From: M. Duke Lane, 76004,2356
To: Anthony Marsh [J], 72127,2301
Date: 4/24/95, 11:10 PM

Re:	More McNamara

Please let me know if you'd prefer not to get this. Right now, it's going 
out to my regular (200+) "JFK" mailing list, but I can start another ....

		   MARY McGRORY - McNamara To World: `Moi?'.

Washington Post

(c) 1995 Washington Post. All rts. reserv.

2246561
MARY McGRORY - McNamara To World: `Moi?'.
The Washington Post, April 23, 1995, FINAL Edition
By: Mary McGrory
Section: OUTLOOK, p. C01
Story Type: Column
Line Count: 70    Word Count: 774

THE TOPIC last week in Washington was Vietnam. A bipartisan rage has seized
the  city.  Robert  McNamara is villain to hawks and doves alike. Thanks to
his  memoirs,  the  debate  that  should  have taken place 30 years ago has
resumed, and the level of acrimony is not that much lower than during those
bitter  years  when  to  go  out  to  dinner meant ending up shouting about
bombing pauses and pacification.

Readers are writing in to protest either that they knew at the time that it
was  futile and fraudulent, or to say that they believed with Ronald Reagan
that  it  was  "a noble cause" and feel equally betrayed. David Halberstam,
the  author  of  "The  Best  and the Brightest," is a one-man "truth squad"
following  the  somber  appearances of the author, who is trying to pretend
that "In Retrospect" is just another collection of Washington remembrances,
and  that  he  is  just another official who could not leash up the dogs of
war.

   President Clinton joined in and unwarily said that McNamara "vindicated"
him, as if his own convictions did not. Vietnam, a haunting presence during
the 1992 campaign, may make a comeback as an issue in '96, in the primaries
anyway.  Sen.  Bob  Dole  is  making  his war record a central theme in his
campaign.  He  is  opposed by Sen. Phil Gramm, who is strikingly nonchalant
about  his  Vietnam  exemptions;  he  got  five  as  a husband and graduate
student.  Gramm  seeks  credit for being the brother of a decorated Vietnam
veteran  and  a  member  of  the  faculty  at  Texas  A&M,  the campus most
supportive  of the war in the entire country. We have more toxic discussion
to look forward to.

   For  some,  the most grating aspect of McNamara's book tour is that when
he  is  asked  why  he  didn't speak out sooner and perhaps save lives, his
answer is basically, "Moi?" What could I have done? he asks piteously. That
diffidence  was  no  part  of  his  persona  when  he  was in charge of the
Pentagon.  He exuded self-confidence and certainties about light at the end
of  the  tunnel.  He  often propounded high-tech solutions like "McNamara's
Fence," which was supposed to keep out marauding North Vietnamese.
   Another  front  in  today's war has opened up. A small group has decided
that  the  treatment  accorded  McNamara -- he was excoriated in a New York
Times  editorial, and Halberstam took him apart in a retrospective piece in
the Los Angeles Times -- has gone too far. It is seriously argued by people
who  don't  like the Establishment to be hit too hard that the treatment of
McNamara will inhibit other high officials from spilling the beans in times
to  come  about  immoral wars in which they were complicit. On the McNamara
timetable, we should get the real dope on the Iran-contra scandal in 2025.

   Ironically,  the  person who learned and benefited most from the obscene
tragedy  of Vietnam was Ronald Reagan, one of the war's most vociferous and
protective champions. Obsessed as he was by the Red Menace, he never sent a
GI  to Nicaragua. Nobody believed more fervently in the doctrine of "Better
Dead  Than  Red"  or  was  surrounded  by  more  intemperate  and bellicose
advisers. But even William Casey and Oliver North could not dislodge Reagan
from the rock-bottom truth about the quagmire.

   Post  press  critic  Richard  Harwood  points  out,  quite rightly, that
McNamara  should  not  carry the full load of blame. Even Halberstam in his
book  "The  Making of a Quagmire" called Vietnam "a legitimate part" of our
global  commitment.  And  nobody should forget Senate hearings in 1968 that
war  critic  J. William Fulbright chaired, when Sen. Eugene McCarthy was in
New  Hampshire  at  the  most  glorious  moment  of his antiwar insurgency.
Chairman  Fulbright bridled when Sen. Russell Long suggested that he wanted
to pull out of Vietnam. No such thing, he protested.

   Eugene  McCarthy  -- and no one has more right to speak -- scoffs at the
notion   that  McNamara's  book  offers  atonement.  "It's  a  Presbyterian
confession; you absolve yourself."

   If  we  are  to learn from the catastrophe, citizens must do better too.
They went along through the wretched years, watching the country being torn
apart,  watching  the  body  bags  come home. They allowed themselves to be
manipulated  into thinking that it was worse to have demonstrations than to
send  young  men  to die in a misbegotten war. Political leaders discourage
skepticism.  But when people are dying, the least their fellow citizens can
do is ask questions.

   Lyndon  Johnson  smothered  questions; Richard Nixon blanketed them with
poisonous  counterattacks.  The war destroyed them both. We should learn to
spot  the power-lovers who pass themselves off as public servants. McNamara
was  one  of them; his camouflage and his statistics were better than many,
but what happened was that he loved power more than truth. Still does, says
Halberstam, and the war rages on.
   Mary McGrory is a Washington Post columnist.

NAMED PERSONS: MCNAMARA, ROBERT S.
ORGANIZATION NAME: IN RETROSPECT
DESCRIPTORS: Books;  Vietnam;  War

		 Twenty Years After: Marking an Ending.

Washington Post

(c) 1995 Washington Post. All rts. reserv.

2246402
Twenty Years After: Marking an Ending.
The Washington Post, April 23, 1995, FINAL Edition
By: Jeff Stein
Section: BOOK WORLD, p. X09
Story Type: Review
Line Count: 114    Word Count: 1260

THE MARK

A War Correspondent's Memoir of Vietnam and Cambodia

   By Jacques Leslie

   Four Walls Eight Windows. 356 pp. $22

   A LOVELY COUNTRY

   By David Lawton

   Harcourt Brace. 262 pp. $22
   BOAT PEOPLE

   By Mary Gardner

   W.W. Norton. 277 pp. $21

   AFTERMATH

   An Anthology of Post Vietnam Fiction

   Edited by Donald Anderson

   Henry Holt. 286 pp. $12.95

   PACIFICATION

   The American Struggle for Vietnam's Hearts and Minds

   By Richard A. Hunt

   Westview Press. 340 pp. $34.95
   THE  END.  The beginning of the end. The light at the end. The end is in
sight.  End  the war now. A secret plan to end the war. End game. "The End"
(Jim Morrison).

   If nothing else, Vietnam gave us endings. There never was a beginning --
no  marching bands, no columns of puffed-up soldiers off to the front. Guys
slunk off to Vietnam at night with their collars up, as someone said. Then,
in  one  swell  fluke  20 years ago next weekend, the North Vietnamese Army
crashed  into  Saigon and turned out the lights. Boom! as John Madden would
say.

   So  now we -- what? Celebrate the end? Can't do it. Wouldn't be prudent.
We  "mark"  the  end,  a  Vietnam  War-ish euphemism if there ever was one.
Because  it's the wrong word. The war isn't over at all; it's like malaria,
raging  beneath the surface. It creeps back with fever and cold sweats just
when  we  think  we've  got  it  licked. You don't think so? Talk to Robert
McNamara. Or Bill Clinton.

   We  don't  mark  anything  about Vietnam; it marks us. Which is the idea
behind  the  memoir  of  Jacques  Leslie,  who  came to Saigon in 1972 as a
24-year-old  rookie  correspondent  for  the  Los Angeles Times and quickly
became  addicted to Vietnam's "intrigue and pumping adrenalin." He had "the
mark."

   "People  with the mark shared a yearning they suspected Vietnam of being
able  to satisfy, and while they hated the war ... they loved it even more,
and hated themselves for loving it."

   Well,  this is an honest confession, if not an original one. The Mark is
state-of-the-art  journalism,  that  is, a lively read that swells with the
writer's  feelings  -- about war, death, cowardice, American officials, his
doltish  editors  and  his colleagues in Saigon. It's the kind of reporting
found  in  today's  Esquire, Vanity Fair and many television newsmagazines,
where  the  correspondents  make  themselves  as  much of the story as what
they're covering.

   I raced through The Mark hoping for an epiphany, a moment when, 20 years
later,  Leslie  realizes  how  much  he  lost  by  obsessing over winning a
Pulitzer  instead  of learning something important from the people on whose
behalf  we were allegedly fighting. Alas, at the end he flees Cambodia in a
U.S. Embassy plane one step ahead of the Khmer Rouge, with hardly a thought
for  his  interpreter left behind. This makes for a terrific metaphor, even
if  he  doesn't  realize it. His epilogue of alienation doesn't make up for
the utterly vacant self-absorption of the previous 250 pages.
   David Lawton, on the other hand, understands everything about the media,
good  and bad, in Vietnam, as well as the cynical embassy officials who ran
the war without so much as a flicker of belief in it. A Lovely Country is a
shrewd,  sophisticated first novel with close echoes of Graham Greene's The
Quiet  American in it, but it's as timely and timeless as a CIA cover up in
Guatemala.

   Lawton's  Saigon  is redolent with fish sauce and double-dealing, as his
man Giles Trent, a political operative at the U.S. Embassy, maneuvers among
the  whirlpools  of espionage and corruption, love and conscience. Lawton's
portraits  of  the American ambassador, armchair military officers, loutish
reporters  and  a  Vietnamese  double agent bristle with authority, and you
know  that  he's  been  there.  As  his  man Trent flies off the top of the
embassy  and  across  the  delta  in  the  war's  last  hour, "He knew that
somewhere  below,  in  a  flooded rice field, a child rode on the back of a
gray  water  buffalo.  In  some village he saw a mother and infant; under a
conical  hat  a  perfect madonna. Then the helicopter cleared the coast." I
hope Lawton will head for Tegucigalpa, where his great talent would be very
much at home.

   Millions  of Vietnamese and Cambodians were left holding the bag when we
skipped town, of course. Tens of thousands of them made it here anyway, and
there's  a  mind  boggling  story behind every one of them. In Boat People,
Mary  Gardner  has stitched together a heartbreaking and heartwarming novel
about  these  plucky  newcomers,  who against great odds triumph over alien
schools,  hostile  doctors,  welfare,  Asian stereotypes, and the ghosts of
relatives who have followed them to Galveston, Tex.

   Disney  should  snap  this  up, for Boat People is every bit as good as,
say,  "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman" -- which is also, of course, its problem.
It's  stocked  with  winning  characters who Gordon writes about with great
knowledge and compassion -- she was an "unofficial social worker" among the
Vietnamese in Galveston. Unfortunately, it never quite gets off the ground.
Even  if  it isn't great literature, though, Boat People should be required
reading  for  high  schoolers and teachers wherever there is a community of
immigrants, Vietnamese or otherwise.

   Tim  O'Brien,  on  the  other  hand, always gets off the ground, and his
short  story  from  Aftermath,  a  collection  of  very  good  writing with
post-Vietnam themes, starts at high speed and never slows down.

   "The  war  was  over  and there was no place to go," begins "Speaking of
Courage."  It's  a  hot  July  4th  afternoon in a dead-quiet prairie town.
Norman  Bowker is a veteran driving endlessly around a lake, alone with his
memories  of  Vietnam,  of  a  dead high school friend, of a girlfriend now
married.  His  father  is shuttered in air-conditioning at home, watching a
baseball game on TV.

   The  town  "looked  as if it had been hit by nerve gas, everything still
and lifeless, even the people," Bowker muses. "The town could not talk, and
would  not  listen.  `How'd  you  like  to hear about the war?' he might've
asked,  but  the  place  could  only  blink  and  shrug.  It had no memory,
therefore  no guilt... It was a brisk, polite town. It did not know ... and
did not care to know."

   Aftermath  surprised  me  like  a  full  clip of bullets straight to the
heart.  Donald Anderson, director of creative writing at the U.S. Air Force
Academy  (of  all  places)  has  managed  to  assemble  some of our Vietnam
generation's  finest  writers  --  James  Park  Sloan, Tobias Wolff, Maxine
Kumin,  Louise  Erdrich,  to  name  a  few  --  in one fast moving literary
platoon.  This  is  not  blood and guts stuff, just guts, writers attacking
America's  postwar  torpor  with  insight  and great wit. Anybody who turns
their nose up at this stuff deserves the country they've got.

   And  how  did  we  get  from  there to here? Richard A. Hunt's balanced,
scholarly  study  of  the U.S. pacification program in Vietnam makes a good
footnote  to Robert McNamara's much ballyhooed mea culpa on the war, for it
was  in  the  effort to "win hearts and minds" that the SecDef's optimistic
numbers  turned  to  mush. Hunt, director of the U.S. Army Military History
Oral  History  Program,  tries  mightily  to  remain dryly even-handed, but
cannot  in  the  end  disguise  what a self-serving, perhaps even criminal,
folly the pacification program was.

   Part  of it was the notorious Operation Phoenix, over-dramatized in many
quarters  over  the  years  as  an "assassination program." Hunt's thorough
study,  including the assessments of Hanoi officials, shows it to be more a
haphazard, badly run system of frontier justice that "hurt the enemy, which
rightly  feared  it,  but  also hurt the cause of the United States and the
government of South Vietnam."

   And  that's  about  as  good  an  epitaph  as any for the U.S. record in
Vietnam.  We  shot  ourselves  in  the foot, if not the heart. Twenty years
later, we're still numb.

   Jeff  Stein  is the author of "A Murder in Wartime: The Untold Spy Story
that Changed the Course of the Vietnam War."

NAMED  PERSONS:  LESLIE, JACQUES; HUNT, RICHARD A.; LAWTON, DAVID; GARDNER,
    MARY; ANDERSON, DONALD
ORGANIZATION  NAME:  MARK;   PACIFICATION;   LOVELY  COUNTRY;  BOAT PEOPLE;
     AFTERMATH
DESCRIPTORS: Books

	  Surreal Surrender In Vietnam  What I Saw In Ford's White Hou

Washington Post

(c) 1995 Washington Post. All rts. reserv.

2246558
Surreal Surrender In Vietnam  What I Saw In Ford's White House.
The Washington Post, April 23, 1995, FINAL Edition
By: Ron Nessen
Section: OUTLOOK, p. C01
Story Type: Features
Line Count: 202    Word Count: 2226

LATE  IN  the afternoon of April 29, 1975 -- 20 years ago -- I stood on the
stage  of the theater in the Old Executive Office Building and announced on
behalf of President Ford that America's war in Vietnam was finally over:

"The  evacuation  (from  the  American  embassy  in  Saigon)  has  now been
completed  \.  \.  \.  .  This  action  closes  a  chapter  in the American
experience.  The  president  asks  all  Americans  to close ranks, to avoid
recriminations  about  the  past, to look ahead to the many goals we share,
and to work together on the great tasks that remain to be accomplished."

   Listening  to  a  tape  of  that announcement today, I can hear my voice
quiver and rise above its normal range. I was trying not to lose control of
my  emotions.  This action closed a chapter in the American experience. But
it didn't resolve it for me -- or in the national consciousness. The fierce
flare-up  of Vietnam memories ignited by Robert McNamara's new book reveals
how  raw  and  equivocal  are  views  about  the war after all these years.
Attacks  on  the  former defense secretary, the clashes between aging hawks
and doves, were as vicious as any since -- well, since the war.

   I  spent  five tours in Vietnam as a correspondent for NBC. Barely 30, I
first  went  there  in  1965  to  cover the beginning of the American troop
buildup.  Eight years later, I made my last trip, to cover the beginning of
the American troop withdrawal.

   I came to maturity there, as a reporter and a man. I lost friends there.
I  saw  and  did  horrifying  things  that haunt me still -- sitting on the
bodies  of  dead  Americans  in  a  helicopter  out  of  Hue during the Tet
offensive  because  there was no other place to sit; being told that a pile
of charcoal beside a road was all that remained of two children incinerated
when  the  fighting  ignited their hut; having the brain of a dead Vietcong
drop  at  my  feet  when South Vietnamese soldiers held up his body for the
camera.

   The  tears  choking  me that April afternoon two decades ago were for my
own  unresolved  Vietnam  chapter.  I'd shared the soldiers' horrors, but I
wasn't  a  soldier. I'd delivered TV reports that sparked anti-war protests
at  home, but I didn't agree with the protesters. As a temporary government
official,  it  fell  to  me  to  announce the end of a war I had no role in
creating.

   The  end in Vietnam began in March 1975, as President Ford was preparing
to  leave  for  his  annual  Easter  golfing  vacation in Palm Springs. The
nightly  TV  news  showed  scenes of panicky soldiers and civilians clawing
their  way  onto  evacuation  planes  out of Danang as the North Vietnamese
started  their  final  sweep  toward  Saigon. In one report, an Indochinese
woman  held  out  her  paralyzed  baby  to the cameraman, begging him to do
something  for  the  child, whose arms and legs flopped uncontrollably. The
cameraman  could  do  nothing for that helpless baby, any more than America
could save the Vietnamese about to be swallowed up by defeat.

   As these ever-more-horrible scenes of disintegration were broadcast into
American living rooms, a number of staff members urged the president not to
go  to Palm Springs. How would it look if TV cameras caught him fending off
questions  about the disaster in Vietnam on the golf course? But Ford, worn
out  and  testy  after  a  hectic  period  of  domestic and foreign crises,
insisted  on  going  through  with  what  had  become an annual Ford family
get-together.
   Danang  had  fallen,  and  in  Palm Springs, the worst nightmares of the
White  House  staff  came true. Every day, on the first tee and on the 18th
green,  reporters  bombarded  Ford with questions about the TV news reports
showing  the South Vietnamese army dissolving, soldiers fleeing by the tens
of  thousands, shoving women and children out of the way to scramble aboard
evacuation planes and ships.

   At  my  daily  press  briefing  at  a  resort  hotel, I was pounded with
questions  about  the president's seeming insensitivity. The low point came
when   the   president   interrupted  his  golfing  holiday  to  visit  the
government's  Elk  Hills oil reserve in California. Ford literally sprinted
across  the  tarmac  at the Bakersfield airport to avoid a pack of pursuing
reporters.

   Before  leaving Washington, Ford had dispatched the Army chief of staff,
Gen.  Frederick C. Weyand, to assess the deteriorating situation in Vietnam
and   determine   what   the   United  States  could  do.  The  president's
photographer,  David  Hume  Kennerly, who had spent two and a half years in
Vietnam  as a photographer for Time, talked Ford into letting him go along.
Ford  agreed,  knowing  that  the  young  photographer  would  give  him  a
no-nonsense appraisal. Weyand and Kennerly flew from Saigon to Palm Springs
to  deliver  their  reports.  Secretary  of State Henry Kissinger came from
Washington.

   The   general   was  pessimistic  about  South  Vietnam's  survival.  He
recommended  that  the  president  request  from  Congress  $722 million in
additional  aid immediately, primarily for ammunition. What was left of the
South  Vietnamese  army  could  not recapture lost territory, but with U.S.
help  it  might  be  able to establish a defensive perimeter around Saigon,
where  6,000  Americans  were  still  based,  and hold out for a negotiated
settlement.

   Kennerly  gave  Ford his own, more terse assessment of the situation: "I
don't  care  what  the generals are telling you. They're (expletive) you if
they say that Vietnam has got more than three or four weeks left."

   Back  in  Washington  after  his  disastrous  vacation, Ford prepared to
deliver  a  speech  to  a  joint  session  of  Congress on the situation in
Vietnam.  He  solicited  the  views  of  a wider range of aides than usual.
Kissinger  submitted  what  Ford  described  as  a  "go down with the flags
flying" speech.

   Sickened  by  the  continued  killing,  worried about Vietnamese friends
caught  in  the  collapse,  concerned that Kissinger would persuade Ford to
deliver his hawkish address, I submitted a draft of my own.

   "We  have  done  our  best  for many, many years," I wrote. "To continue
along  this  same  course  would merely prolong the agony of the Vietnamese
people,  who already have suffered far too much. Given the realities of the
situation,  it  would  be  wrong  for  America to contribute further to the
killing."

   I  realize now it was a naive proposal. The president rejected my draft,
and  Kissinger's  too.  Instead, he gave a middle-of-the-road speech asking
Congress  to approve $722 million more in military aid to South Vietnam, to
modify  restrictions  on U.S. military involvement in order to evacuate the
Americans  and  anti-Hanoi  Vietnamese  trapped  in  Saigon  and to provide
humanitarian assistance to refugees who escaped.

   There were boos and hisses from doves in the House chamber. Two freshman
Democratic  congressmen,  Toby  Moffett of Connecticut and George Miller of
California, walked out in protest.

   Shortly  afterward,  the  Senate Foreign Relations Committee requested a
meeting  with  the  president,  the first such meeting since Woodrow Wilson
occupied the Oval Office. The session was held in the Cabinet Room.
   The  messages  from  both  sides  were  blunt.  The senators advised the
president to pull out the remaining Americans fast, forget about evacuating
any Vietnamese, forget about any more aid money.

   Ford advised the senators that a precipitous withdrawal would enrage and
frighten the South Vietnamese, who could then make it difficult to evacuate
the remaining Americans.

   "If we try to pull out right now, it'll lead to panic and the chaos will
jeopardize the lives of untold Americans," Ford told the senators. "Believe
me, we need to buy time, even a few days."

   The senators grasped the predicament.

   Sen.  Jacob  Javits reiterated his opposition to more aid money to South
Vietnam, but added, "I'll pay any ransom to get our people out."

   If  the  United States cannot get its remaining troops and civilians out
without evacuating some Vietnamese, Sen. Joseph Biden said, then he too was
willing to "buy" some Vietnamese.

   Kissinger  stuck his head into my office after the meeting and expressed
disgust at the cut-and-run mood of the senators.

   "Have you ever heard such (expletive) in your life?"

   In  late April, Ford flew to New Orleans to make a long-scheduled speech
at  Tulane  University. Just two weeks after he'd asked Congress for nearly
three-quarters  of  a  billion dollars in additional aid for South Vietnam,
Ford  was  about  to  acknowledge that South Vietnam was lost and there was
nothing more America could do to save it.

   Immediately  before  the  address,  Ford  attended  a reception where he
sipped  a  martini.  On  the  elevator  to  the field house, Kennerly and I
fretted  that  the  president was tired and might not deliver his milestone
speech  well. I hemmed and hawed tactfully that Ford should read the speech
slowly  and  with  care.  Kennerly,  who  often spoke to the president as a
loving  but  slightly disrespectful son, blurted, "What he's trying to tell
you is, `Don't screw it up.' "

   Ford exploded into one of his great high-pitched horse laughs. He didn't
screw it up.

   "America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam," the
president  told  the  students jammed into the gymnasium. "But it cannot be
achieved  by  refighting  a  war  that  is  finished  as  far as America is
concerned."

   Ford  did  what  no  other  American president had been able to do -- he
spoke  of  the  Vietnam  War in the past tense. From the field house came a
deafening  sound  of  approval.  Some  on Ford's staff shared the students'
enthusiasm.

   On  the  flight back to Washington late that night, one senior Ford aide
raised his drink in a toast: "(Expletive) the war!"

   Five  days  later,  on  April 28, 1975, Deputy National Security Adviser
Brent  Scowcroft  slipped  into an economic meeting in the Cabinet room and
passed  Ford  a  note.  North  Vietnamese troops, already in the suburbs of
Saigon,  had  begun  shelling  Tan  Son  Nhut  Airport,  halting evacuation
flights,  destroying an American C-130 transport plane and killing two U.S.
Marines. By now, only 1,000 Americans remained.

   That evening Ford retired to his private quarters on the second floor of
the  White  House  for  a  corned  beef  and cabbage dinner with Mrs. Ford.
Communications were hooked up that allowed the White House to talk directly
to  Ambassador  Graham  Martin in the embassy and a Navy task force off the
Vietnamese coast.

   As  the C-130 pilots attempted to resume the evacuation, descending into
Tan Son Nhut, they found the North Vietnamese shelling had stopped. But the
planes   couldn't  land.  The  runways  were  blocked  by  abandoned  South
Vietnamese  planes  and  by  thousands  of  South Vietnamese men, women and
children desperate to escape.

   Ambassador Martin, a 61-year-old career diplomat, had resisted the final
helicopter evacuation for days. Now, with no more airlifts possible, tired,
emotional, dispirited, he told Kissinger there was no other option left.

   Shortly  before  11  p.m.,  Kissinger  phoned  Ford in his residence and
relayed  the  ambassador's  conclusion.  The  president  gave  the order to
commence  "Operation  Frequent  Wind," the withdrawal of the last Americans
and  endangered  Vietnamese from Saigon. Thirty-four evacuation helicopters
lifted  off  the  decks  of carriers in the South China Sea and began their
shuttle back and forth to the roof of the embassy.

   During the night, Ford came to the Situation Room for a briefing. On his
way  back  to  bed,  he  paused  outside  the  office of Chief of Staff Don
Rumsfeld.  Ford,  Rumsfeld,  Deputy  Chief of Staff Dick Cheney and I stood
there,  staring at the carpet. A spring rain pinged against the windows. No
one could find anything appropriate to say.

   The  evacuation  went  on  much  longer  than expected, 19 hours. As the
second  dawn  approached  in  Saigon,  the pilots were becoming dangerously
tired.  Martin,  however,  would not end it without a direct order from the
president. The order was sent.

   A  thousand  Americans and 5,500 Vietnamese escaped from the roof of the
embassy. Thousands of panicked Vietnamese, clawing at the fence, were left.
The harrowing scene was immortalized in news photos and TV tape.

   The  turnout of reporters for the end-of-the-war announcement in the EOB
theater  was small, considering the historic moment. The reporters who came
were  scattered  among  the  tiered seats of the auditorium, weary from the
long wait for the evacuation to end.

   I  thought  to  myself:  The  war  is  ending  with neither a bang nor a
whimper, but with a yawn.

   I  read the president's statement with a mixture of sadness, fatigue and
emotional turmoil: This action closes a chapter in the American experience.

   Kissinger  stepped  to the podium to answer questions. It was a piercing
moment  for  him.  He  stood  amid the ashes of a policy he had devised and
implemented for seven years.

   When  Kissinger and I stepped off the stage into a small anteroom at the
end  of  the news conference, Scowcroft was waiting with stunning news. The
evacuation  wasn't  over,  as  we had announced. A rear guard of 129 Marine
security  guards  was  still  holed  up  in  the embassy compound in Saigon
waiting  for  the  helicopters  to return for them. They would wait several
hours.

   We  haggled  over  how  --  or  whether  --  to explain to the press the
erroneous  announcement.  Kissinger wanted to blame the Pentagon's military
communications   center,   although  the  premature  announcement  probably
resulted  from  his  own  incorrect  assumption  that  Ambassador  Martin's
departure  meant the end of the evacuation. Kissinger made a bleak joke: "I
guess  you  could say the end of the evacuation is at hand," a reference to
his premature declaration in 1972 that peace was at hand.

   I proposed that we say nothing.
   "No,"  Rumsfeld  objected. "This war has been marked by so many lies and
evasions that it's not right to have the war end with one last lie."

   And it didn't. We told the truth.

   Ron   Nessen   was   press  secretary  to  President  Ford  and  an  NBC
correspondent  in Vietnam during the war. Parts of this article appeared in
different form in his book "It Sure Looks Different From the Inside."

NAMED PERSONS: NESSEN, RON; MCNAMARA, ROBERT S.
DESCRIPTORS: Vietnam;  War;  Time and History