Kissinger raised the possibility of a bombing halt as a demonstration of good will on our part. I ordered another reduction of our daily attack sorties from 200 to 150, but there was no question that a total bombing halt would be a far more dramatic action. I told him, however, that I was absolutely opposed to one before the election. If everything worked out satisfactorily in Paris and Saigon and he was able to go on to Hanoi, then I would consider a bombing pause for the few days he was there. But there would be no bombing halt until the agreement was signed. I was not going to be taken in by the mere prospect of an agreement as Johnson had been in 1968. Just before Kissinger left for Paris, I gave him a letter I had written the night before. In it I told him to do what is right for an honorable peace, without regard to the election.
Kissinger’s meeting with Xuan Thuy on October 17 was tense and pressured. On the prisoner issue, Kissinger rejected as unacceptable the Communist position that we free all Vietcong civilians held by Saigon; some of these prisoners were terrorist murderers. Kissinger told Xuan Thuy that the South Vietnamese would never accept this and there was no point in his writing down something that could not be implemented. The Communists also opposed our strict interpretation of the provisions for the replacement of war matériel and failed to give us satisfactory language regarding American POWs being held in Laos and Cambodia. It was obvious that there would have to be some slippage in the schedule for completion. They pushed for Kissinger to settle the remaining issues in Hanoi. Knowing my adamant views on this point, Kissinger replied that he could not go to Hanoi until we had a completed agreement. Although some of the points were left unresolved, Kissinger departed for Saigon. He had already cautioned the Communists that Thieu had to be consulted before we would sign any agreement. Kissinger had only been able to schedule three days in Saigon to go over the agreement, even though he knew Thieu would be skeptical about its terms and unhappy that it had been suddenly and unexpectedly concluded without his participation. There was no question that the North Vietnamese were trying to use the pressure of the election deadline to strain our relations with Thieu and to create domestic political problems for him by making it appear that the agreement was being imposed on him from Washington without allowing him time to prepare his public opinion for some of its superficially less than advantageous terms. But Kissinger had gambled that Thieu would overlook such problems and seize the tremendous advantages the agreement would give him if he approached it positively and treated it like the victory it was.
The next day I sent a note to the North Vietnamese informing them that, in my opinion, another meeting would be needed before Kissinger could go to Hanoi and before we could stop the bombing. I reiterated that the questions relating to civilian prisoners and replacement of matériel still had to be settled, as well as understandings relating to the withdrawal of North Vietnamese forces from Laos and Cambodia. I offered a new schedule that would extend the original one for three or four days to allow another meeting between Kissinger and Le Duc Tho. I added that as a sign of good will we would maintain the current restrictions on bombing sorties and B-52 raids while the negotiations were in progress, and I reaffirmed my intention to complete the agreement within the proposed new schedule.
The North Vietnamese were now clearly determined to get a pre-election agreement. They sent a reply completely accepting our position on the questions of arms replacement and unconditional release of our POWs in North Vietnam. I sent a cable to Pham Van Dong saying that the agreement could now be considered complete. Only the matter of the unilateral declarations, which included the arrangements for a cease-fire and the return of American POWs in Laos and Cambodia, still had to be clarified, and I therefore suggested a further twenty-four-hour delay so that these questions could be considered and settled. I said that once these problems had been taken care of, we could be counted on to proceed with the schedule as amended, leading to the signing on October 31. On October 21 the North Vietnamese replied by accepting our position on the unilateral declarations.
When Kissinger arrived in Saigon on October 18, he carried with him a letter I had written to Thieu. In it I said, “I believe we have no reasonable alternative but to accept this agreement.” I assured Thieu that I would view any breach of faith by the Communists with the utmost gravity.
Kissinger found Thieu polite but noncommittal. During one tense and emotional session with the entire South Vietnamese National Security Council and the ambassadors to the Paris talks, he was bombarded with skeptical questions. Reporting afterward, Kissinger said that the South Vietnamese leaders had exhibited a surprising awe of Communist cunning and a disquieting lack of confidence in themselves. It was clear that they were having great psychological difficulty with the prospect of cutting the American umbilical cord. As Kissinger saw the situation, we were up against a paradoxical situation in which North Vietnam, which had in effect lost the war, was acting as if it had won; while South Vietnam, which had effectively won the war, was acting as if it had lost.
There were undoubtedly psychological reasons for this attitude, but there were also practical personal, political, diplomatic, and military factors behind Thieu’s conduct. Because of the way the U.S. media portrayed Thieu, many Americans thought of him as a petty tyrant who suppressed his political opponents. Political dissent was substantially curtailed in South Vietnam, but Thieu still had to deal with an elected National Assembly and face a formidable range of open domestic political opposition. It was by no means certain that he could survive in power unless he could convince his people that the peace agreement was one that would benefit South Vietnam. They had fought and sacrificed too much and they knew the enemy too well to be seduced by the Communists’ professed sincerity or willingness to abide by the terms of any agreement. They were the ones who would have to remain in their country after the last Americans had left, and they were naturally reluctant to accept any agreement that might put them at a disadvantage. Since the provisions of any agreement were bound to be controversial, Thieu would have to make it clear that he was neither surrendering any of South Vietnam’s vital interests nor accepting terms dictated to him by Washington. The problem was that this would take time, and time was the one thing we did not have if we were to keep to the agreed signing schedule.
Thieu would also be concerned about the military consequences of an immediate agreement. Many military analysts believed that the North Vietnamese were so insistent on keeping October 31 as the deadline for a cease-fire agreement because they had geared up to capture and control as much territory in South Vietnam as possible by that date. As early as the beginning of October a captured COSVN directive had revealed plans to draw South Vietnamese forces into the northern regions so that the provinces in the Mekong Delta and around Saigon would be vulnerable to a last-minute offensive; the document also set out plans for terrorist activities after the cease-fire. Haig was seriously concerned about this.
Diary
Haig believes the real problem is the fact that the North Vietnamese are moving very, very strongly around Saigon at this time to get as much territory as they can. Some of the intelligence indicates that they instructed their cadres the moment a cease-fire is announced to kill all of the opponents in the areas that they control.
This would be a murderous bloodbath, and it’s something that we have to consider as we press Thieu to accept what is without question a reasonable political settlement but which must also be justified on security grounds.
On October 20 we began Operation Enhance Plus, a massive airlift of military equipment and supplies to South Vietnam. If the agreement was signed on schedule on October 31, we would have to adhere immediately to its provisions for limited matériel replacement. Therefore it was important to complete as much of the envisaged Vietnamization as possible before the cutoff deadline.
I wanted to make sure once again that Kissinger understood my feelings about not rushing to reach a settlement before the election and about not forcing a break with Thieu by pushi
ng him too fast, so that night I sent him another cable:
As you continue discussions with Thieu, I wish to re-emphasize again that nothing that is done should be influenced by the U.S. election deadline. I have concluded that a settlement which takes place before the election which is, at best, a washout, has a high risk of severely damaging the U.S. domestic scene, if the settlement were to open us up to the charge that we made a poorer settlement now than what we might have achieved had we waited until after the election . . . .
As I outlined yesterday, we must have Thieu as a willing partner in making any agreement. It cannot be a shotgun marriage.
On October 21 Dobrynin delivered what he described as an urgent message from Brezhnev. The North Vietnamese had complained to him that we were reneging on our agreement and he wanted to let us know that the Soviet government expected us to adhere to the proposed schedule.
Also that day word reached Washington that Pham Van Dong had given an exclusive two-hour interview to Arnaud de Borchgrave of Newsweek. When asked whether Thieu could be part of a tripartite coalition government after the cease-fire, Dong had given the opposite impression of what the North Vietnamese had agreed to in Paris. He replied that the National Council of Reconciliation and Concord might actually be or become a coalition government. This was bound to infuriate Thieu and make it even more difficult for him to accept the agreement.
The North Vietnamese were pursuing a cleverly calculated strategy. By agreeing to every point we raised they were building a perfect record in the event they decided to publicize the story of the negotiations. By positioning the agreement as a Communist victory—as Dong had done with de Borchgrave—they were not only saving face domestically and internationally but initiating a psychological battle against Thieu. And by such heavy-handed ploys as deliberately changing words in their translation of the text of the agreement into Vietnamese, they were trying to create friction and suspicion between Saigon and Washington. Thus, even as they were reeling from the effects of our bombing and mining and were troubled by our relationship with their allies in Moscow and Peking, the North Vietnamese were trying to achieve the stunning irony of accomplishing from a position of weakness what they had not been able to attain from a position of strength. They were trying to drive a wedge between us and Thieu; if they succeeded, they might yet use our public opinion to force us to withdraw and give them the chance they wanted to destroy Thieu’s government and conquer South Vietnam. I was determined not to let them succeed.
I had Haig send Kissinger another cable on October 21, urging him to push Thieu as far as possible, short of actually making him break with us. I added that if there appeared to be no chance of obtaining Thieu’s agreement, Kissinger should inform him that we would have to consider making a separate agreement with the enemy. At this point this was not something I considered doing or that I thought would be necessary, but I wanted to impress Thieu with the seriousness of my determination to complete a settlement as soon as the terms were right.
In Kissinger’s judgment the problem was not so much that Thieu would reject the agreement outright and provoke us into breaking with him as that he would stall without giving any answer and thus force us past the signing deadline. He therefore proposed that, in the absence of any indication of Thieu’s reaction to the agreement, or even in the event that he refused to go along with it, he should go on to Hanoi as scheduled. With urgent eloquence he pointed out that cancellation of “the final leg,” as he called it, would cause many difficult problems, of which the most serious was his continuing conviction that once our election was over the Communists would feel far less pressure to settle and might decide to resume fighting:
In recent weeks we have played a tough, ruthless game of using our election deadline as blackmail against the other side. In this process we have obtained concessions that nobody thought were possible last month, or for that matter last week. . . .
Washington must understand that this is not a Sunday school picnic. We are dealing with fanatics who have been fighting for twenty-five years and have recently lost the cream of their manhood in the war. They have taken very painful decisions to make the major concessions they have. We cannot be sure how long they will be willing to settle on the terms that are now within our grasp. To wash out the final leg could cost us dearly.
I felt strongly, however, that the North Vietnamese would exploit Kissinger’s presence in Hanoi as a propaganda victory and use it to turn American public opinion against Thieu, and I refused to consider the final leg as an option unless and until the settlement had been agreed to by all parties.
On the morning of October 21 Kissinger met with a South Vietnamese working group headed by the Foreign Minister, who opened the session with a prayer and then presented twenty-three proposed changes in the draft agreement. Kissinger immediately accepted sixteen of them as minor and probably manageable. The remaining seven, however, raised impossible demands, including the specified withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnam and the virtual elimination of the National Council of Reconciliation and Concord. He explained that the Communist forces, already weakened by battle and deprived of reinforcements, would eventually wither away; he also pointed out that with the unanimity required for any vote, the Council would end up being a protection rather than a handicap for Saigon. The meeting was cordial, and Kissinger felt that he had been able to present his arguments persuasively. But there was still no word from Thieu, and time was passing. In his cable after the meeting with the South Vietnamese working group Kissinger said:
I have requested an appointment with Thieu this evening to determine his intentions. Clearly we cannot wait much longer to make our choice since we are rapidly becoming prisoner of events. In retrospect, it is now clear that I made a mistake in agreeing to a fixed date for the final leg. Doing so got us more concessions than any of us thought possible, but it is clearly making us pay at this end. That is water over the dam. I think when you read the records of our talks here you will find that we have been extremely patient with Thieu.
In the meantime the North Vietnamese accepted our formulation of the unilateral declarations regarding Laos and Cambodia. I immediately sent a letter to Kissinger for him to give to Thieu when they met. In it I said that I had now studied the entire agreement, including Hanoi’s recent concessions, with the utmost care, and I urged him to accept it for the most practical and compelling reasons:
Were you to find the agreement to be unacceptable at this point and the other side were to reveal the extraordinary limits to which it has gone in meeting demands put upon them, it is my judgment that your decision would have the most serious effects upon my ability to continue to provide support for you and for the government of South Vietnam.
As the presidential campaign moved through the summer and fall of 1972, the conventional political wisdom was that I might try to turn the war to my political advantage by producing a settlement right before the election. It was ironic that, primarily because of McGovern’s extremism, but also because of his inept campaign, the political pressure turned out to be exactly the opposite. The opinion polls confirmed my own intuition that, in terms of voter support, my handling of the war was generally viewed as a positive issue for me and a negative one for McGovern, who was perceived as weak and favoring surrender. Therefore any settlement that was hastily completed in time for the election would look cynical and suspicious. The hawks would charge, however unfairly, that I had given away too much in order to meet a self-serving deadline, and the doves would claim, however erroneously, that I could have obtained the same terms in 1969.
As Kissinger pointed out, the risk in waiting until after the election was that the Communists might decide to keep fighting. I was prepared to step up the bombing after the election, but there was no way of knowing whether that would make them adopt a more reasonable position before the American public’s patience ran out, before the bombing began to create serious problems with the Chinese and Soviets or before Con
gress just voted us out of the war.
Diary
The problem, of course, is that we just don’t know whether the enemy has a breaking point or, if it has, when it will come. We don’t know, too, whether that situation may become too difficult for us from a political standpoint in the United States after the election, despite the fact that we may win a very significant mandate.
I am inclined to think that the better bargaining time for us would be immediately after the election rather than before. Before the election the enemy can still figure there is an outside chance their man can win or at least that he could come closer and that we, therefore, would be under pressure to have a settlement.
Immediately after the election we will have an enormous mandate, we hope, for bringing the war to a successful conclusion, and the enemy then either has to settle or face the consequences of what we could do to them.
My advisers differed about whether it would be easier to get a peace settlement before the election or after it. Kissinger felt strongly that the North Vietnamese would be under much more pressure to negotiate before the election because they would expect to get better terms from me while the war was still an issue in the campaign. He was concerned that once the election had passed, they might revert to their earlier intransigence and let the war drag on at a reduced level in the hope that American public opinion would eventually force us to withdraw.
Others, Haig among them, felt that the North Vietnamese would be more likely to make concessions after the election when I would be armed with a landslide mandate and when I would at any rate be less constrained than I had been during my first term. Personally, I leaned toward this opinion, but I was completely prepared to conclude an agreement before the election if the North Vietnamese would agree to the terms we required and if Thieu could be persuaded to come along. Thieu’s apparent determination to postpone an agreement as long as possible presented us with a difficult problem. The knowledge that the North Vietnamese were playing out a cleverly calculated strategy aimed at separating us from Thieu and getting us over a barrel in terms of public opinion did not make that problem any easier to handle.
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