Staying on Message -- Nixon's Message

By Harold Meyerson
Wednesday, June 28, 2006; A25

Let's give credit where credit is due: Nobody knows how to take the worst political hand imaginable -- responsibility for a failing war -- and turn it to their own advantage like the Republicans. That was the defining political accomplishment of Richard Nixon in Vietnam. It may yet be the defining political achievement of George W. Bush in Iraq.

Nixon, of course, had an easier time of it. When he took office in 1969, he inherited a war that his Democratic predecessors had made and that had long since descended into a blood-drenched, stalemated disaster. He could have opted to end the war early in his term, particularly since neither he nor his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, believed it was winnable. But by continuing the conflict, and even expanding it into Cambodia, he enraged the 40 percent of the nation that wanted us out of Vietnam. Millions of demonstrators took to the streets; some of the student movement embraced a wacky, self-marginalizing anti-Americanism; and mainstream Democrats grew steadily more antiwar.