and accepted it even if he personally did not like it. This was a change from his campaign mode when he had accused Hubert Humphrey of advocating parity with the enemy, something Nixon saw as surrender. Once he became president, Nixon adopted the idea of parity but gave it another name - "sufficiency." In terms of Vietnam, he proposed to the other side "mutual withdrawal, guaranteed withdrawal, of forces" (Ambrose, p. 252).
One thing presidents face in their first 100 days is the immediate memory the public has of their campaign promises and statements. During the 1968 campaign, Nixon had been vague about ending the war and never did spell out his plan in any detailed way, though he did pledge to end the war. Nixon had a long-standing public record as an avowed anti-Communist. During Johnson's presidency, Nixon was an avid hawk on Vietnam, often criticizing Johnson's policies while defending the waging of the war itself, a war he said had to be fought to prevent World War III. Nixon favored a military victory, but by 1968 he was being advised that military victory was impossible. The war was also increasingly unpopular with the public, causing Nixon to tone down his militancy in campaign rhetoric. He pledged to end the war without saying how he would do it. Evans and Novak (1971) find that in addition, Nixon lacked detailed planning of any kind for foreign policy: "He possessed a strong, well-defined global strategy but few of the tactics to pursue it" (p. 77).
Nixon knew also that he would be involved in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), and he described his views by setting up two opposing possibilities and then by offering a third. He rejected both the idea of arms control separate from any progress on political settlement and the idea of no SALT agreement until there was some progress on political settlements, such as in Vietnam. The middle course Nixon described as follows: "What I want to do it t...