Richard Nixon

7 Pages 1658 Words

a way “that gives the South Vietnamese a reasonable
chance to survive as a free people2; so he increased the training of Vietnam’s
armed forces.
Nixon was most concerned with the need to protect the lives of the
American troops. So in April of 1970, he approved a joint US-Vietnamese attack
on Communist sanctuaries in eastern Cambodia. It took two months and huge
quantities of supplies were taken, supposedly assuring that the Communists
would not mount an offensive in Vietnam. However, people back in the United
States saw this as expansion of the war. This controversy was settled in 1973
when it was found out that the United States secretly bombed Communist targets
in Cambodia in 1969 and again in 1970; Even though Nixon had said that
“neither the United States nor South Vietnam has moved against those enemy
sanctuaries because we did not wish to violate the territory of a neutral nation.”3
To keep these raids secret, the Pentagon sent false reports to a Senate
committee, but Nixon said in 1973 that Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia’s
chief of state, agreed on the bombings. When South Vietnam invaded Laos in
February of 1971, the US gave air, artillery, and support.. Then in 1972, Nixon
ordered...