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But the drama in which the Ford ladder becomes a critical prop emerges from documents on the last months of Saigon, as communist North Vietnam began seizing provinces from the crumbling regime of Nguyen Van Thieu. Late in March 1975, President Ford sent Army Chief of Staff General Frederick C. Weyand to Saigon to assess the situation and bring back a full report with recommendations. The most compelling product of the Weyand mission comes from Kenneth M. Quinn, a National Security Council adviser on East Asia who, on April 5, 1975, wrote Kissinger a private, top-secret, 10-page memorandum so bleak it still stands as the grimmest and most accurate assessment by the Ford Administration of America's final weeks in South Vietnam. The South Vietnamese forces "may be totally defeated in as little as three weeks," Quinn noted. "President Thieu is discredited and almost completely ineffective. He can no longer provide the leadership necessary to rally the country. The morale of the army and civilian population is critically low and bordering on national despair. Fear of the communists is widespread, and people from all walks of life are now searching for a way to flee the country. Panic is seemingly just below the surface, and an imminent attack on Saigon could lose it [for us]."
Just five days after the Quinn report, Ford went hat in hand before a joint session of Congress to request $722 million in emergency military aid plus $250 million for economic and humanitarian assistance for the people of South Vietnam. "The options before us are few, and the time is short," the President pleaded. "We cannot...abandon our friends." The Senate Armed Services Committee disagreed, and on April 17 rejected the appeal, causing the genial Ford to pound his fist and exclaim, "Those bastards." Meanwhile, Kissinger, in an April 24 State Department meeting, was reduced to denouncing those "treacherous bastards in France" who seemed hell-bent on celebrating America's misadventure in Southeast Asia. What the Ford Library's new documents show, however, is that neither the President nor Kissinger ever really thought Congress would appropriate more money; the nearly billion-dollar request was largely a ruse to buy more time to plan for the imminent evacuation of Saigon and to pin Congress with the historical blame for losing Vietnam.