Word: mcgoverns
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Nixon had watched the international monetary situation approach collapse for nearly a year before doing anything about it, McGovern charged, and when he did act it was to employ the "six-gun diplomacy of John Connally," thereby antagonizing U.S. allies. He had "insulted" Japan by not advising its leaders in advance of his trip to Peking and of the potential impact of his New Economic Policy. He had lost the good will of India by siding with Pakistan in their brief war, and he had waited five months to recognize "the infant, struggling nation of Bangladesh that has suffered...
More generally, McGovern claimed that Nixon's policies were based on a scheme of balancing world power among five giants: the U.S., Russia, China, Europe and Japan. But that, he contended, is "a naive, pre-nuclear view" of the world-"an old world of kings and princes and empires that we will never see again." A balance among the giants cannot remove the causes of war among other nations, he pointed out, "nor can it dispel the demand of some 140 countries to have a say in the issues which determine their survival. Our preoccupation with a military balance...
...McGovern contended that Nixon was following a policy of "unconscious isolationism"; he had allowed the U.S. to become isolated from its allies and trading partners, isolated from the world's developing nations, and isolated "from reality by the insistence that tough talk and big Pentagon budgets are somehow synonymous with national manhood." McGovern called instead for "a new internationalism," which would de-emphasize military solutions and big-power politics. It would instead accent multilateral cooperation, especially in helping small nations overcome hunger and poverty...
...sticking point was Nixon himself. Although Richardson was willing to compromise, the President was not. He argued that the White House version of the legislation already "stretches the budget as far as it can be stretched." Furthermore, he had McGovern in a corner on the welfare issue, and he was not about to give him breathing room by softening his own position. So he stood firm, knowing full well he was sealing the fate of his own "priority" domestic legislation. Said one Congressman: "He preferred a campaign issue to the bill." An Administration executive ruefully agreed: "The President...
Maybe, say the experts, McGovern's frontal assault on the scandals will touch a well of slumbering outrage. But his stridency contains its own backlash. His charge that the Nixon Administration is the most corrupt in the Republic's history is dubious. But something is iridescently wrong there. This Administration's record will, one suspects, find its historical place in the rather short line of federal manipulation and political skulduggery, big and small, that burgeoned with Ulysses Grant. The gold, whisky and railroad manipulations in the unsuspecting Grant's time besmirched his reputation for a century...