Paul Rosenberg on Nixon and "constitutional hardball"

Paul Rosenberg in Destroying democracy is the GOP’s goal Salon 03/30/2015 discusses an idea he credits to Mark Tushnet, "constitutional hardball."

At the time, Nixon’s lawlessness was thought to be an aberration, but it now seems more like the establishment of a new, somewhat sociopathic norm (“madman theory,” anyone?), particularly given how young Nixon hands Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney operated in the Bush administration 30 years later. In the interim, Cheney vigorously defended and covered up Reagan-era lawlessness in the Iran-Contra affair as well. Even more specifically, Nixon’s peace talks sabotage was echoed in electoral criminal activity for both Reagan (the alleged “October Surprise”) and George W. Bush (voter purges).

The bipartisan toleration of high-level misconduct and crime has ebbed and flowed. But the arc of events from Nixon's sabotaging the Paris Peace Talks to Dick Cheney's torture program is a pattern that gets progressively worse.

I wouldn't want to mark the time boundaries of this process too sharply. Corruption and deception are nothing new in American statecraft. But the Cold War created a context in which it grew and intensified to a qualitatively new level.

Today's Republicans would point to the "dictator" Obama's predecessors in that role (in their eyes), Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. And it's true that both in some ways did push the existing limits of their authority, Lincoln in his actions against pro-Confederate Copperheads, FDR in his efforts to boost American defenses against Germany and Japan in the face of determined isolationist Republicans in Congress.

But the criticisms of Lincoln and Roosevelt need to be carefully and critically scrutinized, because both play significant ideological roles in the worldview of today's Republicans.

Strangely enough, conservative Republican Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist (1924–2005) did a good book on Lincoln's Constitutionally controversial wartime actions, All the Laws but One: Civil Liberties in Wartime (1998).

Kathryn Olmsted has described the FDR-planned-Pearl-Harbor conspiracy theory as "a foundational myth of modern conservatism." Many people have debunked it well. For instance: Gordon Prange, At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor (1981) and Pearl Harbor: The Verdict of History (1986). Judith Greer provided a more condensed version in Did FDR know? Salon 06/14/01.

Rosenberg's longish essay looks at the effect of divided government, with one part controlling the Executive and the other controlling one or both Houses of Congress. In that context, he observes:

Democrats have internalized the values of a divided government constitutional order, and don’t even use strongly partisan proposals as bargaining chips. Republicans are still pushing for a radically different constitutional order in the future, and are willing to blow everything up if they don’t get their way, because psycho-politically, they don’t feel they have anything to lose. [my emphasis]

That's a very good description of an important aspect of the Democratic Party's passivity that drives the netroots and other activists nuts. Ironically, it appears in a parenthesis.

Rosenberg also connects it to the ascendancy of neoliberal ideology in the Democratic Party (The right’s Bergdahl calamity: How Bill O’Reilly & Rush Limbaugh discard America’s norms):

... the neoliberal minimalism of Clinton’s policy vision is itself a product of the persistent condition of divided government, and that neoliberalism has substantially replaced New Deal liberalism—the Americanized form of social democracy—within the Democratic Party. ...

... part of what makes things much easier for Republicans in this era is that—with few exceptions—they’re not going up against FDR-style social democrats, with the full-bodied set of attitudes, assumptions, principles and expectations entailed in that constitutional order, but instead face neoliberal Democrats who desire compromise in a framework of diminished expectations.

Digby Parton also writes in the same edition of Salon on where this kind of non-symmetric party dynamics are taking us:

There was a time when we had decided that wars of choice were off the table. We managed to bust that one all to pieces with the invasion of Iraq. For many, many years we had believed that torture was taboo but that’s obviously no longer operative. The torture genie is out of the bottle, especially for unfortunate Americans. And now we are in the process of degrading and abandoning the very long tradition of trading prisoners of war. And we’ve decided that enemy prisoners of war should be held forever, a cruelty reserved only for suspected terrorists up until now.

Conventional wisdom on parade

"You are living in 1969. Drugged-out hippies and scary black people are after you."

This is the kind of thing that self-respecting political junkies have a hard time overlooking. "This" being brought to you by that faithful channeler of press corps conventional wisdom, Carolyn Lochhead of the San Francisco Chronicle, in Party leaders don't seem to care Clinton has taken the big states 04/23/08.

Now, credit where credit is due and all that: Lochhead does point out that winning the Democratic primary in a state is no predictor of whether that candidate will win that state against McCain in "the general", as everyone now seems to be calling the fall general election.

But I was struck by her giving space to a veteran Republican to spout Republican talking points, unchecked of course against any real-world events, in this section:

Jim Pinkerton, who worked in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, said Democrats "are making an eerie replay of 1972," when nominee George McGovern lost in a landslide to Republican Richard Nixon during the Vietnam War.

"They're convincing themselves that the youth vote will carry them, like McGovern was convinced the Baby Boomers and the 18-year-old vote were going to elect him," Pinkerton said. "Well, there were a lot more Lynyrd Skynyrd fans than James Taylor fans out there, and McGovern got clobbered, including by young people."

I'm struck in this election cycle more than ever about how deeply Republican activists seem to be stuck in the "culture war" assumptions of roughly 1968-1973. And it was the 1972 election that was the first round under that particular set of "culture war" assumptions, when the minds of good Christian Republican white folks were haunted by the images of rioting Negroes, fornicating hippies and flag-burning draft-dodgers. Especially those disrespectful Negroes.

The Republicans did use the informal slogan accusing Democratic nominee George McGovern of being the candidate of "acid, amnesty and abortion", "acid" referring to the drug LSD. The basis for this litany? McGovern favored decriminalization of marijuana possession (which has since occurred to a large degree), offering amnesty to draft evaders after a peace treaty was concluded in the Vietnam War (which Jimmy Carter as President did) and leaving abortion as a matter for individual states' decision (now the "pro-life" position, though in 1972 it meant being against imposing any federal ban on abortion). Obviously, their attempts to turn Democrats into weirdo bogeymen in the voters' eyes have gained much in truth-value over the years.

But 2008 is a long way from 1972 in a lot of ways. Nixon had the kind of personality and approach to government that a Dick Cheney could and surely did admire. But he was a pragmatist in many ways and not nearly as driven by ideological or religious dogmas as our Dear Leader Bush or his nationalistic Vice President. In 1972, the country was emerging from the recession of 1971. Nixon had imposed wage and price controls to restrain inflation, which had emerged as a big concern at the time. (McGovern was against the controls; who was more "radical" on that issue?)

Nixon had also drastically reduced the number of American troops in Vietnam, which even war opponents approved so far as it went, and gave many people confidence that Nixon was extracting the country from the Vietnam War. Also, the Vietnam War in 1972 was increasingly unpopular, but not as unpopular as the Iraq War is today. Nixon's slogan of "peace with honor" had considerable resonance.

The scope of the Watergate scandal was not yet apparent, even though the national press corps wasn't in anything like the wrecked state of today's press.

Another huge element in that election was the fact that Nixon had made a high-profile trip to China to begin normalizing relations with China and had made huge progress in "detente" with the Soviet Union, much to the chagrin of the likes of Dick Cheney and those who today are known as "neoconservatives". There were rational reasons, much as any good Democrat hates to say it even today, that voters could think of Nixon as a "peace" candidate. It wasn't all marketing fluff. And he even trotted out Henry Kissinger in October to declare, "Peace is at hand" in the Vietnam War, based on the progress of the peace talks in Paris.

But, more than any association with hippie protesters or scary black people, McGovern was badly hurt by his initial pick of Sen. Tom Eagleton of Missouri as his running mate. When it became public that Eagleton had been treated for severe depression using electroshock therapy, McGovern decided to drop him from the ticket, after rashly declaring when the controversy broke that he was behind Eagleton "one thousand percent". The replacement, Sargent Shriver, was a decent enough VP candidate. But the damage to McGovern's image as a capable decision-maker was done.

The highly competitive Democratic primary campaign in 1972 was also of a different quality than the one going on right now. Hubert Humphrey campaigned as a traditional hawkish liberal against McGovern, who was the preferred choice of the antiwar movement and party reformers. Comparisons to the Clinton-Obama contest would be largely superficial. Not to minimize the internal party stakes of today's contest. But the Humphrey-McGovern split divided the party along ideological and even generational grounds in a way that made it more likely that some traditional Democratic voters that would likely have supported Humphrey in the fall against Nixon would see Nixon as a reasonable alternative.

Nixon's first term was also when the Republicans' "Southern Strategy" went into full swing, deliberately appealing to white segregationists, the "white backlash" vote as it was often called then. This was an important factor at work to pull conservative, traditional Democratic white voters into the Republican column.

Not to run this into the ground, but the degree of market segmentation that is applied today in designing political campaigns is qualitatively different that what was used then. Because candidates today are far more able to target small slivers of the electorate, it's more likely that they will pursue Rovian 51% campaign strategies. While Nixon in 1972 was out to build a mandate for himself. Much of his mandate evaporated with the massive "Christmas bombing" campaign against North Vietnam soon after his re-election. Nixon backed off the "peace is at hand" proposal at the negotiation table and clearly intended to pursue an intensified conventional war in Vietnam. That move was highly unpopular with the public and in Congress, which forced him to quickly back off that approach and sign the Paris Peace Accords in early 1973.

I'm relating all this here because many Republicans, like a young Karl Rove who was working for Nixon's re-election in 1972, processed those events as being an ideological victory over the dang hippies, "hippies" in their minds including also those very scary black people. And they passed that "culture war" sense of politics on to younger Republicans who hadn't even been born in 1972.

So when Jim Pinkerton says he sees this Presidential election as "an eerie replay of 1972", he's just saying that he's a typical "culture war" Republican. They see every Presidential election as a replay of their highly-ideological view of "1972".

Was James ("Fire and Rain") Taylor less popular in 1972 than Lynyrd ("Sweet Home Alabama") Skynyrd? The "Southern rock" band probably sold more records that year. But I'll bet the folk singer had more people who counted themselves as fans.

Pinkerton, holding on to his 1972 "culture war" mentality and applying it to 2008, gives a good picture of the Republican strategy at the present against Obama:

Pinkerton said Republicans will mine such issues as Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers, a former member of the radical Weather Underground group.

"That item alone will be a rich vein of discovery for some eager-beaver Republican opposition researcher," he said. "Oh, and then we'll get on to the Rev. Wright and his life and times, and Indonesia, and his further sociological thoughts on the white working class."

Every time I hear people mention Bill Ayers and the Weather Underground - the Maverick himself went on about Ayers in his This Week interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC Sunday - it reminds me of a Law and Order episode from several years ago. Sam Waterson's character, prosecutor Jack McCoy, was prosecuting a case that was (obviously if unofficially) based on a Weather Underground case in which a female member who had been evading the law for years was discovered to be living as a prosperous suburban housewife. Jack, normally a hard-nosed prosecutor, was unusually ambivalent about prosecuting her for a decades-old bank robbery in which a security guard was killed. He was aware of the complex tangle of motivations at work in the political moment in which it occurred.

When the woman is convicted, they close by talking about her being eligible for parole in 2010 or whenever. Jack says (quoting from memory), "Maybe by then the '60s will be over."

Can the spirit of Richard Nixon help us defeat the mind-controlling space aliens?

Sensible thought, but wrong. For our conservative "culture warriors", they're still reliving "the 60s" as it exists in their minds. Obviously, as we saw in the Social Security fight in 2005, the Republicans would still like to roll back most of the New Deal. But it seems to me that their world view has been more enduringly shaped by their fevered reaction to "the 60s" than by even the New Deal. For some of them, apparently, "the 60s" will never be over.

The problem with these "culture war" attacks on the Democrats is that, given the eager cooperation and even initiation of such attacks by our badly broken "press corps", they create all sorts of uncertainties and suspicions and fears about the Democratic candidate which the Republicans can then exploit with their media-endorsed images of the Republican candidate as the tough, patriotic man of principle. It's not so much that independent voters actually buy the attacks as such. Can anyone really believe Barack Obama is part an a super-secret Muslim Weather Underground terrorist group? But unless they are adequately countered, they have an effect nevertheless, as the Swift Boat Liars for Bush group in 2004 did.

Finally, that "can anyone really believe..." question is probably giving some people too much credit. I was at a party in San Francisco just this week where I was talking some respectable businessman who said in all apparent seriousness that university faculties at Ivy League schools are dominated by Communists. This guy may be quite successful in his business (or maybe not, I don't really know). But he's just plain out of touch with reality in some large portion of his thinking as a citizen about political matters.

Next time that happens to me, I think I'll counter by insisting that, no, those faculties are really dominated by gray space aliens with big eyes who control them through brain implants.

Tags: barack obama, nixon, republican party, republicans, vietnam war

Thuggish politics, Nixon style and the origins of the "culture war"

I've written a number of times about the Republican obsession with their bogeyman of the "dirty hippies", i.e., everything that bothers the "culture warriors" about American society, which they project back onto "the '60s" as the root-point of all the evils.

In his book The Year the Dream Died: Revisiting 1968 in America (1997), which I've quoted in the last couple of posts, Jules Witcover interviewed a number of political figures about the impact of the events of 1968 in particular. His interview with John Ehrlichman elicited an antidote that reminds us that heavy-handed packing of campaign rallies to create a uniformly receptive audience did not begin with Karl Rove and George W. Bush.

The context involved the fearful images of Bad Stuff that were scaring good suburban white folks in those days. Witcover interviews Ben Wattenberg, who he identifies as "a Johnson speechwriter at the time who eventually became a prominent neoconservative". Wattenberg was a Nixon supporter by 1972. Wattenberg, speaking specifically about the 1968 Democratic convention, which became notorious for the Chicago "police riot" in which Mayor Richard Daley's cops pummelled peaceful antiwar demonstrators in front of the network TV cameras, told Witcover that "the convention was not just a liberal revolt".

Now, the people who thought of themselves at that time as being in a political "revolt" would have identified themselves as "left" or "New Left", and would have been offended to be called "liberal". Certainly, some prominent liberals were supporting antiwar demonstrations by that time. But it takes either a romantic perspective or an authoritarian mentality to see a "revolt" in peaceful demonstrations against the Vietnam War or in intra-party political challenges of that time. I don't think Ben Wattenberg suffered from excessively romantic views of politics.

Wattenberg characterized the events, specifically those around the 1968 Democratic National Convention, in culture-war terms (Witcover presumably interviewed him in 1996 or 1997 for the book):

There was a tremendous amount of resentment against everything people were seeing on television, and in many ways properly so. A lot of the so-called social issues, the erosion of order, and some of the sexuality, were personified by the events - the drugs, the nudity, all that kind of stuff - that people saw on television for the first time.

Nudity? In the Democratic Convention?

This is a classic example of the muddiness of "culture war" politics as we know it today in its early stages. With a bunch of protesters gathering in Chicago in the summer of 1968 after all that had happened in the year already, some of the images presented to TV viewers in the coverage of the convention undoubtedly did feature young people smoking pot or at least talking about smoking pot. Maybe even some nudity - with key parts discreetly blocked on-screen, of course! I haven't seen any footage from that event any time recently. But I don't recall the Nudists Against War or whatever being a major feature of the protests.

But, whatever kind of amount of clothing they had, the protesters were demonstrating against the Democratic administration. The cops that were clubbing the demonstrators - and it wasn't even only demonstrators that got clubbed - were the police force of Mayor Daley, one of the best-known Democratic politicians in the country.

Did anyone seriously imagine that elected Hubert Humphrey President in 1968 would have brought hordes of nekkid people into the streets of cities and small towns in Iowa and Georgia to have orgies and smoke dope? And yet culture-war imagery lumps together Humphrey and Bobby Kennedy and nekkid dope-smoking protesters against the Democratic Party as all being The Liberals. Or in Wattenberg's appropriately murky formulation, "the so-called social issues, the erosion of order, and some of the sexuality", those were all lumped together in the minds of many rightwing Republicans as the wicked Democrats and Liberals. Kind of weird, when you stop to think about it.

This image of the Democrats as being somehow advocates and co-participants in riots and pot-smoking and antiwar protesters and guys with unconventional haircuts was used to justify the police-state methods and generally thugish attitude of the Nixon administration. From Witcover:

John Ehrlichman, Nixon's campaign aide in 1968 who became the chief of domestic affairs in the Nixon White House and later was convicted and jailed on charges growing out of the Watergate coverup, agreed. "An element of noncivility was involved that was not present eight years before [when Nixon ran for president the first time}," he said in an interview much later. "Heckling, rock-throwing, vegetable-throwing came into play. It was almost impossible for the candidate to speak without screening the crowd in advance."

(This, Ehrlichman said, was accomplished in the Nixon campaign several times by extraordinary efforts. At the Nixon-Agnew rally in Madison Square Garden in late October of 1968, he said, "we issued tickets broadly, and anyone who presented a ticket who didn't look right, was carrying a sign [critical of Nixon] or was a hippie, was referred down one hall, and the others dressed right were sent down another hall." Those routed to the first hall, he said, "were led to a door that let out onto the street, where there was a 'cop' standing. When they came back around the front and complained, they were directed to go get another ticket a block away in a storefront. There, a Nixon man would stand on a table and report that the fire marshal had just announced that no more would be allowed in." The storefront, he said, was rented just for the purpose of diverting potential hecklers.)

This is one reason that I'm so skeptical of the search for the "real conservatives" who supposedly are true to conservative principles of the balanced budget and civil liberties and a limited Executive and the rule of law.

Because the real existing conservatives in the real existing Republican Party haven't focused on such things when they were actually in control of the White House since the days of Dwight Eisenhower. And even he with his hyper-moralistic foreign policy and his "tripwire/massive retaliation" nuclear force policy was scarcely what I would consider the Model Prince.

Nixon practiced out-and-out thuggery, though the above example is a relatively mild one. His dirty-tricks operation was a preview of the current administration's massive warrantless spying. His administration made the Republican Party the standard-bearer of culture-war politics as we know it today.

Gerald Ford the "healer" set a precedent for enabling the President to operate outside the law and the Constitution with his blanket pardon of Nixon. He also gave probably the single most important career boosts to Dick Cheney and Rummy, who went on to become two of the most destructive figures in the history of the Republic.

Reagan's Iran-Contra operation was the template for the entire foreign policy of the Cheney-Bush administration. And he furthered the culture-war politics of the Nixon administration and raised it with a new level. It was Reagan who formed the Republican Party's current type of alliance with the Christian Right and gave Presidential-level sanction to their creationist pseudoscience.

Old Man Bush was willing to sling sleaze and practice culture-war politics like any supposedly more rightwing Party guy. He also used his pardon power to let Iran-Contra criminals evade legal responsibility for their actions.

The authoritarian streak of today's Republican Party did not spring full-blown from the brow of Antonin Scalia with the Bush v. Gore decision in 2000. It's been a long time in developing, and has a ancestry that goes back quite a bit farther than that the Supreme Court's overriding of the 2000 Presidential vote.

Tags: authoritarianism, ben wattenberg, john ehrlichman, nixon, republican party

It was 33 years ago today...

Richard Nixon resigned the Presidency on 08/08/1974.

Bad governments eventually come to an end. Unfortunately, Dick Cheney's government has been far worse than Nixon's in terms of trampling the Constitution. And it has already lasted longer.

Tags: nixon

Richard Nixon's "lessons of Vietnam"

I was intrigued recently to read an essay by Mortin Halperin, "The Lessons Nixon Learned", which appeared in The Legacy of Vietnam: The War, American Society and the Future of American Foreign Policy (1976), Anthony Lake, ed.

Coming into office in 1969, Nixon with the help of his foreign policy adviser Henry Kissinger had drawn the following lessons from the war at that point, lessons on which he relied during his notorious administration:

• The United States must be able to project a credible intent to use force when its interests are threatened.
• Escalation must be sudden and massive.
• The very existence of the North Vietnamese government, society, and economy must be threatened.
• Indochina must be linked to other issues in dealing with the Soviet Union and with China.
• Domestically, support must come from the right and from patriotic "middle" America.

Since today's Cheney-Nixon Bush administration [that was a real typo!] is the misbegotten spawn of the Nixon administration, Nixon's worldview is in part still driving US foreign policy. The undead stalking the living, one might call it.

To be historically realistic, Nixon's regime on the whole looks like a model of sober statesmanship in comparison to the Cheney-Bush crew, although even in comparison Nixon's policies in the Vietnam War and the Chilean coup of 1973 don't merit such a favorable description.

Nixon was big on the key notion of demonstrating the Will of the American people, especially as embodied in their Leader, being particularly important. Today we know that as the Cheney Stomach Theory of War (i.e., does the wimpy public have the Stomach to wage war forever in Iraq?) and, in Gene Lyons' inspired description, as the Professional Wrestling Theory of Foreign Policy. Halperin wrote:

This [Nixon's Vietnam War] policy had to be administered with considerable skill. Hanoi, Peking, and Moscow had to be convinced that the President had the determination to escalate the conflict as well as the domestic political freedom to do so. The President had to be seen as a decisive man who would pay the domestic costs, whatever they were, of an escalatory policy. (my emphasis)

Nixon and Kissinger never reduced diplomacy to military threats to nearly the extent that Dick Cheney has. But they were fond of brandishing their missiles, too:

The Nixon Administration's approach to the Vietnam war was a reflection of, and in turn was reflected in, its more general relations with the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. The basic objective was to establish a new relationship with Soviet and Chinese leaders under which they would refrain from using military force to exploit local situations, and would instead cooperate with the United States in bringing such conflicts under control. The successful application of this policy required not only an end to the Vietnam war, but more generally a conviction on the part of the Soviet leaders, especially, that the United States would use force whenever it believed it was necessary to defend its interests, even in an arbitrary and unexpected way. This in turn depended on demonstrating to the Soviet leaders that the President believed in the use of force and would not be deterred from using it by domestic political opposition.

The lessons learned from the Johnson Administration's Vietnam policy were simultaneously applied in Indochina and elsewhere. Indeed, the successful application of the lessons of Vietnam required that they be applied in each potential crisis situation. Not only were they believed to be the most likely means to bring any particular crisis under control, but the failure to use the threat of force and to hold the Communist powers responsible would undermine the credibility of the general policy. The United States might have been seen as a pitiful, helpless giant, not only if it had failed to invade Cambodia, but also if it did not take credible steps indicating its willingness to use decisive military force in any potential conflict. Thus, throughout his Administration, every time the United States has seen itself on one side of a local military confrontation and the Soviet Union or China potentially on the other, President Nixon sought to convince the Soviet leadership that the United States would intervene militarily if the Soviets themselves threatened to challenge our interests. (my emphasis)

Halperin's essay reminds us that the value of this approach was, to put it mildly, highly questionable:

If the Kissinger-Nixon policy ultimately failed in Indochina, it is even less clear that the policy was necessary to build a structure of peace, or had an important impact on Soviet or Chinese behavior in other areas.

Tags: kissinger, nixon, vietnam war

Life and times of Rummy

Rummy: too ruthless for Kissinger, not idealistic enough for Nixon

Roger Morris of the Green Institute has done a fascinating historical portrait of Rummy and his dubious accomplishments. In particular, he draws attention to Rummy's malign role in first (1975-6) tour of duty as Defense Secretary. Tom Engelhardt is publishing it in two parts at TomDispatch.com. The first part is called The Undertaker's Tally (Part 1): Sharp Elbows 02/013/07.

I was particularly struck by Morris' description of how Rummy played a critical role in the military's post-Vietnam response to their defeat in the Vietnam War, which largely consisted of deciding to avoid ever having to fight a counterinsurgency war against and also finding scapegoats. Morris writes:

By any measure, Rumsfeld arrived [as SecDef in 1975] at a rare, and exceedingly fleeting moment when the enormous U.S. war machine might have come to terms with its past, and so the future. The failure to do so - hardly Rumsfeld's alone, but his role was decisive - would haunt America and the world into the twenty-first century. ...

Officially, the crumbling of discipline and performance in Vietnam would be blamed not on the military's long-festering venality and incompetence, but on the ready scapegoats of antiwar agitation and the larger social turbulence of the 1960s, a perfect fit with Rumsfeld-Cheney demonology. To the relief of the Joint Chiefs, the Secretary of Defense scoffed at, or swiftly suppressed, any institutional self-examination; yet the counterattack on critics was vicious. (my emphasis)

Rummy encouraged the stab-in-the-back thinking about the loss of the Vietnam War. The same kind of thinking we hear all the time now in its mutation for the Iraq War, as Republicans routinely and brazenly accuse critics of the Iraq War of treason and of endagering American troops.

Morris' description of the post-Vietnam War stab-in-the-back excuse in its early incarnation, which Rummy had such an important role in promoting, very well:

In the siege mentality of Rumsfeld's post-Vietnam Pentagon, the besieging force was never a blindly misjudged nationalism, an intrepid insurgency, corrupt, untenable clients, or persistent myopia, folly, self-delusion, and ultimate self-betrayal of U.S. policy. It was the curse of wavering civilian masters at home - craven Washington politicians and the old foreign policy establishment, especially Democrats - and a public too easily swayed by the treachery of a mythological "liberal media." Humiliation in Vietnam had come not from colossal blunder, but from homefront perfidy, from the hoary stab in the back. "Do we get to win this time?" [the fictional movie character] Rambo famously asks about his return to Vietnam, echoing in popular lore that denial of debacle.

In other words, Rummy has done far more than most individuals to poison the American political culture. But then, you could hardly avoid knowing that from just living through the last five years.

Morris gives us a useful glimpse, though, at the kind of self-assessment that could have taken place, that should have taken place, had the government been run by people of a less dark and cynical turn of mind that Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Henry Kissinger and their boss Gerald Ford:

Within the system, there were predictable if vain attempts to hide the approaching disgrace. When, in 1970, a war-college study of "professionalism" in Vietnam was done with implications (as a pair of reviewing experts described it) "devastating to the officer corps," the Joint Chiefs of Staff quickly classified and suppressed the findings. Yet none of the inner withering was a secret, or even arcane knowledge, in government. Before, during, and after Rumsfeld's first regime at the Pentagon, Congressional hearings, journalism and memoirs exposed the reality for what it was; while nationally noted, amply documented books, often written by veteran officers or based on their testimony, appeared under titles that spoke eloquently of the disaster still to come: Crisis in Command: Mismanagement in the Army, Defeated: Inside America's Military Machine, Self-Destruction: The Disintegration and Decay of the United States Military, The Death of the Army.

How bad a person is Rummy really? The following three sentences give the best brief answer to that I could imagine:

At the time, privately at least, his grasping shallowness led to withering - now long-forgotten - verdicts from knowing witnesses. Even a jaded Nixon would eventually deplore him as "a man without idealism." His extensive experience with despots giving the judgment added weight, Henry Kissinger came to think Rumsfeld the "most ruthless" official he had ever known.

Yes, you read that correctly. Richard Nixon thought Rummy was lacking in idealism. Henry Kissinger thought he was the most ruthless official he'd ever encountered. Yikes!

Morris also looks back at a much-neglected even in 1964, when Rummy as a young Congressman led a revolt against the Republican House leadership, successfully placing a conservative Midwestern Congressman named Jerry Ford as the Republican House leader:

It seems hard now to exaggerate the endless sequels to this small but decisive act. The lifting of the honest but mediocre Ford higher into line for appointment as vice president amid the ruin of President Richard Nixon and his Vice President, Spiro Agnew; Ford's lackluster, if relatively harmless, interval in the Oval Office and later as Party leader with the abject passing of the GOP to Ronald Reagan in 1980; [Kansas Congressman Robert] Ellsworth's boosting of Rumsfeld into prominent but scandal-immune posts under Nixon; and then, during Ford's presidency, Rumsfeld's reward, his elevation to White House Chief of Staff, and with him the rise of one of his aides from the Nixon era, a previously unnoticed young Wyoming reactionary named Dick Cheney; next, in 1975-1976, the first Rumsfeld tenure at a Vietnam-disgraced but impenitent Pentagon that would shape his fateful second term after 2001; and eventually, of course, the Rumsfeld-Cheney monopoly of power in a George W. Bush White House followed by their catastrophic policies after 9/11 - all derived from making decent, diffident Gerry [sic] Ford Minority Leader that forgotten winter of 1964. (my emphasis)

Morris' article really illustrates how the Cheney-Bush Presidency and the Iraq War are the horrible but "legitimate" spawn of the Nixon administration and the Vietnam War.

Tags: jerry ford, kissinger, nixon, robert morris, rumsfeld, vietnam war

Demonstration phobia: I don't get it

Steve Gilliard is one of my favorite bloggers on political and military topics.

But he is completely down on the idea of antiwar demonstrations. In Myth and reality 01/28/07, he even argues, absurdly, that:

... the anti-[Vietnam]war movement failed. Badly.

It alienated the middle class, it failed to gain any congressional victories and anti-war legislators were defeated (Al Gore,Sr, Ralph Yarborough) while US troops were in Vietnam. It also led to two Nixon elections.

This is all but incomprehensible to me. The "antiwar movement" against the Vietnam War was always a lot more than demonstrations, though demos loom large in television retrospectives because they were dramatic.

But the antiwar movement, with not just demonstrations but "teach-ins" and alternative newspapers and political actions and various educational campaigns did raise public awareness about the problems of the Vietnam War and the unjustness and unnecessariness (if that's a word!) of it.

Since "antiwar movement" is a vague term convering people of diverse political interests, then and now, it's painfully simple to find this or that to object to about "the movement."

Also, its true that Nixon's use of what we now call "culture war" themes was partly directly at antiwar demonstrators. But you don't have to look any farther than our esteemed President today to find good white, conservative Republican and even prowar families who were not thrilled about the prospect of their own darling boys going off to fight the Great Communist Menance in Vietnamese jungles.

But saying the antiwar movement "led to two Nixon elections" is as ahistorical as what we expect to hear from our Big Pundits. To quickly mention some of the factors, you would have to include: the fact that the Vietnam War was rightly perceived as an enterprise of the Democratic Party; Nixon's "secret plan" to end the war; the shock of the Tet Offensive in early 1968; worries over drugs and teenage promiscuity and the birth control pill and guys wearing their hair long

Then there was not only the peaceful civil rights movement and its successes, which a lot of white folks chose to interpret as something like the collapse of civilization. There had also been several major urban riots that were freaking out the public. In 1968, the assassination of Martin Luther King sat off an unprecedented series of urban riots. White voters no doubt reacted absurdly to some of those events. But were Nixon voters in 1968 or 1972 more worried about guys with long hair and women in tie-dyed clothing and jeans demonstrating against an unpopular war than about their overheated images of rioting urban dwellers and "uppity" black people? I don't think so.

I don't know about Gilliard in particular. But I've always thought that the sqeamishness a lot of liberal bloggers seem to have about the whole idea of street demonstrations must be partially a reflection of the decline in union membership in the US. If you've ever been out to picket your employer, or even a part of a union that was prepared to do so, demonstrating in public probably doesn't seem like a terribly shocking thing to do.

Tags: antiwar movement, antiwar protest, nixon, steve gilliard, vietnam war

VDH Watch 4: VDH prepares his stab-in-the-back theory for the Iraq War

Vic is cooking the historical books once again: Real Lesson of Vietnam by Victor Davis Hanson: 07/04/05. (Also available in Jewish World Review 07/30/05 issue). And would we settle for less from our man Vic? I should hope not!

According to VDH, The Terrorists are trying to break the public's Will, which in the Republican Party line equates to support of whatever the Bush position on Iraq is at the moment (my emphasis):

The al Qaedists and former Ba'athists anticipate another impending U.S. retreat, like the 1984 flight from Lebanon or the 1993 exit from Somalia after the horrific dragging of American bodies in the streets of Mogadishu. Both pullouts, enshrined in al Qaeda propaganda, contributed to the pre-September 11, 2001, folklore that the United States lacked the stamina to defeat terrorists.

So the media-savvy terrorists have redirected their attacks yet again - back to American troops. Just last week, female Marines, who allay Iraqi unease over the searching of Iraqi women at checkpoints, were blown up aboard an armored truck returning to base from a checkpoint.

Here is the heart of Vic's "lesson" for us:

By 1973, the goal of fashioning a South Korean-like, noncommunist entity in Indochina was supposedly obtained and the war over. The Paris peace agreements recognized two autonomous Vietnamese states. Almost all American prisoners were returned. The last few U.S. ground troops came home.

If the communist North, and its Soviet and Chinese patrons, saw 1973 as a breather rather than a peace, American officials at least promised the South material support and air cover if the communists reinvaded.

They did just that in spring 1975, barreling down Highway 1 with conventional Soviet tanks. Americans apparently did not want another quarter-century commitment to a second Demilitarized Zone to ward off a perpetual communist threat from the north. By 1974, a series of congressional acts radically cut funding of U.S. military support of South Vietnam. The Saigon government abruptly collapsed in April 1975.

And this is the grand conclusion he draws from it:

There are lessons here. When the United States has stayed on after fighting dictatorial enemies - admittedly for decades in Italy, Germany, Japan, Korea and the Balkans - progress toward democracy and prosperity ensued. Disengagement from unresolved messy problems - whether from Europe after World War I, Vietnam in 1973, Beirut after the Marine barracks bombings, Afghanistan after the Soviet defeat, or Iraq in 1991 - only left murderous chaos or the "peace" of dictators.

Yes, when it comes to cranking out hack work, Vic is consistently superlative.

Before we take some time to savor the full extent of his hackery on this one, we should keep in mind that his column is not really about Vietnam. You have to wonder if historical events register in the minds of Bush Doctrine fans as being anything independent of the latest Party slogan. But in any case, this is really an early version of the civilian incarnation of the stab-in-the-back theory to divert responsibility for the disaster in Iraq from the Bush dynasty and their subservient Republican Party onto someone else, i.e., the Democrats.

Also, it would be a shame to spoil our admiration of a truly fine hack job by too many pithy comments. But I can't resist one or two. Now, Vic likes to tell us about "Islamofascism" and how bad it all is. And Dear Leader Bush constantly tells us how The Terrorists hate everything we stand for, hate our freedoms, want to kill us, have no civilized values at all and so on and so forth. Well, if all this is so, why does Vic rely on Al Qaeda propaganda claims to say what American policy should be?

Yeah, Bin Laden would make fun of Bush's private parts if the US withdrew from Iraq. Withdrawing would also deprive the jihadist groups of their most potent recruiting tool of the moment. The fact that Al Qaeda would give their own propaganda spin to it doesn't make it a bad idea from the US point of view. They're puuting a propaganda spin our our staying in Iraq, as well. There's a serious lack of sense in this way of approaching things.

Now, let's go back to a primary source on this particular rightwing fairy tale. Richard Nixon in his No More Vietnams (1985) devotes a chapter to "How We Lost the Peace." Before we explore a "reality-based" version, we'll look at Tricky Dick's. In Tricky's version, as in VDH's, the 1973 Paris Peace Accords gave South Vietnam a solid basis to survive in political and military competition with North Vietnam. But the cowardly, wimpy Congrss blew it:

Congress proceeded to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Since our troops were out of Vietnam, Congress initiated a total retreat from our commitments to the South Vietnamese people. First, it destroyed our ability to enforce the peace agreement, through legislation prohibiting the use of American military power in Indochina. Then it undercut South Vietnam's ability to defend itself, by drastically reducing our military aid. Within two years the balance of power swung decisively in Hanoi's favor. When the North Vietnamese Army was poised to launch its final offensive, South Vietnam's army was in its weakest condition in over five years, reeling from the effects of congressional budget cuts that had strapped it with severe fuel and ammunition shortages.

Can't you feel the contrast to Vic's hackery already? I mean, put VDH up against a world-class liar like Nixon, and you almost feel sorry for him. Compared to the real thing, Vic is just a pale, pale imitation. I love that "total retreat from our commitments" bit, which we'll explore more in a moment. Tricky Dick doesn't mention there that one of "our commitments" was a letter of 02/01/73 that he kept secret from Congress, and possibly even from Secretary of State William Rogers, and was first released in 1977 under pressure from Congress. It promised the following (my emphasis):

1. The Government of the United States of America will contribute to postwar reconstruction in North Vietnam without any political conditions.

2. Preliminary United States studies indicate that the appropriate programs for the United States contribution to postwar reconstruction will fall in the range of $3.25 billion of grant aid over five years. ...

Could that have been a pledge of what in all but name were reparation payments to Communist North Vietnam pledged by a Republican president? Pledging unconditionally even? For beter or worse, this commitment was not fulfilled. No Republicans fretted over much about how not living up to that commitment would undercut our credibility and yadda, yadda.

In the Nixon version, everthing would have been fine if the Democratically-controlled Congress had just appropriated every dollar the Nixon and Ford administration had requested for the Thieu regime in South Vietnam, and also employed American air power to assist them in conventional warfare against the North Vietnamese PAVN (People's Army of Vietnam).

But one thing that could make a person almost nostalgic for Nixon's brand of lying is that he managed to mix it up with enough truths and partial truths that you actually had to think carefully to distinguish them. For example, this is true: "Our [i.e., US] military power was the principal disincentive to Hanoi's breaking the cease-fire."

Especially given that Tricky Dick was laying out a stab-in-the-back argument, its fairly remarkable that he would admit that. In fact, Nixon's 1973 agreement would hve required a long-term, effectively permanent US military presence and participation in combat operations for who knows how many years to come, if it was going to guarantee the survival of an independent, non-Communist South Vietnam (which had been the war aim from the start). There was nothing remarkable - and I'm confident that Nixon himself knew this - about the fact that Congress wouldn't go along.

And if you read Nixon's argument closely, even he is saying that it wasn't just Democrats or liberals that were oppossed to maintaining an active military role in Vietnam after the 1973 agreement. Without going into the details of his agreement, he gripes that Congress by banning US military operations and also by refusing to grant the aid to North Vietnam, "both the carrots and the sticks" had been removed, and "Hanoi as a result had no reasons to comply with [the agreement's] terms." Watch closely now for a pure Nixonian approach (my emphasis):

The antiwar sentiment was largely limited to Indochina. While some media critics irresponsibly charged that I called an alert of United States forces during the Yom Kippur War in October 1973 solely to divert attention from Watergate, there was overwhelming support in the Congress for the massive airlift and other military actions I took to save Israel. But Vietnam was different. Without Watergate, we would have faced the same opposition to our use of military power to enforce an agreement that would bring peace to Vietnam.

I was caught off-guard by the intensity of this backlash. ...

We could not find strong support for our policy in any quarter. ...

Hawks supported the American war effort initially. But its length had taken its toll. As the war became more unpopular, they tired of the struggle and kept a low profile politically. I could still count on their votes during the war, and most remained true to our cause afterward. But none was willing to lead the charge on Capitol Hill.

In other words, the American people were sick of the Vietnam War. They didn't believe it was worth the continuing cost it was demanding. And that sentiment was reflected in Congress on both sides of the aisle. It wasn't an unwillingness to confront substantial threats to American national security or a general abandonment of allies, as Nixon explains there. It's just that sometimes, you have to recognize that a lost cause is a lost cause. And that was one of those times.

But Nixon being Nixon, even after that fairly frank recognition that the public and Congress were done with the war after the 1973 agreement, he comes back with the kind of accusation that so endeared him to his younger admirers like Karl Rove, Rummy and Dick Cheney (my emphasis):

I was shocked by the irresponsibility of the antiwar majority in Congress.
...

I could understand their desire to put the Vietnam War behind us. But I could not understand why they seemed so determined to see South Vietnam conquered by North Vietnam. Whatever their intentions, that was the effect of their actions.

What's sad and almost nostalgic about that is that even rank demagoguery like that seems almost tame by the standards of today's Birchified and OxyContin-ed Republican Party. How much better off we would be if we only had to deal with Nixon's level of dishonesty in the national government today. (A reminder of Molly Ivins' warning that no matter how bad things get, there's always a chance that we'll look back on today as the "good old days." Yikes!)

I know this is long, but I promised to put in a reality-based version. And sometimes, it's just nice to take your time and savor the true extremes of hackery that are available for those who look.

Okay, to the reality-based part. Was it only the alleged faint-heartedness of Congress that stood in the way of South Vietnam's victory over the North Vietnamese PAVN? Well, even after American efforts beginning in 1961 to build up the South Vietnamese government and army, by 1973 they still were not able to survive on their own, politically or militarily, even with continuing American aid. One reason why is given by Stanley Karnow in Vietnam: A History (1983):

South Vietnam's crumbling economy eroded army morale, which had been surprisingly high until then. A survey conducted during the summer of 1974 by the U.S. mission in Saigon found that more than 90 percent of the soldiers were not receiving enough in wages and allowances to sustain their families. Inflation was only one cause, however. Corruption was now exceeding all bounds as commanders robbed payrolls and embezzled other funds. Quartermaster units often insisted on bribes in exchange for delivering rice and other supplies to troops, and even demanded cash to furnish the fighting men with ammunition, gasoline, and spare parts. Officers frequently raised the money by squeezing local villagers, whose support they alienated in the process, and many traded with the Communists privately. The American report cautioned that the "deterioration" had to be halted "if the South Vietnamese military is to be considered a viable force." Ambassador Martin dismissed the warning with a tired cliche: "a little corruption oils the machinery." There was nothing he could do, in any case. Thieu's wife and cronies and their wives, indifferent to the danger, were reaping fortunes in real estate and other deals, and they set the code of misconduct for the entire officialdom. Or as an old Vietnamese adage put it: "A house leaks from the roof."

Congress authorized $1 billion in aid for South Vietnam in 1974, but appropriated only $700 million. Did that cut the feet from under our allies who would otherwise have won?

Karnow again (my emphasis):

[US] Ambassador [to South Vietnam Graham] Martin and others were to assert that the cuts in U.S. assistance had prevented the South Vietnamese from resisting the Communists effectively, but a Pentagon study later noted that only about two fifths of the $700 million allocated actually reached Vietnam; the rest was committed to equipment that awaited shipment or had not yet been spent.

Yes, hard as it may be for the Victor Davis Hansons of the world to recognize (at least in their published utterances), not all events in the world can be dictated by the will of Washington.

But would American airpower have made a decisive difference in the outcome of the conventional-war battles of 1975? Air power true believers would insist that it did. But Jeffrey Record is more convincing when he writes in The Wrong War: Why We Lost in Vietnam (1998) (my emphasis):

Aside from the venality and professional incompetence of much of its senior officer corps, the [South Vietnamese] RVNAF [armed forces] could hardly be expected to shoulder the immense technical and logistical demands imposed upon it by the American style of warfare it was trained and equipped to wage. Though by 1975 the war had been thoroughly Vietnamized, the RVNAF had been transformed into a military force incapable of sustaining itself in combat, notwithstanding the mountains of American military equipment and ammunition that were transferred to the RVNAF between 1973 and 1975. Vietnamization, wrote a young Sen. Sam Nunn on the eve of Hanoi's final offensive, "has resulted in the Americanization of the Vietnamese" via "the dumping of massive amounts of military equipment and supplies on a South Vietnamese force that was unprepared and incapable of coping with the logistics and maintenance requirements related to that equipment.

"There was no more reason to have confidence in U.S. air power than in Vietnamization. Even if Congress had been prepared to approve a post-Paris U.S. reentry into the Vietnam War - which it manifestly was not - it is far from clear that any amount of U.S. bombing, absent a return of U.S. ground forces, could have thwarted Hanoi's ultimate victory in the South. At no time during the war had bombing succeeded either in shutting off the flow of supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail or in compelling Hanoi to negotiate a settlement on terms that precluded reasonable chances for Vietnam's subsequent forcible reunification. Linebacker II, the so-called "Christmas bombing" of targets in and around Hanoi in 1972, was launched in part to persuade Hanoi to accept settlement terms additional to those which it had already accepted the preceding October but on which the United States, because of bitter South Vietnamese objections, sought to renege.

It's true, as Record says (my emphasis):

The United States abandoned its cause in Indochina because it was strategically, politically, fiscally, and morally exhausted. Never prepared (nor should it have been) to make anything remotely approaching the proportional sacrifices in blood and treasure in Indochina that its communist enemy was willing to—and did—make, and being a democracy in which official policy fundamentally hostile to the electorates wishes could not be indefinitely pursued, the United States withdrew from Vietnam because it had no other choice.

But to simply label this a contemptible failure of "will" is as ahistorical as it is foolish. Every war involves some calculation of costs and benefits, however warped those may be by emotion and war fever. The United States disengaged from Vietnam after investing an enormous amount of lives, money and effort into supporting an ally that was never able to carry its war on its own.

Deciding enough was enough at that point was a realistic judgment of American interests, however influenced that may be by emotion and war weariness. Did that decision meet with the approval of the enemy in Hanoi? Yes. But that didn't make it a wrong decision for the US, anymore than Al Qaeda's propaganda provides a reliable guidepost to what American policies should be in 2005, 30 years after the fall of Saigon. It was a recognition of reality. A better understanding of Vietnamese realities and a more sober view of American interests in that region in the early 1960s would have avoided a great deal of unnecessary killing and destruction.

Record concludes, looking at the whole period of the Vietnam War:

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the United States lacked any strtegically decisive and morally acceptable war-winning military options in the Vietnam War. Options considered - and not considered - were either peripheral or, if potent and at least theoretically decisive, unacceptable. The military's vain push for ground war options in Laos and Cambodia and expanded air war options against North Vietnam was a push, in effect, for an extension of the military stalemate in Indochina at a higher and more costly level of violence, though these rebuffed options continue to serve the cause of those who believe that the Vietnam War was a case of American self-defeat.

VDH's stab-in-the-back whining is as vapid today as it was in 1975. It's just that in 1975, fewer people were willing to swallow such nonsense after all those years of the Vietnam War.

[For other installments, see Index to the VDH Watch.]

Tags: iraq war, jeffrey record, nixon, stab-in-the-back, stanley karnow, vdh watch, victor davis hanson, vietnam war