ON APRIL 23, 1975, before a youthful crowd of forty-five hundred at Tulane University, President Gerald R. Ford announced that the Vietnam War was over. “Today,” the president proclaimed, “America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam, but it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned.” The crowd erupted in “a jubilant roar” and “nearly raised the roof with whoops and hollers,” the New Republic’s White House correspondent wrote.221 In less than a week, thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of Vietnamese would be evacuated from Saigon as the North Vietnamese Army closed in on the capital city.
Had Ford consulted Brent Scowcroft about the speech, his de facto national security advisor probably would have urged him to take a less negative, less defensive tone about the war. Later Scowcroft said that the president had strayed “off the reservation,” led on by his political advisers and by his chief speechwriter, Robert Hartmann, in particular. The president was sincere in his desire to get the United States out of Vietnam and to be done with the war. But over the next few weeks, Ford joined Scowcroft and Kissinger in blaming Congress for America’s failure in Vietnam, arguing it had sold out a faithful ally by cutting off the funds for South Vietnam.222 The president might have wanted to avoid refighting the war, but a prolonged national debate about assigning responsibility for America’s worst military defeat and determining the lessons to be drawn from it was inevitable—and arguably necessary. The defeat scarred Scowcroft and his colleagues throughout the military and the government as well as millions of ordinary Americans. Following Watergate, it was “another traumatic experience.”223
In the meantime, however, there were urgent practical problems to be dealt with in connection with America’s departure from Vietnam, and these challenges fell into Scowcroft’s lap. He was a jack-of-all-trades during the final weeks of the United States’ presence in Vietnam, juggling multiple responsibilities and handling competing demands from different departments and agencies across the government. If he “wasn’t the manager,” he said, he certainly had a finger “on the pulse of what everyone else was doing.” He was the “emergency guy,” the person who exerted ultimate oversight and determined, “Well, we need to do this,” or “Well, we need to get another helicopter to go in.” His job was to ensure that the United States’ actions meshed as well as they could, so as to meet the president’s goals. He was at the center of operations during this last phase of the war, and his actions were integral to the ultimate outcome.224
On the face of it, this was not so different from what Scowcroft had done as a Pentagon staff officer or as the White House military assistant: managing complex operations. What did make it different, though, was the scale. Scowcroft now had to stay on top of the whole national security system, not just the Air Force or the presidency. And again he excelled. Two close observers of the Ford White House wrote that it was because of Scowcroft’s impressive performance during the evacuation of Saigon that the president later chose him to succeed Henry Kissinger as national security advisor.225
For most Americans, the end of America’s war in Vietnam is symbolized by the iconic photograph of a Huey helicopter being loaded with passengers on top of a Saigon building—not the US embassy roof, contrary to common belief, but an apartment building used to house Americans (the journalist Tim Weiner identifies it as a CIA safe house).226 But if that photograph suggests the desperation of those final helicopter evacuations, it gives little hint of their mammoth scale. One hundred and thirty thousand Vietnamese left South Vietnam that April, ten times the number that the State Department had planned for. In the final phase alone, in just over fourteen hours’ time, Marine helicopters lifted out almost 8,000 US military personnel, South Vietnamese, and their dependents—about 5,600 from Tan Son Nhut airport, another 2,206 from the roof and courtyard of the US embassy in Saigon, and dozens more from other locations.227
This is all the more impressive since the Ford administration had failed to appreciate the seriousness of the situation in Vietnam until mid-March; up until then, its attention had been overwhelmingly focused on Israel, Egypt, and the broader Middle East.228 But by March 17, the latest North Vietnamese military offensive had put the communists in a “very strong” military position, in the words of Wolfgang Lehmann, the deputy US ambassador in Saigon. The communists took Ban Me Thuot, a strategically significant town in the central highlands, captured the ancient imperial city of Hue, took the coastal city of Da Nang, and then began to advance on Saigon. Nonetheless, as late as March 28, CIA director William Colby predicted that the South Vietnamese would be able to control the Saigon area until 1976, and even North Vietnam’s own political and military leaders didn’t expect to complete their conquest of South Vietnam until the next year.229
Yet soon US officials could not avoid the grim reality facing them: the unexpectedly rapid advance of the North Vietnamese army, coupled with the sudden collapse of the ARVN. The Washington Special Actions Group, consisting of the second-rank officials from each of the national security agencies, such as State, Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the CIA, met on April 2 and decided to immediately begin the evacuation of South Vietnam. Chartered World Airways flights, Air Force C-130s and C-141s, and Air America started flying Americans and South Vietnamese out of Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut airport on a steady basis, with the USAF planes taking off at a rate of three per hour. In the eight days before the airport became inoperable (April 21–28), the Air Force alone lifted out more than forty thousand Americans and Vietnamese.230
Helping to make the extraordinary evacuation possible was the fact that North Vietnam eased up on its attack on Saigon. On April 19, Kissinger, via Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, asked Brezhnev for his help in obtaining a two-week halt of hostilities in the cause of “finally ending the Vietnam tragedy.” Hanoi responded to the Soviet request on April 24, essentially agreeing to a cease-fire for the final week of the evacuation. North Vietnamese leaders hoped the United States would help fund the postwar reconstruction and redevelopment of Vietnam, providing assistance of about $1 billion a year over five years, as Kissinger had offered to North Vietnamese premier Pham Van Dong in February 1973 following the Paris accords. Now, however, the White House was no mood to seriously consider providing aid to Hanoi (and denied having made any such offer, with Scowcroft himself at first refusing to provide a copy of Kissinger’s letter to Dong).
Nonetheless, the North Vietnamese followed through on the cease-fire promise. As one North Vietnamese major general explained, “We didn’t want to do anything that would involve Americans in the fight. Therefore, we did not touch the Americans or shoot at them at all. We just wanted the Americans to leave the country as soon as possible.” The Soviet ambassador sent Scowcroft a message saying that “the leadership of Vietnam favors the establishment of good relations with the United States,” and—on Moscow’s recommendation—a separate statement that there was “no animosity toward the United States in Vietnam and they seek the same from the American side.”231
So the evacuation of Saigon proceeded. Like the Vietnam War itself, it was both a demonstration of extraordinary courage and resolve and an ignominious failure. Thousands of Americans and many South Vietnamese acted heroically and selflessly during those final weeks of near chaos, among them State Department, Defense Department, and intelligence officials, Marine Corps soldiers and officers, Marine helicopter pilots and crews, Air America pilots and crews, and many South Vietnamese civilians and military personnel. The United States thereby avoided what could have been a horrible disaster. As the NSC official Richard Smyser noted, “I can at least say that we did do the decent thing to get the people help.”232
At the same time, the evacuation of Saigon was a disaster in some fundamental respects. As Smyser also pointed out: “It was obvious that we couldn’t help them all.” Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who wanted to leave could not. These were the people who didn’t make it on board USAF transport aircraft or the CIA’s Air America flights, who couldn’t reach the helicopters, who were unable to make it onto the US embassy grounds, or who could not escape by boat. Many simply did not have the political clout, military standing, personal ties, cash and other valuable possessions, good looks—many dancers and bar girls were among those taken out—or other assets that allowed them to get out.233
Timing was one reason for this failure. The Ford administration and the US ambassador to South Vietnam, Graham Martin, delayed the evacuation in an attempt to keep the South Vietnamese government intact as long as possible. Ambassador Martin, CIA station chief Tom Polgar, and Secretary Kissinger hoped to be able to negotiate a settlement with North Vietnam in order to buy more time, even if only to explore the possibility of forming a neutral coalition government.234 Yet by delaying the evacuation until the North Vietnamese army was nearing Saigon, the Ford administration ended up leaving hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Vietnamese behind.235 In the end, Ford, Kissinger, and Scowcroft muddled through, grappling with a situation that was beyond their capacity to manage.
The sheer numbers were daunting. As of mid-April, about 4,000 Americans remained in Saigon, according to the US embassy and NSC’s calculations, and they figured there were another 90,000 relatives of US citizens who likely wanted to leave. There were also 17,000 local employees of the US government and their 120,000 relatives, whom Ambassador Martin had promised he’d evacuate. On April 7 Martin wrote Scowcroft that the United States owed protection to about 175,000 people, among them “local national employees, in-laws of US citizens, Vietnamese employees of American concerns, including the communications media, American foundations, and volunteer agencies, religious leaders, and Western educated professionals” in the employment of the Thieu government. A week later, Kissinger, too, spoke of an “irreducible list” of 174,000 people.236 The government of South Vietnam had about 600,000 employees of its own, too, together with their dependents—and all of them would be vulnerable to reprisals after the fall of Saigon.
A total of 2 to 3 million people thus had a legitimate claim for being evacuated or a good reason to fear for their safety should they stay in South Vietnam.237 But hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese were unable to get out and faced reprisals at the hands of the invading communist forces.238 Making matters worse, the North Vietnamese knew all about these people because, in their haste to flee, South Vietnamese officials hadn’t destroyed their files at the Joint General Staff and National Police headquarters, which named those who’d collaborated with the US military or with the CIA. (These were duplicates of the CIA’s own files that US embassy officials incinerated.)239
In any event, the fear of reprisals against the South Vietnamese resisters proved to be well founded. After the North Vietnamese army gained control of Saigon on April 30, the communists moved hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese to “reeducation” facilities—in effect, grim concentration camps. While most were held for less than a year, about two hundred thousand people were detained for years under conditions of extreme hardship. Although the historical record is murky, the combined numbers of those who were executed and those who disappeared—about sixty-five thousand people—seems to match the estimated number of high-risk South Vietnamese the United States was unable to take out. Some high-ranking military officers and government officials did not wait to be captured and took their own lives.240
It could have been much worse. Contrary to what many US officials had predicted, there was no bloodbath or systematic slaughter in Vietnam, as there had been in Cambodia under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, in China under Mao during the Cultural Revolution, or in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Still, the evacuation marked an inglorious end for the United States, and Scowcroft characterized the fall of Saigon as “a tragedy.”241
How did it come to this?
THE NIXON ADMINISTRATION had opened US diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China in 1972 partly in the hope that the new ties with China would provide leverage on North Vietnam and Cambodia with respect to the war, then at its height. But China wasn’t much help to the United States with either country, and by late 1974 the situation in Vietnam was worse than it had been after January 27, 1973, the date when the Paris peace agreement between Kissinger and Le Duc Tho was finalized. The main reason was that the North Vietnamese themselves, under the leadership of General Secretary Le Duan, refused to deviate from their goal to unify Vietnam. If the Soviets and the Chinese were to retain their influence among Third World nations and uphold their revolutionary credentials, they had little choice but to support North Vietnam’s ambitions.
North Vietnamese leaders were emboldened, too, by the fact that by October 1974, they had “concluded that South Vietnam could no longer count on American support and that the potential for a renewed U.S. intervention was extremely remote.”242 So they decided to embark on a two-year military offensive, the General Offensive, General Uprising campaign, to conquer South Vietnam and reunite Vietnam—with their only opposition being South Vietnam. In the wake of the Paris accords and then Watergate, South Vietnam was essentially on its own (except for the resupply of US equipment and some assistance from the US embassy and the Defense Attaché Office). The ARVN thus had to radically adjust the way it fought, since its soldiers had been trained with and were accustomed to using almost unlimited supplies. By April 1975, South Vietnamese soldiers would reportedly go into battle with one or two grenades rather than a half dozen, and artillery batteries were only allowed to fire one round before getting permission to fire additional rounds—even as the South Vietnamese forces usually had more supplies than they could use and left huge amounts of equipment behind when they retreated.243
Brent Scowcroft was hardly responsible for the United States’ Vietnam strategy or for the fact that by early 1975 the very existence of South Vietnam was in doubt. He had not started working as Kissinger’s deputy until the Paris peace talks with Hanoi were almost completed, and he had not been a party to Nixon’s decisions to “Vietnamize” the war, to invade Cambodia, and to bomb Hanoi and Haiphong in 1972 (Operation Linebacker II). Upon taking office, Scowcroft said he had little confidence in South Vietnam and “no faith in the North.”244
But Scowcroft wasn’t simply a silent partner. The more he, Kissinger, and Nixon worked together, especially after Kissinger became secretary of state, the more Scowcroft participated in decision making. Scowcroft and Kissinger “had worked together a long time and their thoughts were similar,” Robert Hartmann observed. The deputy national security advisor substituted for Kissinger at meetings when he was out of town, served as a go-between with the president when the president was on the road, drafted memos and press releases on his behalf, and kept his boss informed. “Scowcroft was aware of what he didn’t have to show Kissinger,” Hartmann noted, “and what he had [to] show Kissinger.”245
But assessing Scowcroft’s role in Vietnam policy is difficult because of his style as an administrator and presidential adviser. Not only did he prefer to do things quietly, but he liked to discuss issues and make decisions in person rather than in writing.246 For a trusted aide like Scowcroft, communicating orally was faster and more efficient than writing, and every bit as effective. It was also safer. Memoranda can be leaked. They can die on someone’s desk, get killed through editing or redrafting, or be undermined or counteracted by other memoranda. But the scant written record means that Scowcroft’s historical role and political influence are scarcely visible in the archival record—or in journalists’ and historians’ accounts.247
What the Vietnam records do show, however, is Scowcroft’s clear position within the White House’s inner circle. Even as military assistant, he knew about Operation Menu—the secret bombing of Cambodia in 1969–1970, together with the falsification of reports at President Nixon’s orders (the White House even deliberately misled the Air Force chief of staff).248 And as Kissinger’s deputy, Scowcroft facilitated policy making in several ways. He relayed messages from President Thieu and Le Duc Tho to Kissinger, and vice versa. He and his staff tracked violations by the North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese governments of the January 27, 1973, Vietnam peace agreement. He provided Kissinger with a list of US military options against Laos and North Vietnam in April 1973, following up on those presented by Adm. Thomas Moorer.249 And he had his own back-channel correspondence with Ambassador Martin (back-channel because the communications went directly to and from the NSC rather than through the State Department).
Scowcroft also contributed with his tactical and operational knowledge. In 1972, for instance, he advised it would be better to bomb Laos sooner rather than later. In late 1973, he informed Kissinger that the Douglas A-1s could lay mines, but that the LTV A-7 Corsairs could not, since they had trouble flying at night.250 He informed Kissinger and his State Department aides that South Vietnam lacked the ability to mine North Vietnamese harbors, and in early 1975 he recommended moving B-52s to Guam so that they could be available to bomb the advancing North Vietnamese army if need be.251 And he advised the head of the Office of Management and Budget to take into account a number of factors with respect to foreign assistance to Vietnam and Cambodia in 1975, including food aid; a “10% increase in ammunition for the dry season”; the replacement of “very critical equipment lost in combat, to include artillery pieces, M113 armored personnel carriers”; landing craft and patrol boats “for the Mekong supply route”; and helicopter gunships.252
Scowcroft occasionally took jabs at other US officials, particularly at the defense secretary. When discussing the Cambodia bombing, he pointed out that Schlesinger sought a lower sortie rate for air strikes against Cambodia because he was “worried about his press position” and “credibility.” Scowcroft thought that this explained why Schlesinger shied away from taking strong positions on Vietnam and Indochina notwithstanding his hard-line positions on the Soviet Union and continuing SALT negotiations.253
As much as Scowcroft was in Nixon’s inner loop of advisers, his one-on-one conversations with Nixon on Vietnam were not so much dialogues as they were occasions for Scowcroft to serve as the president’s sounding board or as a source of reassurance. Nixon was very proud of his own judgment on foreign policy and not inclined to let others influence his thinking (much less to reveal that others had influenced his thinking). The tenor of the conversations seems to suggest that Nixon was never quite sincere when asking Scowcroft for advice and that his and Scowcroft’s conversations involved little genuine back-and-forth.254
But Scowcroft essentially agreed with Nixon as well as with Kissinger. Like them, he believed that the United States had to be strong in the face of the threats posed by the Soviet Union, Red China, and international communism. He believed in the fundamental importance of preserving “an American image of reliability,” and he subscribed to the domino theory. It was in the United States’ “cardinal” interest “not to be a Paper Tiger,” as McGeorge Bundy had put it in 1965; the United States could not afford to “have it thought that when we commit ourselves we really mean no high risks.” Like Bundy, as well as LBJ, Nixon, Kissinger, and other Cold War hawks, Scowcroft believed that “the way to peace” lay “over the hard road of determination,” whether the enemy was the Axis Powers of World War II or the Soviet Union, “It has been so since 1940 for us all.”255 “Fundamentally, I do believe in power,” Scowcroft said, “and the exercise of power.”256
Like Nixon and Kissinger, Scowcroft saw the fate of Vietnam as intimately connected with the full range of Cold War conflicts, symbolic and real.257 Credibility was (almost) everything for Kissinger and Scowcroft. Thus, in a March 24 meeting on congressional funding for South Vietnam and Cambodia, when Kissinger and his aides discussed the symbolic reasons for maintaining US support for Cambodia, Kissinger speculated that the “contempt” the Chinese had for the United States “must be total at this point”—that is, with the unimpeded advance of the North Vietnamese on Saigon.258
Scowcroft also shared with Nixon and Kissinger a deep resentment of Congress’s interference in US foreign policy. Scowcroft and Kissinger particularly condemned Congress for its refusal in late 1974 and 1975 to consider how its reductions in funding South Vietnam would undermine the Saigon government, affect the capacity of the American presidency, and ramify internationally. In several meetings with Ford and Kissinger, Scowcroft spoke of Congress’s intransigent and destructive behavior.
Although Congress had appropriated $700 million for Vietnam in fiscal year 1975—July 1974 through June 1975—that amount represented only one-half of the previous year’s $1.4 billion budget. So in January 1975, President Ford requested $522 million in supplemental funds to assist South Vietnam; the sum was later reduced to $300 million. For Scowcroft, the smaller, reduced amount was a “reasonable approach which will meet minimal requirements” that “should be submitted . . . probably at the same time as the request for Cambodia.”259 Yet not only did the House Democratic Caucus refuse on March 12, 1975, to commit any more money, but Congress’s foreign aid bill of March 25 contained $2.7 billion less than the White House had requested. And the new legislation didn’t provide any funds for either Vietnam or Cambodia.260
Also on March 12, Ban Me Thuot fell to the communists. President Nguyen Van Thieu then surprised his Army generals—and also the NVA—by ordering them to fall back. Although the retreat was to have consolidated the South Vietnamese army around more defendable positions, the ARVN generals were unprepared for the order to withdraw their forces, and soldiers and civilians alike, faced with the advancing communist forces, fled.261 The North Vietnamese quickly proceeded to seize Hue on March 26, and on March 30 they captured Da Nang, fifty miles to the southeast.
Learning of the imminent arrival of the North Vietnamese, ARVN officers and soldiers, public officials, policemen, and civilians panicked. Some military officers used their own helicopters to rescue their families and flee south. Others used their guns to force their way on board the ships evacuating people from Da Nang. “There have been terrible mob scenes,” Colby reported, “both at the airport where [civilians] stormed loading aircraft and at the port where they jammed ships.” Other soldiers and officers left the field en masse to find their families rather than leave them behind in the provinces. But only fifty thousand of the more than two million who’d crowded into Da Nang were able to leave by sea.262
The others escaped by land. But with the few roads leading south becoming packed with hundreds of thousands of refugees and retreating army troops, all of these people became easy targets. The communists succeeded in killing tens of thousands of them. The ARVN ended up abandoning about $5 billion worth of US aircraft, tanks, ammunition, and other matériel on the front lines, on the roadsides, and in weapons depots in Da Nang, Cam Ranh Bay, and elsewhere (all told, the United States sent $28.5 billion in military and economic aid to the South Vietnam regime between 1953 and 1975).263 “Law and order [had] broken down completely,” William Colby reported. The situation was “almost impossible.”264
With the North Vietnamese forces advancing much faster than either Hanoi or Saigon had expected, the situation in South Vietnam became acute. One hundred and twenty-five Vietnamese Air Force planes were able to flee to U-Tapao and other bases in Thailand—many of the aircraft filled with refugees—and much of the Vietnamese navy was also able to escape, eventually making it to Subic Bay in the Philippines. But ARVN personnel, officials of the Thieu government, and others who had worked for the US and South Vietnam governments were trapped. “It was frantic, a mess,” Scowcroft told Newsweek.265
In this the context, Thieu wrote an “eyes only” letter on March 25 to President Ford. It read, in part:
As I am writing to you, the military situation in South Vietnam is very grave and is growing worse by the hour.
The serious disequilibrium in the balance of forces in favor of the North Vietnamese as well as their strategic advantages, accumulated over the past two years, have led to the present critical situation. . . . Saigon itself is threatened.
It has become evident that it would be extremely difficult for us to contain the advance of the communist forces and to hold the line in order to push back the invaders.
Thieu blamed the United States for the retreat. Ford had quietly promised South Vietnam adequate support immediately after he took office, but with Congress tying his hands, the president couldn’t deliver on his promise. Nor was Ford above deceiving Thieu about how much the administration could help, telling him in late 1974 that “American policy remains unchanged” and promising to “make every effort to provide you with the assistance you need.” Yet after the Nixon pardon and the passage of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, Ford and others in his administration recognized that Congress would not be cooperating with the administration on US aid to Vietnam—a realization confirmed in a meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with Ford, Kissinger, Scowcroft, and other presidential advisers on January 8, 1975.266
Scowcroft agreed with the South Vietnamese president. He thought Congress’s refusal to provide funds had caused the morale of the South Vietnamese army to plummet. It wasn’t so much that the Vietnamese armed forces no longer had the manpower and equipment—although the paucity of supplies was a problem, as we have seen. It was more a matter of “spirit and commitment,” in Scowcroft’s assessment. In his view, the psychological effects of Congress’s refusal reverberated among the South Vietnamese and “perpetrated the collapse” that ultimately led to the disintegration of the ARVN’s command and control.267
Scowcroft believed that had a significantly larger budget been approved, “quite possibly” something could have been worked out. He thought there was “a decent chance to make it work after the Paris Accords”—at least up until Congress cut back its funding.268 Although Scowcroft had no specific scenario in mind, it’s certainly conceivable that the Vietnam War could have ended differently. For Scowcroft, “there was always a big question in my mind, could we have made it work; did the Congress pull the plug?” “So who knows?” he wondered. “History doesn’t reveal its alternatives.”269
When the Senate Foreign Relations Committee decided on April 18 to recommend just $200 million for the evacuation of Saigon and humanitarian relief, Scowcroft couldn’t contain his bitterness. “It is lovely,” he sarcastically said to Kissinger. “They are proposing $200 million for humanitarian assistance.” “It is unbelievable,” Scowcroft added. “It sums up the worst of what went on in the meeting” between the president’s advisers and members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Well, Indochina is gone,” Kissinger responded, “but we’ll make [Congress] pay for it. In my whole testimony today, I said 25 times that it was Congress’ fault.”270
Later that year, Kissinger observed, “We are living in a nihilistic nightmare. It proves that Vietnam is not an aberration but our normal attitude.” He had Congress’s failure to support South Vietnam in mind.271 Both Kissinger and Scowcroft spoke of Congress’s rejection of additional funding for South Vietnam as the immediate cause of defeat, and looked no further than that—not at the military, not at the State Department, not at White House advisers (Kissinger himself most prominently), and not at American presidents.272
Yet with the decent interval that Kissinger and Nixon had created with the Paris Accords and the formal withdrawal of US forces, the United States had essentially committed to leaving Vietnam—something Scowcroft was well aware of. Neither Kissinger, nor President Nixon, nor Al Haig, nor Admiral Zumwalt believed the peace would last, in fact, notwithstanding the fact that Kissinger and Nixon triumphantly presented the Paris Accords to the American public.273
Survivors from both the North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese armies have attested to the fact many ARVN units fought vigorously to defend what remained of South Vietnam against the advancing communist divisions, despite their logistical handicaps and waning morale, especially around Xuan Loc. However, that same commitment wasn’t apparent among South Vietnamese government officials or its civilians. “No spirit of support or sacrifice has been summoned,” wrote one reporter. “No crowds of Saigonese collected blood or money or food for the soldiers, or helped care for the sick and wounded in the hospitals, or offered their services for the refugees,” observed another. “No swarms of volunteers appeared at recruiting stations. No civilians built barricades or filled sandbags or dug antitank ditches. Nor were they asked to.” Ultimately, “the Saigon regime could find no reserve of will largely because it had no relation to its own people,” the reporter, Arnold Isaacs, found. “Its leaders could conceive [of] useless appeals to the United States for the return of B-52s, but not to their countrymen for a common effort at survival.”274
The United States did provide some measure of assistance to the South Vietnamese military in these last weeks. The defense attaché’s office loaded a propane-fueled CBU-55 bomb—the deadliest non-nuclear bomb in the US arsenal—on a South Vietnamese airplane, which then dropped the CBU-55 over North Vietnamese divisional army headquarters just outside the town of Xuan Loc. The massive fireball killed hundreds of North Vietnamese almost instantaneously, either through suffocation—because of the propane suddenly consuming all the oxygen in the air—or through incineration. It was the only time the United States deployed the CBU-55 in Vietnam. Both Radio Hanoi and China protested vehemently, accusing the United States of a military atrocity. The United States also supplied dozens of deadly fifteen-thousand-pound “daisy cutter” bombs to the South Vietnamese air force, which dropped them around Xuan Loc.275
The president, his aides, and US military leaders knew the bombing was only a stopgap measure. “Vietnam [was] falling to pieces,” in the words of David Hume Kennerly, Ford’s prize-winning photographer. Kennerly agreed with the State Department’s William Hyland that Vietnam was a lost cause. “I don’t care what the generals tell you,” Kennerly told the president after visiting Vietnam with Army chief of staff Frederick C. Weyand in April, “they’re bullshitting if they say that Vietnam has got more than three or four weeks left.”276
The growing issue confronting Ford, Kissinger, Scowcroft, Schlesinger, Ambassador Martin, and Joint Chiefs chairman General George S. Brown (who succeeded Admiral Moorer in July 1974) now became how to evacuate Saigon. In early April the planning began in earnest. “Timing is of utmost importance,” the State Department reported to Scowcroft, adding that “for maximum success the implementation must begin promptly after intelligence sources have indicated Saigon is doomed—and before it is too late to be effective.” Since the evacuation would most likely leave South Vietnam without any effective political and military governing authority, the White House wanted to start the evacuation only when absolutely necessary. Yet the more it delayed, the less the chance that all US officials, American citizens, and high-risk Vietnamese needing to leave Saigon would be able to get out safely. Fundamentally related to the matter of timing was, therefore, the matter of “sufficient speed,” since the logistics of the evacuation depended on which assets—ships, helicopters, cargo planes, commercial aircraft—were available, in what numbers, and when.277
The timing and speed of the operation depended, in turn, on more basic questions. Who was to be evacuated? How many were to be taken out? And what was their order of priority? It was assumed that virtually all US citizens would leave (some missionaries, humanitarian volunteers, and contractors excepted), but it wasn’t obvious to US officials which and how many South Vietnamese were to be evacuated. Defense secretary Schlesinger and some members of Congress wanted to evacuate few, if any, South Vietnamese. In many of his decisions on the evacuation, the president was given the option to leave all South Vietnamese (or those South Vietnamese remaining, as the case may be) behind to face the North Vietnamese.
Ford, Scowcroft, and Martin—who were joined by Kissinger, if to a lesser degree—chose another path. They agreed to take out as many high-risk Vietnamese as possible, a number that “could be anywhere from 10,000 to 75,000 people,” Dean Brown remarked. (Ford appointed Brown, a former ambassador to Jordan and Cyprus, to manage the humanitarian portion of Operation Frequent Wind, the final stage of the evacuation).278 Yet it still was not clear what proportion of those in the high-risk category would be evacuated, since the assumption was that not everyone who qualified as high-risk could be taken out.
Another factor Ford’s advisers had to consider was how the US government was going to protect those being evacuated, as well as the flight crews and the soldiers helping get people out, since Congress had prohibited US forces in Vietnam from engaging in further conflict. Would extra forces need to be brought in? How was the US military to respond when attacked by hostile fire? And would some in the South Vietnamese military who opposed the Americans’ departure resist and obstruct the evacuation?
In addition, Ford’s top military and civilian advisers had to decide on a policy for those rescued at sea, since many South Vietnamese were fleeing by boat. What resources should the United States spend on rescuing the boat people, especially if most were not in the high-risk category? How was the administration going to handle the thousands of refugees? Where were these people to be housed, fed, processed, and eventually located?
Scowcroft and his NSC staff, Bud McFarlane in particular, were responsible for overseeing and coordinating almost all phases of the evacuation. They monitored how many Americans and Vietnamese US forces took out each day, using figures from the Saigon embassy and Department of Defense, so as to calculate how many people remained to be evacuated. They coordinated actions with the State Department and the Pacific Command. Mostly, they simply tried to impose a modicum of order on what Scowcroft called a “confusing, crazy” mess.279
Notwithstanding Scowcroft’s hope that the United States would be able to continue to support the Thieu government, he recognized by late March that there was very little the Ford administration could do.280 Under the circumstances, Scowcroft advocated evacuating “as many as possible,” believing the United States had a “moral obligation” to those who worked for the US government and to US contractors. He also believed that Washington’s management of the evacuation would affect the United States’ international reputation: “Other nations will see in our handling of this issue how the U.S. deals with the people of a country which has long been involved with us.”281
The administration feared that the Americans still in Saigon would effectively become hostages. DCI Colby and embassy officials warned that some South Vietnamese held the position that the “evacuation of Americans should not be permitted unless guarantees for their own safety [were] made.” Americans might be subject to “reprisals” if the United States attempted to evacuate US citizens “without taking along friendly South Vietnamese.” The South Vietnamese might even “fire on anyone trying to leave.”282
Based on some combination of these different factors, Ford decided to evacuate as many as possible, including the South Vietnamese dependents of American personnel, the high-risk Vietnamese along with their families and other dependents, and others who had assisted or collaborated with the United States.283
Scowcroft gave Ford immense credit for this decision, especially since members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had unanimously recommended that the last US forces be withdrawn “as fast as possible.” Ford had “nothing to gain” politically by refusing to abandon the Vietnamese, Scowcroft pointed out, while he had “everything to lose” had the evacuation led to US casualties or a subsequent military engagement with the North Vietnamese. It was, he later wrote, “perhaps Ford’s finest hour. It was a tough, lonely decision made with great courage.”284
With the North Vietnamese about to overrun Saigon, Kissinger and Scowcroft depended on Ambassador Martin’s presence on the ground and relied on his judgment of the situation. Martin was among the last to accept the reality that the battle to save South Vietnam was lost. As late as April 25, well after the White House, Department of Defense, and intelligence officials realized how hopeless the situation was, Martin cabled Kissinger and Scowcroft that “the will to fight was still there,” that Hanoi could “no longer mass superior force,” and that the Republic of Vietnam’s air force, which was equipped with Northrop F-5s and other US aircraft, would, “for the first time, be able to meet the enemy in equal force.” Scowcroft thought Martin had broken down and gone “off the deep end.”285 Perhaps the fact that Martin’s own adopted son had been killed while serving as a Marine in Vietnam colored the ambassador’s analysis, intensifying his unwillingness to admit that the war was lost.
Scowcroft nonetheless found Martin “extreme[ly] useful” and “a stabilizing factor” in the midst of “a very hectic period,” offering a consistent message: “Don’t get out. Hang in there.” Scowcroft thought that Martin gave the administration perspective and recognized that he “helped me a lot in trying to figure out how slow we could go, how fast we had to go because Schlesinger at that time was pushing to get his troops out.”286 Even when he and Kissinger had serious disagreements with Martin, the urgency of the situation and the politics of the moment made it impossible to fire the ambassador.
So, paradoxically, Kissinger and Scowcroft allowed Martin considerable discretion, despite the fact that they considered his analysis of the situation in Vietnam fundamentally inaccurate—and even sometimes referred to him as “the madman.”287 On April 19, Scowcroft cabled Martin, advising him to use his “own judgment” in moving out “Vietnamese in the high-risk category.” He assured the ambassador that neither he nor Kissinger was going to “second guess” him; Martin himself had to be “the judge on when and how fast to move such high-risk elements as CIA assets and so forth.” Scowcroft ended the message by writing, “Thank God you are out there.”288
Martin nevertheless attempted to stall the evacuation as long as he could and tried to delay the closing of the defense attaché’s office, the withdrawal of US military forces, and the shutting down of the South Vietnamese government. When push came to shove, he and CIA Station Chief Polgar were even willing to sacrifice President Thieu for the sake of making any kind of deal that could allow the South Vietnamese government and Martin’s “little empire”—as Scowcroft called it—to survive.289
On April 21, after Martin told Thieu it was time to leave, the South Vietnamese president resigned and was flown to Taipei, where his brother was ambassador (Thieu’s wife had already left for Taiwan). On April 28, after a weeklong interregnum during which the vice president was in charge, Duong Van Minh (known as “Big Minh”) became president of South Vietnam. The next morning, the situation deteriorated further. The South Vietnamese army began to disband and the North Vietnamese shelled Tan Son Nhut airport—the center of the US military presence in South Vietnam—littering the runway with the debris of destroyed aircraft and wrecked trucks.
When Schlesinger heard the news that the airport was inoperable, he called Scowcroft, yelling at him, “For Christ’s sake, let’s go to the helos.” Ford checked with Kissinger and agreed: “We have no choice but to send in the helicopters, get our Americans out, and try to save as many friends as we can,” Ford told Scowcroft. So Scowcroft ordered Martin and the Seventh Fleet to begin Option IV—Operation Frequent Wind (before April 15 known as Operation Talon Vise). Thirty minutes later, Armed Forces Radio in Saigon played “White Christmas,” signaling that the final evacuation was under way. Some South Vietnamese had their own name for the operation: “The Running.”290
Over the final two days of April, seventy-one helicopters made 689 sorties staffed by 865 Marines.291 As long as Americans remained at the embassy, Martin knew, the helicopters would keep flying. So he used the flights to evacuate dependents and other at-risk Vietnamese, even as hundreds of Americans at the embassy remained to be evacuated. To Kissinger, Scowcroft, and the Joint Chiefs, Martin’s insistence on evacuating Vietnamese against explicit orders to the contrary was insubordinate. “Graham gave me an initial headcount of several hundred that included both Americans and Vietnamese,” McFarlane reports in his memoirs, “and we started the [last set] of sorties.” Once the helicopters lifted off, however, “Graham reported back” and gave McFarlane “a number that was more than we had started with.” Since McFarlane “knew what [Graham] was doing,” and since he agreed with “his desire to evacuate as many Vietnamese as possible,” he didn’t pass anything along. After a while, “Henry caught on,” and he became very upset when his military assistant admitted that Martin “was padding things a bit and bringing out more Vietnamese.”292
The usually calm Scowcroft snapped. “UNDERSTAND THERE ARE STILL ABOUT 400 AMERICANS IN EMBASSY COMPOUND,” he cabled Martin. “YOU SHOULD ENSURE THAT ALL, REPEAT ALL, AMERICANS ARE EVACUATED IN THIS OPERATION ASAP.”
Furious, the ambassador gave as good as he got:
Perhaps you can tell me how to make some of these Americans abandon their half-Vietnamese children, or how the president would look if he ordered this. . . .
Am well aware of the danger here tomorrow and I want to get out tonight. But I damn well need at least 30 CH-53s [Sikorsky Sea Stallion helicopters] or the equivalent to do that. Do you think you can get president to order CINCPAC [Office of the US Commander in Chief Pacific] to finish job quickly? I repeat, I need 30 ch-53s and I need them now.293
Less than two hours later Martin sent another “flash” (high-priority) message to Scowcroft: “Since my last message nineteen, repeat 19, CH-46s [Boeing Sea Knight tandem-rotor helicopters] have come and gone. They carry about two-fifths of CH-53 capacity. I needed thirty CH-53 sorties capacity. I still do. Can’t you get someone to tell us what is going on?294
As the waves of helicopters scurried back and forth between the US embassy and the US fleet, Martin kept boarding Vietnamese, even though embassy staff, US Marines, and others waited at the mission. “Brent Scowcroft had promised me fifty more of those big helicopters,” Martin recalled. “We had taken the Vietnamese and the Koreans to whom we had made a promise, we carefully counted them and brought them across the wall into the inner compound. We had no intention of bringing the people we had left in the outer compound. We were going to bring these other people out—some of them were cabinet ministers and so on.”295
Many wouldn’t get out. The word in the White House and in the Pentagon was that Martin was “always going to have 2,000 more.” “No matter how many helicopters left, the estimate of the number of evacuees remaining never changed,” one helicopter squadron commander said. “It was like trying to empty a ‘bottomless pit.’” Military leaders already held Martin responsible for delaying the evacuation, and they now (rightly) suspected that he was deliberately withholding Americans so he could evacuate more Vietnamese.296
For his part, Martin blamed Scowcroft for not ordering enough helicopter sorties so he could evacuate all of the Vietnamese still at the embassy. “Actually we very carefully calculated the whole bloody business, taking ninety at a time, and with what Scowcroft had promised me—well, God knows if you can’t count on the President’s national security advisor, who the hell do you count on?”
But the decision wasn’t Martin’s to make. The White House and Joint Chiefs had decided that time was up. Recounted Martin, “Suddenly we got this message that everything was off. ‘The next helicopter is coming; please come out.’” After receiving the news, he cabled Scowcroft, “Plan to close mission Saigon approximately 0430. . . . Due to necessity to destroy [communications] gear, this is the last Saigon message to SecState.”297
At 4:42 A.M. on April 30, the ambassador, pale, suffering from insomnia, unsteady on his feet, and still recovering from a recent medical operation, was helicoptered from the embassy. Additional helicopters rescued the remaining few Americans. The final CH-46 and its escort of Cobra gunships landed just before 8:00 A.M.—in full daylight—to pick up the last eleven Marines. As the last Marines quickly climbed the stairs up to the embassy roof, desperate South Vietnamese raced up behind them. And as the Marines hastily boarded the one waiting helicopter, the first Vietnamese to reach the roof made a dive for the helicopter as it began to lift off.298
About four hundred Vietnamese who were crowded in the embassy courtyard and whom Martin or other US officials had promised to evacuate were stranded. For the US officials and Marines taking the last few helicopters, the scene was excruciating: although orders were orders, many of them had worked for years with the South Vietnamese, and they felt responsible for abandoning them.299
At about noon on April 30, the lead tank from the 324th Division of the North Vietnamese army crashed through the gates to the presidential palace in Saigon. Big Minh was placed under arrest, and the US embassy was ransacked not long afterward. All of Vietnam was in communist hands.300
Soon after Martin landed on the USS Blue Ridge, Kissinger cabled him his appreciation: “I am sure you know how deeply I feel about your performance under the most trying circumstances. My heartfelt thanks.” In the same telegram, Scowcroft wrote, “Graham, you were superb.”301
THE EVACUATION CRISIS was the most severe leadership test Brent Scowcroft had faced in his career. Throughout, he was constantly in touch with Kissinger and frequently with the president. He spoke often with Schlesinger and others in the Department of Defense as well as with Ambassador Martin, Wolfgang Lehmann, Tom Polgar, and President Thieu, whether by telephone or cable. He also worked closely with Adm. Noel Gayler, commander in chief of the Pacific Command.302 And he was “able to knock heads together at CINCPAC and with the fleet commanders when critical bottlenecks showed up,” John Prados reported, not losing sight of what the US hoped to achieve.303
Scowcroft ran the situation room “for a long, exhausting day of one emergency after another.” And with the twelve-hour time difference between Washington and Vietnam, he was often up most of the night and sometimes all night during those final days. To others in the White House, he appeared “frail and exhausted.”304 In contrast to Kissinger, who “grew increasingly irate and short-tempered” as the evacuation drew to a climax, Scowcroft kept his poise. Hartmann, who disliked the holdovers from the Nixon White House, especially Kissinger, appreciated Scowcroft’s “tireless and unflappable” personality. It was similar to that of President Ford himself, who “always tended to calm” during crises.305
Still, Scowcroft found the end of the Vietnam War greatly disturbing. Having dealt with hundreds of families of POWs and MIAs in his role as military assistant and having himself been confined to military hospitals for two years, he couldn’t view the episode and the suffering it involved from twenty thousand feet, as Kissinger did.
The end of the Vietnam War was in many ways a microcosm of the multifaceted history of the failed US involvement in Indochina. “It was,” admitted Scowcroft, “a miracle we got out.”306 What Scowcroft does not say is that the North Vietnamese themselves very much wanted the United States and its South Vietnamese collaborators out; that’s why they were willing to agree to a de facto week-long ceasefire. What he also leaves unmentioned are the significant mistakes and great costs that accompanied the evacuation.
The evacuation of Saigon highlighted the interservice rivalries that had hobbled the US military throughout the war. Bureaucratic battles interfered with the planning, orchestration, and conduct of the operations, and departments and agencies worked at cross-purposes with the “lines of responsibility . . . unclear,” Arnold Isaacs reported in his book Without Honor. “Everybody thought everybody else was in charge until somebody wanted to do something” one military official stated, “and then somebody would disapprove it.” Right until the end, the war featured “mutual incomprehension and mistrust among the various U.S. agencies.” Worse, Ford and his top advisers were “disastrously slow to set any clear direction.”307
William Clements, deputy secretary of defense from 1973 to 1977, described the evacuation as “a damn poor performance by everybody concerned,” with the worst problem being the “absolutely miserable” communications. The Joint Chiefs performed terribly, Clements said, notwithstanding the weeks of planning they’d done. And nonmilitary agencies performed just as poorly: on Guam, for instance, only ninety Immigration and Naturalization Service officials were sent to process the twenty thousand Vietnamese who’d arrived on the island since early April, causing a backlog of thousands of refugees.308
Some of the responsibility falls on Ambassador Martin. Martin conceded his responsibility for how the evacuation developed because of his ceaseless attempts to try to find a way for the government of South Vietnam to survive. But Kissinger and Scowcroft also bore some responsibility. Not only did they stand by Martin until the very end, however upset they may have been with him at times, but they also placed top priority on delaying the fall of South Vietnam as long as they could, in the cause of upholding the credibility of the United States.
Of the three, Scowcroft was the most practical-minded, the least emotional, and the most accepting of the fall of South Vietnam. In his view, having lost the war, the United States simply had to manage the withdrawal as best as it could.309 For Kissinger, the loss of South Vietnam hit deeper. It called into question his years of diplomatic maneuvering and policy making, and it focused new scrutiny on his autocratic style, “his penchant for the virtuoso performance,” and his “addiction to secrecy,” in the description of CIA officer Frank Snepp.310 Kissinger’s management style especially alienated Schlesinger and the Defense Department, Colby and the CIA, and important members of Congress on whom the Nixon and Ford administrations ultimately depended. The fact that the secretary of state told other White House officials he wanted to “avoid running all around town and giving the impression that there will be a total bug-out” suggested his frustration at how the war ended.311
The Vietnam War also revealed long-standing divisions within the White House itself. Kissinger, Scowcroft, Martin, and other anticommunist hawks refused to concede South Vietnam till the bitter end, while James Schlesinger, Ron Nessen, and Robert Hartmann all recommended that the United States cut its losses in Vietnam. Eventually, Ford came to agree with Schlesinger and his political advisers, which led to his Tulane speech declaring the end of the war.
But even with that speech, the internal squabbling did not end. When a reporter asked the president after the speech if Kissinger had approved of his address, Ford exclaimed, “No!” Quickly, Hartmann interrupted: “Mr. President, we did circulate this speech as we always do . . . and I believe that General Scowcroft signed off on it.” Hartmann was covering for his boss, since Scowcroft had never seen the speech. But Scowcroft and Kissinger had been partly misled by the fact that Ford gave another speech in New Orleans that same day, at the Navy League. When Kissinger had asked Scowcroft to check with Ford’s assistants about the speech, Ford’s staff reassured him there would be nothing in it that would “surprise or disturb Kissinger,” John F. Osborne reported in his book White House Watch: The Ford Years.312
The next morning Kissinger went to Oval Office “in a fine temper,” demanding an explanation. So Ford summoned Hartmann and asked him why Kissinger didn’t know about the speech. Hartmann describes the scene in his memoirs:
“Well, we circulated it to General Scowcroft, [Hartmann replied] and we didn’t know for sure whether he’d seen it or not, but his initials are just as good as anybody’s in this room.” And the President knew and I knew that this line [about the ending of American involvement in the Vietnam War] wasn’t in there at the time. But Kissinger didn’t know that. . . . And then Henry ranted and raved and said, “This has got to stop. I can’t hold my head up in front of all these ambassadors with a major statement like this and I don’t know about it. I’ve just lost face.” So when he got through, the President looked over at me and said, “Well I think it’s a misfortunate misunderstanding; the system slipped up somehow. Just be sure, Bob, that this never happens again.”
Hartmann made sure he “looked properly cowed and repentant” and said, “Yes sir.” The meeting adjourned.313
Hartmann knew he could blame Scowcroft and get away with it, since neither the president nor Kissinger would question Scowcroft’s judgment. In any case, Kissinger was being disingenuous: in speeches on April 5 and April 23, he had essentially said the same thing: “The Vietnam debate has run its course. The time has come for restraint and compassion.”314 (Interestingly, Gerald Ford doesn’t write about the Tulane speech in his memoir, A Time to Heal.)
Beyond the divisions within the White House and the military lay deeper splits in the political system. From Kennedy through Nixon, presidents suspected that America’s Vietnam policy could not work in the long run. But each administration chose to put off the reckoning by simply perpetuating the US presence in Vietnam; no president wanted to be the one who “lost Vietnam.”315 While congressional majorities agreed to what the president and Pentagon asked, as the United States poured more and more personnel, matériel, and money into South Vietnam, Congress became increasingly isolated from the policy-making process. Members of Congress were not informed of or included in the Paris peace talks, for example, and the 1973 peace agreement was never approved by Congress.316
The Watergate scandal certainly played a role in the conclusion of the Vietnam debacle. According to NSC staff member William L. Stearman, had Nixon not been preoccupied with Watergate, “he would have resumed bombing” after the North Vietnamese began violating the Paris accords. Lawrence Eagleburger similarly observed, “Had it not been for Watergate, the administration could have carried on a substantially more effective response to the North Vietnamese violations of the agreement.” Eagleburger went so far as to say that it was entirely likely that the North Vietnamese, because they “read us very well,” would not have undertaken “the final invasion of South Vietnam, I think with the proper analysis that we would not react, had it not been for Watergate.” Scowcroft’s analysis aligns with Stearman’s: he had no doubt that “had it not been” for “the growing constraints of Watergate and what it was beginning to mean,” Nixon would have restarted a bombing campaign when the North Vietnamese began to use the Ho Chi Minh Trail to resupply the insurgence in the South in March, 1973. In fact, this is precisely what Nixon, Kissinger—and possibly also Scowcroft—planned for that March and April. But “Watergate sapped any resolve that Nixon may have had to bomb again,” Larry Berman concludes.317
But by 1975, after years of being lied to and misled, after Watergate, and after all those thousands of deaths and all those billions of dollars, a majority in Congress now joined the public and the press in doubting the wisdom of the Vietnam War.318 American presidents had cried “wolf” too many times. Congress would not go along anymore—making the fall of Vietnam only a matter of time.
If Congress had gone along and provided more funding, it might have delayed the fall of the South Vietnam regime, but by late 1974, the fate of South Vietnam was almost inevitable. It is virtually impossible to come up with a plausible alternative history to the end of the South Vietnamese regime—and an end that would more likely come sooner than later. But the secretary of state, national security advisor, and president were all too happy to blame Congress as the proximate cause of the Vietnam defeat. To the extent to which Scowcroft still blames Congress, moreover, he would seem to be ignoring the reasons behind Nixon’s and Kissinger’s “decent interval” and to be taking congressional behavior out of its larger context: the evolution of American public opinion and the shift in presidential-congressional relations in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
LESS THAN TWO weeks after the evacuation, in response to a request from President Ford, Kissinger drafted a memo outlining the lessons he took from the Vietnam War.
One lesson was that “American political groups will not long remain comfortable in positions that go against their traditional attitudes.” In particular, Kissinger claimed that liberal Democrats were incapable of supporting for any significant length of time “a war against a revolutionary movement.” So the “liberal Democrats” were able to accept Vietnam under Kennedy, but “withdrew from it under President Johnson” and subsequent Republican administrations.
Kissinger also pointed out the need for accurate reporting in the press and by US officials. He noted the “absolute importance of focusing our own remarks and the public debate on the essentials” (that is, on what we now call “controlling the narrative”). He emphasized how much “consistency” mattered, since members of Congress and members of the public applied different standards at the beginning of the war in comparison to toward the end.
He observed, too, that the US military was not suited for a war that was at once “a revolutionary war fought at knifepoint during the night within villages” and a conventional “main force war.”
In the end, however, Kissinger contended that the United States could be proud of its accomplishments in Southeast Asia. The United States had saved Indonesia from going communist, he argued. “We paid a high price but we gained ten years of time,” he wrote, “and we changed what then appeared to be an overwhelming momentum.”319
Around the same time, Scowcroft received a memo from the State Department, “Lessons from Viet-Nam”—one that he himself may have commissioned—that reached opposite conclusions. Rather than treating consistency as being of essential importance, the United States needed to “avoid confusing constancy with inertia.” In 1954 and up to the early 1960s the United States faced a monolithic communist bloc, the report observed, and the “activist, outward-looking” climate of the time held that “American resources and American expertise could solve any problem anywhere.” But by the late 1960s, the Vietnam War had come to be perceived as “unjust and unwinnable” by the American public, a situation in which US foreign policy “outstripped the national consensus.” The US government would have been better off seeking a political settlement in 1968 rather than waiting until 1972. As the conditions of the war and as the political climate changed, so, too, should have American policies.
Rather than blaming liberal Democrats or other domestic groups, the State Department’s memorandum observed that successive presidential administrations had made the mistakes of employing short-term rationales, excluding Congress from planning, and failing to explain how the United States’ vital national interests were at stake. Furthermore, the United States had failed to adequately assess its allies’ tenacity and sense of purpose, since “in the final analysis” South Vietnam was “unable to mobilize effectively the support of its people in the face of an implacable, disciplined enemy.” Instead, the United States had “consistently underestimated the tenacity and sense of purpose of Hanoi” and overestimated its ability to break the communists’ will—determination that Kissinger acknowledged by saying that the North Vietnamese were “the toughest in the world to deal with.”320
The report concluded by remarking—once more, contrary to Kissinger—that the United States had “been badly burned in Viet-nam.” The war was not an episode of which the United States should be proud.321
It might be pointless to “refight” the Vietnam war. But the dueling memos made it clear that the lessons of Vietnam were radically different depending on the perspective of the person drawing those lessons. The division is probably just as stark today, with some continuing to believe that Congress caused the United States to lose Vietnam, others arguing that Watergate played a critical role in weakening Nixon’s political capital, and others asserting that by the early 1970s the war was unwinnable.
What was certain, however, was that the fall of Vietnam represented a psychic wound to America’s self-image. But within a few weeks, the Ford administration would get an unexpected chance at payback—an opportunity to restore the United States’ reputation and to demonstrate that America remained committed to international leadership. The president and his advisers would make the most of the opportunity.