50th Anniversary of the Fall of Saigon

A few lessons.

“After America was shamefully run out of Vietnam, people lost their conviction about almost everything.”

— Bob Dylan, opening line of Scorsese’s documentary Rolling Thunder Revue about Dylan’s mid-1970s “Tangled Up in Blue” era tour. For some reason, there doesn’t appear to be an online video of Dylan saying this.

Some random thoughts on the Vietnam War, which ended 50 years ago on April 30, 1975.

When Henry Kissinger first visited Hanoi, to get over jet lag before sitting down to negotiate, he scheduled an initial day touring North Vietnamese museums to learn about their culture. They were all devoted to war.

Uh-oh, Dr. K. thought, we picked the wrong side to back.

When I jumped up to ask Henry Kissinger a question when he spoke at Rice University about 1978, I thought about asking him what he would have done different in Vietnam in 1975 without the Watergate-era Congress, but I wimped out and asked him about the current fashion for Eurocommunism. He replied with a hilarious recounting of the French Communist Party’s craven Breshnevism, which wasn’t fair to the Italian Communist, but had 3,000 spectators roaring with laughter. (Kissinger was really funny).

The northern Vietnamese had finally stopped the vast Chinese surge south from the Yellow River around the 900s AD. They remained more of a border lord warrior culture (like Prussia in Europe) than the insulated southern Vietnamese.

Paywall here.