Historian William Leuchtenburg spares nothing in his criticism of Richard Nixon. The president is portrayed as a psychotic, neurotic, anti-Semitic lunatic - and those are his least offensive qualities. For one thing, Nixon as president virtually abandoned the use of the Oval Office. As Leuchtenburg notes, "During the day, [Nixon] secluded himself in a hideaway in the Executive Office Building [EOB]. At night, he cooped up alone in the Lincoln Sitting Room of the White House. In his EOB retreat, where he spent most of his time, he scribbled notes to himself on a yellow pad for hours… In truth Nixon had almost no friends....Nixon shied away from personal contact. If he had to talk to people, he preferred to use a phone in order to keep them at a distance."
Nixon largely ignored his Cabinet, choosing instead to, "step
outside the traditional executive departments and made a powerful National
Security Council the main engine of his foreign policy, with [Henry] Kissinger
installed in the White House in the West Wing at close reach....In his machinations at the Office of Management
and Budget and by other means, Nixon sought to create a personalized government
center in the White House separate not only from the legislative and judicial
branches but from the rest of the executive branch."
And yet, despite all of this, there were incredible advances in social
policy during Nixon's tenure - although, granted, much of it emanated from the Democratic
Congress, Nixon still signed much of it into law rather than veto them [and, in many
cases, a Nixon veto would have been sustained, thus killing the legislation].
Perhaps nowhere was this social progress more evident than in the area of civil
rights. As Leuchtenburg writes,
"After his presidency ended, even some of his harshest critics expressed
astonished approval of Nixon's civil rights record, for, at the same time that
he was seeking to win over the [racist George] Wallace following [for 1972], he
was presiding over a remarkable trend toward greater equality - a disjuncture
no one has been able to explain...By far the greatest progress in school
integration took place not under Kennedy or Johnson but under Nixon. The
proportion of African American pupils attending all-black schools in the South
fell from 68% in 1968 to 8% in 1972." Indeed, Tom Wicker wrote that on
civil rights, "The indisputable fact is that [Nixon] got the job done -
the dismantling of dual schools - when no one else had been able to do
it."
Of course, as Leuchtenburg points out, one reason for this
progress was Nixon's almost complete lack of interest in domestic affairs
[unless there was a political payoff to be gained]. Unlike Johnson, it was foreign affairs that
most interested Nixon. Like Johnson, however, Vietnam remained a quagmire. And the numbers were chilling. Leuchtenburg writes, "In Nixon's first
six months in office, more Americans died in Vietnam than in all but one
similar period in the past....In contriving a strategy for Southeast Asia,
Nixon opted for the worst possible choice: very slow de-escalation over a
number of years, interspersed with paroxysms of bombing. Especially hideous was
the American treatment of Laos. A half million U.S. bombing missions killed or
displaced hundreds of thousands of peaceful Laotians..." Indeed, one-third
of American deaths in Vietnam occurred on Nixon's watch.
And, even in foreign affairs, Nixon was not always in
charge. A particularly frightening
example of Nixon's incapacitation was the Yom Kippur War in 1973. It is a chilling story detailed by
Leuchtenburg, "The Yom Kippur conflict raised one of the greatest tests of
Nixon's years in office, and at the height of it, the president was absent
without leave. His gargantuan airlift and the threat of Soviet intervention
brought the world the closest to a nuclear confrontation it had been since the
1962 Cuban missile crisis, but during the 16-day war, Nixon did not once attend
a White House strategy conference. Left on their own, and acting with excessive
zeal, Kissinger and other subordinates made the perilous decision to order a
worldwide nuclear alert without informing Nixon until after it was done.
Hunkered down, Nixon could not be troubled with events abroad because he was
wholly absorbed in coping with a domestic exigency that portended the ruin of
his presidency. The Watergate controversy, ostensibly scotched, had become the
consuming event of his tenure."
Almost as interesting as Nixon's presidency is the historiography
that has grown around it in the last 40+ years.
Although the only man to resign the presidency, Leuchtenburg notes,
"In an astonishingly brief time after his downfall, however,
reconsideration [of Nixon's presidency] began, and numbers of writers offered a
more positive assessment of his tenure and came to view him, in retirement, as
a sage.... Nixon's rehabilitation rested almost wholly on his conduct of
foreign relations."
Leuchtenburg, however, says Nixon's foreign policy
"genius" is highly overblown. In fact, he is sharply critical of
Nixon's foreign policy, noting that pro-Nixon historiography, "credits him
with too much and pays too little attention to his shortcomings.... Nixon
focused on Russia and China, and on little else. He gave scant attention to
Europe, save for the USSR, where détente had a very short shelf life. Engrossed
in realpolitik, he neglected Africa, which did not figure largely in the Cold
War.... His policies toward South Asia were capricious, in part because he
regarded India's prime minister, Indira Gandhi, as a 'bitch' and a 'witch'. In
deciding to back Pakistan's war against India because he could not let at
American ally 'get screwed', he helped bring about India's resolve to develop
nuclear weapons and Pakistan's crushing of Bangladesh. He took a still more
cavalier attitude toward Latin America, notoriously in Chile, where he connived
to overthrow [Salvadore] Allende and gave his support to the vile regime of
General [Augusto] Pinochet. Even his one undoubted achievement - the opening of
China - came at a cost. The announcement that Nixon was going to China struck
Japan with 'typhonic force', said the U.S. ambassador in Tokyo - a shock so great
that it led to the fall of the [Eisaku] Saito government."
It was for Vietnam, however - even more so than Watergate - that
Leuchtenburg says Nixon bares as the greatest blame. Indeed, while sometimes praised for ending
the Vietnam War, Leuchtenburg writes, "Nixon actually pursued a
disastrous course in Southeast Asia. He carried on the war in Vietnam
senselessly for four more years, and he devastated Laos and Cambodia."
Historian Stephen Ambrose
wrote, "Nearly all the names on the
left-hand side of the Vietnam Wall in Washington commemorate men who died in
action while Richard Nixon was their commander-in-chief, and they died after he
had decided that the war could not be won." Leuchtenburg also points out that, as a result
of Nixon, "The murderous Khmer Rouge, which had been a negligible faction
at the time of the invasion of Cambodia, grew ten-fold after it - with awful
consequences for the Cambodian people in the Killing Fields."
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