THE WAR: The Last Grim Goodbye

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For a variety of reasons, there was a subdued sense of shame—for some because the nation, as they saw it, had become involved in such a disastrous futility in the first place; for others because the U.S., as they believed, had betrayed an ally and nullified the years of its own sacrifice. As he was about to go for coffee with some bankers and businessmen in Warren, Ark., Newspaper Editor Bob Newton remarked: "Viet Nam will never come up in the conversation. Everybody is embarrassed. It is almost unreal that this could have happened to us."

Fitfully but emphatically, the old polarities of the '60s could still reassert themselves. At Berkeley, the cradle of student radicalism, some 1,000 demonstrators marched with Viet Cong flags to cheer the Communist victory. Activist Tom Hayden called the fall of Saigon "the rise of Indochina."

Some conservatives formulated a stab-in-the-back theory. Lecturing at

Georgia Tech, California's ex-Governor Ronald Reagan drew cheers when he blamed "the most irresponsible Congress in our history" for the collapse in Viet Nam. A bitter editorial in the conservative Indianapolis Star declared: "After the Americans of a braver generation destroyed the Nazis and the horrors of concentration camps became known, pictures of the atrocities were published all over Germany with the caption Wessen Schuld?—'Who is to blame?' The same question applies today." Such rhetoric raised the question of whether Viet Nam might become a campaign issue in 1976. For Republicans to blame a Democratic Congress for "losing" Viet Nam, however, might be risky; it was a Republican Administration, after all, that presided over the Paris peace treaties and the policy since. There will always be room for the question whether the U.S. could have got out sooner and in better order.

For the moment, it seemed unlikely that the U.S. would have the stomach to refight Viet Nam. The war had already cost too much in lives and money wasted 9,000 miles away—more than 56,000 Americans dead and 303,000 wounded, upwards of 1 million dead Vietnamese, $141 billion spent, 7 million tons of bombs dropped—and all for a war that came, more or less, to nothing. The cost had also been exorbitant in hatred and alienation at home.

The macabre carnival of the '60s has long since subsided, although it worked profound changes in America. It remains a question, though, what lessons were carried away from Viet Nam on those last helicopters (see Opinion, page 20). And how Americans finally feel about the aftermath will partly depend on how the victors act in Indochina.