Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (128 page)

Until the Nixon presidency the media was extremely selective in its publicizing of any presidential misdemeanours. Working journalists protected Roosevelt from the exposure of his love-affairs.
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They did the same for Kennedy, concealing the fact that, while President, he kept a Washington apartment for his mistresses, one of whom he shared with a gangster.
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In Johnson’s struggle to extricate himself from the Bobby Baker scandal, the
Washington Post
actually helped him to blacken his chief accuser, Senator John Williams.
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Johnson, as Vice-President, accepted bribes, as did Nixon’s Vice-President, Spiro Agnew: Agnew was exposed and convicted; Johnson went on to the White House.
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Nixon enjoyed no such forbearance from the media. Quite the contrary. But then it is likely that, in certain respects, he went further
than any of his predecessors. This was partly a matter of size: the White House was expanding out of control. Lincoln had to pay a secretary out of his own pocket. Hoover had to struggle hard to get three. Roosevelt appointed the first six ‘administrative assistants’ in 1939. Kennedy had twenty-three. The total White House staff had risen to 1,664 in Kennedy’s last year. Under Johnson it was forty times the size of Hoover’s. Under Nixon it rose to 5,395 in 1971, the cost jumping from $31 million to $71 million.
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Much of the expansion was the work of Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s Security Assistant and later Secretary of State, who controlled the Vietnam negotiations. It was Kissinger who fundamentally expanded the phone-tapping operations, in theory to assist his peace offensive.
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Vietnam, where world peace and American lives were at stake, was the ostensible, and for Nixon the real, justification for many questionable activities.
He
saw secrecy as paramount to success. In 1971 a huge series of secret Administration papers (the ‘Pentagon Papers’) were stolen and given to the
New York Times
, which published them. In Britain and most other Western democracies, those concerned would have been gaoled under government secrecy laws. That was not possible in the USA, where the press enjoys constitutional privileges under the First Amendment. To Nixon, as one of his colleagues put it, this publication was ‘a challenge by the élite, unelected press to the primacy of power of the democratically elected government. A moral issue was at stake.’
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A ‘Special Investigations unit’ of the Executive was authorized to use illegal means (including a break-in) to nail the leaker. This ‘plumbing’ unit became the prototype for other task-forces, one of which broke into Democratic Party headquarters, in the Watergate building, in late-May 1972 and again on 17 June. On the second occasion, about which the Democrats may have known in advance, the ‘plumbers’ were arrested.
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Political espionage, even theft, had never hitherto been taken seriously in America. Johnson had ‘bugged’ Goldwater in 1964. The NBC TV network had bugged Democratic Party headquarters in 1968. Both the
Washington Post
and the
New York Times
published purloined material, of an extremely valuable nature (the Haldeman and Kissinger memoirs), during this period. But the
Washington Post
, in a series of articles beginning on 10 October 1972, decided to make the Watergate break-in a major moral issue, a lead followed by the rest of the East Coast media. This in itself might not have been serious. It failed to prevent the Nixon landslide. But it caught the attention of a publicity-hungry federal judge, John Sirica, known as ‘Maximum John’ for the severity of his sentences – and not, in any other circumstances, a justice likely to enjoy the approval
of the liberal press. When the burglars came before him, he gave them provisional life sentences to force them to provide evidence against members of the Administration. That he was serious was indicated by the fact that he sentenced the only man who refused to comply, Gordon Liddy, to twenty years in prison, plus a fine of $40,000, for a first offence of breaking and entering, in which nothing was stolen and no resistance offered to police.
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This act of judicial terrorism, which would have been impossible in any other country under the rule of law, was to be sadly typical of the juridical witch-hunt by means of which members of the Nixon Administration were hounded, convicted (in some cases pleading guilty to save the financial ruin of an expensive defence) and sentenced.
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But it had the desired effect and ‘broke’ the Watergate scandal, that is, it allowed the machinery of Congressional investigation, where of course the Democrats enjoyed majority control, to make a frontal assault on the ‘imperial presidency’. In the process the notion of executive privilege, once so hotly defended by the liberal media, was scrapped. Indeed, in the overwhelming desire to destroy Nixon, all considerations of national security were cast aside.

Matters were made easy for the witch-hunters by the admission, on Friday 13 July 1973, by one of the White House staff, that all Nixon’s working conversations were automatically taped. Again, there was nothing new in this. Roosevelt had stationed stenographers in a specially constructed cubicle beneath his office to eavesdrop on callers. In 1982 it was revealed that in 1940 he had also used secret tapes, with the help of the Radio Corporation of America, which owned one of the big networks. At the same time it emerged that Truman had made tapes, that Eisenhower used a combination of tapes and dicta-belts, that Kennedy secretly taped visitors (and his wife) for the last sixteen months of his presidency, and that Johnson was an inveterate taper.
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In fact one of Nixon’s first acts, in February 1969, was to have Johnson’s taping system ripped out: he thought it wrong. Then, in February 1971, worried that liberal historians of the future would misrepresent his Vietnam policy, he ordered a new system to be installed. His Chief of Staff, Bob Haldeman, picked one which was indiscriminate and voice-activated, ‘the greatest single disservice a presidential aide ever performed for his chief’.
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These transcribed tapes, which the courts and Congressional investigators insisted that Nixon surrender – under the ironic gaze, presumably, of a ghostly Senator Joe McCarthy – were used to mount a putative impeachment of the President. Whether Nixon was actually guilty of an attempt to interfere with the course of justice, as alleged, and whether such an attempt, if made, was covered by a legitimate interpretation of
raison d’état
,
was never established. Nixon never put his side of the case since, rather than risk the prolonged national convulsion of an impeachment, which might have lasted years, he resigned in August 1974. Thus the electoral verdict of 1972 was overturned by what might be described as a media
putsch.
The ‘imperial presidency’ was replaced by the ‘imperial press’.
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The fall of Nixon was made the occasion for a radical shift in the balance of power back towards the legislature. Some movement in this direction was perhaps overdue. In the event it proceeded much too far in the opposite direction. In 1973 the War Powers Resolution, passed over Nixon’s veto, imposed unprecedented restraints on the power of the President to commit US forces abroad, compelling him in any event to seek Congressional authority within sixty days. Further limitations on presidential foreign policy were imposed by the Jackson—Vanik and Stevenson Amendments of 1973–4. In July—August 1974 Congress paralysed the President’s handling of the Cyprus crisis; in the autumn it imposed restrictions on the use of the
CIA
. In 1975 it effectively hamstrung the President’s policy in Angola. Later that year it passed the Arms Export Control Act, removing the President’s discretion in the supply of arms. It used financial controls to limit severely the system of ‘presidential agreements’ with foreign powers, over 6,300 of which had been concluded from 1946–74 (as opposed to only 411 treaties, which required Congressional sanction). It reinforced its aggressive restrictions on presidential power by enabling no less than seventeen Senatorial and sixteen House committees to supervise aspects of foreign policy, and by expanding its expert staff to over 3,000 (the House International Relations Committee staff tripled, 1971–7), to monitor White House activities.
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By the late 1970s, it was calculated that there were no less than seventy limiting Amendments on the presidential conduct of foreign policy. It was even argued that a test of the War Powers Act would reveal that the President was no longer Commander-in-Chief and that the decision whether or not American troops could be kept abroad or withdrawn might have to be left to the Supreme Court.
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The immediate, and in terms of human life the most serious, impact of the Watergate hysteria was the destruction of free institutions in the whole of Indo-China. Nixon’s policy of withdrawal made sense only if the North Vietnamese were kept guessing about America’s willingness to provide forceful backing to its allies in the South. The War Powers Act, the 1974 Congressional ban on American military involvement, and Congress’s further reductions of all assistance to the South, the direct results of the Watergate
dégringolade
, ended the necessary ambiguities about American
policy. Nixon and his successor, Gerald Ford, were powerless to prevent the North Vietnamese from breaking the accords and taking everything. Some French experts had argued all along that the true cause of the Indo-Chinese struggle, and the dynamic throughout, was the aggressive expansionism of the North Vietnamese and their centuries-old desire, which Communist organization and ruthlessness provided the means to gratify, to dominate all the peoples of Indo-China. That thesis was now strengthened by events. As US aid tailed off, the military balance shifted decisively to the North in 1973. By the end of the year the North had achieved a two-to-one superiority and launched a general invasion. In January 1975 the whole of central Vietnam had to be evacuated, and a million refugees fled towards Saigon. In a last desperate appeal to Congress, President Ford pleaded: ‘American unwillingness to provide adequate assistance to allies fighting for their lives could seriously affect our credibility throughout the world as an ally.’
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But Congress did nothing. At his news conference on 26 March Ford appealed again, warning of ‘a massive shift in the foreign policies of many countries and a fundamental threat … to the security of the United States’.
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The face of Congress remained averted. Less than four weeks later, on 21 April, the Vietnamese government abdicated. Marine helicopters lifted American officials, and a few Vietnamese friends, from the rooftop of the US embassy in Saigon. Nine days later Communist tanks entered the city. It was the gravest and most humiliating defeat in American history. For the peoples of the region it was a catastrophe.

The Communist élites which seized power by force all over Indo-China in April 1975 immediately embarked on nationwide programmes of social engineering which recalled Stalin’s collectivization of the peasants, though in some respects they were even more inhuman. The best-documented is the ‘ruralization’ conducted in Cambodia by the Communist Khmer Rouge, which entered the capital Phnom Penh in mid-April, the American embassy having been evacuated on the 12th. The atrocities began on 17 April. They were carried out mainly by illiterate peasant soldiers, but they had been planned two years before by a group of middle-class ideologues who called themselves
Angka Loeu
(’the Higher Organization’). Details of their plan had been obtained by a State Department expert, Kenneth Quinn, who circulated it in a report dated 20 February 1974.
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The scheme was an attempt to telescope, in one terrifying
coup
, the social changes brought about over twenty-five years in Mao’s China. There was to be ‘total social revolution’. Everything about the past was ‘anathema and must be destroyed’. It was necessary to ‘psychologically reconstruct individual members of society’. It entailed ‘stripping
away, through terror and other means, the traditional bases, structures and forces which have shaped and guided an individual’s life’ and then ‘rebuilding him according to party doctrines by substituting a series of new values’.
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Angka Loeu
consisted of about twenty professional political intellectuals, mainly teachers and bureaucrats. Of the eight leaders, all in their forties (one a woman), five were teachers, one a university professor, one an economist, one a bureaucrat. All had studied in France in the 1950s, where they had absorbed the doctrines of ‘necessary violence’ preached on the radical Left. They were Sartre’s children. It is notable that, while this group of ideologues preached the virtues of rural life, none had in fact ever engaged in manual labour or had any experience at all of creating wealth. Like Lenin, they were pure intellectuals. They epitomized the great destructive force of the twentieth century: the religious fanatic reincarnated as professional politician. What they did illustrated the ultimate heartlessness of ideas. In any other age or place, the plans of these savage pedants would have remained in their fevered imaginations. In Cambodia in 1975 it was possible to put them into practice.

On 17 April over 3 million people were living in Phnom Penh. They were literally pushed into the surrounding countryside. The violence started at 7 am with attacks on Chinese shops; then general looting. The first killings came at 8.45 am. Fifteen minutes later troops began to clear the Military Hospital, driving doctors, nurses, sick and dying into the streets. An hour later they opened fire on anyone seen in the streets, to start a panic out of the city. At noon the Preah Ket Melea hospital was cleared: hundreds of men, women and children, driven at gunpoint, limped out into midday temperatures of over 100 Fahrenheit. Of 20,000 wounded in the city, all were in the jungle by nightfall. One man humped his son, who had just had both legs amputated; others pushed the beds of the very ill, carrying bottles of plasma and serum. Every hospital in the city was emptied. All papers and records in the city were destroyed. All books were thrown into the Mekong River or burned on the banks. The paper money in the Banque Khmer de Commerce was incinerated. Cars, motorbikes and bicycles were impounded. Rockets and bazookas were fired at houses where any movement was detected. There were many summary executions. The rest were told, ‘Leave immediately or we will shoot all of you.’ By evening the water-supply was cut off. What gave the episode its peculiar Kafkaesque horror was the absence of any visible authority. The peasant-soldiers simply killed and terrified, obeying orders, invoking the commands of
Angka Loeu.
Nothing was explained. The intellectuals who had planned it all never appeared.
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