Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam

by Robert K. Brigham

  That begs the question: Why would Kissinger construct such an elaborate fabrication to the president of the United States? Perhaps Kissinger wanted to ensure that the secret talks in Paris (which were actually secret talks inside the secret talks taking place at avenue Kléber in Paris) replaced Vietnamization in Nixon’s mind as the way the Vietnam War ended. But to cement this thinking in the president’s mind, Kissinger needed to show progress in Paris. This led him to make unsubstantiated claims about progress.

  The March Meeting

  On March 16, Kissinger again met with Xuan Thuy and Le Duc Tho at the DRV delegation’s house in Choisy-le-Roi. He began the meeting by summarizing Tho’s comments from the February 21 meeting as follows: “any effort by either side to bring military pressure in Vietnam or in one of the related countries would be inconsistent with our purpose here.”69 Tho immediately challenged this, claiming that “this is a misinterpretation of what I have said,” and clarified that he was only talking about “pressure in negotiations” and that military pressure would continue until an agreement was signed. Furthermore, Tho claimed that the United States was “the side which is constantly making military pressure.”70 Kissinger’s effort to get a nonescalation guarantee in Paris vanished quickly. In his memoirs he wrote that his proposal was “contemptuously rejected with a pedantic lecture that every war had its high points with which it was impossible to interfere.”71 This would not be his last frustration on that day.

  Kissinger also failed to extract concessions from Hanoi on the prisoner-of-war issue. In the avenue Kléber meetings, the diplomats often spoke of the mutual release of prisoners after an agreement was signed, but those talks were short on specifics. During the March 16 meeting, however, the issue formed the backdrop of Kissinger’s troop withdrawal strategy: he had come to view the prisoner-of-war issue as a clever negotiating tactic by which to bring up the issue of a mutual troop withdrawal from South Vietnam. If Hanoi acknowledged that it wanted to negotiate the release of North Vietnamese troops being held in South Vietnamese prisons, then by default it had to acknowledge that its troops were fighting in South Vietnam, something that it would not do in public. This approach, Kissinger suggested, “could give us a handle for pressing the point further, thereby helping to establish one of the basic points in the Administration’s policies on Vietnam.”72 According to historian Jeffrey Kimball, Kissinger hoped that he could convince Hanoi to withdraw its troops from South Vietnam and to release US prisoners of war without a political settlement, whereby the Nixon administration could declare victory: the president could boast to the American public that he had brought US troops home, secured the safety of the prisoners of war, and ended the war honorably.73 Postwar aid could keep the Saigon government in power indefinitely, Kissinger thought.

  North Vietnam was not at all interested in his complicated schemes. Le Duc Tho and Xuan Thuy rejected his proposals outright. No amount of dire military threats or shrewd negotiating tactics were going to stop Hanoi’s demands that the United States must unilaterally withdraw all of its troops from South Vietnam or that a political solution involving the southern Communists in the National Liberation Front (NLF) or Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) was a necessity. These points were precisely why Hanoi continued to prosecute the war.

  Nixon and Kissinger were deceiving themselves by engaging in such far-fetched schemes, further complicated by the fact that they made these strategic decisions in isolation. Neither consulted Congress, and Kissinger especially cut out State and Defense. Walter Isaacson, an early Kissinger biographer, believes that Nixon and Kissinger would have done themselves a favor by making their own negotiating terms and actions public: “It would have made it more difficult for critics of the war to allege that Washington was the only stubborn party.”74 But it would also have subjected them to greater public scrutiny, including their manipulation of the prisoner-of-war issue. They may also have been criticized for so narrowly defining what was acceptable in the negotiations, including their limited view of South Vietnam’s political future.

  Perhaps most alarming to Kissinger, however, was the realization that Saigon would have to be brought in from the cold on the secret negotiations taking place in Paris. From the moment he entered the Nixon White House, he feared that US interests in Vietnam would one day be at odds with Saigon’s needs and that this would expose serious tensions within the alliance. Kissinger warned Nixon of this reality in a private memo: “The lack of an agreed position with the Government of [South] Vietnam will require you to make decisions on our position which could, if later revealed, embroil us in difficulties with Saigon. This is risky, but I see no other way to proceed if we are to maintain momentum and secrecy.”75 In other words, Kissinger purposefully kept Saigon in the dark about the content of the secret meetings taking place with Thuy and Tho. Although he later claimed, “I cabled full reports of every session by back channel to Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker in Saigon to brief Thieu,”76 a close examination of the record reveals that these reports were often sanitized or incomplete, with Kissinger “often personally going over the memo and excising paragraphs.”77

  Nixon worried that a public fight with Saigon would cause the American public to question the US mission in Vietnam. Sooner or later, he surmised, many Americans would ask whether Thieu was worth the continued sacrifice when so many of his policies ran counter to democratic traditions. It is doubtful that Kissinger concerned himself with this issue. Keeping the negotiations secret and out of view of many in the administration and in Saigon meant that he did not have to answer such troubling questions. As long as the president was willing to allow him to meet secretly in Paris, Kissinger could continue to construct elaborate and dubious negotiating schemes. In fact, he admired Nixon for allowing him to do so. Haldeman noted that Kissinger “is fascinated by the complexity of P’s [the president’s] mind and approach. K [Kissinger] loves this kind of maneuver as does P, and K is amazed by P’s ability at it.”78

  Kissinger asked Nixon for approval of his spring 1970 negotiating posture in a series of memorandums he sent to the president just before the second meeting with Le Duc Tho in Paris. Kissinger explained that his negotiating strategy this way: There were two basic issues in Paris: (1) mutual withdrawal of non–South Vietnamese military forces, which the United States insisted upon; and (2) a political settlement in South Vietnam, which North Vietnam required. On the troop withdrawal, Kissinger wrote to Nixon stressing that “agreement… on a verifiable mutual withdrawal is in our and the GVN’s [South Vietnam’s] fundamental interests; even if there is no political settlement,” adding, “the North Vietnamese will almost certainly not wish to withdraw their forces until they have a good idea of the shape of the political settlement.” To get Hanoi to agree to the mutual withdrawal, Kissinger suggested that the United States “put forward a precise and fairly attractive proposal for a mutual withdrawal” requiring “absolute reciprocity.”79 The only issue that really mattered to the United States, he assured the president, “was reciprocity on troop withdrawals.”80 The attractive proposal was a mutual troop withdrawal from South Vietnam on separate but concurrent schedules. Kissinger then quickly informed Nixon of everything that would quickly follow in Paris once he got agreement on the mutual troop withdrawals.

  The problem for Kissinger in 1970 and throughout the negotiations was that he had nothing to deal with to get the reciprocity he so desired. The only bargaining chips he ever used were North Vietnam’s desire to speed up a unilateral US troop withdrawal and the coercive threat of increased military attacks against North Vietnam. Nixon approved his negotiating strategy, however, writing a handwritten note on one of the memos that reads: “We need a breakthrough on principle and substance. Tell them we want to go immediately to the core of the problem.”81

  But the core of the problem for the United States remained the North Vietnamese troops operating in South Vietnam. Hanoi never deviated—not once—from its insistence that North Vietnamese troops had a right t
o be in South Vietnam and that they would remain there following any agreement. Le Duc Tho made this perfectly clear to Kissinger in meeting after meeting, beginning with their discussions on March 16. After listening to Kissinger’s elaborate scheme about the concurrent withdrawal, he flatly rejected any proposal that required the North Vietnamese troops to leave South Vietnam. “But when speaking about a schedule,” he explained to Kissinger, “your program shows two concurrent programs for the withdrawal of yours and North Vietnamese troops, to be completed in the same period. Therefore your proposal amounts to a mutual withdrawal.” Not only did Tho insist that North Vietnamese troops would not leave South Vietnam, he complained that the US withdrawal was “withdrawal by driblets.”82

  Still, Kissinger plugged away, trying to convince Tho that he had a meaningful withdrawal schedule for the United States that the DRV could match. He even declared that the United States was now prepared to offer a specific timetable for the US troop withdrawal. “I am today prepared to present such a schedule to you,” Kissinger told his Vietnamese counterparts in Paris. All US and allied troops would be withdrawn from South Vietnam “over a sixteen month period from the date of an agreement.”83 He then gave the monthly withdrawal schedule based on the number of US troops in Vietnam as of April 15, 1970. That number was 422,000. Beginning with 5,000 troops withdrawn in the first month, the United States pledged to increase its monthly redeployments to 10,000, then 27,000, then 35,000, then 40,000, until all US troops were removed from Vietnam.84 But he was not establishing an exact timetable for the American withdrawal. What Kissinger really was doing was tying that withdrawal date to the signing of an agreement, linking Hanoi’s willingness to secure a deal with the ultimate US withdrawal. That process could be sped up if Hanoi cooperated—or it could be slowed down and supported by US air attacks against important North Vietnamese assets. As Kissinger was fond of telling Tho, it was Hanoi that controlled the pace of the US troop withdrawal. Tho and Thuy sat quietly, listening to this explanation of the US withdrawal.

  Then, Kissinger immediately dove into the need for North Vietnamese troops to be withdrawn from South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia as well. “We reach here the heart of the problem,” he told his fellow diplomats. “Both Minister Xuan Thuy and Mr. Le Duc Tho said at the last meeting that a settlement had to be on the basis of reality,” he stated. “I said at our last meeting that reality requires some reciprocity. It is for this that we are at these negotiations.”85 Kissinger’s insistence that the DRV withdraw its troops from South Vietnam as Vietnamization was in full swing speaks directly to the weakness of the US negotiating position: he and Nixon were convinced that Hanoi would one day agree to this condition to achieve an agreement. Part of their self-deception was to consider Hanoi’s refusal to agree to a mutual withdrawal a technical, rather than political, problem.

  Kissinger and Nixon concurred that North Vietnamese troop withdrawals presented Hanoi with several problems, but mistakenly believed these problems could be managed in negotiations. Kissinger suggested that the United States offer a specific timetable for its own withdrawal, but “without proposing a timetable for theirs.”86 He wanted to create “two concurrent schedules” for troop withdrawals and thought that this approach would help Hanoi if the major reason for rejecting such proposals in the past had been “merely one of image.”87 He and Nixon agreed that if Hanoi rejected this proposal, North Vietnam’s position “will be clear.”88 Since Hanoi had not once accepted in theory or practice that its troops in South Vietnam operated under the same moral and legal conditions as US troops, it should have come as no surprise to Kissinger that Le Duc Tho once again rejected any mention of North Vietnamese troop withdrawals during the March 16 meeting. In fact, Hanoi’s representatives in Paris made the most forceful statement against this idea to date, adding that “US troops should be withdrawn within six months” and that “military problems should be linked to political problems.”89 Furthermore, Tho refused to discuss any political solution that preserved any member of the South Vietnamese government. This was a position Hanoi would stick to until it forced concessions from the Nixon administration that guaranteed North Vietnam’s troops would stay in South Vietnam.

  The April Meeting

  The April 4 meeting did not go much better for Kissinger. Le Duc Tho insisted that the troop withdrawal deadline was “wrong” because it was longer than six months and depended on the settlement of other issues. Hanoi’s negotiators asserted, again, that a mutual withdrawal was unacceptable. In fact, the entire transcript of this meeting is filled with vehement resistance to any discussion of mutual troop withdrawals. Xuan Thuy spoke at length on this topic. He told Kissinger that “the US has brought US and other foreign troops allied to the US one-half the way around the world for aggression in Vietnam. Therefore, the US must completely withdraw all US and allied troops from Vietnam without imposing conditions on the Vietnamese people.”90 He emphatically declared that “as to the Vietnamese people who are fighting on their own soil, it is the legitimate self-defense right of any nation. Therefore, the question of mutual troop withdrawal does not arise.”91 Later in the meeting, Tho drove home the point that no settlement was possible without removing “Thieu-Ky-Khiem” and other leaders “opposed to peace, independence and neutrality.”92 He clearly stated that Hanoi simply could not “accept your military or political proposals.”93

  Remarkably, two days after the April 4 meeting in Paris, Kissinger again told Nixon that the negotiations had gone well. He claimed that Tho had “indicated a readiness to discuss the withdrawal of their forces linked to ours” and that North Vietnamese negotiators “went somewhat further than before in indicating their readiness to recognize the GVN [South Vietnam],” even if they still “asked for the removal of Thieu, Khiem, and Ky.”94 Kissinger called these “two significant concessions” and suggested that Hanoi was also willing to accept the US point “that a settlement had to express the balance of political forces.”95 He led Nixon to believe, falsely, that he had done as the president wished and demanded from Hanoi a time limit for reaching a comprehensive agreement. When Hanoi refused, Kissinger claims, he broke off the talks. The transcript of the April 4 meeting clearly reveals that Tho was willing to meet Kissinger again only if “you have new proposals.”96 The meeting ended with both sides agreeing to “stay in relations” but with no new negotiations scheduled.97

  Kissinger later confessed that he had fallen victim to Nixon’s skepticism. He wanted to keep the channel alive; he concluded therefore that truthful reporting of these meetings threatened that goal because the president was not fully committed to a negotiated settlement, even if he liked the secrecy and grand strategy behind it. “I fell into the trap of many negotiators of becoming an advocate of my own negotiation,” Kissinger later wrote.98 In retrospect, he also believed that the first round of secret negotiations with Le Duc Tho in 1970 collapsed because “diplomacy always reflects some balance of forces and Tho’s assessment was not wrong.”99 In other words, Kissinger fully understood that Hanoi was not going to concede any of its main points because it thought that the United States was in an untenable position. If Washington could not inflict its will on Hanoi with over 500,000 US troops in South Vietnam, how was it going to succeed when it was forced to withdraw those troops because the American public demanded it? How could Washington ask Saigon to do alone what they could not do together? Kissinger shared these fears, and occasionally he shared them with the president.

  After the collapse of the secret negotiations in early April 1970, then, Kissinger’s goal was to try to change the balance of forces in South Vietnam to the advantage of the Saigon government while recognizing that the US would continue to withdraw its troops. He explored no other options because he was still committed to using US hard power assets to end the war through negotiations. Thus, he helped Nixon develop a new, two-part strategy to accomplish this task. The first part was to publicly claim support for in an in-place cease-fire that supported the territorial
status quo. The second was to expand the war into Cambodia to cripple Hanoi’s ability to infiltrate troops and supplies into South Vietnam, hoping that this would force the DRV to bend the knee. For the remainder of 1970 and 1971, Kissinger embraced this new strategy.

  Target: Cambodia

  On April 20, 1970, during one of his many public speeches on Vietnam, President Nixon told the American people that “no progress has taken place on the negotiating front.”100 He explained that Hanoi still insisted that the United States “unilaterally and unconditionally withdraw all American forces” and that “we overthrow the elected Government of South Vietnam,” allowing the NLF to come to power in Saigon.101 He then described what his administration had been doing to end the war, claiming that it had left no stone unturned. The United States, he said, had “stopped the bombing of North Vietnam,” had withdrawn US forces from South Vietnam, had “dealt with the National Liberation Front as one of the parties to the negotiations,” and agreed in principle to “removal of all of our forces from Vietnam.”102 And still, Nixon complained, “there is no progress at the negotiating table.”103 To get things moving in Paris (he meant the secret meetings between Kissinger and Tho), Nixon announced for the first time that the only way forward in Vietnam was “a fair political solution” that should “reflect the existing relationship of political forces within South Vietnam.”104 He surprised many in Congress by supporting “shaping machinery that would fairly apportion political power in South Vietnam.”105