American Empire

by Joshua Freeman

  To the extent that Nixon had a plan to do this, it had four components. First, believing that the war ultimately would have to be settled through negotiations, in August 1969 he had Kissinger begin secret talks in Paris with the North Vietnamese, hoping that they might be more fruitful than the public negotiations that had begun under Johnson. Second, Nixon and Kissinger assumed that the Vietnamese communists would make concessions only if they faced continuing military pressure and the threat of its escalation. Fighting in Vietnam remained at a high level during Nixon’s first year in office, with more than ten thousand Americans killed (as many as had died in 1967). While Nixon continued Johnson’s bombing halt over much of North Vietnam, he intensified bombing elsewhere in Indochina, stepping up the bombing of Laos and, not long after taking office, beginning a bombing campaign in Cambodia aimed at disrupting Vietnamese communist supply routes. Nixon kept the Cambodia attacks secret from the public, Congress, and even most of his own military establishment.

  Third, as much as Nixon wanted to keep up military pressure, he believed that he could not maintain public support for existing troop levels, draft calls, and casualty rates for very long. To reduce the need for ground forces, Nixon increased the role of the South Vietnamese army in the fighting, a policy that Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird dubbed “Vietnamization.” The U.S. presence in Vietnam went from 543,400 troops in the spring of 1969 to just 24,400 at the end of 1972. The South Vietnamese communists proved unable to take immediate advantage of the American withdrawals because of the losses they suffered during the Tet offensive, low morale, and an increased dependence on North Vietnamese soldiers to replenish their strength. To further lower political pressure to end the war, Nixon moved the draft to a lottery system, which eliminated much of its class favoritism, and announced his intention to institute an all-volunteer Army. Draft calls diminished and in September 1971 ended entirely.

  The final piece of Nixon’s Vietnam strategy was to seek assistance from the communist superpowers in ending the war. While rhetorically Kennedy and Johnson portrayed the war as part of a global struggle against communism, in practice they sought to win it in Vietnam itself through the application of military and political strategies designed to deal with localized conflicts. The Nixon administration, by contrast, saw superpower diplomacy as the solution to the war, at least in part. In private talks, the administration conveyed to the Soviet Union its interest in improving relations but suggested that progress in that direction would be dependent on cooperation in ending the Vietnam War on terms acceptable to the United States. The United States also suggested that if the Soviets were not cooperative, the United States would reach out to China. (China had been the largest supplier of military equipment and assistance to North Vietnam until 1969, when the Soviet Union took over that role.)

  By the fall of 1969, it became clear to the Nixon administration that no quick end to the war was in sight. The Soviets rejected linking Vietnam to other issues, and the North Vietnamese remained unbudged in private talks. Nixon considered escalating the air assault on North Vietnam but backed off in the face of internal administration dissent, the largest and broadest-based antiwar demonstrations yet, and doubts that it would bring any major breakthrough. But Nixon felt he had to do something; with U.S. troop levels in Vietnam slowly dropping, he feared that the communists would simply wait the United States out, refusing to compromise in negotiations. So he tried to signal to the North Vietnamese the consequences of not making concessions by military escalations elsewhere in Indochina. In February 1970, the United States launched a bombing campaign in northern Laos using its heaviest bombers, B-52s, designed to disrupt Vietnamese supply lines that ran through the region and support the neutralist Laotian government, which faced pressure from communist forces. Two months later, South Vietnamese and American forces launched a combined attack into a region of Cambodia bordering Vietnam, which ultimately involved thirty-one thousand U.S. troops. Nixon sought to bolster the new Cambodian government of General Lon Nol, disrupt Vietnamese communist sanctuaries and command centers, and again indicate his determination not to yield in any resolution of the war.

  Nixon’s April 30 announcement of the invasion of Cambodia set off one of the largest and most intense waves of protest in the nation’s history. Within days, colleges all over the country were being shut down by strikes and rocked by demonstrations. The murder of four students at Kent State University on May 4 by Ohio National Guardsmen turned the rapidly growing surge of protest into a tsunami.

  The Cambodia invasion protests stood out by many measures. Their sheer size stunned the White House, the nation, and the protestors themselves. Protests took place on more than 80 percent of the nation’s nearly three thousand colleges and universities, with five hundred crippled by strikes. Some four million students and 350,000 faculty members took part in protest activity of one sort or another. On less than a week’s notice, 100,000 people assembled at a rally in Washington, D.C. Most of the protests were organized by local groups, as the largest left-wing national student organization, SDS, had fragmented the previous year (with one segment turning itself into the violent Weathermen).

  The Cambodia protests were remarkable not only for their scale but also for their militancy and the fierce battles they entailed. While on many campuses protests remained peaceful, at scores of others running battles took place with police or National Guardsmen (called out at two dozen campuses in sixteen states). During May, over a hundred protestors were shot by law enforcement officers or guardsmen. Meanwhile, an epidemic of bombing and arson broke out on and near campuses. In the first week of May alone, thirty ROTC buildings were burned or bombed, including at Case Western, Ohio State, Tulane, St. Louis University, and Kentucky. Bombings and arson became almost daily occurrences in Lawrence, Kansas, not the sort of place that generally had been associated with student protest or antiwar activity. But in many ways, Lawrence was typical of the sites of protest in May 1970, as the whole social geography of student activism and antiwar sentiment changed. Earlier student protests had tended to take place at elite colleges or flagship state universities. The May 1970 strikes and demonstrations took place at every conceivable type of college (and many high schools too), including community colleges, religious schools, schools with heavily working-class student bodies like Kent State, and historically black colleges, including Mississippi’s Jackson State University, where on May 7 police opened fire on a women’s dormitory, killing two students.

  Off campus, too, protests drew a broader cross section of society than any previous antiwar actions. Vietnam veterans became a very visible presence at demonstrations. Forty-three Nobel Prize winners wrote to the president urging him to immediately end the war. Labor leaders and corporate executives formed antiwar groups. Twelve hundred Wall Street lawyers went to Washington to lobby against the war.

  The protests against Nixon constituted a national crisis, but they by no means represented a national consensus. In New York, construction workers went on a rampage, violently attacking student antiwar demonstrators and anyone who seemed to be sympathetic to them, as the police stood by doing little to stop the carnage. Soon “hard hat” demonstrations became an almost daily occurrence in New York and spread to several other cities, as much an explosion of class resentment at what the construction workers saw as privileged protestors as a measure of working-class support for the war. Nationally, polls showed an increase in support for the president, in part a rejection of the protests and chaos that followed the Cambodian invasion.

  In Congress, the invasion of Cambodia and the reaction to it bolstered opposition to the war. The introduction of a flurry of measures to check military action in Indochina contributed to Nixon’s decision to pull all U.S. troops out of Cambodia by the end of June, without having had decisive military impact. Congressional critics of the war won a symbolic victory at the end of the year with the repeal of the Tonkin Gulf resolution, and a more practical check on t
he war with a ban on the use of military appropriations for any further U.S. ground operations in Cambodia or Laos. With the consensus that had sustained the Cold War shattered, Nixon faced the real possibility of congressional action to end the war.

  Initially, Nixon made some gestures of accommodation toward the massive wave of antiwar protests, which had taken him by surprise. In the wee hours of the morning of May 9, he went to the Lincoln Memorial to meet students gathered for an antiwar demonstration, trying to talk about football and surfing to the dumbfounded protestors. Afterward, he went over to the Executive Office Building to speak to soldiers camped out to protect the White House from feared antiwar assaults. It was, the president’s chief of staff wrote in his diary, “the weirdest day so far.”

  But Nixon quickly abandoned the idea of trying to appease his critics. Once he announced the Cambodia withdrawal, the nation slowly moved toward resuming business as usual. Looking forward, Nixon began aligning himself with the populist right in an effort to cement a new electoral coalition. Some of the more liberal figures in his administration either resigned or were forced out, while Vice President Agnew became the mouthpiece for attacks on student protestors, liberal elites, and the news media in an effort to mobilize an electoral coalition that the president hoped would include white workers, southerners, and Catholics as well as more traditional Republican voters, what Nixon had taken to calling the “Silent Majority.”

  At least in the short run, it did not work. In spite of a major administration effort, in November 1970 the Democrats lost only two seats in the Senate while picking up nine in the House. Administration supporters failed to oust a single prominent congressional critic of the war.

  Vietnam now hung over Nixon’s head, just as it hung over Johnson’s. To buy time, he continued to simultaneously reduce American troop levels and launch periodic new offensives, including a U.S.-supported South Vietnamese invasion of southern Laos in February 1971, aimed at communist supply bases. (The recently passed congressional spending restriction kept U.S. ground troops from joining in.) Meanwhile, Nixon’s effort to reconfigure the architecture of the Cold War began yielding results, which he hoped would lead to an acceptable settlement in Vietnam.

  In April 1971, following indirect signals between the United States and China that they might be open to establishing some sort of diplomatic relationship, after being almost entirely cut off from one another for over two decades, China invited a U.S. Ping-Pong team to visit. A secret trip to Beijing by Kissinger followed, laying the groundwork for a presidential visit the following February. Nixon’s trip represented a dramatic reversal of the long-established American policy of refusing to accept the legitimacy of the 1949 communist victory of the Chinese Revolution. It began a process that would culminate in formal recognition of the People’s Republic of China in 1979 and a growing range of political, economic, and even military ties.

  Just three months later, Nixon traveled to Moscow. Soviet leaders, fearful of improved U.S.-China relations and worried by a stagnating economy and an extraordinarily expensive arms race, proved as eager as Nixon to forge an improved relationship, what soon got dubbed “détente.” At their summit, Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), the first arms control measure that the United States had agreed to since the start of the Cold War. SALT I had great symbolic importance but only limited practical effect. The treaty froze the number of missiles the two countries could deploy and severely restricted the installation of antiballistic missile systems but did not control the deployment of multiple warheads on a single missile (MIRVs), a technology in which the United States had the lead. With MIRVs, a single U.S. submarine could deliver the equivalent of 160 Hiroshima-strength bombs. The two countries also signed an agreement to facilitate trade and commercial relations, under which the Soviet Union made a massive purchase of U.S. grain, including one-quarter of the entire 1972 crop of wheat.

  Nixon’s diplomatic breakthroughs with China and the Soviet Union brought a dramatic easing of big power tensions. Many hailed Nixon as a statesman of the highest stature for breaking with his own past anticommunism to seek mutually beneficial agreements with the countries that had long been designated as the main U.S. foes. Nixon made what had been almost unthinkable seem natural. Until him, no U.S. president had set foot in a communist nation, except for Roosevelt’s brief trip to Yalta during World War II. Within just a few months, Nixon journeyed to both China and the Soviet Union in visits full of ceremonial expressions of goodwill and massive coverage by the media, much of it carefully orchestrated by the White House.

  Nixon’s willingness to reach accords with the communist superpowers did not represent an end to American anticommunism. Rather, it reflected his belief that the basic status of Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and China could not be changed. Where social and political conditions remained fluid, the Nixon administration pursued a highly interventionist course. Improved relations with China and the Soviet Union were intended, in part, to provide greater freedom of action in such situations, since any countermoves by the communist powers might be checked by a threat to withdraw trade and other concessions, what Kissinger liked to call “linkage.”

  The continued U.S. intolerance for left-wing regimes, especially if democratically elected, played out most starkly in Chile. In the fall of 1970, Salvador Allende, a left-wing socialist, won the presidency of Chile with a plurality of the popular vote in a three-way contest. Determined to prevent another Marxist regime from taking root in Latin America, Nixon authorized the CIA to keep Allende from being inaugurated using any means necessary. “No impression,” Nixon said at a NSC meeting, “should be permitted in Latin America that they can get away with this, that it’s safe to go this way.” Kissinger, his deputy, Alexander Haig, and the CIA failed in their attempt to organize a military coup to keep Allende from taking office, but thereafter the United States moved covertly to undermine his government, funding opposition groups, economically isolating the country, promoting disruptions of all kinds, and cultivating the military. When military leaders did launch a coup in 1973, they knew that they would have the support of the United States, which backed the ensuing dictatorship even as it conducted a prolonged campaign of torture and murder against its opponents.

  While superpower diplomacy might have bought the United States some freedom of action in patrolling the noncommunist bloc to stamp out any moves toward the left, it did little to help with the war in Vietnam. The Soviet Union and China proved willing to pursue improved relations with the United States even at moments when it escalated the war, but they were not willing to cut off supplies to the Vietnamese communists or make more than token efforts to pressure them to end the war on terms favorable to the United States. Still, with Nixon continuing to reduce U.S. troop levels in Indochina, U.S. casualty rates going down, fighting at a low level compared to the past, and the draft ended, the Vietnam War diminished as a domestic political issue, even as negotiations with the Vietnamese communists failed to make progress.

  Then, in the spring of 1972, the communists launched a major offensive in northern South Vietnam, relying heavily on conventional North Vietnamese forces. After making significant initial gains, the offensive bogged down, in part because of the improved fighting capacity of the South Vietnamese army and in part because of the massive tactical use of American airpower. Nixon also launched a major air campaign against North Vietnam that included mining its harbors, as his rage at the inability of the United States to defeat “those little cocksuckers” exploded. “For once,” he told his top aides, “we’ve got to use the maximum power of this country . . . against this shit-ass little country: to win the war.”

  But in spite of one B-52 air attack after another, victory, as always, proved elusive. So with the military situation again stalemated and the U.S. presidential election looming, secret negotiations between the United States and North Vietnam intensified, a
s both sides saw an advantage in achieving a cease-fire and withdrawal of U.S. forces. In late October, the two countries secretly reached an agreement for an immediate cease-fire in place in South Vietnam, an end to U.S. bombing of North Vietnam, a withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Vietnam within sixty days, the release of American prisoners of war, a commitment to the peaceful reunification of Vietnam, the establishment of a new administrative structure that would include communists to organize new elections in South Vietnam, and contributions by the United States to the postwar reconstruction of North Vietnam. But in the face of objections from South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu, the United States balked at signing the tentative pact without changes to reassure him. (The National Liberation Front also criticized the pact for its failure to provide for a release of its civilian cadre imprisoned in South Vietnam.) At that point, the North Vietnamese and then the United States publicly announced the outline of the near settlement. Putting a positive spin on the situation, with less than two weeks before the presidential election, Kissinger proclaimed, “We believe peace is at hand.”

  The 1972 Election

  Nixon did not need a completed peace treaty to win reelection. His meetings in Beijing and Moscow and the troop withdrawals from Indochina had helped put him in a strong political position. So did his handling of the economy, which largely postponed the detrimental effects of the Vietnam War and the deteriorating international position of the country.