Where Le Duc Tho miscalculated was in his estimate of the pliability of the Khmer Rouge, who refused to be Hanoi’s tools on the model of the Pathet Lao. But perhaps he was willing to pay the price of temporary Khmer Rouge autonomy because the immediate consequence of a Khmer Rouge victory would be the undermining of the government in Saigon, which could not long survive the communization of Cambodia. Hanoi also, as it later transpired, had its tried and true remedy for Khmer Rouge independence if it got out of hand. Less than four years after the Khmer Rouge victory in 1975, North Vietnam sent its troops to invade and occupy Communist Cambodia with no more scruple than it had shown toward Sihanouk’s neutral Cambodia in the mid-1960s and Lon Nol’s Cambodia in 1970.
We were prepared to settle for a genuine coalition government for Cambodia with Sihanouk as the balance wheel. What Hanoi pressed for was a Communist government with Sihanouk as a transitional figurehead. As previously with South Vietnam, Hanoi’s notion of our contribution to the negotiating process was the overthrow of our ally. It was the continued Communist refusal of any cease-fire, de facto or negotiated, or of any real negotiation over Cambodia, accompanied by a renewed Khmer Rouge military offensive, that induced us to resume our bombing in Cambodia in February. Our purpose was to create a balance of forces that would deprive the Communists of hope for a military solution and thus force a compromise. This attempt collapsed when Congress in June 1973 prohibited further US military operations in Indochina. (Our diplomacy to end the war in Cambodia in 1973 is discussed at length in Chapter VIII.)
As for a political settlement in Laos, the North Vietnamese leaders remained evasive. At one point Pham Van Dong suggested that it might occur no more than ninety days after a cease-fire; then, amazingly, he was disavowed by Le Duc Tho, who sought a private meeting with me to suggest that henceforth Cambodia and Laos be discussed by him and me alone since his Prime Minister was not familiar with all the nuances. In the event, a political settlement was not reached in Laos until September 14, 1973. The newly constituted coalition government held together tenuously for two years until it was finally engulfed in the general debacle of 1975. And no more than in 1962 did North Vietnam pay even token obeisance to its pledge to withdraw its troops. Between 40,000 and 50,000 North Vietnamese troops remained in Laos even after Hanoi’s own absurd interpretation of the Paris Agreement had been fulfilled.
Economic Aid
THE one subject about which Pham Van Dong was prepared to observe the Agreement was something on which we alone needed to perform: economic aid from the United States. He almost made it seem that Hanoi was doing us a favor in accepting our money. Not that its eagerness would reach the point of modifying its peremptory negotiating methods: American assistance was requested as a right. Any reminder that it was linked to Hanoi’s observance of the other provisions of the Paris Agreement was indignantly rejected as interference in North Vietnam’s domestic affairs or as an unacceptable political condition.
How we reached the point where a voluntary American offer became transmuted into a North Vietnamese “right” shows at the least the degree to which the two societies were doomed to mutual incomprehension and at most the ability of the North Vietnamese to turn insolence into an art form. On our side the offer of economic aid grew out of our contradictory mixture of idealistic values and a materialistic interpretation of history according to which economic motives are thought to dominate political decisions. Perhaps no major nation has been so uncomfortable with the exercise of vast power as the United States. We have tended to consider war as “unnatural,” as an interruption of our vocation of peace, prosperity, and liberty. No other society has considered it a national duty to contribute to the rebuilding of a defeated enemy; after the Second World War we made it a central element of our foreign policy. In Vietnam we thought it a device to induce an undefeated enemy to accept compromise terms. The reverse side of our faith in what we consider positive goals is a difficulty in coming to grips with irreconcilable conflict, with implacable revolutionary zeal, with men who prefer victory to economic progress and who remain determined to prevail regardless of material cost.
For years, all these strands had been woven through our Indochina policy. We had just begun to build up our forces in South Vietnam when President Lyndon Johnson in April 1965 offered Hanoi a program of postwar economic reconstruction. We do not know whether North Vietnam saw in this offer the first symptom of our declining resolution (so that it had an effect contrary to that intended), or evidence of bourgeois incapacity to grasp revolutionary dedication. The offer, in any event, was not taken up.
The Nixon Administration had a different perception of Hanoi’s motivation, but it thought that such a humanitarian proposal was one way of calming domestic dissent. Hence it did not wait long to follow in the footsteps of its predecessor. On September 18, 1969, in a conciliatory speech before the United Nations General Assembly, Nixon renewed the offer of economic aid to North Vietnam as well as the rest of Indochina, to no better effect than Johnson. Undiscouraged, in the summer of 1971 during my secret negotiations with Le Duc Tho, we proposed yet another reconstruction scheme. Le Duc Tho noted it without any show of interest. Nixon reiterated the offer publicly as part of a comprehensive proposal on January 25, 1972. Briefing the press the next day, I explained that we were prepared to contribute several billion dollars to the reconstruction of Indochina, including North Vietnam. The President’s Foreign Policy Report issued on February 9, 1972, was even more specific: “We are prepared to undertake a massive 7½ billion dollar five-year reconstruction program in conjunction with an overall agreement, in which North Vietnam could share up to two and a half billion dollars.” In my “peace is at hand” press conference of October 26, 1972, I repeated this theme. And I did so again in a press conference on January 24, 1973, as did Nixon on January 31, 1973.
By then Hanoi’s interest in the proposition had quickened. It would not admit that it would end the war for economic reasons. But once it had decided on a cease-fire out of military necessity, it was ready, if not eager, to extract the maximum aid from us. Characteristically, Hanoi couched this not in terms of an acceptance of our offer but as a demand for reparations. Nor were Hanoi’s ideas of the appropriate aid level characterized by excessive modesty; Le Duc Tho simply demanded for Hanoi the entire package of $7.5 billion that we had earmarked for all of Indochina. We were prepared to accept neither of these propositions. We were willing to extend aid because it had been promised by two administrations and especially because we thought it useful as one of the inducements to encourage observance of the Agreement. But we insisted that our offer was an application of traditional American principles; it was a voluntary act, not an “obligation” to indemnify Hanoi. It may have been hairsplitting but to us it involved a point of honor. Through weeks of weary haggling we managed to reduce Hanoi’s demand to $3.25 billion, which was put forward as a target figure subject to further discussion and Congressional approval.
The relevant documents were the Paris Agreement and a Presidential message. Article 21 of the Paris Agreement stated:
The United States anticipates that this Agreement will usher in an era of reconciliation with the Democratic Republic of Vietnam as with all the peoples of Indochina. In pursuance of its traditional policy, the United States will contribute to healing the wounds of war and to postwar reconstruction of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and throughout Indochina.
It was a promise given in the expectation that the war was ending and an era of reconciliation would then be possible. And I repeatedly emphasized to Le Duc Tho that any aid presupposed both Congressional approval and Hanoi’s living up to the Paris Agreement.
Our intention to extend aid and even its order of magnitude were well known and had been stated many times on the public record. What was kept secret at the time was a cabled message from Nixon to Premier Pham Van Dong spelling out the procedures for implementing Article 21. In order to underline the fact that it was voluntary and distinct fr
om the formal obligations of the Agreement, Le Duc Tho and I had agreed that the message would be delivered on January 30, 1973, three days after the Agreement was signed, in exchange for a list of American prisoners held in Laos. When on the appointed day the North Vietnamese failed to provide a list of the American prisoners of war held in Laos, we instructed our representative in Paris to delay handing over the note. This produced immediate action: The Laotian POW list was handed over on the afternoon of February 1; as agreed, we gave the North Vietnamese the Nixon message to Pham Van Dong at the same time.
Nixon’s message — drafted by my staff and me — suggested the procedures for discussing economic aid. On my visit to Hanoi there would be a general discussion of principles, leading to the setting up of a Joint Economic Commission. Its purpose would be to work out a precise aid program. (The Joint Economic Commission actually began its discussions in Paris on March 15.) The Nixon message spoke of an amount “in the range of $3.25 billion” over five years as an appropriate “preliminary” figure, subject to revision and to detailed discussion between the two countries. (Food aid was included in the total.) Whatever emerged from the deliberations of the Joint Economic Commission, the Nixon message stressed, would have to be submitted to the Congress, as is any foreign aid program after discussions with a foreign government. A separate paragraph emphasized this point: “It is understood that the recommendations of the Joint Economic Commission mentioned in the President’s note to the Prime Minister will be implemented by each member in accordance with its own constitutional provisions.”
Le Duc Tho, never lacking in chutzpah, presumed to instruct me in January as to what was appropriate to include in a communication from our President. He insisted that such a qualification had no place in the President’s message; our obligation had to be unconditional. I pointed out that whatever the more convenient decision-making procedures of Hanoi, our legislative process was a fact of life. We “compromised” by stating the need for Congressional approval on a separate page, sent simultaneously and of equal weight. Le Duc Tho seemed to draw comfort from this. It would enable Hanoi to publish the letter and to suppress the qualification — which is precisely what it later did, earning itself for the gullible one more demonstration of our duplicity.
The Politburo’s confidence that they could use our domestic pressures to push us from one position of disadvantage to another — not unreasonable in the light of a decade of experience — caused them to shrug off another important qualification, one that was equally real and equally explicit in my discussions with them. When I briefed the press about the Agreement on January 24, 1973, I stressed that we would discuss aid to North Vietnam only after its “implementation is well advanced.”
As it happened, the end of the war also reduced the fervid pressures against the Administration to make concessions to Hanoi; indeed, many who had urged an offer of economic aid as a means to end the war became notably less enthusiastic when it came to voting for it in the Congress. Nor was public opinion, which on the whole would have preferred victory to compromise, hospitable to the proposition that we should extend aid to a government whose brutality was becoming vividly clear through the tales of returning prisoners of war. Nixon was thus on safe ground when he instructed me to reiterate to my interlocutors in Hanoi that aid depended on strict observance of the Paris Agreement, with special reference to withdrawal from Cambodia. The North Vietnamese could not expect otherwise. If the war did not end, the “postwar” period could not begin, and the time for postwar reconstruction aid could hardly be said to have arrived.
Equally predictably, Pham Van Dong rejected this argument. He advanced the startling view that asking Hanoi to observe a signed agreement was to attach “political conditions.” Our aid was to be “unconditional.” In other words, Hanoi was to be free to use American economic aid to complete its long-standing ambition of conquering Indochina in violation of the very Agreement that it claimed obliged us to provide those resources.
Still, what roused the North Vietnamese to genuine outrage was our constitutional requirement of Congressional approval. I had brought with me to Hanoi a voluminous set of documents to educate the North Vietnamese in our constitutional processes. It was a compilation of some fifty-seven single-spaced pages outlining the American budgetary procedure in both the executive and legislative branches; the various types of bilateral and multilateral aid programs in which the United States had participated; the texts of all relevant legislation (including Congressionally mandated restrictions on aid to Hanoi); an outline of various projects that might be included in an aid program for Vietnam; and a list of pungent comments by leading Congressmen and Senators expressing growing skepticism about foreign aid in general. I handed over these documents to Pham Van Dong. He brushed them aside, pretending not to fathom these legislative matters (this despite the fact that he had shown great skill in manipulating Congressional opinion against the Administration while the war was still going on). He also suspected a trick:
First of all, I would like to express my suspicion. . . . I will speak very frankly and straightforwardly to you. It is known to everyone that the U. S. had spent a great amount of money in regard to the war in Vietnam. It is said about $200 billion, and in conditions that one would say that the Congress was not fully agreeable to this war. When the war was going on then the appropriation was so easy [laughs], and when we have to solve now a problem that is very legitimate . . . then you find it difficult.
He kept reiterating that he did not believe the legislative obstacles were anything but pretexts we were using to evade our “commitment”:
We should not deem it necessary to go in [to] the complete complexity, the forest of legal aspects. I feel it very difficult to understand. Of course, when one is unwilling then the legal aspect is a means to this end.
Never, I must say, have I been more eloquent in defense of Congressional prerogative than on this occasion. Later Congressional critics who scolded me for not taking their legislative responsibilities seriously would have been proud of me. It was finally agreed, as anticipated, that we would set up the Joint Economic Commission to consider how to develop our economic relations and to work out an aid program that we would submit to the Congress.
There were some inconclusive exchanges about normalizing diplomatic relations between Hanoi and Washington, and about the pending International Conference that was to be held in Paris to lend international endorsement to the Paris Agreement. Hanoi was not yet ready to establish any formal ties, not even offices that fell short of full diplomatic status. We proposed a number of schemes; they rejected them all. (Amusingly, one of our ideas was accepted by the Chinese a few days later.) With typical self-absorption Hanoi meant to use the prospect of permitting some American diplomats to join the ostracism and general discomfort of their colleagues from Western Europe — and probably the Soviet Union — in Hanoi as a boon that we first had to earn. As for the International Conference, Hanoi’s preoccupation was to reduce the participation of the Secretary-General of the United Nations to a minimum, if not eliminate him altogether. We found an honorific role that preserved his dignity as well as took account of North Vietnam’s touchy view of national sovereignty.
At a final banquet, Pham Van Dong expressed “delight” at my visit, as well as at its results — although as I reread the transcripts at this remove the source of his pleasure is not self-evident. My mood was somber but I had not yet given up hope.
After ten years of bitter warfare, perhaps not much more could be expected. Hanoi and Washington had inflicted grievous wounds on each other; theirs were physical, ours psychological and thus perhaps harder to heal. Our hosts had been courteous but it was too soon to expect a change in attitude. They were clearly applying to the implementation of the Agreement the methods by which they had conducted the war: pressing against its edges, testing our tolerance, violating key provisions tentatively to see where the new balance of forces would be established. And yet with all our doubts we w
ere dedicated to making a major effort for a peaceful evolution; there had been too much anguish to enter lightly into a new confrontation. One could draw some hope from the prospect that Hanoi’s nationalism might cause it to seek better relations with Washington to gain some margin of maneuver between its Communist patrons, Peking and Moscow. Perhaps Pham Van Dong’s dour insistence on economic aid might be a sign that Hanoi’s rulers were considering the option of building their own society rather than conquering their neighbors. In that case we were prepared to cooperate. But I was prey as well to skeptical experience; I left Hanoi with determination rather than optimism. I drove over the same pontoon bridge to Gia Lam airport and then flew in the Soviet transport to Noi Bai airport, where the Presidential aircraft awaited us. We entered it with relief. The soggy weather, the Spartan austerity, the palpable suspiciousness combined in Hanoi to produce the most oppressive atmosphere of any foreign capital I have ever visited. The wary elusiveness of North Vietnam’s leaders inhibited real dialogue much more than I had experienced in talks with any other Communist leaders. I reported cautiously to Nixon, giving my sober estimate of the prospects of the Paris Agreement:
They have two basic choices which I frankly pointed out to them (as well as to the Chinese). They can use the Vietnam Agreement as an offensive weapon, nibbling at its edges, pressuring Saigon, confronting us with some hard choices. In this case they would carry out the release of our prisoners and wait till our withdrawals were completed before showing their real colors unambiguously; they would keep their forces in Laos and Cambodia through procrastination of negotiations or straightforward violations; and launch a big new attack soon. They would calculate that we would not have the domestic base or will to respond.
Years of Upheaval Page 7