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 in late March shook US officials out of their complacency and forced them to confront South Vietnam’s imminent collapse. From the beginning of earnest, if belated, evacuation planning, administration officials labored to include South Vietnamese allies, which made the process much more contested than it otherwise might have been. In the face of consistent opposition, the administration ensured that it had the authority to use the US military to evacuate South Vietnamese nationals as well as the legal approvals necessary to resettle those individuals in the United States.

Ford argued that the United States had a “profound moral obligation” to its South Vietnamese allies. 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 ways that did not have obvious limits, temporal or demographic. Future nonexecutive actors seized on this language to successfully expand resettlement opportunities for growing numbers of South Vietnamese.

As the Reagan administration reinvigorated the Cold War during its first term, US officials also expanded ongoing dialogue with Hanoi. This incongruity is explained by the fact that the issues American officials championed all painted vivid pictures of the evils of communism, including PO/MIA accounting and emigration programs for South Vietnamese, including Amerasians and former reeducation camp detainees. US officials described these causes as “humanitarian” causes.While discussions on “political” issues remained suspended, humanitarian concerns dominated the US-SRV agenda. US officials consistently earmarked more than 50% of annual refugee admissions slots for Indochinese throughout the 1980s.

Reagan’s celebration of the Vietnam War as a “noble cause” and casting of the American soldier as a national hero reverberated widely. Veterans’ rising political capital opened even more space for members of Congress who had served in Vietnam to become some of the most prominent American voices in the US-SRV normalization process. At the same time, nonstate actors continued to play crucial roles. This chapter uses Ginetta Sagan’s Aurora Foundation to highlight the importance of NGO advocacy, the ongoing linkage between humanitarian and human rights rhetoric, and the ways gender dynamics played an important part in solidifying connections between nonexecutive actors.