Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam

by Robert K. Brigham

  Despite the announced withdrawal of American troops from Cambodia, the Senate still voted to support the Cooper-Church Amendment on June 30 by a vote of 58–37. The House rejected the amendment, however, allowing the Nixon administration to continue air operations in Cambodia (Menu) and send money and supplies to Lon Nol. It was the first time Congress had come close to restricting the president’s hand during the war, but it would not be the last. Kissinger later defended the administration’s decision to invade Cambodia this way: “What we faced was a painful, practical decision: whether the use of American troops to neutralize the sanctuaries for a period of eight weeks was the best way to maintain the established pace and security of our exit from Vietnam and prevent Hanoi from overrunning Indochina. Reasonable men might differ; instead, rational discussion ended.”136 In the final analysis, he found the “merits of the case” to invade Cambodia “overwhelming” because he thought it strengthened his hand in Paris.137

  By the summer of 1970, it was clear that Kissinger’s hopes for a quick settlement to the war had vanished. He was now forced to develop a plan that could pressure Hanoi into restarting negotiations in Paris. Military attacks could condition the talks, Kissinger thought, but they could not deliver the knock-out blow. He would have to negotiate a settlement to the war while US troops were leaving Vietnam by the tens of thousands. Vietnamization had placed serious hardships in Kissinger’s path, and the Cambodian invasion had rekindled the antiwar movement and awakened the sleeping Congress. It would now be more difficult to negotiate an honorable peace with Hanoi than it was when Kissinger had first come to the White House. Still, the administration stuck to its clumsy formula about troop withdrawals, the Saigon government, and coercive threats.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE STANDSTILL CEASE-FIRE, 1970–1971

  “THE DECISION TO PROPOSE a standstill cease-fire in 1970,” Kissinger wrote in his postwar memoir, “thus implied the solution of 1972. That North Vietnamese forces would remain in the South was implicit in the standstill proposal; no negotiation would be able to remove them if we had not been able to expel them by force of arms.”1 A mutual troop withdrawal was one of the cornerstones of his war for peace, and he abandoned it rather casually in 1970 and without consulting Saigon. The end result was an unmitigated disaster for South Vietnam.

  The idea of a standstill cease-fire had circulated in Washington since the Nixon administration took power in January 1969. Previously, Nixon and the South Vietnamese government had rejected such proposals, Nixon agreeing with his South Vietnamese allies that a standstill cease-fire placed Saigon at a distinct disadvantage militarily because it was impossible to monitor the PLAF’s movements. Outside of South Vietnam, several high-ranking US military officials also doubted that the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) could hold its own against superior North Vietnamese troops. But American troop withdrawals were forcing the US hand and Kissinger worried that “a strategy of relying on Vietnamization” would “not be compatible indefinitely with a strategy of negotiations.”2 He feared that the United States would lose its bargaining chip of troop withdrawals long before the negotiations needed to ensure Saigon’s future would be complete. Time was always on his mind, and there simply was not enough of it.

  In late May 1970, Kissinger’s war research team, the Vietnam Special Studies Group (VSSG), produced a study exploring a variety of cease-fire options and the path of future negotiations in Paris. This study was kicked around the National Security Council for months until it was finally the subject of a meeting on July 21, 1970. Kissinger concluded from this meeting that the United States had three broad choices: “1) Concentrate on disengagement and leave the question of political settlement entirely to the North and South Vietnamese; 2) Make a major effort to seek a political settlement and hinge our withdrawals on this objective; and 3) Continue on a middle course, withdrawing while attempting to build South Vietnamese strength and meanwhile seeking a political resolution.”3 He told Nixon that a cease-fire was the “most important single proposal to move toward a settlement” and that it also had great “public relations effect here and throughout the world.”4 Yet, he ultimately recommended that Nixon “not make any decision on a cease-fire proposal” at this time.5 Kissinger wanted the president to wait until the new ambassador at large for negotiations, David Bruce, was well established in Paris. Hanoi had long insisted that the Nixon administration was not serious about ending the war because it had not replaced Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. as chief negotiator for the US at the avenue Kléber secret peace talks. Appointing Bruce was an important move in the eyes of the North Vietnamese leadership, Kissinger had concluded, and he thought that it might even condition the secret talks in Choisy-le-Roi.

  Bruce had had a distinguished career in the Foreign Service before Nixon named him to his new post. At the dawn of the Cold War, in 1948, President Harry S. Truman had sent Bruce to Paris as US ambassador. Truman’s secretary of state Dean Acheson claimed that “it is no exaggeration to say that not since Benjamin Franklin had anyone been closer to or more understanding of the French situation.”6 President Eisenhower named Bruce US ambassador to West Germany in 1957 during a crucial moment in the Cold War. Bruce was not as well liked in Germany—many feared he was too much a Francophile—but he was effective. Eisenhower praised Bruce for his calmness in one of the most severe stress points of the confrontation with the Soviet Union. Bruce returned from Bonn in time for the 1960 presidential election. An early supporter of John F. Kennedy, Bruce was severely criticized by some in Washington for his large campaign donations to the Democratic Party. After his election victory, Kennedy briefly considered Bruce for the position of secretary of state. Many of Kennedy’s closest advisers feared that Bruce, then aged sixty-three, was too old to keep up with the best and brightest Kennedy brought into the administration. Bruce instead was given the US ambassadorship to Great Britain in 1961, a position he held until Nixon’s inauguration in January 1969. Bruce assumed his long tenure with the State Department was over until he got the call from Nixon to go again to Paris in the summer of 1970.

  Bruce was an inspired choice to lead the negotiations at avenue Kléber. Kissinger was especially pleased by it. Bruce had written a book about the earliest US presidents, and Kissinger claimed that its author’s admirers found in Bruce “many of the same sturdy qualities.”7 Most telling, however, was his description of Bruce: “Handsome, wealthy, emotionally secure, he was free of that insistence on seeing their views prevail through which lesser men occasionally turn public service into ego trips.”8 In other words, Bruce was going to be the perfect complement to Kissinger’s secret negotiations, where the real work was done out of sight, in Choisy-le-Roi. Or at least that is what he believed at the time. Once established, Bruce reported that he supported Kissinger’s standstill cease-fire.

  September Meetings

  Kissinger put forward the formal cease-fire proposal in Paris on September 7, in a meeting with Xuan Thuy. Le Duc Tho was not present for the discussions, making Kissinger all the more skeptical of good results. Kissinger doubted that Hanoi would accept the cease-fire, but he told Nixon it would test North Vietnam’s willingness to “settle for anything less than total victory.”9 He told several journalists that Hanoi’s “demands were absurd,” but that the cease-fire proposal “might shut up some in this country.”10 After announcing his willingness to abide by a standstill cease-fire, Kissinger warned the North Vietnamese: “We are nearing the time when the chances for a negotiated settlement will pass. After a certain point you will have in effect committed yourself to a test of arms. I do not want to predict how this test against a strengthened South Vietnam, supported by us, will end nor how long it will last. But you must recognize that it will make any settlement with the United States increasingly difficult.”11 But Thuy countered with a telling statement of his own: “We are not afraid of threats. Prolongation of fighting doesn’t frighten us. Prolongation of negotiations doesn’t frighten us. We are afraid of nothing.�
��12

  Sensing that he was losing the moment, Kissinger then announced that the United States was ready to announce a twelve-month schedule of troop withdrawals and would make a promise to leave no residual American forces or bases in South Vietnam after the war. This was a major concession, according to Kissinger. “No other ally of the United States—not Europe, or Korea, or Japan—had been asked to defend themselves entirely by their own efforts,” he later said of the total US troop withdrawal. He also repeated the Nixon administration’s desire to create an international conference that would oversee all-South Vietnamese elections. The United States would not, however, “agree to change leaders of SVN [South Vietnam] beforehand.”13 Kissinger then conceded that the National Liberation Front (NLF) was a reality and that “we should agree to recognizing that all political forces existing in SVN [South Vietnam] were realities.”14 Elections in South Vietnam following an agreement “would offer opportunities for each side to achieve whatever popular support it could muster,” but there could be no political guarantees about the election outcome for any of the participants.15 But a political guarantee had been precisely what Nixon and Kissinger had promised the South Vietnamese government. A political guarantee and a mutual troop withdrawal were the most important elements of Kissinger’s war for peace, and now both were in jeopardy.

  Yet Hanoi flatly rejected the standstill cease-fire proposal of September 7. The North Vietnamese leadership argued that the proposal would restrict People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF) troops to areas they presently controlled without assuring them any role in a political settlement, no matter what Kissinger said about the postwar government in Saigon. Since South Vietnam had gained the military advantage in 1970, a temporary condition according to party leaders, there could be no deal. Thuy also dismissed the significance of Bruce’s appointment in Paris, stating that the new ambassador did not represent a significant policy change in Washington. He condemned the United States for using force in Cambodia to press Hanoi at the negotiating table. Finally, Thuy reiterated Hanoi’s long-standing position that before it would sign any agreement, Nguyen Van Thieu and the rest of the South Vietnamese political leadership had to be replaced.16 A frustrated Kissinger asked Thuy, “If Mr. Nixon asks me, and surely he will, what I have achieved coming here and whether the minister has said anything different from what was said at Kléber street, what answer should I give him?”17 Thuy told Kissinger that Nixon had nothing new to say, particularly in connection with political issues, and therefore “minister Xuan Thuy did not say anything new either.”18 Kissinger concluded that for Hanoi, even a unilateral US withdrawal was not enough. Party leaders demanded that the United States also engineer a “political turnover before we left.”19

  Hanoi’s hardline position during the September 7 meeting was no doubt designed to force more Kissinger concessions. If he was already waffling on a mutual troop withdrawal and he was willing to recognize the political legitimacy of the NLF/PRG (Provisional Revolutionary Government), perhaps the North Vietnamese could also get the United States to give up on the Saigon government altogether to achieve a timely end to the war. Hanoi’s leadership also wanted to press Kissinger on the neutrality of Cambodia and Laos and force the erasure of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) as an international border. All these goals could be accomplished, Hanoi concluded, if North Vietnam could simply outlast the US military assaults and allow domestic US political pressure to mount, forcing more compromises in Paris.

  Shortly after the September 7 meeting, Nguyen Thi Binh, the PRG’s foreign minister and delegate in Paris, announced a new, eight-point peace program designed to push Kissinger even further in this direction. Kissinger claims that Thuy had not mentioned the PRG’s peace proposal during their September 7 meeting, proving that Hanoi was “more interested in propaganda than in negotiations.”20 The record seems to support this claim, though Binh’s announcement had been planned for months and was part of a much larger diplomatic offensive. At the core of the PRG’s proposal was the promise that Communist forces would refrain from attacking departing US troops and that Hanoi would begin immediate negotiations on the release of American POWs in exchange for the withdrawal of all US troops and allied forces by June 30, 1971. Of all of Hanoi’s first principles in the negotiations, getting a fixed date on the final US withdrawal was the most important—naturally because an announced fixed date of withdrawal would have given Hanoi everything it needed to take Saigon by force. It would have been impossible for the Nixon administration to go back on a publicly announced withdrawal date, and so Kissinger purposefully never gave one. Still, this new timetable brought the PRG’s public demands for a complete withdrawal more in line with what Hanoi’s negotiators had been insisting upon in Paris for months.

  Most important to Kissinger, the PRG statement still demanded the ouster of Thieu, Ky, and Khiem, something that the US simply could not support. Binh’s announcement also reinforced several long-standing party principles, including “free” elections in South Vietnam supervised by an interim coalition government (the PRG, neutralists “standing for peace, independence, neutrality and democracy,” and members of the Saigon government other than almost anyone currently holding political power), and the gradual reunification of Vietnam through negotiations between the Vietnamese themselves without American interference. Binh’s Eight Points moved Hanoi’s hardline position on the composition of the coalition government just enough to tantalize Kissinger, but the party remained committed to its conviction that domestic pressures would eventually force an American withdrawal.

  Kissinger was apoplectic when he heard the new PRG proposal. On the surface, the nine-month timetable appeared to be a Hanoi concession, since Xuan Thuy and Le Duc Tho had previously demanded a six-month timetable, but the clock started immediately on the nine-month proposal and not when an agreement was signed. He was also leery of the PRG’s makeup of the coalition government. He bitterly complained that this coalition government would have been hand-picked by Hanoi and was to be provisional. Its final job was to negotiate a settlement with the PRG. “After we had overthrown our own allies,” Kissinger wrote in his memoirs, “a Communist-dominated government was to negotiate with the Communists to decide South Vietnam’s future.”21 He rejected Hanoi’s “version of a fair negotiated outcome,” hoping to place the blame for the lack of progress in the peace talks squarely on the Communists.22

  Following the September 7 meeting with Thuy, Kissinger remarkably reported to the president once again that he was optimistic about the progress of negotiations in Paris and that he saw signs of flexibility in the PRG’s new peace program. Again it appears that Kissinger put the best face on the substance of his secret negotiations so as to keep Nixon committed to the process. He worried that continued bad news and a lack of progress might convince the president to scrap the secret talks altogether. Therefore, in a private memorandum to Nixon dated September 17, Kissinger suggested that there were indeed “two new elements” in the PRG’s proposal that showed promise. The first was “the suggestion that they will talk to us about POWs”; and the second, the “lengthening of the schedule for our withdrawal to nine months.” Kissinger was not forthcoming about the start date of the timetable. He concluded that the PRG’s proposal was probably “intended to generate maximum impact in the U.S.,” but that it should still be explored to “see how much flexibility is behind their schedule and the degree to which we can separate their hard demands for our unilateral withdrawal from our desire to pursue other subjects.”23 He followed this hopeful report with an even more positive analysis of the PRG proposal to Nixon on September 22, in which he claimed that the new PRG proposal was “less assertive” than earlier Communist proposals. Specifically, the PRG peace plan implied that the United States “can quickly and painlessly extricate ourselves from Vietnam if we will only… set a withdrawal date.” Kissinger also claimed that there was no “assertion that we must ‘renounce’ Thieu-Ky-Khiem, as the Communists had frequently demanded.”24 />
  Despite Kissinger’s enthusiasm, Nixon harbored grave doubts about the secret peace contacts. The president had always been pessimistic about Hanoi’s motivation for meeting Kissinger secretly. He also had deep reservations about the standstill cease-fire. He recognized its tremendous propaganda value, but was unsure whether Kissinger was the right messenger. To truly gain the public relations value of the cease-fire proposal, Nixon thought that he might have to use the bully pulpit of the presidency to publicly announce his new concession. Kissinger worried that Nixon might use the proposal as a measure to keep the antiwar movement and Congress off his back and nothing more. Following the Cambodian invasion, Nixon had retreated inside the White House, a move that worried Kissinger greatly. “Within the iron gates of the White House, quite unknowingly, a siege mentality was setting in,” Charles Colson, Nixon’s special counsel, later explained. “It was now ‘us’ against ‘them.’ Gradually, as we drew the circle closer around us, the ranks of ‘them’ began to swell.”25 Kissinger worked very hard to be in the “us” group, even though he often felt slighted by the president.

  Kissinger, of course, saw this development firsthand and was convinced once again that Nixon’s dark moods might threaten the peace talks. He knew that the president was prone to view life as a series of disappointments punctuated by minor successes—it was in his nature to “brood alone” and to believe that “every success brings a terrific letdown.”26 He captured Nixon in this period in his memoir, writing that “Nixon would be sitting solitary and withdrawn, deep in his brown stuffed chair with his legs on a hassock in front of him, a small reading light breaking the darkness, and a wood fire throwing shadows on the wall of the room. The loudspeakers would be playing romantic classical music, probably Tchaikovsky.”27 The loneliness and despair of Richard Nixon would play a role in the secret talks, and Kissinger believed that he needed to manage the president carefully.