The final offensive was a stunning demonstration of Saigon’s lack of support. The South Vietnamese government had been so dependent on massive U.S. support that U.S. withdrawal made its collapse inevitable. The Communists were able to sweep through South Vietnam not so much because of their massive military power, but because there was so little to sweep away. And by 1975, very few Americans, including policymakers and politicians, wanted to reenter Vietnam to rescue the Saigon government in its final hours.
With Nixon forced out of office, President Gerald Ford encouraged the nation to wash its hands of Vietnam. No soap in the world could remove all the blood, or all the memories, but Ford would at least try to throw a towel over the mess. He began by issuing a pardon to Richard Nixon, foreclosing any possibility that a trial would further expose and adjudicate the crimes of the former president. Then, a week before the fall of Saigon, Ford went to Tulane University to close the book on a history that went back decades. On April 23, 1975, speaking before thousands of students, Ford offered only a vague allusion to the unfolding catastrophe. “We, of course, are saddened indeed by events in Indochina. But these events, tragic as they are, portend neither the end of the world nor of America’s leadership in the world.” He said nothing about the fourteen divisions driving toward Saigon, the panicky retreats, or the twenty-one-year American failure to prevent the reunification of Vietnam under Communist leadership. The president sounded as if he were describing a minor natural disaster, nothing worthy of prolonged concern. “Today, 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.”
Should anyone suggest that the United States was responsible for the disaster, Ford had only this to say: “We can and should help others to help themselves. But the fate of responsible men and women everywhere, in the final decision, rests in their own hands, not in ours.” There could hardly be a more deceptive summary of America’s role in Vietnam. For two decades the United States had done everything possible to determine Vietnam’s fate. It had taken as many decisions into its own hands as possible. Indeed, South Vietnam would never have existed without American intervention. Had the United States been committed to self-determination in the mid-1950s it would have honored the Geneva Accords, allowing nationwide elections to reunite Vietnam peacefully. There never would have been an American war in Vietnam. Millions of lives might have been saved. But with Saigon on the brink of collapse, Ford implied that only South Vietnam was to blame for its defeat. The U.S. had merely tried to “help.”
Instead of calling for a great national reckoning of U.S. responsibility in Vietnam, Ford called for a “great national reconciliation.” It was really a call for a national forgetting, a willful amnesia. The president of South Vietnam was not so ready to forgive and forget. He was terrified, and he held the United States responsible for his regime’s collapse. Two days before Ford spoke at Tulane, Nguyen Van Thieu gave an emotional three-hour address announcing his resignation and attacking the American government: “The United States has not respected its promises. It is inhumane. It is not trustworthy. It is irresponsible.” A few days later, CIA agent Frank Snepp whisked Thieu to the airport in the dark of night.
I was assigned to drive the limousine to carry Thieu in total anonymity and blacked-out conditions to a rendezvous point at Tan Son Nhut air base, which was equally blacked out, to be picked up by a blacked-out CIA flight out of the country. When I arrived, Thieu came out with General Charles Timmes, a CIA operative. As they climbed into the back of the car some of Thieu’s aides threw suitcases in the trunk. They tinkled like metal. Thieu had already moved most of his gold out of the country, so I think this was just his stash. The city was in chaos. One hundred and forty thousand North Vietnamese troops were within an hour or so of downtown Saigon. . . . Thieu was crying all the way to the airport. At one point he was talking about the artworks he’d gotten out to Taipei and Hong Kong.
When Snepp pulled up at the airport, the American ambassador, Graham Martin, was waiting.
Thieu raced for the aircraft and Martin literally helped him by the elbow up the stairs. Then Martin leapt down and began dragging away the stairway as if he were trying to rip away the umbilical of the American commitment to Vietnam. I ran up to him and said, “Mr. Ambassador, can I help, can I help?” He just stood there in a panic saying, “No, no, it’s done, it’s done.”
As the CIA secretly evacuated Thieu, the American media was full of accounts of “exhausted and dispirited” civilians “fleeing desperately” toward Saigon and then offshore. However shocking it may have been, most Americans followed the news with little expectation that the collapse of South Vietnam could be averted. A sense of numb resignation pervaded the nation.
Two decades earlier, Dr. Tom Dooley had brought Americans to tears with his account of how the U.S. Navy had supported a mass exodus in Vietnam, how it helped transport hundreds of thousands of frightened refugees, many of them Catholics, from “terror-ridden North Viet Nam” to the South, where a new, independent, and democratic nation was to be established. That powerful faith in America’s righteous role in the world was gone.
Even Time magazine, a cheerleader at every step of U.S. escalation, concluded in April 1975 that Vietnam was “a country seemingly fated for tragedy.” There was nothing to be done. The America that once seemed capable of bending the future to its own design must now bend to a fate beyond its control. With tanks still rolling toward Saigon, Time found most Americans already forgetting Vietnam. To those beginning to celebrate the American Bicentennial, “the news from Indochina seems almost as much a part of past history as the rout of the redcoats at Lexington and Concord.”
But on May 12, 1975, just when it seemed as if the United States was truly “finished” with Indochina, an American cargo ship, the SS Mayaguez, was seized by the newly victorious Cambodian Communists—the Khmer Rouge. The assault was in international waters, sixty miles south of Cambodia, but the new rulers were claiming rights to disputed islands in the Gulf of Thailand and ordered their navy to patrol aggressively. They seized the Mayaguez and removed its forty crewmen from the ship.
Although the Ford administration lacked basic intelligence about the local islands, it moved immediately toward a military response. No thought was given to a diplomatic solution, or to the possibility that force might further imperil the Americans being held and result in unacceptably high casualties. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was determined to demonstrate U.S. military power in the wake of humiliating defeat in Vietnam. He called for a major attack to recover the ship and its crew. “Let’s look ferocious!” Kissinger advised. President Ford agreed.
After initial air strikes on mainland Cambodia, about a hundred marines were dropped by helicopter on the island of Koh Tang, where they believed the Mayaguez crew was being held. The assault on Koh Tang began on the evening of May 14, just as President Ford was presiding over a formal state dinner for the Dutch prime minister. He spent most of the evening ducking out to hear crisis updates. Koh Tang was well fortified and heavily defended by Cambodian troops. Of the eleven helicopters ferrying marines to Koh Tang, four were shot down. The marines who landed safely came under immediate and intense ground fire. Near midnight, with American troops still under heavy fire, Ford received word that the entire Mayaguez crew of forty men were in a fishing trawler sailing back to their empty ship. U.S. forces took them all safely aboard a nearby American destroyer.
With that, the beaming president rose out of his seat and faced the half-dozen men around his desk, most of them still in the tuxedos they had worn to the state dinner. “They’re all safe,” he exulted. “We got them all out, thank God. It went perfectly.” The room erupted in “whoops of joy.” One aide said, “Damn, it puts the epaulets back on!” Ford’s handling of the incident was supported by 79 percent of Americans surveyed by a Harris poll.
The celebratory media cov
erage failed to reveal a key fact. A major military operation had not been required to rescue the Mayaguez crew. The Khmer Rouge decided to release all forty men before the U.S. attack on Koh Tang island. In fact, the crew was not even on Koh Tang; they had been taken to another island and then sent back to the Mayaguez aboard a fishing boat. American troops were thrown into a brutal, bloody battle that cost the lives of forty-one men, three of whom were left behind on Koh Tang and later executed by the Khmer Rouge. An additional fifty Americans were wounded. All to “rescue” forty men who were no longer in danger.
The recent war, and the U.S. role in it, was also absent from most stories about the Mayaguez incident. A little history lesson might have made the seizure of the U.S. cargo ship more understandable. After all, from 1969 to 1973, the United States had blasted Cambodia with 1.5 million tons of bombs. The main goal of the bombing was to hit North Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge troops, yet it killed or wounded thousands of Cambodian civilians, created thousands more homeless refugees, devastated the countryside, and led to massive food shortages by reducing the acreage of rice under cultivation from six million acres to one million. The bombing enraged Cambodians and drove many of them into the arms of the Khmer Rouge, who promised to destroy the American-backed government of Lon Nol and usher in a new dawn of equality and justice. Without American provocation, the Khmer Rouge might have remained the small, mostly ineffectual revolutionary force it had been in 1970. By 1975, it had grown into such a sizable movement it was able to rout the capital of Phnom Penh as easily as the Vietnamese Communists routed Saigon. The U.S. bombing had helped bring to power one of history’s most genocidal regimes, one that starved, worked to death, and murdered at least 1.5 million of its own people (from a population of about 7 million).
The Mayaguez coverage did not encourage historical reflection, but it did provide the template for a major new American story, one that became commonplace in the post-Vietnam era—a story of American victimhood. The common denominator was this: an innocent America and its people had become the victims of outrageous, inexplicable foreign assaults. These attacks, whether from “rogue” nations, terrorist groups, or religious extremists, were broadly viewed as barbaric hate crimes with no clear motive or American provocation. Some of the stories were about real and devastating attacks on American officials, soldiers, or civilians, from the Iran hostage crisis of 1979–1981, to the 1983 suicide truck bombing of a marine barracks in Lebanon, to the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Other accounts greatly exaggerated the threat posed by foreigners. In the 1970s, Arab oil tycoons were said to hold the U.S. hostage by jacking up prices through OPEC. In the 1980s, Japanese corporations and investors were buying up America. And Mexicans and other brown-skinned people seemed always to be pouring across our borders threatening to destroy American national identity. Then, more recently, came a “threat” that was not just an exaggeration but a flat-out falsehood: the Bush administration’s 2002–2003 claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), that it was linked to the terrorists who had attacked the United States on 9/11, and that it posed a dire and imminent threat to U.S. security. Every one of those assertions was baseless, yet Bush used them to justify a preemptive war against Iraq. As with all the stories of American victimhood, it was mostly founded on a single potent assumption: our innocence and their treachery.
Stories about outside attackers are not new in American history. Since the seventeenth century, European settlers routinely depicted Native Americans as foreign aliens on their own land, menacing savages who slaughtered innocent colonists or took them hostage. The first American best sellers were stories about Euro-Americans, especially women, who were held captive by the Indians. And virtually every U.S. war to follow was justified as a righteous response to a real or imagined first strike by non-Americans—from the Boston Massacre (1770), to the siege of the Alamo (1836), to the sinking of the Maine (1898) and the Lusitania (1915), to the attack on Pearl Harbor (1941), to the Gulf of Tonkin Incident (1964). But in all the wars before Vietnam, the United States had always triumphed (or, as in Korea, at least achieved its initial objective). The standard story featured an unprovoked attack followed by glorious victory. Temporary victimhood was quickly forgotten in the glow of righteous retribution.
Vietnam brought something wholly new and unexpected into the American war story: failure. And not just failure to achieve the war’s stated objectives, but failure to preserve the broad conviction that America was an exceptional force for good in the world. During the Vietnam War a growing number of Americans questioned the version of national history so vividly enshrined in high school textbooks of the 1950s—the idea that the United States was a peace-loving nation that had “accepted” world “leadership” only with the greatest reluctance and only to help other peoples secure the blessings of liberty.
The Vietnam War made a mockery of those convictions and by 1971, 58 percent of the public believed their nation was fighting an immoral war. That conclusion led many to cast a critical eye backward to the violent origins and history of the nation—to the brutal displacement of Native Americans, to the history and legacies of slavery, to the dozens of military interventions throughout the world to support or install dictatorships friendly to U.S. interests, even to the most popular war of all—World War II—and the firebombing and atomic weapons that were used to wage it.
The critical thinking awakened in the 1960s endured beyond the Vietnam War, but in less visible forms and forums. With war’s end, public attention turned away from the damage the United States had inflicted on Indochina. Gone were the daily reminders of that faraway world left in ruins. The Communists won the war, but the victor’s prize was a wrecked land, with thousands of towns and villages damaged or destroyed, millions of acres defoliated, cratered, and holding countless unexploded ordnance and toxins, millions of people dead, wounded, or orphaned. Back in the States, American leaders spoke as if their own nation had suffered just as much.
In 1977, CBS reporter Ed Bradley asked newly elected president Jimmy Carter if the United States had any “moral obligation to help rebuild the country” of Vietnam. Carter responded: “Well, the destruction was mutual . . . I do not feel that we ought to apologize or to castigate ourselves or to assume the status of culpability. Now, I am willing to face the future without reference to the past. . . . I don’t feel we owe a debt” to Vietnam.
“The destruction was mutual”? A small, poor country was pounded with five million tons of bombs, while a large, rich country remained physically unscathed; the country of 35 million had some 3 million people killed in the war—a majority of them civilians—while the nation of 200 million lost about 58,000 of its military troops. Had the United States lost the same portion of its citizens as Vietnam did, the memorial in Washington, DC, would have to include about 18 million Americans. Alongside the names of millions of military veterans, you would see the names of babies, young girls and boys, women and men of all ages.
American intervention in Vietnam coincided with the greatest stretch of economic growth and prosperity in U.S. history. While a majority of American civilians were enjoying unprecedented levels of material comfort, civilians all over Vietnam were struggling just to survive. In addition to the obvious perils of bombs and bullets, there were severe food shortages throughout the country. When the war ended there was another decade and more of widespread and unremitting hardship while America remained a relative horn of plenty.
In the 1970s, however, the U.S. economy faltered. The most obvious problems were stagnant economic growth and soaring inflation—stagflation. But larger underlying problems began to emerge, problems that haunt the U.S. economy to the present day—a declining industrial base, trade imbalances, overdependence on fossil fuels, surging deficits, and economic inequalities that would greatly widen in the 1980s and beyond. The economic concerns of the 1970s contributed to a growi
ng feeling that the United States was in decline, not because of its own decisions and actions, but because it was a victim of forces beyond its control.
In 1977, Jimmy Carter became the first American president to acknowledge that the nation’s resources and capacities were not boundless. In his inaugural address he said: “We have learned that ‘more’ is not necessarily ‘better,’ that even our great Nation has its recognized limits, and that we can neither answer all questions nor solve all problems . . . we must simply do our best.” Even in the midst of the Great Depression, President Franklin Roosevelt was generally more upbeat about the prospects for progress.
During the summer of 1979, President Carter offered an even bleaker assessment. The nation’s problems ran “much deeper” than “gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession.” After ten days of intense discussions with dozens of people, Carter went on television to define the “true problems” plaguing America. His conclusion: The United States was suffering a “crisis of confidence . . . a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.” Many Americans had lost faith in the government, in democracy, and in the likelihood of a better future. Carter went on to suggest that recent history—“filled with shocks and tragedy”—was largely responsible for the damage done to the national spirit. The resolute assurance that the United States was exceptionally peaceful, triumphant, righteous, honorable, prosperous, and bountiful had come undone in just a few short years:
American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity Page 28