Part 22 (1/2)
Neither the Chicago nor the Cairo attacks were recorded as a subject of presidential concern. The most recent Gallup poll said 61 percent of Americans approved of the job Nixon was doing. Only 11 percent disapproved. Still, the president ordered a full-dress PR offensive for the occasion of his one hundredth day: ”We can, of course, a.s.sume now that the opposition will be yelping on our heels on that date.”
The first foreign policy crisis of Richard Nixon's presidency hit on April 15. North Korea shot down a navy reconnaissance plane forty-eight miles from its sh.o.r.es only four months after President Johnson had negotiated for the release of the imprisoned crew of the USS Pueblo. Pueblo. National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger was pus.h.i.+ng to bomb an airfield in response. That would be risky, Secretary of State William Rogers, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, and Joint Chiefs chairman Earle ”Bus” Wheeler all warned. Forces weren't in place for the operation, and even if they were, such an attack could ignite a second Asian ground war. Haldeman and Ehrlichman pointed to politics: flyboy heroics would keep them from framing the new administration as ready to wind down the war in Vietnam-especially after Kissinger answered their question as to what would happen if the situation escalated: ” National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger was pus.h.i.+ng to bomb an airfield in response. That would be risky, Secretary of State William Rogers, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, and Joint Chiefs chairman Earle ”Bus” Wheeler all warned. Forces weren't in place for the operation, and even if they were, such an attack could ignite a second Asian ground war. Haldeman and Ehrlichman pointed to politics: flyboy heroics would keep them from framing the new administration as ready to wind down the war in Vietnam-especially after Kissinger answered their question as to what would happen if the situation escalated: ”Vell, it could go nuclear.” it could go nuclear.”
Kissinger, who had just had his first meeting with Soviet amba.s.sador Anatoly Dobrynin, told the president the administration wouldn't get anywhere without a show of force-”They will think you are a weakling.”
Nixon ruminated. He was in the kind of spot he hated: a situation he couldn't control. He ended up doing nothing on Korea; he couldn't. For the first time, the public witnessed President Nixon lose his cool. In a press conference on April 18, in answer to the question ”Mr. President, now that you have had about three months in a position of presidential responsibility, do the chances of peace in Southeast Asia seem to come any closer at all?” he called South Vietnam ”South Korea” three times.
”They got away with it this time,” he told Henry Kissinger, ”but they'll never get away with it again.” The next day, he regained his sangfroid, and the respect of his national security adviser, by green-lighting the next rain of steel on Cambodia, Operation Lunch.
Nixon had become president to play this poker game of world diplomacy. He and Kissinger had an entire novel vision of international order, one defined not by Cold War categories of good versus evil, but by metaphors of control: balance of power, equilibrium, structure of peace. balance of power, equilibrium, structure of peace. They learned early that control was not easy to achieve. Then they raged at what they could not control. They learned early that control was not easy to achieve. Then they raged at what they could not control.
Nixon had auditioned Kissinger in a suite at the Hotel Pierre on Fifth Avenue after the election. Kissinger agreed that foreign-policy decision-making should be centered in the White House, bypa.s.sing the old Establishment in the State Department. Nixon's choice as secretary of state, William Rogers, was a member of that Establishment, a former colleague of Tom Dewey's, a legal adviser to the Was.h.i.+ngton Post. Was.h.i.+ngton Post. He had also been a confidant of Nixon's since the 1940s-the man Nixon had gone to for advice on how to handle the Establishment during his slow, soiling humiliations. Perhaps that was why Nixon singled out his secretary of state for systematic humiliation again and again. Kissinger was glad to oblige-once spreading the rumor that Rogers was a ”f.a.g” who kept a hot, young stud in a Georgetown town house. He had also been a confidant of Nixon's since the 1940s-the man Nixon had gone to for advice on how to handle the Establishment during his slow, soiling humiliations. Perhaps that was why Nixon singled out his secretary of state for systematic humiliation again and again. Kissinger was glad to oblige-once spreading the rumor that Rogers was a ”f.a.g” who kept a hot, young stud in a Georgetown town house.
No one would have predicted that they would have become close partners: Nixon, the hard-line Cold Warrior since the days of Alger Hiss; Kissinger, a former Kennedy administration official and Nelson Rockefeller's foreign-policy right-hand man. But Richard Nixon's thinking had been changing in the years he was distant from government. Freed from playing demagogue to a domestic audience, traveling, absorbing, reflecting, he started to take (a favorite phrase) ”the long view”-thinking less like a Cold War evangelist and more like a European balance-of-power realist. Which was what Henry Kissinger was. Upon Nixon's return from Asia in 1967, he attended the annual late-July retreat at Bohemian Grove, where Republican power brokers did silly Boy Scout rituals before a forty-foot stone owl and listened to daily afternoon, off-the-record ”Lakeside Talks.” Nixon would later say his own talk was his favorite speech of any he ever gave. Communism was no longer ”monolithic”; the Soviet Union was on the verge of strategic parity with the United States; the booming capitalist economies of j.a.pan, Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia would have more to do with checking the spread of revolution in Asia than any American saber rattling; you couldn't export American democracy to the third world anyway. ”Diplomatically we should have discussions with the Soviet leaders at all levels to reduce the possibility of miscalculations and to explore the areas where bilateral agreements would reduce tensions.” It sounded like what Kissinger had gotten Rockefeller to say in '68-that in ”a subtle triangle with Communist China and the Soviet Union, we can ultimately improve our relations with each, as we test the will for peace of both.”
These were heresies of a sort, certainly to the right-wing Republicans Nixon had been courting since 1964. He delighted in the heretic's role. One role model was Charles de Gaulle-an unsentimental amoralist, a gutsy, unconventional diplomatic chess player: granting independence to Algeria, loosening ties to the United States, inching toward the accommodation with the Soviet Union he labeled ”detente.” De Gaulle's influence had shaped Nixon's 1967 Foreign Affairs Foreign Affairs article ”Asia After Vietnam,” with its a.s.sertion that ”the role of the United States as world policeman is likely to be limited in the future”; that diplomats should encourage ”a collective effort by the nations of the region to contain the threat themselves.” article ”Asia After Vietnam,” with its a.s.sertion that ”the role of the United States as world policeman is likely to be limited in the future”; that diplomats should encourage ”a collective effort by the nations of the region to contain the threat themselves.”
Nixon's press conference subst.i.tution of ”sufficiency” for ”superiority” seemed hardly a slip of the tongue: he wanted Leonid Brezhnev to bid farewell to Old Nixon, who'd spoken of ”Dean Acheson's College of Cowardly Communist Containment.” Balancing nations' interests against each other, vouchsafing stability even at the price of apparent moral inconsistency, now seemed the highest good. His belief that this was moral was signaled by his choice of Oval Office furniture: Woodrow Wilson's desk. He also rationalized it in terms of his mother's piety, and the Quaker concept of ”peace in the center.”
Kissinger came to similar intellectual conclusions from different roots: from the trauma of growing up Jewish in n.a.z.i Germany. He once told an interviewer what it was like to flee with his parents in 1938 at the age of fifteen: ”All the things that had seemed secure and stable collapsed, and many of the people that one had considered the steady examples suddenly were thrown into enormous turmoil themselves and into fantastic insecurities.” Warding off insecurity became the highest good-a psychic inclination tailor-made for appreciation of the great European intellectual tradition of balance-of-power thought. The subject of his dissertation was the Congress of Vienna of 1815, which locked into place a system of reciprocal recognition that produced stable power alignments for almost a century. It was the kind of achievement he hoped, with Nixon, to create in the here and now.
Still, they made an unlikely pairing. Kissinger was even on the record as once opining that Richard Nixon ”was not fit to be president.”
But then, Kissinger was as ruthless a b.a.s.t.a.r.d as any Nixon had seen. Each appreciated how the other played the game. That was another place where their minds met.
After Rockefeller lost the nomination, Kissinger became an informal adviser to the Paris peace talks, indispensable because he had French contacts in Hanoi. The Johnson team trusted him implicitly. They shouldn't have. Kissinger was the double agent feeding the intelligence to Nixon that let him scotch the peace deal before the election.
Kissinger understood his boss's psyche better than anyone else. Their psyches were actually quite similar, which also brought them together: Kissinger was a fuming outsider, a Bismarckian who was also Orthogonian.
He had transferred from City College to Harvard, with pretensions of becoming a gentleman. But a Jew couldn't become a gentleman at Harvard; not in the 1940s. He was brilliant enough to be named a professor there. But he seemed to have to work twice as hard as anyone else to earn tenure. He cultivated high manners, perfect taste, social connections, savoir faire. (His great anxiety in the White House was losing cachet with his former Harvard colleagues.) He counted slights from Establishment patrons. Revering and resenting the same men brought Nixon and Kissinger together. So, too, a rage at Kennedys: Kissinger had resigned his position in McGeorge Bundy's NSC because he felt unappreciated and unwelcome.
He was a prima donna. He didn't like having a boss. He was famous for volcanic temper tantrums when Rockefeller's speechwriters fiddled with his prose: ”When Nelson buys a Pica.s.so, he doesn't hire four housepainters to improve it!” Together Nixon and Kissinger revolutionized American foreign affairs across a Shakespearean tangle of mutual manipulation, affection, and resentment.
Nixon issued National Security Decision Memo 2 during the inauguration parade. The doc.u.ment disbanded the group within the State Department that checked the NSC. That made Kissinger the most powerful foreign policy officer in history. It also produced a paradox. Nixon and Kissinger had given themselves more single-handed control over foreign affairs than any other two men in American history. They fetis.h.i.+zed the secrecy of their deliberations more than any other two officers in American history as well. It promised them control-and made those things they could not control all the more enraging: the secrets that slipped their containment chambers, the negotiating miscues, the battlefield blunders, the public relations setbacks. It made them all the more susceptible to losing emotional emotional control. control.
Blunt Helen Thomas of UPI asked the second question of the first Nixon press conference: ”Mr. President, now that you are president, what is your peace plan for Vietnam?” Now, surely, there wasn't a moratorium on an answer.
His response was somehow both short and meandering, merely repeating proposals already on the table. Senator McGovern, with a former college professor's faith in the power of reason and dialogue, had gone to the White House to meet Henry Kissinger and suggest a plan: since our involvement was a disaster and a mistake, couldn't Nixon just say that his predecessors Kennedy and Johnson had committed troops in good faith, but that events had shown that commitment no longer consistent with the national interest? Kissinger allowed that the war had been a mistake. But he said America couldn't pull out because the right wing would go crazy: ”We couldn't govern the country.” Thus did George McGovern become one of the first in a long line of Americans to be gobsmacked by the realization that Richard Nixon's pledge back in New Hamps.h.i.+re-”new leaders.h.i.+p will end the war and win the peace in the Pacific”-would not mean anything dramatic if it would mean anything at all.
Another man surprised to learn that Nixon's inauguration did not mean an early Vietnam withdrawal was Stewart Alsop. Alsop met with William Rogers and made the opposite point as Kissinger: that without without some quick announcement of a pullout of, say, fifty thousand or one hundred thousand, and an end to the bombing, the president would find it impossible to govern-just like Lyndon Johnson. ”I'd rather not comment on that,” Secretary Rogers said nervously, adding that Nixon eventually intended to stop the bombing of North Vietnam. But what Nixon did or didn't intend was never something that Rogers was privy to. some quick announcement of a pullout of, say, fifty thousand or one hundred thousand, and an end to the bombing, the president would find it impossible to govern-just like Lyndon Johnson. ”I'd rather not comment on that,” Secretary Rogers said nervously, adding that Nixon eventually intended to stop the bombing of North Vietnam. But what Nixon did or didn't intend was never something that Rogers was privy to.
On February 21 Kissinger received five scenarios from experts on how to end the war. One of them was ”technical escalation” to atomic, biological, or chemical weapons. Something more proximate they were considering was mining Haiphong Harbor, the economic lifeline of North Vietnam, to ”jar the North Vietnamese into being more forthcoming at the Paris talks.”
The president's second press conference, on March 4, included broad hints about troop drawdowns. The talk in Was.h.i.+ngton was over the notion of effecting national reconciliation by extending amnesty to draft resisters; deep within the White House, the talk was of changing draft eligibility from seven years to a single year. At his press conference the president was asked if he thought he ”could keep American public opinion in line if this war were to go on for months and even years.” He replied, ”Well, I trust that I am not confronted with that problem, when you speak of years.” His first budget proposed a reduction of defense spending from 45 percent of the budget to 37 percent, $1.1 billion below Lyndon Johnson's; as part of the economy move, Defense Secretary Laird announced a 10 percent cut in B-52 raids. ”Public pressure over the war,” the New York Times New York Times reported, ”has almost disappeared.” reported, ”has almost disappeared.”
That was Nixon's first one hundred days. A remarkably successful public relations campaign selling the new presidency as a magnanimous respite from a cacophonous era of division. A popular set of moves to clamp down on dissent, greeted by a media Establishment newly eager to kowtow to a conservative ”Middle America” as eminently responsible. Already, a secret escalation of the Vietnam War. Already, Nixon's own grand dreams that he could make the world order anew, bring new peace and stability to the globe.
And already, a refusal by a paranoid president to believe that the media's acceptance of him as a responsible leader had happened at all. Already, a palimpsest of lies.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.
Trust THE TRUST IN P PRESIDENT N NIXON MIGHT HAVE BEEN SHAKEN SOMEWHAT on Day 101, when the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee repeated something he had first said in 1966: time to declare victory and go home. ”Common sense should tell us that we have now accomplished our purpose as far as South Vietnam is concerned,” Vermont's George Aiken proclaimed, recommending ”orderly withdrawal.” It might have been shaken more on May 9, when after six straight days with nothing on the front page of the on Day 101, when the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee repeated something he had first said in 1966: time to declare victory and go home. ”Common sense should tell us that we have now accomplished our purpose as far as South Vietnam is concerned,” Vermont's George Aiken proclaimed, recommending ”orderly withdrawal.” It might have been shaken more on May 9, when after six straight days with nothing on the front page of the New York Times New York Times about the war, a tiny item in the bottom right corner obscured by a feature on Governor Rockefeller's art collection revealed that bombing was taking place in Cambodia. about the war, a tiny item in the bottom right corner obscured by a feature on Governor Rockefeller's art collection revealed that bombing was taking place in Cambodia.
But the trust wasn't shaken much. In a May 14 TV speech the president announced, ”The time is approaching when the South Vietnamese will be able to take over some of the fighting fronts now being manned by Americans,” proposing simultaneous mutual withdrawal of U.S. and North Vietnamese forces. (He counted on short memories, having charged in 1966, ”Communist victory would most certainly be the result of 'mutual withdrawal.'”) Columnists vied with each other to predict the drawdown numbers: fifty thousand, one hundred thousand, even two hundred thousand. Gallup was about to announce Nixon's approval rating at 64 percent. Maybe, a nonplussed public concluded-if any had noticed the Times Times' dispatch-Cambodian bombing was what it took to bring the horses into the barn.
Henry Kissinger was not nonplussed. On the morning of the ninth, a Germanic screech rang out from the porch of the Key Biscayne Hotel: ”Outrageous! Outrageous!...We must crush these people! We must destroy them!”
Kissinger referred to the secretaries of defense and state, whose offices he suspected had leaked Operation Menu to the Times. Times. He rang up Melvin Laird, pulling him off the golf course at Burning Tree: ”You son of a b.i.t.c.h!” (Laird hung up.) Or maybe the leak had come from the NSC office in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the White House. The thought of a runaway staff was enraging to Kissinger-not just for diplomatic reasons, but for what it suggested to the security-obsessed bulldogs around Nixon about an NSC top-heavy with Harvard grads and Kennedy vets. He rang up Melvin Laird, pulling him off the golf course at Burning Tree: ”You son of a b.i.t.c.h!” (Laird hung up.) Or maybe the leak had come from the NSC office in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the White House. The thought of a runaway staff was enraging to Kissinger-not just for diplomatic reasons, but for what it suggested to the security-obsessed bulldogs around Nixon about an NSC top-heavy with Harvard grads and Kennedy vets.
The Cambodia article wasn't even d.a.m.ning. It was flattering. flattering. The subject of ”Raids in Cambodia by U.S. Unprotested” was how nicely the Cambodian government was cooperating, and that ”there is no Administration interest at this time in extending the ground war into Cambodia or Laos.” The subject of ”Raids in Cambodia by U.S. Unprotested” was how nicely the Cambodian government was cooperating, and that ”there is no Administration interest at this time in extending the ground war into Cambodia or Laos.”
That wasn't the point. The point was that Kissinger and Nixon feared the White House's secrets were being betrayed.
Kissinger called J. Edgar Hoover and told him it was time to move forward on a project they had discussed: wiretaps of Laird, Laird's senior military a.s.sistant, and three NSC staffers, including Morton Halperin. Thus did the FBI learn about such things as Mrs. Halperin's concern for the surgery of a relative in New York, and the Halperin boys' favorite playmates-and that, when reporters asked Mr. Halperin to leak Kissinger statements, he steadfastly refused. The tap on Mel Laird was more productive; from it Kissinger drew a bead on the activities of a hated bureaucratic rival. What he didn't find was any leakers. So he had wiretaps extended to encompa.s.s two more NSC staffers.
A reporter was next. This time, however, it wasn't Kissinger working through the FBI. The president wanted to monitor Henry Kissinger. So John Ehrlichman called on John Caulfield, a new addition to the White House staff, a former detective on New York's version of the Red Squad who'd known Nixon since he'd protected him on the campaign trail in 1960. Caulfield called a friend, who'd worked sweeping Nixon's hotels for bugs during the 1968 campaign. Together, they cased the target's Georgetown town house and told Ehrlichman the job would be difficult. Ehrlichman insisted they try anyway, because national security was at stake. So they scrounged up some phone company credentials and s.h.i.+mmied up a pole to affix a bug to the reporter's phone wire. He was Joseph Kraft, the same journalist who'd lectured his fellow media professionals to stop coddling liberals. But he also was Henry's favorite journalist friend, and Nixon needed to know what his foreign-policy right-hand man was up to. Which was only fair. Kissinger was already working toward opening an entirely separate channel to glean what secrets Nixon might be keeping from him.
The rage for control was spreading as the myths of American tranquillity that rang in the administration began unraveling one by one.
Parents' weekend at Cornell University began on April 18. At 5:30 a.m. a custodian came across three Afroed students carrying wires, chains, knives, and a crude bayonet to Willard Straight Hall, the student union, where a banner reading WELCOME PARENTS WELCOME PARENTS was strung across the threshold. Around back other students demanded employees arriving for work relinquish their keys and leave the premises, smacking one in the face. Then they barricaded the doors and windows as a third group entered through a terrace and a fourth commandeered the campus radio station. was strung across the threshold. Around back other students demanded employees arriving for work relinquish their keys and leave the premises, smacking one in the face. Then they barricaded the doors and windows as a third group entered through a terrace and a fourth commandeered the campus radio station.
Parents slumbering in the guest rooms were roused by Negroes in Black Panther berets: ”Your lives are in danger; you had better get out fast!”
”The black man has risen!”
One father called security. The first question he was asked was whether the intruders ”were white or black.” He replied that they were black and was told, ”Do as they tell you. If they'll let you out, go out. Don't argue with them.”
Cornell was the Berkeley-style ”multiversity” among the Ivies. Its president, James Perkins, shared much with Berkeley's Clark Kerr, including a desiccated procedural-liberalism ideology that fetis.h.i.+zed reasoned negotiation. Which made the going tough when things got unreasonable. As in 1965, when Cornell students shouted down Averell Harriman as an ”agent of imperialism.” Or, in 1967, when 130 students blockaded marine recruiters, and the Undergraduate Judicial Board voted four to three not to discipline them.
Perkins was proud of his civil rights credentials. Eight Negro students had attended Cornell in 1963. By the 196869 school year, he had recruited 250. He had also a.s.signed officials to negotiate with the school's Afro-American Society for the establishment of some kind of black studies program. That drew praise from the New York Times: New York Times: ”With the rise of black consciousness, many colleges are under pressure to start programs in black history and culture, but none have come so far and fast as Cornell.” ”With the rise of black consciousness, many colleges are under pressure to start programs in black history and culture, but none have come so far and fast as Cornell.”
It wasn't nearly far and fast enough for the Afro-American Society. In early 1968 a visiting economics professor said that in the ghetto ”there are no pleasures except those satisfying lower tastes.” Militants took over the economics department to demand his firing. That same day Martin Luther King was shot. At Cornell University's memorial service for the slain champion of nonviolence, AAS members lined up to outmau-mau each other: ”Maybe it's time time we started defending our homes and families from this vicious honky,” one screamed. ”When this honky drives through your neighborhood like they are going to do tonight, and they start shooting at your houses, brothers and sisters, we started defending our homes and families from this vicious honky,” one screamed. ”When this honky drives through your neighborhood like they are going to do tonight, and they start shooting at your houses, brothers and sisters, you shoot back and you shoot to kill! you shoot back and you shoot to kill!...Now if you honkies think you bad enough to f.u.c.k with us, just try it!”
Black militants began browbeating less militant blacks-those who roomed with whites, for example-into tears. Two factions fighting for leaders.h.i.+p of the AAS chased each other around a university building with chains and knives. The Times Times article praising Cornell's racial progress appeared October 29, 1968; two days later, on Halloween, black students kidnapped a white liberal, took him out into the woods, and verbally abused him for his whiteness while menacing him with a knife. The administration discouraged him from pressing charges. As Tom Hayden once said of liberal college administrators, ”Listening to them is like being beaten to death with a warm sponge.” article praising Cornell's racial progress appeared October 29, 1968; two days later, on Halloween, black students kidnapped a white liberal, took him out into the woods, and verbally abused him for his whiteness while menacing him with a knife. The administration discouraged him from pressing charges. As Tom Hayden once said of liberal college administrators, ”Listening to them is like being beaten to death with a warm sponge.”
The board of trustees promised a black studies program by the next school year and set aside building s.p.a.ce. The AAS promptly commandeered the proposed building and refused to let any other university unit inside (the administration responded by granting them the building). The charter they filed for black studies banned white faculty, staff, or students and demanded student control of the board, power over degree requirements, a budget of $250,000 with $50,000 in an ”emergency fund” available ”at all times”; exclusive use of a student union dining room; payment of black students' tuition directly to the new ent.i.ty; and ”full control over the admission of black students to Cornell University and the allocation of financial aid.” Thereupon Perkins stood, as he believed it, firm, insisting state law prevented him from banning whites, as much as he might be convinced that was reasonable.
Perkins thought he was negotiating. He couldn't recognize his adversaries were playing an entirely different game.
The militants had embraced a revolutionary dialectic. Escalating demands, impossible to meet, served ”the objective of raising the level of awareness among blacks” to that of the vanguard, which would come to share with the vanguard ”another objective, the destruction of the university-if not its complete destruction, at least its disruption.” Issue unreasonable demands, and ”the beast we are dealing with will use all the means at his disposal to maintain control of power.” That would reveal the fascism behind the liberal facade.
Even ”the average honkie can be a tool if we know how to use him,” a planning doc.u.ment declared. The militants certainly used Perkins. ”Mr. Perkins,” a spokesman told him, ”don't think that we think the better for you because you're chairman of the United Negro College Fund, because we know that all n.i.g.g.e.r lovers think well of the black colleges, because that's where they want us all to be.” They gave him a deadline of December 10 to sign off on their demands. Instead, Perkins made a counteroffer. Laughing, militants responded by rus.h.i.+ng the main dining room, dancing on the tables, then dumping thirty-seven hundred books at circulation desks of the campus libraries because ”these books have no relevancy to me as a black student.”
Perkins responded by announcing he would not restrain them so long as they were ”peaceful”-though an AAS militant had already punched out a newspaper reporter. On December 17 militants met with Perkins in his office. One student put his arm around him and scowled, a knife handle sticking out of his jeans.
On February 28 President Perkins rose to introduce Allard Lowenstein at a symposium on South Africa. A student rushed the lectern and lifted Perkins by the collar. Another stood by with a two-by-four strapped to his belt. Perkins couldn't believe it. He thought the black students were his friends. In the middle of April the trustees approved the Center for Afro-American Studies, but also announced punishment for three students who'd partic.i.p.ated in the December disruptions. Thus did the takeover begin. It was announced as retaliation for the punishment-though it began fifteen minutes before before the judgment was announced. the judgment was announced.