No More Vietnams

Introduction

The Myths of Vietnam

How the Vietnam War Began

Why and How We Went Into Vietnam

How We Won the War

How We Lost the Peace

Third World War

Author's Note

To those who served

I published
Real Peace
, my fifth book, in a private edition in 1983. It was my first and only experience as a publisher. It was also the only case in which I was able to approach writing an entire book in the way I had always wanted, which was to envision it as a long speech. I wanted it to have the impact of a book but with the clarity, simplicity, and immediacy of a spoken address.

Real Peace
was written five years after
The Real War.
During his first years in office President Reagan had vigorously addressed the crisis in superpower relations I had described in the earlier book. He had undertaken a massive defense buildup and was taking a more assertive line against Soviet aggression. Now I felt our goal as a nation should be a realistic strategy for preserving and extending peace around the world while reducing the chances of a suicidal nuclear war.

My advice to anyone undertaking a major writing project is to do what I have done throughout my political career, whether with speeches, articles, or books: Make an outline. You do not have to be bound strictly by it. But unless you begin by ordering your thoughts coherently, your writing will meander rather than march, sag rather than sing. Always remember, too, that
while you may think all your words are pearls of wisdom, shortening the string during the editing process will keep you from getting tangled in your own rhetoric. Publishers often want big, fat books they can label as “sweeping” or “definitive.” Sometimes a subject requires such length and detail, but all too often it does not. Shorter is frequently better, because shorter texts are usually more powerful and always more read.

I began making notes over the Independence Day weekend in 1983. I finished the seventeen-page outline, written out in longhand on a yellow legal-sized pad, at 12:30 in the afternoon on July 4th, just before leaving my home in Saddle River to go to Yankee Stadium to see New York play the Boston Red Sox. The young Yankee pitcher, Dave Righetti, threw a nohitter, his first, and mine as well. I decided this was a good sign for
Real Peace
!

Five weeks later, I had finished the manuscript. Any author will tell you that when he has completed a project he wants to see it in print as quickly as possible. But publishers require as much as six months' lead time to get a book into bookstores. I decided to cut out the middle man and asked Marin Strmecki, who had helped research the manuscript and prepare it for publication, to produce the book instead. He found a printer and designed the book and the jacket, and by September it was finished. Without a publisher's giant publicity apparatus to depend upon, I mailed copies of page proofs, and later, finished books, to key columnists and opinion leaders around the world. Their responses made
Real Peace
my most critically acclaimed book, and soon Little, Brown asked permission to publish a regular commercial edition.

Many praised the book because they thought I was being critical of President Reagan's hard line. But my most hard-hitting passages were about the myths of peace, the naive and fatally flawed nostrums being put forward by his harshest critics. I also returned to a theme I have repeatedly emphasized ever since Mrs. Nixon and I took a seventy-day trip around the world in 1953: the need to develop a more effective policy to promote freedom and prosperity in the Third World. “The
people in these countries have terrible problems,” I wrote. “The communists at least talk about the problems. Too often we just talk about the communists.” Today the Berlin Wall has come down and most of the nations of Eastern Europe have begun to break free of Soviet domination. But in the developing world, the grinding poverty and misery that provide such fertile soil for communism persists and will do so for generations. The Soviet Union still spends $15 billion a year to prop up anti-American regimes in Vietnam, Syria, Cuba, North Korea, and Afghanistan. The Cold War has ended in Europe, but it is still being waged in the Third World.

• • •

During the 1980 Presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan proclaimed the war in Vietnam a noble cause. His critics called it a gaffe. I call it the truth. Of all the books I have written,
No More Vietnams
is the one that I felt I had an obligation to write—for the sake of the three million Americans who served, for the sake of the 56,000 who died, for the sake of the millions of people of Indochina still suffering under communism because of our failure, and for the sake of history.

Vietnam is the most lied-about war in our nation's history. In the wake of the Vietnamese gulag and the holocaust in Cambodia in which two million people were killed by the communist Khmer Rouge we had tried to keep out of power, those who opposed our efforts—including columnists, authors, and movie directors—have spent the last fifteen years scrambling to justify their antiwar position. Many of them still argue that we were on the wrong side. In this book I demonstrated not only that we were on the right side but that after our fighting men had won the war, the United States Congress lost the peace by slashing aid to our South Vietnamese allies at the same time the Soviet Union was dramatically expanding its aid to the communists in the North.

When I wrote the book in 1985, I was suffering from what my doctor described as the worst case of shingles he had ever seen. In spite of this ordeal, or perhaps as a way of distracting my attention from it, I was able to do some of the best writing
I have ever done. But I erred on one important decision: the title. The one I chose was based on this passage: “ ‘No more Vietnams'
can
mean we will not
try
again. It
should
mean ‘We will not
fail
again.' ” As I look back, the title seems too clever by half, as if I were trying to outsmart people by co-opting the antiwar critics' favorite bumper sticker. Titles, like texts, should be simple and direct. If I were making the decision today, I would choose a different title:
A Noble Cause
.

—RN

March 14, 1990

Saddle River, New Jersey

No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now. Rarely have so many people been so wrong about so much. Never have the consequences of their misunderstanding been so tragic.

Vietnam has been the subject of over 1,200 books, thousands of newspaper and magazine articles, and scores of motion pictures and television documentaries. The great majority of these efforts have portrayed one or more of the following conclusions as facts:

• The Vietnam War was a civil war.

• Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist first and a Communist second and had the support of a majority of the people of Vietnam, North and South.

• Ngo Dinh Diem was a puppet of the French colonialists.

• The National Liberation Front was a revolutionary movement independent of North Vietnam.

• The Viet Cong won the hearts and minds of villagers through humanitarian policies.

• The Geneva Declaration of 1954 legally bound Diem's government and the United States to unify the two halves of Vietnam through elections.

• The agreements in 1962 “neutralizing” Laos prevented the widening of the war.

• The Buddhist protests in 1962 against Diem resulted from religious repression.

• The Johnson administration was the first to send American troops into combat in Vietnam.

• Most American soldiers were addicted to drugs, guilt ridden about their role in the war, and deliberately used cruel and inhumane tactics.

• American blacks constituted a disproportionate number of the combat casualties.

• The United States lost the war militarily.

• The Communist Tet Offensive of 1968 was a military defeat for the United States.

• U.S. secret bombing in 1969 and ground attacks on the Communist bases in Cambodia in 1970 were responsible for bringing the Communists into power in Cambodia in 1975.

• It was a calculated policy of the United States to bomb civilian targets in North Vietnam.

• The percentage of civilian deaths in the Vietnam War was higher than in other wars.

• American POWs were treated humanely by the North Vietnamese.

• The antiwar demonstrations in the United States shortened the war.

• The Paris peace agreements of 1973 were a cynical attempt to provide the United States with a “decent interval” between the withdrawal of its forces and the collapse of South Vietnam.

• The United States could have struck the same deal in 1969 as it did in 1973.

• The domino theory has been proved false.

• Life is better in Indochina now that the United States is gone.

All of these statements are false.

• • •

Ten years ago in April 1975, a violent peace engulfed Vietnam following the withdrawal of the Americans and the victory of the Communists. The North Vietnamese soldiers who steered their Russian-made tanks into the streets of Saigon were harbingers of tyranny and misery for the people of Indochina, of aimlessness and impotence for the United States, and of victory after victory for the Soviet Union in its relentless campaign of conquest and domination over other Third World nations. The spectacle of desperate men, women, and children who had depended on us dragging their household possessions before the Communist invaders was an unprecedented example of American betrayal and failure.

The American withdrawal and the Communist victory were an unmitigated tragedy for the 40 million people of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Before our withdrawal, they had a chance for a better life under governments supported and influenced by the United States. Today, because we failed to meet our commitment to them, they suffer under one of the most brutal regimes in the world.

Antiwar activists had proclaimed that there would be no bloodbath in South Vietnam if the Communists won. But while the blood may not be on their hands, they cannot sleep comfortably at night as they think of the 600,000 Vietnamese who have drowned in the South China Sea attempting to escape Communist tyranny; of tens of thousands more imprisoned in “reeducation” camps; and of the unhappy lot of millions of others condemned to live under Communist rule. There was some freedom of the press before the Communists came to power; now there is none. There were some opposition political parties; now there are none. There was some attempt to have free elections; now there are none. There was some hope
for a better life; now there is none. The per-capita income of the South Vietnamese was $500; now it is less than $200 in Vietnam, one of the lowest in the world.

Even more tragic is what has happened in Cambodia, one of the fallen dominoes of Southeast Asia. When we withdrew our support from the anti-Communist Cambodian government in 1975, 7 million people lived in Cambodia, about the same number who live in Austria today. Three years later, Pol Pot's new Communist government had murdered or starved to death over 2 million.

The massacre of almost a third of the population of Austria would provoke an outcry in the civilized world that would resound for decades. After the Cambodian holocaust, there was only a whisper. Two million lost souls went unmourned while the self-proclaimed humanitarians in United States antiwar circles thrashed around desperately in their efforts to find someone to blame besides themselves. They claimed that the corruption and repression of the anti-Communist Lon Nol government led to the Communist takeover. Even today they continue to make the ludicrous charge that U.S. forces, who were fighting to
prevent
the Communist conquest of Cambodia, transformed peaceful Cambodian peasants into ruthless communist murderers.