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More generally, Nixon argues that a visible failure of the U.S. effort in Viet Nam would undermine Washington's credibility with its allies and weaken its hand in its ongoing negotiations with Moscow on arms limitation and other questions. The Administration seems less convincing on this point, because it also insists that it must continue the bombing, for which there is less and less justification and that does little for U.S. "credibility." Nixon also worries that a Communist takeover in Viet Nam—especially one followed by a "bloodbath" of reprisals there—would lead to an outbreak of recriminations that would scar U.S. domestic policies for years.
It could be, of course, that Nixon risks recriminations of quite another sort. If the U.S. will ultimately have to sacrifice Thieu to get a settlement, Americans might justifiably feel that the war could have been settled and the killing ended much sooner. In that case, the U.S. might have avoided its appalling commitment to bombing.
By any yardstick except the polls, the Administration should be in trouble over its handling of the war. In the four years since Nixon's inauguration, the war has been escalated in Laos and Cambodia and carried back to North Viet Nam, where the U.S. resumed full-scale bombing last May. The violence has increased steadily. More than a third of the 56,000 Americans who have died in Viet Nam since 1961 have been killed during the Nixon Administration. All told, 897,111 Communist troops and 183,000 South Vietnamese soldiers have died in the war—36,000 of them in the past six months alone. Something like 1,300,000 South Vietnamese civilians have died or been wounded in the fighting. Throughout Indochina, the war has produced 11 million refugees—many of whom have been bombed out of their villages by U.S. airpower and artillery.
Yet Richard Nixon apparently sails along toward a major victory as the recognized "peace candidate." One reason, of course, lies in the troop reductions that, along with a sharp decline in draft calls and casualties, have largely neutralized the antiwar movement. But there is more to the President's strength in the polls than is indicated by Defense Secretary Melvin Laird's glib gibe that "the American public understands the difference between addition and subtraction." Some observers, among them Leslie Gelb, who headed the "Pentagon papers" study during the Johnson Administration, reckon that the real difficulty in sustaining protest against Nixon's handling of the war began after the Laos incursion of 1971, when it became clear that Viet Nam was turning into a "proxy war" fought mainly by Vietnamese with sharply reduced U.S. casualties. "From that point on," says Gelb, "nobody could rouse the people on the war issue." Others, among them Pollster Daniel Yankelovich, say that reluctant tolerance of Nixon's stewardship began to turn to something like admiration after his decision to mine North Viet Nam's ports last spring—widely regarded by the public as a daring and successful riposte to Russian and Chinese perfidy.