Fatal Politics: The Nixon Tapes, the Vietnam War, and the Casualties of Reelection

by Ken Hughes

Overview

In his widely acclaimed Chasing Shadows ("the best account yet of Nixon’s devious interference with Lyndon Johnson’s 1968 Vietnam War negotiations"-- Washington Post), Ken Hughes revealed the roots of the covert activity that culminated in Watergate. In Fatal Politics, Hughes turns to the final years of the war and Nixon’s reelection bid of 1972 to expose the president’s darkest secret.

While Nixon publicly promised to keep American troops in Vietnam only until the South Vietnamese could take their place, he privately agreed with his top military, diplomatic, and intelligence advisers that Saigon could never survive without American boots on the ground. Afraid that a preelection fall of Saigon would scuttle his chances for a second term, Nixon put his reelection above the lives of American soldiers. Postponing the inevitable, he kept America in the war into the fourth year of his presidency. At the same time, Nixon negotiated a "decent interval" deal with the Communists to put a face-saving year or two between his final withdrawal and Saigon’s collapse. If they waited that long, Nixon secretly assured North Vietnam’s chief sponsors in Moscow and Beijing, the North could conquer the South without any fear that the United States would intervene to save it. The humiliating defeat that haunts Americans to this day was built into Nixon’s exit strategy. Worse, the myth that Nixon was winning the war before Congress "tied his hands" has led policy makers to adapt tactics from America’s final years in Vietnam to the twenty-first-century conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, prolonging both wars without winning either.

Forty years after the fall of Saigon, and drawing on more than a decade spent studying Nixon’s secretly recorded Oval Office tapes--the most comprehensive, accurate, and illuminating record of any presidency in history, much of it never transcribed until now-- Fatal Politics tells a story of political manipulation and betrayal that will change how Americans remember Vietnam. Fatal Politics is also available as a special e-book that allows the reader to move seamlessly from the book to transcripts and audio files of these historic conversations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813938035
Publisher:	University of Virginia Press
Publication date:	04/21/2015
Series:	Miller Center Studies on the Presidency
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	730 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Ken Hughes, researcher at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center Presidential Recordings Program, is the author of Chasing Shadows: The Nixon Tapes, the Chennault Affair, and the Origins of Watergate (Virginia). His work as a journalist has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe Magazine, and Salon.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

Fatal Politics 1

Vietnamization 11

"A Nightmare of Recrimination" 16

"A Hell of a Shift" 20

How to Kill a Withdrawal Deadline 23

"I'm Being Perfectly Cynical" 26

"We Want a Decent Interval" 30

Meeting Zhou 34

"Old Friends" 36

"He Deserves Our Confidence" 37

JFK v. Nixon 39

The Kennedy Critique 45

The Liberal Mistake 49

"Super Secret Agent" 54

Sixty-Six Percent for Six Months 55

"One Arm Tied Behind" 64

"Why Does the Air Force Constantly Undercut Us?" 67

The Appearance of Success 69

"Any Means Necessary" 70

"A Russian Game, a Chinese Game and an Election Game" 75

"It Could Be a Bit Longer" 78

The Democrats 81

"No One Will Give a Damn" 83

"Idealism with Integrity" 85

"Our Terms Will Eventually Destroy Him" 89

Blowup 1968 97

"We're behind the Trees!" 98

"Saving Face or Saving Lives" 101

"Brutalize Him" 103

Kissinger v. Thieu 111

"No Possibility Whatever" 116

"The Man Who Should Cry Is I" 117

"The Fellow Is Off His Head" 119

No Coalition Government 126

"Peace Is at Hand" 128

"A Little Bit Diabolically" 135

The Chennault Affair 140

"The Clearest Choice" 141

Election Day 1972 143

Promises and Threats 147

Christmas Bombing 150

"Let Us Be Proud" 159

The Prisoners Dilemma 161

The Final Cutoff 163

Stabbed in the Back 165

"We Can Blame Them for the Whole Thing" 167

Nixon's Dolchstoβlegende 170

Unearthing Nixon's Strategy 173

The University of Virginia's Miller Center 179

Decision Points 181

The Nixon Tapes 185

Interpretive Inertia 187

Last Days in Vietnam 192

A Better War 197

The Aid-Cutoff Myth 200

How Wars Don't End 202

Questions Unasked 206

Acknowledgments 211

Notes 215

Index 255

Interviews

University of Virginia Press

Editorial Reviews

Hughes ends by writing that Nixon’s myth of a 'victory' in Vietnam masks cowardice for political courage and replaces patriotism with opportunism. Nixon prolonged a lost war. He then faked a peace. And he then schemed to shift the blame onto Congress. As long as that truth is masked, other presidents can play politics with the lives hundred of thousands of innocent civilians, and tens of thousands of American soldiers.

Consortium News

Ken Hughes, a researcher in the University of Virginia’s Miller Center PresidentialRecordings Program, has provided a great service to Vietnam War scholars and those interested in understanding the history of the Vietnam War.... Hughes has taken us into areas of Nixon’s administration that we only previously imagined and provided insightsinto a tragic period of American history. This is an important book that adds a lot to the historiography of the Vietnam War.

Political Science Quarterly

Woodward cites the work of Ken Hughes of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center to show that 'the massive bombing did not do the job militarily but it was politically popular. Hughes argues with a great deal of evidence that the bombing was chiefly designed so Nixon would win re-election.'

Washington Post

Ken Hughes is one of America's foremost experts on secret presidential recordings.

From the Publisher

Ken Hughes is one of America's foremost experts on secret presidential recordings.

Bob Woodward

Woodward cites the work of Ken Hughes of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center to show that 'the massive bombing did not do the job militarily but it was politically popular. Hughes argues with a great deal of evidence that the bombing was chiefly designed so Nixon would win re-election.'

Washington Post