by Greg Grandin
Within days of Nixon’s January 20 inauguration, Kissinger asked the Pentagon to tell him what his bombing options were. He and Nixon wanted to start striking North Vietnam again but that would be hard to pull off given domestic support for Johnson’s bombing halt. The next best option was to bomb Cambodia. There were two stated reasons why Nixon and Kissinger decided to launch what turned out to be a four-year bombing campaign in that country. First, the peace talks that Nixon, with an assist from Kissinger, had derailed were going to start again, and the White House wanted a show of resolve that would force Hanoi to make the concessions it believed were needed in order to wind down US operations.
The second expressed reason for the bombing was to destroy the supply lines, depots, bases of North Vietnamese forces, and command center of the National Liberation Front (NLF, or the Vietcong, South Vietnam’s Communist insurgency), which was supposedly located in Cambodia, near its border with Vietnam. The United States had in fact started targeting Cambodia (and Laos) in 1965, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted to accelerate the air assault, especially after the early 1968 Tet Offensive revealed just how effective Hanoi was in running troops and arms into South Vietnam from Cambodia. Johnson, however, having escalated the war in 1965 refused to further escalate it in 1968. By then, he was trying to figure a way out.*
Nixon, too, wanted out. But he believed that if he were to have any chance of “Vietnamizing” the conflict—that is, withdrawing US troops while building up the South Vietnamese army—the logistical and communication infrastructure of North Vietnam and the NLF would have to be neutralized. Hanoi and the Vietcong had launched offensives in South Vietnam shortly following Nixon’s inauguration, and Nixon and Kissinger wanted to retaliate in a way that would both send a message and curtail their ability to conduct similar operations in the future.
“Hit them,” Kissinger told Nixon, ten days before the bombing started, and then ask North Vietnam “for private talks.”2
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Nixon and Kissinger’s bombing of Cambodia began on March 18, 1969, and tracks, almost perfectly, two domestic phenomena: the political ascent of Henry Kissinger and the quickening dissolution of America’s political consensus.*
When Kissinger entered the White House, he found adversaries everywhere, including career officers in the Pentagon, increasingly pessimistic experts entrenched in the foreign service bureaucracy, and rivals in his inner circle, both those needing to be kept close, such as the ambitious Alexander Haig, and those whom Kissinger would immediately betray, like Morton Halperin. And then there were the cabinet members Melvin Laird at Defense and William Rogers at State, who once they realized the threat of Kissinger’s pumped-up National Security Council, began to plot ways to undercut him.
The National Security Council, or NSC, was established in 1947 under Harry Truman as a consultative body. Much like the Council of Economic Advisers (established in 1946), which brokered ideas and suggestions regarding prices, employment, monetary policy, and so on, the NSC was meant to advise the president on all matters related to national security and expedite the cooperation of established offices and agencies like the State Department and the Pentagon. It wasn’t meant to be a decision-making, much less a decision-executing, body. But as the Cold War unfolded, the NSC under Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson accumulated more and more autonomy and power. Kissinger, though, presided over a qualitative leap forward. Under his leadership, the NSC represented the most advanced expression of the postwar imperial presidency (before it was shattered by Vietnam and Watergate and put back together along new lines, as we shall see in later chapters).
Kissinger’s NSC became the central hub of the foreign policy of the United States: the vast amount of information churned out by the bureaucracy—memos, country reports, embassy cables, option papers, and so on—now first passed through Kissinger’s office, where it was vetted, culled, and repackaged, before moving on to the Oval Office. “Henry’s Wonderful Machine,” as Marvin and Bernard Kalb described Kissinger’s command center, was nearly a platonic realization of the maxim: information is power. “Since Kissinger controlled the system, he controlled the decision-making process,” the Kalbs wrote. “Everyone reports to Kissinger and only Kissinger reports to the president.”3 His NSC became “the only forum for reviewing and making policy at the highest level and would concentrate control over the execution of policy almost exclusively in the White House.”4 But even this description underplays Kissinger’s reorganizational achievement. Under Nixon, Kissinger didn’t just exercise “control over the execution of policy”—he executed policy. In addition to planning and running the covert bombing of Cambodia, Kissinger organized a number of other clandestine operations, including arms deals (thus foreshadowing Iran-Contra), destabilization campaigns against foreign governments, and hush-hush diplomatic missions to Vietnam, Berlin, China, and the Soviet Union.
Nixon, however, was mercurial. He had approved Kissinger’s plan to reorganize the NSC in December 1968. But Kissinger was afraid the president might reverse himself. Nixon often shied away from direct confrontations with his staff, cabinet members, and other high officials, including those who wanted to rein Kissinger in. Kissinger was constantly on guard to defend his territory.
For Kissinger, beyond bringing (he hoped) Hanoi to heel, bombing Cambodia was both the means and end of this power struggle. “Kissinger’s primary source of power,” Nixon’s speechwriter, William Safire, said in his memoir of his time in the White House, “was in his tuning-fork relationship with the President on matters that mattered to them the most.”5 Cambodia was one of the matters that mattered most to Nixon, understood as the key both to gaining an advantage over North Vietnam and winning (as we will see in a later chapter) his reelection. Kissinger, according to Marvin and Bernard Kalb, “knew, almost instinctively, that he would be able to control the bureaucracy—and thus help reorder American diplomacy—only to the degree that he became indistinguishable from the President and his policies.”6
Rogers at State was opposed to the idea of escalating the war into Cambodia. Laird at the Pentagon was for it, but thought it needed to be done aboveboard, legally and publicly through the normal chain of command. This gave Kissinger an opening, letting him stake out a ne plus ultra position. He wanted to bomb. He wanted to bomb in a way that inflicted the most pain. And he wanted to bomb in absolute secrecy, completely off the books. He grasped the nettle, showing the White House, especially the tough-minded “Prussians” on Nixon’s staff, Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, and the militarists at the Pentagon that he was the “hawk of hawks.”
For Kissinger, the extreme secrecy in which the bombing of Cambodia and Laos was conducted proved personally useful, creating an atmosphere of distrust that allowed him to undercut his rivals. Within the NSC, Colonel Alexander Haig, who was Kissinger’s top military aide, competed with the civilian Morton Halperin for Kissinger’s favor. Kissinger leveraged this competition to his advantage in his own rivalry for Nixon’s attention: Nixon liked the hard-line Haig and distrusted Halperin, who came to represent the defeatism that, Nixon believed, derived from having too much intelligence and expertise. Knowing that support for Halperin would, in his words, “tag” him as a “softy,” Kissinger began, as Seymour Hersh writes, to “savage” him “behind his back.”7
By the fall of 1969, Halperin was gone and Kissinger would soon purge the NSC of anyone else Nixon didn’t like.* The causes of displeasure were diverse, but they nearly all included some variation of either being too soft, too pessimistic, too halfhearted, or too accurate about US prospects in Southeast Asia. As it became increasingly clear that the bombing of Cambodia would not achieve its stated effect—neither forcing concessions from the North Vietnamese nor seriously curtailing the operational ability of the enemy—the madman theory became a self-performance, meant to convince neither Hanoi nor Saigon but Washington that it had an option other than capitulation. According to the general in charge of providing logistical support to the c
ampaign, bombing Cambodia was the “one sacrosanct absolute” for those, like Nixon, who refused to admit that it would be impossible to end the war and save Saigon.8 Cambodia was a test of purity. Kissinger passed.
“It’s an order, it’s to be done,” Kissinger later told Haig, referring to yet another Nixon order to launch a massive bombing raid on Cambodia. “Anything that flies on anything that moves.”9
The bombing galvanized Kissinger. The first raid occurred on March 18. Halperin recalls being in conversation with Kissinger when Haig interrupted with a note indicating the sortie was a success. “Kissinger smiled.”10 Kissinger then brought the information to the Oval Office: “Historic day.… K really excited … he came beaming in with the report,” Haldeman wrote in his diary.11
Kissinger supervised every aspect of the bombing, overruling generals, rolling out maps, and picking his own targets for the bombing raids. Seymour Hersh writes that “when the military men presented a proposed bombing list, Kissinger would redesign the missions, shifting a dozen planes, perhaps, from one area to another, and altering the timing of the bombing runs.” Kissinger seemed to enjoy “playing the bombardier.”12 (The joy wasn’t limited to Cambodia: when the bombing of North Vietnam finally got started again, Kissinger, according to Woodward and Bernstein, “expressed enthusiasm at the size of the bomb craters”).13 “Not only was Henry carefully screening the raids,” one general remembers, “he was reading the raw intelligence.” That intelligence said that one target, Area 704, was home to “sizable concentrations” of Cambodian civilians.14 B-52s flew at least 247 bombing missions over Area 704. A Pentagon report, released in 1973, stated that “Henry A. Kissinger approved each of the 3,875 Cambodia bombing raids in 1969 and 1970 as well as the methods for keeping them out of the newspapers.”15
The bombing “did not bring psychological pressure to bear on negotiations, as hoped,” the historian Joan Hoff writes, and it “did not result in destruction of the [NLF’s] headquarters.”16 Worse than failing to achieve its two stated goals, the campaign took on an escalating logic of its own.
By March 1970, a year of bombing contributed to the shattering of Cambodia’s neutrality, leading to a military coup against Cambodia’s leader, Prince Sihanouk, which was probably sanctioned by Kissinger and Haig.* General Lon Nol deposed Sihanouk and joined the American war effort with enthusiasm. Supplied by Washington with T-28 counterinsurgent attack planes and working closely with Pentagon covert operators, the new regime in Phnom Penh visited apocalyptic devastation on the countryside—that is, in addition to what the United States was doing with its B-52 bombs. Lon Nol’s stepped-up counterinsurgency had the effect of spreading the insurgency, which now consisted, according to one US embassy staffer, of a broad “anti-fascist” alliance of “non-communists,” “Sihanoukists,” and “Red Khmers.”
Within just weeks of Lon Nol’s coup, the argument for escalating the war with a ground assault was hard to refute (at least in Washington). Kissinger, on April 22, 1970, made his case for an invasion to the president and the National Security Council: the spread of the Vietnam War into Cambodia meant the spread of the Vietcong’s “sanctuaries,” which in turn would “endanger the Vietnamization program, thereby threatening a slowdown in the withdrawal of American troops.” As one account, sympathetic to Kissinger, put it, “Kissinger’s presentation was meticulous; no one in the room questioned its facts or assumptions. A consensus seemed to emerge: in order to protect American lives in South Vietnam, the United States should take some sort of military action to prevent a Communist victory in Cambodia.”16 In order for de-escalation to proceed, escalation was required. And so Nixon ordered a ground invasion of Cambodia, which failed completely in its objective to “clean out” the insurgent refuges but did drive them deeper into the country and further polarize Cambodian society.
The American war’s spillover provoked the coup, the coup provoked the invasion, and, in turn, the coup and the invasion provoked, by accelerating the insurgency, escalated bombing. B-52s no longer aimed for just the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong, in a fringe of territory near Cambodia’s border with South Vietnam. For the next two years, the bombing raids spread to cover nearly all of Cambodia, targeting the fast-growing rebellion and devastating the country.
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We’ve now passed the fortieth anniversary of Nixon’s resignation because of his involvement in the Watergate burglary, which is remembered as nearly an exclusively domestic affair. But, more than any other policy, it was Cambodia—both the 1969–70 secret bombing (which created a siege mentality in the White House) and the spring 1970 invasion (which roused the antiwar movement, compelling Nixon to take steps to contain dissent)—that kicked off the chain of events leading to Nixon’s resignation. The crack-up of America’s domestic consensus had begun earlier, under Johnson. When Nixon entered the White House, he “inherited near-civil war conditions,” wrote Kissinger, referring to “establishment” distrust of the new president but offering a good description of the country’s general mood. The actions of Nixon and Kissinger took the crisis to a new level.17
If Nixon came into office feeling like he was in a civil war, the Kent and Jackson killings of students were his Fall of Vicksburg. “The expansion of the Indochina war into Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State and Jackson State,” the Senate investigation into Watergate concluded, led the White House to push for an illegal expansion of domestic surveillance—that is, the crimes that led to Nixon’s ouster. “Kent State marked a turning point for Nixon, a beginning of his downhill slide toward Watergate,” Haldeman wrote.
Dissent was felt within the NSC. When a member of his staff, William Watts, a former Rockefeller aide, refused to work up plans for the spring 1970 ground invasion of Cambodia (because it was a neutral nation), Kissinger unloaded: “Your views represent the cowardice of the Eastern establishment.” Watts lunged at Kissinger, but Kissinger ducked back behind his desk. Watts resigned. Kissinger told another dissenting staffer, Anthony Lake, that he wasn’t “manly enough.” Lake resigned too.18
The historian Arthur Schlesinger is a good bellwether of that Eastern establishment. Having served in the Kennedy administration, when he backed the decision to deepen US involvement in Southeast Asia, by 1970 he had turned into a moderate critic of the war. Here’s his diary entry for May 6, 1970, capturing the desperation of America’s political class and intellectual elites:
Last week Nixon invaded Cambodia. With the evident failure of his Vietnamization policy, he accepted a plan the Joint Chiefs have been hawking around Washington for years and which even Johnson, to his credit, refused. Then he traveled to the Pentagon and denounced protesting students as “bums.” When the President of the United States thus creates a national mood, I suppose one cannot be too much surprised if the National Guard of Ohio fails to exercise discrimination.… The reaction has been one of gloom and fury—a fury derived from a sense of impotence.… What do we tell [young people] now? To wait until 1973, by which time God knows how many Americans and Vietnamese, now alive, will be dead?19
It is important to note that Schlesinger’s despair concerns just the ground invasion of Cambodia. Like most everybody else, he didn’t yet know that Nixon and Kissinger had been secretly bombing that country for over a year (and would continue to bomb it for three more).
The “civil war” spiraled out of control. The “credibility gap” widened into a chasm. Dissent begat measures to counter dissent. The bombing of Cambodia turned the White House into a tinderbox of distrust. The ground invasion of Cambodia, announced to the public by Nixon on April 30, 1970, in a rambling, defiant television address, was its spark. Demonstrations spread across the country, with Washington, DC, turning into an “armed camp.” On May 4, Kent State. Then, on May 15, Jackson State. Paranoia fueled more paranoia. Crimes led to more crimes. Kissinger was involved in the early plotting, including wiretaps placed on close friends and associates, the surveillances, and the meetings where the nation’s highest offic
ers smeared antiwar dissidents as unhinged treasonous elites and discussed blowing up safes and running paramilitary “black bag” operations.
Still the bombing went on, until August 1973. By that time, Cambodia and Laos were destroyed and South Vietnam doomed. But Kissinger was rising. Even at this late date, he was using Cambodia in his ongoing rivalry with Secretary of State William Rogers, who never came around to thinking that the covert devastation of a neutral country was a good idea. Kissinger threatened to resign if Nixon didn’t oust Rogers and give him the Department of State. Nixon wavered. He had hoped to rid himself of Kissinger after his landslide November 1972 reelection. “He’s going back to Harvard,” he told a staffer.20
It was Alexander Haig who convinced Nixon to keep Kissinger and give him State. Despite his rivalry with Kissinger, years of planning an illegal and clandestine war had formed a close bond between the two men.* Rogers resigned on August 16, the day after the bombs finally stopped falling on Cambodia. Nixon announced Kissinger’s appointment as secretary of state a few days later.
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The bombing of Cambodia was illegal in its conception, deceitful in its implementation, and genocidal in its effect. It destroyed the fragile neutrality that Cambodia’s leaders had managed to maintain despite the war next door. It committed Washington to a program of escalation, including its 1970 invasion, which hastened the collapse of Cambodian society. And it achieved neither of its two stated objectives. Hanoi never budged on Kissinger’s most important demand—that it withdraw troops from South Vietnam—nor was its ability to conduct military operations in South Vietnam seriously damaged. Did Kissinger ever believe these objectives were realistic? Evidence suggests that he couldn’t have, since he had concluded by 1965 that the war was hopeless. The question is, in a way, beside the point, for there is an excess surrounding Kissinger’s obsession with Cambodia, an intensity that suggests that the bombing escaped its original rationale and took on a momentum, a “cosmic beat,” of its own.
