The
Last Days of Vietnam
Film
Documentary 2014
A nail bitter of a documentary, about the fall of
Saigon 40 years ago. President Richard Nixon and Dr. Henry Kissinger
successfully negotiated the Paris Peace Accords in 1973 to find peace with
honor, an end to the conflict, and withdrawal of US troops. The North
Vietnamese agreed to the accords because Nixon was a tough negotiator whom they
feared.
Of the Paris Peace Accord, Dr. Kissinger, now 91 with a new
book “World Order,” recalls on film: “We who made the agreement thought it
would be the beginning, not of peace in the American sense, but the beginning
of a period of coexistence which might evolve, as it did in Korea, into two
states.”
In August 1974, when Nixon resigned for Watergate
crimes and Gerald R. Ford became president, the North Vietnamese saw it as
their opportunity to invade South Vietnam, force Americans out and control
the country. The North’s full scale military invasion began in early 1975. The
communists had no mercy for the South Vietnamese and executed thousands.
Much of the exciting news footage in this film has
been widely available in the public domain for years. It is expertly and excitingly edited to tell the story of a major human effort to save as many
South Vietnamese as possible as Saigon fell.
The dramatic news footage of the communist takeover
of South Vietnam is supplemented with various surviving ground personnel speaking
of their efforts to evacuate Americans, and the thousands of South Vietnamese who
fought with US troops, worked for US contractors and the US embassy, as well as
American dependents.
At one point, Dick Armitage, a Navy officer and,
alter, an official in the George W. Bush administration, gave orders without
permission from his superiors. “I figured it was better to beg forgiveness later
than to seek permission,” he said of saving South Vietnamese lives.
The last US Ambassador to South Vietnam, Graham
Martin, who succeeded Ellsworth Bunker in the position, was a hawk from North
Carolina who held the unrealistic belief Saigon could be successfully defended
from the massive invasion of North Vietnamese communists. Martin’s staffers and
military personnel imitated an early secret
evacuation of some South Vietnamese
without Martin’s or Washington’s knowledge.
As reality sank in, the US embassy was opened to as
many South Vietnamese as could gain access to the embassy compound. The mad
rush of South Vietnamese for the safety of the embassy caused me an unpleasant
flashback to Washington DC on the morning of September 11, 2001. When we leaned
Washington was under attack from Middle Eastern terrorists, government agencies
were ordered closed and personnel ordered home. Chaos ensued.
I saw people running frantically from the White
House and from Capitol Hill offices. No one knew for sure what the next target
would be. The faces of Americans were faces of fear and desperation to find no
taxis and many subway stations closed. In the documentary, the location is
Saigon 1974 but the fear and desperation on the faces of the South Vietnamese
was the same as I saw in Washington on September 11.
Audiences will see many dramatic scenes in this film
as it reaches its end. In another scene, a South Vietnamese Navy official was
ordered by Americans to begin evacuation of and move all operational ships out to sea. The old man
remembers such an order as “beyond my position.” He said he ignored military
rules and followed his heart.
The scene of a South Vietnamese military vessel being
denied entry to post in the Philippines is touching. The South Vietnamese flag
is lowered and replaced with an American flag so the vessel could safely dock. The
scene is startlingly realistic as the South Vietnamese aboard sang their
national anthem as their flag came down at the same time their country ceased to
exist.
Scenes from Washington, depict intense Oval Office
photographs of President Ford, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and Dr. Henry
Kissinger as events in South Vietnam came to a close. Ford asked Congress for
$722 million as a last resort to help evacuees. Congress turned its back on South
Vietnam and refused any more money for what they saw as a lost cause.
The US war in Vietnam, which began in 1950 under President
Dwight Eisenhower and escalated under Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, came to an
end under President Ford, who sought to leave the country with as little extra bloodshed
as possible.
Evacuation and repatriation of South Vietnamese to America
was also a credit to Mr. Ford’s leadership and human compassion. Here are some passages from various books on the challenges Vietnam posed in the 1970s.
“The domestic disputes [between North and South Vietnam] that
had characterized the war continued into the postwar period, and the Watergate
crisis prevented enforcement of the argument. The controversy began with a
debate over whether the United states had the right to defend an agreement for
which over 55,000 Americans had died. And then, within six months, Congress in
June 1973 prohibited any U.S. military action or military deployment in
Indochina. It was the first time that the United States had deprived itself of
the ability to enforce an agreement [Paris Peace Accords] for which American
forces had fought and died,” Dir. Kissinger wrote in “Crisis” The Anatomy of
Two Major Foreign Policy Crises.
James Cannon, in 2013’s “Gerald R. Ford: An Honorable Life,”
wrote, “To his great credit, he (Ford) ended the Vietnam War, which three Presidents
before him had mismanaged. It was a humiliating ending to the war, but
Congress, having cut off money for Vietnam, gave Ford no choice. The withdrawal
he managed well, pulling out the last U.S. forces, saving American lives, and
rescuing thousands of Vietnamese who had supported the American effort.”
Dr. Yanek Mieczkowski in his 2005 book “Gerald Ford and the
Challenges of the 1970s,” wrote, “On
April 23, he [Ford] addressed students at Tulane University and declare, ‘Today,
America can regain a sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot
be achieved by re-fighting a war that is finished as far as the American people
are concerned.’”
“The speech was a milestone in contemporary American
history. Ford did something no America president had been able to for thirty
years: He spoke of the Indochina war in the past tense,” wrote Ron Nessen, press secretary to President Ford.
Jim Patterson
JEPDiplomat@gmail.com
No comments:
Post a Comment