The ambiguities of the response to his economic requests did not dim Thieu’s high spirits as he left San Clemente. As his plane took off from California, he had a champagne celebration to mark his pleasure and relief at his talks with Nixon.9 Despite his usual suspiciousness and the gathering omens of future difficulties — our hesitation over both Hanoi’s violations and economic assistance — Thieu had an unshakable conviction that the United States would come to South Vietnam’s aid in a crisis. It was a confidence entertained before and since by other allies of the United States, a faith that has constituted one of our principal assets in the world and that we were determined not to dissipate.
The Aborted Retaliation
THERE was a fashionable slogan that we could not guarantee the future of South Vietnam for all eternity. This was probably true. But eight weeks hardly qualified as “eternity.” What our reactions should have been after a few years might be debated; but failure to react after a few weeks was certain to turn the Paris accords into ashes and make a mockery of American credibility. As early as March 6, 1973, I said to a meeting of the Washington Special Actions Group (WSAG):II
[The President] is concerned that if we permit ourselves to be nibbled to death in Laos and Cambodia it will also happen later in Vietnam. Our critics give us no awards for our restraint. . . . [W]hat do you think they’ll say if we lose Vietnam? They will attack the agreement as a sellout and forget that they were advocating a real sellout just a few months ago. The President held firm for four years in rejecting a simple exchange of POWs for our withdrawal. He’s not going to let Vietnam go down the drain now.
All intelligence estimates, moreover, confirmed that Hanoi was being restrained from large-scale hostilities by fear of American reaction. A WSAG meeting of April 16, 1973, was told by James Schlesinger, then Director of Central Intelligence, that Hanoi was not doing very well in gaining popular support in the South but had improved its military position there since the cease-fire:
This gives the third factor — Hanoi’s judgment of how the U.S. would react to a resumption of larger-scale hostilities — a more important influence than ever on Hanoi’s future decisions.
One of our concerns was how to react to violations without wrecking the entire Agreement. We were prepared to give Hanoi a jolt; we had no desire for all-out war. We judged that a prompt retaliation could enforce a prolonged pause in which both sides might be forced to engage in political rather than military competition. There was another reason for acting swiftly: I learned that the Pentagon was planning to withdraw air power from Southeast Asia at a faster rate than I had appreciated. As I have explained, the jealous independence by which Defense guarded its budgetary decisions meant we were often presented with a fait accompli. We had to act quickly.
At the end of February, there were two brief tests of strength that validated our reasoning. The first was over Laos. Despite the fact that during my visit to Hanoi it had been agreed that a cease-fire for Laos would go into effect within days, the Pathet Lao — Hanoi’s Laotian clients — continued what Premier Souvanna Phouma called a “general offensive.” On the very first day of the truce, the Communists broke it no fewer than twenty-nine times. Souvanna therefore requested American B-52 strikes against the Pathet Lao. The President and I discussed it on the evening of February 22. Nixon was reluctant because he feared Hanoi would use it as a pretext to delay the release of American prisoners of war. I argued that Hanoi would refuse the release of our prisoners — our most insistent demand — only if it was prepared for a showdown for other reasons. Nixon authorized an immediate B-52 strike. Within forty-eight hours the cease-fire in Laos was established.
The second mini-confrontation in late February was indeed over the release of American prisoners of war (though almost certainly unrelated to the Laos incident). Hanoi failed to produce, on February 26, a list of the POWs who were due to be released the next day. It gave no explanation, though it hinted that the release of our POWs was dependent on Saigon’s release of its political detainees — a linkage we had spent weeks of negotiation to avoid. This happened at almost the same time that Washington and Saigon were protesting the appearance of three SAM-2 surface-to-air missile sites at Khe Sanh in violation of the standstill ceasefire.
We responded very sharply by suspending American troop withdrawals and mine-clearing operations in North Vietnamese harbors. Secretary of State Rogers declined to attend any sessions at the International Conference in Paris. A terse message was sent to Hanoi simply informing it of our actions. In addition, White House press secretary Ronald L. Ziegler was instructed to read at his noon briefing a tough statement making clear that the release of American prisoners was an unconditional obligation of North Vietnam not linked to any other provision of the Agreement. A day later I told Ziegler that I was certain the pressures would work (in a conversation that also clearly indicates my plan to leave government soon): “A year from now when I’m out of here, they’re really going to put it to us. Not for that reason but a year from now, they’re going to be tigers but now they’re not ready.” The POWs were released on schedule.
But these were harassments at the fringes of the real challenge, which was the massive infiltration of personnel and war matériel through Laos and Cambodia and across the Demilitarized Zone, violating almost every provision of the Agreement. Schlesinger estimated that at this rate of resupply, Hanoi would by fall be at least as strong in the South as it was prior to the 1972 offensive. The WSAG held many meetings on the subject. As a preliminary step it was decided to send a crescendo of protests to Hanoi with increasingly ominous warnings about retaliation. Notes were sent on March 4, March 6, March 14, and March 15, 1973. The note of March 14 warned that if infiltration continued and culminated in military action by Hanoi, “the consequences . . . would be most grave.”
On March 8 I warned Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. I stressed that a continuation of substantial Soviet deliveries of military supplies would be considered an unfriendly act; a new offensive by Hanoi would have “the profoundest consequence for US–Soviet relations.”
Dobrynin was equal to the occasion. Nothing was ever the fault of the Soviet Union. My information, he argued, was either incorrect or outdated. Indeed, he hinted darkly that the wily Chinese were probably to blame for the continued flow of Soviet military equipment into North Vietnam. The fact was, he told me with a straight face, that several hundred tanks and some supply trains had inexplicably disappeared during the war as they transited China. The Kremlin was convinced that the Soviet war matériel showing up in North Vietnam now was being introduced by the Chinese in their eternal effort to undermine a relaxation of tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. Dobrynin said that it would be appropriate for me to raise the issue with Brezhnev during my scheduled visit to Moscow (eight weeks hence). It was obvious from this we could expect little help from the Soviet quarter. We also warned the Chinese; they replied ambiguously.
On March 13, there was another meeting of the WSAG on this subject. The group concluded that:
We have no intention, under any circumstances, of letting the enemy mount a big offensive this year. We will be meticulous in honoring the agreement ourselves, and we want to make public their continuing violations. There will be no press statements issued that belittle the enemy violations.
The best military option appears to be a resumption of bombing the trails in Laos as soon as possible after the third tranche of POWs is released, possibly followed later by bombing of the DMZ and the area between the DMZ and the South Vietnamese lines, if necessary. The final decision will be made by the President.
But the President was in an uncharacteristically indecisive frame of mind. It was not unusual for Nixon to approach a major decision crab-wise. Long recitals of the dilemmas he faced were his way of reflecting on the options. During his first term the process had led inexorably to a decision. Each successive conversation, however apparently interminable, would lead gradually, almost imperce
ptibly, to a sharper definition of the issues. In stages Nixon worked himself to a fever pitch emotionally so that intellectual and psychological readiness tended to coincide with the point of decision. I would often frame the issue earlier than he; but he had the better instinct for the jugular. His final decision would cut through equivocation to the heart of the matter.
But it was a different Nixon in March 1973. He approached the problem of the violations in a curiously desultory fashion. He drifted. He did not home in on the decision in the single-minded, almost possessed, manner that was his hallmark. The rhetoric might be there, but accompanied this time with excuses for inaction. In retrospect we know that by March Watergate was boiling. At the end of February, he was closeted for long periods with John Dean, his White House Counsel, devising strategy for the investigations by the newly constituted Senate Select Committee chaired by Senator Sam Ervin and worried about the hearings opening in the Senate Judiciary Committee on the nomination of L. Patrick Gray as permanent director of the FBI. It was on February 27 that Dean warned Nixon the cover-up might not be contained indefinitely. Nixon was a distracted man. On March 6, for instance, he ordered a bombing strike of one day’s duration on the Ho Chi Minh Trail — timed for the following weekend. The illegal bumper-to-bumper military truck traffic down the trail promised profitable targets. The next day, March 7, he canceled the order. Again he said he did not want to give the North Vietnamese a pretext for delaying the release of the next batch of American prisoners. I doubt whether this was a considered reason. Gray was in difficulties over the FBI’s Watergate inquiries and was daily dragging in John Dean and the White House. The Senate Judiciary Committee was demanding that Dean appear despite the President’s assertion of executive privilege. Nixon clearly did not want to add turmoil over Indochina to his mounting domestic perplexities.
I submitted a memorandum urging acceptance of the WSAG recommendations for an air strike to the President on March 14. I outlined the North Vietnamese leaders’ possible motivations: They might believe that we would not react to their violations so long as they held American prisoners; they might simply be testing the limits of our tolerance; they might have decided to resume offensive operations as soon as their re-supply effort was completed. Whatever their purposes, we should exhaust every diplomatic avenue, but we would not be able to avoid the preparation of military contingency plans:
[T]he North Vietnamese are exposed both in the trail area of the Laotian Panhandle and in the northern reaches of South Vietnam’s MR-I. In both areas they are operating in daylight and the traffic is so heavy as to be congested. They clearly are taking advantage of the fact that all air action against them has ceased. A series of heavy strikes over a 2 or 3 day period in either of these areas would be very costly to them in both personnel and material.
The future of the Paris Agreement indeed depended on action now to enforce it:
[An air strike] would signify clearly that we will not tolerate continued violations and will react decisively to them. It is precisely this sort of U.S. reaction on May 8 [1972] and again in December [1972] which caused the North Vietnamese to reexamine the course on which they were then bent. If they now believe that we may not react and we fail to do so, we will encourage increasing and even more blatant violations. If we react we will demonstrate the costs which they must expect to bear if they abrogate the Agreement. . . . There will be recriminations. But in my judgment if we do not react, the Agreement may well break down precisely because we did not. The recriminations in that event will be no less severe.
To meet Nixon’s concern about the American prisoners of war, I recommended that we launch an attack on March 24–26, after the third but before the fourth group of our prisoners due for release.
The increasingly insolent tone of Hanoi’s response to our protests required a sharp reaction, in my view, lest the Paris Agreement simply fall apart. Hanoi repeated its by-now familiar interpretation of Article 20, that withdrawal of its troops from Laos and Cambodia had to await a political settlement, which in turn was identified with Communist control. Hanoi rejected our documented evidence of infiltration. Since no military matériel had been introduced through checkpoints as the Agreement required, no evidence of illicit equipment existed, averred Hanoi with characteristic brazenness. In any event the United States had no standing to raise the issue, which should be taken up by the International Commission of Control and Supervision (on which, of course, the Communists had a veto).
In crises the most daring course is often the safest. The riskiest course in my experience has been gradual escalation that the opponent matches step by step, inevitably reaching a higher level of violence and often an inextricable stalemate. Hanoi had to reckon with the fact that holding up release of American POWs would halt our implementation of all other provisions of the Agreement: the mine-clearing, the troop withdrawals, the prospects for economic aid; it might trigger an even fiercer American retaliation, this time against North Vietnam. As I said in my memorandum:
If we act immediately after the third prisoner release, which will be completed by the end of this week, we can minimize the risk of a hold on the remaining POWs. There will be a 2-week period prior to the final release. There will be time after the strikes to reestablish the arrangements for that final release and for our coincident final withdrawal. Meanwhile we would cease all withdrawals as additional leverage to bring about the final release.
But the President temporized. He approved contingency planning but told me again that he was worried about delaying the release of our POWs. On March 15, he issued a warning to Hanoi in his news conference. I spent from March 17 to March 26 in Acapulco on vacation. During that period the Watergate cover-up really began to come apart, with incessant demands for money by E. Howard Hunt, one of the Ells-berg break-in team, though I and my NSC colleagues had as yet no inklings of that. Nixon’s indecisions were compounded on March 19 when Ambassador G. McMurtrie Godley backchanneled to the White House from Vientiane, Laos, questioning the timing of the proposed strike. It might disrupt the scheduled formation of the new Laotian coalition government (which in the event was not finally formed until the following year). Premier Souvanna Phouma might find it difficult to go along. Informed of this message, I instructed General Brent Scowcroft, who had replaced Al Haig as my deputy, to raise Godley’s argument with the President. I cabled to Scowcroft via secure communications from Acapulco:
I want you to discuss the question of the strikes in Laos with the President. I believe Godley is making a good point concerning the possibility of fouling up the Laotian negotiations. However, none of the considerations advanced last week have really changed. I don’t believe the North Vietnamese decision on withdrawal will depend on one series of strikes. Another danger is that they will delay release of POW’s. The counter argument is that they will tend to be ruthless next fall.
I want you to discuss this issue with the President personally and the final decision should be made by him. The President should be made aware of the Godley argument. We should not in any case go before Thursday night [March 22]. My recommendation, on balance, would be that we go then.
Scowcroft on March 20 reported to me the now familiar symptoms of Presidential ambivalence. Nixon had avoided a decision but had ruminated on adverse political consequences. On March 21 Nixon indicated that he would prefer to hold up our troop withdrawals rather than strike. He would order an air attack but “only if it is felt that it will do some real good” — a condition almost surely unfulfillable for a single air strike.
This was the very day John Dean told Nixon that John Mitchell, Charles Colson, Jeb Stuart Magruder, Herbert Kalmbach, and others were not the only ones with a problem. He said the President, too, had a problem — there was “a cancer growing on the Presidency.” Unaware of all of these pressures, I reiterated my position on March 21:
There is one principal argument for conducting the strikes at this time and that is to make it clear to the North Vietnamese that w
e may do something totally unexpected if pressed in defense of the agreement. If the North Vietnamese believe we will not act after the POWs are out, an offensive by the end of the year is almost a certainty. If an offensive succeeds, all those who have fought every move the President has made will be vindicated and the whole basis of the President’s policy undermined. I consider one of the key objectives of our foreign policy to be to get as much time as possible before the resumption of hostilities by the North.
That same day Nixon again philosophized to Scowcroft about the utility and timing of our plan; he asked Scowcroft to query me again. Obviously, I was not giving the desired advice. Nevertheless, I repeated my view on March 22:
The operation is likely to cause considerable though not decisive damage. If they do not react to our strikes it will be seen as a sign of weakness on their part but I do not see what action they can take. . . . Basically, my view remains somewhat similar to my feeling during the Korean situation in early 1969. There is no pressing necessity to strike but failure to react now will cost us later.
Nixon was stung by this reference to the EC-121 incident,10 which awakened his usual instinct to appear at least as tough as his advisers. He ordered an immediate one-day strike on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. This combined every disadvantage: It was too short to be effective, too blatant to be ignored, and too hesitant to have the desired psychological impact on Hanoi. But Nixon’s order had outmaneuvered me. It induced me to recommend postponement until we could discuss matters after my return from Acapulco — in other words, after the final release of our prisoners.
Years of Upheaval Page 48