Vietnam, Protest, and Counterculture 477stood, would mean that the Communists would eventually take over all of
Vietnam. Kissinger, along with Le Duc Tho, received the Nobel Peace Prize
for ending the war, but the Vietnamese diplomat refused to accept the award
because he did not believe there was any honor in slowly ending a war that
had killed millions. The treaty left the southerners in a precarious position so
Nixon agreed to secretly continue supporting the RVN and its president,
Nguyen Van Thieu. In fact, Thieu began violating the treaty as soon as he
signed it, telling his troops that if “Communists come into your village, you
should immediately shoot them in the head,” while those who “begin talking
in a Communist tone... should be immediately killed.” Because of American
funding, the RVN still had over 1,000,000 troops, much more than the North
had, and a sizable Air Force as well, both of which were used against enemy
zones and even against neutral members of ta military commission who were
trying to map each sides’ zones of control in the southern countryside.
Events in Indochina, however, were being pushed to the back burner as
Nixon’s domestic crisis, the Watergate Scandal, was growing and taking up
more attention. In Vietnam, the RVN’s own economy was suffering inflation
rates of nearly 90 percent, the Buddhists were still opposing the government,
and ARVN corruption and desertions continued, while refugees flooded into
Saigon, raising the population in that city from 1 million to 4 million. Even
though it received over $3 billion in U.S. aid in 1973-74, the Thieu regime
had lost most of its control over the RVN.
In the North, Hanoi had given up hope that the treaty would end the
conflict and achieve reunification, instead remembering the way it had vic-
tory stolen at Geneva in 1954. So the DRVN began planning for a final
offensive, which it began in December 1974. The Communists assumed it
would take about two years to conquer the South, but the RVN folded and
by early March, northern forces were barely 150 miles outside of Saigon.
Desperately, Thieu asked the U.S. for help but Congress refused the request
of Gerald Ford, who had become president with Nixon’s resignation, for $700
million to the RVN. On April 26th, 1975, the Communists began the “Ho Chi
Minh Campaign” and the ARVN fully collapsed. American helicopters scram-
bled to get over 7000 American and RVN personnel out of the capital while
U.S. ships in the South China Sea evacuated another 70,000 Vietnamese out
of the country, mostly wealthy southerners who had collaborated with the
Americans. On April 30th, tanks rolled toward the presidential palace, crashed