I rejected this option, too. Had I chosen it, the conquest of South Vietnam by North Vietnam would have been inevitable. That was a result I would not accept. As Vice President, I had been a strong advocate of measures that might have prevented this tragedy. As a private citizen, I had emphatically supported the decision to intervene in the war, though I had disagreed just as strongly with the way my predecessors had handled it. As President, I continued to believe that the moral and geopolitical reasons behind our intervention remained valid. Neither my head nor my heart would permit me to sacrifice our South Vietnamese allies to the enemy, regardless of the political costs I undoubtedly would incur by not withdrawing from the war immediately.
As I studied the option papers before my inauguration, I realized that I had no good choices. But Presidents are not elected to make easy decisions.
• • •
When Johnson administration officials briefed me about Vietnam before I took office, they presented no plan for how we should end the war. No progress had been made in the negotiations in Paris. No comprehensive American peace proposal had been announced. No plans existed to bring home any of our 550,000 troops in Vietnam. On the contrary, sending more troops had been under consideration.
In the first months of my administration, we put together a five-point strategy to win the war—or, more precisely, to end the war and win the peace. Our goal was not to conquer North Vietnam but to prevent North Vietnam from conquering South Vietnam.
VIETNAMIZATION. Since 1965, the United States had furnished most of the money, most of the arms, and a substantial proportion of the men to help the South Vietnamese defend their freedom. In the chaos following Diem’s assassination, we had no choice but to take the lead role in the prosecution of the war. But as a result of this policy, the South Vietnamese military had developed an unhealthy, and unsustainable, dependence on the United States. Now we decided to train and equip South Vietnam’s army so that it would have the capability of defending the country itself. This involved more than handing over our automatic rifles and the ignition keys of our tanks. The most optimistic estimates were that it would take at least three years to create a fighting force that could stand up to the North Vietnamese Army. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird carried out this plan and dubbed it, appropriately, “Vietnamization.” Our whole strategy depended on whether this program succeeded.
PACIFICATION. Our defeat of the Tet Offensive had produced a political vacuum in the countryside. Areas that the National Liberation Front had controlled for years were now up for grabs. We knew that whichever side won the race to take control of the hamlets would have won half the battle. We therefore abandoned the strategy of attrition, which had produced many casualties and few results, and replaced it with one of pacification. Our principal objectives shifted to protecting the South Vietnamese at the village level, reestablishing the local political process, and winning the loyalty of the peasants by involving them in the government and providing them with economic opportunity. General Creighton Abrams had initiated this shift in strategy when he took command of our forces in Vietnam in 1968.1 reemphasized the critical importance of our pacification programs and channeled additional resources toward them.
DIPLOMATIC ISOLATION. All of North Vietnam’s war matériel came from the Soviet Union or Communist China. I had long believed that an indispensable element of any successful peace initiative in Vietnam was to enlist, if possible, the help of the Soviets and the Chinese. Though rapprochement with China and detente with the Soviet Union were ends in themselves, I also considered them possible means to hasten the end of the war. At worst, Hanoi was bound to feel less confident if Washington was dealing with Moscow and Peking. At best, if the two major Communist powers decided that they had bigger fish to fry, Hanoi would be pressured into negotiating a settlement we could accept.
PEACE NEGOTIATIONS. Our decision to forgo a quick military victory increased the importance of the negotiating process in Paris. I was far less optimistic than some of my advisers about the possibility of quick progress in the negotiations unless we coupled our diplomatic efforts with irresistible military pressure. Ho Chi Minh and his battle-hardened colleagues had not fought and sacrificed for twenty-five years in order to negotiate a compromise peace. They were fighting for total victory. But in the hope that I was wrong, I vigorously pursued the negotiating process. I had another compelling reason for doing so. I knew it would not be possible to sustain public and congressional support for our military efforts unless we could demonstrate that we were exploring every avenue for ending the war through negotiations. I insisted on only two conditions: I made it clear I would reject any settlement that did not include the return of all our POWs and that did not protect the right of the South Vietnamese people to determine their own future.
GRADUAL WITHDRAWAL. The key new element in our strategy was a plan for the complete withdrawal of all American combat troops from Vietnam. Americans needed tangible evidence that we were winding down the war, and the South Vietnamese needed to be given more responsibility for their defense. We were not recklessly pulling out according to a fixed schedule. We linked the pace of our withdrawal to the progress of Vietnamization, the level of enemy activity, and developments at the negotiating table. Our withdrawal was to be made from strength, not from weakness. As South Vietnamese forces became stronger, the rate of American withdrawal could become greater. The announcement of the withdrawal program made another subtle but profoundly important point: While the French had fought to stay in Vietnam, the United States was fighting to get out.
Our new strategy in Vietnam sought to achieve the goal for which we had fought for four years. While the United States was going to end its involvement in the war, it would keep its commitments to South Vietnam. We would continue to fight until the Communists agreed to negotiate a fair and honorable peace or until the South Vietnamese were able to defend themselves on their own—whichever came first.
• • •
All five elements of our strategy needed time to take hold. I knew that we would have enough time only if the level of the fighting remained low. If the war heated up, American casualty rates and, in turn, domestic pressure to get out of Vietnam would increase dramatically. I also knew that the North Vietnamese would negotiate at the conference table only if we convinced them that they could not win on the battlefield.
In February 1969, while we were negotiating in Paris and preparing a new peace initiative to probe Hanoi’s intentions, the North Vietnamese launched a savage offensive in South Vietnam. Communist forces killed 453 Americans in the first week, 336 in the second, 351 in the third. South Vietnamese troops were being killed at a rate of over 500 per week. North Vietnamese forces launched a direct attack across the demilitarized zone and indiscriminately fired rockets into Saigon.
These moves were a deliberate test. If there were any truly binding understandings given in exchange for the bombing halt in November 1968, the North Vietnamese were blatantly violating them. I believed that if we let the Communists manipulate us at this early stage, we might never be able to negotiate with them from a position of strength, or even equality. The only way we could get things moving on the negotiating front was to do something on the military front. I therefore concluded that retaliation was necessary.
Our first option was to resume the bombing of North Vietnam. Ideally, we should have dealt a swift blow that would have made Hanoi’s leaders think twice before they launched another attack in the South. But I was stuck with Johnson’s bombing halt. I knew that even though we could show that North Vietnam clearly had violated the “understandings,” bombing North Vietnam would produce a violent outburst of domestic protest. This, in turn, would have destroyed our efforts to bring the country together in support of our plan for peace. I decided that the importance of our domestic unity outweighed the need to retaliate directly against North Vietnam.
Our second option was to bomb North Vietnam’s military sanctuaries just inside Cambodia along t
he border with South Vietnam. Cambodia was formally neutral. But its neutrality was a formality. We honored Cambodia’s neutrality; North Vietnam trampled it. Since 1965, the Communists had established a string of bases on Cambodian territory because they knew that their forces in these areas would be immune to attack. North Vietnam in effect annexed these territories, expelling virtually all Cambodian civilians who lived in or near them. Once secured, the bases were stocked with thousands of tons of supplies shipped in through the Cambodian port at Sihanoukville. For four years Communist troops had struck across the border at American and South Vietnamese forces and then escaped back to the safety of their jungle sanctuaries. A classic example of this tactic was their offensive in February 1969. In March we decided to bomb one of these bases in retaliation.
We also decided to keep the bombing secret. We did this for two reasons: We wanted to avoid the domestic uproar that might result from a publicized air strike, and we wanted to avoid putting Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia’s head of state, in a perilous political position.
I had first met Sihanouk sixteen years before. From the long talks I had with him when I visited Phnom Penh in 1953, I knew he was a clever, opportunistic survivor. His actions did not govern events; events governed his actions. What he did or could do depended largely on what happened in Vietnam. For years he had maneuvered to appease the North Vietnamese because he believed that they represented the side with the best chance of winning. In 1965, when South Vietnam was tottering on the brink of collapse, he severed diplomatic relations with Washington and acquiesced in the establishment of Communist sanctuaries and supply lines in Cambodia.
By the late 1960s, when the tide of the war had turned, Sihanouk began to grow deeply concerned about the Communist military presence in his country. He looked to the United States for help. “We don’t want any Vietnamese in Cambodia,” he told an emissary from President Johnson in January 1968. “We will be very glad if you solve our problem. We are not opposed to hot pursuit in uninhabited areas. You will liberate us from the Viet Cong. For me only Cambodia counts. I want you to force the Viet Cong to leave Cambodia.” Also, in a press interview in December 1967, Sihanouk said that he would grant American and South Vietnamese forces the right to go into his country in “hot pursuit” of North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front troops, as long as no Cambodians were harmed.
As we considered the bombing of the sanctuaries in March 1969, we made these calculations. We knew Sihanouk would approve of the air strikes. But we also knew that he could not afford to endorse our bombing publicly, both because it would violate his formal neutrality and because it would risk provoking a North Vietnamese reprisal. If we bombed the sanctuaries secretly, we believed Sihanouk would probably remain silent. If we announced our bombing publicly, we believed he probably would feel compelled to protest our actions. Cambodian protests, in turn, would create pressure on us to stop the bombing. We therefore proceeded in secrecy.
On March 18, our first bombing run in Cambodia took place. It was a great success. We received reports that our bombs touched off multiple secondary explosions, which meant that they had hit ammunition dumps or fuel depots. Crew members observed a total of seventy-three such explosions in the target area, ranging up to five times the normal intensity of a typical secondary explosion. Politically, Hanoi’s diplomatic foot-dragging ended as its delegate in Paris quickly took up our proposal to convene a session of private talks.
Originally we had contemplated only this one attack. We were prepared to defend our action publicly if we received a formal protest. But none was made. Hanoi’s leaders had no grounds for complaint, because they had for years denied that they had any troops in Cambodia. And Sihanouk, as we expected, assented to our bombing through his silence.
In April and May, I ordered air strikes against a string of enemy-occupied areas within five miles of the border. White House approval was required for each attack through August 1969; thereafter, I turned over general authority to conduct the bombing campaign to our commanders in the field. Our sorties, now conducted regularly against the sanctuaries, wreaked havoc with the enemy’s logistics and forced the Communists to abort planned offensives. By curtailing the enemy’s ability to attack within South Vietnam, the secret bombing saved the lives of many of our fighting men and bought us valuable time to press forward with Vietnamization.
In May 1969, leaks to the news media revealed our operations. Sihanouk’s response to the stories showed that he was in favor of what we were doing. “Here it is,” he said at a press conference, “the first report about several B-52 bombings. Yet I have not been informed about that at all, because I have not lost any houses, any countrymen, nothing, nothing. Nobody was caught in those barrages—nobody, no Cambodians.” He added, “If there is a buffalo or any Cambodian killed, I will be informed immediately. But this is an affair between the Americans and the Viet Cong—Viet Minh without any Khmer witnesses. There have been no Khmer witnesses, so how can I protest?”
Some critics later contended that the secret bombing was an illegal abuse of presidential power. There was no substance to this charge. No reasonable interpretation of the Constitution could conclude that the President, as commander in chief, was forbidden from attacking areas occupied by enemy forces and used by them as bases from which to strike at American and allied troops. Congress was consulted within the limits imposed by the necessary secrecy of the operation. Richard Russell and John Stennis, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, were informed and approved of our plans.
Former President Eisenhower was the only one outside of government that I informed about the bombing. When I briefed him on the operation at Walter Reed Hospital, he strongly endorsed the decision.
The charge that our bombing was illegal under the standards of international law also was without foundation. It is illegal to bomb a neutral country. But neutrality is more than pacifism. As the Hague Convention of 1907 stated, “A neutral country has the obligation not to allow its territory to be used by a belligerent. If the neutral country is unwilling or unable to prevent this, the other belligerent has the right to take appropriate counteraction.” North Vietnam was using Cambodian territory as a staging bound for its aggression. South Vietnam and the United States therefore had the right to strike back at the North Vietnamese forces inside Cambodia.
By mid-1969, Sihanouk made it plain that he understood it was North Vietnam’s actions, not those of the United States, that were endangering his people and threatening to pull his country into the war. In June he complained at a press conference that Hanoi had crowded so many Communist troops into one of Cambodia’s northeast provinces that it was “practically North Vietnamese territory.” A month later he invited me to visit Cambodia to mark the improving relations between our two countries.
• • •
While we applied pressure on the military front, we continued to push forward on the diplomatic front. On December 20,1968, I had sent a message to Hanoi indicating our interest in a fair negotiated settlement. The message was sent through Jean Sainteny, a personal friend whom I had met at the home of Paul Louis Weiller in the south of France in 1965 and who had good relations with the North Vietnamese leaders. On February 1, 1969, in one of my first directives to the National Security Council staff, I had ordered a preliminary exploration of the possibility of a rapprochement with Communist China. We had also taken the first steps toward a detente with the Soviet Union. On April 14, Kissinger met with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin and presented a proposal for setting up a private negotiating channel with North Vietnam.
On May 14, in a nationally televised address, I put forward a new peace proposal. Its terms went beyond any proposal made by Johnson. I proposed that we arrange for a mutual withdrawal of American and North Vietnamese forces and for internationally supervised, free elections to decide the future of South Vietnam. I instructed our delegate to the peace talks, Henry Cabot Lodge, to be as forthcoming as possible to
North Vietnamese counterproposals. On June 8, I met with President Thieu on Midway Island. He expressed his support for our peace proposal. We also announced that the United States was withdrawing 25,000 military personnel from Vietnam—the first reduction since combat forces arrived in 1961. On July 16, I sent another appeal for peace to Ho Chi Minh in a letter delivered through Jean Sainteny. On August 2, I met with Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu, and he agreed to use his influence with the North Vietnamese to get the peace talks off dead center.
All our conciliatory moves proved useless. On August 25, Ho Chi Minh’s reply to my personal letter arrived. He coldly rebuffed our peace proposals and insisted that we withdraw unilaterally from Vietnam and overthrow President Thieu’s government as we left.
On September 3, Ho Chi Minh died. Some observers speculated that his successors might be more amenable to ending the war through negotiations. They proved to be wrong. North Vietnam’s leader had changed, but its policies remained the same.
Meanwhile, public support for our war effort was eroding. Our peace initiatives, the start of our withdrawal program, and our conciliatory speeches slowed the erosion, but they also whetted the appetites of the antiwar activists. As we approached the first anniversary of the bombing halt on November 1, 1969, I knew the time had come for a bold move to mobilize American support for our military efforts so that we could secure a diplomatic settlement that would achieve the goal for which American soldiers had fought and died for over five years: a South Vietnam free from Communist domination and capable of defending itself against both its internal and external enemies.
What we needed most was time. No President has a limitless amount of time to invest in any policy. Because my predecessors had exhausted the patience of the American people with the Vietnam War, I was acutely aware that I was living on borrowed time. If I was to have enough time for my policies to succeed, my first priority had to be to gather as much political support as possible for the war from the American people.
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