“AREN’T YOU JUST AS GLAD it’s all over, though?” Richard Nixon asked an aide the next day.
“I think it’s good to have it over.”
“This guy ain’t going to be the big hero,” Nixon added.
Daniel Ellsberg would be in the spotlight a little longer, though. After a night of celebration, Ellsberg and Russo answered questions at a packed press conference the next morning. Russo told reporters he was going to turn his attention to the effort to impeach President Nixon. Ellsberg agreed with the goal of impeachment. “But I personally have thought enough about Richard Nixon,” he said, “and I hope never to think about him again.”
Asked his opinion of what the trial had accomplished, Ellsberg gave an answer that applied to everything he’d done—everything he’d risked—since his decision to begin copying the Pentagon Papers.
“Telling the truth,” he said, “the very painful truth.”
He ended by saying that he was looking forward to resuming a quiet life of researching and writing, with much less attention from the press. “It’s been a good relationship we’ve had over the last several years,” he joked, “but it’s over now. I’m going back to my wife.”
* * *
Two weeks later, Everett Alvarez, James Stockdale, and hundreds of former POWs sat in an auditorium at the State Department. They had been invited to Washington, D.C., for a celebratory dinner at the White House later that evening. Nixon welcomed the men, thanked them for their heroic service—and couldn’t resist getting in a shot at Daniel Ellsberg.
“And let me say, I think it is time in this country to quit making national heroes out of those who steal secrets and publish them in the newspapers.”
The men jumped up and cheered.
The clip made the TV news the next morning. “It’s not easy to be fully relaxed,” Ellsberg told a journalist, “while watching the president make that kind of attack on you.”
But if Nixon had any more plans in store for Ellsberg, he never got the chance to enact them. Dealing with the ever-expanding Watergate scandal was taking all his time. At Senate hearings, John Dean testified that he had talked with the president more than thirty times about details of the cover-up. The assistant who had set up Nixon’s secret recording system also testified, describing in detail how it worked. Both Congress and Watergate prosecutors asked Nixon for the tapes. He refused to hand them over.
* * *
Not a moment of peace resulted from Nixon’s “peace with honor.”
The North Vietnamese immediately began moving more troops and weapons from North to South. “If the Communists dare put a foot in our zones, we will kill them,” President Thieu told the people of South Vietnam. The violence erupted again, with both sides going on the attack. Communist forces began gaining ground.
Nixon and Kissinger wanted to resume the American bombing. Watergate tied their hands. In June, both the House and Senate approved bills to block all funds for U.S. military activities in Vietnam. Nixon was too politically weak to veto the bill.
“With every passing day, Watergate was circumscribing our freedom of action,” Kissinger, the one person unscathed by scandal, later said. “We were losing the ability to make credible commitments, for we could no longer guarantee congressional approval.”
Ellsberg, a self-described “Watergate junkie,” watched the drama speed toward its climax. He had risked everything to help end the American war in Vietnam. What struck him now was the realization that, in a winding and utterly unpredictable way, he might have accomplished his goal. “Nixon’s effort to get me was the foundation of Watergate,” Ellsberg reasoned. “And without Watergate, I think Nixon might have been able to keep up the bombing of Vietnam indefinitely.”
Henry Kissinger tended to agree. “If it were not for domestic difficulties, we would have bombed them,” he said in September. “This is now impossible.”
* * *
On the night of August 8, 1974, Richard Nixon sat at his desk in the Oval Office. Around him, crews adjusted lights and cameras, setting up for the president’s final broadcast.
The Supreme Court had ruled unanimously that Nixon must turn over his White House recordings. The tape of Nixon and his staff plotting to use the CIA to block the FBI’s investigation of the Watergate break-in proved to be the smoking gun prosecutors were looking for. Here was irrefutable proof that Nixon had personally orchestrated the cover-up.
Nixon’s approval rating plunged to 26 percent. The House Judiciary Committee voted 27–11 in favor of impeachment. The full House was preparing to vote on impeachment, and Nixon was going to lose. That’s when he decided to take a step no American president had ever taken.
A few minutes after nine o’clock, the light on the camera facing Nixon’s desk glowed red. He was on the air.
“Good evening,” Nixon began. “This is the thirty-seventh time I have spoken to you from this office, where so many decisions have been made that shaped the history of this nation.”
He told Americans that his preference was to complete the term to which he’d been elected, but that he longer had enough support to continue. “Therefore,” he announced, “I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow. By taking this action, I hope that I will have hastened the start of that process of healing which is so desperately needed in America.”
August 9, 1974. Nixon addresses his staff before leaving the White House for the last time.
After the speech, Kissinger and Nixon walked together toward the president’s living quarters. In a subdued voice, Kissinger said that history would one day rank Nixon among the great presidents.
“That depends, Henry, on who writes the history.”
Nixon officially resigned the next day. His vice president, Gerald Ford, was sworn in as president. Nixon thanked the White House staff, and said goodbye to Ford.
“Good luck, Mr. President,” Nixon said, shaking Ford’s hand.
“Thank you, Mr. President.”
Outside, under a low gray sky, Richard, Pat, and Tricia Nixon walked along a red carpet to a waiting helicopter. Nixon climbed the steps, turned, smiled, and raised his arms in a final salute. The blades of the helicopter began to whirl. As they rose into the air, the family looked down at the city. Gerald Ford and the White House staff stood on the lawn, still waving.
Richard Nixon’s letter resigning the presidency of the United States.
Nixon leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes.
* * *
On the morning of June 29, 1975, Philip Caputo was awakened by the sounds of falling bombs. Ten years before, Caputo had been one of the first marines to see combat in Vietnam. Now thirty-three, with a wife and two sons, he was back in Vietnam, this time as a journalist, covering the final battle for Saigon. It would all be over soon, that much was clear.
North Vietnamese units were shelling the city from just two miles away. Fires raged and the roads out of Saigon were jammed with refugees and water buffaloes pulling overloaded carts and crying children searching for parents and retreating South Vietnamese soldiers.
There was another explosion. The walls of Caputo’s hotel room trembled.
“They’ve just passed the word,” announced a fellow reporter, his ear to a radio. “That’s it. It’s one-hundred percent evacuation. It’s bye-bye everybody.”
Anticipating the worst, American authorities had set up evacuation points for its citizens. Caputo moved quickly through the chaotic streets to one of these spots and crowded onto one of several waiting buses, packing in with about seventy other journalists and U.S. embassy officials. With shells exploding all around, the bus sped to a military airbase and stopped in front of a complex that had once been General Westmoreland’s headquarters. A bomb slammed into the runway as they ran for the nearest building.
Marine transport helicopters swooped down, landing on the nearby tennis courts.
“Let’s go!” a sergeant hollered, “Drop all your luggage. No room for that. Move! Move! Move!”
Caputo let his suitcase fall and ran onto the tennis courts. Crouching marines, their machine guns aimed outward, guarded the landing zone as about sixty people shoved onto each helicopter. Caputo got a spot and felt the chopper climbing quickly to get above the range of enemy rockets. “My mind shot back a decade,” he later recalled, “to that day we had marched into Vietnam, swaggering, confident, and full of idealism.”
A total of 58,193 Americans died in Vietnam. Over 300,000 were wounded. The number of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed since 1964 was estimated to be at least two million. The United States had dropped a total of eight million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—more than three times the total dropped by American planes during World War II. Thousands of unexploded bombs and mines would continue to kill and maim civilians in the years ahead.
U.S. personnel leave Saigon under North Vietnamese fire.
Lyndon Johnson said, “I’m not going to be the first American president to lose a war.”
Richard Nixon said, “I will not be the first president of the United States to lose a war.”
In a way, each accomplished his goal. On June 30, 1975, when North Vietnamese troops crashed through the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon and raised their flag above the city, Lyndon Johnson lay in a Texas cemetery. Nixon was home in California, in disgrace. It fell to Gerald Ford to inform the American people that the country had just lost its first war.
“The evacuation has been completed,” Ford told the nation. “This action closes a chapter in the American experience.”