A fresh assessment of Richard Nixon as commander-in-chief, this book examines how his leadership of the Vietnam War, arms control, alliance management, and defense policy shaped U.S. strategy during a pivotal period of the Cold War.

Bomb craters scarred the hills outside Khe Sanh, Vietnam. Soviet SS-9 missiles rose from silos across the Eurasian landmass as the Cold War heated up. Egyptian armored divisions waited along the Suez Canal, ready to attack Israel. In January 1969, Richard Nixon stepped into the presidency with these realities already in motion: an unpopular war with more than half a million American troops deployed, a nuclear rivalry approaching parity, and a Middle East poised for another round of conflict.

In National Security in the Nixon Era, author Wayne A. Schroeder explains how the decisions that followed reshaped American strategy for decades. Nixon ordered the gradual withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam while shifting the burden of fighting to South Vietnamese forces, a policy that reduced American troop levels from roughly 550,000 in 1969 to near zero by 1973. At the same time, his administration negotiated the first major nuclear arms agreements between Washington and Moscow. The 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I) froze key categories of intercontinental and submarine-launched missile launchers and paired those limits with the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, an effort to stabilize a nuclear balance that had grown dangerously competitive during the 1960s.

Other changes reached deep into the structure of American defense. Nixon abolished military conscription and set the United States on the path toward a permanent all-volunteer force, ending a system that had drafted hundreds of thousands of young men each year during the Vietnam era. His administration maintained NATO's military posture in Europe while revising U.S. force planning and defense budgets to fit a world emerging from the Vietnam War.

When Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel in October 1973, Nixon ordered a massive U.S. airlift of weapons and supplies to Israeli forces while managing the risk of Soviet intervention. The crisis reshaped Middle East diplomacy and opened the path to the later Egypt-Israel peace agreement.

Schroeder reveals a presidency defined less by a single dramatic event than by a sustained effort to steer the United States through the final, turbulent phase of the Cold War's middle decades.