Richard Nixon

1. 1 Richard Nixon AMST 3100 � The 1960s Rutledge

2. 2 Richard Nixon Since 1960, Nixon had been burning over his incompetent use of the media. But he was ready to run a strong media campaign by 1968. His appearances were carefully staged and scripted. His platform slogan on Vietnam was �peace with honor.� Nixon exploited America�s resentment against the counterculture, portraying himself as the spokesperson for the Silent Majority. Nixon vowed a �law and order� presidency to clean the streets of these protesters. This vow would be problematic as it later became clear that Nixon himself was a law violator.

3. 3 Nixon Nixon barely won the 1968 election - by just over 500,000 votes. By 1968, a rising percentage of American whites asserted that blacks wanted too much too fast and that the federal government had caved in to black demands. By 1969, student busing epitomized their fears. Here, the federal government had �intruded� into the local school districts to enforce the integration of schools. Ironically, Nixon unexpectedly embraced affirmative action. Nixon, the military hawk, was generally a political moderate on economic issues, and a conservative on social issues, but he could be surprising. His racial justice views were largely inconsistent.

4. 4 Nixon By 1970, affirmative action plans began to disturb white male workers, and by the mid-70s affirmative action was the most polarizing racial issue in America. However, race was not Nixon�s main focus in 1968. It was the Vietnam War, and this would be the central issue for Nixon from 1968 through 1971. The war was tearing Americans apart. Nixon called his war plan �peace with honor� suggesting a plan to bring the war to an end � something the majority of Americans wanted � but on terms that saved America�s face.

5. 5 The Early Nixon - Vietnam Richard Nixon served as the Vice President during the Eisenhower administration of 1952-60. His first visit to Vietnam was in 1953, just as the French were losing the war. He concluded that the French had failed to train and inspire the southern Vietnamese sufficiently. Nixon toured the region four more times between 1961-1968 and concluded that The U.S. had not trained the ARVN sufficiently. The U.S. had adopted a soft military model, such as when LBJ halted bombing to pursue talks with the North Vietnamese. To Nixon and other hard-right hawks, what was needed was a harder punch. The Americans needed to show that they would not waver in their commitment to win the war.

6. 6 Nixon and Vietnam, 1968 By 1968, Nixon was on the campaign trail and was asserting that the goal of his administration would be to end the war and win the peace in Vietnam. While Nixon never directly claimed to have a secret plan to end the war, he did allow the rumor mill to spin this message of hope to benefit his campaign. (This was before the age of Fox News). In fact, President-elect Nixon did not have any secret plans to end the war, but he believed he could pound the North Vietnamese to the bargaining table with heavy use of airpower. He wanted to show them that he meant business.

7. 7 The Nixon Doctrine By the summer of 1969, he outlined the foreign policy known as the Nixon Doctrine. The Nixon Doctrine declared that the U.S. would honor its commitment to southeast Asia by supplying arms and aid, but not troops, against direct or indirect communist aggression in the region. Nixon�s policy of turning the war over to the South Vietnamese was called �Vietnamization.� However, it was probably doomed from the start for reasons that were clear as far back as the Kennedy administration. The ARVN (with a few exceptions by the early 70s) were not the motivated army needed to fight for the sovereignty of this new nation-state the Americans were trying to create, and most Vietnamese people were not behind the Americans in this endeavor.

8. 8 Nixon While Nixon did reduce the troops in Vietnam, he also escalated the war. He did this in several ways. He escalated the air war; He widened the war into Cambodia, and then Laos in order to install friendly governments and secure the border regions from the Viet Cong who were using the Ho Chi Minh trail. Ultimately, these policies did not work and by the time the Vietnam War ended, about 41% of all GI deaths occurred under the Nixon administration. When a peace was finally negotiated in 1973, it was neither honorable nor lasting. The North Vietnamese, who were never afraid of Nixon and his �madman strategy,� had clearly won the war. His madman strategy was to make it seem like he was capable of �pushing the button� on them.

9. 9 Nixon In October, 1969, the first major moratorium on Vietnam occurred � it was a national teach-in against the war involving about 10 million Americans in public protest. This protest enraged Nixon, who vowed to ignore the peace movement and accused protesters of being traitors. Nixon tried to scapegoat his failed Vietnam policy on these protesters, claiming the protesters kept the U.S. military from �victory.� In fact the stalemate was due to the North Vietnamese stubbornness in fighting off the French and later the Americans on their own homeland. After the Tet offensive, the communists were prepared to wait the Americans out for as long as it took. They knew they had essentially won by 1968 � and there was never a time when they were losing what they saw as a war for unification. At no time in the history of French and American involvement in this war did the foreign occupiers succeed in winning over the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese.

10. 10 The End Game for Nixon Nixon�s response to the resurgent antiwar demonstrations in 1970 was to order the CIA, the FBI and his own secret �dirty tricksters� to infiltrate and sabotage the antiwar movement. The FBI was experienced in this illegal subterfuge because of their involvement with COINTELPRO. In 1971, Nixon created the Plumbers, a secret white house operation intended to sabotage his enemies (and Nixon did keep a list of his enemies). Increasingly, Nixon felt himself under siege by the protesters, a Democratic Congress, an increasingly hostile press, and even by his own government bureaucracy. Nixon had built his career by lashing out at his enemies, and by the early 1970s he began to cross the line between legal and illegal power.

11. 11 The Pentagon Papers and the Plumbers When the NY Times published the Pentagon Papers in 1971 exposing Presidential lies as early as 1967, Nixon created the Plumbers to discredit Daniel Ellsberg, the man who had provided the top secret Pentagon Papers to the press. The Plumbers were charged with Stopping government leaks, and Discrediting Nixon�s enemies by any means necessary. They targeted Nixon�s political enemies, as well as members of the counterculture like Daniel Ellsberg. In June, 1972, the Plumbers were caught breaking into and bugging the Democratic National Headquarters at its Watergate complex. When Nixon learned of their bungled operation (G. Gordon Liddy was one of the bunglers), he immediately sought to cover it up and began to obstruct the legal investigation into the break in. For this cover up, Nixon would be tried for impeachment and would resign in 1974 to avoid a guilty verdict.

12. 12 Nixon�s Personality Nixon had a dual personality. On the one hand he was smart, poised, and reflective, while on the other hand he was insecure, mean-spirited and frightened. When the first personality reigned, Nixon was at his best (ie China, triangulation and d�tente), but when the second personality reigned Nixon was at his paranoid worst. Nixon was a drinker who allowed �Mr. Hyde� to come out to torment his enemies. Tragically, it was mainly the second Nixon who controlled the White House for the five year period after 1968. Perhaps Nixon even enjoyed the politics of polarization and repression. The secret tape recordings � now publicly available - seem to suggest this. Nixon tended to dismiss those advisors who cautioned humility, preferring the �bold� advice that encouraged polarization and vindictiveness. Henry Kissinger and Agnew appealed to Nixon�s second personality.

13. 13 Nixon�s Personality Nixon often privately spoke of �niggers,� �jigs,� and �jigaboos,� and he constantly used 4-letter words about his enemies. It appears that Nixon was indeed somewhat unstable. He was prone to getting drunk, and while drunk he spoke of �nuking the commies.� His aides feared that he was literally becoming a �madman� so James Schlesinger, his Defense Secretary, insisted that the Pentagon contact him for approval if Nixon ever ordered �the Bomb� to be used. The second Nixon explains the Plumbers and their dirty tricks, the vitriolic and criminal conspirator Spiro Agnew, and the Watergate event. Nixon came very close to subverting the democratic process. Only the persistence of two reporters made the unearthing of just how pervasive was Nixon�s sickness.

14. 14 Nixon�s Exit Ironically, Nixon contributed to the burn out that most Americans felt by 1974, when he stepped down. This burn out ultimately helped the conservatives, because most people were just too tired to continue pushing for reforms.

15. 15 AMST 3100