We kept up our warnings. We had by this time reassurance, if any were needed, that retaliation would not do any lasting damage to our relationship with the Soviet Union. For what it was worth, Dobrynin on March 23 formally assured us that Moscow had stopped arms for Hanoi after the Paris Agreement and argued again that Soviet supplies reaching Hanoi were probably those delayed in transit through China. As for retaliation, Moscow merely hoped that “things would not turn in that direction” — a form of dissociation so mild as to cause us no concern. When Nixon addressed the nation on March 29 to mark the return of our last prisoners of war, he included another tough reminder to the North Vietnamese leaders that they “should have no doubt as to the consequences if they fail to comply with the Agreement.”
Other Administration spokesmen took up the theme. On April 3, the following dialogue took place between Secretary of Defense Elliot Richardson and newsmen questioning him prior to an appearance before a House Appropriations subcommittee:
QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, under what conditions might we have to begin bombing in support of the South Vietnamese?
RICHARDSON: It would be one of those questions that it’s impossible to answer in general terms. We can only see what develops, and hopefully, what will develop is the full and complete implementation of the cease-fire agreements.
QUESTION: But is it possible that we will have to bomb either North Vietnam or in support of the South Vietnamese army again?
RICHARDSON: It’s certainly something we cannot rule out at this time.
On April 2, I sent Nixon a memorandum outlining further possible responses, both diplomatic and military. My memorandum was labeled “information”; it asked for no decision. Nixon was in San Clemente with Haldeman and Ehrlichman. They were under siege by the Ervin Committee, with the chairman threatening to arrest any White House aide who refused to give testimony in public. Nixon simply placed a check mark on my memorandum to indicate that he had noted it. The paper was returned with none of the underlinings and marginal comments that normally showed he had studied a paper carefully.
Planning by the WSAG, meanwhile, revealed that the North Vietnamese, in complete violation of the Agreement, had built up an extensive complex of surface-to-air missiles south of the Demilitarized Zone, especially around Khe Sanh, where activity had been noted before, and in the Ashau valley threatening the old imperial city of Hué. The result was that the Joint Chiefs of Staff now insisted on three days of bombing for antiaircraft suppression before we could attack the North Vietnamese supply complex in Laos that was our real concern.
This put back our timetable once again. To bomb for the better part of a week, we needed to lay the ground with diplomacy. Hanoi, pursuing its own stratagems to head off bombing, gave us something of an opportunity for a dual-track approach by replying to our protests with a hint that it might be ready to talk about violations. It had made a vague reference on March 27 to private meetings to review the Agreement. More explicitly, in a message of March 31, Hanoi suggested that private meetings between Le Duc Tho and me could “resolve difficulties or snags which may arise in future in the implementation of the Agreement.” Of course, being Hanoi, it blamed all breaches on the United States and Saigon. Indeed, it denied us any standing with respect to insisting on the observance of the Agreement. After the completion of our withdrawal, only the Vietnamese parties could deal with such issues. We told Thieu about these messages but waited until he had departed from the United States before responding to Hanoi. We left no doubt that our patience was approaching its end:
The DRV messages are an insult to the intelligence of the U.S. government and the American people in view of the record of the DRV performance, for which no explanation is offered, and their repetition must prevent the normalization of relations which the U.S. government is seeking.
The U.S. side rejects emphatically the DRV contention that responsibility for implementation of Article 7 of the Paris Agreement [regarding infiltration] rests only with the two South Vietnamese parties. All four parties to the Agreement are responsible for its strict implementation. The U.S. side holds the DRV side fully responsible for the continued violation of Article 7 and insists that the DRV side accept its responsibility and cease the infiltration of men and materiel into South Vietnam in violation of that article and Article 20. The U.S. side further insists that the DRV side withdraw its forces from Laos and Cambodia unconditionally as required by Article 20. . . . The U.S. side wishes to point out that continuation of these violations will have most serious consequences.
But the end of our message coupled another warning with a proposal for a meeting with Le Duc Tho:
In order to arrest any further deterioration, Dr. Kissinger proposes a meeting in Paris with special adviser Le Duc Tho at a mutually agreeable time during the first week of May.
Our strategy at this point was to launch a three- or four-day air attack on the North Vietnamese supply bases and trails in Laos and on both sides of the Demilitarized Zone sometime during April. Against this background, we expected my scheduled negotiations with Le Duc Tho in May to help dampen the controversy at home while inspiring Hanoi with increased caution.
But as always, Hanoi had strong nerves. By the end of April, the Ho Chi Minh Trail would be shut down as the rainy season turned it into a quagmire. So Hanoi played for time while continuing its illegal infiltration. It took ten days to reply, then on April 15 accepted the meeting for any day after May 15. Le Duc Tho wanted as long an interval as possible, calculating that we would not attack until after negotiations had taken place. His calculation was wrong; but he prevailed for reasons connected with Watergate, not diplomacy. But for Watergate we would surely have acted in April.
By mid-April, 35,000 fresh North Vietnamese troops had entered South Vietnam or nearby sanctuaries; the total increase in combat personnel and supplies was greater than before the 1972 Easter offensive. The normal Nixon would have been enraged beyond containment at being strung along like this; but Watergate Nixon continued to dither. He had, on April 8, sent Al Haig, now Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, on a five-day fact-finding trip to Indochina. In the past this had been the precursor to strong decisions. Not now. When Haig reported on April 15, the same day as the Hanoi message, Nixon engaged in further procrastination, which would soon make the projected attack pointless as the rainy season rendered the Ho Chi Minh Trail unusable. We were instructed to call yet one more WSAG meeting to consider our options.
Nixon was simply unable to concentrate his energies and mind on Vietnam. The records show that he was engaged in incessant meetings and telephone calls on Watergate. April 14, for instance, we know now was the day the President concluded with Haldeman and Ehrlichman that his old friend John Mitchell must be pressured into admitting that he was “morally and legally responsible.” It was on April 15, the day of our Vietnamese discussion, that Henry Petersen, heading the Justice Department’s Watergate inquiry, urged Nixon to fire Haldeman and Ehrlichman.
I was convinced at the time, as I told Elliot Richardson a few days later, that hesitation was the most dangerous course: “[T]he only chance we have got is not to let the other guys calibrate the price that they have to pay at each stage.” We reviewed the options the next day in the WSAG. In addition to the resupply down the Ho Chi Minh Trail threatening South Vietnam’s safety, we were now faced with a new North Vietnamese offensive in northern Laos. We recommended that this should be attacked by bombing, and that we should suspend mine-clearing. These narrower decisions were carried out almost immediately. But they fudged the fundamental issue, which was the transgressions in the main theater — South Vietnam itself. American B-52 bombers and fighter planes struck targets in Laos on April 16 in retaliation for the North Vietnamese seizure of Tha Vieng, south of the Plain of Jars. On April 17 the raids continued for a second day, and Defense Secretary Richardson at a news conference described them as a response to “a flagrant violation” of the Laotian cease-fire. But no action was taken against the North
Vietnamese infiltration down the Ho Chi Minh Trail or against the illegal infiltration across the DMZ, and that was after all the heart of the matter.
Pursuing the track of negotiations simultaneously, on April 17 we sent a sharp message to the North Vietnamese responding “with indignation and dismay” to their message of April 15. We agreed to a meeting between me and Le Duc Tho, to be preceded by a preparatory meeting between Hanoi’s Vice Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State William Sullivan.
The WSAG met again on April 17. The Joint Chiefs still insisted that they could not attack the Ho Chi Minh Trail in southern Laos — the only segment still in active use with the approach of the rainy season — unless they first destroyed the Communist surface-to-air missile complexes just south of the DMZ.
Therefore, the military extended the length of military operations once again, insisting on a full seven days of bombing. This was a turning point. Three days before this meeting I had been shaken to hear from Leonard Garment how Watergate might touch the President himself. I was appalled by the knowledge, seeing, for the first time clearly, how the Watergate challenges could reach to the heart of the Presidency and destroy all authority. I have described in Chapter IV how I and others responded, but on April 17 I did not see how I could urge Nixon to put his diminishing prestige behind the new prolonged bombing campaign that the situation required and that his own hesitations had made necessary. I therefore suggested at the WSAG that we wait for a clear-cut provocation from Hanoi while continuing with our planning. The members of the WSAG, who were finely tuned to bureaucratic intangibles, understood correctly that this represented a sea change. Up to then our strategy had been to prevent a major challenge rather than wait for it to occur. (Our estimate was that it would not occur for the better part of a year.) The decision meant that we were postponing a preemptive strike indefinitely. Thus sooner or later South Vietnam would have to cope with the full fury of the unimpeded North Vietnamese buildup.
It was a great lost opportunity, as Hanoi’s mild reaction to the air strikes in Laos demonstrated. For five years it had been an article of faith among critics that strong actions marred the climate for negotiations. The truth was quite different. We had invariably found that Hanoi was never more tractable than after a violent American blow. In this case, too, Hanoi responded to our bombing of northern Laos and our tough note of April 17 by accepting on April 20 the preliminary meeting between Thach and Sullivan. There was a Freudian typographical error in its message (or else in someone’s transcription of it) to the effect that Hanoi “strictly respects and unscrupulously [sic] implements” the Paris Agreement — one of the few communications from Hanoi that we could endorse without qualification.
But our strategy was becoming unhinged, for it was clear that we were in no position to carry out the military half of our original plan. In its absence the meeting with Le Duc Tho took on quite a different significance. I informed Nixon on April 21 of Hanoi’s message. We chatted about an NSC meeting planned for April 26 to make the final decision. The meeting never took place. In any event, Watergate would have predetermined the outcome. I made clear to Nixon — in less than good taste — that we were simply in no position to implement our planning: “If we didn’t have this damn domestic situation, a week of bombing would put this Agreement in force,” I said to him. And to demonstrate that my tactlessness had been finely honed, I added another sentence of exquisite infelicity: “[O]ne good thing about Watergate, it puts it all [the Laos bombing] on page 20 [of the newspapers].” To which Nixon, getting into the spirit of things, replied: “It even puts the ten percent increase in inflation on page 20.”
By April 23 it was clear that the President was not prepared to order any kind of retaliation. I told Haig:
My problem is I don’t see how we can get anything done in this climate. I mean supposing we start bombing. This will crystalize all the Congressional opposition. . . . I have no doubt that if it weren’t for this mess we’d back them off [that is, the North Vietnamese].
By the end of April 1973, therefore, our strategy for Vietnam was in tatters. In the light of flagrant North Vietnamese violations and the horrible stories told by returning prisoners of war, the carrot of economic aid to Hanoi was understandably all but eliminated by the Congress: The Byrd amendment, barring direct or indirect assistance unless specifically authorized by Congress, went through by 88 votes to 3. Then the stick of bombing was lost by our own domestic incapacity. The Congress in June was to prohibit a military response by law, but the “window” we had in those few months of early 1973 was closed by Watergate’s enfeeblements.
In this climate my next meetings with Le Duc Tho registered a new reality. I went not as a representative of an America that had just demonstrated there was a penalty for treachery, but as someone with almost no cards to play.
A Charade with Le Duc Tho
I SET out for Paris for what turned out to be an extended series of negotiations with Le Duc Tho lasting (intermittently) from May 17 to June 13. The ill omens did not cease, the most extraordinary being an intelligence report I received while en route to Paris. It was a North Vietnamese account that described how the Viet Cong leaders were briefing their subordinates in the field. The report confirmed our knowledge of Hanoi’s buildup, referring to a “general offensive” that was in preparation. But it was being postponed, the briefing stated, to give Watergate an opportunity to complete the paralysis of our Presidency and the demoralization of our South Vietnamese ally. It accurately predicted that the wounded President now lacked the authority to retaliate against North Vietnamese transgressions.
The Watergate investigations . . . have already proved that the last U. S. Presidential election was fraudulent, and many members of the White House staff have submitted their resignations. Therefore, . . . President Nixon must also resign because he no longer has enough prestige to lead the United States. His weakened authority over the US government is now generating a favorable influence in South Vietnam for the struggle of the NLF,III and will result in a new US policy in Indochina. Even if President Nixon remains in office . . . he will not dare to apply such strong measures as air strikes or bombing attacks in either North or South Vietnam, because the US Congress and the American people will violently object.
Just as it did in the years of peace negotiations, Hanoi was orchestrating its moves with our domestic politics. It had plenty of evidence for its shrewd judgment. Beginning in early May, antiwar measures in the Congress that had usually been blocked in the House of Representatives began to pass. For example, on May 10, the House of Representatives voted 219–188 to cut off funds for the bombing of Cambodia. On May 31, the Senate voted the same by a margin of 63–19. Only three Democratic Senators — James Eastland, Henry Jackson, and Russell Long — voted with the President, along with sixteen Republicans. Twenty Republicans joined forty-three Democrats in voting for the bombing cutoff.
Why did the Administration begin to lose Congressional votes that it had won consistently over the preceding four years? To some extent it was because the Paris Agreement to most Americans spelled “peace”; it signified our disengagement from the war. More concretely, the President’s previous — and usually successful — plea that military measures were necessary to protect American troops lost its rationale after all American forces were withdrawn. Nevertheless, Nixon could have taken his case to the American people, arguing that we could not abandon what 50,000 Americans had died to preserve. A Nixon reelected by one of the largest majorities in history might well have prevailed, as he had so many times before. In the swamp of Watergate the President’s political strength drained away and this option did not exist.
If Hanoi had been able to penetrate our inner councils as well, it would have found a bureaucratic deadlock that a weakened President was unable to resolve. The White House, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and CIA Director Schlesinger favored early preemptive action against the continuing infiltration. Some CIA experts and
the civilian element of the Pentagon favored turning over enforcement of the Agreement to the South Vietnamese — a disguised way of acquiescing in its collapse since the South Vietnamese army was fully occupied in static defense and had no planes of a range to interdict the North Vietnamese supply routes. The State Department wanted to wash its hands of the whole affair, only too happy in this case to have me prominently responsible. There was a division of opinion in the CIA about what Hanoi was up to. One school reasoned that it would act soon to thwart the political gains Thieu was making; another argued that it was building up secure base areas for an assault much later. This was a normal pattern for the role of intelligence in finely balanced policymaking. It usually mirrors the prevalent division of opinion, following rather than creating policy preferences.
There is almost always in a crisis a division between doves who seek evidence for delay, wrapping their hesitation in the mantle of “diplomacy,” which without leverage is bound to be dilatory and inconclusive, and hawks who want early preemptive action. Generally the advocates of passivity seem to have the stronger case in the beginning of a crisis because the risks of action are evident while those of passivity are deferred or conjectural. The bane of preemptive action is the impossibility of proving it was necessary. The penalty for gradualism is that one becomes the prisoner of events. The temptation is nearly irresistible to try to combine both courses, striking bureaucratic compromises rather than seeking real solutions, or to confuse the two. A hawkish policy is coupled with dovish methods that deprive it of effectiveness (the Bay of Pigs syndrome). Or a dovish policy is carried out with hawkish rhetoric (the Iran hostage syndrome). With respect to the violations of the Paris Agreement we had used the rhetoric of hawks, but were forced to be doves. For the first time we had threatened and not followed through.
Years of Upheaval Page 49