Penguin History of the United States of America

by Hugh Brogan

  First, however, he destroyed enormous numbers of Indo-Chinese, and not a few American soldiers (by the end of American involvement, 56,000 US servicemen had been killed and 270,000 wounded). This policy having proved inadequate, he changed tack radically. Peace, he decided, must be made on what terms could be got; and the United States must be protected from any possible ill-effects of acknowledging defeat by at last coming to terms with the communist government of China.

  In executing this policy Nixon had the assistance of the most remarkable diplomatist to emerge in America since 1945. Henry Kissinger, a German Jew, had come to America as a child refugee just before the Second World War. He had made a very successful career at Harvard as an interpreter of international affairs, in large part because, for good and ill, he did not share conventional American attitudes to them. Completely unsentimental and not much interested in ideology, he believed that the balance of power was still the key to understanding the world and that peace could only be brought about by judicious manipulation of that balance. He was a devout believer in the Soviet threat but came to think it was best dealt with by raising up China; and all other diplomatic problems could be made to yield, in the same way, to the logic of power. Just as Russia would not risk quarrelling with China and the United States simultaneously, so all other governments, without exception, could be coerced or bribed into desirable behaviour if reality was made plain to them. To be sure, the business of exhibiting reality was a delicate one; but here Kissinger could rely on his charm, his mastery both of broad issues and of details, his inexhaustible energy, his intellectual ascendancy, and on the wealth and technological superiority of the United States. During his years as Nixon’s adviser on national security, and then as Secretary of State (1973-7), he put all these assets to excellent use in shaping American foreign policy and had many triumphs to his name. He did not emerge with clean hands: his responsibility for the devastation of Cambodia was almost as great as Nixon’s. He found his President a very trying man to work for, and his enormous vanity cannot have liked the manner in which Nixon claimed the credit for all the successes brought home by Kissinger; but unflinching White House support was absolutely necessary if successes were to be achieved, and Kissinger paid the price for that support: he flinched at nothing. He flattered Nixon outrageously, and outmanoeuvred all rivals for the President’s confidence. The outcome seemed to justify him. Nixon made a state visit to China in February 1972; an end to the Vietnamese War was negotiated in the same year, or at least an end to direct American involvement in it (for this Kissinger and his opposite number in the North Vietnamese delegation to the peace talks in Paris, Le Due Tho, were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which Le Due Tho refused2); and when Kissinger turned his negotiating skills to the Middle East, it actually began to seem that progress was at last being made, if only at a glacial rate, towards the settlement of the Arab–Israeli quarrel. In the middle of all this the 1972 Presidential election was held. The Democrats fell further out of favour with the Wallaceites by nominating Senator George McGovern, a noted liberal and anti-war leader: their vote fell off by another two million. Wallace himself was shot and crippled by a would-be assassin and so was out of the race. Nixon was rewarded for Kissinger’s achievements by an overwhelming majority: his popular vote increased by fifteen million, and he took all but seventeen of the electoral votes. But although no one suspected it the doom of his administration was already sealed.

  Like most modern Presidents, Nixon from the first felt that he had to build up a personal political alliance, without too much regard to party or to the theoretical separation of powers, if he was to achieve anything in office. He regarded his task as much more difficult than that of his predecessors, for he was convinced that most politicians, journalists, civil servants and lawyers were his bitter enemies. The little group that stuck to him during the lean years of the sixties was composed, not of yes-men (the stories of bitter rows within Nixon’s official family are legion), but men who were absolutely loyal to their chief, men, and women too, who would let nothing stand in his way. It was said of one of them that he would walk over his grandmother to please the President. It was this group that Nixon brought with him to Washington, and it was attitudes like theirs that he wanted to instil in all those he had to deal with. He would, if he could, fill the executive branch with Nixonians of this stripe, Congress and the judicial bench too. Men of independent spirit were to be crushed; their every move would be regarded as a stroke against the President. All means must be explored for their destruction.

  Such a Manichean attitude is profoundly unwise in American politics, where the separated powers are deeply entrenched in law and custom and where the need to compromise, to live and let live, if the system is to work, is almost universally recognized, by the practitioners if not necessarily by their constituents. Nixon should have learned this lesson quite early in his Presidency when he nominated two totally unfit men for appointment to the Supreme Court. He did not ask what their records as jurists might be; it was enough that they were Southern reactionaries (whose appointment would please the racists), who would owe everything to Nixon and so would presumably be loyal, as the Nixonians understood the word. Unfortunately for them the Supreme Court has its own myth, its own constituency, and appointments thereto need the consent of two-thirds of the US Senate present and voting. It proved surprisingly easy for the opposition to block both appointments. Thereafter Nixon put up only respectable names. But he did not make the appropriate inference that there were some things he could not get away with and ought not to try. He had already set another intrigue on foot.

  The intricacies of the Watergate affair defy summary. They have anyway been laid bare to the world with a fullness for which even American government, the most indiscreet in history, showed no precedent. The general outline of the business may, however, be summarized at no great length and with no great inaccuracy. The Nixonians carried with them to the White House the conviction that of all their enemies the liberal intellectuals were the worst. There were too many of them in government, and too many even of those outside government were too good at finding things out. The worst case of the kind occurred when Daniel Ellsberg, a former employee of the Defense Department, leaked the so-called Pentagon Papers, an official but secret and appallingly frank history of the Vietnam entanglement, to the New York Times. This sort of thing had to stop, for the papers were a great help to the anti-war movement, and their unopposed publication might mean that the secrets of the new Nixon administration would one day be made public too (a foreboding that eventually came true); so a number of ‘plumbers’ were hired by the White House to stop leaks, if they could, and to spy on the opposition. Chief among them were Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt, the one a would-be James Bond, the other a science fiction writer. Both had once worked for the CIA and learned some bad habits. Common sense was not either gentleman’s strong point. They burgled the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in a vain attempt to find incriminating information; and with a handful of Cuban refugees, whom they had hired like mercenary soldiers, they broke into the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate building in Washington, hoping to bug the telephones there. They were detected at their labours by a night watchman who sent for the police; and in a few days all the plumbers had been arrested.

  The incident could not have come at a more awkward moment: the 1972 election campaign was about to begin, and if Nixon acknowledged responsibility for the plumbers he would hand the Democrats a first-rate issue. So he did all he could to conceal the involvement of Liddy and his men with the White House, thus beginning a process that would eventually wreck his Presidency, send most of his closest associates to jail and imperil the whole American system of government.

  At first it seemed that stout denial would do the trick. Of course it would be difficult if any of the arrested men chose to talk, but the White House hoped that silence could be bought with some of the money in the vast treasury accumulated
for the election by the Campaign to Re-Elect the President (known to the Democrats, the press and eventually the world as CREEP). Unfortunately not everyone was satisfied. The Washington Post put two able young reporters on the story, and began to ask embarrassing questions. The plumbers all pleaded guilty to charges of burglary, but when they came up for sentencing in January 1973 the judge indicated that he suspected a cover-up and said that unless somebody talked the sentences would be extremely heavy. This cracked the nerves of almost all the defendants: they began to confess. The Senate set up a special committee to investigate ‘Watergate’. One of the President’s men, his counsel, John Dean, who was deeply involved in the cover-up, decided that the game was lost, and started to tell all he knew to the FBI. Richard Nixon began a long rearguard action.

  There ensued one of the oddest episodes in American history. While Egypt and Israel went to war again, and the Arab countries imposed an embargo on oil exports to the United States and, after the war, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries raised world oil prices to unheard-of heights, touching off global inflation and depressing world trade; while the South Vietnamese government lurched ever nearer to final defeat, Nixon paid attention only in so far as he thought he could exploit the crises to remain in office. It was no good. In the end the American people and politicians, or most of them, realized that their President had conspired to pervert the course of justice. Impeachment proceedings were started, and it became clear that they would almost certainly succeed if pursued to the end. Eventually Nixon reluctantly faced the facts and resigned from office on 8 August 1974. The manner of his going showed that he still did not realize what he had done, in spite of his legal training, his long political experience and his sainted mother’s good advice. He said that he was resigning, the first President in history to do so, because his political base had been destroyed by unprincipled and vindictive enemies. Neither then nor subsequently did he admit that the charges against him were valid, nor did he express any penitence. His misery was obvious, as obvious as his bewilderment; but it was not the misery of an innocent man. He had been too fond of the trappings of his office, both those which he inherited and those which he devised himself. Among the latter was a system of tape-recording which caught every conversation held in the President’s various offices. The evidence of the tapes was unanswerable: Nixon, in defiance of his oath to execute the office of President faithfully, and to preserve, protect and defend the constitution of the United States, which included the requirement that he take care that the laws were faithfully executed, had tried very hard to shield the plumbers and the other culprits from justice. The American people could make sense of this and jumped to the conclusion that Nixon had also planned the original Watergate burglary (which, probably, he did not). Nixon was at a loss. The inner light had failed. For it had told him that anything was allowed to the President of the United States and that anything was allowable which helped a man to win an election. It was the faith on which he had acted all his adult life, the faith he had devised from watching the imperial actions of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and the rest, all of whom had from time to time taken chances with the Constitution. He could see no difference between their cases and his, and so went whining into exile in the luxurious home he had created for himself (partly with taxpayers’ money) in California.

  His countrymen, dismayed by defeat in war, violent social conflict and now by betrayal of law and democracy at the very heart of their political system, wondered if they could ever trust any President, or politician, or voter again. For if Nixon had perverted public life with his lies and recklessness, who had believed him, and put him into office, and collaborated with him almost to the last? And the bicentenary (‘bicentennial’ in American) of independence less than two years away!

  Fortunately for the Americans, history waits for nothing, not even a fit of national introspection. Nixon was replaced by his Vice-President, Gerald Ford (b. 1913). Ford had for years been the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, and his loftiest ambition had been to win the Speakership. Then, in the summer of 1973, as the Watergate affair reached its climax, Nixon’s first Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, was found to have engaged in corrupt practices and had to resign his office, later pleading guilty, by arrangement with the prosecutors, to the least of the charges brought against him.3 Nixon nominated Ford to replace Agnew, and less than a year later found that by so doing he had picked his own replacement.

  Ford was a good-humoured, honest, straightforward man, who did not pretend to genius: as President he consciously modelled himself on Harry Truman, whose reputation as an unpretentious but successful statesman had grown steadily since he left office, even among Republicans. The new President’s family was attractive and reassuring: they began to exorcize the cloud of sulky secrecy which had lain over the White House for so long. Ford lost some goodwill by formally pardoning Nixon, for it seemed to many that the ex-President was getting off a great deal too lightly. Nixon did not help matters by trying to get possession of the celebrated tapes: a special act of Congress had to be passed to thwart him. But it is likely that Ford did the right thing; without the pardon the aftermath of Watergate would probably have been as long-drawn-out and painful as the crisis itself.

  27 A World Restored? 1977–89

  We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the Presidency as a place of honour until the shock of Watergate. We remember when the phrase ‘sound as a dollar’ was an expression of absolute dependability, until ten years of inflation began to shrink our dollar and our savings. We believed that our nation’s resources were limitless until 1973, when we had to face a growing dependence on foreign oil. These wounds are still very deep. They have never been healed.

  President Jimmy Carter, 1979

  America is back and standing tall.

  President Ronald Reagan, 1984

  The defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal together marked a watershed in American history. The effects of the two crises would still be felt at the end of the twentieth century, not least because they made the conduct of foreign policy more difficult and presidents less secure in office. People and politicians alike had to take account of these and related changes, and the struggle to contain the after-effects was a major theme of politics from the mid-seventies until the mid-eighties. But to some extent the double crisis hid for too long the importance of America’s abiding power, wealth and energy: there was much unnecessary concern and loose talk about national decline. In part this was because, beyond the country’s borders, huge historical developments – which the United States, however deeply involved, might influence but could not control – solved some old problems, created some new ones, and cumulatively left the world looking perplexingly different from its appearance in 1945, or even 1976. It was clear only that it was still not a safe world. The lesson of Pearl Harbor held good. As the twenty-first century drew near it became apparent that although America in 2000 would have no less to celebrate than she had had at her bicentenary, still her voyage was going to be endless: no snug haven lay ahead for the ship of state. The task for Americans, as for all the nations, was to fit themselves for the eternal struggle to avoid shipwreck and make the voyage as happy as might be, while avoiding the complacency which had contributed to the wreck of so many actual ships in 1941.

  In 1977 few saw the future in precisely these terms. The new president was inclined rather to view the present as one big emergency and the future as marked by a sharp diminution of the promise of American life: he was an early believer in the theme of decline. He had reasons for this comparatively sober outlook which seemed persuasive to him. The expense of the Vietnam War, and Lyndon Johnson’s refusal to meet it by raising taxes sufficiently, had led to rapid inflation. This undermined the intern
ational monetary system established at Bretton Woods in 1944,1 for it was based on an American preponderance and power in the world economy, and on an assumption that the dollar was as good as gold, which inflation eroded. In 1971, with the United States beginning to run a large trade deficit, President Nixon ended the dollar’s convertibility into gold, which had stood since Franklin Roosevelt’s time, and thereby devalued it by 8 per cent. From now on, the world markets would determine the exchange value of the world’s currencies at any given moment. Wiseacres shook their heads over the loss of the fixed rate system, but it is doubtful if it could have coped as well as did the floating rate system with the next great economic emergency, the 1973 ‘oil shock’.

  This was a consequence of American presidential politics. Nixon engineered an economic boom in 1972 to secure his re-election, and this boom continued in 1973. The United States imported larger and larger quantities of raw materials, especially oil. America’s vast reserves, which had once made her the biggest oil-producing country in the world, were now seriously depleted, and you couldn’t drive Cadillacs on water. War again broke out between Egypt and Israel, and the oil-producing countries of the Middle East took action against Israel’s great patron. They had been amazingly patient, but they were tired of sacrificing their earnings to the profligate ways of the Americans, of pampering a country which at moments of crisis always supported their bitterest foe. Why should they subsidize the American way of life? Cheap petrol was not one of the rights of man, whatever American consumers thought. So the cartel of producers, the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries (OPEC), increased the price of oil fourfold in December, 1973. Within months the United States was experiencing inflation of more than 12 per cent per annum. The Nixon boom ended, and there was a record crop of bankruptcies in the building industry. A new economic crisis, less dramatic, but as deadly and intractable as the one which began in 1929, engulfed the globe. So far as the United States was concerned there was no immediately obvious remedy.