Nixon and Vietnam
By the time Richard Nixon became president in January 1969, approximately 30,000 Americans had died in Vietnam. Neraly 20,000 more would die before the fighting stopped.
"Vietnamization"
As president, Nixon pressed efforts to extricate America from the war, but he, like Johnson, had no desire to admit defeat--to become thye first U. S. president to "lose" a war. He built upon Johnson's post-Tet policy of gradually reducing the number of U. S. troops and turning over more of the fighting to ARVN forces--"Vietnamizing" the war. He though South Vietnam could surivive without U. S. troops. His National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, did not agree. All that could be achieved, he felt, was a "decent interval" between U. S. withdrawal and eventual South Vietnamese defeat. In June 1969, Nixon announced the withdrawal of 29,000 American troops, followed in September by an additional 35,000. Meanwhile, he increased the shipment of guns and materiel to South Vietnamese troops to increase their fighting strength.
Cambodia
In Paris, the peace talks dragged on inconclusively. The North Vietnamese hoped that by dragging out the talks, they could win more advantage on the ground and thus attain a better bargaining position. In response, the U. S. raised the costs of continued delay. Beginning in early 1969, the U. S. began to secretly bomb Viet Cong supply bases in the neutral country of Cambodia. The bombing continued for fouteen months. Then, in April 1970, Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia to clean out pockets of Vietcong troops and supplies. The offensive costs thousands of U. S. and ARVN lives and achieved very little except to exacerbate the anti-war movement and further destabilize the Cambodian government.
In response to the Cambodian invasion, many college students ceased attending classes to protest. Some protests evolved into riots, and many state governors called out their national guard forces to restore order.
Kent State
At Kent State University in Ohio, Governor James Rhodes had ordered out the Ohio National Guard to the campus. On Monday, May 4, 1970, while students were changing classes, the Guard, untrained in crowd control, responded to student taunting and name-calling by opening fire on the crowd. They killed four students and wounded thirteen others. The violence in Vietnam had come home to roost.
Peace
Still the war dragged on. Nixon, a seasoned foreign policy hand , at last realized that the path to peace lay not in bombing North Vietnam but in cutting away their base of support--in this case, the Soviet Union, which supplied the North with arms and materiel. Cannily, however, Nixon did not approach Moscow directly but rather surprised the world by announcing he would go to Red China. At the time,
the U. S. recognized Taiwan, and not the Communist regime in Beijing,
as the only legal representative of the Chinese, so this as a very
daring move. Nevertheless, Nixon went to China and met with
Chairman
Mao Tse-tung and
Chou En-lai (pictured at left with Nixon) The two nations did
not restore diplomatic relations, but the visit achieved Nixon's
intended effect: it raised Soviet suspicions that the U. S. might
recognize Red China and gang up on the USSR. Thus, when Nixon
next traveled to Moscow, the Soviets were ready to talk. Nixon
offered them a deal: in return for putting
pressure on their client state, North Vietnam, the U. S. would send
three
years' worth of grain to the Soviet Union. (Typically, the
communist propaganda machine had been proclaiming record harvests when
in fact the wheat
yield was very low, threatening famine. Nixon's gambit thus
offered the Soviet leaders a way of avoiding possible domestic unrest
and maintaining their power.)The Soviets followed through with their promise. Meanwhile, the last U. S. combat troops left Vietnam in August 1972. However, the talks in Paris remained stalled, so Nixon tried to force the communists' hand by resuming the bombing of the North. The tactic worked, and on January 28, 1973, the Americans, North Vietnamese, South Vietnamese, and the Viet Cong signed the Paris Peace Accords.
Paris Peace Accords
The terms of the agreement were simple but at many points ambiguous. The U. S. agreed to withdraw remaining military advisors, and the North would return 500 U. S. POWs. The fighting in Vietnam would stop and all forces would remain in place--the North and Viet Cong at that time occupied 40% of the South--while the cease-fire was supervised by an international commission. To foster the peace and security of South Vietnam, the U. S. would send moderate replacement military aid and a large but unspecified amount of economic aid. The all-important political arrangments were left vague, with national elections to be held at some time in the future. Nixon and Kissinger called this arrangement "peace with honor."
The End
In the end, neither North nor South Vietnam was able to come to terms on the elections and fighting resumed. On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese troops overran Saigon.
The scene atop the U. S. embassy as panicked Vietnamese refugees board a helicopter
for evacuation to an awaiting aircraft carrier.
Conclusions
Ironically, in its effort to contain communism by taking over the fighting in South Vietnam, the U. S. brought about precisely the result it had feared: it contributed to the destabilization of the region and made eventual communist victory more likely. Why? In part, this occured because the United States' singular fixation on Soviet-directed communism (go back to Kennan's original report) led it to ignore the important role of nationalism in these regional struggles (like Korea, Africa, and Vietnam). It was also abetted by the political tactics of the Democrats and Republicans, with the latter attacking the former of being "soft" on communism, leaving Democratic presidents feeling they had no option but to escalate. Additionally, the men who had fought Hitler and Imperial Japan attempted to apply the lessons of World War II to the Cold War, leading them to conclude that "appeasing" communism as the West had once appeased Hitler would lead the world into another global conflict. Finally, the evolution of the imperial presidency, begun by William McKinley and reinforced by the erection of the national security state in the post-WWII era, allowed for the concentration of too much power into too-few hands with too-few safeguards on abuses of that power. Despite the high cost in American and Vietnamese blood, however, the U. S. would not fully understand this dangerous lesson on the battlefields of Southeast Asia. Instead, it would take a third-rate burglary of a Washington, D. C., office building, to reveal the true depth of deception and perversion of U. S. ideals wrought by the Cold War.
Sources:
Irwin and Debi Unger, Postwar America: The United States Since 1945 (New York, 1990).
Nixon's China Game
The American Presidency
The Fall of Saigon