On June 29, 1973, Minority Leader Gerald “Jerry” Ford rose on the floor of the House of Representatives and made an announcement that left his colleagues baffled and disbelieving. The chamber’s top Republican announced that President Nixon would sign a bill banning any and all American combat activity in, over, or off the shores of North Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam. To House Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, hawks and doves alike, Ford’s announcement sounded preposterous.
Just two days earlier, Nixon had vetoed legislation to ban American bombing in Cambodia. The president had denounced the bill, saying it would “cripple or destroy the chances for an effective negotiated settlement in Cambodia and the withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops.”1
Cambodia had its own powerful Communist insurgency by then, one of the many disastrous unintended consequences of Nixon’s secret bombing four years earlier. When the bombing destabilized the neutralist regime of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, rightists in Phnom Penh ousted the prince in a 1970 coup. Sihanouk saw his only path back to power in an alliance with Cambodia’s then-tiny group of Communist rebels, the Khmer Rouge. Sihanouk became the Reds’ best recruiting tool in the Cambodian countryside, where the hereditary monarch commanded fanatical loyalty, and by 1973 the Khmer Rouge had grown in size and strength to the point where it threatened to take over the country. Kissinger was trying to negotiate a Cambodian ceasefire, and Nixon was using American bombers in an attempt to make the Communists settle. This time, his bombing of Cambodia was open, not secret.
House doves had tried to override Nixon’s veto of the Cambodian bombing ban on June 27, but fell 35 votes short.2 In the intervening two days, they had not found the votes they needed. “We did not have the votes to override the veto,” Rep. Paul Whitten, R-Connecticut, admitted on June 29. “We do not have them now.” So why was Nixon yielding to them just two days after proving he could defy them? If he had enough votes to keep bombing Cambodia, why would he agree to ban all military intervention there and in every other country in Indochina? It didn’t appear to make any sense.
Neither did the other presidential concession Ford announced that day: “If military action is required in Southeast Asia after August 15, [1973, the day the bombing ban would take effect,] the president will ask congressional authority and will abide by the decision that is made by the House and the Senate, the Congress of the United States.” With this, Nixon surrendered his constitutional advantage over congressional doves. Before, they needed to muster a two-thirds majority to defeat him; after August 15, they could do it with a simple, bare majority. What was going on?
Lawmakers on both sides told Ford he had to be mistaken. The House minority leader said he had checked with a White House spokesman the night before and again that morning. “I did not talk to the president, but I am talking of people who have told me they have talked with the president,” said Ford. This was not good enough for his colleagues.
“I would not be willing to accept the word of some member of the White House hierarchy as to the views of the president,” said Rep. Sidney Yates, R-Illinois. “Much too frequently such statements have later been repudiated as not correctly expressing the president’s ideas.”
“I am very nervous about the question of assurances from spokesmen in the White House,” said Rep. Robert Giaimo, D-Connecticut. “There is one person who by a simple press statement today could clarify this matter, and yet we hear nothing but silence from the one man who could clear it: the president of the United States.”
Ford left the floor of the House and placed a call to San Clemente, California, where the president was staying at his “Western White House.” There is no known tape of this conversation, since there was no known secret recording system at the Western White House, but the White House Daily Diary shows that the conversation between Nixon and Ford took place. When the House minority leader returned to the floor, he said, “I just finished talking with the president himself for approximately 10 minutes, and he assured me personally that everything I said on the floor of the House is a commitment by him.”
His colleagues were still baffled (“No President has ever signed a similar piece of legislation,” said Rep. Paul Cronin, R-Massachusetts),3 but they no longer disbelieved. On this day, many representatives who had supported Nixon on the war for years, many who had opposed him just as long, as well as many in the middle joined together and cut off all funds for American combat throughout the nations of Indochina by a vote of 278 to 124.
Not once during the debate did any lawmaker raise the possibility that the president would one day use this vote to blame them for losing Vietnam. Neither did anyone in the Senate, which voted for the all-Indochina combat ban that same day, 64–26. Liberals declared victory. Humphrey urged his colleagues to seize the opportunity, since “the fact is we do not have the votes to end this war without some agreement with the man in the White House.” McGovern called it “the happiest day of my life,” for “at long last, the administration has finally capitulated.”