As seen over and over, Nixon attended to the ma-jor international and domestic political issues of the time with a strategic calculation: If Nixon considered the events important, he gave them proper recognition while placing them in the context of other strategic in-terests. If he had no regard for an event and its place in American strategy, he gave it little or no attention.
Nixon was a highly political man who saw poli-tics as a roadblock to his success. He played up events which could increase his credibility and electability.
He used politics to his benefit when possible; for in-stance, he would refer to “the silent majority” when justifying policies which received public outcries, and is even purported to have White House staff write ghost editorials in support of him.88 Nixon’s presiden-cy was not defined by fostering the will of the people, but by furthering his own agenda.
Nixon often downplayed or belittled events which could potentially hamper his ability to maintain office and pursue his chosen foreign policy goals. His years in office were marked by the cultural movements sweeping the big cities and college campuses. Al-though in his 1969 Inaugural Address Nixon claimed that he “know[s] America’s youth” and he “believe[s]
in them,” the President was often dismissive of the stu-dent protesters.89 Vice President Spiro Agnew freely demonized academics and peace protesters as people
“encouraged to be an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.”90 Since these groups opposed his policies, Nixon dismissed their impact. However, these movements and popular perceptions in general did have some sway on indi-vidual policies. General public opinion plus the Nixon Doctrine were together pivotal in removing the United States from Vietnam. For instance, the strategic bomb-ing campaign of North Vietnam in 1972 was gener-ally viewed by the American public as causing nu-merous civilian casualties. However, while the North Vietnamese did suffer about 13,000 civilian deaths, this level of casualties is unlikely to have pressured the North Vietnamese into the 1973 ceasefire which allowed the United States to leave Vietnam. Instead, in 1972, the U.S. ground troops stopped the progres-sion of the North Vietnamese into South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese thereafter had an incentive to want
the Americans to leave and create a power vacuum so the North Vietnamese could successfully take the South.91 Without popular perception about the harm being inflicted on the civilian population and popular dismissal of the strategy of the North Vietnamese, the public may have read the decision about when and how to leave Vietnam differently.
Nixon was certainly not the first President to align political action with election calculations, as he did with his appointment of John Connally and his eco-nomic decisions at large. Campbell Craig and Freder-ick Logevall argue that the timing of many of Nixon’s foreign policy decisions were likewise motivated by reelection calculations.92 In his memoirs, he describes the announcement of Johnson to stop bombing North Vietnam as an “11th-hour masterstroke that almost won him [Hubert Humphrey] the election.”93 The de-cision did not come as a complete surprise because Kissinger, who was working for the Johnson admin-istration, fed Nixon information about the bombing halt. The halt fell through due to the lack of support from South Vietnam, and Nixon won the presidency.
The incident is less compelling for the facts and more for Nixon’s disgust at the shady maneuver. Politics was a vessel for pursuing his policies, but there was a palpable loathing for politics at the heart of Nixon’s actions. As a man who could never even dream of having the political charm of a Kennedy, Nixon came to disdain those who opposed him.
The time of austerity and unpopularity, coupled with Nixon’s disdain for dissent in the political pro-cess, led to another defining characteristic of his presi-dency: the concentration of power, sometimes secretly held power, in the executive. From Kissinger’s back-channel diplomacy in opening China to Nixon’s
eco-nomic policies, Nixon avoided or ignored the estab-lished political process. U.S. foreign policy, more than ever before, took place outside the knowledge of even the Secretary of State prior to Kissinger’s placement in that position in 1973.
In painting a portrait of Nixon’s time in office, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., describes a President who disregards constitutional provisions regarding the division of power among the three branches of gov-ernment, with Nixon “systematically” concentrating power in the executive. Nixon commandeered three powers constitutionally prescribed to Congress: “the war-making power, the power of the purse, and the power of oversight and investigation.”94 Although Harry Truman in Korea and Johnson in Vietnam pro-vided the precedence of not requiring congressional approval for the dispatch of troops, Nixon addition-ally countered “the power of the purse by the doctrine of unlimited impoundment of appropriated funds”
and avoided investigation through “the doctrine of unreviewable executive privilege.”95 In order to reach his goal of a balanced, full employment budget, in 1973, Nixon refused to “spend more than $12 billion in appropriated funds, an affront to its power so galling that Congress would soon debate whether impoundments warranted his impeachment.”96
Nixon’s disregard of the public and the Congress was overarching:
the bureaucracy was shut out from key policy deci-sions, such as detente with the Soviet Union . . . the announcement of a new economic policy in Au-gust 1971, the trip to China, and the Vietnam peace negotiations.97
He viewed his goals as the President as U.S. goals, and did what he saw as best to achieve them, regardless of tradition, political logic, or legality. Congress and the American public were often either tools or obstacles to achieving objectives.
Although Nixon was never impeached, he re-signed in disgrace on August 9, 1974. In the 2 years since members of the Committee to Reelect the Presi-dent broke into the Democratic National Committee, Nixon obstructed justice by using political espionage and abuse of presidential power to cover up the crimes.98 Kissinger attempted to save Nixon’s job by telling the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which was conducting investigations, that Nixon was pivot-al to the Middle East peace process and “this constant attack on domestic authority is going to have the most serious consequences for our foreign policy,”99 but to no avail. The damage that the disrespect for the politi-cal process and the emphasis on secret, concentrated power had on the Nixon presidency forever eclipses the reputation of Nixon as “the foreign policy Presi-dent.” The United States put in place safeguards such as financial disclosure laws and Freedom of Informa-tion Act amendments after the Nixon presidency to assure that no President could again take advantage of the executive in the way Nixon did.
NIXON’S LESSONS FOR TODAY’S PRESIDENCY