Fortunately, Hanoi did not turn a blind eye. In 1978, it tried to spark the Cambodians to rise up against a government Vietnamese leaders described as “the most disgusting murderers in the latter half of this century.” Vietnam invaded that year, eventually toppling Pol Pot’s heinous regime. The Vietnamese reported, “In Cambodia, a former island of peace… no one smiles today. Now the land is soaked with blood and tears…. Cambodia is hell on earth.”112 Perhaps a quarter of Cambodia’s population died during the Khmer Rouge’s brief rule.
If the United States did not wreak similar devastation on Laos, it was not for lack of trying. The United States had been “secretly” bombing Laos since 1964. It was no secret to the Laotians. Starting in 1967, the pace of the bombing picked up. Civilian suffering increased. When Nixon took over, all restraints were removed. Belgian UN advisor Georges Chapelier detailed the situation on the basis of interviews with survivors:
Prior to 1967, bombing was light and far from populated centers. By 1968 the intensity of the bombings was such that no organized life was possible in the villages. The villages moved to the outskirts and then deeper and deeper into the forest as the bombing climax reached its peak in 1969 when jet planes came daily and destroyed all stationary structures. Nothing was left standing. The villagers lived in trenches and holes or in caves. They only farmed at night. All of the interlocutors, without any exception, had his village completely destroyed. In the last phase, bombings were aimed at the systematic destruction of the material basis of the civilian society. Harvest burned down and rice became scarce.113
Between 1965 and 1973, the United States dropped 2,756,941 tons of ordnance in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites.
The Pathet Lao–controlled Plain of Jars region was one of the areas that took the brunt of the U.S. offensive. Most of the young left to join the Pathet Lao. U.S.-allied Meo soldiers evacuated the remaining villagers. By September 1969, the area was largely deserted. Fred Branfman, who interviewed more than a thousand refugees, wrote, “after a recorded history of seven hundred years, the Plain of Jars disappeared.” Much of Laos suffered a similar fate.114
Nixon barely had time to savor his 1972 electoral victory before the Watergate scandal engulfed his administration. Congressional investigations revealed the depths of corruption and abuses of power. The floodgates opened when Alexander Butterfield disclosed the White House tapes, without which Nixon would have avoided impeachment. At the time, Butterfield said he hoped he wouldn’t be asked about the tapes and, when asked, did not want to perjure himself. He later admitted privately that he hoped committee members would ask that question. He said that while sitting in on Nixon, Ehrlichman, and Haldeman’s discussions of who they were going to pin Watergate on, he had concluded that they were despicable, ruthless human beings and had decided not to protect them.115 The public soon discovered what John Mitchell referred to as the “White House horrors.”116
In October, Vice President Spiro Agnew was forced out of office over bribes and kickbacks he had received when governor of Maryland. Nixon appointed the likable but undistinguished House Minority Leader Gerald Ford to replace Agnew. One observer noted, “few men are better qualified than Ford for a job that demands practically nothing of the man who holds it.”117
The House Judiciary Committee drafted three articles of impeachment for obstructing justice, misusing the powers of the presidency, and refusing to comply with the committee’s requests for information. Pressure to resign came from all sides. Many observers felt that Nixon was becoming dangerously paranoid. Wary of what Nixon might do, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger met with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and instructed that no military units respond to orders from the White House without first getting his approval. By early August, Nixon’s support in Congress had evaporated. Having run out of time and options, he resigned on August 9, 1974.
Gerald Ford announced: “Our long national nightmare is over” and later gave the “madman” Nixon a controversial pardon. But forty government officials and members of Nixon’s reelection committee were convicted of felonies. Among those sentenced to prison terms were Dean, Mitchell, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, political assistants Charles Colson, Egil Krogh, and Jeb Stuart Magruder, and the president’s lawyer, Herbert Kalmbach. Nixon impersonator David Frye quipped, “There’s a bright side to Watergate. My administration has taken crime out of the streets and put it in the White House where I can keep an eye on it.”118
“Psychopathic” Kissinger came through unscathed. In October 1973, he and North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Tom Lehrer, America’s most brilliant political satirist, announced that Kissinger’s winning the Nobel Peace Prize made political satire obsolete and refused ever to perform again. Unlike Kissinger, Le Duc Tho, knowing that peace had not yet been achieved, had the decency to turn the prize down.
Historian Carolyn Eisenberg aptly pointed out, “Richard Nixon was the only President in American history to engage in sustained military action against three nations without a mandate from the public, the press, the government bureaucracies or the foreign elite.”119
Chapter 10
COLLAPSE OF DETENTE:
Darkness at Noon
Jimmy Carter has been a marvelous ex-president—perhaps, as he has claimed, the best in U.S. history. Although John Quincy Adams, who returned to Congress to wage an impassioned struggle against slavery, could have given him a run for his money, Carter can make a very strong case. In 1982, he founded the Carter Center, through which he has promoted democracy, improved health care in underdeveloped countries, secured the release of prisoners, helped restore Haiti’s democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power, and spoken on Cuban TV urging the United States to end its embargo and imploring Castro to improve civil liberties. In 1994, he negotiated a nuclear deal with Kim Il Sung that significantly slowed the growth of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. In his work monitoring elections around the world, he dismissed the opposition’s claims of fraud in sanctioning the 2004 recall election victory of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. He has tried to inject reason into the long-festering Arab-Israeli conflict, issuing highly controversial criticisms of all the antagonists, including the Israelis. He decried George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, called for the shuttering of the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and labeled the Bush-Cheney administration “the worst in history.”1 He has called for the abolition of nuclear weapons and remains the only U.S. president ever to have visited the city of Hiroshima. For his courageous stands and global leadership, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
Yet Carter, who has performed in such exemplary fashion out of office, was inept in office, disappointing his supporters, betraying his convictions, and leaving with an approval rating of 34 percent. Carter’s most enduring legacy as president was not his hypocrisy-stained campaign for human rights; it was his opening the door to the dark side, legitimizing the often brutal policies of his successor, Ronald Reagan—policies that rekindled the Cold War and left a trail of innocent victims stretching from Guatemala to Afghanistan and back again to the World Trade Center. How did that happen? Were the same forces at work during the Carter years that had undermined the administrations of other Democratic presidents, including Wilson, Truman, Johnson, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama?