The Forty Years War: The Rise and Fall of the Neocons, from Nixon to Obama - Softcover

Colodny, Len; Shachtman, Tom

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1634240561 ISBN 13: 9781634240567

Publisher: Trine Day, 2016

Synopsis

This groundbreaking book chronicles the little-understood evolution of the neoconservative movement--from its birth as a rogue insurgency in the Nixon White House through its ascent to full and controversial control of America's foreign policy in the Bush years. In eye-opening detail, The Forty Years War documents the neocons' four-decade campaign to seize the reins of American foreign policy: the undermining of Richard Nixon's outreach to the Communist bloc nations; the success at halting détente during the Ford and Carter years; the uneasy but effectual alliance with Ronald Reagan; and the determined, and ultimately successful, campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein--no matter the cost.Drawing upon recently declassified documents, hundreds of hours of interviews, and long-obscured White House tapes, The Forty Years War delves into the political and intellectual development of some of the most fascinating political figures of the last four decades. It describes the complex, three-way relationship of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Alexander Haig, and unravels the actions of Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Paul Wolfowitz over the course of seven presidencies. And it reveals the role of the mysterious Pentagon official Fritz Kraemer, a monocle-wearing German expatriate whose unshakable faith in military power, distrust of diplomacy, moralistic faith in American goodness, and warnings against "provocative weakness" made him the hidden geopolitical godfather of the neocon movement. The authors' insights into Kraemer's influence on the neocons--will change the public understanding of the conduct of government in our time.

About this title

About the Author

Len Colodny co-wrote Silent Coup: The Removal of a President with Robert Gettlin. Tom Shachtman is an American author, journalist, filmmaker, and educator. He has published more than thirty-five books across a variety of topics, including histories, biographies, and books for children. He lives in Connecticut.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Forty Years War

The Rise and Fall of the Neocons, from Nixon to Obama

By Len Colodny, Tom Shachtman

Trine Day LLC

Copyright © 2015 Len Colodny
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-63424-056-7

Contents

Cover, 
Title page, 
Copyright page, 
Dedication, 
Epigraph, 
Foreword by Roger Morris, 
2016 Update – The Forty Years War: Now 48 Years and Counting, 
Prologue – Is This the Beginning of the End of the Neocons?, 
Book One – Opposing Nixon, 
Section I – The Road to China, 
1) Nixon's Foreign Policy Dreams, 
2) The Anti-Nixon, 
3) Sending Signals, 
4) Young Men in a Hurry, 
5) "Actual or Feigned", 
6) Cambodia and Echo, 
7) Crises Expose Fissures, 
8) Approaching the Zenith, 
Section II – Undermining the Presidency, 
9) Making Allies into Enemies, 
10) "A Federal Offense of the Highest Order", 
11) "Three out of Three, Mr. President", 
12) A Meeting of Mind-Sets, 
13) Actions and Reactions, 
Section III – The Haig Administration, 
14) Three Quick Strikes, 
15) Nullifying Nixon, 
16) Protecting the Flanks, 
17) Endgame, 
Book Two – The Triumph Of The Neocons, 
Section IV – The Post-Nixon Years, 
18) A Short Honeymoon, 
19) Yielding to the Right, 
20) Primary Battles, 
21) The Carter Interregnum, 
Section V – The Reagan Evolution, 
22) Fits and Starts, 
23) The High Tide of Anti-Communism, and After, 
24) Not Going to Baghdad, 
25) The Post — Cold War Dilemma, 
Section VI – Full Power, 
26) Neocons Versus Clinton, 
27) From Candidate to Bush 43, 
28) The Neocon Hour of Triumph, 
29) The Cheney Regency, 
30) Losing Power, 
Epilogue – Foreign Affairs and the Election of 2008, 
Acknowledgments, 
Notes, 
Selected Bibliography, 
Contents, 
Landmarks, 

CHAPTER 1

Nixon's Foreign Policy Dreams

All American presidents, as they enter office, have big dreams. Some approach the presidency wanting to alter the social structure of the country. Richard M. Nixon wanted to change the international alignment of nations. His blueprint for American foreign policy entailed radical changes to the status quo based on what he considered a realistic assessment of the world. He was planning to pursue détente with America's main Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union; to bring about a rapprochement with "Red China," the People's Republic of China, a country that for decades he had pushed the United States to isolate from world affairs; and to negotiate a quick settlement to the war in Vietnam, a war he had supported from the sidelines and had repeatedly urged the U.S. government to win on the battlefield. Nixon's foreign policy dreams had been in formation for a decade. They affected how he ran his campaign, how he chose personnel for his administration, and how he conducted its affairs once in office.

As Nixon was inaugurated in January 1969, the noted foreign policy historian Hans Morgenthau was just publishing A New Foreign Policy for the United States, in which he argued that American foreign policy "has lived during the last decade or so on the intellectual capital ... accumulated in the famous fifteen weeks of the spring of 1947 when the policy of containment, the Truman Doctrine, and the Marshall Plan fashioned a new American foreign policy. ... This capital has now been nearly exhausted."

The main reason for exhaustion was the apparent stalemate of the war in Vietnam, which the United States was fighting against an enemy backed by the main Communist powers, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the People's Republic of China. Recognizing the toll the war had taken, Nixon planned to supersede the goal of containment that had informed the policies of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, and that had mired the United States in Vietnam, with something quite different: engagement with America's Communist enemies. He envisioned this approach bringing him a string of policy triumphs and a place in history as a grand peacemaker.

During his years as a representative, senator, and vice president (1947-1961), Nixon had become the country's leading anti-communist. Though many still considered him as such, he spent much of the 1960s decoupling himself from his earlier, inflexible stance. One landmark in this transformation came on July 29, 1967, in a speech to the Bohemian Club, a private association of Republican movers and shakers, at their annual retreat near San Francisco.

In the address, Nixon argued that more changes had taken place in a single generation than ever before in human history, and the result was a "new world" in which total Soviet dominance of Communist countries had diminished, replaced by "a bitter struggle for leadership" between the USSR and China. And this internal Communist struggle opened the door for American "discussions with the Soviet leaders at all levels ... to explore the areas where bilateral agreements would reduce tensions."

Nixon widened this opening in an article in the October 1967 issue of Foreign Affairs. "Asia after Vietnam" envisioned a series of new regional defense pacts to meet the challenges of future Vietnam-type wars and to counter the might of China. "The regional pact becomes a buffer separating the distant great power from the immediate threat. Only if the buffer proves insufficient does the great power become involved, and then in terms that make victory more attainable and the enterprise more palatable," Nixon ventured. Though "Red China's threat is clear, present, and insistently and repeatedly expressed," he wrote,

American policy toward Asia must come urgently to grips with the reality of China. This does not mean ... rushing to grant recognition to [Beijing], to admit it to the United Nations and to ply it with offers of trade — all of which would serve to confirm its rulers in their present course. ... But] 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.

Nixon's article seems to have rung few alarm bells among his anti-Communist friends, perhaps because he emphasized the need to keep one's powder dry while talking with the enemy. But Nixon recognized that his ideas ran counter to his public image, and he offered his new rationale only to sophisticated audiences. In his 1968 campaign rhetoric, he largely maintained his posture as the strongest anti-Communist candidate in the race. Nonetheless, in his acceptance speech at the Republican convention that year, he extended a surprisingly straightforward olive branch:

To the leaders of the Communist world, we say: After an era of confrontation, the time has come for an era of negotiation. Where the world's superpowers are concerned, there is no acceptable alternative to peaceful negotiation. ... The years just ahead can bring a breakthrough for peace [through] intensive negotiations [and] a determined search for those areas of accommodation ... on which a climate of mutual trust can eventually be built.

To most of his listeners, and to the country's reporters and columnists, his phrases seemed no more than rhetoric, the sort of bland pledge that politicians often utter but seldom follow up with action. Nixon would manage to complete the 1968 race without having to face serious questions that might have forced him to elaborate on his foreign policy intentions.

The American public's distaste for the war had pushed President Johnson to take himself out of the running for reelection. Nixon began the general election campaign with a lead over Johnson's vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey, mostly because of the Republican candidate's frequently repeated promise to bring the war in Vietnam to an end. But Nixon refused to say precisely how he planned to end the war, and Democrats soon began charging that his "secret plan" was merely an election-season ploy. The "secret plan" was like a mirror that reflected only the image the gazer wished to see: Nixon haters saw it as a transparent ruse, convinced there was no such plan. His centrist supporters saw it as a promise to end the war diplomatically. And his conservative partisans saw it as a vow to win the war on the battlefield.

Nixon knew he needed conservatives to win the election. Twenty years later, during the 1988 election season, he reportedly told George H. W. Bush that he'd learned that "you can't win the election with just these people. But you can't win the election without these people." To help maintain support on the right during the 1968 campaign, Nixon appointed three young conservatives as advisers on foreign affairs: Richard V. Allen, Richard Whalen, and Martin Anderson. Nixon took Allen on at the request of a major campaign donor who was also a large supporter of the Hoover Institution, where Allen had worked, but made little use of him, sending Allen to Korea and Japan to explain the implications of his Foreign Affairs article to leaders there, and enlisting him to produce a superfluous book called Nixon on the Issues.

The most notable policy intellectual angling for a position on the Nixon campaign was Henry A. Kissinger, a Harvard professor who for years had been advising New York's moderate Republican governor, Nelson Rockefeller. After Nixon defeated Rockefeller in the primaries, Kissinger hedged his bets: He offered his services to both the Humphrey campaign — pledging to share Rockefeller's secret files on Nixon — and the Nixon campaign, promising to share secret information from the Paris peace talks. Nixon took him up on the scheme, and for the remainder of the campaign Kissinger worked assiduously to pry information from the peace talks, reporting it to Nixon through Allen, sometimes in phone calls conducted in German.

Kissinger, who turned forty-five in 1968, may have seemed the quintessential foreign policy wunderkind, but his ascendancy had been anything but preordained. Born Jewish in Furth, Germany, in 1923, he had arrived in New York at the age of fifteen, five years after the Nazis had taken power and made life intolerable for German Jews. He was headed for a relatively ordinary life — attending night classes in accounting — when he was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943. After a year in the army, he landed at Camp Claiborne, the Louisiana training facilities for the 84th Infantry, where he met Fritz Kraemer.

The encounter would change Kissinger's life. "My role was not discovering Kissinger," Kraemer later recalled: "My role was getting Kissinger to discover himself. [At age twenty-one] Kissinger knew nothing but understood everything." To the younger refugee, Kraemer, a self-assured private, fifteen years older, with two doctorates and a rapier of an intellect, was an alluring leader. "I was in awe of Kraemer," Kissinger later recalled. Kraemer helped Kissinger obtain assignments and promotions in the army and urged him to set his sights beyond accountancy. Kraemer steered him to Harvard and later helped Kissinger choose the subjects of his master's and doctoral theses. In 1957 Kissinger came to prominence in foreign policy circles when he turned a Council on Foreign Relations Study Group's deliberations into a 450-page book under his own name, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, which improbably became a bestseller. A Harvard professor, he was also a consultant on military and missile planning to Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson.

Nixon's need to know about the Paris deliberations in 1968 derived from his greatest fear during the campaign — that Johnson would con the public into believing the war in Vietnam was about to end, which would tilt the electorate to Humphrey. To deter that scenario, Nixon circumvented the law by secretly sending messages to President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam, using as intermediary Anna Chennault, the Chinese-born widow of a celebrated and controversial American general. Thieu, a career military officer, had been part of a military junta that had overthrown the postcolonial leader; elected president with a slim plurality, he had constructed a regime that was nearly as corrupt as its predecessor and more than willing to let U.S. forces bear the brunt of the heavy fighting.

As Nixon had feared, at the end of the summer of 1968 his lead in the polls vanished overnight when Humphrey began advocating a halt to the bombing, effectively distancing himself from Johnson. Hearing rumors of a peace settlement, Nixon used the Chennault channel to warn Thieu not to sign any peace agreement before the election, promising that South Vietnam would get a better deal from a Nixon presidency.

Nixon's messages were intercepted and made their way to Johnson, who characterized them to Senator Everett Dirksen as "treason." Johnson also told Humphrey, who recognized that revealing them would hurt Nixon at the polls, yet decided against releasing the information; there was no proof that Nixon had personally ordered the attempts to sway Thieu, and the revelation would raise questions as to how the information had been obtained.

Trying to manage the situation, Johnson made a conference call to all three candidates (the third was former Alabama governor George Wallace). He warned Nixon obliquely not to further interfere in the negotiations, and Nixon told the president he would stop. But he did not — partly because he feared that Johnson would launch an "October surprise" designed to throw the election at the last moment. And on the weekend before the election Johnson delivered that surprise, announcing a bombing halt and a breakthrough in the peace talks.

On Election Day the race was too close to call. Not until mid-morning of the next day was the final tally counted. Nixon garnered 301 Electoral College votes, thirty more than he needed. In the popular vote, he won by a half-million out of 73 million votes cast — a margin of two-thirds of 1 percent.

The narrow margin is generally attributed to Wallace's presence in the race: If Wallace had not siphoned conservative support away from Nixon and taken five Deep South states, the argument goes, Nixon would have won more easily. But there is evidence to the contrary — that conservative voters actually provided Nixon's margin of victory. The Wallace spoiler argument does hold when the example is Texas, since Humphrey only carried the state by 1.5 percent while Wallace received 19 percent. But it falters when measured against figures from other states where conservative voters were a more significant factor and Wallace voters a less significant one, such as in five states that Nixon won narrowly: California (3 percent), Illinois (2.9 percent), Ohio (2.2 percent), New Jersey (2.1 percent), and Missouri (1.1 percent). Had the first four — states that frequently voted Democratic — gone for Humphrey, the Electoral College tally would have been tipped in the Democrat's favor. Equally significant, the turnout in all five close-call states was more than 80 percent, and more than 87 percent in New Jersey and Ohio. By contrast, the turnout in states won by Humphrey was in the 60-70 percent range, and in those won by Wallace, in the 50 percent range. Nixon also won in states where Wallace had been leading prior to the election: Florida, Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina; intervention by Senators Strom Thurmond and John Tower, arguing that a vote for Wallace was a vote for Humphrey, helped put those states in the Nixon column on Election Day.

Most conservatives who backed Nixon had no idea how radically he planned to change American foreign policy. Indeed, judging by later reactions from the right, if he had been more forthcoming about his ideas before the election, they might well have stayed home and not voted at all.

During the presidential transition period, Nixon began setting into motion his plan to end the Vietnam War — the so-called secret plan which did exist but would have surprised many of those who voted him into office, had they known its character. The plan entailed neither accepting defeat nor pushing for all-out military victory; rather, the Nixon administration would play the USSR and China against each other to force them to persuade their client state, North Vietnam, to negotiate an end to the war on terms favorable to the United States and to South Vietnam.

This approach had its roots in lessons Nixon had taken away from the last major war in which the United States had been involved — the Korean War. In 1953, shortly after Dwight Eisenhower was elected, he had threatened both Communist China and the USSR, and Nixon believed that these threats had resulted in the quick conclusion of the war. On a post-election trip to Florida, Nixon stopped at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington to see the dying Eisenhower; he may have told him, as he did other intimates, that he would bring an end to the war in Vietnam within ninety or a hundred days of taking office.

A most important concomitant of Nixon's plans entailed appointing a national security adviser more in tune with his ideas than the three young conservative Turks he had enlisted during the campaign. Richard Allen, convinced that he himself was too young, and definitely too conservative, to serve as national security adviser, recommended Henry Kissinger for the post. But the leaders of the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution urged Allen to join the administration in some capacity — "We need you in there," they pleaded, as a counterbalance to Kissinger — and Allen accepted the post of deputy national security adviser.

Before Nixon agreed to appoint Kissinger, he chatted with the professor for three hours at the Pierre Hotel in New York City, the president-elect's post-election headquarters. Nixon was already determined to cut the State Department, the CIA, and the Department of Defense out of the foreign policy loop — to run the show himself, with an appointed national security adviser and a reinvigorated National Security Council. For Nixon, one benefit of this approach was that White House employees were not subject to Senate confirmation and could not be required to testify by any congressional committees. Kissinger, whose disdain for the Washington bureaucracies had deepened during a decade of close contact with them, enthusiastically agreed with Nixon's scheme.

After accepting the post in secret, he called Fritz Kraemer to let him know about the offer. "You are not going to be able to make foreign policy," Kraemer warned. "You will not be the engineer but at best the brakeman on the train. The right will call you the Jew who lost us Southeast Asia; the left will call you a traitor." If it were a purely personal question, Kraemer said, he would urge him not to take the job — but he advised Henry to accept for the country's sake, because he was the best-qualified man in America for the position.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Forty Years War by Len Colodny, Tom Shachtman. Copyright © 2015 Len Colodny. Excerpted by permission of Trine Day LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Trine Day
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1634240561
• ISBN 13: 9781634240567
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 480