This is a direct transcript from a book by Christopher Hitchens a noted author and columnist for the New Yorker among others. Now this does not of course mean it is true but it is definitely not a rumour, some vitriol from a talkback caller or a quick hack job from a journalistic dropout. This guy is for real as are his credentials. The book, which I definitely recommend is called The Trial of Henry Kissinger.
"Here is the secret in plain words. In the fall of 1968, Richard Nixon and some of his emissaries and underlings set out to sabotage the Paris peace negotiations on Vietnam. The means they chose were simple: they privately assured the South Vietnamese military rulers that an incoming Republican regime would offer them a better deal than would a Democratic one. In this way, they undercut both the talks themselves and the electoral strategy of Vice-President Hubert Humphrey. The tactic "worked," in that the South Vietnamese junta withdrew from the talks on the eve of the election, thereby destroying the "peace plank" on which the Democrats had contested it. In another way, it did not "work," because four years later the Nixon administration concluded the war on the same terms that had been on offer in Paris. The reason for the dead silence that still surrounds the question is that, in those intervening four years, some twenty thousand Americans and an uncalculated number of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians lost their lives. Lost them, that is to say, even more pointlessly than had those slain up to that point. The impact of those four years on Indochinese society, and on American democracy, is beyond computation. The chief beneficiary of the covert action, and of the subsequent slaughter, was Henry Kissinger."
What a nice bunch of chaps, that's the guy you defend ... I'd like to hear your critique of Stalin sometime
1.7 million Cambodians were also slaughtered in the wake of us leaving because of the emergence of the communist party there, so while us being there cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives, so did not being there.