The Cavalier daily :: Wednesday, January 31, 1973 :: University of Virginia Library

There are no heroes, only
victims. Fifty-five thousand
Americans will never return.
Millions of Vietnamese
peasants are homeless, more
than a million are dead, the
streets of Saigon team with
orphans and the social fabric
of an ancient society is rent
almost beyond repair.

The decent opinion of
mankind has been alienated by
the United States' ten-year
abuse of power. The
reputations of five presidents,
including one who had the
elements of greatness– Lyndon
B. Johnson– and the one who
has brought the armistice–
Richard M. Nixon– have been
badly tarnished. The sensitive
members of a whole generation
hang their heads in shame,
their distrust of their leaders
not to be bought off by a
seven-billion-dollar
rehabilitation program for a
nation whose devastation has
already cost 135 billion.

None of this had to be.

Nixon Critics

Mr. Nixon's more
short-minded critics ask what
he has gained in January that
his brilliant adviser, Henry
Kissinger, had not gained in
October. Others, with longer
memories, ask what was gained
in 1973 that could not have
been won on Mr. Nixon's
assumption of office in 1969.
Still others ask what has been
gained that would not have
come about had Lyndon B.
Johnson, John F. Kennedy and
Dwight D. Eisenhower not
interfered with the social
revolution in Indochina. What,
indeed, has been achieved that
would not have been achieved
had the enlightened views of
Franklin D. Roosevelt
prevailed over the imperialist
vision of Winston Churchill,
the illusions of grandeur of
Charles de Gaulle and the
simplistic global containment
program of Harry S. Truman?

The answer is little, if
anything, of relevance to the
vital interests of the United
States.

Ho Chi Minh, who was a
Vietnamese nationalist first
and a communist second,
established an incipient
Yugoslavia-type communist
government in Vietnam in
1945. He would have
re-established it after Geneva
had the United States not
intervened. His successor will
probably re-establish it before
the end of the decade if the
United States does not again
intervene.

President Nixon has told the
American people that they
sought nothing for themselves
in the war and that their
government's objective has
been "self-determination" for
the South Vietnamese.

But the United States
entered the Indochinese war
because its leaders believed
that any kind of communist
government in Indochina
would threaten its security, if
only indirectly. Roosevelt,
alone among the six presidents
involved, put the people of
Vietnam first. "By what logic
and by what custom and by
which historical rule [do the
Indochinese colonies) belong
to France?" he asked again and
again to Churchill's and De
Gaulle's dismay. "The native
Indo-Chinese have
been...flagrantly
downtrodden.....France has
milked [them] for one
hundred years." He refused,
accordingly, to support
France's plan to reconquer
Indochina when World War II
drew to a close.

The Truman Years

Roosevelt was barely in his
grave before Truman assured
De Gaulle that the United
States would offer "no
opposition to the return of
French authority." There
followed the Cold War in
Europe, the expulsion of
Chiang Kai Shek from China
and the baseless charges of the
Taft-McCarthy-Nixon wing of
the Republican party that
Truman was "soft on
communism." These events
strengthened Truman's
conviction that the installation
of an anti-communist
government in Vietnam was
somehow vital to American
security. By the end of the
French phase of the war in
1954, the United States was
underwriting 80 per cent of its
cost.

President Eisenhower had
the wisdom not to try to
salvage the Drench at Dien
Bien Phu in 1954. ("If to avoid
further Communist
expansion...," Vice President
Nixon said at the time, "we
must .... [put] our boys in, I
think the Executive ... has to
do it.") But Eisenhower did
not have the wisdom to stay
out of Vietnam politically. Yet
even as he went in he did

(Continued on page 4)