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President Nixon Announces Agreement on Ending the War  in Vietnam and Restoring Peace

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On Jan. 23, 1973,

President Richard Nixon announced an accord had been reached to end the Vietnam War. In a televised speech, Nixon said the accord would “end the war and bring peace with honor

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"Images of the Vietnam War That Defined an Era" (15 photographs)

"Vietnam War Photos That Made a Difference" (10 photographs)

Half a century after the nation's fateful early missteps into the quagmire, what are Americans likely to remember about the Vietnam War? A Buddhist monk, doused with gasoline, squatting stoically in the street as roaring flames consume his body. An enemy prisoner grimacing as a bullet fired from a pistol at the end of an outstretched arm enters his brain. A 9-year-old girl running naked down the road, screaming as her skin burns from napalm. Perhaps even more viscerally even than on television, America's most wrenching war in our time hit home in photographs, including these three searing prizewinning images from The Associated Press newsmen Malcolm W. Browne, Eddie Adams and Nick Ut. They are the subject of retrospectives now, in a new book and accompanying exhibitions. - Ralph Blumenthal

"How Young Soldiers Saw Life in Wartime Vietnam" (24 photographs)

The photographs are almost banal. In contrast to most images of a war that still reverberates decades later, they show soldiers lazing, showing off their squalid jungle living quarters, discovering the charm of the Vietnamese children they encounter, reveling in a rare ocean swim. There is nothing remotely as chilling as much of the classic Vietnam War photography, no shots like Nick Ut's of a naked Vietnamese girl fleeing from a napalm bombing or Eddie Adams's shot of a Saigon police chief firing a bullet into the head of a Viet Cong prisoner. Yet these photographs were taken not by professionals but by young grunts barely out of high school. Grinning wide-eyed at this strange land where they had been sent, often against their will, in circumstances they did not fully understand, with little foreboding of what might be in store, their photographs of ordinary wartime days have a special poignancy. - Joseph Berger

Original Reporting

Thirteen of the front-page articles we spotlight in our On This Day in History feature relate to the Vietnam War. Below, we provide links to the original articles, as well as to that day's edition of The Times in Times Machine, which showcases over 150 years of Times journalism just as it originally appeared.

In 1964, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, giving President Johnson broad powers in dealing with reported North Vietnamese attacks on United States forces. In 1968, during the Vietnam War, the My Lai massacre was carried out by United States troops under the command of Lt. William L. Calley Jr. In 1968, 300 Columbia students barricaded the office of the college dean, charging the university with supporting the Vietnam War and violating Harlem residents' civil rights.

In 1969, a quarter of a million protesters staged a peaceful demonstration in Washington, D.C., against the Vietnam War. In 1971, the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, freed The New York Times and The Washington Post to resume immediate publication of articles based on the secret Pentagon Papers on the origins of the Vietnam War. In 1972, the United States halted its heavy bombing of North Vietnam. In 1973, President Nixon announced an accord had been reached to end the Vietnam War. In 1973, the last United States troops left South Vietnam, ending America's direct military involvement in the Vietnam War. In 1974, President Ford announced a conditional amnesty program for Vietnam War deserters and draft evaders. In 1975, the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon fell to Communist forces. In 1982, the newly finished Vietnam Veterans Memorial was opened to its first visitors in Washington, D.C. In 1984, President Reagan led a state funeral at Arlington National Cemetery for an unidentified American soldier killed in the Vietnam War.

First-Person Accounts

In its special " Vietnam '67 " column, historians, veterans and journalists recall 1967 in Vietnam. From this collection, we've selected three firsthand accounts of the war - by an infantry officer, a reporter and a Vietcong nurse. We've added one additional reflection, by a Vietnamese-American author who came to the United States as a refugee in 1975 with his family.

" At Quang Nam, a Raid and a Reckoning " by Marsh Carter, a West Point graduate who spent two years in Vietnam as a Marine Corps infantry officer.

" What I Saw in Vietnam " by H.D.S. Greenway, a former reporter and editor at The Boston Globe.

" A Frontline Nurse for the Vietcong," an oral history by a former nurse with the National Liberation Front, also known as the Vietcong, as told to Tong Thi Xuyen.

" Our Vietnam War Never Ended " by Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of the novel "The Sympathizer," who came to the U.S. from Vietnam at the age of four with his family.
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Teaching Activities

The purpose of this lesson plan is to use primary sources to develop students' close reading and analysis skills while adding to their understanding of the Vietnam War.

Warm Up: If you are just starting a unit on the Vietnam War, or if you are using this activity as a stand-alone lesson, then it's worthwhile asking students to access their prior knowledge. You could do this as a K/W/L activity (PDF), or simply use this question:

What have you heard or learned about the Vietnam War?

Students can do a quick freewrite, and then share their ideas with the class.

Modeling Activity: Since this lesson asks students to look closely at primary sources to make observations and inferences about the Vietnam War, modeling what this kind of thinking can look like for the whole class can help students work more effectively when they are on their own.

Teachers should choose the primary source type that students will be working with (photograph, article or firsthand account). Then, the teacher should do basic sourcing of the document aloud, asking who wrote or made it, as well as when, where and why did they make it.

Next, with a photograph, for example, the class can look closely at one image together and share what they see going on in the picture, what they see that makes them say that, and what more can they find (the same protocol we use in our weekly What's Going On in This Picture? series).

With a text document, the class can read the article together, or perhaps just an excerpt, and use similar open-ended questions: What's going on in this article or first-person account? What do they read that makes them say that? What more can they find?

No matter the document type, teachers should end the exercise by asking students: What questions does this primary source raise for you about the Vietnam War?

Independent Analysis: Working on their own or in pairs, students should choose another primary source to analyze. Perhaps the class is only working with one type of source for this activity, such as photographs. Or maybe you have more time, and students will be analyzing different types of documents. Either way, we suggest you give students some degree of choice in picking which photograph or document they will analyze.

Students should follow the same format modeled with the class earlier. Here is a graphic organizer to help guide students (PDF) in their work.

Class Share: After students complete their primary source analysis, you can have the class or small groups regroup and share what they noticed and inferred as well as what new questions they have. If students like any of their peers' questions they hear, they can add them to the back of their organizer.

Follow-Up Research: Students can select one of their questions about the Vietnam War, and use it to guide a research activity. What more can they learn, whether in books or online, to answer their question. If students have never done open-ended research in class before, you'll need to discuss issues of reliability of sources.

After they conduct their research, students should try to answer their question in writing, making sure to cite their sources. Then, students can share with a partner, small group or entire class what they found out about the Vietnam War.

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Additional Resources
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund The Choices Program Edsitement The National Archives The Learning Network | Teaching the Cold War With The New York Times

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Teaching the Vietnam War With Primary Sources From The New York Times

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"Images of the Vietnam War That Defined an Era" (15 photographs) "Vietnam War Photos That Made a Difference" (10 photographs) Half a century after the nation's fateful early missteps into the quagmire, what are Americans likely to remember about the Vietnam War?

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Vietnamization of the war was a policy of the Richard Nixon administration to end U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War through a program to "expand, equip, and train South Vietnamese forces and assign to them an ever-increasing combat role, at the same time steadily reducing the number of U.S. combat troops."

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Nixon's pronouncements that the war was ending proved premature. In April 1970, he expanded the war by ordering U.S. and South Vietnamese troops to attack communist sanctuaries in Cambodia. Although Nixon did continue to decrease American troop strength in South Vietnam, the fighting continued.

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The Nixon Doctrine (also known as the Guam Doctrine) was put forth during a press conference in Guam on July 25, 1969 by US President Richard Nixon. It argued for a pursuit of peace with America help for South Vietnam