[0:00]Decades back, in late 1972, South Vietnam and the United States were winning the Vietnam War decisively by every conceivable measure.
[0:12]That's not just my view, that 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 to bomb industrial and military targets in Hanoi, North Vietnam's capital city, and in Haiphong, its major port city.
[0:33]And we would stop the bombing if the North Vietnamese would attend the Paris peace talks that they had left earlier.
[0:40]The North Vietnamese did go back to the Paris peace talks, and we did stop the bombing as promised.
[0:48]On January the 23rd of 1973, President Nixon gave a speech to the nation on primetime television,
[0:56]announcing that the Paris Peace Accords had been initialed by the United States, South Vietnam, North Vietnam, the Viet Cong,
[1:08]and the Accords would be signed on the 27th. What the United States and South Vietnam received in those Accords was victory.
[1:16]At the White House, it was called V-V Day, Victory in Vietnam Day.
[1:22]The U.S. backed up that victory with a simple pledge within the Paris Peace Accords,
[1:28]saying, should the South require any military hardware to defend itself against any North Vietnam aggression,
[1:37]the U.S. will provide replacement aid to the South on a piece-by-piece, one-to-one replacement, meaning a bullet for a bullet,
[1:44]a helicopter for a helicopter, for all things lost, replacement.
[1:50]The advance of communist tyranny had been halted by those Accords.
[1:56]Then it all came apart, and it happened this way.
[2:00]In August of the following year, 1974, President Nixon resigned his office as a result of what became known as Watergate.
[2:09]Three months after his resignation came the November congressional elections, and within them the Democrats won a landslide victory for the new Congress.
[2:20]And many of the members used their new majority to defund the military aid that the United States had promised peace for peace,
[2:30]breaking the commitment that we made to the South Vietnamese in Paris to provide whatever military hardware the South Vietnamese needed in case of aggression from the North.
[2:42]Put simply and accurately, a majority of Democrats of the 94th Congress did not keep the word of the United States.
[2:53]On April the 10th of 1975, President Gerald Ford appealed directly to those members of the Congress in an evening joint session televised to the nation.
[3:06]In that speech, he literally begged the Congress to keep the word of the United States.
[3:13]But as President Ford delivered his speech, many of the members of the Congress walked out of the chamber.
[3:19]Many of them had an investment in America's failure in Vietnam.
[3:24]They had participated in demonstrations against the war for many years.
[3:32]And they wouldn't give the aid. On April the 30th, South Vietnam surrendered, and re-education camps were constructed, and the phenomenon of the boat people began.
[3:45]If the South Vietnamese had received the arms that the United States promised, would the result have been different?
[3:52]It already had been different. The North Vietnamese leaders admitted that they were testing the new President, Gerald Ford, and they took one village after another, then cities, then provinces.
[4:04]And our only response was to go back on our word.
[4:09]The U.S. did not resupply the South Vietnamese as we had promised.
[4:14]It was then that the North Vietnamese knew they were on the road to South Vietnam's capital city, Saigon, that would soon be renamed Ho Chi Minh City.
[4:25]Former Arkansas Senator William Fulbright, who had been the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
[4:32]made a public statement about the surrender of South Vietnam.
[4:36]He said this, "I am no more distressed than I would be about Arkansas losing a football game to Texas."
[4:45]The U.S. knew that North Vietnam would violate the Accords, and so we planned for it.
[4:50]What we did not know was that our own Congress would violate the Accords.
[4:55]And violate them of all things on behalf of the North Vietnamese.
[5:03]That's what happened. I'm Bruce Herschenson.
