From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (124 page)

Nixon grew up in a family of modest means in California. After a law degree from Duke University and service in the navy in World War II, where he earned a reputation as a shrewd—and successful—poker player, he entered politics, using McCarthyite methods before the senator from Wisconsin gave them a name and winning seats in the House and then the Senate. A surprise choice for vice president in 1952, he served loyally in that office. Narrowly defeated by JFK in 1960 and by Pat Brown for governor of California in 1962, he seemed politically dead, but he emerged, incongruously and seemingly miraculously, out of the chaos of 1968 to gain the office he had long coveted. Socially awkward and ill at ease with others and himself—"the oddest man I ever knew," one of his White House aides later recalled—Nixon had a keen analytical mind and was a perceptive observer of international affairs.
⁶
He appreciated Kissinger's help in 1968 and saw him as a useful link to moderate Republicans and the still potent eastern establishment. Kissinger had once declared Nixon unfit for the presidency but readily agreed to join his administration.

The middle-American politician and the German-born Harvard professor could hardly have been more different in background, but they shared a love of power and a zeal to mold a fluid world in ways that would establish their place in history. Loners and outsiders in their chosen professions, they were perhaps naturally drawn to each other. Both were insecure to the point of paranoia, and they waged constant warfare with their own inner demons. Not surprisingly, the two men never established a close personal relationship. Nixon tired of Kissinger's whining and frequent threats to resign. In his presence, Kissinger praised Nixon to the point of sycophancy; behind his back, he made snide remarks about the president's "meatball mind" and his drinking. When things went bad,
their relationship soured. But in their first years mutual suspicion was kept in check by mutual dependence, Kissinger using Nixon for access to power, Nixon relying on Kissinger to shape and implement his broad designs. Nixon especially had a reputation as a rigid ideologue, but in power the two men proved pragmatic and flexible. They shared an obsession with secrecy, a zest for intrigue, and a flair for the unexpected move. They also shared a certain disregard for democracy, equating dissent with treason and carrying to extremes the Cold War dogma that national security was too important to be left to an ignorant and indifferent public and a parochial and cumbersome Congress.
⁷

From the outset, they took the foreign policy controls firmly and exclusively in their own hands. Reluctant to share power and certain that a hidebound bureaucracy could be an obstacle to the bold moves they hoped to implement, they restructured the machinery of government to put the National Security Council in control of policymaking and Kissinger in control of the NSC. They used new interdepartmental committees, chaired by the national security adviser, to shut out of the loop Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird and Secretary of State William Rogers, the latter an old friend of Nixon's, while keeping the departments busy compiling massive studies. They used backchannels to hide from their colleagues developments on crucial issues. The NSC more than doubled in size and nearly tripled in budget during the Nixon years. What had been created in 1947 as a coordinating mechanism became a little State Department. "It was a palace coup," author and former policymaker William Bundy observed, "entirely constitutional but at the same time revolutionary."
⁸

Bureaucratic warfare is a way of life in Washington, but the Nixon administration created an atmosphere of oppressive secretiveness, paranoia, backbiting, and conspiracy that makes the word
Byzantine
seem tame by comparison. A notorious slave driver, Kissinger, it was said, treated his aides like mushrooms: They were "kept in the dark, got a lot of manure piled on them, and then got canned." Among his many character flaws, Nixon was incapable of giving orders and seeing that they were carried out. He preferred to operate alone and in secret, and his White House was a veritable den of conspiracy.
⁹
A frustrated Laird secured backchannel cables from friends in the National Security Agency; the Joint Chiefs of Staff employed a navy yeoman to purloin documents to keep them informed about what was going on in the White House.

By the time Nixon took office, the outlines for a fundamental re-orientation of U.S. foreign policy were already clear in his mind. Troubled by what he saw as a resurgence of isolationism in the United States in the wake of Vietnam, he was determined to find a way for his country to "stay in the world, not . . . get out of the world."
¹⁰
Ironically, for this old Cold Warrior, the essential goal was to facilitate an era of peaceful coexistence with the major Communist powers. After a "period of confrontation," he proclaimed in his inaugural address, "we are entering an era of negotiation."
¹¹
This meant, on the one hand, the establishment of detente with the major adversary, the Soviet Union. The second step, obvious by this time but still bold in terms of long-standing domestic political constraints, was the normalization of relations with the People's Republic of China. "Taking the long view," he wrote in a much-quoted 1967
Foreign Affairs
article, "we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors."
¹²
Achievement of these goals would be the focus of foreign policy during Nixon's first term. They would be the polestars around which everything else would orbit.

The first task for Nixon and Kissinger was to end the war in Vietnam, a "bone in the nation's throat," in the words of one presidential adviser, a divisive force that had torn the country apart and blocked constructive approaches to domestic and foreign policy problems.
¹³
The two men also insisted that the war must be ended honorably, which meant to them no ignominious U.S. withdrawal and maintaining the South Vietnamese government intact. As a young congressman, Nixon had led the Republican attack on Truman for "losing" China. Like LBJ, he feared the domestic political backlash that might accompany the fall of South Vietnam to Communism. He worried that a disguised defeat or "elegant bugout" in Vietnam would destroy American self-confidence and breed a crippling isolationism at home.
¹⁴
Most important, he and Kissinger feared the international consequences of a precipitous withdrawal. Intent on restructuring relations with the Soviet Union and China, they believed they must extricate the United States from Vietnam in a manner that demonstrated its
resolve, upholding U.S. credibility with friend and foe alike. "However we got into Vietnam . . . ," Kissinger observed before taking office, "ending the war honorably is essential for the peace of the world. Any other solution may unloose forces that would complicate the prospects for international order."
¹⁵

The two men believed they could compel North Vietnam to accept terms it had previously rejected. The USSR had expressed an interest in expanded trade and agreements to limit nuclear weapons, and the Americans believed this sort of "linkage" could be exploited to secure Soviet assistance getting North Vietnam to accept a "reasonable" settlement. Great-power diplomacy could be supplemented by military pressure. Like his predecessors going back to Truman, Kissinger insisted that a "fourth-rate power" like North Vietnam must have a "breaking point." Nixon believed that Eisenhower had gained peace in Korea in 1953 by hinting he might use nuclear weapons, and he concluded that similar warnings would intimidate the North Vietnamese. He counted on his reputation as a hard-liner to make the threats believable. He even sought to convey to foes the sense that he was capable of acting irrationally, the so-called madman theory. "We'll just slip the word to them that, 'for God's sake, you know Nixon's obsessed about Communism . . . and he has his hand on the nuclear button,' " he confided to his chief of staff during a walk on the beach in 1969.
¹⁶

Like most people new to power, Nixon and Kissinger underestimated their adversaries and overestimated their ability to control events. Even had Moscow wanted to help Washington get out of Vietnam, it probably could not have done so. While competing with China for the allegiance of Third World nations, it could not appear too conciliatory toward the United States. The administration's efforts to tie Soviet-American negotiations to a peace settlement in Vietnam proved unavailing. In the summer of 1969, the United States put forth a new peace proposal and issued not so veiled warnings that if substantive negotiations did not begin by November 1, North Vietnam could expect "measures of great consequence and force." On Nixon's orders, Kissinger convened a top-level study group to draw up plans for an operation named Duck Hook calling for "savage, punishing blows" against North Vietnam up to and possibly including tactical nuclear weapons. Kissinger's study group eventually concluded that air strikes and a blockade might not wrench concessions
from Hanoi or even limit its capacity to prosecute the war in South Vietnam. Nixon aides also warned that drastic escalation would reignite antiwar protests at home. Haunted throughout his career by the fear of failure, Nixon abandoned the plan for peace through coercion with the greatest reluctance and only after being persuaded that it would not work. As a limp substitute, he ordered for mid-October a Joint Chiefs of Staff Readiness Test in hopes that surveillance of Soviet ships heading for North Vietnam and putting Strategic Air Command bombers on high alert would send the appropriate messages. If Moscow picked up the signals, it did not respond as hoped. Hanoi was not intimidated.
¹⁷

Unwilling simply to withdraw from Vietnam and unable to pressure North Vietnam into a settlement, Nixon fell back on what came to be called Vietnamization. After the Tet Offensive, Johnson had begun to shift the burden of the fighting to the South Vietnamese army, and Nixon made this the central element of his plan to achieve peace with honor. By beginning to withdraw U.S. troops and requiring the South Vietnamese to do more, he reasoned, he could pacify the home front. Indulging in some wishful thinking, he hoped also to persuade the North Vietnamese that they might do better negotiating with the United States now than with a much strengthened South Vietnam later. He succeeded at home at least for the short term. Major demonstrations took place across the United States in October and November 1969, drawing millions of people. But Nixon's troop withdrawals took much of the steam out of anti-war protests. Polls revealed strong public support for his policies. "We've got those liberal bastards on the run now," the president exulted, "and we're going to keep them on the run."
¹⁸

Making Vietnamization work proved much more difficult. South Vietnamese found the very term insulting—a "U.S. Dollar and Vietnamese Blood Sharing Plan," they complained.
¹⁹
The United States poured into South Vietnam huge sums of money, vast quantities of weapons, and so many vehicles one congressman wondered whether the goal was to put "every South Vietnamese soldier behind the wheel."
²⁰
Increased U.S. aid and improved training combined with a prolonged enemy stand-down to
leave South Vietnam more secure than at any time since the war began. But huge problems remained. The Saigon government was riddled with corruption and could never win the support of the South Vietnamese people. On paper, the army appeared a formidable fighting force, but it relied heavily on U.S. air and logistic support. North Vietnamese negotiators posed the problem bluntly to Kissinger. If the United States could not win with a half million of its own men, how could it succeed when its "puppet troops" had to do the fighting? It was a question that troubled him, the national security adviser conceded.
²¹
He also feared that for Americans the troop withdrawals would be like salted peanuts: The more they got, the more they would want, in time leading to demands for unilateral withdrawal.
²²
Nixon and Kissinger increasingly worried that the North Vietnamese would stall until the United States left and then deal with South Vietnam.

To improve the prospects of Vietnamization, Nixon in the spring of 1970 took the bold and fateful step of sending U.S. and South Vietnamese troops into Cambodia. For years, the North Vietnamese had exploited Cambodia's neutrality by using its territory for sanctuary. The U.S. military had repeatedly asked for and been denied authority to attack these safe havens. The overthrow of the neutralist Prince Sihanouk in March 1970 by a pro-U.S. faction headed by Lon Nol provided an opportunity difficult for Nixon to pass up. He realized that expansion of the war might have a "shattering effect" at home, but he accepted that risk.
²³
He hoped that destruction of the sanctuaries would weaken North Vietnam's offensive capability, buy time for Vietnamization, and bolster a friendly government in Cambodia. By widening the war into previously off-limits Cambodia, he would also signal the enemy that, unlike Johnson, he would not be bound by restraints. In making the decision, Nixon put himself through an emotional wringer. Kissinger described him as "over-wrought," "irritable," and "defiant."
²⁴
Exhausted, at times quite agitated, he indulged in bizarre behavior. He pumped himself up by repeatedly watching the hit movie
Patton,
a stirring account of the legendary World War II hero. At times, he paced the Oval Office while smoking a corncob pipe in the mode of Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Kissinger had reservations about the move but went along, partly to outflank Laird and Rogers in the raging turf war that was Nixon's Washington.

The Cambodian "incursion" had disastrous results. To be sure, the U.S. military claimed success in terms of sanctuaries destroyed, weapons seized, and intelligence acquired, and the incursion may have bought some time for Vietnamization.
²⁵
On the other hand, it enlarged the theater of operations at a time when U.S. forces were already stretched thin. It forced the North Vietnamese out of their sanctuaries and into the heartland of Cambodia, helping to spark in that unfortunate country a full-scale civil war that in time produced the Khmer Rouge genocide, one of the great human tragedies of recent history.