I think perhaps I was too insistent and rough on Henry today, but I am so disgusted with the military’s failing to come up with any idea, and failing to follow through that I simply had to take it out on somebody. Also, Henry, with all of his many virtues, does seem too often to be concerned about preparing the way for negotiations with the Soviets. However, when he faces the facts, he realizes that no negotiation in Moscow is possible unless we come out all right in Vietnam.
What really matters now is how it all comes out. Both Haldeman and Henry seem to have an idea—which I think is mistaken—that even if we fail in Vietnam we can still survive politically. I have no illusions whatever on that score, however. The U.S. will not have a credible foreign policy if we fail, and I will have to assume the responsibility for that development.
A subtle occasion to apply pressure on the Soviets arose when I attended a ceremony at the State Department for the signing of an international convention banning biological warfare. With Dobrynin seated among the ranks of diplomats listening to my remarks, I said that we must recognize that a great responsibility rests upon the great powers to follow the principle that they should not directly or indirectly encourage any other nation to use force or armed aggression against one of its neighbors. There was no doubt that I was talking about the Soviet Union and North Vietnam.
Just before I left the State Department Auditorium, I went over to shake hands with Dobrynin. I told him that Pat had greatly appreciated Mrs. Dobrynin’s recent invitation to get together for a talk about our trip to Moscow. Later that afternoon Dobrynin called Kissinger and suggested that the ladies’ meeting be arranged for the next day.
Pat had asked Kissinger to brief her on the situation. He told her, “You could say how much you’re both looking forward to the trip, and that you hope nothing will poison it, such as the current developments in Vietnam.”
The meeting was very successful. Pat showed great skill and subtlety. When she raised the point that we did not want anything like Vietnam to interfere with the summit, Mrs. Dobrynin had squeezed her hand and vigorously nodded in agreement.
During the next weeks we pursued a combined policy of applying military pressure on the North Vietnamese and diplomatic pressure on the Soviets. Even while the summit plans were going forward, I was determined not to indulge the Soviet fiction that they could not be held responsible for what North Vietnam did, despite the fact that the invasion had been made possible by the massive infusion of new Soviet weapons and ammunition.
In order to have the necessary military impact, I was convinced that the bombing, which had begun in the southern part of North Vietnam, would have to be brought to the enemy’s heartland around the Hanoi-Haiphong area. The risks of aircraft loss and additional casualties and prisoners of war in these more heavily defended regions were very great, and Laird expressed grave concern about the congressional furor that would follow further escalation of the bombing while Rogers feared that it might endanger the Soviet Summit. Still, I felt that it had to be done, and I approved the plans for operation “Freedom Porch Bravo”—a weekend of heavy B-52 raids aimed at destroying the oil depots around Hanoi and Haiphong, which were being used to fuel the invasion.
The operation was a complete success, and on Sunday morning April 16 I told Haldeman, “Well, we really left them our calling card this weekend.”
Meanwhile, on April 15 the situation took a very serious turn: the North Vietnamese canceled the Paris meeting scheduled for April 24. This was the meeting that the Soviets had hinted might be the decisive one for reaching a settlement. I told Kissinger that I did not think he should take his secret trip to Moscow until we found out what kind of game they were playing.
Kissinger complained to Dobrynin that we had trusted his assurances about this meeting, and warned that its cancellation created serious obstacles to his presummit trip. “The President questions what progress can be made in Moscow if the Soviet Union cannot assure even a meeting with the North Vietnamese on an agreed date,” Kissinger told him.
That night I assessed some of the possible political ramifications of these events.
Diary
Henry obviously considered this a crisis of the first magnitude. I laid down the law hard to him that under these circumstances he could not go to Moscow. I told him that what the Russians wanted to do was to get him to Moscow to discuss the summit. What we wanted to do was to get him to Moscow to discuss Vietnam. I can see that this shook him because he desperately wants to get to Moscow one way or the other. He took it in good grace. Then I told him that we had to consider our option with regard to imposing a blockade.
He walked over with me to the EOB. We stayed down deep on the lawn because there were several groups of tourists, and I was in no mood to talk to anybody at this point.
Later on in the afternoon I had a pretty candid talk with Henry about what we had to look forward to in the future. I said that what we were really looking at was a cancellation of the summit and going hard right on Vietnam, even up to a blockade.
I said under these circumstances, I had an obligation to look for a successor.
I ran down the list, including Rockefeller, Burger, Reagan, and Connally—if we could get him to change his party. Somebody like Burger, or Connally, without the scars on him that I had and with my support, might make it against a fractured Democratic Party.
Henry threw up his hands and said that none of them would do, and that any of the Democrats would be out of the question. I said that if we could get Henry to stay on that we could get continuity in foreign policy. Henry then became very emotional about the point that I shouldn’t be thinking this way or talking this way to anybody—which, of course, he would have realized I wouldn’t. He made his pitch that the North Vietnamese should not be allowed to destroy two Presidents.
After the dinner for the OAS, the military aide came and said I had a call from Kissinger. I went up and took it, and he told me that Dobrynin was still desperate to have him come to Moscow. Vietnam would be the first subject on the agenda. There was some talk even of having the North Vietnamese Foreign Minister there.
After the dinner I told Henry that I had reconsidered the situation and felt that we had to have an open option on the summit. We had to play out the string completely on the negotiating front, and he should go to Moscow.
The next day our bombers accidentally hit four Soviet merchant ships at anchor in Haiphong Harbor. The Soviets immediately protested what they called our “gangster activities.” One of Dobrynin’s staff handed a note to one of Kissinger’s staff warning that the Soviets would be taking “all appropriate steps” to protect their ships “wherever they would be.” An oral protest was made and then a similar note was delivered to the American Ambassador in Moscow. Diplomatically it was interesting—and important—that these protests were kept relatively low-keyed.
I issued orders that we hold absolutely firm in our position. Soviet weapons had made the North Vietnamese offensive possible, and I was not going to let them get off the defensive on this point.
Before Kissinger left for Moscow, he sent me a memorandum describing the strategy he intended to use at the meetings. As I read it I felt the memo did not adequately reflect my instructions about insisting upon a Vietnam settlement as a prerequisite for discussions on any other subject. In our last meeting I had even told Kissinger that if the Soviets proved recalcitrant on this point, he should just pack up and come home.
In their first meeting, Brezhnev protested that the Soviet government did not have as much influence in Hanoi as we seemed to think. He said that the Soviets had refused to answer any new requests for military equipment from the North Vietnamese. When he claimed that they had not supplied all that much equipment in the first place, Kissinger reminded him of the massive tonnage they had sent. In the end Brezhnev refused to promise to put any pressure on Hanoi to achieve either a de-escalation or a final settlement. The most he would agree to do was to forward our latest proposal to Hanoi even t
hough he expected it would receive a negative reaction there. This was a far cry from the Soviets’ earlier assurances that the April 24 meeting in Paris, now canceled, would probably see the fruition of the negotiations.
Having reached this impasse, Kissinger proceeded to move on to further discussions of summit agenda items. He was able to arrange the entire agenda except for the most sensitive elements of SALT, which would require direct negotiation between Brezhnev and me. But I was disappointed as I read his daily cable reports, because I felt that we might have missed the last opportunity to see how far the Soviets were willing to go to get the summit. I also feared that they would interpret Kissinger’s willingness to negotiate without first getting a firm Soviet commitment to restrain the North Vietnamese as a sign of weakness rather than a sign of pragmatism.
In the other areas of discussion, however, there was remarkable progress. Brezhnev produced a SALT proposal that was considerably more favorable than we had expected, and as Kissinger reported, “If the summit meeting takes place, you will be able to sign the most important arms control agreement ever concluded.”
Given Kissinger’s achievements on the summit issues, I felt that there was no point in gainsaying his performance after the fact. If he had followed my instructions and insisted on a Vietnam settlement as the first order of business, perhaps Brezhnev would have dug in, called his bluff, and told him to go home—and that might have meant the end of the summit, with everything that it could accomplish, while still producing no progress on Vietnam. That was a risk I had thought worth taking. In any event the summit was held, and undoubtedly it owed a large measure of its success to Kissinger’s negotiations during this secret visit to Moscow.
Two days after Kissinger’s return I decided to make a short televised speech announcing a troop withdrawal from Vietnam. I felt that a further reduction of our forces while the enemy’s invasion was under way would dramatize our desire for peace. Therefore I announced that an additional 20,000 troops would be withdrawn from Vietnam over the next two months, bringing our total force there on July 1, 1972, to only 49,000 men.
I described the military situation in Vietnam in the plainest possible words: “What we are witnessing here—what is being brutally inflicted upon the people of South Vietnam—is a clear case of naked and unprovoked aggression across an international border. There is only one word for it—invasion.” I said that the bombing of North Vietnam would continue until the military offensive had stopped. “I have flatly rejected the proposal that we stop the bombing of North Vietnam as a condition for returning to the negotiating table,” I said. “They sold that package to the United States once before, in 1968, and we are not going to buy it again in 1972.”
It was a tough speech, and afterward I wished that I had made it even tougher.
The North Vietnamese rescheduled the April 24 meeting for May 2. On April 30 Pat and I attended a barbecue party at John Connally’s ranch in Texas. I made a few remarks and then answered questions. One guest wanted to know whether I had thought about bombing the dikes in North Vietnam. I replied that naturally I had thought about it, but that it would involve an enormous number of civilian casualties. I continued, “We are prepared to use our military and naval strength against military targets throughout North Vietnam, and we believe that the North Vietnamese are taking a very great risk if they continue their offensive in the South. I will just leave it there, and they can make their own choice.”
I knew that the news of this reply would reach Hanoi before the May 2 meeting, and I thought that it might help to strengthen our hand.
That evening I dictated a memorandum for Kissinger outlining my instructions for dealing with the North Vietnamese:
What you must have in mind is that if they get a delay as a result of their talk with you, we shall lose the best chance we will ever have to give them a very damaging blow where it hurts, not just now, but particularly for the future.
Forget the domestic reaction. Now is the best time to hit them. Every day we delay reduces support for such strong action.
Our desire to have the Soviet Summit, of course, enters into this, but you have prepared the way very well on that score, and, in any event, we cannot let the Soviet Summit be the primary consideration in making this decision. As I told you on the phone this morning, I intend to cancel the Summit unless the situation militarily and diplomatically substantially improves by May 15 at the latest or unless we get a firm commitment from the Russians to announce a joint agreement at the summit to use our influence to end the war.
In effect we have crossed the Rubicon and now we must win—not just a temporary respite from this battle, but if possible, tip the balance in favor of the South Vietnamese for battles to come when we no longer will be able to help them with major air strikes.
We know from experience, based on their record in 1968, that they will break every understanding. We know from their twelve secret talks with you that they talk in order to gain time. Another factor is that as we get closer to the Democratic Convention, the Democratic candidates and the supporters of Hanoi in the Congress will increasingly give them an incentive to press on and not make a deal with us with the hope that they can make a deal with the Democrats after the election.
I will be talking with you about the statement you will make when you see them, but my present intuition is that you should be brutally frank from the beginning—particularly in tone. . . . In a nutshell you should tell them that they have violated all understandings, they stepped up the war, they have refused to negotiate seriously. As a result, the President has had enough and now you have only one message to give them—Settle or else!
MAY 1972
On May 1, the day Kissinger was to leave for Paris, I received a letter from Brezhnev that increased my fear that we had failed to impress upon the Soviet leadership my unshakable determination to stand up in Vietnam. Brezhnev bluntly asked me to refrain from further actions there because they hurt the chances of a successful summit.
Kissinger was completely absorbed in mapping out his strategy for his May 2 meeting with Le Duc Tho. I spent several hours trying to make sure that we agreed on the strategy he should follow at the meeting.
Late in the afternoon after an hour and a half session on SALT Kissinger came back into the Oval Office, where I was meeting with Haldeman. He had just received a message. “It’s from Abrams,” he said, “Quangtri has fallen to the Communists. The battle for Hué is beginning.”
We were silent for a moment while he looked over the document. “Abrams says that Quangtri isn’t that important except for the effect it will have on South Vietnamese morale, but the loss of Hué would be a very serious blow.”
“What else does he say?” I asked.
Kissinger cleared his throat uncomfortably, and said, “He feels that he has to report that it is quite possible that the South Vietnamese have lost their will to fight, or to hang together, and that the whole thing may well be lost.”
I could hardly believe what I heard. I took the cable and read it for myself.
“How can this have happened?” I asked.
“The South Vietnamese seem to go in cycles,” Kissinger suggested. “They’re very good for about a month and then they seem to fold up. This crisis has been building up for about a month, and now they’re caving in on schedule.”
“Whatever happens, this doesn’t change my thinking about the negotiations,” I said. “I don’t want you to give the North Vietnamese a thing. They’ll be riding high because of all this, so you’ll have to bring them down to the ground by your manner. No nonsense. No niceness. No accommodations. And we’ll just have to let our Soviet friends know that I’m willing to give up the summit if this is the price they have in mind to make us pay for it. Under no circumstances will I go to the summit if we’re still in trouble in Vietnam.”
And then I thought of the bleak possibility—it was conceivable that all South Vietnam would fall. We would be left with no alternative but to impose a
naval blockade and demand back our POWs.
“And then we’re defeated,” I told Haldeman and Kissinger.
“Then we will just have to tighten our belts,” Kissinger replied glumly.
Shortly after I arrived in the office on the morning of May 2, 1972, Bob Haldeman came in with the news that J. Edgar Hoover had died in his sleep during the night.
I was deeply saddened by the news. I was also taken by surprise. Even though he was seventy-seven years old, Hoover had a vigor and drive that made him seem much younger. He had become the Director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924. Over the next forty-eight years his strong patriotism and his political astuteness enabled him to be the loyal servant of seven Presidents. He had been a part of our national life for as long as I could remember; he was already a national hero when I first met him in 1947.
Information was one of the primary sources of Edgar Hoover’s power. He usually knew something about everything that was going on, and that knowledge made him as valuable to his friends as it made him dangerous to his enemies. He reached a pinnacle of power and prestige during the Eisenhower years. When Kennedy became President, Hoover was already sixty-six years old, and many of Kennedy’s advisers urged him to replace Hoover. Robert Kennedy found some of his activist plans as Attorney General hampered by Hoover’s influence in the Justice Department, and the result was a period of very strained relations.
I remember sitting with Hoover in his house during a visit to Washington in 1961, listening to him go on about “that sneaky little son of a bitch,” who happened to be the President’s brother and Hoover’s boss. Never in all the years I knew him, however, did I hear him speak disrespectfully of John Kennedy or any other President he had served.
It was under Lyndon Johnson that Hoover became a presidential confidant. Lyndon Johnson’s admiration for Hoover was almost unbounded. I remembered his telling me in 1968 that if it hadn’t been for Edgar Hoover, he could not have been President. Johnson’s fascination with information and gossip was as insatiable as Hoover’s own. In many ways the relationship was probably not a healthy one because, as subsequent Senate investigations have shown, it was under Johnson that Hoover allowed the FBI to reach its peak of political involvement.
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