CAMPAIGN ’88 : Nixon’s Lessons of War
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Former President Richard M. Nixon has said attacks on Quayle’s military record miss the point and the question is not whether he saw combat duty but what he learned from the Vietnam War.
Nixon, defending his own conduct of the Vietnam War in an opinion column published Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal, said that “each candidate’s actions during the war matter less than what lessons they learned from the war.”
Quayle, like Nixon a Republican, was in the National Guard during the Vietnam War. Controversy arose after Quayle, a hawk on most military issues, admitted seeking help from his influential family to join the Guard after college and during law school. He has vigorously defended National Guard service as patriotic, and National Guard records indicate that he did not need any special influence to get into the Guard.
Nixon argued that judged both by intentions and by results, the U.S. role in the Vietnam War during his Administration was moral but “when the anti-war left triumphed and the U.S. abandoned its friends, the consequences were a human and moral disaster.”
“We should not make service in combat a litmus test for serving as commander in chief,” Nixon wrote.
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