The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis

Author:John Lewis Gaddis
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.
Published: 2011-04-19T16:00:00+00:00

IV.

RICHARD NIXON inherited this situation, then made it much worse. One of the most geopolitically adept leaders of modern times, he also happened to be the American president least inclined—ever—to respect constraints on his own authority. After all that had happened during the Johnson years, he still believed that the requirements of national security, as he defined them, outweighed whatever obligations of accountability, even legality, the presidency demanded. Nixon’s actions went well beyond the idea that there could be separate standards of behavior at home and abroad: instead he made the homeland itself a Cold War battleground. There, however, he encountered an adversary more powerful than either the Soviet Union or the international communist movement. It was the Constitution of the United States of America.

“I can say unequivocally,” Nixon wrote after resigning the presidency, “that without secrecy there would have been no opening to China, no SALT agreement with the Soviet Union, and no peace agreement ending the Vietnam war.”41 There is little reason to doubt that claim. To have consulted the Departments of State and Defense, the C.I.A., the appropriate Congressional committees, and all allies whose interests would have been affected prior to Kissinger’s 1971 Beijing trip would only have ensured that it not take place. To have attempted arms control negotiations with Moscow in the absence of a “back channel” that allowed testing positions before taking them would probably have guaranteed failure. And the only way Nixon saw to break the long stalemate in the Vietnamese peace talks—short of accepting Hanoi’s demands for an immediate withdrawal of American forces and the removal from power of the South Vietnamese government—was to increase military and diplomatic pressure on North Vietnam while simultaneously decreasing pressures from within Congress, the anti-war movement, and even former members of the Johnson administration to accept Hanoi’s terms. That too required operating both openly and invisibly.

Where Nixon went wrong was not in his use of secrecy to conduct foreign policy—diplomacy had always required that—but in failing to distinguish between actions he could have justified if exposed and those he could never have justified. Americans excused the lies Eisenhower and Kennedy told because the operations they covered up turned out to be defensible when uncovered. So too did the methods by which Nixon brought about the China opening, the SALT agreement, and the Vietnam cease-fire: the results, in those instances, made reliance on secrecy, even deception, seem reasonable.

But what about the secret bombing of a sovereign state? Or the attempted overthrow of a democratically elected government? Or the bugging of American citizens without legal authorization? Or burglaries carried out with presidential authorization? Or the organization of a conspiracy, inside the White House itself, to hide what had happened ? Nixon allowed all of this during his first term; his reliance on secrecy became so compulsive that he employed that tactic in situations for which there could never be a plausible justification. So when plausible denial was no longer possible—in large part because Nixon, with his secret Oval Office taping system, had even bugged himself—a constitutional crisis became unavoidable.

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