No Peace. No Honor.

Fifty years ago yesterday, the Paris Peace Accords went into effect, ending U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.  President Richard Nixon made the announcement (above, pictured) on, of all days, January 23, 1973 - the day after the death of his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, who had placed American combat troops in Vietnam in the first place.  Nixon said that the agreement, which left the Republic of Vietnam in the south intact and to live to fight another day against the Marxist Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north, allowed Americans to end their involvement in the war and walk away after they, as Walter Cronkite had put it in 1968, "lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could."  Nixon called this agreement "peace with honor."

Don't you believe it.

Though the service personnel who fought in Vietnam were indeed honorable people who served their country and in many cases became genuine heroes, such as future U.S. Senators John Kerry, John McCain, and Jeremiah Denton, but there was neither peace nor honor when the American cease-fire went into effect.  The Republic of Vietnam, which was the purported democracy we were supposed to be defending, was a corrupt government that did not represent the will of many if not most people in South Vietnam.  Furthermore, the existence of any government in Vietnam south of the 17th parallel was illegitimate; the Republic of Vietnam had refused to participate in nationwide elections in Vietnam after the French defeat and the fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, effectively ending France's colonial rule in Indochina.  Many observers agreed that had free and fair elections been held then, the communist leader of North Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, would have won in a landslide.  There was nothing honorable in supporting an illegal regime.

And peace? Maybe peace for the United States, but the fighting between North Vietnam and South Vietnam continued until April 1975, when the North Vietnamese army finally reached and occupied the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon (now called Ho Chi Minh City), forcing the collapse of the Republic of Vietnam, the unification of Vietnam under the Communist north, and the hurried escape of the American diplomatic corps from Saigon. 

Nixon said he had a "secret plan" to end the war, but the plan was a no-brainer.  It was simply to let South Vietnamese soldiers do their own fighting while American soldiers simply withdrew after training and advising the South Vietnamese. A ten-year-old could have figured out what the secret plan was.   

Today, many Americans still disagree on how the war ended.  Conservatives say that Nixon ended the war by having Henry Kissinger negotiate a settlement over it.  Progressives say peace activists ended the war by protesting against it. And then there is the third side, which writer John Strausbaugh once pointed out, the cold hard truth: The North Vietnamese ended the war . . . by winning it.