7

The Agony of Peace

Predictably, many leading Democrats lambasted Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon as rank corruption. Leading the charge was Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, who painted the pardon as an unforgivable “betrayal of the public trust.”¹ Politically speaking, however, the pardon was a gift to the Democratic Party. After the Democrats swept the midterm election in 1974, Republicans focused their ire on Gerald Ford. House Minority Leader John Rhodes of Ohio, for example, blamed the pardon for the November rout.² Senator Barry Goldwater had warned Ford about the deleterious consequences of handing Nixon a “Get Out of Jail Free” pass. “It doesn’t make any sense,” Goldwater had told Ford on September 8, insisting that Nixon go to trial. “He may be clear in your eyes, but he’s not clear in mine.”³

With the midterm election over, the Republican Right, led by Goldwater, did everything it could to distance itself from Ford. Conservatives did not want the “accidental president” to be their party’s candidate in 1976. Immediately following the election, Ronald Reagan, flush with ambition, publicly distanced himself from Ford in his weekly newspaper column and radio address. It was a signal of things to come. “When I interviewed Reagan in the fall of 1974,” the journalist Lou Cannon recalled, “he said nothing positive about Ford and claimed it was too early to judge his administration.” ⁴ Conservatives now saw Ford as the quasi-enemy.

Among the tactics President Ford picked up from his predecessor was Nixon’s way of dealing with rancor at home: to go abroad. So with the U.S. economy still troubled in late November 1974, and the midterm election a GOP disaster, Ford left on a tour of Asian nations, including Japan (the first time ever for a U.S. president) and South Korea. His last stop was Vladivostok, the Soviet Union’s Asiatic port city, where he was to meet with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Ford arrived for a round of serious talks, but was delighted to find that the friendly Brezhnev shared his good-natured sense of humor. “Both were rugged outdoor men of action,” recalled Bill Hyland, an American delegate. “They loved sports and good stories, and in other times or in other places they may have become genuinely friendly.”⁵

The purpose of the meeting was no laughing matter: to consider extending the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I) agreement. Many Cold War hard-liners, Democrats as well as Republicans, opposed even exploring a SALT II treaty on the grounds that the United States had everything to lose, having developed very different weapons systems from the Soviet Union’s arsenal. The presumption held that a new arms-limitation treaty would unfairly restrain the U.S. missile program, which focused on precisely targeted light warheads, while likely leaving the USSR its full complement of much heavier warheads on larger missiles. The whole idea of détente, the Cold War thaw initiated by Nixon and Kissinger in 1972, had grown unpopular with many in Congress, who felt that the improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations had been gained at the cost of a naïve accommodation to the Communists’ underlying expansionist aims.

When he arrived in Vladivostok, Gerald Ford may have been new to the execution of foreign policy, though not strictly speaking to the practice of diplomacy. Over his quarter century in the House he’d engaged in any number of tough negotiations, with both allies and opponents at least as intransigent as any foreign leader. Although Brezhnev was more vehement and intractable than most, Ford nonetheless held firm regarding the equation for balancing the two nations’ missile capabilities. The U.S.-backed formula did not lay the “symmetrical” groundwork Kissinger had favored but instead held the Soviets to an even tighter definition of “equality” in number of weapons, regardless of their size or type. Yet, in the end, the bargaining session was successful, and the Soviets were more accommodating than Ford had imagined.

Ford felt pleased and optimistic about leaving Vladivostok with a framework for a SALT II treaty. “The American people would be delighted to hear that my meeting with Brezhnev had gone so well,” he recalled thinking at the time, “and Congress, with some exceptions, would probably endorse the new accord.”⁶ The president was proved wrong on both counts. Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a Cold War hawk, led a crusade to derail SALT II, believing the Vladivostok framework was riddled with holes. Chief among Jackson’s concerns was that the Kremlin wasn’t including the Backfire bomber in the deal, and that the United States needed to take the new Tomahawk air-launched cruise missiles off the table. The deficiencies with SALT II were, in the words of Walter Isaacson, “the devils that resided in its unfinished details.”⁷ Many Americans also resented that, as the U.S. economy sputtered, their chief executive left his watch to share vodka toasts with the country’s sworn adversary as well as dubious allies such as the Japanese, whose inexpensive imports were making aggressive inroads into the American auto market. “The criticism of détente, by both Jackson and Reagan, was done for political reasons,” Kissinger later complained. “And that upsets me. It meant we couldn’t do what we should have done on arms control.”⁸

But America’s economic woes were very real. That December, when the U.S. unemployment rate reached 6.5 percent, Ford had no choice but to invoke the dreaded word “recession” and to admit that nearly every major economic indicator was headed in the wrong direction. Ever mindful of, if not driven by, public opinion, the president immediately dedicated himself to tending to the economy first and foremost, and would keep it his administration’s priority. Although many began to wonder whether Ford had the mettle to tackle the nation’s complex financial problems, he was actually quite up to the task. According to the historian John Robert Greene, Ford, perhaps due to his long service on the House Appropriations Committee, “understood the intricacies of economics and economics policy better than any president of the twentieth century.”⁹

Unfortunately, Ford’s grasp of the situation by January 1975 would directly contradict his understanding of it just three months earlier. Rather than go through with the $5 billion tax hike he had announced in October, Ford unveiled a new economic strategy centered around cutting taxes for most individuals and businesses while levying a windfall tax on oil refineries—which had been profiting enormously from the very shortages strangling the rest of the economy. Conservatives, including Treasury Secretary Simon, bristled at the president’s turn from the battle against inflation to combat the recession on another front. By their thinking, a recession would right itself eventually, whereas inflation opened a gaping wound that would bleed the life out of any economy if left unstanched. Ford chose the counsel of more moderate advisers such as Bill Seidman and Alan Greenspan, who maintained that sophisticated methods to curb inflation should be applied later, because it was the recession that was doing the most immediate harm to the country.

Stung by accusations from all sides that he had flip-flopped on how best to address the nation’s economic crisis, President Ford learned fast just how lonely the middle ground can be. Already decried by conservatives for its potential to send the federal budget deficit and interest rates soaring, the “reasonable” tax cut Ford had proposed ballooned over eleven weeks of debate in Congress from $16 billion to $24.8 billion.¹⁰ Even then, most Democrats weren’t satisfied with the size of the tax cuts—nor with Ford’s accompanying proposal to hold the line on any new federal spending programs other than energy projects. Yet there was more to the legislative impasse than that. In the early months of 1975, the overwhelmingly Democratic Ninety-fourth Congress worked against not only the president as a Republican but also the very prerogatives of the executive branch that Richard Nixon had lately exploited. In any case, most congressional Democrats saw no reason to cooperate with Gerald Ford: they controlled the Senate by 61 to 39 and the House by 291 to 144. So, as dead set against government expansion as he had been through his entire career, Ford found himself with no choice but to sign an economic relief package festooned with new federal programs aimed at providing just that by creating new jobs.

As was his wont, Ford responded to his opponents’ challenge by devising a game plan to win them over toward his goals. He had picked up some extra yardage late in 1974 by sacking more Nixon holdovers, most notably in the Watergate-roiled Justice Department, which had been headed by four different attorneys general in less than two and a half years. When the controversy-prone William B. Saxbe became the first member of Ford’s cabinet to resign, on December 18, 1974, the president saw a chance to make a point with his choice of replacement.

More than any other arm of the executive branch, the Department of Justice had been politicized top to bottom by previous administrations, culminating with Nixon’s use of it as an extension of his reelection campaign. On principle (as well as with an eye toward appeasing Congress), Ford determined to draw his new attorney general from outside the political, or even public, arena. Chief of Staff Rumsfeld suggested the legal scholar Edward H. Levi, the president of the University of Chicago. Ford found Levi’s credentials impressive and his standing as a progressive with a predilection for law and order ideal. At first the president had a hard time securing support for the nomination from right-leaning senators who assumed that, coming from academia, Levi must be a liberal. Ford’s commitment to depoliticizing the justice system didn’t end with Levi’s confirmation, however. His administration would continually ignore the usual partisan priorities in filling federal judgeships.

“Rather than imposing ideological considerations or its own legal-policy goals,” explained the scholar David M. O’Brien, “Ford’s Department of Justice sought high-caliber nominees.”¹¹ However well intended, the gambit would contribute greatly to the president’s loss of backing within his own party. Reagan administration official Stephen Markman would articulate the GOP view years later: “The weakness of the Ford Administration may be seen in the statistic that a record 21 percent of its district court appointments went to members of the opposing party.”¹²

Of course, the Democrats’ sweeping gains in the 1974 congressional elections may have had something to do with Ford’s new embrace of nonpartisanship. The Republicans’ staggering losses left the president little choice but to aggressively appease the opposition if he wanted to get anything done. And the only thing that would appease them was an end to the Vietnam War.

To that point, of course, the United States had never lost a war, and many Americans would rather have been damned than see it lose this one in Southeast Asia. But not losing didn’t necessarily require winning—or even ending the conflict. Officially, the Korean conflict still went on, albeit locked in the stalemate mandated by the compromise that suspended the fighting in 1953. The Paris Peace Talks had left the Vietnam War similarly unresolved. The negotiations’ much-heralded peace agreement rested on the cessation of offensives by North Vietnam along with the withdrawal of all U.S. combatants. While the Paris accords spelled out the requisite completeness of the latter, however, they failed to address the consequences should the North Vietnamese resume aggression against the South. According to the agreement worked out in January 1973, henceforth the United States could protect its ally only through continuing financial aid.

North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho and U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger were jointly awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to forge the Paris accords. Perhaps out of conscience, Le Duc Tho declined his share in the prize. Peace, it turned out, was not his goal. He had correctly calculated that once the Americans were out of Vietnam, they would have little stomach for returning, no matter what. Indeed, the U.S. Congress made no secret of that fact, reducing aid to South Vietnam by half for 1973 and then by half again for the year after. In August 1974, however, the situation seemed susceptible to change as the supposedly hawkish Gerald Ford took over the presidency. He even lived up to the image by closing his very first day in the White House by meeting with Graham Martin, the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam. Hanoi would be watching, as Ford well knew.

Hanoi was also watching, however, when the Democrats triumphed in that November’s congressional elections. Many of them had won by campaigning against everything Richard Nixon had stood for, including “peace with honor” in Vietnam. And even before they were seated, ever more moderates and even some conservatives began joining the newly elected liberals in calling for an end to the whole bloody mess in Southeast Asia. This conflict, the longest war in American history, had also grown into its most expensive, having cost some $150 billion by 1974. With so little return, it was no wonder the citizenry elected so many representatives pledged to cutting the nation’s losses by just pulling out.

That December, the outgoing Ninety-third Congress overwhelmingly approved a Foreign Assistance Act that reduced the appropriation for South Vietnam. Ford held out hope that the cuts might be restored in a supplemental grant, as congressional leaders promised to consider later, if need be. The North Vietnamese, however, proved less inclined to wait. Having poked at South Vietnam’s perimeter for more than a year in contravention of the Paris accords, the Communists launched a major New Year offensive against America’s ally. On January 6, 1975, North Vietnamese forces captured the Southern provincial capital of Phuoc Binh. According to Henry Kissinger, “Phuoc Binh was the test case. If the United States reacted, there was still a chance for Hanoi to withdraw from the brink.”¹³ But the United States did nothing.

Gerald Ford’s natural inclination was to protect the South Vietnamese, at the very least by sending aid. “With adequate United States military assistance, they can hold their own,” he proclaimed.¹⁴ Whether or not that was true, by law Ford could do very little to prove his point. Since the end of World War II, Congress had seen how presidents could let just such military assistance lead into major wars, declared or otherwise. By the time Ford sat in the Oval Office, the legislature had the chief executive on a much shorter leash. As passed by Congress over Nixon’s veto in November 1973, the War Powers Act held the president’s authority to commit U.S. troops to combat abroad without congressional approval for only sixty days. Thus, despite the increasingly aggressive Communist pressure on South Vietnam in January 1975, Ford could do little but keep negotiating—and begging for aid money from Congress.

Hanoi’s leaders took full advantage of Ford’s predicament. Emboldened by the political restraints on the U.S. president, they continued stepping up military action on the ground. They grew so self-assured, in fact, that North Vietnamese premier Pham Van Dong sneered that “even if we offered the Americans a bribe to intervene again, they would not accept it.”¹⁵ Ignoring every dictate of the Paris Peace Accords, the Communist leaders in Hanoi formulated plans to take Saigon in 1976, perhaps 1977. They would beat both deadlines.

Under the North’s continuing and concerted attacks, the South Vietnamese began withdrawing into Saigon, their own capital, early in 1975. The unruliness of their retreat only doomed their fortunes faster. Soldiers and civilians alike abandoned their country’s northern provinces in panic, needlessly ceding strategic strongholds and leaving behind valuable matériel. The wasteful haste came, of course, from fear—but not just of the approaching North Vietnamese troops. The terror also sprang from the sudden absence of American support. The Communists, after all, had been in the South Vietnamese countryside for a generation. Now for the first time in all those years, U.S. help was not forthcoming. Although South Vietnam’s leaders kept expecting their superpower ally to intervene again, their people seemed to know better, and the resulting panic devolved into utter chaos.

According to Robert Hartmann, Ford had considered the situation in South Vietnam hopeless since 1967, when President Johnson had restricted bombing of the North, effectively ensuring that the United States would wage only a large-scale war—not an all-out one.¹⁶ As commander in chief, Ford maintained that even though the war was South Vietnam’s to win or lose, the United States remained responsible for its longtime ally’s ability to put up a fight for its freedom. He said so often, with Congress generally ignoring him and South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu hanging on his every word. Thieu felt certain that Ford’s steady rhetoric held the promise of renewed American intervention. He believed he had good reason to think so: a written promise from Ford’s predecessor. In secret correspondence, most notably in the autumn of 1972 during the Paris Peace Talks, Nixon had gone out of his way to assure Thieu that he could sign the forthcoming accords with the utmost confidence that the U.S. government would stand by him should the peace collapse. Like a car salesman trying to clinch a deal on a lemon, Nixon had repeated these assurances to his skittish client again and again. On January 17, 1973, for instance, Nixon sent Thieu another secret letter in which he stated unequivocally, “First, we recognize your Government as the sole legitimate Government of South Vietnam; Secondly, we do not recognize the right of foreign troops to remain on South Vietnamese soil; Thirdly, the U.S. will react vigorously to violations of the Agreement.”¹⁷

The same pledges did not, of course, appear in the Paris Peace Accords. The problem with the Nixon letters, which could have been seen to constitute a corollary to the accords—and, to Thieu’s mind, even to supersede the agreement—was that no one in either Congress or the State Department had ever seen them, which nullified their serving as official instruments of U.S. diplomacy. Nonetheless, Thieu kept Nixon’s secret letters in a bundle in his bedroom dresser drawer.¹⁸ To him, they guaranteed South Vietnam’s continued independence despite the imminent threat form the North. But Richard Nixon was back stewing in Southern California for good, leaving it largely up to Gerald Ford to determine just exactly what the correspondence meant.

When the Nixon letters’ existence became known early in April 1975, courtesy of Thieu’s administration, Ford claimed that he had not yet read them all. It was not, of course, the first time he had chosen to remain ignorant of the specifics of something Nixon had hatched, so as not to have to lie about it. Ford took the position that the letters must have only reiterated the tenets of the Paris Peace Accords, although Nixon’s promises actually went much further in committing the United States to intervene in the event of proscribed Communist aggression. Various members of Congress spoke out immediately to denounce and discredit the letters, partly to protect their new prerogatives under the War Powers Act. No matter how Ford may have felt personally about America’s obligation to South Vietnam, he made it perfectly clear that his White House wasn’t duty bound to act in line with another of Nixon’s under-the-table schemes.

Through the winter of 1974–75, Ford made one last push to drum up financial support for South Vietnam via public appearances and appeals to Congress. The effort proved fruitless. Among his top advisers only Kissinger kept pressing for continuing aid to the South Vietnamese, and the feeling in some quarters was that Kissinger was only trying to protect his reputation by shifting the blame for the failed peace onto Congress. No one would have put it past him, but the secretary of state wasn’t alone in his multilayered motivations. Ford surely waged his campaign for aid to South Vietnam knowing full well that success would mean the United States would continue to prop up Thieu’s government with supplies, and perhaps even more American lives—and that the Vietnam War would go on. And with that, Ford’s presidency would be sucked all the way into the quagmire that had maimed both the Johnson and the Nixon administrations. But knowing that Congress wouldn’t budge, Ford could speak out on behalf of South Vietnam, preserving America’s (as well as his own) honor and still not lengthen the war. Had Congress been more compliant, one can only wonder whether Ford would have taken the same course.

As it was, in March the North Vietnamese took control of fifteen more Southern provinces, including Darlac, Pleiku, and Kontum. “My guess,” remarked one Western diplomat, “is that a lot of Communist generals are wondering what they did right for a change.”¹⁹ Whatever that was, unless the situation changed immediately, nothing would stop their advance.

To see what could, Ford dispatched a fact-finding delegation to Saigon. Its leader, U.S. Army chief of staff General Frederick C. Weyand, reported on April 5 that it would cost roughly $722 million just to secure a defense perimeter around Saigon. In other words, three-quarters of a billion dollars would buy the United States enough time to ensure the safe exit of its citizens from its doomed Indochinese ally.

Official White House photographer David Hume Kennerly, who had accompanied the delegation to Saigon, returned with a more candid report to the president. “I don’t care what the generals tell you,” Kennerly blurted with the bluntness Ford valued him for. “They’re bullshitting you if they say that Vietnam has got more than three or four weeks left. There’s no question about it. It’s just not gonna last.”²⁰

Ford no longer had any reason to believe otherwise. On April 21, President Thieu resigned his office, made a speech accusing the United States of selling South Vietnam out to the Communists, and fled to Switzerland.²¹ Ford duly requested the $722 million from Congress to protect Saigon’s new caretaker government, but he had already decided what to do regarding Vietnam. And once Gerald Ford made a decision, he acted on it. In an April 23 speech before six thousand Tulane University students jammed into the basketball field house, he declared: “Today, America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned.”²²

The Tulane students cheered wildly as if the home team had just won a game. The Vietnam War was “finished.” The president had said so. The paroxysms of whooping were so sustained it took even Ford by surprise. The bleachers rocked.²³ The Associated Press fired off a bulletin announcing that an era of American history had ended. The very same day, a Gallup poll showed that 78 percent of the American public opposed further U.S. aid to support South Vietnam, with only 17 percent favoring the outlay and 5 percent expressing no opinion.²⁴ The war was indeed already over as far as most of the American people were concerned. What made Ford’s April 23 speech significant was its revelation that their commander in chief finally agreed. For the first time in decades, the public and their president were on the same wavelength on Vietnam.

When the applause at last died down in New Orleans, Ford continued on a more somber but equally pragmatic note. “We are, of course, saddened indeed by the events in Indochina. Events, tragic as they are, [that] portend neither the end of the world nor of America’s leadership in the world.”²⁵

How Jerry Ford had changed. With his speech at Tulane, the erstwhile internationalist made it clear that he would not put the United States through any more pain for the sake of South Vietnam. What’s more, the once-dependable Cold War hawk declared there was no shame in walking off without a victory, at least from this long and ugly war. In truth, Ford’s acceptance of the inevitable collapse of two longtime U.S. allies—for Cambodia was falling to the Communists that spring as well—proved a defining moment for both his administration and his character. “I am determined as a president can be to seek national rediscovery of the belief in ourselves,” he explained. “I ask that we stop fighting the battles and the recriminations of the past. I ask that we look now at what is right with America.”²⁶

It was the same desire for renewal that had prompted Ford to pardon Richard Nixon. Like that risky decision, his move to pull America out of Vietnam grew from his expedient belief in facing the inevitable sooner rather than later. In both instances, Ford opted to make the hard choices fast. After the slow agonies that Watergate and Vietnam had put the nation through, seizing the first opportunities to move on from them just seemed the sensible thing to do.

At the same time, Ford’s remarks at Tulane were deemed a slap at Henry Kissinger, who had not been informed beforehand that the president was about to declare the war “finished.” Naturally, the secretary of state was less than pleased to be blindsided by Ford’s April 23 proclamation, even if he did understand the predicament of this “strong, honorable and genuinely decent man,” as he would describe Gerald Ford in his memoirs.²⁷ Although Kissinger had long spearheaded the nation’s unsuccessful diplomatic efforts to end the war less than a month before, on March 27, he had in effect given the president his blessing to abandon the war. Nearly three decades later Kissinger would recall telling Ford at that White House meeting, “Maybe you must put Vietnam behind you and not tear the country apart again.”²⁸ Kissinger, in other words, agreed that the war was over. What he objected to was being blackballed from the decision-making process, which culminated in New Orleans. “The line about the war being finished—Henry didn’t like that sentence,” Ford later noted. “I knew he wanted to keep fighting for more aid and that he blamed Congress. And I did, too. But having been up there on the Hill for twenty-five years, I just didn’t think it would be all that productive to give them unshirted hell. That’s where Henry and I disagreed. And I was right. I understood the system better.”²⁹

Suddenly, all that remained of America’s longest and most divisive military conflict was the urgent need to evacuate the approximately six thousand U.S. citizens still in South Vietnam—a number that swelled by sixfold when the Americans’ Vietnamese wives, children, and in-laws wanted out, too. President Ford was nearly as concerned for the safety of the tens of thousands of South Vietnamese who had openly sided with the United States, and even for those who just pretended to as the Communists closed on the gates of the capital city. Ever forgiving, Ford pledged not to turn anyone away. Instead, he approved a massive exodus program that flew some forty thousand Americans and Vietnamese out from the Saigon airport. After that, enemy fire on the outgoing planes, although it inflicted no casualties, forced the evacuation to switch to helicopters shuttling off the roof of the U.S. embassy to a waiting fleet of navy ships massed off the coast. Some 1,737 Americans and 5,680 Vietnamese were choppered off the embassy roof in that chaotic last week of April 1975, during which the U.S. Navy ships rescued another thirty-two thousand Vietnamese who had fled the Communists by sea in tiny boats.

Throughout the harrowing mass escape, Ford held firm to his promise that all the South Vietnamese who managed to get out could find a new home in the United States. Not all of his countrymen shared that magnanimous view, but Ford wouldn’t budge. As he saw it, embracing the democratically inclined citizens of Vietnam was the least America could do for these allies. Indeed, he welcomed some of the refugees to San Francisco personally. “As the clock ran down on resistance in Saigon,” Robert Hartmann wrote later, “I watched the President move calmly and confidently through the evacuation minefield … . When the lives of multitudes and the international image of America hung in the balance, Ford acted as if he’d been President all of his life.”³⁰

Declassified documents from this period give factual credence to Hartmann’s claim. As noted in late March 1975, President Ford had sent General Weyand to Saigon to assess the situation and bring back a full report with recommendations. The most compelling product of the Weyand mission came from Kenneth M. Quinn, a National Security Council adviser on East Asia who, on April 5, wrote Kissinger a private ten-page memorandum so bleak it stands as the grimmest and most accurate assessment by the Ford administration of America’s final weeks in South Vietnam. The South Vietnamese forces “may be totally defeated in as little as three weeks,” Quinn noted. “President Thieu is discredited and almost completely ineffective. He can no longer provide the leadership necessary to rally the country. The morale of the army and civilian population is critically low and bordering on national despair. Fear of the communists is widespread, and people from all walks of life are now searching for a way to flee the country. Panic is seemingly just below the surface, and an imminent attack on Saigon could lose it [for us].”³¹

Just five days after the Quinn report, Ford went hat in hand before a joint session of Congress to request $722 million in emergency military aid plus $250 million for economic and humanitarian assistance for the people of South Vietnam. “The options before us are few, and the time is short,” the president pleaded. “We cannot … abandon our friends.” The Senate Armed Services Committee disagreed, and on April 17 rejected the appeal, causing the genial Ford to pound his fist and exclaim, “Those bastards.” Meanwhile, Kissinger, in an April 24 State Department meeting, was reduced to denouncing those “treacherous bastards in France” who seemed hell-bent on celebrating America’s misadventure in Southeast Asia. What the Ford Library’s documents show, however, is that neither the president nor Kissinger ever really thought Congress would appropriate more money; the nearly billion-dollar request was largely a ruse to buy more time to plan for the imminent evacuation of Saigon and to pin Congress with the historical blame for losing Vietnam.

Another debate was shaping up behind closed doors. On the same day the Senate committee rejected Ford’s proposal, Kissinger cabled Ambassador Martin: “We have just completed an interagency review of the State of Play in South Vietnam. You should know that at the emergency White House meeting today there was almost no support for the evacuation of Vietnamese or for the use of American force to help protect any evacuation. The sentiment of our military, DOD and CIA colleagues was to get out fast and now.”³² But the declassified record also shows that the commander in chief insisted that the United States had a moral and humanitarian obligation to airlift out as many South Vietnamese as possible and bring them to America. At Ford’s behest, Kissinger cabled Martin on April 24. “We are amazed at the small number of Vietnamese being evacuated, considering the substantial amount of aircraft available,” he wrote. “I know you feel, as we do, a heavy moral obligation to evacuate as many deserving Vietnamese as possible, and I urge you to redouble your efforts in that regard. The President expects these instructions to be carried out fully and within the time schedule he has set out. For his part, he plans to call the NSC together this afternoon to lay down the law.”³³

Some of the most compelling reading in the Ford Library on the final days of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam comes from the more than one hundred transcribed pages of authorized National Security Agency intercepts of helicopter radio messages sent during the frantic evacuation of the U.S. embassy in Saigon on April 29, 1975. Operation Frequent Wind, as the rescue mission was dubbed, takes on a dramatic new immediacy in the words of the pilots dodging mortar fire and gas bombs to save U.S. embassy staff members before attempting to rescue any South Vietnamese. “Reports are that there are 200 Americans left to evacuate,” an intercept reads. “Gunners Six to GSF Commander. Bring personnel up through the building. Do not let them [the South Vietnamese] follow too closely. Use Mace if necessary, but do not fire on them.”³⁴ Despite firefights around the building, Ambassador Martin, the other remaining Americans, and the luckiest South Vietnamese nationals climbed the ladder and made it out safely to the United States. “The ladder was seen by everybody else as the symbol of our failure in Vietnam,” Ford later recalled. “But, being an optimist, I saw it as a symbol of freedom. Fred and Frank Meijer, both friends, eventually helped me bring that ladder back to the United States. They stood up against Henry [Kissinger] on that one, and won.”³⁵

The owners of a chain of supercenters in Michigan would hardly seem a match for Henry Kissinger in a debate over the Vietnam War, but at the 1995 board meeting of the Gerald R. Ford Foundation, the former secretary of state indeed lost a heated argument on the subject to Fred Meijer of Grand Rapids. At issue was an eighteen-step metal ladder, utterly unremarkable except that in April 1975 thousands of desperate South Vietnamese, fleeing capture by the invading North Vietnamese for freedom in the United States, had clambered up its sturdy steps onto the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon and into American helicopters perched there. To Meijer, the gray ladder was an uplifting symbol of hope; to Kissinger, it was a grim reminder of the U.S. failure in South Vietnam that had cost more than fifty-eight thousand American lives.

It was Meijer’s entrepreneurial son Hank who unwittingly sparked the contention when he went to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) in October 1994, in search of promising new business ventures that might result from the Clinton administration’s impending normalization of relations with Vietnam. While driving down Le Duan Boulevard one afternoon, Hank Meijer asked his driver to stop at the former U.S. embassy, atop which the tragic last moments of America’s involvement in Vietnam had been played out. Abandoned and allowed to be run down into a weed-choked eyesore where only chickens wandered among the shards of broken glass, the padlocked building was slated for the wrecking ball.

“Then I saw the ladder from the evacuation,” Hank Meijer relates. “My first thought was, ‘That’s an important piece of history; perhaps I can pay somebody a few hundred bucks to weld it off with a blowtorch, then crate it up and ship it back to Michigan for display at the Ford Museum.’” When he returned to Grand Rapids and told his father, Fred Meijer, about the ladder, the elder Mejier was captivated, and determined to put those “eighteen steps to freedom” on permanent display before the American people. He figured his fellow board members at the foundation would agree—but when he broached the idea of acquiring the ladder at the next meeting he met with surprisingly harsh resistance from Kissinger. “It’s just a terrible idea,” the nation’s only celebrity diplomat kept repeating. “Why would you want to remind visitors about this horrible chapter in American history?”

Somewhat startled, Meijer held his ground. “Henry, if we don’t acquire the ladder, it will end up in the bowels of the Smithsonian.” To which an annoyed Kissinger shot back, “That’s a good place for it.”³⁶

Then the ex-president spoke up, likening the “freedom ladder” to the concrete slab from the Berlin Wall that adorns the museum’s entrance. “No one knows more than I how humiliating it was,” Ford reminded his secretary of state. “As you recall, I had to sit in the Oval Office and watch our troops get kicked out of Vietnam. But it’s part of our history, and we can’t forget it.” The decision was made to get the ladder. “To some, this staircase will always be seen as an emblem of military defeat,” Ford noted. “For me, however, it symbolizes man’s undying desire to be free.”³⁷