by Conrad Black
Almost two million Americans had served in Vietnam and 58,000 had died there, and about two million Vietnamese also died on both sides combined, military and civilian, a blurred distinction in such a war. Probably Eisenhower should either have helped the French and led the resistance in 1954, though it would have been difficult just a year after Korea, or not guaranteed an independent South Vietnam in 1955. Kennedy was still trying to figure out what to do when he was assassinated. Johnson’s intervention can be justified and probably helped defeat the communists in Indonesia, but the inadequate congressional authorization and the inept strategic plan of the general staff of the army, not seriously interdicting the flow of men and supplies from the North, cannot be justified. Lyndon Johnson, in his reluctance, could never decide if he was really at war.
Nixon was much the most effective of all of the American presidents in Vietnam, but he should have moved to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail and resumed heavy bombing of the North and imported Nationalist Chinese in noncombat roles to compensate for the Chinese Red Army personnel in the North, as he announced Vietnamization in 1969. He submitted the peace agreement to the Senate, which ratified it without significant opposition. The president hoped that this would commit the country to respond to the next North Vietnamese offensive, as it had at Tet in 1968 and in April of 1972, with massive air power. He abolished conscription a few months later.
Richard Nixon had averted the disaster that loomed in 1968, and withdrew from Vietnam with honor. Tragically and unimaginably, Watergate replaced Vietnam as the national crisis, and snatched defeat back, after Nixon had come close to retrieving victory. The Republican Nixon had resurrected the Democrat Johnson after they had fought one of the shabbiest electoral contests in history; and the Democrats betrayed Johnson, destroyed Nixon, and emasculated themselves. Not even Greek dramatists, tragic or comic, had imagined this plot.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
To the Summit of the World, 1973–1992
1. THE WATERGATE DELUGE
Despite its great achievements and the high prestige of the reelected president, the Nixon administration disintegrated very quickly as the Watergate story unfolded amidst a host of minor campaign and administration officials turning court and partisan-dominated congressional committee hearings into confessionals, launching endless accusations of “campaign dirty tricks,” financing liberties, cynical motivations, steadily further up the chain, in the manner of the American plea-bargain system. Immunities for prosecution or sweetheart sentences are traded for incriminating evidence, no matter how uncorroborated and unrigorous, against higher-ups. It was not long before the process backed into the side doors of the White House and Nixon’s own chief aides appeared to have had some involvement, if not in illegal initial activity, in trying to conceal the extent of it.
The Congress doesn’t have to respond to the procedural rules of a Justice Department prosecution (which do not impose much of a restraint at the best of times), so it was not long before the president’s former White House counsel, John Dean, who had been involved in some illegal activity he did not tell the president about, was chirping like a canary flying backward at three o’clock in the morning to the Senate Select Watergate Committee and on national television and radio in the most destructive manner possible. He testified with oleaginous sanctimony, despite the ancient seal of lawyer-client privilege.
Practically the only Nixon underling on the domestic political side who did not crack eventually was G. Gordon Liddy, a heroically motivated lawyer and political soldier who had periodically suggested blowing up the Brookings Institution and other lively initiatives. Even when sentenced to 35 years in prison, he did not alter his testimony, gave a military salute as he left the court, and early in his stay in prison beat up a fellow inmate for the unauthorized borrowing of his toothbrush. (His sentence was radically reduced and he went on to great success as a radio talk-show host and after-dinner speaker, for more than 35 years.) The endless flow of Watergate revelations pushed the soap operas off the air, and the business of government soon became extremely difficult.
The people actually arrested in the Watergate complex, after entering the Democratic National Committee office illegally, testified that their legal fees and family expenses were being paid by someone but they were not sure who. This could not possibly stand. Judge John J. Sirica didn’t believe it and sentenced very severely to encourage reconsideration, and he encouraged the Congress to get to the bottom of the question. The Republican strategists had to know that the source of these funds would be revealed and that refusal to reveal them was just going to lead to aggravated charges of perjury There is no evidence that Nixon knew anything about any of this at this point, but as if morbidly attracted to the subject because he (correctly) doubted that the managers in place had any idea of how to deal with it, he did ask enough to be somewhat informed, all recorded on devices he had placed in his office and telephones, and publicly denied that he knew what he was finding out. There is nothing unconstitutional about presidents not telling the truth, and all presidents are guilty of that at times, but it is a certain method of squandering political capital when it happens on a large scale and comes quickly to light. By not cleaning out the lawbreakers himself, he was leaving it to the courts and to the Democrats in the Congress to do it. He had to either get rid of anyone whose conduct was legally suspect or destroy the tapes, get rid of the most vulnerable of the apparent offenders, and be prepared to stonewall at a defensible point. The first would have been better, as well as more creditable, but by doing neither, Nixon himself sank into the quagmire. On April 17, 1973, Henry Kissinger, who had had nothing to do with any of it, said in a taped conversation: “You have saved this country, Mr. President. The history books will show that when no one will know what Watergate means.”208
The Congress passed the War Powers Resolution, severely restraining the president’s ability to conduct war, and a 180-degree turn from the passivity of the Congress as Roosevelt committed acts of war against Germany in 1941 and from the blank check it gave Eisenhower in the Formosa Resolution in 1955, largely replicated for Johnson in the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964. This was a matter of questionable constitutionality but, at time of writing, has not been tested, and was more a rebuke of Johnson than of Nixon, but it altered the president’s traditional latitude as commander-in-chief, by requiring congressional authorization for combat deployment within 90 days. Nixon’s veto was overridden, but some subsequent presidents (including Clinton in Kosovo and Obama in Libya) have ignored the resolution.
On April 30, 1973, Nixon’s two closest collaborators, John Ehrlichman and Bob Haldeman, resigned; the attorney general, Richard Kleindienst, retired; and White House counsel John Dean (who was trying to blackmail Nixon while trading incrimination of him to the prosecutors and congressional committees for personal immunity) was fired. A special prosecutor was appointed, the rabidly partisan Democrat and Kennedy family friend Archibald Cox.
The rampaging Watergate congressional hearings were suspended during the official visit to the United States by Soviet leader Brezhnev and the long-serving foreign minister Gromyko, starting June 16. It proved impossible to make any real progress on a further arms limitation agreement (SALTII). The summit moved to California on June 23, and Brezhnev, after retiring, and then telling Nixon’s valet that he wanted to resume discussions, told Nixon that the Middle East was about to blow up. Sadat had already evicted the Russians from his country but was loudly proclaiming that war was imminent. Nixon immediately saw the potential for negotiating a comprehensive agreement with Brezhnev and the two superpowers and America’s principal allies imposing it. Nixon feared that Arafat, the Syrians, and other comparative newcomers could prove a great deal harder to deal with even than the Russians had been, especially now that the Kremlin could see its influence fading in the area since the death of Nasser. Nothing immediately came of it, and though the atmospherics of the meeting were good, the summit was only a modest success. (In California, the
Soviet leaders stayed in Nixon’s house, Brezhnev and Gromyko sleeping in the Nixon daughters’ bedrooms.)
At the end of July, a case against Vice President Spiro Agnew arose, of his having taken at least 40 separate bribes and kickbacks in his previous position as governor of Maryland. After a good deal of negotiation, he resigned in exchange for non-prosecution, pleading nolo contendere, which is not an admission of guilt, and paid a $10,000 fine. There is sometimes difficulty determining when political contributions have been made in exchange for official favors. Agnew was not widely respected, and Nixon replaced him, not with either of the two leading stars of his party, Nelson Rockefeller or Ronald Reagan, but with the widely liked and respected but unexciting Gerald R. Ford, a 13-term Michigan congressman and Republican House leader. While this was unfolding, William Rogers retired as secretary of state in August and Henry Kissinger was confirmed as his replacement without difficulty the following month.
The existence of Nixon’s taping device had been revealed by one of the White House witnesses on July 16, and subpoenaed. Nixon apparently did not understand that the courts might order their complete surrender, and having lost the opportunity innocuously to destroy them, declined various methods of somewhat reasonable compromise, including a private hearing by Senate Watergate Committee chairman Sam Ervin, ranking Republican Howard Baker, and Cox, who agreed not to reveal anything irrelevant to their investigation. Many of the tapes were favorable to Nixon, but some were legally worrisome, and many contained more coarse language and ethnic slurs than Nixon would want in the public domain. The hostile press, led by the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the main television networks, were already deluging the public with spurious charges against Nixon of underpaying taxes, zealously tapping telephones (including that of his own brother) and almost what Franz Kafka famously called “nameless crimes.” In April 1974, the Internal Revenue Service, after a campaign of leaks, disallowed Nixon’s agreed tax-deduction for the contribution to the National Archives of his vice presidential papers, but the National Archives kept the papers. This was outright theft, and Nixon had only been following in the steps of his predecessors, from Eisenhower to Johnson and (now Senator) Humphrey. In the circumstances, he gamely paid the assessment (though litigation by him and his literary executors for return of the papers was ultimately successful).
2. REVOLUTION IN CHILE AND WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST
In Chile, communist fellow-traveler Salvador Allende, having pledged not to alter or violate the Constitution, had been inaugurated as president in 1970, and as copper, the staple of Chile’s economy, was at the bottom of its normal price cycle, there was 15 percent unemployment and 30 percent inflation. Allende responded with the usual Marxist policy prescription: he nationalized the largest farms and estates and the copper and banking industries, with minimal compensation; decreed a 40 percent wage increase for workers in all industries; and ordered a freeze in prices. The completely inevitable chaos ensued. Opposition members of the National Congress were excluded and a virtual Marxist dictatorship, replete with intimidation of the media and opposition legislators, was being set up. There was considerable violence, and both the Congress and the Supreme Court of Chile declared Allende’s conduct unconstitutional and generally illegal.
On September 11, 1973, the chiefs of staff of the armed forces revolted, seizing the National Congress, government buildings, radio and television stations, and railway and bus terminals, and attacking the presidential palace with tanks and artillery, storming it with elite troops, and killing or capturing everyone within. Allende allegedly committed suicide with a machine gun given to him and inscribed and engraved by Fidel Castro, but this is contested and he may simply have been murdered or killed in an exchange of fire. Weeks of mopping up and skirmishing followed, several thousand people were murdered, 30,000 were detained, and a large number were barbarously tortured. Allende and his followers were not abstainers in this and the attempt to whitewash them as pacifistic social reformers is a nauseating fraud, but the armed forces, led by General Augusto Pinochet, committed most of the excesses.
There have been many allegations against Nixon and Kissinger of being implicated in this violence, but nothing has ever been proved or even believably argued to support this, including under subsequent Chilean governments led by democratic socialists. The United States certainly made it clear to the Chilean military that it would not oppose a coup, and there is no doubt that Nixon, who knew Latin America fairly well after a number of highly publicized visits there, considered that the entrenchment of a communist regime in a major Latin American country would be a strategic disaster. It must also be said that Pinochet then ran, for 15 years, the most successful government in Latin America. He brought in a group of Chilean alumni of George Shultz and Milton Friedman’s University of Chicago administration and economics faculties, denationalized, deregulated, cut taxes, reduced union prerogatives, welcomed foreign investment, and generated consistently high economic growth rates that sharply increased living standards and lifted up most people who had been in poverty. In 1988, Pinochet, having restored a free parliament, held a referendum on his own continuation as president, against all parties combined, and lost, 55 to 43 percent. He retired, handed over to an elected Christian Democrat, and continued for five years as commander of the armed forces. In geopolitical terms, the Nixon-Kissinger Chilean policy, though it was probably not determining on the ground, was (other than in human rights terms) a complete and important success, and did, ultimately, restore the democracy that Allende had overthrown.
Egypt and Syria attacked Israel during the Jewish Yom Kippur holiday on October 6, and achieved complete surprise. The Syrians pushed the Israelis off the Golan Heights in south Syria, and the Egyptians crossed the Suez Canal and pierced the Bar-Lev Line, which Israel had represented as almost impenetrable, and came a short distance into the Sinai. Both Brezhnev’s warnings and Sadat’s threats had proved well-founded. The Israelis had always assumed that they would not have to face more than a brief war with the Arabs, and went through aircraft, tanks, and ordnance with disconcerting speed. Nixon resupplied the Israeli air force with combat planes and Kissinger made it clear that any Arab attempt to intercept them as they were flown to Israel would be regarded as an act of war. Nixon presciently foresaw that Arab success could produce a reentry of the Soviet Union, as the Arabs’ armourer, into the region, but he sought to help ensure a good showing by Israel without the humiliation of the Egyptians or the Russians, as had occurred in 1967, but with a sufficiently respectable Arab showing to encourage all parties onto the path of a durable peace. He said to Kissinger that Israel could not “get away with just having this thing hang over for another four years and have us at odds with the Arab world. We’re not going to do it anymore.”209
There followed a contest of airlifts with the Soviet Union, which the United States easily won with its superior air transport capacity, and Nixon told his entourage that he would take complete responsibility for the anticipated Arab oil embargo. By October 20, the Israelis had cleared the Syrians back off the Golan Heights, had recrossed the Suez Canal in two places, and had surrounded the Egyptian army in Sinai. This was enough for Brezhnev, seeing his hopes of reentry to the Middle East on the wings of Arab military victory disappear, to propose a cease-fire in place and invite Kissinger to Moscow to work out a durable regional agreement. There was a lack of agreement between Nixon and Kissinger as the secretary of state left for Moscow on October 20. Kissinger didn’t believe a broad settlement could be reached, and thought it better to complete the expulsion of the Russians from the region, and feared that Nixon underestimated the difficulties of reaching and imposing such a settlement. The Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia, had reduced oil production starting on October 17.
Kissinger went to Israel for one day and told the Israelis they had to agree to a cease-fire and could not force the surrender of the Egyptian army in Sinai. On October 22, a joint U.S.-Soviet resolution in the UN Security Co
uncil passed, mandating a cease-fire in place. Israel continued to squeeze, and on the 24th, Sadat became so desperate he asked for joint Russo-American military intervention. (All parties agreed that UN peacekeepers were a nuisance and an irrelevancy and should be avoided.) Nixon would have nothing to do with such a request and on October 24, Brezhnev sent a message to Nixon that if the U.S. didn’t agree to joint action, the USSR would inject forces unilaterally to impose the cease-fire. Nixon and Kissinger and the National Security Council responded with a heightened state of military alert, the dispatch of two aircraft carrier combat groups (Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy) to or toward the Eastern Mediterranean, preparation for the dispatch of an airborne division to the region, and the return to the U.S. for integration into the Strategic Air Command (i.e., for possible attack on the USSR) of 60 B-52s from Guam.
This level of saber-rattling was effective. Brezhnev said no more of his threat to intervene unilaterally, a third UN resolution, cosponsored by the Soviet Union and the U.S., was adopted, and Kissinger muscled Israel into acceptance without closing the ring completely on the Egyptian army in Sinai. It was another strategic success for the United States, the more remarkable for occurring in the midst of an explosion in the Watergate crisis. Nixon had come up with a compromise whereby Senator John Stennis of Mississippi would check the tapes against the White House transcripts. Nixon claimed that his attorney general, Elliott Richardson, and Senators Ervin and Baker had agreed to this (but, unfortunately, for once a White House conversation was not taped), and Richardson and Ervin reneged. Richardson resigned after he refused to fire the special prosecutor, Cox, although Nixon asked him to remain while there was an international crisis; the deputy attorney general, William Ruckelshaus, resigned, but in the manner of early film comedies, Nixon declined his resignation and fired him instead. The acting attorney general, Robert Bork, fired Cox, without taking a position on the matter but because he accepted that the president had the constitutional right to fire anyone in the executive branch of the federal government. There were a great many calls in the Congress for impeachment and hearings on that subject began, in the usual spirit of incandescent partisanship, in the House. If Nixon had just lamented the impasse, he might have got something close to a reasonable compromise, but by pulling the trigger on Cox and the senior officials of the Justice Department, he ignited the issue far beyond his ability to manage. All this unfolded while the Yom Kippur War was in progress and the cease-fire was being negotiated in a time of great international tension.