Jeffrey Lord: Nixon's warning ... no more Vietnams
[Jeffrey Lord is the creator, co-founder and CEO of QubeTV. A former Reagan White House political director and an author, he writes from Pennsylvania.]
In a rare Washington visit to attend the funeral of Arthur Burns [in 1987], a former Federal Reserve Board chairman who had also been the President's friend and economic adviser, word reached the Reagan White House political staff that Nixon would like to meet with us....
For almost two weeks afterwards I found myself wondering about Nixon's reason for spending time with us. Out of the blue, the answer arrived in the mail.
The title of the book in the package was No More Vietnams. The author was Richard Nixon. After his abrupt departure from the White House on that hot, historic August day in 1974, Nixon began what was frequently termed his last "comeback" in politics by writing books. By 1987 he had written four. First, of course, were his bestselling memoirs, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon. In quick succession Nixon had followed with The Real War, published in 1980, Leaders, a penetrating look at leaders he had met in his career (1982), and Real Peace (1984), the bookend to his foreign policy musings on war. But he sent none of these books. What he chose to send -- with a personally autographed salutation -- was something else. And in reading that something else that Nixon had, unasked, deliberately chosen for me to read I understood at once the reason for our meeting.
No More Vietnams was Richard Nixon's memo to the future, his fifth post-presidency book published in 1985. Looking at a group of young thirty-somethings who were already working in the White House, he clearly wanted us to learn and benefit from his experience in global politics. Not because we were young staffers in the current White House but because he knew from his own experience that in some form or other we represented a future in which he knew he would not, could not, live. A future in which, he obviously believed, the principles he had learned in a career culminating with the presidency would still be every bit as operable as they were when he sat in the Oval Office.
In the aftermath of the heated reaction by liberals such as Senator John Kerry and others to President Bush's recent speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, in which Bush took up the inevitable and repeated liberal comparison of Iraq to Vietnam and turned it back on itself, Nixon's book is a reminder that George W. Bush is not the only president to have done so. The very first chapter in No More Vietnams bluntly challenges what Nixon calls "The Myths of Vietnam." He lists 22 myths, ending with myth 22 that "life is better in Indochina now that the United States is gone." Says the former president in a single, succinct follow-up sentence: "Nothing could be further from the truth."
"The antiwar movement did not have a decisive effect on the outcome of the war from a military standpoint, but it had a decisive impact on the political battles that have been waged ever since," says Nixon. "The intellectual and psychological damage...still poisons our foreign policy debates. Ten years later the same distortions about the war that made antiwar activists into heroes on the campuses are still accepted as fact on television, in newspapers, and in college classrooms. Before we can cure ourselves of the Vietnam syndrome, we must purge our diet of the intellectual junk food that helped make us sick to begin with."
Nixon accurately fingered the real problem Americans had already faced in the aftermath of Vietnam and still face today, over twenty years after the publication of his book. He not only knew what that problem was but wanted to make certain that I knew it and did not partake of the "intellectual junk food" that Vietnam was an inevitable defeat and that the consequences of that defeat were somehow anything less than a bloodbath for the people of Southeast Asia. That intellectual junk food is today not only the source for the liberal template of Vietnam. It is the stark objective of liberals sentimental for the 1960s and early 1970s to use the same kind of intellectual junk food to create a Vietnam-like template for Iraq. In the minds of modern liberals -- and as a college student anti-Nixon protester in 1970 I was briefly one of them -- the Vietnam War era is viewed as a romanticized time of an immoral war led by amoral men that was ended by idealistic college kids as a lot of great music played in the background. And everyone lived happily ever after.
Not.
THIS FAIRY TALE IS, as George Bush was too polite to say, not just intellectual junk food. It was -- and remains -- a lie. In point of fact, the now romanticized McGovern campaign to defeat Nixon over Vietnam ended in a brutal 49-state defeat. Nixon, as he later admitted, did himself in by giving his enemies the sword of Watergate. Only then did Democrats gain the power in Congress to undercut the peace that Nixon had negotiated, resulting in the bloodbath that Nixon as president was scorned for predicting. The very core of today's Democratic foreign policy ideas on Iraq have already been tried in Vietnam -- and millions died as a result. A new group dedicated to the liberal Vietnam myth, billing themselves "Recreate '68," is so enamored of the fairy tale of "revolution" that it is using the violence surrounding the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968 as a rallying cry to bring the same ideas to the 2008 Democratic Convention in Denver. Heedless of history, they would implement the bloody failure of liberal Vietnam policy in Iraq. Intellectual junk food as foreign policy.
Richard Nixon's No More Vietnams is today just as important a read as it was when he sent me the book in 1987. While it has many lessons about Vietnam and foreign policy in general that should be taken to heart, there is one that Nixon sought above all to make clear as he passed it down to the next generation.
"In Vietnam," he writes, "we tried and failed in a just cause. No More Vietnams can mean we will not try again. It should mean we will not fail again."
...
Read entire article at American Spectator
In a rare Washington visit to attend the funeral of Arthur Burns [in 1987], a former Federal Reserve Board chairman who had also been the President's friend and economic adviser, word reached the Reagan White House political staff that Nixon would like to meet with us....
For almost two weeks afterwards I found myself wondering about Nixon's reason for spending time with us. Out of the blue, the answer arrived in the mail.
The title of the book in the package was No More Vietnams. The author was Richard Nixon. After his abrupt departure from the White House on that hot, historic August day in 1974, Nixon began what was frequently termed his last "comeback" in politics by writing books. By 1987 he had written four. First, of course, were his bestselling memoirs, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon. In quick succession Nixon had followed with The Real War, published in 1980, Leaders, a penetrating look at leaders he had met in his career (1982), and Real Peace (1984), the bookend to his foreign policy musings on war. But he sent none of these books. What he chose to send -- with a personally autographed salutation -- was something else. And in reading that something else that Nixon had, unasked, deliberately chosen for me to read I understood at once the reason for our meeting.
No More Vietnams was Richard Nixon's memo to the future, his fifth post-presidency book published in 1985. Looking at a group of young thirty-somethings who were already working in the White House, he clearly wanted us to learn and benefit from his experience in global politics. Not because we were young staffers in the current White House but because he knew from his own experience that in some form or other we represented a future in which he knew he would not, could not, live. A future in which, he obviously believed, the principles he had learned in a career culminating with the presidency would still be every bit as operable as they were when he sat in the Oval Office.
In the aftermath of the heated reaction by liberals such as Senator John Kerry and others to President Bush's recent speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, in which Bush took up the inevitable and repeated liberal comparison of Iraq to Vietnam and turned it back on itself, Nixon's book is a reminder that George W. Bush is not the only president to have done so. The very first chapter in No More Vietnams bluntly challenges what Nixon calls "The Myths of Vietnam." He lists 22 myths, ending with myth 22 that "life is better in Indochina now that the United States is gone." Says the former president in a single, succinct follow-up sentence: "Nothing could be further from the truth."
"The antiwar movement did not have a decisive effect on the outcome of the war from a military standpoint, but it had a decisive impact on the political battles that have been waged ever since," says Nixon. "The intellectual and psychological damage...still poisons our foreign policy debates. Ten years later the same distortions about the war that made antiwar activists into heroes on the campuses are still accepted as fact on television, in newspapers, and in college classrooms. Before we can cure ourselves of the Vietnam syndrome, we must purge our diet of the intellectual junk food that helped make us sick to begin with."
Nixon accurately fingered the real problem Americans had already faced in the aftermath of Vietnam and still face today, over twenty years after the publication of his book. He not only knew what that problem was but wanted to make certain that I knew it and did not partake of the "intellectual junk food" that Vietnam was an inevitable defeat and that the consequences of that defeat were somehow anything less than a bloodbath for the people of Southeast Asia. That intellectual junk food is today not only the source for the liberal template of Vietnam. It is the stark objective of liberals sentimental for the 1960s and early 1970s to use the same kind of intellectual junk food to create a Vietnam-like template for Iraq. In the minds of modern liberals -- and as a college student anti-Nixon protester in 1970 I was briefly one of them -- the Vietnam War era is viewed as a romanticized time of an immoral war led by amoral men that was ended by idealistic college kids as a lot of great music played in the background. And everyone lived happily ever after.
Not.
THIS FAIRY TALE IS, as George Bush was too polite to say, not just intellectual junk food. It was -- and remains -- a lie. In point of fact, the now romanticized McGovern campaign to defeat Nixon over Vietnam ended in a brutal 49-state defeat. Nixon, as he later admitted, did himself in by giving his enemies the sword of Watergate. Only then did Democrats gain the power in Congress to undercut the peace that Nixon had negotiated, resulting in the bloodbath that Nixon as president was scorned for predicting. The very core of today's Democratic foreign policy ideas on Iraq have already been tried in Vietnam -- and millions died as a result. A new group dedicated to the liberal Vietnam myth, billing themselves "Recreate '68," is so enamored of the fairy tale of "revolution" that it is using the violence surrounding the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968 as a rallying cry to bring the same ideas to the 2008 Democratic Convention in Denver. Heedless of history, they would implement the bloody failure of liberal Vietnam policy in Iraq. Intellectual junk food as foreign policy.
Richard Nixon's No More Vietnams is today just as important a read as it was when he sent me the book in 1987. While it has many lessons about Vietnam and foreign policy in general that should be taken to heart, there is one that Nixon sought above all to make clear as he passed it down to the next generation.
"In Vietnam," he writes, "we tried and failed in a just cause. No More Vietnams can mean we will not try again. It should mean we will not fail again."
...