by Conrad Black
Despite all his rather amusing posturing about having a “plan” for Vietnam, neither he nor Kissinger, both of whom had visited there a number of times, had much idea of what to do, and they began by making a perfectly reasonable offer to Ho Chi Minh, not yet realizing that Ho not only wanted the whole country, he wanted the distinction of administering a bone-crushing military defeat on the United States as well, and thought he was halfway there with the tremendous antiwar protests in the U.S. Nixon proposed joint withdrawals, free elections, and so forth, and later received what he called a “quite frivolous” reply from Ho (who died on September 2, 1969, a few months short of his 80th birthday). Nixon had let it be known through channels that if he did not receive a substantive proposal from the North within a year of his election, he would take unspecified radical measures. The months went by with no sign of any movement, but the scale of the war was reduced, as the enemy was replenishing his losses from the Tet bloodbath.
Richard Nixon had been fascinated by and heavily involved in foreign policy for more than 20 years before he became president, and had been instrumental in leading the Republicans away from their post–Theodore Roosevelt isolationist roots. As vice president he had made many foreign visits all over the world and had become quite convivial with leading foreign statesmen, including de Gaulle and Adenauer. Despite the State Department, the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate, and most columnists advising against it, Nixon went to Europe from February 23 to March 3 and had an extremely successful visit. The Europeans had seen little of Johnson and didn’t much like what they did see. They liked Kennedy but those were relatively halcyon days. There was sentimental respect for Ike, dislike for Dulles, and admiration, from a distance, for Truman. Nixon was overwhelmingly prepared and had long had the habit of memorizing speeches and delivering them entirely from memory, and the Europeans were impressed by his fluency and foreign policy knowledge. (Nixon had a remarkable memory; he had played the piano since his childhood, but never read music, and memorized hundreds of compositions, including whole concertos.)
He was formidably informed and diplomatic with the NATO Council in Brussels, in meetings with British government leaders and prominent people, and with Queen Elizabeth. So it went in Germany and Italy, and then in extensive private discussions with de Gaulle. The French leader confirmed what the British prime minister, Harold Wilson, had said (having recently met with Soviet premier Kosygin), that relations between Russia and China had deteriorated very badly, although Kosygin and Brezhnev, when they deposed and replaced Khrushchev, had tried to improve those relations.
Since he had first met Nixon as vice president, de Gaulle had appreciated how knowledgeable Nixon was about foreign affairs, and was grateful for his deferences to him. Some of the meetings between them on this visit were at the Palace of Versailles, from which place de Gaulle claimed, in a wild exaggeration on the facts, “Louis XIV ruled Europe.” De Gaulle was correct in insisting on European nuclear deterrent forces, lest any Soviet-American dispute simply devastate Europe without directly endangering the homelands of the protagonists. (The unspoken European preference, if it came to it, was that the Americans and the Russians should slug it out between themselves and over Europe’s head.) Nixon sensibly argued for conventional deterrence in Europe and battlefield nuclear weapons, which would do great damage where forces clashed but avoid the devastation of the whole continent. The two views could be reconciled, and it went much better than with the tedious repeated and unrealistic demands of Eisenhower and Kennedy that Europe simply fold its forces into conventional subordinacy to the Americans.
De Gaulle proposed gradual American negotiation out of Vietnam, which Nixon took as indicating de Gaulle’s desire to use America’s distraction in Vietnam to facilitate the complicated East-West and intra-Alliance balance of power that de Gaulle had been gaming so effectively. (Nixon well remembered when France’s entrapment in Algeria had hobbled it in the world.) He diplomatically returned to Italy for separate meetings with Pope Paul VI, which went very cordially, and after receiving an initially skeptical but soon almost rapturous press in Europe, reflected in the media at home, Nixon and his large party returned, and the president’s handling of a lengthy press conference on his return was widely praised.
Nixon next attacked the strategic-arms mess that Kennedy, Johnson, McNamara, and Clifford had left. With great dexterity, Nixon announced his wish to revive arms-control discussions with the Soviets, which Johnson had deferred after the Czech invasion; reduced the defense budget by $2.5 billion, the first such reduction in 10 years; and called for development of a partial anti-missile defense system, which should placate the hawks and the doves and not overly fluster the Russians. To journalists’ questions, Nixon sagely pointed out that Russian leaders had always been preoccupied with defense and would perfectly understand. In fact, they were always concerned about American technological advantages and this was the beginning of what would be a major turn in the Cold War by emphasis on anti-missile defenses, three presidencies later.
On March 19, 1969, Nixon had a fine reconciliation with the greatest living former secretary of state and his former enemy, Dean Acheson, and they agreed that Johnson had made a mistake committing large numbers of ground forces to Vietnam starting in 1965. Nixon had a further flurry of meetings with world leaders following the funeral of Dwight D. Eisenhower (where he was the eulogist), on March 30. As usual, de Gaulle was the principal focus of Nixon’s attention, and this would be the last meeting they would have. De Gaulle was now more clearly advocating that the U.S. announce it was leaving Vietnam and get on with taking its lumps as a defeated power, which, though he did not put it this way, he thought would be good for it and for everyone else. Nixon had other ideas. De Gaulle also urged early meetings with the Soviet leaders. Nixon was in no hurry for those either, until he had strengthened the U.S. hand in the world. Charles de Gaulle would retire the following month, and died in November 1970, just short of his 80th birthday, and was succeeded by his former premier, Georges Pompidou.
On May 15, the North Koreans shot down a U.S. intelligence-gathering aircraft well offshore, and Nixon responded by sending a large naval squadron, including the nuclear aircraft carrier Enterprise, into North Korean territorial waters and stating that, “It will be the practice of this administration to give only one warning, and North Korea has been warned.” There were no problems with the North Koreans after that. On June 8, Nixon met with Thieu at Midway Island and announced an immediate withdrawal of 25,000 men from South Vietnam. He promised Thieu massive assistance to help the South fight the war, but a reduction in the American effort to fight it for them. It wasn’t much of a start, but it was a start, as student demonstrations began to ripple and bubble around the country just before the end of the university year. At a press conference on June 10, Nixon was asked about Clark Clifford’s statement that the administration should aim at withdrawing 100,000 men by the end of 1970. Nixon said that Clifford had been secretary when force levels and American casualties had reached their highest point; he “had his chance and didn’t move on it. I would hope we could beat Mr. Clifford’s timetable.” (He did.)
Nixon used veteran French diplomat Jean Sainteney as a go-between with Ho Chi Minh, and Kissinger began a long sequence of secret meetings with the North Vietnamese in Paris. Nixon and Kissinger both traded on Nixon’s reputation as a fierce Cold Warrior and potential “madman” in threatening drastic measures if there were not real progress by November 1. He went to the mid-Pacific in July to watch the splashdown of the spacecraft returning the astronauts from the long-promised moon landing, and at Guam enunciated what became the “Nixon Doctrine,” almost indistinguishable from Truman’s and Eisenhower’s doctrines, pledging assistance to countries defending themselves against aggression. He continued on to Manila, Jakarta, Bangkok, and Saigon, where he met with a throng of soldiers. He continued to New Delhi and Lahore, Pakistan (where he liked the Pakistani president, General Yahya Khan), and returned v
ia Romania, where he emulated de Gaulle in encouraging the Romanian leader, Nikolai Ceausescu, to take his distance from the Russians. (Nixon received an immense popular welcome; these visits always aggravated the Russians.)
8. THE SILENT MAJORITY
The problem with Nixon’s plan of a reasonable approach to North Vietnam and granting to November 1, 1969, to respond reasonably was not only that it was impossible to reason with Hanoi but that this gave the Democrats in Congress time to disown their war and hang it in the public’s mind on Nixon. Student demonstrations started up again and something calling itself the Vietnam Moratorium began holding mass demonstrations, though nonviolent ones, on the ides of each month. There were 20,000 demonstrators in Washington and 50,000 in New York on October 15, 1969. Any political consensus in Washington was melting away, and even the Republicans’ new Senate leader, Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania (Everett Dirksen, who had followed Knowland in 1958, had recently died), proposed a unilateral cease-fire.
Richard Nixon had run out of time; his bluff had been called by post-Ho Hanoi; they didn’t believe he could force a satisfactory end; the Democrats were pretending it was his war and most were for just getting out. He was one of the few people who thought a non-communist Vietnam could still be salvaged, and Henry Kissinger, at least until recently and probably still, was a “decent interval” advocate, who thought that if the U.S. could depart and Saigon could stay afloat for a couple of years, the credibility of the U.S. would not be too much shaken. The concept of spending lives for such a cynical objective was contrary to the American ethos, as MacArthur had demonstrated (and Truman was, after all, saving half of Korea), and if whatever was done to provide the interval wasn’t at least plausibly represented as having a chance of maintaining a non-communist South Vietnam, public and congressional opinion would not hold. There had been no bombing over the North for 20 months, since Johnson announced his retirement, and no concessions from the North had resulted. There was no argument for continuing to appease the North if any argument could be advanced for continuing to pursue the war.
The long-considered response to North Vietnamese intransigence was Operation Duck Hook, which was a resumption of heavy bombing of military sites in the North; attacks on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, including, potentially, on land; the mining and closing of Haiphong harbor; and the seizure and elimination of communist depots and sanctuaries in Cambodia. As Nixon did not confide in anyone, neither Kissinger nor the rest of his entourage had any idea of Nixon’s plan to mobilize Middle America behind his plan, whatever it was. And much of the administration had been shaken by the strength and stated intentions of the Vietnam Moratorium. Nixon thought he could rally support for a sensible policy, unlike almost all his advisers (excepting a few military staff), and Kissinger advised in a memo on October 17, that “no quick and decisive military action [seemed] attainable, and that there [was] not enough unanimity in our administration to pursue so daring and risky a course” (as Duck Hook). This wasn’t really the question, which was whether Nixon could build and hold opinion for a policy that he could represent as a winning strategy at an acceptable cost. The American public were, for the most part, not overly concerned with North or even South Vietnamese military and civilian casualties; they did not want to continue indefinitely in a war that was costing American lives and treasure and didn’t seem to be getting closer to an acceptable outcome, and in which their credulity had been abused by their military and civilian leadership. And the party that had plunged the country into the war now wanted to wrench it out.
Nixon had decided against escalation, and in his memoirs cited the death of Ho Chi Minh, which he thought might produce more moderate leadership; much-reduced recent American casualties; and the advice he had received from Sir Robert Thompson, one of the chief architects of the British victory over the communists in Malaya, whom Nixon had known since he visited him in 1953. Thompson said that escalation would cause immense international controversy without addressing the issue of whether the South could, with American material assistance, defend itself. Britain had never had 10 percent of the force levels in Malaya that the U.S. now had in Vietnam, and while his advice in counter-guerrilla activity was worth listening to, staking the whole policy on the advice of a retired British military officer from a scarcely analogous theater 15 years before is no excuse. (Thompson had also given President Johnson a great deal of advice about Vietnam that had proved to be mistaken.)
None of this resonates very believably; if Nixon were going to rally Middle America, the stronger and more purposeful the military effort, consistent with improving prospects and reducing American casualties, the better his argument for doing so. At the least, maintaining Johnson’s bombing concession 20 months after it had failed to produce any quid pro quo from the enemy made no sense (as Nixon acknowledged in his memoirs, and both he and Kissinger later regretted that they had not hit Hanoi hard from the outset). Yet, despite all the errors of successive administrations, a chance remained.
Nixon received a final request from Gromyko, via his ambassador in Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, to pull out of Vietnam, on October 20. Nixon reminded Dobrynin that Johnson only granted the bombing halt because his former ambassadors to Moscow, Harriman, Bohlen, and Llewellyn Thompson, all told him that Moscow could not assist in finding a peace settlement while the United States was bombing a socialist country. President Nixon finally addressed the country and laid out his Vietnam strategy on November 3, 1969. It was a memorable speech. “I have chosen a plan for peace and I take responsibility for it.” If it succeeded, “what the critics say now won’t matter. If it does not succeed, anything I say then won’t matter.” He described all he had done to try to reach an agreement, revealed for the first time (even to Kissinger) the correspondence with Ho Chi Minh, and said that Hanoi had not, and would not, show “the least willingness [to make peace] while it is convinced that all it has to do is wait for our next concession, and the next concession after that one, until it gets everything it wants.” He outlined his Vietnamization plan, to hand over the war to the Vietnamese in accord with the Nixon Doctrine, while retaining air support. He told the young: “I respect your idealism.” (He did not in fact, and considered them shirkers and cowards masquerading as having moral qualms about the war, but was doubtless truthful in saying: “I want peace as much as you do.”)
Then he addressed “the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support.... The more divided we are at home, the less likely the enemy is to negotiate at Paris. Let us be united for peace . . . and against defeat.... Let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.” It was an electrifying address: over 80,000 messages of support arrived almost instantly, 300 congressmen and 58 senators coauthored resolutions of support, 77 percent of the people supported his Vietnamization policy, and the president’s approval rating jumped from 52 to 68 percent.200 A few weeks later Nixon announced the withdrawal of 60,000 Americans from Vietnam. If he had announced 100,000 in his speech over a slightly longer timetable and announced Duck Hook as well, he would not have had appreciably less support. Withal, though it was very late, this was leadership and clarity at least, and the great majority of Americans would rather hand the war to the South than the South to the North if their president said it had a chance of success. He did, and it did, if events in the next presidential term had gone differently.
Nixon moved to shore up and strengthen his silent majority in other ways, promoting locally negotiated school desegregation in every state, not just singling out the South, and sparing the country the unimaginable disaster of enforcing court orders to transport school children all around the great cities of America into racially different areas to promote racial balance. He also founded the Environmental Protection Agency and (largely motivated by his poor youth, when his family had to take their holidays in public parks) vastly increased the number and quality of national parks.
In a 40,000-word foreign polic
y summary in February 1970, entirely composed by Nixon and Kissinger, a “just settlement” was stated as the goal in Vietnam, and an “architecture of peace” was sought which would be more than “the absence of war” and would include a “normal and constructive relationship” with China. The report referred to “nuclear sufficiency,” an inspired concept that consisted of seeking emphasis on defensive systems, while retaining equality of throw weights but exploiting American technological advantages, especially in putting Multiple, Independently Targeted Reentry Vehicles (MIRV) in individual warheads, thus effectively reopening a favorable missile gap. It would not arouse the doves, would placate the hawks, and would incite the Soviets to negotiate while the U.S. steadily gained strength. It was all very sophisticated strategic planning.
When the new French president, Georges Pompidou, arrived for a state visit in February 1970 and was jeered by Jewish opponents of France’s pro-Arab policies in several cities, Nixon went out of his way to be seen in public with the French leader. Kissinger continued his secret meetings in Paris with North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho (“Ducky,” Kissinger called him) all through 1970, but the North was immoveable. They didn’t believe for a minute that the South could defend itself: “If you couldn’t win with 500,000 of your own men, how do you expect the puppet troops to do the fighting? Ducky asked.”201 Cambodia’s carnival prince Sihanouk was sent packing in March 1970, after 16 years, and Soviet premier Kosygin, who disliked him, had the pleasure of telling him this at Moscow Airport, as he saw him onto his plane. Sihanouk’s prime minister, Lon Nol, a pro-American general, sacked the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong embassies in Phnom Penh, closed the port of Sihanoukville to war supplies, and demanded the departure of the 60,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers in the country. He had nopower to enforce this and Hanoi ignored it, though the closing of Sihanoukville was a notable inconvenience to them.