They read Chinese behavior as consonant with the Soviets; it took time for them to see how deep that divide was. The Chinese government funded infrastructure projects, offered medical aid, and made a strong public-relations push to present itself as being in solidarity with oppressed nations around the world fighting white colonial governments or leaders aligned with them.
The United States, in the meantime, was focused on fighting communism, which in practice meant supporting white-minority or colonial governments in Africa—including, most notably, the apartheid government in South Africa.
As independent African nations were emerging, and American priorities aligned the U. While America was trying to reconcile its own contradictions, the Soviet Union and China were eagerly exploiting them through propaganda, as American segregationists and their political enablers loudly denounced the civil-rights movement as a communist conspiracy.
It may seem a strange irony that self-styled champions of individual liberty like Nixon, Reagan, and Barry Goldwater consistently backed white-minority governments in Africa.
That support was inconsistent with a belief in the fundamental democratic rights of all human beings, which all of them espoused. But it was consistent with the belief that black people could not govern themselves, whether in South Carolina or South Africa.
Just like Greeley during Reconstruction, Nixon and Reagan saw the struggles African nations faced emerging from colonialism as symptoms of black inferiority. Kennedy hoped to win black votes despite his tepid civil-rights record by supporting the independence of African nations. Dudziak cites Dean Rusk, the secretary of state under Kennedy, recalling an incident in which a black diplomat was forced to eat outside an airport restaurant where all the white passengers were eating, during a layover in Miami.
But racism often involves assuming that people different from you could not possibly be as logical or rational as you; it was easier for some American leaders to dismiss Africans as backward than to try to understand the role U.
The conversation between Nixon and Reagan records sentiments that, before Donald Trump, presidents typically expressed in private. But it also shows that racist presidents can be restrained by Americans committed to equality under the law. And when it was finally sprung, it was sprung as quite a surprise.
But it was simply part of his own strategic vision to do this. And in respect of the Nixon-Kissinger relationship, that was an extraordinarily productive relationship. They both were strategic thinkers, first class strategic thinkers. And they both had the same sort of strategic vision. And Henry put together a first rate staff. He drove them brutally.
And I would not have worked for him. But he got terrific work out of them. And Nixon had the courage to take the heat for the unpopular things, while Henry took the credit for the popular ones. But Henry, with his staff, and the high degree of professionalism that they brought to this whole strategic project globally was a key to our success. Also, just while I think of it, David just mentioned his problem as a loser coming up for nomination.
That loser image was the reason why, in , he decided that the only way he would get the nomination would be to enter all the major contested primaries, which he did, and he won them all.
And that made it very difficult for the people he had defeated to call him a loser. That is, is corruption endemic to the office? Does the tale of the American presidency in the modern period tell us that our presidents have clay feet? That they have misused and even abused the power of the executive branch?
Was Richard Nixon a product of a series of trends in the concentration of power in the White House? I mean I think that the folks on Clinton actually underscores the magnitude and uniqueness of what Nixon did. The Lewinsky affair was not good for Richard Nixon. It was actually not so bad for Bill Clinton in the end.
He survived it with very high ratings and left office as the most popular president since Franklin Roosevelt. There is sort of this reassertion of Nixonian political style. But I think when we get further and further away from Watergate, it looks not less important but more important. And Nixon himself actually admitted this in a book that Monica Crowley, his assistant toward the end of his life, published of her conversations with him.
And that is, we can turn American political history into a morality play in the later 20 th century, and we can have a cast of characters and say these are evil and these are good.
It may be difficult to cast the latter group. And reduce it all to that. The substance of Nixon, with all of the good and bad, the pros and the cons, it would seem to me deserves, somehow, to be penetrated beyond the Watergate tale.
That there were many sides of Nixon, many Nixons, that were real. That have legitimacy. Yes, we can take away the kind of easy moral judgments and the cartoon character stuff, I agree with that. But what drove Nixon? Again, not just the Watergate break in, but from the start of-- Very early on in his administration, he and Kissinger were wire tapping reporters and their subordinates to find out about leaks.
There was a siege mentality which, I think both Ray and David have described well, was very much a product of real facts on the ground in the s, but was also the product of Richard Nixon and the way he saw the world. And so I think the deeper you go into the real person and substance of Richard Nixon, you find what is in a sense Watergate, metaphorically.
And I guess Ray, you were there. How do we weigh Watergate in assessing the Nixon presidency? To what extent do you see it as a product of the man, and to what extent are you persuaded, and I suspect that you are, that the presidency in some way transcends its least attractive moment?
But I also take a somewhat different view of all the Watergate things, I think, than David does, having myself lived through that. I wrote all the Watergate speeches, worked with our lawyers on it.
I was deeply involved with our handling of it. I was not involved in any of the Watergate stuff, but having done that and then having, in the course of writing my own book on the Nixon years, tried to dig back in to find out what I could about the facts behind the headlines.
I still remember a time during the height of the Watergate frenzy when we were out in San Clemente, and Rose Mary Woods, his longtime secretary who was a close friend of mine, and once sitting with her on the deck of the house she was staying in there. When the phone rang and she went in to get the call and came back, and turned out it had been Jimmy Roosevelt calling. Not about what Nixon had done, not about what his colleagues in the House were doing, his Democratic colleagues in the House, he being a Democratic Congressman.
Saying everything they even accused Nixon of, Father did twice as much of! Presidents are very extraordinary people. Ask yourself. One in 50 million? We are talking about what drives Nixon. But I think that the personal side of it I think we can now discount. In the Nixon case, I would say that when illegalities came to light, and a presidential rule could be legally established, he had no recourse but to step down.
Presidents have cut corners. But when that becomes unmistakable, and the system is asked to accept that or to act on it, he understands that he has to leave, and there is no way he can serve. And so he does resign. The last thing that we want to do is revise our standards. We were both around a lot in that period, Ray, and I think that he looked at this profoundly hoping that he could get away with it.
But I think that he was also prepared as a lawyer and somebody who respected the institution of the presidency. If charges as alleged or whatever were in fact tied to him, then he could no longer serve, and when that became irrefutable, he did step down.
What it does is it re-establishes standards. It re-establishes standards, and I think the Jimmy Roosevelt anecdote is something that…. You know, beginning in , we had a concept of the presidency as a kind of a infallible individual.
We lived in a chronic state of emergency from until the Watergate period. We are going to merge out of this era of emergency into a kind of a post- Cold War. They all did. And I think, however, this is not a standard. It was justified under certain circumstances, as justified by exceptional circumstances. Carry that on into the post-war. In no way do we sit here and say, well, we can respect the achievements.
We can agree that he will never be forgotten. I guess the question really is what has happened in American society in the post-Watergate years to our view of the presidency? It seems to me that Watergate indeed did have a tremendous impact on the level of respect that Americans have had, and this kind of cynicism that many Americans have harbored about American public life and about the presidency since then.
If you were to remove the Vietnam era from those attitudes, if you were to remove the Vietnam War from that, the Nixon impeachment would be, as you say, this would be an event. It would in no way affect attitudes in my opinion. It was lost as we entered in , according to McMaster and Dereliction of Duty.
We nonetheless sustained it for 10 years at horrible domestic cost. That is what it counts for. The red state, blue state divide as a kind of echo of the Vietnam era today, and as the polarization of American politics, which is a kind of legacy of that war, which I think counts for the real what you would call cynicism.
Ray compared the s and the s. Try two elections out. Try this one out. Look at the election in , which is 40 years after the American Civil War. Look at Teddy Roosevelt versus Alton Parker in that election.
It is a perfect replay of the American Civil War. There is not a county out of place. What you have 40 years later is an echo of an earlier conflict. North versus South. If you look at the election, you have a perfect echo of the breakage over the Vietnam era. Almost perfect. In the Vietnam era. Are there any stakes in Vietnam?
Is this a war worth fighting? And we were divided over that. But I think there is sometimes a temptation to reduce Watergate only to the expression of cultural turmoil of the sixties. And although it was certainly a product of that, as well as a product of the growing powers of the imperial presidency that date back to FDR, if not Teddy Roosevelt. Nonetheless, a useful thought experiment is how would a different president, Dwight Eisenhower for example, have handled Watergate, had some of the crimes come to his knowledge as President?
Or Jimmy Carter, or Teddy Roosevelt. To think about, would they have handled it as Richard Nixon did, and would the outcome have been the same? I think the answer we would all arrive at is no, and that does show you that the individual in the office and his own psychological predilections, political concerns, personal concerns, do very much make themselves felt on the body politic, and so the personal role of Nixon has to be kept front and center, even though yes, of course, both the culture, the culture wars of the sixties and Vietnam, and the imperial presidency are also a very important part of the story.
Are they moved by their circumstances to act in particular ways, and are they defined by their historical moment? Or do they define the moment? The time is now here when we can entertain your questions. I think the format is to come forward to the microphone. If you could identify yourself… And let me, before we do that, interject that there are a lot of people here tonight.
I assume there are many questions. Ask a question, make it short, and if you could identify to whom your question is directed, so much the better. And actually I had a question for Mr. You said something that sort of raised a brow with me. You said something about restoring civilization in America, and I wanted to elaborate a little more on restoring civilization in America during the time that you referred to the number of riots.
How would he view our relationship with China today? Would he be happy with that, or would he refuse to buy the Chinese toys? The cities around the country have been just mass-- some were race riots, some were just plain left wing riots. When that was seized, they found it really was a whole bomb factory. Just for example, one of the many marches on Washington, the mobs were storming, they were smashing windows, dragging cars out on the street, throwing bedsprings from overpasses into the path of traffic.
We had to ring the entire White House complex with busses to keep the mobs from storming the White House. This was the kind of stuff we had to deal with, and when I say getting back to civilization, I mean getting away from this and getting back to where people talk with one another. And rising China, which is a phenomenon that we face today, is something that he anticipated and would have encouraged.
And the idea that the Chinese economy, a billion gross terms, be the same size as the American economy in what, 20 years?
In fact, my wife and I have been to China together twice. We went in during the dying embers of the Cold War or the Cultural Revolution. These have been great years. How can our political system be so divided and our people so united? And what were our obligations as Americans in that period? How did we line up on it? What do we see as coming of it? Was it worth it? I have a brief comment and then a question. I think Mr. I wonder if the panelists could speak to Mr. Thank you. Obviously that coup was, and remains, greatly controversial.
To Mr. And as David said about cutting corners to reach a goal. That was somewhat accepted. But was there somewhat a motivation to get us out of there? Successive releases have only made his culpability clearer. Courage, boldness, guts! Goddamn it! That is the thing…. In domestic policy, he established the Environmental Protection Agency and administered the court-ordered desegregation of Southern schools.
In foreign policy, he pursued nuclear arms control with the Soviet Union and, of course, opened a strategic relationship with communist China. Knock off a few villages and hamlets. And, surely without intending to, Nixon helped make the threat of impeachment a recurring feature of congressional debate. In , Clinton was impeached and acquitted over his attempt to cover up his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky.
And legislators have called for the impeachment at various times of both presidents George W. Bush Bill Clinton George W. Help inform the discussion Support the Miller Center. University of Virginia Miller Center. Richard Nixon: Impact and Legacy.
Breadcrumb U. Richard Nixon Essays Life in Brief. Life Before the Presidency. Campaigns and Elections. Domestic Affairs. Foreign Affairs. Life After the Presidency. Family Life.
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