Nixon deserves more consideration than he usually gets.
Nixon’s problem is that he is an example of Shakespeare’s observation that the evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones.
Nixon was up to his ears in various forms of misconduct, notably Watergate, which probably reflect more about his personal paranoia and nastiness (as evidenced in his earlier incarnation as a McCarthyite Commie hunter) than his qualities as a president.
Nixon’s greatest achievement, which still benefits America and the wider world, was engaging with China. Which, oddly enough, began to bring to fruition Roosevelt’s oft expressed belief several decades earlier that China was the future and had to be nurtured by America and the rest of the world. Both Nixon and Roosevelt have been proved right by China’s emergence as the next great economic, and military and global, powerhouse. Which will dwarf America if things continue on their present path.
While there are many aspects of Nixon’s handling of the Vietnam war which can be criticised, if we get away from selected events and look at the general thrust of his policy and actions he succeeded in extricating America from Vietnam, which his predecessors had not managed to do, by a mixture of diplomacy and firm handling of North Vietnam and strong military responses when required.
I remember being in the audience of Hair (the musical, not the body fur although there was a bit of that around in the map of Tassie area in the parachute scene) in the early seventies when members of the cast ran through the audience with protest placards, one of which read ’Pull out Nixon. Like your father should have.’ It was bloody funny at the time, with its reference to Vietnam, and expressed a widely held sentiment. What we all failed to recognise at the time was that the Republican Nixon was the prime mover in getting us all out of that miserable conflict, which the sainted Democratic JFK had got us into.
And Nixon, unlike Kennedy who got America into it and Johnson who made it worse despite his best intentions, managed to resolve that conflict without bringing anyone to the brink of nuclear war (excluding his not very subtle threat to North Vietnam if they continued pissing about in their quaint Oriental fashion in the peace talks while pressing militarily at home). And he did it while engaging with China behind the scenes, which was one of North Vietnam’s two sponsors against America in Vietnam.
It’s worth noting that Nixon did all this by bypassing the State Department etc and using Kissinger as his emissary. These were the independent acts of a president in control pursuing his own vision, not the acts of a wobbly mouthpiece for a bloc of blind opinion like Dubya.
I think Carter tried to do the same as Nixon by imposing his independent view on American foreign policy but, because he was at heart a more or less good (to the extent that any politician is remotely ‘good’) man who lacked the nastiness to crunch those in his rear, he failed to impose his will on them and therefore failed to achieve his aims.
Nixon imposed his will on those in his rear. If he’d been more successful in doing it to all and sundry, and hadn’t been caught out doing the wrong thing in other areas, he could have gone down in history as the president who did the most to assure America’s future by getting out of Vietnam and engaging with China and, to a lesser extent, with the USSR. Instead of a dope like Reagan being credited with destroying communism through Star Wars when Nixon and Carter had laid the foundations for engagement with the already crumbling communist world by less aggressive and more productive steps.
