was Vietnam any closer to a political solution.
The South Vietnamese government felt it had
been sold down the river, as the remaining US
forces progressively withdrew, the last departing
in March 1973. It was not quite like that. The
Americans handed over their installations to the
South Vietnamese and supplied enormous quan-
tities of equipment, until South Vietnam pos-
sessed the fourth-largest air force in the world. It
was up to the South Vietnamese government to
win the war, if it could.
Neither the Vietcong nor the North Vietna-
mese nor the South Vietnamese had any intention
of honouring the armistice – though the commu-
nists were also on their own, both the Chinese and
the Russians having refused to help them further.
If the communists broke the agreement, as they
did, Nixon could have ordered new air strikes, but
this would have been unlikely to restrain them. By
the autumn of 1973, when fighting resumed,
Nixon was weakened by Watergate. The fighting
continued until April 1975, when the communists
took Saigon. The end came swiftly. For the US the
indescribable scenes as South Vietnamese men and
women, allies of the US, crowded on the stairs to
the roof of a CIA safe house close to the Embassy,
mostly in vain, desperately trying to join the heli-
copter evacuation of the American staff, marked a
graphic and humiliating end to America’s efforts to
save South Vietnam from communism. The men
who had died in the war and those who had
returned – the Vietnam veterans – received little
honour or thanks. Americans wanted to forget the
war. In the words of Nixon’s successor President
Gerald Ford, ‘Today, Americans can regain the
sense of pride that existed before Vietnam.’ He
rightly insisted that the tragic events ‘portend nei-
ther the end of the world nor of America’s leader-
ship in the world’. But this was wisdom after the
events. If only it had existed when Johnson mas-
sively involved the US between July 1965 and
March 1966.
At home during his second administration
Nixon had to grapple with inflation and the de-
teriorating financial situation. He began by
cutting back on some of the Great Society social
programmes. He devalued the dollar, and for a
time his administration imposed wage and price
controls. With the huge rise in Arab oil prices all
Western economies were in trouble in 1973 and- In the US, unemployment and inflation
were rising while production was falling, a state
of affairs that prevailed in most Western countries.
According to Keynesian economics, inflation
should have led to a growth in production and
falls in unemployment. Now the economic world
was topsy-turvy. A new term was coined to
describe what was afflicting the West – ‘stagfla-
tion’, stagnation plus inflation.
In the political world, however, the Watergate
scandal soon overshadowed all else. America’s
allies were puzzled by the way US newspapers and
media hounded a president who had arguably
showed himself more successful in securing
American and Western interests, more far-sighted
than any other president in the twentieth century.
Domestically, too, the Nixon presidency seemed
to be following moderate and sensible policies.
But American politics are rough, and dirty tricks
are nothing new. Illegal telephone-tapping,
bribery and misuse of funds have been practised
by some of America’s most eminent leaders. The
press did not expose discreditable information
about all politicians or even all presidents. J. F.
Kennedy’s love-life was kept quiet; Martin Luther
King was bugged. The CIA and the FBI were
engaged in activities beyond anything that had
been sanctioned. Nixon believed he had many
enemies determined to get at him. The knives
were certainly out for him, but he had himself
contributed to this beleaguered atmosphere. The
White House staff were becoming a second secret
administration. They plotted how to strengthen
the president and how best to lay low his enemies.
Nixon was no outsider to these secret discussions.
They proved not to be so secret in the end
because he had them all taped.
The Watergate story really began a year before
the famous break-in with Nixon’s determination
to get at the opponents of his policies in Vietnam
and at home – at those, especially, who from
inside the civil service were leaking secret docu-
ments to the press. The White House set up the
Special Investigations Unit in the pursuit of their
undercover investigations. The Unit’s staff
became known as the Plumbers. It was they who