Nixon's Vietnam War Book

Meticulous, scathing critique of Richard Nixon's cynical attempts at achieving "Peace With Honor" in Vietnam. Kimball, author of several books on Vietnam (most recently Nixon's Nuclear Specter), concludes that Nixon, far from his later spin (still propagated by apologists) that he made the best of a bad hand inherited from his predecessors, exacerbated things with an erratic policy based on expediency, political calculation and, it often seemed, the President's own whims. Hence the "Madman Theory" of threatening North Vietnam with massive retaliation if they failed to surrender while simultaneously pushing for Vietnamization; hence the Cambodian and Laotian "incursions," the former a tactical success but a political disaster, the latter a debacle on all fronts. Nor did Nixon or Henry Kissinger care about prolonging the war or "saving" South Vietnam from Communism after Nixon's reelection, as Kimball (and later authors like Larry Berman and Ken Hughes) makes painfully clear. Perhaps Kimball overstates his thesis in a few particulars, downplaying ARVN's generally solid performance during the Spring Offensive of 1972 (albeit backed by heavy American air power) and the degree to which any President taking office in 1969 would have struggled to extricate the country from Vietnam, with or without "honor." Still, this book provides a devastating rebuttal to those stubborn revisionists who claim that Nixon "won" the war only for those damn liberals to punt it away.