Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  None of these conditions was fulfilled in Indochina. There was no massive attack by regular units across a well-defined boundary but the seeping in of hostile forces across trackless jungles. By some sort of weird bow to legality, the one frontier in Indochina relatively unviolated by Hanoi was the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Vietnam along the seventeenth parallel established by the Geneva Accords of 1954. To compensate for this uncharacteristic deference to a legal obligation, the North Vietnamese proceeded to bypass the Demilitarized Zone by establishing their supply lines in neutral countries that wanted only to be left alone. The Ho Chi Minh Trail ran through Laos; sanctuaries were established in Cambodia. By an even weirder turn of events, this logic was accepted by many domestic critics of the war. Whenever we reacted to these gross violations of international law and threats to the security of our forces, by seeking to intercept the totally illegal supply lines that sustained an aggressive and expansionist activity, it was we who were accused of violating the neutrality of Cambodia and Laos. This was the issue in several of the bitterest domestic controversies of the war.

  The political situation in Vietnam was equally at variance with our preconceptions. The war concerned not the support of a particular government but the legitimacy of any non-Communist structure. Many Americans tended to judge the government we were defending by our own constitutional practices, which were only marginally relevant to a civil war in a developing country with a totally different historical experience. In the West the nation existed before the state, and indeed gave birth to it. In many developing countries the opposite is true; a state is trying to crystallize a sense of nationhood. In such circumstances government is often the only expression of national identity; political contests become a struggle for total power; there is no historical experience with the concept of loyal opposition, without which democracy cannot flourish. Conversely the attempt to force-feed constitutional government can hazard what little cohesion exists.

  So it was in Indochina. South Vietnam, emerging out of a reluctant partition of the country in 1954, struggled for nationhood while a guerrilla assault, organized and run from Hanoi — there is no longer any doubt about this — rent the tenuous fabric of society. The South Vietnamese leadership, essentially brought into office by an American-backed coup in 1963, hung on precariously in the face of an escalating invasion of outside forces; its best officials were systematically assassinated by Communist guerrillas; its economy was ravaged. And while dealing with these challenges, almost unmanageable in their collective impact, the Saigon administration faced relentless pressure for reform from its distant ally, America. Almost miraculously, South Vietnam endured these multiple pressures and even gained in strength — a tribute to the tenacity of its people and a measure of the price they were prepared to pay to avoid being ruled by the brutal totalitarians of Hanoi.

  But, inevitably, the process bore no resemblance to the expectations of the liberal American leadership groups that had conceived the initial intervention. Wedded to an inconclusive strategy — or perhaps engaged in an inherently unwinnable conflict — they lost their self-assurance and sense of direction. They first abandoned victory, then faith even in the possibility of serious negotiation toward a reasonable compromise; finally they concluded that the postwar American role of global leadership was itself deeply flawed.

  This moral collapse was not a minor matter for our country or for nations around the world that depended upon us. That those who had involved America in Indochina should come to argue for the necessity of settling the war was a tribute to their sense of reality. But their refusal — more of a sense of guilt — to admit that a negotiated settlement required national unity behind a minimum negotiating program turned the extrication from Vietnam into a nightmare. No negotiator, least of all the hard-boiled revolutionaries from Hanoi, will settle so long as he knows that his opposite number will be prevented from sticking to a position by constantly escalating domestic pressures. The myth that the obstacle to a settlement was the short-sightedness, if not worse, of our government and not the implacability of the aggressor was in the end endorsed by the very people who had heretofore sustained our foreign policy. The old foreign policy Establishment thus abandoned its preeminent task, which is to contribute balanced judgment, long-term perspective, and thoughtful analysis to the public discussion of our international responsibility.

  As a result of this abdication, the so-called peace movement came to be driven by a relatively tiny group of radicals, whose public support in the country was close to nil. To that most vocal hard core of dissenters, the issue in Vietnam was not the wisdom of a particular American commitment but the validity of American foreign policy in general and indeed of American society. They saw the war as a symptom of an evil, corrupt, militaristic capitalist system. They treated the Viet Cong as a progressive movement, North Vietnam as a put-upon, heroic revolutionary country, and Communism as the wave of the future in Indochina, if not in the entire developing world. They were outraged by our incursion into Cambodia less because of the alleged extension of the war into sanctuaries (from which North Vietnamese had, after all, killed thousands of South Vietnamese and Americans for five years) than because they feared it might lead to success. Concern for the future of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian populations under Communism was contemptuously dismissed as a transparent subterfuge for continuing a war conducted for much more sinister purposes. By the same token, our fear of the decline of American global credibility and its impact on international security was interpreted in radical circles as using the peoples of Indochina as pawns in some overall American strategic design. Indeed, in these terms the decline in America’s world position was welcomed as a contribution to world peace.

  To this small but increasingly strident group a victory for Hanoi was not regrettable but morally desirable. It was not to be mitigated by negotiation but made brutally evident by, in effect, surrender. America’s humiliation in that distant enterprise was seen as an object lesson in the immorality of America’s postwar world leadership and as a convenient tool to demoralize the entire American Establishment — business, labor, academia, the media, Congress — which was perceived as an obstacle to the forward march of history. Thus the arrogant tone of moral superiority, and the flaunting of profanity that implied that its objects were beneath contempt.

  Throughout the last year of the Johnson Presidency, the style, methods, and rhetoric of opponents of the Vietnam war descended to a level of nastiness from which our public life has yet to recover fully. During the 1968 Presidential campaign, the relentless harassment of so warm and generous a personality as Hubert Humphrey reached a bitterness that he could recall only with tears later on.

  All these tendencies were tragically accelerated by the election of Richard Nixon. Nixon was probably the only leader who could disengage from Vietnam without a conservative revolt. Yet his history of partisanship had made him anathema to most of the responsible Democrats. Radical opposition to the war thus fed on and merged with hatred of Richard Nixon on the part of many who had no sympathy for radicalism in general. The virulence of dissent escalated and was not moderated by those who, presumably, stood for values of civilized discourse and civic responsibility. The latter’s yearning to expiate a guilt that was in retrospect vastly exaggerated or nonexistent prolonged the war. It also shattered forever the existing foreign policy Establishment, whose members were ground up between a national policy they dared not support and a radical opposition that would not embrace them — indeed, which was determined to punish them for their past, however hard they might try to disavow it.

  This process destroyed any compassion for the complexity of the task the Nixon Administration had inherited. To withdraw fast enough to ease public concerns but slowly enough to give Hanoi an incentive to negotiate, to show flexibility at the conference table while conveying a determination that there was a point beyond which our national honor would not permit us to go, required a firm strategy sustained by
an understanding public. The persistent domestic pressures — however different the motives — turned this task into an ordeal. By the end of Nixon’s first term, rational discourse on Vietnam had all but stopped; the issue was fought out by recrimination and vilification in the Congress and the media and by demonstrations and riots on the campuses and periodically in the streets.

  The ugliness of the domestic battles was a national tragedy. The issue was posed as to who was “for” or “against” the war — a phony question. Nixon was determined to end our involvement and in fact did so. What he refused to do was to doom millions who had relied upon us to a bloody Communist tyranny. He believed that abject failure would vindicate the neo-isolationist trends at home, demoralize the American people, and make them fearful of foreign responsibilities. He was convinced that an America so weakened would dishearten allies who depended on us and embolden adversaries to undertake new adventures. And he was proved right. The collapse in 1975 not only led to genocidal horrors in Indochina; from Angola to Ethiopia to Iran to Afghanistan, it ushered in a period of American humiliation, an unprecedented Soviet geopolitical offensive all over the globe, and pervasive insecurity, instability, and crisis.

  I will not rehearse here once again all the various arguments made in the debate over the war amid the emotion of the time. I am clearly a party to them; their intellectual and moral merit will have to be sorted out by others in the fullness of time. Whatever the conflicting positions, it was a national disaster that the discussion deteriorated by 1972 into an attack on motives, poisoning the public discourse that is the lifeblood of a democratic society. Critics claimed a monopoly on the desire for peace, ridiculing and condemning all other concerns as subterfuges for psychotic commitment to killing for its own sake. The systematic undermining of trust deflected us from what should have been our principal national debate.

  In the early 1970s America needed above all a complex understanding of new realities; instead it was offered simple categories of black and white. It had to improve its sense of history; instead it was told by its critics that all frustrations in the world reflected the evil intent of America’s own leaders. The Vietnam debate short-circuited a process of maturing. It represented a flight into nostalgia; it fostered the illusion that what ailed America was a loss of its moral purity and that our difficulties could be set right by a return to simple principles. Whatever our mistakes, our destiny was not that facile. A self-indulgent America opened the floodgates of chaos and exacerbated its internal divisions.

  All this bitterness was compounded by Nixon’s response. Nixon became convinced that he was faced with a hostile conspiracy. He was following a bolder policy of American withdrawal than any serious critic had dared offer before he came into office.2 Nixon was incensed by what he saw as the cynicism of prominent Democrats who had taken America into the war and now assuaged their guilt (or sought to preserve their careers) by insistent attacks on a President who was trying to get us out. He was amazed that a callous unconcern for the fate of Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian populations under Communist rule paraded under the banner of superior morality. And he was most outraged — and justifiably — at the radicals’ resort to methods of pressure and sabotage at or beyond the borderline of legality: the terrorism of the Weather Underground, firebombings of research facilities at universities, massive theft of classified government documents, unauthorized leaks of sensitive military operations and negotiating positions, incitement of draft resistance and desertion, to name the worst.

  There is no excuse for the extralegal methods that went under the name of Watergate. A President cannot justify his own misdeeds by the excesses of his opponents. It is his obligation to raise sights, to set moral standards, to build bridges to his opponents. Nixon did not rise to this act of grace. But no understanding of the period is possible if one overlooks the viciousness, self-righteousness, and occasional brutality of some of Nixon’s enemies.

  In truth, the animosities of the President and his opposition fed on each other. And if one lesson of Watergate is the abuse of Presidential power, another is that if a democracy is to function, opposition must be restrained by its own sense of civility and limits, by the abiding values of the nation, and by the knowledge that a blanket assault on institutions and motives can paralyze the nation’s capacity to govern itself.

  Watergate Accelerates

  TWO days after the dramatic weekend that first brought home to me the nature of Watergate, on Tuesday, April 17, Nixon hosted a State dinner at the White House for Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti of Italy, at which Frank Sinatra performed. One of the guests at my table told me that the President had stepped into the press room a few hours before the dinner (it had, in fact, been at 4:42 P.M.) and disclosed that a month earlier he had ordered a new investigation of the Watergate break-in; it had produced “real progress . . . in finding the truth.” Contrary to his previous orders, White House personnel would now be permitted to appear before the Senate Watergate Committee; however, no wrongdoer on the White House staff would be granted immunity from prosecution. Nixon and his political aides clearly had thought that the announcement would have such a minimal impact on foreign policy that they had not informed me of it either before or after. The bearer of the tidings, a devout Nixon supporter, was certain that Nixon’s statement ended Watergate. The culprits had obviously been discovered; the matter could now be left to judicial processes.

  In the light of what Len Garment had told me, I doubted that it would prove quite so simple. In reality, the primary significance of the White House statement was to begin Nixon’s mortal struggle with White House Counsel John Dean, the associate who Nixon feared was about to turn against him. Nixon was now throwing down the gauntlet by denying Dean immunity and thus attempting to deprive him of any hope of making a deal with the prosecutor to save his own skin.

  The dinner was festive and relaxed. The White House, indeed, was like the Titanic; one part of the ship was flooding but no one else was aware, or affected to be aware, of the danger. The band played on. It was, as it happened, the last “normal” dinner of Nixon’s term. Later I joined Sinatra at a small party that was also attended by Vice President Spiro T. Agnew.

  There I received another phone call from the President. He asked me what I thought of his remarks. Thinking it was one of Nixon’s frequent requests for reassurance, I complimented him on his toast at the State dinner. That was not what was on Nixon’s mind. He wanted my reaction to the Watergate announcement. I said that I could not judge its import since I did not know who was involved or what the purpose of the announcement had been. Nixon replied that the refusal to grant immunity would throw “the fear of God into any little boys” who might attempt to escape their responsibility by dumping on associates. Sensing my hesitation, Nixon asked out of the blue whether he should fire Haldeman and Ehrlichman; he was heartbroken, he said, even to have to ask the question. I was dumbfounded; it was one thing for Garment to speculate along these lines; if Nixon himself held that view, he must be in mortal peril. I replied that I did not know enough to answer. However, adopting a formulation from which I never deviated, I ventured one piece of advice: Whatever would have to be done ultimately should be done immediately, to put an end to the slow hemorrhaging.

  Agnew came into the room as I was putting down the telephone and asked me what I thought of Nixon’s Watergate statement. I told him, too, that I could not assess its impact. In a somewhat contemptuous, unfeeling manner, Agnew said that Nixon was kidding himself if he thought he could avoid firing Haldeman and Ehrlichman. He would be lucky if he could save himself.

  Agnew’s acid comment dramatized, on one level, the ambivalent relationship that almost inevitably grows up between the only two nationally elected officials of our government. At the outset, Vice Presidents are always hailed as partners of the President; the new Chief Executive proclaims that he will avoid the tendency of all his predecessors to reduce the Vice President to — in Nelson Rockefeller’s phrase — �
�standby equipment.” He is promised a major role in policy formulation and execution. With rare exceptions these expectations have been disappointed, to the growing frustration of the Vice President, whose increasingly visible chagrin sets up a vicious circle by fueling the natural uneasiness and aloofness of the President. Natural because it takes a superhuman degree of self-abnegation to be at ease with a man whose most exhilarating moment is likely to be one’s death — and men with that capacity for self-abnegation do not reach the Presidency.

  There is also a serious bureaucratic obstacle to assigning the Vice President major responsibilities. The Vice President is the only member of the Executive Branch not subject to removal by the President. To give him a regular task is to gamble on his permanent willing subordination; in case of policy disagreement, the President’s capacity to enforce discipline upon a Vice President controlling his own segment of the bureaucracy would be circumscribed. Hence, Vice Presidents usually wind up with odd jobs in widely different fields or with clear terminal dates. This prevents the articulation of a clear-cut, coherent policy position or the creation of a bureaucratic base. (As Vice President, Nelson Rockefeller used to joke that he was an avid reader of the obituary pages to see when he might be sent abroad as head of an American funeral delegation.)