Brian: Nixon and Ford did not lose the war. LBJ did. Read up on the military history of the Vietnam War (and, by that I mean anything NOT written by Karnow or Halberstam) and you’ll see that we had an opportunity to effectively bring the war to a close after the Tet Offensive (where, incidentally, the Viet Cong was destroyed as an effective fighting force).
LBJ’s unwillingness to hit Hanoi or Haiphong Harbor (which was the main Soviet transshipment point for war material to North Vietnam) or to pursue the VC into their safe havens in Laos or Cambodia meant we were fighting the war with one hand tied behind our backs. LBJ’s fear of provoking a response from either China or the Soviet Union kept him from prosecuting the war fully, especially when it came to bringing the war to the North.
Read up on Operations Linebacker I and II (strategic bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong by Nixon) and the effect they had, both physically and psychologically on the North Vietnamese.
Read up on Congressional unwillingness to maintain supplies of war materials to the South Vietnamese military (which was doing an effective job against the North Vietnamese Army in the field).
Again, Brian, you are not telling the entire story and you are omitting key facts about the war, all of which paint a very different picture than the one you’re offering as history.
As someone who was in the military during the Cold War and had has first command as a young 2Lt in Germany during 1983 in the Fulda Gap, I will tell you that I completely supported a diplomatic solution, but that, in fact, there WASN’T one. The Soviets were committed to their ideology and strategy of world domination, whether through direct conflict or war by proxy.
I saw this strategy first hand in Central America from 1984 – 1988, including seeing the Soviet and Cuban strategy of destabilizing those regimes supported by the US. Yes, some of those regimes were odious, to say the least (El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala), but Cuba and Nicaragua were far worse.
The same went for South Vietnam (another odious regime) versus North Vietnam (worse by far).
One of our jungle warfare experts in Panama was a former Viet Cong major named Danny Nguyen. The North Vietnamese “awarded” Nguyen’s faithful service to the communist cause by killing half of his family and putting the remainder, including Nguyen into “re-education camps” (which he escaped from). They killed his older brother, who had fought the Japanese and French (as a member of the Viet Minh). Following the fall of Saigon, the North Vietnamese communists rounded up the surviving members of the Viet Cong and National Liberation Front (the more correct appellation) and either killed them out of hand or threw them in prison.
Sometimes the choices aren’t “good” or “bad”, but “bad” and “worse”. There is no doubting that our support of folks like the Shah of Iran or Marcos or Batista was deplorable, but the other options, like the Ayatollah or Castro or Danny Ortega, were far worse.
