Nixon Aide’s Call-to-Arms for Afghanistan War

Bruce Herschensohn, a former member of the Nixon administration and now a senior fellow at the Pepperdine School of Public Policy, spoke to the Channel City Club on parallels between the Vietnam War and the current war in Afghanistan.

The title of Herschensohn’s July 8 talk was “An American Amnesia: The Vietnam Stigma and the Current Obama Foreign Policy.” The amnesia he refers to is what he regards as America’s forgetting, or misinterpretation, of what caused the war in Vietnam to fail. This misinterpretation, he said, influences present-day opinion and policy toward the wars in the Middle East.

The Vietnam War effort suffered from lack of support from Congress and the media, according to Herschensohn. Though the war was technically won, he said—ending, as far as the U.S. was concerned, in January, 1973 with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords—Congress’s refusal to allocate sufficient funding, plus ramifications of the Watergate scandal, resulted in the ultimate surrender of South Vietnam, and Cambodia, to North Vietnam. The failure was not because the war was incapable of being won, as many thought, according to Herschensohn, but because of lack of support, in sentiments and finances.