ABSTRACT
President Nixon's central focus in his early teml of office was on the issues of foreign policy and the establishment of more positive relations with the Soviet Union and China. It was uncharacteristic for a political leader who had spent most of his political career attacking communism both at home and abroad to attempt an casing of relations with these communist powers, but his many years of serving as a front-line warrior in the Cold War gave him sufficient authority to embark on such changes and to ward off accusations of 'selling out to the communists'. His continuation of the Vietnam War for another four years, however, demonstrated how he was unable to meet the electoral and Congressional demand for disengaging America from the Vietnam War that had become a military and human quagmire for the US. The human cost alone for Nixon's continued engagement was an additional 20,500 US troops killed and an untold number of dead Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian people. I His buttressing of the corrupt regime of General Thieu could not stop the disintegration of the artificial State of South Vietnam and its incorporation into a united Vietnam by 1975. Like his predecessor, President Johnson, Nixon could not remain uninfluenced by the misinformation and misleading statistics pointing to victory in the South. The exaggerated figures representing body counts, numbers of weapons captured or the effectiveness of civil action programmes were retailed to Nixon from the same military and civilian officials, or their successors in Saigon, that had deceived the Johnson administration. Nixon's political career had been built on the central theme of anti-communism and it was intellectually impossible for him to confront the reality that the withdrawal of US military forces along with their Vietnamese place men, General Thieu and his many outriders, back to America was the obvious solution to this undeclared war. It was not for another four years of fighting, marked by an escalated bombing campaign, that this widely supported programme was eventually adopted by Nixon and his advisers.
