“Would it not be better to compete in the relative merit of washing machines,” he asked Khrushchev, “than in the strength of rockets?”
“Yes, but your generals say we must compete in rockets,” said the Soviet leader. “We are strong and we can beat you.” And in fact, at that moment in history, the Soviets did outpace the United States in rocket thrust. But Nixon was unfazed.
“In this day and age to argue who is stronger completely misses the point,” he said. “With modern weapons it just does not make sense. If war comes we both lose.” Earlier, Khrushchev had talked over Nixon, but now Nixon turned the tables and cut the Soviet leader off.
“I hope the prime minister understands all the implications of what I just said . . . ,” Nixon asserted. “Whether you place either one of the powerful nations in a position so that they have no choice but to accept dictation or fight, then you are playing with the most destructive power in the world. . . . When we sit down at a conference table it cannot be all one way. One side cannot put an ultimatum to another.”
“Our country has never been guided by ultimatums,” Khrushchev finally offered. “It sounds like a threat.”
“Who is threatening?” Nixon asked.
“You want to threaten us indirectly,” the Soviet leader said. “We have powerful weapons, too, and ours are better than yours if you want to compete.”
“Immaterial,” said Nixon. “I don’t think peace is helped by reiterating that you have more strength than us, because that is a threat, too.” And then he gently jabbed Khrushchev in the chest.3
“We want peace with all nations, especially America,” said Khrushchev, now sounding conciliatory.
“We also want peace,” said Nixon. But: “In order to have peace, Mr. Prime Minister, there must be a sitting down at the table and a discussion in which each sees the points of the other.”4
Nixon’s showdown with Khrushchev made front pages around the world, and the picture of the two, perched over the kitchen railing, with Nixon looking very much in charge, became the iconic image of what was soon dubbed the “Kitchen Debate.” Nixon, Time enthused, had “managed in a unique way to personify a national character proud of peaceful accomplishment, sure of its way of life, confident of its power under threat.”5 Khrushchev thought so, too: he didn’t forget his encounter with Nixon, whom he now saw as a determined advocate for America and a potentially formidable adversary, should he win the White House. He did whatever he could, he admitted years later, to help defeat Nixon in the 1960 presidential election.
Foreign affairs were always Nixon’s deepest interest, and the staunch anti-Communism of his early career had a natural connection with events overseas. In the late 1940s, when Nixon’s political career began, it seemed world Communism was on an inexorable march: the Soviets had built their Iron Curtain of Eastern European satellite states, and in 1949, Chinese Communists, led by Mao Zedong, had prevailed in the Chinese Civil War and took power on the Chinese mainland—a shattering blow to freedom for the world. In 1956, Soviet tanks rolled into Hungary to suppress a Democratic movement there. Overhanging all of this was the threat of nuclear annihilation, as the United States and Soviet Union built stockpiles of deadly weapons powerful enough to wipe out any decent concept of human existence.
What Americans saw in the Kitchen Debate was a political leader with the substantive knowledge to go head to head in debate with the leader of Soviet Russia—and to be articulate and resolute in defending the American way of life while doing it. Nixon did not have to worry about whether people saw him as tough on Communism. In fact, when he finally did enter the White House in 1969, many critics had the opposite concern: they felt he would be too much the Cold Warrior, unable and unwilling to manage a more peaceful relationship with the Soviet Union.
Yet the Kitchen Debate provided a clue here as well. “In order to have peace,” Nixon had insisted, “there must be a sitting down at the table and a discussion in which each sees the points of the other.” And as president, much to the surprise of supporters and critics, Nixon would do precisely that with the leaders of the two great Communist powers—not just with the Soviet Union but also with China. He would do it with an approach that I call visionary realism, whereby he exercised a profound strategic wisdom that somehow balanced big-picture thinking with recognition of the realities of the world. And he would do it at a time when the United States faced not just the daunting Cold War challenges of these relationships but also the ongoing bloodbath in Vietnam, which raged on with no end in sight. Nixon’s foreign policy record is large and complex, but for most Americans now, it comes down to three main areas: relations with Russia; relations with China; and the Vietnam War. In each of these areas, Nixon pursued shrewd, strategic, even brilliant policies, though to be sure, this was no guarantee of their enduring success.
Vietnam and Southeast Asia
The Vietnam War paralyzed American foreign policy and traumatized American society. Nixon hadn’t initiated the American military presence in Vietnam, let alone escalated it. But he was determined, as president, to get America out of it. And his foreign policy began with that objective.
When Nixon entered office in January 1969, the war in Vietnam was by far the nation’s most pressing foreign policy issue. Over sixteen thousand Americans had been killed in combat in 1968, the worst casualty year yet for the United States. Worse, the war wasn’t going well; despite years of assurances from the Pentagon and the Johnson administration that a turning point was near, it became clear to the American people in 1968, with the Communist Tet Offensive, that the war would continue to rage on. Even relatively conservative Middle Americans were losing faith in the effort, and they looked to Nixon to find a way out. Most did not favor the Left’s calls for unilateral withdrawal, but they did want American troops to start coming home—preferably, after winning the war.
Nixon had promised as a presidential candidate in 1968 that he had a secret plan to end the war, though he didn’t really have such a plan—at least, nothing that matched the drama of that description. What he developed, once in the Oval Office, was a plan that addressed Americans’ now-prevailing interest: getting Americans home. Thus was born Nixon’s policy of “Vietnamization,” in which he would bring American troops home by the tens of thousands while preparing the Saigon regime to take on more of the war-fighting burden. However, at the same time, Nixon always privately vowed to himself that he would not be the first American president to lose a war, and thus his Vietnam approach had two prongs, which were somewhat mutually exclusive of each other: (1) to get out while saving face as best as possible, and (2) to win. And these conflicting priorities would overhang everything Nixon and Henry Kissinger did when it came to Vietnam.
In his November 3, 1969, address, Nixon laid out his new approach to the nation’s commitment in Southeast Asia:
In the previous administration, we Americanized the war in Vietnam. In this administration, we are Vietnamizing the search for peace. The policy of the previous administration not only resulted in our assuming the primary responsibility for fighting the war, but even more significantly did not adequately stress the goal of strengthening the South Vietnamese so that they could defend themselves when we left. . . . We have adopted a plan which we have worked out in cooperation with the South Vietnamese for a complete withdrawal of all U.S. combat ground forces, and their replacement by South Vietnamese forces on an orderly scheduled timetable. This withdrawal will be made from strength and not from weakness. As South Vietnamese forces become stronger, the rate of American withdrawal can become greater.6
As American troops started returning home, the pressure on the South Vietnam military to carry the fighting load increased. Nixon hoped that US aerial firepower could help even the odds. He coupled his withdrawal of American troops with massive “carpet-bombing” campaigns against North Vietnamese bases in Laos and Cambodia. These efforts commenced with Operation Menu in 1969, in which Nixon deployed American B-52 bombers. His efforts were part strategic and part psychological—he wondered whether he could get better results if Hanoi believed that he was a genuine “madman” or “mad bomber.” Perhaps,