Nixon thought at first that he could scare North Vietnam into ending the conflict within his first year in office, employing what he called the “Madman Theory”: “We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God’s sake you know Nixon is obsessed with Communists. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he had his hand on the nuclear button’—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”24 But his early 1969 ultimatum failed to spook Le Duan, who, long before Ho Chi Minh’s death in September, had taken charge of North Vietnam’s war effort.
