When Partisanship Stopped Ending At The Water’s Edge

November 2, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Afghanistan, Democratic Party, Richard Nixon, Vietnam 

Conrad Black argues that the Democratic Party started the dangerous precedent of wartime politicking in the early Seventies:

The long nightmare in Indochina changed that. Having plunged the United States into Vietnam under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, the Democrats doomed South Vietnam and Cambodia by cutting off all aid to them after Richard Nixon had extracted the 545,000 draftees the Democrats had deployed there on a flimsy legal pretext, and had avoided a Communist takeover in Saigon. Democrats ended all aid to the pro-Western faction in the Angolan war, and made a halfhearted effort to impeach Ronald Reagan for assisting the anti-Communist Contras in Central America. This foreign-policy schism has not healed, though it had become academic for a time after the Cold War ended in complete Western success and the USSR peacefully disintegrated.

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