Moorefield and the young Foreign Service officers who had volunteered to assist him had minutes to break up families and decide who should go to America. He begged family heads to make these decisions, telling a man who had brought seventy family members, “Look, you may be qualified to leave, but I can’t send out seventy people from your family….You’ll have to decide; you’ll have to tell me how this is going to work.” If a family asked his advice, he suggested leaving a healthy wage earner behind to provide for the young and elderly. As a last resort he made the decisions himself. He tried to create two economic units: a group of elderly family members who remained with one or two young men, and a second group that went to America and included young people with marketable skills and a good command of English. He had minutes to decide who would start a new life in the United States or live in a Communist Vietnam; which members of a family would stay together or might never see one another again. He had a soft spot for young women who brought letters from their American “husbands” professing their love but saying they had to support their families in the United States. There were thousands more like them in Saigon, and he wished he could send them all to America.
He looked up from his desk one morning to face a tall, imposing Irish nun in her mid-forties wearing full habit. “You must help me,” she said. “I’ve got a whole orphanage of Amerasian kids and staff who are going to be at great risk.” She wanted seats for eighty orphans. The Babylift crash had led to accusations that Americans were “stealing” Vietnamese children, and Moorefield knew that the government was touchy about the evacuation of undocumented children. Sending out eighty Amerasian children at once would ring alarm bells. He told her he could not process so many unaccompanied children.
She returned the next day, planted herself in front of his desk, fixed him with a penetrating stare, and said, “You are going to help us.” After she returned again, he realized that he was facing an implacable force of nature. “Look, I need you to create small families with a man and woman dressed in civilian attire,” he said. “They can each claim four or five orphans as family members. I’ll approve these ‘families’ one by one and put them on flight manifests fast, before anyone begins asking, ‘What the hell are all these Amerasian kids doing with these couples?’ ” She recruited other nuns, members of her staff, and American friends to pose as parents. They staggered their arrival at the gymnasium, and during the next two days Moorefield flew out eighty Amerasian orphans.
The air force loadmasters were also generous in defining “family.” After perusing the thirty-two adoption affidavits signed by a single American, one of the airmen said, “Do you know you are only allowed to take immediate family members of American citizens out? Are all these people related to you?” The American said they were, directly or by adoption. He had listed the ages of his thirty-two adoptees. One was an elderly Catholic priest.
“What in the hell is this?” the airman asked. “Here’s this eighty-year-old priest.”
“Well, that’s my adopted son.”
The airman burst out laughing and said, “You guys got in here; we’ll do our best to get you out.”
Whenever he could escape from Dodge City, Moorefield evacuated his own special cases. An embassy friend who had left earlier with his Vietnamese wife had asked him to rescue her parents and relatives. Her father was a senior bank official, a guaranteed class enemy. Moorefield arrived at their house to find that the family had packed its suitcases and lined them up in the foyer. As he walked in, the father said, “Ah, Mr. Moorefield, we knew you would eventually come for us.” He was moved to tears by their trust and relieved not to have betrayed it.
The gymnasium became noisier, hotter, and more crowded by the day. Women wailed, babies cried, toilets overflowed, people tripped over discarded luggage, and loudspeakers blared an announcement on a perpetual loop asking everyone to limit themselves to a single Sprite or Coke. When the Ministry of the Interior agents who had manned desks in the auditorium appeared with their families, Moorefield stamped their papers. Gaggles of bar girls moved through the lines, waving affidavits of support signed by their American lovers and clients. He stamped their papers, too. He turned away the policemen and military officers who offered him bribes and a Chinese businessman who promised to make him a wealthy man. He believed that making these life-and-death decisions was easier for him because he had made similar ones while leading troops in battle. But the stress of deciding the fate of so many people, and of witnessing so much anger and love, sacrifice and treachery, corruption and decency, sometimes overwhelmed members of his team. One junior diplomat jumped up and shouted, “I can’t take it anymore! I quit!” Another hurled a Coke bottle against the wall and began screaming insults at the Vietnamese crowding around his desk.
Joe McBride, the Foreign Service officer who had been shocked by the embassy’s luau party after Phuoc Long, joined Moorefield’s operation. He saw the Dodge City processing center as an opportunity to rescue thousands of deserving Vietnamese and was disgusted by the American drug dealers, deserters, and black marketers who had come out of the woodwork and appeared at his desk demanding evacuation. He had orders to send out every American, so he processed them, but reluctantly. One man came through his line several times with different “families” who had obviously bribed him to sign their affidavits. The third time he appeared, McBride grabbed his shirt and said, “Listen, you fucker, if I see you here again, I’m going to make sure personally that you never get out of this country, even if I have to tie you to a fucking tent post.”
It was the kind of behavior one might expect from a self-proclaimed “contrarian.” McBride was the product of an Irish Catholic father and a blue-blooded Yankee mother. He had chafed against both backgrounds and had attended Brandeis, a Jewish institution as far as he could get from his Catholic prep school. The Foreign Service had been a childhood dream nurtured by his maternal grandfather, who had been a “Thomasite,” one of the idealistic young Americans who had gone to the Philippines after the Spanish-American War to launch an English-language public school system, or as McBride put it, “teach our little brown brothers how to be good white men.” AID had hired him out of graduate school and sent him to the Mekong delta in 1969 to serve on a joint military and civilian program charged with pacifying the countryside. He called it “the place I wanted to be, the job I wanted to be doing, the adventure I’d been seeking, and the country where I felt I could make a difference.” He joined militiamen on night ambushes, made Vietnamese friends, and had an official cashiered for corruption. He turned down a promotion to district officer because he thought he was becoming too emotionally invested in South Vietnam, “too upset by all the lying, cheating, and stealing on the American side—the way people told their bosses, ‘Okay, we’re winning, now give me my next promotion.’ ”
A senior AID official who had brought his pregnant Vietnamese girlfriend and her mother to the Dodge City processing center rubbed McBride the wrong way. Exhausted by the stress of making these decisions, and upset that he was not rescuing more deserving Vietnamese, he shouted, “What the fuck, we’ll send out you and your girlfriend but not her mother. Tough luck. Good-bye.” Next in line was a Vietnamese man who said, “Sir, I know you won’t consider my humble case.” He handed McBride a sheaf of documents indicating that he had risked his life while working for several U.S. agencies. McBride evacuated his entire family. (They kept in touch afterward, and one of his sons became a managing partner at the consulting firm McKinsey.) After processing one of his former interpreters who had risked his life while working in a dangerous province, McBride accompanied him to a plane and saw a group of the DAO’s cleaning women climbing aboard. He exploded at their American sponsor and called the embassy to complain. One of Martin’s acolytes said, “Don’t worry, Joe, we know what’s going on.”
One night McBride woke in the villa where he was sleeping to hear a commotion in the street. He went do
wnstairs and saw, illuminated by the moon, a column of ARVN troops staggering down the boulevard. They wore blood-soaked bandages and were carrying their wounded. They struck him as used up and badly used, and he was irate that brave men like these were being abandoned while their commanding officers found seats on evacuation planes. But when Wolfgang Lehmann asked him if he was ready to leave, he said, “Nah, send someone else. I want to see this through to the end.”
* * *
—
Martin had supported President Thieu longer than events warranted. He had even intervened to persuade General Nguyen Cao Ky to postpone a possible coup against Thieu. In mid-April he had driven to Ky’s villa in a dented Volkswagen with Charles Timmes, a retired U.S. general who had trained many of South Vietnam’s military leaders and now served as a liaison between them and the CIA. Martin had disguised himself in a sports jacket and had pulled a cap down over his forehead. He greeted South Vietnam’s former prime minister by saying, “You must be surprised to see a man like me at your house.”
Ky considered the remark condescending but let it pass, partly because Martin’s appearance was so shocking. His eyes were sunken and red-rimmed, and he appeared to have shriveled since Ky last saw him. Without promising to support Ky’s rumored coup, he gave him the impression that the Ford administration wanted Thieu to resign. Timmes spread a map out on the floor, and for several hours he, Martin, and Ky discussed how Ky would stop the North’s advance so that South Vietnam would have a strong hand in any negotiations. As Martin was leaving, he said, “It’s not easy, you know. Give me a few days—then we’ll see what we can arrange.” He was just vague and encouraging enough to persuade Ky to delay his coup.
By the third week in April, Kissinger and Ford had soured on Thieu, and on April 20 Martin went to the palace and encouraged him to resign, warning that if he did not, his generals would push him out. Thieu replied that he would do what was best for his country. Martin cabled Kissinger, “I went home, read the daily news digest from Washington, took a shower, scrubbed very hard with the strongest soap I could find. It didn’t help very much.”
Thieu announced his resignation during an emotional ninety-minute speech on April 21. He blamed the United States, and speaking as if addressing the U.S. Congress and the American people, he said, “You have let our combatants die under a hail of shells. This is an inhumane act by an inhumane ally.” He read aloud from the letter that von Marbod had given Weyand in which Nixon had promised “severe retaliatory action” if North Vietnam attempted to occupy the South. The letter had not swayed Ford or Congress earlier that month, and was unlikely to do so now. Thieu also blamed his generals, charging some with being “cowardly.” He demanded his people’s pity, telling them, “Over the last ten years, all years, months, days, and hours in my life have been bad, as my horoscope forecast.” After promising to “stay close to you in the coming task of national defense,” he declared, “I am resigning but not deserting.” The next morning the South Vietnamese Communists’ Provisional Revolutionary Government issued a statement calling his resignation “a ridiculous puppet dance” and “a clumsy trick manipulated by the United States to keep the Thieu clique without Thieu.”
Xuan Loc fell the same day that Thieu resigned. South Vietnam had committed the last of its reserves to the battle, and Major General Dao had lost a third of them. He fought to the end and spent seventeen years in a concentration camp. But instead of immediately attacking Saigon, the NVA paused for five days. Optimists in Saigon and Washington concluded that the Communists were waiting to negotiate with Thieu’s successor, and the BBC raised hopes by calling the lull in the fighting “a de facto ceasefire.” In truth, the NVA had advanced so quickly that it had outrun its supply lines.
Vice President Tran Van Huong succeeded Thieu. He was reputedly honest and capable but almost blind, afflicted by high blood pressure and diabetes, and appeared a decade older than his seventy-one years. Hanoi had claimed to be ready to negotiate with a “peace cabinet” but dismissed Huong as another American puppet. He had done little to further the chance of negotiations by declaring in his inaugural address on April 22, “Saigon will become a mountain of our bones and a river of our blood. And we will stand and fight together to the last drop of blood.”
The next day, April 23, President Ford addressed a student audience at the Tulane University field house. He had complained beforehand to aide Robert Hartmann about spending “so much time worrying about a war that’s over as far as we’re concerned.”
“Well, why don’t you just say that?” Hartmann asked.
Ford said it might upset Kissinger.
“What do you care whether Henry likes it or not?” Hartmann asked. “You’re the President, and if that’s the way you feel, say it.”
While flying to New Orleans, Ford added a statement to his speech saying that the Vietnam War was “finished.” Press Secretary Ron Nessen knew it would electrify the crowd, writing later in his memoirs, “From my first day in the White House I had a fantasy that at some point I would stand up in front of a news conference and announce the end of the Vietnam War.”
Ford told the students, “America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam, but it cannot be achieved by re-fighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned.” When he uttered the word “finished,” they jumped to their feet and cheered. Ford called it “probably the best reception” he had received from an audience since becoming president.
During the flight back to Washington, a reporter asked if Kissinger had approved the speech. “No! Absolutely not!” Ford exclaimed.
He was right about the line upsetting Kissinger. According to Hartmann, Kissinger “ranted and raved” at a meeting the next day, telling Ford, “This has got to stop. I can’t hold my head up in front of all these ambassadors with a major statement like this and I don’t know about it. I’ve just lost face.”
Ford’s speech devastated morale in Saigon, dashing whatever hopes Thieu’s resignation had raised. Three U.S. allies who had contributed troops to the war—Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines—evacuated their citizens, closed their embassies, and abandoned their Vietnamese employees. Canada, Britain, and other European democracies followed suit. The Vietnamese working for the Canadian embassy returned in the morning to find the building locked and deserted. The British left behind Indians and Hong Kong Chinese holding British citizenship. They stood outside the embassy waving their passports as the ambassador climbed into the limousine taking him to the airport.
Two days after Ford’s Tulane speech, Thieu flew into exile in Taiwan on a plane provided by the embassy. He arrived at Tan Son Nhut inebriated and with so many relatives and bags heavy with so much gold (they clinked as his bodyguards carried them to the plane) that the pilot needed the entire runway to lift off. Thieu’s bodyguards Hieu and Nguyen had been at his side for ten years. The Communists were certain to punish them for protecting his life, but after they had carried his booty onto the plane, he gave each man 5,000 piastres, a pitifully small sum, and left them standing on the tarmac.
Martin saw Thieu off. He said “Godspeed” and jerked away the metal staircase with a surprising burst of energy for someone who looked so sick and frail. CIA agent Frank Snepp, who witnessed the scene, wrote that Martin had pulled away the stairs “as if he was severing the umbilical that had kept us attached to South Vietnam.” Thieu was not the only one making a well-timed exit. Soon after his departure so many senior officers had deserted their posts that an American reporter walking down the corridors of the Ministry of Defense heard a cacophony of telephones ringing on empty desks.
CHAPTER 13
“Make It Happen!”
‘Pan Am flight 841 from San Francisco landed at Tan Son Nhut on April 22 after stops in Honolulu, Guam, and Manila. Most of the twenty passengers scattered across the 747’s 375 seats were hoping to evacuate friends and family members fro
m South Vietnam and then depart two days later on Pan Am flight 842. During the two-and-a-half-hour flight from Manila, they discussed their strategies for accomplishing this. Tra Dong, a young Vietnamese flight attendant, said she was planning to slip her three sisters aboard and hide them in the lavatories while immigration officers walked down the aisle making their final inspection. A South Vietnamese colonel who had been posted to the United States for training said that although he had decided to return to Saigon and remain there with his family, he wanted to evacuate his five-year-old son. He and Tra Dong made a deal: he would smuggle her sisters into Tan Son Nhut and hide them in the Pan Am cargo hangar, and she would smuggle his son onto the plane. Because the jumbo jet would be on the ground for only two hours before returning to Manila that day, they agreed to honor their bargain on flight 842 on April 24.
The other passengers included four Vietnamese women who held U.S. citizenship and were coming to rescue their families, and six American diplomats who had left posts around the world so they could evacuate their Vietnamese friends. All were violating a State Department order forbidding personnel to travel to South Vietnam except on official business. Two of the diplomats, Lionel Rosenblatt and Craig Johnstone, had gone AWOL from their State Department desk jobs and were traveling on their personal rather than their diplomatic passports, hoping that might mitigate the damage they were inflicting on their careers. Both were Foreign Service highfliers in their early thirties. Johnstone was on the staff of Kissinger’s National Security Council, and Rosenblatt was an assistant to Deputy Secretary of State Robert Ingersoll. They gave themselves a fifty-fifty chance of being expelled from the Foreign Service and similar odds that the Communists would take Saigon and imprison them before they could leave. Johnstone believed that because of his experience in Vietnam, facility in Vietnamese, and familiarity with Saigon, failing to rescue his friends would be “repugnant.” Rosenblatt wanted to evacuate his former comrades to settle a debt of honor he had incurred when his Montagnard guards saved his life during a Vietcong assault on his villa. When he told Johnstone that he was flying to Saigon to rescue his people, Johnstone replied, “Yes. That sounds like the right thing to do,” and agreed to join him.
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