John Aloysius Farrell is the author of biographies of House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill Jr. and attorney Clarence Darrow, as well as a forthcoming book on the life of Richard Nixon.

Richard Nixon didn’t sleep well as president. He kept a bedroom to himself, and placed dictation machines on a bedside table to capture his insomniac inspirations. He was a tense man even before entering the White House, and what with opening China, ending the war in Vietnam, taking the United States off the gold standard, integrating Southern schools, founding the Environmental Protection Agency and cutting nuclear arms deals with the Soviet Union, he had more than a little on his mind.

And then there was Watergate. On June 17, 1972, a troop of clowns wearing business suits and rubber gloves, dispatched by Nixon’s senior aides, were caught pilfering and bugging the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C. The president joined in a cover-up operation to thwart prosecution of those who ordered the break-in and save his re-election campaign from damaging, perhaps fatal, disclosures.


At first the scandal seemed contained, yet still it disrupted Nixon’s slumbers.

“I had this strangest dream last night,” he told his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, in a July 20, 1972, conversation captured on the White House tape-recording system and included in a new book, The Nixon Defense, by John W. Dean, the president’s former counsel. “I have a feeling Watergate’s going to be a nasty issue … but I can’t believe … maybe I’m whistling in the dark … but I can’t believe that they can tie it to me.”

Whistling in the dark, he was. On Aug. 9, America will mark the 40th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation from office, one step ahead of near-certain impeachment. This latest Watergate summer brings the publication of Dean’s book and four other additions to the Nixon canon, all of them—each in its way—valuable in the quest to understand this elusive, most Shakespearean of presidents. Much of the analysis is exculpatory, but a few new revelations of misdeeds are startling. At the heart of these volumes is Nixon in shame and glory: a man of humble roots, stunning ambition, legendary resiliency, tragic flaws, condemnable sins—and, yes, rare dreams.

***

The arcs of conspiracy theories bend in predictable directions. The triggering event—a great crime or disaster—occurs. Investigations begin. Bureaucracies scurry to conceal their failures. Exposure of their scheming feeds doubts, fanned by opportunists and those that savor intrigue.

And then time passes. Old men yield their secrets. Documents are declassified. Scholars weigh in. The record is adjusted.

Lost in Transcription Two very different readings of the Nixon tapes. In his new book, The Nixon Defense, John Dean cites several notable exchanges that were not transcribed by Stanley Kutler in his 1997 book, Abuse of Power, a seminal text of Watergate transcripts. But, in several cases where they do overlap, Dean hears and reports things differently than Kutler does. On Nov. 24, 1972, for example, Kutler has President Nixon asking his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, to get Dean to write a report—“some sort of piece”—absolving the White House of wrongdoing. Dean’s version is more evocative, showing a more human president, wanting to rid his second term of the shadow cast by Watergate. “Let’s find some sort of peace,” Nixon says. There is another difference in Dean’s and Kutler’s reporting of a June 21, 1972, conversation between Nixon and Haldeman. In Dean’s version of the exchange, he hears Nixon instructing Haldeman to “go ahead” with the Watergate cover up. Nixon: “If it involved [Attorney General John] Mitchell, then I would think that you couldn’t do it, just because it would destroy him.” Haldeman: “Well, that’s what bothers [White House aide John] Ehrlichman. He’s not sure it doesn’t.” Nixon: “Does it involve Mitchell?” Haldeman: “I put it almost directly to Mitchell this morning, and he didn’t answer so I don't know whether it does or not.” Nixon: “Probably did ... but don’t tell me about it. But you go ahead and do what you want.” This time Kutler has the more forgiving version. He hears Nixon speculating about what Mitchell might have told the burglars. In Kutler’s transcript, the words “go ahead” are not Nixon issuing an order, just a guess at what Mitchell could have said: Nixon: “If it involved Mitchell, then I would think that you couldn’t do it, just because it would destroy him.” Haldeman: “Well, that’s what bothers Ehrlichman. He’s not sure it doesn’t.” Nixon: “Doesn’t involve Mitchell?” Haldeman: “Yes. I put it almost directly to Mitchell this morning and he didn’t answer, so I don’t know whether it does or not.” Nixon: “Hell, he may have said, don’t tell me about it, but you go ahead and do what you want.” Because the quality of the tapes varies widely, such differences are not unusual. Readers—and listeners, since all the declassified recordings are now available online at Professor Luke Nichter’s website, http://nixontapes.org — should take their time, and rewind a few times, before making definitive conclusions.

Intriguing questions linger, as they must in all endeavors involving human beings, where memory is a renegade and self-interest is the default setting. Who paid John Wilkes Booth? What was Lee Oswald doing in Mexico City? But not all answers are essential. We can get to the bedrock, and live with some niggling ambiguity.

So it is with the complex of scandals that have come to be known as Watergate. After 40 years, and much silly speculation about Deep Throat, call girls, the Mob and the CIA, we can say with some confidence that we know what happened to Nixon’s presidency, and why.

Much of that story is told in The Nixon Defense. Taking advantage of the full array of White House tapes (the “final” release took place last August, but archivists will now review the recordings again, to declassify and open segments from 800 redacted hours), Dean sets out to answer the question raised by the late Howard Baker, the Tennessee senator who served as vice chairman of the Senate Watergate Committee: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”

With the aid of a flight of graduate students, Dean has identified a thousand discussions of Watergate on the tapes. He augments the story with his own recollections, selections from Haldeman’s notes and diary and Nixon’s memoirs. Ancient history? Maybe. But there’s a reason why we’ve applied the suffix -gate to lesser scandals for four decades, and why partisan hacks (displaying their usual, woeful ignorance of history) dub almost every gaffe by the opposition “worse than Watergate.”

Watergate is sui generis, dwarfing any other political scandal that Americans have experienced. Ponder the butcher’s bill for the Watergate era: The president of the United States resigned, and accepted a pardon for his crimes. The vice president of the United States, Spiro Agnew, resigned, and pled no contest to income tax evasion for accepting bribes.Two attorneys general of the United States—John Mitchell and Richard Kleindienst—were found guilty. The White House chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, the president’s counsel, John Dean, and top domestic counselor, John Ehrlichman—and several other White House aides (Special Counsel Chuck Colson, etc.)—were found guilty. The president’s personal lawyer and fundraiser, Herb Kalmbach, was found guilty. The director of the CIA was found guilty. The director of the FBI was caught destroying evidence, and resigned. The top officials at the president’s re-election campaign (Mitchell, Jeb Magruder, Maurice Stans and Fred LaRue) were found guilty. Another attorney general and his chief deputy resigned in protest rather than fire a special prosecutor. And more than a dozen of the country’s mightiest corporations and their executives—including American Airlines, Goodyear Tire, Gulf Oil, Northrup and Phillips Petroleum—were found guilty of seeking to buy favor via campaign contributions. Send in the clowns (Gordon Liddy, Howard Hunt and the gang) and, all told, some 60 individuals and more than a dozen corporations were found guilty of one Watergate-related crime or another, and 25 men went to prison.

Dean was among the first of Nixon’s aides to cut a deal with federal investigators and testify against the president. In the Senate hearings of 1973, he was a particularly devastating witness: “I began by telling the president that there was a cancer growing on the presidency and that if the cancer was not removed that the president himself would be killed by it.” It’s noteworthy, then, to find him offering several exonerating conclusions about Nixon in his book.

Dean downplays, as a start, the import of the famous June 23, 1972, “smoking gun” tape, in which Nixon is heard ordering Haldeman to get the CIA to rein in the FBI. Haldeman wasn’t trying to shut down the entire Watergate investigation, Dean contends, only to keep the FBI from expanding its probe into secret campaign contributions, whose disclosure would have proven embarrassing to the corporate donors.

Haldeman and Dean both testified to this effect at the time, though they failed to persuade the jury at Haldeman’s trial. And Dean concedes that it’s no open-and-shut case: The conversation on the tape moves back and forth between the particular and the grand, and at one point the president, he writes, appears to “escalate” the proposed use of the CIA (“They should call the FBI in and say that we wish, for the country, don’t go any further into this case, period!”) to cover up more than just the campaign money.

But had the transcript been properly viewed, and its ambiguity recognized, when it surfaced in the summer of 1974, Dean argues, Nixon “might have survived its disclosure to fight another day. … The smoking gun was only firing blanks.”

Dean also dismisses, as media hype, the significance of another tape—the one from June 20, 1972, with its infamous 18-minute gap. Given Nixon’s penchant for ceaselessly chewing on problems with his aides, says Dean, the discussion erased from the June 20 recording was doubtlessly captured on other tape recordings. Though its disclosure was immensely damaging to Nixon at the time, the 18-minute gap itself has “virtually no historic significance whatsoever,” Dean writes.

Why did the burglars pick the Watergate? There’s the question on which bestselling conspiracy theories hinge. Dean has been a quarry of these conjectures, and waged costly legal wars to halt them. The tapes, he notes, yield no proof that the Watergate caper was a CIA coup d’état or an effort to conceal or exploit (take your pick) a prostitution ring, as conspiracy buffs have suggested.

Liddy’s botched break-in was nothing more than opposition research run amok, says Dean: a fishing expedition prompted by DNC Chairman Lawrence O’Brien’s status as his party’s most effective strategist and by rumors of various Democratic intrigues (that they were paying for their convention through a kickback scheme, for instance) that the Republicans hoped to document.

O’Brien’s relationships with the Kennedy family and billionaire Howard Hughes (each of whom had a history with Nixon) doubtlessly added to the Watergate’s allure. But the burglars were only making the rounds. After they knocked off the DNC, the record shows, Liddy’s crew planned to head for Sen. George McGovern’s campaign headquarters on Capitol Hill to bug and burgle there. They had already cased McGovern’s convention hotel, in Miami, Fla., the Brookings Institution, a Las Vegas newspaper and other potential targets—and botched yet another burglary, of the office of the psychiatrist who treated Daniel Ellsberg, the antiwar activist who leaked the Pentagon Papers.

“Take Vietnam. … We should have flushed it down the drain three years ago, blamed Johnson and Kennedy.” Feb. 1, 1972, the Oval Office: Nixon expounds on the Vietnam War and the role of the United States in the world. NIXON: Now, but the point I make, however, is that there has never been a time when the United States needed, in this office, somebody who knew the Communists, who knows our strengths. Take Vietnam. Who is more keenly aware than I am, that from a political standpoint, we should have flushed it down the drain three years ago, blamed Johnson and Kennedy. Kennedy got us in, Johnson kept us in. I could have blamed them and been the national hero! As Eisenhower was for ending Korea. And it wouldn’t have been too bad. Sure, the North Vietnamese would have probably slaughtered and castrated two million South Vietnamese Catholics, but nobody would have cared. These little brown people, so far away, we don’t know them very well, naturally you would say. But on the other hand, we couldn’t do that. Not because of Vietnam, but because of Japan, because of Germany, because of the Mideast. Once the United States ceases to be a great power, acting responsibly, to restrain aggression, which is actually what we did in India-Pakistan. Our problem was no quarrel with India. I can count. I know there are a lot more Indians than there are Pakistanis, and I prefer the Pakistani government. But we could not allow India, with the support of Russia, to gobble up its neighbor. So we said stop, and it was right! -Excerpted from The Nixon Tapes, by Douglas Brinkley and Luke A. Nichter

Fresh evidence, unearthed at the Nixon Presidential Library in the last few years, proves that Haldeman and others gave direction to Liddy’s team. But Dean’s study of the tapes sustains the current scholarly consensus that Nixon himself did not know about the Watergate break-in before it occurred. “I am confident,” Dean writes. “He had no direct connection.”

“I knew that something was going on,” Haldeman tells Nixon on a Dec. 10, 1972, tape that Dean transcribes. He had “pushed hard” on his staff for intelligence reports on the Democratic candidates.

“Well … I asked for that goddamn stuff all the time,” Nixon concedes.

“And Liddy’s story is that the reason he was bugging is, Magruder was lashing him so mercilessly on getting information,” says Haldeman. They were looking for “secret papers, and financial data that O’Brien had.”

For Nixon, the cover-up was the crime. And Dean has taken on the painstaking task of analyzing—despite the clanking of cups and cutlery, cross-conversations, background music and other infuriating obstacles posed by the taping system—the extent of the president’s involvement, which he concludes was early, comprehensive and persistent.

(I have marched this road myself. Given an opportunity to travel through time I would head to 1972, and to the Oval Office, and oil Nixon’s squeaking chair.)

When Dean famously warned, “We have a cancer … close to the presidency” on March 21, 1973, he believed he was alerting Nixon to the illegal actions being carried out by the White House staff—to the payment of hush money and promises of clemency to defendants and other seamy acts (including the other bugging and burglaries) that were later christened “the White House horrors.”

In fact, as The Nixon Defense demonstrates, Nixon already knew it all. By the time Dean gave the “cancer” speech, only the specific amounts of the burglars’ latest demands for hush money could have surprised the president. Haldeman and Ehrlichman had been keeping the boss up to date.

On the Dec. 10 tape, for instance, Nixon and Haldeman are struck by the news that Hunt’s wife has died in a plane crash in Chicago, with some $10,000 in hundred-dollar bills in her purse. As the scandal unfolded, the president and his men publicly maintained that the $400,000 paid to the Watergate burglars—despite the rubber gloves, secret money drops and coded phone calls used to distribute it—was “humanitarian aid.” But in this private conversation Haldeman tells it like it is. He worries that Hunt’s wife was toting “payoff money,” and Nixon voices alarm at the chance it might be traced. They must hope, Haldeman tells the president, that Hunt was “smart enough to wash it.”

***

It is more than fair to note that, as with most of his unsavory conduct in office, Nixon was following presidential precedent. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Dwight Eisenhower all had recording systems in the Oval Office. All approved break-ins and bugging of political enemies, subversives or ideological foes. All sanctioned covert intervention and the overthrow of foreign governments. All lied to the American people about matters of “national security.” All joined to take the United States into the catastrophic misadventure of Vietnam, leaving Nixon to clean up the mess.

In fact, it was because of Watergate, and a brief era of openness that followed, that Americans learned how the CIA, FBI and other security agencies, for decades, had conducted widespread surveillance of U.S. citizens, bugged, burgled and opened mail, infiltrated dissident groups, plotted to assassinate foreign leaders, forged alliances with organized crime and conducted illegal drug tests on unsuspecting subjects.

“History will show the Nixon Administration not as the one that invented abuse of power, but the one that gloriously if unwittingly served the cause of individual liberty by the clumsy way it tried to continue the abuses of Kennedy and Johnson,” wrote William Safire, the New York Times columnist and former Nixon speechwriter, at the time.

Nixon’s innovation was to bring it all in-house—to set up a secret police force within the White House, answerable to no oversight but his. Its ham-fisted methods and inept personnel would spill across the street into the offices of his re-election campaign, with disastrous results.

In his new book The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, Rick Perlstein tracks how the Watergate scandal ripped the scab of secrecy (to use one of Nixon’s favorite, mildly disgusting metaphors) from the national security state, and what it led to in America.

With the Tommy-gun techniques he employed in his last book— Nixonland—Perlstein shows how each rush of shattering revelation eroded the country’s faith in itself. The Watergate scandals, the fall of Saigon, the oil shock and the corrosive effects of inflation were backdrops for demoralizing disclosures like the Church Committee’s report on CIA misdeeds, the Kennedy and Johnson administration’s bugging and harassment of Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders, Kennedy’s hyperactive sex life—including a dalliance with a mobster’s girlfriend, the assassination plots against Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders (in league with the Mafia) and (hel-lo!) the National Security Agency’s monitoring of American citizens.

Things looked dark indeed—except to Ronald Reagan, who possessed, Perlstein writes, “the ability to radiate blithe optimism in the face of what others called chaos—to reimagine the morass in front of him as a tableau of simple moral clarity.” Spanning the years 1973 to 1976, the book seeks to show why Reagan’s sunny confidence, and nostalgic agenda, proved so attractive in unsettled times.

The Invisible Bridge is an amalgamation of political commentary, social history and biography. Perlstein can go over the top with his portends—last time I checked, tornados and swarming insects are forces of nature that Americans have endured in every era—and it is jarring, for the reader, to shift back and forth between the elegant biographical chapters on Reagan’s early life in Hollywood and politics, and the frantic Perlsteinian pastiche ( The Bad News Bears … Evel Knievel … Transcendental Meditation … Saturday Night Live … Killer bees … Patty Hearst!) he employs to illustrate dissolution in the chapters on the 1970s. It left me hoping that if Perlstein continues his series, he will devote his considerable talents to a more equable analysis of Reagan’s fortunes, and not just dredge the 1980s for an array (Yuppies … Hondas … the Cosby show … Madonna!) of fads and supposed tokens. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

***

If Reagan worked the sunny side of the American dream, Nixon dabbled in nightmare. He was innately insecure, with a fear of seeming weak, easily wounded and apt to sulk when criticized. He lacked the breeding and style, the family fortune and the Ivy League degrees of the Kennedys and Rockefellers and felt it keenly, all his days.

Born and reared in the California outback, Nixon scratched his way from utter obscurity to the vice presidency of the United States in only six years. That rapid rise may have doomed him—depriving him, as it did, of tempering experience. He could campaign with repellent unctuousness, salted with snarl and insinuation. He won a House seat in 1946, and a Senate seat in 1950, by portraying his opponents as the dupes of communism. In the 1952 and 1956 elections, as the Republican vice presidential candidate, he handled the political wet work for Dwight Eisenhower, letting Ike soar above the fray.

“Nixonland,” said Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1956, was “a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win.” The cartoonist Herblock portrayed Nixon with a sinister countenance, crawling from the sewer or standing beside Sen. Joe McCarthy, carrying buckets of tar to smear.

But Nixon made a virtue of his resentments, tapping them to fathom and reach out to the millions of what he called “the silent majority”—those socially conservative, God-fearing, hard-working, child-rearing families of middle-America. He was nothing if not a square. So were they. They shared his grievances and his antipathy toward the trendy, 1960s values of the Eastern elite.

Nixon may actually have won the presidency three times. The results were close enough—and reports of Democratic thievery in Illinois, Texas and other states credible enough—to suspect that he actually beat Kennedy in 1960. He rebounded to win the equally tight and totemic election in 1968—then crushed McGovern on route to a record-setting landslide and a sweep of 49 states in 1972, losing only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.

Nixon’s rise to the presidency was never a given, abundantly clear from the beach book of this summer’s Nixon volumes—a memoir by Patrick J. Buchanan, conservative wise guy, columnist and a former presidential candidate himself. The Greatest Comeback is a Runyonesque account of Nixon’s return from his 1960 defeat and disastrous 1962 campaign for governor of California, which ended with a famous “last” press conference at which he vowed, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”

Nixon seemed as dead as Marley’s doornails until Barry Goldwater took the Republicans down to an historic defeat in 1964, momentarily quenching the conservative movement and creating an opening for a candidate who, never believing his own obituaries, could straddle the rift between the party’s center-right and its then-still-viable center-left.

“Nixon was no ideologue, no true believer,” Buchanan writes. “He had instincts one could call conservative, but reflexive reactions that were liberal. He wanted to leave his mark and become a man of history, and believed that, given the chance, he could make his mark in foreign policy.”

Buchanan, then a 27-year-old journalist, signed up in 1965 as a young factotum—writing letters and speeches, accompanying Nixon on his travels, acting as an emissary to the right and (thankfully, for us) squirreling away memoranda and memories. If Nixon’s 1968 election is indeed the “greatest” comeback in presidential politics (and I won’t argue that it’s not), Buchanan, a fight fan, gives us a lively and unparalleled view of how it looked from Nixon’s corner.

Buchanan is a loyalist. On page 357 of The Greatest Comeback he rejects—despite considerable evidence to the contrary—the suggestion that the Nixon campaign sabotaged Vietnam peace talks on the eve of the 1968 election by sending word to the South Vietnamese government, via a Republican operative named Anna Chennault, that it would get a better deal if it dragged its heels and helped Nixon win.

That particularly bit of skullduggery is the topic of Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate, by Ken Hughes, an expert on presidential tapes at the University of Virginia.

The Hughes book is one for left-leaning conspiracy buffs and Rachel Maddow fans—it is speculative, yet impeccably sourced, with extensive use of White House tapes and documents, memoirs by the various protagonists and other citations. The Chennault saga has dribbled out in bits and pieces over the years. Here it is told—or at least what we know is told, as Nixon’s personal involvement is still a mystery—in one concise, thorough volume.

Hughes contends that Nixon was seeking to cover up the Chennault affair when the president launched the Liddy-Hunt team of “plumbers” down the road that would, almost a year later, bring them to Watergate. It is an intriguing, if unprovable, theory. The episode was certainly some part of Nixon’s motivation—he is heard on his White House tapes ordering his aides to break into the Brookings Institution (“Goddammit, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.”) where he thought evidence on Chennault’s role was hidden.

Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, publicly denied that their secret bombing campaign against North Vietnamese troops in Cambodia destabilized that neutral nation and led to its tragic disintegration. But Hughes cites a segment of the tapes on which, to each other, Nixon and Kissinger acknowledge the bombing’s effects.

“We’d carried out a series of strikes … on Cambodia,” Nixon can be heard telling Treasury Secretary John Connally, on May 4, 1972. “We bombed the hell out of those sanctuaries.”

“And actually, that led indirectly. … It led to the collapse of Cambodia because it pushed the North Vietnamese deeper into Cambodia,” says Kissinger.

Ultimately, the communist Khmer Rouge emerged from the chaos as the ruler of Cambodia and embarked on a bloody, genocidal spree.

“A straight line can’t be drawn from the secret bombing to the Khmer Rouge’s genocide,” Hughes contends. “But there’s no reason to believe the latter would have happened without the former.”

***

Nixon’s cold-blooded foreign policy must be seen in the context of its times. He fought in World War II and then sat, as vice president, at Eisenhower’s side for eight years during the Cold War. The slaughter at Guernica, Nanjing, Dresden, Warsaw and Nagasaki were not dry entries in Wikipedia for Nixon and his generation: They were proof, in his lifetime, of the savagery of man and the need to meet evil force with force. In bombing North Vietnam, he believed, he was only following the example set by Eisenhower, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, who had unleashed the allied air forces upon German and Japanese civilians.

More remarkable was that this California Quaker and admirer of Woodrow Wilson had a bold, idealistic vision as well. He sought to replace the nuclear hair triggers of the Cold War with a more stable balance of power in which Japan, Europe and China joined the United States as counterweights to the Soviet Union. It would “change the world for a while” and bring on a “generation of peace,” Nixon believed. He did not foresee the turns that history would take along the way—the Soviet folly in Afghanistan, the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev—but his vision has largely been fulfilled. We live in the world that Nixon dreamed.

As his presidency crumbled around him, Nixon expressed his hope that history would look less to Watergate and more to his foreign policy achievements—negotiating an end to the Vietnam War, striking a nuclear arms deal with the Soviet Union, acting to save Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur war and launching his famous opening to China. Two Texas historians—Luke Nichter and Douglas Brinkley—grant Nixon his wish this summer.

In The Nixon Tapes, they forsake the titillating in favor of more than 700 pages of transcripts from the White House tapes that show Nixon crafting history—mostly on the great foreign policy initiatives of his presidency. Though daunting for the average reader, this is a noble contribution to American scholarship and our understanding of the Nixon years. The Nichter-Brinkley transcripts chronicle, in detail, the plotting of the opening to China, Nixon’s maneuvering with the Soviet Union over nuclear arms and anti-ballistic missile treaties and the re-emergence, with Nixon’s backing, of Europe and Japan as world powers. We can eavesdrop as Nixon pours the footer for a structure in which communism’s collapse would take place without a third world war. Nixon hoped his “generation of peace” would last for 20 or 25 years. We are now at 40, and counting.

In the spring of 1972, Nixon’s plans for a Vietnam peace settlement, a summit meeting in Moscow and a strategic arms treaty with the Soviet Union seemed imperiled by a North Vietnamese offensive.

If Nixon retaliated against the North, the Soviets would likely cancel the summit. The war would drag on, the antiwar protests continue.

“You’ll be accused of having blown up everything,” Kissinger warned the president.

“I know,” Nixon said. “That brings sadness to me.”

But “we will be remembered as the ones who went to China,” Nixon went on. “And in the future, that’ll work out.”

And it did.