I finished Richard Nixon’s No More Vietnams.
In this book, Nixon defends the Vietnam War as a noble cause. He
critiques how his presidential predecessors conducted the war, defends
his own approach, and blames the Democratic U.S. Congress’ failure to
continue providing support for South Vietnam for Communist North
Vietnam’s takeover of that country. Nixon in later years would express
regret for the title of this book, No More Vietnams, saying that he should have entitled it A Noble Cause.
Nixon’s argument in the book was not that the United States should be
paralyzed from intervening in other countries out of a fear of another
war like Vietnam, but rather that, if the U.S. had to intervene, it
would do what it takes to win—-that it would not lose, as it did in
Vietnam.
I was initially hesitant to read No More Vietnams
because I had already read other books that discussed Nixon’s stances
and strategies regarding the Vietnam War. I read his memoirs, and his
criticisms of President Johnson as well as his own approach to the war
were significant elements in the narratives of some of the biographies
about Nixon that I had read. But I am glad that I read No More Vietnams
because, overall, Nixon goes into more detail in that book in terms of
defending his own point-of-view. I wouldn’t say that this is the case
regarding his explanation for why the United States entered the
war, for, on this, he simply states that “The United States intervened
in the Vietnam War to prevent North Vietnam from imposing its
totalitarian government on South Vietnam through military conquest, both
because a Communist victory would lead to massive human suffering for
the people of Vietnam and because it would damage American strategic
interests and pose a threat to our allies and friends in other
non-Communist nations” (page 152, in an edition in which No More Vietnams is attached to another book by Nixon, Real Peace). Nixon believes that the answer to why the U.S. was in Vietnam is “simple” and “apparent.”
But Nixon does go into detail when he defends his
point-of-view on relevant issues: why he believed that Ho Chi Minh was a
Communist rather than merely a Vietnamese nationalist; how we can know
that Nixon’s military strategy was not targeting civilians; why Nixon
did not believed that most young people were against him; and the list
goes on. When defending his decision to intervene in Cambodia, where
North Vietnam supposedly had bases from which it was channeling supplies
to the Communists in Vietnam, Nixon responds to the charge that he was
violating Cambodia’s neutrality under a Geneva agreement by quoting the
agreement itself: it said that the U.S. did not have to honor a
country’s neutrality if its enemy was using that country as a base.
Nixon also argues that, under President Lyndon Johnson, there actually was
a Gulf of Tonkin incident, contrary to the claims of some that the U.S.
made that up as a pretense to escalate its involvement in the Vietnam
War, for Nixon states that the North Vietnamese account of the war
assumes that the Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred. And, while Nixon
seems to acknowledge that the Tet offensive was on some level a loss for
the U.S., he also notes that it severely damaged the Communist forces
in Vietnam and set them back significantly. There were often times when I
wished that Nixon would document his claims, either through footnotes,
or by referring to sources within his text. There were times when he
did, but I wished that he had done so more. Overall, however, I found
his arguments to be detailed and thoughtful.
Something that interested me in reading No More Vietnams
was that Nixon, although he criticized his predecessors for not being
tough enough in their prosecution of the war, acknowledged that he
himself was limited in terms of his ability or willingness to be
aggressive. Nixon said that President Johnson was reluctant to be too
tough because that could anger the Soviets and the Chinese, but Nixon
indicated that he himself had similar concerns when he was President.
Another factor was the lack of popular support for the war, which Nixon
apparently found to be constrictive. Overall, I found Nixon’s
discussion of the Vietnam War in No More Vietnams to be open and
honest about its challenges, at least in comparison to what he wrote in
his memoirs. Nixon, in both his memoirs and No More Vietnams,
portrays the South Vietnamese army as brave and heroic, against
detractors who considered it to be a lost cause. But Nixon in No More Vietnams
acknowledges that his policy of Vietnamization (which is having the
South Vietnamese army take up more of the slack of fighting the war)
took a while to be effective.
There is a lot more in No More Vietnams than
what I mention in this blog, but I will stop here. I found a lot of
what Nixon said to be persuasive, but I should probably read a source
that is more critical of his policy on Vietnam. I’m hoping that Rick
Perlstein’s Nixonland can be that source. I have already read some critiques of Nixon’s policies: Jerry Voorhis had his criticisms in The Strange Case of Richard Milhous Nixon,
Joan Hoff was rather critical, and, in biographies about Nixon, there
is often a summary of the arguments that certain Nixon aides were making
when they were suggesting that the President not attack Cambodia. But,
overall, I have not found their arguments to be persuasive, for, if
Cambodia was being used by North Vietnam as a base for supplies, then it
makes sense for the U.S. to attack the North Vietnamese bases in
Cambodia. The only anti-Nixon or anti-Vietnam War argument that makes
sense to me is that the war was taking the lives of many innocent
civilians, and that makes me second-guess whether the war was worth the
effort, even if I can understand the rationale for it. Consequently,
while I accept Nixon’s portrayal of North Vietnam as a brutal Communist
country, I am open to hearing whatever pacifist arguments there may be
as to what alternatives there were to war: was there a way to stop
Communist North Vietnam’s expansion, without military force? I am
skeptical, but I am open. The issue is relevant even today, as the U.S.
continues to debate military interventions, whether in the form of
drones, troops, or bombs.