Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam

by Robert K. Brigham

  Nixon, however, ever sensitive to his own light, did not like Kissinger’s grandstanding just before the election. Kissinger explained it this way: “No chief executive would take kindly to an appointee who is cast by the media as the fount of all constructive actions.”87 Even though he was somewhat dissatisfied with his landslide win over McGovern (it was not as big as Johnson’s margin of victory over Goldwater in 1964), Nixon mustered enough conviction to make sure Thieu supported the peace process.

  Nixon sent Thieu a letter shortly after his reelection victory, explaining that the United States needed to move forward in Paris. He was resigned to settle, Nixon wrote Thieu, and he did not appreciate Saigon’s “self-defeating” public “distortions” about the “sound” and “excellent” agreement that his national security adviser had negotiated. Nixon promised Thieu that he would make revisions in the language for the electoral commission and demand a North Vietnamese troop withdrawal and the decommissioning of the PLAF. He warned Thieu that he should be under “no illusions” that the United States would go beyond these requests and that Saigon had better comply or Nixon would be forced “to take brutal action” against South Vietnam. To soften the blow, Nixon promised that he would retaliate immediately if North Vietnam violated the agreement, and he offered to meet with Thieu after the agreement was signed, to symbolize their unity.88

  Thieu still had many objections, but Nixon instructed Kissinger to get the talks in Paris moving again. The president desperately wanted to get the war behind him before the start of his second term. Luckily for Nixon, Hanoi agreed to another meeting beginning on November 20, and a timetable for two other sessions was established. During the first meeting, Kissinger presented Thieu’s list of sixty-nine demands. Even Kissinger thought that this was a mistake. “The list went so far beyond what we had indicated both publicly and privately that it must have strengthened Hanoi’s already strong temptation to dig in.”89 There were other reasons why Hanoi was in no mood for renegotiation on the key points of the proposal. The Politburo were careful watchers of American politics. Hanoi’s leaders expected that Kissinger would soon face a deadline of his own. When the new Congress was sworn in the first week of January 1973, Nixon would be facing an even more hostile US Senate. Republicans had lost two seats and conservative Democrats who occasionally supported Nixon’s Vietnam policy lost their leadership positions on a number of important committees. More important, this new Congress promised to pass a war powers resolution limiting the president’s ability to take the nation to battle. It was also very likely, Laird warned, that Congress would not continue to fund the war.

  Against this backdrop, Le Duc Tho now made new demands of his own. During the second day of their meetings, he insisted that the PRG/NLF and the Saigon government sign and support the proposal. He also demanded that areas now under PRG/NLF control in South Vietnam had to be carefully delineated. There would be no North Vietnamese troop withdrawal, even though Nixon had just given Thieu an assurance that Hanoi would be required to withdraw all of its troops from South Vietnam. Finally, Tho reiterated that the peace agreement must specifically state that the South Vietnamese people had the right to determine their own future. In a letter to the Politburo, Tho explained that during the meeting he had “criticized Kissinger’s suggested changes to the Agreement and raised… matters of principle” for our side.90

  Kissinger sent word to Nixon that things were not going well in Paris, but that it was still obvious that “the North Vietnamese do want a settlement.” He confirmed that Hanoi had accepted a few insignificant changes that Thieu had demanded, but overall, they “drastically hardened their position.” In several important areas, Kissinger complained, they had “returned to pre-October 8 negotiating positions.” He said he thought that he could save the agreement, but it would take days of hard negotiations and would depend primarily on Saigon dropping “their petty demands.”91 Haig was shuttling back and forth to South Vietnam to get Thieu on board, but Kissinger feared that was not enough. After six days of negotiations with Tho, he believed that the United States had improved its position, but only slightly. He reminded the president that the United States had “come into this round of talks with an agreement that we already considered excellent.” The time had come, Kissinger argued, to get a settlement.92 The next talks were scheduled for December 4 in Paris.

  When Kissinger and Tho met on the morning of December 4, there was a heated exchange. Tho began on the offensive, accusing the American of breaking his promises. He also charged that Kissinger had not responded to any of Hanoi’s proposals and instead had issued threats. Tho recalled that Kissinger had sent a message saying that if there was no settlement at these December meetings, “the consequences would be unforeseeable.” In a statement that proved prescient, Tho wondered whether the United States “would even use B-52 bombing raids perhaps even to level Hanoi and Haiphong,” and was probably considering using nuclear weapons, a position that he claimed Nixon had supported while vice president to bail the French out at Dien Bien Phu.93 He then ran through the litany of changes Kissinger had passed along from Thieu, refuting them one by one and concluding that the United States was using the negotiations as a ploy simply to buy Saigon more time. “If you want to negotiate and settle the problems, you must respond to our proposals,” Tho demanded.94

  Over the next several days, Kissinger and Tho closed the gap that had been created by Thieu’s intervention. They made substantial progress on a number of important areas in the agreement, and Tho even agreed to advance the deadline for the cease-fire in Laos and Cambodia. Tho also dropped his demand that civilians be released from South Vietnamese jails as part of the prisoner-of-war exchange. This would leave nearly thirty thousand cadres in Thieu’s jails, a concession that Tho thought Kissinger should have appreciated more. But Tho still rejected some of Kissinger’s other demands. He would not change the definition of the reconciliation commission, allow the terms North Vietnam and South Vietnam to be used in the territorial claims clauses of the agreement, nor agree that North Vietnamese troops would be withdrawn from South Vietnam, and he rejected a three-month target date for the demobilization of forces. Since most of these issues had already been dealt with in the October and November draft proposals, none of them seemed insurmountable.

  During the December 9 meeting, Tho and Kissinger made compromises that moved the two sides closer together. The United States agreed to restore the PRG in the preamble of the agreement (this Tho insisted upon because it recognized the political legitimacy of the southern revolution). The United States pledged to return to the original language of Article I, agreeing to respect the independence, sovereignty, and unity of Vietnam even though Thieu had objected strongly to this provision. Kissinger also agreed to restore Article 4 over Thieu’s opposition, which pledged that the United States would not interfere in the internal affairs of South Vietnam following its withdrawal. In return, Tho made several concessions of his own. He no longer insisted on the phrase “administrative structure” to describe the electoral commission. He conceded on the levels of replacement provisions for military equipment and he agreed to include a sentence requiring that North Vietnam and South Vietnam respect the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).95

  The only two remaining sticking points were the status of the DMZ and Hanoi’s insistence that the PRG be mentioned in the text—not just the preamble—of the agreement. Both sides had returned to the spirit of the October proposal, and each had sharpened the agreement to its liking. It appeared by the December 12 meeting that Kissinger and Tho were close to handing the proposed agreement over to the avenue Kléber meetings to work out the technical aspects of the treaty. Spirits were further lifted when Kissinger brought along Ambassador William Sullivan, the assistant secretary of state, and Ambassador William Porter, chief of the US delegation in Paris.96 Their experience and expertise would certainly help at this stage of the negotiations, Kissinger claimed. After the meeting, Kissinger told Nixon that Hanoi agreed to strengthen
the language on the DMZ, and therefore, “our requirements I indicated publicly on October 26 have been essentially met.” He informed the president that the only US concessions “have been to drop other changes we were requesting in an agreed text which Hanoi considered sacrosanct to start with.”97 Kissinger implied that Thieu would accept the agreement if the proposal included the tougher language on the DMZ. Once again, as he had throughout the process of negotiation, he was overstating Saigon’s acceptance to compromises he had made in its name in Paris without consulting the South Vietnamese.

  Kissinger was not giving Nixon the full picture. He failed to mention that the revised proposals that he claimed were major concessions from Hanoi still included the proviso that allowed the PAVN to stay in South Vietnam. Thieu never would agree to this clause unless coerced and threatened. Nixon, through Haig, instructed Kissinger to “hold tough on the DMZ issue” and said that he should expect Moscow to pressure Hanoi to accept this deal soon if they were going to have any influence over their allies at all. Nixon told Kissinger that if Tho was still intransigent, “you should try our compromise [on the DMZ issue] as the final US concession.”98 Going into the final two days of the meetings, December 11 and 12, therefore, an agreement seemed imminent. This is what makes the events that followed so puzzling and controversial.

  Unexpected Escalation

  Reporting to Haig following his afternoon meeting with Tho on December 11, Kissinger characterized the day’s discussions as being composed “of equal parts of insolence, guile, and stalling by the North Vietnamese.” He concluded that it was still possible that the two sides would reach an agreement during the next day’s session, but “nothing in their behavior suggests any urgency and much in their manner suggests cock-sure insolence.” He then suggested that he return to Washington in the evening after the December 12 meeting. He would not call off the negotiations altogether, but rather would inform Tho that “the two sides are close enough to continue work through diplomatic channels.”99 Kissinger feared that Hanoi was simply stalling for time, thinking that Congress would soon cut off funding for the war or that the contradictions between Washington and Saigon would precipitate a total US withdrawal. In either case, he found Hanoi’s negotiating posture intolerable, even though either scenario seemed likely. Nixon agreed. That evening, he instructed Haig to cable Kissinger, telling him he should come home if he found Hanoi “unmanageably intransigent,” but Nixon agreed that his national security adviser should not break off the talks. He even suggested that if Kissinger thought there was significant progress in the negotiations on December 12, he should be prepared “to extend your stay” if a “day or two more labor will resolve the matter.”100 In typical Nixon fashion, he called Haig almost hourly with updated positions—some contrary to instructions just sent to Kissinger. Eventually, the president told Kissinger that if there was no progress on December 12, he was prepared to “move immediately with the around-the-clock bombing of the Hanoi area” and the reseeding of mines near Haiphong.101 Haig had long been a proponent of the sustained bombing of North Vietnam above the twentieth parallel, so he must have been relieved to relay Nixon’s message to his boss in Paris.

  At the same time, Tho was having problems with his superiors in the Politburo. According to Vietnamese sources, Xuan Thuy and Tho urged Hanoi to soften its position on the DMZ, realizing that if they continued to stick to the proposed vague language, the United States would certainly reject the entire agreement. “It is possible that the talks may be suspended for a period of time and the war will continue.” Tho further warned that the United States faced many obstacles to its plans to continue the war indefinitely, but it could certainly “make massive concentrated attacks for a time and then request the resumption of talks. If we refuse to meet with them the war will continue and the US will place the blame on us.”102 Tho recommended that he agree to tougher language on the DMZ and sign the proposal. “Right now the US needs a settlement,” Tho informed the Politburo, “but if we leave things too long we will miss this opportunity and then our pressure on them will have little effect, because everything has its limits.”103

  It is clear from the transcript of the December 12 meeting that the Politburo refused Tho’s recommendation. There would be no compromise on the DMZ, Tho informed Kissinger, who immediately rejected the language as written. Kissinger told Haig that Hanoi was simply “playing for time,” that the North Vietnamese diplomats could have “settled in three hours any time these past few days if they wanted to, but they have deliberately avoided this.” Kissinger felt that “we have no leverage with Hanoi or Saigon, and we are becoming prisoners of both sides’ internecine conflicts. Our task,” he concluded, “is to get some leverage on both of them.”104 Accordingly, Kissinger then recommended that the United States should “reseed the mines” and “take off all restrictions on bombing south of the 20th parallel.” He also recommended “a two or three day strike including B-52s north of the 20th parallel for early next week.” He then issued a strong warning to Haig, who was about to be promoted to a four-star general in the US Army: “It is essential that the military perform effectively for once in the above tasks.” Oddly, he concluded his cable to Haig by confirming that Hanoi has “reduced the issues to a point where a settlement can be reached with one exchange of telegrams. I do not think they will send this telegram, however, in the absence of strong pressures.”105 Kissinger’s response here is puzzling. On the one hand, he recognized that the two sides were close to an agreement, but on the other he believed that Hanoi would give up its last remaining objections only if the United States unleashed the wrath of its powerful military against North Vietnamese cities.

  But Kissinger had made up his mind. If he did not make progress on December 12, he would support a massive US military escalation in North Vietnam. The discussions did not resolve the remaining issue of the DMZ or the PRG, but he agreed to one final meeting on December 13. As that meeting began, he informed Tho “we will be separating tomorrow and afterwards be in touch by messages.” Incredibly, Kissinger then asked Tho when he would return to Hanoi. Tho replied that he would be back in his capital on December 18. “On the 18th you are back in Hanoi,” Kissinger confirmed. He then told Tho, “We will communicate with you after you are back in Hanoi, or you can communicate with us, and then we can decide whether we can settle it by messages or whether we should meet again.”106 The day Tho returned to Hanoi would see the beginning of some of the most intense bombing in the war, Operation Linebacker II. Apparently, Kissinger wanted to make sure that his negotiating counterpart was back in Hanoi to personally feel the full impact of the bombing.

  It now seems clear from recently released archival sources that Kissinger and much of his staff had concluded that Hanoi “has no intention to meet any of the basic requirements that we made clear to them at the end of October,” and that its tactics have been “clumsy, blatant, and fundamentally contemptuous of the United States.”107 Kissinger left Paris that afternoon for Washington and met with Nixon and Haig the next morning to explore US options after the impasse in Paris. If Hanoi did not respond soon and positively to the latest US amendments, Kissinger recommended that “we start bombing the bejeezus out of them within 48 hours of having put the negotiating record out.”108 After the bombing raids, he argued that the US then needed to simply “offer withdrawal in exchange for our prisoners,” and let the Vietnamese fight it out among themselves. “Let them settle their problems among each other,” he concluded. “The South is strong enough to defend itself.”109 Kissinger did not believe this, but it solved a problem for the United States.

  Nixon agreed that he had no choice but to resume the bombing of North Vietnam. “The North Vietnamese figure that they have us where the hair is short,” he wrote in his diary, they “are going to continue to squeeze us. That is why we had to take our strong action.”110 The president approved Operation Linebacker II on December 18, the day Tho was scheduled to arrive back in Hanoi from Paris, and for the next el
even days, US warplanes dropped approximately 40,000 tons of bombs. The huge American B-52 bombers, built primarily for carrying large nuclear payloads, flew over seven hundred sorties. In his memoirs, Nixon wrote that this was “the most difficult decision he had to make during the war,” but that it was also “clear-cut” and “necessary.”111 Before the air strikes began, he warned Admiral Moorer, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that he did not want “any more of this crap about the fact that we could not hit this target or that one. This is your chance to win this war, and if you don’t, I’ll hold you responsible.”112

  The bombing produced devastating results. Nearly two thousand civilians were killed and much of the Kham Thien district of Hanoi was destroyed. The bombs also hit targets in the heavily populated Bach Mai district, including the region’s largest hospital. The United States lost fifteen B-52s and eleven other aircraft, but the US raids had also destroyed Hanoi’s air defense cover. Intelligence reports suggested that “virtually all industrial capacity [of the DRV] was gone. Power generating plants and their transmitting grids were smashed.” Gas and oil storage dumps were also destroyed and most military vehicles were hit in their storage facilities. According to one report, 80 percent of North Vietnam’s electrical power was knocked out and 25 percent of the nation’s petroleum supplies were destroyed.113 Reports circulated in the US military command that North Vietnam was running dangerously low on Soviet-supplied surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) and therefore could only offer a limited defense of its major cities.