Ending the War in Vietnam

By 1969, a clear majority of Americans wanted their country out of Vietnam. As these documents suggest, disagreement raged over how to get out and what the consequences of U.S. withdrawal would be.

DOCUMENT 1

Richard Nixon Explains His Policy of Vietnamization, November 3, 1969

Elected on the promise of ending the war, Nixon adopted a plan of Vietnamization, strengthening South Vietnam so that it could take over its own defense and U.S. forces could come home. Here Nixon explains why he chose Vietnamization over immediate withdrawal.

But the question facing us today is: Now that we are in the war, what is the best way to end it?

In January I could only conclude that the precipitate withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam would be a disaster not only for South Vietnam but for the United States and for the cause of peace.

For the South Vietnamese, our precipitate withdrawal would inevitably allow the Communists to repeat the massacres which followed their takeover in the North 15 years before. . . .

For the United States, this first defeat in our Nation’s history would result in a collapse of confidence in American leadership, not only in Asia but throughout the world. Three American Presidents have recognized the great stakes involved in Vietnam and understood what had to be done. . . .

For the future of peace, precipitate withdrawal would thus be a disaster of immense magnitude.

I pledged in my campaign for the Presidency to end the war in a way that we could win the peace. I have initiated a plan of action which will enable me to keep that pledge.

The more support I can have from the American people, the sooner that pledge can be redeemed; for the more divided we are at home, the less likely the enemy is to negotiate at Paris.

Let us be united for peace. Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.

Source: Excerpt from Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard Nixon, 1969 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971), 901–9.

DOCUMENT 2

A Vietnam Veteran Urges Congress to End the War, April 22, 1971

John Kerry was a decorated navy lieutenant who served in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969 and later became a U.S. senator and secretary of state. He provided this testimony as a leader of Vietnam Veterans against the War.

. . . In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom . . . is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart. . . .

We found that not only was it a civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese . . . were hard put to take up the fight against the threat we were supposedly saving them from.

We found most people didn’t even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Vietcong, North Vietnamese, or American.

We found also that all too often American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw firsthand how money from American taxes was used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by our flag, as blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs as well as by search and destroy missions, as well as by Vietcong terrorism, and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Viet Cong. . . .

We watched the U.S. falsification of body counts, in fact the glorification of body counts. We listened while month after month we were told the back of the enemy was about to break. We fought using weapons against “oriental human beings,” with quotation marks around that. We fought using weapons against those people which I do not believe this country would dream of using were we fighting in the European theater. . . .

Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese. . . .

Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn’t have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can’t say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won’t be, and these are his words, “the first President to lose a war.”

We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

Source: Excerpt from Legislative Proposals Relating to the War in Southeast Asia, Hearings before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 92nd Cong. 180–210 (April–May 1971).

Questions for Analysis

SUMMARIZE THE ARGUMENT: Why did President Nixon consider it crucial to remain engaged until South Vietnam’s freedom from Communist control was assured? What reasons did Kerry give for placing U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam above all other considerations?

RECOGNIZE VIEWPOINTS: Both Nixon and Kerry considered the effects of U.S. actions in Vietnam on particular nations or groups. With which people was each of them most concerned?

CONSIDER THE CONTEXT: In which ways were Nixon and Kerry both correct about what would happen when the United States left Vietnam?