One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon Read Online Free PDF Page B

president was sure who the boss was: Richard Nixon.
    “This is treason,” said the president of the United States. “They’re contacting a foreign power in the middle of a war.” If not treason, it was a federal crime for a citizen to conduct private diplomacy with a foreign government against the interests of the United States.
    “We know what Thieu is saying to them,” LBJ rasped, his tobacco- and whiskey-cured voice thickened by a cold. “They ought to know that we know what they’re doing. We know who they’re talking to. I know what they’re saying.… If Nixon keeps the South Vietnamese away from the conference, well, that’s going to be his responsibility. If they don’t want it on the front pages, they better quit it.”
    Nixon got the word from Republican allies in the Senate that LBJ was on to him. He telephoned the president at 1:54 p.m. on Sunday, November 3, and denied everything. “My God,” Nixon said, “I would never do anything to encourage Saigon not to come to the table.”
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    The Paris peace talks were scuttled. Philip Habib, a senior State Department diplomat at the peace table, thought that the war in Vietnam would have ended if Nixon had not sabotaged the talks.
    “The deal was cooked. And then something happened. Somebody got to Thieu on behalf of Nixon and said, ‘Don’t agree, don’t come to Paris,’” Habib, who went on to serve loyally under Nixon, recollected years later. “I’m convinced that, if Humphrey had won the election, the war would have been over much sooner.”
    Had the election been held that Sunday, Humphrey might well have won, as the polls reflected. But peace was no longer at hand. On Monday, November 4, preelection polls showed the pendulum of popular opinion swinging back to Nixon.
    That afternoon, the president conferred with Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford, and National Security Adviser Walt Rostow. The voting booths would open in a matter of hours. The question was whether to reveal Nixon’s treachery. The problem was twofold: the charge was explosive and the evidence secret. Could the nation handle the disclosure that Nixon was playing a double game with the lives of American soldiers? Or that the U.S. government was spying on the president of South Vietnam?
    “I do not believe that any President can make any use of interceptions or telephone taps in any way that would involve politics,” Rusk told the president. “The moment we cross over that divide we are in a different kind of society.”
    Nor could the electorate tolerate a last-minute political bombshell of this magnitude. If Nixon won, the revelation could destroy him before he was sworn into office.
    “Some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I’m wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story,” Clifford said. “It could cast his whole administration under such doubts that I would think it would be inimical to our country’s interests.”
    The president and his advisers kept their silence. Election Day came and went. Not until dawn the next day did the result become clear. Nixon had won by a margin of fewer than half a million votes, a narrow plurality, not a ringing majority: 43.4 percent of the vote to Humphrey’s 42.7 percent, with the racist ex-governor of Alabama, George C. Wallace, putatively a Democrat, winning 13.5 percent. Not since 1912 had a president been elected with less of a popular mandate.
    The price of victory was immeasurable. Nixon had scuttled the chance for peace in Vietnam in order to win.
    The president confronted Nixon in a telephone call on November 8. “These messages started coming out from here that ‘Johnson was going to have a bombing pause to try to elect Humphrey’ and that they ought to hold out because ‘Nixon will not sell you out,’” LBJ told the president-elect. “Now, that is the story, Dick. And it is a sordid story.”
    Nixon always