Transcript
0:00Decades back, in late 1972, South Vietnam and the
United States were winning the Vietnam War
0:07decisively by every conceivable measure. That's not just my view.
0:14That was the view of our enemy, the North Vietnamese government
officials.
0:19 Victory was apparent when President Nixon ordered the U.S. Air
Force
0:23to bomb industrial and military targets in Hanoi, North Vietnam's
capital city,
0:29and in Haiphong, its major port city, and we would stop the bombing
0:34 if the North Vietnamese would attend the Paris Peace Talks that
they had left earlier.
0:40The North Vietnamese did go back to the Paris Peace talks, and we
did stop the bombing as promised.
0:48On January the 23rd, 1973, President Nixon gave a speech to the
nation on primetime television
0:56announcing that the Paris Peace Accords had been initialed by the
United States,
1:02South Vietnam, North Vietnam, the Viet Cong, and the Accords would
be signed on the 27th.
1:09What the United States and South Vietnam received in those accords
was victory.
1:15At the White House, it was called "VV Day," "Victory in Vietnam
Day."
1:22The U.S. backed up that victory with a simple pledge within the
Paris Peace Accords saying:
1:28should the South require any military hardware to defend itself
against any North Vietnam aggression
1:36we would provide replacement aid to the South on a piece-by-piece,
one-to-one
1:41replacement, meaning a bullet for a bullet; a helicopter for a
helicopter, for all things lost --
1:48replacement. The advance of communist tyranny had been halted by
those accords.
1:55Then it all came apart. And It happened this way: In August of the
following year, 1974,
2:03President Nixon resigned his office as a result of what became
known as "Watergate."
2:09Three months after his resignation came the November congressional
elections and within them
2:14the Democrats won a landslide victory for the new Congress and many
of the members used
2:21their new majority to de-fund the military aid the U.S. had
promised, piece for piece,
2:30breaking the commitment that we made to the South Vietnamese in
Paris to provide whatever
2:36military hardware the South Vietnamese needed in case of aggression
from the North.
2:42Put simply and accurately, a majority of Democrats of the 94th
Congress
2:48did not keep the word of the United States.
2:53On April the 10th of 1975, President Gerald Ford appealed directly
to those members of
3:00the congress in an evening Joint Session, televised to the nation.
In that speech he
3:07literally begged the Congress to keep the word of the United
States. But as President
3:13Ford delivered his speech, many of the members of the Congress
walked out of the chamber.
3:19Many of them had an investment in America's failure in Vietnam.
They had participated
3:25in demonstrations against the war for many years. They wouldn't
give the aid.
3:33On April the 30th South Vietnam surrendered and Re-education Camps
were constructed,
3:40and the phenomenon of the Boat People began. If the South
Vietnamese had received the arms
3:46that the United States promised them would the result have been
different?
3:51It already had been different.
3:53The North Vietnamese leaders admitted that they were testing the
new President,
3:57Gerald Ford, and they took one village after another, then cities,
then provinces and our
4:04only response was to go back on our word. The U.S. did not
re-supply the South Vietnamese
4:12as we had promised. It was then that the North Vietnamese knew they
were on the road to South
4:17Vietnam's capital city, Saigon, that would soon be renamed Ho Chi
Minh City.
4:24Former Arkansas Senator William Fulbright, who had been the
Chairman of the Senate Foreign
4:29Relations Committee made a public statement about the surrender of
South Vietnam.
4:35He said this, "I am no more distressed than I would be about
Arkansas losing a football game to Texas."
4:45The U.S. knew that North Vietnam would violate the accords and so
we planned for it.
4:50What we did not know was that our own Congress would violate the
accords.
4:55And violate them, of all things, on behalf of the North Vietnamese.
5:01That's what happened.
5:04I'm Bruce Herschensohn.
