Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

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.