President Nixon: Alone in the White House

Dear Ted,

PRINTDISCUSSE-MAILRSSRECOMMEND...SINGLE PAGE

FacebookMySpace Mixx Digg Reddit del.icio.us Furl Ma.gnolia SphereStumbleUponCLOSE

I'll stick to my insistence that Vietnam was Kennedy's war. There's no evidence that Kennedy would have backed off his growing commitment, other than the kind of muttered misgivings at short-term setbacks typical of all heads of state fighting all wars at all times. Eisenhower warned JFK explicitly not to broaden U.S. involvement there. Johnson's leadership was admittedly atrocious, but it grew out of LBJ's psychological (and to a lesser extent political) need to honor the martyred president by carrying every one of his ideas to dangerous extremes. Nixon was seeking to end the war short of abject surrender. In its swaggering machismo, in the smarty-pants Ivy League self-overestimation of its planners, and most of all in its cloak-and-dagger mania for "counterinsurgency," Vietnam has Kennedy written all over it.

Three things about the Cambodia invasion:

First, I've never been impressed with claims of its illegality and think it the weakest of the impeachment charges that were eventually drawn up in the summer of 1974. Either Cambodia had real sovereignty over its Eastern borderlands or it did not. If it did have sovereignty, then it was allowing its territory to be used for attacks on American and South Vietnamese forces and was effectively non-neutral. If it did not have sovereignty, then the Ho Chi Minh trail and Vietnamese bases were effectively Vietnamese territory, and questions of illegality aren't relevant.

Second, we can say that the United States helped create the instability in which Pol Pot flourished, but only as long as we don't blame the United States for the Khmer Rouge genocide, which would be like using the Versailles treaty to blame Clemenceau or Wilson for World War II.

Third, it's wrong to say the Cambodia operation had "no clear military goal." It had a tactical goal of disrupting the Vietcong supply lines--and achieved it for a while. (Laos is another story.)

The problem is that the United States had no goals in any sense larger than the tactical. Reeves has turned up a stunning piece of evidence to show that, at the deepest level, Nixon did not have a clue what our war aims were. En route to China with Kissinger, Nixon scribbles out on one of his legal pads a summation of both sides' negotiating interests. The Chinese side of the ledger begins: "What they want: 1. Build up their world credentials ... 2. Taiwan ... 3. Get U.S. out of Asia." The U.S. side begins: "What we want: 1. Indo-China (?)" With a question mark! What do we want in Indo-China? Who the hell knows?

You ask how Nixon would have reacted to the present crisis. He would certainly have had his moments of despair. As the outcome in Vietnam--a lost war--became clear to Nixon, he wrote that perhaps history was on the side of Communists and other wild-eyed extremists: "We give [the South Vietnamese] the most modern arms, we emphasize the material to the exclusion of the spiritual and the Spartan life, and it may be that we soften them up rather than harden them for the battle." This is pretty much Osama Bin Laden's view of the West's weaknesses.

Since you mention Saudi Arabia, the last days of negotiation during the Paris peace talks are highly instructive on the Nixon/Kissinger idea of Realpolitik--and indicative of what the two of them would be doing now. In October of 1972, South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu refused to sign on to the agreement arrived at in secret negotiations between Kissinger and North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho. He was shocked to find Nixon and Kissinger had become--for the purpose of pressuring the South Vietnamese to sign--de facto allies of the North Vietnamese. And no foolin'. Nixon went even further than that. When Thieu balked a second time, Nixon--by alluding to the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963--basically threatened to kill him, writing in a private letter: "In this context I would urge you to take every measure to avoid the development of an atmosphere which could lead to events similar to those which we abhorred in 1963."

This is the "madman theory" in spades, and it's what's distinctive about Nixon the statesman. Every single president since has looked at ideological coherence as a sine qua non of American foreign policy. Not Nixon. Thieu's reckoning was that, since the United States had spent 10 years and 50,000 lives defending South Vietnam against communism, Nixon would not be willing to trade all of that for a negotiated departure. Wrong-oh. In the context of today's anti-terrorism war, Saudi Arabia can be confident that, since our war is against Islamist terrorism, President Bush will help prop up the Saudi monarchy as long as there is a credible fear that Islamist terrorists are their most likely successors. Sounds logical, right? Such confidence would be warranted whether Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush (Sr.), or Clinton were the American head of state. It would not be warranted for a country negotiating with Nixon, who reveled in cut-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face negotiating gambits. Failing Saudi military cooperation, threats to allow (or even foment) a radical Islamist takeover of the country would decidedly be on the table.

* * *

Many of the saddest things in this strangely sad book are inside Nixon's head. For instance, there's Nixon's belief, after the Watergate break-ins, that "most people around the country think that this is routine, that everybody's trying to bug everybody else, it's politics," which is so cynical--and so wrong--as to border on misanthropy. Or Nixon's opining to his doctor that "he had always thought that most people used sleep to avoid facing problems and making decisions." There's a name for people who think about sleep that way: depressives.

Still, for all that sadness, one of the things I like most about this book is that Reeves, while no joke-cracker, has a nice situational sense of humor. Funniest is the description of how Haldeman's aides had to physically restrain Kissinger from scrambling down the airplane stairway and getting into the runway-greeting photos with Nixon and Chou En-Lai. Also funny is the way Reeves conveys that no amount of fawning press coverage can shake Nixon's conviction that the press is out to get him. After hundreds of pages of suck-up-ish Hugh Sidey--isms quoted passim ("Kissinger dominates the room without doing anything. ... His intellect fills the room. ... Kissinger is fanatical about being fair to every department, about presenting every dissent without distortion."), it's funny when we read a Nixon memo complaining that Sidey has "spoken in the most vicious derogatory terms of RN in the place where you really find out what the people think--the Georgetown cocktail parties."

May we meet at one soon.

Yours,

Chris

PRINTE-MAILRECOMMEND...RSS

FacebookMySpace Mixx Digg Reddit del.icio.us Furl Ma.gnolia SphereStumbleUponCLOSE

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.)

SPONSORED CONTENT