The Nixon Effect. Douglas E. Schoen
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in the region felt that he might go to any length—including the use of nuclear weapons—they might be more inclined to come to the negotiating table. “Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace,” Nixon told Bob Haldeman.7 But Nixon’s blunter measures—from mining Haiphong Harbor and bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia to issuing a worldwide nuclear alert—did not make Hanoi back down.
In spring 1970, Nixon upped the ante in Cambodia. Frustrated by the continued presence of large North Vietnamese supply caches in the country and the North’s use of portions of the country as staging grounds for attacks, he ordered a joint invasion (he called it an “incursion”) of the country by American and South Vietnamese troops. His “secret” bombing of Cambodia in 1970 ignited domestic unrest in the United States, sparking the last great wave of campus protests—the largest in American history—which culminated tragically. National Guardsmen fired at protestors at Kent State University, killing four. Two weeks later, at a protest at Jackson State in Mississippi, police fired again on protestors, killing two.
Nixon expressed sorrow about the incidents, but he also made clear that the increasingly violent antiwar movement bore significant responsibility. “This should remind us all once again that when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy. It is my hope that this tragic and unfortunate incident will strengthen the determination of the nation’s campuses—administrators, faculty, and students alike—to stand firmly for the right which exists in this country of peaceful dissent and just as strongly against the resort to violence as a means of such expression.”8 Polls showed that the majority of Americans shared his views about the war and the limits of domestic dissent.
The outcry promoted by Nixon’s Cambodia policies might have obscured the broader story, at least from an American perspective: the troops were coming home in massive numbers. On his promise to Vietnamize the war and reduce the American troop commitment, Nixon could hardly have been truer to his word. By April 1972, even in the midst of another massive North Vietnamese offensive, Nixon was able to cite the figures to the American people in a nationally televised speech:
On January 20, 1969, the American troop ceiling in Vietnam was 549,000. Our casualties were running as high as 300 a week. Thirty thousand young Americans were being drafted every month.
Today, 39 months later, through our program of Vietnamization helping the South Vietnamese develop the capability of defending themselves—the number of Americans in Vietnam by Monday, May 1, will have been reduced to 69,000. Our casualties—even during the present, all-out enemy offensive—have 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