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106 chapter six “I’ve been saying ‘an honorable end to the war,’ but what the hell does that really mean? There is no way to win this war, but we can’t say that, of course. In fact, we have to seem to say just the opposite.” Richard Nixon, 1969 NIXON “There Is No Way to Win This War” It has been argued by Otto von Bismarck, Henry Kissinger, and others that the business of statecraft should not be seen as a showcase for a nation’s morality —in fact, that morality might even be an impediment to a cold assessment of the facts. A nation, to survive, might have to engage in immoral acts, only to argue later that the highest form of morality was ultimately the survival of the nation. In 1968, an assessment would have to start with the Tet offensive, which, by any objective judgment, changed the landscape of the war. Up until Tet, Lyndon B. Johnson still entertained the thought that somehow he could “win” the war or at least manufacture an outcome that could be camouflaged as an acceptable end to the war. After Tet, the war began to look hopeless, to him, to many of his advisers, and to the American people. Casualties, first. How many killed-in-actions (KIAs) would Americans accept? Fifty a week? A hundred a week? Five hundred? At the beginning of 1968, an especially bloody year in Vietnam, 15,979 Americans had already been killed in the war. By the end of the year, shortly after Richard Nixon won the presidency, the number had spiked sharply to more than 30,000. In one year, the number of American deaths in Vietnam had nearly doubled. And by the time the war ended on April 30, 1975, the United States having suffered the first military defeat in its history, the number had climbed to 58,191.1 In other words, an additional 27,623 Americans died in the last years of a war that the new president privately conceded was unwinnable. “In Saigon the tendency is to fight the war to victory,” newly elected President Richard M. Nixon told Henry Kissinger, the Harvard professor whom he Nixon: “There Is No Way to Win This War” 107 had just selected as his national security adviser. “But you and I know it won’t happen—it is impossible. Even General [Creighton] Abrams [General William Westmoreland’s successor as supreme allied commander in South Vietnam] agreed.”2 Kissinger later wrote that Nixon “entered the presidency convinced . . . that a clear-cut victory in Vietnam was no longer possible, if it ever had been.” He understood that “destiny had dealt him the thankless hand of having to arrange a retreat and some sort of exit from a demoralizing conflict.”3 But if Nixon believed from the very beginning of his presidency that “victory ” in Vietnam was “impossible,” then why did he continue to prosecute the war? Why sacrifice so many more young Americans and Vietnamese to a cause he already considered lost? Was Nixon being simply immoral, or even amoral? Or did he have a definition of morality that he thought justified his policy choices—namely, the survival of America as a vibrant democracy in an unstable world, which, according to Nixon, could not be achieved if the United States suffered an embarrassing defeat in Vietnam. One day, shortly after his election, the new president turned to Richard Whelan, one of his speechwriters, and wondered aloud, “I’ve been saying, ‘an honorable end to the war,’ but what the hell does that really mean?”4 Nixon answered his own question. “There’s no way to win this war,” he acknowledged , “but we can’t say that, of course. In fact, we have to seem to say just the opposite, just to keep some degree of bargaining leverage.”5 So, as he began to juggle his negotiating tactics—an overture to Hanoi, a carefully crafted warning to Moscow, a news conference in Washington, a comforting word to Saigon —he was supremely confident that he could bring the war to an end on roughly his terms and timetable. No more than a year was what he had in mind. Nixon saw himself as a master of the universe, as a president who, with American power and prestige, could control the tempo of the war and manage the diplomatic process in such a way that the United States could emerge from this costly, damaging struggle with its...

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