American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  In mid-October, as the election campaign back home pounded to the finish, Kissinger wrapped up the final details of an elaborate agreement with Le Duc Tho. Tired but euphoric, he flew back to Washington with what he viewed as “the finest compromise available.” He basked in the thought that McGovern had just put forward a peace program that “asked much less of Hanoi than Hanoi had already conceded to us.” When he and Haig reported to Nixon in the President’s “hideaway” suite across from the White House in the old-time State Department building, Nixon was so pleased that he ordered steak and wine to celebrate the breakthrough.

  The last crucial step lay ahead—pressing Saigon into a settlement without risk of “sellout” accusations before election day. Reviewing the terms as he flew to Saigon, Kissinger felt optimistic. The proposed cease-fire in place would leave Thieu’s government in control of 90 percent of the population, Kissinger calculated, and the other provisions were beneficial. To be sure, he had not gained Hanoi’s agreement to withdraw its forces from the south, but he comforted himself with the thought that if a clause forbidding infiltration was honored, attrition would ease the threat to Saigon.

  Arriving in Saigon in this mood on October 19, Kissinger confidently explained the details of the agreement to Thieu and his entourage. He was unprepared for Thieu’s response—total skepticism about the agreement, total consternation at the prospect of being deserted by his American ally. Kissinger argued, promised, threatened. All in vain. After five days of fruitless exchanges he urged Nixon to bypass Saigon and sign with Hanoi. This the President would not do. With election day just ahead, he did not want to rouse Republican hawks or in any way jeopardize his expected victory; moreover, he had misgivings about “losing” South Vietnam. While furious with Thieu’s intransigence, he decided that the only hope now was for Kissinger to renegotiate better terms with Le Duc Tho.

  Returning to Paris two weeks after the November election, Kissinger found himself in a vise between North Vietnam scenting victory and South Vietnam fighting for its existence. Hanoi, after making “maximum” concessions in October, was hardly disposed to reopen the agreement in any event and was given little incentive to do so. Kissinger’s secret discussions with Le Duc Tho made little progress, as Tho responded to new American demands in kind, by heightening his own demands, retracting concessions, stalling. The White House, meanwhile, pursued carrot-and-stick tactics with Saigon, sending more military hardware to South Vietnam—in the process making the little country the fourth-largest air power in the world—and assuring Thieu that if Hanoi violated the agreement the United States would immediately retaliate, while threatening to make peace without him if he refused to go along. At the same time only a stick was waved at Hanoi—another massive dose of bombing—if it did not make further concessions.

  It was not an edifying moment in the White House. Kissinger, pursuing the negotiations in the now frigid atmosphere of Paris, found Nixon mercurial in mood and tactics, alternately bellicose and conciliatory, often withdrawn and sullen, fundamentally ambivalent in his posture toward the rival camps. Kissinger suspected that he was still fair game for White House rivals gunning for his seat—or at least maneuvering to oust him from it. Nixon for his part was concerned about Kissinger’s emotional state—he was, Nixon noted in his diary in mid-December, “up and down”—under the pressures besetting him, especially after his aide hinted at resigning.

  By early December, with the Paris talks deadlocked and Saigon still adamant, Nixon was moving toward a massive “retaliation” strike against North Vietnam. On December 13, the negotiations broke off and Kissinger returned to Washington disillusioned, exhausted, and angry. Gritting his teeth and clenching his fists, as Nixon later remembered, he called Hanoi’s negotiators “just a bunch of shits. Tawdry, filthy shits.” They made the Russians look good, he went on, “compared to the way the Russians make the Chinese look good” when it came to decent negotiating. It was time, Kissinger said, to resume bombing.

  Ready for his last roll of the dice, the President ordered bombing in the north as well as the south and the reseeding of mines in Haiphong harbor. Still dubious about the zeal of the Air Force, he told the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, an admiral, “I don’t want any more of this crap about the fact that we couldn’t hit this target or that one. This is your chance to use military power effectively to win the war, and if you don’t, I’ll consider you responsible.”

  While Americans were celebrating the long Christmas holiday at home, American bombers ranged over the populous corridor between Hanoi and Haiphong, dropping more than 36,000 tons of bombs in the most intensive attack of the war. While Americans paid tribute to the Prince of Peace, B-52S killed at least 1,600 civilians.

  At home the press exploded in indignation. Caught unprepared as a result of the White House penchant for secrecy, filled with hope after Kissinger’s comment two months before that peace was at hand, repeatedly assured that Nixon was winding down American involvement, the public saw the horrendous scenario being enacted again. Nixon was denounced as a madman “waging war by tantrum.” Republican senator George Aiken spoke of this “sorry Christmas present” for the American people. Newspapers blazoned headlines: “Terror from the Skies,” “New Madness in Vietnam,” “Beyond All Reason,” “The Rain of Death Continues.” Pope Paul VI told a Vatican audience that the bombing of “blessed” Vietnam was causing him daily grief.

  The bombing ended when Hanoi agreed to return to the bargaining table, but the agreement Kissinger and Tho patched together in Paris differed little from the October draft. The bombing had not obtained the concessions that Nixon and Kissinger needed to gain Saigon’s consent to an agreement. Nor had this fierce Christmastide demonstration of Washington’s willingness to “retaliate” persuaded Thieu. But now Nixon simply imposed the agreement on him, with yet another promise that if Saigon went along, the United States would “respond with full force” to North Vietnamese violations. After stalling for a few days Thieu admitted that at last he had no choice, saying resignedly, “I have done all that I can for my country.” On January 27, 1973, the agreement was signed in Paris by the United States and the two rivals—and also by the Vietcong’s Provisional Revolutionary Government, which occupied “leopard spots” in the south.

  President Nixon had hoped that the nation would be at peace in Southeast Asia when he began his second term, on January 20. But Thieu’s stalling tactics allowed him to talk only about the settlement soon to come. Still, he could take satisfaction in the triumphs of his foreign policy and look to the future. “We have the chance today,” he told the inaugural crowd, “to do more than ever before in our history to make life better in America—to ensure better education, better health, better housing, better transportation, a cleaner environment—to restore respect for law, to make our communities more livable—and to ensure the God-given right of every American to full and equal opportunity.”

  Even in this hour of triumph he could not ignore the pinpricks. He had heard that some members of Eugene Ormandy’s orchestra had asked to be excused from performing in the inaugural concert at the Kennedy Center and had to be ordered to come, but he was pleased that Ormandy had wanted him to appear on the platform “just to show those left-wing sons of bitches.” He noted in his diary, “What a man he is.” Then, on his ride to the Capitol, demonstrators yelled “f-u-c-k” in the distance, and on the way back the dissidents threw eggs at his cavalcade. The inaugural balls went off well but they were so huge and packed he wondered whether his would be the last of such affairs. Still he felt that he and his wife, Pat, had mixed well with the crowds, which was important because, he wrote in his diary, he needed to demonstrate his “affability.” The White House staff just hadn’t been able to get this across. “On the other hand, you can’t overplay it.”

  With Vietnam evidently settled, he looked forward to more successes overseas. Planning was already underway for the next summit—a visit by Brezhnev to the United States. The President eagerly
anticipated showing America to the Soviet leader—showing not only the White House and the monuments in Washington but, even more, southern California with its splendid freeways and homes. Once again Kissinger journeyed to Moscow to plan what would become known as Summit II. His “advancing” went well, aside from an ominous moment alone with Brezhnev in the General Secretary’s hunting stand ninety miles northeast of Moscow, when Brezhnev suddenly started in on China. His brother had worked there, he said, and had found the Chinese treacherous and arrogant. Now China was building a nuclear arsenal—something would have to be done. To this rather crude gambit Kissinger was noncommittal. The next day Ambassador Dobrynin took Kissinger aside to confirm that Brezhnev had been wholly serious in his comments on China.

  In style, Brezhnev’s June visit surpassed Nixon’s fondest hopes. The party boss was all exuberance and joviality in Washington and at Camp David as he worked the crowd on ceremonial occasions and enthusiastically accepted Nixon’s gift of a Lincoln Continental donated by the Ford Motor Company. After a trip across the country with the President in Air Force One he appeared to be gratifyingly impressed, during a short helicopter ride to San Clemente, by the streams of cars on the roads below and the number of private houses. Some of the beachfront houses were owned by wealthy people, Nixon explained, but most of the others belonged to people who worked in factories and offices. Insisting on staying at San Clemente rather than on a nearby Marine base, the burly Russian agreeably settled in amidst the very feminine decor of Tricia Nixon’s bedroom.

  In substance Summit II could not match the pathbreaking achievements of the Moscow summit thirteen months earlier. The key product—mostly symbolic but a measure of some détente progress over the past year or two—was a joint “Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War.” The agreement provided that the two powers would “act in such a manner as to prevent the development of situations capable of causing a dangerous exacerbation of their relations, as to avoid military confrontations, and as to exclude the outbreak of nuclear war between them and between either of the Parties and other countries”; that each would “refrain from the threat or use of force against the other Party, against the allies of the other Party and against other countries”; that if relations between them and other countries/or among other countries, appeared to involve the risk of nuclear war, the two parties would “immediately enter into urgent consultations with each other and make every effort to avert this risk.”

  It was a noble declaration—but how seriously made? Nixon suspected that Brezhnev wanted it out of fear that Washington might soon conclude a military agreement with China. Kissinger described it at the time as a “landmark” step toward the prevention of nuclear war, but his memoirs present it as a “bland set of principles that had been systematically stripped of all implications harmful to our interests.” From their long agitation for its drafting and their public celebration of it, the Soviets appeared to take the declaration far more seriously. Both sides knew, however, that the success of the agreement depended on a “real life” test, which would depend in turn on each side’s ability to see the agreement as a constraint upon its own options and not merely the other side’s. And a test of all this came with alarming swiftness in that cockpit of violence, the Middle East.

  A curious episode in San Clemente had foreshadowed it. After a convivial dinner filled with warm toasts and Brezhnev bear hugs, the Soviet leader retired early because of jet lag. The President was in his pajamas later in the evening when a Secret Service agent knocked on the door. It was a message from Kissinger: the Russians wanted to talk, immediately— Kissinger did not know why. Shortly Nixon and Kissinger were confronting Brezhnev, Gromyko, and Dobrynin in a stiff and emotional exchange over a Soviet proposal that the two nations agree then and there on a Middle East settlement calling for an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders in return for an end to the state of belligerency. These were the standard Arab terms. Nixon replied coolly that he could not prejudice Israel’s rights. Brezhnev warned in effect that if the two sides could not agree on this, war would break out again in the Middle East.

  This summit confrontation occurred, Kissinger was to complain later, only a day after the signing of the agreement on the prevention of nuclear war. But he should not have been surprised by Brezhnev’s thrust, however untimely, for the subject had come up in Kissinger’s advance meeting in the Soviet Union, and indeed the Middle East had been a source of Soviet-American tension since the Six-Day War in 1967. That war, during which the U.S. Sixth Fleet had been put on alert and two aircraft carriers moved east from Crete, had left the Israelis victoriously occupying Syria’s Golan Heights, Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip, and Jordan’s territory adjoining Israel west of the Jordan River. Ever since, Moscow and Washington had been pouring arms into the seething region, while the Arab nations sought some means of regaining the lands they had lost.

  Early in October 1973, less than four months after Summit II, Egyptian and Syrian troops drove into the Sinai and the Golan Heights while Israel’s guard was down during Yom Kippur. In the course of two weeks of fierce combat, as Israeli forces were pushed back but then gained the offensive, Moscow and Washington alternated in urging a cease-fire in place, depending on whose ally held the upper hand. Finally achieved, it collapsed when Israel, taking advantage of some earlier veiled encouragement by Kissinger and of a real or alleged violation of the truce by Egypt, completed its isolation of the Egyptian Third Army on the east side of the Suez Canal. Both Moscow and Cairo importuned Washington to force Israel to stop its advance. Brezhnev proposed a joint Soviet-American effort to restore the cease-fire, adding that failing joint action, Moscow would “be faced with the necessity urgently to consider the question of taking appropriate steps unilaterally.” The word “unilaterally” leaped out of the message. This Washington would not tolerate.

  There followed what Elizabeth Drew later called “Strangelove Day.” Kissinger did not inform Nixon of Brezhnev’s message, but rather convened an enlarged National Security Council meeting, which decided to issue a general military alert. The Strategic Air Command and other nuclear forces were alerted, along with field commands in Europe. Carriers moved toward the eastern Mediterranean. The next day the alert was claxoned on morning television news shows and blared in newspaper headlines. A message to Brezhnev warned that Washington would “in no event” accept unilateral action. A crisis reminiscent of the Cuban missile confrontation seemed in the making until the White House took one simple step that deflated the situation—it persuaded Israel to accept a cease-fire.

  Washington was intent on diminishing Moscow’s influence in the Middle East. Even a joint Russian-American peace effort, the White House feared, would advance Soviet interests there. According to Raymond Garthoff's careful analysis of the crisis, Kissinger also sought to demonstrate an American capacity to face down Moscow. The “Soviets subsided,” Kissinger wrote later, “as soon as we showed our teeth.” Four months after the lofty declarations of Summit II and after aggressive gestures by both Moscow and Washington, the Bear and the Eagle were once again following the law of the jungle.

  By 1973 summitry was taking on a life of its own. Just as Summit II had little effect on the Middle East crisis, so the summits in general appeared to proceed on their own lofty plane, with only glancing impact on the Realpolitik of international rivalry. Thus Summit I had taken place notwithstanding North Vietnam’s onslaught through the DMZ and the massive American bombing, and despite Hanoi’s indignation at its perfidious ally. Day after day at the summits men solemnly discussed arms reduction deals without exerting any significant influence in the end on the ability of each nation to obliterate the other many times over. The Russians tried at the summits to turn the Americans against the Chinese without avail, for the Americans were having their own summits with the Chinese. Suspecting that mighty decisions were afoot, NATO and other allies were restive over summitry “plots,” but they had little to fear. Washington would not forsake its crucia
l Western alliances for any deals at the summit. Indeed, the White House planned some kind of “Year of Europe” in 1973, but this initiative collapsed.

  Though summitry went on—a third Soviet-American meeting was planned for June 1974 in Moscow—it was approaching a dead end. In part this was a result of a resurgence of hawks among both Democrats and Republicans who, sensing the President’s vulnerabilities and incensed by what they saw as dangerous concessions at the summits, launched counterattacks against the whole strategy of détente. By Summit III press and public feeling appeared to be turning against summitry for several reasons: the dashed expectations following earlier meetings, especially Summit II; rising American resentment over Soviet mistreatment of Jews; Moscow’s “meddling” in the Middle East, climaxed by its aid to Israel’s foes. The Soviets had their own set of grievances, particularly the failure of Congress to grant them equal tariff treatment or to make large credits available. Doubts about détente were growing in the Kremlin. Inevitably Nixon’s last summit in 1974, just before his fall (discussed in the next chapter) produced only limited agreements.

  Gerald R. Ford, appointed to the vice-presidency by Nixon after Spiro Agnew’s resignation and ascending to the presidency after Nixon’s own resignation, made a valiant effort to restore the spirit of détente at his first summit, in Vladivostok in late November 1974. With the aging Brezhnev he reached agreement limiting each superpower to 2,400 strategic weapon systems, which could comprise a combination of heavy bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and air-launched ballistic missiles. Eight months later Ford and leaders of the Soviet Union and thirty-three other nations signed in Helsinki a pathbreaking set of agreements designed to protect human rights and permit freer travel by each nation’s citizens. But relations with Moscow were cooling as anti-Soviet feeling intensified at home, exacerbated by the Kremlin’s expulsions of dissidents, most notably of the writer Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn. Ford’s Secretary of Defense, James R. Schlesinger, became such an open critic of détente that the President fired him, leaving Schlesinger more pestiferous than ever outside the tent.