CBS, NBC, and ABC all had the same top story on the evening news: a hard-line television speech by South Vietnam’s president setting his conditions for a settlement: no North Vietnamese troops in the South, no coalition government. “Thieu didn’t say so in his television broadcast,” NBC’s Tom Streithorst reported from Saigon, “but during his five-day visit here, presidential adviser Henry Kissinger reportedly pressured South Vietnam to accept some form of coalition.” Saigon was calling the election commission a coalition government—a concept Nixon himself had assailed as a “thinly disguised surrender.”1 Thieu was staying within the letter of his commitment not to make his differences with Nixon public. Publicly, he spoke in general terms. All the peace proposals discussed in Paris, he said, were unacceptable.2
McGovern pounced. A settlement now would mean Nixon had added four years to the war “purely to avoid criticism from the right-wing war hawks,” said the Democrat. This was the closest he had ever come to identifying Nixon’s actual strategy.
Standing on the steps of a county courthouse in Dayton, Ohio, hatless in a sudden shower, McGovern asked, “Why, Mr. Nixon, was it necessary to kill another 20,000 young Americans in this war before we end it?
“What did you gain by killing or wounding or driving out of their homes six million people, most of them in South Vietnam, by this incredible bombing that has gone on for the last four years?
“What did you get, Mr. Nixon, for the $60 billion you spent in the last four years on the destruction of Southeast Asia that we needed to build up our own cities, to combat pollution, to build up our own country instead of destroying the land and the villages of another country 10,000 miles from our shores?
“I ask this question: What has changed that makes it any easier for us to get a peace settlement today than the one we could have had four years ago, if we had a president committed to peace four years ago?
“Did you make all these sacrifices, Mr. Nixon, to save your own political face from right-wing criticism?”
McGovern’s attack was based on the premise that Nixon had agreed to a coalition government. If true, “any settlement that comes now in the closing days of this election campaign is the same kind of settlement we could have had four years ago,” McGovern told CBS Morning News in New York. Such a settlement “would destroy Mr. Nixon.”3
If a coalition was a “disguised surrender,” and Nixon were agreeing to one now, then he had prolonged the war for his entire first term only to abandon the South when politically convenient. McGovern didn’t raise the possibility that the president might be settling for a different kind of disguised defeat.
Rumblings about a coalition government forced Nixon to adjust his campaign rhetoric. In eight separate speeches during the campaign’s final days, the president made the same claim in almost the same words: the North Vietnamese “have agreed that the people of South Vietnam shall have the right to determine their own future without having a Communist government or a coalition government imposed upon them against their will.”4 The coalition half of this line was true.
Woodward and Bernstein’s biggest Watergate story to date appeared on the front page of the October 25 Washington Post: “H. R. Haldeman, President Nixon’s White House chief of staff, was one of five high-ranking presidential associates authorized to approve payments from a secret Nixon campaign cash fund, according to federal investigators and accounts of sworn testimony before the Watergate grand jury.”5 Haldeman’s authority in the White House was second only to the president’s. That he had a hand in controlling the secret fund for the spying and espionage campaign against Democratic presidential candidates brought the Watergate story into Nixon’s inner circle.
White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler devoted a half hour of his daily news briefing to denouncing the Post. This time he had backup. The attorney for Hugh Sloan, former treasurer of CREEP, denied that his client had named Haldeman before the grand jury. (Sloan did name Haldeman under questioning by Woodward and Bernstein; the grand jury hadn’t asked.)6 The full-throttle denunciation by Ziegler and the technical basis for the White House denial showed how seriously the president took the Post’s investigation in the closing days of the campaign.
All three networks ran the Haldeman story and the denial. But the next day the evening news would have no time for Watergate.7