I have two items for my blog post today about Joan Hoff's Nixon Reconsidered.
1.
My first item will concern whether the United States should intervene
in other countries. Hoff has a section in her book, "THIRD WORLD
MISTAKES", in which she is quite critical of how President Richard Nixon
approached the Third World. Overall, she seems to be arguing, he saw
it through the prism of the Cold War. Hoff discusses the Nixon
Administration's treatment of Chile, which was headed by the Marxist
President Salvador Allende, who would be overthrown in a coup. While
Hoff does not believe that there is evidence that the CIA or Nixon
Administration "played any direct role in the assassination of President
Salvador Allende," she does acknowledge that they "did everything
possible to destabilize his government" (page 249), by funding Allende's
political opponents, for example. One who was opposed to such features
of President Nixon's foreign policy was Secretary of State William
Rogers, who would later say that the U.S. giving contributions to
foreign elections is a bad idea. One reason, according to Rogers, was
that the U.S. doesn't get its "money's worth" in doing so. Second,
Rogers said, it is embarrassing to the countries and undermines their
trust in the U.S. And third, it contradicts the U.S.'s rhetoric about
non-intervention and allowing "countries to determine their own future"
(Rogers' words on page 251). Some have characterized Rogers as not particularly bright, but I do
believe that his critique of the Nixon Administration's policy in Chile
is quite insightful. I can still see Nixon's perspective----that the
Soviets were backing the leftists in Chile, that the U.S. did not want a
major Communist power in South America, and that thus the U.S. had to support Allende's opponents. Still, in my opinion, Rogers does well to highlight downfalls to U.S. intervention in other countries' political systems.
Hoff herself appears to pursue a
rather isolationist route at the end of her chapter on the Vietnam War
(even though I seriously doubt that she and Rogers were complete
isolationists). She essentially says that the U.S. government and
military officials should apologize for the Vietnam War. She blames the
South Vietnamese, "not the dove-inspired constraints on the U.S.
military", for losing the war (page 242). While Hoff defends Nixon
against a number of charges that she considers to be unfounded and
unfair, she still apparently retains the opposition to the Vietnam War
that she had when she was a New Leftist.
Hoff sometimes seems to
praise Richard Nixon's foreign policy, as when she says that detente may
deserve some credit for the end of the Cold War. But, overall, she
does not have too many kind words for Nixon's foreign policy. As I said
in my post yesterday, she is critical of the "linkage" element of
detente, in which Nixon and Henry Kissinger would link together
different issues in dealing with the Soviets, offering concessions in
some areas if the Soviets would do what the U.S. wanted in other areas.
Her chapter about the Vietnam War is entitled "VIETNAM: WITHOUT PEACE
OR HONOR". She's against how Nixon approached the Third World. What
exactly does she favor in President Richard Nixon's foreign policy? She
says that his rapprochement with Red China was an accomplishment, but
here, her applause strikes me as rather tepid. One goal behind the
rapprochement was to give the U.S. leverage in its relationship with the
Soviet Union, and my impression is that Hoff does not believe that it
did that. Hoff's praises of Nixon's domestic policies are quite
pronounced, by contrast. She does note flaws in some of them, such as
Nixon allowing the dollar to float, and Nixon believing that the Equal
Pay Act could actually bring about equal pay for men and women in the
workplace. But she also believes that Nixon accomplished a significant
amount of good in such areas as civil rights, the environment, and the
U.S. Government's treatment of Native Americans, and that his proposal
to reform welfare was quite groundbreaking. I don't find that same
level of respect in Hoff's book for Nixon's foreign policies.
2. In my post here,
I refer to Stephen Ambrose's claim that Nixon's desire for information
about Democratic National Committee chairman Larry O'Brien could have
contributed to the atmosphere that led to the break-in at the DNC's
headquarters at the Watergate hotel. Ambrose is not the only one who
posits this, for many believe that the burglars were looking for
information about O'Brien. But Hoff does not buy this explanation for
the break-in, and her reason is that "the Watergate burglars did not
initially bug, nor were they subsequently caught in, O'Brien's office"
(page 305). Hoff goes into other motivations for the break-in that have
been proposed, but she appears to be open to the controversial argument
in the book, Silent Coup, by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin,
that the break-in was an attempt to find information about a
prostitution ring that was servicing Democratic and Republican
politicians. I'm not sure if, or to what extent, she buys into the
aspect of Silent Coup's argument for which John Dean sued its
authors for libel: the argument that John Dean was somehow involved in
ordering the break-in and trying to cover things up, since (according to
the authors) Dean's wife was connected with someone who was prominent
in the prostitution ring. Hoff does, however, say on page 311 that Silent Coup
"has surpassed other books about the origins of Watergate" and also
"attempts to resolve factual contradictions in the testimony of all the
participants about the break-ins and cover-up" (page 311).
David Greenberg in Nixon's Shadow said that Hoff essentially provided scholarly cover for Silent Coup. There are many who may feel that Silent Coup
was a book with a crackpot theory that several Nixon apologists
desperately tried to grab onto, perhaps to make Dean a scapegoat for
Watergate. I don't know enough about Watergate to comment. But I do
have to respect Hoff's humble tone in praising Silent Coup, as
when she notes that the book attempts to resolve contradictions in
testimonies. There's not a whole lot of pretense in her liking the book
for that reason.