by Oliver Stone
During the transition period, Kissinger commissioned the RAND corporation to come up with a set of policy options on Vietnam. RAND assigned Daniel Ellsberg, who had just completed work for Robert McNamara on a secret study of U.S. involvement in the war that would later gain fame as the Pentagon Papers. In drafting his options, Ellsberg refused to include a nuclear option, on principle, or a win option, because he thought victory impossible.
Ellsberg’s second report, NSSM 1, posed a series of questions. In response, the Joint Chiefs of Staff stated that the absolute best the United States could hope for was to control South Vietnam in eight to thirteen years, but at a tremendous cost in dollars and lives. Facing that prospect, Nixon decided to quickly end U.S. involvement, but he insisted on ending it on his terms—“with honor”—even if that meant laying waste to much of Southeast Asia in the process.20
Nixon gradually shifted the burden of fighting from U.S. troops, whose numbers had peaked at 543,000, to U.S.-trained and equipped Vietnamese, but he made it clear to Hanoi that this did not indicate a lessening of resolve. He first intensified the bombing in South Vietnam and Laos and then, in March 1969, began bombing North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia.
Nixon wanted to make it clear that he refused to be constrained by previous limits and might act irrationally if provoked. In explaining his “madman theory” to Bob Haldeman in 1968, he highlighted the value of nuclear threats.21
South Vietnamese soldiers undergo U.S. training in 1970. In April 1969, Nixon approved plans to withdraw U.S. forces and replace them with U.S.-trained and -equipped Vietnamese. If this approach didn’t work, Nixon felt he could always play his “madman” card: threaten North Vietnam with nuclear attack.
Nor was it always clear that he was just bluffing. After briefing then Vice President Nixon about nuclear weapons, J. Robert Oppenheimer told a friend that he had “just come from a meeting with the most dangerous man I have ever met.”22 Nixon had, in fact, supported using atomic bombs to bail out the French at Dien Bien Phu.
Fearing a massive public outcry over the bombing of Cambodia, the administration devised an elaborate system of dual target reporting to erase the evidence. Each afternoon, Major Hal Knight, who commanded the radar site at Bien Hoa Air Base, was given alternate targets to pass on to his pilots, who were sworn to secrecy. Neither the radio operator who called in the strike reports nor the intelligence officers who logged in the reports knew that the original targets in Vietnam had not been bombed. Knight, knowing that his actions were in violation of the Military Code of Justice, finally informed Congress in 1973.23
When the New York Times exposed the bombing of sanctuaries in Cambodia in April 1969, Kissinger called Laird a “son of a bitch” and accused him of leaking the story. Nixon, equally furious, ordered J. Edgar Hoover to wiretap three of Kissinger’s top aides, one defense official, and four journalists. Others would later be added to the list.24
In case Nixon’s bombing and threats failed to bring the National Liberation Front (NLF) and the North to heel, he and Kissinger prepared to deliver a crippling blow. Nixon had Admiral Thomas Moorer, the chief of naval operations, secretly draft the plan for Operation Duck Hook without Laird’s knowledge.25 Kissinger instructed the special NSC committee charged with evaluating the plan, “I refuse to believe that a little fourth-rate power like North Vietnam does not have a breaking point. . . . It shall be the assignment of this group to examine the option of a savage, decisive blow against North Vietnam. You start without any preconceptions at all.”26
Roger Morris, research coordinator for the planning group, saw plans targeting two sites in the North for nuclear airbursts. He noted, “Savage was a word that was used again and again . . . a savage unremitting blow on North Vietnam to bring them around.”27 Haldeman told Special Counsel to the President Charles Colson that “Kissinger had lobbied for nuclear options in the spring and fall of 1969.” Laird said the nuclear threat had been “always . . . an option” for Kissinger.28 Even without nuclear weapons, Duck Hook would be brutal beyond comparison. Options included invading North Vietnam, saturation bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong, mining Haiphong harbor, and bombing North Vietnam’s dikes to destroy its food supply. Kissinger met secretly with the Vietnamese in Paris in early August and conveyed the planned ultimatum: “If by November 1 no major progress has been made toward a solution, we will be compelled—with great reluctance—to take measures of the greatest consequences.”29 On October 2, Kissinger sent Nixon a top secret memo stating, “we must be prepared to play out whatever string necessary. . . . To achieve its full effect on Hanoi’s thinking, the action must be brutal.”30
Kissinger’s late-September meeting with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin was interrupted by a prearranged phone call from Nixon, after which Kissinger alerted Dobrynin, “It was a pity that all our efforts to negotiate had failed. The President had told me in his call that the train had just left the station and was now headed down the track.”31
Fortunately, the train pulled back into the station. For a number of reasons, including opposition by Laird and Rogers, concerns about effectiveness, growing antiwar sentiment, and major upcoming antiwar protests, Nixon called Duck Hook off. “The only chance for my ultimatum to succeed,” he reasoned, “was to convince the Communists that I could depend on solid support at home if they decided to call my bluff. However the chances I would actually have that support were becoming increasingly slim [given] signs of a new level of intensity in the antiwar movement.”32 He opted to convey his toughness another way.
On October 13, 1969, Nixon put the U.S. military on secret nuclear alert. Nuclear-armed SAC bombers were dispersed to military bases, awaiting the order to attack. Thirty-two B-58s, 144 B-52s, and 189 KC-135 refueling tankers were readied. Nixon was signaling the Soviets that they had better dramatically increase pressure on Hanoi to negotiate.33 Laird thought it a futile gesture vis-à-vis Vietnam and a potentially reckless one if the Soviets misread U.S. intentions. Undeterred, the United States escalated further on October 25, loading more aircraft with nuclear weapons and placing them on SAC runways. The following day, SAC began flying nuclear-armed B-52s over the polar icecap, taking them ominously close to the Soviet Union. Largely unknown to U.S. leaders, at the same moment the Soviet Union and China were on the verge of war over a border dispute. The Soviets had even sounded out the United States’ willingness to collaborate on a preemptive strike against Chinese nuclear facilities, much as Kennedy and Johnson had sounded out Soviet willingness a decade earlier. China had mobilized nearly a million soldiers and was prepared to respond with nuclear weapons to a Soviet attack. The Soviets might have interpreted Nixon’s provocation not as a signal regarding Vietnam but as a real attack in coordination with China.
A bomb explodes in O Dar, Cambodia, in November 1970. Nixon and Kissinger began secretly bombing Cambodia in March 1969. As Nixon put it, they would “bomb the bejesus out of Cambodia, send in ground troops, and keep the whole operation secret” from Congress and the “peaceniks.”
Morris later acknowledged that Duck Hook had been a harebrained scheme: “The Chiefs had been trotting this crap out for years. It was one more quick fix in a war which had no quick fixes. . . . It was a military and political fiasco which had taken on reality in . . . the Pentagon, where, to put it kindly, some not-very-gifted minds were applying military solutions to these problems.”34 Even hawkish Edward Teller found the nuclear option “irrational.” He later told an interviewer, “Only a few idiots—and they really were idiots—suggested the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam.”35
Nixon went out of his way to suppress attendance at the October and November antiwar marches. The White House spread rumors of Communist involvement. Prowar groups orchestrated by the White House suddenly popped up, condemning the planned rallies. Infiltration of antiwar groups intensified. Antiwar members of Congress were targeted. The beleaguered president even tried to placate the antiwar movement by announcing further troop withdrawals, temporarily
suspending draft calls, and firing Lewis Hershey, the despised head of the Selective Service Board, whose announcement that draft boards would review protesters’ records had made him a target of activists’ wrath.
Despite this unprecedented effort to suppress attendance, some 2 million protesters gathered in cities and towns across the nation on October 15. Nixon recalled, “Although publicly I continued to ignore the raging antiwar controversy, I had to face the fact that it had probably destroyed the credibility of my ultimatum to Hanoi.”36
American society became so polarized around the war and other issues that some people began speaking of a civil war. College campuses were the front lines in the battle. Demonstrations, rallies, and strikes erupted on hundreds of campuses. Government and industry spokespersons set foot on campuses at their own peril.
Activists condemned the unethical use of science to further the country’s military agenda. Scientists, having helped spark the antiwar movement, were often in the forefront of such protests. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the nation’s largest scientific body, with more than 100,000 members, was the first professional organization to pass an antiwar resolution in December 1965. The resolution stated:
Prolongation of the Vietnamese war, with its increasing danger of universal catastrophe, threatens not only the lives of millions, but the humanitarian values and goals which we are striving to maintain. . . . Beside this concern which we share with all citizens, we bear a special responsibility as scientists to point out the large costs of war for the continued vigor of scientific research. Like all scholarship, the sciences cannot fully flourish, and may be badly damaged, in a society which gives an increasing share of its resources to military purposes.37
Scientists’ opposition only intensified in subsequent years. In January 1966, twenty-nine scientists from Harvard, MIT, and other nearby institutions condemned the United States’ use of chemical agents to destroy crops. The statement, presented by Harvard biochemist John Edsall, decried the “barbarous” use of such an indiscriminate weapon. “The fact that we are now resorting to such methods,” the scientists charged, “shows a shocking deterioration of our moral standards. These attacks are also abhorrent to the general standards of civilized mankind, and their use will earn us hatred throughout Asia and elsewhere.”38 The AAAS urged McNamara to stop the spraying, and Johnson received a petition from some five thousand scientists, including many Nobel laureates, demanding that he do the same.
In April 1967, the AAAS magazine, Science, reported that Defense Department officials were having trouble recruiting scientists to perform military research. Former Stanford defense researcher Harold Adams explained, “There is a fundamental revulsion on Vietnam in the egghead community. Academics would rather support the forces of life than those of death.”39 Over the next few years, scientists would increasingly employ the metaphor of choosing “forces of life” over “forces of death” to explain their antipathy toward military research.
In April 1968, when Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection, scientists flocked to support antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy. In May, Scientists and Engineers for McCarthy was formed, with five thousand dues-paying members, including more than 115 members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences and 12 Nobel Prize winners. Frustrated Humphrey supporters confessed that they had abandoned attempts to organize a scientists’ support group. On the Republican side, neither Richard Nixon nor Nelson Rockefeller had even made the effort.
In January 1969, MIT graduate students and faculty members called for a national research stoppage on March 4 to alert the public to how the “misuse of scientific and technical knowledge presents a major threat to the existence of mankind.”40 Approximately thirty universities participated. The events at MIT proved to be the high point of the national effort. Speaker after speaker emphasized the need for scientists to assume responsibility for the social consequences of their work. In the most passionate address, which the Boston Globe called perhaps “the most important speech given in our time,” Harvard biologist George Wald asserted that the real purpose of government was to preserve life, but “our government has become preoccupied with death and the preparation for death.” He said, “We scientists, we opt for life.”41
Events that spring exacerbated the public’s mistrust of science; they were highlighted by a nine-day takeover of Stanford’s Applied Electronics Laboratory and the growing furor over the use of chemical and biological weapons, which forced the Nixon administration to announce a partial cessation of their use in Vietnam.
Meanwhile, Nixon’s threats continued. Neither Moscow nor Hanoi took them seriously. Nguyen Co Thach, North Vietnam’s foreign minister, said that he had read Kissinger’s books. “It is Kissinger’s idea that it is a good thing to make a false threat the enemy believes is a true threat. It is a bad thing if we are threatening an enemy with a true threat and the enemy believes it is a false threat. I told Kissinger that ‘False or true, we Vietnamese don’t mind. There must be a third category—for those who don’t care whether the threat is true or false.’ ” Thach even disputed Kissinger’s claim to having issued an ultimatum in August: “Never has Kissinger threatened us in the secret talks. Because if he threatens us, we would turn our backs. We would stop the talks. They could not threaten us for we knew that they could not stay in Vietnam forever, but Vietnam must stay in Vietnam forever.”42
Thach understood a basic truth that U.S. leaders never grasped: the Vietnam War was about time, not territory or body counts. The United States wreaked unconscionable destruction; it won every major battle. But it could not win the war. Time was on the side of the Vietnamese, who didn’t have to defeat the Americans but simply to outlast them. They would pay a terrible price for independence and freedom. But they would ultimately triumph. North Vietnamese military leader Vo Nguyen Giap explained, looking back:
We won the war because we would rather die than live in slavery. Our history proves this. Our deepest aspiration has always been self-determination. That spirit provided us with stamina, courage, and creativity in the face of a powerful enemy.
Militarily, the Americans were much more powerful than we were. But they made the same mistake as the French—they underestimated Vietnamese forces of resistance. When the Americans started their air raids, Uncle Ho said, “The Americans can send hundreds of thousands, even millions of soldiers; the war can last ten years, twenty years, maybe more, but our people will keep fighting until they win. Houses, villages, cities may be destroyed, but we won’t be intimidated. And after we’ve regained our independence, we will rebuild our country from the ground up even more beautifully.”43
Policy makers arrogantly assumed that the United States’ superior wealth, technology, and firepower would prevail by inflicting such suffering that the Vietnamese would rationally calculate that the price of victory exceeded the benefits. Nixon, in fact, bore some responsibility for Americans’ ignorance of Vietnamese history and culture. As a charter member of Washington’s China lobby—anti-Communist zealots in the Congress, military, media, and business who blamed the State Department for the “loss” of China in 1949—Nixon had hounded the most knowledgeable China and East Asia experts out of the State Department in the 1950s. In explaining the U.S. blunders in Vietnam, McNamara later admitted:
I had never visited Indochina, nor did I understand or appreciate its history, language, culture, or values. The same must be said, to varying degrees, about . . . Kennedy . . . Rusk, . . . Bundy, . . . Taylor, and many others. . . . When it came to Vietnam, we found ourselves setting policy for a region that was terra incognita.
Worse, our government lacked experts for us to consult to compensate for our ignorance. . . . The irony of this gap was that it existed largely because the top East Asia and China experts in the State Department—John Patton Davies, Jr., John Stewart Service, and John Carter Vincent—had been purged during the McCarthy hysteria of the 1950s . . . we—certainly I—badly misread C
hina’s objectives and mistook its bellicose rhetoric to imply a drive for regional hegemony. We also totally underestimated the nationalist aspect of Ho Chi Minh’s movement.44
Ignorance of the enemy filtered down through the ranks. The Vietnamese, on the other hand, strove mightily to understand the Americans. U.S. infantryman Larry Heinemann, who later won the National Book Award for his novel Paco’s Story, attended a literary conference in Hanoi in 1990, where he met Hanoi University Professor of American Literature Nguyen Lien. Heinemann recounted their conversation:
I asked him what he did during the war. . . . He said that his job was to go to Beijing and learn English and then go to Moscow University to read and study American literature. Then he went back to Hanoi and out to the Ho Chi Minh Trail and gave lectures on American literature to the troops traveling south . . . he talked to them about Whitman, Jack London, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald.
A lot of Vietnamese soldiers carried translations of American literature in their packs. Le Minh Khue—a young woman who worked on the Ho Chi Minh Trail disarming bombs—carried Ernest Hemingway. Professor Lien asked me this question, “Now what Vietnamese literature did the American military teach to you?” I laughed so hard I almost squirted beer up my nose.45
While U.S. leaders and the troops they deployed remained in the dark about the country they were invading, the American people were discovering the ugliness of the war their tax dollars were financing. As the November 15 mobilization neared, freelance journalist Seymour Hersh reported that U.S. forces had massacred up to five hundred civilians in the South Vietnamese village of My Lai, which the GIs had nicknamed “Pinkville” for its strong Viet Cong sympathies. Many of the women had been raped. The slaughter had gone on so long that the soldiers interrupted the killing and raping to take lunch and cigarette breaks. Not a single round had been fired at the U.S. infantrymen in return.