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The article discusses the important role of U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird in U.S. President Richard Nixon's Vietnamization, a policy to end the country's involvement in the Vietnam War while improving South Vietnamese military capabilities, during his term in office from 1969 to 1973. It explores the origin of the strategy which defined the country's exit from Vietnam. It also looks at the influence Laird had on Nixon in 1969 and his battle with Kissinger over the direction of the strategy.

In the period from December 1972 until November 1975 the US-Australia alliance faced its greatest ever crisis. In the hands of President Richard Nixon and Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, a relationship that had endured the heights of the Cold War veered dangerously off course and seemed headed for destruction. For Whitlam the world emerging from the ashes of Vietnam offered an exciting opportunity to recast Australia’s image in the eyes of the world and redefine the alliance. For Nixon, the ongoing difficulties in securing an end to the war and the mounting pressures of the Watergate scandal produced a visceral reaction to any criticism—but especially that from once close and trusted allies. In his rage he threatened to rip apart the very fabric of the alliance, asking that options be explored for pulling out top secret U.S. intelligence installations in Australia and ending all intelligence sharing. In Australia, although some saw Whitlam as the great modernizer of Australian foreign relations, others feared he was recklessly endangering the protective umbrella provided by the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author revises existing historical accounts of a critical period during the Vietnam War when the North Vietnamese urgently needed economic aid from their Communist allies in order to prepare for the ambitious Tet Offensive in January 1968, and to help the DRV economy survive President Lyndon B. Johnson's bombardment of North Vietnam under Operation Rolling Thunder. Using new evidence from the archives in Hanoi, this article shows that China-not the Soviet Union-was the biggest donor of economic aid to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV, or North Vietnam) in 1967 and 1968. The new evidence suggests that American intelligence estimates of Communist bloc economic aid to the DRV were incorrect. Misled by inaccurate data, U.S. officials failed to understand the remarkable resilience of the DRV economy to survive U.S. bombardment. An accurate understanding of Communist bloc aid arrangements might have strengthened the arguments of those American officials advocating early peace negotiations with the DRV. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]