The Seventies (2015): Season 1, Episode 3 - Peace with Honor - full transcript
Vietnam is the most divisive,
morally abrasive war
Americans have ever fought anywhere.
It's time for the great silent majority
to stand up and be counted.
How do you ask a man to be
the last man to die for a mistake?
We're just going to refuse to do it.
You may be in jail but you won't be dead.
Military pressure will continue
until a peace settlement is reached.
We have achieved peace with honor.
The Americans are leaving.
The Vietnamese must stay
and face uncertainty.
In Vietnam, we have reached
the end of the tunnel
and there is no light there.
There's no understanding
of America in the 1970s
without understanding
how the decade began
in relationship to
the war in Vietnam.
Normally, live casualties for the
previous week are released on Thursday.
But fighting in the last week
has been so bitter that
military sources released the casualties,
unofficially, today.
340 Americans and 527 South Vietnamese
were killed last week.
Enemy dead were reported to be
more than 5,000.
There was some grumbling among numbers
of young G.I.s taking part in the assaults,
questioning whether the objective
is worth the bloodshed.
Nixon did not want to be the first
President of the United States to lose a war.
It was a matter of
personal pride with him.
His basic goal was to end the war
as quickly as possible,
but on honorable terms
that would preserve, in his view,
credibility as a world power
and as an ally.
President Nixon will dispatch his
adviser on foreign affairs, Henry Kissinger,
to Paris for the peace talks.
It is thought the U.S.
is working on a new proposal
to offer to the Viet Cong
and North Vietnam.
Nixon's strategy on Vietnam
was to negotiate a peace agreement,
but at the same time,
to Vietnam-ize the conflict.
We had to turn the war over
to South Vietnam
or it was going to be hopeless.
We couldn't fight their war forever.
The South Vietnamese were
taught to think like Americans,
act like Americans,
fight like Americans.
South Vietnam's President Thieu
had said that he wanted nothing more
than gradually to take over
full responsibility for the war.
President Nixon started
withdrawing troops almost right away.
He had a lot to withdraw.
There were over 500,000 men there.
But he did this very slowly
as they supposedly shifted the burden
of the fighting to the South Vietnamese Army.
He was withdrawing so slowly,
a lot of people were getting killed in the process.
And there was no end to it.
October 15, 1969.
Vietnam Moratorium Day.
Surely this is a day
unique in our history.
Never have so many of our people
publicly and collectively
manifested opposition
to this country's involvement in a war.
It wasn't hippies.
It wasn't radicals and Marxists.
It was ordinary middle-class Americans.
2 million of them,
taking the day off from school,
from work.
It was a genuine democratic explosion
of anti-war sentiment.
1, 2, 3, 4, Tricky Dick, stop the war!
Mr. Nixon has told aides that
the loss of American popular support,
or the appearance of it, could induce
the new leadership in Hanoi to press on
in the expectation that
the United States would quit.
The October Moratorium made Richard Nixon
go to the mountain top, literally.
He went to Camp David for two weeks
to write a speech
to answer the anti-war movement.
The elites had gotten on
the anti-war bandwagon.
The press, Harvard, the universities,
the East Coast establishment.
By 1969 they were all anti-war.
Hell no, we won't go!
And Nixon wanted to rise up and show
that there was another side. His side.
The outsiders,
the people who didn't go to Harvard,
who revered the flag
and supported our soldiers.
And he wanted to rally them.
To you, the great silent majority
of my fellow Americans,
I ask for your support.
North Vietnam cannot defeat
or humiliate the United States.
Only Americans can do that.
The term "silent majority"
clicked with Middle America
because they were never
represented on television
and they didn't feel they were
represented in Washington
and didn't really have a voice.
President Nixon proudly displayed
52,000 telegrams from persons who supported him.
It's time for the great silent majority
just to stand up and be counted.
At that point he went to 68% approval.
It gave him the room he needed
to maneuver.
Good evening,
my fellow Americans.
Tonight American
and South Vietnamese units
will attack the headquarters for the entire
Communist military operation in South Vietnam.
This is not an invasion of Cambodia.
Nixon's conviction is that
what you've got to do
is cut off the supplies
that the North Vietnamese
are funneling into the South
to the Viet Cong.
And the way to do it is
take out the Ho Chi Minh Trail,
the route they're using
through Cambodia.
They don't quite realize that
Cambodia is its own country.
In fact, a country that's always had
tenuous relationships with Vietnam.
And once they destabilize Cambodia,
you really just have all hell breaking out.
The Cambodian operation
will continue during the coming days.
American units searching for
North Vietnamese troops and installations.
But what they will find
or how long they will be here
no one can say for sure.
The active, large scale American
and South Vietnamese participation
in the fighting in Cambodia has brought a cry
of anger from many college campuses.
At Kent State University in Ohio,
the protest turned into a riot,
with thousands of demonstrators
facing National Guardsmen and police.
Four students are killed at Kent State.
Two students are killed at
Jackson State in Mississippi.
Nixon is sort of overwhelmed.
He's bewildered.
Nixon was very upset by the deaths,
by the belief that he had caused them.
That was a low point of his presidency.
The events of this past week have polarized
not only the opposition to the war
but also the opposition to
the anti-war movement.
Hard-hat construction workers chased and beat
demonstrators in the streets of the financial district.
Police joined ranks with attacking workers
and laughingly watched students brutally beat.
Smoke generated by this latest fuss
is tending to obscure the only real question...
Will the demonstrations have any effect on
shaping the President's Vietnam policies?
The answer here remains no.
A United States military court martial
formally established today
there was a massacre
of civilians at My Lai.
It convicted, Lieutenant William Calley,
one of the American soldiers who was there,
of premeditated murder in
the death of 22 South Vietnamese.
William Calley commanded
the unit that went into My Lai,
a village that was supposed to be
harboring Viet Cong troops.
We were ferried in by helicopters.
We led on the outskirts of the village.
We came across some people
who were in the village.
As I have in this one photograph,
you can see the expressions in their faces
just before they're about to be shot.
Especially the small child on the left.
And the one small boy not realizing
what is about to happen.
In the spasm of violence,
hundreds of people are killed,
all of them civilians.
This unit
from the Americal Division lost it.
They said that, "well,
we just felt like we were killing vermin."
They pulled the trigger
by somehow tricking themselves
to think that they're not killing a human,
they're killing an animal.
The captain and Lieutenant Calley
did not do anything to stop them.
They had lost it themselves.
It was a complete failure.
The White House is acutely aware
that the My Lai scandal
could bring about a disastrous withering away
of public support for the Vietnam War
and from Mr. Nixon's plans for a
staged withdrawal of American forces.
What happened in the Calley case
was not a combat situation.
He shot in cold blood old men,
women and children.
And the day that we as a country
fail to recognize
an act of cold-blooded murder
as murder,
- then we are no better...
- Fine. But why convict Lieutenant William Calley?
Why not convict the battalion command?
Hold it. Hold it. Hold it.
All right. Fellows.
This is your defense?
Every single one of them
that put the man in Vietnam
should be standing there saying,
"I am guilty too."
That's how I feel.
Every one of them.
Vietnam, 5th Cavalry.
Initiating new men.
Start out by singing a little song.
♪ You're going home in a body bag,
do-dah, do-dah... ♪
♪ You're going home in a body bag,
all the do-dah day... ♪
The day after the initiation,
five men came back in body bags.
By the '70s, the U.S. Army in Vietnam
had been essentially destroyed.
Every time we tangled with the Vietnamese
we were getting killed.
And there was no end to it.
So you've got what amounted to
a state of individual mutiny in the U.S. Army.
It's senseless walking down the road.
I'm not going to walk down it.
I'll walk on the trail.
The whole squad'll walk on the trail.
We're going to move out
and they're going to be left behind.
Or I am going to take the point
and they can follow me if they want to.
It's that simple.
We've got a job to do, we'll do it.
We're just going to refuse to do it.
Because it's... You may be in jail,
but you won't be dead.
You're supposedly withdrawing, right?
Well, I figure since
we're going home in the long run,
why don't we just sort of take it easy,
you know?
Don't go out looking for trouble,
just maybe sit down.
If they come to us, we'll fight.
But going out looking for trouble
and wasting more lives
for just time's sake,
to me is just absurd. I don't know.
All the people coming over here now,
they're a lot different than they used to be.
Like World War II-type people
or the old Vietnam people.
It's the Woodstock generation
coming to Vietnam.
The public campaign against
the war in Vietnam
took on a new dimension
in Washington today.
Men who have been there
began demonstrations
armed at speeding the end
of the conflict.
Businessmen have protested. Students have protested.
Mothers have protested. Everybody has.
But the men who fought the war,
who know what it's like, who know what we're fighting,
know what they've been made to do,
haven't.
And it's the first time in history
that they're going to do that.
Lieutenant Paveral died,
so I got a medal.
Sergeant John died,
so I got a medal.
I got a Silver Star, a Purple Heart,
and the rest of it's garbage.
It doesn't mean a thing!
Good evening. The war in Vietnam
has often been camouflaged
by misleading statistics of body counts,
weapons captured, hamlets pacified.
But we are now in the midst
of new, more revealing statistics...
The 2.5 million words
of the Pentagon Papers.
These once-secret papers tell the
agonizing story of the U.S. involvement
in Vietnam through four administrations
of expanding commitment.
The Pentagon Papers have
touched off the deepest controversies,
centering on whether the Presidents
and their men deceived the people.
Daniel Ellsberg, an official who had
served in the Defense Department
and had access to these materials,
he's the one who leaks this to the press.
I was the lead reporter in
the Pentagon Papers.
Ellsberg turned against the war,
and he copied these papers
with the hope that eventually
they would be used to embarrass
an awful lot of people,
and which would show that
we had made a terrible mistake
fighting this war in Vietnam.
I think Kissinger was obsessed with secrecy,
and so was Nixon.
My first three articles were published,
and the Nixon administration
then wanted to stop the whole thing.
My argument inside was if you want to
make the case against the Pentagon Papers,
get up and charge The New York Times
with publishing national security secrets,
gross irresponsibility,
and sabotaging the war in Vietnam.
The Justice Department
went to court in New York today
and got a temporary order restraining the Times
from publishing the next and last two installments.
Attorneys for The New York Times
claim the protection of the First Amendment,
which embodies the concept of
freedom of the press,
as sufficient to protect their
disclosure of the Vietnam memorandums.
The Supreme Court today ruled
that The New York Times
may continue to publish
the secret Pentagon Papers.
I think the lesson is that
the people of this country
can't afford to let the President
run the country by himself.
Even foreign affairs,
any more than domestic affairs,
without the help of the Congress...
Without the help of the public.
If you had to sum up the prevailing
mood here on Capitol Hill,
you could do it with two words...
Embarrassment and anger.
Because of the following
CBS News Special Report,
The Merv Griffin Show will begin
one half-hour later than usual.
The President of the United States
tonight disclosed a Vietnam peace offer
that he says has been secretly
offered to the Communists.
The plan calls for withdrawal
of all U.S. forces within six months
and new South Vietnamese elections
in exchange for a cease-fire
and return of all American prisoners.
The offer that I shall now present
on behalf of the government of the United States
and the government of South Vietnam,
with the full knowledge
and approval of President Thieu,
is both generous and far-reaching.
The response from North Vietnam was,
"no, you're missing something.
You've got to overthrow
the Thieu government."
But we were not going to
overthrow an ally as we left.
And that was the sticking point.
We were stuck.
It was a stalemate.
This is the scene
on the White House lawn.
as the Presidential helicopter
waits for President Nixon to begin
what must be surely
one of the most remarkable journeys
ever undertaken
by an American President,
his trip to Peking.
I will undertake what I deeply hope
will become a journey for peace.
Is the food as good
as people say it is?
I'm no expert on Chinese food,
but I liked it.
Nixon was a very geopolitical thinker
and he liked this idea of linkage.
The idea that he could link
U.S./Soviet policy with U.S./Chinese policy
with U.S./Vietnamese policy
and produce one tidy bundle.
Nixon thought that Vietnamese were hirelings
or pawns of the Chinese and the Soviets.
They weren't. They were Communists domestically,
but they were no one's pawn.
They were using the Chinese and the Russians,
playing them off against each other
to get weaponry to fight us
to gain their independence.
The heaviest fighting in a year
broke out in South Vietnam today.
North Vietnamese forces struck at
eight bases manned by South Vietnamese troops
just south of the demilitarized zone.
The North Vietnamese are unnerved
by the fact that the Americans
seem to be making peace
with both the Soviets and the Chinese.
They're feeling alienated
from their principal allies.
They see the Easter Offensive as
a bold effort to perhaps bring the war to a close,
or at least put themselves in a much better
position with respect to negotiations.
The President has decided to
keep American troops out of fight
and to keep them
coming home on schedule,
no matter what happens
to the South Vietnamese.
According to top officials here,
he will limit U.S. counteraction
to massive air strikes against
enemy forces and installations
in South as well as North Vietnam.
The Americans respond in great force.
And so you see an absolutely
massive aerial bombardment.
The latest, and in some ways,
the greatest of Mr. Nixon's gambles
in his efforts to end the war, as he says,
"with honor and not defeat."
Now the world is waiting to see
how the American minefields
will affect the
North Vietnamese supply system.
Will they really strangle the enemy's
most important supply line?
The North Vietnamese fail
in this effort to have a breakthrough
as a result of this offensive,
and they suffer massive casualties.
It helps to advance the negotiations
in a way that hadn't been possible before.
Henry Kissinger has dropped out of sight again
and nobody is saying where he is.
The President's top adviser left the western
White House yesterday with his children.
There has been speculation
he might have gone to Paris
to renew secret peace talks
with North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho.
The North Vietnamese position began to change
a few weeks before the 1972 election.
They knew Nixon was unpredictable.
So they say, "if we get this mad-man re-elected,
as it looks like he's going to be,
"and he doesn't have to worry
about re-elections ever again,
what the hell is he going to do to us
from now on?"
So on October 8 in Paris,
the North Vietnamese presented
a proposal which for the first time,
after three or four years of endless negotiations,
dropped their political requirement
that we overthrow the Saigon government.
I remember stepping outside at a break,
and Kissinger and I
were in a garden in Paris
and we shook hands and we said,
"we've done it."
We believe that peace is at hand.
There will be a return of
all American prisoners
within 60 days
after the agreement comes into force.
Now with the election just 12 days away,
the Nixon administration says peace is at hand.
It might appear that someone has
pulled a rug out from under McGovern.
Hello?
Kissinger telling us "peace is at hand"
was seen in the United States
as a cynical ploy
to win the election.
The fact is Kissinger is telling Saigon
this is the best you're going to get.
Thieu was afraid that
he was being sold out,
and that once the Americans left
it would be a short matter of time
before his own government fell.
Looked like we had a peace deal.
Kissinger had said "peace is at hand" publicly.
No deal.
Massachusetts is the only state
going for McGovern.
Now President Nixon is swept back
into the White House.
The victory landslide though it is
seems to be Mr. Nixon's alone, not his party's.
I think Nixon was resolute.
"Now I am liberated.
"Now I am never going to
have to run again.
Now I'm going to be
whom I wish to be."
The United States has resumed
full-scale bombing of Haiphong area.
The North Vietnamese said American planes
carried out heavy attacks around those cities tonight,
and Hanoi's armed forces shot down a large number
of planes and captured several pilots.
First Lieutenant.
Navigated B-52.
Nixon wanted the Communists
to think that he was crazy
in the hopes that that would drive them
back to the bargaining table.
A lot of the civilian areas were hit,
apparently.
Civilian areas must have been hit.
And I don't want to say that it was
not a very painful thing to have to do.
When 8,500-pound bombs
come off of one plane
that's the closest thing to
a nuclear weapon.
The response to the Christmas Bombing
was such an outrage.
Here is this small third-world country that
the United States is bombing back to the Stone Age.
The word from the President is
military pressure will continue
until a peace settlement is reached.
Within days after this so-called
"Christmas Bombing,"
the North Vietnamese came back to us
and wanted to re-open the negotiations,
made some concessions,
and within weeks we had an agreement.
So whatever one thinks of the bombing,
it produced peace within about a month.
Good evening.
The Vietnam War ended today.
Ended officially in this room in Paris.
The treaty basically said the
South Vietnamese get to keep their government.
The North Vietnamese get to
keep their soldiers in South Vietnam.
The North Vietnamese will release
the 500 American P.O.W.s.
And everybody promises to stop fighting.
As far as this administration is concerned,
we've done the very best that we can
against very great obstacles,
and we finally have achieved
a peace with honor.
I know it gags some of you
to write that phrase, but that is true.
And most Americans realize it is true.
It is the Americans who are celebrating.
They are leaving.
The Vietnamese are not celebrating.
They must stay and face the uncertainty
of whatever is going to happen to them next.
In Hanoi,
the American military involvement
in the Vietnam War
finally came to an end.
For if anything or anyone symbolized
the American agony of Vietnam,
it was the prisoners
Most were pilots, and many had spent
more than six years in prison.
Now they are on their way home.
It wasn't really until we rolled down the runway,
finally lifted off enemy soil
that we all broke loose and started
hugging and kissing the Air Force nurses.
It was just unbelievable,
and it was all euphoria.
Family gathered in the den to watch
the arrival of the planes from the Philippines.
There was no word as to which of the three planes
Lieutenant Colonel Purcell would be on.
The first one landed, but it wasn't that one.
Then came the second plane.
Someone in the family said that
he won't be on this one either.
But he was.
We were greeted by thousands of people.
They let out the schools and everyone
was waving flags and calling our names.
It was a great, great homecoming.
We are honored
to have the opportunity
to serve our country
under difficult circumstances.
They were legitimate heroes.
They had suffered terribly, and here they were home.
And it gave the country something to cheer about
after having so little to cheer about.
Mr. Nixon said he does not plan to
greet returning P.O.W.s because,
"this is a time when we should not grandstand it.
We should not exploit it."
So many of the soldiers that
came home from Vietnam in the early '70s
couldn't wear their uniforms in public.
They were called baby killers to their face.
And it really was very disturbing.
It distressed us all
to think that those comrades in arms
had come back to such a negative reception,
where we had come back
to ticker tape parades.
The American language has changed
since you went away.
It may even have changed
since you returned.
So the conversation of your wives, friends,
and your children may seem strange.
The Today Show devoted
an entire two-hour episode
to explaining, ostensibly,
to the prisoners of war
what had happened in America
in their absence.
They left a country where
The Sound of Music was the most popular movie.
They returned to one in which
Last Tango in Paris was the most popular movie,
which involved unspeakable carnal acts
that are illegal in most states.
Whatever you do,
don't call a group of women "girls."
It's no longer
considered a compliment by many.
We came home to quite a different world.
It was like Rip Van Winkle waking up
after nearly six years in a prison camp.
It was just unbelievable that our culture
had changed to that point.
In South Vietnam,
both the Saigon government and Communists
have accused each other
of new cease-fire violations,
motivated by attempts to gain
more villages and territory.
The Nixon administration
again expressed confidence
the cease-fire will prove effective
before long.
Mr. President, we have been allies
in a long and difficult war.
And now you can be sure that
we stand with you as we continue to work together
to build a lasting peace.
Nixon promised that if the North Vietnamese
renewed the offensive,
he would send the B-52s back to Hanoi.
Well, it didn't happen
because he was caught up in Watergate.
Washington is a city that
revolves around controversy
during office hours and elegant
social events at night.
These, of course, are days where
there is no shortage of controversy
with the sensational testimony before
the Watergate Committee on Capitol Hill,
with Henry Kissinger still trying to
get that cease-fire agreement implemented.
For a few hours tonight,
attention will be shifted away from those
daytime problems here at the White House.
The guests of honor are 600 Americans
who were held prisoner of war
at some time or other during the
long and agonizing Vietnam conflict.
All of us would like to join in
a round of applause for the brave men
that took those B-52s in and did the job.
Nixon was overjoyed
when the P.O.W.s came home.
And they were overjoyed to see him.
Nixon was a hero to the P.O.W.s.
Because as all of you know,
if they hadn't have done it, you wouldn't be here tonight.
But while he was cheering the P.O.W.s,
Nixon was thinking,
"Watergate's going to take me down."
That night when it was over,
he went back to his study
and got his daughters down and said,
"you know, I might have to resign."
Good evening. The Congress
of the United States in a historic action
today made effective a limitation
on the powers of the President to make war.
The House and then the Senate overturned
President Nixon's veto of the War Powers Bill.
And despite his opposition,
that measure now becomes law.
Does this override
the new developments in Watergate?
I think this has no relationship
at all to Watergate.
This is a prerogative of the
Congress of the United States
that several Presidents have
tried to take unto themselves.
But the people of this country are
demanding that never again
do we stumble into a Watergate.
Excuse me...
The people of this country are demanding
that we never again stumble into a Vietnam.
At 9:04 this evening, Richard M. Nixon
became the first President ever to resign his office.
There is the President waving good-bye.
You can hear the applause.
As we bind up
the internal rules of Watergate,
more painful and more poisonous
than those of foreign wars,
let brotherly love
purge our hearts of suspicion and of hate.
There was this collective
sigh of relief in the country.
Okay, we have a new President.
It's a new day. Let's see how things go.
Secretary Kissinger... The President has already
announced that he will stay in the cabinet.
Sophisticated Vietnamese believe
they're the ultimate victims of Watergate.
They think Congress cut U.S. aid
to settle a score with former President Nixon.
Cronkite News.
March 18, 1975.
According to Pentagon sources,
the North Vietnamese have now penetrated to a point
some 25 miles east of
the provincial capital of Ban Me Thuot,
which fell over the weekend.
The cease-fire that wasn't a cease-fire
involved a lot of bloody combat.
For the first 11 months,
the South Vietnamese fought quite well.
But by 1975,
it became more and more clear
that the North Vietnamese were
building up a formidable logistical system
that portended real danger
for the South Vietnamese.
The Communists began
the first major attack of their offensive.
Saigon's troops made a stand.
It was a vital one.
The entire central highland might be lost.
And South Vietnam could be cut in two
by the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong.
The plan
that the North Vietnamese conceived
would be a two-year plan.
What happened was that when attacking
the central highland town of Ban Me Thuot,
the Thieu government lost its composure.
Government troops were
secretly ordered by President Thieu
to pull out of
the central highland provinces.
The withdrawal quickly became a rout.
Civilians and soldiers fleeing in panic,
leaving behind huge supplies
of American-made war materials.
The North Vietnamese never dreamed
it would result in such a dramatic decision
as to abandon the highlands
which had been fought over for 12 years.
So they reconvened
their central military committee
and determined that the iron is hot
and this the time to strike.
President Thieu said he would not abandon Hue
but the people are leaving anyway.
Thieu said he would not abandon Quang Tri,
and that city is now gone.
The world witnessed the tragedy of
the overrunning of Quang Tri,
followed by Hue, followed by Danang.
And the next thing you know,
those of us sitting in Saigon
are watching our map legitimately bleed red.
A somber Henry Kissinger
outlined in a news conference
what he saw as the choices
now facing the United States.
What we face now
is whether the United States,
not just will withdraw its forces,
which we achieved,
and not just will start the end of
the loss of American life,
but whether it will
deliberately destroy an ally
by withholding aid from it
in its moment of extremity.
There is a new Harris Poll out today on
how people feel about continued military aid to Vietnam.
Only 17% favor that
and almost 3/4 of those questioned
are opposed to further military aid.
It is a tragedy
unbelievable in its ramifications.
I must say that I am frustrated
by the action of
the Congress in not responding to
some of the requests both for economic
and humanitarian and military assistance in South Vietnam.
When you consider how much we've spent
in blood and treasure in Southeast Asia,
and how little we've bought with the money,
I should think that now
the time has finally come to say no more.
A Communist commando unit,
probably Viet Cong,
has slipped into Saigon and dug itself beneath
this American bridge over the Saigon River.
Above them, South Vietnamese helicopter gunships
circle and fling down their salvo of rockets.
Soldiers behind me are firing at Viet Cong units
who are 500 yards away, no more.
This is the closest to fighting has ever come
to Saigon since the Communist Offensive in 1968.
Reporting from ABC News, Saigon.
Now there are reports that the Communists
have the city within artillery range.
At least the airport.
Many Americans on the ground
in South Vietnam at that time
felt serious obligation to Vietnamese
whom they had worked with and knew.
They were running in panic,
not because the NV were so hot on their heels
but because of the threat
that the NV were coming.
They city was suddenly choked
with people, lorries and cars
all chasing one American
evacuation convoy after the other.
I borrowed a truck
with a bogus Embassy license plate on it
and stuffed people in the truck
and drove them through the gate.
The airport received sporadic rocket fire
from Communist forces closing in on the city.
Minutes later came the report
that all Americans are to be evacuated immediately.
By the 29th at noon, there were
about 2,500 people in the U.S. Embassy
who can only be gotten out by helicopter.
The scene at the U.S. Embassy
here in Saigon is total chaos.
The Embassy gates were closed, and we,
like the frightened Vietnamese and their families,
had to fight and claw our way out.
I turned to help them if I could,
but I couldn't get anyone out.
50 at a time took off to the carriers
waiting in the South China Sea.
There was no room, so the Navy men ordered
the pilots to ditch the helicopters in the ocean.
We were living in a period of
what the Greeks call hubris.
Overweening pride.
This was this eighth-rate military power.
How were they going to defeat us?
Once it became a reality,
seeing the pictures on television
of not only a retreat,
but a disorderly retreat.
and that ache within ourselves,
we end up saying,
"this is not who we thought we were."
To see what was in store
for the South Vietnamese people,
to see the visions of our helicopters
and people struggling to get out,
terrible triage and choices
that had to be made.
was clearly one of the lows in my life.
The Communist forces,
some of them riding in Russian-made tanks,
some in captured American jeeps,
rolled into Saigon about 3.5 hours
after the end of the dramatic American evacuation
of U.S. nationals and many South Vietnamese.
There's no way to capture
in one evening's broadcast
the suffering and the grief of 30 years
of a subcontinent at war.
There's no way to capture
the suffering and grief of our own nation
in the most divisive conflict
since our own Civil War.
In Vietnam, we've finally
reached the end of the tunnel
and there is no light there.
What is there, perhaps,
was best said by President Ford...
A war that is finished.
The Vietnam War produced a
million unwritten stories
of human misery and human dignity.
In all, the war in the South
produced over 11 million refugees.
430,000 civilians died in the war
according to an American estimate,
along with 254,000 South Vietnamese soldiers.
The United States has spent more than
$350 billion on Vietnam.
And it may end up
being much higher than that.
The other loss we also know about,
even though we don't talk about it very much.
And when we do,
it's as if it were some kind of index or score.
56,000 lives,
plus about 150,000 seriously wounded.
Many of whom will never recover.
So, when some future politician for some reason
feels the need to drag this country into a war,
he might come out here to Arlington
and stand maybe right over there somewhere
to make his announcement
and to tell what he has in mind.
If he can attract public support
speaking from a place like this,
then his reasons for starting a new war
would have to be good ones.
morally abrasive war
Americans have ever fought anywhere.
It's time for the great silent majority
to stand up and be counted.
How do you ask a man to be
the last man to die for a mistake?
We're just going to refuse to do it.
You may be in jail but you won't be dead.
Military pressure will continue
until a peace settlement is reached.
We have achieved peace with honor.
The Americans are leaving.
The Vietnamese must stay
and face uncertainty.
In Vietnam, we have reached
the end of the tunnel
and there is no light there.
There's no understanding
of America in the 1970s
without understanding
how the decade began
in relationship to
the war in Vietnam.
Normally, live casualties for the
previous week are released on Thursday.
But fighting in the last week
has been so bitter that
military sources released the casualties,
unofficially, today.
340 Americans and 527 South Vietnamese
were killed last week.
Enemy dead were reported to be
more than 5,000.
There was some grumbling among numbers
of young G.I.s taking part in the assaults,
questioning whether the objective
is worth the bloodshed.
Nixon did not want to be the first
President of the United States to lose a war.
It was a matter of
personal pride with him.
His basic goal was to end the war
as quickly as possible,
but on honorable terms
that would preserve, in his view,
credibility as a world power
and as an ally.
President Nixon will dispatch his
adviser on foreign affairs, Henry Kissinger,
to Paris for the peace talks.
It is thought the U.S.
is working on a new proposal
to offer to the Viet Cong
and North Vietnam.
Nixon's strategy on Vietnam
was to negotiate a peace agreement,
but at the same time,
to Vietnam-ize the conflict.
We had to turn the war over
to South Vietnam
or it was going to be hopeless.
We couldn't fight their war forever.
The South Vietnamese were
taught to think like Americans,
act like Americans,
fight like Americans.
South Vietnam's President Thieu
had said that he wanted nothing more
than gradually to take over
full responsibility for the war.
President Nixon started
withdrawing troops almost right away.
He had a lot to withdraw.
There were over 500,000 men there.
But he did this very slowly
as they supposedly shifted the burden
of the fighting to the South Vietnamese Army.
He was withdrawing so slowly,
a lot of people were getting killed in the process.
And there was no end to it.
October 15, 1969.
Vietnam Moratorium Day.
Surely this is a day
unique in our history.
Never have so many of our people
publicly and collectively
manifested opposition
to this country's involvement in a war.
It wasn't hippies.
It wasn't radicals and Marxists.
It was ordinary middle-class Americans.
2 million of them,
taking the day off from school,
from work.
It was a genuine democratic explosion
of anti-war sentiment.
1, 2, 3, 4, Tricky Dick, stop the war!
Mr. Nixon has told aides that
the loss of American popular support,
or the appearance of it, could induce
the new leadership in Hanoi to press on
in the expectation that
the United States would quit.
The October Moratorium made Richard Nixon
go to the mountain top, literally.
He went to Camp David for two weeks
to write a speech
to answer the anti-war movement.
The elites had gotten on
the anti-war bandwagon.
The press, Harvard, the universities,
the East Coast establishment.
By 1969 they were all anti-war.
Hell no, we won't go!
And Nixon wanted to rise up and show
that there was another side. His side.
The outsiders,
the people who didn't go to Harvard,
who revered the flag
and supported our soldiers.
And he wanted to rally them.
To you, the great silent majority
of my fellow Americans,
I ask for your support.
North Vietnam cannot defeat
or humiliate the United States.
Only Americans can do that.
The term "silent majority"
clicked with Middle America
because they were never
represented on television
and they didn't feel they were
represented in Washington
and didn't really have a voice.
President Nixon proudly displayed
52,000 telegrams from persons who supported him.
It's time for the great silent majority
just to stand up and be counted.
At that point he went to 68% approval.
It gave him the room he needed
to maneuver.
Good evening,
my fellow Americans.
Tonight American
and South Vietnamese units
will attack the headquarters for the entire
Communist military operation in South Vietnam.
This is not an invasion of Cambodia.
Nixon's conviction is that
what you've got to do
is cut off the supplies
that the North Vietnamese
are funneling into the South
to the Viet Cong.
And the way to do it is
take out the Ho Chi Minh Trail,
the route they're using
through Cambodia.
They don't quite realize that
Cambodia is its own country.
In fact, a country that's always had
tenuous relationships with Vietnam.
And once they destabilize Cambodia,
you really just have all hell breaking out.
The Cambodian operation
will continue during the coming days.
American units searching for
North Vietnamese troops and installations.
But what they will find
or how long they will be here
no one can say for sure.
The active, large scale American
and South Vietnamese participation
in the fighting in Cambodia has brought a cry
of anger from many college campuses.
At Kent State University in Ohio,
the protest turned into a riot,
with thousands of demonstrators
facing National Guardsmen and police.
Four students are killed at Kent State.
Two students are killed at
Jackson State in Mississippi.
Nixon is sort of overwhelmed.
He's bewildered.
Nixon was very upset by the deaths,
by the belief that he had caused them.
That was a low point of his presidency.
The events of this past week have polarized
not only the opposition to the war
but also the opposition to
the anti-war movement.
Hard-hat construction workers chased and beat
demonstrators in the streets of the financial district.
Police joined ranks with attacking workers
and laughingly watched students brutally beat.
Smoke generated by this latest fuss
is tending to obscure the only real question...
Will the demonstrations have any effect on
shaping the President's Vietnam policies?
The answer here remains no.
A United States military court martial
formally established today
there was a massacre
of civilians at My Lai.
It convicted, Lieutenant William Calley,
one of the American soldiers who was there,
of premeditated murder in
the death of 22 South Vietnamese.
William Calley commanded
the unit that went into My Lai,
a village that was supposed to be
harboring Viet Cong troops.
We were ferried in by helicopters.
We led on the outskirts of the village.
We came across some people
who were in the village.
As I have in this one photograph,
you can see the expressions in their faces
just before they're about to be shot.
Especially the small child on the left.
And the one small boy not realizing
what is about to happen.
In the spasm of violence,
hundreds of people are killed,
all of them civilians.
This unit
from the Americal Division lost it.
They said that, "well,
we just felt like we were killing vermin."
They pulled the trigger
by somehow tricking themselves
to think that they're not killing a human,
they're killing an animal.
The captain and Lieutenant Calley
did not do anything to stop them.
They had lost it themselves.
It was a complete failure.
The White House is acutely aware
that the My Lai scandal
could bring about a disastrous withering away
of public support for the Vietnam War
and from Mr. Nixon's plans for a
staged withdrawal of American forces.
What happened in the Calley case
was not a combat situation.
He shot in cold blood old men,
women and children.
And the day that we as a country
fail to recognize
an act of cold-blooded murder
as murder,
- then we are no better...
- Fine. But why convict Lieutenant William Calley?
Why not convict the battalion command?
Hold it. Hold it. Hold it.
All right. Fellows.
This is your defense?
Every single one of them
that put the man in Vietnam
should be standing there saying,
"I am guilty too."
That's how I feel.
Every one of them.
Vietnam, 5th Cavalry.
Initiating new men.
Start out by singing a little song.
♪ You're going home in a body bag,
do-dah, do-dah... ♪
♪ You're going home in a body bag,
all the do-dah day... ♪
The day after the initiation,
five men came back in body bags.
By the '70s, the U.S. Army in Vietnam
had been essentially destroyed.
Every time we tangled with the Vietnamese
we were getting killed.
And there was no end to it.
So you've got what amounted to
a state of individual mutiny in the U.S. Army.
It's senseless walking down the road.
I'm not going to walk down it.
I'll walk on the trail.
The whole squad'll walk on the trail.
We're going to move out
and they're going to be left behind.
Or I am going to take the point
and they can follow me if they want to.
It's that simple.
We've got a job to do, we'll do it.
We're just going to refuse to do it.
Because it's... You may be in jail,
but you won't be dead.
You're supposedly withdrawing, right?
Well, I figure since
we're going home in the long run,
why don't we just sort of take it easy,
you know?
Don't go out looking for trouble,
just maybe sit down.
If they come to us, we'll fight.
But going out looking for trouble
and wasting more lives
for just time's sake,
to me is just absurd. I don't know.
All the people coming over here now,
they're a lot different than they used to be.
Like World War II-type people
or the old Vietnam people.
It's the Woodstock generation
coming to Vietnam.
The public campaign against
the war in Vietnam
took on a new dimension
in Washington today.
Men who have been there
began demonstrations
armed at speeding the end
of the conflict.
Businessmen have protested. Students have protested.
Mothers have protested. Everybody has.
But the men who fought the war,
who know what it's like, who know what we're fighting,
know what they've been made to do,
haven't.
And it's the first time in history
that they're going to do that.
Lieutenant Paveral died,
so I got a medal.
Sergeant John died,
so I got a medal.
I got a Silver Star, a Purple Heart,
and the rest of it's garbage.
It doesn't mean a thing!
Good evening. The war in Vietnam
has often been camouflaged
by misleading statistics of body counts,
weapons captured, hamlets pacified.
But we are now in the midst
of new, more revealing statistics...
The 2.5 million words
of the Pentagon Papers.
These once-secret papers tell the
agonizing story of the U.S. involvement
in Vietnam through four administrations
of expanding commitment.
The Pentagon Papers have
touched off the deepest controversies,
centering on whether the Presidents
and their men deceived the people.
Daniel Ellsberg, an official who had
served in the Defense Department
and had access to these materials,
he's the one who leaks this to the press.
I was the lead reporter in
the Pentagon Papers.
Ellsberg turned against the war,
and he copied these papers
with the hope that eventually
they would be used to embarrass
an awful lot of people,
and which would show that
we had made a terrible mistake
fighting this war in Vietnam.
I think Kissinger was obsessed with secrecy,
and so was Nixon.
My first three articles were published,
and the Nixon administration
then wanted to stop the whole thing.
My argument inside was if you want to
make the case against the Pentagon Papers,
get up and charge The New York Times
with publishing national security secrets,
gross irresponsibility,
and sabotaging the war in Vietnam.
The Justice Department
went to court in New York today
and got a temporary order restraining the Times
from publishing the next and last two installments.
Attorneys for The New York Times
claim the protection of the First Amendment,
which embodies the concept of
freedom of the press,
as sufficient to protect their
disclosure of the Vietnam memorandums.
The Supreme Court today ruled
that The New York Times
may continue to publish
the secret Pentagon Papers.
I think the lesson is that
the people of this country
can't afford to let the President
run the country by himself.
Even foreign affairs,
any more than domestic affairs,
without the help of the Congress...
Without the help of the public.
If you had to sum up the prevailing
mood here on Capitol Hill,
you could do it with two words...
Embarrassment and anger.
Because of the following
CBS News Special Report,
The Merv Griffin Show will begin
one half-hour later than usual.
The President of the United States
tonight disclosed a Vietnam peace offer
that he says has been secretly
offered to the Communists.
The plan calls for withdrawal
of all U.S. forces within six months
and new South Vietnamese elections
in exchange for a cease-fire
and return of all American prisoners.
The offer that I shall now present
on behalf of the government of the United States
and the government of South Vietnam,
with the full knowledge
and approval of President Thieu,
is both generous and far-reaching.
The response from North Vietnam was,
"no, you're missing something.
You've got to overthrow
the Thieu government."
But we were not going to
overthrow an ally as we left.
And that was the sticking point.
We were stuck.
It was a stalemate.
This is the scene
on the White House lawn.
as the Presidential helicopter
waits for President Nixon to begin
what must be surely
one of the most remarkable journeys
ever undertaken
by an American President,
his trip to Peking.
I will undertake what I deeply hope
will become a journey for peace.
Is the food as good
as people say it is?
I'm no expert on Chinese food,
but I liked it.
Nixon was a very geopolitical thinker
and he liked this idea of linkage.
The idea that he could link
U.S./Soviet policy with U.S./Chinese policy
with U.S./Vietnamese policy
and produce one tidy bundle.
Nixon thought that Vietnamese were hirelings
or pawns of the Chinese and the Soviets.
They weren't. They were Communists domestically,
but they were no one's pawn.
They were using the Chinese and the Russians,
playing them off against each other
to get weaponry to fight us
to gain their independence.
The heaviest fighting in a year
broke out in South Vietnam today.
North Vietnamese forces struck at
eight bases manned by South Vietnamese troops
just south of the demilitarized zone.
The North Vietnamese are unnerved
by the fact that the Americans
seem to be making peace
with both the Soviets and the Chinese.
They're feeling alienated
from their principal allies.
They see the Easter Offensive as
a bold effort to perhaps bring the war to a close,
or at least put themselves in a much better
position with respect to negotiations.
The President has decided to
keep American troops out of fight
and to keep them
coming home on schedule,
no matter what happens
to the South Vietnamese.
According to top officials here,
he will limit U.S. counteraction
to massive air strikes against
enemy forces and installations
in South as well as North Vietnam.
The Americans respond in great force.
And so you see an absolutely
massive aerial bombardment.
The latest, and in some ways,
the greatest of Mr. Nixon's gambles
in his efforts to end the war, as he says,
"with honor and not defeat."
Now the world is waiting to see
how the American minefields
will affect the
North Vietnamese supply system.
Will they really strangle the enemy's
most important supply line?
The North Vietnamese fail
in this effort to have a breakthrough
as a result of this offensive,
and they suffer massive casualties.
It helps to advance the negotiations
in a way that hadn't been possible before.
Henry Kissinger has dropped out of sight again
and nobody is saying where he is.
The President's top adviser left the western
White House yesterday with his children.
There has been speculation
he might have gone to Paris
to renew secret peace talks
with North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho.
The North Vietnamese position began to change
a few weeks before the 1972 election.
They knew Nixon was unpredictable.
So they say, "if we get this mad-man re-elected,
as it looks like he's going to be,
"and he doesn't have to worry
about re-elections ever again,
what the hell is he going to do to us
from now on?"
So on October 8 in Paris,
the North Vietnamese presented
a proposal which for the first time,
after three or four years of endless negotiations,
dropped their political requirement
that we overthrow the Saigon government.
I remember stepping outside at a break,
and Kissinger and I
were in a garden in Paris
and we shook hands and we said,
"we've done it."
We believe that peace is at hand.
There will be a return of
all American prisoners
within 60 days
after the agreement comes into force.
Now with the election just 12 days away,
the Nixon administration says peace is at hand.
It might appear that someone has
pulled a rug out from under McGovern.
Hello?
Kissinger telling us "peace is at hand"
was seen in the United States
as a cynical ploy
to win the election.
The fact is Kissinger is telling Saigon
this is the best you're going to get.
Thieu was afraid that
he was being sold out,
and that once the Americans left
it would be a short matter of time
before his own government fell.
Looked like we had a peace deal.
Kissinger had said "peace is at hand" publicly.
No deal.
Massachusetts is the only state
going for McGovern.
Now President Nixon is swept back
into the White House.
The victory landslide though it is
seems to be Mr. Nixon's alone, not his party's.
I think Nixon was resolute.
"Now I am liberated.
"Now I am never going to
have to run again.
Now I'm going to be
whom I wish to be."
The United States has resumed
full-scale bombing of Haiphong area.
The North Vietnamese said American planes
carried out heavy attacks around those cities tonight,
and Hanoi's armed forces shot down a large number
of planes and captured several pilots.
First Lieutenant.
Navigated B-52.
Nixon wanted the Communists
to think that he was crazy
in the hopes that that would drive them
back to the bargaining table.
A lot of the civilian areas were hit,
apparently.
Civilian areas must have been hit.
And I don't want to say that it was
not a very painful thing to have to do.
When 8,500-pound bombs
come off of one plane
that's the closest thing to
a nuclear weapon.
The response to the Christmas Bombing
was such an outrage.
Here is this small third-world country that
the United States is bombing back to the Stone Age.
The word from the President is
military pressure will continue
until a peace settlement is reached.
Within days after this so-called
"Christmas Bombing,"
the North Vietnamese came back to us
and wanted to re-open the negotiations,
made some concessions,
and within weeks we had an agreement.
So whatever one thinks of the bombing,
it produced peace within about a month.
Good evening.
The Vietnam War ended today.
Ended officially in this room in Paris.
The treaty basically said the
South Vietnamese get to keep their government.
The North Vietnamese get to
keep their soldiers in South Vietnam.
The North Vietnamese will release
the 500 American P.O.W.s.
And everybody promises to stop fighting.
As far as this administration is concerned,
we've done the very best that we can
against very great obstacles,
and we finally have achieved
a peace with honor.
I know it gags some of you
to write that phrase, but that is true.
And most Americans realize it is true.
It is the Americans who are celebrating.
They are leaving.
The Vietnamese are not celebrating.
They must stay and face the uncertainty
of whatever is going to happen to them next.
In Hanoi,
the American military involvement
in the Vietnam War
finally came to an end.
For if anything or anyone symbolized
the American agony of Vietnam,
it was the prisoners
Most were pilots, and many had spent
more than six years in prison.
Now they are on their way home.
It wasn't really until we rolled down the runway,
finally lifted off enemy soil
that we all broke loose and started
hugging and kissing the Air Force nurses.
It was just unbelievable,
and it was all euphoria.
Family gathered in the den to watch
the arrival of the planes from the Philippines.
There was no word as to which of the three planes
Lieutenant Colonel Purcell would be on.
The first one landed, but it wasn't that one.
Then came the second plane.
Someone in the family said that
he won't be on this one either.
But he was.
We were greeted by thousands of people.
They let out the schools and everyone
was waving flags and calling our names.
It was a great, great homecoming.
We are honored
to have the opportunity
to serve our country
under difficult circumstances.
They were legitimate heroes.
They had suffered terribly, and here they were home.
And it gave the country something to cheer about
after having so little to cheer about.
Mr. Nixon said he does not plan to
greet returning P.O.W.s because,
"this is a time when we should not grandstand it.
We should not exploit it."
So many of the soldiers that
came home from Vietnam in the early '70s
couldn't wear their uniforms in public.
They were called baby killers to their face.
And it really was very disturbing.
It distressed us all
to think that those comrades in arms
had come back to such a negative reception,
where we had come back
to ticker tape parades.
The American language has changed
since you went away.
It may even have changed
since you returned.
So the conversation of your wives, friends,
and your children may seem strange.
The Today Show devoted
an entire two-hour episode
to explaining, ostensibly,
to the prisoners of war
what had happened in America
in their absence.
They left a country where
The Sound of Music was the most popular movie.
They returned to one in which
Last Tango in Paris was the most popular movie,
which involved unspeakable carnal acts
that are illegal in most states.
Whatever you do,
don't call a group of women "girls."
It's no longer
considered a compliment by many.
We came home to quite a different world.
It was like Rip Van Winkle waking up
after nearly six years in a prison camp.
It was just unbelievable that our culture
had changed to that point.
In South Vietnam,
both the Saigon government and Communists
have accused each other
of new cease-fire violations,
motivated by attempts to gain
more villages and territory.
The Nixon administration
again expressed confidence
the cease-fire will prove effective
before long.
Mr. President, we have been allies
in a long and difficult war.
And now you can be sure that
we stand with you as we continue to work together
to build a lasting peace.
Nixon promised that if the North Vietnamese
renewed the offensive,
he would send the B-52s back to Hanoi.
Well, it didn't happen
because he was caught up in Watergate.
Washington is a city that
revolves around controversy
during office hours and elegant
social events at night.
These, of course, are days where
there is no shortage of controversy
with the sensational testimony before
the Watergate Committee on Capitol Hill,
with Henry Kissinger still trying to
get that cease-fire agreement implemented.
For a few hours tonight,
attention will be shifted away from those
daytime problems here at the White House.
The guests of honor are 600 Americans
who were held prisoner of war
at some time or other during the
long and agonizing Vietnam conflict.
All of us would like to join in
a round of applause for the brave men
that took those B-52s in and did the job.
Nixon was overjoyed
when the P.O.W.s came home.
And they were overjoyed to see him.
Nixon was a hero to the P.O.W.s.
Because as all of you know,
if they hadn't have done it, you wouldn't be here tonight.
But while he was cheering the P.O.W.s,
Nixon was thinking,
"Watergate's going to take me down."
That night when it was over,
he went back to his study
and got his daughters down and said,
"you know, I might have to resign."
Good evening. The Congress
of the United States in a historic action
today made effective a limitation
on the powers of the President to make war.
The House and then the Senate overturned
President Nixon's veto of the War Powers Bill.
And despite his opposition,
that measure now becomes law.
Does this override
the new developments in Watergate?
I think this has no relationship
at all to Watergate.
This is a prerogative of the
Congress of the United States
that several Presidents have
tried to take unto themselves.
But the people of this country are
demanding that never again
do we stumble into a Watergate.
Excuse me...
The people of this country are demanding
that we never again stumble into a Vietnam.
At 9:04 this evening, Richard M. Nixon
became the first President ever to resign his office.
There is the President waving good-bye.
You can hear the applause.
As we bind up
the internal rules of Watergate,
more painful and more poisonous
than those of foreign wars,
let brotherly love
purge our hearts of suspicion and of hate.
There was this collective
sigh of relief in the country.
Okay, we have a new President.
It's a new day. Let's see how things go.
Secretary Kissinger... The President has already
announced that he will stay in the cabinet.
Sophisticated Vietnamese believe
they're the ultimate victims of Watergate.
They think Congress cut U.S. aid
to settle a score with former President Nixon.
Cronkite News.
March 18, 1975.
According to Pentagon sources,
the North Vietnamese have now penetrated to a point
some 25 miles east of
the provincial capital of Ban Me Thuot,
which fell over the weekend.
The cease-fire that wasn't a cease-fire
involved a lot of bloody combat.
For the first 11 months,
the South Vietnamese fought quite well.
But by 1975,
it became more and more clear
that the North Vietnamese were
building up a formidable logistical system
that portended real danger
for the South Vietnamese.
The Communists began
the first major attack of their offensive.
Saigon's troops made a stand.
It was a vital one.
The entire central highland might be lost.
And South Vietnam could be cut in two
by the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong.
The plan
that the North Vietnamese conceived
would be a two-year plan.
What happened was that when attacking
the central highland town of Ban Me Thuot,
the Thieu government lost its composure.
Government troops were
secretly ordered by President Thieu
to pull out of
the central highland provinces.
The withdrawal quickly became a rout.
Civilians and soldiers fleeing in panic,
leaving behind huge supplies
of American-made war materials.
The North Vietnamese never dreamed
it would result in such a dramatic decision
as to abandon the highlands
which had been fought over for 12 years.
So they reconvened
their central military committee
and determined that the iron is hot
and this the time to strike.
President Thieu said he would not abandon Hue
but the people are leaving anyway.
Thieu said he would not abandon Quang Tri,
and that city is now gone.
The world witnessed the tragedy of
the overrunning of Quang Tri,
followed by Hue, followed by Danang.
And the next thing you know,
those of us sitting in Saigon
are watching our map legitimately bleed red.
A somber Henry Kissinger
outlined in a news conference
what he saw as the choices
now facing the United States.
What we face now
is whether the United States,
not just will withdraw its forces,
which we achieved,
and not just will start the end of
the loss of American life,
but whether it will
deliberately destroy an ally
by withholding aid from it
in its moment of extremity.
There is a new Harris Poll out today on
how people feel about continued military aid to Vietnam.
Only 17% favor that
and almost 3/4 of those questioned
are opposed to further military aid.
It is a tragedy
unbelievable in its ramifications.
I must say that I am frustrated
by the action of
the Congress in not responding to
some of the requests both for economic
and humanitarian and military assistance in South Vietnam.
When you consider how much we've spent
in blood and treasure in Southeast Asia,
and how little we've bought with the money,
I should think that now
the time has finally come to say no more.
A Communist commando unit,
probably Viet Cong,
has slipped into Saigon and dug itself beneath
this American bridge over the Saigon River.
Above them, South Vietnamese helicopter gunships
circle and fling down their salvo of rockets.
Soldiers behind me are firing at Viet Cong units
who are 500 yards away, no more.
This is the closest to fighting has ever come
to Saigon since the Communist Offensive in 1968.
Reporting from ABC News, Saigon.
Now there are reports that the Communists
have the city within artillery range.
At least the airport.
Many Americans on the ground
in South Vietnam at that time
felt serious obligation to Vietnamese
whom they had worked with and knew.
They were running in panic,
not because the NV were so hot on their heels
but because of the threat
that the NV were coming.
They city was suddenly choked
with people, lorries and cars
all chasing one American
evacuation convoy after the other.
I borrowed a truck
with a bogus Embassy license plate on it
and stuffed people in the truck
and drove them through the gate.
The airport received sporadic rocket fire
from Communist forces closing in on the city.
Minutes later came the report
that all Americans are to be evacuated immediately.
By the 29th at noon, there were
about 2,500 people in the U.S. Embassy
who can only be gotten out by helicopter.
The scene at the U.S. Embassy
here in Saigon is total chaos.
The Embassy gates were closed, and we,
like the frightened Vietnamese and their families,
had to fight and claw our way out.
I turned to help them if I could,
but I couldn't get anyone out.
50 at a time took off to the carriers
waiting in the South China Sea.
There was no room, so the Navy men ordered
the pilots to ditch the helicopters in the ocean.
We were living in a period of
what the Greeks call hubris.
Overweening pride.
This was this eighth-rate military power.
How were they going to defeat us?
Once it became a reality,
seeing the pictures on television
of not only a retreat,
but a disorderly retreat.
and that ache within ourselves,
we end up saying,
"this is not who we thought we were."
To see what was in store
for the South Vietnamese people,
to see the visions of our helicopters
and people struggling to get out,
terrible triage and choices
that had to be made.
was clearly one of the lows in my life.
The Communist forces,
some of them riding in Russian-made tanks,
some in captured American jeeps,
rolled into Saigon about 3.5 hours
after the end of the dramatic American evacuation
of U.S. nationals and many South Vietnamese.
There's no way to capture
in one evening's broadcast
the suffering and the grief of 30 years
of a subcontinent at war.
There's no way to capture
the suffering and grief of our own nation
in the most divisive conflict
since our own Civil War.
In Vietnam, we've finally
reached the end of the tunnel
and there is no light there.
What is there, perhaps,
was best said by President Ford...
A war that is finished.
The Vietnam War produced a
million unwritten stories
of human misery and human dignity.
In all, the war in the South
produced over 11 million refugees.
430,000 civilians died in the war
according to an American estimate,
along with 254,000 South Vietnamese soldiers.
The United States has spent more than
$350 billion on Vietnam.
And it may end up
being much higher than that.
The other loss we also know about,
even though we don't talk about it very much.
And when we do,
it's as if it were some kind of index or score.
56,000 lives,
plus about 150,000 seriously wounded.
Many of whom will never recover.
So, when some future politician for some reason
feels the need to drag this country into a war,
he might come out here to Arlington
and stand maybe right over there somewhere
to make his announcement
and to tell what he has in mind.
If he can attract public support
speaking from a place like this,
then his reasons for starting a new war
would have to be good ones.