of Vietnamization and the prospect of ending the war.”
At the time, Nixon put the best possible public face on the defeat. The attack deprived the Communists “of the capacity to launch an offensive against our forces in South Vietnam in 1971,” he said. Privately, however, he was distressed at how poorly the South Vietnamese performed. “If the South Vietnamese could just win one cheap one…Take a stinking hill…. Bring back a prisoner or two. Anything,” he said to national security advisers at the end of February. When the South Vietnamese Air Force failed to attack North Vietnamese trucks because they were “moving targets,” Nixon exploded, “Bullshit. Just, just, just cream the fuckers!” He thought their excuse “ridiculous.”
In March, Haig, who had gone back to Saigon to evaluate the offensive, reported that the South Vietnamese had lost all enthusiasm for the operation. “The extended period of intense combat has convinced the ARVN commanders that the operation should be called off as quickly as possible.” After some of the ARVN troops panicked, Nixon said, “it took only a few televised films of ARVN soldiers clinging to the skids of our evacuation helicopters to reinforce the widespread misconception of the ARVN forces as incompetent and cowardly.” Nixon said nothing about why the impression of ARVN as incompetent was so widespread. Nor did he complain about Haig’s earlier prediction in December that we were “an eyelash” from victory.
Nixon refused to acknowledge Saigon’s failure. Like some coach in a half-time pep talk to a losing team, he told Helms and Kissinger that the United States had to win. “If we fail in Southeast Asia,” he said in March, as a South Vietnamese defeat in Laos was becoming evident, “this country will have suffered a blow from which it will never recover and become a world power again…You can’t fail after staying through six years…We’ve got to win. And by winning…I mean assuring a reasonable chance for South Vietnam to live in peace” without a Communist government imposed on it. He did not mention that he saw such a setback on his watch as an unacceptable blight on his presidency and his reelection prospects.
From the start of the operation, Nixon was determined to give it the appearance of success. He wanted any dissent from this view to be sharply attacked. “We should whack the opponents on patriotism, saving American lives, etc.” he instructed Haldeman. “The main thing, Henry, on Laos,” he told Kissinger in March, “I can’t emphasize too strongly: I don’t care what happens there, it’s a win. See? And everybody should talk about that.”
As the military situation deteriorated, Nixon began attacking the reporters covering the fighting. They “load their statements,” he told national security officials. “The press and the editors are against the war, so they will report this way.” He told Kissinger, “The news broadcasters are, of course, trying to kill us.” He wanted everyone to be extra careful about what they said to newsmen. Journalists should leave a briefing saying, “That was a very poor briefing…That’s what we want the cocksuckers to have,” Nixon said.
Although he knew better, Kissinger confirmed Nixon’s impulse to blame the press for the defeat. He told the president, its treatment of the Laos operation was “vicious…If Britain had a press like this in World War II, they would have quit in ’42.” When the ARVN became bogged down and doubts arose about whether they should focus on getting to Tchepone or simply cutting the supply roads through Laos, Nixon blamed the news media for creating the impression that Tchepone was a principal target of the offensive, which, of course, it had been. Nixon endorsed a plan to control the news coming out of Saigon. We must “not let the goddamn war be decided in the press,” he told Henry.
A majority of Americans refused to see the Laos operation as a success. Only 19 percent in a Gallup poll thought it would shorten the war. Forty percent believed it would lengthen the conflict and 15 percent concluded that it would make no difference. Sixty-five percent of the country did not think Nixon was “telling the public all they should know about the Vietnam War.”
Gallup reported that Nixon now had the same credibility problem on Vietnam as Lyndon Johnson. Only 41 percent of Americans approved of Nixon’s handling of the war, with 46 percent disapproving. Seventy-three percent of an opinion survey favored bringing all U.S. troops out of Vietnam by the end of the year. On March 30, Haldeman recorded that the polls were showing “us the lowest we’ve been.” To combat the slump, Charles Colson, a White House aide, suggested to Nixon that they try to pay off pollster Lou Harris. “We can buy him,” Colson said. After Haldeman followed Nixon’s instruction to offer Harris a polling contract, Colson said, we will find out “how much of a whore Harris is.” Although there is no evidence of wrongdoing on Harris’s part, he began performing services for the Nixon White House.
Nixon and Kissinger devised a plan to raise the president’s approval ratings. They would announce a South Vietnamese victory in Laos and describe their departure as a successful mission. Nixon told Henry, “We will say, well, they have accomplished their objective. They have destroyed the caches. They have done this and now, according to plan, they’re withdrawing.”
In conversations with opinion leaders like Governor Ronald Reagan, Billy Graham, entertainer Bob Hope, and several columnists, Kissinger said, “The President wanted me to give you a brief call to tell you that with all the hysteria on TV and in the news on Laos, we feel we have set up everything we set out to do: Destroyed more supplies than in Cambodia last year. Set them back many months…We achieved what we were after.”
Nixon made the same arguments in an interview on March 22 with ABC-TV’s Howard K. Smith. Everyone at the White House had “seen what I said last night,” Nixon told Kissinger the next day, “—so they have the line. We must all follow the line.” Henry promised to distribute “written guidance” to all the president’s aides after checking them with Nixon and Haldeman.
On April 7, Nixon took to the airwaves again to repeat the same points to the American people. The offensive in Laos had succeeded. It demonstrated that Vietnamization was working and that Saigon had a diminished need for U.S. forces. The way to “dramatically” end the debate “as to whether Laos was or was not a success,” Nixon told Henry before making the speech, was to announce “a bigger troop withdrawal.” He told the country, “I am announcing an increase in the rate of American withdrawals.” By December 1, another 100,000 U.S. troops would leave Vietnam, reducing American forces to approximately 150,000 men, about one third of the number when Nixon took office. “Whether or not we survive,” meaning win reelection, Nixon also told Kissinger, “is going to depend upon whether we hold public opinion. And we can do it with this.”
The polls did not bear out his prediction. “President Nixon has said that if we leave South Vietnam in a position to defend herself, we will have peace in the next generation. Do you agree or disagree?” Gallup asked. Seventy-two percent disagreed. Sixty-one percent of Americans now thought we had made a mistake in sending troops to fight in Vietnam.
Nixon also used his speech to renew pressure on Hanoi to begin final peace negotiations. Encouraged by Kissinger, Nixon hoped that the North Vietnamese would agree to end the war. In March, Henry told him that he thought the North Vietnamese might be ready to “get this thing wound up.” But if the negotiations collapsed this summer, Kissinger cynically advised Nixon to blunt the failure by charging “our critics with wanting a Communist victory in South Vietnam.”
Hanoi did not share Nixon’s and Kissinger’s outlook. With the Laos offensive going their way and Nixon under so much pressure to pull out before November 1972, the North Vietnamese believed they had the upper hand. In April, UPI reported from Paris that the Communists were hinting “in private that they’re confident Nixon will have…to make concessions first if [the] war is to be resolved.” In the middle of the month, the U.S. delegates sent word to Nixon that a negotiating session yielded no results: “Hanoi’s fundamental demands [were] unchanged.” The North Vietnamese showed no interest in giving the Americans a decent interval after they withdrew before trying to topple Thieu’s government. They continued to insist that Nixon abandon Thieu now. By the end of the month, Nixon had decided to let Henry return to Paris once or at most twice more before giving up on the negotiations.
With mastery of Vietnam still so elusive, Nixon wanted to focus public attention on foreign policies that go “far beyond the urgent immediate problem of Vietnam.” He told Haldeman, “Once we remove the Laotian issue…we’ll be drawing some good cards in our strong suit on foreign policy.” In particular, he wanted to put Sino-American and Soviet-American relations at the center of the administration’s public diplomacy. He also hoped it might speed the war to a conclusion. “The Russians are pulling away from” Hanoi, Kissinger told Nixon in March, and “the Chinese can’t supply all the goods.” A principal benefit from better dealings with both Communist super powers could be pressure on Hanoi to end the fighting.
APPROACHES TO THE CHINESE and Soviets might not only influence dealings with Hanoi but, more important, improve Sino-American and Soviet-American relations and give Nixon something to boast about in his reelection campaign.
At the end of 1969, the White House had told the Chinese government that it was ready for renewed contacts and discussions in Warsaw. In November, Undersecretary of State Elliot Richardson had instructed the American embassy in Bucharest to pass along a letter from Theodore White, a journalist famous for his writings about World War II China, to Premier Chou En-lai, proposing a visit to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The Romanians were asked to emphasize that White had close contacts with Nixon and Kissinger and that his visit could promote greater understanding between the United States and China.
In January 1970, after the state department relaxed limits on Sino-American trade in nonstrategic goods, U.S. and Chinese representatives met secretly in Warsaw. The United States proposed direct discussions in either Washington or Peking, reiterated its opposition to Soviet aggression against China, and declared its neutrality on reintegrating Taiwan into China, as long as the dispute was peacefully resolved. At a subsequent meeting in February, the Chinese stated their interest in a visit to China by a high-level American representative, but made a Taiwan settlement a precondition.
Developments in the spring and summer of 1970 temporarily halted further discussions. An agreement to another Warsaw meeting on May 20 fell victim to the Cambodian incursion. America’s “brazen” invasion had ruled out any immediate additional talks. But the Chinese did not close off the likelihood of future contacts. “Only the timing, not the fact, of a meeting was deemed ‘unsuitable,’” Kissinger recalled.
During the summer, the state department announced U.S. willingness to resume the Warsaw talks and the White House further relaxed bans on trade with China. Then, in a Time interview at the end of October, Nixon said he hoped to visit China before he died. At the same time, Kissinger asked President Ceauşescu of Romania, who was in the United States for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the UN, to tell Chinese leaders that “we do not believe that we have any long-term clashing interests.”
After a sharp internal policy conflict, the Chinese had decided to pursue a rapprochement with the United States. In September 1970, however, public White House opposition to the PRC’s admission to the UN further slowed the process. Nixon saw the UN decision as an interim step. In November, he told Kissinger, “It seems to me that the time is approaching…when we will not have the votes to block admission. The question we really need an answer to is how we can develop a position in which we can keep our commitments to Taiwan and yet will not be rolled by those who favor admission of Red China.”
On December 8, the Chinese sent word through the Pakistani ambassador in Washington that Chou En-lai, Chairman Mao, and Vice Chairman Lin Biao were interested in peaceful negotiations about Taiwan and the Strait of Taiwan. They said that a special Nixon envoy would be most welcome in Peking.
Nixon and Kissinger immediately decided on a positive reply. They believed that the Chinese were interested in discussing mutual national security needs, but had confined their message to Taiwan lest they be seen as supplicants asking U.S. help against the U.S.S.R. Nixon suggested a preliminary meeting in some convenient location as a prelude to high-level talks in China. “The meeting in Peking would not be limited only to the Taiwan question,” he explained, “but would encompass other steps designed to improve relations and reduce tensions between our two countries. With respect to the U.S. military presence in Taiwan, however, you should know that the policy of the United States Government is to reduce progressively its military presence in…East Asia and the Pacific as tensions in this region diminish.” Kissinger said later, “The last sentence was designed to encourage Chinese interest in a settlement of the war in Vietnam.” It also signaled that Nixon was committed to withdrawing U.S. ground troops from the conflict.
Nixon and Kissinger shared a desire with the Chinese to keep their exchanges secret until they could portray them as successful. On December 10, in the midst of the discussions, Nixon told reporters that he had “no plans to change our policy with regard to the admission of Red China [Nixon’s hostile term for the Communist regime] to the United Nations at this time.” In the long run, however, he was determined to “have some communication and eventually relations with Communist China.” Nixon was eager to hide the prospect of near-term advances in relations because it could jeopardize the talks by stirring conservative opposition and deprive him of a reelection surprise.
Mao understood Nixon’s political agenda. He told Edgar Snow, the journalist, “The presidential election would be in 1972, would it not? Therefore…Mr. Nixon might send an envoy first, but was not himself likely to come to Peking before early 1972.”
In December, when the Christian Science Monitor published a story saying that the state department was behind talks with China, Kissinger urged the paper’s bureau chief to understand that this was not a state department but a Nixon initiative. Neither he nor Rogers deserved the credit. It was an accurate description of how the China policy had evolved.
Nixon wanted no doubt about his primary role in this new departure toward the PRC. On December 24, at a background press briefing, Henry reiterated what he had said to the Monitor reporter. He also explained that they would be “applying the same principles that I have indicated govern our relationship to the Communist world in general.” They wanted the Soviets to believe that a China initiative was not aimed against them.
On January 11, Kissinger received a new message from Peking through the Romanian ambassador. It was much like the December note, with the important addition that “since President Nixon had visited Bucharest and Belgrade, he would also be welcome in Peking.” The Chinese references to Bucharest and Belgrade, both capitals notable for their independence from Moscow, signaled their interest “above all in the Soviet challenge.” They were also upping the ante by explicitly suggesting that Nixon rather than “a special envoy” come to China. Nixon was reluctant to “appear too eager. Let’s cool it,” he told Henry.
The Chinese were as cautious as the Americans. As with Cambodia, the offensive in Laos brought a suspension of exchanges. In February, Peking publicly rebuked the United States for expanding the war into Laos, but at the same time a Chinese foreign ministry official confided his government’s belief to the Norwegian ambassador that American policy toward China was moving in a new direction.
At a February 17 news conference, Nixon emphasized that the actions in southern Laos “present no threat to Communist China…It is directed against the North Vietnamese.” In the president’s annual foreign policy report released at the end of February, Nixon referred respectfully to the People’s Republic of China and declared it in everyone’s interest to draw “750 million talented and energetic people” into “a constructive relationship with the world community.” He also stressed U.S. determination to do nothing to exacerbate tensions between Moscow and Peking, which was “inconsistent with the kind of stable Asian structure we seek.”
In March, with Mao’s government reiterating its determination to replace Taiwan as the legitimate representative of China in the UN, Nixon reminded journalists of his eagerness for improved relations, but not at the cost of Taiwan’s expulsion from the world organization. Shortly after, the White House tried to mute the president’s qualifying remarks by declaring its interest in additional Warsaw talks and the freedom of all Americans to travel to mainland China.
An opening to China would give “us maneuvering room with the Russians,” Nixon told Haldeman. With Tass, the Soviet news agency, publishing a story about the developing dialogue between the United States and China, Nixon told Kissinger, “that shows that they must be hysterical about this damn thing. Because they said, ‘this removed the mask of U.S.–China’—shit, we don’t have any relations with China.” He also told Henry: “Let’s face it, in the long run it is so historic. You know, you stop to think of 800 million people, where they’re going to be, Jesus this is a hell of a move.”
In March and April, however, Nixon worried that U.S. public opinion might impede a rapprochement. Most Americans were antagonistic to Communist China and particularly to seeing it replace Taiwan in the UN. “We have the problem,” the president told national security officials, “of convincing our own people that there’s a good strong reason to change our position.” In April, after the Chinese invited the U.S. Ping-Pong team in Japan to visit China and journalists coined the phrase “ping-pong diplomacy,” Nixon worried that this “doesn’t help us with folks.” It was helpful “with intellectuals, but…people are against Communist China, period. They’re against Communists, period. So, this doesn’t help us with folks at all,” he told Colson. “It’s just what these intellectual bastards—” he added, and broke off in mid-sentence.
Nixon was reluctant to “make too much hay out of China, because they might pull the rug out from under us; and we don’t want to get our neck out that far.” Kissinger worried about this as well. He believed that the Chinese had the upper hand in the exchanges. “All they have to do is lift a finger and the U.S. comes running,” he told Herb Klein. He feared that “a big enterprise with the Chinese” could give them the power to “kill what we are trying to do with the Soviets, which is the big play” in the administration’s diplomacy.
During a session with newspaper editors on April 16, Nixon spoke candidly about prospects for a shift in Sino-American relations. “Now it is up to them. If they want to have trade in these many areas that we have opened up, we are ready. If they want to have Chinese come to the United States, we are ready. We are also ready for Americans to go there.” Although no additional meetings were currently on the agenda, Nixon added, “We are ready to meet any time they are ready to meet…We certainly have the door open.”
And if the Chinese walked through it, Nixon and Kissinger wished to assure that the president got credit for the achievement. “The big thing now is that we get credit for all the shifts in China policy, rather than letting them go to the State Department, which of course had nothing to do with it—in fact opposed every step the P took because they were afraid any moves toward China would offend Russia,” Kissinger told Haldeman.
Nixon hoped that an opening to China would also make a difference in U.S. domestic affairs: “We’ve got to destroy the confidence of people in the American establishment,” Nixon told Henry. “And we certainly as hell will, if we succeed in…the Communist China thing. That’s why I say now, if it goes and the Soviet thing goes, we’re not going to let these bastards take the credit for it. We’ve got to take credit every time we turn around.”
Nixon believed that a revolution in U.S. relations with Peking and Moscow would deprive establishment liberals of issues they had used against conservatives for years. The sea change in American diplomacy would not only move the world closer to a stable international order but also make Nixon and the Republicans the new leaders in advocating a progressive approach to foreign affairs. It was an astonishing shift away from the anti-Communist rhetoric that Nixon had previously used to advance his political career. It was also a demonstration of how pragmatic he could be to achieve something he believed would establish him as a great president.
KISSINGER WAS RIGHT: Russia was “the big play” in the Nixon foreign policy plan. Improved relations with China were a large part of the diplomatic revolution they envisioned; but détente with Moscow was essential if they were to avoid a Sino-American rapprochement that increased hostility between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.
In the summer of 1970, Pat Buchanan urged Nixon not to let Americans become too hopeful about better Soviet-American relations. During the fall campaign, he suggested that Agnew declare that “we are moving with caution hopefully toward settlement of outstanding conflicts,” but Moscow had taken “tremendous strides in seapower and strategic weapons,” which should restrain any “euphoria” about a détente. Nixon thought it was “very good advice.”
Buchanan did not need to caution Nixon and Kissinger. Between the fall of 1970 and the spring of 1971, Soviet-American differences created substantial doubts about détente. On October 1, Henry told the Yugoslav foreign secretary that he “had three mutually contradictory interpretations” of Soviet policy: “first, that the Soviets are seeking accommodation with Germany but do not want a general détente, and in fact might adopt a tougher stance toward the U.S.; second, that the Soviets want détente; and third, that they do not know what they want.”
Later that month, Dobrynin complained to Kissinger about the poor state of Soviet-American relations. “The United States had already decided to adopt a hard line and it was whipping up a propaganda campaign in order to get larger defense budgets and perhaps affect the election…It was the consensus of all their senior officials that relations with the United States had never been worse since the Cuban missile crisis.” Henry responded that “the problem was how to turn this present impasse in a more fruitful direction.” Dobrynin promised that when Gromyko met the president at the UN, he would look to the future rather than focus on the difficulties of the past. Kissinger said that the president would give “a very conciliatory speech” to the General Assembly.
Nevertheless, Kissinger saw a post-Stalin Soviet Union, which lacked “a strong central point of decision making,” as a dangerous adversary. Their uncertain leadership, coupled with an increased military capacity, might lead them into reckless actions endangering relations with the West. Moscow reciprocated the suspicions—it saw the Nixon administration as rash. Press leaks about their private meetings were not helping things, Dobrynin complained to Kissinger in November. Moscow saw the newspaper stories as an irresponsible attempt to put pressure on it.
By the end of November, Nixon detected a hardening Soviet policy resulting from expectations of a Nixon defeat in 1972. They might be thinking, he told Kissinger, “Any kind of détente between now and ’72 would come up against a very tough bargainer and might help him get re-elected, whereas waiting after ’72 might reduce his chances of getting re-elected and thereby increase the chance for them to make a better deal after ’72 than before. I am convinced that the Soviet leaders are influenced more by internal American political considerations than we like to believe.” Nixon speculated that Democrats like Averell Harriman were behind the current Soviet response to his administration. Nixon’s paranoia was hard at work here. Should he lose in 1972, he could rationalize his defeat as the result of Soviet influence on American politics spurred by Moscow-connected Democrats.
As the year came to an end, Dobrynin told Kissinger, six to nine months into Nixon’s presidency, Moscow saw the administration as “more conciliatory.” But difficulties over the Middle East and Vietnam “had created a bad impression.” Henry agreed: “We both knew that relations between our two countries have worsened in the past couple of months,” he replied. But in a measured statement, he urged Dobrynin to understand that “the President continues to seek better relations and concrete results—negotiation instead of confrontation is no idle phrase.” Henry cautioned “that distrust has begun to set in on both sides…We are at a crossroads in our bilateral relationship. We have the choice between letting this chain of events continue and making a fundamental attempt to set a new course…The President has asked me to reaffirm to you his desire to improve our relations.”
In the last ten weeks of 1970, three issues seemed to impede better relations with Moscow: an inability to arrange a Summit and impasses over SALT and the Middle East.
By the time Nixon met with Gromyko in October 1970, he had given up on a Summit before the November elections. Nevertheless, he was eager for a Soviet commitment to such a meeting in 1971 that he could announce before voters went to the polls. Dobrynin told Kissinger that the Soviet government hoped to host a Moscow Summit next June or September, but resisted any announcement in October of plans for a meeting. The Soviets had no intention of giving the Republicans an October surprise that could help them add congressional seats in November.
In late December, another Kissinger-Dobrynin conversation about a Summit was less than cordial. Henry now cautioned the ambassador against leaks from Moscow about the possible meeting. The administration saw no immediate political benefit from public knowledge and feared that rumors of a meeting that might not pan out could become a political liability. Kissinger complained that earlier Soviet failures to respond positively to a 1970 date or reveal plans for 1971 talks “had made an extremely painful impression.”
SALT also frustrated Nixon’s hopes of reduced Soviet-American tensions. After the largely unproductive April to August Vienna talks, negotiations were scheduled to resume on November 2 in Helsinki. But skepticism at home and abroad that Moscow would give ground on limiting its ICBMs and Washington its ABMs dimmed prospects of a breakthrough. Suspicions of Soviet intentions abounded in the United States, where Vice Admiral Hyman Rickover predicted that by 1975 Moscow’s military capacity “will be ahead of us in virtually all respects.” Although political sentiment in America favored reducing military expenditures, national security concerns trumped interest in arms limitations. “There has not been an arms race,” Rickover said. “The Soviets have been running at full speed all by themselves.” Nixon asked Kissinger, “What is the answer we give to this growing opinion? Rickover has enough of a following to get this across.”
The Helsinki talks, one participant told Bill Bundy, was “‘the nadir’ of the whole negotiation.” Bundy himself said: “It was hardly the way to conduct a major negotiation: a President not really interested, his principal assistant [Kissinger] intervening without the knowledge or concurrence of the negotiating team, and the team left to fend for itself.” Henry told Dobrynin on December 2 about the U.S. delegation in Helsinki, “They have no authority and [are] not given authority and will not be given authority.” Bundy conceded that “any arms control negotiation was pioneering, and not likely to move rapidly in the best of circumstances, but with better handling the morass of 1970 might well have been avoided, and more progress made in ways favorable to U.S. interests.” At the end of the year, SALT prospects were less than robust and negotiations were contributing little, if anything, to a Soviet-American accommodation.
IN THE FALL OF 1970, after the satisfactory outcome of the Jordan crisis in September, Nixon and Kissinger believed that they had a good chance of easing differences with Moscow over the Middle East. During his trip to Europe at the end of September, Nixon told Italy’s President Giuseppe Saragat that U.S. and Israeli firmness in response to Soviet recklessness and the Syrian invasion of Jordan had headed off a more serious crisis between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Three days later, during a conversation with Yugoslavia’s Tito, Nixon “observed that some thought the Soviets wanted chaos in the area.” Tito disagreed, “saying that the Soviets did not want war and, with their strong influence in the area, would not permit escalation.” Although Nixon remained skeptical of Moscow’s intentions in the region, he replied, “We are not discouraged and will continue to press every opportunity for peaceful solution to the problem.”
The Soviets had no intention of turning Middle East tensions into a direct confrontation with the United States. On October 6, Dobrynin offered soothing advice to Kissinger: “The most effective means of preventing events like those which occurred in Jordan is a speedy attainment of a peaceful settlement in the Middle East as a whole.” He urged a renewal of mediation discussions through the UN’s Gunnar Jarring. Nixon was receptive to Dobrynin’s urgings. He hoped that the rescue of King Hussein from Palestinian radicals had improved “chances for a lasting peace in the Near East,” he told state and national security officials.
Kissinger was less hopeful. His exchanges with Dobrynin went beyond optimistic platitudes. Dobrynin coupled friendly advice with a warning that “the Soviet Union could not be intimidated by a show of U.S. force. He asked whether we really thought that one additional U.S. carrier in the Eastern Mediterranean would make the Soviet Union back down…If the Soviet Union acted when its national interest was involved, then it would act with great force.” Kissinger saw the Soviets as in retreat in the Middle East, where they “are trying hard to cut any losses…They now want to wipe the slate without drawing any consequences for the broader spectrum of their relations with us.”
Yet Moscow was not about to concede anything to Washington on the Middle East. With discussions there at a standstill, the Egyptians and Soviets launched a propaganda barrage in the second half of October blaming the United States and Israel for the deadlock and warning that the cease-fire along the Suez Canal was in jeopardy. When ABC newsman John Scali reported that “the Soviets seem less concerned with peace than with maximum support” for Nasser’s replacement, Anwar Sadat, Nixon agreed. Another meeting between Kissinger and Dobrynin underscored the ongoing problems. Dobrynin described a conversation between Rogers and Gromyko as offering little new: “Both sides restated their familiar positions and it was a deadlock.”
By the beginning of November, Kissinger could only tell Nixon that “We are again adrift in the Middle East, being guided, day-to-day, by tactical considerations…I see no evidence of a disciplined adherence to a solid long-term strategy.” Kissinger’s complaint was as much against Rogers as Moscow and the Arabs. He wanted Nixon’s authorization to press the state department to rethink its approach to the region.
Because no one had answers to the Middle East impasse, Nixon was willing to give Henry a say in administration deliberations about the Arab-Israeli conflict, but he was ambivalent about Kissinger’s involvement. As Nixon told Haldeman, “anybody who is Jewish cannot handle” Middle East policy. Henry might be “as fair as he can possibly be [but], he can’t help but be affected by it. Put yourself in his position. Good God…his people were crucified over there. Jesus Christ! Five—six million of them popped into big ovens! How the hell is he to feel about all this?”
Haldeman agreed: “‘What he ought to recognize is that even if he had no problems at all on it, it’s wrong for the country, for American policy in the Middle East to be made by a Jew.’ ‘That’s right,’” Nixon interjected. “‘And he ought to recognize that, because then if anything goes wrong,’” Haldeman added, “‘they’re going to say it’s because a goddamned Jew did it rather than blame the Americans.’”
The extent of Middle East difficulties registered more forcefully than ever in the last two months of 1970. In November and December, the Soviets increased the supply of antiaircraft weapons sent to Egypt. In response, Golda Meir asked Nixon to guarantee aircraft deliveries after 1970. She also asked that the United States remind Moscow of its commitment to Israel’s survival and security and pledge to veto any Security Council resolution imposing a territorial settlement on Israel.
Although promising to maintain the existing supply and finance relationships and to shun any Security Council proposal on the occupied territories, Nixon hedged his commitments by saying he needed more time before making concrete promises on supplies and said nothing about guaranteeing a veto.
A discussion on December 8 in Washington between Nixon and Jordan’s King Hussein raised additional concerns about the Middle East. “Stresses and strain have increased in the Middle East since 1967,” the king said. “The number of extremists has grown. There is greater disunity among the Arab states…He feared that the Middle East is changing from one of Arab-Israeli involvement to one of major power involvement.” They foresaw a possible disaster. Nixon was less than optimistic about negotiations. “There is no guarantee that if talks were to begin we would get the results we hope for,” he told the king, “but continuing as we are will get us nowhere.”
Nixon and Rogers pressed Tel Aviv to rejoin UN-sponsored discussions at once and warned that if it impeded the negotiations, “the Big Four would step in and if that did not work, then the Security Council would move in.” Meir characterized the message as “one of the greatest blows she had received for a long time from the U.S…. She feared that U.S. and Israel were on a collision course.”
Kissinger considered the Nixon-Rogers message a mistake. He told Nixon that “we do not have the climate of confidence in which pressure from us will yield real progress toward talks and ultimate resolution.” The Israelis countered by threatening to open direct negotiations with Moscow, which would boost Soviet prestige in the region and undermine U.S. influence. Despite the unlikelihood of Israeli-Soviet cooperation, Tel Aviv saw the mere suggestion as counteracting American pressure.
Although Kissinger hoped that he and Dobrynin might find some common ground for Middle East discussions, nothing turned up in the closing days of the year. In a conversation on December 22, Dobrynin complained that the U.S. “was trying to push Moscow out of the Middle East,” and characterized it as provocative.
In a year-end summary of Soviet-American differences over the Middle East, Kissinger saw little progress toward a settlement and described the Soviets as reaching for “hegemony in the region.” They had substantially increased their military presence in Egypt and the Mediterranean more generally. Henry was gloomy about improving Arab-Israeli relations. He saw little likelihood of “progress toward a settlement.” Unless we had “a game plan,” we could be “sucked step-by-step into a major crisis” with the Russians.
At the start of the New Year, Don Kendall, Pepsi-Cola’s chief executive officer, who had wide international contacts, gave Nixon and Kissinger some hope that the Russians might alter their stance on the Middle East. Kendall told Kissinger that a top Soviet writer at Izvestia, the official Soviet newspaper, described the Kremlin as eager for an arms-control treaty and a Mideast agreement. The arms race and their involvement in Egypt were “too much of a drain on them. Too many problems at home for a drain of a protracted period of time.” Wouldn’t the American-Jewish community make it difficult for Nixon in the midst of a reelection campaign to support an agreement that would be unpopular in Israel? the Soviet journalist asked. “The Jewish community didn’t put him in office and he would do what he had to,” Kendall replied.
Although the Jewish vote had largely gone against Nixon, he didn’t believe he could simply write it off in 1972. He was especially mindful of sympathy for Israel among a majority of American voters. In January, Kissinger told national security officials that the president wanted questions about arms supplies to Tel Aviv out of the way before November 1972. An escalating debate in which “everyone is trying to outdo everyone else in an election year” would serve neither the national interest nor the president’s popularity.
“There is no denying that there is a political campaign coming in this country in 1972,” Nixon said. “A number of politicians are already making it plain that they will make political capital out of their support for Israel…We will provide arms, long-range agreements with Israel, and guarantees …But if any Israeli leader feels that Israel by taking advantage of internal U.S. politics can have both arms and that kind of support from the U.S. and then refuse to act—even to discuss—then he is mistaken.” Nixon’s rhetoric was largely bluster. Trapped between Israel’s determination to assure its security and widespread American support for Tel Aviv, as well as domestic pressure to quit Vietnam, Nixon vented his frustration in private outbursts. Although the Israelis and their American supporters angered him, Nixon had no intention of letting political opponents win any advantage in the contest to be seen as a firm supporter of Israel.
As Kendall had reported, the Russians were eager for a stand-down in the Middle East. “The future of Soviet-U.S. relations is in our hands, and I want you to know that we are going to make a big effort to improve them,” Dobrynin told Kissinger in January 1971. He proposed discussions between them for “a realistic Middle East agreement.” Nixon wrote in the margin of a Kissinger memo, “K—See what he has in mind.”
In two more meetings during the first week of February, Dobrynin said that Moscow “viewed the Middle East situation as extremely alarming…and hoped that a channel could be established between Dobrynin and myself on these negotiations.” The Soviets “did not believe that our present approach [through the state department] would come to any good end,” Henry told Nixon.
Although Kissinger was convinced that only his control of Mideast policy could bring an upturn, Nixon was skeptical. On February 26, Haldeman recorded that “the K-Rogers thing goes on…now because of the Middle East. Henry persists in rushing in to the P and telling him we’re about to get into a war in the Middle East. The P asks him what he wants to do about it. He doesn’t have any ideas, except that he wants to take over. The real problem is that Henry becomes extremely emotional about the whole thing.” During a White House meeting, “the P had been very tough on Henry, on the grounds that he didn’t have any solutions…The P’s becoming impatient with the whole situation…He told Henry, before Rogers came over, to prepare a set of questions that they wanted the P to ask Rogers…The P asked the questions, and Henry concluded afterward that the answers were all unsatisfactory, but was unable to tell the P what he considered satisfactory answers…So, we’re back in the stew on that one.”
The acrimony revolved around Nixon’s frustration with the insurmountable problems between Israel and its Arab neighbors, especially Egypt, which demanded Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai. No one in the administration had an effective plan for breaking the deadlock. Cairo promised a commitment to nonbelligerency if Israel returned to its pre-1967 borders with Egypt. But Kissinger saw this as “something less than an unqualified acceptance.” The Israelis rejected a return to prewar borders, and only a commitment on both sides to consider plans for a mutual pullback from the Suez Canal, where their armies confronted each other, as a prelude to its reopening kept peace discussions alive.
In March, Middle East problems reached a new low and agitated Nixon’s fears that the outcome would be another war and a possible U.S. confrontation with the Soviets. Moscow publicly denounced Israel’s obstructionism and predicted dire consequences from a failure to reach a political settlement. Following the Soviet lead, the Egyptians also took a tough public stance. Anwar Sadat, who had come to power in October 1970 and seemed to be continuing Nasser’s policy of friendship with Moscow, warned Nixon on March 6 that he would not extend the cease-fire and was ready to resume the fighting with Israel. In March, he warned that his soldiers were eager to start “the battle of liberation” by the end of the month.
Israel was just as difficult to deal with. In early March, during a White House meeting with President Shazar, Nixon predicted that eventually the “well may run dry on the flow of U.S. assistance” and that it was time for Israel “to seriously explore all possibilities for a negotiated settlement.” Shazar resisted the pressure, saying that a solution to Middle East problems “could only be achieved through direct agreement between the parties.”
Golda Meir and Abba Eban were blunter. Mrs. Meir complained that the “U.S. was not acting in the spirit of allowing free negotiations without interference as the President had promised.” Eban told Kissinger that Israel could not promise to satisfy Arab demands for a return to prewar borders. He emphasized that ideas enunciated by Secretary Rogers were unacceptable. Kissinger urged Eban to counter Rogers by putting “forward a position that had a reasonable chance of starting discussion.” But Meir and Eban rejected the suggestion. Nixon now complained that “the Israelis make friendship awfully tough.” He told a leader of the American-Jewish community that Israel’s unyielding approach to negotiations weakened its international position.
Nixon also said that “he resented Israeli efforts to suggest a breach existed between the State Department and the White House,” which of course it did. The Israelis knew about the split in the U.S. government between Rogers and Kissinger, and believed it weakened Nixon’s ability to pressure either them or the Arabs. With Rogers demanding that Nixon use a hard line with Israel to compel greater flexibility in negotiations and Kissinger warning that it would damage U.S. relations with Tel Aviv, risk another Arab-Israeli war, and undermine the president’s domestic standing, Nixon, who had no better idea of what to do, found it impossible to set a clear course.
April brought no better results. “The diplomatic situation drifts,” Hal Saunders told Kissinger in the middle of the month. A conversation between the U.S. ambassador and Meir the next day covered “no new ground.” It added “to the general impression that the Israelis are digging in on their current position.” What are our priorities? Kissinger asked at an NSC meeting. “How can we influence these talks if we don’t know what we want?” They needed to find some formula that could advance the discussions. But with no idea of how to force Israel’s hand, the White House fell back on the belief that neither Tel Aviv nor Cairo would provoke a war from which they had nothing to gain.
With nothing constructive to announce, Nixon believed it best to keep a low profile about the Middle East. He rejected a suggestion that he discuss it in a news conference. “The only plus…is to show he’s standing firm during a week of turmoil,” Haldeman recorded in his diary, “but the minuses of having to talk about Vietnam and the Middle East, etc., that we don’t want to talk about overweigh this.”
IN THE FIRST MONTHS of 1971, with the administration unable to say anything new about ending the Vietnam War or settling Mideast difficulties, Nixon and Kissinger hoped that SALT, which were scheduled to resume in Vienna in March, might give them something to cheer about. In January and February, Kissinger suggested to Dobrynin that they commit themselves to “an ABM only agreement,” provided that it was coupled with simultaneous discussions of limitations on offensive weapons, including a “freeze on new starts of offensive land-based missiles during the negotiations.”
Under pressure from arms control advocates to focus the talks on banning ABMs, Nixon and Kissinger hoped to get something from the Soviets in exchange for limitations on defensive missiles. At the same time, they were determined to keep control of the negotiations in Washington as a way to assure that credit for any agreement went to the president rather than Smith and his colleagues in Vienna.
Kissinger found himself fighting a three-front war. He believed it essential to put a lengthy section about SALT in the annual foreign policy report as a way to signal that this was a White House initiative. He wished to say in the document that “The most important area in which progress is yet to be made is the limitation of strategic arms. Perhaps for the first time…agreement in such a vital area could create a new commitment to stability, and influence attitudes toward other issues.”
Nixon and Rogers were reluctant to raise false hopes for arms limitations. It doesn’t “make a goddamned bit of difference whether SALT’s in the State of the World or not,” Nixon told Haldeman, “you know, it’s—nobody gives a shit except Henry.” Haldeman took Kissinger’s side: “Except,” he said, “the SALT thing—the SALT stuff in there was really about the only news there was in the whole thing.”
At the same time as he fought with Nixon and Rogers, Henry also battled to convince the Soviets of the benefits of a SALT agreement. Moscow, which wanted to curb ABMs but needed time to catch up to the United States in MIRV technology, delayed answering Kissinger’s January proposal. Although Henry cautioned that an ABM agreement alone would not be very fruitful, he described the U.S. as without a time limit for negotiation of offensive weapons, but suggested eighteen months to two years.
When Henry also declared that they “foresaw limitation only on the number of missiles, not on modernization,” it largely gave Moscow what it wanted. Kissinger reported to Nixon that after he handed Dobrynin a letter from him to Kosygin about SALT, the ambassador signaled a keen interest in moving ahead by making constructive suggestions. Dobrynin understood that Moscow needed to make a decision before the talks resumed in Vienna on March 15.
Kissinger was too optimistic. Preoccupied with domestic economic problems and slated to hold a Party Congress at the end of March, the Soviets were unprepared to answer the U.S. proposals. On March 12, a Soviet reply refused to link discussions about defensive and offensive weapons. Moscow proposed an ABM agreement in 1971, with discussions “in principle” of a freeze on ICBMs coming in 1972. There was no commitment, however, to reach an agreement on offensive missiles. The Soviets were ready to discuss them in Vienna, but Dobrynin explained that while the Party Congress was in session, he would be unable to give answers to any additional U.S. counterproposals.
Nixon and Kissinger were determined to reach an agreement, which they believed crucial to foreign policy gains in general and Soviet-American relations in particular. During a March NSC meeting, they emphasized the importance of negotiating a SALT treaty, and winning support for it in the United States and abroad. “This is a big fight,” Nixon told Kissinger and Ron Ziegler. “It affects our dealings with the Russians. It affects our dealings with the Congress. Don’t you realize the importance of this?” He saw the foreign policy implications as “enormous.”
But so were the domestic ones; indeed, Nixon and Kissinger saw more domestic than international gains from a SALT agreement. Neither he nor Nixon believed that a treaty would change strategic fundamentals. “I’m not so sure that the SALT thing is going to be all that important. I think it’s basically what I’m placating the critics with,” Nixon told Kissinger in March. Henry agreed. “We can afford the SALT agreement we are now discussing,” he told Nixon and Haldeman in April. “That won’t be a disadvantage. It won’t mean a damn thing.”
The payoff would be in moving the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. toward détente and in disarming domestic political opponents. Coupling public statements assuring the administration’s commitment to a strong national defense with an unprecedented arms control treaty, Henry said, would “break the back of this generation of Democratic leaders.” Nixon replied, “That’s right. We’ve got to break—we’ve got to destroy the confidence of the people in the American establishment.” It would also help with long-range plans to bolster the country’s national security. “We can’t do much about building a strong defense for the United States during this term because Congress won’t support us,” Kissinger told Haldeman. “What we have to do is get reelected and then move into the defense setup at that time.”
The Soviet military, which Dobrynin described as “certain vested interests,” jeopardized prospects for SALT. “Henry obviously was very much depressed because the general developments had not been what he had hoped,” Haldeman recorded. He accurately suspected “that his SALT plans had probably fallen through.”
Kissinger’s distress also revolved around stalled Summit plans. In January 1971, Kissinger-Dobrynin exchanges all but settled a commitment to hold a meeting in Moscow either in late July or early September. Dobrynin stressed Moscow’s desire for “concrete achievements, not just general goodwill.” Nixon was in full agreement, and instructed Henry “to work out the preliminary details of the agenda.”
But with Middle East and SALT discussions largely on hold, substantive gains at a Summit seemed out of reach. A February Kissinger-Dobrynin meeting “broke up in a rather chilly atmosphere.”
By April, however, Kissinger was hopeful that America’s emerging reconciliation with China coupled with domestic pressure on Brezhnev to reduce arms expenditure and increase consumer goods would improve chances for a SALT treaty and a Summit conference. But when Moscow asked for an agreement on East German control over West German access and ties to West Berlin as the price of a Summit, Kissinger reacted “very sharply…We had proposed a Summit meeting over a year ago,” Henry told Dobrynin, “in order to make some progress in basic Soviet/ American relationships.” He doubted that the president would agree to any preconditions as the price of a meeting.
“I blew my top, I mean deliberately,” Henry told Nixon. “They’re thugs, and they always try to pick up some loose change along the way, and they just ran up against the wrong guy. You just don’t give them any loose change.”
Nixon directed Kissinger to give Dobrynin an ultimatum on a Summit. “I told him,” he reported to the president, “that we had been proposing a Summit for a year now but they had never taken it up, that their interest had been sporadic, and that the next time they raised the subject they should be prepared to announce it and should understand that linkage to any preconditions was unacceptable—it could not be used as a lever on other negotiations.” Dobrynin replied that there must be a misunderstanding. Moscow was setting no preconditions on the talks; they were ready to meet.
At the end of April, however, with still no concrete commitments on SALT or the Middle East, a Summit remained more a hope than a certainty. But with nineteen months to go before he had to face voters again, Nixon remained optimistic that he could turn foreign affairs into a winning platform in 1972.
At a minimum, he intended to put a positive face on his administration’s record. On April 29, despite all the recent frustrations over foreign policy and his private fulminations against the press, antiwar demonstrators, and Kissinger and Rogers for their distracting turf wars, he gave a masterful performance in a news conference covering domestic dissent, Vietnam, Laos, and China. He was the soul of rationality: He wanted the same thing war opponents demanded—peace; he had nothing but respect for the many reporters in the room who disagreed with his policies; he hoped someday to visit China and end that vast country’s isolation; and he had no desire to play Peking off against Moscow; we were seeking good relations with both Communist powers and had every hope that they would ameliorate their differences.
Nixon’s public presentation demonstrated the power of the country’s traditions of comity and consensus, and his effectiveness as a politician. He understood that Americans expected their president to be a unifying rather than a divisive leader. At the time, if the public heard his private conversations, with all his blue language and angry attacks on opponents and collaborators dividing his administration, it would have been the end of his presidency. (Nixon never thought that the recorded conversations made between 1971 and 1973 revealing the seamy side of his personality and political cynicism would ever see the light of day; otherwise, it is inconceivable that he would have recorded the real man, giving vent to his anger and wishes to punish opponents to the full extent of his powers.)
Whatever Nixon’s impulses to engage in political combat, which had been so much a part of his public career and reflected his true instincts, he understood that Americans wanted their president to shun polemics as much as possible and unify rather than divide the country. Nixon was overwhelmingly self-interested, but he was someone who shrewdly presented himself as a wise president always putting the larger national interest ahead of self-serving ends.