US Presidency
1969

For the South Vietnamese, our precipitate withdrawal would inevitably allow the Communists to repeat the massacres which followed their takeover in the North 15 years before .'They then murdered more than 50,000 people and hundreds of thousands more died in slave labor camps .'We saw a prelude of what would happen in South Vietnam when the Communists entered the city of Hue last year. During their brief rule there, there was a bloody reign of terror in which 3,000 civilians were clubbed, shot to death, and buried in mass graves .'With the sudden collapse of our support, these atrocities of Hue would become the nightmare of the entire nation, and particularly for the million and a half Catholic refugees who fled to South Vietnam when the Communists took over in the North. For the United States, this first defeat in our Nation's history would result in a collapse of confidence in American leadership, not only in Asia but throughout the world. Three American Presidents have recognized the great stakes involved in Vietnam and understood what had to be done.