Though by later standards the economy during Nixon’s first term remained robust, both inflation and unemployment exceeded the very low levels of the early and mid-1960s, as the country suffered through a recession in 1970 and a slow recovery the next year. Organized labor, still powerful, responded to rising prices by pressing for large wage increases and other gains. A combination of confidence from years of economic growth and uncertainty about the future made workers exceptionally combative. In 1970, the country lost a higher percentage of working time to strikes than in any year since 1952 (not counting 1959, when the massive steel strike pushed the figure off the charts).
Many of the strikes of the period were unusual in their size, targets, and militancy. In March 1970, post office workers in New York City walked off their jobs, demanding a larger wage increase than agreed to by their national leader and the right to strike, which as federal employees they did not have. The illegal walkout quickly spread across the country until 200,000 postal workers had stopped work in the largest public employee strike in the nation’s history. Nixon sent twenty-five thousand unarmed National Guardsmen and reservists to New York, the first time since 1894 that federal troops had been deployed to try to break a strike blocking mail delivery. The walkout ended only when the administration agreed to a double-digit pay increase, a formal collective bargaining procedure, and other concessions. The next month, forty thousand coal miners launched a wildcat strike demanding hospital and pension benefits for disabled workers. In the fall, more than 350,000 workers struck General Motors for nine weeks in one of the largest strikes since the post–World War II strike wave.
The spread of rights consciousness and the culture of protest to workers, especially young, female, and African American workers, contributed to the labor upsurge. Public employees began joining unions in large numbers, sometimes in defiance of state or local laws. In many cases, the public-sector organizing drives had strong ties to the civil rights movement. The antiauthoritarian spirit of the New Left infected labor too, as workers, far more frequently than during the previous two decades, rejected contracts, voted out leaders, and struck without official sanction. The National Guardsmen who shot the students at Kent State had just recently finished patrolling the highways of eastern Ohio, where Teamsters conducting a wildcat strike had taken to shooting at trucks driven by scabs.
Nixon tried to avoid a head-on confrontation with organized labor over inflationary wage settlements, valuing the support he found among unionists for his Vietnam policy and hoping to woo blue-collar workers away from the Democrats. But when the continuing deterioration of the balance of payments converged with inflation, Nixon decided he had to act. In August 1971, he announced what he dubbed his “New Economic Policy” (NEP). To stimulate the economy, he proposed a series of tax cuts. To check inflation, which he blamed on Vietnam, he took the startling step of imposing wage and price controls, a move that horrified many conservatives (though not business, which understood that in practice controls would primarily mean a check on organized labor). To deal with the balance of payments problem, Nixon simply ended the “gold window” that allowed foreign-held dollars to be redeemed at a fixed price. This in turn allowed a devaluation of the dollar, aimed at making exports cheaper and imports more expensive. To further address the trade imbalance and woo manufacturing workers, Nixon imposed a 10 percent surcharge on imported goods. In effect, Nixon threw out orthodox free-market/free-trade economics in recognition of diminished American hegemony and, more immediately, his need to position the economy to boost his reelection chances.
It worked. Probably the economy would have improved anyway, but the combination of the NEP measures, an easy credit policy by the Federal Reserve, and a spurt of federal spending in early 1972 revived the economy, lowered unemployment, and pushed down the inflation rate. Though organized labor resented federal restraints on wage boosts, Nixon shrewdly retained considerable union backing by paying attention to other labor issues and stressing the conservative social values that he shared with many workers. One major federal report sympathetically addressed the depth of worker alienation in terms not much different from those employed by the New Left, while another documented the job loss that would result from cuts to military spending advocated by Nixon’s liberal critics.
Nixon helped himself in the 1972 campaign but so did discord among the Democrats (though the president had a hand in that too). In the aftermath of its 1968 convention, the party adopted new rules, developed by a committee headed by South Dakota senator George McGovern, that democratized the nomination process, limited the influence of the traditional power brokers, and mandated an increase in young, female, and nonwhite delegates. The reforms deepened the split within the party between liberal activists and the city bosses, labor leaders, and officeholders who had long dominated it. After a hard-fought primary fight, McGovern, who strongly opposed the war and generally positioned himself on the left of the party, emerged as the nominee. The Nixon campaign contributed to McGovern’s success by launching a large covert operation that disrupted the campaigns of his rivals, believing that he would be the easiest Democrat to beat. Nixon may have also played a role, through a covert deal, in George Wallace’s decision to run for the Democratic nomination rather than as an independent, eliminating Nixon’s fear that a three-way race might end up being decided in the House of Representatives, where the Democrats had the advantage.
McGovern proved to be an inept candidate. He picked a vice presidential running mate, Missouri senator Thomas Eagleton, who turned out to have had a history of treatment for mental illness, first defending him and then ditching him. He never found a way to rebut the Nixon campaign portrayal of him as a left-winger out of touch with the country. Some prominent conservative and centrist Democrats deserted him, much as moderate and liberal Republicans had deserted Goldwater in 1964. For the first time in its history, the AFL-CIO did not endorse a presidential candidate, a huge boost for Nixon, while some southern Democratic governors, including Georgia’s Jimmy Carter, refused to back their party’s nominee. Meanwhile, the Nixon campaign vastly outspent and nimbly outmaneuvered McGovern.
When the 1972 campaign began, it looked like the presidential race might be close. It ended in a blowout. Nixon won over 60 percent of the popular vote and carried every state except Massachusetts. Just as he hoped, Nixon won big chunks of voters who had traditionally backed the Democrats, including white southerners, Catholics (he was the first Republican presidential candidate to win a majority of Catholic votes), and union members. But Nixon had no coattails, as the Republicans lost two seats in the Senate and, with a gain of only a dozen seats in the House, remained a decidedly minority party in both houses of Congress. The mixed election results reflected the uncertainty and instability of national politics in the early 1970s, as both the democratic revolution and the conservative upsurge had broad public support.
Out of Vietnam
With the election over, Nixon returned to a piece of unfinished business, the war in Vietnam. When the United States tried to modify its tentative agreement with North Vietnam, the communists held fast and negotiations broke down. On December 18, 1972, the United States launched a massive bombing campaign against the Hanoi-Haiphong area. Ostensibly designed to force the North Vietnamese back to negotiations, the renewed offensive also was meant to send a message to both the North and South Vietnamese that the United States would not hesitate to resume the air war if the communists violated any agreement they ultimately signed. The eleven-day bombing campaign caused widespread destruction, killed over two thousand civilians, and provoked worldwide protests. To the surprise of American leaders, it also proved costly to their own forces, as concentrated North Vietnamese air defenses proved effective in downing U.S. aircraft, including fifteen massive B-52 bombers. Well over a hundred U.S. airmen were killed or captured in what was widely called the “Christmas bombing.”
When the North Vietnamese agreed to resume
negotiations, the two sides quickly finalized a settlement similar except in details to the one they had come to in November, and for that matter not much different from a proposal the communists had put forth in 1969. The agreement was signed in Paris on January 23, 1973. All parties, the South Vietnamese government and the NLF as well as the United States and North Vietnam, expected that many of its painstakingly negotiated provisions would be quickly violated by one side or the other, as they were. But the communists and the United States abided by the clauses that required the release of American POWs and the withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Vietnam, steps accomplished by the end of March 1973. Nixon did not see the agreement as ending the American military role in Indochina or sealing the fate of the South Vietnamese government. In early 1973 the United States continued bombing communist forces in Cambodia and Nixon fully intended to resume bombing Vietnam using aircraft based on carriers or in other countries in the event of a communist offensive that threatened the survival of the Thieu regime. But even many members of his administration recognized that with Congress moving toward cutting off funds for operations in Indochina and the public long wearied of the conflict, at the least for the United States, the war was essentially over. In 1946, Ho Chi Minh told the French, “You will kill ten of our men and we will kill one of yours. In the end, it will be you who will tire of it.” Ho turned out to be right about the French, and right about the Americans too.
CHAPTER 11
* * *
The End of the American Century
Richard Nixon did not have much time to enjoy his landslide reelection or the Paris Peace Treaty that got U.S. troops and prisoners out of Vietnam. Almost immediately his presidency started to unravel, as the details of illegal political activities directed by the White House began to come out. Soon, Nixon, his aides, and the whole federal government became enveloped in a political and constitutional crisis with little precedent. In delayed fashion, the consequences of using the power of the state in ways that had become routine during the Cold War took their toll. National divisions, stemming from the Vietnam War and the political mobilizations of the 1960s, undermined the elite consensus needed to sustain imperial rule. As the inner workings and moral standards of the state became exposed, only removing its leaders could restore its authority.
Nixon’s fall constituted but one piece of a general crisis the United States entered soon after his reelection. After decades of sustained economic growth, the country slipped into a period of deep recession and economic uncertainty. Its diminished capacity to control world events, made evident by its defeat in Vietnam, contributed to the problem, as rising international commodity prices forced unwanted changes in life at home. By the mid-1970s, the economic and political structures that had brought wealth and power to the United States for a quarter century after World War II no longer could sustain economic progress, domestic harmony, or international dominance. One period of the country’s history came to an end, with the shape of the next still very unclear.
Watergate
On June 17, 1972, the Washington, D.C., police arrested five men in the act of breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters, located in an upscale office, hotel, and apartment complex on the Potomac River, the Watergate. The burglary team had illegally entered the office a few weeks earlier to tap its phones, but their eavesdropping equipment had not worked properly, so they were trying again. The burglars had been hired by the Nixon campaign, part of a large-scale effort to spy on and disrupt the Democratic Party during the 1972 election. The campaign of “dirty tricks” was directed and financed out of the White House, with the knowledge and approval of top leaders of the administration, including the president.
The police quickly discovered that one of the Watergate burglars was the chief of security for the president’s reelection committee, that all five had worked for the CIA, and that they received money from E. Howard Hunt, a former CIA operative who worked in the White House. But the refusal of the arrested men to reveal information about their operation, public denials by the president and his aides that they had anything to do with it, and the destruction of evidence and obstruction of investigations by White House and campaign officials kept the break-in from becoming a major election issue.
In early 1973, the White House–orchestrated cover-up of who ordered, directed, and financed the Watergate operation began falling apart. First, Senate Democrats forced the appointment of a bipartisan committee to investigate the case, chaired by conservative North Carolina Democrat Sam Ervin. Then, in March, one of the burglars, James McCord, wrote to federal district judge John J. Sirica, who had presided over the trial in which he had been convicted, claiming that perjury had been committed and that the defendants had been pressured to maintain their silence. In response, Sirica imposed heavy sentences on the seven men who had pled or been found guilty of planning and carrying out the break-in. But he held out the possibility of leniency if they cooperated with the Senate and other investigations. McCord soon began talking to Senate and Justice Department investigators, which caused other vulnerable officials, most importantly the president’s counsel, John Dean, who had coordinated the cover-up, to begin trying to cut their own deals. The press, which had largely ignored or downplayed the Watergate story, with the important exception of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward at the Washington Post, began to barrage the administration with questions. More and more information about Watergate and other covert White House doings began leaking out, as Nixon’s advisers maneuvered to set one another up to take the fall, including the revelation that the acting head of the FBI had personally destroyed potential evidence taken from Hunt’s White House safe on orders from a presidential aide.
On April 30, 1973, Nixon announced the resignations of his two closest assistants, John Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman, and fired John Dean, all linked to Watergate in one way or another. Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, who had close ties to many of the officials under investigation, including his predecessor, John Mitchell, the head of Nixon’s reelection committee, also resigned. Two weeks later, the new attorney general, Elliot Richardson, appointed a special prosecutor to handle the Watergate case, Harvard law professor Archibald Cox. Meanwhile, the Senate Select Committee began holding televised hearings, where a parade of witnesses, including Dean, linked top White House and Nixon campaign officials to the Watergate break-in and Nixon himself to the payment of hush money to the burglars. Testimony also revealed other White House plots involving break-ins, wiretaps, and—though not carried out—arson. In July, a White House aide told the committee about a secret taping system that Nixon had installed in his offices. The committee promptly subpoenaed tape recordings that they hoped would resolve the conflict between charges against Nixon made by Dean and others and his denials, the first time a congressional committee had ever issued a subpoena to the president. Nixon refused to turn the tapes over to the Senate or to Cox, who also subpoenaed them.
While Cox’s subpoena worked its way through the courts, a surprise development weakened Nixon’s hold on his office. In August 1973, reporters learned that a federal grand jury in Baltimore was investigating charges that Spiro Agnew had taken kickbacks from contractors while governor of Maryland. He continued to accept cash even as vice president. On October 10, he pleaded nolo contendere to a charge of tax evasion in connection to the bribes and resigned. Agnew and Nixon had presented themselves as morally superior to their political enemies, to liberals, intellectuals, disorderly students, critics of the war, and protestors of all kinds. Now, it turned out, Agnew was a common criminal, a corrupt politician taking money in return for favors. It then came out that Nixon had taken large tax deductions for which he was not qualified by backdating transactions and that the government had spent over a million dollars improving his homes in California and Florida. In November 1973, he told a group of newspaper editors that “people have got to know whether their president is a crook. Well, I am not a crook.”
His need to address the issue in such terms greatly diminished him. With Nixon and Agnew having achieved power portraying themselves as advocates of law and order and defenders of the nation’s moral standing, the revelations of their greed and personal corruption proved devastating.
The Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, put into place after John Kennedy’s assassination, specified that a vice presidential vacancy be filled by presidential appointment, subject to congressional approval. Nixon chose as Agnew’s replacement House minority leader Gerald R. Ford, a loyalist who would face no problem being confirmed. Many of the president’s critics had considered Agnew a worse alternative, but with Ford in place the idea of forcing Nixon out became more imaginable.
Just after Agnew resigned, an appeals court upheld the special prosecutor’s subpoena. When Cox refused to accept an arrangement Nixon proposed that would have given him only tape summaries and restricted further tape requests, Nixon ordered the attorney general to fire him. Refusing, Elliot Richardson instead resigned. The deputy attorney general would not oust Cox either. Finally, the third in command, the solicitor general, removed the special prosecutor. A massive public outcry ensued. In the heat of the moment, as the television networks broadcast images of FBI agents sealing off Cox’s office and keeping out his staff, many people believed that the very structures of constitutional government were crumbling. The House of Representatives launched an inquiry into the possibility of impeachment, and Nixon found himself forced to appoint a new special prosecutor and agree to turn over the subpoenaed tapes to Judge Sirica.
The tapes haunted Nixon, first in his refusal to release them and then by what they revealed. In April 1974, after the House Judiciary Committee, as part of its impeachment inquiry, also demanded recordings, Nixon finally made public a batch of transcripts. They revealed an ugly picture of a mean-spirited president prone to vulgarity and rambling, obsessed with enemies, racist and anti-Semitic, and clearly involved, at least to some extent, in the illegal activities of his administration and efforts to cover them up. The intimate view of Nixon so differed from the public persona he projected that his credibility collapsed.
American Empire Page 41
