Does McCain's Vietnam View Explain Iraq?
Did Senator John McCain overestimate the Nixon administration’s role in improving the conditions of the American prisoners of war in North Vietnam? The question has new relevance to those who liken the surge in Iraq to the latter stages of the Vietnam fight.
President Nixon’s first year in office, 1969, was a new day for the American POWs. Their captors scaled back their demands for propaganda statements, stopped torturing them as heavily, fed them better and even allowed them to interact more with each other.
Mr. McCain, like many of his fellow prisoners, credited the Nixon administration with stepping up the pressure on their captors by unleashing new attacks on North Vietnam and publicizing reports about the mistreatment of prisoners.
“The tremendous effort mounted by the Nixon administration and millions of Americans in behalf of the prisoners of war in Vietnam is directly responsible for the radical improvements in the treatment of the Vietnam POWS beginning in late 1969,” Mr. McCain wrote in a paper written at the National War College a year after his release. “Many prisoners of war who returned to the United States in 1973 in all probability would never have survived if that change had not taken place.”
Historians, though, say the 1969 death of the North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh was probably a bigger factor.
“All we know is that the death of Ho Chi Minh that year was fundamental to a kind of reassessment of what they were doing,” said Stuart I. Rochester, a Pentagon historian and co-author of the definitive history of the POWs, “Honor Bound.” But, he said, many prisoners — mostly aviators like Mr. McCain — had faulted President Lyndon Johnson for limiting their bombing raids and leapt to praise Nixon for what they believed was a new determination to win the war. (In a 1999 memoir, Mr. McCain acknowledged that Ho Chi Minh’s death came at the same time, but still mainly credited Nixon.)
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President Nixon’s first year in office, 1969, was a new day for the American POWs. Their captors scaled back their demands for propaganda statements, stopped torturing them as heavily, fed them better and even allowed them to interact more with each other.
Mr. McCain, like many of his fellow prisoners, credited the Nixon administration with stepping up the pressure on their captors by unleashing new attacks on North Vietnam and publicizing reports about the mistreatment of prisoners.
“The tremendous effort mounted by the Nixon administration and millions of Americans in behalf of the prisoners of war in Vietnam is directly responsible for the radical improvements in the treatment of the Vietnam POWS beginning in late 1969,” Mr. McCain wrote in a paper written at the National War College a year after his release. “Many prisoners of war who returned to the United States in 1973 in all probability would never have survived if that change had not taken place.”
Historians, though, say the 1969 death of the North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh was probably a bigger factor.
“All we know is that the death of Ho Chi Minh that year was fundamental to a kind of reassessment of what they were doing,” said Stuart I. Rochester, a Pentagon historian and co-author of the definitive history of the POWs, “Honor Bound.” But, he said, many prisoners — mostly aviators like Mr. McCain — had faulted President Lyndon Johnson for limiting their bombing raids and leapt to praise Nixon for what they believed was a new determination to win the war. (In a 1999 memoir, Mr. McCain acknowledged that Ho Chi Minh’s death came at the same time, but still mainly credited Nixon.)