Imperial Stars 3-The Crash of Empire by Jerry Pournelle Page B

about Reagan's faux pas in Iran and Nicaragua and the possibility, so eagerly embraced by his adversaries, that the law had been violated not only by members of the White House staff but by the President himself, so that for the second time in little more than a decade we seemed to be circling around a constitutional crisis—hardly a propitious moment to be digging up old graves in Southeast Asia.
    And yet, as the famous rabbi said, if not now, when? If the choice is right the moment is right, by definition. Twelve years have passed since Nguyen Tien Hung left the presidential palace in Saigon with the dossier of top-secret letters from Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford (at least some of them, presumably, drafted by Henry Kissinger) which form the armature of this book. Hung's story needed to be fleshed out, organized, and properly Englished; and Jerrold Schecter, a professional journalist who had covered Southeast Asia for Time , published a scholarly study of political Buddhism, and served a term in our own "palace," the office of the National Security Adviser, during the Carter administration, was well prepared for the job. The result of their collaboration is a remarkable piece of work, always moving if not always persuasive: at once the story of the Vietnamese debacle as seen from inside Thieu's office and a graphic account of the paralysis that overcame American power at the moment of truth—a subject not so far from our present preoccupations, after all.
    Near or far, we cannot escape it. The paradox of memory is that it deforms, as it were, truly. We end by becoming a mysterious amalgam of what we remember and what we forget. Hence the significance for me of a Saigon street name, and for our country of the circumstances of Saigon's decline and fall—painful though it be to go back to "all that."
     
    So now I am struggling to summon up the memory of the people who lived in my house on Phan Dinh Phung—of the Vietnamese especially, because I know at least vaguely what has become of my round-eyed colleagues: Levine and Falkiewicz (who will have forgiven me, I hope, for calling them Jacobowsky and the Colonel) and various others who shared these requisitioned digs for a while and then went back to the West and about their business; whereas the Vietnamese have long been beyond my ken: Huong the grumpy cook, Mai the chambermaid, Li the Chinese driver, and the hard-faced security types who hung around day and night, guns bulging under their chinos and floppy sport shirts, and above all my bohemian friend, Tran Thi Do (or Therese, as we called her, using her Catholic name,[Real names have been altered, for obvious reasons.] who shopped and interpreted for us and once prepared a memorable melon soup when Henry Cabot Lodge and some military brass came to dinner, to the enduring mortification of Huong. She showed up briefly in Washington, a year or so after my return, when I was about to leave for my new post at NATO in Brussels; and I saw her in Paris during the peace talks in 1968 to which I was seconded from Brussels, and tried to persuade her to stay. Her mother had a little money in France, and her brother was a doctor in Cannes. But she was, she said, consumed with homesickness, le mal du pays , and insisted on going back and disappeared from view, like so many others.
    All these people had visitors, relatives from their villages, sometimes from enemy-infested areas, and Huong—a militant Buddhist who took an equally dim view of the Saigon government and the Vietcong—spent hours talking to them, so that (when there was time and he was willing to distill for me a little of what they said) I sometimes fleetingly had the feeling that I could touch something out there in the mysterious countryside and surmise, if not quite understand, how these people were experiencing the disorder that was roiling the South at that time.
     
    None of this would seem to have much to do with The Palace File , which is the story of the