Reagan had no worries about Nixon in China. He told reporters he was happy about the trip and hoped it might be tied to an end of the Vietnam War.1 Other conservatives in his state condemned the trip. The head of the United Republicans of California, for example, called it “obscene.”
If a President Humphrey had made the announcement, “we would rise up in a storm of opposition,” Reagan told the fall meeting of the state Central Republican Committee. “Of course we would.” He then delivered a near-perfect distillation of a quarter century of Cold War campaign attacks on Democratic presidents. He blamed Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman for Josef Stalin’s domination of Eastern Europe (with no hint of a suggestion as to how anyone could have prevented it). He blamed Truman for losing Korea, although it was Republican President Eisenhower who settled the war with an armistice in 1953. He blamed JFK for the Bay of Pigs, although Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon shared responsibility for that disgrace. He blamed JFK for failing to achieve victory in the Cuban Missile Crisis, leaving to the listener’s imagination what victory in that nuclear confrontation would have involved. Finally, he blamed JFK and LBJ for failing to achieve victory in Vietnam—at which point he noted that Richard Nixon, in contrast, was a Republican. It would have been a perfect distillation of Republican Cold War rhetoric if he had blamed Harry Truman for losing China to the Communists, but this was not the time or place for that.
The genius of such rhetoric was in the way it completely sidestepped any responsibility for devising a plan to save any of these countries. Republicans realized early on in the Cold War that they could blame the loss of any country on the alleged weakness, cowardice, appeasement, treachery—even treason—of Democrats. The solution would then appear obvious: elect Republicans.
Democrats could try explaining that some problems just didn’t have solutions, but voters have never rallied to forthright confessions of impotence. The Democrats tried that approach once, right after the Communists took over China. The State Department issued the China White Paper, a thick volume of declassified documents detailing the history of failed American attempts to shore up the Chinese Nationalists against Mao’s revolution. A World War II hero of demonstrated ability, George Marshall, led much of the American effort, first as a general and then as Truman’s secretary of state. None of Marshall’s credentials as a war hero and patriot stopped Joe McCarthy from accusing him of treason. The dynamic young candidate for Senate from California, Dick Nixon, made a charge that was harder to ridicule but equally untrue, blaming “our State department’s policy of appeasing Communists in China.” (At the same time, Nixon called on State to “immediately issue a statement that the United States will not recognize Red China”—thereby putting the Truman administration on notice that recognizing China might get it accused of appeasement or worse.)2
The White Paper made the case for the hopelessness of the Nationalist cause quite thoroughly. The Democrats may have had more facts on their side, but after the next election Republicans had five more seats in the Senate and twenty-eight more seats in the House on their side.3
What are facts compared to the glorious vision of victories achievable and disasters avertible by the simple expedient of casting out those accused of weakness and replacing them with their accusers? Put it that way, and the problem with the vision is all too clear. Reagan presented it much more captivatingly:
We have lived through a period when we saw a Democratic president bring back the bitter fruit of appeasement from Yalta and Potsdam.
We have seen a Democratic president snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Korea.
We have seen a Democratic president march up to the barricades in the Cuban missile crisis and then lack the will and intelligence to take the last step to victory there.
A Democratic president disgraced us at the Bay of Pigs and Democratic presidents lacked the will and the wisdom to exact a victory for the young Americans who died in Vietnam.
But this is a Republican president who has said only, “I will go and talk, I have no intention of abandoning old friends and allies.”4
This was a Republican president who had just used the first high-level American contact with China in two decades to explain in detail the circumstances under which he would let the North conquer “old friends and allies” in Saigon. What he said in public was no evidence at all of what he did in secret.
As a sign of Nixon’s good character, Reagan pointed to one of his most famous rhetorical achievements: the 1959 “kitchen debate.” As Vice President Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev toured a model American kitchen on exhibit in Moscow, they had started trading barbs about their nations’ respective ways of life. Reagan applauded “a Republican president who, when he was a vice president, met with another dictator, the dictator of the Russians, in the kitchen in Moscow, listened to his blustering threats against the United States, and then said, ‘Try it and we’ll kick the hell out of you.’ ”5 (Reagan paraphrased liberally. Nixon was not so confrontational in Moscow, saying: “My point was that in today’s world it is immaterial which of the two great countries at any particular moment has the advantage. In war, these advantages are illusory.”6 He was making the same point Reagan would make later and better as president: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Before Reagan became president, however, he spent years cornering the market in rhetorical red meat.)7 “Until there is some showing that Richard Nixon has undergone a massive change of personality, he deserves our confidence, prayers and best wishes.”8
Nixon’s personality had not changed. He was the same man who had won elections by accusing opponents of weakness, appeasement, cowardice, and even treachery.9 Attacking such vices never stopped anyone from embodying them.