Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam

by Robert K. Brigham

  Nixon’s disappointment over the Court’s ruling was matched only by his displeasure with the lack of progress in the secret negotiations. He had hoped that the surprise announcement that summer that he would be traveling to China would have had a dramatic impact on Hanoi’s stance, as Zhou Enlai had promised Kissinger that it would. Kissinger told the president that China’s leaders would talk to Hanoi and that they “may exert some influence.”143 Kissinger had no way of knowing that Mao and Zhou had already decided to reject his request to pressure Hanoi to change its negotiating position.144 After the October 3 elections in South Vietnam, in which Nguyen Van Thieu was the only presidential candidate and won reelection with 94.3 percent of the vote, the Paris talks stalled.

  Kissinger asked to meet with Thuy and Tho in Paris in early October, but Hanoi refused, stating that its diplomats would not meet with him again unless he had something new to say. Kissinger claimed he did, and so sent a revised proposal to the US military attaché at the American embassy in Paris, General Vernon Walters, who met with DRV delegate Vo Van Sung on October 11.145 Kissinger’s revised eight points offered two new terms: He shortened the duration of the complete US troop withdrawal from August 1 to July 1, 1972. Furthermore, he promised that Thieu, having just been reelected, would resign one month before a new election in South Vietnam, which would include the PRG/NLF, took place.146 This was the only time Kissinger explored an alternative to Thieu, and it was merely a diplomatic ploy. Thieu agreed to this proposal only because Nixon gave him a guarantee that Hanoi would not accept this new offer.147 Nixon was right. Hanoi once again rejected Kissinger’s proposals outright. There were no further meetings between Kissinger and his Vietnamese counterparts in Paris for the remainder of 1971.

  At the beginning of 1971, Kissinger had believed that he could persuade Hanoi into meaningful negotiations to end the war ahead of the 1972 US presidential election. He thought he could entice Hanoi to agree to a timely end to the war and the return of American prisoners in exchange for allowing North Vietnamese troops to remain in South Vietnam and by granting political legitimacy to the southern Communists. But Hanoi wanted more, and its leaders thought that they could force further Kissinger concessions because of US domestic political pressure to end the war and loss of life. It was clear to North Vietnamese negotiators that the US national security adviser’s position on Thieu was also collapsing in 1971. He no longer insisted on political guarantees for the South Vietnamese government, only that the United States not be the ones to replace Saigon. Hanoi had to do that on its own and after the eventual US withdrawal, Kissinger insisted. But Hanoi smelled growing weakness in his negotiating position in 1971. His strategic blunder of supporting the invasion of Laos, thus exposing Vietnamization’s weaknesses, further convinced the North Vietnamese that Kissinger’s time to shape an agreement to his liking was running short. Time favored Hanoi as the United States faced another presidential election year in 1972 and the political pressures that went with it.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A WAR FOR PEACE, JANUARY 1–AUGUST 31, 1972

  HENRY KISSINGER HAD a very tough month in January 1972. He began the New Year with a call to Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, in which he shared his suspicion that “someone had been getting to the P [Nixon] on Vietnam.” He feared that the chief executive was under “terrible pressure” and that Nixon might “bug out” of Vietnam. The president, he predicted, was going to go public with his secret negotiations, threatening everything that had been accomplished. Kissinger’s instincts told him that this was the “totally wrong” approach and that it was dangerous to “show any nervousness.” As he had so many times before, he ended the phone call with a declaration that Hanoi was “ready to give,” ready to make serious compromises in the secret meetings in Paris.1

  Kissinger had every reason to worry. Nixon was convinced that the war was eating away at his 1972 reelection chances. A Harris Survey taken in March 1971 revealed that Senator Edmund Muskie (D-ME) had a five-point lead on Nixon.2 Recent polling data suggested that Muskie was also ahead of Senator George McGovern (D-SD), for the Democratic nomination. Like McGovern, Muskie was a sharp critic of the Nixon administration’s policies on Vietnam, but he had a stronger following within the party and across the nation because he had captured the public’s imagination as a candidate who possessed unusual candor and directness. His campaign slogan reflected this feeling: Believe Muskie. Muskie formally announced his candidacy on January 4, 1972, but in the weeks leading up to his declaration he was already campaigning heavily and with good results. He told a large audience in Manchester, New Hampshire, home to the first primary of the 1972 presidential election, that “he had been wrong in supporting American involvement in the Vietnam war and that the United States must now withdraw totally whatever the consequences.”3 Muskie was a formidable candidate, his incumbent opponent fretted, and his antiwar message was loud and clear.

  Kissinger’s anxiety over a potential Nixon change of heart in Vietnam was, therefore, well placed. Adding to his concerns, however, was the unsettling feeling he had that Nixon had lost faith in his abilities as national security adviser. Nixon was not returning Kissinger’s phone calls and he had not consulted him about Vietnam in weeks. Several incidents had shattered the president’s confidence in Kissinger. He had backed Pakistan, at Kissinger’s constant urging, during its brief and wholly unsuccessful war with India and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), much to the public’s dismay. Although the public outcry was not nearly as virulent as for Nixon’s actions in Cambodia, Laos, or Vietnam, he and Kissinger were severely criticized for supporting genocide by the Pakistani military. Pakistan had invaded East Pakistan in March 1971, following election results that brought 160 of the 162 parliamentary seats in East Pakistan to the opposition party, the Awami League. General Yahya Khan, Pakistan’s military ruler, quashed the election results abruptly. Protests broke out all over East Pakistan, and calls for independence from Pakistan were universal. Khan quickly approved military strikes to put down the unrest. Hundreds of thousands of Bengalis were killed and another 10 million sought refuge in neighboring India. To stem the tide of refugees and bring stability on its eastern frontier, India launched counterattacks against the Pakistani army operating inside of East Pakistan, forcing a Pakistani retreat and leading to the formation of an independent Bangladesh. The Nixon administration had been secretly sending military supplies to General Khan and supported his invasion plans.

  According to Gary Bass, a Princeton University scholar who has written extensively on the slaughter in East Pakistan, Kissinger’s obsession with this issue forced Nixon to consider firing him. The national security adviser “ranted and raved” about India’s role in the war with Pakistan, the president told one of Kissinger’s associates, Alexander Haig. “He’s personalizing this India thing,” Nixon complained, and he was concerned that Kissinger was about to “crack up.”4 Haig told Haldeman that Kissinger “had a sense of failure about South Asia and seemed to be physically exhausted.”5 Nixon assumed that Kissinger’s ongoing feud with Secretary of State William Rogers was to blame, since the State Department had been openly critical of Pakistan.

  The flap over India and Pakistan only grew worse when Jack Anderson of the Washington Post ran a front-page story on the Nixon administration’s “tilt” toward Pakistan. Anderson’s reporting contradicted everything that the president had said in public about the crisis. The story even suggested that the national security adviser had approved sending Jordanian F-104s to Pakistan. Anderson wrote that Kissinger “assured reporters that the US wasn’t anti-India at the same time he was instructing government policy makers to take steps against India.”6 But the sentence that made Nixon cringe was: “It was precisely this sort of secret maneuvering that got the US deeply embroiled in the Vietnam war before the American people realized it [was] in the public interest, therefore, to publish excerpts from the secret documents”—a not-so-thinly veiled reference to the publication of the Pentagon P
apers.7

  Nixon was furious over Anderson’s piece and he thought that someone in Kissinger’s office must have leaked material to the Post. A full White House investigation revealed that the president’s fears were well grounded. Charles Radford, a yeoman in the US Navy serving as a liaison between the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and the National Security Council (NSC), had passed top-secret documents to Anderson. Radford had served in the US embassy in India and was rightfully offended by Kissinger and Nixon’s distortions about the administration’s neutrality in the conflict. Furthermore, the JCS had correctly feared that Nixon and Kissinger were not completely forthcoming in their own deliberations on the conflict. That is why the JCS had ordered Radford to gather information. Radford had access to the Nixon and Kissinger deliberations in planning meetings and he had opportunity because the NSC was a bit sloppy with its burn bags.

  Nixon blamed Kissinger for the leak to the Post. “The real culprit is Henry,” an enraged president told Haldeman.8 He also informed his close staff that Kissinger never accepted responsibility for problems inside his own office. “He doesn’t want to admit to himself that this could be” his own fault, he complained.9 “Henry is like a child,” he continued; “I won’t have Henry have one of his childish tantrums. I will not discuss it with him.”10 Nixon pushed Kissinger aside for the remainder of December, which led to the national security adviser’s call to Haldeman on New Year’s Day. “I am out of favor,” Kissinger told one of his friends in the press. Kissinger blamed Rogers and everyone at the State Department for undermining his credibility with the president just when the negotiations over Vietnam were at the most crucial stage. Kissinger worried that he might not get another chance to go to Paris.11

  Nixon did not let him off the hook easily. He told Haldeman to inform Kissinger that he was planning to make another announcement on Vietnam troop withdrawals before the Congress returned in January and that he might use that occasion to reveal the secret meetings in Paris. Nixon thought that he needed to appeal to moderate voters in the upcoming presidential election, so disclosing Kissinger’s meetings took away from the argument of many that the chief executive of the United States was not serious about peace. By exposing the talks, Nixon could make it appear that the only obstacle to peace was Hanoi. He also planned to speed up the American troop withdrawal, announcing the redeployment of another 70,000, leaving a residual US force of only 69,000 in South Vietnam. He could announce that Vietnamization had been such a success that a quicker US withdrawal was possible. He could then outline a program of support for South Vietnam that did not sound like a full-scale retreat. US aid to Saigon would continue, and the United States would intensify its bombing raids in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) north of the twentieth parallel and increase mining operations near the major North Vietnamese ports. All of this Nixon threatened to do without any input from Kissinger.

  The crisis inside the White House eventually blew over because Nixon needed Kissinger again. With the summit meetings in Moscow and Beijing in the near future, the president wanted to make sure that Kissinger was feeling secure and that he would be useful. It would have been impossible to usher in a new national security adviser right before such a momentous foreign policy move. Still, he kept Kissinger at arm’s length about the content of his Vietnam speech right up until January 12, when he asked for Kissinger’s advice in advance of his troop withdrawal announcement now scheduled for January 13. Nixon understood that to keep Kissinger contributing to the administration, he needed to stroke his bruised ego. He realized that once he announced that Kissinger had been meeting with Le Duc Tho, his national security adviser would be at the center of a media frenzy, something Kissinger relished almost as much as his exclusive proximity to the president. Eventually, both Time and Newsweek featured Kissinger on their cover, billing him as “Nixon’s Secret Agent.”12 Kissinger called Hugh Sidey at Life, who was also planning to put him on the cover, suggesting that running a picture of him without the president was a problem. “Why don’t you have a picture of Nixon striding over my prostrate body,” Kissinger joked. Or of “me kissing the ring?” Sidey explained that the “cover story is on the Nixon speech, but you are the face on the cover.”13

  Nixon had decided to split the Vietnam talk in two to gain the most public relations value. The first, on January 13, would cover the troop withdrawal announcement, and the second would outline the administration’s current policy and explain to the world that Kissinger had been meeting secretly with the Vietnamese in Paris. Nixon knew that the public and press would want answers to some complicated questions on the nature of the secret talks, so he asked Kissinger to rehearse a few with him, asking him, “Why at this point did we decide we are going to break with the secrecy veil and put out this information?” Kissinger assured him that the administration’s critics, especially the Democrats in Congress, would understand that there was a gap between the public and private peace talks that was “so enormous that we can no longer” keep the private channel secret.14 Years later, Kissinger explained the decision to go public this way: “It became imperative to enable the American public to understand that we had made every effort to negotiate an end to the war.”15 He was back in the inner circle.

  Nixon went on the air January 25 as planned, announcing the outline of the eight points that Kissinger had presented to Le Duc Tho in October 1971. He told the viewing public that there were two paths to peace: negotiations, which “is the path we prefer,” and Vietnamization. He stated that Vietnamization had been so successful that “almost one-half million Americans will have been brought home from Vietnam over the past three years” and that US combat losses have been reduced “by over 95 percent.” But the “path of Vietnamization has been the long voyage home,” he explained. “It has strained the patience of and tested the perseverance of the American people.” Then, Nixon asked, “what of the shortcut, the shortcut we prefer, the path of negotiation?”

  He then dropped his election-year bombshell: that he had sent Kissinger to Paris “as my personal representative on August 4, 1969, 30 months ago, to begin these secret negotiations” with the North Vietnamese.16 Nixon ended his speech by telling the American public that he had instructed Ambassador Porter “to present our plan publicly at this Thursday’s session of the Paris [avenue Kléber] peace talks, along with alternatives to make it even more flexible.”17 One of those alternatives was Nixon’s surprise announcement that President Nguyen Van Thieu and Vice President Huong “would be happy to resign one month before the new election.” The president wanted to be clear: that his offer “will show unmistakably that Hanoi not Washington or Saigon—has made the war go on.”18

  As Nixon had predicted, Kissinger was now in the spotlight. The national security adviser now fielded interview requests on the details of the secret talks for weeks and even made a trip to Congress to testify in hearings on the war. In a lengthy press conference with reporters on January 27, he asked the American public for understanding and to support the administration’s peace initiatives in Vietnam. He told reporters that both sides remained far apart in Paris, largely because of Hanoi’s refusal to make concessions in return for an American withdrawal. He also insisted that North Vietnam’s demand that the United States remove Thieu from power before the implementation phase of any agreement was a nonstarter. Asked by reporters why Hanoi insisted on linking military and political issues in any settlement, Kissinger replied that Hanoi apparently “had little confidence in its ability to win a political struggle in the South if the United States continued its economic support after withdrawing its forces.”19 If one did not look too closely at the details, Kissinger’s charm and wit covered all the loopholes in the Nixon proposals nicely.

  Still, the reaction in Congress was mixed. Nixon supporters claimed that the president’s offer was “fair and just” and that his speech showed that he had “repeatedly done all that he could reasonably and honorably do” as the commander in chief. Three leaders of the Democratic
Party in the Senate were more critical. Senator J. William Fulbright, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, worried that “what looks generous to us may not look generous to North Vietnam. We may have to do more,” he explained. Muskie had major doubts about the specifics of Nixon’s offer, but he applauded the president for committing to a full US troop withdrawal once an agreement was signed. The most severe criticism of Nixon’s speech came from presidential hopeful Senator George McGovern, who observed that “at the same time Mr. Nixon was bitterly opposed to the McGovern-Hatfield proposal to end the war, he was at the very same time offering it to the other side.”20

  Lost in this whirlwind of activity was the fact that the Nixon administration had offered Hanoi no new proposals. The president’s speech outlined offers that had already been put forward by Kissinger in the secret meetings and soundly rejected by Le Duc Tho and Xuan Thuy. Of course, the speech was not intended to move the negotiations forward; it was designed instead to show Nixon as a reasonable leader who had made every effort for peace. This fact was not lost on members of Congress who now claimed that Nixon had not gone far enough in his previous attempts to end the war and that Hanoi was sure to reject all schemes until its conditions were met. He took this criticism—just before he left for China—hard. He was even more irate when the Washington Post called his speech “The Same Old Shell Game.”21 He complained to Haldeman that the Post had “deliberately screwed us, and we’re going to have to get back at them.”22 Nixon ordered his press secretary, Ron Ziegler, to hold back on press credentials for Post reporters asking to cover the China trip.