The Arrogance of Power by Anthony Summers
There was a good reason, Nixon argued years later, for the United States to maintain alliances with such dictators. “Do you want communism out there?” he replied when asked about the relationships with the shah’s Iran and Marcos’s Philippines. “Those are authoritarian states, but they don’t threaten their neighbors, and they are our friends. Totalitarian Communist states do threaten their neighbors and they are not our friends.”
The serious political business of the 1953 Nixon tour was to determine how best to stop the forward march of communism in Asia. Whatever their differences, Eisenhower and Nixon shared the belief that America could not be insular, that it was essential for it to contain hostile powers, and in the fifties that meant Communist powers. For Nixon, however, the effort involved more than simply containment. He had long been preaching that to avoid another world war and bring “peace and security in our time,” the United States had to “go on the offensive in the ideological struggle.” The battle with communism topped the agenda as Nixon’s air force Constellation flew around Asia, to Korea—just starting to settle into the uneasy stalemate that passed for peace—to Malaya, to Laos, to Cambodia . . . and to Vietnam.
At that time, few Americans could have located Indochina on a map. The war being fought there was someone else’s conflict, and few foresaw that the French colonial forces would soon go down to humiliating defeat at the hands of Ho Chi Minh’s guerrillas. Nixon remembered sitting with Emperor Bao Dai in a grand villa north of Saigon, as “barefoot servants padded in noiselessly carrying silver trays laden with fresh fruit and cups of tea.” “If Vietnam is divided,” Bao Dai correctly prophesied, “we will eventually lose it all.”
On a field trip in northern Vietnam, dressed in battle fatigues and helmet, Nixon told French officers and Vietnamese conscripts that they were “fighting on the very outpost of freedom,” that the American people “supported their cause and honored their heroism.” He flew home believing that should the French leave Vietnam, it and its neighbors “would fall like husks before the Communist hurricane.” He uncritically accepted the domino theory, the theory that—fatally for thousands of Americans and millions of Vietnamese—would drive his nation’s foreign policy far into the future.
Soon after Nixon’s return to Washington, when America faced its first serious decision on Vietnam, he was a strong advocate of drastic action. Ten thousand crack French troops were cut off in a shrinking enclave at Dien Bien Phu, under the unrelenting attack of a large Communist force. With the United States funding 80 percent of the cost of the French war effort, and providing some two hundred advisers,1 Eisenhower came under pressure to use U.S. force to relieve the French force. “The boys,” he recalled, referring to his senior aides, “were putting the heat on me.” Lacking the support of Congress or of America’s allies, however, the president did not intervene.
In April 1954, during a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Nixon was asked his opinion of what the United States should do if the French were to withdraw from Vietnam. He replied that the plight of the free world was desperate, and retreat in Asia unthinkable. He continued: “If in order to avoid it we must take the risk now by putting American boys in, I believe that the executive branch has to take the politically unpopular position of facing up to it and doing it, and I personally would support such a decision.”
With those words Richard Nixon had become one of the very first senior elected politicians, even possibly the first, to speak out in favor of putting American ground troops into Vietnam.
Although the remarks had been made on an off-the-record basis, the European press identified Nixon as their source. U.S. papers soon followed up with major headlines. Given the controversial line Nixon had taken and the fact that his audience has been made up of journalists, he could hardly have expected otherwise. Some assumed the vice president was floating a trial balloon on Eisenhower’s behalf, to test public reaction. Yet the record suggests the comments reflected his own view. A letter written the next day by his aide James Bassett, moreover, shows Nixon came to him “wanting his hand held” after his “very forthright talk.” Nixon “knew this would cause an uproar,” Bassett told his wife, and “did it deliberately (as he told me on the phone just now) to ‘stir up some thinking. . . .’ ” Nixon’s talk of sending U.S. troops to Vietnam was “strictly his own baby.”
Behind the scenes Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Arthur Radford had suggested coming to the aid of the French with air strikes flown by U.S. bombers. The plan was designated Operation Vulture and included a special option, the use of three tactical nuclear weapons. Eisenhower’s reaction to that idea, he recalled, was: “You boys must be crazy. We can’t use those awful things against Asians for the second time in less than ten years. My God . . .” Nixon, and others, including Air Force General Curtis LeMay, who would later advocate bombing North Vietnam “back to the Stone Age,” supported the nuclear option.
As the days passed and a French defeat at Dien Bien Phu looked inevitable, Nixon talked on in private about the need for “inculcating some real guts into people.” Eisenhower continued to take a cooler view. “The sun’s still shining,” he said at a White House meeting. “Dien Bien Phu isn’t the end of the world . . . it’s not that important.”
At Duke Zeibert’s with James Bassett, during an evening of “vast hair-letting down” over liqueurs, Nixon argued that the best hope now was a Pacific alliance—“even without the laggard British”—and use of Nationalist Chinese troops if Red China made threats. “Then, by God, we’d have to employ the atom bomb. Mark my words. . . .”
After Dien Bien Phu had fallen, after Eisenhower had notified France that the United States would not intervene, and after Vietnam had been divided in two by the Geneva agreement, Nixon was one of those who continued to promote an invasion involving amphibious landings and ground troops. Eisenhower would later write that he had thought unilateral U.S. intervention “nothing less than sheer folly.” Seven years were to pass before John F. Kennedy was to commit thousands more “advisers” to South Vietnam, the first act in the protracted tragedy of America’s Vietnam War, a war that Nixon would long support.
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Nixon continued to go out of his way meanwhile to show that he personally had “the guts” to face down Communists. His 1958 tour of Latin America, billed as a goodwill mission, nearly cost him his life. The plan called for him to visit eight countries, with Pat at his side, at a time of growing agitation encouraged by Moscow. After a decade of tilting at the idea of communism in the United States, Nixon would now have to deal with the real thing.
At first, in Uruguay, he faced nothing worse than student heckling, signs reading FUERA NIXON! (“Get out, Nixon!”) and IMPERIALIST! and claims that he was a warmonger and friend of dictators. Then, after he had trumped the protesters by debating the issues and—in Alfredo Stroessner’s Paraguay—calling for political freedom, Communist leaders elsewhere decided to be confrontational.
Warned that demonstrators intended to prevent him from visiting Lima’s San Marcos University, Nixon decided to meet them head on. Accompanied only by his interpreter and lead Secret Service agent, he left his car and advanced on a throng of two thousand angry students. “I would like to talk to you,” he shouted. Then, over the roar of abuse that encountered him, he asked, “Why are you afraid of the truth?” Rocks began flying, one breaking one of the Secret Service men’s teeth and glancing off Nixon’s shoulder. When they retreated to their open car, Nixon stood up, hands over his head like a victorious prizefighter, shouting, “Cowards! . . . You are the worst kind of cowards!” as the vehicle pulled away.
Later, as he returned to his hotel, people threw fruit and small stones. A man he remembered as a “weird-looking character . . . [with] bulging eyes” spit full in Nixon’s face. On receiving a sympathetic message from Eisenhower, Nixon replied that the only casualties were “a couple of Ben Freeman’s suits which I will be unable to wear again.”
After that, Nix
The real drama, though, came in Venezuela. From the moment the Nixons emerged smiling from their plane, it was clear the Communists intended a massive onslaught. As the couple stood to attention for the Venzuelan national anthem, a mob on a balcony began showering them with spit. “It fell on our faces and our hair,” Nixon remembered. “I saw Pat’s bright red suit grow dark with tobacco-brown splotches.” They stood and took the abuse, then struggled to their separate limousines for the motorcade into the city.
In the capital’s roughest suburb the Communists had prepared a series of ambushes. What followed, one reporter said, was “like a scene from the French Revolution.” First came a shower of rocks, then a crowd of ragged people brandishing placards and clubs. The Nixon motorcade found a way through, only to run into another barricade to make another short-lived escape, and again be blocked. The chanting this time was not “Fuera Nixon!” but “Muera Nixon!”—“Death to Nixon!”—and it came close to that.
The inside of the car, [Nixon remembered] made me think of a tank, battened down and ready for combat. . . . The Venezuelan and U.S. flags were ripped from the front of our car. . . . I could see that we were really stuck. . . . Out of the alleys and side streets poured a screaming mob of two or three hundred, throwing rocks, brandishing sticks and pieces of steel pipe. . . . A large rock smashed against the shatterproof window and stuck there, spraying glass into the Foreign Minister’s eye.
This crowd was out for blood. . . . It made me almost physically ill to see the fanatical frenzy in the eyes of teenagers—boys and girls who were very little older than my twelve-year-old daughter, Tricia. My reaction was a feeling of absolute hatred for the tough Communist agitators who were driving children to this irrational state. . . . One of the ringleaders—a typical tough thug—started to bash in the window next to me with a big iron pipe.
The man with the pipe, Nixon said later, looked to him like a combination of Gerhart Eisler, Eugene Dennis, and other Communists he had seen in the past. He had of course seen Eisler and Dennis, both American leftists, in the more tranquil ambiance of a congressional hearing room.2 In Caracas the thug with the pipe succeeded in punching a hole in the car window. Flying glass wounded Nixon’s interpreter, hit a Secret Service agent, and nicked Nixon in the face. The iron stave began poking at him through the hole in the window.
“Then we heard the attacker shout a command,” Nixon recalled, “and our car began to rock. I knew now what was happening. It was a common tactic for mobs throughout the world to rock a car, turn it over, set it afire. For an instant, the realization passed through my mind—we might be killed. . . .”
They indeed might have been had not a Venezuelan security detachment cleared the roadblock and made it possible to drive on.3 With its wipers flapping—to clear the waterfall of spit on the windshield, Nixon’s limousine pulled away.
No one had been seriously hurt. The car carrying Pat Nixon had also come under attack, but she was uninjured. Six cars back secretary Rose Woods had been superficially cut by flying glass. On the advice of his Secret Service aide and the interpreter, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, Nixon abandoned plans for a wreath-laying ceremony and headed for the U.S. ambassador’s residence. The party were soon relaxing over gin and tonics and canapés courtesy of the American ambassador’s wife.
Intelligence later established that had Nixon gone on to the wreath laying he would have faced being bombed with Molotov cocktails, four hundred of which had later been found neatly stacked near the tomb of Simón Bolívar. “I don’t think the American people realize how close to death Mr. Nixon and his wife came,” Secret Service chief U. E. Baughman wrote years later. “He damn near got creamed,” said the CIA’s Caracas station chief, Jacob Esterline.
That evening an alarmed President Eisenhower ordered Operation Poor Richard, the movement of a thousand marines, paratroopers, six destroyers, a cruiser, and an aircraft carrier toward Venezuela. They were not needed. Nixon traveled to the airport the next day in a heavily armed convoy and flew home to a hero’s welcome in Washington. The president, the cabinet, senior members of Congress, and a cheering crowd greeted him at the airport.
The placards Nixon now saw carried statements like DON’T LET THOSE COMMIES GET YOU DOWN, DICK and COMMUNIST COWARDICE LOSES—NIXON COURAGE WINS. Soon, in the spirit of the Hound’s Tooth group formed to celebrate his fund crisis, Nixon would found a club for veterans of the Latin American trip. He called it the Rock and Roll Club, presumably referring to the attempt to overturn his car. Members serenaded him at the first reunion with a song, to the tune of “Frère Jacques,” that knocked Venezuela and Peru—“Abajo Venezuela!” (“Down with Venezuela!”)—and hailed their leader with “Viva Nixon!”
The trip had put Nixon in the man of action’s “arena” he so often evoked. Having emerged unharmed, he seemed to indulge the notion that all had worked out well in the end thanks to him, that he had been in control at all times. Witnesses agreed that Nixon did show courage. Whether he demonstrated real control or the sort of wise judgment and self-control a citizen would hope for in a leader is another question. In part the answer lies is in his own compulsive comments about the tour.
“I slept very little,” Nixon said of the night before he confronted the Peruvian rioters. “I knew this necessary period of indecision was far more wearing than tomorrow’s action would be. This was part of the crisis syndrome. . . . A man is not afraid at a time like this because he blocks out any thought of fear by a conscious act of will. . . .”
“I felt the excitement of battle,” he said of the moment he chose to abuse the protesters as cowards, “but I had full control of my temper as I lashed out at the mob.” “It was a terrible test of temper control,” he recalled, of the time a demonstrator spat full in his face. In a tough situation, Nixon said he remained “analytical and cold.” “When someone is trying to damage you, the way to hurt him is not to become angry, but to handle him with detachment.”
Yet by his own contradictory account, Nixon had been far from “cold.” “I felt an almost uncontrollable urge,” he said of the spitter with the bulging eyes, “to tear the face in front of me to pieces.” Only the intervention of a Secret Service agent, he admitted, prevented him from striking the man. Even then, he said, “I had the satisfaction of planting a healthy kick on his shins. Nothing I did all day made me feel better.”
Nixon lost his temper several times during the trip. The first occurred in Peru, when he summoned two State Department officials—half dressed, because they had been preparing for a state dinner—to chastise them for suggesting privately that his actions might prove diplomatically damaging. In Caracas, as his car ran the gauntlet of the mob, he let the Venezuelan foreign minister “have it with both barrels” for trying to explain his government’s policy on demonstrations. Later, his military aide Don Hughes recalled, he gave other government leaders “the most godawful dressing down.” He “exploded in fury” when told Eisenhower was mobilizing American troops for a possible rescue, because the White House had not consulted him first. (It could not have done so, in fact, because communications had been temporarily cut off.)
The “detachment” Nixon ascribed to himself extended also to his attitude to the long-suffering Pat. He had made no move to shield her as they stood through the playing of the Venezuelan national anthem in a shower of spit. He had then insisted that Pat’s car drive immediately behind his, breaking the Secret Service’s cardinal rule that only agents travel in the follow-up car. “One remark made by Mr. Nixon stayed with me from this terrible episode,” said Secret Service chief Baughman. “The agent inside Mr. Nixon’s car said to the Vice President after the motorcade had started to roll again: ‘I hope Mrs. Nixon gets through.’ To which Mr. Nixon replied, ‘I
Nixon would claim it was he who made the “command decision” for the maneuver that brought the motorcade out of the moment of greatest danger, and that he then made “another command decision” that avoided further trouble at Bolívar’s tomb. Other accounts, however, indicate he had nothing to do with the first decision and acted on advice for the second.
Nixon used similar military language to describe how the incidents affected him. “Once the battle is over,” he wrote, “a price is paid in emotional, mental, and physical fatigue.” In Peru he felt “worn out” after an experience lasting just two hours. He was “wrung-out” after the Caracas episode and took his “first afternoon nap in twelve years of public life.” “My reaction to stress, a challenge, some great difficulty,” he explained, “is sort of chemically delayed. . . . After a crisis like that is over, I feel this tremendous letdown, a fatigue, as though I’d been in battle.”
The irony, one that was to have parallels throughout Nixon’s life, was that he had brought the Latin America ordeal upon himself. “It was entirely avoidable,” the Secret Service’s Baughman said of the close call in Caracas. “I’d had a report on just how bad things were, and I didn’t want the Vice President to make the trip. It was like talking into a barrel.” Nixon’s experiences “did not seem to temper his indiscretion.”
The man who supplied the advance intelligence on Caracas, CIA station chief Jacob Esterline, had tried almost desperately to have the visit canceled. Weeks earlier surveillance had produced “incontrovertible proof,” captured on tape, that local Communists were planning to kill Nixon. On his own initiative Esterline had flown to Washington to brief Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles and to warn Nixon. Dulles said: “It’s a political decision. Nixon’s going and that’s that.” A Nixon aide told Esterline to “keep your damn nose out of it.”