The Untold History of the United States

When it finally came down to it, Johnson made his choice—a choice whose consequences will always define his legacy and besmirch that of the nation whose forces he commanded. “Losing the Great Society,” he lamented, “was a terrible thought, but not so terrible as the thought of being responsible for America’s losing a war to the Communists. Nothing could possibly be worse than that.”⁸⁸

Some would say that the United States lost its soul in the jungles of Vietnam. And it would pay a double price in doing so. The war, which the United States would lose ignominiously despite Johnson’s efforts, would also spell the end of the last significant period of social and political reform the United States has seen. Promising both guns and butter, the United States would only deliver on the former. Postwar prosperity would at first slow and then come crashing to a halt.

Chapter 9 NIXON AND KISSINGER: The “Madman” and the “Psychopath”

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger dominated their era as few other men have. Their bold moves brought the world closer to peace. But they also ushered in cruel and vindictive policies that more than offset their achievements. They were as unlikely a pair as ever held high office. Kissinger found Nixon “a very odd man… a very unpleasant man… so nervous… an artificial man… [who] hated to meet new people.” He found it strange that such a loner “became a politician. He really dislikes people.”¹ White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman spent a great deal of time with Nixon but said he “didn’t see me as a person, or even… as a human being…. To this day he doesn’t know how many children I have nor anything else about my private life.”²

Kissinger and Nixon were privately contemptuous of each other, fighting incessantly over who would get credit for their achievements. Kissinger disparaged Nixon as “that madman,” “our drunken friend,” and “the meatball mind,” while fawning all over him in his presence. Nixon referred to Kissinger as his “Jew boy” and called him “psychopathic.”³ But the madman and the psychopath shared a vision of the United States as global hegemon. Nixon considered Woodrow Wilson the “greatest President of this century” because he had “the greatest vision of America’s world role.” Wilson had proclaimed the United States to be the world’s savior. Kissinger similarly observed, “Our experience led us to look upon ourselves and what we did as having universal meaning, a relevance that extended beyond national boundaries to encompass the well-being of all mankind. America was not itself unless it had a meaning beyond itself. This is why Americans have always seen their role in the world as the outward manifestation of an inward state of grace.”⁴ But neither Kissinger nor Nixon understood the basic decency that should have guided the United States’ exercise of power.

Lawrence Eagleburger, who had worked closely with Kissinger over many years, observed, “Henry is a balance-of-power thinker. He deeply believes in stability. These kind of objectives are antithetical to the American experience. Americans… want to pursue a set of moral principles. Henry does not have an intrinsic feel for the American political system, and he does not start with the same basic values and assumptions.”⁵ Nixon and Kissinger would suffer different fates. Nixon would be brought low by pettiness, venality, suspicion, and ambition. Kissinger, though equally flawed, would win the Nobel Peace Prize. But ugly accusations and the threat of indictment for war crimes would haunt him the remainder of his days.

Nineteen sixty-eight was one of the most extraordinary years of the century. Both the United States and the world crackled with energy. Change was in the air. A critical presidential election pitted Republican Richard Nixon against Democrat Hubert Humphrey, whose image was tarnished by years of obsequiously defending Johnson’s Vietnam policies as vice president. Stunningly, the segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace, running as a right-wing populist with retired General Curtis LeMay as his running mate, was polling 21 percent with barely a month to go before the election. His law-and-order message resonated with white voters concerned about ghetto rebellions, campus disruptions, and rising crime.

Postwar baby boomers had begun flooding college campuses in 1964. Imbued with youthful idealism inspired by the civil rights movement and dismissive of Cold War shibboleths, their protests swept the country. In April 1968, Columbia University students occupied several campus buildings to challenge the university’s treatment of the surrounding black community and its support for military research. Columbia President Grayson Kirk charged, “Our young people, in disturbing numbers, appear to reject all forms of authority… and they have taken refuge in a turbulent and inchoate nihilism whose sole objectives are destructive. I know of no time in our history when the gap between the generations has been wider or more potentially dangerous.”⁶

Kirk was right about the generation gap, but his charge of nihilism couldn’t have been farther from the truth. After eight days, New York police violently dragged the protesters from the buildings. Eight hundred were arrested and more than a hundred injured. Nixon called the protests “the first major skirmish in a revolutionary struggle to seize the universities of this country and transform them into sanctuaries for radicals and vehicles for revolutionary political and social goals.”⁷ The viciousness of the attack seemed to confirm radical students’ contention that when push came to shove, U.S. officials would employ violence against their own citizens as they did to defend U.S. corporate and geopolitical interests overseas in Vietnam and Indonesia.

^{Nixon and Kissinger walking on the White House south lawn. Privately contemptuous of each other, the two were as unlikely a pair as ever held high office. Their bold moves brought the world closer to peace. But they also ushered in cruel and vindictive policies that more than offset their achievements.}

Uprisings of students and young workers convulsed industrial nations around the globe. Massive demonstrations rocked Prague, Paris, Tokyo, West Berlin, Turin, Madrid, Rome, and Mexico City, where U.S.-equipped police and soldiers massacred hundreds of protesting students.

In the United States, antiwar forces mounted a challenge to the Democratic Party establishment, throwing their support to Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy. In June, Kennedy was assassinated minutes after his victory in the California primary, dashing hopes for a progressive alternative to Humphrey and his insipid “politics of joy.” In August, antiwar delegates and 10,000 protesters converged on the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. They were met by 12,000 Chicago police, 6,000 National Guardsmen, and 1,000 FBI agents. An additional 7,500 U.S. Army troops were deployed to patrol the black community. Television cameras showed club-wielding police indiscriminately attacking not only the protesters but also bystanders and the media in what a blue-ribbon commission later called a “police riot.”

By a stunning two-to-one margin, the public supported the police over the protesters. Nixon identified those Americans as the “silent majority” and rode their resentments into the White House, narrowly defeating Humphrey. The riot dashed Johnson’s hope that a deadlocked convention would turn to him at the last minute. He still kept a tight grip over convention proceedings, even blocking the moderate platform plank on Vietnam that Humphrey desperately needed. Clark Clifford called the platform defeat “a disaster for Humphrey.”⁸ Humphrey didn’t help his cause by waiting until late September to distance himself slightly from Johnson’s unpopular Vietnam policies. Nixon, on the other hand, insisted that he had a secret plan to end the war, refusing to divulge the details. In reality, this “plan,” as Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird admitted, amounted to little more than a strategy to pummel North Vietnam into submission.⁹