Decades back in late 1972, South Vietnam and the United States were winning the Vietnam War

decisively by every conceivable measure. That's not just my view. That was the view of our enemy,

the North Vietnamese government officials. Victory was apparent when President Nixon ordered the US Air Force

to bomb industrial and military targets in Hanoi, North Vietnam's capital city and in

high-fong its major port city. And we would stop the bombing if the North Vietnamese would attend

the Paris peace talks that they had left earlier. The North Vietnamese did go back to the Paris peace

talks and we did stop the bombing as promised. On January 23rd of 1973, President Nixon gave a

speech to the nation on primetime television announcing that the Paris peace accords had been

initialed by the United States, South Vietnam, North Vietnam, the Viet Cong and the Accords would

be signed on the 27th. What the United States and South Vietnam received in those accords was victory.

At the White House, it was called the Viet Day, victory in Vietnam Day. The US backed up that

victory with a simple pledge within the Paris peace accords saying should the South require any

military hardware to defend itself against any North Vietnam aggression? We would provide replacement aid

to the South on a peace by peace one-to-one replacement, meaning a bullet for a bullet, a helicopter

for a helicopter, for all things lost replacement. The advance of communist tyranny had been halted

by those accords. Then it all came apart and it happened this way. In August of the following year

in 1974, President Nixon resigned his office as a result of what became known as Watergate.

Three months after his resignation came the November congressional elections and within them the

Democrats won a landslide victory for the new Congress. And many of the members used their new

majority to defund the military aid that the United States had promised peace for peace,

breaking the commitment that we made to the South Vietnamese in Paris to provide whatever

military hardware the South Vietnamese needed in case of aggression from the North.

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