Nothing could have been further from the truth. Although Nixon did not make the official announcement of his plans to withdraw American troops from Vietnam until April 1, 1969, Hanoi understood much earlier that this was the policy that he would be forced to support. DRV negotiators hoped to use the Paris talks to speed up the withdrawal process.131 They understood that Nixon would need to wind down the war through troop withdrawals if he wanted to win reelection. Therefore, it was not the bombing of Cambodia but, rather, the withdrawal of American troops that rekindled Hanoi’s desire to meet with Nixon’s representatives in Paris. Party leaders concluded that if the DRV endured the American bombing campaigns, they could destroy Washington’s staying power. Ultimately, DRV leaders would concede nothing short of a unilateral American withdrawal. This negotiating position should have been clear to Kissinger in 1969. He later admitted that he had underestimated Hanoi’s willingness to accept enormous sacrifices to reach its geopolitical goals.
For all his machinations to coordinate military strikes with diplomacy, Kissinger never fully understood that Nixon’s domestic political needs were also a major driving force behind US negotiations. Nixon had to agree to Laird’s Vietnamization plan because there was no path to reelection without following through on his campaign promise to end the war. He thought that bringing troops home could actually bolster public support for continuing the war by sending massive arms shipments to South Vietnam and using US air power to cripple Hanoi’s military capabilities. The escalation of the war in neighboring Cambodia also had a strategic imperative: to gain time for South Vietnam to build its armed forces in preparation for battle against North Vietnam.
Kissinger felt no moral qualms about escalating the war. The fact that the bombing did not destroy COSVN, force the PAVN from Cambodia, or lead Hanoi to the bargaining table seemed not to faze him. Despite all evidence to the contrary, he and the president believed that the bombing had worked. Nixon was so pleased with the news that the North Vietnamese wanted to negotiate in Paris that he allowed Kissinger to take over the peace talks completely. This was a mistake for the usually politically astute Nixon. It gave his national security adviser what he wanted most, consolidation of the war decision making in his office, but it led to some imprudent choices. By the end of Nixon’s first six months in office, Kissinger had perfectly melded strategic imperatives with personal politics. He had taken a risk by supporting the secret bombings, but in his mind the attacks had succeeded. Now Hanoi had agreed to meet secretly in Paris and Kissinger was in complete control of those negotiations.
CHAPTER TWO
THE LONE COWBOY, 1969
“THE MAIN POINT STEMS from the fact that I’ve always acted alone,” Kissinger told Italian journalist and war correspondent Oriana Fallaci, in a revealing 1972 interview. “Americans admire that enormously. Americans admire the cowboy leading the caravan alone astride his horse, the cowboy entering a village or city alone on his horse. Without even a pistol, maybe, because he doesn’t go in for shooting. He acts, that’s all: aiming at the right spot at the right time.”1 Smelling a huge story, Fallaci pushed Kissinger: “You see yourself as a kind of Henry Fonda, unarmed and ready to fight with his bare fists for honest ideals. Solitary, brave.” He replied, “Not necessarily brave. This cowboy doesn’t need courage. It is enough that he be alone, that he show others how he enters the village alone and does everything on his own.” Kissinger concluded this interview, which he later described as one of his biggest public mistakes, by stating, “I want to be where the action is.”2
In much of his academic writing, Kissinger argues that men of action, like Austrian diplomat Klemens von Metternich, are not bound by convention or even hard facts. He had long admired Metternich, whose cool calculations had tied Europe together and raised Austria’s fortunes following Napoleon’s defeat in the early nineteenth century. Metternich was a man of action, not prone to sentimentality or morality in foreign affairs. Like Metternich, men of action were driven to ignore the restraints of reality and the advice of experts so as to lead effectively. Kissinger took a dark view of humanity, and this led him to see international politics as characterized by an unending collision of interests: you settled one problem only to have another surface. He was particularly drawn to the role of history, contingency, and uncertainty in diplomacy. But he also believed that leaders needed to act to control these forces; too much information can weaken resolve, as he claimed had been the case with Kennedy and Johnson in Vietnam. Kissinger was a careful reader of Spinoza and Kant, and he learned from both that history is tragedy, but that men of free will can bend history toward a new reality. He also believed that each generation had the freedom to decide for itself what, if anything, from the past “is analogous” to the present.3 History teaches by analogy, not by a strict reconstruction of cause and effect, he concluded. Writing in 1963, while still a Harvard professor, Kissinger suggests that “there are two kinds of realists: those who manipulate facts and those who create them. The West requires nothing so much as men able to create their own reality.”4 This belief allowed him to insist that the best one could hope for was to establish a world of order and rules.
Among the most important of these rules was that the world needed policing and American power. While other intellectuals, such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., George F. Kennan, and Reinhold Niebuhr, eventually questioned the imperial presidency created by the postwar expansion of American power, Kissinger never once doubted America’s exceptional role in the world. Yet he criticized the crusading impulse in US history, claiming that this compulsion had led John F. Kennedy unnecessarily to Vietnam. However, Kissinger also despised overzealous crusading’s crude twin—isolationism—that surfaced in the United States from time to time. He believed that powerful states had an obligation to create a world order based on stability and promotion of the national interest above such abstract ideals as democracy and human rights. He was not the idealist that his official biographer, Niall Ferguson, claims him to be. He was instead a classical realist who ironically acted with great emotion and personalized much of his effort to secure America’s place in the international system. As a lone actor, an instrument of free will, he was determined to shape history.
Kissinger naturally thought, therefore, that Moscow could easily influence events in Hanoi because he believed that the powerful do what they want and the weak suffer, as they must. He did not understand that for Moscow, forcing Hanoi to concede its first principles carried with it unacceptable costs and risks. Nonetheless, he sought to link Moscow’s desire for progress on strategic arms reductions with Washington’s desire for an honorable peace in Vietnam. This linkage was one of Kissinger’s most ambitious plans to end the war on honorable terms. He would continue to use the coercive power contained in the US threat to escalate the war against Hanoi, but he would also enlist Soviet help to influence the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) to accept some compromises in Paris. Nixon approved this approach and made it the cornerstone of a doctrine that would bear his name. This complex strategy was pure Kissinger, however. The Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, was his unwilling partner in the plan. Neither would be happy with the result.
“In all my conversations with Dobrynin…,” Kissinger wrote in his memoirs, “I had stressed that a fundamental improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations presupposed Soviet cooperation in settling the war.”5 Even though Secretary of State William Rogers wanted to move quickly on a strategic arms limitation treaty with the Soviets, Kissinger insisted that Moscow “should be brought to understand that they cannot expect to reap the benefits of cooperation in one area while seeking to take advantage of tensions or confrontation elsewhere.”6 Kissinger rather naively believed that the war had to be settled sooner rather than later and that the road to peace went through Moscow. He and Nixon held out hope that serious negotiations would be under way by November 1, the anniversary of the cessation of the bombing of the DRV. The time was right to involve the Soviets because, ac
cording to Kissinger, the bombing of Cambodia had created a panic in Hanoi, which had led to the DRV’s decision to renew talks in Paris. He thought that the Johnson administration had made a mistake by not putting enough pressure on the Soviets to influence events in Vietnam, believing instead that the Soviets needed to take a stronger interest in a settlement and that the only way to convey this message to Moscow was to threaten further escalation of the war. Nixon agreed: “We have to say [to the Soviets], ‘Look, if you go on supporting North Vietnam, we will have to act dramatically…’ On the other hand, we have to say, ‘If you are willing to give ground and help us out of this morass, it could mean lots of good things.’”7
Kissinger was keen on linking Soviet cooperation on the Vietnam War with trade talks, arms limitations treaties, and progress in the Middle East—all issues of great importance to Moscow—because he wrongly believed that he alone understood the “connections and motivations that linked far-flung events.”8 Like his hero, Metternich, he envisioned a world that depended on a complex network based on a balance of power. He thought that he could construct such a world from the Nixon White House if the president gave him the power to do so. Kissinger created a small foreign policy empire inside the National Security Council by cutting Defense and State out of most important foreign policy issues. Even in his own office, he concentrated power. His subordinates were denied direct access to the press, to diplomats, and, most important, to the president. Once his realm was established, Kissinger used his keen intellect to create a grand strategy that relied upon linkage, back channels—contact with foreign officials outside of official government protocol, usually conducted in great secrecy—and coercive diplomacy. These efforts fit his personality well and supported his desire to conduct foreign policy outside of the usual channels.
In Nixon, Kissinger found a willing partner, one who favored back-channel communication and bold action over the slow-moving national security bureaucracy. Nixon saw the value in linking Soviet cooperation on Vietnam to larger foreign policy issues. The two men did not like each other personally, but both understood and appreciated that linkage was based on a realistic view of the world. Both were also attracted to the necessary secrecy and slightly conspiratorial nature of the strategy. Over time, however, Kissinger complained that Nixon was less trusting than he needed to be to have sustained success linking Soviet behavior to superpower negotiations on vital national security issues. The president progressively closed the door to outsiders, including Kissinger, making grand strategic moves almost impossible. Kissinger described how this process worked: “Nixon increasingly moved sensitive negotiations into the White House where he could supervise them directly, get the credit personally, and avoid bureaucratic disputes or inertia that he found so distasteful,”9 explaining that “these extraordinary procedures were essentially made necessary by a President who neither trusted his cabinet nor was willing to give them direct orders.”10 But it was not the president but Kissinger who first pushed State and Defense away from decision making on Vietnam.
No one suffered more from Kissinger’s desire to formulate policy alone than Secretary of State Rogers. From their first days in the new administration, Kissinger did all that he could to isolate Rogers from the president. He often used Nixon’s desire for back-channel communication as a reason to cut Rogers out of the loop, but Kissinger also challenged Rogers’s competence and understanding of complex foreign policy ideas, such as linkage. He also complained to Nixon that Rogers was out to get him. White House chief of staff H. R. Haldeman wrote in his diary that Kissinger was “obsessed with discussing” every detail of Rogers’s effort to undermine his foreign policy initiatives.11 When it came to dealing with the Soviets on Vietnam, Kissinger was especially harsh in his criticisms of Rogers.
On March 8, 1969, Rogers met with Dobrynin to discuss the Soviet role in the Paris negotiations, as instructed by Nixon. According to Kissinger, the meeting ended in disaster because Rogers “unilaterally abrogated the two-track approach of separating military and political issues.”12 Rogers, Kissinger claimed, had proposed renewed talks in Paris to discuss both political and military matters, representing a “major change in U.S. policy with serious consequences both for our posture at the Paris peace negotiations and our relations with South Vietnam.”13 Kissinger argued at the time that since taking office in January, the Nixon administration had “undertaken a basic shift in our policy.”14 The White House now believed that “the political future of South Vietnam must be settled by the South Vietnamese themselves” and therefore that political matters should not be negotiated with Hanoi or the National Liberation Front (NLF) in Paris.15 Kissinger was especially enraged that Rogers did not see that discussing political matters was exactly what the Communists wanted, and that such discussions “could only lead to acrimony with the South.”16 The White House, Kissinger told the president, “will be under great pressure to force [Saigon] not to prevent successful negotiations.”17 Finally, Kissinger warned Nixon that Hanoi’s “strategy was to get us: (1) to engage in talks about political subjects, (2) to talk with the NLF, and (3) into talks on de-escalation.” According to Kissinger, Rogers “gave Hanoi the first 2 of its 3 objectives, did not rebut the third and did so without getting anything in return.”18
Nixon took Kissinger’s criticism of Rogers seriously. The president routinely complained about Rogers and the “little State boys” who always “start squealing” when tough decisions had to be made.19 Toughness was one quality that Nixon and Kissinger admired, and both agreed that Rogers was not tough. Kissinger reminded the president that Rogers had waffled during discussions over bombing Cambodia, and he questioned the secretary’s loyalty.20 By constantly bombarding the president with examples of Rogers’s incompetence, disloyalty, and lack of toughness, the national security adviser helped marginalize the State Department. He also satisfied whatever emotional or strategic need he had to control the foreign policy process, especially the back channel to Moscow.
Kissinger had moved quickly to create the back channel to Moscow. Only weeks into the new administration, he had arranged a meeting between Nixon and Dobrynin, purposely excluding Rogers. The job of informing Rogers that he would not be attending the first meeting between the new president of the United States and the Soviet ambassador—while Kissinger would, a major breach of diplomatic protocol—fell to Haldeman, who blamed it all on Kissinger. Nixon cemented the back channel, however, by telling Dobrynin that he should discuss any sensitive issues privately with Kissinger rather than with the State Department. Kissinger applauded the president’s approval of the back channel with Moscow because he believed that “our best course would be a bold move of trying to settle everything [with Hanoi] at once. Such a move should… attempt to involve the Soviet Union.”21
Kissinger met regularly with Dobrynin, usually at least once each week. During one of their first encounters, he presented Dobrynin with a three-point statement on peace in Vietnam initialed by the president. In point one, Nixon confirmed “his conviction that a just peace is achievable.” In point two, the president reaffirmed his willingness to “explore other avenues other than the existing negotiating framework,” including direct meetings between US and DRV officials to “discuss general principles of a settlement,” with the technical details to be handled in Paris. Finally, Nixon claimed that “all parties are at a crossroads and that extraordinary measures are called for.”22 Kissinger warned Dobrynin that the president favored a quick settlement to the war and that “we might take measures that would complicate the situation” if Hanoi did not agree to compromise on its insistence that the South Vietnamese government had to be dissolved prior to any agreement or that it had the right to keep its troops in South Vietnam after the November 1 deadline.23 Dobrynin was evasive in his reply, explaining to Kissinger that “Soviet influence in Hanoi was extremely limited.”24 He did ask Kissinger, however, to clarify what measures the United States might take if Hanoi refused to cooperate. Kissinger never responde
d.
Nixon was pleased with the initial meetings between the two, so he empowered Kissinger to make a formal proposal to the Soviets, the first of its kind since the Vietnam War had started. Without informing Defense Secretary Melvin Laird or Rogers, the president had Kissinger tell Dobrynin that he was prepared to send a high-level US delegation to Moscow, headed by Cyrus Vance, who had been part of the US negotiating team in Paris. Vance would be empowered “to agree immediately on principles for a negotiation on strategic arms limitations.”25 In exchange, Nixon expected the Soviets to tell Vance how they would help in Vietnam. Vance would also be given the authority to meet with North Vietnamese officials to discuss both political and military matters outside of the formal Paris talks. This was the first time that Nixon placed value on a parallel negotiation track in Paris outside the avenue Kléber negotiations. It would not be the last. There was nothing new in the proposal for Moscow on military matters. The United States still insisted on a cease-fire and a mutual troop withdrawal from South Vietnam, even though the Laird plan for American troop withdrawals was already in progress. But on the political side, there was a significant change, at least in Kissinger’s mind. The United States would accept the political participation of the NLF in a coalition government in South Vietnam if it renounced violence and if it would accept an agreement on an independent South Vietnam that would last five years, after which “there would be negotiations for unification” with North Vietnam.26 Kissinger underscored that this was a rare opportunity for North Vietnam, and the White House expected Hanoi to respond within two months. He clearly understood, however, that Hanoi was not likely to take the bait. Of course, the Communists were not about to renounce political violence, so essentially his conditions were meaningless.
Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam Page 6
