Ending of The Vietnam War

8 Key excerpts on "Ending of The Vietnam War"

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  Rethinking the Vietnam War

  • John Dumbrell(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  9 Endings and Reverberations This final chapter will tie up loose ends. It will also consider the wider reverberations, in both space and time, of the Vietnam War. The following account of the period from America’s exit to the fall of Saigon will again address the question of inevitability. Could the regime in Saigon have survived? Was substantial and sufficient support by Washington for the anti-communist cause in Vietnam after January 1973 ever a serious possibility? We go on to discuss what the war revealed about the wider structures of the Cold War, including the war’s spatial repercussions on America’s allies. Subsequent sections discuss the temporal reverberations. Here, we deal with the political development of Southeast Asia after 1975; the post-Vietnam War trajectory of US foreign policy; and the later history and end of the Cold War. The final section provides answers to the many riddles and puzzles of the Vietnam War. The Final Act The ceasefire of 27 January 1973 was preceded by North Vietnamese attacks on over 400 South Vietnamese villages. Continuing to bene-fit from the Sino–Soviet rivalry, the DRV took delivery of huge amounts of new military equipment from their communist great-power sponsors in this period. The new equipment was designed to match the US grants to the South Vietnamese military under the Nixon/Laird ‘Enhance’ and ‘Enhance Plus’ military transfer programmes. The 160,000 or more regular PAVN forces left in the 220 Endings and Reverberations 221 South after the ceasefire were outnumbered by the ARVN, but were supported even more efficiently from the North. Yet, Hanoi remained wary about the possibility of renewed American air intervention. Undertakings to repatriate the US prisoners of war were honoured. For his part, Henry Kissinger sought to preserve what was called an ‘equilibrium’ between the parties, even keeping open the possibility of American reconstruction aid to North Vietnam (Schulzinger 2008: 207).

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  America in the World

  The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941

  • Frank Costigliola, Michael J. Hogan(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  167 The Vietnam War remains the most significant political experience for an entire American generation. That same generation presided over two long and costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and events there no doubt increased public interest and debate over the conduct, outcome, and meaning of the Vietnam War. The result has been a steady increase in the number of scholarly monographs published on Vietnam, making it the war that never ends. Some of this scholarship is simply an extension of the ideological debates that raged on during the conflict, but there has also been a number of recent studies that complicate the war and its meaning. It appears increasingly difficult for scholars to tell the entire story of the war. Its history is told more in fragments, and as a result, no overarching consensus on the contours of the war has developed. In addi- tion, there are no easily discerned schools of thought – such as orthodox or revisionist – that help us parse out the vast literature on the war. It would be impossible, therefore, to review all the worthy scholarship on the Vietnam War or to place it neatly into “camps.” Instead, this essay attempts to survey representative works that point to larger trends in the intellectual landscape. During the war, the overwhelming number of scholarly books on the conflict claimed that the United States was to blame for the tragedy unfolding in Vietnam. Driven by mindless anticommunism at first and later by hubris and arrogance, successive U.S. presidential administra- tions blindly pursued goals that were unattainable by means that were unsustainable. Leading the way in this line of reasoning were books by Jonathan Schell, Joseph Buttinger, Robert Shaplen, and George Kahin. 1 Two of the most influential books written during the war were David 8 The War that Never Ends: Historians and the Vietnam War Robert K. Brigham Robert K. Brigham 168 Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest and Frances FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake.

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  American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization

  The Specter of Vietnam

  • William V. Spanos(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 7 CONCLUSION The Vietnam War, 9/11, and Its Aftermath Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; —W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming” Well, if we can attrit the population base of the Viet Cong, it’ll accelerate the process of degrading the VC. —Robert Komer, head of the pacification program in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, quoted in Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake 1 The essence of American cultural history since the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the humiliating defeat the formidable U.S. army, both military and ideo- logical, suffered at the hands of an infinitely weaker opponent has been, as I have insistently observed in this book, the systematic and increasingly nu- anced forgetting of the Vietnam War, or, more precisely, the tellingly insis- tent remembering of the war that was intended to obliterate its singular history from the consciousness of the American cultural memory. This Her- culean labor to lay the Hydra-headed specter of the Vietnam War to rest— which also meant the recuperation of the disintegrated American national identity—was undertaken not only by the state (and its intellectual deputies), but also by the media, Hollywood, the publishing houses, the ed- ucational institutions—what Adorno called the “consciousness industry”— that, however invisible, are its superstructural prosthetic instruments. As I have argued elsewhere, 2 the long but uneven amnesiac representational process underwent four continuous, if uneven, phases. The first, which ac- tually preceded the end of what, after the Tet offensive of 1968, had come to be seen as a virtually unwinable war, was characterized by a belated 243

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  America in the World

  A History in Documents since 1898, Revised and Updated

  • Jeffrey A. Engel, Mark Atwood Lawrence, Andrew Preston, Jeffrey A. Engel, Mark Atwood Lawrence, Andrew Preston, Mark Lawrence, Jeffrey A. Engel, Andrew Preston(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  11 The Vietnam War America’s long, painful involvement in Southeast Asia began in the late 1940s, when U.S. officials decided that, despite its small size and apparent insignificance, Vietnam represented a key battleground in the global crusade against communism. After World War II, U.S. officials had pressured France to relinquish control of its colonies in Indochina (Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam). But when it seemed that the alternative to French colonialism was Soviet- and Chinese-sponsored commu- nism under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh, the administration of President Harry S. Truman reluctantly backed France. However, in 1954, after a grisly eight-year war, France faced total defeat. The last straw was the fall of the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu, a frontier outpost surrounded by the remote jungle highlands of north- ern Vietnam, in May 1954. Meeting shortly afterward in Geneva, the great powers agreed to settle the Franco-Vietnamese war by partitioning Vietnam into two zones at the seventeenth parallel; the terms of reunification would be decided by a national referendum two years later. The communist-led Viet Minh ruled North Vietnam, officially known as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, while a noncommunist regime under the American-backed Ngo Dinh Diem governed South Vietnam. Fearing a communist victory and confident of his own authority by 1956, Diem cancelled the referendum and mounted a campaign to rid South Vietnam of communists. Just as the Cold War had divided Germany and Korea, by the end of the 1950s the two Vietnams appeared to be two separate countries without a common destiny. In response, North Vietnam, prompted by southern communist insurgents reel- ing from Diem’s anticommunist campaign, decided to resume the drive to reunify all of Vietnam.

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  Vietnam

  An American Ordeal

  • George Donelson Moss(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  On April 23, speaking to a large audience at the Tulane University field house, President Ford made U.S. abandonment of South Vietnam official. He urged Americans to forget about the Vietnam War and avoid arguments about who was to blame for its disastrous outcome. He told the crowd:

  America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned.36

  As Ford uttered the magic word, “finished,” the predominantly student audience of 4,500 erupted with frenzied whistling, cheering, clapping, foot-stomping, and shouting that lasted for several minutes. The president had given voice to the national mood existing at the moment the PAVN forces readied themselves to win the final victory of the long Vietnam War.

  THE FALL OF SAIGON , APRIL 27-30, 1975

  As the Communists drove relentlessly toward their final triumph during the last days of April 1975, the contrast in the national mood with what it had been nearly ten years earlier when President Johnson had sent U.S. armed forces off to fight a land war in Southeast Asia could not have been greater. That combination of pride, arrogance, innocence, crusading anti-Communism and expectations of a quick and easy triumph that had propelled the country into the war had long vanished. During those woeful final days, the national mood was dominated by an overwhelming desire to be rid at last of an endless war. It was a war that had already cost far more in lives and dollars than any worst-case scenarist could have imagined at its outset. A nation that had been badly divided by political and cultural crises exacerbated by the nation’s longest war wanted only for the war to cease. As the Saigon government, which the United States had helped create and sustained for over 20 years, suffered its death agonies at the end of April 1975, most Americans averted their eyes.

  The North Vietnamese and VietCong had the city by the throat; their tanks and artillery were ready and their troops were positioned for attack. But for a few days they held back to allow the Americans and those Vietnamese who had worked for U.S. officials to leave. Within the doomed city, thousands of Vietnamese tried desperately to escape. Everywhere, Americans were accosted by Vietnamese brandishing letters and documents, pleading for a way out of their country. To facilitate the evacuation of South Vietnamese nationals, the U.S. Congress hastily approved legislation waiving entry restrictions for 150,000 Indochinese aliens, including 50,000 high-risk Vietnamese. Each day, thousands of Vietnamese flew out of Tan Son Nhut Airport onboard C-141s and C-130s that formed a round-the-clock airlift to freedom.

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  Four Decades On

  Vietnam, the United States, and the Legacies of the Second Indochina War

  • Scott Laderman, Edwin A. Martini, Edwin A. Martini, Scott Laderman, Edwin A. Martini, Edwin A. Martini(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  Viet Nam scarcely exists in American history or memory. “Vietnam,” on the other hand, has left an indelible imprint on American history and memory. Thus, for most Americans, Viet Nam is not so much a country in Southeast Asia as it is a cultural phenomenon of their creation. Indeed, one might argue that the most important historical lesson of the “Vietnam War” (more properly the Second Indochina War or the American War) is that for Americans the conflict had little to do with Viet Nam itself.1 Indo-china, rather, functioned as a site, one of many through a long history of intervention, in which the United States carried out the drives of its mili-tant national identity. American cultural imperatives drove the decision to intervene, the conduct of the war, and the torturous path to exit the country and come to grips with its shattering impact and legacy.2 For several years now, the historiography of the American War has been trending toward de-emphasizing the notion that the United States “had to” intervene in Indochina as part of the Cold War struggle against world communism. Fredrik Logevall, Mark Bradley, Kathryn Statler, and Andrew Preston, among other scholars, emphasize that rather than being driven into the conflict by the mandates of the Cold War, the United States chose to enter into the war, often despite warnings from allies. Just why it made that decision has not been so fully explored.3 Diplomatic historians tend to focus on individual decision makers, in-Walter L. Hixson CHAPTER 2 Viet Nam and “ Vietnam ” in American History and Memory WALTER L. HIXSON 45 cluding key figures in allied nations, but especially on U.S. national secu-rity elites and, above all, on President Lyndon Johnson. The obsessive focus on Johnson reflects the traditional top-down methodology of diplo-matic history as well as the subdiscipline’s focus on government docu-ments, to the exclusion of theoretical and cultural approaches.

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  Making Peace

  The United States And Conflict Resolution

  • Allan E. Goodman(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  4 Ending the Vietnam War, 1972

  The effort to negotiate a settlement of the Vietnam War was one of the longest, most frustrating, and controversial experiences in U.S. diplomacy. Between 1962, when the Kennedy administration secretly proposed negotiations to North Vietnam in Geneva, and 1972, when a breakthrough occurred in the secret talks in Paris between Henry Kissinger and Le Due Tho, special negotiator for the North Vietnamese politburo, there were more than 2,000 documented efforts to bring Washington and Hanoi to the bargaining table. This case study focuses on the single successful effort to achieve negotiations over a draft agreement on ending the war and restoring peace in Vietnam.

  The case begins by examining developments in the period from 8 to 22 October 1972, during which the North Vietnamese government (hereafter referred to as Hanoi or Democratic Republic of Vietnam [DRVN]) proposed an agreement for ending the war that, despite U.S. concurrence, was rejected by the South Vietnamese government (hereafter referred to as Saigon or Government of Vietnam [GVN]). This aspect of the case illustrates the difficulties of coordinating negotiating positions with allies who are not directly involved in the bargaining and whose goals are different. The focus then shifts to the U.S.-DRVN negotiations in November and December 1972, which attempt to resuscitate an agreement and illustrate the costs and benefits of using force to break a deadlock in negotiation.

  Reaching the Decision to Negotiate

  The story behind the breakthrough on 8 October 1972 in the secret negotiations between Washington and Hanoi, and especially the breakdown in those negotiations on 22 October, begins in midsummer of that year. By July, U.S. government officials had three indications that Hanoi might be prepared to negotiate an end to the war.

  First, Hanoi's tone in the secret meetings between Henry Kissinger and Le Due Tho changed from hostility to cordiality. Second, U.S. officials concluded from intelligence reports and captured Communist documents that Hanoi had begun to instruct its cadres in South Vietnam to prepare to compete politically with the government of Nguyen Van Thieu. Third, prisoner-of-war interrogation reports, moreover, indicated that the Communists' military leadership had planned a series of land-grabbing operations in the early fall to extend their apparent area of control in anticipation of a cease-fire-in-place. Consequently, Kissinger visited Saigon in late July to brief South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu on the secret talks. This was done partly to reassure Thieu that current press speculation predicting breakthroughs, which would involve either his ouster or U.S. support for a coalition government, was groundless. Technically, of course, this was correct. But Kissinger did not indicate to Thieu that because of the indications mentioned, he personally expected to reach an agreement with Hanoi.

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  Trans-Pacific Relations

  America, Europe, and Asia in the Twentieth Century

  • Richard Jensen, Jon Davidann, Yoneyuki Sugita, Richard Jensen, Jon Davidann, Yoneyuki Sugita(Authors)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  For general overviews of the war see George C. Herring, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, 3rd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996) and Robert D. Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941-1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). Two excellent reference books are Spencer Tucker, ed., Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War (New York: Ox- ford University Press; 3-vol. ed. 1998; condensed 1-vol. ed. 2000) and Stanley Kut- ler, ed., Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1996). The published documentation is very rich down to 1968. The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975) is a history written by civilians at the Pentagon, with many important documents. A remarkably thorough collection of American official documents appears in the Vietnam volumes of Foreign Relations of the United States (1992-1998), published by the Department of State. The volumes for 1961, 1962, 1964, 1965, and 1966 are online at http://www.state.gov/www/about_state/ history/frusonline.html. For the military history of the war, which chiefly takes a hawkish viewpoint, start with the overviews by Shelby L. Stanton, The Rise and Fall of an American Army: U.S. Ground Forces in Vietnam, 1965-1973 (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1985) or Phillip B. Davidson, Vietnam at War: The History, 1946-1975 (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1988). The later war is well covered in Jeffrey C. Clarke, Advice and Support: The Final Years, 1965-1973 (Washington, DC: Center for Military History, 1988); Ronald Spector, After Tet: The Bloodiest Year in Vietnam (New York: Free Press, 1992); and Lewis Sorley, A Better War: The Unexamined Vic- tories and the Final Tragedy of America's Last Years in Vietnam (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1999).

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