Had we never arrived in Vietnam, would Cambodians have been slaughtered? Nothing positive came from our presence in Vietnam. NOt for them, not for us.
Here's an interesting exchange from the Nixon tapes:
Nixon: Nuke Vietnam
Tapes reveal former president's strategies
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
COLLEGE PARK, Md. - Thinking big, President Nixon raised the idea of using a nuclear bomb against North Vietnam in 1972, but Henry Kissinger quickly dismissed the notion.
"I'd rather use the nuclear bomb," Nixon told Kissinger, his national security adviser, a few weeks before he ordered a major escalation of the Vietnam War.
"That, I think, would just be too much," Kissinger replied softly in his baritone voice, in a conversation uncovered among 500 hours of Nixon tapes released yesterday.
Nixon responded matter-of-factly. "The nuclear bomb. Does that bother you?" he asked. Then he closed the subject by telling Kissinger: "I just want you to think big."
He also said "I don't give a damn" about civilians killed by U.S. bombing.
That exchange in the Executive Office Building on April 25, 1972, is contained in the largest batch of tapes ever released by the National Archives. Altogether, roughly 1,700 of the 3,700 hours of Nixon White House tapes have now come out.
Most of the newly released tapes were recorded between January and June 1972.
In June 1972, Nixon and chief of staff H.R. Haldeman can be heard worrying about the erratic behavior - late-night telephone calls to reporters, for instance - of Martha Mitchell, the outspoken wife of campaign manager John Mitchell. She had complained about political dirty tricks.
"The woman is sick," Nixon said.
Nixon and his aides are heard talking over ways to limit the fallout if the White House is implicated in the break-in at the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate. The plan: Blame John Mitchell, saying he was so busy trying to control his wife that he was not minding the campaign.
Other Watergate-related tapes include the infamous 181/2 minute gap, an erased segment three days after the break-in. Facing re-election in 1972, Nixon worries aloud on one tape that if America lost the Vietnam War and the Soviets pulled out of a coming arms-control summit, his political career would be history.
The summit was not canceled and soon Nixon was escalating the war. The president signed arms agreements with the Soviets in Moscow and tried to pin the blame for the assassination attempt against George Wallace on liberals in an effort to boost his own political prospects
Within hours of the shooting, Nixon is heard on the tapes stirring up rumors that the suspect, Arthur Bremer, was a left-winger with connections to the Kennedys..
The tapes are replete with Nixon blurting out outlandish remarks, said Nixon historian Stanley Kutler.
"It's a frustrated, angry, confused president lashing out and calling on what he had access to, to defeat an intractable enemy," Kutler said, adding that he believed Nixon was not serious about dropping the bomb. |
