The Best Course Available: A Personal Account of the Secret U.S.-Japan Okinawa Reversion Negotiations

Chapter 1 The Transition to the Nixon Administration

A close presidential election In the November 1968 American presidential elections, Republican candidate Richard M. Nixon was chosen as the thirty-seventh president of the United States. However, Nixon had obtained only 43.5 percent of the vote, winning by only a 0.5 percent margin over the Democratic candidate and incumbent vice president, Hubert Humphrey. Such a tiny margin was unexpected—as my friends in Washington had told me at the end of September, Mr. Nixon’s victory had been predicted for quite some time. After the assassination of Robert Kennedy in June 1968, Nixon’s victory had seemed certain, but in the final stages of the contest Vice President Humphrey launched an aggressive campaign, narrowing the gap with his opponent. Nixon’s election reminded me of the presidential elections that had taken place eight years earlier, in 1960. I was then a researcher at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Like many American citizens, I had been glued to the television at the time of the so-called Great Debate, a duel between Vice President Nixon and the Democratic presidential candidate, Senator Chapter 1 The Transition to the Nixon Administration John F. Kennedy, two vigorous and energetic candidates. Vice President Nixon, who had steadily consolidated his political base during his eight years of service in the two Eisenhower administrations, was hard pressed to respond to the challenge from the up-and-coming Massachusetts senator . As the election drew nearer, the presidential race became much closer than anybody could have predicted. From the start of ballot counting until the very last minute, the outcome was uncertain, and Nixon was defeated by a hair’s breadth, a mere 0.16 percent margin. Personally, I preferred the more eloquent Kennedy and largely ignored Nixon’s career following his election defeat. Two years later, when Nixon lost his election bid to become governor of the state of California , everybody, myself included, assumed Nixon’s political life was over. However, like the proverbial phoenix, Nixon made a truly miraculous comeback in the 1968 elections. Nevertheless, Nixon could never come to terms with such a small margin of victory and subsequently nurtured an almost neurotic fear of defeat. This anxiety had become obsessional some four years later during his reelection campaign in 1972. As Nixon himself wrote in his memoirs, I would . . . have to keep an eye on my own political position. The victory over Humphrey had been far too close for comfort. If it had not been for the debacle of the Chicago convention and the burden of Johnson’s unpopularity, Humphrey might have won. There was no reason to expect that the Democrats would be so obliging as to provide me with similar advantages in 1972. If they were able to unite around Teddy Kennedy or Muskie or even Humphrey again, they would be very hard to beat. Therefore, I decided that we must begin immediately keeping track of everything the leading Democrats did. Information would be our first line of defense.1 Nixon’s anxiety was at the root of a number of political problems, first and foremost the Watergate scandal. Fear of electoral defeat also shaped Nixon’s political strategy in a separate context—one which was important in the Okinawa reversion case, although it was initially unconnected; this was the so-called textiles agreement. To secure the Republican nomination and to defeat the Democratic candidate in the presidential contest, Nixon needed the backing of the southern states. As part of his preliminary strategy in the spring of 1968, half a year before the presidential election itself, Nixon attempted to win the support of the powerful textiles industry, a major voting bloc. Nixon’s approach was to conclude an agreement (the 34 Transition to the Nixon Administration “Southern strategy”) with South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, pledging on August 21 that he would “take the steps necessary to extend the concept of international trade agreements to all other textiles articles involving wool, man-made fibers and blends.”2 From my perspective, observing the course of the presidential elections, I completely overlooked the political significance of this agreement. Moreover, in Japan there was little information or reporting on the matter. In retrospect, I was guilty of political insensitivity and shortsightedness . During the 1968 campaign it was assumed that whichever candidate became president, both Nixon and Humphrey were committed to a foreign policy focused...