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With the aid of some of the president’s other advisers and elder statesmen from the Democratic Party, Clifford succeeded in persuading Johnson that the present number of U.S. troops in Vietnam (about 550,000) should constitute an upper limit and that Johnson, as chief executive, should make a dramatic gesture for peace. In a nationally televised speech on March 31, Johnson announced that he was “taking the first step to de-escalate the conflict” by halting the bombing of North Vietnam (except in the areas near the DMZ) and that the United States was prepared to send representatives to any forum to seek a negotiated end to the war. He followed this surprising declaration with news that he did not intend to seek reelection that year.
Three days later Hanoi announced that it was prepared to talk to the Americans. Discussions began in Paris on May 13 but led nowhere. Hanoi insisted that, before serious negotiations could begin, the United States would have to halt its bombing of the rest of Vietnam. Meanwhile, fighting continued at a high intensity. The communist high command determined to follow the Tet attacks with two more waves in May and August. At the same time, Westmoreland ordered his commanders to “keep maximum pressure” on the communist forces in the South, which he believed had been seriously weakened by their losses at Tet. The result was the fiercest fighting of the war. In the eight weeks following Johnson’s speech, 3,700 Americans were killed in Vietnam and 18,000 wounded. The communists were reported by Westmoreland’s headquarters as having lost about 43,000 killed. The ARVN’s losses were not recorded, but they were usually twice that of the Americans.
In October the Soviets secretly informed Washington that the North Vietnamese would be willing to halt their attacks across the DMZ and begin serious negotiation with the United States and South Vietnam if the United States halted all bombing of the North. Assured by his military advisers that such a halt would not adversely affect the military situation, Johnson announced the cessation of bombing on the last day of October. The bombing halt achieved no breakthrough but rather brought on a period of prolonged bickering between the United States and its South Vietnamese ally about the terms and procedures to govern the talks. By the time South Vietnam joined the talks, Richard M. Nixon had been elected president.
Nixon and his close adviser on foreign affairs, Henry A. Kissinger, recognized that the United States could not win a military victory in Vietnam but insisted that the war could be ended only by an “honourable” settlement that would afford South Vietnam a reasonable chance of survival. A hasty American withdrawal, they argued, would undermine U.S. credibility throughout the world. Although public opinion made it impossible to commit more troops, Nixon was still confident he could end the war with a favourable settlement. He planned to achieve this through bringing pressure to bear from the Soviets and China, both of whom were eager to improve their relations with the United States, and through the threat of massive force against North Vietnam. To signal to Hanoi that he could still inflict punishment by air, the president decided to act on the proposal of Gen. Creighton Abrams, who had succeeded Westmoreland in July 1968, that the United States bomb the secret communist base areas in Cambodia near the Vietnamese border.
When the communists launched another wave of attacks in South Vietnam in early 1969, Nixon secretly ordered the bombing to proceed. Cambodian premier Norodom Sihanouk, tired of his uninvited Vietnamese guests, had confidentially approved the attacks, and Hanoi was in no position to complain without revealing its own violation of Cambodia’s neutrality. Although elaborate measures had been taken in Washington and Saigon to ensure that the air attacks be kept completely secret, the story broke in The New York Times in May. Infuriated by this breach of security, Nixon began a series of measures to plug “leaks” of information; these became part of a system of illegal surveillance and burglary that eventually led to the Watergate scandal of 1972.
In view of the surprisingly good performance of the South Vietnamese army at Tet, and responding to growing pressure in the United States to begin a withdrawal of U.S. troops, the Nixon administration decided to accelerate a program to provide South Vietnam with the high-quality weapons and training that would enable them gradually to take over sole responsibility for fighting the ground war—a program labeled Vietnamization. In June 1969 Nixon announced the withdrawal of 25,000 U.S. troops from Vietnam. In September he announced further troop withdrawals, and by March 1970 he was announcing the phased withdrawal of 150,000 troops over the next year. Abrams protested that the still inexperienced and incompletely trained ARVN could hardly take over the job at such a rapid pace, but the withdrawals were enormously popular at home, and the White House soon found them politically indispensable.
Though popular at home, the withdrawals lowered the morale of the troops remaining in Vietnam by underlining the apparent pointlessness of the war. By 1970 signs of serious problems in morale and leadership were seemingly everywhere. These signs included increased drug abuse, more frequent and serious racial incidents, and even “fraggings,” the murder or deliberate maiming of commissioned and noncommissioned officers by their own troops with fragmentation weapons such as hand grenades. News of the My Lai Massacre, a mass murder by U.S. soldiers of several hundred civilians in Quang Ngai province in 1968, became public at the end of 1969, further undermining convictions about the righteousness of the U.S. military effort in Vietnam. From 1965 to 1973, more than 30,000 U.S. military personnel either in Vietnam or in service related to Vietnam received dishonourable discharges for desertion (though only a small number of desertions actually took place on the battlefield). Another 10,000 deserters were still at large when the United States withdrew from the war in 1973; most of these took advantage of clemency programs offered under Pres. Gerald R. Ford in 1974 and Pres. Jimmy Carter in 1977. Also during the period 1965–73, about half a million men became “draft dodgers,” illegally evading conscription into the armed forces or simply refusing to respond to their draft notices. More than 200,000 men were charged with draft evasion and more than 8,000 convicted. Of those convicted, most were either offered clemency by Ford or pardoned by Carter.
The United States negotiates a withdrawal
While Vietnamization and troop withdrawals proceeded in Vietnam, the negotiations in Paris remained deadlocked. Kissinger secretly opened separate talks with high-level Vietnamese diplomats, but the two sides remained far apart. The Americans proposed a mutual withdrawal of both U.S. and North Vietnamese forces. Hanoi insisted on an unconditional U.S. withdrawal and on the replacement of the U.S.-backed regime of Nguyen Van Thieu by a neutral coalition government. Nixon considered using renewed bombing and a blockade of the North to coerce the communist leadership, but his military and intelligence experts advised him that such actions would not be likely to have a decisive effect, and his political advisers worried about the impact of such actions on an American public eager to see continued de-escalation of the war.
Nixon consequently refrained from striking North Vietnam, but he could not resist the opportunity to intervene in Cambodia, where a pro-Western government under Gen. Lon Nol had overthrown Sihanouk’s neutralist regime in March 1970. Since that time, the new regime had attempted to force the communists out of their border sanctuaries. The North Vietnamese easily fended off the attacks of the Cambodian army and began to arm and support the Cambodian communist movement, known as the Khmer Rouge. Eager to support Lon Nol and destroy the sanctuaries, Nixon authorized a large sweep into the border areas by a U.S. and South Vietnamese force of 20,000 men. The allies captured enormous quantities of supplies and equipment but failed to trap any large enemy forces. In the United States, news of the Cambodian incursion triggered widespread protest and demonstrations. These became even more intense after National Guard troops opened fire on a crowd of protesters at Kent State University in Ohio, killing four students and wounding several others, on May 4. At hundreds of campuses, students “went on strike.” Congress, meanwhile, repealed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
By the summer of 1970 the White House was left with little more than Vietnamization and troop withdrawals as a way to end the war. Vietnamization appeared to be proceeding smoothly, and American counterinsurgency experts had moved swiftly after Tet to help the South Vietnamese government to develop programs to root out the Viet Cong’s underground government and establish control of the countryside. The Viet Cong, seriously weakened by losses in the 1968–69 offensives, now found themselves on the defensive in many areas. However, the limits of Vietnamization were soon demonstrated, when in March 1971 a large ARVN attack into Laos, code-named Lam Son 719 and designed to interdict the Ho Chi Minh Trail, ended in heavy casualties and a disorderly retreat.
In the United States, large-scale demonstrations were now less common, but disillusionment with the war was more widespread than ever. One poll claimed that 71 percent of Americans believed that the United States had “made a mistake” in sending troops to Vietnam and that 58 percent found the war “immoral.” Discontent was particularly directed toward the Selective Service System, which had long been seen as unfairly conscripting young men from racial minorities and poor backgrounds while allowing more-privileged men to defer conscription by enrolling in higher education. College deferments were limited in 1971, but by that time the military was calling up fewer conscripts each year. Nixon ended all draft calls in 1972, and in 1973 the draft was abolished in favour of an all-volunteer military.
Encouraged by their success in Laos, the Hanoi leadership launched an all-out invasion of the South on March 30, 1972, spearheaded by tanks and supported by artillery. South Vietnamese forces at first suffered staggering defeats, but Nixon, in an operation code-named Linebacker, unleashed U.S. air power against the North, mined Haiphong Harbour (the principal entry point for Soviet seaborne supplies), and ordered hundreds of U.S. aircraft into action against the invasion forces and their supply lines. By mid-June the communists’ Easter Offensive had ground to a halt.
With the failure of their offensive, Hanoi leaders were finally ready to compromise. The United States had indicated as early as 1971 that it would not insist on the withdrawal of North Vietnamese forces from the South. Now Hanoi signaled in return that it would not insist on replacing Thieu with a coalition government. On the basis of these two concessions, Kissinger and North Vietnamese emissary Le Duc Tho secretly hammered out a complicated peace accord in October 1972. The Saigon government, however, balked at a peace agreement negotiated without its participation or consent and demanded important changes in the treaty. In November (following Nixon’s reelection), Kissinger returned to Paris with some 69 suggested changes to the agreement designed to satisfy Thieu. The North Vietnamese responded with anger, then with proposed changes of their own. Nixon, exasperated with what he saw as the North’s intransigence and also anxious to persuade Thieu to cooperate, ordered B-52 bombers again to attack Hanoi. This so-called Christmas bombing was the most intense bombing campaign of the war.
After eight days the North Vietnamese agreed to return to Paris to sign an agreement essentially the same as that agreed upon in October. Thieu, reassured by a massive influx of U.S. military aid and by a combination of promises and threats from Nixon, reluctantly agreed to go along. On January 27, 1973, the Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Viet-Nam was signed by representatives of the South Vietnamese communist forces, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the United States. A cease-fire would go into effect the following morning throughout North and South Vietnam, and within 60 days all U.S. forces would be withdrawn, all U.S. bases dismantled, and all prisoners of war (POWs) released. The issue of POWs would remain a controversial one for decades, despite the fact that there was no credible evidence to suggest that U.S. POWs had been kept secretly in Vietnam after the signing of the Paris accords (see Sidebar: Vietnam War POWs and MIAs). An international force would keep the peace, the South Vietnamese would have the right to determine their own future, and North Vietnamese troops could remain in the South but would not be reinforced. The 17th parallel would remain the dividing line until the country could be reunited by “peaceful means.”
