As a new and potentially climactic crisis approaches in the fitful fever of Viet Nam, a beleaguered U.S. President seems a captive of his repeated assertions of the past and his personal passions of the moment. As he has done so often, Richard Nixon spoke again last week of how "the position of the United States as the strongest nation in the world" was at stake in Viet Nam. A defeat for the U.S. might be "repeated in the Middle East, in Asia and in Europe," he warned. He feared that the world might "lose respect" for the office of the President and he vowed: "I will not let that happen."
That is puzzlingly belligerent rhetoric for a leader who is actually withdrawing his nation's troops from a war it has not won. By all logic, if so much is at stake in Viet Nam, his disengagement could be considered grossly negligent. He ought to be pouring U.S. troops into the conflict, rather than pulling them out of it. This mysterious dichotomy between act and word cannot be explained as an attempt to deceive the enemy; the Communists watched the U.S. troopships leave, coolly ignored Nixon's warnings and attacked more massively than ever. The Nixonian rhetoric seems to reveal a misplaced fear that the American psyche cannot handle any tinge of "defeat" or abandonment of professed "principle" in Viet Nam. The President appears to be fighting the phantom of a mythical constituency on the American political right, a spectre perhaps shaped by his own past and never severely examined.
Yet samplings of U.S. opinion show that the public is overwhelmingly weary of the war. Even George Wallace concedes that he is. Americans want their troops back home, the prisoners released and the killing stopped. To be sure, they do not want to see U.S. forces humiliated in a panicky flight for the beaches or watch Communist troops seize immediate control of a Saigon government that the U.S. has supported at such a high price for so long. But they are certainly in the mood for reasonable compromise. Moreover, even most military men feel frustrated by the futility of the conflict, especially the prolonged demonstration of the limits of U.S. power in a restrictive situation. And they cannot help but be apprehensive when so much American naval and air power is concentrated in a far corner of the Pacific, leaving other areas weakened. The handful of remaining hawks who want to bomb Hanoi into dust pose no political threat to the President. And the Democrats who oppose his re-election could only applaud a lowering of U.S. sights in Viet Nam; it is what they advocate.
All of the tired talk of fading U.S. prestige, of nations falling like dominoes, of a massive Communist-inflicted bloodbath, form a self-made trap that only exacerbates the very public reaction that seems to so obsess the President. It could lead him, in turn, to drastic measures that would endanger that "generation of peace" which Nixon so often cites as his prime presidential goal.