We Americans are a do-it-yourself people. During that period we failed to understand that we could not win the war for the South Vietnamese: that, in the final analysis, the South Vietnamese would have to win it for themselves. The United States bulled its way into Vietnam and tried to run the war our way instead of recognizing that our mission should have been to help the South Vietnamese build up their forces so that they could win the war.
When I was talking with an Asian leader before I became President, he graphically pointed out the weakness in what was then the American policy toward South Vietnam: “When you are trying to assist another nation in defending its freedom, U.S. policy should be to help them fight the war but not to fight it for them.” This was exactly where we had been going wrong in Vietnam. As South Vietnam’s Vice President Ky later said, “You captured our war.”
When I took office in 1969 it was obvious the American strategy in Vietnam needed drastic revision. My administration was committed to formulating a strategy that would end American involvement in the war and enable South Vietnam to win.
Our goals were to:
—Reverse the “Americanization” of the war that had occurred from 1965 to 1968 and concentrate instead on Vietnamization.
—Give more priority to pacification so that the South Vietnamese could be better able to extend their control over the countryside.
—Reduce the invasion threat by destroying enemy sanctuaries and supply lines in Cambodia and Laos.
—Withdraw the half million American troops from Vietnam in a way that would not bring about a collapse in the South.
—Negotiate a cease-fire and a peace treaty.
—Demonstrate our willingness and determination to stand by our ally if the peace agreement was violated by Hanoi, and assure South Vietnam that it would continue to receive our military aid as Hanoi did from its allies, the Soviet Union and, to a lesser extent, China.
En route to Vietnam for my first visit as President, I held a press conference in Guam on July 25, 1969, at which I enunciated what has become known as the Nixon Doctrine. At the heart of the Nixon Doctrine is the premise that countries threatened by communist aggression must take the primary responsibility for their own defense. This does not mean that U.S. forces have no military role; what it does mean is that threatened countries have to be willing to bear the primary burden of supplying the manpower. We were already putting the Nixon Doctrine into effect in Vietnam by concentrating on Vietnamization. This meant, as Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird put it, helping South Vietnam develop “a stronger administration, a stronger economy, stronger military forces and stronger police for internal security.”
The most important aspect of Vietnamization was the development of South Vietnam’s army into a strong, independent fighting force capable of holding its own against the communists—both the guerrilla forces and the main-force units from the north that were then waging conventional war.
In October 1969 I sent Sir Robert Thompson to Vietnam as my special adviser, with instructions to give me a candid, first-hand, independent evaluation of the situation. He reported that he was able to walk safely through many villages that had been under Vietcong control for years. He was so impressed with the progress that had been made that he thought we were in “a winning position” to conclude a just peace if we were willing to follow through with the efforts we were making.
After giving sharply increased emphasis to Vietnamization and pacification, the first order of military business was to hit at the enemy sanctuaries and supply lines in Laos and Cambodia.
Cambodia
After the 1962 Laos agreement, which in effect allowed North Vietnam continued use of sanctuaries in Laos, Cambodia’s Prince Sihanouk maneuvered to appease the North Vietnamese, who appeared to him to represent the side with the best chance of winning. In 1965 he broke relations with the United States and acquiesced in the establishment of North Vietnamese base areas in eastern Cambodia, from which over 100,000 North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops launched attacks on South Vietnamese and American troops for four years before I took office.
By January 1968 Sihanouk had grown deeply concerned about the number of Vietnamese in Cambodia, and he told presidential emissary Chester Bowles, “We don’t want any Vietnamese in Cambodia. . . . We will be very glad if you solve our problem. . . . I want you to force the Vietcong to leave Cambodia.”
In March 1969, in response to a major new offensive that the North Vietnamese had launched against our forces in South Vietnam, I ordered the bombing of enemy-occupied base areas in Cambodia. The bombing was not publicly announced because of our concern that if it were, Sihanouk would be forced to object to it. However, even after it was disclosed by leaks to the New York Times in April, Sihanouk did not object. On the contrary, in May 1969, two months after the bombing had started, he said, “Cambodia only protests against the destruction of the property and lives of Cambodians. . . . If there is a buffalo or any Cambodian killed, I will be informed immediately . . . (and) I will protest.”
In June 1969 Sihanouk said at a press conference that one of Cambodia’s northeast provinces was “practically North Vietnamese territory,” and the next month he invited me to visit Cambodia to mark the improvement of relations between our two countries. But Sihanouk’s tilt toward the United States did not satisfy Cambodian public opinion. The Cambodians strongly objected to North Vietnam’s violation of their sovereignty. In a series of rapidly moving events in March 1970 demonstrations against North Vietnamese occupation of Cambodian territory led to the sacking of the North Vietnamese and Vietcong embassies in Phnom Penh. Within a matter of days the North Vietnamese were given forty-eight hours’ notice to vacate the country. Tiring of Sihanouk’s careful balancing act, the Cambodian Parliament voted unanimously to depose him.
This was a brave move but a dangerous one. The North Vietnamese did not pack their bags and move out of Cambodia; instead they moved in—toward Phnom Penh. In 1978 the communist regime in Cambodia put out an official report that estimated that there were about 250,000 Vietnamese and communist forces in northeastern Cambodia when I ordered the move into that country, a number far greater than our own substantial estimates.
In early April the Vietnamese communist forces began their offensive, steadily expanding their base areas until by the end of that month they threatened to convert all of eastern Cambodia into one huge base area from which they could strike at both Phnom Penh and South Vietnam at will. To have acquiesced in this development would have been to sign a death warrant not only for the Cambodians but for the South Vietnamese as well. A communist-dominated Cambodia would have placed South Vietnam in an untenable military situation and would also have endangered the lives of thousands of U.S. servicemen.
Throughout April we showed restraint while the Vietnamese communist forces ran rampant through Cambodia. Our total military aid delivered to Cambodia consisted of 3,000 rifles provided covertly. The communists did not show similar restraint; they made it clear that their sole objective was domination of Cambodia.
Finally, on April 30 I announced our decision to counter the communist offensive by attacking North Vietnamese-occupied base areas in Cambodia bordering on South Vietnam. Our principal purpose was to undercut the North Vietnamese invasion of that country so that Vietnamization and plans for the withdrawal of American troops could continue in South Vietnam. A secondary purpose was to relieve the military pressure exerted on Cambodia by the North Vietnamese forces that were rapidly overrunning it. The North Vietnamese had been occupying parts of eastern Cambodia for over five years and returned there after we left; in contrast we limited our stay to two months and advanced only to a depth of twenty-one miles. It is obvious to any unbiased observer who the aggressor was. To contend, as many still do, that the United States and the South Vietnamese “invaded” Cambodia—in the sense of committing an aggressive act—is as absurd as it would be to charge that Eisenhower was committing aggression against France when he ordered the Norman
dy landings. As New York Times columnist William Safire observed in 1979:
The United States did not invade Cambodia in 1970; on the contrary, we know now that the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia and we struck their positions with some success. The U.S. did not brutalize Cambodia with our bombing; on the contrary, we now know that we bombed an aggressor—which, now that we are gone, today overruns that country.
In a letter to the New York Times recently a man whose only son was killed in Vietnam wrote:
Had the fathers of these young men known that this nation would countenance a sanctuary a scant 50 miles from Saigon, we would have counseled them against induction. That we did not is a burden we will always bear. A great percentage of our ground dead from 1965 to 1970 came from an enemy who with impunity was staged, trained and equipped in the Parrot’s Beak of Cambodia.
The perfidy . . . is anything but the U.S. bombing of the sanctuary itself. The perfidy lies in the fact that for more than four years the United States of America, without serious recorded concern, allowed her fighting men to be attacked, maimed and killed from a position which was itself privileged from either ground or air retaliation.
The joint operations by the U.S. Army and ARVN wiped out huge stores of North Vietnamese equipment—15 million rounds of ammunition (a full year’s supply), 14 million pounds of rice (four months’ supply), 23,000 weapons (enough for seventy-four full-strength North Vietnamese battalions), and much more.
Thanks to this and the following year’s Lam Son operation in Laos by the South Vietnamese forces, Hanoi was unable to stockpile enough supplies for a full-scale attack on South Vietnam until two years later—in 1972. Valuable time had been won with which to complete the task of Vietnamization. And even when the 1972 offensive came, it was weakest and easiest to contain from the direction of the sanctuaries in Cambodia, a testimony to the effectiveness of our measures.
• • •
Militarily, the operation in Cambodia was a huge success. At the time, however, we were mercilessly attacked at home for our efforts to help South Vietnam and Cambodia survive. Many people perceived the joint operations as an American expansion of the war, ignoring the North Vietnamese invasion that had preceded it and forced us to respond. Now that Cambodia has been overrun by two separate communist armies, with its population driven out of the cities on death marches and then systematically starved as a matter of policy, voices echoing those of ten years ago say that it is our fault, that the United States is to blame. Perhaps it is guilt that causes these people to ignore the obvious and blame the genocide the Cambodian and Vietnamese communists have indulged in on the limited military moves the American government made a decade ago.
In fact, if the U.S. had not attacked the North Vietnamese sanctuaries, the communists would have overrun Cambodia in 1970 rather than five years later, when the Congress refused to provide military aid to the anticommunist Lon Nol government. As Henry Kissinger has pointed out:
The genocidal horrors perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in 1975 (even before the boat people dramatized the brutality of Communist Vietnam) have obviously been profoundly disquieting to antiwar critics who for so long advocated that we abandon Indochina to its fate. But those whose pressures rigidly restricted American assistance to Cambodia, who cut off all American military action to help resist the Khmer Rouge, and who finally succeeded in throttling all aid to a still resisting country in 1975, cannot escape their responsibility by rewriting history.
American military actions taken in defense against totalitarian aggressors did not cause those aggressors to become totalitarian. If war had anything to do with the brutalization of the Khmer Rouge, it was war instigated and relentlessly pursued by the North Vietnamese.
The 1972 Invasion
The American and South Vietnamese operations in Cambodia and Laos in 1970 and 1971 successfully prevented major North Vietnamese and Vietcong offensives in South Vietnam during those years and made it possible for the United States to continue to withdraw its forces on schedule.
By the spring of 1972 Hanoi recognized that it could not conquer South Vietnam through guerrilla war tactics, even with the help of conventional units, and that it could not win the support of the South Vietnamese people. There was no credible way for Hanoi to claim any longer that the war in the South was a civil war between the Saigon government and the Vietcong, so North Vietnam dropped the façade of “civil war” and launched a full-scale conventional invasion of the South. Fourteen divisions and twenty-six independent regiments invaded the South. This left only one division and four independent regiments in Laos and no regular ground forces at all in North Vietnam.
As Sir Robert Thompson put it, “It was a sign of the times that this Korean-type communist invasion, which twenty years before would have prompted united Western action and ten years before a Kennedy crusade, immediately put in doubt American resolve and probably won the Wisconsin primary for Senator George McGovern.”
U.S. mining of Haiphong Harbor and the use of our air-power against targets in North Vietnam helped save the day, but the fighting on the ground was done exclusively by South Vietnamese forces. North Vietnam lost an estimated 130,000 killed and disabled. The invasion was a failure.
• • •
When I ordered the mining of Haiphong Harbor and the intensified bombing of North Vietnam on May 8, 1972, there was a great deal of speculation that this would lead to Soviet cancellation of the summit meeting scheduled for June. It did not. Brezhnev and his colleagues came to the support of their ally with words; they objected to our actions strenuously in public. But they went forward with the summit because they wanted and needed better relations with us, particularly in view of our Chinese initiative. Also, our actions in Vietnam had demonstrated not only that we had the power but also that we had the will to use it when our interests were threatened, and that fact made us worth talking to. We were able to go to the summit in a position of strength. If we had failed to take these actions, and as a result had gone to Moscow while Soviet-made tanks were rumbling through the streets of Hué and Saigon, we would have been in an intolerable position of weakness. The Soviet leaders would have assumed that if we could be pushed around in Vietnam, we could also be pushed around in Moscow.
The Chinese also publicly condemned our May 8 action. From an ideological standpoint they had no other choice. From the standpoint of their survival, however, they desperately needed a relationship with an America that was not only strong, but also determined and reliable.
In sum, our actions in 1972 strengthened rather than weakened our new relationship with the Soviets and the Chinese. They both could see that we had power, the will to use it, and the skill to use it effectively. This meant that we were worth talking to. We could be a reliable friend or a dangerous enemy. This did not mean that they could publicly abandon their communist allies in Hanoi. However, their support for Hanoi noticeably cooled, which increased the incentive for Hanoi’s leaders to make a peace agreement.
• • •
As a result of their decisive defeat in the 1972 offensive and their growing concern about the reliability of their Soviet and Chinese allies, the North Vietnamese finally began to negotiate seriously. But they were as stubborn at the conference table as they were on the battlefield. They wanted victory more than they wanted peace. Despite the overwhelming defeat of the peace-at-any-price candidate in the U.S. November elections, they continued to balk at our minimum terms.
On December 14 I made the decision to renew and increase the bombing of military targets in North Vietnam. The bombing began on December 18. It was a necessary step, and it proved to be the right decision. Although it was a very difficult choice, the realities of war, and not the wishful thinking of the ill-informed, demanded this action. The bombing broke the deadlock in negotiations. The North Vietnamese returned to the negotiating table, and on January 23, 1973, the long-awaited peace agreement was finally achieved.
After their decisive defeat on the ground
by South Vietnamese forces in the spring offensive and the destruction of their war-making capabilities by the December bombing, the North Vietnamese knew that militarily they were up against almost impossible odds. As the South Vietnamese economy continued to prosper far more than that of the North, Hanoi’s communist ideology had less and less appeal. Thieu’s Land to the Tiller program, for example, had reduced tenancy from 60 to 7 percent by 1973, a truly revolutionary development that undercut the communists’ argument that the government allied itself with the rich and oppressed the people. Also, the North Vietnamese knew that both the Soviets and the Chinese had a stake in their new relationship with us and might not be willing to endanger that relationship by providing military supplies in excess of those allowed by the Paris peace agreement of January 1973.
From Victory to Defeat
We had won the war militarily and politically in Vietnam. But defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory because we lost the war politically in the United States. The peace that was finally won in January 1973 could have been enforced and South Vietnam could be a free nation today. But in a spasm of shortsightedness and spite, the United States threw away what it had gained at such enormous cost.
After the disillusionment of the mid-1960s many Americans refused to believe that we could win in Vietnam. After years of fighting the war the wrong way and losing, many believed we could not fight it the right way and win. Egged on by the media and often by conscience-stricken “dissenters” who had been responsible for policy errors in the first place, American public opinion was poisoned. In the mid-sixties the “best and the brightest” told us that we could win in Vietnam overnight; that we could win the war on an assembly-line basis, as if entire nations operated like a Ford plant. Now the “best and the brightest” told us that there was no way we could win the war and that we should get out as soon as we could, abandoning South Vietnam to its fate. What they really meant was that since they could not win in Vietnam, they automatically assumed that nobody could. Arrogant even in defeat, with their guilt-ridden carping they poisoned an already disillusioned American public and frustrated all the military and political efforts we made in Vietnam to win the war. Now, shocked by the bloodbath in Cambodia and the tragic plight of the boat people fleeing from “liberated” South Vietnam, they frantically thrash about trying to find someone to blame. All they have to do is to look in the mirror.
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