42 APRIL-MAY 2025 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL While Nixon’s election could be seen as temporarily providing a respite to the political turmoil that had, like an Iowa tornado, swirled the nation uncontrollably, events over the next few years continued to keep tensions high. The killings at Kent State, the Cambodian incursion, and eventually Watergate (which I observed as a member of Henry Kissinger’s National Security Council staff) left America exhausted, divided, and without the will to continue the Vietnam struggle. The Final Blow Seven years later, the ignominious disgrace of the American ambassador fleeing the advancing North Vietnamese Army The perception that even with 500,000 U.S. military personnel in the country, we were unable to protect the embassy, spread across America. on April 29, 1975, from the roof of an embassy building in a helicopter, dealt the final blow to American triumphalism. It was the culmination of seven years of political upheaval, all of which had begun on that night in January 1968, when those 20 Việt Cộng blew their way into the U.S. embassy compound. In an apocryphal reflection on the denouement of America’s decade in Vietnam, the British counterinsurgency expert Sir Robert Thompson was reported to have said: “In Indochina the Americans used the most powerful weapon known to humankind. The most intriguing aspect is that they used it against themselves.” He was referring to television, which in his view had contributed significantly to undercutting the will of the American people and thus led to our defeat in Vietnam. Despite U.S. military superiority in every way, that power had apparently been neutralized by the images, including those of dead Việt Cộng sappers inside the embassy compound, transmitted almost daily into every American home. America’s infallibity could be offset. A divided America could be defeated. n
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