by Oliver Stone
Nixon barely had time to savor his 1972 electoral victory before the Watergate scandal engulfed his administration. Congressional investigations revealed the depths of corruption and abuses of power. The floodgates opened when Alexander Butterfield disclosed the White House tapes, without which Nixon would have avoided impeachment. At the time, Butterfield said he hoped he wouldn’t be asked about the tapes and, when asked, did not want to perjure himself. He later admitted privately that he hoped committee members would ask that question. He said that while sitting in on Nixon, Ehrlichman, and Haldeman’s discussions of who they were going to pin Watergate on, he had concluded that they were despicable, ruthless human beings and had decided not to protect them.115 The public soon discovered what John Mitchell referred to as the “White House horrors.”116
In October, Vice President Spiro Agnew was forced out of office over bribes and kickbacks he had received when governor of Maryland. Nixon appointed the likable but undistinguished House Minority Leader Gerald Ford to replace Agnew. One observer noted, “few men are better qualified than Ford for a job that demands practically nothing of the man who holds it.”117
The House Judiciary Committee drafted three articles of impeachment for obstructing justice, misusing the powers of the presidency, and refusing to comply with the committee’s requests for information. Pressure to resign came from all sides. Many observers felt that Nixon was becoming dangerously paranoid. Wary of what Nixon might do, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger met with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and instructed that no military units respond to orders from the White House without first getting his approval. By early August, Nixon’s support in Congress had evaporated. Having run out of time and options, he resigned on August 9, 1974.
Gerald Ford announced: “Our long national nightmare is over” and later gave the “madman” Nixon a controversial pardon. But forty government officials and members of Nixon’s reelection committee were convicted of felonies. Among those sentenced to prison terms were Dean, Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, political assistants Charles Colson, Egil Krogh, and Jeb Stuart Magruder, and the president’s lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach. Nixon impersonator David Frye quipped, “There’s a bright side to Watergate. My administration has taken crime out of the streets and put it in the White House where I can keep an eye on it.”118
“Psychopathic” Kissinger came through unscathed. In October 1973, he and North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Tom Lehrer, America’s most brilliant political satirist, announced that Kissinger’s winning the Nobel Peace Prize made political satire obsolete and refused ever to perform again. Unlike Kissinger, Le Duc Tho, knowing that peace had not yet been achieved, had the decency to turn the prize down.
Historian Carolyn Eisenberg aptly pointed out, “Richard Nixon was the only President in American history to engage in sustained military action against three nations without a mandate from the public, the press, the government bureaucracies or the foreign elite.”119
Chapter 10
COLLAPSE OF DETENTE:
Darkness at Noon
Jimmy Carter has been a marvelous ex-president—perhaps, as he has claimed, the best in U.S. history. Although John Quincy Adams, who returned to Congress to wage an impassioned struggle against slavery, could have given him a run for his money, Carter can make a very strong case. In 1982, he founded the Carter Center, through which he has promoted democracy, improved health care in underdeveloped countries, secured the release of prisoners, helped restore Haiti’s democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power, and spoken on Cuban TV urging the United States to end its embargo and imploring Castro to improve civil liberties. In 1994, he negotiated a nuclear deal with Kim Il Sung that significantly slowed the growth of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. In his work monitoring elections around the world, he dismissed the opposition’s claims of fraud in sanctioning the 2004 recall election victory of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. He has tried to inject reason into the long-festering Arab-Israeli conflict, issuing highly controversial criticisms of all the antagonists, including the Israelis. He decried George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, called for the shuttering of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and labeled the Bush-Cheney administration “the worst in history.”1 He has called for the abolition of nuclear weapons and remains the only U.S. president ever to have visited the city of Hiroshima. For his courageous stands and global leadership, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
Yet Carter, who has performed in such exemplary fashion out of office, was inept in office, disappointing his supporters, betraying his convictions, and leaving with an approval rating of 34 percent. Carter’s most enduring legacy as president was not his hypocrisy-stained campaign for human rights; it was his opening the door to the dark side, legitimizing the often brutal policies of his successor, Ronald Reagan—policies that rekindled the Cold War and left a trail of innocent victims stretching from Guatemala to Afghanistan and back again to the World Trade Center. How did that happen? Were the same forces at work during the Carter years that had undermined the administrations of other Democratic presidents, including Wilson, Truman, Johnson, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama?
Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 and the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam paved the way for a serious assessment of what had gone wrong and a reversal of the policies that had led the nation astray, both domestically and globally. But that rarely occurred—certainly not during the presidency of the amiable and well-meaning but extremely limited Gerald Ford, a man who, Lyndon Johnson said, could not walk and chew gum at the same time. From the start, Ford sent all the wrong signals.
First he announced that Henry Kissinger would stay on as both secretary of state and national security advisor. Kissinger understood that the United States was facing severe economic and political challenges. After seventy years of trade surpluses, it had run its first deficit in 1971. Now that deficit was widening. The oil-exporting countries in the Middle East, which had joined together to form OPEC, decided to punish the United States, Western Europe, and Japan for supporting Israel in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. The price of oil quadrupled in the next year. The United States, which in the 1950s had produced all the oil it needed, was now importing more than one-third of its supply, making it very vulnerable to this kind of economic pressure. With wealth and power shifting to the Middle East, several U.S. allies adopted more Arab-friendly policies, which Kissinger denounced as “contemptible.”2 Kissinger and other top officials contemplated a different kind of response, even floating the idea of invading Saudi Arabia.
Did the United States really want another war? The country was still reeling from its humiliating defeat by Vietnam, which Kissinger had denigrated as “a little fourth-rate power.”3 No wonder he was feeling despondent over the future of the American Empire. Two months into the Ford administration, he told the New York Times’ James Reston, “As a historian, you have to be conscious of the fact that every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, of aspirations that weren’t realized, of wishes that were fulfilled and then turned out to be different from what one expected. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.”4
North Vietnam began its final offensive in March 1975. The South offered little resistance. Without U.S. forces there to fight its battles and bolster its resolve, the South Vietnamese army simply collapsed. One South Vietnamese officer called it a rout “unique in the annals of military history.” With the South Vietnamese troops in full flight, chaos engulfed much of the country. Soldiers murdered officers, fellow soldiers, and civilians. Defense Secretary James Schlesinger told Ford that only tactical nuclear weapons could prevent defeat. Ford resisted the temptation to use them. Journalist Jonathan Schell realized that this final collapse revealed “the true nature of the war.” He wrote of South Vietnam, “It was a society entirely without inner cohesion, held together only by foreig
n arms, foreign money, foreign political will. When deprived of that support, it faced its foe alone and the mirage evaporated.”5
Gerald Ford being sworn in as president upon Nixon’s resignation in August 1974.
Ford with Henry Kissinger. From the start, Ford sent all the wrong signals. Among them was announcing that Kissinger would stay on as both secretary of state and national security advisor.
Under pressure from the United States, Nguyen Van Thieu resigned on April 21. On April 30, General Duong Van Minh surrendered to North Vietnamese Colonel Bui Tin. Minh said, “I have been waiting since early this morning to transfer power to you.” Bui Tin responded, “You cannot give up what you do not have.”6 Images of South Vietnamese soldiers shooting their way onto planes and U.S. marines beating down desperate Vietnamese trying to escape on the last U.S. helicopters lifting off the embassy roof would remain indelibly imprinted in the American psyche for decades to come. Two years earlier, at the Paris Peace Conference, Nixon had signed a secret protocol promising between $4.25 and $4.75 billion in postwar aid “without any political conditions.” Nixon and Secretary of State William Rogers denied the protocol’s existence. “We have not made any commitment for any reconstruction or rehabilitation effort,” Rogers insisted.7 Ford cited the North Vietnamese victory as proof that Hanoi had reneged on the Paris Agreements and blocked the promised aid. He also imposed an embargo on all of Indochina, froze Vietnamese assets in the United States, and vetoed Vietnamese membership in the United Nations.
Henry Kissinger speaking on the phone in Deputy National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft’s office during the fall of South Vietnam. By the beginning of Ford’s administration, Kissinger was feeling despondent over the future of the American Empire. He told the New York Times’ James Reston, “As a historian, you have to be conscious of the fact that every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, of aspirations that weren’t realized, of wishes that were fulfilled and then turned out to be different from what one expected. So as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy.”
The Vietnamese, who had suffered so deeply during the U.S. invasion, would be left to rebuild their war-ravaged land on their own. Nearly 4 million of their citizens had been killed. The landscape had been shattered. The beautiful triple-canopy forests were largely gone. In 2009, land mines and unexploded bombs still contaminated over a third of the land in six central Vietnamese provinces. Efforts by the Vietnamese government, the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, and the Vietnam Veterans of America, sometimes led by dedicated U.S. veterans like Chuck Searcy in Quang Tri Province, had cleared over 3,000 acres. But over 16 million acres remained to be cleared. Beyond the terrible toll of the war itself, 42,000 more Vietnamese, including many children, were killed by leftover explosives in the years after the war ended. U.S. veterans would suffer too.8 By some estimates, the number of Vietnam vets who have committed suicide has exceeded the 58,000-plus who died in combat.
North Vietnam began its final offensive in March 1975. Without the aid of U.S. forces, the South Vietnamese army simply collapsed. Images of South Vietnamese soldiers shooting their way onto planes and U.S. marines beating down desperate Vietnamese trying to escape on the last U.S. helicopters lifting off the U.S. Embassy roof would remain indelibly imprinted in the American psyche for decades to come.
Instead of helping the American people learn from this execrable episode in U.S. history, Ford encouraged Americans to “regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam.”9 The fact that the United States had not learned the lesson that it should never again support a corrupt dictatorship determined to silence the cries for justice from an oppressed people would come back to haunt it repeatedly in future years.
Reeling from defeat in Vietnam, the United States went out of its way to cultivate anti-Communist allies in the region. Ford and Kissinger visited General Suharto, Indonesia’s right-wing dictator, in early December. The day they left, Suharto’s military invaded the newly independent nation of East Timor, a former Portuguese colony. Suharto had asked his guests for “understanding if we deem it necessary to take rapid or drastic action” in toppling East Timor’s left-wing government. Ford assured him, “We will understand and not press you on the issue.” Kissinger urged Suharto to postpone the invasion until he and Ford had returned to the United States and to finish the job quickly. The invasion proved to be bloody and the occupation prolonged. The estimated death toll from the invasion plus starvation and disease ranges from 100,000 to 200,000 and more. Three hundred thousand people, over half the population, were relocated to camps run by the Indonesian military. The United States continued providing military aid to Indonesia until 1999. East Timor did not regain full independence until 2002.10
Following Nixon’s ouster, conservatives set out to purge the intelligence community of CIA analysts who didn’t believe the Soviets were out to conquer the world. Led by Air Force Intelligence Chief Major General George Keegan, they convinced CIA Director George H. W. Bush to give a group of anti-Soviet hard-liners, labeled Team B, unprecedented access to the country’s most sensitive intelligence so that they could challenge the CIA’s findings about the Soviet Union. In the eyes of CIA analysts, Keegan had already discredited himself with fanciful reports of a Soviet-directed energy weapons program that would give the Soviet Union an enormous advantage over the United States. Rebuffed by military and intelligence experts, he went public with his outlandish theories when he retired. He convinced the editors of Aviation Week & Space Technology to write in May 1977, “The Soviet Union has achieved a technical breakthrough in high-energy physics applications that may soon provide it with a directed-energy beam weapon capable of neutralizing the entire United States ballistic missile force and checkmating this country’s strategic doctrine. . . . The race to perfect directed-energy weapons is a reality.”11 Despite the fact that no such Soviet project existed, the United States began its own space-based laser weapons program in 1978 under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). This eventually led to the much-ballyhooed and incredibly wasteful Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Keegan also incorrectly insisted that the Soviets were building a large-scale civil defense system designed to safeguard much of the Soviet population in the event of a nuclear war. Howard Stoertz, who oversaw the production of National Intelligence Estimates on the Soviet Union, explained why he and others at the CIA objected to this type of outside scrutiny: “Most of us were opposed to it because we saw it as an ideological, political foray, not an intellectual exercise. We knew the people who were pleading for it.”12
Harvard Russia historian Richard Pipes, a virulently anti-Soviet Polish immigrant, was put in charge of Team B. Pipes quickly recruited Paul Nitze and Paul Wolfowitz. According to Anne Cahn, who worked at the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency under President Carter, Team B members shared an “apoplectic animosity toward the Soviet Union.”13 They greatly overestimated the USSR’s military spending and capabilities, predicting that the Soviets would have around five hundred Backfire bombers by early 1984, more than double the actual number. They put the most malign interpretation on the Soviets’ intentions, accusing them of using détente as a ruse to gain hegemony. They rejected the CIA assessment that Soviet nuclear capabilities were primarily defensive in nature, designed to deter and retaliate, not attack.
Pipes complained that the CIA assessments “happened to favor détente and to place the main burden for its success on the United States.” He attributed this to the fact that the CIA’s “analytic staff . . . shared the outlook of U.S. academe, with its penchant for philosophical positivism, cultural agnosticism, and political liberalism.” Actual Soviet behavior, Pipes argued, “indicated beyond reasonable doubt that the Soviet leadership . . . regarded nuclear weapons as tools of war whose proper employment . . . promised victory.”14
Pipes’s report found the Soviets far ahead in every strategic category. The
CIA dismissed it as “complete fiction.” Cahn concluded, “if you go through most of Team B’s specific allegations about weapons systems, . . . they were all wrong.”15
On November 5, Team B members debated the CIA Soviet analysts, most of whom were younger and less experienced. One of the CIA participants recalled, “We were overmatched. People like Nitze ate us for lunch.” A CIA official reported, “It was like putting Walt Whitman High versus the Redskins.” The Agency had blundered, Pipes gloated, by pitting “a troop of young analysts, some of them barely out of graduate school” against “senior government officials, general officers, and university professors.” Pipes reported that when Team A’s “champion,” the young analyst Ted Cherry, began his criticism of Team B’s findings, Nitze “fired a question that reduced him to a state of catatonic immobility: we stared in embarrassment as he sat for what seemed an interminable time with an open mouth, unable to utter a sound.”16
Though Bush and his successor, Stansfield Turner, both joined Kissinger in dismissing Team B’s findings, Bush made sure that this harsher assessment of Soviet capabilities and intentions was incorporated into intelligence reports.
This ill-fated intervention in CIA affairs turned more ominous in September 1978 when a former high-level CIA official, John Paisley, went missing after sailing in the Chesapeake Bay. Paisley, who had been deputy director of strategic research, was an expert on Soviet nuclear and other weapons programs, with authority to request launching of spy satellites. He had been the CIA liaison with Team B. His son claimed that he had been responsible for leaking the story of Team B’s existence to the press.17
