“I would rather be a one-term President and do what I believe is right than to be a two-term President at the cost of seeing America become a second-rate power and to see this Nation accept the first defeat in its proud 190-year history." "No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now." – Former US President Richard M. Nixon, 1969 and 1985 respectively Severe communist losses during the Tet Offensive allowed US President Richard Nixon to begin troop withdrawals. His plan, called the Nixon Doctrine, was to build up the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), so that they could take over the defence of South Vietnam. The policy became known as Vietnamisation, and it had much in common with the policies of the Kennedy administration. One important difference, however, remained. While Kennedy insisted that the South Vietnamese fight the war themselves, he attempted to limit the scope of the conflict. President Nixon said in an announcement, "I am tonight announcing plans for the withdrawal of an additional 150,000 American troops to be completed during the spring of next year. This will bring a total reduction of 265,500 men in our armed forces in Vietnam below the level that existed when I took office 15 months ago." Nixon also pursued negotiations. Theatre commander Creighton Abrams shifted to smaller operations, aimed at communist logistics, with better use of firepower and more co-operation with the ARVN. Nixon also began to pursue détente with the Soviet Union and rapprochement with the People's Republic of China (PRC). This policy helped decrease global tensions. Détente led to nuclear arms reduction on the part of both superpowers. But Nixon was disappointed that the PRC and the Soviet Union continued to supply the North Vietnamese with aid. In September 1969, Ho Chi Minh died at age 79. The anti-war movement was gaining strength in the US. Nixon appealed to the "silent majority" of Americans to support the war. But revelations of the My Lai Massacre, in which a US Army platoon went on a rampage and raped and killed civilians, and the 1969 Green Beret Affair (where eight Special Forces soldiers, including the 5th Special Forces Group Commander were arrested for the murder of a suspected double agent) provoked national and international outrage. The civilian cost of the war was again questioned when the US concluded operation Speedy Express with a claimed body count of 10,889 Communist guerillas with only 40 US losses; Kevin Buckley writing in Newsweek estimated that perhaps 5,000 of the Vietnamese dead were civilians. Beginning in 1970, American troops were being taken away from border areas where much more killing took place and instead put along the coast and interior which is one reason why casualties in 1970 were less than half of 1969 totals. Prince Norodom Sihanouk had proclaimed Cambodia neutral since 1955, but the communists used Cambodian soil as a base and Sihanouk tolerated their presence, because he wished to avoid being drawn into a wider regional conflict. Under pressure from Washington, however, he changed this policy in 1969. The Vietnamese communists were no longer welcome. President Nixon took the opportunity to launch a massive secret bombing campaign, called Operation Menu, against their sanctuaries along the Cambodia-Vietnam border. This violated a long succession of pronouncements from Washington supporting Cambodian neutrality. Richard Nixon wrote to Prince Sihanouk in April 1969 assuring him that the US respected "the sovereignty, neutrality and territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Cambodia..." In 1970, Prince Sihanouk was deposed by his pro-American Prime Minister Lon Nol. The country's borders were closed, and the US and ARVN launched incursions into Cambodia to attack Vietnamese People's Army (VPA)/NLF bases and buy time for South Vietnam. The invasion of Cambodia sparked nationwide US protests. Four students were killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State University during a protest in Ohio, which provoked public outrage in the US. The reaction to the incident by the Nixon administration was seen as callous and indifferent, providing additional impetus for the anti-war movement. In 1971, the Pentagon Papers were leaked to The New York Times. The top-secret history of US involvement in Vietnam, commissioned by the Department of Defence, detailed a long series of public deceptions. The Supreme Court ruled that its publication was legal. The ARVN launched Operation Lam Son 719 in February 1971, aimed at cutting the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos. The ostensibly neutral Laos had long been the scene of a secret war. After meeting resistance, ARVN forces retreated in a confused rout. They fled along roads littered with their own dead. When they ran out of fuel, soldiers abandoned their vehicles and attempted to barge their way on to American helicopters sent to evacuate the wounded. Many ARVN soldiers clung to helicopter skids in a desperate attempt to save themselves. US aircraft had to destroy abandoned equipment, including tanks, to prevent them from falling into enemy hands. Half of the invading ARVN troops were either captured or killed. The operation was a fiasco and represented a clear failure of Vietnamisation. As Stanley Karnow (then chief correspondent of Time and Life magazines) noted "the blunders were monumental... The (South Vietnamese) government's top officers had been tutored by the Americans for ten or fifteen years, many at training schools in the US, yet they had learned little". In 1971, Australia and New Zealand withdrew their soldiers. The US troop count was further reduced to 196,700, with a deadline to remove another 45,000 troops by February 1972. As peace protests spread across the US, disillusionment grew in the ranks. Drug use increased, race relations grew tense and the number of soldiers disobeying officers rose. Fragging, or the murder of unpopular officers with fragmentation grenades, increased. Vietnamisation was again tested by the Easter Offensive of 1972, a massive conventional invasion of South Vietnam. The (Vietnam People's Army (VPA) and NLF quickly overran the northern provinces and in coordination with other forces attacked from Cambodia, threatening to cut the country in half. US troop withdrawals continued. But American airpower came to the rescue with Operation Linebacker, and the offensive was halted. However, it became clear that without American airpower South Vietnam could not survive. The last remaining American ground troops were withdrawn in August. 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