So entrenched is Nixon’s Dolchstoßlegende that people add embellishments to it unnoticed and (sometimes) unknowingly. One such embellishment arrived in movie theaters during the writing of this book. It came from the unlikeliest of sources: a member of the Kennedy family. During the Nixon administration, the only liberals of national stature who came close to getting Nixon right were related by blood or marriage to JFK. The documentary Last Days in Vietnam was written and produced by Rory Kennedy, the daughter of Robert Kennedy and the niece of John Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, and Sargent Shriver. Last Days in Vietnam, as its title suggests, focuses on the fall of Saigon in April 1975. It recycles some old fallacies about the war’s final days before adding some new ones to the pile. Henry Kissinger gets plenty of screen time.
Kissinger: We who made the agreement thought it would be the beginning, not of peace in the American sense, but the beginning of a period of coexistence which might evolve, as it did in Korea, into two states. Reconciliation between North and South, we knew, would be extremely difficult, but I was hopeful.1
Last Days would have served its viewers better by juxtaposing Kissinger talking about reconciliation on camera with his accurate predictions of postsettlement warfare and North Vietnamese military victory on the Nixon tapes. But the documentary doesn’t include any Nixon tapes. Nor does it include an interview with anyone explaining that Nixon and Kissinger got the North to sign the Paris Accords by secretly allowing it to take over South Vietnam following a “decent interval.” That would have enabled viewers to make sense of the North’s March 1975 offensive, which took place a “decent interval” of two years after the last American soldiers left in March 1973.
Last Days misleadingly depicts that March 1975 offensive with an animated map. At first, the map shows no red (North Vietnamese) in South Vietnam. Then it shows red flooding into the South across the DMZ.
At another point viewers hear Frank Snepp estimate that 160,000 North Vietnamese troops threatened the Saigon government, but no one mentions that more than 90 percent of them—150,000—had been in the South since the ceasefire-in-place began two years earlier. If Snepp is right (and he did work in Saigon as a CIA analyst on estimates of enemy strength), then the total number of North Vietnamese troops in the South increased by less than 10 percent from the settlement’s signing to Saigon’s fall. The animation in Last Days makes it look like there was a 100 percent increase in one month. It heightens the drama, but distorts the history.
These omissions just exaggerate the existing Dolchstoßlegende; another set of omissions from Last Days in Vietnam adds a whole new fictional chapter to it.
Last Days cuts out essential information about the struggle between President Ford and Congress over a last-minute aid request. In the excerpt below from the film’s portrayal of Ford’s April 10, 1975, address to Congress, I’ve indicated where the filmmaker omitted portions of the address:
President Ford: The situation in South Vietnam [text omitted] has reached a critical phase requiring immediate and positive decisions by this government. [text omitted] There are [text omitted] tens of thousands of South Vietnamese employees of the United States government, of news agencies, of contractors and businesses for many years whose lives, with their dependents, are in very grave peril. [text omitted] I am therefore asking the Congress to appropriate without delay $722 million for emergency military assistance [text omitted] for South Vietnam. [text omitted] If the very worst were to happen, at least allow the orderly evacuation of Americans and endangered South Vietnamese to places of safety.2
The casual viewer could be forgiven for assuming that the $722 million emergency military aid request was needed to evacuate Americans and endangered South Vietnamese. But that was not so.
For this reason, it is misleading for Last Days to show White House Press Secretary Ron Nessen saying:
Congress wouldn’t pass it. They said, “No more.” You know? “No more troops, no more money, no more aid to the Vietnamese.” Well, I had to go in to President Ford’s office to tell him. I had never heard Ford use a curse word in all the time I’d known him. But when I showed him this story, he said, “Those sons of bitches.”3
Again, the casual viewer of Last Days could be forgiven for assuming that Congress did not vote for aid to evacuate Americans and endangered South Vietnamese. Again, this just is not so.
In reality, Ford made two aid requests. Here’s the unedited quote from Ford’s April 10, 1975, address to Congress with the words that Last Days left out set in italics:
I am therefore asking the Congress to appropriate without delay $722 million for emergency military assistance and an initial sum of $250 million for economic and humanitarian aid for South Vietnam.4
The humanitarian aid covered the costs of evacuating Americans and endangered South Vietnamese, and by April 24 both houses of Congress had approved it.5 Within twenty-four hours of doing so, House and Senate negotiators reached a compromise—on a higher level of humanitarian aid than Ford had requested.
CONFEREES AGREE ON $327 MILLION EVACUATION BILL Washington (UPI)—Senate and House conferees reached formal agreement today on legislation authorizing $327 million to finance humanitarian relief and the evacuation of Americans and friendly Vietnamese from Saigon.…
At the White House, Mr. Ford was described as “pleased” by the compromise legislation.
Press Secretary Ron Nessen said Mr. Ford had notified congressional leaders that he was taking advantage of a provision in the 1975 Foreign Assistance Appropriations Act allowing him to temporarily transfer money from an “Indochina postwar reconstruction fund” for use in meeting the evacuation cost.6
Last Days in Vietnam makes no mention of the humanitarian aid request or of the congressional votes to use it to evacuate Americans and endangered South Vietnamese. Instead, the documentary shows Snepp saying, “Young officers in the embassy began to mobilize a black operation, meaning a makeshift underground railway evacuation using outgoing cargo aircraft that would be totally below the radar of the ambassador.” That may have been necessary, especially before President Ford requested—and the House and Senate okayed—authorization to evacuate endangered South Vietnamese. But a full-fledged, official, overground operation was soon under way.
U.S. SEEKS TO SPEED FLOW OF REFUGEES FROM SAIGON|GOAL PUT AT 8,000 A DAY Washington, April 24—As fears rose here that time was running out on plans for an orderly evacuation of Americans and Vietnamese from Saigon, the director of President Ford’s Refugee Task Force said today that he was trying to accelerate the outflow.
Ambassador L. Dean Brown, who is coordinating the inter-agency relief effort, said in a news briefing at the State Department that about 5,000 persons were being flown daily to Guam, most of them in American military aircraft, but that he hoped “to see that raised enormously.”
“I’d like to see them up around 8,000 to 9,000,” he said, adding that if Communist forces started shelling Tan Son Nhut air base near Saigon, the airlift would have to cease.
“That could happen at any moment,” he said, but he declined to speculate on how much time remained to complete the evacuation of as many as 130,000 South Vietnamese, 50,000 of whom would be admitted to the United States on “parole” status as “high risks” whose lives might be endangered if they remained in Vietnam.7
Far from being a secret black op, the evacuation in Saigon’s final days was overt, authorized by the president and Congress, and reported on the front page of the New York Times. Once again, Last Days heightens the drama at the expense of the truth.
It’s true that Congress rejected Ford’s separate, $722 million request for military aid. To its credit, Last Days has Kissinger acknowledge how little impact that aid would have had.
Kissinger: We knew we were not going to get the $722 million. By that time, it made no big difference. But President Ford said he owed it to Vietnam to make a request.8
While the $722 million request would not have saved Saigon, it did furnish Kissinger, Nixon, and Ford with one more excuse to shift blame for its fall onto Congress. “I am absolutely convinced,” President Ford declared on April 16, 1975, “if Congress made available $722 million in military assistance in a timely way by the date that I have suggested—or sometime shortly thereafter—the South Vietnamese could stabilize the military situation in South Vietnam today.”9 It had taken American advisers on the ground coordinating air power to stabilize the military situation during the 1972 Easter Offensive. President Ford didn’t propose sending any American forces back into battle—just money, equipment, and supplies. As Murrey Marder reported in the Washington Post on April 11, 1975: “There is little or no real prospect, in the judgment of administration strategists, that the requested $722 million in new military aid for South Vietnam could redress the military balance. Indeed, it is unlikely that this aid could reach South Vietnam in time to avert disaster for the government.”10
My own view is that Congress should have responded to Nixon and Ford’s aid requests for Saigon by doubling them. The money would have been wasted in South Vietnam, but it would have been a small price to pay—the per-taxpayer equivalent of pocket change—to demonstrate that Saigon was not going to survive no matter how much money America threw at it. The price of living with the backstabbing myth has been much, much higher. Americans at the time, however, were understandably disinclined to throw their money away. “A lopsided 81-to-12 percent,” the pollster Louis Harris reported at the time, were “opposed to President Ford’s request for $722 million to subsidize military aid to Saigon”—a majority large enough to include the Left, the Center, and even a majority of the Right.11
The omissions of Last Days left viewers and reviewers seriously confused. “When the South indeed became vulnerable,” the movie reviewer Ann Hornaday wrote in the Washington Post, “a war-weary Congress and the American populace they represented effectively put the kibosh on more aid, either for military support or an orderly evacuation.”12 False—Congress passed more evacuation aid than Ford requested; that wasn’t the problem. “Ambassador Graham Martin, a rigid Cold Warrior out of ‘The Quiet American,’ ” wrote George Packer for the New Yorker, “refused to believe that Saigon was about to fall, and wouldn’t allow fixed-wing air evacuations from the Tan Son Nhut airbase while it remained out of North Vietnamese hands.”13 False—Martin allowed thousands of South Vietnamese to fly out on fixed-wing aircraft every day until North Vietnamese attacks on Tan Son Nhut airbase eliminated that option; that wasn’t the real problem, either.14
The real problem was that the White House didn’t start the evacuation until mere weeks before Saigon fell. The time to make provisions for the safe passage out of the country for endangered South Vietnamese was during the same settlement negotiations that provided safe passage out for the last American troops. That, after all, was when the fall of Saigon became a foregone conclusion. But Nixon and Kissinger left the South Vietnamese to fight it out with the North and lose, because to do otherwise would have required an admission that the president and his foreign policy alter ego had never come up with a way to win the war. They lost it in those negotiations; they should have taken responsibility then for the safety of those who had fought on America’s side or served it in a civilian capacity. But Nixon and Kissinger were willing only to accept defeat, not to admit it. Once again, they put their political interests above the lives and safety of the people depending on them.
Last Days in Vietnam also suffers from a curious lack of on-screen Kennedys. It would have done more to clarify why Saigon fell if it had shown Ted Kennedy in 1971 saying, “The only possible excuse for continuing the discredited policy of Vietnamizing the war, now and in the months ahead, seems to be the president’s intention to play his last great card for peace at a time closer to November 1972, when the chances will be greater that the action will benefit the coming presidential election campaign.”15 A clip of Sargent Shriver’s assessment of the draft settlement—“I don’t see what’s the difference between what he has got and what he used to call surrender”—would also have helped. A discussion of John, Robert, and Ted Kennedy’s positions on a coalition government might have illuminated an alternative way to end the war—one that could have included emigration provisions to give friendly South Vietnamese an alternative to dying in a bloodbath or living in a reeducation camp.
In contrast, it could have shown the Republican nominee publicly rejecting a coalition as “disguised surrender” in 1968, then negotiating a better-disguised surrender as president.16 There’s no way to understand America’s last days in Vietnam without seeing how the deal Nixon and Kissinger made with the Communists set Saigon up to fall.