All the President's Acumen: The Paradox of Nixon's Foreign Policy

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Author William Bundy

Publisher Hill and Wang

Year 1998

Pages 672 pp.

Price $35.00

Uniquely among postwar presidents, Richard M. Nixon continues to be the object of hard and unforgiving feelings among historians of American foreign policy. Though all presidents have at times been treated harshly, none evokes the special animus reserved for Nixon. Scholars who regard the American involvement in Vietnam as a blunder of monumental proportions -- and there are few writing today who do not -- frequently treat the president who escalated the war, Lyndon B. Johnson, with real empathy, the scorn once reserved for LBJ having been displaced by a sense of the tragic compulsion that led a man with essentially decent political instincts to doom. The president who extracted the United States from that war, by contrast, is still hated. Since Nixon was a great hater himself, as he ruefully acknowledged in his touching farewell speech, there is perhaps a measure of cosmic justice in this state of affairs -- with Divine Providence ensuring strict reciprocity in this as in all other matters. Whatever the reason, or reasons, the fact remains. Nixon is judged harshly; even his successes are often seen as proceeding from an essentially rotten heart.

William Bundy's exacting, intelligent, and formidable history of Nixon's record in foreign policy demonstrates that the hard judgments about the former president are by no means confined to the radical critics who drove him first to distraction and ultimately to ruin. The author is no radical, but a pillar of the liberal foreign policy establishment. In the 1950s he joined the CIA, then served in the 1960s at the assistant secretary level in the Departments of Defense (for international security affairs) and State (for East Asian and Pacific affairs). He was editor of Foreign Affairs from 1972 to 1984. He is broadly sympathetic to the essential features of post-World War II American foreign policy and even to many central features of Nixon's foreign policy. At the same time, he has written a biting and often savage indictment of Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger. Under Bundy's microscopic examination, scarcely any feature of that record emerges unscathed. Time has not withered, nor custom staled, what is clearly a considerable animosity toward both men.

Bundy, it is true, treats with much generosity the Kissinger of the dark years of 1973-74, after he had become secretary of state, when the political mood was one of the utmost bitterness and serious crises pressed on all fronts. He praises Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy after the 1973 Yom Kippur War as masterful, echoing his complimentary treatment of the handling of the Jordanian crisis in 1970. He also clearly admires Kissinger's rear-guard action against the hard-liners, centered on Senator Henry Jackson (D-Wash.), who were indicting Kissinger for appeasement on arms control and the emigration of Soviet Jews. But what praise there is for the overall record is meted out sparingly, appearing as little oases of commendation amid a desert of condemnation. Bundy's larger judgment emphasizes that Nixon and Kissinger continually deceived the American public and Congress; out of these deceptions flowed the major mistakes in policy (the "tangled web") in which they were subsequently entrapped. Watergate, though emblematic of Nixon's deceit, was not the primary cause of the collapse of the administration's policy from 1973 to 1975. The real reason was that its vaunted "structure of peace" had been "oversold, timed and framed too much for domestic political effect." The administration is alleged, in effect, to have kept three sets of figures: one to mislead the public, another to mislead the Congress, and the third to mislead itself.

THE INDICTMENT

Among the many allegations brought against the administration are that Nixon "personally organized in 1968 a covert operation to persuade Nguyen Van Thieu to defer joining in the peace talks -- the very act that may have tipped the [1968 U.S.] election result in Nixon's favor"; that Nixon never challenged Thieu's choice of commanders in South Vietnam, which might have made a real difference, because of the debt so incurred; that the Cambodian incursion of 1970 was counterproductive to the larger policy of Vietnamization and disastrous for Cambodia, part of a series of missteps that place the responsibility for the mass killing that befell that country after the 1975 Khmer Rouge victory squarely on Nixon and his advisers; and that in the period leading up to the Paris peace accords of January 1973 the administration treated the North Vietnamese with bad faith and brutality and the South Vietnamese with contemptuous disregard, while deceiving the American public with Nixon's secret and unconstitutional pledge to Thieu to resume bombing in the event of a major North Vietnamese violation of the peace accords.