TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=94TT0524> <link 94TO0159> <title> May 02, 1994: Book Excerpt:Nixon's Final Word </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1994 May 02, 1994 Last Testament of Richard Nixon </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> COVER STORIES/BOOK EXCERPT, Page 30 NIXON'S FINAL WORDS </hdr> <body> COMPLETED just days before he fell ill, Beyond Peace gives Nixon's critique of our times. Above all, he urges Clinton not to squander America's leadership in the world. (c) 1994 by Richard Nixon, from Beyond Peace, to be published by Random House Inc. When I met with Mao Zedong for the last time in Beijing on Feb. 27, 1976, I was shocked at how his physical condition had deteriorated since our first meeting in 1972. He was a shell of the man he had been. He was still sharp mentally, but a massive stroke had robbed him of his ability to put his thoughts into words. The charismatic communist leader who had moved a nation and changed the world with his revolutionary exhortations could no longer even ask for a glass of water. As we sat in his book-cluttered office in the Forbidden City, I was reminded of President Dwight Eisenhower's intense frustration after suffering a stroke in 1957. A few days after he returned to the White House from the hospital, he described to me the ordeal that simple speech had become. He complained that when he wanted to say "ceiling," it would come out "floor." When he wanted to say "window," he would say "door." Fortunately, Eisenhower recovered completely. Mao never would. As we spoke in Beijing, he was six months from death and a succession crisis was already raging around him. But I was addressing a man who was still the revered leader of nearly a billion people and who had played an indispensable role in bringing about the new relationship between our countries that had begun four years before. During our conversation, I said that we must continue to cooperate in seeking peace, not only between our two countries but among all the nations of the world. It was painful to watch as he tried to respond. His face flushed as he grunted out half-words. His translator, an attractive young woman dressed in a drab, shapeless Mao suit--one of the worst punishments ever inflicted upon Chinese women by the Old Guard communists--tried to put his grunts into English. Mao knew enough English to realize that she had not understood him. He shook his head angrily, grabbed her notebook, and wrote out the words in Chinese. She read them aloud in English: "Is peace your only goal?" I had not expected the question and paused briefly. "We should seek peace with justice," I answered. My reply was adequate within the context of the cold war. Today that is too limited a goal for the U.S. Our goal then was to end the struggle between East and West in a way that would avoid a nuclear war and also ensure that freedom and justice would prevail over tyranny. Today, the communists have lost the cold war. Yet it is clear that the defeat of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the 20th century was just the first step toward the triumph of freedom throughout the world in the 21st century. This will be assured only if the U.S.--in its policies at home and abroad--renews its commitment to its founding principles. At a time when we should be celebrating victory, many observers are wallowing in pessimism, as if we had suffered defeat. Instead of pressing toward the mountaintop and beholding a new vision of peace and freedom for the future, they are wandering in a valley of self-doubt about the past. No one would say that war is good for a country, but it is undeniable that the U.S. has been at its best when confronted with aggression or some other significant international challenge (our space effort after the shock of Sputnik is a case in point). To meet the challenges we face in the post-cold-war era, we must marshal the same resources of energy, optimism and common purpose that thrive during war and put them to work at home and abroad during an era when our enemy will be neither communism nor Nazism but our own self-defeating pessimism. Charles de Gaulle once said, "France was never her true self unless she was engaged in a great enterprise." This is true of the U.S. as well. Great causes push us to heights, as a nation and as individuals, that would not otherwise be achieved. Without a great cause to galvanize America, the very unity of our nation will be at risk as we struggle to meet the challenges of the coming century. If America is to remain a great nation, what we need today is a mission beyond peace. America Must Lead In the 1992 presidential campaign, a sign in the Clinton campaign office read IT'S THE ECONOMY, STUPID. That was good politics but poor statesmanship. There is a world of difference between campaigning and governing. We cannot have a strong domestic policy unless we have a strong foreign policy. We cannot be at peace in a world at war, and we cannot have a healthy economy in a sick world economy. We must begin by asking ourselves what kind of world we want now that we have peace. Ideally, all nations should have free economic systems, free political systems, and an unfailing commitment to social justice and human rights. But the world is not a blank canvas on which we can paint our vision. We must take its myriad realities into account as we seek to realize our goals. The U.S. cannot become involved in every nation or region where our ideals have not been achieved. We favor extending peace and freedom--but extending peace without compromising our interests or principles, and extending freedom without risking peace. A number of arguments against a continued American leadership role in the world have wide appeal: -- Because of the downfall of the Soviet Union, there is no need for American global leadership. -- Since the U.S. carried the major burden of the cold war, other nations should lead now. -- Even assuming that we are the only ones who can lead, we should give priority to our pressing domestic problems. -- The U.S., with huge budget deficits and trade imbalances, can no longer afford to lead. -- Because of our massive problems at home, the U.S. is not worthy to lead. All these statements are wrong. Only the U.S. has the combination of military, economic and political power a nation must have to take the lead in defending and extending freedom and in deterring and resisting aggression. Germany and Japan may have the economic clout, but they lack the military muscle. China and Russia have the potential military might, but they lack the economic power. None has sufficient standing with all the world's great powers, none has the record of half a century of leadership. As the only great power without a history of imperialistic claims on neighboring countries, we also have something all these countries lack: the credibility to act as an honest broker. The concept of "assertive multilateralism" being advanced by some supporters of the United Nations can only be described as naive diplomatic gobbledygook. Even a collective body as close knit as NATO was not able to be "assertive" in Bosnia. Can anyone seriously suggest that a collective body such as the U.N., nearly one-third of whose members have populations smaller than that of the state of Arkansas, could be "assertive"? We cannot react to every emergency call like an international 911 operator. But we must respond to those that affect our vital interests in the world. The debacle in Somalia was a lesson in how not to conduct U.S. foreign policy. What began as a highly popular humanitarian relief program under President Bush became a highly controversial U.N. nation-building project under President Clinton. As the world's richest nation, we should always be generous in providing humanitarian aid to other nations. But we should not commit U.S. military forces to U.N. nation-building projects unless our vital interests are involved, a test that neither Somalia nor Haiti satisfied. When we do intervene militarily to protect our interests, we should follow President Bush's example in the Persian Gulf War, using the U.N., not being used by it. The new buzzword in the American diplomatic community is enlargement. After containing communism for 45 years, we are told that our goal now should be to enlarge free-market democracy. Enlargement is a tricky word. In photography, a negative can be enlarged to a three-by-five snapshot or a wall-size mural. Based on the record so far, the present Administration is aiming for wallet-size. Some officials clearly believe that the U.S. overextended itself during the cold war, particularly in Vietnam, one of its major battles. They tend to resist American involvement, except in humanitarian activities that have overwhelming public support. They have yet to face up to the fact that it will at times be necessary to use American power and influence to defend and extend freedom in places thousands of miles away if we are to preserve it at home. It is a role that will require global vision and big plays from this President and every successive one in the era beyond peace. Bosnia Some observers, among them Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, have warned that if the West mishandles relations with the Muslim world, a "clash of civilizations" could pit the West against Islam. In the former Yugoslavia, Bosnian Muslims and Christian Serbs fight over control of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the former Soviet Union, Christian Armenians and Muslim Azerbaijanis are fighting over the Nagorno-Karabakh region. In Lebanon, Christian and Muslim militias have been slaughtering each other for years. In central Asia, religious tensions have contributed to the fighting in Tajikistan. The U.S. must not let the "clash of civilizations" become the dominant characteristic of the post-cold-war era. As Huntington observed, the real danger is not that this clash is inevitable but that by our inaction we will make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we continue to ignore conflicts in which Muslim nations are victims, we will invite a clash between the Western and Muslim worlds. One such conflict that must be marked down as one of America's most unfortunate and unnecessary foreign policy failures is the carnage in the former Yugoslavia, where three years ago communist hard-liners rising from the ruins of Marshal Tito's artificial nation-state mounted a naked effort to destroy the democratic government of Croatia. From the beginning of the war, there have been excesses on both sides, but the cycle of violence began as a result of Serbian aggression against other former Yugoslav republics--aggression for which the U.S. and its allies have consistently and repeatedly failed to exact a price. As early as 1991, along with a number of other observers, I called upon the U.N. to lift the embargo against the victims of Serbian aggression. The U.S., the U.N. and the European Community vacillated, equivocated, orated, condemned and ultimately did nothing to counter effectively the Serbian onslaught. The massacre of scores of shoppers and their children in Sarajevo in February 1994 would almost certainly not have occurred had the West acted sooner. It is an awkward but unavoidable truth that had the citizens of Sarajevo been predominantly Christian or Jewish, the civilized world would not have permitted the siege to reach the point it did when a Serbian shell landed in the crowded marketplace. In such an instance, the West would have acted quickly and would have been right in doing so. The siege of Sarajevo can have a redeeming character only if the West learns two things as a result. The first is that enlightened peoples cannot be selective about condemning aggression and genocide. When the Khmer Rouge massacred 2 million Cambodians in the late 1970s, Americans' outrage was muted compared with the anguish we justifiably suffered over the massacre of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. The situation in Cambodia, it seemed, was too fraught with contradiction, especially for those Americans who had opposed our efforts to defeat the communists who carried out the massacre. The other lesson is that because we are the last remaining superpower, no crisis is irrelevant to our interests. If the U.S. had been willing to lead, a number of steps short of the commitment of ground forces--for instance, revoking the arms embargo--could have been taken early in the Bosnian crisis to blunt Serbian aggression. Our failure to do so tarnished our reputation as an evenhanded player on the international stage and contributed to an image promoted by extreme Muslim fundamentalists that the West is callous to the fate of Muslim nations but protective of Christian and Jewish nations. Russia No other single factor will have a greater political impact on the world in the century to come than whether political and economic freedom take root and thrive in Russia and the other former communist nations. Today's generation of American leaders will be judged primarily by whether they did everything possible to bring about this outcome. If they fail, the cost that their successors will have to pay will be unimaginably high. Will Boris Yeltsin be able to continue to provide the leadership Russia needs to achieve the goals of the second Russian revolution--political and economic freedom at home and a nonaggressive foreign policy abroad? The product of a unique period in Russian history, Yeltsin cannot be judged as if he were the president of a stable democracy with an established constitutional order. If he acted like one, he would probably fail. Yeltsin is a tough and sometimes ruthless Russian patriot. Otherwise he would never have been able to come to power and withstand the numerous challenges to his rule. Mikhail Gorbachev started reforms without understanding their likely consequences and then backed down when the dangers became apparent, exposing himself--as one former senior Soviet official described him to me--as a "brutal wimp." In contrast, Yeltsin acts pre-emptively and decisively. This is the key to the continuing support he has among the Russian people despite all the pain associated with his country's transition to democratic capitalism. Yeltsin should be supported but not idolized. By idealizing Yeltsin's government, the West runs the risk of personalizing its Russian policy and creating a potential trap for itself. If he fails to live up to our overly optimistic expectations, the West's Russian policy--while basically sound--may lose public support. While supporting Yeltsin, we should remember that there are other democrats in Russia--many of whom have disagreements with him about the constitutional division of labor. If we do not develop good working relationships with the new generation of Russian leaders, we will be caught flat-footed by unexpected shifts in the political landscape, as we were by the strong showing of Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party in December's elections. On March 14, 1994, I had the privilege of being the first American to address a meeting of an elected Russian Parliament, when I appeared before a committee of the State Duma, the lower house of the new Russian Parliament. The Duma is the breeding ground for future Presidents. Every leading candidate in the 1996 elections, with the exception of Alexander Rutskoi, is a Duma Deputy. Many in the West were shocked when former Vice President Rutskoi and others charged in the armed uprising against the Yeltsin government last October were released from prison by the State Duma's grant of amnesty to them and to those who tried to overthrow Gorbachev in August 1991. For all this, Rutskoi's almost certain re-entry into public life will have a positive political impact. In March 1994, I called on Rutskoi, whom I had met twice before, in his apartment in Moscow. He is a ramrod-straight war hero who looks at the world in a pointedly direct way. He had been out of prison for only 10 days and was still wearing the beard he had grown during his five months there. Our talk had an eerie quality because of a simultaneous and totally incomprehensible conversation between two large parrots in separate cages in the middle of Rutskoi's sitting room. He apologized for the noise, saying that the birds had had more room in his dacha, but that the Yeltsin government had taken the dacha away. The birds were not speaking English, and I knew enough Russian to know they weren't speaking Russian. He said that he had acquired them during a tour in Kuala Lumpur and that they spoke only Malaysian. Rutskoi said that he intended to run for President in 1996 but added ruefully that while he was in prison Zhirinovsky had "appropriated a lot of my political base." As we discussed his impressions of the domestic scene, including the shocking rise in both organized crime and street crime in Russia, he said somewhat ominously, "I am able to bring law and order. I know how to do it." He predicted that Russia's transition to true democracy would take a minimum of 10 years. Russia will inevitably be strong again. The only question is whether a strong Russia will be a friend or an adversary of the West. We must do everything in our power to ensure the former rather than the latter. The most dangerous mistake we could make would be to ignore our differences or attempt to drown them in champagne and vodka toasts at feel-good summits. Rather than papering over differences with diplomatic gobbledygook, we must find ways to disagree without damaging one of the world's most important strategic relationships. The second most dangerous mistake would be to neglect our responsibility for assisting Russia in its transition to freedom, or arrogantly to scold or punish it for every foreign or domestic policy transgression, as though it were an international problem child. What the U.S. wants most from Russia is a nonaggressive foreign policy. That Russian policy has become more assertive, even heavy-handed, is not in dispute. Yeltsin and his pro-Western Foreign Minister, Andrei Kozyrev, talk proudly about the newly muscular defense of Russian interests in the "near abroad"--the Russians' term for the other former Soviet republics. Still, I do not think a new imperialism looms. I have spoken with many Russian politicians of different persuasions, including President Yeltsin, who were nostalgic for at least some aspects of the former Soviet empire. But with the exception of the supernationalistic fringe, all the Russians with whom I have spoken seem to understand that the past can no longer be re-created. As I write these words on March 30, 1994, the overwhelming conventional wisdom in the U.S. foreign policy establishment is that the prospects for the survival and success of economic reforms in Russia are bleak. The reformers are assumed by all the so-called experts to be in retreat after their election losses. Anti-reformers--most of them ex-communist bureaucrats--are ominously gaining strength. It is tempting, in view of the political and economic disarray, to throw in the towel. But this is the time for the West to become a more active participant in Russia's success, not a passive observer of its failure. China During one of our meetings in San Clemente 21 years ago, Leonid Brezhnev expressed concern about the growing threat of China. When I said that it would be at least 25 years before China became a significant economic and military power, he held up both hands with fingers outstretched in what I thought was a sign of surrender. The translator finally interpreted his gesture. "Ten years," he said. Brezhnev was closer to being right than I was. The world's largest communist society could become the world's richest capitalist economy in the next century. Some observers contend that we no longer need a close relationship with China, since the threat of Soviet aggression has disappeared. The other side of that coin is that the Chinese no longer need the U.S. to protect them against possible Soviet aggression. Both concepts are wrong. In the era beyond peace, China and the U.S. need to cooperate with each other for reasons completely unrelated to the Soviet Union or Russia. China has emerged as the world's third-strongest military and economic power. It is strong enough to play a major role in regional conflicts in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. It is the only country that possesses the necessary leverage to rein in North Korea's ominous nuclear weapons program. We should not underestimate China's ability to disrupt our interests around the world if our relationship becomes belligerent rather than cooperative. While most Americans give China high marks for its free-market economics, they rightly criticize the government's continuing denial of political freedom to the Chinese people. However, cutting back our trade with China by revoking China's most-favored-nation status would be a tragic mistake. We cannot improve the political situation in China through a "scorched earth" economic policy. Revoking China's most-favored-nation status would hurt the free-market reformers and entrepreneurs who hold the key to China's future. Not only would it devastate the mainland's economy, it would lay waste to the surrounding region as well. No other nation in Asia supports our linking MFN status to human rights. Today China's economic power makes U.S. lectures about human rights imprudent. Within a decade, it will make them irrelevant. Within two decades, it will make them laughable. By then the Chinese may threaten to withhold MFN status from the U.S. unless we do more to improve living conditions in Detroit, Harlem and South Central Los Angeles. I vividly recall calling on Deng Xiaoping in the fall of 1989, four months after the Tiananmen Square crackdown. After he greeted me in the Great Hall of the People, I told him that there had never been a worse crisis in the relationship between our countries and that it was up to China to take steps to deal with the outrage of the civilized world. With dozens of journalists from around the world looking on, he gave a boiler-plate reply about not tolerating interference in China's internal affairs. After the cameras left, he became far more animated. By then China's battle-scarred old survivor was almost totally deaf. The conversation took on a surreal character, with the official translator shouting my comments into his left ear and his daughter screaming them into his right. But while he had great difficulty hearing, he had no difficulty seeing his responsibility as his country's paramount leader. He told me that after years of subservience to foreigners, China was now united and independent and that the Chinese people would never forgive their leaders for apologizing to another nation. In almost the next breath he introduced the subject of Fang Lizhi, the dissident who was then being sheltered at the U.S. embassy in Beijing, and made a highly constructive proposal for ending the standoff. Deng's message was unmistakable: Our differences could be bridged by discussion behind the scenes but would be exacerbated by red-hot exchanges of public rhetoric. A few months later, Fang Lizhi was released, but on China's initiative, not in response to demands by the U.S. In late 1992 Deng was widely believed to have given the Chinese government these marching orders for dealing with the new Administration in Washington: "Increase trust, reduce troubles, develop cooperation and avoid confrontation." In its first moves, the Clinton Administration responded by increasing distrust, stirring up trouble, threatening noncooperation and fomenting confrontation. A letter from President Clinton to Beijing, which listed fourteen criticisms on issues ranging from human rights to trade, set off months of diplomatic skirmishing that came close to imperiling the constructive relations between our countries. In the future, particularly on foreign policy issues, we should treat China with the respect a great power deserves and not as a pariah nation. The Clinton Presidency The founders wanted government strong enough to protect their security but not so strong as to threaten their liberty, so they placed careful limits on the realm of Federal Government action. But they also understood that freedom could not survive without a strong presidency. In foreign affairs, the case for a strong presidency is overwhelming. Legislators have limited constituencies; the President represents the nation. Just as it was wrong for Congress to enact the War Powers Act in 1973, limiting the President's power to conduct foreign policy because of the unpopularity of the Vietnam War, it would be wrong to limit the President's power to conduct foreign policy in the future because of the failures of President Clinton's policies in Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia. There is always the possibility that a President will make mistakes in acting during foreign policy crises, but it is more likely that the Congress would make an even greater mistake by not acting at all. Today the problem is not an excessively strong presidency, but a hobbled one. Obsessed by the danger of an imperial presidency, many seem oblivious to the dangers of an imperial Congress. There are now more than 25 subcommittees in the House and Senate dealing with foreign policy. Foreign policy cannot be conducted by committee. Meanwhile Presidents, with their limited terms, are more accountable to the electorate than an imperial Congress, to which incumbents are re-elected as much as 98% of the time. The President is subject to impeachment, congressional power over the purse, and other political and congressional constraints. And Presidents, particularly conservative ones, will always be restrained by an adversarial media. Does the U.S. have the will to lead? In the 1992 elections, 62% of the voters cast their ballots for presidential candidates--Bill Clinton and Ross Perot--whose campaign theme was that the country was in the throes of crisis and decline. Clinton and Perot were wrong. We are in the ascendant. We demonstrated what we can do during World War II and the cold war. Now that we have peace, our challenge is to demonstrate that we have the will to lead beyond peace, where our enemy is not some nation abroad but is essentially within ourselves. From the 1960s on, our laws and our mores have been driven by the cultural conceits that took hold during the heyday of the counterculture, including a denial of personal responsibility and the fantasy that the coercive power of government can produce spiritual uplift, cure poverty, end bigotry, legislate growth and stamp out any number of individual and social inadequacies. The founders created a land of opportunity. For more than three centuries, opportunity was enough because the culture conditioned people to take advantage of it. But we have created a culture in which appallingly large numbers ignore the opportunities offered by work, choosing instead those offered by the interwoven worlds of welfare and crime. Our task now is not to invent opportunity but to enforce honest work as the route to it. We need to get America back on track before it sails off into the abyss. What many commentators now join in calling a crisis of the spirit has affected all classes in American society. Mrs. Clinton deserves credit for her courage in articulating the absence of higher purpose in life, despite the fact that since the late 1960s many of her most liberal supporters have relentlessly assaulted traditional values in the name of liberation. Unfortunately, most of the Administration's remedies would make the problems worse. Liberals remain committed economically to a further vast expansion of the welfare state; socially to an agenda of personal liberation from traditional morality and to equality not of opportunity but of result; and internationally to a weak multilateralism whose object is to make America a follower rather than a leader. The Clinton health plan, all 1,342 impenetrable pages of it, is less a prescription for better health care than a blueprint for the takeover by the Federal Government of one-seventh of the nation's aconomy. If enacted, it would represent the ultimate revenge of the 1960s generation. The Administration's ambitious agenda to increase the size and scope of government repeats the domestic policy mistakes of the past. What the U.S. needs is not bigger government but a renewal of its commitment to limited but strong government; economic freedom, which is the only way to assure prosperity and individual liberty; and a moral and cultural system that strengthens the family, personal responsibility and the instincts for civic virtue. The present Administration has added revenues from its massive tax increases to the peace dividend from the end of the cold war--which it has magnified through excessive cuts in defense spending--but despite its overly optimistic predictions, it still faces an out-of-control budget deficit. Even the most deft political shell game cannot hide much longer the fact that the recurring deficits are largely the result of decades of unchecked spending on domestic programs and entitlements. The liberal lament is familiar. President Reagan, they chant, simultaneously doubled the defense budget, reduced taxes, and cruelly cut essential social programs, so that the rich got richer, the poor got poorer, and the country amassed an enormous debt that put the U.S. economy at a significant competitive disadvantage in the world economy. This dire portrayal is wrong. Dramatically ending a prolonged period of stagflation and slow growth, which were lingering legacies of the Great Society, Reagan's tax cuts and deregulation stimulated an economic boom, seven years of uninterrupted growth during which the American economy grew by nearly a third--or by the size of the entire West German economy. The most serious shortcoming of the Reagan and Bush Administrations was their failure to cut the level of entitlement going to those who are not poor, though it is true they received no encouragement from the Democratic opposition to cut these programs. There is no reason why Americans should receive Social Security, medical benefits and other government subsidies without regard to their ability to pay. Only one dollar of every five of non-means-tested entitlement goes to the poor. If our political leadership summoned the courage to cut these programs on a means-tested basis, we would achieve substantial savings and also more fairly distribute the burden of cutting costs to middle- and upper-income taxpayers. On the contrary, the current Administration has continued to fight not only to preserve the present levels of entitlement but to expand the application of this corrosive principle in new and costly ways. We must not stumble blindly into what Margaret Thatcher derisively called the "nanny state." We should build on the many positive accomplishments of the 1980s and correct some of the decade's serious mistakes. Americans do not know how to be second, or even first among equals. They only know how to be the best. After World War II the U.S. became the leader of the free world by acclamation. No other option was even conceivable. We should be just as resistant to playing a secondary role now. But if the U.S. is to continue to lead in the world, it will have to resolve to do so and then take those steps necessary to turn resolution into execution. Above all, America must rediscover its commitment to the pursuit of excellence for its own sake. In the land of liberty, we have sometimes risked making an obsession out of individual freedom without requiring a concomitant sense of individual responsibility. More devastating, the absence of a national challenge has reduced our sense of common purpose. In modern America too many forces--ethnic and cultural diversity, gaps between rich and poor, distrust between old and young--punl Americans in different directions; too few impel them to pull together. The greatest challenge America faces in the era beyond peace is to learn the art of national unity in the absence of war or some other explicit external threat. If we fail to meet that challenge, our diversity, long a source of strength, will become a destructive force. Our individuality, long our most distinctive characteristic, will be the seed of our collapse. Our freedom, long our most cherished possession, will exist only in the history books. </body> </article> </text>