China after the war

Johnson resisted but in November agreed to these terms. Despite the boost this move gave the sagging presidential campaign of Democrat Hubert Humphrey, Richard M. Nixon (whom many had counted out of politics after he lost the race for California governor in 1962) emerged victorious in the presidential contest. Nixon’s War Richard Milhous Nixon (1913-94) was a man who believed in winning at any cost. To ensure victory in the 1968 election, he made repeated-though vague-promises to end the war. Yet, after he was elected, Nixon did not hesitate to expand the war into neighboring Laos and Cambodia. Nixon had evolved a grand strategy with his foreign policy advisor, Henry Kissinger (b. 1923). The strategy called for improving relations with the Soviets (through trade and an arms-limitation agreement) in order to disengage Moscow from Hanoi, and for normalizing relations with China. After the U.S.S.R. and China had cut the North Vietnamese loose, Nixon and Kissinger reasoned, the United States could negotiate a “peace with honor” in Vietnam ...»