One day after taking office, President Nixon assembled his National Security Council to begin a fresh start toward his reach for peace. History has shown that the Americans misunderstood the national motivations and grossly underestimated the local commitment of the Viet Cong and its leadership. After all, North Vietnam’s continued military capability relied on uninterrupted military and economic assistance from the Communist superpowers. A brilliant political strategist, Nixon believed both the “Domino Theory”-an international communist movement toward world domination-and its inverse-that the road to peace in Vietnam ran through Moscow and Peking, not Hanoi. Vietnam suddenly became Nixon’s war, and it became time for him to put into effect his secret plan to end it. Positioning himself as a candidate for peace, Nixon was elected president over Johnson’s Vice President Hubert Humphrey, albeit by a razor-thin margin of 510,000 votes. He repeated this pledge throughout the 1968 campaign, but always without revealing details, insisting that public disclosure would weaken his bargaining position. As a candidate for the presidency in 1968, he gave his pledge to the voters that, if he were elected president, his administration would end the war. In 1968, Richard Nixon began calling for an end to the Vietnam War.
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