McGoverning

[Shevek23]

We never got to witness how Nixon would handle handing the office over to anyone peacefully under the best of circumstances--letting Ford have it as OTL had the advantage of being a sudden surprise move, quick break and done. Had he won reelection and continued to 1977, how would he have handled giving it over even to a handpicked successor--probably not Agnew, I can't see him winning in an honest race (hmm, who says it has to be though? But Nixon would not exert himself so far for him I don't think. Maybe George HW Bush?). Still less if Carter (probably not as strong a contender so early w/o Watergate--anyone see him on Stephen Colbert last night by the way) or Muskie or some other Democrat won. As I understand it, the Bushes (elder) were very nasty about turning the White House over to the Clintons.

But if we have Nixon not choosing his own moment but defeated fair and square, in a race he even tried to put his thumb on the scales of but got beaten anyway, in the midst of the worst levels of Watergate infamy and caught red handed pulling new dirty tricks while old ones were revealed as well...the same Nixon Kissinger used to whisper to North Vietnamese and Soviet diplomats was feeling a little put upon and angry lately, late at night stroking The Big Red Button gently, gently...how is he going to handle the transition?

 

[Yes]

I wonder how Nixon's men- Kissinger, Colson, Hunt, Liddy, Ziegler and the rest-all feel the day after Election Day?

It's interesting you should say that. Some of it will come out in dribs and drabs over the course of the TL, but for one of them that features front and center at the start of the next chapter. Safe to say, a number of non-Nixonian folks do not share his views. This is known in the plot-arcing business as "getting your characters in trouble early"

 

[Yes]

We never got to witness how Nixon would handle handing the office over to anyone peacefully under the best of circumstances--letting Ford have it as OTL had the advantage of being a sudden surprise move, quick break and done. Had he won reelection and continued to 1977, how would he have handled giving it over even to a handpicked successor--probably not Agnew, I can't see him winning in an honest race (hmm, who says it has to be though? But Nixon would not exert himself so far for him I don't think. Maybe George HW Bush?). Still less if Carter (probably not as strong a contender so early w/o Watergate--anyone see him on Stephen Colbert last night by the way) or Muskie or some other Democrat won. As I understand it, the Bushes (elder) were very nasty about turning the White House over to the Clintons.

But if we have Nixon not choosing his own moment but defeated fair and square, in a race he even tried to put his thumb on the scales of but got beaten anyway, in the midst of the worst levels of Watergate infamy and caught red handed pulling new dirty tricks while old ones were revealed as well...the same Nixon Kissinger used to whisper to North Vietnamese and Soviet diplomats was feeling a little put upon and angry lately, late at night stroking The Big Red Button gently, gently...how is he going to handle the transition?

I believe you have captured the motive question of the next chapter very neatly.

 

[Unknown]

Waiting for it eagerly and dreading it at the same time...

 

[John Farson]

Waiting for it eagerly and dreading it at the same time...

As do we all.

 

[Yes]

Waiting for it eagerly and dreading it at the same time...

As do we all.

There is some wisdom here, although it's funny the things on which fate can turn sometimes. And funny what preturbations matter in the end; the next chapter among several other things involved a deep dive into Dick Nixon's psyche. He is without doubt eight or nine of the more disturbing people to work out of the Oval Office in US history...

 

[Yes]

For the sake of the patient and the kind, two brief snippets of the kind of thing to which you can look forward in the next installment:

"It was there Colson came back into the story. To come off bennies more or less cold turkey, while you sat in jail, was a hell of a thing. A hell of a thing. In that pain and paranoia and isolation, shorn from the life he’d lived and the cause he’d fought for, Colson’s believer’s heart flailed for a purpose. Here an outside factor entered the picture; despite the expectation of observers like Hunter Thompson, Colson had friends. And in the later days of September, not so long before Lyndon Johnson had sat George McGovern down and dynamited the presidential election while rubble still fell from Colson’s own contribution, one of Colson’s friends visited him bearing a copy of C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity. It was something to read, and the friend certainly trusted in the power of the Gospel to reshape lives. What Colson did best, on the other hand, was believe — believe what, was always the question — and now he had jail, and withdrawal, and a book. Within a fortnight “Tex” Colson had found the Lord. By itself this was an old prison story. What Tex and the Lord got up to from there, though, was rather more interesting."

"The trouble, as it always was with Nixon, was politics. Nixon spent nearly two weeks after the election in a depressed state: he drank heavily, slept little, raged sometimes, sulked mostly. This gave Kissinger time to work out the hardline proposal for Paris and take it there. [REDACTED] This brought Nixon roaring back to life within days. His attitude put several senior national security staffers in a state of near panic; Nixon was calm. He intended no sudden moves, not while Henry worked away in Paris and tried to walk Le Duc Tho and his crew back to the proposals of October. The staff felt their stomachs drop away. This meant Nixon wanted to act deliberately, and that terrified them."

I am a little houseproud of "drank heavily, slept little, raged sometimes, sulked mostly." It comprehends a very Nixonian state of being.

 

[Yes]

One last snippet, about a man with a plan:

"Henry had a plan; Henry always had a plan. And for a political scientist, the National Security Adviser possessed a very lawyerly mind. He took the facts on the ground, the cold hard sense of Nixon’s desperation always a point that stabbed at the base of his mind, and arranged those facts to suit his new theory. Before what mattered most was peace: peace with Hanoi, peace at home to speed the President’s reelection. Now what mattered most was containment. He had to contain Hanoi’s power, Thieu’s ambition, and Richard Nixon’s rage."

 

[CountDVB]

One last snippet, about a man with a plan:

"Henry had a plan; Henry always had a plan. And for a political scientist, the National Security Adviser possessed a very lawyerly mind. He took the facts on the ground, the cold hard sense of Nixon’s desperation always a point that stabbed at the base of his mind, and arranged those facts to suit his new theory. Before what mattered most was peace: peace with Hanoi, peace at home to speed the President’s reelection. Now what mattered most was containment. He had to contain Hanoi’s power, Thieu’s ambition, and Richard Nixon’s rage."

God damn you, Kissinger, what are you gonna do now...

 

[Bulldoggus]

hat tip to No Southern Strategy and The Two Georges

Thanks a lot, BTW.

 

[John Farson]

That [REDACTED] seems ominous.

 

[Yes]

That [REDACTED] seems ominous.

Removed from its context it is not an ominous event just by itself, but like many things that factor into an outcome it just happens at the wrong time. If by "wrong" you mean "this is bad for those of us who want the Nixon administration to go out with a whimper. Because the 'bang' to which a modern President has access scares us."

God damn you, Kissinger, what are you gonna do now...

Oh, overplay his hand, I'm sure. By itself the motives of someone so nakedly self-interested as Kissinger aren't necessarily a bad thing. He has a feral instinct for survival and if that instinct can be used, say, to help prevent a certain POTUS from doing anything bugfuck insane that might lead the globe down a very dark path, well, that can come back around to the greater good by what you achieve. But if Kissinger starts doing his, "look, I'm a realist here but this crazy guy over here, you never know what he could get up to..." in order to bid up the pot, well, that could get ... problematic.

 

[CountDVB]

Oh, overplay his hand, I'm sure. By itself the motives of someone so nakedly self-interested as Kissinger aren't necessarily a bad thing. He has a feral instinct for survival and if that instinct can be used, say, to help prevent a certain POTUS from doing anything bugfuck insane that might lead the globe down a very dark path, well, that can come back around to the greater good by what you achieve. But if Kissinger starts doing his, "look, I'm a realist here but this crazy guy over here, you never know what he could get up to..." in order to bid up the pot, well, that could get ... problematic.

The thing is that his devotion to realpolitik is horrendously short-sighted since the side-effects have kept gathering up more and more to where it results in a fustercluck. It's almost as if being dicks to people on national levels will eventually bite you in the ass...

 

[Yes]

The thing is that his devotion to realpolitik is horrendously short-sighted since the side-effects have kept gathering up more and more to where it results in a fustercluck. It's almost as if being dicks to people on national levels will eventually bite you in the ass...

You might be on to something there Although tbf about the fact pattern here there was never that much "real" to Henry's politik other than measuring himself against his idol Metternich and coming up short.

 

[CountDVB]

You might be on to something there Although tbf about the fact pattern here there was never that much "real" to Henry's politik other than measuring himself against his idol Metternich and coming up short.

Let us the McGovernator puts a stop on Kissinger and the other collection of nutters. I am also wondering what effects this will have abroad and in pop culture.

 

[John Farson]

Let us the McGovernator puts a stop on Kissinger and the other collection of nutters. I am also wondering what effects this will have abroad and in pop culture.

He can't put a stop on them until January 20th, when he takes office. Until then, Nixon and his boys are still in charge.

 

[Yes]

Let us the McGovernator puts a stop on Kissinger and the other collection of nutters. I am also wondering what effects this will have abroad and in pop culture.

He can't put a stop on them until January 20th, when he takes office. Until then, Nixon and his boys are still in charge.

On the first part, asked and answered among the commenters. On the second, don't worry, we'll get into that over time

 

[Shevek23]

We all know there ain't no lower limit to the worst case, but I doubt this TL was written to showcase the utter impossibility of a McGovern victory since Nixon would be sure to push the Ragnarok button before he could take office. The next fallback from a legacy of civilization ending Armageddon would be to figure out how a Kissinger-Nixon team-up could RF the new administration with dilemmas impossible to resolve without dishonor of some kind; bonus points if it is so cleverly arranged that reasonable people see the timebombs and landmines going off as McGovern's fault.

I am not clever enough for that sort of N-dimensional chess and think that while Nixon and Kissinger might think they are that clever they are mistaken; a predictable outcome is McGovern has to deal with the known landmines he took on in running and a handful of extra headaches that do not make the outgoing administration or defeated party look particularly good, or perhaps some moves that do make them good but that's because they are good, good assets for McGovern to enter office with. The latter segues into the radical notion that Nixon actually cared to be a good US President in service of recognizably rational US interests. And/Or that Kissinger, who started out in the Johnson Administration after all, has some hopes to either be taken on board by McGovern or failing that, to be on the short list for Secretary of State when the next Republican takes office, and therefore would be trying to put out any fires Nixon might wish to start or accidentally start in his current state of mind.

It is the nature of politics of course that one man's solution is another's idea of a problem. At this point OTL, the ideological rift between the two dominant parties was still rather small, with lots of liberal Republicans (whose liberalism was still distinct from that of a liberal Democrat to be sure) and very conservative Democrats; the difference between the parties was more one of the mass distribution on the spectrum as it were--with moderate to liberal Democrats being notably but not dramatically to the left of the center of mass of moderate to liberal Republicans, the latter being strongly concentrated in the center with a fairly substantial right wing balancing a fairly liberal left wing, while the Democrats were more bimodal, a distinctly to the left (but never too radical, that might change a bit as post-Vietnam politicians of the Tom Hayden type start picking up seats) wing bunched around some point somewhat to the left of the Republican moderate-liberal divide, and a Dixiecrat/quasiDixiecrat (people like Yorty of Los Angeles, not Southern but of Southern mentality) wing--and in turn these conservative Democrats are New Deal heirs who have no problem with tax and spend Big Government in the form of pork for their districts--Wallace types essentially.

So, separately with their respective wings mashed together, both parties are pretty similar in terms of mode, median and range, though the Democrats have fewer absolute centrists I suppose. Thus, while a given foreign policy will be welcome to some in Congress (speaking of House and Senate collectively here) and heresy to others, both parties will have both friends and foes in their ranks, and it is probably true that there is no particular policy any President can have on any important issue where both parties won't produce enemies of it, quite possibly two sets attacking from both left and right. But the differences in policy a President from one party would have from one from the other would be rather subtle, and either President would have pretty much the same enemies, filtered with more or less weight to one side or the other. At this early date, it would be hard for a President to leave an ideologically opposed incoming rival a time bomb that is also a boon for the next one from their party's election.

The centrist consensus on foreign policy, the cover for the claim "partisan politics stops at the ocean shore," is probably still going to be dominant and nothing Nixon seems likely to be able to do seems liable to both pass muster within that consensus and be able to shove McGovern out it. Short of WWIII of course!

 

[Yes]

The Flight Forward I: High Crimes and Misdemeanors ​

It is not by great acts, but by small failures, that freedom dies.

- Charles Morgan, Jr.


A man with poor judgment, an impetuous man, a sick man, a power-mad man,
each would be dangerous in the [Presidency]. Even an able, sensitive man needs
stronger safeguards around him than exist today.

- Max Lerner, 1973​

The shock came first. As he tried in his diary to reconstruct how it had happened, how it felt as all President Nixon’s work was dashed away, and given as he was to draw his own logic off from damaging conclusions or cloud motives with detail, Bob Haldeman put down in his diary that first and most it was shock. A numbness when the California result came in — California of all places! — so that it would now be impossible to build a Nixon majority, either popular or in the Electoral College. By the deep, dead hours when they heard about Missouri and the popular vote in Maine, you could see the blood but not feel the wounds anymore.

And, Haldeman went on in ink and meditation, he could “only imagine how the President felt about it, who had been through 1960 already and those few thousand votes, that hell, then triumphed in ‘68 but by the skin of his teeth.” What could that say, he carried on, to a man who had done so much in such a short time, who just months earlier looked to be on the rim of destiny, set to shape a new governing coalition in American politics and new horizons in foreign affairs? The answer, at least for a few observers like Timothy Crouse, Carl Bernstein, and with the most electric prose Hunter S. Thompson, was simple and blunt: it said the President of the United States was a crook.

As November tipped further into the second week, while the solons of the media tried to measure up the meaning of the “Wallace phenomenon” and struggled to deal with the fact that the man they had damned with faint praise since the ‘68 convention had just won a presidential election, the rain of blows on the public edifice of the Nixon White House had just started. Trial dates were set now for Loeb v. Segretti and for the mail-fraud trial against Segretti’s crew, where every wire-service tipster expected the ratfuckers to trade light sentences for enough dirt to drag Kalmbach and probably John Mitchell, a former Attorney General, under. The Supreme Court intended to hear arguments in Ervin v. Nixon a week after the election. Elliot Richardson, pressed hard at his confirmation for promises to clear the decks, moved to appoint a special prosecutor who would bring all the earnest senators’ committees together — the ones that kept headlines well fed around the country — into a pair of cross hairs set on the West Wing.

When on the Friday of election week — Friday was always the day for bad news because you got asked fewer questions right in front of the weekend — Richardson announced the prosecutor would be Nicholas Katzenbach, himself a former Attorney General who had squared off with George Wallace at that schoolhouse door almost a decade before, moods did not improve at the White House. On the one hand, for several days Haldeman struggled just to get the President to function, to pull himself out the deep, terrible blackness that was in him. On the other hand, so much so that for once Haldeman wrote about it, the President’s Chief of Staff feared what would happen when Nixon did rise. Given one chance to leave his mark, Nixon had little left to lose.

If it threatened to end it tragedy, it certainly kicked off in face. No sooner had the glare of election headlines faded when the hunting pack of the press pool turned its eyes to Ted Agnew. He had been mid-scandal when the vote distracted them, and to the reporters that felt like dereliction of duty. Also the frightening grandness of Nixon’s dilemma challenged something that seemed just as important as how the country was run — what did you do if the President was a crook, asked Ben Bradlee, editor in chief of the Post — it challenged the terms on which Tim Crouse’s “boys on the bus” did their business. Agnew’s scandal, on the other hand, was as simple as it was sordid, a wonderful combination. Some observers — “some observers” were favorite weasel words when correspondents rooted around for a lede — thought Agnew’s troubles more than Nixon’s had turned the election. The idea that corruption went that high and Nixon failed to know had tainted him, driven liberal late deciders to McGovern and conservative ones to Wallace, and worn Nixon’s edge in the polls clean away. That played by the journalists’ rules, and practically wrote itself. The urge to follow it along ran deep.

Agnew’s mess was also easy to understand. As Nixon’s “Mr. Clean” Elliot Richardson put it, it was “in all my years as a prosecutor … the most open and shut case I’ve ever seen.” Maryland state prosecutors thought so too and despite Nixon’s win there so did Maryland voters, who the press practically trampled each other trying to interview. On the other hand, this din of judgment around Agnew simply got his back up. He shouted his innocence in press statements. He held a single, pugnacious press conference in which he was sure, in that way Ted Agnew was sure about everything when he got in front of a microphone, that the U.S Attorney’s office in Maryland and the state investigators would clear him of all charges. Agnew got no comfort from Richardson. The precise New Englander was not there to make Agnew’s troubles go away — he was there to make troubles like Agnew go away. This left the sitting Vice President in a lurch unseen in modern times. He went then to the last hiding place, the Oval Office itself.

There the mood had turned. Where Nixon defended Agnew out of necessity before the vote, there were bigger problems now. The great contest before the Supreme Court went ahead: on Nixon’s side, drawn up behind all his powers as President, came the Solicitor General, the bearded and bespectacled curiosity Robert Bork, with his originalist logic and absolutist undertones. Against him came a man who’d held Bork’s job under Jack Kennedy, Archibald Cox, who looked every bit the crew-cut Ivy League football coach, delightfully out of place in his trim suit and small square reading glasses amid sideburns and wide paisleys in the gallery. The Court heard them for a day, then retired to think. It came back Thursday afternoon, with an opinion written by Nixon’s own Warren Burger, and a decision reached eight to nothing (William Rehnquist had recused himself): hand over the tapes.

Agnew had the bad grace to go to Nixon the day after, with wounds still fresh. The more Agnew pressed his case the more combative Nixon got. Haldeman later recalled the end of the conversation, which rose in volume loud enough to hear from outside the Oval Office. As Haldeman noted it down Nixon closed by saying: “Ted, now don’t, do not bullshit me Ted. Don’t give me any, any nonsense about this. You know where things stand. Do not bullshit me. We can both see where this is, you can either say that you’re going to fight the charges and you will not get any support out of me if you’re fighting impeachment — you can do that or you can go. And goddammit you’re going to go. And go quietly, or else.”

The Maryland district court in Annapolis handed down indictments on Monday of Thanksgiving week. Up to that point there had been no formal Congressional opinion voiced on the matter. But that afternoon Rep. Emmanuel Celler, the lame-duck chair of the House Judiciary Committee (the aging Celler had lost his seat in a primary fight to a young Elizabeth Holtzman) known for his good relations with Nixon, said on the record that criminal charges were grounds for the Committee to consider impeachment charges for the Vice President. The next day Spiro Agnew resigned the Vice Presidency.

Now two roads lay ahead, so far as most observers could see. Nixon could lay back and let Katzenbach get on with his work, which might very well paralyze the workings of the White House until it was almost time to turn out the lights for the Nixon crew. Or, Nixon could fight it, even consider firing Katzenbach, or ask Richardson to do it. Nixon’s men saw that as a simple matter of getting a Cabinet secretary to help make a problem go away. Others, who included that Cabinet member, might call it obstruction of justice. The question that posed — whether it was simply okay for a President to do such things — hung over the Constitutional order like the eye of a hurricane.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

The Lord moved in mysterious ways, to make Chuck Colson perform.

Nicholas Katzenbach set about his work as special prosecutor in the middle of a flurry of legal action and investigative confusion. Preexisting legal issues tied down key witnesses to the crimes of CREEP in particular, as criminal trials against key personnel moved ahead and Loeb v. Segretti siphoned off important files for discovery. It would take at least a week to figure out where exactly to start with the whole Chennault business, not to mention the political massage necessary to get the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee to give up the biscuit and let a criminal investigation move ahead. The “Brookingsgate Boys,” it seemed, had done whatever deals they would and taken their sentences, and it would be hard to squeeze more detail out of them especially about Ehrlichman and Mitchell who were still in the frame for CREEP’s sins. And there were the tapes — the fucking tapes, as Katzenbach’s team quickly took to calling them, since they turned on whenever anyone spoke in the Oval Office. As a result the Nixon administration met the Court’s decision and the subpoenas that followed either by tying them up in national security objections or by burying Katzenbach’s team in months of material at once, reels and reels of the stuff.

Katzenbach rallied his troops near the end of the week before Thanksgiving and gave them three targets to concentrate their efforts. The first was Ehrlichman and Mitchell, who looked dirty as hell on inspection when it came to CREEP’s funny money. The second was to map out the Chennault business, get a timeline, figure out where pieces were missing before they tried to find what those were. The third was the fucking tapes, but there it would take so much time to work their way through the month or more where they suspected something might be hiding that who knew when they could look — listen — anywhere else?

It was there Colson came back into the story. To come off bennies more or less cold turkey, while you sat in jail, was a hell of a thing. A hell of a thing. In that pain and paranoia and isolation, shorn from the life he’d lived and the cause he’d fought for, Colson’s believer’s heart flailed for a purpose. Here an outside factor entered the picture; despite the expectation of observers like Hunter Thompson, Colson had friends. And in the later days of September, not so long before Lyndon Johnson had sat George McGovern down and dynamited the presidential election while rubble still fell from Colson’s own contribution, one of Colson’s friends visited him bearing a copy of C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity. It was something to read, and the friend certainly trusted in the power of the Gospel to reshape lives. What Colson did best, on the other hand, was believe — believe what, was always the question — and now he had jail, and withdrawal, and a book. Within a fortnight “Tex” Colson had found the Lord. By itself this was an old prison story. What Tex and the Lord got up to from there, though, was rather more interesting.

It took some time at the start. In the early days mostly what Colson wanted to talk about was the Lord, or C.S. Lewis the author and thinker, or the broad new theological landscapes this opened up. When Colson’s intimates mentioned that his new outlook might be relevant to his situation — saved by grace alone or not he was still in stir — that brought him back to the moment. He was indeed in jail, for wrongs he had done, that was clear now. Not that doing what one could to help Richard Nixon be president was wrong but he’d been… immoderate, been excessive, been egotistical and impulsive. There were other things, too. Things that, now that “Tex” Colson wanted to square his two great objects of affection, Richard Milhous Nixon and God Almighty, with one another he might need to reflect on and explain.

But he had to consider whether they would do more harm than good. For the moment he would keep his mouth shut. There was all this stuff in the news, so his friends and the guards told him, about Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam and the ‘68 election, another goddamned witch hunt aimed at the President. Charge and countercharge flew, and Colson wanted no part of that. The truth would set you free but he blanched at making life more difficult for Nixon before the election. People should have the right to make up their own minds about that, even after these accusations about the Vice President got sprung at the last minute (Colson was an old hand himself, after all, he understood Wallace’s logic to a fault and his new self disdained it.) He wasn’t going to take any chances that what he might say could affect the outcome. That should stay in the hands of God and ordinary Americans.

When both those cosmic forces gave Richard Nixon the bum’s rush, Colson’s perceptions began to change. Nixon was great, a great man, still the best president of the modern era, but he was frail too, a sinner like the rest of us. Agnew, Agnew was a mess, a fool, a disappointment, a man who did not know how to see the light, a liability for the White House and an embarrassment to the county. But Nixon… there were things Nixon needed to get off his chest. Truth was important. Confession cleansed. And when people understood how you had been backed into a corner, how you had to handle matters so important, for the good of the country, that they possessed you and you couldn’t think straight anymore, people ought to know the cost of standing on the wall, why making sure regular folks could sleep at night meant you couldn’t. If they heard that, if they knew about the pain and the effort, they could understand. Bernie said so, too.

Bernie was new, relatively speaking. He had shown up less than a fortnight after the vote, dressed more tidily than a typical jailhouse lawyer, a polite visitor, thoughtful, patient and, it seemed to Colson, a listener. This was good since Colson wanted to talk; whatever in the bennies woke that need in Colson had not faded with the high. Medium-sized, trim, sharp faced and entirely bald on top though he was still in his thirties, with the fashionable sideburns he wore Bernie looked like he’d just stepped out of a Civil War uniform, not a New York law office. He was good company anyway, “my attorney Bernie,” like that song Blossom Dearie sang fifteen years ago. And with his mind for connections, for the lateral ties that could be used to tug society, or the law, in unexpected connections, Colson felt like he should know Bernie from somewhere.

But mostly they talked. Talked about the Brookings job, talked about Kalmbach and the money, talked about how people on the grapevines of Washington said Colson had more to share. Talked about Abraham, about the great monotheistic religions — an impresario by nature, Colson the convert was already ecumenical — and shared traditions. They brought up Bernie’s Jewishness — besides the tell in the first name, his last name was Nussbaum — and the great tradition of Yom Kippur, where you spent a day in the company of the last year’s sins, in openness to God and to personal atonement. Bernie got that Colson was now a “magic Christian”but it was a nice tradition regardless, and Colson appreciated that. Something to think over.

Bernard Nussbaum had volunteered. For Nick Katzenbach’s flying squad of lawyers in the special prosecutor’s office, then again for the Brookingsgate beat among the several parallel investigations, thrice for the shot at Colson. He did not have to: first a Harvard Law Review editor and an Assistant United States Attorney, he’d then joined Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, the most outrageously successful combine of corporate lawyers of his generation, all in their thirties and already with the titans of Manhattan beating down their door. Nussbaum had helped Robert Morgenthau run for governor two years before, and kept up those political connections while the day job furthered the interests of companies listed on the Dow Jones average as their personal attorney.

Now there was blood in the water from the biggest whale in politics, Dick Nixon’s whole vast corrupt enterprise had come unstuck — you heard whispers and boasts and fishing stories in the bars of Midtown, mostly from advertising guys — and it was time to hold people to account. Together, over a painstaking week, Nussbaum sat down with some bright young law clerks and an endless stream of cigarettes to map out the players, a geography of who could know something that was not yet public record. Nussbaum came back often to Colson. And now people had come to the special prosecutor’s office, with word Colson did know things. That he might be convinced to spill them. At least if you listened close and gave Colson a reason. Bernie could do that.

Nussbaum was not so much patient as determined. He could take the time, calmly, to let Colson get comfortable, to spread out an open space of safety and conversation in which Colson could let his own conflicting perceptions duke it out. Nixon the man of destiny, the great leader and thinker, had room now to battle reckless and self-destructive Nixon, Nixon who vacillated, Nixon who failed to appreciate what the people who believed in Nixon were willing to do. This took time. While Katzenbach leaned that long high-German face in Nussbaum’s direction, chin tucked for emphasis, and dragged on what always seemed like the same cigarette, Nussbaum quipped that they should take the Colson matter on a contingency fee — the hourly rate would cripple the federal budget. He has to tell it to himself first, Nussbaum said. We have to let Colson get comfortable hearing it out loud, have to let him make himself sure it needs to be said. Then we nail the bastards. His own compass set by a lifetime of prosecutions, Katzenbach nodded. Sounded right to him. So Bernie just kept showing up, and settled those fixed eyes on Colson’s doughy, earnest yet instinctively obscure face, and waited.

The days dragged on after Thanksgiving. The White House kept spitting seemingly random transcripts like the chunks of food in a drunk man’s sick but Katzenbach had some of the younger guns on it, who drew up a nice tight order that said the Court meant everything, which it really did, burdensome or not, and sent it to district level. Nixon’s guy, Saint-Something, of course objected and now they had to get it calendared with DC Circuit. Everyone needed a pick-me-up. So Nussbaum sat with Tex and waited. Then, as though Colson had eaten the roll of his prophecy as it says in the Good Book, it came.

It happened as Colson carried on one of his twisty internal Nixon monologues out loud, in which the President was both the genius who would settle the damnfool Democrats’ war (Nussbaum knew better than to bring up Eisenhower) with honor, and also a frightened obsessive. The Pentagon Papers, the fact of them in that rat fink Ellsberg’s possession, that meant there had to be more out there. Had to. That’s what it was all about. The Democrats were breaking every national security law on the books all to try and dump their guilt on Nixon. And it drove Nixon crazy, drove him literally to excess — so Colson said. “I mean, it was him who said it, you know?” Colson observed.

“Said what?” asked Nussbaum.

“Said to do it. Blow the safe. I think those were even his words. We’d talked before about what a problem Brookings was, how many people there were probably culpable. He said it. That we had to get somebody in there — to my cost I chose to be ‘somebody.’ I don’t regret the impulse to help the President clear his name, but I should not have encouraged him to turn to criminality in his fear. I should have helped him turn from sin…”

Before Colson got revved up, Nussbaum slipped in calmly. “I want to make sure I understand you. This is the President who said something? President Nixon?”

“Yes he did. He’s the one who said to do it. Get somebody inside Brookings and blow the safe. Those were definitely his words: ‘blow the safe.’ Now he may not even have meant anything as violent as what I did. I do think he wanted to know what they had. He deserved to, this was a… a harrowing time. You had these people committing all kinds of illegal acts to entrap him.”

“The President said to break into Brookings?” Nussbaum asked again. “This was because they had more classified information about the war?”

“He said to break in.”

“When was that? Just if you think you can remember — where was it,” Nussbaum interrupted himself, “when and where did he say this?”

“Last summer. June. I’m going to say June, it definitely was not long after the Times broke the Pentagon Papers business. The President thought there was more material there of the same kind.”

Nussbaum was half the distance into the burning chill of an adrenaline high now. He had turned on. “Lay this out for me again. You say this was something the President said to do not this last June but the year before, that June of 1971, and that it was tied to the Pentagon Papers?”

“That’s what he felt at the time. Oh… the Oval Office. The conversation, I think he probably said this to more than one set of people, but he talked about it while he was in the Oval Office.” Nussbaum’s nostrils were wide as he held himself entirely still. That was nothing; Colson went on.

“Of course that wasn’t the end of it. I mean I tried to, I tried to operationalize a plan about that then. That… didn’t pan out,” Colson said darkly, a flicker of the old malice as the thought of John Dean crossed his mind. “Over time, though, I came to understand there was probably more to it. Certainly there were these papers, really they were part of the larger archive the press calls the Pentagon Papers. But I don’t think that was all of it.” He seemed to steady himself a little.

“I think the President thought they were there. The files — these damned files, excuse my language, that Lyndon Johnson had a copy of. The spying on Nixon, trying to make out that he had done something illegal back in ‘68 during the election. I think the President was so… moved about Brookings and about these other locations where we needed to see what assets the Democrats had, because he felt certain that the files of that investigation were there.”

Nussbaum’s stomach turned over, as if he had just jumped out of a plane. He bore down hard with his teeth, clamped bottom and top against each other, and found calm. “This was your guess — your understanding, what you put together from conversations you heard of or were a part of?”

“Yes.”

“That that’s where this… all this, where it was going?”

Colson spoke with a believer’s certainty. “Yes.”

Nussbaum nodded, like he had just watched the Constitution rewritten. “I want to thank you for that.”

Colson smiled. “You’re quite welcome.” And then he launched into some questions he’d come up with about seder because he’d been reading Exodus. It wasn’t like the movie, on rereading, he said.

Words drifted by Nussbaum like flotsam. Well, this was it, he said to himself. Time. Time to talk Colson down to a point and get the hell out — no phones, God knows which ones were bugged — and get this to Katzenbach. Which Nussbaum did. Colson says it’s there in the tapes, he said in person, and Katzenbach’s gimlet eyes widened. Get the goddamn order to DC Circuit and get it signed, said the former Attorney General. We need all of it because it’s there. The words, the probable cause on Chennault for new subpoenas. Christ, said the Jewish guy from New York. Maybe we need to see if we can indict a sitting President after all.

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Manny said no and thought that would be the end of it; no because to rush anything like this was improper on its face and no because Gurney and Wiggins were too damn much trouble for a man on the way out the door. Bob Drinan would have none of that, but then for a priest Bob could be a real son of a bitch when it came to practicality, that had to be the Jesuit in him. That was how Thomas Patrick O’Neill, Junior, “Tip” to everybody including strangers, saw it laid out in front of him, and that was the point from which the vast, knobble-nosed Boston Irishman started his preamble. Manny was there — Emmanuel Celler, a wisp of an aged Boroughs New Yorker, primaried out of his charimanship of the House Committee on the Judiciary by young Liz Holtzmann, who got the political moment that Manny didn’t. So was the Speaker, the sharp-eyed little Oklahoma fireplug Carl Albert, and the bejowled Louisianan Majority Leader Hale Boggs whose name somehow sounded exactly like he looked.

This was the conclave, these four plus dour, silver-haired Pete Rodino, an honorable time-server from Jersey who’d found himself thrust into Celler’s old job with the new Congress in January, just weeks away. They would sort it out here in Albert’s chambers, where the alcoholic Speaker could drink slowly but openly because, hell, anybody’d need a drink to deal with this mess. No soapboxers like Bob Drinan, no glory hounds, no moles for the White House, no partisan slanging with the other team even though Gerry Ford would’ve been a decent enough guy to have in the room on this. Just the bosses — two of whom incidentally, O’Neill and Boggs alike, both coveted Carl Albert’s job — and a clean decision.

Not only no but hell no, Boggs said. How the hell do you expect me to keep my boys together, said Boggs — his boys were the still-great mass of stolid, Southern career congressmen who formed a powerful plurality in the Democratic caucus — if you hand out a splitter like this issue? For Boggs the question was rhetorical. Tip still went right at it. Because he’s dirty, Tip said. Of course he’s dirty, Boggs answered, dirty’s everywhere, always has been. Dirty doesn’t signify. To this Tip answered that Dick Nixon was so damn dirty that the committees and Nick Katzenbach were at him eight ways from Sunday, and the thing was it all fit together. Not like a city machine where you earmarked and you hired cousins because it greased the wheels, but a damn conspiracy. A conspiracy for Dick Nixon to do whatever the hell he wanted in order to stay in power.

This had been coming since the summer, Tip went on, and Tip had said it then, that if Nixon got out of this alive in November they were going to have to lay out procedures for impeachment. Manny Celler tried to raise a qualifier and Tip stepped right over him with that deep Irish bark. Now that Nixon was done it was even more important, or he’d squirrel right out of it like he did with that goddamn Checkers speech when he was running with Ike. Our voters would never forgive us. Tip looked the meagerness of Carl Albert right in the eye and said it again: our voters would never forgive us.

That was how you did it, Tip thought to himself. It’s what he told those goddamn law-school legislative aides, the well-read ones who called Speaker Albert “the Little Corporal” behind Albert’s back and not because of a resemblance to Napoleon. You couldn’t treat people like that and get things done. When you had a tough guy, a proud guy like Boggs, you squared right up because you showed him you respected him by fighting like men, that way after you beat hell out of each other there could be some kind of settlement at quits. With a weak man, you appealed to his dignity, to his generosity, you built him up so he’d do what you needed him to.

Now Boggs went at Albert the other way, with what the weak man feared: threats to his fragile power, to the order he was supposed to keep. Bullshit, Boggs said. This worm had about turned already. People went and voted that they were mad at Dick Nixon, and now they’re scared that they elected George McGovern. McGovern’s gonna be president soon enough, Tip said, to which Boggs answered, Exactly, in a voice like his listener’s dog had dropped dead on the rug as they spoke. My boys don’t want any part of that, Boggs went on, ‘less McGovern can get something for their districts. Strictly business. Otherwise they want a strong hand and they’re about to lose one even if he is dirty. Katzenbach’s digging and he’s done real well it seems like everywhere but with Dick Nixon. Ed Gurney goes and hikes himself up there on that Senate committee and lays into Sam Ervin about how there’s no direct evidence and no corroborative evidence and after a while that sticks. Charlie Wiggins does the same thing in Judiciary — Celler moved to agree but Boggs cut him off. And then they all gang up and say there’s a whole lot of rotten apples but nobody can say Nixon said “do this” or “do that.” The goddamn tapes are a mess and this whole Chennault thing, hell, half the country thinks Lyndon set the whole damn thing up and some of them are McGovern’s people! How do we keep this together if there’s nothing. And that fool Katzenbach’s talking about trying to indict a sitting president…

… Tip chipped in that there was nothing in substantive law that said he couldn’t…

… Celler cavilled again but Boggs went right over him: hell yes there is, said Boggs. Hell yes. There is not one damn Southern congressman who is going to break the damn system in a moment of crisis like this just because they don’t like Nixon. We’ve got a murderer’s row of criminals in the Nixon campaign, and probably some more in the West Wing. We need to keep an eye on the ball and get that dealt with, Boggs said. Look after some proper law and order because then we look like we’re looking after it. Ervin and Fulbright and them have shot their Senatorial bolt, Boggs went on. They are bogged down in details and they need to get on with showing how dirty CREEP was and leave Nixon the hell alone. It’s bad politics right now. He’s started to look like the victim in all this and we don’t need to kick him while he’s down. Plus we’ve got cranks like Bob Drinan who want to get on him just about bombing Cambodia when most Americans want this war settled for good. They still think maybe Nixon can do that, or at least they think he’s got a better shot than George McGovern. Rodino calmly but firmly said he didn’t think bombing Cambodia was any kind of “just.” Boggs stared Rodino down.

Tip stepped back in; Albert drank methodically and took it all in, keen for every detail as a frightened man would be. I know Bob’s a pain. He’s a good man, he’s a father of my Church but he’s a pain in the ass when he gets stuck on principle. We need to sit down and see what the legal grounds are. And we probably need to take this process back. Otherwise Katzenbach may go off the rails and that will just look bad for us and for McGovern who, like it or not, is gonna be our guy. We need to show people that the Congress of this country is worth a damn. Not just to do plain detective work. That Muskie guy George Mitchell’s lawsuit is doing just fine, I don’t like his chances on appeal but he’s got the dirty money out in the public record. Nick Katzenbach’s pulled in all the guys he can flip on the big fish like John Mitchell and Kalmbach and maybe Haldeman or Ehrlichman. The question is how can we properly see just what the issue is with Nixon.

“Now Hale I agree with you on one thing” — Tip said this and smiled the smile he used when he would spring his point — “this whole process is a mess. Too many directions and that just gives Gurney and Wiggins and Delbert Latta and the rest ammunition. Dick Nixon sure as hell knows how to look persecuted, too. So we need to do this by the book. We need to hand this over to Pete here” — he gestured to Rodino, who looked like the GI private who’d just gotten stripes he didn’t want to deal with — “and get this laid out proper. Manny can figure out how it’s done, because when was the last time we even impeached a judge around here? The Thirties? That’ll take long enough by itself. He goes out looking sober, responsible. Hasn’t done a damn thing, he’s just taught us how to do it. Then we see where we are. See what comes of the damn tapes, and the Paris talks, just see where we are.”

Boggs was doubtful. Gurney’s handed it to us, Boggs replied, handed it over yesterday in that speech down on the Senate floor. If we even think that Nixon fostered a climate of “ill will and misbehavior,” that’s what he said, and sure we all think it, if we think that then we should just censure the man and move on. That’s simple enough. We wrap the damn committees up and get some people charged who Katzenbach hasn’t charged yet, and we get the hell on. The leftists like Drinan can go on with their impeachment ideas and that’ll work real fine for their supporters. But it gets us away from it, we get to say Nixon did wrong and the rest is up to him.

Tip darkened. What if they do have him? he said. What if they turn up a magic piece somewhere? Do you want us to be wrong on that? Tip shaped the word as it came out of its mouth, nearly breathed it over to where Carl Albert sat, the pieces laid out on the board in his mind, the blended whisky poured neatly over the sharper edges of his fear. What if that means we blew our chance or the whole thing gets handed over to Katzenbach who wants to be the next Governor of New York based on whether he can make the President of the United States take a perp walk? I know your boys don’t like it. Tip shrugged now. They don’t have to, he added. They just have to hate the other options worse.

Now Hale Boggs was silent. At long last Manny Celler chimed in that Tip’s was a reasonable point. Celler himself felt that Nixon was hard done by, a reasonable man whose subordinates got ahead of themselves. But examining options was responsible. It also, as Tip himself had said, killed time. Unless things sped up unexpectedly, they could make the right noises until Richard Nixon was a private citizen and let the ordinary justice system carry on as needed. Carl Albert liked the sound of that. He knew how to play for time. Time cooled hot heads; time would get this all done soon enough. Time it was, then.

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Then came the flood. Two days on, as Celler quietly assembled constitutional lawyers and law-clerk congressional aides, even called in the Library of Congress, the Federal District for the District of Columbia sat down en banc again — there were grumbles — and told the sitting President to quit fucking around and hand it all over. So it began.

The reels poured out like a plasticine everlasting stream. First it was a phenomenon, then an industry: it took more hands to the job and Katzenbach lurched frantically into the offices of Mike Mansfield and Speaker Albert to get emergency appropriations out of Congress for more staff before Nixon’s GOP praetorians could talk the bills to death. The press joined in, and not just the papers. HaperCollins took a flyer and got into the rooms as they were transcribed, picking up enough material to rush out a trade-paper “first volume” that went into the nation’s Christmas stockings. It was a phenomenon from birth; water-cooler conversation, fodder for Johnny Carson, the stuff of pop culture where, since Nixon’s crew swore like longshoremen when they were about their work, the phrase “Expletive Deleted” entered American English argot. That was all much of a muchness on its own, enough to rile the half of the country that wanted Dick Nixon run out of town to new levels of indignation, while the half that partly dug in its heels against admitting a mistake and partly believed the goddamn pinkos deserved what they got stood their ground, too. And that was just the noise from the stands.

Down on the playing field there was blood and fury. The Senate’s committees bulled ahead for more witnesses. John Dean, in a dizzy hormonal tangle between self-sacrifice and self-preservation, volunteered to go in front of Ervin’s firing squad in a self-proposed effort to have Nixon’s senior lieutenants fall on their swords and shut the books on the whole thing. Dean tried, and indeed for a couple of days nearly mesmerized the Senate gallery and the television viewers with detailed recollections of privileged Oval Office meetings and backchannel schemes. But the tapes caught up with him. Where there were inconsistencies the nice Harper Collins folks let Rufus Edmisten and the lawyers walk in and take a look and Ervin was back on the hunt. He hemmed Dean in with questions like treeing a fox while in the background Ed Gurney’s deep New England tones bayed in protest (for a Florida senator, you could hear Gurney’s Maine boyhood in every syllable.) Foreign Relations wanted Bob Haldeman on their carpet and he danced in circles of legal protest up to the edge of contempt of Congress: to stay on the job, to keep Nixon reined in on Vietnam. In the meanwhile, more and more of the tapes came out. More suspicious discussion of the investigations, more general malfeasance. Just past the ides of December Katzenbach’s coffee-jagged youngsters found the magic words. There on the reels from June 17, 1971 they met them face to face: blow the safe.

The furor was vast. Nixon’s chorus was swift to respond that a President who liked to talk tough and had a … complicated sense of humor should not be taken literally. For the middle hinge of American opinion this argument did not survive Johnny Carson’s acid disdain that night, but for the hardening shield around the sitting President it was an article of faith. How many terrible or shocking things had LBJ said in his time? Or Roosevelt? The air of debate was a poisonous fume and there was no peace in midwinter. Then Katzenbach sprang his play.

He had feinted already, indicted John Mitchell and also Ehrlichman, and spread fear among the men who sat on couches in the Oval Office that either one would flip something big (John Dean, now barely allowed in the West Wing after his Senate performance, was white with expectation.) Katzenbach had talked it through on long evenings with Bob Sack and Bernie Nussbaum and a tousled young redhead named Weld who had worked twenty-hour days to reach the inner sanctum, in rooms where nicotine settled like an opiate haze and they mapped out the plays and the points and authorities on forests of lined yellow paper. They prepared in detail and then launched their arrows in Times New Roman. The papers had it from planted leaks before it happened; Nick Katzenbach was asking for discovery from President Nixon. Katzenbach said nothing to reporters, or nothing that leaked, but they could surmise that Nixon might then be named as a third-party defendant in the cases of John Mitchell and John Ehrlichman.

So it was that, like a wounded bear, up out of the Southeast Asian mire lurched Richard M. Nixon. This was just about goddamn enough, he said on the phone to the straitened Elliot Richardson. You couldn’t indict a sitting president (Richardson delicately pointed out that there was no formal language to that effect and that the Constitution specified certain immunities for members of Congress so they’d have inked it if they wanted to.) Besides that, Bork had told Nixon — that would be Solicitor General Robert Bork, of the goatee and the originalism — that as the officer charged with the proper exercise of the laws of the United States Dick Nixon didn’t have to put up with this horseshit if he didn’t want to. Again, Richardson pointed to privileges and immunities in Katzenbach’s charter. Nixon would have none of it. Fire him, Nixon said. Goddamn fire him. Nixon kept his sentences short when he meant it; the matter was closed.

Elliot Richardson said no. Nixon pointed out in a predatory growl that he was duly managing the execution of the laws of the country. Richardson said no again, and in clipped Brahmin tones added that he had a letter of resignation drafted against this day already. Bob Haldeman had phoned Richardson’s deputy on a second Oval Office line before the call was over. No luck again — Justice’s number two preferred to jump rather than be pushed, too. That moved the order of succession to Solicitor General — Attorney General now, for a little while at least — Bork. Here Nixon found both a legal mind and a political instinct entirely obliging. Bork let himself be talked out of resignation for the sake of operational continuity in order to bear the burden of being the newest hero of the American right. A life in the law had its demands sometimes.

The papers went crazy. There was no peace at Christmas as bombs fell abroad and the President made the law do what he wanted it to at home. But of course that was what Nick Katzenbach had wanted.

Above his other talents and ambitions, Katzenbach was a prosecutor. He did not win cases by virtuous use of statutes or by mastery of legal loopholes. He won, like any good prosecutor, by getting inside the other guy’s head and making him do what Katzenbach wanted the other guy to do. What Nick Katzenbach wanted Dick Nixon to do was obstruct justice. All Katzenbach had asked for was discovery of documents and related information. In turn Nixon, quoting Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution to every press gaggle that bushwhacked him, had fired a special prosecutor he wasn’t supposed to be able to fire. Katzenbach had mixed feelings about the special-prosecutor approach in any case; what he did know was that if he made the right threat at the right time, Richard Nixon would stomp a mudhole in the prosecutor’s office. And, because of the way the Congress of the United States had described Katzenbach’s job, that was probably an impeachable offense.

Carl Albert smiled a harried, jagged smile as Katzenbach explained all this in smooth Episcopalian tones in the Speaker’s chambers. And that very day, with the aid of a crew of burly delivery-van men, Bob Sack and young Bill Weld delivered tens of thousands of pages of material to the Office of Counsel for the United States House of Representatives Judiciary Committee. In the background, committee staffers and the Library of Congress raced the calendar to prepare a comprehensive con-law report on the impeachment process for the new Chairman, Pete Rodino, by the time the Ninety-Third Congress was sworn in just after New Year’s. In the foreground, into Rodino’s office marched the hired gun: the broad and bespectacled Charles Moore, Jr., the white civil rights attorney from Birmingham, Alabama who had wound stems against the Birmingham church bombers on national television and shrugged off crosses burnt in his yard, who’d destroyed the racial gerrymander in front of the Supreme Court, who’d sued the state of Georgia for what Moore called an illegal vote in the largely racially restricted 1966 gubernatorial election, who’d diced with his career as a senior officer of the American Civil Liberties Union by calling for Nixon’s impeachment. Glasses askew as the photographers flashed their record of the moment, three briefcases gripped in two hands, Moore was about his business and did not look amused. With the new Congress Rodino would let slip Moore’s lead.

Then the race would be on.

 

[Yes]

The Flight Forward II: Think Big
​

[Nothing less than] the destruction of a government that a few weeks earlier
had seemed invulnerable. The president lived in the stunned lethargy of a man
whose nightmares had come true … Like a figure in Greek tragedy, he was
fulfilling his own nature and destroying himself.

- Henry Kissinger, 1973​

If the President had his way, there would be a nuclear war every week!

- Henry Kissinger, various occasions


[T]hat thing which was the main fear and therefore the prime issue. Which wasn’t whether
Nixon was a crook. Millions had been talking on both sides of that issue for more than a
quarter-century now. Everyone knew what the prime issue was. A certain thumb moving
towards a certain red button, a certain question of sanity…. Query: if the man who holds
the thumb over the button is mad….

- Sen. Sam Ervin (D-NC), 1973​

Through it all the war went on. The war that had started all the others, the one that had stood like a bloody wraith at Richard Nixon’s side through every decision of his presidency even before the political dagger Lyndon Johnson had so recently thrust in Nixon’s side showed that fact to all present, except those blinded by faith. It went on and Nixon faced it now, hungry, out of time, and driven by his inner fires to end it one way or another. That his mood and his resolve now frightened calculating men, who knew Dick Nixon in full for who he was, sent a chill throughout “the building,” even among those ordinary souls who had no sure way to know that this was what moved them. The President would have peace in Vietnam, or even victory, or he would not face political oblivion alone. Those calculating others, from fear as much or more than justice, resolved not to join him.

Henry had a plan; Henry always had a plan. And for a political scientist, the National Security Adviser possessed a very lawyerly mind. He took the facts on the ground, while the cold hard sense of Nixon’s desperation stabbed at the base of his mind, and arranged those facts to suit a new theory. Before what mattered most was peace: peace with Hanoi, peace at home to speed the President’s reelection. Now what mattered most was containment. Kissinger had to contain Hanoi’s power, Thieu’s ambition, and Richard Nixon’s rage.

The first step was to gain control of time, to set out precepts for the parties and talk them all to death while other matters were arranged. Then, they would knock North Vietnam back on its heels and make clear that the best Hanoi and their Soviet patrons could hope for was some — probably not all — of the American concessions in the October offer. All the while they would buttress Saigon and Lon Nol’s regime in Cambodia, and bomb hell out of the guerrillas there. At some point there would be an ultimatum about American POWs. Lastly they would sell the story: that Richard Nixon had always sought peace with honor, real honor, that he would not desert America’s friends or give up on America’s captives, that he would press their cause to the last moment of his presidency like an honorable man, that he had been robbed of the chance to do things right by internal enemies and external misfortune. That would probably do.

Kissinger worked the plan for as much of November as he could. He reopened lines of communication in Paris. He stretched out days into a week or more as he indulged Nixon’s and Thieu’s fantasies of strength with aggressive new demands that would secure a South Vietnamese state in treaty law. He even arranged for his old rival, Secretary of State William Rogers who was long since sent to Coventry, to take a multi-day trip to Saigon where he would go over the proposals with Thieu in painful detail. After a while some folk like Rogers himself and Bob Haldeman cottoned on to the outline of Kissinger’s plan and marveled that it might save the day. That surely wasn’t Henry’s intent, they told themselves, but at least you could always count on Henry’s self-interest.

The trouble, as it always was with Nixon, was politics. Nixon spent nearly two weeks after the election in a depressed state: he drank heavily, slept little, raged sometimes, sulked mostly. This gave Kissinger time to work out the hard-line proposal for Paris and take it there. But as he left for more talks the Supreme Court returned the verdict in Ervin v. Nixon. This brought Nixon roaring back to life within days. His attitude put several senior national security staffers in a state of near panic; Nixon was calm. He intended no sudden moves, not while Henry worked away in Paris and tried to walk Le Duc Tho and his crew back to the proposals of October. The staff felt their stomachs drop away. This meant Nixon wanted to act deliberately, and that terrified them.

As Nixon wrestled with Katzenbach’s investigation over the Thanksgiving weekend, he also wrestled with Vietnam. If Henry couldn’t talk the North Vietnamese into something they would simply hunker down and wait for favorable terms when McGovern took … he could barely say it in his own head. Thieu, that bastard, would demand concrete assurances or he’d try to blackmail the new administration by refusing any agreements that might free American prisoners unless Thieu liked the terms. There would have to be a decisive blow; something to hurt the North, something to break them. Then he could squeeze Thieu’s nuts and get a proper agreement signed. This was for the good of the country, really, even for the good of that lefty lunatic McGovern. The question was not whether to break Hanoi, but instead how.

Kissinger kept talking in Paris, even after Thanksgiving, but the substance in his cables grew thin and Nixon laid down an ultimatum: results by the first of December or come home. Le Duc Tho, interested to see what he could get from Kissinger if he pushed hard, abandoned the talks on purpose. Nixon meanwhile had already begun to plan. Now, with Kissinger home, he pressed ahead with his ideas. He wanted national security staff, civilian and uniformed, to return to the DUCK HOOK proposals from 1969 and reevaluate options in light of current plans and circumstances. Now Nixon had an almost manic energy, with twice-daily meetings with principals to look into what their deputies were doing, updates on draft proposals, and streams of suggestions.

By the first weekend in December there were four clear options proposed. The first was simply — “simply” — a massive bombing campaign against Hanoi and Haiphong that would hit strategic targets round the clock for up to a week. The second was a plan, mooted back in the spring, that would marshal and launch a massive raid on Hanoi with nearly three divisions’ worth of ground troops to free American prisoners in the city and seize key North Vietnamese leaders as bargaining chips. The third option was a lightning bombing campaign to destroy North Vietnam’s vast network of irrigation dikes. In the monsoon rains this would trigger floods, crop loss, disease, and possible famine. The fourth option was the use of nuclear weapons.

Nixon himself was drawn to the bombing campaigns. On one hand he nursed a deep skepticism of past strategic air "projects," as he told senior advisers more than once while they haggled over how to break a country like turning a few votes on a bill in the House. In Nixon's view all those big impressive Air Force jobs had done “zilch” to alter the course of the war. This, though, he could get behind. It had the ring of punishment to it; that was what Nixon wanted most, he wanted Hanoi punished, he wanted North Vietnam broken on the wheel and pliant while he went at Thieu. First the dikes, then the cities, then if need be expand again to hit the forces that were mustered to attack the South given an opportunity. Hit the North, hit them and hit them and hit them, until they broke because at the end of the day they had to be weaker men than Richard Nixon. Had to. He asked detailed questions about the dikes, like how many aircraft, how many days, day or night bombing, how far would floods extend, how many dead up front, how many would die for months as food grew scarce.

All this sent chills through several principals. Kissinger, who danced on the head of his main chance as always, complemented Nixon’s strategic vision in the same breath that he drew the talk around again to the estimates from staff studies that bomb, flood, and famine together would kill perhaps two hundred thousand souls. Admiral Thomas Moorer, the round-faced carrier pilot from Alabama turned Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, did what he always did with a President as erratic and given to dissemble as Nixon — he took precise notes in his impressively detailed diary. Conservative by temperament, not inclined to be the first boss of the uniformed military to lose a war, Moorer wanted action but preferred decapitation strikes on Hanoi mixed with the massive ground raid, a modern chevauchee to shatter Hanoi’s sense of security. He also suspected the dikes plan would endanger the POWs; Moorer knew dozens of those men personally, they were friends, even sons of friends, and a priority to him.

William Rogers, the tall, dour, Eastern Establishment champion and Nixon’s marginalized Secretary of State, was appalled and said so. With an end in sight to his confinement at Foggy Bottom and with Nixon’s authority under siege, Rogers threatened to resign if the dikes plan went ahead. Nixon, full of piss and vinegar, ran through three consecutive angry phone calls to Kissinger in which he threatened to fire Rogers just as easily as he would Katzenbach if the legal noose got too tight. With a formidable display of his real gift — blame displacement — Kissinger cajoled Rogers into staying, so he could aid in any talks that did restart. Kissinger found fault with unnamed military officers who doubted the usefulness of strikes on the dikes and fretted about the Geneva Convention. In his cups, Nixon would have none of it. With a new target he laid off Rogers, but said again to Henry in slurs and growls that he would burn the whole damn country down over there if that was what it took. Meantime Kissinger’s staff and Strategic Air Command were to run a planning study for the dikes, and US forces in-country were to be reduced at a faster rate than planned as political cover

While the study charged ahead in the first week of December, the reality of the situation settled on another central figure in Nixon’s apparatus, his Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird. A balding, cherub-faced Wisconsinite, Mel Laird was a veteran Congressman and a skilled boss of the unruly, imperial Pentagon. He was also one of the most underrated schemers and operators in the Nixon machine, not so much through any real criminality but in his mastery at getting what he wanted out of the Department of Defense and Congress alike. He also acted, like any truly competent operator, to try and rein in Richard Nixon’s volcanic, often self-destructive approach to national security. More than once he’d arranged convenient misdirection, complication, or outright failure when Nixon wanted to burn it all down and bomb them all, whoever they were that day, so as to serve what Laird saw as the real goals of the administration.

It was Laird who reached out to Moorer on the 7th — Pearl Harbor Day, Laird had nearly forgotten before his executive secretary brought him the remarks he was to make down at the Navy Yard — to discuss how they would couch the dikes plan in advice. Moorer also discussed the major exercises planned for the 3rd Marine Division around Okinawa that month, and that a more austere version of the big raid on Hanoi — “just” two and a third divisions, not three and a half — could potentially be executed by New Year’s, if permission to move assets was gained in the next three to four days. Laird pulled every military weather service report on forecasts for Southeast Asia between that day and Christmas, asked for data on the logistics of supplying heavy bombers, and an assessment about accuracy differences between the B-52s and smaller aircraft with precision-guided weapons. Years in the House of Representatives still had their uses: when in doubt, talk it to death.

Laird bought more time when he sent SAC and the Joint Staff back to the drawing board for two separate plans, labeled HAMMER for the B-52s, and ARROW for a plan based on Air Force Phantoms and F-111s with F-105G “Wild Weasels” flying radar suppression, and Navy A-6s, all laden with directed air-to-ground missiles or the new laser-guided bombs. Nixon had reached a state of equipoise, concentrated on his legal issues, so any diligent talk of “doing it right” sold well. Even Henry indicated a measure of respect for Laird’s stagecraft. It took another couple of days on top to look thoroughly at weather and casualty issues to do with ARROW and to involve all the relevant commanders in discussion. It always helped to look busy. As that wound up, Kissinger went to Paris for a day to confer with the South Vietnamese who had turned up because Thieu had his own reasons to look diligent, and then at last, as the principals had wrung every day they could grasp from the process, they briefed the sullen Nixon.

There were three plans. One carried the unimaginative name LINEBACKER II for a reason, because it focused on a deliberate series of attacks by heavy bombers on strategic North Vietnamese targets, to be carried out without letup for a week or more. This was the least imaginative option and Nixon smelled that a mile off. He still held forth about it, noted the other players in the room, but the blather was a distraction from the fact he had no interest, an effort to get the other confreres loose and lax. Then Laird, Moorer, and that patrician undertaker of a Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms, briefed the other two options.

Both, with their derivations from the DUCK HOOK studies, bore golf-slang nicknames that referenced those roots. The first was EAGLE, which would lead with convergent B-52 strikes to paralyze North Vietnamese command and control, followed by the “great raid” on Hanoi and efforts to draw out and destroy North Vietnamese units with air power as the American force withdrew. It was much the larger concentration of new force and would take until roughly the new year to marshal. The second was RIGHT SLICE, an evolution of ARROW into a comprehensive plan to attack the dikes above and around Hanoi and the urban centers of northeast North Vietnam with hundreds of tactical aircraft laden with precision-guided bombs and missiles. Some, though not many, extra aircraft were needed and would be sent forthwith, because they had potential value for the other plans as well. There would be inter-service coordination on RIGHT SLICE too; the Air Force would hit the dikes themselves, while Navy fighters would concentrate on the artillery and anti-aircraft batteries bunched in around the dikes for both defense and protection (out of belief that the Americans would not launch a coordinated attack on the dikes.)

Nixon mulled. He asked questions about EAGLE, then dismissed it. Too many American boots on the ground meant they might blow the opening to China, get the hard-liners riled up and ready to help Hanoi after all. (Several others present also reckoned that Nixon felt he still needed the POWs, for political reasons, that they had to come out last as cleanly as possible to drive home Nixon’s bid for survival with a flourish.) Nixon was clear. He wanted fear and death and a batterer’s leverage, and for that really only the dikes would do. Keep the plans for LINEBACKER II of course, if the Pentagon screwed up another thing there had to be a fallback plan because you couldn’t just leave Hanoi to their own devices. But first, hit the dikes.

Nixon asked blunt questions. It was Kissinger who fielded them, because Kissinger always wanted to be the factotum, also because Kissinger believed he was the only one who could steer Nixon in a particular direction. Can we break their will and get them to go back to the October terms? Will this show Thieu we’re steady, that we do what we say we’ll do? All very familiar. There were nods with both motion and words. Admiral Moorer answered technical questions from the hump-shouldered chief executive who was all but drawing up football plays in the sand, as Moorer described air corridors, sortie rates, suppression of enemy air defenses. What about weather? came the fateful question. Laird was Wisconsin nice; weather’s always a question but we believe we’ve got a shot in the next few days, he said with a smile, his body three quarters onto the short road out of the Oval Office.

Aircraft criss-crossed the Pacific. Kissinger fielded phone calls like desultory gunfire from Nixon over the days that followed, rehashing plots while constitutional government shook around them. Then the calls swung away towards Laird. Now we look at the weather, the Secretary of Defense said. We look at the weather. As though for the sake of a common purpose of humanity, the weather was awful. Goddamn awful, bitched Nixon. How had they gotten this one wrong? Monsoon season was tricky, Laird philosophized, backed up by as much bullshit as Henry could shovel. There were great rewards if you could get it clear because the dikes were laden with water and you’d get the floods Nixon intended, but it was hard to time it just so. Keep at it, was the order. The Pentagon did.

It still rained. Nixon asked the questions. Kissinger answered them at length, heaping blame on Laird, Moorer, whoever else he could think of who was willing to take it. Days passed; the study about unfavorable loss-to-target destruction ratios out of ARROW reached Kissinger’s desk as if asked for. He waited for Nixon to reach a ruminative mood and talked it over with him. It got Nixon fidgety, which was the goal. The goddamn Pentagon had screwed the fencepost again. There was nothing you could rely on with all this precision bombing except to go back at it another way, to try it differently. Because you needed to hurt them; it was the only way. So they’d have another day — Moorer recorded that Laird spent it quietly, white as a sheet whenever someone brought up the six-hour weather reports — and then the President himself would scratch this whole damned mess. Play the next hand of cards. LINEBACKER II it was then.

It was less than a week to Christmas when Richard Nixon finally got his chance to bomb the hell out of North Vietnam. And to his great relief it really was, in his considered opinion, quite a show. Two hundred and four B-52s darkened the monsoon skies in waves, with fuel tankers, electronic-warfare aircraft, ground suppression from the F-105Gs, and littler bombs tossed by Phantoms and F-111s and carrier jets. It really was a show. From their northern heartland the Viet hurled surface-to-air missiles with abandon and seeded the clouds with shrapnel from flak. There were higher B-52 losses the first night than expected; this turned out to be a temporary hiccup, a case of pride going before destruction as the Big Ugly Fat Fuckers marched in line like redcoats and were asking for it, practically. SAC sorted that all out over the forty-eight hours that followed, with a lower sortie rate that had Nixon prowling the halls to know when the new tactics would be employed and the rate of dumping seventy thousand pounds of explosives each out of the B-52Ds would go back up. The smaller aircraft flew as well, prowled and waited for clear places among the clouds where they could drop their TV- or laser-guided bombs on target.

Nixon stayed up all hours as the combined air task forces pummeled the North again and again. Here and there something went awry, a bombload dumped in a shipping channel, a grid marker settled off plumb that meant a hospital was destroyed, its frightened patients suffocated in the rubble of a house of care that became their tomb, hits purposeful or not on localized stretches of the dikes that suppurated water and washed away lives and food. On it went. Christmas came; Nixon would have none of Christmas. The jets flew, the bombs dropped. Paper armies of placards and bills and editorials rose up against him, not just at home but across the world. Nixon had never been a quitter. He pressed on.

Finally, on New Year’s eve, Hanoi moved. Notes were passed in Paris. Kissinger responded, and late that evening Washington time talked to the jowled, voluble Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. The North and the PRG wanted to come back to the talks. They had proposals, based on counters to Washington’s October plan. The terms of parley were set out again. Nixon was almost loath to let his offensive go, he wanted assurances from Le Duc Tho directly about the course of talks. Kissinger, scrambling again to justify his patter as he often had to, got Le’s word. On New Year’s the last bombs dropped, for the moment. Thirteen solid days of uninterrupted hell loosed from the skies had done enough for now. Great men would sit and talk and Nixon found that fitting. But he could read a calendar as well as anyone. So could Kissinger. The window was terribly narrow. On the face of it that gave Hanoi tremendous leverage. In order to flip that leverage back to the American side you needed a madman in your back pocket. Kissinger had but to look homeward, to those iron eyes sunk as deep as the abyss, to know he had one handy.

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They stored the bombs aboard the ships; for the war’s whole length that had been the irony. While fresh-faced boys faced fire and metal and the maiming of body and soul and death in the elephant grass, the bombs had lurked in nuclear-proofed bunkers on Guam, or on the long grey warships out on “Dixie” and “Yankee” stations, south and north of the Demilitarized Zone respectively, in secret off in Thailand, or one red phone’s call away in the arsenals of apocalypse spread across Congressional districts in nearly all fifty states. At the quagmire’s edge always there was the whiff of cobalt and tritium and megadeath, and sometimes when you found the right general you could read it in their eyes. The bloody arithmetic. The urge.

The ships were the most convenient source, because per every formal, three-ring bindered operational plan and every contingency scenario on the books, all United States Navy capital ships kept a special magazine of nuclear weapons. On aircraft carriers — especially the largest like the USS Enterprise, “Big E,” the nuclear-powered ship for a nuclear age, lately a part of LINEBACKER II and still tracing lazy eights in the South China Sea — those weapons took the form of “gravity” bombs — no special guidance system, you dropped them and they fell — there for “tactical and operational use.” Those were just the adjectives Richard Nixon wanted to hear. An operation, a procedure. Driven by superior tactics. Surgical. All the magic words, all the lies of mind that lay behind the specially designed locks on those magazine doors. Doors for which the orders to open up were held so close that for most of the distance from Richard Nixon’s yuletide fugue to the middle of January even the Secretary of Defense did not know of them. Orders hidden behind a short drab word: more golf slang for a player’s hole-in-one, poker slang for a poker President that named what he kept up his sleeve always, ready for the moment when he had the will to play it. Three pages of onion paper and a National Security staffer’s haunted soul. Operation ACE.

Now, on the fourteenth day of January, Dick Nixon took that folder off his desk. He talked with Henry again first; Kissinger was dour, resolved. They accept the terms, Kissinger said. Not just in principle, they accept the terms as what we can do, what they wish both sides to put in writing. But Hanoi won’t move, not now, not when they think you might listen to Thieu and walk back the American concessions, not when they can embarrass you — the word that raced down Dick Nixon’s brain stem like wildfire — if they just wait for McGovern. We can get this done but really we have to hold their feet to the fire. I want to talk about how we do that, said Henry. Nixon was in no mood to talk. He knew already, anyway. Word went to Rose Mary Woods, his now famous secretary, and from her to a trusted commodore who had worked on the big nuclear targeting exercises back in ‘69. Nixon would tell Mel Laird when he goddamn got around to it. Meanwhile in the next eighteen hours the commodore would fly to Pearl Harbor, then out to the Philippines and onto the deck of the Enterprise. That was the start of the show.

From there, Nixon’s emissary would call a closed-door meeting with the rear admiral in command of “Big E” and with the Commander, Air Group who was also the unit boss of the Enterprise’s squadron of A-6E Intruders. Those “Short Little Ugly Fuckers,” with their long range and solid bomb load, were the Navy’s premier medium bombers. Two aircraft they’d need, with the two best Intruder pilots on board one of whom, the CAG, was already in the room. Each aircraft would load out one B61 nuclear gravity bomb: these were what they called “dial a yield” weapons, where tripping different permissive locks would trigger explosions of a different scale from the bomb up to one-hundred-eighty kilotons that could lay waste a smaller city. The lead jet’s bomb would be set to ten kilotons, “only” another Hiroshima let out into the world. The CAG would fly that one up to the Lang Chi hydroelectric dam above Hanoi. There he would execute a “lay down” drop, and inside the bullet-shaped metal canister a warhead would tear its own atomic structure apart, shatter the integrity of the dam, and loose the irradiated flood on those downstream at the same time it turned out the lights in much of North Vietnam. The second A-6, its bomb “dialed” to forty-five kilotons, would let the device airburst above Haiphong Harbor, the North’s second city and chief port. That was the plan, the damage, the will to act, and the gamble.

Expect coded confirmation in seventy-two hours said the commodore, as though he had just said the trains were running on time. The Rear Admiral and the pilot nodded and walked out. They were nuclear men in a nuclear world. This was real, this time, but they had heard such words often enough to take the edge off their nerves. Anyway, the President had guts. Whatever else he’d done, he wouldn’t knuckle under to the goddamn gooks. In this, the younger of the two Intruder pilots and Dick Nixon were of one mind. This could be the greatest strategic stroke delivered by the United States since… well, since Nagasaki.

Nixon thought so too. This was what it was to think, to act, to live in the place of the rare men who could make the big decisions. That’s what this was, it was big, truly big. If you wanted to succeed you had to go all the way. Had to make the other side deal with the moment on your terms. You carved out history, or it carved into you. They could argue all they liked, the cheap ,shifty bastards. Hanoi could argue balls and strikes and clauses in Paris til hell froze over. Those goddamn limp wrists and pinkos on the House Judiciary Committee could go through all the motions they wanted, even the good ones, the guys like Wiggins and Latta who stood up and told it like it was. They couldn’t reach him, could they? There was no way to know who meant what — even he wondered sometimes, sometimes you had to wonder when there were so many choices, so many calls in your own head to go one way or another much less what anyone else thought they goddamn knew — no way to say the big mess was any damn thing to do with him. No way to say that there was anything really wrong, because the President did what was right.

More than that he did what he had to do. That was what they never understood. None of them ever understood it. Bebe, he understood what it did, what it cost; sometimes Bob understood where it took him, or at least the goddamn cross he had to bear, the nights, the pain, the rage, the doubt. They were good men, they tried. There was nobody he could rely on like Bebe, Bob could get fucking temperamental about all this, all the bullshit that had been churned up — Christ, McGovern of all people! And that human scum Wallace, there would be a reckoning, that would get done because you could never let any of them think you’d forgiven them not for a moment — but his guys were good men. Good men. They would grasp what he had to do. Not just joke about it any more. It was time to break or be broken. Nixon knew which he’d do.

So it was the days passed; the nights were harder. They hurt. They screamed, they feared, they accused, they stalked him like hounds astride his soul. But he could choose not to remember them, to do what a man did which was square up and lock the door on them when the sun came up. There wasn’t enough drink. And who understood? No one. That little rat fink Dean probably had most of them half out the goddamn door by now and even Laird was unreliable and he was supposed to be in goddamn charge of this thing! Laird with China this and Brezhnev that and that winkle of fear in his eyes. No goddamn guts. What China this and Brezhnev that would know was that when they dealt with Richard Nixon, this was a man, this was a man who meant what he said. And now what? McGovern? Who couldn’t fucking figure out what he meant, much less say it? Christ. And still with the television. Still in the House arguing petty points of law with no sense of political consequences, of how they should treat someone who bore the weight of what he bore, that he could still function, bear up and be a man even through the nights and the tears, face Hanoi with an inescapable consequence and get them to move at last. Who could watch that? Who could care about him and watch that? Pat? CHRIST!!

Then they acted like it was his fault, the goddamn Secret Service suits as they walked her off to somebody, probably some goddamn nurse who could keep her mouth shut but they would judge anyway, never understand that she was the only one for him, that that bright red brand across her jawline was a punishment wrought by the world, that a man could only carry the world for so long when the people he loved didn’t know how to care for him, or at least the people who said they loved him. He had made strategic decisions Dwight goddamn Eisenhower didn’t have the nuts to follow through on, held the fortunes of the nation in his hand and she had to watch that bullshit? The way the agents’ eyes avoided him, guilty little men. Didn’t know. Not them or Butterfield or Rose Mary or any of them.

He had to look over his goddamn shoulder at Moorer and someone with the fucking CIA was leaking like a sieve to the next administration. Had to keep Laird in line now that he knew, at least he’d only given Laird a couple of days to adjust to the operational realities. At least Moorer had set up a direct line to the Enterprise, that was how you kept an eye on the bullshit. Speaking of which, Christ, Henry, Henry was full of it and trying to keep every damn body happy. So what if the President of the United States made a personal call to Thieu and told him if he didn’t want to end up in the same goddamn trunk as Diem he’d sign? There was a point where you played it straight. It benefited nobody, just nobody, if you tried to bluff it out with no time to bluff. Anyway Henry cleaned up stuff like that all the time. At least now the press were on about how that fucking cracker lawyer Moore had screwed it up, pushed too hard too fast. They were trying to let the wop off, Rodino — why did Manny Celler have to go at exactly the wrong time? Never could trust Democrats — that he was running a tight ship and showed patience and statesmanship, just the Counsel’s office had tried to do too much at once. Wiggins was all over that, good for him. A couple of hours of it wasn’t so bad because you could see what the other bastards were up to. Debating like they could do a damn thing to a sitting President. At least that one, the new one, black lady from Texas — wasn’t that a thing — could speak well. She had more balls than the rest of those useless bastards. Well spoken, polite, convinced of the worth of the Constitution like a good American should be. That’s what he was going to defend. The goddamn gooks had a day. They could sign the treaty — for what that was worth, fucking pieces of paper — and give him the peace America deserved or they could fucking burn. He could not care less. He could see the big picture.

He wasn’t expecting Julie, as he waited. They kept up his calendar even when he didn’t want it, to look presidential, to keep the business of government going. Now, even when they had half the goddamn rats off the ship and Ehrlichman under indictment — John, what did they think he did that hadn’t needed to be done, that wasn’t part of the business? When a President or his men needed to do what needed done, that was okay — you had to keep up and see these useless bastards from State and Treasury and the goddamn AFL-CIO. He wouldn’t even let them bring the McGovern people into the building. Not into the West Wing. They could hold those meetings somewhere else if they had to, anywhere in Washington, he hated the town anyway and it wouldn’t bother him there. But he’d seen Julie nowhere on the upcoming logs until someone put her there. Butterfield, maybe. It was so good to see her. Such energy, such life. Integrity. Here she was a young wife and trying to manage a career, too, more on her plate than Julie had, and there was nothing she wanted so much as to help her old dad, to defend that … that purpose, the dignity, the vision, to people. So many sunshine patriots, not enough real friends. Bebe, yes, probably Connally but he had a career to think about so it paid to lay low. So good to see her.

Julie had it. Trish, she was a sweet young woman and the apple of his eye but that’s all she was going to be, and that was all right. Julie had it. She understood the virtues others had a hard time seeing, she saw straight through to what he really meant, what he tried to do. And she understood how to make that clear, really she had a man’s head for public relations, maybe even for politics. She was so clear. Forthright. When she talked to him about legacy, she had a point. That’s what this was about, wasn’t it? Legacy? To make peace for America, to end the damn Democrats’ war, to think big enough to formulate a real solution. To be a man, who stood with the giants who’d held this office, those who knew how to do what was necessary. Julie had a point, though. It was important that people understand. Hard to have leverage if people had closed minds. Flexibility mattered. How you got things done was that you adapted. You never budged beyond a certain line and then inside it you adapted to deal with the circumstances. He had that spirit about him, she could see that. The people who cared, could. You had to be strong, it was just a question of what was the right sort of strength.

Then there was Henry on the phone. Henry who for all his faults was always there, who stayed in the game even when it was tough, although you still had to tell him what to do or he’d go up his own ass trying to cover himself. We can get this done, Henry said. They’re ready. Really? Because there’s no time. No. Time. Those idiots on Judiciary were trying to force a vote, trying to game the goddamn system just to make it difficult for him, when they thought he was vulnerable, thought he’d be weak. We will get it done, soothed Henry. We’ve been this before, all the way along this journey. Thieu is already there because he knows what’s coming with McGovern. They’ll sign? Yes. This is crucial for several reasons. Several reasons. It was hard to think of them in the nagging ache of those idiots in Congress, of Laird and Rogers and so many people who did not understand. Of course, said Henry. We need to show the Soviets, show the Chinese, what they’ll be missing if they have to deal with that fantasist McGovern. Henry went on: we will get the agreement the way we want it and they will give it to you. Before Saturday? By Saturday. By Saturday we’ll get Rogers over here and have this signed.

What about the prisoners clause? It was nut-cutting time. If you had to bow out of a game you needed to make damn sure the guy you wanted to lose didn’t inherit the spot with the best hand. We have the language down, said Henry. Agreement on exchange to be negotiated in its particulars and completed by time of withdrawal, Henry went on. This will make sense because this is a big-picture document. Of course it is, that’s the way we always wanted it. No point in getting bogged down in the details, haggling over anything made you look weak. Think big, do the important things, leave the rest to someone else. This is a strategic document, said Henry in his most wearing professorial style, not a tactical one. It guarantees the cease-fire, it guarantees the withdrawal. It guarantees the scope of how both sides will define replenishment and how they’ll sort out the prisoners. Because we can’t leave them behind, that would be lying after all those guarantees. Can we do that? Do we need to push them?

There was a little hesitation there on the line. You could feel the twitch of Henry’s fear, the damn Jewish knack for self-preservation. This was legacy stuff, just like Julie said. We have set out the terms for arranging release, Henry said. If McGovern can’t get enough people out or has troubles with that, that’s his lookout. We are being open and forthright about everything we and the South plan to do under this treaty. It sets out a path to define the self-determination referendum too. Do we need to get into that kind of thing? Yes, Henry replied. It’s what you say, Mr. President, we need to lay out the big picture. That does not mean we have to carry through all of the big picture now. This is a peace treaty, not a treaty about the details of disengagement or self-determination. This is a treaty that makes peace, and that can get us to those places. Because that’s what we can do. Yes, said Henry. They can have a day. Henry cavilled and clarified. A day. One damn day. You had to have a feel for things to leave a legacy that counted. Twenty-four extra hours on the clock. Yes, Mr. President, replied Henry who understood what he was to say by not saying. Make that clear. Crystal.

The time passed; tired time, slow, foggy time, a waiting room of a world. But there was supposed to be relief at the end. This would prove he’d done what he said he would do. Prove it even to the people who didn’t get it. Maybe nobody got it. Bob couldn’t look at him straight, the bastard, after all they’d done together. Sometimes people couldn’t see what was in front of them. And now Rogers wanted a Cabinet meeting. Rogers! How did he think he had any goddamn leverage? Tear it up — don’t bother reading it all the way through. Just tear it up, it doesn’t matter. That gutless coward Laird leaked to Rogers. Hardly surprising. Not any less surprising that it would’ve been too damn late, that it was a choice to give Hanoi just enough room to see what was in front of them before they hit the wall. That there were still surprises in store. If the parties did not sit down to sign he would burn it down. Not just the warning shots either. Six hours. They could face the first blows and then Hanoi had six hours to do everything, sign, everything including the prisoners. Or there would be another jet plane, with two bombs itself, and right over the city. Burn it all, Hanoi, the leadership, even our own men if it brings peace. He knew what Trish had said about legacies. But in his heart, in a strange way, he wanted it. Wanted it because then people would know, they would see and know and hate themselves for thinking that this bullshit, this hell he lived in, was worth inflicting. He felt it most when his legs hurt; maybe nothing, maybe the phlebitis again. If they killed him, then goddammit he was going to die on his feet. He would do what no other men had the guts to do, always.

Time was a pain-pricked furze of waiting, of drink and drink and drink and not knowing. When they tried to talk to him, Bob or Butterfield or Rose Mary, he just waved them off. This was the big time. This was where it was real. All the useless bullshit — this was real. Where he would be measured. Playwrights, they’d try to capture this and fail. The goddamn useless country had robbed him of his presidency but he would have his legacy nonetheless. And that legacy would be peace, peace in a wasteland if he had to have it. The wasteland was what there was.

Henry called. They had the final copy. They had the copy and it had circulated and now Rodgers needed to get on a plane. Because they’ll sign in time? Yes. They will sign in time. They will sign at ten o’clock Saturday morning, Paris time, if we can guarantee Rodgers and we can keep the South in line, said Henry. Saturday? Definitely Saturday. The protocols were set, the final draft had passed through the Politburo in Hanoi for approval. Saturday? Saturday. Because if not, by Christ… Saturday, Henry came back again, like mindfulness, like a prayer. Signed in entirety? Yes. So that’s it. Mr. President, Henry went on as he was wont to when things looked good for him, we are going to have the peace treaty and have it on your watch. Peace, then. The word was like rum, all the rum on a good day down in the Keys, with Bebe and fishing and a roomful of men without a damned care about the business of the world. Peace, Mr. President, was the answer. The facts gnawed. The prisoners, the violations, the geopolitics when it came unstuck and didn’t matter about the South and the future. Didn’t matter. Fuck them. Bastards. There would be peace. His peace.

He watched them do it, watched the goddamn networks split the screen as they’d figured out how to do because they could let him have nothing, nothing ever. But he didn’t care. Didn’t care about this town or the press or any goddamn bit of it. What mattered was the left of the screen. On the left while the bourbon and Dilantin wore off, while his legs throbbed, men in dark suits set in a ballroom in Paris, around a grand table, and signed another goddamn piece of paper. But this one mattered. This was his peace. He was a man; he kept his promises. There would be peace for the American people, for all they could do to keep it. If that feckless idiot McGovern couldn’t keep it then fuck him. Fuck him. Richard Nixon had made peace. Richard Nixon would be vindicated. He watched the right of the screen too, where they’d scrambled towards it, practically fucking tripped over themselves, ignored all the sensible people who told them this was all just for show now, that they had no power, no right, just their own vanity. That’s all this was anyway, vanity.

Five counts: they voted against three of them. Even Democrats. All this foolishness and they couldn’t make their lies stick. He didn’t know how they’d made the conspiracy count stick, and by one vote — even he didn’t know what anybody meant by all that back then anyway. How could they pretend to? When they had to rely on other people — practically hearsay. That goddamn bastard Colson. Trusted. Bastard. And abuse of power. They didn’t know what power was. Power was when you could end a goddamn nation in fire. Power was when you didn’t because you knew that made you even more powerful, because you let them live with their fear. He watched the vote. What was it Jack Kennedy used to say? “Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.” Right. Never been more right. Never forget, never forgive. He didn’t care about it, anyway.