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A Moment In History

February 20, 2010 by admin | Filed Under History, National Security, News media, Nixon Administration, Nixon Administration figures, Richard Nixon, Vietnam 

On 13 June 1971, General Alexander Haig, then Deputy Assistant to the President for Military Affairs, was the first to discuss with RN The New York Times‘ publication —that Sunday morning— of the first installment of the study that became known as the Pentagon Papers.

RN refers to Mel Laird, who was Secretary of Defense, and General Haig refers to the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment that required complete withdrawal of all American troops from Vietnam by 31 December 1971.  Although it had been defeated in the Senate in October 1970, it remained the subject of discussion and controversy through 1971.  He also mentions Clark Clifford, the ubiquitous Democrat who was one of the legendary Wise Men as well as one of Wasington’s most famous  fixers.  He  had succeeded Robert McNamara as LBJ’s Secretary of Defense.  After initially  deciding to support Johnson’s policies in Vietnam, he turned against the war.



Comments

4 Responses to “A Moment In History”

  1. russ on February 21st, 2010 4:58 pm

    Two or three years ago, I saw Haig being interviewed on C-Span by Timothy Naftali at the Nixon Library in which Haig was asked about the United States becoming involved in foreign civil wars. Haig replied that it didn’t matter if it was a civil war if it involved American interests. Of course, Vietnam, for instance, wasn’t a civil war, but I still wonder what Gen. Haig meant when he said it didn’t matter.

  2. MK on February 22nd, 2010 5:34 am

    @russ, CSPANe re-ran the Naftali-Haig presentation yesterday and I happened to catch the part in question. It focused on Iraq rather than Vientam. The issue came up during the q&a session, when a member of the audience rose to ask about the question raised by some observers during the second term of the George W. Bush administration as to whether internal conflicts in Iraq constituted a civil war. Haig, who had said during his presentation that the U.S. was justified in going to war in Iraq, responded that it didn’t matter. He didn’t go into much detail as to what he meant by that. However, the question wasn’t whether the U.S. should intervene in a country beset by civil war, rather whether factionalism and sectarian killings affected U.S. objectives in Iraq.

    @Frank Gannon, the clip from the tapes is interesting in that RN’s initial reaction is that the most senior person in the unit responsible for the problem should be fired. Of course, this was a year before the Watergate break in, almost two years before RN himself faced wrenching choices regarding aides such as Bob Haldeman, and three years before the President himself resigned. Haig immediately explains that in his view the leak did not occur during Mel Laird’s stewardship of DOD but during the transition from the Johnson to the Nixon administrations.

    Haldeman and Haig made differing comments about the White House tapes in their memoirs. As someone whose job it was to do disclosure review with those tapes later, I found those interesting. Bob wrote in 1979 that “while there is some very undesirable material in [the] remaining thousands of hours, I know that there is also some very great material. And I feel sure the ‘good’ outweighs the ‘bad.’ Thus Nixon has everything to gain and little more to lose from release of additional tapes, even on a random basis.”

    Al Haig asserted in his 1992 memoirs (Inner Circles) that the verbatim record of Nixon’s conversations might be misleading. He wrote that “without the softening effects of the wink, the nudge, the smile, and all the other subtle disclaimers involved, words spoken in such circumstances tend to makes those who speak them sound like fools or thugs or worse.” (Page 447)

    We at NARA did not do transcripts except in court cases because we believed the tapes themselves constituted the record. In working with Nixon’s tapes, there is no way to judge facial expressions, of course. But someone with a discerning ear can pick up a lot about the speakers just from the tone of the spoken words. Listening for tone and manner of speaking (fast, slow, decisive, searching, tentative) you can discern joy, pride, frustration, concern, uncertainty, even searing pain. Some of the most wrenching conversations I ever heard (and which NARA later released) were the ones Nixon had about Watergate around the time he had to ask Haldeman, his chief of staff, to resign. Given how forlorn he sounded, they do support RN’s own statement that asking his most trusted aides to resign was like cutting off his right arm.

    I think Bob was right that Nixon had something to gain from release of his tapes. Too many people of both parties in different time periods have a tendency to dehumanize presidents — for political reasons, due to tribalism (“we’re good, you’re bad”), because they believe the end justifies the means, for any number of reasons. Nothing reveals the human side of being president like listening to thousands of hours of his taped White House conversations.

  3. russ on February 22nd, 2010 7:39 am

    Thanks, MK. I’m still looking forward to a Nixon book from you because I learn so much.

  4. MK on February 22nd, 2010 8:08 pm

    Thanks so much for your kind words, Russ! A book? Someday. . . . yeah, that would be fun!

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