After two decades of savage U.S. efforts to impose imperial control over South Vietnam, the effort collapsed in April 1975.
Columns of refugees and routed troops packed the roads twisting out of the hills and rubber plantations toward the marshy flatlands around Saigon. Barefoot villagers, band of soldiers with their boots rotting off, lost children wailing for their parents, parents screaming for their children, wounded men caked with dried blood and filthy bandages, creeping trucks, buses, and herds of water buffalo, oxcarts lumbering along on wooden wheels, all paraded past the wreckage of burned-out tanks and scattered corpses rotting in the fields by the roadside, fleeing the advancing bombs and shellfire announcing Ho Chi Minh’s imminent victory.
At the U.S. Embassy, a desperate crowd of Vietnamese interpreters, army leaders, bartenders, colonial bureaucrats, and stool pigeons rushed the gates waving letters from American employers, stateside lovers, or distant American acquaintances who used to know someone in their extended family.
Saigon was no more.
To General Thieu and his henchmen, President Ford offered sanctuary in the United States. To the young Americans who had not been able to bring themselves to kill for such gangsters, he offered the choice of permanent exile from the U.S. or imprisonment. On the Vietnamese people, he imposed a trade embargo, a veto on their entry into the United Nations, and a refusal to negotiate the unresolved issues of the war.
The imperialist credo was thus fulfilled: those who have been arbitrarily punished are punished anew.
After two decades of Western terror, retributive deaths were near zero. The much-predicted Communist bloodbath did not materialize, and Hanoi created nothing worse than re-education camps for those who collaborated with the U.S. in killing millions of their fellow Vietnamese.
This remarkable display of restraint passed unnoticed in the U.S. media, which preferred to denounce Communist indoctrination methods. Those whom Washington employed to engage in wholesale torture and massacre of their countrymen were portrayed as innocent victims forced to endure the agony of political lectures.
The hundreds of thousands of orphans, junkies, prostitutes, and maimed survivors the U.S. left in its wake, whom the Vietnamese somehow had to rehabilitate as they struggled to overcome a shattered economy, devastated ecosystem, and demolished social order, were ignored and quickly forgotten.
As for the meaning of it all, the New York Times remained utterly clueless:
“There are those Americans who believe that the war to preserve a non-Communist, independent South Vietnam could have been waged differently. There are other Americans who believe that a viable, non-Communist South Vietnam was always a myth … A decade of fierce polemics has failed to resolve the quarrel.”
Of course, while the war raged, Americans surged into the streets in record numbers to protest that the U.S. had no business meddling in the internal politics of Vietnam, regardless of the prospects for “success.” This position, reiterated endlessly at rallies, protest marches, and teach-ins, was never heard in official circles, nor was it ever given a hearing on the editorial pages of the New York Times.
U.S. hands off other countries.
To the Times‘ editors, these words were incomprehensible.
U.S. military and government leaders were no more insightful. A U.S. Air Force general said that the important lesson of the war was that “We could have won the war if political factors had not entered in,” perhaps a reference to the failure to use nuclear weapons, which both the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations had considered doing. Secretary of State Dean Rusk blamed the “loss” of Vietnam on the “impatience” of the American people, adding that a future Vietnam-style war would require censorship. “You can’t fight a war on television,” he lamented. General Maxwell Taylor contended that success required the banning of dissent, counseling that any president would “be well advised to silence future critics by executive order.”
With millions killed and Indochina in ruins, President Ford urged Americans to forget. “The lessons of the past,” he implausibly advised, “have already been learned … and we should have our focus on the future.”