While the chart below says "casualties," this is actually the death total for each year. You'll note that after Nixon became president in January 1969 the numbers started to drop. It's not that Nixon did a great job; it's that he did manage to start to wind it down. Still, the war dragged on way too long; in fact, it never should have been started in the first place. In analyzing this war it's not that easy to come up with any good guys in terms of American leadership. LBJ started it (I excuse JFK's advisors) and Nixon kept it going too long. This is not a matter of one good guy and one a bad guy. When it comes to the Vietnam War, they were both utter disgraces, but in other areas they both had important positive accomplishments.
One note here...the 16000+ number for 1968, which OCF highlighted in red, belongs to the Kennedy/Johnson count since 1968 was the presidential election year and the Nixon administration did not start until Jan 20, 1969.
I did not highlight that. I was highlighted in the original. I think just to mark the high point, so to speak.
Sorry OCF...my point was that that data point skews the distribution significantly depending on which administration one assumes it's in. Because it actually occurred in the Johnson Administration, the actual counts are 36,152 during the Kennedy/Johnson Administrations (actually a few less since I included the few during the Eisenhower Administration), and 21,279 during the Nixon/Ford Administrations (not including the years after 1986).
This does not excuse any of them for not keeping or getting us out of the war to begin with.
The war was going to happen anyway with or without US involvement. But history takes some strange twists, and an interesting result of the international politics of the South East Asia region is that our former enemy, (North) Vietnam, is now a strategic ally of the US in that region with respect to China.