SOURCE A

A letter from President Nixon to President Thieu of South Vietnam, sent during the final stages of the Paris Peace Talks, 19 January 1973.

The essential fact is that the situation in the United States makes it imperative to put our relationship on a new basis. Long-term friends in the Congress are making public declarations that a refusal by your government of reasonable peace terms would make it impossible for the US to continue providing aid to South Vietnam. It is this situation that threatens everything for which our two countries have suffered so much. I can no longer hold up my decision. When Dr Kissinger leaves Washington on Monday morning, our basic course must be set. As I have told you, we will initial the Agreement in Paris on 23 January. I must know now whether you are prepared to join us in this course, and I must have your answer by 12.00 Washington time, January 21, 1973.

Quoted in J. Hanhimaki and O.A. Westad, The Cold War, 2004

SOURCE B

Adapted from the diaries of Bob Haldeman, President Nixon’s chief of staff, 23 January 1973.

Got word from Henry Kissinger that he has initialed the Vietnam agreement, so we had sessions on planning the President’s speech for tonight. The P read out the official statement he will read on TV tonight, and said all our conditions had been completely met. The P said the GVN and Thieu are totally on board. He said we have a cease-fire for Vietnam, possibly also in Laos and Cambodia. We have peace with honour; the POWs are coming back; it’s a supervised cease-fire; and the right of South Vietnam to determine their own future. He got a little bit emotional at the end.

Quoted in J. Hanhimaki and O.A. Westad, The Cold War, 2004

SOURCE C

From a modern historian’s account.

In January 1973 a cease-fire was finally agreed. The Americans would withdraw within sixty days and the final settlement would be left to the Vietnamese. But the cease-fire was not the prelude to peace. The North Vietnamese soon resumed the conflict and, despite massive supplies of American arms, the badly led South Vietnamese army crumbled completely. The Watergate scandal had removed Nixon in 1974; his successor President Ford knew only too well that the American people would not sanction a renewed US involvement in the war. As the North Vietnamese army thrust south, millions of refugees fled in terror towards Saigon, but the capital itself fell on 30 April 1975 as the last Americans and accompanying Vietnamese were lifted from the American Embassy in a frenzied evacuation.

Adapted from J.A.S. Grenville, The Collins History of the World in the Twentieth Century, 1994