Rush 1

The An Oral History with Richard Moose and the Rise of Commun- ism

Interviewer: Carolyn Rush Interviewee: Richard Moose Instructor: Michael Chapper Date: February 17, 2009 Rush 2

Table of Contents

Interviewee Release Form 2

Statement of Purpose 3

Biography 4

Historical Contextualization: The Fall of Saigon; the Rise of Communism 5

Interview Transcription 13

Time Indexing Recording Log 33

Interview Analysis 34

Appendix 1 37

Works Consulted 38 Rush 3

Statement of Purpose

This project serves to study the personal experiences of Richard Moose during the Viet- nam War, specifically the fall of Saigon. This task will be accomplished through an interview with Mr. Moose, who worked for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and traveled to Viet- nam repeatedly and wrote reports for the Committee during the war. This unique perspective will divulge to people around the world the view, perspectives, and experiences of an American male in Saigon while it was being taken over by the North Vietnamese. This interview will help edu- cate future historians and students on the impact of the War on the Vietnamese and the

American view of the war and its outcome. Rush 4

Biography

Richard Moose was born in February, 1932 in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he lived as a child. Throughout his life, he moved to Mexico, Washington State, New York, London, and

Washington D.C. Starting his education at Columbia University and then transferring and even- tually graduating from Hendrix College, Mr. Moose received a bachelors degree and pursued a career at Lehman Brothers, and later worked in the State Department, the National Security

Council, and in the Staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. From 1954-1956, he worked in the Army Counter-Intelligence, and received a Sharpshooter award in Vietnam. His highest rank was Specialist 3rd Class. Mr. Moose also worked on the Alexandria, VA Democratic

Council on Foreign Relations. In 1957, he married and later had two children, a son and a daugh- ter. In his spare time, Mr. Moose likes to garden and talk politics. Rush 5

Historical Contextualization The Fall of Saigon: The Rise of Communism

The fall of Saigon was a big turning point in Vietnam history. In order to understand the perspective of someone who participated in the fall of Saigon, it is important to first examine the colonial background of Vietnam and the involvement of the U.S. in that country.

In 1883, Vietnam was divided into three parts; the north, with Hanoi as its capital, the south, with Saigon as its capital, and the middle sector, called Annan. Vietnam officially became a French protectorate. With its fertile lands, lively population and fine seaports, Vietnam became the center of French rule. However, Japan came into power in March of 1945. (Isaacs 15)

The Vietminh, a political organization that would eventually drive the French out of Viet- nam, was created by a man named . His organization eventually raised an army of some 5,000 men. The Vietminh, using effective guerilla warfare, waged a war against the Japan- ese, who surrendered in August, 1945. The Vietminh then stepped into power, proclaiming the independence of Vietnam. However, after losing it during World War II, the French were determ- ined to gain back power, and with the help of the British, they were able to take back control of

Saigon and reestablish control of the southern part of the country. (Isaacs 13)

In 1946, France recognized Vietnam as a “Free state” within the French Union, but the negotiations between France and Vietnam started breaking down. Then came the outbreaks of vi- olence that would eventually set off a war that would end up lasting nearly thirty years. This war was called the First Indochina War. (Burchett 61)

In the beginning years of the First Indochina War, the United States maintained a dis- tinctly pro-French neutrality. However, “In the Spring of 1947, the United States formally com- mitted itself to the containment of Soviet expansion in Europe, and throughout the next two years Rush 6

American attention was riveted on France, where economic stagnation and political instability aroused grave fears of a possible Communist takeover” (Herring 7). At this time, Communist

China was becoming increasingly closer to aiding the Vietminh. France was become weaker, and the only chance they had at overpowering the Vietminh was if they had the military support of the United States. This decision to support France in Indochina was the first step toward direct

American involvement in Vietnam:

The strategic reassessment of 1950 thus ended American “neutral- ity” and produced a commitment to furnish France military and economic assistance for the war against the Vietminh. It also estab- lished principles that would provide the basis or U.S. policy in Vi- etnam for years to come and would eventually lead to massive in- volvement. (Herring 12)

At the war’s conclusion in August, 1954, and the departure of the French from Vietnam, the control of the north was given to the Vietminh as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and the south became the State of Vietnam. The south started out under the control of Emperor Bao

Dai, but then he was deposed by his prime minister, Ngo Dinh Diem, and it was called the Re- public of Vietnam. Diem refused to go into negotiations with the north, which then led to the

Second Indochina War in 1959.

At the end of 1960, the Vietcong, or the National Liberation Front, was formed. The Viet- cong was an army based in closely allied to the government. It was created by North Vietnamese communists to heighten the armed struggle in South Vietnam.

The Vietcong would periodically launch hit-and-run attacks on government installations, military outposts and even district towns in the South.

One of the Vietcong’s first military achievements was the battle of Ap Bac on January 2,

1963. Forces of the 7th division of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, led by Colonel Bui

Dinh Dam and Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann, planned to confront the Vietcong 261st bat- Rush 7 talion that they had found entrenched near a hamlet of Ap Bac, southwest of Saigon. The plan was a surprise, three-pronged pincer attack. Vann wanted to move as quickly as they could, but

Dam ended up delaying the operation in order to give the American helicopter pilots time to re- cover from New Year’s Eve celebrations. In the delayed time, the Vietcong learned of their planned attack and were able to devise their own defense plan. The Vietcong were able to take the Army of the Republic of Vietnam by complete surprise, and when the army was ambushed, they lost five helicopters and suffered heavy casualties. This was considered a big milestone for the Communist forces, as it was considered their first big success.

On January 2, 1963, Diem surrendered to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam and was taken into custody by rebel officers. While traveling to Saigon, Diem was assassinated by Gener- al Nguven Khanh, who then seized power in Saigon.

On August 7, 1964, the Tonkin Resolution was passed. This joint resolution of Congress gave U.S. president Lyndon Johnson authority to increase U.S. involvement in the war between

North and South Vietnam. This resolution was passed in response to the attack on U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin by the North Vietnamese. The resolution was also created to promote the maintenance of international peace and security in southeast Asia. On March 8, 1965, the first

American combat troops, the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, arrived in Vietnam to defend the American air base at Danang.

In May of 1968, the Paris Peace talks began between the United States and North Viet- nam. They led to the Paris Peace Accords created in 1973 that put an end to all direct U.S. milit- ary involvement and temporarily stopped fighting between the North and the South. However, numerous violations of the Paris Peace Accords were committed by both sides. In 1973, the last Rush 8

U.S. troops left Vietnam, keeping up their end of the bargain, while North Vietnamese military forces gradually moved through the southern provinces, and eventually reached Saigon.

The early hours of the morning of April 29, 1975 marked the beginning of the end for

Saigon. In the month before, efforts to evacuate all the Americans left in Saigon were made, and they included evacuating thousands of Vietnamese who wanted to get out of Saigon before it col- lapsed. On April 3, President Ford announced “Operation Babylift”, which would evacuate about two thousand orphans from the country. Along with that operation came Operation New Life, which resulted in the evacuation of over 110,000 Vietnamese refugees. But on this morning, Tan- sonnhut Airport was being heavily bombarded with rockets. Planes and buildings were being bombed, wreckage and flames everywhere:

From his cockpit seat, Mallano saw a sudden flicker in the black sky; lightning, he thought at first. Then the airfield began to ex- plode around him. A rocket hit a fuel tank. A second swooshed into the control tower area, and another landed under the wing of Wessel’s plane, rupturing a fuel tank. As fuel began pouring out on to the ground, Wessel and his crew leaped out and ran. Moments later the spilled gas caught fire, turning the damaged plane into a great red blossom of flames. (Isaacs 447)

The Defense Attache Office complex was hit with a round of rockets. One rocket hit the roof of the DAO gymnasium, where at least 1,500 evacuees were waiting to be airlifted out of

Saigon. These evacuees consisted of marines dressed in camouflage, Vietnamese men, women and children, newsmen, embassy secretaries, and Vietnamese generals and their families. Mira- culously no one was injured. Because of the sudden war that taking place at the airbase, none of the U.S. planes could take off and continue with the evacuation. The field was full of armed Viet- namese soldiers and airmen who, already rioting to board Vietnamese aircraft, would almost cer- tainly try to mob American planes. The runways were obstructed. No fixed-wing flights could continue; now the evacuation relied entirely on helicopters. This was called Option IV. The heli- Rush 9 copters, three marine helicopter squadrons and ten additional air force helicopters, were waiting on ships, some forty miles out to sea. The pilots were waiting for orders to carry out the evacu- ation. They code-named it Frequent Wind.

While the helicopter pilots were waiting for permission to carry out Frequent Wind, a team of pilots employed by Air American, the celebrated CIA airline, had volunteered to stay in

Saigon to help with the evacuation. Their role in the evacuation was to pick up evacuees from designated rooftops in Saigon. Their helicopters were the lighter UH-1 “Hueys”, that could land on the rooftops. These pilots took their evacuees to U Tapao air base in Thailand.

Back at Tansonnhut, preparations were being made for the helicopter lift. Areas were be- ing cleared and marked for the helicopters to land. It was then realized by the Americans that the

Communist fire was not, in fact, aimed at the DAO area; it was concentrated on the runways, air- craft parking areas, and fuel and munition dumps. The North Vietnamese were allowing the

Americans to leave unopposed.

While the Americans at the air base were getting ready for evacuation, the Vietnamese were getting desperate for their own chance to escape:

Shortly after 9:30 A.M., a group of 40 to 50 Vietnamese air force officers and airport supervisors burst into the U.S. airlift headquar- ters, waving pistols. Taking three American officers hostage, they demanded to be evacuated. One of the Americans, Air Force Maj. Dale Hensley, calmly assured his captors that threats weren’t needed. They would be given seats, he promised, when conditions at the field settled down. Finally one of the Vietnamese officers handed over his weapons. The others did the same, and the three Americans walked safely out of the building. (Isaacs 454-455)

This event proved to be the point of total lack of control of the Air Force and continued to make the already bad situation worse. Rush 10

The U.S. embassy in Saigon was also being used as refugee center, and originally, people were supposed to be transported from there to Tansonnhut, but as they day bore on, the people stranded at the embassy were taken in helicopters to the fleet. Vietnamese civilians arrived out- side the embassy and tried scaling the walls to get a seat on a flight out. At this point, Ambassad- or Martin had been ordering that South Vietnamese be flown out with the Americans, but Kis- singer and Ford ordered that only Americans be evacuated from that point on.

The American evacuation process ended early in the morning on April 30. While the

Americans’ were finally out of the country, there were still thousands of Vietnamese who were still in Saigon. Many proceeded to evacuate Saigon by boat, and if possible, aircraft. Many tried to reach the evacuation fleet. “About 71,000 Vietnamese abandoned their homes, their posses- sions, and often their families, and put out to sea in tiny fishing boats or ungainly barges in hopes of finding the Seventh Fleet” (Butterfield 5).

Duong Van Minh, the President of South Vietnam, surrendered to the North on the morn- ing of April 30. He asked South Vietnamese forces to end the hostilities and have an orderly transfer of power to prevent any unnecessary bloodshed. Unfortunately, the North Vietnamese were only interested in capturing the city, and they arrested Minh. Saigon was finally captured.

The city was then named after Ho Chi Minh, the former president of North Vietnam, and thou- sands of the Vietnamese left were moved to reeducation camps, where torture, disease, and mal- nutrition were widespread.

As historian Arnold R. Isaacs has argued, it was necessary for the U.S. to withdraw their military aid when they did and stick to the plan of leaving all South Vietnamese behind. He ar- gues that Nixon’s administration should be given much more sympathy than what they were get- ting. “The policies of the first Nixon term were dictated by choices so narrow that I believe much Rush 11 the same course would have been followed even if Hubert Humphrey or some other moderate-to- liberal Democrat had been elected president in 1968” (Isaacs 504). Isaacs believes that it was necessary for the U.S. government to stop financially aiding Saigon.

Unlike Isaacs, Historian Wilfred Burchett was for the Communist party. He had a special relationship with the North Vietnamese, and was very against the U.S.’s aid of South Vietnam during the war. He believed that the North Vietnamese should have all the power in Vietnam, and dominate Vietnam.

The fall of Saigon was the last defeat for South Vietnam. The North took over, naming

April 20 as Reunification Day. They sent the South Vietnamese to reunification camps, where the conditions were horrible. One apparent objective of the Communist government was to reduce the population of Saigon. Reeducating classes were created that sent former South Vietnamese soldiers to the country to take up farming in order to regain full standing in society. This led to the departure of thousands of Vietnamese from Saigon, and even more from the state. The defeat at Saigon was the end of the , and the beginning of the reunification of Vietnam. As

General Van Tien Dung said to the extent the strategies and tactics employed were influenced by those of the great battles throughout ’ history, “But this was the great culmination of the experiences of all the battles fought by our ancestors” (qtd. in Burchett 4). Rush 12

Interview Transcription

Interviewee/Narrator: Richard Moose Interviewer: Carolyn Rush Location: Alexandria, VA Date: December 28, 2008

Carolyn Rush: This is Carolyn Rush and I am interviewing Richard Moose as part of the Amer- ican Century Oral History Project. This interview took place on December 28, 2008 at his house in Alexandria at 3:11 P.M. OK. So first can you give me a brief overview of your career during the Vietnam War era?

Richard Moose: Well, I like many Americans paid very little attention to Vietnam until about

1975. No, 1965. I was at that time working on Capitol Hill on a fellowship from the American

Political Science Association and I worked with a group of, Democratic Congressmen, who called themselves the Democratic Study Group, and they became interested in our policy in Viet- nam. They were concerned about the escalation of the war, and I helped them pull together re- sources and information about it. I then went and in 1966 I went to work at the National Security

Council, the NSC, for the then, President of National Security Advisor, Walt Rossdale. The Pres- ident at that time was Lyndon Johnson having succeeded of course John Kennedy. Johnson ran in

’65, ’66 was making what turned out to be crucial, fateful decisions to add more American troops and escalate the war. I worked for Johnson from the fall of ’66 through ’67, and into early ’68, by which time the war had escalated to almost its greatest intensity of fighting and the largest num- ber of casualties and the greatest outcry in this country against the war. My own son, participated in a march against the White House carrying a sign that said, “Bring the boys home”. I was working inside. By 1968, I felt that I could no longer be loyal to the President’s policy, and I Rush 13 thought the best thing to do was resign, which I did very quietly without any commotion. I then worked on a writing project for the Rockefeller Foundation, and had relatively little to do imme- diately with Vietnam although President Johnson’s Press Secretary asked me to go to Paris and monitor the Peace talks for them. Peace talks were being conducted by presidentially appointed negotiators but the White House press secretary George Christian, wanted his own, wanted a per- spective interview of his own of what was going on at the peace talks, because I knew the negoti- ators, and because I knew the people who were working with them. It was easy for me to fit into the group. I then went back to my writing project after the talks were seemed to be going no place, the talks between the Americans and the North Vietnamese. At the end of 1968, I went to work for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and I then, over the course of the next seven years made repeated trips to Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia with another colleague and we wrote a series of reports for the Foreign Relations Committee. I was in Saigon in April, ’75 when it fell,

I mean I was there until the night before. And that was the end of my intense association with the

Vietnam issue.

CR: So, you were evacuated the night before?

RM: That’s right, that’s right.

CR: And, you were with your friend?

RM: Yes, my friend, Charles Meisner, Chuck Meisner. And I came out on an evacuation flight, a

C130, out of Saigon into Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines. Rush 14

CR: Oh. So, when you were in Vietnam, were there any points where you were scared, or, had any...

RM: I guess three times, in about 1971, my colleague and I went up to the, up to the northern most boundary of the country, up to what they called the demilitarized zone. It wasn’t demilitar- ized though. We went up, we wanted to see the situation up there and we visited some of the marine locations on the way up, Hue, and a couple of others and then went actually on the north- ern most far position of the marines up in the North and we stayed there overnight and that night was happening then that we were shelled by the North Vietnamese. Another time we were down in the South, in the Delta, and the place we were in came under rocket attack, and then, about a week before Saigon fell, my colleague and I, I wanted to go to Pnomh Penh, because I felt that there was a chance, if the embassy was encouraged to do so, that there might be a chance of their trying to intervene and broker some sort of a cease-fire or stand still with the Khmer Rouge, the

Cambodians who were about to take Pnomh Penh, the capitol. The only way we could get there was, the Americans were flying ammunition into Pnomh Penh, and the only way we could get there was to fly in on an ammunition flight, so we went on a C130 loaded with explosives of various sorts and the airfield was under mortar attack and we had to dive out of the plane while it taxied after we landed. That was a little scary, but in all those situations, I guess, you’re too ex- cited to stop and dwell on being scared, scared at some level, but not stopping to think about it.

CR: So, you were pretty well protected by the Americans, or were there any situations where you were, like, really in danger? Rush 15

RM: Oh, we were in danger of having artillery shells fall on us or rockets or the airplane blow- ing up. The situation of Vietnam was very different from the one that we’re more familiar with these days in Iraq. You usually knew where the bad guys were and you usually knew those areas in which you were safe, so if you mean by being protected was there somebody around me to make sure that I didn’t get hurt, no, because it wasn’t like that in Vietnam most of the time. Now there were situations that you could get in easily and unexpectedly but while there weren’t defined front lines like there were in the first or second world war, the situation was not as con- fused and mixed as it was in Iran.

CR: Where were you staying in Saigon?

RM: Well, we usually stayed at the Caravel Hotel which was on a square in the middle of down- town Saigon across from another hotel called the Continental and the National Assembly build- ing, while their excuse for a parliament held its meetings was in between the two.

CR: Did you see things that made you feel ashamed of the United States? Or proud?

RM: (Hesitation) No, by the time I started going to Vietnam, I was of the view that the United

States, or our President, had made a terrible mistake in becoming so involved in Vietnam. I thought that the premise of our involvement was mistaken, that it is to say that the belief that by fighting the North Vietnamese we were stopping the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia, I no longer believed that. So that the fact that the Americans with their in force with such enorm- Rush 16 ous fire power and destructive presence. made me more sad than ashamed. The whole thing was a tragedy that should never have happened, and I guess I was aware of what I felt, the mistakes that were being made and the lack of American sensitivity to the Vietnamese that made me a great deal, you had to be proud of the American soldiers and marines and air men who you saw because they were risking their lives constantly and most of them believed most of the time in what they were doing. The longer the war went on, the less they believed in it, and I have some experiences that showed me how really disaffected many of them were.

CR: What exactly did you do in Saigon?

RM: Well, my colleague and I would go and the embassy and the military headquarters, what was called then MAC-V, Military Advisory Command in Vietnam. MAC-V was the acronym.

MAC-V and the Embassy had been officially informed by the State Department and the

Pentagon that we were coming as representatives of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. We had all of the security requirements that would be required to receive any information that they might have there. And so we would go and we would begin with briefings delivered by the Em- bassy staff and then by the American Agency for International Development people. We would usually get a briefing from the CIA stationed people there in the Embassy and from there we would branch out and using our own contacts and our own resources we would develop other leads like a reporter might have in order to get differing perspectives on the situation in Saigon.

We would talk to, in Vietnam, we would talk to journalists, we would talk to some foreign diplo- mats who were there, we would talk to primarily Vietnamese, we would speak with them of what the situation was, both in a military sense and the economy and the politics of the country. Rush 17

CR: Ok. When you were in Pnomh Penh, what were your most vivid memories of the takeover, well in both Saigon and Pnomh Penh?

RM: Two, I guess. The morning we arrived in Pnomh Penh, early April, ’75, on that ammunition flight I had told you about, we had told American journalists in Saigon what we were going to do, that we were going to fly into Pnomh Penh. The journalists in Saigon were concerned about the well-being and what would happen to their colleagues who were in Pnomh Penh. A number of the news organizations asked us to take their money, and they gave us really quite a lot, what we understood was quite a lot of money, and we were packages for the various ones. We were driven from the airport to the hotel Penom, and it was early in the morning, just after day break, and we found all the journalists having breakfast together in a little room, and we knew a number of them and there was some sort of gallous humor about our being there and what was going to happen to them. In the end, they all left except one New York Times reporter called Sydney

Shanburg who stayed during the takeover for a number of weeks if not months after wards.

While we were there, having a pot of really, really bad coffee with them ‘cause there was no good coffee left. The Time Magazine correspondent whose name I can’t remember, got a telex.

The hotel still had a telex operator, and it was a kind of tele-type machine. They don’t exist any- more, I don’t think. He had a telex from his editors in New York who were editing the piece on

Pnomh Penh that was gonna appear in Time Magazine that week and the query was “did the

“poor masses” in Pnomh Penh huddle under palm thatched roofs?” You know, they were working on their little color that they were adding in there, so there’s general hilarity about that. And then the Washington Post reporter who gotta message while we were still sitting there from Bill Brad- Rush 18 ley, who was the executive editor of the Washington Post at the time, and it was addressed to their correspondent there who had a stringer with him, and I can’t remember the two names right now, but Bradley’s message was really short, it said “get out immediately, and take so-and-so with you if you can”, it said, so they all were kidding so-and-so, because he was obviously ex- pendable of the ______(laughs). Bradley wasn’t saying get him out, so they were all joking about him. I went from there to the Embassy in a petty cab, a man on a bicycle with a little seat behind, and he was terrified and people were running through the streets, and we went by, on the way to the Embassy, we went by a sort of shop, that I had been to many times in the years before.

It was run by an old woman, who had collected odd sorts of old things. and I’ve got a couple of them here on these shelves. Old porcelain, and I went in, and I bought from her a silver elephant that I had looked at before. They used to be here. I don’t know where they are. Maggie probably put ‘em away because she was getting ready to decorate for Christmas. Usually they are there. It was beautiful. The Cambodians were famous for this type of silver ware and she had wanted a great deal of money for it, or what seemed like a great deal of money for it. She wanted a couple hundred dollars for it and as we went by the shop I saw her standing in the doorway and I stopped the petty cab and I went in and she recognized me and we talked for a few minutes and I asked her if she still had the elephant, she said “yes”, she remembered me, and I paid her $500 for the elephant in $20 bills because I figured that she’d need the money. And then I went on to the Embassy and then had some other meetings later in the day and we flew out on the plane that night. Then the Khmer Rouge came into the city that night. I met with the then Prime Minister of

Cambodia before. I remember the old woman better than I remember the Prime Minister now. Rush 19

CR: Wow, that’s really intense. Ok, so I have a picture that I printed out, right here, and I’m sure you recognize it. (Appendix 1)

RM: The most famous picture, yeah.

CR: Yeah. As someone who was there while this was occurring, can you tell me about this im- age.

RM: Well, of course, that happened later in the day that I left, or rather that happened the day following the day that I left. But the day I left, my colleague and I got a message at the hotel while we were having breakfast, from a CIA agent who had briefed us in previous years, and had asked us to meet him in a particular place. At the Majestic Hotel actually, a few blocks away.

And we went there and he told us that he had been the operations officer who had controlled the main North Vietnamese military source that the agency had, and he said he had met, just the evening before, with the North Vietnamese informant, who described their preparations and said they would come into the city the following day but they needed to organize themselves, to com- plete their plans for taking over the city and how they would control it after they did. So he said, you know, the fact that they are not here now doesn’t mean that they’re not able to come into the city. They can come in anytime they want to because they know that the South Vietnamese army has disappeared for all intense and purposes. There is no protection to the city whatsoever. So that was the morning of the day before we left, and we went right from there to the Embassy and our CIA friends said, “You know, I have reported this to my channels. I have reported to the sta- tion chief, the station chief has reported it to the Ambassador, and the Ambassador is determined Rush 20 to keep all the people in the Embassy because he doesn’t believe that the North Vietnamese could come in and take the place.” I said, “Well, what does your station chief believe? Does he believe your informant?” And he said “no”, he doesn’t believe him either, and I said, “But you do obvi- ously”. He said, “I’ve known this man for over three years and he’s never given me bad informa- tion”. So he said, “I’m sure that they’ll be here tomorrow. If not tomorrow, then the next day”. So my colleague and I went to see the Ambassador and told him that we had been greatly impressed by this and that we were gonna report to our committee that the North Vietnamese could take

Saigon anytime they wanted too. We urged him, we pled with him really, to start getting the

Americans out right away because we were afraid of what would happen if they waited until the

North Vietnamese Army actually came into the city, and we said we were even more afraid of the

Vietnamese who had been working for the Americans then, and wouldn’t he begin to help get them out, because at the hotel and a couple of other places that we had been, Vietnamese who we’d known in the years past were pleading with us to find some way to help ‘em get out. But the Ambassador refused. He said that he had recommended against it to the Secretary of State,

Henry Kissinger. Kissinger supported his decision not to evacuate the Americans, and not to start evacuating the Vietnamese because it would look like they were giving up, and I said, “Well, the

North Vietnamese know that you’re beaten. You know, who do you think you’re fooling with this”. The Ambassador was a real... (sigh). In the last _____ you just have to say that he was a very foolish, mistaken, bad man. He just wouldn’t budge. So my friend and I sat down and wrote a long message to the Foreign Relations Committee, which of course had classified information in it and we knew that the Ambassador would never let the Embassy send our message to the

State Department for the committee, so we had already been told that we could get an evacuation flight out the next day, so I said, “Let’s hold on to our message. Let’s don’t send it from here be- Rush 21 cause it might get edited, part of it might get cut out. We’ve got no guarantee it’ll ever get there.

Let’s just hold on to it ‘till we get to the Philippines and we’ll go to the American Embassy there and I know the Ambassador and I’m sure he’ll send it for us, even if he disagrees with us, which is what happened, and so we went out the airport early next morning and we came out on an evacuation flight. So, you know, that scene there needn’t have ever taken place, if the Ambassad- or had acted on the information which was available to him for two or three days before that, and they could’ve gotten most of the people out, and they could’ve gotten a lot of the endangered Vi- etnamese out if the Ambassador had not been so stubborn and wrong-headed about the whole thing.

CR: And a lot of the Vietnamese were stuck there because of him?

RM: Yeah, yeah. The Vietnamese who had worked years for the Embassy, and even ones that, you know, ones just doing ordinary every day kinds of jobs, were, as it turned out, they were all put in re-education camps. Some, I’m sure, were brutally treated, but most of ‘em weren’t, and after a while they were released and many of ‘em even managed to escape after that. Ones who had worked closely with the agency, and that was my CIA friend’s main concern, was to get out a lot of the people that had worked for him and for the CIA station there, because they could be in very great danger. I don’t know what happened to those people. I’m sure many of them were killed, but they could have been gotten out, if the Ambassador had allowed it.

CR: Were there any refugees or Vietnamese who tried to get you to take them? Rush 22

RM: Yes. There was a woman who had worked in the hotel that we had seen over a period of years, and she pled with us to do something for her, and my friend gave her some money and gave her some letters of introduction, which I don’t think did her any good, but she managed to get out on a flight in a couple of days. No, I don’t remember exactly when she came out but she did get out, and my friend and his wife helped her after she arrived here in this country. I saw some Vietnamese who I had known in Saigon after they got out. I never saw any of the Cambodi- ans. I think all of the Cambodians I ever knew or worked with there were killed. And there was no way to get any of them out.

CR: When you think back on the whole experience, what did you think were the lessons Amer- ica should’ve learned from Vietnam?

RM: The thing that always worried me most was that the Americans who made the important de- cisions at various levels so seldom truly understood the way Vietnamese reasoned things. That misunderstanding really began at the very top with the notion that what was going on in Hanoi was part of a Russian-Chinese Communist effort to take over the world. Well, I mean over south- east Asia. Well that was just totally wrong. It was the Vietnamese effort to throw the foreigners out of their country. They had fought the French, they fought the Japanese, they fought the

French again, they fought the Americans. What they wanted was for the foreigners to leave their country alone. Our leaders just didn’t understand that. Then you take it on down to the lowest level, or to, you know, to Saigon level, or to out in the provinces. Our people who were there very seldom spoke the language. They didn’t understand that the South Vietnamese Government had no credibility in the eyes of the South , because the people saw the cor- Rush 23 ruption. They saw their own country men doing what the Americans told them to do, and they didn’t have any respect for them. Our people rarely, rarely did we meet Americans who under- stood this, and when they did understand it, they weren’t able or weren’t willing to act on their understanding of what they saw with the Vietnamese. I had a friend who was a young political officer, who was in love a young Vietnamese girl, and persuaded her family to let her marry him, and then he said about a great project of charting the relationships among the Vietnamese Army

Commanders and the Vietnamese politicians and the various companies in Vietnam and he had a huge diagram of the whole corrupt infrastructure of the country. You know, beginning at the palace level and coming on down. But none of his superiors would listen to him or let him use in any way the information that he had. He understood what was going on. The thing is that we need to learn to understand why the people who were reacting with why they do what they do.

Now, Iraq came along, and it’s a perfect example again of having no idea, no understanding of that country whatsoever, so that the Vice President, and the Secretary of Defense and the Presid- ent could all really believe that we would be greeted and treated as heros for liberating them and that they would all get along with one another and wanna have a Democratic government. They just didn’t understand the first thing about Iraqi politics and we were equally dumb, blind, going into Vietnam.

CR: So what do you think America should have done differently to change that?

RM: In Vietnam?

CR: Yeah, in Vietnam. Rush 24

RM: 1945, Ho Chi Minh, the leader in our Vietnam, wrote to President Roosevelt, and he wanted Roosevelt to help Vietnam secure its independence from France. We should’ve recog- nized the force of Vietnamese nationalism at that time. We helped other countries secure their in- dependence. We should’ve helped the Vietnamese secure their independence. They were no less worthy than anyone else. But, we wanted to keep the French engaged in NATO, and so we didn’t help the Vietnamese get their freedom. We had many other opportunities as we went on down the line, but we took over the burden of fighting from the Vietnamese. We should never have done that. We should have encouraged them to fight, or if they weren’t going to fight, to make their own peace with the North Vietnamese, instead of involving ourselves the way that we did, and destroying and wreaking with destruction and death that we did on the country.

CR: What were your overall feelings, like, when you had come back from Vietnam? What were your feelings on your experience, your experiences?

RM: Frustration, more than anything else. I was fortunate that the people that I’d worked for on the Foreign Relations Committee were by that time by the early ’70’s, had become fairly know- ledgeable about Vietnam. They had become very skeptical of what they were being told by the administration about the progress that was being made in the war and in building a political sys- tem in Vietnam. So, I was gratified that I had the opportunity to help the members of the Foreign

Relations Committee try to bring an end to the war, but I was very frustrated because despite everything that our committee did, those who opposed the war in the Senate, the same was true in the House, but I knew the Senate better. Those who opposed the war were unable ever to win a Rush 25 vote to reduce the war or to set some limits on it. They were never able to win one of those votes until early 1975. We got more and more votes, but we never really got above 36, 37, 38 votes in the Senate because the Senators were intimidated by those who wanted to continue the war. We were always in the position of bringing back reports that said things were not like we’re being told they are. That there’s not real progress towards ending this war. There’s not real progress to- wards building a South Vietnamese army or government that it’s people will support. We would bring evidence back of that, and we’d give it to the committee, the committee would have us publish it. It was frustrating. At the same time, I was glad by it because I felt I was doing something worthwhile.

CR: So did you think it was a more positive or a negative experience?

RM: For me, I’d have to say it was a positive experience because it really sharpened my powers of observation. It taught me the importance of bringing balance to my writing because, while the

Foreign Relations Committee as a whole opposed the war and wanted to bring and end to the war, there were a variety of opinions there about how fast or how indeed that could be done, and we had to be critical before our own committee. So, what I learned was the importance of writ- ing, reporting, and talking in a balanced way so that I could get an audience with people with di- versed years and shades of opinion about the war. I also learned that really good, sincere, dedic- ated people in the government could be terribly wrong and could lie and believe they were doing the right thing. Rush 26

CR: Is there anything else important about the fall of Saigon that you wanted to say? Your exper- iences?

RM: No, I think I hit the points. It was a very sad time. It brought home to me the real human tragedy of the policies that we had followed, the flaws in the judgement of the people who led our country and the people who led the Embassy, how their bad judgement impacted the lives of innocent people, innocent Vietnamese, taught me to be very concerned that as we set out to do what we think is the right thing for other people, that we really make sure that we understand what we’re doing. We’d done a great deal of damage. We’d done some great things. This country did a great thing in standing off the Soviet Union in the way that it did, but we did many bad things along the way that we didn’t have to have done. And we saw, in too many situations, we viewed them as cases of ourselves against the Communists when that really wasn’t what was go- ing on at all. I saw that subsequently in Africa where, again, the only thing that ordinary Africans cared about was having some freedom, getting an opportunity to get an education, and we didn’t really respond to that in the way that we should’ve. We were more concerned about what the

Russians might do in Africa than we were in what might happen to the Africans so that, as we went from the Vietnam experience forward, we didn’t really learn that. We involved ourselves in civil wars in Angola to the great detriment of the people there, all because we thought we were fighting the Soviets or the Chinese. So we didn’t learn much from Vietnam.

CR: Right.

RM: That lightly said. Rush 27

CR: So we didn’t learn anything? Like, I mean...

RM: I don’t know. I don’t know. I think a lot of people learned wrong lessons. Some people came away saying that we didn’t use enough force. Had we used more force we could’ve de- feated the North Vietnamese and things would’ve been better. Well, if we could’ve assumed the responsibility for doing that and if we destroyed Hanoi and the whole North Vietnamese capabil- ity, the North Vietnamese would have only hated us more and more and they would have more and more delayed the day in which Vietnamese could enjoy freedom and prosperity. Some Amer- icans, on the liberal side, learned the other lesson, and that was that we should never involve ourselves anyplace, because they were afraid we’d do the wrong thing because we did the wrong thing so hugely in Vietnam. I think that lesson was wrong, too. Many people say that the reason why we didn’t try to stop the civil war in Bosnia any earlier is because Americans had learned the wrong lesson from Vietnam and were afraid to involve themselves. I think that to intervene in a meaningful way in Sudan is in a way traceable to the huge mistake that we made in Vietnam and the huge mistake that we made in Iraq. You know, we intervened where we shouldn’t and didn’t intervene in Sudan or in Rwanda when we should’ve done something there.

CR: Were there any, like, experiences where you really saw the power of the North Vietnamese?

Like, you personally?

RM: The power of the North Vietnamese was the power of Vietnamese nationalism. I had a friend who was in the army in Vietnam. He was an interpreter. He was the best of their Viet- Rush 28 namese speakers. His name is Jean. When I would visit Vietnam and when I’d go to the coun- tryside, whenever I could, I would get the army to let me take Jean with me as an interpreter.

When we’d go to a village, of course, I would have to go see the village chief, whoever the Sai- gon official was who was present. And I would be surrounded by Americans and Vietnamese of- ficials. Those kind of Vietnamese usually spoke enough English to say whatever it was that they were supposed to say. Meanwhile, I didn’t use Jean as my interpreter for those conversations. I would let Jean wander off in the village, and Jean loved to do that. And Jean would go down to the other end of the village and I would be up here talking to the officials. He would be down there talking to them, and they would be telling him, you know, what the real security situation was, that the North Vietnamese, or the Vietcong, were in the village every night. That the head man of the village was taking bribes from the Vietnamese and giving them information and then lying to the Americans about it. So, what I really saw there was the power, and these Vietnamese would tell my friend, because his Vietnamese was so good that he would make dialect jokes with them, you know, and they loved it. It was so funny, because he played with their language. They loved language, and through him I learned how powerful was the Vietnamese desire to be rid of the foreigners. He was a foreigner, but he was a very different kind of foreigner in their eyes. So that the power of the North Vietnamese always was the power of Vietnamese nationalism, be- cause the Vietnamese really did want to be rid of the foreigners. Now, they’d take advantage of the foreigners as long as they were there, but given a choice, most of the ones in Saigon were not proud of being dominated by the Americans, and that was the power of the North Vietnamese.

Now they were very cunning and enormously brave and persistent in the military sense, but it was really they harnessed the strength of Vietnamese nationalism. That was their power. Rush 29

RM: That’s a good place to stop.

CR: Ok. (Laugh)

RM: (Laugh)

CR: I...

RM: Unless you have other questions.

CR: Well, is there anything else that you think is important that we missed? That you want me to know?

RM: I don’t know. Over and over again, I’ve said this in several different ways. When America set out to deal with the world, the important thing is to have a sensitivity to the feelings and as- pirations and history of other people. That’s so terribly important. We’re very bad at that in this country.

CR: Hm.

RM: We’re so self-absorbed that we really don’t understand and as a consequence we are cap- able of doing great damage because we’re really very clumsy when we get out there. But that’s not an excuse for not trying. Learn languages. The Arabs have a saying, that to learn another lan- Rush 30 guage is to acquire another soul. We’re very compassionate people. There are paradoxes. We’re very powerful people, we’re very compassionate people. But because we lack understanding and tend to project our views and our culture on other people and often it doesn’t fit and we’re very slow to recognize that and we’ve too often let, in recent year, ideology triumph over common sense and good judgement about how to conduct ourselves in the world. That’s another great philosopher.

CR: Better than me! (Laugh)

RM: (Laugh)

CR: Ok.

RM: I hope you can make something out of all that. Rush 31

Time Indexing Recording Log

1. Interviewer: Carolyn Rush

2. Interviewee: Richard Moose

3. Date of Interview: December 28, 2008

4. Location of Interview: Alexandria, VA

5. Recording Format: Cassette

Minute Topics presented in order of discussion in re- Mark cording 5 The danger in Saigon. 10 Local Vietnamese woman affected by the war. 15 Lessons America should have learned from the war. 20 Damage U.S. caused Vietnam. 25 Problems with the U.S. Government during the war. Rush 32

Interview Analysis

Oral history is an integral part of our world’s history today. Without the sharing of per- sonal histories, people today would be lacking the different perspectives and opinions that they gain while learning personal experiences or history. When one reads a person’s particular history or personal experience, they not only gain from it information on a certain time period or event, but they gain the thoughts and opinions of that particular person. These thoughts and opinions are very important to learn the different perspectives of different people and to compare them to others’ experiences. According to historian Donald Ritchie, memory is the key to oral history.

(Ritchie 1) From memories shared and passed on from generation to generation, our world’s his- tory has been created. Without oral history, we would have no stories, songs, or some of the fam- ous literature we have today. As Professor Joseph Gould insisted, the way to collect real history was to record the stories of average people. (Gould 4) Only through the continuation of sharing these important experiences will oral history be carried on throughout our future. My interview with Richard Moose reinforces the writings and thoughts of many historians on the subject of the

Vietnam War, specifically the fall of Saigon.

In my interview with Richard Moose, one of the main things we talked about was Mr.

Moose’s experience in Saigon in the days around the American evacuation. Mr. Moose worked with the Senate Foreign Relations committee, which enabled him to make repeated trips to Viet- nam, Laos, and Cambodia during the war. It was during these trips that he wrote a series of re- ports for the Foreign Relations Committee on his experiences in Vietnam. While he was there,

Mr. Moose had experiences that not many Americans have faced before. One thing that Mr.

Moose noticed and thought was very important was the power of Vietnamese nationalism. “Now they were very cunning and enormously brave and persistent in the military sense, but it was Rush 33 really they harnessed the strength of Vietnamese nationalism. That was their power.” During the

Vietnam War, one thing that all Vietnamese wanted was freedom from foreigners. The true power of the Vietnamese was divulged to Mr. Moose when he visited some Vietnamese villages with a translator friend, and was told what was truly going on in the villages between the Americans and the Vietnamese, and what the Vietnamese wanted. They were told that all the Vietnamese wanted was their country back out of the hands of foreigners. In history, one of the many things that people have learned is that one thing that may be of importance to a person or their country, in this case Vietnam, is freedom. In wars, what is usually fought for is freedom. This part of the interview clearly reinforces the idea of people’s needs for freedom around the world.

Another important point that Mr. Moose makes in the interview is how the flaws and bad judgement of the U.S. Embassy really affected the lives of innocent people in other countries;

It brought home to me the real human tragedy of the policies that we had followed, the flaws in the judgement of the people who led our country and the people who led the Embassy, how their bad judgement impacted the lives of innocent people, innocent Viet- namese... (qtd. in Moose 27)

Many people had different views on the actions of the U.S. government during the war; on what they did and what they should have done. Many people feel that the U.S. should not have gotten involved in the conflict in Vietnam, while others feel that force was the only way to go;

If we destroyed Hanoi and the whole North Vietnamese capability, the North Vietnamese would have only hated us more and more and they would have more and more delayed the day in which Vi- etnamese could enjoy freedom and prosperity. Some Americans, on the liberal side, learned the other lesson, and that was that we should never involve ourselves anyplace, because they were afraid we’d do the wrong thing because we did the wrong thing so hugely in Vietnam. (qtd. in Moose 29) Rush 34

Mr. Moose said that because we are too afraid of invading anywhere, we have interfered where we shouldn’t have, and we have not interfered where our help is greatly needed.

This interview has great historical value because everything that was said is the perspect- ive of one person during the event and it is his story and therefore unique. For example, Mr.

Moose talks about his first hand experiences in Saigon while it was falling, and his relations with some Vietnamese people greatly affected by the war. It is important for people to see the differ- ent perspectives of events so that they get a full view of what went on.

I have learned from this process that it is very important to have many questions prepared in advance because without them there is no general flow of the interview. It is also very import- ant to have researched the topic beforehand so that there is a general idea of what is going to be talked about with the interviewee. Rush 35

Appendix 1 Rush 36

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