Nixon + Watergate = Communist Indochina

Of Richard Nixon’s errors and culpability in the dismal Watergate affair there can be little doubt. They have been chewed, swallowed and re-chewed to the point of regurgitation, a factor which may temporarily curb the appetite for the former President’s recently published Memoirs. Less understood are the errors and culpabilities of those who, in the early and middle 1960s, tried to split the difference between winning and staying out of Vietnam, in the process splitting the United States instead, and by spring of 1968 had achieved an American disaster at home to match the ultimate disaster in Indochina. Yet, the tragedies of Vietnam and Watergate are linked, as the Chinese say, “like the lips and the teeth.”

It is not original to suggest a link between Vietnam and Watergate. Too often, however, the connection drawn turns out to be a shallow comparison of the two as twin monsters of federal misrule or, unhistorically, of Nixon’s misrule. More seriously, Watergate is sometimes viewed as the Achilles heel of the 1973 Paris Agreements on Vietnam. But until the errors of our Vietnam War strategy are as fully analyzed and publicly explained as those of Watergate, our understanding of the connection will not become much more profound. Nor will we emerge from the national spiritual anomie which has paralyzed us for the past four years—lost in the maelstrom of world politics.

BH

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B. Hannah

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Of Richard Nixon’s errors and culpability in the dismal Watergate affair there can be little doubt. They have been chewed, swallowed and re-chewed to the point of regurgitation, a factor which may temporarily curb the appetite for the former President’s recently published Memoirs. Less understood are the errors and culpabilities of those who, in the early and middle 1960s, tried to split the difference between winning and staying out of Vietnam, in the process splitting the United States instead, and by spring of 1968 had achieved an American disaster at home to match the ultimate disaster in Indochina. Yet, the tragedies of Vietnam and Watergate are linked, as the Chinese say, “like the lips and the teeth.”

It is not original to suggest a link between Vietnam and Watergate. Too often, however, the connection drawn turns out to be a shallow comparison of the two as twin monsters of federal misrule or, unhistorically, of Nixon’s misrule. More seriously, Watergate is sometimes viewed as the Achilles heel of the 1973 Paris Agreements on Vietnam. But until the errors of our Vietnam War strategy are as fully analyzed and publicly explained as those of Watergate, our understanding of the connection will not become much more profound. Nor will we emerge from the national spiritual anomie which has paralyzed us for the past four years—lost in the maelstrom of world politics.