Free One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon by Tim Weiner

talking war and peace with the Soviet ambassador on April 15, Nixon learned that North Korea had shot down an American spy plane in international waters over the Sea of Japan. Thirty-one Americans were killed aboard the navy EC-121 aircraft operated by the National Security Agency. Another newly declassified NSA history and other recently released documents show that the Pentagon proposed to strike back with nuclear weapons.
    Nixon first weighed seizing a North Korean ship sailing the high seas under a Dutch flag, which the State Department ruled an act of piracy. “The President said to find a way that international law can be breached,” Haig’s notes from an April 15 conversation with Kissinger read. “The U.S. became a great nation by breaking international law. The President said we certainly have concluded that we won’t just sit here and do nothing.”
    But that is what he did—nothing. The next morning, he presided over a full-scale National Security Council session in the White House Cabinet Room, which included the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who rarely attended such meetings. Haig’s notes are the sole record.
    General Wheeler reviewed the military options, one of which was to attack North Korea with “Honest John” missiles, artillery rockets carrying atomic warheads with a payload of thirty kilotons each, roughly equal to two and a half Hiroshimas. This act “would trigger retaliation,” the general noted. The prospect of that attack, and the retaliation, gave everyone pause. The United States had fought the Korean War before.
    “That is a very tough one to bite,” Kissinger told the president after the meeting. “We might have to go to tactical nuclears.”
    Nixon stared into the abyss of nuclear war and turned away. He considered other acts of war, such as bombing North Korea’s military bases. As Haig recollected in a 2007 oral history for the Nixon Presidential Library, the hawks on the NSC staff recommended “immediate military action against the North by taking out one of their airfields, and, at the same time, to tell Moscow that our toleration days were over. This included the determination to settle Vietnam immediately, with or without the Soviet Union and if the Soviet Union were to join the other side, we were prepared for that contingency as well.” This, like the nuclear option, raised the possibility of a Third World War.
    Kissinger, as he often did, played a double game. He said he sided with the hawks, but he warned the president that Secretary of State Rogers would openly oppose an attack, a revolt that the new administration could ill afford. That left Nixon with no option but a meager show of force: sending a flotilla of navy ships into the Sea of Japan. It was only a show. North Korea went unpunished. Nixon had frozen in the face of a Communist attack. “We do not do a thing with 31 lives missing,” he sighed.
    The president later regretted this decision bitterly. Haig recounted, “Nixon told me it was the worst mistake of his presidency not to respond early on in a decisive way to convince both Moscow and whoever else, Hanoi, Pyongyang, or any one of the camp that this was a different America.”
    One consequence of the EC-121 calamity was Nixon’s near-complete loss of faith in his secretary of state, Bill Rogers. Thereafter, Kissinger became the president’s diplomat in chief, opening secret negotiations with the Soviets, the North Vietnamese, and, through interlocutors, the Chinese in 1969. Rogers was to know nothing about such talks.
    “Nixon did not trust the State Department,” said Kissinger’s Russia hand, Peter Rodman. “There were a number of issues—whether it was Vietnam or relations with the Soviets—where the first few things that Rogers did were the exact opposite of what Nixon wanted.… Nixon decided that he would rather do these things himself. He had Henry there to do it. Henry and he had an ideological affinity. They both looked at the world in