I’ve casually scanned this thread but didn’t see reference to the “money” recording of Nixon and Kissinger discussing prolonging the Vietnam war in order to do better in the 1972 election.
Which obviously they did do. So Dick Nixon knowingly killed thousands of American soldiers in order to bolster his election chances.
ROANOKE, VA. – Three months before the 1972 presidential election, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger met in the Oval Office to discuss when and how to get out of Vietnam.
Despite a massive bombing campaign during the spring and summer, the Republican president had concluded that U.S.-backed “South Vietnam probably can never even survive anyway.”
“We also have to realize, Henry, that winning an election is terribly important,” Nixon told his national security adviser. “It’s terribly important this year, but can we have a viable foreign policy if a year from now or two years from now, North Vietnam gobbles up South Vietnam? That’s the real question.”
Kissinger has tried to spin this recording (naturally), but it says what it says and the meaning is clear.
That needs to be understood in context. Nixon might well have sold himself – and, more plausibly, might well have sold his staff – on the idea that it was a matter of Good vs. Evil and the survival of America really did depend on the survival of his Administration. (I daresay some Americans believe something of the kind still – are you there, Starving Artist?) This was a time when many Americans, left and right, actually believed that the country was on the verge of a revolution, or was already in one. And many on the right saw no important distinction between the radical counterculture and the mainstream of the Democratic Party. As Rick Perlstein recounds in Nixonland, Nixon plumber E. Howard Hunt, while in the Nixon Admin, was also a paperback novelist on the side; writing as “David St. John,” he wrote a thriller called The Coven, in which a thinly-veiled Ted Kennedy figure turned out to be the leader of a Satanic cult. (There was also an incredibly-rich-in-hindsight scene, excerpted by Perlstein, in which the detective visits a filthy hippies’ pad, where at least one of the residents has been turned into a drooling zombie by use of . . . marijuana!)
Bush was almost President in 1976. When Agnew resigned, a new VP was needed. A canvas of Republican Party leaders picked Bush as their first choice, Nelson Rockefeller as their second, and Ford third. Nixon overruled them on Bush and Rockefeller and chose Ford.
Bush II was a far worse President, and I remember both. W was worse because he didn’t happen to do good, like opening China and starting the EPA. All of the vices, none of the token good deeds. Now in all fairness, Bush II was an intellectual zero and Nixon brilliant, but that doesn’t play in the question of redeeming acts or acts of evil.
Yes, that’s another thing – as discussed in the Ford Thread, Ford was a much closer friend of Nixon than was generally known at the time, and Nixon almost certainly picked him because he could reasonably hope for a pardon.
QUOTE=BrainGlutton;12233638]:rolleyes: Curtis, we’ve been over the Vietnam what-ifs in this forum many times before. There is no way South Vietnam could ever have become stable and successful the way South Korea did. SK never had to deal with an analogue of the Viet Cong – the important thing about which was not that it was invincible, but simply that it existed, and kept finding new recruits among the people no matter how many battles it lost and how many of its men got killed. Quite simply, the people of SV did not want the government they had.
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Actually there were communist guerrillas in Korea.
So you’re saying the Allende government was illegitimate because there was a functioning Congress and Supreme Court that was able to challenge the elected President.
As you note, Pinochet fixed those problems. No congress, no courts, no elections - government with zero opposition.
It did eliminate that whole “people electing the wrong [ie, non-US approved] choices” problem.
The attitude also helps explain why Curtis seems to find Nixon’s subversion of the electoral process no big deal*.
(*Along with the whole “being a thirteen year old who thinks he’s a lot smarter than he actually is” thing, of course)
The Chileans could have voted Allende out of office if they wished, next election, and might well have done so. Pinochet – and Nixon – deprived them of that option.
There’s not much evidence to choose from there. Other than Castro, the nearest thing to a Communist dictatorship in LA to date, ever, was the Sandinista government in Nicaragua; and it eventually was eased out – by a free election. (And, no, Hugo Chavez is not a dictator, not quite yet; though we might live to see him become one.)
This makes very little sense. Are you saying right-wing dictaorships are better because they’re more likely to collapse than left-wing ones? If so, that seems like a pretty silly reason. And a non-factual one - there are more right wing dictatorships in the world now than left-wing ones.
In this particualr case, it seems silly to say that left-wing governments are bad because they last so long and right-wing governments are better because they fade away quickly. Allende was in power in Chile for three years, Pinochet was in power for sixteen years.
Except, we’re not talking about Castro, nor Cuba. We’re talking about Chile and Pinochet. Allende wasn’t a dictator – he was democratically elected. How many times does this have to be pointed out to you? :dubious:
It does seem strange to try to justify a Latin American dictatorship overthrowing a democratic government with the argument that Latin American dictatorships eventually get replaced by democratic governments. Wouldn’t it have saved time to just skip the dictatorship phase?