Truman & Nixon War Policies

Nixon himself was no longer in office by that time. He had been forced to resign in disgrace over the Watergate scandal the previous August, but the fall of Saigon marked the final failure of Nixon's policy of "peace with honor" in Vietnam, and more broadly the end of the era of active intervention which had begun under Truman in 1950, and which culminated in two major land wars, neither of which the U.S. could really say it won, and one of which, by almost any standard, it clearly lost.

The experiences of Korea and Vietnam have continued to haunt American culture and policy. Korea has been called the "forgotten war." A generation of Americans know it best through the movie and television show M*A*S*H  which, though nominally about Korea, was a postVietnamera show that was "really" abou

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lin, 1967.) But all of this had to be created by the Truman Administration "on the fly," without either the benefits  or the hampering weight  of previous experience. By contrast, previous Cold War experience, in Vietnam itself and elsewhere in the world, weighed heavily in the shaping of Nixon policy. The domestic pressures which faced Truman were virtually opposite to those which faced Nixon nearly a quarter of a century later. Truman faced a conservative opposition which was anticommunist but, originally and by tradition, isolationist. The far right of Truman's day was more concerned with rooting out real or supposed domestic Communists than with entering into ongoing committments abroad  much less paying for them. Yet, paradoxically, once Korea exploded into war, their isolationism in foreign affairs went out the window. With victory in World War II freshly in mind, conservatives of the Korean War era did not hesitate to call for the strongest action. The contrast to Nixon's situation was complete, because the conservatives were Nixon's base. In the late 1960s, the "Foreign aid" was still unpopular among conservatives, but not Pentagon budgets, or even foreign aid carried out under the Pentagon's a
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Approximate Word count = 2896
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)

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