Melvin Laird, former US defence secretary who oversaw pullout from Vietnam, dies at 94

Melvin Laird, the US defence secretary under Richard Nixon who oversaw the withdrawal of more than half a million U.S. troops during the Vietnam War, has died. He was 94.

He died Wednesday in a hospital in Fort Myers, Florida, his grandson, Raymond Dennis Large III, said by telephone. No cause was given.

A former US congressman from Wisconsin, Laird was the architect of “Vietnamisation,” a plan to bolster the South Vietnamese military and draw down the involvement of American soldiers in the war. The number of US combat troops in the Southeast Asian nation dropped from 547,000 in January 1969 to zero after the Paris Peace Accords were signed in 1973. South Vietnam fell under communist rule in 1975 after the US Congress cut funding to its former ally.

During his four years as defence secretary, from 1969 to 1973, Laird sought to accelerate the “peace with honour” exit strategy that the Republican Party had pledged before Nixon’s presidential election victory in 1968. Laird said his efforts were hampered by military hardliners and by Nixon himself, who approved bombing campaigns in Cambodia and North Vietnam when peace talks stalled.

“Even with the tide of public opinion running against the war, withdrawal was not an easy sell inside the Nixon administration,” Laird wrote in the journal Foreign Affairs in 2005. “Even Nixon, who had promised to end the war, accepted each troop-withdrawal request from me grudgingly.”

Laird was also credited with ending the draft of military personnel in 1973, establishing an all-volunteer force that still exists today, and promoting women to senior ranks in the Navy. He also helped forge an agreement with the Soviet Union to limit anti-ballistic missile systems.