Jan. 27 marked the 50th anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords negotiated by Henry Kissinger and North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho. The agreement did not end the war; it was effectively a ceasefire agreement that North Vietnam violated almost immediately. President Richard Nixon had sought “peace with honor” and pledged to South Vietnam’s President Thieu that the United States would take “swift retaliatory action” in the event of violations by the North. American prisoners of war -- 591 of them -- were brought home on Feb. 12, 1973. The last American troops left South Vietnam on March 29, 1973.
Domestic politics prevented Nixon from honoring his pledge to Thieu. Not only was a Democratic Party-controlled Congress hostile to the reapplication of American military power in Southeast Asia, but, more important, Watergate reared its ugly head. In their frenzied and politically self-interested desire to “get” Nixon and ruin his presidency, Democrats in Congress and a supportive media -- with the help of White House counsel John Dean and high-level FBI agent Mark Felt -- turned a minor case of political espionage into a “major Constitutional crisis” that resulted in weakening the president and dooming South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to communist rule.
In his book "No More Vietnams," Nixon recalled that the “possibility of retaliating against North Vietnam evaporated by the end of April 1973.” Nixon wrote that he was willing to retaliate, but Congress would not support it and soon stripped Nixon of the authority to do so. Congress ultimately prohibited “all direct and indirect American military actions in or around Indochina.” The political forces in Congress that doomed Indochina to communist rule were led by Senator Ted Kennedy, and Nixon noted the sad irony that the brother of the president who “committed the United States to the defense of the free countries of Indochina, was leading the fight to abandon them.”
After cutting off funds for military action in Indochina, Congress passed the War Powers Act, and overrode Nixon’s veto. The effect of all of this, Nixon explained, was to strip him of the ability to enforce the Paris Accords and to give the communists in Indochina a free hand to conquer and consolidate their power. Meanwhile, congressional Democrats and the media obsessed over Watergate, further undermining Nixon’s foreign policy authority. It was a perfect political storm and engulfed not only the Nixon White House but also our longtime allies and the people of Indochina.
Nixon, who along with Henry Kissinger has taken the brunt of criticism for our defeat in Indochina and who have been accused of signing the Paris Accords for the purpose of establishing a “decent interval” between “peace” and the ultimate defeat of South Vietnam, understood that for the accords to have any chance of success America needed to maintain the credibility of retaliation against the North Vietnamese and to continue to provide military aid to our allies in South Vietnam. Watergate made that impossible. If there was a “decent interval” it was manufactured by Congress, not Nixon and Kissinger, and it was anything but “decent.”
Kissinger in the second volume of his memoirs, "Years of Upheaval," explained that the administration “had no intention of letting slip by inaction what 50,000 Americans died to achieve, or of abandoning the millions who in relying on our promises had fought at our side for a decade.” And according to Kissinger, he and Nixon viewed what happened in Indochina as affecting American credibility in other parts of the world. The ink was hardly dry on the agreement when the North Vietnamese continued their practice of “massive infiltration of personnel and war material through Laos and Cambodia and across the Demilitarized Zone, violating almost every provision of the Agreement.” Kissinger noted that normally Nixon would have retaliated harshly against North Vietnam -- he had demonstrated that before -- but “[i]n the swamp of Watergate the President’s political strength drained away, and this option did not exist.”
Amerian indulgence allowed Communism to flourish
Thanks to Congress and a media bent on getting Nixon at all costs, the people of South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were abandoned to their horrible fate under communist rule. Kissinger thus lamented: “By our self-indulgence we damaged the fabric of freedom everywhere. And by our abdication we have already caused more suffering than we ever did by our commitment.”
But we don’t have to take Nixon’s and Kissinger’s words for it that Watergate doomed Indochina. The late historian Paul Johnson in Modern Times concluded that “The immediate, and in terms of human life the most serious, impact of the Watergate hysteria was the destruction of free institutions in the whole of Indo-China.” Congressional restrictions on presidential war powers and the politics of Watergate rendered Nixon, and later Gerald Ford, “powerless to prevent the North Vietnamese from breaking the accords and taking everything.”
Johnson called it “the gravest and most humiliating defeat in American history” and for the peoples of Indochina a “catastrophe.” In what was South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, the communists “embarked on nationwide programmes of social engineering,” especially in Cambodia where the Khmer Rouge slaughtered more than a million people. The Soviet Union went on a geopolitical offensive as the United States stood helpless under the spell of what was called the “Vietnam Syndrome.” This was the cost of removing Nixon from power.
