Pham Van Dong thus did not take long to dash my dim hope that he might prove to be another Zhou Enlai and become a partner in transforming old enmity into new cooperation. He was not — indeed, could not be — a partner, any more than Vietnam was China. Pham Van Dong represented a people who had prevailed by unremitting tenacity; Zhou Enlai was the leader of a country that had made its mark through cultural preeminence and majesty of conduct. Pham Van Dong’s strength was monomaniacal absorption with the ambitions of one country; Zhou was quintessentially Chinese in his conviction that China’s performance was morally relevant to the rest of the world. Pham Van Dong was of the stuff of which revolutionary heroes are made. Zhou, while a revolutionary himself, was of the stuff of which great leaders are made.
Pham Van Dong, it is now clear, sought to tranquilize us so that Hanoi could complete its conquest of Indochina without American opposition. Zhou Enlai acted on the conviction that China’s security — at least in the face of imminent Soviet threat — depended on America’s strong commitment to the global balance of power. To Pham Van Dong the encounter with me was a tactic in a revolutionary struggle. He was prepared to improve relations with America if, as he had implied in our banter, this gained him a free hand in Indochina; otherwise the struggle would resume. In no case did Hanoi see any benefit in heightened American strength and self-confidence. Zhou Enlai’s aims were strategically compatible with ours at least in the foreseeable future; his strategy presupposed shared interests that we would consider worth defending. Far from desiring to undermine America’s international position and national self-assurance, as time went on Zhou attempted discreetly to strengthen both.
After the initial thrust-and-parry, Pham Van Dong and I walked with our colleagues into a formal conference room of heavy furniture and drawn curtains, where we faced each other across a table and immediately ran into another squall. The North Vietnamese Premier made a little speech greeting me formally and graciously, expressing the hope for good results. I replied:
We clearly endorse different ideologies, and it would be idle to pretend otherwise, but we have proved in our relationship with other countries that this need not be an obstacle to good relations and cooperative action. In the long term, from an historical perspective, a strong and independent self-reliant Vietnam is in no way inconsistent with American national interests. We slid into war against each other partly through misconceptions on each side. We thought the war was directed from one central office that was not in Indochina. And perhaps you drew certain lessons from your history that were not exactly accurate. But whatever the conditions under which we are acting, our interest in Indochina is the maintenance of the independence and sovereignty of the countries of Indochina, and that, we understand, is not opposed to your interests.
Pham Van Dong was less than enthusiastic about the reputation I had given him to uphold. The independence and sovereignty of any of the other countries of Indochina had hardly been a North Vietnamese goal in the past. Nor did it turn out to be even remotely an objective for the future. In addition, he surely did not accept our view that South Vietnam was a sovereign country. But he exercised uncharacteristic restraint on these topics. What he could not permit to slip by was my implication of North Vietnamese fallibility:
I think that what has just happened between us — and Dr. Kissinger referred to it as a misunderstanding — in this connection we have repeatedly expressed our views. And on our part I think what we have done, we ought to have done. . . .
In other words, the misconceptions were all on our part. But, as before, the cloud passed again rapidly. Dong continued:
[I]t is something past, something bygone, and we should draw some conclusions about that for the present and the future. And we should, in the spirit we have just mentioned outside and we continue in this room, shift from war to peace, . . . shift from confrontation to reconciliation as stipulated in the Agreement, and . . . bring a new relationship, a solid relationship, on a basis agreed upon by the two parties and aiming at the long-term goals as Dr. Kissinger has just mentioned. As far as we are concerned, we will firmly follow this direction — that is to say to implement the signed Agreement, to implement all the provisions of the Agreement.
Unfortunately, Pham Van Dong’s eloquence was not matched by his country’s actions. Our agenda consisted of three items: observance of the Paris Agreement, normalization of relations, and economic reconstruction. No sooner had we turned to the first agenda item than we realized that Hanoi had no intention of making the Paris accords the first agreement it had ever observed.
The cease-fire established by the Paris Agreement had gone into effect at midnight Greenwich Mean Time on January 27. There were immediate reports of violations as both sides sought to seize as much territory as possible in the hours before the cease-fire went into effect; some battles continued for days afterward. In that early period both sides were guilty of stretching the letter as well as the spirit of the Agreement. Saigon, still the stronger side, gave as good as it received; it expanded its control over more hamlets than it lost. But from then on North Vietnam showed itself capable of uniquely gross challenges to the solemn undertaking it had just signed.
The international supervisory machinery immediately ran into Communist obstruction. Hanoi would not designate the official points of entry through which alone, according to the Agreement, military equipment was permitted to enter South Vietnam under international supervision. Hanoi seemed to feel that refusing to comply with the provision for international control also removed the inhibitions of another clause that limited new equipment to one-for-one replacement. In flagrant violation, Hanoi’s resupply efforts down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, freed of American bombing, proceeded massively and at an ominously more rapid rate than during the war.
As for the political provisions, Saigon was clearly in no hurry to set up the National Council for National Reconciliation and Concord envisaged by the Agreement; Hanoi for its part thwarted any discussion of elections — to be supervised by that Council — which it knew it would lose. But while neither Vietnamese party was distinguished by concern for the political obligations, there can be no doubt that Hanoi’s illegal infiltration of military equipment and personnel started almost immediately, proved decisive, and antedated all the alleged breaches of the Paris accords by Saigon cited later by Hanoi’s apologists.
To make our point, I had brought along a compilation of North Vietnamese violations in the two weeks since the signature of the Paris Agreement. The list left no doubt that Hanoi accepted no constraints of any of the provisions it had signed so recently. We had incontrovertible evidence of 200 major military violations. The most flagrant were the transit of the Demilitarized Zone by 175 trucks on February 6 and the movement of 223 tanks heading into South Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia. Transit of the DMZ by military vehicles violated Article 15(a), on the wording of which we had spent nearly two months and which banned all military traffic, as well as requiring the concurrence of Saigon for civilian traffic. It also violated the explicit stipulation that new military equipment could be introduced into South Vietnam only on the basis of one-for-one replacement through previously designated international checkpoints (Article 7). The movement of tanks through Laos and Cambodia violated Article 20, according to which all foreign troops were to be withdrawn from Laos and Cambodia and the territory of those countries was not to be used as a base for encroaching on other countries. When the tanks reached South Vietnam they would also be violating Article 7’s prohibition of the introduction of new matériel.
Pham Van Dong and Le Duc Tho were not fazed. With the casual brazenness I remembered so well from my encounters in Paris, they explained the violations in terms that were irrelevant to the issue but served marvelously to confuse it.
There is the story of a law professor who taught his students how to take advantage of every possible defense. If one’s client is accused of stealing a black pot, the tactic should be to reply: “My client did not steal anyth
ing. In any case it was not a pot that he stole, and the pot was not black.” Le Duc Tho, to whom Pham Van Dong deferred on this issue, followed the same approach. There had been no violations, he said. And in any case the trucks crossing the DMZ were carrying civilian goods. This, of course, still violated the provision according to which civilian traffic required the assent of Saigon. And the resupply restrictions of Article 7 would become absurd if Hanoi could avoid international control by the simple device of declaring all supplies civilian. As for the tanks, Le Duc Tho and Pham Van Dong halfheartedly denied the truth of my allegations but promised to look into them. They then suggested that perhaps the tanks had been en route when the Agreement was signed. This was, of course, quite irrelevant to the prohibition of their entry into South Vietnam. Vice Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach, who had negotiated the technical protocols in Paris with Ambassador William H. Sullivan, had the cleverest idea. Probably, he averred, such was the urgency of the need that the tanks, too, were carrying civilian goods to the civilian population.
Hanoi’s solicitude for the comfort of the fewer than two million South Vietnamese civilians under its control was remarkable; it had shown little evidence of it while the war was still going on. I was developing the queasy feeling that we were being tested, that if we did not force a showdown soon on the issue of resupply and infiltration the war would resume whenever Hanoi was ready, and all we would have done was purchase a brief respite for the withdrawal of our forces.
Equally frustrating were our discussions of the American soldiers and airmen who were prisoners of war or missing in action. We knew of at least eighty instances in which an American serviceman had been captured alive and had subsequently disappeared. The evidence consisted of either voice communications from the ground in advance of capture or photographs and names published by the Communists. Yet none of these men was on the list of POWs handed over after the Agreement. Why? Were they dead? How did they die? Were they missing? How was that possible after capture? I called special attention to the nineteen cases where pictures of the captured had been published in the Communist press. Pham Van Dong replied noncommittally that the lists handed over to us were complete. He made no attempt to explain discrepancies. Experience had shown, he said, that owing to the nature of the terrain in Indochina it would take a long time, perhaps a year, to come up with additional information, though he did not amplify what the terrain had to do with the disappearing prisoners. We have never received an explanation of what could possibly have happened to prisoners whose pictures had appeared in Communist newspapers, much less the airmen who we knew from voice communications had safely reached the ground.
To calm the atmosphere, Le Duc Tho offered to release twenty prisoners of war ahead of schedule, ostensibly in honor of my visit, and gave me the opportunity to pick them from the POW list. While grateful for the early release, I refused to select the names. I had no basis for making individual selections among those who had already suffered so long. (Prisoners held the longest were being released earliest in any case.) This was one promise Hanoi kept; twenty additional prisoners were released with the first group.
The North Vietnamese were at their most adamant (and obnoxious) about Laos and Cambodia. Article 20 of the Paris Agreement explicitly stipulated that “foreign countries” should end all military activities in Cambodia and Laos and totally withdraw all their forces there.10 In a separate written understanding, Le Duc Tho and I had agreed that Vietnamese as well as American troops were “foreign” within the meaning of this article. If words meant anything, this required immediate North Vietnamese withdrawal from Laos and Cambodia and an end to the use of Laotian and Cambodian territory for base areas, sanctuaries, or infiltration.
My conversations with Pham Van Dong had not proceeded far before it became apparent that the North Vietnamese proposed to drain Article 20 of all meaning. They took the position that the required withdrawal, unconditional on its face, would have to await not only a cease-fire in Laos and Cambodia but also a political settlement in both those countries. Hanoi would withdraw only after negotiations with the new governments there. Since Communist political demands were for what amounted to Pathet Lao predominance in Laos and a total Khmer Rouge victory in Cambodia, North Vietnamese withdrawal would take place, if at all, only after it had become irrelevant and the issue had been decided in favor of the Communist side. Hanoi was proposing in effect to negotiate with itself, or at best with its Cambodian and Laotian stooges, about implementing provisions of an undertaking with us. The achievement of political settlements in Laos or Cambodia — which Le Duc Tho had in fact refused to discuss at Paris — could not possibly be made a precondition for the fulfillment of obligations that made no reference to it whatsoever and, by their plain import, were without qualification.
Hanoi’s outrageous interpretation was particularly ominous for Cambodia. In Laos cease-fire negotiations were at least taking place and we had, for whatever it was worth, Hanoi’s promise to bring them to a conclusion within fifteen days. But in Cambodia the Khmer Rouge refused to talk to any representative of the non-Communist side; their response to Lon Nol’s unilateral proclamation of a cease-fire was a renewed military offensive. We had risked making peace in Vietnam in the absence of formal arrangements for Cambodia because the American Congress would never have tolerated any delay on account of Cambodia alone and because our experts agreed that the Khmer Rouge could not prevail by themselves. If they were deprived of North Vietnamese combat and logistical support, as the Agreement required, some form of compromise settlement was probable. But if North Vietnamese troops remained, in violation of the Paris Agreement, they would almost certainly tip the balance in favor of the Khmer Rouge. Moreover, almost all our studies — the last at the end of January by the British antiguerrilla expert Sir Robert Thompson — indicated that a Communist takeover in Cambodia, by opening another enemy front and a sea route of supplies through Sihanoukville, would wreck South Vietnam’s chances of survival.
In fact, we have since learned from Sihanouk’s memoirs that the Khmer Rouge, considering the Paris Agreement a betrayal, had asked the North Vietnamese troops to quit Cambodia.11 They stayed in violation of Article 20 and against the wishes of both their enemies and their own allies, whom they used as an alibi in their talks with us.
Needless to say, my response to Pham Van Dong was sharp. It was all very well, I said sarcastically, to note Hanoi’s fastidious regard for the sovereignty of its allies. But it was bizarre to maintain that Hanoi could not make a unilateral decision to remove troops it had introduced unilaterally, in compliance with an agreement to which it had pledged itself barely two weeks earlier. Its soldiers were not prisoners in these countries. Hanoi, having introduced its forces without the approval of the legitimate governments, could certainly withdraw them on its own.
It cannot be said that my arguments left a deep impression. On the other hand, experience had taught that Hanoi did not always hold to the original version of its position; it had, after all, abandoned a similar position over South Vietnam. The only immediate “concession” we elicited was a promise by Le Duc Tho to use his “influence” to bring about a rapid cease-fire in Laos — the third time they had sold us that particular item. The Laotian cease-fire finally came about on February 22, but not without the spur of one more US B-52 strike on North Vietnamese troop concentrations in Laos, to the accompaniment of outraged media and Congressional protests that once again we were “expanding” the war. Despite the cease-fire Hanoi withdrew no troops from Laos.
North Vietnamese stonewalling doomed Cambodia, however, to prolonged agony. Pham Van Dong and Le Duc Tho claimed that Vietnam was not involved in Cambodia — another flagrant misrepresentation; hence they needed to take no position with respect to the de facto ceasefire that Lon Nol had proclaimed. They spurned Lon Nol’s offer to talk to Hanoi or to the Khmer Rouge; they maintained their position of 1970 — demanding the overthrow of the Cambodian government. As in the long negotiating stalemate ove
r Vietnam, they insisted that the political structure in Phnom Penh be disbanded before any talks, after which, of course, the talks would have had no purpose. In fact, Hanoi did not even pretend to want a coalition in Cambodia; it insisted on an undiluted Communist takeover. Le Duc Tho in an offhand manner suggested that I talk to Sihanouk, but he was curiously vague about the Prince’s status or even his whereabouts, implying strongly that the Khmer Rouge would be the decisive element in the future of Cambodia. Le Duc Tho — clearly the Politburo’s expert on the other countries of Indochina — was quite condescending about Sihanouk. He made fun of a visit Sihanouk had recently paid to Hanoi and the Prince’s love of personal luxury. He showed a propaganda film about Sihanouk’s visit to Communist-controlled territory in Cambodia, the clear implication of which was that Sihanouk was there on the sufferance of the Khmer Rouge. The primary use that Le Duc Tho seemed to see in Sihanouk was as a means to demoralize and undermine the Lon Nol government.
Years of Upheaval Page 6