by David Milne
Nitze was not as surprised as Cronkite by the Tet Offensive—so-called because the assault was launched on the eve of Tet, the lunar New Year. He had been consistently unpersuaded by the insistence of Walt Rostow and other optimistic hawks that the vast U.S. military effort had the southern insurgency on the back foot—that there was “light at the end of the tunnel.” Clark Clifford had officially replaced a broken Robert McNamara as defense secretary on March 1, and Nitze began to lobby Clifford for a fundamental reappraisal of the war. Clifford had served as a naval aide to President Truman in the latter stages of the Second World War and played a key role in drafting the seminal 1947 National Security Act. He had served President Kennedy on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and advised President Johnson on the Vietnam War in 1965—when he sided with George Ball in opposing escalation. But after LBJ made the decision to Americanize the war, Clifford became one of the president’s staunchest supporters—a fierce advocate of winning wars once established. At the point of his replacing McNamara, Nitze described him as a “fire-breathing hawk.” But then Tet compelled him to change tack completely, as Nitze later described:
Clark’s [views] changed first and Clark switched 180 degrees, so Clark came to the conclusion the thing to do was to cut and run right away. Having been a “bomb ’em to pieces” fellow, he suddenly became “get out at all costs, any costs, just get out.” And that I thought was also wrong, so from that point on suddenly I found myself being not on the dove side, but on the firmer side. I thought it was just dreadful to just pull out.159
On March 4, Clifford briefed the president on his post-Tet recommendations and cast what he described as “grave doubts” on the sharp escalatory route—the dispatch of a further 206,000 American troops—urged by Walt Rostow and General William Westmoreland. Clifford observed that the president’s war policies had already done “enormous damage” to the country “we are trying to save.”160 He doubted whether “we can ever find a way out if we continue to shovel men into Vietnam.”161
Clifford’s assessment shocked President Johnson. Nitze was glad for his change of heart—he had threatened to resign from the administration rather than defend the Vietnam War before Senator Fulbright’s committee—but he now came to view the new defense secretary as mercurial and untrustworthy. So followed a remarkable month in American politics. On March 12, the liberal antiwar senator from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy, won 42 percent of the presidential primary vote in New Hampshire. Sensing LBJ’s political weakness, Robert Kennedy joined the race—on a similarly antiwar platform—to secure the nomination ahead of the sitting president four days later. Previously steadfast supporters of Johnson’s efforts in Vietnam shifted their position to outright opposition in the aftermath of Tet. During a tense meeting with Walt Rostow, Dean Acheson told the national security adviser “to tell the president—and you tell him in precisely these words—that he can take Vietnam and stick it up his ass.”162 During a meeting of the so-called Wise Men—establishment types like Acheson, Robert Lovett, John McCloy, and Charles Bohlen—on March 25, each member counseled the president to disengage from Vietnam. After the meeting, Rostow wrote mournfully, “The American Establishment is dead.”163 The logic of NSC-68 had been given its last rites. On March 31, President Johnson announced a unilateral restriction on the U.S. bombing, called for substantive peace negotiations, and added, finally, that he would not seek a second elected term in office.
The remainder of Nitze’s service to the Johnson administration consisted largely of opposing Clifford’s efforts to concede too much to North Vietnam in the search for peace. President Johnson had appointed Averell Harriman to lead peace negotiations with North Vietnam in Paris beginning May 1. Both Clifford and Harriman wanted the president to order further restrictions on the bombing to facilitate discussions. Nitze joined Rostow in arguing strongly to the contrary. “I was convinced,” Nitze wrote, “that we would achieve nothing in Paris that was not won on the battlefield.”164 And so Nitze’s peculiar relationship with the Vietnam War continued right to the end of the Johnson administration. Advocates of escalation had always spoken the language of NSC-68, the hallowed text of Cold War interventionism. Yet Nitze was as indecisive in person as he was unambiguous on the page. Some conflicts cannot be refracted through a crystalline doctrine, offering a clear path to success. His scattershot take on Vietnam reflected this dilemma. Nitze refused to connect the amped-up language of NSC-68—a theory designed to guide the United States through the Cold War—to any foreign-policy misadventure that followed.
Richard Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey—Johnson’s vice president, who fended off Eugene McCarthy’s challenge following Robert Kennedy’s assassination in June—in the general election of November 1968. Nitze yearned for a job in the new administration, but he had gathered too many enemies on the left and the right during the 1960s to make him a viable choice. Nixon’s defense secretary, Melvin Laird, sounded out senators from both sides of the political aisle on their willingness to confirm Nitze to an appropriate second-tier position. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the 1964 GOP presidential candidate, said no way. He blamed Nitze, unfairly, for the Democratic Party’s success during the election in portraying him as unhinged and quick on the trigger. Laird asked Senator Fulbright his thoughts on the same question, particularly in regard to Nitze becoming U.S. ambassador to West Germany. “My comment is that Nitze is an imperialist at heart,” replied Fulbright, “and would not be a good person to support U.S. troop withdrawals and, therefore, might be a good ambassador to Mali or some other equivalent position—but not Bonn.”165
Congenitally incapable of sitting around in a funk, in the spring of 1969 Nitze established a pressure group with Dean Acheson. The Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy lobbied for the continued development of Safeguard, a missile defense program that would allow the United States to shoot down incoming Soviet ballistic missiles. In the mood to reassert itself after being made peripheral through the Americanization of the Vietnam War, Congress had threatened to cut off funding for the program. Nitze was aghast that sore feelings about Vietnam might be allowed to imperil America’s defensive capabilities. He hired three of Albert Wohlstetter’s most talented graduate students at the University of Chicago to assist his lobbying efforts: Richard Perle, Peter Wilson, and Paul Wolfowitz.166 They combined well and Safeguard was spared by one vote in the Senate in August 1969. Thereafter Nitze’s team remained united in their opposition to defense cuts and any needless kowtowing to the Soviet Union. They began sketching a new strategic agenda for the next generation. When a year later Kennan met with Nitze in Washington, D.C., he found him “as serious as ever about the mathematics of destruction.”167
7
METTERNICH REDUX
HENRY KISSINGER
Henry was too tricky to get along with—nobody in the U.S. government liked him at all because he tricked and deceived everybody.
—PAUL NITZE
Henry understands my views better than anyone at State ever has.
—GEORGE KENNAN
By the fall of 1967, Robert McNamara was absolutely certain that the Americanization of the Vietnam War had been a mistake. Determined to halt a debacle that was largely of his own making, the secretary of defense urged Lyndon Johnson to appoint Henry Kissinger to lead third-party negotiations to end the conflict. Kissinger was a noted scholar and public intellectual, the author of acclaimed books on nuclear strategy and the Congress of Vienna, a Harvard professor with a fierce ambition for government service. McNamara reasoned that Kissinger’s deliberative style, moderation, and varied international connections made him the ideal person to move negotiations forward. On September 12, President Johnson’s advisers gathered to consider McNamara’s suggestion. Secretary of State Dean Rusk endorsed Kissinger’s “trustworthiness and character,” noting that his centrist politics and seemingly orthodox Cold War views means that he is “basically for us.” The hawkish Walt Rostow conceded that Kissinger was a “good
analyst” but worried that “he may go a little soft when you get down to the crunch.”1
McNamara won the argument—for the last time in the Johnson administration—and Kissinger began meeting in Paris with two French intermediaries with Hanoi connections, Herbert Marcovich and Raymond Aubrac, through September and October. The negotiations—code-named “Pennsylvania”—foundered on Hanoi’s reluctance to talk until the United States stopped bombing North Vietnam. While McNamara lauded Kissinger as “a very shrewd negotiator … the best I have seen in my seven years,” Johnson grew increasingly impatient as the weeks passed.2 During a tense telephone conversation in which the president addressed Kissinger as “Professor Schlesinger,” LBJ issued a blunt final warning in the style of Al Capone: “I’m going to give it one more try,” said Johnson, “and if that doesn’t work I’m going to come up to Cambridge and cut off your balls.”3
The channel quietly expired late in 1967 (though the president declined to carry out his threat). Kissinger drew at least two conclusions from this dismal affair. First, he needed to serve a president who trusted his judgment and was willing to give his diplomacy some time to work. Second, he would boost his prospects of securing a powerful position in the next administration if both major parties viewed him as a potential appointment. Having previously worked for the centrist Republican Nelson Rockefeller, Kissinger turned swiftly to advise the victorious Nixon campaign after Rockefeller was defeated in the summer of 1968. His contact was Richard Allen, a thirty-two-year-old member of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University whom Nixon had appointed his principal foreign-policy aide. Allen and Kissinger worked together on the Vietnam platform plank. Allen was sufficiently impressed to invite Kissinger to join Nixon’s foreign-policy advisory board.
Assuming this position would have required Kissinger to break cover, however, so he declined and continued his dual-focus charm offensive. Kissinger also rationalized that he could better serve Nixon by retaining the Johnson administration’s confidence, securing access to whatever useful information might come his way. So Kissinger reached out to members of the administration with whom he had previously worked and who considered him an ally. One was Daniel Davidson, one of Kissinger’s former students at Harvard, who served as a member of Averell Harriman’s delegation in Paris and who kept his old tutor up to date with what was happening. Kissinger then forwarded this information to Nixon via Allen, unbeknownst to Harriman and Davidson. As Allen described it:
Henry Kissinger, on his own, volunteered information to us through a spy, a former student, that he had in the Paris peace talks, who would call him and debrief, and Kissinger called me from pay phones and we spoke in German. The fact that my German is better than his did not at all hinder my communication with Henry and he offloaded mostly every night what had happened that day in Paris.4
Kissinger was brazen in carrying out this task. On August 15, 1968, for example, he wrote to Harriman that there “is a chance that I may be in Paris around September 17, and I would very much like to stop in and see you then. I am through with Republican politics. The party is hopeless and unfit to govern.”5 A few weeks later, Harriman replied, “All is forgiven. Welcome back to the fold.”6 When Kissinger’s double-dealing was publicized in later years, through the publication of Seymour Hersh’s exposé, The Price of Power, Harriman’s team in Paris was appalled. Richard Holbrooke, who would later embark on a celebrated diplomatic career, was one member of the Paris delegation who found Kissinger’s behavior tawdry. “Henry was the only person outside of the government we were authorized to discuss the negotiations with,” Holbrooke said bitterly. “We trusted him. It is not stretching the truth to say that the Nixon campaign had a secret source within the U.S. negotiating team.”7
Kissinger’s devious method of gathering intelligence was not nearly as problematic as what Nixon chose to do with it. In late September, Kissinger informed John Mitchell, Nixon’s campaign manager, “that something big was afoot regarding Vietnam.” A few weeks later, Kissinger fleshed out this insinuation, predicting that the Johnson administration would announce a bombing halt in mid to late October. On October 30, LBJ confirmed Kissinger’s expectation and announced that a unilateral U.S. bombing halt would take effect the following day—meeting Hanoi’s substantive precondition for peace talks. As the skies above North Vietnam cleared of American B-52s, Mitchell got in touch with Anna Chennault, a prominent Chinese-American businesswoman who headed the nationwide Republican Women for Nixon, and who had close links to the South Vietnamese ambassador to the United States, Bui Diem. Mitchell said, “Anna, I’m speaking on behalf of Richard Nixon. It’s very important that our Vietnamese friends understand our Republican position and I hope you have made this very clear to them.”8
The “Republican position” was as follows: South Vietnamese President Thieu should refuse to attend peace negotiations under a Democratic president and instead wait to secure more generous terms under a Nixon administration. The advice was received loud and clear. On November 1, Thieu delivered a belligerent speech that disassociated himself from LBJ’s speech and Harriman’s efforts in Paris. The next day, Ellsworth Bunker reported that Thieu had “closeted himself in his private apartment in independence palace” and was refusing to meet with him. Bunker surmised correctly that Thieu was “convinced that Nixon will win and will follow a hawkish policy, and therefore he can afford to wait.”9 Wait Thieu assuredly did.
The margin of Nixon’s victory on November 5 was wafer-thin. Nixon secured 43.4 percent of the popular vote compared to Hubert Humphrey’s 42.7—this translated into a wider victory of 301 to 191 electoral votes. The segregationist third-party candidate, former Democratic governor of Alabama George Wallace, won 13.5 percent of the popular vote, providing an early portent of how LBJ’s greatest domestic achievements—in the sphere of civil rights—had destroyed Franklin Roosevelt’s uneasy coalition of northern liberals, African Americans, college professors, blue-collar workers, and southerners of all stripes, including bigots. Nixon also used Johnson’s progressive legislation as a useful foil, pursuing the so-called Southern strategy of exploiting the racism and fears of lawlessness of many southern voters, whose world LBJ had upended. In appealing to “states’ rights” and “law and order,” Nixon deployed euphemisms that resonated through the history of the South and that would serve the Republican Party well in the future. The year 1968 was pivotal in American political history—a defining moment for modern conservatism. But George Wallace got it wrong when he crowed that the “great pointy heads who knew best how to run everyone’s life have had their day.”10
The election was seminal in regard to foreign policy too, where pointy-heads like Kissinger were much in evidence. Nixon made two major decisions after defeating Humphrey. First, the president-elect decided to marginalize the State Department and concentrate foreign policymaking in the White House, ensuring that he could pursue his agenda without excessive interference from an arm of government he viewed as an adversary: a competing power base with an institutionally liberal bent. Second, Nixon appointed Henry Kissinger as his national security adviser, with all the power that Nixon’s first goal promised this position. The appointment marked a grand strategic break with the escalation and broadening of the Cold War since 1950. Kissinger was allergic to Woodrow Wilson’s moral certainties and viewed the Kennedy and Johnson years as an era in which American commitments were expanded—in accordance with Paul Nitze’s NSC-68—to unsustainable levels. Kissinger’s geopolitical views held important points of convergence with those of Alfred Mahan, Walter Lippmann, and George Kennan.
Yet the manner of Nixon and Kissinger’s coming together created problems that bedeviled their working and personal relationships. Both were adept at secrecy and duplicity, and they viewed their assuming power as an essential good in itself, regardless of the means used to achieve it. Kissinger was thus willing to lie to Averell Harriman, one of America’s most distinguished public servants, in the hope that he might gain usefu
l information to win favor with Nixon. At the same time, he flirted with the Humphrey campaign, whispering enticing promises—such as one to present the Humphrey campaign with a large incriminating file on Nixon that he’d prepared while advising Nelson Rockefeller—without actually delivering. He was so skilled at convincing people that he was on their side that Humphrey acknowledged, “If I had been elected, I would have had Kissinger be my assistant. That fellow is indestructible—a professional, able and rather unflappable. I like the fact that he has a little fun too.”11 The flappable Kissinger—for Humphrey misread him on that score—would have been pleased by this endorsement, which validated his acting skills as well as his bipartisan credentials.
For his part, Nixon was comfortable sacrificing a peace settlement in 1968 to the greater good of his assuming power. Passing advice to Chennault via Mitchell that he knew would reach Bui Diem was technically treasonous: frustrating the declared intentions of the U.S. government in concert with a foreign nation. Kissinger and Nixon’s first meaningful collaboration therefore laid bare the worst of their traits. Even Nixon’s announcement of Kissinger’s appointment was presented with a glaring untruth. On December 2, Nixon unveiled his new national security adviser and “announced a program that was substantially at odds with what he had told me privately,” Kissinger admitted. Nixon said that Kissinger’s role would be limited to planning and that he “would not come between the President and the Secretary of State.”12 Yet that was precisely where Nixon wanted Kissinger—a like-minded barrier to the State Department.