As a result, Khanh was treated from the start as a strongman who enjoyed America's staunch friendship. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was even sent to South Vietnam to stump the country with him, as a visible symbol that the United States stood beside the new leader. This kind of performance did not come naturally to McNamara. On one occasion he grasped Khanh's hand and declared, "Vietnam muon nam!" Unfortunately, whoever taught McNamara the Vietnamese phrase had neglected to also teach him the proper intonation. So instead of saying "Long Live Vietnam," what he actually said, to the vast amusement of his audience, was "Vietnam, lie down!"
In the face of all this, the failure of the Communists of the North and their Southern allies to win the "hearts and minds" of the city folk is surprising, to say the least. Perhaps it was simply a matter of time. But one reason, precisely, for the vast increase in the urban population that occurred in the early 60's was that the Saigon government, while progressively losing its grip on the countryside, was still able to afford some protection in the towns. From their sanctuaries along the borders, in Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam, the Communists could move forces in and out of the country to collect rice and recruits and to enlarge the "leopard spots" of "liberated territories" almost at will—so that, even if Saigon had a competent administration, the security problem could never be solved, only palliated, unless we did what Lyndon Johnson and Dean Rusk kept assuring the Communists that we would not do: go into the sanctuaries and "widen the war." Instead we relied on attrition to discourage an adversary who was willing and able to take a hundred casualties for every one of ours—and who in fact would sacrifice many hundreds of thousands of men in the coming decade and still field a force of twenty divisions for the final assault on Saigon.
Quite apart from the appeal of their ideology (always limited in the South) and the very real prestige they had acquired in defeating the French, the Communists of the North and their Southern allies were operating from positions of strength. It was the Soviet-Hanoi alliance that was the superpower in Southeast Asia; and the strength of the Communists on the ground was immeasurably bolstered by the sympathy of people everywhere who saw them as victims of imperialism heroically fighting for self-determination and freedom—and the United States in the role of a neocolonialist bully seeking to prop up a puppet regime. They were increasingly adept at generating and exploiting this perception, so deeply rooted in the guilt and self-doubt of the West, whereas the American leadership never learned to take it seriously or to factor it into its calculations. And yet, as we all know now, it was bound to be extremely important—perhaps decisive—in the end.
In short, everything favored the Communist enterprise, and this would have been a good time for us to heed the counsel of prudence and declare not victory, as Senator Aiken of Vermont was to suggest some years later, but defeat: to leave the squabbling Southern generals to their own devices and take our advisers and Green Berets and AID administrators home to ponder the complexities of "nation-building" in Southeast Asia. Such an outcome would have been an unhappy one for the Southerners, but not so devastating as what was to happen ten years later. And it would have spared us an infinite grief.
Nowadays all this is so dreadfully obvious, connu et archi-connu, that one tends to forget how out of the question it was in 1965. Lyndon Johnson would not hear of it. The young press corps in Saigon (including such future antiwar activists as David Halberstam of the New York Times) would not hear of it, either—these being the hawkish fellows who had roused John Kennedy against Diem on the grounds that he was incapable of winning a war for which they, at least, were ready to "bear any burden, pay any price." And at home the great majority in Congress would not hear of it—not in any case without setting off a great national debate about "Who lost Indochina?"
So we sent in our troops and helped the generals sort themselves out and by dint of enormous sacrifices over the next five years created, or more exactly recreated, the situation half-jokingly described by Senator Aiken. By the early 70's, when we were withdrawing the last of our ground forces, the republic had a reasonably competent government and a credible army; and it had been largely freed—after the bloody paroxysm of Tet in 1968 and the joint U.S.-South Vietnamese operation in Cambodia in 1970—from the threat of internal subversion. Thus it was possible for the first time to issue weapons to village self-defense forces in areas once controlled by the Vietcong.
The North had not given up, of course, nor would it in the foreseeable future. But it could be contained as long as the South was willing to fight and we were prepared to supply the means required to maintain the military balance, including the occasional intervention of our naval and air forces.
So this was the upshot of what the Vietnamese think of as the "American war"—from 1965 to 1971. The South lived—dependent upon us, to be sure, but hardly more so than the North was dependent on Moscow. We could therefore now do as the good Senator suggested: declare victory, and go home.
Needless to say, this is not what we did—not quite, and therefore not at all. It is a complicated story, and The Palace File tells it well. Richard Nixon withdrew our armed forces as efficiently and rapidly as they had been inserted by Lyndon Johnson, and with the same sort of consultation with our allies, i.e., none, and meanwhile sent Henry Kissinger to conduct secret diplomacy with Le Duc Tho, which had the effect (however unintended) of assuring the Northerners that the prize would be theirs if they only persisted, and of suggesting to the Southerners that something sinister was afoot. At the end of the so-called peace process we persuaded, indeed forced, South Vietnam to put its head in a noose, the Paris Peace Accords of January 1973, while solemnly swearing that if the trap were sprung we would be there to cut the rope and chastise the villains.
All this was not only explicitly stated in Nixon's letters to Thieu but reinforced by military planning, e.g., inviting the South Vietnamese corps commanders to our air-force headquarters in Thailand to show them how precisely we were planning to target our attacks if the Communists violated the cease-fire. And then, of course, the trap was sprung, in full view of the world, and lo! we were not there.
In our entire history, Hung and Schecter maintain, there is no precedent for such a betrayal. But they immediately mitigate the condemnation by raising, if not settling, some obvious questions. How valid were the commitments of Nixon and Ford? Why were they never made public? Did Nixon and Kissinger cynically betray our allies in the hope of achieving a "decent interval"?
To these questions Kissinger replies, correctly, that it was not the practice in those days to make presidential letters public, and that in any case there was nothing secret about Nixon's determination to enforce the Paris agreement by military action if necessary. Both he and Nixon also indignantly deny that they were being cynical or merely looking for a "decent interval." On the contrary, Kissinger was, and remains, convinced that if not for Watergate, Nixon, with the same willingness that he had shown to take the political heat during the Christmas bombing of 1972, would have responded with air strikes to North Vietnamese violations.
I have no difficulty in believing this: it makes sense and follows logically from Nixon's public commitment to achieve a "peace with honor." But finally, of course, would it have made any difference? Even if we had intervened this time, wasn't Hanoi's victory inevitable in the end? Or would the changing foreign policy of China have brought a new factor into play on the side of an independent South Vietnam?
Etc., ad infinitum—interminable, tiresome, tantalizing questions, begetting more questions, and meanwhile, as Kissinger keeps reminding us in his memoirs, you are obliged to act, whether you have satisfactory answers or not.
Or not to act, which is what it came down to in March 1975. You are Gerald Ford, say, and the North Vietnamese, in open violation of the agreement that Kissinger had spent four years negotiating, are coming straight down over the central highlands to the coast and the highway to Saigon, The Soviets, in contemplation of realizing a return—at last—on a
very old investment, have built them a pipeline through Laos and Cambodia, emerging at Loc Ninh, a couple of hours from the coast. But now the United States Congress, led by Jack Kennedy's younger brother and Lowell Weicker and Bella Abzug, has informed the notoriously "authoritarian" and "corrupt" Thieu regime (over your veto) that they will get no more help from us. Not a bullet. The South Vietnamese army is demoralized and crumbling, like the French and British in the face of Nazi Germany in June 1940. In a few days our ambassador and his staff will have to run for it, ignominiously, with at best a handful of our Vietnamese friends.
At this point, say, General Vogt, the commander of our air force in Thailand, flies over the area and reports that he has never seen anything like it: enemy tanks, artillery, half-tracks, personnel carriers, bumper to bumper—since there are only a couple of roads capable of carrying this kind of traffic—all the way down to the outskirts of Saigon. After groping around in the jungle for years, and dropping millions of tons of explosives on trees, we have a target. "A turkey shoot," Vogt calls it. We could make those roads look like the Sinai in 1967, after the Israeli air force destroyed Nasser's motorized columns in the desert.
What would you do? Does the congressional interdiction wipe out your responsibility to provide for the security of our people in Saigon? Would you order the air-force commander and the carriers cruising along the coast to wipe out all that congestion on the highways and give the South Vietnamese a chance to pull themselves together? And thereby, in all probability, even if the American public rallied to your support, open up a constitutional crisis as bitter as the one that almost led to the impeachment of Richard Nixon?
I don't know whether such a notion ever crossed Gerald Ford's mind. I doubt it. In any case, it's all behind us now. A great power cannot afford to throw good money after the bad and lose itself in remorse and introspection. . . . Or can it? Should it?
The last letter in The Palace File is from Thieu, begging for the help he had been promised again and again. It was never answered.
For all that it is born of Hung's sorrow and Schecter's indignation, their book remarkably keeps its cool. It has the tone and gait of a historical narrative, not of a political tract—recounting lucidly what happened to the government and people of the South after we turned away, which each of us did at different times, of course, depending on who we were and how we were related to the situation. In my case, for example, I quit the Paris delegation late in 1969, after Kissinger had begun holding his secret trysts with Le Duc Tho, and retired from the Foreign Service. During the period covered by The Palace File, I forgot the few words of Vietnamese that I had learned and gradually lost touch with my friends in Saigon.
As a national phenomenon, however, the amnesia that befell us can be dated with some precision: the Paris Accords were signed on January 27, 1973, instituting a cease-fire in place and various political arrangements, including an international supervisory commission in which no one believed. For the North Vietnamese this was merely a phase, albeit an important one, in their famous fight-talk-fight strategy. For Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger it was a culmination and a release. Planes could now at last be sent to Hanoi to pick up our prisoners, who had been subjected to torture and ignominy not only by the Communists but also by visiting American literati; and by mid-July the last of our combat battalions was gone from the South. On August 15, ignoring warnings that the Paris agreements would have to be enforced, the Congress of the United States decreed that there would be no more funds for American military action of any kind in Indochina.
Richard Nixon, by then, was in irremediable trouble, although impeachment proceedings were still many months away. For Cambodia the worst was yet to come, as it was for Saigon, but the news media would now be shifting their attention elsewhere—to the Middle East, for example, where Egyptian staff officers were once again bent over maps of the Sinai. "Vietnam," in the words of a well-known survivor of Camelot, "could now return to the obscurity it so richly deserved."
What happened thereafter is told—admirably, in my opinion—from a point of view that strikes us as surprising and rather odd for the simple reason that it is South Vietnamese; and to this we have not been accustomed. The effect is to remind us that we have been experiencing the war in a multitude of ways, "in-country," as we used to say, or out, through the pain and bewilderment of our soldiers, or as a quarrel with others and with ourselves—but always or almost always this dimension has been missing: the people about whom or for whom, allegedly, it was fought. For this alone, and quite apart from the hitherto unpublished letters and skillful narration, The Palace File deserves an attentive reading.
But there is nothing in The Palace File to equal the pathos of Hung's last visit to Washington, as the enemy tanks are closing in on Saigon. Congress is in recess and no one suggests that it might be called back. The idea is absurd. Gerald Ford is playing golf in Palm Springs. Hung wanders down the long empty corridors clutching his letters, which should have been published years ago. Thieu has always refused to publish them or even allude to them because they are marked top-secret and he feared to anger the lords of the Larger Kingdom, his last resort. Now it is too late.
As he walks, Hung encounters two or three departing solons, including the Senator from Massachusetts, younger brother of the President who first committed American troops to South Vietnam. But Teddy is pressed for time, and makes it clear that his celebrated compassion has its limits; he will pay any price, bear any burden, to bring this conversation with Hung to an end.
And then there is Hung's last sad ill-attended press conference which is reported by some surly stringers on remote back pages, if at all. Someone, it seems, thought to ask Henry Kissinger about this obscure Vietnamese who claimed to have some letters which etc., and Kissinger said yes, letters had passed between Nixon and Thieu, but no, there was nothing newsworthy in them (which, although it scandalizes Schecter and Hung, was sadly true in the sense that there had been nothing secret about the promises that we as a nation, speaking through an almost unanimous Congress, were now unwilling to keep, no matter what).
And so it goes. Back in Vietnam, we are overwhelmed with pathetic detail: an incident with some soldiers and a roadblock, a talk with an old peasant woman, desperate attempts to save endangered people and equipment; clues to a situation that we could not deal with honorably and therefore resolved to forget. In this richness of reference and atmosphere the protagonists of The Palace File come alive and we begin to recover, curiously, not only the little we knew about these people, our friends and victims, but much that we surmised and lacked the time or wit or patience to understand. And now there is something odd, different, in this effort to remember what we never properly knew. Is there any point to it? The story, after all, ends no less badly than it did before. Only the configuration has changed—and the moral center. It used to be a story about us. Now it is a story about them.
Nineteen sixty-eight was the climactic year of the American war, or more specifically of the American phase of the thirty-year war, in Indochina. This was the year of the Tet offensive, a pyrotechnic display featuring dramatic scenes of fighting within the American embassy compound in Saigon and the unprecedented ferocity of the struggle for Hué, preceded—by barely more than a week—by the onset of the siege of Khesanh. All these actions ended badly, even disastrously, for the Communist attackers on the ground, but they inflicted heavy casualties, terrified the South Vietnamese population, and profoundly affected American morale.
The Communists, as they have since told us, were now deliberately trading what they called the "blood and bones" of their followers, especially of their Southern followers who might in any case prove troublesome after the war, for political advantage in an arena they saw, quite correctly, as far more decisive than Hué or Khesanh. In Washington, the Defense Secretary had resigned, a month after the storming of the Pentagon by antiwar demonstrators; but the main thing was that this was an election year in the U.S., during which much of the
Democratic party would behave as if it were already in opposition while Nixon, the Republican candidate, would mysteriously allude to a "secret plan" to end the American involvement—an echo of Eisenhower's "I shall go to Korea" promise of 1952. The North Vietnamese, who would later offend Henry Kissinger by instructing him on U.S. public opinion, could therefore deduce from the campaign posture of both candidates what they had already learned from the Soviet ambassador in Washington: that American policy—just as it had been based after 1963 on a national decision to stay in—would now have to conform to an equal and opposite consensus in favor of getting out.
On the other hand, the American war had given Thieu a victory of sorts: the Vietcong was finished, the delta increasingly secure, the government of the republic alive and in better shape than at any time since the early days of Diem. So Hanoi's problem was to make haste slowly: to accelerate the American departure sufficiently to deny the South time to consolidate its hold on the countryside and prepare for the PAVN's frontal assault; but not to such a point that the Americans, ceasing to take casualties and bearing a much lighter financial burden, would be able to install themselves in a garrison situation, as in Korea, and thus deprive the North of the prize it had sought for so long and at such great cost.
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