Vietnam, An Epic Tragedy

by Max Hastings

  Now, discussing the deal with Nixon, Kissinger called the reparations proposal ‘our best guarantee that they’ll observe the agreement’. The entire US foreign aid budget was less than $2 billion, but the president said indulgently: ‘Give ’em ten billion.’ At luncheon with Haldeman and Haig, Nixon ordered 1957 Château Lafite Rothschild to be served all round. Here was munificence: it was his usual practice to confine the White House’s finest vintages to his own glass, while subordinates were given Californian red. He took pains to put in writing to Kissinger an instruction that election timing should influence nothing thereafter said or done to either the North or South Vietnamese: this note might have looked good to historians, had it not been shown to be at variance with every waking thought within the White House.

  Back in Paris, on 17 October there was quibbling with the North Vietnamese about prisoners: beyond the exchange of military PoWs, Le Duc Tho sought the release of thirty thousand civilians held by Saigon on suspicion of being communist cadres. Kissinger warned that such a proposal would probably prove a deal-breaker for Thieu, whom it was now the national security adviser’s herculean task to persuade to endorse an agreement the Vietnamese had no part in making, but which would determine his beleaguered country’s fate. Nixon told Kissinger, ‘Basically, you’ve got to brutalize him.’ The presidential emissary landed in Saigon to a glacial reception: Thieu’s intelligence service had warned him about the looming Paris deal long before the Americans saw fit to say anything. Captain Phan Tan Nguu, a Special Branch officer, submitted a formal report, based on information from the authoritative communist double agent known as ‘the Tay Ninh source’, saying that cadres agreed that a settlement was imminent, and Thieu was in no doubt about its grim significance for his regime.

  Yet Kissinger assured the president that communist troops would progressively quit his country: ‘It is the judgement of our military people, that the present North Vietnamese forces without reinforcement will eventually have to be withdrawn.’ There was to be an avalanche of new American weapons, to bolster South Vietnam’s defences ahead of the treaty. For a year Kissinger had been assuring the communists that, granted a decent interval, the US would not again intervene in the South after an agreement was signed and residual American forces withdrew. Yet to secure Thieu’s endorsement he offered an absolutely contradictory promise, of immediate military action if Hanoi breached the terms: ‘It is inconceivable that President Nixon would stand by if North Vietnam attacked again.’

  Creighton Abrams, newly sworn in as army chief of staff, joined the national security adviser to persuade Thieu that Americans were men of their word. Kissinger told the Vietnamese: ‘You have to trust me,’ to which the president responded that he saw no reason to do any such thing. The visitor claimed mendaciously that no Vietnamese version of the draft agreement was available. But Thieu had already read a summary circulated down to communist district level, and supplied by ‘the Tay Ninh source’.

  At a meeting on 21 October, Thieu’s foreign minister presented a list of twenty-three demands for changes to the draft Paris agreement, foremost among which was the withdrawal of all Northern troops from the South. Kissinger said: ‘I believe there is no possibility whatever of getting them to agree to this.’ Nixon cabled, directing Kissinger to push Thieu to the limit, but to avoid ‘forcing him to break publicly with us before November 7’. Next morning, the 22nd, Kissinger deployed threats and blandishments, before making the short flight to Phnom Penh to brief Cambodia’s President Lon Nol.

  On the American emissary’s return to Saigon late that afternoon, Thieu denounced the deal as a sham. The proposed election commission, he said, was merely a disguised coalition government: ‘The US has connived with the Soviets and China. Now that you recognize the presence of North Vietnamese here, the South Vietnamese will assume that we have been sold out by the US and that North Vietnam has won the war.’ Several times during their meeting, the president shed tears. Kissinger said: ‘I can only deeply resent your suggestion that we have connived with the Soviets and the Chinese.’ Prominent among Thieu’s objections were that, by conceding territory all over South Vietnam, the US acquiesced in the creation of a ‘leopard-spot’ polity which few people would suppose viable; moreover, communists and anti-communists were granted matching status on the planned election commission. Kissinger messaged the White House, warning that Thieu’s obduracy created a new crisis. He also cabled Hanoi to express anger that premier Pham Van Dong had revealed most of the proposed terms to a Newsweek interviewer, worsening the febrile mood in Saigon.

  On returning to Washington, Kissinger embarked on more hasty ‘conniving’: his first act was to call Soviet ambassador Dobrynin, urging the Russians to explain to Hanoi that two weeks before US election day, the administration must act and speak publicly in such a way as to avoid an open breach with Saigon. He also pleaded for a symbolic North Vietnamese troop withdrawal from the South, and told the ambassador: ‘[Hanoi] may think we are deliberately delaying [a deal] beyond November 7th so we can bomb them or something. I give you the solemn assurance of the president that is not the case.’ Even as Kissinger spoke, down the hall in the Oval Office Nixon was telling Alexander Haig: ‘After the election, we’ll bomb the bejeezus out of them. I’m not going to tell Henry that, but that’s how we’re going to do it.’

  The White House players worked hard to persuade each other that a betrayal of Saigon constituted no betrayal, because the Southern regime had never been much of a government in the first place. Haig said to Nixon: ‘If [Thieu] can’t cut it with a million men with all that equipment then goddamn it, he wasn’t worth saving.’ Kissinger told Nixon: I have come to the reluctant conclusion, Mr President, and it breaks my heart to say it, that the system in South Vietnam is geared to a war which we sustain and that these guys cannot imagine what peace would be like. And that they’re terrified not so much of the communists. They’re terrified of – of peace.’

  When Nixon and Kissinger discussed the danger that the Saigon regime might fall precipitately, the adviser said: ‘I think our honour is – is intact. They won’t collapse that fast.’ On 24 October he told the Chinese ambassador with characteristically witty self-deprecation: ‘I have achieved the unity of the Vietnamese – both of them dislike me.’ As Mao’s man waited for his car, he asked Kissinger’s aide if there was any hope of a deal being signed before election day. He was told that delay was to the communists’ advantage: if there was a bust-up with Saigon before 7 November, the president would be obliged to take its side against Hanoi; after the poll, the reverse would be true. The administration made plain to both Moscow and Beijing that it had no private expectation the North Vietnamese would honour the terms of the settlement: it merely sought their autograph on the paperwork.

  Many leaders of many nations have held conversations on matters of state such as those between Nixon and Kissinger, but never before had voice recordings been made, laying bare their cynicism. The only question that matters to posterity is whether they had real choices. The war was almost certainly beyond winning before Nixon entered the White House. President Thieu and his associates had done little to serve the interests of the society they governed, and only experience would show that the communists did less. Nixon’s crime, if there was a crime, in which Kissinger served as his instrument, was to sacrifice twenty-one thousand American lives and vastly more Vietnamese ones in the course of a series of military and diplomatic manoeuvres designed not to benefit the people of Indochina, Southerners or Northerners, but instead the president’s domestic political interests.

  In some degree, the American electorate may be held complicit: even in the last war years, many voters still craved an outcome that did not make explicit the frustration of national will. Nixon and Kissinger sought to assuage that sentiment not by substantive statesmanship, but instead by a feat of stage carpentry – the creation of a set just sufficiently convincing to get them through a limited season of performances preceding and following the 19
72 election. Their tactical skills in contriving such an outcome demand high respect, though it is hard to extend this to their morality. Kissinger showed that he had no master in the art of realpolitik, which he esteemed so highly. On 23 October he told Thieu face to face: ‘The US will never sacrifice a trusted friend.’ Back in Washington two days later, he told commerce secretary Pete Peterson: ‘I have only one desire – to turn the Vietnamese loose on each other in the hope the maximum will kill each other off.’

  On the 26th the North Vietnamese revealed to the world the terms of the proposed settlement, demanding that America sign by the 31st, as had previously been discussed between Le Duc Tho and Kissinger. Hanoi’s announcement created a sensation in the US, and persuaded Nixon to mandate Kissinger to make the first of countless appearances as a star of TV news shows – hitherto, he had scarcely spoken in public. His inexperience showed, but his authority, wit, apparent frankness and apolitical status carried all before him. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he told a packed White House press conference, ‘it is obvious that a war that has been raging for ten years is drawing to a conclusion.’

  Hanoi, he said, had abandoned its demand for a coalition government in the South; meanwhile, it was scarcely surprising that Saigon had raised issues. ABC TV headlined its report of his remarks ‘Peace is at hand’. Two weeks before election day, Kissinger delivered to Nixon the promise of a triumph. The president said to him on the phone that night: ‘They think you’ve got peace?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘That’s what they think, but that’s all right. Let them think it.’ Praise was heaped on the national security adviser from across the political spectrum. Senator James Buckley, brother of William F., rang to congratulate him, seeking only token reassurance: ‘May I assume that what has been done will not pull any rugs out from any regime?’ ‘Absolutely, totally, 100 per cent.’ ‘Great.’ James Reston of the New York Times said: ‘Your country owes you a great debt, Henry.’ Democratic candidate George McGovern made yet another of a long catalogue of campaign blunders, denouncing Nixon for refusing to abandon Thieu, oblivious of the fact that his opponent was at that very hour marinading the South Vietnamese leader to provide the principal dish at a communist barbecue.

  Saigon continued for a few more days to sidestep an outright breach with Washington: Thieu said delphically that the South would never accept a settlement that worked against its people’s interests, without adding that Kissinger’s deal represented such an outcome. Next day, he told the National Assembly that North Vietnamese troop withdrawal was his ‘minimum demand’, causing the New York Times to charge Thieu with obduracy. On 27 October the Los Angeles Times headlined ‘US Insists Hanoi Pull Back Troops: Requires Action on Withdrawal of 145,000 Men Before Signing’. This was quite untrue, but national reverberations of the story strengthened Kissinger’s reputation for toughness, and drowned out important developments in the growing Watergate scandal – reports of wrongdoing by senior members of the Nixon campaign team.

  Almost all US comment in those days reflected a pervasive, desperate desire to view Dr Henry Kissinger as the nation’s deliverer. The yearning of Americans of every political hue to escape from Vietnam, to believe that peace with some shreds of dignity was attainable, subsumed the concern of a minority about the fate of Thieu’s people. Many judged that any outcome without bombs, bullets and napalm would be better than more of the same. And who can dismiss such a view as ignoble?

  Kissinger had earlier opposed launching further air attacks on the North after the election. Now, however, infuriated by both the intransigence of Saigon and the contemptuous slights from Hanoi, he had come to favour this course. On 31 October he told Nixon: ‘I think we ought to start moving the B-52s further north.’ The president agreed: ‘Absolutely.’ Kissinger continued: ‘Because the only thing those sons-of-bitches [understand?] … If after a week they don’t answer, we ought to start bombing again.’ Next day, Thieu explicitly denounced the draft accords as ‘surrender to the communists’. George McGovern attacked both Nixon and the South Vietnamese for not signing the draft deal: he accused the president of planning four more years of war, to keep Thieu in power – a risible distortion of reality.

  Theodore White, serial chronicler of presidential elections, marvelled at a phenomenon: after decades in which the Republican candidate had been one of the least fondly-regarded politicians in America, in the last days of the 1972 campaign, crowds displayed love for Richard Nixon. One of the final GOP pre-poll broadcasts urged: ‘This time vote like your whole world depended on it.’ On 7 November, Nixon secured a historically overwhelming victory, with 60.7 per cent of the vote against 37.5 per cent for McGovern.

  The story of Vietnam diplomacy through the months that followed was dominated by the administration’s continuing efforts to shake the obduracy of Saigon, to persuade Thieu to accept the draft deal struck in Paris. Back at Gif-sur-Yvette on 20 November, Kissinger presented to Le Duc Tho a list of sixty-nine changes in the draft agreement proposed by the Thieu government, foremost among them the demand for a total withdrawal of Northern forces – which Hanoi did not admit were in the South at all. Most likely, the American negotiator sought thus to emphasise to the communists the obstacles he himself confronted in bringing the Southerners to heel. Next day Le Duc Tho said of the changes: ‘We shall never accept them.’ Hanoi was sincerely uncomprehending of the Americans’ inability to make their Saigon puppets dance to order. Tho renewed his own demand for the release of thirty thousand civilian prisoners. Kissinger then read out a note from his president, instructing him to break off the talks.

  The contradiction about what followed was that the Nixon administration focused its public wrath on Hanoi, while privately deploying a barrage of promises and threats in order to secure a change of heart in Saigon. When Nixon met a South Vietnamese emissary at the White House on 29 November, he was brutally direct, threatening to cut off all support: ‘Without aid, you can’t survive. Understand?’ Yet still Thieu refused to accept the Paris deal. Le Duc Tho withdrew the North’s demand for release of the thirty thousand civilian prisoners, but on 12 December said he must return to Hanoi for consultations.

  What followed was among the most grotesque twists of the war. President Nixon mandated an intensive new bombing campaign, supposedly in response to the communists’ obduracy, and explicitly for their failure to return American PoWs. Yet Le Duc Tho’s position in December was not significantly changed from that of October. All that was different was that South Vietnam had declined to endorse the proposed settlement. The most plausible explanation of what became known as Nixon’s Christmas bombing campaign, Operation Linebacker II, is that it was designed as a show of strength to convince Saigon and the American people of the might and resolve underpinning the US commitment to South Vietnam, and to punish the North for four years’ resistance to the will of Richard Nixon. The devastation changed nothing of diplomatic significance, but proved the last important military act of America’s intervention in Vietnam.

  2 ‘WE’LL BOMB THE BEJEEZUS OUT OF THEM’

  At 1100 on Monday, 18 December 1972, in the B-52s’ crew briefing room at Andersen airbase, Guam, Tennessean Col. James McCarthy pulled aside a curtain to reveal the route map and proclaimed theatrically, ‘Gentlemen, tonight your target is … Hanoi!’ Flier Vince Osborne said, ‘I’m sure cheering was expected … but the crews sat there with very serious looks on their faces and mentally screaming “Oh, shit!”’ Captain Ed Petersen was almost disbelieving on hearing that he and his fellow-fliers were headed ‘Downtown’: ‘I almost thought it was a joke at first.’ The airmen had kidded themselves that, for Americans, the war was all but over. Yet during the ensuing eleven days, 729 B-52 sorties dropped 15,237 tons of bombs on North Vietnam, while tactical aircraft delivered another five thousand. Linebacker II represented the most intensive B-52 commitment of the war, with 155 bombers crowding onto five miles of parking space, before taking off to consume two million gallons of jet fuel a day. Everybody hated Andersen, and some of its in
habitants called themselves ‘crewdogs’ or ‘POGs’ – ‘Prisoners On Guam’. Base vehicles featured bumper stickers cruelly mimicking those about the PoWs in the North: ‘FREE THE POGS’. Twelve thousand personnel were shoehorned into spaces with accommodation for a quarter that number; when a crew was shot down, comrades hastened to appropriate their furniture. Here was the climax of the vast air campaign waged with intermissions since 1965.

  Fliers in all wars inhabit a parallel universe to those doing the ground fighting. In place of hooches and hammocks beneath the jungle canopy, the B-52 men lived in air-conditioned quarters set on concrete deserts where not a shot nor explosion was heard. Most days, they showered and ate American breakfasts before taking off for enemy territory. Much later they landed back, taxied their whining-engined monsters to revetments or stands, then headed towards a cocktail in the officers’ club. This should not imply, however, that they waged a cushy war: the psychological strain was immense, of making repeated exchanges between the humdrum routines of Guam and the missile-trailed skies over North Vietnam.

  The world thinks of the bombing of Indochina principally in the context of its victims, which is just. But those who flew thought little about the people who lay invisible on the ground far below them; much, instead, about the hazards that they themselves faced. Some ‘fighter jocks’ enjoyed their role, as each successive generation of young pilots revels in the thrills of high-speed flight, combat and indeed destruction. But many nursed fear, and never more so than during the 1972 Christmas bombings. The navy’s Cmdr. John Nichols wrote: ‘Nobody wanted to be the last to die in a winless war.’ Many became unashamed of dodging danger. A man might wail in response to a threatened assignment, ‘Hey, wait a minute. I had a flak-suppressor yesterday. It’s not my turn.’ Some detected technical glitches to escape take-off or return early. There were ugly rumours that the communists felt they had enough prisoners, and were not taking more.