Fratricide (May 1970-March 1973) The Vietnam War

CHANTING: No more war! No more war!

This programme contains some strong language

This programme contains some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

CHANTING: USA! USA! USA!

# Love is but a song we sing

# Fear's the way we die

# You can make the mountains ring

# Or make the angels cry

# Come on people now

# Smile on your brother Everybody get together

# Try to love one another right now... #

My brother picked me up at Travis Air Force Base.

I remember he had a Valiant,

an old beat-up valiant,

and we met inside the terminal, and I was so happy to see him.

I just loved my brother.

He said, "Now, I don't want you to get upset,

"but we're probably going to get some trouble when we go outside."

I knew that there was unrest...

..but when we got in his car to drive away from the terminal...

..we had to wind our way through protesters that were...

pounding on the car with the ends of their signs...

and were snarling at me, and pounding on the window,

and shouting obscenities at me.

That was my welcome home to America.

I was just stunned.

I had never felt any anger toward people that were war protesters.

It's a legitimate political stance.

For people that descended into that...

I...

I think that they were really wrong.

# Try to love one another right now

# Right now

# Right now. #

In the spring of 1970,

despite the uproar over the invasion of Cambodia,

and the killing of four students at Kent State,

President Nixon's hold on what he called

"the great silent majority" seemed secure.

But after so many years of fighting,

more and more Americans were tired of the war,

wanted to get out of Southeast Asia,

and did not want the President to expand the conflict further.

Among their representatives in Congress,

anti-war sentiment had steadily grown.

As the President searched for a face-saving way to end the war,

he continued to withdraw troops.

But even as American casualty figures fell,

the gulf between Americans at home widened,

tearing communities, neighbourhoods, even families apart.

CHANTING: No more war!

Nixon was convinced, just as Lyndon Johnson had been,

that the anti-war movement was somehow being directed from Hanoi,

Beijing and Moscow.

Within the iron gates of the White House,

a siege mentality was settling in, a Nixon aide remembered.

"It was now us against them.

"Gradually, as we drew the circle closer around us,

"the ranks of them began to swell."

CHANTING: No more war! USA!

-DAVID FROST:

-Thank you very much indeed and welcome to this special,

very special edition, of the David Frost Show.

The Vice President himself wanted to debate with students

and we suggested a format in which he might like to do so.

Welcome, Eva Jefferson from Northwestern.

Eva Jefferson,

student body president at Northwestern University,

had testified before a presidential commission

looking into the causes of student unrest.

She had warned then that some students were becoming so frustrated

that they felt they had no choice but to engage in violence.

Right now, it's a privilege

to welcome the Vice President of the United States, Spiro T Agnew.

APPLAUSE

Let me take brief exception to one thing you said,

that the only way to get the attention of a society

is to bomb buildings.

I did not say I endorse this,

and if you read my testimony quite carefully,

you will know that I didn't

because you're making people afraid of their own children,

yet they're your children, they're my parents' children,

they're the children of this country.

But when you make people afraid of each other, you isolate people,

and maybe this is your goal,

but I think this could only have a disastrous effect on the country.

APPLAUSE

Let me say, first, that isolating people is not my goal.

If that were true, I wouldn't be here tonight.

Good.

Let me take exception to that oft-repeated rationale

that violence is the only way to get results.

I was trying to explain to you the rationale of some students

who are openly revolutionary.

You're not listening to what I'm saying.

-I'm really distressed...

-What are you advocating?

-EVA JEFFERSON VOICE-OVER:

-They were trying to politically benefit

from making us out to be these scary, horrible, violent people.

We weren't. We were against the war.

We thought the war was wrong,

we thought we were lied to,

and we were in the streets.

America has always had a rich tradition of protest.

We were founded by protesting England.

So to make people afraid of their kids I think was wrong,

but that's what they were about - they were fearmongers.

MAN SPEAKS VIETNAMESE:

It was fratricide.

You can say,

"But they are communists."

OK, they're Communists.

They were the worst Vietnamese in the entire world,

we were the good Vietnamese.

But let's face, Vietnamese killing Vietnamese -

how do you deny that?

If you don't call that fratricide, what do you call that?

What do you...? How do I explain that to my children?

The Cambodian incursion had at least temporarily reduced the flow

of North Vietnamese men and supplies through that country.

But they were still streaming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos.

The White House wanted them stopped.

But this time, South Vietnamese troops

would have to try to do the job alone.

By the end of 1970,

both houses of Congress had barred all US ground personnel -

even advisers and special forces - from crossing the border.

On February 8th, 1971,

17,000 ARVN troops began moving into Laos

to destroy the enemy's jungle bases

and to cut off the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The Americans could only provide air support.

Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger,

believed that a successful operation would boost morale in Saigon,

and prove to Hanoi and the American public

that the ARVN could fight and win on their own -

that Vietnamisation could work.

Although individual ARVN units fought bravely,

the invasion was a failure.

Almost half of the 17,000 South Vietnamese who entered Laos

would be killed, wounded, or captured.

In late March,

as the surviving ARVN forces straggled back across the border

into South Vietnam,

crowds of weeping women, children, and old men, dressed in white,

the colour of mourning,

begged for news of the soldiers who were missing.

In Vietnam, the dead must receive proper burial

so that their restless souls can have peace...

..and their families needed to know the time of their deaths

so that they could honour them each year.

Even before the invasion was over, President Nixon had told an aide,

"We must claim victory, whatever the outcome."

Consequently, tonight,

I can report that Vietnamisation has succeeded.

Because of the increased strength of the South Vietnamese,

because of the success of the Cambodian operation,

because of the achievements of the South Vietnamese operation in Laos,

I am announcing an increase in the rate of American withdrawals.

And generations in the future

will look back at this difficult, trying time in America's history...

..and they will be proud...

..that we demonstrated...

..that we had the courage, the character, the great people.

-Dr Kissinger.

-Mr President?

-Hi, Henry.

This was the best speech you've delivered

-since you've been in office.

-Yeah.

I'll tell you one thing - this little speech was a work of art.

I know a little something about speech-writing

and it was no act, because no actor could do it.

No actor in Hollywood could have done that that well.

-You couldn't have done it unless you meant it.

-Yeah. Mm-hmm.

And if it doesn't work, I don't care.

I mean, right now, if it doesn't work,

then let me say, though, I'm going to find out soon,

and then I'm going to turn right so goddamn hard

it will make your head spin.

We'll bomb those bastards right off the earth,

I really mean it.

EXPLOSION

# In this dirty old part of the city

# Where the sun refused to shine

# People tell me there ain't no use in tryin'... #

You belong to the same nation that is protesting at home.

Do you feel as if you belong to those people?

Very much. Very much.

I wish they'd get us out of here, I really do.

# We gotta get out of this place... #

"The morale, discipline and battleworthiness

"of the US Armed Forces,"

a retired Marine colonel wrote in the spring of 1971,

"Are lower and worse than at any time

"possibly in the history of the United States."

An official report had found that one out of four

enlisted men in Vietnam had used marijuana regularly,

but almost never in combat.

Uh, there's drugs everywhere. You can...

Well, within ten minutes in the country,

I had people approaching me selling skag.

-What's skag?

-It's heroin.

Heroin was cheap, pure, and everywhere.

The Pentagon would eventually acknowledge

that 40,000 American troops had been addicted to it.

# We gotta get out of this place

# If it's the last thing we ever do

# We gotta get out of this place

# Girl, there's a better life for me and you... #

Even General Creighton Abrams,

commander of military operations in Vietnam, now admitted privately,

"I need to get this Army home to save it."

# And I know it too, babe

# Oh, yeah. #

CHANTING: No more war!

The first time in our history...

..that veterans came home from a war and said,

while the war was still going on, and said,

"This war has got to stop."

And the American people might not listen

to a bunch of long-haired hippie kids - what do they know?

But the working class,

the great silent majority Richard Nixon always talked about -

his silent majority that would back him by being silent -

we were their kids.

It finally dawned on me, and this was a long, painful process, that...

..I wasn't helping anybody by keeping my mouth shut.

In April 1971,

some 2,000 members of an organisation

called Vietnam Veterans Against The War

and their followers descended on Washington, DC.

# Oh, a storm is threatening

# My very life today

# If I don't get some shelter

# Oh, yeah, I'm gonna fade away

# War, children

# It's just a shot away It's just a shot away

# War, children

# It's just a shot away It's just a shot away... #

VVAW was... It was great therapy.

We were working it out ourselves.

Vets taking care of vets.

We were generals in our own right.

And we didn't join anything - we became something.

And, yes, I was a Marine, but I was first and foremost a citizen

of the United States of America

and, being a citizen, I had certain responsibilities.

And the largest of those responsibilities

was standing up to your government and saying no

when it is doing something that you think

is not in this nation's best interests -

that is the most important job that every citizen has.

I served my country as honourably

when I was in Vietnam Veterans Against The War

as I did as a United States Marine.

And, in fact, I conducted myself as a Marine

the whole time I was in the VVAW.

My whole life, I conduct myself as a Marine.

Navy Lieutenant John Kerry, who had commanded a Swift boat

in the Mekong Delta, and was one of the organisation's leaders,

was invited to address the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

I went up for the presentation,

and it was standing room only,

and I was crammed up against the wall in the very back.

And when John...

..gave that presentation...

..I felt like he was speaking for all of us.

We could come back to this country and we could be quiet,

we could hold our silence, we could not tell what went on in Vietnam.

But we feel because of what threatens this country,

we have to speak out.

Millions of men have been taught to deal and to trade in violence,

and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history.

Men who have returned with a sense of anger, and a sense of betrayal,

which no-one has yet grasped.

We rationalised destroying villages in order to save them.

We saw America lose her sense of morality

as she accepted very coolly My Lai

and refused to give up the image of American soldiers

that hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum.

We learned the meaning of "free fire zones" -

shoot anything that moves -

and we watched while America placed a cheapness

on the lives of Orientals.

We watched the United States falsification of body counts.

In fact, the glorification of body counts.

We watched while men charged up hills

because a general said that hill has to be taken

and, after losing one platoon or two platoons,

they marched away to leave the hill

for the reoccupation of the North Vietnamese.

And we are asking Americans to think about that...

..because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam?

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

And so when, 30 years from now,

our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm,

or a face, and small boys ask, "Why?"

We will be able to say Vietnam

and not mean a filthy obscene memory,

but mean instead the place where America finally turned

and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.

Thank you.

APPLAUSE

I thought I had never heard so...

Such an incredible speech that says exactly what I'm feeling.

You know? It was extraordinary.

Extraordinary.

The next day, 700 Vietnam Veterans Against The War

gathered at the Capitol.

We originally intended to put our medals in a body bag

and have them delivered to Congress,

but the Nixon administration erected this big wire and wood fence

on the steps of our Capitol to keep us out...

..to keep out the young men and women who were fighting that war...

..and all that did was piss us off...

..and give us the greatest photo opportunity that we could ever have.

-Silver Star.

-Purple Heart.

-Bronze Star.

-Cross of Gallantry.

Distinguished Flying Cross.

And everything else!

I don't want these fucking medals, man!

The Silver Star, the third highest medal in the country,

it doesn't mean anything.

Bob Smeal died for these medals.

Lieutenant Pamaroff died so I got a medal.

Sergeant Johns died so I got a medal.

I've got a Silver Star, a Purple Heart, Army Commendation Medal,

eight Air Medals, National Defence, and the rest of this garbage -

it doesn't mean a thing!

When we threw our medals away,

that got their attention because America values those things -

so do we - that's why it was so important.

On June 12, 1971, Richard Nixon's daughter, Tricia,

married Edward Cox in the White House Rose Garden.

The country watched it all on television.

The wedding was still news the next day,

but another story on the front page of the New York Times

caught the President's attention.

The article, by Neil Sheehan,

was the first report of what came to be called the Pentagon Papers -

7,000 pages of highly classified documents and historical narrative,

compiled secretly at the orders of former Secretary of Defence

Robert McNamara.

He had hoped a study of the decision-making process

that had led to the United States to become so deeply involved in Vietnam

would help future policymakers avoid similar errors.

I thought I knew a great deal.

I thought I knew most of what was worth knowing about the war

and, suddenly, I didn't.

It wasn't a reporter's version of an event,

it was THEIR version of an event, it was their telegrams,

their orders, their memoranda, etc.

The documents proved that American presidents

and their closest advisers had grave doubts

about the chances for victory...

..and that they had routinely lied to Congress

and the American people about the war for years.

I certainly don't endorse...

..anyone releasing top-secret material to the press.

On the other hand...

..I was very concerned about the fact that the government

was not being up-front with the American people,

in certain respects, with the Vietnam War.

Two copies of the report had been stored at the Rand Corporation,

a California think-tank where Daniel Ellsberg,

one of the study's 36 authors, worked as an analyst.

Ellsberg had once supported the war.

He'd served in the Pentagon

and spent two years working for the State Department in Vietnam.

But he had come to see the war as profoundly immoral,

and hope that if Americans understood

how administration after administration had misled them,

they might help bring it to an end.

He and Anthony Russo, another Rand employee,

secretly copied most of the report.

Meanwhile, Neil Sheehan of the New York Times,

who had been reporting on Vietnam since 1962,

and had already secretly read some of the documents,

asked Ellsberg to show him the whole report.

At that point I was very passionate about the war.

I felt that it was really wrong

because we were getting a lot of Americans

and a lot of Vietnamese killed for no purpose.

We were going to lose this war.

And so I vowed to myself, when I saw this material,

that this is never going to go back into a government safe again.

The American public have paid for it with the lives of their sons

and with their treasure,

and it's going to be published.

That piece in The Times is, of course,

-a massive security leak from the Pentagon, you know?

-Yeah.

It all relates, of course, to everything up until we came in.

Henry Kissinger quickly convinced Nixon

that if the Times were permitted to reveal the classified secrets

of earlier presidents,

it was only a matter of time until someone leaked his own.

The Justice Department obtained a temporary court order

forbidding the Times from publishing further instalments

on the grounds of national security.

But on June 30th, 1971, the United States Supreme Court,

citing the First Amendment,

ruled six to three that the Times had the right

to publish the stolen documents.

And I went down into the basement

to wait for the presses to start to roll.

They had these huge, brown reams of paper.

Finally, the presses started to roll...

..and it was just an exquisite moment of vindication

of the freedom of the press in this country

and how important it is.

That changed our whole attitude to our government.

Up until then, the President wouldn't lie.

After then, they always lie.

Nixon feared Ellsberg possessed more classified documents

that would show that he himself had lied

about the secret bombing of Cambodia and Laos,

and he believed that Ellsberg had had help

and wanted to know the names of his co-conspirators.

The President created a private,

clandestine investigative unit within the White House.

It came to be called the Plumbers.

John Erlichman, one of Nixon's closest aides,

eventually ordered them to burglarise the office

of Ellsberg's Los Angeles psychiatrist

in search of material with which he could be blackmailed into silence.

Nixon may have privately feared something else as well.

He was told that the safe at another think-tank,

the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC,

contained files that might reveal the secret role

his campaign had played in torpedoing the peace talks

on the eve of his election three years earlier.

Nixon wanted his plumbers to break into Brookings, crack the safe,

and remove the files.

The Brookings break-in would never take place.

The burglars would be unable to find Ellsberg's file

in his doctor's office.

But Nixon's obsession with his enemies

would be the undoing of his presidency.

The government today restricted the use of weedkiller 2,4,5-T

on the ground that the chemical has caused birth defects

in some laboratory animals.

Since 1962,

American and South Vietnamese forces had sprayed some 20 million gallons

of herbicides over roughly one quarter of South Vietnam.

The idea had been to reduce casualties

by clearing areas around US installations,

and to deny the enemy crops and forest cover.

The most frequently used defoliant was Agent Orange,

which contained 2,4,5-T.

When environmentalists convinced the Nixon administration

to ban the weedkiller on American farms,

the Pentagon had reluctantly agreed

to stop using Agent Orange in Vietnam.

The ecological damage defoliants did was obvious.

The damage done to soldiers and civilians

would be the subject of angry debate for decades.

By the middle of 1971,

Nixon and Kissinger were looking for a way

to get all US troops out of Vietnam

before his re-election campaign began the following year...

..but to do so without causing Saigon to fall too soon.

At the secret talks in Paris,

Kissinger had offered his North Vietnamese counterpart, Le Duc Tho,

the most significant concessions the United States had yet made.

North Vietnam could keep its troops in the south -

tens of thousands of them -

and, in exchange for the release of American prisoners of war,

all American troops would be withdrawn within seven months.

Le Duc Tho countered with a new offer of his own.

Hanoi would release the prisoners

simultaneously with the departure of US forces,

but he still insisted that Washington remove

South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu from power.

Kissinger was encouraged that the North Vietnamese seemed,

for the first time, to be negotiating seriously.

He could almost taste peace, he told a friend.

Thieu knew nothing about the new American concessions to Hanoi.

He was worried about something else.

NBC News interrupts regular programming

to bring you a special report.

The announcement I shall now read is being issued simultaneously

in Peking and in the United States.

Richard Nixon, famous for the ferocity of his anti-Communism,

astonished the world by announcing that he was planning

to restore relations with China

that had been severed for more than two decades.

The United States had gone to war in Vietnam

in part to block Chinese expansionism.

What would Nixon's visit mean for Thieu's future,

or for that of his country?

Thieu was afraid he knew.

"America has been looking for a new mistress," he told an aide,

"and now Nixon has discovered China.

"He does not want to have the old mistress around.

"Vietnam has become old and ugly."

Nixon's visit to China worried Hanoi as well.

They were concerned that warmer relations

between the United States and China

might soon mean less support from Beijing.

Nixon was also planning to travel to Moscow

to meet with Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev,

seeking to ease tensions with North Vietnam's other Communist patron.

Before that summit took place, First Secretary Le Duan,

the man who headed the Politburo in Hanoi,

decided to undertake a new kind of offensive.

It would be conventional warfare this time

and on a scale he had never before attempted.

Le Duan had several goals in mind -

to strengthen his hand at the peace talks

by altering the military balance of power in South Vietnam

to show that the ARVN could not stand on their own,

and to convince the Soviets and the Chinese

his revolution was still worth supporting.

The assault began on March 30th, 1972.

14 North Vietnamese infantry divisions -

more than 120,000 men -

now, for the first time,

supported by hundreds of Soviet and Chinese-made tanks

and other armoured vehicles, attacked on three fronts...

..across the demilitarised zone...

EXPLOSIONS AND GUNFIRE

.in the central highlands...

..and west of Saigon.

Americans would call it the Easter offensive.

To the South Vietnamese, it would be remembered as the summer of flames.

-NEWS REPORT:

-The South Vietnamese army knew this day was coming -

the day without Americans.

It was to be the big test, both for them

and for President Nixon's Vietnamisation programme.

The results in so far are not encouraging.

Whole battalions of the government's third division

joined the refugees on the road south.

They had been outnumbered, overpowered, overwhelmed.

Suddenly, the survival of everything

Nixon and Kissinger had worked for was in peril.

They had to do something and fast.

Nixon ordered up Operation Linebacker.

Massive air attacks on the advancing North Vietnamese.

"The bastards have never been bombed like they're going to be this time,"

he said.

In the end, American air power made the difference.

EXPLOSIONS

The North Vietnamese and their armoured columns,

massed in the open, proved easy targets for American pilots.

"This," one American advisor said,

"was the kind of war we came to fight."

The North Vietnamese suffered 100,000 casualties

and lost most of their tanks and heavy artillery.

Americans may have approved of the renewed use of American air power

to stop the Communist advance into the south,

but Nixon had also ordered American planes

to resume sustained bombing of North Vietnam,

which had been halted since the Johnson administration.

Some saw the new bombing,

which vastly exceeded all previous campaigns,

as evidence that a war Nixon had promised was winding down

was once again being escalated.

The bombing campaign was much more extensive than the bombing campaign

under Lyndon Johnson.

And from the standpoint of pressuring them

to make concessions at the negotiating table,

historically, that's how you did it -

only it didn't work with these guys.

EXPLOSION

They took the pounding.

Among the thousands of South Vietnamese who lost their lives

in the Easter offensive was the brother of Phan Quang Tue.

I had a brother and we were raised together.

He would have been 67.

When his plane was shot down, and later on...

..they weren't able to recover him, his body, so he disappeared.

He was missing in action.

He was 26 years old.

He has his full life ahead of him.

He never had the chance to live his life.

And I can never overcome the feeling, as to...

..himself...

..and his generation, sacrificed their lives, and for what?

And the frustrating thing is that even Vietnamese themselves

do not seem to value that loss.

Let us not slide back toward the dark shadows of a previous age.

We do not ask you...

..to sacrifice your principles or your friends,

but neither should you permit Hanoi's intransigence

to blot out the prospects we together

have so patiently prepared.

On May 26th,

the United States and the Soviet Union signed a historic

anti-ballistic missile treaty,

the first agreement to limit nuclear armaments since the Cold War began.

For the Soviet Union, for China, as well as for the United States,

Vietnam's significance was steadily receding.

On the morning of June 8th, 1972, Nick Ut,

a 21-year-old South Vietnamese photographer

working for the Associated Press

was accompanying ARVN troops on Highway 1,

moving toward a village called Trang Bang,

to dislodge North Vietnamese forces that had occupied it

during the Easter offensive.

Ut was beginning to put his cameras away, ready to return to Saigon,

when he saw a South Vietnamese fighter

suddenly dip down towards the fleeing refugees,

whom the pilot mistook for the enemy.

Ut drove the badly burned girl, Kim Phuc,

and several other injured children to a hospital in Saigon.

She had been burned over 30% of her body.

Then Ut raced to the AP darkroom to find out what he had caught on film.

His photo editor in Saigon told him they could not send the picture

out on the wire because the girl was naked.

But then, Ut's boss, the legendary combat photographer Horst Faas,

saw the pictures.

Nick Ut's photograph appeared on front pages around the world

and won the Pulitzer Prize.

For many Americans, even many of those who had supported the war,

the image seemed to signal that enough was enough.

Kim Phuc would survive.

She eventually left Vietnam and settled outside Toronto.

Back in Paris,

Henry Kissinger was determined to hammer out a peace agreement

before election day.

Now Le Duc Tho made a key concession.

Hanoi no longer insisted that President Thieu had to go.

There was, somehow, this compulsion

to come to some kind of an agreement.

I remember Le Duc Tho, when he produced the draft agreement

in October 8th of '72 to Kissinger, saying,

"You're in a hurry, aren't you? You want to do this quickly."

And the response was, "Yes."

The two sides soon had a tentative deal, a ceasefire in place,

to be followed within 60 days by a complete withdrawal

of US troops and the return of all American POWs.

The United States stopped bombing the North.

No-one had told President Thieu any of the terms.

He refused to sign.

Allowing North Vietnamese troops to remain in the South

would be the death of his country.

Nonetheless, after Kissinger returned home,

12 days before the election, he told the press,

"Peace is at hand."

On November 7th, 1972, Richard Nixon won a stunning victory.

He was re-elected with more than 60% of the popular vote -

521 electoral votes to McGovern's 17.

He took every single state

except Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.

Now the President resolved to rid himself of Vietnam completely

before his second inauguration.

To calm Thieu's fears of what was to come,

Nixon launched another massive airlift of military equipment

to South Vietnam.

"If we had given this aid to the North Vietnamese,"

one American general said,

"they could have fought us for the rest of the century."

The Paris peace talks resumed,

but then Le Duc Tho announced he needed to return to Hanoi

for consultation.

There turned out to be dissension on the Communist side as well.

Hanoi, like Washington,

had not bothered to consult with its southern comrades.

It had dropped the two demands that meant the most to the Viet Cong -

the removal of Thieu and the release of some 30,000 of their prisoners.

Hanoi's message was clear, one bitter Vietcong official said -

"It cared more about American prisoners of war

"than it did for us."

Nixon ordered Kissinger to suspend the talks.

And then, on December 18th,

unleashed round-the-clock air strikes

that flattened targets around Hanoi and Haiphong.

It would be remembered as the Christmas bombing.

Around the world,

anti-war demonstrators returned to the streets.

The Prime Minister of Sweden

compared the United States to Nazi Germany.

The Pope called the bombing, which killed more than 1,600 civilians,

"The object of daily grief."

James Reston of the New York Times

pronounced the raids, "War by tantrum."

Republican Senator William Saxby of Ohio

said the President had taken leave of his senses.

Meanwhile, both the Chinese and the Soviets pressed Hanoi

to resume negotiations.

"The most important thing is to let the Americans leave,"

Zhou Enlai told a North Vietnamese official.

"The situation will change in six months or a year."

On December 26th, Hanoi signalled its willingness to return to Paris.

It would take just six days to reach a final agreement.

President Thieu still balked at signing on.

Nixon was adamant -

Thieu had to go along with what Washington and Hanoi had worked out.

But without informing Congress,

the President assured Thieu in writing

that the United States would respond with full force

if the North ever violated the agreement.

"The Americans really leave me no choice," Thieu said -

"either sign, or they will cut off aid.

"On the other hand, we have an absolute guarantee from Nixon

"to defend the country.

"I am going to agree to sign and hold him to his word.

"He is an honest man and I am going to trust him."

I have asked for this radio and television time tonight

for the purpose of announcing that we, today,

have concluded an agreement to end the war

and bring peace with honour in Vietnam

and in Southeast Asia.

A ceasefire, internationally supervised,

will begin at 7pm this Saturday, January 27th, Washington time.

Within 60 days from this Saturday,

all Americans held prisoners of war throughout Indochina

will be released.

American prisoners of war - 591 of them -

were to be released in batches of 40.

Those who had been in captivity the longest were to come home first.

Today, the largest contingents of repatriated prisoners so far -

60 men - were flown from Clark to Travis Air Force Base, California.

Today's most dramatic moment came when Everett Alvarez

made his happy trek down the ramp, home at last.

For almost as long as most Americans have been aware of Vietnam,

Lieutenant Commander Alvarez has been a prisoner in Hanoi.

He was shot down August 5th, 1964,

during the first raids flown

in retaliation to the Tonkin Gulf incident

and finally, today, he was home.

For years and years...

..we dreamed of this day.

And we kept faith.

Faith in God...

..in our President...

..and in our country.

Within a few weeks,

the last American combat troops would leave Vietnam.

But they would leave behind many unanswered questions.

How long could the South Vietnamese government survive?

And how long would it take for the wounds of war to heal?

# Mother, mother

# There's too many of you crying

# Brother, brother, brother

# There's far too many of you dying

# You know we've got to find a way

# To bring some lovin' here today... #