♪ ♪
(audience applauding)
ANNOUNCER: Tonight, from Atlanta, live and in color:
"The Nixon Answer."
Tonight, Richard Nixon in person
is going to face a panel of citizens
asking the questions they want answered.
Thank you very much, thank you. (chuckles)
Hi, how are you?
(applause continues)
I thank all of you in the studio audience for your warm welcome,
and I just hope my campaigning's
(all laugh)
And so we'll start over on this side
with Mr. Murphy from Atlanta.
REG MURPHY: Mr. Nixon, General Curtis LeMay became
Governor Wallace's running mate today,
and he immediately said that he would use a nuclear bomb
to win in Vietnam.
How do you feel about the use of nuclear weapons
in Vietnam or elsewhere?
I do not believe that nuclear bombs
or nuclear weapons should be used in Vietnam,
I do not think they're necessary to be used in Vietnam,
and we should not risk a nuclear war in Vietnam
by any matter or means.
(audience applauds)
MORTON HALPERIN: We learned pretty quickly
that his secret plan was to threaten the North Vietnamese
with nuclear weapons.
That was his plan.
And he was convinced that the way
to make the threat credible was for the North Vietnamese to fear
that he was crazy and might actually do this.
♪ ♪
(explosions pounding)
♪ ♪
WALTER CRONKITE: Richard Nixon goes over the top
with 287 electoral votes,
and that seems to be the 1968 election.
(crowd cheering and applauding)
DICK FERNANDEZ: After his election,
there was a feeling in the anti-war movement of exhaustion.
We felt devastated by the Nixon election.
And there were a lot of questions like,
what should we be doing, what needs to be done,
and what do we do next?
We didn't know at that time that they were
already planning to blow up Vietnam.
♪ ♪
NIXON: Dr. Kissinger is a man who is known
to all people who are interested in foreign policy
as perhaps one of the major scholars in America
and the world today in this area.
And I trust, under his direction,
he will develop new ideas
and new policies for the critical
problems America has in the field
of foreign policy around the world.
(Nixon murmuring)
Ladies and gentlemen,
I am honored by the confidence
that the president-elect has expressed in me.
And I shall serve the president-elect
with all my energy and dedication.
HALPERIN: Kissinger and I had been colleagues together at Harvard.
I came into the government in '66,
and I very quickly came to believe that we had no idea
what we were doing in Vietnam,
and that it was hopeless, and that we should get out.
Which, of course, Kissinger knew.
Kissinger and I taught a seminar at Harvard
called the Defense Policy Seminar.
There's actually a very famous "New York Times" picture
of the last class of the seminar in 1968,
'cause I alerted "The New York Times" to the fact
that this was going to be Henry's last class.
The photographer walks in and Henry says,
"This will be good for my megalomania."
After the class was over, Kissinger asked to talk to me.
He said that he wanted to ask me to come and work for him
in the White House, and I immediately said yes.
Kissinger had a sense of urgency because by Inauguration Day,
Nixon wanted a paper on options
for what should be done in Vietnam.
We looked at a range of options all the way towards
the one that I favored, which was announcing
that we would withdraw all our forces.
The paper went to Nixon and his response was,
"This is a good options paper,
"but the option that I'm interested in
is not in the paper, and that's the option of escalating."
♪ ♪
I was surprised by the escalation request,
mostly because I thought it was infeasible,
that the country wouldn't stand for it.
And I said to Kissinger,
"If you go in this direction, it will become Nixon's war."
And Kissinger went off and talked to Nixon,
and came back and said,
"He will be proud to have it called Nixon's war."
("All Along the Watchtower" playing)
TOM WELLS: Nixon wanted to end the war quickly.
And the way he hoped to do that was by threatening
the North Vietnamese with a major escalation of the war.
And he had this idea that somehow he could convince
the North Vietnamese that he was capable of anything--
to blow them to smithereens.
(flashes popping)
DANIEL ELLSBERG: H.R. Haldeman,
who became Nixon's chief of staff,
revealed in his memoirs
that during the '68 campaign,
Nixon had discussed with him how
he expected effectively to win the war in Vietnam.
(bomb releasing and exploding)
Nixon's secret plan was to threaten the North Vietnamese
that he would go to a much higher level of escalation than
President Johnson had ever managed,
including the use of nuclear weapons.
But how to make the North Vietnamese
believe that he would do it?
He said, "We'll get the word to them
"that this guy is unpredictable,
"crazy, we can't control him,
and he has his finger on the nuclear button."
And Nixon said to Haldeman,
"Ho Chi Minh will be in Paris
the next day to negotiate."
And in his own mind, the word was used, madman.
He said, "I call it the Madman Theory, Bob."
♪ ♪
And, by the way, privately, I believe
Nixon was that crazy.
FERNANDEZ: My name is Dick Fernandez.
I am a minister in the United Church of Christ.
I worked for eight years as a director
of Clergy and Laity Concerned during the Vietnam War.
In February of 1969, there were a group of us
that went to see Kissinger:
Coretta Scott King,
William Sloane Coffin at Yale,
Rabbi Abraham Heschel.
And as we came in the door, you had these two Jewish men
who had both escaped Nazi Germany
and Poland, respectively.
You could kind of tell there was this recognition.
We said we wanted the war to end, and as our meeting went on,
at one point, Kissinger said,
"You know, I've just been here six weeks-- it takes a while."
He said to us, we need to be patient with them.
Rabbi Heschel, he kind of looked at Kissinger,
and he said, "You know, Mr. Secretary,
the children of Vietnam are dying, so you should hurry."
You could have heard a pin drop.
We didn't know at that time
that they were already planning to blow up Vietnam.
SAM DONALDSON: It has now come to Richard Nixon
as it came so often to his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson:
the sight of hundreds of sign-carrying women
marching in front of the White House,
demanding an immediate end to the war in Vietnam.
It was all very peaceful and quiet.
So was Lyndon Johnson's first anti-war demonstration.
CAROLYN EISENBERG: Nixon is acutely aware of the fact
that Lyndon Johnson's presidency
had been essentially destroyed by the anti-war movement.
That's not lost on him at all.
And he doesn't want to be in that spot.
So from the very beginning, Richard Nixon is always paying
attention to the anti-war movement.
CORA WEISS: Women Strike for Peace
was a gathering of housewives, that's for sure.
And we were all over the country.
We began getting worried about the Vietnam War.
It was a war of atrocities.
We committed crimes against humanity.
It was horrible.
And we were going to work
to try to prevent this war from escalating and end it.
DONALDSON: Today, they marched from the White House
to Capitol Hill; at the Capitol,
the women took turns
listening to anti-war congressmen...
SHIRLEY CHISHOLM: The war should be ended immediately.
We really need a complete re-evaluation
of what this nation's priority is going to be.
And until we end the war in Vietnam
and address ourselves to the domestic war at home,
we are going to continue to be in trouble in our country.
DAVID HAWK: In the early '60s,
what I was most concerned about was really
the Civil Rights Movement.
I went to Mississippi in the summer of 1964
as part of Mississippi Freedom Summer.
And being concerned with
the issue of poverty in America, you could see
easily who was getting sent to Vietnam
and where in American society the draftees
were coming from-- the small towns,
the farms, and the ghettos.
And I went from concern about civil rights at home
directly into concern for the escalation
of the war in Vietnam,
and many, many of my colleagues
and friends from the Civil Rights Movement
also transitioned into the anti-war movement.
I became the anti-war and anti-draft coordinator
for the National Student Association,
and I organized a "We Won't Go" letter
addressed to Nixon, advising him of how deep
and how wide opposition to the war was on the campuses.
And to our surprise, we were invited to meet
with Henry Kissinger and Nixon's chief domestic adviser,
John Ehrlichman, and had that meeting
in the Situation Room in the White House.
ROGER BLACK: Dr. Kissinger
repeated a, a number of times that, that we really
should give them, give them more time, be patient.
Dr. Kissinger said that
if we came back a year from now
and the war was still in the same position,
he would really have no moral argument against us.
HAWK: Kissinger left the room after 20, 30 minutes,
and John Ehrlichman took the floor
and was so hard-line, it shocked people.
He said, "If you think
"that you can break laws you don't like,
"you're going to force us to up the ante
"to the point where we have to give out
death sentences for traffic violations."
I mean, this was so off the wall and over the top
that everybody's jaw just dropped.
(laughs): "What is this guy talking about?"
(guns firing)
It was clear to everybody that the war was going to go on.
(explosion pounds)
These guys were not going to end it,
and they might even be worse than the last bunch.