Being Nixon: A Man Divided (29 page)

Nixon, at first, favored Kissinger’s plan to strike the North with a heavy bombing campaign. But then he pulled back. He could not be absolutely sure that North Vietnam—fourth-rate power or no—would break under the onslaught. He worried that the Russians and Chinese would react violently (and that he would undermine his plan, still half-formed, to create an opening to China). His own secretaries of state and defense were opposed to Duck Hook. Kept in the dark by Kissinger, they found out about the plan only in early October, when Nixon floated the essence to some senators, who promptly leaked it to columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak.
⁵⁶
Rogers and Laird worried that escalation would drive the antiwar movement into a frenzy. They favored further troop withdrawals as a way of defusing protest and calming the country.
⁵⁷

Nixon was a political pragmatist. He worried that Laird and Rogers would resign if he went ahead with Kissinger’s plan, and he was getting tired of Kissinger’s constant feuding with Rogers. “I sense a growing intolerance of K’s attitude and habits. He overreacts and this bothers the P,” Haldeman wrote in his diary on October 13.
⁵⁸

By then, Nixon had already decided to shelve Duck Hook. The roll-the-dice, go-for-broke gambler in Nixon was at odds with the careful poker player who measured the odds and knew when to fold. More often than not, after some bluster, the more prudent Nixon prevailed. Usually, he looked for ways to blame someone else if he had to back off. The fall guys in this case were the peaceniks. “The only chance for my ultimatum to succeed was to convince the Communists that I could depend on solid support at home if they decided to call my bluff. However, the chances I would actually have their support were becoming increasingly slim.”
⁵⁹

The antiwar movement was spreading off the campuses and into communities. It had taken a violent turn, with burnings and bombings, but also become more mainstream. Mothers and fathers were upset about their alienated and lost children. Antiwar organizers were calling for a national day of protest on October 15, a moratorium on work and school to call on Nixon to end the war.

At a press conference at the end of September, Nixon had been asked for his “view” of the coming moratorium. “Under no circumstances will I be affected whatever by it,” he responded. Haldeman knew better: “Keeps coming back to the October 15 Moratorium Plan, although he says it doesn’t concern him,” Haldeman recorded in his diary that night.
⁶⁰

On October 15, hundreds of thousands of people gathered in communities all across the country to hold church services, town meetings, and teach-ins. Some were protesting for the first time.
⁶¹
From the White House that night, the staff could see thousands of candles flickering on the Mall. The protests were mostly peaceful. “A great sigh of relief because it wasn’t nearly as bad as everyone had feared,” Haldeman wrote in his diary.
⁶²
But President Nixon was not relieved. He knew he was losing the country. He headed to the mountaintop, where he could be alone to think and plan.

With Bob Finch, John Mitchell, and Spiro Agnew.

Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum

O
n the night of the October 15 Moratorium, Nixon wrote at the top of a yellow pad, “Don’t get rattled—don’t waver—don’t react.” Then he went to Camp David to try to figure out the smartest way to seize back the initiative. For “twelve to fourteen hours a day,” he recalled, he wrote and rewrote a speech that would, in time, come to be regarded as a conservative manifesto of the culture wars.
¹
He did not get much sleep. “Before big speeches, he’d wander around at night,” recalled one of his personal aides, Jack Brennan. “He would find an empty cabin and work there. He wanted to be alone.” Endlessly scrawling on his yellow pads, Nixon went through a dozen drafts before he called Haldeman and breezily announced, “Well, the baby’s been born.”
²

On a Monday night, November 3, at 9:30
P.M
. Eastern time, the president addressed an audience of 70 million people. “There were some who urged that I end the war at once,” he said. “This would have been the popular and easy course to follow.” A favorite Nixon speech construction was to set up a morally dodgy straw man and then say, with humble sincerity (or unctuous piety, depending on one’s view of Nixon), “but that would be wrong….” Speaking to the nation in a gentle tone, as if more in sorrow than in anger, Nixon raised a specter that he knew would rattle most Americans: “The first defeat in our nation’s history would result in a collapse of confidence in American leadership, not only in Asia but throughout the world.”

He pledged to “win the peace,” using the same gauzy if uplifting phrase he had employed during his presidential campaign. He said that he had a “plan for peace,” though he did not spell out what it was, beyond more fighting and talking, coupled with gradual troop withdrawals. (He made no mention of Duck Hook.)

Then he began his peroration:

And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support….

Let us be united for peace. Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.
³

The Silent Majority
. Nixon had come up with the phrase himself, at 4
A.M
. on the last night he spent at Camp David.
⁴
“Silent majority” was an old phrase meaning dead people, noted Nixon wordsmith William Safire—to join the silent majority meant to die and go to a cemetery.
⁵
But Nixon’s brilliant reinvention of the term was a political masterstroke. It was a natural extension of a theme he had been working on ever since he figured out how the Orthogonians might trump the Franklins. He had long spoken of “quiet Americans” and “forgotten Americans”; now he had found a way to capture the flag back from the protesters—the “loud minority” who, alone, could humiliate the United States.
⁶

Nixon wasn’t sure how the speech had played. He dined alone afterward in the Lincoln Sitting Room, refusing to watch the TV commentators. His family did, however, and they were “livid,” Nixon recalled. Tricia came in and said to her father, “They talked as if they had been listening to a different speech than the one you made.”
⁷
ABC News had put on Averell Harriman as a scoffing commentator—the same Harriman who had announced, “I will not break bread with this man” at Joe Alsop’s house after the 1950 senate campaign. Most of the TV commentators tried to be balanced. They were not so much
biased as dim: They missed the political significance of Nixon’s appeal to the Silent Majority.

Between 10:15
P.M
. and 1:15
A.M
., Haldeman recorded, Nixon called him “at least 15–25 times” wanting to know how the speech had played and ordering a counterattack on critics. Haldeman short-handed Nixon’s request: “If [you] only do one thing get 100 vicious dirty calls to
New York Times
and
Washington Post
about their editorials,” he wrote, adding with a note of parenthetical exasperation, “even though no idea what they’ll be.”
⁸
The chief of staff got busy, generating a massive campaign of letters and telegrams praising Nixon and denouncing his enemies. For days, Nixon kept the telegrams, stacked in piles, in the Oval Office to show to visitors.
⁹

The congratulatory telegrams were partly contrived, but Nixon was not wrong when he told Haldeman that his speech was the greatest turnaround job since the Checkers Speech (or, as Nixon preferred, the Fund Speech) in 1952. Polls showed that more than three out of every four Americans approved of the speech, and Nixon’s approval rating shot up from 52 to 68 percent.
¹⁰
The White House PR team, working with a patriotic salesman named H. Ross Perot, whose computer company had won some hefty government contracts, began printing American flags on bumper stickers and lapel pins, sending the message, not so subtly, that to be against the war was unpatriotic.
¹¹

Pat Buchanan, Nixon’s most hardline speechwriter, had another idea: Unleash Spiro Agnew on the press. Up to this point, the vice president had been regarded by White House staffers, as well as by the president himself, as a nonentity, if not a nuisance. In April, Nixon had told Haldeman that Agnew “must not be involved in decisions. Mustn’t insist on talking to P. He’s supposed to help the P.—take his line and sell it.”
¹²
Ehrlichman reproduced a nasty little saying in his office diary on November 14: “The Assassin’s Dilemma: if they kill Nixon, they get Agnew.”
¹³
But with some help from Buchanan and especially Safire, who had a fondness for biting alliteration, Agnew made an excellent press basher. He had caused a mild stir in October
by referring to antiwar activists as “an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.” Now he ramped up the rhetoric, referring to the “media elite” as “nattering nabobs of negativism.”

Nixon loved it. “P was really pleased with VP talk last night (attacking TV network newscasters) and feels he’s become a really good property, and we should keep building him and using him,” Haldeman recorded.
¹⁴
Going over Agnew’s remarks with Buchanan, Nixon used a gross expression: “This really flicks the scab off, doesn’t it?” the president said.

Nixon was talking about scabs left by Agnew’s earlier slashing attack on “impudent intellectuals,” but he might as well have been talking about his own emotional scar tissue. Though Nixon tried to control his anger, he could not, or perhaps would not, let old wounds heal. He used the expression repeatedly: He “kept ‘flicking off the scab,’ in his skin-crawling metaphor,” wrote Safire.
¹⁵
It was as if he wished to be reminded of the hurt inflicted on him by his tormenters in the press; he rubbed old wounds raw, like a boy, and they festered.

To be so stridently called out by the vice president of the United States was intimidating to communications executives whose businesses were licensed by the federal government. At first, they were cowed. They worried, not unreasonably, about losing their broadcast licenses.
¹⁶
And for the next massive antiwar demonstration, on November 15, the news coverage was different, more skeptical, cooler. The protest was different, too—uglier, more violent. At the Justice Department, protesters chanting “Smash the state!” tore down the American flag and hoisted a Vietcong flag. Standing on the balcony, Attorney General John Mitchell gave them the finger.
¹⁷

At the White House, ringed by city buses to keep the mob away, there was talk of using helicopters to blow out the protesters’ candles. Nixon pretended to ignore the whole thing, watching a football game on TV.
¹⁸
He knew that he had shifted the public perception, aligned himself with patriots and identified the antiwar movement with the bombers and flag-burners. He was winning the PR war.

But he was
not winning the war in Vietnam. In his private communication with Kissinger, Nixon was gloomy. Preparing his Silent Majority speech, he had bluntly asked Kissinger, “Is it possible we were wrong from the start in Vietnam?”
¹⁹
On November 24, as the euphoria from the speech reaction wore off, he wrote Kissinger: “I get the rather uneasy impression that the military are still thinking in terms of a long war and eventual military solution. I also have the impression that deep down they realize the war can’t be won militarily, even over the long haul.”
²⁰

Kissinger didn’t disagree, but he was hopeful that force could be matched with secret diplomacy. He had used Nixon’s round-the-world trip in August as cover to slip away in Paris to a secret meeting with North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho. It was all very “cloak and dagger,” as Nixon put it, “with Kissinger riding slouched down in the back seats of speeding Citroens, eluding inquisitive reporters.”
²¹
Kissinger, with sly humor that amused his fellow top aides, took to referring to Le Duc Tho as “Ducky.” But he also called the North Vietnamese “insolent” and made little progress.
²²
Stonewalling Kissinger, Hanoi was cheeky about the American antiwar movement. “May your fall offensive succeed splendidly,” Radio Hanoi had announced to the students and protesters before the Moratorium.
²³

Nixon was beginning to feel what LBJ had felt: trapped. He would come to regret not unleashing Duck Hook. Years later, he told Kissinger’s biographer Walter Isaacson: “In retrospect, I think we should have done it.”
²⁴

In an interview with the author in 2013, Kissinger echoed Nixon’s regret and said, ruefully, about his Duck Hook plan, “I didn’t follow up. Was I covering my ass or making a serious policy recommendation?”
²⁵
In truth, there were probably no simple answers, no good way out.

As his first
year drew to a close, Nixon girded himself, once again, for the fight. On December 8, Safire sent him a memo warning the president
that “attacks on a biased press and sinister eastern establishment solidify some support, but in the long run, unless tempered, run the danger of appearing thin-skinned and whining.” Nixon wrote in the margin, “We don’t resent. We are not affected.”
²⁶
Three weeks later he explained to Ehrlichman why the press disliked him. It “wasn’t personal,” Nixon told his aide, according to Ehrlichman’s notes. The press’s “hatred” was “based on fact.” As Nixon explained it, “They don’t roll me very often.” He went on: “Seventy-five percent of these guys hate my guts. They don’t like to be beaten: Hiss, Moscow, Caracas, 1968, 11/3”—referring to his Silent Majority speech on November 3—“the biggest beating,” Nixon added. As he so often did, Nixon returned to the Hiss case. “You know, in the Hiss battle I was alone,” he said. “Ninety-five percent of the columnists and news stories were against me. They all said Whittaker Chambers was lying.” Henry Kissinger, quick to the play, chimed in, “Hiss was the epitome of the Eastern Establishment, Mr. President. You and Chambers were outsiders. The wrongness of Hiss really rankled the press.” Nixon nodded. “Intellectuals can’t stand a fight and they can’t stand to lose,” he said.
²⁷

To prepare for his State of the Union in January, Nixon told his staff to clear his schedule for two weeks in mid-January. He holed up in the Executive Office Building by day and the Lincoln Sitting Room by night, setting off the White House fire alarm at 2:30
A.M
. when he tried to light some logs.
²⁸
Finally he headed to Camp David, to wander the cabins.

His determination, as expressed in the notes he made to himself, is touching. At the top of one sheet, he listed the time—10:25 at night—and first wrote himself a reminder to seek out nourishment (“Manola [his valet Manolo, misspelled]—Time to eat something!”). Then he recited a litany that is partly a prosaic to-do list for a State of the Union speech, partly a PR plan, and partly an expression of deep personal longing.

Goals:

Family:

Dignity—

Glamour—(Martha Mitchell re. Kennedy royalty]
*
¹

Personal leadership:

Excitement—Joy in Job—Sharing

Lift spirit of people

Pithy—memorable phrases

Brevity

Moving conclusion

Anecdote

Statesmanship

Honesty—Candor

He penciled a box around a second list:

Hard work

Consideration for subordinates

Concern for people—

Letters—

Calls—

Intelligence

Effect on small groups

Vitality

Four days later, writing an “analysis of 1st year,” he allowed a trace of self-pity to creep in:

No credit for

1. Treatment of staff (doesn’t embarrass—blow up). RMW [Rose Mary Woods]—Correction of errors—doesn’t blame—

2. New Social Events—W.H.

3. Treatment of opponents

a. LBJ—Park [word illegible; Nixon had attended the dedication of the Lady Bird Johnson Redwood Grove in August 1969]

b. H.H.H. to astronaut [Nixon had invited Hubert Humphrey to a party for the Apollo astronauts; Nixon had not been extended a similar courtesy by JFK]

But then he vowed to redouble his efforts to be an upbeat, communicative, sociable, fun-loving All-American president:

Need—(for emphasis)

Work hard—

Treatment of staff

White House Social events—

Bold—gutsy initiatives

Telephone Calls

Music plus football
²⁹

Nixon was never going to reconcile the man he wished to be with the man he feared he was. Alone, at night with his yellow pad, he could imagine and yearn for a leader who was tough but compassionate, bold but wise, firm but gentle. In company, overwhelmed by social anxiety, he sometimes could not speak at all. He would spin his hands, helpless to articulate his eager, almost boyish idealism while maintaining the pose of
l’homme serieux
.