Rachel Maddow - Drift

The assertion of congressional power had strong support across party lines. When an incensed President Nixon vetoed the War Powers Resolution, both the House and the Senate overrode that veto with votes to spare.

And the legislature didn’t stop there, especially not when the subject was once again Vietnam. In April 1975, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee suspected that Nixon’s replacement, President Gerald Ford, wasn’t telling all about his latest request for financial support for our allies in South Vietnam, President Nguyen Van Thieu’s failing army. As far as the committee members could discern from the parade of witnesses sent from the White House, President Ford wasn’t willing to accept the facts on the ground: the North Vietnamese Army was about to overrun the friendly government in Saigon and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. American combat troops were long gone.

During an executive session of the committee, the senators worried aloud that the Ford administration had not made a real plan for the coming collapse of Thieu’s government. They worried that the president’s stubborn support for a failing South Vietnamese military might lead us back into a hot war there, with combat troops once again on the ground. Congress had given Johnson and Nixon too many chances, and these presidents had made too many costly mistakes and miscalculations. The Senate was not in a mood to give Ford free rein. The game was up. Ford wasn’t going to get his $722 million appropriation. He needed to understand that.

So the committee, in the middle of that executive session, dialed up and requested a nearly unprecedented face-to-face consultation with the president, and then marched en masse down to the White House and into the Cabinet Room. “We wanted to tell you our concerns and hear from you your concerns,” Ford’s fellow Republican, Sen. Howard Baker, told the new president. “We hope when we have, we will have established a new era of negotiation between the Executive and Legislative branches.”

Ford was horrified. He wrote in his memoir that the last time the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had showed up at the White House demanding a meeting was back in the Woodrow Wilson administration. Ford—having just come from the House of Representatives himself—was floored by the legislators’ presumption. He described the meeting as “extremely tense.”

And it was. The minutes show the senators pointedly suggesting that the president get control of his ungovernable and unrealistic ambassador in Saigon, that he make a real plan to evacuate the 6,000 Americans and the 175,000 South Vietnamese friendlies, and that he drop his appropriations request by two-thirds and limit it to funds for safe evacuation… or forget it. There wasn’t going to be any more open-ended aid to stand up additional South Vietnamese infantry divisions.

“If there isn’t some indication of aid,” Ford harrumphed, “the situation could disintegrate rapidly.”

“I will give you large sums for evacuation,” Sen. Jacob Javits told the president point-blank, “but not one nickel for military aid for Thieu.”

“We are not wanting to put American troops in, but we have to have enough funds to make it look like we plan to hold for some period,” Ford offered at the end of the meeting. But the senators damn sure weren’t going to get sucked into any more combat missions, even in the effort to evacuate.

“This is a reentry of a magnitude we had not envisioned,” Sen. John Glenn, the famed pilot and astronaut, told the president. “I can see North Vietnam deciding not to let us get these people out and attacking our bridgehead. Then we would have to send forces to protect our security forces. That fills me with fear.” The Senate had dug in its heels, and there was little the president could do.

Oh, but those days stuck in the craw of the inhabitants of the West Wing circa 1975. Gerald Ford’s chief of staff would still be complaining bitterly about that “congressional backlash” and the War Powers Resolution nearly forty years later. “The resolution, despite its questionable and still untested constitutionality,” Donald Rumsfeld huffed in his 2011 memoir, “undercut the President’s ability to convince troublemakers of America’s staying power.” Ford complained aloud to his cabinet that Congress had stepped in where it had no business, forcing him to become the president who would, as he put it, “cut and run,” who would “bug out” of Vietnam. Secretary of State Kissinger actually whined to Ford that a few Republican senators had been really mean to him.

But this wasn’t about mean. This wasn’t about Kissinger, it wasn’t about Ford, it wasn’t personal at all. This was about the fundamental question of American martial power and how it’s wielded.

In the aftermath of America’s decade-long tragedy in Vietnam—in the military demobilization, in the course corrections, and in the political recriminations that followed—something important happened. The new structures that grew out of that searing experience—the Abrams Doctrine, the War Powers Resolution, a newly muscular Congress—had real, fundamental, change-the-country force. Taken as a whole, they had the sort of salubrious outcome old George Mason would have cheered: they clogged up the country’s war-making apparatus.

The questions of how we provide for the common defense, how we apportion our limited resources to the military, how we prepare for war, and whether or not we go to war were back where they belonged, out in the open, subject to loud and jangly political debate.

It must be noted for the record, however, that sales of G.I. Joe remained soft, even with the Kung Fu Grip.

WHEN RONALD REAGAN SPOKE A THING ALOUD, HE BELIEVED it forever and for always. By the time he started running for president, in 1976, he had already developed an unwavering and steadfast faith in the correctness of whatever came out of his mouth. “Once he had made an emotional commitment to this or that policy or story,” Reagan’s most sympathetic biographer, Edmund Morris, would write, “no amount of disproof would cause him to alter his belief in it.” Facts and contrary evidence did not get in the way of a good story—especially one that appeared to set his audiences’ heads bobbing in knowing assent. Welfare queens were driving around Chicago’s South Side in Cadillacs, he’d say out on the stump; one had defrauded the clueless federal government to the tune of $150,000 a year tax-free ! Public housing in East Harlem had gone luxury: “You can get an apartment with eleven-foot ceilings,” Reagan told a group in the early primary state of New Hampshire, “with a twenty-foot balcony, a swimming pool, laundry room, and play room.” The federal government was spending $90 billion a year on welfare and other programs the states should be administering. So let ’em do it. That’d balance the federal budget right there. It all sounded about right to Reagan, and to a lot of the people who showed up for his rallies.

And still, the Gipper could not seem to get the necessary traction in that first race for the Republican nomination. The sitting (though unelected, as Reagan would point out) president, Gerald Ford, defeated the onetime governor in the first six primaries that year, including the one in Reagan’s birth state of Illinois by nearly twenty points. By early spring, Nancy Reagan was trying to gentle her husband out of the race; the campaign was so broke his managers weren’t sure they could afford the jet fuel to get his yellow Hughes Airwest DC-9 charter plane (the Big Banana, the press corps was calling it) to the next contest in North Carolina. But Reagan thought he still had one more card to play, maybe the trump card, against the president who knuckled under to Congress and bailed on the last war.