‘Tittering at Nixon’
Roger Morris’ diatribe against former President Richard Nixon (“While Tittering at Nixon, Don’t Underestimate the Web He Wove,” Op-Ed Page, March 5) can best be understood in terms of a subject neither Morris nor The Times, in its biographical blurb, saw fit to mention. It is impossible to discuss President Franklin Roosevelt without reference to the Depression, or President Lincoln without mentioning the Civil War. That Morris managed to get through four columns on Nixon without mentioning the central event of the Nixon years, the war in Vietnam, is particularly fascinating in view of Morris’ own actions as a member of the Nixon Administration at a fateful moment during that war.
In 1970, American and South Vietnamese forces were suffering terrible and unnecessary losses at the hands of communist troops who for years had been attacking from privileged sanctuaries in Cambodia. President Nixon ordered the sanctuaries cleared out, a move which objective historians of the war concede saved untold American and South Vietnamese lives and shattered the communists’ offensive capacity in the region for two years.
Your blurb about Morris neglects to mention that he was serving on the National Security Council staff at the time of the Cambodian incursion. What did he do when President Nixon ordered an attack on the sanctuaries? He quit. He, and many others, made the absurd claim that by depriving communist troops of the wherewithal to kill Americans and South Vietnamese, Nixon was “widening” the war.
During 1973-75, congressional support for Saigon evaporated, and Soviet support for North Vietnam escalated. It is no surprise, therefore, that the South ultimately could not prevail.
In Vietnam the new communist regime has driven half a million souls to their deaths in the South China Sea, and in Cambodia 1 million to 2 million have perished in an awful holocaust. Someday, we as a nation will have to come to terms with what happened in Indochina when American authority was withdrawn. I don’t expect Morris to help us solve that problem. But I would suggest that The Times should have seen fit to inform its readers that its correspondent was not a dispassionate historian but a man who has a personal interest in debunking Nixon. For if history proves him right about one of the most controversial and fateful decisions of his presidency, where will that leave Morris?
Speaking of history, I wonder whether Morris’ column contains an example of his historical method. He writes of a virtual chorus of “ridicule and . . . dismay” among conservatives about Nixon’s just-published White House memos and then, to prove his point, quotes from a single column by James Kilpatrick. That’s the only negative statement I’ve seen or heard from a conservative about the collection, and I suspect I read and talk to more conservatives than Morris does. On the other hand, after reading the same book, the New Republic’s Hendrik Hertzberg wrote, “The last eight years have made Nixon look good in unexpected ways. Reading his memos, one has to admire his formidable intelligence, his analytical sharpness . . . his vast knowledge of politics and government.” Using Morris’ technique, I would define this as “a vast outpouring of praise from the former President’s erstwhile critics.”
JOHN H. TAYLOR
Assistant to President Nixon
Woodcliff Lake, N.J.