Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam
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But Nixon did not always want to be managed. He sensed that Kissinger did not always see the big picture clearly. With the 1970 midterm elections approaching, the first referendum on the Nixon presidency, the message on Vietnam had to be clear and consistent. Nixon confided in his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, that he often caught Kissinger bluffing.28 Nixon was also worried that Kissinger’s rivalry with Rogers was having a negative impact on the administration, largely because Kissinger was so “jealous of any idea not his own.”29 Nixon wondered out loud whether Kissinger had “reached the end of his usefulness.”30 Haldeman responded that Kissinger was indeed “obsessed with these weird personal delusions” and that he did not think this was “curable.”31 Nixon suggested that Kissinger’s secret talks in Paris might have to come to an end because it was getting increasingly difficult to keep them from Rogers. Then again, Nixon could always replace Rogers as secretary of state, as he often threatened to do.
Kissinger hoped that a second meeting in Paris would brighten Nixon’s mood and restore the president’s faith in his national security adviser and the peace process. As Kissinger left for Paris for a September 27 meeting with Le Duc Tho and Xuan Thuy, he had no way of knowing that Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) premier Pham Van Dong had met secretly with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai. Dong told his benefactor that Hanoi held no illusions about the secret talks with Kissinger in Paris. He believed that the United States still held out hope for a military victory and was not yet ready to concede defeat. He believed that Nixon was using the peace talks at avenue Kléber and his public pronouncements on the diplomatic effort to end the war “to deceive the world.”32 Still, Dong reported, Hanoi saw “some advantages of the diplomatic struggle.”33 The goal was to win support among moderates in South Vietnam and influence “the anti-war public opinion in the US.”34 Zhou promised China’s continued support in Vietnam’s revolutionary war against the Americans.
Dong spent the week in Beijing, eventually meeting with Chairman Mao Zedong on September 23. Mao ridiculed the Nixon administration’s effort to negotiate a secret peace deal with Hanoi. He was especially critical of Kissinger, whom he called a “stinking scholar, a university professor who does not know anything about diplomacy.”35 Mao declared that troubles between China and the DRV in the past had been the fault of “mandarin ambassadors” representing China in Hanoi and that the future looked bright between these two fraternal allies.36 He was especially pleased to learn that Hanoi had not abandoned its commitment to “the unconditional withdrawal of American troops” from Vietnam and that it still insisted upon the removal of the Saigon government before it would sign any peace agreement. Mao, of course, saw both of these requirements as good for China and therefore good for Vietnam. At the end of his meeting with Pham Van Dong, Mao uttered the words Hanoi’s leaders had longed to hear: “I see that you can conduct diplomatic struggle and you do it well. Negotiations have been going on for two years. At first we were a little worried that you were trapped. We are no longer worried.”37
What the North Vietnamese leadership did not realize, however, was that Mao was also exploring the possibility of rapprochement with the United States. He had concluded that the United States might be a useful partner in containing the Soviet Union in Asia. Likewise, Nixon believed that China could help with its allies in Hanoi and be a crucial part of a new world order following the American withdrawal from Vietnam. Both superpowers wanted to use a new relationship to reorient their own power and international perceptions of that power. When a back channel through Pakistan confirmed Mao’s interest in meeting with Nixon, the president assured China’s leader that he was willing to consider a change in US policy toward Taiwan and all US military matters in East Asia. The US/ARVN invasion of Cambodia had made it impossible for Mao to capitalize on the secret contacts taking place in Poland between Chinese and US diplomats because it would have been seen as abandoning the revolutionary war in Cambodia, but by the end of September 1970, conditions were once again ripe to explore a new relationship. The president wasted no time letting Mao know that if invited to China, the president of the United States would surely make the trip.
At the same time, Kissinger reported to Nixon that no progress had been made in Paris. He complained that the meeting was “unproductive” and that no new talks were scheduled.38 Hanoi had categorically rejected the new timetable for the US troop withdrawal and had not even acknowledged the standstill cease-fire proposal. Kissinger later claimed that Hanoi missed a golden opportunity to embrace the cease-fire, because “so many in our government had invested so many hopes in it that the administration was governed by a rare unanimity as planning proceeded.”39
Nixon took Hanoi’s rejection as a signal that North Vietnam was using the negotiations with Kissinger as a diplomatic ploy and nothing else. With US midterm elections less than a month away, the president could not afford to have Vietnam cast a shadow over American politics. Nixon told his top national security advisers that he planned to put Hanoi on the defensive by going public with the latest US peace proposal. Kissinger understood that you did not disagree with the president when it came to elections, so he supported Nixon making a public speech outlining the standstill cease-fire sometime before the US election. He realized that Hanoi had already rejected this proposal, but he told the president a public offer might “give us some temporary relief from public pressures,” something Nixon had believed all along.40
An October Surprise
Nixon proposed the already rejected standstill cease-fire in a televised speech from the Oval Office at the White House on October 7, 1970. He told those watching that he was announcing a “major new initiative for peace.” The new proposal was made possible, he claimed, “because of the remarkable success of the Vietnamization program over the past 18 months.” He then outlined the cease-fire, claiming that the goal was to put an end to the killing. The cease-fire was to cover “a full range of actions,” including bombing and acts of terror. Cambodia and Laos would also commit to the cease-fire, he claimed, because conflict there was closely related to the ongoing war in Vietnam. Nixon then proposed an international conference, along the lines of the 1954 Geneva conference, to “deal with the conflicts in all three states of Indochina.” The president pledged that “we are ready now to negotiate an agreed timetable for complete withdrawals as part of an overall settlement.” It is unclear whether Nixon’s use of the plural “withdrawals” was meant to underscore the idea that he still expected a mutual troop withdrawal, but no one in the press highlighted this interesting word choice at the time. After making some vague references to the need for a political settlement in South Vietnam, he ended his speech by proposing the “immediate and unconditional release of all prisoners of war held by both sides.”41
The press response to Nixon’s speech was overwhelmingly positive. The New York Times noted with approval that the president had not mentioned mutual troop withdrawals.42 The Wall Street Journal said: “However Hanoi finally responds, in fact, the President has put forth an American position so appealing and so sane that only the most unreasonable critics would object to it.”43 One conservative Arizona newspaper, the Daily Citizen, claimed that Nixon’s overture was a major breakthrough in the negotiations: “Perhaps no leader of any nation has made such a far-reaching proposal from a position of strength, he has established an acid test for Hanoi’s peace intention.”44 Perhaps the most interesting sign of support for Nixon’s peace proposal came from the An Quang Buddhist faction in Saigon. Thich Huyen Quang, a spokesperson for the group that was fiercely opposed to the Saigon government, welcomed the idea of standstill cease-fire, maintaining that it held promising possibilities.45 Key members of Congress also praised Nixon for announcing the new proposal, though many Senate Democrats asked, “What took so long?”46
For his part, Kissinger praised the speech, claiming that it was a watershed moment in the war and that Nixon had “presented a comprehensive program that could well have served as the basis
for negotiation except with an opponent bent on total victory.”47 He called the president shortly after the speech to congratulate him. Nixon replied, “As you know, I don’t think this cease-fire is worth a damn, but now that we have done it we are looking down their throats.”48 Still, Kissinger told him, there was some value in making these proposals, even if they went nowhere.
The euphoria over Nixon’s speech was short-lived. Journalists soon noticed that he had not mentioned mutual troop withdrawals. Reporters peppered the administration with questions for two days until a White House spokesperson finally had to admit that there had been “an oversight,” and that the president still “insisted on matching troop reductions by the other side.”49 Rather than deflect interest in the story, the White House remarks sparked a heated controversy. Nixon eventually tried to set the record straight, stating that what he was offering was a “total withdrawal of all of our forces, something we have never offered before,” but then he added the important clause: “if we had a mutual withdrawal on the other side.”50 A follow-up briefing with the White House confirmed that the Nixon administration’s position had not fundamentally changed. The White House insisted that “we would expect that all outside forces would return to the borders of their countries.”51 In the negotiations and in public, the administration considered the PAVN an “outside force.” But despite the administration’s attempts to gain public relations value by announcing the new standstill cease-fire, Nixon essentially had not altered the US position. Washington was still calling for a mutual troop withdrawal, coupled with a political settlement that kept Thieu in power. The standstill cease-fire Nixon proposed was only temporary and still built on the back of an expected mutual troop withdrawal.
It did not take Hanoi long to respond to the speech. The party’s official newspaper, Nhan Dan, criticized the speech in several articles. Nguyen Thi Binh told reporters in Paris that Nixon’s speech was a clever “maneuver to deceive world opinion.” Xuan Thuy added, “What can I say of the five points put forward last night by President Nixon? Only a gift certificate for the votes of the American electorate and a cover-up for misleading world public opinion.”52 Hanoi reiterated its position that it held fast to its demands for a complete and unconditional US troop withdrawal and the “overthrow of the puppet leaders in Saigon.”53 Implicit in these statements was the requirement that North Vietnamese troops be allowed to stay in South Vietnam following any agreement. Hanoi’s leaders decided that Kissinger’s private proposal made public by Nixon during the October 7 speech was, like its predecessors, carefully conceived to yield nothing of substance. The Nixon White House did seem to recognize that any political settlement in South Vietnam had to include the PRG, Le Duc Tho concluded, but it also clung stubbornly to the idea of a mutual troop withdrawal.
But Hanoi’s leaders also understood that Kissinger could be pushed on this issue in Paris. His September 7 cease-fire proposal was the first recognition that the United States was going to find it difficult to get a timely peace and force North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnam. It would only be a matter of time, Hanoi’s Politburo believed, before the cease-fire would move from a diplomatic ploy used by Nixon and his national security adviser to the cornerstone of the final agreement. Time was on Hanoi’s side and Kissinger’s strategy and tactics were helping to speed up the clock.
Pivoting to Laos
Nixon’s October surprise played well in the US for a few days, but the midterm elections yielded a net loss for Republicans in Congress. Within a few short weeks of the speech, Congress also made significant cuts to the overall Defense budget. Kissinger complained that the “Defense budget is below the tolerable level,” but Laird understood the political pressure to rein in spending, and the surest way to do this was to continue the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam.54 When Hanoi did not take the bait on the standstill cease-fire proposal and Congress cut Defense spending, Kissinger understood that the Nixon administration had one more chance to inflict military harm on North Vietnamese troops before Hanoi launched a major offensive against South Vietnam. With the debate over the new cease-fire proposal circulating in Washington, Kissinger met secretly with Nixon to explore a plan for a massive ARVN attack into Laos.
Nixon was favoring the idea of a total troop withdrawal in 1971, coupled with increased air attacks against North Vietnam and the quarantine of Haiphong harbor. He sensed that he had to do something drastic before the 1972 US election to make it appear that peace was imminent in Vietnam. Kissinger rejected this plan. Through Haldeman, he warned the president that “if we pull them out by the end of ’71, trouble can start mounting in ’72 that we won’t be able to deal with and which we’ll have to answer for at the elections.”55 He feared that a sudden US withdrawal would convey “such a sense of impatience to Hanoi that it would simply buckle down and endure the bombing, counting on the domestic uproar to stop American military pressure.”56 As an alternative strategy, Kissinger recommended that Nixon should announce another substantial troop reduction following the completion of the May 31 withdrawal increment, and then commit to “fairly frequent smaller reductions until we had reached a residual force of about 50,000 volunteers by the summer of 1972.”57 This approach, he argued, would force Hanoi to accept a more rapid US troop withdrawal in exchange for a cease-fire. He feared that Hanoi was gearing up for a major military offensive against the Saigon government in late 1971 or early 1972, so his alternative strategy would help avoid that eventuality and give South Vietnam the best chance “to maintain security… through its presidential elections” scheduled for October 1971. The outcome of the war, Kissinger wrote, “would then depend on whether the South Vietnamese, aided only by American air power, would be able to blunt the assault. Peace would thus come either at the end of 1971 or at the end of 1972—either by negotiations or by a South Vietnamese collapse.”58 For the first time, he acknowledged privately that there would be no guarantees that Nguyen Van Thieu’s government would survive.
Still, Kissinger was optimistic that he could enhance Saigon’s political and military position in South Vietnam before the American withdrawal was complete. On November 18, 1970, Congress had approved $1 billion in supplemental appropriations for the war, so there was no current worry about it pulling the plug on US efforts in Vietnam, even though the overall Defense budget saw huge reductions. In proposing his alternative strategy to Nixon, Kissinger suggested a combination of superpower diplomacy with the Soviet Union and China in order to leverage Hanoi’s concessions and quick military strikes. The cornerstone of his plan was armed attacks against North Vietnamese troops now using Laos as a sanctuary. He claimed that the 1970 attacks inside Cambodia had “delayed Hanoi’s logistics buildup for at least fifteen months,” and now the time had come to attack the North Vietnamese troops operating freely inside Laos to buy time for Saigon and weaken the DRV. With just the right amount of military force, Kissinger insisted, he could negotiate the best chance for South Vietnam’s survival. Nixon liked the plan. He, too, believed that the Cambodian invasion had “gravely undermined Hanoi’s capacity to conduct offensive operations,” thus buying much-needed time for Saigon.59
The plan to strike North Vietnamese forces inside Laos had been workshopped in Kissinger’s office for months. His deputy, General Alexander Haig (who had been promoted recently), held regular meetings on the subject in the basement of the White House, and in December 1970, Haig traveled to Saigon to meet personally with Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) commander General Creighton Abrams and to discuss the plan with Thieu.60 US intelligence reports indicated that Hanoi had two primary goals approaching the 1971 dry season. The first was to resupply and reinforce North Vietnamese troops in southern Laos. The second was to launch large-scale military operations in the spring and summer against Quang Tri and Thua Thien provinces in the lowlands of Military Region I, the northernmost regions of South Vietnam.61 Nearly six thousand PAVN troops per month marched along the Ho Chi Minh Trail into southern Laos
in preparation for the offensives.62 This region had great strategic value since the east-west Route 9 was the only passable road from Tchepone in southern Laos all the way to Dong Ha along the Cau Viet River near South Vietnam’s coast. Whoever controlled Route 9 could control military traffic along the DMZ, a vital strategic and tactical asset for all sides in the war. Accordingly, Abrams determined that the time had come to attack the PAVN in Laos to stop it from marching on Quang Tri, the northernmost province in South Vietnam. Haig and he agreed that South Vietnamese troops, backed by US air power, could strike a blow against North Vietnamese troops in southern Laos. Abrams was “extremely enthusiastic about this operation” because of his “growing faith in the capabilities” of the ARVN.63 He carefully planned an ARVN attack on the major North Vietnamese logistic corridor at Tchepone in Laos. He suggested that the South Vietnamese troops would seize the town and then secure the airfield for a sufficient amount of time for combat engineers to enlarge the runway for aerial resupply. If Saigon’s army could hold out long enough, special operations forces could then take over the operation.
An excited Haig returned to Washington to discuss the Laos plan with Kissinger, claiming, “We are within an eyelash of victory in Vietnam.”64 Kissinger, too, was incredibly enthusiastic about the prospects in Laos, telling Nixon, “I’ve looked at this concept and it really looks good.”65 Of course, he warned Nixon not to let Laird in on the plan or “he’ll try to kill it.”66 Once again, Kissinger purposely kept the secretary of defense out of the planning stages of a military operation, by implying that only he and Nixon understood the full importance of military operations in Laos, so it was best to close the circle tight in the White House.67 Throughout his tenure as national security adviser, Kissinger would repeatedly propose policies that he knew Laird and Rogers would reject, so as to win favor with the president. Sometimes, these policies were of dubious strategic value. The Laos attacks, however, satisfied his personal desire to control all aspects of Vietnam decision making as well as important strategic imperatives.