Ronning accepted the assignment, which called upon him not to act as a mediator but to explore what was needed to bring the United States and North Vietnam to the negotiating table. In preparation, Ronning flew to Washington to consult with Averell Harriman, ambassador-at-large, with whom he had collaborated when they headed their respective delegations to the Geneva Conference on Laos. Harriman gave his enthusiastic support to the mission and obtained the sanction of President Johnson. Ronning returned to Ottawa with State Department agreement to the mission following a meeting with William Bundy, the assistant secretary of state for Asian affairs. Bundy was to become the key American player in what was to become one of the most controversial exercises in the diplomacy affecting the Vietnam War.
Prior to Johnson’s approval of the mission, several State Department officers had raised objections to the selection of Ronning as an envoy, citing his advocacy of Western diplomatic recognition of the Peking government and its admission to the United Nations. Pearson was asked for assurances that Ronning would not during his mission dabble in the politics of the China recognition issue. In an odd and rather ridiculous twist, there was a reference to me in these diplomatic exchanges. Knowing that Ronning would pass through Hong Kong en route to Hanoi, the American consul general there, Edward E. Rice, cabled Secretary of State Dean Rusk: “We shall do what we can helpfully to influence Ronning’s thinking if opportunity presents itself. Incidentally, an American in Hong Kong who will have full opportunity to affect his thinking is NY Times correspondent Topping, who is his son-in-law.” I came upon this reference in 1971 while perusing the Pentagon Papers prior to their publication by the Times.
When Ronning arrived in Hong Kong in February 1966, he stayed in our apartment in Repulse Bay Towers. No one, lastly me, intruded on Ronning during his passage through Hong Kong with advice as to how he might conduct what had been staged as a top-secret mission. I learned only that Ronning had business in Southeast Asia with the International Control Commission (ICC), of which Canada was a member with India and Poland. The ICC was created in 1954 to supervise the agreements reached at the Geneva Conferences on Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. There was renewed interest in the ICC because several governments were advocating the reconvening of the Geneva Conference as a venue for Vietnam peace negotiations. While awaiting a signal from Hanoi that he would be welcome, Ronning sailed with us on our junk, the Valhalla, on the tranquil waters of Repulse Bay.
In Hanoi, Victor Moore, the Canadian representative on the ICC, obtained quick approval for the Ronning visit. Having suffered heavy casualties and bomb damage to their infrastructure, the North Vietnamese apparently were ready to talk peace. Traveling via Saigon and the Cambodian and Laotian capitals, Ronning arrived in Hanoi on March 7, carrying a letter to Ho Chi Minh from Lester Pearson urging peace talks. He immediately plunged into an exhaustive round of talks with government and Communist Party officials. During the initial contacts Ronning became progressively discouraged because the North Vietnamese adamantly adhered to the Four Points, which had been laid down the previous April by Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, as the preconditions for the opening of peace talks. These stipulated: The United States must withdraw all troops and military equipment, dismantle its bases, and cancel its military alliance with South Vietnam; the internal affairs of the Vietnamese people must be settled in accordance with the program of the National Liberation Front (political wing of the Vietcong); peaceful reunification of Vietnam during which the two “temporarily divided” zones would not enter into any foreign military alliance or host foreign troops or bases. The unification problems were to be settled by the Vietnamese people in both zones without any foreign interference. Previous overtures by the United States for negotiations had been rebuffed because Washington would not yield to the demand that the Four Points be accepted as a basis for the opening of talks.
At the onset of the discussions in Hanoi, Ronning was given Ho Chi Minh’s regards and apologies for not participating. The seventy-five-year-old leader said he was preoccupied with meetings of the Politburo, but it was clear, Ronning felt, he was overseeing the talks. Ho was quoted as favoring a return to the terms of the agreement reached at the Geneva Conference which provided for elections and reunification. For Ronning, the breakthrough came near the end of his four-day stay when he met with Prime Minister Pham Van Dong. The Canadian told Dong that his purpose was to obtain clarification of two of the preconditions for negotiations in his Four Points: withdrawal of all troops and acceptance of the program of the National Liberation Front in the South. Dong reiterated his stand on the Four Points but then said that developments since January had opened the way for a start on talks. However, he insisted on the precondition that “the United States unconditionally stop all air raids against North Vietnam.” Ronning, startled by this unexpected turn, asked Dong if he was implying that the United States need only stop the bombing for informal talks to begin. As Ronning told me and later elaborated in his book A Memoir of China in Revolution, which he wrote in part while staying at my home, the following exchanges then took place:
Dong: If the United States Government declares that it will stop all military action and attacks against the Democratic Republic for good, and unconditionally, we will talk.
Ronning: Are you asking for cessation of military action against the DRV and if you get it, you are prepared to meet the United States to prepare the ground for ultimate negotiations?
Dong: To that sentence, I must add that an official statement must be made that [the bombing of North Vietnam] is unconditionally and definitely stopped.
Ronning: Are you limiting what you say to the territory of North Vietnam?
Dong: Yes.
Ronning: This has nothing to do with United States action in the South?
Dong: I have not mentioned it. Should I?
Ronning: Yes.
Dong: Our ultimate objective is United States withdrawal.
Ronning: Mr. Prime Minister, are you prepared to negotiate that issue?
Dong: All of the Four Points. The body with the authority is the National Liberation Front—two belligerents.
Ronning: Is that a precondition to talks, or can that be left for negotiations? Is there some possibility of starting informal talks between you and Washington if the United States accepts your proposal, leaving all issues with respect to South Vietnam for later negotiations—perhaps at a conference, so that talks leading to a ceasefire may start?
Dong: Our position embraces many aspects, but in brief, we can say that informal talks and a cessation of attacks against North Vietnam go together.
Ronning: To clarify your last point, your one requirement is an American declaration which definitely and unconditionally concerns cessation of action solely against North Vietnam?
Dong: Correct.
Ronning: We shall be glad to carry to the United States the proposal you make and your position.
Elated, Ronning returned to Ottawa thinking he was conveying a breakthrough in the diplomatic impasse, since the North Vietnamese had modified their position on the Four Points. Pearson and Paul Martin, his foreign secretary, were hopeful that Pham Van Dong’s proposal would lead to peace talks. In Washington Ronning laid out the details of his meeting with Pham Van Dong to Bundy. The secretary treated the Hanoi proposal with suspicion. He saw it as a maneuver to obtain a halt to the bombing and felt that the preliminary talks which would follow would see a return by the North Vietnamese to insistence on adherence to the Four Points. But he said the State Department would give consideration to the matter. On Ronning’s return to Ottawa, the Canadians waited more than six weeks for a reply from Bundy. After being pressed by Martin in an urgent telephone call, Bundy notified the Canadian foreign secretary that a decision had been reached. Bundy told Martin that the bombing would be halted only if Hanoi reciprocated by terminating its assistance to the National Liberation Front. Specifically, the United States was asking that North Vietnam desist from infiltrating military supplies
and fighters to the Vietcong. In formal terms, the State Department held to the position that the United States was not willing to stop the bombing as a “non-reciprocal precondition to the holding of discussions.”
In early June, Ronning left for Hong Kong en route to Hanoi carrying the American reply. He was in despair, convinced that the North Vietnamese would reject the American counterproposal, but committed to salvaging what he could from his mission. The Canadians were not aware at the time that the Americans intended to commence bombing the oil depots near Hanoi and Haiphong on June 10. Nor were they aware, as Ronning embarked on his return journey to Hanoi, that Secretary of State Dean Rusk had sent a message to McNamara raising concerns about the timing of the bombing plan.
“I am deeply disturbed by the general international revulsion and perhaps a great deal at home, if it becomes known that we took an action which sabotaged the Ronning mission to which we had given our agreement,” Rusk said. “I recognize the agony of this problem for all concerned. We could make arrangements to get an immediate report from Ronning. If he has a negative report, as we expect, that provides a firmer base for the action we contemplate and would make a difference to people like [British prime minister] Wilson and Pearson. If, on the other hand, he learns that there is any serious breakthrough toward peace, the president would surely want to know of that before an action which would knock such a possibility off the tracks. I strongly recommend therefore against the ninth or tenth. I regret this because of my maximum desire to support you and your colleagues in your tough job.” Rusk sent a similar message to Johnson. The president agreed to postpone the air strikes.
When Ronning was passing through Hong Kong on his return visit to Hanoi, he confided to Audrey that he was once more en route to the North Vietnamese capital. He wanted Audrey to know of his movements, since she had managed to obtain a China visa and would be in Peking working as a correspondent for the New York Times when he was in Hanoi. I was not privy at the time to any of this. But by chance I had picked up Ronning’s trail in Vientiane, where I was covering the Laotian civil war between the American-backed Souvanna Phouma government and the Communist Pathet Lao. Ronning had boarded a plane of the International Control Mission for Hanoi on June 14. Tipped that he would be returning via Bangkok, I flew to the Thai capital and left a message for him at the Canadian Embassy. When Ronning arrived in Bangkok, he agreed to a late evening meeting in the balcony garden restaurant of the Oriental Hotel. At a secluded corner table, over the next two hours, I was told for the first time of the Smallbridge negotiations.
On his return to Hanoi, conveying the American reply to Prime Minister Pham Van Dong’s proposal, Ronning met with Foreign Minister Nguyen Duy Trinh. The North Vietnamese evidently were anticipating a negative response to their proposal. During the long delay since Ronning’s March visit, there had been leaks in Washington and an escalation of American military operations. When Ronning laid out the American terms for a halt to the bombing—essentially cessation of North Vietnamese assistance to the Vietcong in the South—Nguyen Duy Trinh rejected them summarily. He stood by the earlier proposal made in March that preliminary talks could take place if there was an unconditional end to the bombing of North Vietnam. But he did agree to Ronning’s request that the Canadian channel be kept open for the possibility of further exchanges.
On the morning following our Bangkok conversation, Ronning left for Canada and I for Hong Kong. On the plane I wrote under a Hong Kong dateline the story of Hanoi’s rejection of the American terms, attributing the report to unnamed sources. It was the lead front-page story on June 21 in the Times, even as Bundy was landing in Ottawa to hear Ronning’s report. Bundy met with Ronning that night for seven hours in an Ottawa hotel. At the conclusion of the meeting, Bundy quickly messaged Rusk saying that in his view Ronning had found no opening or flexibility in the North Vietnamese position.
It was the signal that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were waiting for. The next day, the Joint Chiefs issued an executive order authorizing strikes on oil depots in the Hanoi-Haiphong area. It was to be a massive strike, but pilots were instructed: “At Haiphong avoid damage to merchant shipping. No attacks authorized on craft unless U.S. aircraft fired on, and then only if clearly North Vietnamese.” Russian ships were making use of the harbor, and there was concern that one of them might be hit. Everything feasible was to be done to minimize civilian casualties. Bad weather delayed the air strikes. When they were finally carried out on June 29, the Seventh Air Force headquarters labeled them “the most significant, the most important strikes of the war.” But the bombing effectively shut down the Canadian diplomatic channel to Hanoi.
Two years after Ronning returned from Hanoi with the North Vietnamese proposal for the opening of negotiations, President Johnson in effect took a first step toward accepting the terms of that proposal, which he had rejected previously. The bombing by that time had failed to break the will of the North Vietnamese, and American casualties were mounting. On March 31, 1968, Johnson announced that he had halted all air and naval bombardment north of the twentieth parallel. In the same speech he revealed that he would not run for reelection. Hanoi responded positively to the partial bombing halt, and preliminary talks opened in Paris. Formal negotiations commenced in early November after Johnson on November 1 ordered the cessation of all bombardment of North Vietnam.
In the two-year interval between the time that Ronning returned from Hanoi with the conditional offer to negotiate and Johnson’s acceptance of similar terms which in effect meant cessation of the bombing, tens of thousands of Vietnamese and American lives had been lost.
After the death of Chester Ronning in 1984 at the age of ninety, Audrey and I happened to meet Bill Bundy at a reception in New York. He had by then retired from government and was serving on the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations. He told us he had felt guilty for a long time about how he had dealt with Ronning and handled his report when he met with him that June night in Ottawa. He said he should have given more weight to the proposal that Ronning had brought back from Hanoi. He had wanted to apologize to Ronning, but since that was not possible, he was glad that he could at least express his regrets to Audrey.
In his book In Retrospect, published in 1995, Robert McNamara discussed the Ronning mission:
The Canadians considered Pham Van Dong’s message a bona fide peace move; to them, it seemed an advance beyond Hanoi’s earlier insistence on U.S. acceptance of the Four Points before negotiations. Many in Washington did not agree. They distrusted Pearson’s and Ronning’s prior open criticism of Washington’s Vietnam policy and felt Pham Van Dong’s words contained deliberate and clever ambiguities—for example, the use of the word talks rather than negotiations seemed to imply only preliminary contacts, not substantive discussions. The president, moreover, hesitated to stop the bombing again without some reciprocal concession from Hanoi. Thus, the Johnson administration refused to authorize another pause. In retrospect, we were mistaken in not having Ronning at least probe the meaning of Pham Van Dong’s words more deeply.
Reviewing the years of bombing which continued intermittently into the Nixon years even as inconclusive peace approaches were being made to North Vietnam, McNamara commented in his book: “Of one thing I am certain: we failed miserably to integrate and coordinate our diplomatic and military actions as we searched for an end to the war.”
The Senate study in October 1972 on the bombing of North Vietnam based on the revelations in the Pentagon Papers concluded: “This study calls into serious question the efficacy of strategic and interdiction bombing against a highly motivated guerrilla enemy in an underdeveloped country. Bombing appears capable of raising the costs of war to an enemy in such a situation, but it cannot be depended on to weaken his will or to substantially reduce his activity by interdicting his supplies. Compared to the damage to U.S. prestige and the internal division created by the bombing policy, its meager gains must be seriously questioned.”
It wa
s a statement that also had relevance to the record of failed bombing policies in Cambodia during the Nixon administration and the limitations as well as adverse effects encountered by the George W. Bush administration in the employment of air power in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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CAMBODIA
From the 1950s the densely forested border regions of Cambodia were intermittently utilized by the Vietcong, and later by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), as infiltration routes and bases for supporting operations in South Vietnam. To impede the Communists, the United States alternatively employed diplomacy, bombing, and covert incursions until finally, in frustration at failure to seal the border, President Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia in April 1970. American bombing incurred deep resentment among the Cambodian people. This became a major factor in the military victory in 1975 and ascendancy of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime, whose genocidal purges would take the lives of about 1.57 million people.
Prince Norodom Sihanouk in the preceding twenty-five years was the central political figure in the struggle for dominance in Cambodia. The prince alternately juggled and played off the contending ambitions of the French, Americans, Vietnamese, Russians, and Chinese while striving to keep his country intact, neutral, and free of war. In the end he failed and languished in Peking in exile.
On the Front Lines of the Cold War Page 32