The Atlantic and Its Enemies

13. Nixon in China

The withdrawal of Johnson introduced a period of surrealism in American affairs, a surrealism that became grotesque. A President, soon to be hounded from office for telling complicated lies about a matter of no importance, was seen on the Great Wall of China; he had come there as part of a fantasy game, had been received by a Chairman Mao who had ripped the hospital tubes out of his post-stroke body in order to exchange fifty minutes of exhausted and interpreted platitudes with his knees-pressed-together visitor. Mao was, said André Malraux, a colossus contemplating death. Of death, the colossus had seen much. His People’s Republic had turned into a sort of huge, failed version of anything that the Bolsheviks had ever tried, beginning with War Communism in 1919. Thirty million people had starved to death in one of his campaigns, when, trying to stop birds from eating grain, he had ordered peasants to bang pots day and night to stop the birds from landing. They flew about, as planned, until they dropped. Insects were then deadlier to the grain than the birds had been, and Mao’s peasants were eating bark.

In the same period, the dollar turned into paper, and the financial structure that had saved the West collapsed. There was a consequence: oil producers quadrupled their prices, and then octupled them, causing mayhem. Stock exchanges imploded and banks failed; Keynes’s famous line, that modern ideas reflected defunct thinkers, boomeranged back at him. The period even managed to start off with a villa belonging to the modernist French painter Fernand Léger, who had bequeathed it to the French Communist Party, which then offered it as a place where peace negotiations could be concluded (a ceasefire over Vietnam was eventually signed there). These were another Panmunjom, endless haggling over tiny details while hundreds of thousands went on dying.

In November 1968 a presidential election, by a small majority, brought to office the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon, whose reputation was for fierce anti-Communism. He seemed to be entirely pledged to winning the war. Nixon’s presidential career was bedevilled from the start by media hostility, which he was extraordinarily clumsy in handling — bullying one moment, cloyingly and with obvious insincerity making up at another, and then, when both tactics had failed, relapsing into paranoia. Nixon was no patrician from the East Coast — quite the contrary, he counted as a weaselly provincial reactionary, and his assistants were charmless effigies of the American virtues. Hanoi sensed blood. Not long after Johnson’s announcement, what appeared to be negotiations on a ceasefire took place in Paris. Johnson had been desperately trying to arrange these, and offered to stop the bombing in return for North Vietnamese acceptance. It was given, as a propaganda gesture, but it was empty, and very irritating. There were indeed endless different ‘peace initiatives’, a ‘charade’ according to Gabriel Kolko: none had any effect. The North Vietnamese were adamant that the Americans should just pack up and go, and they ignored Johnson’s offers. The fact was that they did hold some cards. The North Vietnamese army was battleworthy and ruthlessly led; unlike the South Vietnamese one, it did not have to rely on ethnic-minority conscripts; it had supplies from one or other of the Communist giants; it had safe areas in ostensibly neutral countries only a few miles from Saigon. Besides, the Americans’ hands were firmly tied. They had too few troops for a very complicated political geography, those few often quite untrained, and therefore reliant on aerial bombardment.

But Johnson could not really bomb the essential targets, because he feared the resulting gruesome publicity, and because he did not want to provoke either Moscow or Peking. The fact was that the Americans were anxious not to push China too far: in 1964 she had exploded an atomic bomb, and in 1967 a hydrogen one (though at the time, in the middle of the ‘cultural revolution’, the country was widely in chaos). There were also great difficulties as regards the United Nations, then taken seriously as a ‘forum’ for ‘world opinion’. Even in 1975 only some two dozen of its 144 member states counted as democracies, and from 1945 to 1991 ‘Third World’ states were run, for half of the time, by their armies. Nevertheless, the organization — at least, capable of ‘peacekeeping’ — had some uses and had to be respected. In any case the North Vietnamese could bite back. They had acquired powerful defences, with 250 interceptors and 8,000 anti-aircraft guns, and one American plane was downed for every twenty-five sorties (whereas, later on, in the Gulf War, the figure was one in 700). The US air force bombed forest, smashed villages, and just caused the locals to hate the Americans all the more (a hatred returned with considerable sincerity). But the North also had the vast advantage that there was a safe supply line, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which went through an area of Cambodia that jutted out towards Saigon itself, the ‘parrot’s beak’. The Americans had too few men to cover these long borders, and in any case they were not the light infantry that might have been effective.

To start with, just the same, events appeared to go in Nixon’s direction. In the first place there was the Americans’ always considerable learning curve. After Tet there was a period when the war seemed to be moving the Americans’ way, and a British expert (from his days in Malaya), Robert Thompson, gave sage advice: the war would have to be ‘nativized’ in the sense that the South Vietnamese should take over as far as possible; their army was given training of a sort. Whether this worked is still debated: there is evidence for and against, but the Northern Communists were certainly not popular, as the huge number of refugees always showed. There was also an American programme of ‘counter-insurgency’, ‘pacification’ — i.e. a carefully controlled reaction, involving the civilian population. Guerrillas or for that matter infiltrators could only really be countered if their areas of support were liquidated, whether by the physical movement of the potentially supportive population, or by that population’s inclining towards the anti-guerrilla cause. The Americans studied these matters, and had an educated team. Robert W. Komer came in May 1967 to head the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support office, or CORDS, run by men who subsequently made considerable careers in the 1980s and even beyond, when the Right were again in charge in sensitive areas (Komer himself becoming ambassador to Turkey). The programme was called by the CIA ‘Phoenix’, an evocation of a Vietnamese symbolic bird, the Phung Hoan (the equivalent of the Central American Quetzal). One of the great problems hitherto had been the endless targeting of competent South Vietnamese officials, of whom tens of thousands had been assassinated. There was to be a riposte — the careful targeting of North Vietnamese ‘cadres’. In 1970-71, 10,444 of these were killed, generally in fire-fights.

Pacification would have meant an infantry war, and the generals did not want this. For a start, they had too few men to cover the long borders with Cambodia and Laos, and of their 540,000 men, only 200,000 were actually fighting. In fact the Marines did quite well with small patrols; and William Colby, Komer’s successor (in 1968), claimed over 20,000 killed, 30,000 captured and 180,000 defections by 1971. Much of the country did become quiet again, and foreigners could travel by road from Saigon to the coast, where there was a protected holiday resort. The watchword was now ‘Vietnamization’ because the Americans were expecting to withdraw, and Westmoreland’s successor, Creighton Adams, was under instructions to release troops as fast as he could. Vietnamization might have worked: however, one of the decisive elements in this pacification would have been mixed American-Vietnamese units, and Westmoreland was adamantly opposed to their existence: only a few thousand such mixed troops operated in the field. Relations were not good — resentment on the one side, contempt on the other, with linguistic barriers to complicate matters. At any rate, by spring 1970 there was a regular war and not a guerrilla one: the North Vietnamese were able to keep troops in great force in Cambodia and their army held what amounted to a regular front line through the mountainous and jungle territory on the official borderline. From there, they could strike at the old imperial capital (most of it was in reality nineteenth-century pastiche architecture), Hue. By stealth, Nixon — infuriated by the endless nonsense of the Paris talks — decided to strike there, together with the South Vietnamese army, which, Thompson said, was now capable of action. There was much military justification for this, given the North Vietnamese army’s closeness to Saigon, and that it was preparing an attack. The Americans’ attack itself did not go badly — much equipment destroyed, food supplies captured, and US casualties falling from ninety to fifty per week — but there was an explosion of rage inside the USA.

This war had now, in a sense, to be won at home. American opinion was in places violently, hysterically, hostile: 1967 had seen 100,000 march on the Pentagon and there were arson attacks in several universities, including Stanford, where the Institute of Social Anthropology was burned down. The National Guard was called out, and over-responded, in panic: in May 1970 at Kent State University four protestors were shot, two of them girl students on their way to lectures. Four hundred and fifty colleges were closed down. Nixon responded violently to ‘bums blowing up campuses’ and famously got support from building workers at one demonstration in New York (he invited their leaders, ingratiatingly, to coffee at the White House; on another occasion he smarmed at student protestors whom he encountered by chance in the early hours on a visit to the Lincoln Memorial). By 1972 the administration was simply held in derision by almost anyone in the United States who could read and write. At the same time, Nixon alienated his own bedrock supporters.

The opposition to the Vietnam War does not, now, look very impressive. After they had won, in 1975, the Communists massacred a quarter of the population of Cambodia, and threw out the ‘boat people’ from Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of the population, forced onto refugee boats, many sunk or destroyed by Malay or Thai pirates before they reached long-term refugee camps in Hong Kong. At the time, the American opposition was saying that the North Vietnamese were just another version of Tito’s Yugoslavians, potentially neutralist and in effect social reformers in the Henry George sense of one peasant, one plot. There are long lists, of the best writers and scholars in the country, who blundered — and who would, very soon, be disavowed by the very people they thought they were defending. John K. Fairbank of Harvard and The Cambridge History of China thought that Mao was ‘one of the best things that has ever happened to China’. The doyen of Asian studies in the USA, Warren Cohen, agreed. His principal target was Dean Rusk, craggy provincial Protestant with a moral sense: who now looks right? Barbara Tuchman said that America was repeating the mistakes of the fourteenth century, when paranoia and the Black Death stalked the land; she wrote in Foreign Affairs that Chiang Kai-shek had been wicked, that in China famine had been ‘eliminated’. Marilyn B. Young recycled Leninist propaganda (The Vietnamese Wars 1945-1990 (1991)) to the effect that peasants with a back garden of rice-land were ‘exploiters’, and ‘concerned Asian scholars’ talked nonsense of the same sort. When the anti-Nixon people took over, their performance was lamentable. The fact was that a million people fled the North when independence came and a further million and a half when the Communists took over in the South. One of the Asian scholars was Chalmers Johnson of Berkeley, who complained of the student opposition that they never took his books out of the library. David Halberstam, who became the veteran journalist in the South, blamed the McCarthy persecution of the ‘Asia hands’ for the American inability to understand what was going on. Even a well-made film such as The Killing Fields, about the Cambodian horrors, somehow fails to mention Communism as the cause of them.

Nixon’s response was to withdraw American troops, promising to ‘Vietnamize’ the war. This had mixed results. The Delta was made safe again, but there was now in 1970 a full-scale war going on along the borders, and the North Vietnamese were quite well equipped to fight it — T54 tanks, 130mm anti-aircraft artillery and 350,000 Chinese to back them up. Cambodia was almost safe reserve territory for them, because King Sihanouk, in 1964, believed that ‘all of south-east Asia is destined to become Communist’, and he allowed the Vietcong tacitly to use his port, Sihanoukville, where better-off Cambodians made money from smuggling to the Vietcong. In 1969 Nixon had stealthily bombed the Cambodian trails while the Vietcong trained Khmer Rouge (12,000) as guerrilleros, whereat mobs in Phnom Penh sacked the Vietnamese embassy and killed local resident Vietnamese. Sihanouk went to Moscow and Peking to have the Communists taken out of the country and was himself exiled — taking up an alliance with the Khmer Rouge even though they went on to kill some of his children. Nixon deviously supported the man who replaced him, a general by the name of Lon Nol (even the CIA heard about this only when Nixon announced it on TV). The bombing in 1970 shattered just huts, and Nixon had acquired another brittle and touchy ally (when Lon Nol was offered sanctuary in the embassy when it all collapsed he refused, blaming the Americans for scuttling from the scene); an attempt to use South Vietnamese troops broke down when they were ambushed. In February 1971 another effort was made, this time to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail at Lam Son, and this was even worse. The Vietcong knew what was coming, and when the South Vietnamese had lost 3,000 men, President Nguyen Van Thieu ordered a retreat, but without telling the Americans. The retreat turned into a rout, fleeing soldiers clinging desperately to the skids of helicopters, and being torn to pieces by the treetops. There were even anti-American demonstrations in Saigon, and by now the Americans themselves were widely demoralized: to counter the use of heroin, urine tests had to be imposed on the army. In 1972 the North Vietnamese made a great effort to break the South. In March 40,000 men attacked over the 17th Parallel into the DMZ. In the first two weeks, there was a South Vietnamese collapse, made much worse because the roads were clogged by fleeing civilians and soldiers’ families — in fact by now there were 5 million refugees in a population of 17 million. An important base, Quang Tri, fell, and only vast US bombing stabilized the front.

Maybe South Vietnam could have been saved, but by 1971 the chief foundation of the American hegemony was collapsing: in mid-August 1971 Nixon refused to honour the gold bills of the dollar. This opened the way to a general crisis of the West, and in that Vietnam hardly counted, except as a symbol. The man who understood this was Henry Kissinger, who, for want of local solutions, looked for transcendental ones. Since the North Vietnamese were impossible, another dimension would have to be opened up on the board, and, here, geopolitics had its part to play. Kissinger had written an admiring book about Prince Metternich, the chief statesman of the post-Napoleonic period in Europe, when there had been forty years of peace, despite the emergence of international problems that were later on to cause great wars. He came to the White House with a formidable academic reputation, and he had qualities that made him dominant there. He had, in the first place, that central European accent that held lecture audiences spellbound. Hannah Arendt, who lectured in the style of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion, had the same trick, in her case of building castles of long words with an air of having something of vast importance to convey, which none of the audience afterwards could remember. Kissinger by contrast had content. There were, in post-Napoleonic Europe, problems that simply could not be solved on the ground. Of these, later on, Yugoslavia became the classic example, because it just broke up into unworkable fragments but at the same time could not be held together. Metternich knew when to haggle, when to browbeat, when to bore stiff, and it was a success. Kissinger — who was, after all, a refugee from a central Europe that had indeed produced all of the horrors and more that Metternich had foreseen — greatly admired him: the answer to insoluble problems was to internationalize them. That was what, over Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger now tried to do. It was a huge face-saving device: America would get out. She did, and the fall of Saigon at the end of April 1975 was one of the subconscience-entering scenes of the post-war world, perhaps its greatest.

The hope was in détente. Stalin had conceded Italy and Greece in return for this and that, at Teheran or Yalta. Could another such bargain be struck? But this time round there was China as well. There was increasing trouble between these two Communist giants; it could be exploited. In 1967 Kosygin had visited Johnson, who noticed the obsession with China, and even Nixon wrote an article hinting that US relations with China might be improved. In March 1969 Soviet and Chinese forces clashed on the river Ussuri, over a border question, and Moscow asked Nixon to condemn the Chinese nuclear tests; there were hints at a nuclear strike to destroy the Chinese ‘facilities’; and the Chinese were refusing the Russians the right to fly supplies to Vietnam or to use their airfields. The Chinese needed America against Russia. There was room, here, for clever-cleverness, and in April 1971 the world was surprised when an American table tennis team went to Peking. It was even more taken aback a year later, when Nixon followed, on 21 February 1972. Through de Gaulle, Ceauşescu and others, approaches were made, along with indications that Taiwan would be formally derecognized. The Sino-Soviet split was real enough, and the Chinese (themselves barely recovering from economic and cultural convulsions) were anxious to fend off a Soviet attack. Moscow had made plain enough what it would do to Communists who took their own ‘path to socialism’, which Peking ineffably had done. Kissinger travelled incognito to Peking in July 1971, and in mid-July Nixon told television that he had accepted an invitation there. In February 1972 he went, and met a Mao who had insisted on leaving his hospital bed. There was a bargain: China would be protected from Russia; Taiwan would be left alone but downgraded; the Chinese would cease to support the North Vietnamese.

Then came Moscow’s turn, and the offer — suitably preceded by a bill to set up an anti-ballistic missile system — was of negotiations over ‘strategic-arms’ limitation, again handled by Kissinger by stealth. After news of the planned visit to Mao, in July 1971, the Soviet ambassador asked for Nixon to visit Moscow first, but he went in fact later, in May 1972. In September 1971 there was even an agreement about access to Berlin. Despite the various crises of the sixties, there were always US-Soviet discussions as to nuclear weaponry — disarmament. Cuba had frightened both sides (and everyone else) and there was a possibility that war might break out by accident over this or that difficult-to-manage international quarrel. In the Middle East there was one such crisis, the Arab-Israeli war of June 1967, when the clients of both sides came to an armed clash and the Israelis won a smashing victory. After Johnson and Leonid Brezhnev met in June 1967, a ‘non-proliferation treaty’ was concluded (July 1968) and this was supposed to stop the chief signatories from passing on nuclear secrets to countries without the bomb, while these countries also agreed not to take them. The chief idea was of course to prevent Germany (or China) from acquiring them. At the same time, negotiations began on the limitation of numbers of strategic arms — SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) — and were permanent after 1969, even the chief matter of US-Soviet relations, though they were held up now and again by political crises. When Nixon and Brezhnev met in Moscow in May 1972, a vast conference on security and disarmament was indeed agreed, but contrary to earlier Soviet ideas it was also to include the North Americans. Preparatory negotiations started in 1973, and led to the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), which assembled in Helsinki in 1975.

These went in tandem with the SALT. The Americans had proposed these in 1964, but the USSR showed serious interest only after Nixon became President in 1969, obviously with a programme of anti-Communism; by now they were greatly worried about China, and in November 1969 the negotiations began for two agreements — an ABM treaty limiting anti-ballistic missiles and a SALT treaty limiting offensive nuclear weaponry. The Soviets were overtaking the Americans in offensive weapons and their interest lay in limiting the Americans’ superior defensive capacity (ABMs), which reduced the effectiveness of their ICBMs. With the US, the interest was the converse, since by 1972 the USSR had over 1,500 missiles to the United States’ 1,054, and, with a first strike, could incapacitate the silos and completely destroy any nuclear balance between the two sides. In May 1972, with Nixon’s visit to Moscow, the ABM and SALT I treaties were signed. There were to be two ABM bases only, with 100 launchers each, one to defend the capital (the ‘Galosh’ system around Moscow, maybe maintained against China) and one to contain the ICBMs. In fact the ABMs of the era were not effective, because their first explosion would block the Americans’ own radar, and the treaty further stipulated that defensive weapons in space, with the use of lasers (where the Americans had a great advantage), would be banned. This greatly assisted the Soviets, the more so as, not subject to democratic controls, they could proceed anyway with secret tests.

There was a further problem, more important later on, in that the disposal of weaponry might include stuff that was obsolete and was anyway due for the junkyard (a ruse used by the Americans when they solemnly withdrew Jupiter missiles from Turkey in the outcome of the Cuban crisis). Besides, what was to happen with inspection, to make sure that the agreements were being kept? This invited trouble, especially on the Soviet side, where there was a mania for secrecy that even divided the Soviet negotiating team: their military refused to divulge information to the civilians, and would only do so to the US military. They now refused any inspection rights, such that satellites would have to be used, and these could not spot concealed weapons on land. In Washington these treaties, whatever their defects, were desired because they led to ‘stability’, then a much prized commodity. The SALT I treaty was a provisional agreement for five years, to keep things at the then level, and affected intercontinental ballistic missiles with a range of over 5,500 kilometres and submarine-based missiles. Bombers, in which the Americans had a considerable advantage, were not affected. The treaty allowed the USSR 1,620 ICBMs and 950 submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and the USA 1,054 and 710 respectively. But it was quite limited — MIRVs (multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles) were unmentioned, and so were Cruise missiles, which the Americans put into service the following year, weapons with a precision that altered nuclear warfare. The Soviets continued to have the more powerful warheads (one megaton or more, whereas the Americans had a few hundred kilotons) but there was a mathematical formula for the effect of an explosion, which varied according to the negative cube of distance but only according to the square of the power. Qualitative, not quantitative, matters then began to count.

But the value of the treaties was essentially political. It was translated into a high-sounding document about peaceful coexistence and mutual respect, which amounted to a declaration that the USA recognized the USSR as a legitimate and equal partner, and not as a bandit state. The same Moscow ‘summit’ not only agreed the establishment of the CSCE, but also a conference on MBFR (Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions on the conventional-weaponry side). There was even a commercial counterpart, a commission assembling for the first time in Moscow, with an agreement as to the sale of American grain, and in 1975, following an agreement on space, two manned spacecraft solemnly met up. The grain trade opened the way for bank credit and sales of factories or technology, and in the 1970s the Eastern bloc developed quite quickly because of Western credits (though, much to the fury of the Soviets, the USSR was denied most-favoured-nation status by the Jackson Amendment, which made this dependent upon free emigration of Jews: the effect was to multiply the administrative side, customs and insurance, of US-Soviet commercial exchanges). The apogee of this period was reached with Brezhnev’s journey to the USA, on 22 June 1973, when another high-sounding declaration was made, at Soviet insistence, that there would be co-operation to ensure that the two sides would collaborate if there were any danger of a nuclear war. Some Europeans saw this as a step towards US-Soviet condominium.

When Kissinger went to Moscow in September 1972 he laid out the programme — Helsinki on European security (i.e. borders, etc.) in November, Vienna on reciprocal conventional disarmament (MBFR) the following January. The Helsinki negotiations led to a conference of foreign ministers in July 1973, and to the CSCE in July 1975, also at Helsinki. There were of course various hidden concerns on both sides, and since Congress at the time was very close to desiring absolute withdrawal from Vietnam (Senator Mansfeld’s amendment to that effect was rejected only by two votes in 1973), the Americans were operating under considerable pressure from public opinion — perhaps the worst side-effect of Vietnam being its effects on that. At any rate, the attempt to appeal to Moscow did lead to just the attempt at a huge conference that the Soviet side had been wanting since 1954. This also set up a machinery for détente, with bureaucracies on both sides that came, increasingly, to adopt a mutual understanding which meant, in 1990, that there was no real revolution against Communism: the intelligent Communists sacrificed the stupid ones, and remade their own careers very profitably, contacts intact.

The meeting of foreign ministers that initiated the CSCE in Europe assembled in Helsinki on 3 July 1973 (the experts met in Geneva). There were three great topics to be discussed — ‘baskets’, as they were called — the third being in effect human rights, i.e. free circulation of ideas and people, the other two concerning politics and economics. In April 1974 the West made an essential concession, official recognition of the borders of 1945, and the Americans were apparently happy enough to dispose of subjects that were uncomfortable for the Soviets, because they were proceeding with the beginnings of SALT II. The Europeans preferred to let the negotiations last, over the ‘third basket’ (at French insistence), and in any case the Americans had to bear in mind their own eastern European constituency, at times incandescent. Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, suddenly took up the ‘third basket’, no doubt as compensation for what had happened over the ‘first’, political one. In the event, differences between the USA, France and Germany, each of which had its own emphasis, were resolved, the French having pushed the ‘third basket’ because they wanted to give satellite governments a lever to prise open the ‘Iron Curtain’ as and when they wanted to, and the Germans, less concerned with this, concerned to avoid having borders defined as ‘intangible’ as distinct from ‘inviolable’. At the turn of July/August 1975 thirty-three heads of state (Europeans, with the USA, Canada, the USSR) signed the ‘Final Act’ of the CSCE — recognition of borders, certain precautionary measures in military affairs, promotion of trade, free circulation of people and ideas. It was a considerable success for the USSR, which had wanted reognition of borders since Potsdam, and Brezhnev told the Politburo that it had needed ‘thirty years of colossal efforts’ to reach that point. Besides, there had been a Soviet condition as regards free circulation of people and ideas, that this would have to reflect ‘national legislation’. The Soviets had wanted to establish a permanent ‘organ’ for the CSCE, which of course might have established them as part of a security structure, as distinct from NATO, but the West managed to substitute, simply, permanent arrangements for conferences (to which Brezhnev proposed, in 1977, various additions as regards ecology, energy, transport). The CSCE had been part of a strategy to draw western Europe towards Moscow.

Georges-Henri Soutou poses the question as to whether recognition of ‘human rights’ mattered more, in the longer term, than the recognition of borders, and of the legitimacy of Communist rule in eastern Europe. It is a good question. As regards ‘human rights’ — a clumsy Atlantic, bureaucratic rendering of the French ‘Rights of Man’ — the Soviets were indeed, for a time, embarrassed. But then they hit on a useful device: there were blemishes, and more than that, on the Western side. If the fate of a dissident Yuri Orlov or Leonid Plyushch were mentioned, the Soviet representatives could wax indignant as to the rights of women in Micronesia. How were such matters to be covered? What Vladimir Bukovsky calls une bureaucratie droitsde-l’hommarde grew up, and could easily be used against the interests of the West, or even to break up countries such as Turkey. And the KGB knew how to manage ‘dissidence’, to use it, even in the ‘satellite countries’. One writer-martyr, Andrey Sinyavsky, turned out to be one of its agents.

This clever-clever management of world affairs because of the Vietnam problem was not rewarded with forbearance on the part of the North. Between Kissinger’s journeys to Peking and Moscow, the North Vietnamese attacked (spring 1972). There were now very few American troops on the ground, and the South Vietnamese were exhibiting all the signs of rout. This began in March and went on until June with attacks from Laos and Cambodia as well as North Vietnam, and there was fierce fighting in the Mekong Delta. By now there were only 10,000 US combat troops present (400,000 had been taken out) and the ARVN had superior numbers, but the forces were mismanaged in defensive positions without reserves and refugees clogged the roads. Without the B52s there might have been collapse (Pleiku-Kontum). Nixon began to think only of great air strikes in the North at last and secretly approached Brezhnev, who wanted a ‘summit’ on arms control. Kissinger did not even tell the ambassador. Nixon was widely condemned, but Moscow went ahead with the Brezhnev meeting and Dmitri Simes, there on the Soviet side, said that Nixon handled the meeting perfectly, not ‘moralizing’ as Carter was later to do.

Bombing seemed to be the only way to save South Vietnam, and Nixon, in the face of much opposition within the Cabinet, went ahead to mine Haiphong and bomb the supply depots and railways. He was now rewarded for his efforts over Vietnam. Perhaps Chinese pressure meant that the North made a serious move for peace; in any event, Hue had not fallen and by mid-September 1972 Quang Tri had been retaken. A presidential election was due in the United States, and Nixon sent a message via Andrey Gromyko, the Soviet minister of foreign affairs, that after the election he would go much further in attacking the North. On 8 October Kissinger reported from Paris that there had been a great shift: the North were at last seriously talking peace. Nixon celebrated with Lafite-Rothschild but matters then dragged on because the proposal did not suit the South Vietnamese leader, Thieu, at all: he could see that if troops were left as they were on the ground (the proposal for ceasefire) then Saigon was under great pressure. In the event he had to be threatened by Nixon with complete abandonment before he gave way, and the North also prevaricated. Kissinger was infuriated and called its team ‘tawdry, filthy shits’. Nixon then sent in waves of B52s against the Hanoi-Haiphong area from 18 to 30 December, dropped 40,000 tons of bombs, and received an appalling press, the ineffable little Kennedy saying it should ‘outrage the conscience of all Americans’. Congress moved to cut off funds. In reality the bombing had not been marked by much ‘collateral damage’: the bombs were (as the Soviet experts noted) of a new and ‘smart’ kind and the military installations were indeed hit. This sufficed: on 9 January 1973 Le Duc Tho accepted the conditions proposed in November. Thieu himself was obstinate — the agreement was not at all favourable to him, as it left the North in a position to strike at will — but Nixon, both threatening the end of all aid, but also promising a bombing campaign if the North Vietnamese broke the truce, overruled him, with a deadline of 20 January 1973 (his own inauguration) for the ending of the war. This finally caused the North Vietnamese to appreciate that they would have to wait for final victory, and on 27 January 1973 the agreement was at last signed. It left a messy situation on the ground, half war, half peace, and Thieu used it to clear the Delta, while the Vietcong moved heavy weaponry through jungle roads and developed an ultra-modern radio network.

In these same weeks Nixon secured a landslide electoral victory, almost as great as Johnson’s. He was handed it easily enough. This was partly because — an admiring biographer, Jonathan Aitken, does not quite see how devastating this was — he had procured short-term growth, prosperity and even tax cuts by coin-clipping the dollar itself. But in any event the Democrats, true to form for the Vietnam opposition, made fools of themselves, reconstructing their party statutes on lines that allowed any fringe grievance-struck group a say, conducting their affairs childishly in public, and finally putting forward the classic loser candidate. At the heart of matters was a vast change in American politics symbolized by the Southern Democrats and the switch of old Republicans in the north-east: there were new coalitions at work. Nixon’s ‘silent majority’ speech of November 1969 had it right: there was indeed an almost unnoticed America that was very far from sharing the concerns that made the headlines, and they voted for Nixon.

However, this did not matter, as by now in Washington there was what, later, in England, was called ‘a media feeding frenzy’. A sort of civil war developed in the USA, Nixon being in some quarters hated (with, even twenty years later, an Oliver Stone film to perpetuate the black legend). The administration’s own men could not be trusted, and in June 1971 the New York Times had started to serialize the ‘Pentagon Papers’, a huge collection of government documents, studies commissioned by McNamara in 1967, and ‘leaked’ by a one-time McNamara recruit from Harvard (Daniel Ellsberg: he had been at King’s, Cambridge, moved on to Harvard, and even served in Vietnam — precisely the McNamara sort until he had his moment of truth against the war). The studies were not binding, merely indicating how the administration thought, but the overall effect was to make Nixon conclude that ‘the media’ were against him and he was extraordinarily clumsy and brutal in his underhand dealings. Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post had been the object of gruesome flattery; now the Nixon machine went into clumsy reverse. He ordered wire-taps on thirteen telephones of his own officials. He did not trust his people, including Kissinger, and had every word recorded that was spoken in the White House. Kissinger was furious about the Ellsberg leak, and absurd prosecutions followed; newspapers were not just frontally attacked in this way, but were also surreptitiously harassed over television licence renewals and the like. Kissinger, similarly, devised foreign policy without letting the State Department know what he was doing, or even, as regards Moscow, telling the US ambassador.

For the re-election of 1972-3 Nixon’s war chest was flowing over in contributions, hundreds of thousands of dollars in safes. These could be handed out in generous bundles, and in the middle of a triumphal campaign Nixon hardly noticed at all what his lowest subordinates were doing: in this case a break-in to the Democrat headquarters in the Watergate Building on 17 June 1972. Nixon had been extraordinarily vindictive about the anti-war liberals — ‘We’ll get them on the ground where we want them and we’ll stick our heels in, step on them hard and twist’ — and he tried very hard indeed to destroy Ellsberg: even a special small team called ‘the plumbers’ (one of the White House security officers had a mother who wrote to him proudly that his grandfather, a plumber, would have been so pleased at his rise) was set up to find out what could be discovered from his psychiatric records. A list of enemies was drawn up, including Gregory Peck and the president of Harvard, and the telephone recordings whirred away. In the event, Nixon tried to weasel out of his ultimate responsibility, was caught up in a network of blackmail and blustering, and was eventually impeached by a Congress that had always had a Democrat majority. Not long after the Vietnam peace, he too was out, succeeded by a nonentity, Gerald Ford, who had not even been Vice-President, but who had to step in because the Vice-President had been caught in assorted illegalities as well.