Rory Kennedy (2014)

This Oscar-nominated documentary, directed by Robert Kennedy’s daughter Rory, was screened on BBC4 in July 2015 in their Storyville series.   (There was no acknowledgement that I noticed that the film had been shown at Sundance and other American festivals and had a theatrical release in New York during 2014.)  In its early stages, Last Days in Vietnam is an odd combination.   It was, for this viewer, a salutary reminder of the educational value of documentaries:  I learned facts about the closing years of the Vietnam War that I should have known but hadn’t.   At the same time, the film seems to push hard to characterise Graham Martin, the US Ambassador in South Vietnam from 1973 to 1975, as, if not the villain of the piece, the catastrophically benighted cause of much of the conflict’s final chaos.  There seems to be consensus that Martin, long after most of his countrymen recognised that South Vietnam was on the verge of collapse, continued to insist that the Americans’ South Vietnamese allies could hold Saigon and the Mekong Delta[1].  Rory Kennedy, as if anxious for a dramatic human focus, underlines Martin’s culpability through a selection of still photographs and archive footage that seems designed to show him as aloofly anachronistic or just plain shifty.   The fact that his foster son had been killed in action in Vietnam is mentioned as if partly to excuse Martin although it also naturally makes you question his capacity for properly objective judgment.

Yet Last Days in Vietnam becomes more complex (including in its presentation of Martin, so that he emerges from accounts of the Fall of Saigon as a man who, while politically unrealistic, was personally tenacious).  The second half of the film develops a compelling traction between the talking heads of US military and government personnel – and four South Vietnamese men – and the film archive that Rory Kennedy has assembled.  The informational value of the narrative is eclipsed by emotional eloquence when Kennedy reaches the last two days of April 1975, and American attempts to evacuate Saigon.  The plight of the South Vietnamese – desperate to escape from Saigon with their lives, dismayed that their country is about to die even if they don’t – is very distressing.  It’s a relief that it’s sometimes uplifting too.   Ba Nguyen, a pilot in the South Vietnamese air force, flew his wife and three children in a Chinook helicopter out of the country over the Pacific Ocean.  The Chinook was far too large to land, as some smaller helicopters had been able to do, on American naval vessels so the Nguyens jumped out in turn – the mother holding her baby daughter, the father managing to emerge, largely unscathed, from the Chinook once it had crashed into the sea.  All five family members survived and were taken on board the Kirk.  The description of this terrifying but wonderful escape – recollected by one of Ba Nguyen’s sons and the ship’s officers, and accompanied by recorded footage of the incident – is a fine example of the simple power of documentary film when it describes human experience in extremis through a combination of actuality and retrospection.

The Americans interviewed by Kennedy are impressive and articulate – in one or two cases almost too articulate.  Frank Snepp of the CIA, for example, seems, from his first appearance, clearly aware of the issues the material raises:  although he has personal testimony to give, he comes across less as a witness, more as a commentator.   Stuart Herrington, an army captain and intelligence officer who was among the last Americans to helicopter out from the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon, is rather different.  Near the end of the film, Herrington describes the events of late April 1975 and the guilt that he and others felt at having deserted the South Vietnamese whom the evacuation left behind, as a microcosm of America’s failure – ‘not getting our act together’ – in the Vietnam War as a whole.  You perceive this, at a much earlier stage, as the impending moral of the story of Rory Kennedy’s film but Herrington is cogent and expressive (and, compared with Frank Snepp, unself-conscious).  His summing up still has strong impact.  Kennedy’s interviewees also include Henry Kissinger (now in his nineties), although he appears more – along with Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford et al – in the newsreel footage.

9 August 2015

[1] I was surprised that the American Ambassador had the level of authority the film shows Martin as having.  However, his Wikipedia entry mentions an incident from earlier in his diplomatic career – albeit a formal and relatively inconsequential incident – that suggests Martin was keenly aware of his official status.  He was ambassador to Thailand from 1963 to 1967.  According to Wikipedia, ‘… during a state banquet for the Thai King … [when] the King toasted President Johnson, [Vice-President Hubert] Humphrey tried to return the toast with a toast to the King.  Martin interceded and gave the toast himself, explaining later to … Humphrey … that as the Ambassador, he was the President’s personal representative, and thus, outranked the Vice President. He finished his explanation by saying “If you become President yourself someday, Mr Vice President, you can be sure that I will guard your interests as closely as I did President Johnson’s tonight”.’