No More Vietnams (35 page)

Winston Churchill once remarked that history would treat him kindly because he intended to write the history. This book was not written to preempt historians. It was written because both during and after the war, as President and private citizen, I found that television and newspaper coverage of the Vietnam War described a different war from the one I knew, and that the resulting misimpressions formed in the public's mind were continuing to haunt our foreign policy. In these pages, I have set down the story of the war as I saw it, with the advantages and disadvantages that follow from this perspective.

This is the sixth book I have written, and the fifth that I have written since leaving the presidency. It is a book about which I have especially keen feelings. Its roots go back more than thirty years, to my first visit to Vietnam in 1953. But the intensity of my feeling about it stems from having been the President who inherited the Vietnam War at its peak and had to end it, and having then seen the peace that was won at such cost thrown away so cavalierly. The lessons of Vietnam are, to me, very personal ones. The analysis of events that I have given here is, of course, my own, derived from my own experience, study, and observation. Those who may disagree
with its conclusions should direct their disagreements at me. However, there are others whose contributions I particularly want to acknowledge.

In the preparation of this book, I have drawn not only on my own experience, but also on scholarly and archival sources. In addition to the memoirs of the principal actors, among the most useful of these have been John Barron and Anthony Paul's
Murder of a Gentle Land: The Untold Story of Communist Genocide in Cambodia;
Larry Berman's
Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam;
Peter Braestrup's
Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington;
Michael Charlton and Anthony Moncrieff's
Many Reasons Why: The American Involvement in Vietnam;
Hoang Van Chi's
From Colonialism to Communism: A Case History of North Vietnam;
Louis A. Fanning's
Betrayal in Vietnam
; Marguerite Higgins's Our
Vietnam Nightmare;
Colonel William E. Le Gro's
Vietnam from Ceasefire to Capitulation
; Guenter Lewy's
America in Vietnam;
Stephen J. Morris's “Human Rights in Vietnam Under Two Regimes”; Douglas Pike's Viet Cong:
The Organization and Techniques of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam
; Norman Podhoretz's
Why We Were in Vietnam
; Francois Ponchaud's
Cambodia: Year Zero;
Sir Robert Thompson's
Peace Is Not at Hand;
Robert F. Turner's
Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development
; and General Cao Van Vien's
The Final Collapse
.

For their contributions to my thinking on the issues involved in the Vietnam struggle, I want to thank the many members of my administration, and others, with whom the effort to deal with the war and its aftermath were shared. Many friends and associates offered information and counsel as I wrote this book, but I would especially like to express my appreciation for their advice to the late Ellsworth Bunker, who served as United States ambassador to Saigon from 1967 to 1973; General Edward G. Lansdale, who spent many years as an adviser to our allies in South Vietnam; and Stephen B. Young, who worked in our pacification program and now serves as dean of Hamline
Law School. For their specific help with this book, I also want to thank four people in particular: Dolores Dynes, for her devoted work in preparing the manuscript; Carlos Narvaez, for his diligence in searching out research materials; and, for their exceptionally able, astute, and dedicated assistance, Marin Strmecki—who served as principal research and editorial coordinator—and John H. Taylor, my administrative assistant.

—
R.N.

Saddle River, New Jersey
December 31, 1984

Also by Richard Nixon

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In the Arena

1999: Victory Without War

Real Peace

Leaders

The Real War

RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon

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