The president said a few words and quickly departed, leaving Haldeman to announce to the staff they were—all of them—to submit their resignations at once. The cabinet received the same instructions soon afterward. Although some would be reappointed, and Nixon had supposedly meant to administer a short, sharp shock of fresh energy, few saw it that way. Kissinger thought the move “degrading . . . political butchery,” delivered in a manner that was “almost maniacal.”
Nixon spent much of the month that followed sequestered at Camp David, seeing old and new appointees. Colson found the atmosphere there “something right out of 1984 . . . like one of those secret hideaways in a James Bond movie—eerie.” Back at the White House, there was pervasive bitterness.
In December Nixon embarked on the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam, the final brutal drive to get the United States out of the war. United States troop levels had fallen to about twenty-five thousand, and few of them were combat troops. American casualties had been reduced to very small numbers, and it had seemed in October that a settlement was imminent. “We believe peace is at hand,” Kissinger had said dramatically two weeks before the election. Now there was a new stalemate, with the North again intransigent, and the South’s President Thieu stubbornly blocking a deal he thought fatal for his regime.
Nixon, however, desired a resolution before the start of his second term. “He now wanted the war over on almost any terms,” according to Kissinger. “. . . The North Vietnamese committed a cardinal error in dealing with Nixon: They cornered him. Nixon was never more dangerous than when he seemed to have run out of options.”
The president responded by mounting the most concentrated air offensive of the entire conflict, which he set in motion on Monday, December 18. Haldeman had noted in his diary: “The P said I would rather bomb on Monday, unless you think we really need to do it on Sunday. He didn’t like the idea of having a Sunday church service while we were bombing.” This domestic squeamishness aside, Haldeman observed, Nixon “wanted to appear to be the tough guy all the way through.”
An armada of some two hundred airplanes—more than half the Strategic Air Command’s B-52s—flew nearly three thousand sorties, bombing Hanoi and Haiphong virtually around the clock. The North Vietnamese suffered serious losses—estimates of casualties and destruction vary wildly—and twenty-six American planes were shot down. Except for a break Nixon allowed on Christmas, the assault continued for twelve days.
When he ordered the bombers in, the president told the chairman of the Joint Chiefs that the air offensive was a chance to “win this war.” Won it was not, but North Vietnam accepted a deal with the United States within two weeks, in time for Nixon’s sixtieth birthday. “Brutality is nothing,” he told Kissinger when South Vietnam’s Thieu at first declined to fall into line. “You’ve never seen it if this son-of-a-bitch doesn’t go along.” Thieu soon yielded, for he had no choice.
A peace agreement was duly signed in late January, and Nixon told the nation that “peace with honor” had been achieved. To “have it break within a year or two,” the president would recall having observed to Kissinger, “would leave us nothing to be proud of. . . .”
Yet that is precisely what was to happen. The Nixon settlement offered more to the North Vietnamese, in a real sense, than had been foreseen in the Geneva accords of 1954. Then, the Communists had agreed to withdraw to the North. The arrangement Nixon accepted in 1973 permitted some 148,000 North Vietnamese troops to remain in the South, posing a grave threat to Saigon from the outset.15 That, he admitted in old age, was the “biggest flaw” in the agreement.
North Vietnamese attacks began again almost immediately, attacks that were to culminate in 1975 with total victory over the South and the ignominious departure of those Americans left in Saigon.
Nixon would insist to his dying day that American military force could and should have been used again to rescue the South Vietnamese regime. The new attacks would have been summarily stopped, he argued, had his presidency not been weakened by Watergate, had the “stupid and shortsighted” Congress not set itself firmly against further military involvement. It is an argument, however, that fails to take into account the utter determination of the northerners to prevail.
“We won the war,” Nixon would still be claiming in 1992, “but lost the peace.” It was mere verbiage, as was his claim that the United States had achieved “peace with honor in Vietnam.” What the Christmas bombing of 1972 really achieved was to blast open an escape route from a predicament that, from the American point of view, had long since ceased to be tenable.
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To bomb during the holiday season, Nixon was to say, had been “the most difficult decision I made during the entire war . . .” “I suppose all the decisions are hard,” he had written in his diary, “but this one was heartrending.”
The president had Winston Churchill on his mind during this period, and on Christmas Eve his diary entry had been positively Churchillian:
This is December 24, 1972—Key Biscayne—4 A.M. The main thought that occurred to me at this early hour of the morning the day before Christmas, in addition to the overriding concern with regard to bringing the war to an end, is that I must get away from the thought of considering the office at any time a burden. . . . I think the term glorious burden is the best description.
On this day before Christmas it is God’s great gift to me to have the opportunity to exert leadership, not only for America but on the world scene. . . . this really begins a new period and this tape concludes with that thought—a period of always reminding myself of the glorious burden of the presidency.
Within months, in an address to the nation that was really an attempt to talk his way out of Watergate, Nixon would be using the Christmas air campaign as the banner of his personal suffering: “my terrible personal ordeal of the renewed bombing of North Vietnam.”
His ordeal took place in private, mostly in the peace and sunshine of Key Biscayne. Haldeman had no contact with the president for a full twelve days, an unprecedentedly long gap. He himself took a vacation in California, as did other senior staff, including for a while Henry Kissinger. So far as the press was concerned, as the UPI’s White House correspondent Helen Thomas has recalled, the president was “in hiding.” He made no public appearances for eleven days, watched a lot of football on television, and took in six movies.
Nixon’s true condition at that time can only be guessed at. His silence on the bombing, he was to claim, was out of a concern not to jeopardize negotiations. “But I also think,” Kissinger was to write later, “there were other, more complex reasons. Nixon was still seized by the withdrawn and sullen hostility that had dominated his mood since his electoral triumph.”
Others had more damning interpretations. Anthony Lewis of the New York Times accused the president of acting “like a maddened tyrant.” The Washington Post said millions of Americans were wondering at “their President’s very sanity.” Republican senator William Saxbe thought Nixon had “left his senses on this issue.”
The New York Times’s James Reston called the bombing offensive “war by tantrum”—and perhaps on good evidence. His colleague William Beecher, the Times’s military correspondent, had filed a dispatch reporting that in the course of demanding renewed bombing, the president had been “throwing stuff against the wall.”16
At dinner on the first night of the attack, Nixon had talked in an astonishing vein in front of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Moorer, Henry Kissinger, Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter Alice Longworth, Pat and Julie, and the columnist Richard Wilson. He said, Wilson recalled, that he “did not care if the whole wide world thought he was crazy in resuming the bombing. If it did, so much the better. The Russians and Chinese might think they were dealing with a madman and so had better force North Vietnam into a settlement before the world was consumed in a larger war. . . .”
It was the Madman Theory again, four years after Nixon had first proposed frightening the Communists with the notion that t
he man with “his hand on the nuclear button” could not be restrained “when he’s angry.”17
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Two months earlier, before the November landslide, Haldeman had made a remarkable diary entry following a meeting with the president. Nixon, he noted, had “made the interesting point that after the election we will have awesome power with no discipline, that is, there won’t be another election coming up to discipline us.”
One item on the agenda was revenge. “I want the most comprehensive notes on those that have tried to do us in,” Nixon had told John Dean. “. . . they didn’t have to do it . . . they are asking for it and they are going to get it. . . . We have not used the power in this first four years. . . . We have never used it . . . things are going to change now.”
There were also grandiose plans for the future. Early in December, Nixon ordered immediate action on three political projects. He wanted his brother Edward to run for Congress in Washington State; Tricia’s husband Edward Cox to run in New York; and Julie’s husband David Eisenhower in Pennsylvania. Was he attempting to emulate the Kennedys and found a dynasty of his own?
During the Christmas recess Dean met for lunch with the chief counsel of the House Judiciary Committee, Jerome Zeifman. What did Zeifman think, Dean inquired, of Nixon’s chances of persuading Congress to repeal the two-term limit on the presidency? “Sometimes,” Zeifman responded, “I wonder if your boss is demented.”
Life’s Hugh Sidey, an authority on the presidency, reported that after the election Nixon had gone “to the mountaintop at Camp David and read Arnold Toynbee for ideas about how to carry his administration to greater heights. He mused about how he might wage a campaign to rescind the 22nd Amendment and run for a third term.”
Should Nixon not succeed in extending his presidency, Jeb Magruder was to write, he intended to “control the Executive Branch of the government by establishing ‘a perpetual presidency.’ He was so convinced that his kind of administration was better for the country than anything the Democrats could offer, that he wanted to be able to pick his successors.”
Nixon’s choice as his heir, he told several people, was former Texas governor John Connally.18 With him in the White House, Nixon hoped, he himself would retain effective control of foreign policy.
Such great expectations were nonetheless shot through with anxiety. “In the Oval Office that December of 1972 I saw a very troubled man,” recalled James Keogh, summoned by Nixon to discuss his appointment as director of the United States Information Agency. “I left the office concerned because I could see that he was troubled . . . he, as a perceptive man, already knew how serious the road ahead was for him.”
The president’s fears, like those of his namesake who had reigned over fifteenth-century England, were driven by dreams and portents. Late in 1972, Ehrlichman remembered, “a strange shudder—a premonition?—went through the people near the President. . . . He had been getting messages via Rose Woods from Billy Graham and Jeane Dixon, among others, that his life was in danger. . . . the soothsayers had him worried.”
As early as a month after the Watergate arrests, Nixon himself had glimpsed the future and turned away. “I had a strange dream last night,” a recently released tape shows he confided to Haldeman. “It’s going to be a nasty issue for a few days. I can’t believe that—we’re whistling in the dark—but I can’t believe that they can tie the thing to me. . . .”
40. The palace guard, in the Oval Office. Bob Haldeman is in the foreground, John Ehrlichman at the far end of the table. Dwight Chapin (standing) thought his boss would be “the greatest president in history.”
41. The president with Attorney General John Mitchelle, his “political right arm.”
42. An ally, and a deal. Nixon with Teamsters Union leader Frank Fitzsimmons. Fitzsimmons got a (conditional) pardon for his jailed predecessor, Jimmy Hoffa, while Teamsters money flowed to the Nixon White House.
43. Hard hats on a table in the White House—there was a special one for Nixon—during a 1970 visit by construction workers’ leaders. Their members had recently attacked antiwar demonstrators.
44. In 1971, Nixon and Haldeman discussed using Teamsters thugs to beat up antiwar demonstrators and “smash some noses.” Two days earlier assailants had broken the nose of Abbie Hoffman. “. . . they got him . . .” Haldeman now told the president.
45, 46. Nixon visited South Vietnam to encourage U.S. troops. At home, in l970, he rushed out in the middle of the night to meet with demonstrators at the Lincoln Memorial, then had his valet make a speech in the deserted House of Representatives.
47, 48. Nixon’s crowning achievement was the breakthrough to China, marked by the meeting with Mao Zedong in early 1972. Months later, he became the first American president to visit Moscow. At the first of three meetings with Leonid Brezhnev, he concluded a historic arms limitation agreement.
49. Henry Kissinger, national security adviser and later secretary of state, was the helmsman of Nixon’s foreign policy. He saw “Walter Mitty” dimensions in the president's personality.
50. Chile’s President Salvador Allende, shortly before he was found shot dead on the day of his overthrow by General Augusto Pinochet. “The Nixon administration wanted a violent coup,” according to a senior CIA official.
51, 52. The president and (left to right) Haldeman, Kissinger, and Stephen Bull midway through his first term. Determined to win reelection, Nixon put his trust increasingly in covert operations run by special assistant Charles Colson. “We did a hell of a lot of things,” Colson said, “and never got caught.”
53.Break-in at the Watergate, spring 1972
54. Gordon Liddy made the plans.
55. Howard Hunt recruited the burglars.
56. James McCord testified that he planted bugs.
57. Louis Russell, who had worked with Nixon on the Hiss case, admitted he was “watching” that night.
58.What was the motive for the break-ins? Democratic Party chairman Lawrence O’Brien had knowledge of several matters that could damage Nixon.
59.Secret 1: Republican sabotage of peace talks, using Anna Chennault, in 1968.
60.Secret 2: Nixon had taken money from the Greek dictatorship, through his friend Thomas Pappas.
61.Secret 3: The reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes had not been seen or photographed for years. Yet he still aspired to control politicians, and Nixon had taken his money.
62.Secret 4: Heidi Rikan said she had been “a call girl at the White House.” Both Democrats and Republicans had reportedly used a brothel near the Watergate.
63. The mighty fallen. Haldeman and Ehrlichman—convicted on obstruction of justice, conspiracy, and perjury charges—went to jail.
64. The Watergate grand jury’s evidence went to the House Judiciary Committee in two locked briefcases. The jury named the president as an “unindicted coconspirator.”
65. Nixon’s secretary, Rose Woods, demonstrated how, she claimed, she might accidentally have erased a key Watergate tape. Special Prosecutor Jaworski believed the culprit was Nixon.
66. A president out of control. At New Orleans, in the fall of 1973, Nixon grabbed press secretary Ron Ziegler, whirled him around, and shoved him toward reporters. His speech and gestures that day led to press speculation that he was either drunk or drugged.
67. End game, 1974. The House Judiciary Committee voted three articles of impeachment, charging Nixon with offenses warranting trial and removal from office. He avoided facing the charges by resigning.
68, 69. Supporters and opponents took to the streets.
70, 71, 72. As Nixon’s presidency collapsed, there were unprecedented fears and precautions. Defense Secretary James Schlesinger (below left) ordered that any military orders emanating from the White House were to be checked with him. Air Force General George Brown told the Joint Chiefs (above) there were fears of “some sort of coup.” Nixon’s aide Alexander Haig (below right) said he feared improper action only by the Congress, not the armed services.
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73, 74. Resignation, August 9, 1974. Pat held back her tears as Nixon made a rambling speech to the staff about his father and his mother—and the importance of never giving up. He bade farewell, in defeat, with the V for Victory sign.
75. In his first months of “exile,” Nixon came close to death when a blood clot moved from an inflamed vein in a leg to one of his lungs. He was thus spared from appearing as a witness at the Watergate cover-up trial.
76. He remained isolated in San Clemente, with only a handful of aides, for many months afterward.
77. Over the years, Nixon gradually recovered from his disgrace, remaking himself in the image of an elder statesman. He thought his White House meeting with President Clinton, in 1993, “the best I have had since I was president.”
78. When Pat died in June 1993, her husband’s grief was obvious. Holding his hand at one point on the day of the funeral, unrecognized by the press, was the psychotherapist Dr. Hutschnecker.
79, 80. After his death at age eighty-one, in April 1994, Richard Nixon made the cover of Time for the fifty-sixth time. He had made a final strenuous journey, to Russia, the previous month. The gravestone honors him as he would have wished, as a peacemaker.
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We kept one step ahead of the sheriff . . . that’s what we’re doing.