South Vietnam Quotes
President Johnson was trying to organize peace talks in Paris. Nixon didn’t want a public announcement to occur before election day when he was running against Hubert Humphrey. Knowing the South Vietnamese President was reluctant to go to Paris but was under pressure from America to do so, he sent a message through Chennault that he should not accept and “hang on” as Nixon would shortly win. The South Vietnam president refused to go to Paris, Nixon won the election, and then had to cope with the continuation of the war that might well have ended before he took office. Nixon believed that he could get Russia and China to pressure Ho Chi Min to make peace. Nixon's private overtures to the South Vietnam president, violated the Logan Act which prohiited private citizens negoatioating with foreign governments. President Johnson was aware of Nixon's commission of this felony want wanted to prosecute him, but the evicence had been obtained from secret intelligene agency bugging and wiretapping both the South Vietnam Embassay in Wishington and the Presidential Palace in Vietnam the public knowledge of which would have caused a scandal. Instead, he called Nixon and warned him to stop, but the damage had already been done, and the South Vitenamese government would not go to Pariis where they would have to agree to a coalition government with the Communists. THey waited for Nixon to deliver a peace treaty which would leave them in charge of South Vietnam. In the final analysis, the South Vietnamese ended up with nothing and no participation in anything when the U. S. Withdrew and the Communists took over.
Ford was then a member of Congress. This was known as the “Domino Theory” and was the strategic reason that sending troops to Vietnam was in America’s vital Interest. However, the Domino Theory was incorrect. Vietnam did fall to the Communists, and yet NONE of the countries became communist. Actually, they became even more democratic.
President Johnson had invited Ike to the White House to advise about the Vietnam War in general and the Rolling Thunder operation in particular. President Eisenhower’s quotation was one of the clearest statements of the so-called Domino Theory which was believed by almost all American Military and Foreign Policy leaders. It was tragically wrong, but it drove U. S. policy throughout the war. When the Communists took South Vietnam, there was no subsequent Communist takeover or attempt in any of the countries Eisenhower had enumerated. One of the reasons was that the Vietnam Communists were not very close to the Russians and for over 1000 years had considered China their worst enemy. They had little solidarity with the International communist movement, but American intelligence did not realize that. They did not believe that the ethnic hatred between Vietnam and China would inhibit the Vietnamese in modern times. It did. Even after the war, the Vietnamese developed better relations with the U. S. then they had with China. One of the major things the intelligence and policy operators missed was that there was not a single map in China that showed Vietnam as a country. To the Chinese, it has always been a part of China and they want it to be in the future. The Vietnamese have not agreed for a millennium.
The reference to Munich referred to British Prime Minister meeting with Adolf Hitler in Munich, giving Germany some of their demands while receiving assurances that there would be no further aggression. This appeasement just encouraged Hitler to take more and soon he had invaded all of Europe beginning World War II. The view since has been that a dictator must never be appeased in unjust aggression, even on relatively small items. What made the Vietnam War so complicated was that while it appeared that the attacks on South Vietnam by Communist North Vietnam was a first step of general Communist Aggression, the reality was that it was primarily a Civil War where the South was a massively corrupt, Catholic Controlled dictatorship and the North was a Communist dictatorship dominated by Buddhists. And there was major friction between the Vietnamese Communists and the Chinese Communists who were not working in concert for general Communist domination. The North Vietnamese were a nationalist movement. The Domino Theory had been wrong.
