American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  The voyagers were not modest about their success, or about its historic importance. It had been “the week that changed the world,” as the President put it in a farewell banquet toast in China. Nixon’s mere announcement of his forthcoming trip to Peking had “transformed the structure of international politics” overnight, Kissinger maintained years later. Certainly they had much to brag about. They had penetrated and demystified the inscrutable Orient, put Moscow on the defensive, and expanded trade and “people-to-people exchanges.” They displayed extraordinary skill and patience not only in negotiating with their erstwhile enemies in Peking but in fending off their adversaries in State and Defense, in Congress, in the old China Lobby. Moreover, they had been blessed with that priceless gift for diplomats negotiating on a confused and darkling plain—luck. China’s leadership had been undergoing a massive internal convulsion that still had not ended when Kissinger first arrived. Washington’s political intelligence on China was so poor that the voyagers knew little of the intensity of the conflict between the anti-Soviet, moderate faction represented by Chou and the hard-line “anti-imperialists” led by Lin Piao and supported by the military. This left them in blissful ignorance of a conflict whose merest spasm could have upset all their plans.

  Still, the test of their success lay in Moscow as well as in Peking. They were above all playing triangular diplomacy. Soon after returning the summiteers redoubled planning for another historic meeting.

  At the end of March 1972, only four weeks after the return of the exuberant voyagers from China, three divisions of North Vietnamese infantry, backed by two hundred tanks and new recoilless artillery, smashed south across the Demilitarized Zone. There ensued one of the most bizarre series of events in the Vietnam War. While General Creighton Abrams’s forces to the south had long anticipated such an attack, they took days to discern just what was happening. Although the United States had long been pulling out its troops by the thousands, Hanoi converted the attack into a major offensive after the breakthrough. Although strategic air and sea power could have little immediate impact on a land offensive, Nixon resumed intensive bombing of Haiphong and Hanoi—the first since 1968—and mined Haiphong harbor and other North Vietnamese ports. Although the White House at this point was desperately eager for a Moscow summit, mainly in order to persuade Moscow to persuade Hanoi to accept a settlement, American aircraft sought to interdict Soviet ships bringing military supplies to Hanoi, which risked provoking a major incident. Although such an event did occur when American bombs hit four Soviet merchant ships in Haiphong harbor, the Kremlin merely protested and continued with plans to welcome the Americans in Moscow.

  All these incongruities could be explained by one circumstance—the desire of two nuclear superpowers to parley within the triangle of great-power rivalry, giving only secondary consideration to tertiary powers. But the incongruities challenged the popular shibboleth that Moscow or Peking headed up a massive, global, coordinated communist movement. For neither government had decisive influence over a North Vietnamese leadership that gloried in its own autonomy.

  Washington’s rapprochement with Moscow took much the same form as the opening to Peking. Once again the President dispatched Kissinger to “advance” the trip. Once again he sidetracked his Secretary of State—this time by repairing to Camp David, ostensibly with Kissinger, and then informing Rogers that his security aide had flown to Moscow on receiving a sudden invitation from Brezhnev. And once again the President blew hot and cold about the prospective summit. He was eager to be the first President since FDR to visit the U.S.S.R., the very first to go to Moscow—a trip that Ike had missed after the U-2 debacle. But he feared a debacle of his own making, if Moscow saw the parley as a means of strengthening its hand in Vietnam and weakening the American, or if on the other hand the Kremlin suddenly called off the whole summit. For Moscow was becoming huffy. When Kissinger invited Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, with whom he had a close working relationship, to view Chinese-made films of Kissinger’s Peking visits, this interlude of triangular diplomacy with a vengeance ended in a sharp exchange between the two over the American buildup in Southeast Asia.

  But the Kremlin did not call off the summit, nor did the White House. The Soviet Union wanted to throw its weight against Chinese influence, to hold tight its corner of the triangle, to persuade Washington to put its full effort behind West German ratification of postwar treaties with Russia and Poland, to discuss arms control, to make deals for grain and other Soviet needs. Nixon’s aims were simpler but no less compelling: to persuade Moscow to press Hanoi for an acceptable settlement; to emerge from a second summit as the supreme peacemaker; above all to dish the Democrats on the peace issue and win big in November.

  Late in May 1972, Air Force One, bearing the President and Mrs. Nixon and the usual big presidential party, soared off into the skies over Washington, this time heading east. The mood, in Kissinger’s memory, was optimistic, even jubilant, unspoiled by undue humility. “This has to be one of the great diplomatic coups of all times!” the President recalled Kissinger saying. “Three weeks ago everyone predicted it would be called off, and today we’re on our way.”

  President Nikolai Podgorny, Premier Aleksei Kosygin, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, and a conspicuously small crowd greeted the Americans at Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport. As party boss, Brezhnev was not required to be there and chose not to be. The presidential motorcade raced to the Kremlin through emptied streets. Soon the Nixons were installed in opulent quarters inside the Kremlin’s Grand Palace, and shortly after that the President was closeted with Brezhnev.

  He faced a large, active man with heavy swept-back hair over bushy eyebrows and powerful features. Brezhnev’s rapidly alternating friendliness and pugnacity reminded the President of Irish labor bosses back home, or even Chicago’s Mayor Daley. Wasting little time on formalities, the General Secretary launched into vigorous complaints about Vietnam. This over, he became almost convivial as he proposed a close personal relationship between them and spoke of the memory of Franklin Roosevelt cherished by the Soviet people, and he warmed up even more when Nixon said that in his experience disputes among subordinates were usually overcome by agreement among the top leaders.

  “If we leave all the decisions to the bureaucrats,” Nixon ventured, “we will never achieve any progress.” Brezhnev laughed heartily at this common complaint of leaders. Kissinger was not present at this initial meeting.

  “They would simply bury us in paper!” the General Secretary said, slapping his hand on the table.

  The parley that followed underwent the zigs and zags, the starts and stops, that had always characterized Soviet-American negotiations. The crucial business was nuclear arms negotiations. Kissinger conducted the hard bargaining. He and the President had kept control of the American side by excluding from a direct role in the summit talks not only Rogers but the SALT experts in Helsinki, who had been negotiating on arms for many months. Hour after hour, jotting down on yellow pads endless combinations and permutations of arms calculations, Kissinger hammered out compromises with his Kremlin counterparts, under the watchful eye of the President. And this was the greatest incongruity: here inside the Kremlin, the historic citadel of Russian authority, ringed by military might in and around the capital, in a nation bristling with nuclear arms, this magically transported White House, with its President and aides, secretaries and secretaries to secretaries, communications and transportation experts, security men and chauffeurs, was closeted with the Soviet power elite commanding those nuclear arms from a cluster of ancient buildings around them.

  Communication was easy with the help of a gifted Soviet interpreter, but the language was arcane: throw weights and first strikes, hard targets and soft, silos and delivery vehicles, ABMs (antiballistic missiles), ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles), and MIRVs (multiple independent reentry vehicles). These bland and bureaucratic terms, as Bernard Weisberger noted, “hid the appalling realities of the subject and made seem
ingly rational discussion possible.” The two nuclear powers had continued to operate on the premise that their goal was not to win a nuclear exchange but to forestall one by making clear that if one side launched a first strike, the other would, with its surviving weapons, inflict an unbearable counter-strike. Thus neither side could hope for victory. But each side had to guard against the possibility that reckless leaders in the other camp might nevertheless be tempted to take out its weapons or to encase theirs in hardened silos and other devices, or to turn science fiction into reality by developing technology that could destroy or turn away incoming missiles. Thousands and thousands of nuclear weapons had been piled up in each nation to guard against the unthinkable—a situation in which one’s own side had no nuclear weapons left and the other had at least one.

  The key outcome of the Moscow summit was a strategic arms limitation treaty limiting the deployment of antiballistic missile systems to two for each country—one to protect the capital and one to protect an ICBM complex—and an “Interim Agreement” freezing for the next five years the number of ICBMs and submarine-launched missiles each side could possess. There were collateral agreements and understandings: a grain deal for the Soviets, who were facing a potentially catastrophic crop failure, implicit promises by Moscow that it would not intervene in Vietnam against the United States, and a set of “Basic Principles” piously promising that each nation would try to avoid military confrontations, would respect the norm of equality, would not seek unilateral advantage at the expense of the other, all this in the spirit of “reciprocity, mutual accommodation and mutual benefit.”

  In its detail, it was a small step. The Interim Agreement called for no reduction in offensive weapons systems, but simply established a cap on the number of missile launchers each country could build until a permanent agreement could be negotiated. No constraint was placed on the number of independently targeted warheads that could be placed on each missile. But symbolically it was a big step. After years of frustration the nuclear powers had proved that they could negotiate limits on offensive weaponry. “A First Step,” The New York Times headlined, “but a Major Stride.” Once again the presidential party returned to a hero’s welcome, with SALT treaty ratification assured—the ABM agreement was soon ratified by an 88-2 vote—and the President’s reelection prospects further enhanced. Soon the White House promotion team was dramatizing his personal triumph in Moscow.

  Peace Without Peace

  On the evening of November 7, 1972, Richard M. Nixon stood at the pinnacle of world prestige and domestic power. Even the scattered first returns showed that he was winning a sweeping victory over George McGovern. With Eisenhower, he was only the second Republican in the century to win two presidential elections. Both his mixed batch of liberal-conservative domestic policies and his bomb-and-pull-out Vietnam tactics appeared to be handsomely vindicated in the election returns. He was concluding a year of achievement—the summits in Peking and Moscow, the SALT agreement, the apparent winding down of American involvement in Indochina. Only a week or so earlier Henry Kissinger had told the press, “We believe that peace is at hand.”

  But the President did not appear triumphant, or even happy, that night. He had a spell of melancholy, perhaps foreboding. Was it due to some revelations about campaign excesses that had come to light, and the possibility of far more serious disclosures? Or his failure to carry in a Republican Congress? Or the empty feeling that this would be his last campaign, that the conflict and crisis on which he thrived appeared to be over? Or merely the pain of having the cap on a top front tooth snap off while he was listening to the early returns? The next morning, looking cold and remote, he strode into a specially summoned meeting of the White House staff, thanked them perfunctorily, and turned the meeting over to Haldeman, who without ado ordered all staff members to submit their resignations immediately.

  The most likely explanation for Nixon’s malaise was Vietnam. Following North Vietnam’s massive “Eastertide” attack across the DMZ in March and Washington’s retaliatory bombing and blockade, Hanoi had continued its heavy offensive for weeks. The President had sporadically taken personal command of the air war, chafing when the weather was poor. “Let’s get that weather cleared up,” he exclaimed to Haldeman and John Mitchell one afternoon in April. “The bastards have never been bombed like they’re going to be bombed this time.” It wasn’t just the weather. “The Air Force isn’t worth a—I mean, they won’t fly.” In May the bombing reached its highest level of the war; the next month American planes dropped over 100,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnam. Even so the war was grinding down to a stalemate again. Thieu remained in power; the South Vietnamese Army was still largely intact; Hanoi had lost 100,000 men in the attack, perhaps four times Saigon’s losses. On the other hand, tens of thousands of North Vietnamese troops were now ensconced in defensive positions well below the DMZ.

  It was this last fact that now produced the single most crucial development in the latter stages of the Vietnam War—a development so carefully concealed from the American public, so muffled in diplomatic bargaining, so obscured in double-talk, that its full nature and import would not be clear for years. This was the signaling by Nixon and Kissinger to Hanoi through Moscow and other channels that the American troop withdrawal would continue even though Hanoi’s troops stayed in place in South Vietnam, that Washington would not exact a troop withdrawal from Hanoi to match its own steady pullout of the ground forces that for years had been the principal support of the Saigon regime. This signal was wrapped in a shroud of self-protective premises and claims: that the South Vietnamese Army was now fortified enough by American arms and training to hold its own, that the North Vietnamese forces would wither away in the south as a result of their isolation from their bases across the DMZ, that the Americans could always return with heavy bombing and even with troops if Hanoi conducted further attacks.

  The most remarkable aspect of Washington’s yielding to Hanoi was that Nixon and Kissinger did not deceive themselves—they knew exactly what they were doing. They were at the very least taking an enormous gamble with the future of South Vietnam as an independent nation, at the worst laying the groundwork for a peace bound to collapse—a peace without honor. For few American leaders had warned more often than Nixon that communism was innately aggressive, that Hanoi was insatiably expansionist, that the communist enemy could be stopped only by counterforce, that to yield militarily to communists was to encourage them, not to desist, but to grab more. Kissinger could hardly have been unaware of the teachings of Vietnam’s foremost military strategist, Vo Nguyen Giap—that revolutionary forces must know how to be patient but also when to strike. Indeed, Giap had called only a few months earlier for heavy attacks by combined regular and guerrilla forces.

  One man who understood the situation with crystal clarity was President Nguyen Van Thieu in Saigon. When Nixon sent Kissinger’s deputy Alexander Haig to Saigon early in October to urge the South Vietnam regime to go along with negotiations with Hanoi, Thieu had argued, protested, stormed, and finally broken into tears. The President’s reaction to Haig’s report of this episode, as reflected in Nixon’s memoirs years later, revealed once again the disingenuous cynicism of his attitude toward what the South Vietnamese later would call Nixon’s sellout.

  “I sympathized with Thieu’s position,” the President wrote. “Almost the entire North Vietnamese Army—an estimated 120,000 troops that had poured across the DMZ during the spring invasion—were still in South Vietnam, and he was naturally skeptical of any plan that would lead to an American withdrawal without requiring a corresponding North Vietnamese withdrawal. I shared his view that the Communists’ motives were entirely cynical. I knew, as he did, that they would observe the agreement only so long and so far as South Vietnam’s strength and America’s readiness to retaliate forced them to do so. But I felt that if we could negotiate an agreement on our terms, those conditions could be met.” He sent Thieu a personal reassurance that he would agree to nothi
ng without talking “personally with you well beforehand.” Thieu did not want talk— he wanted a guarantee that his ally would not keep withdrawing its troops while his enemy’s troops stayed in place.

  Throughout the late summer and early fall of 972, as the President became increasingly involved in campaign chores, Kissinger had been meeting secretly in Paris in a desperate effort to work out an agreement with Hanoi’s negotiator, the redoubtable Le Duc Tho. Although eager to stop the bombing and to get on with their war with the Saigon regime now that their troops were in place, the North Vietnamese were in no great hurry; their intent now was to win the war with as few losses as possible. Kissinger, however, was under heavy time pressures: he wanted to demonstrate progress in the negotiations to help his chief ward off McGovern’s expected peace offensive, to soften public demands that the remaining American troops continue to be pulled out on schedule, and above all to reach an agreement with both Hanoi and Saigon before Congress convened in January and began to slash appropriations for the war in Vietnam. The negotiators spent hundreds of hours on the fine-print questions involving a cease-fire, the return by Hanoi of American prisoners of war, the timing of the withdrawal of the remaining American forces—by August 1972 the last United States ground combat troops had been withdrawn— following the cease-fire, and some kind of tripartite commission that would supervise elections and otherwise help implement the agreement.

  There was an Alice-in-Wonderland quality to these discussions: most of the key provisions of the draft agreement, aside from the return of POWs, would be made irrelevant by the transcending legitimation of Hanoi’s presence in force south of the DMZ. And elaborate plans for electoral commissions and the like were preposterous given the deadly hatred that was bound to remain between North and South Vietnamese and the repeated failures of communists and noncommunists in other lands to agree on electoral arrangements, or even on what an election meant.