From Saigon to Kabul: Biden’s response to Vietnam echoes in his views of Afghanistan withdrawal
Two weeks before Saigon fell in April 1975, a 32-year-old Joe Biden was among the senators summoned to the White House for a top-secret briefing on the crisis in Vietnam.
Though just a freshman, Biden gave the president a clear message: The situation in Vietnam was hopeless, and the United States should leave as quickly as possible, according to a column by Rowland Evans and Robert Novak at the time that described Biden’s interactions with then-President Gerald Ford.
Other senators who supported Biden at the time were taken aback by their young colleague’s “didactic performance,” the columnists wrote.
Nearly half a century later, Biden’s attitude toward the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan has been strikingly similar — even as events echo the frantic evacuation of Americans and those who helped them in South Vietnam.
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In a closed-door briefing, top officials at the State and Defense departments told Biden and other senators on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the South Vietnamese army had “a chance” to defend Saigon and the Mekong Delta area with more U.S. military aid, the newspaper accounts said.
“I am convinced there is absolutely no chance,” Biden told reporters after the briefing, according to an article in the Memphis Commercial Appeal.
But Biden was willing to spend tax dollars on a narrowly tailored effort to extract Americans.
Days before Saigon fell, the Senate approved a measure authorizing Ford to use tens of millions of dollars to aid with an evacuation.
“It is merely a ransom,” Biden said, joining with other senators who opposed military aid to Vietnam but backed the emergency funding out of a worry that some of the South Vietnamese would be angry about being deserted by their ally and would need to be “bought off” to allow Americans to safely depart, according to news accounts at the time.
When Saigon did fall, Biden was reflective and struck a tone of hope.
“We now seem to be finally out of Vietnam,” Biden said to the Seattle Daily Times. “It seems to me we’ve learned an important lesson about careless military involvement abroad.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-vietnam-afghanistan/2021/08/15/fd155518-fdd5-11eb-ba7e-2cf966e88e93_story.html