A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (145 page)

Farmers watched in horror as EPA agents, often dressed in black with firearms, sealed off their land or seized their equipment for threatening “wildlife preserves,” otherwise known as rancid ponds. Restrictions on killing predators in the West grew so oppressive that ranchers engaged in the shoot-and-shovel approach, where they simply killed coyotes or wolves and buried the bodies. By the 1990s, a Florida man was sent to prison for two years after placing clean sand on his own lot; a Michigan man was jailed for dumping dirt on his property (because his wife had asthma); and an Oregon school district was taken to court for dumping sand on a baseball field. Land that was dry 350 of 365 days a year could be designated by the EPA as a “wetland”! The government claimed
private
land as small as 20 feet by 20 feet as a sanctuary for passing birds—or, as one wag called them, glancing geese. These and numerous other excessive and outrageous practices by the EPA and related land and environmental agencies went far beyond Teddy Roosevelt’s goal of conserving wildlife and nature and bordered on elevating animals to human status.
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Such an approach was not surprising. A linchpin of the modern environmental movement, made popular in a 1968 book by biologist Paul Ehrlich,
The Population Bomb
, was the notion that people were reproducing far too rapidly and would soon create such environmental and population problems that the seas would dry up and “millions” would starve when the agricultural sector could not keep up.
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“The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” he intoned: “In the 1970s and 1980s
hundreds of millions of people
will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
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Malthus eventually repented of such preposterous views after he had written them. Almost two hundred years later, events proved Ehrlich’s theories as wrong as flat-earth theories.
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The United States—and the world, for that matter—continued to increase food production per capita, both on average and on every continent. Indeed, with very few exceptions, almost every twentieth-century famine was politically induced.
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At the time Ehrlich predicted the deaths of “hundreds of millions,” an Iowan named Norman Borlaug, who had grown up in the Depression-era Dust Bowl, concluded from observing dry midwestern fields that the problem was the lack of technology, not the application of it.
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Borlaug engineered new strains of wheat, which expanded food production in sub-Saharan Africa, one of the slowest food-growing regions of the world. Not only did Borlaug’s efforts produce more food overall, but his techniques increased production per acre.

Of more immediate impact on the Nixon-era economy was the environmental movement’s attack on the automobile. Seeking to drastically cut back auto emissions, the EPA planned widespread new controls to “rein in” Detroit. Exhaust gases in the atmosphere, by then called smog, which included less visible but possibly more dangerous elements, had become an obvious problem in many cities, especially Los Angeles. The problem arose from the “tragedy of the commons,” wherein it was in the individual interest of people to pollute, but in no one’s individual interest to spend money for expensive pollution equipment on a car. Rather than provide tax incentives or other indirect methods to encourage people to move, on their own, to less polluting vehicles, the government used brute force. Even for those convinced that the government needed to act, the emphasis should have been on having the government set a standard—as it does with the department of weights and measures—and allowing Detroit to meet it by whichever means it found most effective or profitable. Instead, the EPA quickly drifted into determining which technologies cars “should” use. Without doubt, the air was cleaned up within twenty years, but other aspects of American life suffered dramatically as Americans saw taxes for the growing bureaucracy increase while their choices shrank, and there is no evidence that the same results could not have been achieved through market-oriented methods.

Similar measures passed by the 1968–74 congresses included the Occupational Health and Safety Act (administered by OSHA, the Occupational and Safety Health Administration), the Toxic Substances Control Act, and a series of clean air and pure food and drug acts. By 1976, businesses estimated that it cost $63 billion per year to comply with this legislation—money that ultimately did not come from the “evil corporations,” but from (often low-income) consumers who paid higher and higher prices. At the same time, productivity fell. The Coal Mine Health and Safety Act reduced coal production by 32 percent. “Good,” shouted the environmentalists, but it made America more dependent on foreign fuels. Worse, unemployment soared in states where federal pollution mandates forced vast new expenditures on scrubbers and other pollution-control devices.

Not only did Nixon fail to resist any of these measures, he embraced them, accelerating the growth of government on his own, even when legislation was not foisted on him. The White House staff, which before Kennedy consisted of 23, rose to 1,664 by the time of his assassination, then leaped to 5,395 by 1971.
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Expanding government across a wide range of activities by maintaining the Great Society social programs and the space race, and adding the requirements of Vietnam and the cold war on top of all the new costs of the EPA and other legislation, had made Washington’s debts such a drag on the economy that it had to slow down, if not collapse. The first sign that something was seriously wrong was inflation and its related effect, the declining value of the dollar abroad. Europeans, especially, did not want to hold dollars that had steadily lost their value. If the U.S. government could not control its appetites, then the international banking system—headed by American banks—could and did.

The postwar financial structure, created under the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, called for foreign currencies to be pegged to the dollar—the international medium of exchange—and for the dollar to be held relatively constant to gold (at about $35 per ounce). A stable dollar was achieved through balanced budgets and fiscal restraint in the United States. Once the Great Society programs had kicked in, however, balancing the budget—especially under Nixon’s Keynesian structure—was nearly impossible. Every new deficit seemed to call for new taxes, which, in turn, forced productivity and employment downward, generating more deficits. Eventually, Nixon severed the link to gold, and although many conservative economists howled, he had actually unwittingly foisted the dollar into an arena of international competition that imposed discipline on the U.S. Congress that it could never achieve itself. Within a decade, as electronic money transfers became common, the free-floating currency markets reacted swiftly and viciously against any government that spent money too freely. Nixon’s paradoxical legacy was that he helped kill Keynesian economics in the United States for good.

The End of Vietnamization

“Peace with honor” had characterized Nixon’s approach to getting the United States out of Vietnam. Along with his national security adviser, Harvard professor Henry Kissinger, Nixon had sought to combine a carrot-and-stick approach to dealing with Hanoi. The “carrot” negotiations involved continuing talks in Paris to get the North Vietnamese out of the South. After Tet, with the elimination of most of the VC armies, this would have amounted to a victory for the South. But Hanoi did not want any genuine negotiations and had stalled, hoping to run out the clock on the patience of the American public. Kissinger’s “stick” included an accelerated bombing of the North combined with an immense resupply of the Vietnamese army, known as Vietnamization.

In reality, Vietnamization returned to the original Kennedy policy of supporting Vietnamese troops in the field, and by 1969 the Saigon government seemed much more enthusiastic about demanding that its own generals actually fight. As it turned out, as long as they had American air support and supply, the Vietnamese troops proved capable, holding their own against the communists. Nixon, whose name is strongly associated with the Vietnam War because of the protests, withdrew Americans at a faster rate than John Kennedy had put them in.

In May 1969, Nixon announced a new eight-point plan for withdrawing all foreign troops from Vietnam and holding internationally supervised elections. Under the new plan, the United States agreed to talk directly to the National Liberation Front (NLF), but behind the scenes it sent Kissinger to work the Soviet Union to pressure the North. That June, Nixon also withdrew the first large number of troops from Vietnam, some 25,000. Another 85,000 men would be brought home before the end of the year. This, obviously, was the corollary of Vietnamization—the withdrawal of American forces, which, after hitting a peak of 540,000 troops when Nixon came into office, steadily declined to only about 50,000 at the time of his resignation.

Another element of the stick strategy, though, was a renewed commitment to bombing North Vietnam. Here the United States missed yet another opportunity to take control of the conflict. Unlike Johnson, who had made the strategic bombing of the North ineffectual by selecting targets and instituting pauses and peace offensives, Nixon appreciated the necessity for pressure applied consistently and focused particularly on Hanoi. Still, North Vietnamese casualties were light, with only 1,500 civilians killed during the entire war compared to nearly 100,000 dead in the bombing of Tokyo in World War II. Such facts did not dissuade antiwar Senator George McGovern from telling NBC that the United States had conducted “the most murderous aerial bombardment in the history of the world,” had engaged in “the most immoral action that this nation has ever committed,” and had carried out a “policy of mass murder.”
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In fact, a real “mass murder” had occurred, although it had taken place nearly a year before, while Johnson was still in office.

In the fall of 1969 the Pentagon revealed that during the Tet offensive, American soldiers had entered a village at My Lai and massacred the inhabitants, including women and children. First Lieutenant William Calley, who had led the assault, was court-martialed and sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of twenty-two unarmed civilians. A psychiatric team who examined the men concluded they were sane, and had known what they were doing at the time. Naturally, this incident fanned the flames of the antiwar movement, which derided soldiers as “baby killers.” Calley’s statement justifying his conduct indicated that he had not differentiated at all between Vietnamese civilians and Viet Cong or North Vietnamese soldiers. “It was no big deal,” Calley said. “That was my enemy out there.”
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It was not My Lai, but another action, this time by Nixon, that set off the protesters like never before. Nixon did not intend to let the communists attack allied bases from Cambodia with impunity, and beginning in March 1969, the president sent American aircraft on secret bombing missions over Cambodia, exposing North Vietnamese troops there to fire. A year later, on April 30, 1970, U.S. troops entered Cambodia to clear out the North Vietnamese sanctuaries. It was a move that should have occurred in 1965, and would have occurred in any declared war almost instantly. But this merely temporarily protected Americans already in the South. It did little to affect the attitudes of the North.

Instead, the bombing sparked new protests, with fatal results. At Kent State University, a bucolic, nonviolent Ohio campus prior to May 1970, a tragic shooting occurred when protesters had become so destructive that the National Guard was called out.
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Students first torched the ROTC building, then attacked firemen who struggled to put out the fires, slashing their hoses. During subsequent protests, the guardsmen unexpectedly fired into the crowd, killing four. In May, at the all-black campus of Jackson State, rioting unrelated to the war resulted in the police killing two students. Both events solidified in the public mind the violent nature of the antiwar/“student” movements. From January 1959 to April 1970, more than 4,300 bombings racked universities, government buildings, and other facilities, at a rate of nine a day, most by the radical Weathermen.

Protest took on a form different from demonstrating or bombing: releasing secure or classified documents that could damage America’s war efforts. In 1971, a former Defense Department official, Daniel Ellsberg, provided secret documents to the New York
Times
, which published the classified Pentagon study called
The History of the U.S. Decision Making Process in Vietnam
. These excerpts revealed that in many cases the Johnson administration had lied about U.S. involvement. Even though the documents only covered events until 1965, the nature of the analysis and the sources of some of the data would have exposed U.S. intelligence-gathering methods and threatened national security. For that reason, Nixon rightly fought their release in court, losing a Supreme Court decision that allowed their publication. The New York
Times
knew that all the significant information contained in the so-called Pentagon Papers had already been made public. The affair had nothing to do with informing the public and everything to do with further embarrassing the government, especially Nixon, who was tarred with Johnson’s actions. Like the protests, publication of the Pentagon Papers only added to Hanoi’s resolve, convincing the communists that America would soon crack. Nixon, on the other hand, thought that it was Hanoi that was close to surrender.

His one serious attempt at bringing the North to the bargaining table through bombing involved the April to August 1972 Linebacker offensive. Linebacker proved extremely successful: more than 70 percent of enemy tanks were destroyed or damaged by tactical aircraft and gunships, and by August, allied air power had virtually eliminated any armored capability in the North.
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Linebacker II, unleashed in December after Hanoi had grown intransigent, consisted of an eleven-day bombing. According to one analyst of air power, “the effect of the…campaign on Hanoi’s ability to resist was crushing. In what now stands as another preview of the functional effects achieved by allied air power two decades later in Desert Storm, the rail system around Hanoi was attacked with such persistence and intensity that poststrike reconnaissance showed that repair crews were making no effort to restore even token rail traffic.”
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Another source concluded that North Vietnam was “laid open for terminal destruction.”
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POWs in Hanoi confirmed that the North Vietnamese were nearly on the verge of collapse during the bombing, a view supported by the British and other foreign ambassadors there.