Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam

by Robert K. Brigham

  Opposition from Congress

  Hanoi reasoned that the Nixon response to the Easter Offensive had created conditions that made a swift military victory over South Vietnam impossible, but the attacks had opened the door on diplomacy and the political struggle. The Linebacker bombings had revitalized the antiwar movement in the United States, but more important, they had moved Congress to take its most aggressive steps against Nixon and the war to date. There were several attempts to cut off all funds for the war. Senators Frank Church (D-ID) and Clifford Case (R-NJ) proposed an amendment to the foreign aid bill that would end funding for all US military operations in Southeast Asia except for the withdrawal of American troops (subject to the release of all prisoners of war). If the Senate passed the amendment, it would have marked the first time that either chamber had passed a provision establishing a cutoff of funds for continuing the war. The amendment was defeated in August by a vote of 48–42, but paved the way for a host of other congressional amendments to end funding for the war.

  Laird spent much of June testifying before Congress on the war’s ever-rising costs. Nixon had ordered Laird to send additional military equipment to Saigon as part of his Enhance Program, but Laird complained that these new expenditures were unfunded in the next two fiscal budgets.97 These were not the kinds of debates Nixon wanted to have with Congress during an election year. Kissinger often complained that Congress was the enemy in Vietnam. “The most amazing thing,” he told journalist Joe Alsop, “is that nobody—not Brezhnev or any communist [sic]—is as hard on us on Vietnam as our own people. No communist [sic] has dared to make the demands that the democrats [sic] are making.”98 It now seems clear that Hanoi understood that it might be impossible for Nixon to see the last stages of Vietnamization through because of a recalcitrant Congress. It was unlikely that Linebacker and the mining of Haiphong made it any easier for him to get congressional funding to keep the military pressure on Hanoi. This was not a new problem, as many congressional critics have claimed.99 During the president’s first term, there were eighty roll-call votes on Vietnam in Congress, almost all of them aimed at restricting funds or troops. Laird understood how Congress worked in this environment better than Kissinger or Nixon, and he was pushed aside during the summer of 1972 because he told them both what they did not want to hear.

  With Laird on the sidelines, Kissinger did his best to help Nixon with the Congress. He called Mike Mansfield (D-MT) and asked whether the senator would be willing to do the president a favor. “All these various end the war amendments that are up… I was wondering whether there was a possibility from your point of view of not to bring them up to a vote this week and wait until Congress reconvenes.”100 Kissinger assured the senator that the reason to delay the vote was that Hanoi was ready to bend the knee. “By the middle of July,” he told Mansfield, “I think we’ll see more clearly where we stand in negotiations.”101 He was quite confident that Hanoi was ready to negotiate and that the war would soon be over. US intelligence reports had suggested that Hanoi had ordered cadres in South Vietnam to begin preparing for both for a standstill cease-fire and for competing politically with the Thieu government.102

  What Kissinger did not know at the time, of course, was that Richard Nixon’s political problems were not confined to Congress. On June 19, 1972, two young Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, published a story claiming that a former CIA officer, James McCord, who was now a salaried security coordinator for the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), was one of five men caught breaking into Democratic National Committee Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington on June 17. McCord had made several trips to Miami, according to Woodward and Bernstein, to meet with the other burglars. Former attorney general John Mitchell, who was heading up the Nixon reelection campaign, said he was “surprised and dismayed” over the allegations and that CREEP had no knowledge of the break-in or of McCord’s relationship to the other men arrested at the Watergate.103 The Post would continue to unravel this story until events at the Watergate and their cover-up eventually led Nixon to resign the presidency in August 1974. Against this backdrop of domestic turmoil and upheaval, Kissinger and Le Duc Tho met throughout the summer of 1972, looking for a way out of the Vietnam conundrum.

  Summer Meetings

  The big breakthrough came on July 19 when the two convened again in Paris. In their longest meeting to date, Kissinger and Tho were unusually cordial toward each other. Kissinger noted that Tho was “positive” and his nonpolemical approach meant that he was certainly serious about negotiations. Kissinger hinted to Nixon in a postmeeting memorandum that he saw some movement toward the president’s January 25 proposal. If Hanoi wanted to accept the ceasefire proposal, it could then negotiate the political issues. Kissinger saw no harm “in following this string out.” He told the president, “The minimum we achieve is building a reasonable negotiating record. The maximum we could gain is either a fair settlement or a temporary cease-fire.” He noted that these goals were still distant, but “we are in a good position to explore the chances.”104

  What made the July 19 meeting so important, however, was that Kissinger did actually have something new to offer. He proposed a cease-fire of four months’ duration, “during which period both sides would stop their military activity and negotiate the details of a settlement.”105 At the end of four months, the US would complete its troop withdrawal and then the POWs would be released. This was a very different proposal than the president had made on May 8 and Kissinger had outlined in the May 2 meeting in Paris. Previously, Nixon had demanded that the POWs be released before he would start the final phases of a US troop withdrawal. Kissinger had insisted throughout the spring that any standstill cease-fire would require the redeployment of North Vietnamese troops who had crossed the DMZ during the Easter Offensive. He now told Tho that they could stay in South Vietnam as part of the standstill cease-fire. When pressed for clarification, Kissinger agreed that this was a modified position from the president’s May 8 speech. “When I met with you on May 2 we were discussing the withdrawal of all your forces to the positions of March 29, prior to the offensive.” He now concluded that North Vietnamese troops could stay in “positions they now occupy.”106 This was an important concession for Hanoi. It also cleared the confusion caused by Kissinger’s many previous formulations on the cease-fire. In the July 19 meeting, he had given the definitive US position as one of allowing North Vietnamese troops to stay in South Vietnam, thus forever forcing Saigon’s hand.

  This was good news for Hanoi. The PAVN’s 325th and 312th Divisions, roughly twenty thousand troops, had been sent into Quang Tri Province to combat the ARVN’s effort to retake the province. Despite suffering heavy losses, these divisions would now be allowed to stay in South Vietnam and be replaced and resupplied as the result of any agreement worked out between Kissinger and Tho. This was the news that Hanoi had been desperate to hear, since it was now convinced that the Nixon administration was not going to agree to overthrow Thieu before an agreement was signed. If Tho could get the Americans to agree to a complete troop withdrawal, a cease-fire, reconstruction aid, and the release of all political prisoners in exchange for a total cessation on bombing and mining, it might be worth the gamble. In other words, Hanoi’s leadership saw an opportunity to settle the pressing military matters and force the United States to modify its commitment to Thieu. Hanoi was now willing to compete with the Saigon government for political control in South Vietnam because it believed that the United States would leave North Vietnamese troops in an advantageous military position inside South Vietnam. Hanoi’s leaders sensed that Nixon was willing to give up on Thieu to settle the war. Kissinger had already suggested as much in the secret talks in Paris.

  Kissinger did go further down the political road than he had ever gone before at the July 19 meeting. For the first time, he suggested that the United States was “seeking to separate our direct involvement from the political outcome, so that what happens later
is the result of Vietnamese conditions, not American actions.”107 He told Tho that he understood Hanoi’s political objectives in South Vietnam, implying that it was up to Hanoi to achieve them, however. “We do not want to accomplish” the overthrow of the Thieu government for you, Kissinger informed his Vietnamese counterparts.108 He did say, however, that the United States would “remain neutral” in any election that might take place in Saigon. To Hanoi, this must have seemed as if Kissinger was resigned to the fact that South Vietnam was going to have to win the political struggle on its own against Hanoi. But North Vietnamese leaders also understood that any political struggle would ultimately depend on the balance of forces inside South Vietnam and the negotiations in Paris were giving Hanoi what it wanted in this regard. Playing for time allowed Hanoi to improve its military posture inside South Vietnam as well as build up its logistics and supply lines. Eventually, the Politburo concluded that Hanoi’s diplomats could negotiate an end to the air war over North Vietnam in exchange for a face-saving peace for Nixon in an election year.

  When it was Tho’s turn to speak, he told Kissinger that the time had come to settle the war through negotiations. He suggested that the national security adviser, too, needed a quick settlement because the Nixon administration was facing public outcry from its actions in North Vietnam. Kissinger corrected Tho, arguing that “the popularity of the president has increased enormously after the decisions of May.” He insisted that antiwar activist “Jane Fonda does not represent America.” Some polls did show support for Nixon’s military strikes, but the majority of Americans still wanted to see the war come to an end. Kissinger also agreed with Tho that the “original reasons which led to our involvement [in Vietnam] are no longer valid,” so it was indeed time to reach a negotiated settlement. Tho was disappointed that Kissinger had not come with more specific proposals, namely an immediate US troop withdrawal and a cease-fire, but he reported to his colleagues in Hanoi that the “US showed it wanted a solution,” even if Kissinger presented “nothing new.”109 But the July 19 meeting did set the precedent for how the secret talks would shape the final agreement.

  Kissinger and Tho met again on August 1, for eight hours. Kissinger reported to Nixon that this was the “most interesting session we have ever had.”110 Notes from Hanoi confirm that its negotiators sensed movement in Paris. They reported that Kissinger was eager to get something done before the US presidential election, and therefore, seemed open to compromise on the political arrangements in South Vietnam. To explore this opening, the Politburo instructed Tho to “discuss the major principles based on our maximum requirements [italics in original] so that we might sound the US intention and force a comprehensive settlement.”111 Hanoi’s negotiators in Paris were to employ this tactic “until the convention of the Republican Party,” which in 1972 was held the third week in August in Miami Beach, Florida.112 The negotiators were then to gradually steer Kissinger “towards our position of settlement.”113 At the August 1 meeting, Tho outlined what that might look like from Hanoi’s perspective: the US should stop all military activities in Vietnam, withdraw all of its troops within two months, grant reconstruction aid, and support the creation of a coalition government.114 For the first time, however, Hanoi did not insist that Thieu be removed from power before the signing of an agreement. This was indeed a major concession.

  But it was a concession based on Hanoi’s calculations that South Vietnam was not going to become another South Korea. Throughout the negotiations, Hanoi’s diplomats argued that Kissinger wanted to have a military cease-fire but still an armed camp in South Vietnam with the Saigon government in power, just like what the United States had created in Seoul following the Korean War armistice in 1953. Truong Chinh, former secretary-general of the party and leader of North Vietnam’s national assembly, warned that Vietnamization was just an American return to the Korean playbook. He argued that the United States had no intention of ever leaving South Vietnam and that instead it wanted to “leave behind a residual force for a long-term occupation of a number of military bases to be used as bridgeheads for helping the Saigon puppet army to continue its criminal persecution and massacre of our people and turn South Vietnam into a US neo-colony and military base.”115 But Tho had backed away from these dogmatic statements while in Paris and now conceded that Thieu did not have to be removed from power before an agreement.

  Kissinger noticed the change right away. He later reported that Tho “had a whole new set of North Vietnamese proposals” at the August 1 meeting. Along with allowing Thieu to remain in power until a coalition government could form in Saigon, Kissinger argued that the North Vietnamese diplomats also gave up on their demand that the US unconditionally withdraw all of its troops before an agreement and on a fixed schedule. He declared that for all intents and purposes, the demand for an unconditional deadline for an American withdrawal “was dead.”116 Of course, this was a rather moot point, given that most US troops had already been withdrawn. However, the national security adviser still claimed it as a victory in the negotiations. He also told Nixon that Hanoi no longer saw the coalition government as provisional and that Thieu would have a veto power over some of its composition. The remaining issues—the cease-fire, POWs, and the cessation of American bombing and mining—were all technical issues that could be worked out in future meetings.

  Clearly, the record shows that Kissinger once again overstated Hanoi’s concessions. Tho still insisted on linking military and political issues and still required the United States to terminate all military aid and support to South Vietnam. Hanoi’s diplomats also continued to support its condition that the cease-fire be confined only to Vietnam, allowing them freedom of action inside Laos and Cambodia. Hanoi did agree, for the first time, to announce the names of all prisoners held in Vietnam, but again it would not release any of the POWs until the shelling and mining stopped and the final peace agreement was at hand. Finally, Tho never agreed that the coalition government was going to be permanent, as Kissinger claimed.117 The record is very clear that Tho still called the new coalition government “provisional.” His official statement to Kissinger read, “A three-segment provisional government of national concord will be set up in South Viet Nam to carry out the tasks of the period from the restoration of peace to the general elections… in South Viet Nam.”118 And, Tho still insisted that “immediately after the signing of the overall agreement, Nguyen Van Thieu will resign.”119

  On August 14, Kissinger and Tho met again to go over the new positions. Before the meeting, Kissinger “thought Tho’s proposals sufficiently serious to send the whole voluminous text to Bunker and Thieu.”120 He also sent a copy to Nixon, suggesting that he saw movement in Hanoi. Although nothing much came out of this meeting, Kissinger told the president that during the last three meetings in the summer of 1972, “we have gotten closer to a negotiated settlement than ever before; our negotiating record is becoming impeccable; and we still have a chance to make an honorable peace.”121 Nixon was not convinced. He told Haig that it was “obvious that no progress was made and that none can be expected.”122 He concluded that Kissinger needed to be discouraged from talking about progress in Paris, at least until the election was over. Nixon feared that his security adviser’s enemies, of which there were many, would use the talks to harm the administration politically. He was especially critical of Kissinger’s planned trip to Saigon to meet with Thieu shortly after his August 14 meeting in Paris with Tho. He thought any problems in Saigon would play badly in the United States just before the Republican National Convention, scheduled for the third week in August.

  Nixon had reason to be concerned. Kissinger ostensibly went to Saigon to inform Thieu of the progress in Paris. However, rumors circulated all over South Vietnam that he was coming to impose a settlement. Since he had rarely consulted with Thieu about anything, Kissinger’s trip only added to Saigon’s anxiety. Adding to Thieu’s worries was the fact that the once-secret meetings in Paris were now front-page news. No substance wa
s ever leaked to the press, but the time and place of the Kissinger-Tho meetings were now announced in real time. Kissinger claims that Thieu was more confident then than he had been in the past—but how would he know; he rarely met the man.

  During their first meeting, Kissinger gave Thieu the working paper he was using to prepare for his next meeting with Tho. It was the first time that Saigon had seen specifics on the talks in Paris. The paper outlined the key US responses to the summer meetings, suggesting that the two sides were close on an agreement in principle. He told Thieu that they should know if a breakthrough were possible in two more meetings. The conditions of that agreement would remain consistent with long-held US first negotiating principles. Specifically, Kissinger reported that the United States would “not change its military position” except to move the troop withdrawal deadline from four to three months. Likewise, on the political front, Washington would reject a coalition government and instead support the creation of an electoral commission that would oversee free, open, and democratic elections among the South Vietnamese. The commission, now named the Committee of National Reconciliation, would consist of representatives from the PRG and the Saigon government and each would have veto power. Furthermore, all decisions made by the new commission would have to be unanimous. The only purpose of the commission was to supervise the elections. One important caveat that Thieu warmly received was Kissinger’s insistence that the national election in South Vietnam form a government consistent with the polling. In other words, Kissinger thought that the majority of the South Vietnamese population would not vote Communists into office. He predicted that the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) might gain “two out of twenty” governmental seats.123 Kissinger had a special message for Thieu about the elections: “In our country, political opponents are taken into the cabinet not to be given influence but to be deprived of it.”124 It all sounded so good on paper.