My political advisers believed that it would be in my interest to let the Pentagon Papers come out. First of all, the study focused principally on Kennedy’s and Johnson’s handling of the war. Because it was written in 1968, it could contain nothing about my administration’s actions. Furthermore, the Times stories about the Pentagon Papers leveled serious charges against my Democratic predecessors. Most of the accusations were based on grotesque distortions of the historical record. But that did not alter the fact that it would be to my political advantage for them to appear on the front page of virtually every newspaper in the country.
Nevertheless, I decided to try to block the publication of the Pentagon Papers because concrete policy considerations outweighed whatever political benefits I might accrue. It posed a significant threat to some of our national security interests. The National Security Agency feared that the more recent documents would provide code-breaking clues and contain information about our signal and electronic intelligence capabilities that would be spotted by the trained eyes of enemy experts. The State Department was alarmed because the study would reveal SEATO contingency war plans that were still in effect. The Central Intelligence Agency was worried that it would expose past or current informants and would contain specific references to the names and activities of agents still active in Southeast Asia. One secret contact dried up almost immediately, and other governments became reluctant to share their intelligence information with us.
We also were concerned that the release of the Pentagon Papers would damage our delicate negotiations with China and the Soviet Union. Diplomacy, especially with Communist powers, depends on secrecy. If leaders cannot express their views frankly for fear that what they say will appear in the next day’s headlines, the chances of making progress in negotiations will be sharply reduced. If, for example, word had leaked out about our China initiative, those who opposed it in both countries would have destroyed any chances for success. When the Pentagon Papers were leaked, Kissinger was about to take his first secret trip to Peking, and the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the Soviet Union were just getting started. I knew that before going forward with our rapprochement, the Chinese would watch carefully to see how I handled disclosure of the Pentagon Papers. In their eyes, a failure to act would have meant that we were an unreliable partner with whom it would be risky to share sensitive information.
If the New York Times had acted with any degree of responsibility, we could have avoided the battle in the court. But it had not done so. Its editors admitted having had possession of the documents for more than three months before publishing them. Yet never once had they asked anyone in the government whether publication of any of the classified material might threaten national security or endanger the lives of our men in Vietnam.
The Supreme Court ruled against the government. But I still believe I acted responsibly in challenging the right of the New York Times to publish the Pentagon’s study. Its release was an illegal action. Its publication was a threat to our ability to conduct foreign policy. If we had done nothing, we would have been setting a dangerous precedent: Every disgruntled bureaucrat in Washington would have read our inaction as a signal that he could leak anything he pleased and that the government would simply stand by helplessly. In the thirteen years since the Supreme Court sanctioned the Times’s publication of the Pentagon Papers, that is exactly what has happened.
• • •
Our pacification and Vietnamization programs completely transformed the war in Vietnam. The military picture we faced in 1972 was almost entirely different from the one we faced even as late as 1970. We had countered the Communists’ strategy of guerrilla war so effectively that they abandoned it. Their new strategy was to wage a conventional war. In short, Hanoi had chosen to fight our kind of war.
In early 1972, we expected a major Communist offensive that would decide the outcome of the war. The presence of North Vietnamese tanks in Laos indicated that the assault would not be an urban insurrection like the Tet Offensive but an overt invasion by a conventional army. If it succeeded, South Vietnam would be swept off the map. If it failed, North Vietnam would be forced to negotiate an end to the war. We were prepared for their attack because all five elements of our Vietnam policy had come together.
Our Vietnamization program had turned South Vietnam’s military into a formidable fighting force. Its army had 120 infantry battalions organized into 11 divisions, 58 artillery battalions, and 19 armored units of battalion size. Its navy had 43,000 sailors operating 1,680 naval craft. Its air force had 51,000 servicemen operating more than 1,000 aircraft. South Vietnam, with a population of 19 million, had over 1 million men in its armed forces and another 3 million in its local militias.
Our pacification program had extended Saigon’s control throughout the country down to the hamlet level. Our South Vietnamese allies had uprooted the Communist infrastructure, thereby depriving enemy forces of supplies and military intelligence. Our economic aid had produced unprecedented prosperity for the South Vietnamese people.
Our great-power diplomacy had unnerved the North Vietnamese by isolating them from China and the Soviet Union. During my summit meeting in China in February 1972, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai mildly criticized American actions in Vietnam, but they spoke more in sorrow than anger. I also had initiated the process of detente with the Soviet Union. A summit meeting with Leonid Brezhnev was scheduled for May in Moscow. We were close to resolving several issues of great importance to the Soviets, including a major grain deal and the first Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement. Brezhnev considered the war in Vietnam an issue of secondary significance by comparison. Neither major Communist power had helped us end the war. But both had taken clear steps to distance themselves from Hanoi. Communist leaders by training and practice are master conspirators. They never trust their adversaries and seldom trust each other. The fact that we were meeting with their major allies in Peking and Moscow had to concern the men in North Vietnam’s politburo.
Our staged troop-withdrawal program had sustained support for the war effort in Congress and among the American people for three years. By January 1, 1972, we had withdrawn over 400,000 troops from Vietnam. None of the 133,200 troops who remained were involved in the ground fighting, and most were to be withdrawn within six months. I doubt that we could have continued fighting the war if we had not been gradually withdrawing our troops. Since 1969, we had been faced with the danger of Congress legislating an end to our involvement. Antiwar senators and congressmen had been introducing resolutions to force us to trade a total withdrawal of our troops for the return of our POWs. By 1972, the Senate was regularly passing these measures, and the votes in the House were getting close. We were able to prevent the passage of these bills only because our withdrawal announcements provided those whose support for the war was wavering with tangible evidence that our involvement was winding down.
During this period we were making every possible effort to reach a negotiated settlement. With phenomenal stamina, tenacity, and patience, Henry Kissinger tried again and again to break the logjam in sessions of our secret negotiations in Paris. North Vietnam rejected all of our proposals categorically. In October 1971, Kissinger made our final peace offer: a standstill cease-fire followed within six months by a total American withdrawal, a mutual exchange of POWs, and an internationally supervised election in South Vietnam in which the Communists could participate. Our proposal stretched the limits of our generosity. If the North Vietnamese were sincerely interested in peace, they would have been interested in our offer. But Hanoi again refused to negotiate seriously.
For three years the North Vietnamese had ruthlessly exploited our secret negotiations in order to divide Americans on the home front. On the one hand, they had stalemated the peace talks. Hanoi persistently demanded that we withdraw our forces unilaterally and that we overthrow President Thieu’s government as we left. These conditions were unacceptable. We had not fought for ten years and lost over 50,000 lives so that w
e could install a Communist government in Saigon as we withdrew in disgrace. On the other hand, the North Vietnamese planted stories in the press and circulated rumors among antiwar activists to the effect that the United States was blocking progress in the talks. This took a toll on public support of the war. We found ourselves being criticized for failing to make certain concessions that in fact we had already made in the private talks. But we could refute these criticisms only by disclosing the secret negotiations, which we feared might destroy any chance for them to succeed.
Finally I concluded that Hanoi’s refusal to respond to our October offer, coupled with reports of a huge North Vietnamese buildup, probably meant that it had opted for a test of arms on the battlefield. I therefore decided that the time had come to make clear to the American people just who was obstructing the talks. Only in this way could we muster support for whatever actions might become necessary when North Vietnam launched its offensive. On January 25, 1972, in a nationally televised address, I revealed the record of the twelve sessions of Kissinger’s secret talks and reiterated the terms of our final proposal. In conclusion I said, “The only thing this plan does not do is to join our enemy to overthrow our ally, which the United States of America will never do. If the enemy wants peace, it will have to recognize the important difference between settlement and surrender.”
• • •
On March 30, 1972, the North Vietnamese launched a massive invasion of South Vietnam. Striking at our ally’s weakest point, three full divisions, along with 200 Soviet T-54 tanks and scores of 130mm guns, trampled across the internationally recognized neutral territory of the demilitarized zone. More forces swept in from Laos along Route 9 toward Hue. Other units were poised to strike into the central highlands toward Kontum and Pleiku and to invade southern South Vietnam from Cambodia. It was as blatant as North Korea’s invasion of South Korea in 1950.
I considered North Vietnam’s attack a sign of desperation. Hanoi clearly believed Vietnamization was working. If it were not, the North Vietnamese could have waited and let it fail after almost all of our troops were gone. They also had to be concerned about the fact that we were developing a new relationship with their allies in Moscow and Peking. They knew that time was not on their side. I gave no consideration whatsoever to the suggestion of some of my aides that, particularly with an election coming up, we should let South Vietnam fend for itself. I believed that it would be not only immoral but stupid to stand by quietly while North Vietnam bludgeoned our South Vietnamese allies. Hanoi had refused to settle the war at the conference table. Now, after the North Vietnamese had chosen to fight the kind of war we fought best, we were in a position to force them to settle on our terms.
During the first weeks of the invasion, the news from Vietnam was discouraging. On April 2, just south of the demilitarized zone, North Vietnam’s forces mauled South Vietnam’s Third Division. Fourteen bases were abandoned as South Vietnamese resistance collapsed under the intense onslaught. Communist troops driving toward Hue threatened to isolate all of South Vietnam’s northern units in a giant pincer movement. On April 5, three North Vietnamese divisions struck into Binh Long Province, about seventy-five miles north of Saigon. On April 13, in their push toward the South Vietnamese capital, they surrounded the town of Anloc; supplies could be dropped only by parachute. On April 23, North Vietnamese troops rolled into the central highlands toward Kontum. South Vietnam’s Twenty-second Division fell apart under attack, but its Twenty-third Division held the line. On April 27, the North Vietnamese launched a new wave of attacks along the northern front, and four days later the provincial capital of Quang Tri fell to the Communists.
During their offensive, the Communists once again engaged in barbaric attacks on civilians. At both Anloc and Quang Tri, North Vietnamese troops indiscriminately fired artillery shells into crowds of refugees who were fleeing the fighting. Thousands were killed. In Communist-occupied areas of Binh Dinh Province, there were public executions of hundreds of individuals suspected of having ties to the Saigon government. In one hamlet, forty-seven local officials were buried alive. In Quang Ngai Province, Communist troops strung land mines around forty victims and then, as their wives and children watched, detonated the mines, blowing the helpless captives to bits.
Our response to the offensive was quick in coming. Hanoi was now fighting a large-unit conventional war. Its infantry divisions, tank columns, and logistics system all made perfect targets for our air power. On April 1, I ordered the bombing of North Vietnamese territory within twenty-five miles of the demilitarized zone. Within two weeks, I authorized air strikes up to the twentieth parallel. I also ordered the Pentagon to assemble a massive sea and air attack force in Southeast Asia. Initially, to augment those forces already in Southeast Asia, I sent two cruisers and eight destroyers for sea bombardment, and twenty B-52 bombers and four squadrons of F-4 fighter-bombers for battlefield air strikes and a renewed bombing campaign against North Vietnam. More deployments followed later.
On May 2, Kissinger met with Hanoi’s delegation for a secret negotiating session in Paris. Over the years he had always had to listen to a litany of verbal abuse from his interlocutors during these sessions. Now, confident of imminent military victory, Hanoi’s representatives were even more insolent and unbearable. After putting up with insults and invective for three hours, Kissinger broke off the talks.
That was Hanoi’s last chance. I decided that now it was essential to defeat North Vietnam’s invasion. If the enemy had one Achilles’ heel, it was his supply system. Intelligence reports estimated that to sustain their push into South Vietnam his forces needed several thousands of tons of ammunition and fuel every day. Our best chance of halting the invasion was to take decisive action to stop the shipment of these supplies.
It was a difficult decision. Only two months earlier I had gone to Peking and opened our new relationship with the People’s Republic of China, and in only three weeks I was scheduled to go to Moscow for my first summit meeting with Brezhnev. I did not know what reaction to expect from China and the Soviet Union, who had strongly backed North Vietnam, if I attacked their ally. But I believed that if we allowed North Vietnam to conquer South Vietnam, the hardheaded realists in the politburos in Peking and Moscow might think a United States that lacked the will to defend its interests was not worth talking to. Consequently, I ordered the mining of North Vietnam’s ports, including Haiphong Harbor, and the bombing of prime military targets throughout North Vietnam, including those in Hanoi.
On May 8, I announced this decision in a nationally televised address. After describing the North Vietnamese invasion, I outlined our three options: an immediate withdrawal, a negotiated peace or a decisive military action to end the war. I said that I had rejected the first option because it would be immoral to abandon our South Vietnamese allies to Communist tyranny and because it would encourage aggression throughout the world. I explained that while I preferred the second option, “it takes two to negotiate” and the North Vietnamese had proven to be unwilling partners. Therefore, I said, the United States really had no choice at all: “There is only one way to stop the killing. That is to keep the weapons of war out of the hands of the international outlaws of North Vietnam.” In order to leave the door open for later negotiations, I concluded with a reiteration of our basic terms for a fair peace settlement.
Antiwar critics and the news media competed with each other in denouncing our action. One senator remarked that the decision was “reckless and wrong.” Another said that “the President must not have a free hand in Indochina any longer.” One newspaper called the decision a “desperate gamble” and urged that Congress should cut off funds for the war to “save the President from himself and the nation from disaster.” Another claimed that the President “has lost touch with the real world.” One legislator topped them all when he breathlessly intoned that the President “has thrown down the gauntlet of nuclear war to a billion people in the Soviet Union and China . . . Armageddon may be onl
y hours away.” There was nearly unanimous agreement that, as one network reporter put it, our action “practically kills prospects of a summit” with the Soviet leadership. Most of the members of Congress, my cabinet, and my staff shared the view that the summit would probably be off.
Hanoi claimed our actions were an “insolent challenge” and asked for increased support from its Communist allies. But Moscow and Peking did not man the battle stations. Both went through the motions of protesting our actions, but otherwise did nothing. China expressed its support for North Vietnam and criticized our actions in public and private, but the Chinese did not back up their words with any actions. In fact, Peking reprinted my May 8 speech, complete with my denunciations of North Vietnam’s intransigence and aggression, in the official state newspaper.
Kissinger and I agreed there was a good chance the Soviets would cancel or postpone our summit meeting. But signals soon came in indicating that they wanted to go forward with it. Their public criticism was, by Communist standards, muted. Their private protests were limited to the damage caused by our bombing of their ships in port. Their arms-control and trade negotiators affected an attitude of business as usual. In spite of the dire predictions of our critics, our first Soviet-American summit came off on schedule on May 22.
Brezhnev went forward with the summit for two reasons. First, he wanted and needed better relations with the United States, particularly in view of our China initiative. Second, he knew we were worth talking to, because our actions in Vietnam had demonstrated that we had not only the power to defend our interests but also the will to use it. If we had not acted, we might have had to go to Moscow while Soviet-made tanks were rumbling through the streets of Hue and Saigon. We would have been in an intolerable position of weakness. Brezhnev would have assumed that if I could be pushed around in Vietnam, I could also be pushed around in Moscow.
No More Vietnams Page 16