History of the United States (1964–1980)
The growing Watergate scandal was a major disaster for Nixon, eroding his political support in public opinion and in Washington. However he did manage to secure large-scale funding for South Vietnam, much of which was wasted. The United States withdrew its troops from Vietnam before the Paris Peace Accords in 1973. However, Watergate resulted in significant Democrat gains in the 1974 midterm elections and when the new 94th Congress convened the following January, it immediately voted to terminate all aid to South Vietnam in addition to passing a bill forbidding all further US military intervention in Southeast Asia. President Ford was against this, but as Congress had a veto-proof majority, he was forced to accept. South Vietnam rapidly collapsed as the North invaded it in force, and Saigon fell to the NVA on April 30, 1975. Later nearly one million Vietnamese managed to flee to the U.S. as refugees. The impact on the U.S. was muted, with few political recriminations, but it did leave a "Vietnam Syndrome" that cautioned against further military interventions anywhere else. Nixon (and his next two successors Ford and Carter) had dropped the containment policy and were not willing to intervene anywhere.
National Security Action Memorandum 263
Many historians, Kennedy acolytes, and celebrities, such as movie director Oliver Stone, have claimed that the withdrawal of 1,000 U.S. soldiers from Vietnam was the beginning of Kennedy's plan to withdraw completely from South Vietnam after he gained re-election in 1964 and cited NSAM-263 as evidence for that plan. Others, including Pulitzer Prize winning historian Frederik Logevall, have said that "NSAM 263 hardly represented the kind of far-reaching policy initiative that the incipient-withdrawal proponents suggest. It was but one part of a larger 'selective pressures' policy designed to push the Diem regime into greater effectiveness." Logevall concluded that "The great preponderance of the evidence...would appear to refute any notion that John Kennedy had decided to withdraw from Vietnam." However, Logevall goes on to speculate that Kennedy, because of his character and personality, might have considered, at a later date, a unilateral withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam.