In short, Tho’s proposal was not that far apart from Nixon’s May 8 proposal or what Kissinger had agreed to in their August meetings. It seemed that Hanoi was now willing to accept a military settlement separate from the political one. The new commission would handle the political problems after an agreement was signed. It would also be the forum for discussions on the armed forces operating inside South Vietnam. This arrangement allowed Thieu to stay in power until the cease-fire went into effect and the new commission began its deliberations. This, Kissinger concluded, was an agreement that Nixon could support. “We have done it,” Kissinger and his assistant Winston Lord proclaimed.56 An emotional Al Haig, who had served in Vietnam, said that this pending agreement had “saved the honor of the military men who had served, suffered, and died there [in Vietnam].”57
Kissinger quickly reported to Nixon that it appeared an agreement was imminent even though he did not want to go into the specifics, which were “complex and sensitive.”58 He wondered why, though, after a “decade of exertion and suffering by the North Vietnamese,” they conceded so many of their conditions.59 It now seems clear, from sources inside the government in Hanoi, that the Politburo was convinced that it could achieve its overall objectives in the negotiations—its first principles—after the agreement was signed. The Politburo sent Tho a letter of instruction on October 4, just before his meeting with Kissinger. The letter was not a surrender document as Kissinger has claimed. Instead, it was an appraisal of the balance of forces in South Vietnam and the need to settle the war immediately to take advantage of the current military and political situation.
The letter was the result of two days of consultations at the foreign ministry in Hanoi. The North Vietnamese foreign minister, Nguyen Duy Trinh, supervised a small working group that concluded that the time had come to separate the military and political issues in order to “foil Nixon’s scheme to prolong the negotiations and to win the election, to continue Vietnamization and to negotiate from a position of strength.” Specifically, Tho’s instructions from Hanoi were to seek agreement that quickly ended the US military presence in South Vietnam and establish a political commission that would in effect “lead to the de facto recognition of the existence of two administrations, two armies, and two areas in SVN [South Vietnam].” Such an agreement would naturally lead to a Communist victory in South Vietnam, the foreign ministry concluded, because the “new balance of forces” would be to Hanoi’s “great advantage.”60 The letter stated that whatever Hanoi could not win at the bargaining table in Paris, “conditions to obtain these objectives [would evolve] later in the struggle with the Saigon clique and win bigger victories.”61
By agreeing in principle to Le Duc Tho’s October 8 proposals, Kissinger allowed Hanoi to achieve its major political and military objectives outside of the negotiations. This is something a good negotiator should never do. Sustainable peace agreements require that important political and military matters be addressed specifically in the cease-fire agreement. Kissinger left it for the Communists to overthrow the Saigon government as a practical outgrowth of the agreement. He had said as much when he told Tho in September that the US was “prepared to start a process in which, as a result of local forces, change can occur.”62 The proposals Tho put forward in Paris on October 8 recognized that Hanoi could achieve its goals by force after an agreement and that the important matter was simply getting US agreement on the military matters, especially the cessation of hostilities against North Vietnam. Kissinger reasoned that after ten years of war, the United States had no choice but to acquiesce to continued North Vietnamese presence in South Vietnam because a PAVN withdrawal had been “unobtainable” by force and therefore could not be a “condition for a final settlement.”63 Hanoi’s diplomats were surprised that he did not demand more of them in Paris.64
The seasoned North Vietnamese leadership had negotiated with the French, the British, the Chinese, and now the Americans. They had spent most of their adult lives negotiating asymmetrical conflicts to their favor. They understood that a comprehensive peace agreement could work against them if it contained enforcement mechanisms and implementation levers that were embedded in a new South Vietnamese constitution or other framework. Their job in Paris was to make sure that the political questions had vague solutions. Ironically, this was the approach Kissinger favored as well. Both sides understood that the most important aspect of any peace agreement is the implementation phase, and yet this was the weakest part of the proposal. In effect, Kissinger and Tho were about to leave the oversight and implementation responsibilities of the peace agreement to a loosely defined commission with no capacity or legal authority to press violations and to a three-party committee made up of appointed southern Vietnamese, each with a veto power. This was a recipe for disaster. Furthermore, the proposals put forward in October 1972 contained few resources for the implementation phase and no mention whatsoever of decommissioning any armed forces.
It now seems clear that Hanoi and Washington, exhausted by major war, wanted to move as quickly as possible to the next stage of the conflict. The proposals put forward guaranteed that the political matters that they refused to address in Paris would be settled militarily in South Vietnam after a peace agreement between Washington and Hanoi. That was precisely what Kissinger wanted. He told McGeorge Bundy, Presidents Kennedy and Johnson’s former national security adviser, that with the proposed agreement, “we are the hell out of South Vietnamese politics.”65 But the meaning of this agreement also raises serious questions about the efficacy and morality of pursuing a war for political means that are then surrendered.
Kissinger continued to comply with Tho’s general framework when they met over the next three days. In lengthy negotiating sessions, the two sides hammered out the last remaining issues.66 They agreed to further water down the responsibilities of the political commission, now stipulating that it was no longer required to settle all political matters in South Vietnam within ninety days of the agreement but, rather, to “do their utmost” to reach a compromise by the deadline. There were some significant changes in how to replenish and replace military equipment inside South Vietnam, a tacit admission by both sides of the military conflict that they knew this agreement would engender.67 Tho agreed to a cease-fire in Laos and Cambodia, though there were no enforcement mechanisms built into the agreement. And finally, the two sides established a timetable for the cessation of US bombing of North Vietnam (October 21), the initialing of the final agreement in Hanoi (October 22), and the signing of the final agreement in Paris (October 30). They concluded their four days of meetings in Paris by agreeing that with their efforts “we will reach our objective of peace.”68
An elated Kissinger recalled that this was his “most thrilling moment in public service.”69 After four years of hard negotiations in Paris, he had achieved what most thought impossible, a negotiated settlement to the Vietnam War. He returned to Washington to brief Nixon, declaring, “Well Mr. President, it looks like we’ve got three out of three [China, Moscow, Vietnam].” A confused but nonetheless pleased Nixon replied, “You got an agreement. Are you kidding? Did you agree on it? Three out of three?”70 Nixon then turned to Haig for confirmation. “I’m going to ask Al, because you’re too prejudiced, Henry. You’re so prejudiced to the peace camp that I can’t trust you.”71 Haig agreed that the deal was set. Oddly, Haig then told the president that Thieu wanted this deal and that he was indeed “aboard.” Nothing could have been further from the truth. Trying to cover his tracks, Kissinger then told Nixon that he had to go to Saigon to explain the agreement to Thieu, but that it was a better deal “than anything we dreamt of. I mean it was absolutely, totally hard-line with them.” Nixon asked whether the agreement would “totally wipe out Thieu.” Kissinger’s response was again deceptive at best: “Oh no. It’s far better than anything we discussed. He won’t like it because he thinks he’s winning.”72 He was right that Thieu would not like the agreement.
Thieu Objects
&n
bsp; After a return trip to Paris on October 17 to go over the final drafting of the agreement, Kissinger flew directly to Saigon to meet with Thieu,73 and spent five days going over the treaty with him point by point. On the first day, the South Vietnamese president assembled his entire national security staff and Saigon’s representatives to the avenue Kléber talks in Paris. Haig called the meeting “tense” and “emotional,” but Kissinger told Nixon that Thieu and his colleagues did not reveal their reaction to the proposed agreement and instead sat quietly, “coolly reserving any judgments.” When Thieu asked whether the agreement was part of Nixon’s reelection campaign, Kissinger pulled out a handwritten note from the president assuring Saigon’s leaders that there were no “electoral considerations” in the draft agreement and that “we could not miss the chance for an honorable peace.”74
During subsequent meetings, Kissinger continued to stress that the agreement was good for South Vietnam. Incredibly, he told Thieu that the National Liberation Front’s (NLF) cadres would be totally demoralized by the peace pact (maybe implying that they still had military and political work ahead of them?) and that Nixon would respond with ferocious force if North Vietnam violated the agreement. He reported to Nixon that Thieu was coming around to support the agreement—another of his major misstatements of fact—but that South Vietnam was still having “great psychological difficulty with cutting the American umbilical cord.” Kissinger wondered whether Saigon’s leaders were a little too fixated on the North Vietnamese and their cunning. He claimed that what South Vietnam needed was a good dose of self-confidence to face the political and military challenges ahead of it. Still, he was sympathetic to the idea that Saigon simply wanted more time. “They know what they have to do and it is painful,” he told Nixon. He lamented the fact that if the US could have lasted two more years, Saigon would “have it made.” Still, Kissinger expected Thieu to get on board with the agreement if he wanted to continue to receive American military aid. The time had come, he warned, for Thieu to show his full support for “the agreement.”75 Privately, Kissinger confided that the United States “never said that we were committed to preserving him.”76
Once again, Kissinger had badly miscalculated Thieu’s willingness to do what the United States told him. Thieu leaked his conversation with Kissinger to the South Vietnamese government and he spread the rumor around Saigon that he had not been consulted about the progress in Paris. He also told supporters that he was disgusted that Kissinger presented him such a flawed agreement. Thieu told his National Assembly that he was not going to accept this surrender document, and on October 24, the day after Kissinger left Saigon, he went on the radio to announce in specific detail what was wrong with the proposal. He charged that Kissinger wanted him to participate in a coalition government (not entirely accurate) and that North Vietnamese troops would be allowed to stay in South Vietnam (entirely accurate). He called for direct negotiations between Saigon and Hanoi and direct talks between the PRG and South Vietnam. For the next several days, Thieu and his staff examined the proposal and wrote to Kissinger with sixty-nine major changes that they required. Former ambassador to the United States Bui Diem suggested that Kissinger had “chosen to treat the South Vietnamese as secondary players in the negotiating game” and that he and Nixon had “formulated their strategies without us and had pursued their objectives with the least possible reference to us.”77 This arrogant approach to the war only made Thieu more vulnerable. He was not consulted as the fate of his country was being discussed in Paris. His only recourse was to object to the proposal and to keep the US national security adviser waiting before meeting him in the Presidential Palace in Saigon. Kissinger’s predictable response was that “no ally had a right to treat an emissary of the President of the United States this way… We felt the impotent rage so cunningly seeded in foreigners by the Vietnamese.”78 Kissinger practiced his own special version of orientalism.
Thieu’s fears about the PAVN and the flawed proposed agreement were justified. Allowing North Vietnamese troops to remain in South Vietnam meant that he had to orchestrate a two-front war with diminishing US resources while Hanoi continued to enjoy military support from China and the Soviet Union. This allowed local PRG/NLF forces to make rapid advances because Saigon needed to spend its resources combating the heavily mechanized PAVN infantry forces. This was not an idle concern. A top-secret CIA assessment of Communist military strength, given to Kissinger on October 16, claimed that “the enemy was inching closer to Saigon than at any time since the spring of 1968.” Most military regions in South Vietnam saw significant levels of enemy troops that were now leaving their base areas and preparing to attack urban centers. Particularly crucial were Communist advances in Military Region 4, where they threatened the important delta city of My Tho and the entire “rice bowl” of the Mekong Delta. A military freeze in place, the report warned, “could be depicted as entailing a loose Communist encirclement of Saigon with the GVN’s [South Vietnam] capital technically describable… as an enclave island more or less surrounded by PRG territory.”79
Thieu thought that Hanoi was also getting an American troop withdrawal without any requirement that it remove its own troops from South Vietnam. He had always envisioned the war in South Vietnam ending as the Korean War had, with an armistice that created a heavily guarded demilitarized zone with massive US support, including American troops. What Kissinger was negotiating instead was a unilateral American withdrawal that left the PAVN in South Vietnam and the PRG/NLF in a shared oversight arrangement as its forces marched on Saigon. It was almost too much for Thieu to bear. He reportedly told his close colleagues that he would resist the October agreement with every fiber of his being, even in the face of American pressure.80
Kissinger assured Thieu that the specifics of the agreement did not matter because if North Vietnam violated the peace pact, “the US would act to enforce the agreements.”81 After the war, Kissinger’s critics charged that he and the president did not have the constitutional authority to make such pledges, that only Congress could make such explicit authorizations. Since Congress was not likely to make such an approval, it stood to reason that Kissinger was making empty promises and that he should have known better. Yet he defended his assurances to Thieu, explaining that he thought it was “inconceivable that the United States should fight for ten years and lose over 55,000 men and then stand by while the peace treaty, the achievement of their sacrifice, was flagrantly violated.” A refusal to enforce the agreement would have turned the negotiations “into a subterfuge for abandonment.”82 That was precisely Thieu’s point. He claimed that Kissinger was betraying Saigon. Kissinger’s plan was more than a betrayal of a corrupt Saigon government, however; it was the abandonment of all of South Vietnam.
To make matters worse, Hanoi broke a promise to Kissinger by announcing that North Vietnam and the United States had reached a tentative peace agreement. The announcement came while he was still in Saigon. There was some political advantage to Nixon that North Vietnam had announced that an agreement was close just before the US presidential election, but it did Kissinger no favors in Saigon. Sensing that he was getting nowhere with Thieu, Kissinger instructed Haig to contact Hanoi’s representatives in Paris to tell them of the difficulties he and Nixon were having with the Saigon government. Haig’s cable explained that the United States could not proceed in the negotiations unilaterally, and since Saigon had so many objections to the October draft, it had to sort out the complex details further. Haig informed Hanoi that the president had also requested that “Kissinger return to Washington immediately to consult on what further steps to take.” The cable also warned that the serious obstacles in Saigon were caused in part, by the “breach of confidence committed by the DRV” when it went public with the contents of the proposal. Still, Haig’s cable assured Hanoi that the US remained committed to finding a solution to the war at the earliest opportunity.83 But, Haig added, there would be no more negotiations until after the US presidential election.
To make sure that the negotiations stayed on track and that Saigon did not completely halt the progress made in Paris, Kissinger went on a publicity campaign of his own. On October 26, shortly after his return from Saigon, he held a press conference where he claimed that “peace is at hand.” He suggested that Saigon had some objections to the proposal, but in a thinly veiled threat added that the United States “will make our own decisions as to how long we believe a war should be continued.” To make sure that Hanoi realized what he was saying, Kissinger told the gathered reporters on the record that he believed the entire negotiations could be wrapped up in “one more negotiating session with the North Vietnamese.”84 South Vietnam was noticeably absent from this assurance. Saigon’s intransigence would not stop the negotiations from moving forward.
Kissinger’s press conference also served as damage control just before the November 7 presidential election. Hanoi’s public announcement had put some pressure on Nixon to secure a deal before that date, but Kissinger’s statements to the press gave the United States options. It was, in a sense, the best of both worlds for Nixon. He could point to supposedly substantial progress in the peace talks, but did not have to defend the specifics of an agreement that Saigon thought was a suicide pledge. Others noticed Kissinger’s skill, too. Chuck Colson, one of Nixon’s closest aides, called him shortly after his press conference to say that it was “a masterful performance… but more importantly, you put it across in such a way that now what happens now for the next 10 days, the election is settled. You’ve settled it.”85 Even Secretary of State Rogers applauded Kissinger’s skill at turning a bad situation into a political bonanza for Nixon, telling him that his press conference “covered the ground as well as could possibly be covered. I don’t know how you could have been better.”86
Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam Page 24