WHITE HOUSE YEARS: PART 2 THE AGONY OF VIETNAM
By Henry Kissinger
In the second installment of TIME's excerpts from White House Years, Henry Kissinger writes of the war that divided the U.S. at home and threatened to make a shambles of its policies abroad. He tells for the first time how during secret negotiations in Paris in April 1970--before the U.S. invaded the North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia--he proposed that Cambodia's neutrality be guaranteed and that an international conference on the subject be convened. North Viet Nam's representative, Le Duc Tho, bluntly spurned the proposal, claiming that Hanoi expected to hold sway over all of Indochina some day.
The author gives an intimate look at the anguished debates and bitter wrangling within the Nixon Administration that accompanied every military move in Indochina, the efforts to end the war and how they were thwarted by Hanoi's rigid refusal for nearly four years to accept a settlement that would amount to anything less than a sellout of Saigon, the rationale behind the mining of North Viet Nam's ports and the Christmas bombing of 1972, why he declared "peace is at hand" on the eve of Nixon's reelection, his attempts to build bridges to dissident students and professors, the acid exchanges with South Viet Nam's leaders as a peace treaty drew near, and the angry threat from Nixon that finally brought Saigon around. The memoirs describe Kissinger's painful falling-out with Nixon and his decision--never acted upon because Watergate intervened--to resign from public office some time in 1973.
White House Years, to be published on Oct. 23 (Little, Brown; 1,521 pages; $22.50), covers Kissinger's stewardship as National Security Adviser during the period following Richard Nixon's 1968 election, ending with the signing of a Viet Nam peace treaty in January 1973. A second volume, now in preparation, will recount the years to January 1977, during most of which Kissinger was Secretary of State.
"THERE WAS NO ALTERNATIVE"
I cannot yet write about Viet Nam except with pain and sadness. When we came into office, over half a million Americans were fighting a-war 10,000 miles away. Their numbers were still increasing on a schedule established by our predecessors. We found no plans for withdrawals. Whatever our original war aims, by 1969 our credibility abroad, the reliability of our commitments, and our domestic cohesion were alike jeopardized by a struggle in a country as far away from the North American continent as our globe permits.
The Nixon Administration entered office determined to end our involvement in Viet Nam. But it soon came up against the reality that had also bedeviled its predecessor. We could not simply walk away from an enterprise involving two Administrations, five allied countries and 31,000 American dead as if we were switching a television channel. For a great power to abandon a small country to tyranny simply to obtain a respite from our own domestic travail seemed to me--and still seems to me--profoundly immoral and destructive of our efforts to build a new and ultimately more peaceful pattern of international relations. We could not revitalize the Atlantic Alliance if its governments were assailed by doubt about American staying power. We would not be able to move the Soviet Union toward the imperative of mutual restraint against the background of capitulation in a major war. We might not achieve our opening to China if our value as a counterweight seemed nullified by a collapse that showed us irrelevant to Asian security. Our success in Middle East diplomacy would depend on convincing our friends of our reliability and their adversaries that we were impervious to threats of military pressure or blackmail. Clearly the American people wanted to end the war, but every poll made it equally evident that they saw their country's aims as honorable and did not relish America's humiliation.
The principles of America's honor and America's responsibility were not empty phrases to me. I had been born in Germany in the Bavarian town of Fuerth. Hitler came to power when I was nine years old. Until I emigrated to America, my family and I endured progressive ostracism and discrimination. When I first walked the streets of New York City, seeing a group of boys, I began to cross to the other side to avoid being beaten up. And then I remembered where I was.
I therefore have always had a special feeling for what America means. I could not accept the self-hatred that took every imperfection as an excuse to denigrate a precious experiment. I was enormously gratified to have an opportunity to repay my debt to a society whose blemishes could not obscure for me its greatness, its idealism, its humanity and its embodiment of mankind's hopes. Ironically, in view of the later charges of "historical pessimism" leveled against me, it was precisely the issue of our self-confidence and faith in our future that I considered at stake in the outcome in Viet Nam.
I could never think of the war as a monstrous criminal conspiracy, as was fashionable in some circles. Our entry into the war had been the product not of a militarist psychosis but of a naive idealism that wanted to set right all the world's ills and believed American good will supplied its own efficacy.
The "Secret" Bombing
In January 1969, a complete halt in the bombings against North Viet Nam had been in effect for more than two months. No large-scale ground operations were under way. Peace talks had been going on for eight months in a mansion on Avenue Kleber in Paris, but their single achievement at that point was to decide on the shape of the table at which the negotiators were to sit. Soon evidence mounted that Hanoi was preparing a major offensive, a clear violation of the tacit understanding that had brought about the bombing halt. The new Administration began weighing how to respond.
Alternatives were hard to come by. Thought turned to bombing of the North Vietnamese sanctuary areas in Cambodia for reasons exactly the opposite of what has been assumed: it was not from a desire to expand the war, but to avoid bombing North Viet Nam and yet to blunt an unprovoked offensive.
Revisionists have sometimes focused on the Nixon Administration's alleged assault on the "neutral" status of a "peaceful" country. But the issue concerned territory which was no longer Cambodian in any practical sense. For four years, as many as four North Vietnamese divisions had been operating on Cambodian soil. In 1978 the Communist victors in Cambodia put the uninvited North Vietnamese presence in northeastern Cambodia in 1969-70 at 300,000, which far exceeded our estimates. From their base areas, North Vietnamese forces would launch attacks across the border into South Viet Nam, inflict casualties, disrupt government, and then withdraw to the protection of a formally neutral country. It requires calculated advocacy, not judgment, to argue that the U.S. was violating the neutrality of a peaceful country when with Cambodian encouragement, we in self-defense sporadically bombed territories in which for years no Cambodian writ had run, which were either minimally populated or totally unpopulated by civilians, and which were occupied in violation of Cambodian neutrality by an enemy killing hundreds of Americans and South Vietnamese a week.
Nixon was leaning toward a B-52 strike against the sanctuaries, but on Feb. 22, 1969, the day before he was to leave on a trip to Europe, he decided to defer action. The same day Hanoi launched a country-wide offensive that cost 453 American lives during its first week. "It was an act of extraordinary cynicism, " writes Kissinger; Nixon "was seething." Twice during the next two weeks he ordered the Communist sanctuaries bombed, then reconsidered. Finally, after a rocket attack on Saigon, Nixon decided to go ahead and called together his key advisers.
The meeting on Sunday afternoon, March 16, in the Oval Office was attended by Secretary of State William Rogers, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, General Earle Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and myself. It was the first time that Nixon had confronted a concrete decision in an international crisis as President; it was also the first time that he would face opposition from associates to a course of action to which he was already committed. He approached it with tactics that were to become vintage Nixon. On the one hand he had made his decision and was not about to change it. On the other hand he felt it necessary to pretend that the decision was still open.
Laird and Wheeler strongly advocated the attacks. Rogers objected not on foreign policy but on domestic grounds; he feared that we would run into a buzz saw in Congress just when things were calming down. After several hours of discussion, Rogers finally agreed to a B-52 strike on the base area containing the presumed Communist headquarters. These deliberations are instructive: a month of an unprovoked North Vietnamese offensive, over 1,000 American dead, elicited after weeks of anguished discussion exactly one American retaliatory raid within three miles of the Cambodian border in an area occupied by the North Vietnamese for over four years. And this would enter the folklore as an example of wanton "illegality." The B-52 attack took place on March 18,1969.
Two months later, mindful that Hanoi had rejected another peace plan and determined to protect the beginning of the U.S. withdrawals, Nixon ordered attacks on a string of other Cambodian base areas, all essentially unpopulated by civilians and within five miles of the border. Originally, says Kissinger, the Administration had planned to acknowledge the bombing if Hanoi or Phnom-Penh reacted to it. But neither capital said a word; in fact, Kissinger maintains that Cambodia's Prince Sihanouk tacitly approved the raids, and he quotes several public statements made by the Prince denying that raids were taking place or that American actions were causing civilian casualties.
We saw no sense in announcing what Cambodia encouraged and North Viet Nam accepted. The bombing was kept secret because a public announcement was a gratuitous blow to the Cambodian government, which might have forced it to demand that we stop; it might have encouraged a North Vietnamese retaliation (since how could they fail to react if we had announced we were doing it?). Our bombing saved American and South Vietnamese lives.
This is why the press leaks that came from American sources and recounted air strikes against the Cambodian sanctuaries struck Nixon and me as so outrageous.
The conviction that such leaks were needlessly jeopardizing American lives, which I shared, caused the President to consult the Attorney General and the Director of the FBI about remedial measures. J. Edgar Hoover recommended wiretaps, which he pointed out had been widely used for these (and other much less clear-cut) purposes by preceding Administrations. The Attorney General affirmed their legality. Nixon ordered them carried out on the basis of explicit criteria of which access to or unauthorized use of classified information was the principal one. I went along with what I had no reason to doubt was legal and established practice in these circumstances, pursued, so we were told, with greater energy and fewer safeguards in previous Administrations. I believe now that the more stringent safeguards applied to national security wiretapping since that time reflect an even more fundamental national interest.
A Nation Tearing at Itself
By mid-1969, Nixon had unilaterally begun withdrawing U.S. troops and at the same time launched a major effort to upgrade Saigon 's forces to prepare them for the day when they would be entirely on their own. This program became known as "Vietnam-ization." Kissinger was concerned that this would become a risky strategy. The slow process of withdrawals, he warned, "would become like 'salted peanuts' to the American public; the more troops we withdrew, the more would be expected. In turn, Hanoi might simply decide to wait us out and launch an all-out attack after most American forces had been withdrawn." As it was, Hanoi did not soften its demands: total and immediate U.S. withdrawal, the removal of Saigon's government and the installation of a coalition regime dominated by the Communist Viet Cong. At home, meanwhile, antiwar groups staged nationwide demonstrations on Oct. 15, 1969--the "Moratorium"--even though, as Kissinger notes, "we had gone beyond the program for which they had been demonstrating only nine months previously."
Even with the perspective of ten years, it is difficult to avoid a feeling of melancholy at this spectacle of a nation tearing at itself in the midst of a difficult war. By October the Administration had announced withdrawal of over 50,000 troops and had also accomplished the reduction of B-52 sorties by 20%, of tactical air operations by 25%, and a change in battlefield orders that amounted to a decision to end offensive operations.
The previous Administration had sent almost 550,000 Americans to Viet Nam, had no negotiating proposal except that we would withdraw six months after the North Vietnamese left, and had strongly implied that it would insist on retaining a large residual force thereafter. Yet there was little compunction about harassing and vilifying a new President who had offered total withdrawal within twelve months of an agreement and free elections, and who had opened up the subject of a ceasefire.
The war in Indochina was the culmination of the disappointments of a decade that had opened with the clarion call of a resurgent idealism and ended with assassinations, racial and social discord and radicalized politics. Our dilemmas were very much a product of liberal doctrines of reformist intervention and academic theories of graduated escalation. The collapse of these high aspirations shattered the self-confidence without which Establishments flounder. The leaders who had inspired our foreign policy were particularly upset by the rage of the students. The assault of these upper-middle-class young men and women--who were, after all, their own children--was not simply on policies, but on life-styles and values heretofore considered sacrosanct. Stimulated by a sense of guilt encouraged by modern psychiatry and the radical chic rhetoric of affluent suburbia, the young protesters symbolized the end of an era of simple faith in material progress. Ironically, the insecurity of their elders turned the normal grievances of maturing youth into an institutionalized rage and a national trauma.
My attitude toward the protesters diverged from Nixon's. He saw in them an enemy that had to be vanquished; I considered them students and colleagues with whom I differed but whose idealism was indispensable for our future. In November 1969 Nixon asked me to comment on a memorandum sent to him by Pat Moynihan, then Counsellor to the President. It described a scene at a Harvard-Princeton football game in which the assembled graduates--worth, according to Pat, at least $10 billion--roared support when the Harvard University band was introduced, in a takeoff on Vice President Spiro Agnew's denigrating phrase, as the "effete Harvard Corps of Intellectual Snobs." A warning in Moynihan's memorandum about the "incredible powers of derision" of the young was significantly underlined by the President. A part of my response follows:
"Most are casualties of our affluence. They have had the leisure for self-pity, and the education enabling them to focus it in a fashionable critique of the 'system.' Many are substantially anti-Establishment not only because that is the natural bent of youthful alienation, but also because it is a major thrust of contemporary academic literature. Modern American sociology, psychology, political science, literature, etc., have turned a glaring light (as they should have) on the faults in our society. All this is bound to fall on fertile ground--and cover more of it than ever before--in a country that sends 8 million kids to college.
"There just might be a chance, over time, to win some of these young people to your side. You have something basic in common with many of them--a conviction that the machinery of New Deal liberalism has to be fundamentally overhauled. You also share a concern that America play a more balanced and restrained role. You are, in fact, turning over most of the rocks at home and abroad that these kids want to see turned over."
"General Kirschman" Goes to Paris
Most of Kissinger's diplomatic breakthroughs were achieved via unofficial "back channels" that he established, with Nixon's encouragement, to bypass the regular bureaucracies. One such channel was set up in Paris to deal secretly with North Vietnamese negotiators. Initially he dealt with Xuan Thuy, Hanoi's chief negotiator at the official plenary peace talks on Avenue Kleber. On one occasion, Xuan Thuy argued that hundreds of thousands of North Vietnamese troops were in South Viet Nam through the "free choice" of the local population. Kissinger found this so absurd that, he writes, "I jokingly invited him to Harvard to teach a seminar on Marxism and Leninism after the war. He declined, saying that Marxism-Leninism was not for export--which will come as remarkable news to all the inhabitants of Indochina today." In any event, Kissinger soon learned that Xuan Thuy was a functionary, not a policymaker. The man he had to talk to was Le Duc Tho, who was clearly Hanoi's top representative in Paris.
Le Duc Tho and I held three secret meetings between Feb. 21 and April 4, 1970. On a weekend or holiday, to provide better cover, I would leave Washington on one of the presidential fleet of Boeing 707s. It would land at Avord, a French air force base in central France. My plane would touch down just long enough to let me off; it would then proceed to Frankfurt's Rhein-Main Airport. I would have transferred meanwhile to a Mystere 20 executive jet belonging to President Pompidou for the flight to Villacoublay Airport, a field for private airplanes near Paris.
One meeting was nearly aborted by a technical malfunction. Because the pilots did not know whether Avord had the equipment for repairs, the plane had to go to Germany, but no one there knew of our impending arrival, much less of our mission or predicament. Fortunately, we established contact from the airplane with General Vernon Walters, our defense attache in Paris, in a radio hookup through Washington. Walters went to the Elysee Palace, where President Pompidou himself authorized his jet to meet my plane in Frankfurt.
I landed in a dark corner of the Rhein-Main airfield; Pompidou's jet was already waiting, and we were airborne again within ten minutes of landing. Walters claimed that West German cooperation was speeded up by their belief, encouraged by him, that the passenger was a secret girlfriend of Pompidou's. I have often wondered why he thought the waiting ground personnel could have been fooled about the sex of the passenger.
In Paris General Walters would lead me to an unmarked rented Citroen. Walters would drive us to his apartment building in the Neuilly section of Paris, where he smuggled us by elevator from the underground garage. As far as his housekeeper was concerned, I was a visiting American general named Harold A. Kirschman. We would proceed the next day to a house at 11 Rue Darthe in Choisy-le-Roi on the outskirts of Paris.
At the first meeting, Xuan Thuy greeted me and led me into the living room to meet the man whose conceit it was to use the title of Special Adviser to Xuan Thuy, although as a member of the governing Politburo he outranked him by several levels. Le Duc Tho's large luminous eyes only rarely revealed the fanaticism that had induced him as a boy of 16 to join the anti-French Communist guerrillas. It was our misfortune that his cause should be to break our will and to establish Hanoi's rule over a country that we sought to defend.
Le Duc Tho considered negotiations as another battle. His idea of a negotiation was to put forward his unilateral demands. Their essence was for the U.S. to withdraw on a deadline so short that the collapse of Saigon would be inevitable. On the way out we were being asked to dismantle an allied government and establish an alternative whose composition would be prescribed by Hanoi. Any proposition that failed to agree with this he rejected as "not concrete."
The first series of secret negotiations with Le Duc Tho ended with his statement that unless we changed our position, there was nothing more to discuss.
A Wider War
Perhaps the most bitterly disputed episode of a bitterly disputed war is the decline and fall of Cambodia. In March, with Prince Sihanouk traveling in France, anti-Vietnamese riots began to erupt across Cambodia. Prime Minister Lon Nol and Deputy Prime Minister Sirik Matak ousted Sihanouk, who there upon took refuge in Peking and turned against the U.S. Kissinger 's critics argue that the U.S. engineered Sihanouk's downfall and later, by attacking the North Vietnamese sanctuaries, caused the war to engulf all of Cambodia and to ensure victory for the Communist Khmer Rouge. Kissinger maintains with much documentation that the coup took the U.S. completely by surprise, that it came about because "the sanctuaries increasingly aroused the nationalist outrage of Cambodians," and that Hanoi's forces began overrunning Cambodia as early as the end of March 1970. Kissinger reveals, for the first time, that on April 4, 1970, in Paris, he proposed to Le Duc Tho that they should "discuss immediately concrete and specific measures to guarantee the neutrality of Cambodia, [either] bilaterally or in an international frame work. " But Tho abruptly dismissed any suggestion of neutralization or of a conference. He emphasized that "it was his people's destiny not merely to take over South Viet Nam but to dominate the whole of Indochina. The boasts were made in secret, but the military moves that expressed these ambitions were plain to see." The moves began in February 1970, when the North Vietnamese launched an offensive on the Plain of Jars in Laos. On March 16 Le Duc Tho turned down an immediate de-escalation in Laos as well as in--or from--Cambodia.
From an inexhaustible national masochism there sprang the folklore that American decisions triggered the Cambodian nightmare, and the myth survives even today when the Vietnamese, without the excuse of American provocation but with barely a whimper of world protest, have finally fulfilled the ambition of conquering the whole of Indochina. The military responses we made were much agonized over and in our view minimal if we were to conduct a retreat that did not become a rout. Hanoi's insatiable quest for hegemony--not America's hesitant and ambivalent response--is the root cause of Cambodia's ordeal. The persistence of the image of American officials plotting the overthrow of neutralist Prince Sihanouk in Cambodia and plunging deeper into war in Laos as well as Cambodia illustrates the prevalence of emotion over reality. By the middle of April, before we had undertaken any significant action, Sihanouk had irrevocably joined forces with the Communists, the North Vietnamese had dedicated themselves to the overthrow of the Phnom-Penh government, and Hanoi's forces were attacking deep inside Cambodia.
We had as yet given no military aid, no intelligence support, and had only formalistic contacts with the new government. The coup itself had come without warning; its consequences threatened not only the freedom of Cambodia but our entire position in Viet Nam. We would, if the Lon Nol government collapsed, confront all of Cambodia as a Communist base, stretching 600 miles along the border of South Viet Nam. Vietnamization and American withdrawal would then come unstuck. So we were being driven toward support of Lon Nol hesitantly, reluctantly, in response to circumstances in Cambodia that we could neither forecast nor control.
The record leaves no doubt that the North Vietnamese, also caught by surprise by the March coup, bear the heaviest responsibility for events in Cambodia. Their illegal and arrogant occupation of Cambodian territory had torn apart Sihanouk's neutralist country; they created the Khmer Rouge as a force against Sihanouk well before his overthrow. It was they, not we, who had decided on a fight to the finish on the bleeding body of a people that wanted only to be left alone.
Revisionist history has painted a picture of a peaceful, neutral Cambodia wantonly assaulted by American forces and plunged into a civil war that could have been avoided but for the American obsession with military solutions. The facts are different. By April 21 we had a stark choice. We could permit North Viet Nam to overrun the whole of Cambodia. Or we could resist Cambodia's absorption, supporting the independence of a government recognized by the United Nations and most other nations, including the Soviet Union.
Curiously enough, one of the most implacable critics* of our policy in Cambodia presents the same analysis of what our choices were: "Back in March and April the Administration had had freedom of choice in reacting to events in Cambodia. If it had decided not to encourage, let alone to arm Lon Nol, it could have compelled either the return of Sihanouk or, at least, an attempt, by Lon Nol, to preserve the country's flawed neutrality. This would probably have meant a government dominated by Hanoi and at the very least it would have allowed the Communists continued use of [the port of] Sihanoukville and the sanctuaries."
This passage combines all the misconceptions about events in Cambodia in 1970. We did not encourage Lon Nol or even begin to arm him for weeks after North Vietnamese troops were ravaging a neutral country. The option of Lon Nol's restoring Cambodia's neutrality did not exist; it had been explicitly rejected by Le Duc Tho on April 4, 1970. And by then Sihanouk was no longer in a position to be neutralist. The real prospect before us, therefore, was exactly what the quoted paragraph describes as the most likely outcome: the reopening of Sihanoukville, a government in Phnom-Penh dominated by Hanoi and reopened sanctuaries now comprising all of eastern Cambodia. Where I differ sharply from the paragraph is in its assertion that we had "freedom of choice." This is precisely what we did not have, for the prospect it describes would have meant an overwhelming, insurmountable and decisive menace to the survival of South Viet Nam.
No Middle Ground
In the U.S., Kissinger notes, "there had been no consideration of attacking the sanctuaries before April 21. " Yet a fateful decision was made only a week later, on April 28.
The first two weeks of April had seen a wave of Communist attacks on Cambodian towns and communications. On Tuesday, April 21, Communist forces struck the town of Takeo and cut the road between it and Phnom-Penh. The North Vietnamese were systematically expanding their sanctuaries and merging them into a "liberated zone." If these steps were unopposed, the Communist sanctuaries would be organized into a single large base area. By April 21 the basic issue was whether Vietnamization was to be merely an alibi for an American collapse or a serious strategy designed to achieve an honorable peace.
At a major National Security Council meeting on April 22, three tactical options were considered: doing nothing (the preferred course of the State and Defense departments); attacking the sanctuaries with South Vietnamese forces only (my recommendation); and using whatever forces were necessary to neutralize all of the base areas, including American combat forces, recommended by Ellsworth Bunker, our Ambassador in Saigon, General Creighton Abrams, our commander in Viet Nam. and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Two base areas were of special concern. The Parrot's Beak, Cambodia's Svay Rieng province, jutted into Viet Nam to within only 33 miles of Saigon. Farther north was an area code-named the Fishhook. No one around the table questioned the consequences of a Communist takeover of Cambodia. If Cambodia collapsed, we would be even harder pressed to pull out unilaterally; if we accepted any of the other options, we would be charged with "expanding the war." There was no middle ground.
Nixon told his colleagues that he approved attacks on the base areas by South Vietnamese forces with U.S. support. Since the South Vietnamese could handle only one offensive, Wheeler recommended that they go after Parrot's Beak. This led to a debate about American participation; Laird and Rogers sought to confine it to an absolute minimum, opposing even American advisers or tactical air support.
At this point Vice President Spiro Agnew spoke up. He thought the whole debate irrelevant. Either the sanctuaries were a danger or they were not. If it was worth cleaning them out, he did not understand all the pussyfooting about the American role or what we accomplished by attacking only one. Our task was to make Vietnamization succeed. He favored an attack on both Fishhook and Parrot's Beak, including American forces.
If Nixon hated anything more than being presented with a plan he had not considered, it was to be shown up in a group as being less tough than his advisers. I have no doubt that Agnew's intervention accelerated Nixon's ultimate decision to order an attack on all the sanctuaries and use American forces. Agnew was right; we should either neutralize all of the sanctuaries or abandon the project. We were in danger of combining the disadvantages of every course of action. We would be castigated for intervention in Cambodia without accomplishing any strategic purpose.
On Saturday, April 25, Nixon called me to Camp David to review the planning. I walked along at the edge of the swimming pool while he paddled in the water. Nixon began to toy with the idea of going for broke: Perhaps we should combine an attack on the Cambodian sanctuaries with resumption of the bombing of North Viet Nam as well as mining Haiphong? The opposition would be equally hysterical either way. I replied that we had enough on our plate; we would not be able to sustain such a gamble.
Nixon dropped the subject after ten minutes and never returned to it. In retrospect I believe that we should have taken it more seriously. The bane of our military actions in Viet Nam throughout was their hesitancy and inconclusiveness.
In all events, after the poolside strategy session at Camp David we flew back to the capital, and in the late afternoon Nixon invited John Mitchell to join Bebe Rebozo and me for a cruise down the Potomac on the presidential yacht Sequoia. The tensions of the grim military planning were transformed into exaltation by the liquid refreshments, to the point of some patriotic awkwardness when it was decided that everyone should stand at attention while the Sequoia passed Mount Vernon--a feat not managed by everybody with equal success. On the return to the White House, Nixon invited his convivial colleagues to see the movie Patton. It was the second time he had so honored me. Inspiring as the film no doubt was, I managed to escape for an hour in the middle of it to prepare for the next day's NSC meeting.
On Sunday evening, April 26, the President met with his principal NSC advisers--Rogers, Laird, Wheeler, CIA Director Richard Helms and me--in his working office in the Executive Office Building. Nixon tried to avoid a confrontation with his Secretaries of State and Defense by pretending that we were merely listening to a briefing. To my astonishment, both Rogers and Laird fell in with the charade that it was all a planning exercise, and did not take a position. They avoided the question of why Nixon would call his senior advisers together on a Sunday night to hear a contingency briefing.
As soon as the meeting was over, the President called me over to the family quarters and instructed me to issue a directive authorizing an attack by American forces into the Fishhook area. I had it drafted, and he signed it. Just to be sure, the President first initialed the directive and then, beneath his initials, also signed his full name.
Not even this "double-barreled presidential imprimatur," as Kissinger calls it, settled things. Both Rogers and Laird were having second thoughts. Nixon agreed to think it over for 24 hours.
On Tuesday, April 28, in a 20-minute meeting with Rogers, Laird and Mitchell, the President reaffirmed his decision to proceed with a combined U.S.-South Vietnamese operation against the Fishhook. He noted that the Secretaries of State and Defense had opposed the use of American forces and that Dr. Kissinger was "leaning against" it. (This was no longer true; I had changed my view at least a week earlier. In my opinion Nixon lumped me with his two Cabinet members because he genuinely and generously wanted to shield me against departmental retaliation.) Nixon assured them he would assume full responsibility for the decision.
The final decision to proceed wai thus not a maniacal eruption of irrationality as the uproar afterward sought to imply. It was taken carefully, with much hesitation, by a man who had to discipline his nerves almost daily to face his associates and to overcome the partially subconscious, partially deliberate procrastination of his executive departments. The fact remains that on Cambodia, Nixon was right. And he was President.
"Operation Total Victory 42," as it was labeled, was launched against the Parrot's Beak during the night of April 28. American and South Vietnamese forces pushed forward into the Fishhook area at 7:30 a.m. Saigon time on May 1. The same day Nixon visited the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon and--on the spur of the moment--ordered what he had long been considering, an incursion into all other base areas. Twelve enemy base areas were attacked in the first three weeks.
Without our incursion, the Communists would have taken over Cambodia years earlier. The bizarre argument has indeed been made, with a glaring lack of substantiation, that the cruelty of the Khmer Rouge in victory was the product of five years of American and Cambodian efforts to resist them. No one can accept this as an adequate explanation for the murderous Khmer Rouge. Sihanouk does not believe this; they were men he had kicked out of Cambodia in 1967 as a menace to his country. He told me in April 1979 that the Khmer Rouge leaders were "always killers."
Nixon set a June 30 cutoff date for the Cambodian incursion. Eventually, 32,000 U.S. ground troops were involved. But, Kissinger says, casualties "never reached more than a quarter of the 800 a week that Laird had feared," and dropped sharply after that. At the time, Kissinger estimated that the action would delay Hanoi's next major offensive by six to eight months; Sir Robert Thompson, the British expert on guerrilla warfare, figured that it would set the North Vietnamese back by as much as two years. Thompson proved to be right. But that did not help to defuse a gathering explosion at home. The May 4 killing of four students at Kent State University by rifle fire from Ohio National Guardsmen proved to be a match thrown into a powder keg.
Campus unrest and violence overtook the Cambodian operation itself as the major issue before the public. Washington took on the character of a besieged city. On May 9 a crowd estimated at between 75,000 and 100,000 demonstrated on the Ellipse, south of the White House. The President saw himself as the firm rock in this rushing stream, but the turmoil had its effect. Pretending indifference, he was deeply wounded by the hatred of the protesters. In his ambivalence Nixon reached a point of exhaustion that caused his advisers deep concern.
Exhaustion was the hallmark of us all. I had to move from my apartment, ringed by protesters, into the basement of the White House to get some sleep. Much of my own time was spent with unhappy, nearly panicky colleagues, even more with student and colleague demonstrators.
I found my discussions with students rather more rewarding than those with their protesting teachers. When I had lunch in the Situation Room with a group of Harvard professors, their objections to the Cambodian decision illustrated that hyperbole was not confined to the Administration. One distinguished professor gave it as his considered analysis that "somebody had forgotten to tell the President that Cambodia was a country; he acted as if he didn't know this." Another declared that we had provoked all the actions of the other side and that an incursion to a depth of 21 miles into territories occupied for four years by the North Vietnamese might encourage our commanders to believe that the use of nuclear weapons was now authorized.
The meeting completed my transition from the academic world to the world of affairs. These were men who had been my friends, academicians whose lifetime of study should have encouraged a sense of perspective. That they disagreed with our decision was understandable; I had myself gone through a long process of hesitation before I became convinced that there was no alternative. But the lack of compassion, the overweening righteousness, the refusal to offer an alternative reinforced two convictions: that for the internal peace of our country, the war had to be ended, but also that in doing so on terms compatible with any international responsibility, we would get no help from those with whom I had spent my professional life.
Hanoi's Spring Offensive
After Cambodia, the remainder of 1970 and 1971 brought inconclusive military operations and equally inconclusive diplomatic negotiations. The U.S. made repeated efforts to find what Kissinger terms "an honorable compromise. " On Oct. 7, 1970, Nixon offered a standstill cease-fire and a total bombing halt. In May 1971 Kissinger offered a cease-fire and unilateral withdrawal provided Hanoi ended its infiltration. Le Duc Tho refused to budge from his demand that the U.S. overthrow the Saigon government, by rigging the scheduled presidential elections or even by murder. "Le Duc Tho was eager to be helpful," Kissinger writes. During one session, "he took me aside and suggested that if we did not know how to replace [South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van] Thieu by means of the presidential election, assassination would do admirably. The vehemence of my refusal produced one of the few occasions when I saw Le Duc Tho temporarily flustered. He obviously had trouble understanding what I was getting so excited about. " In 1972, however, the immediate concern was with Hanoi's military moves.
On March 30, 1972, four weeks after the President returned from his historic visit to China, the long awaited offensive in Viet Nam finally broke over us. The pretense that the Viet Nam conflict was a "people's war," a guerrilla uprising in the South, was over; this was an invasion by the North Vietnamese regular army in division strength.
I was convinced that this was Hanoi's last throw of the dice. On April 3 I told the President that the attack would now precipitate matters; we would get no awards for losing with moderation. If we defeated the offensive, we would get a settlement. The North Vietnamese had thrown everything into their effort; if it failed, they would have no choice except to negotiate.
Against intense bureaucratic opposition, Nixon ordered repeated augmentations of our air and naval forces in Southeast Asia. On April 9 Soviet Ambassador Anatoli Dobrynin complained that our buildup was growing ominous. "Anatol," I replied, "we have been warning you for months that if there were an offensive we would take drastic measures to end the war once and for all. That situation has now arisen." He did not bristle. The Soviets rarely bully when they believe the opponent to be strong and serious.
A great deal now depended on our exchanges with Moscow. During a luncheon on April 12, Dobrynin assured me that his leadership was not interested in a showdown. He said that a visit by me to Moscow, which had been discussed since early in the year, was now urgent. The agenda could be Viet Nam, as well as accelerated preparations for a summit meeting between Nixon and Soviet Communist Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev.
The proposition evoked the most diverse emotions in Nixon. He longed for the summit. To be the first American President in Moscow stimulated his sense of history; to go where Eisenhower had been rebuffed would fulfill his ambition to outstrip his old mentor. On the other hand, Nixon was suspicious of a Soviet ploy to delay or complicate our planned military campaign against North Viet Nam. Not the least of Nixon's concerns was how he would explain to Rogers yet another secret mission by his security adviser.
Nixon decided to go to Camp David while I was in Moscow; it would be announced that he and I were reviewing the situation together. From there, he would break the news to the Secretary of State that we had received a sudden invitation from Brezhnev to discuss Viet Nam and that in view of its urgency he had accepted it on the spur of the moment.
Kissinger went to Moscow on April 20. In his meeting with Brezhnev, "I said bluntly that Hanoi's offensive threatened the summit. I went so far as to advance the startling thesis that the Soviets had an interest in preventing a North Vietnamese victory; I doubted that the President would come to Moscow if we suffered a defeat. "After ten hours of talks on Viet Nam with Brezhnev, Kissinger concluded that "we could go quite some distance before the Soviets would jeopardize the summit. " The stage was thus set for a strong U.S. riposte to Hanoi's spring offensive.
Mining the Harbors
Speaking from the Oval Office on April 26, Nixon contrasted our peace proposals with the enemy's steady buildup for a new offensive. Twelve of North Viet Nam's 13 regular combat divisions were in South Viet Nam, Laos or Cambodia. "By July 1," the President said, "we will have withdrawn over 90% of our forces that were in Viet Nam in 1969. Before the enemy's invasion began, we had cut our air sorties in half. We have offered exceedingly generous terms for peace. The only thing we have refused to do is to accede to the enemy's demand to overthrow the lawfully constituted government of South Viet Nam and to impose a Communist dictatorship in its place."
This was the sole remaining issue.
Hanoi answered by launching another offensive, this time in the far north. On April 27, five days before I was to meet again with Le Duc Tho, the North Vietnamese attacked with the heaviest artillery barrage of the war and large numbers of tanks; much of their equipment was Soviet.
My meeting with Le Duc Tho on May 2 was brutal. Contrary to the mythology of the time, the North Vietnamese were not poor misunderstood reformers. They were implacable revolutionaries, the terror of their neighbors, coming to claim the whole of the French colonial inheritance in Indochina by whatever force was necessary. Futhermore, they were never more difficult than when they thought they had a strong military position--and never more conciliatory than when in trouble on the battlefield. Unfortunately, May 2 was a day on which Le Duc Tho was confident he had the upper hand. Quang Tri had fallen the day before. Pleiku was in peril. An Loc was now surrounded. For all Le Duc Tho knew, a complete South Vietnamese collapse was imminent.
Le Duc Tho argued that Hanoi's offensive was not in fact an offensive, since it had been provoked by the U.S., which was the real aggressor. He proceeded to quote statements from our American critics to support his position, which led to a testy exchange:
Kissinger: Our domestic discussions are no concern of yours.
Le Duc Tho: I would like to give you the evidence. It is an American source, not our source. [Senator J. William] Fulbright said that the acts of the liberation forces in South Viet Nam are in direct response to your sabotage of the Paris conference--
Kissinger: I have heard it before. There is no need to translate. Let's go on to the discussion.
Le Duc Tho: I would like to quote--
Kissinger: I have heard it before. Please go ahead.
Le Duc Tho refused to go ahead. He did not negotiate; he simply read me the formal North Vietnamese position, publicly available for months. There was no point in continuing the meeting. Le Duc Tho was not even stalling; he was laying down terms. As I got up to leave, Le Duc Tho took me aside and said in the tone of a fellow conspirator that his side's prospects were "good."
The die was cast. The May 2 meeting revealed Hanoi's conviction that it was so close to victory that it no longer needed even the pretense of a negotiation. Our action had to provide a shock that would give the North pause and rally the South.
What concerned Nixon most was the imminent Moscow summit. Haunted by the memory of Eisenhower's experience in 1960 [when Nikita Khrushchev abruptly canceled a summit because of U-2 "spy flights" by the U.S.], he was determined that any cancellation or postponement should come at his initiative. He was adamant that a cancellation by Moscow would be humiliating for him and politically disastrous.
Nixon Adviser H.R. Haldeman strongly opposed our cancellation of the summit. It would damage the President by making him appear impulsive. Nixon suggested that Haldeman and I solicit Treasury Secretary John Connally's views.
We called on Connally at the Treasury Department around noon on Thursday, May 4. Connally's eyes were narrowed, squinting, as was his habit when he was gauging his challenge. We explained that the President was determined to resume bombing in the Hanoi-Haiphong area and had decided to preempt Moscow's probable reaction by canceling the summit. Haldeman said that he disagreed with the latter. Connally resoundingly seconded Haldeman. Cancellation would gain us nothing domestically; the accusation of rashness would be added to the usual barrage of criticisms. We should leave the dilemma to the Soviets, whose arms had made it all possible. Anyway, Connally did not think it a foregone conclusion that the Soviets would cancel. As soon as Connally had spoken, I knew he was right.
Connally stressed that while we should not cancel the summit, we also should not refrain from doing what we thought necessary out of fear of the Soviets' doing so. Whatever measures we took had to be decisive. Challenging the Soviet Union was, in fact, safer if we showed no hesitation. The principal issue, he said, was simply what would be the most effective military response. That too cleared the air. My preferred strategy was to blockade North Viet Nam by mining its harbors.
Nixon's Gamble
My deputy, Alexander Haig, Haldeman and I met with Nixon in his hideaway in the Executive Office Building. The President was in good form, calm and analytical. The only symptom of his excitement was that instead of slouching in an easy chair as usual, he was pacing up and down, gesticulating with a pipe on which he was occasionally puffing, something I had never previously seen him do. On one level he was playing MacArthur. On another he was steeling himself for a decision on which his political future would depend.
Nixon then and there decided upon the mining of North Vietnamese ports. He would speak to the nation on Monday evening, May 8. He would convene the National Security Council on Monday morning.
It was one of the finest hours of Nixon's presidency. He could have taken the advice of his commander in the field, supported by his Secretary of Defense, and concentrated on the battle in South Viet Nam. He could have temporized, which is what most leaders do, and then blamed the collapse of South Viet Nam on events running out of control. He could have concentrated on the summit and used it to obscure the failure of his Viet Nam policy. Nixon did none of these. In an election year, he risked his political future on a course most of his Cabinet colleagues questioned.
The NSC meeting ended at 12:20 p.m. on May 8. Nixon said he would make a final decision at 2 p.m., and asked Kissinger to bring the necessary papers to his Executive Office Building hideaway at that hour for signing.
When I arrived, Haldeman was there. Before I could hand Nixon the order, he told me that Haldeman had raised new questions. To my amazement Haldeman described the dire impact that the proposed action would have on public opinion and the President's standing in the polls. When Nixon excused himself to go to the bathroom, I whirled on Haldeman, who had never meddled in substance, and castigated him for interfering at a moment of such crisis. Haldeman grinned shamefacedly, making clear by his bearing that Nixon had put him up to his little speech. I was used to many games from my complex leader; this one was beyond my comprehension--until the revelation of Nixon's taping system suggested a possible motive: the President wanted me unambiguously on record as supporting the operation lest the hated "Georgetown social set" seek to draw a distinction between him and me as they had on Cambodia. Be that as it may, Nixon returned from the bathroom and without another word signed the "execute" order.
At 8:30 p.m., while the President briefed the congressional leadership, I saw Dobrynin, whom I had called away from a dinner. Dobrynin asked what precise measures were implied in the blockade. He lost his cool only once when I asked him how the Soviet Union would react if the 15,000 Soviet soldiers in Egypt were in imminent danger of being captured by Israelis. Dobrynin became uncharacteristically vehement and revealed more than he could have intended: "First of all, we never put forces somewhere who can't defend themselves. Second, if the Israelis threaten us, we will wipe them out within two days. I can assure you our plans are made for this eventuality."
At 9 p.m. Nixon addressed the nation. In a restrained and powerful address, he repeated his willingness to settle the war. But the North Vietnamese "arrogantly refuse to negotiate anything but an imposition." The only way to stop the killing, therefore, was "to keep the weapons of war out of the hands of the international outlaws of North Viet Nam." He recited the military actions he was taking; he stated our negotiating position, the most forthcoming we had put forward: a standstill ceasefire, release of prisoners and total American withdrawal within four months.
Hanoi asked for increased support from its Communist backers. But there was no rush to the barricades in either Moscow or Peking. On the afternoon of May 10, Dobrynin came to the Map Room of the White House. Out of the blue, he asked whether the President had as yet decided on receiving Soviet Foreign Trade Minister Nikolai Patolichev, who was in Washington on a visit. The request could only mean that the Soviet leaders had decided to fall in with our approach of business as usual. Trying to match the Ambassador's studied casualness, I allowed that I probably would be able to arrange a meeting in the Oval Office.
In every crisis tension builds steadily, sometimes nearly unbearably, until some decisive turning point. The conversation with Dobrynin, if not yet the turning point, deflated the pressure. We knew that the Moscow summit [described in last week's installment in TIME] was still on.
From Stalemate to Breakthrough
By the time Nixon and I returned from the May 1972 summit in Moscow, Hanoi's spring offensive had run out of steam. With our bombing and mining making themselves felt, the North Vietnamese army was stalled. Our twin summits, in Peking and Moscow, had undoubtedly engendered a sense of isolation in the North. And they had greatly strengthened Nixon's domestic position, thus removing Hanoi's key weapon of leverage on us. In June we received the first inconclusive hints that Hanoi might be engaged in cease-fire planning. By the middle of September, the evidence was unmistakable.
Throughout the summer, private sessions with Le Duc Tho--"Ducky" to the American negotiators--brought what Kissinger describes as "significant movement, entirely by Hanoi." Probably convinced that Nixon would be much stronger after the November elections, Hanoi began to press for a quick settlement.
Kissinger saw this, he writes, as a great opportunity; unless it was grasped, the U.S. mood was such that even with an overwhelming mandate, Nixon would quickly be "pushed against the grindstone of congressional pressures" to end the war on almost any terms. In this situation, an unprecedented four-day secret session was convened on Sunday morning, Oct. 8. The critical meeting was held in a house in suburban Gif-sur-Yvette, once owned by the French artist Fernand Leger and still adorned with his Cubist paintings and tapestries. Around noon, after Kissinger had laid out the essentially unchanged U.S. position, the North Vietnamese requested a break until four that afternoon.
My staff and I strolled a bit in the clear autumn air in the garden, whispering softly (in case the bushes were bugged). Then, to pass the time, I thought of taking a drive. After ten minutes, restless and wanting to confer more privately with Haig, I asked the driver to stop the car at a place where Haig and I could walk. He pulled over at a spot where the trees lining the road suddenly opened up to reveal a small lake. Picnickers were spreading out their food on checkered tablecloths; couples were lying under the trees. The sky had the mellow blue of the early French autumn. And none of these Parisians paid the slightest attention to this odd group of self-absorbed Americans who were walking along the narrow footpaths lined by tall grass.
For us the contrast between the matter-of-fact peacefulness of the scene and our own anxiety was almost beyond bearing. At 4 p.m. we would know whether the agony endured by so many for nearly a decade would have purchased an honorable end to the war in Viet Nam.
The meeting resumed on schedule. Le Duc Tho did not beat around the bush. "In order to show our good will and to ensure a rapid end to the war, rapid restoration of peace in Viet Nam, as all of us wish for, today we put forward a new proposal, a very realistic and very simple proposal," he said.
Le Duc Tho suggested that the U.S. and North Viet Nam sign an agreement settling the military questions between them--withdrawal, prisoners, ceasefire. The political problem--"that is the most thorny, the most difficult problem"--would not be allowed to prolong our negotiations. Le Duc Tho now dispensed with the entire concept of a coalition government. It was now only an "Administration of National Concord," to be set up within three months by the two South Vietnamese parties and charged with implementing the signed agreements and "organizing" elections.
This pale shadow of their former demands for a coalition government was not much to show for a decade of heroic exertion and horrendous suffering by the North Vietnamese. After four years of implacable insistence that we dismantle the political structure of our ally and replace it with a coalition government, Hanoi had now essentially given up its political demands.
And there were other provisions that also helped meet our concerns. For three years Hanoi had insisted on an end of American military aid to South Viet Nam. Le Duc Tho now scrapped this proposal; we could continue to supply South Viet Nam. Hanoi accepted our proposal of May 31, 1971, that infiltration into South Viet Nam cease; if observed, this would guarantee the erosion of North Vietnamese strength in the South.
At once I and most of my colleagues understood the significance of what we had heard. In the immediate recess I asked for, my aide, Winston Lord, and I shook hands and said to each other: "We have done it." Haig, who had served in Viet Nam, declared with emotion that we had saved the honor of the military men who had served, died and suffered there.
I have often been asked for my most thrilling moment in public service. I have participated in many spectacular events. But the moment that moved me most deeply has to be that cool, autumn, Sunday afternoon while the shadows were falling over the serene French landscape and that large quiet room, hung with abstract paintings, was illuminated only at the green baize table across which the two delegations were facing each other.
Sailing into Stormy Seas
On our return to Washington on Oct. 12, Haig and I went to Nixon's refuge in the Executive Office Building. Somewhat exultantly, I told the President that it looked as if he had achieved all three of his major goals for 1972--the first two being the visit to Peking and the Moscow summit. Nixon's principal concern was Thieu's reaction. I was --naively--optimistic.
Nixon was quite positive that an agreement was unnecessary for the election; its benefit would be too marginal to warrant any risks. Haldeman thought that an agreement was a potential liability; he was certain that Democratic Candidate George McGovern's support had been reduced to fanatics who would not vote for Nixon even if he arranged the Second Coming. On the other hand, an agreement might disquiet conservative supporters. The Viet Nam negotiations, in short, were not used to affect the election; the election was used to accelerate the negotiations.
On Oct. 13 a cable arrived from Ambassador Bunker with a warning that whatever the agreement, we might be sailing into stormy seas in Saigon.
That was putting it mildly. "Thieu objected not to specific terms but to the fact of an agreement," Kissinger writes. He did not come right out and say so. "Instead, he fought in the Vietnamese manner: indirectly, elliptically, by methods designed to exhaust rather than to clarify, constantly needling but never addressing the real issue." On the third day of meetings, the Vietnamese presented Kissinger with 23 changes, some major, in the draft peace treaty; later that figure would triple, to 69. Finally the talks broke down completely as Thieu, between tears of rage, accused the Americans of having "connived" to sell him out. "Obviously the negotiations could not continue without his agreement," writes Kissinger. Yet "turning on Thieu would be incompatible with our sacrifice, "he adds. Further, "we had to make Hanoi understand it would not be able to use our differences with Saigon to jockey us at the last moment into doing what we had refused for four years: overthrowing the political structure in South 'Viet Nam. "In any case, Kissinger goes on, "Thieu's reaction guaranteed that the war would not end soon." Kissinger was barely back in Washington when the North Vietnamese, hoping to force Nixon's hand, went public. They broadcast the terms of the proposed treaty, which had been kept secret until then, and accused the U.S. of stalling on its implementation.
"Peace Is at Hand"
The press conference that I held on Oct. 26 came to be denounced as a Nixon electoral ploy to raise hopes for peace during the last stages of the presidential campaign. This misses the mark completely. Once Hanoi had gone public we had no choice except to state our case. I had two objectives. One was to reassure Hanoi that we would stand by the basic agreement, while leaving open the possibility of raising Saigon's suggested changes. The second was to convey to Saigon that we were determined to proceed on our course.
So it happened that I appeared for the first time on national television at the very end of Nixon's first term. The White House public relations people, convinced that my accent might disturb Middle America, had previously permitted pictures but no sound at my press conferences. On Oct. 26 they finally took a chance on my pronunciation.
In my opening remarks I uttered the phrase that was to haunt me: "A war that has been raging for ten years is drawing to a conclusion ... We believe that peace is at hand."
Nixon was not aware that I would use the words "peace is at hand." It was a pithy message--too optimistic, as it turned out --a signal to Hanoi that we were not reneging and to Saigon that we would not be derailed. And despite all the opprobrium heaped on it later, the statement was essentially true--though if I had to do it over I would choose a less dramatic phrase. The fact is that a bitter war that had lasted ten years and cost untold lives was settled within weeks of that statement.
Meanwhile, our public debate on Viet Nam heated up once again. Two main lines of attack developed: that the whole thing was a fraud to help Nixon win the election, which all polls showed was nonsense; that the same terms had been attainable four years earlier, which was totally untrue. Some antiwar critics had long since given up on ceasefire; on North Vietnamese withdrawal from Laos and Cambodia; on a ban on infiltration into South Viet Nam; on continued aid to Saigon. Now that much more had been achieved, they could not bring themselves to admit that possibly their Government had not been so immoral and stupid as their folklore had it.
The Christmas Bombing
When Kissinger returned to Paris to resume negotiations with Le Duc Tho in November 1972, the U.S. was in a bind. Despite Thieu 's stubbornness, Washington was reluctant to impose terms on him that would have had the effect, as Kissinger puts it, "of undermining the morale and survival of our ally." On the other hand, Hanoi now seemed less eager for an agreement, and appeared to be gambling that if it stonewalled long enough, a new, more liberal U.S. Congress would soon arrive in Washington and, in Kissinger's words, "force us out of the war" by cutting off funds. In a memo to Nixon, Kissinger warned: "They are playing for a clear-cut victory through our split with Saigon or our domestic collapse rather than run the risk of a negotiated settlement. We are faced with the same kind of hard decisions as last spring." Meetings in November and December led nowhere, and on Dec. 13, convinced that "we were simply treading water," a discouraged Kissinger headed home. Hanoi, he was sure, had been determined ever since the negotiations had resumed "not to allow the agreement to be completed. This was the insoluble problem over which we began the Christmas bombing five days later."
During the December negotiations, I had tried to impress on Nixon that a breakup (or a recess) would mean that we would have to step up military pressures on Hanoi if we did not want either an endless war or an unenforceable peace likely to wreck Saigon. I am positive that had Hanoi in December given us one or two minimal, essentially window-dressing, propositions, Nixon would have accepted them with alacrity. He was not anxious to resume bombing.
Nixon, Haig and I met in the Oval Office on the morning of Dec. 14 to consider our course. All of us agreed that some military response was necessary. I favored resuming bombing over all of North Viet Nam, but using fighter-bombers over populated areas north of the 20th parallel. Haig favored B-52 attacks, especially north of the 20th parallel, on the ground that only a massive shock could bring Hanoi back to the conference table. Nixon accepted Haig's view. I went along with it--at first with slight reluctance, later with conviction. For Nixon and Haig were, I still believe, essentially right. We had only two choices: taking a massive, shocking step to end the war quickly, or letting matters drift.
The bombing resumed on Dec. 18 and lasted for twelve days. The moral indignation rose with each day. The proposition that the U.S. Government was deliberately slaughtering civilians in a purposeless campaign of terror went unchallenged. Yet Hanoi radio, on Jan. 4, 1973, cited a preliminary figure of about 1,300 persons killed after twelve days of bombing; many must have been military personnel, for antiaircraft batteries were a primary objective. I received incredibly bitter letters from erstwhile friends, from angry citizens. (None of them wrote me in January when the agreement was reached.) It seemed to be taken for granted that North Viet Nam was blameless and that we were embarked on a course of exterminating civilians.
I was in the eye of a hurricane whose elemental force derived not only from the hatreds of the two Viet Nams and the hysteria of domestic critics, but also from a painful rift between Nixon and me [see box "Chagrined Cowboy"]. In early December, TIME magazine, with the best will in the world, added to earlier irritations by selecting Nixon and me as joint Men of the Year. I knew immediately how this would go down with my chief, whose limited capacity for forgiveness surely did not include being upstaged (and being given equal billing as Man of the Year with his assistant was tantamount to that). I appealed all the way up the TIME hierarchy' to the editor-in-chief, Hedley Donovan, to take me off the cover. Donovan put an end to it by replying that if my importuning did not stop, I would be made Man of the Year in my own right.
When the bombing started, many journalists applied the very categories so assiduously fed out by White House p.r. people in the preceding weeks to cut me down to size: Nixon was identified with the "hard," I with the "softer" position. I did not indicate to any journalist that I had opposed the decision to use B-52s. But I also did little to dampen the speculation, partly out of a not very heroic desire to deflect the assault from my person. Some journalists may have mistaken my genuine depression about the seeming collapse of the peace efforts for a moral disagreement. Though I acted mainly by omission and partly through emotional exhaustion, it is one of the episodes of my public life in which I take no great pride.
Nixon was justifiably infuriated by assertions that I had opposed the bombing. I sensed that my period in office should draw to a close. If negotiations collapsed, I would resign immediately, assuming full responsibility. If they succeeded, I would see the settlement through and then resign toward the end of 1973. But for Watergate, I would have carried out this plan.
No foreign policy event of the Nixon presidency evoked such outrage as the Christmas bombing. On no issue was he more unjustly treated. It was not a barbarous act of revenge. It did not cause exorbitant casualties by Hanoi's own figures; certainly it cost much less than the continuation of the war, which was the alternative. A decade of frustration with Viet Nam, a generation of hostility to Nixon, and--let me be frank--exasperation over his electoral triumph, coalesced to produce a unanimity of editorial outrage that suppressed all judgment in an emotional orgy. Nixon chose the only weapon he had available. His decision speeded the end of the war; I can think of no other measure that would have.
Birthday Breakthrough
"The prediction that the bombing was destroying all prospects for negotiation was as common and as false as the accusation that it was a massacre of civilians," writes Kissinger. "Exactly the opposite happened." Indeed, on Dec. 18, the day the bombing resumed, the U.S. proposed to Hanoi that the talks also resume, and Hanoi agreed on Dec. 30. The date was set for Jan. 8, 1973. Says Kissinger: "I was positive we had won our gamble and that the next round of negotiations would succeed."
On Jan. 8 Le Duc Tho and I met again at Gif-sur-Yvette for what we both had promised would be our last round of negotiations. The breakthrough came on Jan. 9. It was Nixon's 60th birthday. I reported to Washington:
"We celebrated the President's birthday today by making a major breakthrough in the negotiations. The Vietnamese have broken our hearts several times before, and we just cannot assume success until everything is pinned down, but the mood and the businesslike approach was as close to October as we have seen since October."
Nixon flashed back: "If the other side stays on this track and doesn't go downhill tomorrow, what you have done today is the best birthday present I have had in 60 years."
Great events rarely have a dramatic conclusion. So it was in Paris in January. After the issue of the demilitarized zone between North and South Viet Nam was settled (we agreed that the zone is a provisional military demarcation between two parts of Viet Nam--thus recognizing the separate entity of South Viet Nam; no movement was to be permitted across the DMZ by military units, but civilian movement through it would be negotiated), there remained primarily the theological issue of how to sign the documents so that Saigon did not have to acknowledge the Communist-front Provisional Revolutionary Government. We devised a formula according to which neither Saigon nor the P.R.G. was mentioned in the document; the agreement to end the war in Viet Nam has the distinction of being the only document with which I am familiar in diplomatic history that does mention the main parties. The negotiations had begun in 1968 with a haggle over the shape of the table; they ended in 1973 with a haggle in effect over the same problem.
I returned to the U.S. on Jan. 13, stopping in Washington to pick up Haig for the trip to Key Biscayne. I reported to Nixon around midnight; we met until 2:30 a.m. Though I was unhappy with some of Nixon's actions toward me, though I objected to some of his tactics, I felt that night an odd tenderness toward him. He had seen our country through perilous tunes.
He had honored me by his trust, he had sought to sustain our country's strength and dignity as he saw it, and he had revolutionized diplomacy. We spoke to each other in nearly affectionate terms, like veterans of bitter battles at a last reunion, even though we both sensed somehow that too much had happened between us to make the rest of the journey together.
Haig would leave on Jan. 14 for Saigon with an ultimatum that we would sign the document, if necessary, without Thieu. I would return to Paris on Jan. 23 to complete the agreement.
The signature by foreign ministers would take place in Paris on Jan. 27. As a sop to Rogers, I had agreed not to attend the final culmination of these efforts. What we had struggled, prayed, hoped and perhaps even hated for--the end of our involvement in Indochina, and peace--was about to be celebrated.
But we still did not have the agreement of that doughty little man in Saigon, President Thieu. Nixon was determined to prevail. "Brutality is nothing," he said to me. "You have never seen it if this son-of-a-bitch doesn't go along, believe me." Haig delivered a scorching letter from Nixon to Thieu on Jan. 16. Its crucial paragraph read: "I have irrevocably decided to initial the Agreement on Jan. 27, 1973, in Paris. I will do so, if necessary, alone. In that case I shall have to explain publicly that your Government obstructs peace. The result will be an inevitable and immediate termination of U.S. economic and military assistance." On Jan. 21, Thieu finally relented.
I believed then, and I believe now, that the agreement could have worked. [A cease-fire would begin Jan. 27. All U.S. combat troops would be withdrawn and military prisoners released within 60 days. The South Vietnamese people would have the right to determine their own political future. The DMZ would be respected. The U.S. would pledge to aid in reconstruction efforts.] The agreement reflected a true equilibrium of forces on the ground. If the equilibrium were maintained, the agreement could have been maintained. We believed Saigon was strong enough to deal with guerrilla war and low-level violations. The implicit threat of our retaliation would be likely to deter massive violations. We had no illusions about Hanoi's long-term goals. Nor did we go through the agony of four years of war and searing negotiations simply to achieve a "decent interval" for our withdrawal. We were determined to enable Saigon to prevail if assaulted. But for the collapse of executive authority as a result of Watergate and congressional refusal to provide adequate aid to Saigon, I believe we would have succeeded.
A Broken Heart
On Jan. 22, two days after Richard Nixon's second Inaugural, I left for Paris for the final meeting with Le Duc Tho. It was to take place for the first time on neutral and ceremonial ground in a conference room at Avenue Kleber, the scene of 174 futile plenary sessions since 1968.
When I arrived in Paris, I learned that Lyndon Johnson had died that day. He was himself a casualty of the Viet Nam War, which he had inherited and then expanded in striving to fulfill his conception of our nation's duty and of his obligation to his fallen predecessor. There was nothing he had wanted less than to be a war President, and this no doubt contributed to his inconclusive conduct of the struggle. It was symbolic that this hulking, imperious, vulnerable, expansive, aspiring man should die with the war that had broken his heart.
The meeting started at 9:35 a.m., Jan. 23. Le Duc Tho managed even on this solemn occasion to make himself obnoxious by insisting on ironclad assurances of American economic aid to North Viet Nam. I told him that this could not be discussed further until after the agreement was signed; it also depended on congressional approval and on observance of the agreement. Finally, at a quarter to one, we initialed the various texts. After this, Le Duc Tho and I stepped out on the street in a cold misty rain and shook hands for the benefit of photographers.
America's Viet Nam War was over.
Next Week
In Part 3: A momentous decision "to risk war in the triangular Soviet-Chinese-American relationship"--on Peking's side. -A near showdown with Moscow over a Soviet-backed invasion of Jordan by Syrian troops and tanks. -Tips on the statesman's craft ("The old adage that men grow in office has not proved true in my experience"). -An unsentimental philosophy of foreign policy: "One reason the Viet Nam debate grew so bitter was that both supporters and critics of the original involvement shared the same traditional sense of universal moral mission."
-- William Shawcross, the British journalist who wrote Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.