Successful End to Legal Segregation

Week of April 26 From Berlin (Again) through Vietnam 1 of 2

After Stalin’s death, the new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev put an end to his predecessor’s reign of paranoid terror.  Indeed Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956 at the 20th Communist Party Congress. The state was still to control everything but arbitrary arrests, executions, and internal exile came largely to an end. Khrushchev released many of Stalin’s political prisoners, mostly communists who had for one reason or another run afoul of the paranoid Stalin.

Although Cold War tensions eased, they did not disappear.  During the 1950s some two million East Germans escaped communism by going through the only hole open within the Iron Curtain: crossing from East Berlin into West Berlin and then to West Germany. Under postwar agreements, the Allies maintained access to and control over West Berlin. Lack of personal freedom and economic opportunity drove the exodus, which resulted in a “brain drain” and a negative economic impact on East Germany.

The communist country’s head of state, Walter Ulbricht, repeatedly begged Khrushchev to close the city’s borders to keep the population from fleeing to the West. The Soviet leader instead informed the Allies in November 1958 that they should give up their rights to West Berlin and threatened to give the East German government control over the access routes to the city effectively cutting it off from the West.  (Recall Stalin had done this but was thwarted by the Berlin airlift). Khrushchev implied that if the Allies (i.e., NATO) resisted, World War III could be the result.

Eisenhower rejected the Soviet leader’s demand and promised to use force to maintain the West’s rights to the city. Khrushchev did not follow through with his threat but the tensions led more East Germans to flee west including 200,000 in 1960 and another 150,000 by August 1961. To stop the hemorrhaging and yet avoid war with NATO, Khrushchev gave the East German government the green light to begin building a permanent barrier or wall around East Berlin cutting it off from the western half of the divided city.

At midnight Sunday 13 August 1961 the East German army began stringing barbed wire around the western city while troops blocked access points.  All Berliners found themselves cut off from families, work, school, etc. Telephone lines were severed. Concrete-block construction shortly followed creating a wall around west Berlin of over 80 miles.  Strengthened over the years, the barrier included troops in guard towers, trip wire alarms, dogs, trenches, mines, electric fencing, anti-vehicle barricades and more.

Khrushchev had been emboldened to make such a move after meeting with Kennedy in June at Vienna, Austria.  Kennedy struck the Soviet leader as weak and inexperienced and would do nothing to prevent construction of the wall to avoid military conflict. (Curiously, Khrushchev did not try this with Eisenhower)

JFK actually had feared a worse crisis if Soviet and East German troops had invaded West Berlin.  Now clearly they would not. Still, on seeing the Wall on a visit to Berlin, a visibly angered Kennedy told a welcoming crowd of two million West Berliners that the West stood with them and that Ich bin ein Berliner (“I am a Berliner”). He proceeded to give a speech outlining the differences between the communist east and capitalist west challenging those who “really don’t understand, or say they don’t, what is the great issue between the free world and the communist world” to “Let them come to Berlin” and see. JFK went on to say “Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put up a wall to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us.”  (See link for a portion of JFK's speech: President John F. Kennedy "I Am a Berliner" Speech at Berlin Wall - Bing video (Links to an external site.)

While Kennedy could do nothing to help East Berlin (possibly provoking World War 3 was unthinkable with the nuclear weapons available to both sides), he could reassure West Berliners—and by extension Western Europe--that while he would accept the line drawn by the Soviets, he was now drawing a line in West Berlin that the Soviets crossed at their own risk.

The Wall was effective, virtually eliminating escapes into West Berlin.  Some intrepid Germans succeeded in finding ways through the barrier over the years for example once flying over it in a hot air balloon! Yet successes were rare and some 200 East German died in escape attempts.

Berlin wasn’t the only Cold War crisis vexing the new president, however. Cuba arguably was creating even greater problems for Kennedy. In 1959, Cuba underwent a revolution led by Fidel Castro that overthrew a military dictatorship under Fulgencio Batista. A closet communist, Castro shortly after taking power began a program of nationalizing businesses and gradually abolishing private property. Thousands of Cubans, their property confiscated and threatened with persecution as enemies of the new communist Cuba, fled to the United States (especially southern Florida hence the strong Cuban community that remains there today), while they still could. Like most, but not all communist states (Yugoslavia outside the Iron Curtain and not occupied by Soviet troops was the exception), freedom to travel or move abroad legally was almost totally prohibited. Castro also quickly allied his new government with the Soviet Union.

Unhappy with this state of affairs, Eisenhower’s administration approved a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) plot to arm Cuban exiles and provide logistics, including naval and airpower, for support of a counter-revolutionary invasion of the island nation. The invasion however, was not ready before Ike left office although Kennedy allowed the plan to proceed.  Approximately 1,400 Cuban exiles in boats launched from two central American countries landed at the Bay of Pigs on April 17, 1961. Within three days the invasion was a total failure for a host of reasons.  These included too few troops who failed to spark a popular counter-revolution in the country and a refusal by JFK to commit significant US airpower to the invasion.  The president feared a Soviet response, possibly even nuclear (highly unlikely) if the US was seen as too overtly committed to the plan that everyone realized was hatched covertly by the CIA. The CIA for its part dismissed the US Air Force’s concerns that the invasion lacked significant assets to succeed without significant US intervention.  Kennedy always appeared lukewarm to the project and decided not to risk further US military intervention considering the invasion's diminishing chances of success…which diminished further with Kennedy’s decision to effectively pull the plug.

Nonetheless, JFK could not distance himself from the failure and international public relations disaster that resulted from what clearly was a US foreign policy fiasco.  Furthermore, Kennedy’s apparent fecklessness re the operation led Khrushchev to believe that the new president was weak and could be easily intimidated which emboldened the Soviet leader to go ahead with the construction of the Berlin Wall.  Even more problematic, the failed invasion frightened Castro and convinced the Soviets into believing there would be further US efforts to destabilize his revolution or possibly an outright an American invasion.  This led the Soviet Union to surreptitiously start smuggling Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBMs) tipped with nuclear warheads onto the island.  These weapons had a range of 1200 miles and could quickly hit targets within much of the United States.

While the Soviets were trying to conceal the missiles and the construction of their launch sites, American spy planes in the middle of October 1962 confirmed their presence. Kennedy demanded the Russians remove the missiles, but Khrushchev refused.  While some Pentagon officials wanted to launch airstrikes against the cites and invade Cuba, JFK feared this might trigger a nuclear war. Instead he ordered the US navy to place a “quarantine” around Cuba, barring all ships with military cargoes from docking in Cuban ports. This would mean stopping and boarding any Soviet ships heading to Cuba. (The Kennedy administration chose the word “quarantine” over “blockade” because the latter term could be considered an act of war under international law.  Of course, this was simply semantics, as the quarantine was a blockade). Yet JFK was not convinced his quarantine would work and allowed the Pentagon to go forward with plans to invade Cuba.

US forces, which included nuclear weapon carrying bombers and Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) aimed at the Soviet Union, were put on high alert. The Soviet Union also had bombers and ICBMs capable of hitting the US (albeit fewer) at the ready.  Each side had thousands of nuclear bombs and warheads stronger than those that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  A nuclear war in 1962 would have killed millions on both sides. One estimate Kennedy received suggested 1/3 of the population of the northern hemisphere could die.

Khrushchev ordered Soviet ships not to challenge the blockade and by the end of October the US and USSR reached a deal whereby the missiles would be withdrawn from Cuba in exchange for the US promising never to invade Cuba (and to quietly, later, remove IRBMs based in Turkey and Italy pointed at the USSR). By the end of November, the offending missiles had been removed from Cuba and the crisis was at an end.

Although portrayed as a victory for Kennedy, it was more of a draw, since it boiled down to a trade—Soviet missiles out of Cuba, and American missiles out of Italy and Turkey.  The latter part of the deal was largely kept hush-hush however, and in the American and global press, JFK came out the winner.  This was also the view of Communist Party leaders in the Soviet Union who arranged a coup less than two years later replacing Khrushchev with Leonid Brezhnev as First Secretary of the Communist Party (effectively the leader of the Soviet Union)

Kennedy’s Cold War problems extended beyond Berlin and Havana, however, to across the Pacific to Vietnam.

During World War II Japan seized France’s colony of Vietnam in southeast Asia. After the war, France reclaimed the colony but found itself fighting an independence movement that included communist rebels led by Ho Chi Minh. The French defeat at Dien Bien Phu forced France to give up its colony after which two governments emerged.  Ho Chi Minh was in charge of the northern part of the country with its capital at Hanoi, and an anti-communist and quasi-democratic government was in charge in the south from Saigon under Ngo Dinh Diem. The former received financial and military aid from China and the USSR, while the latter received the same from the United States beginning with Eisenhower’s administration.

Although there was talk of having elections that would unify the country divided at the 17th parallel, neither side trusted the other to conduct or honor free elections, so none occurred. There was a significant communist presence in the south however, known as the Viet Cong (VC) whose military wing quickly launched a guerilla war against the South Vietnamese government to unite Vietnam under the government in Hanoi. The VC was particularly effective in rural areas.  To help Diem’s Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), Eisenhower sent military advisors to train it in tactics and US military equipment.  By the time Eisenhower left office in 1960, there were approximately 900 American advisors in South Vietnam.

Kennedy shared Eisenhower’s concern that without US assistance, the communists would over-run the south, and beyond that, lead to the communist takeover of two other former French colonies: the recently independent monarchies of neighboring Laos and Cambodia. This fear was part of the US government’s “domino theory” which posited that if one country in a region fell to communism, others would shortly follow like a line of dominos knocking one down after another. If unchecked it was believed communist global domination would be inevitable.

JFK also understood that his government was looking weak in standing up to the communists following the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs invasion and its inability to prevent the Berlin Wall from going up.  For JFK, maintaining the anti-communist government in South Vietnam became a line in the sand. Instead of just sending advisors, Kennedy first sent 500 Green Berets to Vietnam in the summer of 1961 followed by 3000 more combat troops (though still referred to as “advisors”) in November.

Unlike the Korean conflict, in Vietnam there was no “frontline” as VC insurgents launched hit and run raids from inside the country.  ARVN forces, often unable to distinguish neutral or even pro-government villagers from communists, often committed atrocities (indiscriminate killings, assassinations, burning villages) increasingly turning the countryside against the government…and the US troops assisting them.  By 1963, Kennedy had increased US troop totals to 16,000 as the US found itself increasingly taking control over the effort to put down the insurgency.

JFK believed a significant part of the problem was Diem’s increasingly authoritarian regime driving South Vietnamese to support the communists. More importantly perhaps, Diem, a Catholic in a predominately Buddhist country, actively promoted Catholics and discriminated against Buddhists, leading to significant antigovernment protests followed by a severe crackdown that Kennedy’s administration believed would aid a communist takeover.

Furthermore, the generals leading ARVN decided that Diem needed to go, so with JFK’s approval (the generals would not have acted without it), Diem’s government was overthrown on November 1, and Diem was assassinated the following day (just under three weeks before Kennedy’s own assassination). The military ran the country until civilian rule was restored with the election of Nguyen Van Thieu as president in 1967.

President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) escalated US military commitment to Vietnam (after reassuring the American public that he would not “send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do the fighting that Asian boys should do themselves”).  He had previously told a White House meeting however, that “I am not going to lose Vietnam.  I am not going to be the president who saw southeast Asia go the way that China went.”  Unfortunately, the two views were incompatible.

Below: LBJ

 

LBJ authorized the use of American destroyers to provide cover for South Vietnamese covert operations against North Vietnam’s coast.  On August 2, 1964, the USS Maddox was attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats but suffered no damage. On the stormy night of August 4, the Maddox reported it was attacked again, although subsequently its captain had his doubts.  Nonetheless, LBJ used the alleged attack to get Congress to pass a resolution giving him unlimited authority to deploy US forces to Vietnam. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution unanimously passed the House of Representatives and received only two negative votes in the Senate on August 10. Within a year of its passage, 90,000 US combat troops would be fighting in Vietnam. The US also quickly began a bombing campaign against military targets in North Vietnam and suspected Viet Cong bases in South Vietnam.  The goal of the US commitment was to convince the North Vietnamese government to stop supporting the Viet Cong in the south, which would lead to its defeat. 

Instead, North Vietnam began to infiltrate North Vietnamese Army (NVA) units into South Vietnam to aid the VC and engage US forces. The American quagmire in the Vietnam War was well underway.

The guerilla nature of the war meant that VC troops would make hit and run raids against US and ARVN targets (including murdering civilians believed to be assisting them). US and ARVN troops would conduct their own raids on suspected VC camps which frequently included rural villages. Those villages found harboring VC or their supplies would often be partially or totally burned.  Again, there was no frontline per se, US helicopters would frequently airlift troops into combat throughout South Vietnam to engage enemy VC or NVA forces.

Below: US Army helicopters were ubiquitous in the Vietnam War

Since occupying territory was no sure sign of success (once US troops left an area, the VC often came back), the army used “body counts” to determine whether missions were successful or not, i.e., the more dead VC the more successful the mission. The problem was counting who was and was not VC when women and teenagers could be among enemy forces. Did elderly sympathizers count?  Cynics suggested the army’s point of view was that any dead Vietnamese persons were VC so count them.

As the war continued, LBJ kept increasing the number of US soldiers and not surprisingly as troop totals grew the number of Americans killed grew as well.  By the end of 1965 over 184,000 troops were in Vietnam of which over 1,000 died. By 1968, there were over 535,000 American service personnel in Vietnam.  The total number of American deaths through that year topped 35,000. Over six times as many were wounded.

The overwhelming majority of those killed and wounded were young men (women were not allowed to serve in combat roles in the US military and served primarily as nurses and support staff). While many young men did voluntarily enlist in the armed forces to go and fight in southeast Asia, not nearly enough did so, and the war effort required draftees. The US had maintained conscription since World War II. Roughly a 1/3 of American soldiers who fought—and died—in Vietnam were drafted. The average age of those killed-in-action was 23.

Deferments were available to college students and the nation’s institutions of higher learning were flooded by young men seeking to escape conscription more than to get a collegiate education. (Of course if you failed your classes and were kicked out of school, you were again subject to being drafted).  Campuses became hotbeds of a growing antiwar (and anti-draft) movement as thousands began protesting as early as 1965. They took as their model previous African Americans Civil Rights demonstrations.  Many without deferments burned their draft induction notices or fled to Canada. President Johnson became easily the most unpopular man on campus, with antiwar students frequently chanting “Hey, Hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today.”

 The protests provided fuel for a growing “counter-culture” whereby young Americans questioned the traditional mores of marital fidelity and sobriety and increasingly embraced extra-marital sex and recreational (and illegal) drug use. The most popular drug being marijuana, which when ingested, particularly smoked, reduces anxiety and creates a sense of euphoria. Another popular drug was lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) which causes hallucinatory “trips” (both good and bad).

Many young Americans condemned their parents’ traditional values as hypocritical in a supposed “land of the free” that had supported segregation and sent 18-20 year-olds off to war but wouldn’t let them vote. (One of the legacies of the Vietnam War, was the 26th Amendment giving 18-20 year-olds the suffrage ratified in 1971. The idea in part being if “old enough to fight, old enough to vote”).  In a rather superficial protest against societal convention, young men began wearing their hair long and both sexes embraced shabby clothing and  infrequent bathing.  (Up until the early 1960s, the overwhelming majority of men wore hats out-of-doors--real hats, not baseball caps. This changed suddenly and dramatically for men of all ages who discarded the headgear by the end of the decade.  I will give up to two bonus points to the first ten students who give me an answer I agree with by 11:59 Friday, April 30). They also embraced a new electric guitar driven music originating from the rhythm and blues of African American musicians such as “Little Richard” Penniman and Chuck Berry in the 1950s.  Below: Chuck Berry

 

Dubbed “rock and roll”, the genre exploded into popularity with younger white audiences particularly-- and ironically—after the British band “The Beatles” performed on the popular variety program, The Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964. Some 73 million Americans (a record at the time) or 40% of the population tuned in to watch John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr perform live. (For that performance click the link:  The Beatles - Ed Sullivan Show - Bing video (Links to an external site.) ) The event launched “Beatlemania” (named after the hysterical crowds, particularly the young women, who attended their performances) in the US and the band dominated the music charts until their breakup in 1970.

Below are The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. From left: Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Ringo Starr (drums), and John Lennon

Young people who embraced the counterculture were frequently referred to as “hippies” (a word derived from hipster, a term associated with a smaller, more literary counter-culture movement in the 1950s), whether they were or not.  Hippies claimed to have “dropped out” of mainstream society by rejecting traditional conventions that encouraged starting families and building careers in favor of casual sex and day-jobs (or no jobs at all).  Rejecting capitalism, they often attempted to form communes in which all goods (including needles--heroin became popular among such folks) and not infrequently bodies, were shared. The most notable communal efforts occurred during the so-called “Summer of Love” of 1967 in San Francisco when tens of thousands descended upon the city. While a lot of people had lots of fun, the experiment in communism failed as it was discovered few people really wanted to share their boyfriends and girlfriends, and even fewer their personal possessions. (They also discovered that one typically needed to work to eat.  A lesson at least as old as that taught by the Christian apostle, Paul).

Below: a photo of Hippies in the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco during the "Summer of Love" 1967.

As for Vietnam, despite LBJ’s assurances that the war was going well and the end was near, the continually rising troop totals and deaths belied that optimistic reading of the situation. Furthermore, this was America’s first televised war.  ABC, CBS, and NBC brought film footage from the conflict into homes most every night, and what Americans frequently saw were wounded (rarely dead) American soldiers, burned villages, homeless civilians, i.e., the horrors of war.  For the American public, the war visibly dragged on night after night with no end in sight.

(Fwiw I can remember being all of six or seven years old and my parents shooing me away from the TV when Vietnam footage came on.  Y’all know, history doesn’t seem like history when you’ve experienced it)

If you are wondering why the US didn’t simply invade North Vietnam (the US Air Force was bombing the heck out of it), and put an end to the war, the answer was primarily fear of China. The Chinese had intervened to prevent North Korea’s communist regime from being overthrown, and it was believed they would do so again if the US were to try and invade North Vietnam.

Hence the US had to win the war without cutting off the source of supplies, and increasingly troops, i.e., North Vietnam.  The US military attempted to do so with bombing supply lines but in the jungle environment of southeast Asia in which supplies could be easily smuggled south, this was not easily accomplished. 

As the war dragged on, increasingly parents began joining their kids in protesting the war. Yet while by the end of 1967 at least one poll showed a plurality of Americans wanted to end US involvement in Vietnam, many still supported the war effort. The war ironically maintained significant support from those many Americans who were put off more by the association of the angry protests with the youth-driven “counter-culture” than arguably the war itself.

January 30, 1968 marked a major turning point in the conflict when roughly 80,000 Viet Cong insurgents and NVA troops launched their Tet Offensive (named after the Vietnamese New Year) against a multitude of military and civilian targets including attacks in some 100 cities and towns throughout South Vietnam.  Arguably the most audacious attack was on the US Embassy in Saigon. The VC failed to take any of their objectives and were beaten back with severe casualties by US and ARVN forces. The offensive was a military failure and the Viet Cong decimated, BUT the impression it gave Americans at home, where of course much of the offensive wound up on the evening news, was that the war far from heading toward its end, would endlessly continue. 

While a battlefield victory for the US, Tet was a propaganda victory for Vietnam’s communists as it led more Americans to oppose continuing the war. Tet also torpedoed LBJ’s hopes for reelection. On the domestic front, Johnson had been extraordinarily successful in getting his legislation passed. With a friendly Democratic Congress, LBJ achieved the largest expansion of the federal government into the lives of Americans since the New Deal in what LBJ called “The Great Society”.  In addition to expanding coverage for Social Security and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (better known as “welfare”), Congress guaranteed health care for elderly Americans (65 and older) by creating the Medicare program and the poorest Americans through Medicaid.  Johnson, of course, had also successfully passed the Civil and Voting Rights acts, cementing the Democratic party’s support among most African American voters.

With his legislative record and a still booming post-WWII economy further spurred by government military and domestic spending, LBJ should have been a shoo-in for reelection.  Vietnam however was his Achilles heel.  Rising antiwar sentiment led Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy to challenge LBJ for the Democratic nomination.  After McCarthy finished a strong second in the nation’s first primary—New Hampshire’s—in March 1968, Johnson announced March 31 he would not seek reelection.  Subsequently, New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy—younger and popular brother of the slain president—jumped into the race, also as an antiwar candidate. This split the Democratic party’s antiwar electorate and opened the door for Vice-President Hubert Humphrey to seek the nomination as the Democratic Party’s “establishment” candidate. Humphrey wasn’t exactly for continuing the war but he wasn’t exactly for stopping it either. All three candidates were unabashedly liberal (i.e., what decades earlier had been called “progressive”), so domestic issues had relatively little impact on the three men’s campaigns. An assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, simplified matters by shooting Kennedy three times in a Los Angeles hotel in the early morning hours of June 5, 1968 after winning California’s Democratic primary. Despite frantic efforts by doctors to save him, Kennedy died of his wounds early on January 6.  Sirhan, a Palestinian Arab immigrant, murdered Kennedy over the senator’s strong support for Israel.

Below: Robert Kennedy (center) shortly before his assassination

Kennedy’s death did not unite antiwar Democrats however, because McCarthy’s and Kennedy’s supporters largely despised each other more than the war.  At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, antiwar demonstrators battled police outside the convention hall while inside pro-protester and pro-police Democrats verbally assaulted and blamed each other for the violence. Of course, the chaos both inside and out was broadcast to millions of Americans watching at home leaving many to wonder if the Democratic party could continue to manage the nation if it could not manage its own convention. Out of the ruckus, Vice-President Humphrey won the nomination.

Further complicating the party’s chances for holding onto the presidency was a third party candidacy by Alabama’s Democratic governor and segregationist George Wallace, who promised to take votes away from Humphrey especially in the deep South.

The benefactor of all of this Democratic bloodletting was the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon, back after losing to JFK in 1960.  Still popular in mainstream Republican circles which had been aghast at the conservative Goldwater’s nomination in 1964, the moderate Nixon was seen by most Republicans as their best bet to retake the presidency.

The major issue was the war which both candidates loathed to address. Humphrey failed to articulate if and for how long he was willing to support it.  He did announce that he would end the US bombing of North Vietnam as a step in hoping to bring about a peace deal with North Vietnam. LBJ in an attempt to help Humphrey, announced on Halloween 1968—less than a week before the election-- that he was ordering a halt to bombing North Vietnam.   

Nixon rightly blamed the Johnson administration, including of course the supportive Humphrey, for the escalation and quagmire in Vietnam but refrained from offering anything concrete plan as to how he would end the US commitment. Nixon promised only “that we shall have an honorable end to the war in Vietnam.”

The election proved extremely close with Nixon narrowly winning the popular vote, but by a fairly comfortable margin the Electoral College (see map below)

Wallace’s basically anti-civil rights campaign cost Humphrey the Deep South while Nixon failed to make inroads there. (Nixon had supported the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts). He did better in the border or “peripheral” South where Wallace split the Democratic vote, arguably handing a number of states to Nixon.

It is difficult to say who Wallace hurt/helped more.  A Democrat, he undoubtedly took Democratic votes away from Humphrey, especially among those who would never vote for a Republican. Wallace also won about 8% of the vote outside the South, especially among white working class voters who usually voted Democratic, which may have cost Humphrey traditionally Democratic states like New Jersey. On the other hand, many white Southerners were angry at LBJ and Humphrey’s support of civil rights, which, if Wallace had not been on the ticket, might have led many white Southern voters to hold their noses and vote for Nixon.

The Republican won 15% of African American voters, more than 2 ½ times that of Barry Goldwater four years earlier.  (Undoubtedly, many of these were southern African Americans who could not yet bring themselves to vote for a Democrat after that party’s nearly century long record of disenfranchisement and discrimination)

In any case, Nixon was president and although he moved too slowly for his antiwar critics (mainly Democrats), he did begin to get the US out of Vietnam by inexorably removing US troops from that country.  Nixon’s goal was “de-Americanization” through “Vietnamization” of the war i.e., to draw down the US troop commitment by ideally providing the South Vietnamese military the means (equipment and training) to ultimately defend itself.

Nixon kept his promise. By the end of 1970, he had pulled over 200,000 troops from Vietnam. On the eve of the 1972 election, fewer than 25,000 American soldiers remained and the end of US involvement was nigh.  In the meantime, Nixon stepped up the bombing of VC and NVA supply lines known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail that moved troops and materiel into South Vietnam through neighboring Laos and Cambodia (two nations suffering under their own communist insurgencies). US and ARVN troops temporarily invaded Cambodia in the spring and summer of 1970 to try to stop the flow of supplies and remove staging areas for VC and NVA operations, sparking renewed student protests which had quieted down with the gradual but persistent withdraw of US troops.  Anti-war protestors feared a renewed expansion of the war. Protestors need not have worried. Nixon was committed to “Vietnamization” and the withdrawals continued.

Below: map of the Ho Chi Minh Trail

Note:  Nixon believed that most of the public opposition to the war resulted from the draft, and as a candidate indicated his desire to end it.  He faced opposition however from both the Defense Department and many in Congress against quickly ending conscription.  Still as troop totals came down, the draft became increasingly irrelevant. Nixon effectively ended the draft late in December 1972. It has never returned though President Jimmy Carter resumed draft registration in 1980.

(Interesting to me, the US is currently fighting a war in Afghanistan now in its twentieth year with no public protests and almost no Congressional opposition despite over 2300 servicemen and women so far dying in that conflict.  There was also little sustained opposition to the 2003-2011 Iraq War that killed nearly 5,500 American military personnel.  It seems President Nixon’s view that most Americans don’t mind war so much as long as other people’s kids—“volunteers”—are fighting it)

Meanwhile, peace talks between North Vietnam and the VC on one side and the US and South Vietnam on the other were occurring in Paris. These ultimately led to the “Paris Peace Accords” signed by all parties on January 27, 1973 resulting in a cease fire and the removal of all remaining US forces in exchange for the release of all US prisoners of war held by the North Vietnamese.  The ceasefire collapsed immediately between North and South Vietnam but the US adhered to its commitment to withdraw so by the end of 1973 there no longer any American combat forces in Vietnam.

Sporadic fighting continued between the Vietnams for two years until the NVA launched a final successful offensive against the South in the spring of 1975. On April 30 Saigon fell and with it the Republic of Vietnam, leaving the country united under the communist regime in Hanoi.  Shortly thereafter, communist insurgencies toppled the governments of Cambodia and Laos.

The long American intervention in southeast Asia had ultimately been an unnecessary failure that cost the lives of nearly 60,000 Americans.

Ironically, the US withdrawal had not been necessitated by defeats on the battlefield.  Whenever American and NVA or VC forces confronted one another, it was the communists who routinely suffered far greater casualties.  But what the Vietnamese communists lacked in military expertise, they compensated for with persistence.  They won their war against the US by wearing down the American public’s (and by extension its government’s) will to fight. 

As Saigon was ready to fall, an American military team was negotiating with their North Vietnamese counterparts regarding the final evacuation of American diplomatic and other personnel from the capital. A frustrated US Army colonel, Harry Summers, recalled saying to his NVA counterpart, a Colonel Tu: “You know, you never beat us on the battlefield”, to which Tu replied, “That may be true, but it is also irrelevant.”

North Vietnam had won the war.

Unlike Korea, South Vietnam had no single defensible frontier to hold back the final North Vietnamese offensive, and perhaps more importantly, no US troops left to defend the country.  Since the end of the Korean War, the US has kept approximately 30,000 soldiers in South Korea to defend it should it be attacked by North Korea.

Also unlike the Korean War, the US could not threaten the use of nuclear weapons as the Soviet Union, now with a nuclear arsenal to match the US, would likely have responded in kind.  In addition, although with far fewer than the US and USSR, the People’s Republic of China also had developed its own nuclear weapons it could have deployed.

Politically, the war drove Lyndon Johnson from office. While most historians laud LBJ’s domestic accomplishments, his dramatic escalation of the war in Vietnam remains a dark shadow over his presidency.  For Richard Nixon, his move toward ending US involvement guaranteed his reelection in 1972, but what should have been a triumphal second term, instead turned to tragedy.