sold Nixon’s Assessment of the War in Vietnam, Provided to British Prime Minister Edward Heath

By 1968, the United States had over half a million troops in Vietnam, the war there had been dragging on for years, and public dissatisfaction had blossomed into a substantial anti-war movement. In the 1968 election, Nixon claimed to have a plan to end the war. Insofar as he did have a plan to bring peace, it mainly entailed reducing American casualties by having South Vietnamese soldiers bear more of the ground fighting – a process he called "Vietnamization" – and defusing anti-war protests by ending the military draft. Nixon provided the South Vietnamese army with new training and improved weapons and tried to frighten the North Vietnamese to the peace table by demonstrating his willingness to bomb urban areas and mine harbors. The most controversial aspect of his strategy was an effort to cut the Ho Chi Minh supply trail by secretly bombing North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia and invading that country. The U.S. and South Vietnamese incursion into Cambodia in April 1970 helped destabilize the country, provoking a bloody civil war and bringing to power the Khmer Rouge, a Communist group that evacuated Cambodia’s cities and killed millions. Nixon began to withdraw American troops from Vietnam in June 1969 and replaced the military draft with a lottery in December of that year. In December 1972, the United States began large-scale bombing of North Vietnam after peace talks reach an impasse. In late January 1973, the United States, South Vietnam, the Viet Cong, and North Vietnam signed a peace agreement, under which the U.S. agreed to withdraw from South Vietnam without any comparable commitment from North Vietnam. Historians still do not agree whether Nixon believed that the accords gave South Vietnam a real chance to survive as an independent nation or whether he viewed the agreement as a face-saving device that gave the U.S. a way to withdraw from the war "with honor." In the end, it had taken Nixon five years to disengage the U.S. from Vietnam; about a third of the Americans who died in combat were killed during the Nixon years. How did Nixon feel about the U.S. involvement in Vietnam which defined his presidency? Here is the answer.

The recipient, Sir Edward Heath, was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1970 to 1974, so his ministry overlapped completely with Nixon term as U.S. President. Heath’s accession represented a change in the leadership of the Conservative party, from aristocratic figures such as Harold Macmillan and Lord Home to the meritocratic Heath. He is most remembered as being the Prime Minister who took Britain into the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1973.

Typed Letter Signed ("RN") on his personal letterhead, New York City, February 22, 1985, to Heath, reflecting on Vietnam and enclosing a copy of his latest book, No More Vietnams. "Since April 30th will mark the tenth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, we shall probably be inundated in the weeks ahead with scores of books, columns, and television documentaries criticizing and lamenting the American role in Vietnam. The enclosed book presents a different point of view. There can be an honest difference of opinion over whether we should have become involved in Vietnam and how the war was conducted, but after witnessing the reign of terror that has been imposed upon the people of Vietnam and Cambodia by the Communist regimes we opposed, fair-minded observers can reach only one conclusion: Whatever our mistakes, the United States tried and failed in a just cause in Vietnam. As I put it in the last paragraph of this book, ‘No more Vietnams’ can mean that we should not try again. It should mean we must not fail again."