A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy in the Nixon Presidency - Softcover

Bundy William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809016249 ISBN 13: 9780809016242

Verlag: Hill & Wang Inc.,U.S., 1999

Inhaltsangabe

An authoritative historical assessment of american foreign policy in a crucial postwar decade.

William Bundy's magisterial book focuses on the controversial record of Richard Nixon's and Henry Kissinger's often overpraised foreign policy of 1969 to 1973, an era that has rightly been described as the hinge on which the last half of the century turned. Bundy's principled, clear-eyed assessment in effect pulls together all the major issues and events of the thirty-year span from the 1940s to the end of the Vietnam War, and makes it clear just how dangerous the consequences of Nixon and Kissinger's deceptive modus operandi were.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

William Bundy held key positions in the Defense and State Departments from 1951 to 1969 and in the Central Intelligence Agency, and served as the editor of Foreign Affairs from 1972 to 1984. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

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Tanlged Web

Chapter One

AN HOUR AND A MAN

The election year of 1968 was as eventful and tumultuous as any in American history--a war in Vietnam that had turned sour yet offered no easy exit; an antiwar movement at home, chiefly among a generation born during or after World War II to great expectations and ideals, with many both resenting and profiting from a conscription system loaded in favor of the educated and well-to-do; new movements such as feminism just starting to take hold; and above all a deep-seated racial division between African-American and white citizens, as old as the nation itself but attacked more forthrightly by President Lyndon Johnson than by any predecessor, with the result, common in history, that as the possibility of improvement showed itself, bitterness and frustration became all the greater.

There had been election years of equally deep domestic discontent and convulsion--in 1932, at the depth of the Great Depression, bonus marchers and breadlines in the cities conveyed a whiff of revolution. In other intense election years the nation faced and debated issues of peace and war--1860, 1864, 1916, 1940. But never before had the two elements come together powerfully in the same election year. That they did in 1968 is basic to understanding the Nixon presidency. This was an hour of testing, and the experienced Republican candidate in that year was, in the eyes of a plurality of the American voting public, ready for the test.

For twenty-plus years, Richard Nixon had cut a wide swath in American public life and made a deep impression on two fronts. One was political campaigning. He had raised to a high level the art of imputing subversivetendencies to liberal opponents, acquiring early the nickname "Tricky Dick." Almost every campaign he fought was etched in the memory of his contemporaries for some extraordinary event: 1952 for a "Checkers speech" in brilliant defense of his own honor; 1960 for woebegone handling of a TV debate with John F. Kennedy; 1962 for a bitter farewell press conference in California before the despised media. This Nixon was emotional, capable of igniting deep chords of feeling for and against his personality and positions, and at the same time of masterly expository speeches. He was a superb practitioner of politics, occasionally with the raw side showing.

The other feature that stood out in Richard Nixon's record was his extensive foreign policy experience. As a member of Congress, Vice President in the collegial Eisenhower structure, and then as a much-traveled private citizen, his exposure to the world and to foreign leaders stood near the top among the political figures of his time and among twentieth-century candidates for the presidency. He had been particularly involved in and articulate over policy toward East Asia, stressing the threat from China after the Communists won power there in 1949, and had made dramatic impressions of competence and coolness on two occasions -- under the physical threat of a crowd in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1958, and in a dramatic kitchen debate in the Soviet Union in 1959 with the redoubtable Nikita Khrushchev. On the other hand, both in public and in government councils, Nixon demonstrated on many occasions a strong inclination to deal with problems by decisive action, violent and military if necessary, and not to be constrained by potential opposition at home or by the attitudes of allied countries. Both in domestic politics and in his foreign policy views, he had the temperament of a "true believer," fervent, intolerant, sure of his own positions.a

An hour and a man had come together. The story of Nixon's prepresidential career, his years of preparation, is not only an account of the personal development of an extremely energetic and intelligent American of his generation, but a study of what the American nation itself went through, especially in East Asia, in the first twenty-five years of the Cold War.

1. The Making of a True Believer

Richard Nixon grew up next door to the Pacific Ocean. His wartime service was as a Navy officer in the South Pacific. Elected to Congress in 1946 over a popular liberal Democratic incumbent, in a campaign that he made markedly negative by the standards of the period, Nixon made a strong impressionat once as an articulate younger voice in a Republican Party that retained many elements of its prewar isolationism.

When the Marshall Plan for Europe was announced in the spring of 1947, Christian Herter of Massachusetts picked Nixon as a junior member of a special bipartisan House committee, which spent several weeks examining the European situation. The committee soon endorsed the Plan, and Nixon went all out to turn around his skeptical California constituents. The experience did much to establish him as a serious worker and thinker on foreign policy.1 In his own account of the trip, Nixon dwelt on what he learned about Communists, whom he insisted on meeting face to face and found to be men of great ability to be taken extremely seriously. He concluded that the only thing Communists would respect and deal with was "power at least equal to theirs and backed up by willingness to use it" and that a basic rule with Russians must be "never bluff unless you are prepared to carry through, because they will test you every time." At the same time, Nixon saw that it was essential to improve economic conditions in Europe, the main object of the Marshall Plan. (The question of military measures was not then to the fore.)2

At the opposite extreme from this high-toned committee was the House Un-American Activities Committee, dominated by right-wingers from both parties and often accused of irresponsibility in exposing supposed Communist activity. Doubtless on the strength of his election campaign, in which he had so successfully attacked his Democratic opponent for leftist leanings, Republican leaders put Nixon on HUAC, where he rapidly distinguished himself as an active participant and articulate questioner. By the summer of 1948 he was the lead figure in the committee's investigation of a just-retired State Department official, Alger Hiss, on charges of association with Communists leveled by a confessed Communist informant, Whittaker Chambers. A dramatic confrontation between the two was inconclusive, but Nixon kept pressing Chambers, who finally came forward that fall with microfilm of State Department cables, stored for years in a pumpkin on the farm of a friend. These so-called Pumpkin Papers became the key evidence leading to the conviction of Hiss, in early 1950, for perjury concerning his relationship with Chambers.

Nixon was also in the lead in linking the celebrated Hiss case to alleged Communist influence on American policy in China during and after World War II. As the Chinese Civil War turned in favor of the Communist side in 1947-49, he consistently supported attempts to increase American military aid to the Chiang Kai-shek government, and when Mao Zedong took over China in October 1949, became a strident proponent of the charge that the "loss" of China had been the fault of President Harry Truman and his Secretary of State, Dean Acheson. While Nixon steered clear of some of the wilder attacks mounted by the mostly conservative andRepublican "China Lobby," he remained close to its members in and out of Congress.

When North Korea attacked South Korea in June 1950, Nixon fully supported Truman's decision to commit American forces to the defense of South Korea. Unlike many Republicans--Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, for example--he never challenged Truman's refusal to seek a declaration of war or any other congressional approval, apart from the voting of appropriations. Nixon consistently took an expansive view of presidential authority in matters of war and peace. On the other...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Hill & Wang Inc.,U.S.
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1999
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0809016249
• ISBN 13: 9780809016242
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 672
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar