EDITORIALS:
O'Gara, James
INVOLVEMENT'S LAST HOURS The Indochina of American ordaining is gone. As this is written, Cambodia is all but lost, and South Vietnam's time seems extremely limited. The situation is an unmitigated...
...The situation is an unmitigated disaster...
...If it is to be "in" again, it can only be on the basis of expansive humanitarianism...
...A beautiful corner of the world is permanently scarred...
...or by the hurling of some last American bodies into the fray, as could result through a careless extension of presidential authority to use troops in Indochina...
...of its substantial economic and humanitarian obligations to that part of the world...
...Dubious, too, is some of the talk concerning the evacuation of American loyalists...
...But this country can press for its honoring, through third parties -China and Russia most notably-and world agencies in positions of influence...
...Tens of thousands stand in risk of reprisals for having come under the spell of the stranger from across the Pacific-who didn't belong there in the first place and who now retires, disgraced and a little humiliated, but supported ever by the ideological macho that motivated the misadventure...
...Unfortunately, there is considerable ambiguity in the American approaches to date...
...is "out" of Indochina, or nearly so...
...But some of the figures mentioned-200,000, and perhaps as many as a million-seem unreal...
...In this context, President Ford's request of April 10 for $250 million for economic and humanitarian aid to South Vietnam is piddling...
...An indiscriminate and wholesale expatriation could touch off new panic, with God-knows what consequences...
...The Communists' word very frequently is no better than our own, and cannot be accepted at face value...
...The recriminations are bitter, and well might they be...
...they only challenge the purity of American concepts...
...it could also sum to an indefensible depletion of the resource the country needs most in order to recover-its own people...
...The airlift of the infants, for instance- however well-intentioned-smacked of cultural imperialism and, to the extent that Ambassador Graham Martin can be credited, of political opportunism...
...The other day in Paris, Vietcong representatives assured an American delegation, which included Congressman Edward Pattison of Troy, N.Y., that the Communists were following a policy of "general amnesty," and that it applied even to those involved with the CIA and in the Phoenix program...
...But let it also work so that as many Vietnamese as possible can safely stay...
...Communist victories do not relieve the U.S...
...proceed without delay in evacuating those whose lives are truly in danger from reprisals...
...Safe passage and resettlement of threatened South Vietnamese are, of course, moral imperatives...
...If it is people who are important, the American course should be clear...
...Apart from enormous problems of logistics, there is the question of propriety...
...Two cultures have been shattered...
...It is perhaps the most urgent of immediate tasks.tasks...
...This amount cannot begin to finance relief and recovery, particularly if this aid is conceived-as it should be-in terms of all the Vietnamese people, and all the Cambodians...
...The U.S...
...Hundreds of thousands have died needlessly or in vain, including 55,000 Americans...
...Let the U.S...
...by impractical, if not cynical, requests for $722 million in emergency aid for Saigon...
...There's a lot of blood on American hands, and it is not going to be washed away by grand gestures, like the parachuting of supplies to the last garrisons in Phnom Penh...
Vol. 102 • April 1975 • No. 3
