The Frail Stairs to Freedom
A haunting memory of the Vietnam conflict comes home
It is a black iron ladder, painted gunmetal gray. Nothing fancy; more industrial than not. Sixteen feet long. But up its rungs some 6,000 Americans and South Vietnamese clattered to the small roof of the American Embassy in Saigon and then onto helicopters during 18 terrifying hours leading up to the fall of the South Vietnamese capital on April 30, 1975. Now, fittingly, that makeshift staircase has found its way to the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library in Grand Rapids, Mich.
Some Americans look at that ladder, and another in the famous UPI wirephoto, of lines of evacuees streaming up, and see bitter symbols of a war lost and a people abandoned. Jerry Ford, whose memories of those days are indelibly engraved in his heart, looks at that ladder and sees what presidential historian Richard Norton Smith calls a "bridge to freedom for thousands of Vietnamese" who fled one homeland and found a new one in America.
Ford, while he was president, fought hard to gain approval of his plans to offer refuge to the 130,000 Vietnamese refugees who poured out of Vietnam in just over one month's time; he had to fight even harder to get U.S. lawmakers to appropriate the $400 million needed to resettle them in the United States.
Insisting on tradition. Recently declassified documents offer details of a crucial meeting between Ford and members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the White House on April 14, 1975, to discuss the plight of Vietnamese refugees. One senator, Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, went so far as to suggest: "We could put these people in Borneo. It has the same latitude, the same climate, and would welcome some anticommunists."
President Ford's response was swift and firm: "... our tradition is to welcome the oppressed. I don't think these people should be treated any differently from any other people_the Hungarians, Cubans, Jews from the Soviet Union."
When harsher voices spoke against resettling the Vietnamese in America, suggesting that they would be a drain on welfare resources, Ford returned to the theme of America as a nation of immigrants where diversity was welcomed and treasured. And he pointed out that 60 percent of the refugees were children who deserved to have a chance.
Ford got the funds from Congress, and with the help of Rep. Peter Rodino of New Jersey, George Meany of the AFL-CIO, the American Jewish Committee, and a group of state governors, he eventually won popular approval of the resettlement program. Just eight months later, in December 1975, the very last Vietnamese refugee walked through the gates of the last of four refugee camps, at Fort Chaffee, Ark., and all had been settled in their new country.
That ladder means a lot to Jerry Ford. He wanted to have that ladder. He put the arm on Secretary of State Madeleine Albright sometime back: If ever the old embassy in Saigon was torn down, he would like to have it for his library.
Last year the embassy was razed, and the ladder was reclaimed. The Smithsonian wanted it; but Ford got it. On April 10, Jerry Ford unveiled the ladder in the main lobby of his presidential library. To him, it will always stand as a monument to what America gained from the Vietnam War, not what it lost.
This story appears in the April 19, 1999 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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