Nixon, one of the greatest Presidents?

Europeans are not as ideological as Americans and expect their leaders to be human and allow a certain amount of corruption and what Nixon did was not so bad by their standards.
Americans expect Boy Scout rules that are excepted if their party is breaking them.
Europeans view this as hypocrisy and...well yeah!

 

The Tet offensive was a massive defeat for the NLF who only got into garden at the embassy.

 

Nixon came from genuinely humble beginnings, volunteered and served in WW2, was congressman and senator for California and VP for 8 years with a noted expertise in foreign policy. Where he resembles Trump is his paranoia, social awkwardness, resentment against the political establishment/press and appeal to the 'forgotten' voters.

 

Still that is awfully close for a force claimed to be on the ropes by the Johnson and Westmoreland apologists!

 

~ Jane Fonda ended the Vietnam war.

 

Rubbish. The crushing of the Tet offensive is what ended the VC as a force in the South. After that the North had to send in NVA troops, illegally so to boot, which no one seems to admit when criticizing American policy. That wouldn't have happened without Johnson's escalation and having those boots on the ground there. Nixon wouldn't have been able to force the North to the table without Johnson's support of the South early on; don't see Nixon being able to conduct operations in Cambodia, which were necessary regardless of the sniveling at home and abroad by commie sympathizers, and he certainly wouldn't have been able to use the bombing campaign to force the North to the table in peace talks that everybody moons over. The South didn't fall until Congress yanked outr support from the South while the North continued to receive support from both the Soviets and China. The North only kept the war going because they knew they had support in the American media and the leftwingers were destroying the Democratic Party in 1968. this is in Giap's diary, and isn't 'revisionist history'.

 

What's 'revisionist' about it? Republicans opposed FDR's early war efforts, they opposed expansion into Viet Nam, and they harassed and obstructed both throughout the wars, then ran around claiming credit for winning them. lol they hid under their beds and sniveled until they were over. Of course nowadays they pay hacks to write garbage bashing every Democrat who ever lived for the last couple hundred years and spam message boards with their own made up 'history'. Both Korea and Viet Nam were necessary as part of the containment doctrine; if Eisenhower hadn't been so conservative in dealing with Soviet and Chinese foreign subversion activities in the 1950's we and the world would have been far better off.

 

The Vietnamese were heavily in the revolutionary spirit and no one was going to break it. They’d already thrown out the French and the Americans had already dropped more bombs on it than they had in all of Europe in world war 2. The Vietnamese settled into their tunnel systems and fought well under the jungle canopy. And mining the harbors didn’t dampen their spirits.
This is where people usually say that there was a lack of American will that lost the war but the Soviets had the military will and they got their butts handed to them in Afghanistan.
The only question I have remaining is why the US felt it had an Interest in Vietnam and why it made up that Gulf of Tonkin lie.

 

~ Well most believe it was America's relentless " nation building" , to support democratic governments and to counter communism. Now our own country is walking down the same path we once vehemently opposed.
Gulf of Tonkin is a mystery.

 

I guess I don’t understand why Vietnam was so important when Cuba was ignored after the bay of pigs.

 

~ Welcome to the club. I read some of ' An Unfinished Life ' - John F. Kennedy biography. It seems fairly certain he was going to pull the U.S. out of Vietnam as there was no point in escalating a war that we likely could not win without using another A-bomb.
In contrast Richard M Nixon's book ' No More Vietnams ' last chapter is titled 'How We Won The War '.

 

Once when asked why he so steadfastly supported the Vietnam war, LBJ said that he did not wish to appear weak by withdrawing American troops and look like the mistake between the Kennedys. (Believing RFK would win in 68.
In any case, the US certainly did not win that war and gained a reputation for reckless military involvement and effectively war crimes.
Vietnam fell in its entirety to the communists and did not harm the US in any way.

 

We can start with this bit of revisionist history you posted.

"Republicans wanted to hide under their beds and let the entire globe fall to Soviet and Red Chinese Imperialism; these days they've invented a new fake history for themselves as the 'Heroes' who won the Cold War, a Big Lie many young people seem to believe"

Reagan declared his own war on the Soviet Union and broke them financially. He directed his top national security team to develop a plan to end the Cold War by winning it. The result was a series of top-secret national security decision directives that Committed the U.S. to “neutralizing” Soviet control over Eastern Europe and authorized covert action and other means to support anti-Soviet groups in the region.
One of the many tricks he pulled and my personal favorite was to leak technology for pumping stations for their pipeline into Europe they thought they were stealing. The technology looked good but had built in fatal flaws. The Soviets ended up spending billions on pumping stations that didn't work.
A key element of Reagan’s victory strategy was the support of anti-communist forces in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola and Cambodia. The “Reagan Doctrine”
The Reagan doctrine was the most cost-effective of all the cold war doctrines, costing the United States less than a billion dollars a year while forcing the cash-strapped Soviets to spend some $8 billion annually to deflect its impact.

In Margaret Thatcher’s words, Ronald Reagan had "ended the Cold War without firing a shot."

 

Yeah, that episode was horrendous and atrocious and a dark stain on Jane. But she is still a great actress......, and hot.

 

After the Bay of Pigs fiasco JFK decided any action against Cuba was futile and not worth any more effort. At the same time he was confident of our efforts in Viet Nam which were small and somewhat under the covers. He later changed his mind, as James California points out, but was assassinated before he could change directions (or he might have felt we were already too embedded.)

 

I’m reading that Jackie Kennedy always believed that Johnson had at least a hand in the Kennedy assassination. Seems like the war really heated up after 63.
I worked in the oil industry and many people there believe that Vietnam was thought to be oil rich which turned out not to be true.
It does seem odd that Johnson wasn’t with Kennedy in his own home state.
But we will never know what was going on at that time I guess.