Having read this thread (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=178101), I feel that it may be useful to explain why Clinton referered to Nixon as a “statesman”, and why he was in fact deserving of having a flag at half-staff for his own merits, not simply because he was president.
In domestic policy, Nixon was a crook. Granted. There are those who say he thought of himself as a medieval prince, rather than an elected leader, and that Kissinger encouraged that. Fine. The fact remains, however, that Nixon’s attempt at detente and his China policy were absolutely excellent ideas - and for these, Nixon deserves our respect. The following is an excerpt from an essay I did for one of my foreign affairs classes (for what it’s worth, the essay got an “A”):
** President Richard Nixon was not exactly overburdened with troublesome things like scruples, honesty, or a sense that he had a duty to be truthful to the electorate. But as traditionalists, he and Kissinger attempted to reshape the world in such a way that traditionalist doctrine taught would keep the United States safe, not just for days or weeks or even months, but years. Perhaps decades. They failed, in some ways, but not because their theory or foreign policy practices were unsound – it was domestic politics, and not foreign policy, that ended up destroying the Nixon administration. It is an undeniable truth that despite Nixon’s arrogance and high-handedness, he did a better job of promoting and securing the interests of the United States of America than any other President we have studied.
Nixon and Kissinger, like all traditionalists, saw the world as a dangerous place which approximates a hobbesian state of nature, plagued with anarchy and the threat of war. But Nixon and Kissinger saw an opportunity to avoid the threat of war with the Soviet Union by institutionalizing the balance of power in Eurasia. Kennedy had known that, thanks to the Sino-Soviet split, the balance of power in Eurasia was fundamentally stable – the Soviets wouldn’t dare do anything too adventurous with an unfriendly People’s Republic of China on their border. Nixon reasoned that, if the United States had improved relations with the PRC, it could ensure that it remained hostile to the USSR, and act as a check on the. And if the United States actually established normal relations with the PRC, then the Sino-Soviet and Eurasian balance of power could remain stable indefinitely. That balance of power would become “institutionalizedâ€.
But to Nixon and Kissinger, making it difficult for the Soviets to wage war on NATO countries just wasn’t good enough. They wanted to Soviets to lack not only the opportunity, but the desire to go to war or do any other evil expansionist things. Nations, according to traditionalism, don’t just go to war because they feel like it, they go to war to promote and secure their interests. So Nixon tried to move the world, and US-Soviet relations, into an “Era of Negotiationsâ€. Since both the United States and the Soviet Union were fundamentally unthreatened, they could afford to negotiate on issues where the interests conflicted, rather than engaging in brinksmanship. And that’s what the Nixon administration did, with a series of talks and treaties designed to move the world away from the Hobbesian state of nature.
For example, both the US and USSR considered one of their highest interests to be trying to prevent a nuclear war – widespread death and destruction are generally considered to not further the interests of countries they happen to.1 Before Nixon, these two countries would try to prevent nuclear war by participating in expensive, difficult arms races to try to build as many and as high-quality nuclear weapons as possible. But Nixon tried to address the threat of nuclear war through negotiation, with the SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) and the SALT I (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty One) treaty with the USSR, designed to regulate and freeze the number of ICBMs, as well as eliminating the destabilizing anti-ballistic missile systems being researched. These talks had actually started under Johnson, but Nixon was the one who finished them and got the treaty. This was conciliation, not deterrence or compellence, and it worked, primarily because as long as there were no missile defenses and each country could maintain secure retaliatory forces, it didn’t actually matter how many missiles they had.
Nixon negotiated on other issues with the USSR as well, including post-WW2 borders of European nations and regulation of conventional weapons buildups in Europe. Not all these negotiations succeeded, but the attempt was made, at least, to show the Soviets that they could pursue their interests through negotiations and the international system. In addition, Nixon normalized US-USSR trade relations, and tried to help them get more trade with other nations – the idea being to give the Russians a stake in the international system. Sure, the Soviets could pull out of START and other talks and treaties, and build up their forces in an aggressive way, and do any number of things we wouldn’t like – but if they did that, they’d lose the benefits of membership in the international community and trade deals. Kissinger called this the “delicate calculus of pluses and minusesâ€, and it worked to constrain the Russians even in a Hobbesian international system. Détente was the name for this whole policy of a shift to an era of negotiations, and it was effective.
It was effective on the international scene, of course. But it wasn’t popular at home – it seemed like weakness, pandering to the Soviets as the people and Congress saw it. And the Watergate scandal degraded Nixon’s ability to build popular support for détente. Nixon was, as Drachman and Shank made clear, a man obsessed with secrecy and unwilling to confront those in the public or his own administration who opposed him, calling anti-war protestors “bumsâ€. He could never be an effective leader of the American people, he held them in too much scorn for that. But he pursued the traditionalist interests of the United States in a unique, innovative way that worked while it lasted – it showed that the Soviets would negotiate, that they weren’t the horror-movie unrelenting monsters that the Truman administration had characterized them as. And so I say that Nixon did the best job of pursuing America’s interests of any president we studied. He just did a miserable job of convincing the people of that. **