The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan

by Rick Perlstein

  Vessels arrived at their intended destinations, coastal cities like Qui Nhon, Tuy Hoa, and Nha Trang; desperate passengers discovered that these “safe havens” had already been abandoned to the Communists. Da Nang was the nation’s second-largest city, formerly home to the mighty United States air base, once the busiest airport in the world. A great battle was supposedly under way to save the beachside metropolis. Lazy American reporters deployed the usual clichés to describe the fighting: “juggernaut,” “blitzkrieg.” A skeptical writer, though, quoted a French observer on the scene: “There never was a last battle for Da Nang.” Another eyewitness broadened the description: “There is no war.” South Vietnam was already lost.

  On March 28, South Vietnamese marines clambered aboard the last ship to depart the city, the USS Pioneer Commander, and slaughtered twenty-five civilians. All told, there were four thousand passengers aboard—but only a few barrels of water. “One woman’s baby had died in her arms while she waited on a barge for four days without water or shelter,” read an Associated Press dispatch. “She became hysterical as she came aboard the freighter and leaped overboard.”

  There were airplanes for the refugees, too. But only three civilians made it aboard the last one to lift off. The rest of the passengers were members of the South Vietnamese 1st Division’s Hac Bao, or “Black Panther,” unit, who fought their way aboard by opening fire into the waiting crowd. Not every member of the Black Panther unit made it, however, for when the plane landed in Saigon, a mangled body, M-16 rifle still strapped to his shoulder, was found dangling from the fuselage. Others dropped from wheel wells from thousands of feet. Another plane, lifting off south of Ban Me Thuot, was barely able to ascend after a grenade went off under one of the wings. At the South China Sea port of Cam Ranh Bay, amid the Vietnamese marines aiming grenades and rifle fire at both civilians and their very own officers, a helicopter carrying President Ford’s personal photographer, part of a White House observational mission, was shot at. He told the New York Times, “We decided not to make any more passes over the ship.”

  THE GRISLY DETAILS FROM THE USS Pioneer Commander, the chaotic last flight out of Da Nang, and other such stories did not run in all too many newspapers, which reserved space for news of, Operation Babylift, instead. “Their eyes wide with wonder and showing no ill effects from a 25 hour dash across the Pacific from endangered Saigon, 55 Vietnamese orphans have arrived to a new life in the United States,” ran the front-page article on April 3 in the Toledo Blade, complete with photo of two darling sleeping infants. Americans couldn’t get enough news, either, about the young man who organized Operation Babylift. Ed Daley, president of World Airways, was “gregarious, an outgoing, good party guy who will gather up a planeload of friends and fly off to Europe for a weekend,” ran one profile (“TOUGH AIRLINE CHIEF LIKES CHILDREN; SENDS THOUSANDS TO CIRCUS, SYMPHONY”). On an impulse, he had flown one of his company’s 727s to Da Nang, hoping to help organize evacuations. He arrived only in time for that last planeload, the one overrun by the ARVN 1st Division. Throwing punches, crying “One at a time, one at a time, there’s room for everybody”—and then, his clothes finally ripped to shreds, firing a pistol in the air—Daley was forced to stand by helplessly as the taxiing plane ran over people on the runway. Unbowed, he pressed south on to Saigon, confident his American ingenuity would find a way to redeem the debacle. He had conceived a plan, and a slogan worthy of an advertising man: Operation Babylift. “Unable to do anything else in Vietnam,” Schell wrote, “the United States was now making off with planeloads of Vietnamese babies.” As freed POWs would redeem the debacle in 1973, rescuing orphans would redeem it now.

  And so on April 3, the news was filled with smiling prospective parents, accounts of Daley’s defiance in continuing the operation even after the Federal Aviation Administration threatened to throw the book at him, and with testimony about jammed State Department and charity phone lines following the merest rumor of his plans: “We had big responses from the American public when the Hungarians and Czechs and Cubans had their crises, but this has been the biggest response in my thirty years’ experience,” said a relief specialist from the U.S. Catholic Conference.

  Then, two days later, on April 5, the news was this: “Grim workers resumed their search today for more bodies of Vietnamese war orphans killed Friday when a huge U.S. jetliner en route to the United States crashed in a rice paddy.”

  The search continued as a special section of Time now on the newsstands asked, “Is This What America Has Left?” The Economist’s cover, “The Fading of America,” pronounced, “The Indochina rout will now make every ally of the United States doubt whether it can believe in the promises of American support.” British Petroleum and Gulf finalized the sale of their holdings in Kuwait to the government there. The two Western companies had asked a price of $2 billion. They were paid one-fortieth of that. A leader of West Germany’s Christian Democrats worried, “If Berlin were attacked tomorrow I am not absolutely certain that the United States would intervene.” According to a new poll, only 34 percent of Americans would favor helping West Germany in the event of an invasion, and only 27 percent would want to help Israel.

  PRESIDENT FORD, WHATEVER THE FATE of his personal photographer, was still confident the rout could be reversed.

  On January 9, Ron Nessen had announced that the president wanted military aid for Vietnam above the $700 million Congress had already authorized for the fiscal year. It was one of the other things that shocked Tom Wicker at the White House meeting between Ford and his Times colleagues: the president’s brassy conviction that a few hundred million more might just turn this thing around. “Some note in his remarks even suggested to me,” he recalled, “the insane possibility of the return of American troops.” Only 12 percent of the public in the second week of February thought the United States should send more aid; in mid-March two liberal senators, Republican Charles “Mac” Mathias of Maryland and Democrat Adlai Stevenson III of Illinois, introduced legislation to cut off help to Southeast Asia altogether. Senator Frank Church, for his part, asked, “We have so much blood on our hands out there. Why do we thirst for more?” On March 28 the president sent Army Chief of Staff Fred Weyand to South Vietnam to assess the situation. The conclusions he brought back were simultaneously realistic and fantastical.

  Realistic: “The current military situation is critical, and the probability of the survival of South Vietnam as a truncated nation in the southern provinces is marginal at best.”

  Fantastical: An emergency congressional appropriation of $722 million would be all it would take to save the day.

  Nessen announced an April 10 presidential foreign policy speech to a joint session of Congress. In the interim, following a golf date with Bob Hope in Palm Springs and a dinner with Ronald Reagan (who “has been critical of Mr. Ford’s policies as President,” the New York Times explained, “and is being promoted as a possible candidate for President in 1976, even though both he and the President are Republicans and Mr. Ford has announced his intention to seek a Presidential term in his own right”), a reporter at the airport asked Ford what he was doing about the military losses in Southeast Asia. The president “laughed playfully,” as the New Yorker reported it, “and broke into a run.”

  How droll: America, the country that ran away.

  In a speech to a San Francisco civic organization he deployed the death of the babies to advance what some saw as a message of reconciliation—and others saw as an invitation to civic amnesia: “In this hour of sadness and, I am sure, frustration, let us not dispel our energies with recrimination or assessments of blame. The facts, whatever they may be, will speak for themselves, and historians will have plenty of time to judge later on. What is now essential is that we maintain our balance as a nation and as people and that we maintain our unity as a powerful but peace-loving nation.” He added a political fillip, however: “This obviously is not the point in history to dismantle our defenses, nor can we adopt such a naive view of t
he world that we cripple our vital intelligence agencies.”

  And that was not a unifying notion at all. Among those who might not agree were the voters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

  Late in 1974 a director named Peter Davis showed a documentary called Hearts and Minds briefly in a Los Angeles theater to qualify it for Academy Award consideration. It opened with an Operation Homecoming parade for POW George Thomas Coker, who told a crowd on the steps of the Linden, New Jersey, city hall about Vietnam, “If it wasn’t for the people, it was very pretty. The people there are very backwards and primitive and they make a mess out of everything.” General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces, in a comment the director explained had not been spontaneous but had been repeated on three takes, was shown explaining, “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.” (Thereupon, the film cut to a sobbing Vietnamese mother being restrained from climbing into the grave atop the coffin of her son.) Daniel Ellsberg was quoted: “We aren’t on the wrong side. We are the wrong side.” The movie concluded with an interview with an activist from Vietnam Veterans Against the War. “We’ve all tried very hard to escape what we have learned in Vietnam,” he said. “I think Americans have worked extremely hard not to see the criminalities that their officials and their policy-makers exhibited.”

  A massive thunderstorm raged outside at the Oscar ceremony at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on April 8, 1975—where after Sammy Davis Jr.’s musical tribute to Fred Astaire, and Ingrid Bergman’s acceptance of the Best Supporting Actress Award for Murder on the Orient Express, and Francis Ford Coppola’s award for best director (one of six Oscars for The Godfather: Part II: “I’m wearing a tuxedo with a bulletproof cummerbund,” cohost Bob Hope cracked, “Who knows what will happen if Al Pacino doesn’t win”), Lauren Hutton and Danny Thomas opened the envelope and announced that Hearts and Minds had won as the year’s best documentary.

  Producer Bert Schneider took the microphone and said, “It’s ironic that we’re here at a time just before Vietnam is about to be liberated.” Then he read a telegram from the head of the North Vietnamese delegation to the Paris peace talks. It thanked the antiwar movement “for all they have done on behalf of peace. . . . Greetings of friendship to all American people.”

  Backstage, Bob Hope was so enraged he tried to push his way past the broadcast’s producer to issue an onstage rebuttal. Shirley MacLaine, who had already mocked Sammy Davis from the stage for having endorsed Richard Nixon’s reelection, shouted, “Don’t you dare.” Anguished telegrams from viewers began piling up backstage. One, from a retired Army colonel, read, “WITH 55,000 DEAD YOUNG AMERICANS IN DEFENSE OF FREEDOM AND MILLIONS OF VIETNAMESE FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM . . . DEMAND WITHDRAWAL OF AWARD.” On the back of that particular wire, Hope madly scribbled something for his cohost Frank Sinatra to read during his next turn on camera—which he did, to a mix of boos and applause: “The Academy is saying we are not responsible for any political utterances on this program and we are sorry that had to take place.” Upon which, backstage, the broadcast’s third cohost, Shirley MacLaine, berated Sinatra: “You said you were speaking for the Academy. Well, I’m a member of the Academy and you didn’t ask me!” Her brother, Warren Beatty, snarled at Sinatra on camera: “Thank you, Frank, you old Republican.”

  Two nights later, in a haunting, haunted performance full of awkward pauses and applause lines that yielded no applause, the president told Congress that “to build upon our many successes, to repair damage where we find it, to recover our balance, to move ahead as a united people,” it should vote $722 million in military assistance for South Vietnam and $250 million for humanitarian and economic aid. (Two Democratic freshmen and Phil Burton walked out.) “Let us put an end to self-inflicted wounds,” he said, his Midwestern voice sounding flatter than ever. “Let us remember that our national unity is a most priceless asset. Let us deny our adversaries the satisfaction of using Vietnam to pit Americans against Americans. At this moment, the United States must present to the world a united front.”

  And then he absorbed the unmistakable fact that the public was already united—against giving Vietnam anything at all. Gallup found that the public opposed humanitarian aid by a margin of 55 percent to 40 percent and military aid by 79 percent to 15. The respondents opposed letting evacuated South Vietnamese live here by 52 percent to 36 percent. Even, apparently, infants: in San Francisco’s Presidio district, a warehouse providing temporary housing for the orphans of Operation Babylift (which angry South Vietnamese, Swiss aide workers reported, were now calling “an abduction of children”) was under armed military guard after threats to their safety.

  The most hawkish Democratic senator, Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson, said he opposed military aid, too, and added, “I don’t know of any on the Democratic side who will support it.” The Appropriations Committee chair, John McClellan of Arkansas, another hawk, said it would only “prolong the conflict and perhaps postpone the inevitable—a Communist victory, a complete takeover.” A Republican dove, Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon, said, “I am appalled that a man would continue in such a bankrupt policy”—and the most infamous Republican hawk of all, Barry Goldwater, had already announced, a year earlier, “We can scratch South Vietnam. It is imminent that South Vietnam is going to fall into the hands of North Vietnam.” You could not reasonably see this as an ideological or partisan choice. But in the future, it would be interpreted by cynical and opportunistic critics as precisely that.

  On April 14, the secretaries of state and defense met with Senate leaders to press the case for the appropriations, and to discuss details of the impending likely evacuation of all American personnel from Saigon—and, the president hoped, of thousands of loyal South Vietnamese. Henry Kissinger cited a million as the upward range of the South Vietnamese who would need rescuing, 174,000 as the low number. A mission sent by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had just returned from Vietnam and reported it might be too late even to safely evacuate Americans. In the private meeting with the secretaries of state and defense, a skeptical Senator Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island said that perhaps the nation of Borneo would welcome refugees: “It has the same latitude, the same climate, and would welcome some anti-Communists.”

  They were only responding to the will of their constituents. In conservative St. Petersburg, Florida, the newspaper printed readers’ responses to a survey. They opposed humanitarian aid 695 to 361 and military aid 1,010 to 65. “I can never understand why our government is always so willing to rush great quantities of materials and equipment to most foreign countries for aid, but when our own people need aid it becomes so hard to come by,” one reader wrote.

  “When you read what those Vietnamese men did to women and children being rescued, think who would get the food and other aid,” wrote another. “If Mr. Ford has millions of dollars to squander on a hopeless cause, he could use it to curb crime . . . here at home.”

  “Let’s stop this once and for all and quit playing on the sympathies of United States citizens.”

  “It would seem that President Ford has become bereft of his senses. . . . What about the billion dollars’ worth of armaments that the South Vietnamese army walked (or ran) away from and which fell into the North Vietnamese’s hands?”

  Congress voted only the $200 million for humanitarian aid. The House vote against military aid included fifty Republicans. Ford promptly told Congress that it was responsible for the “loss of Vietnam”—not, say, a South Vietnamese army whose officers abandoned their troops to slaughter infant civilians. He claimed that “just a relatively small American commitment” could have met “any military challenges.” (He lied. The Pentagon’s estimate of what it called an “austere program” to save Saigon had been $1.4 billion at a minimum.) Senators, for their part, saved face by describing how Nixon had gulled them—writing “secret agreements” into the Paris Peace Accords promising future military assist
ance he had no authority to give.

  Two branches of government, hurling recrimination at one another, accusations almost unto treason.

  To the west, the capital of Cambodia fell to a fearsome Communist agglomeration known as the Khmer Rouge. This was not bad news, the Los Angeles Times editorialized, “for the suffering Cambodians themselves.” The New York Times’ correspondent there, Sydney H. Schanberg, published a reflection amid the collapse noting the “million Cambodians killed or wounded (one seventh of the population), hundreds of thousands of refugees living in shanties, a devastated countryside, children dying of starvation and carpenters turning out a steady stream of coffins made from ammunition crates.” It was headlined “INDOCHINA WITHOUT AMERICANS: FOR MOST, A BETTER LIFE.” However, within three days, watching the horrors already unfolding under Khmer Rouge rule, Schanberg wrote that he was changing his mind: it was already evident that the Khmer Rouge were beginning a genocide of millions of their countrymen in a lunatic bid to radically engineer an agrarian society without banks, religion, or indeed any modern technology whatsoever, beginning with the purging of intellectuals, businessmen, Buddhists, and foreigners—the establishment of a Communist “Year Zero.” “Everyone had felt that when the Communists came and the war finally ended, at least the suffering would largely be over. All of us were wrong.”

  The North Vietnamese invasion force continued its waltz southward. The Washington Post columnist Tom Braden quoted an off-the-record remark of Henry Kissinger that “the United States must carry out some act somewhere in the world which shows its determination to continue to be a world power.” On April 21, President Thieu appeared on South Vietnamese TV and resigned his office in a lachrymose, ninety-minute performance, citing Richard Nixon’s broken promises of a “full force” if North Vietnam broke the cease-fire. The next day his former government’s mighty air base at Bien Hoa, where Bob Hope used to broadcast USO shows at Christmastime, fell to the Communists. The day after that, President Ford told graduates assembled in the Tulane University field house, “Today America can regain the sense of pride that existed before. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned.”