50th Anniversary of the Fall of Saigon

On April 30, 1975, just over eight months after President Nixon resigned the presidency, the capital of South Vietnam was captured by the North Vietnamese Army. The Fall of Saigon led to the reunification of Vietnam under communist control. Thousands of South Vietnamese fled the country as refugees and Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City the following year.

America’s involvement in Vietnam began long before Richard Nixon became president. Beginning in 1950, President Harry S. Truman sent a small number of military advisors. President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent money and equipment and President John F. Kennedy sent 16,000 American troops as advisors. By the end of 1968, under President Lyndon B. Johnson, 555,000 Americans were fighting in Vietnam.

In 1968, Nixon campaigned on bringing an honorable end to the war in Vietnam and, once elected, his speeches about Vietnam expressed the goal of achieving a lasting peace with honor. The Nixon administration’s plan for Vietnam was “to end the war and win the peace.” The goal was to prevent North Vietnam from conquering South Vietnam through training and equipping South Vietnam’s army to defend itself, known as Vietnamization. In peace negotiations, President Nixon had two conditions: the return of all of the American POWs and the right of the South Vietnamese people to determine their future.

On January 23, 1973, in a nationally televised address from the Oval Office, President Nixon announced a peace agreement had been reached—ending America’s involvement in Vietnam and securing the return of all American prisoners of war. The Paris Peace Accords were signed five days later, on January 27, 1973. America pledged to continue to support South Vietnam with military and economic assistance and by using air power if the communists violated the terms of the treaties.

President Nixon described the peace achieved through the Paris Peace Accords as “fragile” and wrote, “I knew all our gains depended on convincing Congress that simply concluding the Paris peace accords did not end our responsibilities. A peace agreement is only as good at the will of the parties to keep it.”

The North Vietnamese did not comply with key provisions of the Paris peace agreement and the United States gradually withdrew military and economic support. By 1975, no American air support was provided, and funding had been drastically reduced by Congress. As Nixon describes, “The possibility of retaliating against North Vietnam evaporated by the end of April 1973. It was not a failure of presidential will—I was willing to act—but an erosion of congressional support.”

In an Introduction to his book No More Vietnams, President Nixon reflected in 1990, “Of all the books I have written, No More Vietnams is the one I felt I had an obligation to write—for the sake of the three million Americans who served, for the sake of the 56,000 who died, for the sake of the millions of people of Indochina still suffering under communism because of our failure, and for the sake of history.”

The former president goes on to write about the lessons Americans can learn from Vietnam. From his first visit to Vietnam as Vice President in 1953, his legacy would become interwoven with the Southeast Asian country. In the Author’s Note at the end, Nixon explains, “But the intensity of my feeling about it stems from having been the President who inherited the Vietnam War at its peak and had to end it, and having then seen the peace that was won at such cost thrown away so cavalierly. The lessons of Vietnam are, to me, very personal ones.”

While the history is complex, fifty years later, there is still much to learn from the lessons of Vietnam.