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C00002 00002	AN HISTORICAL VIEW OF NIXON
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AN HISTORICAL VIEW OF NIXON


	In my opinion, history may regard Nixon as the most competent
U.S. president of the twentieth century, in the  sense  that  he  set
himself the hardest tasks as president and achieved them.

	The  first of these tasks was settling the Vietnam war on the
terms that he achieved.  This would not have been difficult if he had
had  full  congressional and popular support, but given that congress
was about to tie his hands, he found himself in a poker game with the
North  Vietnamese  with  almost  no  cards  in  his  hands. The North
Vietnamese were demanding that in order to get our prisoners back, we
would have to overthrow the Thieu government for them.  A majority of
Congress was either explicitly willing to accede to  this  demand  or
was  trying  to  reduce  our  strength  to  an extent that would have
required acceding to it.  Therefore, if the North Vietnamese had held
out  for  a  few more months, they would probably have got their way.
In order to achieve a settlement on his terms, Nixon had to make many
sacrifices.  Here are some examples:

	1.  He  sacrificed  his  conservative domestic economic views
making innumerable concessions to the Democratic Congress in order to
keep them off his neck on the war issue.

	2.  He  appointed  fanatics  to  the Environmental Protection
Agency trying to keep the environmentalists off his neck.

	3. He made big concessions to the Russians and the Chinese in
order  to  get  some co-operation from them in dealing with the North
Vietnamese.

	4. He went all out to win the 1972 election  by  as  large  a
margin  as possible in order to show the North Vietnamese that he had
popular support even though a majority in Congress was  against  him.
This  included  promoting  the  excessively  partisan  spirit  in his
administration that led to Watergate.

	5. He stretched his authorizations from Congress to the limit
and past it in Vietnam itself in order to give the South Vietnamese
a chance to defend themselves.