Word: forde
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...still grieve over those we were unable to rescue," Ford reflected last week from his library in Ann Arbor. "I still mourn for 2,500 American soldiers who to this day remain unaccounted for. Yet along with the pain there is pride. In the face of overwhelming pressure to shut our doors, we were able to resettle a first wave of more than 130,000 Vietnamese refugees. To have done anything less would in my opinion have only added moral shame to military humiliation." Today almost a million people born in Vietnam live in the U.S., making Vietnamese Americans...
...results make for some of the most compelling reading in the Ford Library: more than 100 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...
...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." He resisted, but when he returned to Grand Rapids and told his father about the ladder, Fred Meijer was captivated, and determined to put those "18 steps to freedom" on permanent display before the American people. He figured his fellow board members at the Ford Foundation would agree--but when...
Then the ex-President spoke up for his old friend Meijer, 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...
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." But the newly declassified record also shows that the Commander in Chief insisted...