WHY IT HAPPENED

By Henry Kissinger

Most of the literature of Watergate--a cottage industry-- treats it as a personal aberration of Nixon's, as if there I had been no surrounding circumstances. In truth, Watergate is unthinkable apart from Nixon's driven personality. But historians who neglect the destructive impact of the war in Viet Nam on American politics, spirit and unity will misunderstand Watergate.

We had become militarily involved in Indochina during the Kennedy Administration. The war in Viet Nam was thought to reflect the cutting edge of a homogeneous ideology directed by a monolithic Sino-Soviet bloc. The Johnson Administration had escalated the Kennedy Administration's commitment, sending more than 500,000 American troops to combat what it considered a test case of a theory of revolutionary warfare centrally directed from Moscow and Peking. That assessment proved to be mistaken. Hanoi was essentially acting on its own, though it could not have done so without the help of the two giant Communist powers, especially the Soviet Union.

Many of the Johnson Administration policymakers who had involved us in Indochina later became so demoralized that they in effect joined the critics who had destroyed them and their President. But their original perception was not so mistaken as their loss of confidence in themselves made it appear. The rulers of Hanoi were anything but the benign nationalists so often portrayed by gullible sympathizers; they were cold, brutal revolutionaries determined to dominate all of Indochina. The impact of a North Vietnamese victory on the prospects of freedom and national independence in Southeast Asia was certain to be grave; the much maligned domino theory turned out to be correct.

Whether the strategic stakes justified such a massive American involvement must be doubted in retrospect. But once American forces are committed, there is no valid goal except to prevail. The Kennedy and Johnson Administrations trapped themselves between their convictions and their inhibitions. They engaged us in Indochina to defeat a global conspiracy and then failed to press a military solution for fear of sparking a global conflict--a fear probably as exaggerated as the original assessment.

But these failures deserve compassion rather than scorn. The men who involved us in Viet Nam ventured American prestige beyond the strategic merits of the local issue and risked infinitely more than they intended. Yet their purposes were far from ignoble; later events confirmed the validity of the view that American impotence in the face of aggression could have catastrophic consequences. The global turmoil that followed the final collapse in Indochina owed not a little to loss of confidence in the stabilizing role of America; Soviet adventurism accelerated with American weakness. And the horrible fate of the peoples of Indochina since 1975--the mass murders, the concentration camps, the political repression, the boat people--is now rendering a final verdict on whether our resistance to totalitarianism, or our abandonment of our friends, was the true immorality.

Even before the Nixon Administration came into office in January 1969, we had decided to withdraw American forces as rapidly as possible. The Administration perceived also that far from coordinating their policies, Peking and Moscow were engaged in an intense geopolitical and ideological struggle. The difficulty was how to implement these judgments while maintaining our international responsibilities and our national honor.

Our definition of honor was not extravagant: we would withdraw, but we would not overthrow an allied government. We were prepared to accept the outcome of a truly free political process in South Viet Nam even if it meant the replacement of the personalities and institutions that we favored. But a free political process was precisely what Hanoi was determined to prevent. In negotiations they did not budge from their central demands: that America had to withdraw from Indochina unconditionally, that on the way out we must overthrow the governments that were allied to us. And they did not alter these terms until they were militarily exhausted.

By then America's unity had been strained almost to the breaking point. For the first time in history, the average person could see the ugliness of war every evening on television. Americans from every walk of life were moved to protest. At the same time, poll after poll showed an overwhelming majority of Americans unprepared to accept an outright, humiliating defeat. The result was bitter domestic stalemate.

In this impasse two groups proved pivotal: the foreign policy Establishment and the tiny indigenous radical movement.

The leadership group in America that had won the battle against isolationism in the 1940s and sustained a responsible American involvement in the world throughout the postwar period was profoundly demoralized by the Viet Nam War. They had launched their country in the 1960s into this war of inconclusive ends and ambiguous means. When it ran aground, they lost heart. The clarity of purpose that had given impetus to the great foreign policy initiatives of the late 1940s--the Marshall Plan, the Greek-Turkish aid program, the Atlantic Alliance, the reconstruction of Japan--was unattainable in Indochina.

There was no massive attack by regular units across a well-defined boundary in Indochina, but the seeping-in of hostile forces across trackless jungles. These forces were supplied from neutral countries that wanted only to be left alone. The Ho Chi Minh Trail ran through Laos; North Vietnamese sanctuaries were established in Cambodia. By a weird inversion of logic, whenever we reacted by seeking to intercept the totally illegal supply lines, it was we who were accused of violating the neutrality of Cambodia and Laos.

The political situation in Viet Nam was equally at variance with our preconceptions. Many Americans tended to judge the government we were defending by our own constitutional practices, which were only marginally relevant to a civil war in a developing country with a totally different historical experience.

Inevitably, the process bore no resemblance to the expectations of the liberal American leadership groups that had conceived the initial intervention. They first abandoned victory, then faith in the possibility of serious negotiation toward a reasonable compromise; finally they concluded that the postwar American role of global leadership was itself deeply flawed. The myth that the obstacle to a settlement was the shortsightedness, if not worse, of our Government and not the implacability of the aggressor was in the end endorsed by the very people who had heretofore sustained our foreign policy. The old foreign policy Establishment thus abandoned its pre-eminent task, which is to contribute balanced judgment, long-term perspective and thoughtful analysis to public discussion.

This abdication created a huge vacuum in the entire debate over the war. The result was that the so-called peace movement came to be driven by a relatively tiny group of radicals, whose public support was insignificant. To that most vocal hard core of dissenters, the issue was not the wisdom of a particular American commitment but the validity of American foreign policy in general and indeed of American society. They saw the war as a symptom of an evil, corrupt, militaristic capitalist system. They treated the Viet Cong as a progressive movement, North Viet Nam as a put-upon, heroic revolutionary country and Communism as the wave of the future in Indochina, if not in the entire developing world. They were outraged by our incursion into Cambodia less because of the alleged extension of the war than because they feared it might lead to success. Concern for the future of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians under Communism was contemptuously dismissed as a subterfuge for continuing a war conducted for more sinister purposes. Our fear of the decline of American global credibility was interpreted in radical circles as using the peoples of Indochina as pawns in some overall American strategic design. In these terms the decline in America's world position was welcomed as a contribution to peace.

To this small but increasingly strident group, a victory for Hanoi was not regrettable but morally desirable. Our humiliation was seen as an object lesson in the immorality of America's postwar leadership and as a convenient tool to demoralize the entire U.S. Establishment--business, labor, academe, the media, Congress--which was perceived as an obstacle to the forward march of history.

All these tendencies were tragically accelerated by the election of Richard Nixon. Nixon was probably the only leader who could disengage from Viet Nam without a conservative revolt. Yet his history of partisanship had made him anathema to most of the responsible Democrats. Radical opposition to the war thus fed on and merged with hatred of Richard Nixon on the part of many who had no sympathy for radicalism in general. The virulence of dissent was not moderated by those who, presumably, stood for values of civilized discourse and civic responsibility. Their yearning to expiate guilt shattered forever the existing foreign policy Establishment. By the end of Nixon's first term, rational discourse on Viet Nam had all but stopped. The issue posed was who was "for" or "against" the war--a phony question. Nixon was determined to end our involvement, and in fact did so. What he refused to do was to doom to a bloody Communist tyranny millions who had relied upon us. He believed that abject failure would vindicate neo-isolationist trends at home. He was convinced that an America so weakened would dishearten allies and embolden adversaries. And he was proved right. The collapse in 1975 not only led to genocidal horrors in Indochina, but from Angola to Iran to Afghanistan it ushered in a period of American humiliation, an unprecedented Soviet geopolitical offensive and pervasive crisis.

The discussion had deteriorated by 1972 into an attack on motives, poisoning the public discourse that is the lifeblood of a democratic society. Critics claimed a monopoly on the desire for peace, ridiculing and condemning all other concerns as subterfuges for psychotic commitment to killing for its own sake. The systematic undermining of trust short-circuited a process of maturing. It fostered the illusions that all frustrations in the world reflected the evil intent of America's leaders, that what ailed America was a loss of its moral purity and that our difficulties could be set right by a return to simple principles.

All this bitterness was compounded by Nixon's response. He was incensed by what he saw as the cynicism of prominent Democrats who had taken America into the war and now assuaged their guilt by insistent attacks on a President who was trying to get us out. He was outraged--and justifiably--at the radicals' resort to methods at or beyond the borderline of legality: the terrorism of the Weather Underground, fire bombings at universities, massive theft of documents, unauthorized leaks, incitement of draft resistance and desertion.

There is no excuse for the extralegal methods that went under the name of Watergate. A President cannot justify his own misdeeds by the excesses of his opponents. It is his obligation to set moral standards, to build bridges to his opponents. Nixon did not rise to this act of grace. But neither is an understanding of the period possible if one overlooks the viciousness, self-righteousness and occasional brutality of some of Nixon's enemies. In truth, the animosities of the President and of his opposition fed on each other. And if one lesson of Watergate is the danger of abuse of presidential power, another is that in a democracy, opposition must be restrained by a sense of civility and limits.

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