President Nixon: Alone in the White House

Dear Ted,

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I should clear up that what I was assenting to was Alan Greenspan's assertion that Nixon was the smartest president since (the intellectually overrated) Wilson. I certainly wouldn't gainsay your placing Honest Abe in the top spot, with a nod toward Jefferson and Madison. And I'm not a big one for IQ, either. Hell, if IQ were everything, you'd be president, and then where would we be?

Even excluding Vietnam and Cambodia, I can't share your assessment of Nixon's foreign policy as "dazzling." It was too delusional for that. At times he conquered those delusions. While it's outside the time frame of this book, he did a good job of defending Israel during the Yom Kippur War, for instance, even though strong Arabist sympathies (due to anti-Semitism? to an admiration for De Gaulle?) led him to mis-assess the whole dynamic of American Middle East policy. In 1970, for instance, he insisted to Israeli diplomats that he was doing all he could, given that the country was 3-to-1 against Israel--at a time when Harris Polls showed it was actually 8-to-1 for Israel (46 percent to 6 percent), with a plurality saying they'd even be willing to send troops to defend it.

The China opening? Well, it was bold. It brought China closer to Western markets. And, indispensably, it rattled the Sovs. But the undisclosed price we paid for it emerges in the tremendous chapter on the India-Pakistan war of 1971, one of the longest in this book. (Reeves knows a lot about Pakistan. He wrote a book on it called Passage to Peshawar, which I'll now make a point of getting.) The role of Pakistani leader Yahya Khan, the Butcher of Bangladesh, as go-between for the China meeting seems to have led Nixon and Kissinger into a wholly unnecessary--and, again, delusional--special relationship with Pakistan, a relationship that got deeper and deeper the more atrocities Khan committed and the more he lied to us.

There were Keystone Kops moments in this shameful episode. Chou En-lai told Kissinger (and I quote), "If India invaded Pakistan, China would not be an idle spectator but would support Pakistan." This kernel blossomed in Kissinger's head in the days before he met Khan, until the message he delivered was that "Chou En-lai had told him that the Chinese would intervene with men and arms if India moved against Pakistan." (Kissinger had pulled a similar stunt before, causing panic in the Kremlin by saying he planned to "expel" Russian advisers from Egypt.)

In the wake of widespread massacres, and with as many as 10 million refugees pouring into India, Indira Gandhi said, "Above all, India seeks stability." Nixon's response? "That bitch. That whore." At a time when the American people, the American press, huge majorities in the American Congress, and virtually the whole of the American State Department thought India was in the right, Nixon and Kissinger were waging what Reeves nicely calls a "two-man Cold War" against India, even sending warships and warning Leonid Brezhnev that "if the Indians continue their military operations, we must inevitably look toward a confrontation between the Soviet Union and the United States." I read stuff like that and think we're lucky the Nixon damage wasn't worse.

One thing I guess I admire in Nixon's foreign policy is its nonpartisanship. But only in the abstract, for the effect of this was probably negative. Vietnam was John F. Kennedy's war, and bit more partisanship might have stopped it. Nixon had inclinations in this direction. Less than a year into his term, Nixon asked Kissinger, "Is it possible we were wrong from the start in Vietnam?" But at a meeting during the invasion of Laos he said, "We are going to get out in a way to justify the investment we've made so far." Most of this investment had been made by others. Why not wash one's hands of it and blame the whole mess on Kennedy and Johnson? Similarly, Nixon's initial reaction to the Pentagon Papers was of the no-skin-off-my-back variety. ("Make sure we call them the Kennedy-Johnson papers.") But later, goaded by Kissinger at his most Iago-like ("It shows you're a weakling, Mr. President. ... [T]hese leaks are slowly and systematically destroying us."), he used them as the pretext for crimes that carry his administration's signature mountains-of-molehills lack of perspective. (Breaking into Ellsberg's shrink's office, cracking safes at the Brookings Institution, and various other plumbing work.)

We probably ought to talk about Nixon on economics. Reeves sees a Nixon totally untethered from economic principle, out of his depth. As such, for all his deeply felt populism (populism was probably the only political principle he ever felt deeply), he was a sitting duck for his party's interest groups. Although Milton Friedman's right-wing attack on Nixon's 1971 wage-price freeze strikes me as more cogent, AFL-CIO President George Meany may have been right to see it as "a rich man's plan, holding down wages but not corporate profits or the interest being paid to lenders and investors." Within Nixon's administration, the real push for wage-price controls had come all along from representatives of corporate fatcatocracy, like George Romney--and, to a lesser extent, from Donald Rumsfeld. After years of inflationary union wage settlements, it finally occurred to Big Business to say to Nixon, "Well, if it's that important to you, then you hold down wages and take the heat."

At the secret meeting at Camp David where Nixon's 1971 economic package--the freeze, the devaluation, the protectionist tariffs, and the floating dollar--was planned, someone said, "After this everybody here should get a Ph.D. in economics." To which a person Reeves describes as "one of the real economists" (it has the ring of the late, lamented Herb Stein) replied, "Yes, and everybody who already has one should turn theirs in."

Best,
Chris.

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This week, Slate's Book Club investigates Richard Reeves' new biography of Richard Nixon. (Click here for more on our format, here to learn how you can write for the Book Club, and here to buy the book.)

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