finally jammed in, under gunfire, and, badly damaged, the aircraft limped heroically back). Then all the other coastal towns fell, Cam Ranh Bay, the great American base, after only thirty minutes of fighting; one airport was captured with more than sixty grounded aircraft. By early April the North Viet namese had cut off Saigon, and were able to shell Bien Hoa airfield. Cambodia was collapsing as well: on 12 April 276 Americans were evacuated from Phnom Penh, which should have been a sign to the still disbelieving Thieu. He hung on to office for another week, desperate to see the B52s return. Instead, he learned on 23 April that President Ford, speaking at a university, had announced that the war in Vietnam ‘is finished as far as America is concerned’. His audience stood up and clapped.
The evacuation of Saigon had itself been held off, to forestall panic, but panic then took hold, as a formation of captured Cessna A-37s bombed the presidential palace. The famous scene came on 29 April, with the helicopter evacuation from the embassy compound itself. Up and down, on film, 6,236 people were taken off through crossfire, the large machines lifting off from the walled-in yard, the smaller ones from the roof; 662 flights were made between Saigon and ships eighty miles away, the crews managing matters with great efficiency and such decency as could be mustered; and the end came at 5 a.m. on 30 April, when the ambassador left. Now, every South Vietnamese who could get away made for the American Seventh Fleet, helicopters landing so fast that they had to be pushed overboard as soon as the occupants had been got out, to make space for the next one: 675,000 refugees were brought to the United States. On 30 April a North Vietnamese tank smashed through the gates of the presidential palace. The stand-in president, the selfsame Duong Van Minh who had once destroyed Ngo Dinh Diem at the Americans’ behest, wanted formally to capitulate. He was told that he no longer had anything to give up, but was allowed, on the radio, to say a few words to the effect that that was that. In Cambodia, at the same moment, there was a similar collapse, as the Khmer Rouge moved in to a silent Phnom Penh, filled with a foreboding that was entirely justified.
To start with, the opponents of the Vietnam War were jubilant: the ‘People’ had triumphed, the Americans and their lackeys were scuttling ignominiously away, as ‘Whites’, in this scenario, were supposed to do. The Communists were even on a best behaviour that comes as a curious shock after the experiences of mismanaged American triumphs, a quarter-century later, in Kosovo or Baghdad, when army engineers were replaced by private contractors. The North Vietnamese worked to get the electricity and water in Saigon going, and for a time there was recovery. But this solicitude for the Saigon population did not last for very long. The usual tyrannical procedures were applied, with attempts at heavy industrialization, and collectivization of agriculture, in a country wrecked by a quarter-century of war. Even the Mekong Delta, from which rice had been exported, saw famine. Anyone connected to the ‘old order’ was ‘re-educated’ in gruesome camps and a secret police had the usual field day. Vietnam was distinguished only by a phenomenon known as the ‘boat people’, as a million people (estimates differ) bribed their way onto open boats to escape, over pirate-ridden seas, to countries such as Malaysia or even Australia, where they were not greatly wanted. About 750,000 of the Chinese minority were floated off from 1978 onwards, taking years to become, eventually very successfully, integrated elsewhere. Meanwhile, Vietnam relapsed into the traditional hostility towards China, and there was even an absurd war. In Cambodia matters were even worse. A provincial peasant and largely teenage Communist Cambodian guerrilla force had started up: the Khmer Rouge. These were led by one Pol Pot, who, though not a great academic success in France, had learned the usual stew of exterminatory Communism that flourished in those parts (Enver Hodza in Albania, and for that matter Andreas Papandreou in Greece, had had the same training). Maoism had glorified the revolutionary peasant, whereas Marx had regarded peasants with contempt — ‘quadrupeds’ (as the French Left saw them). Mao had demonstrated that the peasants were after all revolutionary, that the evil really lay in the towns, where money was made, and foreigners flourished. A sort of mad peasant ideology resulted. On 17 April 1975 the Khmer Rouge invaded the Cambodian capital and declared that townspeople were abolished: 2.5 million people were killed, sometimes horribly, or starved, or worked to death, until the Vietnamese invaded. In later years, ‘boat people’ and the ‘killing fields’ of Cambodia (revealed by an enterprising Hungarian television journalist, Aladar Chrudinak) counted as glaring evidence that the Americans had been right in fighting the Vietnam War, and wrong only in the method with which they had fought it. This is a debate that goes on.
There was another great symbol of this period — ‘Watergate’, and the fall of Richard Nixon. It was as if the gods had wanted to take a revenge, in black humour, for Nixon’s weaselly behaviour over Vietnam, for the original offence was comic, and we might even apply Hegel’s remark as to ‘the terrifying infinity of the particular’. Nixon’s staff were caricature business school types, sandwich lunches, work-out sessions, confusing efficiency with efficacy: no imagination at all. John Ehrlichman was a Christian Scientist lawyer who objected to Nixon’s drinking and refused to work with him unless it stopped. The drinking did in fact stop, more or less, and Nixon’s judgement did not improve: without a drink he became charmless and gauche. The Chief of Staff, John Mitchell, exuded silent strength, misleadingly, but he had a first-class record that made Nixon feel inferior, and brought out the nasty, frustrated and unscrupulous side of the President. Junior staff, tails wagging, organized a break-in at Democrat headquarters in the Watergate office building, in the hope of finding discreditable papers. The affair was bungled, lies were told, and Nixon, his head in Chinese clouds, did not follow the trivialities. Then he lied as well. Then the lies were recorded, as well as his reactions to the revelation of this. Then the people who tried to find out about the recordings were harassed, and then more lies were told.
Lying about (and obsession with) trivialities, and subjecting opponents to this or that survivable illegality, were not new in American politics, or for that matter the politics of most other countries. Roosevelt himself had been guilty. The Watergate break-in had even occurred in a defensible context, because secret documents had been ‘leaked’ to
There was far, far more in the background. The October crisis of 1973 introduced a period of terrible instability, when quite sober commentators could assume that the End was Nigh. OPEC now appeared to be almost a villainous operation from James Bond, with a palace headquarters on the Vienna Ringstrasse. The earnings of oil exporters rose from $23bn in 1972 to $140bn in 1977. There was a fourfold inflation of oil prices, and then an eightfold one; stock exchanges collapsed, banks failed, and a tidal wave of petro-dollars engulfed the world, enriching by far the least worthy recipients. Golda Meir, in Israel, remarked that Moses had wandered in the desert for forty years, leading his people to the only place in the Middle East that had no oil. But it was on the whole America’s own doing. The oil producers, left to themselves, would have been far too disunited for common action, and their common strategy at OPEC did not in fact last for very long. But the fall of the dollar in 1971 pushed them together: why accept valueless paper dollars? The same was true, though not to the same extent, for producers of other raw materials — coffee, tobacco, copper, rubber, iron ore, meat as well — and prices shot up, even in 1971, two years before the oil shock. The problem was symbolized by the Brazilian city of Manaos, deep in the jungle. There, once upon a time, rubber had appeared, and the place became opulent: famously Dame Adeline Patti, the great opera singer of the 1890s, appeared there. Then rubber was produced elsewhere, and Manaos relapsed back into semi-jungle. Now, the Middle East was becoming a huge Manaos.
At least in the epoch of Manaos, there was one commodity that ruled everything else, including money: gold. International prices were stable, or even inclined to go down gently, because the main trading countries’ currencies were based on the Gold Standard. If more gold had been produced then no doubt prices would have risen, but there was a very limited supply of it — roughly what could have been stored in a house (silver was far more plentiful, and therefore unreliable). Up to 1914, and in most ways even 1931, most currencies could be exchanged into gold on demand. In practice it was of course inconvenient and unsafe for gold to be carried around in any quantity, but paper money based on it was trusted, and there were few openings for the manufacture of paper money on the scale that occurred in the 1960s. If you had a profit, you might keep it safely in paper — and very handsome, dignified paper at that. Now, the inflation of the paper dollar meant that, on top of low prices, the producers were
