The American forces fought well, and their entry into the conflict in 1965, together with the aerial bombardment of enemy areas, helped stave off a South Vietnamese defeat. In that sense, Americanization achieved its most immediate and basic objective. But if the stepped-up fighting in 1965-66 demonstrated to Hanoi leaders that the war would not swiftly be won, it also showed the same thing to their counterparts in Washington. Chinese and Soviet military and economic aid now flowed into North Vietnam in increased amounts, and Beijing also sent - beginning in June 1965 - support units to assist the war effort. Until March 1968 they would come, ultimately totaling some 320,000 troops - including anti-aircraft artillery units, defense engineering units, railway units, and road-building units.
As the North Vietnamese matched each American escalation with one of their own, the war became a stalemate. The US commander, General William Westmoreland, proved mistaken in his belief that a strategy of attrition represented the key to victory - the enemy had a seemingly endless supply of recruits to throw into battle. Worse, the American reliance on massive military and other technology - including carpet bombing, napalm, and crop defoliants that destroyed entire forests - alienated many South Vietnamese and brought new recruits to the Vietcong. A major Communist offensive coinciding with the Tet lunar New Year in early 1968, though inconclusive in its military effects, inflamed American domestic opinion and indirectly caused an embattled LBJ to rule out (publicly at least) a run for reelection.
This was the situation that confronted Richard Nixon when he assumed the presidency in January 1969. "I’m not going to end up like LBJ," Nixon vowed before the inauguration, recalling that the war had destroyed Johnson’s political career. "I’m going to stop that war. Fast." He didn’t, and the main reason is he wanted to win it first. Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, understood that the conflict was generating deep divisions at home and hurting the nation’s image abroad, and that they had to begin withdrawing American troops. The difficulties of the war signified to them that American power was limited and, in relative terms, in decline. Yet the two men feared, just like the Johnson team before them, that a precipitous disengagement would harm American credibility on the world stage. Nor were they any less committed than their predecessors to preserving an independent, non-Communist South Vietnam, if not indefinitely then at least long enough to get Nixon reelected. To accomplish these aims, Nixon set upon a policy that at once contracted and expanded the war.
A centerpiece of Nixon’s policy was "Vietnamization" - the building up of South Vietnamese forces to replace US forces. Nixon hoped such a policy would quiet domestic opposition and also advance the peace talks underway in Paris since May 1968. Accordingly, the president began to withdraw American troops from Vietnam, decreasing their number from 543,000 in the spring of 1969 to 156,800 by the end of 1971, and to 60,000 by the fall of 1972. Vietnamization did help limit domestic dissent - as did replacing the existing draft with a lottery system, by which only those nineteen-year-olds with low lottery numbers would be drafted - but it did nothing to end the stalemate in the Paris negotiations. Even as he embarked on this troop withdrawal, therefore, Nixon intensified the bombing of North Vietnam and enemy supply depots in neighboring Cambodia, hoping to pound Hanoi into concessions. When the North Vietnamese refused to buckle, Nixon turned up the heat: in April 1970, South Vietnamese and US forces invaded Cambodia in search of arms depots and North Vietnamese army sanctuaries.
The president announced publicly that he would not allow "the world’s most powerful nation" to act "like a pitiful, helpless giant." Maybe not, but the invasion triggered nationwide protests in cities and on college campuses, and caused an angry US Senate to repeal the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964. After two months, US troops withdrew fTom Cambodia, having accomplished little. Another invasion the following year, this one into Laos and involving no regular US ground troops, likewise yielded no appreciable results.
The fighting continued through 1972, but there was also a diplomatic breakthrough. When Hanoi launched a major offensive across the border into South Vietnam in March, Nixon responded with a massive aerial onslaught against the DRV. In December 1972, after an apparent peace agreement collapsed when the South Vietnamese refused to moderate their position, the United States again launched a furious air assault on the North - the so-called "Christmas bombing." Months earlier, Kissinger and his North Vietnamese counterpart in the negotiations, Le Duc Tho, had resolved many of the outstanding issues. Most notably, Kissinger agreed that North Vietnamese troops could remain in the South after the settlement, and Tho abandoned Hanoi’s insistence that the Saigon government of Nguyen Van Thieu be removed. Nixon had instructed Kissinger to make concessions because the president was eager to improve relations with the Soviet Union and China, to win back the allegiance of the United States’ allies, and to restore stability at home. On January 27, 1973, Kissinger and Le Duc Tho signed a ceasefire agreement in Paris. Nixon then compelled a reluctant Thieu to accept it by threatening to cut off US aid while promising to defend the South if the North violated the agreement. In the accord, the United States promised to withdraw all of its troops within sixty days. North Vietnamese troops would be allowed to stay in South Vietnam, and a coalition government that included the Vietcong eventually would be formed in the South.
The United States pulled its troops out of Vietnam, leaving behind some military advisers. Soon, both North and South violated the ceasefire, and large-scale fighting resumed. The feeble Saigon government, whose military by the start of 1975 possessed a huge numerical advantage in tanks, artillery pieces, and combat-ready troops, could not hold out. Just before its surrender, hundreds of Americans and Vietnamese who had worked for them were hastily evacuated from Saigon. On April 29, 1975, the South Vietnamese government collapsed, and Vietnam was reunified under a Communist government in Hanoi.
The end came even sooner in Cambodia. The Nixon-ordered invasion of 1970 had set in motion a bloody five-year civil war between a US-sponsored
21. Vietnamese try to get on-board a US helicopter sent to evacuate CIA personnel from a building in Saigon, April 29,1975. The manner of the US exit from Vietnam was humiliating to many Americans and disastrous to the Vietnamese who had collaborated with the United States.
Government under Lon Nol and the Communist-led Khmer Rouge. Massive American bombing of Khmer Rouge and North Vietnamese positions in Cambodia propped up the Lon Nol government for a time but devastated Cambodian society in the process. The physical destruction was enormous, and many hundreds of thousands of refugees flooded Phnom Penh and a few other urban centers. Upon returning from a visit to the war-torn country in early 1975, Republican congressman Paul N. McCloskey said: In Cambodia, the United States had done "greater evil than we have done to any country in the world, and wholly without reason, except for our benefit to fight against the Vietnamese."395 On April 1, 1975 Lon Nol relinquished power and fled the country for Hawaii; on the tenth, US president Gerald Ford ordered the evacuation of all remaining American personnel; and on the seventeenth, the Khmer Rouge triumphantly entered the capital.
Indochina’s third domino fell with much less violence and destruction. In early 1973, soon after the signing of the Paris Accords, Laotian prime
Minister Souvanna Phouma reached a ceasefire deal with the Pathet Lao that gave the Communists a dominant position in Vientiane’s coalition government. The departure of the United States further strengthened the position of the Pathet Lao, and following the Communist takeovers in Vietnam and Cambodia in April 1975, the non-Communist leaders fled for Thailand. That December the Pathet Lao announced the creation of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. Truong Chinh’s dream of a revolutionary Indochina seemed to have come true.
World History
