How did the US get out of Vietnam? In this episode, we are diving into how 'peace' was agreed in Paris, and what it really meant for Vietnam.Don is joined by Pierre Asselin, professor at San Diego State University and author of, among others, ‘A Bitter Peace: Washington, Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Agreement’ and ‘Hanoi’s Road to the Vietnam War, 1954-1965’.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Tim Arstall. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast.
Chapter 1: What event marked the end of the Vietnam War?
January 27th, 1973, the Hotel Majestic, Avenue Cléber, Paris' 16th arrondissement. a palace, one of Paris' most luxurious grand hotels, government office for the Ministry of Defense, the head office of UNESCO. This many-storied building has lived many lives. Today, it gains another string for its bow.
Inside, delegates from the United States, South Vietnam, the Viet Cong, and North Vietnam formally sign an agreement ending the war and restoring peace in Vietnam. Tomorrow, on the 28th of January, at 8 a.m., there will finally be a ceasefire. The U.S. will get to work withdrawing their troops and dismantling their bases, and the North Vietnamese will release their prisoners of war. Peace at last.
The End
Hello, listeners. Glad you're with us. I'm Don Wildman, and this is American History Hit. It's 2025, the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, when North Vietnamese forces took the capital of the South, effectively ending America's involvement in that country's civil war.
The events of the war have been examined so many times in scholarship and media, yet one aspect of this period often escapes notice. Our exit plan for withdrawal. I'm not talking about Hueys on the embassy roof. All that's in a previous episode of ours. Today, we explore the more official pursuit to achieve Nixon's peace with honor. What deal did we mean to strike? What were the objectives?
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Chapter 2: What was Nixon's strategy for ending the war?
And why weren't the North Vietnamese, in the end, persuaded? This critical chapter we discuss today with a former guest of our show, Professor Pierre Asselin, who occupies the Dwight E. Stanford Chair in American Foreign Relations in the Department of History at San Diego State University. Nice to be with you again, Pierre. Thanks for coming on. My pleasure, Don. Good to be back.
Let's put this all in context. When Nixon first runs for election in 1968, he promises an, quote, honorable end to the war in Vietnam. What then evolves into peace with honor, a campaign slogan in 1972. And right there is the dilemma. It will take eight years. for the failure of our efforts in Vietnam to finally resolve themselves. And in the end, it comes under Nixon's successor.
What were the major factors that logjammed this process?
So Nixon had a very clear understanding of the situation in Vietnam. I think for all of his flaws, we really need to give Nixon credit for understanding what was happening in Vietnam and what that meant for the larger international global Cold War context.
Chapter 3: Why did the North Vietnamese reject peace negotiations?
From the moment he assumes the presidency, Nixon is cognizant of the fact that the American military enterprise in Vietnam is not going to meet its stated objective of effectively providing for a South Vietnam that will be forever protected from the communist menace. Nixon understands that in light of previous failures, the U.S.
is likely to lose in South Vietnam, to not meet its political objective of, again, preserving the South as a non-communist entity. So then the question becomes how to end the commitment while salvaging American credibility and honor so that the U.S. can continue fighting the Cold War in other parts of the world.
So for the U.S., right, Vietnam is certainly important, but it's one battle within the larger context of this global Cold War. So for Nixon, the idea here is to deal with defeat in Vietnam, but deal with it in such a way that the United States will have the staying power to remain in the larger context Cold War fight against the Soviet Union, China, and other rivals.
Yeah, we often talk about it on this podcast. Korea, part one, Vietnam, part two. That's really rough, but I mean, that's kind of the idea. So the idea was to emerge from this with our credibility intact in order to continue the fight against the dominoes falling, right?
Exactly, exactly. And that's the thing, right? I mean, credibility, prestige, those are really, really important currencies in international relations. You know, it doesn't matter if you have big guns or a powerful economy. It's always about how you use these things. Right. And where are the people believe that you're going to use your economic might, your military might to meet your objectives?
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Chapter 4: How did the Paris Peace Talks unfold?
And that's how Nixon approaches it. The other element, I think, Don, that that accounts for the length of the disengagement is the model that Nixon is using. Nixon was always a big fan of Charles de Gaulle. And specifically, he admired the way de Gaulle had gotten France out of Algeria. Algeria was such a mess, right, for the French.
And Nixon, rightly or wrongly, believed that de Gaulle had indeed achieved what de Gaulle himself called la paix dans l'honneur, right, the peace in honor in Algeria. And just as it took de Gaulle four years to extricate France from Algeria, again, with a view to maintaining French credibility internationally after Algeria, Nixon would take four years to get the United States out of Vietnam.
And that's not coincidence. Nixon is very closely following the Gaullian playbook in Algeria when he's looking at Vietnam.
That is the first time I've ever heard a parallel there. That's interesting.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's the thing, right? The French War in Algeria is so much in common with the American War in Vietnam. It's sensible because we always compare the American War in Vietnam to the French War in Vietnam. And that's wrong. We should be comparing it to the French War in Algeria.
There are many more parallels and similarities between those two conflicts than there are between the American War in Vietnam and the French War in Vietnam that preceded it.
Well, and fittingly, I suppose this whole conversation will end up in Paris because that's where this whole accord is negotiated, the Paris peace talks. But before we get there, the first play for peace happens under Johnson after the New Hampshire primary in 1968 when he, Eugene McCarthy, had done so well that...
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Chapter 5: What were the key differences between North Vietnamese and Viet Cong?
Johnson actually, in reaction, halts the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign on March 31st, 1968. So how then do negotiations develop from there?
I think the Americans were always more committed to a diplomatic solution than their counterparts in Hanoi. And when Johnson decides that he's going to try and solve this diplomatically, various efforts are made to connect with Hanoi.
Ultimately, all these initiatives are going to fail primarily because the leaders on the other side, the leaders in Hanoi, have no interest whatsoever in a negotiated solution. They're going to pretend to be interested because it's going to elevate their profile, their standing internationally, right? They're going to look reasonable, right?
But we now know from the record on the communist side that fundamentally this willingness to negotiate was not matched by an actual desire to find a compromise solution to the war. Until the latter stages of the war, leaders in Hanoi are going to remain convinced that they can win this militarily if they're patient enough and if they make the proper investment.
Did they see us as a furtherance of the colonization? Were we the next colonizing power to come in after the French?
So that would be the public narrative, right? So the communists are a really remarkable propaganda machine. And they were extremely good at controlling the narrative of the war, particularly the narrative that the international community consumed, if you will. And they certainly presented the American intervention as kind of this neo-colonial crusade, right?
But again, amongst themselves, privately, they recognize this as the United States essentially trying to contain their Marxist-Leninist ambitions. In the context of the Cold War, I really think the United States had no choice but to become involved in Vietnam.
And while the outcome and the circumstances that produced were certainly tragic, you know, it's hard to imagine the United States avoiding Vietnam in light of what's happening internationally. But what we see communist leaders do from the moment the Americans intervene is start tracing these parallels between what the Americans are doing and what the French did before them.
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Chapter 6: How did Nixon's victory impact Vietnam negotiations?
Chapter 7: What role did credibility play in U.S. foreign policy?
But we now know from the record on the communist side that fundamentally this willingness to negotiate was not matched by an actual desire to find a compromise solution to the war. Until the latter stages of the war, leaders in Hanoi are going to remain convinced that they can win this militarily if they're patient enough and if they make the proper investment.
Did they see us as a furtherance of the colonization? Were we the next colonizing power to come in after the French?
So that would be the public narrative, right? So the communists are a really remarkable propaganda machine. And they were extremely good at controlling the narrative of the war, particularly the narrative that the international community consumed, if you will. And they certainly presented the American intervention as kind of this neo-colonial crusade, right?
But again, amongst themselves, privately, they recognize this as the United States essentially trying to contain their Marxist-Leninist ambitions. In the context of the Cold War, I really think the United States had no choice but to become involved in Vietnam.
And while the outcome and the circumstances that produced were certainly tragic, you know, it's hard to imagine the United States avoiding Vietnam in light of what's happening internationally. But what we see communist leaders do from the moment the Americans intervene is start tracing these parallels between what the Americans are doing and what the French did before them.
And of course, the international community loves this stuff, right? Because Vietnam has already been a victim of... of colonial exploitation and manipulation. So it becomes easy to cast the Americans in that same light. There's a commitment on the part of leaders in Hanoi to this Marxist-Leninist design.
That would be a terrible thesis to get out there for us because that was our past as well. We decolonized ourselves and great sympathies would rise up in their favor.
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Chapter 8: What were the major intelligence failures in the Vietnam War?
We now know leaders in Hanoi were really shocked by Nixon's victory and they were deeply troubled by it. During the last year of his presidency, Johnson tries really, really hard to make peace happen. He curtails the bombing. He is very, very accommodating. And as it turns out, Hanoi will interpret all of this as weakness on the part of the Americans.
And so instead of encouraging Hanoi to negotiate, Johnson's overture are going to essentially kind of make Hanoi solidify its position, right? So it's all perception, right? But we now know that in Hanoi, Johnson's, I guess, flexibility was interpreted as weakness. Nixon comes to power, and leaders in Hanoi are very much aware of his background, and they are concerned.
Then Nixon decides to Vietnamize the war, which is really de-Americanize the Vietnamese civil war. And they like that. But then he starts talking to the Chinese. He starts talking to the Soviets. He invades Cambodia. He invades Laos. And then the communist leadership is really, really concerned about Nixon.
And that's going to make them a little more humble in the way that they approach diplomacy with the Americans.
Was Nixon aware of that? I mean, did we have intelligence that they perceived Johnson as weak?
No. So, you know, people always talk about the Tet Offensive as America's biggest intelligence failure in Vietnam. How could we not see this coming? To me, the biggest intelligence failure of the whole war is the inability of American leaders to ever understand who they were up against. You know, all along, they assume Ho Chi Minh is in charge, right?
And then Ho Chi Minh dies in 69, and they're still not clear on who's running the show in Hanoi. We now know that long before American ground troops are committed to South Vietnam, we have a leadership of really, really hard men in power, that has effectively sidelined Ho Chi Minh and the famous General Giap. A guy by the name of Le Duan or Le Zuan is basically calling the shots in Hanoi.
And those guys are uncompromising. And Americans never knew until long after the war was over who exactly were those guys and the extent that they never understood also the extent of their commitment to what communists called total victory.
Was Nixon extending an olive branch from the beginning? Was there a strategy to, I'm going to keep this up or else? Or was that kind of behind the scenes only?
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