American Empire

by Joshua Freeman

  Not satisfied with what had been released, the special prosecutor asked for more tapes. Nixon refused, leading to a court test of his ability to withhold material on the grounds of “executive privilege.” On July 24, 1974, the Supreme Court, while upholding the previously untested notion that the president could unilaterally withhold information about confidential deliberations, ruled unanimously that in this case other considerations outweighed that right. On the very night of the ruling, the Judiciary Committee began a televised debate of impeachment. Two days later, it voted twenty-seven to eleven for an article of impeachment charging the president with obstruction of justice, later adding two more articles.

  On August 5, complying with the Supreme Court decision, Nixon released a tape transcript, which he had jealously guarded, of his discussions two years earlier with Haldeman, in which he ordered his aide to have the CIA tell the FBI to call off its investigation of Watergate because it would jeopardize national security. The recorded conversation provided direct proof that the president had used a government agency, under false pretenses, to try to block an investigation of illegal political activities, precisely the obstruction of justice the impeachment articles accused him of. The tape also made clear that Nixon had repeatedly lied in his public statements about his role in Watergate.

  Many Republicans, including Vice President Ford, had continued to defend Nixon even as congressional Democrats moved toward trying to remove him. That all but ended with the release of the “smoking gun” transcript. With impeachment a certainty and conviction in the Senate highly likely, on August 8, 1974, Nixon announced his resignation effective the next day, the only time in American history that a president had left office before the end of his term.

  Nixon’s conduct alone cannot explain this extraordinary outcome. Nixon later claimed, in a typically self-pitying passage, that he only acted within established norms: “I played by the rules of politics as I found them. Not taking the higher road than my predecessors and my adversaries was my central mistake.” Too kind to himself, he nonetheless touched on a partial truth. The growth of the national security state during the Cold War had created the apparatus, opportunity, and even to some extent necessity for the kind of abuses that Nixon had engaged in. Prior presidents had paved the way. But Nixon’s contempt for the law came at a moment when changed circumstances led to unexpected consequences.

  To fight the Cold War, government officials had created and expanded police and intelligence agencies with covert operational capacities, exempt from public oversight, and promulgated an ideology that justified virtually any action by them in the name of anticommunism and national security. For the CIA, violating its charter and the law became routine, from its penetration of domestic political groups under Eisenhower to its massive domestic spying program under Johnson. The FBI, too, had gone from intelligence gathering and law enforcement to covert activity designed to promote particular political outcomes and eliminate political leaders it disapproved of. None of the Watergate escapades approached the seriousness or moral degeneracy of the secret FBI campaign during the Johnson administration to destroy Martin Luther King Jr. The Cold War not only provided the ideological soil for executive power unchecked by law, it also created the raw material for its execution in the operatives, hangers-on, thugs, and fantasists connected to the CIA and other covert government agencies, including the Watergate burglars and their bosses. For a government that for decades engaged in covert, irregular, and illegal activities directed at those defined as enemies abroad, it came to seem natural to use similar tactics against those defined as enemies at home.

  As president, Nixon first turned to irregular and illegal methods not for partisan purposes but in his effort to pursue the increasingly unpopular war in Indochina. The 1969 New York Times revelation that the United States was conducting a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia led Nixon and Kissinger to launch a program of unauthorized wiretaps on National Security Council staff members, journalists, and even the military aide to the secretary of defense to try to find out who had leaked the information. The 1971 unauthorized publication of the Pentagon Papers, a massive secret government study of how and why the United States got entangled in Vietnam, which included hundreds of pages of classified documents, led Nixon to create the capacity within the White House itself for cloak-and-dagger operations. One of the authors of the Pentagon study, defense consultant Daniel Ellsberg, having grown disillusioned with the war, gave a copy to the New York Times (and later to other newspapers), hoping that its publication would undermine support for continued fighting. Though the Pentagon Papers did not deal with the years after Nixon took office, he sought an injunction to suppress their publication. The Supreme Court refused to go along. Furious, Nixon and his aides, in addition to indicting Ellsberg and an associate, set up a crew inside the White House, dubbed the “plumbers,” to stop leaks and engage in covert activities. To try to discredit Ellsberg, a team led by Howard Hunt broke into his psychiatrist’s office to steal his records. One reason Nixon and his aides paid hush money to Hunt for his role in Watergate was their fear that he would reveal the Ellsberg break-in. Illegality for purposes of state and purposes of partisanship had become completely intertwined.

  Past presidents had blurred the line between partisan and governmental activity and used covert methods. But deep social divisions, especially over Vietnam, had ended the consensus within the federal government and institutions of power that kept covert actions covert. After the Paris Peace Treaty, hesitations about undermining a president during wartime became superfluous, and festering grievances bubbled up at an accelerating rate. Democrats pressed the Watergate investigations in part out of anger at the contempt with which Nixon treated Congress, which cost him support among members of his own party too. The acting associate director of the FBI, Mark Felt, resentful of Nixon’s treatment of his agency and failure to appoint an insider as director after J. Edgar Hoover died, leaked crucial information about the Watergate scandal to Bob Woodward at the Washington Post, which aggressively pursued Nixon, in contrast to its complicity in hiding John Kennedy’s covert actions and personal transgressions. The revelation of a list Nixon kept of enemies he sought to punish using the power of government (through tax audits, denial of contracts and licenses, prosecutions, and the like), which included not only radicals and marginal dissenters but also mainstream figures in journalism, politics, labor, and business, mobilized powerful forces against him.

  Many people had supported Nixon because they expected him not to be a shrinking violet when it came to reestablishing order and stability. But by 1974, circumstances had changed greatly from his initial election and even his reelection, with the United States out of Vietnam, the wave of urban rioting over, and the radical and countercultural movements of the 1960s in decline. To the extent that there was lawlessness, chaos, and threats to constitutional government, Nixon himself seemed responsible. To a population and national leadership eager to put Vietnam, racial conflict, and youth rebellion behind it, it was the president who appeared as the main obstacle to social and political normality. Leaders in politics, business, and the media perceived the uncertainty and government paralysis that resulted from the prolonged Watergate investigations as detrimental to the country’s well-being. Once the alternative to Nixon was neither George McGovern nor Spiro Agnew but Gerald Ford, Nixon seemed expendable, even to many of his onetime supporters. The international and domestic bases for an imperial presidency had collapsed in the face of the overextension of the empire.

  The Fall of Saigon

  Watergate extinguished whatever dim possibility Nixon and Kissinger might have had for re-escalating the U.S. military effort in Indochina. After the Paris Peace Treaty, the United States continued to send military aid to the South Vietnamese government and bomb communist supply lines in Cambodia. Nixon and Kissinger repeatedly said that if the Vietnamese communists launched an offensive, they would resume bombing Vietnam itself
. But strong public distaste for the war and deepening antiwar sentiment in Congress made that unlikely. Watergate made it impossible. In June 1973, Nixon found himself with no choice but to acquiesce to a congressional cutoff of all funds for military action in Indochina, which ended the bombing of Cambodia and the possibility of new attacks on Vietnam. Later that year, Congress passed the War Powers Act, which required the president to give Congress timely notification of any armed action by the United States and get its approval within sixty days, a symbolic step back from the near-unilateral power to make war that presidents had given themselves since the Cold War began. Soon after Nixon resigned, Congress reduced the level of military aid to the South Vietnamese government.

  In early 1975, the communists launched a new military offensive. In response, South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu made an extraordinary blunder, ordering his forces to abandon the entire central highlands in order to concentrate defenses elsewhere. The chaotic retreat led to a rapid collapse in confidence in the Thieu regime, the progressive dissolution of the South Vietnamese army, and a decision by the communists to shift their objective from limited military gain to outright victory. Gerald Ford, still new as president, unsuccessfully tried to get Congress to increase aid to the South Vietnamese. It would not have made a difference. As the South Vietnamese government and army crumbled, all that was left for the United States was to organize a hasty, disorderly evacuation of the Americans still in the country and as many of its Vietnamese allies as possible. The last Americans flew out of Saigon on helicopters on April 30, 1975, as the communist forces began taking over the city.

  The reunification of Vietnam under communist control had no direct impact on the United States, in spite of the enormous effort spent in money and lives to prevent it. The United States never had significant material interests in Indochina and its geostrategic concerns turned out to be needless, as the domino theory proved false. Though the murderous communist Khmer Rouge movement captured control of Cambodia during the final communist offensive in Vietnam, it had strained relations with the Vietnamese. (In 1979, Vietnam and Cambodia went to war, leading to the ouster of the Khmer Rouge government.) Otherwise, no further communist advances occurred in Asia. Vietnam itself entered a long period of suffering as it coped with the physical and social devastation of the war, unassisted by the United States, which reneged on its promise of postwar reconstruction aid. A communist leadership that had been brilliant at war proved incompetent at peace, leaving the country one of the poorest in the world.

  The Decline of American Power

  The communist victory in Vietnam telegraphed the limits of American power to other nations. An incident just after the capture of Saigon displayed just how inept its effort to police the world had become. In mid-May 1975, the crew of an American cargo ship, the Mayaguez, en route from Hong Kong to Thailand, was taken prisoner by the new communist government of Cambodia in what the United States considered international waters. President Ford, eager to demonstrate his willingness to use force, ordered a rescue mission and air attacks. But rather than romping to success, the U.S. forces suffered from poor intelligence and heavy resistance. Forty-one Americans died and fifty were wounded in the attempt to free the crew, which the Cambodians had moved before the rescue force arrived and then released unharmed.

  The most consequential sign of the diminished ability of the United States to shape the world came out of the Middle East. In October 1973, the Egyptians and Syrians launched a coordinated attack to win back land they had lost to Israel in their 1967 war. The Israelis, caught by surprise, suffered serious setbacks. With the Soviet Union sending military supplies to Egypt and Syria to replace depleted stocks, the United States responded in kind with a massive airlift of equipment to Israel. A successful Israeli counteroffensive ensued. The United States then helped broker a cease-fire and disengagement of forces, but by then the Arab oil-producing states, led by Saudi Arabia, had begun reducing their output, saying they would continue to do so until Israel returned to its 1967 borders. They also sharply raised the price of oil and imposed an embargo of oil shipments to countries supporting Israel, including the United States. Washington did nothing to force them to back down.

  The oil boycott accelerated a run-up of energy prices already under way, part of a broad inflationary surge that pushed the economy into a nosedive. Nixon’s expansive fiscal and monetary policy in 1971 and 1972 had ended the 1970 recession, while wage and price controls had helped check inflation. But rapid economic growth pushed up consumer demand, creating inflationary pressure, especially once Nixon began loosening price controls. Wages, which peaked in 1972, stopped keeping up with prices.

  Mid-1970s inflation proved difficult to control because of its nature. Since World War II, economists and policymakers had believed that they could stabilize prices by manipulating government and consumer demand. But as Nixon’s second term began, supply problems played a large role in pushing up prices, defying the usual government tools for retarding inflation.

  First came a sharp run-up in food prices. The Nixon administration had deliberately reduced the size of agricultural surpluses in an effort to boost farm income, leaving little slack in markets at a time when the devaluation of the dollar upped agricultural exports. The consequences soon became evident when poor harvests in a number of grain-producing countries combined with the massive sale of grain to the Soviet Union to create unexpected shortages in domestic and international markets, pushing up food prices. The cost of meat rose so sharply in the spring of 1973 that a consumer boycott movement briefly flourished, a rerun of a spurt of protest against high food prices that had taken place in 1966.

  An exceptionally large harvest in 1973 decelerated the rise in food prices, but by then a surge in oil prices had started that would prove far more disruptive. Energy costs had begun rising even before the oil boycott, reflecting long-term changes in demand and supply. Cheap energy had been critical to post–World War II growth in the United States and other industrial nations. With little price disincentive, usage ballooned. The total energy consumption of the United States increased nearly two-and-a-half-fold between 1949 and 1973.

  By the early 1970s, oil provided as much energy in the United States as the next most important sources—natural gas and coal—combined. But domestic production of crude oil had peaked in 1970, making the country increasingly dependent on oil imports, which rose very quickly in the early 1970s. A bit less than half the imported oil came from countries that belonged to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), a producers’ cartel organized in 1960. Fourteen percent came from Persian Gulf nations. The tight world oil market gave these overlapping blocs inordinate power, which they demonstrated during the Middle East war.

  The Arab oil embargo led to gasoline shortages in the United States, evident in the long lines that became common at gas stations. Prices shot up, with the cost of crude oil quadrupling in a single year. Inexpensive fuel had come to be seen as such an entitlement that people were outraged, even though in mid-1974 the price of a gallon of gasoline, an irreplaceable resource that had to be extracted from the ground, refined, and transported long distances, remained only about a third the cost of a gallon of Coca-Cola, essentially carbonated sugar water. For a society long used to infinite supplies of cheap gasoline, waiting on line for expensive fuel came as a visceral blow, a sobering demonstration of the limits of American power and a dark message about the future.

  Nixon and Congress took some modest measures to reduce oil consumption—lowering the speed limit to 55 miles per hour and extending daylight saving time—and approved the stalled plan for an Alaska oil pipeline. Nonetheless, oil prices helped push up the inflation rate from 8.4 percent in 1973 to 12.1 percent the following year. With so much money going to energy and average take-home pay falling, spending on other items declined. Manufacturers cut back production and laid off workers, leading to a further decline in spending. In
early 1974, the stock market tumbled and housing construction slumped. The unemployment rate reached 8.7 percent in May 1975, as the country experienced the worst recession since the 1930s. Economists, policymakers, and the public all found disconcerting the simultaneous climb of prices and unemployment, which historically had moved in opposite directions.

  Nixon’s pumping up the economy for the 1972 election and the enormous hikes in food and energy costs helped bring on the recession of the mid-1970s. But more fundamental forces also seemed to be at work, as it soon became clear that something more than a normal business cycle was taking place. Though the recession ended by the spring of 1975, the economy remained weak for another seven years. From 1973 to 1982, the GNP grew at an average annual rate of only 1.8 percent, compared to roughly 4 percent from 1960 to 1973. After decades of broadly shared upward mobility, most people found their standard of living going down.

  Other countries also suffered from prolonged periods of stagnation, but in many cases not as deeply. The United States, long the top country in gross domestic product per person, by 1980 had slipped to eleventh, behind not just such economic powerhouses as West Germany and France but also Belgium, Denmark, and Iceland. The post–World War II era, so strongly identified in the United States and around the world with rising material abundance and American hegemony, had come to an end.