by Oliver Stone
President Sukarno during a 1956 visit to the United States.
President Nixon greets President Suharto, who seized power in Indonesia after the U.S.-aided massacre of between a half million and a million Communists and other leftists in what the CIA later called “one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century.”
The following months saw the massacre of between a half million and a million Communists and other leftists, many by means of U.S. arms. Perhaps a million people were imprisoned, some for decades. McGeorge Bundy told Johnson that the events following October 1 were “a striking vindication of U.S. policy.”81
His base decimated, Sukarno was forced out in 1967, replaced by Suharto. American businessmen felt great relief. The U.S. Embassy in Jakarta telegrammed Washington in December 1965, “Pressure for removing foreigners from direct control of extractive raw material production has been building for years.” Without the uprising, “removal of foreign oil companies would have been certainty.”82 Among the foreigners looking for concessions in the aftermath of the slaughter was the right-wing oilman H. L. Hunt. Hunt proclaimed Indonesia the sole bright spot for the United States in the Cold War and called the ouster of Sukarno the “greatest victory for Freedom since the last decisive battle of World War II.” In late 1968, the National Intelligence Estimate for Indonesia reported:
An essential part of the Suharto government’s economic program . . . has been to welcome foreign capital back to Indonesia. Already about 25 American and European firms have recovered control of mines, estates, and other enterprises nationalized under Sukarno. In addition, liberal legislation has been enacted to attract new private foreign investment. Tax incentives are offered and the rights of managerial control, repatriation of profits, and compensation in the event of expropriation are, in large measure, guaranteed. The prospects for private foreign investment in extractive industries are fairly good . . . there is substantial foreign investment in relatively untapped resources of nickel, copper, bauxite, and timber. The most promising industry, from the standpoint of both foreign capital and Indonesian economic growth, is oil. Crude production, chiefly from the fields of Caltex 5 in Central Sumatra, now averages 600,000 barrels per day, and daily output will probably exceed one million barrels within the next three years.83
In 1968, the CIA acknowledged that “in terms of the numbers killed, the anti-PKI massacres in Indonesia rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century.”84 Ambassador Green told a secret session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that nobody knew the actual death toll: “We merely judge it by whole villages that have been depopulated.”85
Suharto and other military dictators remained in power for decades. Despite the country’s tremendous natural wealth, the average Indonesian stayed mired in poverty. As the New York Times, which had been effusive in its praise for Suharto over the years, reported in 1993, “the average Indonesian earns the equivalent only of $2 or $3 a day and thinks of regular electricity or indoor plumbing as unimaginable luxuries.”86 U.S. corporations, however, thrived in the post-1965 business-friendly climate that was shaped with the help of U.S. economic advisors and safeguarded by a brutal military that violently repressed the least signs of opposition.
A distraught Johnson listens to a tape sent from Vietnam in July 1968. To the detriment of both his presidency and the nation, Johnson chose Vietnam over the Great Society.
Johnson, stubborn, vain, coarse, and narrow-sighted, sacrificed his dreams of being a great domestic reformer in order to pursue his anti-Communist obsessions in Vietnam, Indonesia, and elsewhere around the globe. Looking back in 1970, he told historian Doris Kearns that he had faced an impossible choice and ended up sacrificing “the woman I really loved—the Great Society—in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world.” But, if he hadn’t done so, he explained, he would have been seen as a “coward” and the United States as an “appeaser.”87 Johnson claimed that he made the choice knowing full well what it meant for him and understanding clearly how previous wars had destroyed the hopes and dreams of prior generations:
Oh, I could see it coming all right. History provided too many cases where the sound of the bugle put an immediate end to the hopes and dreams of the best reformers: the Spanish-American War drowned the populist spirit; World War I ended Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom; World War II brought the New Deal to a close. Once the war began, then all those conservatives in Congress would use it as a weapon against the Great Society . . . they’d use it so say they were against my programs, not because they were against the poor . . . but because the war had to come first. First, we had to beat those Godless Communists and then we could worry about the homeless Americans. And the generals. Oh, they’d love the war, too. It’s hard to be a military hero without a war. Heroes need battles and bombs and bullets in order to be heroic. That’s why I am suspicious of the military. They’re always so narrow in their appraisal of everything. They see everything in military terms.
When it finally came down to it, Johnson made his choice—a choice whose consequences will always define his legacy and besmirch that of the nation whose forces he commanded. “Losing the Great Society,” he lamented, “was a terrible thought, but not so terrible as the thought of being responsible for America’s losing a war to the Communists. Nothing could possibly be worse than that.”88
Some would say that the United States lost its soul in the jungles of Vietnam. And it would pay a double price in doing so. The war, which the United States would lose ignominiously despite Johnson’s efforts, would also spell the end of the last significant period of social and political reform the United States has seen. Promising both guns and butter, the United States would only deliver on the former. Postwar prosperity would at first slow and then come crashing to a halt.
Chapter 9
NIXON AND KISSINGER:
The “Madman” and the “Psychopath”
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger dominated their era as few other men have. Their bold moves brought the world closer to peace. But they also ushered in cruel and vindictive policies that more than offset their achievements. They were as unlikely a pair as ever held high office. Kissinger found Nixon “a very odd man . . . a very unpleasant man . . . so nervous . . . an artificial man . . . [who] hated to meet new people.” He found it strange that such a loner “became a politician. He really dislikes people.”1 White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman spent a great deal of time with Nixon but said he “didn’t see me as a person, or even . . . as a human being. . . . To this day he doesn’t know how many children I have nor anything else about my private life.”2
Kissinger and Nixon were privately contemptuous of each other, fighting incessantly over who would get credit for their achievements. Kissinger disparaged Nixon as “that madman,” “our drunken friend,” and “the meatball mind,” while fawning all over him in his presence. Nixon referred to Kissinger as his “Jew boy” and called him “psychopathic.”3 But the madman and the psychopath shared a vision of the United States as global hegemon. Nixon considered Woodrow Wilson the “greatest President of this century” because he had “the greatest vision of America’s world role.” Wilson had proclaimed the United States to be the world’s savior. Kissinger similarly observed, “Our experience led us to look upon ourselves and what we did as having universal meaning, a relevance that extended beyond national boundaries to encompass the well-being of all mankind. America was not itself unless it had a meaning beyond itself. This is why Americans have always seen their role in the world as the outward manifestation of an inward state of grace.”4 But neither Kissinger nor Nixon understood the basic decency that should have guided the United States’ exercise of power.
Lawrence Eagleburger, who had worked closely with Kissinger over many years, observed, “Henry is a balance-of-power thinker. He deeply believes in stability. These kind of objectives are antithetical to the American experience. Americans . . . want to pursue a set of moral principles. He
nry does not have an intrinsic feel for the American political system, and he does not start with the same basic values and assumptions.”5 Nixon and Kissinger would suffer different fates. Nixon would be brought low by pettiness, venality, suspicion, and ambition. Kissinger, though equally flawed, would win the Nobel Peace Prize. But ugly accusations and the threat of indictment for war crimes would haunt him the remainder of his days.
Nineteen sixty-eight was one of the most extraordinary years of the century. Both the United States and the world crackled with energy. Change was in the air. A critical presidential election pitted Republican Richard Nixon against Democrat Hubert Humphrey, whose image was tarnished by years of obsequiously defending Johnson’s Vietnam policies as vice president. Stunningly, the segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace, running as a right-wing populist with retired General Curtis LeMay as his running mate, was polling 21 percent with barely a month to go before the election. His law-and-order message resonated with white voters concerned about ghetto rebellions, campus disruptions, and rising crime.
Postwar baby boomers had begun flooding college campuses in 1964. Imbued with youthful idealism inspired by the civil rights movement and dismissive of Cold War shibboleths, their protests swept the country. In April 1968, Columbia University students occupied several campus buildings to challenge the university’s treatment of the surrounding black community and its support for military research. Columbia President Grayson Kirk charged, “Our young people, in disturbing numbers, appear to reject all forms of authority . . . and they have taken refuge in a turbulent and inchoate nihilism whose sole objectives are destructive. I know of no time in our history when the gap between the generations has been wider or more potentially dangerous.”6
Kirk was right about the generation gap, but his charge of nihilism couldn’t have been farther from the truth. After eight days, New York police violently dragged the protesters from the buildings. Eight hundred were arrested and more than a hundred injured. Nixon called the protests “the first major skirmish in a revolutionary struggle to seize the universities of this country and transform them into sanctuaries for radicals and vehicles for revolutionary political and social goals.”7 The viciousness of the attack seemed to confirm radical students’ contention that when push came to shove, U.S. officials would employ violence against their own citizens as they did to defend U.S. corporate and geopolitical interests overseas in Vietnam and Indonesia.
Nixon and Kissinger walking on the White House south lawn. Privately contemptuous of each other, the two were as unlikely a pair as ever held high office. Their bold moves brought the world closer to peace. But they also ushered in cruel and vindictive policies that more than offset their achievements.
Uprisings of students and young workers convulsed industrial nations around the globe. Massive demonstrations rocked Prague, Paris, Tokyo, West Berlin, Turin, Madrid, Rome, and Mexico City, where U.S.-equipped police and soldiers massacred hundreds of protesting students.
In the United States, antiwar forces mounted a challenge to the Democratic Party establishment, throwing their support to Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy. In June, Kennedy was assassinated minutes after his victory in the California primary, dashing hopes for a progressive alternative to Humphrey and his insipid “politics of joy.” In August, antiwar delegates and 10,000 protesters converged on the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. They were met by 12,000 Chicago police, 6,000 National Guardsmen, and 1,000 FBI agents. An additional 7,500 U.S. Army troops were deployed to patrol the black community. Television cameras showed club-wielding police indiscriminately attacking not only the protesters but also bystanders and the media in what a blue-ribbon commission later called a “police riot.”
By a stunning two-to-one margin, the public supported the police over the protesters. Nixon identified those Americans as the “silent majority” and rode their resentments into the White House, narrowly defeating Humphrey. The riot dashed Johnson’s hope that a deadlocked convention would turn to him at the last minute. He still kept a tight grip over convention proceedings, even blocking the moderate platform plank on Vietnam that Humphrey desperately needed. Clark Clifford called the platform defeat “a disaster for Humphrey.”8 Humphrey didn’t help his cause by waiting until late September to distance himself slightly from Johnson’s unpopular Vietnam policies. Nixon, on the other hand, insisted that he had a secret plan to end the war, refusing to divulge the details. In reality, this “plan,” as Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird admitted, amounted to little more than a strategy to pummel North Vietnam into submission.9
In what a blue-ribbon commission later called a “police riot,” police indiscriminately clubbed antiwar demonstrators, bystanders, and the media outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968.
In the final weeks of the campaign, Johnson jump-started the stalled peace talks, ordering a bombing halt to bring Hanoi back to the table. Fearing such an “October surprise,” Nixon employed Anna Chennault, widow of famed World War II general Claire Chennault, as his liaison with the South Vietnamese government. Johnson put her under surveillance and determined in late October that she was telling South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu to withdraw from the talks because he would receive better terms from Nixon. Johnson considered Nixon’s behavior treasonous. But lacking ironclad proof, Humphrey foolishly declined to expose Nixon’s machinations. “Johnson was furious,” White House aide Joseph Califano reported. Not exposing Nixon’s “treason,” Johnson believed, had been “the dumbest thing in the world,” proving that “Hubert had no balls, no spine, no toughness,” and it cost Humphrey the presidency.10
Nixon during the 1968 campaign. Riding the resentment of antiwar protesters by what he called the “silent majority” and claiming that he had a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam, Nixon narrowly defeated Hubert Humphrey.
With less than a week to go in the campaign, Thieu and Vice President Ky did indeed pull out of the talks, sealing Humphrey’s fate. Years later, Chennault, who cochaired Republican Women for Nixon, confessed her role. Until that discovery, just days before the election, Johnson provided little assistance to Humphrey, believing that Nixon would more likely continue his Vietnam policies. Humphrey, he feared, would seek peace at any price. Johnson even had the FBI tap Humphrey’s phones so he would get advance notice if Humphrey planned to openly oppose the war.
Nixon had another source of information. Harvard Professor Henry Kissinger had been a close advisor to New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Nixon’s foe in the Republican primary. When Nixon won the nomination, Kissinger sneered, “The man is . . . a disaster . . . he can’t be elected—or the whole country would be a disaster.” He told others, “That man is unfit to be president.”11 That, however, didn’t deter him from offering Nixon secret information about the Paris peace talks that Nixon used to sabotage the negotiations. He alerted Nixon to a major breakthrough in early October that made a bombing halt imminent. The U.S. delegation in Paris, he reported, had “broken open the champagne.”12
Kissinger simultaneously ingratiated himself with the Humphrey camp. He told Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Look, I’ve hated Nixon for years,” and offered to give Humphrey access to Rockefeller’s Nixon “shit files.”13 Humphrey naively believed that Kissinger was working for him and later said that he had planned to name him as national security advisor.
Nixon had little interest in domestic policy, which he once dismissed as “building outhouses in Peoria.”14 His domestic programs catered to moderates, alienating hard-core conservatives. It was foreign policy where he hoped to make his mark. He and Kissinger decided to bypass the “impossible fags”15 in the State Department and run foreign policy out of the White House. Nixon chose his secretary of state accordingly: he selected an attorney, William Rogers, who told Nixon that he knew little about foreign policy. Nixon confessed, “It was that ignorance that made the job his.”16 Kissinger cracked, “Few Secretaries of State can have been selected beca
use of their President’s confidence in their ignorance of foreign policy.”17 Kissinger made sure that Rogers was kept out of the loop on critical intelligence and decision making. The Nixon/Kissinger policies proved less ideological than many expected. “American-style democracy,” Nixon declared in 1967, “is not necessarily the best form of government for people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America with entirely different backgrounds.”18 He advised Kissinger to disregard Africa. “Henry,” he said, “let’s leave the niggers to Bill [Rogers] and we’ll take care of the rest of the world.”19