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.
United States assistance to Vietnam
In the early months of his administration, President Jimmy Carter (1977–1981) and the communist regime in Hanoi attempted to negotiate the outlines of a normalization agreement that would include U.S. assistance. The negotiations stalled, however, when the Vietnamese responded that they would neither agree to establish relations nor furnish information on U.S. POW/MIAs until the United States pledged to provide several billion dollars in postwar reconstruction aid.
Simultaneously, Congress objected to Carter's moves by reinforcing existing prohibitions on aid to Vietnam. Normalization efforts ultimately were thwarted in 1978 by Vietnam's decision to align with the Soviet Union, its invasion of Cambodia, and its expulsion of nearly half a million ethnic Chinese who then became
refugees in Southeast Asia.