New President, Old War

On Friday, August 9, 1974, surrounded by family and friends in the White House’s East Room, Gerald R. Ford took the presidential oath of office. Referencing the events that led to Nixon’s resignation, Ford famously declared, “our long national nightmare is over.”¹⁴ While the Watergate break-in and Nixon’s concomitant indiscretions certainly felt like a bad dream, the conflict that had haunted the nation’s conscience for more than a decade, the Vietnam War, continued.

The Paris Peace Accords purported to end the conflict in 1973. The Accords, however, never provided a plan for permanent peace.¹⁵ The agreement did end direct American military involvement, thereby offering a face-saving means through which Nixon could claim he delivered his campaign promise to provide “peace with honor.” While American combat troops returned stateside, however, copious amounts of military supplies, economic aid, and pledges of continued US support continued to flow from Washington to Saigon.

If the ongoing Vietnam War did not top Ford’s priority list when he assumed office in August 1974, it quickly rose on the presidential agenda. Although the war had never truly ended, in December Hanoi transitioned from a regrouping and preparation stage to taking the offensive.¹⁶ In a January 28th meeting with congressional leaders, Ford and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger painted a vivid picture of the dire circumstances in South Vietnam and emphasized the need for additional American support. If requests for funds from the executive branch remained consistent, their audience had changed in dramatic ways. The previous November, Republicans lost forty seats in the House and four in the Senate, and many of Congress’s newest members rode a tide of disgust with the Vietnam War and Watergate into office, setting the stage for a showdown between the two branches.¹⁷ In response to Ford’s request for assistance for South Vietnam, Representative Al Ullman (D-OR) retorted, “we see the divisiveness on the streets of Saigon. We are putting money in a place that is doomed to fail.”¹⁸ The president still asked Congress for $300 million for the RVN that afternoon, but he could not have been optimistic, as legislators continued to send clear signals that they would not approve additional aid.¹⁹

Throughout January and February 1975, it became increasingly difficult to deny that South Vietnam’s days were numbered. By the end of March, it was impossible. North Vietnamese troops captured Phuoc Long province in early March, the strategic city of Buon Ma Thuot (in the Central Highlands) on the 10th, and the old imperial capital and symbolically important city of Hue on the 25th.²⁰ In response, South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu ordered the ARVN to retreat and “abandon northern and central provinces in order to focus on the defense of Saigon,” a decision that caught the United States off guard and unprepared.²¹ As a secret NSC memorandum put it in mid-March, “South Vietnam is in deep trouble.”²² And everyone knew it.

As communist troops converged on Da Nang, the hysteria was palpable. The city’s regular population of 458,000 had more than doubled in previous weeks thanks to a sizable influx of those fleeing the communist offensive.²³ To assist with an evacuation, Ford authorized the use of Boeing 727s, 747 cargo planes, navy ships, and contract vessels to move “as many passengers as possible … out to sea.”²⁴ To put it mildly, these belated plans were poorly executed. Panicked mobs converged on the coastline and airport, and order completely dissolved. As a memo put it to Kissinger on March 31, “charity compels me not to comment on the US Navy’s effort to help move the refugees, but I know nobody who is impressed.”²⁵ Most were horrified as untold numbers died in the chaos.²⁶ Even private attempts at evacuation, like those led by American Ed Daly, owner of World Airways, dramatized the almost complete lack of planning, on the one hand, and the sheer magnitude of the chaos, on the other.²⁷

The idea of “peace with honor” likely invoked different images for different Americans, which is part of the reason the phrase served as an effective campaign slogan. Yet it seems safe to conclude that the evacuation of Da Nang fell well short of that goal. Whether one vociferously opposed or enthusiastically supported the Vietnam War, it would have been difficult to find the stories of Da Nang’s collapse anything other than gut-wrenching.²⁸

Vivid descriptions of Da Nang’s fall made international headlines and created ripples of fear in South Vietnam. “Ugly stories about Americans fleeing Danang and Nha Trang,” LTC Stuart A. Herrington recalled, “without regard for the fate of their employees were circulating in the corridors of the DAO [Defense Attaché Office].” “Since our Vietnamese secretaries and interpreters were known to our Communists adversaries,” he explained, “it was not surprising that they were frightened of such a fate.”²⁹ Fears of communist reprisals exacerbated concerns about American negligence. As early as March 7, individuals displaced by the violence reported to State Department officials that North Vietnamese soldiers were executing RVN civilian and military leaders.³⁰ Whether such stories were accurate or not, these accusations seemed to validate Washington and Saigon’s claim that Hanoi would massacre its enemies in a “bloodbath,” should the communists prevail.³¹ The “ugly stories” about American disregard for their Vietnamese employees – combined with gruesome reports of the fate of former American allies in conquered areas – provided a hard lesson. Many Americans in Vietnam and Washington vowed to prevent a repeat of the US failures in Da Nang.³²

Ford gave the media ample ammunition to make images of the human suffering in South Vietnam even starker. He received the news of Da Nang’s fall aboard Air Force One en route to Palm Springs for the Easter holiday. Unfortunately for Ford, the major media outlets juxtaposed the heart-stopping images from Da Nang with footage of the American president playing golf in sunny California. When journalists confronted Ford on the course to ask about Indochina, the president literally ran away from the reporters to avoid having to answer. As his press secretary Ron Nessen recalled with dismay, “the picture of him sprinting ahead of a pack of reporters was on TV and front pages all over the country.”³³ When Nessen stepped up to the podium the next day, journalists predictably focused their questions on Ford’s “odd behavior.” After Nessen tried to suggest that the president did not actually run, one of the reporters quipped, “he ran almost as fast as the South Vietnamese Army,” which ignited a roar of laughter.³⁴ The headlines practically wrote themselves.

Evacuation Planning

On April 2, 1975, a decisive meeting of the Washington Special Actions Group (WSAG) convened. Kissinger chaired the WSAG, which also included high-ranking officials from the State Department, Department of Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff, CIA, and NSC. Those assembled agreed that South Vietnam would fall imminently. The Secretary of Defense, James Schlesinger, gave a very bleak and accurate report of the situation when he warned, “We should be prepared for collapse within three weeks. I wouldn’t count on any more than 45 more days.”³⁵

US officials faced a similar situation in Cambodia. Communist forces, in this case led by the Khmer Rouge, were closing in on the US-backed regime. Phnom Penh, in Secretary Schlesinger’s estimation, had “only eight to ten days left,” and the US government had already begun to airlift the final Americans and some of those associated with the United States out of the country. Kissinger spoke for those assembled when he concluded with regard to Cambodia, “there is just nothing we can do.” Given this terminal diagnosis of the situation in Cambodia and the magnitude and duration of the American involvement in Vietnam, the conversation quickly returned to the question of US allies in South Vietnam. In Schlesinger’s words, the consensus was “we don’t want any recurrence of the Danang fiasco.”³⁶ An exchange between Kissinger and Philip Habib, the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, on the topic is especially revealing:

The fact that the “limited” list included 93,000 South Vietnamese reveals one of the enduring consequences of decades of US involvement in Vietnam. While US officials were able to rapidly escalate and, eventually, deescalate the number of Americans in the country, the number of South Vietnamese impacted and, given Hanoi’s imminent military victory, implicated by their association with the United States steadily increased. Although US combat troops left in 1973, the ties between Americans and South Vietnamese endured.

The disastrous US evacuation from Da Nang prompted American policy makers to face the colossal logistical and moral challenges the imminent collapse of South Vietnam posed.³⁸ From the very beginning of earnest evacuation planning, the administration was, Kissinger recalled, “fully determined to save as many Vietnamese who had cooperated with America as we could.”³⁹ Yet, as the disparity between evacuating “upwards of 10,000” and a million people suggests, in early April the administration remained wholly unprepared for the challenge. There was little doubt in US policy makers’ minds that the international community would see endangered South Vietnamese as an American responsibility. As the State Department cautioned, “other nations will see in our handling of this issue how the US deals with the people of a country which has long been involved with us.”⁴⁰ Even after the Paris Accords, concern about US credibility abroad continued to motivate US strategy in Vietnam.⁴¹

Over the next few weeks, government officials faced the unenviable task of prioritizing whom to admit to the United States. Many confounding factors exacerbated this daunting undertaking. Timing, for instance, remained a persistent problem. A “Study of Evacuation Planning” explained that “action taken either too soon or too late could lead to a repeat on a larger scale of what happened in Danang.”⁴² In other words, if the administration began an earnest evacuation too soon, it could undermine its own efforts to evacuate as many South Vietnamese as possible by fomenting panic. On the other hand, if the US policy makers waited too long and the military situation made a large evacuation impossible, erring on the side of caution could also lead to failure. Thus, while the Ford administration privately acknowledged that South Vietnam would fall, it went to great lengths to perpetuate the falsehood that it believed Saigon could survive. By April that idea amounted to pure fiction, but it helped the administration buy direly needed time to pursue its evacuation goals.

On April 3, Ford addressed the nation from San Diego. He devoted his entire speech to discussing the “great human tragedy” unfolding “as untold numbers of Vietnamese flee the North Vietnamese onslaught.”⁴³ “The United States has been doing and will continue to do its utmost to assist these people,” the president promised. He then announced a new initiative, Operation Babylift.⁴⁴ “I have directed that money from a $2 million special foreign aid children’s fund be made available to fly 2,000 Vietnamese orphans to the United States as soon as possible,” he explained, noting that he expected the flights to land “within the next 36 to 48 hours” and that all of the children would be “adopted by American families.”⁴⁵

Numerous foreign adoption agencies had been operating in Vietnam throughout the 1970s.⁴⁶ The fall of Da Nang and Ford’s announcement, however, shifted the nature of the enterprise in at least two crucial respects. First, Operation Babylift changed the previous departure of one or two children at a time to an en masse emigration, which spurred “competition among the seven adoption-sponsoring agencies for space on airplanes.”⁴⁷ Second, despite the humanitarian headlines, Operation Babylift was a military operation.⁴⁸ The first US government sponsored flight took place aboard a C-5A jet, which unloaded a cargo hold full of military supplies the same day it was to transport Vietnamese children to the United States.⁴⁹ Approximately fifteen minutes after takeoff, an explosion sent the plane hurling back towards the ground, killing almost everyone on board. The exact death tally is unknown because, in addition to the fact that “some children had been slipped aboard at the last minute,” making precise record keeping impossible, the grim reality was that “no one knew how many had been sucked out” as the plane crashed.⁵⁰ If precise numbers are impossible to determine, the tragedy is undeniable: the vast majority of the South Vietnamese children onboard and a significant number of Americans were killed, including forty-three of the forty-four American women the Defense Attaché Office had snuck onto the plane and at least one American child.⁵¹ “The disaster was almost too unbearable to believe,” journalist Arnold R. Isaacs recalled. “It was laden with a sense that Americans were somehow cursed in Vietnam, fated to bring only tragedy even when trying to do good.”⁵²

In contrast to Ford’s description of Operation Babylift, moreover, many of the South Vietnamese children who arrived in the United States were not orphans. In some cases, Americans transported children against their parents’ wishes.⁵³ The assumption that children in orphanages were parentless was a common American misunderstanding of the function of orphanages in Vietnamese society as places where families could bring their children to receive temporary care.⁵⁴ Just as common, however, were the conscious decisions made by Vietnamese families to seize upon the opportunity presented by American policy to chart their own course. As Allison Varzally explains:

In some cases, therefore, the tendency to depict the children who participated in Operation Babylift as orphans likely involved both genuine misunderstanding and intentional obfuscation. However, one cannot ignore the much larger history of Americans depicting adopted children from Asia as orphans.

Operation Babylift rested on a long history of American paternalism toward Asia in general and South Vietnam in particular.⁵⁶ Suggesting the children who participated in Operation Babylift were orphans expanded the American practice of erasing Asian mothers in a narrative about American rescue of “orphans.”⁵⁷ In this case, the erasure of Vietnamese mothers sent a particularly strong message, as many of the children who traveled via Operation Babylift were Amerasians, the children of Vietnamese women and American men.⁵⁸ Framing the children as orphans enabled American officials to craft a compelling rescue narrative while, at the same time, obscuring the role the violence unleashed by the American military played in creating conditions that required rescue in the first place.⁵⁹ Scholars in the field of critical refugee studies have shown that rather than incompatible actions, “warring and rescuing” had been mutually constitutive elements of American policy in Asia throughout the Cold War.⁶⁰

Operation Babylift also demonstrated the tensions animating the United States’ immediate policy goals in spring 1975. Perpetuating the fiction that South Vietnam could survive while quietly beginning the US evacuation required American officials to walk an extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, tightrope. If public pronouncements expressing faith in South Vietnam’s stability and repeated requests for economic and military aid helped sustain the illusion of American confidence, attentive observers were not fooled. As the protagonist observes in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer-Prize winning The Sympathizer: “You have evacuated your own women. You have evacuated babies and orphans. Why is it that the only people who do not know the Americans are pulling out are the Americans?”⁶¹ The competing desires to put the war “behind” the country as soon as possible, and the impulse to stay and assist South Vietnamese both served as powerful sub-currents in different pockets of American society and the governmental bureaucracy. Reconciling these instincts challenged Ford, future administrations, and nonexecutive actors for twenty years.

On April 5, while still in California, Ford and Kissinger met with US officials who had just returned from South Vietnam. The presidential delegation members included Army Chief of Staff General Frederick C. Weyand and David Kennerly, a straight-talking photographer who had earned a Pulitzer Prize for his work in Vietnam and was serving as Ford’s White House photographer. Weyand’s formal report suggested that South Vietnam was “on the brink of total military defeat” and that the ARVN would need $722 million “worth of supplies, primarily ammunition” not to retake lost territory but to accomplish the much more modest goal of establishing “a strong defense perimeter around Saigon.”⁶² Weyand also wrote extensively about the importance of creating at least an illusion of American confidence. “The essential and immediate requirement is Vietnamese perception of US support,” he argued.⁶³ Doing what was necessary “to give South Vietnam a morale lift, and, if possible, to induce Hanoi to pause,” the Army Chief of Staff continued, would be extraordinarily valuable even if it “buys nothing but time,” because “at this moment that time is vitally needed.”⁶⁴ Kennerly also reported directly to Ford and did not mince words: “they’re bullshitting you if they say that [South] Vietnam has got more than three or four weeks left” he declared, “there’s no question about it. It’s just not gonna last.”⁶⁵

In addition to his blunt verbal report, Kennerly also shared compelling photographs of South Vietnam’s ongoing collapse. The snapshots, in Kennerly’s words, included images of “refugee kids, of wounded evacuees, of the ship filled with fleeing South Vietnamese soldiers.”⁶⁶ In his autobiography, Ford recalls that after the meeting he “decided to step up our efforts to get the refugees out.”⁶⁷ The president also had Kennerly’s photographs displayed prominently in the West Wing. When someone removed the images, Ford personally ordered that they resume their previous position, determined that his staff “know what’s going on over there.”⁶⁸ While facing the reality was one thing, crafting a timely policy response was another matter entirely.

Legal obstacles exacerbated the formidable challenges that including South Vietnamese in the American evacuation would require. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 imposed strict caps on the numbers of immigrants who were allowed in the country, and the law limited the annual ceiling for refugees at a paltry 10,200. If the Ford administration wanted to admit even a fraction of the people on the “limited list,” the United States would need to accept many times the annually allotted limit, and it would need to do so quickly. There was one possible loophole the administration could use: the “parole power.” As historian Carl Bon Tempo explains, the parole power emanated from a clause in the 1965 Act that “permitted the attorney general to admit (or “parole”) an alien into the United States on an emergency basis if the admission served the public interest.”⁶⁹ While previous administrations had used the parole power to admit refugees fleeing communism, the decidedly different geopolitical and domestic circumstances of the mid-1970s rendered the Ford administration’s ability to use the parole power to admit South Vietnamese far from certain.

Building a Consensus

The question of whether or not the administration could mobilize the support needed to put the parole loophole into practice – and whether or not it could do so before South Vietnam collapsed – set off a wave of frantic policy making in Washington. Time was short and the stakes could not have been higher. On April 5, the same day that Ford met with Weyand and Kennerly, Robert J. Ingersoll, the Acting Secretary of State, wrote a classified “urgent action” memo to Attorney General Edward Levi regarding the parole of South Vietnamese and Cambodians with close ties to the United States. Because Cambodia fell only twelve days later, on April 17, the discussion soon shifted to those in the RVN. The Secretary of State argued South Vietnamese associated with the RVN and US would “face death or persecution from the communist elements if they remain” and thus “will look to the United States for resettlement.” “We estimate there are conservatively 200,000 to whom the United States Government has an obligation and the number may run to many times that number,” Ingersoll observed, concluding, “we have an obligation to receive them.”⁷⁰

The 1965 Act awarded the parole power to the Attorney General. In practice, however, government-wide coordination was needed, especially in the tense political atmosphere of 1975. Congressional support was especially critical given Capitol Hill’s control of appropriations.⁷¹ The suspicions with which legislators viewed executive policy making during this period, especially vis-à-vis Vietnam, ensured that members of Congress would have much to say about the potential parole of South Vietnamese and US evacuation planning more broadly. Thus, rather than present a simple yes or no question, Ingersoll’s letter about the possible parole of South Vietnamese ignited a series of discussions and debates throughout the US government.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) immediately joined the conversation. Two days after Ingersoll’s letter ignited formal discussions, INS Commissioner L. F. Chapman Jr. wrote to Levi to share the INS’s view. Chapman noted that he personally instructed “no action shall be taken to require the departure” of Indochinese in the US who have a “well-founded fear of persecution.”⁷² While not a permanent solution, this measure provided a temporary fix to allow the Attorney General, and by extension, the rest of the government, to focus on those in more immediate peril. Additionally, the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees’ stated that “No Contracting State shall expel or return (‘refouler’) a refugee” to the territory from which he or she was fleeing.⁷³ Chapman argued that this provision, combined with US diplomatic pressure, would be sufficient to protect any South Vietnamese abroad from being deported to Vietnam after the imminent communist takeover.

Khuc Minh Tho was one of the South Vietnamese abroad as her country collapsed. The thirty-six-year-old mother of three was stationed at the RVN embassy in the Philippines, a position she coveted because it allowed her to support her children and, most importantly to her, provide them with access to high-quality education that she could not otherwise afford. Tho’s father was a teacher before he was drafted into the ARVN, and he had instilled in her the value of education, a lesson she carried with her even after he and her mother were “killed by communists.”⁷⁴ After losing her parents, Tho married at nineteen, and her husband, Nguyen Dinh Phuc, a graduate of the South Vietnamese Military Academy, was killed in combat when Tho was five months pregnant with their third child.⁷⁵ Widowed four days after her twenty-second birthday, Tho never formally remarried, though she fell in love again with Nguyen Van Be, a man she called her husband. As she explained, they “lived like husband and wife” but postponed marriage because her children were still so young and, they agreed, should be her “top priority.”⁷⁶ One can only imagine how Tho endured the emotional trauma of watching her country fall from afar while her three children and second husband, another graduate of the RVN’s Military Academy, remained in South Vietnam. Tho’s story serves as a vivid reminder that the events of late April 1975 were cataclysmic for the South Vietnamese. Even for those like Tho, who were physically safe from harm, virtually none were safe from the trauma of family separation.

As North Vietnamese troops continued their march toward Saigon, many US congressmen expressed deep reservations about accepting large numbers of South Vietnamese. After decades of relative economic abundance in the United States, especially for the white middle class, the US economy had entered a precarious stage. Between 1969 and 1974 inflation had doubled, and by 1975 unemployment, which rested at under 4 percent throughout the 1960s, had reached 7.5 percent.⁷⁷ Financial indicators were not the only barriers to entry for South Vietnamese, however. Anti-immigration sentiment, pervasive racism in American society, and the tendency to depict Vietnamese as enemies rather than allies all combined to prompt many legislators to resist policies that might expand the United States’ commitments in Southeast Asia rather than contract them. Because many of the legislators who were hesitant to support an influx of South Vietnamese chaired powerful committees in the House and Senate, this oppositional group was able to exert influence beyond its numbers during the mid-1970s.

Inevitably, however, the many members of Congress held a wide range of views on the question of US obligations, or lack thereof, to its South Vietnamese allies. On April 9, for example, Ford received a letter from twenty Senators imploring him to assist “refugees who are trapped in the Saigon vicinity” and to avoid a repetition of “the most regrettable … reported abandonment of Vietnamese civilians who had worked for the American government” in Da Nang.⁷⁸ Among the nineteen Democrats and one Republican who authored this letter were future Vice President Walter Mondale, former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and two individuals who would be vocal proponents for expanding programs for South Vietnamese migrants in the late 1970s: Dick Clark (D-IA) and Claiborne Pell (D-RI). These Senators and their colleagues urged Ford to use the parole authority “to aid not just orphans, but all Vietnamese who may face reprisals for their association with the United States.” “Plans should be formulated,” they continued, “without any delay to permit the swift and orderly evacuation of those who are now endangered or might be threatened in the days and weeks head.”⁷⁹ “We can assure you,” the Senators promised, “that the Congress will cooperate fully in the task of preventing the needless suffering among the victims of this tragic war.”⁸⁰

Senator Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy had been urging Congress to do exactly that for years. Since the spring of 1965, Kennedy served as the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee for Refugees and Escapees, a position he used to hold hearings, send key aids like Jerry Tinker and Dale DeHaan on fact-finding trips to Vietnam, and introduce resolutions and legislation to provide humanitarian assistance to Vietnamese displaced by the war.⁸¹ After a decade of advocacy, Kennedy “kept firing off press releases, making statements, and otherwise attempting to influence public opinion and bureaucracy,” efforts that certainly aided the administration’s larger goals.⁸² In March, for instance, Kennedy introduced a bill to provide $100 million in “additional humanitarian assistance” for South Vietnam and Cambodia.⁸³ Kissinger, cognizant of the fact that the administration would need congressional allies, personally called Kennedy multiple times in late April, confessing “I need help on congressional authority, on parole authority.”⁸⁴

Recognizing that it would need congressional support, the administration kept key legislators informed about its intentions, even while the policies to implement those plans were still very much in flux. On April 9, Ford and sixteen members of his staff met with leaders of congressional committees on Foreign Affairs, Armed Services, and Appropriations to discuss the unraveling situation in Vietnam and Cambodia. An agenda for the meeting specified that Ford and Kissinger would talk at length about the parole initiative. Ford informed congressional leaders that he planned to evacuate three categories of South Vietnamese, including “leaders and their families associated with” the US government facing “persecution”; those “individuals and families” affiliated with US “private interests”; and, finally, a “general category refugees, the criteria yet to be established.”⁸⁵ As Operation Babylift dramatized, the broad, often vague dictates of humanitarian impulses were difficult to translate into specific policy. Nevertheless, a general sense of urgency is obvious when reading administration records from mid-April. The agenda for Ford’s April 9 meeting, for example, ended with the question “Would they [congressmen] not do what you are seeking to do [admit South Vietnamese allies]?”⁸⁶ This query would echo in the White House and on Capitol Hill for years to come.

On April 10, Ford gave a televised address on the nation’s foreign policy. With respect to South Vietnam and Cambodia, he conceded, “the options before us are few and the time is very short.”⁸⁷ Ford’s speech is best known for his request for $722 million “in very specific military supplies” based on Weyand’s report and “$250 million for economic and humanitarian aid for South Vietnam.”⁸⁸ Given the consistent signs of congressional unwillingness to appropriate aid, and the fact that South Vietnam’s total collapse was only weeks away, both contemporaries and scholars have criticized Ford’s request as being ill conceived, unrealistic, and tone-deaf. Kissinger biographer Jussi Hanhimaki notes, however, that the administration was “fully aware that it had no chance of being approved.”⁸⁹ NSC meeting minutes demonstrate that the White House knew asking for “no military aid” would be in line with “the predominant mood in Congress.” The NSC suggested this approach was infeasible, however, because asking for no military assistance would “trigger an immediate collapse in Saigon,” which would “imperil 6,000 Americans” still in the country and “make it impossible to evacuate the Vietnamese.”⁹⁰ Ford’s request, therefore, was intended to buy the administration time.⁹¹

Although the United States publicly promoted the belief that South Vietnam would rally, the administration’s true goals were much more modest: evacuate the remaining Americans and as many US allies as possible. Statements supporting this conclusion in the documentary record from this period are ubiquitous and, ultimately, persuasive. Yet one cannot ignore other factors at play. The actors and institutions formulating US policy during these fateful months were not operating in a vacuum. Throughout the decade that US combat troops fought in Vietnam, the executive and legislative branches repeatedly clashed, and the Departments of State and Defense likewise had a rivalrous and tense relationship. The large egos and personal rivalries between the men who led each of these institutions created a perfect storm for suspicion and confrontation.⁹² Widespread realization among US officials that they were witnessing South Vietnam’s final weeks also injected the weight of history – and the question of blame and culpability – into ongoing clashes about the evacuation.⁹³ That Ford’s request for $722 million in military aid for South Vietnam could be used as evidence that it was Capitol Hill, and not the White House, that abandoned South Vietnam was therefore especially convenient. Nevertheless, the fuller context of the speech and administration policy suggest that buying time for an evacuation vision that included South Vietnamese was Ford’s primary objective.

As Ford explained in his speech: “I must, of course, as I think each of you would, consider the safety 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 businesses for many years whose lives, with their dependents, are in very grave peril.”⁹⁴ Thus, without saying so directly, the president described the first two parole categories – those who worked for the US government and private American companies – that he included in his meeting with congressional leaders. The final category proved more problematic. In the televised address, Ford simply stated, “There are tens of thousands of other South Vietnamese … to whom we have a profound moral obligation.”⁹⁵

Ford’s assertion of a “profound moral obligation” represented far more than a throwaway line. While depicting the obligation as moral rather than legal permitted the United States to frame the evacuation as a rescue rather than a withdrawal, invoking morality also fashioned the American obligation in a way that did not have obvious limits – temporal or demographic.⁹⁶ Future policy makers, nongovernmental organizations, and Vietnamese American activists all claimed that the United States had a “moral obligation” to assist expanding categories of South Vietnamese.

Ford’s quantification of the nation’s “moral obligation,” rather than the existence of the obligation itself, however, had far more immediate consequences. In the short term, the president painted a very misleading picture of what the administration hoped to accomplish. Because, as Ford confessed to the congressional leaders the previous afternoon, competing interests in the government bureaucracy were still trying to determine how to define the final category of parolees, the president needed to be vague. Yet his suggestion that the final category would include “tens of thousands” did not at all reflect the scope of evacuation planning then underway. The president knew the State Department had been requesting the parole of hundreds – not tens – of thousands. In fact, at an NSC meeting the day before Ford gave his speech, Kissinger told Ford “the maximum” tabulation of his “list of potential evacuees” included 1.7 million people.⁹⁷ While the president’s underestimation temporarily appeased those who opposed a large parole, his speech also clearly misrepresented the scope of the planning then underway.

While he was vague and misleading in regard to precise numbers, Ford accurately explained the administration’s intention to evacuate both Americans and South Vietnamese. Because the War Powers Act of 1973 required congressional authorization for the use of any military force in Vietnam, however, the president could not put this vision into action unilaterally. He therefore closed the section of his speech on Vietnam by asking Congress to “clarify immediately its restrictions on the use of US military forces … for the limited purposes of protecting American lives by ensuring their evacuation, if this should be necessary.” Ford also requested “prompt revision of the law to cover those Vietnamese to whom we have a very special obligation and whose lives may be endangered should the worst come to pass.”⁹⁸ He asked Congress to fulfill all of these directives, including the appropriation of funds, “no later than April 19.”⁹⁹ That requests for nearly one billion dollars in aid for South Vietnam and evacuation authorization appeared in the same speech highlights the profound contradictions animating US policy in early April 1975.

Nevertheless, the administration refused to yield on its plan to include South Vietnamese in the US evacuation. An April 14 meeting with congressional leaders revealed that it would be an uphill battle. After his speech on the 10th, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee requested a meeting with the president, something it had not done since World War I.¹⁰⁰ Ford described the meeting as “very tense” and noted the message from the Senators “was clear: get out, fast.”¹⁰¹ Ford’s memoirs suggest that the Senators echoed earlier statements that they would not provide “one nickel for military aid” and added reservations about including the South Vietnamese in official evacuation planning.¹⁰² As Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE) put it, “I will vote for any amount for getting Americans out,” but, “I don’t want it mixed with getting the Vietnamese out.”¹⁰³ Scholar P. Edward Haley suggests that the Senators’ “main purpose was to obtain a promise from Mr. Ford that he would swiftly withdraw the Americans remaining in Vietnam” and that “once they were certain that this was being done … they would be willing to provide the president humanitarian aid.”¹⁰⁴ Haley’s argument, especially in light of the pervasive mistrust that the war precipitated between the executive and legislative branches, is persuasive. Still, while Haley’s analysis amends Ford’s recollections, the difference is one of degree, not kind. Clearly, at least in terms of the majority congressional opinion, the path of least resistance would have been to evacuate all of the remaining Americans in mid-April and be done with it. The Ford administration and a key cohort of legislators refused to take this path.

In addition to vociferous debates occurring in the United States, South Vietnam’s imminent collapse triggered heated clashes among the Americans left in Saigon. For this group, ongoing discussions about an evacuation were not abstract concerns but urgently present dilemmas: what would happen to the people they looked in the eyes every day? Some Americans who had South Vietnamese families refused to evacuate without their dependents, which forced Congress to approve a “very limited parole program” to “eliminate one of the reasons why some Americans refuse to leave.”¹⁰⁵ Other Americans tied US policy makers’ hands by sneaking out their families, friends, and employees on secret flights to the Philippines.¹⁰⁶ Unwilling to wait for Washington to act, Americans in Saigon, including some who returned to the country as it was falling to assist former friends, worked to create an “underground railroad,” that is, a clandestine evacuation.¹⁰⁷ Those among this group who continued to play an important role in the US-Vietnamese normalization process were Richard Armitage and Shepard Lowman.¹⁰⁸ In many ways, then, the administration benefited from events it could not control, like lower-level Americans deciding to evacuate their associates, regardless of whether they had permission to do so.

Until very recently, scholars suggested that these events took place in direct opposition to the wishes and orders of the US Ambassador in Saigon, Graham Martin. In 1966, Martin’s adopted son, Glen, a helicopter pilot, died in Vietnam, giving the Ambassador a very personal stake in the country’s survival.¹⁰⁹ From his appointment as US Ambassador to South Vietnam in June 1973 onward, Martin repeatedly dismissed negative predictions and refused to believe that the country his son had died to defend was lost until the bitter end. Recent scholarship persuasively argues, however, that Martin’s position on evacuation planning was also more nuanced than conventionally understood.¹¹⁰ The Ambassador insisted that any overt actions that could foment widespread panic must be avoided at all costs, and he practiced what he preached; his wife, Dottie, was still in Saigon on April 28 and their personal residence remained unpacked.¹¹¹ Martin, therefore, limited official evacuation planning in Saigon to such an extent that it infuriated lesser ranking American officials. The Ambassador, however, did not stand in the way of covert evacuation attempts, at least not those he thought could operate without undermining the façade of American confidence in South Vietnam’s viability. While lesser-ranking Americans went further than the Ambassador desired, engaging in what Thurston Clarke calls a “humanitarian mutiny” to evacuate their friends and colleagues, other aspects of the clandestine evacuation took place with Martin’s tacit approval.¹¹² “The evidence that he believed the United States had a moral responsibility to evacuate endangered Vietnamese is extensive,” Clarke demonstrates, adding, “he had proven himself willing to violate American and South Vietnamese immigration regulations to achieve it.”¹¹³

The differences between the evacuation planning in Washington and Saigon, therefore, were therefore less drastic in reality than they appeared on paper. American leaders in both capitals worried a great deal about perception and the importance of buying time to implement evacuation goals that included South Vietnamese. Meanwhile, other individuals on the ground in Vietnam, immune from the pressures of such visible leadership positions, worked feverishly to evacuate as many as possible before it was too late.¹¹⁴ They too learned the lessons of Da Nang and operated on the assumption that if they wanted to guarantee their friends and coworkers safe passage out of the country, they would have to take matters into their own hands.

That Americans were still on the ground to make these decisions, however, was also a conscious part of the administration’s strategy. Once the last Americans left Vietnam on April 30, 1975, critics chastised the administration for leaving Americans there for so long in the first place. It seemed reckless to endanger American lives for so long, some observers charged, when it was obvious Saigon would not be able to stop, no less turn back, the communist forces encircling the South Vietnamese capital. Indeed, some within the government leveled similar criticisms. Secretary of Defense Schlesinger asked Ford to start evacuating the remaining Americans from Saigon in early April and “repeated his request almost daily.” When Ford refused, Schlesinger ordered empty planes fly in and out of Saigon to demonstrate for posterity that the evacuation – especially if it went sour – could have been completed much earlier.¹¹⁵

Retaining a small yet significant contingent of Americans in Vietnam was not an oversight, however. As Kissinger explained: “we would not be able to evacuate any South Vietnamese friends unless we prolonged the withdrawal of Americans, for Congress would surely cut off all funds with the departure of the last American,” a reality that prompted the administration to instruct Martin in late April “to ‘trickle out’ the remainder [of Americans] so that an airlift could be kept going to rescue the maximum number of Vietnamese.”¹¹⁶ Like its request for military aid, then, the decision to leave Americans in South Vietnam as the country was obviously crumbling was a strategic decision intended to provide time and justification for the administration’s evacuation plans.¹¹⁷

While many on the ground in South Vietnam supported the administration’s goals, often unintentionally, putting the broad mandates of Ford’s “profound moral obligation” into specific policy continued to provoke bureaucratic infighting in Washington. The Departments of State and Justice, in particular, offered competing visions. As a classified memo explained, the tension between fulfilling the nation’s “special obligation” and “limiting public controversy to the extent possible” led to significant disagreements between the two institutions.¹¹⁸ “The State and Justice Departments are agreed on the principle of parole for Vietnamese … but differ sharply as to numbers,” the memo continued, noting that “the Justice Department would limit the use of parole to a maximum of 50,000, or 40% of the total number of refugees, whichever is less, because of domestic impact.”¹¹⁹ The State Department proposed a much more expansive policy, arguing that the United States should “take our fair share,” including “as many as 200,000,” or even “under certain circumstances” a “much larger” number, perhaps even one million.¹²⁰ On the one hand, the State Department’s framing of the evacuation much more accurately represented the scope and duration of US involvement in South Vietnam. On the other hand, even State’s figures meant that resettlement would only be available to a small minority of those whose lives were forever altered by the American escalation of the Vietnam War.

As Americans fought about admissions figures, their arithmetic had profound consequences for South Vietnamese. The ways American policy created ripple effects with often devastating consequences for South Vietnamese is apparent, for example, in a “Study of Evacuation Planning Issues and Options for Viet-Nam,” which the State Department prepared on April 17. “The category of evacuees which has caused most concern,” the memo explained, “is the 17,600 [current] Vietnamese employees of the US Government with their estimated 112,00 to 150,000 dependents.”¹²¹ American and Vietnamese cultures defined “dependents” very differently.¹²² While Americans emphasized the nuclear family, the Vietnamese “conceived of family … as a collection of generations living within a single household,” an understanding that included “the totality of their maternal and paternal relatives.”¹²³ The difference between admitting 112,000 and 150,000 dependents, then, would be nothing short of catastrophic for South Vietnamese families: 38,000 lives and the unity of countless families hung in the balance. Although it is worthwhile to enumerate the ways US officials categorized their decision-making process in April 1975, then, it is equally important to remember that the numerical estimates that figured into the complex calculus of evacuation planning represented human lives. Because human ties, especially the broader understanding of family as understood by the Vietnamese people, defied easy quantification, family separation was endemic. After 1975, family reunification became a driving force that motivated many American and Vietnamese individuals both inside and outside of government.¹²⁴

In addition to leaving Americans on the ground in South Vietnam longer than the Secretary of Defense thought prudent, siding with the Department of State over the Department of Justice, and instructing the US Ambassador in Vietnam to do everything he could to prolong the evacuation to allow more time for South Vietnamese to escape, the administration also secured congressional approval for its parole program. On April 24th, Congress passed the legislation Ford requested in his April 10th address. The law gave Ford “limited authority to use American troops in the evacuation of Americans and South Vietnamese from South Vietnam.”¹²⁵ Revealingly, the Senate rejected an amendment that would have stricken section 4, “dealing with withdrawal of foreign nationals along with American citizens,” by a 12–80 vote.¹²⁶ By April 24, then, American policy makers not only regarded the imminent American evacuation of Saigon as a given (it had been so for weeks), but Congress codified its concurrence with the administration’s position: the American evacuation would include South Vietnamese.

The executive and legislative branches agreed to the parole of three groups of South Vietnamese. The first included those who were “immediate relatives of American citizens or permanent resident aliens, estimated to number between 10,000 and 75,000.”¹²⁷ In keeping with long-standing trends in American immigration law, then, this first preference category facilitated family reunification. Because the nation had yet to establish a separate body of refugee law, this precedent had important implications for the future. With category II, US policy makers approved for parole of “Vietnamese already at Clark Air Force base” in the Philippines – those, in other words, who Americans had already evacuated out of the country.¹²⁸ Although the presence of South Vietnamese at the US base in the Philippines dramatically bent if not outright broke South Vietnamese, American, and Philippine immigration regulations, the parole of these individuals reveals the extent to which “middle-grade movers” could force the hands of their superiors. It also demonstrates how US leaders in Washington and Saigon used their subordinates’ defiance to pursue some of their own policy objectives that they knew would be unpopular with Congress and the American people.¹²⁹

The final category of individuals included in the April 1975 parole was “up to 50,000 ‘high risk’ Vietnamese refugees and their families.” Those who fell under the umbrella of “high risk,” included “past and present US government employees, Vietnamese officials whose co-operation is necessary for the evacuation of American citizens, individuals with knowledge of sensitive US government intelligence operations, vulnerable political or intellectual figures and former Communist defectors.”¹³⁰ The April 1975 approvals thus provided for the parole of a total of 125,000 persons, in addition to those already at Clark Air Force Base. Though inadequate to address all of those to whom the United States owed a “special obligation,” these numbers represented a triumph for those who labored for a large parole. At the same time, it was obvious that the number of individuals eligible for “high risk” status far outpaced the fifty thousand available slots.

The Vietnam War “Is Finished”

On April 24, the same day as the S1848 vote, Ford gave a defining speech at Tulane University. As Americans and South Vietnamese were evacuating from Saigon, Ford pleaded for national unity: “Today, America can regain a sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned…”¹³¹ At this point, the students interrupted the president with a long and thunderous applause. As Ford’s press secretary recalled, “the speech was a milestone in contemporary American history. Ford did something no American president had been able to do for thirty years: He spoke of the Indochina war in the past tense.”¹³² Ford read the public’s mood correctly; many wanted to relegate the Vietnam War to history, a reality that did not bode well for the South Vietnamese associated with the US/RVN.

Despite the president’s announcement, the war continued. The same day as Ford’s speech, 488 Americans and more than 3,000 Vietnamese departed from Tan Son Nhut (Tan Son Airport).¹³³ Ford described the following events this way: “The final siege of Saigon began on April 25. Kissinger was on the telephone to US Ambassador Graham Martin several times a day, and his reports convinced me that the country was going to collapse momentarily.”¹³⁴ Even at this critical juncture, Kissinger encouraged the Ambassador “to ‘trickle’ out the remaining Americans slowly so that the airlift of endangered South Vietnamese could continue.”¹³⁵ Martin was happy to oblige. He closed an April 25th telegram to Kissinger by explaining: “You are quite right that I feel as you do, a very heavy moral obligation to evacuate as many deserving Vietnamese as possible. I feel it so deeply that I refrain from commenting about it or putting it in the official reports to the Department which some damn fool leaks to the press and endangers cutting off our ability to continue as we are.”¹³⁶

On April 28, the evacuation that had been underway came to a halt when Tan Son Nhut came under heavy artillery fire and two US marines were killed in the attack. In his autobiography, Ford reports that he had hoped to reconvene evacuation flights once the firing stopped, but “a new problem” replaced the issue of North Vietnamese attacks: “Refugees were streaming out onto the airport’s runways, and our planes couldn’t land. The situation there was clearly out of control.”¹³⁷ Accordingly, late in the evening on April 28 (EST), Ford announced the beginning of Operation Frequent Wind, the final phase of the withdrawal: evacuation by helicopter.¹³⁸ At 11:00 p.m. Kissinger personally called Graham and instructed him to “pull the plug: All Americans must come out together with as many Vietnamese as could be loaded on the helicopters.”¹³⁹

Ultimately, Operation Frequent Wind replicated many of the tragedies that occurred in Da Nang. The South Vietnamese people paid dearly for the failures of American policy, while Americans were forced to confront the glaring limits of US power. As the country collapsed, Khuc Minh Tho was still in the Philippines, and she had to face her country’s demise – grieving her home, the country that her first husband, parents, and other relatives died to defend – as she endured the hell of not knowing the fates of her three children and second husband. It took ninety days before she received a telecom from Be informing her that he and her children were all alive and unharmed. Any relief Tho must have felt at receiving such news was undoubtedly mitigated by the reality that they remained separated, with Tho “stateless” and having no means to reunify her family. This realization was devastating. As Tho recalled decades later, when she didn’t “know how I could get to see them again,” it was paralyzing: “At that time, I keep thinking, maybe I cannot live without them.”¹⁴⁰

The international news media broadcast the harrowing scenes from the final hours of the evacuation around the world, including the obvious reality that many of the South Vietnamese who wished to escape would not be able to do so. Amid this dominant storyline, the administration’s frantic, though deeply flawed, efforts to evacuate as many South Vietnamese as possible remained largely unreported. Interviews given by administration officials in the evacuation’s immediate aftermath added to the myth that the inclusion of South Vietnamese was an accidental, on-the-ground decision. On May 1, for example, Press Secretary Nessen faced multiple questions about the legality of Ford’s decision to include South Vietnamese evacuees. “I was in no mood to explain patiently the legal justification,” Nessen admitted in his memoirs, “and I snapped back at the questioners.”¹⁴¹ When pushed to respond directly to the question of whether or not Ford broke the law, Nessen responded, “He did it because the people would have been killed otherwise.” When the reporter asked him to cite a legal rationale, an incredulous Nessen replied, “I am citing a moral rationale.”¹⁴²

Conflicting and misleading figures also added to the general perception that the administration completely failed to account for South Vietnamese allies in advance. Nearly every published source reports (correctly) that the American evacuation of Saigon included the exit of approximately 1,000 Americans and 6,000 Vietnamese. What the majority of sources fail to note, however, is that these figures are the numbers for Operation Frequent Wind, the two-day helicopter evacuation, not the entire evacuation itself. These numbers omit the 40,000 Vietnamese the United States evacuated before Tan Son Nhut closed on April 28 and also the 45,700 Vietnamese that the United States evacuated by sea as Operation Frequent Wind continued.¹⁴³

Beyond the ambiguity of specific statistics and the contradictory comments offered by administration officials, the momentum to support a suspicious reading of the United States’ evacuation was vast and well founded. In its efforts to secure the existence of a noncommunist South Vietnam, the United States deployed 2.5 million troops, released 80 million liters of chemical agents, and dropped 15.35 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, efforts which not only caused unfathomable physical destruction but also played a large part in leaving over 3 million dead, with an additional 14 million wounded, and 300,000 missing in action.¹⁴⁴ This torrent of violence, Espiritu explains, “displaced some twelve million people in South Vietnam – almost half of the country’s total population at the time – from their homes.”¹⁴⁵ In light of the much longer US involvement in Vietnam, then, it is understandable why even well-informed observers regarded the administration’s evacuation efforts as, at best, far too little far too late.

Including South Vietnamese in the US evacuation also permitted American policy makers to attempt to undo some of the damage US conduct during the war wrought on the American reputation worldwide. As Maureen P. Freeney explains, “The granting of refuge was central to the state’s attempts at selective amnesia at the end of the war,” a process whereby “US officials delinked the decision to offer refuge to emigrants from Vietnam from the destruction wrought by the US military during the war,” an approach that transformed the United States “from aggressor to generous patron.”¹⁴⁶ The fact that the administration’s large parole could conveniently function as a form of “damage control” that allowed the United States to, in Heather Marie Stur’s words, “reclaim the ‘humanitarian label’” as Washington sought to “rehabilitate its image … as a benevolent power,” therefore, also explains why contemporaries and scholars have viewed American policy with suspicion.¹⁴⁷

Questions about American sincerity highlight a larger tension: because of the number and diversity of individuals involved in formulating US policy during the normalization process, it is difficult to speak of American intent with precision. US officials often supported the paroles and, later, other migration programs, for different, even contradictory reasons. This truth only became more pervasive as a growing number of individuals contributed to the negotiation and implementation of migration programs in the years and decades after 1975. While resettling South Vietnamese allies served as an effective form of Cold War propaganda, at least in theory, in practice, negotiating refugee programs often led to greater contact cooperation between Washington and Hanoi, especially as time went on.

By arguing that the United States had a “profound moral obligation” to its South Vietnamese allies and insisting on a sizable parole at a time when it would have cost Ford very little domestically to stay silent and simply evacuate Americans, the administration refused to take the path of least resistance. Declaring that the United States should offer resettlement opportunities for its South Vietnamese allies and defining that “moral obligation” on the basis of employment and familial ties set precedents that helped drive US policy for the next twenty years. The deployment of US troops for the evacuation also signaled enduring changes in American military policy more broadly. The armed forces’ role in the evacuation, Jana K. Lipman has shown, led the US military to embrace “humanitarian” missions on a much larger scale, a trend that has expanded dramatically in the twenty-first century.¹⁴⁸

The “Refugee Problem”

In retrospect, it is clear that the completion of the American evacuation from Saigon signaled a beginning, rather than the end, of US resettlement programs for South Vietnamese migrants. At the time, however, competing agendas, unyielding executive-legislative mistrust, and the reality that the US government did not control the migrations out of Indochina combined to threaten the possibility of continued admissions for South Vietnamese. The day after the last US helicopters left Saigon, L. Dean Brown, head of an Interagency Task Force, wrote to Kissinger about a “grave political problem” confronting the administration. The crux of the issue was that, just as the administration predicted, “with Americans safely out of Saigon, Congress is starting to cool off on the Vietnamese problem.”¹⁴⁹ Furthermore, the original parole, including allocations for the first, second, and especially third (“high risk”) categories were not sufficient to cover the number who had escaped.

The discrepancy stemmed from the South Vietnamese who left by sea rather than by air.¹⁵⁰ While the approved parole covered those evacuated on US ships, the 30,000 Vietnamese who escaped on their own exceeded the total parole number. Although US policy makers had anticipated this problem, it did not make the clash between the human stakes and increasing apathy any easier to reconcile.¹⁵¹ To make matters even more complicated, approximately 1,600 individuals who evacuated changed their minds in the aftermath of Saigon’s collapse and, ultimately, successfully petitioned to return to Vietnam.¹⁵² Regarding the far more numerous individuals who escaped on their own and desired resettlement abroad, the INS recommended “that the previous limit of 50,000 for high risk refugees … not be increased,” a decision that would require the US to draw a “clear line” and only assist those evacuated by Americans.¹⁵³ The administration was ultimately able to overrule the INS and secured support from a “cool … even hostile” Congress, expending a great deal of political capital to expand the parole to cover the additional escapees with the promise “that we would attempt to resettle at least 20,000 of this number abroad.”¹⁵⁴ In the years ahead, changing circumstances and assumptions made multilateral refugee resettlement a foundational part of the US approach to the Indochinese diaspora. More immediately in the spring of 1975, however, American policy makers remained largely focused on crafting a unilateral response.

Adequate funding was in jeopardy in early May. On May 1 legislators in the House voted down HR 6069, which would have provided funding for the evacuation and resettlement of Indochinese parolees.¹⁵⁵ The move caused Ford to exclaim, “God damn it, I just don’t understand it,” and drew a televised lecture from Nessen on the president’s behalf.¹⁵⁶ At least part of the problem stemmed from the fact that the legislation, which had been making its way through committee for weeks, contained authorization for Ford to use military force for evacuation purposes, which the House refused to approve after April 30th. This decision threatened the entire program because, as a May 5th memo explained, “without additional funds, the US Government will be able to continue resettlement efforts only one more week.”¹⁵⁷ This dire need for additional funds dramatized the literal and metaphorical distance between evacuation from South Vietnam and resettlement in the United States, which remained vast.¹⁵⁸

Throughout the remainder of May 1975, the administration went on the offensive to garner public and congressional support for increased parole numbers. On the 19th, Ford created the President’s Advisory Committee on Refugees to complement the Interagency Task Force on Refugees.¹⁵⁹ The administration also received encouraging signs from powerful domestic organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and the AFL-CIO, which wrote letters to the White House and publicly proclaimed their support for Ford’s resettlement program.¹⁶⁰ Ford continued to emphasize his belief that “we have a moral obligation to help these refugees resettle and begin new lives in the United States. They fled from South Vietnam for two reasons: They feared that they would be killed if they stayed and they did not want to live under a Communist system of government.”¹⁶¹ In his press conferences and cabinet meetings, Ford also argued that although “Americans want to forget the Vietnam War … we must not take out our frustration and anger on the innocent victims of the war. To do so would dishonor the sacrifices America has made in good faith.”¹⁶²

Ford’s campaign succeeded. Congress passed the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1975 (Public Law 94–23), which the president signed into law on May 23, 1975.¹⁶³ Congress also appropriated $405 million for resettlement in addition to the $98 million in economic assistance funds already spent by the Task Force.¹⁶⁴ Historian P. Edward Haley argues, “With the approval of the aid for the refugees the United States reached the end of its long, bitter involvement in the Vietnam War.”¹⁶⁵ While the United States’ “long, bitter involvement in the Vietnam War” was far from over, the influx of funds permitted the US government, along with the help of voluntary agencies, to open and maintain four reception centers in the United States: Camp Pendleton, California (opened on April 29); Ft. Chaffee, Arkansas (May 2); Eglin Air Force Base, Florida (May 4); and Ft. Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania (May 28).¹⁶⁶ By the end of December, “some 130,000 refugees” had been successfully resettled in the United States.¹⁶⁷ The closing of the domestic resettlement centers, however, did not end ongoing debates about the United States’ commitment, or lack thereof, to the South Vietnamese people, nor did it permit US officials to ignore events in Southeast Asia.

The Unfinished War

The fall of Saigon forced US policy makers to confront new geopolitical realities in Indochina. In his path-breaking book, Edwin Martini demonstrates that after 1975 the US imposed a series of hostile policies that in many ways perpetuated the war.¹⁶⁸ These included extending the economic embargo that it had previously placed on North Vietnam to the entire country and preventing the new united country, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV), from joining the United Nations. Despite willingness from many in Congress to move forward with more formal ties, the Ford administration refused to pursue official relations.¹⁶⁹ These decisions, Martini contends, amounted to the beginnings of an “American war on Vietnam” that lasted until 2000.¹⁷⁰

The Vietnam War remained unfinished in other ways, despite Hanoi’s unequivocal military victory. For South Vietnamese like Khuc Minh Tho, the war continued in visceral, intimate ways, as family separation and, for those still in Vietnam, fears of reprisals rendered their lived realities far from peaceful. For a small subset of Americans, the war also persisted through family separation, though those in the United States enjoyed safety from the physical violence of the Vietnam War, as they had throughout the conflict.

Although most Americans were eager to consign the conflict to history, one notable exception to this general trend was the issue of American servicemen listed as prisoner of war/missing in action (POW/MIA). In early 1973, in accordance with the Peace of Paris Accords, 591 American prisoners returned to the United States in Operation Homecoming. Despite Hanoi’s repatriation of American POWs in 1973, concerns about missing American servicemen became even more pronounced after Saigon’s fall, thanks largely to policy decisions made by the Nixon administration that came back to haunt future administrations.

As American combat operations increased in scope, scale, and frequency throughout the mid-1960s, US servicemen ran increasing chances of being captured and held as prisoners of war (POW). Likewise, as Americans fought in dense, unfamiliar terrain, men frequently went missing in action (MIA). The number of Americans held prisoner or gone missing increased throughout the mid-1960s, and their families were left with little recourse. In fact, as Heath Hardage Lee explains, when the servicemen’s wives attempted to get information about their husbands’ status, most “government officials were patronizing, placating, or just plain disinterested.”¹⁷¹ Led by Sybil Stockdale, whose husband, Jim, was shot down and captured in July 1965, military wives from around the country began meeting, initially in “casual events, sitting around kitchen tables” to provide mutual support and share information.¹⁷² After a few years of playing by the governments’ rules, which meant mostly keeping quiet, the wives had enough; in 1967 this “wives’ ‘grapevine’” that connected military communities on the East and West Coasts joined together as the League of Wives of American Vietnam Prisoners of War, with Stockdale at its helm.¹⁷³ With growing publicity, the League of Wives became a powerful voice in the domestic debates about the Vietnam War. In May 1970, the organization transformed into the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Action, with its headquarters in DC.

The League’s name change reflected important shifts in government policy. In 1969, the Department of Defense combined the previously distinct categories of prisoner of war and missing in action to a new hybrid: POW/MIA. This “unprecedented” classification was, historian H. Bruce Franklin argues, “purposefully designed to suggest that each and every missing person might be a prisoner, even though most were lost in circumstances that made capture impossible,” a decision that “created many false hopes.”¹⁷⁴ The combination of the new POW/MIA classification and Nixon’s Go Public campaign, which popularized the cause, furthered the administration’s policy goals in multiple ways. American POW/MIAs served as justification for continuing the conflict by reframing the unpopular war as a rescue mission.¹⁷⁵ More than the POWs themselves, moreover, the publicity campaign focused on the families they left behind. As Natasha Zaretsky notes, “the public was bombarded with images and stories of the loyal wives, grief-stricken parents, and uncomprehending children of American prisoners.”¹⁷⁶ While the League and Nixon administration emphasized family separation, they did not have a monopoly on using family rhetoric and iconography to support their aims; antiwar activists also used their identities as mothers and the suffering of women and children in Vietnam to support their arguments.¹⁷⁷

This history of the League and government (mis)use of POW/MIA accounting cast a long shadow on the post-1975 period. By combining the POW and MIA categories, the government made it virtually “impossible for anyone … to arrive at a precise accounting.”¹⁷⁸ While this was an advantage for Nixon insofar as it made it impossible for Hanoi to say definitively that it had repatriated all POWs, it was a handicap for subsequent US administrations because they were also unable to persuade American families that their government had properly handled or resolved the issue.

The League had also changed dramatically by 1975. While post-1975 NGOs like the Aurora Foundation and especially the Families of Vietnamese Political Prisoners Association would echo the methods used by the initial League of Wives, after 1975 the membership and leadership of the League changed in fundamental ways. Once Operation Homecoming brought American prisoners home, the POW wives like Sybil Stockdale who had been so instrumental in the organization’s founding and success no longer had personal incentives to continue their activism. For those families who were not among the lucky 591, some “accepted the loss of their missing men,” and also disengaged from POW/MIA politics. The League, therefore, transformed into a much more radical group possessed by “the most fervent faith that some of the missing might still be alive.”¹⁷⁹

These families’ high hopes soon turned into palpable anger as they blamed the government in Washington for their suffering as much as the one in Hanoi.¹⁸⁰ Ford regarded POW/MIA accounting as one of the “divisive residues he was anxious to leave behind” and gave the League a lukewarm reception, which only exacerbated tensions between the organization and the US government.¹⁸¹ Capitol Hill, while generally more sympathetic than the White House, still gave POW/MIA families little reason for optimism. A congressional Committee on Missing Persons in Southeast Asia concluded in December 1975 that “no Americans are still being held as prisoners in Indochina” and “a total accounting … is not now, and never will be, possible.”¹⁸² The families, however, were unconvinced.

Once Ronald Reagan emerged to challenge Ford for the presidential nomination, Ford hardened his POW/MIA rhetoric. Reagan had starred in the 1954 film Prisoner of War and had personally called Sybil Stockdale in 1968 to offer his support to the nascent League of Wives.¹⁸³ In 1973, the California governor hosted a huge parade and elegant evening gala to welcome home returning prisoners.¹⁸⁴ Reagan, with his clear POW/MIA-ally credentials, used what he framed as Ford’s lack of commitment to American servicemen to criticize the already unpopular president. In a gesture clearly aimed more toward domestic politics than foreign policy, in March of 1976, Kissinger declared “full accounting” of American POW/MIAs to be “the absolute minimum precondition without which we cannot consider the normalization of relations.”¹⁸⁵ Despite a brief hiatus during the Carter administration, US policy makers maintained this position until the mid-1990s. Although the power of the POW/MIA lobby and government support for the cause had not yet neared its apex, one can already detect the influence the issue would soon wield inside and outside the corridors of power.

If the war felt unfinished to the American POW/MIA families who did not know the fates of their loved ones, the war also persisted in other ways. Indeed, concerns about POW/MIAs and ongoing obligations to South Vietnamese allies were already becoming linked. In October of 1976, for example, James M. Wilson represented the United States at a meeting of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva. The UNHCR occupied a unique position in global geopolitics. As Gil Loescher explains, the humanitarian organization was created to be “a strictly non-political agency and an advocate for refugees,” a charge from the UN which put it in the odd position of both an advocacy organization and an institute intended to “facilitate state policies.”¹⁸⁶ The organization had refused involvement in Vietnam until the early 1970s, viewing those internally displaced as beyond its refugee-focused mandate.¹⁸⁷

Wilson arrived at the UNHCR meeting as the first occupant of a just-created State Department post: Coordinator for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. The existence of this new position within the State Department was only the latest example of executive-legislative wrangling over control of the nation’s diplomacy. As historian Barbara Keys explains, Kissinger saw the office as a way to co-opt some of Congress’ leadership on human rights and deal with “the problem” of “congressional assertiveness in the realm of foreign policy.”¹⁸⁸ Although a multitude of functions could have fallen under the purview of this new position, Wilson described his primary objectives as trifold: (1) a reorganization of the preexisting Office of Refugee and Migration Affairs, (2) the creation of an office for handling POW/MIA accounting, and (3) the creation of an Office of Human Rights.¹⁸⁹ The duties assigned to this office foreshadowed many future developments. As Lipman observes, the Coordinator for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs “linguistically and bureaucratically” tied human rights to humanitarianism in the State Department and the US military.¹⁹⁰ These links intensified dramatically in the years ahead.

It is revealing that Wilson, as the occupant of a just-created State Department post, represented Washington at the UNHCR meeting in 1976. Sending a relatively low-ranking official illustrated the United States’ somewhat distant relationship with the UNHCR. Although, as the self-proclaimed leader of the West, the United States provided a majority of the organization’s funding, throughout the Cold War American policy makers had preferred unilateral decision-making over the UNHCR’s multilateral approach to refugee issues. Regardless of Washington’s somewhat tepid relationship with its host in Geneva, Wilson used the meeting to shine light on what he argued was an urgent issue: the fate of Indochinese migrants.

Already in October of 1976, the migration the world would soon come to call the “boat people crisis” was substantial enough to dominate Wilson’s agenda at the UNHCR meeting. While in Geneva, Wilson described what he called a “new phase” of the migration and lamented that the international community was already “in danger of both singly and collectively failing in our responsibilities and obligations [to Indochinese refugees].”¹⁹¹ “There are now two critical aspects of the problem to consider,” Wilson explained. “The first is the matter of over 70,000 Indochinese refugees [already in camps] in Thailand.” “More compelling is the second problem,” he continued, “involving the hundreds of refugees who manage to flee Indochina each month in small unworthy sea vessels.” Foreshadowing the language subsequent US policy makers would use when the migration grew by orders of magnitude, he argued “the problem of the Indochinese refugees who, under great peril, manage to flee by boat in the South China sea is without question the most dramatic and tragic situation this Committee will discuss at this session.”¹⁹² During this early stage of what scholars now call the Indochinese diaspora, however, the UNHCR reception was unenthusiastic at best. The organization and its High Commissioner continued to view the exodus of migrants from Vietnam as an American responsibility and questioned whether those who were crossing international borders in the mid-1970s actually had a “well-founded fear of persecution” and therefore legally qualified for refugee status.¹⁹³

Throughout 1975 and 1976 – before and after Wilson’s comments in Geneva – American policy makers clashed over whether or not the US should resettle additional migrants, reflecting stark divisions within the US bureaucracy. By December, 80,000 people, “with well over 150 new arrivals per week,” were living in very difficult conditions in camps in Thailand.¹⁹⁴ As Acting Secretary of State Ingersoll explained to Attorney General Levi, many of those were “individuals to whom the US Government has both a special connection and obligation. Under the original general parole program they would have clearly fallen within our priority categories I, II, or III.”¹⁹⁵ The question of the United States’ obligation to its South Vietnamese allies, then, was not one which arose in April 1975 and quickly disappeared, but a topic with which US officials had to reckon for decades after 1975.

While anti-communism spurred the initial American commitment to South Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s, after 1975 US officials framed the US obligation to the South Vietnamese people in moral terms, referencing familial connections and employment ties. In February 1976, the State Department, INS, and Department of Justice contacted congressmen to ask for the parole of an “additional 11,000” that included approximately 1,000 category I refugees and 10,000 who would have qualified under the original “high risk” category. “We have a real obligation to these high risk refugees,” the joint letter argued, and “aside from our obligation, we also have the humanitarian motive of alleviating the sufferings of these individuals, most of whom are living under deplorable camp conditions in Thailand.”¹⁹⁶ This letter provides a brief glimpse into the ways discussions about South Vietnamese migrants, who American officials routinely called “refugees,” expanded from a narrow focus on US obligation stemming from the Vietnam War to become entangled with the growing power of human rights rhetoric. The necessary committees of Congress were willing to support an additional parole “to reunify families” (i.e., those in Category I), a trend that extended far beyond 1976. Many legislators, however, were very reluctant to approve any additional “high risk” cases.¹⁹⁷ It took two additional months of tough lobbying until on May 5 Congress approved the 11,000-person parole, which left the question of US commitment, or lack thereof, to the 80,000 and growing number of migrants in Thailand unaddressed.¹⁹⁸

The number of oceanic migrants escalated throughout Ford’s tenure as president. By September 1976, Wilson explained to INS Commissioner Chapman, “We are facing a plainly calamitous situation with respect to the Indochinese refugee boat cases. As more and more of these boats flee Vietnam, they are meeting with an increasingly hostile reception in the countries of first asylum in the area. Many are being turned back to sea in unseaworthy vessels, with untrained crews and in the typhoon season.”¹⁹⁹ Wilson’s tone was desperate. He repeated that the “urgent problem” needed an “immediate answer,” yet “in view of the assurances which we have given The Congress, further class parole must be ruled out,” and “special legislation would be too time consuming.”²⁰⁰ He suggested that at the very least, the United States “make available 100 conditional entry spaces per month for the use of refugees escaping by boat.”²⁰¹

By December, the NSC threw its weight behind Wilson’s proposal. “The president is deeply concerned with this entire problem,” an NSC memo explained, adding, “we should act now to make sure this problem is resolved and our program is operating prior to the President’s leaving office.”²⁰² The issue, simply put, did not “get resolved.” Oceanic migrants continued to depart from Vietnam in the late 1970s and 1980s, reaching proportions that made the “calamitous situation” in 1976 look paltry. In the years that followed, US policy makers enhanced the connections that Wilson’s post foreshadowed: vis-à-vis the SRV, refugee policy, humanitarianism, human rights, and US foreign relations would become so deeply entangled as to be virtually inseparable.

Conclusion

That 130,000 Vietnamese evacuated alongside US personnel in April 1975 was neither haphazard nor unanticipated; the Ford administration fought vigorously for precisely this outcome. The sheer horror of the fall of Da Nang shook US officials out of their complacency and forced them to confront the reality of South Vietnam’s imminent collapse. As the WSAG meeting on April 2, 1975, makes clear, US policy makers were determined to prevent a “recurrence of the Danang fiasco” and made an immediate commitment to evacuating South Vietnamese whose lives would be at risk because of their association with the United States.

The Ford administration’s successful campaign to include South Vietnamese in the American evacuation was far from inevitable. The administration fought a divided and deeply apathetic Congress, public, and, at times, INS to ensure that Ford had the authority to use the US military to evacuate South Vietnamese nationals and the legal approvals necessary to resettle those individuals in the United States. Like the fall of Da Nang, however, the evacuation of Saigon was a harrowing event marked by desperate mob scenes at points of departure, US inability to execute all of its evacuation goals, and the horror of family separation for many South Vietnamese. In April 1975, however, 130,000 Vietnamese evacuated alongside the United States, many of them before US helicopters carried the last Americans out of Vietnam on April 28–30. Even though South Vietnam ceased to exist, the ties that the US government had established with the South Vietnamese people remained. Although Ford administration officials mobilized less of a response over time, US policy makers remained conscious of the fact that the “refugee problem” did not end on April 30, 1975, nor did it end when the last American refugee reception center closed on December 20, 1975.

While the Ford administration succeeded in securing the inclusion of South Vietnamese in the American evacuation, then, the battle to achieve that goal exposed major fault lines. The dilemmas on the streets of Da Nang, Saigon, and on the South China Sea blurred the boundaries between various aspects of US policy, as Congress’ efforts to assert itself in the nation’s foreign affairs, especially through human rights-based policies, clashed with the executive’s traditional prerogatives in defining refugee admissions. These trends, combined with executive and legislative dissatisfaction with the ad hoc parole process, persisted into the Carter years, as the rate of departures from Indochina soared.

Indeed, over the course of the next twenty years, more than one million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians would flee their homelands by land and by sea. The Ford administration remained acutely aware of the oceanic exodus and secured an additional 11,000-person parole for these individuals. The administration’s records, however, also reflect a complete lack of information or concern regarding Hanoi’s treatment of Amerasians and the victorious regime’s detention of more than one million individuals in reeducation camps. Jimmy Carter inherited all of these issues, as would Reagan, Bush, and Clinton after him. US efforts to negotiate and implement policies to address each of these groups became, along with POW/MIA accounting, the primary basis of US-SRV relations for the next twenty years.

Normalization Talks Stall, Refugees Surge

On January 20, 1977, Jimmy Carter became the thirty-ninth president of the United States. “This inauguration ceremony marks a new beginning, a new dedication within our Government, and a new spirit among us all,” Carter commended, where “peoples … are craving, and now demanding … basic human rights.”¹⁴ These ideas – a new beginning, where a human rights-based morality would dictate American policy – were especially attractive in the wake of the Vietnam War and the Watergate Scandal and helped bring the relatively unknown Georgian to the White House.

One of the ways Carter sought a new beginning was to pursue formal relations with the SRV.¹⁵ As the National Security Council (NSC) put it two weeks after Carter’s inauguration, “obviously, we must seek to normalize relations with Vietnam.”¹⁶ “Normalization could serve a variety of US interests,” a memorandum explained: “It might enable us to limit Soviet influence in Indochina” and “inhibit Vietnamese adventurism toward its neighbors,” not to mention “open up commercial and economic opportunities for American businessmen.”¹⁷ The report concluded that while Asian governments would be “sensitive to our style in pursuing” official ties, “most … hope to see us overcome our differences with the Vietnamese.”¹⁸

After the United States made various goodwill gestures in January and February, Hanoi expressed interest in receiving an American delegation.¹⁹ Because of the potential of the prisoner of war/missing in action (POW/MIA) issue to fan the flames of domestic opposition, as Reagan’s challenge to Ford in the 1976 election demonstrated, the administration was sure to tread carefully. In retrospect, however, what is most striking about this initial delegation and Carter’s general position on POW/MIA accounting is that they lacked the intense passion and impossible expectations that characterized the official US stance in the 1980s and beyond.²⁰ Before the delegation’s departure, for example, the Department of Defense “impressed upon the Commission the need to be realistic in its expectations for further Indochina accounting.”²¹ As Carter recorded in his diary, “If they [Vietnamese officials] don’t insist on reparations and don’t castigate us publicly, I think we can accept some reasonable accounting for the MIAs.”²²

Because of Carter’s willingness to accept “reasonable” rather than demand “full” accounting, the question of economic aid remained the biggest potential obstacle to the rapid resumption of official US-SRV ties.²³ In 1973, Nixon secretly promised Hanoi billions of dollars in a classified letter, which Hanoi used to argue that Washington remained legally obliged to pay reparations.²⁴ Carter rejected this interpretation and insisted, at least at first, that the opening of official diplomatic and economic relations must occur without preconditions. Only thereafter would the United States be willing to provide aid “as a humanitarian gesture rather than a legal obligation.”²⁵ By the end of the delegation’s visit, Hanoi agreed to “dropping the term ‘precondition’ in favor of ‘interrelated’” and further acquiesced to framing American aid as “humanitarian” rather than as reparations.²⁶

Already in April of 1977, US representatives were also raising the issue of “refugees and family reunification” in their discussions with the SRV officials.²⁷ In its Final Report to Carter, the US delegation relayed that “the Vietnamese said they would be ‘generous’ with regard to their citizens wishing to join relatives in the US … providing they follow proper procedures.” Reframing the nature and timing of US aid, willingness to accept “reasonable” rather than full accounting, and positive signs regarding family reunification inspired policy makers to schedule the first official normalization talks for May 3, 1977, in Paris. Seeking resumption of official diplomatic relations without prerequisites (i.e., aid) served as the basis of the US negotiating position.²⁸ The NSC and State Department agreed that despite Carter’s rhetoric, human rights were one of many bilateral issues to be discussed after official relations resumed rather than serve as preconditions to formal ties.²⁹

The Paris talks began auspiciously but quickly crumbled. The US delegation was led by Richard Holbrooke. Holbrooke, a thirty-six-year-old Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, had spent seven years in Vietnam as a Foreign Service Officer and had ample experience negotiating with Hanoi during the Paris Peace Talks.³⁰ Although Holbrooke proposed “establishing relations” and commencing with the “exchange of Embassies,” Phan Hien, the lead SRV negotiator, refused to concede on the aid question.³¹ Even when Holbrooke went off script and offered something he had no instructions to propose – “to go outside and jointly declare to the press that we have decided to normalize relations” – Hein refused.³² The magnitude of the devastation wrought by US conduct during the Vietnam War and Hanoi’s ambitious plans for national reconstruction made foreign investment, especially that promised by the defeated Americans, financially and symbolically imperative to SRV leaders.³³ After Hanoi publicly insisted that Washington remained obliged to pay reparations, Congress passed a series of resolutions prohibiting the United States from giving the SRV any aid whatsoever.³⁴

When the two sides reconvened their discussions in June, Holbrooke reiterated the United States’ willingness to immediately establish diplomatic relations and exchange ambassadors on three separate occasions.³⁵ SRV leaders remained equally resolute in their demand for aid, however, and the talks ended in a stalemate. Despite the impasse, Carter kept his word not to veto Hanoi’s admission to the United Nations, and although Washington and Hanoi used the SRV’s representation at the UN to have secret meetings in New York throughout the year, ongoing discussions on formal relations proved fruitless.³⁶

As the talks dissolved in Paris, high-level discussions about how to address growing migrant departures mounted in Washington. The oceanic exodus, which had begun immediately after the fall of Saigon, continued to escalate. In a June 23, 1977, memo, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance explained to the president that “many Indochinese refugees who are escaping by sea are drowning,” not only because their vessels were often unseaworthy and ill-supplied, but for a much more preventable reason: “with no guarantee that they will be accepted by any country, masters of passing ships refuse to pick them up.”³⁷ Instead of rushing to rescue drowning people, in other words, many ships continued full steam ahead. At the same time, the Hmong in Laos, whom the CIA had heavily recruited as part of the “Secret War” in that country, began fleeing in increasing numbers into Thailand.³⁸ “I believe the United States bears a special responsibility for both groups of refugees,” Vance argued, in reference to overland and oceanic migrants.

The Secretary of State’s description captured the widening gap between how international refugee accords functioned in theory and how they operated in practice. Although not all of the world’s nations were signatories, the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, as amended by the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, defined a refugee as any individual “outside the country of his nationality” due to “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”³⁹ This definition was further supported by Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which proclaimed that “everyone has the right to seek and enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.”⁴⁰ In theory, then, any nation to which asylum-seekers first arrive – known as a nation of first asylum – is obliged to receive migrants, respect their rights, and provide certain basic material conditions. In practice, however, the unequal distribution of the world’s resources makes the implementation of these universal principles extremely difficult and politicized. It is usually the case, for instance, that the same nations repeatedly bear the burden of first asylum (due to the geographic concentration of migrant streams), a reality that exacerbates already tense geopolitical relationships.

These difficulties can be even further aggravated by competing understandings of culpability and responsibility. Most nations of first asylum in Southeast Asia – Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Philippines, and Indonesia (the ASEAN or Association of Southeast Asian Nations) – believed that the years of violence and destabilization unleashed by US warfare rendered Washington responsible for creating the migration in the first place. The ASEAN therefore expected the United States to relieve them of the burden of first asylum by resettling large numbers of migrants. When this expected American response did not manifest, the first asylum nations, who were US allies, often closed their borders and refused to assist migrants. As Vance explained to Carter, “the crux of the problem” was the “the logjam on resettlement.”⁴¹

While Southeast Asian nations looked to the United States to craft a bold and comprehensive response to the land and especially seaborne migrant flows, domestic laws hampered American officials’ ability to respond. The lack of a comprehensive refugee legislation continued to plague American policy makers. Because of the strict hemispheric limits set by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the parole power continued to be the only means through which US officials could admit refugees into the United States.⁴² The UNHCR, the humanitarian agency the UN had tasked with refugee advocacy and policy coordination was also “woefully unprepared” to handle the crisis and initially took a stance in favor of repatriation, or returning migrants to their home countries, hoping “to avoid open-ended resettlement.”⁴³

In light of the deteriorating conditions in Southeast Asia, Vance urged Carter to support a 15,000-person parole. This request, if granted, would constitute the fifth parole for South Vietnamese since April 1975.⁴⁴ Vance acknowledged that the Ford administration had promised Congress that the previous parole would be the last but explained “that statement was based on calculations which subsequently have proved to be serious underestimations … the situation is again urgent.”⁴⁵ “In my view,” the Secretary of State argued, “both the past American role in Indochina and this Administration’s deep commitment to human rights requires that we take immediate action.”⁴⁶

In August 1977, at Carter’s request, Attorney General Anthony Bell approved the parole of 15,000 additional Indochinese refugees. The relative ease of this decision stemmed from two key factors. First, even though past officials had underestimated the magnitude of the migration, the numbers were still low enough that, in Vance’s words, “the refugees would go relatively unnoticed.”⁴⁷ Second, in the summer of 1977, US officials conceptualized the additional paroles as a “cleanup process connected to the 1975 admissions.”⁴⁸ In this context, Ford’s original argument about a “profound moral obligation” to the South Vietnamese remained persuasive enough to prompt action, and Carter’s stance that human rights should be a guiding principle of US foreign relations made assisting those in peril an obvious policy choice for the White House.⁴⁹

Among those who arrived in the United States in 1977 was Khuc Minh Tho. Tho was stationed in the Philippines when her country collapsed in April 1975, rendering her both “stateless” and separated from her three children and second husband.⁵⁰ All of the men in Tho’s family, either through volunteering or conscription, served in the South Vietnamese military. Between her embassy connections in Manila and the information she received from recently arrived migrants, she knew that Hanoi had instilled a mandatory policy of “reeducation” for the RVN’s former military and civilian personnel, a policy that involved prolonged imprisonment under incredibly difficult conditions. While in the Philippines, Tho received a letter from a friend in Vietnam, a simple feat which she described in the context of the times as itself a “miracle.” The letter acknowledged that things were “very hard” for Tho but added that “all of us think only you” can do something to try to help the reeducation camp detainees. “If you can’t do it,” Tho later recalled the letter said, “I think one day all of our husbands are going to die.”⁵¹

When Tho arrived in the United States in 1977, she carried two promises that weighed heavily on her heart. She had vowed after her first husband’s death that she would take care of their children, and one can only fathom how Tho, as a refugee in a foreign country halfway around the world, coped with what must have been unrelenting torment at being separated from her son and two daughters.⁵² Tho had also decided to accept the charge her friend had given her – how could she refuse? She would somehow find a way to try to secure the reeducation detainees’ release before it was too late.

The US government’s attention, meanwhile, remained focused on those fleeing Indochina. Carter instructed the State Department to convene an Interagency Task Force “to develop a longer-term program for dealing with the Indochinese refugee problem.”⁵³ The Task Force ultimately recommended that the United States should “(1) continue to admit Indochinese refugees who are either boat cases with no chance to resettle elsewhere or non-boat cases who meet established criteria for admittance; and (2) make a substantial contribution through the … UNHCR to an internationally supported resettlement program in Thailand for refugees who inevitably will remain there.”⁵⁴ The Final Report suggested that 25,000–30,000 refugees would arrive in the United States by the end of 1980, and estimated the total costs for both the first and second recommendations would be between $120 and $138 million.⁵⁵

Carter rejected these recommendations. He partially feared political fallout. Poll numbers indicated that 57 percent of respondents opposed the 15,000-person parole in August, and the possibility of increased job competition did not bode well for Democratic Party constituents.⁵⁶ Long-standing anti-Asian racism and Americans’ antipathy toward Vietnam after 1975 also fomented public disapproval. Repeated requests for increased parole numbers occurred as films like Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, and Apocalypse Now facilitated a further “dehumanizing of the Vietnamese” in popular perception.⁵⁷

In rejecting the Interagency Task Force’s recommendations, Carter not only bowed to popular pressure but also followed the National Security Council’s advice. Although the NSC supported the parole, it warned Carter not to implement a long-term solution based on impartial and incorrect information. “We recommend the President not concur in making any such commitments at this time,” the NSC argued, because “the report was based on refugee escape rates that have doubled and possibly quadrupled since it was written.”⁵⁸ Moreover, the memo continued, “authorization and appropriations legislation to fund the current refugee program [the 15,000 parole] encountered considerable opposition in Congress” due to lack of “broad international support” for resettlement and because “we have not been able to establish any limits on future US commitments.”⁵⁹

How is it that the migration figures “doubled and possibly quadrupled” so quickly that the best-informed policy makers in Washington – arguably, some of the best-informed officials in the world – could not keep up with the numbers? Two changes in Vietnam explain the surge. First, it became increasingly clear that the SRV’s reeducation camp policy was not as advertised.⁶⁰ After its military victory in 1975, Hanoi implemented a broad program to attempt to transform southern Vietnam and integrate it with the north as quickly as possible.⁶¹ Part of this larger program included extending the system of reeducation camps it had previously instituted in the north to the entire country.⁶² Hanoi required military and civilian officials of the former RVN regime, more than one million in total, to report for reeducation, a process initially set to last from ten to thirty days, depending on one’s former rank.

These terms initially inspired optimism about reconciliation and reunification, at least for some in South Vietnam. Truong Nhu Tang, a high-ranking member of the National Liberation Front and Provisional Revolutionary Government (whose supporters Americans derogatory called the “Viet Cong”), for example, personally drove two of his own brothers to report for their required thirty-day reeducation terms in June 1975.⁶³ While Hanoi released “approximately 500,000” within ninety days, the government quickly expanded the program’s original terms to “until their [detainees’] political loyalty is insured … or for a maximum period of 3 years.”⁶⁴ Even this forecast proved to be far too optimistic. Hanoi did not release the last detainees until 1992. While there were undoubtedly differences among the over one hundred camps, each involved armed guards, barely subsistence rations, harsh physical labor, mandatory “confessions,” nonexistent medical care, and very little, if any, family visitation. Especially as time went on, the camps regularly drew comparisons to concentration camps and gulags.⁶⁵

Although the military phase of the Vietnam War ended in 1975, prolonged incarceration robbed many South Vietnamese families of any hope for postwar peace. As Tang recalled, “everyone had some family member or other in a camp,” and once people realized that reeducation meant ongoing detention and family separation, a “wave of panic” swept through Saigon, which was only made worse by a “continuing flood of arbitrary arrests.”⁶⁶ As historian Sam Vong explains, “the indefinite imprisonment of ARVN officers was a constant reminder that the Vietnam War had never ended, but continued to wage on in the intimate sites of the family.”⁶⁷ Even for the sizable number of lower-ranking individuals Hanoi released after a year or two, life after reeducation included surveillance, lasting social stigmatization and discrimination, and fear of arbitrary arrest.

A second reason migrant numbers surged is that Hanoi implemented sweeping economic changes in the south.⁶⁸ This process included mandated relocation to New Economic Zones (NEZs). NEZs were rural areas in the interior, where self-sufficiency was near impossible thanks to infertile land and lack of access to basic necessities. Many of those interned briefly in reeducation camps (and the families of reeducation camp detainees) were among those forcibly relocated to NEZs.⁶⁹ Thus, while the two categories were by no means mutually exclusive, former reeducation detainees and those banished to NEZs had, by 1977, multiple incentives to flee.

In retrospect, then, it is easy to see the signs of the brewing “unprecedented human tragedy” in Indochina. The numbers of oceanic and overland migrants were on the rise, with no end in sight. Even at this early juncture, when departure figures were orders of magnitude less than they would become in 1979, first asylum nations lacked the resources to cope with the incoming migrants. The UNHCR, meanwhile, viewed the issue as an American responsibility and doubted migrants’ refugee status. At the same time, the parole admission system left US officials able to respond with only inadequate half measures. Despite the obstacles US law erected, however, when reading official documents from 1977, one can also detect a noticeable lack of will. While there were those who supported admitting South Vietnamese, these individuals, without a determined White House orchestrating and supporting their efforts, lacked the organization and momentum to implement policy.

Part of the reason for American inaction during this period also stemmed from the fact that members of Congress remained deeply divided about the wisdom and desirability of expanding US commitments to its former South Vietnamese allies.⁷⁰ Congressmen Joshua Eilberg (D-PA), Chairman of the House’s Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, and International Law, who vociferously opposed the 1976 paroles, continued to object to the practice of using the parole power to bring in large numbers of refugees. Eilberg believed that Ford and then Carter were using the parole authority inappropriately and perhaps illegally, a criticism that reflected a larger aversion among some members of Congress who were concerned about the “overuse” of parole authority, which they argued “was providing a ‘back door’ to the United States.”⁷¹ To make matters even more complicated, Attorney General Bell agreed with Eilberg and became increasingly reluctant to implement paroles, even at the president’s request.⁷²

While some congressmen suggested that Carter was doing too much, others argued the president was doing far too little. Congressional activism centered especially on Vietnam’s neighbor, Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge had taken control in April 1975 and quickly perpetuated one of the most brutal genocides of the twentieth century.⁷³ From mid-1975 to late 1978, the Khmer Rouge killed approximately two million of Cambodia’s seven million people.⁷⁴ To implement their vision of a pure agricultural society free of corrupting outside influences, the regime and its leader, Pol Pot, maintained a vice grip of control by ruling through fear and brute, unmitigated force. For three years, the Cambodian people endured forced relocations, forced family separations, forced starvation, forced labor, and forced military service. Any dissent from these directives was met with death.⁷⁵ Although evidence to demonstrate the full scope of the genocide was not widely available until the end of 1978, by May 1977 the warning signs were dire enough to instigate congressional hearings.⁷⁶ In September, the CIA reported that more than 1.2 million had already perished.⁷⁷ Senators Bob Dole and Claiborne Pell and Representative Stephen Solarz urged the administration to speak out against the Khmer Rouge and to create a special (additional) parole program for Cambodians.⁷⁸ While these calls for action were unsuccessful in 1977, congressmen continued to play a leading role in advocating for an American response to the crisis in Cambodia.⁷⁹

As conditions in Cambodia deteriorated, the US government marshalled little to no response to the growing migration. Carter’s refusal to approve the Interagency Task Force’s recommendations left those who supported expanding admissions with few options. The 15,000-person parole slots were already depleted by December 1977. This meant that as departures escalated, there was not a single resettlement slot available. These conditions prompted Vance to call for “an additional 7,000 parole of boat people.”⁸⁰ Brzezinski recommended Carter increase the number to 10,000 to buy more time, a vital necessity given that by year’s end migrants were fleeing “at a rate of roughly 1,500 per month – three times the rate estimated as recently as September.”⁸¹ Others within the administration agreed, adding, “to fail to respond to the boat cases would be inconsistent … with our current human rights policies.”⁸² Even the CIA wrote a report entitled, “Refugees and Human Rights: An Issue in US-ASEAN Relations.”⁸³ Clearly, the administration’s initial efforts to keep these various aspects of its policy in separate lanes proved untenable; human rights, refugee politics, and US foreign relations in Southeast Asia were becoming deeply interwoven.

Carter ultimately approved the additional parole that his Secretary of State and National Security Advisor recommended. The president, however, went with the smaller number, approving 7,000 parole slots, not the 10,000 Brzezinski suggested, and wrote “expedite firm policy” in the margin of the decision memorandum.⁸⁴ While Carter proved responsive to pressure, then, mobilizing a response to the growing migration was not an executive priority in 1977. Carter threw his time and energy into other issues, especially work on energy legislation and the Panama Canal treaties. Nonstate actors filled this vacuum and mounted a transnational campaign to garner an accurate picture of on the ground realities in Southeast Asia, rally domestic opinion, and encourage the administration to substantively expand American commitments.

The CCIR and the Politics of Information

“By the end of 1977,” Leo Cherne later recalled, “the federal government was literally at a dead end, unable or unwilling to risk promulgating a bold, consistent and coherent long-range Indochinese refugee policy” even as “the human tragedy continued to mount.”⁸⁵ Some refused to accept this status quo, including the members of Congress and State Department officials who emerged during the Ford administration as individuals determined to address the ongoing costs of the war borne by the South Vietnamese.⁸⁶ One such individual was Shepard “Shep” Lowman, who was married to a Vietnamese woman, Hiep. Shep Lowman had been among those Americans who returned to Saigon as the country was collapsing to help facilitate the evacuation of South Vietnamese. With the White House unwilling to award the oceanic and overland migrations a high priority in 1977, Lowman called Leo Cherne, head of the International Rescue Committee (IRC).

The IRC, a humanitarian aid organization, began during World War II and in the postwar period gained an international reputation as a leading voice in assisting and advocating on behalf of refugees around the world. By the late 1970s, the IRC and its Chairman had a long history of involvement with Vietnam. In September 1954, for example, Cherne traveled to Saigon at the IRC’s behest to explore how the organization might help with the massive displacement the Geneva Accords prompted within Vietnam (900,000 migrated from North to South while 125,000 simultaneously traveled in the opposite direction).⁸⁷ During his trip, Cherne personally met South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and thereafter persuaded the IRC to establish programs to assist the RVN with its resettlement efforts.⁸⁸ Given IRC’s standing as one of the premier refugee-focused humanitarian organizations and its history of relief efforts in Vietnam, it is not surprising that when at wit’s end, Lowman decided to call Cherne.⁸⁹ A week after their conversation, Cherne phoned Lowman to inform him that he established the Citizens’ Commission on Indochinese Refugees (CCIR) as a subcommittee within the IRC to gather information and launch a public relations campaign to convince the American public, Congress, and the president to implement and sustain a long-term program for Indochinese refugee resettlement.⁹⁰ The CCIR’s institutional history and subsequent activism reveal much about the merging of human rights and humanitarian rhetoric and methods in the late 1970s and beyond.

The CCIR’s membership read like a list of who’s who among powerful political brokers in the United States. Cherne convinced his longtime friend William Casey, former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and future head of the CIA, to co-chair the commission.⁹¹ The Commission also included Monsignor John Ahern, Father Robert Charlebois, John Richardson, Bayard Rustin, Albert Shanker, Rabbi Marc Tannenbaum, and Elie Wiesel.⁹² The CCIR’s list of notable members did not end there. Robert DeVecchi, Cecil B. Lyon, Thelma Richardson, Louis Wiesner, and Stephen Young also served on the CCIR.⁹³ From its inception, then, the CCIR had many advantages: bipartisanship, close government contacts, decades of experience working with and pressuring Washington, the ability to raise funds quickly, and vast networks among diverse segments of the American population. The CCIR utilized each of these strengths to successfully advocate for major and long-lasting changes in US policy.

The Commission’s first task was to formulate an accurate picture of the situation on the ground in Southeast Asia. Reliable information, while always important, proved especially essential in this case, given the volatility of migrant flows and the reality that communist-controlled governments in Hanoi and Phnom Penh had expelled most Western journalists. More than simply acquiring intelligence, however, the CCIR engaged in a specific type of “politics of information” that came to characterize transnational human rights advocacy in the 1970s: obtaining on the ground information governmental actors were either unwilling or unable to amass and mobilizing that information in an explicit effort to provoke outrage and incite state action.⁹⁴ Amnesty International’s 1976 delegation to Argentina and its subsequent report on the desaparecidos is perhaps the best-known example of this type of transnational human rights advocacy during this period.⁹⁵ The Citizens Commission adopted Amnesty-like methods and immediately conducted a fact-finding mission throughout Indochina and the ASEAN states, planning to conclude their trip with a press conference in Bangkok.⁹⁶ The organization pursued these initiatives with Brzezinski’s and Vance’s blessing.⁹⁷ That the CCIR, a subcommittee of a well-known humanitarian organization, used the methodologies associated with human rights NGOs foreshadowed the ways the two movements became linguistically, politically, and institutionally linked.

The Commission members used their domestic clout and the IRC’s international reputation to shine a light on the severity of the situation in Southeast Asia. At its February 1978 press conference, the CCIR argued that American inaction was creating a vacuum of leadership that only the United States could fill. The US practice of pressuring its ASEAN allies to act generously even as American policy makers implemented small, inadequate paroles sent a clear message: those to whom first asylum nations granted “temporary” asylum would likely become permanent burdens.⁹⁸ The gap between American rhetoric and action, in other words, gave first asylum countries little incentive to receive migrants or to treat those already there humanely. Accordingly, Cherne began the CCIR press conference with an unequivocal call for US leadership, arguing “the US must adopt a coherent and generous policy for the admission of Indochinese refugees over the long range, replacing the practice of reacting belatedly to successive refugee crises since the spring of 1975.”⁹⁹

The Commission’s members continued to vocally advocate for change when they returned to the United States. They met with Brzezinski and Vance, testified before powerful congressional subcommittees, and even hosted a luncheon for the new United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Poul Hartling, in Washington, DC.¹⁰⁰ While the new High Commissioner hailed from Denmark, the new Deputy Commissioner, Dale S. DeHaan, was an American with a long track record of involvement in refugee affairs as an aide to Senator Ted Kennedy and counsel for the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees, and International Law.¹⁰¹ De Haan’s appointment is a striking example of the deep connections between the US government and transnational humanitarian institutions like the UNHCR. His appointment also symbolized a profound change in the relationship between the UNHCR and the US government. Although the United States had always provided the majority of the UNHCR’s funding, the Indochinese diaspora marked the first time American officials truly embraced the multilateral organization.¹⁰²

Thanks to the networks the Citizens’ Commission members posessed, the CCIR’s campaign to “change the climate of public opinion” succeeded brilliantly, though not uniformly.¹⁰³ To help counter reluctance to accept refugees, the CCIR members mobilized their expansive domestic networks. The administration received letters of support from the AFL-CIO, American Immigration and Citizenship Conference, a coalition of African American leaders, Freedom House, and the Coalition for a Democratic Majority.¹⁰⁴ Other voluntary agencies involved in refugee resettlement like the American Council of Voluntary Agencies and Church World Services also called for greater Indochinese admissions.¹⁰⁵ The avalanche of letters that inundated the White House consistently and vividly used Carter’s human rights rhetoric against him. The American Council of Voluntary Agencies suggested, “The present emergency represents the most pressing human-rights problem facing the United States today.”¹⁰⁶ As Freedom House put it, “one clear test of America’s concrete support of human rights would be our national commitment to deal humanely and speedily with the thousands of refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia now awaiting resettlement.”¹⁰⁷ The Coalition for a Democratic Majority went as far as to cite Carter’s campaign promises and observe incredulously that the “failure to adopt a generous refugee admissions policy will undermine the moral authority of your administration’s stance on the issue of international human rights. Can we present ourselves to the world as the champions of human rights and at the same time deny refuge to victims of massive, extreme human rights violations?”¹⁰⁸

This framing made it especially difficult for the Carter administration to maintain its indifference without appearing hypocritical. In March 1978, Carter announced the United States would offer an additional 25,000 parole slots and pursue legislation to help secure a long-term American commitment to refugees.¹⁰⁹ In this quest the administration was aided, indeed, preceded, by congressional activism. Kennedy had been introducing refugee legislation for years with no success. The “cycle of inaction was finally broken in mid-1978” when, Kennedy recalled, “it became clear that I would have the opportunity to become chairman of the full Judiciary Committee at the beginning of the 96^th Congress,” replacing Senator James Eastland (R-MS), who had actively opposed Indochinese refugee admissions.¹¹⁰ Eilberg also lost his chairmanship of the House Immigration Subcommittee.¹¹¹ These changes precipitated what Kennedy described as “intensive consultations” between “Congressional Committee staffs and officials in the Executive Branch in an effort to draft consensus legislation.”¹¹²

While support for the largest parole since the fall of Saigon and the announcement of forthcoming refugee legislation hinted at coming transformations in US policy, major battles lay ahead. Attorney General Bell, for example, made it clear that the 25,000-person parole would be his last, and due to budgetary concerns, he dragged his feet in formally approving the measure.¹¹³ Furthermore, although the administration had outlined the basics of what would become the Refugee Act of 1980, various factions within the US bureaucracy disagreed strongly about specific provisions.¹¹⁴ Significantly, however, the National Security Council and Department of State were of the same mind. Although these two institutions would soon disagree vehemently over the geopolitical stakes (and therefore necessary policy priorities) in Asia, both the NSC and State Department agreed that the United States needed to develop a long-term response to the Indochinese diaspora that involved robust resettlement opportunities for South Vietnamese in the United States.

Charting a New Course in Southeast Asia

In December of 1977, as the CCIR began its fact-finding mission, Vietnam briefly invaded neighboring Cambodia in response to repeated border clashes. These hostilities resulted in the suspending of diplomatic relations between the two communist countries.¹¹⁵ Although Hanoi quickly withdrew its troops, the incursion precipitated an increase in the migrant flow in two important ways. First, Sino-Vietnamese relations, which were already precarious, deteriorated further.¹¹⁶ As Beijing took measures to defend its ally Cambodia, Vietnamese and Chinese troops scuffled along their shared border. In response, Hanoi retaliated against its ethnic Chinese population, the Hoa, who lived predominantly in Cholon (near Ho Chi Minh City) and numbered approximately 1.2 million.¹¹⁷ The SRV shut down Hoa businesses and forced them to make citizenship pledges; large numbers began to flee.¹¹⁸ In five months, more than 160,000 crossed into China until Beijing closed the border in July.¹¹⁹

The SRV raid also exposed the horrors occurring in Cambodia. As Samantha Power’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book on the history of genocide notes, although “inaccessibility is a feature of most genocide, Cambodia was perhaps the most extreme case. The Khmer Rouge may well have run the most secretive regime of the twentieth century.”¹²⁰ Hanoi’s incursion pulled back the Khmer curtain and allowed survivors carrying stories of Khmer Rouge atrocities to escape. The CCIR and select members of Congress galvanized an American response.¹²¹ Kennedy, Dole, Solarz, and Pell held a series of hearings, published press releases, and sponsored resolutions.¹²² Meanwhile, major television networks also began running specials on the issue, fanning the flames of public opinion.¹²³ When Mondale visited Asia in April 1978, much of his meeting with Thai leaders consisted of providing assurances and promises for future action.¹²⁴

As many Americans came to grips with the “Auschwitz of Asia” for the first time, not a single victim of the Khmer Rouge was eligible for parole into the United States. Technicalities in the wording of the March 1978 parole precluded any Cambodian refugees from using the new slots. In May, many in Congress and the CCIR called for “a special parole for the 15,000 refugees now concentrated in camps next to the Cambodian border where they are in constant danger of Khmer Rouge killings, kidnappings, and other depredations.”¹²⁵ It took US officials until December to respond to this proposal. In the interim, what American journalist Barry Wain described as a “human deluge … along with a freakish series of tropic storms” hit Southeast Asia.¹²⁶ As floodwaters and migrants “inundated countries of the region,” US policy stood at an impasse due to larger clashes about American geostrategic priorities.¹²⁷

As was the case prior to 1975, larger Cold War considerations colored the American assessment of what was occurring in Southeast Asia and imbued the United States’ Vietnam policy with heightened significance. In the spring of 1978, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, after a period of détente, became increasingly hostile.¹²⁸ In this context of reinvigorated Cold War animosities, Brzezinski argued that Hanoi was a Soviet proxy that needed to be counterbalanced with increasingly strong US-Chinese ties. He also posited that the deterioration of relations between Beijing and Hanoi made simultaneous diplomatic openings impossible. According to this framing, the United States needed to pick a side, and the choice was obvious: China.¹²⁹ Moreover, in keeping with previous practice, Brzezinski refused to ask Beijing to pressure the Khmer Rouge into stemming its massive human rights violations.¹³⁰

Many State Department officials disagreed with the National Security Advisor’s approach. Because Vietnam’s once significant need for aid grew desperate, throughout spring and summer 1978 Hanoi made it clear that it was willing to pursue rapid normalization without preconditions and, if these statements were not enough, made repeated goodwill gestures to cultivate Washington’s favor.¹³¹ When Carter failed to respond, Hanoi joined COMECON (the USSR led Council for Mutual Economic Assistance) in June, but throughout July and August continued to publicize its willingness to resume official relations on American terms.¹³² Vance argued that the United States should seize the opportunity.¹³³ As late as August 31, 1978, it seemed Carter would side with the Department of State. As the president confided to his diary, “I think we ought to move on Vietnam normalization. Ham [Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s Chief of Staff] feels that it might be a serious political problem, but I believe the country is ready to accept it now that they’ve dropped their demands for reparations or payments.”¹³⁴

Ultimately, however, Brzezinski’s Cold War logic carried the day. Carter’s decision to prioritize US-Chinese relations over US-Vietnamese ties was part of a larger “strategic reorientation of 1979–80” that responded to and precipitated a “resumption of Cold War hostilities” on a global scale.¹³⁵ On October 11, Carter postponed talks with Hanoi until after the resuming formal relations with China “provided,” in the president’s words, “they [the Chinese] didn’t deliberately delay.”¹³⁶ When explaining its decision, however, the administration cited “the situation in Cambodia, the refugee crisis, and Vietnamese-Soviet ties.”¹³⁷

Over the summer of 1978, as US bureaucracy clashed over American strategy in Asia, the numbers of oceanic and overland departures from Indochina escalated rapidly. That American officials stalled as the migrant departures surged demonstrates the luxuries US policy makers enjoyed that both first asylum nations and Indochinese migrants did not: time and distance. US officials could afford to be lackadaisical about the escalating diaspora due, in no small part, to geography. But more than literal distance from Southeast Asia, many Americans also enjoyed a metaphorical distance from the Vietnam War. For the majority in the United States who regarded the Vietnam War as over with the withdrawal of US troops in 1973 or the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, a continued focus on Vietnam or South Vietnamese migrants was a choice. For the South Vietnamese people, those watersheds marked turning points but not an end; the Vietnam War remained vividly ongoing for those in reeducation camps, on the high seas, or in refugee camps.

Khuc Minh Tho’s lived realities are illustrative of these larger trends. In 1978, Tho’s son, her eldest, fled Vietnam by boat. With his mother abroad and would-be stepfather in a reeducation camp, the twenty-one-year-old traveled with family friends who agreed to take him to help prevent the young man from being conscripted into the army and, it was Tho’s fear, be deployed to Cambodia. Tho’s son and friends landed in Malaysia, as did 75 percent of oceanic migrants that year.¹³⁸ The arrival of “staggering” numbers of Vietnamese, the Washington Post reported, “has left Malaysia, a small country with monumental poverty problems of its own, in a state of near panic,” which prompted violence against the newcomers so severe that the Malaysian government “called up two reserve army battalions to keep peace.”¹³⁹ Tho’s son survived the voyage at sea and the violence ashore. After three months in a refugee camp, Tho was able to sponsor him and bring him to the United States.¹⁴⁰

He arrived in early 1979, marking the first time Tho had seen any of her children in more than four years. Given that she was stationed in the Philippines since 1972 and separated from her children who were still finishing secondary school in Vietnam, it was the first time she got to see any of her children on a daily basis in seven years.¹⁴¹ While the copious records Tho left behind and an oral history she gave do not offer comment on their reunion, one can only imagine how she felt upon seeing her son, by then a man, for the first time in years. Later that year Tho also sponsored her brother, a former reeducation camp detainee, and his wife and children after they also completed an oceanic journey that took them from Vietnam to a refugee camp in Malaysia and, eventually, to the United States.¹⁴² Tho’s family story illustrates what Varzally describes as Vietnamese families’ “commitments to remain connected” using “elaborate strategies of survival and revision.”¹⁴³ Amid all of the joy that likely accompanied Tho’s reunions with her family members in 1979, she still endured ongoing separation from her two daughters and second husband. This painful reality, combined with the knowledge that so many others of her fellow South Vietnamese were experiencing the same thing, drove Tho to do everything in her power to see families reunited. Soon, her efforts produced consequences that reverberated far beyond her own family.

Family reunification remained a priority for US officials as well. Even after Carter formally postponed US-SRV normalization talks in October 1978, representatives from Washington and Hanoi continued to meet in secret.¹⁴⁴ In December, for instance, US and SRV officials met in New York.¹⁴⁵ While the two sides clashed in many respects, migration concerns seemed to be an area where they might make progress. Robert Oakley, the lead US negotiator, expressed American concern “about a situation in which so many people feel they must flee at great danger” and asked Hanoi “to work with the UNHCR to arrange orderly departures.” US officials were also pressuring the UNHCR to work with Hanoi, ASEAN, and resettlement nations to facilitate a more coordinated response.¹⁴⁶ “A more orderly and humane manner of departure,” Oakley argued, would help decrease the number who felt compelled to take their chances on the high seas and “facilitate family reunification.” This US willingness to meet with delegates from Hanoi and discuss refugee issues and family reunification, even as talks on the status of formal economic and diplomatic ties remained suspended, was a harbinger of things to come.

When assessing the US approach toward the SRV after December 1978, then, a resurgence of Cold War animosities goes a long way toward explaining the American position. Brzezinski’s victory in the internal bureaucratic struggle by playing the “China card” clearly grew from a broader resurgence of US-USSR hostilities. Other factors also loomed large, however, with human rights and refugee advocacy foremost among them. Indeed, in nongovernmental advocacy, administration rhetoric, and, ultimately, American law, it became increasingly difficult to disentangle human rights from refugee politics.

A surge in domestic and international awareness of the Holocaust also contributed to and helped solidify the growing linkages between Washington’s position on human rights, US refugee policy, and the oceanic exodus. Throughout the summer of 1978, for example, the CCIR argued that an American failure to respond to the Indochinese diaspora would be equal to the country’s failure to admit endangered Jews on the eve of World War II. As the CCIR put it, “it is clear that, three years after the evacuation of Saigon, ‘our long national nightmare’ is not over. Indeed it has assumed a new dimension, requiring swift and generous response. The alternative would be to repress the nightmare. This we did as a nation in the 1930s. The Holocaust has not released its grip on our national conscience to this day, some 40 years later. We must not and we need not repeat this tragedy.”¹⁴⁷

It was no coincidence that the CCIR and other actors frequently invoked the Holocaust. Humanitarian advocates had taken a similar approach with regard to Biafra in the late 1960s, and this trend was amplified by the late 1970s thanks to a surge in “Holocaust memory” facilitated by cultural productions like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.¹⁴⁸ Greater awareness of and interest in the Holocaust provided both a point of comparison and, in Zaretsky’s words, an “instantly recognizable vocabulary of evil,” a moral rhetoric that did not require explanation.¹⁴⁹ In this context, Phuong Tran Nguyen suggests, “the boat people came to approximate latter-day Holocaust survivors, offering compelling testimony that brought the world to tears and to action.”¹⁵⁰

The moral urgency embedded in this framing had many consequences. First, comparisons to the Holocaust rendered questions about refugee status all but moot. Although there were those who questioned migrants’ motives, once comparisons with the Holocaust became ubiquitous, the pre-existing American practice of labeling all migrants as “refugees” became common practice. References to the Holocaust, in other words, made it seem obvious that migrants were not only outside of their home countries but also had a “well-founded fear” of persecution. In this context, the UNHCR’s previous reluctance to get involved withered. So did the organization’s belief that the migration was an American responsibility. In addition to quieting questions about refugee status, then, Holocaust comparisons also added pressure for other nations to respond with resettlement opportunities, a trend that was especially pronounced once it became obvious that Washington would accept the majority of the resettlement and financial burden. Ultimately, the UNHCR played a leading role in facilitating Indochinese refugee resettlement into the 1990s.¹⁵¹

One individual who personified the connection between the horrors of World War II and the 1970s human rights movement was Ginetta Sagan.¹⁵² Born Ginetta Moroni on June 1, 1925, in Milan, Italy, both of Sagan’s parents – her Catholic father and Jewish mother – were doctors. Her parents’ financial security ensured that she received a robust private education, including instruction in French, English, Latin, and Spanish and frequent trips throughout Europe and Africa.¹⁵³ The outbreak of World War II, however, changed Sagan’s life. After the Italian surrender in 1943, the eighteen-year-old Sagan joined her parents in the anti-Fascist movement. She delivered food and clothing to Jews in hiding, guided those in danger to safety through the Italian Alps she hiked as a child, distributed pamphlets for the resistance, and disguised herself as a cleaning lady and nun to gain access to government offices to “pilfer stationery for use to forge papers or to make wax imprints of seals.”¹⁵⁴ These exploits earned the less-than-five-foot Sagan the nickname “Topolino,” or little mouse. Both of Sagan’s parents were murdered as a result of their resistance work and Sagan herself was imprisoned and tortured. She endured, in her own words, “all the usual things – beatings, rape, electric shocks” for six weeks.¹⁵⁵ One night, after weeks of constant abuse, a guard threw a loaf of bread into her cell, and Sagan soon discovered a matchbox baked into the roll with a single word inscribed inside: “corragio [courage].”¹⁵⁶ I knew then I would be all right,” Sagan later recalled, “someone knew what was happening to me. Someone cared.”¹⁵⁷ On April 23, 1945, two guards appeared to take Sagan to her execution. The men who arrived, however, were resistance sympathizers or were underground members in fascist uniforms, and they brought her to a hospital instead. Sagan celebrated April 23 as a second birthday for the rest of her life.¹⁵⁸

She eventually immigrated to the United States, where she founded the West Coast branch of Amnesty International’s American chapter (AIUSA) at her home in Atherton, California, in 1968. Sagan thus personifies the connections between the 1940s and the 1970s human rights moments and embodies the reality that Americans “imported,” rather than innovated, human rights vernaculars in the 1970s.¹⁵⁹ Sagan also soon became one of the most influential voices in the United States regarding Vietnamese reeducation camp prisoners. Although she had yet to attain this status, growing awareness about the Holocaust in the United States continued to influence the ways US policy makers responded to oceanic and overland Indochinese migrations.

On November 1, 1978, Carter established the President’s Commission on the Holocaust. CCIR member and author of The Jews of Silence, Elie Wiesel, chaired the Commission and Bayard Rustin, another CCIR member, also served on the committee.¹⁶⁰ The Holocaust Commission also included legislators who became some of the strongest voices in favor of expanding opportunities for South Vietnamese to resettle in the United States in the years ahead: Rudy Boschwitz, Stephen Solarz, and Claiborne Pell.¹⁶¹ In the late 1970s, Boschwitz was the only refugee serving in the US Senate. His family fled Nazi Germany when he was young, and the Senator from Minnesota advocated on behalf of Indochinese refugee admissions throughout his tenure in Congress.¹⁶² Solarz, a third-generation Jewish American, had a stepmother who was a refugee from Nazi Germany and had “more Holocaust survivors in his district than anyone else in Congress.”¹⁶³ The New York Congressman took over the influential Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs in 1980, and in his memoirs, Solarz explains that he advocated so tirelessly on behalf of Indochinese refugees because of “US failure to do more to rescue European Jewry from the growing Nazi threat in the 1930s and the counterproductive consequences of our military involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s.”¹⁶⁴ Finally, Pell’s motivations for supporting Indochinese refugee admissions, like Sagan’s advocacy, linked the 1940s and 1970s in intimate ways. Pell’s father had served as the US representative on the UN War Crimes Commission in the wake of WWII.¹⁶⁵ Thereafter, the younger Pell served as Vice President of the International Rescue Committee in the 1950s and played a large role in advocating on behalf of Hungarian Refugees. Although some within Congress and the US bureaucracy continued to oppose refugee admissions, those who supported admitting large numbers of Indochinese continued to gather allies, moral ammunition, and seats at the head of influential committees and subcommittees where they could translate their priorities into policy.

As 1978 drew to a close and 1979 began, a rapid series of events altered the status quo in Southeast Asia. The departure of oceanic and overland migrants surged dramatically. Nearly 3,000 oceanic migrants reached the shores of first asylum countries in August, and the number jumped to 8,558 by the end of September and 12,540 in October, each month set a record for the largest number of arrivals to date.¹⁶⁶ In response, on November 2, Thailand announced that it would not accept any additional migrants, and Malaysia threatened to follow suit.¹⁶⁷ Drastic measures such as these occurred as regional and global leaders were beginning to recognize Hanoi’s complicity in the growing number of departures. SRV officials both extracted exorbitant bribes from migrants and implemented policies intended to force the ethnic Chinese population to leave.¹⁶⁸

On the same day that Thailand closed its borders, Hanoi and Moscow signed the Soviet-Vietnamese Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation.¹⁶⁹ The promise of substantial Soviet aid emboldened the SRV to respond to repeated Khmer incursions into Vietnamese soil with a full-scale invasion of Cambodia on Christmas day 1978.¹⁷⁰ Vietnamese troops successfully captured Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, on January 7.¹⁷¹ “In the months that followed, sporadic fighting and the ensuing chaos pushed more than half a million peopled toward the Thai border,” a migration Aihwa Ong describes as one which “half-dead refugees walked, stumbled, and crawled out of the jungle toward the camps [in Thailand]. They came as straggling bands of families, groups of orphans, Khmer Rouge deserters, and smugglers, preyed upon by both the retreating Khmer Rouge and the Thai soldiers.”¹⁷²

The reverberations of the Second and Third Indochina Wars seemed to precipitate migrant flight at every turn. After the resumption of diplomatic relations between the United States and China, for instance, Beijing, with tacit American approval, launched a two-week invasion into northern Vietnam in February to teach Hanoi a “lesson” for invading Cambodia.¹⁷³ Tens of thousands of Vietnamese died in the attacks, and “close to a million” were displaced.¹⁷⁴ The United States responded by backing China, if not in word than in deed. American policy makers, Brzezinski’s explained, spearheaded an effort to “keep the international heat on Vietnam and to discourage all aid donors to Vietnam from giving aid until Vietnam withdraws its forces from Cambodia.”¹⁷⁵ The reasons which Carter cited in October 1978 for the postponement of ongoing US-Vietnamese normalization talks – Cambodia, refugees, and SRV-Soviet ties – had all, from Washington’s perspective, worsened and grown as greater barriers to closer ties. If, in other words, these conditions began at least partially as a cover, they quickly became genuine obstacles.

In the midst of all of the upheaval at the turn of 1978–1979, the administration did not let the thirtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1978 pass without mention. It was on this occasion that Carter famously declared, “human rights is the soul of our foreign policy.”¹⁷⁶ As departures from Indochina surged, the president also commented specifically on refugees. “Refugees are the living, homeless casualties of our world’s failure to live by the principles of peace and human rights. To help them is a simple human duty,” Carter argued, “As Americans – as a people made up largely of the descendants of refugees – I feel that duty with special keenness.”¹⁷⁷ Although the administration powerfully articulated why the United States should “welcome more than our fair share” of Indochinese migrants, Carter’s team had yet to back these words with action.

On January 10, 1979, CCIR members held another consequential press conference. Given that the rate of oceanic departures from Vietnam increased by “more than tenfold … during the last 11 months” and the number of those fleeing from Cambodia and Laos had more than doubled, the CCIR called international – and especially American – leaders to action.¹⁷⁸ Passionately advocating for a response predicated on robust resettlement, the Commission declared the United States should accept “100,000 for the year 1979” but conceded that “more countries will have to accept a fair share of the Indochinese refugee population.” The Commission addressed their last recommendation directly to Carter. While the CCIR conceded that “the time is an awkward and difficult one” given financial difficulties and unemployment at home, it nevertheless argued that because “this is a refugee crises of such compelling humanitarian urgency, a matter of life-or-death for so many thousands of Indochinese, and a human rights issue of such overriding importance” the administration must act.¹⁷⁹ The CCIR surely spoke for many in Washington when it proclaimed before an international television audience: “We urge the President of the United States to take the lead … to respond quickly and generously to this fundamental human rights emergency … lest the dismal history of the 1930s repeat itself.”¹⁸⁰ This poignant human rights rhetoric, articulated by a humanitarian organization in the wake of increased Holocaust memory, demonstrates the ways the boundaries between human rights and humanitarianism often dissolved in practice in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

The combined efforts of the CCIR and shows of support from key members of Congress prompted the administration to act. In February 1979, Carter created the Office of US Coordinator for Refugee Affairs and appointed former Senator Dick Clark (D-IA) “to bring order and continuity to the handling of refugees and to help shepherd a new refugee bill through Congress.”¹⁸¹ The legislative-executive efforts to produce legislation bore fruit in March 1979.¹⁸² The bill that became the Refugee Act of 1980 proposed to fundamentally alter US refugee policy.¹⁸³ First, unlike immigration programs, refugee policy would originate in the White House, a gesture to refugee policy’s continued significance in US foreign relations. Nevertheless, the bill required the president to undertake annual consultations with Congress, codifying the recent trend that Capitol Hill would exert an influential voice in refugee issues.¹⁸⁴ Congress’ efforts to claim a more assertive role in the nation’s foreign policy thus took many forms.

The Refugee Act acknowledged, at least implicitly, that “refugee crises” – so often conceived of as temporary – were becoming permanent fixtures in late twentieth century geopolitics. By creating an annual allotment for the admission of 50,000 refugees, the legislation also revealed that resettlement would be a defining feature of US policy. Pragmatically, this approach would streamline the inefficient, ad-hoc parole process that took place between 1975 and 1978. Clark noted that “if the proposed Act had been in effect since 1975, the emergency group admission provisions would have been employed only” in April 1975.¹⁸⁵ In other words, all of the 1976–1978 “emergencies” would have been handled under the proposed new “normal flow” ceiling of 50,000 refugees, without the need for repeated debates undertaken in a crisis atmosphere. Rather than a firm 50,000-person ceiling, moreover, the act also permitted the president, after required annual consultations with Congress, “to increase the number depending on the international situation.”¹⁸⁶ Although the Indochinese diaspora helped dramatize the need for and justify the Refugee Act, the legislation had implications far beyond US-SRV relations.

The law dramatically altered the definition of “refugee” in the United States. The Act enshrined the international definition, as articulated in the 1951 Convention and 1967 Protocol, into US domestic law, a move that Clark explained “reflected the administration’s commitment to human rights.”¹⁸⁷ This point of consistency also revealed that US and international refugee norms were becoming increasingly linked and mutually reinforcing. For at least a time, officials in the United States and Geneva used the same definition of “refugee” and emphasized resettlement as a primary response to “refugee crises” abroad. The Refugee Act, however, also included an exception clause, which permitted the president to admit individuals as refugees even if they did not meet the enumerated criteria so long as they were of “special humanitarian concern.” By codifying a human rights-based definition of refugee and legally linking the language of human rights and humanitarianism, the law fundamentally altered the legal landscape in the United States and ensured these moral languages would play primary roles in US policy making and nonstate advocacy in the future.

The same month that Congress began debating new refugee legislation, the administration announced its intention to increase Indochinese refugee admissions to 7,000 a month, with a projected total of 120,000 for the fiscal years of 1980 and 1981.¹⁸⁸ In midst of these initiatives, the number of oceanic and overland departures increased exponentially, setting new records for the highest number arrivals each month throughout the spring and culminating with just under 57,000 arriving in June.¹⁸⁹ Amid these staggering departure rates, a CCIR member testified before Congress that “the decisions which US officials in Washington have to make are almost like a medical triage in military field hospitals – determining who can be saved and who will die.”¹⁹⁰

As the number of oceanic departures surged, the UNHCR accelerated its efforts to work with Hanoi to establish an alternative means of departure from Vietnam for would-be migrants. UNHCR representatives and SRV officials signed a memorandum of understanding initiating the Orderly Departure Program (ODP) in May 1979.¹⁹¹ The ODP was a multilateral initiative whereby individuals would leave Vietnam directly and resettle abroad in countries like the United States, Canada, France, and Australia, obviating the need for dangerous sea journeys and the hardships of protracted stays in refugee camps. The brief, seven-point memorandum began with the proclamation that the “authorized exit of those people who wish to leave Viet Nam and settle in foreign countries – family reunification and other humanitarian cases – will be carried out as soon as possible and to the maximum extent.”¹⁹² When Richard Holbrooke met with Ambassador Ha Van Lau in New York soon after the program’s implementation, Holbrooke noted that it was “a good agreement” and repeated US desire to see Hanoi “achieve an orderly flow of refugees and family reunions at levels commensurate with the ability of the international community to absorb them.”¹⁹³

While a meaningful development that would have major consequences in the long term, the ODP did not resolve the immediate situation, which by the spring of 1979 had turned desperate. The oceanic and overland migrations, simply put, placed demands on first asylum nations that they were unable or unwilling to meet. Between 1975 and 1995, approximately one-third of all Vietnamese “boat people” landed in Malaysia.¹⁹⁴ Frustrated and desperate, Malaysian authorities began systematically pushing refugees back out to sea, with 400,000 denied the right to first asylum by mid-1979.¹⁹⁵ On June 30, 1979, the ASEAN nations, which were not signatories to the UN accords governing international refugee law in this period, “issued a joint communiqué stating that its member states would not accept new arrivals.”¹⁹⁶ The ASEAN also publicly and privately registered their discontent with American policy.¹⁹⁷ As a memorandum prepared by the National Intelligence Office for East Asia and the Pacific revealed, the nations of first asylum were increasingly “annoyed by American criticism of their refusal to accept more refugees … and all believe the United States should accept the major burden of resettling all the refugees.”¹⁹⁸ ASEAN also intensified its criticism of the SRV, most notably in a speech given by S. Rajaratnam, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Singapore at the twelfth ASEAN Ministerial Meeting. Rajaratnam suggested that the Indochinese exodus amounted to “a military exercise,” an invasion intended to destabilize the region to help further Vietnamese “ambitions” for “hegemony in Southeast Asia.”¹⁹⁹ The Minister ended his speech with a reference to the Holocaust, noting that Hanoi’s “deliberate policy” was more efficient “than gas chambers – the Vietnamese push them out into the open sea. It costs them nothing” and Hanoi gets “money for the boats” by extracting bribes from migrants before permitting them to depart.²⁰⁰

This calamitous situation of simultaneous record-breaking departures and border closings prompted US officials to skew available parole slots to oceanic migrants.²⁰¹ This decision, however, had the unintended consequence of encouraging other nations to adopt draconian measures to prompt Washington to intervene. Sara Davies argues, for example, that Thai leaders “decided that if this [denying the right to first asylum] is what is necessary to get US attention, they can be just as harsh as other countries.”²⁰² The CCIR was also obviously tired of American inaction. “If the US government does not act dramatically and forcefully to save the tens of thousands who will be cast out to sea or forcibly returned to Indochina and to certain death,” a June 1979 press release warned, “American credibility will suffer a blow from which it may take decades to recover.”²⁰³ While the CCIR was clearly using inflammatory rhetoric to provoke US policy makers into action, the implication that American credibility could and would sink further from failing to respond to the Indochinese diaspora in 1979 than it had already fallen thanks to US conduct in the Vietnam War vividly illustrates the lag in American leadership. When examining these years in retrospect, armed with the knowledge that over one million South Vietnamese would resettle in the United States by 1995, it is easy to overlook the uncertainty of 1977–1979. During these contentious years, that the United States would provide significant resettlement allocations and financial support to the UNHCR was far from certain.

The events of spring 1979 upped the ante for the Carter administration. In addition to nongovernmental humanitarian groups, foreign leaders – American allies, no less – were characterizing the diaspora as a deliberate forced expulsion policy and making explicit comparisons to the Holocaust on the international stage. In this context, failure to act amounted not only to a humanitarian failure but a geopolitical liability as well. To add to the criticism coming from the CCIR and ASEAN allies, inaction started to have political consequences for Carter at home. As Ted Kennedy rose to challenge Carter for the Democratic nomination, the Senator from Massachusetts used his long history of supporting humanitarian assistance for Vietnamese refugees to criticize the Commander in Chief.²⁰⁴ These incentives mobilized the administration into action.

The United States Takes a Leadership Role

After years of nonexecutive pressure, the White House implemented major policy changes in the summer of 1979. The administration’s first step was to use a pre-scheduled Tokyo Economic Summit in June to make an international appeal for Indochinese refugee resettlement. A confidential memorandum that Dick Clark prepared for Carter prior to his departure read as though it had been written by the CCIR. Clark suggested “the exodus of refugees from Indochina has reached such staggering dimensions as to pose major political and security problems for Southeast Asia as well as a refugee problem of proportions not matched since Nazi Germany in the 1930’s.”²⁰⁵ Clark advocated that the administration pursue action on three fronts: “(1) ensure the extension of temporary asylum; (2) to increase permanent resettlement; and (3) to meet the large costs involved.”²⁰⁶ “After the Tokyo Summit,” Clark suggested that the president spearhead an effort to condemn the SRV through the UN and also convince the UNHCR to host a conference “aimed at agreement on a program of practical steps to increase temporary asylum, permanent resettlement and financial support.”²⁰⁷ As another aide explained to Carter, “in moral terms, this is an opportunity for leadership that we should not let slip.”²⁰⁸ At Tokyo, Carter launched all of these initiatives. The president announced that the United States would double its admissions to 14,000 per month and make additional resettlment and financial pledges at the forthcoming UNHCR conference.²⁰⁹

It is worthwhile to pause here to recall that as late as September 1977, the most knowledgeable officials in Washington informed Carter that the United States should expect to admit approximately 25,000–30,000 Indochinese refugees by the end of 1980.²¹⁰ By June of 1979, US officials supported the entry of 14,000 refugees per month. Not all Americans supported such a dramatic increase. A summer 1979 poll reflected that 57 percent of Americans opposed measures which would “see immigration laws relaxed to ease the admission of the boat people,” while 32 percent were in favor.²¹¹ In addition to nativism, economic woes, and compassion fatigue, racism also played a role. As Brzezinski put it, “if the refugees were white Europeans they [Americans] would be much more concerned than they are with yellow people half-way round the world.”²¹²

Geopolitical, humanitarian, and human rights objectives outweighed domestic objections to refugee admissions, however. Those who emphasized Cold War priorities and those who argued human rights should guide US policy found common cause in Indochinese refugees, especially South Vietnamese who fled by boat. That the State Department and NSC, which were so divided on other fundamental issues, were of the same mind when it came to this cohort undoubtedly fueled American policy. This trend of unlikely allies supporting South Vietnamese refugee resettlement was only just beginning.

In July of 1979, Vice President Mondale, who had taken an active role in Indochina issues as a Senator and throughout Carter’s term, traveled to Geneva to represent the United States at a UNHCR-hosted conference on Indochinese refugees. That it was Mondale, and not Carter, illustrates that even at this critical moment the oceanic and overland migrations did not top the executive priority list. Nevertheless, the shift from James Wilson heading the US delegation in 1976 as the Coordinator for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs to having the sitting vice president in attendance spoke volumes about the relative importance with which Washington viewed the meeting and the UNHCR. As Mondale and his team traveled to Geneva, Americans at home were feeling the effects of an oil shortage, as motorists around the country waited in long lines for the chance to fill their tanks. After an intensive summit with domestic labor and business leaders at Camp David, Carter gave a televised address to the nation that condemned the American tendency to “worship self-indulgence and consumption.”²¹³ Although prescient in many respects, the speech rubbed voters the wrong way, which did not help the president on the eve of an election year.

The vice president, however, made an entirely different impression at Geneva. His speech opened with a powerful reference to the 1938 Evian Conference. At Evian, thirty-two nations, including the United States, met to discuss the fate of Jews in Germany and displaced throughout Europe. In the midst of the Great Depression and pervasive anti-Semitism, however, the delegates at Evian offered words but no action.²¹⁴ As Mondale proclaimed to those sitting before him in Geneva in July 1979: “At stake at Evian, were both human lives – and the decency and self-respect of the civilized world. If each nation at Evian had agreed on that day to take in 17,000 Jews at once, every Jew in the Reich could have been saved. … Let us not re-enact their error. Let us not be heirs to their shame.”²¹⁵ While Mondale’s words still resonate decades later, his audience included individuals with living memory of WWII.

In many ways, the vice president told the UNHCR and ASEAN nations what they had been waiting to hear. He argued to the world leaders sitting before him that “we must all be prepared to commit ourselves to multi-year resettlement programs – for the problem will not be solved quickly.” Mondale also announced that the United States would lead by example by doubling its contribution to the UNHCR and sending four additional navy ships to help rescue oceanic migrants in peril.²¹⁶ The vice president ended his speech the way he began, by invoking the Holocaust and the weight of history: “History will not forgive us if we fail. History will not forget us if we succeed.”²¹⁷ As Mondale recalled with satisfaction, “the best we expected was a polite applause and some nodding of heads. But the response was electric and when I finished people leaped to their feet for a sustained ovation.”²¹⁸

The international community responded with more than applause. The sixty-five nations in attendance pledged a total of $160 million and increased the number of promised resettlement slots from 125,000 to 260,000.²¹⁹ The long-term consequences of this approach were historic. Indochinese refugee resettlement continued into the 1990s, making it one of the “most elaborate and expensive” programs in the UNHCR’s long history and one of the most consequential, involving, as Loescher explains, “the largest permanent population transfer there has ever been between developing and industrialized program.”²²⁰

In addition to facilitating far-reaching changes in global refugee norms, the Geneva Conference also gave US officials the opportunity to present their narrative of events to the world. “The fundamental responsibility” for the current crisis, the vice president argued, “must rest with the authorities of Indochina, particularly the government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. That government is failing to ensure the human rights of its people. Its callous and irresponsible policies are compelling countless citizens to forsake everything they treasure, to risk their lives, and to flee into the unknown.”²²¹ On the one hand, many of the SRV’s policies warranted condemnation, and thereafter Hanoi agreed to prevent boat departures, which amounted to at least an implicit acknowledgment of its role in the forced exodus of the Hoa.²²² On the other hand, however, Mondale’s narrative of SRV culpability required a large dose of historical amnesia about the systemic violence the US government unleashed in Vietnam prior to 1975.²²³

Separating the postwar exodus from the war in this fashion permitted much of the historical revisionism that surged during the Reagan years. As Phuong Tran Nguyen explains, the oceanic migration fundamentally altered the position that the government in Hanoi and defeated South Vietnamese occupied in the public imagination: “Vietnam’s communist party, once the darlings of the anticolonial movement, were now well-known human rights violators, and the refugees from Indochina, once considered the corrupt losers of a civil war, were suddenly the heroes of the postwar.”²²⁴ That the sitting American vice president could criticize Hanoi on the grounds of human rights violations with a straight face at an international conference only four years after the last US helicopters evacuated Saigon demonstrates the extent to which human rights functioned not as a neutral rights discourse but as a language of power in international relations.

The fact that the United States expanded, rather than contracted, its commitment to South Vietnamese, who American policy makers repeatedly characterized as “refugees,” is also telling. Ford’s original argument about the United States’ “profound moral obligation,” combined with Carter’s human rights rhetoric resulted in a significant, and not at all inevitable, broadening of the precedents set in 1975 and 1976. In 1979, the number of South Vietnamese entering the United States each year exceeded the original 130,000 parolees who evacuated Saigon alongside American personnel in April 1975. Rather than a temporary aberration, the trend of enlarging the number of eligible South Vietnamese individuals eligible for resettlement in the United States continued for another decade.

The position that Washington assumed vis-à-vis Cambodia, however, illustrates that real and important limits existed on American commitments. If the oceanic exodus from Vietnam provided the United States with an opportunity to chastise Hanoi, the situation in Cambodia did not. While US officials characterized Vietnam’s presence in Cambodia as an “invasion,” the truth that Hanoi unseated a genocidal regime remained. Officials in Washington, the White House especially, did everything they could to minimize this fact. Indeed, while the 1979 Geneva Conference made great strides toward alleviating the pressures oceanic migrants placed on nations of first asylum, the issue of overland migrants – predominantly Cambodians on the Thai-Cambodian border – went largely unaddressed.²²⁵ While the administration eventually submitted to external pressures to provide food aid to Cambodia, Congress took the lead, sending delegations to visit the border and using its power of the purse to double the administration’s request for food relief.²²⁶ As it had done regarding human rights more broadly, Congress used the publicity that hearings could bring and its role in appropriations to point US foreign policy in directions that the president did not want to go.

While Congress injected its priorities into the nation’s foreign policy, it could not dictate US diplomacy. In what scholar Michael Haas calls “The Faustian Pact,” the United States’ determination to condemn Hanoi as part of a larger strategic shift prompted American policy makers to support the exiled genocidal regime in a myriad of ways, including voting to award Cambodia’s UN seat to a coalition that included the Khmer Rouge.²²⁷ In an echo of the military phase of the Vietnam War, Washington was fighting Hanoi in Vietnam and in Cambodia. While geopolitical and human rights objectives aligned in Vietnam, in Cambodia they did not, and geopolitics triumphed, despite the objections of many in Congress and the CCIR.

This status quo had lasting implications for US-Vietnamese normalization. In addition to citing the diaspora, poor human rights conditions, and concerns about SRV-Soviet ties, the administration maintained that the withdrawal of Hanoi’s troops from Phnom Penh was an absolute minimum condition the SRV had to satisfy before the United States would be willing to resume formal normalization talks.²²⁸ This requirement, in addition to the demand that Hanoi facilitate a “full accounting” of American POW/MIAs, forestalled official US-Vietnamese negotiations until the early 1990s. In the interim, migration programs, along with POW/MIA accounting, became the basis of ongoing US-Vietnamese ties. By the end of his term, the Carter administration linked human rights, refugees, and US-Vietnamese normalization policy in numerous ways, as epitomized in the Refugee Act of 1980, which Carter signed into law on March 17, 1980.²²⁹

Conclusion

The Carter years established a number of precedents that demarcated American policy toward the SRV for the foreseeable future. The administration initially attempted to establish formal diplomatic relations with the SRV by insisting that official ties should resume without preconditions. A few years later, however, as US-Chinese relations cast a long shadow over US policy in the region, American officials suspended formal talks with Hanoi and stipulated that official diplomatic relations between the United States and SRV could not occur until Hanoi withdrew its troops from Cambodia. In the years ahead, US policy makers insisted that Hanoi had to meet an expanding number of preconditions prior to the resumption of official ties. Despite the absence of official US-Vietnamese relations and the impasse in formal normalization negotiations, however, US officials remained willing to meet with Hanoi to discuss migration issues and family reunification. While condemning Hanoi as a violator of human rights and seeking to isolate the SRV in the international community, US officials simultaneously met with SRV officials to discuss the Orderly Departure Program and refugee resettlement more broadly. These policies all became institutionalized with bipartisan support in the years ahead.

The magnitude of the oceanic and overland migrations also crystalized the linkage of human rights and refugee policy in American thought and law. Indeed, while it took time to hammer out some of the law’s procedural elements, the Refugee Act of 1980’s codification of a human rights-based definition of refugee encountered almost no resistance whatsoever.²³⁰ Congress’s efforts to inject human rights standards to US foreign policy beginning in the mid-1970s, combined with Carter’s articulation of a human rights approach to diplomacy and the severity of the Indochinese refugee crisis – especially when described in exigent Holocaust rhetoric – all prompted US officials to perceive the Indochinese refugee crisis through a human rights lens. The urgency that human rights rhetoric and Holocaust comparisons bestowed upon the situation helped create a consensus in favor of blanket refugee status for Indochinese migrants and resettlement as the primary American and international responses. As part of this process, US officials increased their support for and willingness to work through multilateral initiatives organized by the UNHCR.

The timing and nature of the American response to the Indochinese diaspora also revealed the influence nonstate actors could wield. Although many factors beyond the Citizens Commission on Indochinese Refugees led to the dramatic about-face in US policy, the CCIR played a decisive role in the politics of information. Because the White House remained preoccupied with other issues, the information, pressure, and publicity the CCIR garnered were instrumental in creating a broad base of support for refugee admissions. Indeed, Mondale’s speech at Geneva was, in many ways, a formal articulation and adoption of the policies the CCIR had been proposing for over a year.

Even though the CCIR took an expansive view of US obligations, there were still others who escaped the Commission’s and administration’s attention. As the CCIR and others shed a spotlight on oceanic and overland migrants, two other groups – Amerasians and reeducation camp detainees – languished within Vietnam’s borders. Once a new president entered the White House, new advocacy groups moved to the fore to prompt policy makers to negotiate and implement migration programs for both of these cohorts. As formal US-Vietnamese relations stalled, nongovernmental advocacy became increasingly more vital in infusing urgency into ongoing discussions about refugees and family reunification.