President Nixon's address to the nation on November 3, 1969 is now widely acknowledged to be among the handful of presidential speeches that affected the course of history. In this speech, which was entirely written by the President himself, he outlined the situation he had inherited when he became President ten months earlier (with 540,000 Americans in Vietnam), and presented his plan for withdrawing American troops and achieving a peace with honor. He asked for support from "the great silent m