Harold Pinter, the great playwright who died recently, drew a distinction in his 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech between what playwrights and other artists do and what politicians do. “Truth in drama is forever elusive,� he said. “You never quite find it, but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavor. The search is your task.� By contrast, “Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance.�
Pinter overstates his case, as everyone does when making contrasts that favor what we do over what others do, but the distinction he draws sheds some light on certain aspects of history and current affairs.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy said, in his inaugural address, “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.� Kennedy’s expression-of-power sentiment was clear, forceful, and in tune with the times, agreed to by most Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, as the country attempted to contain an expansionist Communist empire. It also led directly to our deeper involvement in Vietnam and the wars of Southeast Asia. Convinced that the dominoes would fall if we did not stop Communist expansion in Southeast Asia, presidents Kennedy and Johnson committed troops to the fight.
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Richard Nixon was not known for directness of speech. He often appeared to say one thing and mean another — which Pinter might have said fulfilled his definition of political speech. A prime example is actually something Nixon did not exactly say, but implied during his 1968 campaign for the presidency: that he had a secret plan for ending the war. What he said was that he would bring the war to an end — he just didn’t say how. People read into that what they wanted.
Nixon actually did have a “secret plan� to end the war: to pressure the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and Red China to stop supplying arms, fuel, and food to North Vietnam and thereby force the war’s end at a peace table. He and Henry Kissinger bragged to friends that this plan would bring the war to an end within six months of taking office. They would secretly achieve détente with the Soviets, and a rapprochement with China — which the Communist giants desired — and in exchange, those giants would jettison North Vietnam.
Nixon and Kissinger thought they were furthering that plan by sending secret “power� messages to Moscow via Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin — but just read what Dobrynin wrote home in his contemporaneous notes of his first meeting with Dr. Kissinger on February 21, 1969. He directly quoted Kissinger as saying that the United States was no longer thinking in terms of a “military solution� in Vietnam, that the United States “would have no objection if, after [a Vietnam peace] agreement is reached, events in Vietnam were to take their own ‘purely Vietnamese’ course and thereafter develop ‘in keeping with the historical traditions and experience of the Vietnamese people’.� Dobrynin presumed this phrasing meant that the United States would not intervene if, after hostilities ended, South as well as North Vietnam went Communist.
In exchange, Kissinger on Nixon’s behalf demanded that the USSR accommodate the United States on reductions in nuclear arms and conventional forces and by stepping back from the growing Soviet influence in the Middle East.
Talk about mixed messages! The USSR understood that Nixon was backing away from an open-ended commitment to the integrity of South Vietnam, and thus the Soviet Union had no reason to stop supplying its client state, North Vietnam.
This was the context for what Nixon first announced in mid-1969, which became known as the Nixon Doctrine: “The United States will participate in the defense of allies and friends but ... cannot — and will not — conceive all the plans, design all the programs, and undertake all the defense of the free nations.� With this doctrine, Nixon rejected Kennedy’s go-anywhere, pay-any-price notion. Nixon redefined the national interest downward, and made it conditional.
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In Pinter’s terms, Nixon seemed to be stepping away from power — the ultimate exercise in realism.
Those outraged by this diminution of American interest would oppose Nixon’s attempts at détente, rapprochement, and a negotiated end to the Vietnam War — and would soon become the neocons.
The neocons were very bellicose and spoke in power terms. They claimed to be realists but they were actually ideologues, their supposedly truthful understandings of how the world worked being no more than a set of interpretations. They wanted to redefine American interests yet again — upward, so that the United States would not only “go anywhere ... to assure ... liberty� but would do so by means of pre-emptive attacks.
Ronald Reagan eventually disappointed the neocons by talking tough but not brandishing a big enough stick — by signing accords with the Soviet Union, agreeing to reduce the American troops in Europe, and talking seriously about removing all the nuclear weapons in the world.
The neocons would not achieve full control of public policy until after Sept. 11, 2001, when they persuaded Bush to pre-emptively invade Iraq — an action excoriated by Pinter in his Nobel speech as being the epitome of power enabled by putting forth lies to gull the public.
My hope is that incoming president Barack Obama, who has shown himself thus far capable of actively seeking truth and going beyond power-speech in his assessments of the current economic crisis, may be able to bring American political discourse closer to truth than any president in the last 40 years.
Salisbury resident Tom Shachtman has written more than two dozen books and many television documentaries.
