In April 1975, during the chaotic final days of the Vietnam War, there were some 3,000 babies in the country that had been fathered by U.S. servicemen.

"Dad felt very responsibly that he wanted to get those babies out," Steve Ford told CBS News — "dad" in this case being then-President Gerald Ford.

"The word was once the North got into Saigon, that these babies would be possibly slaughtered, killed," Steve Ford said.

President Ford moved urgently, and Operation Babylift was born, flying more than 2,500 of those children to the United States.

But the first flight in the operation crashed just minutes after takeoff, killing 78 of the nearly 250 children on board. The president was undeterred, and the flights resumed the very next day, filled with cardboard file boxes that had been r

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