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

by Rick Perlstein

  Among those who disagreed—who wished to dwell on Vietnam as a national teachable moment—was a writer in the “Notes and Comments” section of the New Yorker, who said, “Our noble commitments, our firm stands, our global responsibilities—how frequently, in recent years, have they served as a cover for self-interest and greed, then as sunglasses against the flames?” And the editors of the liberal weekly the New Republic, who observed that this was the week of the two hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord. “If the Bicentennial helps us focus on the contrast between our idealism and our crimes, so much the better.” A contributor in the same issue opined that North Vietnam “is one of the several among the poorest nations in the world that have tried or will try to create a collectivist society, based on principles that are repugnant to us, yet are likely to produce greater welfare and security for its people than any local alternative ever offered, at a cost in freedom that affects [only] a small elite.”

  And now the revolutionaries would have their chance, in South Vietnam and North Vietnam both—or, as it was soon simply to be known, just “Vietnam.”

  ON APRIL 28, THE ROCKEFELLER Commission called former Central Intelligence Agency chief Richard Helms back from his posting as ambassador to Iran to testify about the allegations of CIA assassinations. Eighteen days earlier, President Ford, in his speech asking for Vietnam aid, had said, “The Central Intelligence Agency has been of maximum importance to me. The Central Intelligence Agency and its associated intelligence organizations could be of maximum importance to some of you in this audience who might be President at some later date. I think it would be catastrophic for the Congress or anyone else to destroy the usefulness by dismantling, in effect, our intelligence systems upon which we rest so heavily.”

  Daniel Schorr confronted Helms on his way out of the hearing room: “Welcome back”

  “You cocksucker!” Helms replied. “ ‘Killer Schorr’—that’s what they ought to call you!”

  The cameras started rolling; Helms was hardly more civil. “I must say, Mr. Schorr, I didn’t like what you had to say on some of your broadcasts on the subject. I don’t think it was fair, and I don’t think it was right. As far as I know, the CIA was never responsible for assassinating any foreign leaders.”

  Another reporter followed up: had he ever discussed assassinations?

  Helms raised his voice: “I don’t know whether I’ve stopped beating my wife, whether you’ve stopped beating your wife. In government, there are discussions of practically everything under the sun.”

  “Of assassinations?”

  “Of everything.”

  That same day in Saigon, where the CIA may or may not have assassinated South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, Tan Son Nhut Air Base fell to the Communists. Its fall was hastened by an attack by South Vietnamese troops who, rather than defend the base from their erstwhile enemy, stole a small armada of airplanes themselves.

  That was the coup de grâce. The next morning, at six thirty, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger announced, “The President ordered the final withdrawal of the Americans from Vietnam at approximately 11:00 last night on the advice of the ambassador and subsequent to the closing of Tan Son Nhut making it necessary to go to a helicopter air lift.”

  The evacuation was dubbed “Operation Frequent Wind”—like a reference to flatulence, like something out of M*A*S*H. It was desperate, sordid, unplanned. The American consul general, after all, had been going around town announcing, “Saigon is as sound as the American dollar.” (But how sound was that? Inflation was 9.2 percent.) The ambassador’s wife resolutely refused to pack.

  And Americans, once the film cans were flown back to New York, got to see on TV how it had all gone down.

  John Chancellor, opening NBC’s evening news broadcast on April 30: “Good evening. The city of Saigon was renamed today. Victorious Communists who forced the city’s surrender said that henceforth the city will be known as ‘Ho Chi Minh City.’ ”

  A Soviet-made Vietcong tank was shown crashing through the gate of the presidential palace, a Communist soldier scrambling down the nose, running a National Liberation Front flag across the lawn.

  The choppers evacuating Americans maneuvered in zigs and zags, the better to dodge heat-seeking missiles in their seventeen-minute flights to the ships massed in the South China Sea—and to dodge American helicopters commandeered by enemy pilots trying to shoot Americans down. Other helicopters were commandeered by deserters. On the deck of the USS Blue Ridge one landed without permission, tangling in the rotor blades of an evacuation chopper. The mightiest nation in the world, unable to control access to its own warships; American authorities finally decided to simply let the deserters board, to class them as refugees. Aboard the Blue Ridge, the surplus helicopters were simply pushed overboard, useless military hardware, buried at sea.

  The penultimate segment of the previous evenings NBC’s newscast had been an editorial from the network’s stern house commentator, David Brinkley, broadcast, incongruously, from outdoors:

  “The United States did not lose the war since it never really tried to win it, instead trying to help South Vietnam win the war, and finding it would not, or could not; and though the United States did not lose the war, it did lose a great deal. The money, we know about; the inflation, we still live with; the social discords in this country are still to be seen. The other loss we also know about, though we don’t talk about it much—”

  The camera pulled back, zooming wide, revealing that he was standing in the middle of an endless sea of white tombstones.

  “Fifty-six thousand lives, plus about 160,000 seriously wounded, many of whom will never recover. So when some future politician for some reason feels the need to drag this country into a war, he might come to Arlington, and stand maybe right over there somewhere”—he pointed off into the distance, then pulled his hands tight across himself—“to make his announcement and tell what he has in mind. If he can attract public support, speaking from a place like this, then his reasons for starting a war will have to have been good ones.”

  Then, also incongruously, another editorial followed, from the broadcast’s anchor, offering the opposite interpretation. “The American people gave up on Vietnam without telling Vietnam,” John Chancellor said, and the image on-screen was a clutch of hip young long-haired men in silken shirts and bell-bottoms, watching TV—as if standing in for a morally dissolute nation that no longer knew how to keep its word. “It didn’t dawn on the Vietnamese people that the guarantees were withdrawn until they saw that the United States was not going to help get it back, or even help keep what was left. They did not.”

  The next night, Brinkley gave another editorial:

  “Perhaps in the way the war was ending was explained why it was ending as it did. . . . The North was willing and able to fight. In the South they were desperately trying to abandon their own country. . . .”

  And once more John Chancellor from his anchor desk told the opposite story: “During yesterday’s Saigon evacuation, a sizable number of South Vietnamese hoped to be rescued from rooftops by American copters, but they weren’t. South Vietnamese had hope because they were taught the United States would aid if South Vietnam were in trouble—but the United States did not.”

  In the New York Times, across the entire front page, was the headline: MINH SURRENDERS, VIETCONG IN SAIGON; 1,000 AMERICANS AND 5,500 VIETNAMESE EVACUATED BY COPTERS TO U.S. CARRIERS. Below that, an indelible image: a line of bodies snaking up a ladder to a precipitous shack atop the CIA station chief’s residence, the embassy grounds having been commandeered by what Henry Kissinger had once confidently dismissed as a “fourth-rate military power,” now far too dangerous for helicopters to lift off from. “Ford Unity Plea,” another front-page headline read. But that fantasy could not be sustained even within the confines of a single network newscast. This hell, these scenes out of Hieronymus Bosch, this place people were risking death in order to leave, for which
we had sacrificed fifty-six thousand soldiers and half a trillion dollars in national treasure, dividing our nation in half: this is what our investment produced?

  SOME OF THE SOUTH VIETNAMESE who made it to the United States were preliminarily resettled at Eglin Air Force Base in the Florida panhandle—in defiance of a hastily assembled petition got up by residents of the base’s host city, which was called Niceville. A radio poll that found 80 percent of Niceville’s residents didn’t want them. The Associated press reported, “Children in one school joked about shooting a few.” High school kids spoke in class of plans to organize a “Gook Klux Klan.” Students in a twelfth-grade psychology class told their teacher they were worried the refugees would try to convert them to Communism.

  “Disease, disease, disease, that’s all I’ve heard,” complained a congressman representing another relocation site, the San Diego County Marine base, Camp Pendleton, of the phone calls he was getting. “They think of the Vietnamese as nothing but diseased job seekers.” In Arkansas, at Fort Chaffee, which admitted twenty-five thousand refugees, the compound was so well guarded that a radical journalist compared it to the “strategic hamlets” the U.S. military used to build in South Vietnam. A recently returned veteran told him, “I don’t like the people personally. I didn’t see anything worth saving and I don’t now.” The protest placards read “GOOKS GO HOME.”

  In Detroit, a black autoworker told the New York Times, “People are losing their cars, houses, jobs. Let them stay there until we do something for people here.” In Valparaiso, Indiana, a salesman asked, “How do you know we’re not getting the bad guys? You can’t say for sure. Nobody can, and Lord knows we’ve got enough Communist infiltration now.” President Ford implored, “We can afford to be generous to refugees” as “a matter of principle.” Mayor Daley of Chicago responded, “Charity begins at home.” The Seattle City Council voted seven to one against a pro-settlement resolution. California governor Jerry Brown said Congress’s refugee bill should be amended with a “jobs for Americans first” pledge. Explained Harvard sociologist David Riesman, “The national mood is poisonous and dangerous and this is one symptom—striking out at helpless refugees whose number is infinitesimal.” Though one observer simply didn’t see the cruelty of his countrymen before his eyes.

  RONALD REAGAN HAD BEEN OBSESSED with the debate over aid to South Vietnam. He heard in it, he said on the radio, “an echo of the hollow tapping of Neville Chamberlain’s umbrella on the cobblestones of Munich.” He counted dominoes falling: “Japan, the great industrial power capable of modernizing and arming a Communist Asia, has just opened discussions with Hanoi”; “Henry Kissinger returns empty-handed from the Middle East”; “The Sixth fleet may soon find it must withdraw or become a model ship in a bottle.” He predicted that a lack of American will to save South Vietnam would “tempt the Soviet Union as it once tempted Hitler and the military rulers of Japan”—ushering in an imminent Communist massacre of innocents (he cited reports of Vietcong soldiers driving over crowds of refugees) behind a liberal “curtain of silence.” He predicted purgatory for the “1,300 men still listed as missing in action over there.” And, in an interview with the libertarian magazine Reason, he repeated his favorite old John Birch Society canard: “You know, Lenin said the Communists will take Eastern Europe, they will organize the hordes of Asia, he said they will then move into Latin America, and he said the United States, the last bastion of capitalism, will fall into their outstretched hands like overripe fruit. . . . [O]ne of these days, under the present policies of the Congress, the United States will stand alone as Lenin envisioned it and face the ultimate from the enemy.”

  He asked on the radio, of the imminent coming of those Asian hordes: “Will it be said of today’s world leaders as it was of the pre–World War II leaders, ‘They were better at surviving the catastrophe than they were at preventing it’?”

  Then what he feared most came to pass: America denied South Vietnam military aid. America let South Vietnam fall. America cut and ran. It must be a pretty wicked nation, you might think he would have reflected, to countenance an evil like that.

  Not at all, Reagan insisted, once it was over. Instead he found a way to see nobility, God’s chosen nation doing naught but Christian duty.

  He began a broadcast titled “Letters to the Editor”: “In these times when so many of us have a tendency to lose faith in ourselves it’s good now and then to be reminded of the good-natured, generous spirit that has been an American characteristic as long as there has been an America.”

  He then recounted a letter he claimed to have seen from an unnamed American missionary in Vietnam to an unidentified publication.

  “The reverend described a 20-foot craft adrift in the Gulf of Thailand with no fuel, no food, no water, barely afloat and sinking with its cargo of 82 refugees.

  “Towering over it was the aircraft carrier the USS Midway. The reference described the Midway as tired. It had already deposited some 2,000 refugees on other ships, refugees who had arrived in more than 500 flights. One flight was a light observation plane not designed for carrier landings. The Midway had moved up to top speed to enable the pilot to land with an entire family jammed inside the tiny fuselage. There were forty coppers on the deck, brand-new F5E fighters and A37s that had carried people who preferred not to be ‘liberated’ by the Communists. . . .

  “Once onboard they had one question: would they be handed over to an unfriendly government, perhaps to be eventually murdered? The executive officer of the ship told him this would not happen. He said, ‘Our job is to keep you as comfortable as possible, heal the sick, and feed you to your hearts’ content.’ That was the official policy of our nation and therefore of the Midway.”

  He then described a miracle of the loaves and fishes, straight out of the Gospel According to Reader’s Digest:

  “A tiny baby with double pneumonia was cured. People without clothes were given American clothing. Sailors took the old clothing and washed them for their guests. Pretty soon homeless children were being given piggyback rides on the shoulders of American seamen, and Navy T-shirts bearing the Midway decal began appearing on the little ones. . . .

  “Ads went into the ship’s paper asking for toys. Charity begat more charity.”

  Reagan concluded: “In the dark days right after World War II, when our industrial power and military power were all that stood between a war-ravaged world and a return to the dark ages, Pope Pius XII said, ‘America has a genius for great and unselfish deeds. Into the hands of America God has placed the destiny of an afflicted mankind.’

  “I think those young men on the Midway have reassured God that He hasn’t given us more of an assignment than we can handle.”

  In its years in Southeast Asia, the USS Midway had served as a death-dealing juggernaut—a launching pad for air strikes responsible for killing thousands, perhaps millions, of civilians. Listening to Ronald Reagan, you could imagine that its only role had been rescuing widows and orphans. That the entire war had been about rescuing widows and orphans. Others told you Vietnam was a crime, a waste—or, at best, something very, very complex. It took Ronald Reagan to explain how simple the whole thing was. Charity begetting more charity: how could it have happened any other way?

  HIS COLUMN NOW RAN IN 226 newspapers. He turned down dozens of speech invitations for every one he accepted. He was now broadcast on 286 stations—laboring mightily to turn his listeners into a dedicated conservative activist army. “It’s time to write your congressman again.” “Will Congress do anything about this mess? Well, maybe that’s up to you.” “You and I should lobby for it. We should demand not only its passage but that the commission be manned by men and women who will determine whether the laws of the marketplace can replace the useless regulations and create real savings for the consumers. Only our indignation voiced out loud will bring this about. . . .”

  He railed against the government bureaucrats who “really rule America,” who were “not basically crea
tive,” were “low risk takers” and “growing like Topsy”—but so much more dangerous than mere legislators because they made up rules behind closed doors, and “if you break one of those bureaucrat-designed regulations, you’re guilty as charged unless you can prove you’re innocent.” He railed against English teachers replacing grammar drills with “electives like creative writing, filmmaking, mythology, and detective story writing.” And the “Alice in Wonderland” world of bureaucracy: “To err is human,” he would quip. “It takes a government computer to really louse things up.” He told the story of a wife who got a letter informing her that her dead husband could no longer receive Social Security benefits: “Don’t tell my husband,” she replied. “He’ll die of a heart attack.” Such tales were good for comic relief. Except when they weren’t funny at all. For instance, the “no fewer than five government agencies . . . studying the effects of leaded gasoline” who came up with “no data to verify harm from it,” which hadn’t kept the EPA from spending $100 million mandating catalytic converters to attenuate the hazardous emissions. But the converters, he said, produced “a substance more harmful to you and me than those emissions they’re controlling.”

  Maybe the stories were true. Maybe they weren’t. He had a way of telling a story that made it uncheckable: “An item recently appeared in a national magazine” (which magazine?). “Some years ago a poll was taken” (whose poll?). And the facts went by too fast for innocent radio listeners to check in any event. One time, he sternly lectured against Ahab-like maritime bureaucrats demanding that a tourist paddle wheeler, the Delta Queen, be fireproofed according to the law for modern ships. Even though she “has never had a fire.” Her owners said that would put them out of business. “No matter, said the bureaucrats in Washington. The Delta Queen could not be made an exception.” It had had a fire only two and a half years earlier.