The Vietnam War has been finished for ten years now, a year less than Richard Nixon supposedly has been, yet a decade later both continue to haunt us: a double haunting, in this case, one ghost beckoning still again from an unlikely mansion in sun-blind California to raise the specter of the past, which, like time in a Faulkner novel, is inescapable—existent only within the dimensions of the threatful reiterant present.
No More Vietnams (Arbor House, $14.95) is a very good book, in my opinion Richard Nixon’s best, saving only the remarkable Memoirs. Though frankly intended as a brief in defense of the five Administrations (and one in particular) that sustained an American presence in Southeast Asia, as a history of a quarter-century of bitter warfare it develops and sustains sufficient consistency to extend its reach far beyond the bounds of mere apologia. At once a concise recapitulation of, and a pointed meditation upon, a protracted episode that is likely to prove to have been pivotal in the second half of the twentieth century, it is going to have to be digested—one way or another—by anybody wishing to consider responsibly the flood of print released by the observance of this tenth anniversary of the fall of Saigon. “No event,” Mr. Nixon writes, “in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now. Rarely have so many people been so wrong about so much. Never have the consequences of their misunderstanding been so tragic.” And never have the “lessons” of history been more wrongly misconceived, or more disastrously applied.
Comments