President Ford in the Oval Office with Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger discussing the fall of Saigon, April 28, 1975 | Image courtesy of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library & Museum.
The first day of May, 1975 found the President of the United States nursing a fierce political and diplomatic hangover. Scarcely 36 hours had passed since Gerald Ford excused himself from a White House stag dinner he was hosting for Jordan's visiting King Hussein in order to take a call from Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger. It had been twenty-five years, almost to the day, since Harry Truman first authorized U.S. military assistance to a French colonial army fighting Viet Minh insurgents in Indochina. Now it fell to Ford to extricate the U.S. from its ill-fated intervention. In doing so, he would illustrate an important lesson: leaders are judged less by the burdens they inherit than by the character they demonstrate in addressing them.
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Author of An Ordinary Man: The Surprising Life and Historic Presidency of Gerald R. Ford
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