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| Washington: From the Review | |
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| In 1974, Jim Laurie served as contributor to the Hong Kong magazine the Far Eastern Economic Review, from
Washington D.C. That year I covered the impeachment and resignation of U-S President Richard Nixon. At the end of the startling events of that year in Washington, this reporter offered this assessment of the foreign policy accomplishments of the Nixon Presidency. |
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Reference: Vol. 85, No. 33, 23 Aug 1974, 10 COVER STORY: What Nixon leaves behind By James Laurie |
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| Washington: The withdrawal of Richard Nixon has seemed to provide America with a form of catharsis;
the cleansing of the body politic and, if not a fresh start, at least a period of reunification and
rededication to a certain lost morality. But Asian leaders wait to see what effect the change of leader in the White House will have on their countries. For, right up to the end, the Nixon pride lay in his achievements over five and a half years in foreign affairs. At every opportunity, he pointed to the way he had opened up relations with China, brought an end to the Vietnam War, his summitry in Moscow and the success of the negotiations he had ordered in the Middle East. January 1969: Richard Nixon came to power after a do-little, say-little campaign which rested largely on his assurance that he had a plan to do what a Hubert Humphrey Administration, saddled with Lyndon Johnson's albatross, could never do. Over the next four years, the alleged plan proved to be a long one, with many diversions along the way. March 1969: The first diversion. Almost as soon as he came to office, the President ordered the secret bombing of Cambodia. A report to the House Judiciary Committee, as it considered whether the bombing of Cambodia should be an impeachable offence, confirmed that the United States carried out nearly 4,000 B-52 strikes inside Cambodia between March 18, 1969, and May 1970; raids which only a handful of people in Washington ever knew about. June 1970: From the secret stage in Cambodia, the US moved on to an all-out invasion. In two months of fighting, nearly 2,000 Americans and many more Vietnamese and Cambodians were killed and wounded. Heated world denunciations followed what the US military establishment said was an operation which would shorten the American presence in Vietnam. (A similar plan had been drawn up during the Johnson years but at that time it was rejected.) February 1971: Another detour round the path to peace; again a plan which had been mooted before but rejected. The Vietnamese called the move Lam Son 719; the American press was to call it the "ill-fated Laotian invasion." Planned by the Americans, backed by the Americans, it was carried out by the Vietnamese troops and ended in near disaster -- well short of its announced goal of stopping the North Vietnamese along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. January 1972: As President Nixon pulled American troops out at a rate of several thousand a week, he escalated American air action in Cambodia and Vietnam. February 1972: The greatest diversion of them all. The visit to Peking marked the high point of Richard Nixon's presidential career. Detente was quite a turnabout for the cold-warrior of the Eisenhower years. Just as Mao dropped the slogan: "Running dogs of American Imperialism," so Nixon, who had said of the Chinese during the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960: "They don't want just Formosa, they want the world," changed his rhetoric for the Shanghai Communiqué. For Richard Nixon, the signing at Shanghai meant new popularity at home and a place in the world as a great statesman. Nixon's China policy (coupled with that vague notion outlined at Guam in 1969 known as the Nixon doctrine) appeared to signal an era of new independence for Asian nations and an end to American hegemony in the area. January 1973: After the most brutal air raids of the war over large areas of North Vietnam and Cambodia and the mining of Haiphong harbor triggered by a large-scale North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho put their signatures to a treaty in Paris, removing the Americans from the war -- a task many believed could have been accomplished under similar conditions four years earlier. The Nixon argument remained that his "Peace with Honor" would have been impossible without his major effort at detente with Moscow and Peking. Kissinger: The prime mover throughout Nixon's foreign operations had been, of course, Henry Kissinger, German-born Harvard professor who, some would say, turned out to be the only good appointment Nixon ever made. Through thick and thin, Kissinger managed to maintain a fairly credible reputation. He had the ability to stay very much in the background when unpopular decisions were being made (Vietnam bombing, wiretapping of Government officials) and very much in the foreground for the prestige moments (China, the Paris peace talks, the Middle East). If the Nixon-Kissinger accomplishments towards detente remain the only positive legacy of the Nixon period, even these policies came under increasing criticism. Criticized for undermining US-Japanese relations by forcing a limit on Japanese textile exports and failing to inform Tokyo of his detente with China, Nixon sought anxiously to become the first US President to visit Japan. Instead, with his position both at home and in the world undermined by scandal, Richard Nixon, who had always taken great pride in accomplishing "firsts," became the first American president to be driven from office, charged with misuse of power, obstruction of justice and criminal acts. |
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| (C) 1974 Review Publishing Company Limited. All Rights Reserved. | |
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