1975 and 2007

One of the first calls I made after the Democrats swept into power in the Congress was to Abner Mikva. He is one of the great honest liberals, a man I admire though on many things I don't agree with him. When he was White House counsel to President Clinton, he had taken issue with an editorial I'd written in the Forward ruing the decision of the 94th Congress to abandon Vietnam to the Communists. He'd told me that he was in the Congress back in 1975, when the vote was taken, that it was the only course, and that he remained proud of his vote.

There are those of us, however, who will always think of 1975 in a different way, as one of the darkest years in America's history, and who will wrestle with its lessons for the rest of our lives. I found myself re-reading the history this week. It's not only that the Democrats are about to accede but that President Bush is about to make the a trip to communist Vietnam. As recently as Wednesday he rejected the analogy between Iraq and Vietnam. He did it so articulately that it's clear he's been thinking about Vietnam.

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The stage for the tragedy was set only months after the Norwegians, in late 1973, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger and North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho, for the peace accord they struck earlier that year. The North Vietnamese regime, in violation of that very accord, immediately started rebuilding its forces in the South. So President Nixon, though weakened by Watergate, went to the Congress and asked for more aid for the free Vietnamese government in the South.

In April 1974, Congress refused. Nixon, engulfed by Watergate, resigned in August. In October, the 93rd Congress passed a law cutting off all foreign aid to Vietnam. President Ford vetoed the measure, but the Congress overrode the veto. In November, the Democrats sharply expanded their power on the Hill, gaining 48 seats in the House and five in the Senate. Many of the newcomers were of a new, far more left-wing, mindset.

In January, the struggle between the administration and the Congress over aid to Vietnam took on great urgency. Judge Mikva, who once served on the U.S. Court of Appeals, told me yesterday, when I reached him by phone in Chicago, that he remembers Mr. Kissinger "prowling the halls" of Congress arguing against an aid cut-off. He also remembers the minority whip, Robert Michel, also from Illinois, reading a letter from Mr. Ford saying, as Judge Mikva put it, that "we needed to stay in so we could leave with dignity" and making terrible predictions. Many turned out, Judge Mikva said, to be true.

In the spring, Congress acted, blocking military appropriations for the South Vietnamese. I was in Hong Kong at the time and can still remember the clarity with which the correspondents saw what was going to happen and began flocking to Saigon. Not that we were, by any means, the only ones who saw it. President Thieu, the one-time general who was the leader of South Vietnam, knew what it would mean to be without ammunition. He promptly retreated from the Central Highlands. Saigon now lay exposed.

On April 6, the New York Times issued an editorial under the headline "Commitment?" It quoted the envoy of free Vietnam in Washington saying, "it is safer to be an ally of the Communists, and it looks like it is fatal to be an ally of the United States." It also quoted Secretary Schlesinger at the Pentagon as repeatedly stating "his view that this country has a moral — though not a legal — commitment to continue aid indefinitely." The Times, after sketching the costs of the war, concluded by asserting that the "American people long ago rightly determined that those are heavy costs that they would not pay again in Southeast Asia."

In Cambodia, Phnom Penh fell in mid-April. Saigon fell at the month's end. The frantic efforts to negotiate a peaceful transition went for naught. On May 1, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal published Peter Kann's famous "Obituary for South Vietnam," which was one of the few pieces extolling the heroism of South Vietnam's often-mocked army. It was "not an army of bumblers and cowards," he wrote. "It was an army that stood and fought with great courage and competence on a few occasions you may remember, like the siege of An Loc. …

"It was an army that for years watched the Americans try to combat the Communists with every wonder of modern weaponry and which then, all too suddenly, was left to face the Communists with American-style tactics but without American-style resources. …" He conceded that the North Vietnamese were stronger. "But the stronger side is not necessarily the better side. ‘Better' becomes a question of values and much as I may respect Communist strength and stamina I cannot accept that the Spartan Communist society of North Vietnam is better than the very imperfect South Veitnamese society that I knew."

It was one of the few eulogies the free Vietnamese ever got. And then a region with a population as large as eastern Europe was thrown into the decades of a still-dark night of communist tyranny. Hundreds of thousands were thrown into re-education camps. Millions died in the killing fields of Cambodia. The outpouring of boat-people from Vietnam astonished the world. In 1979, the summit of industrialized countries meeting at Tokyo was forced to set aside its agenda to deal with the crisis of the millions seeking to escape the communism to which they'd been abandoned.

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There are no doubt those who reckon the betrayal of Vietnam didn't matter in the long term. America went on to win the Cold War and, as Mr. Bush's pending visit to Vietnam attests, hasn't forgotten the country to which more than 50,000 of America's own men gave their lives. But yesterday I asked Judge Mikva whether he saw any parallels between the situation that faced the 94th Congress and the one that will greet the Democratic majority in the 110th.

"Absolutely," he said. He didn't predict anything as precipitous as that which took place a generation ago."I'm not sure any president, Democrat or Republican, could do what Congress did then," he told me. But he did predict that Congress would assert itself on the war. Then Judge Mikva offered the kind of subtle distinction that experience in all three branches can bring. Iraq, he suggested, is, like Vietnam, a problem of the size and difficulty that can be dealt with only by the legislature.