NIXON WAS FEELING CONFIDENT in the summer of 1972. He repeatedly told the public he was demanding a full and vigorous investigation of the Watergate break-in. Most people believed him. After the Republican Convention that August, Nixon led Democratic nominee George McGovern by a lopsided 64–30.
When Kissinger prepared to return to Paris for talks with the North Vietnamese, Nixon emphasized that he was in no hurry to end the war. “Henry, you tell those sons of bitches that the president is a madman and you don’t know how to deal with him. Once re-elected I’ll be a mad bomber.”
The message got through. Leaders in Hanoi knew Nixon was almost certain to win another term. And when Nixon said he’d be the mad bomber, they believed him. It was time to cut a deal. All along, the North Vietnamese had been demanding the removal from power of President Thieu’s government in South Vietnam. Now they decided to drop that demand. This quickly led to a breakthrough. Kissinger agreed to the complete withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam. In exchange, Le Duc Tho agreed to a cease-fire and the return of American prisoners of war.
December 1972. Henry Kissinger meets with North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho in Paris during negotiations to bring an end to the Vietnam War.
It was a cynical bargain on both sides. “The most important thing was the American withdrawal,” Tho’s top aide later said. With American forces gone, Hanoi would have time to remove Thieu in its own way. Kissinger realized this, of course. And he knew that when the fighting flared up again, Nixon would likely resume the American bombing missions.
But in the meantime, Nixon could declare he had finally achieved “peace with honor.”
Kissinger flew back to Washington with the good news. He and the president celebrated with a bottle of French wine and steaks from the White House kitchen.
There was only one problem—no one had bothered to consult with President Thieu.
When Kissinger flew to Saigon to brief the South Vietnamese president, it did not go well. Thieu blasted the deal, and was especially enraged that North Vietnam would be allowed to keep its troops in the South.
“The South Vietnamese people will assume that we have been sold out by the United States,” he complained to Kissinger, “and that North Vietnam has won the war.”
Kissinger reminded Thieu that Nixon had stuck it out in Vietnam for four bloody years. “Had we wanted to sell you out,” he said, “there have been many easier ways by which we could have accomplished this.”
Unmoved, Thieu demanded a total of sixty-nine modifications to the deal.
Kissinger called the list “preposterous.” He assured Thieu that the United States was not abandoning South Vietnam, that Nixon would continue the bombing as long as necessary. The tense visit ended without agreement.
When it was over, Thieu turned to his press secretary and said, “I wanted to punch Kissinger in the mouth.”
* * *
On election night, Nixon ate dinner with his family at the White House. An hour later, he felt something in his mouth crack—a cap had snapped off one of his front teeth. He had to go on television in a few hours. A dentist hurried over to fix the tooth.
Nixon then sat in the Lincoln Sitting Room, his tooth throbbing, as election returns began coming in. It was a landslide of historic proportions. Nixon carried forty-nine states, winning more than 60 percent of the vote to McGovern’s 37 percent.
It was a moment to savor. Instead, Nixon grappled with a sense of foreboding.
“I am at a loss to explain the melancholy that settled over me on that victorious night,” he later wrote. “Perhaps it was caused by the painful tooth. To some extent the marring effects of Watergate may have played a part.”
Nixon’s cover-up was holding, but possibly not for long. Hunt, Liddy, McCord, and the four men from Miami were all facing felony charges for the break-in. Their trial was set to begin in January—just like Ellsberg’s. Meanwhile, reporters at the Washington Post were digging closer and closer to the real story, and the FBI, in spite of Nixon’s efforts, was still investigating. The shadow of secrets still to be revealed darkened Nixon’s night.
So did the ongoing crisis in Vietnam. Soon after the election, Nixon wrote to President Thieu. “I repeat my personal assurances to you that the United States will react very strongly and rapidly to any violation of the agreement.”
Nixon was promising to continue the bombing. It wasn’t good enough. Thieu insisted on his modifications to the deal. Kissinger brought the proposals to Paris, knowing there was zero chance they would be accepted by the North Vietnamese. In a meeting with Le Duc Tho, Kissinger quipped that he had accomplished the impossible: he had unified Vietnam.
“Both North and South Vietnam hate me now.”
Tho was not laughing. North Vietnam had no intention of renegotiating points that had already been settled. “If these are your last, unchangeable proposals,” he told Kissinger, “settlement is impossible.”
Kissinger hinted that Nixon was likely to respond militarily.
“Threats have no effect on us!” Tho shouted. “We have been fighting against you for ten years. Our people will never give up.”
The peace deal was on the brink of collapse. Nixon and Kissinger were livid with Thieu, but he was an ally. So they turned their fury on the North.
“We have no choice,” Kissinger advised, “but to step up our bombing as a means of making them agree.”
* * *
On the night of December 18, the lights in Hao Lo prison suddenly went out. There were now nearly four hundred American prisoners crammed into the Hanoi Hilton, many held in groups in large, concrete cells.
Lying in their bunks, the men heard the sharp shriek of air-raid sirens. And then, distant at first but growing louder, the thunder of the engines of American bombers.
“Atta boy!” shouted a prisoner.
“Sock it to ’em guys!”
Seconds later the walls started shaking. Plaster fell from the ceiling. The prisoners jumped out of bed and cheered. The guards, brushing rubble from their hair, shouted for quiet.
“They are trying to kill you!” a guard cried.
“No,” said one of the pilots, “they’re not trying to kill us.”
Outside the prison walls, massive bombs fell on the city. The air raid lasted all night. “The bombers kept coming,” James Stockdale later wrote, “and we kept cheering.”
“Let’s hear it for President Nixon!” the men shouted.
From a small window high in the wall of his cell, Everett Alvarez watched the dancing light of fires burning in downtown Hanoi.
Perspective is everything.
“Despair. Horror.” That was Daniel Ellsberg’s response to the renewed bombing—the “Christmas Bombing” as the press dubbed it. Over the next twelve days, American bombers struck Hanoi and Haiphong with twenty thousand tons of explosives.
The Washington Post called the campaign “savage and senseless.”
“War by tantrum,” said the journalist James Reston.
As the angry reaction intensified worldwide, Richard and Pat Nixon spent a lonely Christmas in their Key Biscayne home. Kissinger defended the attacks, pointing out that American planes were targeting military and industrial targets. Some bombs accidently hit homes and a hospital, but Kissinger dismissed the civilian deaths as hardly worth notice.
“Perhaps no more than four hundred to five hundred civilians were killed,” he said.
Fifteen more American planes were shot down, the crews killed or dragged to prison camps.
But in any case, Kissinger told the press, the bombing was North Vietnam’s fault.
While bombs fell in the North, Nixon sent a blunt note to President Thieu in the South: the United States was going to make a deal with or without his consent. Thieu quietly indicated more flexibility. The bombing ended on December 30.
“If both sides now return to the attitude of good will shown in October,” Kissinger cabled to the North Vietnamese, “the remaining problems can be rapidly solved.”
Hanoi was willing to talk. Kissinger returned to Paris.
“It was not my responsibility,” he said, reaching to shake hands with Le Duc Tho. “It was not my fault about the bombing.”
“You have tarnished the honor of the United States,” replied Tho.
* * *
On January 8, 1973, Daniel Ellsberg was given a standing ovation when he spoke at an antiwar rally in Los Angeles. It was one of the last demonstrations against the Vietnam War.
In Paris, Kissinger and Tho worked out a peace deal—essentially the same deal they had agreed to in October. On January 9, Nixon’s sixtieth birthday, Kissinger cabled the news to Washington. Nixon called it the best birthday present he’d ever gotten.
He knew, of course, that his South Vietnamese allies were unhappy. Privately, he promised President Thieu that American involvement in Vietnam would not end. “You have my assurance,” he wrote, “that we will respond with full force should the settlement be violated by North Vietnam.”
* * *
A week later Judge Matthew Byrne sat in a green leather chair behind a raised bench in a large, windowless Los Angeles courtroom. Sandy-haired with long sideburns, the forty-two-year-old judge had a reputation for intelligence and fairness. He knew the whole country was watching the trial that was finally under way. He knew it could make his career.
In the jury box sat ten women and two men. The rows of spectators’ benches were packed with reporters and war protestors and a few curious celebrities. Patricia Ellsberg sat in the first row. At a long table, sitting with their lawyers, were Tony Russo and Daniel Ellsberg.
In a two-hour opening statement, prosecutor David Nissen told the jury that Russo and Ellsberg were unquestionably guilty of damaging America’s national security. Projecting slides on the courtroom’s wood-paneled wall, he discussed each charge, illustrating step-by-step how the defendants had committed theft and espionage.
For Ellsberg, the seriousness of the stakes really hit home. “The odds,” he told a reporter, “are in favor of my spending a long time in prison.”
* * *
A little after three thirty in the afternoon of January 22, Lyndon Johnson woke from a nap in the bedroom of his Texas ranch. Feeling intense pain in his chest, he grabbed the phone and called the Secret Service agents assigned to the ranch.
“Send over whatever agent is on duty.”
Alarmed by the agony in Johnson’s voice, two agents rushed to the bedroom. They found him on the floor. He was not breathing. Johnson was flown to an army hospital in San Antonio, where he was pronounced dead of a heart attack.
* * *
The next day, in Paris, Kissinger and Le Duc Tho initialed the deal to end the Vietnam War.
That night President Nixon announced the historic news. “I have asked for this radio and television time,” he began, “for the purpose of announcing that we have today concluded an agreement to end the war and bring peace with honor in Vietnam.”
Nixon outlined the deal, and thanked the American people for their support. He ended with a tribute to the fallen president.
“In his life, President Johnson endured the vilification of those who sought to portray him as a man of war,” Nixon said. “But there was nothing he cared about more deeply than achieving a lasting peace in the world.”
There was no mention, in his tribute, of Nixon’s efforts to undermine Johnson’s peace talks four years before. No mention that since then more than twenty thousand Americans had died in Vietnam—all to achieve a lousy deal that allowed North Vietnam’s army to stay in the South, making a lasting peace impossible. No mention that neither Nixon nor Kissinger expected their “peace with honor” to actually end the killing.
“I came away from the January negotiations,” Kissinger later noted, “with the feeling that we would have to bomb the North Vietnamese again in early April or May.”
* * *
In a Washington courtroom a week later, G. Gordon Liddy stood with his arms folded, his face impassive, as the clerk read the jury’s verdict: guilty on eight counts related to the Watergate break-in. Moments later James McCord was also found guilty. Howard Hunt and the four men from Miami had already pled guilty.
All seven faced long prison sentences—but only for the Watergate break-in. So far, no one had talked about earlier jobs.