I believe, however, that Nixon’s own assessment of these events is closer to the mark. He always maintained that the United States had left Paris in 1973 with a solid agreement to win the peace—and he saw a different culprit in the demise of South Vietnam. “By 1973,” Nixon would later tell Monica Crowley, his assistant in his final years, “we had achieved our political objective; South Vietnam’s independence had been secured. But by 1975, the Congress destroyed our ability to enforce the Paris agreement and left our allies vulnerable to Hanoi’s invading forces. If I sound like I’m blaming Congress, I am.”15 Indeed, it is impossible to overlook the magnitude of Congress’s decision to wash its hands of the war in 1975.
The American loss in Vietnam was one of the most bitter chapters in American history and continues to haunt our politics today, but Nixon makes a legitimate case in saying that he left the disposition of the war in a manageable state. As the leader of a democracy, he was bound to consult the sentiment of the popular majority, which overwhelmingly desired a drawdown of the American commitment—even if the hope was that such a withdrawal could be done in concert with a victorious outcome. Ultimately, Nixon had to address the American interest first, and in bringing the troops home, reducing American casualties, and securing terms for what, at least in theory, could have been a manageable peace, he achieved as much and probably more than any other president could have done in similar circumstances. It is true that he agreed to a peace in 1973 that he could have had four years earlier—but whether it had been agreed to at the later date or in 1969, Nixon seemed to have gotten the best terms he could have. He extracted the United States from a war that was costing it dearly in human, political, and financial terms. If this doesn’t count quite as a resounding triumph, it deserves the more sober term “achievement.” It took some doing.
Nixon’s conduction of the war had several substantive effects beyond Vietnam. At home, congressional anger about his actions in Cambodia led to the adoption of the War Powers Resolution in 1973, a federal law that reined in a president’s ability to wage acts of war without congressional approval. Of course, the Constitution already makes this clear, but the decade of war in Vietnam prompted congressional liberals to make the terms more specific: presidents would have to notify Congress within forty-eight hours of committing forces, and they could not keep them engaged for longer than sixty days without congressional authorization. The law was passed over Nixon’s veto. Yet nearly forty years later, it did not prevent Barack Obama from waging an undeclared war in Libya.
More broadly, Vietnam was one of the central drivers of Americans’ loss of faith and confidence in government—a confidence that would never again reach the levels of the early postwar period. And, of course, Nixon would be the central player in another driving event: Watergate, which was just beginning to unfold when the Paris Peace Accords were signed. Watergate would not only shatter the confidence of Americans in the honesty and reliability of their government; it would also cripple the remaining American resolve to assist our South Vietnamese ally. Without Watergate, it’s unlikely that the Congress would have so brazenly abandoned Saigon in 1975. The two events are unimaginable without each other.
And so Vietnam cannot be scored as one of Nixon’s happier chapters—indeed, every American president that touched it has found himself scarred. Yet Nixon did fulfill, however imperfectly, his promise to the American people to end the war. There is much to criticize in how he got it done, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that he did get it done.
It’s safe to say, though, that if Nixon’s main foreign policy feat was ending the Vietnam War, his legacy would be checkered at best. But of course, it was not with Vietnam that Nixon left his deepest mark. Nixon will be remembered in history as the American president who ended the global isolation of Communist China, paving the way for normalization of diplomatic relations—with world-historical implications.
China
In 1969, when Nixon took power, many in the American foreign policy establishment still clung to a view of world Communism that held that the Russians, the Chinese, the North Vietnamese, and Communists elsewhere all moved in sync, united in ideology and goals. Yet the Russian-Chinese relationship had imploded earlier in the decade, and it was clear by 1969 that nothing like a Russian-Chinese alliance any longer existed. Quite the contrary: the two Communist powers had become bitter foes. During Nixon’s first year in office, the Russians and Chinese came closer than they ever had before to going to war. During the spring and summer of 1969, Chinese troops crossed the disputed Ussuri River to ambush the island of Zhenbao (Damanski). But the Russians retook the territory in a successful counteroffensive two weeks later. The fighting took about a thousand lives on both sides, and according to recently released documents, the Soviets seriously considered a nuclear strike against the Chinese.16 The United States persuaded the Soviets to stand down.
Nixon saw the Soviet Union’s actions as a troubling new phase in the Cold War, reinforcing an idea that had been building in his mind for years: the United States should try to develop constructive relations with the Chinese. It was the Soviets, Nixon told his national-security staff, who posed the greater danger. It would not serve American interests, he stressed, to see the Chinese “smashed” in a war with Russia.17 The Chinese feared the Soviets, Nixon believed, and these clashes might push China toward developing a better relationship with the United States—and thus help contain Soviet power. The Sino-Soviet Split presented the United States with an opportunity to position itself between the two Communist powers—not only lessening chances that they might become allies again but also reducing the risk to the United States of a three-pronged Cold War. And with the United States and China opening relations, Nixon reasoned, the Russians would be motivated to improve relations with Washington as well.
This was hardly the prevailing outlook in 1969. Not only was it a minority view in the American foreign policy establishment; even Nixon’s own top officials didn’t share it. At first, Henry Kissinger could not understand the president’s desire to reach out to China. “Our leader has taken leave of reality,” Kissinger told his staff in 1969. “He thinks this is the moment to establish normal relations with Communist China. He has just ordered me to make this flight of fancy come true . . . China!”18
Years later, Kissinger would write that he and Nixon came to the idea of approaching China independently. But the documentary record offers no support for such claims. By all available evidence, the opening to China was Nixon’s idea alone.
Nixon’s anti-Communism, while genuine, had always obscured a more pragmatic, realistic side, which he prided himself on as a student of world affairs. As early as 1954, when he was a young vice president, Nixon had suggested a more conciliatory policy toward China. Nixon did, however, oppose President Kennedy’s proposal to allow China a seat in the UN, saying that it would “irreparably weaken” the rest of Asia. Well into the 1960s, hardline views on Red China, as it was then known, were firmly in the mainstream. In 1966, a Harris poll showed that 58 percent of Americans opposed giving recognition to mainland China and would vote against a candidate proposing it. Yet, Nixon, during that same year, confided to philanthropist Elmer Bobst that his dream was “to bring China into the world.”19
Nixon had recognized for some time that China was on the world scene to stay, and that Taiwan leader Chiang Kai-shek’s dream of returning to mainland China would never happen. The United States, Nixon had come to believe, had to take the world as it found it—and nowhere did this apply more than to China.
The next year, Nixon authored a seminal article in Foreign Affairs, “Asia after Viet Nam,” in which he tried to determine the future of Asia—and the US policy toward Asia—beyond the impact of the Vietnam War. Envisioning a future that he would soon help to bring about, Nixon wrote:
Taking the long view, we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors. There is no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation. But we could go disastrously