Analysis: Plea for Emergency Aid for Saigon

Date: April 15, 1975

Author: Henry Kissinger

Genre: speech; petition

Summary Overview

Between mid-1965 and early 1973, American forces fought a full-fledged war in South Vietnam against regular North Vietnamese soldiers and communist irregular guerillas from the South. When direct combat between American and communist forces ended in March 1973 with the exit of US troops from South Vietnam, the latter country remained on the map for two more years, until April 1975. With the adoption of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, covering the US withdrawal, vague political agreements were established among the competing forces in South Vietnam, which were supposed to be expanded and worked out in detail later. These agreements gave US president Richard Nixon and his national security advisor Henry Kissinger the ability to say that they had achieved “peace with honor” in Vietnam, and they argued that South Vietnam had a good chance to succeed as a nation in 1973. In reality, the military situation favored the communist forces. With the US public and Congress very wary of more aid to South Vietnam, when communist forces began a new offensive in early 1975, they met with unexpected success and soon threatened to take over all of South Vietnam in one campaign. In the midst of the South Vietnamese collapse, Kissinger lobbied Congress for more aid to the besieged South Vietnamese government. His speech revealed his own beliefs about the viability of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, which he helped construct, and also provided windows into debates that have raged ever since on both the role of US credibility in leading America into the conflict and also on the actual possibility of South Vietnamese success after 1973.

Defining Moment

Kissinger's speech before the Senate Committee on Appropriations occurred in the midst of the military collapse of South Vietnam in the spring of 1975. In December 1974, communist forces had begun a hesitant offensive in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. Unexpectedly, for both the communists and the Americans who were watching, the forces of South Vietnam rapidly disintegrated and the communists were able to continue a sustained offensive into the heart of South Vietnam. By mid-April, the complete takeover of South Vietnam by communist forces was imminent and all the major cities were either in communist hands or severely threatened.

In the middle of this chaos in South Vietnam, even as US officials prepared evacuation plans for the remaining Americans in the capital city of Saigon, Kissinger urged the US Senate to provide increased funding for the beleaguered South Vietnamese, which US president Gerald Ford had officially requested from Congress. Estimating the South Vietnamese armed forces had abandoned around $800 million worth of materiel while retreating over the last couple of months, Kissinger recognized that “the amount of military assistance the President has requested is of the same general magnitude as the value of the equipment lost,” but argued that the aid would still work. Detractors, both then and since, have wondered why the United States should provide such extensive aid if previous aid and materiel had been so casually wasted (Herring 296). Kissinger's claim that the new aid would cover only “minimum requirements” to stabilize the situation in South Vietnam—and it was debated whether that would actually happen—also held the door open to requests for further high levels of aid to come. By 1975, however, the US public and most US leaders had concluded that the United States had spent enough blood and treasure in South Vietnam. Congress denied this request for more military funding.

Author Biography

Henry Kissinger was the US national security advisor, a powerful position in the US bureaucracy that was created in 1947 to fight the Cold War, from 1969 to 1975, under both Nixon and President Gerald Ford. He was also the US secretary of state from 1973 to 1977. While he served both Nixon and Carter, he is most known for his years under Nixon, during which he helped wind down American involvement in Vietnam. Alongside his North Vietnamese counterpart in negotiations, Le Duc Tho, Kissinger received the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, under which US forces left South Vietnam.

Document Analysis

Throughout the document, Kissinger largely blames two sources for the imminent defeat of South Vietnam—the North Vietnamese and American unwillingness to extend any more aid to the crumbling nation. In Kissinger's view, the 1973 Paris Peace Accords had put in place a viable path forward toward a political solution between North and South Vietnam, although most people at the time were unsure what that eventual settlement would look like. After all, the North Vietnamese and the communists in South Vietnam had long vowed to unite the country, by any means necessary, under a communist government. Therefore, most historians tend to see the aspects of the 1973 agreement that related to the political future of South Vietnam as only temporary, although Kissinger and Nixon at the time, and their supporters since, have insisted that the 1973 Accords provided a legitimate chance for South Vietnam to succeed. Therefore, he largely blamed the North Vietnamese for escalating the conflict again after 1973, stating, “It is both inaccurate and unfair to hold South Viet-Nam responsible for blocking progress toward a political solution to the conflict.” He argued that North Vietnam never took the political aspects of the Paris settlement seriously and were always planning on a military takeover of the South.

Relatedly, Kissinger argues, the lack of American willingness to give South Vietnam more aid in fact encouraged North Vietnamese intransigence and spurred their military offensives, including the final one in early 1975. He argues, “So long as the possibility existed of U.S. intervention to offset the strategic advantages of the North, Hanoi could be expected to forgo major military action.” Basically, for Kissinger, when it became clear that the United States would no longer support South Vietnam with new funding or more weapons, it seemed to open the door to a communist victory. In fact, dismissing the charges of others that the South Vietnamese armed forces were unwilling to fight, Kissinger finds the root cause of their retreat and disintegration in the American lack of aid. In a kind of linked effect, he argues that the lack of American aid has led to a lack of good war materiel for the South Vietnamese army, which then produced low morale because the soldiers felt unsupported and undersupplied. This low morale is said to have caused them to flee when “they faced an enemy superior both in numbers and in firepower.” Thus, the aid that Kissinger is requesting would, in his assessment, allow an “end to the military conflict and [would] establish conditions which will allow a fair political solution to be achieved.” In essence, renewed American aid would bolster the morale and fighting ability of the South Vietnamese forces, halt the communist advance, and shift the entire future of Vietnam back again away from the military realm to the political realm, as it had been, he believed, in early 1973.

Bibliography and Additional Reading

Herring, George C. America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975. 3rd edition. New York: McGraw Hill, Inc., 1996.

Hess, Gary. Vietnam and the United States: Origins and Legacy of War. Rev. Ed. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998.