Free lecture addresses what the Vietnam War meant, and how it ended – Friday, Sept. 4
August 19, 2026
Free lecture at noon on Friday, Sept. 4, at the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum in Columbia
At first, the Vietnam Memorial in Washington was controversial, especially among veterans. It did not celebrate their experiences, or even recognize them – the survivors – for what they had done in service to their country. It was down in the ground – unobtrusive, unheroic, like something America wanted to bury and forget. And it was the idea of a Yale undergraduate who had never served.
But eventually, it became a shrine, and not only for veterans. It’s arguably the most popular war memorial in the country.
At noon on Friday, Sept. 4, at the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum in Columbia, historian Michael Nelson of Presbyterian College will talk about that and much more in a free lecture titled “The End of the Vietnam War.” He will talk, as the title suggests, about that end in 1975, and go beyond it to what happened before that, what it meant and means to this country, and to the rest of the world.
This lecture is part of the museum’s regular Noon Debrief series, and those programs last an hour. So obviously there won’t be time to go through every important thing that happened in the years America was so deeply involved in Southeast Asia, battle by battle. Nelson will focus more on what he terms “The fight over what the war was about, after it was over.”
There will be some material covering what happened before that, such as the early pacification efforts, and Richard Nixon’s efforts to “end the war.” Of course, what he did didn’t accomplish that. It simply ended America’s active participation, and determined who was going to be the winner when the war actually did end.
But Nelson will point out one key thing that Nixon did to at least postpone the inevitable victory of South Vietnam’s enemies. He will focus on some key wording in the Paris Peace Accords signed on 27 January 1973. The last paragraph, Nelson believes, was a “masterpiece of ambiguity,” that at least gave the South some temporary protection after U.S. forces packed up and left. It gave the impression that if the North violated the terms of the agreement, the U.S. might come back.
As a result, the North and their Vietcong allies didn’t “immediately overrun the South.” They thought Nixon might mean it. What ended their hesitation? Watergate. Once Nixon resigned in August 1974, the North was ready to crush the South. It didn’t take long, considering against the length of struggle that preceded it. Saigon fell on 30 April 1975.
Michael Nelson, who received his doctorate from the University of Arkansas, came to Presbyterian College in Clinton to teach history in 2000. His research and teaching cover the Cold War, military and diplomatic history, the U.S. and the world in modern times, Vietnam, and America in the 1960s. He is working on a biography of Roger Hilsman, an architect of Cold War planning in the 1950s who then helped the Kennedy administration shape its policies in Southeast Asian. He later was a critic of how Lyndon Johnson handled those matters.
About the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum
Founded in 1896, the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum is an accredited museum focusing on South Carolina’s distinguished martial tradition through the Revolutionary War, Mexican War, Civil War, Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, Vietnam, the War on Terror, and other American conflicts. It serves as the state’s military history museum by collecting, preserving, and exhibiting South Carolina’s military heritage from the colonial era to the present, and by providing superior educational experiences and programming. It recently opened a major new exhibit, “A War With No Front Lines: South Carolina and the Vietnam War, 1965-1973.” The museum is located at 301 Gervais St. in Columbia, sharing the Columbia Mills building with the State Museum. For more information, go to https://crr.sc.gov/.
