Richard Nixon's Tough Assessment

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

It has become conventional wisdom that only a stern anti-Communist such as Richard Nixon could have opened relations with China. It may also be that only a Nixon could have withdrawn U.S. forces from a conflict with a Soviet proxy and accepted a cease-fire that left thousands of Communist insurgents far beyond their legal borders, in place for an eventual onslaught. By the time the 1973 Paris accords were signed, any prudent politician might have had enough doubts about South Viet Nam's survival to start shifting blame to others for having "lost" an ally. Hawks like Nixon assailed doves for cutting military aid. The doves replied that they were facing up to the reality of the hawks' failure on the battlefield.

To improve the odds that posterity will see things his way, Nixon has outlined his version of what happened in his memoir RN (1978); in two books about superpower conflict, The Real War (1980) and Real Peace (1984); and in No More Vietnams, published this month (Arbor House; 237 pages; $14.95). The compact volume serves four purposes: 1) to retrace American involvement in Viet Nam by recounting, often disapprovingly but also with some sympathy, decisions made by his predecessors stretching back to Harry Truman; 2) to defend Nixon's own record, sometimes more emphatically than in his muted memoir; 3) to reassert the implacability of Communist adversaries and the consequent need to maintain a potent military posture; and 4) to prescribe a future course that would couple a strong defense establishment with a much enhanced economic aid program, aimed at stimulating Third World entrepreneurship and two-way trade. Nixon's proposals have been hailed as sound if not original. But his appraisal of his own stewardship sometimes seems more generous than candid.

While much can be taken on 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," and its lesson should not be abstention from involvement but shrewd selectivity in defining national interest followed by fierce determination to do what is needed to win. Says Nixon: " 'No more Vietnams' can mean we will not try again. It should mean we will not fail again."

Nixon sees the three decades of American engagement in Indochina as a litany of "too little, too late." He wishes Truman had forced the French to bring about an independent, non-Communist state. That having failed, he believes President Eisenhower ought to have sent in air support to relieve the French at Dien Bien Phu; as Ike's 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. By the time Nixon took office in 1969, he says, the only workable option was Vietnamization: turning the fighting over to the South Vietnamese while providing arms, aid, military training and political tutelage to safeguard their future.

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 his Vietnamization program was a success both in the hamlets and on the battlefield. His assertion that a pro-Western Viet Nam represented a vital U.S. security interest relies less on inherent economic or geopolitical advantages than on the domino theory: he points to Hanoi's present control of Cambodia and Laos and its steady pressure on Thailand. He acknowledges that the cease-fire agreement, which authorized tens of thousands of enemy soldiers to remain and re-arm themselves, inevitably imposed an onerous self-defense burden on South Viet Nam; thus its fate depended on continuing aid of more than $1 billion a year in 1975 dollars, which Congress refused to approve. Meanwhile, North Viet Nam flagrantly violated the accords. In effect, he says, the agreement amounted to "we cease and they fire."

Nixon bitterly denounces antiwar activists, intellectuals, 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 Nam.

In arguing the possibility of East-West collaboration, despite the ongoing competition that he labels the Third World war, he sensibly observes, "While the Soviets want the world, they do not want war." To critics who say that strengthening Third World economies will only add to the competitive 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.