Imperial Stars 3-The Crash of Empire

by Jerry Pournelle

  Of course I knew, in a general way, how it was going to come out, although the concluding chapters of The Palace File provide no end of details I had failed to register at the time, or registered and then forgot: about how South Vietnam's gold reserves fell into Hanoi's hands; the heroic last stand of the ARVN (the Republic of Vietnam's ground troops) at Xuan Loc; the hopeless attempts to persuade the U.S. Congress to authorize emergency aid, if only to slow down the pace of events and extricate the most endangered people, the most valuable equipment; the beginning of the South Vietnamese exodus.

  Hung and Schecter deal briefly and grimly with these incidents, their concern being not so much to wring our hearts as to clinch the argument they have been making, to the effect that in order to get the South Vietnamese to agree to the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon made secret promises (later repeated by Gerald Ford) to President Nguyen Van Thieu that were never kept. This is the central thesis of The Palace File, which is based on a series of hitherto secret communications between the American President and Thieu:

  Both President Nixon and Secretary Kissinger promised Thieu that the Seventh Air Force at Nakorn Phanom would be used to bomb North Vietnamese targets if the Paris Accords were violated. [Seventh Air Force chief] General Vogt's oral history clearly demonstrates that his forces were not only a deterrent, but he expected to mount a full-scale response to North Vietnamese violations. Certainly, the letters from President Nixon to President Thieu were commitments that had not been made public or shared privately with the Congress. . . . [F]or the South Vietnamese, however, they were, in fact, part of the understanding.

  On April 23, 1975, while the decimated ARVN 43rd regiment was firing its last munitions east of Xuan Loc, holding its ground and inflicting enormous losses on a vastly superior enemy force, Gerald Ford (who had by then succeeded Nixon as President) raised the white flag. In a speech at Tulane University in New Orleans, he said: "America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned." The Vietnamese who heard these words—Hung, for example, who was in Washington, desperately lobbying Congress—were devastated, of course, but not surprised. Nor was there any outcry in the country, so far as I can remember, our people having long since—long before the signing of the "peace" agreement in January 1973—turned its back on Vietnam.

  A week later, to be sure, Hanoi's tanks breached the gates of Thieu's palace and a new era—the aftermath—began. For several days, like an unshriven ghost, Saigon came back to lead the evening news. Our troops were long gone, but our embassy staff and other civilians had to be extracted. And then all those unbelievable things happened in Southeast Asia: millions murdered by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia; hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese "boat people" adrift in the South China Sea, raped and despoiled by pirates. Still, a great power cannot lose itself indefinitely in a situation where "all's to be borne and naught's to be done." So the curtain came down.

  Few Americans are aware that in the autumn of 1987—more than twelve years after the war's end—the boat people are still coming out at the rate of 1,200-1,500 a month, an astounding exodus for a people whose sense of self is so deeply rooted in the burial places of their families; or that the ethnic Chinese, including tens of thousands who supported Hanoi in the war, have been expelled from Communist Vietnam or interned; or that Hanoi's army is still bogged down in Cambodia defending a puppet government—nguy, the term they once applied so invariably to Saigon; or that the Vietnamese are hungry, even in the bountiful South, hungrier than they have been since the famine that followed the collectivization of the land by the Communists in the North in 1955 and 1956.

  The litany goes on, but is anyone listening? Certainly not the "useful idiots" of the Susan Sontag-Mary McCarthy school, that goes without saying—but what about the rest of us? We did the best we could for those people, and the worst; and never learned to distinguish the one from the other. And when the last of our troops left the country in 1973, two years before the fall of Saigon, we had finally reached a consensus: enough was enough.

  It still holds, it seems to me, but uneasily. In the fullness of time we built a monument in Washington to mourn our dead. We have had a trickle of novels, memoirs, and films, welling up from many sources, irrepressibly, about mayhem in the jungle and bewildered young men who could not fathom why they were there; and compensatory fantasies of the Rambo type, of course; and even a few attempts, conscientiously financed by foundations and think tanks, to review the historical record on public television. But these, much like the rare works of political and military analysis published in the past few years, have been strangely received, if at all: praised or damned mechanically, as it were, in feeble response to reflexes that have somehow lost their spring. It is as if the Vietnam that once so roiled our body politic, and gave rise to so much reportorial posturing, pop anthropology, and anguished moralism, had been relegated to oblivion, so that we have trouble remembering what it was all about.

  And now we have this Palace File, a moving account (and from an unaccustomed angle) of one of the most shattering events of our history. It is a scandalous book, in the biblical sense of the word, producing serious new evidence and argument to prove that we as a nation not only failed our Vietnamese allies but shamelessly betrayed them. It has been available for more than a year now, but—"woe unto him through whom the scandal comes!"— to date I have seen only one review.

  Granted, there must be others, beyond my ken, but I think it safe to assume that The Palace File has failed, as they say in the trade, to take off.

  This morning's New York Times carries the third or fourth of a series of reports on postwar Vietnam. A number of memoirs and studies of former members or supporters of the Vietcong, now for the most part in exile, have been published by David Chanoff and Doan Van Toai. And most importantly, Ellen J. Hammer has brought out her long-awaited—corrosive and devastating—account of the overthrow and murder of Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, Nhu.[A Death in November, Dutton, 1987]

  According to Toai, once a fellow-traveler of the Vietcong and now a research associate at the University of California in Berkeley, there is more ahead; and all this would suggest that the amnesia that followed so hard upon our Vietnamese obsession may be coming to an end. It was never total, and now it remains to be seen whether the larger public, and not just one corner of academia, is ready to go back to "all that." There are always issues more pressing than the past, even the relatively recent past; and this truism is true a fortiori—notoriously—for a people as perennially and programmatically unfinished as ours.

  Witness the latest episode in the continuing struggle between the White House and Congress over the direction and management of our foreign affairs. When The Palace File appeared, the welkin was beginning to ring with revelations and rumors about Reagan's faux pas in Iran and Nicaragua and the possibility, so eagerly embraced by his adversaries, that the law had been violated not only by members of the White House staff but by the President himself, so that for the second time in little more than a decade we seemed to be circling around a constitutional crisis—hardly a propitious moment to be digging up old graves in Southeast Asia.

  And yet, as the famous rabbi said, if not now, when? If the choice is right the moment is right, by definition. Twelve years have passed since Nguyen Tien Hung left the presidential palace in Saigon with the dossier of top-secret letters from Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford (at least some of them, presumably, drafted by Henry Kissinger) which form the armature of this book. Hung's story needed to be fleshed out, organized, and properly Englished; and Jerrold Schecter, a professional journalist who had covered Southeast Asia for Time, published a scholarly study of political Buddhism, and served a term in our own "palace," the office of the National Security Adviser, during the Carter administration, was well prepared for the job. The result of their collaboration is a remarkable piece of work, always moving if not al
ways persuasive: at once the story of the Vietnamese debacle as seen from inside Thieu's office and a graphic account of the paralysis that overcame American power at the moment of truth—a subject not so far from our present preoccupations, after all.

  Near or far, we cannot escape it. The paradox of memory is that it deforms, as it were, truly. We end by becoming a mysterious amalgam of what we remember and what we forget. Hence the significance for me of a Saigon street name, and for our country of the circumstances of Saigon's decline and fall—painful though it be to go back to "all that."

  So now I am struggling to summon up the memory of the people who lived in my house on Phan Dinh Phung—of the Vietnamese especially, because I know at least vaguely what has become of my round-eyed colleagues: Levine and Falkiewicz (who will have forgiven me, I hope, for calling them Jacobowsky and the Colonel) and various others who shared these requisitioned digs for a while and then went back to the West and about their business; whereas the Vietnamese have long been beyond my ken: Huong the grumpy cook, Mai the chambermaid, Li the Chinese driver, and the hard-faced security types who hung around day and night, guns bulging under their chinos and floppy sport shirts, and above all my bohemian friend, Tran Thi Do (or Therese, as we called her, using her Catholic name,[Real names have been altered, for obvious reasons.] who shopped and interpreted for us and once prepared a memorable melon soup when Henry Cabot Lodge and some military brass came to dinner, to the enduring mortification of Huong. She showed up briefly in Washington, a year or so after my return, when I was about to leave for my new post at NATO in Brussels; and I saw her in Paris during the peace talks in 1968 to which I was seconded from Brussels, and tried to persuade her to stay. Her mother had a little money in France, and her brother was a doctor in Cannes. But she was, she said, consumed with homesickness, le mal du pays, and insisted on going back and disappeared from view, like so many others.

  All these people had visitors, relatives from their villages, sometimes from enemy-infested areas, and Huong—a militant Buddhist who took an equally dim view of the Saigon government and the Vietcong—spent hours talking to them, so that (when there was time and he was willing to distill for me a little of what they said) I sometimes fleetingly had the feeling that I could touch something out there in the mysterious countryside and surmise, if not quite understand, how these people were experiencing the disorder that was roiling the South at that time.

  None of this would seem to have much to do with The Palace File, which is the story of the immolation of the republic we helped bring into being after the French left Indochina in 1954—and to which, however imprudently, we pledged "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." No less. The pledge was made and renewed by five successive American administrations, rarely in such resounding rhetoric but perhaps more importantly in deeds, so that when the South Vietnamese began to falter in the early 60's we induced them to fight on by dispatching a half-million of our own troops to their country, building a vast military infrastructure, and organizing a consortium of Asian and Pacific nations to aid them or at least bolster them morally in their struggle.

  These early years, however, are only sketchily evoked in The Palace File. The authors focus on the period after 1971, the decline and fall, their purpose being not only to make us feel the "pity and terror" of it but also to assert a thesis, namely, that our behavior during the last years—and specifically our failure as a nation to honor Nixon's promises to Thieu—"constitutes the betrayal of an ally, unrivaled in American history."

  The verdict is severe. It is all very well for an old-world country, perfidious Albion, say, to be cynical about its alliances. "England has neither permanent friends nor permanent enemies. It has permanent interests." But this is not for us. We need to think of ourselves as a moral people, perhaps this is the most permanent of our interests. Faced with that terrible sentence from The Palace File, we look for attenuating circumstances, and although these are not hard to find they turn out to be the very same arguments that persuaded us to abandon our friends in Vietnam in the first place. The incompetence and fecklessness of our allies made them difficult, if not impossible, to defend; the costs were staggering, incommensurate with any good we might achieve; a growing number of Americans had come to feel, however wrongly, that the war was immoral to begin with, or had lost its moral sanction because of the manner in which it was fought. Etc.

  These arguments—and I have cited only a few—were at least arguable. They could be answered but they were mutually reinforcing and finally overwhelming, unless we were willing to go back to the beginning and carry the war to the North, the source of all our troubles. But this was ruled out because it might embroil us with the Chinese. Or so we believed.

  A misbegotten affair, and quite hopeless—such was the view of Sargent Shriver, the American ambassador to France in 1968, long before Nixon wrote his letters to Thieu. He suggested that I should leave the Harriman-Vance delegation to the peace talks in Paris (the open ones that were being conducted while Kissinger and North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho were doing the real negotiating in secret) and do something useful, like coming to work for him. The Vietnam game was over, there was nothing for it but to get out.

  Shriver was a good man, amiable and intelligent, but I was dismayed by his readiness to walk away from "all that"—as if the government of a great power could simply repudiate the debts of its predecessors. "So we made a mistake. Let's admit it and cut our losses." But what, then, would happen to the South Vietnamese?

  On Phan Dinh Phung I knew no one except the Japanese ambassador who lived across the street and was good enough to invite me to dinner when I moved in; and people to nod to, of course, including an old man who sold pho, a highly seasoned North Vietnamese soup, from a pushcart. A dead ringer for Ho Chi Minh, according to Falkiewicz, but his pho was delicious. Thousands of people lived and doubtless still live on our street, one of those great broad southern French avenues of Saigon that run interminably east and west, plane-tree-shaded and elegant until one approaches Le Van Duyet, where a Buddhist monk made a torch of himself in 1963 and hastened the downfall of Ngo Dinh Diem; turning meaner and more populous as you proceed westward, bearing north toward the air base at Tan Son Nhut where Therese's mother, if memory serves, owned a house, although she lived on Hai Ba Trung. Or south toward the teeming Chinatown of Cholon—the Big Market. The sense of the place comes back slowly, a patchy disjointed sense, because it takes time and leisure to assimilate a great city; and we had almost none of either.

  I say we, meaning the embassy people, but I really cannot speak for the mass of Americans. And mass was increasingly the word. Soon after my arrival in Saigon in 1965, and quite apart from the growing plethora of journalists, the city began swarming with motley assortments of Americans, some of whom seemed to have precious little to do: aspiring writers accredited by countercultural publications; hungry photographers without fixed assignments; delegates of various cockamamie committees; pop anthropologists—they brought a 60's atmosphere to the city center, with their guitars and marijuana and Australian bush hats.

  Remembering them now it occurs to me that they were a bizarre little fringe benefit, as it were, of our decision to elbow the South Vietnamese aside and take over their war. But was there ever such a decision? If so, it had been deemed too cosmic for my ears when I went through Washington, en route to Honolulu and Saigon; nor had it ever been announced, out of a "decent respect for the opinion of mankind," to "a candid world." Declarations, formalities, national mobilization— these things were long out of style. We had the Tonkin Gulf resolution, to be sure, and we had dropped some bombs on Northern boat docks in August 1964; and then, if memory serves, on enemy concentrations in the South in February 1965, when the "Rolling Thunder" program (of air attacks on the North) was getting under way. The idea was not so much to do serious damage as to warn Hanoi to cease and desist. I remember sitting with Ambassador Maxwell Taylor in the MAC-V (Military Assistance Command-Vietnam) situation room and watc
hing General Westmoreland describe, pointer in hand, how the marines would land on the beaches at Danang.

  The South Vietnamese were not consulted on these operations; they were merely informed, usually ex post facto, if at all. They were reeling from a combination of troubles: political chaos in Saigon, increasing infiltration from the North, larger-scale Vietcong attacks. Which brings back an even earlier memory of MAC-V, probably my first, when as a new official at the embassy I was paying a courtesy call and General Richard Stilwell came out of his boss Westmorland's office, shaking his head sadly, and said to a colleague of mine who was steering me toward the exit: "This is it. These little fellows can't hack it." What "it" was I've forgotten; but the words have stayed with me. If the "little fellows" could not hack it, a new term for my lexicon, we Americans of course could.