Real Peace (14 page)

As we look to the future, we should do so with confidence. I do not believe there will be a world war. I believe there can and will be progress in building more peaceful relations with
the Soviet Union. I believe our geopolitical competition will continue. But if we muster the will, we need not be pessimistic about the outcome. As one generation succeeds another, we will begin to see the process of peaceful change take hold in the Eastern bloc as it is already doing to a small degree in Hungary and China. In that change lies the ultimate solution to the riddle of peace. We will win in the long run, and win without war.

But we must avoid soft-headed overconfidence. History tells us it is not enough to be on the right side. The pages of history are strewn with the wreckage of superior civilizations that were overrun by barbarians because they awoke too late to the threat, reacted too timidly in devising a strategy to meet it, and because they lacked the will to make the necessary sacrifices to win.

The history of the world is a narrative of man's struggle to become free and remain free. Freedom has not come cheaply, and keeping it is not easy. We hold a responsibility to the future unique to our time and place. Nothing that today's generation can leave for tomorrow's will mean more than the heritage of liberty.

No people have ever had a more exciting challenge. Yet the American people sometimes become deeply disillusioned about playing this role in the world. The loss in Vietnam was traumatically painful. The burden of building the defenses of the free world is great. The fact that countries to which we give billions of dollars in aid vote against us consistently in the United Nations is maddening.

Without the United States, there is no chance for peace and freedom to survive. Without the United States, the dawn of the twenty-first century would open a new age of barbarism on a global scale.

But we must assume this burden not just for others but for ourselves. We have a spiritual stake in not walking away from a great historical challenge. President de Gaulle wrote, “France is never her true self except when she is engaged in a great enterprise.” This is true of individuals; it is true of nations; it
is particularly true of Americans. Only by participating in a great enterprise can we be true to ourselves.

There could be no greater enterprise than to build a structure of real peace. The struggle to protect freedom and build real peace can raise the sights of Americans from the mundane to the transcendent, from the immediate to the enduring.

During a meeting with Brezhnev in the Crimea in 1974, I jotted down this note on a pad of paper: “Peace is like a delicate plant. It has to be constantly tended and nurtured if it is to survive; if we neglect it, it will wither and die.” Peace has barely survived in the rocky soil of the twentieth century. The violence of two world wars and scores of smaller wars has nearly uprooted it time and again. It has managed to survive, but is far from safe. It is not a grim burden but an inspiring challenge to build and sustain real peace. Given the alternative of suicidal war, we must not fail.

Winston Churchill once remarked that history would treat him kindly because he intended to write the history. This book was not written to preempt historians. It was written because both during and after the war, as President and private citizen, I found that television and newspaper coverage of the Vietnam War described a different war from the one I knew, and that the resulting misimpressions formed in the public's mind were continuing to haunt our foreign policy. In these pages, I have set down the story of the war as I saw it, with the advantages and disadvantages that follow from this perspective.

This is the sixth book I have written, and the fifth that I have written since leaving the presidency. It is a book about which I have especially keen feelings. Its roots go back more than thirty years, to my first visit to Vietnam in 1953. But the intensity of my feeling about it stems from having been the President who inherited the Vietnam War at its peak and had to end it, and having then seen the peace that was won at such cost thrown away so cavalierly. The lessons of Vietnam are, to me, very personal ones. The analysis of events that I have given here is, of course, my own, derived from my own experience, study, and observation. Those who may disagree
with its conclusions should direct their disagreements at me. However, there are others whose contributions I particularly want to acknowledge.

In the preparation of this book, I have drawn not only on my own experience, but also on scholarly and archival sources. In addition to the memoirs of the principal actors, among the most useful of these have been John Barron and Anthony Paul's
Murder of a Gentle Land: The Untold Story of Communist Genocide in Cambodia;
Larry Berman's
Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization of the War in Vietnam;
Peter Braestrup's
Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington;
Michael Charlton and Anthony Moncrieff's
Many Reasons Why: The American Involvement in Vietnam;
Hoang Van Chi's
From Colonialism to Communism: A Case History of North Vietnam;
Louis A. Fanning's
Betrayal in Vietnam
; Marguerite Higgins's Our
Vietnam Nightmare;
Colonel William E. Le Gro's
Vietnam from Ceasefire to Capitulation
; Guenter Lewy's
America in Vietnam;
Stephen J. Morris's “Human Rights in Vietnam Under Two Regimes”; Douglas Pike's Viet Cong:
The Organization and Techniques of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam
; Norman Podhoretz's
Why We Were in Vietnam
; Francois Ponchaud's
Cambodia: Year Zero;
Sir Robert Thompson's
Peace Is Not at Hand;
Robert F. Turner's
Vietnamese Communism: Its Origins and Development
; and General Cao Van Vien's
The Final Collapse
.

For their contributions to my thinking on the issues involved in the Vietnam struggle, I want to thank the many members of my administration, and others, with whom the effort to deal with the war and its aftermath were shared. Many friends and associates offered information and counsel as I wrote this book, but I would especially like to express my appreciation for their advice to the late Ellsworth Bunker, who served as United States ambassador to Saigon from 1967 to 1973; General Edward G. Lansdale, who spent many years as an adviser to our allies in South Vietnam; and Stephen B. Young, who worked in our pacification program and now serves as dean of Hamline
Law School. For their specific help with this book, I also want to thank four people in particular: Dolores Dynes, for her devoted work in preparing the manuscript; Carlos Narvaez, for his diligence in searching out research materials; and, for their exceptionally able, astute, and dedicated assistance, Marin Strmecki—who served as principal research and editorial coordinator—and John H. Taylor, my administrative assistant.

—
R.N.

Saddle River, New Jersey
December 31, 1984

Also by Richard Nixon

Beyond Peace

Seize the Moment

In the Arena

1999: Victory Without War

No More Vietnams

Leaders

The Real War

RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon

Six Crises

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