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The bombing resumed on Dec. 18 and lasted for twelve days. The moral indignation rose with each day. The proposition that the U.S. Government was deliberately slaughtering civilians in a purposeless campaign of terror went unchallenged. Yet Hanoi radio, on Jan. 4, 1973, cited a preliminary figure of about 1,300 persons killed after twelve days of bombing; many must have been military personnel, for antiaircraft batteries were a primary objective. I received incredibly bitter letters from erstwhile friends, from angry citizens. (None of them wrote me in January when the agreement was reached.) It seemed to be taken for granted that North Viet Nam was blameless and that we were embarked on a course of exterminating civilians.
I was in the eye of a hurricane whose elemental force derived not only from the hatreds of the two Viet Nams and the hysteria of domestic critics, but also from a painful rift between Nixon and me [see box "Chagrined Cowboy"]. In early December, TIME magazine, with the best will in the world, added to earlier irritations by selecting Nixon and me as joint Men of the Year. I knew immediately how this would go down with my chief, whose limited capacity for forgiveness surely did not include being upstaged (and being given equal billing as Man of the Year with his assistant was tantamount to that). I appealed all the way up the TIME hierarchy' to the editor-in-chief, Hedley Donovan, to take me off the cover. Donovan put an end to it by replying that if my importuning did not stop, I would be made Man of the Year in my own right.
When the bombing started, many journalists applied the very categories so assiduously fed out by White House p.r. people in the preceding weeks to cut me down to size: Nixon was identified with the "hard," I with the "softer" position. I did not indicate to any journalist that I had opposed the decision to use B-52s. But I also did little to dampen the speculation, partly out of a not very heroic desire to deflect the assault from my person. Some journalists may have mistaken my genuine depression about the seeming collapse of the peace efforts for a moral disagreement. Though I acted mainly by omission and partly through emotional exhaustion, it is one of the episodes of my public life in which I take no great pride.
Nixon was justifiably infuriated by assertions that I had opposed the bombing. I sensed that my period in office should draw to a close. If negotiations collapsed, I would resign immediately, assuming full responsibility. If they succeeded, I would see the settlement through and then resign toward the end of 1973. But for Watergate, I would have carried out this plan.
No foreign policy event of the Nixon presidency evoked such outrage as the Christmas bombing. On no issue was he