Nixon Reconsidered 8

I finished Joan Hoff's Nixon Reconsidered.  I have three items.

1.  I liked something that Hoff said on pages 344-345:

"...the parents of those born after 1974 either strongly opposed or supported Nixon for reasons their children still do not quite understand: 'My parents hate him,' one of my students responded on a questionnaire asking why she was taking a class on Nixon, 'and I want to know why.'"

Why did I like this passage?  I can't really say.  I guess it's because it warms my heart to see people wanting to learn more about the world around them, due to something in their background that they don't quite understand.

I was one of the people born after 1974.  What did my parents think about Richard Nixon?  My impression is that they neither hated him nor loved him.  They believed that he was a shady politician, but they didn't have high expectations about politicians, in general.

Although my parents didn't appear (at least to me) to have strong opinions about Nixon, there were a couple of times when they expressed an opinion about him.  When I was in the sixth grade, I was reading The Final Days, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.  The back cover quoted the New York Times saying about the book: "Unprecedented....Mr. Nixon emerges as a tragic figure weathering a catastrophic ordeal...and weathering it with considerable courage and dignity."  When I read that quote to my Mom, she responded that she felt that way about Nixon during Watergate.

My Dad one time told a story about a conversation that his father had with someone about Nixon.  A relative was really gun-ho about Nixon, saying that Nixon would be a great President, and my Grandpa retorted, "Nixon will be the last President, and, not only that, he will be the worst President."  My Dad in telling the story may have been implying that my Grandpa was not too far off the mark: while Nixon did not turn out to be our last President, Nixon's Presidency did end on a dismal note.

2.  On pages 345-346, Hoff talks about how Nixon during the 1990's was deemed by many to be authentic:
"He insisted on speaking out on issues, especially foreign policy ones; he looked like a real person, not a talking head, on television; he stood for something rather than nothing or everything, as is now the trendy postmodern fashion...Nixon's potential appeal by the early 1990s because of his own 'real' look was lost on him; he once said to me that 'blow-dry hair is now as important as brains' when running for office.  It is truly a postmodern moment when Richard Nixon, who had to deal with charges of inauthenticity all his public life, became more real and authentic than the totally packaged variety of contemporary politician."

Throughout Richard Nixon's political career, there were many who did not regard Nixon as particularly authentic.  With all of the "new Nixons" coming out, many wondered who the real Nixon was.  According to Hoff, however, Nixon during the 1990's was regarded by many as more authentic than most of the politicians who were on the scene.  I can attest to that, on some level.  I was watching a YouTube clip of David Frost's interview of Nixon, in which Nixon was responding to Frost's questions about Watergate.  One of the commenters said that she liked Nixon because he was comfortable with being who he was.  Granted, this clip was of an interview of Nixon from the late 1970's, not the 1990's.  But I could see the commenter's point.  I don't know if Nixon was telling the truth or not in the Frost interviews, but he did come across to me as authentic, as a real person.  I have the same impression whenever I watch Nixon's Checkers Speech from 1952----and this is a speech that detractors consider to be particularly inauthentic, with its staged den and Nixon's sappy reference to the family dog.  Many say that Nixon was uncomfortable in his own skin, and they may be right.  But there were a number of times when Nixon came across as authentic, as if he were conveying a message of "This is who I am, take it or leave it."

3.  For this third item, I'll offer my general assessments of Hoff's book.  Overall, the book has a lot about policy, and I had to reread parts to grasp what exactly Hoff was narrating.  The book is important, but it is very dry, in areas.  At the same time, I enjoyed Hoff's anecdotes about her interviews with Nixon.  In terms of her argument that President Nixon had significant and progressive accomplishments in domestic policy, she may be right about that, but I wish that she addressed certain liberal arguments against Nixon's domestic policy.  For example, a number of progressives were critical of Nixon's welfare reform plan of giving cash benefits to the poor, maintaining that the funding would not be adequate.  Hoff should have addressed that charge by saying whether or not the poor would have been able to live on the amount of money that Nixon's plan would give them.  Another point that I would like to make is that I found Hoff to be rather elliptical, in places.  She seemed to agree that the Joint Chiefs of Staff was bugging the National Security Council, for example, but I wanted her to go into more detail about why it would do this.

Good book, though!

Psalm 122

Psalm 122 is about going to Jerusalem, as well as desiring Jerusalem's prosperity and peace.  Last week, I shared songs about Psalm 121.  This week, allow me to share this song, which is about the first line of Psalm 122: "I was glad when they said to me, let us go into the house of the LORD" (KJV).

What I'd like to focus on in this post is Psalm 122:5: " For there are set thrones of judgment, the thrones of the house of David."  Patrick Miller in the HarperCollins Study Bible says the following: "Jerusalem is praised...as a place where just judgment may be found (cf. Deut 17.8-13; Isa 2.2-4; Mic 4.1-4)...See 1 Kings 7.7.  On the responsibility of kings for rendering justice and judgment in Jerusalem, see 2 Sam 15.1-6; 1 Kings 3.16-28; Jer 21.12; 22.15-16."

Miller cites a lot of passages there.  In Deuteronomy 17:8-13, the levitical priests are the ones at the central sanctuary who pass judgment in difficult cases.  In some of those other passages, however, such as Jeremiah 21:12 and 22:15-16, God appears to want the Davidic monarch to execute justice.

The reason that this whole issue stood out to me when I was reading and studying Psalm 122 was that I had recently listened to a podcast on I Kings.  The podcasts are done by Matthew Ryan Hauge and Craig Evan Anderson, both of whom have Ph.Ds.  They're excellent, in my opinion, for they go into I Kings in depth, explaining why people are acting as they are in the text.  In the podcast on I Kings 3:4-15, in which Solomon asks God for wisdom so that he could judge the people, one of the hosts was saying that Solomon here was trying to usurp power that did not belong to him.  The host noted that Deuteronomy 17:8-13 says that the levitical priests are to be the ones who are to judge, but here Solomon was, wanting to be the judge himself.  (UPDATE: Looney under my blogger post notes that Deuteronomy 17:9 mentions a judge who was not a Levite.  As I look again at Hauge and Evans' notes about their podcast, they, too, seem to acknowledge the existence of non-Levite judges.  Still, their argument appears to be that kings, according to Deuteronomy, were not the ones who were to judge.)

I think that the host is raising important issues, but I am not entirely convinced by his interpretation, for a variety of reasons.  For one, how do we know that either Solomon or the narrator of I Kings 3:4-15 was aware of the law in Deuteronomy 17:8-13?  My impression is that there are many scholars who date Deuteronomy later than King Solomon.  Moreover, while the Deuteronomist indeed added things to I Kings, my understanding (based on what a number of scholars have said) is that he did not write all of the narrative in I Kings himself.  Couldn't the part of the story about Solomon asking God for wisdom so that he could judge the people be prior to the time of the Deuteronomist?  If so, then maybe the narrator is not portraying Solomon as doing something wrong in wanting wisdom so that he could judge; rather, the narrator may assume that Solomon's request is reasonable, since kings in those days judged.

Second, God in I Kings 3:4-15 approved of Solomon's request for wisdom.  There is no indication in the text that Solomon was illegitimately seeking to usurp power that belonged to someone else.

Third, I do not know how Hauge and Anderson approach the diversity of Scripture----if they believe that the Bible contains different voices with different ideologies, or if they believe that all of the Bible is the viewpoint of God.  The thing is, the Hebrew Bible strikes me as rather diverse on the issue of who should judge.  Deuteronomy 17:8-13 says that the Levitical priests should, but there are other passages that are either okay with the Davidic king judging, or that encourage the Davidic king to do so.  How do we know that I Kings 3:4-15 is not one of the voices that presumes that the Davidic king should judge?

But things may be messier than I have implied so far in this post.  The reason is that, while Psalm 122 appears to be okay with the Davidic king judging, it appears to have been influenced by Deuteronomic thought.  Psalm 122:4 mentions giving thanks to the name of the LORD.  That is a Deuteronomic concept: that the house of God is a place where God has put God's name, not a home that God himself inhabits.  Psalm 122 may adopt some aspects of Deuteronomic ideology, but not other aspects.  Or could the Deuteronomistic School have changed its mind by coming to accept the role of the Davidic king as judge over Israel?

Nixon Reconsidered 7

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.

My Blog Is 6!

Today is my blog’s sixth birthday!  What I want to do in this post is to share with you my goals for this coming year of blogging, including my struggles over what some of my goals will be.

My plan is to continue My Year (or More) of Nixon until February 2014. I probably will not read all of the books that I planned to read.  I said on this blog, for example, that I was thinking of reading Theodore White’s books on the 1960, 1968, and 1972 Presidential elections, but that probably won’t happen.  I’m currently drawn more to some of the books about Nixon that are in my local library than I am to some of the books that are in my own personal library.  But I may get back to the latter after March 2014,  Essentially, I’ll be taking a break from My Year (or More) of Nixon in February-March 2014.  Then, I will decide whether to resume my reading of books about Nixon, or to move on to something else.

In February 2014, I will blog through two books for Black History Month.  One is John McWhorter’s Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America.  The other is Andrew Hacker’s Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal.  McWhorter’s book was recommended to me by a conservative who was essentially saying that racism was not a problem that was holding African-Americans back anymore, since there were many African-Americans who were doing quite well, and many who were not had themselves to blame. (I question whether McWhorter himself would go that far, however.)  Hacker’s book was recommended to me by an African-American who wanted to show me that racism indeed remained a problem in American society.

March 2014 will be Women’s History Month.  For that, I am planning to blog through two books.  The first is Christopher Byron’s Martha, Inc. which is a biography of Martha Stewart.  I’ve been wanting to read this book ever since I saw it in a bookstore over a decade ago.  I didn’t buy it at the time, but I saw it at a Goodwill years later and bought it then.  I got chills as I read the following line from the cover’s jacket: “Byron attends, through fly-on-the-wall sources, executive meetings with some of the most powerful individuals in American business to watch as they try to deal with a woman who emerged from nowhere to overpower them all.”  I would probably not buy stocks from Martha Stewart, but I respect her because she is a confident, powerful woman, who (according to Byron) apparently rose from obscurity.

The other book that I will read in March 2014 is Carl Bernstein’s A Woman in Charge, which is a biography of Hillary Clinton.  When I was a conservative, I disliked Hillary Clinton immensely (not that I knew her).  Now, I tend to admire her strength and her mind.  Bernstein’s book dates to 2007, so it won’t have anything about her 2008 run for the Presidency, or her time as Secretary of State.  But it may have interesting material about her life up to 2007, which would include her childhood and early life, and her time as First Lady and then United States Senator.

April 2014 will be National Autism Month.  I may blog through a book about Asperger’s for that, or I may not.

A lot of my posts this coming year of blogging will be about political history, or contemporary issues.  Will I still write about the Bible and religion?  Probably so.  I will continue my blog posts about the Book of Psalms until I am done with the Book.  As far as what I will do after that for my weekly quiet time posts is concerned, I’m thinking about that.  Maybe I’ll go on to Proverbs.  Maybe I’ll go on to I-II Chronicles, since I already have an Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture book that includes Chronicles.  Or I may do nothing, since there’s no guarantee that I will have the time.  Come to think of it, most of my plans for this blog that I am discussing are rather tentative.  But they’re what I hope to do.

I’ll still be blogging about my weekly church services.  On whether I will blog about my church’s Bible study, I am debating if I will even attend that.  I have problems with conservative evangelical Christianity, and so I wonder if I should go to my church’s Bible study, where people seem to (on some level) have that particular perspective.  Going to church with my aversion to conservative evangelical Christianity is one thing, but going to a Bible study group is another, since Bible study groups are smaller and more intimate.  I have been reading some of my past posts about my church’s Bible study, and I think that they’re good posts.  Sometimes, the best posts are the ones that we write when we are struggling with something!  But I’m questioning whether I even want to blog about my religious struggles to the extent that I have in the past.  I’ve blogged about a lot of them before, and I’m not sure that I have anything new to add.  Plus, maybe I just don’t want to think about my religious struggles, and would just prefer to enjoy my life.

I’d like to close this post by thanking those who read me.  I have readers who may not read every single post that I write, but they have been reading me for years, and I appreciate that.  I also welcome people who have started reading me.  This past year has been rather slow in terms of my blogs getting new followers, or my posts getting “likes.”  I’ve had previous years that were much more fruitful, at least in that area.  But I appreciate those who read me—-those who come to my blog looking for information, those who click “like,” those who comment, and those who don’t.  I disagree with a blogger who said that blogs that don’t include a space for comments are not true examples of blogging, for my own definition of blogging is simply having a blog and writing on it on a fairly regular basis, whether or not one is popular or interacts with a lot of readers.  But it’s nice to have readers.

On to year 7!

Nixon Reconsidered 6

In my blog post today about Joan Hoff's Nixon Reconsidered, I will talk about detente.  Detente literally means a "relaxing or easing of tensions between nations" (page 183).  Under President Richard Nixon, detente included agreements with the Soviet Union on arms control and trade, and also the linkage together of different issues so that the United States could encourage the Soviets to do what the U.S. wanted in exchange for the Soviets receiving certain benefits and concessions.

I have three items on detente.

1.  On page 183, Hoff states that Nixon aimed "to seek sufficiency rather than superiority" in arms-control deals (Hoff's words).  The United States would not try to be superior to the U.S.S.R. by having more weapons, in short, but the United States would take care to have enough weapons to do the job of protecting itself and of being able to retaliate if the U.S.S.R. attacked it (and the threat of retaliation would hopefully discourage the U.S.S.R. from attacking in the first place).  I've read that Ronald Reagan criticized detente because it was the United States negotiating itself into a position of being number-two behind the Soviet Union.  I wonder if Reagan there was expressing his problems with the "sufficiency rather than superiority" aspect of detente.

2.  As I said in my post here, the concept of linkage seems to me to be common sense: the U.S. tells the Soviets that it will agree to something that the Soviets want, if the Soviets agree to do something that the U.S. wants.  That sounds to me like negotiation!  But the linkage of different issues in U.S. negotiations with the Soviets was actually pretty controversial.  In my post here, I discussed and linked to a YouTube video of a 1988 Presidential debate among the Democratic primary candidates, and also the Republican ones.  In the Republican debate, Alexander Haig was criticizing Ronald Reagan's arms-control negotiations with Mikhail Gorbachev (which George Bush was defending) because they did not seem to have any linkage.  Meanwhile, other Republican candidates were critical of the U.S. dealing with the Soviet Union when the Soviets still had a poor human rights record and were helping to export Communism to other countries.  These Republican candidates may or may not have supported linkage, as Al Haig did, but they probably agreed that the U.S. should not just think about arms control when it was deliberating on how to deal with the Soviet Union, for the U.S. should also consider such issues as human rights and curbing Soviet interventionism.

Hoff herself does not seem to think that linkage worked.  She notes that Henry Kissinger was a major proponent of linkage, and I'm noticing a trend in Hoff's book that, in her eyes, most of what Henry Kissinger said and did was bad.  But what are her specific objections to linkage?  On page 158, Hoff states: "First and foremost, it never worked with respect to the Soviet Union in negotiations with Vietnam or the SALT I talks, and it made Nixinger policy look indifferent to Third World concerns, except insofar as they could be linked to relationships between major powers."  For Hoff (as I understand her), linkage did not enable the U.S. to get the Soviets to do everything that the U.S. wanted in the areas of Vietnam and SALT I, and, on some of the occasions when the Soviets did do what the U.S. wanted, it wasn't because of some convoluted linkage, but rather for other reasons.  I also want to say that Hoff's discussion of linkage and the Third World stood out to me because Nixon himself in some of his foreign policy books criticizes treating the Third World primarily as a battleground for the Cold War.  But Hoff's contention appears to be that Nixon as President did precisely that.

I may not be grasping the totality of the concept of linkage, or Hoff's arguments against it.  See the wikipedia article on linkage.  Something that the wikipedia article says (for what it's worth) is that "The Nixon-Kissinger approach did not link foreign and domestic arenas."  That would mean that human rights was not a part of linkage, at least not for Nixon and Kissinger----that the U.S. did not grant the Soviets advantages in (say) trade in exchange for an improved human rights record.  Still, Nixon in his memoirs does argue that the U.S. used its relationship with the Soviet Union to encourage it to allow Soviet Jews to leave the U.S.S.R.

3.  On pages 203-207, Hoff talks about the decline of detente.  Certain arms control agreements were slow in coming, and there was also concern that some of the arms control agreements already negotiated were disadvantageous to the U.S.  The Jackson-Vanik amendment to the Trade Reform Bill was challenging trade with the Soviet Union.  And a grain deal with the U.S.S.R. was resulting in an increase in domestic grain prices.  Later, President Jimmy Carter would emphasize human rights, specifically the provision about human rights of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, and that was "a bone of contention between the United States and the Soviet Union" (page 207).

Nixon Reconsidered 5

For my blog post today about Joan Hoff's Nixon Reconsidered, my topic will be the so-called "madman theory."

What's the "madman theory"?  According to Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman, in his book The Ends of Power, Nixon during the 1968 campaign mused about how he could end the Vietnam War as President by making the North Vietnamese think that he was a madman who could do anything, including drop the nuclear bomb.  The notion that Nixon held to a "madman theory" is widely accepted.

Hoff appears to be skeptical that Nixon embraced the "madman theory," however, and she lists the following considerations:

1.  Only Haldeman mentioned Nixon saying anything about it.  Nixon himself told Hoff that he didn't remember using the term in a conversation with Haldeman, and that he rarely discussed with Haldeman "substantive foreign policy matters" (Hoff's words on page 177).  Hoff also says that Nixon would have been imprudent to use the term "madman theory" in discussing his diplomacy, since Nixon called the anti-war protesters irrational.  Nixon did say, however, that, if he discussed the threat of "excessive force" in the Vietnam War, that had to do with Nixon using Kissinger as the "good messenger" (Nixon's terms) who would be a foil to Nixon's well-known anti-Communism.  That sounds to me like the substance of the madman theory----within a "good cop, bad cop" context----even if Nixon did not use the exact term.

2.  Hoff speculates that the term "madman theory" may go back to Henry Kissinger.  In 1959, Daniel Ellsberg delivered two lectures to Kissinger's Harvard seminar, and they were entitled "The Political Uses of Madness."  Ellsberg discussed how Adolf Hitler used "irrational military threats" (Ellsberg's words) in a political manner, and Ellsberg went on to criticize Hitler's strategy.  Hoff states that "there is some indication in even his earliest books that Kissinger accepted such an approach as diplomatically feasible," but that there is nothing in Kissinger's memoirs that indicates Kissinger's support for the "madman theory" (page 178).  According to Hoff, this is probably because Kissinger was trying to depict himself as a great negotiator.

3.  Hoff refers to an example of Kissinger encouraging the use of force, while Nixon was very hesitant.  "On April 15, 1969," Hoff narrates, "North Korea shot down a United States Navy EC-121 reconnaissance plane, killing all thirty-one men aboard" (page 173).  Contrary to what Kissinger would assert in White House Years, Hoff states, we can see in military documents that Nixon at first was all for "striking the North Korean airfield responsible for the attack on the American plane" (page 174).  But Nixon changed his mind on this, concluding that such an attack would be unfeasible, due to the dearth of enough U.S. planes and ships in the area, and the potential unwillingness of Japan and South Korea to serve as a base for the U.S. (since they wouldn't want to be involved in a conflict between the U.S. and North Korea).  Hoff states, "It would have taken up to a week to mount an effective air strike, with effective backup power, in case North Korea decided to deploy its 400 MIG jets" (page 175).

Kissinger, by contrast, supported an air-strike.  Kissinger did not believe that the North Koreans would attack back, plus he thought that an air-strike would show the Soviet Union, China, and North Vietnam that Nixon meant business.  Nixon in his memoirs says that Kissinger told him: "If we strike back, even though it's risky, they will say, 'this guy is becoming irrational----we'd better settle with him.'"  Kissinger was the one supporting the "madman theory" in this case, not Nixon, Hoff argues.

Hoff narrates that Kissinger during the Ford Administration would similarly "overreact."  In 1975, the Khmer Rouge "captured a U.S. merchant ship and its forty-man crew", and President Gerald Ford acted on Kissinger's advice by attacking Koh Tang, the island where the ship and crew were believed to be (page 176).  Kissinger supported this measure as a way to maintain the United States' worldwide prestige, after "sixty hours of negotiating had failed" (page 176).  But the attack ended up being a disaster.  Forty-one Americans died, fifty were wounded, and many Cambodians were killed on account of a bomb while they were evacuating.  Moreover, the Cambodian government released the crew prior to the U.S. attack, meaning the attack was useless.  Hoff states that the U.S. should have negotiated with Cambodia through the UN or neutral channels.

But let's return to the North Korea incident.  As I look in volume 1 of Nixon's memoirs, and I read Nixon's account of the North Korea incident, it seems to me that Nixon identified with Kissinger's motives for wanting the U.S. to attack North Korea, for Nixon himself was concerned about U.S. prestige abroad.  Nixon also narrates that he initially supported a retaliatory attack.  But Nixon says that he came to believe that an attack would not be feasible, and he states that Kissinger himself came around to backing off from his support for an attack.  Kissinger saw that (among Nixon's team) only Vice-President Agnew, Attorney General John Mitchell, and he supported an attack, whereas Secretary of State William Rogers, Secretary of Defense Mel Laird, and most of the other top national security people opposed it.  (It's interesting to me that Agnew and Rogers were involved in these discussions, since there were many times that they were marginalized or kept outside of the loop.)  According to Nixon, Kissinger concluded that "we could ill afford a Cabinet insurrection at such an early date in the administration", and also that "congressional and public opinion were not ready for the shock of a strong retaliation against the Communists in North Korea" (page 475).  Nixon agreed to a plan of continuing intelligence flights, while backing them up with "fighter escort," and also of launching another round of attacks on North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia, just to show North Vietnam (and North Korea) that the U.S. still meant business.  Nixon also expresses a sense, based on intelligent reports, that what North Korea did was an isolated occurrence.

I've not yet read the entirety of Henry Kissinger's White House Years, but his account of the EC-121 incident is on pages 315-321.  Essentially, Kissinger portrays Nixon as failing to act decisively and to demonstrate solid leadership during this crisis, which occurred so early in Richard Nixon's Presidency.  Rather, according to Kissinger, Nixon was dithering and was considering options.  Kissinger admits that he himself (meaning Kissinger) "favored some retaliatory act, but was less clear about what it might be" (page 317).  Kissinger also sees Nixon's point that "we could certainly not sustain a prolonged ground war" if North Korea responded (Kissinger's words, page 319), but Kissinger says that he did not believe that North Korea would escalate the situation if the U.S. retaliated.  Like Nixon in his memoirs, Kissinger narrates that he (meaning Kissinger) ultimately backed off from supporting retaliation because there was "no Congressional support" for it, plus Nixon's team was divided.  Kissinger states on page 320: "I never had had an impression that Nixon had his heart in a retaliatory attack.  He had procrastinated too much; he had not really pressed for it in personal conversation; he had not engaged in the relentless maneuvering by which he bypassed opposition when his mind was made up."

While Hoff disputes elements of Kissinger's account of the EC-121 incident, what is interesting to me is that Kissinger's account appears to be more consistent with Hoff's portrayal of Nixon than Nixon's own account of it in his memoirs, even though Hoff does not appear to be a huge fan of Kissinger (or such is my impression----she seems to portray Kissinger as a glory hog who could offer some pretty bad advice and whose accounts are not always trustworthy).  Kissinger depicts Nixon as someone whose heart wasn't into retaliation, which is consistent with Hoff's contention that Nixon was not a supporter of the "madman theory."  Nixon, however, seems to be implying that he would have supported bombing North Korea to secure America's reputation, but he did not deem it to be feasible at the time.  Circumstances were holding him back, in short!

Nixon Reconsidered 4

I have three items for my blog post today about Joan Hoff's Nixon Reconsidered.

1. On page 109, Hoff says the following about Nixon's stance on equal rights for women:

"Nixon told me in 1983 that his family (his wife and two daughters) favored the ERA, but he had come to believe after 1963 that the Equal Pay Act would achieve equality for women----apparently not realizing that this legislation could never end the pay differential between women and men or the sex-segregated nature of the U.S. labor force.  This view may have had validity in 1969 when Nixon came into office, but he argued the point with me as though twenty years had not passed and proved him (and many others, including Democratic women who had supported the Equal Pay Act) wrong.  Nonetheless, he correctly asserted that effective application of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act could serve the same purpose for women as passage of the ERA.  Nixon admitted to me, however, that as president he had not done as much for women as he would have liked."

This paragraph exemplifies that Hoff's intention in Nixon Reconsidered is not to whitewash Nixon's record on domestic policies, although she does believe that Nixon as President had a number of significant progressive domestic policy accomplishments.  Hoff is open about what she considers to be strengths and weaknesses in Nixon's record.  For example, Hoff acknowledges that there were weaknesses in Nixon's policies regarding women.  Hoff also discusses the sexist attitudes of Nixon and some of his staff, as well as Nixon's tepid support for the Equal Rights Amendment as President.  At the same time, Hoff notes accomplishments that Nixon made in terms of fighting gender discrimination, and she also appears to give Nixon the benefit of a doubt, in some cases.  On page 104, Hoff says that Nixon questioned the value of recruiting women for government positions, as Nixon expressed doubt that this would get him more female votes.  Hoff states: "Rather than being a totally negative comment simply rationalizing the president's reluctance to appoint women, it could have been, suggested the columnist Tom Wicker, a 'hard political calculation; or it conceivably was a view somewhat ahead of its time that women generally wanted effective measures against sex discrimination rather than the highly visible 'token' jobs in government for a select few.'"

What I liked about the paragraph on page 109 is that it highlighted two aspects of Nixon.  On the one hand, Nixon was making the same arguments in 1983 about the Equal Pay Act that he had made back when he was President, even though (according to Hoff) subsequent events had proven him wrong.  On the other hand, Nixon acknowledged to Hoff that his record as President on equality for women was inadequate, that he himself was not completely satisfied with his record on this issue.  Many of us would like to think that we accomplished something good, and we try to justify our decisions; yet, since none of us is perfect, we can also look back and reflect that we could have done more.  Self-justification and regret seem to co-exist in a lot of people!  Personally, I find it refreshing when an ex-President looks back at his time in office and shares his regrets: what he wished he accomplished but didn't, what he did wrong, what he could have done better, etc.  It makes the ex-President look more human, which contrasts with how politicians continually try to spin to make themselves look flawless.

2.  On pages 149-150, Hoff talks about how Henry Kissinger did not expect for his working relationship with Richard Nixon to last, and yet the two managed to bond over shared characteristics:

"On the surface Nixon and Kissinger----an American Quaker and a German-American Jew----appear to have been the odd couple of U.S. foreign policy.  Given his long personal and professional association with the Rockefeller family and his blunt criticisms of Nixon, Kissinger apparently did not think he would last even six months in the new Nixon administration.  Yet when these two men came together in 1968, they actually shared many viewpoints and had developed similar operational styles.  Both relished covert activity and liked making unilateral decisions; both distrusted bureaucracies; both resented any attempt by Congress to interfere with initiatives; and both agreed that the United States could impose order and stability on the world only if the White House controlled policy by appearing conciliatory but acting tough.  While neither had headed any complex organization, both thought 'personalized executive control' and formal application of procedures would lead to success.  Even more coincidental, perhaps, each had a history of failure and rejection, which made them susceptible to devising ways of protecting themselves and their positions of power.  Often their concern for protection appeared as obsession with eavesdropping, whether wiretaps or reconnaissance flights.  They even eavesdropped on themselves: Nixon by installing an automatic taping system in the White House, Kissinger by having some of his meetings and all of his phone conversations taped or transcribed from notes.  In a word, instead of compensating for each other's weaknesses and enhancing strengths, Nixon and Kissinger shared their worst characteristics."

Hoff goes into more detail about the relationship between Nixon and Kissinger.  It was quite stormy, in areas!  Nixon thought at one time that Kissinger needed psychiatric help, and Nixon often tried to hinder Kissinger from taking credit for foreign policy moves.  And Kissinger actually was trying to upstage Nixon (according to Hoff), and also badmouthed Nixon to others after the Nixon Presidency.  Meanwhile, as Hoff notes, Nixon in his memoirs was quite mellow in talking about Kissinger.  Overall, from what I have read in books about (and even by) Nixon, there were intense personality conflicts among Nixon's staff.  I doubt it's an Administration in which I would have wanted to work, at least in the inner-circle!

Moreover, Hoff notes that prominent Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman thought that Nixon and Kissinger actually did compensate for each other's weaknesses: that Nixon did well in crisis but poorly when things were going well, whereas Kissinger tended to stress out in crises, while handling the good times rather adeptly rather than botching things up.

Whatever their conflicts, Nixon and Kissinger did have a long-standing relationship in the area of foreign policy, particularly during Nixon's Presidency.  I recall Stephen Ambrose telling the story in his biography of Nixon of when Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi visited Nixon and Kissinger during a conflict between India and Pakistan, and she noted that Nixon was continually saying, "Isn't that right, Henry?"

I like stories in which people whom one would not expect to get along actually do end up forming a fairly successful relationship----whether that be a working or a personal relationship.

3.  On pages 163-164, Hoff talks about Nixon's Secretary of Defense, Mel Laird, who had a reputation as a hawk during his time in the 1960's as a Congressman, but who as Secretary of Defense was much more moderate.  As Secretary of Defense, Hoff says, Laird pushed for the end of the draft, the replacement of American troops in Vietnam with South Vietnamese troops (Vietnamization), and the withdrawal of American troops "faster than the Pentagon thought the South Vietnamese forced could be trained to replace them..."  Laird also questioned extending the war into Laos and Cambodia.  Hoff says that, "unlike Nixon and Kissinger, Laird was more interested in ending the war in Vietnam than in winning it."  All this, "Despite cartoons depicting Laird's bald head in the shape of a missile, bomb, or bullet..."

In addition to liking opposites-attract stories, I also enjoy stories in which a person acts differently than people perceive him.  I think of the movie, Separate But Equal, which was about a companion case to the Brown vs. the Board of Education Supreme Court decision banning racial segregation in public schools.  In that movie, the side that is challenging segregation is afraid when Earl Warren becomes the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, for it learns that Warren as California Attorney General was a major force behind putting Japanese-Americans into internment camps during World War II.  But Warren surprised the anti-segregation side.  Not only did Warren come to support desegregation, but he also attempted to persuade the other justices to support it so that the court could make a firm statement.

The way that the movie depicts the situation, Warren's eyes were opened to the realities of racial discrimination after he had become Chief Justice, and he saw that his African-American driver was sleeping in his car one night because no hotel or motel would accept him.  Maybe this is true, and maybe it is not.  Still, Warren probably did surprise people when he fought for desegregation.

Why Laird changed his mind, I have no idea.  Perhaps he learned more.  Maybe he just got to the point where he wanted the war to end, and he didn't believe that hawkish measures were working.  I've read Republicans who make fun of how the liberal establishment says that Republican politicians who end up supporting liberal measures have demonstrated "growth" since their time in office.  Personally, I think it's great when people change with new information and exposure to real life----whether that change be from left to right, or from right to left, or from one of these extremes towards the middle.  All sorts of people can move from shallow positions to positions of depth.

Coming back to the issue of regrets, I'd like to quote what Earl Warren said in his 1977 memoirs about his support for Japanese internment camps during World War II (see here): I "since deeply regretted the removal order and my own testimony advocating it, because it was not in keeping with our American concept of freedom and the rights of citizens...Whenever I thought of the innocent little children who were torn from home, school friends, and congenial surroundings, I was conscience-stricken...[i]t was wrong to react so impulsively, without positive evidence of disloyalty..."