and the staunch anti-Communism of his early career had a natural connection with events overseas. In the late 1940s, when Nixon’s political career began, it seemed world Communism was on an inexorable march: the Soviets had built their Iron Curtain of Eastern European satellite states, and in 1949, Chinese Communists, led by Mao Zedong, had prevailed in the Chinese Civil War and took power on the Chinese mainland—a shattering blow to freedom for the world. In 1956, Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary to suppress a Democratic movement there. Overhanging all of this was the threat of nuclear annihilation, as the United States and Soviet Union built stockpiles of deadly weapons powerful enough to wipe out any decent concept of human existence.
What Americans saw in the Kitchen Debate was a political leader with the substantive knowledge to go head to head in debate with the leader of Soviet Russia—and to be articulate and resolute in defending the American way of life while doing it. Nixon did not have to worry about whether people saw him as tough on Communism. In fact, when he finally did enter the White House in 1969, many critics had the opposite concern: they felt he would be too much the Cold Warrior, unable and unwilling to manage a more peaceful relationship with the Soviet Union.
Yet the Kitchen Debate provided a clue here as well. “In order to have peace,” Nixon had insisted, “there must be a sitting down at the table and a discussion in which each sees the points of the other.” And as president, much to the surprise of supporters and critics, Nixon would do precisely that with the leaders of the two great Communist powers—not just with the Soviet Union but also with China. He would do it with an approach that I call visionary realism, whereby he exercised a profound strategic wisdom that somehow balanced big-picture thinking with recognition of the realities of the world. And he would do it at a time when the United States faced not just the daunting Cold War challenges of these relationships but also the ongoing bloodbath in Vietnam, which raged on with no end in sight. Nixon’s foreign policy record is large and complex, but for most Americans now, it comes down to three main areas: relations with Russia; relations with China; and the Vietnam War. In each of these areas, Nixon pursued shrewd, strategic, even brilliant policies, though to be sure, this was no guarantee of their enduring success.
Vietnam and Southeast Asia
The Vietnam War paralyzed American foreign policy and traumatized American society. Nixon hadn’t initiated the American military presence in Vietnam, let alone escalated it. But he was determined, as president, to get America out of it. And his foreign policy began with that objective.
When Nixon entered office in January 1969, the war in Vietnam was by far the nation’s most pressing foreign policy issue. Over sixteen thousand Americans had been killed in combat in 1968, the worst casualty year yet for the United States. Worse, the war wasn’t going well; despite years of assurances from the Pentagon and the Johnson administration that a turning point was near, it became clear to the American people in 1968, with the Communist Tet Offensive, that the war would continue to rage on. Even relatively conservative Middle Americans were losing faith in the effort, and they looked to Nixon to find a way out. Most did not favor the Left’s calls for unilateral withdrawal, but they did want American troops to start coming home—preferably, after winning the war.
Nixon had promised as a presidential candidate in 1968 that he had a secret plan to end the war, though he didn’t really have such a plan—at least, nothing that matched the drama of that description. What he developed, once in the Oval Office, was a plan that addressed Americans’ now-prevailing interest: getting Americans home. Thus was born Nixon’s policy of “Vietnamization,” in which he would bring American troops home by the tens of thousands while preparing the Saigon regime to take on more of the war-fighting burden. However, at the same time, Nixon always privately vowed to himself that he would not be the first American president to lose a war, and thus his Vietnam approach had two prongs, which were somewhat mutually exclusive of each other: (1) to get out while saving face as best as possible, and (2) to win. And these conflicting priorities would overhang everything Nixon and Henry Kissinger did when it came to Vietnam.
In his November 3, 1969, address, Nixon laid out his new approach to the nation’s commitment in Southeast Asia:
In the previous administration, we Americanized the war in Vietnam. In this administration, we are Vietnamizing the search for peace. The policy of the previous administration not only resulted in our assuming the primary responsibility for fighting the war, but even more significantly did not adequately stress the goal of strengthening the South Vietnamese so that they could defend themselves when we left. . . . We have adopted a plan which we have worked out in cooperation with the South Vietnamese for a complete withdrawal of all U.S. combat ground forces, and their replacement by South Vietnamese forces on an orderly scheduled timetable. This withdrawal will be made from strength and not from weakness. As South Vietnamese forces become stronger, the rate of American withdrawal can become greater.6
As American troops started returning home, the pressure on the South Vietnam military to carry the fighting load increased. Nixon hoped that US aerial firepower could help even the odds. He coupled his withdrawal of American troops with massive “carpet-bombing” campaigns against North Vietnamese bases in Laos and Cambodia. These efforts commenced with Operation Menu in 1969, in which Nixon deployed American B-52 bombers. His efforts were part strategic and part psychological—he wondered whether he could get better results if Hanoi believed that he was a genuine “madman” or “mad bomber.” Perhaps, he mused on more on than one occasion to Henry Kissinger, if the North Vietnamese and their Communist allies in the region felt that he might go to any length—including the use of nuclear weapons—they might be more inclined to come to the negotiating table. “Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace,” Nixon told Bob Haldeman.7 But Nixon’s blunter measures—from mining Haiphong Harbor and bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia to issuing a worldwide nuclear alert—did not make Hanoi back down.
In spring 1970, Nixon upped the ante in Cambodia. Frustrated by the continued presence of large North Vietnamese supply caches in the country and the North’s use of portions of the country as staging grounds for attacks, he ordered a joint invasion (he called it an “incursion”) of the country by American and South Vietnamese troops. His “secret” bombing of Cambodia in 1970 ignited domestic unrest in the United States, sparking the last great wave of campus protests—the largest in American history—which culminated tragically. National Guardsmen fired at protestors at Kent State University, killing four. Two weeks later, at a protest at Jackson State in Mississippi, police fired again on protestors, killing two.
Nixon expressed sorrow about the incidents, but he also made clear that the increasingly violent antiwar movement bore significant responsibility. “This should remind us all once again that when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy. It is my hope that this tragic and unfortunate incident will strengthen the determination of the nation’s campuses—administrators, faculty, and students alike—to stand firmly for the right which exists in this country of peaceful dissent and just as strongly against the resort to violence as a means of such expression.”8 Polls showed that the majority of Americans shared his views about the war and the limits of domestic dissent.
The outcry promoted by Nixon’s Cambodia policies might have obscured the broader story, at least from an American perspective: the troops were coming home in massive numbers. On his promise to Vietnamize the war and reduce the American troop commitment, Nixon could hardly have been truer to his word. By April 1972, even in the midst of another massive North Vietnamese offensive, Nixon was able to cite the figures to the American people in a nationally televised speech:
On January 20, 1969, the American troop ceiling in Vietnam was 549,000. Our casualties were running as high as 300 a week. Thirty thousand young Americans were being drafted every month.
Today, 39 months later, through our program of Vietnamization helping the South Vietnamese develop the capability of defending themselves—the number of Americans in Vietnam by
