Today is the 50th anniversary of South Vietnam’s collapse, one of the late 20th century’s greatest tragedies. It followed 30 years of war, 20 of which had direct U.S involvement, entailing over 58,000 dead Americans and perhaps 1 million Vietnamese. U.S. Marines helping the last Americans and Vietnamese refugees escape by helicopter from the U.S. embassy roof was an optic that emblemized America’s decline. April 30, 1975, was America’s Cold War Dunkirk. It was a catastrophic retreat pointing to defeat but from which America recovered and surged forward to Cold War victory 14 years later.
The images of those few days, which I recall from my childhood, were horrible. There were only a few days for evacuation. President Nixon had negotiated “peace” with North Vietnam in 1973. But it was chiefly a pretext for U.S. military withdrawal. The terms allowed North Vietnamese troops to remain inside South Vietnam. U.S. public support for the war, after 20 years, had collapsed. It was the best Nixon could achieve. His own political collapse during Watergate prevented any decisive U.S. action against the inevitable North Vietnamese violations of the peace terms. President Ford half-heartedly sought additional U.S. military aid for South Vietnam, which an exhausted and impatient U.S. Congress overwhelmingly rejected. So, Ford authorized U.S. evacuation as North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces approached Saigon.
On April 29, U.S. radio in Saigon played “White Christmas,” signaling to remaining Americans and select South Vietnamese that collapse was near. The result was chaos, with desperate crowds surging against the walled U.S. embassy, and U.S. Marines on the wall holding them back. About 7000 escaped over 24 hours. U.S. helicopters ferried evacuees to U.S. aircraft carriers offshore. Helicopters after landing had to be pushed into the sea to make way for subsequent landings. There was nowhere else they could safely fly. Some South Vietnamese commissioned their own flights to land uninvited as well.
U.S. Saigon naval attaché Richard Armitage, later a senior Defense official in the George W. Bush administration, was assigned to destroy the South Vietnamese navy before seizure by advancing communist forces. Instead, without official authorization, he sailed 31 ships of the South Vietnamese fleet, with 30,000 refugees on board, to the Philippines. Over 120,000 Vietnamese refugees escaped South Vietnam in the final days. President Ford authorized their entry into the U.S. As the horrors of communist control of a united Vietnam unfolded, hundreds of thousands of more Vietnamese fled, often on flimsy boats in the South China Sea, preferring the risk of drowning or pirates to life in communist Vietnam.
Today there are 2.3 million Vietnamese Americans, whose success in education and business across just 50 years or less makes them one of the most amazing immigration success stories in American history. My own community in Northern Virginia filled with Vietnamese refugees after 1975, and I went to school with many of them. One family lived at the Catholic church down the street. Another family lived on our street in a house, owned, I think, by a CIA employee. These families, like hundreds of thousands of others, arrived with nothing. They sent their children to college, and today they are successful in their professions, living in large suburban houses. Vietnamese refugees tend to be ardent in their Americanism and grateful for their freedoms. But their success does not erase the tragedy of collapse by South Vietnam, along with Cambodia and Laos. The noncommunist Cambodian government fell on April 17, 1975, amid similar chaos and U.S. evacuation. Over 300,000 Cambodian refugees fled out of a 6.6 million population. Many others would later wish they had fled. The subsequent Khmer Rouge communists launched a genocide that killed 1.5 million to 3 million Cambodians. In August, communist forces, the Pathēt Lao, seized the Laotian capital Vientiane. Again, there was another U.S. evacuation. Not long after, the U.S. diplomat relative of a classmate at school talked to our class about her family’s evacuation from Vientiane, showing us terrifying slides of their last days there. Communist signage appeared in the streets, as she and her family had only hours before escaping. About 300,000 Laotian refugees, or ten percent of the population, also fled, to neighboring Thailand.
The suffering of the peoples of Indochina was epic. More died after “liberation” than had across decades of war. The blow to American prestige and power was also tremendous. The icon for American decline became the image of an evacuating American ambassador, folded U.S. flag in his arms, boarding a helicopter on an embassy roof. In British spy novelist John le Carré’s The Honorable Schoolboy of 1977, the British intelligence chief in Hong Kong toasts his American colleague for joining the ranks of second-rate powers. The Soviet Union seemed ascendant and the U.S., deflated. The fall of Indochina was followed by other disasters. Pro-Soviet communists seized Angola and Mozambique in 1975, and Ethiopia in 1977. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Pro-Soviet Sandinistas seized Nicaragua in 1979, thereafter supporting Marxist guerrillas in El Salvador and elsewhere. Post-Vietnam America was gun-shy and reluctant to respond. In 1976 Congress passed the Clarke Amendment ending aid for the anti-Marxist resistance in Angola. The 1983 Boland Amendment ended U.S. aid to anti-Marxist resistance in Nicaragua, setting off a multi-year political struggle between President Reagan and the Congress, resulting in the Iran-Contra scandal. In 1971, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield had proposed cutting U.S. troops in Europe by half. It was defeated but only after major lobbying against it. President Jimmy Carter came to power in 1977, in the post-Vietnam spirit, pledging reduced U.S. military spending and overseas involvements, as he warned against an “inordinate fear of communism.” The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the fall of the Shah in Iran provoked renewed defense spending and a more assertive U.S. foreign policy. But nobody expected the communist regimes of eastern Europe to fall in 1989 or the Soviet Union itself to implode in 1991, after which the U.S, became the uncontested “hyperpower” of the world.
In 1940 amid the calamitous British Dunkirk evacuation, as Nazi Germany seized nearly all of Europe, few could visualize the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945, with Britain among the victorious powers. The tide of global events can surge in unexpected directions. Few in 1975 expected Vietnam later to align against China, looking to the U.S. for alliance. U.S. policymakers feared in the 1950s that the collapse of Indochina would lead to communist domination of southeast Asia. Had that collapse occurred in 1955 or 1965 instead of 1975, perhaps Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and others would have succumbed. Perhaps U.S. support for noncommunist Indochina at least protected the rest of southeast Asia. But actually winning the Vietnam War was likely always a bridge too far. Unlike South Korea in 1950, which was unified against North Korea’s invasion, South Vietnam was divided, with the Viet Cong insurgency widely supported by many South Vietnamese, who saw their cause as nationalism or anticolonialism rather than communism. They were naïve.
America will help a nation resist and build for about two decades, whether South Vietnam or, more recently, Afghanistan. But if those nations do not cohere and stand on their own, America loses patience and withdraws. Richard Nixon would later write that the Vietnam War was not lost on the battlefield but in America, in the board rooms and press rooms where public opinion is shaped. But no nation, including America, will support an indefinite, decades-long faraway war, especially if no vital interest is directly threatened. Christian Realist thinker Reinhold Niebuhr, although an anticommunist, nearly from the start opposed the Vietnam War, for this reason and because he was skeptical, somewhat paternalistically, that Vietnam, which he described as a Buddhist peasant society, could become democratic. Since Niebuhr, other such societies have become prosperous democracies. Imagine if Indochina had followed the example of South Korea or Taiwan.
Perhaps the horrors afflicting Indochina before and after its fall to communism were almost unavoidable. But they were not permanent. Democracy and America values today in the world seem again at low tide, as they were in 1975, compounded by malaise and self-doubts at home, now as then. But we have recovered before, and we can again, if we collectively choose to do so. That choice is before us. May we choose wisely.