Abrams's tactical innovations fitted perfectly with Nixon's decision to begin withdrawing American troops. In late 1968 Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford had sanctioned Abrams's two-stage process for modernizing South Vietnamese military forces and gradually turning the war over to them. Melvin Laird resurrected Clifford's proposal and called it “Vietnamization.”
The idea had a long past. In 1951 the French had called it jaunissement or “yellowing. ” France established the Vietnamese National Army, and central to the ill-fated Navarre Plan of 1953–1954 was the assumption that the Vietnamese would take on greater responsibility for combat against the Vietminh. The United States picked up where the French left off. Vice President Richard Nixon summed up American opinion about South Vietnam in April 1954 when he argued, “The Vietnamese lack the ability to conduct a war by themselves or govern themselves. ” J. Lawton Collins claimed that “the American mission will soon take charge of instructing the Vietnam army.... The aim will be... to build a completely autonomous Vietnamese army. ” During the Kennedy administration, American advisers concentrated on training ARVN officers. In October 1963 General Charles J. Timmes proudly announced, “We have completed the job of training South Vietnam's armed forces. ” Yet two years later the major rationale for committing United States ground forces was to buy time to build an effective South Vietnamese army and turn the fighting over to it. In a letter to Duong Van Minh on January 1, 1964, Lyndon Johnson promised that as “the forces of your government become increasingly capable of dealing with this aggression, American military personnel in South Vietnam can be progressively withdrawn. ” Westmoreland and the joint chiefs lost sight of that objective in their naive assumption that the killing machine would make short work of the enemy, but even then Vietnamization was in the back of their minds. In his speech to the National Press Club in November 1967, Westmoreland announced that in two years “we will be able to phase down... our military effort, withdraw some of our troops, with the understanding that the Vietnamese will be prepared to take over those functions that are being now performed by our troops. ” Vietnamization, then, had been French and American policy for twenty years. The only difference in 1969 was that as opposition to the war grew, Richard Nixon had little choice but to turn the war over to South Vietnam and begin withdrawing American troops. He took his time in doing so, not wanting to be the first American president to lose a war.
The reaction to Vietnamization was mixed. John Paul Vann enraged General Creighton Abrams with his observation that “The first 100,000 Americans to leave would be for free. They are the clerks, the laundry- men, the engineer battalions building officers' clubs throughout the country. So many extraneous things are soaking up people not essential. ” Others had heard it all before. Senator John C. Stennis of Mississippi argued that the United States “would be badly mistaken if we think we can depend too much upon this South Vietnamese army winning this war.... I don't believe they will be able to do it and I believe Hanoi knows this better than we do.... We'll have to stay there for ten years at best. ” But Nixon did not have years. He had months.
On February 22, 1969, the North Vietnamese launched that year's Tet—New Year's—offensive, and although they achieved none of the surprise of a year before, 1,140 American soldiers died in three weeks of fighting. In April the number of United States troops in South Vietnam peaked at 543,400 men, and in mid-May Nixon offered a new peace plan. But like all of the earlier proposals, it was primarily a military document, a cease-fire, rather than a comprehensive political settlement. Nixon wanted mutual, simultaneous withdrawal of all American and North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnam, release of all prisoners of war, and establishment of an international body to supervise the ceasefire. Pham Van Dong and Nguyen Van Thieu dashed Nixon's hopes for peace. In Hanoi, Pham Van Dong said that peace would come to Vietnam only after the complete withdrawal of all United States soldiers, the removal of Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Cao Ky from office, and the participation of the National Liberation Front in the government of South Vietnam. Thieu reiterated what he called his “Four No's": “One, coalition government. Not negotiable. Two, territorial integrity. Not negotiable. Three, the Communist party in the Republic of South Vietnam. Not negotiable. Four, neutralism. Not negotiable. ” There was nothing to negotiate.
Fighting in the A Shau Valley in May 1969 brought Nixon more political problems. The North Vietnamese considered the A Shau critical to their logistical effort. Throughout 1967 and 1968 American forces had conducted search-and-destroy sweeps of the area, and in May 1969 Abrams decided to attack. Between May 10 and June 7, the 9th Marine Regiment and elements of the 101st Airborne Division carried out Operation Apache Snow. The battle captured the attention of the American press when a protracted struggle developed on Ap Bia mountain in the A Shau Valley. The North Vietnamese had elaborate bunker complexes on the mountain. Abrams called in B-52 strikes and heavy artillery bombardment to pulverize the mountain before the American assault, but just before the troops attacked on May 18, a torrential rain fell. The bombardment denuded the top of the mountain, and the mud made the attack difficult. American troops went up the mountain twelve separate times. Before taking the summit on May 20, the Americans suffered fifty-six deaths and hundreds wounded. They found 630 dead North Vietnamese troops in the bunkers. The marines titled Ap Bia “Hamburger Hill. ” The press loved the description and splashed it all over American newspapers and televisions at the end of May. Eventually, 241 Americans died in Operation Apache Snow.
That Hamburger Hill was a tactical success in keeping the NVA off balance mattered little to the public. When Abrams abandoned Ap Bia on May 27, just a week after the battle, a cry went up. Senator Edward Kennedy charged that “President Nixon has told us, without question, that we seek no military victory, that we seek only peace. How then can we justify sending our boys against a hill a dozen times, finally taking it, and then withdrawing a week later? ” Combined with the stalled peace talks in Paris, Hamburger Hill seemed like more of the same—more firepower, more carnage, more for nothing.
As the first phase of Vietnamization, MACV upgraded ARVN firepower. During 1969 ARVN units received 700,000 M-16 rifles, 12,000 M- 60 machine guns, 6,000 M-79 grenade launchers, 500,000 jeeps and trucks, 1,200 armored vehicles, and 1,000 pieces of artillery. The Vietnamese Air Force got F-5 fighters as well as 400 aircraft and 100 helicopters. The total value of American arms transfers to South Vietnam was $725 million in 1968, $925 million in 1969, and another $925 million in 1970. On June 8, 1969, Nixon flew to Midway Island for a summit meeting with Nguyen Van Thieu on Vietnamization. Out of it came Nixon's announcement: “I have decided to order the immediate redeployment from Vietnam of the divisional equivalent of approximately 25,000 men. ” On August 27, 1969, the United States 9th Infantry went home.
There was other progress in Vietnamization as well. The plan to get ARVN to assume more responsibility for offensive operations began to yield fruit late in 1969 and in 1970. The number of enemy troops killed in action by ARVN increased from 20 to 32 percent. Nguyen Van Thieu removed a major peasant complaint against his government in 1969 by restoring the village elections and autonomy that Ngo Dinh Diem had eliminated a decade earlier. Thieu also accelerated a land reform program and recognized titles to land given to the peasants by the Viet- minh and Vietcong.
At least on the surface, still further things were going well for Saigon and the United States. The presence of 543,000 American and nearly one million ARVN troops, the Accelerated Pacification Campaign, and the Phoenix Program were preventing the Vietcong from recovering from the Tet offensive. Tran Van Tra, according to his own account, had to break up the Vietcong 320th Regiment into platoons and squads to restore the Vietcong political infrastructure: “Sending a concentrated main force unit to operate in such a dispersed manner was something we did reluctantly, but there was no alternative. ” The situation was serious enough that North Vietnam even flirted with the possibility of getting Chinese troops
into the war. The Chinese already had 60,000 people in North Vietnam—soldiers, railway maintenance workers, storage personnel, and antiaircraft crews. But the Chinese were very cautious; they wanted to help North Vietnam, but they did not want to get into another Korea. In fact, the $525 million worth of goods North Vietnam received from China and the Soviet Union in 1968 dropped to only $200 million in 1970.
In light of both the real reformist activity on the part of Saigon and the problems of the communists, Nixon's scheduled reduction in ground forces seemed to make sense. Nixon had already scheduled the troop withdrawals. The 3rd Marine Division was supposed to leave in late November and the 3rd Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division two weeks later. By the end of 1969, if both Nixon and Kissinger had their way, American troop levels would be down to 470,000 people. But neither the wreckage Tet had effected upon the communists nor the advances South Vietnam was making toward taking seriously its own responsibilities made enough difference. Unless Washington agreed to some tactical innovations, the North Vietnamese would take over just as soon as the last American troops left. The only substitute for American troops was increases in American firepower and a widening of the war. Arc Light raids of B-52s over South Vietnam had begun in 1965, and in the battle of Khe Sanh army and marine infantry commanders discovered just how much damage the super-bombers could do. To maximize his strength, Abrams called in saturation B-52 raids on suspected enemy strongholds before sending in his soldiers. Lifting conventional restraints was another consequence of Vietnamization. Since 1965 American military officials had requested authority to invade Laos and Cambodia in pursuit of the enemy, to cross the DMZ into North Vietnam, and to mine Haiphong harbor. During the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, policymakers avoided those alternatives for fear of triggering a Koreanlike response from the Chinese. But the Cultural Revolution that disrupted China in the mid-1960s made that much less likely. Nixon and Kissinger listened to Wheeler and Westmoreland and asked them to draw up contingency plans. The White House was preparing to take the war beyond Vietnam.
In February 1969 Abrams reported that the communist Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN) was five miles across the border in Cambodia and that there were supply dumps all along the border. The general was eager to destroy them with B-52 raids. In response, Nixon in March authorized Operation Menu to limit enemy use of those sanctuaries. Nixon also had a “madman strategy. ” He believed that Eisenhower's secret messages to China and North Korea in 1953 threatening nuclear weapons had brought the North Koreans to the negotiating table. Nixon aimed to convince North Vietnam's leaders that he had none of Lyndon Johnson's reservations, that he was “tougher, ” willing to escalate the war if necessary, perhaps by arming the raiders with nuclear weapons. Large-scale bombing of Cambodia would send a signal to Hanoi that there was a “new kid on the block who wouldn't put up with the old bullshit. ” Nixon wanted the North Vietnamese “to believe I've reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We'll just slip the word... that 'for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communists. We can't restrain him when he's angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button'—and Ho Chi Minh... will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”
Actually, in his worst moods Nixon was precisely the unstable personality he wished the communists to think him to be. When he was under intense criticism, his lifelong demons—insecurity, resentment, and paranoia—took over. During the last days of his administration, when the pressures of Watergate became unbearable, his secretary of defense James Schlesinger was to become so alarmed about Nixon's mental condition that he issued global instructions in July 1974 to all military commanders to disregard any orders from the president that did not bear Schlesinger's countersignature.
But those days were still five years away on March 18, 1969, when Nixon launched the B-52 raids over Cambodia. They were shrouded in secrecy. When the press picked up rumors of the bombing raids, the administration self-righteously denied them. To cover up the raids, the administration falsified military records. On May 9, 1969, however, the New York Times broke the story. Nixon denied it, but he was enraged at what he considered the leaking of highly classified information and authorized illegal wiretaps on the telephones of journalists and suspected collaborators. Operation Menu continued until 1973, by which time 16,527 sorties of aircraft had dropped 383,851 tons of explosives on Cambodia.
Later in 1969 the administration escalated the bombing of Laos, which had begun in 1965. Communist guerrillas—the Pathet Lao—controlled most of northern Laos, receiving substantial aid from North Vietnam. Bombing raids over the Plain of Jars were designed to assist Royal Laotian forces. The United States and South Vietnamese did not have the personnel to intervene directly in the conflict, but Nixon was intent on making life more difficult for communists in northern Laos.
The death of Ho Chi Minh on September 2, 1969, left North Vietnam grief-stricken. Ho's will decreed that neither time nor money be wasted on an elaborate funeral, and the entire proceeding took only thirty-five minutes. Sitting on a raised platform, Pham Van Dong and Vo Nguyen Giap wept openly. Westerners were accustomed to seeing unemotional, inscrutable communist leaders standing on the Kremlin balcony or in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. It dawned on many observers at that moment what had been demonstrable for decades: that Ho was beloved by his people. His death made for a collective leadership that complicated the peace process. Pham Van Dong, Le Duan, and Vo Nguyen Giap dominated the North Vietnamese Politburo. As head of the Lao Dong party, Duan presided over domestic affairs. Pham Van Dong continued to exert leadership over foreign policy, and Vo Nguyen Giap oversaw defense matters. All matters of state policy needed approval by the triumvirate, a system guaranteed to be inflexible. An intense debate raged in Hanoi throughout the summer over how best to see the war to its end. Truong Chinh, a close friend of Ho Chi Minh and chief theoretician for the Lao Dong party, argued that time was on the side of the communists and that they should be very cautious. Political reality was forcing deescalation on the United States, and North Vietnam must avoid any military action that might give Nixon a battlefield victory. Instead North Vietnam should maintain the tactical initiative and prepare for a “long- drawn-out fight. ” Vo Nguyen Giap, anxious to deliver a deathblow to South Vietnam, was willing to go along with Truong Chinh's argument for a while, but within a year he would call for a new offensive against South Vietnam, which Truong Chinh thought grossly premature.
Policy quarrels roiled Hanoi, but in Washington Nixon found himself without any policy. The madman strategy was not working. North Vietnam kept insisting on its old demands: withdrawal of all American troops, removal of Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Cao Ky from office, and participation of southern communists in a coalition government. Nixon and Kissinger hoped that the Soviet Union would bring pressure to bear on Hanoi. But Moscow wished desperately for a strategic arms limitation treaty, and after 1968 had started to lose interest in Vietnam; problems in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe seemed more compelling. Yet even as late as 1970 the United States still did not comprehend how independent of Chinese and Soviet control Hanoi was and had always been.
And the antiwar movement was becoming ever stronger. The trial of the “Chicago Eight ” began in September 1969. The government charged them with conspiracy to riot and obstruct justice during the Democratic National Convention the year before. The trial quickly turned into a media circus. Bobby Seale, the black activist, kept up a steady series of outbursts until Judge Julius Hoffman had him gagged and chained to his seat. The Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman petitioned to have his name changed so nobody “will think I am related to this fascist judge. ” Jerry Rubin of the Yippies and Tom Hayden, head of the Students for a Democratic Society, draped a Vietcong and an American flag across their defense tables. The trial lasted five months. In mid-February the jury acquitted them all of conspiracy charges, and later an appellate court overturned the convictions for contempt and rioting. During the fall of 1969, the Vietnam Mor
atorium Committee and the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam prepared a series of mass demonstrations. They developed a wide-reaching organization, secured endorsements from leading antiwar politicians, and placed advertisements in the major metropolitan dailies.
Millions participated in the October 15 moratorium. In Vietnam tens of thousands of American soldiers donned black armbands in support of the moratorium. More than 100,000 people gathered on the Boston Common and 250,000 marched in Washington. President Nixon reacted at once, releasing to the press a telegram from Pham Van Dong supporting the event. Then, in a television speech on November 3, Nixon made a patriotic appeal to his compatriots, most of whom, he believed, supported the war effort. In 1963 Madame Nhu had insisted that the “government of Ngo Dinh Diem is popular with a silent majority and is criticized only by a noisy minority of the population. ” Six years later Nixon made a similar argument with a similar phrasing: “Tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support. ” The silent majority remained silent, but the antiwar activists did not. On November 15, 1969, the Vietnam Moratorium Committee staged a march that brought 500,000 people to Washington, D.C., the largest demonstration in United States history.
The antiwar movement triggered a clash of cultures in the United States. At its roots, the controversy was based on class distinctions.
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