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Good Morning, ladies and gentlemen.
I'm Rear Admiral Ted Walker, the
President of the Navy Memorial and
I want to welcome you to this Richard Nixon
legacy forum specifically addressing
Cold War strategy and his effect upon it.
It 's my pleasure to have you here with us today.
This Navy memorial has been
here for now 22 years.
We are in existence
to honor the service of
people who have served in
all the sea services: Navy, Marine
Corps, Coast Guard and our National Merchant Marine.
As you can see behind me here,
President Nixon was in fact in the Navy.
He served in the second World
War, he served in
a job that was close
to my heart as a supply
officer, he was a freight cargo forwarder.
I think he
was probably most famous for
helping the troops out because somehow
or other he got a
channel to get hold of
fresh hamburger meat, once or twice a month, and he had
"Nick's hamburger stand" on one
of those steamy islands in the South Pacific.
Like so many, he labored under
extremely difficult conditions, unsung,
but absolutely critical to our winning the war.
It's my pleasure to host
this and to have
this forum here, Pennsylvania
Avenue, on "America's Main Street".
And with that, I
would like to turn you over
to the coordinator of the
Richard Nixon legacy program,
Mr. Geoff Shepherd.
Good morning and welcome.
I'm here to
open the eleventh of our
series of Richard Nixon legacy forums.
This is the first one on foreign affairs.
Part of the reason
is because I spent five
years on President Nixon's staff doing domestic affairs.
And I feel far more comfortable
in that area but we decided we
ought to recognize that he
was really a foreign affairs expert too.
So this is - and we're really pleased to do this.
We're starting with Richard Nixon as Cold War strategist.
If you would study the
Cold War, an excellent
way to start is to study
the public life of
Richard Nixon, as a
congressman, a senator, Vice
President, years as a
private citizen, and then as
President, and years as an elder statesman.
The Cold War was an everyday focus.
And for America, we were extraordinarily
fortunate to have such a
well prepared, thoroughly experienced
individual involved in that area.
And we know that because of the records.
And one of the interesting things that
we're able to have welcome
us today is the Archivist
of the United States who is
the keeper of those records.
David Ferriero is a super archivist.
He's a librarian.
He was librarian at Duke,
and at MIT, and then
was head of the
New York Public Libraries before he became the National Archivist.
I like this story because
at one point in the recent
past I had a meeting with
him and I snuck
in five or six
books, because I know
he's a lover of books, that represented a different point of view on some aspect of the Nixon presidency
, and I put the books on the table, we held our meeting, I made the point.
He got the point without the books.
But then it occurred to me
it was going to be a
whole lot easier having gotten
the books into the
National Archives than to get the books back out.
And fortunately David sent an
assistant down so that I
was able to take books out of the National Archives.
I think I'm one of the very few people who's ever been able to do that.
But with that introduction, let me
introduce David Ferriero, Archivist of
the United States.
Thank you Geoff. It's a special treat
to be here in this building
as a Navy vet, it's
very nice to have my office
right across the street and I
have wandered over here as often
as I can so it's very
appropriate that we're meeting here.
It is also a great pleasure
to join you this
morning for the latest in the
distinguished series of Nixon legacy
forums cosponsored by the Nixon Foundation and the National Archives.
The National Archives assumed responsibility for
presidential libraries in 1941 when
we accepted the Roosevelt
Library from FDR's family and foundation.
In 2007, the Nixon Library
joined us as the twelfth
of what are now thirteen presidential libraries.
A couple of months ago in
February we moved more
than 42 million pages of Nixon presidential records
from our facility in
College Park, Maryland to the
major new archival facility we
built at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California.
Now the entire Nixon story, from his early years to his almost two decades of post-presidential contributions are in one place and under one roof. The
Nixon Library arguably holds the
fullest record of any presidential
administration in history.
And we know that many
major works of scholarship will
now begin to emerge from that
rich trove assembled so carefully in Yorba Linda.
As these Legacy Forums of Nixon
Administration alumni illustrate, and illuminate our 37th President's domestic policies
and today for the first time
, his foreign policy, that play a vital part in filling in a blank that papers and even tapes can't do. They will convey
a real sense of what it was like to be there.
Now it's my pleasure to introduce the
moderator for today's Nixon
Legacy Forum, Edward F. ***.
He has served three presidents
, and four governors of his home state of New York.
He's been particularly active in the
areas of judicial excellence, education policy, and the environment.
In 2009 he was elected
Chairman of the New York State Republican Party.
Of course, he was the
37th President's son-in-law, married
Tricia *** (Tricia Nixon)
in the Rose garden at the White House in June 1971.
And during the post-presidential
years, he accompanied Mr. Nixon
on many foreign trips including some
to China, the Far East,
and the Soviet Union and Russia.
Ladies and gentlemen, Ed ***.
David, thank you very much.
It's a pleasure to be here for this forum.
I think I would
like to lead off by setting
the stage about the values
that President Nixon held
dear and that was really
a part of his make-up.
That in fact, those values that
were at the basis of everything that he did.
And to do that, I'm going to
read from Senator Dole's
eulogy in 1994 for President Nixon.
Senator Dole said, "I believe that
the second half of the 20th
century will be known as the age of Nixon.
Why was he the most durable figure
of our time? Because he
always embodied the deepest
feelings of the people he led.
One of his biographies said that,
'Richard Nixon was one of us.'
For those among you who
are wondering who that was, that
was Tom Wicker, no great Nixon fan.
But he said, 'Richard Nixon was one of us.' '
And so he was', says Senator Dole.
To tens of million
of his countrymen, Richard Nixon was
an American hero who shared
and honored their belief in working
hard, worshiping God, loving
their families, and saluting the flag.
He'd call them the silent majority.
Like them, they valued accomplishment more than ideology.
They wanted the government to do
the decent thing, but not to bankrupt the nation.
They wanted its protection in a dangerous world.
But they also wanted creative statesmanship and achieving a genuine peace with honor.
It is true that no one knew the world better than Richard Nixon.
As a result, the man who
was born in a house that
his father built would go on
to become this century's greatest
architect of peace.
Richard Nixon, who I
knew intimately for 30 years,
was a genuinely great man. Some men are great because of the positions they hold and they do well in those positions.
Richard Nixon was just a great man, period.
And that's because of some of the basic attributes that he had.
And of those attributes, I would
say the most important
was his tremendous intellect:
an intellect that thought strategically.
His daughter Tricia said that
if there is any one characteristic about
him that was most important,
it was that he thought strategically.
I wouldn't call him an 'intellectual', if I did, lightning would probably strike me, because an intellectual, on his or her own, was not what Richard Nixon was about. He was about putting actions together with thought.
And anyone who has worked with
him as these men have,
they understood how
he put thought together with action.
Let me read to you
from his writings in which
he talked about the interaction between
intellectual thought and action.
He said, "Reading is
also indispensable to providing perspective.
So when you tackle a specific
problem, you will think broadly, not narrowly, deeply, not superficially.
Most of the great leaders I
have met," and he names them:
Churchill, De Gaulle, De
Gasperi, Menzies, Yoshida, Mao Zedong,
Zhou Enlai, "were prolific readers.
Each of these men was
a far sighted strategic thinker.
Not because he inherited that trait.
It was the result of
his habits of reading and contemplation ."
And he concludes
this chapter on thinking in
one of his post-presidential books.
By saying, "There's no greater exhilaration than the sense of accomplishment you feel after making a decision based on
careful, intense thought.
In the end, thinking provides the
inner peace and serenity
necessary for decisive and effective action."
A man of thought and a
man of action, that was Richard Nixon.
Among his other attributes that
served him well was his
acute sense of shifting
political forces.
Both domestically, which made
him the effective politician that
he was, and also internationally,
which made him into the
great architect of peace that he was.
And in his post-
presidential years after he finished
his memoirs, he came back to New York.
And he wrote a book
during the 1980 campaign.
A book that Lyn Nofziger, who was an adviser to then-candidate Reagan, made sure
was placed on the table next to Reagan when pictures were
taken of him for the cover of Time Magazine.
So this was the Reagan
campaign saying, "Richard Nixon's
thinking in foreign affairs is our thinking." The book was entitled "The Real War", this was a time when the Soviets
were on the move.
We were still recovering from Vietnam.
You had the Neo-Cons growing, you had the Committee on Present Danger.
In this context, President Nixon
wrote, and this is the
essence of what he
was saying about foreign policy
at the time, "The United States represents Hope, Freedom, Security, and Peace, the Soviet Union stands for Fear, Tyranny, Aggression, and War. If we
are determined to win, if we
resolve to accept no substitute
for victory, then victory becomes possible.
Then the spirit gives way, gives
edge to the sword, and the
sword preserves the spirit and freedom will prevail."
Those are stirring words, fighting words.
Words that were attempting
to bring back the fighting spirit,
as Reagan was trying to do
in the '80 campaign and in his early presidency.
To confront the Soviet Union,
then in the post-Vietnam era, was
on the move across the world.
In 1982 I was privileged to
travel with President Nixon to Eastern Europe.
We went to Czechoslovakia, to Hungary,
to Romania, to Bulgaria.
They didn't let him into Poland.
If he had gone into Poland, I
think they were afraid he was
so popular there it would
have caused a serious riot that could have toppled the regime.
But, on that
trip, he had some very
intense discussions with people, like
President Kadar of Hungary
and, as is typical as
he did on his travels, he absorbed what was going on.
He absorbed not just
in Eastern Europe, but Eastern Europe
which was so closely reacting
to what was going on in the Soviet Union.
And he came back and quickly wrote a book
not about real war, but about "Real Peace", was the title of it.
Small book, small volume, no index, he just wanted to get it out.
5,000 copies distributed to
thought leaders and political leaders
around the country because he knew it was time for a change.
And here's what he said.
This is Richard Nixon reacting
to realities on the stage
and changing, trying to change,
the approach of the
country, of the administration: "So
the cost of Soviet conquests
are a massive drain on its desperately weak economy.
The British may have been enriched
by their empire, but the Soviets are being impoverished by theirs."
And talking about Andropov, who was the Soviet Leader at the time, "The assets are his military power.
Great as they are, his assets are ill-suited to solving his problems.
He has to look for ways to
deal with his problems, or at least mitigate to them.
That fact brings a prospect for real peace.
Great!
Putting it simply, both sides want
peace, the United States because
we believe in peace, the Soviets because they need it.
The time is ripe for a deal." This was, "hard-headed detente", as he called it. 1983, time
to adjust, time to
make a deal, time to negotiate.
I think we have here some
sound bytes that have never
been heard before, Richard Nixon, in 1983, talking about detente. (Nixon) Talking
to Manlio Brosio, the former Secretary-General of NATO, a great Italian diplomat, who served six years in Moscow before he came to the United States.
And he told me
in the late '60s before I
became President, very very
vigorously when many Europeans
were clamoring for detente.
He said, "I know the Russians.
They are liars.
They are great actors.
They are cheaters.
and they lie and they act
because they consider it's their duty to do so." He said, "You cannot trust them!"
Now, having said that, however, he did not go on to say that you should not deal with them.
And my answer to this
whole proposal or question as
to whether or not the Russians can
be trusted is very simply: Only
if we make agreements, which are in their interest to keep, "self-enforcing agreements", and only if everything that we do with them positively
is linked to something else which will cost them if they break the agreement, but you can't trust them on the basis that
"Well, we're sincere and they're sincere."
That is totally irrelevant where the the Russians are concerned. Reason is:
Their goal is very different from ours. To simplify it, our goal is peace as an end in itself
, their goal is victory,
and whether it's peace or war, its a means to the end, the end of victory, Soviet or Russian
or Communist domination of the world.
And under Marxist-Leninist teachings,
you use any means to achieve that "Great Goal", and if it requires you to lie and cheat, you lie and cheat. Now, under the circumstances, we do not follow that particular type of "morality".
And under the circumstances,
however, in dealing with them
it doesn't mean that we have
to lie and cheat, but we
must be aware of the fact
that they will, when they can get way with it,
but on the other hand, you can deal with them and they
will keep a deal on the basis
that it will serve their interests and ours.
I do not think that morality is really relevant as far as they're concerned.
They are thinking in terms of the "Total Communist World" or "Communist Society"
for everybody, and equality and everything else that Communism, in its ideal state, is supposed to produce,
and they believed, therefore, that anything that they do to achieve that
is justifiable.
I recall,
for example, a conversation with
regard to the whole idea
of whether or not they were
sincere, that I had with
Ambassador Bolen, our former
ambassador to Russia and a great Russian expert.
And he was concerned, this was
in the early '60s, after
he had become Ambassador to Paris,
by statements out of
Washington in the early '60s
that some Washington people in
the government were convinced that
Krushchev was sincere in his desire for peace.
And he said, "that is
so stupid and so wrong,"
he said, "He is a communist.
He can no more be sincere
than this table" -- there
was a coffee table between us -- "could be sincere.
He's a materialist.
And he will therefore
be for whatever is necessary to achieve his ends.
Sincerity has nothing to do with it."
You see here a man
who understands that you
need to do a
deal, to negotiate, but you
got to negotiate from strength
and no one here knows who you
are negotiating with, but it's
time to negotiate because of
those early years of the
Reagan presidency, the United
States had come back in its military strength and its fighting spirit, the Soviet had declined because
of its economic problems. The time was ripe to do a deal. This is his sense of the shifting political forces and what we ought to do with them.
You also saw here the second
point I want to raise: His ability to communicate in clear, simple phrases. Those of
our panel who watched him work
on his speeches, he would
work them over and over
again on his yellow pad.
Not just the words, but his thoughts, honing them down, so that
every word had meaning, and his audience understood that, and was complimented by it, and that's what made him such an effective communicator. The other
point I'd like to raise about
him, a basic attribute that
he had throughout his political career,
as evidenced throughout his career: He rejected political correctness, the accepted wisdom, the veneer that people would have,
as it was put forward, he would try to the essence of what
the situation was or what the person was.
Alger Hiss and Whitaker Chambers: Very good example of the start.
He saw through Alger Hiss and stood with Whitaker Chambers.
Even though Chambers was disheveled,
disorganized and Hiss was a member of the elite and very well put together.
He said, "No,
Chambers was right, Hiss is wrong,"
and he was right about that.
You could take the next step, you talk at the end of his career,
about Gorbachev and Yeltsin.
Everybody was impressed with Gorbachev,
here's a man we can deal
with but, he went with Yeltsin.
Because he understood the essence of Gorbachev.
Gorbachev wanted to just improve communism.
Yeltsin was a true democrat,
"lower d", who wanted to
turn Russia into a
true democracy and he
was a person we should work
with despite all of his
personal problems, the drinking and
all the other things we know about Yeltsin. I had an experience, I happened to be down in Cuba
and ended up, in 1987, in a four hour
conversation with Fidel Castro. It was simultaneous translation from midnight to 4 A.M. and
in the middle of it, Castro blurted out, "How did Mr. Nixon know I was a Communist?!".
1959, Washington: Castro just comes into power, comes to Washington
and he meets with the Vice President, the VP and he have a conversation, and the Vice President
then produced a memorandum
to the President saying, "This man is a Communist, we have to do something about him."
Of course, Castro was parading then as a great democrat, and
the liberal media and others
were saying eventually that we
had turned Castro into being a Communist by our approach to him.
Castro, was saying to me, in that comment, that he was a Communist, we was trying to deceive people about that, and (Vice) President
Nixon, saw through him, and that bugged him, it bothered him. He wanted to know how he did he do that. Well, that was the ability of Mr.
Nixon to see through to
the essence of what a person was or a situation.
Finally, I would like
to emphasize the courage that he had of his convictions.
Some people have those great insights,
but aren't willing to go
out there on the political stage
and say and fight for them.
Whether it was Hiss,
or whether it was that memo, with
respect to Castro, or whether
in his final years, talking
about Yeltsin and pushing with
the Bush Administration in private and public forums.
"Yeltsin's the man we have to deal with."
He had the courage of his convictions, which came through
in everything that he did.
Briefly, I'd like to say
a few things about him personally and the settings in which he worked.
Since he liked to think, ideas
were more important to him than things. He lived simply. Small, simple
bedroom and study.
His favorite room in the
White House was the Lincoln sitting room.
He had his hideaway
office next to the Oval Office, his EOB,
hideaway. He often entertained in his post-presidential years in New York City
in our small library, in our
apartment, with Tricia being the
hostess for Heads of
State, Heads of Government and
for others who would come to visit him there.
Never went on a board, never accepted an honorarium.
He gave up his
Secret Service because they were
an impediment to his moving
around freely and he
didn't feel that the government should pay for it.
For a living, he
wrote books, but he wrote
books like the one
I showed you. "Real Peace", he didn't make any money off of, he just wanted to get his message across. He made speeches for impact, not for the money that was involved, and as a result he did have impact.
Of course his biggest one was
his trip to China, just briefly.
Of course my interest
back in the 60's were very singular.
One word: Tricia.
That was it.
But in the process I interacted with
Mr. Nixon as he was running
for the presidency and I happened to be in the library on the apartment on 5th avenue
in February, 1968. The discussion then
in the newspapers were
"Nixon's Secret Plan for Peace."
What was it? Of course, he never talked about that.
That was Rockefeller pushing Nixon to
say something, to expose what his plan was.
Rockefeller didn't think Nixon had a plan.
I happened to be in the library
waiting for Tricia to change
her clothes, we were going
out, and he comes
in after a hard day of
campaigning, he liked to listen to Tchaikovsky. Should I ask him or not?
Well, I'm almost a member of the family.
Mr. Nixon what's your plan?
"I'm going to go to Peking.
I'm going to go to Moscow and that's
how we're going to bring about
peace in Vietnam and the world." Wow!
I didn't tell anyone.
I just kept it to myself.
He had already thought out what he was going to do.
He built up the intellectual capital
that served his presidency so well in
the foreign policy area.
Of course there are many other areas that will be discussed here:
The Yom Kippur war, and how he settled that, that led to Camp David and the Oslo accords, peace with honor in Vietnam, ending the draft that led to the volunteer army and a lot of the way we fight now, in many ways, the India-Pakistan war which still defines, in many ways, what's going on
in the Subcontinent now.
Even at the end of his
career and of his
life in 1994,
he was still in the game.
He was still thinking strategically and
to him the Cold War, the effects of the Cold War, were still not over, and he was concerned about Russia.
His basic thesis was: Communism
is dead in Russia, but democracy
has not won. And for that
reason he was traveling back
and forth to Russia, worried about
whether it was Gorbachev or Yeltsin, speaking out on that topic. I remember he
came back on a trip several months before he died.
I was in his library.
He gets a call from President Clinton.
They had a conversation about Clinton's Russia
policy, and you could
see in the subsequent months Clinton's
Russia policy changed along with the advice that was given by Richard Nixon. So,
that's, as I see it, the essence of the man.
I'd like to conclude by going
back to Senator Dole's eulogy,
and he talks about the
last time he saw President Nixon:
On a luncheon honoring the 25th anniversary of his first inaugural, without a note,
President Nixon stood and
delivered a compelling speech, capturing
the global scene as only
he could and sharing his vision of America's future.
When it was over, he was surrounded
by Democrats and Republicans alike,
each wanting just one more
word of Nixonian council, one more insight into world affairs.
And Dole concluded: "May the day of judging President Nixon on anything less than
his entire life and career, may that come to a close." That's what this forum is
about, and the distinguished folk here who
served in President
Nixon's administration to address President Nixon and the Cold War, let me introduce them:
Mr. Allen, head of the Foreign Affairs Issue Team
during President Nixon's 1968 campaign, and served as a senior member of President
Nixon's Security Council. He went on
to serve as assistant to the President
for National Security Affairs in the Reagan administration.
He is now a senior fellow at
the Hoover Institution and President
of the Richard B. Allen
Company, a Washington-based consulting services firm. Our next speaker's going to be Richard Solomon. Ambassador
Solomon is President of the United States Institute of Peace.
He served on the staff of
the National Security Council from 1971
to 1976 and that position as an aid to National Security adviser Henry Kissinger. He supported President Nixon's efforts to normalize relations with the People's Republic of China. He also served in a variety of posts at the US Department of State, including Director of Policy Planning, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs and
Ambassador to the Philipines. Our third speaker on this panel will be John Lehman. Secretary Lehman is chairman of JF Lehman and Co., a private equity
investment firm.
He has served as Secretary of the Navy during the Reagan administration, as a staff member to Henry Kissinger
on the National Security Council, as a delegate to the Force Reduction Negotiations in Vienna and as Deputy Director
of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Richard Allen? You're up. Thank you very
much, Ed and distinguished colleagues.
Mr. Ferriero, nice to see you here, Geoff Shepherd, Frank Gannon is lingering someplace up in the back.
I did a mental calculation, and you
are confronted, the audience
is confronted with today with about
two hundred and ten years
of solid, hands-on Nixon experience. Also, I see our
colleague, Bud Krogh, here today,
add another many years
of experience too, pushing two hundred and twenty-five or
thirty years, a lot of time.
Ed, of course, Ed
***, had the opportunity to see it from the inside, to travel with the President, especially after his presidency, got to know him very well. My personal acquaintance, and I think it's important to make
these kinds of confessions, was having the opportunity to pass out Nixon/Eisenhower pamphlets
in working-class South-Bend Indiana while I was "imprisoned" in a Catholic university known as Notre Dame. When I was all of 20 years old, I got
to meet Mr. Nixon when
he came to the Notre Dame
campus, was enormously impressed. 1957, I met him again when I was in Washington because I crashed
a cocktail party at the Capitol Hilton, when I was working here that summer,
walked into
a room, saw a lady I
knew I had seen before but couldn't identify.
And the man next to her turned around and stuck out his hand.
It was the Vice President of the United States!
And I said "I met
you last year at Notre Dame".
"I remember," he said.
"I remember."
I began sending him
my articles when I began to write.
I went abroad to
the University of Munich, in Germany, to do my post-graduate work for three years, came back,
began communicating with Mr. Nixon, he eventually moved to New York.
On a number of occasions
I had the opportunity to visit him in New York,
I was wondering if this man, who had the
singular vision of the way the world ought to be organized, would, in fact decide to run for President again after having
the experience of 1960 and then the setback of 1962, having lost the governorship
to Pat Brown in
California and making
a declaration that some people
thought meant that he
would never again serve as a public figure. In 1966
he visited 47 Congressional districts, and lo and behold, 47 Republican congressmen
were elected: 46 men and one woman. His thinking was moving more and
more toward running for
president again.
By 1968, I was asked to
take a leave of absence from the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University, to come east and to join a very young crowd: Pat Buchanan, 28 years old, Raymond Price, 30 years old, I was a little over 30 years old, 31 years old, Bill Sapphire,
who wasn't but a few years older than we were, Alan Greenspan and
a very interesting cast
of characters, young, and a
very small campaign staff began to build.
Martin Anderson, my colleague, my
domestic counterpart, Richard Wayland,
a great speechwriter and thinker.
This little coterie of individuals put together, if you will, at Mr. Nixon's behest, comprehensive programs. What Ed
said was very important and it
is also important when you study President Reagan, to whom I was quite close over a number of years as well, prior to the Presidency and
then during the Presidency.
You have to understand that the man
read and understood and
when Ed said President Nixon
read,
he did read deeply and he communed deeply with those that had specialized knowledge, but he also wrote, and he wrote on
tablets like that, and that's
exactly the way he
wrote his inauguration speech, out of
Journey's Point in Long
Island when the first inaugural address.
All of these study habits,
deep reading habits, and these
deep discussion habits, and thinking
habits are brought to
bear in a way that
we can't attribute to a lot of presidents we've known, at least during my lifetime. That's not to say that the presidents weren't good, excellent or sometimes even
great in their own right, but those that were the most serious and most studious that I can recall in my own mind during this
period of my lifetime
which spans from 1936
forward, thinkers and doers, based on deep thought, were two: Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Mr. Nixon's formation came about very naturally,
in a way.
In 1946 he was drafted
to run for Congress, was
elected.
In 1948 he began the investigation of Alger Hiss,
who evoked the sympathy of
the entire establishment press.
But as Ed correctly remarked, in the
long run, Richard Nixon was right, and Alger Hiss was wrong. Whitaker Chambers was right, as disheveled as he was. I met Mr. Chambers once.
He was right, and Hiss was wrong, and history has proven that Hiss was a
communist spy, a Soviet spy.
He betrayed our secrets.
Forged in that and
the kind of reaction that came from it, he then moved on to a race against Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950, that also evoked
the great antipathy.
You can see if you look
back historically now, if you
will, an anti-Nixon press forming.
By 1968, it was a different story, and the good
thinkers, we had an awful lot of them in this very small campaign team, believed that it
was time to demonstrate a new Nixon.
And the new Nixon was very
much part of the "shtick" as they would say,
in these days.
He even went in 1968 on Laugh In, and his one line on Laugh In was "Sock It To Me!" The crows eyes and smile, and, if you will, a new impression was created. A hard fought campaign with Nelson Rockefeller and I might add
Henry Kissinger on the other
side who didn't even
know of Richard Nixon during 1968.
A minor adjustment that
Henry and I were able to
make on the Vietnam platform so
we'd have no argument, Nixon sails out in front.
I happened to be
reviewing the other night, the
only set of notes, I'm an inveterate note-taker, I'm afraid,
page after page of the
first cabinet meeting, the day
after the cabinet was announced
in a theater in the round approach,
all of them together.
Oddly enough, on that day
Mr. Nixon forgot the name
of his best friend, his new
Secretary of Commerce, Maury Stans.
For those of you who remember,
that day was kind of humorous. We had a day-long briefing, and my notes go on
and on, and RN charged his
cabinet with getting the
right people in government, it
was a very, it was
a stupendous lesson on how
to staff a government.
Take the people that
you trust, and those
that you don't know, those in
the bureaucracy, tried to
convince them of the worth
of your program, but always
take the people that you trust.
That lesson was not always
learned and as a consequence
we had some anomalies, shall
I say, in administrations.
Mr. Nixon's worldview was well-
developed.
I think he did think in terms of winning the Cold War, without question,
winning the Cold War.
That policy came off
track for a brief
period of time during the
1970's, when, taking
a simple term that is
used in diplomacy to describe
relaxation of tensions, "detente",
relaxation of tensions among nations or between nations, taking that one, simple term and somehow elevating it into a
form of theology if you
will, led to
all sorts of offshoots of
thinking in the government
about the inevitability of the process.
A good friend, Zbigniew Brzezinski who eventually became Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, and a great thinker, even wrote a book
titled "Convergence", which was
describing basically how we
would drift steadily leftwards and
the Soviet Union would
drift steadily rightward, and at
some point in the future
we would converge.
There was a lot of vulgar
theory going on, while I don't
think Mr. Nixon shared it, tactically
the use of what became
the theology of detente, eventually caused a great deal of ripples within
the Republican party, and perhaps, elsewhere as well.
Because it held the theory that if you could coax the Soviet Union into becoming
dependent on trade and
aid, the transfer of
technology, you could
alter its behavior by
the threat of denial of
that very same technology and
trade to which it had become accustomed. It didn't work.
It simply didn't work.
And that caused, I believe,
a bit of a setback in the
later years after Mr.
Nixon left office. I had
the opportunity to visit him
in California and have long discussions with him.
And I think that he saw
too that this had
been elevated to a level
that didn't make sense, but he
did think constantly about people.
And he was concerned
about his country in a profound way.
Finally I want to mention the opening to China.
Ed *** heard it
in February of '68.
I heard it not long
before that when I visited
him in the law offices in New York City.
I had helped, I had
made some inputs on an
article for "Foreign Affairs"
magazine in October of
1967 that was entitled: "Asia after Vietnam".
And in that article, which
was ignored by and large by
the press, was a
key paragraph or key
set of sentences that indicated
what our end really had in mind.
He wasn't prepared to talk
about what that plan
was in any elaborate detail
lest it.. the conversation.. get off track. What he wanted to do was plant the seed.
I was scheduled, I was not yet full-time in the campaign, I was at Hoover,
my job
there was to be editor of
the yearbook on International Communist Affairs
and as such, I had
sixteen or seventeen people on the staff and
I had to go abroad to
talk to people who were
working for us in various places in Asia.
I was on the way to Korea,
to Japan and to Hong Kong.
Mr. Nixon said, "I'd like
to give you letters for the
President of Korea and for
the Prime Minister of Japan, but I
don't think the Prime Minister of Japan will see you.
However, his brother who was
once a prime minister as well
is a very good friend, who was Prime Minister when I was Vice President."
So I went off with letters to former Premier Kishi, in Japan, and to
President Park Chung Hee
in Korea.
And I was authorized by
Mr. Nixon to drop that
notion and also
another notion - the return
of Okinawa, the prospective, possible
return of Okinawa, would be
considered were Richard Nixon to be elected.
These two gifts, if
you will, advance notice of
what might happen with respect to
China, although I couldn't be
quite explicit, were very,
very welcome in Japan. By the time I got to Korea,
I couldn't deliver the letter, because
four days prior, the North
Korean squad guerrillas had
attacked the Blue House and
the last of the crowd that
had come over the DMZ was
shot dead on the steps
of the Blue House,
the equivalent of the White House. So I couldn't effectively deliver the letter. As it was, Mr. Nixon had a broad vision for
Asia after Vietnam, which meant he saw a conclusion to Vietnam, which he wasn't permitted to conclude as
promptly as he would have
liked, "Peace with Honor",
but he saw something very profound.
He opened the door to China, there's no question about it.
No one else could have done it.
But I do think that, were he
alive today, Richard Nixon
would be having some very serious
second thoughts about where
that relationship has lead, and
some of the overhanging dangers inherent in it.
Thank you very much, Ambassador Solomon.
My colleagues have touched on
a number of the key points that
I'd wanted to make but
I will put them in a broader framework. (Please Do)
As we look at Richard Nixon's contributions to national and our strategic position, it's very clear that the opening to China and the subsequent arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union, but particularly the China opening fractured the dynamic of the Cold War. It restructured our dealings
with the two major communist powers.
And there's a long history to that kind of maneuvering, but the
Nixon initiative really stands out.
You can go back to George Washington's
time, here was our first
President, even before the Revolution, figuring out how
to maneuver his would-
be country between the French and the British. The Russians were there, the Spanish were there so,
if you look at the history
of that early period you see
again the country trying to
figure out how the deal
with threats, pressures and
opportunities with countries abroad.
But the China opening clearly stands
out as one of
the great strategic initiatives in
20th century diplomacy. Now we can look at it in some very interesting
perspectives that will reinforce
what my colleagues have said.
Richard Nixon, without question,
came to the Presidency as
probably the best prepared candidate
to deal with the world of the 20th century.
And as we look
back on his experiences as
President Eisenhower's Vice President, it was very clear the kind world he was confronting in the late 1960s,
he had dealt with
in very similar structural terms,
in the 1950s. President Eisenhower dispatched Vice President Nixon
to Asia in 1953.
President Eisenhower was
dealing with a very unpopular war in Korea.
He was dealing with a recently
formed Sino-Soviet alliance, an
alliance between the Chinese and the Russians.
And one of his
problems was to reassure a
range of allied countries in
Asia that we would stand by them, that we would contribute to their security. So, Vice President Nixon dealt with a world that, 15,
16 years later, he confronts again.
But this time the challenge is
not the Korean War, it's the Vietnam war. This time, the Sino-Soviet relationship is showing, at least, signs of political strain.
And again,
we have Asian allied
countries concerned about whether
the United States will hang
in there, will support their security,
and in 1967, as *** Allen has mentioned, Mr. Nixon, in business, but also considering
a run for the Presidency, has
to say to himself,
"If I win, the
last thing I want to
deal with is the burden
of the Vietnam War. It was destroying the presidency of Lyndon Johnson. He knew it
would be a great burden to his
likely candidate challenger, one
of them at that point, Hubert Humphrey,
and the brilliance of
his consideration of
the world at that time was
that he could see that there
might be a possibility of
splitting the Communist world and
creating circumstances where, as
we like to refer to
it, he could leapfrog out of
the Vietnam quagmire and reposition
the United States as the
most maneuverable and secure
element in a strategic
triangle, as we came to refer to it.
What is very interesting about the
1967 article that
*** Allen has referred to, "Asia
after Vietnam," is one, is its very title.
He was again thinking beyond the
quagmire "How do I get
out of Vietnam into a
new strategic environment?" But the other thing that is interesting as we
re-read that article today, there's
somebody who is not mentioned
in that article: There's a dog
that isn't barking. There's almost
no mention of the
Soviet Union, that whatever
thinking with going on that Ed *** may have picked up was not communicated
in anything but the most
elliptical fashion, where
Mr. Nixon had talked about
the need to engage
China so that it wouldn't
persist in its posture of
angry isolation. Well the
'67 article really didn't
gain much attention and what
is, what is fascinating
about the subsequent history is the thing that gained world attention was a Ping-Pong ball. President Nixon,
within two weeks of his
inauguration in early
1969, had Henry Kissinger
in and said that he
wanted to try to engage the Chinese.
He started sending messages to Beijing (Peking),
first through the Romanians and then the Pakistanis.
And initially those messages didn't elicit much of a response.
But in the summer of 1969, the Sino-Soviet feud, which up to that point had been largely political, erupted into serious military clashes
along the Sino-Soviet border along the Ussuri river
, and that signaled the differences between the two major Communist
countries had reached a point
where maybe something serious could be done.
And shortly thereafter, Mr.
Nixon began to see positive
responses coming out of China.
In October of 1970,
Chairman Mao Zedong brought Edgar Snow atop Tiananmen for the National
Day celebration, subtly signaling
that he was prepared to talk to an American.
To everybody's shock in
April of '71 as
Chairman Mao later said to,
I guess it was to Henry Kissinger or maybe it
was the President himself, he
said "All we did is we
threw out a little ping-pong ball, and the world went crazy!"
That, suddenly, in the United States in particular, the great fear that we would be drawn into a war with China over Vietnam
, sort of reprising
the fear that we had had
in the Korean War of being
drawn into a war with
China, suddenly that ping pong
diplomacy, the initiation of
it, gave people a
sense that maybe the game would significantly change. 3 months later, Henry Kissinger, at the invitation of the Chinese,
made a secret trip to Beijing, early
July of 1971.
And in those secret
talks laid the basis for President Nixon's formal Presidential trip to China
in February of 1972, and that really initiated this dynamic that did change the context and the political
and strategic maneuvering of the Cold War Period.
Let me make an observation about China
today that is worth looking at.
How did that initiative play out
now with the perspective of
more than thirty years?
The Chinese, without question, have benefited by the
relaxation of tensions and
then the normalization of relations
with the United States that was
completed during the Carter
administration 1978 - 79
and then by
the transition in Deng
Xiaoping, who opened up
China and set in
motion the truly phenomenal economic growth of China and the rise
of the most populous
country in the world, which
today, at the beginning
of the second decade of the
21st century, is reshaping
certainly the world economy.
And we'll have to see what
its impact is more broadly
in strategic terms.
One of the things
that President Nixon was
concerned about in his opening
to the Chinese was not
dispiriting our allies, and, above all, Taiwan. Chou En-lai
in his discussions with President
Nixon and Henry Kissinger thought
that Chiang Kai-shek, who died in 1975, but
thought that Chiang in
Taiwan would be so
dispirited by the opening
that they would throw
in the towel, there would be
an accommodation of some sort,
and that China would be
reunified on the basis
that Mao and Chou
En-lai had perceived, that
is Taiwan coming under Communist control.
Today, 2011, Taiwan
is still there!
Taiwan has prospered.
Its politics have opened, its economy has taken off, and one
of the great, interesting challenges
for the next decade or two is whether the Taiwan-Mainland China relationship, as it's now generally referred to,
largely detoxified of its civil war element, can somehow lead to an accommodation in a
situation where the United
States still does what it
can to secure the island.
The other two fascinating
elements that are resulting out
of the Nixon initiative of
1971 too are Vietnam
and Korea.
One of the tremendous ironies of
those initiatives is today: Who
is one of our most enthusiastic friends in Asia? Its Vietnam! Because of Vietnam's fear of a resurgent China and where that relationship will go given China's increasing
pressure on its claims
to the South China Sea remains
a very interesting question. Finally, there's Korea. Again, we think back to President Eisenhower concerned about ending the Korean War. One of the interesting stories about the Kissinger secret trip to Beijing
in the summer of '71 is,
unknown to Kissinger, and we
only discovered it later, was
that at the same time that
Kissinger secretly was in
Beijing, Kim Il
Sung, the north Korean
leader was also in Beijing,
they didn't know it, and of
course Chou Enlai kept
them all apart. Shortly after the secret trip, within
a few hours, Chou Enlai went back to North Korea to try to reassure Kim Il Sung the opening
to the United States was not
going to harm North Korean interests.
Then he went to
Vietnamese leaders that
China would not compromise their security, but both of these small Communist countries were highly
unnerved as were frankly
our allies in the
region about how that would happen.
Contrast the situation with
Taiwan today with North Korea. North Korea has never been able to break out of the the hammer lock of the Kim family dynasty
, its economy has never taken off, its elite hangs on by its nuclear program, and
its artillery pointed at Seoul, while South Korea has become one of the great economic and political success stories
and North Korea,
a collapsed economy and
a society that is seriously
impoverished by what the Kim family has imposed on that society now has to lean on China for its security
and for its economic well-being.
So the Nixon initiative set
off some very dramatic trends
that continue to play out
and without question have
enhanced American security.
Thank you very much. Secretary Lehman?
Well thank you, and
in the interest of full
disclosure I have to
disclose that I am a
*** Allen-trained man. His
introduction was brief,
there are many things left out that are relevant here.
*** was one of the
three founders along with Arley
Berk who, for whom this theater is named,
of what is now the CSIS, and while he was there, he wrote a book called "Peace or Peaceful Coexistence" which
I read when I was
an undergraduate and was very
much struck by and
so I made a pilgrimage
to the CSIS, CSS
as it was then called, part
of Georgetown University, which was
in a tiny little townhouse in Georgetown and met *** for the first time and that led to a
long relationship that endures
strongly to the present day,
but it was
*** Allen who brought me
into the White House on
his staff, and on the
Kissinger staff that has
influenced my
thinking ever since.
And what I wanted
to talk about
is to set a
geopolitical or military context for what the world looked like when Richard Nixon took
office because it's really, the
balance was so much
tilted against the United States
that people tend to forget the
environment in which he had to work.
He really had a three-front war.
He was the first President
elected since the mid-nineteenth
century with both houses
of Congress in the hands of the other party.
And it was bitterly
divided at the
time over the Vietnam War, and not just the Vietnam War,
but the Cold War.
And not with books like "Convergence" and "Two Apes and a Treadmill" and the rise of revisionist historians who
interpreted history as the Cold War being our fault, that the Soviet Union was just reacting to our
constant building of the military and provocation.
And that was also part in
parcel of a defeatism that had grown in NATO, because at the time people were
very skeptical of the idea of a Sino-Soviet rift, and from the Western Europe perspective,
they faced a massive Chinese
potential military reinforcement of an
already massive Warsaw Pact
standing Army of 180
Divisions that were poised
to sweep across
Western Europe, and everyone
knew in NATO councils that
the argument was between whether
it would take one week, two
weeks, or three weeks for
the Warsaw Pact to
reach the channel, nobody argued, there
wasn't a serious argument anywhere
in NATO that that
was all that it would
take for them to sweep across Europe and then it would go nuclear
and the western Europeans
knew that while we could call
it a "tactical" nuclear weapon for
that exchange that
so -called flexible response was
a trigger to all -
out nuclear war to them.
What is "tactical", from the other
side of the Atlantic, is very
total for them when
nuclear weapons are used, and then
the third front was, of
course, Vietnam and Southeast Asia.
And so the President had
a daunting strategic picture
when he came in.
It was very easy to criticize
his initiatives to start negotiations on strategic arms limitation and
ballistic missile defense, and
so forth, but the fact is there were no real strategic building programs going on
in the United States at
the time, when President Nixon took office.
The Russians had five new
strategic systems being
deployed, they had two new strategic bombers, including the Backfire, they had the SS-18s, the SS-11s, they had new solid fuel
rockets and nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles.
They were at the
full deployment and
touting of their 1700-ship Navy.
And while the United
States fleet at that
the time President Nixon came in
was rapidly shrinking from just
below 1000 ships, it
was declining at about
10% a year while the
Soviet fleet was growing at
about 20% a year and serious
ships, more than 100
submarines, nuclear submarines and we had no building programs.
And so it's my
belief that his allowing of the detente view of American policy to
gain the traction it did
which led to the negotiations
of the SALT I
Treaty and the ballistic
missile, the ABM treaty,
was because he, after he
was out of office I had discussed it with him myself,
he didn't have many
alternatives. It was in his view, a way to keep things, kind
of say, "Nice doggy,
nice doggy," while he looked for a stick, and, on a Congressional
front it's very, we
think we have a bitter
divided polity here
today in Washington today, especially in Congress.
This is a "Sunday-School picnic" compared to the
bitterness of those years in Congress.
And it wasn't strictly Republican/Democrat by any means.
The Congress was very different then.
It was both parties were
split between hawks and doves to oversimplify.
The Jackson wing of the
Democratic Party was still
very strong and more
anti-detente than the Republicans were.
Whereas the Republicans, there
were many more liberal Republicans at the time, like Clifford Case and so forth, and split the Republicans, so it
was a very complicated situation, and
I think that, with the perspective of history, it was very
astute way to deal
with the issue because in
order to get the
ABM Treaty and the SALT I treaty through. It was necessary to use, and the President did
it, I think, very effectively
with his congressional relations staff
and his own personal
relationships on the
Hill to force the
liberal Democrats and the
liberal Republicans in the
Case wing of the party
to support an entirely new,
what was called then ULMS,
Underwater Launched ballistic Missile System, which is now the Trident, a new B-1
bomber, the Tomahawk cruise
missiles, a new MX
missile, the beginning of the
spending for that deployment,
and so the criticism against,
and it was a real criticism,
against those two treaties, as
the fruits of detente, was that
it legitimized a two
-to-one advantage by the
Soviet Union in strategic delivery systems and it put a stop, an effective stop, to the expansion that the United States had in the technology of ballistic missile defense. The Soviets did not have the capability
to deploy ABM and we did, we had had two active sites at the time the treaty was negotiated.
But in retrospect, this was what enabled the
funding and the acceleration
of the strategic programs which heretofore
had been totally blocked on the Hill.
So in
retrospect it was, I believe, in President Nixon's view, the way to use some Jujitsu
in a politically hostile situation,
to begin the redressing of
the balance that he felt had been allowed to decline very, very seriously.
And with regard to
the opening to China,
as you know, there have been several books written about
the Navy's role in gathering
intelligence during those years.
Suffice it to say, some
of these books allege we were tapping cables and reading in real-time
exactly what the
Russians were, Soviet high command was reacting, thinking
and ordering in their deployments and so forth.
And there is no doubt in my
mind, that the opening
to China, which I thought
was ably handled after
the thunderclap
of the trip, had a huge
impact on Soviet thinking
that suddenly transformed their perspective
from clearly being arrogantly
dominant in knowing that
they could sweep to the channel, one of the highest Soviet planners told me that they ran extensive war games,
just as we did every year
and even better analytically tooled ops analysis of all the NATO exercises and all of our exercises and they said they never had an exercise that in which, nor
did their intelligence gathering
from NATO exercises, where they
weren't able to get to the channel in a week.
And then suddenly, they
had to suddenly face a
two front strategic dilemma
because here was the United
States now dealing with China,
and China was becoming more,
much more aggressive in dealing
with the Soviet Union because they
had this new opening that
the Chinese saw even
better than we how much
that would change the strategic picture in the Pacific.
So, I believe
that the Cold War ended as
it did, in no small
measure, because of the
impact, however, astutely or
badly it was played as the
years went by, of this
tremendous sea change in
this strategic global balance with
the openings to China. John, you
have really opened a every interesting
line of inquiry here because the opening of China was as much about
the Soviet Union as it
was about China, and President Nixon, in his later years, said to me there were
two major mistakes that he saw he had made.
One was wage price controls. The second, was
that he didn't mind Haiphong and do the more intense bombing of North Vietnam earlier in '69 rather than when he did it after the trip to China and before the trip to the Soviet Union. We forget that the trip to the Soviet Union
was a first trip by an
American President to the
Soviet Union and he did
against a backdrop of very
strong military attacks on
North Vietnam, that he later regretted he hadn't done earlier.
My question is, if he had
done it earlier, would it
have been possible to do it
earlier with respect to us thinking about going to China?
Would it have been possible to go to China against that?
And with respect
to the Soviet Union, would he
have been able to do it earlier without
having some violent response from them?
Well after the trip to China they were unnerved by that
and of course just as an added piece of this, just the fact that this trip was pulled off, after
that was seen, you
can imagine how the North Vietnamese felt about that.
If I may just point out, even an earlier incident which
occurred within the first seventy or eighty days, John will remember, the North Koreans shot
down an unarmed EC-121, which was a "Constellation", old propeller-driven aircraft, naval aircraft, observation plane... that's
a nice term for a spy plane.
What?
I mean for a spy
plane, yes, EC-121. W
e got the 'hit
order', the 'hit speech', We can't seem to
find Kennedy's 1961 Cuban Missile Crisis speech.
But I'm supposed to draft the
speech for RN, little did I know he was
having two speeches written and
so we've labored for a
couple of days, it had to
be a very quick response at the
time and submitted the
draft of a speech to
RN and then watched
the press conference, or the
announcement. That night what happened,
RN announced that he
wasn't hitting, wasn't striking,
we had called for targets in
North Korea, by the way, and there weren't any, everything was under rocks, in mountainsides, harbors were built, nothing was exposed except a civilian population, so a counter value strike would have been nothing, so there
was no point in doing that.
What was the ultimate reason?
President Nixon thought that by
not reacting militarily at
early provocation, whether we
committed the provocation, or they
committed the provocation by shooting down
the 121, send in a signal to the Chinese that we intended to pursue a reasonable
course and would not resort immediately to force.
The Sino-Soviet can also be remembered came as a result of the Cuban Missile Crisis, that's where it really broke into the open. The Chinese condemned the Soviets for backing down, saying that they were not revolutionaries after all, they had
basically lost their revolutionary fervor and it was China that was going to carry on this vast revolutionary warfare,
People's War, and so on and so forth.
National Liberation Movement....
Let me just give you
an alternative view of the
origins of this Sino-Soviet,
not to break your train,
it really was Khrushchev's attack
on Stalin at the '56
Party Congress (the 1956, 20th Party Congress, yes) which told Mao Zedong the man he had relied on for his own political credibility in China, Stalin, had been taken down so Khrushchev, in effect, was undermining
Mao's authority within the Communist movement.
Which is not to say the Cuban Missile Crisis wasn't.. (It was the scab that was more or less picked, so to speak if I'd put it..) Since we are
in the Navy Memorial here with
distinguished naval persons like
our National Archivist here, let
me take the naval view of your question.
Could we have taken action earlier?
My own view is that we could have mined the entire North Vietnamese coast without bringing China in. H
ad we embarked on the
kind of Christmas-bombing, B-52
saturation bombing or taken a
lot more of the protected
sites off the protected target list,
I think that would have brought
Chinese reinforcements, not necessarily
brought them into the war overtly, I don't think that would happen, but they would have greatly increased their support because, and I want to hear both Dicks' responses to this, but the hostility between the Vietnamese and the Chinese goes back millennia and the
Chinese were not that comfortable
in supporting Vietnam.
Certainly they supported them in
solidarity with their Communist brothers, but their national dislike of the Vietnamese made a much more complex issue. I personally think
we could have brought a better
and earlier end to
the war had we mined,
particularly enforced, a mining operation,
but not increasing the bombing. What I find interesting, significant,
about this exchange is
the way President Nixon combined
the use of military strength and diplomacy.
Military capability
was always the servant of diplomacy
and I think he felt that
his, and to relate it
to the Vietnam situation, that he
felt that his opening to
the Chinese would so demoralize
the Vietnamese, that again
would change the dynamic of
the Paris negotiations about ending the Vietnam war.
And, I think there he
had to have been
disappointed in the degree
to which the Vietnamese "toughed it out".
And, of course, you remember the relationship deteriorated to the point where, Deng Xiaoping tried to, as the phrase went, "Teach the Vietnamese a lesson", in 19...and I'm trying to remember (1979, it was) that when
Deng Xiaoping came to Washington on his triumphal conclusion to the normalization process, he told President Carter he was gonna "Teach the Vietnamese a lesson." They had a border punch-up, the Vietnamese did actually give the Chinese a bloody nose, they didn't come out well out of it, but that level of hostility was there, it has been there for, as you said, centuries,
and it's still there in the balance of the region today, but again, for President Nixon, the military was always a component with the diplomatic, the political deal, being the ultimate objective. I
'd just like to
make one point that has not
been made although you
mentioned the President's books.
There is a corpus of ten
books that Richard has written, and it wasn't just six crises after
having lost the governorship in California, and writing about six major crises of his life, but then
you displayed some of them on the way.
I think I have all of
them signed by RN,
a great treasure. If you take those 10 books together, and I have not reread them
in recent years.
What I do remember of them,
is that you have a complete
world view.
What the Germans would call
Weltanthschaun that is complete, not ideological and closed in thought, but you'd also contest the evolution of Mr.
Nixon's thinking in reaction to real events.
He recognized the opening as
we discussed with the article
in October, 1967 "Foreign
Affairs" which was my job
to explain to the, within
a few months, people didn't
pay any attention to it.
I'll tell another...
No but there was, excuse me
for interrupting, some people were paying attention.
Well the literati like you were paying attention.
The Chinese were, one of the things that Ed *** said was that Richard Nixon read history and thought about it deeply, when he had his first
meeting with Chou Enlai, what does
Chou Enlai say? "I've read your six crises, it's not a bad book", and just to brag slightly, when I joined the National Security Council staff I had just finished a 600-page book
analyzing Chinese politics, the Chinese went and translated that book, as they did of course for Mr. Nixon's writings and
were getting word back that... Did you get your royalties?
Pardon?
Did you get your royalties?
Right, 1 billion, and some readers...
Unfortunately, no royalties.
But the point is that
the Chinese did really want
to understand the thinking of their counterparts.
There's another critical point
that the American press didn't want to understand about Richard Nixon's
positions, and I want to relate a very humorous incident that occurred in the... fall of 1968. Martin Anderson, his wife Anele, also a great scholar, and I were talking with
Mr. Nixon, and I believe
Alan Greenspan was there too.
BB Rebozo, one of Mr. Nixon's greatest friends was there.
It was Rebozo's home and RN himself.
And we were discussing the
press treatment of RN's
discussion of many issues,
and he said, "Dammit, the press is not paying attention to what I'm saying on the issues, and I've
spoken on every darned issue there is!"
Martin and I said, "Yes sir, we know", and I had been keeping issues for about two years of Richard Nixon's statements and I'd had Pat Buchanan sending me the speeches and I had been cutting them
up and at that time, this was
before computers and Xerox
machines, I'd slice it out and put it on cards, in a shoe box .
This was while I was at the Hoover Institution.
So we had about
15 or 16 people on the staff and
we had some people who would
assemble my equipment or my stuff.
And, one of the
side tasks in doing
this for the yearbook for International Communist Affairs was to
use one of the people to collect
the Richard Nixon statements and
that would categorize them: Latin America,
Asia, Europe, Soviet Union.
So I had this continuing shoe box
full of cards and one
day I came in and I
gave it to a young lady
and I said, "You're doing this work now?" she said, "Yes, sir, I am." Well, we got it all fixed up and done and I walked out and thought, "Where have I seen her before?" I went home that day, and on the cover
of Time Magazine, there was
a story of interracial marriage
that had taken place between two Stanford students, one
of them being Dean Rusk's daughter.
Dean Rusk's daughter was organizing my Nixon issues cards.
So, I went back the next
day and said, "Excuse
me, you are who I
think you are, aren't you?"
She said, "Yes, Mr. Allen, but my husband and I need this money that
I'm making in this
job and I would
never, ever say anything to my father". Well, I went away almost in tears, but wouldn't say a word, but thought, "Well, fat's in the fire." I finally got a chance to tell Secretary Rusk
that story, and he was absolutely gobsmacked
by what happened. Fast forward, those cards. Mr. Nixon, at
that meeting said, "Allen and
Anderson, you get your rear
ends on an airplane right now
and get up to New York and
I want my..." Within four
days with the aid
of Bill Casey who came as a volunteer to the campaign,
we put together a 168 page book of Nixon on the issues and had them printed.
I designed them and I
had one copy, leather-bound, entitled "Nixon Socks it to 'Em" and it
was carried up to the
plane by Mary Frauning, of my staff in New York, and gave to Mr .
Nixon that one leather
-bound copy and he said,
"That's great, give it to the press".
And Martin Anderson went through
the back of the plane handed
it out to the press and never,
again for the rest of
the campaign, did the question
of Nixon on the issues ever come up.
I think you raised a very
good point about Mr. Nixon
and during the build up to
the '68 election there was
a period of time when he
said to the staff, "You're not going to see me for the next 9 months, I'm going to be traveling.
You go ahead and do
what you have to do politically, but I'm going to the Mideast, Asia," and he
did that with one person accompanying him, and he built up a dossier on the issues, but this opens up other issues. The Cold War wasn't just about China and Vietnam, but the Mideast, what was going on in the Mideast, the '73 war, and he was able to deal with what came up in the Yom Kippur War,
the threat to Israel, which he then took care of personally. He made sure the resupplies were on the way, and then he made sure things were safe for the Egyptian Army
that led the way. Of course the Soviets had already left Egypt, but opened the relationship and the US, the relationship between the military, which I think is even important this day...would someone like to comment on the Mideast part of the Cold War? And what Mr. Nixon did there? Just one quick vignette, and then I'll pass it on, but since we're in the Navy memorial here.
But the way it was hanging
in the balance in '73, as
you remember, and for the
first time the Russians
had given the Egyptians and
the Syrians handheld heat-
seeking missiles and they
were devastating. The Israeli Air Force
needed replacements.
They needed A-4s and they need Phantoms.
Not one of our allies
in NATO would allow landing rights and fighters, of course, can't make it across
the Atlantic and across the Mediterranean
to get there. As you know, Richard Nixon had spent time in WWII
on carriers and was well aware of their capabilities.
He said, "Why don't you line up
some aircraft carriers and 'hopscotch'
them over?" Within two days,
the Navy had four carriers strategically
placed and the A-4s
and the Phantoms hopscotched across
the Atlantic and got to Israel before
they lost their whole Air Force. Of course, Golda Meir knew they were on their way, so they could go on the offensive against the
Egyptian Armies.
Right Then there's the other half of it, when the Israelis in several weeks had trapped the Egyptian armies in the Southern Sinai. At that point, President Nixon said, "No. Stop." We had the ability to do it, of course. And that led to the relationship between Egypt and the United States.
Is that correct?
I think that's exactly right,
it was, again, a great
strategic insight
that propelled him
to make the decisions that he made at the time.
There was a lot of hesitation internally
at that time but he,
he saw the shape
of what could come out of
it if the players on the
chessboard were treated accordingly.
It's even more remarkable
that right now, there's great
reason to worry about the
reversal of all of that
in terms of an Egyptian/Israeli
relationship and what will
come as a result of the Middle East today.
I do wish we had RN here today so we could get a little thinking and guidance on how to handle the Middle East, because it's sorely needed -Go back to the cards! Well, I think we're all a little anecdotal so I can't resist telling- Anecdotal, you said?
I can't resist telling this story of one of the first trips I took with ***. Early in the administration, we went to Libya.
We were the last White
House officials to visit
Libya before the takeover by Gaddafi.
And I sat next to the Defense Minister.
This is right before Gaddafi took over, and King Idris was off in Greece getting medical treatment, and he told me "We
were very impressed with how your Navy Pilots flew against the Egyptians," and I
said, "They weren't, they were Israelis! Israelis have Phantoms!" but he said, "Well, we've lived with the Jews for a thousand years, and they can't fly airplanes." This was a defense minister!
Point was another thing
that John did to me on that
trip, by the way, was
to arrange for me to fly
in a backseat of an
F-4 with a full ordinance strike on a desert training facility, he rode in another airplane, we had
fond memories of that.
Shortly thereafter, Gaddafi took over and the big issue was, my god, they're gonna raise the price of oil from
five dollars a barrel.
That's an interesting observation, but
you did refer to, with
respect to the resupply, that the
President himself said, "How about
lining up aircraft carriers to get them there."
There was resistance in the
Defense Department and in the State Department.
They were trying to think what to do, but President Nixon thought this out in advance and said, "No, we're going to do this.
How about doing it this way, let's get it done."
And the consequences of that stretched out for many years... But what
else would be new, with resistance from the State Department to a White House initiative?
Let me just add, since we're coming out with
all these inside baseball stories, something about his long enduring concern with maintaining an effective relationship with the Chinese.
And that relates to his reaction
to the Tiananmen shoot-up of the students. He privately
made it very clear to President
Bush, 41, that the relationship
with China could not be destroyed
by the the public reaction
to the shooting of the student demonstrators.
And that led to the secret trip that Renscoe Croft took in the summer
of '89 to try to sustain the relationship through what was obviously a period where the
domestic basis for political
support for the Chinese had
been seriously eroded, undermined
by Tiananmen, the other part
of it, which I was in
the middle of, was in 1990,
I was negotiating a settlement
to the Cambodian conflict and
the issue of
trying to deal with our
POW/MIA issue as it related to Vietnam.
And we were having
negotiations through the
United Nations Security Council, first
in New York and then in Paris.
And this was after Tiananmen
and dealing with the Chinese
on a direct bilateral basis was
still a no-no but we
were dealing with them through
the U.N., and President Nixon knew I
was carrying out this negotiation, I was the Assistant Secretary for East Asia at that point,
and he invited me to
dinner at his house in
Saddle River, New Jersey.
And he grilled me on what our objectives were in
negotiating with the Chinese, what we were going to do with Vietnam, because he was very worried that we were
going to, somehow, go too easy on the Vietnamese and
somehow compromise our dealings with the Chinese.
For whatever it's worth,
I think the dinner discussion
reassured him, and now, if you look at the outcome
of the Cambodia settlement
and the road map to normalizing with
Vietnam if there was any
beneficiary of that negotiation
which did get all of the
major powers who had been
involved in Indochina since the
French colonial period, it was the Chinese, because with the French out, the
British out, the Americans out, China's just over the border.
One of the jobs of the National Security Adviser and Council staff is to brief former presidents from time to time, and I once went up to New York in 1981 and brought a leading
Soviet specialist, Richard
Pipes, and a China specialist,
Jim Lilyn. On the way in,
Mr. Nixon said to me--he
called in the car--we had big clunky phones,
He said, "Are those people with you?"
And I said, "Yes, sir," he said "Tell'em to go shopping for a while, before we have dinner, I want to talk to you," and I sat down with him alone and he said " All right
now, Allen, I want
you to tell me
what's going on inside. I want to know all of the details there!" Well, I had to sort
of 'bunt' my way
through that afternoon because
his long arm and his
mind were still very much in the present
of that day.
He kept the 'tetrodes' if you will, into various parts of the government.
He could talk to *** Solomon, me, and Al Haig,
he could talk to anybody he wanted
to because people would
answer his telephone calls and answer his summons.
And that night, we
had a dinner in that brownstone, in New York City, and he displayed all of the mastery that he really had had for a long time and never lost.
Let me add one other story
about how important China was to this man.
After
I served on the National Security Council staff
to the summer of '76,
and I went to
the RAND Corporation for what turned out to be a decade.
Early 1977 I'm sitting
in my office, and my
secretary, eyes wide
open, and said that "President Nixon is on the line!" Now, when I worked for Henry Kissinger, the President never called directly to staff levels, like us, but President Nixon had just recovered from phlebitis, and of course in that dark situation after his resignation.
And he grilled me for over
a half hour, "What's going on in China?" I don't think he wanted
to call Henry Kissinger to find that out.
He knew what I was up to and about.
And he hung up at the
end of this half hour, and
I said "That son
of a gun, he's going to rehabilitate himself by going to China."
Sure enough, a few months later, it was announced that the Chinese had invited him
as their old friend to come
back to China and it really began, if you like, the political rehabilitation
as international figure of Richard Nixon.
That is an extremely important point, I went out to see him at San Clemente afterward,
and we walked the
beach a little bit and
he talked of a program, a 'Get Well' program, he didn't use those words, but
a 'Get Well' program. It was shortly after he had gone out to California
and he had a plan even then,
a strategic plan that he was going to implement.
He was going to
travel and it
was an amazing thing to watch
a plan that he set out once more again
. He's had plans all his life, strategic plans that unfolded,
and the Get Well plan was
extremely well thought through and executed. 10
books. In fact, my thought
is that coming up
on RN's Centennial for
2013. It might be a
very good time to put together the 10 in a set so that they're not just disparate volumes but republished and put together in a boxed set. They're extraordinary
books that still reverberate through today.
He was one of the first to
write about the Muslim countries
stretching from Morocco to Indonesia
and their importance for the future. This was long before other people had focused on it. You can see it grow from
book to book to book as he
wrote about it. I remember on August 9
of 1974, we rode in Marine 1
and went by the Washington
Monument, he said,"What did you
say? Still President until noon?" I said to the President, "Mr. President, ten years, you'll be back." Sure enough, ten years later, on the cover of Newsweek Magazine, by order of Catherine Graham
after she heard him make a presentation, his extraordinary ability of his to present
what was going on in the
world and in politics
and on the cover of Newsweek, he was back. And I have snuck
up behind you and that's
a perfect note to conclude this forum.
We could go on all afternoon
and we expect more forums, more talks about the 37th President with these people and others, but you see what we get into?
Thank you for watching and thank you for coming, we have
another forum on June 13th,
thank you.
Well done.
A lot of fun.