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RN’s Trip From The Chinese Perspective

December 9, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Book Review, China, Richard Nixon 

JamesHumes

James Humes is the author of a new book filled with new insights on RN’s trip to China.

Former RN speechwriter, historian, author and all around polymath  James Humes was at the Nixon Library on Monday to discuss and sign copies of his new book Only Nixon: “His Trip to China Restudied and Revisited.”

Humes arrived with his co-author Dr.  Jarvis Ryals, and was introduced by the President’s younger brother Ed Nixon, who helped inspire the book when he joined the authors on their trip to China in 1999.

“Only Nixon” is a unique study of RN’s 1972 trip, Humes argues, because it tells the story through the Chinese perspective and addresses key information neglected by scholars and historians.

Humes sat down with Nixon Foundation Vice President Sandy Quinn to discuss his new insights on this latest episode of TNN TV:

Courtesy of TNN contributor and radio talk show host David Stokes, a podcast of Humes full remarks will soon become available.



Comments

2 Responses to “RN’s Trip From The Chinese Perspective”

  1. DE Teodoru on December 9th, 2009 5:14 pm

    Prof. Stokes may not have mentioned this but, we who used to plead with LBJ after Tet 1968 not to “seize defeat from the jaws of victory,” should realize that Nixon seized victory from the jaws of defeat in Vietnam. Bob Khomer, who headed CORDS under LBJ—a devoted genius of a bureaucrat– focused on saving the peasants who ran to the cities to escape our merciless bombing of the countryside by providing them with settlement opportunities in the cities. As a result, the Viet Cong “fish” were left high and dry because the peasant “sea” moved to the cities where, according to Le Duc Tho, Hanoi had no infrastructure. As a result, Hanoi desperately attacked all of South Vietnam’s cities to punish these refugees from turning South Vietnam from 85% rural in 1963 to 75% urban by 1967 and becoming, according to Radio Hanoi “petit bourgeois,” meaning shop keepers and tradesmen. The Democrats feared that if Nixon wins in Vietnam– and boy did they hate Nixon– it would be as it was with Ike in Korea: Dems start wars and Reps finish them. So Congress stripped the South Vietnamese of the means to defend against the invading North Vietnamese army—after Tet it was all tanks and cannons, no more guerrillas. Still, so effective was the South Vietnamese rolling back of the VC infrastructure—Phoenix Program– that in April 1975, Thieu’s General Staff recommended that they pull back to the Mekong Delta because there they could hold out indefinitely.

    Nixon had to pull out of South Vietnam because he realized Dem Congress would do anything so he doesn’t win. But he made a deal with China to have Chinese boys do what Congress would no longer allow American boys to do: stop Hanoi’s westward march over all of SE Asia. Thus what Nixon did, is exactly what Eisenhower got involved in SE Asia to do. Per the NSC documents, Ike in 1958 wanted to prevent Thailand from falling to the Communists. By getting the Chinese to hold back Hanoi in Cambodia, Nixon snatched victory from the jaws of defeat and saved Thailand. There’s more, much more, that make the case that Nixon– NOT KISSINGER– was a foreign policy genius. Most of it is in Communist archives which some of us still read carefully. It is said that leaders, like parents, are not appreciated until they are gone. Nixon hurt a lot of us, but we can’t take away from him that in Asia he did exactly as he set out to do. Had Nixon not put a permanent wedge between China and Russia, Reagan would never be celebrated as the President who ended the Cold War. There’s a lot to criticize and reproach Nixon for but as good historians you can’t do that until you first give credit where credit is due. God forgives you, Mr. President; perhaps we should too….and appreciate you as well!

  1. "Only Nixon" Reviewed « The New Nixon

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