Last Days in Vietnam movie review (2014)

One surprising thing about the film is how unfamiliar its story will be for many Americans. For younger viewers, that’s more understandable. But this reviewer was an avid news watcher throughout the period covered and yet came out of Kennedy’s film wondering, “Why did I not know more about all this?”

One reason, of course, is that the collapse of South Vietnam two years after most U.S. troops were withdrawn was so abrupt and chaotic that it came across mostly as inchoate geopolitical spasms on the evening news. There was no lucid, overarching narrative of the kind Kennedy is able to provide in retrospect. Another reason, though, is that by 1975 Americans were so sick of the Vietnam War, which had divided the country into bitterly opposed camps for years, they simply wanted to look away. In doing so, they exacerbated a tragedy they had helped create.

Kennedy’s story begins in 1973, when the Paris Peace Accords negotiated by the Nixon administration and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger brought the long and torturous Vietnam War to an apparent end. North and South Vietnam were supposed to remain separate states like the two Koreas, and Nixon was able to withdraw U.S. forces while proclaiming “peace with honor.” Yet the agreement was, as one interviewee notes, a “masterpiece of ambiguity.”

In one of history’s bitter ironies, peace was maintained for a while because the North Vietnamese considered Nixon insane enough to attack them again if they broke it. Once the President was deposed by the Watergate scandal in late 1974, they saw their opening and took it. By spring of 1975, their troops were pouring across the South (the use of red spreading across a map has seldom been more appropriate) and the new administration of Gerald Ford gave no sign of returning America to the war.

In Saigon there remained several thousand Americans including contractors, newsmen, security and diplomatic personnel. As the collapse of the South unfolded, many of these folks grew increasingly worried about their South Vietnamese friends, colleagues and family members. And while making evacuation plans would have seemed the natural course of action at this point, it was not the one pursued by U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin, a genteel North Carolinian who simply couldn’t believe that disaster was imminent until it was literally upon him.