Nixon’s mythical secret plan

Following up on my reference yesterday in “A secret plan” to Nixon’s “secret plan” to end the Vietnam war during the 1968 campaign, our friend Steve Hayward writes:

Nixon’s so-called “secret plan” is one of the great myths about Nixon that I took up in The Age of Reagan. Here is the passage (from Chapter 7):

That Nixon had advertised a “secret plan” to end the war during the 1968 campaign is a commonplace of Nixon lore, but this is a myth, owing mostly to a wire service story that intuited such a plan. Nixon said no such thing; the phrase “secret plan” was used by a questioner to Nixon in a New Hampshire town meeting, but attributed to Nixon in a UPI story that was only belatedly corrected. But Nixon had to treat the issue carefully; it hardly served his purpose to refute the story and say he had no plan. Instead Nixon said, quite reasonably, that he didn’t want to undercut President Johnson’s negotiations through any campaign statements he might make. In fact Nixon wasn’t sure what to do about the war.

In that regard–not sure what to do about the war–Kerry is in much the same place as Nixon.

I should qualify all my comments concerning the period since 1968 as being based on memory and subject to the fallibilities of memory. I stand corrected.
Steve adds an important postscript for Rocket Man:

I met Michelle Malkin in person the other night, and you can tell Hindrocket that she is even prettier in person than in her photos.

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