using substantial cultural and social upheaval, and leading ultimately to Watergate -- was the Vietnam war.
             When President Nixon took office in January 1969, he became responsible for the lives of 540,000 young Americans who had been sent to Indochina under the policies of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Choosing not to abandon an ally to certain defeat by the armies of communist North Vietnam, the President began withdrawing U.S. troops while bolstering South Vietnam's capacity to defend itself and, when necessary, making Hanoi pay a substantial price for its aggression. Actions such as the Cambodian incursion in May 1970 and the bombing of North Vietnam in May 1972 and again in December saved American and South Vietnamese lives and won broad public support but drew harsh criticism from the anti-war movement, the prestige media, and the Democratic Congress.
             In January 1973, the Paris Peace Accords were signed, ending direct U.S. military involvement and paving the way for return of U.S. prisoners of war, many of whom had been brutally tortured by the communists. At the same time, the American side pledged to continue to support South Vietnam with military and economic assistance and by using air power if the communists violated the terms of the treaties. Recent scholarship suggests that as a result of the Nixon Administration's war policies and its tactics in the peace talks at Paris, its goal of preserving the freedoms of the people of South Vietnam and Cambodia might have been fully achieved if the United States had kept its promises after the pact was signed. A few months after the war ended, President Nixon was charged with complicity in blocking the FBI's investigation of the June 1972 Watergate break-in. In a political atmosphere made even more corrosive by Democratic control of Congress, residual tension over Vietnam, and the nation's deepening economic and energy-supply woes, the investigation was broadened to in...