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As U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration took office in January 2021, Biden’s past voting record came under scrutiny, leading to misrepresentations by some partisan critics. Since late 2020, we received inquiries from Snopes readers who pointed us to a section from Donald Rumsfeld’s 2018 book, When the Center Held: Gerald Ford and the Rescue of the American Presidency, which they said reported that Biden was opposed to welcoming South Vietnamese refugees into the U.S. and to providing them aid at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Rumsfeld, who was Ford’s secretary of defense at the time, recounted a meeting on April 14, 1975, between Ford and a number of senators surrounding the resettlement of refugees from South Vietnam: This recollection did not fully depict the context around Biden’s disagreement. At the time, Biden was part of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. A declassified transcript from the Ford Library Museum details the full conversation. In the discussion, Ford, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and a number of senators were debating evacuations of Americans, Vietnamese refugees, and military aid to Nguyễn Văn Thiệu, who was president of South Vietnam (though he would resign a few days after this meeting): In the conversation, Biden was not arguing against refugees coming to the U.S., but instead was more concerned about details around the plan, particularly the specifics of military aid to the South Vietnamese government and funding for getting both Vietnamese refugees and Americans out. It is not clear in the statement We should focus on getting them out whether Biden was talking about Vietnamese or U.S. troops. According to VietFact Check — a project run by PIVOT, a progressive Vietnamese American think tank— Biden was talking about the South Vietnamese. The conservative Washington Examiner claimed that he was talking about getting the U.S. troops out. On April 25, 1975, Biden opposed The Vietnam Contingency Act of 1975 which would send emergency funds to South Vietnam for evacuation and relief efforts. Biden expressed his concerns over how aid money intended for evacuation was going to be used, and the limits of the powers of the U.S. president. On April 23, 1975, in a speech on the Senate floor, Biden argued that the president had constitutional authority to evacuate U.S. citizens, but the evacuation of noncitizens was an entirely different matter that should be negotiated through organizations that are available, and through diplomatic channels that we could use. In the same speech in the Senate, he argued that there is no question in anybody's mind [...] that the bill's section 2, containing $100 million, labelled as a 'contingency fund' may not be, but clearly could be, used for military aid to the South Vietnamese government. He argued that $100 million in the evacuation contingency fund was not a diplomatic channel, and would even aggravate the situation, which he described as the North Vietnamese [continuing] to tighten their military noose around Saigon [...] they are in a position today to interdict Tassonhut airport. Humanitarian aid, he said, should be sent through multilateral organizations. The aid package eventually died on the House floor anyway, and days later the South Vietnamese capital fell to the North Vietnamese army. But in May 1975 Biden voted in favor of a resolution Expressing the sense of the Senate to welcome to the U.S. the latest refugees from South Vietnam and Cambodia. In late May 1975, Biden was not present to vote for H.R. 6755, the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act, which is not the same as a Nay vote. But as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he approved the bill in order to release it to the floor for a final vote. He, along with the majority of the committee, did so with an amendment and a favorable recommendation. Many in the Vietnamese American community still believe that Biden did not support refugee resettlement and in October 2020, ahead of the U.S. presidential election, in a bid to attract their support, Biden addressed this in an op-ed in a Vietnamese language newspaper: Given that Biden was opposed to Ford providing more military and humanitarian aid to South Vietnam around the time the conflict was going in favor of the North Vietnamese over his concerns for how it would be used, but not opposed to refugee resettlement in the U.S. as well as aid for the resettlement of these refugees, we rate this claim as Mostly False.
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