“No
event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War.”
No one did more to keep it that way than the author of the preceding
sentence, Richard Milhous Nixon. It’s the opening line of his 1985 best
seller,
. In the former president’s version of
events, he won the war, only to watch helplessly as Congress “proceeded
to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.” One reviewer wrote
that Nixon had fabricated a “stabbed in the back” myth, one all too
reminiscent of the
that German militarists
created to blame their defeat in World War I on their country’s
civilians (rather than on the predictable shift in the balance of
battlefield power caused by America’s entrance into the war on the
Allied side). In the battle over history, however, Nixon had a crucial
advantage over his critics. They didn’t have access to the best
evidence: the classified record of Nixon’s foreign policy making,
especially his secretly recorded White House tapes. The tapes covered
the critical period— February 16, 1971, to July 12, 1973— when Nixon
withdrew the last American troops from Vietnam, negotiated a settlement
of the war with North Vietnam’s Communist government, engineered the
diplomatic opening to China, established a détente with Russia, and won a
landslide reelection. The tapes reveal the complex and subtle interplay
between all these actions— including the ways Nixon manipulated
geopolitical events for domestic political gain. Unsurprisingly, he
fought until his death in 1994 to keep the American people from hearing
the tapes; tragically, it took the federal government nearly two
decades, until 2013, to finish declassifying these invaluable and
(thanks to Nixon’s sound-activated recording system) comprehensive
historical records. By then it was almost too late. Politicians, policy
makers, and pundits now routinely invoke Nixon’s backstabbing myth as
reason to block attempts to end America’s twenty-first-century wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan. They even promote Nixon-era strategy as a path to
victory in both these countries.
Nixon’s tapes reveal, however, that he merely
came up with a politically acceptable substitute for victory.
Neither Nixon nor any of his military or civilian advisers ever devised a
workable strategy to win the war, but Nixon and National Security
Adviser Henry Kissinger devised a brilliant, if ruthless, strategy to
win the election. As Nixon and Kissinger saw it, victory in the
presidential election did not depend on victory in Vietnam; they merely
had to postpone— not prevent — the Communist takeover of South Vietnam
until sometime after November 1972. To accomplish this end, Nixon kept
American soldiers in Vietnam into the fourth year of his presidency, at
the cost of thousands of American lives.
That was the military
side of his secret strategy. Like his official, publicly announced
strategy, Nixon’s secret strategy had both a military and a diplomatic
side. Officially, Nixon’s strategy was “Vietnamization and negotiation.”
Publicly, Nixon said Vietnamization would train and equip the South
Vietnamese to defend themselves without the need for American troops.
Secretly, Nixon used Vietnamization as an excuse to prolong the war long
enough to delay South Vietnam’s fall past Election Day 1972.
As
for the diplomatic side, Nixon said publicly that the aim of
negotiations was to reach an agreement with the North guaranteeing the
South’s right to choose its government by free elections. Secretly,
however, he did not require the North to abandon its goal of military
conquest of the South. Instead, he settled for a “decent interval”— a
period of a year or two — between his final withdrawal of American
troops and the Communists’ final takeover of South Vietnam. For Nixon to
completely evade the blame for defeat, he had to do more than prop up
the Saigon government through 1972. If it fell shortly after he brought
the troops home, Americans would see that their soldiers had died in
vain, and Nixon would go down in history as the first president to lose a
war. Nixon could avoid this fate, however, if the Communists gave him a
“decent interval.”
Nixon and Kissinger’s secret strategy, though
clearly immoral, did not spring simply from the character flaws of two
men. It was a logical, if extreme, outgrowth of Cold War politics.
Successful Cold War politicians blamed their opponents for losing
countries to the Communists — even countries where Americans and
Communists had not been fighting.
Republicans gained control of
both houses of Congress in 1946 in part by blaming Democrats for
“losing” Eastern Europe to Communism; the GOP also picked up House and
Senate seats in 1950 by blaming Democrats for “losing” China to Mao
Zedong’s Communist revolutionaries. JFK won the presidency in 1960 in
part by blaming Republicans for “losing” Cuba to Communist Fidel Castro.
Given this political tendency, Nixon had reason to fear that if he lost
Vietnam in his first term, American voters would deny him a second one.
That was political reality. It doesn’t excuse what Nixon and Kissinger
did; it merely shows that they acted on the basis of rational political
calculation.
Just as important as how Nixon won the 1972 election
is how his opponent lost. According to the Emory University professor
Drew Westen, political campaigns are built, in part, on “the story your
opponent is telling about himself” and “the story you are telling about
your opponent.” The story Nixon told about himself— that he would keep
the war going only until South Vietnam could defend itself or the North
agreed to let it choose its government by free elections — was not true.
Unfortunately, the story his opponent told about him wasn’t true,
either.
The Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. George McGovern
of South Dakota, did not accuse Nixon of prolonging the war and faking
peace for political gain, of putting his reelection campaign above the
lives of American soldiers, of sacrificing them for a fig leaf behind
which he would secretly surrender the South to the Communists. Instead,
McGovern and other liberals claimed that Nixon would never allow Saigon
to fall, that a vote to reelect the president was a vote for four more
years of war. Although Nixon’s tapes show that he was not the steadfast
ally of Saigon that he pretended to be, McGovern’s charges
counterproductively reinforced the image that Nixon had carefully
cultivated.
Worse, McGovern didn’t know what to do in October 1972
when South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu publicly declared that
the deal Nixon and Kissinger made with North Vietnam was a sellout and
surrender to the Communists. The charge was both damning and true, but
because it contradicted what McGovern had been saying, he failed to
seize the opportunity it offered. Autopsies of McGovern’s campaign
usually detail his parade of political pratfalls through the summer and
fall of 1972, but they neglect its central strategic flaw. Vietnam was
the biggest issue of the general election campaign, and McGovern fumbled
it.
It didn’t have to be that way. Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-
Massachusetts, provided an alternative strategy when he accurately
accused Nixon of cynically using Vietnamization as a fraudulent cover
for timing military withdrawal to his reelection campaign. Kennedy’s
brother-in-law Sargent Shriver — McGovern’s running mate in the fall
campaign — accurately accused Nixon of negotiating surrender. If
McGovern had told
that story throughout the campaign, not only
would he have been right, but Nixon’s troop withdrawals and Thieu’s
blowup would have provided the story with credible confirmation.
Instead, McGovern and other liberals lost control of the foreign policy
narrative, telling a story about Nixon that was both false and
flattering to the man it was designed to defeat.
Though
the 1972 campaign is decades past, the myth Nixon made (and McGovern
unwittingly reinforced) persists, now hallowed as if it were settled
history. Right and Left agree that Nixon was determined to use American
military power to preserve South Vietnam until Congress tied his hands.
The Right calls that losing Vietnam, the Left calls it ending the war,
but both agree that’s what happened. As we shall see, Nixon invited
Congress to pass legislation denying him authority to militarily
intervene in Vietnam, despite having the votes he needed to sustain a
veto. Legislation barring military intervention throughout Indochina
(Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) passed with a veto-proof majority only
after Nixon’s conservative supporters joined his liberal opponents and
accepted his invitation. Like Nixon’s secret military and diplomatic
strategy, this legislative maneuver enabled him to deny responsibility
for losing Vietnam.
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The danger of the backstabbing myth that Nixon spun in
No More Vietnams is that it paves the way for more Vietnams. Today, no politician
wants to be accused of losing Iraq or Afghanistan. That doesn’t mean
any of them (or their civilian and military advisers) have ever come up
with
a way to win either war. Nixonian myth, however, gives them a
politically acceptable alternative to admitting failure. They can hold
up
the false hopes that training and equipping the local armies will enable
them to replace American soldiers and that a political settlement will
reconcile parties who have demonstrated their inclination to fight out
their differences. The cost of false hope is measured in lost and shattered
lives.
Fortunately, Nixon’s
myth is shattered by the evidence on Nixon’s tapes and in his White
House documents. I’ve been studying Nixon’s tapes for decades, first as a
journalist writing in the pages of the
New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Boston Globe Magazine,and
other publications in the 1990s, and since 2000 as a researcher with
the Presidential Recordings Program of the University of Virginia’s
Miller Center. The tapes tell a story that is both true and,
potentially, lifesaving. Once we remember this hidden part of our past,
we will no longer be condemned to repeat it.
Excerpted from “Fatal Politics: The Nixon Tapes, the Vietnam War, and the Casualties of Reelection” by Ken Hughes. Copyright © 2015 by Ken Hughes. Reprinted by arrangement with University of Virginia Press. All rights reserved.
Richard Nixon (Credit: AP)
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