New Nixon documents

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White House advisers convene secret sessions about the political dangers of disclosures that U.S. troops committed atrocities in the war zone, and about whether the president can delicately intervene in the investigation. In the face of an increasingly unpopular war, they wonder at the impact on support at home. The best way out of the war, they agree, is to prop up a new government that they hope can unite the fractured foreign land.

With an obvious resonance to today's events, the National Archives and Records Administration released 50,000 pages of previously classified documents from the Nixon administration on Wednesday that show how that White House wrestled with issues that eerily parallel problems facing the Bush administration.

There are many significant differences between the wars in Vietnam and in Iraq, a point that senior administration officials make at any opportunity. But in tone and content, the debate during the presidency of Richard Nixon about the impact of that generation's war and of war-crimes trials on public support for the military effort and for White House domestic initiatives strikes many familiar chords.




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