Paris Peace Accord: The US ticket out of Vietnam
The fall of Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, came two years after the Paris Peace Accord.
The peace agreement was signed on January 27, 1973 and was the fruit of nearly five years of mainly top-secret talks between US national security advisor Henry Kissinger and his North Vietnamese counterpart, Le Duc Tho.
South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu opposed the accord but signed it nonetheless under heavy pressure from US President Richard Nixon.
The Vietcong guerrilla movement was also present at the talks but did not have a full seat at the intentionally round table.
The accord's key points were:
- An immediate truce, with each side controlling the territory it occupied when the ceasefire took effect on January 27, 1973. This allowed North Vietnamese soldiers to remain present in South Vietnam, one of Thieu's main objections.
- The withdrawal within 60 days of US troops from Vietnam along with their weapons and equipment.
- An end to the infiltration of fighters and supplies from North Vietnam via Laos and Cambodia.
- A political process to decide the future of South Vietnam but no plans for a coalition government.
- The release of prisoners of war, mainly from the United States, within 60 days.
Kissinger and Le Duc Tho won the Nobel Peace Prize that year but Le Duc Tho declined to accept it.
The deal was quickly violated by both sides, though, as fighting continued, infiltrations from the North did not end and the United States transferred equipment to the Saigon government.
"In one sense, this agreement was a joke," commented military historian Edwin Moise from Clemson University in the United States.
"Neither side had any intention of obeying it. It did not settle the question of who would end up controlling South Vietnam," he added. This was because Nixon and Kissinger had decided to focus first on military aspects.
"From our first meeting with Le Duc Tho in April 1970, we said we wanted to separate the military and political issues," Kissinger told a conference hosted by The Nixon Center in April 1998.
Moise noted that "what the United States got out of the agreement was, essentially, a way out of Vietnam," while Thieu later blocked attempts at a political settlement.
North Vietnam and its Vietcong allies in the South benefitted from the accord because neither was obliged to withdraw its forces from the South.
Peter Rodman, a Kissinger aide, said they would nonetheless have been "at an enormous disadvantage", because the United States was allowed to continue aiding South Vietnam, were it not for certain events.
Nixon "was prepared to use force to enforce the agreement" by bombing infiltration routes and resupplying South Vietnam, Rodman told the 1998 conference. But "Watergate and the Congress knocked out these last two props from under the agreement in very short order," he said.
And by mid-1973 US lawmakers had ruled out more military action in Southeast Asia, before slashing US aid to South Vietnam.
In August 1974 the Watergate scandal forced Nixon to resign and Saigon fell less than nine months later.