The autograph dealer who bought Kimmons’ scrap of paper with Nixon’s signature, Mark Vardakis, has said that he tried repeatedly—through Nixon’s office—to get him to confirm or deny the story. In the past, on another matter, Nixon had been helpful to Vardakis, but this time the dealer’s phone calls and letters went unanswered. “I got the cold shoulder,” Vardakis told the author, “got no cooperation at all.”
In 1985, when the Forbes Collection acquired the note for its collection of presidential autographs, a story on the alleged incident appeared in the New York Times. The Times’ reporter, in turn, received no assistance when he contacted Nixon’s office. Nixon himself was eventually asked about the matter by the historian Herbert Parmet. Responding to questions submitted in writing in advance, he at first replied, in contradiction of his own assertion at the time, “The trip was purely political. I never took a trip to Vietnam for business purposes.” Then, when pressed on the specific allegation: “It’s a marvelous story, but totally apocryphal . . . I’ve heard of it.”4
Parmet was not sure what to believe. “Remember,” he reminded the author, “Nixon was a master of dissembling. . . . Everything has to be treated with caution.”
A hard look at the crewman’s story fails to disprove it. While in Vietnam in 1964, Nixon was flown by helicopter—five heavily armed machines were involved—to see villages outside Saigon.5 They were not the locations named by Kimmons, but nothing in the available record excludes the possibility that he had the covert meetings claimed by Kimmons.
Evidence exists, moreover, of a dispute between U.S. diplomats and army officers about Nixon’s travel that day. A National Security Council memo written soon afterward referred to “the unfortunate episode of Nixon and the helicopters.” A footnote to the memo, published by the State Department in 1992, states that the deputy commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam at the time, General William Westmoreland, “escorted Nixon . . . apparently by unauthorized use of helicopters.”
Other records indicate that Henry Cabot Lodge, the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam and Nixon’s former running mate in the 1960 election, had ordered a senior aide to “keep an eye” on Nixon during the visit. He told the aide, Mike Dunn: “Get on the helicopter with him. I don’t want him ever alone with anybody unless you are there to hear what he is told and what he says.” Dunn, who failed to join the group on the helicopter, was quoted as saying Westmoreland had turned him away.6 Why he really became separated from the Nixon party was never fully resolved.
Notes written by Major Paul Schreck, one of the two officers named by Kimmons as having briefed the helicopter crews, show that he did pilot Nixon. They do not refer to the secret operation Kimmons described, and Schreck could not be interviewed; like Kimmons, he died in the early nineties. However, the second officer named, Lieutenant Colonel John Hughes, was alive and provided tantalizing information.
The battalion commander recalled meeting Nixon and ferrying him around on a “milk run,” the overt part of the trip.7 Hughes said he assigned his “best people” to the job, including Kimmons, who served either as crew chief or door gunner. He had no direct knowledge of the story Kimmons told—of the meeting with the Viet Cong and the prisoner exchange—but he was aware that a part of the mission had been a secret operation.
“That was run by the Green Berets,” Hughes said carefully. “All I know about it is that the Green Berets took Nixon on a mission. . . . That was all classified, and I didn’t have access to it. I knew he was going out on something unusual. . . . I didn’t care for the idea of his doing that. He came out of it alive. Nobody got shot. No holes in the bird. I bellied up real close to the Berets, and I’m not going to tell you everything we did. . . .”
The famed Green Berets—more formally, the U.S. Army’s Special Forces—were deployed in strength across South Vietnam at the time of the Nixon visit, with two camps near the Cambodian border in the area of the prisoner exchange that Kimmons described. They were working with other services that year under the umbrella of the Special Operations Group (SOG), answerable directly to the Pentagon. A new program of clandestine missions, approved by President Johnson two months earlier, involved what were politely described as “destructive undertakings”; using Vietnamese and Chinese mercenaries to run commando raids into Cambodia, North Vietnam, and Laos.8
General Westmoreland, who accompanied Nixon on at least part of his helicopter tour, was one of a handful of senior non-SOG officers briefed on those operations. The go-between, remembered by Kimmons as Father Wa, almost certainly refers to a gun-toting soldier-priest by the name of Nguyen Lao Hoa, celebrated for organizing resistance to the Viet Cong under the patronage of Edward Lansdale, the legendary CIA operative who pioneered covert actions in Southeast Asia. Lansdale was on close personal terms with Nixon.
Research has also unearthed an order to the U.S. Special Forces, dated the day of Nixon’s arrival, instructing units to “cease activities within 5km. Of VN [Vietnam]/Cambodian border.” The command originated with “Maj. Gen./Prime Minister of RVN”—South Vietnam’s prime minister, Major General Nguyen Khanh. Khanh and his foreign minister met Nixon for dinner during the visit. Were the U.S. Special Forces being ordered to avoid combat to keep a former vice president out of harm’s way—as much as possible—during a secret negotiation?
U.S. personnel did go missing in those early days of the war. Yet published government records, subjected to intense scrutiny in the nineties because of claims that U.S. prisoners remained alive in enemy hands, reflect no prisoner exchange in 1964.9 The chief of analysis for the Defense Intelligence Agency’s office on POW/MIA affairs, Sedgwick Tourison, in 1999 judged Kimmon’s account “farfetched.”
How then to account for the several components of the episode that seem to fit Kimmons’s claims? Would Kimmons have named Major Schreck and his former commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Hughes, both alive when he made his allegations, had he known they were likely to challenge his story? Why did Colonel Hughes agree in his interview for this book that the Green Berets did take Nixon on a “classified” mission?
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At the time of Nixon’s 1964 visit Vietnam had still been a small war in a distant country remote from day-to-day concerns in the United States. That year 146 Americans died there, and 1,039 were wounded. Four years later, with the 1967 U.S. death toll at nearly 1,000 a month and rising, it had become the key issue of the presidential election.
For Nixon, almost certainly facing his last chance of capturing the White House, the national crisis posed a difficult question. As the candidate presenting himself as an expert on foreign affairs, as the veteran of more trips to Southeast Asia than any other politician, what cogent Vietnam policy could he offer the nation?
Nixon had always supported the line U.S. leaders from Truman to Johnson had taken, namely that support for the South Vietnam regime was justified by the notion that its collapse would be followed by the loss to the Communists of the entire region. Fourteen years earlier Nixon had been one of the first to urge that the government “take the risk now by putting American boys in.” Then, he had even shown himself open to using nuclear weapons in Vietnam.*
As late as 1992, Nixon would maintain that President Kennedy had been right to commit sixteen thousand “advisers” with air and naval backup, which represented the first step into the quagmire.10 The United States, Nixon urged at the time, should allocate all possible resources to achieve victory. In those gung ho days, before the casualties started to mount, he was not alone. Robert Kennedy too had been confident his country was “going to win.”
In 1964, after the trip to Vietnam on which he allegedly negotiated the release of American prisoners, Nixon had called for “nothing less than victory.” As American deaths climbed into the hundreds, he charged that the Johnson administration lacked “the will to win . . . win for America and win for the Southeast Asians.”
By 1965 Washington raised its commitment to two hundred thousand men, including combat troops
for the first time, and undertook the first strategic bombing of North Vietnam. Nixon now called for “victory over the aggressors,” arguing that U.S. forces could not be withdrawn until the South became capable of defending itself. On the ideological front, he claimed, “we have already won.” He opposed talk of a negotiated settlement, again insisting there could be “no substitute for victory.”
In 1966, with troop levels expanded to four hundred thousand and increased bombing failing to have the desired effect, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was assailed by doubt regarding the government’s strategy. He advised Johnson to “level off military involvement for the long haul while pressing for talks.” The leader Nixon so admired, President de Gaulle, publicly called for American withdrawal, as he likewise urged Nixon privately both then and later.
The tycoon Elmer Bobst, so close a confidant to Nixon that he was Uncle Elmer to the Nixon girls, thought the war “an unmitigated disaster.” “We must stop this war,” he would write Nixon, “because of the uselessness of having to keep on killing and maiming thousands of human beings who have the right to live. We will have to face up to the world and state that for reasons of humanity alone we wish to bring this godless war to an end, without having to thrust further hundreds of Vietnamese into the earth.”
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.11
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.”12
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.”13 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.”