Word: saigon
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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...
...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...
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...
...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...
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...