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Yet, once again betraying his ambivalence toward his acknowledged concern for a new "national unity" on foreign policy and his protective impulse toward recent Presidents and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, whose reputation has been so endangered by recent setbacks in U.S. diplomacy, Ford promptly reverted to recriminations. Once again, however indirectly, he indicated his belief that a major share of the burden of blame for South Viet Nam's military debacle rested on the Democratic-controlled Congress.
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 ban in July 1973 against money for any further U.S. military intervention in Southeast Asia and by the War Powers Resolution passed over a Nixon veto in November 1973. The eventual result, according to Ford, was that 18 North Vietnamese divisions had been sent into the South. That, in turn, led President Thieu to order what Ford termed, in an understatement, a "poorly executed . . . strategic withdrawal" from the northern provinces. That withdrawal turned into a rout.
The President also fed the growing controversy over just what kind of commitments the U.S. had made to the South Vietnamese government as the peace settlement was arranged. He insisted that the accords were based on the premise that the U.S. would "provide adequate economic and military assistance to South Viet Nam." More vaguely, he said that another assumption was that "if necessary, the U.S. would help sustain the terms of the Paris accords." Ford claimed that there was a "universal consensus" in the U.S. behind "adequate material support" to South Viet Nam, ignoring the fact that the Democratic Party platform of 1972, at least, had called for an end to such military aid.
Ford did not mention a related charge last week by Democratic Senator Henry Jackson, a candidate for his party's 1976 presidential nomination. In a speech on the Senate floor, Jackson said that he had been "reliably informed that there exists between the Government of the United States and South Viet Nam secret agreements which envision fateful American decisions."
Jackson's charge touched off a furor in Washington. It not only portended a potentially explosive political 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 it.