Our diplomacy with Moscow and Peking had turned the tables on Hanoi. It had been an article of faith within the Kennedy and Johnson administrations that making a decisive military move against North Vietnam risked the intervention of China and the Soviet Union. That now changed: Hanoi was fearful that its allies might use their leverage to intervene on the side of its enemy. A North Vietnamese official later complained in an interview, “Nixon is capitalizing on the disunity among the socialist countries in one way or another to be free to act. This affects our war and, thus, our fighting has become very difficult.”
During May, South Vietnam’s army turned the tide in the ground war. By May 4, after times when it seemed all might be lost, the South Vietnamese had pulled themselves together and reestablished the northern front twenty-five miles north of Hue. Once the initial crisis passed, South Vietnam’s army fought better than it had in any previous battle. The failure of the North Vietnamese to launch their three attacks simultaneously was skillfully exploited by the South Vietnamese, who shifted their airborne divisions from front to front, depending on where the fighting was heaviest. When South Vietnam’s forces established a defensive perimeter, North Vietnam’s troops had to assume fixed positions. This enabled us virtually to destroy them with B-52 strikes.
When I received the first proposals for bombing North Vietnam from the Pentagon during the first week of May, I hit the ceiling. Their proposals were a timid replay of the Johnson bombing campaign from 1965 through 1968. In a long memorandum to Kissinger, I wrote, “I cannot emphasize too strongly that I have determined that we should go for broke.” I went on to say that we were in danger of doing too little too late and that it was better to err on the side of doing too much while we had maximum public support. “I think we have had too much of a tendency to talk big and act little,” I wrote. “This was certainly the weakness of the Johnson administration. To an extent it may have been our weakness where we have warned the enemy time and time again and then have acted in a rather mild way when the enemy has tested us. He has now gone over the brink and so have we. We have the power to destroy his war-making capacity. The only question is whether we have the will to use that power.” I made it clear that I had the will to take strong actions and was prepared to risk the consequences.
Once I had clarified what I wanted done, our armed forces brought our tremendous firepower to bear on the enemy with stunning results. We mobilized every available ship in the Seventh Fleet. Over 400 B-52 bombers and F-4 fighter-bombers struck at targets both on the front in South Vietnam and in the rear in North Vietnam.
Like Johnson, I restricted our bombing to military targets. Charges that we were systematically bombing North Vietnam’s dikes were enemy propaganda. No credible evidence was ever produced to substantiate them. But unlike Johnson, I did not retain personal control over target selection. Since a bombing campaign was a military operation, I put Admiral Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and our military commanders in Vietnam in charge of conducting it. There were bombing restrictions within a twenty-five-to thirty-mile-deep buffer zone and within ten miles of Hanoi and five miles of Haiphong. But even within these areas, field commanders could hit certain types of targets—such as power plants, munitions dumps, and air bases—without approval from Washington.
By November we had pounded North Vietnamese positions near the demilitarized zone with over 16,000 tons of naval bombardment and had dropped over 155,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnam. We had expended less bombing tonnage than Johnson had during a comparable period. But because North Vietnam was now waging a conventional war and because I had given our commanders the authority to maximize the advantage of our air power, we succeeded in crippling North Vietnam’s military effort.
Our most telling operation was the mining of North Vietnam harbors and the blockade of its coast. The port at Haiphong received an estimated 2.1 million tons of supplies a year, including over 85 percent of North Vietnam’s military matériel and 100 percent of its oil. Once our mines were in place, not a single ship entered or exited the port. It was impossible to transfer these shipments to the railroads through China without an extended period of adjustment. In early June we received reports that over 1,000 railroad cars were backed up on the Chinese side of the border and that ammunition shortages were becoming acute. Hanoi’s offensive had bogged down.
When I spoke at the Oxford Union in 1978, one of the British students asked whether I had any regrets about ordering the incursion into Cambodia. I replied that my only regret was that I had not done it earlier. I have the same regrets with regard to my May 8, 1972, decision. We should have begun bombing North Vietnam and mining its harbors at the time of our Cambodian operations in 1970. From a military standpoint, it would have been far better to strike at Hanoi’s military strength in North Vietnam rather than waiting until its troops were moving through Laos and Cambodia or fighting in South Vietnam.
I did not act sooner for three reasons. First, as the violent reaction to the Cambodia incursions would prove, I believed it would be very hard to hold the country together while pursuing a military solution. I thought that adding the bombing and mining to the incursions would have been more than the traffic could bear. Second, I knew that winning a temporary respite from enemy actions would not by itself guarantee South Vietnam’s survival. It was imperative that the United States be able to stay in Vietnam until our allies had developed the capability to defend themselves. Third, since our initiatives to open new relationships with China and the Soviet Union were only in their early stages, I feared that their chances for success would be snuffed out if we took such strong action against their North Vietnamese allies.
In retrospect, however, I would have to agree that a good case can be made by those who believe that we should have taken strong action against North Vietnam much earlier than we did.
In June, South Vietnam’s counteroffensive began. For over two months the defenders of Anloc held out with phenomenal courage under a brutal siege. Every soldier had been a casualty at some point. Now, with the help of our bombing, they began to strike back. After two weeks of house-to-house fighting, they had cleared the city of enemy troops. By August the South Vietnamese Army had retaken the rest of Binh Long Province. On June 28, it attacked along the northern front. Ten weeks later, despite the monsoon rains, three South Vietnamese divisions had pushed six North Vietnamese divisions out of the provincial capital of Quang Tri.
North Vietnam had thrown the total weight of its armed forces into the spring offensive. Fourteen divisions and twenty-six independent regiments had invaded South Vietnam, leaving one division and four independent regiments in Laos and no regular ground forces at all in North Vietnam. Hanoi’s armed forces were in tatters. Seventy-five percent of its tanks had been destroyed. Its ranks were now filled with sixteen- and seventeen-year-old soldiers. Some of its battalions had been ground down to fifty troops. Estimates put the number of their killed in action at over 100,000.
In the spring offensive of 1972, South Vietnam’s army had held off the North Vietnamese onslaught without the assistance of any American ground combat troops. Our senior military commanders in Vietnam and Washington, many of whom had earlier questioned whether Vietnamization would succeed, now unanimously agreed that the South Vietnamese Army had proved that, if properly equipped and led, it could hold its own against North Vietnam’s best troops.
We can never know whether the South Vietnamese could have won without the assistance of American air power. But we know for certain that we could not have won with our air power alone. Vietnamization had worked. Our ally had stopped the spring offensive on the ground, and our bombing had crushed it.
• • •
It was fashionable in academic circles to assert that the Vietnam War proved that military power no longer had any utility in international politics. But the exact opposite was the case. For almost four years the North Vietnamese had stalled both our public and private peace talks. Now, after the United Stat
es and South Vietnam had decisively defeated North Vietnam’s spring offensive, Hanoi for the first time began to negotiate seriously.
Hanoi’s reading of American politics added an incentive to settle the war quickly. Because I was leading Senator McGovern by as much as thirty percentage points in the polls, the North Vietnamese probably concluded that I was almost certainly going to be reelected on November 7. They also probably believed that they might get better terms from me before the election than after it.
As a result, our private channel with the North Vietnamese became active in August. In late September they presented a new proposal during a two-day session of our secret talks. Although it was significantly more forthcoming than any of their past proposals, it was still unacceptable on the key military and political issues. It was clear that the next meeting, scheduled for October 8, would be decisive in determining whether they intended to reach a settlement before the presidential election.
When the talks reconvened, Hanoi made a proposal in which it capitulated on most of the major issues. The North Vietnamese abandoned their demands for a unilateral American withdrawal, a coalition government for South Vietnam, the overthrow of President Thieu, and a cutoff of our military and economic aid to Saigon. Hanoi’s new proposal called for a cease-fire in place, which we had been offering since late 1970, followed by an American withdrawal and an exchange of POWs within sixty days. When we signed the Paris peace agreements in January 1973, some observers claimed that we could have reached an identical settlement in 1969. They ignore the fact that Hanoi rejected these very terms until October 1972.
Most of our remaining disputes were hammered out in another session of talks in mid-October. But on one major issue we could not budge the North Vietnamese from their position: They refused to withdraw their forces from South Vietnam. All along they had asserted that the conflict was a civil war and refused to acknowledge explicitly that they had any troops in the South. Hanoi therefore rejected our repeated demands for their withdrawal on the grounds that they were not involved in the war.
We knew there was no way to force them to concede this point. It is an axiom of diplomacy that one cannot win at the conference table what one could not win on the battlefield. Although South Vietnam had reversed the tide of battle before the monsoons set in, the North Vietnamese continued to occupy large areas of South Vietnam along the demilitarized zone and in the central highlands. We had to consider how Hanoi viewed its options. We knew that if reaching a settlement required the North Vietnamese to give away territory that South Vietnam had been unable to take away, they would calculate that they were better off not concluding an agreement. If we had stood firm in demanding North Vietnam’s withdrawal, there would have been no peace agreement.
In resolving the issue, we never conceded the legitimacy of North Vietnam’s military presence in South Vietnam. Our tactic was to write a formulation that tacitly required the enemy to withdraw. We demanded that Hanoi pledge to stop the infiltration of men into South Vietnam. If the promise was kept, enemy forces in the South soon would have to withdraw or else wither away. When the North Vietnamese agreed to this, we set a timetable for signing a completed agreement by October 31.
On October 18, when Kissinger flew to South Vietnam to explain the agreement to the South Vietnamese, he ran into strong resistance from Thieu. After meeting with the entire South Vietnamese National Security Council and the ambassadors to the Paris talks, Kissinger reported that the South Vietnamese leaders were exhibiting a surprising awe of Communist cunning and a disquieting lack of confidence in themselves. It was clear that they were having great difficulty with the prospect of cutting the American umbilical cord. As Kissinger saw it, we were up against a paradoxical situation in which North Vietnam, which had in effect lost the war, was acting as if it had won, while South Vietnam, which had effectively won the war, was acting as if it had lost.
Thieu understandably wanted the agreement to require the North Vietnamese to withdraw their forces from his country. But his objections went deeper: He was profoundly insecure about what would happen after the United States withdrew. As a result, he proposed over twenty changes to the draft agreement, seven of which we knew the North Vietnamese would never accept. It now seemed inevitable that the October 31 deadline would pass without an agreement.
While negotiating with Thieu, we were also negotiating with the North Vietnamese over his reservations about the draft agreement. Hanoi, noting the difficulties we were having with Saigon, pursued a cleverly calculated strategy: On the one hand, its delegates agreed to virtually all of the technical points we raised in order to build a perfect negotiating record that, if publicized, would make it appear that South Vietnam was obstructing a settlement. On the other hand, through leaks and press interviews, they portrayed the agreement as a Communist victory. Their strategy sought to whipsaw Thieu between international and domestic public opinion. If he rejected the agreement, he would be attacked throughout the world for refusing what appeared to be fair terms. If he accepted it, he would be attacked within South Vietnam for caving in to what the Communists were presenting as terms favorable to them.
On October 26, the North Vietnamese sprang their trap by going public with the peace agreement, including our timetable for signing. Kissinger went ahead with a press conference he had scheduled that day to reassure the North Vietnamese that we were serious about reaching an agreement and to distract attention from Thieu’s objections. In his opening statement, he said, “We believe that peace is at hand. We believe that an agreement is within sight, based on the May 8 proposals of the President and some adaptations of our January 25 proposal, which is just to all parties.” News-media reports focused on the his statement that “peace is at hand.” I knew immediately that our bargaining position with the North Vietnamese would be seriously eroded. Since we had publicly stated that we expected the negotiations to produce an agreement, there would be pressure on us to deliver—and that could be exploited to extract concessions from us.
Our critics claimed that Kissinger’s statement was a ploy to win voters with the election less than two weeks away. This was not true. Polls indicated that our handling of the war in Vietnam was generally viewed as a positive issue for me and a negative one for McGovem, who was perceived as weak and even as favoring surrender. If we had hastily concluded an agreement in time for the election, it would have provoked charges of the worst kind of cynicism. It would not have won us new support from either side of the political spectrum: A suspiciously quick agreement would have led hawks to accuse us of selling out in order to meet a self-serving deadline, and doves to claim that I could have obtained the same terms in 1969.
I hit this issue head on in a televised campaign speech on November 2.1 declared, “We are not going to allow an election deadline or any other kind of deadline to force us into an agreement which would be only a temporary truce and not a lasting peace. We are going to sign the agreement when the agreement is right, not one day before. And when the agreement is right, we are going to sign, without one day’s delay.”
We soon concluded that meeting the October 31 deadline was unrealistic. Thieu’s unwillingness to agree to what I believed were the best possible terms was distressing. He seemed oblivous to the crucial issue. South Vietnam’s survival did not depend on whether enemy troops occupied a few sparsely populated regions. It depended on whether the United States enforced the terms of the peace agreement, both with continuing aid and with a credible threat of military action. That would be possible only if Saigon retained the support of Congress. If we did not settle the war quickly, Congress would probably legislate an end to the war in January. If Congress concluded that South Vietnamese obstructionism had delayed an agreement, it would probably undermine our ability to come to the aid of our ally if necessary. Nevertheless, I was willing to give Thieu more time to come around.
The negotiations were scheduled to reconvene after the election. In the meantime, we found that both Saigon and Hanoi were
playing a frustrating game with us. Our intelligence indicated that Thieu had told his generals to prepare for a ceasefire before Christmas, but he continued to pretend that he was willing to go it alone. Our intelligence also showed that Hanoi was preparing for military moves, but its delegates continued to affect a sincere desire to make peace.
On November 9, I sent Alexander Haig to consult with the South Vietnamese. I thought he was the best man to bring Thieu around because he would be able to talk to him as one respected military officer to another. He delivered a letter to Thieu in which I responded to the South Vietnamese objections to the October agreement. “We will use our maximum efforts to effect these changes in the agreement,” I wrote. “I wish to leave you under no illusion, however, that we can or will go beyond these changes in seeking to improve an agreement that we already consider to be excellent.” Haig stressed that if we did not reach a settlement before Congress reconvened in January, it would almost certainly cut off our aid to South Vietnam. He pressed Thieu relentlessly, but Thieu would not budge. He continued to restate his previous objections.
On November 14, I wrote another letter to Thieu. I reiterated that we would probably not be able to obtain all the adjustments he had requested. I pointed out that what was said in any agreement was what we would do in the event the North Vietnamese renewed their aggression. I added, “You have my absolute assurance that if Hanoi fails to abide by the terms of this agreement it is my intention to take swift and severe retaliatory action.”
Meanwhile, the North Vietnamese had decided to try to take advantage of our differences with Saigon. Hanoi had come to two conclusions: that a lack of progress in the talks would be blamed on Thieu and that, if an agreement was not forthcoming, Congress would pull the rug out from under us. Therefore, its delegates started to stall.
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