What happened in South Vietnam by the end of 1975 following the Paris Peace Accords?

The secrecy of the negotiations, along with slow technology and the time differences between Washington, D.C., Paris, Hanoi, and Saigon, ensured that the negotiating process was time-consuming and tedious. In spite of these challenges, the two sides were, after many deadlocks and near agreements, able to come to a compromise in January 1973. For their efforts, Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were awarded the Noble Peace Prize in 1973, although Le Duc Tho refused to accept the award since he believed the U.S. and South Vietnamese were in violation of the Accords.

In the end, the years of time and effort put into the negotiations were for naught as the ceasefire collapsed in 1975. With Richard Nixon forced out of office because of Watergate and the vast majority of Americans strongly opposed to continued involvement, it was only a matter of time that South Vietnam would collapse. That came even faster than some had expected, as the South Vietnamese army withered in the face of an all-out North Vietnamese offensive in 1975, which culminated with the fall of the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon in April 1975.

Winston Lord was Special Advisor to National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger from 1969-1973, during which time he served as one of Kissinger’s closest confidantes and went with Kissinger to the Paris negotiations. He describes the difficulties faced by the negotiating teams in coming to an agreement that was suitable for all parties involved, as well as the reasons for the Accords’ eventual collapse. Lord later served as Ambassador to China as well as Assistant Secretary of State in various capacities from 1993-1997. He was interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy and Nancy Bernkopf Tucker beginning in April 1998.

You can read Lord’s account of negotiating with China. Go here for other Moments on Vietnam.

“They were not in a mood to compromise”

In some ways it was even more complicated to keep these discussions with the North Vietnamese secret than these weekend excursions from Washington. Everyone knew that Kissinger was in Paris and was probably following him, in a sense. So we had an elaborate operation working with the American Ambassador, who was Richard Watson.

We had to find a way for Kissinger to negotiate with the North Vietnamese without people in Paris knowing about it. So the cover story was that Kissinger was holed up in the Embassy, talking to Ambassador Watson. Dick Smyser and I went off on our own to a big, open plaza looking at the Eiffel Tower….it was the Place de Trocadero. We would wait there.

Then Secretary Kissinger slunk down in a car that went out of the back door of the Embassy, since the press was covering the front door. He picked us up at the Place and we went to the meeting place for our negotiation with the Vietnamese. We came back to the Embassy and, while [John] Negroponte and I were writing up the report of the meeting, Kissinger, for cover reasons, went out to a restaurant.

Everyone knew about that. In fact, he had a woman named Margaret Osmer (pictured with Steve Bell in 1975 on “Good Morning, America”) as his date, who used to work for ABC Television. She later joined me at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, many years later, to run my meetings programs.

There was a lot of criticism at the time of Kissinger. The press knew that [chief Hanoi negotiator in the Paris peace talks] Le Duc Tho, the senior North Vietnamese negotiator, was in Paris at the same time. So the press berated Kissinger, asking why he didn’t meet with Le Duc Tho while he was in Paris, to see if he could make some progress with the North Vietnamese, instead of going out with some good-looking blonde to a Paris restaurant. No one knew about the secret negotiations. Of course, this was a cover story for Kissinger, because we had met with Le Duc Tho earlier in the day.

In retrospect, until we got to the fall of 1972, there were times when Le Duc Tho was somewhat more polite than others. But if you were really hard-headed about it, you’d have to say that the North Vietnamese really didn’t move very much throughout this period, despite our succeeding proposals….

I think that it’s also fair to say, and this is a sad commentary on human nature, that Hanoi generally was more forthcoming when we were hitting them hard, militarily. They were also friendlier. They were more arrogant and intransigent when they seemed to be doing well, militarily and/or we were letting up on the pressure….I don’t want to exaggerate this, because until September-October 1972, they made no real major moves. Nevertheless, there were times in 1971-72 that we came from the meetings, more discouraged than at other times, when we were more encouraged.

The North Vietnamese negotiators had fought for a long time for their goals against the French and us. They had been around a long time and were willing to continue the negotiations for a long time. So they were not in a mood to compromise. So all of this made it extremely difficult.

Month after month, and year after year, their basic position was to call for a unilateral, U.S. withdrawal, the establishment of a coalition government in Saigon, and to stick with all these positions, in a revolutionary spirit. They tended to look to their long investment in what they were doing, feeling that domestic support for the U.S. position was crumbling, for all of the reasons that I’ve mentioned.

So they basically sought to wear us down. They would come, essentially as a part of their negotiating style, to listen to our positions and see whether the United States was going to make more concessions and move closer to what they wanted.

One milestone I should mention briefly…was May 1971, probably over Memorial Day, since we always went to Paris on holidays or weekends at this time. We presented what we considered an extremely significant proposal to move the negotiations forward, which in fact was brought out in the eventual settlement signed in January 1973. I recall how we agonized over trying to make a major proposal. I don’t recall why, but the timing was such that we tried to make a breakthrough at that point. I believe that it was a seven-point proposal, which was essentially a military settlement only, consistent with President Nixon’s principle of being willing to be flexible on the military side, but not on the political side.

October 1972:  “It was the break that we were looking for”

As we headed toward January 1972, we gradually came to the conclusion that it was important for the President to make a major, public address, again on Vietnam. In the speech he would outline our strategy and goals, recalling Vietnamization [a policy to expand, equip, and train South Vietnam’s forces and assign to them an ever-increasing combat role, at the same time steadily reducing the number of U.S. combat troops] and reviewing the progress made to date in terms of declining American casualties and troop levels in Vietnam.

Above all, he would reveal the fact that we had made a reasonable offer to North Vietnam and that for some time we had been conducting secret negotiations with them. It was up to Hanoi to respond in a meaningful way. I believe that, toward the end of 1971, we fleshed out further the five more proposals made in May 1971. In fact, I am sure that we did.

So there was a Nixon speech on January 25, 1972. Like all of these speeches, I worked hard on the drafting of it. Of course, the speechwriters turned it into much better English, while I worked on the substance of it

We went over to Paris for this meeting in October 1972, and were given a present by Le Duc Tho. We still had a lot of work to do on it, but basically, it was the break that we were looking for. It incorporated the unilateral withdrawal of U.S. forces and the release of our prisoners, on the military side. The language of the proposal was fairly specific in this respect.

The North Vietnamese proposal also included a ceasefire in place and international supervision of the agreement. The North Vietnamese had moved away from their insistence on a coalition government. There still was some tough negotiating, but they used some new language. They proposed a national reconciliation arrangement, but, in effect, they would leave President Thieu in power in Saigon. So the North Vietnamese dropped the political demands that they had stuck with for years.

“We had several days of further negotiations. The last day ran for 14 hours straight.”

From my point of view, not to mention Nixon and Kissinger, these demands were something that we shouldn’t compromise on.

We went back to the North Vietnamese. We had several days of further negotiations, until October 11, trying to improve the draft, generally keeping Washington and Saigon informed. The last day ran for 14 hours straight. As usual we were preparing verbatim transcripts. I couldn’t even go to the bathroom when I wanted to, and I had plenty of coffee to keep me going.

We had to make sure that we got our prisoners back from Laos and Cambodia, and we were trying to get the Communist side to withdraw its troops from there and to have a ceasefire extended there. So that was a problem. Another problem was allowing military aid to both sides to continue after a ceasefire. Then there were the details of the international supervisory system and what the status of the DMZ [Demilitarized Zone] was. This was the actual dividing line between North and South Vietnam.

There were still a lot of details to handle, and a lot of tough questions to be resolved, but the basic breakthrough had been achieved. The North Vietnamese no longer insisted on a coalition government.

The final day of these negotiations was October 11, 1972. So there were four days of negotiations, but one of these days went for 14 hours straight. Kissinger prepared to go back and report to President Nixon. We had a draft agreement initially agreed, but with some outstanding issues of a secondary nature remaining to be resolved.

There were also some technical questions of what specific phrases meant, and so on. So this was an exhausting period of several days, including all night sessions of redrafting, checking, sending cables, reporting, and filling in Saigon and Washington, as well as preparing talking points for the next day. We also had to prepare new proposals, in addition to verbatim note taking and so on.

I was left behind in Paris with FSO [Foreign Service Officer] Dave Engle, who by then had been involved in the negotiations as our top Vietnamese speaker in the Foreign Service. He and I were left behind to have technical talks with the North Vietnamese to clear up some of these sub-issues. So we sat down with the North Vietnamese at the next meeting. I don’t remember the details except I was both exhilarated and exhausted.

“To say that we were depressed would be a colossal understatement”

Then, of course, our next step was to go to Saigon and present this wonderful agreement we had negotiated. We were still not entirely satisfied, but the basic issues had been solved and we thought that we now had a rough agreement, in draft, and ad referendum [subject to subsequent confirmation] by Hanoi’s Politburo and our President. Of course, we made it clear to the North Vietnamese that we would have to sell this draft to our ally in South Vietnam.

Before we went to Saigon to review the agreement with President Thieu we sent a cable ahead to foreshadow to some extent that we had something. I forget the term we used, but we said that it represented a breakthrough, a possible agreement, or something like that. We clearly let Thieu know, through Ambassador [Ellsworth] Bunker, that we were coming to discuss this draft with him. So off we went to Saigon in mid-October 1972.

We went to President Thieu’s office, and Kissinger made the presentation about why it was in the South Vietnamese interest to accept the agreement and that we would back them up. In case there were any violations, President Nixon would react strongly. Thieu could count on us to enforce the agreement.

Kissinger said that this was the best deal that we could get, based on the level of American domestic support. We had done our duty by South Vietnam. We had hung tough in the negotiations and kept Thieu in power. He had gotten a lot of economic and military aid from us. We would rush extra aid into South Vietnam before the agreement was signed, so that he would be in the strongest position possible, before the provisions of the agreement entered into effect. This effort was called Project ENHANCE, or something like that.

We said that we would resume bombing if the North Vietnamese attacked in violation of the agreement. We said that we would give South Vietnam full diplomatic support as well as military and economic aid. We said that we were working on the Chinese and the Russians to isolate Hanoi and try to get them to cut off aid to the North Vietnamese, if possible, and that this was clearly our intention. There was also the whole aid dimension, where we had agreed with the North Vietnamese that we would help them with the reconstruction of their country.

He picked out all kinds of other language which he thought was weak, in terms of international supervision, supplies, the amount of aid, or whatever. He complained about virtually everything, but above all, the continued presence of North Vietnamese troops in South Vietnam. Secondly, Thieu said, in effect, that we had misled him. He said that this agreement went way beyond what we had been reporting to him and what he thought was in store for him.

Thirdly, in negotiating this agreement, we had been negotiating the fate of South Vietnam. Now, he said, you come to me, a couple of weeks before your elections, and expect me to accept this agreement, which will seal the fate of my country and my countrymen in a couple of days. He said that the agreement was wrong in terms of principle and also wrong in terms of perception, with the Americans ramming this agreement down my throat and not taking into account the fate of the South Vietnamese people.

“It was maddening. We were very depressed anyway, because of Thieu’s reaction. We had President Nixon and Al Haig beating up on us.”

So, overall, this was a very tough and discouraging session, to say the least. It wasn’t a matter of saying that we should go back and fix this up or deal with this or that problem. He essentially rejected the overall agreement. It was not a total formal rejection of the agreement. He said: “We’ve got to have the following changes.” But he required so many changes, and they were so important, that it was just impossible, to see a solution.

To say that we were depressed would be a colossal understatement….We ended three or four days of very difficult discussions in Saigon. We were reporting back to President Nixon, through Deputy Security Adviser Al Haig, using back channels, which involved double encrypting of the messages. We reported that Thieu was reacting negatively and what he wanted.

President Nixon and Haig were already more skeptical of the agreement than we were. They appreciated the breakthrough that we had achieved but they were not quite as enthusiastic about it as Kissinger and his team were, not including Negroponte. Above all, Nixon did not want to have a big split with our ally. After all, it was their country.

So we stayed in Saigon a couple of more days after the initial blowup to try to get President Thieu to be more flexible and to collect his requests. By then we realized that we would have to go back to Hanoi and try to accommodate what Thieu’s priority concerns were. They appeared to be so extensive that it was pretty discouraging.

Meanwhile, we were sending cables back to Washington, reporting the results of our conversations with Thieu. It was maddening, because there was a time delay in sending the cables, especially using double encryption….

It was maddening. We were very depressed anyway, because of Thieu’s reaction. We were nervous as hell about this agreement blowing up. We had President Nixon and Al Haig beating up on us, and we had this communications glitch because of the time difference and the delays occasioned by communications and the double encryption process. We were always one message behind on these things.

We left Saigon with very extensive South Vietnamese demands for changes in the agreement. We had to do a holding action with Hanoi. By this time, of course, it was impossible to go to Hanoi. We could only go there if we could absolutely close the deal.

We had to postpone the trip to Hanoi, and Kissinger said, in effect, to the North Vietnamese: “Well, we told you in Paris that this deal is a good one and we still think that it is. However, we cannot implement this agreement without South Vietnamese acceptance. We will continue to work with our allies and will try to bring them around. However, we’re going to have to make some changes. We just can’t sell the agreement to the South Vietnamese in this way. We stand by the basic agreement. We think that it’s a good agreement. Don’t give up. We’ll be in touch with you. I can’t come to Hanoi now.”

So we went back to Washington. I don’t know how soon this happened, but within a day or two there was a press release out of Hanoi, lambasting the United States, President Nixon, and Kissinger. The statement said that the United States had agreed to a deal with Hanoi and now, under the pretense that it couldn’t tell their lackeys in Saigon what to do, the U.S. was now reneging on the arrangements we had made.

Hanoi said that we had broken a solemn agreement with Hanoi and also an agreement for Kissinger to visit Hanoi. They then proceeded to publish the entire agreement that we had reached with them.

“I recall vividly having sensational, three-star meals, but being very gloomy”

We went over to Paris in November 1972, after the elections. The Hanoi representatives were very intransigent. After a couple of days of discussions, when we essentially treaded water but didn’t make any progress, the North Vietnamese representatives came in and basically tried to unravel the agreement. They began to make some new demands and to take back some of the concessions that they had already made.

We said that we were going to blow the whistle and stop. We weren’t getting anywhere. So we stopped. We had another go-around with the North Vietnamese in Paris in December 1972, with the same lack of results. We were not getting anywhere. In fact, we raised the South Vietnamese points with the North Vietnamese, and there were a few technical points they ceded, but we were not getting anything significant, and Hanoi was making counter-demands.

During the November and December sessions we stayed at the U.S. embassy. I recall vividly having sensational, three-star meals, but being very gloomy. As we headed toward the Christmas holidays in 1972, we were at an impasse. We had tried to make clear that we wanted to go essentially with the October agreement but that we needed a few changes, both on the merits and to bring the Saigon Government aboard. But Hanoi was not having any of this.

Whatever the extent of the bombing of North Vietnam, the objective, of course, was never to cause civilian casualties….The fact is that within days of the beginning of the bombing, we received a conciliatory note from Hanoi, suggesting that we resume negotiations. So this worked out well, and it probably encouraged President Thieu of South Vietnam to think that we would be tough in the negotiations with the North Vietnamese, or at least in enforcing a settlement….

“Toasts were exchanged, and there was a feeling of camaraderie all around”

We concluded the agreement in Paris with the North Vietnamese and initialed it on January 23, 1973. Toasts were exchanged, and there was a feeling of camaraderie all around. There had been too much pain and anguish, but clearly there was a feeling of relief on our part and that of the North Vietnamese.

We had to get the Saigon Government on board with the revised text, in these final days. We sent [Deputy National Security Adviser to President Nixon] Al Haig to Saigon. There were at least a couple of letters from President Nixon to [President of the Republic of Vietnam] Nguyen van Thieu. These letters were very tough and also very reassuring at the same time. I did the basic drafting, as usual, with Kissinger’s direction and Nixon’s approval.

Basically, they said that we had done all that we could. We told President Thieu that we had gotten whatever we could and that we weren’t going to get a better deal. The letters said that President Nixon felt that the revised agreement satisfied the national interests of the United States and of the Republic of Vietnam. The letters said that we would enforce the agreements and would bomb North Vietnam, if necessary, and that the United States would stick by South Vietnam. Furthermore, we would provide economic and military aid to South Vietnam.

We pointed out the advantages of the agreement and our willingness to enforce it. President Nixon said, in effect, that we had given the Saigon Government all that we could give it in terms of years of blood and treasure and in terms of the deal. Now was the time for the Saigon Government to come aboard and support the agreement that had been negotiated.

Also, as part of the negotiation, we included the aid program, which was somewhat separate. We were very careful not to promise to make reparations payments to North Vietnam. However, we wanted to offer them some economic incentives. We would call them funds for the reconstruction of Indochina and provide large amounts of money for Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam as well….

Thus, with Saigon’s grudging acceptance, we initiated the agreement and returned to Paris for the final signature on January 27, 1973. Kissinger stayed in Washington, and Secretary of State [William] Rogers went to sign the agreement in Paris with the other foreign ministers.

“Whatever you feel about the war,…our cutting off economic and military aid when North Vietnam was breaking the agreement, was absolutely immoral”

Within a few months after the signature of the Paris Accord in 1973, Hanoi began to nibble around the edges of the agreement. I left the NSC [National Security Council] staff in May, 1973….

The North Vietnamese continued to make trouble. While I was out of government service, Kissinger went over to Paris to negotiate with [North Vietnamese Politburo member] Le Duc Tho in an effort to get enforcement of the basic agreement back on track. This effort didn’t work out.

Meanwhile, Congress was beginning to put limits on what we could do in Cambodia and stopped the bombing there and in Laos. Finally, a couple of years later, Congress virtually put a stop to aid to South Vietnam, a truly dishonorable and reckless act. So, over a period of time, the Saigon Government was being undermined.

Whatever its shortcomings — and there were serious ones — the psychological and military impact at limiting and then stopping our aid was devastating. And, of course, it encouraged Hanoi.

Toward the end, in 1975, when the South Vietnamese Army was defeated in a hurry, Congress had already, and unconscionably, virtually cut off military and economic aid to South Vietnam.

Whatever you feel about the war, we had negotiated this agreement with North Vietnam and had gone through all of this torture and losses. Even though the South Vietnamese Government was not perfect, our cutting off economic and military aid to them, when North Vietnam was continuing to be resupplied by its allies and was breaking the agreement, was absolutely immoral, in my opinion.

Whether continued aid on our part would have made all of that much difference is another issue, but has nothing to do with the principle. And imperfect as the Saigon government was, it certainly was preferable to the Hanoi Communists. In any event the economic and military aid which had been promised to the South Vietnamese was not being delivered, which weakened them further.

So our military plans to handle the North Vietnamese threat turned out to be based on a mistaken set of assumptions. This contributed to the South Vietnamese military collapse. A second consideration was the major offensive by North Vietnam against South Vietnam, to which we had planned to respond by bombing.

This plan was undercut by Congressional action in September 1973, prohibiting the further bombing of targets in Southeast Asia. There was also the growing problem of the Watergate affair, which related to the manner of President Nixon’s reelection in November 1972. As a result, over time, the executive power of the U.S. administration was effectively broken and our ability to take strong action against North Vietnam was further weakened, on top of the general fatigue over the war.…

The North Vietnamese figured all of this out, and so the various means of discouraging North Vietnam from attacking South Vietnam were ineffective.

In terms of U.S. economic aid referred to in the Paris Agreement, Hanoi never got it. We had told them two things. First, we told them that we had to get Congressional approval to provide economic aid to Hanoi. Secondly, North Vietnam would have to observe the Paris Agreement. There was some controversy as to whether we had made a commitment to provide aid to North Vietnam.

We made it clear to Hanoi that we couldn’t provide aid to North Vietnam without Congressional approval, and we had already told the Congress that. Many Members of Congress didn’t like the idea of providing any assistance to Hanoi. They also didn’t like the fact that we had made promises to provide such aid secretly, even though we had hedged the promise by stating that we needed Congressional approval to provide it.

That created further controversy, which was worsened by the fact that from the very beginning Hanoi began to violate the Paris Accord of 1973. These violations were fairly blatant, and then the North Vietnamese escalated the situation by blatantly breaking the ceasefire agreement. Under these circumstances, we weren’t about to give aid to North Vietnam, which we couldn’t get out of Congress anyway. So that incentive for Hanoi was rapidly withering away.

All of the sticks and carrots, in short, were effectively removed, and the Paris Agreement collapsed.

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