Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (114 page)

Some people have argued, moreover, that Nixon did a decent job of managing the war, especially given the terrible circumstances that he confronted on taking office. His escalation in Cambodia, they point out, followed earlier incursions by the enemy—the North Vietnamese were the first to destabilize that unfortunate country—and seemed to make sense from a strictly military point of view. It was hardly fair, they add, to blame the United States for all the blood that later stained the Cambodian landscape. Some people also think that Nixon's overtures to Mao and Brezhnev gave him greater freedom than Johnson had had to unleash bombing attacks, thereby enabling him to pound a little sense into the North Vietnamese in Paris. In any event, the President's defenders insist, the bombings were not reckless in the sense of risking wider world war, for Nixon had first assured himself that Peking and Moscow would tolerate them. Indeed they did, even the Christmas bombing of 1972. Nixon's rapprochement with the Chinese and the Russians may also have increased feelings of isolation in Hanoi by 1972, thereby helping a little (although not nearly so much as American concessions) to induce the North to agree to the temporary continuation in power of Thieu.
⁵⁷

Nixon and his defenders emphasize above all that it would have been very difficult before 1972 to secure a good settlement, for two reasons. First, the North Vietnamese were stubborn and wily negotiators. More than once during the fruitless years of talks they seemed forthcoming, but mainly to court world opinion, whereupon they dug in their heels. Second, Nixon and Kissinger emphasized that they dared not compromise much before 1972. If they had reached an agreement that seemed to pave the way for North Vietnamese victory, they would thereby have abandoned all that the United States had been fighting for, including its allies in Saigon. This would damage America's "credibility" in the world and encourage powers like the Soviet Union and China to underwrite "proxy" wars in the future. Such an agreement, Nixon realized, would also have exposed him to criticism from the millions of Americans who still hoped in 1969 (and later) for a peace with honor. Instead, he pursued Vietnamization, a policy that reduced American involvement, strengthened South Vietnam's military capability, and ultimately (once concessions were made) got the United States out of the war. Carefully managed Vietnamization, Nixon maintained, produced a settlement that was acceptable politically in the United States, thereby enabling the nation to moderate potentially disastrous domestic recriminations.

Still, Nixon's policies in Vietnam look as politically motivated in hindsight as they did to critics at the time. Total Vietnamization, given the well-demonstrated corruption and political instability that rent South Vietnam, was almost certainly doomed to failure. Without huge and apparently endless infusions of American support, neither Thieu nor anyone else in Saigon could withstand the relentless drive of the enemy. Hoping for the best, Nixon persisted anyway, using Vietnamization as a fig leaf to reduce American casualties and as a means of enabling Thieu to hold out for a while. That would create an interval—politically crucial to Nixon—between the withdrawal of United States forces and South Vietnamese defeat. Much of the bloodshed that occurred on his watch might have been averted if he had tried harder to compromise. When he finally did, in the election year of 1972, he secured an agreement that was politically more palatable than it would likely have been in 1969, when support for the war had been stronger. But it was no better than what might have been achieved at that time, and it was accomplished only after four more years of slaughter. It was not a peace with honor.

The Vietnam War taught Americans a few lessons, chief among them the dangers of large-scale military intervention in strategically marginal areas of the world. In future years American politicians and military leaders were more likely to set limits before sliding into quagmires like the one that had swallowed so much humanity in Southeast Asia. "No more Vietnams," they warned. Given the grand expectations that Americans had had until then about their ability to shape the world, this was a shift of historic importance—one that demarcates the postwar era. As Maxwell Taylor explained later in the 1970s, "We [the United States] certainly had a feeling after World War II that we could go almost any place and do almost anything. Well, we did many things at enormous cost, but henceforth we're going to have trouble feeding and keeping happy our population just as every other nation is. This is not a time for our government to get out on limbs which are not essential."
⁵⁸

This useful lesson, however, was learned only after extraordinary costs that Nixon's policies helped to escalate. After 1969 the war further savaged and badly destabilized Vietnam and Cambodia. As before, it diverted the attention of American foreign policy-makers from serious problems elsewhere, especially in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. Continuing fixation on Vietnam also left the United States relatively weaker vis-à-vis the Soviets, whose arsenal of missiles and delivery capacity reached parity with that of the United States by the 1970s.
⁵⁹
At home the war provoked serious economic difficulties, especially inflation, by 1973. It accelerated the rise of an imperial presidency and contributed powerfully—thanks to Nixon's quest for control—to the constitutional crisis of Watergate.

More generally the war undercut the standing of political elites. Nothing did more than Vietnam to subvert the grand expectations that many Americans had developed by 1965 about the capacity of government to deal with public problems. Popular doubt and cynicism about "the system" and the Washington Establishment lingered long after the men came home.

The war above all left an abiding sourness in the United States. Veterans of the war tended to feel this with special intensity. Unlike the servicemen who had returned to parades and celebrations in 1945, those who came back after 1968 encountered an increasingly weary and cantankerous nation. Dumped into civilian life after surviving the terrors of the bush, they experienced staggering problems, including unemployment, guilt, depression, rage, and a sense of rejection. Hundreds of thousands suffered from "post-traumatic neurosis," flashbacks, and nightmares. Suicide rates among the veterans were much higher than in the population at large.
⁶⁰

Sourness in America extended well beyond the reception of veterans, neglectful though that was. Wider recriminations that had risen during the war persisted for years thereafter. Many people, including political leaders like Ronald Reagan, never stopped insisting that the war need not have been lost. They regarded anti-war activists and draft avoiders with a fury and contempt that did not abate with time.
⁶¹
Other people, including many who had once supported the war, raged at the military and political leaders who had dragged the country into the conflict and at Nixon for his Machiavellian maneuvers. A vocal few still insisted many years later that North Vietnam—contrary to what Nixon maintained in March 1973—had not turned over all American prisoners-of-war or soldiers said to be missing in action. America's longest war inflicted wounds that time was very slow to heal.

25
End of an Era? Expectations amid Watergate and Recession

Even as the United States was pulling the last of its soldiers out of combat in Vietnam, the scandal known as Watergate was beginning to wreck Nixon's second administration. From then until he resigned under fire in August 1974 the President found himself driven ever more into a corner. As he ran for safety he shed advisers, including Haldeman and Ehrlichman, who were involved in his cover-up of the break-in at the Watergate complex in Washington. But one bizarre development after another, including the revelation in July 1973 that the President secretly taped conversations in the Oval Office, gave him no rest. By itself the break-in was petty, but Nixon's attempts to cover it up were crude, cynical, and illegal acts to obstruct justice. The prolonged but often exciting events of the Watergate scandal ultimately created a constitutional crisis and further polarized the nation.
¹

In its broadest sense, the scandal of Watergate arose from the tumultuous and destabilizing trends of the 1960s, especially the war in Vietnam and the deviousness and power-grabbing associated with the rise of an imperial presidency.
²
It became the constitutional impasse that it did in large part because of Nixon's special passion for vengeance and control. In its narrower sense, however, the scandal began with Gordon Liddy, the irrepressible "plumber" who had broken into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist. In February 1972 Liddy was working as an espionage expert with Nixon's Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP), headed by Nixon's friend and former Attorney General, John Mitchell. Liddy recommended to Mitchell that CREEP tap the phones of Democratic National Committee chairman Lawrence O'Brien at the Watergate complex. Mitchell and his top aide, Jeb Stuart Magruder, approved the idea, and undercover agents of CREEP broke in to tap O'Brien's phone on May 27. Something went wrong with the tap, however, whereupon an undercover team of three Miami-based Cuban exiles, Frank Sturgis, and James McCord, chief of security for CREEP, returned to fix it on June 17. A watchman caught them breaking into the office and called police, who arrested them.

It remains disputed why CREEP resorted to such illegal activity. The most widely accepted theory, however, holds that CREEP wanted to learn all it could about Democratic electoral strategy.
³
More specifically, it may have hoped to discover what O'Brien, a former lobbyist for the reclusive tycoon Howard Hughes, might know about possibly embarrassing connections among Hughes, Nixon's brother Donald, and various criminal figures. Some people have also speculated that Nixon sought to find out if O'Brien had evidence linking him to assassination plots against Fidel Castro.
⁴

Whether Nixon knew in advance of the plans to break into the Democrats' national headquarters is another unresolved question. He always denied that he did, and his press secretary, Ron Ziegler, dismissed reports of presidential involvement by branding the affair as a "third-rate burglary attempt." Nixon may have been telling the truth in denying foreknowledge; thanks to years of effort by his lawyers, who brought suits to prevent release of relevant documents and tapes, it has been impossible to know. But Nixon's super-loyal aides could have had no doubt in 1972 about his partisan zeal to embarrass "enemies," especially in an election year. Like their boss, they were contemptuous of democratic procedures and of the niceties of constitutional protections. After all, the President had already authorized wiretapping of his own advisers, tried (via the Huston Plan) to involve the FBI and CIA in illegal surveillance activities, encouraged creation of an "Enemies List," and ordered establishment of the "plumbers" who burglarized the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist. Mitchell, Magruder, and others, moreover, were well aware of Nixon's special dislike of O'Brien. In the siege mentality that Nixon incited among his aides, something like Watergate was probably an excess waiting to happen.

Unfortunately for Nixon, address books taken from two of the burglars contained the name of E. Howard Hunt, a onetime "plumber" then working for CREEP.
⁵
Both he and Liddy had been in the Watergate building the night of June 17; both were later arrested as co-conspirators behind the break-in and tapping. At this point Nixon might have fired any and all aides who were involved, thereby clearing some of the air. But it was the middle of an election campaign, and he decided on a cover-up. "Play it tough," he ordered Haldeman. "That's the way they play it, and that's the way we are going to play it."
⁶
Within a few days of the break-in he arranged to provide hush money for the accused. Sums for this purpose ultimately approached $500,000.
⁷
On June 23 he ordered Haldeman to have the CIA stop an FBI investigation of the affair. This probe had been started by L. Patrick Gray, acting head of the FBI, who had been named to this post after Hoover had died on May 2. Nixon's order was an illegal use of the CIA and a deliberate obstruction of justice.
⁸

Nixon's decision to cover up was his fatal error. One revelation after another frustrated his efforts, many of them illegal, to sit on the lid. But it is easy in retrospect to see why he tried. Gathering with Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and others immediately after the break-in, he learned (if he did not know already) of CREEP's involvement. To confess to such activity risked not only admission of administration culpability concerning Watergate but also revelations of other clandestine efforts, such as the earlier break-in—conducted by Hunt and Liddy—at the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist. Nixon, moreover, prided himself on being able to fight his way out of a hole. He considered his life to be a series of crises, all of them plotted by implacable conspirators. Watergate was such a crisis, and he would overcome it, too.

Developments as early as the autumn of 1972 suggested that the cover-up might not succeed. In late September a grand jury indicted the burglars, as well as Hunt and Liddy, who were scheduled to be tried in the court of federal district judge John Sirica.
Washington Post
reporters Carl Bernstein and Robert Woodward followed the case closely, printing stories describing the "slush fund" that CREEP was amassing. They also established links between CREEP and presidential aides such as Haldeman and White House Special Counsel Colson, who had originally hired Liddy and Hunt as plumbers. In compiling their stories, which later were turned into a best-selling book on the scandal, Bernstein and Woodward relied on a hidden source who became known as Deep Throat.
⁹
The identity of this person is yet another mystery surrounding the affair. Best guesses are that the reporters relied on tips from a highly placed and disaffected FBI agent. Angry at being prevented from investigating the break-in, the agent is thought to have leaked information to the press.
¹⁰

During the election campaign, however, Nixon was fortunate. To the dismay of McGovern, who had been assailing the break-in, the trials of the conspirators were postponed until after the election, and Sirica ordered people involved to say nothing about the case. Most reporters, moreover, paid little attention to the burglary: compared to the possibility of peace in Vietnam it seemed an insignificant story. The role of the press in the unfolding of the scandal, both then and later, was less important than journalists were to claim. Probing by judges and politicians mattered a good deal more.
¹¹

This digging approached pay dirt in early 1973. In January the five burglars, plus Hunt and Liddy, were found guilty. Judge Sirica announced that there was more to the break-in than met the eye and threatened tough sentences. McCord, fearful of taking the rap for everyone else, came forth in March to implicate higher-ups in the administration. He talked also to members of a select Senate investigating committee, headed by folksy Sam Ervin of North Carolina, that had started to look into the affair. McCord's revelations started a scramble for safety by others involved in the scandal, including John Dean, Nixon's counsel, and Magruder. Both talked to a grand jury that had been convened on the matter. By late April Nixon himself was feeling the pressure, and he forced Dean to quit. Richard Kleindienst, who had replaced Mitchell as Attorney General, also resigned. Nixon even forced out Haldeman and Ehrlichman. The Berlin Wall around the White House had fallen.
¹²

Ervin's committee opened televised hearings on the matter in May, enabling the public to watch McCord accuse Dean and Mitchell of foreknowledge of the break-in, and Mitchell and Magruder of authorizing it. Testimony before the Ervin Committee that summer, especially by Dean, broke further news of the plumbers, of the Huston plan to abuse the powers of the FBI and the CIA, of presidential wiretapping, and of Nixon's authorization of hush money in order to seal the cover-up. Americans were stunned to learn from Alexander Butterfield, a former aide to Haldeman, that the President secretly taped conversations in the Oval Office. By the autumn of 1973 all concerned—Sirica, the Ervin Committee, and Archibald Cox, a Harvard Law School professor whom Nixon had been forced by pressure to name as an independent special prosecutor—were battling the President and his lawyers for release of the tapes.
¹³

Nixon fought gamely on, in October ordering his new Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, to fire Cox. Richardson, however, resigned rather than carry out the order. William Ruckelshaus, next in command at Justice, also resigned. Finally Nixon prevailed on Solicitor General (by then Acting Attorney General) Robert Bork to do the firing. Critics of these actions, which took place on October 20, called them the Saturday Night Massacre. Nixon then agreed to name another prosecutor, Leon Jaworski of Houston, and surrendered some of the tapes to Sirica. But it was obvious that the President was not ready to give in. As before he cited executive privilege as grounds for not releasing all the tapes. One of the tapes he did turn over to Sirica, moreover, contained an eighteen-and-one-half-minute gap—erased by accident, Nixon's secretary volunteered—of a key conversation between the President and Haldeman on June 20, three days after the break-in. The erasure aroused a further storm of suspicion.
¹⁴

Other walls also crumbled in late 1973. Vice-President Agnew was shown to have accepted kickbacks from contractors while governor of Maryland and even while Vice-President. On October 10 he was forced to resign after pleading no contest to a charge of tax evasion, whereupon Nixon named House GOP leader Gerald Ford of Michigan as Agnew's replacement.
¹⁵
Investigations into Nixon's financial affairs at the time were even more damaging to the administration. They revealed that his lawyers had backdated his signature on a deed of gift of his papers to the National Archives, so as to qualify for an income tax deduction in 1969. Examination of his tax returns, which had also been prepared by lawyers, indicated that he had failed to declare taxable improvements made by the government to his substantial personal properties at Key Biscayne, Florida, and San Clemente, California. Nixon responded with a memorable statement, "I have never profited . . . from public service.. . . I have never obstructed justice. . . . I am not a crook." He promised to pay his back taxes. It was obvious, however, that he had amassed great wealth in the course of his life and that he had fudged his tax returns.
¹⁶

Jaworski, meanwhile, proved to be as tenacious a prosecutor as Cox, and a grand jury to which he had presented evidence responded on March 1, 1974, by indicting seven members of the CREEP and White House staffs, including Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell, on charges of obstruction of justice and impeding the investigation of Watergate. Nixon was named as an unindicted co-conspirator. The grand jury instructed Sirica to turn over tapes in his possession to the House Judiciary Committee, which by then was considering whether to impeach the President. Both Sirica and the House Committee subpoenaed the White House for release of the many tapes still in Nixon's possession.
¹⁷

Nixon continued to resist. Instead of surrendering the tapes themselves, he released on April 30 some 1,300 pages of edited transcripts from the tapes. These, he explained, had "expletives deleted." Defending his action on television, the President said that the transcripts "included all the relevant portions of the subpoenaed conversations . . . the rough as well as the smooth. . . . The President has nothing to hide." In fact, the transcripts had been sanitized. Even so, the transcripts were damaging to the President, for they showed that he had discussed with Dean possible payments to Hunt and that he had ordered aides to perform "dirty tricks" on political opponents. The phrase "expletive deleted," occurring with great frequency on the transcripts, further undermined the President's moral standing.

Sirica, who had listened to the tapes involved, knew that the transcripts had been sanitized. One of the tapes, for instance, had recorded the President as telling aides to say nothing to the grand jury in 1973. "I don't give a shit what happens," he had said. "I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover-up or anything else, if it'll save it—save the plan." The transcripts that he released revealed none of this, expletives included.
¹⁸
Sirica, Jaworski, and the House Committee therefore insisted again that Nixon turn over the tapes themselves. Nixon still refused to do so, citing executive privilege, and took the case to the Supreme Court. It promised to hear the matter in July.