APRIL 1970 was a difficult month for the men running the White House. Nixon was, by his own description, “tense” because of the coup in Cambodia and the unchanging military situation in South Vietnam. The tension seeped to Kissinger, who spent much of his working day worrying about—and trying to shape—the mood of his boss.
There was plenty to worry about. Kissinger’s secret talks with the North Vietnamese had gone badly, and, by mid-April, Nixon and Kissinger were convinced that the North Vietnamese, far from negotiating an end to the war, planned to try to overthrow the Lon Nol government and take over Cambodia. The White House’s options seemed limited, largely because of the recent escalation of bombing and ground war in Laos, which had led to a brief renewal of antiwar dissent in Congress and the media—dissent that had been forcefully neutralized, so Nixon and Kissinger thought, by the strong November speech and the administration’s continuing reliance on Vietnamization.
There were other pressures, too. The doves in Congress were continuing their efforts to force the administration to seek a ban on the MIRV missile. And the Senate, having defeated Nixon’s nomination of Clement F. Haynsworth, Sr., for a Supreme Court vacancy the previous November, turned back his second nominee, G. Harrold Carswell, on April 8. Nixon took the rejections of these southern judges personally. “If the Northern liberals had tasted victory in defeating my second nominee,” he wrote in his memoirs, “I was determined that they would at least pay a political price for it in the South.”
It was amid these political rebuffs that Nixon’s aides and staff were invited to share the President’s admiration for the movie Patton, a biography of the World War II Army hero. The movie glorified—as Hollywood invariably does—the violence of the war. General Patton was dramatized as unpredictable and independent almost to the point of insubordination—qualities that obviously appealed to Nixon. He had been forced to cancel plans to see his daughter Julie graduate from Smith College after the Secret Service warned that several student demonstrations were being planned. “Julie was also terribly disappointed,” Nixon wrote in his memoirs. “She tried to hold back her tears.” Vice President Agnew had some unwelcome advice for the President: “ ‘Don’t let them intimidate you, Mr. President. You may be President, but you’re her father, and a father should be able to attend his daughter’s graduation.’ ”
But Nixon was not only a President who could not attend his daughter’s graduation. He was also a President who, the year before, had canceled the Duck Hook escalation in North Vietnam and had done nothing in response when the North Koreans shot down an American plane. Hanoi still stubbornly refused to show any signs of lessened resolve, despite repeated warnings and savage “signals.” The President was worried, Kissinger noted in his memoirs, that 1970 would not produce any major foreign policy achievements, and he did not want to let his policies in Southeast Asia be the major criteria for the voters in the November congressional elections.
Early in April, eager to retaliate against his real and imagined enemies but afraid of the political consequences, Nixon had instructed Kissinger to explore secretly the possibility of a summit meeting with the Soviet Union. Late that month, the Russians responded, as the White House viewed it, by increasing their combat personnel in Egypt and authorizing their pilots to begin flying defense missions there. Nixon did not publicly criticize the Russians. Instead, he was forced—again for political reasons—to make another concession to antiwar critics. On April 20, he announced that by the spring of 1971 an additional 150,000 American troops would be withdrawn from South Vietnam—the largest cutback so far.
A reaction was inevitable. It came during the last days of April, and it culminated in Nixon’s formal order, issued in secret on April 28, that American troops invade Cambodia. Once again, the method in the madness was to show the North Vietnamese and the Soviets that they must not take risks with Richard Nixon’s character. The order, when it was made public two days later by the President, would be justified as a response to increased “military aggression” by the North Vietnamese. Kissinger, in emotional discussions with NSC staff members before the invasion, repeatedly made it clear, though not in so many words, that Nixon’s apparent instability was a usable and expandable bargaining resource.
Still, an intention to invoke the “madman theory” does not fully explain the Cambodian invasion. The decision was made by an angry, frightened, and unsure President whose main adviser—in a kind of reverse synergism—exploited those fears to establish, once and for all, his dominant position in the White House. Kissinger’s participation in the Cambodian planning led to the resignation of at least four members of his staff, all of whom argued that the invasion of Cambodia by American troops would accomplish none of its objectives. It led to campus riots, the jailing and slaying of students, and Senate passage of the Cooper-Church Amendment demanding the removal of all American troops from Cambodia by July 1—the first such military restriction ever voted by Congress against a President in a time of war, declared or undeclared.
A ground assault into the Cambodian sanctuaries had always been high on the military’s wish list. In February, Laird, accompanied by Robert Pursley, his military assistant, made an inspection trip to South Vietnam and discussed such an assault with General Creighton Abrams, head of American forces. Abrams was convinced, Pursley recalls, that the South Vietnamese Army could now handle such a ground assault by itself, with very little United States support.
Sihanouk’s overthrow on March 18 removed a major obstacle, and, with Lon Nol’s acquiescence, the South Vietnamese Army began penetrating deeply and often into Cambodia. On March 20, two days after the coup, there were South Vietnamese Air Force attacks and ground probes inside Cambodia; a week later, a South Vietnamese armored unit crossed the border. On April 5, two South Vietnamese battalions moved ten miles into Cambodia. The official policy of the United States government at the time was that the South Vietnamese were operating on their own without American support, but few—either in the United States or in North Vietnam—were fooled.I
In postwar interviews, Nguyen Co Thach told the author that his government hoped at first that the Lon Nol regime would remain neutral and permit the North Vietnamese troops to continue operating out of their base areas along the border. The South Vietnamese invasion in April dashed that hope, and also put Hanoi’s troops in jeopardy. Its forces found themselves caught in a pincer between the invading South Vietnamese Army and units of Lon Nol’s Cambodian Army, which was made up, in many cases, of American-trained Khmer Serei and Khmer Kampuchean Krom, who had been infiltrated into regular Cambodian units after the ouster of Sihanouk, and, according to some Green Beret officers, even before his overthrow. The North Vietnamese troops, confronted with a classic military trap, had to break out of their base areas to protect their foothold inside Cambodia. “We went westward” in the skirmishing after Sihanouk’s ouster, Thach explained, “but not to capture Phnom Penh.” It would have been “militarily impossible” at that point to go into the main city, because the Khmer Rouge, the guerrilla Communist insurgents in Cambodia, were not strong enough. North Vietnam’s goal in 1970, Thach said, was “to train the Khmer Rouge people so they could set up an army to liberate themselves.”
Hanoi’s decision to expand its activities in Cambodia was a military step that many advisers on Kissinger’s National Security Council staff had anticipated. Watts and Lynn both remember warning Kissinger that an invasion of Cambodia would force the Communist troops out of their sanctuaries and drive them farther west—toward Phnom Penh; in essence, the aides were arguing that the invasion would in fact provoke the threat that Kissinger and Nixon were using to justify it—that Hanoi had plans to invade Phnom Penh.
John Court recalls seeing some evidence later on that the goal of the North Vietnamese, caught between the South Vietnamese and Cambodian Army operations, was to threaten Phnom Penh. “But it was not compelling. The North Vietnamese objective was to win in South Vietnam—not in Cambodia.” It was only after the invasion that the possible threat to Phnom Penh appeared. “The evidence came to light as a result of the incursion,” Court recalls. “The documents [captured then] showed that as the North Vietnamese moved west, they could threaten Phnom Penh. Henry talked like he wanted to believe it. It provided a neat reason after the fact.”
There was similar skepticism at the Pentagon. Colonel Pursley concluded, after reviewing the available intelligence, that “there was no substantive basis” for the Nixon-Kissinger theory that Phnom Penh was directly threatened. “It’s a theory that has to stand on its own.” A senior civilian Pentagon official says he and his staff concluded that the North Vietnamese would not risk an overthrow of Lon Nol because it would be much criticized in the Third World. At the State Department, intelligence officials recall that the North Vietnamese began preparing for an attack from Lon Nol shortly after Sihanouk’s ouster. North Vietnamese artillery was normally targeted to the east, at sites inside South Vietnam, rather than against Cambodia, to the west. But “They turned their guns around 180 degrees,” one official said. “They were worried about their supply lines and their troops were terribly exposed.” It was only then that the North Vietnamese began to expand their base areas inside Cambodia, seeking to protect their supply lines and, in the process, alarming Nixon, Kissinger, and some of the military. The State Department and senior civilian officials in the Pentagon urged that the United States limit its aid to the Lon Nol government; they argued that an immediate heavy shipment of arms and matériel could provoke the North Vietnamese into retaliating against the new regime.
Evidence and arguments were less important in the White House than Nixon’s belief that Hanoi was defying him. By the third week in April he had developed a solution: to demonstrate his toughness by using American troops in the next cross-border invasion of Cambodia.
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The policy was irrational and the intelligence used to justify it unpersuasive, and thus Nixon planned the Cambodian operation in secrecy, away from those in the Cabinet who might object. Laird and Rogers, while aware of the proposed escalation, were excluded from any serious involvement in its planning; in their place Nixon relied on Richard Helms, his newly compliant CIA director.II He also set up an extraordinary backchannel arrangement with General Abrams in Saigon, and with other military men who were experts at telling presidents what they wanted to hear. The same could be said for Kissinger. Between April 22, when Nixon first considered using Americans in Cambodia, and April 26, when he made the final decision to, as he put it in his memoirs, “go for broke” and commit 32,000 American troops to the invasion, there is no evidence that Kissinger raised any objections, although Laird, Rogers, and some of Kissinger’s closest aides voiced heated dissent.
Watts, Lake, and Morris, who knew of the secret Paris peace talks with Le Due Tho, were especially upset. Watts knew firsthand just how irrational Nixon’s approach to the operation was. In one telephone call during the Cambodian planning, Watts was assigned to take notes as the President talked to Kissinger and said, speaking of the Senate rejection of Haynsworth and Carswell, “Those senators think they can push Nixon around on Haynsworth and Carswell. Well, I’ll show them who’s tough.” In another telephone conversation, Watts heard Nixon tell Kissinger, “The liberals are waiting to see Nixon let Cambodia go down the drain the way Eisenhower let Cuba go down the drain.” The “madman theory” was now being directed at Congress.
Watts knew too that Nixon and Kissinger were excluding from their planning everyone who might raise objections. Shortly before a key meeting Kissinger ordered him to locate Admiral Moorer, acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and invite him to an Oval Office meeting as “the President’s principal military adviser”—thus not as a representative of the Secretary of Defense. Obviously, “Laird was not to be invited.”
Watts learned by Friday, April 24, six days before the invasion, that American troops would be involved in force. That evening, Lake, Morris, Lynn, and Winston Lord filed into Kissinger’s office to discuss the invasion. As they did, Kissinger looked across the hall to Watts, working that day in his outer office, and said, “Do you want to sit in? This is my bleeding hearts club. Do you consider yourself a bleeding heart?” Lake remembers that moment well. “I could see Bill’s future passing before his eyes because I think he knew what was going to happen. He said, ‘Yes, I consider myself as such,’ and we went in.”
The meeting itself dealt only with the possibility of an invasion of Cambodia by South Vietnamese troops with American advisers. Morris, Lynn, Lake, and Watts had each been privately told—and Lord may also have known—that American troops would also be used, but none of the aides knew whether the others had been told, so none of them brought up that aspect. At one point during the discussion, which remained low-keyed, Kissinger heard out Lake’s arguments and said, “Well, Tony, I knew what you were going to say.” Lake recalls thinking, “ ‘Well, I am out of the effectiveness trap. If I am predictable, if I can be dismissed that way, then there is no point in my staying around.’ I decided to resign if they did it.”
Lynn told Kissinger that a Cambodian invasion would not only drive the North Vietnamese deeper into Cambodia (where Nixon already had come to believe they were), but, more important, would leave the defense of South Vietnam that much more vulnerable and open to a Vietcong and North Vietnamese offensive. Kissinger made a special effort with Lynn, who was older and, with his background as a Pentagon analyst, seemed more mature and less agonized than the other dissidents. Lynn remembers hearing more than once during those frantic days Kissinger’s explanation of the bargaining power of Nixon’s seeming irrationality: “Henry talked about it so much, particularly at the time of Cambodia—that the Russians and North Vietnamese wouldn’t run risks because of Nixon’s character.” By then, however, Lynn had become concerned about Nixon’s real state of mind. “All of us were worried about this man’s stability. We’d have glimpses of him and didn’t know what to do with it.”
A few days before the operation, when the Joint Chiefs’ hastily drawn plans for the attack were submitted to the White House, Kissinger—as he had done with the Duck Hook planning papers—asked some of his staff to evaluate them. “The plan was just awful,” Lynn recalls. “It was imprecise and vague. I was to write up all the questions I could think of—about refugees, the South Vietnamese Army, security, and I even queried the proposed result of the operation itself.” Kissinger told Lynn his list was “terrific” and gave it to a military aide to present to the Joint Chiefs for a reply. Lynn heard nothing over the next few days and eventually asked Haig whether anything would come from his queries. Nothing did. Lynn had managed to convince himself after writing his tough critique of Duck Hook in the fall that Kissinger had not wanted those escalations, and he still thought so years later. He could have no such illusions about Cambodia. Lynn was to leave the NSC staff not long afterward.
Morris was among those who warned Kissinger about the domestic dangers of the Cambodian operation. He and Lake “said we thought there would be tremendous domestic consequences. We said something about ‘blood in the streets,’ but we had no idea what was going to happen at Kent State. I argued that Cambodia was a contradiction in terms for Henry, in that he was always talking about a savage blow and it was technically impossible to administer a savage blow in that terrain; this was another indecisive action and the war would simply go on. You might have political effects in Southeast Asia but you certainly would have political effects here at home.”
None of the arguments mattered. Nixon had begun to personalize the war and no one, certainly not his national security adviser, dared to interfere. Until he made his dissent known, Morris had been involved in the flow of paper from Nixon’s office to Kissinger, memoranda he later described as “stream-of-consciousness excursions into courage and aggression” that would “make extraordinary reading for historians if they survive.” Nixon published only one such paper in his memoirs, a memo he wrote during the Cambodian planning. Kissinger published the same document in full.III Morris says the memoranda depicted “a man angry and obsessed with the idea that the other side was trying to push him around” in Cambodia. “Now what the hell are they trying to do, Henry? These intelligence reports are very disturbing. It looks as if there is an effort here to take advantage of the weakness of the new regime, an effort to take over large sections of the country, to upset the truce, to have some kind of decisive, indirect effect on politics in South Vietnam.” Nixon’s memoranda gave the sense “of being taken advantage of—a sense that the other side was trying to steal a march on the whole process and the tacit understanding by which Kissinger had begun the secret negotiations: which is that we were now at the stage of getting out and they were going to help us get out in a mutually advantageous way. Suddenly they had broken the rules of the game and we could not afford to let them do that. The constant refrain of these conversations was: How are we going to look? Where will we be after this if they do something dramatic in Cambodia? We can’t let them do this.”
Morris remembers Kissinger as very noncommittal in his telephone talks with Nixon during that time: “You’re right, Mr. President, but on the other hand they could simply be testing us; they may not be going all the way. There was a lot of ‘Yes, Mr. President’ in it.” Kissinger was talking “not as if he were serving the President,” Morris thought, “but as if he were treating him,” as a doctor would his patient.
Morris and Lake resigned on April 29, in a joint letter to Kissinger expressing regret “because of our regard and respect for you.”IV They handed their letter to Haig and asked him not to give it to Kissinger until after the invasion. “Tony and I seriously discussed calling a news conference when we quit,” Morris recalls, to tell the public about the wiretapping and Nixon’s drinking. “I consider the failure to do so to be the biggest failure of my life. We didn’t do so on the single calculation that it would destroy Henry. I knew the administration was squalid, but there still was this enormous illusion about Henry. I clung to the delusion that the man was still rational and that even his own strong sense of self-survival would keep him out of real trouble. In effect, it was my theory of the limits of the ruthlessness of Henry Kissinger; in truth, there were no limits.”
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Watts said nothing to Kissinger after the late meeting on Friday, but was more nervous and tense afterward than usual. Watts had become heavily involved in the Cambodian planning, a project he loathed. It was a hard weekend for Nixon, too, Watts recalls. Late Friday afternoon, the President flew to the presidential retreat at nearby Camp David, Maryland, with Bébé Rebozo. There was the usual heavy drinking. At some point that night, the President, his voice slurred, telephoned Kissinger at the White House and turned over the phone to Rebozo, who had a message that the President would never deliver himself. Watts, horrified, listened on the line as Rebozo said to Kissinger, “The President wants you to know that if this doesn’t work, it’s your ass.”
On Saturday, Watts finally expressed some of his concerns about American troop involvement to Kissinger, who told him, “Don’t worry. I’ve seen the Old Man and it’ll never happen.” Kissinger suddenly began to praise Watts, telling him the Cambodian planning had “separated the men from the boys” and asking him to be White House coordinator of the operation. “I was now considered okay,” Watts says. “I got home utterly distraught. What the hell do you do?”
Sunday afternoon there was to be a typical Nixon-Kissinger ritual: Rogers and Laird were invited to a National Security Council meeting, supposedly to discuss the Cambodian invasion plans. They still did not know that the basic decisions had already been made. Watts was torn. That afternoon, half an hour before the meeting, he told Kissinger he could not attend. “ ‘When I came to work for you,’ I said, ‘my sense of loyalty was, first, to the American people, secondly, to you, and finally, to Richard Nixon. I’m against this action on every count and I’m resigning.’ Henry didn’t know I was going to do it. We had a very tense exchange—hostile and tense. He said, ‘Your views represent the cowardice of the Eastern Establishment.’ ” Watts was angry too; he stalked into the Situation Room and told Winston Lord what had happened. Haig suddenly charged in, also very angry, and said, as Watts recalls it, “What the hell did you say to Henry? He’s furious.” Kissinger was throwing papers around his office in a rage, Haig said. Then he told Watts: “You’ve just had an order from your Commander-in-Chief and you can’t refuse.” “Fuck you, Al,” Watts replied. “I just have and I’ve resigned.” Watts left the White House and went home, feeling better than he had in months.V
There was much solace for Kissinger, however. If his staff was defecting, the President was not. On the day before Watts resigned, Kissinger—the man who had waited out Rogers’ visits to the White House in agony—had been invited to join Bébé Rebozo, John Mitchell, and the President on a hard-drinking cruise along the Potomac. “The tensions of the grim military planning were transformed into exaltation by the liquid refreshments,” Kissinger noted in his memoirs, without explaining how that group of four nonmilitary men could conduct military planning. The high point of the afternoon’s activities was another screening of Patton, Kissinger’s second viewing at the President’s behest.
Nixon wrote much of his April 30 speech himself, but he read his final draft to Kissinger and Haldeman for their approval. Kissinger, as he subsequently told the Kalb brothers, offered “only small comments.” The speech included a number of major lies—notably Nixon’s statement that the United States had previously done nothing to violate Cambodia’s neutrality. His cataclysmic view of the ground activities in Cambodia was equally significant: “It is not our power but our will and character that is being tested tonight. The question all Americans must ask and answer tonight is this: Does the richest and strongest nation in the history of the world have the character to meet a direct challenge by a group which rejects every effort to win a just peace, ignores our warning, tramples on solemn agreements, violates the neutrality of an unarmed people, and uses our prisoners as hostages?” In his memoirs, Kissinger defended the speech, saying that “behind the words, at once self-pitying and vainglorious, the merits of the case were overwhelming.”
William Rogers had a different reaction to the speech. He was presented with a copy only hours before it was to be telecast, and only a few moments before he, as the administration’s highest-ranking official in foreign affairs, was to brief the Cabinet on it. One aide recalls the scene: Rogers had his shirt and tie open that afternoon; he had found time to play golf at his country club in the morning and had exposed his neck too long to the sun. Rogers read the speech without emotion until he came, near the end, to Nixon’s plea that the country unite behind his policy. Then his face flooded with outrage. He flung the speech down and said, in a rare outburst, “Unite the country! This will make the students puke.”
At the Pentagon, Laird and Pursley were angry about Kissinger’s and Nixon’s manipulation of General Abrams, who had assured Laird in February that the South Vietnamese Army could handle a Cambodian invasion by itself. “What they were doing,” Pursley says, “was feeding Abrams stuff in the backchannel.” In the critical days in late April, when Nixon and Kissinger were trying to avoid an internal confrontation on Cambodia, Nixon suddenly announced in a meeting that he would ask Abrams for his private view on the use of American troops; Abrams recommended exactly what the President wanted. Pursley learned from Haig what Abrams was telling the White House, and he refused to believe it. There was a shouting match between the two officers. “Haig was really putting the pressure on me, calling me and saying ‘The Pentagon better come around.’ ”
Kissinger had now routed his two biggest foes inside the bureaucracy, and moved even closer to the Oval Office. It was Kissinger who stood firm in the hours immediately before the Cambodian invasion, reassuring the White House staff that it was a necessary action. Kissinger also told the staff, according to William Safire’s memoirs, “We’re trying to shock the Soviets into calling a [summit] conference, and we can’t promote this by appearing to be weak. . . . Anyone who wants to negotiate a peace must hang tough. If we get through this, we should have a negotiation by July or August.” It was the essence of the “madman theory,” as well as dramatic evidence of Kissinger’s loyalty.VI
All the internal debate over North Vietnam’s intentions inside Cambodia was swept aside by the night of April 30, when Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia in his televised address. Using a map, the nervous and perspiring President falsely declared that “thousands” of North Vietnamese soldiers “are invading the country from the sanctuaries; they are encircling the capital of Phnom Penh.” It was a test of American resolve, Nixon added: “If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.”
In his memoirs, Kissinger did not go quite that far, but he did describe the Cambodian invasion as necessary to save Cambodia and Vietnamization. “By April 21 we had a stark choice. We could permit North Vietnam to overrun the whole of Cambodia so that it was an indisputable part of the battlefield and then attack it by air and sea . . . Or we could resist Cambodia’s absorption” into North Vietnam. “The basic issue had been laid bare by Hanoi’s aggressiveness; it was whether Vietnamization was to be merely an alibi for an American collapse or a serious strategy designed to achieve an honorable peace.”
Nixon continued to behave erratically. The morning after his speech, after only a few hours of sleep, he traveled to one of the few places where he could be assured of a warm reception—a briefing room in the Pentagon where he was to get a report on the offensive from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. To some of those at the briefing he seemed incoherent. “He was like a college coach giving a pep talk,” a senior Pentagon official recalls. “He was, in effect, giving the Chiefs carte blanche” in the war. The official added, “He was a little bit out of control. It scared the shit out of me.” In his memoirs, Nixon wrote that there had been a strained moment during the briefing: “Everyone seemed to be waiting for someone else to speak. Usually I like to mull things over, but I made a very uncharacteristic on-the-spot decision. I said: ‘I want to take out all of those sanctuaries. Make whatever plans are necessary, and then just do it. Knock them all out so that they can’t be used against us, ever.’ ” There was a small group of employees and press people waiting to greet him afterward, and Nixon once again seemed incoherent. Asked by a reporter about the American troops in Vietnam, he suddenly denounced the antiwar movement, which had taken to the streets in instant protest against the invasion: “You see these bums, you know, blowing up the campuses. Listen, the boys that are on the college campuses today are the luckiest people in the world . . . and here they are burning up the books, I mean storming around on this issue—I mean you name it—get rid of the war; there will be another one. . . .” Nixon’s remarks were tape recorded by the journalists, and the word “Bums” was in every headline the next morning. Many readers, of course, agreed with the President.
The political pressure grew on May 3, when William Beecher of the New York Times reported the renewed bombing of North Vietnam, which had not been announced by the White House. The President had authorized raids over two days on supply depots and populated areas that had been off-limits since the bombing halt of November 1968. One raid, Beecher wrote, involved attacks by as many as 128 American fighter-bombers in Quangbinh and Nghean provinces, and North Vietnam broadcast charges of extensive civilian casualties. The renewed bombing of the North was another jolt to the bureaucracy, because, as press and public did not know at the time, Nixon and Kissinger had ordered the attacks without Laird’s approval. Instead, the order went directly to Admiral Moorer.
Kissinger had tried to stop publication of Beecher’s story, and when that failed, he and Nixon turned again to wiretaps.VII On the evening of May 2, shortly after Kissinger heard that Beecher’s piece was going to be run, and the day after the Hanoi broadcasts, Haig cited Beecher’s article as a “serious security violation” in a formal request to the FBI for four more wiretaps. Pursley was to be wiretapped again at home and in his office, the real target clearly being Laird. Richard Pederson, the State Department counselor who was known to be close to Rogers, was also to be wiretapped at home and office; he shared two private lines on his desk with the Secretary of State. William H. Sullivan, the former Ambassador to Laos who was then a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, was on the list. He was a close aide to Marshall Green, who had become, after his dissent on the Cambodian operation, a major bête noire in the White House.VIII Sullivan was also a protégé of Averell Harriman, yet another reason for suspicion. And finally, Beecher, whose articles had been a source of grief to the White House since early 1969, was to be wiretapped. That assignment was of special sensitivity. Haig, citing presidential authority, told the FBI the White House wanted Beecher’s home and office telephones to be wiretapped. “Haig stated . . . that he fully realizes the difficulty in covering office phones in . . . The New York Times,” an FBI memorandum said, “and knows that this might not be feasible.” According to the memorandum, “General Haig was advised that we would check with the Attorney General for clearance.”
There is no known evidence that Beecher’s office telephone—and unavoidably those of other Times reporters—was wiretapped. It was not “feasible,” apparently, to do so. The newspaper had a large switchboard. So do government agencies, and, as the Watergate Special Prosecution Force later concluded, none of the people wiretapped by Nixon and Kissinger in 1969 and 1970 was monitored at work.
The FBI wiretaps on Pursley, Pederson, Sullivan, and Beecher would stay on until February 10, 1971, when, apparently at Hoover’s insistence, all of them were removed. Kissinger, in his 1974 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, explained that the four were wiretapped because they had access “to the information, to sensitive information that had leaked,” and thus could logically be considered suspects. In fact, as Kissinger had to know, none of them—not even Beecher at the time—was aware of the real secret involved in the May 3 story: Laird had not authorized the bombing but had been bypassed. Laird, for all his infighting with Kissinger over Vietnamization, was a good soldier and had suffered many indignities in silence, but the Nixon and Kissinger decision to ignore the chain of command was high-risk.
On May 4, the Kent State shootings took place. The campuses exploded; one-third of America’s colleges were shut down by administrators and demonstrators within a week. Ever the political animal, Nixon now sought to quell the national uproar. On May 8, the day before a hundred thousand citizens were to demonstrate in Washington, Nixon held a news conference and announced that “the great majority” of the American units in Cambodia would leave by the second week in June. He also unilaterally announced that all American soldiers would be withdrawn by July 1, and that no Americans would be permitted to go farther than twenty-one miles inside Cambodia. Kissinger was upset with the orders, describing them in his memoirs as “panicky decision[s]” that were the “one concrete result of public pressures.” Kissinger was concerned about Nixon’s hesitancy because, as he put it in his memoirs, “The ambivalence of the government in Washington was bound to be transmitted to those in the field who soon sensed that Washington was not handing out prizes for imaginative and bold efforts to pursue the enemy in Cambodia.” There was another, equally fundamental concern that was not spelled out in the memoirs: Nixon’s decision to limit the Cambodia offensive demonstrated anew the ultimate power of the antiwar movement. The “signal” was one of weakness, and not the promise of continued irrationality worthy of a true “madman.”
The night after his news conference was another sleepless one for the President. His telephone logs, as reproduced in William Safire’s book, recorded fifty-one conversations between 9:22 P.M. and 4:22 the next morning. After the final call, Nixon, accompanied only by his personal valet, Manolo Sanchez, drove to the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial, where antiwar demonstrators had already begun to gather, and engaged some of the students in chitchat. There was talk of travel and environmental problems, as few of the young people dared to engage the President directly on the Cambodian issue. “I hope it was because he was tired,” one student subsequently told reporters, “but most of what he was saying was absurd. Here we had come from a university that’s completely uptight—on strike—and when we told him where we were from, he talked about the football team.” Nixon, now joined by Secret Service men and White House aides, drove to the Capitol, where he and Sanchez found the doors to the House chamber locked. Finally a key was found, and Nixon then showed Sanchez where he had sat as a member of the House in the 1940s. Nixon, according to Safire, sat in the first row of the chamber and told Sanchez to make a speech. There were some comments from the valet on his pride at being an American, and applause from the President. Nixon ended the morning with breakfast in a downtown hotel shortly before 7:00 A.M., his first meal in a Washington restaurant since his inauguration. Nixon devoted nearly seven pages of his memoirs—far more space than he allotted to some major international events—to an attempt to explain this sequence of activities. He had deliberately chosen not to take any staff or press along, Nixon wrote, in an effort to engage the dissidents in serious talks. “Thus it was especially frustrating when the newspapers reported that I had been unable to communicate with the young people I met . . .” Not even his closest aides saw it his way, Nixon added. When John Ehrlichman referred a few days later to the “problems I had created by talking about sports to students who had traveled hundreds of miles to protest my war policies . . . I snapped at him about the problems a President has when even his own staff believes the false stories that are spread about him.”
Nixon wrote that “Those few days after Kent State were among the darkest of my presidency.” There were also stories in the press revealing that Rogers and Laird had opposed sending Americans into Cambodia, and Walter Hickel, the outspoken Secretary of the Interior, publicly criticized the President’s failure to communicate with the dissenting students. Two hundred and fifty State Department officials went so far as to sign a public statement objecting to the administration’s Cambodian policy.
Kissinger remained steadfast through it all, although the demonstrations after Kent State threatened to make him, as well as the President, a virtual prisoner. One night Kissinger slept in Nixon’s bedroom in the bomb shelter to avoid the demonstrators who ringed the White House. While many officials in the administration—including Nixon—advocated further concessions to the demonstrators, Kissinger was adamant in his opposition to them. “He was appalled at the violence they provoked and at the ignorance of the real issues they displayed,” Nixon wrote. “He felt strongly that I should not appear more flexible until after the Cambodian operation was successfully completed. As he put it, we had to make it clear that our foreign policy was not made by street protests.”IX It was vintage Kissinger. To the President, he was unrelenting and tough—even tougher than Nixon. To student groups, however, with whom he repeatedly held private meetings in the days after the Kent State shooting, the message was “Give me six months.”
One of Kissinger’s former colleagues from Cambridge, an academic dean, recalls being asked to sit in during one of these meetings. “I felt—naïvely—that he really cared about the students,” the dean recalls. “We sat down and talked about a plan to increase his contact with campuses—it was exactly what a dean would expect from a Harvard professor. By the time Henry had finished with the students—he briefed them in the Situation Room—they were eating out of his hand. I was equally taken; I really saw it as the beginning of a dialogue that Henry was going to have with American students. He told them, ‘Give me six months. If you only knew what I’m staving off from the right’—a suggestion that he did not fully agree with the plans of Nixon. He sent away a very docile group of young people.” Once the crisis had passed, however, there were to be no more such meetings involving the dean, and “I became increasingly unimportant to Henry.”
Kissinger also had a stormy meeting that week with a group of thirteen senior faculty members from Harvard, including Thomas Schelling and Paul Doty. The session ended with angry denunciations and many newspaper stories. Kissinger’s break with Harvard as reported by the nation’s press had a built-in benefit for him: It played well in the Oval Office.
Perhaps the embattled President and his loyal adviser were able to get some pleasure from their “Top Secret—Eyes Only” world of intelligence and national security as, on May 9, upward of a hundred thousand students and other demonstrators, none of whom had access to White House secrets, marched around the White House to protest Cambodia and Kent State. On that day, the National Security Council bureaucracy ground out NSDM 59, dealing with one of the most highly classified areas in government—nuclear weapons. Nixon and Kissinger signed authorizations bringing the total number of warheads for nuclear weapons in American arsenals to 27,173, an increase of 1,139 over the previous fiscal year. Another NSDM, No. 60, was also promulgated as the demonstrators marched: It authorized the deployment of 8,951 of those nuclear warheads outside the United States, spreading the weapons to American military installations across the world. On that day, too, the White House wiretaps produced a conversation between Halperin and Ellsberg in which Halperin told his friend that he had decided, after the Cambodian invasion, to resign as a consultant to the National Security Council. Halperin also said, according to an FBI transcript, that “the major and most certain consequence” of the Cambodian invasion “is that a large number of Cambodian civilians will be killed and labeled Viet Cong.” Two days later, J. Edgar Hoover rushed Nixon and Kissinger “Eyes Only” letters reporting Halperin’s views. Earlier, Halperin had been overheard informing a caller that Laird and Rogers had disagreed with Nixon’s decision on Cambodia. Halperin also said, as Hoover reported to the White House, that “in his opinion the President had never had the intention of getting out of Vietnam,” and added that “the only effective way to oppose the present policy is to elect a Congress which will stop the war by cutting off funds.” Halperin was also quoted as agreeing to work with Walter Pincus, a staff aide to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who had played a key role in the committee’s inquiry into Laos.X
Nixon, Kissinger, and Haig have given conflicting accounts of what happened next, but it is known that the Halperin intercepts led to a frenzy of high-level action. On May 12, the FBI was requested by Haig, in Kissinger’s name, to wiretap two more members of the NSC staff: Lake, who had just resigned, and Lord, a Halperin protégé who had proved his mettle, in Kissinger’s and Haig’s eyes, by not joining the others in resigning over Cambodia. Lake and Lord were wiretapped for the next nine months. The next day, Hoover participated in a White House meeting with Nixon and Haldeman, and perhaps others, at which he was told to deal from then on only with Haldeman on the White House wiretaps. Kissinger and his office were no longer to be on the mailing list for wiretap summaries. On that day, too, Hoover provided the White House with some of the FBI’s verbatim logs of the Halperin wiretaps upon which the summaries had been made.
At this point, Kissinger had reached a new height of power and authority inside the Nixon White House, and it is inconceivable that Nixon intended to strip away his direct access to the wiretap information as a punishment. One obvious factor in the switch was Lake, who was going to remain for the next few months as Kissinger’s personal aide and thus might learn of FBI reports on his own wiretap, just as he had learned of the wiretaps on others. Similarly, Winston Lord was going to play a far greater role in Kissinger’s office, something that Kissinger surely knew, and would also be exposed to the FBI records. Lake was wiretapped not for any indiscretion, but because of what he knew and the White House’s fear that he would begin talking—which he did not. Lord had been brought into the National Security Council by Halperin, for whom he had worked in the Pentagon, and was thus a prima facie suspect in the hysteria over Halperin that persisted in the Oval Office.
What is extraordinary about the mid-May maneuvering inside the White House is how everyone involved lied about it in subsequent investigations, and managed to get away with the lies. President Nixon told J. Edgar Hoover, as Hoover reported in a memorandum, that Haldeman was to be the sole recipient of the wiretap summaries, “inasmuch as the President is anxious to cut down leaks that are occurring at the present time.” In his deposition in the Halperin wiretap lawsuit, however, Nixon volunteered a different reason for making the change: “General Haig came in to see me. He expressed great concern about Dr. Kissinger’s very emotional and very concerned reactions to the Cambodian action, not that he was opposing it. . . . He said we have simply got to get some of the load off . . . and he wanted it transferred to someone else and suggested that it might be Mr. Haldeman.” But Haig, in his deposition in the Halperin suit, said that he had learned of the switch in policy only when Kissinger told him about it. Kissinger “said the decision had been made that we are out of it and there was a decision that I welcomed,” Haig testified. In testimony a few months earlier, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, however, Haig acknowledged that “I had urged Henry to disassociate the National Security Council staff, meaning me or anybody else, from what was essentially an internal security matter. . . . I know he took that matter up either with the President or Mr. Haldeman or somebody outside of our office, and he informed me that we would in fact be out of it.” Kissinger, in his Senate testimony, explained that the transfer to Haldeman’s office “was no climactic event. During the course of the spring it had become clear to me that while I was getting occasional reports, I was in no position to do anything with these reports and I would just look at them and throw them into my out basket. I, therefore, pointed out on a number of occasions to the President that my office would serve best if it concentrated on foreign policy matters and if internal security matters were shifted somewhere else.” After Cambodia, Kissinger said, “when I had mass resignations from my staff . . . I believed then that it was probably decided that the combination of my preference and some of the difficulties that had existed on my staff made it desirable to accede to my recommendation and shift it to another office. I was informed of this as a routine matter several days later. . . . The President never spoke to me about it.”
Kissinger, of course, did not testify about one conversation with John Mitchell that may explain why he now wanted to get out of the wiretap business. In an interview with the FBI after the Watergate scandal broke, Mitchell recalled discussing the White House wiretaps either with Haig and Kissinger or just Haig alone. The FBI quoted Mitchell as agreeing with Haig and/or Kissinger that “the wiretaps could become ‘explosive’ ” and that the whole wiretap operation was “a dangerous game we were playing.” Mitchell later recalled that, in his opinion, Kissinger simply “wanted to get out” of the wiretap operations that spring. “He was just ducking—running for cover.”
Exactly what did provoke the procedural change remains a mystery. Although Kissinger and others have repeatedly emphasized the almost trivial nature of the wiretap information, it was considered far from routine in the Nixon White House. The day after Haldeman was authorized to be the sole recipient of the summaries, he called in a senior FBI official and reported that Nixon had specifically requested that the summaries were to be handed to him personally or to be given in a sealed envelope to his aide, Lawrence Higby. Haldeman then instructed Higby—in the presence of the FBI official—not to open them. Haldeman further told the FBI that it was no longer to initiate wiretaps on demand from Kissinger or Haig unless he had cleared them in advance.
The change in procedure removed Kissinger from direct control of the wiretap operation. By then, his NSC staff had been purged; the malcontents and the disaffected had already left his office or were in the process of resigning. Morris, Lake, Watts, and Lynn would be replaced over the next few months by others far less mercurial, independent, and brilliant—but far more trustworthy and dependable from Kissinger’s point of view. The new NSC aides would learn to follow orders without question.
Cambodia was a watershed for Kissinger; he would no longer permit himself to become fond of those on his staff, as he had with Lake and Morris. Kissinger also began to delegate to Haig much of the work of dealing with the staff and their papers. He would now begin to involve himself even more closely with Nixon and the continuous centralization of power in the White House.
By the end of June, the Cambodian offensive had played itself out. In their meetings with staff aides and the press, Nixon and Kissinger repeatedly described it as a victory, but the military in the field knew better. In June 1970, General Abrams raised a profound problem in a cable to Washington. He noted that the South Vietnamese Army was scheduled that summer to assume more military responsibility inside South Vietnam under the Vietnamization program, but was still heavily engaged on the ground in Cambodia. Abrams strongly recommended that the South Vietnamese be permitted to slow down the timetable for Vietnamization and continue to operate in Cambodia “during the next few weeks . . . to prevent loss of major objectives”—that is, the loss of Cambodia. Far from aiding Vietnamization, the Cambodian operation was apparently hindering it. Laird summed up the dilemma in a staff meeting at the Pentagon: “The South Vietnamese are wandering all over Cambodia protecting the government while we, in turn, are in South Vietnam protecting the South Vietnamese.”
It was even more complicated than that, for the United States Air Force was fully involved by then in bombing Communist targets in Cambodia; and would continue to bomb there until stopped by Congress in mid-1973. Ironically, the air war in Southeast Asia had been expanded at a time when Kissinger’s and Nixon’s cherished secret B-52 bombing of Cambodia had come to an end. The last improperly reported “Menu” bombing raid was on May 26; in its fourteen months of operation, the more than 108,000 tons of bombs that had fallen on Cambodia had all been officially recorded as falling on South Vietnam. That secret would remain safe for three more years.
The end of Menu did not mean the end of secret bombing, however. On April 24, a week before the Cambodian invasion, the United States Air Force was authorized to begin bombing targets with tactical fighter-bomber aircraft as far as eighteen miles inside Cambodia; these raids were officially recorded as having taken place in Laos. That secret bombing lasted for thirty days, under the code name “Patio.” After the American troop pullout on June 30, more secret fighter-bomber missions were authorized and there was much less concern about where the bombs fell. Bombing could now be carried out over much of eastern Cambodia and officially reported as being somewhere else. Under the code name “Freedom Deal,” more than 8,000 missions against North Vietnamese, Vietcong, and Khmer Rouge troops inside Cambodia were flown between July 1970 and February 1971, when the duplicitous reporting procedures were discarded. Many of those bombing missions also eventually came to involve B-52s.
The continued bombing, albeit secret, by American aircraft and the continued need for South Vietnamese troops in Cambodia were evidence of the failure of the invasion. The North Vietnamese sanctuaries had not been cleaned out—only relocated to the west. The air war had been vastly expanded and the White House was again resorting to secrecy to disguise that fact. Later in the summer, the CIA produced a special study of the Cambodian operation and concluded that it had not “substantially reduced” the North Vietnamese capability in Cambodia. Any supplies that were captured, the CIA said, could easily be replenished in two and a half months.XI In early June, Le Due Tho refused a Kissinger request for another secret meeting in Paris, telling the White House the talks were in “temporary suspension” because of Cambodia. (The public peace talks between the United States and North Vietnam continued to drag on in Paris, but those sessions—announced in advance to the press—were little more than propaganda forums, and remained so throughout the war.)
The CIA’s analysis proved to be highly accurate, but it was not the whole story. Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia had backfired in two important aspects: It had not damaged North Vietnam’s military capability there, and it had also led to an improvement in Hanoi’s relations with its difficult ally, the Khmer Rouge. Throughout the Vietnam War, the constant tension between those two guerrilla armies was never fully perceived by the policy makers and intelligence agencies in Washington.
The antagonism originated with Hanoi’s support of the Sihanouk government. In his postwar interviews, Deputy Foreign Minister Thach explained that his country supported Sihanouk because of his stance against the United States and his insistence on keeping Cambodia neutral—and thus open to North Vietnamese infiltration. But Sihanouk was also relentless in his efforts to stamp out the Khmer Rouge, and this naturally led to and reinforced the Khmer Rouge’s distrust of Hanoi. After Sihanouk was overthrown, Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader, went to Peking for conferences with the Chinese. In his absence, Thach said, Pol Pot’s deputy asked the North Vietnamese to help fight Lon Nol. “Within two weeks, we helped them liberate four provinces,” the North Vietnamese official said. “When Pol Pot came back to Cambodia, he asked us to leave—and so we did.”XII
Thach’s explanation of the early days of warfare after Sihanouk’s ouster was no doubt self-serving, but his description of the poor relations between Pol Pot and North Vietnam was borne out by the hostile relations between the two countries after the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in 1975.
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Congress, in the wake of Laos and Cambodia, became even more concerned about the war in Southeast Asia. The Cooper-Church Amendment, which had passed the Senate, was not acted upon in the House, but other senators were proposing end-the-war amendments that went even further. Senators George McGovern and Mark Hatfield jointly proposed an amendment to the Defense Procurement bill that would have cut off all funds for the Vietnam War by the end of 1970; it lost 55 to 39. “But the pattern was clear,” Kissinger noted with resignation in his memoirs: “Senate opponents of the war would introduce one amendment after another. . . . Hanoi could only be encouraged to stall, waiting to harvest the results of our domestic dissent.”XIII
On August 30, the Pentagon supplied Senator Edmund S. Muskie’s office with some statistics that had been requested months earlier. Nixon’s and Kissinger’s operation in Cambodia had resulted in the deaths of 344 Americans and 818 South Vietnamese soldiers; 1,592 American GIs were wounded, as were 3,553 South Vietnamese. There were “no reliable or comprehensive” statistics for civilian Cambodian casualties during the two-month operation, the Pentagon said, but there was an estimate of the number of Cambodian refugees—130,000. None of these figures was mentioned in Kissinger’s or Nixon’s memoirs.
I. Laird revealed to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee six weeks later that he had “approved and recommended” the April 5 mission and others.
II. Helms had been badly burned by Kissinger and the NSC staff in the debate over MIRVs and Soviet missile testing the previous fall. Being proved right in that argument hadn’t helped his position with the White House; he knew Nixon and Kissinger were still constantly criticizing CIA reporting. His subsequent insecurity played into Kissinger’s hands: Helms not only supported the use of American troops in Cambodia, but also suppressed a CIA analysis, completed in April 1970, which concluded that a major American and South Vietnamese Army attack on the sanctuaries in Cambodia, no matter how successful, “probably would not prevent [the North Vietnamese] from continuing the struggle in some form.” The report was provided to Helms thirteen days before the Cambodian operation, but Helms returned it to his analysts, asking that it be considered again on June 1, six weeks later. John Huizenga, testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1976, described Helms’s action as an example of “gross interference” with the intelligence product.
III. In the memorandum, written April 22 at five o’clock in the morning, Nixon castigated the “State Department jerks” who had successfully urged him the month before not to offer Lon Nol large-scale military aid and thus provoke the North Vietnamese. “They are romping in there,” Nixon said of the North Vietnamese, “and the only government in Cambodia in the last twenty-five years that had the guts to take a pro-Western and pro-American stand is ready to fall.” Nixon began the memorandum by noting, “I think we need a bold move into Cambodia. . . . In the event that I decide to go on this course . . . We are going to find out who our friends are. . . .”
IV. Neither Morris nor Lake left the staff immediately, but both were cut off from all sensitive materials. Shortly before Morris left the NSC that fall to work for Senator Walter F. Mondale, Democrat of Minnesota, as a foreign policy aide, Haig offered him a chance to stay in the government at a high level. “We’ll get you a job in the Peace Corps,” Haig said. “You want to stay in government somewhere where you won’t have to worry about these big matters. We’ll handle that.”
V. Watts formally left the National Security Council staff in early July, after catching up with his task of typing the minutes of NSC meetings. The day before he left, Kissinger called him in and, in a friendly and solicitous manner, asked him what he was going to do. As he left, Watts said, “Goodbye and good luck. It’s been fun.” “Don’t say that, Bill,” Kissinger responded. “It’s been interesting.”
VI. Safire did not note in his memoirs that Kissinger was wrong in his optimistic assessment of the impact of the Cambodian invasion on the Paris peace talks, as he had been and would be about nearly all aspects of the Vietnam War negotiations. But he included Haig’s comment after Kissinger’s presentation at the meeting: “The basic substance of this is, we have to be tough!”
VII. The first report of the bombing was made by Hanoi Radio, and Beecher, the Times’s Pentagon correspondent, confirmed the account from sources in Washington and prepared to write his story. Kissinger telephoned Max Frankel, the Washington bureau chief of the Times, and, with Beecher listening on an extension, began arguing against publication. Frankel and Kissinger talked almost daily, and perhaps, Beecher thinks, there was something in Frankel’s resistance or his tone of voice as he defended the planned publication that alerted Kissinger. He suddenly asked whether anyone was listening on an extension. Frankel quickly shooed Beecher off the telephone and continued the conversation, unaware that everything he was saying was being recorded and transcribed in Kissinger’s office. Kissinger’s motive for trying to prevent publication of the story—already known internationally—was obviously to avoid provoking Laird, who had been bypassed in the bombing decision and might retaliate. It seems obvious, of course, that Laird had learned almost immediately of the bombing, through his own sources, but chose to keep his counsel.
VIII. When Beecher reported, in another exclusive dispatch on April 22, that Nixon had secretly authorized a supply of captured Communist weapons for the Lon Nol regime, Nixon telephoned Kissinger in a rage and demanded that Green be fired. Kissinger took no action and Nixon did not return to the subject. But Kissinger too was angry about the story. Shortly after the Cambodian invasion, he ran into Jonathan Moore, another aide to Green who had joined in dissent on the Cambodian operation, in a White House corridor. Obviously smarting about the April 22 leak, Kissinger asked Moore, “Jon, why do you give me so much trouble? Why are you so resistant?” Moore, who had attended some of Kissinger’s defense strategies lectures at Harvard, replied, “It’s simply a matter of analyzing the pros and cons of your options and projecting the consequences, just like you taught me, professor.” Kissinger said nothing and slipped into a nearby bathroom. A moment later he walked out and found Moore still in the corridor, waiting to see Daniel P. Moynihan, a former Harvard professor who was Nixon’s senior adviser on urban affairs. “Jonathan,” he bellowed, “if I asked you to send rifles to our boys over there, you’d find a way not to do it.”
IX. In his memoirs, Kissinger claimed that he had a “special feeling” for the students, who, he said, “had been brought up by skeptics, relativists and psychiatrists; now they were rudderless in a world from which they demanded certainty without sacrifice. My generation had failed them by encouraging self-indulgence and neglecting to provide roots.” It could be argued that the students’ concerns were far less complicated, and in fact were centered in moral outrage over a war that was destroying a society. In any case, there is evidence that Kissinger’s feelings toward antiwar students were far less avuncular and more personal—he was more and more becoming a target of the antiwar movement. In mid-April 1970, for example, as the Cambodian invasion was being planned, Kissinger was invited to give a keynote address to a conference of graduate students at the Johns Hopkins School of International Studies in Washington. After he was introduced, a majority of the roughly one hundred students in attendance stood up and a student leader read a statement they had signed which denounced the administration’s Indochina policies. Kissinger listened in silence and, forgoing his speech, threw the floor open for questions. The first was direct: “Dr. Kissinger, do you consider yourself a war criminal?” With no show of emotion, Kissinger turned to the chairman of the proceedings, said, “Mr. Chairman, get your audience in order,” and walked out.
X. Pincus, a Washington Post reporter, served as staff consultant to the Foreign Relations Subcommittee on U.S. Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad, which was chaired by Senator Stuart Symington, Democrat of Missouri. Beginning early in 1969, Pincus and Roland Paul, the subcommittee’s counsel, toured American installations overseas to plumb and record in detail exactly what the United States military was doing in each country. Their work was closely monitored by Kissinger and the National Security Council, and by their second trip that year, every interview Pincus and Paul conducted with American officials was tape recorded. It was during this investigation that Pincus and Paul uncovered the extent of the secret American involvement in Laos and convinced Symington and Fulbright they should make it public. The two investigators also looked into the status of the National Security Agency’s highly classified relay and interception stations overseas—another area that put them into constant conflict with the White House.
XI. Cambodia was another setback for Helms and the CIA, however, in the view of Nixon and Kissinger. The Agency’s analysts had insisted for years that the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville, on the Gulf of Siam, was not a major supply conduit for the North Vietnamese and Vietcong. Military analysts disagreed, and the dispute, which reached into the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, was not resolved until after the May invasion, when captured documents showed that an estimated 23,000 tons of military supplies had been funneled through the port from 1966 to 1970, far higher than the 6,000 tons officially estimated by the CIA. The Agency had refused to upgrade its estimate during the controversy, despite heated Pentagon protests. Helms had sided with his analysts, and as a result his reputation was diminished further. Nixon considered the Agency soft on Vietnam.
XII. Sihanouk, meanwhile, had established an exile government in Peking, which the Chinese government recognized. This raised the specter—at least in Nixon’s and Kissinger’s eyes—of his possible return with a pro-Communist government to Phnom Penh. Despite the White House fears, such a move was highly unlikely, for Sihanouk’s main popularity was in the Cambodian countryside, not in Phnom Penh. In addition, there is evidence that the Chinese were less than enthusiastic in their initial support for Sihanouk. Thach recalled that shortly after Sihanouk’s ouster, China formally requested North Vietnam to recognize the Lon Nol regime. Lon Nol, whose grandfather was Chinese, was treated deferentially by the Chinese during a visit there in 1969, Thach said, and invited to visit the graves of his ancestors. Thach claimed that the Chinese decided to endorse Sihanouk’s exile government only after the North Vietnamese, Vietcong, and Khmer Rouge began their successful counteroffensive in late March and early April. “The Chinese realized that Lon Nol was very weak and so they recognized Sihanouk,” Thach said. There is independent evidence for Thach’s allegations. In Sideshow, William Shawcross cited a CIA report, made within days of Lon Nol’s ouster of Sihanouk, which said that the Chinese Ambassador to Phnom Penh had made it clear that China was prepared to accept the Lon Nol government as long as the North Vietnamese Army and Vietcong could continue to have access to the sanctuaries. The CIA also reported that the Chinese, as well as the North Vietnamese, initially tried to deal with Lon Nol, but—after Lon Nol rebuffed any negotiations over rights of passage—both countries turned to the Khmer Rouge and gave it active support. Nixon and Kissinger, by encouraging Lon Nol to abandon neutrality in the Indochina war, managed to bring the North Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge together.
XIII. The invasion did not prevent the ultimate defeat of South Vietnam, but it did pay off handsomely for Kissinger. In his memoirs, Nixon reported that in mid-May he awarded hand-sewn Purple Hearts to Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Kissinger “for all the wounds you have sustained in the line of duty over the past few weeks . . . This will be our secret,” Nixon told his aides, “but I wanted you to know how much I appreciate what you have done.” The Purple Hearts, Nixon said, were sewn by a girl friend of Bébé Rebozo. Truly, Kissinger had cracked the inner circle.