“The day they actually bury Richard Nixon, they’ll need to fill the hole with concrete,
back over it with a steamroller, then post a guard there just in case he tries to make a run for it.”
--Jimmy Breslin, New York Daily News, July 2, 1974
“Ed, you’ve heard of reincarnation, right?”
“Sure, sure.”
“Well, most people talk about how they’d like to come back as a dog or a tree.
Richard Nixon must’ve been a cat that came back as a human, because every time you think he’s dead, he finds another life.”
--Johnny Carson with Ed McMahon, The Tonight Show, July 1, 1974
As July came in humid and damp off the Chesapeake Bay, settling over the one-time malarial swamp now home to the nation’s capital, the 37th President of the United States arose from the coma he’d spent the past six weeks in. Despite all of the pain he’d inflicted upon her, physically and mentally, Pat Nixon was overjoyed that her husband had survived. She reached out for his hand, held it, said how much she loved him. It was the most emotion she’d shown in a very long time. The gratitude in those beady, darkened eyes was manifest, her heart lifted by it, yet that feeling was quickly dashed when the business light switched on in his head. An awkward silence ensued when he asked if his briefer was in yet. Pat deferred until the doctors had come in to check on their famous patient. Then the metaphorical bomb was dropped, and the ensuing rage that erupted from Richard Nixon rattled the windows of the Presidential Suite at Bethesda Naval Hospital. The chief of neurology watched the veins rise in the former president’s neck and wondered if a fatal stroke was going to finish off what the phlebitis-induced clot had not. Yet, in keeping with the survival instincts of nature’s most unloved creatures, Nixon did not suffer a cerebral hemorrhage. He found that inner animal strength and settled himself, digesting the information, absorbing it.
Those bastards removed me from office when I couldn’t even defend myself. I don’t care if it takes me the rest of my life. I will get every last goddamn one of those ungrateful rats.
While one leader honed in the crucible of the 1950s pulled himself out of the grave, much further south, another was in his last moments. Juan Perón, the president of Argentina for the third time, the driver of that nation’s politics, was trying to recover from two heart attacks he’d suffered within the last week. His outlook was grim enough that his third wife and vice president, Isabel, had been sworn in under Argentina’s version of the 25th Amendment as acting president. The aides and loyal underlings that had followed Perón for thirty years scurried about, the more religious of them praying, the rest wondering how safe their positions would be. Their leader had been friendly with Allende, after all, and he was in the ground, and the man who had him murdered, General Augusto Pinochet, had just taken Allende’s office as president of Chile. He’d visited Buenos Aires, not that long ago, and didn’t exactly hit it off with Perón. Pinochet wanted Allende’s supporters that had fled across the frontier border with Argentina into the mountains. Into exile, hiding and waiting for their chance to avenge the loss of their martyred leader. Perón was not going to hand anyone over to this strutting martinet, but couldn’t say it out loud, for he valued being able to keep a cordial relationship with Santiago despite his personal distaste. He told the general
“Perón tarda, pero cumple (Perón takes his time, but accomplishes).” Now time had caught up to the old grandee of Latin American politics, and the third heart attack struck, the one that stopped the fiercely emotional Argentinian’s life force for all time. Isabel Perón was the leader of Argentina now, but how long would it be until an Argentine Pinochet emerged?
*****
“So it’s Trudeau again, huh?”
“Yes, sir, he does have a talent for coming out of things on the good side.”
“Well, that’s not a bad thing. He campaigned on being against wage and price controls. For a lefty he’s got good business sense, sounds like.”
“Perhaps we should invite him to the summit with the Brits.”
“That might not be a bad idea. The more cooperation we get, the better.”
--Notes from a meeting between President Connally and Treasury Secretary Rockefeller
July 10, 1974
*****
“I don’t believe in binational states. There are wonderful examples of this, prosperous multinational states: Switzerland, Switzerland, and Switzerland. Everywhere else, be it Cyprus, Austria-Hungary, or the Ottoman Empire, has ended in a terrible bloodbath.”
--Amos Oz, 1972, discussing the Six-Day War at Bar-Ilan University
Few places in the world had seen so much violence incurred over so few miles of land as the island of Cyprus. The tiny island’s rich history was soaked in blood and tears—located within shouting distance of Turkey, Lebanon and Israel, but settled by Greeks as far back as 1100 BC, the rich soil, Mediterranean sea salt breezes and utility as a port left it coveted by many. The Hittites, Egyptians, Romans, Arab Caliphate, the Knights Templar, the Republic of Venice, and the Ottoman Empire had all come through and taken the island as their own. Through all of it, the descendants of those Greeks that had settled it for three thousand years had clung to the island, loved it, desired it to be part of their homeland. When the Ottomans fell to the Russians in 1878 and the British took it over to keep it away from Moscow’s outstretched hands, the native Greeks thought their moment was at hand.
When World War I broke out, and the Ottomans decided to throw in with the Germans after a series of British missteps, there was no question of Cyprus being returned to their former masters. The answer was no, and when the Empire disintegrated under the weight of fighting a war they were too weak to wage, Cyprus became a Crown Colony of the British Empire. The Second World War brought disaster to the British, but Cyprus held, and joined forces with them to fight off the Nazis, and after the war, the British repaid the favor by undertaking an effort to get the Turks and the Greeks to renounce their claims on Cyprus. It took nearly fifteen years to achieve, but the signing of the London and Zurich Agreements in 1959 was a major feather in the cap of Harold MacMillan’s foreign policy. It’d been fifteen years since then, with Archbishop Makarios III of the Greek Orthodox Church serving as President, and Dr. Fazıl Küçük as Vice-President, representing the 18% Turkish population of the island. It’d been rough, there’d been a few close calls, such as attempted subversion by the Greek military junta after the 1967 coup in Athens, but the peace had largely held.
Until now.
The Greek junta had spent months pressuring Makarios, even trying to assassinate him, and had failed in doing so. Finally, with the help of the Greeks on Cyprus who favored unification, they launched a full-scale military coup, sending Makarios fleeing to RAF Akrotyri on the island, where he was rapidly evacuated by the quick-thinking base commander to Gibraltar. The uproar spread around the world as fast as word got out from the various embassies and the BBC World Service. While the NATO countries were most concerned, seeing as Greece and Turkey were crucial members of the alliance for reasons of geography, the Soviets also had reasons both historical and geographical for great interest. Henry Kissinger quickly dispatched Joseph Sisco, the former Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs; now the newly-installed Undersecretary for Political Affairs. From the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Big Jim Callaghan bundled the very capable Roy Hattersley, his deputy as Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, on the first flight available immediately after the emergency cabinet meeting (Harold’s performance was somewhat erratic, giving all in attendance further pause as to his ability to carry on in the job). The Brits and Soviets wanted a return to
status quo antebellum, Kissinger (through Sisco) would be content with
enosis (the unification of Greece and Cyprus) or a return to independence, and the Turks wanted the northern end of Cyprus as their own and let the rest stay independent. It was an absolute mess, and nobody was satisfied with the offers, which to the Turks and Makarios both seemed like a stalling tactic.
Events quickly escalated from there, with Makarios going before the United Nations in a dramatic appearance a mere 72 hours after the coup and denouncing the invasion by the Greeks, calling it an affront to Greek and Turks both. Two days after that, believing (correctly) that the U.S. would happily accept Cyprus being integrated into Greece, the Turks came storming onto the northern shore of the island. The Cypriot National Guard (an uninspiring force comprising torpedo boats and ancient Soviet T-34 tanks well past their prime) launched several attacks on the beachhead and failed, for rather obvious reasons. The Greeks and Turks now both raced to reinforce, and the Greeks were first to do so, parachuting in two companies of infantry with anti-tank missiles and mortars. The CNG brought all of its T-34s to bear and along with the Greek infantry took the fight to the Turks and nearly collapsed it. What saved them from being driven into the sea was the appearance of F-5As from the Turkish Air Force firing Zuni rockets with antitank warheads, taking out several of the T-34s. This was followed by a second wave dropping CBU-42 cluster bombs upon the exposed Greek infantry. For those unacquainted with a cluster bomb, imagine a shotgun blast magnified by thousands. That’s just one cluster bomb. The Turks dropped dozens of them. The Turks won the encounter, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. As this battle raged, a Greek landing craft, the
Lesvos, was using its 40mm Bofors antiaircraft guns to shell Turkish Cypriot militia while landing another two companies of infantry forces. When reports of the attack reached the Turks, they sent out three destroyers, concerned the Greeks were bringing forces
en masse to Cyprus. The
Lesvos sprinted back to its home port, and in the nighttime confusion and reports of multiple Greek ships, the F-4 Phantoms of the Turkish Air Force ended up attacking their own destroyers, sinking one and setting another ablaze. It was a horrid mistake, one that placed the Greeks in a position to defeat what remained of the Turkish forces and, if they so chose, massacre the Turkish Cypriots.
Life has a funny way of interrupting when you’re making plans.
What came next was the confluence of three men’s reactions to the events of 20 July. The first was Callaghan in London, aghast at the scenario laying before them and immediately burying himself deep inside Wilson’s sphincter until Wilson agreed to lay down the law, so to say, with Washington. The second was Connally, who didn’t need Harold Wilson to tell him what a disaster this could be: an all-out war between two pivotal NATO nations. He’d already made a call directly to Dimitrios Ioannidis, the brigadier who’d ousted Georgios Papadopoulos from the junta leadership, to tell him he’d immediately freeze all U.S. military aid to the Greeks if they tried to take advantage of the desperate Turkish situation. This led to Ioannidis calling in an unknowing Joseph Sisco, who endured an hour-long diatribe that focused on the withdrawal of support, repeating, “You promised me you’d keep the Turks out of Cyprus!” Sisco, caught short by the President bypassing his boss, Kissinger, could only stammer out that he had made no promises, just offers to do his best. When Wilson called, Connally was already prepping to tell the Turks to not send any reinforcements unless they wanted the USAF to load up the B61s on a C-141 and fly right out of Turkey forever. That was an extremely big stick to wave at the Turks, and Connally knew it. He was going to be the Law now.
The third person who saw opportunity and took it was Spyros Markezinis, the very brief former Prime Minister of Greece, having served for a whopping total of six weeks last year before Ioannidis decided he didn’t like the liberalization that Markezinis was creating and threw both him and Papadopoulos out. While some of the old guard politicians like Konstantinos Karamanlis wanted nothing to do with their former Cabinet colleague because he’d, in their eyes, legitimized the junta (even though he took the job precisely because the task was to ease out the junta), others still spoke to him. These people had eyes and ears, they knew that dissatisfaction was rising all around and they knew that the Americans were now threatening to throw the Greek economy into the abyss if Ioannidis took one more step in pursuit of
enosis. And so they talked. They talked to Spyros because he was the money genius, the man who saved Greece’s economy in the 1950s; the only civilian to get on the inside, if only for a few weeks, of the junta. There was one other thing, too, something almost everyone had forgotten. Spyros had spent the war in the Resistance, leading one of the many bands despite being only 5’2” and a lawyer by training, and had caught the eye of old Marshal Alexander Papagos himself in the early days of the Cold War. That wasn’t an accident.
Spyros organized. He called secret meetings, cajoled and flattered, slowly brought more old guard politicians into the fold, and on July 24th, a general strike began. Across Athens, Corinth, Patras, Tripoli, Livadia, and Thessaloniki, the people took to the streets. The Navy, royalist to its core and already having attempted to throw out the generals a year before, steamed the destroyer HS
Kanaris (named after the old hero of the war for Greek independence) into the Petalioi Gulf. As Ioannidis tried to sneak reinforcements to Crete using a pair of Olympic Airlines 727s, the
Kanaris aimed its brand new French Crotale surface-to-air missiles skyward and shot both of them down. With the loss of his last trump card, so went any power Ioannidis had left. The other members of the junta had him arrested, and reached out to Spyros Markezinis. They knew him, even if it had been a brief association, and trusted him a damn sight more than they did the other royalists and socialists out there. Brought into the Royal Palace, they offered Markezinis the Presidency. It was a much higher step up. To their shock, he declined, and told them that if this were to work, then he would have to be in the Cabinet, as a symbol of intraparty cooperation, while a rival served as President. It took a man of true principles to turn down their offer, but the little barrister had those qualities in spades. And so, Konstantinos Karamanlis was named President of Greece, while the prime minister ousted in 1967, Panagiotis Kanellopoulos, returned to that position, with Spyros Markezinis as deputy prime minister and Minister of Finance. To further ensure stability, Andreas Papandreou returned from exile to serve as Minister of Public Order, lending leftist credibility to the unity government.
And so by July 27th, while sporadic fighting continued on Cyprus between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, the military government of Greece ceased to be. By the early days of August, a United Nations peacekeeping force had landed on the island while Hattersley conducted talks in Geneva with representatives from the new Greek government and the existing Turkish one. Also present was Makarios III, determined that these men should not partition his nation. The Turks were threatening to go onshore again in the north to seize ground, and while the Greeks were no longer led by generals, national pride required them to fight against any seizures or divisions of land by Turks. For now, though, the peace held. The rest would be figured out soon enough.
*****
“I stand here today to address what has come to feel like semi-annual speculation about my political ambitions for higher office. It has been a difficult five years for my family and I. There’s the mistakes I’ve made and the suffering my wonderful son, Ed Junior, has gone through with his cancer that he has miraculously recovered from. There’s also the greater tragedy of the Kennedy family. One brother shot down over France. One who became President and struck down by an assassin. A third who ran for President—and would have won—until an assassin came for him too. Now I am the only son of Joseph P. Kennedy remaining, and I have done my best these past five years to match his legacy as patriarch of the Kennedys. Part of me wants to leave it at that, to look over my family, to help care for my nieces and nephews who lost their fathers.
The rest of me, though, looks out at this nation and sees it crying out for real leadership. The last six years have been nothing but an orgy of criminality from the executive branch. Things simply cannot go on as they are. If we are to move forward through the rest of the 1970s and regain our standing as a progressive, freedom-loving nation, then we cannot look to the retreads that President Connally has instilled at the White House, not least of all his choice for Vice-President, Ronald Reagan. Mr. Reagan’s political philosophy lies somewhere in the sixteenth century, and is not fit to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency. I think the President is an honorable man, but honorable men can and do make mistakes. The appointment of Mr. Reagan shows that he valued expediency over the right temperament to succeed him if necessary.
I can no longer deny what reason and common sense are telling me, and it is with this in mind that I am declaring my candidacy for the Democratic nomination as President of the United States.
--Ted Kennedy, July 30th, 1974
Excerpt of his campaign announcement in Lafayette Park,
with his back to the White House
