President Nixon's Detente Policy
The legacy of President Richard M. Nixon can easily leave Americans confused. The only United States president ever to resign the office in disgrace as a result of the Watergate episode, Richard Nixon is viewed by many in overwhelmingly negative terms. Even his ending of America's involvement in Vietnam, which he called “peace with honor,” has been severely criticized on the grounds that he could have ended it much sooner and spared many American and Vietnamese lives. In the domestic arena, aside from the attempts of his administration to deceive the people about sensitive security issues, his legacy was also mixed.
In other parts of the world, however, especially in the former Soviet Union, Nixon's contributions to history are seen in a very positive light. Indeed, according to some Russian observers, Nixon has been characterized as a hero in that nation because, as they see it, he made the world a safer place. There can be little doubt that President Nixon's overtures to Communist China and the Soviet Union, orchestrated by his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, went a long way toward reducing tensions in the world. When Richard Nixon first ran for president in 1960, an event that gained much attention was the famous “kitchen debate” between then Vice President Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. While on a tour of an American-style home at an exposition in Russia, Nixon and Khrushchev got into a heated debate in the kitchen of the house, which showed the American vice president wagging his finger in Khrushchev's face. It was presented as a triumphant moment for the candidate.
For that and other reasons, President Nixon was never accused of being soft on communism, or anything else, for that matter. So when he decided to try to ease relations between the United States and the Communist world, no one ever accused him of going easy on teh Communists. True, he was likely motivated by his desire to extricate the United States from what was seen as the quagmire of Vietnam, and he believed that the Soviets, if approached properly, could contribute to that end. But despite that possibly ulterior motive, there is little doubt that President Nixon genuinely desired to improve relationships with his adversaries. Ever since the time of the Cuban missile crisis, it had been apparent that a few false moves could set off a nuclear exchange which could only have disastrous results.
Thus Richard Nixon's pursuit of detente can be seen as a move that did indeed make the world a safer place, a fact which even Nixon's harshest critics, who are legion, would probably have to acknowledge, however reluctantly.