That Evil Nixon

For John, BLUF:  I am not impressed with this story.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Nixon’s Vietnam Treachery

This is from The New York Times "Sunday Review" and written by Mr John A Farrell.

Here is the lede:

Richard M. Nixon always denied it: to David Frost, to historians and to Lyndon B. Johnson, who had the strongest suspicions and the most cause for outrage at his successor’s rumored treachery.  To them all, Nixon insisted that he had not sabotaged Johnson’s 1968 peace initiative to bring the war in Vietnam to an early conclusion.  “My God. I would never do anything to encourage” South Vietnam “not to come to the table,” Nixon told Johnson, in a conversation captured on the White House taping system.

Mr Farrell says that Mr Nixon lied.

Mr Farrell also missed that the person with "the most cause for outrage" was 1968 Presidential Candidate Hubert Horatio Humphrey, the Happy Warrior, for whom I voted.

Gee, looking back on it, I kind of like Mr Nixon's move.  Having served two tours in Southeast Asia I tend to think the dishonesty is the Democrats who betrayed the South Vietnamese, and the Cambodians.  The peace they brought was the peace of the dead and those in re-education camps and those who became refugees, often at their own peril.

First the Congress cut off our support of Cambodia, in the Summer of 1973, and Pol Pot won that war and we had "Year Zero" in Cambodia, and then the Cambodian Genocide.  Somewhere between a million and a half and three million people died between 1975 and 1979.  I wonder if Mr Johnson, or Mr Farrell are proud of that?

But, then President Nixon was gone and Gerald Ford was the President and North Viet-nam moved on South vier-nam and we didn't go back to help them.  We didn't even give them the logistics support they needed.  Does that make you proud?  Seemed to make the Democrats proud.

And, frankly, I became disenchanted with the Democrats.

Regards  —  Cliff