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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 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.

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.

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.