In the final weeks of the campaign, Johnson jump-started the stalled peace talks, ordering a bombing halt to bring Hanoi back to the table. Fearing such an “October surprise,” Nixon employed Anna Chennault, widow of famed World War II general Claire Chennault, as his liaison with the South Vietnamese government. Johnson put her under surveillance and determined in late October that she was telling South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu to withdraw from the talks because he would receive better terms from Nixon. Johnson considered Nixon’s behavior treasonous. But lacking ironclad proof, Humphrey foolishly declined to expose Nixon’s machinations. “Johnson was furious,” White House aide Joseph Califano reported. Not exposing Nixon’s “treason,” Johnson believed, had been “the dumbest thing in the world,” proving that “Hubert had no balls, no spine, no toughness,” and it cost Humphrey the presidency.10
With less than a week to go in the campaign, Thieu and Vice President Ky did indeed pull out of the talks, sealing Humphrey’s fate. Years later, Chennault, who cochaired Republican Women for Nixon, confessed her role. Until that discovery, just days before the election, Johnson provided little assistance to Humphrey, believing that Nixon would more likely continue his Vietnam policies. Humphrey, he feared, would seek peace at any price. Johnson even had the FBI tap Humphrey’s phones so he would get advance notice if Humphrey planned to openly oppose the war.
Nixon had another source of information. Harvard Professor Henry Kissinger had been a close advisor to New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Nixon’s foe in the Republican primary. When Nixon won the nomination, Kissinger sneered, “The man is… a disaster… he can’t be elected—or the whole country would be a disaster.” He told others, “That man is unfit to be president.”11 That, however, didn’t deter him from offering Nixon secret information about the Paris peace talks that Nixon used to sabotage the negotiations. He alerted Nixon to a major breakthrough in early October that made a bombing halt imminent. The U.S. delegation in Paris, he reported, had “broken open the champagne.”12
Kissinger simultaneously ingratiated himself with the Humphrey camp. He told Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Look, I’ve hated Nixon for years,” and offered to give Humphrey access to Rockefeller’s Nixon “shit files.”13 Humphrey naively believed that Kissinger was working for him and later said that he had planned to name him as national security advisor.
Nixon had little interest in domestic policy, which he once dismissed as “building outhouses in Peoria.”14 His domestic programs catered to moderates, alienating hard-core conservatives. It was foreign policy where he hoped to make his mark. He and Kissinger decided to bypass the “impossible fags”15 in the State Department and run foreign policy out of the White House. Nixon chose his secretary of state accordingly: he selected an attorney, William Rogers, who told Nixon that he knew little about foreign policy. Nixon confessed, “It was that ignorance that made the job his.”16 Kissinger cracked, “Few Secretaries of State can have been selected because of their President’s confidence in their ignorance of foreign policy.”17 Kissinger made sure that Rogers was kept out of the loop on critical intelligence and decision making. The Nixon/Kissinger policies proved less ideological than many expected. “American-style democracy,” Nixon declared in 1967, “is not necessarily the best form of government for people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America with entirely different backgrounds.”18 He advised Kissinger to disregard Africa. “Henry,” he said, “let’s leave the niggers to Bill [Rogers] and we’ll take care of the rest of the world.”19
During the transition period, Kissinger commissioned the RAND corporation to come up with a set of policy options on Vietnam. RAND assigned Daniel Ellsberg, who had just completed work for Robert McNamara on a secret study of U.S. involvement in the war that would later gain fame as the Pentagon Papers. In drafting his options, Ellsberg refused to include a nuclear option, on principle, or a win option, because he thought victory impossible.
Ellsberg’s second report, NSSM 1, posed a series of questions. In response, the Joint Chiefs of Staff stated that the absolute best the United States could hope for was to control South Vietnam in eight to thirteen years, but at a tremendous cost in dollars and lives. Facing that prospect, Nixon decided to quickly end U.S. involvement, but he insisted on ending it on his terms—“with honor”—even if that meant laying waste to much of Southeast Asia in the process.20
Nixon gradually shifted the burden of fighting from U.S. troops, whose numbers had peaked at 543,000, to U.S.-trained and equipped Vietnamese, but he made it clear to Hanoi that this did not indicate a lessening of resolve. He first intensified the bombing in South Vietnam and Laos and then, in March 1969, began bombing North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia.
Nixon wanted to make it clear that he refused to be constrained by previous limits and might act irrationally if provoked. In explaining his “madman theory” to Bob Haldeman in 1968, he highlighted the value of nuclear threats.21
Nor was it always clear that he was just bluffing. After briefing then Vice President Nixon about nuclear weapons, J. Robert Oppenheimer told a friend that he had “just come from a meeting with the most dangerous man I have ever met.”22 Nixon had, in fact, supported using atomic bombs to bail out the French at Dien Bien Phu.
Fearing a massive public outcry over the bombing of Cambodia, the administration devised an elaborate system of dual target reporting to erase the evidence. Each afternoon, Major Hal Knight, who commanded the radar site at Bien Hoa Air Base, was given alternate targets to pass on to his pilots, who were sworn to secrecy. Neither the radio operator who called in the strike reports nor the intelligence officers who logged in the reports knew that the original targets in Vietnam had not been bombed. Knight, knowing that his actions were in violation of the Military Code of Justice, finally informed Congress in 1973.23
When the New York Times exposed the bombing of sanctuaries in Cambodia in April 1969, Kissinger called Laird a “son of a bitch” and accused him of leaking the story. Nixon, equally furious, ordered J. Edgar Hoover to wiretap three of Kissinger’s top aides, one defense official, and four journalists. Others would later be added to the list.24