788 Chapter 29 From Camelot to Watergate: 1961–1975
he had often seemed to lack in his earlier career. His
willingness, despite his long history as a militant cold
warrior, to negotiate with the communist nations
indicated a new flexibility and creativity. His landslide
victory appeared to demonstrate that a large majority
of the people approved of his way of tackling the
major problems of the times.
But Kissinger’s agreement with the North
Vietnamese came apart when Nguyen Van Thieu,
the South Vietnamese president, refused to sign it.
Thieu claimed that the agreement, by permitting
communist troops to remain in the South, would
ensure his ultimate defeat. “Why,” he asked
Kissinger, “are you rushing to get the Nobel Prize?”
To Kissinger’s chagrin, Nixon sided with Thieu and
resumed the bombing of North Vietnam in
December 1972, this time sending the mighty B-52s
directly over Hanoi and other cities. The destruction
they caused was great, but their effectiveness as a
means of forcing concessions from the North
Vietnamese was at best debatable, and in these
strikes for the first time the United States lost large
numbers of the big strategic bombers.
In January 1973 a settlement was finally
reached. As with the October “agreement,” the
North Vietnamese retained control of large sections
of the South, and they promised to release American
prisoners of war within sixty days. Thieu assented
this time, largely because Nixon secretly pledged
that the United States would “respond with full
force” if North Vietnam resumed its offensive.
Within several months most prisoners of war were
released, and the last American troops were pulled
out of Vietnam. More than 57,000 Americans had
died in the long war, and over 300,000 more had
been wounded. Nearly a million communist soldiers
and 185,000 South Vietnamese soldiers were
reported killed.
In 1973, too, Kissinger was named secretary of
state; he shared the Nobel Prize for Peace with a
North Vietnamese diplomat for negotiating an end to
the Vietnam war.
Domestic Policy Under Nixon
When Nixon became president in 1969, the major
economic problem he faced was inflation. This was
caused primarily by the heavy military expenditures
and easy-money policies of the Johnson administra-
tion. Nixon cut federal spending and balanced the
1969 budget, while the Federal Reserve Board
forced up interest rates to slow the expansion of the
money supply. When prices continued to rise, uneasi-
ness mounted and labor unions demanded large
wage increases.
In 1970 Congress passed a law giving the presi-
dent power to regulate prices and wages. Nixon orig-
inally opposed this legislation, but in the summer of
1971 he changed his mind and announced a ninety-
day price and wage freeze. Then he set up a pay
board and a price commission with authority to limit
wage and price increases when the freeze ended.
These controls did not check inflation completely—
and they angered union leaders, who felt that labor
was being shortchanged—but they did slow the
upward spiral.
In handling other domestic issues, the president
was less firm. Like President Kennedy he was primar-
ily interested in foreign affairs. He supported a bold
plan for a “minimum income” for poor families, but
dropped it when it alarmed his conservative support-
ers and got nowhere in Congress. But when a
groundswell of public support for conserving natural
resources and checking pollution led Congress to pass
bills creating the Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) and the Clean Air Act of 1970, he signed
them cheerfully.
Primarily he was concerned with his own political
standing. Hoping to strengthen the Republican party
in the South, he checked further federal efforts to
force school desegregation on reluctant local districts,
and he set out to add what he called “strict construc-
tionists” to the Supreme Court, which he believed
had swung too far to the left in such areas as race rela-
tions and the rights of persons accused of committing
crimes. He also proposed mostly conservatives to fill
vacancies in the Supreme Court.
After his triumphant reelection and the with-
drawal of the last American troops from Vietnam,
Nixon resolved to change the direction in which the
nation had been moving for decades. He
announced that he intended to reduce the interfer-
ence of the federal government in the affairs of indi-
viduals. People should be more self-reliant, he said,
and he denounced what he called “permissiveness.”
Excessive concern for the interests of blacks and other
minorities must end. Criminals should be punished
“without pity.” No person or group should be cod-
dled by the state.
These aims brought Nixon into conflict with lib-
erals in both parties, with the leaders of minority
groups, and with those alarmed by the increasing
power of the executive. The conflict came to a head
over the president’s anti-inflation policy. After his sec-
ond inauguration he ended price and wage controls
and called for voluntary “restraints.” This approach
did not work. Prices soared in the most rapid infla-
tion since the Korean War. In an effort to check the
rise, Nixon set a rigid limit on federal expenditures.
To keep within the limit, he cut back or abolished a