Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam

by Robert K. Brigham

  Hanoi’s confusion over Nixon’s letter caused the party’s Politburo, led by Le Duan, to approve a back-channel contact in Paris between Xuan Thuy and Kissinger to further probe the US position. Le Duan had disapproved of negotiations in general ever since the 1954 debacle at Geneva, which had divided Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel following its war with France. He was a southerner who believed that the party had surrendered at the negotiating table what it had rightfully won on the battlefield, leaving the South an occupied land in the hands of the American allies in Saigon.58 Hanoi would not make that mistake again, according to Le Duan, but he was still intrigued to hear what Kissinger had to say. Technically, Xuan Thuy was the head of the North Vietnamese negotiating delegation in Paris, though Le Duan had sent Le Duc Tho, a much higher-ranking party official, to serve as his “special adviser” there. The meeting between Kissinger and Thuy, therefore, had approval at the highest levels of government in Hanoi, despite Kissinger’s later claims that Thuy “was not a policymaker but a functionary.”59 Few Nixon administration officials at the time knew how important this initial back-channel contact was, or perhaps they would have insisted on more involvement in Kissinger’s planning for the meeting.

  The first secret meeting took place in Paris on August 4 at Sainteny’s house on rue de Rivoli. Kissinger seemed eager to hear North Vietnam’s response to Nixon’s letter to Ho Chi Minh.60 Thuy evaded giving that response for much of the three-hour meeting. Instead, he laid out North Vietnam’s position. Hanoi wanted the Saigon government dissolved and a coalition government that included the NLF put in its place. Hanoi also insisted on an unconditional and unilateral withdrawal of American troops on a fixed timetable. “We wonder why the U.S. could bring its troops rapidly and it could not pull them out rapidly?” Thuy asked Kissinger. “Why don’t you propose 5 or 6 months for the complete withdrawal of troops from SVN [South Vietnam].”61 For the remainder of the secret negotiations, getting a fixed deadline on US troop withdrawals was one of Hanoi’s first principles. Kissinger then repeated a formulation he would make again and again in negotiations: troop withdrawals were a result of reaching an agreement, not an unconditional move on the part of the Nixon administration. Hanoi had not anticipated Kissinger’s design, but North Vietnamese leaders smelled weakness in the proposal. Nixon had already announced that twenty-five thousand US troops would be withdrawn from Vietnam by August 31, withdrawal of a further thirty-five thousand would be announced in September, and eventually he would order that another fifty thousand troops be redeployed by April 1970. What Hanoi wanted, however, was a US commitment to withdraw all of its troops, including residual forces, as quickly as possible without a mutual withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops. “You can adjust the speed of our troop withdrawal,” Kissinger told Thuy, “by that of yours [from South Vietnam].”62

  Kissinger did not expect Thuy to agree to a mutual troop withdrawal. He understood that the North Vietnamese representative was there to accept concessions, not make any. “They were specialists in political warfare,” he later wrote of Thuy and his associate, Mai Van Bo. “They pocketed American concessions as their due, admitting no obligation to reciprocate moderation.”63 He was also well aware that Hanoi was counting on “the nervous exhaustion” of the United States.64 Kissinger believed that North Vietnam had no intention of making progress in Paris at this time, even in back-channel talks, because it might slow the momentum of US troop withdrawals. In the years to come, Hanoi would use the secret contacts to try to speed up the process, but for now, North Vietnam seemed intent to let the US withdraw at its own pace. There was nothing he could say to Thuy in August 1969 that would convince him that the United States might “stop bringing soldiers home.”65 It was not a credible threat, and Hanoi understood this fully. Kissinger concluded that after the first US troop withdrawals, Hanoi “was on the verge of achieving the second of its objectives without reciprocity [the first was the bombing halt]… a US unilateral withdrawal.66

  Kissinger then outlined the Nixon administration’s program to get a settlement on the war by November 1, one year after the cessation of US bombing of North Vietnam. He claimed that the United States had made a series of “unreciprocated gestures” in the previous year, including the announcement of the unilateral withdrawal of twenty-five thousand American troops; the acceptance of the NLF in national elections in South Vietnam as long as it renounced violence; the commitment to finding common ground between the NLF’s ten-point program; and the recognition of the existing balance of political and military forces. He finished with a warning: “If by November 1 no progress has been made, the United States would have to consider steps of grave consequence.”67

  Thuy sat patiently and without expression as he listened to what Kissinger would later call “the most comprehensive American peace plan yet,”68 phrasing Kissinger introduced in all his secret meetings in Paris. When Thuy finally responded, he reverted to Hanoi’s long-held position that the United States needed to dismantle the Saigon government and settle the political questions in South Vietnam according to the NLF’s ten points. A coalition government made up of the PRG and remnants of the Saigon government would help solve all political questions, Thuy suggested, but the NLF was not to be dissolved as the Johnson administration had demanded. As to military problems, the United States needed to provide a concrete timetable for the unilateral withdrawal of all American troops. The political and military issues were linked, he explained: “One could not be solved without the other.”69 He then suggested that Kissinger had said that the United States had launched a partial and then total bombing halt against the DRV and then it had announced plans to withdraw twenty-five thousand US troops. Kissinger agreed, stating that this was a sign of goodwill, but he added that he “had found no goodwill by the DRV.”70 Thuy explained that this was not true, that Hanoi had responded with “great goodwill.”71 North Vietnam’s original position was that no talks would take place before a total US bombing halt. The act of goodwill was meeting with US representatives in Paris before a total bombing halt was in place. He implied that the United States had not seen this gesture as a sign of goodwill.

  Since Kissinger and Thuy were restating positions that had already been expressed repeatedly in Washington and Hanoi, nothing substantial came of the August 4 meeting. Neither side was yet ready to concede any key point. Detecting the diplomatic stalemate and not wanting to come home empty-handed, Kissinger then suggested that the two agree to a secret back channel at the highest level. To accelerate the negotiations, Kissinger claimed that “the President of the United States is prepared to open another, secret channel with Vietnam [and] to appoint a high-ranking representative of competence to have productive discussions.… If this channel is opened, the United States will adjust its military activities to create the most favorable circumstances to arrive at a solution.”72 Thuy accepted the back channel on the spot, without consulting Tho or party leaders in Hanoi. Kissinger then raised a practical problem. “Did they prefer Sainteny or General [Vernon] Walters as a means to communicate with [Kissinger]” when they wanted to use the back channel? Thuy said if he had anything to convey, he would say it to General Walters. Kissinger reminded Thuy that “General Walters [could] not discuss; he [could] only take messages” for him.73 This back channel became the forum for serious negotiations for the remainder of the war. And Kissinger, of course, convinced Nixon that he alone should be the contact.

  The back channel to Hanoi came at a price, however. Kissinger had shut out Defense and State, keeping them informed only through summaries of the conversations with Thuy and later with Tho. He had very little input from either department. He developed the US negotiating position with less and less consultation with anyone else in the government, including the president. Few in Kissinger’s National Security Council ever fully understood where the negotiating strategy was heading, even his closest associates. Scores of transcripts of Nixon and Kissinger reliving the highlights of negotiations in Paris make it clear
that Kissinger was cutting people out of the loop.74 There is also ample evidence that Kissinger himself could not always keep up with the various proposals being put forward in Paris.75 And of course, he did not consult at all with his allies in the Saigon government before he met with Thuy. They had no idea of the substance or character of the conversations. In other words, Kissinger had complete control of what was being said to the highest-ranking Vietnamese representatives, with little open debate or discussion with other senior policy makers in the Nixon administration or America’s allies in Saigon.

  In Retrospect

  This way of conducting the secret talks with Hanoi may have pleased Kissinger, and it may have suited his personality, but theory and history suggest that it was the wrong way to build support for a negotiated settlement. Rather than isolating himself from the rest of the national security bureaucracy, he should have built a negotiations constituency within the government that cooperated fully in putting together first negotiating principles and mechanisms to handle the discussions in Paris. Sustainable peace agreements require big networks to be successful.76 Kissinger practiced poor tradecraft by isolating the talks to only a few. He was trying to get the minimum number of actors necessary in a room in Paris to get the peace signed with Hanoi, but in the process he also failed to create the broadest possible support for any agreement among the South Vietnamese. He failed to grasp that the war in Vietnam had actually become a mutually hurting stalemate. High casualties had led to military exhaustion, and this was a period then that was ripe for meaningful negotiations. But Kissinger conditioned each meeting in Paris with military escalation, or at least the threat of escalation. This coercive approach paid few dividends. There was much to be explored with Hanoi and Saigon, if only he was willing. Instead, he stuck to rather outmoded views of power, violence, and peace.

  One of the keys to the most successful peace agreements is “buy-in.” Skilled negotiators make their adversaries understand that they will get more of what they want if they stay inside a process that guarantees political compromise and full participation in public life for most of the belligerents. Kissinger failed to examine what sources of leverage he had to move Hanoi from violence to serious negotiations. He met Hanoi’s violence with coercive threats and increased violence. Kissinger never once used the carrot of negotiations, convinced that the stick of intimidating power was the only thing that Hanoi would understand.77 The prospect of descending into a deeper and bloodier conflict in 1969—the bloodiest year of the war—should have sparked an interest in Kissinger to spend more time exploring his negotiation options. He had done his homework on Vietnam from his first trip there in 1965, but once in the White House, he seemed to forget all that he had learned. If he was willing to be creative—and why not, since nothing else was working—he might have been able to link the most important aspects of US first principles to a cease-fire and peace agreement. Instead, he stuck to worn-out formulas that increased the violence in Vietnam for little political or military gain for the United States or its allies, formulas that Hanoi routinely objected to.

  Kissinger also failed at the most basic tasks of ending deadly conflict. Rather than shutting out Laird and Rogers, he should have used them to build a coalition of supportive colleagues who could have helped develop oversight guarantees, burden sharing, enforcement mechanisms, and the governmental capacity needed to see a successful agreement finalized. Perhaps most important, Kissinger clung hopelessly to Thieu’s government of South Vietnam, without consultation with or inclusion of others, but he never fully embraced Thieu, and in fact he was rather dismissive of most South Vietnamese political leaders. By cutting Saigon out of the process, Kissinger missed the opportunity to explore a potential and important asset: other political options in South Vietnam that may have garnered more support among the population than the corrupt Thieu. Nonmilitary leaders were present in many realms of South Vietnamese civil society, but Kissinger’s negotiating strategy failed to surface them. His coercive strategy in Paris lacked vision, shutting out potential allies. Altering this approach would have taken away from his privileged position within the administration, but it might have led to more expansive and coordinated negotiations to end the war.

  On the American side, Kissinger did assemble what he called “The Senior Review Group,” comprising high-ranking officials from the State Department, the Defense Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA, and his own National Security Council (NSC) staff, to discuss the secret negotiations. This group was one of six subcommittees that he established to handle national security affairs. It met infrequently, however, and rarely had access to his most detailed notes on the Paris negotiations.78 He had also expanded his NSC staff from twelve to thirty-four in a further effort to closely control all aspects of Nixon’s foreign policy by “greatly reducing the Department of State’s participation” in the formulation of policy.79 In September 1973, Nixon appointed Kissinger secretary of state, replacing Rogers, making him the first and only person to serve simultaneously as national security adviser and secretary of state. Eventually, however, Kissinger’s concentration of power and his lone cowboy strategy left him frustrated and dejected. It did not do South Vietnam much good, either.

  The analysis of the August 4 Kissinger-Thuy meeting reveals some of the problems with Kissinger’s approach. Writing from Paris five days after the meeting, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the former US ambassador to Saigon, who now headed the American negotiating delegation in Paris at the avenue Kléber talks (which were separate from Kissinger’s secret talks also in Paris) that focused primarily on technical issues, suggested that Kissinger drew out Thuy on the need for a mutual withdrawal, but that Thuy “was careful not to indicate in any way that they were prepared to engage in a step by step tacit withdrawal process. He left their withdrawal open, but gave no sign that it would be phased and geared to our withdrawal.”80 Lodge was well aware that belligerents usually agree to link a mutual troop withdrawal before either side commits to the act. When Kissinger demanded that the DRV withdraw its troops from South Vietnam as a condition for further US troop withdrawals and progress in Paris, he was pushing a rather weak reed. Kissinger had already admitted as much in memo after memo to Nixon complaining that Vietnamization was taking away one of his most important negotiating assets.81 DRV leaders understood that the American public demanded US withdrawals and that there was absolutely no reason for them to respond to Kissinger’s threats about escalation. Kissinger knew this, too, calling troop withdrawals “salted peanuts” for the American public; the more troops were withdrawn, the more withdrawals would be expected.82

  Yet he held out some hope that he could use the steady diet of US troop withdrawals to America’s advantage. He understood that he had no chance of reversing Nixon on the withdrawal issue, but now Kissinger wanted to link the withdrawals to greater military action against North Vietnam and increased aid to South Vietnam. He wrote to the president in early September, suggesting that one reason for a recent lull in PAVN infiltration into South Vietnam might be that Hanoi was waiting to see how the Nixon administration responded to Vietnamization. Kissinger suggested that Hanoi might “fear Vietnamization” if “by gradually reducing US presence and lowering casualties,” the administration “could maintain American public support [for the war] while [South Vietnam] is successfully strengthened.”83 This formula would become the cornerstone of the Nixon Doctrine later in the year. Kissinger also laid out several options on what to do now that American troops were coming home, but he clearly favored “military escalation” as a “means to a negotiated settlement, not as an end, since we have ruled out military victory.”84 He wanted to end the war quickly by pushing for a negotiated settlement along the lines of the proposal advanced by the aborted Vance mission. If Hanoi refused to negotiate, the US should force the DRV into submission with “a series of short, sharp blows.”85 During an NSC meeting on September 12, Kissinger suggested that the United States needed a comprehensive plan to end the war
, “not just troop withdrawals.”86 Nixon agreed that a strategy entirely dependent upon Vietnamization would not work. He authorized Kissinger to form a small working group inside the NSC to study the problem.

  Duck Hook and Pruning Knife

  Kissinger’s planning group met in the White House Situation Room for most of September and October, trying to piece together some military options that would give them an edge in the negotiations and lessen the negative impact of US troop withdrawals. The planning was given the name “Duck Hook.” Typically, Kissinger insisted that all escalation planning be confined to his small working group, away from Rogers and especially Laird. It was also typical that his only answer to the Vietnam riddle was military escalation. Not once did the Duck Hook planning staff explore how to incentivize the negotiations by looking at what could be done to improve the political climate in Saigon to secure more support for the government.

  Instead, the group explored a variety of military options against North Vietnam, each designed to achieve maximum political, military, and psychological shock at increasing levels of intensity. One action after another was put forward: mining Haiphong harbor; blasting the irrigation dikes along the Red River with iron bombs; resuming the bombing against North Vietnam and intensifying it by striking cities, roads, and bridges; and even using “the nuclear option,” literally.87 Kissinger fed Nixon each of these possibilities because the president wanted to make a bold statement on Vietnam in October or November. Nixon sent Kissinger a draft of the speech he was planning to make, outlining his new policies toward Vietnam, in late September for revisions. It appears that some on Kissinger’s staff—Tony Lake, Roger Morris, and Peter Rodman, in particular—collaborated on the president’s speech, at least on those aspects that dealt directly with Duck Hook.