No foreign-policy event of the Nixon presidency evoked such controversy as the Christmas bombing. After 12 days Hanoi returned to the table. A few weeks later, just after Nixon’s second Inaugural, I went to Paris and initialed the agreement ending the war. Lyndon Johnson, whom I had often briefed at the LBJ Ranch, died on the same day. It was symbolic that this hulking, imperious, vulnerable, aspiring man, so full of life, should die with the war that broke his heart. He, too, was a casualty of Vietnam.
