Word: viets
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Nixon's authority as a former President, he offers no footnotes and only cursory citations of sources. One wonders, for instance, just how he can be certain that President Ngo Dinh Diem would have outpolled Ho Chi Minh or any other opponent in a hypothetical free election in South Viet Nam. His book is less a history than an impassioned pleading against both neo-isolationists who believe the U.S. has no stake beyond self-defense and confrontational rightists who see a Soviet hand guiding every local upheaval in the Third World. To Nixon, Viet Nam was "a just cause...
...Vice President, Nixon says, he counseled that "our choice was to help the French now or be faced with the necessity of taking over the burden." He condemns President Kennedy for the overthrow of Diem, which he argues led to political instability from which South Viet Nam never recovered. He faults Lyndon Johnson for halting bombing, rather than intensifying it, to encourage diplomacy; for fighting a limited war, seeking "not to win, but only not to lose"; and, above all, for failing to blockade the Ho Chi Minh Trail and other supply routes before the invaders became entrenched...
Underlying Nixon's rationale is a fervent if hard-to-prove belief that virtually all the revolutionaries in South Viet Nam were agents of North Viet Nam. He rejects the idea that there was any significant homegrown dissent, any genuine civil war. Yet some of the evidence he adduces indicates the opposite: the fact that North Viet Nam imprisoned erstwhile South Vietnamese guerrillas suggests that these dissidents were viewed as dangerous nationalists. In justifying his claim that he "won the war" but that Congress lacked the will to honor its commitments and so "lost the peace," Nixon contends that...
...liberals and especially the press, whom he collectively accuses of bias, hypocrisy and hoping the Communists would win. He says of the war, "It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now." Yet Nixon admits that Watergate and his own unpopularity undercut his appeals for military aid to South Viet...
...pressure on American industry, he points out that the best current customers for U.S. products are industrialized Canada and Japan. In an inspirational final summons to "a peaceful revolution for progress in the Third World," Nixon brings back to mind the far-seeing foreign policy analyst whom Watergate, and Viet Nam, destroyed...