Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  Here, indeed, is the central dilemma of the statesman. Nixon was not the first American President, nor will he be the last, to face the core question of leadership in a democracy: To what extent must a national leader follow his conscience and judgment, and at what point should he submit to a public mood, however disastrous for the nation or the peace of the world he considers it to be? The question permits of no abstract answers. The extreme cases are easy. The dilemmas arise in the gray area where the national consensus is itself vague or contradictory, or where its convictions are ill founded and likely to lead to a debacle though the statesman cannot prove it. The consequences of the totalitarian victory in Indochina, for the people concerned as well as for global stability, like all prospective dangers, were unprovable in 1973. There would be few who would doubt them at this writing (1981).

  A President who identifies leadership with public opinion polls dooms himself to irrelevance; a President who substitutes his judgment totally for that of other elected representatives undermines the essence of democracy. Weak Presidents try to hide behind a public opinion that, in the end, will not forgive debacles even when caused by its own preferences. In 1938 after Munich, Neville Chamberlain was the most popular man in Britain; appeasement exactly reflected the dominant opinion. Twenty months later it had become a byword for weakness of will. Strong Presidents sometimes rely excessively on their judgment; some are later revered as great because they did so. Nixon’s fate was to fall before he had a chance to vindicate or even act on his convictions with respect to the settlement in Vietnam.

  Thieu Visits San Clemente

  BEFORE we could turn our full attention to the North Vietnamese violations, one last vestige of the Paris negotiations had to be taken care of: our promise that our ally, President Nguyen Van Thieu of the Republic of South Vietnam, could visit the President of the United States. It had been an extra inducement to go along with the cease-fire. Thieu had held out for months against the peace agreement that effectively partitioned his country. The Paris terms were better than either our critics or supporters thought possible. As negotiating proposals, Thieu himself had approved them for three years — when the North Vietnamese seemed unlikely to accept them. Once they did, he maneuvered to put the onus for compromise on us. What he really wanted was to go on fighting until the last invaders were expelled. It was not his fault that American public opinion would not tolerate it.

  Thieu fought us with Vietnamese methods of tenacity and single-mindedness not unleavened by duplicity. We both wanted the same conclusion, an independent South Vietnam secure in its territory. Those of us who negotiated the Paris Agreement were neither cynical nor naive. We expected North Vietnam to continue to press, but we had brought about a balance of forces, and Congress would have surely voted us out of the war unconditionally if we had tried to go beyond that. The United States hoped that military stalemate would at least ensure security and perhaps someday lead to political dialogue among the Vietnamese.

  Thieu had his eye on the other end of the telescope. What he saw close up was not the ultimate peace but the immediate enemy. After the cease-fire, our troops withdrew halfway around the globe; his people would remain facing an army dedicated to the destruction of every flicker of independence in Indochina. We were sure of our own resolve to control Hanoi’s ambitions; his eye focused on the long-term uncertainties. And he was essentially right, for it turned out that the Nixon Administration could not sustain its determination domestically, and even if it had, a successor administration was likely to funk our conception of our responsibilities. Thieu developed a bitter hatred of me as the architect of the peace agreement. While I had deep sympathy for Thieu’s anxieties, we had no choice. The United States could not reject, when Hanoi accepted them, the very peace terms we had been offering with Thieu’s acquiescence for three years. To this day I respect Thieu as a gallant figure who fought for the freedom of his people and who was ultimately defeated by circumstances outside of his, or his country’s, or our, control.

  Thieu visited the United States from April 2 to 5, 1973. There was little about the visit of which we could be proud. Throughout the war, though his countrymen fought side by side with ours, it had been impossible to receive him in America for fear that his presence might spark civil disorders. He had met American Presidents furtively in Guam, in Hawaii, and at Midway. He had never been permitted to set foot on the continental United States.

  Thieu’s 1973 visit to America was intended to make up for that, to symbolize a new peacetime relationship and our dedication to a free South Vietnam. It turned into almost the exact opposite. The end of the war had not ended the risk of public disturbances. It was therefore decided to receive the leader of an allied country, for whose freedom tens of thousands of Americans and their allies and several hundred thousand Vietnamese had given their lives, at the Western White House in San Clemente. The arrival and departure ceremonies could be held inside the well-guarded Presidential compound. Even the State dinner was dispensed with and transformed into a small family gathering. The pretext was that Nixon’s dining room had room for no more than twelve guests; the real reasons were doubt that we could generate a representative guest list and fear of hostile demonstrations.

  To fulfill the promise of a visit to Washington, Vice President Spiro Agnew was chosen to play the host in the nation’s capital. The atmosphere there was revealed by a telephone conversation I had with Agnew shortly before Thieu’s plane touched down. Agnew complained that only one Cabinet member — Secretary of Labor Peter J. Brennan — had been willing to join him for Thieu’s arrival ceremony. The guests ready to attend the dinner tendered by the Vice President were appallingly few. Most senior members of the Administration had found some excuse for being out of town. It was a shaming experience. In my days in Washington, several Communist leaders had been received with honor. Senior officials had vied to attend State dinners in honor of neutralist leaders who specialized in castigating the United States. But the staunch President of a friendly country was a pariah. His alleged failings as a democrat were, for a decade, used as an excuse — by those who wished us to abandon his people to the enemies of democracy. There were no boat people fleeing from Vietnam while Thieu was there. Vietnamese by the million voted with their feet during his rule, pouring into areas under his control and away from Communist-held territory. Conventional wisdom blamed this on our bombing; since it continued after our bombing ended, it was almost certainly a reaction to the brutality of Communist rule. Thieu took steps to liberalize his government — however inadequately — even in the midst of Communist terrorism of which his best officials were the primary targets. None of this profited him with his critics.

  To be sure, South Vietnam was hardly a democracy in our sense. There were justified criticisms of harshness and corruption. But when Thieu’s disgruntled opponents in Saigon’s turbulent pluralistic politics expressed these to our press, no contrast was drawn with Hanoi, where no opposition was tolerated, the press was controlled, and access to foreign media was prohibited. It was not, in short, a fastidious assessment of degrees of democracy that was at work on American emotions about Thieu. He was the victim of a deeper, more pervasive confusion that manifested itself in double standards in all the democracies. When we sounded out our European friends about a visit by Thieu either in connection with his trip to the United States or separately, there was an embarrassed silence. Neither he nor his Foreign Minister was ever received in allied capitals, except in Paris, which was the site of the negotiations; the process of delegitimizing the Thieu government — the first stage toward abandonment — was well advanced. Meanwhile, Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, the so-called foreign minister of the phantom Communist Provisional Revolutionary Government, which could not boast even a capital, was lionized in Eastern Europe.

  It is a curious phenomenon, this self-hypnosis that persuades honest and serious men to concentrate their moral indignation on what is considered conservative. Between the wars it was known in Europe
by the slogan, “No enemies on the left.” In the postwar years we have seen Western newspapers replete with the transgressions of the regimes in Spain, Portugal, South Korea, Greece, Iran, South Vietnam, and others, while being much more restrained — almost apologetic — about the cruelties of the “people’s democracies” of Eastern Europe, the left tyrannies of the Third World, and of course Communist North Vietnam.

  Never mind that the “progressive” regimes maintain domestic order — the test apparently applied for the loyalty of the population — because they are also totalitarian and that some conservative regimes face turmoil simply because they have neither the theory nor the apparatus for effective repression. Never mind that conservative regimes leave their neighbors alone and occasionally evolve into democracies (Spain, Greece, Portugal), while Soviet military power imposes its will on a global basis in the name of a universalist doctrine. Nor does the postwar period record the amelioration of many radical regimes in the Third World. The terrible migrations of our time have always been away from Communist countries and never toward them. Yet down the years disdain and outrage have disproportionately been reserved for friends of the West, such as Thieu in 1973 and the Shah of Iran later in the decade.

  In an ideal world, our democratic principles and the needs of our security would coincide. But the reality is that constitutional democracy, which we consider “normal,” is, in fact, a rarity both in the sweep of history and on the breadth of this planet. This is no accident. Constitutional democracy places authority in an abstraction: obedience to law. But constitutionalism can function only if law is believed either to reflect an absolute standard of truth or grow out of a generally accepted political process. In most parts of the world and in most periods of time, these conditions have not existed. Law was the verdict of authority, not of a legislative process; politics has been about who has the right to issue orders. Personal authority has been made bearable by a concept of reciprocal obligation, as in feudal societies, or when limited by custom, as was the authority of kings who ruled by the claim to divine right in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In each case tradition was a limiting factor; certain exactions were impossible not because they were forbidden but because they had no precedent. No ruler of eighteenth-century Europe could levy income taxes or conscript his subjects; authoritarianism, in short, was quite precisely circumscribed.

  It was, paradoxically, the emergence of popular government that expanded the scope of what authorities could demand. The people by definition could not oppress itself; hence its wishes, as expressed by assemblies or rulers in its name, were absolute. The growth of state power has gone hand in hand with the expansion of populist claims.

  In this context modern totalitarianism is a caricature, a reductio ad absurdum, of democracy; modern authoritarianism is a vestige of traditional personal rule. This is why some authoritarian governments have been able to evolve into democracies and why no totalitarian state has ever done so. Personal rule has inherent limits; government that claims to reflect the general will countenances no such restraint.

  But for this very reason, authoritarian governments are infinitely more vulnerable to internal subversion than totalitarian ones. When the personal bond of reciprocal obligation is broken, both rulers and subjects become demoralized; the former because they have no legitimacy for governing on a sustained basis by naked force, the latter because once the criteria of obedience have evaporated, every directive appears oppressive. Our dilemma is that in almost all developing countries on this planet, authority is still personal. The transition to constitutionalism is a complex process that, if force-fed, is more likely to lead to totalitarianism than to democracy.

  One of the premises of the democratic process is that the loser accepts his defeat and in return is given an opportunity to win on another occasion. It depends on a moderate center. Such an evolution is almost inevitably thwarted in a developing country when a totalitarian element succeeds in organizing a guerrilla war. This impels the government into acts of repression, starting a vicious circle that traps both government and opponents and destroys whatever moderate center exists — fulfilling the central purpose of the insurgency. Moreover, the victims of terrorist attacks are almost invariably the ablest and most dedicated officials, leaving in place the corrupt, whose transgressions multiply as they attempt to make up for the peril of their station by accumulating the maximum material compensations.

  The American response to this historical phenomenon is usually expressed in the conviction that a government under siege can best maintain itself by accelerating democratic reform and by expanding its base of support by sharing power. But the fundamental cause of a civil war (of which guerrilla war is a special category) is the breakdown of domestic consensus. Compromise, the essence of democratic politics, is its first victim. Civil wars almost without exception end in victory or defeat, never in coalition governments — the favorite American recipe. Concessions are ascribed to the weakness of those holding power, not to their magnanimity, and hence accelerate rather than arrest the disintegration of authority. The proper time for reform is before civil wars break out, in order to preempt their causes — though this does not always work when the insurrection is inspired, financed, trained, and equipped from outside the country. The next occasion for conciliation is after victory (as in America as Lincoln intended, or in Nigeria after 1970), but Western inhibitions about force and authoritarian incompetence usually combine to prevent the testing of this hypothesis. As for the so-called “political solution” to civil wars — the much-touted recipe of negotiation among the parties — it too is belied by historical experience. It is against all probability that groups that have been assassinating each other would govern jointly; this is why it is next to impossible to think of a civil war that ended in coalition government. It is at best a temporary expedient to preserve one group to fight again under better circumstances. Thus guerrillas generally refuse political negotiations when they seem to be winning and conduct them generally to gain time for a later showdown.

  This is why the perennial American pressures for political talks tend to demoralize allied governments with which we are associated. When the crying need is for an assertion of authority, our advice usually dilutes it. And hard-pressed governments beset by an implacable domestic enemy are often reduced to paralysis by advice which they know is dangerous if not disastrous but which they dare not reject. This was the fate of Nguyen Van Thieu, as it was later of the Shah of Iran.8

  Thieu’s country was assaulted on every frontier, first by guerrilla forces trained and equipped by Hanoi and then by a large invading army from North Vietnam. Nevertheless, the United States government pressed for an electoral process and flexibility in negotiations, partly out of conviction and partly to placate insatiable critics at home. By a miracle of fortitude Thieu managed to navigate this passage, fighting a determined enemy and propitiating an uncomprehending ally. He emerged in 1973 with an agreement in which Hanoi gave up its political demands of many years in return for a cease-fire better than we had expected, though more precarious than he had hoped.

  I had little personal affection for Thieu but I had high regard for him as he continued his struggle in the terrible loneliness that followed America’s withdrawal. He received scant compassion or even understanding. It did not dent his dignity. Though the sole head of state to have his reception ceremony in the absence of the public, he acted as if this were the most natural thing in the world. At the San Clemente arrival, Nixon made a polite speech that referred to South Vietnam’s capacity to defend itself — a dubious proposition if Hanoi launched an all-out attack with Soviet weapons. Thieu fell in gracefully with this fairy tale, not, however, without contrasting South Vietnam’s position to that of Europe, which still required 300,000 American troops a quarter-century after the end of World War II.

  This ritual completed, the two leaders repaired for their private talks. There was, in fact, not much to discuss. Thieu did not whine about the task
we had left him or Hanoi’s malevolence. He gave a matter-of-fact account of North Vietnamese violations. Nixon assured him privately — as he had already done publicly on March 15 and elsewhere — that he would resist blatant violations by force if necessary. At the same time he urged Thieu to lean over backward to carry out South Vietnam’s obligations under the Agreement. If there was to be a breakdown of the Paris accords, Nixon advised, the onus must fall unambiguously on Hanoi. Thieu pointed out that the main obstacle to assembling the National Council for National Reconciliation and Concord, as required by the Agreement, was Hanoi’s refusal to hold the elections that the Council was to supervise. The “political contest” so passionately advocated by some in America during the war would never be undertaken by Hanoi in peacetime. It would not risk a generation of struggle on ballots that it disdained in its own country.

  Nixon’s and Thieu’s second day of discussion mostly concerned aid for South Vietnam. It had a slightly unreal quality because the American participants knew that Congressional support even for economic development assistance was eroding fast. The liberals were losing interest because they had little commitment to the survival of South Vietnam, and the conservatives believed that they had discharged their obligations by supporting the war to an honorable conclusion. Both reflected the war-weariness of the nation. Nixon promised to use Saigon’s aid request as a target figure; the final result would depend on Congressional consultation. Thieu did obtain a pledge in the final communique that the two allies would maintain “vigilance” against “the possibility of renewed Communist aggression after the departure of United States ground forces from South Vietnam.” Furthermore, “actions which would threaten the basis of the Agreement would call for appropriately vigorous reactions” — yet another clear public statement of Nixon’s intention to enforce the Agreement.