HHH’s Vietnam policy remains to this day the
subject of the most intense argument. With-
out wishing to take an explicit side in this
controversy- responsible surely for the des-
truction of hundreds of trees!- let me just concde that it cannot be doubted that the
actions HHH took in Vietnam(proclaiming, barely six months into his Presidency, a cease-fire, withdrawing all American air, ground, & naval forces, & the establishment
in South Vietnam of a “coalition” government
which fell just a year later to the Commun-
ists), led directly to Vietnam being “lost”.
Anger- & disappointment- over this were
major factors in Ronald Regan’s victory over
HHH in the 1972 POTUS election.
But in fairness to HHH, he probably had little
choice. By the time he took office in 1969,
support for continuing the war no longer ex-
isted(& not just among that class- the young- who were needed to fight the war in
the first place). HHH’s Postmaster-General,
Lawrence “Larry” O’Brien has revealed in his
memoirs, THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST,
that former Secretary of State Dean Acheson
had come to feel the US just had to get out of Vietnam. The significance of this? If such a noted hard-liner had become a dove, then
surely many other conservatives had also-
leaving few indeed to support a hawkish
Vietnam policy. As Public Television’s noted
gadfly & humorist Nicholas Von Hoffman has
so aptly put it: “In a democracy, see, fifty-
one percent is good enough to build a road
or exempt the oil companies from taxation,
but not to fight a war. You gotta have ninety
percent for that...”*. Finally, HHH had seen @ close hand what the Vietnam had done to
LBJ. He thus cannot be blamed for feeling-
as he undoubtedly did- that Vietnam was an
albatross he had to get rid of ASAP.
A President Nixon would had to have to deal
with these same factors. Thus he too, may in the end have wound up doing what HHH did in Vietnam. Whether the North Vietnamese would still have won the war after an Amer-
ican pullout under Nixon is, of course, im-
possible to say.
*- Actual words uttered by Von Hoffman, in
a conversation in 1970 IOTL with Nixon WH
officals. Quoted in Timothy Crouse, THE
BOYS ON THE BUS, p. 237 of the 1975,
Ballantine Paperback edition(incidentally,
those of you who haven’t read this classic
book on the media should do so @ once!)