“Nothing new under the Sun” — Ecclesiastes
This is a story of then and now: 1974 and 2024; Hanoi, Beijing, and Washington—from U.S. betrayal of South Vietnam in 1973–1975 to America’s unilateral surrender to Beijing in 2023–2024.
Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden slow-walked prepaid aid to Taiwan. Mr. Biden all but announced unilateral surrender of Taiwan at an APEC conference in San Francisco in November 2023.
The intentions of the top leadership of antiwar protesters of 1974–1975 and the progressives and socialists of 2024 were the same. Many hated the United States and lusted and acted to change it. They found hope for democracy in Hanoi and prosperity in Beijing. They allied with the enemy in Hanoi and in Beijing.
In Vietnam, the top leaders of the Left were a distinct, passionate, and successful minority force for change, particularity in Congress. Yet they never won the hearts and minds of the American people.
At the peak of street protests in October and November 1969, a “silent majority” rose to defend Richard Nixon. On Nov. 16, Nixon’s “Silent Majority” speech polled 77–79 percent favoring Nixon’s Vietnam policies. Only 6 percent disapproved. Massive protests had mobilized support for the president.
Very small percentages of the public were ever both against the war and admirers of war protesters.
Until the end, the U.S. people wanted a victory and despised Hanoi’s friends. Americans wanted to defeat communism, were unimpressed with the Vietnam antiwar teach-ins, rated the SDS and Black Panthers highly unfavorable, sided with the police in the riots at the Democratic convention in 1968, and believed antiwar activists were aiding the communists and performing acts of disloyalty against the soldiers fighting in Vietnam.
Finally, in 1980, five years after the fall of Indochina, a Harris survey found that 73 percent of the public agreed, “The trouble in Vietnam was that our troops were asked to fight in a war which our political leaders in Washington would not let them win.”
Still small leftist front groups for peace had falsely, but successfully, claimed to represent very large constituencies—e.g. women, lawyers, doctors, students, racial minorities, and war veterans.
