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

detail of his war strategy was essential “to understand the situation, so he could make what he believed—in his heart—to be the right decision, because these were horrible decisions,” Haldeman said. Each military maneuver was a search for a way to end the nightmare of Vietnam, an act of war intended to make peace. Each sought to change the tragic course of history. Each led to death and destruction.
    “Go for the big play,” Nixon always said, as if war were a football game. The big play was Nixon’s plan for a way out of Vietnam—“to the extent he had a plan,” said Winston Lord, Nixon’s ranking National Security Council staffer, who became ambassador to China in 1985. Lord said that Nixon believed from the start that “he could use the Russians and maybe the Chinese to pressure Hanoi, to bring the war to an end by trying to improve relations with them, and cornering Vietnam in that way.”
    Nixon would use the art of diplomacy with Moscow and Beijing, and the art of war in Indochina, in a radically new way to create a rapprochement between the most powerful Communists on earth and the United States. The grand bargain would work if Nixon could persuade the leaders of China and Russia to help pursue peace in Vietnam.
    This audacious stratagem began to take shape before the inauguration. The first moves were encoded messages woven into Nixon’s inaugural address.
    On January 2, 1969, after checking with J. Edgar Hoover, Kissinger met with Boris Sedov, officially counselor at the Soviet embassy in Washington but better known as a KGB spy. “Sedov said that the Soviet Union was very interested that the inaugural speech contain some reference to open channels of communication to Moscow,” Kissinger told Nixon. “I said that all this would be easier if Moscow showed some cooperativeness on Vietnam.” The KGB’s proposal to ghostwrite a passage of the inaugural address gave Nixon the inspiration to send an equally subtle message to China. In 1967, Nixon had written an article for Foreign Affairs that touched on America’s need to establish political and diplomatic relations with China. “There is no place on this planet for a billion of its potentially able people to live in angry isolation,” he wrote.
    Nixon’s inaugural directly addressed Moscow with the words suggested by the spy Sedov: “Our lines of communication will be open.” Then, aiming his words at Chairman Mao Tse-tung, Nixon repeated his “angry isolation” lines from Foreign Affairs . Mao noticed: on his orders, the Beijing People’s Daily took the unprecedented step of printing the complete translated text of Nixon’s inaugural on its front page. Nixon had told Kissinger about sending signals to Mao. Haig recounted, “In the second week of the administration, Henry came back from the Oval Office and said to me, ‘Al, this madman wants to normalize our relations with China.’ And he laughed. And I said, ‘Oh, my God.’” It seemed inconceivable. And yet, when Nixon began a more direct approach to China later that year, he would find out that he was pushing on an open door.
    But how to get the attention of the Soviets, and how to persuade them to help pursue peace in Vietnam? At his first National Security Council meeting, on January 25, 1969, Nixon suggested a carrot: talks on a nuclear weapons treaty. “This will be a great symbol,” he announced. Kissinger proposed a big stick: the threat of a nuclear attack.
    Kissinger had made his name with a 1957 treatise titled Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy , a book often cited, if rarely read, by the high priests of Pentagon war planning. Its thesis was that nuclear weapons had a political and diplomatic utility: to coerce enemies. The challenge was translating their immense military power into coherent foreign policy. Now he put his theories into practice.
    In the secretary of defense’s dining room, on January 27, Kissinger and Laird discussed “military actions which might jar