After Saigon's Fall: Refugees and US-Vietnamese Relations, 1975–2000

In the crowded field of scholarship on American involvement in Vietnam, it is rare for a study to come along that truly breaks new ground. Yet this is exactly what Amanda C. Demmer's excellent, pathbreaking book does. After Saigon's Fall is an original, nuanced, and well-written examination of relations between the United States and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in the post-1975 period. Demmer offers a comprehensive and compelling account of the process through which the two countries reestablished diplomatic and economic relations, despite decades of continued hostilities after the war ended. Demmer also examines humanitarian efforts to assist Vietnamese refugees and reunify families separated by the conflict. Her book fills a void in the literature on legacies of the Vietnam War and contributes significantly to our understanding of the uneasy peace that followed. Relying on a wide range of primary sources—including archival materials from five presidential libraries, multiple nongovernmental archives, and congressional records as well as published memoirs and oral interviews—Demmer convincingly shows that Vietnamese-American normalization was a contested process that played out over decades. Moreover, Demmer argues that concerns over human rights in Vietnam and the exodus of nearly 1 million Vietnamese people fundamentally shaped relations between Washington and Hanoi. As Demmer explains, American officials publicly took the position that the Vietnamese government must account for every American classified as a prisoner of war or missing in action as a precondition for normalization. However, despite this nearly impossible demand, throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, American and Vietnamese policy makers participated in secret negotiations and cooperated on refugee resettlement.