At least in part because of the very different expectations that had been built up around this speech, my strongly expressed determination to stand and fight came as a surprise to many people and therefore had a greatly increased impact. I called on the American people for their support:
I have chosen a plan for peace. I believe it will succeed.
If it does succeed, what the critics say now won’t matter. If it does not succeed, anything I say then won’t matter. . . .
And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support.
I pledged in my campaign for the presidency to end the war in a way that we could win the peace. I have initiated a plan of action which will enable me to keep that pledge.
The more support I can have from the American people, the sooner that pledge can be redeemed; for the more divided we are at home, the less likely the enemy is to negotiate at Paris.
Let us be united for peace. Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.
Very few speeches actually influence the course of history. The November 3 speech was one of them. Its impact came as a surprise to me; it was one thing to make a rhetorical appeal to the Silent Majority—it was another actually to hear from them.
After the speech I had dinner by myself in the Lincoln Sitting Room. I did not listen to the TV commentators, but the rest of the family did, and they were livid with anger. They said that the comment and analyses broadcast by the network news correspondents criticized both my words and my motives. Instead of presenting impartial summaries of what I had said and cross sections of political and public reaction, most of the reporters talked about the speech they thought I should have given. Tricia came in and said, “They talked as if they had been listening to a different speech than the one you made.”
But there were signs that the critics and the commentators were unrepresentative of public opinion. The White House switchboard had been lighted up from the minute I left the air. The calls continued for hours, and soon the first waves of telegrams began to arrive. After I took calls from Cabinet officers, staff, and others—including Dean Acheson—I began to realize that the reaction to the speech was exceeding my most optimistic hopes.
I was too keyed up to sleep very well that night. The various reports of the public response to the speech excited me; the reports of the television coverage rankled me. Later I made a note: “Before November 3 a majority of the press expected RN to cave, and those who did not expected him to have a violent reaction to the demonstrations. He surprised them by doing neither. The RN policy is to talk softly and to carry a big stick. That was the theme of November 3.”
By morning the public reaction was confirmed. The White House mail room reported the biggest response ever to any presidential speech. More than 50,000 telegrams and 30,000 letters had poured in, and the percentage of critical messages among them was low. A Gallup telephone poll taken immediately after the speech showed 77 percent approval.
There was no mistaking that the Silent Majority speech had hit a responsive chord in the country. In fact, for the first time, the Silent Majority had made itself heard.
The outpouring of popular support had a direct impact on congressional opinion. By November 12, 300 members of the House of Representatives—119 Democrats and 181 Republicans—had cosponsored a resolution of support for my Vietnam policies. Fifty-eight senators—21 Democrats and 37 Republicans—had signed letters expressing similar sentiments.
The November 3 speech was both a milestone and a turning point for my administration. Now, for a time at least, the enemy could no longer count on dissent in America to give them the victory they could not win on the battlefield. I had the public support I needed to continue a policy of waging war in Vietnam and negotiating for peace in Paris until we could bring the war to an honorable and successful conclusion.
During the weeks after November 3 my Gallup overall-approval rating soared to 68 percent, the highest it had been since I took office. Congressional reaction was so positive that I took the unprecedented step of personally appearing before both the House and Senate and addressing them separately to thank them for their support.
At the same time I was under no illusions that this wave of Silent Majority support could be maintained for very long. My speech had not proposed any new initiatives; its purpose had been to gain support for the course we were already following. I knew that under the constant pounding from the media and our critics in Congress, people would soon be demanding that new actions be taken to produce progress and end the war.
One result of the unexpected success of the November 3 speech was the decision to take on the TV network news organizations for their biased and distorted “instant analysis” and coverage. Unless the practice were challenged, it would make it impossible for a President to appeal directly to the people, something I considered to be of the essence of democracy.
A few days after the speech, Pat Buchanan sent me a memorandum urging a direct attack on the network commentators and a few days later he submitted a speech draft that did so in very direct and articulate language. Ted Agnew’s hard-hitting speeches had attracted a great deal of attention during the fall, and I decided that he was the right man to deliver this one. I toned down some of Buchanan’s rhetoric and gave it to Agnew. We further moderated some sections that Agnew thought sounded strident, and then he edited it himself so that the final version would be his words. He decided to deliver the speech in Des Moines, Iowa, on November 13.
When the advance text arrived at the networks, there was pandemonium; all three decided to carry the speech live. For thirty minutes, Agnew tore into the unaccountable power in the hands of the “unelected elite” of network newsmen. He said, “A small group of men, numbering perhaps no more than a dozen anchormen, commentators, and executive producers, settle upon the film and commentary that is to reach the public. They decide what 40 to 50 million Americans will learn of the day’s events in the nation and in the world.” Referring to my November 3 speech, he said that my words had been unfairly subjected to “instant analysis and querulous criticism.”
The national impact of Agnew’s Des Moines speech was second only to that of my November 3 speech. Within a few hours telegrams began arriving at the White House; the switchboards were tied up all night by people calling to express their relief that someone had finally spoken up, and within a few days thousands of letters began pouring in from all over the country.
The networks purposely ignored the widespread public support Agnew’s words received and tried to label the speech as an attempt at government “repression.” The president of CBS, Frank Stanton, called it “an unprecedented attempt by the Vice President of the United States to intimidate a news medium which depends for its existence upon government licenses.” The president of NBC, Julian Goodman, said that Agnew’s “attack on television news is an appeal to prejudice.” George McGovern reflected left-wing and liberal congressional reaction when he said, “I feel that the speech was perhaps the most frightening single statement ever to come from a high government official in my public career.”
Some voices were raised on Agnew’s side. Jerry Ford said that if the media distorted the news, they should be called to account: “I don’t know why they should have a halo over their heads,” he said. George Christian, President Johnson’s last Press Secretary, said that LBJ had been concerned about the very questions Agnew raised, but he had been afraid to make a speech about them because he knew it would be interpreted as an attack on freedom of the press.
Even some of our severest critics admitted that Agnew’s complaints were not unfounded. Writing in the Saturday Review, for example, British journalist Henry Brandon stated, “The Vice President made a few telling points. Instant commentary based on a hasty reading of a speech without much time for contemplation is hazardous and can lead to rash conclusions or unfair cri
ticism.”
After the tremendous success of my November 3 speech, an element of desperation entered into the planning of the November Vietnam Moratorium, known as the New Mobe. We received alarming reports that several militant groups involved in the New Mobe now felt that only a violent confrontation could adequately dramatize their concerns. Because of the radical background of some of the New Mobe organizers, many congressmen who had supported the October Moratorium managed to be unavailable for comment before the New Mobe began and out of town while it was going on.
On November 15 the New Mobe arrived. In San Francisco, while some of the crowd of 125,000 yelled “Peace!” Black Panther leader David Hilliard insisted, “We will kill Richard Nixon. We will kill any [one] that stands in the way of our freedom.”
In Washington, 250,000 demonstrators surged into the city, causing the Washington Post to rhapsodize: “To dig beneath the rhetoric is to discover something extraordinary, and quite beautiful. Those who were here . . . are here in support of what is best about this country.” At the Washington Monument, Dick Gregory brought the crowd to its feet when he said, “The President says nothing you kids do will have any effect on him. Well, I suggest he make one long distance call to the LBJ Ranch.” And later in the day came scattered episodes of violence. A group of protesters battled with police as they made their way through the streets knocking out windows. At the Justice Department protesters shouting “Smash the state!” stormed the building, tore down the American flag, burned it, and raised the Vietcong flag in its place.
I had never imagined that at the end of my first year as President I would be contemplating two more years of fighting in Vietnam. But the unexpected success of the November 3 speech had bought me more time, and, bolstered by Sir Robert Thompson’s optimistic estimate that within two years we would be able to achieve a victory—either in the sense of an acceptable negotiated settlement or of having prepared the South Vietnamese to carry the burden of the fighting on their own—I was prepared to continue the war despite the serious strains that would be involved on the home front. Two years would bring us to the end of 1971 and the beginning of the 1972 campaign, and if I could hold the domestic front together until then, winning an honorable peace would redeem the interim difficulties.
As 1970 began, I envisioned a year of limited and even diminishing battlefield activity. I also envisioned the continuation of Kissinger’s activity in the secret channel. I was rather less optimistic than Kissinger regarding the prospect of a breakthrough in the secret negotiations but I agreed that we must continue to pursue them as long as there was even a possibility they would be successful. Kissinger and I agreed that at the very least they would provide an indisputable record of our desire for peace and our efforts to achieve it.
I was disappointed but not surprised by the apparent ineffectiveness of our attempts in 1969 to get the Soviets to apply pressure on North Vietnam. But I understood the pressures placed on Moscow by the rivalry with Peking for ascendancy in the Communist world, and I felt that the important thing was to keep the Soviets aware that while we might recognize their inability to decrease their support of Hanoi or to apply pressure on the North Vietnamese to negotiate a settlement, we would not tolerate any major increase in aid or belligerent encouragement. Not surprisingly, the greatest incentive for Soviet cooperation in Vietnam was our new relationship with the Chinese, but that would not become a major factor until the middle of 1971.
I do not know whether or how I would have acted differently if at the end of 1969 I had known that within less than four months I would be forced to order an attack on the Communist sanctuaries in Cambodia, or that the next two years would once again bring America to the brink of internal disruption over Vietnam. At the same time I would have to walk a constantly higher tightrope trying to support our allies and our fighting men while not pushing the increasingly powerful antiwar forces in Congress into passing legislation that would cut off funds for the war or require our withdrawal.
All this lay ahead. As I sat in my study in San Clemente on New Year’s Day thinking about these problems, I actually allowed myself a feeling of cautious optimism that we had weathered the worst blows from Vietnam and had only to hold firm until time began to work in our favor. I suppose that in some respects the Vietnam story is one of mutual miscalculation. But if I underestimated the willingness of the North Vietnamese to hang on and resist a negotiated settlement on any other than their own terms, they also underestimated my willingness to hold on despite the domestic and international pressures that would be ranged against me.
1969: PRESIDENT AND CONGRESS
I was determined to be an activist President in domestic affairs. I had a definite agenda in mind, and I was prepared to use the first year of the presidency to knock heads together in order to get things done. “The country recognizes the need for change,” I told the first meeting of my new Urban Affairs Council, “and we don’t want the record written that we were too cautious.”
But it didn’t take long to discover that enthusiasm and determination could not overcome the reality that I was still the first President in 120 years to begin his term with both houses of Congress controlled by the opposition party. I sent over forty domestic proposals to Congress that first year, including the first major tax reform package since Eisenhower’s first term, a proposal to reorganize foreign aid, a message on electoral reform, the first presidential message in our history dealing with the explosive problems of population growth, and some twenty proposals dealing with crime and drug and pornography control. Only two of these proposals were passed: draft reform and our tax bill. Legislation that would take the Post Office Department out of politics and turn it into a non-partisan corporation soon followed. We won some tactical legislative victories over the Democratic opposition, but it soon became clear that my attempts to get Congress to approve creative and comprehensive proposals were going to be resisted.
Three major congressional battles that first year illustrated the kind of problems I would face in my dealings with Congress throughout my first term. There was the cliff-hanging one-vote margin of victory on my request for an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system, underscoring the uncomfortably narrow bipartisan coalition I had to depend on when it came to foreign policy and defense issues. Then there were the battles over the Supreme Court vacancies: with the Haynsworth nomination at the end of 1969 and the Carswell nomination at the beginning of 1970, Congress, in an unprecedented partisan display, refused to confirm two successive presidential Supreme Court nominees. Finally, our bold attempt to reform the federal welfare system—the Family Assistance Plan—illustrated the problem of the Senate’s tendency to fracture into special interest groups. As George Shultz later summed it up. “He who walks in the middle of the road gets hit from both sides.”
It was clear to me by 1969 that there could never be absolute parity between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. in the area of nuclear and conventional armaments. For one thing, the Soviets are a land power and we are a sea power. For another, while our nuclear weapons were better, theirs were bigger. Furthermore, absolute superiority in every area of armaments would have been meaningless, because there is a point in arms development at which each nation has the capacity to destroy the other. Beyond that point the most important consideration is not continued escalation of the number of arms but maintenance of the strategic equilibrium while making it clear to the adversary that a nuclear attack, even if successful, would be suicidal.
Consequently, at the beginning of the administration I began to talk in terms of sufficiency rather than superiority to describe my goals for our nuclear arsenal. Putting an end to the arms race meant working out trade-offs with the Soviets, and I wanted us to have the most bargaining chips from the outset in order to get the best deal. I said that Congress must not send me to the negotiating table as the head of the second strongest nation in the world.
This is where the ABM came in. The Soviets had indicated that they were willing to reach agr
eement on defensive arms limitation. Most of the liberals in Congress, the media, and the academic community tended to take them at face value in this regard and feared that a congressional vote for an ABM system would destabilize the existing arms balance and compel the Soviets to increase their own construction programs, thus losing a precious opportunity and moving the arms race up another notch.
I thought they were wrong. I thought the Soviets’ primary interest in opening arms negotiations at that point was that without an ABM we would be in a disadvantageous negotiating position. Our intelligence reports indicated that in 1969 the Soviets spent the equivalent of $25 billion on nuclear weapons. They deployed more than a hundred intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) while we deployed none; they added several nuclear missile-firing submarines to their Navy while we added none; and they deployed forty new ABMs around Moscow. We knew that even as the debate in Congress over an American ABM was raging, the Soviets had initiated work on more ICBMs and ABMs, as well as major new radar systems in conjunction with their deployment; they were also building additional submarine missiles. I felt that tactically we needed the ABM as a bargaining chip for negotiations with the Soviets: they already had an ABM system, so if we went into negotiations without one we might have to give up something else, perhaps something more vital. In that sense, we had to have it in order to be able to agree to forgo it. I tried to persuade Congress that what the ABM vote represented was really a philosophical turning point in America’s strategic credibility.
I knew that the vote on ABM would reverberate around the world as a measure of America’s resolve. The minute the Europeans or the Japanese decided that we could not be depended upon to keep our commitments and stand up to the Soviets, the American position in Europe and the Far East would be severely damaged. But as I saw it, the ABM vote involved the much deeper question of whether Americans still believed that we stood for something in the world and that we must be willing to bear the burden of resisting aggression against our allies and friends. I believed that the majority of Americans felt this way; but as long as there was any doubt about it among our enemies, the temptations to test us would be that much stronger. The ABM vote would be the first significant congressional vote on defense measures in my administration, and I wanted the signal to go out that we had not lost our national sense of purpose and resolve—because I did not think we had.
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