Vietnam's Second Front by Andrew L. Johns

Author:Andrew L. Johns
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

The Icarus Agenda

Vietnamization and Its Political Implications

Our researchers into Public Opinion are content

That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;

When there was peace, he was for peace;

when there was war, he went.

—W. H. Auden, “The Unknown Citizen”

Politicians, after all, are not over a year behind Public Opinion.

—Will Rogers, The Autobiography of Will Rogers

Richard Nixon had dreamed of being president for decades. With his defeat of Hubert Humphrey, that ambition was finally realized. Yet, on assuming the mantle of the presidency, he discovered that the freedom to say and do as he saw fit that he had enjoyed as a nonincumbent no longer existed. The new president attempted to free himself from these restrictions through secrecy and misdirection but came to realize that the vagaries of domestic politics limited him to a fairly restricted set of options. He faced constraints analogous to those of Icarus, the son of the skilled craftsman Daedalus. Imprisoned with Icarus on the island of Crete by King Minos, Daedalus crafted wings to allow him and his son to escape. Daedalus warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun or to the sea—the heat could melt the wax on the wings, and the water could weigh the wings down. In either case, he would be doomed. That narrow corridor proved too restricting for Icarus. Overcome by the joy of flight, he got too near to the sun, the wax melted, and he plummeted to his death. Like Icarus, Nixon had to navigate between the military and the political fronts, forced to grapple with domestic opinion in his effort to win the peace. This chapter will focus on Nixon's first year in office, examining how his Vietnamization policy evolved from the perspectives of the Nixon White House and the Republican Party, which for the first time since the Americanization of the conflict had direct influence on U.S. policy decisions in Vietnam.

Nixon often complained that he inherited a war not of his making. Vietnam, he claimed, resulted from the “faulty strategies” of his predecessors, the “‘architects’ of the mess” he faced when he assumed the presidency. 1 No one can deny that Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson made the decisions that created the morass in Southeast Asia. But the new president's protests should not obscure a critical fact: Nixon undoubtedly contributed to the situation he confronted. His hawkish criticisms of the policies implemented by the two previous administrations, not to mention his vague and ambiguous campaign statements on the conflict, convey a significant measure of responsibility for the situation he encountered on 20 January 1969 both on the ground in Vietnam and at home. Nevertheless, Nixon entered the Oval Office with supreme confidence in his foreign policy expertise. As he told an interviewer in 1967, “I've always thought this country could run itself domestically, without a President. All you need is a competent Cabinet to run the country at home. You need a President for foreign policy.” 2 He firmly believed that he would

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