Why Did Nixon Want To End The Vietnam War

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The 'silent majority' was just a slogan Nixon used to justify his action. Nixon was elected because he promised to end the Vietnam War. In the 1968 campaign he claimed that he knew how to end the war, but he couldn't talk about it in fear of revealing plans to the enemy. It was called 'Nixon's Secret Plan'. He did get elected in the end though, but instead of ending the war right away like he wanted and planned to do in the first place, he kept the war going continuing on for another four years. During that time there were protests all over the United States, and it became extremely clear that a big majority of Americans really wanted the war to end as quickly as possible. Nixon stated that the protesters were small in numbers but a very vocal …show more content…

Haldeman. Haldeman sold this memoir to a publishing center with the intent that it would not be published until Nixon had passed. Ironically, Haldeman died first. In the memoir, Haldeman states that Nixon was ready to end the war early as soon as he took office, but Henry Kissinger, Nixon's National Security Adviser at the time, told him it would just cause a recession and that this would jeopardize his chance of being re-elected in 1972. That was the reason why that Nixon kept the war going on for another 4 years, finally ending it almost right before the 1972 election. There was a recession with high interest rates and high inflation, beginning literally as soon as the war came to an end. Nixon urged there to be wage and price control to try to stop it from occuring, but it didn't work. Gerald Ford (his successor) spent a lot of his time talking about this, but didn't do much. The next president, Jimmy Carter, is still blamed for it still to this day, but he derived the problem from two previous presidents. Long before Nixon was president, Vietnam was seen to be a 'quagmire', a war we couldn't win and couldn't quit. Some people predicted that Nixon would end the war by just simply declaring victory and pulling out, which is just about what eventually …show more content…

They persuaded them not to sign the treaty, telling them they would get a much better deal if Nixon was to be elected. This is very illegal for a party to negotiate treaties like this without the authorization of the federal government. Nixon's people publically admitted they did this. Nixon did get elected though. Literally as soon as he was sworn into office, he called a cabinet meeting to announce that he was ready to end the war by just declaring victory and pulling out of the war which was his plan all along. Henry Kissinger, then just a national security advisor at the time, convinced him out of ending the war. If he ended it now it would cause a recession, which would threaten Nixon's second term. In the end, Nixon kept the war going on another four years, just to keep his second term as president secure. It was a week before the 1972 election Henry Kissinger appeared on TV with a speech beginning 'Peace is At Hand'. Towards the end, Nixon ended up signing the peace treaty. We promised the North Vietnamese reparations, but after our troops came back home, Nixon revoked them, so as consequence, the North Vietnamese revoked their promise to give us all their information on POWs and MIAs, so we still don't know what happened to several thousand of

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