ARVN From the Viewpoint of the Whitehouse

1. ARVN From the Viewpoint of the Whitehouse Nixon’s Gamble for Peace, 1969-1973

2. Why did Nixon Choose to Gamble with ARVN? • “And I said, with respect to Vietnam, I said, The war in Vietnam is lost and the sooner you get out, the better we will be.It was lost, but they-- he, for some reason, kept at it. It wasn't his war and it seemed to me that just him handling a presidency, you stick around with a war for two years and it's your war. And it became his war. And in the end, half the country seemed to think he started it”-Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Asst. to President for Urban Affairs • Communism, bloodbaths, oppression, and poverty • “for example, if we talk about the morality of a communist takeover-would it be moral to allow a communist takeover and have the bloodbath in South Vietnam that they had in North Vietnam where 500,000 of our good Catholic friends of Danang were murdered, 500,000 starved to death in slave labor camps” -Richard Nixon, Oval Office White House Tape 508-13, 2 June 1971, Nixon Presidential Materials

3. Presidency/ Vietnamization • Secretary of State Melvin Laird • Laird, General Creighton Abrams, and NSA Henry Kissinger • Divisions over the success of Vietnamization

4. A Decent Interval? Or Nixon willing to accept a decent interval if it became forced upon him? Lam Son 719 “I think it will, I think I agree with you (Kissinger) that there’s a 40 to 50 percent chance, maybe 55, that it will work, that we might even get an agreement. But what kind of an agreement? I think, I think, in other words, I guess, in other words, of course there will still be war out there, back and forth, but the South Vietnamese are not going to be knocked over by the North Vietnamese not easily not easily. “ Linebacker I and Linebacker II Watergate