“If an individual wants to be a leader and isn’t controversial, that means he never stood for anything.”
—Richard M. Nixon
The legend that Nixon had a “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War is a media-made myth
The infamous “Christmas bombing” of Vietnam actually had one of the lowest casualty totals of any bombing campaign—because the U.S. targeted military sites
Under Nixon, federal spending on social issues exceeded spending on defense for the first time in the history of the Republic
Federal regulations grew only 19 percent under LBJ, but 121 percent under Nixon
Richard Nixon presents a special problem for conservatives. He is rightly honored for his role in exposing the Communist spy Alger Hiss early in his career. Yet he flirted with socialism both abroad and at home, instigating the policy of détente with the Soviet Union that demoralized Cold War foreign policy and emboldened the Soviets, and imposing wage and price controls on the American economy. Nixon despised liberals but largely governed as one, trying relentlessly to ingratiate himself with the liberal establishment even though he knew instinctively that liberals would never respect or accept him.
He had the most complicated character of any modern president—supremely intelligent and visionary, but also petty, vindictive, and paranoid—the latter trait said to be among the reasons his presidency self-destructed in the scandal of Watergate. On the merits, there would seem to be little reason for conservatives to approve of Richard Nixon, and indeed during his presidency many leading conservatives openly attacked him. M. Stanton Evans, chairman of the American Conservative Union at the time, famously said, “There are two things I don’t like about President Nixon: his domestic policy, and his foreign policy.”
And yet Nixon deserves to be defended by conservatives because of the viciously unfair attacks on him from the left, and in particular because the standard narrative of the Watergate scandal is in error. Putting Nixon into clearer perspective offers many important lessons: on the distorted media and historical accounts of that turbulent time; on the low character of the left; on the fundamental problems of uncontrollable bureaucracy; and on the constraints facing any modern president who attempts to seriously confront the left and reform the government.
Watergate will forever cloud the talents and supreme ability that brought Nixon to the summit of public life. Henry Kissinger has likened Nixon’s complex character and fate to a Shakespearean tragedy; Fred Greenstein thinks him a Dostoyevskian character. Nixon was shy and introverted—not the best traits for a politician—but could also be charming and highly effective with both small and large audiences. Friend and foe alike have testified to his first-class intellect. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, who met with Nixon on several occasions to discuss economic and social policy, wrote that “few if any [presidents] have had a higher I.Q. . . .He was also personally pleasant.”
There is no doubt that liberal hostility toward Nixon hardened him and aggravated his own animosities. Probably no president of the twentieth century took office with such a fund of hatred among his enemies and critics—most of which arose from his role in the exposure of Alger Hiss, and his supposed “Red-baiting” campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas in the 1950 California Senate election. Liberals would never forgive these transgressions against good will and good taste. “The hatred he evoked in his political opponents was extraordinary even by the turbulent standards of American democracy,” Kissinger observed. “The New York Review of Books,” political journalist Theodore White noted, “treats him as if he does not belong to the human race.” Nixon reciprocated, saying that his enemies should be “kicked in the groin.” And historian Paul Johnson has observed, “The Eastern liberal establishment never really admitted the legitimacy of the Nixon administration. From the start, the media interests which spoke for the establishment treated the Nixon presidency as in some metaphysical sense an outlaw regime whose true, unconstitutional character would eventually be exposed.”
“I still remain mystified by the personality of the perhaps most complex President of the twentieth century. . . . It would take a poet of Shakespearean dimension to do justice to the extraordinary, maddening, visionary, and debilitating personality of Richard Nixon.”
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Henry Kissinger
His greatest election victory, the landslide forty-nine-state sweep in 1972 over George McGovern, left him feeling strangely melancholy—a state of mind Nixon said he could not explain. Nixon’s legions of enemies have fixed on a supposed “pettiness” as the core of Nixon’s character, and history has forgotten Nixon’s great act of magnanimity: not contesting the results of the 1960 presidential election, which Nixon lost to John F. Kennedy by the narrowest of margins.
That the election was stolen from Nixon has never been seriously doubted. Many people, including the outgoing President Eisenhower, urged Nixon to contest the results, demand recounts in Illinois and Texas where the most votes were stolen, and file legal challenges. Nixon refused, because he knew that such an unprecedented political fight would be damaging to the nation. The contrast with Vice President Al Gore’s conduct after the close 2000 election is plain to see.
The most significant fact about the Nixon presidency is that Nixon was a wartime president—arguably the most beleaguered incoming president since Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Like Lincoln, Nixon wasn’t just fighting a foreign foe: the antiwar movement of the left openly wished for America’s defeat in the Vietnam War Nixon had inherited from President Johnson, and liberal Democrats who had supported the war effort under Kennedy and Johnson were cowed by the revolt of the radical wing of their party. Hence, as Henry Kissinger observed, “The new Nixon Administration was the first of the postwar generation that had to conduct foreign policy without the national consensus that had sustained its predecessors largely since 1947.”
By the time Nixon took office in 1969, Vietnam had become the nation’s longest war, with war deaths surpassing the Korean War total. The U.S. troop level peaked at 543,000 in the spring of 1969. Nixon shared the nation’s frustration, but dared not openly show it. That Nixon had advertised a “secret plan” to end the war during the 1968 campaign is a commonplace of Nixon lore, but this is a myth largely generated by a wire service story. Nixon had said no such thing. The phrase “secret plan” had been used in a question directed to Nixon in a New Hampshire town meeting, but attributed to Nixon in a UPI story that was only belatedly corrected. Nixon had to handle the issue carefully; it would hardly have served his purpose to refute the story and say that he had no plan. Instead Nixon said, quite reasonably, that he didn’t want to undercut President Johnson’s negotiations through any campaign statements he might make.
Nixon concluded that, although a majority of Americans might back him, he could not prosecute the war with a free hand with the cultural and media establishments of the nation against him. There is considerable evidence that the North Vietnamese understood and exploited the liberal resistance, dragging out negotiations because they recognized that Nixon’s secret threats to escalate the war in the fall of 1969 were a bluff. Years after the war, a North Vietnamese official told the Wall Street Journal,
[The anti-war movement] was essential to our strategy. Every day our leadership would listen to world news over the radio at 9 a.m. to follow the growth of the American antiwar movement. Visits to Hanoi by people like Jane Fonda and former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and ministers gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses. We were elated when Jane Fonda, wearing a red Vietnamese dress, said at a press conference that she was ashamed of American actions in the war and that she would struggle along with us.
“Communism isn’t sleeping; it is, as always, plotting, scheming, working, fighting.”
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Richard M. Nixon
Nixon ultimately settled on a transitional plan of “Vietnamization” of the war, including a phased withdrawal of American troops and training the South Vietnamese to defend themselves, a strategy the Johnson administration had rejected. Nixon finally brought U.S. involvement to an end and secured the release of our prisoners of war, through an act that enraged the left and the media—the “Christmas bombing” of 1972. When the North Vietnamese balked at concluding a peace treaty, Nixon took off the gloves and decided for the first time to attack the North seriously. Nixon, according to his own recollection, told the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Thomas Moorer, “I don’t want any more of this crap about the fact that we couldn’t hit this target or that one. This is your chance to use military power effectively to win the war, and if you don’t, I’ll consider you responsible.” For the first time in the war, B-52s were used to bomb Hanoi, starting on December 18.
The reaction was ferocious. Opponents of the war, who had by this late date virtually exhausted the vocabulary of accusation and abuse, seized upon the image of the supposed “carpet bombing” of Vietnam to level the most extreme charges of the entire war. The New York Times called the bombing “terrorism on an unprecedented scale,” and said its first two days alone were the “equivalent of the Hiroshima bomb.” (This was wildly inaccurate.) Times columnist Tom Wicker said the U.S. had “loosed the holocaust” on North Vietnam. The Washington Post also embraced the theme that the bombing amounted to “terrorism,” calling it “the most savage and senseless act of war ever visited, over a scant ten days, by one sovereign people upon another.” The London Daily Mirror said the bombing was “an act of insane ferocity, a crude exercise in the politics of terror.” The Guardian said, “Mr. Nixon wants to go down in history as one of the most murderous and bloodthirsty of American Presidents.” La Opinion in Buenos Aries carried the headline, “U.S. Carries Out Most Complete Plan of Destruction in Human History.” Congressional Democrats, not to be outdone by the media, engaged in their own hyperbole. Senator McGovern called the bombing “a policy of mass murder . . . the most murderous bombardment in the history of the world,” and Iowa Senator Harold Hughes said, “The only thing I can compare with it is the savagery at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
Only months later did information emerge that the media coverage of the Christmas bombing was not simply inaccurate, but bordering on hysteria. In fact, the bombing had one of the lowest casualty totals of any bombing campaign in the history of warfare—because the U.S. had indeed targeted military sites. The Hanoi death toll, the Economist noted, “is smaller than the number of civilians killed by the North Vietnamese in their artillery bombardment of An Loc in April or the toll of refugees ambushed when trying to escape from Quang Tri at the beginning of May. That is what makes the denunciation of Mr. Nixon as another Hitler sound so unreal.” New York Times reporter Malcolm Browne acknowledged that “the damage caused by American bombing was grossly overstated by North Vietnamese propaganda,” and the Baltimore Sun’s Peter Ward agreed that “evidence on the ground disproves charges of indiscriminate bombing.” The critics who claimed the bombing would prolong the war were proved wrong. But the myth that it was a terrible atrocity has persisted ever since.
The peace agreement ultimately did not secure the long-term freedom of South Vietnam—though had Nixon not been damaged by Watergate, it is possible that he would have been able to enforce the agreement and keep the Communist North at bay.
Richard Nixon: A Life by Jonathan Aitken (Regnery, 1994).
While Nixon was undoubtedly an anti-Communist, he initiated the “détente” with the Soviet Union that undermined America in the Cold War and emboldened the Soviet Union. The arms control treaties Nixon signed, especially the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty of 1972, prevented the U.S. from developing defenses against Soviet missile attack and meant that Ronald Reagan a decade later had to spend considerable political capital to begin to reverse American policy on missile defense (the ABM treaty wasn’t finally abandoned until 2001 under President George W. Bush). Meanwhile, the Soviet Union continued a massive arms buildup throughout the 1970s, openly regarding détente as a diplomatic weapon in their “class struggle” against the West. Nixon’s opening to Communist China gave rise to the ultimate cliché of counterintuitive politics: “Only Nixon could go to China.”
The erosion of America’s position in the world under détente would escalate during the presidencies of Nixon’s successors, Gerald Ford and especially Jimmy Carter. And it is possible to speculate that had Nixon survived Watergate, he might have been in a position to hold a harder line against the Soviet Union. On the other hand, Nixon’s similar grand strategy in domestic policy—what might be called his attempt to reach détente with liberalism at home—failed for much the same reason.
Any other president who had compiled Nixon’s domestic policy record would be regarded as standing firmly in the liberal-progressive tradition. President Johnson has gone down in the history books as the big spender on social welfare programs, yet federal spending grew faster during Nixon’s tenure than during Johnson’s. It was under Nixon that social spending came to exceed defense spending for the first time. Social spending soared from $55 billion in 1970 (Nixon’s first budget) to $132 billion in 1975, from 28 percent of the federal budget when LBJ left office to 40 percent of the budget by the time Nixon left in 1974. While Nixon would criticize and attempt to reform welfare, he nonetheless approved massive increases in funding for other Great Society programs such as the Model Cities program and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, despite the fact that top aides had urged him to cut or eliminate many of these programs. Some of the expensive policies that Nixon supported on entitlements, such as the expansion of Food Stamps and automatic cost-of-living increases for Social Security recipients, contributed to runaway spending trends in successive decades.
Federal spending for the arts, which benefited mostly the cultural elites who hated Nixon, quadrupled. Economist Herbert Stein, who served on Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisers, summed up his dubious record: “The administration that was against expanding the budget expanded it greatly; the administration that was determined to fight inflation ended by having a large amount of it.” Nixon once asked an aide, “What’s a balanced budget worth in terms of votes?” “Fifty thousand votes in a national election, that’s all.” Not surprisingly, the New York Times praised Nixon near the end of his first term for his “abandonment of outmoded conservative doctrine.”
“We may well have been the most progressive administration on domestic issues that has ever been formed. It was amazing what [Nixon] would say yes to. . . . It is not likely that the Nixon Administration will ever be credited for what it tried to do.”
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Daniel Patrick Moynihan, domestic policy adviser to President Nixon
The explosion in spending was matched by an equally dramatic explosion in federal regulation—from an administration that regarded itself as pro-business. Nixon created a number of the new “alphabet soup” regulatory agencies that are constitutionally dubious, such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The number of pages in the Federal Register (the roster of federal rules and regulations) grew only 19 percent under Johnson, but a staggering 121 percent under Nixon. In civil rights, Nixon expanded the regime of “affirmative action” racial quotas and set-asides far beyond what Johnson had done. In other words, Nixon consolidated the administrative state of the Great Society in much the same way that President Eisenhower (whom Nixon had served as vice president) consolidated the New Deal. Ronald Reagan would run and govern as much against Nixon’s legacy as he would against LBJ’s, and a number of Nixon’s administrative creations would cause Reagan the most trouble in his attempts to scale back the size and scope of the regulatory state during his White House years.
Nixon’s worst deviation from sound domestic policy came in economics. He became the first president ever to impose wage and price controls in peacetime—in another reversal of the conservative principles Nixon had espoused before being elected president. In 1965 Nixon had said, “The lesson that government price fixing doesn’t work is never learned.” He had attacked wage and price controls in the 1968 campaign, and spoken often of his own frustrations with such controls during World War II. “I will not take this nation down the road of wage and price controls,” Nixon had reiterated, “however politically expedient that may seem.” But then he did exactly that, in 1971, and at the same time he took the U.S. off the gold standard.
“Looking back on the budget, economic and social policies of the Republican years, it would not be unfair to conclude that the political verdict of 1968 had brought reaffirmation, rather than repudiation, of Great Society liberalism.”
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Pat Buchanan, speechwriter and adviser in Nixon’s White House
Neither step improved the U.S. economy. On the contrary, these and other moves by Nixon—all in contradiction of the sound conservative principles he had run on—initiated the high inflation that ruined the American economy in the 1970s.
But then Nixon suddenly switched course again after his 1972 landslide election victory and started his second term apparently determined to try to rein in the welfare state and reform the Washington bureaucracy. This is where Watergate comes in.
Nixon’s guilt in the Watergate cover-up is a supposedly well-established fact. What might be called the “Standard Heroic Account” of Watergate finds its wellsprings in Nixon’s much-exaggerated “paranoia”—that is, Nixon’s supposed fixation with the idea that his enemies were out to get him. In the Standard Heroic Account, Watergate was an epic struggle between the truth-seeking crusaders in Congress, the Justice Department, and the media against the villains in the White House trying frantically to cover up criminal political dirty tricks—complete with a “Saturday Night Massacre” (when Nixon fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox and attempted to close down the investigation); crucial evidence that was mysteriously missing or tampered with (the unexplained 18 ½-minute gap in a key Oval Office tape); hush money (cash payoffs to Howard Hunt and others); mystery figures (“Deep Throat,” the secret source for Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein); and betrayal (by White House counsel John Dean, whose 1973 Senate testimony first implicated Nixon in the cover-up). With Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, the two-year Watergate saga ended in a victory for American constitutional democracy. The triumph of a vigilant media and an aroused Congress supposedly showed that “the system works.”
There is a certain narrow truth to the Standard Heroic Account of Watergate. Much of Nixon’s behavior and many of his decisions are indefensible. But the Standard Heroic Account leaves out some extremely important context, and conceals the fact that Nixon was the victim of a double standard and a witch-hunt atmosphere in Washington. As Nixon noted, previous presidents had bugged and harassed their political opponents. Lyndon Johnson, for example, had bugged Barry Goldwater’s campaign in 1964. Nixon was right to complain that he was being held to a different standard. The real reason Democrats wanted to destroy Nixon—and the reason so many Republicans gladly went along—is that Nixon was threatening to take away their political power.
It is on precisely this point that all of the accounts of Watergate miss the nature and deeper significance of the political clash that was the backdrop of the affair. Watergate changed the operation of government in subtle but profound ways. While sleuths of history continue to hunt for the tantalizing missing details, it is on Watergate’s effect on the structure of government that the most important revisionism remains to be done. The reaction to the temporary constitutional crisis brought about by Nixon’s misdeeds (temporary because he would have been gone from the White House by 1977 in any case) was a permanent constitutional crisis. Congress and the federal bureaucracy were able to usurp powers from the presidency during its post-Watergate weakness—by means of the War Powers Act and the Budget Impoundment and Control Act. Watergate didn’t just change our standards of ethics in government; it changed the balance of powers laid out in the Constitution. Far from showing that “the system works,” Watergate introduced significant new distortions into our system of government that have hobbled all succeeding presidents.
Nixon had set his sights on a large project in his second term—gaining real control of the executive branch bureaucracy. “We have no discipline in this bureaucracy,” Nixon complained to John Ehrlichman on one of the Watergate tapes. “We never fire anybody. We never reprimand anybody. We never demote anybody. We always promote the sons-of-bitches that kick us in the ass.” He was starting to refer to many federal programs not as objects to be “reformed,” but as “failures” that should be cut. In his second inaugural address, Nixon set out his intention bluntly: “A new era of progress at home requires turning away . . . from condescending policies of paternalism—of Washington knows best.” His first budget proposal in the second term called for eliminating more than one hundred programs, while holding total spending growth to a relatively parsimonious 8 percent. Nixon was proposing to do nothing less than upend the established political arrangement, according to which Democratic administrations expanded government in exciting new progressive ways, and Republican administrations only slowed, or at best stalled—but never rolled back—the encroachment of government bureaucracy, taxes, spending, and regulation onto citizens’ lives.
The significance of Nixon’s conservative turn was not lost on the liberal establishment. The New York Times huffed that Nixon’s second inaugural address heralded “a reversion to the do-nothing Federal Government and every-man-for-himself ideology of the Hoover era.” Michael Novak, fresh from writing speeches for McGovern running mate Sargent Shriver in the 1972 campaign, wrote that the Establishment “knew that for the first time since Andrew Jackson, a President had arisen who genuinely threatened both the economic and symbolic power of the Eastern elite.”
By 1973, Nixon wrote years later, “I had concluded that Congress has become cumbersome, undisciplined, isolationist, fiscally irresponsible . . . and too dominated by the media.” What was needed, Nixon thought, was to “break the Eastern stranglehold on the executive branch and the federal government.” Nixon’s plan to break the bureaucracy required that he take Congress on as well. “Armed with my landslide mandate and knowing that I had only four years in which to make my mark,” Nixon wrote in his Memoirs, “I planned to force Congress and the federal bureaucracy to defend their obstruction and their irresponsible spending in the open arena of public opinion. . . .” Nixon wrote in his diary at the time, “This is going to be quite a shock to the establishment, but it is the only way, and probably the last time, that we can get government under control before it gets so big that it submerges the individual completely and destroys the dynamism which makes the American system what it is.”
“We must always remember that America is a great nation today not because of what government did for people but because of what people did for themselves and for one another.”
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Richard M. Nixon
By declaring his intent to control—and reduce in size—the structures on which the power of the Democratic Party rested, Nixon would be launching one of the most bitter political fights in American history. Nixon knew that he had “thrown down a gauntlet to Congress, the bureaucracy, the media, and the Washington establishment and challenged them to engage in epic battle.”
He started his attack on spending immediately. Nixon froze spending for housing and urban development programs, suggesting that the money be sent back to the states through revenue sharing instead. When Congress overrode his veto of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, which had appropriated $18 billion for water treatment, Nixon announced that he was going to invoke the presidential power of “impoundment”—he was going to refuse to spend the appropriated money. There is no more direct way of taking on Congress and the bureaucracy than impoundment. The impoundment power had a long pedigree. Presidents going back to Thomas Jefferson had impounded duly appropriated funds. Jefferson had impounded funds for the construction of naval warships because the threat of war with Britain and France had eased. Nixon pointed out that while his impoundments came to 3.5 percent of total spending in 1973, President Kennedy had impounded 7.8 percent of the budget in 1961 and 6.2 percent in 1962, while LBJ had impounded 6.7 percent in 1967.
Nixon signaled that he intended make the widest use of impoundment: “I have nailed my colors to the mast on this issue; the political winds can blow where they may.” By the beginning of 1973, Nixon had impounded funds for over one hundred federal programs, each with an interest group or local constituency behind it. More impoundments were promised to follow if Congress did not get runaway spending under control. Members of Congress in both parties rightly feared that scaling back spending might involve being defeated for re-election. Pork-barrel spending was the chief means of assuring their re-election, and a reduced ability to deliver pork diminished the attachments of the interests who helped keep them in office. Hence their fury at Nixon, and hence the reason Watergate quickly became the pretext for destroying the president who was threatening to shut down business as usual in Washington.
Some conservatives at the time perceived what Nixon was up to and fought back against the witch hunt the left unleashed during Watergate. A joke from the time: a true conservative was someone who didn’t support Nixon until after Watergate.
Nixon ran for president in 1968 on a platform of “law and order,” promising to appoint “strict constructionist” justices to the Supreme Court and signaling that Americans could expect him to reverse the liberalism of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the Warren Court’s radical jurisprudence. But Nixon’s record of judicial appointments is mixed.
The Senate rejected Nixon’s first two Supreme Court nominees, Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell, because they were thought too conservative and Southern-leaning. When Nixon then appointed Judge Harry Blackmun from Minnesota in 1970, Time magazine opined, “There is little likelihood that Blackmun will be criticized for his judicial philosophy or specific decisions.” Strict constructionism? “I don’t know what it means,” Blackmun told a reporter. Blackmun was swiftly confirmed and soon demonstrated that he was no strict constructionist, moving steadily to the left during his time on the Court. He was the author of the worst Supreme Court decision since Dred Scott, the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that mandated abortion on demand in all fifty states.
“History will treat me fairly. Historians probably won’t, because most historians are on the left.”
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Richard M. Nixon, to NBC’s John Chancellor in 1988
Nixon’s other three appointees were better, to varying degrees. Chief Justice Warren Burger was a cautious justice, while Lewis Powell, thought to be a conservative at the time of his appointment, often disappointed conservatives in rulings that compromised with liberal doctrine. It was Powell, for example, who, in the famous Bakke case about reverse discrimination in college admissions, promulgated the doctrine that “diversity” was a legitimate criterion for hiring and admissions decisions—a deeply corrupting doctrine that is still with us today.
Nixon’s only home run on the Court was William Rehnquist, whom Ronald Reagan later elevated to Chief Justice.
Between Nixon’s acquiescence in or even sponsorship of so many constitutionally doubtful expansions of the regulatory statutes—the Endangered Species Act, the creation of OSHA and the EPA—and his botched appointments to the Supreme Court, Nixon’s constitutional grade has to be marked down to a C+. If it were not for his abortive attempts to rein in the government in his second term and his vetoes of bad legislation such as the War Powers Act (his veto was overridden), his grade would be even lower.