Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (114 page)

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Authors: Conrad Black

BOOK: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership
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Richard Nixon, now heavily backed by public opinion, was defending the credibility of the United States, and said that his office would not be worth holding if he was chased out of Vietnam by the communists, who had treated his every conciliatory gesture with contempt for three years. Now they had gone too far. The inexhaustible and brilliant diplomatic troubleshooter Henry Kissinger, dispatched to Moscow on April 20 after Nixon had delayed his departure for two weeks, to set up the state visit to the Soviet Union, reported that Brezhnev claimed no foreknowledge of the North Vietnamese attack and didn’t care how severely the Americans blasted North Vietnam. In discussions with Gromyko, he moved the parallel discussions between arms-control specialists a long way forward from where they had arrived at Helsinki.
Kissinger returned on April 25 and he and Nixon worked out the retuning of their strategy: the greatest arms-control agreement in history (though Nixon always thought arms control a fraud because the Russians always cheated and the U.S. could always win an arms race, so there was no reason to curtail it, a point proved by subsequent president Ronald Reagan); a slight caution to the Chinese with an upbeat visit to Moscow; and the decision finally to unload on the Vietnamese communists from the air as the president had been advocating since he was Citizen Nixon seven years before.
As the outcome in South Vietnam hung in the balance, Nixon ordered the closing by aerial mines of Haiphong harbor and the direct destruction of all military targets in North Vietnam, including every trace of the country’s rudimentary rail and highway network. Still unflustered by what was widely assumed to be the imminent cancellation of his visit to the Soviet Union and the arms-control agreement, he spoke to the nation on May 8. He summarized the Kennedy-Johnson escalations, his staged withdrawals, and his frequent and completely unrequited efforts at peace agreements in public and private negotiations. And he summarized the escalation of the air war, which he promised would destroy the entire war-making potential of the North and would continue until there was a peace agreement, including a return of prisoners of war. This was a tacit admission, as Johnson had made in 1966, that the NVA could remain in South Vietnam. With China having deserted Hanoi’s higher ambition to drive the U.S. out and Moscow apparently more concerned with the triangular relationship with Washington and Beijing than with encouraging Hanoi’s war ambitions, the diplomatic objective now conformed to military and diplomatic realities at last.
The liberal press and the peace Democrats attacked Nixon’s escalation, but the Silent Majority held firm, as Nixon had withdrawn American forces and was clearly being assaulted by a totalitarian regime in violation of international law, and the South Vietnamese were now defending themselves quite courageously. Moscow reaffirmed its invitation to him, and he departed Washington for Moscow on May 20 after ordering an increase in air strikes on North Vietnam from 1,000 to 1,200 every day he was in the USSR He and his very large entourage landed at Moscow on May 22, and on the first state visit of a president of the United States to the Soviet Union, Nixon was greeted with maximum ceremony and respect and conducted in a vast motorcade to the Kremlin Grand Palace, over which the U.S. flag now flew beside that of the Soviet Union.
The key issue of the summit talks was Strategic Arms Limitations (SALT), and Nixon supported Kissinger and the professional arms negotiators led by Gerard Smith, to agree on equal launchers and throw weight, but exempt multiple-warhead regulation (MIRVs) and intercontinental bombers, thus appeasing the doves while retaining the ability to overstrain Soviet financial resources and quiet the hawks. (It was all even more symbolic than the space race, since both countries had a vastly excessive nuclear capability for any conceivable purposes.) Agreement was reached and signed on May 26, including anti-missile defense systems, and leaving out American MIRVs and long-range bombers. It was a brilliant agreement for the United States.
Nixon went on to Leningrad, eloquently addressed the Soviet people and the world in a conciliatory televised address, had a very cordial windup with Brezhnev, went to Kiev, called upon the Shah of Iran, and returned to Washington on June 1 and went directly to address the Congress, which greeted him with abundant and cordial respect. By this time, the South Vietnamese, with no American help on the ground, had defeated and repulsed the communist offensive. The Nixon (or Truman or Eisenhower) Doctrine was working. There had never in American history been such a sequence of strategic policy successes, apart from the unfolding of World War II after May 1942. Nixon had won the war of the United States against North Vietnam and was within sight of retrieving a non-communist South Vietnam, as ARVN had demonstrated it could hold with heavy U.S. air support. This was astounding progress since Johnson had thrown in the towel with his Manila proposals six years before. Nixon was now hoping for more than a decent interval after the end of direct American involvement in the Vietnam conflict.
12. THE 1972 ELECTION AND THE CLIMAX IN VIETNAM
 
What now took place was unprecedented in America—a bipartisan dual suicide. Pacifist George McGovern defeated Hubert Humphrey in the California primary and was assured of the Democratic nomination, which he did win on July 13. The Democratic convention in Miami was a shambles that saw votes cast for fictitious characters and Mao Tse-tung for vice president, and where McGovern only got to speak at 3 a.m. The vice presidential candidate, Thomas Eagleton, had to withdraw because of earlier mental health problems, and was replaced by Kennedy in-law and former War on Poverty director and ambassador to France, Sargent Shriver. The Democratic platform called for immediate purification of the environment whatever the cost in unemployment, higher income taxes for everyone above the average national income, drastic defense cuts and immediate, unconditional withdrawal from Vietnam, unlimited busing of school children to achieve racial balance in each school regardless of geography or the wishes of parents, a guaranteed annual income for every American, and immediate amnesty for all draft dodgers and deserters. Running against the most successful single presidential term at least since Roosevelt’s third term 30 years before, the Democrats chose a very mediocre candidate to run on an insane platform that not a third of the population could possibly have endorsed.
For the first time in decades, running in his own right, Nixon was going to enjoy a landslide. More than that, the Democrats had committed themselves to a nomination process that fragmented their party, expelled the bosses (and even refused to seat the mayor of Chicago, Richard J. Daley, who had won the 1960 election for Kennedy), and distributed power to unrepresentative blocs of affirmative-action-selected delegates. Following 40 years of distinguished candidates (Smith, Roosevelt, Truman, Stevenson, Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey), the Democrats would not produce an impressive, or for the most part even serious, candidate for president or vice president for 20 years (except for Senator Lloyd Bentsen, the vice presidential candidate in 1988). George Meany, the head of the AFL-CIO, the principal labor confederation, which had declared its neutrality in the election for the first time in history, allowed that he would not vote for either candidate but that his wife and daughters were voting for Nixon.
Meanwhile, a group of overeager Republicans, responding to what they and the Nixon forces generally thought was an unscrupulous, unpatriotic Democratic Party favored by liberal media, broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building in Washington and were apprehended by police on June 14. Nixon had not known anything of this mad enterprise, nor, specifically, had anyone close to him, and it was so ludicrous that for a long time even the Democrats and the national media didn’t think such an astute operator as Nixon could possibly be dragged into it. Unfortunately, instead of delegating the matter to someone to keep it away from the presidential office and shut it down as best he legally could, Nixon became directly involved in strategies for dealing with it and repeatedly misled the public and the press about his involvement, which came to light when a tape recording system in his office and on some of his other telephones was revealed and its recorded contents were subpoenaed. It is still not clear that Nixon did anything illegal, but once the media and his partisan opponents got a glimpse of Nixon’s vulnerability, they pursued him relentlessly, he continued to mishandle the problem, and executive authority evaporated day by day.
Nixon made the further error of spending all the vast resources of his party in this election year on his own campaign, and for the first time since 1946 did not lift a finger to help Republican congressional candidates and scarcely campaigned personally at all. Had he elaborated the program he had championed for decades, including welfare and health care reform, tax reductions and simplification, and a strong but sane environment policy; added a referendum on the Vietnam peace terms he insisted on; and spread the party’s money around the congressional races and campaigned hard for his party’s candidates, he would probably have withstood even the tactical errors he made handling Watergate, inexplicable as they were.
Kissinger continued the formerly secret but now revealed talks in Paris, and the North Vietnamese finally recognized that they could not defeat the United States: that Nixon was about to smash his pacifist opponents, had induced Beijing and Moscow to defect from Hanoi, had adequately supported ARVN to beat the communists on the ground, and was now battering the North with over a thousand air strikes a day that could not be endured indefinitely and that were arousing no protests at all in America. (The American public, within reason, didn’t care what Nixon did to the North; it was only concerned about American casualties, and these had almost stopped). By the time Nixon was renominated (1,327 to 1) at his convention in Miami on August 22, Le Duc Tho had accepted the last published American peace terms and had agreed with Kissinger, who had undoubtedly managed very difficult negotiations with impossible interlocutors with great skill, on an October 15 date of peace. There would be an elaborate formula for subsequent elections in South Vietnam, which all sides would ignore.
By October 10, Kissinger had pushed Le Duc Tho a little further back than what Nixon had offered in January, while McGovern went on national television to say that he would end all aid of every kind and withdraw completely from South Vietnam on inauguration day. Even the
New York Times
remarked that McGovern was advocating harsher terms for the U.S. and Saigon than Hanoi was now proposing. Kissinger returned to Washington on October 12, and as peace appeared imminent, Nixon finally cut the bombing of the North to 200 sorties a day. Nixon and Kissinger were trying to bring Thieu into line, but he was demanding the complete withdrawal of northern forces from the South. Nixon had let pass the ability to turn any part of the election into a referendum on a peace settlement. However great his own victory, the Democrats would hold the Congress.
Ironically for a president about to win the greatest plurality in American history (unsurpassed even 40 years later), time had run out for Richard Nixon. He couldn’t browbeat Hanoi into more concessions, would have to force the issue with Thieu, and would soon be facing votes to cut off the war in Congress now that he had made the Democrats’ war terminable on his own previously stated terms. On November 7, 1972, Richard Nixon won over McGovern, 47.2 million to 29.2 million, 60 percent to 37.5 percent of the vote, and lost only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. The electoral vote was 520 to 17. The Republicans won 12 congressional seats but lost two senators. It was a presidential landslide comparable only to Roosevelt’s in 1936 and Johnson’s in 1964, in the whole history of contested American elections starting in 1824.
Nixon had only to inauguration day, 14 weeks, to get a peace signed in Vietnam. He managed the recalcitrance of Thieu by raising the ante one more time, as the deadline of the now completely post-Johnson congressional Democrats to withdraw American support closed in on them. The U.S. was threatening the North with massive escalation if they did not accept revised American terms and the South with abandonment of the war if they did not accept the terms. It was a delicate game. Kissinger took Thieu’s exceptions to the draft agreement to Paris on December 4, and they were rejected. Kissinger and Nixon both went into overdrive, Kissinger carrying on arduous negotiations with the Chinese in Paris in the evenings and with Le Duc Tho during the day, while Nixon pulled out all the military and diplomatic stops, raising the intensity of bombing beyond any previous levels. He remined Haiphong harbor and resumed heavy bombing in Hanoi on December 14, and the bombing was moved to 1,500 strikes per day on December 18. The Soviet ambassador in Hanoi told North Vietnamese, premier Pham Van Dong on December 23, with American bombs falling near the prime minister’s office, shaking the building and requiring raised voices, that Hanoi had to accept American terms. Mao Tse-tung himself told the Viet Cong foreign minister the same thing on December 29, calling those who held out “so-called communists, and bad guys.”
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The next day, Hanoi announced that it would resume the Paris talks on January 8, and signaled privately that they would accept the revised American terms. These chiefly consisted of wording changes demanded by Thieu, as Kissinger (for security reasons) had been using North Vietnamese interpreters, and the Vietnamese version contained many insulting references to Saigon and Washington as, respectively, “vassals” and “pirates.” After a final mighty flourish of B-52 deluges, Nixon suspended the bombing of the North on January 18, and was reinaugurated on January 20. President Lyndon Baines Johnson, just 64, died on January 22 (and was accorded a state funeral and widely praised as a master of the Congress and the greatest champion of civil rights since Lincoln). On January 23, Nixon announced to the nation and the world that the Vietnam War was ending with a cease-fire on January 27, with the withdrawal of the 24,700 remaining U.S. personnel (down 96 percent from where it had been four years before), and with the return of prisoners. He referred generously to Johnson.

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