Harold Riley responded (“Research before criticism”) to my response (“A question of facts”) by correctly stating that Nixon ordered a brief incursion into Cambodia in 1970.
He was attempting to defend his charge that Nixon “broadened the war” in contrast to my point that Nixon was rapidly bringing our troops home from the time he took office.
If Mr. Riley read the rest of my letter he would have read: “In Mr. Riley”s defense, while Nixon was bringing home the troops, he was simultaneously using other military means to force North Vietnam to the peace table, which ultimately proved successful in January of 1973 with the Paris Peace Accords.”
By “other military means” I was referring to the carpet bombing of North Vietnam, the mining of Haiphong Harbor and, of course, the successful Cambodian raid that Mr. Riley refers to.
I don”t quite understand Mr. Riley”s negative view of Nixon for bringing our troops out of Vietnam, while giving Kennedy and Johnson a pass for sending over a million of our boys there in the first place (the peak being 543,000 in 1968).
There are a lot of reasons not to like Nixon, but his getting us out of Vietnam should not be one of them.
Phil Smoley
Lakeport
