by Conrad Black
Nixon was the second (after Eisenhower) of many U.S. presidents to call for a restoration of energy independence, but nothing came of it, then or under the next seven presidents, as the strategic vulnerability of the United States steadily increased. The price of oil rose 400 percent in a few months, taking gasoline prices and the rate of inflation up with it. The Democrats wanted gas rationing, but Nixon, who had worked in the wartime Office of Price Administration before joining the navy in World War II, resisted this as a catastrophic idea.
On January 17, 1974, in a prodigious feat of personal diplomacy, Henry Kissinger negotiated a mutual withdrawal of the Israeli and Egyptian armies and won the confidence of both sides. He was emerging as a very widely admired and dazzlingly talented foreign minister and not just an extremely capable executant of a brilliant foreign policy president.
On March 18, the oil embargo ended, but the oil-exporting countries were already addicted to high-priced oil. Egypt and the United States reopened diplomatic relations after a lapse of seven years and more than a decade of frosty relations before that, after the Eisenhower-Dulles pullout on financing the Aswan Dam project and Nasser’s flight into the arms of Khrushchev. And on May 29, Kissinger completed the brokering of the Israeli-Syrian forces disengagement, which has stood, unviolated, at time of writing, for 38 years.
On April 5, 1974, French president Georges Pompidou died in office. Nixon attended his funeral and, as he had been at the memorial service for de Gaulle in the same place (Notre Dame Cathedral) five years before, was by far the most prominent figure among the very large number of heads of state and government present. He remained three days in Paris and met with many foreign leaders in the opulent U.S. embassy, on the Faubourg St. Honore between the British embassy that had been “bought” by the Duke of Wellington after Waterloo, and the Elysée Palace, residence of the president of the Republic. De Gaulle’s former finance minister Valéry Giscard d’Estaing was elected the third president of the Fifth Republic a few months later.
Nixon started a Middle East tour in Cairo on June 12, and he and Sadat stood in an open car (despite Nixon’s phlebitis, heat of over 100 degrees, and the avoidance of open cars by U.S. presidents since the assassination of Kennedy in 1963) and were cheered by dense crowds numbering well over a million on the way from the airport to the presidential palace. It was quite a turn in U.S.-Egyptian relations. There was a series of accords on secondary matters with Egypt, and Nixon went on to meet with King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. Nixon was unsuccessful in urging Saudi support for the reestablishment of King Hussein as representative of the Palestinians rather than Arafat, but he parried the king’s championship of the 1967 borders. Faisal promised a quick reduction in the price of oil. Nixon continued on to a very cordial meeting with the Syrian president, Hafez al-Assad, and restored diplomatic relations with that country, then proceeded to Israel, where he told Premier Yitzhak Rabin that the United States would no longer give Israel an open-ended guarantee. There was an emotional exchange at the state dinner with the recently retired Golda Meir, whom Nixon praised and who replied in an impromptu toast that “Richard Nixon is a very great American president.” The tour concluded with a very satisfactory visit with Jordan’s King Hussein and Nixon returned to the United States on June 19.
3. WATERGATE, THE LAST ACT
Former junior and middle-level White House officials were now being routinely given prison sentences, usually for perjury in denying their knowledge of the Watergate break-in before it occurred, or in muddying the waters about it when it had first been exposed. It was all coming down to the tapes. Nixon, having failed to destroy them, underestimated their explosive content, and botched many opportunities to compromise regarding their use, was almost certainly going to be ordered by the Supreme Court to surrender them.
In accord with his 1972 agreement with Brezhnev, Nixon made the annual visit to the Soviet leaders starting on June 27. The president was received with immense ceremony and cheered by large crowds all along the route in from the airport to the Kremlin. Two days later they removed to Yalta, only a few miles from where Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin had met 29 years before. Brezhnev wanted a Russo-American nonaggression pact, but Nixon was wary, because he thought it was really an effort to isolate the Chinese. It was a very convivial occasion, but again, little tangible progress was achieved. Nixon’s now almost rabid domestic enemies, deranged with blood lust whatever the facts and consequences to world affairs and the domestic constitutional balance and the institution of the presidency, having vocally feared that Nixon would give the national security store away in the Kremlin for domestic political advantage, now professed to be disappointed that he returned almost empty-handed on July 3.
On July 24, the Supreme Court voted 8–0 (future chief justice William Rehnquist abstaining as a former employee of the Justice Department) that Nixon had to surrender all the tapes. The key was the June 23, 1972, tape that his enemies were about to represent as “a smoking gun.” In fact, he had authorized Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean to suggest to the director and deputy director of the CIA, Richard Helms and General Vernon Walters, that they ask the FBI to desist from investigating the Watergate affair because it might, through the Cubans who made the break-in, back into the CIA operations against Cuba. Helms and Walters said that they would obey a direct order from the president but would not act otherwise. Nixon declined to take it further (and it was a fatuous idea of Haldeman’s, a former advertising executive, anyway, since the local prosecutors were investigating, not the FBI). This was nothing to impeach a president for, but the crisis had to end, and the fact that it was not (and is not) clear that Nixon violated the law, or that he committed an impeach able offense, was now beside the point. He had been crucified by his opponents and the tension in Washington was intolerable. The distinguished British author Muriel Spark wrote a novel, The Abbess of Crewe, that was a parody of Watergate, about the theft of a thimble in a convent. She was correct; it was nonsense, but it was inexorable.
At 9 p.m. Eastern Time, on August 8, 1974, Richard Nixon delivered, despite unimaginable pressure, from memory and with complete composure, an entirely dignified and eloquent address, admitting no crimes but acknowledging serious errors and the impossibility of continuing in these circumstances, and said that he would resign as president the following day at noon. It was a formula that would be durable and successful: errors but not crimes, and his status in historical regard would rise steadily, after the initial explosion of recriminations. He could have fought through a Senate trial; there was no longer anything negative to emerge, and the House Judiciary charges against him were partisan bunk, except possibly for the authorization of money paid to defendants in exchange for altered testimony. But he might have been removed by the required two-thirds majority of the Senate, and if he had squeaked through, would have had no moral authority to fill the next two years and five months of his term. All conceded that Nixon had spoken with dignity; he departed after an emotional and affecting address to the White House staff the next day, and a brief serenity settled on the capital and the country.
Thus passed from the scene, though not for long from public life, one of the most talented and unusual figures in American history. Richard Nixon seemed a rather ordinary man, and attracted and retained a following of tens of millions of ordinary people to whom, as to him, little came easily, and who never ceased to persevere, often against more glamorous, facile, advantaged, and wealthier people (the Kennedys, Rockefellers, Stevensons, etc.). This bond with ordinary people, many of whom would be routinely described as strivers or even losers, was the constituency he never lost. He built this invisible bloc of the struggling middle and working class into an immense following that never deserted him, to and after his death, and was one of his three great accomplishments. The second was that he was one of America’s most effective presidents, who calmed a terribly divided and riot-torn country at war when he took the headship of it in 1969. He was rivaled only by Franklin D. Rooseve
lt, Harry S. Truman, Ronald Reagan, and, in a sense, Woodrow Wilson, as the most strategically astute and imaginative president in the country’s history. And third, in being the subject of the arousal of the puritanical conscience of America by his opponents, which destroyed his career, and by maintaining that he had committed errors but broken no laws, Nixon took back the control of that puritanical conscience and turned it against his oppressors. He remains one of the presidents Americans are most interested in, and though dead more than 15 years, he gnaws now at that conscience that so assaulted him. In the last and greatest of his many comebacks, he had largely regained public esteem by the time of his death in April 1994, aged 81. All his successors as president attended his funeral, by the Nixon Library and birthplace in Yorba Linda (suburban Los Angeles), and Henry Kissinger, the last and most intimate of the eulogists, unforgettably captured the deceased as one who had come from an improbable place. “He achieved greatly, and he suffered deeply. But he never gave up.... he advanced the vision of peace of his Quaker youth.... He was devoted to his family. He loved his country. And he considered service his honor.” Richard Nixon did not always seem to be of this world; both very ordinary and even awkward, sometimes banal, and yet an imperishable demiurge. He will linger in the American consciousness for a very long time.
4. PRESIDENT GERALD FORD
On August 9, incoming president Gerald Ford spoke with great sensitivity, graciousness, and insight, said that “our long national nightmare is over,” and asked for prayers that the man “who had brought peace to the world” would enjoy it himself. He chose for vice president Nelson Rockefeller, who was confirmed after unnecessarily belligerent hearings, and Henry Kissinger continued as secretary of state. These men, with Donald Rumsfeld in defense and William Simon at the Treasury, provided capable and distinguished leadership as the country settled down from the unprecedented hysteria and national neurosis of Watergate. Ford granted Nixon a full pardon on September 8, 1974, as the ex-president fought for his life against blood clots, and the vindictive mood of the country punished Ford in the midterm elections for his decency. The year ebbed uneventfully away.
Inflation soon became the chief preoccupation of the administration, and there was agitation for both spending reductions and tax cuts. The economy was rather uncertain into 1975, and so were many foreign areas. A Portuguese military faction had overturned the semi-fascist dictatorship that had ruled for 42 years, in April 1974, and an internecine struggle between pro- and anti-communist forces seesawed back and forth in senior military circles for almost two years, before the pro-Western faction, with heavy input from the CIA and the Holy See, prevailed.
Turkey had landed forces in Cyprus in the summer of 1974, to protect the Turkish minority, and the always prickly Greek-Turkish relationship put great strains on NATO. At the end of November 1974, Ford and Brezhnev met at the Far Eastern Soviet city of Vladivostok. There was a tentative agreement to try to balance the different throw weights and launch vehicles of strategic nuclear weapons, as so-called nuclear units were devised for negotiating purposes. But the Russians had to face the fact that though they had gross parity, the Americans had superior technology and quality of weapons. The pace of discussions was not assisted by the fact that Brezhnev suffered at least one minor stroke in the course of them. The points of concurrence took many years to aggregate into a serious agreement.
The follow-up discussions with Israel and Egypt after the disengagement were so sluggish, even under the relatively reasonable new premier, Yitzhak Rabin, that Ford informed Rabin in March that he was “reassessing” U.S. policy in the region, and all U.S. aid to Israel stopped from March until there was finally some movement at the end of the summer, and an interim Sinai agreement was arranged under Kissinger’s constant and ingenious efforts, in September.
In the meantime, the North Vietnamese staged their long-awaited third major invasion of South Vietnam. Unlike the first such lunge, at Tet in 1968, there were no U.S. ground forces to repulse them; and unlike the second offensive in April 1972 to disrupt the triangular arrangements Nixon was making with Beijing and Moscow, there was no U.S. air power to assist. And the Democrats, whose war it had been, voted down any military assistance to the South. It was the unalloyed capitulation of America, renunciation of its long war effort, and the abandonment of an ally that had endured over 500,000 war dead fighting a former common enemy. Lack of Democratic enthusiasm for any participation in that war is understandable, but the Senate had ratified the peace agreements when there were explicit promises to assist the South in the event of an enemy breech of the agreement, which was universally anticipated. Nothing short of another massive air campaign was going to save Saigon this time, but this brutal abandonment of the anti-communist cause in South Vietnam 20 years after Eisenhower had sent Nixon there to pledge support for the “first domino” was irresponsible by the standards of great powers.
If Eisenhower had dictated sensible cooperative terms to France in 1954 in exchange for assistance and then arranged just part of the country for Ho Chi Minh and legitimized the rest; or if he or Kennedy had introduced SEATO forces along the DMZ and in Laos to prevent the communist subversion of the South, and Kennedy had not handed Laos to the communists for conversion into the greatest land arms route in history with the agreement of 1962; or if Johnson had entered on a direct congressional authorization, pushed Vietnamization from the start, had soldiers stay for longer tours and, again, followed MacArthur’s and Eisenhower’s advice and stopped the infiltration along the Ho Chi Minh Trail; or if Nixon had done the same as soon as he was inaugurated and after Johnson’s phony peace breakthrough failed to achieve anything; or even, just possibly, if the Senate had not scuttled Indochina in 1973–1975, it would probably, or at least might, have ended satisfactorily.
As it was, tragedy metastasized: hundreds of thousands were massacred in the South, almost a million mainly Chinese Vietnamese fled the South in boats, and hundreds of thousands drowned, and perhaps two million people perished in the Killing Fields of Cambodia. Because of the failures of the U.S. political class and military high command, and the ability of the generally weak American left to misrepresent the motives and moral relativism of the powers at war, all Indochina was doomed to a horrible, heartbreaking fate. Nixon, by great dexterity and at times courage, had avoided the defeat of the United States itself. But it suffered a distinct strategic setback, captured graphically by terrible pictures of American helicopters departing the rooftops of Saigon with their erstwhile allies desperately clinging to the runners. It was the hour of America’s greatest ignominy. The United States would ultimately accept about 200,000 Vietnamese refugees (including Nguyen Van Thieu).
Civil war broke out in Angola in earnest at about this time, as the Portuguese empire collapsed and the home country was itself a closely contested battleground between competing communist and pro-Western factions. The Soviet Union and Cuba (which sent tens of thousands of troops, some of them with a refueling stop in Canada) aided one faction, the U.S. another, and the South Africans supported both the U.S. protégés and another faction. This war went on for 15 years, and by the time the originally Russian-sponsored contender won, the Cold War was over, oil had been discovered in Angola, and the standard of living rose swiftly.
The Italian Communist Party made substantial gains and there was a good deal of disturbing speculation about bringing it into government. The Soviets were emboldened in their always teeming efforts to incite communist takeovers of vulnerable countries in Latin America and Africa.
President Ford did put on something of a show of strength when an American merchant ship, the Mayaguez, was seized by Cambodian communists in May 1975. He dispatched helicopter forces to retake the ship and liberate the crew, which they did. It was a bit of a Pyrrhic victory, as two of the helicopters crashed, having made some errors in the approach and approximately as many servicemen were killed as sailors were rescued, but it was a successful show of force. A greater success came in Augus
t of the following year when North Korean soldiers killed two American soldiers who were routinely pruning a tree in the zone between the two Koreas. Kim Jong II, the dictator’s son, managed to have this accepted by a conference of the unaligned as an attempted invasion of the North. Ford sent heavy military units into no-man’s-land to continue routine gardening, and B-52s repeatedly overflew the parallel at low altitude. It had the desired effect.
The United States and Canada and almost all European countries participated in the Helsinki Accords in July and August 1975. The effect of the Accords was generally thought to be morally to respectabilize the Soviet Union, and they didn’t really accomplish much except involve the Kremlin in a discussion of the subject. The so-called Decalogue, which was the agreed document from the conference, guaranteed freedom of thought (which is in any case difficult to interdict) and of conscience and religion (slight progress for the communists), but did not refer to freedom of expression or of political leadership selection. It guaranteed nonintervention in the affairs of each country, which was, of course, as much an assurance of untroubled despotism as anything else, but might, in theory, make outrages like Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968 more difficult. Helsinki did give rise to Human Rights Watch, an avowedly leftist organization that would surpass even Amnesty International in its whitewash of the international left.