President Richard Nixon and

the Vietnam War 1969 - 74N C Gardner MA PGCE

Key Events: Nixon Administration and

the Vietnam War

• January 20th 1969: Richard Nixon takes office as

President of the United States.

• Nixon seeks ‘Peace with Honour’ in Vietnam.

• Vietnamization: a smaller role for the United States in

Vietnam; a larger role for South Vietnamese armed

forces.

Key Events: Nixon Administration and

the Vietnam War

• Hanoi’s strategy: to hold on and wait for the United

States to give up and leave Vietnam.

• The Anti-Vietnam War movement in the United States

evenly divided the nation by 1969 when Nixon took

office. In a democracy, public opinion matters.

• South Vietnam: no match on its own for North Vietnam

President Richard M. Nixon 1969 - 1974

Tet Offensive: significance

• The Communist Party of North Vietnam regarded the Tet Offensive of January 1968 as the turning point of the Vietnam War and as a decisive triumph, and thought at the time that its consequences would eventually result in final victory, which indeed it did in April 1975.

• By 1968 the Vietnam War had become much more difficult to analyse, for the very process of protracted war had made it not only a military struggle but one in which the political, economic, and ideological and human domains became increasingly crucial.

Tet Offensive: consequences

• Factors involved in Vietnam by 1968 and onwards:

• 1 Politics – Washington; the domestic political scene in

the United States – Johnson had become an unpopular

president because of the war – he had had to withdraw

from the Presidential race in March 1968.

• In November 1964 after his landslide victory, Johnson

was fully confident of a second term as President from

1969 to 1973, but it didn’t happen because of the

quagmire of Vietnam and the consequences of Tet.

Other factors involved in the Vietnam War from 1968

• 2 Economics – the sheer cost of the war for the United States

treasury and economy.

• 3 Ideology and Human Resources – “1-2-3-4 What are we

fighting for? Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn, next stop is

Vietnam.”

• By 1967 – 68 at least half of the American public questioned the war,

the purpose of the war, the legitimacy of the war. Young Americans

were dying in their thousands in the jungles of Vietnam, but Tet

showed that the enemy was far from being defeated.

• Anti-war protests in cities and university campuses across America

had become part of the political landscape and no politician running

for public office was immune from this. In a democracy public

opinion and support matters.

The Tet Offensive: consequences

• For America, Tet was a long-postponed confrontation

with reality; the United States had been hypnotized

until then by its own illusions as a superpower, its own

desires, and needs.

• The belated realization that it had military tactics and

technology but no viable military strategy for winning the

war made Tet the turning point in the Johnson

Administration’s calculations.

Tet: the American media became more sceptical

• Tet caused the American media to become more

sceptical of official reports on the war from the

Johnson Administration and the Pentagon.

• But the media never became critical of the imperialist

politics that had led to the intervention in Vietnam in the

first place.

Tet: the American political and economic system

itself was now in danger

• Before Tet, the weight of opinion was for the war in

order to attain quite rational objectives: the hegemony

of American power over social trends in the Third

World.

• America did not want Third World nations to become

socialist and independent of the American-dominated

capitalist world economy.

• However, after Tet the costs of the war to the

American system of politics and economics were

measurable. The limits of American power were

exposed by Tet.

Tet: the consequences

• For America to have pursued the scale of

escalation to an even higher level after Tet

would have wreaked an untold amount of

damage on the United States economic

position at home and abroad, on its military

power elsewhere, and on its political life – a

price scarcely any serious person proposed to

pay.

Tet: the Vietnamese Revolution gained a decisive

advantage

• The Tet Offensive gained a decisive advantage for the

Vietnamese Revolution in its overall struggle for national

unity.

• Tet impacted on Washington’s comprehension of the

centrality of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) in

the war effort.

• The will and capability of South Vietnam and its armed

forces remained the key to the eventual outcome of the

war.

The origins of Vietnamization

• The American consciousness was deeply effected by Tet in terms of the realization that the war could not be won unless South Vietnam assumed a far greater burden militarily.

• “Vietnamizing” the Vietnam War became the last pillar of American strategy, leaving its position wholly dependent on its own dependents.

Vietnamization guaranteed eventual victory

for North Vietnam

• Nearly all who were closely connected with the

war greatly doubted in private that the

Republic of Vietnam (RVN) – South Vietnam

– could grasp the military victory that had

eluded over half a million GIs.

• In this sense North Vietnam attained the main

strategic objectives of the Tet Offensive,

compelling the United States to leave the realm

of desire and confront that of necessity.

The Nixon Administration’s Confrontation with

Vietnam

• The Nixon Administration came to power in

January 1969 carrying with it the full weight

of the past – the inherited legacies of earlier

assumptions regarding the nature of American

power and the world, the overweening desires

and ambitions, and the same goals and tools

for attaining them.

• Consensus, vested interests and the conventional

wisdom are the hallmarks for incoming American

administrations rather than innovation and new

ideas.

Nixon’s policies on Vietnam

• American policy on Vietnam during the first Nixon Administration (1969 – 73) was often tentative and contradictory, reacting both to the changing balance of forces in Vietnam and to the largely unpredictable events of Western capitalism.

• Like the Johnson Administration, Nixon could scarcely admit to defeat in Vietnam. Nixon shared all of the ideological and cultural commitments of Johnson regarding credibility, dominoes, and the dilemma of American military power.

Nixon’s views on Vietnam

• Like most of Washington, Nixon at the end of 1967 saw the war

as stalemated. During the Tet Offensive he, along with Johnson,

became committed to the notion of buying time to allow South

Vietnam to take over the main burden of fighting so that the

direct American role could be reduced.

• By 1968 Nixon ceased to believe that the war could be

won exclusively by force of arms. Nixon’s originality lay

in his groping for a parallel diplomatic solution to the war

which involved the Soviet Union and China.

• Nixon intended to link global U.S.-Soviet relations in

the world to progress in reaching a satisfactory

Vietnam settlement.

Nixon’s “Madman Theory”

• Part of Nixon’s Vietnam strategy was the application of

his “madman theory.” He stated: “I want the North

Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I

might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the

word to them that, ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is

obsessed about Communism. We can’t constrain him

when he’s angry – and he has his hand on the nuclear

button’ – and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in

two days begging for peace.”

Enter Henry Kissinger

• Henry Kissinger was the ambitious National Security Adviser in the Nixon Administration and his originality lay in grossly oversimplifying the nature of the international process and world power relations in a way which reinforced the President’s own inclination to make diplomacy central to his Vietnam strategy.

• Kissinger sincerely believed that great-power diplomacy could produce a mutually satisfying, enforceable consensus that could subsume local problems.

Henry Kissinger with President Nixon, 1973

Henry Kissinger, National Security Adviser 1969 - 73

• By reinforcing the President’s deeply felt assumptions

and convoluted strategy with his own, Kissinger was

to help the administration embark later on an illusory

diplomacy which would make possible a final U.S.

troop withdrawal and a precondition for North

Vietnam’s triumph.

• Harvard professor Henry Kissinger was no more

perceptive than any of his predecessors.

Kissinger’s rationale for the war

• Kissinger had to confect a rationale of “credibility” for

punitive action in an already devastated Vietnamese

theatre, and he had to second his president’s wish to form

part of a “wall” between the Nixon White House and the

Department of State.

The crisis of American military power

• Having failed to win the war at a cost of $30 billion

annually, the United States could not conceivably

expect to succeed by spending less.

• The White House was also convinced that its “credibility”

and diplomatic strategy required it periodically to escalate

the war for relatively short durations, even as it was

seeking to proceed with troop reductions, cut costs, and

deflect the opposition to the war.

The Crisis of American Military Power

• The Nixon Administration reduced the numbers of U.S.

troops and instead relied much more on air power and

artillery – in a word, on firepower. Well over half the

tonnage of the entire war was used during Nixon’s first

four years (1969 – 1973).

• Kissinger’s assumption was that it was necessary to

reduce North Vietnam’s supplies and strength for as long

as possible to gain time for his other options.

Tonnage dropped by the United States on Vietnam

• In 1969 the United States used 2.8 million tons of air and ground

munitions, a shade below the 1968 peak.

• Nixon and Kissinger decided on ‘hot pursuit’ of enemy

forces across the borders of Laos and Cambodia in 1969.

The raids were flown by B-52 bombers which fly at an

altitude too high to be observed from the ground and

carry immense tonnages of high explosive: they give no

warning of approach and are incapable of accuracy or

discrimination because of both their altitude and the mass

of their shells.

• Between March 1969 and May 1970, 3,630 such raids

were flown across the Cambodian border.

High civilian deaths from American bombing

• As a result of the expanded and intensified bombing campaigns ordered by Nixon and Kissinger from 1969, as many as 350,000 civilians in Laos, and 600,000 in Cambodia, lost their lives. (These are conservative estimates.)

• In addition, the widespread use of toxic chemical defoliants created a massive health crisis which fell most heavily on children, nursing mothers, and the aged, and which persists to this day.

April 1970: Cambodia invaded

• In April 1970, Nixon decided to invade Cambodia, despite reservations expressed by his own advisers. Nixon went before the American public to announce that 31,000 American troops had entered Cambodia to destroy the headquarters of the revolutionary forces. He pleaded for support.

• The invasion produced only modest military yields. The Americans killed 2,000 enemy troops and destroyed 8,000 bunkers. The attack on Cambodia had bought some time for additional Vietnamization.

April 1970: Cambodia invaded

• The invasion failed completely, however, in its larger goal

of reversing the military trend toward a victory for the

North. The South Vietnamese forces aiding the

Americans fought poorly, and their incompetence and

unwillingness to fight were abundantly evident on

evening news programmes.

• The U.S. and South Vietnamese forces also failed to find

the headquarters of the North Vietnamese operations.

April 1970: Cambodia invaded

• Worst of all, from Nixon’s point of view, the

Cambodian invasion provoked some of the most

furious anti-war demonstrations of the Vietnam War.

• The business community also became galvanized against

the war. Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, testified

before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the

terrible toll the war had taken on the economy and morale

of business people.

May 1970: anti-Cambodia invasion protests,

Kent State University, four students shot dead

by Ohio National Guardsmen

May 1970: anti-Cambodia invasion protests, Kent

State University, Ohio

Public reaction against the Cambodian

invasion of April 1970

• Paul Harvey, a conservative radio commentator, told his huge following in small towns of the Midwest and South, “America’s 6% section of the planet’s mothers cannot bear enough boy babies to police Asia – and our nation can’t bleed to death trying.”

• The concern of such prominent, middle-of-the-road individuals heartened congressional opponents of U.S. involvement in the fighting.

• Senator J. William Fulbright (D., Ark.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, considered their support “essential if we are ever to change our policy in Southeast Asia.”

U.S. base and fleet system in East Asia

• At the war’s peak 250,000 Americans participated in the conflict from outside Vietnam, especially in the Navy. Naval bases in Thailand, Okinawa, Guam, the Philippines, the Seventh Fleet at sea, Taiwan, and Hawaii were directly involved in war-related activities.

• Air power remained a card Washington was ready to play and to which the Pentagon had no objection. The planes stationed outside Vietnam could be used as a threat to re-enter the war even if all U.S. forces were withdrawn from South Vietnam.

Demoralization in the U.S. armed forces

• During 1968 – 69 troop morale visibly to break down,

and from 1970 onward the human collapse of the

Americans in Vietnam ceased to be simply an

individual or psychological issue and became a highly

publicized major organizational question involving

discipline and, ultimately, the very capacity of the U.S.

armed forces to function.

• The difficulties began with drugs, the GI’s antidote to

terror and boredom. At the start of major U.S. troop

involvement in 1965, senior officers could not imagine

that the use of both hard and soft drugs would become so

widespread.

Use of heroin and marijuana; racial conflict

• Heroin and marijuana were cheap and readily obtainable by

1968, when their use began to rise sharply. The drug epidemic

was to some extent related to the sheer boredom among enlisted

men, as long days on bases replaced search-and-destroy missions.

• Racial conflict among troops grew out of inherited legacies

compounded by the distinctive experiences of blacks in Vietnam.

Overrepresented in combat or in menial tasks, and led by very few

black officers, blacks in Vietnam were much more under the

influence of radical and militant currents than their white

counterparts.

• Black pride was the rule. Malcolm X and Cassius Clay were their

most admired heroes. 20% of all black troops in South Vietnam

in 1970 declared they hated whites, and over one-third disliked

them but tried to get along with them.

Breakdown in army discipline; “fragging”

• 1 Enlisted men’s contempt for their officers.

• 2 Officers’ desire to squeeze more combat out of their

subordinates.

• 3 Drugs.

• 4 Racism.

• All of the above produced a profound breakdown in

discipline and the emergence of “fragging,” the attempted

murder of officers by soldiers, usually with grenades.

Fragging – the murder of officers by soldiers

• During the Vietnam War fraggings included attacks by black soldiers

against white officers for racial reasons as well as the efforts of drug

peddlers and users in the military to prevent discipline.

• Fraggings (attacks on officers) 1969 – 72: 788

confirmed attacks, resulting in 86 deaths.

• Other data suggest 1,016 attacks on officers 1969 – 72.

These levels were far higher than both world wars, which

involved many more men.

• When officers were strong leaders they “commanded

oftentimes at the risk of their lives due to the

possibility of grenade incidents.”

President Nixon with his advisers, Oval Office,

The White House, Washington D.C.

Nixon’s ability as a statesman

• President Richard Nixon had the ability to read

the minds of the Communist leaders of the

Soviet Union and of China, the two Great Power

sponsors of North Vietnam. He had studied

them for so long and was capable of thinking in

their terms.

• Nixon was realistic in identifying their national

interests – a philosophy of deal-making that the

Communists understood.

Peace sought in Vietnam

• The triumph of détente, of triangular

diplomacy with the Soviet Union and China

under the Nixon Administration meant that

Hanoi could no longer rely on their

unqualified support.

• Nixon had assumed the presidency in January

1969 with a clear mandate to end America’s

commitment in Vietnam.

Vietnamization

• Nixon opted for a strategy of withdrawing

American troops gradually while turning over

the conduct of the war to the South

Vietnamese.

• Twice Nixon widened the war at least

temporarily, in order, he believed, to hasten its

end.

April 1970: Cambodia

• In April 1970 Nixon ordered U.S. and South

Vietnamese troops into Cambodia in an effort to rout

enemy bases there and buy time for Vietnamization.

• One of the most controversial moves of his presidency,

the Cambodian incursion met passionate opposition,

especially on college campuses. Then in February 1971

he approved a major ground operation in Laos.

Kent State University, Ohio, May 4th, 1970: four

students are shot dead by the Ohio National Guard

whilst protesting against the invasion of

Cambodia

Kent State University: tear gas

Peace negotiations between the U.S. and

North Vietnam in an impasse when Nixon took

office in 1969

• South Vietnam’s President Thieu refused to

negotiate with the Communists in Hanoi; they in

turn insisted on the withdrawal of all U.S. forces

and the removal of the existing South Vietnamese

regime, to be replaced by a coalition government.

President Thieu with President Nixon, 1969

Henry Kissinger’s secret diplomacy, 1971

• To move forward, National Security Adviser Henry

Kissinger began secret negotiations with the North

Vietnamese in Paris in 1971.

• Seeking to end the war before presidential elections in

November 1972, Kissinger eventually made

extraordinary concessions.

• The United States agreed to withdraw completely from

Vietnam, accept the presence of several North

Vietnamese divisions in South Vietnam, and recognize

the legitimacy of the Provisional Revolutionary

Government (PRG), created in June 1969 to serve as a

Communist counterpart to the Saigon government.

Henry Kissinger, National Security Adviser, in

Paris negotiating with the North Vietnamese

Christmas Bombing, December 1972

• After Kissinger announced that “peace is at hand” on

October 26th, 1972, Nixon pursued his plan to achieve

total victory by the most savage aerial attack on North

Vietnam of the entire war, in an effort to force Hanoi to

surrender.

• Kissinger agreed to meet with Le Duc Tho, the North

Vietnamese negotiator, again on November 20th, after the

U.S. presidential election was over.