Saigon’s Fall Still Echoes Today

ENLARGE

A North Vietnamese tank rolls through the gate of the Presidential Palace in Saigon, on April 30, 1975. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS

Four decades ago this week, in what was then Saigon, I was trying to facilitate the evacuation of orphans as North Vietnam’s armed forces approached the city. I had left the U.S. Army after two tours in Vietnam and had returned to do what I could to help as America fled a war—a fight for freedom—that it had shamefully chosen to forfeit.

As the nation marks the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon on April 30, we would do well to clear away the myths that still adhere to that bloody conflict and understand why America got involved, what went wrong and what the consequences were.

We went to war because by ratifying the United Nations Charter in 1945 and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (Seato) treaty a decade later, the U.S. pledged to oppose armed international aggression. Critics have long claimed that the State Department lied when it said the U.S. was responding to North Vietnamese aggression. That charge is baseless. After the war, Hanoi repeatedly acknowledged—including in its official history, “Victory in Vietnam”—its decision in May 1959 to open the Ho Chi Minh Trail and send vast numbers of troops, weapons and supplies to overthrow its neighbor by armed force. That was every bit as illegal as when North Korea invaded its southern neighbor in June 1950.

The U.S. made mistakes, but the two most decisive factors in the outcome of the war were incompetent micromanagement by President Lyndon Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and Hanoi’s brilliant propaganda campaign, which fueled a gullible—and often disingenuous—global peace movement. Protesters, as angry as they were misinformed, ultimately persuaded Congress in May 1973 to prohibit spending on further U.S. combat operations in Indochina.

Following North Vietnam’s “liberation” of South Vietnam and Cambodia, millions of people lost their lives and tens of millions lost any chance at freedom. Yale University’s Cambodia Genocide Projectconcluded that the Communist Khmer Rouge killed 1.7 million Cambodians, more than 20% of that country’s population—the worst per capita, per annum, genocide of the 20th century. Hundreds of thousands in South Vietnam died as “boat people” desperately searching for freedom. Countless others died by execution or in “re-education camps” and “new economic zones” operated by their new rulers.

This was not a military inevitability. As Yale University’s John Lewis Gaddis wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2005, “Historians now acknowledge that American counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam were succeeding during the final years of that conflict; the problem was that support for the war had long since crumbled at home.”

Other than the human consequences, the real tragedy is that on almost every major point of contention war protesters got the facts wrong. Ho Chi Minh was portrayed as a nationalist who would likely be a buffer against Chinese expansion if we supported him. This ignored Hanoi’s official biographies, which acknowledged Ho’s role as a co-founder of the French Communist Party in 1920, his subsequent training in Moscow, followed by years traveling the world on behalf of the Communist International.

China? At Hanoi’s Third Party Congress in 1960, First Secretary Le Duan declared: “It is precisely the Chinese Communist Party, headed by Comrade Mao Tse-tung, which has most brilliantly carried out the teachings of the great Lenin.”

Another myth: The forces of the “National Liberation Front” or “Viet Cong” were independent of North Vietnam. Hanoi published the proceedings of the Third Party Congress in English, calling for “our people” in South Vietnam to establish a “national united front” three months before the NLF was proclaimed by Hanoi.

Still another myth: LBJ “lied” about a North Vietnamese attack on the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin on Aug. 2, 1964, as a pretext for escalating America’s military involvement. In 1995 Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, Hanoi’s former defense minister, admitted the attack occurred.

The U.S. went to war not because of a skirmish in the Gulf of Tonkin, but to stop five years of escalating aggression. Following the attack on the Maddox, Congress enacted a statute (by a vote of 416-0 in the House, 88-2 in the Senate) authorizing the president to use “armed force” in response to Communist aggression in Indochina (including Cambodia).

Perhaps the cruelest myth was that—in the long-ago words of the current U.S. secretary of state while addressing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971—U.S. military personnel in Vietnam were regularly committing “war crimes” and behaving in a “fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan.” When Tim Russertquestioned him about these charges on “Meet the Press” on May 6, 2001, then-Sen. John Kerry dismissed them as “the words of an angry young man,” declaring that our soldiers in Vietnam “served as nobly, on the whole, as in any war.” But he didn’t apologize for defaming 2.7 million fellow veterans, and relatively few Americans heard his correction.

Though Congress ultimately snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, Americans’ sacrifices were not totally in vain. By resisting Communist insurgencies in the region the U.S. bought time for vulnerable targets such as Thailand and Indonesia to become stronger. Soviet intervention in Angola, Afghanistan and Central America, encouraged by the U.S. withdrawal, would cost hundreds of thousands of lives. But had we abandoned South Vietnam in 1964, the outcome would almost certainly have been far worse.

America went to war in Vietnam with the overwhelming support of Congress and the public, to pursue a containment policy that had been embraced by both parties through four presidents. But a brilliant psychological warfare campaign by this country’s enemies misinformed and divided the American people, with tragic consequences—a reflexive hostility, in many quarters, to the use of U.S. military power anywhere in the world—that still weaken the nation today.

Mr. Turner co-founded the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia School of Law and has co-taught an interdisciplinary seminar on the Vietnam War since 1990.