Nixon Tapes

I just heard on NBC Nightly News some the Nixon tapes released today. It drives me crazy. There are a lot of younger Americans who know little or nothing about Vietnam. Watching this report their ignorance will be enhanced by the misinformation provided by NBC by allowing a Nixon quote to go unchallenged. Nixon stated in 1973 when the first US prisoners of war released from Vietnam came back as heroes because:

• The US "won" the Vietnam war.


• The claim that the soldiers come out proud because "the US came out with the flag flying high".


• The statement "Our enemies respect us. Our allies now trust us."

These statements are delusional. The US lost that war. Read Wikipedia. Look at this picture. When you "win" a war you don't do a desperate, disorganized evacuation of your embassy.


The only hint that a young American could glean from this that maybe things weren't as they were presented on NBC was the short, enigmatic phase used by Brian Williams at the end of the clip:

"Richard Nixon and Bob Hope before the fall in 1973".

What sense would a young person make of this? Is this a reference to the autumn of 1973. What "fall" was he talking about. When did this "fall" occur? Anybody under thirty years of age would be confused. He just saw two iconic figures congratulating each other over victory and success.

I'm sure most young people would simply ignore the word "fall" as maybe a slip by Williams or as a word that they misheard. It simply wouldn't compute. Surely everybody knows that the US has "never lost a war". Right?

The whole point of Johnson and Nixon dragging out that war leading to over 40,000 deaths (of the total 58,000) that came after it was utterly obvious that it was unwinnable came from the fact that neither wanted to be the "first President to lose a war". Nutty.

What makes me puke is that Americans have never owned up to the horrors they inflicted on a people who simply wanted independence. The Vietnam War resulted in over two million civilian deaths (1.6 million in the south, 400,000 in the north). The Republic of South Vietnam had 220,000 soldiers killed. There were 1.2 million soldiers in the Viet Cong or North Vietnam Army killed. Why was the killing so one sided? Because the US used carpet bombing and a "scorched earth" policy. They shot first and asked questions later. The 1964 Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater wanted to nuke the whole thing, kill all 40 million people and be done with it.

Think about it. If the British in 1775-1783 had used the tactics of the US Army in Vietnam, then the number of colonists killed in the conflict would have been 340,000, not the 42,000 who died (8,000 in battle, 10,000 as POWs, and 7,000 of disease). The US inflicted ten times the horror on the Revolutionary war on the Vietnamese people even though it was clear that the "war" was unwinnable (see the Pentagon Papers reflecting strategic thought at the highest level in 1965).

The poet and philosopher George Santayana said: "Those
who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

NBC News is creating an ignorant public who will perpetuate the foolish and deadly mistakes of the past because NBC can't be bothered to put statements in a proper historical context. Tragedy.