Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam

by Robert K. Brigham

  Kissinger’s relentless assault on Laird and Rogers, along with his fawning over the president, kept his own policy hopes and personal ambitions alive. Within three days of the Silent Majority speech, having already postponed the military escalation option Kissinger favored, Nixon met with Dobrynin and repeated all of his threats about what would happen if North Vietnam did not compromise soon. He told Dobrynin that the United States would have to “pursue our own methods for bringing the war to an end.” Nixon warned, “We will not hold still for being diddled to death in Vietnam.”123 Reverting to form, Kissinger applauded the president’s approach with Hanoi and the Soviets. “I wager no one has ever talked to him that way his entire career! It was extraordinary! No president has ever laid it on the line like that.”124 Kissinger followed these compliments with word that Xuan Thuy might be interested in meeting him in Paris again.125 Nixon was delighted.

  By the end of 1969, then, Kissinger and the US policy toward Vietnam had come full circle. He still supported a compromised peace arrived at by coercing Hanoi into concessions in Paris through threats of greater violence and through greater Soviet pressure on the DRV. The erratic Nixon supported both positions in private, even if he often abandoned them in public. But the president could be managed, Kissinger thought. Despite Nixon’s embrace of Vietnamization, Kissinger never gave up hope that he alone could develop the winning exit strategy in Vietnam. The events of 1969 did reveal that even when Laird and Rogers won, they sometimes lost. Kissinger was able to make the future of the secret contacts the cornerstone of Nixon’s end game in Vietnam. He still felt trapped by circumstances and knew that he would never be able to reverse US troop withdrawals, but he deluded himself—and eventually the president—into thinking that there was a way forward that did not involve the United States’ giving Hanoi the Saigon government on a platter. Kissinger believed that he could eventually use increased US military pressure to condition the talks in Paris, forcing Hanoi to abandon some of its first principles as the price needed to get the United States to do the same. Nixon’s Silent Majority speech had garnered enough public support that Kissinger believed he now had a credible threat to escalate the war over North Vietnam even while Laird continued to bring US troops home. At the beginning of the year, the administration had no clear direction or plan for Vietnam other than Vietnamization. Kissinger now saw an end game come into focus based on his earlier experience studying the war in the Johnson years.

  CHAPTER THREE

  BOLD MOVES, 1970

  “I HAVE ALWAYS BELIEVED that the optimum moment for negotiations is when things appear to be going well,” Kissinger wrote in his postwar memoirs.1 In early 1970, he told Nixon that things were indeed going well for the United States in Vietnam. According to the latest military reports, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) now controlled over 55 percent of the countryside in South Vietnam, more than doubling the territory under its control from the previous year.2 Combined US and Republic of Vietnam (RVN) bombing and shelling and Saigon’s pacification program further compressed revolutionary forces into ever-smaller areas of the countryside. Nixon’s “Silent Majority” speech in November 1969 had rallied public support for the president’s plan to bring US troops home while simultaneously increasing aid and military material to the Saigon government. These withdrawals were being managed with care not to create public demands for an even faster retreat.

  Kissinger thought that the time was right, therefore, to approach Hanoi about more secret meetings in Paris. He believed that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) might be motivated to make some concessions, including its demand for the ouster of the Thieu government, so as to speed up an American withdrawal. Kissinger’s linkage here was problematic. He wrongfully equated the DRV’s desire to speed up the US withdrawal with its insistence that the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) be allowed to stay in South Vietnam and that the Saigon government not be given a monopoly on political control. He oversold Hanoi’s willingness to embrace these US enticements, failing to see other possibilities.

  Self-Stunted Strategy

  For a negotiator, success comes in figuring out what you have to give that your adversary really wants. What levers can you push to condition behavior and outcomes? Kissinger understood the power of America’s coercive threats, but he did not exploit Hanoi’s first principles. He did not use what Hanoi wanted most for reciprocity on key issues. He also failed to properly gauge was what possible through coercion and what was possible through negotiation. North Vietnam wanted a timely US troop withdrawal, but Vietnamization was taking care of that, though not at the speed that Hanoi’s leadership wanted. But North Vietnam also insisted that the United States replace the Saigon government as part of the agreement. Kissinger never fully explored what this might mean. Hanoi obviously wanted to take South Vietnam by force and unite the country under the Communist banner, but Kissinger failed to explore what might have made that task more difficult. Instead, he stubbornly clung to Thieu and Nguyen Cao Ky, South Vietnam’s vice president. There is evidence to suggest that a vibrant civil society was developing in the south around what it meant to be South Vietnamese.3 This political project was joined with enormous cultural production along these same lines. It now seems clear that the South Vietnamese population had a strong sense of cultural and political identification with the state, even if they sometimes were dubious about its leadership. There was a robust belief in a shared history and aspirational future that could have been useful in thinking about what a final peace agreement might have looked like. Could a more inclusive US negotiating effort have surfaced the names of groups or individuals that might have presented a popular third way—besides the Communists or Thieu/Ky—that could have come to power in Saigon? Even a cursory exploration of the vanguard of South Vietnamese society would have been helpful. Instead, Kissinger kept his circle of knowledge about South Vietnam and his negotiating strategy purposefully small. There may not have been a way out of the Vietnam conundrum by examining the opportunities here, but it was a path not pursued.

  Likewise, Hanoi also seemed very interested in postwar reconstruction aid. Nixon and Kissinger used it like bait, but they never made it an integral part of their negotiating strategy. Not once did Kissinger explore what it would mean in Hanoi if the United States announced its willingness to underwrite the costs of achieving a negotiated settlement. There were vague references to reconstruction aid in the secret talks, but nothing concrete. Later, Nixon would offer private assurances to Hanoi that the United States would help it rebuild, but these overtures were never formally introduced in the various proposals.

  These were all failures of imagination and creativity when it was needed most. Ultimately, Kissinger concluded that Hanoi was employing a strategy of waiting the United States out, and therefore the time was right to search for a breakthrough that could bring an honorable end to the war in 1970. He expected the DRV to surrender many of its first principles or pay an enormous price for its insolence. This is how he negotiated; he issued ultimatums and coercive threats, but eventually he bargained away many of America’s first principles one by one. Contrary to much that has been written about the secret negotiations, Hanoi rarely conceded on their major points. This reality did not stop Kissinger from using coercive power to condition the talks, even when it diminished domestic US support for the Nixon administration’s policies in Vietnam and had little effect in Hanoi.

  Kissinger was not interested in “shaving salami,” as he called the DRV’s attempts to hold out to see what the next US concession might be.4 Instead, he wanted to make one or two bold moves during secret negotiations with Hanoi that assured a reasonable negotiated settlement to the war as quickly as possible. This was naive at best. He always feared that he would run out of time in the negotiations. He worried that Congress would substantially cut funding for the war or that the American public would demand the total withdrawal of all US troops before he could secure a safe future for South Vietnam and resurrect US i
nternational prestige and credibility. Kissinger understood that Nixon faced an increasingly hostile Congress and that the opposition controlled both houses, the first time a US president had come to power under those circumstances since Zachary Taylor did in 1849. Since taking power, Kissinger believed that escalation and coercive diplomacy were actually the best ways to quiet domestic critics, to counter the phased US troop withdrawal, and to entice Hanoi into meaningful negotiations. He also relished the idea that supporting a harder line inside the Nixon administration brought him even closer to the president at William Rogers and Melvin Laird’s expense. The expanded bombing campaigns against PAVN sanctuaries in Cambodia during Nixon’s first year in office were designed to show Hanoi that the US troop withdrawals were not as important as the potential US escalation of the conflict. “A bold move” of military force, Kissinger had argued, was “the only way to end the war quickly and the best way to conclude it honorably.”5 Time would prove him wrong.

  Because of his decisive action against the PAVN in Cambodia and the threat to resume the air war against North Vietnam, Kissinger assumed that Hanoi would be interested in making some compromises at the meetings in Paris. He thought that his bold moves and Nixon’s Silent Majority speech had taken away one of Hanoi’s most important weapons in the secret talks: US public opinion. Congress, too, had been relatively quiet. Saigon’s gains against the PAVN and People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF) inside South Vietnam also buoyed the prospects for compromise in Paris, Kissinger concluded.

  Sensing Opportunity

  For once, Kissinger seems to have captured Hanoi’s mood perfectly. In January 1970, party leaders gathered at the Eighth Plenum of the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) to assess the war’s progress. Many were nervous about the military gains made by the armed forces of South Vietnam. The Cambodian bombings had also set the PAVN back considerably. Le Duan, the VCP’s secretary-general, convinced his fellow party members that these new developments had created unfavorable conditions for the revolution in South Vietnam.6 The PLAF was losing control of the countryside to the Saigon government at an alarming rate, he warned. Since the 1968 Tet Offensive, the front had lost nearly half of the population formerly under its control.7 Increased aid and material, including new heavy artillery and tanks, had given the Saigon government a momentary military advantage, and perhaps Le Duan decided the party needed to make countermoves quickly. Heeding Le Duan’s warning, the party decided that it needed to “broaden” and “diversify” its response to the war.8 “We must answer enemy attacks not only with war and political activity,” they argued, “but also with diplomacy.”9 The VCP now committed itself to serious bargaining in Paris to help buy time for its military program. There was also the issue of postwar reconstruction aid that many in Hanoi’s Foreign Ministry thought might bear some fruit if the negotiations were handled delicately in Paris, an option Kissinger never fully explored.

  Kissinger sensed that the window for negotiations might be open for only a brief period of time, however. He worried that once Hanoi found a way to replace cadres at a faster rate in South Vietnam; it would regain territorial losses and would no longer be interested in substantive talks. He never doubted the DRV’s capacity to endure the heavy bombing, even though he publicly stated that it was crippling Hanoi. The statistics from South Vietnam were “moderately encouraging,” Kissinger concluded, but he also knew “that North Vietnam’s confidence was unbroken.”10 Based on a series of pronouncements from PAVN General Vo Nguyen Giap, Kissinger argued that Hanoi may have temporary difficulty “in adequately maintaining its compulsory draft system” and there was little evidence to “suggest even obliquely that any new infusion of manpower is planned from North Vietnam,” but that conditions could reverse themselves quickly.11 He also feared that the contradictions in Nixon’s Vietnamization strategy were all too apparent in Hanoi. Continued troop withdrawals silenced domestic critics temporarily, but Kissinger had consistently complained that they also weakened his hand. He had hoped for the best, thinking that maybe Hanoi saw that Vietnamization had actually allowed Nixon to win public support for continuing a new phase of the war, sending massive amounts of military supplies to South Vietnam while expanding the US air war. If the Nixon administration could continue to apply military pressure, maybe he could achieve a breakthrough in Paris. Kissinger always beat the familiar drum.

  On January 19, 1970, Kissinger sent the president a memo highlighting the importance of negotiations and the need to keep military pressure on Hanoi. He warned that “the North Vietnamese cannot have fought for 25 years only to call it quits without another major effort.”12 And despite all the rosy predications in Washington, he pointed out that the United States had “not seen proof that [the] ARVN has really improved.”13 Despite nearly $200 million in increased funding for the South Vietnamese armed forces, Kissinger was still apprehensive that Saigon was not able to stand on its own against Communist forces. He claimed that the ARVN looked formidable on paper, but that desertion rates remained a key problem. Without American troops by their side, he wondered whether the ARVN could ever counter the “aggressive and offensive fighting spirit” of the PAVN and PLAF.14 The ARVN was a constant source of frustration for Kissinger, and he often let that irritation out in National Security Council (NSC) meetings. He complained bitterly about the ARVN’s unwillingness to take casualties and that when it did face the PAVN, it would take “a shellacking.”15

  He was even more concerned, however, that Nixon was losing faith in the value of negotiations and might shut them down completely. “I don’t know what these clowns want to talk about,” the president told Kissinger during a phone conversation on January 14, 1970.16 “The line we take,” Nixon warned, “is either they talk or we are going to sit it out. I don’t feel this is any time for concession.”17 Kissinger conceded that Nixon might be correct; Hanoi might be entertaining the idea of negotiations to buy time so that it could rebuild the PLAF and increase PAVN infiltration into South Vietnam. But he could not tolerate the thought of Nixon’s handing the war over to the military planners at the Pentagon, especially Laird, so he continually stressed to the president that the secret talks in Paris was the place where the war would end. Kissinger told Nixon that if he could meet the DRV representatives in Paris, he could “warn them and tell them if there is an offensive there will be no telling what we will do.”18 The goal was to end the war before a major PAVN offensive began. He was also desperate to revive the talks so that he could have some control over the rate of the US withdrawal and military operations, even though Laird guarded these decisions closely. Kissinger constantly worried that Vietnamization was becoming too central in Nixon’s overall scheme for the war, replacing negotiations as the central way that the United States would extricate itself from Vietnam.

  The president’s lack of faith in negotiations was apparent in his first major foreign policy report to Congress on February 18, 1970. It was a sober assessment of the administration’s foreign policy and had first been proposed by Kissinger shortly after Nixon’s election. Kissinger envisioned a document that would “serve as a conceptual outline of the President’s foreign policy, as a status report, and as an agenda for action.” He hoped that it would “simultaneously guide our bureaucracy and inform foreign governments about our thinking.”19 What he got from Nixon instead was a vague commitment to negotiations to end the war and open-ended promises about military victory. Nixon told Congress that “peace requires a willingness to negotiate,” yet concluded, “As South Vietnam grows stronger, the other side will, we hope, soon realize that it becomes ever more in their interest to negotiate a just peace.”20 Even though Kissinger had penned many of these words, he was surely disappointed by Nixon’s insistence that Hanoi would negotiate only when South Vietnam could stand on its own. Kissinger was forever skeptical that that day would ever come. He disingenuously continued to prosecute the war, even to expand it, in the belief that South Vietnam was no match for the Communists militarily.
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br />   Kissinger also feared that Nixon had entered into one of his many periods of depression in early 1970, and that the president was therefore incapable of focusing on the importance of diplomacy. In his Diaries, Nixon chief of staff H. R. Haldeman recorded the pattern to which the chief executive repeatedly fell victim. He often followed a public victory, in this case the November 1969 Silent Majority speech, with a severe “letdown.”21 For weeks after, Nixon was not able to grasp the complexities of his own grand strategy. He often isolated himself in the White House, ruminating about his failures and insecurities. Since time was of the essence, Kissinger spent weeks stroking Nixon’s bruised ego so that the president would remember the grand chess game that both had created to bring Hanoi to the bargaining table. This was no time to lose nerve, Kissinger told his aides in private, no time for Nixon to hide inside a bottle.22

  Kissinger was troubled by all the hand-holding he had to do for Nixon. He told his aides, “It would have been very different with Rockefeller.”23 The former New York governor would have been “so much more normal” and would have immediately grasped the genius of Kissinger’s strategic moves against Hanoi.24 Instead, Kissinger had to do his job and care for Nixon’s fragile emotional state. When Nixon got in one of these moods, he recalled, the president “hated to put himself in a position where he might be rebuffed.”25 He was careful not to put too much faith or substance on the line in Paris. In every negotiation, Kissinger reported, “my instructions included some expression that Nixon did not really expect success.”26 This gave Nixon the cover that his fragile ego needed and, if things should go wrong in Paris, it gave him the opportunity to tell Kissinger, “I told you so.” Eventually, he agreed to allow Kissinger to meet privately with his Vietnamese counterparts, if for no other reason than to establish a record of having done so. Kissinger was thrilled. He finally had complete control over all that was important on Vietnam, despite Laird’s strong fingerprints on Vietnamization. He was aware, however, that he had to show progress in the secret talks or the president would shut him down. Nixon’s views toward the Paris contact would play a dramatic role in how Kissinger approached negotiations for the remainder of the war. He understood that Nixon always kept his eye on the concept of “peace with honor” that he had announced at the beginning of his presidency, even if the details of the secret meetings in Paris escaped the president.