RICHARD NIXON: 1913-1994 : Nixon Remembered as Vietnam’s Savior in O.C.’s Little Saigon : Mourning: Immigrants hail former President as great anti-Communist U.S. leader who tried hardest to save their homeland.

Forget Watergate. Never mind about China and Russia.

In Little Saigon on Saturday, Vietnamese refugees mourned Richard Nixon as the American who they believe tried hardest to save their beloved homeland.

“He was the greatest President of the United States and one of the greatest leaders of the world,” said Dr. Co D.L. Pham, a physician who heads the Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce. “When Nixon resigned, all of us felt like we lost our President. We respected him and we adored him so much. We look at him like a savior.”

With Vietnamese music blaring over loudspeakers and the smells of homemade treats surrounding them, thousands strolled through the bustling Asian Gardens Mall on the afternoon after the death of the 37th President Friday night. Here, in the center of the largest Vietnamese community in America, Nixon was remembered with fondness and respect.

“The Vietnamese community will have some special day in his remembrance,” Tim Pham, 34, who fled to the United States in 1975 after the fall of Saigon, predicted as he sat in Asian Gardens eating lunch with his wife and two young children. “To my generation, he’s one of the most famous Presidents.”

In the mall’s courtyard cafe, people sipped iced coffee, slurped noodle soup and puffed on cigarettes. Amid the Vietnamese conversation at table after table came the word “Nixon.”

“We feel great sympathy for his death. It’s a great loss both for the state and for the Vietnamese as well,” said Phuonganh P. Nguyen, 28, a health counselor. “The leaders of the Congress, Democrat and Republican, they should follow the path that he set. He is a great one.”

Many of Nixon’s policies that enraged the American public are the very measures that make Vietnamese immigrants revere him.

Though he campaigned in 1968 on a promise to end U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, Nixon instead escalated the bombing of North Vietnam and expanded attacks into Cambodia and Laos. And he announced plans for a “Vietnamization” of the war by training and equipping the South Vietnamese to defend themselves.

“For (Vietnamese) Nixon is maybe the most familiar name of a politician,” Yen Do, editor of Nguoi Viet Daily News, the community’s largest newspaper, said. “He means hawk for Vietnamese. Everybody knows that he was a very, very strong anti-Communist. He was a real hero for the refugees because he was a strong anti-Communist and because he was a strong leader.

“We’re very, very sad that he passed away. We feel that we lost a friend, an important American statesman who understood Vietnam,” Do said. “This is the end of an era. The man who made several decisions about Vietnam and Vietnamese life has disappeared. Now there are no more American politicians who were involved deeply in Vietnam left.”

To these immigrants, Watergate is seen not as a disgraceful mistake but as an unfortunate distraction. Many blame the American public, not the former President, for making it a scandal, and believe that overreaction to the burglary at the Washington hotel-and-office complex and the events afterward interrupted Vietnam’s best chance for freedom.

“In this country, people care more about domestic policy of a President, but to us we look abroad. We appreciate foreign policy and we thought he was one of the best Presidents,” said Quynh N. Nguyen, who fought in the Vietnamese Navy and now is a computer programmer in Lakewood. “It’s regrettable that (Watergate) happened. Maybe it is one of the causes of our defeat in Vietnam, because we didn’t have his full support or attention because of the problem here.”

Even those who were babies during the war have fond feelings for Nixon.

“He was a friend to our country,” said Le Nguyen, 22, a student at Cal State Fullerton. “He was a very brave President. He tried his best to save our country, and I really appreciate the way he worked for us.

“I don’t know a lot of history about (Nixon). I was small, so I don’t know a lot about what was happening. All I know is he helped our country. That’s important to me.”

Dhanh Nguyen, 58, a former soldier in the Republic of Vietnam, said he cried when he learned of Nixon’s death Saturday morning on Orange County’s weekly Vietnamese radio program. Sitting at the Asian Gardens Mall, talking about Nixon, he nearly wept again.

“He killed Communists, that’s good,” Nguyen said through an interpreter. “I love Nixon. I respect Nixon.”