From the S&S archives:
Nixon visits troops in Vietnam

BANGKOK — President Nixon swept in and out of South Vietnam Wednesday, saying: "We have gone as far as we can or should go in.opening the door of negotiations which will bring peace."

Nixon made his statement at Independence Palace in Saigon where he conferred with President Nguyen Van Thieu.

Recounting the peace offers made by the allies at the Paris talks, Nixon said it is now time for the. North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong "to sit down with us and talk seriously about ways to stop the killing."

Later at a combat base near Saigon, he told U.S. infantrymen: "Out here in this dreary, difficult war, I think history will record that this may have been one of America's finest hours, because we took a difficult task and we succeeded."

Nixon dashed to nearby Vietnam and back before heading for India Thursday on his round-the-world tour.

Nixon's noon arrival at Saigon's Tan Son Nhut airport and his helicopter hop to the Presidential Palace marked the first visit by an American president to the South Vietnamese capital. Nixon was in Vietnam for 5½ hours.

His call at Di An, a small base in scrub country some 12 miles north of Saigon, was the first presidential trip into a combat operations area in Vietnam — though military officers reported Di An had not come under any enemy attack for nearly a year.

Former President Lyndon B. Johnson limited his Vietnam visits in 1966 and 1967 to Cam Ranh Bay, a big U.S. coastal base 180 miles northeast of Saigon. That base is rated as the safest station in the country.

Security and secrecy engulfed the Nixon trip as it began from Bangkok without advance announcement. It was unscheduled on his three-day visit to Thailand. A White House source said later the President had planned all along to go to Vietnam, despite strenuous objections from the Secret Service.

Mrs. Nixon went along too and helicoptered to an orphanage and to an Army field hospital outside Saigon.

The President mixed sports talk with more serious observations as he chatted with camouflage-helmeted troops of the 1st Infantry Division at Di An.

"Chicago? See the Cubs? They might take it all," baseball fan Nixon would say to a GI who came from the Windy City. "Tigers aren't so hot this year," he told a Detroiter.

Trekking about the muddy red clay by foot and motoring in a jeep, the commander in chief talked to Cobra and light observation helicopter crews, to defenders of bunkers within the barbed wire perimeter, to ranking officers and to privates. He pinned Distinguished Service Crosses on three of the men.

"What happens in Vietnam, how this war is ended, may well determine what happens to peace and freedom in all of Asia," he told the servicemen.

Nixon took the same view after meeting with Thieu for more than two hours in war-and-peace strategy discussions.

Standing with the 42-year-old Vietnamese leader on the steps of the presidential palace, Nixon said:

"The stakes here, important as they are for the people of North and South Vietnam, are important also to all the world."

"It is time to bring an end to the war, but to bring an end to the war in a way that will not encourage another war; bring an end to the war in a way which will provide the right to choose the kind of government they want for the people of South Vietnam, and in providing that right, make it more possible for the other nations in Southeast Asia to retain that same right for themselves."

Thieu agreed that "the Communist side has nothing to gain by waiting" for more allied concessions. He reaffirmed his pledge that South Vietnam will be "making efforts to shoulder an increasingly larger share in the military struggle."

The significance of the lull in the fighting — now in its seventh week — and in the decline in enemy infiltration was weighed by the allied leaders and by Nixon in talks with U.S. advisers, a White House source indicated.

Gen. Creighton W. Abrams Jr., the U.S. commander in Vietnam, and Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker were with the President.