1972
Nixon and Kissinger
FROM THE TIME ARCHIVE
Jan. 1, 1973
It was a year of visitations and bold ventures with Russia and China, of a
uniquely personal triumph at the polls for the President, of hopes raised and
lately dashed for peace in Viet Nam. Foreign policy reigned pre-eminent, and
was in good part the base for the landslide election victory at home. And U.S.
foreign policy, for good or ill, was undeniably the handiwork of two people:
Richard Milhous Nixon and Henry Alfred Kissinger, the President's Assistant for
National Security Affairs. For what they accomplished in the world, what was
well begun—and inescapably, too, their prolonged and so far indecisive
struggle with the Viet Nam tragedy—the two are Men of the Year.
They constitute in many ways an odd couple, an improbable partnership.
There is Nixon, 60, champion of Middle American virtues, a secretive, aloof yet
old-fashioned politician given to oversimplified rhetoric, who founded his
career on gut- fighting anti-Communism but has become in his maturity a
surprisingly flexible, even unpredictable statesman. At his side is Kissinger,
49, a Bavarian-born Harvard professor of urbane and subtle intelligence, a
creature of Cambridge and Georgetown who cherishes a never entirely convincing
reputation as an international bon vivant and superstar. Yet together in their
unique symbiosis—Nixon supplying power and will, Kissinger an intellectual
framework and negotiating skills—they have been changing the shape of the
world, accomplishing the most profound rearrangement of the earth's political
powers since the beginning of the cold war.
The year contained vast praise, tidal changes, a movement from a
quarter-century of great power confrontation toward an era of negotiations. But
if Nixon and Kissinger succeeded in opening the gates to China, in urging a new
detente with Russia, in pressing forward the SALT talks and a dozen other
avenues of communication between East and West, it was also in its final days,
a year of devastating disappointment. In October Kissinger euphorically
reported to the world that "peace is at hand" in Viet Nam. Then, as it has so
many times before in America's longest and strangest war, the peace proved once
again elusive. As the Paris negotiations dissolved in a fog of linguistic
ambiguities and recriminations, Richard Nixon suddenly sent the bombers north
again. All through the year, Nixon and Kissinger labored at a new global
design, a multipolar world in which an equilibrium of power would ensure what
Nixon called "a full generation of peace." But at year's end, the design
remained dangerously flawed by the ugly war from which, once again, there
seemed no early exit.
Other themes and other figures, of course, also preoccupied the world in
1972. While Nixon and Kissinger projected their visions of order, political
terrorists kept up a counterpoint. In May, three Japanese gunmen hired by
Palestinian guerrillas opened fire at Tel Aviv's crowded Lod airport, killing
26 travelers and wounding 72 others. Then in September, eight Palestinians
invaded the Israeli Olympic team's dormitory in Munich. Twenty hours later, 17
men, including eleven Israeli athletes and coaches, were dead.
The shadow of the gunman still hung over Northern Ireland. This year
alone, more than 450 people died in the terror. A bomb blast in downtown Dublin
killed two people and accelerated a government crackdown on the Irish
Republican Army in the South. The dangerous freelance adventurism of skyjacking
persisted. As of last week there have been 393 such episodes round the world in
1972, including one marathon in November that lasted 29 hours before the three
hijackers left the Southern Airways jet in Havana. China's Premier Chou En-lai
was crucial to the beginnings of detente that is leading more than one-fifth of
the earth's population out of its dangerous isolation. So was Russia's Leonid
Brezhnev; with the Soviets, the Americans signed 15 far-reaching bilateral
agreements for trade and cooperation in space, technology and other fields The
Man of the Year in 1970, West Germany's Willy Brandt, continued pursuing his
Ostpolitik with the signing of a treaty normalizing relations between the two
Germanys and won a surprisingly generous mandate at the polls from his people
for it. But the primary will and intellect behind the emerging alignments
resided in the White House.
From Ideology to Realpolitik
It was a full year for Nixon, who had to combine the roles of statesman
abroad and politician seeking re-election at home. In a pre-election address on
foreign policy, Nixon declared with some satisfaction that "1972 has been a
year of more achievement for peace than any year since the end of World War
II." Such optimism reckoned without the breakdown of the Viet Nam negotiations,
yet in many ways the assessment was accurate. Nixon and Kissinger adroitly
played Russian and Chinese desires and fears off against one another to
establish a nonideological basis for relations among the three great powers.
Peking's perception of an American determination to get out of Viet Nam,
its worry about Russian influence spreading deeper into Asia, and to a lesser
degree in concern about the burgeoning power of Japan—all these factors led to
the Chinese summit last February, with its astonishing tableaux of Nixon
walking the Great Wall, of Nixon toasting Chou. The genius of the
Nixon-Kissinger policy was its sensitivity to thinking in Moscow and Peking.
That startling thaw between the U.S. and China deeply disconcerted the Soviets.
Anxious to quiet its Western Europe borders, Russia had been diligently
courting Willy Brandt and other leaders in the hope of solidifying the status
quo in Europe. But the Washington-Peking tie also made a U.S.-Soviet thaw
imperative from Moscow's standpoint, which is precisely what Nixon and
Kissinger had planned. In a sense, Nixon vaulted over the Western Europeans to
establish his goal: improved ties with Russia. From this triangular power play
emerged continued improvements in relations and slowly expanding trade with
China, and the series of agreements, including a massive trade pact, with
Russia. It opened the path toward other negotiations, notably on "Mutual
Balanced Force Reductions" in Europe, scheduled to begin Jan. 31.
The theoretical basis of the Nixon Doctrine is stated in Kissinger's 1969
American Foreign Policy: "Regional groupings supported by the United States
will have to take over major responsibility for their immediate areas, with the
United States being more concerned with the overall framework of order than
with the management of every regional enterprise." Kissinger recognized that
the legacy of Viet Nam would be a reluctance to risk further involvement
overseas; he and Nixon also understood the inherent instability of a bipolar
world.
The Nixon-Kissinger objective has therefore been to shift the focus of
revolutionary regimes round the world from ideology to issues of national
interest. Both men are turning the criteria of decision making from what some
Europeans cynically call "the savior attitude" to the equations of Realpolitik,
implicitly abandoning the moralistic considerations that have dominated
American foreign policy since Woodrow Wilson. "The world is becoming less
ideological," says British Political Scientist Frederick Northedge, "and more
concerned with survival."
The classical policy that Kissinger and Nixon are practicing derives from
perceptions of national interest that have dictated successful foreign policy
in Europe for 500 years. Political thinkers like Machiavelli and Hobbes
contributed to a body of experience and theory that culminated in the 19th and
20th centuries in the effective policies in Metternich, Bismarck, Adenauer and
De Gaulle, four statesmen whom Kissinger admires. Metternich claimed that "it
is freedom of action, not formal relations" that leads to successful diplomacy.
Following that dictum, Kissinger and Nixon have reassessed U.S. relationships,
abandoning some ties as out-of- date (Taiwan), remaking others that might
inhibit freedom of action (Japan, Western Europe) and forging new ties with old
enemies (Russia and China) to expand the field of play. Another dictum of
Realpolitik holds that "interests are constant, alliances are not,"
For all the successes of the Nixon-Kissinger policies, there have been
some missteps even apart from Viet Nam. One evident weakness is that the
balance-of-power design has not allowed much of a role for lesser nations. The
White House has tried to compensate by declaring that in reality Japan and
Western Europe are the two additional poles in a pentagonal relationship.
Argues Harvard Government Professor Stanley Hoffman: "We have, especially in
Asia, moved as if the era of horizontal great-power diplomacy had arrived, and
our weaker allies are disconcerted. We have, both in Europe and Asia, behaved
as if our principal allies were already part friends, part rivals."
Most of the shocks to American allies were registered in 1971 after the
first overtures to Peking. Japan was hardest hit but other Asian allies were
similarly disconcerted—South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, and most
traumatically, Taiwan. There was also some unease across the Atlantic. In 1972
there was increasing accommodation to the new realities, but inevitably
uneasiness remained. Partly to relieve Western Europe's apprehensions about the
new American Realpolitik, the White House has declared 1973 to be "the year of
Europe," with the intention of mending long-neglected relations there once the
U.S. disentangles itself from Viet Nam. The Administration still must formulate
a coherent European policy, especially in the areas of economics.
The ambiguities and shock of the Viet Nam impasse have led some in
Washington to speculate that the extraordinary Kissinger-Nixon relationship was
in some trouble. The question was beguiling but difficult to answer, for the
two constructed a working arrangement that is unique in U.S. history. Among
other things, it has been the odd arrangement of Secretary of State William
Rogers, whose department Nixon has largely bypassed in the making of foreign
policy. For the President, Kissinger has been a combination of
professor-in-residence, secret agent, ultimate advance man and
philosopher-prince. In an important sense, he is Nixon's creation, using the
power base of the presidency to roam the world and speak for Nixon, to set the
stage for summits, to negotiate war and peace. There have been simpler
relationships before, but none exactly the same: Richelieu and Louis XIII,
Metternich and Hapsburg Emperor Francis I, Colonel House and Woodrow Wilson,
Harry Hopkins and F.D.R.
The Loyalist Who Never Joined the Team
In their personal dealings, Kissinger and Nixon tend toward formality,
with a certain restraint and distance that are natural to both men. Each, in
his own way, is a somewhat enigmatic character. Despite moments of humor, Nixon
remains his intense, somewhat rigid self, even with Kissinger. Both men have
their private lives, and Kissinger is not on the list (a short one) of the
President's intimate friends. For all his outer ego, his fierce driving of
subordinates and his international celebrity, Kissinger has a servant's heart
for Nixon when it comes to power and ideas. He has been willing to subject
himself to the scorn of his academic peers (after the Cambodian invasion) and
serve the President with a total loyalty that is matched inside the White House
only by H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, Press Secretary Ronald Zeigler and
Kissinger's own deputy on the National Security Council, General Alexander
Haig. Once, after listening to department spokesmen advocating their parochial
concerns before the National Security Council, Kissinger stalked out of the
room, grumbling that "not a goddamned one of them except the President cared
about the national interest."
Kissinger is not a team player in the almost obsessive sense that the
other Nixon loyalists are. He will, for example, lunch on occasion with a
reporter and provide background on the peace negotiations. He has no close
friends inside the White House—and not a few enemies who resent his power and
personal style, his dates with beautiful women and access to a larger, more
glamorous world. Kissinger's strength in the administration, so far, has been
that he has won the President's confidence and trust, that they enjoy a
remarkable professional rapport. Says on high-ranking U.S. diplomat: "The halls
of the State Department are littered with the bones of those who thought they
could split the President and Henry." The President even wrote Kissinger once:
"Frankly, I cannot imagine what the Government would be without you."
Despite their dissimilarities, they share some traits. One is a contempt
for bureaucracy. "In the bureaucratic societies," Kissinger once wrote, "policy
emerges from a compromise which often produces the least common denominator,
and is implemented by individuals whose reputation is made by administering the
status quo." Both tend toward perfectionism. Kissinger drives his National
Security Council staff to strive for that state of refinement in their position
papers and memos that he likes to define as "meticulous"—a favorite adjective
of approval.
The Advisor as Lone Cowboy.
Nixon takes a particular delight in Kissinger's secret operations and
ruses. Sometimes Nixon has even helped to throw observers off the
track—spending an apparently nonchalant weekend at Camp David when a secret
meeting was on in Paris. So secretly have the Paris talks been held that only a
handful of Administration officials saw the draft agreement that Kissinger
hammered out with Le Duc Tho in their five-day session last October. CIA
Director Richard Helms obtained his copy through his sources in Viet Nam and
asked if the text was accurate. Said Kissinger suavely: "It has the odious
smell of the truth." On another level, late one night before the election,
Nixon came back to Washington. The President told Kissinger that the two of
them had been on different journeys that day, but he believed the roads led to
the same goal.
The relationships between the two has occasionally been strained, however,
most notably by a recent two-hour interview that Kissinger foolishly granted to
Italian Journalist Oriana Fallaci. The quotes in that performance were so
startling and hubristic that some readers familiar with Kissinger's
intellectual style suspected Fallaci of embroidery. "President Nixon showed
great vigor, a great ability, even in picking me," Kissinger is quoted as
saying, apparently in all seriousness; of course he was quite right, but
perhaps he should not have been the one to say it. In an interview that fairly
bristles with the first person singular pronoun, Kissinger revealed that he
loved "acting alone" in his diplomacy: "The Americans love the cowboy who comes
into town all alone on his horse, and nothing else. He acts and that is enough,
being in the right place at the right time, in sum a western. This romantic and
surprising character suits me because being alone has always been part of my
style."
The idea of Kissinger as Jimmy Stewart has a certain ridiculous charm,
although the notion is probably closer to Nixon's image of himself as expressed
in Six Crises a decade ago. In any case, the President's men were not amused.
"About this point," says one White House source, "it was high noon in the old
West Wing. At least a half dozen people who matter here in the White House hit
the ceiling when they read that story. They called it the biggest ego trip
anyone had ever taken." Soon afterward, at press briefings, Zeigler pointedly
and repeatedly emphasized that the President was "giving instructions" to
Kissinger about the Paris negotiations, deflating any suggestion that Kissinger
was a diplomatic Destry. Since then, Kissinger seems deliberately to have kept
a very low profile—although that might have reflected discouragement with the
progress of the peace talks.
The new spirit of national interest and Realpolitik naturally dictated
disengagement from Viet Nam. Yet Saigon's hold on the U.S. was once again
disastrously tenacious. Elected in 1968 on a pledge to end the war, Nixon chose
an excruciatingly slow four-year policy of Vietnamization—turning the war over
to Thieu's forces—as a means so he thought, to salvage some "honor" from the
commitment. His forays to Moscow and Peking this year were decisive in turning
Hanoi toward serious secret negotiations; the critical moment came last spring
when, even after Nixon had gambled by mining the harbors of the North, the
Russians decided not to call off the summit meeting.
The Reasons Why Peace Was Not at Hand
At last, on Oct. 26, Kissinger made his now famous misstatement: "Peace is
at hand" in Viet Nam. The world's hopes soared, the stock market leaped upward
with Kissinger's declaration: "What remains to be done can be settled in one
more negotiating session with the North Vietnamese negotiators, lasting, I
would think, no more than three or four days." But between Oct. 26 and Dec. 16,
the settlement that both sides supposedly agreed upon disastrously unraveled.
Kissinger blamed the North Vietnamese for the impasse, and in calculated anger,
the President unleashed the most massive bombing of North Viet Nam of the whole
long war. One top Administration official said last week that Nixon's behavior
was influenced by the way in which Dwight Eisenhower ended the Korean War. "You
remember," the official said, "that the talks with North Korea were bogged
down. Ike took over and immediately ordered massive bombing of North Korea,
including the dikes. Nixon was Vice President then, and he says that, however
much of a peaceful image Ike struck, his show of strength worked."
In assigning blame, others looked to South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van
Thieu, who certainly was doing everything in his power to torpedo the proposed
agreement. Inevitably, too, the Nixon-Kissinger relationship was scrutinized
more earnestly than ever for frictions. It became a journalistic fashion to
look for "light between" the President and his advisor. There was some
encouragement for this activity from within the White House, notably from
Haldeman, who considers himself an extension of Nixon and deeply resents
Kissinger's high profile and the fact that Kissinger is not subordinate to him
as is everyone else on the President's staff. And it did not escape notice that
in his Dec. 16 briefing, Kissinger repeatedly emphasized that it was the
President who had to be satisfied with the settlement.
These scraps aside, there is no real evidence of strain between the
President and his advisor, perhaps because a careful reconstruction of the
chronology of events in Paris and Saigon indicates both must share some
responsibility for the breakdown in reaching an agreement. Kissinger seems to
have underestimated the difficulty of the remaining "details" to be worked out.
It was odd for a man of Kissinger's caution to have been so euphoric and
expansive as he was on Oct. 26. His anticipation was too great, relying too
much on what he called the continued "good will" of Hanoi and Le Duc Tho, with
whom he evidently got on well. He also underestimated the opposition of Thieu.
For his part, Nixon, who fully understood what Kissinger had brought back
from Paris, backed off when Thieu balked. In sending Kissinger back to the
North Vietnamese to extract more specific language in the draft on the
sovereignty of South Viet Nam, so as to meet some of Thieu's objections, Nixon
alarmed Hanoi, which believed it had a deal. In predictable riposte, Hanoi then
began asking for revisions of its own. As Kissinger explained in his Oct. 26
briefing, an agreement had finally seemed possible because the military and
political issues of the war were to be separated; a cease-fire now, then
politics and maneuvering among the Vietnamese for the ultimate control of
Saigon. By raising the sovereignty issue, among others, Nixon sharpened a
deliberately fuzzed point, bringing the detailed politics of the settlement
back into the present negotiations. In other words, he insisted on nailing down
specifics where Kissinger and Tho had purposefully left them vague, subject to
future negotiations, as the only means of reaching agreement.
When Hanoi refused to buy, Nixon ordered the bombers aloft to try to
pressure the North Vietnamese. The heavy military gamble, in his view, had paid
off before, when he invaded Cambodia in 1970, Laos in 1971, and mined Haiphong
last May in the face of criticism and protest in the U.S. The atmosphere around
the White House was even similar to last spring's, a mood of coolness and
toughness only occasionally soured by the fulminations of the "doom and gloom
brigade," as the Washington press corps is called. Gambling had, in fact,
become part of Nixon's international style—to seem deliberately unpredictable,
to let Hanoi, Moscow and Peking know that he was capable of almost anything, to
keep them off their guard. It may be that he felt doubly confident this time in
re-escalating the war, for the U.S. election six weeks before may have
persuaded him, rightly or wrongly, that public opinion would be solidly behind
him.
The Election and Nixon's America
The President, in fact, was spending much of the time last week on his
Inaugural Address, taking as his thematic starting point Teddy Roosevelt's two
Inaugurals emphasizing the responsibilities of the U.S. as a world power and of
individuals as citizens. Its tone and confidence would surely reflect the scale
of his victory last November. With 49 states and 60.7% of the ballots cast,
Nixon's landslide ranked with Lyndon Johnson's in 1964 and Franklin Roosevelt's
in 1936. The appearance of a mandate was there, but it was in some sense
deceptive. Nixon's men claimed the endorsement of a "new Republican majority,"
but they were ignoring the widespread ticket-splitting that occurred at the
polls. In the House, the G.O.P. picked up only 13 seats, and in the Senate,
where Republicans needed five to claim control, they lost two seats. That left
the Democrats ahead 57 to 43 in the Senate and 243 to 192 in the House, where
three seats will be declared vacant. The Democrats also made a net gain of one
governorship.
It was, as everyone said, a peculiar election. Aided by the Democratic
reforms that he himself had helped to institute, George McGovern seized control
of the nation's majority party and then so mishandled it that the election
became a referendum less on issues and ideologies than on the personal
competence of the two men. Issues of economic and social justice became lost in
a tangle of doubts about McGovern himself. First he proposed a $1,000-a-year
guarantee for every American, only to revise the suggestion later. Then came
the Eagleton affair, McGovern never could shake the charge, however unfair,
that he was the candidate of "amnesty, acid and abortion." He was, too many
voters believed, and indecisive radical—the worst kind.
Somehow, McGovern deeply misjudged the American psyche. In part, he was
defeated by a mood of reaction against the '60s, against the counterculture,
against permissiveness, against social programs for blacks, against excessive
welfare spending. Yet the nation was not engaged in a precipitate swing to the
right, rather is was apprehensive about too rapid change and about George
McGovern as a leader.
When Arthur Bremer gunned down George Wallace in a Maryland shopping
center last May, Richard Nixon's re-election was all but assured. He picked up
the vast majority of Wallace votes in November.
Given the McGovern nomination, Nixon waged a comfortable non-campaign from
the incumbent's traditional stance of statesmanship-above-the-battle. The
economy, one issue that might have sunk the Republicans, was humming along
toward recovery. Scandals, or near scandals, erupted, infecting the political
air with a sour smell. First there was ITT, with the suggestion that the
Justice Department dropped antitrust suits against the corporation in return
for at least a $200,000 subsidy of the G.O.P convention. Agents with ties to
the Committee for the Re-Election of the President and to the White House were
arrested after breaking into the Democratic National Committee's Watergate
headquarters to remove electronic bugs planted there earlier. Nixon's campaign
was heavily financed by anonymous donors. Yet none of those issues took hold in
a serious way, none of them seemed to make much difference. Says Paul Asciolla,
a liberal priest and editor in Chicago: "Nixon was smart. He talked about the
football blackout when McGovern was going on and on about the bombing. He
talked about safety in the streets when McGovern concentrated on Watergate."
Americans were not all that callous or indifferent. Yet they seemed, in a
sense, disengaged from the large political and social and military issues that
had demanded so much of them in the decade past. There was some sense of
endorsing the status quo, or of improving it gradually; a nation bombarded by
rhetoric through the 60's did not take to McGovern's apocalyptic language. This
disengagement undoubtedly worked to Nixon's political advantage in the
election, just as it gave him, paradoxically, the freedom with which to pursue
his boldest international ventures.
But generalized portraits of a national mind have a tendency toward
caricature. America is—has always been—a mosaic of inconsistencies, of deeply
contradictory and often unexpected impulses. The language of "liberal" and
"conservative," of "Middle American" and "radical," usually lags behind the
real changes. Thus, for example, William F. Buckley now favors
decriminalization of marijuana. Black Panther Bobby Seale is running for mayor
of Oakland, Calif., and between those conservative and radical poles, the mass
of Americans exhibit a complexity that defies tidy compartmentalization.
Nixon has taken more and more of articulating his own vision of America.
At its core is his profound conviction that the real America, the heartland
America, the land of the Founders' virtues, has somehow been betrayed by the
liberal Eastern media and by Government and academic intellectuals who grew up
in the legacy of the New Deal. Without those enemies, the President seems to
believe, the nation would belong to itself again.
Something Less than the New Revolution
But when he articulates this vision, Nixon on occasion deals in
simplicities of virtue, spiritual nostalgia, even paternalistic atavism that
are as unrealistic as the excesses of radical rhetoric. In an extraordinary
interview he granted to the Washington Star-News before the election NIxon said
"The average American is just like the child in the family. You give him some
responsibility and he is going to amount to something. If on the other hand you
make him completely dependent and pamper him and cater to him too much, you are
going to make him soft, spoiled and eventually a very weak individual."
For all the dazzle—and trials—of his foreign relations, Nixon's domestic
record in the first four years has represented something less than his "New
American Revolution." When the President heralded that objective two years ago,
he listed six major goals: revenue sharing, government reorganization, health
insurance reform, welfare reform, full employment and new environmental
initiatives. Of those efforts, only general revenue sharing has been approved
by a hostile Congress; the other goals have proceeded fitfully or not at all.
Most of Nixon's domestic efforts in Congress have involved beating back passage
of bills the Administration regarded as too expensive. When that failed, he
resorted to the veto or, as in the case of the very expensive water-pollution
bill, he simply refused to spend all the funds authorized.
In the Nixon years, federal spending has mounted massively, but in his
second term the President will try to curb the rate of increase. It is also
going through a period of rough riding for the President on Capital Hill.
Majority Leader Mike Mansfield has announced that he will pursue ways to
develop Democratic alternatives to White House proposals. In fact, chances are
that Nixon will simply not propose a great deal, but will concentrate on trying
to run more efficiently the vast number of federal programs already in being.
The middle and blue-collar classes certainly do not want to pay more taxes for
programs which, they feel, benefit mostly the blacks or other members of what
socialists call the "under class." But there may be some areas—for instance,
medical care or the environment—where even Nixon's own constituency may
eventually become dissatisfied in the absence of greater federal effort.
Nixon's victory hardly caused a mood of merriment to descend on Republican
Washington. "We are sore winners," said one Cabinet member. The morning after
the election the President demanded resignations from 2,000 politically
appointed members of his Administration, including his entire Cabinet, so that
he could clean house as he chose. Only four of his eleven Cabinet members will
still be at their desks after Jan. 20, plus Elliot Richardson, who moves from
HEW to the Department of Defense. The only obvious pattern in the changes is an
emphasis on managers, budget trimmers—and loyalists. But the large turnover,
which is being reflected in lesser posts down the line, serves a larger
management purpose in Nixon's mind. Nixon told reporters in a post-election
Camp David meeting: "The tendency is for an Administration to run out of steam
after the first four years, and then to coast, and usually coast downhill." Too
often, he observed, anyone in government "after a certain length of time
becomes an advocate of the status quo, rather than running the bureaucracy, the
bureaucracy runs him."
From Privacy to People, Power and Peace
What Nixon seems not inclined to tamper with is the staff of his palace
guard, whose pettiness and unswerving zealotry, many would argue, do not serve
the President well. More than ever, Nixon lives in isolation, avoiding the
press as much as possible as he moves from Camp David to Key Biscayne to San
Clemente, reveling in the privacy that those retreats provide him. He treats
Congress as an entity to be ignored or an obstacle to be surmounted, often to
the distress of its members even in his own party. Although the Administration
during the campaign observed a moratorium in its vendetta with the press, it
has now begun a calculated drive to frighten the TV networks into more
"balanced" coverage.
His critics call him remote and heartless, but Nixon believes that he is
linked in a mysterious way to the great American majority—the silent American,
the middle American, the middle class, the middle-aged. He believes a majority
of Americans share his vision of a traditionalist revival, of trying to make
less government work better, of encouraging local remedies and local
responsibilities for local problems. It is his version of power to the people,
and it is a power he thinks can be harnessed to change the direction and spirit
of the country for good. Observes TIME's High Sidey: "He is out to lay claim to
a whole counter-counterculture, this one the culture of Middle America."
Abroad, Nixon will now concentrate on making his Realpolitik an ongoing
reality through SALT II, world trade and money agreements, the slow, patient
task of redefining ties with old allies. By visiting China and Russia, Nixon
and Kissinger have constructed a triangular world order with Japan and the
major European powers also invited to play new roles in his "generation of
peace." All this could, of course, be undone if President and Advisor cannot
end the war in Southeast Asia. It remains, as it was, incredibly, four long
years ago, Nixon's and Kissinger's first and most vital priority, a possible
destroyer of the best of presidencies and policies. Together the Men of the
Year accomplished much in 1972, but the essential achievement continued to
elude them.
COVERS GALLERY: Click here to see the cover image from 1972
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