Nixon and Mao (16 page)

While he had some sympathy for the civil rights movement, Nixon disliked much of what he saw in the 1960s. He saw in the turmoil a toxic intolerance and contempt for old values and for established ways of doing things. “I had no patience with the mindless rioters and professional malcontents,” he wrote in his memoirs, “and I was appalled by the response of most of the nation’s political and academic leaders to them.”
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In private, he called protesters “rabble” and “scum” and suspected that Communists were behind their demonstrations. He longed for a return to what he saw as basic American values: “A strong United States patriotism, strong moral and spiritual values.”
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The postwar baby boom, which came of age in the early 1960s, had spawned not only a powerful youth culture but a willingness on the part of the young, or at least many of them, to challenge existing mores and institutions at a time when many of their elders were also questioning them. Much of the resulting turmoil was froth: sex, drugs, and rock and roll. There were massive concerts, at Woodstock, for example, where people sat in the mud and talked of love and peace—young women with flowers in their hair and men with beards, in wild shirts and beads and bell-bottom trousers. On the extremes, a few—and it was hard at the time to tell how many there were—rejected American democracy altogether and talked of violent revolution or going back to the land to set up their own societies. The movie
Easy Rider,
whose biker heroes soared across American high on speed and psychedelics, pausing every so often to cast an approving eye on struggling communes or score some more drugs, expressed for a generation an incoherent longing for freedom, but from what? Suitably, the heroes die before they can grow old and suburban.

Nixon watched the cultural changes with dismay. Look, he told Haldeman in 1971, at that new television show “that glorified the homosexuals.” In Nixon’s opinion, “homosexuality, dope and immorality are the basic enemies of a strong society, and that’s why the Russians are pushing it here, in order to destroy us.”
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The United States, he feared, had suffered irreparable damage from “the new morality where the individual determines what is moral and what is right” and everyone blames “the establishment.”
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The establishment took the blame for it all—poverty, violence, injustice, and, above all, Vietnam.

For many Americans at the time, that one word summed up all that had gone wrong with the United States in the 1960s. Vietnam meant loss—of sixty thousand American lives, of the country’s prestige and influence, and of innocence. Stories of American soldiers taking drugs and reports of casual brutalities—the massacre of civilians at My Lai, for example—shook people back home. Before Vietnam, American soldiers had been “our boys” and American wars had been righteous—for independence, for a better world in the First World War, to save that world from fascism in the Second, and, in Korea, to stop the spread of international Communism. Vietnam was, or so many Americans had come to think, not righteous at all. Indeed, it was very wrong. The United States was interfering in the affairs of a far-off country whose people wanted their independence. It was backing the corrupt regime of South Vietnam against—or so it was sometimes naively believed—a broadly based nationalist movement in the south and the benevolent socialist state of North Vietnam. Even those who had few illusions about the Communist regime in the North wondered, with George Kennan, what vital American interest was at stake in a small and backward part of Southeast Asia; and conservatives worried about what an unpopular and unsuccessful war was doing to the American military and to American society itself.

On paper, the United States should have been able to handle the insurgent forces in South Vietnam and the simple little country of North Vietnam easily. A country of 250 million against one of 20 million; the most developed economy and technology in the world against one that was still primarily agricultural; and the most up-to-date weapons against simpler Soviet or Chinese ones. A sour joke that circulated in Washington in 1968 had experts feeding all available statistics from both sides into a computer. The computer was asked, Will the U.S. win the war? The answer: You won in 1966.

The Kennedy and Johnson administrations and their generals had promised victory year after year. The United States had poured money and hardware and young men into Vietnam, and victory had kept receding. Even for a rich country, the financial burden was proving heavy; from 1962 onward, the United States ran a budget deficit that ultimately contributed to growing inflation and an increasing indebtedness. It was also, although few people realized it until the crisis of 1973, growing dependent on foreign oil. In 1968, the Tet offensive, launched by North Vietnam and its southern collaborators, shook the faith of the American public in all the promises of victory. Tet, in fact, was a military victory for the American forces and their South Vietnamese allies, but it did not appear so to public opinion. When Communists could seize Hué, the old capital of Vietnam, with impunity or occupy the outer compound of the American embassy itself in Saigon, it seemed to many Americans that the war was unwinnable. In the United States, in Congress, on Wall Street, in the churches, in the universities, and on the streets, Americans demanded an end to it.

Nixon and Kissinger knew the damage Vietnam had done to the United States internationally as well as at home. The Soviet Union and its allies had watched with pleasure as American power failed to crush North Vietnam. American allies had watched uneasily as their superpower showed its weakness. Their publics had increasingly turned sour on the United States; in Canada and western Europe, huge demonstrations demanded that the United States get out of Vietnam. Much of the criticism, and not just from the left, was disturbingly anti-American. The United States was portrayed as an international bully in which the forces of capitalism ran uncontrolled. In the Third World, American imperialism was routinely condemned, while little was said of the Soviet empire.

Nixon wanted to reverse the decline. “Power of the United States,” he told Haldeman in his first year in office, “must be used more effectively, at home and abroad, or we go down the drain as a great power. Have already lost the leadership position we held at the end of WW II, but we can regain it, if fast!”
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To do that, he had to get the United States out of Vietnam but in a way that did not look like a scuttle. “Peace with honor” was the promise he made to the American public during the election campaign, a slogan that appeased liberals, who simply wanted the United States out of Vietnam, and the right, which thought that Nixon would show firmness. He was not entirely disingenuous. He loathed the North Vietnamese and would have defeated them if he could. He did not simply want to abandon the South (as in the end he did). Unfortunately, Nixon had no real plan of how to get the United States out of Vietnam, merely a hope that the negotiations with the North Vietnamese that had started in the Johnson administration could be made to work, perhaps through the application of judicious amounts of force and the right sorts of promises.

His main interest was in the big issues facing the United States, its relations with the Soviet Union above all. The Soviets were pushing ahead with the development of advanced nuclear weapons and were expanding their navy. Under Brezhnev’s leadership, they were showing an aggressive determination to hang on to what they had and to spread their influence in fresh parts of the world. Brezhnev not only justified the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 as necessary to save socialism there but said, in what came to be known as the Brezhnev Doctrine, that he would do the same thing in other socialist countries when the Soviet Union deemed it necessary. In the Middle East, the Soviets were supplying huge amounts of weaponry and sending thousands of advisers to radical Arab states such as Egypt and Syria.

Even apart from what the Soviets were up to, the world had dangerous pockets of instability: in the Middle East, where the Arab-Israeli conflict showed every sign of heating up again; in Latin America, where military regimes often combined a contempt for democracy with anti-Americanism; in South Asia, where India and Pakistan remained in a state of armed tension; and, of course, in Southeast Asia itself, where the war in Vietnam was spilling over into Laos and Cambodia. The United States also had problems in Europe—with France, for example, as it asserted its independence in often irritating ways. The key Cold War alliance of NATO was, as Kissinger put it, in “a state of malaise.”
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One of the reasons Nixon took a trip to Europe a month after his inauguration was to show that the United States was ready to consult with its allies and that it was no longer completely preoccupied by Vietnam.

Vietnam, though, kept intruding itself. The North Vietnamese, sure that victory was at hand, were not prepared to negotiate seriously, and so the war dragged on, with more Americans dying and more American resources being used up. “No matter what facet of the Nixon presidency you’re considering,” Haldeman told an audience in the late 1980s, “don’t ever lose sight of Vietnam as the over-riding factor in the first Nixon term. It overshadowed everything else, all the time, in every discussion, in every opportunity, in every problem.”
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In his first November in office, Nixon and his staff watched from a barricaded White House as hundreds of thousands of antiwar protestors poured into the center of Washington. As a radical fringe turned violent, government offices filled with tear gas. “Very strange emotional impact,” reported Haldeman, “as they took down American flag and ran up Viet Cong.”
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Nixon feared, among much else, the effects that Vietnam would have on American thinking about the world. Would the United States in its bitterness become extremely nationalistic or take refuge, as it had done after the First World War, in passive isolationism? For a president who had spent much of his career on foreign policy and who believed that the United States was a force for good in the world, either alternative was abhorrent. He also recognized that, like it or not, the United States was no longer the dominant world power it had once been.
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It now had to deal with its own relative decline and the rise of confident newer powers. Early on in Nixon’s administration, his undersecretary of state, Elliott Richardson, wrote a memorandum that accurately captured the president’s thinking:

The Nixon foreign policy, as I understand it, is built first of all on a realistic awareness of changes in the world that have taken place over the past decade. For purposes of the role of the United States, the most important of these are: (a) the increasing capacity and determination of individual nations to maintain their own independence and integrity; (b) the subordination of ideologies to these over-riding national objectives; and (c) the recognition that United States economic and military resources, in light of competing domestic demands, are not as unlimited as they may once have seemed.
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It was a point of view echoed a few days later, on December 18, 1969, by Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, who told a press briefing that the days when the United States was the richest and most stable country in the world, “the country without whose leadership and physical contribution nothing was possible,” were over. Other countries were now playing a much greater role in the world. There were new nations to deal with, as well as the fact that Communism was no longer a monolith. “We, therefore, face the problem of helping to build international relations on a basis which may be less unilaterally American.”
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Both Nixon and Kissinger also believed that, as Nixon put it in a letter to Melvin Laird, his secretary of defense, “the great issues are fundamentally interrelated.” He did not want, he said, to establish artificial links. “But I do believe,” he added, “that crisis or confrontation in one place and real cooperation in another cannot long be sustained simultaneously.”
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The Soviets should realize that if they wanted to enjoy the benefits of trade, for example, with the United States, they ought to be ready to talk arms control—or be helpful over Vietnam. In one of his early meetings with Anatoly Dobrynin, in October 1969, Nixon told the ambassador, “If the Soviet Union found it possible to do something in Vietnam, and the Vietnam war ended, the U.S. might do something dramatic to improve Soviet-U.S. relations, indeed something more dramatic than they could now imagine.”
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Linkage, as the tactic came to be known, was also, in Kissinger’s words, “an overall strategic and geopolitical view.” Ignoring the fact that events were connected made coherent policies difficult, if not impossible. The difficulty, he complained, was that Americans were not used to seeing the world in this way: “American pragmatism produces a penchant for examining issues separately; to solve problems on their own merits, without a sense of time or context or of the seamless web of reality.”
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In that seamless web of reality, China was increasingly coming to figure. Nixon had always been, and remained, firmly opposed to Communism, but by the time he was president some of the passion had gone out of him, as it had out of many of his contemporaries. The Soviet Union, they all knew, had an evil system and was the enemy of the United States, but they had become accustomed to dealing with it. If they could deal with one Communist power, why not another? American dealings with the Soviet Union were an example of what might be possible. The Cold War was a conflict, but it also was a relationship. Statesmen on both sides had gradually come to the realization that nuclear weapons meant they could not afford a hot war between the United States and the Soviet Union. The two sides had been obliged to talk to each other. Like individuals in an intense relationship, they had gotten to know each other’s ways and what to expect. They had continued to fight each other, but indirectly. And sometimes they had collaborated: to limit the spread of nuclear weapons to other powers, for example, and to ease tensions in the Middle East.