Yeah. He really wanted Elvis as Secretary of State. Click on link for funny story of their visit.
On a more serious note, “Richard Milhous Nixon inherited near-civil war conditions”. That quote has always stuck with me . There is a great book, “1968: The year that rocked the World” that, if you’re interested, really helps get a feel for the trauma of the time.
“Vietnam and beyond” is the title I gave to this unit years ago and it sticks rather well. Here we get in to Kissinger’s assessment of how Nixon was different, “complex”, and how he pulled the country away, or tried to, from its Wilsonian moorings. Once again I find Kissinger’s assessment of Wilson complicated. He seems to say here, that though Nixon did need, he believes, to start focusing on national interests, and allow the old “invisible-hand” to render stability, he appears to have a respect for what Wilson did in his time and how that ushered us through two world wide wars. I do think though that he feels it was Wilsonianism possibly that took us in to the quagmire of Vietnam, yet Nixon, “shared the great American yearning for a foreign policy devoid of self-interest”.
For all the pundits out there on the conservative right that attacked Obama’s offer to “extend a hand if they (Iran, North Korea etc.) will unclench their fist”, might want to remember that Nixon said much the same in 1969 about the need to talk with China and the Soviet Union, and how those talks helped lead to the final extrication from Vietnam. Nixon, Kissinger asserted, saw the USSR not as a zero-sum game, but rather as something more complicated. There is another game he brings into the discussion towards the end. How does that work?
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The more that I read about Kissinger’s analysis, the more that I seem to question my opinion of Nixon. For a long time I only associated Nixon with Watergate and saw him as an extremely dishonest president. In Kissinger’s point of view, however, Nixon is portrayed as a genius of foreign policy and I do have to agree. His ability to see the big picture and focus on that versus focusing on simply the smaller issues like the Soviet Union was doing is remarkable. I was also surprised by how Mao, Zhou, and Deng seemed to share similar strategies for negotiating. Kissinger’s description of the US, USSR and China in this chapter seem to portray the US and China as two skilled countries who could negotiate with a true purpose, while the USSR was portrayed as increasingly ignorant in their negotiating skills; this seemed especially obvious when they proposed an alliance with the US in 1973 and 1974 against China but only after the US had already done so with the Chinese.
I also thought it was interesting when Kissinger went into the three schools of thoughts that existed in the US during this time when it came to foreign policy. That is, the theologians, psychiatrists, and that of radicalism, all of which still seemed to miss the “bigger picture” that Nixon and Kissinger saw when it came to a rapprochement with the USSR and China.
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I agree with your comment. I always thought that Nixon was a bad president based on what I’d heard, but being able to actually read about him is starting to change my mind. Kissinger’s descriptions of the USSR, US, and China are in sync of how I’ve portrayed these three countries in my head this school year. The US likes being the hero and along with China, likes to negotiate. The USSR comes off kind of radical and reckless but with it’s own purposes that could potentially lead to destruction. While it’s been quite evident that the USSR enjoys having control of third world countries, I hadn’t realized that the US likes to do the same for an ego boost. And we fail because the world still hates us to this day.
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I think the game your talking about is the game of chess, an example Kissinger uses to describe his linkage policy. This description stood out to me because I remember Ambrose criticizing Kissinger for viewing foreign countries, in particular, third world nations, as merely chess pawns to be moved in the game between the superpowers aka USSR & USA. This is exactly how Kissinger explains linkage though. Kissinger believed that by dominating more of the chessboard or the world, the more constrained would be our opponent, or the USSR. The fact that Nixon’s administration opened up relations with China again meant a lot to Kissinger because it held the potential for more of the chessboard.
It was nice to see Henry Wallace’s ideas come back in this chapter as the psychiatric school of thought, I like hearing about them because it just sounded so radical at the time for someone to call out America for pointing fingers and sticking them in all the pies. It took a whole generation for his ideas to be more widely accepted and I think they contribute greatly to the Peace Movement.
Also, I found it really funny when Kissinger was describing the first criteria of the Nixon Doctrine, which was that America would keep its commitments. Kissinger compared the assurance that America would keep its commitments to “professions of chastity,” since “its abandonment is unlikely to be announced before the event.” For anyone that doesn’t find this hilarious, drink some coffee. If you told your parents you would stick to abstinence, would you really go running to tell them, “Oh, I’m about to have sex” ?? No.
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I am still not really clear on Kissinger’s thoughts on the Nixon Doctrine, his perspective on it makes it difficult to determine whether it was effective or not.
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I fully didnt grasp the “convergence theory” and its meaning. I understand that it states the risk America did have to take in order to stop communism from spreading, but how did it stop two societies whom were “destined” to come together and be more alike?
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So I never really knew that Nixon was highly responsible for helping America into a better global position thanks to his overall diplomacy. It’s often overshadowed by the Vietnam War and Watergate, which in all fairness are huge deals. Kissinger mentions this very fact in the book, but it makes me wonder how much he’s trying to paint Nixon as a good guy. He served under him as Secretary of State, so did he want to highlight the good he did amongst all the bad? Is that a good thing to do when telling a story? Essentially, there’s bias there in favor of Nixon, but I’m not sure how much or how important it is.
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I thought it was interesting how out three very different schools of thought, Nixon couldn’t choose one, but rather rejected all of them. If I understood it correctly, the Psychiatric school treated the two nations (US and USSR) as people that wanted the same thing (peace), the theologian school believed in the need to fight communism (containment), and the convergence theory asserted that it was senseless for America to run huge risks in opposing communism when the two societies were destined to become more and more alike in the natural course of history. In the end, Kissinger explains that Nixon set out to establish the national interest as the basic criterion for a long-range american foreign policy.
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Kissinger’s voice really seems to come out in this chapter (more so than any of the rest that we’ve read in my opinion). The way he defends Nixon seems to be on a deeply personal level, as though Nixon were an extension of himself. It makes it hard for me to decide where it all went wrong – Ambrose made it seem like Nixon’s mistakes worsened certain situations in the war and that he didn’t deal with the chaos that was going on within the US at the time much at all, but Kiss makes it seem like Nixon only had the purest intentions in mind and that it was the mistake of his predecessors that set him up to fail.
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Even though the events occurring happen more than ten years before this was written,it still doesn’t feel quite like straight up history. Before now, Kissinger was telling a sort of objective and distant history but now that he is a part of the story, things are different. Like when he mentions detente, it seems like this super slick cool new idea and Kissinger doesn’t take personal responsibility for it. However when Brinkley describes linkage, he says its basically a new name for an old (and not very effective) policy coined by Kissinger alone.
I thought the whole “let of the soviet union overextend” idea was interesting. Especially considering the idea became popular right after Vietnam, when the American people had become familiar with over extension themselves. The idea of doing nothing as an official policy strikes me as really interesting. The USSR was treated like a flame. Initially containment sought to rob it of its oxygen to have it slowly sputter into nothingness. When that didn’t work, policy makers thought instead to let it shine bright in hopes it would burn itself it out.
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I thought this chapter was interesting because Kissinger kept bringing up old topics or people that we previously studied because the ideas and policies were repeated in this time. Talking about containment as a policy or approach to the communist issue reemerged (if it ever went away in the first place) with the mention of Acheson and Dulles, but Kissinger clarifies that Nixon was beginning to understand that over-extension was the true downfall for communism. Other examples are Nixon believing that the United States as a strong power made the world safer and its allies stronger as well, not being concerned with the motives of an Asian leader like Mao, and conducting foreign policy in the name of national interest like Teddy Roosevelt had done.
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