Word: saigon
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...tape and film and photographic paper, pictures of Viet Nam by the hundred gross. Bit by visual bit, Americans accrued a vivid (if distorted) portrait of the country where their sons and husbands were dying, a terrifying multimedia montage of nervous teenage heroes behind sandbags, of Saigon's beleaguered charm, of a green, green countryside with helicopters hovering everywhere...
...years after the fall of Saigon, the debacle in Southeast Asia remains a subject many Americans would rather not discuss. So the nation has been spared a searing, divisive inquest--"Who lost Viet Nam?"--but at a heavy price. The old divisions have been buried rather than resolved. They seem ready to break open again whenever anyone asks what lessons the U.S. should draw from its longest war, and the only one to end in an undisguisable defeat...
...fighting. Though the former President's self-interest is , obvious, parts of his analysis are supported even by the enemy. U.S. Army Colonel Harry Summers Jr., who considers Viet Nam "a tactical success and a strategic failure," was in Hanoi on a negotiating mission a few days before Saigon fell. Summers recalls telling a North Vietnamese colonel, "You know, you never defeated us on the battlefield." The foe's reply: "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant." In essence, the U.S. was outlasted by an enemy that proved able and willing to fight longer than America...
...last U.S. Ambassador to Saigon, Martin had just eleven minutes to pack and evacuate the embassy as South Viet Nam neared its final collapse. Martin left behind family portraits and mementos of more than two decades in the Foreign Service, but he did manage to salvage top-secret documents from the embassy. In 1978 the FBI investigated his handling of the files, but the Justice Department later decided not to prosecute. Martin, 72, has retired to Winston-Salem, N.C. He does not believe the war had to end in such a disastrous manner. "Had President Nixon served out his term...
...said that President Reagan's Star Wars proposal does not "respect reality." Head of the Ford Foundation from 1966 to 1979, Bundy, 66, is now a history professor at New York University. His conclusions about Viet Nam are the opposite of Martin's. "It was not Watergate that made Saigon's survival impossible," he has written. "It was the fatal . . . imbalance between what (South Viet Nam) would have needed from us and what our own society would let us provide. The basic error was not in any one failure, but in the attempt itself...