Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (112 page)

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Authors: Conrad Black

BOOK: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership
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None of this resonates very believably; if Nixon were going to rally Middle America, the stronger and more purposeful the military effort, consistent with improving prospects and reducing American casualties, the better his argument for doing so. At the least, maintaining Johnson’s bombing concession 20 months after it had failed to produce any quid pro quo from the enemy made no sense (as Nixon acknowledged in his memoirs, and both he and Kissinger later regretted that they had not hit Hanoi hard from the outset). Yet, despite all the errors of successive administrations, a chance remained.
Nixon received a final request from Gromyko, via his ambassador in Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, to pull out of Vietnam, on October 20. Nixon reminded Dobrynin that Johnson only granted the bombing halt because his former ambassadors to Moscow, Harriman, Bohlen, and Llewellyn Thompson, all told him that Moscow could not assist in finding a peace settlement while the United States was bombing a socialist country. President Nixon finally addressed the country and laid out his Vietnam strategy on November 3, 1969. It was a memorable speech. “I have chosen a plan for peace and I take responsibility for it.” If it succeeded, “what the critics say now won’t matter. If it does not succeed, anything I say then won’t matter.” He described all he had done to try to reach an agreement, revealed for the first time (even to Kissinger) the correspondence with Ho Chi Minh, and said that Hanoi had not, and would not, show “the least willingness [to make peace] while it is convinced that all it has to do is wait for our next concession, and the next concession after that one, until it gets everything it wants.” He outlined his Vietnamization plan, to hand over the war to the Vietnamese in accord with the Nixon Doctrine, while retaining air support. He told the young: “I respect your idealism.” (He did not in fact, and considered them shirkers and cowards masquerading as having moral qualms about the war, but was doubtless truthful in saying: “I want peace as much as you do.”)
Then he addressed “the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support.... The more divided we are at home, the less likely the enemy is to negotiate at Paris. Let us be united for peace . . . and against defeat.... Let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.” It was an electrifying address: over 80,000 messages of support arrived almost instantly, 300 congressmen and 58 senators coauthored resolutions of support, 77 percent of the people supported his Vietnamization policy, and the president’s approval rating jumped from 52 to 68 percent.
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A few weeks later Nixon announced the withdrawal of 60,000 Americans from Vietnam. If he had announced 100,000 in his speech over a slightly longer timetable and announced Duck Hook as well, he would not have had appreciably less support. Withal, though it was very late, this was leadership and clarity at least, and the great majority of Americans would rather hand the war to the South than the South to the North if their president said it had a chance of success. He did, and it did, if events in the next presidential term had gone differently.
Nixon moved to shore up and strengthen his silent majority in other ways, promoting locally negotiated school desegregation in every state, not just singling out the South, and sparing the country the unimaginable disaster of enforcing court orders to transport school children all around the great cities of America into racially different areas to promote racial balance. He also founded the Environmental Protection Agency and (largely motivated by his poor youth, when his family had to take their holidays in public parks) vastly increased the number and quality of national parks.
In a 40,000-word foreign policy summary in February 1970, entirely composed by Nixon and Kissinger, a “just settlement” was stated as the goal in Vietnam, and an “architecture of peace” was sought which would be more than “the absence of war” and would include a “normal and constructive relationship” with China. The report referred to “nuclear sufficiency,” an inspired concept that consisted of seeking emphasis on defensive systems, while retaining equality of throw weights but exploiting American technological advantages, especially in putting Multiple, Independently Targeted Reentry Vehicles (MIRV) in individual warheads, thus effectively reopening a favorable missile gap. It would not arouse the doves, would placate the hawks, and would incite the Soviets to negotiate while the U.S. steadily gained strength. It was all very sophisticated strategic planning.
When the new French president, Georges Pompidou, arrived for a state visit in February 1970 and was jeered by Jewish opponents of France’s pro-Arab policies in several cities, Nixon went out of his way to be seen in public with the French leader. Kissinger continued his secret meetings in Paris with North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho (“Ducky,” Kissinger called him) all through 1970, but the North was immoveable. They didn’t believe for a minute that the South could defend itself: “If you couldn’t win with 500,000 of your own men, how do you expect the puppet troops to do the fighting? Ducky asked.”
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Cambodia’s carnival prince Sihanouk was sent packing in March 1970, after 16 years, and Soviet premier Kosygin, who disliked him, had the pleasure of telling him this at Moscow Airport, as he saw him onto his plane. Sihanouk’s prime minister, Lon Nol, a pro-American general, sacked the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong embassies in Phnom Penh, closed the port of Sihanoukville to war supplies, and demanded the departure of the 60,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers in the country. He had nopower to enforce this and Hanoi ignored it, though the closing of Sihanoukville was a notable inconvenience to them.
9. THE CAMBODIAN INCURSION
 
On April 30, 1970, Nixon again addressed the nation and told the world of his decision to intervene directly in Cambodia, with the South Vietnamese, to eliminate the enemy military sanctuaries. (He had explained privately, to Rockefeller, that a leader took as much flak for unpopular half-measures as for doing them completely, so he might as well do it right.) He assured the country that it was a measure to secure the integrity of Cambodia, not violate it, and that the forces making the incursion would be withdrawn promptly. He added: “It is not our power, but our will and character that is being tested.... We live in an age of anarchy. . . . We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilization in the last 500 years. Even here in the United States, great universities are being systematically destroyed.... If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, behaves like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.... I would rather be a one-term president and do what I believe is right than to be a two-term president at the cost of seeing America become a second-rate power and to see this nation accept the first defeat in its proud, 190-year history.”
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He again carried the country, comfortably enough, though opposition to his action was close to 30 percent, and in a regrettable incident at Kent State University, Ohio, on May 2, four demonstrating students were killed by gunfire from panicky National Guardsmen. Nixon telephoned the bereaved families and deplored the incident, but the televised spectacle shocked the nation, and the subsequent grand jury investigation was a whitewash of the National Guard. The country was also troubled at this time by revelations of a massacre of 567 civilians at My Lai, Vietnam. Nixon handled the issue well with his comment at the last press conference of 1970 (December 8) that the generous spirit of almost all the 1,200,000 Americans who had served in Vietnam must not be sullied by such incidents and that anyone convicted of such incidents would be punished.
There were widespread demonstrations but, for the first time, there were large demonstrations in favor of the administration, including over 100,000 people in New York on May 20, after hard-hatted construction workers had several times beaten up students and other demonstrators carrying Viet Cong and North Vietnamese flags and desecrating American symbols, including urinating on the famous statue of George Washington in the New York financial district. Nixon, a skilled and hardball political operator for 25 years, well knew how to polarize the country along an uneven division in his favor. The great majority, whatever they thought of the war, had no patience for adulation of the communist enemy and wanton desecration of the emblems and heroes of American patriotism.
On June 30, 1970, the White House revealed that in the Cambodian action, which ended on schedule, the U.S. had lost 344 dead and the ARVN 818, not the thousands that even his own secretaries of state and defense (Melvin R. Laird) had predicted. It was claimed that over 13,500 enemy soldiers had been killed or captured, as well as over 22,000 guns, 15 million rounds of ammunition, and a formidable 14 million tons of rice, and that 12,000 enemy buildings and bunkers had been destroyed, including, Kissinger deadpanned, what was presumed to be the enemy headquarters, a large, wooden, five-sided structure. Only a third of enemy forces in Cambodia had been eliminated, but this was the sharpest and most effective military initiative the Allies had ever taken in Vietnam, and, as Nixon told the press, at least six months of comparative tranquility had been bought.
In the autumn of 1970, there was a series of unconnected events that Nixon and Kissinger met with agility. They stood ready to support Israeli intervention to help King Hussein of Jordan against a Syrian intervention, but Hussein eliminated the entire Syrian tank force from the air and chased the Syrians out. Israel would not be welcome. It was then that Hussein signed over leadership of the Palestinians to the completely unfeasible terrorist Yasser Arafat and his PLO. In Chile, the voters gave Marxist candidate Salvador Allende 36.3 percent of the vote and 80 of 200 members of the Congress, which would secure his election in a three-way race, and Nixon began considering methods of undermining the tenuous result, as he had, with good reason, no faith in the adherence of a communist to the constitutional niceties, once in office.
Nixon made a peace proposal in Vietnam on October 7, with the midterm elections in mind, a stand-still cease-fire and the withdrawal of all nonindigenous military forces from the South followed by internationally supervised free elections. It was like LBJ’s Manila proposal of 1966, but again Hanoi rejected it, presumably because it still thought it could defeat the U.S. itself. In a brief trip to a few European capitals, Nixon had a much more agreeable visit with the old fascist Francisco Franco in Madrid than with the almost equally old communist Tito in Belgrade, and better than either with the pope and the new British prime minister, Edward Heath, but the trip was overshadowed by the death at age 52 of the Egyptian president, Gamel Abdel Nasser. Nasser had been a failure at everything except manipulating the Great Powers and inflaming the Arab masses. The new president, Anwar Sadat, would prove much more amenable to serious progress in stabilizing the Middle East.
In the midterm elections, the Republicans, after Nixon made a whirlwind tour of 30 states (in the last year of his presidency, Johnson could not go anywhere except military bases without demonstrations), gained two senators and lost nine congressmen, a very respectable showing. Adlai Stevenson Jr. was elected governor of Illinois, Congressman George H.W. Bush was defeated for U.S. senator from Texas by Lloyd Bentsen, Eugene McCarthy retired, Hubert Humphrey came back to the Senate for a fourth term, and Conservative James Buckley was elected as senator from New York. By the end of 1970, Nixon had reduced force levels in Vietnam to 335,000, down 215,000 from when he entered office, and far ahead of Clark Clifford’s rather gratuitous recommendation to aim for a reduction of 100,000 by then.
10. THE OPENING WITH CHINA
 
During the United Nations General Assembly in September, Nixon made conciliatory overtures to the Chinese Communists, via Pakistani president Yahya Khan, as he always did in his talks with Ceausescu. On December 9, the Pakistani ambassador in Washington handed over to Kissinger a letter from Yahya summarizing a conversation with Premier Chou En-lai, in which Chou said it would be sensible for a senior American official to visit China. Nixon had cast this bread upon the waters even before he was president, in a conciliatory passage on China he wrote in
Foreign Affairs,
the publication of the Council on Foreign Relations. Nixon had long recognized that China could not be excluded from the world, and he knew that to force Hanoi to stop imagining it could defeat the Unites States, as opposed to just the South Vietnamese, at least one of the communist giants had to be weaned away from bankrolling and arming that effort. He was also confident that opening up relations with China would assert irresistible pressures on Russia to be more cooperative in other areas, though as with Hitler and Stalin in 1942–1944, if too much advantage were taken of the dispute between the dictators, they would be capable of composing their differences. Nixon, as the chief conceptualizer and architect of this arrangement, knew it had to be managed with extreme caution. Now, he and Kissinger immediately composed a letter to Chou proposing comprehensive talks at the highest level.
On February 8, 1971, as congressional action had barred U.S. ground forces in Laos, Nixon browbeat Thieu into sending 30,000 men to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Of course the force was of wholly inadequate strength (like Marshall’s Sledgehammer in France in 1942, Chapter 10), and though ARVN started out all right, they soon met with superior forces, before reaching their objective of Lam Son. Nixon devised the ruse de guerre of helicoptering onto the target, claiming victory, and then packing up the operation just in time to avoid an ARVN massacre. It was clever but it didn’t fool either Hanoi or the American media, who saw the ragged condition in which the ARVN units returned. On April 9, having already announced a further 50,000 reduction in manpower, Nixon told the country that U.S. force levels in South Vietnam would be down to 184,000 at the end of 1971, an almost two-thirds reduction since he entered office, and ARVN appeared to be doing a tolerable job of holding its position.

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