General Bruce Palmer, who has usefully analyzed the intersection of political, military, and diplomatic aspects of the war, acknowledged that Watergate made impossible any response to the renewed North Vietnamese assault in 1975. But he recognized that the more fundamental fault lay within the nature of the peace agreements themselves, and Palmer excoriated Kissinger for his role in concluding those agreements. The “peripatetic” Kissinger, Palmer claimed, was out of his element in dealing with the Vietnamese, mainly because he had so overextended his involvement in numerous diplomatic processes at the time. Kissinger simply failed to give his “undivided attention, skills, and energy” to negotiating a more favorable cease-fire arrangement, Palmer wrote.29
The Paris Accords of January 1973 in every respect denied any realistic prospect for peace and independence for South Vietnam. Nixon proclaimed that they had secured “peace with honor,” and he gained the release of the American prisoners of war in Vietnam. For his part, Kissinger had his Nobel Prize, but he hardly had a policy. Instead, the American leaders offered illusion and paradox: the United States remained committed to South Vietnam but had withdrawn its military capability to enforce that commitment. The public lost interest, and Congress followed the election returns. The charade was apparent to all—and most of all to Hanoi, which acted accordingly and imposed its will throughout Vietnam in 1975. Thus Nixon had “ended” the war, but after being driven from office, he was spared “losing” it. Later, he could reflect and blame others and such events as Watergate. Kissinger did likewise, but in the minds of many Republican right-wing critics, he had “lost” the war; and for that, among them he remained a pariah, with little chance for the continuing public service and adulation he craved.
Nixon and Kissinger had signed an agreement that provided for the maintenance of North Vietnamese troops in the South and political legitimacy for the Viet Cong. No wonder, then, that South Vietnam’s President Thieu balked. He acquiesced to the Paris Accords only after securing President Nixon’s secret promise of “full economic and military aid” in the event of North Vietnamese violations of the agreement. According to Nixon, the congressional fury over Watergate prevented him from honoring that commitment. But his undertaking a secret obligation to a course of military action short-circuited both constitutional and political processes. His failure to consult with Congress before promising to come to Thieu’s aid marked a dangerous course at any time, but particularly when he served a divided government, with the other half legitimately entitled to a share in such decision making, involving as it did the appropriations process.
Defense Secretary James Schlesinger later complained that he had no knowledge of such commitments; if he had, he insisted, he would have used them as bargaining leverage with Congress. When he learned of them, he at first thought the United States had “welched” on its promises; on reflection, however, he realized that “if you don’t know that the commitments have been entered into, you don’t know that the country has welched.” In later years, Schlesinger deplored the “stab-in-the-back argument,” barely disguising his contempt for Nixon’s and Kissinger’s views: “Congress knew nothing of these [commitments] …, when it started bugging out of Vietnam in the summer of 1973.”
President Thieu believed Nixon’s pledges. While he sensed that Nixon was preoccupied during their January 1973 meeting, his skimpy knowledge of the American political system left him with the conclusion that Watergate was trivial; he apparently could not imagine that the President could be driven from power. Kissinger later offered Thieu his persistent view that Watergate had destroyed the Administration’s ability to defend South Vietnam. Belatedly, Kissinger conceded that Thieu had been right about the Paris Peace Accords, but in a curiously obtuse statement he added that Watergate would have been even more catastrophic for South Vietnam if there had been no agreement. In exile and disgrace, Thieu ignored Kissinger’s rationalization; perhaps he asked himself what could have been more catastrophic for him or his fellow citizens.30
Watergate undeniably undermined Nixon’s prestige at home and his ability to carry through unpopular policies. That, he and Kissinger later argued, is central to understanding the failure to carry through the commitment to defend South Vietnam. The reasoning is labored and tortured. From the time that Kissinger signed the Paris Accords, he and Nixon promised the nation only relief and extrication from the struggle that they well knew would continue in South Vietnam. A stronger president, free of congressional restraints and criticisms, they implied, would have interdicted the North Vietnamese 1975 offensive by air strikes and once again inflicted heavy losses on the enemy. They obviously ignored the uncomfortable fact that the American air attacks since 1965 had hurt, but not thwarted, the Communists. Nixon’s problem was the limits of his political influence to exhort the nation to continue the war; and that limitation had little or nothing to do with Watergate. At the time of the January 1973 peace agreements, with his power and popularity still unaffected by Watergate, he never alerted the nation to the possibility that American military operations might continue, with the risk of continuing casualties.
The inability to conclude the war had frustrated Nixon throughout his first term. Could he, after 1972, have summoned a national will to retaliate—a retaliation that might well have resulted in more domestic upheaval, as well as in the North’s refusal to return the American prisoners of war? The President never prepared for such a contingency; to have made that promise would have negated all the interpretive gloss that he and Kissinger had imposed on the peace agreement. With or without Watergate, the nation wanted an end to its involvement. “My God, we’re all tired of it, we’re sick to death of it,” wrote an Oregonian. “55,000 dead and $100 billion spent and for what?”31
Watergate to some extent had dogged Nixon throughout the Paris negotiations in the fall of 1972. But almost total distraction set in after his meeting with Thieu in San Clemente in January 1973. The cover-up began to unravel shortly afterward, and within two months, the President’s top aides prepared to resign. But Congress had not yet imposed restraints on Nixon’s ability to carry on the war. Enforced bombing pauses and the War Powers Act came later in the year. “I needed desperately to get my mind on other things,” Nixon remembered—but he could not or would not do so.32 If Watergate was a distraction, the President himself allowed it to be. Only he understood the dimensions and dangers of Watergate at the time; appropriately, he bent his energies to “lancing the boil.” The tortuous taped conversations offer ample testimony to his distraction, but the President himself made Watergate a priority; only later did we understand that he had little choice.
* * *
Watergate and Richard Nixon contributed to the passage of the War Powers Act. The measure had its roots in the frustration of Congress with the Johnson Administration. But the Vietnam War had only exacerbated executive-legislative tension over war making and foreign policy that could be traced back to the beginnings of the republic. President Nixon’s inability (or refusal) to end that war promptly enough, combined with a Congress emboldened and aggressive because of his weakness, set the stage for the War Powers Act, which passed over Nixon’s veto in November 1973. Johnson’s actions provided the inspiration; Nixon’s behavior and subsequent vulnerability provoked the occasion.
Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 75 that “the history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind, as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world, to the sole disposal of … a President of the United States.” The framers had an unhappy, uneasy memory of executive power. “The constitution supposes, what the history of all Gov[ernment]s demonstrates, that the Ex[ecutive] is the branch of power most interested in war, & most prone to it,” Madison wrote to Jefferson in 1798. “It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the Legisl[ature].” A half-century later, Lincoln confidently expressed the fram
ers’ “original intent” when he told his law partner that they knew that when kings involved their nations in war, it was “the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.”33
American presidents have regularly committed combat personnel despite the absence of formal war declarations; the congressional role at best has been consultative. The shared-governance arrangement has worked most effectively as a means for mobilizing national will to endorse executive innovations in foreign policy—as, for example, with the Truman Doctrine in 1947 or Eisenhower’s response to the Formosa Strait situation in 1954–55.
The War Powers Act stipulated that a president must notify Congress of any troop deployment abroad within forty-eight hours and required him to withdraw those troops within sixty days unless Congress explicitly authorized their continued use. The legislation passed Congress during the “firestorm” following the dismissal of Archibald Cox. The same weakness that forced Nixon to choose Gerald Ford as Spiro Agnew’s successor, and Leon Jaworski as Cox’s, made him incapable of persuading enough members of his own party to sustain his veto. But his weakness resulting from the dismissals was of less consequence than the national mood of disgust over the Vietnam war. Symbolically, the War Powers Act may have constituted the most significant attempt to restrict presidential power since Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act in 1867, which limited a president’s ability to dismiss cabinet officers confirmed by the Senate. The President then was Andrew Johnson, a man almost bereft of party and interest-group constituencies and a man who confronted a nation tired of conflict and division. When Nixon vetoed the War Powers legislation, he made extravagant claims for executive prerogative, a provocation that might explain why fifteen House members—a mixture of liberals and conservatives—who originally opposed the legislation then voted to override his veto. (Senator Sam Ervin opposed the legislation throughout the voting.)34
Subsequent events, however, amply demonstrated that for all its symbolic qualities, the act did not significantly alter the practical power of the presidency. From the Mayaguez to the Gulf of Sidra incidents, the lesson was clear: presidents will shoot first and consult Congress later. Limits on a president’s military initiative are defined in large part by the extent of his popularity and prestige. A chastened Henry Kissinger noted in 1975 that “comity” between the two branches was “the only possible basis for national action.” He conceded that the decade-long struggle over executive dominance in foreign affairs had ended. Kissinger may have been dissembling or speaking as an overeager supplicant, yet there was no gainsaying the reality that Congress must participate in some way: “foreign policy,” he acknowledged, “must be a shared enterprise.”
Congressional inertia and indifference, however, still offered presidents broad authority to maneuver on their own in foreign policy, as when Jimmy Carter terminated the Taiwan defense treaty and froze Iranian assets, and when Ronald Reagan took action in Grenada, the Mediterranean, and Central America. Congress invoked the War Powers Act for the first time in 1983 after Reagan sent troops to Lebanon. Still, the legislative branch dealt gingerly with the popular President, giving him eighteen months, rather than sixty days, to withdraw troops. Reagan did so before the expiration of the deadline.35
The War Powers Act probably is moot if a President will show an appearance of shared governance. In April 1988, President Reagan used American forces to retaliate when Iranian mines imperiled U.S. vessels in the Persian Gulf. Reports then indicated that congressional leaders had no intention of pressing the Administration to invoke the act; instead, those leaders expressed satisfaction that they had been consulted in advance. For nearly two terms, the Reagan Administration and Congress had disputed the efficacy of the law; after the Persian Gulf attacks, a White House official said: “Maybe after eight years we’ve finally gotten it right.”
A month later, however, prominent congressmen admitted that the formal machinery of the War Powers Act never had worked, probably was unworkable, and perhaps was unwise. Senator George Mitchell (D–ME), a vocal critic of Reagan’s adventurist foreign and military policies, acknowledged that the law had “failed.” Senator Sam Nunn (D–GA) criticized the time constraints of the act, contending that it offered foreign governments a lever for influencing policy debates in the United States. Finally, Democratic Majority Leader Byrd frankly conceded that “if I were president, I would thumb my nose” at the law. “Reform” proposals circulated to institutionalize congressional consultations and abrogate the automatic troop-recall proviso, substituting instead a stipulation that troops would be removed if a majority of Congress so demanded.36
Whatever the mechanism, there is no substitute for political will. Well before the passage of the War Powers Act, Richard Nixon realized that Congress would no longer support the Vietnam war. Congress’s shared powers are inherent in the governmental apparatus, and the choice to use them rests largely with that body.
Foreign-policy achievements are the historical touchstone for Nixon Administration partisans and will doubtless attract the attention of future historians. Henry Kissinger argued that the Administration attempted to strike a balance between the extremes of crusading and escapism—a “symmetry between the twin pillars of containment and cooexistence.” Kissinger conceded failure, but he insisted the fault was in the stars: “History will forever debate,” he wrote, “whether without Watergate Nixon could have achieved this goal.” The necessary discipline and calculation for such a course, Kissinger contended, “fell prey to the passions of the Watergate era.”
Clearly, Kissinger believed that Watergate had prevented that balance in Indochina. In addition, however, beyond the “bitter divisions” engendered by Vietnam, Kissinger complained that “the ugly suspicions” of the “Watergate purgatory” corroded the Administration’s pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union. A “rare convergence” of conservatives who despised the Soviet Union and liberals who equally despised Nixon combined, Kissinger lamented, “to dismantle” policies that sought a relaxation of tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union.37 Watergate’s role in aborting détente is more subtle, more complex, and more consequential than its connection to the outcome of the Vietnam war; but like Vietnam, détente aroused opposition for reasons that had nothing to do with Watergate.
Nixon’s first inaugural address set the stage for a new era in superpower relations, emphasizing peaceful negotiations: “Let us take as our goal: Where peace is unknown, make it welcome; where peace is fragile, make it strong; where peace is temporary, make it permanent. After a period of confrontation, we are entering an era of negotiation.” Remembering his roots and the need to maintain his traditional constituency, the new President also emphasized the need to maintain national strength. In the speech that Nixon did not deliver in March 1968 when Johnson withdrew from the presidential race, he described “a new era in our relations with the Soviets, a new round of summit meetings and other negotiations.”
Nixon himself first used the word “détente” in a 1970 address to the United Nations. But evidence abounds, as Raymond Garthoff has demonstrated, that détente always remained a strategy, not an objective; a means, not a goal, of the Nixon Administration. Another scholar found détente “ambiguous,” a characteristic that led to the breakdown of a domestic consensus for its support. The policy essentially spelled ad hoc actions and was often subservient to other aims, as witnessed by Nixon’s willingness to sacrifice a summit conference and a strategic arms limitation (SALT) agreement rather than halt the bombing of North Vietnam.38
By 1973 the Administration’s relations with the Soviets had made enormous strides in the direction Nixon had promised, from expanded trade dealings to the 1972 SALT agreement. That agreement produced both a limitation on antiballistic weapons and a more limited deal to contain the number of strategic offensive missile launchers and weapons. Nixon and Soviet leader Brezhnev held summit me
etings in 1972 and 1973. The second produced the Prevention of Nuclear War Agreement, but more notably it resounded with chords of amicability and presented images of warm embrace. That meeting occurred during the Senate investigation of Watergate, just prior to John Dean’s testimony. Richard Nixon was at the pinnacle of his power and prestige in his dealings with foreign adversaries. But his vulnerability over Watergate soon chipped away at that lofty status.
The traumatic moments of October 1973 are crucial to an understanding of the decline, or what one writer has called the “stall,” of détente. That month, of course, was Nixon’s cruelest. The Agnew resignation and the dismissal of Cox combined to focus the Watergate crisis on him personally and gave impetus to an impeachment inquiry. Amid those mishaps, the President confronted the Yom Kippur War and the ambiguous competitive policies of the Soviets. Those events sparked the first congressional rejection of détente and laid the groundwork for a decade-long challenge to that policy.
Assaults on the policy had begun earlier. Senator Henry Jackson (D–WA) was a traditional liberal Democrat on domestic issues, but a hard-liner toward the Soviets and an advocate of new weapons systems. Jackson pushed for legislation conditioning the Soviet Union’s access to most-favored-nation trading status with the United States on its willingness to ease its restraints on emigration, particularly of Soviet Jews. Détente had emboldened Soviet dissidents. Brezhnev and the Kremlin leaders found no linkage between maintaining détente and internal policies toward their own citizens, but American opponents of détente insisted on that connection. The bill Jackson advocated (with Charles Vanik [D–OH]) finally passed the House in December and the Senate several months later.
The Wars of Watergate Page 89
