Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Journal Pioneer
The year 1973, now four decades on, saw a series of momentous political events on the world stage: The winding down of a war in Southeast Asia, a scandal surrounding an American president, a coup in South America, and a major Middle Eastern war.
On Jan. 27, Henry Kissinger, U.S. President Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor, and North Vietnamese Politburo member Le Duc Tho signed the Paris Peace Accords, ending American involvement in the Vietnam War.
The United States had been fighting in Vietnam for a decade, to little avail, and at an immense cost in lives, money, and prestige. Almost 60,000 troops had been killed, and tens of thousands wounded.
Tens of billions of dollars had been spent. Domestic pressure to finally end the war was enormous.
In January-February 1968, the North Vietnamese and the Communist Viet Cong had launched the massive Tet Offensive in South Vietnam.
Although it was not a victory militarily, the ability of the Vietnamese Communists to mount such a large-scale operation shocked the American public, which had been led to believe by its political and military leaders that the war was being successfully prosecuted.
As Bruce Springsteen would later sing, in “Born in the U.S.A.”:
I had a brother at Khe Sahn
Fighting off the Viet Cong
They’re still there, he's all gone.
With little American support after 1973, the corrupt South Vietnamese regime was no match for its opponents. In April 1975, the Communists completed their conquest of the country, and North and South Vietnam were united under their rule.
The war would destroy the careers of two American presidents.
On March 31, 1968, Democrat Lyndon Johnson, whose popularity was plummeting after Tet, announced that he would not seek re-election that fall. His successor, Republican Richard Nixon, though ending American military operations in Vietnam, would be brought down by the Watergate scandal in 1973-74.
Although not directly connected to the war, Watergate – named for the building that housed the Democratic National Committee, which was burglarized by Nixon operatives in 1972 -- was the culmination of a long period of illegal activity on the part of the White House.
The unpopularity of the war had led to massive opposition on the part of students, workers, and most of the elected leaders of the Democratic Party in Congress, so Nixon had become used to using unlawful methods to combat his enemies, real and perceived.
It finally caught up to him.
By May 1973, a special Senate Watergate Committee had been established and its hearings were broadcast on television. As evidence against him mounted, Nixon would resign in disgrace a year later, forestalling certain impeachment and removal on the part of Congress.
On Sept. 11, a CIA-sponsored coup deposed the Marxist-inspired regime of Salvador Allende in the South American nation of Chile, installing the right-wing General Augusto Pinochet.
Allende was killed, and thousands more would be tortured and executed under Pinochet’s brutal regime.
It too was carried out in the name of fighting Communism.
Finally, Oct. 6 saw the start of the largest Arab-Israeli war to date. The Yom Kippur, or Ramadan, War began with the simultaneous attack by Egypt and Syria on the Israeli-occupied Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights, both captured in 1967.
Thrown onto the defensive during the first days of fighting, Israel eventually gained the upper hand and carried the war into Syria and Egypt.
A UN-brokered cease-fire ended the fighting on Oct. 25.
But the war, in which Israel suffered heavy losses, was a political setback, and Kissinger, who was now U.S. Secretary of State, started conducting shuttle diplomacy, and engineered a military disengagement agreement between Israel and Egypt on January 18, 1974.
An Israeli-Syrian one followed a few months later.
A final peace treaty between Israel and Egypt was brokered by President Jimmy Carter five years later, though none was ever signed with Syria.
Today, while the Middle East remains in turmoil, Chile is once again a democracy and Vietnam, which now has diplomatic relations with the U.S., is one of the world’s most peaceful nations.
