The Politically Incorrect Guide to Vietnam certainly indicated that what Nixon did actually got us far closer to actually winning the war than what Johnson did. As far as the nuke bit, you DO realize we were threatened with a nuclear war when we invaded China during the Korean War and we were forced to withdraw from that, right?
“You DO realize we were threatened with a nuclear war when we invaded China during the Korean War and we were forced to withdraw from that, right?”
No, actually that’s something I’ve never heard before. In fact I’m not sure many people have ever heard that one before.
Red China tested their first atomic bomb in 1964, eleven years after the Korean cease fire. President Eisenhower got Red China and North Korea to agree to that ceasefire by threatening to nuke them.
So yes, there was nuclear blackmail involved. It’s just that you have the players reversed.
There were only two powers who had nuclear weapons in 1953. The USA and the USSR. But the Soviets tested their bomb one month after the Korean armistice was signed. And unlike Red China they weren’t fighting in that war.
“The Politically Incorrect Guide to Vietnam certainly indicated that what Nixon did actually got us far closer to actually winning the war than what Johnson did.”
I’m sure Phillip Jennings did his best when he wrote The Politically Incorrect Guide to Vietnam. HR McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty is still the definitive account.
It was his PhD thesis at UNC when he was an Army major. He had access to LBJ and McNamara’s memos, to those of Rusk and McNaughton and the rest the McNamara Whiz Kids who through their arrogance and deceit set in motion a disaster. The book is regarded as important enough to be included on military reading lists.
Nixon’s goal was to extricate American combat troops from South Vietnam after building the ARVN into an army capable of fighting. By 1972 he had most American combat troops out of South Vietnam. The ARVN was still dependent upon American supplies and the threat of heavy American air power to keep North Vietnam at bay. If that’s what you mean by actually winning then he did it.
All of that came to naught when the post-Watergate Democrat Congress cut off ammunition and gasoline supplies to South Vietnam, and prohibited Gerald Ford from bombing the resulting massive NVA armored invasion of the South.