Honorable Exit

by Thurston Clarke

  She called a meeting of the heads of the consular sections and U.S. agencies in Da Nang and briefed them on the official plan. They agreed that the consulate should ditch it and evacuate its Vietnamese employees. One called their evacuation “a matter of conscience.” They decided to limit the evacuees to employees and their spouses and children, leaving behind siblings and parents. It was harsh, but they could not imagine finding transportation for extended Vietnamese families. Tull returned to her office and drafted a cable to acting ambassador Wolfgang Lehmann requesting permission to begin a phased evacuation. She looked out her window and saw the sun sparkling on the river and a city at peace. Yet she was about to inform Saigon and Washington that the greatest U.S. foreign policy and military adventure since World War II was about to end in ignominy and defeat. She had no illusions about the possible consequences to her career of being the first U.S. diplomat in South Vietnam to deliver this unwelcome news, nor would it help that the person delivering it was a woman.

  She cabled Lehmann that if Thieu withdrew the Airborne Division, the Communists would seize South Vietnam’s northernmost provinces. She proposed bringing official Americans stationed in outlying provinces into Da Nang by car or helicopter every evening and returning them to their posts every morning to avoid panicking the Vietnamese. She asked for aircraft to fly American dependents and the consular district’s Vietnamese employees and their families to Saigon. When she showed a draft to her section chiefs, CIA base chief Bob Grealy asked her to add a sentence saying, “The Base Chief concurs.”

  She included Grealy’s line and decided that if she was going to wreck her career, she might as well go whole hog. She added another line saying that a massive evacuation from all of South Vietnam was inevitable and imminent and recommended that the U.S. Navy reposition elements of the Seventh Fleet off the coast. Her secretary typed up a final draft. As Tull signed off on it, she said, “Okay, here we go. Either they give me what I’m asking for or there’s going to be a demand that I leave the post immediately and I’ll be back in Washington with my career in shambles.” At that moment, Al Francis’s wife came into her office with coffee and a plate of fortune cookies. Tull’s fortune read, “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

  Tull thought that if Ambassador Martin had been in Saigon, he would have dismissed her cable as panicky and premature. Instead, Lehmann called several hours later to say that he had approved her request and that Air America planes would begin arriving the next morning. She informed General Truong and promised that the evacuation would be discreet and done in stages to avoid upsetting the public. She added that some Americans had asked if Vietnamese military personnel such as translators could be included. They feared that the Communists would punish them harshly because of their close working relationships with Americans. Truong approved their departure and called her evacuation “a wise move,” a reaction confirming her impression that with the Airborne Division gone, he despaired of defending Hue and Da Nang.

  Her slow-motion evacuation ran smoothly. Americans stationed in the provinces brought out a contingent of Vietnamese for evacuation every evening and slept in Da Nang before returning to their posts. Martin learned about what she was doing while on leave and complained to the State Department. He accused her of overreacting and promised to square things away when he returned. Al Francis was also critical when he came back from medical leave. She had already been scheduled to leave for Washington in February, and Francis encouraged her to depart as soon as possible. On March 24, two days before she left for Saigon, General Truong held a dinner in her honor. As she was heading into the dining room, his wife pulled her aside and asked in Vietnamese, “If our country is about to fall to the Communists will you take three of our children?”

  Tull recalled the atrocities that the Communists had committed after taking Hue in 1968 and thought, “Oh, this makes perfect sense.” If they captured Truong, he was sure to be executed or spend years in a concentration camp, and his family would face punishment and discrimination. She agreed to take the couple’s three middle children, aged nine, eleven, and fifteen. Mrs. Truong could not bear to part with her toddler, and her seventeen-year-old son was almost draft age. Tull doubted that Truong or his wife would escape and assumed that she would be raising their children as her own.

  Truong seated her next to him at dinner. CIA base chief Grealy sat on the other side. Speaking to Truong in Vietnamese so Grealy would not understand them, she said, “You know, your wife has asked me to take your children to the United States if the Communists take the country.” As Truong turned to face her, she added, “I have told her that I will.”

  Speaking slowly and pausing between each word, Truong said, “Thank…you…very…much.” She took his reply as more evidence that the war was lost and she had been right to risk her career to launch an evacuation.

  CHAPTER 3

  Who Lost Vietnam?

  The photograph that White House photographer David Kennerly took of the March 25 Oval Office meeting called to brief army chief of staff General Frederick Weyand before he led a mission to South Vietnam reveals little about the complicated relationships between some of those in attendance. President Ford sits behind his desk, hands crossed and leaning back in his chair. Ambassador Graham Martin is directly opposite him, and General Weyand and Henry Kissinger are on Martin’s left, staring at him intently as he makes the kinds of statements that sixteen days later will prompt Kissinger to tell Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, “Between you and me, we’ve got an Ambassador there [in Saigon] who is maybe losing his cool.”

  Weyand had agreed to lead what would prove to be the last and most futile of the multiple fact-finding missions that American presidents had sent to Vietnam. Ford had charged him with determining how much U.S. military aid was necessary to replace South Vietnam’s recent losses in arms and equipment and to restore the morale of its armed forces. Before resigning the previous August, President Nixon had requested $1.45 billion in military and economic aid for South Vietnam. Congress had authorized $1 billion but had appropriated only $700 million. Despite Phuoc Long, Ford had been unable to persuade Congress to release the unappropriated $300 million. Now that the situation had worsened, he planned to request the $300 million again, in addition to whatever sum Weyand recommended.

  The conversation between Ford, Weyand, Kissinger, and Martin was largely untethered from reality—from what Theresa Tull had reported, Walter Martindale had experienced, Bill Bell had heard, Stuart Herrington had observed, and Tom Glenn’s intelligence had revealed. This was not surprising because the premise of the Weyand mission—that additional American aid could alter the outcome of the war—was at best wishful thinking and at worst a fantasy postponing the moment when Kissinger and Ford would have to face the task of evacuating Americans and South Vietnamese. In fact, as Ford, Kissinger, and Weyand knew, Congress was unlikely to authorize whatever sum Weyand suggested, and even if it did, no amount of aid could arrive in time to save South Vietnam. Weyand’s mission amounted to political theater, a way for Ford to appear to do something. The only person at the Oval Office meeting who apparently did not recognize this was Graham Martin.

  The night before leaving Saigon for home leave on March 1, Martin had informed Los Angeles Times correspondent George McArthur, the only member of the Saigon press corps whom he professed to like and trust, that there was “no way” that North Vietnam could win militarily. “I told him he was full of shit,” McArthur recalled, “although I phrased it more politely.” He and Martin had a complicated relationship that McArthur likened to that between “friendly enemies.” McArthur had cut his teeth on the Korean War and had been covering Vietnam since 1965. He admired Martin’s patriotism (“he’s a patriot all right”) but believed that pumping more money and arms into South Vietnam was sinful because it would result only in more killing and destruction, given that the final outcome was bound to be a North Vietnamese victory. Among their other di
sagreements was Martin’s unwavering support for Thieu, who he claimed possessed a “boldness of vision” making him “like Napoleon.”

  By the time of the March 25 Oval Office meeting, Martin had been away from South Vietnam for almost a month. Despite Ban Me Thuot and the Convoy of Tears, at a State Department meeting the day before he had told Kissinger that the situation was not “in any way hopeless” and suggested that the secretary persuade Americans that by surrendering the Central Highlands to the Communists, Thieu had made a “wise consolidation.” On this day, he told Ford that South Vietnam’s armed forces would give the Communists “a helluva scrap.”

  As the meeting was ending, Ford turned to Weyand and said, “This is one of the most significant missions you have ever had. You are not going over to lose, but to be tough and see what we can do….We want your recommendations for the things which can be tough and shocking to the North.” He added, “I regret I don’t have authority to do some of the things President Nixon could do.”

  Weyand’s mission would instead be fruitless and insignificant, and the only “tough and shocking” thing that Ford could have done would have been to order B-52 bombers back to attack North Vietnamese positions, a move that would violate the Case-Church amendment and infuriate Congress and the American people. Martin knew this, but as if channeling Richard Nixon, he said, “If we are not legalistic, there are things we can do.”

  “Like what?” Kissinger asked.

  Martin was silent.

  Weyand promised to give the South Vietnamese “a shot in the arm.” The day before, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger had warned him that it was too late for that, telling him, “Fred, be careful. Don’t overpromise. Don’t get caught up on the notion that you are going to reverse the tide. It is all going down.”

  Ford and Kissinger disliked and distrusted Schlesinger and had not included him in this meeting. (In November, Ford would fire him.) But despite Ford’s talk of doing something “tough and shocking,” he and Kissinger privately agreed with Schlesinger’s pessimism. Kissinger would later claim that by the time Weyand went to Saigon, “President Ford and I had no illusions about the outcome of the tragedy” and had sent Weyand to reassure America’s allies because “we thought cutting off aid to an ally in extremis was shameful and could have a disastrous impact on nations relying on America for their security.” He failed to mention their other motive: shifting the blame for losing South Vietnam to Congress when it refused to appropriate whatever sum Weyand had recommended. Kissinger would also claim that Ford had requested additional aid for South Vietnam “for largely symbolic reasons,” that “those of us who favored going through the motions of giving aid knew it would never get there before the collapse,” and that those opposing it knew that “the end was imminent no matter what the fate of the aid bill.”

  Years later, Kissinger would write that he and Ford had also sent Weyand to South Vietnam and requested that Congress approve supplemental aid to buy time to organize an evacuation. Had they not asked for more aid, he argued, Thieu’s government would have panicked, and Americans residing in South Vietnam might have faced retribution from an enraged populace and military. “Above all,” he wrote, “we were fully determined to save as many Vietnamese who had cooperated with America as we could. All this imposed a need for gaining time.” Because of this, he said, Ford had sent Weyand to South Vietnam, even though “the $300 million supplemental had become largely irrelevant.” But if he and Ford had been so concerned with evacuating Vietnamese, he never explained why neither of them had raised the issue with Weyand on March 25.

  Before the meeting ended, Kissinger had some fun at Martin’s expense, telling him, “I’m glad you’re going back out there. When it all goes down and the American people ask, ‘Who lost Vietnam?’ Philip Habib will have someone to point to.”

  Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia and Pacific Affairs Philip Habib was a long-standing Martin enemy. He considered Martin “wrong about a lot of things,” “a strange, strange man,” and “a cold, calculating man with a very keen mind,” whom Vietnam had “destroyed physically and somewhat mentally.” He had formed some of these opinions while accompanying a congressional fact-finding delegation to South Vietnam in February during which Martin had asserted that his analysis of the situation in Vietnam was correct because “I’ve been in this business for forty years and I’ve never been wrong.”

  There had been a testy exchange between Habib and Martin at the previous day’s State Department meeting. After Martin asserted that it was “quite possible” that South Vietnam could hold Da Nang, Habib had shot back that it was not “a possibility,” adding, “The situation is so grave that they will be lucky to hold on to the heartland right now.”

  Martin took offense at Kissinger’s joke about Habib blaming him for losing South Vietnam and retorted, “Remember, the one thing you’ve got going out there is the fact I am the only guy involved in this whole business who has absolutely no pressure to make some goddamned fool decision to avoid criticism. There is absolutely no way I am going to be held responsible for the fall of Saigon….So I am not interested in doing anything except what makes sense right now to get the Americans out alive and as many of our Vietnamese friends, to whom we have committed ourselves, as we can. And I’m going to do that, and I’m not going to be pushed unless you relieve me.”

  Kissinger’s joke had been particularly unkind if you knew, as he did, how much Martin claimed to admire him. Earlier that year, Martin had seized the opportunity of standing next to him at a State Department urinal to praise him as “a genius.” Kissinger had replied coolly, “Well, Graham, you’re a genius in your own way.”

  The joke was unkinder still if you knew, as Kissinger did, how reluctant Martin had been to accept the Saigon post because he dreaded being known as the ambassador who had lost South Vietnam. When Nixon offered him the job in 1973, he had been preparing to retire as ambassador to Rome and move to his Tuscan hill farm, where, he liked to say, his greatest ambition was to graft an olive tree onto a juniper so he could put the olive in a martini and get instant gin. (He also told friends and family that he would have liked “to have written, to have explored, just to have lived.”) He told his daughter Janet that he would refuse Saigon, “because if anything happens they’ll have to make a scapegoat out of somebody.” But over the course of several months Kissinger’s deputy Alexander Haig bullied him into accepting the position by implying that to refuse it would be dishonorable, on one occasion saying, “If the President [Nixon] says he needs you to go, you go. You cannot spend eight years in Paris, four in Rome, and then turn down a tough job.”

  Three weeks after Phuoc Long fell, Martin tried to escape his sacrificial goat tether by suggesting that Kissinger name him deputy secretary of state. He made the request in a January 27 cable headed “Personal and Absolutely Eyes Only via Martin Channel.” He opened with a blast of flattery, telling Kissinger, “That was one hell of a speech you made in Los Angeles. Historians may compare its long range effect with [Secretary of State] Marshall’s Harvard speech which led to European recovery.” Marshall’s speech had provided “a rallying point, a blueprint,” he said, but it had taken “a great many dedicated and intelligent people…working under the direction of Under Secretary [Dean] Acheson to effect the historic reversal in American attitudes and preserve Western Europe for the Free World.”

  Without mentioning Deputy Secretary of State Robert Ingersoll by name (yet), Martin compared him to Dean Acheson and found him wanting, telling Kissinger, “It should, by now, be quite clear to you that you do not have the comparable mechanism to provide for you the indispensable backstopping which Acheson provided for Marshall. With it, under your leadership, the U.S. could really embark on a series of breakthroughs which would make the Marshall period, and even your own remarkable record to date, look like a kindergarten exercise. Without it, your individual genius can provide only such gains w
here you have time to personally supervise the follow-through of your initiatives.” He then volunteered to become Kissinger’s Dean Acheson, saying, “I have absolutely no doubt of my ability to organize and marshall the intellectual resources of the Department to provide you the kind of backstopping you need.” And if Kissinger decided to make him deputy secretary of state, he added, “Now would be the most appropriate time to do so.”

  He suggested that Kissinger appoint Ingersoll ambassador to West Germany, giving him “a graceful exit.” To discourage Kissinger from thinking that he was trying to escape South Vietnam, he said that if Congress provided the necessary appropriations, “there is no way for Saigon to lose.” He reminded him that he had promised to serve in Saigon for only a year and was now into his second and planning to leave in the spring. He closed, “It’s been fun working with you.”

  His pitch was crude: Kissinger could become the century’s greatest secretary of state and make Marshall’s State Department look like “a kindergarten exercise,” but only if Martin was around to “backstop” him. There is no evidence that Kissinger responded, and their first face-to-face meeting since Martin’s cable had probably been at the State Department on March 24.

  It must have been galling for Martin to have Kissinger brush aside his offer, not least because some of the great American diplomatic luminaries of the twentieth century—Averell Harriman, David Bruce, Douglas Dillon, and George Marshall—had mentored and promoted him and praised his brilliance, leaving him with a Kissinger-sized ego, one even less well disguised than Kissinger’s.