she has spoken on dissent at many scholarly conferences so she was a natural to write the chapter on nixon's dissent ladies and gentlemen, katherine scott. >> thank you for that kind introduction and thank you all for attending our pabl today. thank you to all those that organized the conference. i feel fortunate to be here and to be invited and be up here with these three top-notch scholars on the war. i'm going to stray a little from the topics that they've spoke about today in that my piece, the chapter that i wrote, examined the literature related to the nixon administration's

response to dissent about the vietnam war. so my topic related, though not specific to the vietnam war itself and i'm going to talk a little bit about the nixon administration's response to dissent, more specifically about the works that have been written about the nixon administration response to dissent. and then i'm going to spend about half of the -- the last half of my talk describing what i think are some of the directions that i think we need to go. for what was he responsible for the policies. that has been a scholarly debate for decades. now, for the purpose of the essay that i wrote and the topic that i'm giving today, i'm describing anti-dissent

policies, such as wire tapping, surveillance, black bag jobs, all in an effort to weaken and discredit the anti-war movement first and then later president nixon's own political enemy. this body of literature has been largely shaped by historian and washington insider arthur slesing injury, published in 1973. slesing injury made the case that since world war 2 the executive branch had a mask unprecedented and unchecked powers in order to challenge the nation's security the watergate investigation has the use in the power with the national security

state. americans, political comparison, which is a work based in large part on his who works as a consultant and these first scholarly treatments placed nixon's extra constitutional activities within the broad historical context of the growth of the executive branch in the 20th century. now, of course, richard nixon addressed his dissent in his 1978 memoir defending the practice of wire tapping journalists and staff among others as a legitimate response to, in his words, levels of domestic terrorism. the administration's dissent policy, the president insisted, quote, did not involve the use

of any measures, not previously employed by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. indeed, the president expressed no concern no, remorse, rather, and revealed no interconflict over his administration's reliance on questionable results. in the 1990s, as scholars gained access to more white house materials, such as presidential recordings and documents, their work began to emphasize the personal role that president nixon played in shaping, encouraging, and in some cases demanding that his aides go after first disdense and then political enemies. these more recent works have held nixon personally accountable for the political

culture of the era. and while recent scholarship has introduced new and exciting lines of inquiry, which i can address more in the question and answer period, i think it leaves some important questions unanswered. first, i argue scholar focus far too closely on the effort to combat dissent in this era. imagine if we pulled the lens back from the executive branch and examined, instead, the larger american government structure itself. for example, in what ways were american political institutions, specifically both outside of the american branch, responsible for the dissent during the cold war era. in a constitutional government, based on the rule of law, and

the intentionally designed as a system of checks and balances, certainly the legislative and judicial branches both bear some responsibility for the nixon administration's anti--dissent policies and practices. congress and the courts not only legitimate myself nixon's activities but demanded that the state aggressively in 1968, congress passed the control and state streets act. conservative congressional democrats, who were furious over the johnson administration's in their mind failure to respond forcefully to urban riots and civil unrest, including title 3 into the bill over the white house's objections. title 3 and electronic

surveillance in the name of protecting national security by imposing law & order. similarly, the judicial branch routinely privileged national security interests over constitutionally protected individual rights in the 1960s and early 1970s. in 1968, supreme court justice, who was a franklin roosevelt appoint tea said the right to free speech was not without limits. he explained in this interview, i have never said that freedom of speech gives people the right to tramp up and down the streets by the thousands, either saying things that threaten others with real literal language or that threaten them because of the

circumstances under which they do it. it wasn't until 1972 with the landmark supreme court decision issued in u.s. v. the united states district court that the supreme court began to restrict the state's power to wire tap without limits. sectly, i think we need to try to find a way to assess american's attitudes. it's always difficult to assess public sentiment about issues at any given time. americans, of course, do not generally know about the nixon administration secret anti-dissent policy until the investigation of the watergate but this tells us something about how americans felt about civil disorder and especially street heat. civil unrest, urban revolt and protests, an overwhelming

majority of americans polled in 1970, 76% said they did not support the first amendment right to government policies. blaming the press for sensationalizing protests and this disorder, a majority of those polls polled did not support the freedom of the press. nixon's anti-dissent rhetoric did not seem to offend the americans who elected him by a landslide in 1972 when he earned a greater margin of the popular vote than he had four years before. now, to explore these questions is not to evolve richard nixon of his role in anti-dissent policy. but we need to acknowledge that the nixon white house formulated these policies in a context of a political climate that had grown increasingly intolerant of

public protests and disorder. his program was supported by public officials who, like him, saw limits to constitutional protection during times of upheaval. the policy cannot be adequately explained as natural evolution of the imperial presidency. although, that does tell an important part of the story. they did reflect, i think, a deep am bif lens for americans and dissent which has been the current theme american history. during times of disorder and perceived threat to national security, the line between illegal and legal state activities has often been hard to distinguish and obviously we continue to grapple with the questions even today in order to better understand our own time in the future.

thank you. [ applause ] >> i want to remind everybody, we have two very helpful people holding microphones. please have the microphone in your hand before you ask a question. yes, sir? >> i'm a doctor retired from whittier college. to guess s to professor scott, this may be a bit personal, a couple years ago in the alumni magazine there was an article by the president about opening their law school in china. would you consider being against lecture there on richard nixon as i did but was turned down.

>> thanks. >> hi, i had a question for you. regarding empire life and imperialism, american empire and how do you individually feel about the idea of having imperialism put over the vietnam war? >> let's start with john. >> you're saying that -- your question -- let me see if i understand this correctly -- is how do we feel as historians

about whether vietnam was an i am peerist project? >> i think it's very possible to call vietnam an imperialist project. they have built their entire opposition to imperialism and that was a factor and a theme about what the meet meaning of vietnam was. i work with political groups who use those kinds of arguments. i was not entirely convinced that vietnam was an imperialist enterprise but i definitely could see how that kind of analysis applied to the situation that we were protesting from the standpoint of vietnamese who received these

foreigners come into their country and first one set of them and then another set of them and then the wars just go on. it certainly must have looked -- it suddenly must have had an imperial list stick outlook from their view. now, as how i deploy that as an historian is another issue. because i'm outside of that context of personal activity and so i try and analyze the motives of states and state power. from that perspective, vietnam looks and feels different. perhaps it's because suddenly you're looking and feeling it from the standpoint of washington as opposed to the vietnamese village so you see american concern for that security in the western pacific,

our ideas about cold war challenges and our fears that an anti communist ally might fall in south vietnam. so a whole different set of factors apply from that kind of a standpoint. >> jack, do you want to say something? >> yes, i'd like to address that. i think it's an important question. the problem is that it has been politicized too much. you have to define it. it seems to me, if you look at the sweep of history from 5,000 years ago, the earlier civilization, imperial simply means one entity dominates another in some way. and that other entity is not entirely happy with it. certainly this is the case with the united states vis-a-vis vietnam. i try not to use the term too much because it is a war that gets in the way of analysis. but if you think about why the u.s. entered the war and i think there's much documentation about

this since it's not terribly contentious, it was because american leaders, through all of these administrations, from true man were interested in preserving the credibility of america's will and ability to control or put down revolutions against an international system that the u.s. favored. sometimes called capitalist system. there were perhaps some security concerns but i think few of us would argue that there were real security concerns about the communist coming to power in vietnam, unless you bought into the domino theory. i could go on with this. but, again, it has to deal with the definition of the term. let's put ourselves in the sweep of history. here's a big power intervening and a little country and so what

else would it be? it's a complicated topic but i don't think they can explore a cold war in vietnam. >> the phrase was peace with honor. did it have an effective effect? and was it successful? >> well, from what i know it was the deliberate slow began to capture the vote of those who

wanted an end to the war, whether they were on the right or the left. honor was an appeal, especially to those right of center who either wanted to get out by using more military force or just wanted to get out if you didn't use military force. i think it was his way of running that middle line, walking the tight rope during the election. if you look at, for example, "new york times" headlines during this period, covering nixon's campaign, that made -- owl was the other name -- and on the other hand, honor, if you interpreted it, that meant we're not going to give up on the side line government. now, if you were really sap pea

about this, that's what the war was all about. it was reserving the sideline government with the issue of credibility and so forth. as long as nixon said that, you could project that it wasn't going to be easy to get out of this war. but it was a good way of approaching the war and i think nixon himself perhaps believed he could pull it off. yes, ma'am? >> hi, my name is gail. i wanted to speak a little bit more about nixon's response to the pentagon papers being the downfall. rather than the fact that if he just -- and would you talk about that a little more. >> the pentagon papers had a study, as a military analysis,

as a strategic study were about decisions, that it all happened in or behind or before 1968. president johnson, kennedy, eisenhower, actually, and mostly democrats. fdr and truman. there was no content in the pentagon papers that called into question the victim leadership or his own kind of decisions. all right? he could have let this go by as an enormously certainly but a leak and treated it in a standard perspective. but he drew attention to the issue first with the attempt to suppress the document, which

invoked first amendment disputes and freedom of the press issues that were guaranteed to be explosive in american society and moved the conversation up to the level of the united states supreme court where, in fact, it was found against him and, second, when he could not achieve what he wanted on the surface, he referred to subterrainian techniques and it was actually the first -- how should i say -- active who in the creation of the subterranian forces and undermine his own leadership and presidency, ultimately forcing him to resign.

so in a very real sense you can trace the downfall of richard nixon to the actions he did or did not take in the wake of the pentagon papers and because of the importance of those issues, the pentagon papers move as an american political document, not an examination of the prosecution of the vietnam war. >> john may have mentioned this. nixon's concern wasn't about the papers. it was the emotional response he had to it was it would undermine his effort. >> that was alexander hayes argument. >> which nixon accepted? >> yes, nixon on this june 17th meeting that i've quoted you here, nixon adopts all three of the same that he tells him on the telephone the day the pentagon papers leak.

>> what about nixon's anti-dissent policy because no one and i think he reacted so sfrongly because he was speaking out and sort of disrupting the way he would like to pursue things. >> i absolutely agree. >> most of the discussion about vietnam is focused on the roles of kissinger and mr. nixon. perhaps less well known are the devil tapes and have any of you looked at the papers? are there surprises in there? are we learning more about his

role on capitol hill, he's an as institute politician and turned out to be a bureaucrat particular in-fighter. what insights have you learned? >> yes, i am now looking at the papers. let's remember that secretary laird played an important role by insisting on the de-americanization and that was his plan and it worked in the end of simplifying the argument and that was an important role but at the same time, nixon and

kissinger bypassed them. they saw it as part of a solution. that is, you're going to withdraw and if you haven't won an agreement, that is necessary to preserve south vietnam, then there's the danger of south vietnam failing. falling. and therefore you need to build up the south vietnamese on the other side. nixon didn't end it until 1969 and into '70 and even then it was more than laird wanted them to the other strategy was force. khpwhv it purpose, which was to force the other side to withdraw north

ve vietnamese troops from south vietnam and to give up on their insistence of the unified vietnam. that did not happen. but the point is that vietnamization took a while to come into play and by then most american troops had withdrawn. >> we're out of time. >> i had actually a slightly different determination of laird's role. and by the way, the nixon library has quite an excellent oral history that they did. in any case, i think that nixon's view of laird was somewhat similar to what john kennedy thought about harriman, that he was a crocodile on the side of the creek that would bite your head off if you did it wrong.

so laird's positions and what laird did and how he related to the president's enterprises was of huge importance to the white house. and that's why things happened the way they did during that period of the vietnam war. and i think jeff is right about laird's commitment to de-americanizing the war but the way that the nixon administration went about doing that had a lot to do about the character of melvin laird, who, by the way, played an important role in watergate, not only convincing him to yield the tapes in 1973, '74, but also with gerald ford. >> okay. time for one, maybe two questions. >> yes? >> my name is mark. we've been asking similar questions so i'll try to get it a different way.

can we actually have won of the vietnam war? how and what did it look like. >> okay. that's an impossible question to answer. my answer would be no and i could list some reasons. i think, though, one way of approaching this is to ask did nixon, kissinger, and laird and others believe the war could be won? we have to define what that meant. do you mean militarily? >> they did not believe it could be won militarily and that's important to remember when blame is on other people and wanted what they are suggesting they wanted this either decent chance. >> i will also agree that the war was not winnable. >> >> i'm the moderator so i

won't answer the question. please thank the excellent panel and thank you all for your questions. >> you're watching american history. all weekend every weekend on c-span 3. >> there's a new website for american history tv where you can find our schedules and preview our upcoming program. watch our weekly series as well as access the history tweets. history in the news and social media from facebook, youtube and four square. follow american history every weekend on c-span 3. >> before he won