Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  An Eerie Visit to Hanoi

  FOR me, the sensation of landing in Hanoi on February 10 was the equivalent of stepping onto the moon. As over the course of a decade the war turned from a crusading mission into a national nightmare, the cool manipulators in Hanoi had exploited America’s hesitations and self-doubt. Pilgrimages of antiwar Americans to this Mecca of revolutionary rectitude became a regular event. North Vietnam successfully advertised itself as an innocent, peace-loving country sorely beset by brutal foreigners. Its negotiators in Paris perfected the ambiguous pronouncement that left the impression of great opportunities being lost by American administrations insufficiently dedicated to peace. Hanoi had understood that one of the major battlefields was in the minds of Americans, and it conducted the campaign brilliantly. One cannot deny respect for the fanatics who in their youth had dedicated themselves to Communism, had suffered heroically for their beliefs, had fought with single-minded devotion and courage first against the Japanese, then against the French, and finally against the Americans, exhausting all adversaries through the test of arms and psychological warfare.

  We had forced a tenuous compromise from these zealots; but it took a greater act of faith than I was capable of to believe that they would abide willingly by an inconclusive outcome. The purpose of my journey to Hanoi in February 1973 was to encourage any tendencies that existed to favor peaceful reconstruction over continued warfare, to stabilize the peace insofar as prospects of American goodwill could do so, and to warn of the serious consequences should these hopes be disappointed.

  The Boeing 707 of the Presidential fleet landed at Noi Bai military airfield, about fifty miles north of Hanoi. It was a gray, misty morning. The landscape around the airport was flat and desolate, pockmarked from our B-52 bombing that had destroyed most of the buildings and cratered the runways, though they had been patched up well enough to permit the plane to come to a bouncing stop.

  Le Duc Tho greeted me almost affectionately. That dour, dedicated revolutionary and I had developed a curious relationship over the nearly four years of secret meetings in Paris. On one level he undoubtedly hated me as the representative of an “imperialist” power seeking to deprive North Vietnam of what it considered its birthright — hegemony over all of Indochina. As a professional Leninist he despised the bourgeois values of compromise I put forward. And there were times that I deeply resented how he sought to manipulate our public opinion and shatter our self-respect; the effrontery of his deceptions inside and outside the conference room could be enraging. At the same time I admired Le Duc Tho’s subtlety, his acumen, his iron self-discipline. In all the years of negotiation with me he never lost his poise; he never made a mistake. Nor did he abandon his courtesy — except once, in May 1972, when, carried away by the prospect of seemingly imminent victory, he was tempted into insolence.6 He had stonewalled ingeniously for three years. And when the occasion to settle had been imposed by Hanoi’s defeats in 1972, he did so with flexibility and speed.

  What Le Duc Tho’s real views of me were must await Hanoi’s adoption of a Freedom of Information Act. Toward the end, at any rate, he thought it expedient to maintain the facade of cordiality. He greeted me at the military airfield with friendly smiles, almost as if it were a reunion of veterans of some ancient conflict. He took me by the hand to a shabby little barracks beside the tarmac, its windows blown out. After light banter over tea, we boarded a Soviet An-24 light transport aircraft for the twenty-minute flight to Gia Lam International Airport nearer Hanoi, another landmark familiar to me from years of military briefings. (The 707 could not land at Gia Lam because its runways were not long enough.)

  Gia Lam was heavily damaged; B-52s had scored a direct hit on its main runway. Only the front facade of the control tower was standing; one could look up through its windows and see the sky behind. We were greeted by other officials and set off in a motorcade of Soviet Volga sedans to the city. As it turned out these were virtually the only automobiles I saw during my visit.

  Both airports were on the north side of the Red River. Hanoi lay on the south side looking like a sleepy French provincial town. The river could be crossed only by pontoon bridges; the famous steel-girdered Paul Doumer (or Red River) Bridge, so frequently cited as proof of the ineffectiveness of our air campaign, had finally collapsed under the onslaught of the Christmas bombing.

  The north side of the river was heavily cratered by our bombing, resembling photographs of a lunar landscape. Once we reached Hanoi proper, however, the scene could not have been more peaceful. It was immediately obvious (and confirmed by surprised journalists a few weeks later)7 that the city itself was practically undamaged by our bombing, contrary to the mythology of the alleged barbarity of our Christmas attacks. Along the streets we traveled, the only destruction we saw was the shattered house of the French Delegate-General, hit accidentally several months earlier in the midst of our negotiations in Paris — endearing us neither to our interlocutors nor to our French hosts. Totally absent too was the frantic bustle of Saigon. A visitor from another planet would never have known that the same people inhabited both cities. Nor would he have guessed correctly which of the capitals had sent forth the invading armies that had terrified every neighbor and absorbed the world’s attention — proving that faith and discipline, not material strength alone, create their own advantage.

  Hanoi’s buildings were dilapidated, and in the style of southern France; it was evident that hardly any new urban construction had taken place since independence nearly two decades earlier. The wide tree-lined avenues were filled with cyclists. There was an occasional Soviet-built truck but no private cars. The streets were not crowded; the authorities had not yet brought back all who had been evacuated during the previous year. The people looked solemn, serious, aloof, indifferent. How incongruously the heroic presents itself! Whatever had motivated the unprepossessing men and women to fight and endure so tenaciously was not to be read in their faces. They glanced at our motorcade with no visible interest, though its length must have made it evident that something important was taking place.

  I drove into Hanoi with strange detachment. My visit was the end of a long journey but it had no self-evident purpose. Ever since the climactic phase of the negotiation, Le Duc Tho and the Politburo had been eager for me to visit their capital. Their motive was elusive. It could not be the hunger for equal status with China, which had made Brezhnev press to receive me in Moscow after my secret visit to Peking: Hanoi’s leaders were too self-contained for that; psychological insecurity was hardly their most notable feature. Did they seek to tranquilize us before launching a new wave of conquest? It was possible, but it was a double-edged tactic. From our perspective our demonstration that we had explored every opportunity for conciliation was a necessary condition in America for defending the Paris accords by other means if it came to that. Might Hanoi be content to rest on the frenzied exertions of a lifetime of struggle and begin meeting the needs of its people? That was what Le Duc Tho had been saying and what we were prepared to explore.

  In any event, our choices were circumscribed. I had come to Hanoi in part to symbolize a commitment to national reconciliation at home — a subject of no interest to the North Vietnamese. We hoped to convince Hanoi’s leaders of the futility of resuming military operations by insisting on a strict performance of the Paris accords. But deep down I knew, with a sinking feeling, that words would not impress them. Somewhere along the line we would be tested. We would have to show our mettle. At the same time I had to attempt to provide inducements for peaceful endeavors in the shadow of two imponderables: Could Hanoi so adjust its scale of values as to give building its economy a higher priority than it had in all previous periods in its history? And would Congress support us?

  I understood, or rather felt inchoately, that I, the representative of a superpower, was at a strange disadvantage in this city so devoid of all the appurtenances of modern life. America had been obsessed by Vietnam, but in the long run it was for us only a smal
l corner of a world for whose security we had become at least partly responsible. On the other hand, the epic poem the leaders in Hanoi were acting out was their sole cause. They had the capacity to damage us out of any proportion to what we could gain, by resuming the war or their assault on our domestic tranquillity. But they could do nothing positive for us. They were too egotistical to think of foreign policy in terms of an international system; too arrogant to believe in goodwill; too ambitious to restrain their purposes by ideas of concord. And so I drove into Hanoi uneasily aware that the best outcome would be the avoidance of a loss and the best hope only that soon Vietnam might recede into oblivion in our national consciousness.

  I was housed in an elegant two-story guest house in the center of Hanoi that had once been the residence of the French Governor-General of Tonkin. Most of my staff stayed in the Reunification Hotel, a shabby old structure diagonally across the street, whose walls were covered with graffiti, mostly in Russian, the cultural contribution of various Soviet aid missions. Service there was based on the proposition that all foreigners were potential spies whose stay could be cut short by showing no mercy to any aspiration to elementary comfort.

  Le Duc Tho accompanied me to my own room and then politely excused himself, to prepare for my first meeting with Prime Minister Pham Van Dong. Having some time, my colleagues and I decided to take a walk, much to the discomfiture of both the North Vietnamese protocol officials and my Secret Service protectors. For once, North Vietnamese pedantry deserted them. This possibility had not been foreseen; hence no instructions had been left and the flustered guards at the gate did not impede our departure. We strolled along streets that the dearth of motor traffic made appear both old-fashioned and serene, crowded with people calmly performing their chores. Two little lakes form the center of Hanoi. We walked along them, the first American officials to move freely in Hanoi in two decades, while a few hundred yards away other Americans, our prisoners of war, still languished in a cruel captivity.I Passersby stared at us with no evident emotion. They displayed neither hostility nor friendliness, treating us as if we were some strange mutation of no possible relevance to them. In front of one of the buildings was a huge billboard with a map showing what Hanoi’s rulers were pleased to consider the “liberated areas” of the South. Though somewhat generous to Hanoi, it was not inaccurate. I wondered how the people of North Vietnam reacted to it; it was precious little to show for their twenty years of sacrifice.

  We strolled back to my residence. And here North Vietnamese addiction to formal regulations took its revenge for our flirtation with the unexpected. At the gate everyone was asked to show a pass in order to regain admittance. This was easy enough for my colleagues, who had been handed identity cards at the airport. Unfortunately, I had been given no such document. Bureaucratic rules in any totalitarian Communist state are not treated casually; in Hanoi they are an obsession. I was refused admittance. The North Vietnamese guard had never heard of me. This may reflect badly on the quality of the gossip columns in Hanoi’s newspapers but it was no consolation to me; I expressed displeasure, with my legendary humility and restraint. An officer showed up, but he too hesitated to bend the regulations. A twenty-minute argument ensued. It finally took Le Duc Tho’s intervention to keep me from having to sleep in the streets. One of my staff later raised the matter with a North Vietnamese protocol official. He, nervously apologetic, explained that the head of a delegation was never given a pass; it was a mark of special status! Obviously, neither had any head of a delegation ever taken a walk. Eventually they provided me with a pass, to which I held on for dear life.

  My living arrangements were lavish but also a bit erratic. The dimensions of the bedroom were majestic; it was lit by a forest of lights hanging from the ceiling. Unfortunately, each light was controlled by a different switch, located in a different part of the room. Before retiring I had to hunt down the appropriate switches, with varying degrees of success; at any rate none was reachable from my bed, so that I had to return to it in pitch-darkness. Getting into bed was itself not a simple task. Every evening I found it immaculately made up, my pajamas laid out, a book I was reading (by Henry Fairlie on the Kennedy Presidency) carefully placed on my pillow. The only barrier was a mosquito net, enveloping the entire bed, that was tucked in so thoroughly it was impossible to get in without lifting up the mattress and undoing the whole arrangement, which in turn guaranteed that I would be pursued into bed by a swarm of mosquitoes.

  In my bathroom I had only scalding hot water in the bathtub but no plug, and nothing but ice-cold water in the washbasin. Actually, my hosts were making every effort to be hospitable. North Vietnam was a small country of limited resources, burdened by a vast military establishment, not to mention a concerted American effort to disrupt its economy. Nevertheless I was paranoid enough to suspect my hosts of a further diabolical attempt at psychological warfare — especially since I was awakened every morning at 5:30 by the sound of the citizenry conducting their compulsory calisthenics in the plaza in front of my bedroom window.

  I had requested some time for sight-seeing, especially of cultural sites, as I usually did in visiting a country for the first time. Le Duc Tho graciously accompanied me on these excursions. He found them quite educational since he had never seen them before himself. We first visited Hanoi’s History Museum, a collection of historical relics assembled mostly by the French. As reorganized by the North Vietnamese, the museum told of ancient battles against the Chinese or against smaller neighbors, great migrations and rebellions. Each artifact was labeled with its place of excavation. Le Duc Tho found the exhibits fascinating, mainly because the excavation sites reminded him of nearby prisons where the French had confined him as a guerrilla leader. The old revolutionary was clearly more interested in his fight to create a new culture than in celebrating an ancient one. He gave me a detailed account of the relative merits of solitary confinement in various prisons, and unhelpful hints on how to disguise myself as a Vietnamese peasant.

  The next day I visited an art museum. I have to say it was rather disappointing. It was as if this talented people had consumed its substance in a history of incessant struggle, leaving no time or energy for the development of gentler qualities or pursuits.

  Pham Van Dong

  AS we turned to serious talks, we soon found ourselves in the position of survivors of an ancient vendetta who have reluctantly concluded that their inability to destroy each other compels an effort at coexistence — though without conviction or real hope. We were both aware of the dictates of prudence, but neither side could shake off its memories, nor could Hanoi abandon its passions. The attempts to behave in a friendly manner were so studied and took so much exertion that they created their own tension; the slightest disagreement tended to bring to the fore the underlying suspicion and resentment.

  Hanoi’s leaders soon showed that they had lost none of the insolence that for years had set our teeth on edge. My opposite number in these talks was Pham Van Dong, Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam for nearly twenty years. But the change of personality brought no alteration in the familiar style of condescending superiority or of deception masquerading as moral homily.

  Pham Van Dong had come to my attention in January 1967, when he had given a brilliant interview to Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times, explaining why Hanoi was confident of winning against the mightiest power in the world. Dong had argued that the disparity in strength was illusory; the North Vietnamese were prepared to fight for generations; America’s material superiority could operate only in a more limited time span. They would simply outlast us.8 Pham Van Dong turned out to be right — aided not a little by an American military strategy massive enough to hazard our international position yet sufficiently inhibited to guarantee an inconclusive outcome.

  Pham Van Dong, implacable and incisive, had stalked our consciousness, and occasionally our consciences, during the intervening years. His periodic Delphic pronouncements had both raised public e
xpectations and dashed official hopes. In early 1972 he had denounced all talk of compromise as “the logic of a gangster”; when a compromise was reached later in 1972, his interview with an American journalist put the most tendentious interpretation on it and contributed to the breakdown of the negotiations.9 In the last stages of the negotiation it was Pham Van Dong in whose name the most important communications from Hanoi were addressed to President Nixon.

  Pham Van Dong was wiry, short, wary, his piercing eyes watchful for the expected trickery and at the same time implying that the burden of proof of any statement by an arch-capitalist would be on the speaker. He greeted me on the steps of the elaborate structure now called the President’s House. From here French colonial administrators had ruled all of Indochina and established in the minds of their all-too-receptive Vietnamese subjects the conviction that the boundaries of Indochina should forever after coincide with those of the French colonial empire. Vietnamese expansionism, which had already proved the nightmare of its neighbors even before the arrival of the French, was thus given new impetus and legitimacy by colonial rule. We entered a large reception hall and seated ourselves in a semicircle for the introductory informal conversation — as in China. Also as in China, this was an occasion for subtle hints to establish the mood.

  The meeting started pleasantly enough with Pham Van Dong and me protesting our eagerness to begin a new relationship, and pledging perseverance to that end. But then the Premier introduced a jarring note; less than two weeks after signature of the Paris Agreement, he dropped an ominous hint of renewed warfare. If a new relationship did not develop a solid basis of mutual interest, he averred, the just-signed Paris accords would be “only a temporary stabilization of the situation, only a respite.” He immediately qualified this slightly by adding that such was not Hanoi’s preference. As a devout Leninist he happily fell in with my somewhat irrelevant response that we based our new relationship on the existing facts. Pham Van Dong could not resist returning to the theme of his earlier interview with Harrison Salisbury: “We Vietnamese living in this area will remain forever. But you are from the other side of the ocean. Should we take account of this fact, too?” In other words, when would we abandon South Vietnam? I replied with a pointed allusion to North Vietnam’s status as a separate country: “This is why we are no long-term threat — despite recent events — to your independence.” But Pham Van Dong was no more inclined than Le Duc Tho to give away anything, even a philosophical point, for nothing. Nor would he forgo another subtle warning of Hanoi’s implacable determination: “But we should think this over.”