To conservatives it borders on stating the obvious – South Vietnam collapsed in the spring of 1975 to invading North Vietnamese because American military forces were no longer in South Vietnam. To liberals, the reason for South Vietnam's collapse to the communists is not so apparent – because for years liberals had claimed that the main problem in South Vietnam was the presence of US troops. How could their nearly complete departure by 1973, except for a small contingent to protect the American embassy in Saigon, mean anything other than clear skies ahead?
It's not often that you hear a liberal cite what many conservatives have long believed about Vietnam, but that's what happened when filmmaker Rory Kennedy appeared on “The Daily Show” last week to plug her new documentary, “Last Days in Vietnam.” After Stewart praised Kennedy's new movie as a “fabulous film,” he made a dubious claim
STEWART: This is about the evacuation of Saigon. Fill in the people, you know, it's one of the lesser known episodes of the Vietnam War.
Arguably it's just the opposite, the best known episode of the war, its ignoble conclusion to Americans and their South Vietnamese allies, its triumphant climax to the communists. But among the war's “lesser known” aspects? Only to Stewart and his allegedly well-informed viewers. Kennedy was diplomatic in nudging Stewart from his claim –
KENNEDY: Well, you know, I think a lot of people are familiar with the iconic image of the helicopter on top of what people think is the embassy -- it's in fact not the embassy – and the desperation of the Vietnamese trying to leave during those final hours. And what had happened was, we had a peace accord in 1973, a peace accord was signed, we no longer had troops. This is now April of '75. The North come in, the country falls within four months because the US presence isn't there, and it falls much quicker than anybody expected. So it became very desperate, the US decided we just got to get the Americans out and leave all our Vietnamese counterparts behind.
STEWART: And they've surrounded Saigon but in the peace accords they had promised not to do this.
Oddly, Stewart and Kennedy can't bring themselves to describe more specifically who “they” are – the communist North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. Nor, for that matter, do Kennedy or Stewart elaborate on why South Vietnamese who helped the US during the war were desperate to flee the country before it fell to the communists – a desperation mirrored today by Iraqis fleeing ISIS, and for the same reason.
KENNEDY: They had promised not to, but they broke the peace accord and the US had promised, Nixon had promised we'll come in if the North attacks and then of course Nixon had resigned with Watergate, Ford was in office. We had put a Congress in position where they really didn't support the war in Vietnam …
Ahem, that's a “Democratic” Congress, as I recall. In fact, Nixon had the terrible misfortune to be the first president since 1849 to take office with both chambers of Congress controlled by the opposing party.
KENNEDY: … as a country we didn't support the war and we just weren't going to be getting behind getting back into the quagmire of Vietnam. And so there was no support by the US and we were just kinda able to, it fell like a house of cards.
STEWART (dryly facetious): It's amazing how United States' history exists in such singular fashion and you never see a cycle of these types of …
KENNEDY: Never repeats itself …? (audience laughs)
Stewart was clearly alluding to Iraq and Kennedy picked up on the allusion. By doing this, he's suggesting that the US departure from Iraq in 2011 put the country at risk of becoming another charnel house. Not incidentally, there have been significant departures from this "cycle" -- post-war Germany and Japan, for example, along with South Korea.
Most conspicuous by its absence was the question Stewart could not bring himself to ask Kennedy – does she believe her uncle, President John F. Kennedy, and her father, hard-nosed Cold Warrior Robert Kennedy (at least until he refashioned himself a dove for the '68 campaign) bear any responsibility for US involvement in Vietnam? It's hardly a stretch to suggest that Stewart should have asked this. The New York Times ran a story about “Last Days in Vietnam” on Aug. 28 by Ralph Blumenthal, who covered the war for the paper from 1969 to 1971. After describing some of Kennedy's previous work (“Ghosts of Abu Ghraib,” 2007; “Ethel”, a film about her mother, 2012), Blumenthal wrote that Kennedy saw her latest film “special” to her – “My family and our history in Vietnam obviously played a role.” Apparently not so obvious to Stewart. Kennedy told Stewart that Nixon “promised” to help South Vietnam if the communists violated the 1973 peace accord, a vow that Nixon was unable to keep when forced from office by the Watergate scandal in August 1974, less than a year before South Vietnam collapsed. But it was JFK who made a more memorable promise in his inaugural address, one that motivated untold numbers of men who'd later serve in Vietnam – "we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship ..."
