[JasonC]

Nixon was perfectly willing to bomb the beejesus out of NVN and he won re-election in a landslide. Opposition to the war outside of radical left circles evaporated with the draft and the withdrawal of US ground troops. The country rejected the defeatist line every chance they were given. They just didn't think they were voting for defeat and capitulation in 1974. They thought Nam was over and they were just voting out a crook.

The hard left has tried to pretend ever since that everyone always agreed with them over the war - which ignores McGovern's catastrophic defeat. And that the war was unwinnable because the VC could hide and stuff - which ignores the fact that the VC was gone and it took ten divisions of Russian armor to destroy SVN. It is all lies and always has been. US airpower plus ARVN were enough to defeat NVN in 1972, and would have been plenty in 1975. But the hard left did not want to stop losing boys in a far away land. They wanted communism to win and their US enemies to lose.

They still do.

[syriacus]

The country rejected the defeatist line every chance they were given.

True!

My father, a loyal Chicagoland Democrat had detested Nixon for years but voted for him rather than McGovern, whom he saw as weak on defense. Both my father and another Democratic friend called me long-distance, to try to convince me to vote for Nixon, but I was still a kneejerk liberal in those days.