Following the US elections in November 1968, Richard Nixon, the new Republican president, promised to ‘bring us together’, and pledged the gradual withdrawal of troops from Vietnam. The war, however, continued and Nixon ordered the bombing of Cambodia from where the supply of arms was reaching the North Vietnamese, while telling the American public that the USA respected Cambodia’s neutrality. Slowly, Nixon managed to hand back the organization of the day-to-day military operations to the South Vietnamese in what he called ‘Vietnamization’.
The Paris Accords of January 1973 finally brought a ceasefire in Vietnam but allowed the Viet Cong to maintain the territory already captured in South Vietnam, much to the displeasure of the South Vietnamese. Although the last US soldiers had left Vietnam by the end of March, the USA continued to supply arms to the South while the Soviets continued to supply the North. As Nixon began withdrawing aid, the North gained the upper hand, eventually defeating South Vietnam in 1975, resulting in the panicked evacuation of the South Vietnamese ‘boat people’. Communist armies also triumphed in Laos and Cambodia. Eisenhower’s great fear had come to pass the whole of Indochina was now communist.