Reckless: Henry Kissinger and the Tragedy of Vietnam

by Robert K. Brigham

  Kissinger suggested that Hanoi might want to move more quickly than either Saigon or Washington did because its military situation was “bad and getting worse.” He and Ambassador Bunker, who also attended the meeting, told Thieu that there would be no agreement of any kind before the US presidential elections and that this would add a certain amount of pressure to Hanoi’s situation since the bombing and mining would continue. Furthermore, Kissinger stressed that the Nixon administration would never consider ending its military aid to Saigon before a final agreement was signed. He thought Tho was an imbecile for thinking he would. “I have to confess,” Kissinger told Thieu, “that I have overestimated Le Duc Tho’s intelligence.” Finally, Kissinger suggested that Hanoi might make more concessions at the September 15 meeting because recent polls showed that President Nixon was going to win the national election in a landslide. After the election, if Hanoi had not agreed to a settlement, the US would “step up our air campaign and force a resolution that way.” Accordingly, he suggested that Thieu’s only public response to their meetings should be negative. “The only thing I ask you,” Kissinger requested on the first day of his meetings with Thieu, “is not to say that you are satisfied with our discussions.”125

  Kissinger did not have to worry. Over the next two days, Thieu presented a long list of complaints, modifications, and additions to the Kissinger paper. He rejected the idea of a coalition government, the supervisory commission, national elections with the PRG participation, the end of US aid to South Vietnam, and the standstill cease-fire. He insisted that South Vietnam’s current constitution be enforced throughout the cease-fire and that the National Assembly remain in power. He also suggested that any cease-fire had to involve Laos and Cambodia. Kissinger reminded Thieu that if Hanoi accepted a standstill cease-fire and a return of American POWs, Nixon would have to agree, that it was not wise for the Americans to dismiss all of Hanoi’s proposals. He also hinted that Nixon might even be forced to accept a bilateral exchange that linked an end to the US bombing and mining in exchange for the American POWs. At every turn, Kissinger tried to make Thieu see that an agreement was near, but that there was more to gain by postponing its inevitability. What he did not want was for Thieu to accept Tho’s August 15 proposals, or reject outright his own working paper for the September 15 meetings in Paris. But Thieu did reject Kissinger’s working paper and Hanoi’s proposals, making life pure hell for the Nixon administration.

  Thieu’s instincts told him that Kissinger was closer to a deal with Hanoi than he had acknowledged. He distrusted Kissinger, and with good reason. Thieu feared that Kissinger might sacrifice South Vietnam for Nixon’s reelection. He believed that the security adviser so wanted to advance his career, to become secretary of state, that he might just “throw South Vietnam under the bus” to get Nixon what he wanted most; a second term.126 He also feared that the United States would settle the remaining military issues, including a cessation of the bombing and mining, without consulting the Saigon government. If the Nixon administration withdrew its troops and made a bilateral agreement with Hanoi to end the bombing in exchange for the release of the POWs, it would leave Saigon in an extremely vulnerable situation. Thieu understood that a standstill cease-fire would also allow several main force North Vietnamese infantry divisions to remain in South Vietnam. All of this was simply unacceptable. He was even more upset when he received a letter from Nixon confirming what Kissinger had told him and suggesting that the time had come to get a settlement. Thieu believed, as did his staff, that Kissinger and Nixon were ready to settle political matters in exchange for the POWs. He told Kissinger as much during their last meeting on August 17.127

  Kissinger left Saigon dejected. He always believed that Washington’s negotiation position might one day put it at odds with Saigon’s needs. It was just like Kissinger, though, to think that he could cut Thieu out of the Paris discussions for years and then simply fly to Saigon to commandeer South Vietnam’s support. The irony here is rich. In Paris, he refused to overthrow the Saigon government for Hanoi, but in Saigon he refused to take Thieu’s very real concerns seriously. When he claimed that he and Tho never discussed political issues at all in Paris, Thieu knew he was bluffing. The gambit lay bare the problems with Kissinger’s overall negotiating strategy. He wanted to appear consistent and conciliatory at the same time in order to make progress and keep the secret talks alive. This meant that he had, by design, not fully shared the subtleties and nuances of the talks with Thieu until he was sitting in front of him in the Presidential Palace in Saigon. This strategy may have seemed prudent at the time, but it would explode during Kissinger’s secret talks in September and October with Le Duc Tho, leading to one of the war’s most controversial and deadly chapters and sealing Saigon’s fate.

  CHAPTER SIX

  PEACE IS AT HAND, SEPTEMBER 1972–JANUARY 1973

  “WE WANT TO END this war rapidly,” Kissinger told Le Duc Tho during their seventeenth private meeting in Paris, on September 15, 1972. “Not only to stop the suffering, but to provide justice to both sides. Not only to cease hostilities, but to turn energies to the tasks of peace and reconciliation. Clearly our two countries and our two peoples share an overriding interest in a peace that comes soon and a peace that will last.”1 Kissinger had come to Paris convinced that the “time was ripe for an overall solution.”2 Tho agreed. He wondered, though, whether the US national security adviser was using the negotiations as an election-year ploy. When pressed, Kissinger told Tho, “I think it is better that we settle before the election but not for the election.”3 Kissinger correctly understood that the Nixon administration had already garnered enough support among blue-collar Democrats and conservatives to secure the election. Settling the Vietnam War was not going to help or hurt the thirty-seventh US president in the upcoming election, but it was going to help Kissinger secure his place in the second Nixon administration. A deal on Vietnam would also allow him to focus his efforts on diplomatic openings with the Soviet Union and China, the heart of his foreign policy goals.

  Nixon agreed that the war had to end so that he could make good on his promise of détente and the peace dividend that would come with it. After seven years of heavy combat losses and swollen defense budgets, he and the American people needed a respite from war. “This war has got to stop,” he explained to Kissinger, “We cannot go along with this sort of dreary business of hanging on for another four years.”4

  Kissinger thought he could end the war in Paris in the fall of 1972 by tightly controlling the message so that there could only be muted objections to the specifics. He did not share his Paris talking points with the State or Defense Department and he bragged about it to Hanoi’s diplomats, declaring that he did not want anyone else involved in the negotiations, especially “within our own government.”5 Only the president and Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker knew the specifics, along with Kissinger’s closest staff at the National Security Council (NSC)—Alexander Haig, Winston Lord, John Negroponte, and Peter Rodman. Furthermore, Kissinger told Tho that the Saigon government had not been consulted on the particulars of the new proposals because they presented “great difficulties for our friends” in South Vietnam.6 He would get Saigon’s approval after the fact, he assured Tho. Kissinger held his new proposals closely because he knew that the compromises he was about to make in Paris would raise serious objections in Washington and Saigon. He was planning to concede on almost every important military and political point.

  The new plan included a unilateral US troop withdrawal from South Vietnam in exchange for return of all prisoners of war. It also allowed all North Vietnamese main force infantry divisions in South Vietnam to remain in South Vietnam, even though there were still some questions about resupply and replacement. Kissinger never pressed Hanoi on this issue. He continued to make vague references to Nixon about the need for the withdrawal of “some” of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) troops from South Vietnam, but in Paris he never made it a condition of the agreement. Kissinge
r never challenged Tho when the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) leader remarkably declared that all regular PAVN infantry troops “were in North Vietnam” to stand without objection. Kissinger also pledged that once the United States left South Vietnam, it would not delay North Vietnam’s plans. He understood that his meetings with Tho were cementing a process, which “as a result of local forces,” might lead to significant changes in South Vietnam. The United States had “no intention to interfere in South Vietnam,” Kissinger assured Tho, nor did it “insist on a pro-American government in Saigon.” He then spoke the words that Tho most certainly thought he would never hear in Paris: “We will not oppose the unification of Vietnam and that after it is unified, we will respect its unity.”7 Just what was it that the United States and South Vietnam had been fighting for all those years if it was not the political future of South Vietnam? Kissinger was resigned to the fact that he could not give South Vietnam “a guarantee that they would prevail,” so he hoped to pry some concessions from Hanoi as part of an overall compromise solution that gave South Vietnam a reasonable chance to survive on its own.8 His calculations were hopelessly wrong.

  One of Kissinger’s most important concessions during the September 15 meeting was the timing of the cease-fire. During all previous negotiation sessions, he had argued that the cease-fire had to come at the beginning of any settlement. At this meeting, however, he agreed to Hanoi’s condition that it come after the signing of the agreement. This concession was a great boon for North Vietnamese troops inside South Vietnam, who could now rebound from their tremendous losses suffered during the Easter Offensive. The delay in the cease-fire also allowed Hanoi to try to gobble up as much territory in South Vietnam as it could before the truce went into effect. Kissinger wanted to extend the cease-fire to Laos and Cambodia as well, but Tho would never agree to limit North Vietnam’s infiltration routes. Without a region-wide cease-fire, Hanoi could also continue its support of the Communist forces working against the governments in Phnom Penh and Vientiane.

  Kissinger thought that the cease-fire concession actually played to his advantage because the United States could keep the Linebacker attacks going right up until it signed the peace agreement. He understood from Tho’s comments in Paris just how devastating the attacks had been. This was the last bit of leverage the Nixon administration had over Hanoi, since most of the US troops had now been withdrawn, so Kissinger did not object to the delay. The remaining US troops, Tho insisted, had to be withdrawn within forty-five days of the signing of the agreement. Kissinger implied that the United States preferred three months, but that this was not a deal breaker.9

  Hanoi did make one important concession. In previous discussions, Tho had insisted that the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) and the Saigon government dissolve and that a new coalition commission—the three-party Provisional Government of National Concord (GNC)—be formed to oversee all political matters. Now, he agreed to allow the Saigon government and the PRG to exist beyond the signing of the agreement.10 Both would then be permitted to temporarily administer areas under their control. Slowly and deliberately, a new provisional commission would oversee the election of a constituent assembly that would then pick an executive. Kissinger argued for the direct election of the president by the entire enfranchised South Vietnamese population and proportional representation in parliament. This difference remained an important obstacle to peace following Kissinger’s other concessions. But it also surfaced the idea that South Vietnam’s president Nguyen Van Thieu did not have to resign before Hanoi would sign on to a peace agreement. Kissinger saw this as a monumental victory, one that would indeed allow peace with honor.11

  Hanoi and Saigon understood that this appearance of protection for Thieu meant nothing if there was no check on North Vietnamese forces operating in South Vietnam. What Kissinger agreed to as a safeguard against Communist aggression was meaningless if no enforcement mechanisms were attached. No penalty or reprisal was built into the agreement should Hanoi violate the terms proposed on September 15, only promises made to Thieu outside the agreement.

  Kissinger probably knew at the time that these promises would be difficult to keep, given the mood of the US Congress and the American people. The Senate was home to most antiwar resolutions and amendments. Election projections for the 1972 Congress suggested that even more Democrats would occupy US Senate seats, and they indeed picked up two additional seats in the 1972 elections and held on to their majority in the House.12 However, national election statistics suggest that Nixon’s 1972 landslide win that November was a referendum on McGovern, not on the antiwar sentiments of most Americans. Public opinion polls still showed that nearly 60 percent of Americans characterized US involvement in Vietnam as “immoral,” and 60 percent agreed that the war was a “mistake” and favored a complete US withdrawal.13 Americans were exhausted from the war, and many of Kissinger’s policies—especially escalation of the war into Laos and Cambodia and the renewed air attacks against North Vietnam—had pushed them to the limit. To his detriment, Kissinger never really understood how his provocative military tactics influenced US public opinion against the war.

  Kissinger insisted that getting Hanoi to allow Thieu to stay in power following an agreement was a major North Vietnamese concession. No Vietnamese—north or south of the seventeenth parallel—saw it that way. Kissinger took great delight in showing a consistent record in Paris on the need to keep Thieu in office following an agreement. He boasted to Nixon that he was not going to do Hanoi’s work for it by overthrowing Thieu as part of the peace agreement and that he had won a major victory with the September 15 concession. The electoral commission Kissinger agreed to meant that the Communists still had to deal with Thieu, and Kissinger saw this as a major improvement. But Tho still wanted more guarantees about Hanoi’s freedom of action following an American withdrawal. The Politburo believed that the United States could easily use its air power to prop up the Saigon government indefinitely. Tho wanted to avoid a perpetual war at all costs, but told Kissinger that North Vietnam was not afraid: “If need be we will continue fighting” until the end of Nixon’s second term, “we will do that.”14 Kissinger never doubted Tho’s sincerity on this topic.

  Hanoi’s strategy to remove the United States from Vietnam permanently rested on trying to get an agreement before the US election or using public pressure in the United States to make sure that the US air war could not continue. North Vietnam’s strategists assumed this meant an agreement could come as early as October 1972, but no later than January 1973, when the new US Congress was sworn into office. Tho pressed Kissinger on a date to finish an agreement in Paris even before the details were finalized. Even though Nixon favored waiting until after the US presidential election, scheduled for November 7, 1972, his national security adviser assured Tho that if they could agree on the general framework, then an agreement could be in place by October 15.15 Kissinger confided in the president that it was impossible to work out all of the details by then, but there was some value in fixing the schedule.16 He also told him that the September 15 meeting “was by far the most interesting session he had held,” and that there was significant momentum toward an agreement. He was particularly pleased to report that Hanoi had made a major concession on the “coalition-type electoral commission,” confirming that Hanoi had dropped its demand that Thieu had to resign before any agreement.17

  This was good news for Nixon, who had rejected any type of coalition government with the Communists. In a lengthy meeting with Haig just before Kissinger left for his September 15 meeting in Paris, the president produced a recent poll, which confirmed “the fact that the American people are two to one against any kind of coalition with the communists [sic].”18 But Haig tried to convince Nixon that the new commission was just “a fig leaf” that Kissinger had to agree to so as to move the process along. Without supporting this new commission, Haig confessed that “our proposal would have absolutely nothing new in either a public or private sense.”19
The president still balked. He claimed that Kissinger’s NSC did not seem to understand that “the American people are no longer interested in a solution based on compromise.” Instead, the public favored “continued bombing” and still wanted to see “the United States prevail after all these years.”20 Eventually, Nixon asked Haig to tell Kissinger to take a tough line in Paris or else he would end the negotiations. Kissinger was ordered to take a stance that “would appeal to the Hawk and not the Dove.”21

  Nixon pollsters did not share the complete domestic picture with the president. The data proved that 45 percent of Americans polled in April 1972 favored stepping up the bombing and the same number opposed it. Once the bombing started, there was a significant shift in support for the bombing of North Vietnam, but most Americans still favored a complete US withdrawal from Vietnam. The polls do not make sense without the context. Nixon’s pollsters confused the data, focusing only on the first part of the equation. They told the president that nearly 60 percent of the public favored continuing to bomb North Vietnam, which was true but also irrelevant if not matched with the reality that a majority of Americans still wanted out of Vietnam.22 The majority of Americans wanted to bomb Hanoi and withdraw from Vietnam.

  Kissinger was growing increasingly worried about Nixon’s ever-changing positions on Vietnam. He feared that these inconsistencies would surface just as he felt he was now making major progress in Paris. This must have weighed heavily on his mind as he prepared to meet with Le Duc Tho again at the end of September. Even though Washington and Hanoi began inching closer to an agreement, he was nervous that Nixon might at any moment blow the talks up. Of course, he also was concerned that Saigon would reject the compromises he was making in its name and without consultation. On this point, however, Nixon was adamant: He would handle Saigon if Kissinger got Hanoi to bend the knee. If Hanoi made reasonable concessions, it would be he who would convince Thieu that the United States would always step in to defend South Vietnam militarily. Nixon even suggested to Kissinger, “How about getting [Ellsworth] Bunker over and letting him do the brutalizing of Thieu,”23 just in case there was progress in Paris? Kissinger begged Ambassador Bunker to make sure that Thieu understood that “the appearance of differences between Washington and Saigon could have practical consequences of influencing Hanoi toward a rapid settlement in the secret talks so as to exploit what the [sic] might perceive as a split between the United States and GVN [South Vietnam] and the resulting political disarray in Saigon.” It was essential that Thieu “stay close to us,” Kissinger told Bunker, “so that we demonstrate solidarity to Hanoi.”24