MYTH OF THE DECISIVE BATTLE

of the most socially and militarily traumatic events inhistory was the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The failures there left scars that affect military decisions even into the twenty-first century. The United States had to and did make a lot of mistakes to lose their part of that war, but the real mistake that started it all wasn’t one any American made. It was made by a Frenchman. A French general to be exact. His name was Henri Navarre, and he hated to lose. Normally that is a good trait in a general, but in this case it led him to make a mistake that cost thousands of French lives and later ensured there would be tens of thousands of American and Vietnamese dead.Navarre was in charge of the pacification of Vietnam after World War II. When that war had ended, the French returned to their former colony of French Indochina after the defeated occupying Japanese departed. There was some expectation by the French who returned that things would go back to normal when the French plantation owners and managers returned home. But times had changed. There was no normal to return to.Japanese had not only defeated but also embarrassed the European nations, taking away the entire subcontinent with impressive ease. During the war, the Allies had encouraged local guerrilla movements to resist the Japanese, training a few and arming many. The communists joined in this, fielding their own resistance movements. When the French returned, the Vietnamese refused to trade the new master for the old one. The French resisted. After nine years of insurrection, the French government accepted that they were not going to turn back the clock. Also, until Navarre made his mistake, there was a good chance that Võ Nguyên Giáp, leader of the Viet Minh, would accept a coalition government or similar compromise so long as it gave Vietnam self-rule. Though the Viet Minh likely had a further expectation of taking over once the French were gone.was a fact that both sides had started talking and that actually spurred General Navarre to look for his own victory. He may even have seen the talks as a sign of his failure. His job had been to reassert total French control and that had not happened. He had not done his job. Navarre certainly realized that once the diplomats had reached any agreement, there would be no way for him to retrieve the situation. But a major victory that dramatically broke the rebellion would not only vindicate his efforts and the sacrifices his soldiers had made already but would also ensure a favorable settlement. What Navarre wanted is a phrase that has appeared before: He sought a decisive battle that would win his war. Unfortunately, to quote a cartoon squirrel popular at that time, “that trick never works.”problem with fighting any insurgency is how to bring them to battle. Navarre needed the Viet Minh to fight him in a standup battle. But they had so far been wiser than to do that. With air support, artillery, and tanks, there was every expectation that the French would dominate any conventional fight. But the French general thought of a way to force just such a battle. And he was correct: The plan worked and the battle occurred, just not how and when he expected.idea was to set up a target that was such a challenge and so enticing that Giáp had to take the bait. To offer this, the French established a base near the town of Dien Bien Phu. This was in the far western part of Vietnam, near nothing except the Laotian border and across trackless jungle from just about anything else. Then, to sweeten its appeal as a target, Navarre built his base in a valley surrounded by steep mountains and did not occupy the mountains. Then Navarre moved most of his army there.location seemed to so favor the Viet Minh that they had to attack or lose credibility. Navarre also thought that it really favored him. He saw the battle in his mind and was sure how Giáp would react. Since the French flew in all of their supplies and reinforcements, it wasn’t too inconvenient to be far from everyone else. But the French general’s expectation was that the dense jungles and distances would limit Giáp to troops armed with only what they could bring with them. This would be men with rifles and little else. It was a long walk.Vietnamese had shown a liking, as they later did against the Americans, for human wave attacks. Navarre expected Giáp to rush thousands of his rifle-armed guerrillas in suicidal charges at the base to be slaughtered by his planes, tanks, and artillery. Then, once the strength of the Viet Minh had been wasted, Navarre’s army could easily pacify the rest of the country. His decisive battle would win the war, retrieve French honor, and provide an ideal position for the negotiators. And it would work if Giáp did as expected.of course Giáp did not do what Navarre wanted. He did summon every Vietnamese he could muster, but not for suicidal attacks. For months, the French would get glimpses of the guerrillas in the mountains around them, but they would vanish before the French airplanes could be called in for a strike. Viet Minh snipers regularly took shots into the camp, most at maximum range. But other than harassment, nothing happened for months at the French base in Dien Bien Phu.General Henri Navarre did not see was that during all those months of seeming inactivity, tens of thousands of peasants and guerrillas were hauling on their backs ammunition, artillery pieces broken down into parts, and everything else needed to win a modern battle against the arrogant French in the valley. Villagers would put one artillery shell weighing seventy or eighty pounds in a sling and spend weeks carrying it along jungle paths, which were invisible under the trees, to deliver them to caves cut into the mountains. Finally, the heights on every side of Dien Bien Phu were covered with dug-in artillery and mortar positions. Shells were stockpiled, and when the rainy season arrived, Giáp was ready.the rain came the clouds. The clouds were so constant and thick that the French airplanes could not be used effectively. And the rain came on like a monsoon, because it was one. Soon the French tanks could not even move in the deep mud. Everything rusted and had mold. Then the Viet Minh attacked. The French camp was first subjected to a round-the-clock barrage. Thousands of artillery shells were fired. French casualties mounted, and the survivors began shooting blindly into the mountains. There was nothing Navarre’s men could do. After several days of bombardment, the human wave attacks did begin. Yes, the Viet Minh losses were high, but the attacks succeeded. Section by section, building by building, the French perimeter contracted. Brave French Foreign Legionnaires attempted to parachute into the diminishing French-controlled area by jumping blindly through the clouds. This was before the era of controllable parachutes, and almost all of those volunteers were either killed or captured. When the airstrip was lost, there was no more hope. A short time later, the French command bunker was overrun. The decisive battle was over with a decisive result. The French had lost, and lost badly.peace talks had stalled for months, awaiting the results of the battle at Dien Bien Phu. Once it was apparent just how greatly the Viet Minh had won, they were able to drive a hard bargain. The French agreed to split the country, ceding the northern half to the Viet Minh and setting up a friendly government in the south. The North Vietnamese waited to unite the country under their control.Viet Minh were communists and so Western nations began to support and assist the South Vietnamese government even as the Viet Minh, now known as the Vietcong, began an insurgency. Had Navarre not lost at Dien Bien Phu, the settlement might not have split Vietnam. A more peaceful resolution might have been reached: one in which the two halves of Vietnam were actually joined under a single government.Western fear was that Vietnam would become a Chinese satellite. But we know now that the Vietnamese were never willingly going to become pawns of the Chinese. After the United States pulled out, and the country was united, Vietnam and China fought three little-publicized but vicious wars. Relations even today are chilly.in the name of containing communism, America sent some “military advisers” and began their involvement in Vietnam. And whole books have been written about the mistakes made by the United States. But the entire mess started because a brave French general wanted a decisive battle so badly that he was willing to put his army in a position from which it could not win. Had he not, there would have been no American Vietnam War.

. MARKETING DISASTER“

We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel, he quips that the “Edsel is a no-go.” He was referring to a colossal flop by Ford Motor Company in the late 1950s that incurred heavy financial losses for the company and served as a negative example for future endeavors by Ford and other companies. The Edsel was such a failure that on the fiftieth anniversary of its unveiling, Time magazine made a list of the fifty worst cars of all time in its honor.factors combined to make the Edsel a colossal failure. Described frequently as “the wrong car at the wrong time,” it was a large, gas-guzzling car at a time when consumer preferences were shifting toward smaller cars. Sales trends in the years preceding its release suggested that the automobile market had nowhere to go but up. With the onset of a recession in 1958, the Edsel’s release was hardly opportune; only two cars saw an increase from 1957 production in that year. Moreover, the Edsel was released in September, a time when most dealers were discounting 1957 models. In 1958, Ford first released its most inexpensive model of the Edsel, the Citation, causing its later-released model, the Corsair, to seem excessively expensive by comparison.certain mystique surrounded the Edsel’s release as a result of an intense advertising campaign by Ford. The car was billed as a revolutionary design, and in some ways it was: Its self-adjusting rear brakes and automatic lubrication were unprecedented features. However, leading up to its release, the Edsel was presented as a car of the future. All ads featured only blurred images of the car or pictured only its hood, stating, “The Edsel is coming.” As vehicles were shipped to dealers, the dealerships were required to keep the cars covered with tarps. Ford created a television program called the Edsel Show, featuring big-name celebrities like Frank Sinatra. Ford advertising heralded the day the car would be unveiled as “E-Day.” Consumers expected an auto that could drive on water and brew coffee; they got, in their view, a rehashed version of other Ford models. Members of the media derisively referred to the vehicle as “an Oldsmobile sucking a lemon” or “a Pontiac pushing a toilet seat.” While many people flocked to dealers to see for themselves what this new model looked like, few bought the car. Internally projected to sell 200,000 vehicles, the Edsel sold only about a third of that. The company lost about $250 million, equivalent to more than $2.25 billion today. The only possible silver lining was that technological advances in the Edsel were incorporated in future Ford vehicles. Moreover, on the strength of other sales, Ford still maintained a profit in the years the Edsel was in production.existed beyond Ford’s marketing strategy, however. By establishing a new division for the Edsel, Ford would use brand-new dealerships rather than relying on dealerships that had already delivered for the company. Unfortunately, Ford did not establish new manufacturing facilities for the Edsel. The Edsel division had to rely on manufacturing facilities for other divisions, such as Mercury. There was no incentive to ensure quality in Edsel vehicles, since the division benefited from selling its own vehicles; in fact, there was some interdivisional competition, which resulted in deliberate sabotage of Edsel vehicles. Cars would arrive at Edsel dealerships with parts missing or the brakes not working. Another problem was a complicated “Tele-touch” gear-shifting mechanism that many drivers and mechanics had difficulty understanding. Design flaws such as a poorly secured hood ornament also became a hazard that gave Edsel a bad reputation; at speeds of about 70 mph, the ornament on the original model was known to fly off the hood.issues stemmed from internal disputes at the top of the Ford food chain. Robert McNamara (later secretary of war), a prominent figure in the company, was generally unsupportive of the endeavor and was instrumental in getting the Edsel nixed in 1960; his argument was that the Edsel was bleeding the company dry. There were even intense disputes about the name. In the early 1950s, Ford had become a publicly traded company, no longer exclusively owned by the Ford family. While Henry Ford II, the original Henry’s grandson, was president, his will was not inviolable. Though he was opposed to the automobile being named after his father, a meeting from which he was absent resulted in the decision to dub the new car the Edsel. Numerous studies and surveys by Ford to determine what name should be used yielded no conclusive results. The company even hired a prominent poet, Marianne Moore, to offer input; her suggestions, including “Utopian Turtletop” and “Mongoose Civique,” were rejected. Though Edsel was settled on, it was learned after its release that consumers associated the name with negative phrases such as “weasel,” “dead cell,” and Edson (a tractor), which tempered demand for the car. Moreover, many thought the designers’ attempts at making the car physically distinguishable from others merely resulted in an ugly vehicle.Edsel’s legacy exists as the archetypal flop. Though it is a collectible for some, a stigma is still attached to the car. In the early 1990s, Saturn Corporation used Edsel’s failure as an example of what not to do when developing and marketing their flagship car. Rumor has it Skip LeFauve, former president and CEO of Saturn, distributed books about the Edsel to his executives and had them underline everything Ford did wrong. Some described Saturn as “the next Edsel.” Evidently they were wrong, considering the company’s success.is unclear whether there ever will be a “next Edsel” because pains have been taken to avoid that dubious distinction. Regardless, the Edsel will forever be memorialized as a huge disappointment to the car-buying public, a huge embarrassment for the company, and a huge lesson for corporate America.

. INDECISIVE LEADERSHIPoriginal plan for the Bay of Pigs invasion was for a small group of rebels to land near the mountains in Cuba. They were to be the seed from which an insurgency that would overthrow Fidel Castro grew. This was modeled on a very successful CIA program that had overthrown a left-leaning government in Guatemala a few years earlier. Much of the same team worked on both. Both plans were the brainchild of Richard Bissell, the chief of covert operations for the CIA. Bissell was both brilliant and proven. From the moment he took on the project during the Eisenhower administration, everyone was sure Castro was doomed.project ran parallel to other less than brilliant moves by the CIA, including hiring the mob to stage a hit on Castro. Still it got strong support from the vice president and the likely next president, Richard Nixon. But John Fitzgerald Kennedy won instead. This had two effects. The first was that Bissell had to sell the program to the new president. Kennedy was young and had a lot to prove. He was facing increasing pressure from the hawks in both parties (yes, there used to be Democratic hawks, really) and was inclined to support anything that made him look tough on communism. Using half-truths and not explaining too much, Bissell got a busy JFK to agree.second effect of Nixon losing was that Bissell no longer was working with any real supervision. Nixon had been active in the planning. Kennedy was too busy. Thus many things changed. The small group became a small army. A sneak landing became an amphibious attack. More than 2,000 disgruntled Cubans began to train in secret Central American bases.continued to agree, but only on the basis that the entire plan be secret and that the United States have deniability. It could not look like the U.S. government was involved at all. It was unclear who else he expected the world to blame for an amphibious landing and B26 bombing raids on its island neighbor. That summer the Miami Herald found out about the training camps. They were pressured to kill the story and did. At the end of October 1960, a Guatemalan newspaper ran a detailed story about Cubans training in their country. On January 10, 1961, the story about the Guatemalan training camps was featured on the front page of the New York Times. But the CIA and Bissell remained confident.February 1961, the Bissell invasion plan involved the U.S. Marines, two bomber wings of the U.S. Air Force (USAF), numerous U.S. Navy destroyers, and his intrepid Cubans. Strangely, there was no clear plan about what to do if the invasion did overthrow Castro. There was no government in exile or any one group ready to inspire the Cuban masses and form a friendly government.balked at the sheer size of the plan, and despite the CIA’s best efforts, he demanded it become a solely Cuban project without any direct involvement by the American military. Undeterred, Richard Bissell presented on March 11, 1961, a new plan confirming the president’s desires. This plan now called for a few thousand men to land, rally the Cuban people, and defeat the 200,000 soldiers of the Cuban army. The landing location was moved to a better beach, but one that was sixty miles from the mountains and safety if anything went wrong. A confident Bissell assured Kennedy that the plan would be a 100 percent Cuban affair and would almost assuredly succeed. Kennedy agreed and then was distracted by other affairs, one of them with Marilyn Monroe.less than a month to go, one element had to be added. With Kennedy pulling the USAF out, the invasion would need air cover and support. The Cuban air force was a joke by modern standards, but it had enough prop-driven aircraft to disrupt the landings unless neutralized. What the CIA devised was a wing of B26 bombers manned by quickly trained Cuban “volunteers.” No provision was made to explain how the Cuban rebels obtained a complete wing of heavy bombers.this point, the Pentagon got involved and examined the final plan. They were less than impressed, giving the landings alone a 30 percent chance of succeeding. But, not wanting to antagonize the new administration or the CIA, the Joint Chiefs officially reported to the White House that the plan had a “fair” chance of succeeding. Then the PR element of the CIA went into action, and press releases from a fake “Cuban Leadership Council” began to appear.the beginning of April, the 1,500 Cubans trained in Guatemala were shipped to Nicaragua and boarded a number of rusty freighters, which were later dubbed the “Cuban Navy” in the Cuban Leadership Council’s press releases. At this point, it also became apparent to all but the most unobservant that U.S. deniability was gone. A “defector” flying a B26 that was supposedly from the Cuban air force was put on display in Miami. But the man was not a Cuban airman. It was quickly noticed by some newsmen that, judging from what he did not know, he could not have been in the Cuban air force, and that the model B26 he had “stolen” was one not in use by Cuba. Castro certainly knew something was up. Kennedy, realizing this, gave orders canceling the bombing mission that was supposed to isolate the beach where the Cubans were to land.seemed to know that the bombers would not show except the Cuban rebels on their ships. But even then, the Cuban rebels’ morale was so bad that the CIA handler in charge of the landing went ashore on April 17 along with the scuba divers who were to secure the beach. Onshore he found no defenders except a bogota full of partying locals.CIA agent radioed for the Cubans to land. Before they reached the beach, a single Cuban army jeep on patrol appeared and swept the beach with its spotlight. Likely, this was a standard procedure and as yet there really was nothing to see. But the CIA man opened up with his Thompson machine gun. The jeep fled and with it any chance of surprise.the boatloads of Cuban rebels reached the beach, it was noticed that no one had been appointed to command the landing. Once more, CIA personnel substituted for officers and directed the whole thing. When the escaped jeep reported the invasion, Castro was notified. He immediately ordered the nearest armed units to drive off the invaders. The units happened to be from the Cuban Military Academy. The cadets were armed and dispatched to the beachhead. One working airplane, a World War II Sea Fury, flown by the top pilot in the Cuban air force, Enrique Carreras, also scrambled and was soon strafing the beach. Pinned down by the cadets and the Sea Fury, the 1,500 Cuban expats and their CIA handlers dug in. More Cuban troops arrived, and soon it was difficult to run ammunition from the boats to the beach. By afternoon, the Cuban rebels’ ammunition was already running low. There was not going to be enough for a breakout from the beach. There was barely enough to maintain a defense.evening Bissell pulled President Kennedy from a formal reception. He explained to the president that the situation was dire. The only way to save the invasion was to release the fighters and bombers from the carrier Essex located nearby. It was at this point, after having approved every action taken so far, that Kennedy lost his nerve. He refused permission because he did not want the United States involved. The navy chief of staff who attended the meeting is said to have pointed out that it was already involved, but Kennedy refused permission. He suggested that the Cubans flee to the mountains as planned, but Bissell pointed out that the landing location had been changed and those mountains were now sixty miles away and on the other side of an increasing percentage of the Cuban army.fighting became more intense as more units of the Cuban army arrived on the eighteenth. Still the Cuban rebels held out on the beach. They had nowhere else to go. Kennedy did finally agree to one bombing raid by the “volunteer” Cubans in the B26s. American jets could accompany the bombers to discourage them being attacked, but were not to engage any ground targets. Unfortunately for deniability, the Cubans who were to fly the bombers refused to do so. They had seen how their comrades had been abandoned and were not willing to trust that the American fighters would be released to defend them. Eventually, the raid did occur. The bombers were being flown by that well-known Cuban unit the Alabama National Guard, dressed in their National Guard uniforms and operating on U.S. radio frequencies. Making things worse was that the rebel Cuban pilots were right. Someone forgot that the backup bombers in Nicaragua and the fighters in Florida were in different time zones. Four of the National Guard bombers were shot down when the fighters never appeared.April 19, it was apparent that the landing was a failure and that the rebels could not hold out much longer. The CIA handlers had gone back to the boats of their “Cuban Navy,” which were waiting offshore and loaded with ammunition and weapons. One attempt was made to get to the beach with the needed ammunition, but the convoy turned back when the leader of the 1,500 rebel Cubans surrendered before the first boat arrived. The Cuban army rounded up 1,189 invaders and found 114 dead. A year later, President Kennedy ransomed the survivors from Castro for a payment of $59 million.failure of the Bay of Pigs landing was likely inevitable given the changes to the plan. So perhaps the greatest mistake, among the many, was Kennedy simply approving the landings at all or Bissell proposing it. Kennedy’s had been a political decision, and he paid little attention to the military concerns. Certainly when JFK refused to support the landings with any American forces, he eliminated any chance of success or even survival by those Cubans who were risking their lives and freedom at the CIA’s behest.this been handled differently, there would have been a good chance that, if shown a viable alternative, the Cuban people would have thrown an increasingly more repressive Castro government out. The inaction by Russia during the entire drama demonstrated their unwillingness to get involved. But the plan did fail, and Cuba in 2009 remains one of the last communist regimes. Another consequence of this failure was a near-nuclear war. The Russians were emboldened by the stumbling reactions of President Kennedy, and they then felt free to establish nuclear missile bases in Cuba. Kennedy, having learned his lesson on being fainthearted, took a strong stand regarding the Cuban-based Russian missiles, and many experts say that both superpowers were just a few misunderstandings or missteps away from complete mutual atomic destruction. Had the plan worked as it had in Guatemala, the Western Hemisphere would be very different. A capitalistic Cuba may have discouraged many communist insurrections in Central and South America. Would there be a Hugo Chávez today if Kennedy had not lost his nerve?

. PUT UP WITH THIS MISTAKE1968 a scientist at 3M named Spencer Silver decided to work on improving one of the most successful of that company’s products, adhesive tape. What was needed was a better glue that held more firmly, but still allowed the tape to be removed. By 1970, he had instead developed something very different, but of no use to adhesive tape. What Silver had managed to produce was a glue that was easy to remove but had only weak sticking power. Interesting, but seemingly a failure if there were no commercial uses for it. Four years passed, and then a colleague of the scientist commented that he was frustrated that the small sheets of paper he used to mark that day’s songs in his hymnal would fall out. The friend didn’t want to use tape because he was worried about harming the book’s pages. Finally there was a use for the weak glue that had been a mistaken result four years earlier. By 1980, the Post-it note was found in offices all over the world.

. UNNEEDED RISKin a political scandal that threatened to destroy his presidency, Richard Nixon famously declared, “I am not a crook,” in a televised Q and A session with 400 Associated Press managing editors in November 1973; while he never recanted such words, the enormity of evidence suggesting he was a crook left a permanent blemish on Nixon’s presidency. As a result of the Watergate scandal, Nixon became not “the president who ended Vietnam” or “the president who oversaw large-scale racial integration” or even “the president who helped take America to the moon.” Nixon instead became “the president who resigned to avoid being justifiably impeached.”scandal initially looked like a mere robbery. On July 17, 1972, a security guard at the Watergate Office Complex—where the Democratic National Headquarters was located—noticed that tape was covering several doors to keep them unlocked. He removed the tape and continued his shift, but when he noticed that the doors had been retaped, he phoned the police. Five men were arrested and later indicted, along with two others, for conspiracy and burglary. The burglars had on their persons and in their hotel rooms thousands of dollars of cash that could be traced back to the 1972 Committee to Reelect the President, a fund-raising organization for the Nixon administration that was given the pejorative acronym CREEP by his opponents. This connection between the committee and the burglary earned the burglary considerable media attention. The scandal became the subject of an investigative journalism project spearheaded by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who relied largely on anonymous sources. Their correspondence with a source referred to as “Deep Throat” (revealed in 2005 to be former FBI Associate Director William Mark Felt) suggested that the burglary and its coverup had ties to the FBI, the Justice Department, and even the White House. This fueled a broader investigation that did not end with the burglars’ convictions. It was not long before Nixon asked for the resignation of some of his closest aides implicated in the scandal, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. He also fired White House Counsel John Dean, who would later become a witness against Nixon.held by the Senate garnered substantial media coverage; the majority of Americans saw some segment of the hearings between May 17 and August 7. It was learned during the hearings that all conversations held inside the Oval Office were recorded. Archibald Cox, a special counsel in the Justice Department charged with examining the Watergate scandal, subpoenaed the tapes; Nixon refused, citing executive privilege and issues of national security, and ordered Cox to withdraw the subpoena. Nixon offered Cox a rigged compromise: John C. Stennis, a famously hard-of-hearing Senator from Mississippi, would review the tapes and summarize them for the special prosecutors. When Cox refused, Nixon forced the resignation of Attorney General Elliott Richardson. The attorney general had been appointed just two months before, and he refused to comply with Nixon’s demand to fire Cox. Richardson was replaced with Robert Bork. Bork reluctantly dismissed Cox and replaced him with Leon Jaworski, who picked up where Cox left off. It was this incident, dubbed by the press as the “Saturday Night Massacre,” that led Nixon to assert he was not a crook.did not give up. His efforts caused Nixon to attempt a compromise, releasing transcripts of the tapes with information pertinent to national security redacted. Controversy stemmed from an almost twenty-minute gap in one of the tapes. In July 1974, the Supreme Court mandated that full access to the tapes had to be granted. That same month, the House Judiciary Committee voted to recommend three articles of impeachment against the president: obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress. In August, a tape was released that was deemed the smoking gun of the affair, an irrefutable piece of evidence that destroyed Nixon politically. It detailed a 1972 conversation between Nixon and Haldeman in which Haldeman described a plan to cover up the burglary by having the CIA obstruct an FBI investigation into the affair; Nixon approved the plan. That conversation, along with charges that Nixon paid blackmail money to hush conspirators, sounded the death knell for Nixon’s presidency. Nixon’s own lawyers abandoned him, and many who had been reluctant to impeach him declared that they had changed their minds.Nixon never admitted to being involved in Watergate or its coverup, he did declare that he regretted not handling the scandal correctly. After being informed that there were enough votes in Congress to impeach him, he resigned on August 8, 1974. His successor was Vice President Gerald Ford, who a month later fully pardoned Nixon to protect him from criminal prosecution. Such an action drew accusations that a deal had been made between Ford and Nixon in which the latter would be pardoned for handing over the mantle of the presidency, though no evidence of such a deal has ever surfaced. Many attribute Ford’s defeat in the election of 1976 to the Watergate incident.political landscape in the decades following Watergate had been irrevocably altered by the political consequences of Nixon’s actions. Initially, the Democrats gained substantial ground in congressional elections as a result of the subterfuge of a Republican organization devoted to getting Republicans elected. The practice of recording conversations in the White House ended. Many new laws came into existence with the ostensible purpose of encouraging ethics in government.language now shows just how deeply Nixon’s Watergate mistake affected the nation. Any public scandal is defined with the “-gate” suffix. These are across-the-board issues ranging from sports to pop culture: Spygate (a football controversy involving the New England Patriots spying on the New York Jets); Monica-gate (Monica Lewinsky’s ill-fated relationship with President Bill Clinton); and, more recently, Kanye-Gate (singer Kanye West publicly humiliating another singer during a televised awards ceremony).oversaw many positive political developments during his tenure. He had significant foreign policy successes, such as his historic visit to China in 1972, which opened up diplomatic relations with them. He also initiated the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union, and he signed a cease-fire with North Korea, effectively ending American involvement in the Vietnam War. He made significant advances on the domestic front, implementing many of the most progressive social reforms of the 1960s. During his presidency, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created, and Nixon signed the Clean Air Act and supported extensive conservation measures and environmental reforms. He was also the first president to take up the issue of welfare reform. He signed important legislation prohibiting gender discrimination and implemented the first significant Affirmative Action program. Perhaps most notable, he was pivotal in desegregating Southern public schools.the Watergate was broken into, Richard Nixon was up almost twenty points in the polls. He had a lead that was beyond insurmountable and won easily. Watergate was just not necessary on any level. This one mistake meant that his other achievements have been completely overshadowed by scandal. Perhaps the most negative consequence of Watergate was the rise in public cynicism toward politicians. So many investigations went on after Watergate—often initiated primarily to destroy political opponents—that the public became jaded. In the decades since Watergate, public apathy for important political issues has risen. Politicians and their political agendas are often looked at with deep skepticism. This mistake changed how we view our leaders. The fallout has reverberated across the decades, ushering in a new era of public cynicism, apathy, and partisanship that continues to this day.

Date: 2015-02-16; view: 1362