8    Crush the Serpent under Heel (1969)

Once elected, Richard Milhous Nixon needed to deliver on his campaign promise to end the Vietnam war. Nixon—whose whole political career had been built on Cold War confrontation, who had advocated U.S. intervention at Dien Bien Phu and had spent the mid-1960s attacking Lyndon Johnson for not doing enough—ought not to have been able to fool anyone. But he did. Perhaps the public had become so desperate that by merely saying he had a “plan,” people assumed Nixon intended to negotiate an end to the war. The real intent, Henry Kissinger’s protestations aside, was to batter Hanoi into conceding defeat at talks. Melvin R. Laird, whom Nixon made his secretary of defense, frankly acknowledges that this was the case.¹

The handling of the Vietnam policy review conducted by incoming national security adviser Henry Kissinger indicates Nixon’s direction. The president-elect ordered Kissinger to ready both a spectrum of options and a set of questions designed to elicit the differences among Washington agencies, field commanders, the Saigon embassy, and so on. Kissinger hired the defense think tank Rand Corporation for this task. Fred Ikle led the study team, and its top analyst was Daniel Ellsberg. After reviewing a plethora of material, interviewing Washington officials, and holding preliminary conversations with Kissinger, Ellsberg wrote a draft listing Vietnam options—together with illustrative questions—on December 20, 1968. He presented these to Kissinger on Christmas Eve and had a revised options paper on January 8, 1969. A number of things changed between the first and final drafts. A section on objectives, added at the head of the paper, specified the aim as ensuring the withdrawal or destruction of North Vietnamese forces in the South and of National Liberation Front infrastructure and forces; plus, it noted, that goal “would mean rejecting a compromise outcome if offered to us and would probably mean our refraining from proposing any compromise terms.” Confusing outcomes with tactics, the paper characterized compromise itself as a policy. It also denigrated the withdrawal option as one with “no advocates within the U.S. Government” but that “might become necessary if some of the alternative strategies failed.” Given this set of choices, the Vietnam paper clearly favored victory as an objective.²

There was more. In Ellsberg’s initial formulation, four alternatives were offered (and one more penciled in) for escalation, but the final version added two variants on an invasion of North Vietnam, even though this was expected to require an additional 250,000 U.S. troops with added costs of $6 billion to $9 billion in the war budget. Advocates believed, the paper argued, that “U.S. public opinion and U.S. allies will tolerate this course, especially if DRV proves intransigent at Paris,” and that “military victory is probably already on its way in South Vietnam.” But the paper correctly judged this opinion as highly speculative and noted that failures at each level of escalation would increase pressure for additional moves. It stated, “U.S. domestic controversy raised by any of these measures and especially by mobilizing reserves could strongly encourage Hanoi to hold out . . . expecting the U.S. ultimately to be forced to withdraw.” However, according to this paper, proponents believed that “the threat or onset of the higher levels [of escalation] is likely to bring major concessions from DRV, perhaps sufficient for a satisfactory settlement.” Meanwhile, the withdrawal option was modified to a partial pullout, leveling off at about 100,000 troops, excluding a full U.S. withdrawal.³

This version was distributed to those attending the NSC meeting on January 25, the first big Nixon-era Vietnam powwow. By then the language warning of escalation pitfalls had been cut, though the concept of threat remained. The change had much to do with two people. The first was Harvard academic Thomas C. Schelling, Ellsberg’s mentor and Kissinger’s colleague. Schelling, who sat in on the presentation of the draft paper to Henry, remarked that it lacked strategies for winning or for threats (which lay at the heart of Schelling’s theories about force and bargaining). The second person was General Andrew Goodpaster, who had become a sort of general factotum for the Nixon transition team. He took the options paper and gave it final form. In Goodpaster’s hands, alternatives inserted merely to cover the waterfront acquired a more concrete character.

Several points need to be made about this exercise. First, the judgments themselves embodied contradictions. For example, although officials believed Hanoi was talking because of its military defeat at Tet, the documents contained a clear sense the DRV could maintain its strength in the field over the foreseeable future, and no expectation that Hanoi might offer the concessions to be expected of a defeated power. Second, although Mr. Nixon wanted to issue the paper on inauguration day—and did so—he never actually chose an option. Nixon went straight to implementation. The use of threat to influence Hanoi became central to his strategy.

The other key point is that arguments about all the options included claims or beliefs about the antiwar movement, what consequences courses of action would have on it, and inferences about the Movement’s impact on subsequent strategic choices. In short, Washington now recognized that strategy could no longer be determined in isolation. Richard Nixon knew he was in a race for victory from day one.

Discussion at the National Security Council on January 25, 1969, showed that Nixon was well versed in the essentials. “We do have the internal problem in the U.S.,” the president remarked, “and it will be very difficult to continue without some change.” Nixon nevertheless felt the best course of action would be to hold on and told the group that achieving a cease-fire ought to be dropped as a negotiating goal. Offers of unilateral withdrawals were also to be eliminated. He wanted to “seek ways in which we can change the game,” Nixon said, adding, “I visualize that it could take two years to change this thing.” General Earle Wheeler warned that draft calls would increase. General Goodpaster suggested making a cease-fire part of restoration of the DMZ. He too worried that “Hanoi will initially also target on the U.S. domestic problem,” hoping to “erode U.S. patience and willingness to continue.” Nixon wanted six months of strong military action combined with “a good public stance which reflects our efforts to seek peace.” He said quite directly that some troops could be brought home after a few months, “as a ploy for more time domestically,” and Nixon wanted to clarify exactly how the Soviet Union could deliver Hanoi. After the meeting the president asked Laird for his views on the draft, and he asked the Pentagon to provide advice on transitioning to an all-volunteer military establishment.⁴

As a practical matter, this was Nixon’s first opportunity to implement his plan for peace. It is quite clear that his entire thrust ran in the opposite direction from the suppositions of those who, during the 1968 campaign, had imagined that Nixon’s plan was to negotiate a solution. The record also shows that Nixon intended to use troop withdrawals to counter antiwar critics. Nixon’s concept closely resembled the “Madman Theory” he had articulated to political operative Harry Robbins “Bob” Haldeman—now White House chief of staff. One day, walking along a beach, Nixon told Haldeman he would end the war during his first year, confident he could actually do that. The means? Speaking in the third person, Nixon had said, “They’ll believe any threat of force Nixon makes because it’s Nixon.” His notion of threat, Haldeman affirms, flowed not from academic theorists like Kissinger but from experience in the Eisenhower administration, when Ike was thought to have ended the Korean conflict by threatening escalation—and, of course, there was what Nixon believed to be the lost opportunity of Dien Bien Phu.

Nixon named the concept himself. “I call it the Madman Theory, Bob,” Nixon had said. “I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war.”⁵ It is no longer necessary to continue the historical debate that has raged over whether the Madman Theory existed and what it meant.⁶ The actual, secret records of the policy documents and the NSC discussions make Nixon’s intentions explicit.

Recalling these deliberations, Henry Kissinger would write that officials had been “too demoralized” and the Nixon team too new at that first NSC meeting to extract any “imaginative ideas” for a president eager to hear them.⁷ That is debatable. In fact, it was Kissinger himself who short-circuited the discussion of options, telling the Council they could ponder these once everyone had responded to the questions Ellsberg had drafted—the other part of the transition review. Kissinger issued these questions as National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM) 1 and required each element of the bureaucracy—from the JCS to the CIA to the Office of the Secretary of Defense to the embassy in Saigon—to separately detail its views. The imaginative ideas, such as they were, were already in the NSC options paper. Despite all the erasures, emendations, and revisions, one element that remained was the notion of threat—Schelling’s calling card, and soon Nixon’s mantra. Most important, short-circuit or not, the conversation in the Cabinet Room had alluded to the path Nixon would take: avoid a political settlement in Paris; push Hanoi by vigorous near-term military action, combined with Soviet leverage; and play for time with the public by projecting an image of openness to talks, pulling out a few troops, and dealing with the draft. Nixon also spoke of sending a letter to open channels to Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia. Kissinger reinforced the message a few days later, meeting with Secretary Laird and General Wheeler and asking what might be done to signal escalation to Hanoi. As an illustration, Henry mentioned a buildup of amphibious shipping at a South Vietnamese port to suggest an imminent invasion of North Vietnam.

Time was the real issue, and it had become short indeed. The part of the Nixon transition exercise that has attracted the most attention is NSSM-1, answered over a period of weeks. Ellsberg and NSC staffer Winston Lord collaborated on the summary paper that compared the bureaucracy’s responses and drew out their themes. Not even the most optimistic respondents assured the president of victory in any tolerable time frame. The optimists estimated 8.3 years would be required to pacify South Vietnam. The pessimists’ average came in at 13.4 years or more. But the options papers anticipated the need for an outcome in about two years (five at most), and Nixon had mentioned two when speaking to the NSC. Yet Hanoi drove the pace of fighting, and the ARVN, though judged more effective in 1968, “faces severe motivation, leadership, and desertion problems.” Indeed, September 1968—after the enemy’s military defeat at Tet—marked the latest peak in South Vietnamese desertion. Recent statistics showed North Vietnamese defections down—rather odd for a “defeated” adversary.⁸ No matter who was consulted, NSSM-1 afforded no confidence that Nixon had much time.

Haldeman’s words are instructive on this point: “From the very first days in office the brilliant Nixon-Kissinger team was confident they could finish, with honor, the most difficult conflict this nation has ever waged . . . Nixon had conceived the ‘Madman Theory’ as the way to do it. Henry perfected the theory and carried it to the secret series of the Paris peace talks: A threat of egregious military action by an unpredictable U.S. President who hated Communism.” But Hanoi stood fast. Says Haldeman, “The reason was clear. No threat, and no offer, could obscure one great fact known to the world at large. The American people had turned against the war.”⁹

Whatever was going to happen in the paddy fields would take time. This president wanted immediate action. Nixon’s drive to smite the enemy led to bombing, an application of aerial firepower to lay the groundwork for his Madman Theory. The effort to apply such force that Hanoi would back down consumed the first year of Nixon’s presidency.

According to Kissinger, the option arose “not from a desire to expand the war, but to avoid bombing North Vietnam and yet to blunt an unprovoked offensive.” Initial discussions took place on January 30, when he met with JCS chairman Wheeler and Secretary Laird “to explore how we might respond should there be an enemy offensive.”¹⁰ But the memorandum of that conversation reveals that the idea had nothing to do with responses to an attack. Instead, Kissinger raised the question of “what could be done in South Vietnam which could convey to the North that there is a new firm hand at the helm.”¹¹ Wheeler suggested operations in the DMZ or ground forays into enemy base areas. But troops were already fully committed, and talk turned to the potential for CIA covert operations in Cambodia. It was Kissinger, again, who asked about stepping up B-52 strikes.

During the transition Nixon had already raised Cambodia and what could be done to destroy Hanoi’s forces there. The day after the inauguration he asked the Joint Chiefs for options to stop supplies through Cambodia. This formed the backstory for Nixon’s remark at the NSC on January 25. Wheeler and the Chiefs thought little of the preferred alternative, a naval blockade, and had hardly begun working the problem when Nixon spoke out. Secretary of State William P. Rogers dutifully recommended sending the letter to Sihanouk. It is true the prince had begun warming to the United States. In early 1968 the Cambodian leader had told interviewers that if there were North Vietnamese bases in his country, the fault lay with the United States; by year’s end he would inform Washington Post reporter Stanley Karnow that he looked forward to better relations. Sihanouk released the crew of a U.S. naval craft that had blundered into Cambodia. Phnom Penh also began to obstruct Chinese arms shipments funneled through the port of Sihanoukville to base areas along the Cambodian-Vietnamese border.

Before anything could be done, General Abrams asked for a bomber raid against COSVN, the enemy command center, which U.S. intelligence believed to be in one of the base areas. The Abrams request catapulted Nixon into his first big Vietnam decision, telescoping all the careful planning. On February 18 a MACV briefing team explained the proposal for an Arc Light strike against COSVN, after which Dr. Kissinger sent the president a lengthy paper on the pros and cons of two options, an overt or a covert attack, either of which could be framed as unilateral, responding to provocation, or “officially categorized as a mistake.”

In his memoirs Kissinger wrote, “I advised against an unprovoked bombing of the sanctuaries. We should give negotiations a chance, I argued, and seek to maintain public support for our policy.”¹² That is not precise. Kissinger recommended against an unprovoked overt attack and against an immediate covert strike (not because of negotiations but because cables exchanged between Secretary Rogers and Ambassador Bunker had “deprived us” of the option “during the next few weeks without unacceptable risk of compromise”). There was not a word about American public support. In fact, Kissinger’s paper insisted there were advantages to “a covert ‘accidental’ attack against COSVN Headquarters.” He advised Nixon to have Abrams bomb right up to the border “to set the stage for a possible covert attack,” to plan the actual raid, and to be on the lookout for a “suitable local action” as pretext.¹³ Nixon approved on February 22. Nixon and Kissinger were looking for their own Gulf of Tonkin.

President Nixon initially ordered the bombing on February 24, during a trip to Europe. Kissinger issued the execution order aboard Air Force One during a stop in Brussels. Laird and Wheeler warned that those who knew about the messages regarding the bombings might make trouble. Laird’s warning, combined with Kissinger’s “covert” bombing idea, resulted in the secret bombing of Cambodia. Nixon waited a few weeks while planners designed a scheme to conceal the attacks. The issue of negotiations did not enter the calculus until the second week of March, at which point Kissinger advised the president to move immediately, before there could be private talks, so the bombing would already be under way when they began.¹⁴

Because of the controversy attached to this bombing, which eventually involved Senate hearings and the near passage of an impeachment charge against Richard Nixon, many key participants later distanced themselves or contrived to minimize their participation. Only one—MACV commander General Creighton V. Abrams—took full responsibility. In fact, Abrams went further. The initial MACV request aimed only at its nemesis, COSVN. But Abrams told a Senate panel in 1973 that he had asked for wider attacks on enemy base areas because he knew troop withdrawals were coming. Abrams wanted to show “evidence of support” for his troops, “their spirit and their morale and their determination.” “If you did not do those things,” General Abrams related, “you would be courting, in my opinion, disaster for the whole force.”¹⁵

The general’s concept is borne out by the records of tape-recorded MACV command conferences that have recently become available. Although the Cambodia bombing is referred to only obliquely, it is clearly the base areas at issue, not COSVN. Incidentally, General Andrew Goodpaster, now in Vietnam as Abrams’s deputy, was a key proponent too. Secretary Laird arrived for his first Saigon visit on March 5, emphasizing that the change in administration would afford “a little time here,” but that the key was “to develop a national policy that we can go to the people with.” Laird’s concept included protecting the U.S. force, developing the South Vietnamese, and reducing the U.S. commitment, “not only in the form of men, but in casualties and materiel and in dollars.” Laird raised the question of B-52s but warned that Pentagon budgets factored in reduced numbers of missions, with additional cuts anticipated for 1970.¹⁶ There was no direct mention of the Cambodia strikes, but Abrams told the Senate that he did have such conversations with Laird at this time.

The MACV commander’s concept would be altered in translation. From the beginning Nixon ordered tighter-than-tight security. Operation “Menu” would be conducted under such secrecy it could not possibly have had the morale effect Abrams wanted. Under its control system, B-52s were briefed to strike inside Vietnam; their mission changed while airborne, and they were directed by ground-based radar to the Cambodian target. Paperwork was falsified to indicate attacks in South Vietnam. The JCS automated database did not record the strikes. Targets were developed at MACV, sent to Washington by back channel, turned into mission plans by the Joint Staff, and passed to Secretary Laird, who approved them, presumably after consulting Kissinger. General Wheeler then sent orders directly to the Strategic Air Command. Only selected individuals knew. For example, neither the secretary of the Air Force nor its vice chief of staff were aware of Menu. Laird did tell key legislators, including senators Richard Russell and John C. Stennis. The falsification of reporting became a problem once controversy erupted, because false reporting is an offense under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Kissinger told Laird on the eve of Menu that Nixon’s order to attack neutral Cambodia was “something he cannot ever avow.”¹⁷

In any case, Nixon approved the raids but postponed them, rejecting Kissinger’s advice on the desirability of immediate attack. But by his security adviser’s account, Nixon was “champing at the bit.”¹⁸ On March 15 the NLF fired some rockets into Saigon. Washington took this as a violation of an “understanding” with Hanoi (never formally agreed) that underlay LBJ’s final bombing halt. The Nixon White House immediately went into high gear, with the president ordering the bombing and Kissinger privately phoning Laird to prompt him on what to say at a meeting the next afternoon. This encounter, on March 16, was apparently held to afford Secretary Rogers an opportunity to state his objections, based on domestic political grounds and negotiations. Then Nixon responded. “The state of play in Paris is completely sterile,” he said. “I am convinced that the only way to move the negotiations off dead center is to do something on the military front. That is something [Hanoi] will understand.”¹⁹

The Menu bombing began with “Breakfast,” a strike at one enemy base area in the Fishhook region of Cambodia (the bases were each given their own code names—“Lunch,” “Dinner,” “Supper,” “Dessert,” “Snack”). It went in at 2:00 PM, Washington time, on March 17. Almost sixty B-52 bombers loosed 1,386 tons of ordnance on the target.²⁰ High anticipation at the White House, marked by Nixon checking with Kissinger on the flights of the planes, NSC memos commenting on results, and so on, would be rewarded by reports of many secondary explosions, some more powerful than the bombs that set them off.

“Breakfast” marked the beginning of a real air campaign. In April, when North Korea shot down an American spy plane and an order for direct retaliation was countermanded by Laird,²¹ Nixon resorted to more Cambodian bombing instead. Again the NSC memos flew. Afterward the president told General Wheeler he was very pleased. Then the aerial offensive became regularized, averaging a hundred sorties a month into the summer, several hundred monthly after that. About 70,500 tons of bombs fell on Cambodia during 1969, with another 35,300 tons in the first four months of 1970. This represented almost 15 percent of the bomb tonnage dropped on North Vietnam in all of Rolling Thunder.

A week after the first Menu attacks, Jack Walsh of UPI wrote a brief wire-service story on General Abrams’s original request to strike COSVN. Another journalist, William Beecher of the New York Times, followed up. Beecher had apparently got wind of earlier appeals to bomb Cambodian base areas (Westmoreland had recommended this in December 1967) and did some checking. In Thailand, where one of the B-52 units, the Thirty-third Bombardment Wing of the Strategic Air Command, was stationed, the Thai press ran an early story mentioning the bombing. Beecher confirmed the details. On May 9 his piece “Raids in Cambodia by U.S. Unprotested” appeared in the Times. Beecher’s story correctly noted base areas as the targets, revealed that the United States was sending Special Forces teams into Cambodia to assess bomb damage, contained an accurate figure for bombs dropped to that point (5,000 tons), and reported the White House’s purpose as being “to demonstrate to Hanoi that the Nixon Administration is different and ‘tougher’ than previous administrations.” The only error lay in dating Nixon’s decision to January.²² All Nixon’s draconian secrecy had been pointless.

The president went ballistic. At his Key Biscayne, Florida, retreat, Nixon burned up the phone wires with blistering calls to Kissinger and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. He demanded the leaker’s head. Kissinger and Hoover conferred and by that afternoon had tabbed one of Henry’s own NSC staff, Morton H. Halperin, as the likely culprit. By 6:20 PM a wiretap had been placed on Halperin’s phones. The circle of taps quickly expanded. Kissinger made Alexander Haig his contact person for the wiretap transcripts, which soon filled a White House safe. All the taps were illegal under the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control Act. Within a few scant months of assuming office, Richard Nixon had begun his march down the path of illegality.

Mr. Nixon’s War

It likely would have made no difference to Nixon had he known that the Cambodia bombing story had been built on journalistic shoe leather, based on information gleaned in Thailand and not from a White House leak.²³ Such suspicions roiled across this man’s mind that he probably would have suspected some other skullduggery afoot. If not that, there were plenty more reasons for action. From the beginning Nixon saw himself as isolated, the target of shadowy bureaucratic forces out to sabotage his initiatives. He would counter his enemies by holding his cards more than close. Nixon conducted policy as a virtual conspiracy. The wiretaps, far from an anomaly, were an excess waiting for an excuse.

Characteristically, within days of assuming office Nixon did something about the “October Surprise” charges left over from the election. What he did was try to pin it on Lyndon Johnson, turning it into a conspiracy by LBJ to sabotage the election and throw it to Humphrey. Diplomat Philip Habib would be raked over the coals to shake him down to get evidence against Johnson. Nixon subsequently kept the October Surprise in mind and repeatedly threatened to “out” this alleged Democratic maneuver. In fact, President Johnson’s papers contain a file on this episode today precisely because one of Nixon’s threats led Walt Rostow to order the documents be brought together. Rostow added his own memo summarizing what he knew of the Nixon campaign’s machinations. Clearly LBJ and Rostow intended to use the records if Nixon made any public claim about the October Surprise, which would have been explosive in that era of Watergate.

Bob Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff until Watergate brought him down, recorded that this president needed to be protected from himself. Nixon was forever firing off orders—as little notes, perhaps, scribbled in the margins of memos or news clippings, on the phone, or blurted out at meetings. The orders often demanded extreme measures. Some White House officials adopted the technique of sitting on certain Nixon orders for a day or two, then asking the president whether he really wanted those things done. Other orders went straight to the “circular file.” Kissinger became adept at channeling Nixon’s ire, riding the wave in the direction of actions he himself thought desirable. And Nixon’s constant demands for “more”—more aggressive Pentagon proposals, more White House control in diplomacy, more sway over the bureaucracy—became a theme in every crisis or negotiation.

Nothing if not complex, Richard Nixon would be the subject of endless efforts to understand the man, by former colleagues as well as observers. At age fifty-six he had reached the stage of life where legacies and accomplishments seemed important, and Nixon had lost two elections before going up against Humphrey. Following his California gubernatorial debacle in 1962 he had lashed out at the press, famously declaring that they wouldn’t have “Dick Nixon to kick around any more.” Losing the presidency to Kennedy in 1960, he had indulged in similar recriminations in a memoir called Six Crises, charging JFK with using secret information about Cuba in a televised debate (untrue). Henry Kissinger was being charitable when he wrote, “generosity of spirit was not one of Nixon’s characteristics.”²⁴

Vindictiveness was a Nixon trait, and it likely played a part in both the post-Cambodia wiretaps and Nixon’s soon-to-be “enemies list.” But that was just the beginning. The president was also prone to intense suspicion, secretiveness, hypersensitivity, and narcissism. Haldeman, writing his first volume of recollections shortly after the appearance of the science fiction movie Star Wars, remarked that the president had treated him like one of the androids in the film. Dr. Arnold Hunschnecker, Nixon’s psychiatrist, reportedly believed the president had been emotionally deprived as a child.²⁵ Bryce Harlow, legendary Republican political operative who worked with Nixon for more than two decades, believed the young Nixon had been “hurt very deeply by someone he trusted . . . hurt so badly he never got over it and never trusted anyone again.”²⁶

Other aspects of Nixon’s character rather suited him to guide American foreign policy. Alexander Haig recalls him as a “living data bank regarding the history, culture, economy, aspirations, secret agenda, and current news and gossip about every important country in the world.” What Nixon did not know he studied. And he knew just about everybody on Capitol Hill plus many foreign leaders. Haig found Nixon “brilliantly intelligent.”²⁷ Kissinger agreed that Nixon was knowledgeable and perceptive and thought him decisive and brave too, willing to make decisions that often went against the advice of his experts. Many saw Nixon as painfully shy, fearful of confrontation and willing to do almost anything to avoid it, unable to relax except with family. Speechwriter Ray Price believed Nixon had light and dark sides in contention. Nixon’s other key speechwriter, William Safire, saw the president as even more complex, an intellect of many layers constantly in motion. Safire pictured Nixon as “an amalgam of Woodrow Wilson, Niccolo Machiavelli, Teddy Roosevelt, and Shakespeare’s Cassius.”²⁸

A key issue is probity. Was Nixon to be trusted? Entirely apart from these insider pictures, the record in 1969 did not bode well. Nixon’s political operations had repeatedly dealt in exaggeration and negative campaigning, the truth of his claims debatable. In his first run for a California congressional seat, he made his opponent out as the tool of communists. The same happened in 1950 when Nixon was elected to the Senate. In between was the notorious episode of the “Pumpkin Papers,” in which Nixon, chairman of a panel of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), “discovered” microfilmed documents hidden in a pumpkin that incriminated HUAC target Alger Hiss. The staged discovery and Nixon’s ostentatious return to Washington from a vacation cruise raised questions about the evidence. Then, during Nixon’s run for the vice presidency with Eisenhower in 1952, the New York Post published allegations of a Nixon slush fund, and Ike nearly threw him off the ticket. Nixon responded with a televised speech in which he obsequiously sought forgiveness, ignoring the central charges while providing irrelevant details about personal expenses and admitting only to accepting the gift of the family dog, named “Checkers” by daughter Tricia. Not least would be Nixon’s claim of a plan to end the Vietnam war during his 1968 campaign. Insiders knew plenty more about Richard Nixon, but even the public had food for thought.

In his book Six Crises, Nixon alluded to a predilection for framing life as a series of “us versus them” situations. Suspicion and hypersensitivity had free rein in his White House, only this time Richard Nixon had the full resources of the U.S. government at his disposal. This had implications for the Vietnam war as well as for America. The subjects of the FBI wiretaps merely became the first victims.

Journalists, colleagues, family members, scholars, and others have devoted thousands of pages to dissecting Richard Nixon’s early life, attempting to divine what made the man. It is safe to say that Nixon was affected by his relationship with his mother; his perceptions of growing up poor in California; the missing father-son relationship, truncated when the former left the family and difficult before that; and his bonds with his four brothers, two of whom died before Dick had established himself. There are also clues in the tortured courtship with his first girlfriend, not to mention the odd relationship between Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower, possibly the closest thing to a father, or at least a political mentor, in Nixon’s life. Ike once told journalists he would need days (a couple of weeks, actually) to think of what Nixon had done as vice president. Dick repaid the remark. Cordial enough in his eulogy at Eisenhower’s funeral—the former president died two months into Nixon’s presidency—in his memoirs Nixon would write that “perhaps the best description I can give of Dwight Eisenhower is that he had a warm smile and icy blue eyes.”²⁹ That was supposed to be complimentary. It was Eisenhower’s reserve, his aloofness, the “tempered hard steel” beneath apparent high spirits that Nixon admired. And it was probably not coincidental that, in choosing a passage from his own diaries to capture Ike’s decision style, Nixon selected late March 1954, when the Dien Bien Phu crisis had been at its height and the “Vulture” option on the table. Richard Nixon saw himself as hardened too, and he sought to project that image.

The president took office with a war in Vietnam mired in stalemate, an American public soured on the conflict, and an active and surging movement opposing the U.S. course. A negotiated settlement could have been had right then, as Henry Kissinger outlined in a quietly discarded Foreign Affairs article.³⁰ But apart from the complicating factor of Washington’s alliance with Saigon, settling would not have displayed strength, constituting a basic reason for Nixon to reject it. That the antiwar movement favored a settlement made that alternative even more unpalatable. This was not the Movement prolonging the war; rather, this U.S. leadership refused to take what was on the table and gambled the balance could be reversed. In making that choice, by inclination and by will, Richard Nixon would follow the path of force.

Of course, Nixon faced a basic contradiction in pursuing this strategy. The war had passed a turning point in 1968, like it or not, and for all the damage to Hanoi’s armies, the United States could no longer fight the same way. American withdrawal could be slowed or stretched out, but it could not be avoided. The ground forces were a diminishing quantity in terms of capability too. Vietnamization was afoot. Nixon’s reliance on naval and air power would be dictated by these factors, but it also represented the preferred posture during Eisenhower’s administration, where Nixon had gained his spurs. In a sense, the “Vulture” scheme finally came to fruition in 1969. But now, as at Dien Bien Phu, a reliance on remote striking power contained fatal flaws.

The political knot of Vietnam started with the antiwar movement. In the early days of his presidency Nixon spoke of the “youth problem” and deputized his friend and aide Robert Finch as a sort of ambassador to youth. Given this president’s style, the Finch appointment quickly lost any meaning, since the envoy would be frozen out of the Oval Office. After a few months Nixon made Daniel Patrick Moynihan his new point man. But Moynihan, too, amounted to little more than a fact finder. The action stayed in White House hands. A darker and deeper track emerged, already set up, now stoked to a new intensity.

Barely a month after the inaugural, deputy White House counsel Egil Krogh told Hoover’s assistant at the FBI that the president opposed student protests—he used the term “disorders”—and wanted the FBI’s information on which students benefited from federal scholarship money.³¹ At a news conference on March 14, answering a question that had most likely been planted, Nixon declared he was considering terminating financial aid to student protesters. The president softened the pill a week later when he said that the students were properly drawing attention to real social problems, but he restricted that primarily to university issues. Not long afterward Nixon told speechwriters to work up a text that would not be so accommodating. On April 28, before the Chamber of Commerce, the president demanded that colleges discipline student protesters, referring to a “new revolutionary spirit and new revolutionary actions that are taking place on the campuses.”³²

The Nixon White House scrambled to understand the “youth problem.” The day after the president’s threat to defund students, advisers recommended that Nixon open lines of communication to them. Moynihan told the president that, on this subject at least, U.S. intelligence was deplorable. Nixon asked Kissinger his opinion. The latter met with a delegation of student leaders in late April, but that session backfired when the students used the White House Press Room to declare that efforts at opposition must continue: the administration was not actually moving to end the war. Domestic affairs czar John D. Ehrlichman also had secret meetings with protesters. In May Ehrlichman asked consultant Arthur Burns to use his academic contacts to poll faculty opinion on student concerns. The adviser reported a general feeling that only a small group of protesters existed, most affiliated with the SDS. In itself, this demonstrated Moynihan’s proposition on poor intelligence, for protests had long surged past the level Burns suggested, and the SDS, already eclipsed, was about to fracture. Nixon issued formal instructions to Ehrlichman to assemble the best recent literature on the students.

Understanding fell short at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Some, like speechwriter Ray Price, actually considered this a nonproblem and thought it was a mistake to take the protesters seriously. Ehrlichman, ignoring the Movement’s strong critique of U.S. imperialism, stated, “these people were not taking seriously the role of the United States in the world.” Some at the White House had children of an age to be swept up in the cauldron of these times. Ehrlichman’s son announced he was leaving to go live in the woods. “It was,” Ehrlichman recalled, “a tough time to be a parent.”³³ Others trivialized the Movement. When Harvard erupted in the spring of 1969 and students took over some buildings, Kissinger cracked that in three days no one would know who had done what to whom. When one of Ehrlichman’s kids phoned in anguish—all his friends were in the streets protesting—the boy was brought to Washington and accorded a one-on-one with Kissinger, who managed to still his doubts, at least for the moment. Some Kissinger dog-and-pony shows worked better than others. (Laird’s son John had fewer doubts; he came out actively against the war and marched in demonstrations.) Roger Morris, a Kissinger aide on the NSC staff, recalled the general feeling about the students: “They were insubstantial and capricious, [we] basically thought it was a Draft protest, [we] thought they were cowardly, [we] thought they were there for frivolous reasons . . . [We] just never took the protest seriously in an intellectual sense.”³⁴

Not waiting for better information, the Nixon people swung into action. Attorney General John N. Mitchell ordered the FBI to initiate wiretaps without court order against the Black Panthers in February. Ehrlichman aide Tom Huston suggested funneling money to friendly student groups in March. Around this time his boss first advocated creation of a special security unit under White House aegis—the notorious “plumbers” of Watergate fame. The domestic czar and others called on the Internal Revenue Service for data on opponents as well (the IRS began delivering in July, and between then and September 1970 it would review the tax returns of 1,029 organizations and 4,300 individuals). Nixon ordered Ehrlichman to put Huston in charge of gathering intelligence on whether foreign powers controlled the protesters, and Huston asked both the FBI and CIA to report on this matter. He defined “control” so broadly that something seemed certain to turn up. Nothing did. But the fact that neither agency could find any hard evidence did little to allay suspicions. Haldeman continued to believe it even after the war. “I think Hanoi was instigating them to begin with,” he told a historian of the antiwar struggle.³⁵

What happened when the Army tried to stop its domestic spy program shows the direction of the Nixon approach. Operating under a summer 1968 directive, the Army collected a huge array of information and had its plainclothesmen infiltrate widely. Until Army personnel planners asked for an extra 175 slots specifically for these spies, service officials thought that Army intelligence was merely using FBI data. Requests for infiltration were considered covert operations, subject to approval by Secretary of the Army Stanley R. Resor. After a few more disturbing incidents, the deputy secretary and the Army’s chief counsel moved to tighten control and phase out domestic intelligence with a directive to the Army’s vice chief of staff. In March 1969 chief counsel Robert E. Jorden III went to the Justice Department to request language in a new government-wide directive that would formally assign this collection role to the FBI, precluding military spying.

Jorden failed, despite a series of meetings with Deputy Attorney General Richard Kleindienst. He thought he had made progress when William H. Rehnquist, in charge of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, wrote a draft that went partway. The Rehnquist draft provided that the Army would act only at the request of Attorney General Mitchell. But Mitchell and Kleindienst changed the order to state that the attorney general would manage all domestic intelligence gathering, including the Army’s. The Mitchell version went to the White House on April 11. Nixon approved the directive on May 19. Meanwhile, senior officials saw a quarterly report on Army domestic intelligence collection demonstrating that almost 40 percent of the 3,219 spot reports had come from its own agents, not the FBI or elsewhere. The Army stayed in the domestic spy business.

Nixon was pleased when a federal grand jury in Chicago indicted eight antiwar leaders who had participated in the demonstrations the previous summer. The indictment, which came through on March 19, cited violations of several statutes. Ironically, one of them had been authored by Jerry Voorhis, whom Richard Nixon had defeated in his first electoral contest by painting Voorhis as soft on communism.

By now the president was ready for his power play on Hanoi. The connection between the war and Nixon’s perception of the opposition is neatly encapsulated by what transpired. He called a summit on the Pacific island of Midway. Before leaving, on June 2 Nixon scribbled his approbation in the margin of a Wall Street Journal editorial that argued Abraham Lincoln had taken extreme liberties with the law but had still saved the nation in the Civil War. Nixon departed the next day. He flew on Air Force One to Madison, South Dakota, where he spoke at a small education and technical school, General Beadle State College (soon to be renamed Dakota State College). Nixon felt safe from protesters, but even here a demonstrator turned up, brandishing a poster condemning “America the Insane,” headed, of course, with Vietnam. A photo duly appeared in Time magazine. In Madison the president laid down the gauntlet. He could have been parroting the Wall Street Journal. “We find old standards violated, old values discarded, old precepts ignored,” Nixon thundered. “We have the power to strike back, if needed, and to prevail. The nation has survived other attempts at insurrection, we can survive this.”³⁶ The word insurrection, applied to the protesters, was disturbing. On the way to Midway Nixon stopped off at Honolulu for a strategy session with military commanders. These were indeed dangerous times.

“He Appeared to Want a Quick Solution”

Of escalation strategy Richard Nixon would write in his memoir, “It was an option we ruled out very early.”³⁷ That sentence cloaks a huge story, one that preoccupied him for many months. And appropriately, the Midway conference, on an island named for its location roughly halfway between North America and Asia, oddly represents about the midpoint of that evolution. Conversation at the administration’s first NSC meeting on Vietnam, according to Kissinger’s official record, had ruled out any deescalation.³⁸ On January 27 Nixon had gone to the Pentagon for a private lunch with Laird and Wheeler, where they mulled over “a program of potential military actions which might jar the North Vietnamese into being more forthcoming at the Paris talks.”³⁹ And Laird and Wheeler had returned the visit, meeting with Kissinger at the White House a few days later to go over the same ground.

By late February the JCS planners had assembled some possible actions, and Laird sent their working paper to Kissinger. The possibilities included the standard options, save that the Pentagon provided for either real or feigned use of each, and it added one for “technical escalation,” which from the contents of this appendix appears to be a euphemism for nuclear weapons.⁴⁰ The other alternatives were invasion of the North, invasions of Laos or Cambodia, resumed bombing of North Vietnam, and attempted subversion of North Vietnam. Kissinger handed the package to Al Haig, rapidly expanding his role from mere military expert on the NSC staff to Henry’s deputy. Once Haig rendered an opinion Kissinger responded to Laird. It was March 3. Again the political constraints were manifest. “I am somewhat concerned,” Kissinger wrote Laird, “that the ‘realities’ of the current domestic and international environment do not lend themselves to the acceptance of these risks at this time.” Kissinger returned to the proposals he had pressed on Laird a month before—visible signals of a buildup such as planning conferences or “even the staging of amphibious shipping”—which “could be implemented with less risk of international or domestic turbulence.”⁴¹

Here is where the circle closes. The Nixon White House realized that the politics of Vietnam stood in the way of its preferred option. Rather than abandon his course, Nixon tried to contrive conditions under which it could be carried out. In the first instance this involved concretizing Vietnamization, which Laird did during his Saigon trip. The second element, beginning in mid-March, was the president’s counterattack on the antiwar movement. A final ingredient in the mix centered on the Paris negotiations, where Nixon and Kissinger both perceived that the appearance of American flexibility would help gain them freedom of action.

But the problem of an actual U.S. bargaining position remained. One of the Nixon-Kissinger NSSMs had had the object of distilling acceptable provisions for a settlement. Deliberations that spring, culminating in discussions from early April on, boiled the negotiating position down to a series of points. These included a full North Vietnamese withdrawal, no cease-fire that recognized any National Liberation Front territorial control, and political reconciliation if the insurgents laid down their arms. This American position was acceptable to Saigon. Officials surely knew it would be a nonstarter in Hanoi. Privately, Nixon and Kissinger considered certain political guarantees to the NLF, but that went beyond anything agreed on by the bureaucracy and was also ahead of Saigon. In mid-May Mr. Nixon unveiled the position, calling for mutual withdrawal of DRV and U.S. forces over a one-year period. Hanoi insisted Vietnam was one country, its troops under no obligation to withdraw anywhere. That too was predictable. The most sensible conclusion is that Nixon wanted to get what he could out of Hanoi if it agreed, but failing that, he hoped to generate the sense of a process under way that might shield him from criticism.

A dichotomy existed in Washington’s use of communications channels. The Nixon administration made the term linkage part of its diplomatic lexicon, and it referred to getting the Soviets to do things on behalf of the United States for the sake of Moscow’s relationship with Washington. One of these was to deliver Hanoi. At a minimum the Soviets could pass messages to DRV leaders. At their first meeting, on February 21, Kissinger asked Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin to inform Hanoi that the United States “could not accept a settlement that looked like a military defeat, and . . . was not prepared to accept a settlement immediately followed by the change of government in South Vietnam . . . although they had no objection to a gradual evolution.”⁴² This was Kissinger’s “decent interval,” in a nutshell. But the steel behind the rhetoric was that Nixon wanted no part of defeat—and that entailed escalation. Kissinger confirmed this when he told Dobrynin on April 3, in answer to a direct question whether the United States intended to expand the war, that Nixon would end it “one way or the other.” Kissinger returned to this theme later, adding that it would be unfortunate if the United States were driven to escalate, since a U.S.-Soviet confrontation over Southeast Asia made no sense.⁴³ On April 14 Kissinger saw Dobrynin again, remarking that the president had “decided to make one more direct approach on the highest level before drawing the conclusion that the war could only be ended by unilateral means.”⁴⁴ In the absence of a settlement, he said, “we might take measures that would create a ‘complicated situation.’” Dobrynin warned that Moscow’s influence in Hanoi was strictly limited.⁴⁵ Seeing Dobrynin in June, Kissinger reiterated that Nixon intended to end the war, one way or the other.

The threat loomed. The “one more direct approach”—a visit to Moscow by Cyrus Vance, deputy chief of the U.S. delegation to the Paris negotiations—never happened. But all along Kissinger had intended a tough escalatory step—the mining of Haiphong harbor, part of the JCS bombing alternative. Then came the Korean shoot-down crisis,⁴⁶ to which the president responded by bombing Cambodia. Not wanting to move in different directions at once, Nixon delayed direct action against the DRV, setting a deadline and then extending it. Late in May the CIA’s Richard Helms warned that mining without bombing would not work. On the eve of Nixon’s departure for Midway there was movement at Paris, where delegation chief Henry Cabot Lodge met privately with DRV Politburo member Le Duc Tho, whose remarks suggested a fresh atmosphere, if not substantive change, in Hanoi. On Kissinger’s staff, analysts pointed to Tho’s statements as indicating fear of a U.S. escalation.

The Midway summit had been designed to showcase Vietnamization. The U.S. withdrawals and the upgrade of the ARVN entailed by that program were the central focus both there and at Honolulu, site of the president’s preliminary get-together with the U.S. military. Nixon’s NSC briefing book contained nothing regarding the threat strategy. The record of General Abrams’s final MACV staff conference prior to attending also had nothing about Madman. But at the leaders’ one-on-one session at Midway, according to the record made by Thieu’s aide Nguyen Phu Duc, Nixon went out of his way to inform the Saigon leader the United States would shortly make new secret bombing raids in Cambodia, the biggest yet, striking several base areas at once. Kissinger emphasized that Nixon had rejected the advice to deescalate. Later the president “observed that the greatest mistake of President Johnson was the gradualistic approach in military actions against North Vietnam. Now, it would be different.” The broad hint of escalation was palpable. Nixon told Thieu his strategy was intended to demonstrate to Moscow that the USSR’s interest lay in helping to end the war, a “top secret piece of information” that “only he, Nixon, and Kissinger were [in] on.”⁴⁷

Both Nixon and Kissinger noted the political problems in the United States, and the president congratulated Thieu on actions in Saigon that would help contain them, with Vietnamization being a big step in that direction. Thieu agreed.

A major headache with the Madman strategy flowed directly from the policy-as-conspiracy nature of the process. As in other instances of Nixon-era two-track gambits, time and attention were devoted to the artful business on the surface and drawn away from the secret course simultaneously pursued. With Vietnam, the Midway conference christened Vietnamization and negotiations as Nixon policy, and these aspects consumed an increasing proportion of the attention the White House lavished on Southeast Asia. The summer brought an extensive effort (covered in the next chapter) to refine the details of troop withdrawals. Kissinger and Nixon had to concern themselves with that to keep control of it. Escalation issues were muted.

Thus July brought a flurry of action, with NSSMs on troop withdrawal, Vietnamese politics, and internal security, plus fresh deliberations on the Paris talks following the NLF’s creation of a new entity, the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam, a gambit to claim national identity in the negotiations. The climactic encounter came aboard the presidential yacht Sequoia on July 7, when Nixon took his top brass for an evening cruise on the Potomac. The CIA estimate prepared for this occasion speculated on Hanoi’s newly reduced military profile. The NSC briefing memo confined itself to Vietnamization. Before the Sequoia cruise Haldeman noted Kissinger as “discouraged” because Laird and Rogers were pushing for maximum withdrawals, while the security adviser’s “plans for ending [the] war aren’t working fast enough.” Haldeman knew that Kissinger “wants to push for some escalation, enough to get us a reasonable bargain for a settlement within six months.”⁴⁸ By Kissinger’s account the Sequoia evening turned out as he had feared: “no one asked . . . whether the lull might not reflect the fact that our strategy was succeeding . . . It was decided to make a basic change in the battlefield orders for General Abrams.”⁴⁹ The next morning Kissinger spilled the beans on Madman to Laird, telling him, “for his own use, the President has not excluded the possibility that he could take an option to the right in order to end the war quickly.”⁵⁰

Mr. Nixon himself dates his decision on the Madman strategy to July. He specifically recorded his fear of “a massive new antiwar tide” that could sweep the country when Congress and the colleges returned from summer vacation. “Unless I could build some momentum behind our peace efforts over the next several weeks, they might be doomed to failure by the calendar,” Nixon wrote. “I decided to ‘go for broke’ in the sense that I would attempt to end the war one way or the other—either by negotiated agreement or by an increased use of force.”⁵¹ Morton Halperin and Winston Lord on the NSC staff collaborated on a succession of papers blandly titled “Vietnam Alternatives” that resurrected the proposal to “quarantine” North Vietnam by mining Haiphong harbor, this time coupled with a resumption of bombing. Another signal went to Hanoi, carried by Frenchman Jean Sainteny, now employed as an emissary.

While America and the world thrilled to the achievement of the Apollo XI astronauts who first landed on the moon, the president implemented his strategy. He began an around-the-world trip with a leg to the South Pacific to meet the returning astronauts, then went on to Bangkok and Saigon, seeing Nguyen Van Thieu at the presidential palace. The alternatives were plain enough. Thieu raised them, remarking that he saw two alternatives: “either for the U.S. to speed up the war or to help [South Vietnam] take over more of the war burden.”⁵² Nguyen Phu Duc also attended this private session. According to Duc’s version, Thieu said, “We ha[ve] either to seek a military solution of the war, or prepare ourselves for a long war.” The leaders discussed various aspects of U.S. support. “Should we make it clear to the other side we are not going to quit?” Nixon asked. The Saigon leader said yes. Nixon groused that negotiating had been expensive and had given the enemy time. According to Duc, “Nixon indicated that he was looking for another approach. He appeared to want a quick solution of the war.”⁵³ The Saigon aide did not know the president had also used his Madman strategy as a tool to influence Moscow. On a further leg of this trip, Mr. Nixon signaled the Russians again, telling Romanian officials he would take new action if the Paris talks did not progress soon. “I never make idle threats,” the president had said.⁵⁴ The channel to Hanoi through Sainteny was also used to transmit a letter from Nixon to Ho Chi Minh.

The administration posed its threat directly when Henry Kissinger held his first secret session with North Vietnamese diplomat Xuan Thuy. Arranged by Henry Cabot Lodge and Le Duc Tho as an alternative to the stalled public negotiations, the secret sessions were to become the main avenue for diplomatic exchange. At that first one, in Paris on August 4, Kissinger made a great deal of the upcoming one-year anniversary of negotiations in November. “He had been asked to tell them in all solemnity,” the security adviser adverted, that “if by November 1, no major progress had been made toward a solution, we will be compelled—with great reluctance—to take measures of the greatest consequence.” Kissinger did not specify what the United States might do, but Hanoi had erred gravely in trying to portray Vietnam as “Mr. Nixon’s War,” he said, because if it were, Richard Nixon would feel obliged to win it. “No one knows what the final result would be of such a series of events. We believe that such a tragic conflict to test each other can be avoided.”⁵⁵

In diplomatic usage this kind of representation is an ultimatum. Hanoi rejected it, using Ho Chi Minh’s reply to Nixon’s letter for that purpose. Washington learned of this on August 25 though U.S. officials in Paris and apparently received the text only five days later. Dr. Kissinger analyzed it for the president as “very tough, almost insolent.”⁵⁶

“After receiving this unpromising reply,” Nixon recalled, “I knew that I had to prepare myself for the tremendous criticism and pressure that would come with stepping up the war.”⁵⁷ The White House did not bother to await the hard copy. Kissinger had already begun agitating, telling Haldeman and Ehrlichman on August 18 that the option selected had to end the war in six to nine months. The security adviser had a plan, he told the others, but Nixon needed “to make [a] total mental commitment and really be prepared to take the heat.”⁵⁸ On August 28 the advisers reviewed Henry’s plan. One requirement, Kissinger noted, would be preparations to counter domestic upheaval. In early September the Pacific Command forwarded an Air Force scheme for aerial bombing of North Vietnam.

The fat now blazed in the fire. The world learned of the death of Ho Chi Minh on September 3, and NSC staffers predicted this might lead to moderation in Hanoi, but it made no difference. The president called a big strategy meeting for September 12. Dr. Kissinger had his people prepare a lengthy analysis of four possible courses of action. For the current strategy, as well as those of accelerating negotiations or Vietnamization, the paper advanced detailed criticisms; for escalation, there were none. Kissinger merely noted, “there are many problems associated with this policy but I will not concern you with them in this paper because they are being fully staffed elsewhere.”⁵⁹ Officials met in the Cabinet Room at the White House for the entire morning. Ambassador Bunker, General Abrams, and Admiral John McCain, the Pacific commander in chief, all came home for these deliberations. They lunched with the president and then held additional discussions that afternoon in Nixon’s hideaway in the Old Executive Office Building.

Despite the buildup, none of the talk actually dealt with the options, and Nixon made no decision. What was said that afternoon is not known. But three days earlier Kissinger told General Wheeler to ensure that all escalation planning be strictly confined within military channels—that is, kept from Mel Laird. A couple of days after the NSC discussion the Joint Chiefs sent a special group to Vietnam to create an operational concept. Headed by Admiral Frederic S. Bardshar, chief of the Joint Staff, the group conferred with CINCPAC planners at Honolulu, then went on to MACV. Shortly after they left CINCPAC, Admiral McCain cabled Washington to follow up on conversations he had had during his visit. The Kissinger staff adopted the code name “Duck Hook” to refer to the escalation plan. They envisioned a series of bold, imaginative actions against North Vietnam, each one distinct and conducted so as to achieve maximum political, military, and psychological shock at an increasing level of intensity, starting with mining Haiphong and the resumption of bombing. Staffer Anthony Lake and others pored over the list, noting that each escalation would be politically more difficult to justify in the United States, especially bombing the system of dikes along North Vietnamese rivers. They asked what would happen if the options had no effect.⁶⁰

The military knew this as Operation “Pruning Knife.” Admiral Bardshar, no fool, had flown carrier planes against the Japanese in World War II, commanded the aircraft carrier Ticonderoga during the Tonkin Gulf incident, and led U.S. naval air forces on Yankee Station during the final months of Rolling Thunder. But neither Bardshar nor the dozen or so officers with him could dream up anything new—the war had gone on so long that every option had been proposed at least once. General Abrams, when Bardshar checked with him, spoke enthusiastically about a “new ball game,” but the concepts were not so fresh.⁶¹ In addition, the air campaign plans bumped up against physical factors—Nixon’s deadline coincided with the onset of the northeast monsoon, which would drastically reduce good flying weather over the North. Pruning Knife covered mining Haiphong, an aerial onslaught against the DRV, closing the Cambodian port Sihanoukville by blockade or mines, and ground forays into Cambodia, Laos, and the Demilitarized Zone.

The Pruning Knife planners’ visit to Saigon coincided with a flurry of activity at the White House. Nixon wanted to cover his political flank by announcing a second troop withdrawal and, a few days later, draft call reductions of 50,000 over the next few months. Kissinger’s staff discussed Duck Hook on September 20 and 24. The president had the Joint Chiefs to breakfast on the twenty-fourth, the first time during his presidency they had come to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as a group. On September 25 Bardshar delivered his Pruning Knife outline plan. Nixon went to Camp David on the twenty-seventh, bragging to aides that Hanoi had underestimated “the man”—he would not be the first president to lose a war—and “the time”—he still had more than three years left in his first term.⁶² Aide Patrick J. Buchanan recorded Mr. Nixon as saying, “If for one month . . . everybody would ‘shut up’ about the war, we would be a long way toward getting it over.” In fact, it would be over before the 1970 congressional elections, Nixon insisted. “We are going to be able by then to ‘see the light at the end of the tunnel,’” he crooned.⁶³

Nixon knew, though others did not, that a speech existed, already in its second draft, in which he would reveal Duck Hook to the nation as he hurled bombs at Hanoi. The text spoke of his “major decision” and “sober and considered judgment” that genuine talks had not occurred, a “tragic miscalculation of our will and purpose.” Nixon would declare, “I was not elected to preside over the senseless attrition of American lives by a deluded foe.” Saying nothing of the Madman Theory, he would insist this escalation was “limited” and sought no wider war.⁶⁴

Kissinger saw Ambassador Dobrynin again that day, and in a bit of stage-managing, the president contrived to phone during their séance. Nixon called from Camp David, where he had just told nine Republican senators that he was thinking of blockading Haiphong and invading the DRV—scaring Congress and scaring the Russians, all at the same time. Dr. Kissinger’s message to Moscow would be that Vietnam was the critical issue, that the United States “took seriously Hanoi’s attempt to undermine the President’s domestic position,” and that “the train had left the station and was headed down the track.”⁶⁵ Dobrynin’s warnings of limited Soviet influence in Hanoi were ignored.

Immediately afterward Kissinger called Nixon back to report his impressions, and a key exchange occurred. Both men knew that a recently formed antiwar front, the New Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam, had called for a national moratorium with actions every month, starting with a mass march on Washington on October 15. The president clearly anticipated that his escalation would trigger a massive response. As they spoke in euphemisms for Duck Hook, Nixon referred to the demonstration. Kissinger, still pushing, opined that events of the past several weeks excluded a long-haul strategy: “The doves and the public are making it impossible.” Nixon took the point. He asked Kissinger if they could pick up the pace and “make the tough move before the 15th of October . . . he doesn’t want to appear to be making the tough move after the 15th just because of the rioting at home.” Nixon was aware that the nation “is going to take a dimmer view after the move than before” and felt it better “to nip it before the first demonstration, because there will be another one on November 15.” Henry warned only that this timing risked the deadline the United States had already given Hanoi, so “it will look as if we tricked them.” The president was not dissuaded.⁶⁶

Dr. Kissinger assembled his key aides on September 29 to hand out work assignments. This “September Group” included Soviet affairs expert Helmut Sonnenfeldt, who wrote the paper on probable Soviet reaction, and NSC China aide John Holdridge, author of the one on the Chinese. Authorship of the paper on Hanoi itself is not clear. Tony Lake, Roger Morris, and Peter Rodman collaborated on the draft presidential speech. No one was satisfied with the speech, and there were continuing doubts about the Duck Hook options themselves. That day Lake and Morris wrote a joint memo to the NSC military aide, Navy captain Rembrandt Robinson, arguing the basic paper needed extensive reworking to include more analysis, alternative military programs, and treatment of U.S. diplomatic objectives. The study, finished or not, went to the president on October 2. This was the paper that contained the “full coverage” of escalation absent from Kissinger’s earlier analysis of Vietnam alternatives. The package contained a fresh draft of the speech and a list of questions to be answered before Duck Hook went forward. But the dozens of pages of projections and estimates ignored the political impact, except to say it was a question beyond the competence of NSC staff.

The next day the president pondered the plans during a visit to his Key Biscayne home. Away from Washington, closeted with his personal entourage (Kissinger, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman) instead of the usual administration officials, the chief executive sat in swim trunks and a sport shirt. Haldeman immediately picked up on the lack of any provision for domestic impact. Kissinger said the big question would be whether the president could hold the country together. Ehrlichman felt strongly that they ought to start getting ready, that “we can and should pre-program several routes on a [public relations] basis.”⁶⁷ Nixon suddenly expressed fear that the escalation might not work, and he would be lost.

Over the next couple of weeks the entire Madman strategy would be abandoned. The questions are why and when. Some scholars date this to October 6, when the president ordered Laird to arrange for a major Strategic Air Command (SAC) nuclear war exercise that would surely be detected by the Russians.⁶⁸ It seems equally likely the SAC maneuver was first laid on as an element of Duck Hook, not a replacement for it. Both the NSC staff and the Pentagon continued to work on the escalation, including several more drafts for the speech, the earliest of which still contained Duck Hook. The final version of the bombing plan, “Pruning Knife Alpha,” came as late as November 13 in a JCS paper to Laird. On October 9 the presidential speech was put on the official schedule—for November 3. According to Haldeman, Kissinger feared the president had decided against his plan, but Haldeman’s own guess was that Nixon would enunciate U.S. attempts to mollify Hanoi, then wait for a reaction; if Hanoi escalated, “we move fast to heavy retaliation, mining etc., with this bad faith as basis.”⁶⁹

Several things had changed already. The president had abandoned the notion of carrying out Duck Hook before the October 15 moratorium. This kept his diplomatic deadline but further complicated the political problem. That equation also changed. The White House tried to project “cool contempt” toward the antiwar movement,⁷⁰ but Haldeman’s diary vividly demonstrated Nixon’s mushrooming anxiety. October 8: “Kept the doves at bay this long, now have to take them on.” The president prevailed upon his vice president, Spiro Agnew, to give a series of speeches lambasting student protesters, which Nixon himself planned to follow up. October 9: “[The president] fears [he] can’t hold the country that long at that level.” October 10: “concern about schedule for next week after October 15, not strong enough.” Nixon put speechwriter Price to work on something he could say about the protests. October 13: “Lot of concern about plans for Moratorium Day as it nears and heat builds.” Nixon sent a letter to a student at George-town thundering that the democratic process would be destroyed if government accepted policies advocated by street demonstrations.⁷¹ The day before the moratorium Agnew denounced a letter sent by Hanoi leader Pham Van Dong in support of the demonstrations and demanded that antiwar leaders repudiate it.

On October 11 Haldeman saw the president as nearing the final stages of his decision. Indeed, that day Laird and the full JCS spent three hours with Mr. Nixon. That Nixon still held book for Duck Hook is indicated by his telling them that contacts with legislators showed they could “‘catch hell’ from the Hawks as well as the Doves if we followed the long road.” Yet casualty rates seemed to be falling, suggesting that a long-term approach like Vietnamization could be viable. Laird warned that Duck Hook itself should not be viewed as an immediate payoff strategy: “anything done in North Vietnam will take at least a year.” Then Wheeler briefed Pruning Knife, declaring at the outset that he did not consider the plan militarily sound. At the end of his presentation the JCS chairman stated that the Chiefs as a whole thought Duck Hook flawed because it envisioned too short a period of attack. In between, Wheeler ranged over various problems from the impending monsoon to insufficient aerial refueling capability to the need to move additional aircraft carriers from Korean waters to Vietnamese. Admiral Thomas Moorer, the chief of naval operations, added that the target list and sortie allocations were merely illustrative, and much remained to be done. “The President then asked, ‘What can we do in two weeks?’” Of course, the answer was the SAC aerial alert exercise. Mr. Nixon ordered that the Pruning Knife plans be refined and reformatted for week-long and fortnight-long aerial assaults.⁷²

Clearly, no immediate “go” order was possible. Melvin Laird’s role in this charade is notable but obscure. The Chiefs presented the plan to him several times. “I never understood why the Joint Chiefs of Staff were so enthusiastic about Pruning Knife,” Laird recalled in an interview. But General Wheeler’s White House briefing on October 11 indicated the polar opposite. Laird seems to have leaned on the Chiefs to get them to downplay the possibilities. So the SAC alert went ahead instead. There are suppositions but no clear evidence that the Soviets observed the SAC alert or drew any conclusions from it. However, Dobrynin returned to the White House on October 20 to deliver a note that plainly said the use of additional force in Vietnam was both misguided and extremely dangerous. Nixon’s account here exults in the denunciation he dished up in return, but the fact remained that Moscow had put Washington on notice that it might well respond to an act of force. Kissinger ignored Nixon’s demand he tell Dobrynin afterward that the president was out of control on Vietnam. This was one of those presidential orders his subordinates quietly torpedoed.

Publicly the protests held center stage. An ominous prelude took place in Chicago starting on October 8. This was the “Days of Rage” in which the most extreme faction of the SDS, which had all but broken up at its convention that summer, took to the streets to exact revenge for the 1968 police riot. Only a few hundred SDSers showed up, making impossible any real effort to support the Chicago Eight, then on trial, and the gathering degenerated into an aimless street fight. The rump SDS faction went underground and became known as the Weathermen. They would work assiduously to break down the middle-class values of upbringing that held members back from adopting violent tactics.

The big show on October 15 roiled across the nation. There were over 2 million protesters—at least 50,000 in Washington, that many in New York, 100,000 in Boston—demonstrations in dozens of cities across the nation. At the White House the president ceremoniously held an early-morning NSC session. In the Old Executive Office Building suite of the NSC staff, William Watts labored on the latest draft of the speech. That night Nixon put a nail in Duck Hook’s coffin, reflecting on the irony of this peace protest: “It had, I believed, destroyed whatever small possibility may have existed of ending the war in 1969.”⁷³ The next day he convinced his chief congressional leaders, Gerald R. Ford in the House and Hugh Scott in the Senate, to call for a moratorium of their own—a moratorium on protest. Kissinger relates that on October 17 he advised the president—no doubt reluctantly—to put off a decision on Duck Hook. Two days later Agnew gave the first of his incendiary speeches attacking the Movement: student protesters were “an effete corps of impudent snobs,” leaders were “hard core dissidents and professional anarchists.” The Movement comprised trash with whom society could dispense.

From that point, Richard Nixon’s unbending efforts were devoted to the speech he would give on November 3. Years later, retired and in disgrace, the former president gave three reasons why he had decided against escalation. First, Nixon doubted whether he could have “held the country together for the period of time needed to win in view of the numbers of casualties we would be sustaining.” Second, he says, he had determined not to let Vietnam paralyze American foreign policy. Lastly, Nixon writes, “I knew a military victory alone would not solve our problem.”⁷⁴

The Duck Hook text morphed into something different, an effort to create a base of political support for the long haul. Price remained the lead speechwriter, but the Kissinger staff worked up a pair of drafts, and Nixon himself labored assiduously. A stack of all his scrawled, handwritten notes for the November 3 speech would be several inches high. There were at least a dozen drafts, with the precise number difficult to discern because of so many cut-and-paste partial redrafts. Before a nationwide television audience that night the president conjured a “great silent majority” of Americans, claiming these people supported his Vietnam policy and rejected the position of the “vocal minority.” Nixon repeated his earlier line that to withdraw from Vietnam because protesters urged it could destroy America as a free society. Mr. Nixon did not explain how extending the U.S. sojourn in the Vietnam quagmire, simply to defy protesters who expressed the national will embodied in the 1968 election, would perfect that free society.

Henry Kissinger characterizes response to the speech as “electric.” He notes that from the moment it ended, “the White House switchboard was clogged with congratulatory phone calls,” and there were 50,000 supportive telegrams and 30,000 letters. But the president took no chances. Even Kissinger conceded that “no doubt some of the enthusiasm was stimulated by Haldeman’s indefatigable operatives who had called political supporters all over the country to send in telegrams.”⁷⁵ In actuality, in testimony at a 1999 trial held to consider the fair market value of the original of this speech and its drafts, presidential aide Alexander M. Butterfield revealed that he had spent weeks prompting the response, arranging with labor unions, military retirees, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, millionaire entrepreneur H. Ross Perot, and others to generate it. “Everybody was spring-loaded to respond,” Butterfield testified. “It truly was manufactured.”⁷⁶ Nixon made a point of calling reporters into the Oval Office to photograph some of the telegrams and letters. Vietnam would be Richard Nixon’s war after all.

It was a late summer day that I returned to New York, one of those bell-clear, glorious days that make you glad to be alive. The cab dropped me and my two suitcases on Amsterdam Avenue and 114th Street, right next to my dormitory, but actually at the worst possible place, since you could not enter the building there. John Jay Hall’s entrance was inside, tucked away in a corner of the inner campus. Naturally I did everything wrong, lugging the suitcases two blocks up to College Walk, back around the main academic building, and into the dormitory quad. There had been a gate just up the street on 114th, as I learned soon enough. I was sweating profusely when I got to the dorm. Not an auspicious beginning, but I did not mind. New York was under my feet again. The dorm room turned out to be a nine- by twelve-foot cubicle facing up 114th toward the Hudson River. Until the 1968 student strikes, it had been occupied by two people. One reason for the strike that year became instantly apparent.

Vietnam had been the big issue at Columbia in 1968. It remained a live one when I arrived in 1969. Columbia strongly denied complicity, which was accurate, in that the university took no public stance supporting the war, and there was no on-campus ROTC program for aspiring officers. But the university was a major recipient of federal research money, many of those funds dedicated to military technology or scientific development. Columbia also stood among the founders of a university consortium working with the Institute for Defense Analyses. College Walk, the campus crosswalk that corresponded to 116th Street, witnessed many protests against the university’s complicity and the war itself. These were a weekly, at times daily, occurrence. They were impossible to avoid.

I did not come to Columbia to participate in the antiwar movement. I had my doubts about the war, but also about political organizations. The events of 1968 had stunned me, from Tet right through the election; I had experienced a bombardment of successive challenges to my conventional thinking. But I rejected recruitment by Columbia’s rump SDS chapter and other activists. Shortly after reaching New York I was scandalized by the sheer stupidity of the Days of Rage. But I also saw the press revelations of the U.S. bombing of neutral Cambodia. There seemed to be little wisdom on either side of this war.

The main lounge in my dorm had a TV set, the only one in the building at the time. We saw constant reports on the trial of the Chicago Eight, and the judge seemed as hell-bent on persecuting the protesters as the Chicago police had been on beating them up. Their offense had been to oppose a war I knew had never been declared, a war spiked by the Tonkin Gulf incident, which already seemed contrived. Defendant Bobby Seale, whose proceeding had been severed from that of the others, was shackled, restrained, and prohibited from speaking, without precedent in American justice. Rulings from the bench were arbitrary and quixotic, often betraying malice aforethought. The trial became an education in the arrogance of power. It contributed to the general ferment, not least at Columbia. Many upperclassmen, prompted by the Chicago trial, commented on the similar violence perpetrated by the New York Police Department at Columbia. The Nixon administration had declared its Vietnamization policy and announced the withdrawal of some American forces, but that little slice of 25,000 seemed merely cosmetic to me. I knew a lot about the U.S. military, and I knew that in a force the size of what we had in Vietnam you could pull that many out without much affecting anything. That turned out to be true. A new withdrawal shortly after I entered Columbia, another 35,000 troops, went further, but not much. Mr. Nixon seemed to be extending the war, not ending it.

In the fall of 1969 the New York Mets were in the World Series. The lounge in my dorm, and no doubt those in other Columbia residence halls too, was filled with students watching the games. The joy was great in Mudville when the Mets won the World Series. One could not avoid the news interspersed with the sports. Early in September, Army lieutenant William Calley was charged with premeditated murder for his unit’s massacre of more than a hundred (later shown to be closer to 500) Vietnamese civilians at the hamlet of My Lai. Then, late that month, the Army dropped charges against eight Green Berets who had murdered one of their Vietnamese operatives. I had yet to learn the details, but both incidents showed that U.S. tactics were as misguided as the strategy, and immoral to boot. Reality obliged me to confront my reluctance to become engaged.

Presently, the death of Ho Chi Minh was followed by the president of the United States telling us that he refused to be influenced by protesters. I could read the newspapers as well as anyone, and I knew the dissenters were only voicing what the opinion polls showed to be the majority view. I looked favorably on those who participated in the October 15 moratorium, only to be told a few days later by the vice president that people like me were “effete impudent snobs.” Agnew’s rhetoric escalated from there. And in his November 3 speech, Nixon announced, contrary to everything I could see around me, that the real majority, the “great silent majority,” favored the war. The extravagance of those claims struck me. I decided to listen to what the antiwar people had to say. Another moratorium march was coming up, in Washington on November 15. I went. That was my first antiwar demonstration.⁷⁷

But my hopes the war might end were frustrated, along with those of all Americans who thought our country ought to be extracting itself from this tragic conflict. How bad it was would be revealed only gradually, painfully, starting the next year.