became a divisive issue on the domestic scene, diverting resources from Johnson's domestic agenda and polarizing Johnson's own broad-based New Deal constituency, finally disempowering him so much that he withdrew from presidential politics altogether.
Nixon's imperial presidency appears to have been enabled partly by the disempowerment of Johnson, but partly because of evidence uncovered in the wake of Watergate that Nixon and company made a project of wielding executive power on a variety of issue fronts. Nixon came into office on a promise of Vietnamization of the war--the opposite of what had happened with LBJ (Schaller, Scharff, and Schulzinger 338ff). In concert with Henry Kissinger, Nixon opened "back channels" of negotiation with the Soviet Union, leading toward a series of foreign-policy coups from dTtente to the opening with the PRC (Schaller, Scharff, and Schulzinger 353-5). On the other hand, Nixon also oversaw the invasion of Cambodia and Laos in 1970 as a strategy of pursuing North Vietnamese military units, which in the U.S. culminated in the shooting of four antiwar students at Kent State University in Ohio and Nixon's dismissal of the dead and protesters more generally as "bums" (Schaller, Scharff, and Schulzinger 340-1). In 1973, Nixon operatives facilitated the military coup that toppled a duly elected socialist government in Chile. Persistent and growing antiwar protest, including Pentagon Papers disclosure of everything from phony body counts to phony military assessments and the viciousness of atrocities (Schaller, Scharff, and Schulzinger 342-3) did not disempower Nixon's presidential strategy but instead fostered the enemies list, the taping of White House conversations, and the creation
...