Seeking the Last Exit from Viet Nam

Phnom-Penh was about to fall. The fateful and almost certainly final siege of Saigon was about to begin. The most frustrating and tragic chapter in the history of U.S. foreign policy was, one way or another, ending. And a new American President, unelected at home and untested abroad, was about to shake off the shackles of past U.S. failures in Southeast Asia and place his own unique stamp on America's global diplomacy by fashioning new policies on which Americans could unite. Such was the setting and the advance billing for what Gerald Ford had promised would be "the most important speech I have ever made."

But when the President faced a joint session of Congress last week to address it and the nation in his first major foreign policy address, he, like too many U.S. Presidents before him, found himself entangled in the toils of Viet Nam. The fresh start, the global vision, the new priorities would all have to wait once more on the dire exigencies of Viet Nam. But there was indeed a new factor: Ford faced a predicament unprecedented in U.S. history. His first concern could not even be candidly expressed. It was the delicate and dangerous task of extricating 5,000* Americans from an allied nation, South Viet Nam, that seemed in imminent danger of being overrun by the Communist forces of North Viet Nam and the Viet Cong. Also, if it could be done, Ford wanted to evacuate some 200,000 South Vietnamese who have worked closely with the Americans during the war.

Emergency Aid. For Ford to admit that this was his prime worry would mean hastening the very collapse in Saigon that would put the Americans there in the jeopardy Ford feared. Even privately to order their evacuation could spread the same kind of panic that in recent weeks had seized millions of South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians in their headlong flight from northern provinces. Even to suggest that the government of President Nguyen Van Thieu would finally have to stand on its own without further injections of massive U.S. military aid would be to risk the outrage of South Vietnamese troops and increasingly anti-American civilians. That could produce what high U.S. officials termed "nightmarish possibilities." By this they meant a final Viet Nam horror of American troops' having to fight their way into South Viet Nam against the dual firepower of both the once friendly South Vietnamese soldiers and those of the North to rescue American civilians and shepherd them out.

Faced with that agonizing dilemma, Ford chose perhaps the only course open to him. He asked a suspicious and reluctant U.S. Congress to provide $722 million in emergency military aid to the Saigon government. He urged the Congress to clarify his now murky authority to use American troops in Viet Nam for "the limited purpose of protecting American lives by ensuring their evacuation, if this should become necessary." He also pleaded with Congress to amend existing law so that he could employ the same forces to help bring out the vulnerable South Vietnamese--to whom, he said, the U.S. has a "special obligation." And Ford set an urgent deadline of the end of this week for Congress to act.

Ford's public rationale for the military aid was that it "might enable the South Vietnamese to stem the onrushing aggression, to stabilize the military situation, permit the chance of a negotiated political settlement between the North and South Vietnamese, and, if the very worst were to happen, at least allow the orderly evacuation of Americans and endangered South Vietnamese to places of safety." Prudently, he did not promise that any of those things would happen if the funds were provided.

Privately, high Administration officials explained that Ford simply felt that he had to seek the military aid or else see the safety of the Americans imperiled. They were, in effect, hostages in South Viet Nam, and the aid money was meant as ransom to get them out. The requested funds were not to be ransom to the government of President Thieu but a stimulant to the confidence of the South Vietnamese that they might still hold out. As these Washington officials depicted it, if Ford had made his speech without asking for the $722 million in arms, Saigon and its people would have felt finally jettisoned by the U.S. with immediate, unpredictable and perhaps fearful consequences for the Americans still in Viet Nam.

Private Briefings. Ford's public plea and the accompanying private but official explanations in briefings raised some puzzling questions: Was Ford seeking the aid without either expecting Congress to approve it or assuming that it would do any practical good in "stabilizing" the sagging military situation in South Viet Nam? If so, did not the private briefings by his officials defeat his real purpose? Or was the combined effort, public and private, an astute attempt to pressure Congress into providing the money, or at least some of it? Or, despite his protestations to the contrary, was Ford setting up Congress to be the scapegoat if it did not provide the funds and South Viet Nam fell? Whatever the answers, the episode was one of the most extraordinary gambits in the tortuous history of a wretched and confusing war.

While an unusually tense and nervous Ford labored through the Indochina portion of his speech, members of Congress sat in a chilly near-silence. There were an embarrassing number of empty seats. At one point, a number of freshmen Democratic Congressmen committed the ultimate breach of legislative etiquette: they walked out on the President. One Congressman even booed.

Ford nevertheless had other things to say about Indochina. He rightly deplored the "vast human tragedy that has befallen our friends in Viet Nam and Cambodia." He insisted that this was no time "to point the finger of blame." Rather, "history is testing us." America should "put an end to self-inflicted wounds" and "start afresh" in a new spirit of cooperation between the President and Congress.

Yet, once again betraying his ambivalence toward his acknowledged concern for a new "national unity" on foreign policy and his protective impulse toward recent Presidents and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, whose reputation has been so endangered by recent setbacks in U.S. diplomacy, Ford promptly reverted to recriminations. Once again, however indirectly, he indicated his belief that a major share of the burden of blame for South Viet Nam's military debacle rested on the Democratic-controlled Congress.

Growing Controversy. The President traced the decline of Saigon's forces since the Paris peace accords of January 1973, which were negotiated by Kissinger. He said that South Viet Nam would have maintained its security if the terms of the agreement had not been "flagrantly violated" by Hanoi (but neglected to mention that they had been flouted by Saigon). Hanoi had been emboldened to do so, Ford suggested, because military aid to Saigon had been cut back by Congress; Ford also pointed out that the President's capacity even to threaten retaliatory military moves had been curtailed by a congressional ban in July 1973 against money for any further U.S. military intervention in Southeast Asia and by the War Powers Resolution passed over a Nixon veto in November 1973. The eventual result, according to Ford, was that 18 North Vietnamese divisions had been sent into the South. That, in turn, led President Thieu to order what Ford termed, in an understatement, a "poorly executed . . . strategic withdrawal" from the northern provinces. That withdrawal turned into a rout.

The President also fed the growing controversy over just what kind of commitments the U.S. had made to the South Vietnamese government as the peace settlement was arranged. He insisted that the accords were based on the premise that the U.S. would "provide adequate economic and military assistance to South Viet Nam." More vaguely, he said that another assumption was that "if necessary, the U.S. would help sustain the terms of the Paris accords." Ford claimed that there was a "universal consensus" in the U.S. behind "adequate material support" to South Viet Nam, ignoring the fact that the Democratic Party platform of 1972, at least, had called for an end to such military aid.

Ford did not mention a related charge last week by Democratic Senator Henry Jackson, a candidate for his party's 1976 presidential nomination. In a speech on the Senate floor, Jackson said that he had been "reliably informed that there exists between the Government of the United States and South Viet Nam secret agreements which envision fateful American decisions."

Jackson's charge touched off a furor in Washington. It not only portended a potentially explosive political debate for 1976 but also went to the heart of an apparently inevitable future historical argument over how South Viet Nam finally was lost. Ford and Kissinger seemed to be setting up a theory that they had been stabbed in the back by Congress in their efforts to keep Saigon alive. Jackson seemed to be saying that Nixon and Kissinger had made a secret commitment to President Thieu and had deceived Congress about it.

Private Letters. Asked for specifics, Jackson said that he trusted his source but did not know the details of precisely what Washington had promised Thieu when the U.S. was trying to coax the Saigon government into a settlement. Other sources close to Jackson claimed that the Washington Senator's source had told him that Nixon may have verbally pledged that the U.S. would respond with the use of its air-power if the North Vietnamese staged a full offensive.

In response to Jackson's speech, Presidential Press Secretary Ron Nessen conceded that Nixon had exchanged private letters with Thieu before the accords were signed. But Nessen insisted that Nixon had not committed the U.S. to anything that he and Kissinger had not also stated publicly. What Nixon wrote Thieu in January 1973, according to Nessen, was that the U.S. would "react vigorously" in the event of wholesale Communist cease-fire violations. Thieu seemed to confirm that, when he used the same terms in contending last week that the U.S. had "pledged that it would react vigorously if the North Vietnamese Communists resumed their aggression and brazenly violated the Paris agreement." Hanoi had done so, Thieu insisted, and the U.S. had violated its "pledge."

Tran Van Lam, South Viet Nam's former Foreign Minister, who had signed the Paris accords and is now President of the South Viet Nam Senate, told TIME Correspondent Roy Rowan last week of an earlier and similar letter from Nixon to Thieu. He said that he had kept a photocopy of a two-page Nixon letter dated November 1972. The essence, said Lam, was that Nixon told Thieu reassuringly, "Don't worry about North Viet Nam. It cannot launch an offensive in the South which we would not react to immediately and vigorously." At the time, Lam explained, "Haiphong harbor was mined, and you were bombing with your B-52s." He said that the term vigorously was, quite understandably, interpreted in that bristling military context.

The argument sent newsmen scurrying to re-examine just what had been said publicly by Nixon and Kissinger back in 1973 (see box). Clearly, Kissinger had repeatedly maintained that "there are no secret understandings." Just as certainly, the Paris peace accords "permitted" each side in the Viet Nam War to replace arms on a "piece-for-piece" basis, and Kissinger had publicly committed the U.S. to doing so for its South Viet Nam ally. Although vast amounts of military aid had been appropriated by Congress to Saigon since fiscal 1973 ($4.9 billion worth), the level of replacing each expended or lost military item had not been maintained.

Kissinger had also kept the possibility of renewed American air assaults open by refusing to entertain "hypothetical" questions about any such contingency plans. Even if there had been an understanding between Nixon and Thieu, Nessen argued last week, it had been rendered "moot" by the congressional limits placed since then on the presidential use of American military power.

That was true, but it did not resolve the question of whether Nixon and Kissinger had deceived Congress about private assurances to Thieu. Idaho Democratic Senator Frank Church backed Jackson, calling the confirmation of the Nixon letters "another cobblestone in a long road of deceit that has characterized our policy in Southeast Asia." Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield supported a full investigation by the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees. The new Foreign Relations Committee chairman, Democrat John Sparkman, asked the White House to turn over "all pertinent documents" on the subject. Indeed, there seemed little reason not to reveal any Nixon-Thieu letters now.

High Road. That controversy is minor compared to the potential divisiveness and discord latent in Ford's insistence in his speech on Congress's role in bringing about the present crisis and its responsibility to provide instant aid to Saigon. Of such stuff are "Who lost China?" poisons brewed in the body politic, even if Ford, as he vowed, would not be the Republican to cast blame.

Ford's approach was not what his closest domestic advisers, Bob Hartmann, Donald Rumsfeld and John Marsh, had argued for or anticipated. Indeed, almost up until the day of the speech, Ford's White House staff appeared confident that the President would take the high road this time, extend a conciliatory hand toward Congress, and in the process demonstrate his own command of foreign policy. They underestimated Ford's vulnerability to the last-minute persuasion of Henry Kissinger.

It was Kissinger, as it turned out, who worked over the draft of the speech with Ford until 1:30 a.m. on the day it was delivered. Until then, the President had not even decided whether he would ask for any further military aid for South Viet Nam. Ford finally produced a speech that sounded as though it had been written by Kissinger--and probably was. For it is Kissinger who has been most pessimistic about the consequences for America's position in the world if South Viet Nam fell ignominiously. And Kissinger's reputation and achievement in the Paris accords is in jeopardy in Indochina.

Kissinger's hand was even apparent in the key portions of Ford's address that dealt with places outside the crisis area of Indochina, where he talked about the need "to recover our balance." Ford showed more emotion, and drew his first spurts of Republican applause, on three issues known to be especially bothersome to the Secretary of State. In each case, Ford was protesting what he considered encroachments by the Democratic Congresses of recent years on Executive functions. They were:

AID TO TURKEY. Ford angrily deplored the congressional cutoff of aid to Turkey after that nation had invaded the Greek-held portion of Cyprus. He said that he understood how Congress had laudably hoped to pressure Turkey into helping to settle that dispute, but he called the termination of aid "an unprecedented act against a friend" and noted that it had not been helpful in getting negotiations under way. Ford ignored, however, the fact that the Turkish invasion may have violated U.S. laws requiring an end to aid for any nation, even a NATO ally like Turkey, that is adjudged a military aggressor against another country.

SOVIET TRADE. Ford was similarly acerbic in protesting congressional insistence that improved trade relations with the Soviet Union must be conditioned upon greater freedom of emigration. He said that this restriction had been "self-defeating." Although he did not note that it too had been championed by his potential 1976 rival, Senator Jackson, he said that it had both "harmed" relations with the Russians and resulted in a lower level of Jewish emigration. Western Europe and Japan, moreover, had stepped into the breach to supply trade credits to Moscow, to a total of $8 billion. The result, according to Ford, was that Americans had lost jobs and business that they otherwise could have had.

INVESTIGATING THE CIA. Ford drew his best applause with an assault upon the "sensationalized public debate over legitimate intelligence activities," meaning press and congressional inquiries into alleged abuses of CIA authority at home and abroad. He said that he would cooperate in any "responsible" review of the CIA so long as "vital information" was protected, but again charged that the investigation "ties our hands" and threatens to cripple "a vital national institution."

Ford's survey of the rest of the world was disappointing in its predictableness, and was delivered in a manner that at times suggested he did not have a firm grasp of what he was talking about. Instead of a thorough reassessment of U.S. foreign policy, which he had promised, Ford pretty much reaffirmed long-held U.S. positions. As expected, he declared that the U.S.'s difficulties in Indochina did not mean that the U.S. had been rendered impotent elsewhere. "Let no potential adversary believe that our difficulties or our debates mean a slackening of our national will," he warned. "We will stand by our friends. We will honor our commitments. We will uphold our country's principles." Although those terse sentences seemed pointedly designed as applause lines, they drew little.

While generally devoid of new initiatives or concepts, Ford's speech did announce some new diplomatic moves. He said that he intended to meet with the leaders of Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Indonesia, as well as other Asian nations, to reassure them personally that the events in Indochina would not affect America's resolve to retain close ties with them. He revealed that he plans to go to Peking "later this year." As for the breakdown of Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East, Ford repeated the willingness of the U.S. to take the issues to a Geneva conference or to pursue any other avenues that the Arabs and Israelis ask the U.S. to undertake.

But clearly, it was the discouraging and threatening events in Viet Nam and Cambodia that preoccupied the President. Realistically, he sought no new help for the Phnom-Penh government, although he could not resist chiding Congress for its recent reluctance to provide more aid. He noted dryly that he had requested "food and ammunition for the brave Cambodians" in January, and that "as of this evening, it may be too late." Indeed it was. Two days later, U.S. Ambassador John Gunther Dean closed the U.S. embassy in Phnom-Penh, and he and his small remaining staff were evacuated by U.S. Marine helicopters from the aircraft carriers Okinawa and Hancock. It was the somber, classic ritual that marks the end of lost cities and lost wars.

Enough Spent. Ford did ask for $250 million in emergency humanitarian and economic aid to relieve the suffering in South Viet Nam--a request that the Congress will readily grant. Congress is also likely to grant Ford the explicit authorization he requested to use troops, if necessary, to aid in an evacuation from South Viet Nam.

But, barring a sharp turnabout in congressional opinion this week, there seemed to be almost no chance for more military funds for Saigon. "I think the American people and the U.S. Congress figure that $150 billion under five Presidents is enough to spend in that part of the world," said Mike Mansfield in typical understatement. Democratic Senator John L. McClellan, a longtime Viet Nam hawk whose Appropriations Committee would have to approve the military aid request, expressed a prevailing congressional view: "I think it's too late to do any good. Further military aid could merely prolong the conflict and perhaps postpone briefly the inevitable --a Communist victory, a complete takeover."

Perhaps the only thing that could alter such harsh and final judgments is evidence from Saigon that the worst fears of the Administration are justified, that the aid is indeed the price and ransom of bringing the Americans out of there safely.

Actually, the initial street reaction in Saigon was that U.S. military aid was on the way. That was probably due to the fact that the Saigon government praised the speech as "encouraging" and a "reaffirmation" of continued American support. More sophisticated Vietnamese were skeptical. Ford, observed one doctor, really meant that "we're on our own. April 19, and then it's over." Commented Saigon's Chinh Luan newspaper: "This speech came to South Viet Nam just as a final touch of a magician seeking to give a few more minutes of life to a dying patient."

Arms List. Yet, if the plight of the Americans was seen to be grave, could not Congress vote for the aid funds as a last gesture, believing that the money would provide a psychological lift but not actually be spent? Perhaps, but the weariness with Viet Nam, the suspicion of the Executive, runs deep in Congress. Moreover, while not optimistic about the practical impact of shoring up the Saigon forces, Pentagon experts contend that shipment of military supplies could be hastened to reach Saigon quickly. There is still some $175 million worth of equipment in the pipeline, but it is fully contracted and much of it is en route; it would be augmented by any new funding. The President's fact-finding general, Army Chief of Staff Frederick Weyand, provided a detailed list of arms he felt that Saigon could well utilize, and they would be rapidly sent if Congress approved. As for U.S. public opinion, however, the early reaction tabulated by the White House was that telegrams were running better than 2 to 1 against Ford's appeal for such aid to Saigon. Again, barring a marked shift in the gravity of the threat to Americans in Viet Nam as perceived in the U.S., it did not seem likely there would be much urging from congressional constituents to support Ford's request.

Unfortunately, the net impact of Ford's speech, as well as the controversy over earlier commitments, was to maintain the divisive domestic rupture over Viet Nam rather than to bridge it. The fissure between the Legislative and Executive branches of Government seemed to have widened rather than narrowed; the possibility for further bitterness as events run their melancholy course increased rather than lessened.

Responding as he felt he had to, Ford has nonetheless bobbled his first grand opportunity to lead the nation out of its concentration on a lost cause and to heal the wounds of domestic partisanship over Viet Nam. To be sure, he could not with a mere speech assuage the agony or the guilt that many Americans feel when they think of the lost and ruined lives, or watch the suffering of the war victims on their television screens. The worry over what still lies ahead for those in Indochina, both Americans and those to whom the U.S. owes a moral debt of gratitude, is real enough. But something more could properly have been expected of a new President who had no need to feel fettered by the mistakes and the policies of the past.

* Although the President cited 6,000 as the number of Americans in South Viet Nam, 1,000 have recently left.

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