Are you fucking kidding me? More soldiers died in Vietnam AFTER Nixon took over than before. Nixon "sorted it out" by escalating the violence, only to sign a treaty that threw the Saigon Regime under the bus.
Those soldiers died because Nixon would rather send more poor people into a meat grinder than just admit a defeat. All this "Peace with Honor" bullshit that prolonged the war for years and cost thousands of American and Vietnamese lives.
I guess, if you need to believe in an afterlife to assuage your fear of death, you do you, man.
Uh, guy, not really. We were funding the Saigon Regime up until the day Saigon fell. The US had committed $700 million in additional weapons to the RVN in FY1975. (In addition to the tens of billions of dollars in weapons we left behind) This is part of the "Stabbed in the Back" myth I was talking about earlier.
Nixon and Kissinger knew the Saigon regime would fall after the US pulled out, because it had no popular support.
Here's where you can educate yourself.
Since partisans have turned the April 30, 1975, Communist takeover of South Vietnam into a political weapon, I’m going to spend the anniversary doing a little myth-busting.
historynewsnetwork.org
Mel Laird, Richard Nixon’s defense secretary, started the modern myth that “Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by cutting off funding for our ally in 1975” in a 2005
article in Foreign Affairs, the journal of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations.
It wasn't true, but that never stopped a meme.
$700 Million
A quick, easy check of an old newspaper database shows Laird's cutoff claim to be
false. In the fiscal year running from July 1, 1974, to June 30, 1975, the congressional appropriation for military aid to South Vietnam was $700 million.
Nixon had requested $1.45 billion. Congress cut his aid request, but never cut off aid.
Nixon's successor, President Gerald R. Ford, requested an additional $300 million for Saigon. Democrats saw it as an exercise in political blame-shifting. "The administration knows that the $300 million won't really do anything to prevent ultimate collapse in Vietnam," said Senator and future Vice President Walter F. Mondale, D-Mn., "and it is just trying to shift responsibility of its policy to Congress and the Democrats." Congress didn't approve the supplemental appropriation.
Congressional aid cuts didn't determine the war's final outcome. Saigon's fate was sealed long before, when Nixon forced it accept his settlement terms in January 1973.
Political Spin Nixon crafted this secret strategy to foster the illusion that his public strategy of "Vietnamization and negotiation" worked. Vietnamization was supposed to train the South Vietnamese army to defend itself so the American army could come home; negotiations were supposed to produce a settlement guaranteeing the South's right to choose its own government by election. Nixon privately realized that Vietnamization and negotiation would not work as he said they would.
"South Vietnam probably can never even survive anyway," he said in private, but never in public. To conceal Vietnamization's failure, Nixon timed the withdrawal of U.S. forces to the 1972 election. This way, California Governor Ronald Reagan could welcome delegates to the Republican National Convention in 1972 with the perfect words to launch the President's reelection campaign: "The last American combat team is on its way home from Vietnam."
To get the North Vietnamese to accept a settlement that, on paper, guaranteed the South's right to free elections, Nixon assured them, through the Soviet Union and China, that if they waited a "decent interval" of a year or two before taking over South Vietnam, he would not intervene. The Communists accepted Nixon's settlement terms because they knew that they didn't have to abide by them and the would get a clear shot at overthrowing the South Vietnamese government if they waited approximately 18 months after Nixon withdrew the last U.S. ground forces. Nixon wanted this "decent interval" to make it look like Saigon's fall wasn't his fault.
