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In the story of Theseus, the hero volunteers to slay the Minotaur in the labyrinth created by the master craftsman Daedalus. Ariadne, Daedalus's daughter, who had fallen in love with Theseus, taught him the way to reach the center of the maze, where the half-man, half-bull lived. She also gave him a ball of string that would help him escape after completing his task. Theseus would have been doomed to wander the labyrinth forever—or until he randomly stumbled on the right sequence of decisions that would lead him to the exit. This chapter analyzes how the Nixon administration did just that, taking multiple steps and missteps in an effort to end the war, all while facing keen domestic pressure from all sides and a new international system largely of Nixon's own making.

In the long series of negotiations with Le Duc Tho, Kissinger informed Nixon that he had hammered out an acceptable agreement that could end America's longest war by the end of the year, a crowning achievement in the first Nixon administration's foreign policy. Nixon saw this as an opportunity to maximize his political gain and a useful tool for the upcoming November 1972 election. However, the October agreement fell victim to many problems embedded in Kissinger and Nixon's Vietnam policy. The South Vietnamese president rejected Kissinger's offer. Also, throughout the fall of 1972, the rift between Kissinger and Nixon grew wider with Nixon contemplating letting go of Kissinger as part of his reorganization of his foreign policy team. These events are presented in detail in this chapter.

A Puerto Rican and two African American trained steamfitters were rejected when they applied for “A Branch” journeyman membership. Since the union did not want to refer them to work, the Mechanical Contractors' Association's (MCA) members all denied them jobs. The steamfitters of Local #629 had two grades — “A Branch” that encompassed specialized construction jobs and the “B Grade” that accounted for maintenance work. After an investigation pursued by the New York City Human Rights Commission, the A Branch hired its first black worker in 1967. While the Nixon administration only furthered the Philadelphia Plan for political purposes, this chapter reveals how Nixon neglected this support after gaining more power. The plan, however, survived and was able to integrate skilled construction unions successfully. Ultimately, employment discrimination persisted in skilled trades because of industry changes.

This chapter discusses the most serious effort to normalize relations between the United States and Cuba since Washington broke ties with Havana in January 1961. In 1974, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger opened communications with Fidel Castro, anxious to discuss bilateral issues and to do so discreetly, through intermediaries. Kissinger’s message set in motion a protracted effort to achieve an “opening” to Cuba comparable to the opening to China—an effort to extend the Nixon-Kissinger strategy of détente with the Soviet Union to its Communist ally in the Caribbean. Over the next eighteen months, emissaries traveled back and forth between Washington and Havana, and Kissinger’s deputies quietly met with Cuban officials in airport lounges, New York hotels, and private homes to discuss the issues that divided the United States and Cuba.

This chapter details how the first crisis for the Nixon administration came with the news that leftist Salvador Allende had captured a plurality of the vote in the September 1970 presidential election. It reviews the U.S. role in destabilizing the Allende government. The historical literature tends to give scant attention to the United States and Chile after September 11, 1973. To recount the complete story about the U.S. role in Chile demands investigating not only the war against Allende but also the myriad of ways that the Nixon and Ford administrations and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger bolstered the Pinochet dictatorship. The chapter also analyzes Kissinger's lead role in encouraging the overthrow of President Juan José Torres (1970–1971), the socialist political and military leader of Bolivia.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of U.S. policies toward Latin America during Henry Kissinger's career as national security adviser and secretary of state. Henri Kissinger directed inter-American relations between 1969 and 1977. Like his predecessors, Kissinger judged relations with Western Europe, the Soviet Union, and China as strategically more important than relations with Latin America. But Kissinger launched noteworthy initiatives, such as the attempt to normalize relations with Cuba and to transfer the canal to Panama. The Kissinger years were also historically significant for Latin Americans. The 1970s represented the most violent period in the history of post-independence (1825) South America. This book provides a comprehensive investigation of the foreign policies of the Nixon and Ford administrations toward Latin America and Kissinger's central role in formulating and implementing those policies.

During the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict became entangled in the global rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. American policymakers, particularly Henry Kissinger, believed that the Soviets wanted to exploit the Arab-Israeli conflict to drive the West from the Middle East and dominate the region. To prevent that, the Nixon administration sought to end Soviet influence there and exclude it from all efforts to reach a negotiated settlement. However, the American view was based on misperceptions about Soviet interests and objectives in the region. In fact, fearing American dominance and a war with the United States, the Soviets proposed a joint superpower-guaranteed or even imposed comprehensive peace settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Because the United States spurned these proposals, the Cold War was exacerbated, there were several near-confrontations between the superpowers, and important opportunities to reach a comprehensive settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict were permanently lost.

This chapter describes the efforts by the United States and Eduardo Frei to prevent Salvador Allende from attaining the presidency. The Nixon administration, after choosing not to involve itself in the 1970 presidential race to the extent the Johnson administration had in the 1964 election, reacted with great alacrity to Allende's victory in the popular election. Richard Nixon himself instructed CIA director Richard Helms to conduct covert operations in Chile, behind Ambassador Korry's back. In addition, Chilean politicians, particularly Christian Democrats of the Frei line, tried or at least explored ways of averting an Allende victory and sought for that purpose the support of the U.S. embassy in Santiago. Though many of the documents that tell this part of the story have been available to researchers since at least the early 2000s, only one scholarly work has treated these attempts by Chilean politicians, especially Eduardo Frei, in depth. The tendency of scholars of U.S. foreign relations during the Cold War to assume rather uncritically that the only decisions that mattered were taken in Washington has narrowed the perspectives from which the history of Cold War Chilean politics has been studied and interpreted.

This chapter argues that achieving unity and guaranteeing the success of a coup in Chile still remained a big “if” in mid-1973. In the months between May and September 1973, U.S. officials monitoring plotting in the country had been relatively unimpressed with the progress toward this goal. Although the Nixon administration was highly sympathetic to the prospect of a coup, its reading of the situation within Chile and its concern for its own image also meant that this did not translate into a precise policy to accelerate military intervention against Allende. Instead, as Kissinger himself admitted days after 11 September, the United States “created the conditions as great as possible.”

This concluding chapter argues that cooperation is often best secured because of misperception. When actors hold flase intersubjective beliefs (FIBs)—in which agents wrongly believe that their understanding of a relationship is shared—cooperation may be much more likely to happen, especially if there are principled differences or conflicts of interest. The case of détente—the most robust period of cooperation between the superpowers—was only possible because of FIBs. Détente to the Soviets meant that they could safely support national liberation movements without US meddling. On the other hand, the Nixon administration thought that Soviet strategic parity meant that military competition had been replaced by political competition.

This chapter focuses on an event on August 5, 1974, in which Henry Kissinger addressed a meeting of disgruntled State Department officials and defended his handling of the Cyprus crisis. The crisis left Kissinger's diplomacy in tatters but not his self-confidence. Failure to preserve peace and stability in the eastern Mediterranean, the secretary of state was soon explaining, was the responsibility of everyone except himself. He rewarded those junior State Department officials who had warned him of the dangers that his actions were creating with a systematic effort to destroy their careers. The secretary refused to provide Congress with a complete account of his actions and pointed the finger of blame for the Cyprus mess at the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, which, after years of supinely accepting Nixon administration policies, finally nerved themselves to take back part of their constitutional role in the management of foreign affairs.

Since its founding of the republic, Americans have devised a variety of different ways to reconcile unity with depth, separation with checks, and presidentialism with republicanism. This chapter surveys the succession of informal institutional and organizational improvisations that periodically altered practical working relationships within the American constitutional system. These extra-constitutional contrivances created several distinctive “systems” of administration, each of which preserved the republican idea of inter-branch collaboration. Nineteenth-century remedies were party-based; twentieth-century remedies were administration-based. The move from one system to the next marked a profound change in the operation of government at large, but at every turn, a more powerful presidency was corralled into novel arrangements that reaffirmed collective responsibility. The origins of our beleaguered republic lay in the 1970s, when that spirit of accommodation began to break down. Presidents grew more independent in their political and institutional powers, and they asserted their right to unitary control over the executive branch more vigorously. In the congressional pushback, collaboration gave way to a constitutional face-off.

This chapter gives an overview of the drug trade surrounding the seedless cannabis sativa—the marijuana plant used for the potent, high-grade Thai sticks. Such wares fetched a premium price on American soil, and their trade continued to addle the Nixon administration even in the face of a much larger threat—heroin trafficking. Given how limited a commodity this prime quality, perfectly dried and packaged Thai and Laotian pot was, in the 1970s it was a seller's market with no end in sight. Unlike other drugs whose distribution was tightly controlled at the upper levels by syndicates, the Thai marijuana trade was controlled only by the laws of supply and demand.

For polluters, America in 1970 was still something of a Wild West. A number of federal, state, and municipal laws aimed at improving air quality were already on the books, but few were enforced, and pollution from the nation’s ever-growing stock of motor vehicles, power plants, and factories remained uncontrolled in much of the country. A passage from the Ralph Nader Study Group’s Vanishing Air, published in May 1970, vividly illustrates the extent to which dirty air was a fact of life for city dwellers of the period: . . . The New Yorker almost always senses a slight discomfort in breathing, especially in midtown; he knows that his cleaning bills are higher than they would be in the country; he periodically runs his handkerchief across his face and notes the fine black soot that has fallen on him; and he often feels the air pressing against him with almost as much weight as the bodies in the crowds he weaves through daily. . . . New York’s problems with air quality were hardly unique. In an October 1969 letter to the Senate Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution, a resident of St. Louis expressed similar sentiments about the sheer pervasiveness of pollution in her community: . . . What really made me take the time to write this letter was the realization that I had begun to take the haze and various odors for granted. Close the doors and windows and they’ll be less noticeable[. I]t is very disturbing to think I’ve become used to the burning-rubber smell in the evening and the slightly sour smell in the morning. What does air smell like? . . . And air pollution’s costs went far beyond sour smells and dirty handkerchiefs, as a series of deadly “inversions” both here and abroad had made dramatically clear beginning in the late 1940s. Typically, the air at higher altitudes is cooler than that below. This is because the surface of the earth absorbs sunlight and radiates heat, warming the air closest to the ground. That warm surface air then cools as it rises higher into the atmosphere.

This chapter focuses on a protest at the US embassy in which women of color, particularly Wynta Boynes of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and Esther Urista of La Raza Unida, protested that the US delegation to the intergovernmental conference was insufficiently representative of US women. The episode signals the ways in which, in the wake of the US civil rights movement, race had emerged as the principal gauge of representation and identification. US delegation leaders claimed the confrontation as a victory, indicating that it demonstrated a “free and uninhibited exchange” and offered “an impressive and persuasive example of U.S. participatory democracy at work.