Hanoi’s leaders shouted for joy at the news. The war was over, if not militarily then certainly politically. Ho Chi Minh’s prediction that the United States would not sustain the war had materialized. In an interview with a French journalist in 1968, Giap defined Tet as “the most tragic defeat for the Americans. The Tet offensive marked a turning point in this war . . . . It burst like a soap bubble the artificial optimism built up by the Pentagon . . . . Gone, and gone for good, is the hope of annihilating the Liberation forces . . . . Gone are the pacification projects. They would have to start all over from scratch.” On April 1, 1968, Lyndon Johnson stopped all Rolling Thunder raids north of the nineteenth parallel, and two days later the North Vietnamese accepted the invitation to discuss the war. They were not serious, of course, any more than they had been in 1954 when they offered to talk to the French about Dienbienphu. Diplomacy was simply another tool in bringing about the final expulsion of the United States from Indochina.
But Johnson’s announcements did not constitute a real change in strategy, just tactical adjustments. Along with Walt Rostow, William Westmoreland, and Earle Wheeler, he still wanted to achieve the original goal of establishing a stable, noncommunist government in Saigon. The thrashing Westmoreland had given the communists at Tet was proof of American military superiority. That ARVN had fought its Tet battles with courage and discipline was even more encouraging. The weak link in the strategy was politics at home, Johnson believed. Withdrawing from the presidential race, rejecting the requests for more troops, and limiting the bombing of North Vietnam, Johnson hoped, could buy political time for his basic policies to succeed.
William Westmoreland also had to go, another political victim of Tet and, like his predecessor General Paul Harkins, a fatality of the General-Blimp image he had self-destructively embraced. Johnson brought Westmoreland home in April 1968 and named him army chief of staff. Before he left Vietnam, Westmoreland said that the “war cannot be won in the classic sense, because of our national policy of not expanding the war . . . [but we] denied to the enemy a battlefield victory . . . and arrested the spread of communism.” He returned to Washington unreconstructed. Johnson replaced him with General Creighton (“Fighting Abe”) Abrams.
While limiting the air war over North Vietnam and preparing the way for negotiations in Paris, Johnson was doing everything possible to shore up the political and military situation in Saigon.
At first the center of attention was the A Shau Valley, actually a series of several valleys and mountains in Thua Thien Province. By 1968 the A Shau Valley had become one of the principal entry points into South Vietnam from the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the staging area for most enemy attacks in I Corps. More than 6,000 NVA troops were in the valley, and Westmoreland and Abrams worried that they were ready for a second offensive. Designating the attack on the A Shau Operation Delaware, Westmoreland had B-52s pound the valley for a week in mid-April before sending in elements of the 1st Cavalry (Airmobile) Division, the 101st Airborne Division, the 196th Light Infantry Brigade, and the ARVN 1st Division to attack the enemy troops, supply caches, and bunkers. The battle raged for three weeks, costing the United States more than sixty helicopters. But the campaign killed 850 North Vietnamese troops, compared to 139 Americans, drove them out of a region they had controlled for years, and captured an unprecedented number of weapons.
By the time Operation Delaware was winding down in the north, Tet II was under way farther south. With the peace talks just weeks away, enemy troops maneuvered for position. On May 5, 1968, the communists launched 119 attacks on provincial and district capitals throughout South Vietnam. They attacked Saigon and Tan Son Nhut air base and got two regiments into the northern suburbs of Saigon and back into Cholon. They also fired 122-mm rockets into Saigon for several days. The U.S. 25th Infantry Division fought back, and tactical air strikes eventually dislodged the enemy. When the fighting ended, 160,000 more civilians were homeless.
By that spring Khe Sanh was becoming an embarrassment. The Tet offensive had distracted American attention from the outpost, but Westmoreland would not back away from his prediction that it was the real communist objective. The marines repulsed NVA infantry assaults on March 16-17 and again on March 29, but Giap was already in the process of withdrawing his troops from Khe Sanh. American troops were there without an enemy to fight, and Creighton Abrams wanted to get them out of Khe Sanh for use in other battles. In Washington there was concern about the political fallout of withdrawing from Khe Sanh. Clark Clifford, sensing the mood of the nation, wondered about “all the hoopla last year, the talk of Dienbienphu, of Khe Sanh as the western anchor of American defenses in I Corps, the doorway to the Ho Chi Minh Trail. How’s it going to look when we pull out?” Vo Nguyen Giap understood the dilemma: “As long as they [the Americans] stayed in Khe Sanh to defend their prestige, they said Khe Sanh was important; when they abandoned Khe Sanh, they said Khe Sanh had never been important.” Still, Abrams did need the men. The marines and air cav troops left Khe Sanh on June 13, 1968. General Rathvan Tompkins described what was left of the place: “Khe Sanh was absolutely denuded. The trees were gone . . . everything was gone. Pockmarked and ruined and burnt . . . like the surface of the moon.”
After Tet, Washington stressed the importance of shifting responsibility to the South Vietnamese. ARVN went from 798,000 to 850,000 troops, and Creighton Abrams conducted increasing numbers of joint American–ARVN military operations. ARVN troops received crash training programs in the latest military technology and equipment. It was not an easy task, for the South Vietnamese did not mind having the United States doing the fighting. After a visit to South Vietnam in July 1968, a frustrated Clark Clifford complained that it was still largely an American war and that “the South Vietnamese leaders seemed content to have it that way.”
The pacification programs were also expanded. The Vietcong had suffered terribly during Tet and might be vulnerable to a political as well as military offensive. Robert Komer left South Vietnam later in 1968 to become ambassador to Turkey and was replaced by William E. Colby. Colby, born in St. Paul in 1920, had graduated from Princeton in 1940 and spent World War II in the Office of Strategic Services fighting with the French resistance. After the war he earned a law degree at Columbia and in 1950 joined the CIA. In 1959 he became CIA station chief in Saigon. After three years there he returned to Washington to head the CIA’s Far East Division. A devout Roman Catholic, Colby saw life as a struggle between good and evil. In the sixteenth century, as Neil Sheehan perceived him, he would have been perfect as a soldier for Christ in the Jesuit order. Now the embodiment of evil was communism, and Colby viewed himself as an anticommunist crusader, a civilian soldier fighting for a free world.
Colby’s Phoenix Program put South Vietnam, with the assistance of CORDS and the CIA, to eliminating the Vietcong leadership through arrest, torture, conversion, or assassination. The South Vietnamese implemented the program aggressively, but it was soon laced with corruption and political infighting. Some South Vietnamese politicians identified political enemies as Vietcong and sent Phoenix hit men after them. The pressure to identify Vietcong led to a quota system that incorrectly labeled many innocent people as the enemy. By 1972 as many as 20,000 people, many of them Vietcong, had been assassinated. Phoenix undoubtedly hurt the Vietcong, though not nearly so much as the military campaigns during Tet and afterwards.
As the Phoenix Program was going after the Vietcong infrastructure, Colby launched the Accelerated Pacification Campaign to win over the loyalties of the 1,200 villages controlled by the communists. Using local militia to provide security and differentiate between Vietcong and nonpolitical families, the program set about land reform and economic development—clearing roads, repairing bridges, building schools, and increasing rice production. The program lasted until early 1970. By that time the Accelerated Pacification Campaign had redistributed more than 2.5 million acres of land to peasants and armed over 500,000 militia to protect villages from Vietcong attack. Th
ose were substantial achievements, but they failed to counterbalance the destruction and dislocation that the killing machine was bringing to South Vietnamese peasants.
Back home the war was also taking its toll on American politics. It had destroyed Johnson, and was tearing up his party.
The heir to the Johnson wing of the party was Vice President Hubert Humphrey, born in South Dakota in 1911 but seasoned in the progressive Democratic politics of Minnesota. In 1944 he had become mayor of Minneapolis. He gained a national profile at the 1948 Democratic convention when he campaigned for a strong civil rights position in the party platform. Humphrey won a seat in the United States Senate in 1948 and was reelected in 1954 and 1960, firmly defining himself as a Democratic-party liberal, an advocate of civil rights, Medicare, and labor legislation. He made an unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960 and in 1964 accepted the vice presidential spot. The next four years were the worst in Humphrey’s life. Johnson was contemptuous of him, calling him a “little boy who cries too much.” Shortly after the inauguration in 1965, Winston Churchill died, and instead of sending Humphrey to the funeral, Johnson asked Chief Justice Earl Warren to go. Humphrey never forgot the insult. Humphrey worried about escalating the war, and in retaliation Johnson froze him out of policy-making discussions. Yet as a loyalist, he did not go public with his doubts, and when Johnson withdrew from the race, Humphrey stepped up.
From the beginning of the campaign for nomination, Humphrey was in trouble. For three years, despite private misgivings, he had publicly supported administration policies in Vietnam. If he continued to back the idea of military victory, he would not enjoy any support from insurgent Democrats ready to split the party in two. But if he made public his personal opposition to escalation, he risked Lyndon Johnson’s wrath. Johnson no longer had the power to designate his successor, but he could veto Humphrey. In any event, as the campaign developed Humphrey would come to be defined as the surrogate for the president who had taken pleasure in despising him.
Further roiling the Democratic party were peace negotiations with the Vietnamese communists, now at last under way. The talks began in Paris on May 13, 1968. W. Averell Harriman represented the United States. North Vietnam sent Xuan Thuy. One of the earliest anti-French Vietnamese nationalists, Thuy had spent years in French prisons. Between 1963 and 1965 he served as foreign minister of North Vietnam. Nguyen Thi Binh represented the National Liberation Front, the political arm of the Vietcong. She had been a strident student nationalist, imprisoned between 1951 and 1954. She joined the National Liberation Front in 1960 and was soon traveling the world promoting Vietcong goals, a political journey that had now taken her to Paris. South Vietnam sent Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky to head its delegation.
Saigon was in no mood to compromise. Any accommodation with the communists, the South Vietnamese leaders knew, would eventually send them to labor camps or worse. The United States approached the talks believing it held the advantage in Vietnam, while the North Vietnamese were just as certain that the Americans had suffered a strategic defeat. From the beginning Johnson insisted that Harriman take the hard line: Leave the Thieu-Ky government in place, deny representation for the National Liberation Front, implement mutual withdrawal of all North Vietnamese and American troops, and exchange prisoners of war. Xuan Thuy, just as adamantly, articulated the North Vietnamese position: Cease all bombing raids over North Vietnam, withdraw all American troops from South Vietnam, remove the Thieu-Ky government, and create a coalition government in Saigon that included the National Liberation Front.
The American delegation spent the first few weeks quartered in the plush fifth floor of the Crillon Hotel, but after a few meetings with Xuan Thuy, the delegates moved down to the cheaper first floor and brought their wives from Washington. It was going to be a long stay. Throughout 1968 the impasse found expression in a debate over the size and shape of the negotiating table. Ky refused to sit at the same table with Nguyen Thi Binh, especially if her place indicated equal status with him. Binh, of course, insisted on equal status. Harriman had to think of a table design that would satisfy both. The world press corps descended on Paris to report the talks but ended up taking pictures again and again of the table. Art Buchwald observed that once they finished the six-month debate over the shape of the table, the diplomats would have all of 1969 to decide on “butcher block, Formica, or wood finish.”
Harriman considered Nguyen Cao Ky an impossible, petulant hack who made the communists look like paragons. One member of the American delegation drew a laugh out of Harriman when he suggested that they solve the problem of the size and shape of the table by using “different size chairs, with the baby’s high chair reserved for Ky.” More than one observer noted that during debate about the table, 8,000 Americans died along with 50,000 North Vietnamese and perhaps another 50,000 South Vietnamese civilians. Throughout 1968 the Paris peace talks spent their energies in pointless procedural arguments, deepening the cynicism with which Americans viewed the war.
The presidential candidates running against the war made the most of the stalled negotiations.
Senator Robert Kennedy of Boston, Humphrey’s strongest opponent, was then in his mid-forties. Kennedy had graduated from Harvard and from the University of Virginia Law School. He masterminded his brother’s successful 1960 bid for the presidency and then became attorney general. Robert Kennedy was a man of intense passion and brutal honesty. Tact was not his strong suit. Joseph Kennedy, the patriarch of the family, who considered John too forgiving of other people, said of Bobby that “when he hates you, you stay hated.” After his brother’s assassination, Kennedy served as attorney general for a few more months, but his dislike for Lyndon Johnson was matched only by Johnson’s loathing for him. Much in agreement in their domestic-policy liberalism, they were nevertheless hopelessly divided in personality, the newly genteel Irish wealth of Massachusetts against the earthy poverty of the Hill Country. Kennedy left the Justice Department in 1964 and won a United States Senate seat from New York.
After the assassination, Robert Kennedy was a different man. Well before, he had lost his cockiness and became introspective, reading deeply in philosophy, tragedy, and religion. He questioned the existence of God in a world that killed the innocent. Moved by the writings of Albert Camus, he wrote in his notebook, “Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured, but we can reduce the number of tortured children.” By 1966 he was concluding that the war had gotten out of control, that the United States was seeking a military solution to a political problem. “I have tried in vain to alter our course in Vietnam before it further saps our spirit and our manpower, further raises the risks of a wider war, and further destroys the country and the people it was meant to save,” he said on March 26, 1968, in his announcement for the presidency. His campaign was an immediate success. The Kennedy mystique was a powerful force in 1968, as were Kennedy money and ties to the party machine. Eugene McCarthy commanded the respect of the antiwar movement, but its heart was with Kennedy. Kennedy defeated McCarthy in the California primary in June, but on the night of his victory he was assassinated in Los Angeles. His death put the nomination in the hands of Humphrey, who had gathered delegates from states where the party establishment rather than the voters made the selection. The Democrats then headed for their national convention in Chicago.
The Republican campaign was also fixing on the war. Nelson Rockefeller, heir to the Standard Oil fortune and governor of New York, hoped for the GOP nomination. But Republican conservatives hated him, not only for his moderate liberalism but for his clear distaste for the nomination of Barry Goldwater in the election of 1964. Governor George Romney of Michigan, a former president of American Motors, was another liberal Republican. Although GOP conservatives rejected many of Romney’s positions, they did not detest him as they did Rockefeller. But Romney made one devastating rhetorical slip. During the New Hampshire primary campaign in late February, he confessed
to having been “brainwashed” by MACV during a visit to Vietnam in which he was assured of the war’s progress. Politicians cannot speak of themselves with so naïve and simple an openness. Romney lost the New Hampshire primary. Out of the squabblings among the Republicans emerged Richard M. Nixon.
Between 1953 and 1961 Nixon had served as vice president under Dwight D. Eisenhower. After losing the 1960 presidential election to John F. Kennedy and suffering another loss in the 1962 California gubernatorial election, he practiced law and spoke on behalf of Republican candidates, building up a long list of political IOUs that he called in during the 1968 election. In the vaguest terms, Nixon criticized Johnson’s conduct of the war and promised that he could do better. On the eve of the New Hampshire primary he made his “pledge to [the voters] that new leadership will end the war and win the peace in the Pacific.” When Humphrey demanded that he spell out his peace plan, Nixon responded, “No one with this responsibility who is seeking office should give away any of his bargaining position in advance . . . . Under no circumstances should a man say what he would do next January.” The remark did not awaken the skepticism it came close to inviting. Nixon easily won the nomination.
Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 Page 28