Nixon in China Page 15
By 1966, Mao was less inclined to make reassuring noises. American escalation in Vietnam coincided with his vengeful return to full power. He was bent on destroying his enemies, a very large and eclectic group, on rooting out ‘bad ideas’, including foreign ones, and on transforming Chinese society. The Cultural Revolution made chauvinism, always a strand in Chinese thinking, respectable, even essential, for good Maoists. As the Red Guards set about enthusiastically destroying traditional Chinese culture, they also turned on foreign influence and foreign powers. They burned books in foreign languages and tried to ban all foreign music. In 1967, a mob set fire to the British mission in Beijing and beat up British diplomats. Screaming crowds surrounded the Soviet embassy for days on end. It was at this time that the Soviet women and children who were being sent home for safety had to crawl under an arch at the airport while Red Guards spat at them.
Abroad, Chinese students and those representatives who had not yet been called back to China to be reformed denounced the authorities in their host countries and did their best to spread the thought of Chairman Mao. In one African country, workers at the Chinese embassy recited Mao’s sayings on local buses and tried to present bewildered locals with copies of the Little Red Book and Mao buttons. When some photographs of Mao were vandalized outside the Chinese embassy in Paris, the reaction in Beijing was hysterical, with a massive demonstration against the French embassy. The People’s Republic had diplomatic relations with about forty nations in 1966; within a year after the start of the Cultural Revolution, it had disputes with thirty of them. As the leading capitalist power in the world, the United States was of course not only China’s mortal enemy but the leading source of foreign poison. Unfortunately for the radicals during the Cultural Revolution, they could get at it only indirectly. Chinese who had worked for Americans or American-owned companies in the past and the handful of American fellow travellers who had stayed on in China after 1949 were all attacked as imperialist spies.9
In 1969, Marshall Green, one of the State Department’s leading China experts, toured Asian capitals and reported back that the general feeling was that ‘China had never been in such a negative, truculent mood as it was at that time. Asian leaders felt that any hope of progress in establishing a constructive dialogue with China was out of the question until the Cultural Revolution subsided.’ (On the report Nixon noted, ‘this is great’.)10 In fact that is precisely what was happening.
Even Mao, living amid his layers of protection, surrounded by courtiers eager to please him, was now realizing how dangerously isolated China was in the world and how weakened by the Cultural Revolution. When he addressed a meeting of the Communist Party’s Central Committee in the spring of 1969, he called for an end to the violent stage of the Cultural Revolution: ‘Is this endless quarreling necessary?’ Some people, he said, had gone too far: ‘It is not good to be crude and careless, which often leads to mistakes.’11 By that point, virtually all universities and many schools were closed. Factories repeatedly shut down while workers debated arcane political points. Hospitals ran with skeleton, barely educated staff, while trained doctors and nurses languished in the countryside to ‘learn from the peasants’. Much of the army was scattered about China’s cities and towns, keeping peace between angry factions, all claiming the blessing of Chairman Mao. Yet China still had many external enemies. It was barely on speaking terms with India since the two had fought a war in 1962. Even the peaceful post-1945 Japan could not be trusted. Taiwan was still run by a government which claimed authority over the whole of China. The United States was present in force in Vietnam just to the south. Might it not be tempted to take advantage of China’s turmoil either to finish off China’s ally North Vietnam once and for all or to do something worse? And along China’s northern and western borders, Soviet troops were massing.
The United States was a much stronger power, but its confidence, too, had been shaken by recent events. The 1960s had been turbulent, not as turbulent as in China, but in terms of American history an extraordinarily troubling decade with turmoil at home and the loss of prestige abroad. A wave of assassinations – President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy – shook Americans’ confidence in their own society. President Johnson’s War on Poverty did much good, but it also exposed the dreadful slums in some of the United States’ richest cities. Many young people and sometimes their elders talked of the need for radical change. Had the United States become Amerika, out of a Kafka novel, or worse, a fascist state? Cities grew used to demonstrations, against poverty, injustice and, of course, the war in Vietnam. University campuses saw teach-ins and sit-ins and protests.
In the South, a black civil rights movement, supported by white liberals, exposed to Americans and to the world the underside of American society. It became clear that Southern blacks lived under a system not that different from apartheid, barred as they were from using restaurants or white-only water fountains. Moreover, they were denied the most basic of rights, such as that to vote. By the 1960s, Southern blacks and their supporters from the North challenged the system at all points. Freedom riders sat in the white sections of buses. Blacks sat at white-only lunch counters. In the spring of 1963 Martin Luther King called for civil disobedience against unjust laws. That summer he addressed a massive demonstration in Washington. ‘I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”‘ The next year, during Freedom Summer, an enormous drive started to register black voters in the South. In Washington, President Johnson pushed a Civil Rights Act through Congress.
Southern whites resisted any changes with ferocity. School integration was marked by riots and tear gas. The first black student at the University of Mississippi had to be escorted there by troops with guns. A police chief in Birmingham, Alabama, used fire hoses and dogs on black demonstrators. In 1963, a bomb placed in a church killed four young black girls. A civil rights worker was murdered in Mississippi. (It took thirty years to bring his killers to justice.) The following year three civil rights workers were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. In 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Violence in the South touched off violence in the North as blacks rioted in their ghettos. Watts, in Los Angeles, went up in flames in 1965, Newark and parts of Detroit in 1967. After King’s shooting, riots broke out in more than 120 cities. In the centre of Washington, the police lost control of the streets and watched helplessly while rioters looted and burned. The army had to be called in to restore order and patrol the city.
While he had some sympathy for the civil rights movement, Nixon disliked much of what he witnessed in the 1960s. He saw in the turmoil a toxic intolerance and contempt for old values and for established ways of doing things. ‘I had no patience with the mindless rioters and professional malcontents,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘and I was appalled by the response of most of the nation’s political and academic leaders to them.’ In private, he called protesters ‘rabble’ and ‘scum’ and expressed his suspicion that Communists were behind their demonstrations. He longed for a return to what he saw as basic American values: ‘a strong United States patriotism, strong moral and spiritual values.’12
The post-war baby boom, which came of age in the early 1960s, had spawned not only a powerful youth culture but a willingness on the part of the young, at least many of them, to challenge existing mores and institutions at a time when many of their elders were also questioning them. Much of the resulting turmoil was froth: sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. There were massive concerts, at Woodstock for example, where people sat in the mud and talked of love and peace – young women with flowers in their hair and men with beards, in wild shirts and beads and bell-bottom trousers. On the extremes, a few, and it was hard at the time to tell how many there were, rejected American democracy altogether and talked of violent revolution or going back to the land to set up their own societies. The movie Easy Rider, whose biker heroes s
oared across America high on speed and drugs, pausing every so often to cast an approving eye on struggling communes or score some more drugs, expressed for a generation an incoherent longing for freedom, but from what? Suitably, the heroes die before they can grow old and suburban.
Nixon watched the cultural changes with dismay. Look, he told Haldeman in 1971, at that new television show ‘that glorified the homosexuals’. In his opinion, ‘homosexuality dope and immorality are the basic enemies of a strong society, and that’s why the Russians are pushing it here, in order to destroy us’. The United States, he feared, had suffered irreparable damage from ‘the new morality where the individual determines what is moral and what is right’, blaming ‘the establishment’.13 The establishment took the blame for it all – poverty, violence, injustice, but above all for Vietnam.
For many Americans at the time, that one word summed up all that had gone wrong with the United States in the 1960s. Vietnam meant loss – of 60,000 American lives, of their country’s prestige and influence, and of innocence. Stories of their soldiers taking drugs, reports of casual brutalities – the massacre of civilians at My Lai, for example – shook people back home. Before Vietnam, American soldiers had been our boys and American wars had been righteous – for independence, for a better world in the First World War, to save that world from fascism in the Second and, in Korea, to stop the spread of international Communism. Vietnam was, or so many Americans had come to think, not righteous at all. Indeed it was very wrong. The United States was interfering in the affairs of a far-off country whose people wanted their independence. It was backing the corrupt regime of South Vietnam against, or so it was sometimes naively believed, a broadly based nationalist movement in the South and the benevolent socialist state of North Vietnam. Even those who had few illusions about the Communist regime in the North wondered, with the leading American diplomat and thinker George Kennan, what vital American interest was at stake in a small and backward part of Southeast Asia; and conservatives worried about what an unpopular and unsuccessful war was doing to the American military and to American society itself.
On paper, the United States should have been able to handle the insurgent forces in South Vietnam and the simple little country of North Vietnam easily – a country of 205,000,000 against one of 20,000,000; the most developed economy in the world against one which was still primarily agricultural; and the most up-to-date weapons against simpler Soviet or Chinese ones. A sour joke which circulated in Washington in 1968 had experts feeding all available statistics from both sides into a computer. The computer was asked, Will the US win the war? The answer: You won in 1966.
The Kennedy and then the Johnson administrations and their generals had promised victory year after year. The United States had poured money and hardware and young men into Vietnam and the prospect of victory had kept receding. Even for a rich country, the financial burden was proving heavy; from 1962 onwards, the United States ran a budget deficit which ultimately contributed to growing inflation and an increasing indebtedness. It was also, although few people realized it until the crisis of 1973, growing dependent on foreign oil. In 1968, the Tet Offensive launched by North Vietnam and its southern collaborators had shaken the faith of the American public in all the promises of victory. Tet in fact was a military victory for the American forces and their South Vietnamese allies, but it did not appear so to public opinion. When Communists could seize Hué, the old capital of Vietnam, with impunity or occupy the outer compound of the American embassy itself in Saigon, it seemed to many Americans that the war was unwinnable. In the United States, in Congress, on Wall Street, in the churches, the universities and the streets, Americans demanded an end to it.
Nixon and Kissinger knew the damage Vietnam had done to the United States internationally as well as at home. The Soviet Union and its allies had watched with pleasure as American power failed to crush North Vietnam. American allies had watched uneasily as their superpower showed its weakness. Their publics had increasingly turned sour on the United States; in Canada and Western Europe, mass demonstrations demanded that the US get out of Vietnam. Much of the criticism, and not just from the left, was disturbingly anti-American. The United States was portrayed as an international bully in which the forces of capitalism ran uncontrolled. In the Third World, American imperialism was routinely condemned, while little was said of the Soviet empire.
Nixon wanted to reverse the decline: ‘Power of the United States’, he told Haldeman in his first year in office, ‘must be used more effectively, at home and abroad, or we go down the drain as a great power. Have already lost the leadership position we held at the end of WW II, but we can regain it, if fast!’14 To do that, he had to get the United States out of Vietnam but in a way that did not look like a scuttle. ‘Peace with honor’ was the promise he made to the American public during the election campaign, a slogan that appeased both liberals who simply wanted the United States out of Vietnam and the right who thought that Nixon would show firmness. He was not entirely disingenuous. He loathed the North Vietnamese and would have defeated them if he could. He did not simply want to abandon the South (as in the end he did). Unfortunately he had no real plan for getting the United States out of Vietnam, merely a hope that the negotiations with the North Vietnamese which had started in the Johnson administration could be made to work, perhaps through the application of judicious amounts of force and the right sorts of promises.
His main interest was in the big issues facing the United States, its relations with the Soviet Union above all. The Soviets were pushing ahead with the development of advanced nuclear weapons and were expanding their navy. Under Brezhnev’s leadership, they were showing an aggressive determination to hang on to what they had and to spread their influence in fresh parts of the world. Brezhnev not only justified the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 as necessary to save socialism there but said, in what came to be known as the Brezhnev Doctrine, that he would do the same thing in other socialist countries when the Soviet Union deemed it necessary. In the Middle East, the Soviets were supplying huge amounts of weaponry and sending thousands of advisers to radical Arab states such as Egypt and Syria.
Even apart from what the Soviets were up to, the world had dangerous pockets of instability, in the Middle East of course where the Arab–Israeli conflict showed every sign of heating up again, in Latin America where military regimes often combined a contempt for democracy with anti-Americanism, in South Asia where India and Pakistan remained in a state of armed tension, and of course in Southeast Asia itself where the war in Vietnam was spilling over into Laos and Cambodia. The United States also had problems in Europe, with France, for example, as it asserted its independence in often irritating ways. The key Cold War alliance of NATO was, as Kissinger put it, in ‘a state of malaise’.15 One of the reasons that Nixon took a trip to Europe a month after his inauguration was to show that the United States was ready to consult with its allies and that it was no longer completely preoccupied with Vietnam.
Vietnam, though, kept intruding itself. The North Vietnamese,sure that victory was at hand, were not prepared to negotiate seriously and so the war dragged on, with more Americans dying and more American resources being used up. ‘No matter what facet of the Nixon presidency you’re considering,’ Haldeman told an audience in the late 1980s, ‘don’t ever lose sight of Vietnam as the over-riding factor in the first Nixon term. It overshadowed everything else, all the time, in every discussion, in every opportunity, in every problem.’ In his first November in office, Nixon and his staff watched from a barricaded White House as hundreds of thousands of anti-war protesters filled the centre of Washington. As a radical fringe turned violent, government offices filled with tear gas. ‘Very strange emotional impact’, reported Haldeman, ‘as they took down American flag and ran up Viet Cong.’16
Nixon feared, among much else, the effects that Vietnam would have on American thinking about the world. Would the United States in its bitterness become extremely
nationalistic or take refuge, as it had done after the First World War, in passive isolationism? For a president who had spent much of his career on foreign policy and who believed that the United States was a force for good in the world, either alternative was abhorrent. Nixon also recognized that, like it or not, the United States was no longer the dominant power it had once been. It now had to deal with its own relative decline and the rise of confident newer powers. Early on in Nixon’s administration, his UnderSecretary of State, Elliot Richardson, wrote a memorandum which accurately captured the President’s thinking:
The Nixon foreign policy, as I understand it, is built first of all on a realistic awareness of changes in the world that have taken place over the past decade. For purposes of the role of the United States, the most important of these are: (a) the increasing capacity and determination of individual nations to maintain their own independence and integrity; (b) the subordination of ideologies to these over-riding national objectives; and (c) the recognition that United States economic and military resources, in light of competing domestic demands, are not as unlimited as they may once have seemed ’17
It was a point of view echoed a few days later, on 18 December 1969, by Nixon’s National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, who told a press briefing that the days when the United States was the richest and most stable country in the world, ‘the country without whose leadership and physical contribution nothing was possible’, were over. Other countries were now playing a much greater role in the world. There were new nations to deal with as well as the fact that Communism was no longer a monolith. ‘We, therefore, face the problem of helping to build international relations on a basis which may be less unilaterally American.’18
Both Nixon and Kissinger also believed that, as Nixon put it in a letter to Melvin Laird, his Secretary of Defense, ‘the great issues are fundamentally interrelated’. He did not want, he said, to establish artificial links. ‘But I do believe that crisis or confrontation in one place and real cooperation in another cannot long be sustained simultaneously.’ The Soviets should realize that, if they wanted to enjoy the benefits of trade with the United States, for example, they ought to be ready to talk arms control – or be helpful over Vietnam. In one of his early meetings with Dobrynin, in October 1969, Nixon told him: ‘If the Soviet Union found it possible to do something in Vietnam, and the Vietnam war ended, the U.S. might do something dramatic to improve Soviet–U.S. relations, indeed something more dramatic than they could now imagine’. Linkage, as the tactic came to be known, was also, in Kissinger’s words, ‘an overall strategic and geopolitical view’. Ignoring the fact that events were connected made coherent policies difficult, if not impossible. The difficulty, he complained, was that Americans were not used to seeing the world in this way. ‘American pragmatism produces a penchant for examining issues separately; to solve problems on their own merits, without a sense of time or context or of the seamless web of reality.’19