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Fifty Years Ago, Events in America Sealed the Fate of Millions of Southeast Asians

By Walter Donway

August 6, 2024

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Fifty years ago, on Thursday, August 8, 1974, U.S. President Richard M. Nixon, speaking on national television from the White House, told Americans he would resign his presidency the next day. The Watergate crusade by the media, academia, and Democratic politicians had reached such a frenzied pitch that Nixon did not have the support in Congress to stave off impeachment and conviction. He knew it.

Now, millions would die, become refugees, and lose their freedom.

Nixon knew, too, that the prolonged battle to defend South Vietnam’s freedom against communism probably was lost. The Paris Peace Accords he had won, and had guaranteed to South Vietnam that he would enforce, were a dead letter. They were rendered unenforceable by a Congress panicked by peaceniks, the media anti-war campaign, voices in academia, and Americans demoralized by the first televised war in history with the inevitable traumatic scenes of battle. Now, millions would die, become refugees, and lose their freedom.

This is not a discussion of the rights and wrongs of “Watergate.” Literally, of course, the term refers to a burglary at Democratic campaign offices in the Watergate Hotel—and if President Nixon knew of it and, if he knew, participated in a “cover-up” of it.

Nixon, the anti-communist, was on the brink of defeating the showcase communist crusade of our time: the long, deadly war of communist North Vietnam to defeat and incorporate South Vietnam.

This campaign “dirty trick,” many commentators reminded us at the time, was part of a long tradition, mostly by Democrats, of such machinations. It did not matter. Richard Nixon, long loathed by left-liberals as the quintessential “anti-communist,” “Cold Warrior,” and even “McCarthyite,” had defeated in a landslide Sen. George McGovern, the furthest left candidate ever fielded by the Democrats. The American people had delivered a resounding “No!” to the Left. And they must be shown the disaster that they had invited. A disaster called “Watergate.” Commentators noted that by the time the media had done its thing, “Watergate” referred to more than 30 alleged Nixon offenses.

And yet, that was probably not what it was all about. Nixon, the anti-communist, was on the brink of defeating the showcase communist crusade of our time: the long, deadly war of communist North Vietnam to defeat and incorporate South Vietnam. It had been a half-century project of Ho Chi Minh to free his country from French colonialism. When he resorted, at last, to Soviet power to liberate his country, he became its destroyer. He is at once a heroic, tragic, and historic figure, but this is not his story.

 

A Brief Background

Turn to when America became entangled in Vietnam. The long French colonialist rule had been fought and defeated. It was clear that now the driving force of North Vietnam was communism. (Young Ho Chi Minh had gone long ago to Moscow to be indoctrinated and trained. As always, he was a remarkable student.)

In July 1959, the first U.S. soldiers were killed in South Vietnam when guerrillas raided their living quarters near Saigon. Then, in May 1961, President John F. Kennedy sent helicopters and 400 Green Beret special forces to South Vietnam and authorized secret operations against the Viet Cong (communist guerillas).

Those who lived through this era know the long escalation of U.S. commitment, the rising anti-war sentiment, the repeated infusions of more troops, the victories and defeats. It continued for more than a decade through the death of Kennedy and then the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who relentlessly escalated the war, determined to prevent a communist Vietnam, which might be the first step toward a communist Southeast Asia. And we remember the unprecedented division of America, often violent, always bitter, as the war in Vietnam became the only topic of discussion, the only political issue, the Great Divide.

Finally, it defeated President Johnson, who declined to run for re-election in 1968. The election became a race between the Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey and Republican Richard Nixon, who won by the narrowest electoral margin in U.S. history.

It sometimes seems that Nixon’s first term, starting in 1968, is forgotten. This is not the place to recount his accomplishments. But the war in Vietnam continued for four long years, during which Nixon withdrew U.S. troops, called the “Vietnamization” of the war. He also, in a remarkable historic measure, ended the draft in America in favor of a professional voluntary force. Notably, Nixon “secretly” ordered the bombing of North Vietnamese military sanctuaries in Cambodia. This became one of the “Watergate crimes.”

The election in 1972 pitted Democrat George McGovern, the “peace at any price” candidate, against Nixon, who continued to insist that America had committed itself to the defense of South Vietnam against communist takeover. Nixon, of course, won in a historic landslide vote. McGovern seemed unable to stick to opposition to the war and proposed an unprecedented “redistribution” of wealth.

Nixon wanted a peace agreement that guaranteed that “So. Vietnam” would not become, as that supreme wordsmith Vladimir Nabokov quipped, “Soviet” Nam.

Nixon used American air power in a way that had been opposed in a long, impassioned campaign by the U.S. media and peace movement. Why? It was airpower after all that had defeated the Nazis in WWII. Yes, but North Vietnam was communist. In fact, much of the opposition to the war became a defense of North Vietnam as a nation of peasants and “nationalists” against the remnants of corrupt “colonialism” in South Vietnam.

Reportedly “furious” at having been played along, Nixon ordered bombing to resume on December 18, 1972.

The “Nixon bombing” of North Vietnam, reviled by the media in a thousand imaginative stories and photographs, nevertheless drove North Vietnam to the peace talks in Paris. We fast-forward here, but the peace talks went on for years. A chief result for North Vietnam was that the bombing slowed or ceased in bombing “halts” to encourage peace.

Then, in December 1972, the North Vietnamese abruptly withdrew from the Paris talks so long encouraged by U.S. “restraint.” Reportedly “furious” at having been played along, Nixon ordered bombing to resume on December 18, 1972. American B-52s and fighter-bombers dropped over 20,000 tons of bombs on the cities of Hanoi and Haiphong, killing at least 1,624 civilians. The headlines everywhere referred to Operation Linebacker II as “Nixon’s Christmas bombing.”

Less than a month later, however, on January 27, 1973, the United States and North Vietnam signed the peace accords in Paris, called an Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Viet Nam. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and his North Vietnamese counterpart in negotiations were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Hey, not so fast . . .

 

Politics, Politics, Politics

The long, bitter war was over! Now, the U.S. movement against defeating the communists and in favor of keeping America from winning the war achieved a decisive victory. By the end of 1973, 95% of American and allied troops had left Vietnam as well as Cambodia and Laos under the amendment sponsored by Senators Clifford Case (R-NJ) and Frank Church (D-ID). Enacted in June 1973, the Case-Church amendment prohibited further U.S. military activity in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia unless the president secured Congressional approval in advance.

Then, on November 7, 1973, came the War Powers Resolution (P.L. 93-148) to provide procedures for Congress to approve in advance all decisions to use the armed forces. Bottom line: the president, as commander-in-chief, no longer could act on his own initiative to defend American interests. President Nixon, of course, vetoed it. But a Congress on the tidal wave of “end the war,” “peace now” sentiment overrode his veto with a two-thirds vote in each house. Nixon and Kissinger then knew that there was nothing to restrain the North from full-scale invasion.

Now, let us speed up the succession of events.

On August 8, 1974, Nixon resigned. Vice President Gerald Ford became president. Soon after, he issued a blanket presidential pardon, absolving Nixon of all alleged crimes. The liberal-left rocketed into a fury of moral recriminations. They wanted Nixon in jail.

North Vietnam, which so long had prosecuted its aims, opposed by America, and at the cost of some 58,000 American battlefield deaths, merely took these new developments into account and acted. North and South Vietnam had continued military activities immediately after the Paris Peace Accords (one reason for the Case-Church Amendment to keep America from getting involved, again). Now, five months after the War Powers Resolution, North Vietnam, with utter disregard for the peace treaty, launched an offensive on March 10, 1975, known in North Vietnam as the “Ho Chi Minh Campaign.”

North Vietnamese regular army forces, never free to openly invade the South because of the American defense (including its airpower), streamed south, achieving victory after victory. As the communist offensive surged toward Saigon, and surrounded the city, President Gerald Ford spoke at Tulane University on April 23, 1975, declaring that the Vietnam War had ended as far as the United States was concerned. He stated, “Today, Americans can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war.”

It was not North Vietnamese forces that sealed South Vietnam’s doom. It was the U.S Congress, swept along by such U.S. media as The Washington Post and the New York Times in an ideological frenzy that swept along the American press and much of the foreign press.

This announcement was devastating news for the South Vietnamese who were, at that moment, desperately seeking U.S. support as the North Vietnamese closed in for the final assault on the capital city.. The fall of Saigon marked the official end of the Vietnam War—the first defeat of America in a war.

It was not North Vietnamese forces that sealed South Vietnam’s doom. It was the U.S Congress, swept along by such U.S. media as The Washington Post and the New York Times in an ideological frenzy that swept along the American press and much of the foreign press.

President Nixon in two letters had privately (the media insists on saying “secretly”) assured South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu that the United States would enforce the peace agreement with its full airpower. Even as North Vietnamese forces streamed south, reassured by the War Powers Resolution, the U.S. Seventh Fleet, including the mighty attack carrier striking force known as Task Force 77, remained in the South China Sea off the coast of South Vietnam.

As the North Vietnam regular army and the Viet Cong guerrillas confidently and openly, for the first time, rolled south along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the Seventh Fleet’s air power could have obliterated it. Instead, it was used for the largest helicopter evacuation in history, Operation Frequent Wind.

President Ford’s hands were tied, he felt, by the Case-Church Amendment and the War Powers Resolution.

President Ford’s hands were tied, he felt, by the Case-Church Amendment and the War Powers Resolution. Pushed through Congress by the leading American “dove,” Senator Frank Church, the latter was the triumph of the peace forces and, more so, of the opposition to anti-communism represented by Nixon.

President Ford could have ordered the Seventh Fleet bombers to attack the North Vietnamese Army, exposed on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. But he would have faced impeachment. That is assuming the Seventh Fleet had obeyed his order. But Ford was not that kind of man. One wonders if Nixon might have ordered the Seventh Fleet bombers into action and challenged the War Powers Act in the Supreme Court.

 

The End in South Vietnam

And so, Saigon fell to the tanks, troops, and bombs and was soon renamed Ho Chi Minh City. Vietnamese who had supported the American defense of freedom were slaughtered or fled under the most devastating circumstances. According to the Vietnamese government, within two years of the capture of the city one million people had left and thousands more would do so. Following the end of the war, according to official and non-official estimates, between 200,000 and 300,000 South Vietnamese were sent to re-education camps, where many endured torture, starvation, and disease while they were being forced to do hard labor. Reportedly, some 30,000 South Vietnamese were identified and executed using a list of CIA informants left behind by the U.S. embassy. Non-communist intellectuals, such as university presidents, were jailed.

At the same time, the U.S. military retreat left Cambodia helpless before the Khmer Rouge. Cambodian genocide, systematic murder of some three million people in Cambodia from 1976 to 1978, was carried out by the Khmer Rouge government under Pol Pot. Laos, too, fell to communist invaders.

There had been good reasons for the long, bloody war to prevent the communists from conquering South Vietnam. Everywhere communism had prevailed, the rule had been genocidal mass murder, “re-education” by imprisonment and torture, famine, and permanent dictatorship. It was no different in South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

Men like President Thieu knew it. When, on April 21, 1975, he made his final public address, resigning the presidency, the U.S. Congress had refused further significant assistance in the face of the North Vietnam onslaught. In a speech often tearful, Thieu bitterly reproached the United States.

“The Americans have asked us to do an impossible thing . . . You have asked us to do something you failed to do, with half a million powerful troops and skilled commanders, and with nearly $300 billion in expenditure over six long years . . .

“But you found an honorable way out. And at present, when our army lacks weapons, ammunition, helicopters, aircraft and B-52s, you ask us to do an impossible thing . . .

“The United States is proud of being an invincible defender of the just cause and the ideal of freedom in the world . . . Are US statements worthy? Are US commitments still valid?”

Some fifty years later, the question is no closer to an answer.

 

Vietnam under Communism

After centuries of resisting Chinese rule, then a century of French colonialism, then a decade of resistance to communism at huge sacrifice, some 100 million Vietnamese were united by military conquest under a dictatorship ruled perpetually by the communist party. Their “liberation” was from partial freedom under foreign rule to totalitarianism under “home rule.”

Hundreds of thousands fled the country; others stayed and starved.

In 1975, the Vietnamese economy was in shambles and with “liberation” only got worse. Hundreds of thousands fled the country; others stayed and starved. Like previous communist regimes (communism holds no surprises), Vietnam, faced with starvation and economic collapse, was forced in 1986 to partially yield to a market-oriented economy (the Doi Moi reforms). As in China, and surely imitating it, Vietnam’s economy substantially improved.

Whereas leftists in Western nations defend what they call “liberties”—speech, press, religion, voting, assembly—but steadily work to curtail economic rights—property, trade, business decisions—communists make concessions to economic liberties but resolutely suppress the rights to speech, press, and religion.

Human Rights Watch reports that the communist government prohibits independent or privately owned media outlets, strictly controls radio, television, and print publications, and imposes criminal penalties for disseminating materials that oppose government, threaten so-called national security, and promote “reactionary ideas.”

In one of the most powerful books on America in Vietnam and the delusions American intellectuals held and preached about what communist “liberation” would be like, Why We Were In Vietnam (Simon & Shuster, 1884), Norman Podhoretz quotes Truong Nhu Tang, a lawyer and politician who became a leader of the “revolutionary government” set up by North Vietnam and fought in the jungles for years along with other guerrilla forces such as the Viet Cong to overthrow the South Vietnamese government.

It took Tang only months, after the communists took over and began to execute and jail non-party intellectuals, to become profoundly disillusioned. He was among the fortunate ones who successfully fled the country in a boat with 40 fellow refugees. Of that, he said: “Never has any previous regime brought such masses of people to desperation. Not the military dictators, not the colonists, not even the ancient Chinese overlords.”

He later wrote: “The people of Vietnam who want only the freedom to go where they wish, educated their children in schools they choose and have a voice in government” [are instead] “treated like ants in a colony. There is only the opportunity to follow orders . . . never the opportunity to express disagreement. Even within the [Communist] party, the principle of democracy has been destroyed . . . Stalinism, discredited throughout most of the communist world, flourishes under the aged and fanatic Vietnamese leadership.”

One wonders what this educated man in the mid-20th century had expected, given the record of communism, but he at least had the excuse of living in a country dominated for centuries by foreign powers and their domestic pawns. That is not an excuse available to American intellectuals who could only criticize and lament the government of South Vietnam knowing the only likely alternative.

Podhoretz comments: “Reading these words [of Tang], one recalls Susan Sontag, Mary McCarthy, and Frances Fitzgerald expending their intellectual energies on the promulgation of theories of Vietnamese culture calculated to deny that the people of Vietnam cared about freedom in the simple concrete forms set forth by Tang. One recalls Sontag saying that ‘incorporation’ into a society like that of North Vietnam would ‘greatly improve’ the lives of most people in the world.”

He adds that admittedly both Sontag and McCarthy were troubled, at first, by portraits of Stalin they saw all over the North when they were there. Sontag produced an explanation: It was just that the Vietnamese could not bear to waste anything.

It seems that intellectuals do not require an “excuse” for anything they might have written. The talent for rationalization is unlimited.

 

 

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