Then, for a unique moment in his Presidency, Nixon was alone outside the Presidential compound with a friend, an associate, and one single Secret Service driver. I am sure that the mouths of many terrorists would have watered had they known what easy targets were available to them that Saturday afternoon. The President of the United States and his national security adviser, between them possessing almost all the national security secrets of the country worth having, were cruising around Southern California with only a single bodyguard who had to double in brass as a chauffeur.
When we were alone again Nixon became more relaxed than I have ever seen him. He and I sat in the rear of the car, Rebozo in front, as we headed toward the town of Whittier. Nixon pointed out the gasoline station his family had run and had sold just before oil was discovered on their former property. He showed us the hotel where a discouraged Republican party had canvassed volunteers to run for the United States Congress against the presumably unbeatable incumbent Democrat of the district — itself an almost unprecedented procedure. Nixon had applied because he had nothing better to do. To his surprise, he had been selected, and he won an election that even his associates had conceded to his opponent.
We drove around Whittier College, where he recalled the teachers who had been an inspiration to him. For once, I did not think that there was any arrière pensée. The Nixon in the backseat was not the convoluted, guarded, driven politician I knew from the Oval Office, but a gentler man, simpler in expression, warmer in demeanor.
And as he was talking softly and openly for the first time in our acquaintance, it suddenly struck me that the guiding theme of his discourse was how it had all been accidental. There was no moral to the tale except how easily it could have been otherwise — a theme much more apparent to Nixon than to me. For the lesson I had been drawing from what I heard was that only a man of unusual discipline and resilience could have marched the path from candidate in a hopeless Congressional race to the Presidency of the United States. Clearly, this was not the way it seemed to Nixon, who, that afternoon in Whittier, acted as if he belonged among his simple origins in a way he never did in any of the Presidential settings.
I have always thought of this car ride through Southern California as one clue to the Nixon enigma. “Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth,” said Archimedes. Nixon sought to move the world but he lacked a firm foothold. That, I suppose, is why he always turned out to be slightly out of focus. His very real gentleness, verging on sentimentality, ran the risk of sliding into mawkishness. And his cult of the tough guy was both exaggerated and made irrelevant because it had to be wrung from essentially resistant material. Nixon accomplished much but he never was certain that he had earned it.
As we headed for Los Angeles, Nixon suddenly conceived the idea that Rebozo and I should see not only his origin but how far he had come. He wanted to drive by the residence where he had lived for two years and recovered his sense of direction after losing the Presidential election of i960. He would direct the driver; it would take us only a few minutes out of the way.
It soon emerged that Nixon had no precise idea of the location of that residence. He remembered it was in a big development in some canyon near the Beverly Hills Hotel. We explored every canyon and the streets leading off them. We searched for well over an hour. But try as we might, we could not find the house. And in the process of looking, the relaxed, almost affable, Nixon gave way to the agitated, nervous Nixon with whom I was familiar. He was at ease with his youth; he could recount his struggles; he could not find the locus of his achievements.
Nixon had set himself a goal beyond human capacity: to make himself over entirely; to create a new personality as if alone among all of mankind he could overcome his destiny. But the gods exacted a fearful price for this presumption. Nixon paid, first, the price of congenital insecurity. And ultimately he learned what the Greeks had known: that the worst punishment can be having one’s wishes fulfilled too completely. Nixon had three goals: to win by the biggest electoral landslide in history; to be remembered as a peacemaker; and to be accepted by the “Establishment” as an equal. He achieved all these objectives at the end of 1972 and the beginning of 1973. And he lost them all two months later — partly because he had turned a dream into an obsession. On his way to success he had traveled on many roads, but he had found no place to stand, no haven, no solace, no inner peace. He never learned where his home was.
One More Crisis
BY July, we were all trapped in the wait for the court cases, the investigations, and the impeachment proceedings that, each following its own momentum, seemed to be coming to a head simultaneously as if guided by an invisible hand. Even international relations slowed down. At home, we had to fight off criticisms that the summit had failed and détente was in jeopardy because we had not concluded a SALT agreement. But had we succeeded, the charge would have been that we had concluded agreements on unfavorable terms to save the President. It would have been an exacerbation of the process that had drained us for over a year. Since no agreement is possible that does not involve a balance of concessions, the group arguing that better terms were available would always have the better of the debate. Who could not claim that more might have been accomplished — especially in a Presidency whose credibility had collapsed? By July 1974 only 13 percent of the public still thought that Nixon was doing a good job as President — the lowest figure since polls were taken.
The controversy over SALT was symbolized by the supposed conflict between Schlesinger and me. We both denied major substantive disagreements, which was true, and implied that there was no dispute, which was not. It was an old-fashioned struggle for turf, made insoluble by the absence of a functioning Presidency. It is not necessary for present purposes to rehearse the debate. The fact is that it should never have occurred. But it illustrated the precariousness of America’s position in the world in the summer of 1974. Our system requires a strong President to establish coherence; as Presidential authority disintegrates, so does the ability to settle disputes. The prospects for the Administration were frightening if impeachment proceedings were to be added to the existing malaise.
Foreign countries were watching with awe and confusion the growing paralysis of one of the key supports of the international system. They could not believe what was happening; except for a few especially sophisticated leaders, all thought that the harassment of Nixon might subside at any moment. And even when during the course of July the unthinkable became more and more obvious, our adversaries showed amazing restraint — in what was perhaps the greatest tribute to the foreign policy of the Nixon Administration.
We, especially Nixon, had been talking about a “structure of peace” for years, perhaps to a point where critics were gagging at the phrase. No doubt Nixon did not moderate his customary hyperbole as he grew more and more desperate. And yet when he was reduced to impotence, when every minor-league American bureaucrat dared to challenge him with impunity, foreign leaders almost without exception remained silent and respectful. Some did so because they expected him to recover, but for the vast majority it was because they had been drawn into the orbit of our design. Almost all thought that they were better off with the international system as it existed than with any alternative that they could imagine. The Soviets wanted to preserve the option of détente as a counterweight to China; the Chinese needed us as a counterweight to the Soviets; the industrial democracies harassed us when it was safe but their new leadership relied on us for security and progress; the nations of the Middle East had no alternative to the peace process under our aegis. We had built better than we perhaps knew; the greatest tribute Nixon received was the quiescence of the nations of the world while he lay mortally wounded.
Only in the Aegean, where the primeval hatreds of Greeks and Turks flared again on Cyprus, did we have to endure an international crisis in those last weeks of Nixon’s office, and it was not that they took advantage of Nixon’s plight or even calculated it in their decisions. It
was an eruption of old frustrations and oppressions; but nonetheless it laid bare the vulnerabilities of a divided Administration with a President in no position to impose coherence. I must leave a full discussion of the Cyprus episode to another occasion, for it stretched into the Ford Presidency and its legacy exists unresolved today. I touch on it here only to the extent that it illuminated the fragility of our policymaking process and because it showed that foreign policy claimed our energies even as we were steeling ourselves for the final act of Nixon’s tragedy.
Greeks and Turks first came into contact when the Turks burst out of Asia and systematically reduced the Byzantine Empire, finally occupying Constantinople in the year 1453 and later coming to rule Cyprus in 1571. From then on, the fates of the two peoples had been intertwined, generating hatreds out of reciprocal cruelties made more bitter by their inability to escape their interdependence. For a while, major offices of state in the Ottoman Empire were held by Greeks who were then better educated and more experienced; their conquerors relieved their frustrations by frequent pogroms until the Greek population in Turkey was to all practical purposes eliminated by massacre and expulsion in the early 1920s. The two nations continued to coexist (if that is the word), the Greeks remembering Turkey’s military predominance, the Turks obsessed by their fear of Greek intellectual subtlety — each convinced that in the end the other was out to rob it of its birthright; each seeing itself the victim and prepared to preempt fate by wreaking vengeance on its neighbor. The Greek-Turkish conflict has belonged to the blood feuds of history.
After World War II, the old enemies Greece and Turkey were allies in NATO with a common stake in the security of the eastern Mediterranean. But their atavistic bitternesses found a focus in the island of Cyprus, forty-four miles from mainland Turkey, with a population 80 percent Greek and about 20 percent Turk — a lethal cocktail.
As in many other nations of mixed nationalities, a tenuous civil peace had been possible while the island was under foreign rule. But when the British granted independence to the island in i960, with Britain, Greece, and Turkey as guarantors of its internal arrangements, the subtle Greek Orthodox Archbishop Makarios III, leader of the Greek Cypriot community and of the campaign against British rule, found himself obliged to concede a degree of self-government to the Turkish minority, offensive to all his notions of government or nationality. He did not have his heart in it, and with independence he systematically reneged on what he had promised, seeking to create in effect a unitary state in which the Turkish minority would always be outvoted. The history of independent Cyprus was thus plagued by communal strife, and in 1967 Turkey’s threat to intervene militarily was aborted only at the last moment by a strong warning from President Johnson. It had become since an article of faith in Turkish politics that this submission to American preferences had been unwise and would never be repeated. I had always taken it for granted that the next communal crisis in Cyprus would provoke Turkish intervention.
Makarios nevertheless continued to play with fire. In 1972 he introduced Czech arms on the island for the apparent purpose of creating a private paramilitary unit to counterbalance those set up by the constitution. In 1974 he again took on the Greek-dominated National Guard in an effort to bring them under his control. Greece was then governed by a military junta, violently anti-Communist, deeply suspicious of Makarios’s flirtation with radical Third World countries, which it took to be a sign of his pro-Communist sympathies. It therefore encouraged plans to overthrow him and install in Cyprus a regime more in sympathy with Greece, oblivious to the fact that an overthrow of the constitutional arrangements on Cyprus would free Turkey of previous restraints. Ankara was, to be sure, at least as disquieted by the trend of Makarios’s policy as Athens, but to the Turks the preferred solution was a federal state amounting to de facto partition. Uniting Cyprus with Greece would in Turkish eyes doom the Turkish community and jeopardize Turkish se-curity interests on the island. No reassurance was possible. After all, the Turks remembered how they had handled a similar problem five decades earlier by exterminating the minority.
On July 15 — six days after my return from the Soviet Union and Europe — Makarios was overthrown in a coup d’état just as he returned from a weekend in the mountains; he was nearly assassinated. He was replaced by an unsavory adventurer, Nikos Sampson, known as a strong supporter of union with Greece. A crisis was now inevitable.
There was nothing we needed less than a crisis — especially one that would involve two NATO allies. Whomever we supported and whatever the outcome, the eastern flank of the Mediterranean would be in jeopardy. And our government was neither cohesive enough, nor did the President have sufficient authority, to sustain a prolonged period of tension.
The issue immediately became entangled in our domestic politics. Greece was a military dictatorship; hence, all groups critical of our approach to human rights urged us to turn on it as the instigator of the upheaval; failure in Cyprus would, it was hoped, produce the overthrow of the hated Greek colonels. This view was held passionately not only among traditional opponents of Nixon; it was the dominant conviction in the State Department; the Secretary of Defense moved toward it increasingly as the week progressed.
To me the issue was more complicated. I thought it most unlikely that Turkey would tolerate the union of Cyprus with Greece. That Turkey was driving toward a showdown was obvious — at least to me. A good test of whether a country is seeking a pretext for military action or a basis for a compromise is whether it can live with its own proposals. If they are inconsistent with its real interests and with its previous stands, one can be pretty certain that a casus belli is being prepared. That was the case with the Turkish position in the first week of Makarios’s overthrow. It would be difficult to imagine a foreign leader more unpopular in Turkey than Makarios. He had been blamed, with considerable justice, for the plight of the Turkish minority on Cyprus. During previous crises Turkey had insisted on his removal. Suddenly Ankara put forward the demand that Makarios be returned to office. The motivation had to be that Ankara calculated Athens was even more reluctant to see Makarios restored; Ankara presumably was counting on using the Greek refusal as a pretext to move its army into Cyprus. (There was also the slight technical problem that for about a day no one knew whether Makarios was alive and if so where he could be found.)
Turkey’s demands left little doubt that it was planning to intervene. Explicit condemnation of the Greek junta by the United States would have turned a likelihood into a certainty. A Greek debacle was in my view probable; only a regime that had lost touch with reality would take on both Makarios and Turkey over the Cyprus question. My view, as I was to explain to a WSAG meeting of July 21, was that the Greek government was unlikely to survive its follies. That made it all the more necessary that the United States not be seen in Greece as the agent of its humiliation. At the same time, we could not without cost resist a Turkish invasion because that would be considered as objectively supporting the Greek junta. In any case, only the threat of American military action could have prevented a Turkish landing on the island; this was an impossibility. My consultations with Congressional leaders produced the unanimous advice that we should not get involved at all. We could not avoid diplomatic engagement in a NATO crisis, but in the last three weeks of Nixon’s Presidency we were in no position to make credible threats or credible promises — the instrumentalities of diplomacy.
During the week of July 15 I therefore dispatched Joe Sisco to London, Ankara, and Athens. Britain, as one of the guarantor powers, was seeking to mediate between the parties. Sisco’s mission was to help Britain start a negotiating process that might delay a Turkish invasion and enable the structure under Sampson in Cyprus to fall of its own weight. But Turkey was not interested in a negotiated solution; it was determined to settle old scores. On July 19 it invaded Cyprus, meeting unexpectedly strong resistance.
We faced a strategic dilemma. We wanted to keep both Greece and Turkey in the Alliance; we sought
to prevent unbridgeable fissures. The dominant view of the bureaucracy during the first week was expressed at the WSAG meeting of July 21. Two days after the Turkish invasion of Cyprus had started, Schlesinger urged a conspicuous dissociation from the Greek government, a withdrawal of American nuclear weapons from Greece, and an end to home-porting arrangements in Greece for the US Sixth Fleet. To force my hand the proposal was helpfully leaked to the Washington Post. For my part, I was convinced that the junta in Athens would not last out the week but I was certain that if we were perceived as the cause of Greece’s debacle we would pay for it for years to come. Whatever one’s view of the wisdom of our previous policy toward the Greek junta, a Greek-Turkish war was not the moment to dissociate ourselves. Our immediate task was to stop the war; to remove nuclear weapons from Greece while Turkey invaded Cyprus would eliminate all restraints on Turkish military action. I also feared that if we once withdrew nuclear weapons we might never be able to return them — setting a dangerous precedent.
Nixon was in San Clemente and, while I briefed him regularly, he was in no position to concentrate or decide between my basic view and Schlesinger’s, especially not in a rapidly changing situation. The preoccupation with Watergate had reached a point where we were losing even the ability to transmit papers bearing on vital foreign policy matters instantaneously between the President and the White House. So many documents relating to Watergate were being moved over the circuits to San Clemente that on July 19 I had had to ask for special priority for cables bearing on the Cyprus crisis.
Years of Upheaval Page 175