Phnom-Penh was about to fall. The fateful and almost certainly final siege of Saigon was about to begin. The most frustrating and tragic chapter in the history of U.S. foreign policy was, one way or another, ending. And a new American President, unelected at home and untested abroad, was about to shake off the shackles of past U.S. failures in Southeast Asia and place his own unique stamp on America's global diplomacy by fashioning new policies on which Americans could unite. Such was the setting and the advance billing for what Gerald Ford had promised would be "the most important speech I have ever made."
But when the President faced a joint session of Congress last week to address it and the nation in his first major foreign policy address, he, like too many U.S. Presidents before him, found himself entangled in the toils of Viet Nam. The fresh start, the global vision, the new priorities would all have to wait once more on the dire exigencies of Viet Nam. But there was indeed a new factor: Ford faced a predicament unprecedented in U.S. history. His first concern could not even be candidly expressed. It was the delicate and dangerous task of extricating 5,000* Americans from an allied nation, South Viet Nam, that seemed in imminent danger of being overrun by the Communist forces of North Viet Nam and the Viet Cong. Also, if it could be done, Ford wanted to evacuate some 200,000 South Vietnamese who have worked closely with the Americans during the war.
Emergency Aid. For Ford to admit that this was his prime worry would mean hastening the very collapse in Saigon that would put the Americans there in the jeopardy Ford feared. Even privately to order their evacuation could spread the same kind of panic that in recent weeks had seized millions of South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians in their headlong flight from northern provinces. Even to suggest that the government of President Nguyen Van Thieu would finally have to stand on its own without further injections of massive U.S. military aid would be to risk the outrage of South Vietnamese troops and increasingly anti-American civilians. That could produce what high U.S. officials termed "nightmarish possibilities." By this they meant a final Viet Nam horror of American troops' having to fight their way into South Viet Nam against the dual firepower of both the once friendly South Vietnamese soldiers and those of the North to rescue American civilians and shepherd them out.
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, the U.S. has a "special obligation." And Ford set an urgent deadline of the end of this week for Congress to act.