In 1972, with the Vietnam War still raging, Democrats certainly hoped to make the large loss of American life a pivotal issue in their effort to oust Nixon. Washington Post cartoonist Herblock led the way. A long-term Nixon-hater, he graphically emphasized that Nixon’s war had cost twenty thousand lives. George McGovern, the Democratic nominee, ardently sought to exploit this large death toll. The only out-and-out antiwar presidential candidate of the entire Vietnam era, McGovern implored the electorate to “choose life, not death” when they voted in November. “Someone,” he insisted, “must answer for [the] 20,000 more dead, for 110,000 more wounded, for 550 captured or missing, for $60 billion more wasted in the last four years.”
Ultimately the most striking characteristic of McGovern’s candidacy was its spectacular lack of success. In 1972 the Vietnam War—and the high death toll of the Nixon years—simply failed to resonate with the electorate. Part of the reason was unconnected to casualties. The two main candidates simply ran very different campaigns. McGovern’s was a liberal insurgency that initially benefitted from the opening up of the nominating process to state primaries in which activists made a decisive difference. McGovern had trouble, however, transforming his primary momentum into the fall. At the Democratic Convention, in particular, he was slack and disorganized. His acceptance speech was made to a tiny audience in the early hours of the morning. He also picked a vice-presidential running mate who soon had to withdraw after he admitted undergoing electroshock therapy.
Nixon, meanwhile, sought to soar above the fray. He had already established his credentials as a successful international statesman, visiting both China and Moscow within the space of four months in the first half of the year. In the summer and fall he then implemented a detached Oval Office–centered campaign, while his aides played dirty. On presidential orders Nixon’s underlings worked hard to tarnish McGovern as a radical in cahoots with the most extreme antiwar protestors—those long-haired, and sometimes violent, demonstrators who “the great silent majority” had so little time for.
While this unseemly Watergate-tarnished campaign grabbed the nation’s attention, the actual fighting in Vietnam slipped into the background. This was surprising, for throughout 1971 the war had remained a major topic. In February and March, Nixon had seemed particularly vulnerable after media reports depicted South Vietnam’s incursion into Laos as a spectacular fiasco. Correspondents had been particularly eager to criticize the government’s clumsy efforts to minimize helicopter losses and use “misleading evidence” to claim the South Vietnamese had performed well. Then in the spring, with opinion polls revealing that 61 percent considered the war a mistake, the antiwar movement launched another bout of mass protests. The actions of veterans who opposed the fighting were particularly striking, as they discarded their medals and appeared on the media and before Congress. When John Kerry, the future senator, presidential candidate, and secretary of state under Obama, was called before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he dubbed the war “the biggest nothing in history,” adding, in a subtle rephrasing of the Korean War sound bite, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
A year later, Nixon was able to prevent Vietnam from igniting as a major campaign issue. He began his reelection campaign by readopting the mantle of peacemaker. On January 25, just weeks before making the historic trip to China, he went on television to reveal that Kissinger had met a North Vietnamese negotiator on twelve occasions. In these secret sessions, Nixon explained, Kissinger had unveiled numerous initiatives to break the deadlock, but each one had been rebuffed by North Vietnam.
If this speech helped to defuse the charge that Nixon had made no moves to end the war, then his next televised address, on April 26, emphasized the success of Vietnamization. On the day he had assumed office, Nixon reminded his national audience that the American troop ceiling in Vietnam was 549,000. Our casualties were running as high as three hundred a week. Thirty thousand young Americans were being drafted every month. Today, thirty-nine months later, through our program of Vietnamization—helping the South Vietnamese develop the capability of defending themselves—the number of Americans in Vietnam by Monday, May 1, will have been reduced to sixty-nine thousand. Our casualties—even during the present, all-out enemy offensive—have been reduced by 95 percent. And draft calls bring them to zero next year.
As Nixon pointed out, even a major new North Vietnamese offensive failed to halt the inexorable decline in American losses. Vietnamization was one obvious reason. The other was that Nixon unleashed a true techno-war campaign, especially in the air, to bolster South Vietnam and counter the communists.
Hanoi had launched its Easter Offensive on March 30. It was a sustained three-pronged attack that placed intense pressure on South Vietnam during the spring and into the summer, but Nixon hit back hard. As he told his advisers, he was determined to “bomb those bastards like they’ve never been bombed before”— and he certainly had sufficient power at his disposal. Alongside the massive B-52s, which each had a payload of about twenty-two tons, the U.S. Air Force was now equipped with high-precision weapons that had been waiting for action since the 1968 bombing pause. As the historian Stephen P. Randolph points out, American aircraft could now “strike accurately from a higher altitude, avoiding the antiaircraft fire that had always been the greatest threat to strike aircraft. More significantly, perhaps, a single aircraft could attack with greater assurance of destroying a target than had been possible” during the 1960s. Nor was this all. On May 8 Nixon announced the mining of Haiphong Harbor. Within the space of just two minutes U.S. planes laid thirty-six mines. Without suffering any losses, they closed the major port through which North Vietnam brought in crucial supplies.
From Nixon’s perspective, this techno-war response was a clear success. By June it had helped halt the Easter Offensive, at a cost to Hanoi of about half the 200,000 troops it had thrown into battle. By October it had even contributed to a breakthrough in the negotiations. For the first time Hanoi agreed to a settlement that would leave Thieu in place. During November and December Thieu himself was the main obstacle to a deal: he balked, in particular, at an agreement that would permit communist troops to remain in the South. But after Nixon launched the massive Christmas bombing raids in December, Thieu was somewhat reassured both by minor additional North Vietnamese concessions and by the prospect that the United States would again bomb if North Vietnam violated the deal. On January 23 the Paris Peace Accords were finally signed. Four days later a ceasefire went into effect, bringing an end to the United States’ protracted involvement in the Vietnam War.
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