H102 Lecture 30: America Sinking through a Watergate

During the 1968 presidential campaign, Republican candidate Richard Nixon announced a secret plan for ending America's involvement in the Vietnam War. Once he came to office in 1969, Nixon gave this plan a name: "Vietnamization." What he meant by "Vietnamization" was that the United States would withdraw gradually from Vietnam and turn over military duties to the South Vietnamese. In essence, Nixon's plan was a return to the policies of Eisenhower and Kennedy who wanted to help the South Vietnamese forces fight the war.

However, events in Vietnam continued to thwart Nixon's plan. The North Vietnamese Communists stepped up their attacks in 1969 and used supply lines in Laos and Cambodia to supply their troops. These efforts prompted Nixon to order a secret United States invasion of Cambodia as well as increased bombing in Laos. This plan, however, did not remain a secret from the American public for long. On April 30, 1970, Nixon appeared on national television to announce that the United States had invaded Cambodia and that the government needed to draft an additional 150,000 American soldiers. This announcement provoked even more anti-war protests, most of them on college campuses.

University of Wisconsin-Madison students confront police during Dow Chemical demonstrations on campus

On May 4, 1970, panicky troops of the National Guard fired shots into a crowd of student demonstrators at Kent State University in Ohio, killed four of the protestors, and wounded nine. The incident outraged the public and turned many moderates against the Vietnam War and the Nixon administration.

Under increasing pressure to bring about a swift end to the war, Nixon ordered saturation bombing of North Vietnam as well as heavier mining of its harbors. This military strategy, at last, had a political effect, and the parties involved in the war signed a truce early in 1973. United States troops began to withdraw, with most American soldiers out of Vietnam by March 1973. The war in Vietnam, however, raged on for another two years. The United States provided some air support while the South Vietnamese continued to fight a ground campaign against the North Vietnamese. In 1975, the tide finally turned against America and its allies. That year, North Vietnamese forces captured Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, and the last United States troops evacuated from the war torn country. In 1976, North and South Vietnam reunited under Communist rule. Two decades of American involvement in the Vietnam War had devastated Vietnam and its people, had claimed over 55,000 American lives, and had frayed American society. In the end, the United States had gained little.

Richard Nixon's Foreign Policy Achievements

In all fairness to Nixon (and you know we are always scrupulously fair), we need to examine his real achievements in the realm of foreign policy:

"Détente"--a French word meaning "release from tension"--was a new type of diplomacy developed by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, Nixon's National Security Advisor (Kissinger later became Secretary of State in 1973). Détente allowed for a partial thawing of the Cold War and the recognition that the Soviet Union was not, in the eyes of the United States, the seat of evil in the world. Détente worked to play off the tension between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China--two Communist states with a history of animosity and rivalry. Nixon and Kissinger's plan was to use balance of power diplomacy to maintain world equilibrium. Said Kissinger:

"The deepest international conflict in the world today is not between us and the Soviet Union but between the Soviet Union and Communist China."

The "Five Policemen" Concept

According to Nixon and Kissinger, five specific nations (or coherent groupings of nations) had to cooperate militarily and industrially to maintain this global balance of power. They had to remain superpowers and "police" the other nations around the globe in the interest of world peace. The "Five Policemen" were:

Nixon and China

Ever since Mao Zedong had established the People's Republic of China in 1949, the United States had refused to acknowledge Communist control of the nation and recognized instead the government of Taiwan as the official Chinese state. Starting in 1971, however, Nixon reversed this policy and began to open normal channels of communication with the People's Republic. First, China invited an American table-tennis team to a tournament. This "Ping-Pong Diplomacy" demonstrated an easing of tension between the two nations. Then, Nixon called on Congress to ease trade restrictions against China. In July 1971, with an eye on the next presidential election, Nixon announced plans to visit China.

Why did Richard Nixon, the outspoken anti-Communist, reverse the United States Chinese policy?

In February 1972, Nixon gained the heavy news coverage he craved when he visited China. His visit helped establish diplomatic ties between the two nations. Within a matter of months, Nixon built on his foreign policy achievements in China when he visited the Soviet Union.

Nixon and the Soviet Union

During their meetings, Brezhnev and Nixon found consensus on the following points:

Even after his visits abroad, Nixon's successes in foreign policy continued. One of his achievements was a new agreement with the Soviets on the fate of the city of Berlin. Berlin had been a sore point in East-West relations since the end of the Second World War, and especially after the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. The Berlin Agreement of 1972 was Nixon's most important achievement in pursuing the policy of Détente. Under the 1972 agreement, the United States and Soviet Union pledged to the following provisions:

Another political triumph for Nixon was the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) of 1972. This was the first tentative step of the United States and the Soviet Union to ease tensions between the two superpowers and to reduce the threat of a nuclear war by limiting atomic weapons. In SALT I, the two nations agreed to the following provisions:

SALT I did little to limit the total offensive power of either side, but it did demonstrate that under the policy of Détente, agreement between the superpowers was possible.

Meanwhile...

Even if one could argue that Nixon was one of the most successful American presidents of the twentieth century in terms of foreign policy, his domestic policy has marred his reputation. Historians refer to the disastrous chain of events that eventually forced Nixon out of office as "Watergate." Watergate was the name of a Washington, D. C. hotel and office complex in which the Democratic National Committee located its campaign headquarters for the 1972 election. On the night of June 16, 1972, several men working for the President broke into the Watergate to plant illegal wiretaps in the Democratic offices. It was a botched affair from the very beginning and the resulting fallout not only ended Nixon's presidential career, but changed Americans' ideas about politics, in general, and about the Presidency, in particular. After Watergate, many Americans refused to trust the executive branch of government to the extent that they had in the past.

Richard M. Nixon had a paranoid fear of political enemies. This fear manifested itself in Nixon's efforts to isolate and destroy any potential dangers and to try and control dissent in American society. Many of Nixon's closest advisers shared the President's siege mentality. These people included:

Ehrlichman and Haldeman, both domestic advisors, drew up a list of the President's political enemies. This list, which numbered about 300 people, contained the names of prominent figures in all areas of society, including Walter Mondale, Edmund Muskie, Ted Kennedy, Daniel Schorr, Steve McQueen, Jane Fonda, and Dick Gregory. The list labeled twenty persons "especially dangerous." Once Ehrlichman and Haldeman put together the list, they tried to determine how best to neutralize the President's enemies. John Dean, a lawyer and White House staffer, said:

"How can we maximize the fact of our incumbency in dealing with the persons known to be active in their opposition to our administration? Stated a bit more bluntly, how can we use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies?"

Nixon had run in 1968 on a platform of law and order. Now, he and his advisors were looking for ways to skirt the law in order to squelch political dissent. First, the President ordered the Internal Revenue Service to investigate the tax records of his "enemies." Next, he and his advisors wiretapped the National Security Council when they suspected that council members were leaking information to the press. Then, Nixon tried to take over United States intelligence gathering with the Houston Plan, named for advisor Tom Houston. He called together the heads of the CIA and the FBI and proposed a systematic plan to squelch his opposition by wiretapping, intercepting mail, and burglarizing homes and offices to obtain sensitive records. This last element of Nixon's plan appalled even J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI who was notorious for his own efforts to gather information against his enemies. Nixon went ahead with the plan over Hoover's objections and created his own intelligence-gathering group, the "Plumbers," to plug leaks of secret presidential activities and foreign policy actions. Their first major operation was to stop the publication of the Pentagon Papers in 1971.

The Pentagon Papers

The Pentagon Papers were a classified study of the Vietnam War carried out by the Department of Defense. Daniel Ellsberg, a Defense Department official, believed that the public had the right to know the secret details of the administration's war plans, so he released copies of the study to the New York Times and to the Washington Post. The Times ran the first section of the Pentagon Papers as its lead story on June 13, 1971. Although Nixon tried to prevent the paper from releasing the papers to the public, the Supreme Court ruled that the newspaper had the right to publish the documents. In response to the incident, the "Plumbers," which included G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt, and some Cuban dissident recruits, broke into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist in search of damaging information. Ehrlichman had approved the burglary "if done under your assurance that it is not traceable."

Eventually, the "Plumbers" also helped other groups dedicated to Nixon's reelection in 1972. One of these groups was the Committee to Re-Elect the President, known more commonly by its unfortunate acronym, CREEP. CREEP was headed by John Mitchell. Having presided over the creation of new campaign laws for 1972 as Attorney General, Mitchell worked diligently and swiftly to get money for Nixon's campaign war chest before the laws went into effect. One of CREEP's favorite methods was "government by stickup." CREEP approached major corporations for money with the understanding that, in exchange for generous campaign contributions, the Justice Department would turn a blind eye to any of that corporation's illegal activities.

As the chief of a new intelligence unit under CREEP, Liddy proposed a break-in at Democratic headquarters in the Watergate hotel and office complex. Mitchell refused to authorize the plan at first, but approved it after two months. On the night of June 16, a group of inept burglars broke into the Democratic National Committee's headquarters. Police quickly discovered the break in and arrested the culprits. Investigators eventually traced large amounts of cash carried by the burglars back to CREEP.

During the campaign, the Democrats did not exploit the issue, and Nixon won reelection. Details of the scandal, however, emerged after Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein began an in-depth investigation into the burglary and reported their findings. Soon, the public learned that on June 23, 1972, Nixon had authorized the FBI to cover up the scandal, although it remained unclear whether Nixon himself had ordered the Watergate break-in in the first place. Soon after, a Senate select committee, headed by Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, investigated the break-in and the cover-up and began to unearth a sordid tale of political corruption and rampant abuse of government power. In May 1973, Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox subpoenaed tapes of Oval Office meetings and telephone conversations, but Nixon cited executive privilege and refused to comply with the request. Not only did this refusal damage Nixon's public image, but the Supreme Court eventually rejected the President's claim of executive privilege in United States v. Nixon (1974) and forced the President to hand over the tapes. To make matters worse, investigators caught Vice President Spiro T. Agnew accepting bribes. As a result, Agnew became the first United States Vice President to resign from office.

Meanwhile, House hearings began in July 1974. Although Nixon had not surrendered all of the tapes, Congress heard enough to learn that Nixon had been the ringmaster of a deceitful administration. The House planned to impeach the President for organizing a cover-up, obstructing justice, and abusing power. Facing a largely unsympathetic public and the prospect of an impeachment trial, Nixon resigned from office on August 9, 1974. Eventually, 378 federal officials either pleaded guilty or were indicted in connection with Watergate.

"Control Pollution: Dump or Flush [Nixon] 1972 Sanitary Gasket"

In the aftermath of Watergate, the American public lost a great deal of faith in the office of the President. Nixon's successor, President Gerald Ford, was well-intentioned, but lost credibility when, not long after becoming President, he pardoned Nixon for any crimes, real and imagined, that he had committed while in the White House.

The story of everything that has occurred in America since 1974 is incredibly fascinating. In fact, this tale covers the lifetime of most History 102 students. But, this is a history class, and we need time to mull over the events of the nation's recent past before we can interpret them for you. We'll take up the events of the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and today in a future class...

Lecture 30	*Related Web Links*
Content	Presentation	Audience	Link	Info
		College	The Pentagon Papers
		College	Watergate
		College	Nixon's Second Inaugural Address, January 20, 1973

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