When he took office in January 1969, Richard Nixon projected an image of calm and deliberate statesmanship; he introduced no startling changes, proposed no important new legislation. Indeed, he accepted more or less uncritically the New Deal approach to managing
Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, a member of the Apollo 11 mission, walks on the moon (1969). President Kennedy's goal to put an American on the moon by the end of the decade was achieved during Nixon's administration.
The economy. He considered the solution of the Vietnam problem his chief task. Although he insisted during the 1968 campaign that he would end the war on “honorable” terms if elected, he suggested nothing very different from what Johnson was doing.
In office, Nixon first proposed a phased withdrawal of all non-South Vietnamese troops, to be followed by an internationally supervised election in South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese rejected this scheme and insisted that the United States withdraw its forces unconditionally. The intransigence of the North Vietnamese left the president in a difficult position. Nixon could not compel the foe to end a war it had begun against the French nearly a quarter of a century earlier, and every passing day added to the strength of antiwar sentiment, which, as it expressed itself in ever more emphatic terms, in turn led to deeper divisions in the country. Yet Nixon could not face up to the consequences of ending the war on the communists’ terms.
The president responded to the dilemma by trying to build up the South Vietnamese armed forces so that American troops could pull out without South Vietnam being overrun by the communists. He shipped so many planes to the Vietnamese that within four years they had the fourth-largest air force in the world. He also announced a series of troop cuts.
For a while, events appeared to vindicate Nixon’s position. A gradual slowing of military activity in Vietnam had reduced American casualties. Troop withdrawals continued in an orderly fashion. A new lottery system for drafting men for military duty eliminated some of the inequities in the selective service law.
But the war continued. Early in 1970 reports that an American unit had massacred civilians, including
South Vietnamese women and children were among some 300 apparently unarmed civilians killed in the My Lai Massacre in 1968. Lieutenant William Calley was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. After many appeals, he was released in 1974.
Dozens of women and children, in a Vietnamese hamlet known as My Lai revived the controversy over the purposes of the war and its corrosive effects on those who were fighting it. The American people, it seemed, were being torn apart by the war: one from another according to each one’s interpretation of events; and many within themselves as they tried to balance the war’s horrors against their pride, their abhorrence of communism, and their unwillingness to turn their backs on their elected leader.
Nixon wanted to end the war but he did not want to lose it. The war’s human, economic, and social costs could only vex his days and threaten his future reputation. When he reduced the level of the fighting, the communists merely waited for further reductions. When he raised it, many Americans denounced him in increasingly massive antiwar protests. If he pulled out of Vietnam and the communists won, other Americans would be outraged.
Perhaps Nixon’s error lay in his unwillingness to admit his own uncertainty, something the greatest presidents—one thinks immediately of Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt—were never afraid to do. Facing a dilemma, he tried to convince the world that he was firmly in control of events, with the result that at times he seemed more like a high school valedictorian declaiming sententiously about the meaning of life than the mature statesman he so desperately wished to be. Thus he heightened the tensions he sought to relax—in America, in Vietnam, and elsewhere.
World History
