Nixon believed that “there’s no way to win the war. But we can’t say that, of course,” because the United States needed to “keep some bargaining leverage” at the Paris negotiations with the North Vietnamese. During the 1968 presidential campaign, he had claimed to have a secret plan that would bring “peace with honor” in Vietnam. Nixon insisted that the United States could not simply “cut and run,” leaving the 17 million South Vietnamese to a cruel fate under Communist tyranny.
Peace, however, was long in coming and not very honorable. Nixon and Kissinger overestimated the ability of the Soviets to exert pressure on the North Vietnamese to sign a negotiated settlement, just as they misread their own ability to coerce the South Vietnamese government to sign an agreement. By the time a settlement was reached, in 1973, another twenty thousand Americans had died, the morale of the U.S. military had been shattered, millions of Asians had been killed or wounded, and fighting continued in Southeast Asia. In the end, Nixon’s policy gained nothing the president could not have accomplished in 1969.
