Nixon was in a difficult spot. If the North Vietnamese offensive led to the collapse of South Vietnam, he feared he would pay for it dearly at the ballot box. Conservatives were already upset that Nixon had gone to China, and now Kissinger was in Moscow, helping to plan for the May summit, precisely when North Vietnam was trying to take South Vietnam by force with an offensive launched through the DMZ with Soviet-built tanks. If the president went through with the May summit, he would be toasting Moscow’s leaders when their tanks were helping kill American and ARVN troops in South Vietnam. The optics in April just did not play to his favor.
While Kissinger was in Moscow, Abrams sent a gloomy report to Nixon predicting that the PAVN has “neither lost his resolve nor changed his aims.”62 Despite the heavy air assaults against North Vietnam, wrote Abrams, the North Vietnamese effort had successfully reversed ARVN military gains in each of the four military regions in South Vietnam, and the “total infiltration of personnel and units for 1972… already exceeds that for the same period in 1968.” He warned that the North Vietnamese were “committed to and capable of” launching further military attacks through the summer of 1972. Accordingly, he asked the president whether there could be no further US troop deployments out of Vietnam until June 1972, something he must have realized went against Nixon’s plans. He argued that any force level under sixty-nine thousand American troops and advisers “will magnify the existing turbulence… to an unacceptable level.” Abrams cautioned that the ARVN was not likely to win the battle against North Vietnam without “substantial US material and moral support.”63 Few things annoyed Richard Nixon more than pessimistic field reports from Vietnam.
When Kissinger returned to Washington from Moscow, he immediately went to Camp David for a meeting with the president. He was expecting a “tense” meeting and he was “very distressed.”64 He felt that Nixon had not supported his negotiating position in Moscow; and cables demanding that he get progress on Vietnam, or else, hardly steadied his nerves. But Nixon was always averse to direct confrontation, so his Camp David meeting with Kissinger ended with both agreeing that Nixon should go public about the North Vietnamese offensive, his security adviser’s trip to Moscow, and a new troop withdrawal announcement. What would not be mentioned in the speech, however, was that Hanoi had finally agreed that Tho and Kissinger would meet again in Paris on May 2.
May
The day before he left for Paris, Kissinger had one of his regular long and meandering phone conversations with the president. Nixon wanted to make sure that Kissinger understood that “the bargaining position we have isn’t very strong right at this moment.” He urged Kissinger not to worry too much about South Vietnam, but to “just remember they [Hanoi] are in for a hell of a shock if they turn us down.” Nixon was referring to his April 25 speech, when he reiterated his Eight Points fully articulated during his previous January address to the nation. He was offering no new proposals; he wanted Kissinger to understand that clearly. His major incentive to offer Hanoi was “the fear they have for what we can do to them.” Nixon promised if Hanoi did not accept his peace offer soon, “we will demolish them.” Kissinger agreed, and then turned to his usual habit of fawning over the president, “Our biggest strength right now is your unpredictability and your toughness.”65
Despite the tough talk, Kissinger was worried. North Vietnamese forces had just taken Quang Tri City, the first provincial capital captured during the offensive. It appeared that nothing was going to stop their march south, and soon Hue would be the target. The symbolism of the old imperial capital falling to North Vietnamese forces was almost too much to bear. The PAVN were taking on enormous casualties, but nothing was slowing them down. Nixon hated the idea that Hanoi was “kicking us” and that the United States was not “kicking them.” Of course, he complained, “I am not sure the god-damned Air Force ever hits anything.”66 That had always been one of Laird’s main concerns. He never thought the air attacks against North Vietnam were going to stop the Easter Offensive or win the war. “You can’t win the damn thing just with air power… you gotta win this damn thing on the ground,” he told Kissinger in early May.67 The problem on the ground, Laird added, was not training, was not materiel (with the possible exception of the M41 Walker Bulldog, a light tank that was no match for the Soviet-built T-54), and was not mission; it was leadership. What the ARVN needed was to change “a few commanders right now” and a good “kick in the ass.”68
But Kissinger did not see the problem in South Vietnam exclusively as a problem with the ARVN. He blamed Laird and Abrams for lying to the president about the ARVN’s strengths and capabilities and the military command for its reluctance to mount a major offensive against Hanoi’s key assets. If they had been telling the president the truth all along, Kissinger reasoned, Nixon could go to Moscow in May “very cool” and say, “All right, we are licking you sons-of-bitches.” Nixon agreed, stating that now there were no good choices left in South Vietnam, but that he would still make them. “The only one who would consider doing nothing,” the president told Kissinger, “would be Laird.”69 Although he relished Nixon’s attacks on Laird, Kissinger had real problems facing him in Paris. How could he convince Hanoi that to continue the offensive would come at too high a price? How could he relay to Tho and the rest of the North Vietnamese leadership that Nixon meant it when he said that he was prepared to unleash hell on Hanoi?
When the meeting started, Tho noticed that Kissinger’s personal demeanor had changed. The national security adviser “no longer had the appearance of a university professor making long speeches and continually joking,” but was now instead “embarrassed and thoughtful.”70 But remarkably, Kissinger told Tho that he had nothing new to say. He reminded his Vietnamese counterparts that Nixon’s proposals from last year had been effectively unanswered. He also suggested that the United States was serious about a settlement to the war, but that the “US will not negotiate at gunpoint. There is no reason to discuss a future agreement if the North Vietnamese invading forces are encroaching on our side.”71 Tho was disheartened but not surprised by Kissinger’s comments. “After 7–8 months without meeting each other, I expected you to tackle the question of solution immediately,” he told Kissinger.72
But, Tho’s role in the planning of the Easter Offensive was proof enough that he had no intention of agreeing to any of Kissinger’s proposals, nor did he think Kissinger was empowered to offer anything new. The entire Politburo thought that Nixon was unlikely to make any meaningful concessions in 1972, and this is what had led them to support the Easter Offensive. Tho and Le Duan made a strategic error, however, in thinking that the offensive would lead to a political uprising all over South Vietnam and that it would happen quickly. During the May 3 meeting in Paris, it was too soon to tell that Hanoi’s offensive would not end the war militarily and that the ARVN would actually halt the attacks. Those realities were still weeks, if not months, away, and Kissinger left Paris empty-handed.
In his war memoir, Kissinger writes that the May 2 meeting was the culmination of his effort to secure peace and that he was disheartened that Hanoi wanted to continue its martial endgame instead, even though “there was no question that the back of the North Vietnamese offensive had to be broken militarily.”73 He was clearly engaging in wishful thinking, even though the North Vietnamese offensive eventually stalled. Preparing to go up the rungs of the ladder of escalation, Nixon wrote to Brezhnev the following day, complaining that the May 2 meeting in Paris was “deeply disappointing,” especially since Kissinger had received assurances in Moscow that future talks with Hanoi would be productive. The president warned that he was prepared to take “the next steps” and that he was particularly disturbed that Moscow did not exert much influence over Hanoi since “Soviet military supplies provide the means for the DRV’s actions.” Finally, he asked the Soviet leader for his “assessment of the situation.”74 Nixon was not bluffing about the attacks, he told Kissinger. He shared that he had won $10,000 playing poker during
World War II in the South Pacific because he would bluff, “but no one can remember an occasion when he [Nixon] was called that he didn’t have the cards.”75 He thought he had all the cards in the spring of 1972, but he was clearly mistaken.
After sending the letter to Moscow, Nixon made plans to escalate the attacks against Hanoi. On May 8, he gave the order to launch massive air attacks near Hanoi and Haiphong. The military gave the bombings the code name Linebacker, because of the president’s love of football. “We’ve crossed the Rubicon,” Nixon told his national security staff.76 Kissinger was delighted. After weeks of debate, the chief executive had decided to take stronger measures against North Vietnam, something that Kissinger had been urging all along. Kissinger knew that Nixon was quite angry that Laird and Rogers did not back him in his hour of greatest need, and he was equally angry with the JCS and Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV). Once again, he alone supported the president’s desire to retaliate with massive force to a provocation by Hanoi. Again, Kissinger saw strategic and personal benefit by backing the president’s most audacious military plans. Nixon asked Kissinger, “Why in the world is Laird unable to see the critical situation in the South?” The national security adviser told the president that the only thing Laird cared about was Vietnamization.77 Kissinger called the May 8 decision to escalate the air war over North Vietnam one of “the finest hours of Nixon’s Presidency.”78
Nixon announced the new raids in an address to the nation that same evening. He claimed that the North Vietnamese, supported by massive offensive weapons “supplied to Hanoi by the Soviet Union and other Communist nations,” had killed over twenty thousand civilians in their brutal attacks on South Vietnamese cities in “wanton disregard of human life.” He then reminded the American people that he had already offered Hanoi, through Kissinger’s secret negotiations and his own public announcements, “the maximum of what any President of the United States could offer.” Nixon then outlined the three options facing the United States in Vietnam: (1) the immediate withdrawal of all American forces, (2) continued attempts at a negotiated settlement, or (3) decisive military action to end the war. He stated: “There is only one way to stop the killing. That is to keep the weapons of war out of the hands of the international outlaws of North Vietnam.” He then dropped a bombshell: the United States was going to mine the entrance to all North Vietnamese ports and intensify air attacks.79
The press and congressional reaction to Nixon’s announcement was universally critical. The New York Times denounced the president’s decision as a “desperate gamble” and “a threat to world peace.”80 The Times urged Congress to cut off all funds for the war to “save the President from himself and the nation from disaster.”81 The Washington Post declared that Nixon “has lost touch with the real world… the Moscow summit is in the balance, if it has not yet toppled over… The only relief in this grim scene is that Mr. Nixon is coming to the end of a term and the American people will shortly have the opportunity to render a direct judgment on his policy.”82 Senator Muskie, who had withdrawn from the presidential race on April 25, said that Nixon “was jeopardizing the major security interests of the United States.”83 George McGovern, the new Democratic front-runner for president, warned Congress that Nixon “must not have a free hand in Indochina any longer.”84 But two public opinion polls found that the president enjoyed tremendous public support for his actions against North Vietnam.85 Still, over 1,800 people were arrested for protesting Nixon’s decision. Police used wooden bullets and tear gas against protestors in Berkeley, and 715 National Guardsmen were called out to handle the protests in Minneapolis.
Over the next three days, a total of eleven thousand mines were laid in North Vietnamese coastal waters and ports as part of Operation Pocket Money. The intensified air attacks on key military and transportation systems (Linebacker) began that evening. For the next four months, US planes hit roads, bridges, rail lines, supply depots, and troop bases, dropping more than 150,000 tons of ordnance on North Vietnam.86 Less than three weeks after the air attacks began, Kissinger and Nixon were on their way to Moscow for the summit meeting with the top Soviet officials. The USSR’s relative silence on the new air attacks proved to Kissinger that the Soviets wanted the meeting with Nixon more than they wanted to help their friends in Hanoi.
When Nixon and Kissinger met with the Soviet leadership in Moscow in May, they were greeted by a firm lecture from Brezhnev: “You overestimate the possibility in the present situation of resolving problems in Vietnam from a position of strength.”87 But Kissinger noticed that the Soviets were most concerned with the ships and sailors they had lost during the Linebacker attacks, and actually had very little to say about any immediate Soviet response. They were “bellicose” and “rough,” he later recalled, but their attack on the United States was for the record, to calm Hanoi’s nerves, nothing else.88 He had met with Dobrynin before the summit and had learned as much when one of the Soviet aides translated Brezhnev’s response to Nixon’s May 8 letter asking the general secretary for his assessment of the Vietnam situation. Brezhnev condemned US actions because he had to. He declared that the Soviet Union would not sit by and watch the United States bully an ally; there would be consequences for American actions. But when Kissinger asked for clarification, Dobrynin offered that the Soviet threat was only meant for “additional measures to those announced on May 8.” For Kissinger, this meant that the international crisis over Linebacker and the mining of Haiphong “was over.”89
Kissinger has suggested that when North Vietnam’s leadership saw Moscow back away from the Linebacker crisis (and China was soon to follow with the obligatory condemnation but no action), it felt isolated and was therefore convinced that it had to return to the bargaining table in Paris. “Clearly someone had blinked,” he later reported. “Less than a week after the resumption of full-scale bombing and the blockade of North Vietnam, efforts were being made to resume negotiations ‘without preconditions’—a far cry from Hanoi’s previous insistence on the ‘correctness’ of its terms.”90 A message from Le Duc Tho was delivered to Kissinger on May 12, confirming a readiness to resume talks. Kissinger believed that his critics thought that Hanoi would “be conciliatory only when we showed goodwill,” and that Linebacker proved the opposite to be true.91 Hanoi was now willing to meet because the United States had pressed it militarily, he claimed.
In Hanoi, the decision to reopen the secret Paris talks with Kissinger was a bit more complex. The US air attacks and mining in May had been quite devastating. There had been a steady stream of war materiel and supplies arriving in North Vietnam as seaborne imports before the mining, but by mid-May it had dropped to nothing. The Linebacker bombings had cut off the main North Vietnamese fuel lines to the south and destroyed most rail bridges and transportation depots in the north. As a work-around, thousands of tons of supplies were off-loaded in China for land transport to North Vietnam. By July 1972, over 60,000 tons of supplies had made it to North Vietnam through China.92 According to some reports, almost 2,000 tons of military supplies crossed the northern border from China into North Vietnam every day.93 Some US pilots reported seeing “bumper-to-bumper” truck traffic on major routes into North Vietnam.94 By the end of May, even the CIA doubted that the bombing campaign could stop “increased levels of resupply” in the months ahead.95 Despite this impressive movement of war materiel under intense bombing and mining conditions, Hanoi had difficulty moving supplies to multiple PAVN divisions engaged in conventional combat in South Vietnam. Even though Hanoi sent more than 600,000 tons of supplies to the PAVN in 1972, it was not enough to sustain the offensive. Hanoi also found it difficult in this environment to stockpile supplies.96 In other words, it was impossible for Hanoi to sustain a conventional offensive because of logistical problems. In addition, North Vietnamese troop losses continued to pile up under American bombs and an ARVN counteroffensive. Some estimates suggest that North Vietnam lost nearly 100,000 troops during the entire Easter Offensive. Hanoi could
replace PAVN losses without drying up its strategic reserve, but these fatalities put severe stress on North Vietnam.
Adding to that stress was the ARVN performance as it launched a counteroffensive to retake Quang Tri City and the entire province. Throughout the summer, the ARVN fought effectively against the North Vietnamese, taking full advantage of US air power. Few had expected the ARVN to prevail, but by mid-September, they had cleared the PAVN out of the provincial capital. These military factors certainly played a significant role in Hanoi’s decision to meet with Kissinger again. It is more difficult to tell from the available documentation whether the Soviet and Chinese positions had much of an impact on Hanoi’s decision to back off from its military goals and accept a meeting with Kissinger, but clearly Moscow and Beijing had little impact on what was said in Paris.
The VCP considered its options in May, and finally decided that it could no longer take South Vietnam by force. On June 1, the Politburo passed Resolution 220, ending its commitment to the military goals of the Easter Offensive. Hanoi could not deliver the knockout blow that Le Duan and Le Duc Tho had predicted, but the PAVN had caused considerable pain and consternation in South Vietnam. President Thieu was forced to declare martial law and lower the ARVN draft age to seventeen. Over forty thousand ARVN troops that were released from service were called back to active duty. But Thieu remained in power despite these difficulties. Hanoi’s decision to meet with Kissinger, therefore, was based partly on the pain that the US bombing and mining had caused, partly on the ARVN’s military performance, and partly on the inability of the PAVN to take South Vietnam by force. And yet party leaders firmly believed that the offensive had paved the way for a new phase in the war, one that would require a smaller military footprint and increased diplomacy in Paris.
Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam Page 20