by Greg Grandin
Most of these votes would have gone to Nixon had Wallace and LeMay not run, and Nixon wanted to make sure he got them in 1972. To do so, he intended to implement his famous “southern strategy.” That Nixon cultivated racial resentment in order to win the South is well known. Less so is that his strategy had a foreign policy component: maximum air power in Southeast Asia—essentially LeMay’s Stone-Age strategy, that is, bomb them into submission. “It was very clear,” George McGovern said about his talk with Kissinger, that “they were already starting to chart the so-called Southern Strategy of trying to develop an approach that would pull the South away from Wallace and into the Nixon column.… I never again could develop much respect for their Vietnam policy. I thought that they were willing to continue killing Asians and sacrificing the lives of young Americans because of their interpretation of what would play in the United States.”4
Nixon needed to placate conservatives to forestall another third-party challenge. In this, Kissinger, having established himself as the “hawk of hawks,” was a useful emissary. For the next five years, the extreme actions taken by Nixon and Kissinger—the mining of North Vietnam’s harbor, the Christmas bombing, Operation Linebacker, the destruction of the Mekong Delta, and, of course, Cambodia and Laos, two countries that were effectively bombed back into the Stone Age—were blood tribute paid to the growing power of the American Right.
Nixon had Kissinger speak with prominent conservatives, including California governor Ronald Reagan, the Reverend Billy Graham, William Buckley, and the comedian Bob Hope: “The president wanted me to give you a brief call to tell you that with all the hysteria on TV and in the news on Laos, we feel we have set up everything we set out to do: Destroyed more supplies than in Cambodia last year. Set them back many months.… We achieved what we were after.”5
They achieved nothing. North Vietnam never wavered, never conceded to Nixon’s demand that it remove troops from South Vietnam in exchange for US withdrawal. But that didn’t matter, because the bombing was meant to win at home.
Nixon was particularly worried about Reagan, and Kissinger stoked his worry.
“He said that you have a real problem with the conservatives,” Kissinger told Nixon in November 1971, about a recent conversation he had had with Reagan.
“Oh, I know,” Nixon said.
Kissinger continued: “He says you’re going to wind up without any friends because you can’t win the liberals anyway.”
“Geez,” said Nixon.6
Kissinger told Nixon that he had counted off the administration’s conservative achievements to Reagan, including the deployment, over liberal opposition, of MIRVs, or multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle nuclear missiles. “We wouldn’t have had Cambodia,” Kissinger said, referring to the 1970 US invasion, “we wouldn’t have had Laos … And we wouldn’t have an $80 billion defense budget.”
At one point, Nixon cut in: “We wouldn’t have had Amchitka.” “We wouldn’t have had Amchitka,” Kissinger repeated.
The story of Amchitka, a small island off Alaska, is largely forgotten now, but here Nixon and Kissinger are talking about it as if it were a moment in human events equal to Winston Churchill’s “blood, toil, tears, and sweat” speech to the House of Commons in 1940. In the early 1970s, Amchitka was the site of a pitched battle between arms control and environmental groups and the White House over plans to conduct a high-yield, extremely radioactive nuclear test there. The test had no military or scientific benefit but was seen as something of a ritual by the Right, fireworks to celebrate the end of Johnson’s presidency, when many hawks (like LeMay) felt the United States had fallen behind on nuclear development. Then, when public opposition to the detonation began to grow, Nixon had a chance to show conservatives that he would stand up to “liberals.” He let it be known that, were the Supreme Court to issue an injunction against the test, he would go forward anyway.
The Court didn’t block the test, but Haldeman told Kissinger to play it for politics anyway. “Tell Reagan we’re taking unmitigated heat in order to keep that thing going. We need all the support of the right.” Later, after the test was conducted, Nixon met with Senator Barry Goldwater and mocked the fears of environmentalists. “The seals are still swimming,” the president said. “I’m damn proud of you,” Goldwater told him.7
* * *
What would become known as the Reagan Revolution was on the march and Nixon had a conservative majority (as long as it didn’t split). Nixon’s aides made a calculated decision to play this “positive polarization,” as Vice President Spiro Agnew described the breakup of American society, for advantage. “There are twice as many conservatives as Republicans,” said Haldeman, and the White House, especially after the Cambodia invasion in the run-up to the 1970s midterms, increasingly turned Vietnam into a “social issue,” linking the war to crime and protests at home, tagging dissenters as unpatriotic, blaming the murder of protesters on protesters themselves, on a “radical liberalism,” “whimpering isolationism,” and “pusillanimous pussyfooting on the critical issue of law and order.”8
But until conservatives became a dependable voting bloc, Nixon couldn’t just govern from the right. Though their moment was passing, he still had to reckon with liberals and the Left, ranging from New Dealers who continued to believe that “Franklin D. Roosevelt was president,” as Nixon complained, to the churches, the war protesters, the civil rights movement, antipoverty and environmental groups, and more radical organizations.
To keep this wing of American politics at bay, even as he worked to build his “silent majority” into an electoral coalition, Nixon could count on the versatile Kissinger. “We knew Henry as the ‘hawk of hawks’ in the Oval Office,” Haldeman recalled. “But in the evenings, a magical transformation took place. Touching glasses at a party with his liberal friends, the belligerent Kissinger would suddenly become a dove.… And the press, beguiled by Henry’s charm and humor, bought it. They just couldn’t believe that the intellectual, smiling, humorous ‘Henry the K’ was a hawk like ‘that bastard’ Nixon.”9
Kissinger was effective with liberal critics. With religious folk, he could invoke his experience in the Holocaust. With reporters, he could flatter and leak and stroke their egos. And with students, he cultivated a compelling mix of irony and candor. One remembers a performance Kissinger gave at MIT, in late January 1971.10 He started his remarks “with a confidential air,” telling the audience that Nixon had not been his “first choice” for president. Then, after a dramatic pause, he confessed “that he had doubts, that he was troubled, yet confident that the Administration had chosen the only sensible path”—gradual withdrawal and “Vietnamization.” As to rumors that the administration was considering using nuclear weapons (rumors that turned out to be true), Kissinger “made a disparaging remark about absurd scenarios that might be found in the lower offices of the Pentagon, but the real decision makers would never use those terrible weapons.”* Asked by one skeptical student what it would take for him to resign, Kissinger said: when the “whole trend of the policy became morally reprehensible to me.” But, he added, he wouldn’t criticize the president publicly “unless gas chambers were set up or some horrendous moral outrage.”
Recalling the encounter at a later date, the unconvinced student wondered, “What if … there is no need to build ovens? What if … the ovens are the infernos created by the napalm and the bombs from the B-52s?”
Kissinger had largely won over the young crowd. “He had sounded so sincere, so sympathetic, so much one of us,” said the student. Yet even as Kissinger was lying that the war was winding down, B-52s were pounding southern Laos to prepare for a ground invasion, which took place on the Monday after Kissinger’s Saturday MIT speech.
Kissinger was equally good with liberal intellectuals. He pulled them in, letting them think they had an audience. He often lunched with Arthur Schlesinger, and every time he did he let the historian in on a secret: he was thinking about resigning. “I have been thin
king a lot about resignation,” he said following the invasion of Cambodia. “In fact, I thought about it long before Cambodia.” Again, Schlesinger didn’t know about the bombing of Cambodia or about Kissinger’s deep involvement in planning the invasion. Neither was Schlesinger aware of Kissinger’s plotting with the president to “destroy the confidence of the people in the American establishment.” So it was possible for him to take Kissinger seriously when he said he stayed on to prevent further damage to “institutions of authority.”11
And even if Kissinger couldn’t convince liberal and left-wing intellectuals about the soundness of Nixon’s policy, they were still reassured that someone at ease with concepts such as “bourgeois society,” “objective conditions,” and “structural crisis” was in the White House. His “soul was conservative,” as his mentor Fritz Kraemer once said, meaning he valued hierarchy and order. But his mind was formed by many of the influences that shaped the New Left, including existential exaltations of individual free will. Kissinger appreciated history’s sweep, possessing a dialectical instinct that some compared to Hegel’s (“Henry thinks in a constantly theoretical framework. Every time a wave occurs on the east end of the shore, he’s got it tied into a relationship with the west bank,” said one academic admirer he brought into the NSC as an analyst).12 “The West,” he wrote in his undergraduate thesis, “has produced no political theorist with an ability to reach the souls since Marx.”13 That Kissinger was essentially a New Left mind with Old Right morals wasn’t lost on Alexander Haig, who described him to Nixon as someone “cut from that goddamn … left wing [cloth] even though he’s a hard-line, tough guy.”14
And when the wit and good wine came up short, Kissinger deftly invoked fear of right-wing revanchism: “If we had done in our first year what our loudest critics called on us to do,” Kissinger told the MIT audience, “the 13 percent that voted for Wallace would have grown to 35 or 40 percent; the first thing the president set out to do was to neutralize that faction.”15
Kissinger, who as a child witnessed the collapse of the Weimar Republic, presented himself as holding the center against the right, telling liberals that if he resigned, Spiro Agnew would be making foreign policy. If there were to be a revolution in America, he warned, it wouldn’t be led by Students for a Democratic Society, Tom Hayden, pacifist Quakers, or social-justice Catholics and Jews. When a society truly collapses, Kissinger said, “some real tough guys,… the most brutal forces in the society take over.”16 “We are saving you from the right,” he told NSC staffers who had resigned in protest over the 1970 invasion of Cambodia. “You are the right,” they replied.17
The 1971 invasion of Laos—carried out with 17,000 South Vietnamese troops and massive US air strikes—was another catastrophe. It was meant to shut down the so-called Ho Chi Minh trail, over which Hanoi supplied the Vietcong. But the North Vietnamese army routed the South Vietnamese, killing or wounding nearly 8,000 of the attackers. The United States lost over 100 helicopters and 215 soldiers. But Nixon spun the invasion as a success. He told Haldeman: “We should whack the opponents on patriotism, saving American lives, etc.”18 When the press began to report accurately the unfolding disaster, Kissinger took the opportunity to stoke Nixon’s anger: the media’s reporting on Laos, he said, was “vicious.” Never at a loss for a useful historical analogy, Kissinger told Nixon that if “Britain had a press like this in World War II, they would have quit in ’42.”
Foreign policy was turned inside out, with Nixon and Kissinger keying their actions not to external reality but rather to their need to manipulate domestic opinion. In the real world, the invasion of Laos was a failure. But as Nixon told Kissinger, the real world didn’t matter. “The main thing, Henry, on Laos,” he said, “I don’t care what happens there, it’s a win. See?”19
* * *
“To listen to even a few of the Nixon tapes,” write the historians Fredrik Logevall and Andrew Preston, “is to be struck by the degree to which foreign policy options were evaluated in terms of their likely effect on the administration’s standing at home.”20 Here are two examples. The first is from March 1971, when Kissinger told Nixon that “we’ve got to get enough time to get out. We have to make sure that they don’t knock the whole place over” (that is, make sure North Vietnam didn’t overrun South Vietnam as soon as the United States withdrew its troops). “We can’t have it knocked over brutally, to put it brutally, before the election.” Then on August 3, 1972, Nixon: “I look at the tide of history out there, South Vietnam probably is never going to survive anyway, I’m just being perfectly candid.… We also have to realize, Henry, that winning an election is terribly important. It’s terribly important this year, but can we have a viable foreign policy if a year from now or two years from now, North Vietnam gobbles up South Vietnam? That’s the real question.” Kissinger replied: “If a year or two years from now North Vietnam gobbles up South Vietnam, we can have a viable foreign policy if it looks as if it’s the result of South Vietnamese incompetence.” Kissinger then went on to say that “we’ve got to find some formula that holds the thing together a year or two, after which—after a year, Mr. President, Vietnam will be a backwater.” Having helped prolong the war to get Nixon elected, Kissinger was now working to prolong it—until he could reach a face-saving agreement—to get him reelected.21
Nixon, though, was afraid that Kissinger would be tempted to strike a deal and bask in the praise he would receive as a peacemaker. He told Haig to keep watch. The president, Haldeman wrote in his diary, “wants to be sure Haig doesn’t let Henry’s desire for a settlement prevail, that’s the one way we can lose the election. We have to stand firm on Vietnam and not get soft.”22 Kissinger mostly stayed firm. But by early 1972, it was becoming increasingly apparent that Nixon’s and Kissinger’s strategy of withdrawing troops while escalating the bombing wasn’t working. Soon, writes Larry Berman in his detailed history of the Paris negotiations, the White House would capitulate “on almost every major point” Hanoi was insisting on, including that “any cease-fire would be a ‘cease-fire in place,’ that is, North Vietnamese troops would stay in the South if they were already there.”23
Fighting, nonetheless, continued. The North launched a major offensive at the end of March, and Nixon responded with a massive bombing campaign: Haldeman wrote in his diary that Nixon was massing a huge attack force, still hoping, against all evidence, that another whack “will give us a fairly good chance of negotiations” and force concessions out of Hanoi. “Henry has the same view.”24
At this point, the bombing had as much to do with conciliating the small group of true believers that had hardened around Nixon in the White House as it did the broader Right. “I refuse to believe that a little fourth-rate power like North Vietnam does not have a breaking point,” Kissinger had said earlier, amid making plans for one of his savage blows that was supposed to end the war. Kissinger told the Soviet ambassador that Vietnam had become a “major domestic problem.” He continued: “We cannot permit our domestic structure to be constantly tormented by this country ten thousand miles away.”25 Confronted with an opponent he could not bend, Kissinger had come to think of the United States as the tormented victim.
By late spring, the negotiating momentum had swung to the North Vietnamese. On May 2, Kissinger sat down in Paris with North Vietnam’s main representative, Le Duc Tho, in a meeting he described as “brutal.” “Le Duc Tho was not even stalling,” Kissinger said. “Our views had become irrelevant; he was laying down terms.”26 “He operated on us like a surgeon with a scalpel with enormous skill,” Kissinger remembered years later.27
A member of Hanoi’s delegation described Kissinger as defeated: he “no longer had the appearance of a university professor making long speeches and continually joking, but a man speaking sparingly, seemingly embarrassed and thoughtful.”28 Le Duc Tho baited Kissinger over and over again with references to a particularly sensitive topic: the rise of domestic dissent in the United States and public opposition to the
war. Kissinger tried to say that that subject was off the table, tersely informing the North Vietnamese that he wouldn’t discuss domestic politics. But Le Duc Tho kept pressing the point, bringing up Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers as “evidence of the U.S. process of intervention and aggression” and as an example of how Kissinger was being undercut at home.
“Sadness was apparent on his face,” Le Duc Tho later said. “We did not know what he was thinking at that moment, but later he repeatedly wrote that the division of mind in America caused him great pains.”29
Kissinger quickly regained his rakishness. “We bombed them,” he told a number of confidants in private shortly after this meeting, “into letting us accept their terms.” It was a remark as callous as it was true.30
The only thing left was to spin Le Duc Tho’s terms so they didn’t hurt Nixon’s commanding lead in the polls. “My old friend Henry Kissinger held a press conference the other day explaining his diplomatic triumphs,” Arthur Schlesinger wrote in his journal in October 1972, following the announcement that an agreement with Hanoi had been reached. Schlesinger continued: “He was, as usual, subtle, disarming and disingenuous. What is most obvious is the spectacular and unprecedented concessions we have made. But the press, following Henry, has written about it all as if we had made no concessions at all. What is saddest of all is that if Nixonger (as Isaiah Berlin would say) had been willing to make these concessions in 1969, we could have had the settlement then; and 20,000 Americans and God knows how many Vietnamese, now dead, would be alive.”31
In November, Nixon got his landslide, having managed to win reelection as both a war president and a peace candidate.* The Southeast Asia piece of the “southern strategy,” though it did nothing to move Hanoi, was a success at home. The price of victory, however, was high, and included, as the historian Ken Hughes writes, the lives lost in “the four years it took Nixon to create the illusion of ‘peace with honor’ and conceal the reality of defeat with deceit.”32