Read Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power for Free Online

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 forsome 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 PowersResolution, 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