INTRODUCTION. The “Madman Theory.”

It was foggy as they strolled. The pair had taken a break from speechwriting. Little doubt Richard Nixon was tense over the upcoming election and tired from the campaign’s unrelenting politicking. He had a tendency to overwork himself. Perhaps, more aptly, he had a tendency to overthink.

Nixon favored padding across the ocean shoreline. He found the rhythm of the waves soothed him. His chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, recounted that Nixon’s mind strayed to a foreign policy lark, a secret plan he had been mulling. By 1968, the Vietnam War had reached a destructive stalemate of bombings, offensives and insurrection. The conflict had handicapped one American president in John F. Kennedy only to fell Lyndon Johnson. At home, the next commander-in-chief would face a nation all-too done, marching, protesting even rioting over a war halfway across the world that everyone wanted over but no one seemed to know how to end. During the presidential campaign, Nixon already had been promising a swift peace. The question weighing on the prospective frontrunner was how to de-escalate the conflict in Vietnam once he entered the Oval Office. It was a matter of finally taking the rational route to settle for a “peace with honor.”

Yet as they paced the beach, Haldeman remembered, Nixon had a different idea. What of the irrational route? Instead of halting the bombing as Johnson tried in vain, what of escalating? Instead of winding down, what of winding up? The candidate spoke of upping the ante on the Indochinese Peninsula. “I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war,” Nixon explained. He would play a kind of latter-day ogre, a bully—"obsessed," "angry," not able to be “restrain[ed].” If the American president acted with abandon, he could scare Hanoi to the peace table. Just tell them that “he has his hand on the nuclear button—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace,” Nixon promised his chief aide. With crazed strategic bluffery, Nixon proposed he could finally extract the Americans from the Vietnam quagmire. He called it his “madman theory.”

Although he did not offer an opinion in his memoir, likely Haldeman eagerly assented to Nixon’s idea that midsummer’s day. And not merely for his tendency toward solicitousness toward his boss. For the former advertising executive with his signature brush-cut, the idea spoke to his political instincts. It had muscle and brawn. It caught Nixon in a swaggering mood. And beyond strongarm tactics, the “madman theory” was based on pretense. The scheme did not purport to blow up the world, the schemer would simply look willing to do so. It was the key distinction in the strategy—acting suicidal rather than the act of nuclear suicide.

This flair for the dramatic jibed with Haldeman’s very joie de vivre. For all his square cut, Nixon’s chief of staff had something of the postmodern in him. During his days in advertising in Los Angeles, Haldeman embraced the notion that image could define reality, those postmodern ideas that presentation could matter as much as what was being presented, as much as Truth and Reason; that, as the veteran newsman and Nixon-watcher Marvin Kalb wrote, “the perception of reality is as acceptable as reality itself.” And just so the president’s madman scheme was a play for the postmodern age, the idea that power was essentially a great game of feints and double-talk, of mystique both remote and overwhelming. “The whole point of it,” the historian Jeffrey P. Kimball noted, was that “Nixon didn’t consider himself to be crazy.” He considered himself crafty.

The key to the “madman theory” was acting mad. And if not a first-rate actor, Nixon was perpetually performing. Haldeman called his boss the Man of a Thousand Facets. Born and raised in near-poverty, Nixon fancied himself a Horatio Alger, bootstraps never quite polished, never quite clean. In Washington he gained a quick reputation in equal parts for blandness as for “eager beaver hustle.” To his critics he was regarded as an inveterate backroom gossip, fatuous to the powerful, devoid of principle. He became known as a “sweaty striver,” ungrounded in ethics, all too malleable, on a permanent campaign.

John F. Kennedy had watched Nixon closely since they entered the House of Representatives together in 1946. “He felt sorry for Nixon,” Kennedy told his confidant, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, “because Nixon did not know who he was, and at each stop he would have to decide which Nixon he was at that moment.” It seemed, to Kennedy, “exhausting.” For Nixon sold versions of himself—from Red-baiting wunderkind to just an average Joe, from crazed carpet-bomber to elder statesman. Some thought Nixon a political genius, a “scrapper and a fighter,” a “tough guy.” Others thought him a little man and a great coward. Still others found him a joke. When he wrote or spoke of his life, Nixon became a great Sentimentalist, peppering his speeches and memoirs with old saws, mantras and tales of impossibly good children. The madman—the part of the raging ogre—was another role to play…