Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam

by Robert K. Brigham

  Months passed before Dobrynin eventually told Kissinger that Hanoi had not responded positively to Nixon’s proposal. At the time, Kissinger wondered whether Dobrynin had even sent the message to Hanoi, because no official reply “was ever received from Moscow.”27 It now seems clear that Soviet officials did pass the proposal along to DRV prime minister Pham Van Dong, who simply rejected it outright in early May 1969. Dong explained that there was nothing new in the American proposal, that it settled no political questions, and that it did not include the DRV’s demand for a unilateral US troop withdrawal on a fixed timetable.28 Anything that needed to be said, the prime minister concluded, could be said in Paris. He then pointed the Nixon administration to the NLF’s Ten-Point Overall Solution, announced on May 8, 1969. The plan called for (1) a unilateral US troop withdrawal from South Vietnam, (2) South Vietnamese elections that included NLF candidates on the ballot, and (3) the “reunification of Vietnam” through an agreement “between the two zones without foreign interference.”29 There was no mention of North Vietnamese troops at all. The statement concluded with the controversial declaration that the NLF was the only true representative of the people of South Vietnam, implying once again that the Saigon government had to be replaced before any agreement could be signed.30 The front had once promoted a coalition government, but now it insisted that it alone held political legitimacy. It appeared as if the NLF’s negotiating position was actually hardening at the exact same time that Kissinger and Nixon were trying to use Moscow to influence events in Vietnam.

  Partially in response to the NLF’s peace proposal, Nixon tried one more approach with Moscow, this time on his own, by publicly stating that he was serious about resuming the bombing of North Vietnam and widening and intensifying the war if there was not a settlement soon. “I must also make clear, in all candor,” the president warned in a May 14 televised speech, his first to the nation on the Vietnam War, “that if the needless suffering continues, this will affect other decisions.”31 He also added that he wanted “to end this war” and that the “time had come for some new initiatives.”32 Among those new initiatives was a proposal to withdraw all US forces from South Vietnam if the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) also withdrew from South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Both sides were to stick to a strict twelve-month timetable. Kissinger considered this a major improvement over Lyndon Johnson’s insistence that North Vietnamese troops retreat across the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) six months before the last residual American troops were withdrawn. Always focusing on domestic politics, Nixon thought that such a withdrawal plan would play well in the 1970 midterm elections. Again Hanoi rejected Nixon’s proposals outright, partially because they knew that US public opinion was forcing the president to make American troop withdrawals his top priority.33

  As Nixon was delivering his address, Kissinger was explaining to Dobrynin that if the Soviets did not “produce a settlement,” the United States would “escalate the war.”34 Kissinger always assumed that Moscow wanted to end the Vietnam War as much as the United States did, so as to move on to bigger and more important issues. This was partially true. But it is also true that the Soviet Union gained significant power and prestige inside the Communist camp from its close relationship with Hanoi. The outgoing US chief negotiator in Paris, Averell Harriman, tried to tell Kissinger as much. “They’re going to take Hanoi’s side in these negotiations,” Harriman warned. The Soviets might help smooth over some of the finer details of the peace talks, he suggested, but “they won’t take our side in supporting the Thieu government, for instance.”35 Tommy Thompson, former US ambassador to the Soviet Union, echoed Harriman’s caution. He claimed that the Soviet state-controlled media was “vocal and unequivocal” in its support for the DRV negotiating position and that it was “unlikely that the Soviets will go far in pressing Hanoi toward concessions unless the talks are near breakdown.”36

  There were multiple reasons that Moscow was a difficult partner for the United States in ending the Vietnam War. For one, the Soviets desperately needed to combat China’s claims, with an occasional echo from Hanoi, that the Soviet Union was a revisionist state. The rift between China and the Soviet Union had intensified shortly after the Soviets’ 20th Congress in 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, denounced Joseph Stalin’s abuses and excesses against the party. Khrushchev criticized Stalin for having failed to make adequate defensive preparations before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, for purging many high-ranking and experienced Red Army officers during the Second World War, and for his attacks against political rivals within the party. He then claimed that the transition from capitalism to socialism could be accomplished by parliamentary means and not just through a bloody revolution. All this criticism of Stalin and the suggestion that socialism could come about peacefully was interpreted by the Chinese as a gesture toward peaceful coexistence with the West, a fundamental challenge to China’s self-proclaimed role as the vanguard of continuous revolutions in the southern world.

  The rift grew when Beijing’s party-controlled press published essays criticizing the Soviets for their “Maoist pretentions to ideological and policy leadership of the Communist world.”37 Mao Zedong’s bold claims about surviving a nuclear war so enraged Moscow officials that Red Army contingency plans now included a clash with Communist China. Mao boasted, “If war breaks out, it is unavoidable that people will die. We have seen wars kill people. Many times in China’s past half the population has been wiped out.… We have at present no experience with atomic war. We do not know how many must die. It is better if one-half are left, the second best is one-third.… After several five-year plans [China] will then develop and rise up. In place of the totally destroyed capitalism we will obtain perpetual peace. This will not be a bad thing.”38 Writing in 1960, Deng Xiaoping, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, claimed, “The Soviet party is opportunist and revisionist; it lacks any deep knowledge of Marxism; its ideas about disarmament are absurd; peaceful coexistence could mean nothing, except as a tactical weapon to deceive the enemy; the Soviet idea of a division of labor among the countries of the socialist camp is wrong; and China must go her own way.”39 By the end of 1960, the Soviets had pulled all of their advisers out of China and Moscow was looking for ways to prove its credentials in the socialist camp by supporting what it called “wars of national liberation.” Following the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the war in Vietnam was at the top of Moscow’s list.

  The Soviet Union was in a difficult position, therefore, when Kissinger asked for Moscow’s help in ending the war. It had to choose between its leadership of the Communist world or improved relations with the United States and the benefits that would surely follow. Of course, he underestimated how much the Soviet Union needed to be a champion of the southern world. Besides, the Soviet Union had already cashed in on its relationship with Hanoi. The DRV had backed Moscow after its 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia and had pledged neutrality in the Sino-Soviet dispute. Aid from the Soviet Union to the DRV had increased steadily since 1964, and in March 1966, at the Soviet Union’s 23rd Congress, Le Duan, the secretary-general of the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP), called the Soviet Union “a second motherland.”40 Perhaps no incident showed Hanoi’s move toward Moscow more vividly, however, than the damage to the Chinese cargo ship Hongqi (Red Flag) in Haiphong harbor. The Hongqi had a cargo of war materiel for delivery to the DRV but was asked to anchor outside of the port while priority was given to a Soviet ship that was arriving later in the day. During the delay, the Hongqi was damaged by an American air strike, causing considerable outrage in Beijing.41 All of this points to a complicated but complementary relationship between the DRV and Moscow, one that could not easily be put aside for larger foreign policy objectives. The Harvard professor who championed realism and linkage did not understand the basic political needs of his major adversary.

  Soviet prime minister Alexei Kosygin set the record straig
ht at the end of May 1969, rejecting Kissinger’s threats outright. On May 27, he sent Nixon a letter explaining that Moscow would only solve mutual problems with the United States on a case-by-case basis and that linkage was dead.42 Kissinger remained unconvinced. He asked to meet with Dobrynin on June 11 for one more round of discussions.

  During the meeting, Kissinger reiterated the US position on the war: both sides must agree to a mutual troop withdrawal and the South Vietnamese must settle the political questions themselves. Dobrynin asked about a coalition government in South Vietnam. Kissinger replied, “We are both realists.” To bring about a coalition government in South Vietnam, Kissinger continued, “we would have to smash the present structure of the Saigon Government while the NLF remained intact.” This, he concluded, “would guarantee an NLF victory sooner or later. We would never accept that.”43 Kissinger then turned the conversation to Moscow’s influence in Hanoi. “Hanoi was very difficult,” Dobrynin explained. The DRV leadership believed that they “knew their own requirements better than the Soviet Union.”44 A frustrated Kissinger reminded the Soviet ambassador that Moscow provided the DRV with 85 percent of its needed military equipment and therefore had built-in leverage in Hanoi. A subdued Dobrynin asked Kissinger about the state of US-Soviet relations. Kissinger then voiced the sentiment that the Soviets had been hoping not to hear again: “A really massive change [in the relationship] depended on the settlement of the Vietnam War.” Dobrynin ended the meeting complaining to Kissinger that Americans “always seem to link things.”45

  Just two days later, on June 13, Prime Minister Alexsei Kosygin announced the final Soviet response to Kissinger’s linkage ploy. In a statement of fraternal socialist solidarity, Kosygin pledged Moscow’s support for the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG), created by the NLF in 1969 as a government-in-waiting, and praised it as “the legal government and the true representative of the people of South Vietnam.”46 Moscow had been discussing the creation of such a front government with Hanoi for a number of months. As the Nixon administration announced that it would begin pulling American troops out of Vietnam, North Vietnamese leaders decided to follow that move with a small troop withdrawal of their own. The Soviet Union and the North Vietnamese then launched a joint diplomatic offensive, insisting that the creation of the PRG was the most encouraging prospect for peace in Vietnam in a number of years and rejecting US attempts to drive a wedge between Hanoi and Moscow.47 The same day that the Soviets officially recognized the PRG, Andrei Gromyko, Moscow’s minister of foreign affairs, cabled the PRG’s new foreign minister, Nguyen Thi Binh, pledging the Soviet Union’s full support and confirming that the peace talks in Paris were the only place that discussions on Vietnam should take place.48 The secret idea of using Moscow to force Hanoi into a quick negotiated settlement by the Nixon administration’s November 1 deadline was allowed to die of natural causes shortly after Kosygin’s announcement. Kissinger would have to try another path to end the war on honorable terms.

  Back Channels

  Frustrated by Moscow’s unwillingness to aid the US cause in Vietnam, in June 1969 Kissinger created a back channel directly to Hanoi outside of the Paris talks. This was entirely against protocol and was unknown to most in the Nixon administration. Kissinger opened the back channel through Raymond Aubrac, a French scientist who had played a key role in a secret contact, now known as PENNSYLVANIA, with Hanoi a year before Nixon came to power. Aubrac was an old friend of Ho Chi Minh, and in the summer of 1967 he’d promised to deliver a message to the aging DRV leader if the Johnson administration had anything new to say. Kissinger, who knew Aubrac from meetings in Europe of the Pugwash group, an organization of antinuclear scientists and policy officials, had referred the proposal to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, with a copy to Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara. PENNSYLVANIA went nowhere in late 1967, but Kissinger and Aubrac continued their conversations about Vietnam during the first year of the Nixon administration.

  In mid-1969, Kissinger urged the French scientist to reach out to his Vietnamese friends in Paris again with the news that Nixon was willing to negotiate with the DRV based on the realities in Vietnam. He thought that Hanoi would notice the subtle but important distinctions between the Nixon administration’s position on negotiations and the Johnson administration’s insistence that the DRV withdraw all of its troops from South Vietnam before the United States did the same. Aubrac reported Nixon’s willingness to negotiate to Mai Van Bo, the head of the DRV’s commercial legation in Paris. On June 14, shortly after the Moscow channel dried up, Aubrac cabled from Laos that he had just met with a high-ranking DRV official there and that Hanoi seemed to be responding positively to a message from Kissinger that read, “The president would like to explore channels outside the current framework of the negotiations.”49 The message proposed that “delegates from the United States and Vietnam could meet outside the Paris framework” to discuss “the general principles of a solution.” Once agreement on principles was achieved, Kissinger concluded, “then the final technical negotiations could shift back to Paris.”50 Of course, he thought that he should be the one to conduct the secret talks in Paris. This would place him at the center of the most important decisions being made about Vietnam and help him keep his spot next to the president. He understood, even at this early date, that eventually Vietnam would be a secondary concern for the United States and that the president would make history by moving toward rapprochement with China and the Soviet Union. Kissinger wanted to be along on that journey.

  To cement his role in the secret talks, Kissinger encouraged Nixon to follow up Aubrac’s contact with a letter to Ho Chi Minh. The letter became the topic of much conversation at the White House in mid-July. Kissinger arranged for the president to meet with Jean Sainteny, a former French military officer turned diplomat and businessman who had years of experience in Vietnam and who had built up trust in both Washington and Hanoi. In preparation for the meeting, Kissinger told Nixon that he should ask Sainteny to set up a meeting between the national security adviser and Le Duc Tho, the head of the North Vietnam’s negotiating team in Paris. But Kissinger did not like being cut out of the back channel by Nixon, so he requested that he, and not his old friend Sainteny, “deliver the letter to Ho Chi Minh through Le Duc Tho.”51 The president eventually balked at Kissinger’s suggestion and instead spent a considerable amount of time with Sainteny, going over the contents of the letter and the administration’s position on negotiations. The two concluded that Sainteny would deliver the letter and that he would stress the administration’s concern “that nothing can be gained by further delay in substantive negotiations.”52 Nixon was sticking to his November 1 deadline for substantive negotiations so as to influence the 1970 US midterm elections.

  In the final draft of the letter, Nixon pledged his support to “move forward at the conference table toward an early resolution to this tragic war.”53 He claimed that his speech of May 14 had “laid out a proposal which I believe is fair to all parties.” Still, he insisted, he was ready to discuss other programs, “specifically the 10-point program of the NLF.”54 He also asked Sainteny to tell Hanoi that if the present impasse in the negotiations continued beyond November 1, he would be forced to resort to military actions of “great consequence.”55

  Sainteny left for Florida the next day. Before he left, he sent the White House a letter outlining what he would say to the DRV delegates in Paris and his contacts in Hanoi. Nixon was certainly pleased by Sainteny’s willingness to act on behalf of his administration and was thrilled to read that Sainteny would tell his Vietnamese friends that “President Nixon sincerely wishes to put an end to this war and he is prepared to discuss it with good will with the highest responsible authorities of the government of Hanoi on condition that he would find on their part the same real desire to reach a resolution.” Sainteny concluded by telling Nixon that he would inform Hanoi that Kissinger would travel to Paris on August 4 and that Kissinger expected to learn “of Hanoi’s reacti
on to the message of the President” while in France.56 Sainteny delivered the letter to Xuan Thuy, North Vietnam’s second-in-command in Paris, three days later, on July 18.

  Nixon’s letter puzzled DRV leaders. First, they were confused that it was addressed to Ho Chi Minh, the aging leader of the Communist Party in Vietnam. Ho had not been involved in the day-to-day activities of the party for nearly two years, and everyone in Hanoi knew that the party’s secretary-general, Le Duan, had successfully isolated him from important decisions. In addition, Ho was very ill—in fact, he would die in his sleep only two months later. Second, the letter suggested that Nixon wanted to negotiate along the lines of the NLF’s ten-point plan. If this was true, why had the US bombed Cambodia and why was it sending increased aid to the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces (RVNAF) and the Saigon government? Third, Nixon’s warning that he would widen and intensify the war if Hanoi did not negotiate soon and in good faith, carried with it the thinly veiled threat that the United States would resume bombing the DRV. But party leaders wondered, was this even possible, given the hostile reaction in Congress to such threats and the pledge by some in Congress to place restrictions on US bombing missions? Fourth, Nixon officials were still insisting publicly on a mutual troop withdrawal, but by mid-July the US was already beginning a unilateral exit. Was the troop withdrawal merely a pretext to expand the air war over North Vietnam, or had public pressure forced the president’s hand? And, finally, shortly before receiving Nixon’s letter, Hanoi had learned that Nixon and South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu had met at Midway Island to discuss Laird’s Vietnamization program. Although Saigon had not been involved in the discussions at the Pentagon, Thieu accepted American withdrawals as a political necessity.57 Hanoi understood this to mean that the United States was propping up Saigon for an eventual American withdrawal. Indeed, the first US troop withdrawal, eight hundred members of the Ninth Infantry Division, had already taken place in July, and more would follow. Did this mean that the United States would no longer support an open-ended military commitment to South Vietnam? In the end, Hanoi could not help but conclude that Nixon’s letter did not seem to mesh with what was actually happening in Vietnam or in the United States.