A Crisis Gone Mad – Folha de S. Paulo, August 18, 1974

by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira

In France, it is increasingly common to refer to World War II—or at least its first phase, marked by the disconcerting Nazi victories and the even more disconcerting retreat of the Allies—as the “mad war.” The nickname seems natural today. However, at the time, the general public witnessed these episodes without realizing how aberrant they were. I believe they would not have believed it if they had been told the war would go down in history as “mad.” Will it take some historical distance for today’s masses to realize, in turn, the madness of the events in which they are living?

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I say this in reference to the crisis that brought down Richard Nixon.

He undoubtedly deserved to be removed from office. But the reasons given by those who advocated his impeachment appalled me. Not because they were insufficient to justify the anti-Nixon campaign, but because there were far more compelling reasons to discredit the President, and yet these were rarely mentioned in the arguments for his resignation. Why? I don’t know. The reader can judge for themselves.

Nixon’s détente with Russia and China was a veritable hydrogen bomb against the psychological and moral bulwark that defended the West against the psychological warfare waged by Moscow and Beijing. This was so significant that it can be said, without exaggeration, that communism has never achieved such a victory since Russia’s Bolshevik revolution. Even the catastrophic achievements that Roosevelt’s softness (let’s call it that) provided to communists at Yalta do not equal the diffuse but profoundly harmful results of the “breaking of ideological barriers” the Nixon-Kissinger duo pursued.

To this already exuberant reason for the US Congress to create a dramatic institutional crisis to cut short the détente, another fact was added, perhaps less serious but much more palpable. Russia was supplied with wheat, credits, technicians, and know-how in such quantities that it disrupted the US economy. Such was the abundance of these supplies that Russia was able to resell part of the wheat Nixon had supplied to it at a profit to countries friendly to the US or to neutral countries. This was another reason Congress entered into a clear confrontation with the President.

Finally, during the crisis that brought down Nixon, it became clear that he had craftily concealed certain clauses of his pact with the Soviet Union from Congress to secure legislative approval. This fact alone would have been enough to cause a scandal twenty times more sensational than Watergate.

However, all of this took a back seat. Why?

To halt the decline in his popularity, Nixon could only point to Kissinger’s diplomatic efforts to restore peace, which was continually threatened in one corner of the world or another. And the anti-Nixon controversy was so misguided that, as far as I know, no one emphasized that these threats to peace stemmed systematically from Russian pressure. In turn, that pressure proved the utter futility of détente in transforming Russia into a peaceful power. When Kissinger flew here and there to “save” the peace, he did nothing more than cover up a wound opened by the Kremlin with the fragile band-aid of a treaty.

However, none of this seems to have had much, if any, bearing on Nixon’s downfall. What weighed heavily against him was that he authorized the break-in at the opposition party’s headquarters, evaded paying a few dollars in income tax, and tried to hide wiretap recordings from Congress.

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Am I exaggerating the fact that Nixon’s most reprehensible actions were underestimated? Not at all. Otherwise, it would be incomprehensible that President Ford was able to keep Kissinger in his position as Secretary of State, with the declared intention of continuing Nixon’s policies, without drawing from the affronted nation a protest as powerful as an apocalyptic typhoon to make the new president feel its displeasure.

Nixon fell, but détente, the worst thing to happen during his administration, remained intact!

A crisis gone mad: that is how the episode that led to Richard Nixon’s resignation will be remembered in history.