half a century

a straight line

My dad drilled us nightly when possible about both geography and historical commemorations, not the least because it gave us a topic for dinner conversations (especially overseas). I am therefore mindful of dates.

I remember precisely where I was on Wednesday, 30 April 1975, when I heard that Saigon capitulated to North Vietnamese forces, ending the Republic of Vietnam and a lot more.

In the category of “you have to be kidding me”, my father had worked a temporary assignment to strengthen South Vietnam’s tax collection activities (his work) less than six months earlier. I suspect few of us had any idea how close the end of that country was when he flew back from Saigon in late December 1974.

Today's historic marker began preoccupying me last fall I recognized the half century mark on the horizon. I was determined the War College Alumni Association ought offer a program to commemorate the service by so many alumni in Southeast Asia between roughly 1960 and 1975. I apologize to any of you who had trouble with the link to that event on 11 April; I am no longer on the Board but I heard people had trouble. I deeply regret that as it was a superb event.

I offer my thoughts on the most-enduring effects from this time, though I have thought about discussing who individuals served or the effects on the national security community. I see Vietnam as conjuring up an era, one altering the lives of all who lived it and came afterwards, whether you are the lady who asked my husband last month why he went to Vietnam or if you had no idea a “sovereign country” by that name existed between 1954 and 1975. Vietnam also changed our view of and role in the world. .

Vietnam hollowed out trust in national institutions. We still seeing the disintegration of those bodies as a method of uniting us as a people.

The analogy of fall of South Vietnam as a "slow-motion traffic accident" certainly applied as we watched the Northerners seize control of the long, thin country created following the French withdrawal under the Paris Accords. That 1954 document ended France’s colonist status over Southeast Asia. I doubt many Americans remember either that Paris governed Vietnam for roughly a century or that the nationalist movement under Ho Chi Minh at least purportedly sought U.S. assistance against the French when World War II ended. Too few people today seem aware that anything predated the 24/7 news blast era that Ted Turner inaugurated five years after our war ended in the 1970s. Pre-CNN was a media landscape with four primary national network news sources. I suspect I was already in the minority in paying attention to the events, as American society had wearied on so much by April 1975.

We tried to maintain two independent countries in Vietnam, as we still see on the Korean peninsula. Unfortunately, the one under Saigon’s control never had much chance of survival without constant infusions of aid and troops to keep it in control over its own population. One minor indicator: the bulk of South Vietnamese citizens were Buddhists whie the regime leadership was Roman Catholic from the north. Corruption throughout its twenty year existence was endemic, fed by outside assistance no matter its intent.

Despite billions of dollars and millions of men (primarily, although many women also served, particularly as nurses in the theater) sent to Vietnam, we had chosen an unachievable objective. South Vietnam did not have the requirements for a sustainability on its own nor was it ours to save. We fell into a MHH mindset as I discussed last week, hoping grafting our system onto the Republic of Vietnam would overcome indigenous nationalism and communist supporters. We never succeeded in isolating the correct variable to fix, though we spent administrations and lives trying..

Scenes of helicopters ferrying desperate people, many American but even more Vietnamese, from the roof of the U.S. Embassy to safety as the Vietnamese spilled across the country in the spring of 1975 evoked futility and anger following a generation of sacrifices. Amid an era of relative prosperity at home while hearing that success was “just aroaund the corner” up until it wasn’t, the footage of desperation reinforced the sinking feeling about our country so familiar in the 1970s. Jimmy Carter’s malaise speech in 1979 certainly echoed the feeling in many households at home.

Doubts about many institutions developed in the 1960s as the Judiciary ruled on several changes to law in our society. The Supreme Court 1954 Brown v Board of Education ruling facilitated 1960s removing states' (predominantly, but not exclusively, in the South) discrimination against African Americans. School integration was a first step—and led to the creation of many religious-affiliated private schools for affluent students. Several other decisions, such as 1964 Griswold v Connecticut (handing birth control to couples rather than the State authorities under the right of privacy) or Miranda v. Arizona two years later (guaranteeing the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination), altered the sense of power within the country. For some, these three moves alone evidence the judiciary was out of control because of a single liberal, Earl Warren, who was the chief justice. Ironically, Republican Dwight Eisenhower nominated the Californian to serve as Chief Justice. This assault on the traditional “order” in many parts of the country cast doubt about who institutions supported rather than seeing those institutions as built on our Constitution’s provisions. Those buoyed by these decisions saw the national trajectory as more favorable—and this launched the culture wars of the 2020s from these actions if nothing else.

Coincidentally, change occurred within the Roman Catholic Church because of the Second Vatican Council between 1962 and 1965. This "liberalizing" reform left many Catholics adrift and disoriented. The split within the Church is still playing out today as the Cardinals gather to anoint a new Holy Father, as I wrote about following Pope Francis's death ten days ago. Mainline Protestant faiths similarly began splintering over social positions such as supporting the war, shredding some congregations as a result.

We generally accept that the reporting on the 1968 Tet Offensive played a pivotal role degrading our trust in national institutions. People today remember years of dinner broadcasts with Uncle Walter, meaning the revered CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, recounting improving conditions on Vietnamese ground, in line with the White House and Defense Department narrative to support increased troop demands. The two other major networks had their broadcasters, such as Chet Huntley and David Brinkley at NBC, who provided similar reports from the field as did the print journalists. The 1971 publication of the Pentagon Papers, in the face of Nixon’s attempts, made clear that falsifying the public record to retain support had been the Johnson, then Nixon game all along.

Optimism receded following the Tet Offensive, although U.S. ground troops remained in South Vietnam for five more years. As Americans sat at their dinner tables in late January 1968, only to have Cronkite’s disgust over Tet become obvious. It wasn’t that Tet was so bad (Americans sent the Viet Cong packing, of course) but the previous reports indicated this couldn’t happen as we succeeded. Yet we were not succeeding in a strategic analysis as network news video unquestionably showed. Conditions allowing enemy fighters on the grounds of our most secure position in South Vietnam—the U.S. Embassy grounds—could hardly be success after three years. South Vietnamese and U.S. personnel drove the North Vietnamese back from the grounds while severely undermining the Viet Cong forces.

The reports in early 1968 also focused on a relatively obscure Marine Corps base in northwest South Vietnam, Khe Sanh. Remote in its location, the Johnson administration feared it would replicate what became the great French siege—and perceived defeat—at Dien Bien Phu fourteen years earlier. In short, the media was suddenly bringing a different war to American homes from what the story had been for much of the combat period beginning in the mid-1960s, despite our incredible investment in resources and blood. But Joe and Joanna Q. Public in Boise, Amarillo, Tonowanda, or Paducah had far less faith in either the media on reporting or the government in any branch.

In short, many no longer found the national institutions reliable statements about in prioritizing our needs as the nation because things were so convoluted, so broken in merely a generation. Whether it was the Legislature's Constitutional responsibility to oversee the Executive action, confirm nominations, or use the power of the purse to authorize increasing expenditures, the Congress didn’t appear to do their job. The Democrats controlled the House of Representatives but did nothing to derail actions by either an aggressive Democrat in Lyndon Johnson, who incrementally increased the U.S. forces on the ground in this remote country after taking over from John Kennedy, or later the slights of hand by his successor.

Many people want to believe Kennedy would have withdrawn advisors following the Diem debacle only weeks before his own Dallas 1963 assassination, but I remain unconvinced. If we have learned nothing over the past fifty years, it ought to be that an individual can make things worse but each and every one of those in national security operate within a system, so large as be difficult to alter long term. Perhaps I am too cynical, but many participants are invested in trends underway in that system. Johnson, scarred by what he saw as elitist arrogance on the part of inherited Kennedy advisors, was determined not to be the man who lost Vietnam, despite recognizing early we would not likely succeed. I am not sure we really had any idea of saving the country meant long term except not “losing it”. Not losing is hardly the same as knowing how to move forward in a sustainable trajectory.

The secretive, resentful Republican Richard Nixon shared LBJ's profound insecurity regarding Eastern elitists he believed deprived him of the 1960 presidential vote, though he had at least earned a law degree in the outer ring, Duke University, of the elitist sanctum. Richard Nixon won the presidency in a three-way race on a "law and order" platform, differentiating himself from the disastrous Democrats who suffered from public unrest surrounding the 1968 Chicago convention. Relying on George Wallace as a figure to divide opposition votes hardly endeared him to many who wanted new institutional approaches.

Working with another Machiavellian in Henry Kissinger to reroute international politics, Nixon prioritized Vietnam below his greatest ambitions as a strategic thinker: to bring the Soviets to heel by returning a weak China as a worry for the Soviets in the global chess game. Ultimately, Nixon sacrificed South Vietnam to ensure he could move China against the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. Nixon's machinations coincided with voters tiring of a war they could tell we were not winning. Rather than throwing more good money after bad, both Nixon and a substantial portion of the public said “enough already”. This outcome occurred as growing budget pressures made Vietnam all the more unpalatable for all but the hardest core supporters of a chimeric regime.

Though Nixon campaigned on "a secret plan" to end the War, more Americans died during his five years as a wartime president. The "secret plan" did not exist in any meaningful manner, but Nixon proposed "Vietnamization" to substitute for an American-centric effort. He also ended the detested and division draft less than a year before his impeachment and resignation.

Nixon's determination to secure reelection created the Watergate debacle, a separate tale from the conflict but contributing further to society's disdain for a major institution. The political upheaval resulting from investigative journalism and related presidential advisors lying to Congressional committees reinforced doubts for many about the efficacy of our system.

The condemnations of government and the news media, central institutions of our culture, expanded with the Watergate lies of Richard Nixon and the coverage of our progress towards peace in Vietnam. It's seductive but a fool’s errand to seek a single turning point that soured people as a whole, although I suspect each of us has a particular memory of that moment of discomfort, if not fury, at what we were hearing. I was overseas during Watergate, spared of the drip drip drip of Nixon’s staff admitting the POTUS’s lies but it lead to Nixon's resignation ten months before South Vietnam fell. We prided ourselves, painfully, on the Constitutional system surviving the challenge of a man who saw himself able to use the apparatus of government solely to his advantage.

The lessons of Vietnam went beyond a single man, which is the key point many of us misjudged about the United States. Les Gelb and Richard Betts co-authored The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked in 1979, arguing that decision-makers knew perfectly well that they could not achieve their stated aims. Growing public unrest led Lyndon Johnson to abandon hopes for reelection in 1968, retiring to a Texas ranch in relative disgrace and seclusion for the remainder of his life. LBJ died in early 1973, two days after what would have been the end of a four-year term if he had somehow won the '68 campaign. Nixon served for four and a half years but they were a bitter, dark period.

The indisputable effect was that an ever-growing number of Americans no longer trusted institutions to serve their interests as they saw them. We can argue about whether they were correct, but that was the perception. Fifty years later, that discomfort remains. Americans all too often automatically assume institutions choose malevolent outcomes to which they as individuals do not subscribe. I see this as a direct outcome of the Vietnam milieu and history.

We use Vietnam as shorthand for an era, whether we mean the years, the societal upheaval, the cultural changes, or the institutional doubts. I frequently say we are ahistorical as a society yet this era left uncalcuable change on us. We can never go back, of course, to either Vietnam or the time preceding it. But, more tragically, I hope we aren’t destined to see the changes as so transformative as to destroy us as a people. I am no longer sure on that point.

I welcome your thoughts on this era, this war, and the theme. I genuinely want to hear how others, whether living through it or looking back upon it, see Vietnam’s end on 30 April 1975.

The list of citations below does not pretend to be anything other than a woefully brief introduction, whether you experienced the conflict or if you know nothing of the Vietnam era.

Thank you for your time today as I knew it was an extended column. I especially appreciate the paid subscribers.

Be well and be safe. Take a moment to thank all who gave so much over Vietnam. FIN

Bernard D. Cole, Goin’ to ‘Nam. Red Bank, New Jersey: Newman Springs Publishing. scheduled Summer 2025 publication.

“Full Pentagon Papers Declassified”, CBSNews.com, 2012, retrieved at duck://player/SCQLYo4aySg

History.com Editors, “Vietnamization”, History.com, 3 November 1969, retrieved at https://www.history.com/articles/vietnamization

Harold Moore and Joseph Galloway, “We Were Soldiers Once…and Young. New York: Random House, 1992, reissued 2004, retrieved at https://www.amazon.com/We-Were-Soldiers-Once-Young/dp/0345472640

Rufus Phillips, III, and Richard Holbrook, Why Vietnam Matters: An Eyewitness Account of Lessons. Annapolis, Maryland: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2017

Harry Rothmann, Warriors and Fools: How America’s Leaders Lost the Vietnam War and Why It Still Matters. Creative Space Independent Publishing Platform, 2018, retrieved at https://www.amazon.com/Warriors-Fools-Americas-Leaders-Vietnam/dp/1987591569

“The Vietnam War: A Film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick”, PBS.com, 2017, retrieved at https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-vietnam-war/#watch