Moscow … it is really terribly difficult to deal with even a country as important as Mexico.”75 From President Johnson’s failings, Nixon learned to divert the public’s attention from the Vietnam War. True, he maintained the American commitment to South Vietnam, especially in 1969–1970, and he later approached the Soviets and the Chinese for help in ending the war. But he did not let Vietnam dominate his presidency as it had dominated that of his predecessor.
Nixon also rejected Wilsonian idealism. As he told a reporter shortly before the 1968 election, Americans needed to recognize that “the American-style democracy that we find works so well for us may not always work well for others.” This criticism of liberal internationalism was inspired in large measure by the moralistic rhetoric that accompanied the defense of South Vietnam. To Nixon, the United States was in no position to interfere in other nations’ domestic affairs. “That doesn’t mean that I am opting for military dictatorships,” he noted. “[But] for the United States to attempt to say that, well, this nation or that nation doesn’t have the kind of a government that we think is what we would want for it,… that is more than we can take on our plate.” America could perhaps use its influence on behalf of certain freedoms, “but I don’t think we can impose it.”76 As president, he summarized these ideas in blunt terms to one of his ambassadors: “We hope that governments will evolve toward constitutional procedures but … we deal with governments as they are.”77 This is not to say that Nixon was without optimism. He was, after all, a middle-class Californian who retained at least some of the idealism typical of his generation of political leaders. Yet he maintained a healthy distance from the moral perspective in international affairs. Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko later said of Nixon’s diplomacy, “He always presented himself as a pragmatist … a man who preferred to keep discussions on a purely practical level.”78
Nixon laid out his administration’s international policies in a series of four massive foreign policy reports to Congress between 1970 and 1973. The first report’s opening sentence captured its essence: “The postwar period in international relations has ended.” The Vietnam War was winding down; European and Asian economies were challenging the United States; and Moscow and Beijing were engaged in a bitter struggle for leadership of the communist world. Although the United States needed to live up to its commitments, argued Nixon, America’s friends would have to shoulder more of the burden. The United States “cannot and will not conceive all the plans, design all the programs, execute all the decisions and undertake all the defense of the free nations of the world.”79 Although some observers equated this “Nixon doctrine” with isolationist retrenchment, Nixon emphasized that America’s military would remain formidable. Human rights concerns were entirely absent from the foreign policy reports, with the exception of a brief mention of U.N. priorities in the fourth report (May 1973).
Henry Kissinger was at the center of the foreign policy nexus even longer than was Nixon. As national security adviser (1969–1975) and secretary of state (1973–1977), he acted as a constant antagonist to human rights advocates. An academic schooled in the diplomacy of Metternich and Talleyrand, Kissinger was a strong believer in traditional interstate relations and the balance of global power. And like Nixon, he preferred to deal with only the most powerful nations; the developing world mattered little to him, excepting those places where the United States and the Soviets battled by proxy. Kissinger tended to believe that the United States should maintain relations with key states, no matter how illiberal or undemocratic their governments were. In a 1966 essay that would become remarkably self-referential, he argued that a true statesman’s view of human nature “is wary; he is conscious of many great hopes which have failed.” To the statesman, “gradualism is the essence of stability” and “maintenance of the existing order is more important than any dispute within it.”80 Kissinger carried these attitudes into the Nixon administration. As he told a group of business leaders in 1971, the administration sought to “reduce dogmatic hostilities around the world. Our policies are not idealistic, moralistic. We do not plead altruism—a tendency far too common in the history of American foreign affairs.”81
Kissinger’s Machiavellian streak went hand in hand with his pessimistic view of human nature. Growing up Jewish in prewar Germany, he witnessed firsthand the weakness of the Weimar Republic and European democracies in the face of the Nazis’ rise. This lesson in the fragility of democracy may explain, in part, his later willingness to deal with undemocratic governments like those in Beijing and Moscow. And on a personal level, he was more than a little arrogant. “I’ve always acted alone,” he told a journalist in an unguarded moment. “Americans like the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse…. This amazing, romantic character suits me.”82 And although Kissinger was a tremendous asset to the Nixon administration, he was difficult to maintain, and his carefully cultivated public image of cool rationality masked his mercurial emotions.83 A Nixon speechwriter suggested that “the care and feeding of Henry was one of the greatest burdens of [Nixon’s] presidency, but he was worth it.”84 Nixon himself was blunter, once telling an aide, “There are times when Henry has to be kicked in the nuts. Because sometimes Henry starts to think that he’s president. But at other times you have to pet Henry and treat him like a child.”85
Kissinger’s diplomatic style matched his pragmatism. Because he believed in maintaining personal relationships with important leaders, he was unlikely, to say the least, to assail someone for human rights violations. He argued that American attacks on the Soviets’ record would make superpower conflicts only more likely and that similar criticism of anticommunist states would alienate allies. The real job of diplomacy, he asserted, was to hammer out bilateral agreements based on mutual interest, not to make grand pronouncements of principle that would have no long-term effect. Even when President Nixon supported humanitarian assistance in war-torn regions, Kissinger was largely indifferent. As we will see, scholars, journalists, and activists have not merely criticized Kissinger’s indifference to humanitarianism; several have even accused him of complicity in human rights violations through his support of authoritarian regimes in Chile, Indonesia, and elsewhere.86
From our twenty-first-century perspective, Nixon and Kissinger come across as singularly unsympathetic, even antagonistic, toward human rights matters. But it is worth considering their position in a broader historical context. These men practiced a form of diplomacy that had served European and American statesmen for centuries. Only in rare cases had other states’ internal practices concerned executive policymakers in Washington. We must also acknowledge that many domestic and foreign observers applauded Nixon’s foreign policy and his rejection of the American imperium. His détente with Moscow was generally popular in 1972–1973, and he was commended for the opening to China and the accords that finalized America’s Vietnam withdrawal. A relatively small number of Americans wanted Nixon to pursue a more moral course that included human rights judgments. It is perhaps most accurate, then, to say that Nixon and Kissinger were transitional figures whose training and worldview did not prepare them for the human rights activism of the 1970s. The movement was so new and unusual that they tended to believe it was politically driven and largely irrelevant to the real work of diplomacy.
The post-1968 Cold War thaw—of which the U.S.-Soviet détente was an integral part—was the international political foundation on which American human rights policies were built. Moderates in the American and Soviet camps had been trying to engineer a détente since the 1950s, but a viable working relationship had always eluded them. By the late sixties, divisions in both alliances made for a more congenial superpower climate. Sino-Soviet tensions peaked in 1969, when the two nations became engaged in a series of bloody border clashes. Meanwhile, Yugoslavia, Romania, Albania, and Czechoslovakia expressed varying degrees of independence from Moscow. Coincident with this lack of unity in the communist world, France pursued a more unilateral course and withdrew from the NATO integrated military command. And in a process known as Ostpolitik, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt cultivated relations with East Germany and the Soviet Union. Owing to these splits, East/West tensions reached a postwar nadir at the end of the sixties.
Richard
