Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam

by Robert K. Brigham

  Ending the War on Acceptable Terms

  On the eve of Nixon’s inauguration in 1969, Kissinger’s views on Vietnam were further clarified in a now-famous Foreign Affairs article. Niall Ferguson has called this essay “one of the most brilliant analyses of the American predicament in Vietnam that anyone has ever written.”68 Hyperbole aside, Kissinger’s insights are intriguing. He argued that the United States had a conceptual problem in Vietnam, which was its tendency “to apply traditional maxims of both strategy and nation-building to a situation which they did not fit.” The Johnson administration, aided by General William Westmoreland, who was in charge of all allied military operations as commander of the MACV, had lost sight of one of the “cardinal maxims of guerrilla warfare: The guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.”69 Westmoreland had pursued a conventional strategy of attrition against the insurgents, Kissinger argued, following “the classic doctrine that victory depended on a combination of control of territory and attrition of the opponent.” Westmoreland believed that defeating the NLF’s main forces “would cause the guerrillas to wither on the vine.”70 He spoke of a future crossover point in the war when Hanoi would find its substantial losses in support of the southern revolution unacceptable and would quit the fight.71 Westmoreland’s tactics were more complicated than Kissinger’s quick visit to Vietnam revealed, but this did not stop the Harvard professor from making quick judgments about what was needed to win in Southeast Asia.

  Westmoreland’s crossover point proved illusory. “Military successes,” Kissinger wrote in the Foreign Affairs article, “could not be translated into permanent political advantage.”72 He doubted that the Johnson administration understood the fundamental conception of the war from Hanoi’s point of view: “We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for psychological exhaustion.”73 Kissinger thought that the Communists had achieved their objectives while diminishing the American will to continue aiding South Vietnam.

  He also believed that the Johnson administration had severely mishandled the peace negotiations. Harking back to his 1965 trip, Kissinger again argued that Johnson did not understand that “our diplomacy and our strategy were conducted in isolation from each other.”74 As Kissinger had noted in his report for Lodge back in 1965, Johnson’s major mistake, an unforced, self-inflicted wound, was to announce that he would go anywhere and meet with anyone to discuss peace in Vietnam. The president initially made this announcement during an April 1965 speech at Johns Hopkins University, but he repeated it often. Kissinger believed that this gave a distinct advantage to Hanoi, allowing its leaders to determine where and when to engage in diplomacy. How could the United States enter into unconditional negotiations with Hanoi “unless we know what our objectives are, at least within broad limits?” Most important, Kissinger believed—as he’d first argued back in the August 1965 Harvard seminar—that Washington must know what is “desirable from our point of view” and “what is bearable.”75 The Johnson administration had no idea how the war was going to end because it had no idea what it wanted. Kissinger concluded that Nixon did not have to repeat these same mistakes.

  The way forward was to combine military pressure with careful diplomacy based on the national interest. Kissinger ruled out a unilateral withdrawal, noting:

  The commitment of 500,000 Americans has settled the issue of the importance of Vietnam. For what is involved now is confidence in American promises. However fashionable it is to ridicule the terms “credibility” or “prestige,” they are not empty phrases; other nations gear their actions to ours only if they can count on our steadiness. The collapse of the American effort in Vietnam would not mollify many critics; most of them would simply add the charge of unreliability to the accusation of bad judgment. Those whose safety or national goals depend on American commitments could only be dismayed.… Unilateral withdrawal, or a settlement which unintentionally amounts to the same thing, could therefore lead to the erosion of restraints, and to an even more dangerous international situation. No American policymaker can simply dismiss these dangers.76

  Remaining steadfast in support of the Saigon government did not mean that the war would go on forever. Kissinger maintained that the Communists could not win the war militarily and that therefore they would be forced to negotiate a mutual withdrawal from South Vietnam. He had no evidence to support these claims, but they certainly found fertile ground among Johnson’s critics. Kissinger argued that negotiations could be influenced by military strikes at key times and places that would make it more difficult for the Communists. If Washington and Hanoi could agree on a mutual troop withdrawal caused in part by the pain of these military strikes, it would then be up to the South Vietnamese themselves to figure out their own political future. Such an approach would also allow the United States to more closely coordinate its military operations with diplomacy. Kissinger felt strongly that separating military issues from political issues in negotiations could also help the United States avoid a direct confrontation with its South Vietnamese allies if differences of opinion cropped up during peace talks. This was his general framework for the negotiations he would soon lead secretly in Paris, where he met with high-ranking North Vietnamese officials for four years to hammer out an acceptable peace. These first principles never changed, but Kissinger would eventually surrender them one by one. In fact, his requirement that military and political be separated eventually granted Hanoi a free pass in South Vietnam after an American troop withdrawal.

  Of course, Hanoi thought that Kissinger’s proposals were naive and preposterous. Having fought the French for decades and having committed untold thousands to the southern revolution, Communist Party leaders were not about to separate military issues from political ones. For the Communists, the war had always been about the political future of Vietnam south of the seventeenth parallel. Reunification of the country under the socialist banner was the party’s first principle and this would not be negotiated away, no matter how elegantly Kissinger claimed that it could be. As Nhan Dan, the party’s daily newspaper, later declared, “The military and political aspects of the issue are inseparable because the underlying cause of the war is the American imposition of a stooge administration on the South Vietnamese people.”77 As one former foreign ministry official offered, “The military is the bell, but diplomacy is the sound of the bell.”78 Kissinger misread Hanoi’s intentions and capabilities perfectly.

  From his first days at the White House, however, Kissinger believed that it was possible to end the war on acceptable terms. This required a sophisticated strategy based on linkage and leverage. He had no doubt that he was the only one in the Nixon administration who could handle this difficult assignment. It is not entirely clear why Kissinger had such self-confidence in his ability to negotiate an end to this deadly conflict. He had no experience in serious negotiations before joining the White House. In fact, much of his approach in Vietnam was based on outdated theories about cold calculations of power. He did not understand how to negotiate peace because he ultimately thought he could force the enemy to bend its knee through military force alone.

  His first order of business along this torturous path was to develop a strategy for the Vietnam War in the midst of serious military and political constraints. To that end, in December 1968, before he actually took up his office in the White House, Kissinger hired the RAND Corporation, a think tank with strong ties to the Defense Department, to prepare a study outlining contingency options in Vietnam. This was more than an academic exercise. Kissinger had been a consultant at RAND and respected its work. He had heard that RAND was now “dovish” on the war, but he also knew that it would explore all options, including those he would outline in his Foreign Affairs essay. Fred Kiel led the RAND team and Daniel Ellsberg, a former marine, was its top analyst. Kissinger had some history with Ellsberg. Shortly after the 1968 election, he told a RAND seminar audience that he had “lear
ned more from Dan Ellsberg than anyone else in Vietnam.”79 Ellsberg did have considerable wartime experience, and he had just finished a detailed secret history of American involvement in Vietnam for the Pentagon. Two years later, he would leak this study to the New York Times, much to Nixon’s dismay.

  Ellsberg wrote the first draft of the RAND study and presented it to Kissinger and a few close associates on December 20, 1968. Kissinger wondered why there was no “win” option listed among the various potential policy choices. Ellsberg later recalled telling Kissinger, “I don’t believe there is a win option in Vietnam.”80 Kissinger also noted that there was no mention of coercive power, no threat option. Ellsberg agreed to revise the paper to include these two options. Just before the inauguration, he sent a new draft to Kissinger that described a full spectrum of possibilities. At one extreme was “military escalation aimed at negotiated victory.” Military options under this category could entail “air and ground operations in Cambodia,” “unrestricted bombing of North Vietnam including Hanoi,” and the mining of Haiphong harbor. Any combination of these options would be a purposeful escalation of the war. The paper argued that “the threat or onset of higher levels [of escalation] is likely to bring major concessions from DRV, perhaps sufficient for a satisfactory settlement.” The overall goal of this option was to “destroy the will and capability of North Vietnam to support the insurgency.”81 This option clearly appealed to Kissinger.

  At the other extreme was “unilateral withdrawal of all U.S. forces.”82 Kissinger quickly denounced the withdrawal option, claiming that it was not a viable choice. He did not want this idea presented to the president, so it was deleted from the final list of options discussed by the full NSC on January 25, 1969. The fallback extreme position was a “substantial reduction in U.S. presence while seeking a compromise settlement.”83 This option involved gaining approval from Saigon to slowly begin a phased reduction of US troops to about 100,000 by the end of 1971 while building up South Vietnamese military forces. There were other options in Ellsberg’s paper, but none of them was taken seriously.

  In addition to the four outcomes outlined in Ellsberg’s paper, the January 25 NSC session heard a range of military strategies. The Joint Chiefs wanted to build up the South Vietnamese armed forces without withdrawing US forces, but Laird and Nixon chafed at that idea because it would add significant costs to an already expensive war with no promise of success. The Chiefs countered that at its current pace, it would take two to three years to modernize the South Vietnamese forces to the point that it could cope with the Communist military threat. The modernization scheme was not intended “to build an RVNAF [Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces] capable of dealing with an external (North Vietnam) threat.”84 Kissinger worried that any “escalation of force might suggest to the other side that our staying power has been compressed.”85

  When the long NSC meeting ended, Nixon had not made a concrete decision on any of these options. By default, then, the two extreme options were now unofficial Nixon administration policy. No one present at the NSC meeting could have predicted that the administration would pursue military escalation and troop withdrawals simultaneously. Ellsberg later agreed that it was difficult to imagine trying to bomb Hanoi into submission while at the same time supporting a policy of unilateral US troop withdrawals.86 Just what was the United States supposed to negotiate at Paris? What leverage did it have? How could US negotiators demand a mutual withdrawal of US and North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnam if the United States was going to withdraw its troops anyway because of domestic political pressure? How would Hanoi respond to an escalation of the war? Would it put more military pressure on the Saigon government? Was the Saigon government ready to take over the war militarily? Answers to these questions remained elusive. This strategic confusion, caused in part by Nixon’s refusal to be pinned down on a specific policy option, was exacerbated by a confrontation between Kissinger and Defense Secretary Melvin Laird.

  Kissinger and Laird disagreed on some fundamental aspects of Vietnam policy, especially the redeployment of US forces. Their tactical disagreements turned into a personal rivalry that played out during key meetings of the NSC. In early March 1969, Laird presented Nixon with a concrete plan to unilaterally withdraw US forces from Vietnam. Citing political pressures at home, Laird had requested specific plans to turn the war over to Saigon. He also pressed General Creighton Abrams, the US forces commander, to draw up firm plans (with hard numbers and dates) for the withdrawal. Some military reports suggested that increased funding for the RVNAF, first implemented in late 1968, had paid off, resulting in considerable progress.87

  During an NSC meeting on March 28, 1969, General Andrew Goodpaster, who had served on Nixon’s transition team, declared that “the caliber of the force [South Vietnamese armed forces] has improved. There can be no question about their improvement.… We are, in fact, closer to de-Americanizing the war.”88 Goodpaster had been a trusted military officer during the Eisenhower years and Nixon had come to respect his opinion while serving as vice president. Nixon often responded to complex military programs with a great deal of skepticism, but he liked Goodpaster and this helped Laird sell the program of an American withdrawal.

  Nixon was encouraged by Goodpaster’s comments. “We need a plan,” the president declared. “We must get a sense of urgency in the training of the South Vietnamese. We need improvement in terms of supplies and training.”89 Just as Kissinger was about to intervene, Laird interrupted and told the president, “I agree, but not with your term ‘de-Americanizing.’ What we need is a term ‘Vietnamizing’ to put emphasis on the right issue.”90 Nixon agreed with the semantic and policy change, cutting Kissinger out of one of the most important strategic decisions of the war.

  “Vietnamization,” as Laird’s plan was unfortunately called, had been tossed about by the Johnson administration for years. Johnson had once famously said, “We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves.”91 Laird now thought that the Saigon government and its forces were capable of taking over more responsibility for the war, because the latest reports showed considerable progress on the military front.92 He wanted to reduce the combat role of US troops and begin the phased US withdrawal, while at the same time pressing ahead with new military supplies for South Vietnam. Even Abrams, who had been generally cool on Saigon’s progress, reported in March 1969 that the South Vietnamese performance had improved substantially. But Abrams thought “Vietnamization” should move forward only if three indicators were favorable: (1) progress in the pacification program designed to eliminate the top Communist cadres, (2) continued improvement in the South Vietnamese army, and (3) a reduction in the direct threat to the Saigon government from North Vietnam.

  Laird was well aware of Kissinger’s objections and Abrams’s conditions, but he pressed forward anyway with a plan to withdraw fifty to seventy thousand American troops in 1969 alone and the drafting of a long-range plan for the total withdrawal of US forces. Laird was no dove, but he had concluded long ago that a total military victory in Vietnam was unlikely at acceptable cost and risk and that a continued force presence there was doing more harm than good. He was especially critical of Westmoreland and Abrams for their handling of the South Vietnamese army. He thought the military responsibility was being transferred painfully slowly under Abrams and that this had created dependency in Saigon. President Thieu, of course, hated to see the US troops leave, but if a withdrawal had to happen, Thieu hoped it was joined by increased American aid for South Vietnam. Abrams and Thieu also thought that the US withdrawal would be accompanied by a withdrawal of all North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnam. Laird suffered no delusions that Kissinger was likely to win this point through negotiations, nor that the military could expel Communist forces from South Vietnam. He also understood that the American people would remain skeptical about claims of Saigon’s substantial military progress. The only way forward se
emed to be troop withdrawals and a substantial buildup of the South Vietnamese military, significantly above 1968 levels.

  Laird’s plan appealed to Nixon. He could satisfy the doves by withdrawing US forces, and at the same time, the hawks would be pleased that the US was actually increasing its aid to the South Vietnamese government. He also credited Laird’s “enthusiastic advocacy” of Vietnamization as the basis for his decision, further alienating his national security adviser.93 Kissinger was apoplectic. He argued that Vietnamization would ultimately weaken the US bargaining position in Paris, because a US withdrawal would convince Hanoi that the United States no longer cared about the political outcome in South Vietnam. How could Laird take away one of the most important levers that the United States had in Paris—the presence of a large number of American troops? As Kissinger put it in his memoirs, he had had “great hope for negotiations,” but the administration now risked “throwing away our position in a series of unreciprocated concessions. At home, the more we sought to placate the critics, the more we discouraged those who were willing to support a strategy for victory, but who could not understand continued sacrifice for something so elusive as honorable withdrawal.”94 Throughout the negotiation process, Kissinger complained that domestic political considerations were putting too many constraints on the US negotiating team in Paris. It was impossible to implement his broad strategic plans in the face of such obstacles.

  A frustrated Kissinger warned the president that Laird’s plan had many pitfalls. “Our main asset,” he wrote to Nixon in late March 1969, “is the presence of our troops in South Vietnam. Hanoi has no hope of attaining its objective of controlling the South unless it can get us to withdraw our forces.” He assured the president that the DRV could not force the United States to withdraw its forces “by military means.” The implication was clear: why would Nixon agree to Laird’s plan when he did not have to? There was no military pressure for the United States to withdraw. He also believed that the South Vietnamese forces would not be ready to take over the war for a number of years. Kissinger appealed to Nixon’s need to appear strong in light of domestic political pressure, stating, “Our liabilities are the domestic opposition in the United States and the continuing weak base of the Saigon government.”95 Nixon remained unconvinced by Kissinger’s appeals.