American Empire by Joshua Freeman

Author:Joshua Freeman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2012-07-16T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

* * *

The End of the American Century

Richard Nixon did not have much time to enjoy his landslide reelection or the Paris Peace Treaty that got U.S. troops and prisoners out of Vietnam. Almost immediately his presidency started to unravel, as the details of illegal political activities directed by the White House began to come out. Soon, Nixon, his aides, and the whole federal government became enveloped in a political and constitutional crisis with little precedent. In delayed fashion, the consequences of using the power of the state in ways that had become routine during the Cold War took their toll. National divisions, stemming from the Vietnam War and the political mobilizations of the 1960s, undermined the elite consensus needed to sustain imperial rule. As the inner workings and moral standards of the state became exposed, only removing its leaders could restore its authority.

Nixon’s fall constituted but one piece of a general crisis the United States entered soon after his reelection. After decades of sustained economic growth, the country slipped into a period of deep recession and economic uncertainty. Its diminished capacity to control world events, made evident by its defeat in Vietnam, contributed to the problem, as rising international commodity prices forced unwanted changes in life at home. By the mid-1970s, the economic and political structures that had brought wealth and power to the United States for a quarter century after World War II no longer could sustain economic progress, domestic harmony, or international dominance. One period of the country’s history came to an end, with the shape of the next still very unclear.

Watergate

On June 17, 1972, the Washington, D.C., police arrested five men in the act of breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters, located in an upscale office, hotel, and apartment complex on the Potomac River, the Watergate. The burglary team had illegally entered the office a few weeks earlier to tap its phones, but their eavesdropping equipment had not worked properly, so they were trying again. The burglars had been hired by the Nixon campaign, part of a large-scale effort to spy on and disrupt the Democratic Party during the 1972 election. The campaign of “dirty tricks” was directed and financed out of the White House, with the knowledge and approval of top leaders of the administration, including the president.

The police quickly discovered that one of the Watergate burglars was the chief of security for the president’s reelection committee, that all five had worked for the CIA, and that they received money from E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA operative who worked in the White House. But the refusal of the arrested men to reveal information about their operation, public denials by the president and his aides that they had anything to do with it, and the destruction of evidence and obstruction of investigations by White House and campaign officials kept the break-in from becoming a major election issue.

In early 1973, the White House–orchestrated cover-up of who ordered, directed, and financed the Watergate operation began falling apart.

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