Explore "What did Richard Nixon Learn?" by Howard Zinn on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
No one American president can be blamed wholly for the disastrous U. S. military assault on Vietnam. The long line of blame, if we really stretch, can go as far back as Franklin D. Roosevelt, who spoke to the world of self-determination but gave the French secret assurances that they would not be expelled from their colony in Indochina, comprising Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower gave massive military aid to the French in their war against the Vietnamese independence movement. John F. Kennedy began the military escalation by sending the first large contingents of American troops and using U. S. warplanes to bomb Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson then carried on the major escalation of the war, with all-out bombing, and 525,000 troops. Nixon extended the war to Laos and Cambodia, but finally saw the need to sign a peace treaty which called for U. S. withdrawal. Ten years after the end of the war he wrote about his role in a memoir: No More Vietnams. I reviewed his book, as follows, in the Madison, Wisconsin Capital Times in May of 1985.
Richard Nixon has learned nothing from the Vietnam experience. And now he wants to teach us what he has learned. Let's examine his strange analysis.