The Specter of Vietnam

W hat would it have been like, being on one of those last helicopters? Those of us who weren’t rushed out of Saigon when it fell 50 years ago, marking the end of the Vietnam War, can get a sense from the accounts of those who were. But the photographs are the most vivid depiction.

Less well-known is the final dispatch of Thomas Polgar. CIA station chief of Saigon, Polgar was one of the last Americans to leave the doomed city. His final assessment, delivered shortly before his departure, read, in part: “It has been a long and hard fight and we have lost. This experience, unique in the history of the United States, does not signal necessarily the demise of the United States as a world power.”

The next couple of years would challenge this blunt assessment. Yet they would also show why the Vietnam War remains worthy not just of enduring memory, but of continued study.

Decades of left-wing revisionism and pop culture clichés — cue “Fortunate Son” — have elided that the war began as a broadly popular cause. Yet it was never without controversy. From the murkiness of the Gulf of Tonkin, through organized protests, to the ultimate drawing down of American troops and aid, it dominated American politics.

It also provided political temptations. As early as 1966, National Review’s Frank Meyer was chastising congressional Republicans, then in the minority, for “a display of petty partisanship, apparently devoid of principle and certainly irresponsible in effect, the active content of which is just about limited to gloating over the dissensions on Vietnam in the Democratic Party.” Such behavior, Meyer believed, weakened the case for Republicans as effective stewards of American interests, which very much included contesting global communism. America did not seek its preeminent global role. But it could not escape it, either. We were “the only free-world power capable of facing up to the Soviet challenge,” as James Buckley (brother of William F.) wrote in his 1974 book If Men Were Angels.

But conservatives were not much interested in Johnson boosterism, either. Meyer’s criticism of “the indecision and erratic course of the Johnson policies” was common on the right at the time. The “best and the brightest” whose foibles David Halberstam chronicled deserved it. Those technocratic managers who surrounded LBJ were convinced they could wage a war just as effectively as they, in the Great Society’s heyday, could manage domestic society. Instead, they discredited that entire governing approach.

As the war became a quagmire as a result, Richard Nixon, Johnson’s successor, set in motion the eventual withdrawal of American troops from the conflict, transitioning America’s role to supporting South Vietnam. Not long after Nixon resigned and left office, Congress ended that support. In August 1974, James Buckley was in his first (and only) term as the “sainted junior senator from New York,” as his brother called him. He was one of just a handful of senators who opposed a reduction in military aid to South Vietnam. Opposite him were figures such as Senator Joe Biden, who was “getting sick and tired of hearing about morality, our moral obligation” (as he would say a year later of aiding Cambodia).

The Biden side prevailed politically. “It will always be arguable whether the South Vietnamese could in the end have maintained their independence even with unstinting material aid from the United States,” Buckley wrote. “What cannot be argued is the role Congress played in sealing their fate.” He was right in believing that Vietnam was a test America failed, one that could “invite other, even more difficult ones, in other areas—Korea, the Middle East, Africa, or even in our own hemisphere.” Communism made great strides across the globe in those dark ’70s. America seemed unsure of itself — and impotent.

Those were the days of “Vietnam Syndrome.” Whether it was a widespread illness or one disproportionately suffered by America’s elites might be answered by the fact that, just a few years after the fall of Saigon, a presidential candidate prospered by defying it. “There is a lesson for all of us in Vietnam,” Ronald Reagan told the Veterans of Foreign Wars in August 1980. “If we are forced to fight, we must have the means and the determination to prevail or we will not have what it takes to secure the peace. And while we are at it, let us tell those who fought in that war that we will never again ask young men to fight and possibly die in a war our government is afraid to let them win.”

There are other things to learn from this history. Polgar, in his last dispatch, urged us to heed them. “Those who fail to learn from history are forced to repeat it,” he wrote. “Let us hope that we will not have another Vietnam experience and that we have learned our lesson.” As president, Joe Biden, in eerie consistency with his decades-younger self, gave us images in Afghanistan — cargo planes replacing helicopters, this time — comparable to those that came out of Saigon 50 years prior. He did not learn much from Vietnam. Will the rest of us?