After the Fall

by Kasey S. Pipes

  To Nixon, the demise of the wall and the looming collapse of the Soviet Union were significant achievements. He had essentially predicted the collapse. But it did not represent the end of the fight. At a speech to the Boston World Affairs Council on April 12, 1990, Nixon argued that even if Communism had failed, freedom had not yet prevailed. He wanted the United States to be prepared to fill the vacuum that would be created by the dissolution of the Iron Curtain. The formerly Communist countries would need help making the transition into democratic states. In a play on Woodrow Wilson’s famous phrase, Nixon said that the time had come to make the world “safe for freedom.”1

  That summer, Nixon hired a new research assistant. Monica Crowley had been studying at Colgate University when she wrote a letter to Nixon about his book 1999. A few weeks later, she was shocked when Nixon wrote her back and asked her to come visit him. She did and the two hit it off immediately. Then in the summer of 1990, Nixon hired Crowley as his research assistant. On her first day in his office, he asked her to read a speech he would give in Boston about the end of the Cold War. The next day, she entered his office and was greeted by Nixon with a question: “What does Gorbachev really want?”

  Crowley gave a thoughtful answer about how Gorbachev could not continue to try and strike a balance between the reformers like Boris Yeltsin (who had already quit the Communist Party) and the traditional Communists.

  Nixon agreed. “No, he can’t,” he said. “He runs the risk of losing both sides if he continues this way.” He added that the “train has left the station as far as the collapse of Communism is concerned.”

  Nixon then expressed his concern about what the Bush administration might do to help Gorbachev. “Unfortunately,” he continued, “we have a major political problem on this score because the right will not raise any warning flags because they have to stand by Reagan, who, based on his performance during his last months in office, would go even further than Bush toward making a deal with Gorbachev.”

  Nixon’s position was that the U.S. should continue to be cautious with the Soviet Union (including keeping defense spending high) while looking for ways to bolster the European countries. He suggested to Crowley that “rather than a Marshall Plan, what is needed is a Bush Plan, under which the nations of Western Europe and the United States would develop a coordinated program for credits, debt relief, technological assistance, and even aid to compensate for the years lost during the period they have been under Soviet domination.”

  Still, Nixon didn’t rule out helping the Soviets under the right conditions. He believed the U.S. should help only if “Soviet foreign and defense policy is clearly defensive and not aggressive.”2

  Later that year as the Soviet Union teetered on the brink of collapse, Lithuania began seeking its independence. The small country not only had been controlled by the Soviets, but also had been a part of the Soviet Union. The Bush administration, not wanting to interfere directly in Soviet affairs, resisted calls to publicly support the independence movement.

  “Has Bush lost his mind?” Nixon angrily asked Crowley one day in November. “Has he been asleep throughout the entire Cold War? Look at this: he isn’t moving an inch on Lithuania. He just keeps letting his friend Gorbachev roll over the poor place.” To Nixon, Bush didn’t have to choose between supporting or opposing Lithuanian independence. He often painted in shades of grey when it came to the canvas of foreign policy, and he believed that there was a way for the Bush White House to neither support nor oppose the Lithuanian independence movement.

  When Crowley pushed him to do more on the issue publicly, Nixon demurred. “I can’t really go to Bush because he’ll resend it—too close to Gorbachev to be objective,” he said. “And I cannot and will not [go] to Baker.”3 The comment revealed that Nixon’s opinion of the secretary of state had soured considerably. And it revealed that Nixon knew he no longer had the influence he once had in the Reagan administration.

  Since his long meeting with Baker after the ’88 election, Nixon had feared Bush’s selection for secretary of state might not be up to the job. Now the fears had turned to reality in Nixon’s mind.

  “If Baker doesn’t stop drooling over [Eduard] Shevardnadze,” he told Crowley one day—referring to Baker’s attempt to win over the Soviet foreign secretary—“I’m going to gag.” Nixon had long believed that Baker—and to some extent Bush—put too much stock in personal diplomacy. “Smart leaders act on behalf of their national interest,” he said, “personal relationship be damned.” When Shevardnadze resigned on December 20, Nixon felt that Baker had been duped because Baker’s strongest contact in the Soviet government was now gone.4

  But Bush and Baker were about have an even bigger foreign policy challenge on their hands. And this one would prove to be the defining issue of the Bush administration.

  * * *

  When Iraqi tanks crossed over the Kuwaiti border on August 2, 1990, the world watched as Iraqi forces seized Kuwaiti oil reserves. Almost overnight, the world oil market was in turmoil. The question quickly became, what would the U.S. do in response?

  “I should have seen this coming,” Nixon remarked at the time of the invasion. Watching events from his office in New Jersey, he knew that no easy options or simple solutions existed for the Bush administration. Less than two years before, he had told Baker that there was not much that could be done in Israel. Now his realpolitik suggested a similar dearth of solutions on Iraq.

  “Conflict has engulfed the Middle East for two thousand years,” he said. “We can do some things at the margin, but nothing the United States can do will change that. It’s up to the direct parties involved, not us.”

  Still, Nixon knew that the Bush administration would have to respond. He wondered what that response would be. “Never tell your enemy what you will do,” he said to Crowley one day in August in his office, “and never tell him what you won’t do.”

  Nixon clearly didn’t have the same relationship with the Bush White House that he had enjoyed with the Reagan White House. Yet on September 5, President Bush called Nixon to seek his advice. Nixon promised a document with his specific recommendations.

  He immediately set to work on outlining his ideas for Bush. In the final document, he called for removing Saddam Hussein from power or “at the very least, eliminating his war-making capabilities. . . .” He also suggested avoiding any language about “trying to bring ‘democracy’ to Kuwait.” To Nixon, this was a land grab and a power play by Hussein, and Bush should simply defend Kuwait’s territorial integrity—nothing more and nothing less.

  Nixon worried that the Bush-Baker diplomacy with Gorbachev could come into play in the Middle East. If Gorbachev offered to help in any way, Nixon urged Bush to decline the offer. He saw no reason to invite Gorbachev into the issue.

  He also suggested that Bush take his time. He did not believe that a military attack before the midterm elections would help Republicans. “No advice could be more stupid,” he wrote in reference to campaign consultants calling for action before November. He wrote that any military attack before the election would only produce a “marginal effect.”5 Crowley was deputized to hand deliver the memo to the White House.

  The Persian Gulf War marked a change in Nixon. During the Reagan years, he had relished the chance to offer advice and be back in the game after years in exile. But the shine of those experiences had now grown dim. Nixon, now more than fifteen years removed from his resignation, no longer simply longed for influence.

  “I did what I could when it was my time in there,” he said wistfully, “but now all I can do is offer advice. If they take it, fine; if they don’t, what can I do?”

  The old Cold Warrior still wanted to be in the arena as momentous conflict was transpiring. And if his advice was ignored, he knew there was little else he could do but watch the events at home like everyone else. For a man with a keen and restless mind, it was perhaps the greatest punishment of all that he had to leave office before he finished his work on for
eign policy and that he was relegated to simply offering advice.

  Still, when Bush came out strong and ordered a military mobilization in the Persian Gulf, Nixon was pleased. As he prepared to send Bush a note praising his speech announcing the policy, Nixon told Crowley that he simply wanted to “buck the guy up. He needs some encouragement. He’s surrounded by critics and people who don’t want to step up to this. He needs to be reassured that he’s doing the right thing.”

  During the ensuing weeks, Nixon’s pleasure turned to frustration as Bush painstakingly tried to build international support for his action, including working to secure the passage of UN Resolution 678, which essentially blessed military action.

  “What is the point of being number one if we don’t use that power?” he railed to Crowley one day that fall in his office. “We simply have to do what it takes, criticism be damned. If we don’t, who will?”

  Again, the continuing evolution of Nixon’s thinking on international affairs could be seen. As he had with Reagan on the Soviets, Nixon continued to move in a more hawkish direction. “If Bush falters even an inch on this,” he said privately, “Hussein will dig in, and every goddamned dictator in the world will have a field day.” The man who had wanted Woodrow Wilson’s desk in the Oval Office during his presidency now dismissed the idea of the international community solving problems. “I’ve always believed that the United States should use the UN when necessary but not be used by it,” he said. He found the UN resolution “helpful but really not necessary.”6

  When Bush offered later in November to send Secretary Baker to Baghdad in one last diplomatic gesture, Nixon was aghast. “Diplomacy has its place, and this is not it,” he raged in his office. “My God! What in hell is going on down there? Don’t they know this will backfire right in their faces?”7

  January 15, 1991, was the deadline that had been imposed on Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. On January 6, Nixon—who still was concerned that Bush might opt for diplomacy at the last minute—published an op-ed in the New York Times. The article, which was called “Why,” made the case for military action in the Middle East in direct, realpolitik terms. “Had we not intervened, an international outlaw would today control more than forty percent of the world’s oil,” he wrote. “We cannot allow Mr. Hussein to blackmail us and our allies into accepting his aggressive goals by giving him a chokehold on our oil lifeline.”8

  Three days later, Nixon turned seventy-eight. But there was little time for celebrating. That day, Secretary Baker again attempted to find a diplomatic solution to prevent the outbreak of war. When his discussions with Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz fell apart, Nixon’s birthday mood brightened. “Baker may have wanted a deal,” he said, “but I know that the White House didn’t want one. How could they? Hell, if the Iraqis weren’t negotiating in good faith, why should we?”9

  When the U.S. launched its invasion on January 16, Nixon watched the news from New Jersey. The early air assaults were successful. It became clear that the vaunted Iraqi Republican Guard would be no match to the U.S. military. Back at home, President Bush’s approval ratings began to skyrocket. Nixon worried that Bush would misread the numbers.

  “I know Bush,” he told Monica Crowley. “He and the others down there are riding high on this 85 percent and won’t be open to suggestions.”

  Still, Nixon sent another memo to Bush on January 28 with just that—more suggestions on how to conclude the war and deal with its aftermath. His main point was that Bush should continue to attack aggressively until the Iraqis surrendered. Nixon referred to a conversation he had had with Lyndon Johnson in 1969. LBJ had complained to Nixon that he had received bad advice when he was encouraged to halt bombings in Vietnam. Johnson said he had been advised that “if I called a halt the North Vietnamese and Vietcong would stop shelling South Vietnamese cities. But nothing happened.” Johnson, Nixon wrote to Bush, regretted his decision and lamented that every “one of the bombing halts was a mistake.”10

  While Nixon’s opinion of Bush continued to improve, his view of Baker continued to decline. When Baker worked with the Soviets on a joint public statement demanding that the Iraqis back down, Nixon was outraged. “What the hell is Baker doing?” he asked. “Including the Soviets in this now is a major mistake.” Later, when the White House distanced itself from the Baker statement, Nixon still raged against the secretary of state. “Bush should fire him over this,” he said.

  On February 23, Bush called Nixon and told him that the ground assault was about to begin in Iraq. Just a few days later, the Iraqis were ready to surrender. Nixon worried that Bush had ended the conflict too soon. He particularly worried that Hussein still had troops available to him. Indeed, not long after the conflict ended, Hussein used his remaining troops to attack the Kurds and the Shiite Muslims in Iraq.

  Not long after the fighting stopped, President Bush called Nixon again and invited him to come meet with him at the White House. Nixon agreed. But still raging at Baker, he told Brent Scowcroft that his only request for the meeting was that “no State Department people” be in the room.

  On April 22, Nixon met at the White House with the president and several senior staffers. The only State Department representative was Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, whom Nixon actually liked. Baker was not present. Nixon spoke to the group for nearly two hours. He focused on the demise of the Soviet Union and the Soviets’ attempts to stave off their now inevitable collapse. “I told them not one dollar of American aid should be sent to the Soviet Union until it demonstrates a real commitment to democratic reform,” Nixon would recall.11

  But he did not feel like he made the impact he had wanted to make in the meeting, and he was critical of the team Bush had assembled. “Reagan was very good in that he picked some excellent advisors,” he said later. “I just don’t see that with Bush.”

  The U.S. victory in the Persian Gulf War represented the high tide moment for the Bush administration. As Nixon had predicted, Bush’s high poll numbers wouldn’t last and he would soon find himself in a tough reelection battle. But the war itself had been successful.

  Nixon had strong opinions about what the Bush administration was doing right and what it was doing wrong, but he took his case straight to the principals and urged his course of action.

  Nixon’s behavior during this time contrasted sharply with that of another former president. In the months following the Iraqi invasion, Jimmy Carter had been worried that the U.S. would engage in military action—something Carter opposed. But rather than work directly to influence the White House, Carter worked behind the scenes to influence the UN Security Council. Later on, Carter wrote to several Arab countries and urged them to “call publicly for a delay in the use of force,” suggesting that they might “have to forego approval from the White House, but you will find the French, Soviets, and others fully supportive. Also, most Americans will welcome such a move.”

  Carter’s efforts failed, and the U.S. succeeded in confronting Hussein. But for the former president from Georgia, it was not a profile in courage.

  * * *

  With the Persian Gulf War successfully winding down, Nixon’s mind again turned to the Soviet Union. He prepared for another trip to Moscow in March of 1991. Now that the Soviet Union’s collapse seemed inevitable, Nixon worried about how the dissolution would transpire. How would the Soviets handle the transition? To Nixon, figuring out that question required figuring out Gorbachev. So he set out to meet the Soviet leader yet again.

  He arrived in Moscow and met with both Mikhail Gorbachev and rising political star Boris Yeltsin. Gorbachev struck Nixon as still very much on top of his game. He urged the Soviet leader not to try and execute a summit with the U.S. to shore up his position in the Soviet Union. “Even by our standards some summits do not help an American president at home, as I am well aware,” he commented, reflecting on his own attempt in 1974 to stave off domestic political trouble by traveling overseas. After the meeting, he said that Gorbachev was �
��either the greatest actor in the world—and incidentally, I’ve often heard that my Soviet friends are great actors as well as great liars—or at least he gives the impression at this time of being a deeply committed man.”12

  But if Nixon was impressed with Gorbachev, he was awed by Yeltsin. He told Monica Crowley that the “difference between Gorbachev and Yeltsin is that Yeltsin stands for democratic principles. And he doesn’t have the material resources to launch a dictatorship. If Russia has any future, Yeltsin is it.”13

  Nixon told Crowley that while he had been in the Soviet Union he had purposely chosen to visit the exact same market that he had visited when he had traveled to the Soviet Union in 1959. He noted that the people he met were perhaps better off financially in 1991 than they had been in 1959, but that they were “poorer in spirit.” He sensed that people now realized that the Communist system “has just come to its end.”14

  On April 14, Nixon wrote for Time magazine that Yeltsin represented the future. He wrote that American policy should embrace the reformers in the Soviet Union. “Supporting reform is morally right,” he wrote.

  Again, Nixon was in the news and the White House took notice. On April 22, he met again at the White House with President Bush. From Nixon’s perspective, the meeting did not go well. “They don’t understand the potential or the energy of the reformers,” he said of the president and his team. “The Russian people,” he continued, “who have to stand in line two hours for bread, don’t care if Gorbachev is tipping vodka glasses with Bush!”15

  The Bush administration did appreciate the diplomatic opening that the collapse of Communism represented. But the administration also recognized the challenges, as well. President Bush wanted to move cautiously. Some twenty thousand nuclear weapons were still located in the region and Bush didn’t want to make any sudden moves that could lead to a more unsafe world.