(2 of 10)
In the U.S., a hitherto obscure former Pentagon analyst, Daniel Ellsberg, became famous overnight; he illuminated the nation's Viet Nam policy process and precipitated a classic clash between press and Government by releasing most of a 47-volume secret Pentagon study of the war. The Nixon Administration's Justice Department, under the President's closest personal adviser, Attorney General John Mitchell, acted swiftly in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent newspaper publication of the papers, then moved to prosecute Ellsberg. It was Mitchell, too, who decided to bring conspiracy charges against Roman Catholic Priest Philip Berrigan and several others for, among other things, an alleged plot to kidnap Presidential Adviser Henry Kissinger as a means of dramatizing opposition to the war.
If anyone could challenge Nixon's ranking as the year's dominant figure, it was China's wily Chou Enlai. He not only strengthened his own hand in a Peking power struggle, but succeeded in his policy of pushing China on to the world's diplomatic stage. Despite forlorn efforts by the U.S. to keep Taiwan in the United Nations as China was finally admitted, Chiang Kai-shek's government was expelled. It was Chou, as well as the remote Chairman Mao Tse-tung, who responded to Nixon's overtures and opened the Forbidden City to Henry Kissinger, who had some claim of his own to be considered diplomacy's Man of the Year. But only a U.S. President could take the first steps toward rapprochement, and perhaps only a Republican President named Richard Nixon could have brought it off with so little conservative outcry.
It was a year in which the nation's perception of its President shifted sharply. In the early months, still fresh was the memory of his strident 1970 campaign, which exploited fear and tried to connect Democrats with rising crime and unrest. This approach was rejected by the voters and gave Nixon's most likely 1972 opponent, Senator Edmund Muskie, a priceless chance to appear cooler and wiser in an Election Eve broadcast.
Overstated Views. Apparently stung, Nixon took a loftier route in 1971, although there were some lapses. To protect his political right flank, he recklessly intervened in the case of Lieut. William Calley Jr., who was convincingly convicted of mass murder at My Lai; Nixon had to be reminded by an eloquent Army prosecutor, Captain Aubrey Daniel III, of the higher legal and moral issues at stake. He again attempted to make the Supreme Court into a haven for conservative mediocrity; before getting two solid nominees approved, he considered a list of people so undistinguished that the American Bar Association found some of them "not qualified."
He hurt himself in earlier years by overstating his old views and now overstated his new ones, like a man who has learned a new lesson and repeats it too vehemently. Exaggeration continued to be one of the less attractive traits of Nixon's rhetoric in 1971. Thus he claimed, without the slightest qualification, that "Vietnamization has succeeded." He offered the sweeping opinion that "I seriously doubt if we will ever have another war." When he devalued the dollar, he declared it "the most significant monetary agreement in the history of the world."