In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1010 Epilogue Epilogue In 1975, senior officers who went home to the United States from the embassies in Saigon, Phnom Penh, and Vientiane found that their Foreign Service colleagues in Washington avoided talking about Indochina; junior officers received even a colder shoulder.1 Many left government service, demoralized. Repatriated employees of the Agency for International Development, younger for the most part, were sent off to francophone Africa and to Central America, where I met some of them in the course of my travels in the late 1970s. It was hoped that there they could put to use the skills they had learned of working with poor and often desperate people, showing them how to grow the new varieties of “miracle rice” on their farms and bringing clean drinking water to their refugee camps. It was hoped, above all, that the contagion they bore would not infect Washington, for these were individuals who felt deeply about what they perceived to be the sacrifice of the Indochinese to the Communists. Washington in 1975 was certainly no longer the Washington of 1940, 1950, or 1960. The old values of the era of Eleanor Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy had largely disappeared from sight in the capital. The moral underpinnings of American foreign policy had to a large extent evaporated. By the 1990s, the American Establishment was mainly ruled by money and greed. Even genocide in 1994 was accepted with hardly a ripple in the bureaucratic routine, of interest only to some activist clergymen and human rights activists, more and more on the fringes of American society. Respect for laws was increasingly replaced by the rule of the strongest, as displayed by the media, including some of the most staid journals of American life, which fudged the boundary between fact and fiction, deepening a credibility gap that was already wide. The Soviet Union’s disastrous intervention in Afghanistan, which left that country in ruins and led to the collapse of the Soviet empire, was some consolation that America was not alone in the pursuit of folly. The colossal might of American armed force ruled the world, but the rhetoric had a hollow ring as the country turned inward, focusing on its own proliferation of problems. A question raised with increasing frequency was: What did the United States really stand for? The environment in which Americans lived also changed for the worse. The unsightly concrete barriers erected around the White House and other Epilogue 1011 public monuments and the cordoning off of streets belied a siege mentality, as if a piece of wartime Saigon and Phnom Penh had been imported. In his April 30, 1970, speech, President Nixon had made the prophetic remark “We live in an age of anarchy.” Now the statue of Thomas Jefferson needed to be bunkered against a mad bomber. A team of social scientists at the Fordham Institute for Innovation in Social Policy has tracked the state of well-being in the United States since 1970 by means of a composite index constituted by 16 statistical indicators measuring such phenomena as child abuse, teen suicide, alcoholism, homicide, and income inequality. From a high of 76.9 in 1973, this index had sunk to a low of 37.5 in 1991 and had virtually leveled off in the remainder of the 1990s.2 The spread of disrespect for the law in public life, violence that in the view of the American Medical Association had reached epidemic proportions , the resurgence of old phenomena such as racism, the rise of hate groups, the domination of urban neighborhoods by gang warfare, the growing costs of crime, a seemingly endless war on drug trafficking, and a White House and Congress awash in corporate funds all made it seem that the nation had lost its moral moorings and was drifting, like a great ship, rudderless and powerless. The part that its involvement in Indochina played in such phenomena at the close of the American century cannot be measured precisely. But the circumstantial evidence is there. Americans were genuinely shocked by the overthrow of constitutional governments and the assassination of presidents; the killing of civilians ; the sacrifice of loved ones in a war that many perceived to be a lost cause; the embrace by their government of colonialism in its dealings with the leaders of South Vietnam and Cambodia, whose people had an intimate knowledge of colonialism ; and, finally, the manner in which their government washed its hands of not only the cause but also the people...

Share