Vietnam was without any doubt, the lowest point of American foreign policy in the sixties and seventies. Even before Vietnam however, the poverty of American foreign policy had been exposed in Africa, specifically in the Congo. There, the Kennedy administration intervened cynically, decisively and disastrously through several agencies, especially the ubiquitous Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to install the insanely corrupt Joseph Desiree Mobutu as he was then known as the ruler of Congo. Later on, that psychopath, in rejecting his Christian antecedents, rechristened himself Mobutu Sese Seko Kuk Ngbendu Wa Za Banga and inflicted himself on the people of his country which he renamed Zaire from 1965 till 1997 when his bloody career was terminated by death. It is now clear that American hands guided those that tortured and then, murdered Patrice Lumumba, the legitimate and principled leader of Congo. John Kennedy, perhaps the first globally visible western leader of the modern era had the blood of a martyr on his hands on that hot November day in Dallas, Teas when he in turn, was assassinated. Such was the controversy surrounding his murder that the realty of that crime is impenetrably shrouded in mystery and is up till now, the subject of a rash of conspiracy theories. The truth is now no longer likely to be laid bare at any time soon, if ever and that possibility recedes further with each passing day as all those involved in that crime in one way or the other, are no longer alive to shed any light on it.
Not lomg after Kennedy was assassinated, thousands of American troops were fighting in Vietnam, attempting to bomb the Vietnamese back to the Stone age and the Vietnamese jungles into treeless deserts using what they called agent orange, one of the most toxic defoliants known to man. In the guise of saving the Vietnamese from Communism, the Americans attacked poor defenceless people with bombs weaponised with napalm and spent uranium in an attempt to wipe them off the face of the earth. It was a dirty war and the dirty aggressors were the ‘civilised’ Americans.
Even as the Americans were dropping their dreadful cargo of high explosives on Vietnam and later the neighbouring countries of Laos and Cambodia, the so called sanctuary countries, a nasty little war was raging through the American homeland. One hundred years after the supposed emancipation of African-Americans from slavery, they were still everywhere in chains; most of them remained disenfranchised, strictly segregated, stigmatised by the colour of their skin and denied the opportunity of fulfilling their potential in the land of their birth. By the time the youth of the world assembled in Mexico to celebrate the 1968 Olympiad, the excellent performances of black atheletes on the tracks was put in the shade by the Black power demonstration put up by Tommy Smith and John Carlos, winners of the gold and bronze medals respectively in the 200 metres, to show the seething discontent of their lot within the USA. Blacks all over the country endorsed this demonstration carried out before the whole world. They did this through a combination of peaceful protests and rioting which left many American cities in flames. Not even prisoners, a disproportional percentage of whom were black were left out of the struggle for black emancipation as many of them were slaughtered like pigs in a pen when the then Republican governor of New York State ordered the storming of the Attica prison to put down a revolt by prisoners who could no longer live with the condition the inhuman conditions they had to put up with within the prison.
Thus it was that within the period of eight years, the American situation had become unrecognisable from what it was when the Presidency was handed over to John Kennedy in such promising circumstances on that glorious morning when the new president stood up before a mammoth crowd and indeed, the whole world, to uphold the Constitution of the United States. Within that period, the turmoil within the nation had claimed the lives of the President, his brother, Edward and that apostle of the Gandhian principle of non-violent struggle, the great orator; preacher and leader of the Black struggle for justice, Dr. Martin Luther King.
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After the assassination of Kennedy, the Presidency was passed on to Lydon Baines Johnson, a crusty but politically savvy Texan who as Vice President, was all but invisible under Kennedy. It became the responsibility of this man from the deep South to respond in one way or the other to the crisis brought about by the revolt of the oppressed Blacks to centuries of corrosive white supremacy. Although he was from a part of the country, notorious for the shabbiness of the treatment reserved for people of colour, Johnson did more for black equality than the patrician Northerners, the Kennedy brothers. It was under his watch that the Civil Rights Bill which ended some of the more visible signs of black oppression was signed. Under the confused circumstances of the time, the disciples of law and order came to the fore and the country took a massive lurch to the right, thereby paving the way for the ascendancy of Richard Milhous Nixon to the Presidency.
To put it bluntly, Nixon was the possible choice for the role of saviour of the beleaguered Republic as he was a dyed in the wool crook, a man devoid of principles, niceties or compassion. He was a man with a siege mentality, ruled by violent passions but a man who at that point, probably more than any other politician mirrored the dreams and aspirations of his compatriots. They sent him to the White House riding on the heady crest of a landslide victory in the 1968 Presidential election. Not content with this, they sent him back there four years later with a greater endorsement four years later. Other than engineering the great rapprochement with China and setting the stage for bringing back American troops from Vietnam, ‘with honour’ as he loudly proclaimed at the time, the Nixon presidency was as close to being a non-event as it was possible to be. His second term was a disaster of monumental proportions as he did nothing without that period but battle to stay in office as he tried to distance himself from his lieutenants in what has come to be known as the Watergate scandal. In doing this, he perjured himself brazenly in his testimony