The USA In the Time of Richard Nixon
1969-1974
By Mike Donovan
Watergate - Whittier and Duke - The only President to Resign - VP Spiro Agnew - “I Am Not a Crook” - Gerald Ford – Defensive End for Whittier College 1930-32 - $18,000 – Alger Hiss - “Tricky Dick” -
It's not a good sign for the legacy of a president if his most famous quotation is, “I am not a crook.”
If not for the presidential pardon Gerald Ford gave him when he took over, Nixon would have done prison time.
The mass of Americans supposedly hated Nixon because of Vietnam, but it really was more a matter of the cultural war than the Vietnam. I hated Nixon because everyone else did and I was a hippie and that was part of my job. Did I really understand all the issues and did I come to my conclusions about him after a socratic dialectic analysis? You know the answer.
Nixon's downfall came as a result of his extreme paranoia and distrust of everyone. He also was a 'power-tripper' who enjoyed revenge a little too much and used every arm of the government and then some to spy on his enemies. And his list of enemies could fill a big city phone book. It was ridiculous. Nixon decided at one point that a stand-up comedian named Richard M. Dixon needed to be investigated. His crime? he made jokes about President Nixon in the movie Millhouse. The White House thugs had Dixon's phone tapped and the comic was followed by undercover spies. About the best they could come up with on the guy was that he once spent a n afternoon at a cheap motel with a married waitress, and that he owed a bookie $90. They decided not to bust Dixon. A lot of taxpayer and Republican campaign treasury funds were wasted trying to prove that the comedian was a no good un-American Commie.
Short take on the elections;
Popular vote 1968-----------------------------Nixon 31,785,000
Humphrey Jr. 31,275,000
Wallace 9,906,000
Electoral vote 1968 Nixon R) 301
Humphrey Jr. D)191
Wallace AI) 46
Alabama governor George C Wallace was the leader of the so-called “American Independent Party.” Wallace was really pulling a Teddy Roosevelt 1912. George was a Democrat but knew he could not win the nomination of his party. So he formed a party whose platform was anything the candidate says it is, and the AIP carried four states. For a sample of his material, how about this,
“I say segregation now, segregation tomorra, and segregation forever!”
Wallace hurt himself in 68 when he chose former air force general Curtis LeMay as his running mate. LeMay, had wanted to start a nuclear exchange with Russia during the Cuban missile crisis and these days made no secret of his belief that we should introduce nuclear weapons into the Vietnam War. LeMay wanted mushroom clouds so badly he must have been on mushrooms. Wallace needed to tone down his extremist image with his VP choice. LeMay caused dismay for any shrewd Wallace supporters.
ELECTION RESULTS, 72;
Popular vote 1972 ----------------------Nixon 45,767,000
McGovern 28,357,000
Electoral vote 1972 ------------------ Nixon 520
McGovern 17
The Democrats had a great chance to unseat the rather unpopular Mr. Nixon but they blew it by nominating an extreme liberal for the top post and a man who had undergone shock therapy for depression as VP.
Nixon didn't finish two years of his second term.
Not only did Nixon resign, but also the year before, his Vice President, the pompous Spiro Agnew of Maryland was forced to resign his office in a separate personal scandal.
Nixon's cabinet;
Secretary of State------ William P. Rogers-----1969-1973
Henry Kissinger-----1973-1974
Sec. of War------------Melvin R. Laird----------1969-1973
Elliot L. Richardson-----1973
James R. Schlesinger-1973-1974
Sec. of Treasury----------David M. Kennedy ----1969-1970
John B. Connally--------1970-1972
George P. Schultz-------1972-1974
William E. Simon-------1974
BIO:
Richard Nixon was born January 9, 1913 in Yorba Linda California. His family was far from rich and had their share of tragedy including the death of a brother whom Richard greatly admired.
Little Richard was a great orator even participating in oratory contests in Yorba Linda Grammar School.
From 1926 to 1928 Nixon attended Fullerton High before spending his senior year at Whittier Union High School. He was president of his high school class in Whittier.
Nixon was awarded a scholarship to Harvard from the Harvard Club of California, but he was financially incapable of moving to Cambridge and supporting himself, so he declined and instead enrolled in a Quaker school, Whittier College in California where he finished number 2 in his class. For this he was given a $250 scholarship to Duke (this was when one dollar could but three cars) and studied post grad law at Duke University in North Carolina. Mister Nixon majored in Constitutional Law, with a minor in federal tax law, which was ironic because he trampled the Constitution with the Watergate cover-up and illegally used the IRS to prosecute political enemies.
Nix returned to California to practice law but later landed his first Washington job, a minor post at Franklin Roosevelts’ OPA, the Office of Price Administration. Nixon was one of many lawyers at the OPA.
From 1940 to 1942 Nixon was in the frozen orange juice business. RN was one of three partners in CITRA-FROST CO., a small business that ran out of juice.
Nixon enlisted in the US Navy in World War II. Historian Stephen Graubard most unfairly infers that Nixon's only motive for enlistment was political long term gain. He writes that Nixon, “aspired to a political career, and realized that service in some military capacity was a sine qua non.” Aside from the snobby Latin, this is a cheap shot. The man chose to risk his life for his country, and some egghead 50 years later calls him a conniving opportunist from his desk at Brown University. Graubard goes on to imply that Nixon never saw any fighting, writing that Nixon had “abundant time to read, play poker, and write daily letters to his wife.”
Nixon in fact did see some action and danger. Rich made Lieutenant. They don't promote men in the Navy for writing letters to his wife.
In fact, like John Kennedy, Nixon saw action in the Solomon Islands. Nixon didn't needlessly get his PT Boat cut in half by a Japanese destroyer, but he was there in the Solomons. Richard served in the Combat Air Transport Command in logistical support, and won citations for meritorious performance at Bougainville and Green Islands. Sure, he didn't face the kind of action that Kennedy did, but that doesn't mean it's all right to make it seem that he was behind the lines guarding the books, like a professor Grabuard.
Nixon studied Texas Five Hole poker and was such an intelligent player that he left the Navy with a tidy sum of winnings at the expense of his less studious fellow servicemen. The semi-dirty dough helped him get a new start after the service. I could have used his coaching in Atlantic City once or twice last year.
Nixon ran for Congress in California against incumbent Jerry Voorhis in 1948 and won. The Nix vs V campaign marked the beginning of his dirty fighting tactics that would last a lifetime, sending him to the top and then sending him down from the mountain too.
Voorhis was an FDR Democrat, a group that didn't exactly have the momentum at the moment. It was a good time to try to upset a well known new dealer. The Nixon campaign began to distribute flyers that accused Voorhist of being a “tool of the Communists.” Once a person is accused of something like that, even denying it gives the charge more publicity and its a no win situation for the targeted individual. Some of Nixon's flyers had a tint of anti-semitism, accusing Voorhis of being a stooge of “international Jewry.” As election day closed in, thousands of phone calls went out to voters saying that Voorhis was in fact, a Communist, not just a tool and a fool. Nixon won and served two terms.
Nixon was elected to the Senate at the same time as John F Kennedy of Massachusetts. The two future contenders for the Presidency had offices close to each other and by all accounts were quite friendly. Each at one point wrote a personal check for the other's campaign for re-election.
Congressman Nixon reached national fame in the Alger Hiss Case. Nixon said that many state department employees were either Communists themselves or were Communist tools. At the top of his State Department list of scoundrels was Alger Hiss . Nixon never completely proved his charges but a jury convicted Hiss of perjury on flimsy evidence. People said that the Hiss case was a red herring and that Nixon was just a red baiter, but I say Hiss was guilty. (boo! hiss!)
Cal voters elected Nixon to the US Senate in 1952. He beat Helen Gahagan Douglas with the help of some serious red baiting. Critics ripped Nixon for this dirty campaign for the rest of his life. "She's pink down to her underwear," he taunted. Helen responded that Nixon was yellow down to his socks. Helen Douglas used to be a Broadway Opera singer of some renown before she moved over into politics like Al Franken, but she couldn't sing a tune powerful enough to overcome Nixon's red-baiting. Nixon's campaign pamphlets denouncing her were printed on pink paper.
It was after defeating Douglas that his opponents gave him the derisive nickname “Tricky Dick,” a name that was still quite popular with the crowd I ran with as a teen-ager while he was President.
In 1952 the Republicans chose Eisenhower for President. Ike chose Nixon for VP because only RN fit the ideological bill. Party veterans all wanted Taft of Ohio for VP. But Ike didn't like the isolationism of Mr Taft, nor the isolationism of any of the other front-runners for VP. Dwight settled on Nixon for his political opinions. It went against the political tradition of personal connections to advance in politics. Ike had never met Nixon when he chose him to be his running mate. Nixon was the only one anti-Communist enough to suit Eisenhower's taste and also favored co-operation with foreign countries to defend America. Like Ike, Nixon felt that Washington's Farewell Address no longer applied. It was time for America to get involved in all the world's foreign affairs as the only way of keeping them in line and preventing them from starting yet another world war.
Shortly after accepting the 52 Vice Presidential nomination Nixon nearly had to withdraw from the race. Richard was accused of making himself 'Richie Rich' by accepting some illegal gifts and of maintaining an illegal slush fund of cash. Nixon defended himself in the famous nationally televised "Checkers" speech (which can be rented on video) in which he sarcastically declared that he had received a gift of a dog for his little girl and he was darn sure going to keep it no matter what anyone said.
The corny speech worked and Ike decided not to drop Nixon from the ticket in 52.
RN served as Vice President for 8 years but Ike didn’t confide in him very often. After losing to Kennedy in 1960 Mr. Nixon retired briefly before running for California Senate in 1962. He lost the election and famously snapped at the press in the post game show, that, “you aren't going to have Nixon to kick around any more.”
Nixon returned to private law practice and wrote a book called Six Crisis that sold well. It was about six political crisis in his political career including the incident in Venezuela when the racist xenophobic chauvinists there spit on him and violently surrounded his car. Nixon barely got out of Venezuela alive and became a hero back in the states for the abuse he took abroad.
Most people thought he was finished, but he rose from the dead. Nixon's election in 1968 was one of the great political comebacks of American History.
Nixon rose to power as a domestic anti-Communist and then made the White House by taking anti-Communism into the international plane. By 1968 the domestic threat of Communism was not the platform to victory among conservative voters it once had been. But the threat of nuclear war with Communist countries was as potent as was the threat of Communist political subversion in earlier decades. So Nixon could still play the card to get in. Ironically, once he got in, he built bridges to the Communist world that a liberal could not have dared to attempt.
EVENTS;
FIRST HUMAN LANDS ON MOON
VIETNAM WAR/PROTEST MOVEMENT
WEATHER UNDERGROUND BOMBS US CAPITOL 3-71
KENT STATE MASSACRE 71
END OF VIETNAM WAR 73
WATERGATE/
WATERGATE COVER UP/
LAUGH-IN -NIXON GOES ON COMEDY SHOW
KISSINGER INFLUENCE
INDIA PAKISTANI WAR OF 1971 CREATES BANGLADESH
RADFORD MOORER AFFAIR
ELECTION OF 72
SHOOTING OF WALLACE
ARAB-ISRAELI WAR OF 1973
OPEC OIL EMBARGO
OPENING TO "RED CHINA'
PEACE IN VIETNAM
RESIGNATION OF AGNEW
FORD APPOINTED TO THE VICE PRESIDENCY
RESIGNATION
ELECTION OF 1968;
If 1968 was not the most controversial election in American history it certainly was the most violent. The Democratic Convention in Chicago was a scene of rioting between hippies and the Chicago police. Today no vid/sound byte fluff TV piece on the 1960’s is complete without footage of the police clubbing the hippies.
The violence of the Vietnam War, the body bags, and one-legged GI’s coming home from Indochina were part of the violence stage-drop. The front-runner for the presidency was assassinated a few short weeks after he gave a moving speech about the assassination of the nation’s greatest black leader.
What is less remembered is that the Republican Convention in Miami was also marred by a riot in which police killed three blacks.
Vietnam, race relations (i.e. race riots alarming white America) and Denny McLain were the three dominant stories for 1968.
Many Democrats wanted to challenge Johnson for re-election but it would be a discourtesy to challenge the Party incumbent, especially one trying to win a foreign war. But when Johnson gave his overplayed “I shall not seek” speech on March 31 declining the re-nomination the hats quickly landed in the Demo ring. Robert Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Genie McCarthy and George Wallace, to name the best remembered, all wanted the Democratic nomination.
The favorite of the antiwar movement for some time was Eugene McCarthy, even if they all had to accept that he was un-electable. Most Americans still supported Johnson in his Vietnam effort. There wasn't much hope that a candidate of either major party could run and win on a platform of immediate unilateral American withdrawal from Nam, and that's what McCarthy was selling. (The guy was a poet on the side by the way, so I could never have voted for him. Who is more useless than a poet? Even the town drunk is good for a laugh. )
This guy was a liberal anti-war left Dem before it was hip. McCarthy spoke out against the war in 1967 unequivocally and he entered the Presidential race as a Democrat on October. One day he's watching Bob Gibson pitch in the Series against Boston, the next morning he's running for President. Genie knew it was rude to challenge the incumbent in your own party, but McCarthy felt that the war was so wrong and so serious a matter that if Johnson wouldn't get the United States out of there, some other Democrat would have to seize the nomination and get in there and do it themselves.
The Tet Offensive in January 1968 swung the center to the left and suddenly McCarthy found himself a mainstream candidate overnight. All of a sudden this fringe lefty extremist was viable!
Then McCarthy shocks the nation by winning two of the early Democratic primaries over Humphrey and Lashua. Then LBJ shocks the nation by saying he isn't going to be a candidate. Only then does Robert F. Kennedy jump into the race as a peace candidate.
Not only was RFK stealing McCarthy's act, he was doing it only after McCarthy had polished it for six months in Peoria first to make sure it worked. The Little Red Bobby Hen was showing up to eat the peace cake after Genie had baked it.
The Kennedys had all the money and the power and the Jack Kennedy legacy to milk and they did. Bobby got momentum fast. He was more handsome, young, and rich than McCarthy. The family knew how to win. Soon the Kennedy people were asking McCarthy to drop out of the race, in the name of party unity. You can imagine how mad that made the McCarthy people. It's making me mad just to write about it.
The Kennedy Klan argued that the idea was to win, not to prove you could boast that 'I told you so,' on Vietnam. What did it matter who took the early risk on the issue. RFK was far more electable, and the idea was to end the war. Who stood the better chance to make that higher goal?
George Wallace was the candidate of the old ‘solid racist South.’ When he knew he could not win the Democratic nomination in his wildest segregationist dreams he decided to run as an Independent. Without Wallace the election would have gone to Nixon in a walk. Nixon's poll numbers were up to 20 points ahead of any Democrat in the early summer. But Wallace siphoned off the entire redneck vote from the Nixon train and his spoiler role made the election of 1968 a photo-finish.
Robert Kennedy was on his way to winning the Democratic nomination when an Islamic terrorist gunned him down for no reason. Bobby had just won the California primary and seemed unstoppable. Sirhan Sirhan slayed RFK in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in June of 1968. The nomination was still up for grabs.
When the Republican Convention met in Miami it was the Vice Presidency that was still very much up for grabs. The Republicans chose Governor Spiro Agnew of Maryland partly because he was a tough ‘law and order’ type. This choice of Spiro triggered the race riot in Miami.
America in 1968 was a white supremacy world where blacks still weren’t generally allowed on television unless they were carrying bags at the train station. But that doesn’t mean that when they deliberately start violence it should be re-written with protectionist euphemistic slick writing as if they were the innocent victims of actions they instigated and executed. This is exactly how historian Bill Clinton describes the Miami riot in his dripping of relentless unfair political bias memoir My Life. He uses his biography as a canvass on which to polemicize all of the American history he lived through. Note that the riot just seems to have somehow happened. No one started it. It just happened.
The riot in fact originated with a black activist group calling itself the ‘Poor People’s Campaign.’ According to historian Clinton the PPC decided to meet in Miami to hopefully influence in a gentle way Nixon’s choice for VP. Right. As if any one of them had the remotest interest in steering the Republican Party in one direction or another.
“The Poor People’s Campaign moved from Washington
to Miami Beach in hopes of influencing the Republican
convention in a progressive way. They were disappointed
by the platform, the floor speeches, and Nixon’s appeals
to the ultra-conservatives. After the Agnew nomination
was announced, what had been a peaceful gathering
against poverty turned into a riot. The National Guard
was called out, and the by now predictable scenario
unfolded: tear gas, beating, looting, fires. When it was
over three black men had been killed, a three-day curfew
was imposed, and 250 people were arrested and later
released to quiet charges of police brutality.”
BC
Clinton implies at the end that police brutality was a large part of this event but if this were true then the Miami riot would have been spotlighted by the liberal media for the past 38 years as a dual event to match up with the police brutality of the Chicago riot.
The 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago produced a big riot between the hippies and the police. This is the one they seem to have miles of good color footage of. Hippies were throwing rocks and burning the flag. Many were waving the flag of North Vietnam and chanting "Ho Ho Ho Chi Mihn."
Throughout the anti-war protest movement there were always these extremists spoiling it for the rest of the reasonable people. There is also the leftist contention that most of these disgraceful rads were FBI double undercover agents. A few slick undercover agents led the rest of them in the wrong extremist direction in order to discredit them.
If the FBI had double agents making the crowd seem evil, they did the job a little too well and somehow forgot to inform the Chicago Police. The helmeted Chicago's finest overreacted and went through the crowd of hippies beating them randomly with clubs and breaking a lot of bones. By attacking the crowd they made victims out of the aggressors and if these cops were conservatives, they didn't help their cause. They made these hippies, many of their leaders arrogant know it all charlatan squids, into martyrs and folk heroes for decades to come. It was already cool to be an anti-war hippie, but now you were part of a cause with casualties and purple hearts.
Humphrey won the Democratic nomination in spite of a spirited challenge by Shirley Chisolm of New York.
The national election was close, very close.
Nixon beat Johnson's Vice-President Hubert H. Humphrey (D) in the battle of the VP's. Nixon won the popular vote by only one percent, but won in the Electoral College by 20 percent!
1968 The Whole World Was Watching
Of course it can be argued that without Wallace, Nixon wins in a landslide. On the other hand, the states carried by Wallace were southern states, which usually go Democratic so in that sense he may have helped Nixon. The South didn't flip, but it was neutralized.
In any case, Nixon probably could not have beaten front-runner Robert F. Kennedy. Humphrey was no RFK.
THE ALSO-RAN – HUBERT H HUMPHREY
I have a special place in my heart for Hubert H Humphrey. He played a role in helping me get into show business. Humphrey was one of my first impressions. He had a very distinctive high pitched squeal of a voice with an unmistakable energetic staccato rhythm. And he was garrulous to a fault. All the TV comedians did a Humphrey impression and it was easy for a 13 year old boy to imitate the impressionists. In later years I learned to do a direct impression of the people I impersonated. But back then I didn’t do John Wayne, I did Rich Little’s John Wayne, and Frank Gorshon's Hubert Humphrey.
Humphrey was a liberal’s liberal. He was raised in a tiny town in South Dakota during the Great Depression, a real double-whammy. Either one would be hard enough to take alone. Most South Dakota towns were not even called towns, they were called “commerce-centers.” A feed-store and a gas station at a windswept crossroads did not have the nerve to call it self a town.
Humphrey’s dad was a pharmacist and little Hubie grew up listening to political gossip in the store. Father Humphrey was one of about four registered Democrats in Doland, SD. There were about 400 Republicans. Mr. Humphrey worshipped FDR. Reading Humphrey’s biography is the best argument for the positive achievements of FDR’s New Deal that I have ever entertained. It is an excellent case in point for the benefits to the common people of some well timed and well placed big government interference in the way things are run. In particular the REA, the Rural Electrification Administrations, paid positive dividends in the world of the Humphreys and their South Dakota neighbors.
The Great Depression hit the western world of small farms long before it got near Wall Street. The world of the South Dakota farms was crashing for the entire decade of the 1920’s while it was roaring for the cities of the east. Then when the entire national economy hit the skids, the Dakotas were plagued by severe drought. Dust storms added to the economic terror. Then plagues of grasshoppers swarmed in to eat the paint off the houses. It was a biblical horror show.
Humphrey’s dad had been elected to the S.D. state legislature and his name was being tossed around as a possible candidate for governor. But little Hubert wanted to get away and go to college in Minnesota. If the boy went away and left dad to run the store alone, then Humphrey senior would have to give up his dream to run for governor.
Hubert did it. He left home and went off to study at the University of Minnesota, destroying his father’s dream of rising in politics. The selfish bum! It’s a good thing the son rose in life enough to enable his father to enjoy the dream vicariously.
Hubert Humphrey rose to prominence as a Minnesota politician and almost won the nomination for president in 1960. He settled for becoming VP in 1964.
In 1968 HHH was the conservative Democrat compared to Gino McCarthy or RFK, the two lefties of the field. After a life time in politics as one of the most famous liberals in Washington, Humphrey was now the one candidate who was not the liberal. There was no Vietnamization plan in the works if Humphrey had won. Hubert had even broken with his president a little bit over this. Humphrey was in a bad spot because he had to show he was loyal to his president Lyndon Johnson, but Johnson’s Vietnam policies were clearly an abject failure. Humphrey had to somehow propose a change without offending Johnson. Hubert was going to end the war in Vietnam in a way that was about halfway between the ideas of Nixon and the McCarthyists.
Humphrey was always opposed to the bombing operations against North Vietnam something that irked President Johnson and kept Humphrey out of many national security meetings.
INAUGURATION
When Nixon said, 'So Help Me God' in January of 1969 in was the first time since 1849 that a new President had to start his term with a Congress controlled in both houses by the opposition.
LUNAR LANDING - 1969;
Americans were incredibly exited when the USA became the first country to successfully place a man on the moon in July of 1969. Within a few years, we became rather blasé about it. The lunar landings were powered down and phased out by 1972 but not before three missions successfully put humans on the moon and returned them safely.
The Christopher Columbus of space travel was Neil Armstrong who stepped onto the moon on July 21 and said, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” The quote has gone down in history as one of the biggies along with “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country,” and, “Don’t give up the ship.”
But Armstrong actually butchered the copy he was supposed to recite. He was using man and mankind in the same context, as the human species, so what he said was redundant. He was essentially saying, “That’s one small step for mankind, one giant leap for mankind.”
What he was supposed to say was, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” He forgot the “a”. But everyone knew what he meant anyway, so all but English teachers and other fastidious debunkers have overlooked the error.
As the lunar program was very costly and produced few tangible productive results, the public, in a liberal mood swing already, began to condemn it as wasteful. The billions spent by NASA was just another offshoot of the insensitive establishment. The economy was in bad shape, people were poor, and the idea of sending more and more people to the moon for no great reason seemed arrogant and senseless.
In the short term, yes, but the sun is going to run out of battery power in a few million years so we had better get on the ball again at some point.
THE VIETNAM WAR;
Johnson handed the Olympic torch of Vietnam to Nixon, but with only the flame for a handle.
Nixon had quite a few options for dealing with the Vietnam War. Unfortunately none of them were good options. His natural instinct was to try and win the war, but it was Kissinger's opinion that the opportunity to win the war had been lost by the Johnson Administration and the only way to go now was to find a way to withdraw with a draw. The US hoped to leave with dignity and somehow keep our South Vietnamese allies in power without our military presence. That was some tall order.
Some of Nixon's advisors wanted him to take aggressive offensive military action. They wanted him to take the war to the NVA and VC. They suggested bombing the dikes of the North. This would have devastated the land quite effectively, but the loss of civilian life would be so enormous that Nixon did not have the heart to do it (believe it or not). There was also the serious consideration of using small (tactical) nuclear weapons in combat areas. A tactical nuke had never been used in anger before and using them in Nam might create a whole new dynamic in international conflicts. Then Russia could have justified using them 20 years later in Afghanistan, for example. No. Nixon rejected that idea also, thank Christ.
When Nixon took office the USA had already lost 31,000 KIA in Vietnam. Johnson left office with no exit strategy of any kind for his successors to latch on to.
It seemed insanity to maintain an unpopular war as far away from home as the physical earth allows. It was ten thousand miles to Vietnam, away, or one mile for every day it lasted.
It's easy to forget that the public, press and Congress originally supported the Vietnam War Vietnam War overwhelmingly. When Kennedy was sending 16,000 "advisors" to Nam, and when Johnson in 63 and 64 was continuing our participation, there were no mobs in the streets turning the flag upside down and there were no vets throwing their medals away on the Capitol Hill grounds. The polls showed strong support for American actions in Vietnam until at least 1965.
It was originally a case of good against evil in terms of rules of international behavior. North Vietnam had invaded three countries without provocation. These were Laos, Cambodia and South Vietnam. Laos and Cambodia were not democracies but they did not deserve to be invaded. These Communist invasions violated several specific treaties and international law in general. South Vietnam was a fledgling democracy full of corrupt officials but it too did not deserve therefore to be invaded by the godless Communists.
The United States supported Laos against the Communists until the Communists won in 62. Then we supported South Vietnam until we left in 73 and that is the only reason the Communists won in 75. They were allowed to win. They did not win on the battlefield. They won on the American home front.
We pulled out. They walked in. But they could have fought us for a hundred years and never would have taken over South Vietnam if that had been our determination. Unfortunately for the good citizens of South Vietnam and Cambodia who would be murdered when the Communists took over, this was not our determination. Our determination was to get out, period. Damn the South Vietnamese people, the soldiers who had fought beside us, and the principles we were there for. Damn them all if that’s what it takes, just get us out of there. That was the mood of the country in 1971 and beyond and was the mood of much of it before that. By 71 it was just “out NOW!” I know. I lived it. I felt the same way. The war had gone on too long. There were too many casualties. It was an endless stalemate. “Out Now” was the big slogan. No one cared about any details or arguments when it comes down to those two words as a national mantra.
Anti-war demonstrations plagued the administration from day one. I was in one of those ant-war demonstrations at the age of 16 in Boston in May of 1971. There were 200,000 of us and all my two friends and I did was sit on a hill and listen to a lot of speeches. But but I was there. Actually we heard so many boring leftist speeches about issues having nothing to do with the Vietnam War that we left early and took the bus back to Southie.
CAMBO 1969-1971
The secret bombing then the invasion of Cambodia in 1969-1971 by US forces was the biggest issue of all amongst us lefties. Kissinger was a war criminal and so was Nixon. The left (and that included almost all of the center by 1971) believed that the Cambodian invasion was illegal, unconstitutional and fascist. They still feel that way today. The left has not retracted the condemnation of the invasion of Cambodia.
Cambodia bad enough on its own. It was also the event that triggered the killings at Kent State.
It wasn’t a matter of 'Blame America First.' We went one better. To us it was 'Blame America Only.'
The ruler of Cambodia was Prince Sinahouk. His country was being invaded by the Red Cambodians, the Khmer Rouge. The Prince was a devout anti-communist. The eastern border area of his country was completely occupied by NVA Army units, VC and Khmer Rouge troops. The key word is completely. Sinahouk himself said that there was not so much as a single water buffalo left in this area that was of native Cambodian blood. East Cambo was a safe haven for offensive operations against American troops. VC and NVA troops were entering the South Vietnam war zone in safety, killing US troops and then retreating into Communist occupied Cambodia. The Commie Cambo sanctuaries were resulting in the highest US KIA rates of the entire war, as much as 400 dead per week.
Nixon and Kissinger ordered the B-52 raids on the sanctuaries with the expectation that North Vietnam would protest. The US was prepared to admit to the bombings and to explain all the details of the situation to the world as well as to the American public. Key members of Congress on both sides of the aisle were confidentially informed of the bombings before they took place and when they happened, there was no outcry against it.
But the North Vietnamese then surprised everyone by not admitting that the bombings ever took place! Why? Because they did not want to admit to the world that they were illegally there in the first place.
Sinahouk made it clear that he wanted the US to get the Communists out of Cambodia but he also indicated that we would have to do it without his official permission because it would be a threat to his political survival to openly side with the US. It was in concession to Sinahouk for his cooperation that Kiss-Nix decided to keep the B-52 raids a secret.
In any case, the bombings took place and there were no civilian Cambodian casualties. Neither Cambodia nor North Vietnam ever even claimed there had been any Cambodian civilian casualties! Yet millions demonstrated in America against our murderous bombing of the innocent Cambodian people.
The raids were not enough to change the strategic picture. The NVA continued to increase its military presence in the sanctuaries for a two-fold military/political goal. Goal 1 was to help the Khmer Rouge overthrow Sinahouk and win Cambodia for the Communists, and goal 2 was to inflict casualties on US troops in South Vietnam. It should be stressed that the VC and NVA making their forays into South Vietnamese areas had no specific military objective in mind other than killing Americans. There was no great ammo dump to capture like at the Battle of the Bulge, there was no Dien Bien Phu to surround and lay siege to, and there was never a chance that they could capture Saigon. The strategy was to wear down American morale at home by killing American soldiers. It was a terrorist strategy.
Sihanouk went on vacation to Paris in March of 1970, a foolish move. While he was away a rebellion broke out against him in Phnom Penh. 20,000 protestors, mostly young people enraged over the Communist occupation of eastern Cambodia, attacked the North Vietnamese and the NLF embassies there. The Cambodian Parliament demanded that the Army expel the Communists from the eastern sanctuaries. Juxtapose this against the college hippie protests in the United States calling us the demons for trashing the Cambodian people and nation by bombing Communist sanctuaries.
Sihanouk grabbed a plane to Moscow and asked the Soviets to pressure the North Vietnamese to withdraw their troops. While this was going on, the Cambodian Assembly voted 92-0 to depose Sihanouk and replace him with Lon Nol, the acting Prime Minister. Sihanouk then went to Peking where he switched sides in a desperate attempt to retain power. He called for victory against the new Cambodian government. Suddenly new rulers of his homeland were “stooges for American imperialism.”
Liberal authors have implied that the CIA was behind the coup in Cambodia that put Lon Nol in power. The United States didn’t even have up to date intelligence on events in Phnom Penh, let alone intelligence agents. Sam didn't have the means to start a coup there even if he had the will.
Lon Nol now openly asked for assistance from the United States, but Nixon and the K decided that they did not want to give the NVA any just cause to launch a full-scale invasion of the entire country. They later regretted the decision because the NVA launched the invasion anyway. Cambodia would have defended the assault more effectively if the US had sent assistance as soon as Nol requested it. Lord knows what the college protestors would have done if we had intervened that openly in Cambodia, at Lon Nol's request.
In early April of 1971 the NVA and the VC invaded Cambodia. Benedict Sihanouk was waiting in the rear guarding the Communist mail. He was available as the head of a new Communist state. The NVA captured a full one fourth of the country by the end of the month. They were closing in on the capitol, Phnom Penh. Soon Cambo would become one of the Red states on the political map.
Finally in April of 1971 Nixon ordered USA ground troops across the border into Cambodia to attack these Communists who were occupying all of the eastern border area of Cambodia.
The response at home was hippies, college professor, housewives and future presidential candidates, telling the world that we were the terrorists. Nixon was a Nazi and Kissinger too. America was the murderous aggressor. This is still spoken regularly by the left as an historical fact. It was the Blame America First crowd’s finest hour.
The Khmer Rouge overran Cambodia a short time after we finally withdrew in 1973. Their 1975 invasion, in full alliance with North Vietnam and fully communist and anti-democracy, resulted in the installation of a totalitarian communist regime that committed genocide against the Cambodian people. Three million Cambodians were massacred in the worst horror since Nazi Germany exterminated the Jews in the concentration camps. Their leader was Pol Pot. These were the bad guys we were fighting in Vietnam and Cambodia. When we left, they marched in and took the victory they had been seeking all those years.
And yet the modern history textbook, The Enduring Vision text and footnote of page 1,000 lays the blame for this genocide on the USA. The writing is slick, offensive and unjust. Blaming The United States for the Cambodian holocaust is like blaming the UK for the invasion of Poland in 1939.
First the text that spawns the footnote blames the USA for all the killing and destruction. Dateline February 1973:
Relieved that the long nightmare of the war was past,
most Americans quickly put the conflict aside. Few
considered the extent to which American involvement
in the war had physically devastated much of Vietnam,
caused 2 million Vietnamese casualties, and brought
severe human and material losses to Cambodia and Laos*
How can it be that the USA was responsible for all the casualties and all the damage? Doesn’t it take two to fight a war? Didn’t we all celebrate the downfall of communism in 1989? Was that not who and what they were? Did they not conduct offensive operations against at least 3 non-belligerent countries in Southeast Asia? Now the asterisk;
The US bombing and invasion of Cambodia, for example,
had further disrupted an already divided nation and opened
the door for the seizure of power by the communist Khmer
Rouge rebels in 1975.
This gives the false impression to the student that the communists took over the country in some sort of a 1975 coup. “Seizure of power,” is a ludicrous description of the total invasion and military conquest of Cambodia by the communist armies. The term rebels is really too kind, also. This was a large army by 1975, superior in numbers, armaments, logistics, training, morale and political support, and they were rolling up the field in a one way onslaught in the spring of 75. The Khmer Rhouge was supported politically and supplied militarily by North Vietnam, China and the USSR. The Soviets sent weapons through China. This was no longer a “rebel” army, my friend.
The footnote concludes with this on the fact that 40 percent of the population of Cambodia was then murdered;
This genocidal horror, too, was part of the legacy of the
Vietnam War.
Yes it was part of the legacy, but not in the way you imply. This genocide was the kind of thing that we were trying to prevent. This genocide was a result of our departure from Vietnam, not our arrival.
CONVICTION OF WILLIAM CALLEY 3.29.71
It is hard to understate how much public attention was paid to the Bill Calley case during the early 70’s. It was bigger than the OJ trial because the political implications matched and surpassed the spectacular events of the Calley crime itself.
Journalist Seymour Hersh first brought the My Lai story to national attention.
The first one to try to was a soldier named Ron Ridenhour. He had joined Charlie Company after rotation had changed Charlie’s entire roster since the massacre. But scuttlebutt about what happened was floating around without shame, or concern for the legal implications. The more soldiers Ridenhour talked to the more he realized that something horrible had happened and that the world did not know and should know.
When Ridenhour was discharged and returned to the states he began writing letters to US government officials, including the President, telling of the stories he had heard. There was little or no response, certainly none from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Journalist Hersh got involved and the ball got rolling.
The case Toth vs. Quarles [?] had to be prosecuted as soon as possible. If Calley left the Army then he’d be protected from prosecution. The Supreme Court in 1955 had decided in that once a serviceperson is discharged, they can no longer be prosecuted for crimes committed in uniform. This worked in the favor of the prosecutors however in one respect. Former Vietnam soldiers could testify about crimes they witnessed or participated in without fear of legal reprisals. They could talk about My Lai as long as they were back in the states and in time many came forward and did.
At first sentiment was against Calley. He had herded a group of unarmed civilians into a ditch and them killed them all with machine gun fire. There was no doubt that he had done it. Other members of his unit had done the same, just not to the degree he had. ‘Charlie Company” murdered defenseless civilians who had already surrendered. His immediate commanding officer, Ernest Medina was charged with murder in a separate trial.
At first there was nothing but national and international outrage against Calley. But slowly at first and then in torrents there arose a backlash in his favor. Current and former servicemen felt that if Calley could be convicted then any serviceman could be convicted, since there was always a fine line between soldier and civilian in hot combat areas. “I killed in V.N,” spray painted one veteran on Calley’s car windshield during his trial, “Hang me too.” I was a long haired 16 year-old left wing convert hippie and after a while even I began to wonder. No matter how much one was against war or this war, there developed a reasonable doubt in virtually everyone’s mind that perhaps Calley was doing what he was trained to do in a stressful situation, and his insane deed may have been part of an insane situation. His murder trial raised gray area issues of combat that were not resolved then and are not resolved today.
It comes down to a simple matter. If old men, women and children are making munitions, booby traps, helping to lay mines, reporting enemy positions to its combat units and feeding and supplying their soldiers voluntarily and with spirit, are they innocent civilians entitled to protection from violence? Furthermore, if there are documented cases of children and old women walking into a cluster of soldiers and killing them with a grenade, is it not reasonable for other civilians to therefore lose the protections of the Geneva Conventions regarding rules of warfare? These are questions, not answers, questions still on the table in Iraq today where civilians murder US troops and then retreat behind the protective masonry of the word civilian.
Calley and his Charlie Company were green and had already lost several men to minefields. Calley had already been traumatized by a helicopter ride out of a minefield in which he shared the cabin with six pair of boots with the feet still in them but nothing else. Parts of dead men’s faces stared at him from the floor.
The assault on My Lai was to come early in the morning. Speed, surprise and full scale attack were considered essential. My Lai was such a hot zone that it was designated ‘free-fire,’ meaning it was so hostile that it was basically ok to shoot anything that moves. In fact, My Lai demonstrated the insanity of the free-fire zone concept. The villages of the My Lai hamlet were considered heavily defended. The previous month (February 1968) many fierce fights had taken place there. It had long been a stronghold of the Viet Cong. In fact, when the mid-50’s Geneva Accords were agreed on partitioning the country in half, the My Lai area was one of the only places where most of the refugees actually fled into the Communist North from the South. And it was far more than Cabot Lode’s claim of ‘a handful’ that moved in that direction. Maybe if they had divided the country a little further to the South there would not have been a Vietnam War.
The mission was to Shermanize the entire group of My Lai ‘fortified hamlets’ as one intelligence report had called them. But they weren’t supposed to kill everyone in them. Charlie Company was going in to raze the villages and destroy all crops and any other means of succoring Viet Cong troops.
Charlie Company had not been specifically ordered to slay the town but several factors were dovetailing into a mind-set for massacre.
In another sense however Calley was personally responsible for his actions because he had displayed the same behavior earlier in less stressful situations. Two soldiers at his trial reported an earlier incident in another village where he was questioning an old Vietnamese man and then brought him to the edge of the town well. Calley threatened to throw him into the well if the old man did not give the right information. A splash was heard and then a gunshot. A soldier went back and saw a well red with blood. It was not a combat situation.
Captain Medina was acquitted of 102 counts of murder.
Calley was convicted and sentenced to life in prison on 3.29.71, but Nixon reviewed the case and in August reduced his sentence to 20 years. For a few months Nixon resisted pressure from veterans groups and others to pardon him completely. But then after things cooled off a little, he gave the My Lai maniac a complete pardon. Calley today manages his father’s jewelry store in Georgia. Give him credit for one thing. He hasn’t tried to write a best seller about his deed.
A soldier named Thompson at one point in the massacre stood between Calley and a house full of civilians that Calley was going to kill. It was a situation where Thompson literally was saying you will kill these civilians over my dead body. Calley backed down. Thompson had saved their lives. About 35 years later Thompson went back to Vietnam with a CBS film crew and was hugged by the people he had saved.
The My Lai massacre is pointed to as proof that we were no worse than the enemy in our murderous cruelties. It proved also that the war was bad. There wasn’t even a good guy to root for. It was bad versus bad.
Then they say that there were hundreds of other My Lai’s out there that we didn’t hear about.
No.
The Communists in the Vietnam were far more terrorist than we were. They had assassinated thousands of village officials before the US arrived in any significant force. The South was not committing a similar campaign of terrorism against the North. My Lai was a disgrace that did not represent typical American behavior. The genocide in Cambodia after the Communists took over speaks for itself.
PING PONG DIPLOMACY
On April 12 1971 some members of the US table tennis team visited Peking to participate in sporting exhibitions. This would be no big deal today. In fact I am going to be playing at two comedy clubs in China next month, one of which is named Chopshticks located in Shanghai (no joke.) But 1971 was another world. The Cold War was in full swing; the Vietnam war was on and the UN still recognized only the leaders of Taiwan as the legitimate government of China. There were no formal diplomatic relations between the two giants. No American had officially been allowed into China since it became Communist in 1949.
The arrival of the ping pong team was big news all over the world. It was a marker, a symbol, and a stepping stone for change, a bridge towards the next step of a Nixon visit to China in 1972. I remember that everyone was talking about it. The opening of US-China relations through table tennis was given the media nickname, ‘ping-pong diplomacy.’
MIDDLE EAST RELATIONS TO 1972 – PILLAR POLICY
Nixon took over in 1969 at a rough time for US-Middle East relations.
The war of 1967 Arab-Israeli War was all settled down. But in January of 1968 Great Britain announced that it as withdrawing from the Middle East, and that included Southwest Asia. Britain had provided security for the Persian Gulf for decades and that was all going to come to a sudden end, with no plans for who was going to take over that police duty. The temptation for Soviet moves to the oil jugular was clear.
If the United States had not been bogged down in Vietnam, it is likely that American influence and power could have prevented the outbreak of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Sam also would have gladly stepped up the plate and took over for Britain of the Gulf region in Nixon's time.
For Britian it was more a money matter of money than any desire to abandon its traditional foreign policy of peace and empire through strength. The small Gulf states even offered to pay the expenses if England would provide the force. It was an interesting offer but it wasn't dignified enough for British pubic relations. J Bull just said no to Arab funding for British military operations.
The United States Navy, which would have to do most o the work of protecting the Middle East from itself and one certain outsider, was stretched out over 24,000 miles of US foreign policy. America had warships in every corner of the globe, and a destroyer keeping an eye out on Baffin Island. Nixon didn't have the ships to patrol all the nooks and crannies of South Asia and the Suez region. Even if he had the will he didn't have the way unless he wanted to downgrade US capabilities in Vietnam, Korea or the North Atlantic.
The best alternative in Kiss and Nixes thinking was to employ one of the Gulf States to become the police power in the region and keep the Soviets out and prevent local wars through strength. It was a simple matter of giving a lot of first-rate US weaponry to the Gulf friend of our choice. Since no power in the region had much military might, whomever got the bag of toys from Uncle Samta would rule the Gulf. America named Iran to be the princely power, and the Shah of Iran was more than willing to go along.
When the Shah heard that Britian was leaving the Gulf, he immediately proclaimed that Iran was going to fill the power vacuum. This was before the United States had even approached Iran to be its very friendly power in the Gulf. Before the Shah got away and became a problem on his own, we might as well reign him in to do our foreign policy bidding in exchange for all the guns and ammo he needed.
This policy had problems for America as far as its other “friends” in the Gulf were concerned. The rest of the states of the Middle East in Asia did not look with favor on a rising Iranian power in the region. Iranian hegemony as at least was frightening to the Gulf State as western or Soviet hegemony (and I've heard eggheads pronounce it with the accent on the second syllable – he GE mo ny.) Iran was also a threat to its neighbors for two natural reasons. Iran was not really an Arab state. It was a Middle Eastern State. Iran was an oil state. Iran was Islamic. But it was racially Persian, not Arab. It spoke farsi, not Arabic. I asked an Iranian BMW salesman last month if he spoke any Arabic, and he said, “one or two sentences.”
The United States decided to balance the pillar of power in Iran with a second pillar in Saudi Arabia. These two countries would now do our bidding in the Middle East at opposite ends of the Gulf. The addition of the second pillar would give an Arab power enough weapons and prestige to not have to fear Iran.
This policy of surrogate US security policemen in the Gulf, regardless of their political affiliations, was known as the “Nixon Doctrine.” It was Machiavellian. The ends justified the means. It was a shame we had to make deals with Arab states that had
CAMBODIA FEVER - KENT STATE MAY 4, 1970
There were many anti-war demonstrations in reaction to the Cambodia invasion but one of the most severe was the one’s at Kent State University in Ohio. The action began days before the day of the tragedy. The peace protestors were throwing rocks and bottles through campus windows and at police cars. They made a serious attempt to firebomb the ROTC building on campus. Governor Rhodes of Ohio declared martial law on May the third, and ordered 3,000 National Guard troops to the campus to protect the rent-a-cops from the unruly hippies who wanted to give peace a chance.
On May 4 600 students left the books back at the dorm and demonstrated against the war, the ROTC, the national guard, Nixon, Kissinger and our fascist nation. The college cops ordered them to disperse. Under martial law, the gathering was illegal. They chanted bad things and threw rocks. Then the National Guard fired tear gas into the crowd. As the crowd made an orderly retreat up a hill the Guard inexplicably opened fire on the unarmed demonstrators killing 4 and wounding 11. One of the dead students had chosen not to retreat. He had stood before the advancing guardsmen displaying a defiant middle finger that cost him his life. I have seen this inspirational photo. The guy had guts.
Nothing could have hurt the administrations war policy more severely than this insane military answer to a college demonstration. Domestic and international opinion turned against the war like the Johnstown flood. Now the Cambodian invasion was proven wrong, even though the two events did not in reality connect directly.
Kent State has retained historical fame but an equally horrible event took place on May 15 at Jackson State College in Mississippi. There State troopers handled a student protest at a female dorm by shooting at them, killing two and wounding 11. All of this triggered a hysterical wave of protests all over American colleges. 400 had to temporarily shut down normal academic activities.
The bible of the ‘Fascist America invaded peaceful Cambodia” point of view is Sideshow by William Shawcross.
The US Ambassador to Cambodia during these years in a sworn statement said that much of the book is totally erroneous.
Once again let’s look at how The Enduring Vision explains things to students. First the authors claim that the bombings did not disrupt the communist supply bases in Cambodia. However, they assert,
They did help to undermine the precarious stability of that
tiny republic and to precipitate a civil war there between
pro-American and communist forces.
Well that’s interesting. We are to blame for the civil war and genocide in Cambodia. It is odd that the authors admit that there were pro-American forces there at all. I seem to recall that we were the bad guys attacking a strictly neutral country. Just who were these “pro-American forces” in Cambodia that the writers speak of? How could we have bombed these sanctuaries in total disregard of the wishes of that entire country if you also tell us that there were “pro-American forces” on one side of their civil war?
The answer is that there were indeed pro-American forces in Cambodia. It was the established leadership of the nation and its standing army. They had been totally intimidated by the communists, were afraid to seek our help openly, and were happy to let us bomb the NVA out of their sanctuaries, or at least try to.
Or are the authors suggesting that the country was completely neutral until later when all of a sudden a civil war erupted and for some strange reason a great faction appeared that was totally in favor of the nation that had bombed their land viciously and without provocation? How does one logically account for these “pro-American forces” in Cambodia?
Later they add this about our “invasion” (it was an incursion that is always referred to as an “invasion”);
The invasion ended Cambodia’s neutrality, widened the war
throughout Indochina and provoked massive protests.
“Throughout Indochina”? I think all of Indochina was already quite involved.
Oliver Stone, a Vietnam vet and filmmaker also blames the US for the Cambodian genocide. In his film NIXON, in which he demonizes his subject so much that he even portrays his faithful wife Pat as having hated him (an unforgivable offense), he closes out the film with an epilogue voiceover in which blames the USA for Pol Pot’s 3 million murder victims. It’s just words on a movie script with no concrete support but our nation still buys this garbage; [insert exact quote]
Bitter veterans do not speak for all veterans. A half a million Vietnam vets came home and joined the VFW and the American Legion. The John Kerry crowd isn’t the only voice on the issues.
But then, as now, the anti-war crowd gets all the spotlight from the liberal press as though they speak for everyone. Anti-war vets get the red carpet and the hawks don't get an interview from the Telegraph Creek Montana weekly Gazette. Today, the ever hostile and obese left-wing filmmaker Michael Moore is publishing a new book of letters he has received from soldiers in Iraq who condemn the war, as though these letters speak for all of our troops. The book is small and he needed letters from relatives and ex-servicepersons from other wars to fill it up enough to call it a book. But talk in person (and I have) to anyone who served over there and they all say the same thing to me. “You know, there’s a lot of good things going on over here that you never hear about on the news.”
William Shawcross has admitted that his book was wrong.
BANGLADESH;
A political map of today’s world shows a country east of India called Bangladesh. In 1970 this country didn’t exist. In 1970 this area was known as East Pakistan, an irredentist partner to West Pakistan. Both regions collectively were one country, Pakistan.
In the fall of 1971 a series of border clashes between India and Pakistan erupted into full-scale war. India won the war and eliminated East Pakistan from the face of the earth. A new nation was formed, with a government favorable to India and it was to be called Bangladesh.
Starvation and overpopulation plague the country to this day.
The United States came closer to involvement than is widely known. Though seldom remembered today, The Indo-Pakistani war was banner headlines in even the Boston newspapers for two straight months.
LAOS 71;
The South Vietnamese Army, under US guidance launched an incursion onto Laos to try to clean out the Communist military sanctuaries there. The South Vietnamese Army was defeated and driven out, adding to Nixon’s weak political position on Vietnam.
THE PENTAGON PAPERS AND THE PLUMBERS
In June of 1971 several major newspapers began to publish government documents about the Vietnam War that became known as the Pentagon Papers. They were supposed to be secret but someone leaked them to the New York Times and others.
Kissinger was fully steamed about the leaks and soon a band of men was formed to prevent any such further unwanted revelations. They became known around the White House as “The Plumbers,” because they were in charge of stopping leaks. I get it, nayaa ha.
The Pentagon Papers were a national sensation and when they were revealed in full they became a best selling five volumes book collection. The papers actually dealt with US government decisions on Vietnam under Kennedy and Johnson. In those years Kissinger was only a peripheral player, so he actually was not under the gun when they came out. But Henry felt that if these papers could be leaked, then anything he said, did or wrote in confidence could also be leaked, so something had to be done.
It was finally plumbed out that the leaker had been Daniel Ellsberg, a Defense department think-tank egghead that came up with a guilty conscience about the war and decided on his own to leak all the top secret material. Ellsberg became a nationally famous person overnight and remained so for sometime. I still see him pitching in his two cents on political talk shows as a talking head in a four corner box. The Pentagon papers gave him a real celebrity life. I don't care much for him, for he has a Messiah complex that stinks to high heaven where the real messiah lives. He thinks he is the voice of God now and that the voice of God is hard left.
When Kissinger and the Plumbers found out that Ellsworth was the bad guy they broke into his office to try to find some dirt in him, but when the deed of breaking and entering his office became public they heaped more dirt on themselves and the administration they served than they carried out of there on Ellsberg.
1972 NV OFFENSIVE;
The North Vietnamese, taking advantage of our endless withdrawals of troops, launched the “Easter Campaign” an all out attack on South Vietnam in April of 1972. Nixon responded by launching heavy bombing attacks on the north. The South Vietnamese Army held. Later the December bombing campaign called “Linebacker II” brought Hanoi to the bargaining table in a reasonable mood at long last. The US air arm was for the first time allowed to hit with full conventional force across the North including the cities.
ELECTION OF 1972;
It didn’t add up on the surface. The entire country had gone hippie. Senators and hockey players had one hair. An overwhelming majority of Americans were against the war. Leftism was mainstream to a degree unparalleled in all of US history. Yet in the middle of that playing field, the Democrats got clobbered by a Republican in one of the most one-sided elections of all time in any free country. This 17 year old long-haired hippie watched the election of 1972 with amazement. How could this happen? This was “our” chance and we ran into a freight train at the polls. How could this be?
The Democrats put up a candidate from their own extreme left, while the Republicans put up a candidate from their moderate left. Nixon was a cold warrior, but he was no redneck. He was too liberal even for the Eastern Establishment. It didn’t matter that the hippies considered Richard a fascist reactionary right-wing war-monger. What mattered was that with the silent majority of mainstream voters, extremism in the pursuit of the presidency is always a vice. The Democrats ran an extremist version of itself and the Republicans didn’t. It was 1964 in reverse.
The Democrats put up the most left-wing candidate in US history for president. George McGovern, was a senator from South Dakota and a former B-24 bomber crew member in World War II. McGovern wanted to govern. He had seen war and was against it. He was the candidate of the anti-war movement and the hippies, as well as intellectual libs and the traditional power bases of the party. I met him once. We talked about the joy of studying history. It was an 11 second conversation but it was thrilling to meet him. He is a good person.
The Democrats were putting up a good fight until a scandal rocket the ticket. It was a “depressing” story, and is famous enough now, that it gets mention even in the quick sound byte TV versions of American History. This scandal is mentioned every Presidential Election year by all the pundits
In 1972 it was revealed that Vice Presidential nominee Tom Eagleton had undergone electroshock therapy for depression a few years earlier. Tom had not told anyone of it, not even his own Democratic party. Eagleton resigned as the Vice Presidential aspirant. McGovern made a show of asking TE to stay on but everyone knew that Tom had to resign.
Now instead of an underdog team with rising momentum, the Democrats had a candidate and a ticket that behind in the polls and appeared to be running an inept and embarrassing campaign. No one likes to back a loser. The ticket went from hip to un-hip in a shock-therapy heartbeat.
Let's go back to the beginning and look at the campaign in more detail. Late in 1971 the front-runner for the Democrats was husky Edmund Muskie, the Senator from Maine. But then came the famous crying in the Manchester snowstorm incident just before the New Hampshire Primaries. When Edmund wept away, he got swept away. Like Eagletons' depression confession, Muskie's tearful press conference is part of all TV sound byte histories. A three minute jump-cut history of American presidential Presidential campaigns would have to include a full four seconds of the Muskie moment.
Here's what happened. It started when a New Hampshire Newspaper, or, should I say, the New Hampshire Newspaper, the Manchester Union Leader wrote an article about Muskie in which he was quoted (a Muskie letter cited) as saying that is was perfectly OK to use the word “Canuck” to describe French-Canadiens. I guess this was a sensitive issue in New Hampshire where there's a lot of Canucks registered to vote. A lot of the road signs in New Hampshire are in both English and French.
Muskie swore that the charge was false. No photocopy of the alleged Canuck letter was ever produced so he was probably right. But the Union Leader also included criticism of his wife. They said that she chewed gum and wasn't always terribly ladylike.
Whoa!
Muskie was a hot tempered guy to begin with (he had once put a waiter in a headlock for a spot of dirt on his scrambled eggs) and he went berserk. He was in Manchester at the time, the manufacturing center city, named after the bigger one in England, and immediately called for a press conference.
If Muskie had held that press conference indoors the entire course of world history might have been different. He might have won the Presidency in 1972. But he held it outdoors and it was snowing. Muskie defended these charges with passion and with some solid arguments of disproof.
But too many snowflakes came crashing down upon his warm cheeks. They began to melt and it sort-of looked like he was crying. A few scummy reporters ran to their phones and wired headlines back to their rags that “Muskie Breaks Down Crying at Press Conference.” The story spread like wildfire. Even if he could now prove he was had not cried, the political impact could never compete with the amount of publicity that was generated when it was reported that he had cried. Accusations get 90 points. You lose by being accused and “not guilty” carries the same penalty as guilty; Political damage
If Muskie had worn a felt hat he might have won the nomination. He probably wouldn't have picked Eagleton, so that scandal would never have happened and the Democrats might have beat Nixon. There never would have been a Watergate, no resignation nor a President Ford. Vietnam would have closed sooner for the US; Muskie probably would have been re-elected. There never would have been a Jimmy Carter; and Reagan might never have been installed as a reaction to Carter's pacifist foreign policy; A few snowflakes changing the course of history.
George Wallace was once again a powerful third-party candidate in the 1972 race. He was a real player, a real factor. If somehow the other top candidates cancelled each other out, the guy might actually get in. It was a scary thought, and few people discounted that possibility completely. Then tragedy struck in the form of a lunatic gunman named David Brenner. No, check that, his name was Arthur Bremmer.
Governor Wallace was campaigning at a shopping mall in Maryland on May 15, 1972 when Arthur Bremmer reached out from the crowd with a pistol, emptying six shots into Wallace and the crowd. There is a chilling film record of the event. The sound is brutal. Wallace was paralyzed for the rest of his life. George Wallace withdrew from the race, to fade from history as a black mark on our national record. Today the name George Wallace to a 20 year old means a black Las Vegas comedian.
Historians interpret this horrible shopping mall event as a help to Nixon. On the other hand with Wallace out of the race the South was an open field all over again, and the traditional Democratic “Solid South” could conceivable go McGovern. But McGovern was too liberal for the solid south. He not only wanted the USA to unilaterally and immediately withdraw from Vietnam with no quid quo pro, he also wanted a blanket amnesty for the draft dodgers who had fled the country and now wanted to come back. Ouch. There goes ten million votes right there.
72 was another gypsy moth election. Everywhere in the country there was universal hatred for Nixon. It seemed that no one, absolutely no one supported this guy. On the television and in the newspaper it was the same story. But on Election Day the Republican voters came out of the woods and somehow voted him in by a big margin. It's a shame he let those voters down with his dishonest criminal actions in the Watergate cover-up. Nixon coined the term "the silent majority" to describe his supporters and he was correct. By the time of the next presidential election he had successfully undermined that majority with his illegal actions and made it almost impossible for Ford to win.
Senator McGovern carried only the District of Columbia and my home state of Massachusetts. Long after the election was over, during the Watergate crisis and Nixon’s downfall there was a popular bumper sticker I saw a thousand times that read “Don’t Blame Me. I’m From Massachusetts.” One history textbook says that the popular bumper sticker read “I Told You So.” I'm from Massachusetts and I never saw a single one that said “I Told You So,” and I'm telling you so right now.
They call right wingers who never served in the military, a “chickenhawk.” Former history professor McGovern was the reverse, a “bravedove”. George was a World War II bomber pilot. McGovern had seen war and hated it. “McGove-dove had seen real combat and real danger.
On the other hand a lot of the anti-war youth were “chickendoves.” They just didn’t want to get maimed or killed in Vietnam or anyplace else and used high and moral arguments to avoid admitting their real gut motives. McGovern was lucky he got back alive from WWII. You have to respect a guy like that when he says he thinks we’re wrong about something.
Will Rogers once said that if there was one thing he knew after looking around the country for his whole life it was that when all is said and done, this country is liberal. Apparently not that liberal. McGovern was the most left wing major presidential candidate in American history. The Dems learned their lesson. Their party took an unacceptable beating. From now on, their nominees would have to either be moderate liberals or centrists, or if they were liberals they would have to deny it and pretend to be center leaning.
Incidentally Arthur Bremmer wrote a book in prison called ASSASSIN’S DIARY. This led to a wise law that stipulated that henceforth any criminal assassin who wrote a book about his crime had to give all profits to the victim and their family.
CHRISTMAS BOMBING -- 12 72
Uncle Sam Santa dropped a lot of bombs on North Vietnam over the Christmas holidays in 1972. Apparently the Communists had been naughty this past year. They got a half a million lumps of coal in their stocking with TNT in the middle.
Liberals at the time and liberal historians talk about this as if its a most insensitive international crime. What did it matter that the Communist had murdered a million people in Southeast Asia and were getting ready to murder four million more as soon as we withdrew? What did it matter that the Communists were atheists and didn't exactly believe in Christ or Santa? What did it matter that the US was doing this because it seemed like the only way to get them to act reasonably at the bargaining table, and thereby the only way to end the war. What did it matter that it worked and that the peace agreement of 1973 was, at least according to all insiders, a direct result of the show of force of the Xmas bombing?
All that does not matter much. What matters is that the big bad United States bombed the noble peasants of North Vietnam and we did it on Christmas, for Pete's sake. How bad can we be?
TREATY ENDS VIETNAM WAR –JANUARY 1973
I turned 18 on January 27 1973. The draft ended on January 27 1973. Saved by the bell!
The Vietnam war cost the United States 56,019 dead. Many more were wounded. Estimates vary. The United States also lost a lot of international prestige and power as it withdrew from Southeast Asia. Estimates do not vary.
Material losses were high. For starters, more than 5,000 helicopters were shot down.
The Paris Agreement of 1973 was very clear on not allowing any resumption of military hostilities. From Chapter 5, Article 15;
The reunification of Vietnam shall be carried out step
by step through peaceful means on the basis of
discussions and agreements between North and
South Vietnam, without coercion or annexation by
either party.
The United States withdrew from Vietnam not in defeat, but as part of a this treaty of peace signed in January of 1973 between the warring states of Nam. North Vietnam later reneged on these agreements and we did not re-enter to enforce the terms that had been violated. The peace agreements of January 1973 therefore had been dishonored. The United States had signed these treaties along with North and South Vietnam.
This was not deliberate betrayal on Nixon and Kissinger’s part. They had every intention of honoring the commitment if the North Vietnamese violated the agreement. But when the North invaded and it was time to act, it was 1975 and the Congress and the American people would not allow it. Gerald Ford was in office by then and was proud to address a college crowd and make his famous foreign policy statement, “The Vietnam War is over as far as America is concerned.” The crowd cheered wildly. While the North was overrunning the South, the crowd cheered over the idea that we would do nothing. The tough foreign policy from Truman to Nixon was over. Isolationism/pacifism set in. Certainly, at the very least with regards to Southeast Asia.
Laos took the fall too for the Vietnam settlement. The country fell to the Communist Pathet Lao as soon as the Americans left but the world was too busy to notice.
Bill Calley shouldn’t be the most famous soldier to come out of the Vietnam War. Plenty of our guys honored their uniform but their names aren’t remembered like the name of the guy who stained it. For every Calley there were 10 men who won the Medal of Honor, but they aren't famous names. Only Calley the killer, and Kerry the protestor.
There are plenty of movies and TV shows showing Americans behaving badly, but very few about any positive relationships we might have formed with some Vietnamese people, or heroism we might have shown in battle.
NIXON’S TRIP TO CHINA 1972
Don’t get me started on this one. Nixon and Kissinger thought they were isolating North Vietnam diplomatically by establishing diplomatic relations with Red China! Here I draw the line and say an emphatic, “No!”
In opening diplomatic relations with China, Nixon did something no Democratic President could have done. If a Dem had tried to connect with the Red Chinese, it would have looked pink. But since Nixon had a life-long record of loyal anti-communism, he could extend a hand to the Communist Chinese and the American people would let the Maoists shake it.
Good. They gave diplomacy a chance in China. But they thought that North Vietnam was shivering in its boots when Nixon went to China because in order to normalize relations with America, China would be in effect abandoning its support for North Vietnam, a ridiculous concept.
It might be a progressive and Christian thing to do by recognizing China, but it did not win us the war in Vietnam as these two guys sincerely believe it did.
This subject is the most frustrating thing in the study of the war, this constant mind-boggling idiocy about the “great historic enmity” between Vietnam and China, and Nixon driving a wedge between them.
If this ‘historic enmity’ is true it made us fools out of those seeing Red China behind the North Vietnamese cause. This is part of the standard left slanted historical science on the war. Anti-Communist crusaders were now safely seen as laughing stocks. Of course the Vietnam war was not part of some “vast red-wing conspiracy” as the loony’s thought. China and Vietnam were historic enemies! That’s how foolish the US was in prosecuting this stupid war. I’ve heard this and read this an honest thousand times.
The opposite was true. The North Vietnamese Communists hated China like the Canadians hate the Americans, and the Americans hate the French. They might at worst have been the teenager who thinks he hates his parents but lives off their money and loyally sees them on the holidays without a bad word between anyone. The Vietnamese are children of the Chinese culture. They are racially close to the Chinese, and their language and writing of it are both derived from China.
Without China’s committed support, North Vietnam could never have won the Vietnam Civil War. Some enemy. Even the argument that it was Russia, not China, that supplied 90% of the money and military equipment to North Vietnam is useless. No one denies that China supplied the other 10% and most of the supplies passed from the USSR through mainland China. Would an enemy ever do that for his enemy? The very concept is insane and we bought it. It’s scary stupid.
Ho Chi Minh depended heavily on China throughout the rise to power of the Communists on the North. The first areas to come under NV Communist control was the northernmost provinces, those closest to China. More than 300,000 Chinese troops served in the Vietnam War under the direction of North Vietnamese leaders. Some enemy.
It will be pointed out of course that in 1979 China had a war with North Vietnam, proving that the two were enemies. But it was a phony war with next to no casualties, a war of show and disinformation designed to validate the ‘historical enmity’ jive. It was a war for western public consumption, and one devoid of worthwhile military objectives for either side. More on that war in the Carter chapter.
Nixon and Kissinger also thought that by engaging in relations with Communist China, they were also isolating the Soviets, another ridiculous concept. As if the ties between these two Communist giants were not strong; as if the mere diplomatic recognition of China meant that the Russians had lost their old ally to our sphere of influence. It is so insane, but that is exactly what Nixon and Kissinger thought, and that’s they way a lot of history books still tell it. The Sino-Soviet split was a load of garbage?
As with Vietnam and China, the USSR and China were also supposedly “historic enemies.” China seems to have a lot of historic enemies. These two Commie behemoths were always on the verge of war. I’ve seen many national news magazine covers concerning the possibility of nuclear war between China and Russia over the decades and even very recently. I laugh every time to keep from getting too frustrated.
Communist China owed its very existence to the Soviet Union. They shared the same religion, Communism, with Russia as the wise old priest and China the young rebel priest who wants some changes in the ceremonies. On the basis of these lame, weak and inconsequential differences of philosophy, the United States sincerely thought that China and Russia were about to go to war any day now. For decades we have believed this. It’s not a dead issue even today.
China thought the Communist worldwide revolution should be primarily agrarian, with the farmer as hero, while the Soviets thought that the industrial worker was the national hero around which the socialist structure should be built. Big deal. The Sin-Soviet split was a conflict of pamphlets without real physical disputes and issues. The idea that these two giants of Communism were preparing for war over ideological hair-splitting is as silly as Gulliver’s Lilliput, where the two kingdoms were going to war over the best way to cook an egg.
Nixon and Kissinger thought that by this “triangular diplomacy” they were manipulating these three Communist nations into separating from each other. In fact the three were united and making fools of us. They were quite united especially in promoting the image of disunity.
THE COMET KAHOUTEK
In February of 1973 astronomers discovered a large meteor headed towards our solar system. It was named Kahoutek. The meteor wasn't on a path to strike the earth directly, but it was probably going to come close enough for everyone to see, and the earth would pass through the debris from its tail.
Kahoutek passed through the Solar System n October of 1973. It wasn't as bright and spooky as people feared (or hoped.)
In the summer of 1973 I bought a little paperback with the cover ripped off called 'The Comet Kahoutek', by Joseph F. Godavage. The book was a study in the history of comets that came close to hitting the earth but in the process left a tail of outer space debris that the earth had to pass through. Goodavage argued that the records of history prove that every time the earth passes through the tail of a major comet, it is a time of spectacular events, way out of proportion to normal times. Joe predicted that when Kahoutek passes by, and earth passes through its tail in October of this year, it will be a time of upheaval. Great political events will happen. the earth might see a major war break out.
I read this book with interest and waited patiently fort October of 1973 to roll around to see what happens.
So did anything unusual happen in October of 1973 as the book predicted? The Arab-Israeli War of 1973 broke out leading to terrifying near-nuclear confrontation between the USA and the USSR. The Arab oil embargo was imposed on the United States, leading to a disastrous economic crisis. Inflation and recession ruled, as the gas shortage changed the world. The Vice President of the United States resigned in scandal. The Justice department decided that Nixon had to hand over incriminating tapes that would force him to resign the Presidency. The Congress passed the War Powers Act making it almost impossible for the U.S.A. to send troops into action without a long drawn out Congressional debate and vote.
I watched these events unfold and I had that kooky Kahoutek in the back of my mind.
Today this book, published only in paperback, is forgotten and almost impossible to find. There are books about Kahoutek by learned astronomers, but they don't talk about the events connection. His accurate predictions might as well have never happened, but if they had been wrong, he would have been ridiculed.
Godavage is a well-respected astrologer, and his bulls-eye predictions never made headlines because he was a well respected astrologer. Godavage would have been taken more seriously if he had claimed to be a psychic who spoke to the dead. JFG later wrote a best seller called How to Write Your Own Horoscope.
The amazing prediction of Goodavage has never gone down on record. The guy was either a lucky guesser crackpot, or perhaps there was something to his astonishing thesis, and its incredible accuracy.
I tell you this story in part to set up the dramatic month of October, 1973.
1973 YOM-KIPPUR WAR/ THE ARAB OIL EMBARGO
In October of 1973 the Arab states surrounding Israel were preparing to attack Israel so the Israeli Air Force began striking Egyptian forward positions. The Arab states then launched a full scale invasion of Israel that nearly succeeded in wiping Israel off the map before Israel counterattacked with the help of US military supplies and intelligence.
At one point the Soviets threatened to intervene on behalf of its Arab allies, especially Syria. The USA warned the Rooskies that intervention would be answered with US intervention. There was danger of a third world war. US nuclear forces world wide were put on full alert or “defcon 4.” Defensive condition five means war is actively under way. Defcon 1 means all is well. Defcon four is very bad.
Both superpowers officially stayed out, thank God.
The Arab-Israeli 1973 war ended in something of a draw, but with an Egyptian army trapped in the Sinai desert and Israel in full control of the Golan Heights in Syria [see map].
American support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War angered the oil-rich anti-Semitic Arab states. OPEC voted to stop the sale of oil to the USA. It was a body blow to the United States economy.
The Arab embargo triggered a gasoline crisis in America. We even gave it a name with capitals, “The Energy Crisis.” Like depressions that preceded The Great Depression, there was the periodic energy crisis but then there was The Energy Crisis. That would be the one in 1973-4 when my father paid me 20 bucks to go wait in a two mile long gas line in order to be allowed to fill up his tank half way only. It was never even certain that there would be any gas available when you reached the front of the column.
The OPEC embargo on 73 took an already unstable gray American economy and made it far worse. Oil is the lifeblood of the world’s economy but don’t try to explain that to those who think oil is evil and any American effort to protect it’s free flow is evil too.
The middle aged Americans of 1973 who were on their way up in Washington carried the wounds of the Embargo. They became the old and powerful men of much later Presidencies. The deep resentment over this mistreatment by the Middle East in 1973 has much to do with the belligerent attitude of the present Bush administration towards the Middle East. It is not just anti-terrorism and the 9-11 attacks that inspires the older leaders running the country when they assess what to do about places like Syria, Iran and Iraq. Revenge for 73 and 79 (hostage crisis to be covered later) are always in play also. We were humiliated and could do little about it. Don’t think for one minute that this isn’t part of what drives Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and the rest.
The neo-hippies today have no perspective on how the US was mistreated and bullied by the Middle Eastern states in these years.
Part of the problem was the momentum swinging against American influence. America was on the downslide in international prestige already as a result of it’s exit from Vietnam in the January 73. The Watergate scandal was emerging, weakening Nixon’s international prestige and with it Kissinger’s ability to make his brand of shuttle diplomacy effective. Then, just at the moment when America was at it’s 20th century nadir in international clout, the Arab-Israeli War broke out, the bad guys almost won and the in the aftermath the USA was punished like a delinquent schoolboy by a bunch of small states with large oil wells who knew they could hide behind the geographical safety of the region. The USA had no physical presence in the Middle East with which to threaten military force if it wanted to for political purpose. It is a crucial difference today that since the 1991 Gulf War we do have that physical presence and this increases the options the President has in foreign policy..
The Arab Embargo of 1973 damaged the NATO alliance and our good relations with Japan. The OPEC states threatened to cut off oil to our friends if they dared to stand by us in our support for Israel. For the first time since World War II America lost the open support of its allies, the same allies we had protected militarily and supported financially and politically since World War II. It was something of a stab in Uncle Sam’s back. We got pails of sand thrown in our face by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Iran, and Iraq, while France, Britain, Japan, and Italy looked the other way and helped the Arabs refill the buckets.
Then NATO and Japan let the Arabs dictate terms on continuing to give them oil. These nations were far more dependent of foreign oil than was the United States and they were closer to the Middle East so it is understandable (if not forgivable) that they accommodated OPEC’s racist blackmail.
The OPEC states did not have anything to lose economically by letting Israel continue to exist. If anything Israel’s financial resources and growing population could have created an integrated Middle Eastern economy beneficial to all. At least the stupid Nazi’s honestly felt that the Jews were a threat to German jobs, lowlife moneylenders ruining Germany’s financial structure. The Arabs had no sane selfish reason to even think that Israel was hurting them physically. It was strictly on bigoted religious grounds that the Arabs tried to destroy Israel many times and it was only for religious and racial hatred that OPEC made me and my father wait in two hour gas lines on Tuesdays and Thursdays to get a half a tank of gas at prices three times higher than they were a month ago.
OPEC used oil extortion to put our allies in a half-nelson until they cried uncle and said “Israel is bad and you guys are good.” The only European nation to stand by the United States during the Arab oil embargo was the Netherlands. The Arabs hated the Netherlands because it is a nation with a large and powerful Jewish population. OPEC singled out the Dutch for special mistreatment and made it clear that it would even give oil to the Great Satan America before it would give any to the Netherlands.
The Netherlands responded by reminding the rest of Europe that it supplied half the natural gas to western Europe and would pay it forward if its European allies left it stranded. The larger European states shrewdly found ways to re-export some Arab oil to the Netherlands on the sly.
The NATO allies and Japan accommodated Arab anti-Semitism by accommodating the Arabs on the oil issue. Our allies denounced America’s support for Israel, denounced Israel, and sang songs of support for the Arab cause even though every word out of their press releases was a dirty lie. In reality they loved freedom and democracy, but they loved oil a little more. They saw the United States as a toothless tiger in a cage while the Arabs were seen as the oil Santa Claus sailing on a magic carpet of political clout with nine flying camels pulling the rug. Santa Sheik had made a list and was checking it twice. He wanted to see which countries had been naughty enough to stand up for democracy and freedom in Israel and which ones had been nice enough to stand up for autocracy in the oil rich sheikdoms of the anti-Semitic OPEC block. On Christmas morning 1973 France, Japan, Italy, West Germany, and Great Britain got the oil powered train set while we and the Dutch got a lump of coal with a card that said ‘die in your sleep.’
The sand sheikdoms became very rich at a rate that dazzled everyone. The Arab OPEC states were looking at a surplus of $67 billion by the middle of 1974, a figure five times what it had been three years earlier. They were swimming in oil and swimming in dough. These countries went on a spending spree with the money. They didn’t hoard it. They built and bought airports, skyscrapers, oil facilities, ships, and above all military weapons. In fact, by 1979 the surplus was entirely gone.
In December 1973 Kissinger went to Saudi Arabia to try and get the Arab OPEC states to give us back the Middle Eastern oil on which our economy so depended. He got a lecture from the King on how the Jews and communists were trying to take over the Middle East. The King indicated that he wanted to end the embargo against the United States but he needed some concessions to bring back to his Arab brothers. Kissinger had none to offer. Faisal said that for starters, Jerusalem had to be declared an Islamic Arab city.
The King was not lying on any point. He wanted these conditions and he honestly wanted to end the embargo against America. Unlike more naïve oil states, the Saudis realized that their economy was integrated into the world’s economy and therefore the new Saudi riches would shrink painfully in value if the United States, the foundation of the earth’s economy, was hit with a devastating recession or inflation as a result of the oil shortage. In the short run it was fun to tweak the nose of the big bad Americans but in the long term it was in the Saudi interest to support the American economy, not sabotage it.
Saudi Arabia therefore wanted to produce at only slightly below normal rates to slow down the Energy Crisis for American banks while still giving punishment a little and keeping the prestigious embargo on the table. Iran disagreed and wanted severe curtailments in OPEC oil production to keep the prices rising and the west hurting. To solve the impasse over production at one point two OPEC output quotas were agreed to, one for Saudi Arabia and one for everyone else in the cartel.
The consumer states began to adjust to the embargo. They were still taking a beating but they were showing some signs of a comeback. A serious movement was growing for developing alternative energy sources, such as mass production of electric cars and solar toilets. This alarmed the Arabs. The west began to look for oil supplies outside of OPEC.
By February of 1974 Great Britain had broken with the hostage nations and decided that it had had enough. It wasn’t worth what little and expensive oil that it was getting from the Middle East. It wasn't worth it if meant kow-towing to nations with no military power, only political. The Brits had survived Hitler. They were tired of having to dance for their oil.
The US told the Arabs that in light of the affront of the Embargo it would not use it’s power influence or diplomacy to help reach a full armistice and repatriation on the Syrian and Egyptian theatres still simmering from the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. As you recall, Arab armies were trapped in place when the shooting stopped and Israel had not loosened the knot. Israel was holding the Arab armies hostage to a settlement recognizing Israel’s right to exist. This the racist Arabs would never agree to. At least we actually had something the OPEC blackmailers wanted. Enough influence over Israel to probably be able to broker a deal that sent the Arab soldiers back to their families.
All these factors added up to a settlement and the Arab oil embargo was rescinded by an OPEC vote on March 18, 1974. My life got better when it was lifted. It had made living conditions difficult in my America. No one could even drive around to look for a job. There weren’t any and if there were, you couldn’t get there to apply. Then I heard these college students chanting in 1990 and in 91 during the Gulf War “No Blood For Oil!” and wonder if any of them ever cracked a history book in their lives. How could you not realize that oil is one of the few things on this globe that is worth fighting for? If you wouldn’t want to see the USA defend it’s oil supply, then what are we keeping a military for? To guard the nations amusement parks?
THE RADFORD-MOORER AFFAIR 1971
In describing the Watergate affair, I am using the time line of events as set in the book Silent Coup, not the standard schoolbook chronology.
Radford-Moorer is where the entire chain of events began that led to the downfall of President Nixon. Charles Radford was only a Navy Yeoman, but he had been stealing papers from the National Security Council, copying them, and passing them on to the Joint Chiefs of Staff through his navy Boss Admiral Moorer for about two years.
Why did the JCS not have this information anyway and why was he stealing? Was he acting on his own or we he ordered or encouraged to steal?
Basically, the NSC is supposed to be a supplemental arm of the national government working on equal terms at best with the CIA, the State Department, the Department of Defense, the Congress, the heads of military intelligence, and a few other groups we could name.
But Nixon and Kissinger wanted to run the government as a private fiat, and keep all those other groups out of the loop while they personally ran the show.
The bottom line was that Nixon distrusted just about everyone, including his cat. The paranoid prez had aides put a blindfold on “mittens” whenever he read intelligence reports in her presence.
NSC was not supposed to be the top organization because its members were informally appointed and not subject to Congressional approval or public scrutiny. Nix and K and made it the number one organization in running the country for those precise reason. The NSC had many members, but it essentially came down to Kissinger and Al Haig. These three guys ran the country in secret and circumvented all the major organizations that were supposed to be running it as a big team.
Nixon distrusted his Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird because Laird wanted to do crazy things, like play by the rules and do things with Congressional approval or at least after Congressional debate. So a 'backdoor channel' was opened between the White House and the military. The White House gave orders to its top military commanders through secret channels, so that the man whose job was to run the nation's military in a monitor overseer capacity, the Secretary of Defense, was kept in the dark.
Most of the major decisions on the Vietnam War under Nixon were made without the knowledge of Defsec Laird, who found out only after the operation was well under way. The man who was supposed to more or less make the key decisions, albeit at the president's bidding, was not even aware of the decisions he might have to implement.
After all, while these top posts were in some ways the job of doing what they were told, they did have the important right to resign and tell the public why they resigned. That has been done often and is an important freedom, even though it isn't written into the Constitution. Laird didn't even get a chance to do that because he didn't know what was going on. By opening up this backchannel, the President may not have been violating any specific Constitutional wording, but he was essentially knowingly violating the spirit under which our national government had long been operating, and violating the Constitution as its implementation had so far been interpreted for the last 190 or so years.
So the NSC is running the country and the JCS is unhappy about it. Not that any of us want the military to be running the country either, but they should at least have some input into how things are done with their troops and ships, even if they don't have the last word.
The key to all this now is Al Haig, who came into the Nixon White House as a colonel and left as a one star General. He was promoted to general for services to Nixon, not for deeds in the field of combat. His star was earned for political combat. If Nixon knew that Haig was stabbing him in the back all along Haig probably would have retired as a colonel and certainly wouldn't have been later made White House Chief of Staff in the second Nixon administration and certainly wouldn't have made it to the post of Secretary of State in the Reagan administration. As an added bonus, he certainly wouldn't have been able to run for president in 1984 and 1988 lousing up the Republican primary debates with his rude ego.
Haig is the key because he had a gay-looking (this is significant) yeoman on his staff named Charles Radford who was stealing documents right under Haig's nose from the NSC and sneaking them over to the JCS. This was being done under the direct orders of two Admirals, whose names aren't that important, but the chain led to a third admiral whose name is important. Admiral Thomas Moorer was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and when the stolen documents were reaching his desk regularly, we can see that the dual government at odds with each other was a serious situation and one which would not sit right with the American people if they knew about it.
There were hundreds of cases of the stolen documents from yeoman Radford, but I'll just give you an obvious extreme one to make it clear how serious was this espionage on one branch of the government from another.
Henry Kissinger was engaged in secret negotiations with Communist China to open diplomatic relations with the United States for the first time since the Cincinnutti Reds took over in 1949. It was going to be blockbuster stuff when Nixon announced this diplomatic triumph to the world and it was supposed to help him win re-election in 1972. With the Vietnam war going on, and no Tom Eagleton affair still to come, Nixon was not a lock for 72. If he could open diplomatic relations with China it would be theoretically great for the country, for world peace, and for his re-election. Kissinger was the main front man for opening up the new relationship with our old enemy Communist China and the negotiations were secret.
But the military was by and large against opening diplomatic relations with Communist China. Moorer was no admiral admirer of Chou en Lai or Mao and didn't even like Chinese food. He was an old fashioned anti-Communist from the 1950's mentality and, unlike Nixon, had no political motive to change his mind about it.
So through all of this development, yeoman Radford was often in contact with important people, including Kissinger. Radford went through Kissinger's briefcase regularly when no one was around, made photocopies of secret documents, and passed them on to the admirals who passed them on up to Admiral Moorer.
Through this spy process the military knew all about the upcoming diplomatic opening to China, and when Nixon announced it to the world he was not announcing it to the military, he was rehashing old news.
This is a serious and obvious example to show what was going. But Radford was doing more than he had to, more than he had been asked to, like a drug addict. Sometimes he eavesdropped on people who trusted him and then made notes on the conversations (memcons) to be passed up the chain of command, that is the military command.
Radford was not acting on his own. He was following orders. But he did become addicted to the spy stuff and performed above and beyond the call of duty. If back-stabbing spying were combat he would have been up for a 30 pieces of silver star.
Most of the time he was on the staff of Al Haig, but Haig never “knew” what was going on right under his nose. Haig was a key liaison between the JCS who loved him, and the White House/NSC who trusted him. Nixon trusted him and even the sly neurotic Kissinger trusted him. Haig was the missing link between the military and the White House. Nixon was circumventing the military, but he couldn't do it to such an extreme that the military would rebel, so Haig's job was to keep a modest bridge open between the branches. Nixon and Kissinger didn't realize that Haig was taking sides all along, playing a dirty double game, and was betraying his commander in chief all along. Haig was pretending to not know that there was a spy in his camp. That way Haig could always stay clean even if his spy got caught. Radford was stupid enough to think that he was pulling off this incredible spy stuff right under Haig's brass hat, but he was being played like a violin by a superior scum.
This is going on for much of 1970 and all of 1971. Then in December, Jack Anderson writes a column about the US relations with India and Pakistan respectively during their conflict. The two had a major war in late 1971. The United States pretended to be neutral, but secretively, the United States was “tilting” towards Pakistan. A Jack Anderson column spilt the tilt on Nixon favoring Pakistan. This might not have been so damaging to Nixon but for the fact that Pakistan got whipped in the war, so Nixon's shrewd diplomacy looked foolish by backing a loser.
It just so happened that spy Radford had become a casual acquaintance of Jack Anderson and his wife in recent months. The relationship was based on small unimportant favors that Radford had done for Anderson's elderly parents. But Radford's boss, the admiral that was fencing his stolen goods and ordering him to spy on Nixon, became emotional when he incorrectly surmised that Radford had “leaked” the Pakistan tilt story to Anderson. The admiral then began to spy on his own spy! He reported to Nixon's people that his own spy was leaking the Pakistan story to Jack Anderson, though obviously he didn't tell them that his suspect was his own trusted spy on the White House.
Nixon ordered Radford's phone tapped, and asked John Erlichman, his close aide and confidant to investigate whether Radford was having a homosexual affair with Jack Anderson! Apparently, Nixon thought that the young Radford who looked like a gay movie star, was attracted to old men who didn't look gay at all. Or maybe he thought Anderson was a sugar daddy gay lover who bought young Radford “nice things” in exchange for certain favors. Erlichman couldn't bring himself to investigate the gay angle, but he told Nixon that he had looked into it but had come up empty handed. The phone taps on Radford only produced two boring phone calls between Anderson and Radford in which Anderson thanked the yeoman for another small favor and invited Radford and his wife to the Anderson's for dinner. Radford turned him down. Radford was married and did decline the invitation. But it seemed that he had once actually gone to the Anderson's for dinner and swears that they never discussed politics, and certainly not India or Pakistan.
But the Nixon White House was not satisfied. They asked Radford to come to the White House and take a lie detector test. Radford thought the jig was up and that his spy days were over. Yeoman Radford was a religious guy who had justified his spying activities because he felt (with arguable justification) that Nixon's secret White House was immoral if not illegal, and that he was doing justice and the American people a heroic service by spying on Nixon and Kissinger for the military.
Radford waited for the killer questions and was utterly surprised when the questions were all about his relationship with Jack Anderson. He was relieved to answer these questions easily, denying any sordid relationship with Anderson be them political or personal.
But then the interrogators accidentally caught a big fish while trying to catch a smaller one. They asked him is he ever had illegally taken documents from a source he was not authorized to take them from and delivered them secretly to someone else.
Radford's heart raced, his face went pale. The interrogators knew they hit the jackpot, but they weren't quite sure what it was.
They all took a break and Radford telephoned his admiral spy-boss. He told him, “They're asking me some tough questions. What am I supposed to do now?” The admiral completely misinterpreted what Radford was asking because the admiral was still mad at Radford because he incorrectly presumed that Radford was the leaker to Jack Anderson and he wanted him to confess to this. “Well son,” said the admiral in a magic moment, “just tell them the truth.”
To Radford, a religious guy, this sounded like, “turn yourself in, turn me in, turn us all in, the game is over so we'll all feel better if we just get it all out in the open.” It meant nothing of the sort, but it was too late for anyone to stop the chain of events from here on in.
Radford spilled his guts on all his spying and on all his superiors that ordered him to do it. The Nixon people were looking for a leaker to a newspaper column, and they hit the jackpot on a spy ring conducted the the military on the White House and the NSC. They were stunned and thrilled in a negative way. This was big. Wait till the boss hears about this.
Soon the admiral spymaster was summoned to the White House for a showdown. He too was asked to take a polygraph test and they began firing questions at him about Radford and the spy system in operation against the Nixon boys. The admiral had no choice but to admit to as much of it as he could while finding some ways to tone the damage down to save his job. He admitted to everything, but denied how important the information was and tried to deny how high up the chain the information went after he got it. They asked the admiral to sign a full confession but he refused, at least at first.
Once Admiral W. broke down, it was clear that Nixon had more leaks than a screen door on a submarine. Erlichman brought the tape to Nixon. Erlichman was surprised when Nixon declined to listen to it. The President felt that he should be shielded from knowledge of any of the specifics so that he could always truthfully say I didn't know, if anything were investigated later. But he was glad to know the basics.
The culprit at the top of the chain, not including those who facilitated the spy process, was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Moorer. Erlichman and Kissinger thought that the Admiral should be removed from his post and the spy ring exposed in public.
But Nixon did not want to be embarrassed by the inefficiency of his administration. He preferred to let Admiral Moorer know that from this point on the White House knew what was going on. Then he could keep Moorer in office with that hanging over his head. Instead of a fired ex JCS complaining to the press about his dismissal, he would have a pliant Chairman “on a short leash.” It was shrewd really. You've been caught, now as punishment you have to stay on the job knowing that you've sinned and we're on to you. Instead of having power disproportionately large for the job you would have the reverse.
Kissinger was very upset that his briefcase was being pilfered for documents. Nixon told Henry not to worry about it, that the leaks to Moorer was a very manageable situation, and they could even somehow play it to their advantage, something Kissinger did not buy for a moment. Several accounts in major memoirs say that Nixon liked to toy with Kissinger, tweaking the NS Advisor with in-fighting instigated by the President. If Nixon could now and then force Kissinger into something of a nervous breakdown in front of people, the President felt that it kept a ball and chain on Kissinger's power, which Nixon feared. So while Nixon depended heavily on Kissinger and confided in him greatly, he also played devious games to make sure Kissinger was having fights with others within the cabinet while Nixon played innocent bystander.
Kissinger in particular was always complaining about Secretary of State William Rogers. It seemed the Secretary of State occasionally wanted to be included in important foreign policy decision making, something Kissinger could never tolerate. Nixon enjoyed the Kissinger-Rogers feud and did nothing to solve it. Kissingers White House memoirs are filled with long winded complaining about the problems caused by the supposed incompetence of Will Rogers.
The key to it all was the interview with Admiral W. In it he definitely but indirectly implicated Al Haig as someone who surely knew about the leaks and did nothing to stop it, and in fact enabled it by being dumb and blind to them. Haig more or less made sure that doors were left unlocked and that Radford was ordered to turn the lights out in the room before he left.
Moorer, whom Admiral W. had passed up the spy news to, now made a key move to protect Haig. He asked that a second hot-seat interview be conducted with Admiral W. But this time the admiral was carefully coached to recite all the same confessions, but this time omit the name of Al Haig. That would produce a second tape of the W. confessions and if Congressional investigators asked for the confession, they would be given the tape of the second interview in which Haig was safely unnamed.
Now we come to the famous Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, the man who broke the Watergate story, the man who won the Pulitzer, the intrepid “gotchya” journalist who always has the inside story and never reveals his sources. People associated Watergate with Woodward and Robert Redford played him in the movie, with Dustin Hoffman as his fighting sidekick at the Post, Carl Bernstein.
Woodward has recently written three books on the W. Bush administration and how it conducted the War on terror and the War in Iraq. I've read two of his book and I find him annoyingly vague. He seems like he's taking a stand or making a point but then retreats and he has said nothing at all. Just when you think he's about to indict someone he doesn't. I read his book about John Belushi and didn't like it. It seemed to come down to his siding with whoever agreed to an interview and going after whoever didn't agree to an interview.
Woodward' big source on the Watergate book, All the President's Men was one of the nation's top mysteries for thirty years. The source was nicknamed “Deep Throat” and the country begged Woodward to tell us who it was and he never wood. (Deep Throat was a popular animated Disney Movie about a lost giraffe.)
Woodward always annoys me because he never uses profanity in his writing but he always quotes his subjects whenever he catches them swearing. If anyone quotes Nixon or Bush dropping an 'F bomb' Woodward has to include the exact quote. But he remains above board in his own text. Its cheap and I hate when any writer does that. He likes being naughty. Then Woodward had to name his secret source “deep throat.” Its immature as far as I'm concerned.
I never cared a hoot about “who was deep throat” any more than I cared “who shot JR.?” I think the mystery was driven by the movie connotation of the nickname more than any real need for the average America to know who his secret insider source was on the Watergate story. Woodward may have generated this ninth grade naughty momentum for his name and his book quite on purpose. If the source had been nicknamed, “Charley Lashua” no one outside of Washington would have worried about it much, and certainly not for decades.
The actual source, the real Deep Throat finally confessed on his death bed just about three years ago and it disappointed the nation because he wasn't even a famous name and so all the speculation about how it was Al Haig or Henry Kissinger or Jackie Gleason went out the window. I forget who the real source turned out to be. The ending was boring and it took 30 plus years to finish the play.
The focus here is not his source, but the reporter Mr. Woodward, the super secretive insider who always has insider sources within the top ranks of every administration and he never reveals who it is. You or I could get the same treatment and have no defense. Insert your name for mine;
“Mike Donovan is the kind of guy stabs you in the back at the drop of a hat,” a close colleague said, who asked to remain anonymous. “Mike never once told the truth in his entire life as far as we all knew,” said another unnamed source. “If Donovan ever did a kind thing in his life, no one I know can name it,” said one member of his family who wished not to be identified because she “might get grounded.” Another close friend told us that “Mike once tried spying for the Soviets, but decided he didn't like the pay. He felt guilty about it and just decided to stop. I'm not trying to put him down. Everyone makes mistakes. In fact, I know that now he is back to being a loyal American.” A former employer told me in a 1983 interview that “Donovan can only be trusted as as far as he can throw Tipper Gore.”
If Woodward's targets were actually on trial in a court of law they would have the legal right to confront their accusers. But since they are being tried and fried in the court of the Woodward Post, they cannot. Millions of readers draw their conclusions based on one side of the story presented by a famous reporter, backed by a famous newspaper, backed by a famous publishing house, with no chance for cross-examination.
So the authors of Silent Coup give Woodward a taste of his own medicine. They have conducted a hundred interviews with people who knew and worked with Woodward and came to some startling conclusions. They called Woodward up and told them what the people said about him and Woodward hit the roof, snapping into the phone, “Who told you that? That's a lie! No way, no way! Who told you that. Name me the dirty dog! I want names! You have no proof!” The reporters smugly reminded Bobby that he never reveals his sources. Woodward finally barked that “you guys can write anything you want about me,” and hung up the phone. Authors Colodney and Gettlin took him up on that offer.
It seems that Woodward was never an anti-war left winger at all, but he posed as one to maintain his credibility with the public and the left leaning sources. In fact, he was double-dealing in his image in order to get the scoop while actually helping to create it.
Bob Woodward was an important military intelligence communications officer in the Navy. The key word is important. He had access to all the important communications and was completely trusted for his loyalty, his talent and his dedication. He was right-wing workaholic military man insider who channelled messages from all the top military people.
Woodward was so good at his job that just when he was about to retire from the Navy with honors, when he was offered a job as a liaison officer from the Navy to, are you ready for this, The White House! That's right, Bob Woodward used to go to the White House and deliver top secret briefings from the military. BW did it often, and he did it well. He was completely trusted to brief top White House personnel and then go back and brief the military in the other direction.
It gets better. Woodward flat out absolutely denies it! He denies that he ever had this job! The man had an office in the basement of the White House and worked like a spy in top secret clearance conditions and he denies it. There are dozens of people who were interviewed by the authors of Silent Coup who burst out laughing when they were told of Woodward's denial. “I saw him go in and out a hundred times, what a jive turkey,” said one unnamed source for example. “I was there while he delivered the briefings on several occasions, what a transparent liar,” said another close friend.
So why deny the truth about a great job? Woodward in his own biographical interviews always maintains that he hated the Navy, didn't like the work, was doing nothing particularly important, and was bored silly. Wow. Something fishy going in here, eh? You want to talk about all the deceits and lies flying around the Nixon White House, you can start with the guy who posed as the man exposing all the deceits and lies around the Nixon White House! Its quite a story. I'm giving you the shortened version, but you can read Silent Coup if you've got the spare time for the full version.
Here's more. Guess who Woodward briefed regularly at the White House. Was it Rose Mary Woods, the Presidents trusted Secretary? No. Was it Pat Nixon? No. It was General Alexander Haig. And Woodward vehemently denies that he ever briefed Haig. Why deny it? What sin is it to be an intelligence liaison and brief General Haig. Obviously because Haig was Woodward's top insider unnamed source inside the White House. Haig had known Woodward for years and trusted him completely based on an earlier relationship when Woodward was doing Navy work.
But its even worse than it sounds because Haig was completely trusted by Nixon as having his first loyalty to Nixon and his top NSC team, but Haig was stabbing Nixon in the back all the while and Woodward was delivering the knife.
The NSC was basically a three man troika of Nixon, Kissinger and Haig. Men like Laird and Rogers, JCS Chairman Moorer, J. Edgar Hoover at FBI , and even Helms at CIA were completely blocked out of the major decision making process.
Not only were these powerhouse insiders turned into outsiders, they were pretty well unanimous in their opinion that they didn't like the decisions being made in the foreign policy field. They felt it was the president's final decision, but the policy debating process should belong to a wider field than the neurotic Nixon, the disliked egoist Haig, and the detested Harvard professor Kissinger, whose ego made Haig's seem like chump change.
So the military, the CIA, and the State Department all feel left out and by the President and they resented his usurpation of too much power. The State department thought that much of the Vietnam policy was too warlike, and the military thought it was too pacifistic and compromising. The military was plotting the downfall of the President through controlled leaks, and the facilitators included the trusted Al Haig and his trusty briefer Bob Woodward, who shared Haig's right-wing military values and has never been honest with the American people about that and his role in the fall of Nixon. Woodward won awards for his expose, but it's really the author that needs exposing.
ENTER JOHN DEAN
If you asked me to describe Watergate John Dean a year ago I would have tried to show off how much I knew about history by describing him as “that super-square poindexter type with the real short hair and glasses who was always on TV during the Watergate hearings. That's that extra square businessman looking shy guy. In an era when everybody had long hair and looked hip, even hockey players, Dean was one of the last of the mohican Simon Milqutoast guys.”
I would have only been flashing my ignorance. Yes, that is exactly the image that American generally remembers about key player in the Watergate story John Dean. And that was exactly what Dean was trying to impress on the American public during these hearings.
But the image of Dean, like that of Woodward, was an image flipped for propaganda purposes. John Dean III in actuality was exactly the opposite around the White House. In an era when the White House of Nixon was a bastion of the last few remaining short haired squares in America, Dean was the resident hippie rebel. John Wesley Dean III became the new Counsel to the President and soon played a sinister role in the Watergate affair and became a nationally famous name for his role. Dean eventually went to jail for obstruction of justice, while his boss got the pardon from Ford.
But Dean arrived as an annoyance to the rest of the White House staff. dean had long hair, drove fancy sports cars to the White House and had big fancy boots up on the desk while he made calls to tonight's babe data. the other House staffers talked about him as the resident hippie playboy in the White House.
When he got indicted he appeared in national court as a reverse image of himself and I bought it. 35 years later I'm reading about the real Dean in Silent Coup and feel foolish for having so fallen for the switch. I'm in show business and I bought his publicity kit.
Silent Coup indicates that Dean played a much more duplicitous role in the entire Watergate affair than his own confessional memoir Blind Ambition would indicate.
My problem as a scholar is that its all fresh to me and it shouldn't be. I thought all the Watergate stuff got very boring and the more books that came out about it, the less I wanted to read about it . Now I'm crash coursing Watergate when I should have developed some strength there from having lived through it. But the Watergate scandal dominated the news for years. Years! It got so tiresome that before it even came to a climax, I was pleading “enough!”. Then all the major participants wrote tell-all biographies and I didn't care what they had to tell. Off hand I thought I knew a great deal about John dean, but I do not make the dean's list by a long shot. In fact I'm a flunky on Watergate. maybe it was better that I waited so long, because Silent Coup seems to be the real starting point for all the other books to measure up to. Even Nixon wrote letters to some of the other players recommending it! And they write about how “I should have known it was dean all along!”
AGNEW RESIGNS THE VICE PRESIDENCY
Vice President Spiro T. Agnew had been so popular a figure within the Party at one time that it was feared at the 1968 Convention that he would hurt the ticket by getting a bigger ovation from the crowd than Nixon would. All that would change in 1973 when a bribe scandal rocked his world.
Charges against he VP surfaced that year. Because a sitting Vice President could not be prosecuted while in office, Agnew actually went to the Congress and requested that he be impeached! That was the only way he could defend himself while still serving out his term. Request was denied.
Charges of bribery and corruption against Agnew piled up until he finally in October of 1973 decided to resign.
Nixon now had to appoint the next Vice-President of the United States. He or she wold have to be confirmed by the Senate, so the choice had to be a careful one. Nixon had to worry about who would be objectionable to his own party as well as the Democrats. he had to find a popular republican without too much baggage, someone what was not too liberal or maverick for the Republicans, and someone who wasn't too right wing for the Democrats.
There were a few names that came up on everyone's short list. The press and all of Washington began to guess who it would be.
John Connally, the governor of Texas that was wounded in JFK's limo, was a possibility. But Connally was in a Democrat's Limo that November 22, 1963. He had only recently switched over to the Republican Party. That didn't seem fair to make him President, and with Watergate, coming to a brew, it was a possibility that whomever Nixon picked would, if confirmed, by the next President. So for the first and only time in American history, the next President of the United States would be appointed, not elected.
Governor Ronald Reagan was in the hunt. But Nixon wanted a shadow for vice-president, not an equal or a superior. Reagan would upstage Nixon with the media and the public, and would never be a quiet supportive presence around the White House, no matter how often he gave out warm smiles. Nixon's ego would not tolerate a Vice-President Reagan. Besides, he was a hard-line conservative, and might face a Senate challenge for confirmation.
Imagine if Nixon did choose Reagan and he had been confirmed. There's no way an incumbent President Reagan would have lost to Jimmy Carter in 1976. No way. Then, if in 1979 the same Iran Hostage Crisis took place, the whole thing would have turned out a little differently.
WATERGATE
On June 17, 1972 in Washington D.C. in the witching hour of the night, five Republican burglars broke into the office of the Democratic National Committee to install bugging devices. The offices were located in the Watergate apartment complex (Monica Lewinsky later lived there). But a rent-a-cop became suspicious and bagged them all. The damage to the Republicans world from this b&e would ‘trickle up’ until it reached the President and forced him to resign the office.
The key man among the five arrested was John McCord, who gave the fake name of Michael McKenzie when he got busted, but it turned out his real name was John McCord and he was an important guy. This creep was a member of CREEP.
President Nixon had a dirty tricks squad known as “the plumbers” because they were supposed to find and stop the source of those leaking damaging information to the press. One such target was a defense department analyst named Dan Ellsberg who had provided the New York Times with a large volume of the material he had analyzed on the Vietnam War. The Times published the first installments of exiting material beginning on June 13, 1971 under the working title, The Pentagon Papers. The PP were a sensation. They revealed that the American public had been lied to repeatedly on Vietnam, especially in the Johnson era. The Papers were damaging to the war effort in general and Nixon was angry with Ellsberg for leaking the work to the press. The president then acquired a court order forbidding the New York Times from further publication of PP. But Times too it all the way to the Supreme Court and won. The issue was “prior restraint.” Censorship is occasionally legal in this country as long as the material is heard in public once before it is declared obscene, dangerous or defamatory. You cannot restrain the material prior to a public floating, only after the fact. We have the right to see it once.
Nixon responded by having his plumbers break into Ellsworths' office to try and find some dirt on the guy. They got caught and Nixon had one more nightmare on his hands.
I never would have taken Silent Coup seriously except for one important fact. The major participants in the Watergate break-in and the fall of Nixon were not only impressed with the book, they actually corresponded with each other with an excitement as in we have now been enlightened. Haldeman is writing to Erlichman sayin, 'no wonder so and so did such and such, that clears that up. That was going to bug me forever.'
The big slime in Silent Coup was John Dean, who ended up doing time as if he was Nixon loyalist taking the fall for Nixon's crimes. But Dean helped to bring about Nixon's fall and it was deliberate. Then he pretended that he had been caught trying to help Nixon illegally.
Woodward went to Yale and claims today that he underwent a “sea change” in his political thinking. He says he was unhappy and distraught about American policies in Vietnam.
But two key facts do not bear this out. First of all he was at Yale undergoing this sea change and turning left wing anti-war at a time when no one else was. This was in 1963-1964 and there was not much of a commitment of United States forces in Vietnam. There were no protest demonstrations against the war at Yale or anyone else. The nations politician and press were decidedly supportive of the US commitment to stop the Communist takeover of Southeast Asia. It's odd that Woodward said he underwent this epiphany when famous lefties all over the nation still had not. So he was way ahead of the Jerry Rubins of the world in 1963! Who knew?
The other key fact is that everyone interviewed by the authors of Silent Coup who knew Woodward in 1963-4 said that he was very conservative and a real joiner and never expressed any anti-Vietnam War sentiments publicly or privately. Even his ex wife said that was nonsense and they were still friends when she said that.
SUPREME COURT
Nixon named four men to the Supreme Court, but no the Senate rejected two of his too conservative choices.
First he replaced the retiring Chief Justice Earl Warren with Warren Burger (no relation to Hamilton Burger of the Perry Mason courtroom – was 'Ham Burger' a private joke among the writers?)
Nixon nominated Clement Haynesworth of South Carolina as an associate justice. But many Senators felt that his life associated with injustice and voted against him. 17 Republican senators said no to Clem. Nixon was angry and decided to nominate a replacement just as redneck on civil rights as Clem was. G. Harrold Carswell of Florida got his name sent up and again, the Senate sent him back down, this time a mere 13 Republican Senators joined the gang tackle.
A reporter asked Nixon if he was going to appoint a black man to the Supreme Court. He said, “No, but I am going to nominate a Blackmun.” Minnosota's Harry Blackmun was approved by the Senate.
Lewis Powell was another Nixon appointment. Nixon apparently didn't hold a grudge because Powell's great grandfather had tried to kill Secretary of State Seward.
His last appointment was William Rehnquist of Arizona who lasted a long time. The left hated Rehnquist for decades. (sp)
NIXON WAS NOT THE ONE
We all hated Nixon. That was a given. I spray painted harsh graffiti against Nixon on a wall in my neighborhood. It was on that wall for three years. I feel bad about it. It was pretty mean. I don't even want to tell you what it said.
I know the smug conceits of the lefties because I was one of them. It all starts by condemning all politicians as corrupt, making you a superior and most important, a more loving being. Its spiritual conceit. You are now part of a cause, a revolution of good against evil. You won't join the military but you are not passive. You just fight for a different goal. You are a soldier for your causes and your great overall cause is peace. I never truly hated Nixon but we all had to so I did my best to say I hated him. It was just a rule.
Nixon is not as bad as I thought he was, but he was a man without a country politically so I can’t exactly embrace him on a reconsideration. He was not a leftist, needless to say, but he was not a true representative of strong Republican thinking either. His only ideology was survival in the game of politics. Nixon saw it all as a fascinating political battle but not a fight between people who get it and a bunch of blabbermouth lefty holier-than-thous who don't get it, which is the way I see it.
Some of my Republican fellow-travelers try to defend Nixon in mixed company (R&D) and when they turn to me for support I just look at the ground. I try to tell them in private, ‘look sometimes you just have to cut your losses and move on.’ If you concede a point now and then you establish your credibility. Make concessions where your position is untenable anyway, you win on both ends. Now you slip out of an impossible argument and pick up points for being fair and reasonable and not a knee-jerk.
Give them Nixon.
POSTSCRIPT: WOODSTOCK 1969
Personally, I don't think Woodstock belongs in a general history of the United States. But it seems that all he new history textbooks consider this giant entertainment event part of American history.
Ok, I'll try to go with it, but I add it at the end as a minor protest.
I was 14 at the time and everyone was talking about it in my neighborhood for weeks before it happened, and we weren't even hippies. We had wiffles. My sister had a chance to go and only this year has forgiven my mom for not letting her.
It was all the greatest bands in rock and roll for a three day festival of music peace and love. Today there are aging hippies who are rich and powerful at every level of the entertainment business. But in 1969 the generation gap was so severe that only the young could produce a show based only for the young with an invitation to a young audience of 150,000 people. The whole country was watching to see if the new generation could pull it off on its own. Would there be violence? The loving hippies had been causing a lot of property damage on college campuses and downtown department stores in recent times. Could more than 100,000 hippies get together and not have any trouble?
Yes!
They did it!
That was the big story of Woodstock. See the film. Its great and its a valuable historic time capsule. But the big story is how proud the hippies were that they got together at plus 100,000 for three days and nights and there was no violence.
My sister asked me if I wanted to go and I told her I was worried that the hippies might beat me up because I had a wiffle cut. My sister laughed at me and said I didn't understand what it was all about. I only understood the rules of the South Boston where any given two teen-ager guys from another street were a potential problem when you walked by them. I'ds seen the hippies rioting in the streets for years on TV. I was a square. I was in another tribe. I thought it would be dangerous.
Just after Woodstock my friend's older sister ranted about what a disgrace the thing had been. I asked her why, and she shook her head and condemned them for the amount of garbage they left behind. I said, “What were they supposed to do, hitchhike back to Oregon with bags of garbage?” That got a big laugh from her brother. She was 20 and I was 14. He was neutral but he just liked seeing me get one in.
I had a tougher time with Detective Logan.
He came to my Catholic High School about three months after Woodstock. We all had to file into the auditorium to hear his lecture on the evils of drugs. This guy was good. He didn't need a stage or a microphone. He marched up and down the center aisle and gave his talk about drugs like a drill sergeant a senators oratory skills. He was a passionate and angry man, a dynamic speaker.
People on pot and hash are more violent, not less,
“Hashish comes from the word 'assassin!' “
“Hashish!” - “Assasssin!”
Long pause looking everyone up and down.
“Hashish!” ....”Assassin!”
“Are there any questions.”
Little ol Don Knotts me stands up and meekly says,
“You say that marijuana leads to violence. There was a lot of marihuana at Woodstock, so why was there was no violence?”
I had never smoked marijuana in my life and I was a square. I liked Bobby Darrin better than the Beatles. I had no selfish motive to ask.
Detective Logan lit into me with one great livid speech. It went on and on about a lot of very vague things and it was all directed at me. There was fire coming out of his tongue and he went on about how all sorts of different bad things are violent in their own way. After four minutes or so he wrapped it up with,
“There were three illegitimate children born that weekend! Don't you stand there and try and tell me there was no violence at Woodstock!”
Well at that point the auditorium erupted in a fantastic cheer. Logan had scored the winning basket with no time left in a playoff game. As the crowd went wild a kid in the row in front of me turned around and said, “Donovan, you feel like crap.” And I cleaned up the quote up a little.
To be honest, it didn't upset me that much. I knew that he didn't answer my question and I felt inside just a big shoulder shrug. Even the crowd cheering didn't bother me that much. I'm not saying I felt good about it, but crowds don't bother me, that's why I'm a public performer. I had occasionally sang solo in the school choir for years, and was in oratory. I knew this guy was good but I also understood oratory and that all he had done was beat me with that. The Detective had not defeated my argument.
We all went back across the street to homeroom classes after the big event, the drug guy talk for 1,000 students. After everyone had settled in, my homeroom nun, who was not especially fond of me, addressed the class with dramatic pause. She stood and waited until the room was completely silent,
“Before we begin ... I just want to say to you Michael Donovan...
that Mr. Logan was very unfair to you. He did not answer your question and he had no right to treat you that way.”
Then she went on to business as usual.
It took me 40 years to finally get the real message of Woodstock. The lesson is that Woodstock non-violence was such a spectacular shock that it only proves that the hippies were usually violent. They expected and got medals for not causing trouble, like the Million Man March. Big deal. Proves you usually are unruly.
The long-hairs are just as aggressive and violent about their leftist beliefs as the short hair Republicans and military men are about theirs. The hippies were all “fighting for peace,” never realizing that it's an oxymoron. You can work for peace by being conciliatory. But that doesn't play because if there is one thing a leftist never is, it is conciliatory. They like to “fight” for a righteous cause.
There's a great scene in the Woodstock movie where it's pouring rain and most people are handling it in a fun way, but some are griping. A group of hippies marches by a camera-man and one of them stops and gives the lens a piece of his mind. He's not joking either when he says,
“I want to know why the police and the CIA and the FBI are seeding the clouds, man! They just don't want to see this work. We saw the planes fly by and they're seeding the clouds to make sure it rains! Why isn't anyone reporting this, man!”
Then he walks off shouting, “Stop seeding the clouds!”
Rent the movie. It's really great. And you'll get to see this classic do-do bird.
AFTER OFFICE
Nixon was not terribly involved in political events after office. That's not counting the pardon.
RN won the nation's sympathy shortly after leaving office when he had a bad case of phlebitis and almost died from it. The nation followed his medical condition every day. It was odd, the country having just unleashed a Niagara Fall of bilious hate for the guy and now we have to pray for him to get well. But Rich recovered and wrote several excellent books. The best one by far is called The Real War, published in the early 80's. Real War's chapter, THE OIL JUGULAR should be required reading for anyone who is interested in the origins of the Persian Gulf Conflict of 1991
Nixon arbitrated an umpire strike in major league baseball in the mid-1980’s. He told them if they didn't settle the strike he would run for President again.
SOURCES
The 10,000 Day War, by Michael MacLear – The liberally slanted 12 part TV documentary is based on this liberally slanted book. Or was it the other way around?
All the President's Men, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein – The book of the Watergate story by the two intrepid Washington Post Reporters reporters who broke the story and told the world. But was bob Woodward's role in the investigation more sinister than that of mere reporter, or was he actually helping to make events take place and only then reporting them? That is the question raised by the 1991 book, Silent Coup.
All the President's Men, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein – The movie of the Watergate story by the two intrepid Washington Post Reporters reporters who broke the story and told the world.
In Confidence, by Anatoly Dobrynin – The Soviet Ambassador to the United States in the era has a few things to say about Nixon.
Enduring Vision; Boyer-Clark c) – General college history.
The material on Vietnam is orthodox left and sometimes infuriating to this reader. Tell all sides, will ya? You can even make a call and pick a team at the end, but at least give the conservative side an audition.
This is a huge book but you can see with the expanding size of our history, there is shorter and shorter space for each subject. The Whig Party gets a collective page. Histories of the same size in 1930 gave it five pages.
The Final Days-Bernstein-Woodward – This book was a smash sensation when it came out, especially the negative personal portrait aspect. People ate it up, for it essentially laughed at Nixon, even though it was outwardly a serious book.
A Heartbeat Away – Witcover - The story of the fall of Vice President Agnew.
The Making of the President, 1972, by Theodore H. White. One of the first political books I ever read. It blew me away when I was 17. My paperback with the cover ripped-off (sure sign that the author and publisher got ripped-off) gave me the feeling of ‘the more you know, the more you know you don’t know.’ I like this one best out of his Making of the President book series.
The eccentric Teddy White may have some anti-Republican and anti-Nixon bias as he was a good friend of John F. Kennedy.
No More Vietnams; Nixon – This is a must book for every high school senior. If they are going to force our kids to read Howard Zinn , then in the name of fairness and balance, Nixon should be able to speak his side of the argument. Its un-American to not be allowed to confront your accusers and present evidence. Nixon presents a simple and lucid defense of America’s role in the Vietnam War. Agree with him or not, this is a double history because he wrote history in both the literal and figurative.
On the Hill, by Alvin Josephy Jr. - c) – This history of the US Congress had a pro-Dem bias, so you can imagine how it treats Nixon.
Palace Politics, by Robert Hartmann – c) 1980 – Ford's Chief of Staff tells the story of Ford's elevation to the Vice Presidency in 1973 in some detail.
RN; Richard Nixon, his memoirs – This is a great book, especially his early life. He overcame much tragedy and adversity in his rise to success, but it began to bore me when it got to Watergate, as Watergate always did. The telling of his early life left a lasting and positive impression on me.
The Nam chapters are very valuable and more detailed than his follow-up book on Vietnam subject mentioned below.
Sideshow, by William Shawcross – Very influential book denouncing and describing the secret bombing campaign in Cambodia. The left still cites this book as proof of this and that, but ignore the important fact that William Shawcross has come out and said this is was fundamentally in error and he has revised his conclusions and his opinions.
Silent Coup – A breathtaking revisionist version of the fall of the President. It's hard to get me to stick with books about Watergate because its boring. O'm only 70 pages into this and it has altered my thinking completely. The the other Watergate books were boring because they weren't accurate.
Six Crisis, by Richard Nixon - One of his first books. It details some events in his early political life. I like the chapter where he gets spit on in Caracas.
Nixon, a film by Oliver Stone … Is an invaluable resource for students interested in an insane version of the events in the life of Richard Nixon. Look for the voice of Stone as the reporter interviewing Nixon’s mother.
Steal This Book; Jerry Rubin – This ultra-leftist hippie handbook influenced me as a teen-ager. I loved it. He was a real hero. Today I am anti-Jerry Rubin, and I resent the influence this big jerk had on me when he was alive and famous. What a better person I might have been if it weren't for these hippie leaders and their brainwashing.
Vietnam at War, The History 1946-1975, by Lt. General Phillip B. Davidson – c) 1988 To my mind, this is the most detailed military history of the Vietnam War, and without an axe to grind. I've bought new books for much less than I paid for this used. I'd say it was worth every penny. What I like most about it is that Phil is a retired military man and has no big writers ego to clog off the work with show off prose. By not trying to be a fine writer he is one.
White House Years; Kissinger, --Kissinger was a free-roaming cabinet advisor, but had more influence with the President than the Secretary of State William Rogers. This led to an open and mean spirited rivalry between the two courtiers. In the end Kissinger won and became the new Secretary of State.
It took a long time to finish all of these Kissinger memoirs. This is the first of a series. It was worth the time. The K certainly presents a strong case in his own defense against all specific criticism on the Cambodia incursion. Its easy to say 'Kissinger is a Nazi!' because he invaded Cambodia, but at the very least he deserves to be heard if a charge this large is made. White House Years is slow reading but not above any general reader, a few big words notwithstanding.
I think its very important when considering today’s events in the Middle East in American foreign policy to consider the historical political perspective. Read Kissinger trying to negotiate for the United States in the Middle East in the later Nixon years. Arab states both large and small were in the driver’s seat and did not treat him or any other of our emissaries well. They had us over an oil barrel especially after the Arab-Israeli War of 1973. I had to feel sympathy and anger when reading these detailed accounts of these negotiations. It is some satisfaction to know that we can no longer be pushed around over there, because we are now over there.
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