The problem is, separating the rest of Nixon’s presidency from Watergate is like separating the rest of Johnson’s presidency from Vietnam, the rest of Carter’s presidency from Iran, the rest of Clinton’s presidency from Lewinsky and the rest of GWB’s presidency from Iraq.
As one who was draft-eligible during the Nixon administration, I tend to side with those who believe Nixon could have gotten the substantially the same resolution in Vietnam in 1969 that he eventually got in 1973, saving the country four years of a war that was pretty damn stupid to begin with.
And while I’m willing to give Nixon credit for China, the EPA, and some other ideas, the incredible, systematic corrosiveness of Watergate and its effect on politics for a generation more than obliterates whatever positive accomplishments history will credit him with.
Nevertheless, the PRC was not one whit less a “legitimate” government than the ROC. Revolutionary governments are legitimate.
What “strife”? The PRC and ROC glare at each other over the water but they never really get into it. The PRC knows that, even if the U.S. stayed out of it, it could not pull off a successful invasion – troop numbers aren’t everything in what would necessarily be a naval operation.
In hindsight, yes, but I think we still had reason to be optimistic in 1969. This was a year after the Tet Offensive, when the public started to turn against the war, but our military and political leadership knew that Tet was a military failure for the N. Vietnamese that had virtually wiped out the Vietcong. Not knowing what a resilient enemy N. Vietnam was, I bet they figured if they could maintain a stalemate long enough the N. Vietnamese would settle for a partition of the country and Vietnam would become another Korea.
If the revolutionary government honored or negotiated previous foreign commitments and followed a rule of law I would agree; however, the PRC unilaterally invalidated prior commitments that were unfavorable (while insisting on the maintenance of those that were, like the return of Hong Kong to “Chinese” rule) and instituted a system of government that was oppressive, corrupt, horrifically destructive, and nothing short of deliberately murderous (albeit this has a long tradition in China long before Mao was an itch in his daddy’s pants). And the flip of recognition from the ROC to the PRC as “One China”–with the attendant disavowal of the ROC leaving it an effective non-state–is an example of the worst of Kissinger’s “realpolitik” in action, the engineered removal of sovereignty that was solely in the supposed interest of the United States, a compromise of alleged deep ideological opposition to Communism to no political or strategic benefit…although it has allowed the United States military industry to sell tens of billions of dollars of weapons (much of which paid for by US taxpayers in a variety of three cornered deals) to the ROC.
Nixon was a decidedly polarizing individual; an “honest” man who saw no problem in lying six different directions if it achieved a result, who brought political tricksterism to new lows, who would say the foulest things about his opponents with a smile plastered on his face. Nixon campaigned into office promising to end US involvement in Vietnam, and then did it again four years later as if it were as fresh as the morning sunlight. Eisenhower, forced to accept Nixon in order to bring in California and not split the GOP, thought him a man of the lowest character and untrustworthy to the bone. I can say something good about most Presidents–even GWB has a few things to be said of him that are favorable–but Nixon was a vile individual and an ineffectual, duplicitous chief executive.
I can say a few good things about Richard Nixon, if no one else in the thread will. He was a smart man, and a hard worker. Most of what he did, most of his successes, came solely through force of will. He was an introvert in a job full of extroverts; a shy, lonely man, who every day in the public eye hid that, and through the force of his ambition, ascended to the presidency.
The tragedy of Richard Nixon came out of that. He was a man who had been beaten down by life, who had learned that the world was a hard unfair place, and that the working man would always be screwed over by the rich and powerful, from his childhood, where his father lost his ranch and they were forced to live with relatives, to the poor financial condition of his family that forced him to decline full academic scholarships to Harvard or Yale and go to a local school, so that he could help with the family finances, to his rejection from all the existing fraternal societies as Whittier College, to the rallying around Alger Hiss by liberal intellectuals, to the 1960 election, where Eisenhower’s lack of an endorsement, and Kennedy money and Kennedy dirty tricks cost him the presidency.
This was Nixon’s tragedy, that he was always on the outside looking in. It meant that he could never trust anyone, so he felt he had no choice but to get his enemies before they got him. And because he couldn’t trust, there was no one close enough to him to be able to tell him when he went too far. Instead, he surrounded himself with people like Ehrlichman and Halderman, Dean and Mitchell, who reinforced his paranoia and resentment.
I’m not so sure about that, the NLF had recovered from the failure of Tet in '68 and was able to keep the pressure up in 1969 despite the losses to the VC; their forces just became more NVA than VC. Our military and political leadership had a good idea of how resilient the NLF was but had been downplaying it and lying about to the public for a long time. The drop in public support was just paying the piper for having deceived the public who had been told that the enemy was on the ropes, there was a light at the end of the tunnel and the NLF was incapable of a mass offensive like Tet. While Tet was a military failure, it had done a great deal of damage to the South and despite the losses to the VC MACV’s response to Tet was to ask for another 100,000 troops.
This is pretty much the folly of Vietnam in a nutshell. Attrition isn’t really a strategy; it’s the lack of one.
Nixon deserved every bit of criticism that he received over Watergate and his dirty tricks. Furthermore his policies in Cambodia, Bangladesh and Chile also deserve harsh criticism and his imposition of price controls was thoroughly misguided.
However his visit to China was a big deal and not only helped to weaken the Soviet Union but probably paved the way for China’s own entry into the global economy some years later which helped lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
He also had a number of domestic accomplishments . From Wikipedia:
Overall his legacy is extremely mixed but his presidency was certainly not the unmitigated disaster that his critics make it out to be.
Boom-chaka-wawa
Kissinger: Mr. President, you’re looking mighty sexy today.
Nixon: Well gosh, you seem rather frisky. Is that an ICBM in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
Kissinger: You know how hot playing realpolitik gets me Tricky Dicky boy. I just made a deal with Satan, you wouldn’t believe the bargain I got.
Nixon: Aw Henry, bring your big sexy self over here and get rid of your clothes.
Kissinger: What’s that sound? Are you taping this?
Nixon: Taping? Why no, never. What, you think I tape our love sessions for later self gratification? Boom-chaka-wawa
That’s how he saw himself. Whether his perceptions were true or not is a different story, but Nixon saw himself as standing with the great majority of average Americans against the elite. As Richard Perlstein, in his introduction to Richard Nixon’s speeches put it:
Oh, what a time it was . . . Nixon Plumber E. Howard Hunt was also a novelist, and, in 1972, published (writing as David St. John) The Coven, a detective thriller in which a thinly-veiled Ted Kennedy character was the leader of a Satanic cult. (There’s also a telling scene where the protagonist visits a house full of hippies, one of whom is in a permanent vegetative state, his mind “destroyed by marijuana.”) This seems to have reflected his actual world-view, one he shared with much of the team. That was how polarized things were: Not just the hippies and peaceniks and counterculturalists and black militants, but the Democrats were viewed by Nixon and his men as Pure Evil and America’s Enemies. They seem actually to have believed that America’s survival depended on their holding the WH for a second term.
I knew that. Just like W was trying to one-up his daddy, Darth Cheney was trying to one-up his spiritual daddy, Tricky Dick.
Actually the W interregnum left me with softened opinions on Tricky Dick. Yes he was a lawless evil genius, but compared to W, he was still a genius who didn’t start any major wars.
