Fifty years ago things were in a state of disrepair. As a child, I was just happy to be living in the same country as my father after our two-year separation.
I hope you’ll enjoy this recording of the full August 1974 chapter of For the Love of Vietnam: a war, a family, a CIA official and the best evacuation story never told. The print version is below.
Also included in the book is one of my favorite August 1974 memories about dancing with my father at our housewarming party. I told the story at Crandall Library in 2015.
Chapter: August 1974
August was a pivotal month politically for America but a relatively quiet one for us. Life in Saigon was much more confined than the wide open spaces of Taiwan, but we were settling into routines. Though busy with the pressures of the office, my father made as much time as he could to spend with the re-united family. Stamp collecting became a favored pastime. He spent hours helping each of us pore over mail-order catalogs, discussing options, choosing favorite stamps, and filling out order forms. It created a quiet, orderly atmosphere in the cavernous house.
In contrast, politics back home were in an unprecedented state of disarray. As of this writing, August 1974 holds the inauspicious honor of being the only month in history in which a standing U.S. president left the White House under threat of impeachment. Richard Milhous Nixon had been elected the 37th president of the United States in 1968. He was a vicious politician as well as a paranoid and quirky man.
He had every conversation in the Oval Office recorded, a practice which proved fatal to his defense against charges that he colluded in the Watergate scandal. His tapes were subpoenaed by the Supreme Court and, when released on August 5, provided compelling evidence of Nixon’s complicity in covering up a June 1972 break-in to the Democratic National Committee headquarters by Republicans.
With the certainty of impeachment by the Senate on charges of obstruction of justice, abuse of power, criminal cover-up as well as several violations of the Constitution, Nixon announced his resignation, effective at noon on August 9, 1974.
It seems so black and white now.
Back then, it wasn’t.
For or against Nixon, it was unsettling for the nation. My mother was sick at heart.
“Well, it looks as though Nixon has had it,” she wrote to her parents. “Even if he is wrong, it still makes one want to weep. Ah well . . . what is there to say.”
It takes a certain level of personal egotism to hold public office. Nixon paraded his brash confidence by flashing his signature “Vs” on the campaign trail and at presidential public appearances.
While American televisions were tuned to the Watergate trials and Nixon’s resignation, the unsuccessful cease-fire was continuing in South Vietnam, creating floods of refugees—many of them orphans—into urban centers across the country. Artillery fire could be heard from Saigon, rounds of 155s into Viet-Cong-held territory just a hair’s breadth from our home in the city.
My younger brother Jimmy said one of his only memories of being six in Saigon was of watching rosy bursts of artillery from the roof of our house of an evening.
“I didn’t know what it was,” he said. “But I didn’t think it was good.”
“The peace and ceasefire in Vietnam are curious,” wrote my father to his sister in August. “Da Nang is hit with five dead yesterday and the general level of fighting kicked off by the North Vietnamese is rising daily. Most people may be thinking of Watergate, Nixon, inflation, and gas prices, but war is very close and very real to us here.”
The South Vietnamese were particularly vulnerable to the outcome of the political turmoil in Washington. It wasn’t just a philosophical matter of who was going to take office but what policies the new president was going to adhere to in light of the Vietnam question; the slightest change in the winds could spell disaster.
Despite the mounting evidence to the contrary, my father was holding onto his conviction that his efforts would be successful. “Sometimes the best moments are the darkest ones, as Churchill told us. I still have faith that we will win.”
My father’s optimism, in retrospect, was not well-placed, nor broadly felt among the South Vietnamese populace. Nixon’s resignation initiated its own domino effect that would not stop until the Americans were run out of Saigon. The citizens of South Vietnam seemed to know this instinctively. Within hours of Nixon’s resignation, rumors of an ill omen put Saigon on the sweat: A boulder sitting atop a hill above President Thieu’s native village had inexplicably cracked in two. Soothsayers could not help but cast the incident in a dark pallor, a foreshadowing that the worst yet was to come.
Oblivious to such signs, the whitewash of American politics rolled on. Gerald Rudolph Ford, sworn in on August 9, 1974, concurrently with Nixon’s resignation, immediately expressed the intention to carry out the policy of his predecessors in regard to South Vietnam. He sent a letter to South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu on August 10, reassuring him of continued support. Thieu proudly read the letter to his cabinet.
“They thought that, well, even if Mr. Nixon had resigned, they can still believe in a commitment from the U.S. to help South Vietnam,” Bui Diem, the Vietnamese Ambassador-at-Large said later.
What they didn’t know, however, was that President Ford had sent letters to several allies on that same day, assuring all of them of the same continued support. But these were just letters, not an act of Congress.
Before long, senior congressional leaders would inform Ford and his Secretary of State Kissinger that Vietnam was just one of many urgent issues. The oil crisis and a struggling domestic economy loomed larger than the needs of a flagging Asian army half a world away, especially one in a country that had caused so many Americans such dissension and heartache.
With so many congressmen facing re-election pressures, the unpopular and divisive subject of Vietnam was not going to be brought up willingly, if at all. That message was not relayed to Thieu and his cabinet; they were allowed to believe that the fate of Vietnam was still dear to the American heart.
While these issues were pressing in on the powers-that-be, we as a family simply carried on, settling into our new life in Saigon.
Home renovations were continuing; we finally had lights and air-conditioning on all three floors, a working telephone, and a bona fide (if tiny) swimming pool at the center of the house.
One thing that we still didn’t have was a washer and dryer. “It makes me sick,” my mother wrote, “The maids sit and scrub the clothes on the tile floor. They are the clothes-destroyers in action . . .”
Flash Memoir: Dancing in my Father’s Footsteps
Written on March 4, 2013
I remember the big housewarming party my parents had at the end of August in 1974. But only very little. Much the shame, for it was the event of the month in Saigon, inspiring even the biggest bigwig of the South Vietnamese army, General Tran Van Trung to attend. He arrived in two cars—the only cars allowed into our little alley. Everyone else had to find parking on the city streets and make their way through the mud from a recent rainstorm to our front door. They also walked under the inspection of armed guards who were stationed for three blocks around our house!
I don’t recall the pomp and circumstance of the General’s arrival, though I am sure there must have been a great deal. Our front yard—which was essentially a “lawn” of small opaque white pebbles about the size of a parking place—had been converted into the guard tower location. Built of metal sheeting for sides and roof, it served before and after the party as quite a nice playhouse for tea parties and such. But of course, during the party, the armed guards needed the space for guarding the important military guests. I regarded them suspiciously with their gray uniforms and large guns. They seemed, I thought, out of place in my playhouse, but since I had no choice about their being there, I made no fuss.
Instead, I found my way in and out of the crowd that had suddenly taken over our space, our three-story house in this new city that I knew so little about. My mother and father circulated about, guiding people to eat at the buffet downstairs and up to the roof for music and dancing. My dad worked at a radio station and knew a lot of musicians so we had the best bands in the country there. They played under the canopy of a real parachute that had perhaps, I liked to think, carried some young soldier to safety.
My favorite part of the evening came when my dad pulled me from the shadows to dance with him. I was clumsy at it and he told me to step onto his feet. His leather shoes were a perfect stoop for my little sandaled ones and we twirled around the dance floor as if on wings.
He looked down on me with a big grin on his face and, at that moment I knew I was his favorite person at the party. Not the intimidating generals, not the famous singers, not the hundreds of friends and neighbors nor even the siblings whose size and demeanors often overshadowed my own quiet ways. It was me, there on the rooftop, floating on his footsteps, safe in his grasp.
~*~
Thank you for sharing this fifty-year-old walk down memory lane with me. To follow me through until the ultimate end—the Fall of Saigon in April 1975—subscribe to “Stories of Vietnam.”
Until next time,
Kat
Excerpt taken from the 2023 publication of For the Love of Vietnam: a war, a family, a CIA official, and the best evacuation story never heard.