RN

by Richard Nixon

  The next morning, the New York Times ran a story by its distinguished foreign correspondent C. L. Sulzberger that “initial information” suggested that a naval installation for nuclear submarines was being built in Cienfuegos. Because the information was vague and unconfirmed and because Sulzberger’s column appeared on the paper’s editorial pages, there was a chance that the story might not be picked up for several days. When Kissinger and Dobrynin met in the Map Room that morning, neither mentioned the column nor the alleged base. Dobrynin, in fact, reported that the Soviet leaders were interested in holding a summit, and he even proposed dates. Kissinger suggested that he return to the White House later that afternoon for a reply.

  However, at a press briefing across the river in the Pentagon, a Deputy Assistant Secretary inadvertently revealed that there was evidence that a Soviet submarine facility was possibly being constructed in Cuba. Confronted with this leak, Kissinger had to meet with reporters. He tried to finesse the situation as much as possible, but the story was in the news that evening.

  Kissinger told me that when Dobrynin came back to the White House at 5:30 that afternoon his face was ashen. To Dobrynin’s surprise and then to his discomfort, Kissinger studiously ignored the afternoon’s events and began by stating calmly that he had my answer concerning the proposed summit. In principle, he said, I would agree to a meeting in Moscow in either June or September 1971. Finally he said that he wanted to talk about the press statements that had come out of the Pentagon and his own press conference earlier that afternoon. He had implied to the reporters that we did not yet know whether there actually was a submarine base in Cuba. He told Dobrynin that he had done this deliberately in order to give the Soviets an opportunity to withdraw without a public confrontation.

  “I want you to know, however, that we have no illusions about this matter,” Kissinger added. “We know there is a base in Cuba, and we will view it with the utmost gravity if construction continues and the base remains.”

  Dobrynin tried to minimize the problem, but Kissinger persisted. We were giving the Soviets an opportunity to pull out because we did not want a public confrontation. But we would not shrink from other measures, including public ones, if we were forced into them.

  Dobrynin asked whether we considered that the 1962 understandings on Cuba had been violated. Kissinger replied that we did. Cuba was a place of extreme sensitivity for us, and we considered that the installation of the submarine base had been carried out with maximum deception. Dobrynin said that he would immediately inform the Kremlin of what Kissinger had said.

  I gave orders that absolutely no further news leaks about the submarine base were to occur until we received the Soviet reply. The entire success of our strategy of keeping the crisis low key depended on keeping a tight lid on the story. I knew from the 1962 experience that a serious war scare would sweep the country if the real story of Cienfuegos hit the headlines.

  We were able to keep the secret so well that during the next few days several prominent political leaders and journalists dismissed Cienfuegos as a trumped-up crisis. Senator Fulbright, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, charged the administration with “hoodwinking the American people” and said that stories of nuclear submarine bases in Cuba were aimed at getting Congress to approve generous appropriations for the Pentagon. I did nothing to discourage such mistaken opinions; in fact, I did everything possible to carry on business as usual. The most recent U-2 flights indicated a slowing of activity at Cienfuegos, so on September 27 I left for a week-long trip to Europe.

  On October 6, our first morning back in Washington, Dobrynin called to arrange an appointment with Kissinger. He handed Kissinger a note in which the Soviet government reaffirmed the 1962 understanding about Cuba and stated that it was not doing anything in Cuba that would contradict that understanding. When Kissinger showed me the note, I was tremendously relieved. Our strategy had worked. The Soviets had decided to take advantage of the maneuverability a low profile afforded. They were backing away from the crisis by denying that it had ever existed.

  We could not, however, accept Dobrynin’s vague declaration as the definitive settlement of such a serious incident. A few days later Kissinger handed him a note from me that welcomed the Soviet reply but specifically outlined our interpretation of the 1962 understanding. I wrote, “The U.S. government understands that the U.S.S.R. will not establish, utilize, or permit the establishment of any facility in Cuba that can be employed to support or repair Soviet naval ships capable of carrying offensive weapons, i.e. submarines or surface ships armed with nuclear-capable, surface-to-surface missiles.” To nail down the details so that there would be no further “misunderstandings,” I listed five specific actions that we would consider violations of the 1962 agreement.

  Dobrynin objected to the bluntness of some of the language, but he hinted that the question would soon be put to rest. A few days later TASS, the Soviet government news agency, issued a statement that no submarine base existed, thus putting the Soviets officially on record.

  The crisis was over. After some face-saving delays, the Soviets abandoned Cienfuegos. Through strong but quiet diplomacy we had averted what would have been known as the Cuban Nuclear Submarine Crisis of 1970 and which, like its predecessor, might have taken us to the brink of nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union.

  The events at Cienfuegos Bay convinced me that I had chosen the right course in dealing with another Communist threat in Latin America—this one in Chile.

  In Chile’s presidential elections of September 4, 1970, a pro-Castro Marxist, Salvador Allende, came in first with a 36.3 percent plurality. Under Chilean law Allende’s slim plurality was insufficient for election, and the Chilean Congress would choose the new President on October 24. The CIA estimated that Cuba had pumped about $350,000 into the Allende campaign. Allende’s own intentions, stated in a campaign speech, were clear: “Cuba in the Caribbean and a Socialist Chile in the Southern Cone will make the revolution in Latin America.”

  Allende had run for President three times before and been defeated each time. In the Chilean elections of 1962 and 1964 Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had authorized CIA expenditures of almost $4 million to avert a Communist takeover in Chile. Knowing this, and knowing that nearly two-thirds of Chile’s voters had rejected Allende, I directed the CIA to provide support for Allende’s opponents in order to prevent his election by the Chilean Congress.

  We live in a far from ideal world. As long as the Communists supply external funds to support political parties, factions, or individuals in other countries, I believe that the United States can and should do the same and do it secretly so that it can be effective. Under Communist standards of morality, governments are meant to be subverted and elections influenced. To me it would have been the height of immorality to allow the Soviets, the Cubans, and other Communist nations to interfere with impunity in free elections while America stayed its hand. It is a peculiar double standard that would require us alone to stand abjectly aside as democracies are undermined by countries less constrained by conscience. In Chile we sought to help non-Communist parties have at least the same resources as the lavishly financed pro-Allende forces.

  In mid-October I was informed that our efforts were probably not going to be successful; therefore I instructed the CIA to abandon the operation. Allende was inaugurated President of Chile on November 3.

  I was extremely troubled by this. I believed, as had my two predecessors, that a Communist regime in Cuba exporting violence, terrorism, and revolution throughout Latin America was dangerous enough. An Italian businessman who called on me before the Chilean election had cautioned, “If Allende should win, and with Castro in Cuba, you will have in Latin America a red sandwich. And, eventually, it will all be red.” Such fears were realized when, soon after Allende came to power, Cuban intelligence agents began operating from a base in Chile, exporting revolution to Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay.

  After three years
of inefficient administration, during which the Chilean economy suffered from a series of crippling strikes, Allende was overthrown by the Chilean military in September 1973, and according to conflicting reports, was either killed or committed suicide during the coup.

  America was being tested in the fall of 1970—by war in Vietnam; by the threat of war in the Middle East; by the introduction of threatening nuclear capabilities in Cuba. In Chile the test was just as real, although much subtler.

  Communist leaders believe in Lenin’s precept: Probe with bayonets. If you encounter mush, proceed; if you encounter steel, withdraw. I had feared that in our handling of the EC-121 incident in 1969 the Communists may have thought they had encountered mush. While our effort to prevent Allende from coming to power failed, at least in 1970 in Jordan and in Cuba, their probing had encountered our unmistakable steel.

  1970 ELECTIONS

  Shortly before the 1970 congressional campaign began, Pat Buchanan sent me an eleven-page memorandum analyzing The Real Majority, a new book which claimed that the elections in 1970 and 1972 would be decided by what the authors, Richard Scammon, Kennedy’s Director of the Census Bureau, and Ben Wattenberg, a former Johnson speechwriter, called the “Social Issue.”

  In what became a highly publicized formulation, Scammon and Wattenberg described the average American voter in the next election as a forty-seven-year-old housewife from the outskirts of Dayton, Ohio, whose husband was a machinist. “To know that the lady in Dayton is afraid to walk the streets alone at night,” they wrote, “to know that she has a mixed view about blacks and civil rights because before moving to the suburbs she lived in a neighborhood that became all black, to know that her brother-in-law is a policeman, to know that she does not have the money to move if her new neighborhood deteriorates, to know that she is deeply distressed that her son is going to a community junior college where LSD was found on the campus—to know all this is the beginning of contemporary political wisdom.”

  The purpose of The Real Majority was to persuade Democrats to stop playing so heavily to the fashionable but unrepresentative constituencies of the young, the poor, the racial minorities, and the students. Once the Democrats got on the right side of the Social Issue, the book argued, they could win the election by taking the offensive on the economy, which was the Republicans’ weak point.

  If this analysis was right, and I agreed with Buchanan that it was, then the Republican counterstrategy was clear: we should preempt the Social Issue in order to get the Democrats on the defensive. We should aim our strategy primarily at disaffected Democrats, at blue-collar workers, and at working-class white ethnics. We should set out to capture the vote of the forty-seven-year-old Dayton housewife.

  I had decided not to do any active campaigning in 1970. I felt confident that I would not be needed because in Ted Agnew we had the perfect spokesman to reach the silent majority on the Social Issue. Our strategy worked brilliantly at first. The Social Issue had liberals on the run everywhere, with Agnew in hot rhetorical pursuit. He stirred up predictable emotions—Hubert Humphrey called him the “brass knuckles of the administration”—but in fact his salvos were remarkably restrained for campaign rhetoric and hit right on target.

  When the campaign began to heat up around the middle of September, I was deeply involved in preparations for my second European trip, which lasted from September 27 to October 5. When I left, it seemed as if we actually had a chance to pull off an upset victory and pick up some seats. When I returned, I discovered that we were in serious trouble in almost every major race.

  The problem was that we had peaked too early on the Social Issue. Democrats know how to read too, and they had obviously taken the lessons of The Real Majority to heart. Adlai Stevenson III, running for the Senate in Illinois, responded to attacks on his ultraliberal record with a highly emotional invocation of his war record. Newsweek dryly called it “the most improbable speech” in his political career and noted that the Illinois Senate race “was offering final proof that this is the year when even the proudest liberals feel they had better pay major attention to the flag and to all the traditional values, yearnings, and fears of Richard Nixon’s silent majority.” Running for the Senate in California, Ted Kennedy’s liberal protégé John Tunney used TV commercials that showed him riding around in a police car.

  As the campaign progressed and the Democrats successfully blunted the Social Issue, they unleashed a full-scale attack on us about the economy, which was undeniably having problems. They hammered at the fact that unemployment had climbed to 5.5 percent and insisted it was going to go higher still.

  We commissioned a quick private poll that indicated that as things stood we were going to lose thirty House seats and possibly all but one of the key Senate seats. I decided to reverse my earlier decision and announced that I would campaign personally for our candidates in a number of key races. During the three weeks before the election I devoted seven full days to campaigning for candidates in twenty-two states.

  Almost everywhere I went during the campaign there were bands of demonstrators. As I was entering a hall in New Jersey, a young man reached out and as he shook my hand shouted a few obscenities at me. I motioned the Secret Service back, and I stood looking at him while he screamed, “You’re guilty of murder every day you fight this war.” I said to him, very quietly, so that he had to lean a little bit forward to hear me, “Have you been to Vietnam?” He seemed surprised, and hesitated before he said, “No.” I looked at him again for a moment before I said, “Our men are fighting there so you won’t have to fight there or anyplace else in your lifetime.” By this time he had released his grip on my arm, and I walked directly into the hall.

  I would not have wanted Pat or the girls to see some of the things the demonstrators did or hear some of the things they shouted, and I was concerned about the vast majority of individuals and families who had come out in high spirits for a presidential rally and suddenly found themselves in the midst of an ugly confrontation.

  While I was talking to a crowd of about 5,000 supporters at California’s San Jose Municipal Auditorium, a crowd of about 2,000 demonstrators beat on the doors all around the building. As I walked the few steps to my car after the speech, I could see protesters gathered on the other side of the police barricades just a hundred feet away. They were chanting their favorite slogans, including “One, two, three, four—we don’t want your fucking war,” and I could not resist showing them how little respect I had for their juvenile and mindless ranting.

  I stood on the hood of the car and gave them the V-sign that had become my political trademark. It had a predictable effect, and a chorus of jeers and boos began. Then I saw something coming toward me. When it hit the roof of the car, I realized that it was a rock. Suddenly rocks and eggs and vegetables were flying everywhere. Within seconds I was inside the car and Secret Service agents were following emergency evacuation procedures. Unfortunately one of the cars in the motorcade behind us stalled, and its windows and windows in the press bus were broken by rocks. Several people, including Secret Service agents, were hit by rocks and flying glass.

  The local police chief may have exaggerated when he said it was an act of God that I got out safely. But the dents in the presidential limousine and the broken glass from the bus were real enough, and the possibility of a more serious incident having developed was very disturbing. The organizer of the demonstration proudly claimed credit for the mêlée, saying that the Peace and Freedom Party and other antiwar groups had staged the demonstration to call attention to their claim that I was a “war criminal” who was not welcome in California. He said, “After dropping that many bombs on the Vietnamese people how can anyone associated with the government claim to be upset about people throwing some eggs and rocks at Nixon? What’s so precious about Nixon that he can’t take a few eggs when he can dish out so many bombs?”

  We flew to San Clemente from San Jose, and that night I sat in my study for over an hour, thinking about what had happened
and about how I should respond. As far as I knew this was the first time in our history that a mob had physically attacked the President of the United States. I did not care what these demonstrators or their leaders thought about me personally, but if they did not respect the office of the presidency, I thought that people should be made to recognize that fact and take sides on it.

  Two days later, at a rally at Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix, I discussed the San Jose incident.

  I wanted to cut through the fashionable notion that all our troubles were the result of the supposedly immoral war in Vietnam. It was time to brand this alibi for violence as the pure nonsense it was. “Those who carry a ‘peace’ sign in one hand and throw a bomb or a brick with the other are the super hypocrites of our time,” I said. “Violence in America today is not caused by the war; it is not caused by repression. There is no romantic ideal involved. Let’s recognize these people for what they are. They are not romantic revolutionaries. They are the same thugs and hoodlums that have always plagued the good people.”

  The speech was interrupted many times by loud cheers from the noontime audience. One of the loudest came when I said, “And now could I add a personal note? The terrorists, the far left, would like nothing better than to make the President of the United States a prisoner in the White House. Well, let me just set them straight. As long as I am President, no band of violent thugs is going to keep me from going out and speaking with the American people wherever they want to hear me and wherever I want to go. This is a free country, and I fully intend to share that freedom with my fellow Americans. This President is not going to be cooped up in the White House.”