The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam

by Max Boot

THE EXISTENCE of the Kissinger–Le Duc Tho talks remained confidential until January 1972, when Nixon announced that they were going on, but even then the extent of the American concessions was not revealed. By contrast, there was no hiding the body bags that kept coming home. More than twenty thousand American troops would die and more than fifty thousand would be seriously wounded during the Nixon administration’s slow-motion disengagement from Indochina. News of this continuing stream of casualties, along with the attacks on Laos and Cambodia, induced despair in many Americans and convinced them that Nixon really was the war-loving madman that he only pretended to be. Domestic opposition surged after panicky National Guardsmen opened fire on demonstrators at Kent State University on May 4, 1970, killing four students and wounding nine. More than 4.3 million students across the country demonstrated against the invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State shootings, forcing the temporary closure of 20 percent of America’s colleges.