Roger Morris: Nixon Goes to Europe (Part II)
The respect went to personality and politics as well as fame. De Gaulle’s book “The Edge of the Sword” was perhaps the most dog-eared and annotated in Nixon’s personal library. In its pages he found sanction for both his great-man grandiosity as a politician and the reclusiveness and frail self-image (if not paranoia) that tortured his public career. He vigorously underscored de Gaulle’s claim that “Great men of action have without exception possessed to a very nigh degree the faculty of withdrawing into themselves.” As early as the 1960 campaign, not long after the then-vice president had first met the Frenchman, a CBS reporter, Nancy Dickerson, noted that Nixon had “studied de Gaulle and was trying to emulate him.”
Much of the affinity stemmed from the shared disdain of both men for the fractious give-and-take of democratic politics, and for legislatures that dogged their grand strokes. “Parliaments,” de Gaulle wrote in another passage Nixon underlined, “can paralyze action but not initiate it.” Even before the European trip, Haldeman noted the newly elected president already beginning to distance himself from the congressional politics and the policy bargaining he detested: “He feels he should be more aloof, inaccessible, mysterious, i.e. de Gaulle…”
Historians would long debate the psychological forces that drove Richard Nixon to the destructive fear, aggression and isolation of the Watergate scandal. But there would be no question that one of the factors was also the fortifying influence and justification of the Gaullist presumptions.
Not least, there was de Gaulle’s own courtly treatment of Nixon when he had been out of power. After the presidential loss of 1960 and the California gubernatorial defeat in 1962, Nixon had missed no opportunity to visit the French president, and the reception was unfailingly cordial. Holding forth at the Elysée Palace on one occasion in the 1960’s, de Gaulle talked with Nixon the private citizen — considered by most in America and the world a has-been — as if he were a fellow head of state, urging American negotiations with China and Russia, introducing Nixon to the term détente, and most memorably toasting the former vice president’s return to power “in an even higher capacity.”
It was validation Nixon obviously treasured, just as he never forgot the similar respect shown him over the same years by the Shah of Iran and the military junta of Pakistan, personal deference that would shape fateful policies toward both nations during his presidency. As a national security council officer watching the dynamic at work as Nixon rewarded African states where he felt well-treated during his interregnum, and ignored those where he felt slighted, I noted in my diary with some exasperation:
Foreign policy is no “black magic,” as LBJ once said to us. Ours is banal human behavior. We add a corollary to Palmerston’s classic formula about nations having no permanent friends, only permanent interests. Presidents and their advisers have permanent urges, and define friends and interests to satisfy them.
Nixon’s talks with de Gaulle during the February 1969 trip, the last before the general’s death the following year, were in some respects prophetic. He once again urged on Nixon a policy of détente with China as well as Russia, “a matter of good sense.” Their discussion of the Middle East would echo remarkably in today’s world: a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, including Israeli return of the occupied territories from the 1967 war, was vital to international stability, de Gaulle told him. Failing a peace agreement, the general went on, Israel would “become more and more imperialistic,” finding in its conquests “colossal difficulties” with “assassinations and concentration camps.”
Not disagreeing, Nixon answered that he was “somewhat pessimistic on the Middle East,” with the danger that “radical forces” could upset any settlement. In any event, he assured de Gaulle, his policy would be based on “strict considerations of national security,” and “not . . . influenced by the Jewish vote in the United States.”
Aptly, it was only on Vietnam that they differed significantly, with de Gaulle urging a prompt exit from a dead-end war by an America whose “power and wealth were so great that it could do this with dignity. It would be better to let go than to try and stay.” Nixon replied that Washington’s “credibility” was at stake if he did not end the war “in a responsible way.” It was the same answer Kissinger would give the next day when de Gaulle asked “where” the U.S. would be less credible by leaving Vietnam, and the national security adviser replied “the Middle East.”
“How very odd,” the general pronounced an epitaph on what would be the rationale for four more years of carnage. “It is precisely in the Middle East that I thought your enemies had the credibility problem.” It was an exchange the presidential party chose not to leak, unlike de Gaulle’s last toast to Nixon as “statesman and man.” The White House was also eager to let the press know that on the trip’s last stop, at the Vatican, Pope Paul VI talked of the “severe mistreatment “ of Christians in North Vietnam and urged Nixon to continue the war “until victory.”
Given that Lyndon Johnson, beleaguered by the war, had been all but sequestered in the White House for the past year, there was a palpable sense of national relief and satisfaction at the sight of an American president once again on a popular tour. The entourage flew back to Washington on March 3 in triumph, landing with another ornate ceremony. The White House aide Patrick Buchanan told the president that the public now saw him, as he hoped, as “a man of stature and wisdom. We could not have asked for more.”
With only a few hours of sleep, a buoyed Nixon had a congratulatory meeting with bipartisan congressional leadership the next morning and, that evening, a one-hour press conference that the New York Times called a “tour de force” and the liberal New Republic found “dazzling.” “After six weeks in office,” concluded one historian, “Nixon had made an excellent impression on virtually everyone.”
Headlines were still celebratory five days after Nixon’s return, when Kissinger telephoned him in Florida to complain about Secretary of State Rogers talking to the Soviet ambassador in what Kissinger thought unsophisticated terms that detracted from his own back-channel diplomacy. Even before the trip, only a month into his tenure, Kissinger had threatened to resign in a jealous tirade against Rogers with Haldeman.
“Rogers’s self-interest is so paramount that he can’t adequately serve the president,” Kissinger told him in a complaint that even more justifiably, as the historian Robert Dallek (a co-contributor to this blog) later observed, might have been “lodged against Henry.” The grousing had gone on throughout the trip as protocol put Rogers more often in the limelight and closer to the president than Kissinger. It was all the first stages of a relentless animus that would fill the private archives of the administration over the next four years until Kissinger himself became Secretary of State.
The rancorous infighting also worked to further Nixon’s own penchant for the furtive and his hard-line war policy that Kissinger not only advocated but also indulged in as a decisive advantage over his bureaucratic rivals. “My response to the Communist offensive has been measured, deliberate, and, some think, too cautious,” a conciliatory Nixon told a post-trip press conference. “But it will continue to be that way, because I am thinking of those peace talks every time I think of a military option in Vietnam.”
The secret policy was very different. “There is not going to be any de-escalation,” Nixon told an approving Kissinger three days after their return from Europe, though the president also worried that a lessening of the fighting in South Vietnam would not give him the rationale he wanted to show the North Vietnamese his readiness to punish them in battle.
However, a March 15 Vietcong attack in Saigon satisfied this condition, and he gave the final order for the secret bombing of Cambodia they had planned on Air Force One three weeks before. On March 16, again with Kissinger’s approval and partial stage-managing, Nixon called in Rogers and Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird for what he called a “debate” to hear their objections to the bombing, after which he pretended to deliberate on their views. It was yet another charade to placate old supporters and friends. The order had already been given.
The European tour of February 1969 would be only the first in a sequence that would make the president and First Lady Pat Nixon the most traveled White House couple in history. This included the historic visits to Beijing and Moscow in 1972 that were influential in his reelection (it was during that Moscow trip that the first Watergate break-in took place), as well as the poignant last journey to the Middle East and Soviet Union in 1974, as the scandal-scarred president, cheered abroad but besieged at home, tried in vain to stave off his fall that would come soon after their return.
The Nixon archives would show these other foreign trips, like that first flight to Europe, resulted mostly in a reinforcement of his views and a capping of policies already settled. They were fleeting exercise in politics and public relations rather than in the statesmanship he sought to prove, and which proved to be more challenging than a well-conducted tour. Paradoxically, such ventures ended up proving the wisdom of Nixon’s nemesis Lyndon Johnson. In 1968, when aides expressed regret that Johnson would not take one more triumphant trip abroad, he replied in his characteristic drawl: “Oh, come on boys, a president goin’ somewhere in that big plane is no substitute for doin’ the right job here.”