Ted Kennedy had shown Democrats a way to have at Nixon—something they desperately needed. According to Kennedy’s critique, Nixon’s decision to prolong the war wasn’t an act of political courage, just political calculation—even political cowardice. Nixon wasn’t going to deny victory to the Communists, just delay it until politically convenient. Beneath the appeals to patriotism lurked boundless political opportunism. What could be less patriotic than sacrificing the lives of American soldiers for political gain?
Liberals other than Kennedy, however, were making a different charge against Nixon. For some reason, the most vocal, influential, even brilliant ones grew convinced that Richard Nixon would never let the Communists take over South Vietnam. Ever. Not merely before his reelection, but for as long as he remained president. This was the serious opinion of serious men.
Three of them—Paul Warnke, Morton Halperin, and Leslie Gelb—were, by any measure, true experts on Vietnam. All had worked in the Pentagon during the Johnson administration, first under Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, then his successor, Clark Clifford. They were the top three officials in the Pentagon’s Office of International Security Affairs, the in-house think tank known as “the State Department within the Defense Department” that advised the defense secretary on the many international implications of matters military. They were brilliant men with impeccable academic credentials, advanced Ivy League degrees all around: Warnke’s from Columbia, Halperin’s from Yale, Gelb’s from Harvard. When McNamara decided he needed an in-depth study of American decision making in Vietnam, a top secret history of the war destined to become known as the Pentagon Papers, the assignment fell, quite naturally, to Warnke, Halperin, and Gelb. David Halberstam may have won a Pulitzer Prize for The Best and the Brightest, his epic study of how brilliant men sucked America into a quagmire, but Warnke, Halperin, and Gelb wrote theirs first.
Gelb was one of Kissinger’s grad students at Harvard, Halperin the guest lecturer at the professor’s last class. The new national security adviser took Halperin with him to the White House as the Vietnam expert on the National Security Council (NSC) staff. This gave Halperin insider status in two administrations, one Democratic, one Republican (although he never joined the inner circle of either president). The experience enhanced Halperin’s credibility as a Vietnam expert, and for many liberals his stature grew after he severed ties with the White House in the spring of 1970 over Nixon’s decision to send American troops into Cambodia. By then, Gelb was a Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and Warnke had opened up a law practice with Clifford, the former defense secretary whom all three continued to advise. One result of this advice was an article, “Clark Clifford on Vietnam: Set a Date and Get Out,” that Life magazine put on its May 22, 1970, cover. Clifford called for complete withdrawal from Vietnam by December 31, 1970.1 (The White House learned of this in advance through an illegal FBI wiretap on Halperin’s phone, placed there on the never-substantiated suspicion that he had leaked the secret bombing of Cambodia while on Kissinger’s NSC staff. “This is the kind of early warning we need more of,” Nixon’s chief domestic policy adviser, John Ehrlichman, wrote Haldeman, who agreed.)2 Demand for Warnke’s, Halperin’s, and Gelb’s advice grew among Democrats who wished to replace Nixon in the White House. (Even after Halperin became an adviser to Edmund Muskie, the Democratic front-runner, the FBI tap remained on his phone.)3 They influenced politicians and the public through their writing as well.
They thought Nixon would withdraw from Vietnam only when and if Congress forced him. “The president has not sought to keep his policy a secret from the American people,” Gelb and Halperin wrote in the Washington Post on May 24, 1970. “But despite what he said, most observers have assumed that he was first of all a politician, and that he therefore had ruled out any escalation and was planning to withdraw all American forces before 1972.” This revealed more about the authors than the president, specifically that (1) they thought it would be politically advantageous for Nixon to bring the last troops home before 1972, even though that would make it possible for the Communists to overthrow the South Vietnamese government before Election Day—a political calamity for an incumbent president; and (2) they did not know of the secret, RNC-commissioned poll indicating that one particular military escalation would be spectacularly popular, and therefore not the kind of thing a politically motivated president would “rule out.” The authors’ convictions were stronger than their evidence: “Neither by word nor deed has the president indicated any intention to withdraw all American forces.” In fact, the president had indicated it “by word,” having spoken of “complete withdrawal of all U.S. combat ground forces,” “withdrawal, first, of all U.S. combat troops,” and “this government’s acceptance of eventual, total withdrawal of American troops” in three separate, nationally televised addresses.4 Despite Nixon’s frequently made promise, the authors concluded that he would withdraw “only to the degree that he believes the South Vietnamese forces can fill the gap, and only if Hanoi does not step up its military effort. Given these criteria, there will be many American troops in Vietnam for a long time to come.”5
The dilemma was apparent. If Nixon really intended to withdraw only when South Vietnamese troops could do the same job as American ones, then he would have to keep American troops in Vietnam indefinitely. On the other hand, if Nixon really intended to bring all the troops home, then he would have to do so despite South Vietnam’s inability to take their place in battle. Nixon could really intend only one of those two things. The liberals just picked the wrong one. They didn’t see Nixon as a politician who would withdraw all the troops merely to create the semblance of the “peace with honor” he had promised (knowing Hanoi would not agree to a ceasefire or release of the POWs for anything less than total American withdrawal). They saw Nixon as more than a politician. They thought he would keep Americans fighting and dying as long as it took to preserve South Vietnam. “If the President means what he says, we will have American forces numbering perhaps 50,000, perhaps 200,000, in Vietnam indefinitely, propping up the current Saigon regime,” Gelb and Halperin wrote in the Post on October 11, 1970. “The fighting will continue and Americans will continue to die and be wounded.”6
Warnke took up the same theme in the June 21, 1970, Post, referring to “the President’s unstated (but now undisguisable) insistence that our proxy regime must be permanently secured.”7 If this were true, the war would never end.
Clifford publicly predicted that if Nixon won reelection, the Vietnam War “will continue indefinitely.” The former defense secretary told the Democratic Platform Committee, “The Republican Party, which in 1968 pledged an end to the war, in 1972 offers what appears to be perpetual war.”8
The President of Perpetual War was a poor choice of political narratives, primarily because it was not true. Perpetual war was a harsh charge, to be sure, but it would backfire at the worst possible moment, when Nixon traded complete American military withdrawal from Vietnam for the POWs before Election Day. Yet it dominated liberal and Democratic rhetoric through the 1972 campaign.
The party’s ultimate presidential nominee believed. “Vietnamization with its embrace of the Saigon regime perpetuates the war,” George McGovern told anyone who would listen throughout his campaign for the nomination and presidency.9 “The president’s Vietnamization policy virtually guarantees that our prisoners will remain in their cells, that our troops will remain in danger, that the negotiations will be stalled, and the killing will continue.”10
The Nixon that haunted the liberal imagination was someone who took anti-Communism to an extreme. Someone who, for example, would withdraw American troops from Vietnam only if Saigon’s were strong enough to take their place, even after it became clear that this would mean sacrificing American lives in perpetuity.
By casting Nixon as the implacable foe of Communist victory in Vietnam, liberals played into his hands. If he was the man they thought, he would never quit, never give up or give in. But Nixon would do all these things. And when he did, liberal campaign rhetoric would provide him with cover.
One of the brilliant young liberals who grew convinced of Nixon’s undying devotion to Saigon was Daniel Ellsberg. His was a résumé to shame an overachiever: Harvard summa cum laude, a year abroad at the University of Cambridge, company commander in the Marine Corps, nuclear strategist, RAND Corporation think tanker, Pentagon analyst, a couple of years in Vietnam working on pacification before returning to the States and being asked to write a chapter of the Pentagon Papers, the top secret Defense Department history of the Vietnam War. Ellsberg is best known as the man who turned the Pentagon Papers over to the newspapers in 1971—the biggest unauthorized disclosure of classified information up to that time.
Less known is why he leaked them. Ellsberg had been hopeful when Nixon chose Kissinger as national security adviser. Ellsberg knew Kissinger as a realist about Saigon’s prospects. In Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg wrote:
In 1967 and 1968 I had been with him in conferences on Vietnam, where he was expressing a point of view that was well in advance of that of any other mainstream political figure at that point. He argued that our only objective in Vietnam should be to get some sort of assurance of what he called a “decent interval” between our departure and a Communist takeover, so that we could withdraw without the humiliation of an abrupt, naked collapse of our earlier objectives. He didn’t spell out how long such an interval might be; most discussions seemed to assume something between six months and two years.11
Ellsberg didn’t want a “decent interval.” He thought the war should end immediately. But he saw Kissinger’s presence on Nixon’s White House staff as a sign that at least the administration was getting out of Vietnam. That was before one of Ellsberg’s closest friends, the White House insider Morton Halperin, convinced him that Nixon was staying in. Listening to Halperin, Ellsberg grew convinced that Nixon was doing what presidents before him had done. Ellsberg’s reading of the Pentagon Papers convinced him that Johnson, Kennedy, Eisenhower, and Truman had all escalated America’s involvement in Vietnam to keep it from falling on their watch.
Nixon had no readiness at all to see Saigon under a Vietcong flag after a “decent interval” of two or three years—or ever. Not, at least, while he was in office. That meant not through 1976, if he could help it, as he believed he could. That didn’t mean he expected the VC [Vietcong] or DRV [North Vietnam] to give up, permanently, its aim of unifying the country under its control. And so it meant that the war would essentially never end. His campaign promise of ending the war was a hoax.12
Nixon’s exit strategy for Vietnam was indeed a hoax, but not the one that Ellsberg and the liberals feared. Their certainty that Nixon would not settle for a “decent interval” and that he would never let Saigon fall made it easier for him to do both. They unwittingly reinforced Nixon’s image as a president who would never retreat, never surrender, a steadfast ally who would never accept a Communist takeover of Vietnam. Their attacks made him stronger.