]President Nixon: I just want to say, if you got a little flack from your party, just know there was one party down at the White House that was appreciative.
Ted Kennedy did more than issue a call for a coalition government. He actually accused Nixon of timing America’s military exit from Vietnam to the president’s reelection campaign. Although Kennedy remained the most prominent liberal Democrat in America following the deaths of his brothers—and the charge he made was accurate—he drew a response from other American liberals that illustrates the feckless, floundering disarray in which liberalism remained mired during the early 1970s.
Kennedy made his penetrating critique of the president’s strategy in a June 7, 1971, speech to the National Convocation of Lawyers to End the War, the same speech in which he called for a coalition government. “At last, the ultimate and cynical reality of our policy is beginning to dawn on the American people. The only possible excuse for continuing the discredited policy of Vietnamizing the war, now and in the months ahead, seems to be the president’s intention to play his last great card for peace at a time closer to November 1972, when the chances will be greater that the action will benefit the coming presidential election campaign,” said Kennedy. “How many more American soldiers must die, how many innocent Vietnamese civilians must be killed, so that the final end to the war may be announced in 1972 instead of 1971?”1
Kennedy’s charge was accurate and his question on point. But the last of the Kennedy brothers had no documents to back his words. (Nixon’s White House tapes remained secret and under the president’s complete control; the NSC transcripts of Nixon and Kissinger’s negotiations with foreign leaders were also top secret.)
Although Kennedy lacked inside information about the Nixon White House, he did have some about how the Kennedy White House had handled the war. At this point, so did much of America. The source was Kenneth O’Donnell, who had worked on JFK’s first congressional race, helped run his 1960 presidential campaign, and served as a top White House political aide. In the August 7, 1970, issue of Life magazine, O’Donnell quoted a meeting between President Kennedy and Mike Mansfield, the Senate majority leader, in the spring of 1963. The United States needed to withdraw from Vietnam, said Kennedy. “But I can’t do it until 1965—after I’m elected.” After Mansfield left the room, the president demonstrated that he wasn’t just telling Mansfield what the senator wanted to hear by elaborating on his intentions to O’Donnell: “In 1965, I’ll be damned everywhere as a Communist appeaser. But I don’t care. If I tried to pull out completely now, we would have another Joe McCarthy red scare on our hands, but I can do it after I’m reelected. So we had better make damned sure that I am reelected.”2 If this was indeed JFK’s approach, then Nixon wasn’t the first president to time withdrawal from Vietnam to his reelection.3 During the Kennedy administration, 168 Americans died in Vietnam, 100 of them during 1963. The difference between JFK’s approach and Nixon’s was not one of kind, but of degree.
O’Donnell and Dave Powers, another Kennedy White House aide, said they once asked JFK how he would get out of Vietnam without suffering a loss of American prestige. “Easy,” said the president. “Put a government in there that will ask us to leave.”4 Daniel Ellsberg put the question to Robert Kennedy while the defense analyst was working on the Pentagon Papers: Would JFK have been willing to accept a Communist takeover of South Vietnam in 1965? According to Ellsberg, RFK replied: “We would have fuzzed it up. We would have gotten a government in that asked us out or that would have negotiated with the other side.” (This was the same interview in which RFK, according to Ellsberg, said President Kennedy would have handled Vietnam like Laos, where JFK had accepted a coalition government.)5
Other Kennedy administration officials remained unconvinced. Former secretary of state Dean Rusk said that the idea that JFK had decided to get out of Vietnam following his reelection was hard to believe “for one unimportant reason and for one very important reason.” The “unimportant reason” was that the president never mentioned any such decision to Rusk. “This by itself is not conclusive, since for reasons of his own, Kennedy possibly didn’t want to confide in me his future plans for Vietnam,” Rusk wrote in his memoir, As I Saw It. The important reason, Rusk said, was that “if he had decided in 1962 or 1963 that he would take the troops out after the election of 1964, sometime during 1965, then that would have been a suggestion that he would leave Americans in uniform in a combat situation for domestic political purposes, and no president can do that.”6 It would be nice to believe this, but the Nixon tapes prove that at least one president did do that—and he did it without confiding in his secretary of state or secretary of defense.
Unsurprisingly, Republicans counterattacked against Ted Kennedy’s charge. More than 1,200 at a party fund-raising dinner in Boston cheered as Gov. Ronald Reagan denounced him: “The senator has charged that the president plays politics with the lives of young Americans. This is an irresponsibility that no Republican has ever committed against the five Democratic presidents who presided over the four wars we’ve known in our lifetime.”7 (Reagan was a master of Republican rhetoric but a bit blind to the ways of other practitioners of the art. Accusing Democratic presidents of playing politics with American lives was all too common.)8 The next day, Reagan called on Kennedy to apologize for making such a “venal, vicious charge.”9
Stunningly, one of the few people who could compete with Kennedy for the title of America’s top liberal rose to Nixon’s defense: Hubert Humphrey, Nixon’s 1968 opponent and potentially his 1972 one as well. “I do not believe the President is playing politics with Vietnam,” Humphrey said on the floor of the Senate.10 “I do not think it is a matter of the president being cynical or of the president trying to prolong the struggle.” Humphrey supported a congressionally set withdrawal deadline, but he saw Nixon’s opposition simply as a difference of judgment. “I do not think that makes him bad,” said Humphrey. “I may disagree with the president’s policy. I do not disagree with his sense of sincerity or integrity.”11
The former vice president made the next day’s New York Times: “Humphrey Says Nixon Shuns Politics on War.”12 He also got a thank-you call from the president.
[]President Nixon: I just want to say, if you got a little flack from your party, just know there was one party down at the White House that was appreciative.
Humphrey: Well, I very much appreciate that. [President Nixon chuckles.] And let me say I did exactly what I would have expected that you or someone like you to have done under the same circumstances, and which you did do.
President Nixon: Yeah.
Humphrey: And I believe there are rules of fair play, and I’m not going to—I have too much respect for the office and the man that occupies it [President Nixon attempts to interject] to permit things like that to go unchecked.13
The president complimented Humphrey on a recent Gallup poll showing him neck and neck with Kennedy for 1972. As for Vietnam, “there’s no political mileage in [sic] anybody in keeping this going,” said Nixon.
“Of course not,” said Humphrey.
The president laughed.14
Anyone who wondered why Nixon didn’t just withdraw from Vietnam upon taking office had only to look at the speech Humphrey gave on national television as the 1968 Democratic presidential nominee.
Let me first make clear what I would not do.
I would not undertake a unilateral withdrawal.
To withdraw would not only jeopardize the independence of South Vietnam and the safety of other Southeast Asian nations. It would make meaningless the sacrifices we have already made.
It would be an open invitation to more violence … more aggression … more instability.
It would, at this time of tension in Europe, cast doubt on the integrity of our word under treaty and alliance.
Peace would not be served by weakness or withdrawal.15
If Nixon had brought all the troops home in 1969, Humphrey could have attacked him from the right, called him weak, accused him of inviting aggression, violence, and instability. Of destroying American credibility. Of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Of sounding a retreat that meant 31,000 Americans had died in vain.16
Any Democrat could have made that charge, since none of the Democratic Party’s 1968 presidential candidates had called for immediate withdrawal—not Robert Kennedy, or Eugene McCarthy, or even George McGovern, who entered the race after Kennedy’s assassination. That’s why the notion that Nixon could simply have withdrawn from Vietnam shortly after taking office without suffering any political consequences is a fantasy. Leaving Vietnam may have been a popular idea, but losing it was not.17 Since Nixon realized that leaving meant losing, and that losing the war meant losing the next election, he viewed liberal attempts to set a withdrawal deadline as political poison. Unless he was willing to be a one-term president—hardly the worst thing to be—Nixon had to keep Saigon from falling before Election Day 1972.
Nixon portrayed his decision to continue the war as an act of political courage: “There were some who urged that I end the war at once by ordering the immediate withdrawal of all American forces. From a political standpoint this would have been a popular and easy course to follow.”18
It would have been, in fact, political suicide. In 1969, the Republican National Committee (RNC) commissioned a secret poll to gauge the popularity of various Vietnam exit strategies. Immediate withdrawal came in last place. The statement—“We should get out immediately on North Vietnam’s terms”—drew the opposition of 83 percent. By comparison, “We should use atomic bombs to end the war in Vietnam quickly” was opposed by 82 percent. In Nixon’s first year in office, immediate withdrawal from Vietnam polled worse than nuclear war.19
To be fair to the American people, no one had told them that it was the unanimous view of the Joint Chiefs, CIA, State, Pentagon, and Gen. Creighton Abrams that South Vietnam’s survival would depend on American troops for the foreseeable future, meaning that America’s true alternatives in Vietnam came down to either staying indefinitely or leaving and losing. Nixon seemed to offer a third way, Vietnamization, a promise that all the troops would come home once he judged South Vietnam capable of its own self-defense.
“Precipitate withdrawal,” he warned, would lead to dire consequences. In South Vietnam, it would mean Communist takeover and the slaughter of thousands; in America, “as we saw the consequences of what we had done, inevitable remorse and divisive recrimination.” All this was as true in 1969 as it would be four years later, although the phrase “precipitate withdrawal” implied that at some point leaving would not mean losing. The president called on “the great silent majority of my fellow Americans” to be “united against defeat,” knowing full well that it already was.20 The Silent Majority speech raised his approval ratings to the highest level of his presidency, 68 percent.21 He would not equal it again for four years, when he finally announced that he had achieved “peace with honor” in Vietnam and the troops and prisoners were coming home.22
Until then, Nixon made a political virtue of political necessity: “It is tempting to take the easy political path: to blame this war on previous administrations and to bring all of our men home immediately, regardless of the consequences, even though that would mean defeat for the United States” (April 30, 1970);23 “From a political standpoint, this would be a very easy choice for me to accept” (May 8, 1972).24 Immediate withdrawal would have been the easy way for Nixon to become a one-term president.