Richard Nixon, the president: The summits before the fall

Editor’s note: This article is one in a five-part series looking back on the life of one of Duke’s most infamous alumni — Richard Nixon. Read the previous installments on Nixon’s childhood and time at Duke, introduction to the political spotlight and road to the White House, with the final article on his eventual fall from grace to be published this week.

For 22 years, Richard Nixon had campaigned relentlessly. Now, at the zenith of his career, he had to govern.

Peace with honor

One Harvard professor came with Nixon to Washington in 1969, serving as the president’s national security adviser. That man, Henry Kissinger, would become one of the president’s most trusted confidants until the bitter end, a vital instrument to be wielded in Vietnam peace talks and Nixon’s future diplomatic exploits. Kissinger was equal parts egomaniacal, brilliant, hot-tempered, charming, manipulative, practical and thin-skinned. Their marriage was unlikely: Kissinger, a Jewish immigrant and academic, and Nixon, who hated professors — especially Ivy Leaguers — and spouted antisemitic remarks, sometimes in front of Kissinger.

“At an early age, I have seen what can happen to a society that is based on hatred and strength and distrust,” Kissinger would later say. A Machiavellian pragmatist, he felt deep loyalty to the United States, which he saw as a great liberator in a world of profound evil.

Kissinger and his family had fled Germany in 1938, and the 22-year-old returned to Europe as a soldier. He would lose at least 13 family members in concentration camps, though not from the one he and the 84th Division liberated at Ahlem. When he returned to his hometown, only 37 Jews remained.

“The intellectuals, the idealists, the men of high morals had no chance,” he wrote in a letter. The 37 survivors “had learned that looking back meant sorrow, that sorrow was weakness and weakness synonymous with death.”

“For the formative years of his youth, he faced the horror of his world coming apart, of the father he loved being turned into a helpless mouse,” said Fritz Kraemer, the military adviser who discovered Kissinger and convinced him to attend Harvard. “It made him seek order, and it led him to hunger for acceptance, even if it meant trying to please those he considered his intellectual inferiors.”

In March 1969, Nixon directed the Air Force to commence bombing operations in Cambodia. Although officially neutral, Cambodia, along with neighboring Laos, was used by the North Vietnamese as a critical route to transport troops and supplies.

Fearing public backlash over bombing an officially neutral nation, the Nixon administration kept Operation Menu secret from the American public — until The New York Times broke the news in May. Furious, Kissinger and Nixon ordered FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to wiretap the phones of administration officials they suspected of leaking the documents. When Hoover expressed trepidation over wiretapping a journalist, the Nixon administration called upon a private organization to get the job done.

There are no confirmed records of the number of civilians killed in Operation Menu. What is known is that targeted areas were small and lightly populated, but carpet bombing operations in Southeast Asia were often inexact and total in their devastation. Throughout Operation Menu, B-52 Stratofortresses dropped 100,000 tons of high explosives and flew 3,630 sorties.

The Nixon administration’s bombings and destabilization in the region not only set the stage for the rise of the Khmer Rouge, whose regime later carried out a genocide that killed 1.2 to 3 million Cambodian ethnic minorities, but also pushed the North Vietnamese deeper into the country, drawing the previously neutral nation into a larger conflict.

In 1970, the North Vietnamese overran much of Cambodia at the request of the Khmer Rouge. In April of that year, Nixon announced a ground invasion of Cambodia, followed by Operation Freedom Deal — a bombing campaign that continued for three more years and claimed the lives of roughly 50,000 to 150,000 civilians.

* * *

Though he was far more interested in foreign than domestic policy, the president could not ignore how the war was tearing Americans apart at home. The same day 37 college presidents signed a letter asking Nixon to end the war, Ohio National Guardsmen fatally shot four college protesters at Kent State University.

“I thought of my own daughters,” Nixon would write years later in his memoirs. “Of their learning to talk and to walk, and their first birthdays, and the trips we took together … getting them through the teenage years, getting them through college and then — whoosh — all gone.”

But the White House did not show that same compassion at the time. The administration’s response reminded the press corps that “when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy.” The statement did not mention the four dead and eight wounded.

Soon, over 450 universities would go on strike. By May 7, there were firebombings on at least 10 campuses. As Kissinger told student activists to be patient, 16 governors across the nation called the National Guard for 21 campuses.

On May 8, Nixon promised that the U.S. troops in Cambodia would withdraw in due time and that the incursion was a necessary strategic move to protect the remaining troops in Southeast Asia, 150,000 of whom would be home soon. “The great majority of all American units will be out by the second week of June, and all Americans of all kinds, including advisers, will be out of Cambodia by the end of June,” he said.

Nixon was sleepless that night. The chaotic week had taken all his strength, and as he looked out the window to the pockets of protesters at the Washington Monument, he decided to wake up his valet Manolo Sanchez. Sanchez had never seen the Lincoln Memorial.

“Let’s go look at it now,” the president said.

At 4 a.m., Nixon and Sanchez arrived at the memorial. Egil Krogh, an aide who followed the president that night, remarked how “intense” Nixon was. “He was trying to empathize with them the best he could.”

Even after two decades of politics, Nixon had never shaken his awkward streak, and it showed when he tried to engage the students that night. Meanwhile, the students were tongue-tied before the president. Bob Moustakas, a student protester, recalled that the energy in the air was akin to when a high schooler’s parents came down to the basement to make small talk during a house party.

“I know most of you think I’m an SOB,” the president said, “but I want you to know that I understand just how you feel.”

Crickets.

One girl was from Syracuse University. Nixon praised Syracuse’s football team. He spoke about Whittier College, where he played football. He talked about the beach at San Clemente and advised the students to travel while they were young. California was good. Prague and Warsaw were nice.

“We are not interested in what Prague looks like,” a student interrupted. “We are interested in what kind of life we build in the United States.”

Nixon agreed with this statement and then espoused the importance of understanding people everywhere, especially in one’s own country. He continued unscripted about the U.S. environmental program and “spiritual hunger,” which “all of us have and which, of course, has been the great mystery of life from the beginning of time.”

“Remember this is a great country, with all of its faults,” he called out before getting back in his car. John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s domestic policy adviser, called the meeting at the Lincoln Memorial a “great shame.” The two sides had met, but they simply could not reach each other.

* * *

Nixon would continue his policy of Vietnamization — attempting to end U.S. involvement in the ongoing war by training South Vietnamese forces, allowing them to assume more combat roles while American troops were gradually removed. In January 1973, the Paris Peace Accords were signed, allowing the remaining U.S. troops to leave by March. South Vietnam would fall in 1975, nearly a year after Nixon resigned in disgrace.

Trouble at home

Federal Reserve Chair Arthur Burns once referred to Nixon as “a man of great intelligence and ability,” but not a “strong” man. The president was thoughtful and deeply emotional, but also self-pitying, neurotic and utterly lacking Eisenhower’s comfort working with the Establishment.

Nixon’s decision-making process was “crabwise,” Kissinger said. He preferred long meetings with a select group of advisers, playing devil’s advocate and meditating alone with his yellow legal pads before finally coming to a decision. Nixon needed isolation to be efficient.

The administration built a protective cocoon around the “introvert in an extrovert profession.” The president needed a specific tempo and handled spontaneous meetings poorly, which he would hurriedly end by shoving trinkets into the other’s hands. He ate the same lunch every day. He preferred making tiny tweaks to trivial things — from the dictaphones in his bedroom to the Nixon campaign bumper stickers to badgering individual congressmen for their votes, which he issued a memo against.

Other idiosyncrasies would be more dangerous. The “mad monk,” as Haldeman and Ehrlichman called him, would give orders meant to be ignored and leave it to his aides to decide what ought to be done. These orders could range from banning his staff from eating White House congressional breakfasts to bombing Damascus.

As chief of staff, Haldeman served as a guard between Nixon and the outside world. Nixon and his family would work with notes on pillowcases instead of verbal conversations. Leaks, bugs and spies were useful and common weapons.

And tapes.

Taping conversations was not an uncommon practice; presidents back to Franklin D. Roosevelt had selectively recorded their conversations for posterity. However, Haldeman went a step further, installing a new noise-activated system that captured every conversation in the Oval Office. Since only the president and chief of staff knew that such a system was in place, even a man as private as Nixon could drop his guard.

Besides, nobody but Nixon was going to listen to those tapes.

* * *

For all the Prussian structure in his everyday life, Nixon was ideologically flexible. Progressive tax reform for low-income families, Social Security hikes, the end of the draft and the establishment of Occupational Safety and Health Administration all made their way to his desk. He was more than happy to take his share of the credit with a signature — even if he had private disagreements with the policies and the Democrats who backed them.

The president was no environmentalist. He did not campaign on the issue, often regarded environmental activists with disdain — “Some of these people are nuts,” he said — and believed that protecting the environment and promoting job growth was a zero-sum game.

But just eight days after his inauguration, a massive oil spill took place off the coast of Santa Barbara in the president’s home state, the largest oil spill to ever affect U.S. waters at that time. Coupled with the electorate’s increasing worry about pollution and environmental issues, Nixon had to respond.

Within a few short years, the president’s pen would sign off on such historic legislation as the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act — even if he was often worried about the costs of these projects. Nixon also oversaw the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Legacy of Parks program.

Nixon’s reluctant support of the budding environmental movement was not unremitting. He vetoed the Clean Water Act of 1972 over cost concerns — though Congress would later override his decision — and supported the Trans-Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act of 1973, a move made primarily in the hopes of averting an impending energy crisis.

Despite his personal apathy on the subject, the Nixon administration effectively created the environmental wing of the federal bureaucracy and became responsible for some of the longest lasting domestic environmental policy of the 20th century. In a 2012 survey of environmental groups ranking the U.S. presidents in terms of environmental action, Nixon would only trail Theodore Roosevelt.

Years later, John Whitaker, Nixon’s environmental policy aide, told the former president that he believed he would be remembered for his domestic policy, especially on the environment. 

“For God’s sake, John,” Nixon said. "I hope that’s not true.”

* * *

Environmental policy wasn’t the only progressive issue Nixon backed. Throughout his time in office, he would reverse a century of policies aimed at forcibly assimilating Native Americans and announce a policy of “self-determination without termination,” which pushed for more tribal autonomy and economic development on reservations. The president also signed off on Title IX, the landmark civil rights law prohibiting sex-based discrimination at schools receiving federal funding.

Nixon believed integration was inevitable and supported the efforts of Labor Secretary George Shultz to peacefully desegregate the South. Speechwriter William Safire would describe the policy as “make-it-happen, but don’t make it seem like Appomattox.” During Nixon’s first term, the budget for enforcing civil rights increased to nearly 35 times its original amount; by 1972, the proportion of Black children attending segregated schools in the South fell from 68% in 1968 to only 8%.

While Johnson and Kennedy were credited with establishing affirmative action, Nixon implemented its first major formal plan and timeframe. The president endorsed and defended the Philadelphia Plan presented by Assistant Secretary of Labor Arthur Fletcher, which required federally funded construction contractors to hire minority workers.

But there was less noble and more political intent behind many of these actions. The wounds from 1960 still ran deep. Nixon believed Black voters had turned against him during his first presidential campaign, and, as with all his other perceived opponents, he found it impossible to forgive them.

Thus, Nixon was drawn to the Philadelphia Plan in part for political reasons — the policy created a divide between minorities and organized labor, which found unlikely bedfellows in staunch Southern conservatives who viewed the plan as “reverse discrimination.”

He also had personal misgivings about policies that would afford Black Americans more rights. A believer in Black genetic inferiority, the president held the view that busing Black students to white schools would lead to poorer educational outcomes for students of both races, and he publicly endorsed a constitutional amendment banning school busing.

* * *

In June 1971, Nixon declared drugs “public enemy number one” — launching what is now known as the War on Drugs — in response to reports of widespread heroin use among troops in Vietnam and college students back home.

Though he launched the War on Drugs, Nixon was not responsible for its escalation in the following decades. Nixon had signed the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, which rolled back mandatory minimum sentencing laws for possession and targeted drug distributors; early efforts to combat heroin use, especially in Washington, D.C., showed signs of success.

Subsequent presidents — Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter — largely followed the same drug policy as the Nixon administration. It wasn’t until the Reagan administration that the War on Drugs and Nixon’s “law and order” rhetoric converged into a militarized campaign with lasting consequences for the nation.

Between 1975 and 2019, the U.S. prison population increased from 240,593 — a record high at the time — to 1.43 million Americans, and punishments for drug charges were disproportionately doled out to Black and Latino Americans. Today, one-fifth of the U.S. prison population is serving time for a drug charge, and police were making over 1 million drug arrests per year until the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nixon does not shoulder the full blame for the War on Drugs’ devastating consequences on the U.S. prison population and Black community. But as with affirmative action, there was political motivation involved in his contribution.

“By getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news,” Ehrlichman later said.

“Did we know we were lying about the drugs?” Ehrlichman asked. “Of course we did.”

* * *

Nixon also struggled with fiscal policy. As his first term drew to a close, the Vietnam War was running up U.S. budget deficits, and the Federal Reserve’s attempts at gradualism were driving worries of recession. At the same time, the U.S. did not have enough gold to match the dollars circulating in the world economy at the set rate of $35 per ounce, leading to fears of eventual dollar devaluation among traders and several runs on the dollar.

Less than a year out from the 1972 presidential elections and anxious about the political consequences of economic stagnation, Nixon wanted “one big bold play … the whole damn thing at one time.” That “big bold play” would be the greatest intercession in the U.S. economy since the New Deal — and the global economy since the Bretton Woods agreement. 

On Aug. 15, Nixon announced that he would not only implement a series of wage and price controls but that the U.S. would unilaterally close the gold window and replace it with a to-be-determined substitute. In the aftermath of World War II, the gold exchange standard established by Bretton Woods was the bedrock of the world monetary order. Though the system would not be formally abolished, Nixon’s announcement, referred to as the “Nixon shock,” rocked the world economy.

Nixon’s plan would be a success — in the short term. The Dow Jones industrial average would rise a record 32.93 points the day after Nixon’s announcement, and the move was widely popular among polled Americans. The unemployment rate dropped to 5.5% by Election Day, and inflation held steady at 3%.

The president would lift price controls after the 1972 election to soften the pressure on the economy, but the damage was already done. The Nixon shock is credited as one of the main causes of the 1973-75 recession. The cost of living for American households soon rose — as did unemployment — as the dollar plummeted by a third under a floating exchange rate system. All this was amid a 1973 Arab oil embargo in response to Nixon’s support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War, which resulted in oil prices nearly quadrupling overnight.

Only Nixon

“I wouldn’t put out a statement praising it, but we’re not going to condemn it either,” Nixon said. The president was responding to a question Kissinger received on what the White House was planning to do about the growing humanitarian crisis in East Pakistan.

The 1949 partition of India had divided Pakistan into two regions separated by about 1,000 miles — the majority-Punjabi West Pakistan and the majority-Bengali East Pakistan. A minority of politicians in East Pakistan were pushing for the region and its population of 65 million to secede from the West, with its population of only 58 million. Angered by the government’s sluggish response to a cyclone that devastated the East, East Pakistan politicians won a majority in the 1970 elections, the first since the country gained independence in 1947.

Pakistani President Yahya Khan instituted martial law in response to the election results, and mass protests and strikes erupted across East Pakistan. After 25 days of protest, West Pakistan officials ordered the Pakistani army to execute Operation Searchlight, determined to keep their seat of power.

The White House could not have stopped the bloodbath that ensued in the first few days of Searchlight. And throughout the next nine months, the Americans did not stay fully silent, as the Nixon administration paused military aid to the Pakistanis, exercised emergency airlifts for refugees and urged Yahya to negotiate a settlement with the separatists.

But looking back at the weeks of massacre that turned into months, and the countless U.N. statements of great disappointment and condemnation, and the amount of refugee aid sent to the region to hold back the tide of widespread famine, one must ask:

Why was the Nixon administration silent on the Pakistan issue, even as the Bengali death toll climbed to the hundreds of thousands? Even as members of the Pakistani army raped between 200,000 and 400,000 women at gunpoint, often with American-made weapons? Even as 10 million refugees fled in mass exodus? Even as many of those lucky enough to escape certain death nevertheless perished in wretched fashion, fading fast in cramped refugee camps rife with cholera?

The answer was China.

In 1970, Nixon told Time magazine that if there was one thing he wanted to do before he died, it was to visit China. It was a golden opportunity for the Americans — one that could pressure the North Vietnamese into an end to the Vietnam War and gain leverage over the Soviets.

Throughout Nixon’s first term, Khan had become a favored liaison between the Chinese and Americans — and Nixon had no special feelings for the Indians, who supported the East Pakistani guerilla movement that ultimately overpowered the Pakistani army. This was the reason why the president wrote on April 28, a month into the massacre: “To all hands. Don’t squeeze Yahya at this time.” “Don’t” was underlined three times.

Nixon could not let the gold window pass. The cold calculus of human lives dictated that a great man should let thousands die so that billions may live without fear of nuclear war. Nixon wanted to be a great man.

The Bengali genocide, which lasted until December 1971, took the lives of at least 500,000, who would become the blood price of a new world order.

And in February 1972, the president would land in Shanghai.

* * *

Sino-American relations had quickly soured after the Communists drove the Nationalists into exile in 1949, and the U.S. had refused to recognize the People’s Republic as the legitimate government of China since. Nixon himself supported Chiang Kai-Shek, the Nationalist leader of the Republic of China, in 1960.

Times change. By the mid-1950s, ideological disagreements and growing ties between the USSR and India amid Sino-Indian border disputes soured the Sino-Soviet marriage. A decade later, the two powers were competing for leadership of world communism. With potential enemies surrounding them from north and south alike, the Chinese looked across the Pacific.

Throughout the early ‘70s, the U.S. and China indicated that they would consider rapprochement. PRC Chairman Mao Zedong released four captured American yachtsmen in April 1971. That same day, the American ping-pong team was welcomed as the first U.S. delegation to set foot in China since 1949. A few weeks later, the Pakistani ambassador delivered to Kissinger a handwritten letter that Khan had received from PRC Premier Zhou Enlai, which invited an American envoy or Nixon himself for “a direct meeting and discussion.” Two months later, Nixon eased trade restrictions against China that had been in place since the Korean War.

On July 9, 1972, the press was told Kissinger had a stomachache and would take a few days to recuperate while on a trip to Pakistan. At dawn, the national security adviser, in fine health, secretly boarded a plane to Beijing.

* * *

On July 15, Nixon announced to his nation’s surprise — and Taiwan’s distress — that he would visit China. The United Nations stripped the Republic of China of its position and gave its seat to the PRC in October, and by 1973, a slew of countries had broken ties with the island nation to establish diplomatic ties with the mainland.

“I hate to do it. I hate to do it … [The Taiwanese] have been my friends,” Nixon said. But he and Kissinger agreed. Taiwan, sentimentality aside, was the “least significant” American interest.

“It’s a heartbreaking thing,” Kissinger remarked. “They’re a lovely people.”

* * *

A more significant geopolitical interest heeded the call. Within days of Nixon’s announcement, he heard from the Soviets, and USSR Premier Leonid Brezhnev invited the president to Moscow in August.

“Here we kick the Russians in the teeth — and they invite us,” Nixon crowed. He announced the Moscow trip Oct. 12 and became the first American president to visit the capital in May 1972. At the end of the summit, the two men signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks — better known as the SALT agreements — limiting the deployment of anti-ballistic missile systems and freezing the number of strategic ballistic missile launchers.

* * *

Nixon would call the week of Feb. 21, 1972, “the week that changed the world.” Anything else would have been an understatement.

The most symbolically important moment of the trip was Nixon’s conversation with Mao, who had been in poor health but insisted on meeting the president. The two men joked about Chiang (“Our common old friend,” as Mao put it), pretty girls (“Anyone who uses pretty girls as a cover must be the greatest diplomat of all time,” Nixon said) and the most recent U.S. election (“​​I voted for you,” Mao quipped). Americans could not believe their eyes when the front page of their newspapers displayed the photo of the president and the chairman shaking hands.

A gaggle of reporters documented a whirlwind week: Nixon at the Great Wall, Pat and the pandas, mao-tai liquor, revolutionary ballet, glass flowers, gymnastics exhibitions, the Ming Dynasty tombs and the Forbidden City.

On his final night in China, the president called Kissinger and Haldeman into his room. 

“Nixon talked about his accomplishments, asking for confirmation and reassurance,” Kissinger remembered. “We gave him both, moved in part by an odd tenderness for this lonely, tortured and insecure man.”

The president had accomplished something nothing short of remarkable. He had ended 25 years of no diplomatic contact between the two powers, and in doing so had shifted the balance of the world. Although Vietnam remained a mixed bag, the Americans had largely accomplished the policy goals they hoped to eke out of the relationship.

But even at the height of his accomplishments, Nixon could not stop the gnawing feeling he carried with him even across the Pacific, the weight that doubtlessly stayed with him as he watched Haldeman and Kissinger leave his hotel room. It didn’t matter what he did. It would never feel like enough.

Editor’s note: Much of the information for this article was sourced from John A. Farrell’s 2017 book “Richard Nixon: The Life,” and Stephen E. Ambrose’s 1989 book “Nixon, Vol. 2: The Triumph of a Politician, 1962-1972.”

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