People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [327]
In early 1975 Senator John C. Culver of Iowa was unhappy that Americans would not fight for Korea: “He said that Vietnam had taken a mighty toll on the national will of the American people.” Shortly before that, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, speaking to the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies, was reported as being “generally gloomy,” saying that “the world no longer regarded American military power as awesome.”
In March 1975 a Catholic organization, making a survey of American attitudes on abortion, learned other things. To the statement: “The people running this country (government, political, church and civic leaders) don’t tell us the truth,” more than 83 percent agreed.
New York Times international correspondent C. L. Sulzberger, a consistent supporter of government cold-war foreign policy, wrote in a troubled mood in early 1975 from Ankara, Turkey, that “the glow has worn off from the era of the Truman Doctrine” (when military aid was given to Greece and Turkey). He added: “And one cannot say that the bleak outlook here is balanced by any brilliant United States successes in Greece, where a vast mob recently battered the United States Embassy.” He concluded, “There must be something seriously wrong with the way we present ourselves these days.” The problem, according to Sulzberger, was not the United States’ behavior, but the way this behavior was presented to the world.
It was a few months after these reports, in April of 1975, that Secretary of State Kissinger, invited to be commencement speaker at the University of Michigan, was faced with petitions protesting the invitation, because of Kissinger’s role in the Vietnam war. Also a counter-commencement program was planned. He withdrew. It was a low time for the administration. Vietnam was “lost” (the very word supposed it was ours to lose). Kissinger was quoted that April (by Washington Post columnist Tom Braden): “The U.S. must carry out some act somewhere in the world which shows its determination to continue to be a world power.”
The following month came the Mayaguez affair.
The Mayaguez was an American cargo ship sailing from South Vietnam to Thailand in mid-May 1975, just three weeks after the victory of the revolutionary forces in Vietnam. When it came close to an island in Cambodia, where a revolutionary regime had just taken power, the ship was stopped by the Cambodians, taken to a port at a nearby island, and the crew removed to the mainland. The crew later described their treatment as courteous: “A man who spoke English greeted us with a handshake and welcomed us to Cambodia.” The press reported: “Captain Miller and his men all say they were never abused by their captors. There were even accounts of kind treatment—of Cambodian soldiers feeding them first and eating what the Americans left, of the soldiers giving the seamen the mattresses off their beds.” But the Cambodians did ask the crew about spying and the CIA.
President Ford sent a message to the Cambodian government to release the ship and crew, and when thirty-six hours had elapsed and there was no response (the message had been given to the Chinese liaison mission in Washington, but was returned the next day, “ostensibly undelivered,” one press account said), he began military operations—U.S. planes bombed Cambodian ships. They strafed the very boat that was taking the American sailors to the mainland.
The men had been detained on a Monday morning. On Wednesday evening the Cambodians released them—putting them on a fishing boat headed for the American fleet. That afternoon, knowing the seamen had been taken off Tang Island, Ford nevertheless ordered a marine assault on Tang Island. That assault began about 7:15 Wednesday evening, but an hour earlier the crewmen were already headed back to the