What’s in It for Teddy?

I was against the Nixon-Kissinger trip to Peking. I think we could have won the war in Vietnam at an early date with the right kind of strategy. But, under circumstances prevailing after 1969, I must reluctantly admit that Nixon’s reversal of our Asian policy was probably the only sensible thing that could have been done. The country wouldn’t have supported anything else.

Too much had gone wrong with our conduct of the Indochina war. We had failed to build up the South Vietnamese army fast enough; we had not given Saigon the sort of aviation that might have made the threat to bomb dikes and drown the enemy’s rear a diplomatic counter capable of forestalling Red Chinese intervention. The campuses in the U.S. had gotten out of hand; the older population, while not exactly war weary (few people were sacrificing very much), was tired of domestic hell-raising. Nixon had to make the best deal on South Vietnam that he and Henry Kissinger could contrive—and in exacting a tacit promise from Peking to lay off on aid to Hanoi as we withdrew our army from South Vietnam we really did get what amounted to a truce (not a peace) with provisional honor.

JC

About the Author

John Chamberlain

John Chamberlain (1903–1995) was an American writer.

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I was against the Nixon-Kissinger trip to Peking. I think we could have won the war in Vietnam at an early date with the right kind of strategy. But, under circumstances prevailing after 1969, I must reluctantly admit that Nixon’s reversal of our Asian policy was probably the only sensible thing that could have been done. The country wouldn’t have supported anything else.

Too much had gone wrong with our conduct of the Indochina war. We had failed to build up the South Vietnamese army fast enough; we had not given Saigon the sort of aviation that might have made the threat to bomb dikes and drown the enemy’s rear a diplomatic counter capable of forestalling Red Chinese intervention. The campuses in the U.S. had gotten out of hand; the older population, while not exactly war weary (few people were sacrificing very much), was tired of domestic hell-raising. Nixon had to make the best deal on South Vietnam that he and Henry Kissinger could contrive—and in exacting a tacit promise from Peking to lay off on aid to Hanoi as we withdrew our army from South Vietnam we really did get what amounted to a truce (not a peace) with provisional honor.