Word: leaderlessness
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...Ranh Bay, a once impregnable U.S. base visited by President Lyndon Johnson in 1966, leaderless marines went on a rampage when their evacuation ships arrived from Danang. They took over cars and Jeeps at gunpoint, robbing fellow refugees at random. Soldiers even fired on American helicopters and chartered aircraft seeking to land in Cam Ranh. The situation was so bad that field commanders in the military region around Saigon were ordered to execute rioting troops on the spot; one commander in Binh Tuy province east of Saigon ordered some troops shot for indiscipline...
Reeling, stunned, confused, the army of South Viet Nam was in disordered retreat last week in the face of a continued Communist offensive. Government positions were abandoned with scarcely a fight. Leaderless, demoralized troops dropped their weapons and joined hundreds of thousands of civilians in a panicky southward flight. In the most stunning Communist victory in more than two decades, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops and tanks on Sunday overran Danang, the country's second largest city. According to reports by South Vietnamese officials, this victory gives the Communists nearly complete control of the entire northern half...
...swiftness of the retreat was not the only problem. Discipline among retreating troops in some cases collapsed completely as officers left their men leaderless or troops simply refused to obey orders. In the coastal city of Tuy Hoa - the destination of tens of thousands of refugees - unruly rangers roved around aimlessly, shooting into homes and further terrifying the people. By midweek the police had gone, the banks were closed, and it was impossible to buy bread or rice...
Muskie's name has been mentioned with increasing frequency recently, as a leaderless Democratic Party considers the possible nominees for 1976; a relatively obscure Congressman from a state with six electoral votes; a junior Senator from lexas whose extravagent political hashes are reminiscent of the still-unpopular Lyndon Johnson; a conservative Senator from the State of Bocing an anathema to liberal Democrats, who suffers from suspicion about the handling of his campaign fund in 1972; a former Senator from Oklahoma who ran for the Presidency three years ago because he couldn't get re-elected to the Senate...
Even the counterculture of the '60s--which was genuinely in opposition to advanced, bureaucratized capitalism and the stilted, unspontaneous him in beings it created--could not transcend this vision of the past. The hip Left's retreat into rural communalism and undisciplined, leaderless opposition was essentially in keeping with America's Jeffersonian traditions. In American style, a large part of the '60s Left could not make a virtue of organized planned collectivism but instead tried to create a vision of society which was small scale, often rural, and largely anarchic. In a society and economy as interdependent and complex...