s taying the c ourse 271administration for a supplemental appropriation to send additional
military assistance to Saigon. City after city fell quickly to the advancing
NVA legions until they arrived at the outskirts of Saigon itself. Th ere,
in a scene that summed up the futility of two decades of American
intervention, the last Americans fl ed the U.S. embassy in helicopters.
Victorious communist troops burst into the grounds of the presidential
palace—Th ieu had resigned days earlier, to no avail—and raised their
banner in triumph.
Defeat in Vietnam closed a dismal chapter in wartime presidential
leadership. Neither Lyndon Johnson nor Richard Nixon could fulfi ll
the core tasks. Th e former compiled a weak record. He never estab-
lished a coherent military strategy to meet his political goals, and he did
not keep a fi rm grip on the conduct of the war or alter direction when
battlefi eld success proved elusive. Reluctant to make hard choices about
national priorities, Johnson could not bring himself to level with the
American people about the true cost of the war. His diplomacy with
either Vietnam proved halting and ineffective. By 1968, Johnson’s
domestic agenda, his cherished dream for a Great Society, had unrav-
eled, a political casualty of the war.
Nixon fared even worse. He let the war drag on for four years at a
cost of another 20,552 American lives in combat and countless thou-
sands of Vietnamese deaths, military and civilian, for an agreement no
better than what Johnson might have secured. From 1969 to 1973,
American policy in Vietnam veered unpredictably between gradual dis-
engagement and quixotic drives for victory, refl ecting the instability of
the president’s temperament. American and South Vietnamese security
gains did not add up to a basis for the long-term survival of the Saigon
regime. And like Johnson, Nixon gravely underestimated the will of the
Vietnamese communists to reunify their country. Any prospect for an
independent South Vietnam following the departure of U.S. forces
required engaging in a deliberate, open approach to peace-building,
generating domestic support for an ongoing American commitment.
Instead Nixon preferred to off er expressions of toughness and private
pledges to Th ieu, neither an adequate substitute.
The Vietnam War provoked deep angst about presidential war
powers and a political push to check them. On the political left, the war
prompted talk of an “imperial presidency,” to use the phrase of liberal