Vietnamization
Vietnamization
- Henry Kissinger, a Harvard professor whom the president appointed as his special assistance for national security affairs.
- The new Vietnam policy moved along several fronts.
- By 1973, the Selective Service System was on its way to least temporary extinction.
- In the fall of 1969, Nixon announced reduction of American ground troops from Vietnam by 60,000 the first reduction in U.S. troop strength since the beginning of the war.
- By the end of their first year in office, Nixon and Kissinger had concluded that the most effective day to tip the military balance in America’s favor was to destroy the bases in Cambodia from which the American military believed the North Vietnamese were launching many of their attacks.
- Four college students were killed and nine others injured when members of the National Guard opened fire on antiwar demonstrators at Kent State University in Ohio.
- The trail and conviction in 1971 of Lieutenant William Calley, who was charged wit h overseeing a massacre of more than 300 unharmed South Vietnamese civilians, attracted wide public attention.