Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam

by Robert K. Brigham

  At Harvard, McNaughton spoke about the military problems that the United States faced in Vietnam and was incredibly pessimistic about the Saigon government’s capabilities. He did not believe that the Johnson administration could defeat the Communists through air power alone, and he was not in favor of a major escalation in the number of American ground forces. McNaughton summed up his remarks by making six observations about why the United States should withdraw from Vietnam. To begin with, he did not believe that Vietnam was in America’s “sphere of influence.” He also felt that the Vietnamese revolutionaries had taken up arms because they had no other path to political power. He thought that the high morale of Communist forces presented the Saigon government with significant obstacles. He thought that the Saigon government was corrupt, elite, and “full of slobs.” He believed that the weak and poor in Vietnam should ultimately prevail over the social elite. And, finally, he believed in an all-Vietnamese solution for South Vietnam.37 McNaughton ended his remarks by asking, what would happen if South Vietnam collapsed? He believed that the United States could then walk away from Vietnam with its prestige intact.38

  McNaughton’s comments caught Kissinger by surprise. He stated publicly that he thought McNaughton’s pessimism was unwarranted and showed poor judgment. He said as much to his former Harvard colleague National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy in a letter dated March 30, 1965, assuring him that he believed Johnson’s “present actions in Vietnam are essentially right.” Kissinger concluded his letter by expressing his “respect for the courage with which the administration is acting.”39 Privately, however, he shared McNaughton’s skepticism about American prospects in Vietnam. Since the Kennedy administration, Kissinger had had grave doubts about Washington’s commitment to the war. “All history proves that there is no cheap and easy way to defeat guerilla movements,” he wrote in 1962. “South Vietnam has been plagued by Communist Viet Cong attacks ever since it became independent in 1954. Their defeat can only be accomplished by adequate military force.” Kissinger concluded, “I hope that we… have made the internal commitment to ourselves to see that a sufficient military effort is made to end the guerrilla attacks; we cannot be content with just maintaining an uneasy peace.”40 Of course, an uneasy peace is exactly what he agreed to in 1973. For Kissinger, the purpose of having power himself was to help develop policies that overcame what he perceived as the Kennedy administration’s tentative reaction to crises. If Kennedy had demanded reforms from the Saigon government and gotten them, he could have backed South Vietnam from a place of power.

  Kissinger sharpened his critique of America’s Vietnam policy during the last months of the 1964 presidential race. Lyndon Johnson was seeking election in his own right after Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963, and he was running against a host of Republicans who had sharp differences on foreign affairs. Kissinger believed that Nelson Rockefeller, whom he was advising on foreign policy, needed to distance himself from Johnson and from the rest of the Republican field, especially front-runner Barry Goldwater, a conservative senator from Arizona. Goldwater had a scorched-earth policy when it came to Vietnam. He wanted to carry the war to North Vietnam and advocated massive bombing raids against Communist troops and supply lines.41 He also lamented that the fact that the United States had not used nuclear weapons against North Vietnam. Johnson, in Kissinger’s mind, was simply carrying out Kennedy’s timid plans to support South Vietnam without the use of American troops. Kissinger believed that Rockefeller should make the presidential race a contest over Vietnam.

  Rockefeller never grasped the subtleties of Kissinger’s Vietnam policy papers, however. Kissinger suggested that Rockefeller force Johnson to admit that the war was going badly, that the NLF controlled much of the countryside, and that the war was now a region-wide conflict also involving Laos and Cambodia. The Soviets and the Chinese sponsored the insurgents fighting the South Vietnamese government, and Kissinger argued that Rockefeller should make sure that the American people understood that this all had begun on Kennedy and Johnson’s watch. Moreover, the Johnson administration’s “hesitancy to be firm and unwavering in the face of Communist advances in Laos and Vietnam,” Kissinger wrote in September 1964, “has increased the trend toward neutrality in our SEATO allies.” He urged Rockefeller to link American failures in Vietnam to larger foreign policy issues: “Isolated problems or states no longer exist. Single, simple remedies are no longer available. Every event has worldwide consequences.”42

  But Rockefeller could never find his footing on Vietnam. He often ignored Kissinger’s recommendations, instead staking out policy positions that were similar to Lyndon Johnson’s. Rockefeller and Kissinger also underestimated the amount of public support for Goldwater and his recklessly clear positions.

  At the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, where Goldwater easily won the Republican Party’s 1964 presidential nomination, Rockefeller saw his desires to moderate his party’s foreign policy positions evaporate. As he gave his convention speech, Rockefeller was booed so loudly he could barely be heard over the crowd. All of Kissinger’s work to create a nuanced Vietnam position was lost on an angry mob. For Kissinger, the experience was terrifying. According to his official biographer, Niall Ferguson, “Time and again Kissinger was reminded ominously of the politics of his German childhood.”43 In Goldwater and those who supported him, Kissinger saw a movement that was “similar to European fascism.”44

  When the Republican Party rejected Rockefeller’s ideas in San Francisco, Kissinger decided to vote for Lyndon Johnson and see whether he could influence the Democrats and maybe hit the reset button on his government experience. However, as historian Robert Dallek has noted, it was a Republican, not a Democrat, who secured Kissinger his first government job dealing directly with the Vietnam War.45

  In the spring of 1965, Kissinger rekindled his friendship with Harvard colleague George Lodge, the son of Republican presidential hopeful Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. Johnson had recently appointed the elder Lodge ambassador to South Vietnam, a position he had also held in the Kennedy administration. Kissinger had supported Lodge’s appointment enthusiastically, and their relationship led the ambassador to hire Kissinger to conduct a strategic assessment of the American position in Vietnam. Kissinger jumped at the chance to participate in policy making, even if he was only reporting to the ambassador.

  In preparation for his October 1965 visit to Vietnam, the first for Kissinger, he made a list of experts to consult and books to read. He wrote to several US military leaders who had spent time in Vietnam and found that most were optimistic about the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) but were less positive about the Saigon government. Most of Kissinger’s energies, however, were devoted to understanding the American position. He sent a letter to Colonel John “Mike” Dunn, Lodge’s former military attaché in Saigon, who had a rather bleak view of American personnel in South Vietnam. Dunn told Kissinger that the American military in Vietnam was “the most professional in their viewpoint” but the CIA was the best informed, though “not always objective.” The embassy people, Dunn warned, were “seldom either professional in their attitudes or particularly well informed.”46 This last statement stuck with Kissinger. He was, after all, making his report to the ambassador and the embassy staff.

  Kissinger also called on experts in Cambridge. On August 4, 1965, he joined fifteen others for an intense meeting at Harvard in Seminar Room 2 of the International Legal Studies Center. Kissinger chaired the session, asking a series of questions that would help inform him of the problems facing the United States in Vietnam. Although he had long advocated a more forceful American military response there, his questions, taken from the transcript of the meeting, focused almost entirely on negotiations to end the war. Kissinger asked:

  (a) Should negotiations await some change in the military situation?

  (b) Can military operations be geared to support the object of bringing about negotiations?

  (c) What non-military measur
es can we take during military operations to support the objective of negotiations? (What do we do if the Saigon regime collapses?)47

  After addressing several queries about process, Kissinger then asked his colleagues to address a number of pressing questions under the heading “The Substance and Purpose of Negotiations”:

  What are we trying to achieve? To show that wars of national liberation won’t work? To curb Chinese expansion? To exploit Sino-Soviet conflict? Johnson and Rusk say we are trying to preserve free choice for the people of Vietnam. Are we fighting against a certain method of change (wars of national liberation) or the fact of change?

  Can we give content to the phrase “a free and independent South Vietnam”? Would South Vietnam alone be the subject of negotiation or should other problem areas be included?

  What guarantees are needed? Who must participate in the guarantees?48

  In hindsight, the questions and the answers were rather naive. Lucian Pye, MIT’s leading China scholar, suggested that the first objective really was “to get North Vietnam to cease their aid of the insurgency.”49 He spoke as if this was something that the Johnson administration had inadvertently overlooked, and something that was easy to accomplish. Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, who would later play a pivotal role in Saigon, suggested that the Johnson administration should try to “separate the Viet Cong from Hanoi and negotiate with them on the creation of a government in Saigon with Communist participation but not domination.”50 But Hanoi had already made clear that the total reunification of Vietnam was its first priority. Some at the meeting supported creating protective enclaves, walling off South Vietnam with seven or eight US military divisions.51 This suggestion carried no weight in the Johnson administration, and the president had been clear that there would be no enclave strategy. The last speaker of the day was MIT political scientist Norman Padelford, who concluded that Vietnam was the “wrong war at the wrong time in the wrong place.”52

  It now seems clear, however, that one important lesson Kissinger took away from the Harvard seminar was that the “frame of reference of American discussion of Vietnam has been too narrow.”53 John King Fairbank, Harvard’s leading historian of China, offered this observation. After making several somewhat reductionist arguments about the place of China in Vietnamese history, Fairbank said that the United States needed to “enlarge our conception of what the US interest is.” He concluded, “The main thing is to try to get China into the act, to give her the idea that she has a responsible role in the world, to get her into the United Nations, and to establish contact with her at as many levels and in as many ways as possible.”54 Fairbank’s suggestion intrigued Kissinger. He would draw on this formulation when he joined the Nixon administration, linking China’s desires to improve relations with the United States with Nixon’s desire to end US involvement in Vietnam.

  Even though he was intrigued by Fairbank’s reframing the Vietnam problem to include China, Kissinger’s focus on this day was squarely on negotiations. He argued that the United States could not enter into negotiations “unless we know what our objectives are, at least within broad limits.” He concluded that the administration must know what is “desirable from our point of view” and “what is bearable.”55 Kissinger, it seems, was embracing some of what John McNaughton had said during their April seminar. The Johnson administration had no idea how this war was going to end, Kissinger feared, because it had no idea what it wanted. What could Johnson live with in regard to the future of South Vietnam? What would be the price of that future? No one in Cambridge was asking those questions, and Kissinger suspected that few in Washington were, either.

  Nonetheless, on the eve of his first trip to Vietnam in October 1965, he decided to arrange one last set of meetings with Washington officials. He met with William Bundy, Johnson’s assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, who warned that optimistic reports from the CIA masked the reality.56 He then visited CIA officials, including William Colby, who was the former Saigon station chief. Colby assured Kissinger that the South Vietnamese forces were more than capable of handling the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF), and that new recruits had allowed the government to expand its pacification programs aimed at destroying the NLF’s infrastructure in rural provinces.57 A later meeting with CIA director Admiral William Raborn, who was also rather optimistic about America’s chances in Vietnam, revealed that the top intelligence officer knew little about the particulars of the war and was often confused about Saigon officials. Kissinger concluded that Raborn, despite his optimism, “was amazingly badly informed” on Vietnam.58

  Walt Rostow, an economist now working at the State Department, also offered a positive picture. He believed that the Saigon government was faring well against the guerrillas and that the limited pacification program had shown some positive early results. Rostow told Kissinger that the war could be won if the “main forces of the Viet Cong” were “smashed” and if the United States could make the “North Vietnamese… cease their direction and supply” of the PLAF.59 A short visit with McNaughton exposed that Kissinger’s Harvard seminar guest had not softened his position on withdrawal in the last six months and that he lacked Rostow’s enthusiasm for the war. After showing Kissinger several internal Defense Department studies that indicated very little probability of success, McNaughton told him, “Let’s face it… At some point on this road we will have to cut the balls off the people we are now supporting in Vietnam.” He suggested that if Kissinger really wanted to help Lodge out with his study, he should “address [himself] to the question of how we can cut their balls off.”60

  Kissinger came away from these meetings more disillusioned about American tactics in Vietnam but not about its wartime aims. He still believed that the United States was fundamentally correct to challenge Communist expansion in South Vietnam, but he feared that the Johnson administration’s tactics were flawed—that the slow squeeze it had committed itself to in Vietnam was not going to push Communist forces into the sea. Without the complete commitment to a military victory, Kissinger believed, the administration was going to have to find a political settlement to the war. But how could it find a political settlement if Johnson had not defined what was acceptable? Kissinger thought that the problems in Vietnam were strategic, not necessarily tactical. The goal, therefore, was simply to develop an overall strategic outlook for the war that cemented the United States’ geopolitical objectives with its modes of operation.

  Kissinger outlined this problem in a preliminary report to Lodge submitted on the eve of his trip, where he challenged some fundamental American assumptions about the war. He argued that Johnson had been wrong in applying gradual military pressure against the Communists. He told Lodge he believed the president had erred when he announced on April 7, 1965, in a speech at Johns Hopkins University, that he was “prepared to enter into unconditional discussions” with Hanoi.61 Kissinger thought that using terms such as “unconditional negotiations,” “cease-fire,” and “tacit mutual concessions” was “demoralizing to our friends.”62 He also wondered where talk of negotiations with Hanoi would lead. “It is true that we cannot know all the elements of a negotiating position in advance,” he wrote Lodge. “But we do know that we will have to adopt an attitude towards the NLF: we must know whether we will strive for an all-Vietnamese or simply South Vietnamese solution; we must have ideas on how to police an agreement. We must be precise on these issues, there is grave danger that negotiations will primarily concern the extent of our concessions. Our Vietnamese allies may lose confidence. The Communists, in short, could repeat the pattern of previous successful civil wars.”63 Lodge called Kissinger’s report “a remarkable contribution from someone who has never been here.”64

  During his three-week trip to Vietnam in October 1965, Kissinger met with several senior US military leaders, including General William Westmoreland, commander of Military Assistance Command in Vietnam (MACV), who assured him that the war was going well. Westm
oreland informed him that it would take nineteen months to pacify about half of the country and another eighteen months after that to control nearly 80 percent of South Vietnam. Everyone on Westmoreland’s staff had the same rosy predictions. Kissinger told Lodge, “If I listened to everybody’s description of how we were succeeding, it is not easy for me to see how the Vietcong are still surviving.”65 Kissinger met other Americans who had similarly optimistic predictions. After one briefing at the Second Corps headquarters, Kissinger concluded that “the Army has degenerated. They have produced a group of experts at giving briefings whose major interest is to overpower you with floods of meaningless statistics and to either kid themselves or deliberately kid you.”66 He grew increasingly skeptical about US tactics in Vietnam during his visit, but still fundamentally believed in its war aim of challenging Communist expansion.

  Kissinger left Saigon in early November 1965, and hidden away in his diary entry of November 2 is the birth of the Nixon administration’s “peace with honor” formulation, based on his own analysis of the situation: “We have to come out honorably in Vietnam.”67 Later, as national security adviser and secretary of state, with the largest national security assessment capabilities in the world at his disposal, Kissinger still relied most heavily on his own calculations. He thought that his strategic compass pointed truer than most, so why not depend upon his own virtues? He also considered himself an action-intellectual. He was bored grading papers and giving lectures. Even before Harvard granted him tenure, Kissinger was a regular in Washington. One of his great frustrations was that Kennedy and Johnson had not relied more heavily upon his expertise.