Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam

by Robert K. Brigham

  Kissinger was eager to go to Paris in early 1970 because Hanoi had sent Le Duc Tho, a high-ranking member of the Politburo, to assist Xuan Thuy. Kissinger and his Vietnamese counterparts met three times between February 21 and April 4, 1970. Their first meeting took place at 11, rue Darthe, Choisy-le-Roi, a working-class suburb of Paris, at the residence of the DRV delegation, in what Kissinger later described in his memoirs as the “small living room” of a house “that might have belonged to a foreman in one of the factories in the district.”27 Here, Kissinger met Le Duc Tho for the first time. For the next three years, these two men would be the principal negotiators in Paris charged with finding a solution to the Vietnam War. For their efforts, Kissinger and Tho would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. After their initial meeting, Kissinger described Tho this way:

  Gray-haired, dignified, rather short, invariably wore a black or brown Mao suit. His large luminous eyes only rarely revealed the fanaticism that had induced him as a boy of sixteen to join the anti-French Communist guerrillas. He was always composed; his manners, except on one or two occasions, were impeccable. He knew what he was about and served his cause with dedication and skill. That cause was to break the will of the United States, to destroy the government in Saigon it was supporting, and to establish Hanoi’s rule over a country our predecessors had pledged to defend.28

  A Habit of Misrepresentation and Revisionism

  Kissinger often called his Vietnamese counterparts in the party “fanatics.” He usually attributed their dedication to the revolution to some childhood trauma spurred on by French imperial actions. This is an interesting construction given the lengths that Kissinger has gone to in his own life to discredit his horrific experiences in Nazi Germany with helping to formulate his worldview. He once told historian Jeremi Suri that his childhood in Furth, Germany, had very little to do with his subsequent political and emotional development. “The political persecutions of my childhood,” Kissinger assures us, “are not what control my life.”29

  But Kissinger clearly overstates the case. His views on power and democracy were certainly shaped by his European experiences as a young man. He favored the United States in the world system because American democracy also allowed for the use of its preponderant power in a realistic way. He believed that European democracies were weak—especially the Weimar Republic—and this had allowed Hitler to come power and expand his terror. The United States, in contrast, was not afraid to wield its power and take the lead in international affairs when its interests were threatened. Kissinger thought that Americans enjoyed and supported decisive leaders who understood that the world was a dangerous place. They were not all that concerned with democracy as long as fearless leaders handled real threats, as Franklin Roosevelt had done during the Second World War. Kissinger wanted to temper the progressive impulse in America that had led liberal Democrats to support nation building and anticommunism in South Vietnam, however. He was constantly reminding his critics that he had “inherited this mess” in Vietnam and that only a statesman of his caliber could extricate the United States from Southeast Asia and, at the same time, tame America’s ambitions.30 He once stated, “I am impatient with people who thought all they needed to do was make a profound proclamation that made them feel good.” “I mean,” he added, “I had seen evil in the world, and I knew it was there, and I knew there were some things you had to fight for, and that you cannot insist that everything be to some ideal construction that you have made.”31 This was Kissinger’s central belief and it came from his understanding of Europe in the 1930s. He wanted to apply this conviction to Vietnam, and Le Duc Tho would be his partner in this enterprise.

  The first meeting in Paris showed how far apart Kissinger and the Vietnamese really were on many substantive issues. But it also showed the lengths to which Kissinger was willing to go, including purposefully deceiving the president, to keep the contact alive. He constantly misrepresented the DRV’s position to Nixon and to America’s allies in Saigon, whom he never consulted on substantive issues. Kissinger actually conceded a number of key points during the 1970 secret talks. He covered up his deception by carefully controlling the flow of information to the president and by constantly revising the narrative of his time in office. Few public figures have gone to greater lengths to control the historical record of their time in office than Kissinger.

  Indeed, Kissinger has spent much of his time out of government revising his actions inside of government. In 1979, just four years after the end of the Vietnam War, he published the first of his massive, two-volume memoirs.32 Each volume contains over 1,500 pages of published writing and notes. In addition, Kissinger selected the passages relating most directly to the Vietnam War and published them separately in 2003, under the title Ending the Vietnam War.33 In each of these books, he presents himself as a clear-eyed realist who fixed the mess in Vietnam that he had inherited from liberals in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. He is a compelling writer, and the sheer weight of his work makes challenging him on details a daunting task. Still, fierce critics lined up when they saw that Kissinger was clearly trying to manipulate the public record. The two most interesting challenges came from two of Kissinger’s former Harvard colleagues, McGeorge Bundy and Stanley Hoffmann.

  Bundy, who had served as Kennedy and Johnson’s national security adviser, argued that Kissinger had often offered “doubtful interpretations” of the past. He was particularly concerned about the “gravity of distortions” in Kissinger’s memoir, White House Years.34 Specifically, Bundy criticized Kissinger for blaming Watergate, and not his own policies, for the Vietnam debacle. He thinks Kissinger purposefully garbles the public record about conversations the Nixon administration had with the Saigon government over the DRV’s violations of the 1973 peace agreement so as to mask the administration’s weak position. Kissinger claims that promises made to Nguyen Van Thieu that the United States would reenter the war if Hanoi violated the agreement were real. Shortly before the final peace agreement was signed in January 1973, Kissinger drafted a letter on Nixon’s behalf to President Thieu, stating, “We will respond with full force should the settlement be violated by North Vietnam.”35 After the Fall of Saigon, Kissinger claimed, “It never occurred to me that we could lose fifty thousand men and then not insist on enforcing what they had achieved.”36 But no one else inside the government knew of the promises Nixon made to Thieu. “Not even the Joint Chiefs of Staff were informed that written commitments were made to Thieu,” said Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, who was commander of US naval forces in Vietnam. Making Bundy’s point even more bluntly, Zumwalt said, “There are at least two words no one can use to characterize the outcome of this two-faced policy. One is ‘peace.’ The other is ‘honor.’”37 Bundy argues that Kissinger was playing fast and loose with the facts to hide his own role in the Vietnam fiasco. Kissinger knew that the United States would never be able to return to Vietnam after signing the 1973 peace agreement, and to say otherwise was to “seek ignoble self-protection by cursing the darkness of Watergate.”38

  Hoffmann believes that posterity was so much on Kissinger’s mind when he was writing his memoirs that we have to ask whether he was “entirely candid.”39 Hoffman is particularly critical of Kissinger’s handling of the war in Vietnam. He claims that Kissinger tended “to interpret America’s successive [peace] proposals in such a way as to put maximum emphasis on continuity, and to present the North Vietnamese as the ones who made the decisive concessions.”40 Hoffmann goes on to suggest that it was the United States that gave up on its demands that Hanoi withdraw its troops from South Vietnam before any agreement could be signed. Kissinger’s treatment of the mutual troop withdrawal is indeed problematic.41 He also steadfastly clings to his contention that Hanoi made concessions all along and especially after the 1972 Christmas bombings (which will be discussed in a later chapter). Finally, Hoffman concludes that the memoirs are tainted with Kissinger’s overall desire to be “right,” arguing that this need “merges with his other
unattractive bias, vindictiveness.”42 Nothing highlights Kissinger’s willingness to distort the record for his own ends, and his vindictiveness, more than the secret peace talks with Le Duc Tho and Xuan Thuy in 1970.

  The February Meeting

  Kissinger began the first secret meeting on February 21 on the offensive. He argued that the DRV wanted to place conditions on the negotiations that guaranteed “political predominance” for the Communists in South Vietnam and “then we [the US] will rely on your good faith and self-restraint for the future.”43 He suggested that Hanoi’s allies in Moscow were growing tired of these conditions and that Hanoi should be careful or it would find “that the international situation has complications which may mean that Vietnam will not enjoy the undivided support of countries which now support it.”44 He also suggested that “Hanoi’s position” in South Vietnam had not improved since their previous meeting in August 1969, and hinted that the trend would continue in this direction for the foreseeable future.45 The balance of forces in South Vietnam, Kissinger argued, did not warrant Hanoi’s insistence on political preconditions. He warned that President Nixon had used his Silent Majority speech to achieve public support for the war and that Vietnamization had actually made it possible for the United States to continue to support the South Vietnamese government indefinitely, something he told Le Duc Tho, even if he did not believe it himself.

  Tho and Thuy noticed a subtle, but important, shift in the American position when Kissinger began talking about the need for a mutual troop withdrawal from South Vietnam. Kissinger acknowledged that there needed to be a mutual troop withdrawal, but he also stated that the Nixon administration would not insist that North Vietnamese troops be put on the same legal standing as American forces in South Vietnam. He claimed that the United States sought “a practical, not a theoretical, end to the war.”46 In other words, he was conceding the point that North Vietnamese troops were not foreigners in South Vietnam. This was the first of many steps that Kissinger would take in regard to the North Vietnamese in South Vietnam. (The last would come in January 1973 with a peace agreement that allowed ten North Vietnamese main force infantry divisions to remain in South Vietnam after the signing of the agreement and the final US troop withdrawal.) He also insisted that Hanoi did not have to publicly announce the North Vietnamese troop withdrawal, “so long as it in fact took place.”47 Finally, he hinted that the United States would drop its insistence that North Vietnam’s withdrawal from South Vietnam had to happen before the United States completed its redeployment.

  To the Vietnamese, these concessions were signs that Washington had begun to see the presence of North Vietnamese troops in South Vietnam differently. Although he made no mention of it to Kissinger, Tho told his associates in Hanoi that he thought Washington would eventually be forced to concede on the mutual troop withdrawal to end the American war.48 North Vietnamese troops would be allowed to stay in South Vietnam, he predicted, as a result of an agreement with the United States on all other matters.49 Kissinger always couched these “concessions” with like sacrifices from North Vietnam when reporting to the president—he would explain to Nixon that the DRV was ready to discuss its own troop withdrawals from South Vietnam—as a way to gloss over the subtle changes in what he had already said to the Vietnamese negotiators.50 Hanoi viewed Kissinger’s remarks as a sign that America’s will was beginning to wane even if its commitment to punishing North Vietnam militarily was not.51

  Following the first secret meeting, Kissinger remarkably told Nixon, “This has been an important meeting, certainly the most important since the beginning of your administration and even since the beginning of the talks in 1968.”52 Kissinger insisted that Tho “gave the impression of being much more ready for business than before,”53 and that he was ready “to accept some rather significant changes in their position.” One indication of this change, according to Kissinger, was that the North Vietnamese negotiators “dropped their demand that the GVN [South Vietnam] be changed as a precondition to substantive talks, saying that this could be discussed later.”54 Another was that “they did not use the word ‘unconditional’ when speaking of US withdrawals, and they did not challenge me when I said we could discuss the withdrawal of all non-South Vietnamese forces.”55 Kissinger went on to claim that North Vietnamese negotiators “stated flatly that now is the time to negotiate” and that they appeared “worried about Vietnamization.”56 Unbelievably, he told Nixon that “there are faint suggestions that they may be ready to talk seriously about troop withdrawal on a reciprocal basis.”57

  It is really difficult to fathom Kissinger’s overly optimistic reporting to the president following the February 21 meeting. Although Rogers and Laird had no idea that Kissinger was meeting in secret with Hanoi’s representatives in Paris, Nixon was copied on the official summaries of the meetings and could clearly see that Kissinger was making false claims, plus a handful of Americans had been in the room with Kissinger.58 Curiously, the morning session only included a summary of the conversation, but the afternoon discussions were transcribed word for word. Taken together, these two documents, now available at the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California, show us that Kissinger was deliberately misleading the president on the substance of the secret talks.59 Neither Le Duc Tho nor Xuan Thuy had announced any changes in the DRV’s position. In fact, during the morning meeting, Thuy reiterated the terms he presented during the August 1969 secret talks, claiming that North Vietnam demanded a timetable for the complete withdrawal of all US troops from South Vietnam, without saying a word about redeploying Hanoi’s troops fighting in South Vietnam. Not a word.

  Furthermore, Tho insisted that the very first issue for the secret talks with Kissinger was the American troop withdrawals, stating, “We feel that you have not [sic] good will and are not prepared to settle the matter.” The North Vietnamese negotiators also demanded that political and military matters be taken together, something Kissinger had opposed from the start. In sharp contrast to Kissinger’s summary to Nixon, Thuy again insisted that “the Thieu-Ky-Khiem” regime in Saigon had to be dissolved prior to any agreement and that only a new government “without Thieu-Ky-Khiem” could bring peace to South Vietnam.60

  Contrary to Kissinger’s claims, Tho sharply criticized Vietnamization. Vietnamese sources make it clear that he saw Vietnamization as a thinly veiled device to hide a unilateral and inevitable US withdrawal. In other words, party leaders in Hanoi shared Kissinger’s view that Laird’s policy was undermining the US position in Vietnam. As Kissinger rightly feared, the withdrawal of US troops convinced Hanoi to endure the bombings long enough for the Nixon administration to completely withdraw from Vietnam. Tho taunted Kissinger, claiming that “we have many hardships to go through. But we have won the war. You have failed.”61 When Kissinger balked at this suggestion, Tho explained, “Before, there were over a million US and puppet troops, and you failed. How can you succeed when you let the puppet troops do the fighting? Now, with only US support, how can you win?”62 This was hardly the language of a man who was ready to concede on any major points, at least as Kissinger presented them. He must have understood this. Almost every one of his claims to Nixon about the progress in Paris proved false.

  To make matters worse, Kissinger had not consulted with South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu or any political leader from Saigon. The State Department confirmed in late 1970 that “there has been no real consultation with the GVN on settlement issues since 1968; the only subjects discussed during 1969 and 1970 have been POWs and (at present) a ceasefire.”63 Kissinger was content to speak for the US allies in Saigon because he held them in such utter contempt. Kissinger often called Thieu “an insane son of a bitch” and the rest of South Vietnam’s leaders “bastards.”64 All Vietnamese, above and below the seventeenth parallel, were just a “bunch of shits,” according to Kissinger.65

  It now seems incredible that Kissinger had asked so many ordinary Americans and Vietnamese to make huge sacri
fices for a government he held in such disdain. Furthermore, when the South Vietnamese government refused to follow his lead on the negotiations, he often threatened that he would seek a bilateral peace agreement with Hanoi that left Saigon out in the cold.66 It is curious that he would not budge on the removal of a government that he did not consult, did not respect, and was easily willing to abandon. Several other Saigon political scenarios surfaced before the 1971 South Vietnamese election, but Kissinger explored none of them, remaining content to defend Thieu in Paris while criticizing his capabilities in Washington.

  For his part, Thieu did not trust Kissinger or Vietnamization. He had not been consulted when Nixon adopted Laird’s policy, but he was later forced to accept it in public or risk losing US aid altogether. Had he known about Kissinger’s deception in Paris, Thieu would have been livid and probably would have gone public with his complaints. Thieu constantly questioned Kissinger’s loyalty and worried that the American might make a separate peace with Hanoi that left South Vietnam vulnerable.67 Even though Thieu gained some benefit from the air war over Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam, he detested Kissinger’s management of the war. There is some indication that Thieu tried to get word to Nixon that Kissinger was not to be trusted in Paris.68