The End of the Vietnam War

David Hume Kennery, a Pulitzer winning photographer and a friend of President Gerald Ford, shares his access to the White House and Vietnam in a stirring visual essay of the last days of Vietnam (published in Politico).

Not only was the war lost, but evacuation was mostly chaos. I don’t recall being surprised by the collapse, but the famous picture of Americans and Vietnamese loading into a helicopter on the roof of a CIA building brought it home dramatically. It was clear that they were running for their lives and that it would require dozens more helicopters to complete the job. You sensed immediately many would be left behind.

Hubert Van Es