1975!

Yes, It Has been Fifty Years

April 30, 1975, was the day the Vietnam war ended, with Hanoi’s victory. South Vietnam’s capital, Saigon, was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, honoring North Vietnam’s revered leader. Vietnamese who had been associated with the American role in the conflict were sent to “reeducation camps.” About two million Vietnamese, over time, made it to the United States, where, on the whole, they are an American immigrant success story.

The days around the fall of Saigon were vividly described by H.D.S. Greenway of the Washington Post in his book Foreign Correspondent: A Memoir. As the city prepared for the end, Greenway wrote this in the newspaper:

SAIGON, April 25 — When evening comes to Saigon, foreigners still gather on the open sided terrace of the old-fashioned French colonial hotel, The Continental Palace, to drink an aperitif as they have done for 50 years. The lights begin to come on, the waiters take orders and the slow fans on the high ceilings bring some relief in the tropical heat.

But when the hour of the curfew comes, and it now comes at 8 PM, …strange and even terrifying shapes began to gather in the darkness outside. It is the hour when beggars, cripples, prostitutes, junkies and transvestites become desperate for one last pitch. There are children, dirty and uncared for…Girls, some vacuous with narcotics, all of them begging and pleading, pulling at the last of the potential customers…

Fear pervades all contacts and contacts and all conversations now, fear of the unknown, of what will come.

For those of us in the generation that served in the war, opposed it. and, in my case, covered it as a reporter, Vietnam was a defining experience, along with the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, the summer urban riots, the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968, Watergate from 1972 to 1974, and the culmination of the Indochina conflict in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam in 1975.

The cascade of losses were the origins of America’s erosion of self-confidence, leading us to the ignominy of Donald J. Trump’s ascendency and presidency.

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Symphony Space, a large theater on Manhattan’s Upper West Side was the scene in early April of a tribute to Stevie Wonder’s album Songs in the Key of Life, released in 1976 and one of the greatest in his magnificent repertoire. Wonder is now seventy-four and can still sell out Madison Square Garden if he chose to.

The performers and the band in the tribute were all young and nearly all Black. The audience was middle-aged and older and nearly all white. There were standing ovations.

Fifty years — a half century — is a large part of anyone’s life. But for those of us who were young in 1975, my sense is that the passage of time since Vietnam and the Motown heyday in music seems remarkably close.

What else happened fifty years ago? Saturday Night Live premiered in 1975. Steven Spielberg’s Jaws became the template for the cinematic extravaganzas that he continues to make today.

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The Socialist Republic of Vietnam is a robust autocratic nation of one hundred million people. The U.S. intervention in Vietnam’s civil war was an effort to block Communist China’s influence in the region — but in 1979, only four years after Hanoi’s victory, a Sino-Vietnamese war erupted with thousands of casualties and ending in a stalemate.

The communist alliance in Indochina had already been demolished when Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978 to oust the victorious Khmer Rouge. Simply recalling these events from the perspective of 2025 underscores the ironies of America’s misbegotten foray in the region. The impact the U.S. had there — politically, culturally, economically — has long since been superseded, but in the United States the long-term consequences of the war are palpable.

On this April 30, we are absorbing the scale and unpredictable outcomes of Donald Trump’s upheaval of the nation he leads. Are we heading toward a catastrophe or something else? It is impossible to foresee how things will look a half century from now. What music being performed now will get standing ovations then? Will this year’s expected Superman summer blockbuster (about a comic strip character that first appeared in 1938) be getting another rendition?

Will Saturday Night Live be celebrating its one-hundred-year anniversary, and will it be airing on something called television?

Living through events of magnitude, which every generation invariably does, defines how civilization evolves.

Stevie Wonder may not have known that Songs in the Key of Life would be earthshaking when he recorded it — he was only in his mid-twenties — but it has certainly been ever since. And it has proved a lasting source of joy. The fall of Saigon, for all its significance at the time, has faded. Vietnam’s leadership is appealing now to Trump not to reimpose burdensome tariffs, which are a threat to the country’s developing economy and the global order.

I have been told that as you age, time starts to pass more quickly. It has been fifty years since 1975, but it certainly doesn’t feel that way.

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On April 30, Netflix will be featuring a major new multipart documentary series on the Vietnam war. The trailer is attached