The Cambodian “Incursion” 785dozens of women and children, in a Vietnamese ham-
let known as My Lai revived the controversy over the
purposes of the war and its corrosive effects on those
who were fighting it. The American people, it seemed,
were being torn apart by the war: one from another
according to each one’s interpretation of events; and
many within themselves as they tried to balance the
war’s horrors against their pride, their abhorrence of
communism, and their unwillingness to turn their
backs on their elected leader.
Nixon wanted to end the war but he did not
want to lose it. The war’s human, economic, and
social costs could only vex his days and threaten his
future reputation. When he reduced the level of the
fighting, the communists merely waited for further
reductions. When he raised it, many Americans
denounced him in increasingly massive antiwar
protests. If he pulled out of Vietnam and the commu-
nists won, other Americans would be outraged.
Perhaps Nixon’s error lay in his unwillingness
to admit his own uncertainty, something the great-
est presidents—one thinks immediately of Lincoln
and Franklin Roosevelt—were never afraid to do.
Facing a dilemma, he tried to convince the world
that he was firmly in control of events, with the
result that at times he seemed more like a high
school valedictorian declaiming sententiously about
the meaning of life than the mature statesman he so
desperately wished to be. Thus he heightened the
tensions he sought to relax—in America, in
Vietnam, and elsewhere.The Cambodian “Incursion”
Late in April 1970 Nixon announced that Vietnam-
ization was proceeding more rapidly than he had
hoped, that communist power was weakening, and
that within a year another 150,000 American soldiers
would be extracted from Vietnam. A week later he
announced that military intelligence had indicated
that the enemy was consolidating its “sanctuaries” in
neutral Cambodia and that he was therefore dispatch-
ing thousands of American troops to destroy these
bases. (American planes had been bombing enemy
sites in Cambodia for some time, although this fact
was not revealed to the public until 1973.)
To foes of the war, Nixon’s decision seemed so
appallingly unwise that some of them began to fear
that he had become mentally unbalanced. The con-
tradictions between his confident statements about
Vietnamization and his alarmist description of pow-
erful enemy forces poised like a dagger thirty-odd
miles from Saigon did not seem the product of a rea-
soning mind.South Vietnamese women and children were among some 300 apparently unarmed civilians killed in the My Lai Massacre in 1968. Lieutenant
William Calley was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. After many appeals, he was released in 1974.