Richard Nixon

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Richard Nixon

• AMST 3100 The 1960s
• Rutledge

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Richard Nixon

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

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Nixon

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

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Nixon

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

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The Early Nixon - Vietnam

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

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Nixon and Vietnam, 1968

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

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The Nixon Doctrine

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

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Nixon

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

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Nixon

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

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The End Game for Nixon

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

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The Pentagon Papers and the Plumbers

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

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Nixons Personality

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

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Nixons Personality

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

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Nixons Exit

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

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AMST 3100
End