Privately, Nixon called airstrikes ineffective

WASHINGTON - President Richard M. Nixon believed that years of aerial bombing in Southeast Asia to pressure North Vietnam achieved "zilch" even as he publicly declared it was effective and ordered more bombing while running for reelection in 1972, according to a handwritten note from Nixon disclosed in a new book by Bob Woodward.

Nixon's note to Henry Kissinger, then his national security adviser, on Jan. 3, 1972, was written sideways across a top-secret memo updating the president on war developments. Nixon wrote: "K. We have had 10 years of total control of the air in Laos and V.Nam. The result Zilch. There is something wrong with the strategy or the Air Force."

The day before he wrote the "zilch" note, Nixon was asked about the military effectiveness of the bombing by Dan Rather of CBS News in a prime-time interview. "The results have been very, very effective," Nixon declared.

Nixon's private assessment was correct, Woodward writes: The bombing was not working, but Nixon defended and intensified it in order to advance his reelection prospects. The claim that the bombing was militarily effective "was a lie, and here Nixon made clear that he knew it," Woodward writes.

Nixon's note, which has not previously been disclosed, was found in a trove of thousands of documents taken from the White House by Alexander P. Butterfield, deputy to H.R. Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff, and not made public until now. Butterfield's odyssey through Nixon's first term is the subject of Woodward's book, The Last of the President's Men, to be published Tuesday by Simon & Schuster.

Butterfield became a key figure in the Watergate scandal when he revealed to Senate investigators the existence of the White House taping system. The tapes captured Nixon's role in the cover-up and marked a critical turning point in the collapse of his presidency. Woodward and Carl Bernstein exposed the Watergate story in the Washington Post.

The new book, based on the documents and more than 46 hours of interviews with Butterfield, offers an intimate but disturbing portrayal of Nixon in the Oval Office. Butterfield depicts Nixon, who died in 1994, as forceful and energetic, but also vengeful, petty, lonely, shy and paranoid.

Butterfield felt deeply conflicted; he was proud to be serving but chagrined to be caught up in the underside of Nixon's presidency. "The whole thing was a cesspool," he told Woodward.

Butterfield, now 89, was in charge of preventing other Nixon staffers from leaving the White House with government documents, but he saw many, including the late Nixon counselor Arthur Burns, haul away boxes when they left.

Butterfield anticipated writing a memoir, so when he left the White House in 1973, "I just took my boxes of stuff and left," he told Woodward, packing them into his and his wife's car.