by Max Boot
Lansdale’s Cassandra-like warning went unheeded—again. By 1973, after a decade of costly and seemingly futile conflict, most Americans were heartily sick of Vietnam and eager to shed the commitments made by administrations stretching back to Harry Truman’s day. Nixon and Kissinger were as war-weary as anyone. In their haste to disengage, they would set in place the conditions for the very bloodbath—and the mass exodus of refugees—that Lansdale had predicted. But just as Lansdale had been ignored when he warned about the consequences of toppling Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, so a decade later he was ignored when he warned about the consequences of a peace treaty that would render meaningless the sacrifice of fifty-eight thousand American lives.
Lansdale’s newfound marital bliss would provide scant diversion from the tragedy that was about to engulf Indochina.
35
The Abandoned Ally
It is so easy to be an enemy of the United States, but so difficult to be a friend.
—NGUYEN VAN THIEU
THE final reckoning for South Vietnam was to come in the spring of 1975, a little more than two years after the conclusion of the Paris Peace Accords. By then, Richard Nixon had been disgraced, while the mood of self-confidence and optimism that had led America into Vietnam in the first place had been discarded as thoroughly as the fedoras and pillbox hats of the early sixties.
Facing the threat of impeachment over the Watergate scandal, Nixon had become the first president to resign from office. On the morning of August 9, 1974, Dick and Pat Nixon left the White House for the last time, walking down a red carpet onto the South Lawn to climb aboard a drab, olive-colored army helicopter that would begin their journey to exile in California. “Goodbye, Mr. President,” Nixon said to his successor, Gerald R. Ford, who had assumed the vice presidency less than a year earlier after the resignation of Spiro Agnew amid a corruption probe.
“Goodbye, Mr. President,” Ford replied, in the republican version of “The king is dead, long live the king!”
Then the new president and the new first lady, Betty Ford, walked back into the executive mansion, holding hands, to take part in a hastily arranged inauguration ceremony. At noon, Chief Justice Warren Burger administered the oath of office in the East Room. Ford, standing in a blue suit in front of a heavy yellow drape, delivered a short inauguration address. “In all my public and private acts as your President,” he said, “I expect to follow my instincts of openness and candor with full confidence that honesty is always the best policy in the end. My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.”1
In truth, the nightmare was just beginning. Americans were dealing with runaway inflation, rising oil prices, increasing crime, and divisions over fundamental issues such as legalized abortion and school busing. The whole country seemed to be going through a crisis of confidence. In early 1974, as his brother, Stewart Alsop, lay dying of cancer, the columnist Joseph Alsop, a paladin of the Eastern Establishment, wrote to a friend, “I have begun to think that the ’70s are the very worst vintage years since the history of life began on earth—with the possible exception of such intervals as the wanderings of Attila in Europe.”2
GIVEN THE multiple crises on the home front, it was hardly surprising that few Americans, with the exception of old Vietnam hands like Edward Lansdale, had any sympathy for the plight of America’s allies in South Vietnam. North Vietnam had taken advantage of the withdrawal of American forces in 1973 to broaden and improve the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It was now easy for Hanoi to move large numbers of troops and weapons south, including tanks and howitzers imported from the Soviet Union and China, to make up for losses suffered in the Easter Offensive. A cadre likened the experience of driving the Ho Chi Minh Trail after 1973, with the threat of American air strikes lifted, as being “not much different from what I would later experience heading into the suburbs of an American city during rush hour.”3
As North Vietnam was getting stronger, South Vietnam was visibly attenuated. Although the South Vietnamese armed forces appeared formidable on paper, numbering more than a million men, the bulk of them were in low-quality militia units, the Regional and Popular Forces, tied down in static defensive positions. The ground combat units of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) numbered only 210,000 men—fewer than the total number of North Vietnamese forces left in the South after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords. Desertion further depleted South Vietnamese ranks, as did commanders’ habit of inflating their paper strength to claim the salaries of nonexistent soldiers.4 The problem was exacerbated by declining support from Washington. The United States had provided $1.53 billion in military aid in 1973, $1.069 billion in 1974, and $583 million in 1975—half the level judged necessary even in the absence of a major North Vietnamese offensive. At the same time, a global epidemic of inflation eroded the buying power of the dollar and the piastre. In early 1975, the chairman of South Vietnam’s Joint General Staff, General Cao Van Vien, issued a directive to his forces: “From this moment on we must conserve and economize on the use of each individual bullet, each drop of gasoline.”5
“We would like to be on the side of freedom,” President Nguyen Van Thieu lamented. “How can the free world abandon us?”6 Very easily, as it turned out—all the more so because Thieu’s country was hardly a democracy. Although North Vietnam was far more repressive, the lack of representative government in the South convinced many Americans that South Vietnam was not worth saving. Even many South Vietnamese came to question whether such a corrupt and ineffectual state was worth fighting for, although few showed any desire to live under Communism. By January 1975, Lansdale was writing, “With the new Congress apparently coming to the conclusion to sharply curtail aid to Vietnam, looks as though the U.S. will wind up with no options on doing anything to help our Vietnamese friends. Ouch.”7
THE UNITED STATES did not, in fact, have any good options when the North Vietnamese armed forces launched another major offensive on March 10, 1975. The attackers swiftly captured the town of Ban Me Thuot, the key to the entire Central Highlands. Rather than trying to regain control, Thieu ordered a hasty redeployment of the ARVN from the northern part of the country, intending to consolidate around Saigon and the Mekong Delta, where most of the population and agricultural land was located. This was a fatal miscalculation that led to the collapse of the South Vietnamese armed forces and, with them, the whole state. “A redeployment of forces during a slack period would have been extremely difficult—but to do so under pressure was all but impossible,” noted Ira Hunt, an American general based in Thailand who provided logistical support to Saigon.8
By April 21, despite staunch and even suicidal resistance by some ARVN units, the last remaining defenses had collapsed around Saigon. Staffers at the U.S. embassy and the CIA annex next door began frantically shredding and burning files. The embassy roof, with smokestacks belching flames from the incinerators, looked like a funeral pyre.9
The U.S. ambassador, Graham Martin, who had succeeded Ellsworth Bunker in 1973, was suffering from bronchial pneumonia. “Drawn” and “pasty-faced,” he looked, in the words of the CIA officer Frank Snepp, “like a walking dead man.”10 Martin had held out hope until the very end that South Vietnam could survive. Finally, on the morning of April 29, 1975, he agreed to launch Operation Frequent Wind, the helicopter evacuation of the final remaining Americans along with South Vietnamese who had worked closely with them. Americans throughout the city knew the end had come when that morning the American Radio Service interrupted its regular programming to announce, “It’s a hundred and five degrees in Saigon and the temperature is rising.” This was followed by the playing of Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas”—the signal to skedaddle.11 The U.S. embassy turned into a “complete mob scene”: “It was surrounded,” an American correspondent noted, “by a huge, frantic crowd of Vietnamese trying to get in, trying to climb over the walls.”12
By the afternoon of April 29, a parade of Marine CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters were landing on the roof of the e
mbassy and the larger CH-53 Jolly Green Giants in the parking lots. The helicopter flights went on all afternoon on April 29 and into the night. Finally, in the early morning hours of April 30, the order came directly from President Ford: the ambassador had to get on a helicopter and the evacuation had to end. The sickly Graham Martin, clutching the embassy’s flag, took off with his remaining staff at 4:47 a.m.
There were still at least four hundred frantic Vietnamese and third-country nationals sitting in neat rows in the parking lot. “Don’t worry,” the Marines told them, “there’s a big helicopter coming and we’re all going. . . . Nobody’s going to be left behind.” Then the Marines sneaked away one by one to enter the embassy through a back door, barring the entrance behind them. When the panic-stricken Vietnamese saw what was happening, they smashed through the door. It was too late. At 7:53 a.m., the final helicopter took off with the final load of Marines—the last American troops out of the 2.7 million who had served in-country to leave Vietnamese soil.13
The passengers on those last helicopters saw a doomed city beneath them. “It looked like the countryside was exploding in flames,” the ABC correspondent Ken Kashiwahara said. “That’s no exaggeration. The ammunition dump at Long Binh, which was just outside Saigon, was exploding, and the sun was setting, and in several parts of the city there were big fires and flames going into the sky. It was just incredible.”14 In the distance could be seen highways crowded, Frank Snepp noted, with “literally thousands of trucks and tanks, presumably North Vietnamese, inching their way forward, their headlights blazing.”15
ON APRIL 21, Nguyen Van Thieu resigned the presidency after a decade in power. Seven days later, the Republic of Vietnam swore in its last president—General Duong Van Minh (“Big Minh”), the leader of the anti-Diem coup that had plunged the country into chaos in November 1963. He claimed that he could make a peace deal because one of his brothers was a Vietcong general. But with victory in sight, the North Vietnamese had no interest in negotiating. At 10:45 a.m. on April 30, 1975, a T-59 tank from the 203rd Tank Brigade crashed through the gates of the modernist Independence Palace (built on the site of the old Norodom Palace), where Minh and his cabinet were waiting. A few minutes later, the Communist flag was raised over the building. When the news reached Hanoi, the Vietcong leader Truong Nhu Tang noted, “the ordinarily grim and stoic Hanoiese were cheering, singing, hugging each other—many of them sobbing with a force of emotion unimaginable to anyone who had not endured and suffered as they had.”16
What Americans call “the Vietnam War” and Vietnamese “the American War” had finally concluded in one last spasm of violence. This was the end of a thirty-year civil war between competing factions of Vietnamese over control of their country, each side aided by outside sponsors, each claiming to be the sole legitimate representatives of nationalist aspirations. The conflict had claimed the lives of 58,000 Americans and 3.6 million Vietnamese.17 Rare was the family in either South or North Vietnam that did not have an altar set up in a corner of their house with a picture of a child, a parent, or another close relative who had been killed.
For the Communists, it was a glorious victory, the culmination of their struggle to reunite their country. “We were celebrating the advent of a new world,” Truong Nhu Tang said.18 From the American vantage point, it was the worst military defeat in their country’s history, representing a profound rupture with what most (save partisans of the doomed Confederacy) perceived as an unsullied record of martial success. South Vietnam, the state that Edward Lansdale had done so much to create and sustain, had ceased to exist. Saigon was literally wiped off the map; it was renamed Ho Chi Minh City. Cambodia fell at virtually the same time to the Khmer Rouge, while Laos fell to the Pathet Lao.
All that remained for America was to succor those able to escape.
EVEN BEFORE the fall of Saigon, Edward Lansdale had sprung into action to try to help his old friends in South Vietnam. In March 1975, he wrote to Hubert Humphrey, now back in the Senate, to suggest “bipartisan action to save those people who have had to flee from their homes.” He invoked his experience in 1954–55, when he had helped nearly a million refugees move from North to South Vietnam, warning, “The problem today is even a heavier one.”19
Lansdale’s desperation increased as he received frantic pleas from South Vietnam. Pham Duy, the famous balladeer, sent him a particularly heartrending, handwritten note on April 3: “You know what happens to me and my family if the Communists arrive. We are now, 8 children, my wife and myself, ready to go anywhere we can live decently. . . . I never want to leave Vietnam illegally, but it’s now a question of life and death! Can you help us?”20
Lansdale joined a group of Vietnamese friends on the evening of April 6, 1975, in front of the White House for a prayer vigil. As “an unseasonal April wind storm” chilled them and blew out their candles, “they prayed that Americans would help save their families left behind in Vietnam,” Lansdale wrote in an article for the New York Times. “As the wind whisked away their words and tears, it seemed that nobody was listening.”21 The public may have been indifferent to the fate of South Vietnam, but Congress and the Ford administration did agree to spend $405 million to resettle 130,000 refugees in the United States.
Many of Lansdale’s old Vietnamese friends asked him to help them find a new job, a new home, a new car—a new life. He arranged for Pham Duy to stay with a friend from the Air Force; eventually the singer moved to California and began giving concerts and selling records.22 Nguyen Duc Thang, the incorruptible general who had once been seen by Lansdale as the savior of South Vietnam, escaped with his family on a small boat just before the fall of Saigon. Eventually, with the help of Lansdale and other friends, he went to work for IBM, employing his formidable mathematical skills.23 Another friend, Bui Diem, a former South Vietnamese ambassador to the United States, wound up working, improbably enough, at a kosher deli in Washington called Goldberg’s.24 Lansdale spent Christmas week 1975 “playing a modest Santa Claus to Vietnamese families in need, giving them presents of holiday food (fruit cakes, candies, etc) to feed their big families.”25
As for the last leaders of South Vietnam: the flashily bedecked Nguyen Cao Ky, the air marshal and former prime minister and vice president, opened a liquor store in Orange County, California, where he worked fourteen hours a day. After the failure of his store in 1984, he went into the shrimp-fishing business in Louisiana. He died in 2011 after having moved back to Vietnam.26 His old rival, President Nguyen Van Thieu, moved to London and then to the Boston suburbs. He became a controversial figure in the Vietnamese American community, with many of his countrymen blaming him for the collapse of South Vietnam. He died ten years before Ky. In his exile, Thieu offered a pithy summation of the South Vietnamese experience: “It is so easy to be an enemy of the United States, but so difficult to be a friend.”27
THERE WAS nothing in Vietnam comparable to the horrors of the “killing fields” of Cambodia, where an estimated two million people lost their lives after the takeover of the Khmer Rouge in 1975. But the Vietnamese Communists did carry out more limited executions of “enemies of the people,” and they sent at least three hundred thousand South Vietnamese—including civil servants and politicians, artists and writers, army and police officers—to hellish “re-education camps,” where they had to engage in manual labor with inadequate rations and without medical care while being subjected to Communist indoctrination and made to write “self-criticism” reports confessing their ideological sins. Those who broke the rules were subject to confinement in “tiger cages,” beatings, and executions.28 More than a million people were forced to move out of the cities and into the countryside to work on collective farms. Private businesses and property were confiscated. Anyone whose family was associated with the ancien régime—roughly a third of the population—suffered discrimination in employment and education. Books were burned, newspapers and broadcasters closed, and a stifling Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy imposed in the schools and the medi
a.
Conditions took another turn for the worse in 1978 when the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia to depose China’s genocidal client, Pol Pot, beginning an eleven-year occupation of that neighboring country. The following year, 1979, Chinese troops invaded northern Vietnam, only to be defeated and humiliated by the battle-hardened Vietnamese army. There had been only a four-year respite between the end of the Second Indochina War and the outbreak of the Third. The new war—combined with the misery of collectivization and expropriation, drought and flooding, and international sanctions—sparked an economic crisis. In 1978–79, some 700,000 people fled Indochina on leaky, overcrowded boats; as many as 200,000 of these “boat people” died at sea. The rest reached squalid refugee camps in other Southeast Asian countries. In all, more than 1.4 million people left Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam following the Communist takeover of Indochina.29
EDWARD LANSDALE expressed “a deep-seated feeling of grief over my failure to accomplish enough in my 1965–1968 service in Vietnam to have helped the people there prevent the tragedy which eventually overcame them.”30 He and his old teammates continued to believe until their dying days that his program of political action could have saved South Vietnam. As Charles “Bo” Bohannan wrote in 1982, “Had Lansdale remained in Vietnam in the late 50s and early 60s the story would have been far different. Had we been permitted to advise Nguyen Cao Ky as he desired, again the story might have been far different.”31 And it was not just Lansdale and his circle who thought so. William Conrad Gibbons, one of the foremost chroniclers of the Vietnam War, was to say, “I think one of the tragedies of the whole thing was that [Lansdale] was never put in charge. . . . He had more of an ability to deal with the people there than almost any American—certainly any American of note. . . . Of all the people involved, he had the best understanding of what we ought to do.”32
