Editor\u2019s note: April 30, 2025, marks the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War. In commemoration, Military Times is highlighting stories about the Vietnam War.<\/i><\/p>\n\n\n\n
By March 1975, the situation in Vietnam, and South Vietnam specifically, was dire. Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu, the last in a long line of military dictators propped up by the United States was, according to historian Edward Rasen<\/a>, \u201cmaking decisions based on his daily astrological chart, while Graham Martin, U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, had terminated daily CIA briefings, threatened to \u2018cut the balls off\u2019 CIA Saigon station chief Tom Polgar, and was becoming increasingly detached from the reality on the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n South Vietnam was unraveling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As of March 14, Thieu had conceived a strategy \u201ccalled \u2018light at the top, heavy at the bottom,\u2019 pulling forces out of northern South Vietnam and concentrating them around the palace \u2026 because he was concerned his military commanders might move against him,\u201d according to Frank Snepp, the CIA\u2019s chief analyst in Vietnam in 1975.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHe went to Cam Ranh Bay and his message was, let\u2019s pull the Airborne back, let\u2019s shift them around. But he didn\u2019t follow through. He didn\u2019t tell his commanders about his timetable, so when the North Vietnamese moved out of the Central Highlands and concentrated in Military Region 1, the South Vietnamese army was in a confused state. That was one of the reasons they collapsed so rapidly.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n And where was America\u2019s president? Golfing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Amid the rapidly accumulating military losses in South Vietnam, President Gerald Ford was in Palm Springs, California, on an eight-day Easter holiday. Staying with his golfing buddy, Fred C. Wilson, founder of the Trans World Insurance Company, Ford played several rounds of golf, including one with Bob Hope, Leon Parma and William G. Salatich, president of the Gillette Company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHe\u2019s just a real good guy,\u201d Wilson told a reporter on March 30, 1975. \u201cI want to help him have a real good time and help him relax as much as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Having less of a \u201cgood time\u201d was Ford\u2019s White House press secretary, Ron Nessen, who had to go into PR crisis management to attempt to show both the American people and the South Vietnamese that the president\u2019s golf games did not, in fact, make him indifferent to the military crisis and the plight of hundreds of thousands of refugees in Vietnam.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On March 31, 1975, Ford dodged reporters by breaking out into an all-out sprint when asked by a reporter what he was doing about the \u201cmilitary losses of the South Vietnam Government,\u201d according to a report by the New York Times<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201c\u2018We are trying to get to the plane,\u2019 he replied as he and his entourage jogged toward the Presidential jet.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n According to the New York Times<\/a>, Nessen stated Ford \u201chad been receiving complete information from Washington on the war, was concerned about it and \u2018feels a great deal of compassion.\u2019\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet, as the New York Times stated, \u201cThe Vietnam situation, however, has not disrupted the President\u2019s vacation schedule. Mr. Nessen has repeatedly told reporters that there is nothing more Mr. Ford can do or say.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Receiving a report on April 5 from Gen. Fred Weyand, Army chief of staff and former commander of the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), who had just departed Saigon after assessing the situation, the president was told<\/a> amid the luxe background of Palm Springs that \u201cthe current military situation is critical and the probability of the survival of South Vietnam as a truncated nation is marginal at best.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n