Nixon Volume III

Ruin and Recovery 1973-1990

Stephen E. Ambrose

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781481424134
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Biografías políticas

In Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973-1990, Stephen E. Ambrose completes his acclaimed biography of the man many historians call the most fascinating politician in American history: Richard Milhous Nixon. Rarely before on the stage of global politics has one man, respected and reviled, blessed and cursed, held us in such rapt attention. Using Nixon's own words, private writings, and tape-recorded conversations, Ambrose captures the man and all his contradictions as he faces the ordeal of Watergate and its aftermath, the long road back to public life.Watergate is a drama with high stakes and low skullduggery, of lies and bribes, of greed and lust for power. At its center is the obsession of the country and much of the world with President Richard Nixon himself. It is a remarkable play of foolhardy heroism as Nixon risked everything trying to maintain dignity and his job, when he alone had the power to determine the outcome of the scandal, whether by resigning, confessing, destroying evidence or defying the courts and Congress.Ambrose explains how Nixon destroyed himself through a combination of arrogance and indecision, allowing a "third-rate burglary" to escalate into a scandal that overwhelmed his presidency.Yet even after his self-exile from Washington and the Republican Party, even after the national outcry that sealed his shame, Nixon would not go gentle into oblivion. Ambrose provides an unforgettable portrait of the older Nixon in San Clemente, drawing on his seemingly endless reserves of determination, laying the groundwork for yet another comeback, a return to the arena that would defy all odds. Ambrose illuminates all the hidden years, and we see Nixon's gradual transformation from pariah to valued elder statesmen, respected internationally and at home even by those who had earlier clamored loudest for his head. This is the story of Nixon's final fall from grace and astonishing recovery.

CHAPTER ONE

THE NEW AMERICAN REVOLUTION AND TROUBLES IN VIETNAM

November-December 1972

ON NOVEMBER 7, 1972, Richard Milhous Nixon won a landslide victory in the presidential contest by a staggering 61 to 39 percent. This was the climax to twenty-six years of campaigning. His re-election, however, was a personal triumph only. The Republican Party lost, as the Democrats held onto their control of both houses of Congress.

The two victories, by the Republicans in the presidential race and by the Democrats in the congressional races, dominated American politics over the following twenty-two months, a period characterized by more bitterness, divisiveness, and pure hatred than any since Reconstruction. The unanticipated, the unwelcome, and the unimaginable became the norm.

This unhealthy situation came about: Because of the way Nixon had conducted his re-election campaign, which left his opponents furious; because of ethically questionable and possibly illegal acts carried out by his men during his first term, which left him vulnerable; because of the long-drawn-out retreat from Southeast Asia, which left the hawks with no incentive to defend him and the doves with feelings of bitterness over the death and destruction that had marked the period 1969-72 in Vietnam; because of Nixon’s determination to take on not only the Democrats but the basic structure of American government; and because of Nixon’s deep-rooted, long-standing anger at his opponents, real and imagined, which led him to ill-considered and ill-tempered outbursts, which in turn goaded his opponents into extremism, thus raising the stress on the already badly battered body politic.

His anger was exacerbated because he knew that in the war that lay ahead, he had some serious weaknesses. Although he had that 61–39 vote, and although he had done a magnificent job on the politics of his problems in the 1972 campaign, all the problems remained. He did not have peace in Vietnam, and the 93d Congress was not going to give him any funds to continue the war. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had refused his order to help him cover up the June 1972 break-in by men working for his re-election committee at the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex in Washington. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the courts, and some reporters were pressing various investigations into Watergate, and the Democrats in control of the 93d Congress could hardly wait to get organized and begin investigations of their own.

Nixon, on election night 1972, could anticipate that despite his overwhelming victory, the Democrats, the bureaucracy, the media, and the courts were all going to go after Watergate and other issues from his first term as hard as they could. And Nixon knew, better than any other individual in the country, how much there was in the Watergate break-in affair and other first-term activities for them to find.

So, on election night 1972, Nixon could not enjoy his triumph. He was not planning how to bring people together, to create a consensus behind his program, but rather how to destroy his enemies before they destroyed him. In his own immortal phrase, “They are asking for it, and they are going to get it.”

That was going to be the real theme of his second term, if Nixon could get his way.

NIXON’S announced program for his second term was so ambitious he dared to call it nothing less than the “New American Revolution.” Although the phrase contained some element of typical Nixonian hyperbole, what he proposed to do was certainly sweeping, even breathtaking. He gave an outline in an interview with Garnett Horner of the Washington Star-News on the Sunday before the election; it was published the day after the election.

In some places, Nixon sounded like a leader rallying his people for a protracted war. He called for a return to the rigors of self-reliance to replace the “soft life” and said he hoped to use his second term to lift the nation out of a “crisis of the spirit.” He vowed to work to end “the whole era of permissiveness” and to nurture “a new feeling of responsibility, a new feeling of self-discipline.”

Nixon believed the nation had become pampered and indulged, that its character had been weakened. “The average American,” he said, “is just like the child in the family. You give him some responsibility and he is going to amount to something. He is going to do something.

“If, on the other hand, you make him completely dependent and pamper him and cater to him too much, you are going to make him soft, spoiled, and eventually a very weak individual.”

In explaining his thoughts, Nixon drew on the comparison he saw between himself and the nineteenth-century British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli. He had been reading Robert Blake’s biography of Disraeli, recommended to him by Professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan of Harvard. “My approach,” Nixon explained, “is that of a Disraeli conservative—a strong foreign policy, strong adherence to basic values that the nation believes in and the people believe in, and to conserving those values, and not being destructive of them, but combined with reform, reform that will work, not reform that destroys.”

His “strong foreign policy” was designed to ease tensions in the post-Vietnam War world. He had begun the process in his first term, with the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I), the opening to China, and the movement in the Paris peace talks toward a cease-fire in Vietnam. He intended to follow up vigorously. His first priority was SALT II, “which will be more important than SALT I” because it was going to establish tighter limitations on strategic weapons. Next came a European Security Conference and, in a parallel channel, the Mutual Balanced Force Reduction (MBFR) talks, designed to reduce conventional forces in Europe. Equally important was to “continue the dialogue with the People’s Republic of China [the PRC].” He intended to work for peace not only in Vietnam but also in the Middle East.

In a word, détente, or an easing of tensions, around the world. Whether he could develop a constituency for such fundamental changes remained to be seen. He had failed to do so in the preceding four years. Liberals and left-wingers continued to regard anything Nixon proposed with the greatest skepticism, while conservatives and right-wingers were deeply suspicious of détente in general and Nixon’s specific proposals in particular. He had not consulted with the military before signing SALT I, which made the Joint Chiefs unhappy. They were also upset by Nixon’s proposed peace settlement in Vietnam, because Nixon had dropped his demand that the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) withdraw from South Vietnam.

On the domestic side, Nixon’s plans were equally ambitious. He told Horner he intended to reduce drastically the size and scope of the federal government, which he said, “is too big and it is too expensive.” The bureaucracies were “too fat, too bloated.” He intended to “shuck off’ or “trim down” the Great Society programs of the 1960s, and to carry out a major reorganization of the executive branch of the government.¹

In three words, a “New American Revolution.” Like any revolution, it was sure to arouse opposition. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, especially those designed to help poor and minority kids, had their defenders; indeed, they constituted a majority in the Congress. Entrenched interests, headed by Congress and supported by the congressional staffs, the lobbyists, the corporations that did business with the government and the federal bureaucracy, regarded any attempt to reorganize the government with skepticism and suspicion.

Nixon, with a mandate from the people, was ready to take them all on—the Joint Chiefs, the right wing, the left wing, the entrenched interests. He knew it would be the biggest battle of his political career. He intended to win it, and thereby reshape the nation, its government, and its foreign policy.

He was in good physical shape to do battle—fifty-nine years old and in excellent health. Although he was constantly chiding himself, rightly, for not getting sufficient exercise, he kept his weight down. He had not missed a day’s work due to illness in his entire first term (and very few throughout his career). He took no vitamins nor any medication. He went to Bethesda, Maryland, for a post-election physical examination; emerging from the hospital, he said jokingly, “They told me I feel fine.”²

Mentally, he was gearing himself up. In his own view, he had too often been weak in his first term, had too often allowed the bureaucrats to subvert or sabotage his program, had too often accepted compromises proposed by his department heads rather than insist on his bold initiatives. He resolved, in the second term, to take control, to act tough, to be tough.

He got started the day after the election. At 11 A.M. he met with the White House staff. The members were still a bit groggy from the victory celebrations of the night before. Nixon had a toothache. To his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, he appeared withdrawn, “grim and remote.” Kissinger sensed his mood accurately: “It was as if victory was not an occasion for reconciliation but an opportunity to settle the scores of a lifetime.” Nixon gave perfunctory thanks to the staff, before announcing that the first order of business was to reorganize. “There are no sacred cows,” he declared, then changed the metaphor: “We will tear up the pea patch.”

He gave his thinking. He told them that while rereading Blake’s Disraeli, he had been struck by Disraeli’s description of Gladstone and his Cabinet as “exhausted volcanoes.” He was not exhausted, he went on; he was determined to avoid the “lethargy that had characterized [President Dwight] Eisenhower’s second term. . . .” Then he strode out of the room.

His chief of staff, H. R. “Bob” Haldeman, took over. He passed around mimeographed forms on which he told the staffers to list all the documents in their possession. Then he said that each man present was to submit his resignation immediately.³ At noon, Nixon and Haldeman repeated the performance in a meeting with the Cabinet.

Had Nixon waited, the resignations would have come in over the next month or so, voluntarily, as was customary. As it was, his actions and his obvious anger bemused and confused his closest associates, men who had worked diligently and enthusiastically for his re-election. They had expected to be thanked; instead, they got slapped. Director of Communications Herb Klein, who had been with Nixon on mornings after election day since 1946, knew him well enough to expect a letdown of some kind, but even Klein was appalled: “I found this post-election act the most disheartening, most surprising, and most cruel of all. . . . It was ungrateful and it was bitterly cold.”⁴ Kissinger was bothered by “the frenzied, almost maniacal sense of urgency about this political butchery,” and by the way Nixon conveyed “in his hour of triumph an impression of such total vindictiveness and insensitivity. . . .”⁵

That afternoon, Nixon flew to his vacation retreat at Key Biscayne, Florida. Accompanying him on Air Force One were his wife Pat, his daughters Julie Eisenhower and Tricia Cox, his sons-in-law David and Edward, his friend Bebe Rebozo, his secretary Rose Mary Woods, and Kissinger, Haldeman, and his domestic adviser John Ehrlichman. For the next few days, while the others swam and soaked up the sun, Nixon, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman worked on the details of the reorganization.

That was a small group for such a big task. Nixon’s isolation bothered some of his supporters. Robert Finch, an old friend and former Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) in the first Nixon Administration, was one. He called Woods and asked her to tell the boss not to announce or leak any decisions he made without first at least pretending to consult with the Cabinet and party leaders. As Woods put it in a memo for Nixon, “He said even if you have decided exactly what you are going to do he feels it is imperative that nothing be put out until it appears that you have given the people concerned ‘their day in court.’ ”⁶

Leaks came anyway. At the end of the first full day in Key Biscayne, a “high Administration source” told Robert Semple of The New York Times that Nixon’s restructuring of the federal government would “further increase the authority of his own Executive Office and accelerate a long-term decline in the power of the Cabinet.”⁷ A few days later the same newspaper, citing “senior officials,” said the goal was to decentralize the machinery of government while centralizing the policy-making process, which would be taken “out of the departments and moved to the White House, where it is much more difficult for Congress and the public to trace how the decisions are made.”⁸

Charles Colson, a special assistant to the President, was one of those slated to have his resignation accepted, primarily because of his close association with E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, who were under indictment for their role in the break-in to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters at the Watergate apartment complex in June. Colson, typically, was blunt about what was going on at Key Biscayne: “Haldeman and Ehrlichman are in a major power grab.”⁹

NIXON’S most immediate problem was not reorganizing the government, or taming the bureaucracy, or promoting SALT II, but Vietnam. On the eve of the election, Henry Kissinger had announced that as a result of his negotiations in Paris with North Vietnamese envoy Le Due Tho, “Peace is at hand.” But although the North Vietnamese had indicated they were ready to sign the agreements worked out in October—which provided for a “National Council of Reconciliation” composed equally of Communists and anti-Communist members, a cease-fire, the return of the American prisoners of war, and the right of 160,000 members of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) to remain in place in South Vietnam—President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam had protested bitterly over what he regarded as a sellout, even a surrender, and refused to sign or accept the agreements. The fighting went on.

Nixon wanted to stop it, for many obvious reasons. He, or at least Kissinger, had promised that the fighting was all but over. Détente could not be fully implemented until the war ended. The war was a major drain on the budget. It exacerbated the divisions among the American people; it threatened to tear the country apart. And it could not be won. Nixon had withdrawn all ground combat troops in his first term. The Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) was incapable of driving the NVA out of South Vietnam. Nixon’s options were to increase the level of bombing in North Vietnam and extend the target list to include the Hanoi-Haiphong complex, or persuade/force Thieu to accept the agreement.

The bombing option, however, had little appeal, especially after “peace is at hand.” How could Nixon explain to the American people a bombing campaign against North Vietnam when it was South Vietnam that refused to accept the agreement? Bombing Hanoi was not going to get the NVA out of South Vietnam. Escalation on the ground via the reintroduction of American combat units might work, but that was unthinkable, because of domestic politics, and in fact was never considered.

So Nixon turned on Thieu, whose objections to the agreement he regarded in any case as unfounded. Thieu said that the National Council represented the coalition government the Communists had always demanded; Nixon thought that was poppycock. He called the Council a facade, a consulting body without power or purpose. Thieu wanted the NVA out of his country; Nixon knew that was impossible. Thieu wanted guarantees that no North Vietnamese would cross the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ, which...