H428 Final paper final draft

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Michael Hephner
History 428

The End of an Era: Media Coverage of the Surrender of Saigon

On Wednesday April 30, 1975, when military forces from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam entered the Presidential Palace in Saigon and accepted the formal surrender of the South Vietnamese government, the Republic of Vietnam ceased to exist. That day was many things to many different people. The country of South Vietnam ceased to exist and the country of the United States would never be the same. That day witnessed both the conclusion of a long war and the execution of a massive and complex evacuation of people. The U.S. news reports of April 30 day conveyed a sense of urgency and frenzy that those evacuating had and the sense of doom and loss that the military defeat gave the evacuees. Many articles took the opportunity to address the totality of the American involvement in Vietnam and what that involvement meant in terms of lives lost and material expended. Some of the news reports considered the deeper meaning of this development and what affect it would have on American foreign policy around the world. The primary concern expressed was whether or not America would honor the commitments that it made to other Asian countries. Twenty two hundred miles to the Northeast sat 50,000 American combat troops in Korea and the government there wondered if the United States would fight on their behalf. None of the articles examined however said that the United States had lost the war. People may have said it to each other, but it was not written in any of the mainstream articles and reports of that day. [Many other phrases and euphemisms were used, but that phrase was not.
There were two especially significant developments that occurred on the final day of the Vietnam War. First there was the military defeat of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam by the North Vietnamese Army and second there was the evacuation of the remaining American personnel as well as those Vietnamese who worked closely with the Americans. On March 10, 1975 the North Vietnamese Army had attacked and defeated the South Vietnamese military positions at Ban Me Thout nearly 200 miles north of Saigon. Three days later the South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu ordered all of his troops to evacuate the Central Highlands Area. In doing so he surrendered twenty-three of the country's forty-one provinces and created a mass exodus of civilians fleeing ahead of the Communists. Nearly seventy-five percent of all the troops defending Ban Me Thout were killed on that retreat and of the more than 400,000 civilians who were trying to escape, only a few thousand made it. The retreat turned into a chaotic rout as the North Vietnamese rolled down the coast taking town after town and base after base. The morale of the troops plummeted and many soldiers abandoned the battlefield to care for their families. The speed of the collapse was breathtaking and by April 20 sixteen North Vietnamese divisions had encircled Saigon, poised to either level the city or accept its surrender.
At the beginning of April there were more than 7,500 Americans in Saigon and 164,000 Vietnamese who were on the U. S. government's "endangered" list. Over the course of the month the majority of these people were loaded onto U.S. ships and had sailed for one of the two principle staging areas for evacuees, Guam or Wake Island. The last 24,000 gathered at Tan Son Nhut airfield north of Saigon and were airlifted out by U.S. Air Force C-130 and C-141 cargo planes. Once the airfield was threatened by North Vietnamese forces President Ford authorized operation Frequent Wind. Frequent Wind called for the deployment of 1,000 Marines into Vietnam to protect the landing zones and U.S. jets that were to provide protection from the air for the eighty-one large Chinook helicopters that would be used to ferry people from the U.S. embassy to ships waiting off shore.
This essay analyzes over thirty mainstream media sources from the United States that were published on April 30 and throughout the first two weeks in May of 1975. Nine newspaper articles that came from the New York Times, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Los Angeles Times were analyzed and twenty-two articles from the periodicals Time, Newsweek, and U.S News and World Report were examined. The NBC Nightly News television broadcast on April 30, 1975 was examined as well. For the majority of Americans, these sources constituted the primary source of information on the events of the last day of the Vietnam War. From these accounts millions of United States citizens formed their thoughts and opinions on what happened that day in Saigon.
The main theme of the U.S media accounts of April 30, 1975 is the urgency and panic by the South Vietnamese who were afraid that they would be killed if they remained in the country. George Esper of the New York Times wrote that at the end of the evacuation, ""Large groups of Vietnamese clawed their way up the ten foot wall of the embassy compound in desperate attempts to escape approaching Communist troops." John Chancellor in his Nightly News Broadcast spoke of "soldiers using the butts of their rifles to break the handhold of desperate Vietnamese as they tried to cling to the last helicopter leaving." Newsweek wrote of the "thousands of frantic Vietnamese that were mobbing the embassy gates pleading to be put on one of the evacuation flights." The Los Angeles Times reported that in their panic, "the South Vietnamese crowded onto the runways in terror, forcing the United States to cut short the operations with fixed-wing aircraft and to begin using helicopters to take the remaining evacuees to the ships offshore." John Finney writing for the New York Times wrote that the lives of the South Vietnamese who worked for the United States "would be in danger" with a Communist takeover. Newsweek also reported that these people "would be a prime targets for execution following the Communist takeover." Newsweek also referred to Saigon as "A City at the Edge of Doom." Rumors had been spreading for weeks on what actions the North Vietnamese would take once they assumed control of the country. The consensus of the speculation was that the Communists would treat those Vietnamese who had worked with the Americans harshly at best. These Vietnamese were referred to as "endangered" and "at risk" in almost every media account.
As much as words described the final scenes of the evacuation, the pictures accompanying those stories portrayed a sense of human drama and desperation. The iconic images of helicopters lifting the off of the rooftop of the U.S. Embassy containing the remaining Americans and South Vietnamese were used not only in the New York Times and Washington Post stories, but were carried in newspapers around the world. Even people who did not take the time to read those articles would get the sense and panic and urgency that was contained in those images.
Along with pictures, many articles chose to use a quote from the statement released by President Ford's press secretary which said that "I ask all Americans to close ranks, to avoid recrimination about the past, [and] to look ahead." These stories were written to give the impression that many Americans had resigned themselves to the defeat of South Vietnam in 1973 when the United States had pulled out its ground forces from the country and the POW's had come home. Time wrote "most Americans had made their emotional peace with Vietnam more than two years ago." and went on to speculate on the effect that the events in Vietnam would have on America's relations with other countries.
Although there were many different accounts of the last day of the Vietnam War, not a single one of them said that America had lost the war. None of the media accounts examined, used those words, although there were quite a variety of words and phrases used to describe the final result of the war. Time magazine referred to it as "a war that is finished - as far as America is concerned." The Washington Post portrayed it as the "end of American involvement" and in the New York Times opinion that it was the "end of a century of western influence." President Ford, through his press secretary Ron Nesson said that the evacuation of American personnel from Saigon "closes a chapter in the American experience" and the Christian Science Monitor contended that it "heralded a new era for the United States in Southeast Asia." Perhaps those reporters did not want to antagonize their readers or perhaps they honestly did not view it that way, but today most historians believe that America lost the Vietnam War. While the criteria that people might use to determine victory or defeat will differ, it can be said that America, for all the effort and material it expended could not maintain a stable and independent non-communist country called South Vietnam.
Several media accounts of the events of April 30 used the opportunity to provide a narration of the amount of time and money that the United States spent on the war. These articles emphasize the length of time that America was involved in the war and the number of lives lost and the amount of money spent trying to keep South Vietnam from falling under communist rule. Haynes Johnson of The Washington Post wrote, "The final act of American involvement that had lasted for a generation, took the lives of 56,737 military personal cost more than 160 billion and affected nearly every aspect of American life occurred in the early morning hours of Wednesday." The New York Times reported that the evacuation "brought an end an American involvement in Vietnam that cost more than 50,000 lives and $150-billion." The Christian Science Monitor described the evacuation as "ending a generation of involvement in Indo-China." These articles give the reader both a sense of the tremendous effort that America made and of the tremendous loss that America suffered, since it had all come to an end.
The end of the war had ramifications not only for the United States and Vietnam, but also for other countries around the world. Several newspaper reports chose to highlight the effect that the ending of the Vietnam War would have on other American allies. An account in The Christian Science Monitor, had a country by country breakdown on how the governments of those countries would react to Vietnam's fate. They speculated on how Americas' withdrawal of support in Vietnam would affect other commitments made in Asia, and that the governments in those countries need to reassess the nature and their degree of dependence upon the United States. Specifically they addressed Korea, the other Asian country where America still had 50,000 troops stationed.
The last day of the Vietnam War was a culminating event for everyone who had ever been involved in the war, whether it was an end or a beginning. For the thousands of Americans who were there and the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who were in Saigon that day, they have their memories of their experiences to draw from and will use those to make their conclusions as to what happened that day. A much larger segment of people in the United States though, relied on the reports that were printed in their local newspapers or broadcast on their local television stations to draw their conclusions and form their opinions about the event. In the mainstream U. S. press these reports portrayed a sense of panic and urgency of those who were being evacuated and a sense of doom for those who were not. They often took the time to recap the involvement of America in the war, although they were careful not to portray the war as a loss. The decisions made by the people who reported the end of the war in Vietnam had a tremendous effect on how the country who had invested so much in the war would think of it for years to come.


James Willbanks, ed., Vietnam War: The Essential Reference Guide (Santa Barbara, Ca.: ABC-CLIO, 2013).
Col. Matthew Molten, Between War and Peace: How America Ends Its Wars (New York: Free Press, 2011) 274.
George Esper, New York Times, April 30, 1975, "Communists Take Over Saigon; U.S. Rescue Fleet is Picking Up Vietnamese Wo Fled in Boats,"1.
NBC Nightly News with John Chancellor, broadcast on April 29, 1975, http://0-digital.films.com.opac.sfsu.edu/PortalViewVideo.aspx?xtid=39066&psid=0&sid=0&State=&title=The&IsSearch=Y&parentSeriesID=
Richard Steel, Newsweek, May 5, 1975, "The End of An Era," 20.
Rudy Abramson, Los Angeles Times, April 30, 1975, "Evacuation Ends; Ford asks U.S. 'to Close Ranks' A1.
John Finney, New York Times, April 30, 1975, "Ford Unity Plea: President Says That Departure 'Closes a Chapter for U.S.,"1.
Richard Steel, Newsweek, May 5, 1975 "The End of an Era," 20.
Loren Jenkins, Newsweek, May 5, 1975 "A City at the Edge of Doom," 24.
Time, May 12, 1975, "The Last Grim Goodbye," 6.
Time, May 12, 1975 "The Exodus: Turning Off the Last Lights," 19.
Haynes Johnson, The Washington Post, "Saigon Surrenders to Vietcong; Withdrawal Ends Role of U.S." 1.
Esper, Communists Take Over, 1.
Dana Adams Schmidt, Christian Science Monitor, "U.S. Adjusts to New Era in Asia-After Vietnam," 1.
Johnson, Saigon Surrenders, 1.
George Esper, New York Times, "Evacuation From Saigon Tumultuous at the End" 16.
Schmidt, U.S. Adjusts 6.
Schmidt, U.S. Adjusts 6.