It's not what you face, it's how you face it

The first day of May, 1975 found the President of the United States nursing a fierce political and diplomatic hangover. Scarcely 36 hours had passed since Gerald Ford excused himself from a White House stag dinner he was hosting for Jordan's visiting King Hussein in order to take a call from Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger. It had been twenty-five years, almost to the day, since Harry Truman first authorized U.S. military assistance to a French colonial army fighting Viet Minh insurgents in Indochina. Now it fell to Ford to extricate the U.S. from its ill-fated intervention. In doing so, he would illustrate an important lesson: leaders are judged less by the burdens they inherit than by the character they demonstrate addressing them.

Schlesinger informed Ford that the last Marines defending the U.S. embassy in Saigon had been successfully airlifted from its roof, even as the South Vietnamese capital was overrun by troops and tanks from the Communist North. For weeks Ford had officiated a running debate between Schlesinger and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. At stake was the fastest, safest extraction of several thousand Americans still in Vietnam – the Pentagon’s preference – while the State Department hoped as well to bring out as many as possible Vietnamese whose involvement with the United States marked them for slaughter by a vengeful North.

Ford, noted for his Trumanesque plain-speaking, had been forced to dissemble lest the South Vietnamese, awakening to their fate, turn on their erstwhile ally. “If they think we have given up, that will set them off,” he told skittish lawmakers. Little about the final American exit went according to plan. When enemy shells pitted Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut airport, Ford authorized an evacuation by helicopter instead of fixed-wing aircraft. A planned 75 sorties turned into 682. A three-hour operation wound up taking six times as long. A UPI photo of Americans scrambling to board a helicopter perched atop a Saigon roof came to symbolize the hasty withdrawal, an ignominious coda to America’s searing experience in Vietnam.

The 1,373 Americans and 5,593 Vietnamese and third-country nationals choppered to safety were dwarfed by 45,000 now stateless Vietnamese plucked from fishing boats and homemade rafts in the South China Sea by an American fleet hastily assembled at Ford’s orders. No one in the White House was tempted to post signs boasting Mission Accomplished, the president least of all. Outwardly self-possessed – recriminations were not his style – away from the cameras Ford felt deeply the humiliation of seeing his country “kicked out of Indochina.”

Pressed by reporters to justify the evacuation of so many South Vietnamese nationals, he snapped, “I did it because the people would have been killed and I’m proud of it.” Already branded as his country’s only unelected vice president and president, after the spring of 1975 Ford wore a scarlet letter as the first American president to lose a war. Yet what he would always remember as “the worst day of my presidency” was also, paradoxically, the first day of his presidency.

In the nine months since his somber East Room inaugural, Ford might be forgiven for thinking he was only sharing the nation’s highest office. From Richard Nixon he inherited a deteriorating economy, energy shortages, a fraying NATO alliance, an arms control stalemate with the Soviet Union, not to mention a Cabinet and White House staff whose first loyalty was to his predecessor.

“No one in the White House was tempted to post signs boasting Mission Accomplished.”

Most of all he inherited Nixon. According to Ford, a quarter of his time was consumed by Nixon’s tapes, papers, and legal prospects. The national news media was even more preoccupied with the former president. Indeed, it was in hopes of changing the subject that Ford had pardoned his predecessor for any illegalities clustered under the generic abuse of power called “Watergate.” Rarely has a president so misjudged public sentiment. Overnight Ford’s approval ratings dropped a record 22 points.

“He’s been run over by history,” declared George Reedy, Lyndon Johnson’s former press secretary. A Christmas week exposé of domestic surveillance activities and foreign assassination plots by the CIA reinforced the most painful of presidential lessons, the role of what British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan famously called “Events, dear boy” in determining the national agenda.

Worse lay ahead. Reflecting a popular desire to put Vietnam in the past, on the morning of May 1, 1975, the House of Representatives voted down a $327 million administration package providing for the evacuation and resettlement on U.S. soil of some seventy thousand refugees from a country that no longer existed.

Before lunch he communicated his disappointment – if not his rage – to the American people. Recalling earlier victims of foreign war and oppression who had been welcomed to these shores, Ford cited the Founders’ vision of the United States as a refuge from despots and divine right. His anger was still fresh when he met with GOP lawmakers on May 6. “It just burns me up,” Ford grimaced, lambasting “these great humanitarians” who wanted nothing more than to turn their backs on a national embarrassment. “We didn’t do it to the Hungarians,” said the president, his voice rising, “we didn’t do it to the Cubans and, damn it, we’re not going to do it now.”

That night he used a nationally televised press conference to turn up the heat. At a time when 8.9 percent unemployment sparked concerns about foreigners taking scarce jobs from U.S. workers, Ford explained to viewers that 60 percent of the refugees were children. It did wonders for his credibility when George Meany, the crusty, Democratic-leaning head of organized labor, echoed the president’s appeal. To do less than Ford proposed, rasped Meany, was to deny America’s heritage.

Ford knew it would take a lot more than bully pulpit moralizing to change minds in an emotionally bruised nation where 54 percent of those polled agreed with Senator George McGovern’s view that “The Vietnamese are better off in Vietnam.” In Arkansas resentful locals renamed Fort Chaffee, one of several military installations reconfigured to house refugees from southeast Asia, “Gooksville.” General Leonard Chapman, Jr., head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, didn’t help things by predicting an onslaught of Vietnamese “wearing loincloths and carrying spears.”

To combat such ugly emotions, Ford assembled a diverse coalition, including governors and mayors of both parties, the American Civil Liberties Union, and faith leaders – the Pope weighed in, as did the American Jewish Congress. Attorney General Ed Levi creatively interpreted existing laws, agreeing to “parole” 125,000 aliens. The administration entrusted resettlement issues to Julia Taft, a savvy 32-year-old White House Fellow who silenced California Governor Jerry Brown by threatening to go on TV and denounce Brown’s hostile stance toward the newcomers.

Against all odds, it worked. On May 23, 1975, Ford signed into law the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1975. The revised legislation earmarked $405 million to help settle an initial wave of approximately 130,000 Vietnamese refugees in the United States before the nation kicked off its Bicentennial year. By throwing himself heart, soul, and conscience into the refugee cause, Ford demonstrated a capacity for mercy reaching far beyond his disgraced predecessor and showed true leadership in how he dealt with one of the greatest challenges he’d been bequeathed.

Addressing a hundred of the newest Americans at a Bicentennial naturalization ceremony on Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello lawn, Ford said their presence made America “unique among nations,” and “Americans a new kind of people,” menaced only by conformity of thought, taste, or behavior. It was a message two centuries in the making.

“Recriminations were not his style.”