by Conrad Black
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it was a measure to secure the integrity of Cambodia, not violate it, and that the forces making the incursion would be withdrawn promptly.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.”202
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.
Three days before, in what was a considerable breakthrough, and, as it turned out, by direct order of Mao Tse-tung himself, the U.S. Ping-Pong team, at the end of an international tournament in Japan, was invited to tour the People’s Republic. It was such an obscure gesture, few outside the White House and the Kremlin took any notice of it. The Chinese released long-held prisoners; there were further secret contacts in different capitals; and Mao gave a relatively conciliatory interview to American longtime fellow traveler Edgar Snow. Two giants were almost indiscern-ibly winking and twitching at each other across a crowded and unobservant world. On May 18, as Soviet-American relations warmed, with the U.S. no longer asking Moscow to apply any pressure on Hanoi, and Moscow uneasily detecting some movement in U.S.-China relations, an outline was announced of a comprehensive arms-control agreement between the two superpowers.
On June 2, again via the Pakistani channel, Chou reported that Mao would be delighted to welcome Nixon to China, and that for a preparatory and organizing visit Chou would welcome a designated senior official, who was soon confirmed to be Kissinger. Eight days later, unannounced, Nixon ended a 21-year trade embargo on China. He was conducting an extremely delicate and intricate minuet on a high-wire, with consummate skill. The country was heavily distracted by the publication of the Pentagon Papers, purloined from the Defense Department by a disaffected Vietnam expert, Daniel Ellsberg, and published in successive newspapers. The government tried to enjoin publication, but the papers were disparaging of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, not of Nixon’s.
Henry Kissinger departed on July 1 on his Asian trip to Saigon, Bangkok, New Delhi, and Pakistan, where he feigned illness and was conveyed to the airport in disguise in an old car driven personally by the Pakistani foreign minister, in the dead of night, and then flew to Beijing. Kissinger and Chou agreed that American forces could leave Taiwan if China promised not to invade the island, a sober and fair communiqué was worked out, largely by Mao, and Chou promised not to grant entries to any more American politicians who were seeking them until after Nixon’s visit.
Kissinger left Beijing after a completely successful visit on July 11, recovered from his pretended stomach flu in Northern Pakistan, flew on to Tehran, and, by prearrangement, sent on the maximum security line from the U.S. embassy there the preagreed one-word message to Nixon, delivered to him by General Alexander Haig, “Eureka.” At 7:31 p.m., July 15, 1971, Richard Nixon electrified the world with an unscheduled announcement on all radio and television outlets in the United States, as an identical announcement was made in Beijing. It was stated that Kissinger had been invited to China by Chou En-lai, had visited and expressed Nixon’s interest in visiting China, and that Chairman Mao Tse-tung had cordially invited the president, who was happy to accept and would go to China before his scheduled visit to the Soviet Union in May 1972. Every government in the world except Pakistan was thunderstruck. The timing of the trip was to ensure that Nixon had maximum leverage on Mocow when he went there. He had all the world powers in a row; it was a remarkable feat for a country that just 30 months before was riot-torn, was diplomatically inactive, and saw no exit from Vietnam.
On August 13, 1971, Nixon rounded up his economic officials and advisers and brought them to Camp David for a serious discussion of how to avoid inflation and rev up the economy in the year before the election. He said that conditions had changed and that no one should be bound by past positions. He announced the next evening a package of investment credits, excise tax reductions, a 5 percent reduction in the number of federal employees, a 10 percent cut in foreign aid, a 90-day wage and price freeze, a 10 percent tax on all imports, and a suspension of the gold convertibility of the dollar. It was a bold program that responded to the renewed international interest in effectively buying gold from the United States at discounted prices. It could be assumed to stop inflation temporarily (until after the election), stop the foreign pickpockets, stimulate the economy, but introduce an age of relatively little discipline between currencies, when they would have no value at all, except opposite each other. He concluded that “Whether the nation stays Number One depends on your competitive spirit, your sense of personal destiny, your pride in your country and yourself.”203 It was a popular program that again confounded the Democrats, who thought Nixon incapable of price controls and were gearing up to accuse him of being soft on inflation. Europe and Japan were accustomed to exploiting a high dollar with cheap exports, while undermining the dollar by exploiting its convertibility. Nixon ended this. In removing the dollar from any standard of comparative measurement other than its value opposite other free-floating currencies, he was opening the floodgates to more easily disguised inflation, a temptation future administrations could reasonably be assumed to have trouble resisting. He should, after the dust had settled, have reintroduced some disciplinary yardstick for intergovernmental transactions, even a blend of gold, oil, and consumer necessities.
In the autumn of 1971, East Pakistan (originally Bengal and later Bangladesh), separated by a thousand miles across India from West Pakistan, was agitating for independence from the West and had voted accordingly in December 1970 (97 percent for Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League). Nixon’s ally Yahya Khan had persuaded himself that both China and the U.S. would come to his aid against India, and Nixon suspected the Russians of inciting the Indians and the Bengalis. He cut aid to India, but general disorder broke out when Mujib declared East Pakistani independence. Yahya unleashed the 70,000 soldiers he had deployed in the East, and hundreds of thousands of East Pakistanis were killed and millions fled to India. The United States and China wanted to be helpful to Yahya, but there were limits to what they could reasonably do against such a strong sentiment of national expression, and in the face of Yahyas brutal and unimaginative response to it.
Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi visited Washington in November 1971 and had a very unsatisfactory exchange with Nixon. She pledged to leave West Pakistan alone but required that the violence cease in East Pakistan and that the refugees who had poured into her country in millions be permitted to return. It was not an unreasonable position, but Nixon suspected her of fomenting the violence in the East and of having designs on the West. At the end of November, guerrillas armed and trained by the Indians entered East Pakistan and the Indian army came a few miles across the East Pakistan border, ostensibly to maintain order at the request of the local authorities (a complete fabrication). Gandhi was duplicitous and Yahya was delusional, an unpromising state of affairs for the subcontinent, and on December 3, Yahya insanely launched an ineffectual attack on the Indian air force. It did little damage but gave the Indian leader all she needed to launch an all-out invasion of East Pakistan. The Indians decimated the Pakistani air force, enjoying superior numbers.
Nixon blamed India for escalating the crisis, Pakistan for starting the war, and the Russians for inciting the Indians. He warned the Soviet Union and India against any attack on West Pakistan, and moved a nuclear aircraft carrier task force to the Bay of Bengal. Nixon used the visiting Soviet agriculture minister and then the direct hotline to Brezhnev to send his warning. This was the best he could do for Yahya. On December 10, Kissinger gave the Chinese ambassador to the UN a full sheaf of aerial photographic reconnaissance of Soviet force dispositions all along its Asian borders from Turkey to the Far East. On December 16, the Pakistani army in East Pakistan surrendered to overwhelming Indian forces, having put up a respectable fight in a dubious cause. It all settled down quickly but lengthily embittered relations between India and the U.S.
Nixon met with the principal West European leaders at different temperate places in December, assured them of America’s solidarity with Europe, and agreed to a revaluing of currencies that enabled him to cancel the 10 percent import surcharge in
his August economic message. Nixon told all three leaders—France’s Pompidou, Britain’s Heath, and West Germany’s Willy Brandt—that the five geostrategic points with the industrial and military strength to influence the world were the United States, Western Europe, Japan, Russia, and China. As head of one, he was concerned to strengthen his alliance with Europe and Japan, detach China completely from Russia, and then, from a position of strength, negotiate de-escalation of tensions and a reasonable working relationship with Russia. All the European leaders purported to understand, and concurred. It was perfectly correct and skillfully executed pure strategy. The great challenges to the United States since it had become the world’s greatest power had come from Nazi-dominated Western Europe (1938–1944) and the Russia of Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev since then; an economic challenge from a friendly Japan was already developing, and a Chinese rivalry was predictable eventually. The United States dealt effectively with each as it arose.
As the election year of 1972 opened, Nixon announced a withdrawal of another 70,000 Americans from Vietnam by May, which would leave only 69,000, a reduction of 88 percent from when he entered office. He awaited the Democrats’ claim that this was insufficient and that total withdrawal should be offered, and it was not long in coming. Senator George McGovern, one of the leading candidates for the presidential nomination and almost an outright pacifist, demanded that Nixon offer total withdrawal in exchange for release of American prisoners of war. Nixon then, on January 25, 1972, revealed Kissinger’s secret negotiations in Paris and hammered the Democratic peace candidates with the fact that Hanoi had not only been offered what McGovern and the others accused Nixon of not offering, but had rejected it. He said that “the only reply to our plan has been an increase in troop infiltrations and communist military offensives in Laos and Cambodia. We are being asked publicly to set a terminal date for our withdrawals when we already have offered one in private.... If the enemy wants peace, it will have to recognize the important difference between settlement and surrender.”204 As usual, Nixon outsmarted his critics.