The Arrogance of Power (51 page)

It was during that year, when staying with Bobst, that Nixon told Len Garment he was “driven by his pacifist mother's idealism.” On yet another trip to Vietnam, however, he called for not just “a marginal number [of troops] . . . but more than enough. . . .” He seemed to swing from one policy to another, on one day apparently calling for troop increases, on another warning of the risk of “going overboard” and sending too many soldiers. The Vietnam conflict, Nixon repeatedly said, would be remembered as “the war that had to be fought to prevent World War III.”

In 1967, the year before the election, more than eleven thousand Americans were killed in the war, along with an estimated hundred thousand Vietnamese combatants. Some fifty thousand civilians were also killed or wounded. The U.S. troop strength would rise to nearly half a million by year's end.

Defense Secretary McNamara decided at this point that “escalation threatened to spin the war utterly out of control.” U.S. efforts had hurt the Communists, he told Johnson, but they were still able to keep up their attacks. The enemy showed no sign of breaking under the bombing. McNamara suggested reining in the military and adopting a more flexible bargaining position. At the same time CIA Director Richard Helms told Johnson that the risks of accepting failure in Vietnam were “probably more limited and controllable than most previous argument had indicated.”

McNamara reported moreover, that the “other war,” the struggle for the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese population, was also going badly. Corruption was rampant, the population apathetic. Such concerns appeared not to bother Nixon. On another visit to Saigon that year he responded cynically when an American official asked for his help in encouraging that genuine elections be held in South Vietnam. “Oh sure, honest, yes, honest, that's right,” said Nixon,
“so long as you win.”
Then he winked and slapped his knee.

Unlike McNamara and many others in Washington, Nixon remained effusively optimistic about the war's outcome. “It can be said now,” he declared, “that the defeat of the Communist forces in South Vietnam is inevitable. The only question is, how soon?” When U.S. bombers hit targets inside the buffer zone along the Chinese frontier, an area previously out of bounds, Nixon said the time was right for “massive pressures.”

“Most Americans,” McNamara told Johnson, “do not know how we got where we are. . . . All want the war ended and expect their President to end it. Or else.” At home mass protest was beginning in earnest—twenty thousand people marched on the Pentagon in the fall of 1967. Nixon had already called for limits to protest, supporting a call for dismissal of a professor who said he would welcome a Communist victory. By now even many formerly hawkish Republicans were having grave doubts about the conflict.

No politician could safely ignore such a groundswell of popular opinion. Nixon listened in September 1967, when speechwriter Richard Whalen advised him not to visit Vietnam again if all he was going to do was come back continuing to voice support for the war. Nixon canceled the trip. “Flexibility,” he told Whalen, “is the first principle of politics.”

From then on until the election Nixon became not so much flexible on Vietnam as opaque, ambiguous. In conclave with Whalen, he pondered ways to make his pitch on the war sound different from Johnson's. He thought he should stop talking about seeking “an honorable end to the war,” exclaiming: “What the hell does that mean?” Yet “peace with honor” would ultimately become Nixon's long-term theme, and more than five years later, as president, he would claim to have achieved precisely that.

If he were in the White House, Nixon told Whalen in private, he would be prepared to threaten the North with nuclear weapons. In the meantime, though, he wanted his speechwriters to produce something that had a “hopeful note, an upsweep of optimism,” language that signaled flexibility. Whalen and his colleague Ray Price turned out draft after unused draft. When Whalen submitted a memo suggesting that the war was a “gross failure,” that the nation stood “imprisoned in a gigantic mistake,” Nixon did not reply.

Instead, he again publicly called for tougher tactics against North Vietnam “in our national interest” and characterized the latest Communist onslaught, the Tet offensive, as “a last-ditch effort.” He again raised the possibility that the Vietnam conflict could lead to World War III. Then he took a position that startled everyone, including his own staff.

“If in November this war is not over,” Nixon announced to an audience in March 1968, “I say that the American people will be justified in electing new leadership, and I pledge to you that new leadership will end the war and win the peace in the Pacific.” “Nothing lay behind the ‘pledge,' ” speechwriter Whalen wrote later, “except Nixon's instinct for an extra effort of salesmanship. . . .”

The
New York Times'
s David Halberstam recalled that Nixon used this ploy repeatedly, “touching his breast pocket as if the plan were right there in the jacket—implying that to say what was in it might jeopardize secrecy.” As Halberstam's colleague Neil Sheehan put it, Nixon gave the public the impression he had such a plan—and that was what counted.
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For a while after the “pledge” speech, it seemed to his aides that Nixon was about to say something meaningful about Vietnam. Feet propped on a
desk at campaign headquarters, he told Whalen he was going to start talking “substantively” about “this stupid war.” He said that it was vital to restrain China and to persuade the Soviets—who with China supplied North Vietnam with arms—that an American defeat would embolden Beijing and heighten the risk of a superpower confrontation.

As a Nixon speech was being drafted along these lines, President Johnson changed the political landscape. He announced a peace initiative in the form of a limited bombing halt and, astonishing almost everyone, said he would not be running for reelection. Nixon canceled his own speech, explaining he would refrain from comment on the war while hopes of a peace breakthrough lasted.

Dispirited, Whalen concluded that on Vietnam as on many other issues his boss was guided less by conviction than by centrism, “the pragmatic splitting of differences along a line drawn through the middle of the electorate. . . . Nixon's aim was to find the least assailable middle ground.”

Nixon's withdrawal into silence, couched to look like patriotic support of the president, seemed to Whalen to be nothing more than “a brilliantly executed political stroke—and a cynical default on the moral obligation of a would-be president to make his views known to the people. But politics imposed no sanctions on maneuvers that worked, and Nixon's worked superbly.”

“I've come to the conclusion,” Nixon told Whalen and colleagues privately, “that there's no way to win the war. But we can't say that, of course. In fact, we have to seem to say the opposite, just to keep some degree of bargaining leverage.”

That summer of 1968, during a stroll beside the ocean with Haldeman, Nixon talked of frightening North Vietnam into taking part in peace talks. “I call it the ‘Madman Theory,' Bob,” he said. “I want the North Vietnamese to believe I've reached the point where I might do
anything
to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communists. We can't restrain him when he's angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button'—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”
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In a 1984 interview Nixon claimed not to remember having made such a remark. Yet Charles Colson likewise recalled Nixon, as president, instructing Kissinger to warn Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin that “the President has lost his senses, that you don't know if you can restrain him, that Nixon might start using serious weapons in North Vietnam and dramatically escalate the war.”

Nixon “sat in the Oval Office chuckling,” said Colson, “while Kissinger carried out the mission.” This account corresponds to an episode described by Kissinger in his memoirs. Nixon, he said, told him in the fall of 1969 to “convey to Dobrynin that the President was ‘out of control' on Vietnam.” Kissinger claimed that he regarded the order as too “dangerous” to carry out and so said nothing to Dobrynin about Nixon's supposed instability.

Three months earlier, however, Kissinger had sent that very same message by proxy when he instructed Len Garment, about to leave on a trip to Moscow, to give the Soviets “the impression that Nixon is somewhat ‘crazy'—immensely intelligent, well organized and experienced to be sure, but at moments of stress or personal challenge unpredictable and capable of the bloodiest brutality.” Garment carried out the mission, telling a senior Brezhnev adviser that Nixon was “a dramatically disjointed personality . . . more than a little paranoid . . . when necessary, a cold-hearted butcher.”
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The irony, the former aide reflected ruefully in 1997, was that everything he had told the Russians turned out to be “more or less true.”

Within weeks of the “Madman” chat with Haldeman, Nixon changed his tune totally when he spoke with Republican Senator Mark Hatfield, a committed opponent of the war. “He gave me assurances,” a satisfied Hatfield wrote afterward in a letter to a concerned citizen, “that he saw this war not as a military threat . . . but rather as an outgrowth of the misery and injustices of life in South Vietnam . . . that the real thrust against Communism will not be made with hand grenades and guns alone but with a more effective battle against social, economic and political injustices that deny people their basic right to adequate food, living conditions and human dignity. . . . I concluded that Richard Nixon represented the greatest hope for peace.”

Heartened and convinced by their discussion, Hatfield announced that Nixon was his candidate for president, for he found him to be a man with “a reliable believable peace alternative.” Nixon told Haldeman he was “the one man in this country” who could end the war, a task he would accomplish in his first year as president. Earlier he had informed a visitor he would do it in six months.

In the late spring of 1968, though, Nixon told an interviewer, “There is no alternative to the war's going on. We have to stop it with victory, or it will start all over again.” Did he really believe victory was possible? His first defense secretary, Melvin Laird, told the author in 1998, “I think he started out that way. He felt he could win. . . .”
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If Nixon had a cogent notion of how he could win the war or even end U.S. involvement in Vietnam, the American people never got a chance to consider it. As the countdown to the election began, Senator Hatfield worried that the candidates' real positions on Vietnam remained unclear. “In the democratic process,” he said, “voters should not be forced to go to the polls with their fingers crossed; they should not be forced to rely on blind faith that the men they vote for will share their views on the most important issues of the election.”

That was very much the dilemma voters found themselves facing in November. Only insiders knew that in the very last days before the election President Johnson had been presented with damning intelligence suggesting that Nixon and his running mate Agnew were playing politics with the lives of hundreds of thousands of men, American as well as Vietnamese. Had this
information been made public at the time, it would surely have destroyed Nixon's presidential hopes in a single stroke—then and forever.

_____

This is a story that has long hung between the shadows of Nixon's past and the disgrace of his presidency, half reported on partial evidence, often exploited by partisan sources, yet never fully resolved. He escaped full opprobrium for his behavior while he was alive, yet the evidence implies a sin and a cynicism worse than any of the offenses that would later make headlines.

The episode in question turns on the attempt by President Johnson, in the weeks before the 1968 election, to convince the Communists and the South Vietnamese to attend peace talks that might end the war. To achieve that would mean overcoming the complex objections of both sides. Would the Communists sit down with the South? Would the South sit down with both the North and the Viet Cong, theoretically an independent guerrilla movement but dismissed by the South as the creature of the northerners?

In the fall, after marathon diplomatic efforts, Johnson was persuaded that a formula had been found. Overcoming his own doubts, and with the support of U.S. commanding General Creighton Abrams, he at last decided to take the step essential to secure North Vietnam's cooperation. On October 31, in spite of evidence that South Vietnam might not come into line, he ordered a halt to the bombing of the North.

Had the talks actually gotten under way there was a chance—impossible and pointless now to debate how good or slender a chance—that the Vietnam War would soon have ended. The talks did not start, however, because two days later South Vietnam's President Thieu announced his government would not take part.

Thieu had a slew of reasons not to attend, not the least of them being the likelihood—unpalatable and usually unacknowledged in those days—that his regime had virtually no chance of long-term survival were the Americans to disengage.
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Whether and when the Americans would disengage, however, would depend on who was in the White House.

President Johnson, nearing the end of his term, would soon be an irrelevance. Hubert Humphrey, his would-be Democratic successor, was a poor prospect from Thieu's point of view. He had already told South Vietnam's president bluntly that prolonged U.S. aid was just “not in the cards.” Humphrey had also publicly promised to stop bombing the North and spoke of reducing the number of U.S. troops. With Nixon, on the other hand, as Thieu had told a close assistant, his regime would have “a chance.”