FOR COLLABORATION, NOT CONSPIRACY (via Mike Daley):

Avoiding Nostalgia In a Dangerous World (Richard Brookhiser, 6/11/05, NY Observer)

Nixon in the White House was secretive, and therefore paranoid—not only because he was Nixon, but because he and Henry Kissinger were pursuing a risky and complicated foreign policy. They wanted to get out of Vietnam, without throwing the South Vietnamese to the wolves. To do this, they needed the cooperation—or at least acquiescence—of China and the Soviet Union. To get that, they sought to play the Communist superpowers off against each other—in a nice way, of course. All this, they hoped, would lead to a more stable world.

Accomplishing this strategy involved secret approaches through Pakistan and the secret bypassing of the State Department. All of it might unravel if one, two, many Pentagon Papers came out; so could Nixon’s re-election. (He didn’t have faith in the Democratic Party, which would give him the gift of George McGovern.) Hence Nixon’s obsession with leaks, and hence the plumbers, who thought they had found a leak at the Watergate, then a dull, pompous apartment complex, not yet a place with a numinous aura, like Armageddon.

There were a number of problems with Nixon’s strategy. It despaired of the world situation, seeing the Communist powers as powerful and perdurable, forces to be dealt with, not (as Ronald Reagan would say) transcended. It was a leader-to-leader strategy, cutting out the degraded masses of the Soviet and Chinese empires, as well as the American public. It depended on Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy.

The Watergate crisis unraveled Nixon and his strategy, which led to the unraveling of Southeast Asia. This wasn’t a necessary consequence; conceivably, some Democrat might have stepped into the breach. After all, it was the Democrats who began the Vietnam War in earnest. But by the mid-70’s, the Democratic Party was a different animal. George Wallace was a racist, Henry Jackson was a corpse; the two relatively conservative Democrats who rose to national leadership were Jimmy Carter, who pardoned Vietnam draft dodgers, and, many years later, Bill Clinton, who was a sort of draft dodger.

Meanwhile, the South China Sea filled with boat people, and Arlington filled with Vietnamese restaurants. Lose a country, gain a restaurant. When I saw Mr. Felt giving his thumbs-up on the AOL start-up menu, I thought he should stroll into the nearest Saigon Palace and see what reception he got. No doubt, there would be no hard feelings. That was another country; the dead are gone. Now Vietnam wants American investment and tourism.

Now we are involved in new foreign wars, minus any scandal greater than John Bolton’s attitude. How do we avoid muzzy nostalgia 40 years later, and millions of dead along the way?

The hard left, and the anti-war right that is its ally—Pat Buchanan, Robert Novak, Taki—are much weaker than the left of the Vietnam era. The media, which made and broke Presidents, is weaker still; Leonardo di Caprio is not about to play Dan Rather. The main difference is that George W. Bush, unlike Richard Nixon, doesn’t care what his enemies, real or imagined, think.

Nixon and Kissinger deserved to be persecuted for their official policies, not prosecuted for some mild illegalities.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 11, 2005 12:00 AM