Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  VIII

  Indochina: The Beginning of the End

  Broken Promises

  WHEN the Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam was signed in Paris on January 27, 1973, it fulfilled a national longing shared by the Nixon Administration and its critics. To most Americans it signaled the end of the war. But the millions in Indochina who had suffered and struggled knew that their freedom was precarious.

  All too soon, the leaders of North Vietnam showed that the cease-fire was merely a tactic, a way station toward their objective of taking over the whole of Indochina by force. Before the ink was dry on the Paris Agreement they began to dishonor their solemn obligations; in truth, they never gave up the war. On the occasion of my February 1973 trip to Hanoi, it was possible, stretching goodwill and credulity to the utmost, to explain the already blatant violations of the Agreement as a reflex twitch after ten years of struggle (see Chapter II). During March that excuse vanished; it became apparent that the cease-fire was a barely disguised cover for moving men and weapons into position for another offensive. The violations were not technical; they were flagrant preparations for a new stage of war by means explicitly prohibited in the Agreement.

  The scale was staggering. In a three-month period, as we protested to the Soviets in early May, 30,000 troops were infiltrated into South Vietnam through Laos. War matériel could legally be introduced only as replacement for outworn equipment on a one-for-one basis and only through a system of international checkpoints. The United States kept its word throughout; the North Vietnamese sent in over 30,000 tons of military equipment in thousands of trucks — none through international checkpoints, whose establishment in any event had been made impossible by North Vietnamese obstruction. They added 400 tanks and 300 pieces of heavy artillery to their inventory for war, and set up a network of antiaircraft installations. The North Vietnamese systematically blocked the operation of the International Commission of Control and Supervision (ICCS), which was supposed to monitor the cease-fire. Since two of its four members were Communist (Poland and Hungary), it was hamstrung also because the Communist members refused to confirm Communist violations, thereby canceling out the observations of the Canadian and Indonesian participants in the Commission.

  Article 20 of the Paris Agreement had required the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Laos and Cambodia; a separate written understanding had defined North Vietnamese forces as “foreign” within the terms of the Agreement. Article 20 also prohibited the establishment of base areas in other countries of Indochina and the use of their territory for infiltration. Both of these provisions were being ignored. The North Vietnamese refused also to withdraw from Cambodia, though, as we now know, even the Cambodian Communists demanded it.1 Hanoi’s troops in Laos were actually augmented. More than 18,000 trucks entered Laos. North Vietnamese forces took part in combat operations in Cambodia and used both countries for logistical purposes.2

  South Vietnam was not virginally pure. In the first few months it more than held its own in minor engagements over control of territory. There was some harassment of Viet Cong liaison officers who were assigned to a Joint Military Commission. And South Vietnam dragged its feet on the formation of the National Council for National Reconciliation and Concord, because Hanoi, for its part, would not agree to countrywide elections. But these matters could not begin to compare with Hanoi’s immediate, unprovoked — and eventually decisive — efforts to transform, wholesale, the balance of forces in Indochina.

  By March 1973, less than two months after signing an agreement to end the war, we were thus facing a crass challenge that mocked every significant provision of it. This raised two issues: Should we act to enforce the Agreement? And did we have the right to do so?

  We were not naive when we made the Agreement. As I have indicated in Chapter II, I never believed that Hanoi would reconcile itself to the military balance as it emerged from the Paris Agreement without testing it at least once more. In our estimate, Saigon could handle most North Vietnamese encroachments, especially if American military and economic aid (permitted by the Agreement) was adequate. But we recognized that there might be gross breaches of the Agreement that could topple the military balance it ratified and that would be discouraged only by the threat of American retaliation. American air power was thus always seen as an essential deterrent to the resumption of all-out war. Nixon gave assurances on this score to South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu to persuade Thieu to accept the Paris Agreement. It was self-evident that Saigon could not survive if Hanoi were free to infiltrate all countries of Indochina and to strike against South Vietnam wherever it chose along a frontier of seven hundred miles.

  The obvious fact that the peace settlement was not self-enforcing has been evaded by some who have questioned whether we had a right to defend the Agreement by military action, or even to pledge to do so. The President’s legal authority to continue air operations after the Paris Agreement was spelled out in a memorandum that Secretary of State William P. Rogers submitted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1973; a Library of Congress study commissioned by the committee agreed in early April 1973 that there was “no bar to resumption of hostilities in Vietnam or Laos and the President retained whatever legal power he had had to carry on the war before the Paris Agreement.”3 Nevertheless, since then various arguments have been advanced to suggest that Nixon’s assurances to Thieu that we were prepared to defend the Paris Agreement by military action if necessary were improper, illegitimate, or unwarranted.

  One argument is that Nixon’s pledges were improper because the letters containing them were never made public or endorsed by the Congress.4 There are several flaws in this line of criticism. One is that similar instances of unpublished Presidential letters indicating a President’s intention to vindicate his perception of the national interest have been written by most postwar Presidents. For example, President Kennedy made such commitments to both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.5 Such Presidential assurances obviously are not legally binding; they define an intention that the recipient is entitled to take seriously, however. Nor did Nixon ever invoke his letters to Thieu as a legal obligation, as the formal basis of his threats of retaliation, or as arguments against the later legislation that barred their implementation. There is ample constitutional precedent for the validity of what Nixon (and Kennedy) did in the national interest.

  From the perspective of a decade it is possible to argue that Nixon would have been well advised to seek formal Congressional approval of the Paris Agreement, as a basis for enforcing it. I certainly think now — though I did not propose it then — that he should have demanded an authorization from the Congress in 1969 to conduct the war he inherited when he assumed the Presidency, giving the Congress the choice of pursuing the existing strategy or ending our involvement. In his first term Nixon took too much on his own shoulders in his effort to end a war he had not started, in the face of harassment by many who had brought about the original involvement, and against constant Congressional pressures that deprived our strategy of impetus and our diplomacy of flexibility.

  Nixon refused such a course in 1969 and did not consider it in 1973 because he believed it incompatible with the responsibilities of a President. In 1969 he thought it an abdication to ask the Congress to reaffirm his authority to conduct a war that was already taking place. In 1973 he was convinced that to ask a hostile Congress to give him authority to enforce the Agreement would be a confession that he had no authority to resist while the Congress was deliberating, and would thus invite an all-out North Vietnamese assault. He therefore proceeded to do what in his view the national interest required, in effect challenging the Congress to forbid it.

  The most direct rebuttal to the charge of “illegitimate secret agreements” is that Nixon’s assurances to Thieu were not secret. His policy and intentions were totally public. Indeed, the public nature of Nixon’s pledge was the essence of the assurance that helped persuade Thieu to sign the Agreement
.I Nixon, his Secretary of Defense, and other officials repeatedly stated the Administration’s intention to enforce the Agreement. Sometimes this took the form of refusing to rule out the use of force, as I did in my press conference on January 24, 1973, explaining the terms of the Agreement, and as Secretary of Defense Elliot Richardson did even more explicitly in a television interview on April 1, 1973, and in remarks to newsmen on April 3, 1973. Sometimes it was stressed that there was no formal inhibition on our use of air power, as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State William Sullivan pointed out on television on January 28, 1973, and as I reaffirmed in a television interview on February 1, 1973. There were ominous assertions that we had resorted to force before and could do so again, as Nixon warned in a news conference of March 15, 1973: “I would only suggest that based on my actions over the past four years, that the North Vietnamese should not lightly disregard such expressions of concern, when they are made with regard to a violation.” (These and other warnings are quoted later in this chapter and more fully in the backnotes.)6 However indirectly phrased any one statement may have been, their overall impact was correctly summed up in the President’s annual Foreign Policy Report published on May 3, 1973: “Such a course [massive violations] would endanger the hard won gains for peace in Indochina. It would risk revived confrontation with us. . . . We have told Hanoi, privately and publicly, that we will not tolerate violations of the Agreement.”

  The media’s reaction — especially to Nixon’s scarcely veiled threat at his March 15 press conference — is the clearest possible evidence that there was nothing secret about the President’s intentions. For example, the Washington Post editorialized on March 18, 1973:

  We do not doubt at all that, if he chose, the President could resume the bombing — even now, B-52s continue to rain death daily on Cambodia and no one seems to mind. More than that, we don’t doubt at all that President Nixon is “tough” enough to bomb; nor do we know of anyone else who doubts it. Given his overwhelming margin of victory over Mr. McGovern; given his evident determination to run the government in a way avoiding the need to depend on or cooperate with the Congress; and given the new associations he has forged with Moscow and Peking, we would not even argue that a resumption of bombing would significantly undercut his political or diplomatic plans for his second term. He is in an enviable position to conduct his Vietnam policy on the merits alone.

  The same interpretation was put forward by the New York Times of March 17, 1973:

  The President left little doubt that he regarded resumption of bombing and harbor mining as a viable option against North Vietnam. Hanoi’s leaders recently tried to test Mr. Nixon’s resolve on the cease-fire terms by delaying the process of releasing American war prisoners, and when they saw the Administration’s firmness they returned to the agreed upon schedule. A similar response is looked for now.

  The President’s determination to use force was thoroughly understood; and his right to do so early in 1973 was unimpaired. The issue, at bottom, is not really a legal question but turns on one’s perception of the national interest. Our determination to enforce the Agreement came up against all the passions unleashed by the Vietnam war. Those who had always wanted us to wash our hands of the non-Communist peoples of Indochina sought to vindicate their course upon the war’s conclusion. Letting free Indochina go as the result of an agreement seemed to them no more pernicious than their previous insistence on unilateral withdrawal. They saw the Paris Agreement not as the honorable compromise it was, but simply as a fulfillment of their old prescription to disengage unconditionally. They wanted to impose their version of an agreement that in fact constituted much more. It was inevitable, and just as predictable, that we could not accept this. We had opposed unconditional surrender during the war. All the reasons that impelled us to pursue the war to an honorable settlement argued for maintaining its terms. We had no intention of letting slip by inaction what 50,000 Americans died to achieve, or of abandoning the millions who in relying on our promises had fought at our side for a decade. We were convinced that the impact on international stability and on America’s readiness to defend free peoples would be catastrophic if we treated a solemn agreement as unconditional surrender and simply walked away from it. And events were to prove us right.

  How was the Paris Agreement then to be maintained? “By diplomacy,” the favorite answer of our critics, was no answer at all. It was diplomacy, after all, tedious years of it, that had produced the very Agreement that was being violated. But it had not been diplomacy in a vacuum. We had brought military pressure to bear on Hanoi. Effective diplomacy depends on other countries’ assessment of incentives and penalties, not on the eloquence of some individual. To argue otherwise is a bromide, an evasion of the problem.

  No one who had gone through the agonies of Nixon’s first term could contemplate with an easy mind the domestic eruption that a new recourse to force — even if only a few days’ duration — would bring. Radical critics, of course, wallowed in charges of blood lust and esoteric psychological theories of our alleged propensity to violence. But they were acting out their own inner turmoil, not advancing a reasoned analysis. These traditional foes of the war were joined in this new phase by a different group — people of distinction who had supported the Administration in the war but felt that America had done enough. We had done our duty, they felt, by achieving an honorable extrication; no national interest was served by insisting on an honorable outcome. The ambivalence of this group — at once deploring the threat of force and hoping that it would deter the circumstance in which it might be used — was expressed in a column in Newsweek of March 26, 1973, by my late dear friend, the irrepressible and sage Stewart Alsop:

  A lot of people (including, for example me) went along reluctantly with the President’s Vietnam policy because the McGovern alternative was shameful. If the President again sends the bombers over Hanoi, such people are going to begin asking themselves some hard questions.

  The White House estimate is that the North Vietnamese cannot mount a successful main-force attack on South Vietnam for many months — at least until next autumn. Can the South Vietnamese not learn to defend their own turf within these many months? If not, why not? And if not, when? Must we really send the bombers north again, in order to prove the integrity of the President’s rhetoric? Will it work if we do? Won’t the Senate rescue Hanoi, as the Senate was ready to do in December, before the Paris pact was signed?

  It is most earnestly to be hoped that these questions need never be asked. Paradoxically, the best reason for so hoping is that the President, trapped by his own rhetoric, has very little choice but to make good on his threat if the violations continue. Moscow and Peking no doubt know that this is so, and they will no doubt let Hanoi know that it is so.

  Alsop’s argument — the new conventional wisdom — was that if the South Vietnamese could not take care of themselves after a decade of assistance, they would never be able to do so. This amounted to turning over millions of non-Communist Vietnamese to a totalitarianism they clearly hated and feared. Nor was this argument applied to Europe, where 300,000 American troops remained twenty-four years after NATO was formed, and 50,000 American troops were still stationed in Korea twenty years after the armistice, in areas much better able to defend themselves than South Vietnam. The reason for our continued commitment is the same in both Europe and Korea: We doubt the ability of our allies to assume their own defense completely and we fear that the removal of our shield might tempt aggression.

  Nixon, like me, hoped that Alsop’s second proposition would turn out to be right: that Nixon’s renown for ruthlessness would deter gross violations. No doubt there was an element of braggadocio in our pronouncements. But if the bluff did not work, what then was to be our policy? Should we let South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia be engulfed by Hanoi’s imperialism within months of signing an agreement guaranteeing their survival? What would this tell others about American reliability as an ally? If we were prepared to abandon
Indochina, why not South Korea or for that matter any other friendly country? These were the considerations that drove Nixon and me, with reluctance, to the conclusion that we had no choice except to resist Hanoi’s cynical testing of the Agreement. As I said in reply to a question at a press conference on April 23, 1973:

  Concerned people should ask themselves: What should the United States do? What is our position if we can neither threaten nor offer incentives, if we are criticized for attempting to maintain the agreement by force and pressed not to provide the economic incentives which might be another motive for keeping the agreement? And we should ask ourselves: Where will we be if what was a very solemn agreement, very painfully achieved, in which we made very major concessions, is simply disregarded?

  * * *

  The profound problem we face as a nation today is whether we should sign an agreement, and when it is totally violated, act as if the signature which was then endorsed by an international conference should simply be treated as irrelevant.

  The American people would have been entitled, of course, to take a different view of our national interest. But the people never chose abdication. Nixon’s massive mandate over McGovernism and steady public opinion polls justified our course. Three clear majorities had emerged in American public opinion after the 1968 Tet offensive: a majority that held it had been a mistake to get involved in Vietnam in the first place, a majority who wanted that involvement ended, but an even larger majority that rejected the peace movement’s policy of immediate and unconditional withdrawal.7 It was left to us who inherited the war and the national ambivalence to square the circle. There is no doubt many people were simply tired of the war, fearing it would go on forever, but they also did not want to lose it. Exhaustion is no guide to policy.