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01:29Recently declassified files indicate that Madame Chenault worked aggressively to sabotage the peace talks
01:37by urging South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thu to resist negotiating with the Communists.
01:44If the South Vietnamese held out, Chenault promised, a Republican administration would secure them a better deal.
01:54We can never tell whether or not this did lose the election for Humphrey, but the fact is that Nixon was willing to engage in this clandestine secret operation, which was probably illegal.
02:10Good evening, my fellow Americans.
02:14The tactic may have worked.
02:17But when Lyndon Johnson ordered a bombing halt on October 31st in order to lure the North Vietnamese to the bargaining table,
02:25the South Vietnamese dampened the public's hopes by opposing the peace talks.
02:30This is one of the great and still untold scandals in American political history because you had someone who was a private citizen negotiate directly with the president of a country in which the United States had already committed some 525,000 troops abroad.
02:50Richard Nixon won the election, the very first person he appointed to his cabinet was the secret source who had leaked the information about Lyndon Johnson's sudden peace efforts, Henry Kissinger.
03:06While it's not clear that President Johnson would have been successful in bringing peace to Vietnam, the South Vietnamese were no better off when Nixon concluded his own peace negotiations than they would have been in 1968.
03:24In those four intervening years, 20,000 Americans and an uncalculated number of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians lost their lives.
03:36It was a pattern that would repeat itself.
03:39Nixon's concern that his opponents were concealing something drove him to resort to clandestine tactics to uncover their secrets and seize the advantage.
03:52Nixon was a very complicated man.
03:56I think he was an outstanding president.
03:59I respected the decisions he made, which were very courageous.
04:06He was a dedicated patriot.
04:08He had a number of personality aspects, which complicated his life and his conduct of the presidency.
04:23Complicated as his life may have become, his beginnings were simple.
04:28Richard Milhouse Nixon was born in Yorba Linda, California in 1913.
04:34His mother raised him in the Quaker faith, while his father worked him long hours in the family grocery store.
04:43Although he earned a scholarship to Harvard University, he opted to stay at home and attend Whittier College.
04:50Determination and hard work also earned him a degree from Duke Law School.
04:55After his graduation, the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor jolted the United States into World War II.
05:05Then Richard Nixon joined the Navy.
05:07As a supply officer in the South Pacific, he discovered a new side of himself.
05:18And he taught himself to play poker, not for the fun of it, but in order to make money.
05:22As a Quaker, he should perhaps not have wanted to gamble, but he learned that these men, who didn't necessarily expect to live, would take all sorts of risks.
05:35And he learned to play a very conservative, reasoned game of poker.
05:39At war's end, Richard Nixon parlayed his poker winnings to help finance his first political campaign,
05:50running against Democratic U.S. Congressman Jerry Voorhees.
05:53He won the election and soon made a name for himself as a vocal anti-communist on the House Un-American Activities Committee.
06:04Two years later, in 1948, he faced Helen Gahagan Douglas in a bitterly contested race for the U.S. Senate seat in California.
06:14He engaged in a bare-knuckles campaign, and this included, you know, releasing documents about her voting record
06:27that associated her with the one communist-leaning member of the House of Representatives,
06:33but in ways that were misleading and inaccurate.
06:37It was during that campaign that Helen Gahagan Douglas coined the nickname Tricky Dick.
06:42Nixon was quick to respond in kind.
06:46More consistent in resisting communist aggression in Korea.
06:49He said of Mrs. Douglas, she is pink all the way down to her underwear, which didn't seem very chivalrous, actually.
06:59Once in the Senate, Nixon began to investigate the communist leanings of a debonair State Department official named Alger Hiss.
07:07Based on circumstantial evidence supplied by informant Whitaker Chambers, Nixon accused Hiss of lying under oath and espionage.
07:20Chambers produced papers and microfilm long hidden in a hollowed-out pumpkin to support his claim that Hiss had copied classified documents
07:29and passed them on to the Soviets, and passed them on to the Soviets.
07:34Hiss steadfastly maintained his innocence, but Nixon called his bluff.
07:39He was willing to gamble his entire career on his instinct that Hiss was guilty.
07:44After one trial ended in a hung jury, Hiss was convicted of perjury and sent to prison.
07:54Nixon's dogged determination earned him a position of prominence within the Republican Party
08:00and the lifelong enmity of his Democratic opponents.
08:03He was so popular among conservative Republicans that at only 38 years of age,
08:10he was recruited to become Dwight Eisenhower's running mate in the presidential election of 1952.
08:21The Eisenhower-Nixon ticket won a landslide victory,
08:25but in spite of their political success, Eisenhower always maintained a comfortable distance from his young vice president.
08:33Eisenhower was a child.
08:34Eisenhower, I think, never caught into him, never really got to like him.
08:40One might have hoped, and I think Nixon hoped,
08:43that maybe they could have had a kind of father-son relationship,
08:47or that Nixon could have become his protege in some way,
08:51but it never worked out that way.
08:54In 1955, when French legions were fighting to maintain their control over Vietnam,
09:00Nixon was an advocate of the secret project Vulture.
09:04It called for dropping atomic bombs
09:07on Viet Minh forces at the NBN Phu.
09:10Eisenhower, however, rejected the plan.
09:17In spite of the fact that Richard Nixon worked hard
09:20to win Ike's approval, the president considered
09:23dropping him off the 1956 ticket.
09:26Although Ike's lack of enthusiasm undermined his confidence,
09:33Nixon carried on.
09:35During his second term as vice president,
09:38he distinguished himself by traveling the world
09:41to build new ties with foreign dignitaries,
09:45always making sure to report his impressions
09:48to President Eisenhower.
09:50In 1960, Richard Nixon won the Republican nomination
09:59and faced John F. Kennedy in a close race.
10:02The final insult to Nixon's pride occurred
10:05when Eisenhower seemed reluctant to endorse his candidacy.
10:09Reporters asked Eisenhower,
10:12can you name a major decision
10:14where Nixon's advice was decisive?
10:17And Eisenhower said, give me a week and I'll think of one.
10:20And that was widely viewed as being dismissive of him.
10:26Eisenhower did finally endorse his vice president,
10:29but it was too late.
10:31For Richard Nixon, defeat at the hands of John Kennedy
10:34was a bitter blow.
10:36For his wife, Pat, the break from the demands
10:39of political life was like a vacation.
10:42It would be another eight years before Nixon would return
10:45to national politics.
10:47This time as a victor.
10:51In the intervening years,
10:53the United States entered into a war
10:55that had become increasingly unpopular.
11:00It would prove to be a conflict
11:02that would further enmesh Richard Nixon
11:05in a web of secrecy.
11:11Richard Nixon had spent most of his adult life in politics,
11:14had reached full maturity while in the White House
11:17and had spent long hours dreaming about the goals
11:20he would achieve as president.
11:26As he entered office in 1969,
11:28the tensions of the Cold War still loomed on the horizon,
11:32presenting ever greater and unknown threats
11:35that included nuclear arms
11:37and a vast array of deadly chemical and biological weapons.
11:44But all this seemed to pale in juxtaposition
11:46to a conflict that raged on the other side of the world.
11:52America's involvement in Vietnam
11:54had begun under President Eisenhower
11:56and by 1968 had escalated into an undeclared
12:00and unpopular war.
12:02During his campaign, Richard Nixon hinted to the voters
12:08that he had a secret plan to end the fighting
12:10and bring U.S. soldiers home.
12:12During his first days in office,
12:16he promised peace with honor in Vietnam.
12:20The man he chose to help him accomplish this feat
12:24was his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger.
12:28Although quite different in style,
12:32the two were destined to forge a profoundly important relationship.
12:36Kissinger believed it was because he had found an effective way
12:40to work with his boss.
12:46He could not confront people directly
12:48and tell them he disagreed with them.
12:52He could do it by paper.
12:54So, one reason our relationship thrived
12:58is we spent a lot of time together,
13:00but all the important decisions were made on the basis of memos.
13:04Since he was so much on guard all the time,
13:08it was not easy to have a personal relationship with him.
13:14In spite of Nixon's inability to let his guard down,
13:18he and Kissinger were so close
13:20that others in the State Department,
13:22including Melvin Laird, his Secretary of Defense,
13:24and William Rogers, his Secretary of State,
13:27were shut out of the policy-making loop.
13:30When it came to strategizing about the war in Vietnam,
13:33the President and Kissinger made all the decisions.
13:41They just fed off of each other,
13:43I think, in a way that was really unhealthy.
13:45But the negative characteristics they shared
13:47was this kind of paranoid sense
13:49that there was something out there
13:51or someone out there out to get them
13:53in one way or another.
13:57President Nixon's plan to end the war
13:59included Vietnamization
14:01which called for the slow withdrawal
14:03of American ground troops from Vietnam,
14:07while the South Vietnamese learned to survive on their own.
14:11The plan angered the Joint Chiefs of Staff
14:14who thought Nixon was going soft on communism.
14:17What we don't really fully appreciate even today
14:23is the intense and depth of dislike of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
14:29our top military officials of Nixon's foreign policy.
14:33Frustrated that they had been shut out of the decision-making process,
14:37the Joint Chiefs decided to engage in a clandestine operation of their own.
14:45An admiral named Robert Waylander ordered a yeoman named Charles Radford
14:52to spy on the National Security Council,
14:56to pilfer records, to wiretap on one occasion,
15:00but largely simply to take documents and Xerox them.
15:06Unaware that this secret spy operation was underway,
15:09President Nixon was working hard to appease his military commanders
15:13by taking a bold and violent step.
15:17In hopes of sending a clear message to Hanoi,
15:20President Nixon agreed to a secret plan
15:22to bomb North Vietnamese targets in Cambodia.
15:26Within two months of becoming president
15:28and promising to bring a quick end to the war,
15:31Nixon approved a massive B-52 bombing strike,
15:35codenamed MENU.
15:43A deliberate effort was made to prevent the American public,
15:47especially from knowing, Congress from knowing,
15:50and even the Secretary of the Air Force,
15:53from knowing that the bombing was taking place.
15:55Why?
15:56Because there would have been an uproar against him.
16:01The B-52 bombers carried immense cargoes of high explosives
16:05designed for saturation bombing over a wide area.
16:13They flew at an altitude too high to be observed
16:15by North Vietnamese moving along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
16:19Melvin Laird, Secretary of Defense during the first Nixon administration,
16:27worried whether enough precautions were being taken
16:30to minimize the risk of striking civilian centers.
16:34Between March of 1969 and May of 1970,
16:38over 3,000 raids were flown across the Cambodian frontier.
16:43Bombing surveys after the war estimate that hundreds of thousands of civilians lost their lives.
16:54At the same time that the U.S. Air Force was dropping bombs on Cambodia,
16:58peace negotiations were underway in Paris.
17:02Some of the talks were formal negotiations carried out in public.
17:07Other talks were held in the strictest secrecy.
17:12Most of the serious work was done in the private talks,
17:16because in the public talks each side repeated their well-known positions.
17:23An aura of intrigue surrounded the secret peace negotiations.
17:29Anthony Lake, assistant to Henry Kissinger, was there.
17:34This was a way of life, to keep secrets away from everybody.
17:40So when we traveled over, we would go under assumed names to fly over,
17:47when we were flying over to Paris.
17:49I was Major Larkin.
17:51Kissinger was Colonel, somebody that began with a K.
17:54And we would drive around Paris in cars with curtains drawn, et cetera, et cetera.
17:59The talks were so secretive that for the first several months,
18:04members of the U.S. State Department did not even know that private negotiations were taking place.
18:12This put me in a very difficult position, because I was a State Department officer.
18:16Many of them were my friends, and I felt some real embarrassment
18:21not being able to tell them what we were actually doing,
18:25which is not the way to run a railroad.
18:27A feeling of paranoia so pervaded Henry Kissinger's office
18:32that members of his own staff began to suspect that their phones were being tapped.
18:40There were many rumors at the time that telephones were being tapped.
18:45Most of the rumors were about taps on telephones in offices.
18:50There were some rumors and even occasionally some evidence of taps on home telephones.
18:56In spite of the administration's attempts to keep the lid on their secret policies,
19:03stories continued to leak out.
19:07Henry Kissinger mistrusted virtually everyone to work for him,
19:10so one of the reasons the taps were installed was to find out
19:13who was leaking material to the New York Times and the Washington Post.
19:16And he believed someone on his staff was doing that, and he had to find out who it was.
19:21President Nixon believed the leaks were contributing to the domestic unrest that continued to grow unabated throughout the nation.
19:31Within a year after entering office, he had begun to think of himself as a man under siege,
19:37and as such, he was prepared to strike back.
19:47By 1969, in America, the movement to end the war in Vietnam had turned violent.
19:54During his first year in office, Nixon was aware that over 3,000 bombings against U.S. government property were under investigation.
20:02Even for the most level-headed individual, the pressure would have been hard to bear,
20:11as it was as siege mentality prevailed within the White House.
20:17Nixon, at his core, was an insecure man, a lonely man, a man in search always of approval from others,
20:26a man who, no matter how much success he ever achieved, it would never be enough inside of him.
20:32In order to neutralize his many opponents, President Nixon continued several domestic surveillance programs
20:41that had been initiated by his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson.
20:46One of these secret programs, called CONIS, was conducted by the Army
20:50in order to spy on American civilians who seemed to have subversive ideas.
20:56Another was the clandestine Operation Chaos, run by the CIA.
21:08The object was to infiltrate student groups, especially anti-war groups,
21:13to investigate professors who were conducting research that was negative,
21:17perhaps about any aspect of American foreign policy, but especially the war.
21:21Thousands of miles away in the jungles of South Vietnam, a CIA counterinsurgency program was underway.
21:31Under the auspices of a secret operation called Phoenix,
21:35U.S. Army advisors were training the South Vietnamese military, police and civilians
21:41to root out Viet Cong intelligence agents who had infiltrated their villages.
21:46The CIA referred to its activities under Phoenix by the euphemistic term, pacification.
21:59One of the important components was assassination,
22:04and it's been estimated to have killed at least 20,000 alleged Viet Cong.
22:10So the objective was to identify, interrogate, arrest, or neutralize, the word was, to kill Viet Cong infrastructure.
22:20By CIA standards, Phoenix was an unqualified success.
22:25But for many others, far too many innocent people were caught in the crossfire.
22:30And you can imagine, in an operation in which the objective is to arrest, interrogate, incarcerate, without due process of law,
22:43the ratio of mistakes could be very high, given all the factors that operate.
22:48During the first years of Nixon's presidency, the administration was also working hard to win the release of American prisoners of war,
23:01incarcerated in several Hanoi prisons.
23:05These efforts were certainly warranted, since reports indicated that many of these POWs had been subjected to years of solitary confinement and torture at the hands of their captors.
23:19But Nixon's critics suggest there might also have been an ulterior motive behind the administration's effort to win their freedom.
23:30Nixon and Kissinger exploited the issue politically by trying to use the POW issue as a wedge with the growing anti-war movement in the country.
23:39And so the return of the American prisoners of war was elevated to a massive public relations game at the highest level
23:48to protect the legacy, in their mind, of peace with honor.
23:53Then in the fall of 1969, a story broke that threatened to turn into a true public relations nightmare.
24:03First called Pinkville and later the My Lai Massacre, the story involved the alleged cover-up of atrocities committed by American soldiers during the conduct of war.
24:1724-year-old Lieutenant William Calley was accused of ordering the men in his platoon
24:22to slaughter over 100 innocent men, women and children in the hamlet of My Lai.
24:33The subsequent court-martial of Lieutenant Calley further divided an already embattled country
24:38and called into question the army's policy of search and destroy, which measured success by numbers of enemy killed.
24:49When Calley was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, the president ordered that he be released from the stockade at Fort Benning, pending a review of his case.
25:00He was confined to an apartment on the base until Nixon indicated that no further action was appropriate.
25:09In 1975, after serving only three years of his sentence, Calley was paroled, to the delight of his supporters.
25:16Two years after entering office, President Nixon was no closer to delivering on his promise to secure peace with honor in Vietnam.
25:30And to his great consternation, more trouble was about to erupt, this time in his own hemisphere.
25:37In the fall of 1970, democratic elections brought the Marxist Salvador Allende to power in Chile.
25:53American business interests and officials in the Nixon White House viewed the situation with alarm.
25:58Within two weeks after Allende's electoral victory, Nixon called a meeting with Richard Helms, then director of the CIA, with a view towards destabilizing the Chilean economy.
26:19We have the very famous notes that Richard Helms took of this meeting in the afternoon of September 15, 1970,
26:27where Nixon says, make the economy scream, use our best men, take $10,000,
26:34don't tell the ambassador in Chile what we're actually doing, foment a coup, do whatever it takes.
26:40This was the marching orders for the CIA to overthrow Chilean democracy by hook or by crook.
26:48Nixon told his advisers a little anecdote to explain his rationale for overthrowing the Allende government.
26:55He says, look, you have communism in the Caribbean, in Cuba, now you are going to have communism on the mainland of Latin America.
27:06You have a red sandwich in Latin America and pretty soon it will all be red.
27:10It soon became apparent that in order for a coup to succeed, the CIA needed the support of the Chilean military, then under the command of General René Schneider.
27:22But General Schneider was adamantly opposed to any meddling in the electoral process.
27:31CIA cable traffic indicates that Henry Kissinger authorized a covert operation aimed at removing General Schneider from power.
27:39What the CIA did under pressure from Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger was run around and look for a handful of disgruntled mid-level Chilean commanders and try and push them to foment a coup.
27:56They would kidnap René Schneider, blame it on the left in Chile.
28:03This would create, you know, massive opposition to Allende and the military would be able to take power, abrogate the election and simply move on from there.
28:13During September and October of 1970, CIA operatives in Chile recruited two different right-wing extremist gangs to kidnap General Schneider.
28:25Cables between CIA officials in Santiago and Kissinger's office document that the CIA supplied the kidnappers with gas grenades, machine guns and ammunition.
28:43On October 22, 1970, a squad under the command of General Roberto Vio shot and killed General Schneider during a botched kidnapping attempt.
28:58A recently declassified CIA report shows that after the arrest and conviction of these men, the CIA paid $35,000 in hush money to help their families relocate.
29:13Kissinger believes that the administration's actions can only be understood within the context of Cold War politics.
29:20First of all, every previous president, Kennedy and Johnson, were also determined that Allende did not become president.
29:30And they spent a lot more money in Chile to prevent it than Nixon did.
29:35The Cold War was not a Tea Party. And Nixon did not want another Soviet base in the Western Hemisphere, which he thought Allende would facilitate.
29:50Allende managed to hold on to power, but for the next three years, the Nixon administration and the CIA conducted a covert operation against the Chilean government, codenamed Project FUBELT.
30:03The secret program was designed to destabilize the economy and included erecting an invisible economic blockade against Chile.
30:18Then, on September 11, 1973, the very day that Henry Kissinger was going through his own Senate confirmation process as Secretary of State,
30:28right-wing General Augusto Pinochet led an assault on the presidential palace.
30:34Hours later, when soldiers entered the presidential office, they discovered the corpse of Salvador Allende with a bullet hole through his head.
30:43His death was reported to be a suicide.
30:45Days later, United States Senators were told by a State Department official that the Nixon White House had advance warning of the coup, but decided on a hands-off policy.
31:04Recently released documents have established that the administration was immediately sympathetic to Augusto Pinochet's new regime.
31:17The Nixon administration embraced this cutthroat military dictatorship, helped it consolidate and stay in power for what became 17 years of dictatorship.
31:28While the Chilean coup may have stopped the spread of communism, it did so at a heavy toll.
31:36For nearly two decades, death squads swept the country, kidnapping and murdering thousands of Chilean citizens.
31:47But by 1973, Richard Nixon had so many problems of his own that he had little time to concern himself over human rights violations in Chile.
31:56The president's excessive concern about leaks reached such a high level that it led him to authorize illegal acts which would lead to the unraveling of his own administration.
32:11By the start of Nixon's third year in office, his policy of Vietnamization seemed to be succeeding as the numbers of U.S. troops in Southeast Asia were reduced.
32:27On June 12, 1971, the president celebrated the happy occasion of his daughter Trisha's wedding.
32:38All seemed to be going well until the next morning.
32:41On the front page of the New York Times, next to Trisha's wedding pictures, was another headline.
32:51A Vietnam Archive Pentagon study traces three decades of growing U.S. involvement.
32:57Soon to be known around the world as the Pentagon Papers, it was the first installment of a 7,000-page report that investigated how the United States had become mired in Vietnam.
33:13Nixon's initial reaction to the paper's publication was fairly cool since he felt that the report had the potential for damaging the reputations of his Democratic predecessors.
33:25But the president's nonchalance soon turned to unbridled rage when he realized that someone had leaked classified information to the New York Times.
33:40He and Henry Kissinger claimed that delicate diplomacy involving the Chinese, the Russians, and the North Vietnamese had been put in jeopardy.
33:55We were concerned what other countries would think if they could not rely on our ability to maintain the confidentiality of our exchanges.
34:08There's no doubt that Nixon overdid his reaction.
34:13But like most of the things he overdid, there was more talk than action.
34:17President Nixon soon learned that the culprit behind the leaks was a rand consultant and former student of Henry Kissinger's named Daniel Ellsberg.
34:29Once an ardent supporter of U.S. intervention in Vietnam, Ellsberg was now convinced the conflict was futile.
34:37He dismissed Nixon's Vietnamization policy as a bloody and hopeless protraction of the war.
34:43Nixon's pursuit of Elsberg soon became a vendetta.
34:50Nixon tried to discredit Ellsberg by recruiting J. Edgar Hoover to dig up dirt on him.
34:58When Hoover assigned a low priority to the project, Nixon confided to advisers that it was time for the elderly FBI director to retire.
35:06Nixon then took a step that would seal his fate.
35:13He established a secret investigative unit under the direction of his aide, John Ehrlichman, which would respond directly to the Oval Office.
35:23The new group would soon be working out of the basement in the executive office building with a sign in the door that read, Mr. Young Plumber.
35:34The plumber's group was designed to plug leaks. That's why they have the name plumbers. They decided to use the plumbers then in its first illegal black bag job by breaking into the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg.
35:52So they were planning simply to damage his reputation in every way, shape, form they could find.
35:59On September 3, 1971, John Ehrlichman authorized the plumber's burglary of the Los Angeles office of Dr. Lewis Fielding in hopes of obtaining Ellsberg's psychiatric files.
36:12The incident, in essence, led to the illegal operation of the plumber's unit within the White House.
36:24So it's crucial in terms of the beginning of the end of the Nixon administration's legal activities in opposition to its enemies.
36:34In hindsight, those closest to Nixon believed that the president was his own worst enemy.
36:40A man who often had to be protected from his first impulses.
36:45When I found out about that category of things, which was when it became public, I asked an old friend of Nixon's, I said, what do you think happened here?
37:02And he said, some damn fool went into the Oval Office and did what he was told.
37:09Those sorts of things, I was amazed and shocked. They were senseless. They were unworthy of a president.
37:28What was worthy of presidential conduct were the steps that Nixon took to reduce the tensions of the Cold War.
37:38In 1971, he showed the wisdom to unilaterally ban the research and development of offensive biological weapons.
37:48Of deadly biological weapons.
37:53During his first term in office, Richard Nixon worked in concert with Henry Kissinger to achieve detente with the Soviet Union.
38:01Engaging in secret back-channel negotiations with the Soviets, the president and his national security advisor sidestepped both the Congress and NATO to negotiate an anti-ballistic missile agreement and a strategic arms limitation treaty.
38:17And with Kissinger's assistance, Nixon opened a dialogue with Communist China that culminated in his highly touted visit to that country in 1972.
38:32In foreign policy, he was extremely innovative with respect to dealing with China and the Soviet Union because he wanted to conduct the Cold War in a different manner, leave containment behind and try to figure out a new operational mode for dealing with these two gigantic countries.
38:57And that will be forever to his credit.
39:03But by the summer of 1973, Nixon's ultimate fate was no longer in his hands.
39:09A scandal caused by the plumbers, his own secret investigative unit had begun to consume most of his time and energy.
39:16Often, Henry Kissinger, now Secretary of State, was left alone to deal with international crises like the Arab attack on Israel in the fall of 1973.
39:29As a policy-maker, you're always overwhelmed with decisions, so you react more like an athlete.
39:41You do not have the choice of changing your mind because what you do tends to be irrevocable.
39:47In crises, most people are in foxholes throwing out an occasional memo that they're not responsible.
39:56And there are only two or three people who emerged who are willing to make decisions.
40:02At the Paris peace table, Nixon's negotiators were secretly laying the groundwork for a surprising settlement.
40:09In 1973, they succeeded in negotiating a ceasefire in Vietnam.
40:18We, today, have concluded an agreement to end the war and bring peace with honor in Vietnam and in Southeast Asia.
40:28Nixon and Kissinger claimed that they had fulfilled their promise to bring peace with honor
40:34because they were leaving the Saigon regime secure and independent.
40:42And that was their claim, that the U.S. could withdraw knowing it had made the Saigon regime strong enough to survive.
40:51Now, what's questionable, and I think false about that claim, if one looks at the record,
40:56is that there were parts to the agreement which, in the long run, would result in the fall of the Saigon regime.
41:06And Nixon and Kissinger knew this was the case.
41:11The part of the agreement that was so astonishing was that Nixon and Kissinger agreed to let over 100,000 North Vietnamese troops remain on South Vietnamese soil.
41:21To many, this virtually ensured the subsequent fall of the Saigon government.
41:30Some historians suggest that Nixon and Kissinger may have had a secret motive in agreeing to this aspect of the treaty.
41:36How are you going to keep your ally, President Tu, from seeing this as a betrayal?
41:44Well, one of the things you're going to do is you're going to guarantee to President Tu that as soon as those troops in the South make their first move,
41:52which everyone knew they would, we're going to bring back the B-52s and we're going to punish the North Vietnamese like they've never been punished before.
41:58If President Nixon did have a plan to return U.S. air power to Vietnam, that plan was to be derailed by a cataclysmic succession of events known as Watergate.
42:12As it was, Richard Nixon no longer held public office by the time the Saigon government fell into communist hands in 1975.
42:22From the moment the plumbers were apprehended while pilfering files at the Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate apartments,
42:34Nixon's presidency began its slow collapse.
42:38By 1974, his critics clamored for him to resign.
42:41I think he achieved a great deal.
42:49The night before he left office, I told him, I said, history will treat you better than your contemporaries.
42:57I believe that is true.
43:00On August 8, 1974, Richard Nixon appeared before his staff to bid farewell before he resigned as President of the United States.
43:11But always, you will be in our hearts and you will be in our prayers.
43:25Thank you very much.
43:31The dream that guided his adult life was over.
43:34Nixon's obsessive desire to learn the secrets of others was his undoing.
43:43For the time being, at least, much of what he'd accomplished in public life was overshadowed by scandal.
43:50He believed.
43:51He believed that he was nailed nicely, since not knowingly, welcomedShowing contact of the dead,
43:53But still, of the days he was not being reunited.
43:59He called the