South Vietnamese

Pham Phu Quy, a driver and deliveryman, was a teenager in Saigon in 1975, with a father who worked for the South Vietnamese government, and a mother who worked for the northern army.

Nhan Lee was a young boy whose father was a South Vietnamese military pilot and who stole a plane on the day Saigon fell, whisking his wife and son away — they survived only because an American officer, Larry Chambers, ordered the men on his warship to dump millions of dollars’ worth of helicopters into the sea to give the Lee’s plane space to land.

Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate, found out about the impending peace talks and, through an intermediary, got word to South Vietnamese President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu to cancel the first session; if Nixon won, he would get a better deal.

In 1968, Richard Nixon enlisted Anna Chenault to help gum up the Paris Peace talks among the United States, Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnamese government, and the South Vietnamese government, which was utterly dependent on U.S. arms and aid.

According to Politico, Nixon’s promises of unconditional support, conveyed by Chennault and others, “no doubt helped to persuade the South Vietnamese government to boycott proposed peace talks, shutting a door that Johnson had opened and clinching Nixon’s victory.”