The Bridges

 CHAPTER 7

  The Bridges

THE PERSONAL and intellectual inclinations of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger probably had a greater impact on the policymaking process than those of their immediate predecessors because they strove more vigorously to subordinate the bureaucracy's perceptions and interests. To a large extent they succeeded, and the manner in which they did so is of crucial importance. Most credit must go to Kissinger; from early 1969, he built bridges and barricades all across Washington.

The highest barricades were erected against William Rogers and Melvin Laird and the departments of State and Defense. The principal bridges were to Nixon, to his principal aides, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, to carefully chosen leaders of Congress, to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and to a certain section of the press. Of these the most enduring was the one to the press. It was a fine and careful structure, thrown with confidence across the gap that separated the new White House from the liberal denizens of Georgetown in Washington.

Washington is the only capital city in the world where information is so freely available that political and diplomatic reporting can be done without the gift of “access.” But paradoxically, Washington is also the city where “access” is both most easily obtained and most treasured. Kissinger understood from the start that many of the town’s best-known journalists consider themselves essential to the business of government.

When they are critical, it is in the most intimate sense; their comments are intended to disrupt their relations with the men at the center of the opinions they seek to interpret and convey. In the early, uncomplicated days before Watergate, younger men modeled their careers and "investigative reporting" became fashionable.

Kissinger knew some of these journalists before he came to Washington. He seems to have appreciated that they could provide him with the constituency that he, unlike the heads of great departments, lacked. Soon after the Inauguration he told his staff that he alone would leak information to reporters. He made one exception: anyone could talk to Time magazine for a cover story that was being planned on him. He began to cultivate some journalists socially and others privately.

The lavishly furnished house of Joseph Alsop in Dumbarton Avenue in Georgetown epitomized the nature of the journalistic elite. Alsop's views on the war were straightforward; he supported coercion. Although an abrupt man, he was cultured and he served fine food and wine; his invitations were prized. Kissinger was soon a frequent guest, invited far more than Melvin Laird or William Rogers. His wit, his apparently modest and self-deprecating irony, his exquisite charm, a willingness to discuss high matters of state after dinner, and the apparent confidence he exuded—all this made him irresistible. He was quickly recognized throughout Georgetown as one of the oasis in this tour, rather hostile to the administration of bond salesmen, advertising executives and zony lawyers.

Behind their backs, Kissinger was often contemptuous of individual journalists—he regaled his staff with accounts of their ignorance and their willingness to have information spoon-fed to them—but to their faces he was delightful, and he had a highly developed way of persuading each one, whatever his views, that he respected him enormously and agreed with him. Few reporters were able to resist the flattery of the discreet murmur, “I wouldn’t trust this information with anyone else but . . . ,” or the unexpected phone call, “I would like you alone to know that . . .” Each was convinced that he and Kissinger had a special relationship. Joseph Kraft (who was wiretapped by Ehrlichman) said later, “He would always deal with me as though I was responsible and all the rest of the colleagues in the press were irresponsible.” Henry Brandon, of the Sunday Times of London, said: “Henry used to tell me that I was the one correspondent in this town that he doesn’t try to manipulate.” Kissinger had Brandon wire-tapped. 

Ordinary reporters saw less of him socially than columnists, but those covering the State Department or the White House were both amazed and grateful for the access they had to him. It had never before happened that a national security adviser met them or returned their phone call so often; few wished to upset their criticism and would send him into a rage was easy to do. Even the slightest criticism would send him into a rage and result in angry calls either to the reporter himself or, worse still, to his editor—who might well have had dinner with Kissinger only the night before. If there was a story in the first edition of the Washington Post that he disliked, Kissinger might call the paper’s publisher, Katherine Graham, that same evening to denounce it. Such likelihood made many reporters understandably wary when writing about Kissinger.

He used his position both to obtain public attention and to shield himself from it. He would talk to Congressmen and to Senators as he would talk to journalists—for their ears only. He would not testify before Congress, on grounds of executive privilege, and he would give few interviews for the record. In this way his views simply seeped into the public consciousness. Kissinger’s leaks became editorials, newspapers took up the issues in which he was interested and, in Washington, a good many attitudes to the war were altered. Many journalists believed, and helped their readers to believe, that this administration was full of new foreign policy ideas and, above all, was really withdrawing from Indochina. Few of the reporters who had Kissinger’s confidence produced stories that would quality were reporters who refused to play by his rules—men like I. F. Stone, Jack Anderson, Laurence Stern and Seymour Hersh. It was their stories—on the Indo-Pakistan War, My Lai, Cyprus or Chile—that he feared and that helped somewhat to change policy.

But their efforts and even the force of the Watergate investigation, which showed the links between the foreign policy of Kissinger and Nixon and the abuses of power at home, did little to weaken Kissinger's bridge to the press. By mid-1973, when the Watergate story began to emerge, too many journalists and editors had invested too much in “Henry” as “Super-K” to allow the image to be destroyed by his unfortunate association with Richard Nixon. As Nixon sank, Kissinger began to look like the only hope of the Republic. It is true that by the end of 1975 press inquiries and Congressional committees had uncovered several misuses of American power in Greece, Chile, Southwest Africa, the Middle East and Italy, quite apart from Indochina. As a result, there was a short period when some of the facing of the bridge crumbled and Jimmy.

Carter gingerly criticized kissinger in his Presidential Campaign.But no serious harm was done to kissingr's relationship with the media.

The bridge to the press served Kissinger best and longest, but more crucial was the one to Nixon. The precise nature of their personal and intellectual collaboration is unclear. Which of them conceived strategy and which tactics, who first suggested the trip to China, who formulated the "Nixon Doctrine" for the defense and self-defense of Asia, who insisted on extensive covert use of the CIA to subvert and destroy foreign politicians they considered hostile to their cause—these questions have not in all cases been answered. The uncertainty lies in part in the ambiguous way in which they have treated each other publicly. The mutual praise of the early years of euphoria gave way after 1974 to a tendency by each to deprecate the other's accomplishments.

In January 1969, Kissinger's access to Nixon was dependent upon H. R. Haldeman and, to a lesser extent, on John Ehrlichman. Each had served Nixon loyally for years, and each regarded Kissinger with the suspicion due a man who had so quickly somersaulted from public contempt for their mentor into a position of privilege. It is a tribute to Kissinger's charm and willingness to adapt himself to their mores, that he quickly won their confidence, and was therefore able to spend more and more time with a President whose attitudes and concerns he understood very well.

Nixon hated to be rushed. Any official who came into the Oval Office with the request that the President make a decision there and then, rarely passed Haldeman again. Kissinger knew that Nixon’s enjoyment of foreign policy stemmed in part from the fact that it enabled him to ramble around the world every day of the week. In the first months of 1969 their morning meetings were like seminars in which each saw himself as the teacher. Kissinger never forced an issue; he deferred to Nixon’s soliloquies and reminiscences while gently inserting his own views and positions.

In front of the President or with Haldeman and Ehrlichman, Kissinger’s deference to Nixon was often obsequious. William Safire, a Nixon speechwriter, excused this because “he was the newcomer to the group, had never called Nixon by his first name or been made to feel needed by a man struggling to come back.” The habit endured after the group accepted him. But in the privacy of his own office Kissinger often denigrated the President. He would gossip about Nixon’s instability, his lone liness and his  “meatball mind,” and he encouraged his aides to listen to him on his rambling telephone calls. Some of Kissinger’s staff found the president puzzling. The comments that he scribbled on interoffice memos were of uneven quality. The authors of The Final Days have noted occasions when he wrote, “This man is a goddamn fool,” or “Bomb them,” on memos and when he ticked all three of mutually exclusive options offered him.

Larry Lynn, a systems analyst who had been at the Pentagon, remembers that in one discussion of the budget in 1969 Nixon’s eyes glazed, he gripped his chair and launched into a soliloquy on the need for assassination squads in Vietnam. Lynn was embarrassed. So was the wife of the British ambassador when she sat next to Nixon at a White House dinner early in the administration.

“I understand you are a very good friend of Henry Kissinger,” he said.

“Yes.”

“He’s a remarkable and much misunderstood man.”

“Oh you mean by the press?”

“No,” said Nixon, turning to her. “I mean by his wife. Women like that should be shot.”

Despite this incident, she did not entirely believe Kissinger when he assured her that he had agonized before accepting his job and that he had only done so “because I would never have forgiven myself if some unbelievable disaster had happened to the world.” Others accepted his candor; his mellifluous, intimate expositions of the nature of power were hard to reject.

Kissinger's concept of office life caused tensions on his staff. Personally he was disorganized and untidy, incapable of setting a schedule and maintaining it. He believed that people do not produce their best work if treated gently and that the lash of the tongue is by far the best incentive. His own was often cruel and sarcastic, but some people did respond to it and his methods of exacting work had their own rewards; he could be just as generous in his praise. He would often attempt to make up for an attack with a little kindness. One young woman whom he had loudly scorned for making a mistake about ballet found two tickets on her desk next week. Such behavior inspired loyalty in some; others found it intolerable, and throughout 1969 some of the more sensitive recruits gradually disappeared.

Kissinger realized that he needed the help of a competent manager for the office. The man he took on, Colonel Alexander Haig, later played a large part in determining the conduct of the war in Cambodia. Haig was a West Point man, forty-five years old, had served Douglas MacArthur in Korea and had done a tour in Vietnam on Search-and-Destroy operations. Most of his career had been in the Army bureaucracy, where he had often been a "horse-holder," an aide to a senior official. After working for both Robert McNamara and Cyrus Vance in the Pentagon he became Deputy Commander of West Point, where he had insisted that the cadets march with their fingers cocked at the second knuckle, their thumbs pointed straight at the ground, their elbows locked. He was quoted as explaining, "If they can get that hand straight, that elbow stiff, then all the rest of it falls into place. Every directive becomes second nature. It’s my way of putting a signature on a unit."

Haig had at first no policy responsibilities on the NSC; but, industrious as he was efficient, he gradually became indispensable to Kissinger. "Stalin to Henry's Lenin," one aide suggested unkindly. He was one of the few people who were able to withstand the abuse and the complex demands Kissinger would extend; within a few months he had started his rise to a prominent policy position on the staff. But even Haig sometimes came out of Kissinger’s office gritting his teeth and clenching his fists.

Occasionally Haig would gossip with other members of the staff about the madness of the two men for whom they all worked, but he bristled at anything he saw as weakness toward the war. His attitude to Indochina was that of a narrow soldier; he considered Kissinger was often too soft on the enemy. Haig believed in his commander in chief, right or wrong, and his loyalty to the Army was such that Kissinger used to joke, “I’m going to call the Pentagon to ask them to release you for a day’s work on my staff,” or “There’s no point in your coming, Al, the Army doesn’t have anything at stake in this meeting.”

By the summer of 1969, Haig was virtually running the staff. He attempted to instill a sense of discipline and hierarchy, and he took upon himself the moral as well as the organizational problems of the office. (He had one girl removed because he disapproved of her love life.) He was known as an intellectual soldier, but some of his peers from the Pentagon doubt the extent of his independent thought. In the Lenin-Stalin analogy, he was the adjutant who saw that Kissinger’s plans and theories were implemented as effectively as possible. He was enormously diligent about it and soon became known as the last man to leave the office. While Kissinger was building bridges in Georgetown, Haig worked quietly in the basement. So it happened that the lonely President, wandering around the basement.

at night with little or nothig to do, first came to know him and them to orecoginze that he had qualities that " Henry " lacked.

Kissinger did not consolidate his control over foreign policy until the invasion of Cambodia. But it became clear through 1969 that much of the new National Security Council structure, which itself greatly favored his own position, was to be cosmetic. It did have important functions. In the first four months of 1969 about fifty-five National Security Study Memoranda were issued and the bureaucracies became buried in paper work. At the same time, power was removed elsewhere. After the North Koreans shot down the EC-121 spy plane (an event to which Kissinger, unlike Laird, wanted to respond with force), a special crisis committee, the Washington Special Action Group, was set up. Kissinger chaired it. The other NSC groups that he ran included the Verification Panel, which directed arms-control strategy; the Vietnam Special Studies Group, which monitored the conduct of the war; the Defense Program Review Committee, which oversaw the Pentagon’s budget; and the 40 Committee, which was to plan all foreign covert intelligence activities (such as the prolonged and successful campaign to destroy President Salvador Allende of Chile).

Despite such early bureaucratic successes, Kissinger continued to take the competition between him and both Rogers and Laird seriously. It was easy for the President to make a distinction between him and Rogers. The Secretary of State was affable but idle; he refused to go into detail and would arrive at White House meetings with a short memo on the subject in hand. Kissinger would come with a huge briefing book and, sometimes, aides to check facts and lend dignity. It was soon evident that Nixon paid more attention to Kissinger, but Kissinger was not reassured. “It’s like the Arabs and the Israelis. I’ll win all the battles and he’ll win the war. He only has to beat me once,” he said to William Safire. In fact, it took Rogers a long time to realize even that battle had been joined, let alone that war had been declared.

Safire describes how Kissinger used the transcripts of his telephone calls as a secret weapon in the war. “Complaining to a correspondent about the perfidy of his arch rival, Secretary of State Rogers, Henry then edited [a] transcript, changing words to reflect stronger support of the President by Kissinger, and sent the revised version along to Haldeman as an act of dishonor to the unsuspecting reporter and an act of disloyalty to the President.” On foreign trips Kissinger seemed always anxious to keep the State Department ignorant of the substance of the most important conversations. He refused to use embassy secretarial help; everything had to be done by the staff he brought with him. Many of Rogers’ aides were from the American U.N. delegation and were oblivious to the struggle, but Nixon understood the battle between the two men. He told Safire, “I’m sorry about how Henry and Bill go for each other. Henry thinks Bill isn’t very deep and Bill thinks that Henry is power crazy. In a way they are both right.” In his memoirs he wrote: “Rogers felt that Kissinger was Machiavellian, deceitful, egotistical, arrogant, and insulting. Kissinger felt that Rogers was vain, uninformed, unable to keep a secret and hopelessly dominated by the State Department bureaucracy.” Nixon said that Haldeman had to act as a “demilitarized zone” between the two men and that he needed to include Attorney General John Mitchell in many foreign policy discussions as a stabilizing influence.

Kissinger paid as much, perhaps greater, attention to Melvin Laird, and in the case of Cambodia this competition was more important. The Department of Defense houses more different interest groups than the State Department. The overriding tension is between the military, headed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and their civilian controllers, led by the Secretary. The Secretary is empowered to represent the vast bureaucracy; the Chiefs are not supposed to transmit orders or advocate authority. Laird found that Kissinger frequently attempted to deal directly with the Chiefs.

In the late sixties, when Robert McNamara became disillusioned by the military’s enthusiastic analyses of the war, he had attempted to assert civilian control over the Chiefs more effectively. The Chiefs had resisted McNamara and invoked the help of their Congressional allies. At the end of 1967, for example, the Preparedness Investigating Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee held hearings on the dispute between McNamara and the Chiefs on the efficacy of bombing. It declared, “It is high time, we believe, to allow the military voice to be heard in connection with the tactical details of military operations.” The Chiefs were especially infuriated by the inquisitive and skeptical nature of the Office of Systems Analysis, which subjected to rather scathing criticisms such programs as the bombing of trucks in Laos and the whole of the B-52 bombing operations.

Melvin Laird made some early mistakes and lost some ground won from the military by McNamara.

He refused a military request that he close the Systems Analysis Office, but he downgraded the Office of International Security Affairs, ISA, the Pentagon's mini-State Department, which was supposed to evaluate the political and diplomatic consequences of military moves. In the Kennedy and Johnson administrations Paul Nitze, William Bundy, John Naughton and Paul Warnke had made ISA into a powerful institution; now it was placed in the hands of Warren Nutter, a rather ineffective, right-wing academic from the University of Virginia. At one NSC meeting on Vietnam, early in 1969, Nutter simply repeated as every topic the line, “ISA’s views are already represented; we agree with the Joint Chiefs.” Mort Halperin recalls that after the meeting he and other aides said to Kissinger “ISA just died. You’ll regret it.” “No I won’t,” said Kissinger.

About Indochina, the Chiefs soon perceived that the reality, as opposed to popular belief, was that Kissinger almost always took a tougher line than Laird. Laird wanted to complete Vietnamization and withdraw American troops as fast as possible. Kissinger still insisted either that victory could be achieved by force, or that, if it could not, then force must nonetheless be applied to demonstrate toughness and determination. Whenever Laird attempted to cut back the rate of bombing, Kissinger resisted.

General Westmoreland, the former Commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, who was back in Washington as Army Chief of Staff, later said that by April 1969 he and his colleagues saw Kissinger as “the architect” of the Vietnam policy. Kissinger treated Westmoreland cleverly; though he respected the General for his intellectual and military limitations, he always carefully deferred to him when they met. Westmoreland described Kissinger as “a diplomat and a historian with a feel for power,” whereas Laird was “a very superficial feel for things”; he was a “secret dove” who would not gamble with Congress against the military. Kissinger, on the other hand, didn’t do little of Congress that he proposed a moratorium on all actions to deal with the administration’s Vietnam policies. That was how Kissinger liked to see business conducted.

Kissinger had several direct connections with the Chiefs. Haig was one, and another was Air Force General John Vogt, the Air Force's Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and Operations. Vogt was a former student of Kissinger's and an unrestrained advocate of bombing.

. Laird held a daily Vietnamization meeting with his staff at the Pentagon. A detailed memorandum of record of each meeting was kept by Philip Odeen, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Regional Programs. These memoranda are very useful in documenting the tensions and disagreements between Laird and the White House. Many of the positions and opinions ascribed to Laird in this book are based on the evidence of these memoranda.

Kissinger used to ask Westmoreland to come over to the White House to "touch base," as well. In the summer of 1969, Laird tried to stop such encounters, but the two men evaded his supervision by being more discreet, often using Alexander Haig as a courier. Another link was, of course, the liaison office between the NSC and the Joint Chiefs, which Laird had tried unsuccessfully to have Kissinger close down. What he had feared happened: the Chiefs and Kissinger used the office to communicate about matters on which they considered Laird's views "unnecessary."

The wiretaps were used as yet another way to isolate Laird and Rogers. On May 9, 1969, the day William Beecher broke his story on the secret bombing of Cambodia, Laird was playing golf outside Washington. He was summoned to the telephone; it was Nixon and Kissinger in Key Biscayne. “It was a hell of a go-round,” Laird recalls. “They were furious and accused me of leaking the information to prove that secrecy was not important, that Sihanouk didn’t care.” Laird denied he had done any such thing, but Kissinger did not seem reassured. It was later that day that Kissinger walked along the beach with Mort Halperin and told him that Laird had accused him of being the leaker, Laird denies this. The tap that was placed on Halperin’s telephone that evening was to remain there for twenty-one months, despite the fact that Halperin agreed not to receive secret documents and even though he left the staff later in the year, disillusioned by the nature of his employer.

Beecher’s story was not the first leak to disturb Kissinger and Nixon. Beecher’s story was a detailed and fairly precise account of their approach to SALT had been published, and Beecher himself had written about the administration’s ideas for retaliating against North Korea over the EC-121 plane. Such leaks, Kissinger warned, were of enormous importance to a novice like himself. He had already met with Nixon and Mitchell and Hoover to discuss how leaks could be plugged. Hoover and Kissinger had already mapped out a plan that aides, Haig and William Sullivan, should stay in touch on the matter Beecher's story on the secret bombing pushed them into action .

On May 10, Kissinger sent Haig over to the FBI with the names of Halperin and three more "suspected leakers." They were all tapped. Two, Helmut Sonnenfeldt and Daniel Davidson, were on the NSC staff. Within weeks Davidson was asked by Haig to leave; his tap had apparently shown that he talked to journalists, but not that he leaked classified information. Davidson was not unduly upset; he too was beginning to find Kissinger's methods distasteful.

The third man, Colonel Robert E. Pursley, was an Air Force officer who had worked as military assistant to secretaries McNamara, Clark Clifford, and, now, Laird, and who had won the admiration of all three, he was often spoken of as a future Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Laird relied greatly on Pursley and frequently called him at home in the evening to discuss the business of the day. His record suggested that he was unlikely to have leaked information. The explanation for tapping him, Laird and Pursley are certain, was to enable Kissinger to know what was in Laird’s mind. (Personal animus may also have been involved, Pursley had made his opposition to Menu clear; he had written Laird’s periodic questions to the Chiefs; he had been opposed to armed retaliation against North Korea. He and Haig disliked each other.)

The FBI produced transcripts and summaries of the taps, and on May 20, 1969, Kissinger and Haig went over to Sullivan’s office in the FBI to read them. Sullivan wrote Hoover a memorandum about the meeting that same day; Haig and Kissinger later had “no recollection” of its having taken place. According to Sullivan’s memo, “Dr. Kissinger read all the logs. On doing this, he said, ‘It is clear that I do not have anybody in the office that I can trust except Colonel Haig here.’” Haig submitted two more members of the NSC staff to be tapped. They were Richard Snider and Richard Moose. Moose was the staff secretary of the NSC. Like Davidson, Moose was already dispirited by the atmosphere in Kissinger’s office and was about to go to work for Senator J. William Fulbright, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. (In that capacity, he later undertook several missions to Cambodia and produced pessimistic reports that conflicted with Haig’s official enthusiasm and helped turn the Congress against the war. Haig once told Moose that Fulbright was a “traitor.”)

Altogether, seventeen people were tapped over a period of eighteen months; they included other members of Kissinger’s staff, White House aides, several journalists (some of whom regarded themselves as close confidants of Kissinger), and officials from State and Defense. Apart from Pursley, whose tap was removed and then replaced, probably the most significant was Richard Reed, the Counselor at State and one of Laird’s principal aides.

Since them Kissinger has tried to minimize his role, admitting some of his meeting with Hoover but forgetting the deails The sole purpose was to plug leaks, he has asserted; and he went along with it because he was  assured by men more schooled in government that it was standard practice. He did not “originate” names, but “supplied” them on instruction, reluctantly; he found the whole process “distasteful.”

The record shows that Kissinger participated fully in the process. He was, in Nixon’s word, “outraged” by the Beecher story. Anxious to “destroy whoever did this,” he met with Hoover at least three times in that period, talked with him by telephone several times, sent Haig to the FBI with the names of fourteen of the seventeen people to be wiretapped, actually picked some of the names himself (certainly Colonel Pursley’s), was aware when Haig went over to read the transcripts and went with him at least once, and received thirty-seven summaries of the taps from the FBI. There is no evidence that Kissinger felt any qualms until publicly confronted. In 1969, the taps were useful not only in discovering a good deal about his own staff and Laird’s and Rogers’, but also in demonstrating to Nixon, Haldeman and Ehrlichman that he was one of them. They were important blocks in his bridge to the President and his closest aides. They produced no evidence of leaking; in his memoirs Nixon wrote wistfully, “Unfortunately none of these wiretaps turned up any proof linking anyone in the government to a specific national-security leak.”

After the tapes were revealed in 1973, Halperin began a lawsuit against Nixon, Kissinger, Haig, Haldeman, Mitchell and others for invading his privacy. When a deposition was taken from Kissinger, Halperin was in the room. The lawyers commented on the fact that, although he had professed his “distaste,” Kissinger did not apologize to Halperin. The lawyers could not have known that Kissinger had just spoken to Nixon on the telephone. Nixon had referred to Halperin, “He is obviously smart and knows this thing. We treated him too well.” Kissinger had replied, “Too well. That is the only mistake I made.”

• The law on wiretapping is complex. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution provides: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act authorized the use of wiretaps and bugs in cases of domestic crimes, but only after the issuance of a judicial warrant based on probable cause that one of certain specified crimes had been or was likely to be committed. Various safeguards were imposed, including a thirty-day limit on the duration of each wiretap without reauthorization by the judge. At the same time, however, Title III of the Act specifically refrained from legislating in the area of “national security” wiretaps or bugs.
• Halperin and his family argued in their case against Henry Kissinger et al. that the wiretaps had violated their First and Fourth Amendment rights and had also violated Title 

"Give us six months," Kissinger urged liberal critics of the war when he arrived in Washington in January 1969. Eight months later there was no obvious sign of progress in Vietnam and the antiwar movement was girding itself for another mass protest. There had, however, been developments in Indochina. Relations with Sihanouk had been restored, and Cambodia was being secretly bombed. Nixon had outlined in Guise, basis of what he was to call the "Nixon Doctrine": in the future Washington would provide only matériel, instead of men, to any Asian country in need of help. Kissinger had had a secret meeting with the North Vietnamese in Paris, and Nixon had announced the first withdrawal of 25,000 American combat troops. He maintained that his policy—which limited the removal of American combat troops to the pace at which Vietnamese soldiers were trained—was the only alternative to "precipitous withdrawal" that would result in "defeat and humiliation." There was, how

III of the Safe Streets Act. On December 16, 1976, Judge John Lewis Smith, Jr., of the District Court in the District of Columbia found that Richard Nixon, H. R. Haldeman and John Mitchell had indeed violated the Halperin family's Fourth Amendment rights:

At no time were there any reviews or evaluation of the material obtained through the electronic surveillance. No attempt was made to minimize the interception of plaintiff's conversations, either as regards individuals intercepted or information gathered. No further investigation or questioning of Mr. Halperin took place during this period. In addition, the tap continued after he left the National Security Council to engage in various antiwar efforts, and long after many of the other national security wiretaps were removed. Numerous summary letters in the later course of the surveillance related solely to Halperin's political activities and beliefs.

The wiretap thus appears to have developed into a dragnet which lacked temporal and spatial limitation. It represents the antithesis of the "particular, precise, and discriminate" procedures required by the Supreme Court in numerous Fourth Amendment cases. The surveillance constituted an invasion of plaintiff's privacy and freedom of expression. For these reasons, even granting the inapplicability of the general warrant requirement, the Court finds the wiretap per se unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment and unjustified by any possible exception thereto.

At the same time the Court also ruled that Kissinger was not liable for these violations on grounds of his "inactive role and lack of oversight authority." Halperin immediately appealed this ruling. In their statement of the case for the appeal, Halperin's lawyers (from the American Civil Liberties Union) noted that "documentary evidence and the Nixon and Mitchell testimony [in the case] indicates that Kissinger was responsible not only for suggesting names for the surveillance program but also for recommending the termination of particular surveillances. According to FBI memoranda, Kissinger exercised this authority despite observations from the FBI that it was not yielding any information about leaks and should be terminated. These documents also show that the FBI viewed Kissinger, acting through Haig, as responsible for beginning and terminating the surveillances. Indeed [William] Sullivan [Assistant Director of the FBI] confirmed this was his impression at his deposition."

ever, a third option. Hanoi was demanding a fixed timetable for the withdrawal of all American forces, not just combat troops. Nixon rejected this on the grounds that it “would completely remove any incentive for the enemy to negotiate.” What was not clear was how much incentive Nixon’s terms gave Hanoi. The North Vietnamese realized that Nixon’s principal domestic concern was to reduce American casualties; in the absence of a timetable it was in Hanoi’s interests to maintain, if not step up, military attacks to keep the pressure on Washington.

The Pentagon’s Systems Analysis Office reported throughout 1969 that the Communists were now stressing the importance of inflicting a high rate of American casualties, and that they were, in effect, able to determine the rate at which Americans died. One enemy document, captured in late April 1969, noted that the spring offensive “was a significant tactical and a great strategic victory; we killed more Americans than we did in the 1968 spring offensive. [It] upset Nixon’s plan, because U.S. forces were heavily hit and their weakening puppet army could no longer provide support for the implementation of neocolonialism. The antiwar movement in the U.S. flared up again strongly demanding the withdrawal of U.S. troops. For each additional day’s stay the U.S. must sustain more casualties.” In the same spirit, the Vietnamese Communists dismissed the announcement of the first troop withdrawals as “tokenism,” and said “only a grain of sand [that] in no way affects the continuation and intensification of the war.”

At his first meeting with the North Vietnamese on August 4, Kissinger warned that if progress had not been made by November 1, "we will be compelled—with great reluctance—to take measures of the greatest consequences." Hanoi showed no flexibility. The administration was already being entrapped in the logic of its own methods. Threats have to be followed through if they are to carry weight in the future. Neither the bombing of Cambodia, nor Nixon's public warnings to Moscow, nor Kissinger's remark to Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin that "the train has left the station and is now headed down the track" had shown results.

In his memoirs, Nixon says that he realized "I had to prepare myself for the tremendous criticism and pressure that would come with stepping up the war." In September, while the antiwar movement was preparing for a nationwide protest and demanding a moratorium, Kissinger ordered a few members of his staff to work with the Joint Chiefs to produce plans for a "savage, punishing blow" against this "third-rate power," North Vietnam.

The proposals of the "September Group" on the NSC staff included an invasion of Laos, the mining of Haiphong harbor, and more widespread bombing of North Vietnam—including Hanoi—than ever before. According to Roger Morris, a member of Kissinger’s staff at the time, the group also considered bombing the dikes that hold back the waters that irrigate North Vietnam. In Tad Szulc’s account of the Nixon foreign policy, The Illusion of Peace, Szulc maintains that Kissinger also considered using a nuclear device to block the railroad pass from China to North Vietnam. The important thing, Kissinger repeatedly told his staff, was to find Hanoi’s “breaking point.” 

Rogers and Laird were opposed to escalation. Laird argued fiercely that it would divert resources from Vietnamization and be vastly counterproductive at home; it was all that the antiwar movement needed, he thought—a shot in the arm. Nixon was not impressed by arguments about public opinion. At a breakfast meeting on September 25, he cheered General Westmoreland by dismissing the Secretary of Defense's concerns—public opinion, he noted, should follow the President, not the other way around. Kissinger was of a similar mind. "What we do in Vietnam," he said once, "has to be measured in terms larger than Vietnam itself. And history teaches us that people do not easily forgive their leaders for producing disaster, even if they do seem to reflect their immediate desires."

As for the specific proposals, Kissinger's opinions were at this time, as they often were, hard to discern. When William Watts, who had replaced Moose as the staff secretary on the National Security Council, saw the plans he was horrified, and he wrote Kissinger a long memo setting out his objections. Like Laird he warned of the dangers of domestic unrest. Such arguments did not seem to impress Kissinger, but he gave the plans to Larry Lynn. As a Systems Analyst, Lynn subjected the plans to strict criticism and concluded that even in the narrowest military sense they were unsound. It was his analysis, rather than Laird's concerns about public protest, still less any consideration of "morality," that did the proposals most damage. They were now not implemented. Instead, Nixon made an effective appeal to the "silent majority," and Vice President Agnew was sent around the nation to combat the press.

But the “September Group” was significant. Only eight months into his administration, when no Communist offensive had been launched, Nixon’s policies had brought him close to raising the stakes in Vietnam over the objections of the Secretaries of Defense and State. For a time the whole exercise became something of a joke among those NSC staff members who knew of it. They would repeat the first line of the draft speech with which Nixon was to have announced the escalation: “Tonight pursuant to my orders . . . adding to it such phrases as "Strategic Air Command has launched a defensive attack on Moscow." In the end, it was only the package that was rejected. Many of the components of the September 1969 strategy were implemented as Nixon and Kissinger attempted step by step to increase the pressure on Hanoi and on Moscow. Cambodia was also used.