DETROIT — For those of us old enough to remember the awful end of the Vietnam War, the scenes of chaos in Afghanistan earlier this month were painfully familiar. I never thought I again would see panicked Americans being evacuated from one of our embassies as we pulled out of a country for which our troops had fought and died in a war we lost. Yet there it was.
The commentators were, not surprisingly, brutal towards President Joe Biden, who had only days before assured the world that this wouldn’t happen. Some also noted that former President Donald Trump had negotiated directly with the Taliban, ignored the pro-U.S. Afghan government, and how vowed to have all American troops out by last May.
In fact, only days before the fall of Kabul, Trump was accusing Biden of wanting to keep the “forever war” going, and claiming he would have had everyone out of Afghanistan already.
But the buck stops on the desk of the person in the White House when things go bad — and that’s Biden. Does that mean the voters will punish the Democrats in next year’s election? Will this be an issue in the next presidential campaign three years from now?
Suddenly, I remembered that I had known the only other man who had been in the position President Biden was in this month. That was President Gerald Ford, who was in the White House when South Vietnam fell apart in the spring of 1975. Twenty years later, when I was a reporter and he was long out of politics, I went to his retirement home in California and talked to him about that.
Ford had been a hawk on Vietnam from the start of our commitment in the early 1960s, and remained so long after many other politicians in both parties had turned against the war.
America had pulled its last combat troops out of Vietnam in 1973, and two years later, North Vietnam launched a major attack on the south. President Ford consulted with military experts, and then went to Congress on April 10, and asked for almost a billion dollars in military and economic aid to South Vietnam. There was virtually no support for that. “I will give you large sums for evacuation, but not one nickel for military aid,” a Republican friend on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said. That was on April 10. Ford saw the writing on the wall, and soon declared the war was “over as far as America is concerned.”
What followed was a messy and horrifying evacuation that included the crash landing of “Operation Babylift,” a plane filled with South Vietnamese children, 78 of whom died. South Vietnam fell on April 30.
Twenty years later, when I asked Ford about that, he still felt that Congress should have appropriated the money for South Vietnam — even if it hadn’t worked. “At least, as President, I would have been satisfied that we made the best effort that we could. My conscience would have been freer, clearer, if we had made that final effort.”
The scenes of Americans clinging to helicopters on the embassy roof were, to that generation, probably more searing and humiliating than the ones from Kabul this month. After all, that had never happened before. But did the voters punish President Ford? Not at all.
Not, that is, in any obvious way we can measure. Ten years later, I interviewed a number of Vietnamese and some American diplomats who had been there. Most were bitter. They felt America had let them down. But none singled out Gerald Ford. The fall of Saigon was a non-issue in the tightly fought Republican primary campaign the next year between Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, who barely held off his challenger.
Nor was it an issue in the fall, when Jimmy Carter narrowly defeated Ford. The biggest issues that year were the Nixon pardon and the economy. Nobody talked about leaving Vietnam. Americans were thoroughly tired of Vietnam, and most were happy to be out of there — Democrats even more so than Republicans.
No two situations are the same, of course, and almost half a century separates the fall of Saigon from the fall of Kabul. Gerald Ford, unlike Joe Biden, wanted to keep the war going.
Politics are much more polarized now, and the Republicans and former President Trump are already attacking the Biden administration for the messy way we left Afghanistan,
But ask yourself – when we elect a new congress a year from now, are Americans likely to be upset because we are no longer in Afghanistan? What about three years from now, during the next Presidential election campaign?
Unless new terrorists again use Afghanistan as a base to attack America, I find it hard to believe anyone will care.
When I interviewed Ford, America was already trading vigorously with the unified communist Vietnam, and about to resume full diplomatic relations. I wondered if that bothered him. Not at all, he said; he had seen the same thing after World War II, where he had personally seen combat. “We always seem to change our attitude towards and forgive our enemies,” he said.
It is hard today to imagine Americans in 2040 touring or vacationing in a Taliban-controlled Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. But it wasn’t easy to imagine package tours to Hanoi in 1975.
As Gerald Ford knew, you never can tell.
