Remembering Ford.

I shared the warm feelings for Gerald Ford that were so evident in almost everyone during the week of mourning. There were very few discordant moments. A minor one that irritated me was the television commentators who insisted on talking over the music at the funeral, which was often as beautiful as their prattle was mindless. And I was troubled by the failure of so many congressional bigshots to interrupt their holidays to greet Ford's body as it returned to Capitol Hill. It was especially desirable that Nancy Pelosi be there. If she is to have any chance of restoring the spirit of comity to the House, she must show a human side that has heretofore not been a conspicuous part of her public persona. Gerald Ford was first and foremost a man of the House. Tip O'Neill would have understood, and he would have showed up.

But now for what upset me the most. It came during the National Cathedral service, when Henry Kissinger praised Ford for having done such a great job of rescuing our South Vietnamese friends when we fled Saigon in 1975. In fact, this was one of Ford's and Kissinger's great failures. They left behind hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese who had been led to rely on us. The reason is that Ford and Kissinger--and to an even greater extent, Graham Martin, their ambassador, and Thomas Polgar, their CIA station chief in Saigon--did not want to face the fact that South Vietnam was going to fall. It would have been hard enough for us to pull off the rescue if the most careful planning had been done. You had to keep the South Vietnamese forces fighting to provide cover, even as they would have learned we were pulling out some of their countrymen.

That's why I've been writing about the similar situation that now confronts us in Iraq--I know how hard it will be to extricate our friends even if reality is faced. But if you're living in fantasyland, as Bush is with his insane efforts to make us "successful," we're not going to plan now. The truth is that Bush has gotten into such a mess that disorder is likely to prevail whenever we leave, so we have to plan now to rescue our friends even in the presence of chaos.