“I’m not going to be the first American president to lose a war.” That was Richard Nixon in 1969 talking about the Vietnam War.
Now technically, American troops departed Vietnam in 1973, two years before the fall of Saigon in 1975, but I think most of us can agree that the Vietnam War was a failure and not a win for the United States. But does anyone blame Richard Nixon alone for losing Vietnam?
It certainly wasn’t Nixon who lost the war solely. Multiple presidents had at least a hand in the long process of involvement.
Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy each had a hand in something, whether supporting the French while they still colonized Vietnam or the South Viennese government, assistance like aid and military advisers were given to help the anti-communist effort.
But it wasn’t until President Lyndon Johnson that Vietnam escalated and became a mess. Eventually, Nixon’s expansion into other places like Cambodia made things worse. It all culminated in a terrible peace deal in January 1973, the Paris Peace Accords, and an embarrassing end in April 1975, with the last evacuees being helicoptered out of Saigon from rooftops.
All in all, it was a messy situation and a communist victory, which I would mostly credit to LBJ and Nixon. And after Vietnam, America was cautious about something like that ever happening again. But as they say, history repeats itself.
Now, if you ignored all the times I used the word Vietnam and read those last few paragraphs, you might be hard-pressed to tell if I was talking about the Vietnam War or the War in Afghanistan.
That’s because they’re eerily similar. And like LBJ and Nixon before them, the War in Afghanistan has its own losing presidential power couple: Donald Trump and Joe Biden, one that led to the same terrible peace agreement and embarrassing end as Vietnam.
