The Foreign Service Journal, June 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JUNE 2015 9 Lessons of Vietnam Thank you for the April J ournal’s look back at Vietnam. I was struck by the reference in “History Revisited” (Editor’s Introduction) to an AFSA editorial of June 1975 advocating a “post mortem of the Vietnam era…to which the career Service can contribute greatly.” You noted that “there is little to indicate that such an assessment was ever undertaken.” One was in fact undertaken, albeit in haste, in early May of 1975. It was done in response to a memorandum from the White House requesting an analysis of “The Lessons of Vietnam.” I drafted it, but it reflected comments and ideas of liter- ally dozens of FSOs and others who had served in Vietnam over many years and in many different capacities. It was hardly a definitive study, of course, but it was an honest first attempt to look comprehensively at what had gone wrong and why. The paper never got to the president’s desk. Instead it went to Henry Kissinger (both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor at the time), along with comments from his staff. A few days later, Kissinger wrote to the president, in his own inimitable style, on the lessons of Vietnam. Our memo (attached) was better, in my opinion. David Lambertson Ambassador, retired Winchester, Kansas (Editor’s note: Look for both memos in the July-August FSJ. ) Perceptions and Misperceptions The April FSJ is outstanding. I knew that it was going to feature Vietnam, but I was not prepared for its impact. The accounts both of what befell Embassy Saigon during the 1968 Tet Offensive and of how, in 1975, a small group of mid- level FSOs organized and then imple- mented the evacuation of large numbers of at-risk Vietnamese when Saigon fell drew me powerfully back into that time. I was not in Saigon in 1968; I had left for my next post (Kinshasa) only months before the Tet Offensive. Although I was in the State Department in April 1975, I was working on the Laos desk, vividly aware of what was going on in Vietnam next door. We may be grateful that some of these FSOs, in particu- lar Kenneth Quinn, Parker Borg and Joseph McBride, have now had a chance to tell their stories. They acted without official orders and to some extent contrary to them. But I think they represented the Foreign Service at its finest. The editor’s introduction commends, rightly, the call of the June 1975 Foreign Service Journal for a “post-mortem” on the Vietnam era. I believe the function was admirably performed, later, by Rob- ert McNamara. As Secretary of Defense in the Ken- nedy and Johnson administrations, he was among the chief proponents of the VietnamWar. Yet in his books— In Retro- spect (1995) and Argument Without End (1999)—he acknowledged, courageously , that we were “terribly wrong.” His basis for saying this was a series of conferences that he was instrumental in organizing between senior American wartime lead- ers, diplomatic and military, and their Vietnamese counterparts, each side giv- ing their view of the course of the war and the negotiations attempting to end it. Two salient conclusions emerge from McNamara’s presentation. One is that the war was unwinnable at any acceptable cost. The other, even more striking, is that it was unnecessary. The respective sides had views of events and circumstances almost totally at odds with each other. The American frame of reference was the Cold War and the need to contain communism—hence the “domino theory”—and the Vietnamese frame of reference was their experience of French colo- nialism. Their interest was in national independence, not spreading communism. Could such mutual misperceptions be operating also today, in, for instance, our dealings with Iran? Theodore L. Lewis FSO and FSR, retired Germantown, Maryland A Vietnam Backstory The FSJ retrospectives on the fall of Saigon were excellent reading. However, there is another backstory worth telling, which concerns advance warning to us by Vietnamese seers. After my arrival in Saigon on March 6, 1973, my official duties included interac- tions with select opinion leaders who in some cases turned out to be practitioners of the occult. First was President Nguyen Van Thieu’s astrologer. In mid-1973 he told me that Thieu would be forced out of office in 1975 “after Tet.” This practitioner of Chinese astrology had been consulted by Thieu before the 1967 presidential election and told Thieu he would win. For this reason, he was kept on for regular advice. Another group of seers with whom I often met were Cao Dai Church educa- tors in Tay Ninh Province. They organized séances led by clairvoyant young women. The “spirits” indicated that the com- munist conquest was imminent. The Ho