Richard Nixon was re-elected president in 1972 with a solid majority over Democratic candidate George McGovern. McGovern won the Electoral College votes of only Massachusetts.
Before the vote, Nixon's National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger had announced that peace was at hand in the Vietnam War. A negotiated exit for the US had almost been concluded. After the election, it fell apart because our allied South Vietnamese government, headed by the authoritarian Nguyen Van Thieu, refused to go along with the terms. Nixon intiated what was called the "Christmas bombing" of Hanoi, pounding the North Vietnamese capital with heavy bombing. The action was tremendously unpopular in the US, especially after the promise of peace-at-hand. The bombing was opposed by most of America's democratic allies, some more vocally than others. And it threatened to unravel Nixon's more constructive foreign policy achievements, the improvoed relations with the Soviet Union (detente) and China.
That January, the legendary investigative journalist I.F. (Izzy) Stone wrote in the New York Review of Books 01/25/73 issue (article dated 01/02/73), a description of Nixon's post-election attitude that doesn't fit George w. Bush in every way, but does have some striking similarities.
We have got ourselves a moral monster for a President. His Christmas message, as written in the skies over shattered Hanoi, is that he is determined to have his own way, at whatever cost in human suffering. "Strength and resolution command respect…. But weakness and naïve sentimentality breed contempt." Thus spake our Zarathustra in his radio address of October 29 on America's need to be ever first in military might, so we can all be Supermen and make little people tremble.
Almost everything Nixon has done since his re-election, whether at home or abroad, in small ways as well as large, fits the portrait of a crafty, suspicious, and vindictive man; isolated and distrustful of those around him, and with that touch of megalomania virtually inescapable when one sits at the buttons which can unleash thermonuclear thunderbolts. Like the Godfather, he is ever watchful of the respect due him, and ready for salutary measures of enforcement where it flags.
Thus when the B-52s were ordered out on December18, "Administration officials" explained, according to the New York Times next day, that "the principal purpose of the President's action was to insure that the North Vietnamese leaders would comprehend the extent of his anger." One felt piously that the "h" in "his" should have been capitalized. He is, as we have been constantly told the bombings were intended to show, not to be "trifled" with.
There are some major differences with Bush, of course. Bush doesn't seem to have the paranoid edge that Nixon so obviously did. I'm not sure if that's particularly good news, though, because his administration is even more obsessed with secrecy. And Bush seems even more resistant than Nixon was to criticism.
More importantly, Nixon had a more pronounced pragmatic streak than Bush has exhibited in actual policies (though Bush has been more flexible in campaigning than in governing). Nixon also had a grand vision of better relations with the two leading hostile powers at the time, the USSR and China, that was far more constructive - and in it's essentials (outside of Vietnam policy), was probably more popular with Democrats than Republicans.
But Bush's insistence of showing his "resolve" by "staying the course" with bad policies in Iraq are very reminiscent of the attitude Stone describes here with Nixon. Only Bush is much worse in that regard.
Nixon eventually accepted a "reality-based" version of events in Vietnam. Among other things, the North Vietnamese had shot down an unexpectedly large number of B-52s during the Christmas bombing. Although Nixon claimed to the hard right, which increasingly became his base and last bastion of hope as the Watergate scandal began to bring down his administration, that the Christmas bombing showed his toughness and brought North Vietnam back to the table. Actually, it was arguably one of the worst failures of any military initiative in the whole history of America's war in Vietnam.
And apparently, in those days 33 years ago when many more people had adult memories of the Second World War, reference to possible lessons from the German experience were not quite so heretical as the Republicans take them to be today:
He [Nixon] is also a gambler, and his foreign policy begins to seem more and more a succession of daring wagers. Ever since the Cambodian invasion, he has been winning. But one day the little white ball is going to end up somewhere else. Hitler, too, beginning with the occupation of the Rhineland, launched a series of gambles and won them all—all, that is, except the last.
The lesson for Americans lies in the price the Germans paid for following their leader as long and as blindly as they did. The real problem, as the coming weeks will make clearer, is not just to disengage America from South-east Asia but from the increasingly one-man rule of Richard Nixon. He can undo with one plunge of his bombers months of slow progress toward détente. He can unite the world against us in hate and fear.
One sad thing about Stone's 1973 essay now comes in his discussions of how Democratic leaders like Ted Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey were expressing such optimism about Nixon's administration, including his Vietnam policies. Stone marvels that those Democratic leaders hadn't seemed to notice the many articles in the mainstream press about the risks of Nixon's Vietnam policies!
Yes, once upon a time, in a media galaxy far, far away, American newspapers and - believe it or not - TV news departments - were actually assertive in seeking out news and making analyses that might - yes, it's true - displease the sitting Republican president! Amazing to think about, isn't it? It seems farther removed from today's reality than scenes depicted in the Fantastic Four movie. Stone even includes a long exerpt from a press conference with Gerald Warren, the Scotty McClellan of January 1973, in which reporters seemed to think it was their job to ask aggressive questions.
When that happened on Monday at one of Scotty's press briefings, it was actually, literally front-page headline news. REPORTERS ASK WHITE HOUSE ACTUAL QUESTIONS ABOUT A SUBSTANTIVE ISSUE. That's really how far we've come. It's a strange, exotic, man-bites-dog event when reporters actually get assertive in asking the White House questions about the people's business.
And there's this passage, that reminds us how little the officer corps seems to have learned from their own shooting-self-in-foot approach to creating a massive credibility gap for themselves. The reference is to the fact that North Vietnam began evacuating civilians from Hanoi before the Christmas bombing actually started. They had expected bombing attacks against Hanoi from the start of the American bombing in 1965, and had evacuation plans in place and were ready to execute them:
If the other side's account is correct, these threats explain North Vietnam's order of December 3 to begin evacuating all schoolchildren from Hanoi. The US has not denied that threats were made, but its propagandists have twisted the evacuation order to prove that "as of December 3, Hanoi already was planning to scuttle the negotiation" (see Hearst service backgrounder from Washington in the Boston Traveller, December 22). This is on a par with Pentagon claims that if civilians were hurt in Hanoi it must have been their own fault because a) Hanoi had shot down American planes and the debris had hit civilians or b) they were hit by debris from all those SAM missiles. As the mugger said, if the victim hadn't resisted, he wouldn't have been hurt.
It's almost as if, in preparation for the Iraq War, Pentagon spokespeople went back and studied their predecessors' mistakes in public communication and set themselves to outdoing the earlier disaster.
And it's not limited to PR. Rummy's vision of "military transformation" relies heavily on faith in air power. Stone wrote in 1973:
With us Americans aerial bombardment is more than tactical or strategic: it has become a disease; it is downright maniacal, a compulsive twitch. The year-end [1972] compilation out of the Pentagon says we have showered about 7 million tons of bombs and rockets on Southeast Asia since we set out to make it safe for something or other on January 1, 1961. This is more than 2 million tons greater than all the bombs we dropped on Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific in World War II, and more than ten times the 635,000 tons dropped on Korea.
If victory-by-airpower were more than a delusion, Korea long ago would have been united in desolation. We literally left nothing standing above the 38th Parallel. We had overwhelming air superiority yet we were pushed back to the parallel and North Korea was re-established. Bombing surveys after World War II showed that in industrial countries output expanded and morale rose as the bombs fell. But delusions are not cured by rational demonstration.
In underdeveloped countries like Indochina's, the cost of every peasant killed is by now many times his weight in gold, but life—and the war—goes on. Our war—since we took over from the French—is just entering its thirteenth year. In the eight months alone since the mining and bombing of Haiphong and Hanoi were ordered by Nixon, more bombs have been dropped than during the entire Korean war. But Hanoi has still been able to impose deadly losses on our B-52s and—with justice—claim a strategic victory. Pain we can impose on the innocent, but militarily bombs and blockade just don't seem to work as promised.
Karl Marx famously said, creatively quoting the philosopher Hegel, that history repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. The Bush administration, with its resurrection of the dark side of the Nixon administration, may be re-writing that notion to: the first time as tragedy, the second time makes the first tragedy look like farce.
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