Title Card: Peacemaker

NARRATOR: At age 56, after 22 years of political battle, Richard Nixon had become the most powerful man in the world. He envisioned nothing less than a new world order with himself as its architect.

Pres. NIXON: [Inaugural Address] The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of "peacemaker." This honor now beckons America.

If we succeed, generations to come will say of us now living that we mastered our moment, that we helped make the world safe for mankind. This is our summons to greatness.

Mr. RICHARDSON: And there's no question at all that Nixon aspired to greatness. He would talk constantly about the "generation of peace" that he hoped to contribute to building that would indeed be his bequest to the United States and the world.

NARRATOR: As Nixon took power, he assembled a staff that would leave him free to carry out his ambitious plans and whose loyalty had already been demonstrated.

H.R. HALDEMAN, White House Chief of Staff: The White House staff, as it evolves, I think you will find will be smaller than it's been in the past.

NARRATOR: H.R. Haldeman, a former advertising executive who had been at Nixon's side since 1956, was made chief of staff. He was proud, he once said, to be Richard Nixon's "son of a bitch." John Ehrlichman, a lawyer and top aide during the campaign, would handle much of domestic policy.

Together, he and Haldeman would tightly control access to the president.

Those whom they excluded called them "the Berlin Wall." Behind that wall, Nixon could focus on his main interest, foreign policy, bypassing the State Department to work closely with his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger.

President NIXON: Dr. Kissinger is perhaps one of the major scholars in America in the world today in this area. He has never yet had a full-time government assignment and he will bring to this responsibility a fresh approach.

Mr. MORRIS, Kissinger Aide and Nixon Biographer: They organized the government to concentrate power in the hands of these two men in the White House. And it's not accidental that he appoints an old friend, but a decidedly weak practitioner in Bill Rogers in the Department of State or essential a Wisconsin Dells politician, Melvin Laird, as secretary of defense. There are no strong figures in his Cabinet and there are no strong foreign policy figures anywhere in the higher echelons of the government.

It is to be Richard Nixon's foreign policy and it is to be carried out with sophistication and some subtlety by Henry Kissinger.

NARRATOR: Looming over the new administration was the war in Vietnam. American troops had been fighting for four years on behalf of South Vietnam against the Soviet-backed Communist forces of the North. The war had already taken the lives of 30,000 Americans and over a million Vietnamese.

And destroyed one president. Nixon was determined not to let it destroy him. Even before his inauguration, Nixon had Kissinger began secret contacts with the North Vietnamese in an attempt to move the stalled Paris peace talks forward and soon, the two men developed a strategy they hoped would get the U.S. out of the war without abandoning America's ally, South Vietnam.

Pres. NIXON: We have adopted a plan which we have worked out in cooperation with the South Vietnamese for the complete withdrawal of all U.S. combat ground forces and their replacement by South Vietnamese forces on an orderly, scheduled timetable. This withdrawal will be made from strength.

NARRATOR: Confident that this policy would end America's involvement in Southeast Asia by the end of 1970, Nixon and Kissinger turned their attention to global strategy, reshaping America's entire relationship with the Communist world.

Mr. MORRIS: And they both began, in 1969-1970, with a notion that only lately has become fashionable in Washington and that is that the post-war is really over, that the Cold War ought to be a thing of the past. They are, in that sense, almost 20 years ahead of their time.

NARRATOR: Recognizing that the Soviet Union had nearly caught up to the U.S. in nuclear strength, Nixon and Kissinger dispatched a team of negotiators to work out a treaty with the Soviets. For the first time in the history of the nuclear age, the two superpowers sat down to discuss setting limits on nuclear weapons. At the same time, they began secret contacts with the other great Communist power, China. There were few more forbidding and isolated places in the world in 1969, but Nixon believed that China, with its vast population and growing nuclear arsenal, would soon be too powerful to ignore.

Mr. MORRIS: Here, for the first time in the 20th century, we have two men at the very pinnacle of the American government who have some clear notion, not only of what the world is doing out there, what's happening in the world, but of where they want the United States to fit in. We are not a nation that practices its foreign policy by design, for the most part and Nixon and Kissinger are an exception to that rule.

NARRATOR: In the summer of 1969, Nixon announced the first American troop withdrawals from Vietnam. Arms control, China, Southeast Asia. He seemed to be moving steadily toward becoming a peacemaker.