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American History: Nixon Goes to China
STEVE EMBER: Welcome to THE MAKING OF A NATION -- American history in VOA Special English. I'm Steve Ember.
Today, we continue the story of the thirty-seventh president of the United States, Richard Nixon.
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The year is nineteen sixty-nine. Richard Nixon, a Republican, is in the first year of his first term in office. His biggest foreign policy problem is the continuing war in Vietnam. During the election campaign, Nixon had promised to do something to end the war.
The question was: what?
Some Americans want him to withdraw troops from Vietnam immediately. Bring the soldiers home, they say. Others believe the United States should take whatever measures are necessary to win. Expand the ground war, they say, or even use nuclear weapons.
Withdrawing troops would leave South Vietnam alone to resist communist North Vietnam. Yet that was the reason the United States had entered the conflict -- to prevent the communists from capturing the south.
Expanding the war would not be an easy decision either. Already, by nineteen sixty-nine, more Americans had died in Vietnam than had died during the Korean War.
For Richard Nixon, the war is a terrible test. If he fails, his presidency could end the way Lyndon Johnson's presidency ended. Johnson decided not to run for re-election after he lost public and political support for his war policies.
Presidents have advisers, and Nixon's most important adviser was Henry Kissinger. Kissinger was an expert on foreign relations. He later served as Nixon's secretary of state. Together, they tried many ways to settle the conflict in Vietnam. It took several years before the involvement of the United States would finally end.
The American efforts were both diplomatic and military. Peace talks were taking place in Paris. But the Nixon administration started secret peace talks in Paris at the same time. The administration also withdrew some troops from Vietnam. Yet -- secretly -- it sent other troops into Cambodia. And it began bombing Laos.
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