| Abstrakt: |
On April 10, 1975, in an address before a Joint Session of the Congress President Gerald Ford said that "the situation in South Vietnam and Cambodia has reached a critical phase requiring immediate and positive decisions by this government." In his view the United States had two options. Either to "let the Government of South Vietnam save itself and what is left of its territory, if it can," or "to enforce the Paris accords with our troops and our tanks and our aircraft and our artillery and carry the war to the enemy". To help South Vietnam to repel communist aggression, Ford requested that "Congress consider appropriating additional funds" ($722 million) "in very specific military supplies". Ford also reminded the Congress of the fate of "nearly 6,000 Americans who remain in South Vietnam and tens of thousands of South Vietnamese employees of the United States Government, of news agencies, of contractors and business for many years whose lives, with their dependents, are in very grave peril." With no Congress authorization for additional funds for Saigon troops, Ford ordered the evacuation of "all American personnel remaining in South Vietnam" (over 1,300 Americans) and around 5,600 Vietnamese. With the fall of Saigon, on April 30, 1975, the war that influenced the foreign policy decisions of four American administrations (Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford) ended. While Kennedy's support for South Vietnam was based on his belief that "every time a country, regardless of how far away it may be from our borders passes behind the Iron Curtain the security of the United States is thereby endangered", Johnson viewed the commitment to prevent communist expansion into Indochina as a test of credibility for the United States: "We are in South Vietnam because we have a promise to keep... Around the globe, from Berlin to Thailand, are people whose well-being rests, in part, on the belief that they can count on us if they are attacked. To leave Vietnam to its fate would shake the confidence of all these people in the value of an American commitment and the value of America's word." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
