As the carnage in Vietnam mounted, Nixon’s all-consuming ambition collided with Helms’s dutiful service to Lyndon Johnson. In January 1968, one thousand five hundred and forty-five Americans died in Vietnam. Four hundred sixty-seven had been drafted. One hundred died in helicopter crashes. Six of the dead came from the District of Columbia. There were three homicides and two suicides.1 North Vietnam’s demand for complete U.S. withdrawal remained unchanged.
Nixon couldn’t depend on the Johnson administration’s overoptimistic statements. He distrusted the reports of Saigon correspondents in the major newspapers, who had long since soured on the war. After the Tet Offensive in late January 1968, when the Viet Cong fought their way onto the grounds of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, even CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite questioned the war.
Nixon no longer talked about the “aggressor.” He talked about peace. “I wanted the war to end but in a manner that would save the South Vietnamese people from defeat,” Nixon wrote in his memoir. “I felt there were a number of unexplored avenues to probe in finding a way to end the war.”2
One place where Nixon probed was among the South Vietnamese themselves. He renewed his friendship with Anna Chennault, the Chinese-born wife of World War II hero General Claire Chennault and an outspoken supporter of Nationalist China. Nixon had first met the Chennaults in Chiang Kai-shek’s palace in Taiwan in 1955. When her husband died in 1958, Anna was touched by Nixon’s condolence letter. They kept in touch about Asia and Asian communism, for which, she noted, “he showed a certain fascination.”3
In 1967 Chennault moved to Washington and lived with her two daughters in a penthouse apartment in the Watergate complex. She became a fundraiser for the Republican Party. Her thronged soirees attracted politicians, donors, diplomats, and CIA hands. Helms did not know Anna Chennault personally, but he certainly knew who she was. Her late husband was a founder of an air freight company that had supplied the OSS in Asia and serviced U.S. military bases throughout the region ever since. She was friends with Helms’s colleague Ray Cline, who had served as station chief in Taiwan in the early 1960s. Cline, now deputy director of intelligence, made a point of conferring with Chennault every six weeks or so because of her superb range of contacts, “to exchange ideas and interpretations, not information,” he said.4
One of Chennault’s “very close personal friends” was South Vietnam’s ambassador to Washington, Bui Diem, with whom President Johnson met with before traveling to Saigon in March 1968. LBJ returned home and stunned the country by announcing a pause in the bombing of North Vietnam, the opening of peace talks, and his decision not to run for reelection in 1968. Ambassador Diem became the South Vietnamese observer to the talks. Johnson knew the South Vietnamese had little interest in facilitating negotiations they feared would strengthen the communists, and he suspected Bui Diem might be in touch with Nixon’s people.
Helms, the butler of espionage, responded to the president’s needs. CIA agents “reported regularly” on the activities of Bui Diem, wrote Thomas Powers. The Agency bugged the Washington office of South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu as the National Security Agency intercepted and deciphered radio transmissions from South Vietnam’s embassy in Washington. As director of Central Intelligence Helms delivered the full take to the Oval Office.
Johnson was convinced the former vice president was encouraging the South Vietnamese to resist his terms. Nixon feared the peace talks were designed to help elect Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who announced his candidacy after Johnson bowed out. For his part, Helms was under no illusion the war could be won. After the Tet Offensive, he convened a panel of Agency analysts to assess its impact. They concluded that the Saigon government lacked key attributes of nationhood. It could not defend its frontiers, lacked resolution to fight the communists, and resisted reforms to win public support.5 Helms conveyed this dismal conclusion to the president, knowing he did not want to hear it.
Helms feared for his country. After the assassination of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968, looting and rioting raged in the heart of the capital. “To get home after a meeting with the President I had to pass through military checkpoints in place along the route from the White House…” Helms later recalled. He found his emotions “roiled by the realization that half a million troops were at risk in Vietnam, a country many Americans might have trouble finding on a map,” while “a semblance of martial law was in effect in Washington; and carnage and arson had erupted across the country.”6
Helms’s tenure as director depended on the results of the 1968 presidential campaign now upended by Johnson’s decision not to run. In June, Robert Kennedy emerged as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, before he was shot and killed in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the night he won the California primary. In August, Nixon secured the Republican presidential nomination by positioning himself between New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, the favorite of the Eastern Establishment, and California governor Ronald Reagan, the new darling of conservatives. When the divided Democrats nominated Humphrey in Chicago as police mauled antiwar protesters and innocent bystanders, Nixon adopted a supporter’s plaintive plea, “Bring Us Together,” as a campaign slogan. He offered himself, improbably but effectively, as a healer.
Under orders from Johnson, Helms stayed current on Nixon’s Vietnam contacts, either through a campaign spy or the NSA wiretaps or both. He went along with LBJ’s command, he told aide George Carver, because, as he never tired of saying, “I only work for one president at a time.”7
Dan Rowan had come a long way since 1960 when his affection for singer Phyllis McGuire drew the ominous attention of Sam Giancana. In 1967, he and his partner in comedy, Dick Martin, put together a new TV variety show for NBC called Laugh-In. CBS had scored a hit with The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, a variety show that featured antiwar musicians such as Harry Belafonte, Joan Baez, and Pete Seeger, which was daring for a prime-time show. Laugh-In mostly avoided the war while cultivating a youthful aesthetic with quick-cutting skits and sexual innuendo packed into punchlines like, “You can bet your sweet bippy,” and “Sock it to me, baby.” Laugh-In was, in many ways, an establishment show, the commercial, rather than the cutting, edge of the cultural change sweeping America.8 It was also the most popular TV program in the country.
Laugh-In was, in the lingo of the day, a “rip-off.” Here was a national television network co-opting the moral justice of the sit-ins to desegregate Jim Crow lunch counters and the campus teach-ins to protest the war in order to make jokes and sell advertising. Laugh-In was a case study in what Herbert Marcuse, the popular New Left philosopher, called “repressive tolerance,” namely the ability of a capitalist society to defuse dissent by commodifying it. Laugh-In was also sixty minutes of fast, funny comic relief for millions of Americans traumatized by Vietnam, riots, assassinations, and the draft.
Nixon intuited its possibilities. When Laugh-In writer Paul Keyes proposed an appearance on the show, Nixon agreed. Keyes, a rare conservative among TV jokesters, rehearsed Nixon to deliver the program’s signature punchline. After several takes, they came up with a bit that was broadcast on the premiere of the show’s second season in September 1968.9 With his recognizable bulbous nose in profile, Nixon slowly turned to the camera and converted the punchline into a question, “Sock it to me?”10 It was deft and self-deprecating, unexpected, and amusing. Nixon’s men underscored the message with campaign ads during the show.11
Marcuse’s analysis was eclipsed by Nixon’s performance. The canny candidate had applied the reactionary genius of repressive tolerance to the needs of retail politics. “It elected Richard Nixon,” claimed George Schlatter, the show’s creator.12 Hollywood hype aside, Laugh-In made Nixon seem normal, no small feat.
Nixon heard the disturbing news from Henry Kissinger, former adviser to Nelson Rockefeller, now angling for a job in the administration. Kissinger said he’d heard from Democratic friends that Johnson was planning to drop his conditions for peace talks in order to jump-start negotiations with the North Vietnamese. Nixon felt it was a craven move, abandoning a firm U.S. negotiating position to buck up Humphrey’s lagging campaign.13
On October 16, Johnson called Nixon and briefed him on his plans for an imminent halt to the bombing. While Nixon listened in sullen silence, LBJ urged him to be discreet in his public statements. When Anna Chennault heard the news, she wrote a note of protest to Nixon, and then flew to Kansas City where Nixon was campaigning. She brought with her a written presentation that deplored the idea of a bombing halt and recommended a long-term approach to the war.
That same day, Nixon’s running mate, Maryland governor Spiro “Ted” Agnew, received a briefing on Johnson’s plans. The NSA intercepted a call from Chennault to President Thieu, telling him to “stand fast,” reject LBJ’s deal, and wait for Nixon to take office. According to biographer Powers, Chennault’s intercepted conversations were written up in the office of Tom Karamessines, now the deputy director of plans. Helms gave them to Walt Rostow, Johnson’s national security adviser, and Rostow shared them with the president.14
Nixon wanted to know what Helms knew about LBJ’s intentions. On October 22, he decided he could pressure the CIA director into disclosing the White House plan, but he didn’t want to do it himself. He ordered Haldeman to tell Agnew to “go see Helms.” The message was simple and brutal: “Tell him we want the truth [about Johnson’s plans for a bombing halt]—or he hasn’t got the job,” meaning he wouldn’t be retained as CIA director.15 Haldeman knew when to ignore a Nixon order, and this was one of those times. Agnew never called Helms.
On October 31 Nixon was preparing to address a nationally televised rally at Madison Square Garden when he got another phone call from Johnson. There had been a breakthrough in Paris, the president said. After wide consultations among his advisers, he had decided to call a total bombing halt over North Vietnam. He would make the announcement in two hours.
“Whatever this meant to North Vietnam,” Nixon confided to his diary, “he had just dropped a pretty good bomb in the middle of my campaign.” Nixon suppressed his anger and thanked the president for the call.16 “I had done all this work and come all this way,” he complained to himself, “only to be undermined by the powers of an incumbent who had decided against seeking reelection.”17 Johnson told aides he thought Nixon was sabotaging his peace initiative. Nixon called the president back to assure him he would never do such a thing. LBJ didn’t believe him.
On Tuesday, November 5, seventy-two million Americans voted. When the ballots were counted, Nixon had narrowly defeated Humphrey to win the presidency. The Go East strategy that Nixon crafted after his defeat in the California governor’s race had finally succeeded. His mastery of business, the law, and American politics had been vindicated. Nixon gave a victory speech to supporters in the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, then went home to the Fifth Avenue apartment to have a meal with his family. He ended the day by retreating alone to the privacy of his library where he put one of his favorite albums on the turntable, Richard Rodgers’s musical score for a World War II documentary, Victory at Sea. He turned the volume all the way up.18
Richard Helms saw the realities of American power like few others. Not just the shattered consensus and growing recriminations among U.S. policymakers. Not just the divided Congress and the alienated youth. Not just the elusive enemy and the unwinnable war but the raw struggle for power at the very top: the wrathful Johnson, deploying all instruments of national intelligence to contain a rival for power; the crafty Nixon, using Anna Chennault to thwart the diplomacy of his own president in a successful bid to win the White House.
Helms’s directorship hung in the balance. A week after the election, he and other top national security officials briefed Johnson and the president-elect in the Oval Office. In his memoirs, Nixon said he found them all capable men but “very nearly worn out” and devoid of new ideas.19 After the meeting broke up, Johnson pulled Helms aside. He said Nixon had asked, for a second time, if he should keep him on as director of Central Intelligence. Johnson said he told Nixon, “I’ve no idea how he [Helms] voted in any election and have never asked what his political views are. He’s always been correct with me and has done a good job as director. I commend him to you.”
Four days later, the president-elect summoned Helms to a hotel suite in New York. Helms was greeted by Bob Haldeman, the advertising executive now serving as Nixon’s chief of staff. The two men took an instant dislike to each other. Nixon told Helms he was retaining him as director because he wanted to keep the CIA “out of the political arena.” Helms hastened to agree. They shook hands. Helms exited by a freight elevator to avoid the reporters lurking in the lobby.20
Three days later, Richard Helms and Cynthia McKelvie were married in a Presbyterian ceremony at his brother’s home in South Orange, New Jersey, not far from where he grew up. McKelvie was amused to be described in Time as “a divorcée,” which she said “made me sound far more glamorous than I was in reality.”21
Howard Hunt sent congratulations and a couple of presents. “Having some experience with the institution of divorce,” Hunt wrote, “I know how rewarding and fulfilling another marriage can be.” Helms replied with his thanks for his intrepid pal. “I must confess I am awed by your ability to produce these goodies,” he wrote, “but then I remember that you have never failed to extricate your heroes from impossible situations.”22
Mr. and Mrs. Helms flew off to Jamaica as the guests of Lord Ronald Graham, an old friend and classmate of Helms’s at the Swiss boarding school La Rosey. Graham, once notorious for his youthful pro-Nazi views, lent them a cottage on the grounds of his estate in Ocho Rios, high on a hill overlooking the Caribbean.23 Twenty-two years before, Lord Graham had arranged the sale of a nearby property to Ian Fleming, the former MI6 man turned novelist, who built the estate he called Goldeneye. It was there Fleming had conjured up the adventures of James Bond.24
It was just the neighborhood for Dick Helms’s honeymoon, which was soon over.