A few days later President Nixon was reelected, defeating the Democratic candidate, Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, in a landslide—521 electoral votes to 17. McGovern carried only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia. McGovern’s campaign had been hampered by his tendency to advance poorly thought-out proposals, such as his scheme for funneling money directly to the poor, and by his rather bumbling, low-key oratorical style. The campaign marked the historical breakdown of the coalition that Franklin Roosevelt had fashioned and on which he and his Democratic successors, particularly Truman and Johnson, had ridden to power. Of that coalition, only African Americans voted solidly for McGovern.
Nixon understandably interpreted his convincing triumph as an indication that the citizenry approved of everything he stood for. He had won over hundreds of thousands of voters who had supported Democrats in earlier elections. The “solid South” was again solid, but this time solidly Republican. Nixon’s so-called southern strategy of reducing the pressure for school desegregation and otherwise restricting federal efforts on behalf of blacks had a powerful attraction to northern blue-collar workers as well.
Suddenly Nixon loomed as one of the most powerful and successful presidents in American history. His tough-minded but flexible handling of foreign policy questions, even his harsh Vietnamese policy, suggested decisiveness and self-confidence, qualities
President and Mrs. Nixon dine with Chinese communist officials in Beijing in February 1972. Even Nixon's harshest critics conceded that his initiative in reopening United States-China relations was a diplomatic masterstroke.
He had often seemed to lack in his earlier career. His willingness, despite his long history as a militant cold warrior, to negotiate with the communist nations indicated a new flexibility and creativity. His landslide victory appeared to demonstrate that a large majority of the people approved of his way of tackling the major problems of the times.
But Kissinger’s agreement with the North Vietnamese came apart when Nguyen Van Thieu, the South Vietnamese president, refused to sign it. Thieu claimed that the agreement, by permitting communist troops to remain in the South, would ensure his ultimate defeat. “Why,” he asked Kissinger, “are you rushing to get the Nobel Prize?” To Kissinger’s chagrin, Nixon sided with Thieu and resumed the bombing of North Vietnam in December 1972, this time sending the mighty B-52s directly over Hanoi and other cities. The destruction they caused was great, but their effectiveness as a means of forcing concessions from the North Vietnamese was at best debatable, and in these strikes for the first time the United States lost large numbers of the big strategic bombers.
In January 1973 a settlement was finally reached. As with the October “agreement,” the North Vietnamese retained control of large sections of the South, and they promised to release American prisoners of war within sixty days. Thieu assented this time, largely because Nixon secretly pledged that the United States would “respond with full force” if North Vietnam resumed its offensive. Within several months most prisoners of war were released, and the last American troops were pulled out of Vietnam. More than 57,000 Americans had died in the long war, and over 300,000 more had been wounded. Nearly a million communist soldiers and 185,000 South Vietnamese soldiers were reported killed.
In 1973, too, Kissinger was named secretary of state; he shared the Nobel Prize for Peace with a North Vietnamese diplomat for negotiating an end to the Vietnam war.
World History
