Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam

by Robert K. Brigham

  A week later, Kissinger tried a different approach. He suggested that Hanoi had used its forces “the way a bullfighter uses his cape: to keep us lunging in strategically unproductive areas and to prevent us from grinding down the guerrilla forces.” The major problem now facing the United States if Nixon accepted Laird’s Vietnamization plan was that “de-escalation would amount to self-imposed defusing of our most important asset.… All this suggests that we should not agree to de-escalate now.” Kissinger begged the president to hold firm, to not give in to the political temptation of withdrawing forces. He doubted that troop withdrawals would have much political meaning if they were not accompanied by a major escalation in military strikes. The planning of the two had to be carefully coordinated, and Kissinger assured Nixon that he was very close to having “the overall game plan” in place.96 The president worried, however, that public opposition to the war was growing and that if he did not show progress in ending the war by the 1970 midterm political elections, protests would increase and Congress would cut funding for the war, exactly at the time when new resources were needed to support the Saigon government and its forces. “If we had no elections, it would be fine,” Nixon told Kissinger and the rest of the NSC.97 But time was now another enemy in the Vietnam War. Domestic politics mattered to Nixon. Elections mattered to Kissinger, too, far more than he has been willing to admit, but Nixon did not think he understood electoral pressures.

  Nixon announced his administration’s Vietnamization plan on April 1, 1969. Rather than implementing a unilateral withdrawal, he tied the redeployment of American forces to the other side’s actions. The plan called for the complete withdrawal of US troops six months after Hanoi completed its own withdrawal from South Vietnam. Nixon erroneously believed that he could simply outlast Hanoi if he piled on the military pressure. “The key point,” he claimed, was not “the timetable but rather getting Hanoi to comply with the conditions for withdrawal.”98 The following week, Nixon had Laird draw up the formal withdrawal plans (National Security Study Memorandum 36), complete with timetables for transferring the US combat role to South Vietnam. Ironically, NSSM 36 (and another report, NSSM 37) assumed that the war would drag on for years in South Vietnam, that Saigon would face increased military pressure from the Communists, and that there would be no mutual troop withdrawal. This report eventually proved reliable as the final peace agreement signed between North Vietnam and the United States allowed ten North Vietnamese infantry divisions to remain in South Vietnam following the complete US troop withdrawal.

  The mutual troop withdrawal would be the subject of many hours of negotiating in Paris. Kissinger would continue to press for a mutual withdrawal, but he did so as thousands of US troops were leaving Vietnam. Nixon would periodically reassert his steadfast determination to see a mutual withdrawal. Kissinger complained to anyone who would listen that Nixon and Laird had tied his hands in negotiations.

  During the battle over troop withdrawals, Kissinger turned his interest to military strikes. He believed that the United States had to increase its military pressure on Hanoi if it was unilaterally going to withdraw its own forces from South Vietnam. He envisioned a major escalation in the bombing and an expansion of the war’s parameters to send Hanoi the message that troop withdrawals did not mean that the United States was in full retreat. Attacks against North Vietnamese assets would also buy Saigon time, now that American troops were being withdrawn. Kissinger also wanted to ensure that Laird would never be able to outmaneuver him at another NSC meeting. Accordingly, he devised a questionnaire, now known as National Security Study Memorandum 1 (NSSM 1), on the war’s progress for all departments and agencies, which would keep them busy compiling massive studies while he tried to regain the president’s confidence. Kissinger recalled Ellsberg to the White House to collate the answers to the questions. The study took months and was totally inconclusive, just what Kissinger wanted. “I’m tying up the bureaucracy for a year,” he explained to an aide shortly after Nixon’s inauguration, “and buying the new president some time.”99

  Part of Kissinger’s strategy was to use that time to convince Nixon that Laird’s troop withdrawals were not going to help end the war on favorable terms. Kissinger appealed to Nixon’s interest in increased military strikes against the Communists when he asked Laird and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Earle Wheeler, what tactics could be used to signal to Hanoi that there was “a new firm hand at the helm.”100 The key issue for Kissinger was how to apply enough military pressure to coerce the Communists to make some concessions in Paris. Wheeler thought that carrying out air attacks against the DRV could signal that the Nixon administration was more formidable than its predecessor. Lyndon Johnson had refused to bomb near Hanoi, and he never launched offensive military operations against North Vietnamese sanctuaries inside Laos or Cambodia, operations that Kissinger would soon insist would be essential in the US effort to buy Saigon time to stand on its own feet militarily. He also thought military operations in Laos and Cambodia against Communist havens would send the right message to Saigon. Laird, however, warned Kissinger that new attacks against North Vietnam, or in Laos and Cambodia, would create political nightmares for the administration.101

  Laird’s warning was prophetic. He was always more conscious of the political repercussions of policy, but Kissinger pressed on, telling Laird and Wheeler that their suggestions were not bold enough. Kissinger wanted Wheeler to “find ways to ratchet up the military pressure that did not risk breaking the negotiations.”102 He disagreed with Laird when the defense secretary claimed that MACV was doing everything possible to keep the military pressure on Hanoi and the PLAF. Laird understood, however, that stepping up military operations went against public demands that the war be brought to a close. If Kissinger was going to force options on the rest of the administration that included military escalation, he was going to have to do so without Laird’s full support and out of the public view.

  This impasse led to one of the most fateful choices of the war, the decision to bomb Cambodia. The decision did not come lightly, but it was fully embraced by Kissinger. Years later, Kissinger claimed that the decision to attack North Vietnamese sanctuaries along Cambodia’s border with South Vietnam was in direct response to a Communist military offensive that began on February 22, 1969. He maintained that Hanoi had violated the 1968 bombing halt understanding by launching new attacks over the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Nixon called the attacks “small-scale but savage” and thought the offensive was a “deliberate test, clearly designed to take measure of me and my administration at the outset.”103 In typical Nixon fashion, the president said, “My immediate instinct was to retaliate.”104 Kissinger agreed: “If we let the Communists manipulate us at this early stage, we might never be able to negotiate with them from a position of equality, much less one of strength.”105

  But even before the Communist offensive, Nixon and Kissinger had been studying how to destroy North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia. During the 1968 presidential race, both had challenged Johnson’s decision not to strike Cambodia. In early January 1969, before his inauguration, Nixon asked for reports on North Vietnamese strength in Cambodia and on what Abrams was doing “to destroy the build up there.”106 The president concluded, “I think a very definite change of policy toward Cambodia probably should be one of the first orders of business when we get in.”107

  Years later, Kissinger claimed that he had asked Nixon to delay the bombing of the Cambodia base area because he wanted to “give negotiations a chance.”108 He also claimed that he had encouraged Nixon to normalize diplomatic relations with Cambodia prior to the air raids in the hopes that the Cambodian government could then pressure the PAVN to withdraw.109

  But Kissinger’s claims are disingenuous. In a phone conversation with Nixon on March 8, a week before the president approved the mission, Kissinger told him he had to act before private peace talks began in Paris or he would “be accused of insincerity.”110 Kissinger also made it c
lear to Nixon that he favored the bombings to influence the negotiations. “We have combined heavy military pressure with a deliberate pace in Paris,” Kissinger wrote to him in a memo. “We have specifically refrained from taking the initiative on opening private talks.”111 Feeling some time pressure, therefore, Nixon asked Kissinger to consult with Abrams on the bombing missions.

  The general had been studying this problem for months. He replied that enemy strength in Cambodia included “11 known base areas, 3 divisions, and perhaps 5 to 7 regiments” along the border with South Vietnam.112 Abrams insisted that he now had credible evidence of where these PAVN forces were and, more important to Nixon, where the secret Communist headquarters for the southern revolution (Central Office South Vietnam, or COSVN) was located. The intelligence on the targets “appeared to be very accurate and sound” and there “was every reason to believe there would be no Cambodians in the target area.”113

  The BREAKFAST Bombings

  On February 18, over breakfast in the secretary of defense’s conference room at the Pentagon, Kissinger, Wheeler, and Laird met with two of Abrams’s staff (no representative from the State Department was present), who briefed them on the Communist buildup in Base Area 353 inside Cambodia. One of the aides took notes, referring to the meeting as “the breakfast group.”114 From that moment on, the mission to attack PAVN sanctuaries in Cambodia was given the unfortunate code name BREAKFAST.

  Following the breakfast meeting, Kissinger ordered Colonel Ray Sitton, known in the Pentagon as “Mr. B-52,” to develop a list of bombing options that would form the backbone of the BREAKFAST attacks. As he was completing his assignment, Sitton got a call from another colonel, Alexander Haig, who told him that they had to fly to Brussels to brief Nixon on the Cambodian target list. Nixon was on his first trip abroad as president, shoring up the European alliance that had been badly shaken during the Johnson presidency. Before the briefing, Sitton asked Wheeler whether he was “selling something” or simply providing the president with information.115 Wheeler responded that he trusted Sitton to know what mood the president was in and to act accordingly. Kissinger suggested that the briefing take place on the short flight from Brussels to London, but Nixon was so busy practicing his remarks that he did not meet with Sitton. Instead, Kissinger took the briefing.

  Sitton assumed that he had traveled all that way in vain until he got a cable from Kissinger approving the target list. Kissinger demanded that Sitton keep the mission a secret, however, even from the pilots. With Kissinger’s help, Sitton devised a plan to use phony logbooks to cover up the illegal attacks. “There are valid targets right along the border [inside South Vietnam] adjacent to that,” Sitton explained. “We will merely show in the record that we flew a mission to this area.”116 The intrigue continued with each new set of targets. Sitton described going to the White House basement entrance, where Kissinger would meet him: “Dr. Kissinger would look at it [the sortie target], approve it or amend it, whatever he felt like doing.”117 Later it was revealed that the air force chief of staff knew nothing of the Cambodian bombing missions. It was Kissinger, and Kissinger alone, who accepted and approved the bombing targets. Even Sitton later questioned this practice: “I don’t know what he was using or his reason for varying them.” Wheeler told Sitton that the reason for selecting certain targets did not matter, “because it seemed to be working.”118

  On March 15, Nixon used the pretext of Communist rocket attacks against Hue and Saigon to order the immediate implementation of the BREAKFAST plan. Nixon told Kissinger that the order was “not appealable” and that he should keep Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., now head of the Paris delegation, and Ellsworth Bunker, ambassador to South Vietnam, in the dark about the attacks.119 No one in Saigon was to make any public statement about the Communists’ attacks until after the US planes hit their targets, and then only after Nixon himself gave approval. “I mean it,” the president declared, “not one thing is to be said to anyone publicly or privately, on or off the record, about this new attack on Saigon.”120 He also ordered that the State Department not be notified about the attacks inside Cambodia until “only after the point of no return.”121 Rogers was not to be trusted with information about the bombing, Kissinger told Laird in a phone call later that day, because some senior State Department officials had previously gone public in opposition to raids in neutral Cambodia.122

  After Nixon’s order, Kissinger forwarded an approved target list to Sitton, who sent the coordinates on to Saigon. From there a courier passed them along to the appropriate radar stations and control sites. After the normal mission briefing, pilots and crews received secret instructions from a ground radar station in South Vietnam just after takeoff. According to journalist Seymour Hersh, who gained access to Sitton’s secret target lists through the Freedom of Information Act in the 1980s, “The radar sites, using sophisticated computers, would in effect take over the flying of the B-52s for the final moments, guiding them to their real targets over Cambodia and computing the precise moment to drop the bombs.”123 When the mission was complete, the officer in charge burned all evidence of the real target. Then, he wrote up a fake report showing that the sortie scheduled to hit a target in South Vietnam was actually flown. He included a full accounting of everything used in the mission to complete the deception. This process was repeated with every new target list.

  The first BREAKFAST strike at two p.m. on March 17, 1969, Washington time, launched a secret fourteen-month nighttime bombing campaign, known as Operation Menu, which hit the same six PAVN base areas in Cambodia until the end of May 1970. During Menu, American B-52s dropped 108,823 tons of ordnance and flew 3,875 sorties. Laird later confirmed that between March 1969 and March 1970, the Menu bombing amounted to “nearly one-fifth the tonnage dropped by U.S. forces in the Pacific theater during all of World War II.”124

  Despite this destruction, by March 1970, the primary strategic objective had not been met. The bombing campaigns actually drove the North Vietnamese troops deeper into Cambodia, not into South Vietnam, as planned. Although thousands of North Vietnamese troops were killed during the entire Cambodian intervention, Hanoi replaced these troops without melting its strategic reserve. Nixon’s obsession with finding the secret Communist headquarters, reported to be just inside the Cambodian border, near what US officials called the parrot’s beak because of its geographical features, also ended in disappointment. The mobile offices for the southern revolution (COSVN) were not bound to architecture and highways as were governmental offices in the United States, so escape was relatively easy. Finally, some scholars have claimed that the US bombing raids drove rural Cambodians into the arms of the Khmer Rouge, whose genocidal program was not yet in view, destabilizing the Cambodian government, which had eventually allied itself with the United States.125

  It took five years for the American public to find out the true scale of the secret bombing of Cambodia. Recounting these events, historian Greg Grandin concludes, “That’s how an illegal, covert war came to be waged on a neutral country, a war run out of a basement by a presidential appointee who a few months earlier was a Harvard professor.”126

  But this does not explain fully why Kissinger pursued this illegal tactic so recklessly. For Kissinger, every action usually had a dual purpose. The secret bombing of Cambodia was no exception. Kissinger firmly believed that striking PAVN sanctuaries inside Cambodia would hurt Hanoi’s ability to wage war in South Vietnam and that this in turn would have an impact on negotiations in Paris. From a material perspective, there is no doubt that he was right. He has always linked Hanoi’s decision to escalate the conflict with his willingness to support the bombing campaign in Cambodia. In his justification for his wartime policies, Ending the Vietnam War, Kissinger claims that the decision to bomb Cambodia came only after the PAVN offensive in early 1969 that killed nearly two thousand Americans. Of the attacks, he writes that Hanoi understood that they had “humiliated the new President.”127

  But Kissinger also believed t
hat he could isolate Laird and Rogers by so resolutely supporting the secret bombing in Cambodia, because he knew the president supported it, too. Laird was not necessarily against bombing Cambodia, but he thought it should be made public. He later explained, “I told Nixon you couldn’t keep the bombing in Cambodia secret.… It was going to come out anyway and it would build distrust.… I was all for hitting those targets in Cambodia, but I wanted it public, because I could justify before Congress and the American people that these were occupied territories of the North Vietnamese, no longer Cambodian territory.”128 Rogers also warned against keeping the bombing secret, and both told the president that they disagreed with his political reasons for not going public. Kissinger knew better than to challenge the president. He supported the secret bombing of Cambodia because it served his purposes in Saigon, Paris, and in Washington, as well as his strategic imperatives.

  Three days after the bombing began, on March 20, 1969, Kissinger called Nixon with good news: “Hanoi has accepted bilateral private talks.” He concluded that “we now know how badly they need them.”129 The implication, of course, was that there was some correlation between the Cambodian bombing campaign and the DRV’s willingness to resume peace talks in Paris. Nixon and Kissinger thought that added military pressure on Hanoi could end the war on favorable terms within the year, and they were delighted to learn that Hanoi wanted to meet again. They were both eager to move on to what they considered more important foreign policy issues, such as thawing relations with the Soviet Union and “opening” China. Kissinger fed that part of Nixon that believed that “a little fourth-rate country” like Vietnam “had to have a breaking point.”130 He also encouraged the president to think that acts of toughness—such as bombing Cambodia—could substitute for tactical and strategic disadvantage in Vietnam.