Being Nixon: A Man Divided (48 page)

Here was a role reversal. Haldeman had sometimes fed Nixon’s insecurities, but he never expressed anxiety himself. Haldeman’s job was to guard Nixon from his enemies and his own worst instincts. If Haldeman was distracted by his own concerns, who was to protect Nixon?

Pat Nixon did
not want to add to her husband’s burdens. She had strong opinions—primarily that Haldeman and the inner circle were keeping her husband isolated and insulated from the cabinet, from most of his own staff, and from his own wife. “If I were in charge of the campaign it wouldn’t be running the way it is being run,” she wrote her friend Helene Drown. She saw that her husband had seemed oddly depressed on the night of his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention. But “she tried to avoid bringing up what she referred to as the ‘unpleasant subjects,’ ” recalled Julie in her memoir. The president’s daughter did not spell out precisely what those “unpleasant subjects” were, but, generally speaking, Pat’s aversion to confrontation was at least as great as Nixon’s. As ever, she tried to bear tribulation stoically, silently, and with good, if forced, cheer. It stung when McGovern, flailing, compared her husband to Hitler. Both she and Nixon looked “thin and haggard,” Julie wrote David.
“I think I made a mistake protecting Daddy too much and in giving in too much,” Pat later told Julie, “but I knew he was busy, the war was hanging over us.”
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Years later, Nixon’s
personal assistant, Steve Bull, struggled to find the right word to describe the atmosphere in the White House in the early fall of 1972. He uttered the word
poisonous
and immediately retracted it as too harsh, too melodramatic. But something was offkey as the Nixon bandwagon tooted its own horn. Perhaps, Bull later speculated, the never-ending war in Vietnam was to blame. The War President could never stand down. “The feelings of being under siege never wore off,” he said. “It had a corrosive effect. We never really relaxed. I never heard Nixon say he was happy or sad. He was so formal.”
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On the evening
of October 12, Kissinger bustled into Nixon’s hideaway in the Executive Office Building. As usual, the blinds were drawn—“Nixon liked his working offices to convey the atmosphere of a cocoon,” Kissinger recalled—and the president was reclining on his easy chair with his feet up on the settee. Coming straight from his plane from Paris, where he had been negotiating with the North Vietnamese, the national security adviser was exultant.
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“Well, you’ve got three out of three, Mr. President. It’s well on the way.” By “three out of three,” Kissinger meant the opening to China, détente with the Soviet Union, and now—after so many painful years—a peace agreement with North Vietnam.

“You got an agreement? Are you kidding?” said Nixon.

“No, I’m not kidding,” answered Kissinger.

Nixon began to tease Kissinger, looking over to Al Haig, who was not smiling. “I’m going to ask Al, because you’re too prejudiced, Henry. You’re so prejudiced to the peace camp that I can’t trust you. Don’t you think so, Al?”
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Nixon later wrote that Haig appeared “subdued,” but “a better word might have been
despondent
,” Haig recalled in his memoirs.
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Kissinger’s assistant had just returned from
Saigon. He doubted that Thieu would go along with the deal, which the South Vietnamese president was sure to regard as a sellout.

Back in EOB 175, Kissinger, who thought Nixon was “affecting nonchalance” with his japes to Haig, opened his red folder marked “Eyes Only” and began going over the elements of the deal. The key was a new concession by Hanoi: The North Vietnamese no longer required that Thieu be driven out of office and replaced by a coalition government.

Nixon became “cranked up,” Haldeman recorded in his diary, and began interrupting Kissinger to hold forth on why the North Vietnamese were suddenly backing down: the “Linebacker” bombing and mining of Hanoi and Haiphong in May had convinced the Politburo that Nixon would not give up, and the president’s trips to Moscow and Beijing had shaken Hanoi’s faith in its allies. (The “usual litany,” wrote Haldeman.)

Nixon called for a celebration. He ordered a steak dinner prepared and served in his suite, and broke out his best wine for a toast. Haldeman drily recorded, “The P told Manolo to bring the good wine, his ’57 Lafite-Rothschild, or whatever it is, to be served to everyone. Usually, it’s just served to the P and the rest have some California Beaulieu Vineyard stuff.”
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A month before
the election, the polls continued to predict a landslide. Nixon looked at the numbers and believed that the nation was on the verge of an epochal shift. The Silent Majority was reasserting control, and Richard Nixon was their tribune. The country, he told Haldeman on October 14, was tired of demonstrators and “permissiveness,” tired of the elites telling them what to think and how to live; most voters wanted a return to “basic American values.” Nixon instructed that his troops were not to speak of the coming “landslide” but rather of “the New American Majority”—the “N.A.M.” Nixon’s triumphalism was more than politics; the president wanted to lead a restoration of “moral and spiritual values,” as he expansively explained to Haldeman. “Our
N.A.M. appeals across the board,” said Nixon. “The ‘movement’ has had it,” he said, referring to the leftist “movement” that had seized the campuses and transfixed the media elite. “Square America is coming back. We didn’t just gather a bunch of haters. The real issue is patriotism, morality, religion.” If just taxes and prices were the issue, he added, the voters would be “for McGovern.”
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So often a political visionary, Nixon was right again—or almost right. The riotous years known as “the ’60s,” with their revolutions in individual and group rights and social and sexual mores, were finally ending. His prediction about the political landscape prefigured the so-called Reagan Revolution by almost a decade.

But Nixon’s vision was also premature, partly for reasons of his own making. The furious revolt against authority that ran through the mid- and late 1960s, that had rocked the establishment and weakened hierarchies in the church and academe, that had turned children against their parents, was not quite spent. Some changes, like women’s liberation and an emboldened press, were permanent. There was one final authority figure waiting to fall in this great national melodrama, though he did not know it.

More immediately, the
Vietnam nightmare had not ended, not quite yet. Haig’s premonition about Thieu was correct. When Kissinger appeared at the Presidential Palace in Saigon on October 23 to try to persuade Thieu to sign on to the peace deal he had worked out in Paris, the South Vietnamese president rebuffed him. The terms of the agreement did not require the North Vietnamese to withdraw its more than 120,000 soldiers already in South Vietnam. Without American support, Thieu knew that he was doomed. He told Kissinger a story about a man catching a thief in his bedroom. The police arrive, but the thief refuses to leave the house. So, after a while, the police chief holsters his gun and says, “He’s not such a bad guy. Why don’t you learn to live with him? After a while he may get homesick and go back to his own family.” Or, Thieu said, “He might rape your
wife.”
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Listening impassively to Kissinger spell out the terms of the deal, Thieu recalled, “I wanted to punch him in the mouth.” As it was, Thieu had to turn away from Kissinger to hide his tears.

“This is the greatest failure of my diplomatic career,” Kissinger huffed as he stood up to leave. “Why,” asked Thieu bitterly, “are you rushing to get the Nobel Prize?”
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Nixon was not unsympathetic to Thieu. Possibly, Nixon had a sense of the irony: In 1968, he had wanted the Saigon leader to balk at LBJ’s offer of peace talks and a bombing halt. The president cabled Kissinger, “We must have Thieu as a willing partner in making any agreement. It cannot be a shotgun marriage.”
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There were other reasons not to rush. Colson had persuaded Nixon that a deal before the election would look politically expedient. The constituencies so carefully cultivated by Colson—Catholics, labor, blue-collar ethnics—had heartily approved of Nixon’s bombing campaign in the spring. They regarded McGovern as an agent of surrender.
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The North Vietnamese could read the polls, and they wanted a deal before the November election. They knew Nixon would win, and they feared that he would have a free hand to bomb away. To push things along, on October 26 Hanoi went public with the terms of the proposed deal and on Radio Hanoi accused Nixon of dragging out the talks to cover up his “scheme of maintaining the Saigon puppet regime for the purpose of the continued war of aggression.”
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Kissinger tried to grab back the microphone by holding a hastily organized press conference. Surprisingly, given Kissinger’s by-now global celebrity, his actual voice had rarely been heard by the public. Although Kissinger constantly stroked and fed reporters “on background,” he had never faced the press live before the TV cameras. (“The White House public relations people were convinced that my accent might disturb Middle America.”) Now Nixon authorized his national security adviser to try to publicly reassure both Hanoi and Saigon that a deal suitable to all sides was still possible. This was a delicate task, and Kissinger may have been anxious about his maiden performance before the cameras, because his choice of words was
unfortunate. He declared, “We believe that peace is at hand.” Nixon at first congratulated Kissinger on his TV press conference performance but soon came to realize that his chief foreign policy adviser had blundered: Even Kissinger eventually realized that he had gone too far. The words “peace is at hand”—“so redolent of Neville Chamberlain and the effete 1930s cult of appeasement,” as Haig put it—were sure to harden North Vietnam’s resolve and further stiffen Thieu’s spine as well.
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Nonetheless, Kissinger was a hero in the press. “Good-bye Viet Nam” proclaimed the cover of
Newsweek
. “How Kissinger Did It” ran the headline of the story. Nixon was “so mad his teeth clenched” when he learned that Kissinger had tipped off
The New York Times
to the peace deal. “I suppose now everybody’s going to say that Kissinger won the election,” he told Colson.
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Haig, who liked to blow on the coals, told Haldeman that Kissinger was motivated by a desire to get credit.
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Haldeman was more philosophical. In his diary for October 26, he recorded that he predicted to “the P” that the flap over “peace is at hand” would “turn out to be the best lucky break of the campaign because it takes the corruption stuff off the front pages, totally wipes out any other news.”
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The “corruption stuff”
was not going away.
The Washington Post
was pushing the Segretti story. Nixon was not pleased to learn from Haldeman that Segretti had learned dirty tricks (called “rat fucking” by campus politicians) at USC, where he had been a fraternity brother of Gordon Strachan as well as a pal of Dwight Chapin.
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Chapin and Strachan were on the White House staff. Nixon had wanted to keep Watergate out of the White House. Though the press had mostly yawned over Watergate, on October 27 CBS News gave it fourteen minutes—an eternity on a twenty-three-minute evening news program—and planned to do a second installment. The show consisted mostly of repackaged
Washington Post
stories, but it now had Walter Cronkite’s imprimatur. Colson called CBS News executives
and bullied them into cutting the second segment in half, but some damage was done.
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“The P had a strong reaction to CBS’s special report on the Watergate last night,” Haldeman recorded. “Says, ‘That finishes them.’ He means he’s ready to write CBS off.”
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After the election, Colson called CBS News President Frank Stanton and threatened, “We’ll break your network,” but by then Colson’s own days in the White House were numbered.

As Nixon got
ready to depart for the last campaign swing of his life, Tricia came into the Lincoln Sitting Room and said, “I want this week to be a real last hurrah.” Nixon’s final rally took place in Ontario, California, a few miles from his first rally twenty-six years before. He told the overflow crowd that the country, which had seemed so divided when he was elected president in 1968, was “getting together.” The nation may have been more exhausted than united, but Nixon had at least succeeded in muting the anger.

The day before the election, he walked on the beach for two miles and noticed that the peace sign that someone had carved into the red sandstone cliff had been “worn down by weather. It was very dim,” he wrote in his diary. “It looked like a man with a frown on his face. This may be an indication that those who have held up this sign have had their comeuppance and they are really ready for some heavy depression.”

His November 6 diary entry concluded “on a rather subdued and analytical note,” he wrote in his memoir. “We are not going to lose,” he wrote. He thanked God in a Quakerish way (“I must say that someone must have been walking with us”) and took pride in his accomplishments over the previous year. “The Peking trip, the Moscow trip, the May 8 decision [to mine Haiphong Harbor], and then the way we have handled the campaign—must deserve some grudging respect even from our critics. The only sour note of the whole thing, of course, is Watergate and Segretti. This was really stupidity on the part of a number of people.”
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