For all these reasons I intended to stay long enough in 1973 to see the peace in Indochina established; to launch the new initiative toward the industrial democracies that came to be known as the Year of Europe; and to consolidate the new Moscow-Washington-Peking triangle. I had spoken tentatively about a post-Washington career with some close friends: perhaps a fellowship at All Souls College at Oxford. Nancy Maginnes had just consented to become my wife, though our plans were to be delayed repeatedly by the crises soon to descend on us.
I shall never know whether I would in fact have carried out my intention, or would have become so absorbed in the conduct of affairs as to defer my departure. Nor can I prove that our vision of a hopeful future was attainable. It is futile to speculate on “might-have-beens.” All our calculations were soon to be overwhelmed by the elemental catastrophe of Watergate.
But it was still in this mood compounded of elation and relief that on January 24, 1973, four days after Nixon’s second Inauguration, I crossed the narrow street between the White House and the Old Executive Office Building to brief journalists on the newly concluded Vietnam agreement. After going through the agreement section by section I closed my remarks with a deeply felt appeal for national reconciliation:
The President said yesterday that we have to remain vigilant, and so we shall, but we shall also dedicate ourselves to positive efforts. And as for us at home, it should be clear by now that no one in this war has had a monopoly of anguish and that no one in these debates has had a monopoly of moral insight. And now that at last we have achieved an agreement in which the United States did not prescribe the political future to its allies, an agreement which should preserve the dignity and the self-respect of all the parties, together with healing the wounds in Indochina we can begin to heal the wounds in America.
A Spanish poet once wrote: “Traveler, there is no path; paths are made by walking.” In that fleeting moment of innocence — so uncharacteristic of the Nixon Administration — we were confident that in the second term we would travel the road of our hopes and that we would walk a path leading to a better future.
II
A Visit to Hanoi
ONE of the first tasks before us in 1973 was to consolidate the Vietnam peace agreement that had been signed in Paris on January 27. This was the objective that took me on one of the most unusual diplomatic trips of my career: my first visit to Hanoi. In the capital of our ferocious antagonists who had brought war to Indochina and upheaval to America, I intended to discuss with the North Vietnamese leaders the strict observance of the Paris Agreement that I had negotiated with Le Duc Tho and on that basis the possibility of a more positive relationship between our two countries.
The Paris Agreement
THE Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam had become possible when after ten years of bitter war and four years of negotiating stalemate, North Vietnam accepted what it had heretofore adamantly rejected: the continued existence of the Saigon government. The Agreement called for an immediate cease-fire in place throughout Vietnam; for the withdrawal of all remaining American troops (about 27,000); and for the release of prisoners of war throughout Indochina. Hanoi’s infiltration of troops and matériel into South Vietnam was prohibited. International supervisory machinery was to police the cease-fire and regulate the entry of replacement equipment through designated checkpoints. Another provision restored the seventeenth parallel as the Provisional Military Demarcation Line between North and South Vietnam, prohibited all military movement across it, and permitted civilian movement only by agreement between the Vietnamese parties. Hanoi further agreed to withdraw its forces from Laos and Cambodia and not to use these countries’ territory for military action against South Vietnam. The political settlement in South Vietnam was left to future negotiations between the Vietnamese parties.
The United States had made a determined effort to end the war in Laos and Cambodia as well as in Vietnam. North Vietnam had consistently refused, on the excuse that such matters were within the jurisdiction of the peoples of Laos and Cambodia. This solicitude for the sovereignty of North Vietnam’s neighbors would have been touching had it not been so unprecedented; it seemed to apply only to the withdrawal of Hanoi’s forces, not to their introduction, since tens of thousands of North Vietnamese troops had been systematically violating the peace and sovereignty of Laos and Cambodia for two decades and were, of course, still there.
In the end, Le Duc Tho agreed to arrange a cease-fire in Laos. After “consultations” with the Communist forces in Laos (the Pathet Lao, who were in fact totally subordinate to Hanoi), Le Duc Tho pledged in October 1972 that Hanoi would bring about a cease-fire in Laos within thirty days of the cease-fire in Vietnam. By early January Le Duc Tho shortened the interval to fifteen days.
On Cambodia, he flatly refused to be specific, claiming — truthfully, as it turned out — that Hanoi had less influence over its Cambodian Communist ally, the Khmer Rouge. In our talks from September 1972 through January of 1973, Le Duc Tho assured me again and again that when the war was settled in Vietnam, there was “no reason” for the war to continue in Cambodia.1 But Hanoi would make no formal commitment other than a private understanding that it would “contribute actively” to restoring peace in Cambodia after the Vietnam war was settled. After we pressed in vain for months, Nixon reluctantly concluded that we could obtain more only by continuing the war in Vietnam. It was obvious we had no support at home for holding up an otherwise acceptable Vietnam agreement because of Cambodia, where Congress had sought for several years to reduce our involvement and our aid to the absolute minimum. If we did not proceed, Congress was certain to cut off all funds for Cambodia and Vietnam. Moreover, in the view of our Embassy in Phnom Penh as well as of our military experts, the Cambodian Communists would not be able to prevail without North Vietnamese combat support, which in turn was precluded by the terms of the Paris Agreement.
We sought to protect our position by two further steps. First, we persuaded the Cambodian President, Lon Nol, to call once again (for at least the fifth time in three years) for a cease-fire in Cambodia and to declare a unilateral cessation of offensive military operations. Second, before initialing the Paris Agreement, I handed Le Duc Tho a statement to the effect that
if, pending a settlement in Cambodia, offensive military activities are undertaken there which would jeopardize the existing situation, such operations would be contrary to the spirit of Article 20 (b) of the Agreement and to the assumptions on which the Agreement is based.
In plain English, this meant that if the Khmer Rouge rejected Lon Nol’s proclamation of a cease-fire the United States would continue military support for the Cambodian government. Le Duc Tho indicated that he understood.
The Paris accords with all their ambiguities reflected the balance of forces in Vietnam in the wake of the climactic battles of 1972. As with any peace settlement, it depended on the maintenance of that balance of forces. We had no illusions about Hanoi’s long-range goal of subjugating all of Indochina. In the final phase of the negotiations in November and December 1972, I repeatedly warned Nixon to that effect.2 But I was also persuaded that our people would not sustain the prolongation of the war for a period of time that would make a military difference. In August 1972 President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam had expressed to me his estimate that if the war continued, by December 1973 North Vietnam would be weaker than it was in March 1972 — a marginal improvement over where we were. And all our political experts were convinced that the newly elected Congress would cut off funds for the war, starting in January 1973, using as a first target the Administration’s request for supplementary appropriations to finance the cost of resisting Hanoi’s spring offensive of 1972.
We were, in short, not just getting out under the cynical cover of a “decent interval” before the final collapse. We hoped for a decent settlement. The Agreement’s risks were etched painfully in the minds of all the negotiators on our side. But we had achieved far bett
er terms than most had thought possible. By 1972 our critics had reached the conclusion that Hanoi would never settle for anything less than the overthrow of our ally, the Thieu government in Saigon. This we had successfully resisted. A non-Communist South Vietnam had been given the chance to survive. With the proper mixture of rewards and punishments for Hanoi, we thought we had a reasonable chance to maintain the uneasy equilibrium in Indochina; certainly a better chance with an agreement than by continuing an inconclusive war in the face of mounting hostility at home and the near-certainty of a Congressional cutoff of funds.
I shall deal in Chapter VIII with whether it was realistic to expect that we could assemble the proper mix of rewards and punishments. We thought so and we had reason for our belief. For present purposes it is enough to stress that our intention was to make the Paris Agreement work. This was my attitude when I left Washington on February 7, 1973, on an eleven-day Asian journey that was to take me to the capital of our recent enemy, North Vietnam, as well as to those of two old friends, Thailand and Laos, and of a new friend, the People’s Republic of China.
My feelings as I prepared for the trip to Hanoi had none of the exultation at a patiently prepared breakthrough that had marked my secret trip to China. Nor was there the inherent drama of superpower diplomacy that had characterized my first trip to Moscow. Lacking, too, was the prospect of the easy camaraderie of my many visits to European capitals or the sense of shared purpose that transcended the courteous formality of consultations in Tokyo. For four years I had read every scrap of information about the North Vietnamese, at once so self-absorbed and so bellicose, so brave and so overbearing. What is the blend of qualities that lifts a people to dominion over neighbors of roughly comparable endowments? What had given Rome preeminence in the world of city-states or Prussia in Germany or Britain in Europe? No doubt many physical factors were involved. But material elements needed the impetus of intangibles of faith and dedication. These — unfortunately for us — Hanoi had in obsessive abundance.
The Vietnamese had lived through centuries of Chinese rule without losing their cultural identity, a nearly unheard-of feat. They had outlasted French occupation, all the time nurturing the conviction that it was their mission to inherit the French empire in Indochina. Lacking the humanity of their Laotian neighbors and the grace of their Cambodian neighbors, they strove for dominance by being not attractive but single-minded. So all-encompassing was their absorption with themselves that they became oblivious to the physical odds, indifferent to the probabilities by which the calculus of power is normally reckoned. And because there were always more Vietnamese prepared to die for their country than foreigners, their nationalism became the scourge of invaders and neighbors alike.
More than passion the Vietnamese had an invincible self-confidence and a contempt for things foreign. This disdain enabled them to manipulate other peoples — even their foreign supporters — with a cool sense of superiority, by an act of will turning their capital for over a decade into a center of international concern. What we considered insolent deception was another definition of truth; whatever served Hanoi’s purposes represented historical necessity. Like a surgeon wielding a scalpel, Hanoi dissected the American psyche and probed our weaknesses, our national sense of guilt, our quest for final answers, our idealism, and, yes, even the values of its sympathizers, whom it duped no less cold-bloodedly than its adversaries. Our misfortune had been to get between these leaders and their obsessions.
Our Indochinese nightmare would be over; Hanoi’s neighbors were not as fortunate. Propinquity condemned them to permanent terror. Our relief that the war had ended was matched by their foreboding that their freedom would end if we equated peace with withdrawal. The exultation of Washington was replaced by the uneasiness of those who depended on us the closer we approached the borders of that implacable country conducting its aggressions in the guise of victim.
A Visit to Bangkok
IN the arc stretching from the Mediterranean around the rim of the Indian Ocean, including the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, and all of Southeast Asia, Thailand alone escaped colonial occupation in the nineteenth century and did it by a careful, unobtrusive manipulation of the contending powers. To be sure, its geographic location at the junction of the French and British colonial spheres made it a natural buffer between European empires. But such a location had more often led to partition than to independence.
In any event, opportunity never translates itself into reality automatically. Thailand had maintained its independence because its leaders skillfully exploited its geographic position to rescue a margin of independence from the rivalry of physically stronger states; because it had a cultural identity relatively immune to subversion from neighboring countries; and above all because its policy had the resilience of a bamboo reed but also its toughness.
During World War II, Thailand supported Japan when the latter’s conquests made it predominant in Southeast Asia; it switched to the Allies when Japan’s defeat became inevitable. It accomplished these gyrations with such matter-of-fact grace that they appeared not as treachery but as the natural conclusions drawn by a self-confident nationalism. Thailand seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of leaders to embody the exact nuance of policy needed for a given circumstance. When conditions changed, the leader was discarded (though never deprived of honor). There was a personality for each situation, all sharing the commitment to Thai independence. My friend Lee Kuan Yew, the brilliant Prime Minister of Singapore, used to say that we needed to watch carefully when the Thai leaders associated with us would be replaced; it would herald a sea change, whatever the formal protestations.
But while Thailand could be adaptable in its dealings with distant empires, it perceived less margin for maneuver in the face of aggressors located on its borders. It never wavered in its conviction that Hanoi’s conquest of Indochina must be resisted because it would be a mortal threat to Thailand’s survival. Zealots in faraway lands might consider the rulers of Hanoi as the innocent victims of foreign aggression who would conduct themselves peaceably toward their neighbors once the conflict in Vietnam was settled. The leaders of Thailand had no such illusions; their country had not survived by wishful thinking. In their minds a victory for Hanoi in South Vietnam would lead automatically to Communist domination of Cambodia and Laos; this in turn would increase the pressure on Thailand, especially on the northeast province, acquired only during the past century and culturally close to Laos. Thailand did not propose to face North Vietnam’s strength, discipline, and determination alone. Not noted for exposing itself to unnecessary risks, it nevertheless had permitted President John F. Kennedy to send marines there in 1962 as a counterweight to North Vietnamese pressures on Laos. Thai troops fought alongside ours in Vietnam; Thailand provided air bases for the war in Vietnam from 1966 onward. It sent volunteers (and occasionally even regular forces) to assist the neutralist government of Laos whenever the North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao approached too close to the Mekong River, which formed the boundary between Laos and Thailand.
No doubt the leaders in Bangkok acted as they did — in the Thai tradition of relying on a distant strong country to balance a nearby danger — because they could not imagine that the United States would permit itself to lose a war. They were baffled by our increasingly shrill domestic divisions over what seemed to them a clear-cut menace. At first they wrote them off as the inexplicable maneuvers of immature foreigners. But when the Pentagon Papers disclosed to the whole world the extent of their carefully calibrated participation in the Indochina war, the cautious policymakers in Bangkok developed serious doubts, which bubbled just below the level of action.
It cannot be said that the Thai leaders greeted the Paris Agreement with jubilation. They could not really understand why a superpower should compromise with a smaller regional bully. They favored anything that seemed to assure the continued independence of South Vietnam and a neutral Laos and Cambodia on Thailand’s borders. But they had too much experie
nce with North Vietnam and were too skeptical of man’s perfectibility to confuse a temporary — one hoped, prolonged — weakness of Hanoi with a change of heart. Sooner or later the Thai believed Hanoi would resume a hegemonic course, and they wanted to deflect it from the borders of their kingdom. Everything for them therefore depended on whether the United States would help maintain the balance of power in Indochina, whose disturbance had triggered our intervention in the first place.
I was not surprised to find Bangkok full of premonitions. The Prime Minister was Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn, who in the best Thai style hid a calculating intelligence behind a bland and seemingly ponderous exterior (thereby gaining additional time for reflection and warding off the impetuous pressures for which Americans were notorious). He embodied Thai reliance on the United States. After the Congress in June 1973 passed the law prohibiting any further American military operations in or over Indochina, Thanom disappeared in one of those nearly anonymous moves by which the Thai signal adaptation to new circumstances.
On February 9, 1973, when I saw him, Thanom did not act as if this outcome was foreordained. Still committed to the strategy of the previous decade, he essentially wanted to know the answer to two questions: How would we react to North Vietnamese violations of the Agreement? And how many forces would we keep in Southeast Asia, particularly in Thailand, to help preserve the balance of power in the area? I made clear that we had the most cold-blooded assessment of Hanoi’s ambitions and we would not stand idly by if it engaged in massive violations of the Agreement. On the other hand, I hoped on my visit to Hanoi to encourage tendencies toward peaceful construction.
With respect to the American military presence in Southeast Asia, the fact was that I was not certain because so much depended on our domestic politics. So I waffled. Some troops would be withdrawn, given the fact of a Vietnam cease-fire and our domestic realities. But substantial forces would be left or else Hanoi would be practically invited to attack. There is, I suppose, no alternative to such generalities when one is faced with a theoretical quandary that eventually only experience can resolve. And to the horror of the peoples of Southeast Asia, Thai fears proved more well-founded than my reassurances.
Years of Upheaval Page 3