campaign of Barry Goldwater, who was well to the
right of mainstream Republicans. In 1966 and
1967 he rebuilt his political support as the man
best able to unite Republicans. By the time of the
party’s convention in 1968, he was once more the
obvious candidate to contest the next presidential
election.
Driving ambition and sheer hard work rather
than privilege and a silver spoon got Nixon to the
White House. He saw himself as the underdog
who had had to make his own way. As president he
retained a sense that he faced danger from many
unscrupulous enemies and from an ill-disposed
establishment. Determined to defeat them, he
responded with conspiratorial ruthlessness. There
was a loneliness about his White House years, with
his reliance on a small team of White House polit-
ical staff, from whom he demanded absolute loy-
alty. For Nixon, safety would be guaranteed only if
he could gain control over those he believed
wished to discredit him and his policies. It all
ended with the Watergate fiasco and his resigna-
tion to avoid impeachment. But his performance as
president during his first administration won him
the trust and confidence of a far greater majority of
American voters in the 1972 election than in the
lacklustre election of 1968.
Nixon’s passion was to devise for America a
new global strategy that would extricate it from
the rigidities of the Cold War. He appointed
William P. Rogers, a former attorney-general
under Eisenhower, secretary of state. But in
shaping a new foreign policy he called on the help
of a Harvard professor, Henry A. Kissinger, to act
as national security adviser. Kissinger replaced
Rogers as secretary of state when Rogers resigned
in the autumn of 1973. Kissinger proved a bril-
liant strategist in tackling contemporary inter-
national problems. The most pressing need was
to extricate the US from fighting an endless war
in Vietnam.
Vietnam had divided the nation. During his
election campaign Nixon promised that he had a
plan to end the war. The plan was to roll the film
backwards, to the point before massive numbers
of US combat troops had been sent to Vietnam,
and the hope continued to be that the American-
equipped South Vietnamese army plus punitive
bombing by the US would force the North
Vietnamese to give up, the struggle. Kissinger was
as tough-minded as Nixon about the war, deter-
mined that it should not end in a humiliating
defeat. The US position he put forward at the
Paris peace negotiations – these had begun during
Johnson’s presidency in May 1968 – was that all
foreign forces should leave South Vietnam, which
should then be left to decide its future in free
elections. This was unacceptable to the North
Vietnamese; they knew that whichever side organ-
ised the free elections would be sure to win
them. They demanded a coalition government in
South Vietnam, to include the communist South
Vietnamese National Liberation Front, which
they easily dominated after the Tet offensive had
inflicted terrible losses on the Vietcong.
The Nixon plan was to Vietnamise the war on
land and to bring US combat troops home in
stages. The Americans suffered heavy casualties in
1969 and were increasingly demoralised, many
soldiers resorting to cheap drugs. In 1968 US
forces had reached their maximum of 536,100
men; in 1969 they were reduced to 475,200; by
1971 their number had dropped to 157,800 and
when the armistice was signed in January 1973
only 23,500 were still left in Vietnam. But while
US troop reductions took place the air war was
secretly extended to Cambodia along the North
Vietnamese supply routes, the Ho Chi-minh trail.
(Kissinger’s plan and need for secrecy was due to
circumventing Congress which would have had to
approve war against a neutral state; the secrecy of
the operations could not be maintained.) In April
1970 American and South Vietnamese troops
actually invaded Cambodia, to the dismay of
American public opinion, which wanted to get
out of the war and not into a new one. On the
ground the North Vietnamese and Vietcong were
showing no signs of weakening. Nixon’s only
response was to step up again the bombing of
North Vietnam. Kissinger meanwhile had made
secret contact with the North Vietnamese nego-
tiator in Paris, Le Duc Tho, in February 1970.
Not until the Americans were prepared to
abandon their insistence that the North Viet-
namese forces in the South should withdraw at
the same time as the Americans could a deal be