Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (113 page)

Comments such as this indicated that popular perceptions of McGovern—as an earnest but bumbling and left-of-center liberal—badly hurt him. The AFL-CIO executive council, with but three dissenters, refused to endorse him for the presidency. So did leaders of individual unions, especially in the building trades.
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Many working-class Democrats, traditionally the heart of the party, were also disaffected. Some opposed McGovern because they thought his strong opposition to the war both demeaning and unpatriotic. Others regarded him as a leftist who spoke for middle-class liberals and intellectuals, not blue-collar people. McGovern, indeed, in many ways represented a political culmination of protest movements and causes of the 1960s; he was the most left-of-center presidential candidate of any major political party in United States history. Millions of onetime Democrats either voted for Nixon in November or refused to vote at all.
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Nixon was disdainful of McGovern, whom he considered preachy. He was anxious to attack him. But the opposition was so badly divided that he scarcely had to fight. Moreover, he enjoyed substantial support from the press. Outside of the
Washington Post
, the media largely ignored McGovern's charges about the break-in at Watergate during the campaign. Nixon, playing the role of high-minded statesman, managed to keep all but friendly reporters at some distance and isolated those few who had the temerity to be critical: although journalists had grown more skeptical as a result of the credibility gap over Vietnam, they were not yet as adversarial as they were to become in the next few years. And publishers overwhelmingly backed the incumbent. Of the 1,054 dailies surveyed by
Editor and Publisher
, 753, or 71.4 percent, endorsed him; only fifty-six backed McGovern.
⁴⁶

The expectation of victory, however, did not stop Nixon from doing all he could to pile up support. As in the 1970 election, he posed as the defender of "law and order" and assailed the opposition as "soft" on crime and big on "forced" busing. He took special pains to fine-tune the economy so that it would peak in November. Early in the year he approved a $5.5 billion space-shuttle project, not because he thought it had great scientific promise—experts told him it did not—but because he understood the political gains to be made from such a venture.
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During the campaign he substantially stepped up federal spending. As Melvin Laird, his Defense Secretary, recalled, "Every effort was made to create an economic boom for the 1972 election. The Defense Department, for example, bought a two-year supply of toilet paper. We ordered enough trucks . . . for the next several years."
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Congress, too, propelled election-year spending by its approval of sharp hikes in Social Security benefits: some $8 billion in extra checks went out in October. Veterans' benefits also increased, as did federal grants to state and local governments under Nixon's revenue-sharing plan.

Leaving nothing to chance, Nixon took pains to gain the support of potent interest groups, especially in the corporate sector. In 1971 he agreed to increase federal supports for milk prices, in return for which the dairymen, a strong lobby, contributed $2 million to his campaign. Early in 1972 he killed an anti-trust suit against ITT, which donated $400,000 in support of the GOP convention. The GOP campaign in 1972 was virtually a textbook demonstration of the huge role that big money, especially corporate money, had come to play in American presidential elections. The list of firms that made large contributions (some of them illegal) to Nixon's re-election effort read like a
Who's Who
of regulated industries, including airlines, bankers, and truckers.
⁴⁹

Nixon and Kissinger labored especially hard in the summer and fall of 1972 to manage the situation in Vietnam so that it would appeal to American voters. With the elections near at hand in the summer of 1972, they redoubled their efforts at the peace table in Paris, conceding for the first time a key demand of the North Vietnamese: that they be allowed to keep troops in the South after a cease-fire. Nixon also backed away from America's commitment to Thieu, agreeing to establishment of a tripartite electoral commission composed of Saigon, the NLF, and neutralists. It would have the task of arranging a settlement after the cease-fire went into effect. Led by chief delegate Le Due Tho, the North Vietnamese also compromised, agreeing that Thieu might stay on in control of the South until later settlements could be reached. By mid-October an agreement had been hammered out along these lines. United States troops would leave South Vietnam within sixty days of a cease-fire, and North Vietnam would return American POWs. The tripartite commission would step in to arrange a political settlement, administer elections, and take responsibility for implementing the results.
⁵⁰

Kissinger, who was almost desperately eager to settle the war by election time (and take credit for the result), thought he had made a breakthrough. On October 31 he stated publicly, "Peace is at hand." But he had failed to consult Thieu, who refused to accept an agreement that would permit North Vietnamese troops to remain in the South or that would acknowledge NLF sovereignty. Such concessions, Thieu feared, spelled doom for him and his government. Nixon, moreover, tended temporarily to side with Thieu. Confident of winning the election, peace or no peace, he held out hope of better terms—something like the "peace with honor" that he had promised the people. For these reasons the election passed without a settlement. Still, the administration's well-publicized efforts helped to display him as a man seeking peace and to undercut the anti-war opposition. As his trips to China and the USSR had indicated, the President was a master at making symbolic moves in foreign policy that advanced his political fortunes at home.

No one was surprised when Nixon won resoundingly in November. He received 47.1 million votes, 60.7 of the total cast, to McGovern's 29.1 million, and carried every state except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. His total vote was 15.3 million higher than it had been in 1968 (and 5.4 million higher than the combined vote for him and Wallace in 1968). McGovern got 2 million fewer votes than Humphrey had received four years before. This was one of the most one-sided presidential elections in modern American history—as overwhelming for Nixon as the election of 1964 had been for Johnson.

What the election results said about American politics was not quite so clear. Although Democrats lost twelve seats in the House, they maintained control of the chamber. Thanks in part to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Barbara Jordan, elected in Texas, and Andrew Young, a winner in Georgia, became the first black southerners to go to the Hill since the era of Reconstruction.
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Democrats gained one seat in the Senate. It was obvious that two long-range trends of postwar American politics, the rise of split-ticket voting and the decline of party organizations, were accelerating. The election, moreover, was more a rejection of McGovern than it was a sign of voter affection for Nixon. Voter participation, which had been dropping in the 1960s, fell further in 1972—to the lowest levels since 1948. Polls suggested the power of yet another troubled legacy from the 1960s: rising distrust of national politicians and doubts about the capacity of government to do the right thing most of the time.

Still, there was no doubting the magnitude of Nixon's victory or the remarkably rapid fall of the Democratic coalition, at least in presidential elections. This decline had first become sharp in 1966, when sizeable numbers of white working-class voters either had refused to vote or had deserted to the GOP. In 1968 Nixon and Wallace had attracted millions of such voters, and in 1972, with Wallace sidelined, Nixon won them for himself. The backlash that had whipped through American life since the mid-1960s reverberated more strongly than ever in 1972.

S
AFELY RE-ELECTED
, N
IXON FELT FREE
to unleash the awesome destructiveness of American air power on the North Vietnamese. He told Admiral Thomas Moorer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "I don't want any more of this crap about the fact that we couldn't hit this target or that one. This is your chance to use military power to win the war, and if you don't, I'll consider you responsible." The twelve-day "Christmas bombing" that followed was indeed intensive, blasting the city of Hanoi and arousing storms of protest around the world. The
New York Times
called it "Stone Age barbarism." The 36,000 tons of explosives dropped during that time were more than had been used between 1969 and 1971. They killed some 1,600 civilians. The North, by then equipped with surface-to-air missiles, knocked down fifteen B-52S and eleven other American planes, causing the death or capture of ninety-three American airmen.
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On December 26, the eighth day of the bombing, the North Vietnamese (who had run out of missiles) indicated that they were ready to return to the peace table when the bombing stopped. Nixon called it off on December 30, and the two sides soon resumed talks in Paris. On January 14, Kissinger and Tho reached an agreement that was essentially the same as the one they had worked out in October.
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This time Nixon imposed it on Thieu, sweetening the taste a little by promising unilaterally (and without congressional input) that he would continue to provide him with military support and would "respond with full force" if the North Vietnamese violated the agreement. The cease-fire started at midnight following January 27, five days after Lyndon Johnson suffered a fatal heart attack at his ranch.

In announcing the cease-fire Nixon told the world five times that it represented the "peace with honor" that he long had promised. But Americans were skeptical. A Gallup poll showed that two-thirds of the people did not believe that Nixon was telling the whole truth. Times Square, which had been mobbed on V-J Day in 1945, was deserted. "There's nothing to celebrate," an American Legion commander told
Newsweek
, "and nobody to celebrate with."
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Americans were right to be skeptical, for it was clear that the agreement was far from a "peace with honor." The United States had conceded the most important demand of the North—that its troops be permitted to stay in the South—and had gained nothing more than it could have had in October. The bombing had accomplished nothing. Suppose, critics asked, that Nixon had been willing to grant this demand in 1969? If he had, they said, the North might have dropped its insistence (as it did in 1972) that Thieu be removed immediately from power. A cease-fire might have been reached at that time. Instead, critics emphasized, there had been four more years of carnage. Between January 1969, when Nixon took office, and January 1973, when the cease-fire went into effect, the United States lost 20,553 servicemen—or more than a third of the 58,000 who died during the war. Official estimates conclude that 107,504 South Vietnamese troops were killed during these four years, along with half a million troops of the North Vietnamese and NLF.
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The cease-fire hardly stopped the fighting. As Nixon and Kissinger knew (but did not explain to the American people), the political future of South Vietnam would have to be settled by force. The United States continued to pour military aid into South Vietnam. It dropped 250,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia in the next seven months, more than the tonnage used against Japan in all of World War II. Congress, however, stiffened, cutting off appropriations for such bombing as of August 15, 1973. In November it overrode a presidential veto to pass a War Powers Act. This required American Presidents to inform Congress within forty-eight hours of deployment of United States forces abroad and to bring the troops home within sixty days unless Congress explicitly endorsed what the President had done.
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By then the Nixon administration was fighting to defend itself against Watergate-related charges of illegal activities. It was losing political muscle that it needed to direct its foreign policies. But Congress would have refused to help Thieu in any event, and it cut back aid. It nearly eliminated it after Nixon left office in August 1974. Lon Nol fell from power in Cambodia in April 1975, replaced by a brutal Khmer Rouge regime led by Pol Pot. The Khmer Rouge killed an estimated 2 million people during the next three years, at which point the North Vietnamese went to war and chased them into hiding. Thieu, overwhelmed by a North Vietnamese military offensive, was forced to resign on April 21, 1975. As his loyalists scrambled desperately to climb aboard United States helicopters, Hanoi ran up its flag in Saigon on May 1 and renamed the capital Ho Chi Minh City. South Vietnam was a state no more.

N
IXON AND
K
ISSINGER WERE NOT
, of course, responsible for America's original involvement in Vietnam. Nor were they really to blame for the fall of Thieu. That was mainly the result of North Vietnam's unwavering determination to take over the country, of South Vietnam's inability to resist, and of America's fatigue with the fighting. From the beginning American leaders had underestimated the will to fight of the North, overestimated the staying power of the South, and misjudged the endurance of the American people. There are events in the world that not even the greatest military powers can control.