ABSTRACT
The responsible and courageous path was to see the commitment through—give South Vietnam a chance to remain independent of North Vietnam. The "two Vietnams", as even Bernard Fall called them. It is one thing to disagree with the Johnson-Nixon point of view; it is another to call it—and not only polemically, but righteously—immoral. Nixon then rehearsed the official view of why we were in Vietnam in the first place. Nixon assumes, rather, that many in South Vietnam want independence from North Vietnam. Nixon is so certain that he has the American tradition on his side that he now moves in for the closing kill. He wants to show in a few last paragraphs that he is at the very center of the national self-understanding, at the heart of truth and morality as the American tradition presents them, and that his opposition falsely uses the banners of morality for something outside American experience and values.
