As South Vietnam fell, a Democratic governor turned refugees away while Washington’s Republican leader welcomed them as a ‘moral duty’

As North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces closed in on Saigon 50 years ago this week and thousands of South Vietnamese prepared to flee their homeland, some Americans weren’t ready to welcome the refugees with open arms.

Informed that some refugees would be flown first to Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton for processing, then-California Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, said they weren’t welcome to stay in the state permanently. With the unemployment rate above 8%, he said he didn’t want refugees taking jobs from California residents.

Other states, too, were leery of accepting the people fleeing the communist takeover of Southeast Asia.

But not Washington, then-Gov. Dan Evans or his staff.

Brown and others who opposed taking in Vietnamese refugees were “guilty of the worst kind of hypocrisy,” Evans, a Republican, said at a news conference two days after Saigon fell.

“Except for the American Indian, we all came here as refugees from somewhere,” he said, according to an Associated Press account of the event. “Sure, we should open our doors. They supported what we’re attempting to do, and for that they were driven from their homeland.”

Washington would take 500 refugees on their way to America at that moment, he said, bringing them first to Camp Murray, the Washington National Guard base near Tacoma. State agencies would help nonprofit and religious groups find them sponsors, new homes and jobs.

‘Babylift’ tragedy

Evans’ efforts to help people whose lives were upended by the end of American involvement in Southeast Asia were not triggered solely by the pictures of helicopters lifting off from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon that last week of April.

An upcoming book about the journey of Southeast Asians to Washington and the lives they made here, “New Land,” by John C. Hughes and Edward Echtle Jr., recounts how Evans met with then-President Gerald Ford in San Francisco in early April about the plight of thousands of Vietnamese orphans coming to the United States.

The book, part of the Legacy Washington Project, will be released on May 20 and be available on the Secretary of State’s website.

With South Vietnam’s eventual fate clear in early 1975, military transports were sent to begin bringing orphans, many of them the mixed-race children of American soldiers, to the United States. Ford promised federal help to cut red tape for families waiting to adopt them. U.S. Navy ships also were ordered to stand off the Indochinese coast to assist refugees.

On April 4, Ford and first lady Betty Ford were scheduled to greet the first planeload of “Operation Babylift” orphans due to land at a California Air Force Base. But that morning, the president and Evans received word a C-5A Galaxy carrying some 243 orphans plus escorts and crew had crashed and burned shortly after takeoff. About half on board were killed.

After meeting with the president, Evans told reporters Washington was “ready and eager” to find homes for war orphans, Hughes and Echtle write. He was also weighing how many Vietnamese refugees Washington could accommodate.

Orphans welcomed

The orphan flights continued despite the tragedy. Two days later, 407 orphans arrived at SeaTac airport, where public health officials checked and treated them for dehydration and, in some cases, chicken pox; vaccinated them for measles; and released the ones who were healthy enough to anxiously waiting families, news accounts of their arrival reported. Instead of a military transport, they’d been flown in by a Pan Am 747 chartered by the Holt Children’s Service.

For most of April, much of the world watched as communist forces marched inexorably toward Saigon, eventually overrunning it and renaming it Ho Chi Minh City on April 30. Those who had worked with American forces or businesses tried to flee.

Over the next several days, some 100,000 refugees fled Vietnam, Hughes and Echtle write, with tens of thousands more left behind and looking for a way out. Ford asked Congress for $507 million to help resettle at least 130,000 refugees in the United States, saying, “We are certain that the American people will support the administration in its efforts to help these refugees.”

But while one survey said 56% of Americans backed flights for the war orphans, another survey said 54% opposed Ford’s plan to resettle the refugees in the United States. In California, Gov. Brown called Ford’s resettlement plan haphazard and said his state couldn’t handle 500,000 refugees – several times more than the total thought to be coming to the whole country – with 1 million of its residents out of work.

Setting an example with 500

In his autobiography, Evans, who served as governor for 12 years and died in September, wrote he was “appalled and furious” over Brown’s comments.

“Our state would set an example,” Evans decided.

After announcing on May 2 that the state would accept 500 Vietnamese refugees, Evans directed the state Department of Emergency Services to oversee planning for the resettlement and assigned his special assistant, Ralph Munro, to find out what was going on in Camp Pendleton.

And if Munro were to run into Brown, Evans told him: “Please tell that son of a bitch what it says on the base of the Statue of Liberty.”

In a later interview for “New Land,” Munro said he flew to San Diego, rented a car and talked his way onto the base. There, he saw an encampment of 10,000 people who included the former South Vietnamese vice president, as well as people who looked like they had absolutely nothing.

“I was dumbstruck by it all,” Munro recalled. He found a phone booth and called Evans, who told him to fly back to Olympia with a first-hand account and pictures.

Two officials from Emergency Services, Joel Aggergaard and Ed Burke, were dispatched to Camp Pendleton to find the refugees interested in coming to Washington. When they broadcast the news the state would resettle 500, a line quickly formed outside the tent where they had set up. Within two hours, they had 800 applicants.

Evans had emphasized he wanted a cross-section of refugees.

For “New Land,” Aggergaard and Burke explained how they went to their motel room with a stack of 3-by-5 cards that had basic information about each applicant. They selected 50 who were fluent in English and 50 who spoke no English at all. Then they threw the rest of the cards on a bed face down and selected another 400.

On May 19, Ford signed a $455 million bill to relocate as many as 130,000 refugees nationwide and appointed Evans to the Presidential Refugee Advisory Committee.

First refugees come to ‘Bright Light Camp’

The next day, Evans and his wife, Nancy, greeted the first 34 refugees to arrive from Camp Pendleton, flying into SeaTac and making the drive south to Camp Murray. After a short period at the camp, “we will offer you a new opportunity, a new home and a new chance in Washington state,” Evans told them through an interpreter. “Perhaps the weather is cooler than you’re used to, but the people of Washington have a very warm welcome for you.”

As Hughes and Echtle recount in “New Land,” Nancy Evans noticed that one of the women listening intently was pregnant. She told the woman that the Evanses had three sons of their own and maternity care in the state was excellent.

Xuan Hoa Thi Pham had worked for the provisional government, and her husband, Chuong Nguyen, had been an intelligence officer who worked with the U.S. military. They and their five children had left Saigon on a military transport the week before Saigon fell, journeying from the Philippines to Guam to San Diego with only the clothes on their backs.

“Everything was a blur. My heart was dead and frozen,” Nguyen recalled in 2024. But meeting Evans gave them hope. “We saw his humanity, and we were grateful.”

Four months later when their son was born, they named him Evans Nguyen. The families would celebrate their friendship with a yearly dinner and display photos of their gatherings in both homes.

Within a month, the resettlement operation at Camp Murray, known as “Bright Light Camp,” had placed 338 refugees around the state. By Oct. 1, it had closed, but refugees continued to pour into the state.

Churches, charities, civic organizations and individuals around the state volunteered to sponsor Vietnamese refugees, along with others coming from Laos and Cambodia when those countries also fell to the communists. Southeast Asian refugees arrived in Washington at a rate of 400 to 500 a month from 1977 to 1979.

From too few to count to thousands

In 1970, the U.S. Census did not count Vietnamese residents separately, including them only within the “other” category, in which Washington had 9,360 people listed.

In 1980, Vietnamese was a separate census enumeration for the first time. Washington had 9,838.

In 1990, the census expanded its Asian enumerations even further, listing 18,699 Vietnamese, 11,096 Cambodians and 6,191 Laotians living in Washington.

In 2020, the Census estimated some 92,000 Vietnamese, 27,800 Cambodian and 12,435 Laotian people were living in Washington.

While many settled in Seattle, Tacoma or other Puget Sound cities, others set down roots in smaller communities around the state.

Roy McDonald of Colfax began helping refugees fleeing Hungary in the 1950s, then Cuban refugees who fled the Castro regime. After the fall of Saigon, McDonald helped resettle some 300 Southeast Asian refugees in and around the small Whitman County seat, The Spokesman-Review reported in its 1980 Progress Issue. Some worked at McDonald’s nursing home, others at the community hospital and at local restaurants.

Two businessmen in White Center signed up to sponsor 28 refugees from three families, renting apartments and stocking them with food and household goods, the authors recount in “New Land.” A newspaper publisher in Willapa Harbor helped refugees find work in an oyster packing plant and a lumber mill. A tailor from Saigon was hired at an Aberdeen clothing store. Gonzaga University offered free room, board and tuition to 23 Vietnamese students.

Over the decades, Southeast Asian refugees have followed the path of other immigrants in American history, moving into a life in a new land while attempting to keep traditions and ties to an old one.

Last year, Hughes, co-author of “New Land” and chief historian for the Secretary of State’s Legacy Washington project, went to see Evans, whom he interviewed for the book and covered as a reporter for the Aberdeen World decades earlier.

With him he brought Evans Nguyen, whose parents had met the governor at Camp Murray. Also in the group was Rep. My-Linh Thai, who came to Washington as a refugee at 15 and is the first refugee elected to the Legislature.

They were there to talk with Evans about his decision to welcome refugees nearly a half-century earlier. Evans called it “a moral duty” and recalled his news conference when he said the descendants of previous immigrants now try to close the door behind them. The meeting occurred just three days before the 98-year-old Evans died.