When did the United States officially pull out of Vietnam?
278419#53
The growing Watergate scandal was a major disaster for Nixon, eroding his political support in public opinion and in Washington. However he did manage to secure large-scale funding for South Vietnam, much of which was wasted. The United States withdrew its troops from Vietnam before the Paris Peace Accords in 1973. However, Watergate resulted in significant Democrat gains in the 1974 midterm elections and when the new 94th Congress convened the following January, it immediately voted to terminate all aid to South Vietnam in addition to passing a bill forbidding all further US military intervention in Southeast Asia. President Ford was against this, but as Congress had a veto-proof majority, he was forced to accept. South Vietnam rapidly collapsed as the North invaded it in force, and Saigon fell to the NVA on April 30, 1975. Later nearly one million Vietnamese managed to flee to the U.S. as refugees. The impact on the U.S. was muted, with few political recriminations, but it did leave a "Vietnam Syndrome" that cautioned against further military interventions anywhere else. Nixon (and his next two successors Ford and Carter) had dropped the containment policy and were not willing to intervene anywhere.
History of the United States (1964–1980)
20282194#21
Gen. Viên nearly became a signatory to the Paris Peace Accords in 1973. A tentative agreement between the United States and North Vietnam was reached in late October 1972, but President Thiệu rejected the accord and demanded 69 changes. Concerned that the Hanoi government might pull out of the negotiations altogether and seek to defeat the South Vietnamese, President Nixon ordered the heavy aerial bombing (Operation Linebacker II) of North Vietnam in December 1972. Although American losses were light overall and damage in North Vietnam heavy, American public opinion and Congressional anger ran high against the bombing campaign. The Hanoi government agreed to return to the bargaining table, and Nixon suspended operations against North Vietnam on December 29, 1972. Nixon offered repeated, private assurances (which did not have the weight of formal diplomatic guarantees) to President Thiệu several times during the first two weeks of January, but could not get him to agree to sign the peace document. When President Thiệu continued to balk, Nixon told him that he would independently sign the peace accord on January 23 with or without South Vietnamese consent. Thiệu capitulated. By January 22, however, it was unclear if Thiệu would actually send a delegate to Paris to sign the documents. Gen. Viên offered to go to Paris to initial the peace agreement without Thiệu's consent, but President Nixon vetoed the idea.
Cao Văn Viên
4511448#20
The U.S. pulled its troops out of Vietnam in 1973, and the conflict finally ended in 1975 when the North Vietnamese took Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City. The war exacted a huge human cost in terms of fatalities (see Vietnam War casualties). 195,000–430,000 South Vietnamese civilians died in the war. 50,000–65,000 North Vietnamese civilians died in the war. The Army of the Republic of Vietnam lost between 171,331 and 220,357 men during the war. The official US Department of Defense figure was 950,765 communist forces killed in Vietnam from 1965 to 1974. Defense Department officials concluded that these body-count figures need to be deflated by 30 percent. In addition, Guenter Lewy assumes that one-third of the reported "enemy" killed may have been civilians, concluding that the actual number of deaths of communist military forces was probably closer to 444,000. Between 200,000 and 300,000 Cambodians, about 35,000 Laotians, and 58,220 U.S. service members also died in the conflict.
Cold War (1962–1979)
68196#8
The Geneva Accords promised elections in 1956 to determine a national government for a united Vietnam. Neither the United States government nor Ngô Đình Diệm's State of Vietnam signed anything at the 1954 Geneva Conference. With respect to the question of reunification, the non-communist Vietnamese delegation objected strenuously to any division of Vietnam, but lost out when the French accepted the proposal of Việt Minh delegate Phạm Văn Đồng, who proposed that Vietnam eventually be united by elections under the supervision of "local commissions". The United States countered with what became known as the "American Plan", with the support of South Vietnam and the United Kingdom. It provided for unification elections under the supervision of the United Nations, but was rejected by the Soviet delegation. From his home in France, Vietnamese Emperor Bảo Đại appointed Ngô Đình Diệm as Prime Minister of South Vietnam. With American support, in 1955 Diệm used a referendum to remove the former Emperor and declare himself the president of the Republic of Vietnam.
Việt Minh
170512#14
At the end of 1972, Operation Linebacker II helped achieve a negotiated end to the war between the U.S. and the Hanoi government. By 1974, the United States had completely pulled its troops out of Vietnam. The ARVN was left to fight alone, but with all the weapons and technologies that their allies left behind. With massive technological support they had roughly four times as many heavy weapons as their enemies. The U.S. left the ARVN with thousands of aircraft, although the B-52 strategic bombers were removed to the United States, making the South Vietnam Airforce the fourth largest air force in the world. These figures are deceptive, however, as the U.S. began to curtail military aid. The same situation happened to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, since their allies, the Soviet Union, and China has also cut down military support, forcing them to use obsolete T-34 tanks and SU-100 tank destroyers in battle.
Army of the Republic of Vietnam
222928#64
The Geneva Accords promised elections in 1956 to determine a national government for a united Vietnam. Neither the United States government nor Ngô Đình Diệm's State of Vietnam signed anything at the 1954 Geneva Conference. With respect to the question of reunification, the non-communist Vietnamese delegation objected strenuously to any division of Vietnam, but lost out when the French accepted the proposal of Việt Minh delegate Phạm Văn Đồng, who proposed that Vietnam eventually be united by elections under the supervision of "local commissions". The United States countered with what became known as the "American Plan", with the support of South Vietnam and the United Kingdom. It provided for unification elections under the supervision of the United Nations, but was rejected by the Soviet delegation. From his home in France, Bảo Đại appointed Ngô Đình Diệm as Prime Minister of South Vietnam. With American support, in 1955 Diem used a referendum to remove the former Emperor and declare himself the president of the Republic of Vietnam.
First Indochina War
5119376#76
Historians disagree on whether Vietnam would have escalated if Kennedy not been assassinated and had won re-election in 1964. Fueling the debate were statements made by Secretary of Defense McNamara in the film "The Fog of War" that Kennedy was strongly considering pulling the United States out of Vietnam after the 1964 election. The film also contains a tape recording of Lyndon Johnson stating that Kennedy was planning to withdraw, a position in which Johnson disagreed. Kennedy had signed National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) 263, dated October 11, which ordered the withdrawal of 1,000 military personnel by year's end, and the bulk of them out by 1965. Such an action would have been a policy reversal, but Kennedy was moving in a less hawkish direction since his speech on world peace at American University on June 10, 1963.
John F. Kennedy
27213409#23
Ho Chi Minh made an official visit to China and the Soviet Union. He received pledges of $200 million in aid from China and $100 million from the Soviet Union, but neither China nor the Soviet Union agreed to attempt to pressure the United States and other Western countries to hold 1956 national elections in Vietnam.
Zhou Enlai, the premier of China, said the United States was violating the Geneva Accords and that the national elections scheduled for July 20, 1956, might not be held due to U.S. and South Vietnamese opposition.Diệm in a speech said that South Vietnam was not bound by the Geneva Accords and that conditions necessary for free elections did not exist in the North.
1955 in the Vietnam War
13477970#20
By 1968, America had officially been at war with Vietnam for four years, but U.S. involvement in Vietnamese affairs went back as far as the early 1950s, when France required aid from the U.S., as well as South Vietnam, essentially a puppet state of the U.S., in maintaining control over French Indochina, and public support of the war had begun to wane. In January 1968, Vietcong troops launched a surprise attack in South Vietnam, known as the Tet Offensive; one of the points of attack was the U.S. embassy at Saigon. Though U.S. troops were able to fend off the Vietcong and ultimately prevailed militarily, this attack signaled a turning point in both U.S. troop morale and in public trust of the government's reports on the progress of the war, as many Americans had no idea that the Vietcong were capable of infiltrating American and South Vietnamese headquarters the way that they did. Many Americans were unaware of the extent of the brutality involved in the war, but the Tet Offensive changed that, and American television cameras were available firsthand to record footage of the bombing of cities and the execution of prisoners of war.
United States news media and the Vietnam War
34976514#37
Soon after the Paris Agreement on Cambodia resolved the conflict in October 1991, however, Vietnam established or reestablished diplomatic and economic relations with most of Western Europe, and several Asian countries. In February 1994, the United States lifted its economic embargo against Vietnam, and in June 1995, the United States and Vietnam normalized relations. In June 2005, a high-level Vietnamese delegation, led by Prime Minister Phan Văn Khải, visited the United States and met with their U.S. counterparts, including President George W. Bush. This was the first such visit in 30 years. Although the visit mostly went well, a few embarrassing events occurred such as the White House's official website (www.whitehouse.gov) accidentally depicting the flag of South Vietnam in its official announcement of the visit. This provoked dismay and hostile comments from the Vietnamese government until the White House officially apologized and corrected the webpage. In addition, a crowd of hostile protesters gathered outside the White House during Phan's meeting with President Bush denouncing the Vietnamese Communist Party and waving South Vietnamese flags.
History of Vietnam since 1945