Best of the Ford tributes

Of all the various tributes and remembrances I've read since President Ford's passing, Quang X. Pham's in today's WaPo is only one that taught me something about him that I didn't know, and I think overall it's the best. The by-line informs us that Mr. Pham "was born in Saigon [and] served as a Marine pilot in the Persian Gulf War." He was 10 in April 1975, when the last helicopters left the American embassy in the city and country of his birth, and he and his family were among the 130,000 "blessed South Vietnamese" (less than 1% of its population) whom the United States was able to relocate into "refugee camps across the United States."

Key graphs (italics mine; bracketed portions and second ellipsis in original):

In the end, after two decades of flailing diplomacy in that tiny peninsula, Gerald Ford dealt with the aftermath: empty guarantees made to an ally, promises he could not keep and a "peace with honor" that the congressional Watergate class would not enforce....

In a May 1975 article in the New York Times, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) commented that "barmaids, prostitutes and criminals" should be screened out as "excludable categories." Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) "charged that the [Ford] Administration had not informed Congress adequately about the number of refugees" — as if anyone actually knew during the chaotic evacuation. "I think the Vietnamese are better off in Vietnam," sniffed George McGovern in Newsweek.

At the time, unemployment in the United States hovered near double digits. Perhaps this had something to do with the anti-refugee emotion. In Larry Engelmann's "Tears Before the Rain: An Oral History of the Fall of South Vietnam," Julia Vadala Taft, head of the interagency task force for refugee resettlement, recalled such opposition. "The new governor of California, Jerry Brown, was very concerned about refugees settling in his state. Brown even attempted to prevent planes carrying refugees from landing at Travis Air Force Base near Sacramento.... The secretary of health and welfare, Mario Obledo, felt that this addition of a large minority group would be unwelcome in California. And he said that they already had a large population of Hispanics, Filipinos, blacks, and other minorities."

The refugees were extremely fortunate. Our biggest supporter, outside of Julia Taft, was the president of the United States. Even though he had described the Vietnam conflict as "a war that is finished as far as America is concerned," Ford's attention was now focused on the refugees. In May 1975 he visited the camps, and soon after refugees began leaving to start new lives across America. The government wanted to disperse the refugees to spread the cost among many states and communities. By Christmas of that year, all refugee camps had been closed, and the refugees were resettled in every state.

I am not aware of any other politicians, antiwar protesters, esteemed journalists or celebrities visiting Fort Chaffee, Ark., where my family was temporarily housed for two months. But Gerald Ford did.

The same supposedly compassionate doves, in other words, who'd opposed America's efforts on behalf of the South Vietnamese people wore their compassion on their sleeves, but quickly replaced that with armbands of bigotry and racism — while Jerry Ford, stymied and forced by Congress to watch as our nation broke its promises and abandoned an American ally, nevertheless did his own best to mitigate the harsh effects of that betrayal.

Mr. Pham doesn't use the phrase "cut and run." But see if you can read his op-ed without thinking of that phrase — and its likely consequences, and the parallels from Mr. Pham's history lesson and Jerry Ford's life — in the context of today's Iraq.