A Letter From The Publisher, Apr. 14, 1975

It was almost exactly 25 years ago, in May 1950, that TIME ran its first cover story on the fighting in Viet Nam. The face on the magazine's cover then was that of the country's embattled Emperor Bao Dai; the issue was whether the U.S. should heed appeals for American assistance in the French struggle against Viet Minh insurgents. In the quarter-century since then, events have compelled cover treatment of the seemingly endless Indochina conflict no fewer than 64 times. Whether or not some sort of final resolution of war is at last at hand, the anonymous Vietnamese orphan on the...

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