The Illusion of Peace [antikvár]

Prologue Richard Nixon—and with him much of America and the world—firmly believed that foreign policy was the most constructive and positive aspect of his presidency. This, he claimed, would be the most enduring contribution of the years he spent at the White House. And until the very end, Nixon used his foreign policy as his principal defense in the Watergate crisis. For many years, indeed, America and the world saw him as an immensely innovative policy-maker and—together with Henry Kissinger— as the statesman of peace. He ended the Vietnam war for the United States, estabhshed détente with the Soviet Union, opened the dialogue with China, and brought a semblance of peace to the Middle East. But this Nixonian image obscures much of the truth, hiding the real story of these astonishing and complex years. As the perspective lengthens, it becomes clearer and clearer that what Nixon gave America and the world was only the illusion of peace. This book is a factual account of Nixon's foreign-policy stewardship. I have been especially concerned with the public as well as the secret aspects, and with the contradictions between these two in the execution of American policy. Some of the information and impressions contained herein derive from my own experience as a newspaper correspondent in Washington covering, on a day-to-day basis, the visible conduct of American foreign policy during Nixon's first term in the White House. I have read all I could of the published accounts in books, congressional reports, periodicals, and newspapers pertaining to Nixon's and Kissinger's performances; obviously all this material was helpful in broadening my own personal observations. Public documents of the entire Nixon era were used in this reconstruction along with material, some of it still kept secret by the United States government, gained from a wide variety of sources in Washington and