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

serve as the secretary of state, William Rogers, and the secretary of defense, Melvin Laird.
    Bill Rogers, who had advised Nixon since the first Eisenhower campaign in 1952, and who had served Ike as attorney general, was a genial man and an honest broker, but not a diplomat or a strategist. Mel Laird, a Republican congressman since 1953, was equally affable, and he knew the intricacies and intrigues of Washington politics, but he was no commander. Nixon selected them for their weaknesses, not their strengths. Neither man could conceive what lay ahead in the world of political warfare that Nixon and Kissinger would create. The president would seek to make them figureheads, in charge of little beyond the edges of their desks.
    “It was a bizarre way to run a government. I think we all knew it was bizarre. But this is how Nixon wanted it,” said Peter Rodman, Kissinger’s Soviet specialist at the NSC and a key Rumsfeld aide at the Pentagon after 9/11. “Nixon decided that he would rather do these things himself. He had Henry there to do it. Henry and he had an ideological affinity. They both looked at the world in the same way.”
    Nixon knew what he was doing: striving for greatness. And greatness could be won only on a global scale, by making war and peace with honor. He cared about law and order, he cared deeply about his own reelection, but above all he cared about the war. The war touched everything, at home and abroad, and if it went on, it would break him as it had broken Lyndon Johnson. He was so bold as to predict he could make peace in a matter of months. “There was an absolute conviction on Nixon’s part that, by the fall of 1969, he would have Vietnam settled,” Haldeman said.
    To do so, he would have to concentrate all the powers of government in his hands.
    Nixon was the first president in one hundred twenty years who confronted a Congress controlled by his political opponents. Democrats held the Senate 57–43 and the House 243–192. Thus, he decided, when it came to the conduct of the war, he would have to circumvent Congress.
    Since the start of the Eisenhower era, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren had expanded civil liberties and curtailed police powers. So Nixon would have to find ways to bend or break the law to fight his enemies at home—or stack the court with conservatives. He was the only Republican president, save Eisenhower, since 1933. Thus, he believed, the State Department, the CIA, and even the Pentagon were riddled with a generation of liberals and leftists appointed by Democrats. These centers of power would have to be purged of enemies and replenished with allies.
    Nixon thought that a permanent government, the Establishment—led by eastern elitists and Ivy League intellectuals, Kennedy men and Johnson loyalists—would fight him on every front. He foresaw their strategy. The liberals, working with their allies in Washington, would use the law to tie his hands in Vietnam. The leftists, working with like-minded friends at think tanks and universities, would organize massive demonstrations against the war. Increasingly frustrated with the powers of the Justice Department and the FBI to investigate and indict his enemies, Nixon soon conceived and executed eavesdropping and espionage operations that would be run by his most trusted aides at the White House.
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    Each of the three men in Nixon’s innermost circle had a highly ambitious aide who gained great power through proximity to the president. Like their patrons, two of these three prot é g é s would go to prison.
    Kissinger’s right-hand man was Alexander M. Haig, his military assistant at the National Security Council. Haig rose in rank from colonel to four-star general under Nixon without leading troops in combat. The White House was his battleground. He won his stars through tireless service; if a light burned in an office at 3:00 a.m., it was likely Haig’s. By turns charming and mercurial, but