Now came collapse. Thieu hoped to hold on with enclaves that would get American support — Da Nang on the coast, together with Saigon and the Mekong Delta. But, once again, the Northern commanders applied ruthless methods, using refugees to paralyse the defenders’ movements, and attacked towards Hue, a city already vastly demoralized by the Buddhist troubles and swamped in refugees by the North Vietnamese attack of 1972. On 24 March the old fake-imperial city, tinkling bells and all, collapsed, and a million refugees now fled towards Da Nang, where the Americans had had their fortress-port, or tried to get away by sea, clinging to anything that might float. By 29 March Da Nang was falling as well, as official America turned a disdainful back (the ambassador even tried to prevent a decent man, Edward J. Daly, president of World Airways, from sending two Boeing 727s to the city, flying on the first one himself. After landing, his aeroplane was mobbed by thousands of people, some 270 of whom were finally jammed in, under gunfire, and, badly damaged, the aircraft limped heroically back). Then all the other coastal towns fell, Cam Ranh Bay, the great American base, after only thirty minutes of fighting; one airport was captured with more than sixty grounded aircraft. By early April the North Viet namese had cut off Saigon, and were able to shell Bien Hoa airfield. Cambodia was collapsing as welclass="underline" on 12 April 276 Americans were evacuated from Phnom Penh, which should have been a sign to the still disbelieving Thieu. He hung on to office for another week, desperate to see the B52s return. Instead, he learned on 23 April that President Ford, speaking at a university, had announced that the war in Vietnam ‘is finished as far as America is concerned’. His audience stood up and clapped.
The evacuation of Saigon had itself been held off, to forestall panic, but panic then took hold, as a formation of captured Cessna A-37s bombed the presidential palace. The famous scene came on 29 April, with the helicopter evacuation from the embassy compound itself. Up and down, on film, 6,236 people were taken off through crossfire, the large machines lifting off from the walled-in yard, the smaller ones from the roof; 662 flights were made between Saigon and ships eighty miles away, the crews managing matters with great efficiency and such decency as could be mustered; and the end came at 5 a.m. on 30 April, when the ambassador left. Now, every South Vietnamese who could get away made for the American Seventh Fleet, helicopters landing so fast that they had to be pushed overboard as soon as the occupants had been got out, to make space for the next one: 675,000 refugees were brought to the United States. On 30 April a North Vietnamese tank smashed through the gates of the presidential palace. The stand-in president, the selfsame Duong Van Minh who had once destroyed Ngo Dinh Diem at the Americans’ behest, wanted formally to capitulate. He was told that he no longer had anything to give up, but was allowed, on the radio, to say a few words to the effect that that was that. In Cambodia, at the same moment, there was a similar collapse, as the Khmer Rouge moved in to a silent Phnom Penh, filled with a foreboding that was entirely justified.
To start with, the opponents of the Vietnam War were jubilant: the ‘People’ had triumphed, the Americans and their lackeys were scuttling ignominiously away, as ‘Whites’, in this scenario, were supposed to do. The Communists were even on a best behaviour that comes as a curious shock after the experiences of mismanaged American triumphs, a quarter-century later, in Kosovo or Baghdad, when army engineers were replaced by private contractors. The North Vietnamese worked to get the electricity and water in Saigon going, and for a time there was recovery. But this solicitude for the Saigon population did not last for very long. The usual tyrannical procedures were applied, with attempts at heavy industrialization, and collectivization of agriculture, in a country wrecked by a quarter-century of war. Even the Mekong Delta, from which rice had been exported, saw famine. Anyone connected to the ‘old order’ was ‘re-educated’ in gruesome camps and a secret police had the usual field day. Vietnam was distinguished only by a phenomenon known as the ‘boat people’, as a million people (estimates differ) bribed their way onto open boats to escape, over pirate-ridden seas, to countries such as Malaysia or even Australia, where they were not greatly wanted. About 750,000 of the Chinese minority were floated off from 1978 onwards, taking years to become, eventually very successfully, integrated elsewhere. Meanwhile, Vietnam relapsed into the traditional hostility towards China, and there was even an absurd war. In Cambodia matters were even worse. A provincial peasant and largely teenage Communist Cambodian guerrilla force had started up: the Khmer Rouge. These were led by one Pol Pot, who, though not a great academic success in France, had learned the usual stew of exterminatory Communism that flourished in those parts (Enver Hodža in Albania, and for that matter Andreas Papandreou in Greece, had had the same training). Maoism had glorified the revolutionary peasant, whereas Marx had regarded peasants with contempt — ‘quadrupeds’ (as the French Left saw them). Mao had demonstrated that the peasants were after all revolutionary, that the evil really lay in the towns, where money was made, and foreigners flourished. A sort of mad peasant ideology resulted. On 17 April 1975 the Khmer Rouge invaded the Cambodian capital and declared that townspeople were abolished: 2.5 million people were killed, sometimes horribly, or starved, or worked to death, until the Vietnamese invaded. In later years, ‘boat people’ and the ‘killing fields’ of Cambodia (revealed by an enterprising Hungarian television journalist, Aladár Chrudinak) counted as glaring evidence that the Americans had been right in fighting the Vietnam War, and wrong only in the method with which they had fought it. This is a debate that goes on.
There was another great symbol of this period — ‘Watergate’, and the fall of Richard Nixon. It was as if the gods had wanted to take a revenge, in black humour, for Nixon’s weaselly behaviour over Vietnam, for the original offence was comic, and we might even apply Hegel’s remark as to ‘the terrifying infinity of the particular’. Nixon’s staff were caricature business school types, sandwich lunches, work-out sessions, confusing efficiency with efficacy: no imagination at all. John Ehrlichman was a Christian Scientist lawyer who objected to Nixon’s drinking and refused to work with him unless it stopped. The drinking did in fact stop, more or less, and Nixon’s judgement did not improve: without a drink he became charmless and gauche. The Chief of Staff, John Mitchell, exuded silent strength, misleadingly, but he had a first-class record that made Nixon feel inferior, and brought out the nasty, frustrated and unscrupulous side of the President. Junior staff, tails wagging, organized a break-in at Democrat headquarters in the Watergate office building, in the hope of finding discreditable papers. The affair was bungled, lies were told, and Nixon, his head in Chinese clouds, did not follow the trivialities. Then he lied as well. Then the lies were recorded, as well as his reactions to the revelation of this. Then the people who tried to find out about the recordings were harassed, and then more lies were told.