The Cold War

by Robert Cowley

  Kissinger held his briefing on December 16 and said what he had been told to say. He stressed the president's consistency, unflappability, firmness, patience, and farsightedness. He mentioned Nixon fourteen times (he had been criticized by Haldeman for referring to the president only three times in his October news conference).

  By this time the tension in the Nixon-Kissinger relationship was threatening to lead to an open break. Kissinger was unhappy with his boss because of his interference, and his back-and-forthing, on the negotiations. Nixon was furious with Kissinger for his “peace is at hand” statement, which had raised public expectations to a high level, expectations that were going to be dashed when the bombing began. Nixon also resented the way Kissinger had thrust himself onto center stage, his constant leaks to reporters, and the way the reporters responded by giving Kissinger credit for the huge margin of the election victory. Further, earlier in December, Time magazine had named Nixon and Kissinger “Men of the Year,” with their pictures on the cover; Kissinger correctly feared that Nixon resented having to share the honor.

  On December 17, Nixon wrote a letter to Thieu. Usually, the president signed drafts of letters to foreign heads of government prepared by Kissinger; in this case, he wrote the letter personally. Nixon had Haig fly to Saigon to handdeliver it. In the letter Nixon made a threat: Unless Thieu accepted the agreement, the United States would go it alone. “You must decide now whether you want me to seek a settlement with the enemy which serves U.S. interests alone.”

  Although Nixon himself would do anything possible to avoid a break, the threat was not meaningless, because, as Goldwater's statement indicated, Congress might carry it out regardless of the president's wishes. Thieu knew that, and he also knew how to read between the lines of Nixon's letter. After reading it, he told Haig it was obvious he was being asked to sign not a peace agreement but rather an agreement for continued American support.

  On December 18 the air force launched its B-52s and fighter-bombers against Hanoi. The orders were to avoid civilian casualties at all costs; for example, a missile-assembly plant manned by Russian technicians in the heart of Hanoi was off-limits, partly because of fear of Soviet casualties, partly to avoid near-misses that would devastate residential areas. Still, Linebacker II, as the operation was code-named, greatly damaged railroads, power plants, radio transmitters, and radar installations around Hanoi, as well as docks and shipyards in Haiphong.

  It was not Nixon but Johnson who had imposed the restrictions on targets; in fact, they frustrated Nixon. The day after the bombing began, he read a report about targets that had been avoided for fear of civilian casualties, and he called Admiral Moorer. “I don't want any more of this crap about the fact that we couldn't hit this target or that one,” Nixon said. “This is your chance to use military power effectively to win this war, and if you don't, I'll consider you responsible.” But the armed forces, concerned about their reputation and perhaps doubtful of the effectiveness of area bombing, continued the restrictions.

  Nevertheless, a French reporter in Hanoi referred to “carpet bombing,” a line repeated by Radio Hanoi. As a result, there was an immediate worldwide uproar and many expressions of moral revulsion. There had been no presidential explanation or announcement of any kind. People everywhere had taken Kissinger at his word, that only a few t's needed to be crossed and a few i's dotted and the negotiations would be wrapped up. The shock when the bombing was announced was even greater than that following the Cambodian incursion of 1970.

  The adverse congressional and editorial reaction was unprecedented. Senator William Saxbe, an Ohio Republican, said Nixon “appears to have left his senses.” Democratic Senate leader Mike Mansfield of Montana called it a “Stone Age tactic.” Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts said it was an “outrage.” In an editorial, The Washington Post charged that the bombing caused millions of Americans “to cringe in shame and to wonder at their President's very sanity.” James Reston, in The New York Times, called it “war by tantrum.”

  Nixon did have supporters, including Governors Nelson Rockefeller of New York and Ronald Reagan of California and Republican senators James Buckley of New York, Howard Baker of Tennessee, and Charles Percy of Illinois. John Connally, former governor of Texas and treasury secretary, called Nixon daily to encourage him and assure him that, regardless of what politicians and the media said, the people were behind him.

  That was probably an exaggeration, but not as gross as the exaggerations of Nixon's critics. They charged that he had ordered the most intensive bombing campaign in the history of warfare. That was nonsense. In comparison to the human costs at Dresden, Hamburg, Berlin, and Tokyo—not to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki—in World War II, the bombing of Hanoi during the Christmas season of 1972 was a minor operation. Under the severe targeting restrictions followed by the air force, civilian casualties were only around 1,500, and at least some of those were caused by SAM missiles falling back on the city after missing their targets. In World War II a bombing raid that killed fewer than two thousand German or Japanese civilians was not worth even a minor story in the newspapers, not to mention expressions of moral outrage from opinion leaders and prominent politicians. The Christmas bombing of Hanoi was not terror bombing, as the world had come to know terror bombing in the twentieth century.

  Nixon's private response was to personalize it and assign to his critics the lowest possible motives. In his diary he wrote that they “simply cannot bear the thought of this administration under my leadership bringing off the peace on an honorable basis which they have so long predicted would be impossible. The election was a terrible blow to them and this is their first opportunity to recover from the election and to strike back.”

  That was by no means the whole truth. The most basic cause for the moral revulsion was the nature of the war itself. Few in the United States had protested the firebomb raids of World War II, which set out deliberately to kill civilians. Why the difference three decades later, especially when the air force was doing its utmost to avoid killing civilians? Because from 1942 to 1945, the United States was fighting for its life against a foe who was not only pure evil but also powerful enough to threaten the entire world. In World War II there had been no ongoing negotiations with the Germans and Japanese, only a demand for their unconditional surrender. In 1942–45 the Americans were bombing in order to hasten that surrender.

  But in 1972 no one believed that the United States was fighting for its life, or that the NVA could conquer the world, or that there could be no end to the war until Hanoi surrendered; and few believed that more bombing would bring a quicker end to the war.

  Despite the protest, Nixon continued to send the B-52s and fighter-bombers, and the battle raged in the sky above Hanoi. If Hanoi was far from being the most heavily bombed city in history, it certainly was one of the best defended. The SAMs shot down six of the ninety B-52s that flew missions on December 20; the following day, two of thirty were destroyed. The air force could not long sustain such losses; on the other hand, the Soviets could not long continue to supply SAMs in such quantity to the North Vietnamese (they were shooting a hundred or more per day at the attackers).

  Nixon felt his resolve was being tested; he was determined to prevail. Kissinger, however, broke under the pressure of the protest and began leaking to reporters, especially Reston, word that he had opposed the bombing. This infuriated Nixon. He instructed his aide Charles Colson to monitor all Kissin-ger's telephone calls and contacts with the press. The president, according to Colson, “was raving and ranting about Henry double-talking.” Colson did as instructed and discovered that Kissinger was calling Reston and others, “planting self-serving stories at the same time he was recommending Nixon be tough on Vietnam.”

  When Haldeman confronted Kissinger, the national security adviser simply denied the facts. “I have never given a personal opinion different from the pres-ident's,” he claimed, and said he had not given an interview to Reston. Haldeman got him
to admit that he had called Reston on the telephone, just before Reston wrote a column stating that Kissinger had opposed the bombing and implying that Kissinger was the one moderate, sensible man among Nixon's advisers. Kissinger concluded his conversation with Haldeman by suggesting that it was time for the president to give him a vote of confidence: a letter from Nixon giving Kissinger backing and credit for the progress in the negotiations.

  Nixon went to his home in Key Biscayne, Florida, for Christmas. He ordered a thirty-six-hour halt in the bombing for the holiday. In his diary he complained he was “more and more” a lonely individual. “It is a question not of too many friends but really too few—one of the inevitable consequences of this position.” He received very few Christmas salutations, even from Republicans on Capitol Hill and members of his Cabinet. As a result, he told interviewer David Frost four years later, “it was the loneliest and saddest Christmas I can ever remember, much sadder and much more lonely than the one in the Pacific during the war.” He did make some telephone calls, including one to Ronald Reagan, who complained about CBS News coverage of the bombing and said that under World War II circumstances, the network would have been charged with treason.

  The day after Christmas, despite urgings from some of his aides and much of the media that he extend the Christmas Day truce, Nixon ordered the biggest bombing raid yet, 120 B-52s over Hanoi. Five were shot down, but that afternoon Nixon received a message from Hanoi. The Communists, who had evidently exhausted their supply of SAMs, proposed that the talks resume in Paris on January 9. Nixon replied that he wanted technical talks resumed on January 2, and he offered to stop the bombing of Hanoi if the Communists agreed. Hanoi did so.

  General Haig was furious. He did not want to stop the bombing when Hanoi was all but on its knees. He was incensed when he discovered that “every single adviser of the president … [was] calling the president daily, hourly, and telling him to terminate the bombing.” But even Haig realized that Nixon had little choice, because if he continued the bombing after the congressional session began on January 3, “there would have been legislative restrictions which would have been national suicide from the standpoint of ever negotiating a settlement.”

  Nixon decided to call off the bombing. On December 29 he announced that he had suspended offensive operations north of the 20th Parallel and that the Paris talks would resume.

  So who won the eleven-day battle? The North Vietnamese had shot down fifteen B-52s, and eleven fighter-bombers had gone down. Ninety-three American airmen were missing—thirty-one became known POWs. The enemy had fired 1,200 missiles and lost three MiG jets to achieve these results. Some 40,000 tons of bombs had fallen on Hanoi—40 kilotons, or the equivalent of two Hiroshima-size bombs. However, visitors to Hanoi soon after the battle ended, including Americans, all testify that although great destruction was done to military and industrial targets—such as the airfields, railroad network, and factories—residential areas were mostly untouched.

  There was no clear-cut winner. Thus the last American action in the Vietnam War was characteristic of all those that had come earlier: cursed by half measures. From 1964 to 1969, Johnson's actions, as described by Nixon, were always “too little, too late.” That had been true as well as Nixon's ultimatum in November 1969; of his Cambodian incursion of 1970; of his Laotian operation in 1971; of his May 8, 1972, air offensive; and now of his Christmas bombing. He had taken the heat for an all-out offensive without delivering one. It was not that he did not want to, but rather that it was overwhelmingly obvious the American political system would not allow him to do so.

  Nixon called Hanoi's willingness to resume the talks a “stunning capitulation,” one presumably brought about by the bombing. But it had been Saigon, not Hanoi, that had created the stalemate in the talks. In his message to Hanoi, Nixon had referred to the October agreements; going back to them represented an American, not a North Vietnamese, concession. Kissinger's reference to “normalization” of relations continued the hints he had been secretly making to Le Duc Tho that when peace came, the United States would aid in the reconstruction of North Vietnam, just as it had helped Germany and Japan after World War II.

  On December 30, Senator Henry Jackson, a Democrat from Washington, called Nixon to ask the president to go on television and explain that “we bombed to get them back to the table.” Nixon passed the message along to Kissinger with a note: “He is right—but my saying it publicly would seriously jeopardize our negotiations.”

  Nixon had another reason to hesitate over making the claim that Jackson wanted him to make. It would have been extremely difficult to get informed observers to believe that Nixon had bombed Hanoi in order to force North Vietnamese acceptance of terms they had already agreed to. It was much easier to believe that Nixon's real target was not Hanoi but Saigon. And as 1972 came to an end, there was no indication that Thieu was prepared to sign.

  On January 2, 1973, the House Democratic Caucus voted 154 to 75 to cut off all funds for Vietnam as soon as arrangements were complete for the withdrawal of American armed forces and the return of the POWs. On January 4 the Senate Democratic Caucus passed a similar resolution, 36 to 12.

  Nixon passed the pressure on to Thieu. Initially, he tried to do so through Anna Chennault, the widow of General Claire Chennault, whose influence on the right wing of the Republican Party was considerable. He had her friend John Mitchell, his former attorney general, ask her to use her influence with Thieu, but the “Dragon Lady,” as she was commonly called, refused. There was irony here. In 1968, Mitchell had persuaded Mrs. Chennault to intervene with Thieu to get him to refuse to help Johnson in his election-eve bid for peace, which, if successful, might have given Hubert Humphrey the presidency. Now Nixon wanted her to persuade Thieu to cooperate with the president and accept an unsatisfactory peace. She would not.

  Nixon again wrote directly to Thieu. The letter, dated January 5, was less threatening than previous ones and contained a more explicit promise: “Should you decide, as I trust you will, to go with us, you have my assurance of continued assistance in the post-settlement period and that we will respond with full force should the settlement be violated by North Vietnam.”

  Nixon was not in a position to give such a promise. Without congressional appropriations, he could not come to Saigon's aid.

  That same day he had a meeting with the leaders of both parties. The atmosphere was cold. He spoke briefly about Vietnam. He said he knew many of the men in the room disagreed with his policies but added that he was determined to persist.

  Nixon concluded, “In any event, you have indicated your own positions— some of you—which is in direct opposition. I understand that. I have the responsibility. Gentlemen, I will take responsibility if those negotiations fail. If they succeed, we all succeed.”

  On January 6, Nixon went to his retreat at Camp David, where he met with Kissinger, who was flying to Paris the next day. The president said that if Kissinger could get Le Duc Tho to go back to the October 8 agreement, “we should take it.” Kissinger demurred, but Nixon insisted. He did want Kissinger to get some wording changes so that “we can claim some improvement,” but the point was that the war had to end, on whatever terms, in this round of negotiations; otherwise the Ninety-third Congress would force the administration to end it on even worse terms.

  The president did agree that Kissinger could threaten the North Vietnamese with a resumption of the bombing of Hanoi if they did not cooperate, but Nixon then warned him that “as far as our internal planning is concerned, we cannot consider this to be a viable option.” As for Thieu, Nixon referred to Haig's report of his December visit to Saigon: Thieu was saying that “it is not a peace agreement that he is going to get but a commitment from the United States to continue to protect South Vietnam in the event such an agreement is broken.” Nixon said that was exactly right.

  January 9 was Nixon's sixtieth birthday. In an interview, he gave his formula for living: “Never slow down.” He admitted that he had man
y problems, “but boredom is the least of them.”

  He also wrote by hand a piece of self-analysis: “RN approaches his second inauguration with true peace of mind—because he knows that by his actions, often in the face of the most intense sort of criticism, what he is bringing to the world is a ‘peace of mind’—that is, a peace formed by the exercise of hard reason and calm deliberation, and durable because its foundation has been carefully laid.” Nixon instructed Haldeman to pass the piece along to the staff and called it “an excellent line for them to take” when talking to the press about the president.

  That afternoon Nixon got what he called “the best birthday present I have had in sixty years.” Kissinger cabled from Paris that there had been “a major breakthrough in the negotiations. In sum, we settled all the outstanding questions in the text of the agreement.”

  Le Duc Tho had accepted Kissinger's revised wording on the demilitarized zone. But it made no practical difference; the accord that had been reached was basically the same as in October. Kissinger aide John Negroponte was disappointed. He told friends, “We bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our concession.”

  Getting the Communists to accept the accord had never been the problem; the problem was Thieu, and that remained. Nixon was eager to have the situation resolved before Inauguration Day, January 20, but he worried that Thieu would refuse to cooperate.