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TWO DECISIONS IN TWO DAYS
On July 15 and 17, 1971, President Richard M. Nixon made two critical national security decisions. The first decision will go down in the history books as one of the boldest acts of diplomacy in the twentieth century. The second decision, which embroiled me in more personal difficulties than I could ever have imagined, led to the downfall of the Nixon presidency.
I had been at an impromptu visit by Nixon to the Lincoln Memorial at 4:45 A.M. on May 9, 1970, a few days after he had decided to invade Cambodia. During an hour-long discussion with a group of stunned students who had come to protest his actions, he told them he had “great hopes that during my administration … the great mainland of China would be opened up so that we could know the 700 million people who live in China, who are one of the most remarkable people on earth.” That foreshadowing of his intention to open China finally climaxed with his electrifying announcement to the world on July 15, 1971.
On the evening of that day, the president told the world that on July 1, Dr. Henry Kissinger had conducted secret talks with Premier Zhou Enlai of China, during which Zhou invited Nixon to visit China “before May 1972.” The president said he had accepted Zhou’s invitation with pleasure. His subsequent visit to China in February 1972, hinted at in his writings and numerous comments over the previous four years, constituted the most dramatic and, to knowledgeable experts in U.S. foreign policy, the most significant achievement of the Nixon presidency.
But on the morning of July 17, the president made a second, very different decision. That morning he presided over a meeting that I attended on the patio outside his office at the so-called western White House in San Clemente, California. The western White House included the president’s home, La Casa Pacifica, an ornate white-stuccoed and red-tiled building that was located just to the north of a small, one-story office building complex that contained offices for the president, senior staff, and the traveling White House entourage. La Casa Pacifica, perched on the bluffs above the best surfing beach in Southern California, had a magnificent view. The president purchased it in 1969, and it had become his residence when he took extended vacations away from Washington, D.C.
The view from the patio outside the president’s office was also spectacular, and we could see a U.S. Navy destroyer steaming through the whitecaps just off the coast in the bright morning sunshine, providing security for the president and his family. La Casa Pacifica’s office complex was located just to the north of the Camp Pendleton Marine Corps base. With the Marines to the south, the Navy to the west, and the Secret Service embedded in various posts around the western White House, the president lived and worked in a sort of militarized high-security resort.
A May 1971 congressional report highlighted the difficulties facing our troops in Vietnam: boredom and stress had led many to turn to drugs—marijuana and heroin among them. The problem worsened when an influx of inexpensive high-potency heroin hooked around one-fifth of the troops at some point during their tours of Vietnam. The growing heroin epidemic in Vietnam, and spikes in crime from addicted soldiers returning home, was a key aspect of Nixon’s June 1971 declaration that drug abuse is “public enemy number one in the United States,” beginning the modern phase of the “war on drugs.” The purpose of the July 17 meeting was to report to the president on the progress of a major administration effort he had launched a few weeks before to curb the use of heroin by our soldiers in Vietnam.
Except for the president and counsel and assistant to the president for domestic affairs, Ehrlichman, the other meeting attendees—Dr. Jerome Jaffe, Dr. Beny Primm, and I—were jet-lagged from our respective trips. We sat around a glass patio table, enjoying the sunshine as we presented the president with a thorough report on our findings. The president looked tanned and rested, and his mood was ebullient, the result of the overwhelmingly positive response to his China announcement two nights before.
I had just returned the day before from two weeks of travel to France, Greece, Turkey, India, Thailand, Laos, and South Vietnam, where I was assessing the effectiveness of our international narcotics control programs in these countries. The results were mixed, with good results in curbing the growth of poppies in Turkey but less success in preventing the flow of heroin into South Vietnam. During my trip I had met with action officers in the State Department, the CIA, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, the U.S. Customs Service, and the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, telling all of them about the president’s strong commitment to reducing the flow of illegal drugs into the United States.
My final foreign stop on the two-week trip was in South Vietnam, where I joined up with Dr. Jaffe, the newly designated chief of the Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention; Seth Rosenberg, Dr. Jaffe’s assistant; and Dr. Primm, one of Jaffe’s principal drug treatment advisers. They met me in South Vietnam so that we could take a firsthand look at the urinalysis centers the military had recently set up at the president’s direction in Long Binh and Cam Ranh Bay. The machines in these centers tested for the presence of opiates in soldiers’ urine. If soldiers tested positive, they would need to go through treatment before being released into civilian life. Long Binh and Cam Ranh Bay were the principal debarkation centers for U.S. soldiers leaving Vietnam following their tours of duty. The handmade sign above the entrance to the center at Long Binh proclaimed its purpose: THE PEE HOUSE OF THE AUGUST MOON.
During our trip in South Vietnam, we also had visited several military facilities, met with commanders and their staffs, and observed the functioning of the diagnostic system. In our meetings, we became acutely aware of the toll the war was taking on our soldiers, and we promised to provide all the help we could. We were encouraged to learn that the diagnostic system we had just instituted showed less opiate use by our soldiers than we had expected. In our meeting with the president, we reported the findings that the number of U.S. military personnel who tested positive for opiates in their systems, approximately 4.5 percent, was well below the 20 percent figure reported in the press. The president told us how pleased he was with the results so far and encouraged us to move ahead aggressively with the program. He said he was glad that the percentages showed that 96 percent of those who came back from Vietnam could be employed and move back into society without fear of them being drug users. Following this meeting with the president, Dr. Jaffe, Dr. Primm, and I briefed the television pool reporters on the meeting and the results of the trip.
What gave me the most satisfaction that day was the conviction that our Vietnam drug program would help us alleviate the false perception among some Americans, especially business leaders, that the Vietnam veteran was a ruthless killer, a junkie, and therefore unemployable. The president was committed to changing the image of the Vietnam vet as a junkie. He had told me and others in a previous meeting on June 3, 1971, that narcotics would be an issue used by adversaries to his Vietnam policy to impugn the military, so it was both a political and a real issue. With the number of positive tests among our soldiers lower than what we had anticipated, I felt we had made a solid contribution to defending against any opposition to the president’s Vietnam policy based on the narcotics issue. Following lunch at the western White House with Dr. Jaffe, I was feeling very good about what we had accomplished and was looking forward to some rest and relaxation before returning to D.C. But this was not to be. Ehrlichman’s secretary found me and said that he wanted to see me as soon as it was convenient. This always meant immediately.
When I was waved in to Ehrlichman’s office, he got up and quietly closed the door behind me. This surprised me because his office was already in the innermost sanctum of offices closest to the president’s own. Any additional secrecy afforded by a closed door didn’t seem necessary to me at the time. Then he told me about the president’s second national security decision.
I sat down in a chair in front of his desk and he handed me a bulky file labeled PENTAGON PAPERS, the colloquial name for the Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force. I leafed through the contents, which included newspaper reprints of the Pentagon Papers, news stories about the papers and about the Supreme Court’s rejection of the government’s request to restrain their publication, and various internal memos. As I read, Ehrlichman told me that the assignment he was about to give me had been deemed of the highest national security importance by the president. He emphasized that the president was as angry about the leak of the Pentagon Papers as he had ever seen him on any other issue.
In his dry style, Ehrlichman said that while I was junketing around the world working on drug programs and policies, he, along with White House chief of staff Bob Haldeman, then head of the National Security Council Kissinger, and special counsel to the president Chuck Colson had been working hard and meeting regularly with the president to determine how best to respond to the leak of the Pentagon Papers, which he described as a “crisis.” According to Ehrlichman, the president was certain that a conspiracy was involved in the release of the Pentagon Papers and that we needed to run our own investigation to find out who was part of the conspiracy. He said the president didn’t believe that a thorough investigation could be carried out by the FBI or the Department of Justice. Consequently, he had ordered that an independent White House team be set up to begin its own investigation immediately. This new team would investigate the ramifications of the release of the Pentagon Papers to the press by Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg had served in the Marines, earned a Ph.D. from Harvard, and worked for the RAND Corporation, where he was one of a few employees to have access to a 7,000-page highly classified report about the history of the Vietnam War. Given his lofty credentials and the threat posed by his access to classified documents, the investigation was to have the highest priority, and preparations were to begin that day.
Copyright © 2022 by Matthew Krogh
