University of South Carolina Spartanburg - Carolana Yearbook (Spartanburg, SC)

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1970 ' s OVERVIEW Vol. 1 No.l Spartanburg, S.C. THE NIXON YEARS uses VIETNAM V AR ENDS March 1973 (AP) — The U.S. Command officially ended more than a decade of military intervention in Vietnam on Thursday, folding its colors and sending its last 2, .500 men homeward or to other bases in Southeast Asia. The last American troops left Vietnam virtually around the clock. Planes took off from Saigon ' s Tan Son Nhut air base from midnight on. The last flight was due out by dusk, ending the role of the U.S. Command that once had half a million American soldiers un- der its orders. Some troops simply transferred to U.S. bases in Thailand where the United States will continue to maintain a strong air arm to discourage any mass offensive in South Vietnam by the North Vietnamese. WATERGATE NIXON RESIGNS 1974 (AP) — Although he contended to the end he had done no wrong deserving the destruction of his presidency, two years of scandal had brought him to the brink of impeachment, stripped of his most effec- tive friends. Even his staunchest defenders began deserting the embat- tled President when he admitted he had withheld evidence from Con- gress, the public and his own lawyer. A tidal wave of reason followed that Ni, on admission on Aug. 5, and his acknowledgement that he had given orders within a week after the June 1972 break-in that the Cen- tral Intelligence Agency be used to blunt the FBI investigation. Nixon also disclosed that he was told six days after the break-in that his cam- paign director and former attorney general, John N. Mitchell, may have had some prior knowledge of the plans to wiretap Democratic headquarters. This stood in stark contradiction with numerous state- ments by Nixon that he had known nothing about a cover-up until informed by then-White House legal counsel John W Dean III on March 21, 1973. More than eight members of his White House staff had been sentenced to jail. The subsequent Nixon admission of his involvement in a scheme to head off the FBI investigation, plus an earlier disclosure that key tapes were missing and an 18V2-minute segment of another was blank, seemed to insure his fall. NIXON PARDONED Sept 1974 (AP) — President Ford granted Richard M. Nixon a free, full and absolute pardon for any criminal conduct during his presidency, and Nixon responded with a statement of remorse at my mistakes over Watergate. 1 feel that Richard Nixon and his loved ones have suf- fered enough. The former President responded from his home in San Clemente, Ca- lif., with a statement in which he admitted no criminal wrongdoing but said that one thing 1 can see clearly now is that I was wrong in not acting more decisively and more forthrightly in dealing with Wa- tergate, Philip Buchen, White House counsel, told reporters that Ford granted Nixon a sweeping pardon without any strings attached. In announcing the pardon. Ford said any move to try the former Presi- dent might have taken months or years during which ugly passions would again be aroused, our people would again be polarized in their opinions, and the credibility of our free institutions of government would again be challenged at home and abroad. By the time Americans stopped participating in the fighting, nearly 46, 000 had died on Vietnam battlefields.