The Wars of Watergate (117 page)

More than a decade of American political history lay behind the end of the Vietnam war, a history that included the deceptions of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Johnson’s dishonest campaign utterances in 1964, and the unwillingness of both Johnson and Nixon to work effectively with Congress and defuse the growing criticism of the war. The accumulation of those circumstances, combined with weakened presidential authority, certainly hampered Ford’s ability to provide any substantial economic aid to the Saigon regime after he assumed the presidency. Within days of Nixon’s resignation,
the U.S. Embassy in Saigon warned that congressional cuts in appropriations for the South Vietnamese encouraged the North Vietnamese to increase their offensive operations. The North believed that the presidency had been emasculated, according to Wolf Lehmann, the Deputy Chief of Mission in Saigon, and that assessment sealed the North’s determination to launch a decisive offensive. While Lehmann stressed Hanoi’s perception of “the great uncertainty” in the United States, however, he also knew that Watergate alone could not explain the fall of the Thieu government in South Vietnam.

Ironically, the North Vietnamese paid a peculiar price for the impaired presidency that gave them an opportunity for total victory in 1975. That very weakness, combined with the aggressiveness and assertiveness of Congress, barred any American move to implement Nixon’s promises of American economic aid for “postwar reconstruction” in Vietnam.

By April 1975 Congress undoubtedly reflected a national belief that Vietnam was a hopeless quagmire and that the South Vietnamese government had squandered military equipment and financial aid. When Ford asked Congress for $722 million in emergency aid in April 1975, he invoked the familiar argument that a failure to comply would only undermine America’s honor and respect for its commitments abroad. Now, however, that shop-worn proposition fell on deaf ears. What is more significant than Congress’s reluctance is that neither Ford nor Kissinger seriously considered the use of American naval or air power to interdict the North Vietnamese final offensive. The last, vain request to Congress for aid was a gesture, designed perhaps to lift South Vietnamese morale, but more importantly to exculpate the executive branch from any responsibility for Saigon’s fate.
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General Bruce Palmer, who has usefully analyzed the intersection of political, military, and diplomatic aspects of the war, acknowledged that Watergate made impossible any response to the renewed North Vietnamese assault in 1975. But he recognized that the more fundamental fault lay within the nature of the peace agreements themselves, and Palmer excoriated Kissinger for his role in concluding those agreements. The “peripatetic” Kissinger, Palmer claimed, was out of his element in dealing with the Vietnamese, mainly because he had so overextended his involvement in numerous diplomatic processes at the time. Kissinger simply failed to give his “undivided attention, skills, and energy” to negotiating a more favorable cease-fire arrangement, Palmer wrote.
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The Paris Accords of January 1973 in every respect denied any realistic prospect for peace and independence for South Vietnam. Nixon proclaimed that they had secured “peace with honor,” and he gained the release of the American prisoners of war in Vietnam. For his part, Kissinger had his Nobel Prize, but he hardly had a policy. Instead, the American leaders offered illusion and paradox: the United States remained committed to South Vietnam
but had withdrawn its military capability to enforce that commitment. The public lost interest, and Congress followed the election returns. The charade was apparent to all—and most of all to Hanoi, which acted accordingly and imposed its will throughout Vietnam in 1975. Thus Nixon had “ended” the war, but after being driven from office, he was spared “losing” it. Later, he could reflect and blame others and such events as Watergate. Kissinger did likewise, but in the minds of many Republican right-wing critics, he had “lost” the war; and for that, among them he remained a pariah, with little chance for the continuing public service and adulation he craved.

Nixon and Kissinger had signed an agreement that provided for the maintenance of North Vietnamese troops in the South and political legitimacy for the Viet Cong. No wonder, then, that South Vietnam’s President Thieu balked. He acquiesced to the Paris Accords only after securing President Nixon’s secret promise of “full economic and military aid” in the event of North Vietnamese violations of the agreement. According to Nixon, the congressional fury over Watergate prevented him from honoring that commitment. But his undertaking a secret obligation to a course of military action short-circuited both constitutional and political processes. His failure to consult with Congress before promising to come to Thieu’s aid marked a dangerous course at any time, but particularly when he served a divided government, with the other half legitimately entitled to a share in such decision making, involving as it did the appropriations process.

Defense Secretary James Schlesinger later complained that he had no knowledge of such commitments; if he had, he insisted, he would have used them as bargaining leverage with Congress. When he learned of them, he at first thought the United States had “welched” on its promises; on reflection, however, he realized that “if you don’t know that the commitments have been entered into, you don’t know that the country has welched.” In later years, Schlesinger deplored the “stab-in-the-back argument,” barely disguising his contempt for Nixon’s and Kissinger’s views: “Congress knew nothing of these [commitments] …, when it started bugging out of Vietnam in the summer of 1973.”

President Thieu believed Nixon’s pledges. While he sensed that Nixon was preoccupied during their January 1973 meeting, his skimpy knowledge of the American political system left him with the conclusion that Watergate was trivial; he apparently could not imagine that the President could be driven from power. Kissinger later offered Thieu his persistent view that Watergate had destroyed the Administration’s ability to defend South Vietnam. Belatedly, Kissinger conceded that Thieu had been right about the Paris Peace Accords, but in a curiously obtuse statement he added that Watergate would have been even more catastrophic for South Vietnam if there had been no agreement. In exile and disgrace, Thieu ignored Kissinger’s
rationalization; perhaps he asked himself what could have been more catastrophic for him or his fellow citizens.
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Watergate undeniably undermined Nixon’s prestige at home and his ability to carry through unpopular policies. That, he and Kissinger later argued, is central to understanding the failure to carry through the commitment to defend South Vietnam. The reasoning is labored and tortured. From the time that Kissinger signed the Paris Accords, he and Nixon promised the nation only relief and extrication from the struggle that they well knew would continue in South Vietnam. A stronger president, free of congressional restraints and criticisms, they implied, would have interdicted the North Vietnamese 1975 offensive by air strikes and once again inflicted heavy losses on the enemy. They obviously ignored the uncomfortable fact that the American air attacks since 1965 had hurt, but not thwarted, the Communists. Nixon’s problem was the limits of his political influence to exhort the nation to continue the war; and that limitation had little or nothing to do with Watergate. At the time of the January 1973 peace agreements, with his power and popularity still unaffected by Watergate, he never alerted the nation to the possibility that American military operations might continue, with the risk of continuing casualties.

The inability to conclude the war had frustrated Nixon throughout his first term. Could he, after 1972, have summoned a national will to retaliate—a retaliation that might well have resulted in more domestic upheaval, as well as in the North’s refusal to return the American prisoners of war? The President never prepared for such a contingency; to have made that promise would have negated all the interpretive gloss that he and Kissinger had imposed on the peace agreement. With or without Watergate, the nation wanted an end to its involvement. “My God, we’re all tired of it, we’re sick to death of it,” wrote an Oregonian. “55,000 dead and $100 billion spent and for what?”
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Watergate to some extent had dogged Nixon throughout the Paris negotiations in the fall of 1972. But almost total distraction set in after his meeting with Thieu in San Clemente in January 1973. The cover-up began to unravel shortly afterward, and within two months, the President’s top aides prepared to resign. But Congress had not yet imposed restraints on Nixon’s ability to carry on the war. Enforced bombing pauses and the War Powers Act came later in the year. “I needed desperately to get my mind on other things,” Nixon remembered—but he could not or would not do so.
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If Watergate was a distraction, the President himself allowed it to be. Only he understood the dimensions and dangers of Watergate at the time; appropriately, he bent his energies to “lancing the boil.” The tortuous taped conversations offer ample testimony to his distraction, but the President himself made Watergate a priority; only later did we understand that he had little choice.

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Watergate and Richard Nixon contributed to the passage of the War Powers Act. The measure had its roots in the frustration of Congress with the Johnson Administration. But the Vietnam War had only exacerbated executive-legislative tension over war making and foreign policy that could be traced back to the beginnings of the republic. President Nixon’s inability (or refusal) to end that war promptly enough, combined with a Congress emboldened and aggressive because of his weakness, set the stage for the War Powers Act, which passed over Nixon’s veto in November 1973. Johnson’s actions provided the inspiration; Nixon’s behavior and subsequent vulnerability provoked the occasion.

Alexander Hamilton wrote in
Federalist
75 that “the history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind, as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world, to the sole disposal of … a President of the United States.” The framers had an unhappy, uneasy memory of executive power. “The constitution supposes, what the history of all Gov[ernment]s demonstrates, that the Ex[ecutive] is the branch of power most interested in war, & most prone to it,” Madison wrote to Jefferson in 1798. “It has accordingly with studied care vested the question of war in the Legisl[ature].” A half-century later, Lincoln confidently expressed the framers’ “original intent” when he told his law partner that they knew that when kings involved their nations in war, it was “the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to frame the Constitution that
no one man
should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.”
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American presidents have regularly committed combat personnel despite the absence of formal war declarations; the congressional role at best has been consultative. The shared-governance arrangement has worked most effectively as a means for mobilizing national will to endorse executive innovations in foreign policy—as, for example, with the Truman Doctrine in 1947 or Eisenhower’s response to the Formosa Strait situation in 1954–55.

The War Powers Act stipulated that a president must notify Congress of any troop deployment abroad within forty-eight hours and required him to withdraw those troops within sixty days unless Congress explicitly authorized their continued use. The legislation passed Congress during the “firestorm” following the dismissal of Archibald Cox. The same weakness that forced Nixon to choose Gerald Ford as Spiro Agnew’s successor, and Leon Jaworski as Cox’s, made him incapable of persuading enough members of his own party to sustain his veto. But his weakness resulting from the dismissals was of less consequence than the national mood of disgust over the Vietnam war. Symbolically, the War Powers Act may have constituted the
most significant attempt to restrict presidential power since Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act in 1867, which limited a president’s ability to dismiss cabinet officers confirmed by the Senate. The President then was Andrew Johnson, a man almost bereft of party and interest-group constituencies and a man who confronted a nation tired of conflict and division. When Nixon vetoed the War Powers legislation, he made extravagant claims for executive prerogative, a provocation that might explain why fifteen House members—a mixture of liberals and conservatives—who originally opposed the legislation then voted to override his veto. (Senator Sam Ervin opposed the legislation throughout the voting.)
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Subsequent events, however, amply demonstrated that for all its symbolic qualities, the act did not significantly alter the practical power of the presidency. From the
Mayaguez
to the Gulf of Sidra incidents, the lesson was clear: presidents will shoot first and consult Congress later. Limits on a president’s military initiative are defined in large part by the extent of his popularity and prestige. A chastened Henry Kissinger noted in 1975 that “comity” between the two branches was “the only possible basis for national action.” He conceded that the decade-long struggle over executive dominance in foreign affairs had ended. Kissinger may have been dissembling or speaking as an overeager supplicant, yet there was no gainsaying the reality that Congress must participate in some way: “foreign policy,” he acknowledged, “must be a shared enterprise.”

Congressional inertia and indifference, however, still offered presidents broad authority to maneuver on their own in foreign policy, as when Jimmy Carter terminated the Taiwan defense treaty and froze Iranian assets, and when Ronald Reagan took action in Grenada, the Mediterranean, and Central America. Congress invoked the War Powers Act for the first time in 1983 after Reagan sent troops to Lebanon. Still, the legislative branch dealt gingerly with the popular President, giving him eighteen months, rather than sixty days, to withdraw troops. Reagan did so before the expiration of the deadline.
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