The Calm After the Storm

DAVID HUME KENNERLY -- THE WHITE HOUSE
APRIL 1975: AS VIETNAM WAS FALLING
He understood global business better than American politics

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In foreign policy, these tough-guy orders were much less frequent; though, when they occurred, they could be unsettling (after a few months with Nixon, I was able to distinguish between what he intended to be carried out immediately and what he deserved to be given an opportunity to reconsider). For example, in August 1969, a TWA plane with Americans aboard was hijacked and flown to Damascus airport. I reported this fact to Nixon, who was in San Clemente with his two friends, Charles ("Bebe") Rebozo and Robert Abplanalp. Obviously trying to impress his pals, Nixon issued a curt-sounding order: "Bomb the airport of Damascus." I was certain the order would never survive the night and called Secretary of Defense Mel Laird to tell him what had happened. The two aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean were out of range, and bombing a country is not a simple matter of giving an order: targets have to be selected, a diplomatic scenario prepared and press guidance developed. So Laird and I decided to carry out the letter of the order by implementing the first steps and leaving the other measures for the next day. In the morning, at my regular briefing, I brought Nixon up to date, including the fact that the Sixth Fleet carriers were now near Cyprus. "Did anything else happen?" Nixon innocently asked. When I replied in the negative, the President--without moving a facial muscle--said, "Good."

The trouble arose with members of the Nixon entourage who had less access and less experience with exuberant presidential statements. When the full extent of Watergate became apparent in April 1973, I asked permanent elder statesman Bryce Harlow how it could have happened: "Some damn fool got into the Oval Office and did as he was told," Harlow remarked.

Inside the Nixon White House
Nixon set in motion a fierce competition among his advisers while guarding the mystery of his own ultimate destinations. He was determined that foreign policy be conducted from the Oval Office, but he never said as much to his Secretary of State. He would send me off on secret back-channel negotiations without informing Bill Rogers--and while complaining to Haldeman about the Kissinger-Rogers feud that he himself never ceased stoking. The result was that the State Department would often pursue a course of action that was in direct conflict with what I was doing on behalf of the President and of which the department was unaware. The practical consequence was that the party being overruled blamed the outcome on some malign influence--as time went on, most often on me.

Nixon's reputation for "trickiness" resulted from his need to balance his abhorrence for direct confrontation against his even stronger inward drive to live up to his foreign policy convictions. Preposterous as this may sound, what passed for trickiness was Nixon's way of being principled.

Spending much of what would normally be considered personal time in his hideaway in the Old Executive Office Building or at Camp David, Nixon would sit in an easy chair, his feet on a hassock, the shades drawn, commenting on conceptual rather than action memoranda and making notes on his yellow pads. To relieve the inner tension, he would call in one of his advisers to go over his notes and/or to recount again and again the battles of his earlier years, from the Alger Hiss case through the California election of 1962. These grinding conversations could go on for hours while the designated listener, frantic over the work and telephone calls piling up back in the office, yearned even for some catastrophe to divert the President and permit one to get back to one's regular chores.

The incentives for Nixon's adviser soon became exactly the opposite of the normal assistant's ambition, which is to log the maximum amount of time with the President. Nixon's aides by contrast tried to cut down their time with the President. In the process, they revealed something less creditable about themselves: the degree to which the emotionally exhausting White House atmosphere had robbed them of sensitivity for the obvious and all-encompassing loneliness of their President, who needed them as much to fill the emptiness of his life as for practical advice.

Though Nixon did not particularly enjoy the mechanics of governing and was generally leery of visitors, he did enjoy foreign guests. But even in his area of expertise, he would not meet a visitor without meticulous preparation to minimize the prospects of some unwanted direct confrontation.

My staff would prepare a detailed memorandum explaining the purpose of the visit, the physical arrangements, what the foreign interlocutor was likely to say, our recommendations for the best response, the optimum outcome and the dangers to avoid. Nixon would commit to memory either the entire memorandum or the part he thought useful. Since Nixon did not like to admit that he needed any staff assistance in foreign policy, he never brought the staff memorandum to the meeting. Instead, he would hold forth as if extemporaneously, not without sometimes skating closer than I considered wise to the very subjects our memorandum had warned represented the areas of thinnest ice. Nixon liked to live dangerously and to show off his skill at doing so.