Barry Sussman: Cutting Funding for the Vietnam War: a Precedent for Iraq?
Posted at 2:18 pm, January 9th, 2007
Talk about Congress cutting funding for the Iraq war has been moving from a mumble to what I expect will be a roar before long. It brings me back to a moment in the spring of 1973 when the House voted to block military aid for South Vietnam, the first step in a series of funding cuts that brought that war to an end.
In my judgment at the time, it was the Watergate scandal that emboldened Congress to act. Then, as now with Iraq, there was public revulsion at the war. But I thought it was unlikely Congress would have cut funding if not for the scandal having weakened Richard Nixon so badly.
There’s some discussion now about what Congress can do legally—whether it can block individual budget requests, say for escalation of troops—and also what the Democrats on Capitol Hill feel would be a sound approach politically.
I don’t remember discussions of the constitutionality of cutting funding in 1973. Instead I remember President Nixon mired in Watergate when, in early May of that year, the House voted to block the funding of military aid for South Vietnam and Cambodia. It was one of the legislators’ most independent, aggressive acts since the start of the war a decade earlier.
I was writing a book on Watergate at the time. To test my theory (one that seems so obvious now), a week after the House vote I phoned William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to ask what impact he felt Watergate had on American foreign policy, if any. I didn’t mention the House action but Fulbright brought it up immediately, calling it most significant and saying it indicated a change in the role Congress would play in foreign affairs.
Fulbright went further, saying Watergate had been “a very salutary development. It is immediately painful and sad to the individuals involved. But in a broad governmental aspect, it will help readjust relations between the President and the legislature.”
In an essay for HNN, a George Mason University Web site, a writer named Lauren Zanolli goes into the Vietnam funding cuts and states that “historians have directly attributed the fall of Saigon in 1975 to the cessation of American aid.”
At the time, it was a Democratic Congress that reined in a Republican president when he was terribly weakened by scandal and conducting a widely-hated war. Iraq is at least as widely hated as Vietnam was but the scandal aspect is lacking. Let’s see what happens next.
January 10th, 2007 at 6:46 pm |
Regarding “In an essay for HNN, a George Mason University Web site, a writer named Lauren Zanolli goes into the Vietnam funding cuts and states that ‘historians have directly attributed the fall of Saigon in 1975 to the cessation of American aid.’” It is a myth that Nixon, Kissinger, and others originated. The sources Zanolli uses are few in number and flawed in analysis and evidence. The historical consensus is NOT that Congressional funding cuts, which were not significant, caused the fall. The historical consensus is that Nixon and Kissinger had known the war was lost long before and chose a decent-interval exit strategy to preserve their reputations. They knew that after the withdrawal of American forces it was likely that Saigon would fall. It finally fell because of the weaknesses of the Saigon government itself, and because U.S. troops and bombers were not there to counterbalance the political and military superiority of the other side. Gerald Ford helped to perpetuate the myth, as did the Right in the decades after the war. This is the myth upon which “swift-boating” was founded.
Congressional funding cuts and restrictions began at the time of Nixon’s incursion into Cambodia. By late 1971, even Republican and Democratic hawks were warning Nixon that he could not stay in Vietnam if the only purpose was to preserve the Thieu government (or Nixon’s own reputation).
In a nutshell, and in the end, congressional opposition to a perpetual war was one of the major factors that forced Nixon and Ford to face reality and bring an end to the bloodbath.
–Jeffrey Kimball, historian
May 20th, 2007 at 10:55 am |
Kimball shows why the youth of America hate America. He rewrites the facts and distorts the truth. By throwing in “swift-boating” he tries to sound contemporay. But what is proven by his ignorant retort is that Nixon WAS hampered by the Democrats in Congress. And Vietnam was not lost, but given away. Today the Democrats want to give Iraq away to (insert name here). The Democrats today just like in 1971 only wanted to win the White House. They again do not care how they do it, and hopefully just like in 1972 they will not win.