ABSTRACT
Richard Nixon spent the first months of his presidency considering how to proceed in Vietnam, finding it difficult to settle on a firm course of action. President Nixon, like most other Americans of his generation, viewed the Vietnam War through the prism of the Cold War, and he understood the Cold War in uncomplicated binary terms. According to this thinking, the United States was an indispensable force in the defense of freedom, while the Soviet Union and its communist allies were totalitarian threats bent on global domination. As Wicker suggested, the bloodbath theory seemed to be necessary for Nixon and his supporters. Their entire geopolitical worldview was predicated on a vision of communist totalitarianism and brutality – of which there was certainly plenty. The empirical bar when it came to communism was set low. The My Lai Massacre was the most infamous American atrocity of the Vietnam War.
