Read Online One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon by Tim Weiner - Free Book Online Page A

words, not weapons—“and even politicians such as Frank Church and Howard Baker.” Church and Baker were U.S. senators. Church was a liberal Democrat who sponsored the first major bipartisan moves against the war. Baker was the Republican who famously asked at the 1973 Watergate hearings, “What did the president know and when did he know it?”
    The FBI and NSA taps, like so much that would come to torment Nixon, were all about the war abroad and the war at home. No one ever said it better than Haldeman himself: “Without the Vietnam War there would have been no Watergate.”
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    Nixon’s greatest domestic enemy was the peace movement, which rose with every American who fell in Vietnam. By the end of March 1969, that death toll had reached 33,641, surpassing that of the Korean War.
    That same week, Nixon devoted one of his first major public statements to the growing demonstrations on college campuses across the country. “This is the way civilizations begin to die,” Nixon said. “The process is altogether too familiar to those who would survey the wreckage of history: assault and counterassault, one extreme leading to the opposite extreme, the voices of reason and calm discredited.
    “As Yeats foresaw, ‘Things fall apart. The center cannot hold,’” he warned. “None of us has the right to suppose it cannot happen here.”
    Many knew by heart the next lines of the Irish poet’s “The Second Coming,” written months after World War I ended.
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.
    The president and his speechwriters rarely wove poetry into their political rhetoric, but this verse was apt. Nixon really did fear anarchy in America. The American people truly were weary of the blood-dimmed tide. And the four-star generals genuinely feared Nixon would fall apart in the face of the growing opposition to the war.
    “The subject of U.S. casualties is being thrown at me at every juncture: in the press, by the Secretary of Defense, at the White House and on the Hill,” General Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote to General Abrams in Saigon on April 3. “I am concerned that decisions could be made in response to strong pressure inside and on the administration to seek a settlement of the war.” Both men had been commanders in World War II under General Eisenhower, who had died the week before, on March 28. Like Ike, they wanted to fight and win. But these were men who had won their stars commanding soldiers in a war of unconditional surrender; their tanks and their artillery and above all their thinking about how to fight a war were rusty. America’s generals were confounded by Asian guerrillas. They did not trust Nixon to lead them to victory. The mistrust was mutual.
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    The president led a National Security Council meeting the week of Eisenhower’s death, seeking a way to end the American role in the war before the year was over. The CIA’s director, Richard Helms, gave his unvarnished analysis. Two weeks of nonstop B-52 bombing in Cambodia had had no visible impact on North Vietnam’s military capabilities. The leaders of South Vietnam were not leading their own soldiers. It was pointless to send more American troops into battle without a strategy.
    “We need a plan,” the president said. “We are working against a time clock. We are talking six to eight months.”
    “We must get a sense of urgency in the training of the South Vietnamese,” Nixon continued. “How do we de-Americanize this thing?” De-Americanize meant using Asians to fight Asians while pulling out Americans, changing the color of the anticommunist corpses on the battlefield.
    Secretary of Defense Laird thought it was the wrong word, too negative. He said, “What we need is a term— Vietnamizing —to put the emphasis