The Nixon Effect. Douglas E. Schoen

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СКАЧАТЬ been reduced by 95 percent. And draft calls now average fewer than 5,000 men a month, and we expect to bring them to zero next year.⁹

      In branding the North Vietnamese offensive “a clear case of naked and unprovoked aggression across an international border,” Nixon made clear that the attack was being repelled solely by South Vietnamese forces. “There are no United States ground troops involved,” Nixon said. “None will be involved.”¹⁰

      These massive troop withdrawals not only lowered American casualties in Vietnam but also slowly drained the life out of the antiwar movement at home—and with that, finally brought a close to the anarchic energies of the late 1960s, which a few years earlier had seemed to threaten the capacity of the United States to govern itself. Yet Nixon received virtually no credit for the twin feats of saving American lives and restoring American domestic tranquility.

      The remaining problem, for Nixon, was the outcome of the war itself.

      The truth of the matter was that Nixon saw Vietnam, to some extent, as a distraction from big-power, Cold War–related politics—the great matters of state that mattered most to him, and in which he hoped to have the most far-reaching impact. So he wanted to get out of Vietnam for many of the same reasons that the American people did. Unlike them, however, he had to worry about his reelection. Nixon’s management of the American withdrawal from Vietnam was at least partially influenced by his concern over electoral politics—namely, that the war not be brought to an end too quickly, lest problems develop in the interim that might reflect badly on the administration’s policies.

      Documentary evidence suggests that Kissinger convinced the president that total American troop withdrawals should not be completed until after the 1972 elections.¹¹ And, in fact, twenty years later, during the 1992 presidential primaries, Nixon even told reporters that George H. W. Bush should have kept the Gulf War running through the campaign, as it would have helped his reelection chances.

      “We had a lot of success with that in 1972,” Nixon said.¹²

      Yet Nixon did succeed in bringing the war to an end, even if the process was protracted and difficult. Peace talks in Paris, which had continued off and on for years, finally began to pick up momentum in 1972. In October of that year, just a month before the presidential election—with Nixon holding a commanding lead in the polls over George McGovern—Kissinger held a press conference and announced that peace was at hand. He hadn’t apparently cleared that view with South Vietnam’s president Thiêu, who objected to terms that would allow Hanoi to retain all of its current territory. But with peace—of a kind—so near to achievement, Nixon knew that he held the advantage, and he pressured Thiêu to accept the agreement by threatening to cut off aid to Saigon. The South Vietnamese president resisted, continuing to push for changes to the tentative agreement; when the North Vietnamese responded by also backing away from the talks, Nixon was left looking for leverage.

      He and Kissinger then unleashed the so-called Christmas Bombings in late December to try to bring Hanoi back to the negotiating table. Undertaken a month after Nixon had won the greatest landslide in presidential history, the bombings were some of the most massive in the history of warfare. They did extensive damage to North Vietnamese infrastructure, and Nixon credited the bombardment with bringing Hanoi back to the peace table (others dispute the cause and effect). Perhaps the bombings had the effect Nixon claimed, perhaps not; without question, the momentum for a peace agreement was strong on the American side, and he and Kissinger were determined to bring it to closure. On January 27, 1973, the Paris Peace Accords were signed, bringing an end to American participation in the Vietnam War, the nation’s longest military conflict.

      The agreement constituted “peace with honor,” Nixon said in a televised address to the American people.¹³ Others had their doubts. Critics pointed out that the peace terms—under which the North would be permitted to keep 140,000 troops in South Vietnam, even as American troops withdrew their presence down to zero—were essentially the same as the ones on offer in 1969. And since 1969, they said, an additional twenty-five thousand Americans had died in combat. What had been gained?

      That question became more haunting as the peace agreement broke down, due largely to blatant violations by the North Vietnamese Communists. By later in 1973, the two sides were fighting again, and President Thiêu declared the agreement null and void. The now fully Vietnamized fighting forces of the South proved, alas, not able to repel the North’s march—and Nixon, by now reeling under the Watergate scandal, had lost his political leverage to help Saigon. In August 1974, when Nixon resigned the presidency, the war was going very poorly for the South. By spring 1975, the North Vietnamese were nearing Saigon. Thiêu appealed to President Gerald Ford for assistance, but the new Congress, chock full of new progressive Democratic arrivals, elected on anti-Watergate sentiment, blocked the request—one of the most shameful congressional moments in American history, representing a flat-out desertion of an ally in dire need. Thiêu resigned, accusing the Americans of betraying his country—not only by abandoning him but also by forcing him into the 1973 peace agreement. On April 30, the North Vietnamese overran Saigon. The Vietnam War ended at last with victory for the Communists. The North and South would soon unite to become the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

      In total, fifty-eight thousand Americans lost their lives in Vietnam, and given its tragic outcome, the sense remains that they died in vain. Some blamed Nixon for prolonging a war that, they claimed, he and Henry Kissinger were never fully interested in winning; all they wanted, on this view, was to establish a “decent interval” between final withdrawal from Vietnam and the total collapse of the Saigon regime. Critics claimed that they cared only about securing the release of American POWs and covering themselves from political damage in the 1972 elections. Otherwise, South Vietnam would be left to fend for itself.¹⁴ Of course, even if one accepts this view, it would at most apportion only partial blame to Nixon. The commitments made by Nixon’s predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson, and even Johnson’s predecessor, John F. Kennedy, were fateful as well.

      I believe, however, that Nixon’s own assessment of these events is closer to the mark. He always maintained that the United States had left Paris in 1973 with a solid agreement to win the peace—and he saw a different culprit in the demise of South Vietnam. “By 1973,” Nixon would later tell Monica Crowley, his assistant in his final years, “we had achieved our political objective; South Vietnam’s independence had been secured. But by 1975, the Congress destroyed our ability to enforce the Paris agreement and left our allies vulnerable to Hanoi’s invading forces. If I sound like I’m blaming Congress, I am.”¹⁵ Indeed, it is impossible to overlook the magnitude of Congress’s decision to wash its hands of the war in 1975.

      The American loss in Vietnam was one of the most bitter chapters in American history and continues to haunt our politics today, but Nixon makes a legitimate case in saying that he left the disposition of the war in a manageable state. As the leader of a democracy, he was bound to consult the sentiment of the popular majority, which overwhelmingly desired a drawdown of the American commitment—even if the hope was that such a withdrawal could be done in concert with a victorious outcome. Ultimately, Nixon had to address the American interest first, and in bringing the troops home, reducing American casualties, and securing terms for what, at least in theory, could have been a manageable peace, he achieved as much and probably more than any other president could have done in similar circumstances. It is true that he agreed to a peace in 1973 that he could have had four years earlier—but whether it had been agreed to at the later date or in 1969, Nixon seemed to have gotten the best terms he could have. He extracted the United States from a war that was costing it dearly in human, political, and financial terms. If this doesn’t count quite as a resounding triumph, it deserves the more sober term “achievement.” It took some doing.

      Nixon’s conduction of the war had several substantive effects beyond Vietnam. At home, congressional anger about his actions in Cambodia led to the adoption of the War Powers Resolution in 1973, a federal СКАЧАТЬ