Help a younger baby boomer deal with this right wing assertion

"Nixon got us out of Vietnam."

(Underlying assertion - Democrats got us into it).

I was a kid then, but never got the feeling that Nixon got credit for ending that war in such a positive way.

(Underlying assertion - Democrats will get us out of it).

but he did it in a roundabout way via Cambodia and then it was helicopters in the middle of the night and all those who were our friends over there were screwed and ended up risking their lives on little boats in the ocean.

In other words we retreated. And we'll do the same this time.

Cambodia?

His initial plan for that triggered the protests at Kent State.

He came to office claiming he and his mates had a secret plan to end the war; but they prolonged it.

Bryant
Check it out --> http://politicalcomment.blogspot.com

Then why in the ever loving hell do Republicans *always* blame Democrats for "losing" Vietnam?

For an interesting take on the history of the Vietnam war look here. In particular pay attention to Nixon's "secret plan"..

http://www.pbs.org/battlefieldvietnam/history/index.html

Does that mean the draft was over in 1973?

There is some truth to this assertion.



It was the Democratic-controlled Congress, and not Nixon, that ended US military involvement in Southeast Asia on August 15, 1973. Congress reduced financial aid (did not eliminate it) to South Vietnam after they had mandated a halt to US military action.

Did this cause us to "lose" the war in Vietnam? Incredibly, there are those who argue that we should have continued to waste money and lives in that entanglement to this very day, if that's what it would have taken to achieve whatever objective they wish to retroactively substitute for the Domino Theory. These people bemoan the bloodbaths that followed our withdrawal, asserting that we should have stayed in Vietnam to prevent them. Here is the best counter I have seen to that argument:

So if Nixon had a secret plan to end the war it wasn't particularly freakin good because I caught the freedom bird in Feb 1973, 5 years later. That after tens of thousands more dead Americans and after the deciding skirmish of the Vietnam Conflict...you know, the one at Kent State University.

It was public rejection of the war that ended Vietnam, similarly it will be public rejection of the war that ends Iraq.

The Second Indochina War (of which Vietnam was but a part) was a result of WWII. We inherited the Vietnam quagmire from the French (Right wingers will love this argument).

Nixon LOST the war.

you're redefining a thing as another thing. The US, indeed, did start the Second Indochine War. By your logic, the Napoleonic Wars could easily have been seen as the initiating factor behind the 2nd World War.

It appears that the U.S. propped up the existence of South Vietnam in the 1950s to create the divide that ultimately led to the war.

Rather rude.

I'm trying to learn, and you're being snarky about it, taunting me for now knowing much to begin with. Well you know more than I do about it, OK? Good for you. Aren't you superior to us all.

At the close of WWII, the threat of communism taking over France and Italy were very real.

In a brokered agreement between De Gaul and Truman, Truman agreed to support (look the other way)in Frances efforts in indochina in if France did more to promote (crush communism) democracy in post war France. France gleefully accepted military aid from the U.S. in their war in SE Asia. In return, there was a quiet blood letting in France that stopped the advance of Communism.

This type of help has been equated with the lend lease act during WWII. Some argue that this type of help brought us in to the Indochina war in a support fashion, prior to our full involvement. However, because of the rampant anti-communism movement in the U.S. during the 1950's, when France basically lost their war, it was then up to the US to fill the gap in the form of "advisors".

U.S. military began a backdoor troop movement into the country as early as 1957. Ground troops in the form of brigades began in 1960. the first official US death in Viet Nam is recorded as happening in 1961.

Vietnam cannot be seen separately from other events in the area after 1945. Only from an American POV it appears as an isolated conflict.
WWII is quite a different story.

Anyway, I'm just offering ammunition. If the premise is set at "Nixon got us out Vietnam" then this should suffice ;)

Nixon ran for president claiming to have "a secret plan to end the war" (presumably "with honor", to appease the rabid anti-communists among his supporters).

The "secret plan" didn't exist. Instead, he expanded the war into Cambodia (which wound up empowering Pol Pot and the Khemer Rouge, thanksabunch Dicky) and letting it drag on for another 25000 soldiers dead.

And the whole "Vietnam is still holding our POWs" mythos can be traced back to Dick, and his efforts to use the POWs to take the moral high ground away from the antiwar movement.

(So in that sense, Nixon kept us fighting that war for another two decades.)

Which is not technically true. It is as far as the Viet Nam War is concerned but in fact my father told me he was in Viet Nam briefly during the Second World War fighting against the Japanese while serving in the US Marines.

1950 saw the first "military" advisors go to Vietnam. If you want a good read, try The Quiet American. A good enough film of it was made a few years back... with Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser (who, bizarrely enough, can act).

Truman put military advisors into Vietnam in 1950 and recognized a shitty government. Basically, if he hadn't, then Ike, Kennedy and Johnson wouldn't have been able to get the situation so out of control...

So... Truman, Kennedy, Johnson vs. Ike, Nixon and a wee bit o' Ford... that's actually 12 years each, isn't it?

I'd say that the balance sheet is totally equal.

a second and first indochinese war. It was one long war with with times of no fighting.

as the great hero who got us out of it.

anyone who ENDS an unjust war, even by cutting and running, even by abandoning equipment in the field, even by outright desertion, is a hero in my books. Nixon was an evil asshole and he's lucky there isn't an afterlife, but if there's the one good thing that happened on his watch, it was the US pull out from Vietnam. I don't care how he did it or why he did it. The war was stopped. If only Johnson had the balls to lose, so many lives could have been spared on both sides. Fuck it. Vietnam won, but in the long run, it hardly seemed to matter.

cheap ass good made by them.

as a disgraced former President when the war ended.

AND BUSH LIES AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY LIES AND THE TONS OF CHICKENSHIT CHICKENHAWK MOTHERFUCKERS WHO LOVE FOR OTHERS TO SHED THEIR BLOOD? IT MUST REALLY SUCK THAT YOU HAVE TO GO BACK 30 FUCKING YEARS TO JUSTIFY YOUR LOVE OF PURE FUCKING EVIL.

Will that do?

:rofl:

I blame myself for being a history geek and as a result go off on some major tangents and totally forgetting the matter at hand. :)

Cheers and peace always.

Richard Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace on August 9, 1974. The last American troops left Vietnam on April 30, 1975.

President.

This is technically true. However, Major American combat forces were out of Viet Nam by the end 72. Advisors and and some support contingents made up the American troop strength in VietNam until 75, when the NVA made its final push into the south.

on in Viet Nam. They knew it was unwinnable but they just kept dumping warm bodies into the killing zone.

Nixon ran Viet Nam like he did everything else. And he's the only pResident (so far) that was forced to resign before he got kicked out of office.

but Henry Kissinger sabotaged the settlement by making demands that the North Vietnamese couldn't meet.

Five years later, he accepted exactly the same settlement.

About half the U.S. troop deaths and an uncounted number of Vietnamese civilian deaths occurred between 1968 and 1973.

It's all in the documentary "The Trials of Henry Kissinger," which was shown on the Sundance Channel a few years ago.

and convinced Thieu to refuse the terms. They told him that if Nixon was elected, he could get the South Vietnamese much better terms. Thieu ended up much disappointed.

Nixon signed the exact same deal in 1973 that he was offered in 1968 but
thousand more died, got hurt, were taken POW, and families destroyed.

He kept us in 'Nam to placate the usual band of crooks and liars. America grew to HATE this lying bastard as a result.

His impeachment and resignation, supposedly over covering up Watergate, was window dressing. Most Americans just hated the lying son of a bitch already, and were looking for a legal excuse to drop-kick him out of DC.

Which is why I am constantly befuddled over our Congress' lack of resolve about knocking down and taking out a similarly hated President, today.

He strung us along to win in '72, claiming that "Peace is at hand."

He was a murdering war criminal. He could've pulled out at any time after his election in 1969. He was far more cowardly and unable to face a disgruntled military industrial complex than his excremental predecessor LBJ.

Key thing to remember though--he LIED. And don't buy any bullshit you hear about Watergate and the impeachment being about obstruction of justice. America could've handled Nixon lying about a "third-rate burglary." They wanted the motherfucker taken down for what he'd done in Vietnam.

Ask anyone who was around at the time. They'll back me up.

Although so many of us have gotten twisted up that I'm sure some boomers will chime in with an opposing opinion.

Nixon tried to bomb his way to victory and had every intention of continuing to do just that.

He escalated the war Vietnam and tried to win that way, first, though.

It was the post-watergate Congress that had the moral courage to end our involvement. Until the 1974 act, while we took most of our combat troops out, we continued to be very much involved in the war.

"As Stanley Karnow noted, Americans "turned against the war long before America's political leaders did."<100> Doubts began surfacing in Congress. In December 1974, it passed the Foreign Assistance Act of 1974, which cut off all military funding to the South Vietnamese government. The act fixed the numbers of U.S. military personnel allowed in Vietnam: 4000 within six months of enactment and 3000 within one year.<101> Robert McNamara writes that " there is no evidence that the South Vietnamese would ever have been able to accomplish on their own what they failed to achieve with massive American assistance. The level of congressional funding was irrelevant … The Nixon administration, like the Johnson administration before it, could not give the South Vietnamese the essential ingredient for success: genuine indigenous political legitimacy."<102> Richard Nixon resigned due to the Watergate Scandal. President Gerald Ford signed the act into law.

By 1975 the South Vietnamese Army was much larger on paper than its opponent. However, they faced a well-organized, highly determined and well-funded North Vietnam. Much of the North's material and financial support came from the communist bloc. Within South Vietnam, there was increasing chaos. The withdrawal of the American military had compromised an economy dependent on U.S. financial support and the presence of large numbers of U.S. troops. Along with the rest of the non-oil exporting world, South Vietnam suffered from the price shocks caused by the Arab oil embargo and the subsequent global recession.

Between the signing of the 1973 Paris Peace Accord and late 1974 both antagonists had been satisfied with minor land-grabs. The North Vietnamese, however, were growing impatient with the Thieu regime, which remained intransigent in its opposition to national elections. Hanoi was also concerned that the U.S. would, once again, support its former ally if large scale operations were resumed.

By late 1974, the Politburo gave its permission for a limited VPA offensive from Cambodia into Phuoc Long Province. The strike was designed to solve local logistical problems, gauge the reaction of Saigon forces and determine if the U.S. would return to the fray. In late December and early January the offensive kicked off and Phuoc Long Province quickly fell to the VPA. There was considerable relief when American air power did not return. The speed of this success forced the Politburo to reassess the situation. It was decided that operations in the Central Highlands would be turned over to General Van Tien Dung and that Pleiku should be seized, if possible. Before he left for the south, General Van was addressed by First Party Secretary Le Duan: "Never have we had military and political conditions so perfect or a strategic advantage as great as we have now."<103>"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War#South_Vietnamese_government_stands_alone.2C_1974.E2.80.931975

so that gives him some credit, too?

Remember who was the chief "negotiator"..Kissinger