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Chapter 1. A Continuation of War by Other Means: The Origins of the American War on Vietnam, 1975–1977
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A CONTINUATION OF WAR BY OTHER MEANS THE ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN WAR ON VIETNAM, 1975–1977 As the last helicopters were leaving the roof of the United States embassy in Saigon on April 30, 1975, Henry Kissinger sat helplessly in his West Wing corner office. “Neither Ford nor I could any longer influence the outcome,” he wrote in his memoirs. “So we each sat in our offices, freed of other duties yet unable to affect the ongoing tragedy, with a serenity rarely experienced in high office.” For the past several years, Kissinger had been the primary architect of the American war on Vietnam. Yet on this day, as he describes it, he was mostly contemplative, his reflections interrupted only by the occasional update from a staff member and, later, a press conference in which he argued that “what we need now in this country, for some weeks at least, and hopefully for some months, is to heal the wounds and to put Vietnam behind us and to concentrate on the problems of the future.”1 Kissinger was certainly not alone in wanting to put the war in Vietnam behind him. The steady erasure of Vietnam from American attention actually had begun after the signing of the Paris Accords two years earlier. As the United States became engulfed in the Watergate scandal during 1974 and as most American personnel were evacuated from Southeast Asia, interest in the ongoing wars in both Vietnam and Cambodia declined steadily. An essay in Time magazine noted that many Americans had for some time “enjoyed a comforting illusion: that Viet Nam and all its horrors had gone away for good” now that the Vietnamese were simply fighting each other.2 Newsweek echoed these sentiments, claiming that after the 1973 Accords “the agony of Vietnam seemed to recede.”3 In the spring of 1975, however, “the war burst upon the U.S. all over again,” making clear to all those in the United States seeking to forget the war that it was the agony of Americans, not the agony of Vietnam, that had seemed to recede over the past two years.4 The Khmer Rouge victory in one a continuation of war by other means 13 Cambodia and the fall of Saigon once again brought the wars in Southeast Asia to the forefront of American consciousness. Images of suffering children , abandoned allies and clients, and fleeing Americans returned to the nightly news, newspaper headlines, and covers of magazines in one final flurry. Since 1950, the cover of Time had been devoted to some aspect of American involvement in Southeast Asia sixty-four times. For Newsweek, the count was sixty-two times since 1961. From early April until early May 1975, Vietnam was once again the story, as the mainstream media pondered the United States’ role in the world, the plight of “those we left behind,” and, most of all, “where do we go from here?” Just as quickly, though, Vietnam once again disappeared. In the second week in May, the covers of both major newsweeklies featured rising Soviet ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov, rendering Vietnam increasingly to the back pages, where it would remain indefinitely. The war thus ended for Americans, but not for America. By the time the Vietnamese were once again out of sight and out of mind in mid-May of 1975, the new war against Vietnam already had begun. As Saigon was being liberated by the revolutionary forces of Vietnam, the Ford White House swiftly imposed harsh economic sanctions on South Vietnam, to match those long in place against the North. In the midst of his meditations on April 30, the secretary of state found time to recommend to the Commerce Department that it freeze an estimated $70 million in South Vietnamese assets held by American-owned banks and their foreign subsidiaries.5 Two weeks later the White House was again in crisis mode, after a Khmer Rouge gunboat detained the SS Mayaguez in the Gulf of Thailand. Kissinger, returning to Washington on May 13 from a trip to the Midwest, arrived just in time for a meeting of the National Security Council. Soon after, he underwent what he later described as “one of the most bizarre and tense evenings of my experience in government.”6 After another long day of NSC meetings, diplomatic negotiations with the Chinese, and the authorization of military force to rescue the crew of the Mayaguez, the White House proceeded with a...