Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2006/11/09/tdr_interview_historian_robert_dallek_on_the_nixon_bush_administrations.php
Thursday, November 9, 2006
Professor and historian Robert Dallek is the author of many best selling books including Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy 1932-1945; The American Style of Foreign Policy: Cultural Politics and Foreign Affairs; Ronald Reagan: The Politics of Symbolism; and Lone Star Rising: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1908-1960. His latest book, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power—to come out in the spring of 2007—focuses on the Nixon presidency, specifically President Nixon’s relationship with his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. The Dartmouth Review recently had the chance to sit down with Professor Dallek to discuss his forthcoming book.
The Dartmouth Review: You’re the author of many books about American Presidents, from Kennedy to Johnson to Reagan. Now you’re working on a book about President Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. How long have you been working on this book?
Robert Dallek: 4 years.
TDR: And did Henry Kissinger cooperate with you as you were writing it?
RD: Well, I had an interview with him, but it wasn’t very long, and he wasn’t terribly accessible—but what I did have was access to his papers which opened up the independence of anything I was doing. His papers are open to all the scholars and historians at the University of Maryland, College Park.
TDR: And surely much of your research for the book came from the Nixon tapes and his papers?
RD: Oh yes, it came from the Nixon papers and tapes, which were added to the Nixon presidential materials, and the presidential materials were brought from archives, in a branch of the national archives. Those archives also include the papers of Henry Kissinger, which now have some 20,000 pages transcribed.
TDR: About how many hours of the Nixon tapes are there then?
RD: Well there are a total of 3,700 hours, but only 2,800 hours are open.
TDR: Did you listen to that mostly yourself?
RD: Imagine 2,800 hours! Just think of it this way – it’s some 240 days – you’d be going at it 24 hours a day for about half a year. No, I had somebody who helped me with listening and looking at transcriptions of the Kissinger conversations, because we don’t have tapes for them. For Kissinger, what we have are transcripts of the conversations he had.
TDR: And, why do you think Nixon made these tapes? Ultimately they were what brought him down.
RD: Well, they did—first of all, the reason he began making them was that he had ordered Presidential aids to make a memorandum of the conversations and have them create a documentary record that would be available to historians, but that would also be available to Nixon later on when he wrote his presidential memoirs. The aids, who were responsible for making a lot of these memos, were falling further and further behind, so Nixon’s chief of staff suggested to Nixon that he do what Lyndon Johnson had done, which was to tape conversations.
But Nixon went beyond Johnson. Johnson taped conversations that he chose to tape. In other words, when someone came into the office, Johnson would push a button to signal to his secretary that he wanted a tape made of the conversation, but Nixon had what was called a voice activated system, that, at any time people came into an area, such as his hideaway office, the oval office, or on the telephone, it would tape the conversation, and that’s how you end up with 3,700 hours of taped conversations.
TDR: No doubt you found some surprises on the tapes. I know you don’t want to anticipate your new book in that respect, but could you perhaps give us a hint?
RD: Sure. Well, first of all there’s a lot of foul language. Nixon did a lot of cursing. There really are a bevy of four letter words that he uses. And then later on, when a lot of these tapes were released because of the Watergate investigation, what became famous was “expletives deleted,” because of the attitudes of the time. But now, of course, we can see the expletives are very much front and center.
But of course there are many serious conversations about just about every major issue that was going on in the presidency between March of 1971 and summer of 1973, when he stopped taping.
TDR: Why did he stop taping?
RD: He stopped taping because during the Watergate investigation, it became known that he was taping, and as soon as it became known, they stopped taping conversations for obvious reasons.
TDR: Now that you mentioned Watergate, let’s dive into that affair. What were the Watergate burglars looking for in the offices of the Democratic National Committee?
RD: Well, they were talking about planting bugs in the Democratic National Committee headquarters as a way to keep on top of what the Democrats were doing. Nixon, you have to remember, was a very hard-nosed campaigner, and the dirty tricks were something he not only engaged in, but believed others would try to use against him. So they wanted to have a kind of inside track on what the Democrats might be planning or trying to do against him. So they went to the Democratic National Committee headquarters to plant bugs. Basically, Nixon had John Mitchell and a few others try to find out what the Democrats were up to.
TDR: And it wasn’t just Watergate was it?
RD: There was the break-in at Ellsberg’s, Ellsberg’s psychiatrist office in Beverly Hills California. Nixon talked about breaking into the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. But that wasn’t done, but he did talk about it.
TDR: And did Kissinger have anything to do with these break-ins?
RD: No—as far as I can tell he had nothing to do with them.
TDR: What brought Nixon and Kissinger together? Some would say, perhaps, that Kissinger’s tendency to extreme secrecy with Nixon’s paranoia was an interesting mix– what do you think?
RD: Well, when they got together at the start of Nixon’s presidency, they really didn’t know each other. And what brought Kissinger to Nixon’s attention was that he had been writing critical opinions on what the Democrats had been doing on foreign policy, the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in particular. And also, Nixon was drawn to the idea of getting a national security advisor who had been the trusted associate of Nelson Rockefeller, and so it was a happy note for Nixon to be able to snatch up Henry Kissinger from Rockefeller’s grasp, so to speak.
TDR: Did they get along personally, or would you say that they were solely professional colleagues?
RD: Well, I wouldn’t say they were solely anything. They got along but they also battled – there are tapes and documents to demonstrate this. As Nixon’s presidency came to a close, his political standing declined while Kissinger’s went up, and Nixon couldn’t stand that!
TDR: Did their personal conflicts strain their professional relationship too?
RD: Well, Nixon would complain an awful lot about Henry. In his [Nixon’s] diary, you could see a lot of his hostility to Henry. Henry tried to get credit for the China initiative—trying to reopen China–he was sort of trying to steal the limelight from Nixon. Kissinger was mindful of this. For example, Time magazine put Nixon and Kissinger together on their cover. This was in December of ’72, and Kissinger was very nervous about this, because he knew Nixon would be very resentful, and Nixon was resentful; he didn’t want to share the limelight with Henry, who was his subordinate: he was Nixon’s national security advisor at the time. Henry didn’t become Secretary of State until September of ’73, which was 11 months before Nixon resigned. But, Kissinger was very respected in his public relations with the media and the press, and he really did become a kind of international superstar, which frustrated and irritated Nixon.
TDR: Aside from these personal conflicts toward the end, would you say that their foreign policy—their worldviews—were similar, as far as the Soviet Union and Vietnam were concerned? The big problem for Nixon was Vietnam. When he came to office in 1969, did he have a plan to end the war? At the time I think it was claimed that he had a secret plan to end it. Did he?
RD: Well, he didn’t call it a secret plan, but that’s the way it came out in public: that he wasn’t going to talk about it. So no, he did not have a secret plan to win the war. What happened was they knew that the public and the Congress was not going to sit still for a continuation of this war. Nixon understood that if he still had 545,000 troops in Vietnam when he came up for reelection in 1972, he would lose his reelection bid. So he knew he had to get out.
The administration came out with something called Vietnamization. It was the idea that you train the Vietnamese to do the fighting, and build up their armed forces so that they can defend themselves. But, Kissinger’s objection was that once you start withdrawing American troops, it would be a signal to the North Vietnamese that we were leaving, we weren’t going to stay, and that the South Vietnamese would not be able to effectively defend themselves.
And now with all this talk of Vietnamization, if we can connect this to Iraq, the current administration is saying “If the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.” But there is little clear evidence that the Iraqi military is going to be able to do that effectively and allow us to stand down. It really is a kind of replication of what happened in Vietnam, where we had hoped against hope that the South Vietnamese forces, in which we had invested billions of dollars, would defend the country. But they weren’t able to do it. And we see very much of the same thing in Iraq.
TDR: Do you think the Vietnam War could have been won if South Vietnam had maintained its independence? You seem to imply no.
RD: We could have won the Vietnam War, if, let’s say, we had put in a million troops (we had about half a million in there), and if we invaded North Vietnam. We could have conquered that army, we could have occupied that country. But Americans recalled old experiences, and the country was fed up with the war, in which thousands of Americans had been killed. The country simply didn’t want any more of it. And so, Nixon and Kissinger slowly retreated; by the time Nixon’s reelection came along, there were only some 29,000 – 30,000 American troops left in Vietnam. Nixon said he would keep his honor, and honor his pledge to bring the boys home, and he did indeed bring the boys home.
TDR: Given the parallels you’ve just spoken of between the Vietnam War and the war in Iraq, what would you say a realistic course for America would be in Iraq.
RD: Well, I just don’t think we can stay there forever. I think the American public is fed up: as I’m sure you know, over 60% now think that going into Iraq was a mistake, which is consistent with Bush’s presidential standings. His approval rating is in the mid 30’s, maybe high 30’s – he topped out recently at about 40%. He’s in very serious political trouble at home because of the Iraq war abroad. So, what do we do there? How long can we stay? How do we manage this situation? Nobody has answers. There are no answers. And all we hear is stay the course, but “stay the course” is not a policy. And the country is resistant to that, I think. If there were some way to win right now, no one sees it. But I think there is a mounting sense that we’re going to have to get out at some point.
TDR: What’s the threat if we withdraw from Iraq?
RD: You know, there’s always this talk, the same with Vietnam, that if we leave, and South Vietnam falls, it undermines, even destroys, American credibility, it emboldens your enemies, it makes you more vulnerable. But, what happened with Vietnam is that it enhanced American credibility once we left, because it was realism. We’re not going to be able to control and master the situation in Vietnam, so the best thing to do is to leave, because the public and the Congress are not going to allow it to go on, and the number of casualties we’ve suffered there in Vietnam, which reached into the thousands, was just getting too high. The public doesn’t want any more of it. So, we have to get out. It was a turn to realism.
The ultimate question we have to ask is, did we win or lose the Cold War? And of course, we won the Cold War, and Vietnam proves to be a terrible mistake. Did we need to hold off the North Vietnamese in order to ensure our victory in the Cold War? No – not at all! Now the question comes, what will happen when we leave Iraq? The idea is that, well, it will embolden our enemies, it will create the feeling of “cut and run,” that we don’t stand up for ourselves. But there’s an alternative way to think about it, which is that if we get out of Iraq, we will have the resources to use in other places, in more aggressive ways, to combat the international terrorists. It may be that in the long run, we need to think of the Iraq War as America’s Dunkirk.
TDR: How do you mean?
RD: Dunkirk was in 1940. When the British and the French were defeated by the Nazis along the European front. France collapsed, and the British had about a quarter of a million-man land army. It seemed hopeless. So what did Britain do? They evacuated those troops—leaving behind a lot of their equipment—and brought them aboard every conceivable kind of ship. It was a heroic effort by the British navy, the British fishermen, and every kind of craft went across the channel to take aboard British troops, British soldiers, and transport them back to England. And, Dunkirk allowed the British to reestablish their power to fight the war, and ultimately win it.
And so, if we suffer a setback in Iraq, which I believe we have, and will continue to, this does not mean we will lose the war against terrorism – it does not mean it destroys our credibility. In fact, the intelligence committees, the intelligence agencies, 16 of them recently reported that what we are doing is increasing rather than decreasing the level of terrorist threats and dangers to the United States around the world. So I think this war in Iraq is proving to be the greatest disaster in American foreign policy since Vietnam, in that, yes, we do need to fight this war on terror, but there are far more effective ways to do it.
TDR: Like what?
RD: My feeling is, we would have been better off if we had invested more in Afghanistan, where we routed the Taliban, and where we had, I think the prospect to establish a friendly stable government. But because we didn’t invest the kind of money that we put into Iraq, we now find ourselves on both fronts, in Iraq and in Afghanistan, really besieged. So, I think we’d do better getting out – we could be in this Iraq war forever. There’s a lot of disillusionment about it.
TDR: That brings us to the growing rift there seems to be among conservative intellectuals these days over the Bush administration. Many think that the administration is just playing fast and loose with conservative values – how do you think Nixon would view the current Republican administration?
RD: I expect Nixon would view what Bush did in Iraq as creating a terrible dilemma for his administration, which is ruining him politically, and destroying his credibility, and the public trust in him. I think Nixon would see it as a serious foreign policy error. I know that’s what Professor Jeffrey Hart thinks, and William F. Buckley too. There are an awful lot of conservatives who now are outraged by the unfolding of the mess in Iraq, and this kind of evangelism and all this rhetoric about establishing democracy abroad – it’s a kind of Wilsonian universalism. Wilson in World War I preached “the war to end all wars,” “let’s make the world safe for democracy.” And look at all the wars and fighting that has gone on since the end of World War I. Look at how much struggle there has been, continual struggle, to promote democracy. Nearly 100 years later, to try to promote it in the Middle East.
As a president in the 19th century, John Quincy Adams, said, “Do not go in search of monsters abroad. We are the well-wishers of every nation’s freedom and independence. But we are the advocates and defendants only of our own.” And although the times have changed, and America is in a very different place now in 2006 than it was in 1826 or 1827 when John Quincy Adams said that, it still has a kind of wisdom.
TDR: Certainly. One last question: You talked about the evangelism of Bush’s foreign policy. What about the religious evangelism he brings into his domestic policy? He brings his faith into a lot of his policies, what with stem cell research and his view on abortion. To what degree did Nixon’s faith (he was a Quaker I believe) inform his positions and policies?
RD: Not much—Nixon was mostly pragmatic. He wanted to put a call for the national health insurance program and welfare reform, called the Family Assistance Plan. He put in place the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency. So he was behind some strikingly liberal initiatives. He didn’t get all of them through by any means, but the EPA is one they definitely did put in place. He was quite pragmatic about domestic policies. He was pragmatic about his foreign policies because he had been such a big opponent of Chinese communism, but he still established relations with China, because he knew he had to pit the Soviets and the Chinese against each other. He knew he wanted to win the Cold War.
TDR: Well thank you very much, Professor Dallek.