From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (128 page)

The prospect of an Allende victory sent shock waves through a previously preoccupied White House. Kissinger had once dismissed Chile as a "dagger pointed to the heart of Antarctica." But the election occurred simultaneously with the Cuban submarine crisis and another upheaval in the Middle East, and U.S. officials were deeply alarmed at the possibility of an Allende presidency. "There is a graveyard smell to Chile," ambassador Edward Korry reported from Santiago, "the smell of democracy in decomposition."
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Nixon later justified his actions with a hyperbolic hemispheric domino theory, outrageous in its scope, passed on to him by an Italian businessman: "If Allende should win, and with Castro in Cuba, you will have in Latin America a red sandwich. And eventually it will all be red." The possible domestic political consequences seemed even more dangerous. Like other administrations back to Kennedy, Nixon lived in mortal terror of another Castro. "Chile could end up being the worst failure in our administration," a belatedly engaged Kissinger ominously warned a White House aide, " 'our Cuba' by 1972." "I don't see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible," he quipped on another occasion, perhaps expressing his innermost feelings about democracy.
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The administration thus authorized a major covert operation to thwart an Allende presidency. On September 16, Nixon allocated $10 million to the job, assigned the CIA exclusive responsibility, tasked it to "make the economy scream," and urged operatives to consider anything "your imagination can conjure."
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The agency formulated a two-track program. Track I, its "Rube Goldberg gambit," named after the cartoonist famous for contriving the most intricate mechanisms to perform the most simple tasks, set up a complex, convoluted, and totally impractical scheme involving bribing Chile's legislators and undermining its constitution to bring Frei back as president. Track II called for a military coup or the assassination of Allende, along with the kidnapping of a top general who favored following constitutional processes. The murder of the general actually sparked a
backlash in Chile. Both schemes failed. The Congress declared Allende president on October 24, 1970.

The Nixon administration proceeded to launch economic and psychological warfare against the Allende government. Egged on by large corporations threatened by the new government's nationalization program, the United States reduced once voluminous aid to a trickle. It denied credits to buy wheat, an especially important sanction in a time of worldwide grain shortages. An "invisible" blockade also included persuading the World Bank to prevent loans to Chile. The CIA provided funds for opposition newspapers and spread misinformation to undermine Allende. Continued U.S. military assistance sent an open invitation for a coup.

In September 1973, the Chilean military overthrew the government; Allende committed suicide or was murdered. No evidence has ever been produced to prove conclusively that the United States instigated or actively participated in the coup. Even without U.S. intrusion, Allende might have been overthrown. His frantic and ill-conceived efforts to nationalize basic industries and reshape the Chilean economy added to the nation's woes and provoked massive popular discontent. But there can be no doubt that U.S. intervention between 1970 and 1973 helped create the conditions in which the coup took place. Kissinger himself later admitted that while the United States had not done the job, "we helped them."
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The administration recognized with unseemly haste the new government of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, an outspoken admirer of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. It quickly restored economic aid. Pinochet adopted free market policies that favored U.S. corporations. He also instituted a brutal, authoritarian regime that executed as many as ten thousand dissidents and jailed many more. Kissinger may not merit the war-criminal stigma sometimes pinned on him, but the administration's overreaction to the Chilean election, its disdain for Chilean democracy, and its vicious assault on the Allende government make it in large measure responsible for what followed. Ironically, although neither Kissinger nor Nixon thought Latin America very significant, their actions there perhaps more than anywhere else blackened the reputations for statesmanship to which they attached such great importance.
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Their handling of a late 1971 crisis on the Indian subcontinent further reveals the moral—and geopolitical—bankruptcy of their approach to
Third World issues. West Pakistan's brutal attempts to suppress an independence movement in the eastern section of a country whose two parts were separated by a broad expanse of Indian territory produced rampant atrocities and evoked worldwide condemnation. As many as ten million refugees fled East Pakistan for India, creating a huge economic burden for the New Delhi government and threatening its stability. India could hardly resist a chance to profit at the expense of its mortal enemy. Its support for an independent Bangladesh threatened to provoke the third war on the subcontinent since 1947. In late November, Indian troops crossed into East Pakistan. Shortly after, fearing an Indian move into West Pakistan, President Yahya Khan, a dictator who had seized power in a coup d'état, launched strikes against Indian air bases, invaded disputed territory in Kashmir, and called upon the United States to abide by its treaty commitments.

The Nixon-Kissinger response was shaped by petty prejudices on the one hand and contrived geopolitics on the other. Sharing a bias that had afflicted their predecessors back to Truman, the two men generally disliked Indians, labeling them variously "slippery, treacherous people," "arrogant bastards," and "goddamn Indians." They especially disliked India's prickly prime minister, Indira Gandhi, who, like her equally difficult father, Jawaharlal Nehru, often indulged in shrill criticism of the United States. In their private conversations, which often resembled locker-room talk and of which Nixon foolishly made a taped record, they referred to Gandhi as "bitch," "whore," and "old witch."
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The announcement of an Indo-Soviet friendship treaty shortly before the war with Pakistan began, itself partly a response to the U.S. shift toward China, stirred their geopolitical fantasies. Viewing the situation not as a difficult regional problem but as a menacing Cold War crisis, they concluded, without real evidence, that India had hostile designs on West Pakistan and even that India and its Soviet ally might seek regional hegemony.
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By contrast, they liked Pakistani dictator Khan, desperately sought to keep him in office until their China gambit was consummated, and even fancied balancing the presumed Soviet-Indian threat with a Sino-American-Pakistani alignment.

Thus, while claiming to be neutral, the administration secretly "tilted" toward Pakistan. Conjuring a major international crisis out of an essentially local conflict, the anxious and sometimes near frantic leaders insisted that the entire U.S. international position was at stake. They could not permit a loyal and useful ally to be destroyed. They must demonstrate
to China, in the words of an NSC aide, that the United States was a "reliable country to deal with," and to all nations the president's toughness.
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The administration provided arms to the Pakistanis, reaffirmed its commitment to Pakistan's sovereignty, and threatened to cancel the upcoming summit if the Soviets did not stop sending arms to India. Nixon ordered the aircraft carrier USS
Enterprise
and three escort vessels into the Bay of Bengal to reassure Pakistan and deter India. In the meantime, to protect the president's visit to China, the highest priority, Kissinger went to extraordinary lengths to keep the Chinese informed.

Nixon and Kissinger later insisted that their timely intervention had forced Moscow to back down and thwarted an Indian invasion of West Pakistan. In fact, there is little evidence to suggest that such threats existed. In Bundy's words, the U.S. response to the Indo-Pakistani war was "replete with error, misjudgment, emotionalism, and unnecessary risk-taking."
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From a moral standpoint, the United States backed the wrong side. It also supported the losing side. Pakistan was forced to recognize the independence of Bangladesh. Moreover, when columnist Jack Anderson made public the administration's closely held tilt toward Pakistan (apparently leaked to him by a JCS spy, navy yeoman Charles Radford), an increasingly paranoid White House called into action the "plumbers" team it had assembled to plug leaks, a clear sign of the mindset that would produce the Watergate scandals.

Nixon's policies toward Africa paralleled those toward civil rights issues at home and reflected deeply held attitudes on race. The president shared the racial views of his generation and class. In the confines of the White House, he often used racial epithets such as "nigger," "jigaboo," and "jungle bunny." Recognizing that African Americans were closely tied to the Democratic Party, he all but ignored them as a voting bloc, pitching his campaigns toward southern whites. As vice president, he had taken progressive stands on civil rights. During his presidency, he advised his underlings to "do what the law requires and not
one bit
more."
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These views carried over into foreign policy. There "has never been an adequate black nation," he once observed, "and they are the only race of which this is true."
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He paid little attention to Africa, its lack of significance in his mind made starkly manifest by his willingness to leave it to Rogers's State Department. When Biafra's secession from Nigeria set off
a long and tragic civil war with enormous human suffering, the State Department backed Nigeria because it saw Biafra as a hopeless cause and hesitated to antagonize Nigeria, a major oil-producing state. Setting a precedent that would be followed into the next century, the administration also cast a blind eye toward strife-torn Burundi, where the minority Tutsis in 1972–73 murdered as many as 250,000 Hutus and drove another 100,000 into exile.

Like its predecessors, the administration also tolerated white minority regimes in southern Africa. United States officials conceded that such governments could not last indefinitely, but they believed, in the shortsighted words of National Security Study Memorandum 39, that "the only way that constructive change can come about is through them." In addition, the white regimes maintained stability in at least one part of Africa, a region where, not coincidentally, the United States had important trade ties and major investments. Thus, rather than pressuring them with sanctions, the administration chose to work with them. Trade with South Africa boomed. The United States, in defiance of UN sanctions, purchased large quantities of chrome from Rhodesia. The CIA reduced covert aid for black rebel groups in Portuguese Angola. With Africa, as in the Third World generally, Nixon and Kissinger displayed little interest in local conflicts unless they seemed tied to great-power issues.
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Despite the frustrations of his first years in office, Nixon enjoyed his moment of glory when it most counted—1972, an election year. In that dramatic twelve months, he made a path-breaking and much ballyhooed trip to China and followed it with a summit in Moscow, where enemies of nearly thirty years appeared to put the Cold War behind them.

Nixon's "week that changed the world" visit to China (February 21–27) was as much diplomatic pageantry as substance, largely by design. The president's handlers viewed the trip not only as a diplomatic breakthrough but also as an opportunity to boost his stature as world statesman. They also believed, as White House operative Chuck Colson observed hyperbolically, that "RN's election is in the hands of Peking." The administration persuaded the Chinese to permit U.S. construction of a satellite relay station in Beijing so that events could be broadcast live back home. "Nixon's Chinese Picture Show" was planned with all the care of a Hollywood spectacular. Events were scheduled for prime time in the United States. In assigning press passes, television was favored over the
more critical and analytical print media.
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From Nixon's first appearance in China—alone on the tarmac extending a "handshake for peace" to Zhou—through countless banquets, and a presidential visit to the Great Wall, the trip was high drama. There were moments of incongruity: a Chinese military band in the age of rock and roll playing traditional American tunes such as "Oh Susannah" and "Home on the Range." Perhaps the greatest irony came on February 22, George Washington's birthday, when the onetime red-baiter Richard Nixon rose in the Great Hall of the People, a glass of lethal maotai in hand, to toast Mao Zedong with aphorisms drawn from the chairman's own sayings.
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The negotiations were conducted mostly with Zhou and—in another example of the White House's petty and secretive management style—entirely without Secretary of State Rogers. They produced important results. Before his departure, Nixon had sought unsuccessfully to get Chinese help on Vietnam. During their conversations, Zhou did provide oblique assurances that China would not intervene militarily, freeing Nixon's hands, if necessary, to escalate the war. The two nations agreed not to seek hegemony in Asia and to oppose any other nation's efforts to do so, an only slightly disguised allusion to the Soviet Union. The United States affirmed that it would continue to defend Japan but also promised to check any Japanese efforts to expand in Asia and to keep the Japanese from getting nuclear weapons. The touchiest issue, naturally, was Taiwan. In their Shanghai Communiqué, the two nations made separate and parallel statements. The United States agreed that Taiwan was part of China (a position the Chinese Nationalists agreed with) and went partway toward meeting China's demands for its withdrawal by promising that it would do so as tensions eased. China moved toward the U.S. position by expressing hope for a peaceful resolution of the Taiwan issue. Nixon also gave secret assurances that he would normalize relations in his second term. State Department officials were outraged when they learned that the communiqué had not mentioned the Taiwan defense treaty, warning that conservatives at home would be furious. Themselves enraged with State's insolence, Nixon and Kissinger conceded to the extent that Kissinger mentioned the treaty at a press conference.
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