Editing Operation Linebacker II (section)

===Negotiating===
On 22 December, Washington asked Hanoi to return to the talks with the terms offered in October.<ref>Vo Nguyen Giap, ''Tong hanh dinh trong mua xuan toan thang'', Chap. 1</ref>  On 26 December, Hanoi notified Washington that it was willing to "impress upon Nixon that the bombing was not the reason for this decision, the CPV Politburo told Nixon that halting the bombing was not a precondition for further talks".{{Sfn|Asselin|2002|p=150}} Nixon replied that he wanted the technical discussions to resume on 2 January and that he would halt the bombing if Hanoi agreed. They did so and Nixon suspended aerial operations north of the 20th parallel on 30 December. He then informed Kissinger to agree to the terms offered in October, if that was what it took to get the agreement signed.<ref>Lipsman & Weiss, p. 29.</ref> Senator [[Henry M. Jackson|Henry Jackson]] (D, [[Washington (state)|Wash.]]), tried to persuade Nixon to make a televised address to explain to the American people that "we bombed them in order to get them back to the table."<ref name= "Ambrose, p. 411">Ambrose, p. 411.</ref> It would have been extremely difficult to get informed observers in the U.S. to believe that he "had bombed Hanoi in order to force North Vietnamese acceptance of terms they had already agreed to".<ref name="Ambrose, p. 411"/>

Now the only stumbling block on the road to an agreement was President Thieu. Nixon tried to placate him by writing on 5 January that "you have my assurance of continued assistance in the post-settlement period and that we will respond with full force should the settlement be violated by North Vietnam."<ref>Lipsman & Weiss, p. 28.</ref><ref>Karnow, p. 654.</ref> By this time,  due to congressional opposition, Nixon was in no position to make such a promise, since the possibility of obtaining the requisite congressional appropriations was nil.<ref>Ambrose, p. 406.</ref> The South Vietnamese president still refused to agree. On 14 January Nixon made his most serious threat: "I have therefore irrevocably decided to proceed to initial the agreement on 23 January 1973...  I will do so, if necessary, alone".<ref>Ambrose, p. 413.</ref><ref>Lipsman & Weiss, p. 32.</ref>

On 9 January, Kissinger and Le Duc Tho returned to Paris. The agreement struck between the U.S. and North Vietnam was basically the same one that had been reached in October. The additional demands that had been made by the U.S. in December were generally discarded or went against the U.S. [[John Negroponte]], one of Kissinger's aides during the negotiations, was more caustic: "[w]e bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our concessions."<ref>Ambrose, p. 413</ref> The DMZ was defined as provided for in the [[Geneva Accords (1954)|Geneva Accords of 1954]], and would in no way be recognized as an international boundary. The demanded withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnam was not mentioned at all in the text of the agreement.  Kissinger did obtain a "verbal agreement" from Tho for a token withdrawal of 30,000 North Vietnamese troops.<ref>Lipsman & Weiss, pp. 29–30.</ref>

The demand for an inclusive, Indochina-wide cease-fire was simply discarded in the written agreement. Once again, Kissinger had to be satisfied with a "verbal understanding" that a cease-fire would be instituted in Laos simultaneous with or shortly following that in South Vietnam.<ref>Lipsman & Weiss, p. 30.</ref> An agreement on Cambodia (where the North Vietnamese had no influence over the [[Khmer Rouge]]) was out of the question. The size of the ICCS was finally decided by splitting the difference in the number demanded by both parties at 1,160 personnel.<ref>Lipsman & Weiss, pp. 22, 30.</ref> The [[Paris Peace Accords]] were signed at the [[Hotel Majestic (Paris)|Majestic Hotel]] in Paris on 27 January 1973.<ref>{{cite web |url = http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F40A13F83C5F10738DDDA10A94D9405B838BF1D3 |title = Vietnam Peace Pacts Signed; America's Longest War Halts, Built on Compromises |work=The New York Times |first = Flora |last = Lewis |date = 28 January 1973}}</ref>