For my blog post today on Stephen Ambrose's Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973-1990, I'll use as my starting-point something that Ambrose says about the Vietnam War on page 57:
"But
no matter how strong the President's words, they could not change the
facts. Except for Thieu clinging to power in Saigon, an important point
for Nixon, little had been achieved in January 1973 that the Communists
had not been offering in January 1969; the bombing had not improved the
October terms; the cease-fire was not holding. What Nixon had achieved
was impressive, but it was something he never talked about: the
withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam without a right-wing revolt
in the United States. What he did talk about, peace with honor, he had
not achieved."
I first learned about the perspective that Nixon's
agreement did little more than what the Communists had been offering in
1969 from the Oliver Stone movie, Nixon. I think it was the second or third time that I watched the movie that I noticed that point. You can watch the scene here.
Nixon announces to reporters that the Vietnam War is at an end, the
reporters do not applaud, then a reporter asks Nixon if it is not true
that the agreement accomplishes little beyond what the Communists
offered in 1969, and that Nixon has unnecessarily prolonged and escalated the war to
new levels of violence. When I first saw the scene, I thought that
Nixon was saying that the Vietnam War was at an end, and the reporters
were only interested in talking about Watergate. When I watched the
scene later, I learned that one of the reporters (probably speaking the
sentiments of Oliver Stone himself) was questioning whether Nixon truly
deserved a pat on the back for how he brought the Vietnam War to an end.
I
don't know enough about the issue to comment. What exactly were the
Communists offering in 1969, and how did that compare with the agreement
that Nixon got in 1973? I have my doubts that the Communists in 1969
were seriously committed to allowing South Vietnam to remain an
independent country.