President Joe Biden’s disastrous handling of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan drew immediate comparisons to the end of the Vietnam War.
Helicopters evacuating personnel out of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul over to Hamid Karzai International Airport this weekend as the Taliban marched into the Afghan capital were immediately compared to infamous images of a crowd desperately trying to board a helicopter on the roof of an apartment building in Saigon (which housed USAID and the CIA’s deputy chief of station) as Communist forces swept across South Vietnam.
As South Vietnam collapsed in the spring of 1975, President Gerald Ford and the U.S. government undertook massive rescue efforts to evacuate thousands of South Vietnamese families who had helped the United States during the war.
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The leading voice in the Senate opposing this effort was a young Joe Biden.
As the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong swept south toward Saigon in 1975, thousands of South Vietnamese who had allied with the U.S. were in danger of recriminations from the Communist regime.
Biden said: “I do not believe the United States has an obligation, moral or otherwise, to evacuate foreign nationals. … The United States has no obligation to evacuate one, or 100,001, South Vietnamese.”
In April 1975, the remaining U.S. soldiers in the country numbered in the thousands. Ford argued that, as the last troops were removed from the country, the U.S. should evacuate the South Vietnamese who had helped the U.S. during the war too. “The United States has had a long tradition of opening its doors to immigrants of all countries,” Ford said. “We felt that a number of these South Vietnamese had been very loyal to the United States and deserved an opportunity to live in freedom.”
Biden objected to this sentiment and called for a meeting between the president and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee so he could voice his objections to Ford’s request for funding these efforts. The meeting took place on April 14, 1975. Then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who led the meeting, said that “the total list of the people endangered in Vietnam is over a million” and that “the irreducible list is 174,000.”
Kissinger said there were “Vietnamese to whom we have an obligation,” but Biden said: “I will vote for any amount for getting the Americans out. I don’t want it mixed with getting the Vietnamese out.”
Ford was upset with Biden’s response, believing that failing to evacuate the South Vietnamese would be a betrayal of American values, saying: “Our tradition is to welcome the oppressed.”
On April 18, 1975, while explaining his opposition to the Vietnam Contingency Act of 1975, which would have provided funds for these efforts, Biden said he believed that “the only objective of the U.S. government at this moment … should be the evacuation of all Americans and their dependents now in South Vietnam.” He said that aside from “perhaps an estimated 1,800 diplomatic personnel assigned to foreign embassies in Saigon,” the U.S. should not try to evacuate any other South Vietnamese.
Biden lamented that the bill contained “provisions also permitting the evacuation of untold numbers of foreign nationals.”
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee recommended the bill be passed by the full Senate by a vote of 14 to 3, with Biden one of the three nays. The conference report also passed the Senate as a whole by a vote of 46-17, where Biden again voted against it.
Biden instead called on the Ford administration “to help seek a negotiated settlement” with the North Vietnamese for “endangered South Vietnamese” that, instead of evacuating them, would ensure their “safety in place.” Saigon fell on April 30, 1975, and hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese who did not manage to escape the country were eventually sent to reeducation camps, where they were often abused, tortured, or killed.
Biden has spoken on at least two subsequent occasions about his role in the meeting between Ford and the Senate committee, both times failing to mention that a central focus of the meeting was Vietnamese refugees.
On September 17, 1987, he recounted the meeting with Ford and said that while “everybody played patty cake” with Ford, he stood up to him. “I ran for office, got elected to the United States Senate at 29, and I was one of those votes to stop the war. And I’m proud of it.”
And on October 25, 2012, while delivering the eulogy for former Sen. George McGovern, then-Vice President Biden talked about the meeting with Ford and said, “I remember walking out of there thinking I was right. I got to go to Washington and be with George McGovern and play a little, little tiny part in ending that war.”
Despite opposition from Biden and other leading Democrats, the U.S. military evacuated over 130,000 Vietnamese refugees in the immediate wake of the collapse of South Vietnam, and the U.S. resettled hundreds of thousands of them inside the U.S. in the following years.
“I may be the most immoral son of a gun in this room,” Biden reportedly said in early 1975 when arguing against aid to Cambodia, as reported by the Wilmington Morning News. “I’m getting sick and tired of hearing about morality, our moral obligation.”
As many as 10,000 to 15,000 U.S. citizens are believed to still be in Afghanistan, though officials have provided conflicting figures. The U.S. Embassy in Kabul repeatedly warned this week that it could not guarantee the safety of Americans attempting to make their way to the airport. American officials said that 3,200 U.S. residents have been evacuated as of Tuesday evening, and there have been 7,000 total evacuees since Aug. 14. They also said the U.S. has relocated roughly 2,000 Afghan immigrants so far.
Richard Holbrooke, the former Obama special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, reportedly said that Biden insisted in 2010 the U.S. needed to leave Afghanistan the same way it did in Vietnam.
Holbrooke wrote that “Biden erupted” when he mentioned women in Afghanistan, according to diary excerpts from his book, with Holbrooke writing that Biden almost rose up from his chair and said, “I am not sending my boy back there to risk his life on behalf of women’s rights. It just won’t work. That’s not what they’re there for.”
Holbrooke said he brought up the idea of a residual force being left in Afghanistan to train the Afghan forces and said Biden responded dismissively: “He said it ain’t going to happen. He said I don’t understand politics. He said we’re facing a debacle politically. He said we’re going to lose the presidency in 2012 if unemployment remains high, and Afghanistan was the other issue that could pull us down, and we have to be on our way out, that we had to do what we did in Vietnam.”
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Holbrooke said, “This shocked me, and I commented immediately that I thought we had a certain obligation to the people who had trusted us,” and Biden disagreed, retorting, “F*** that, we don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam. Nixon and Kissinger got away with it.”
