Meanwhile, by early August of 1974 it was quite apparent that a Congressional impeachment was certain to be forthcoming no matter what Nixon did to save his presidency.  Furthermore, fellow Republicans sensed that the anti-Nixon mood whipped up by Congress and the press would also sweep Republican Congressmen from office in the coming 1976 elections.  They pleaded with Nixon to simply step down, and step away from this political mess.

Thus on August 8th, Nixon resigned ahead of this much-anticipated trial of the President.  Vice President Gerald Ford now stepped up to become America's new president.

But Nixon was still liable to civil suits against him now that he was out of the White House.  However, Ford sacrificed his political career to extend a presidential pardon to Nixon, to avoid putting the nation through a nasty political show-trial that Nixon's political enemies were looking forward to.  The latter were furious that Ford had let Nixon get away unchastened.

In any case, Congress was not in the mood to want to cooperate with the new American president, convinced that by curtailing the powers of the White House they had just delivered America from dangerous tyranny.

What the Democratic Congress was unwilling to understand was how greatly they had weakened American power by crippling the office of the American president – and the American power that much of the world depended on politically, economically, and even morally.  They were about to see the results of their "democratizing" of American foreign policy … though certainly also they would refuse to take serious note of the lessons that the results of their actions should have taught them.  Instead, they congratulated themselves proudly for what they had just done to save American democracy from presidential imperialism.  And they would see to it that, in the writing of the historical narrative presented in the nation's schools and universities to rising generations of young Americans, the world would continue to celebrate this momentous event when Congress saved America from the evil president, Richard Nixon.

From their point of view this would play ideologically much better than having to acknowledge what were the real consequences of Congress's anti-imperialism (or just anti-Nixon) crusade, ironically inspired by America's great moral leader, Ted Kennedy.  Because the real consequences of this great Congressional moral crusade did not take place in America itself (which mostly just left the country stunned), but instead in far-off Southeast Asia.

Since the "anti-imperialist" Congressional cutback in American financial support for the pro-American Saigon government, the situation in South Vietnam worsened day by day.  Finally, in early 1975 panic set in among the South Vietnamese soldiers who now understood that their cause was lost without further American aid – to offset the aid the Communist North was getting from Soviet Russia.

And at the end of April the world was treated to the well-televised spectacle of the last of the American diplomatic mission beating a cowardly retreat from Saigon, with loyal Vietnamese civilians hanging on to the American helicopters in an effort to get out of the country with them.  The Communists had completely routed mighty America in Vietnam.

But this also meant that the political status quo in the entire region of Southeast Asia was going to suffer a huge shift.

But for the South Vietnamese themselves, the worst was yet to come.  A huge number (perhaps a million) of pro-Western South Vietnamese were carted off to re-education camps, which were simply concentration camps, where many died from the miserable conditions found there.  Also, the Communist authorities followed classic Communist doctrine in collectivizing the peasant farms and Middle-Class businesses, which had also the classic Socialist/Communist effect of crippling horribly the country's economy.

Millions of Vietnamese thus attempted to escape the country in overcrowded boats of all sizes and quality.  By 1978-1979 that had become a humanitarian disaster of huge proportions, as many of the boats were sunk by bad weather or by simply the poor quality or overcrowding of the boats, or the "boat people" died of thirst, or were kidnaped and murdered or sold as slaves by pirates.  Many were thankfully picked up by commercial vessels and brought to British Hong Kong. Others, able to reach countries such as Malaysia, Thailand or the Philippines, were usually put in internment camps where they sat for a very long time waiting for clearance to move on.  Most of these, over 800,000, were eventually settled in the United States.  Another quarter-million were settled in Europe or England's Commonwealth countries.

But next door, in Cambodia, the nightmare was even greater.  With Congress's undercutting of the American-based status quo in Southeast Asia, the 1975 collapse of the South Vietnamese government was accompanied by a similar collapse of "neutral" Cambodia next door.  Taking over the country was the Cambodian Communist Party, known as the "Khmer Rouge," under the leadership of the Communist intellectual Pol Pot.  Pol Pot and his colleagues were deeply committed to a utopian vision they all held of an entirely agrarian, pre-Western, pre-urban society – something similar to Mao's agrarian Communism and Gandhi's pre-British, pre-modern Hindu traditionalism in India.  To bring this vision to pass, they moved all the residents of urban Cambodia, including the capital, Phnom Penh, to work camps in the countryside.  They closed the country off to any outside influences, and then proceeded to destroy all traces of Western culture in the country, including individuals (urban intellectuals and professionals) who were likely to resist this Rousseauian / Maoist program.

Once again, the classic Communist effect resulted, with a total collapse of the economy, the exhaustion and starvation of the population, as well as the execution of whole classes and categories of Cambodians.  The "Killing Fields" of Cambodia comprised vast numbers of Cambodians who died at the hands of these Khmer Rouge "revolutionaries."  The actual count of those who died in this nightmarish event however may never be known.  Official estimates that were made when the Khmer Rouge was finally overthrown in 1979¹ put the death toll at 4.8 million, though other later estimates put that number at between 1.5 to 2 million.  About half of that number was by way of execution, the rest by starvation and disease.

¹Although both Vietnam and Cambodia were officially Communist as of 1975, the two countries practiced very different forms of "Communism" (actually just ethnic nationalism) and found themselves in conflict along their mutual borders from 1975 onward – with the Cambodian Khmer Rouge actually undertaking several direct attacks on Vietnamese territory. Finally in late December 1978, the Communist Vietnamese invaded Communist Cambodia and overthrew the Khmer Rouge government, placing in power a pro-Vietnamese government in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh.  This finally brought the massacre of the Cambodian population to an end.