For the time being, President Nixon listened to Laird. He visited Saigon in February 1970 and he listened to Creighton Abrams's plea for an invasion of the sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos but remained unconvinced. But that same month the bombing of Laos became public, and the political attacks started immediately. On February 19 Senator Eugene McCarthy demanded to know “under what authority... [are] American pilots bombing the Plain of Jars which is hundreds of miles from the Ho Chi Minh Trail and has nothing to do with the war in Vietnam? ”
For years the joint chiefs had wanted to send troops into Cambodia to eliminate the sanctuaries; Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon refused, hoping to avoid escalating the war. But the idea of widening the war into Laos and Cambodia to compensate for the troop withdrawal gained momentum. In 1969 Nixon had opened the way for invading Laos and Cambodia by approving the expanded air strikes. At the time he viewed bombing as a compromise, something short of an invasion. The administration reacted quickly to persistent questions, denying the Cambodian raids outright and claiming that the air raids over Laos had been only at the request of the Laotian government to stop North Vietnamese aggression. At a press conference on March 6, 1970, Nixon assured reporters that there “are no American ground combat troops in Laos.... We have no plans for introducing ground combat forces into Laos. ” But two days later Captain John Bush of the United States Army was killed by North Vietnamese sappers who attacked his compound ten miles inside the Laotian border. Senator Fulbright, warning of another credibility crisis, charged that Nixon “does not have the authority, nor has Congress given him authority, to engage in combat operations in Laos, whether on the land, in the air or from the sea. ” When confirmation of the Laotian involvement appeared in March 1970, questions naturally arose about Cambodia. On April 2, Secretary of State Rogers told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “Our best policy is... to avoid any act which appears to violate the neutrality of Cambodia.... We have cautioned the South Vietnamese.... We think it is inadvisable to have cross-border operations. ” Three weeks later Rogers reassured the House Appropriations Committee, “We recognize that if we escalate and we get involved in Cambodia with our ground troops, our whole program is defeated. ”
Rogers had no idea what was going on. On March 27 and 28, American helicopters accompanied battalion-size ARVN forces on an invasion of Cambodia. Communist forces escaped to the west and began dumping their weapons on the Khmer Rouge, Cambodia's communist insurgents. Serious consideration of an invasion undertaken together with ARVN and American troops had been under way for months, but Prince Norodom Sihanouk, though acquiescing in Operation Menu as well as the presence of Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops in Cambodian territory, wanted to maintain at least a formal neutrality. Sihanouk was trying desperately to save his country. If he did not allow the North Vietnamese use of the sanctuaries, they would provide assistance to the Khmer Rouge, who were trying to overthrow him. When Sihanouk cooperated with Hanoi, the North Vietnamese limited their support of the Khmer Rouge. But by tacitly cooperating with Hanoi, Sihanouk risked the ire of the United States. He wavered back and forth, walking a deadly political path. MACV intelligence reports enticed Nixon, Kissinger, and Abrams with the prospects of capturing the elusive Central Office for South Vietnam. But Nixon could not invade Cambodia as long as Sihanouk was in power. It would be a violation of Cambodian sovereignty. What Nixon and Kissinger needed was a pro-American government in Phnom Penh.
Lon Nol was their man. Born in 1913 in French Cambodia and educated in French colonial schools, between 1935 and 1954 he had held a number of important posts in the French colonial administration and became close to Sihanouk. After independence in 1954, he was minister of national defense. Throughout the early 1960s Nol, a devout Buddhist and anticommunist, urged Sihanouk to side with the United States against the Vietcong, but the prince maintained Cambodian neutrality. Lon Nol started scheming. Sihanouk was a short, round man who loved Parisian suits but hated having to wear a size 48 short. Each year he took off for the Cote d'Azur in France, where he spent a couple of months in a high-class fat farm. Lon Nol knew that no matter how desperate the political situation, the prince would never forgo the trips. Late in 1969 Sihanouk had already purchased fifty new suits, all of them 44 or 42 short. He left for France in January 1970. In March, with Sihanouk in Paris, Lon Nol deposed the prince.
Lon Nol fanned political support by moving against the more than 400,000 Vietnamese living in Cambodia, where ethnic hatreds were intense. Within days of assuming power, he launched murderous attacks on the Vietnamese community, slaughtering thousands of civilians and raising ethnic rivalries to a fever. He also expressed to Richard Nixon his fears about the spread of the Vietnam War westward and the inability of Cambodian forces to handle the situation. Lon Nol doubled the size of the Cambodian army in a month and appealed to Nixon for arms. Nixon agreed.
On April 19 the president flew out to Hawaii to visit the crew of Apollo 13, who had just returned from a harrowing voyage to the moon. In Honolulu, Admiral John McCain, Jr., commander in chief of the United States Forces in the Pacific (CINCPAC), briefed him. An Annapolis graduate and a submariner during World War II, McCain replaced Ulysses S. Grant Sharp at CINCPAC in July 1968. Known as the “Red Arrow Man, ” McCain was a hard-boiled anticommunist given to placing red arrows on open world maps to show communist expansion around the globe. For reporters in Hawaii and Saigon, his briefings were laughably infamous, full of gloomy descriptions of “Reds, ” “Commies, ” and “Chicoms. ” McCain's son was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, which intensified the father's passion. McCain unfurled a map before Nixon, and, sure enough, there were the big red arrows, “McCain's Claws ” according to the reporters. Half the country was painted red, and the claws were reaching out for Malaysia and west to Thailand. “The Cambodians need more than a few thousand rifles, ” McCain told the president. “If you are going to withdraw another 150,000 troops from South Vietnam this year, you must protect Saigon's western flank by an invasion of the Cambodian sanctuaries. ”
Developments back home upset Nixon. In April the Senate rejected both of his nominations to fill the vacancy left on the Supreme Court by Abe Fortas's resignation. The Senate turned down Clement Haynsworth for the apparent mediocrity of his credentials and G. Harrold Carswell for his hesitancy on racial change. Nixon was so angry at the sixty-one senators who had voted against his appointments that he publicly called them “vicious hypocrites. ” That month he watched private screenings of the film Patton. Nixon loved George C. Scott's portrayal of the lonely, misunderstood but tough general who had defeated the Germans at the Battle of the Bulge. Cambodia became a way for Nixon to express his toughness, to seize the political initiative back from the Senate. “Those Senators think they can push me around, ” Nixon told Kissinger. “But I'll show them who's tough. ”
On April 30, 1970, President Nixon went on television with an important national security announcement. It was vintage Richard Nixon. He wanted to sound like George C. Scott being Patton. Sweat forming on his upper lip from the camera lights, Nixon stridently warned: “We live in an age of anarchy. We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilization in the last five hundred years…. Small nations all over the world find themselves under attack from within and without. ” The president declared that “only the power of the United States deters aggression. ” To protect American lives and guarantee Vietnamization, he had authorized an invasion of Cambodia. “We take this action not for the purpose of expanding the war … but for the purpose of ending the war in Vietnam, and winning the just peace. ” Searching for military victory or at least a satisfactory withdrawal, the killing machine moved into Cambodia.
It was a joint “incursion, ” as Nixon defined it. The United States 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) and the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, along with the 1st ARVN Armored Cavalry Regiment and the 3rd ARVN Airborne Brigade, invaded the Fishhook, a region of Cambodia ab
out fifty miles northwest of Saigon. It was the ultimate search-and-destroy mission, the hunt for COSVN. If the troops could locate and annihilate the enemy's command headquarters, they could finish off the trouble from that part of Cambodia. Melvin Laird begged Nixon not to include in his speech any reference to COSVN: “Right up to the time he gave that speech I was pleading to have that out because COSVN was never a single headquarters…. So again the American people were misled by not having a real understanding of what it was about. But the speech … was made … COSVN was listed as a major military target. ” Laird got it right. COSVN was hardly what most American officers thought of as a command headquarters. It was not a fixed installation like MACV but a small number of senior officers and staff assistants.
The reports Nixon received on the first day of the invasion were so optimistic that he ordered the Pentagon “to take out all the sanctuaries. Make whatever plans are necessary and then just do it. Knock them all out so that they can't be used against us. Ever. ” Two weeks later the 25th and 9th Infantry Divisions attacked the Dog's Head, a region about twenty-five miles southwest of the Fishhook, and the 4th Infantry Division invaded Cambodia west of Pleiku. Nixon renewed the bombing of North Vietnam, although he confined the strikes to areas just north of the Demilitarized Zone.
But the troops never found COSVN. Nearly 80,000 American and ARVN soldiers spent a couple of months slogging through eastern Cambodia, unloading tens of thousands of tons of explosives, but making little contact with the enemy. Communist troops were there, but the invasion actually drove them deeper—further west—into Cambodia. The destruction associated with the invasion sent a flood of refugees pouring into Phnom Penh. Creighton Abrams claimed that the invasion had resulted in more than 11,000 enemy deaths, but the CIA disputed the claim, arguing that the bombardment had been so intense that “civilians and non-combatants [were] being included in the loss figure. ”
Although they never found COSVN, the troops captured a wealth of enemy supplies: 15 million rounds of ammunition, 143,000 rockets, 14 million pounds of rice, 23,000 firearms, 200,000 antiaircraft rounds, 5,487 mines, and 62,000 hand grenades. They destroyed 11,700 North Vietnamese bunker complexes. Nixon announced that the captured supplies and weapons were “enough to keep the North Vietnamese going for a year. They will be crippled now. ” Westmoreland defended the Cambodian invasion as the event that had finally pushed North Vietnam past the elusive crossover point. But there was so little contact with the enemy that Abrams could not afford to have the United States troops on a walking tour of Cambodia. All ground operations in Cambodia by ARVN and the United States were over by the end of June. No sooner had they left than new battalions of North Vietnamese troops moved down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and back into the Fishhook, Parrot's Beak, and Dog's Head, as did the enemy soldiers driven west into Cambodia by the initial invasion. The enemy, as it had been so many times in so many places, was back.
In other ways the invasion was a disaster. Once in Cambodia, ARVN troops behaved badly, stealing everything in sight. North Vietnam gave strict orders to its troops to avoid the civilian population, and political cadres then went in behind the ARVN troops and appealed to the Khmer peasants, telling them that communism, not South Vietnam and the United States, offered the best hope for freedom. When it was over, the invasion had given the Khmer Rouge new weapons as well as a civilian population ripe for recruitment.
The administration also paid a heavy political price at home. Nixon had completely miscalculated the public reaction. On April 19 the Vietnam Moratorium Committee, sponsors of the huge, nationwide antiwar rallies in October and November 1969, announced that it would close its Washington office. The troop reductions convinced Americans that Nixon was scaling down the war. That changed on April 30, when Nixon announced the invasion of Cambodia. The incursion breathed new life into the antiwar movement. The president found himself facing one of the worst eruptions of civil disobedience in modern American history. On college campuses mass demonstrations disrupted classes. At Kent State University, National Guard troops called out by Ohio Governor James Rhodes to keep order fired into a crowd of students, killing four and creating martyrs for the antiwar movement. Similar violence occurred at the black Jackson State University in Mississippi. On May 8, some 100,000 people marched into Washington.
The extent of the protests bore deep into Nixon's paranoia. What had started out to be a military victory was turning into political disaster. In the White House, Nixon had an anxiety attack and could not sleep. After 10:30 p.m he made nearly fifty phone calls to friends and political associates, seeking reassurance and vindication. Suddenly, in the middle of the night, he ordered the limousine to drive him over to the Lincoln Memorial to visit the camped protesters. But he was not at his best. Sleepless and tired, he talked with the students but not about the war. To a group of Ohio State students, Nixon rambled on and on about Woody Hayes and times of glory. For one student from California, the evening was surrealistic: “Here we are protesting an immoral war and the president of the United States shows up in the middle of the night to tell us about baseball and how great the surfing is in California. It was unbelievable. ”
It was just as bad in Congress. Senators Mark Hatfield and George McGovern sponsored an amendment requiring total American withdrawal from South Vietnam by the end of 1971. Although the Hatfield McGovern Amendment failed to pass in the Senate, it indicated the frustration many Americans felt about the war. Senators John Sherman Cooper and Frank Church were somewhat more successful. Cooper, a Republican from Kentucky, and Church, a Democrat from Idaho, sponsored an amendment prohibiting the United States without congressional approval from sending advisers into Cambodia, providing combat air support for Cambodian troops, or financing the sending of troops into Cambodia by other nations. On June 30, 1970, the amendment passed the Senate over bitter administration opposition, fifty-eight to thirty-seven.
So in the end, the invasion of Cambodia forced Nixon to accelerate the troop withdrawals even while Henry Kissinger was arguing that those reductions weakened his hand diplomatically. The historian William Turley writes that the need to exploit mountain regions and supply routes in Laos Cambodia had long forced North Vietnam to see Indochina as “a strategic unity, a single battlefield. ” The Cambodian invasion showed that the United States viewed Indochina in the same way. And in the words of Senator Lee Metcalf of Montana, “With the Cambodian invasion, Nixon has made it his war. ”
10
The Fall of South Vietnam, 1970–1975
The real problem is that the enemy is willing to sacrifice in order to win, while the South Vietnamese simply aren’t willing to pay that much of a price in order to avoid losing.
—Richard Nixon, 1972
They were probably the most influential antiwar group of all—the Vietnam Veterans against the War. Organized by six veterans in 1967, the VVAW had thousands of members by 1970. John Kerry, the VVAW spokesman, staged the Winter Soldier Investigation, and for three days between January 31 and February 2, 1971, 116 veterans testified of atrocities. Kerry argued that “the My Lai massacre was not an aberration, the isolated act of a ne’er-do-well second lieutenant gone berserk. . . . It was symbolic of a war gone berserk.” With the world press focused on them, John Kerry’s men testified that “at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks.” Their testimony was riveting, and the Nixon administration knew it. Time was running out on “peace with honor.”
Nixon had to accelerate the troop withdrawals. The 3rd Brigade of the 9th Infantry Division went home in October, and in December, Abrams lost the 4th Infantry Division and the 25th. At the end of 1970 he had 335,000 troops at his disposal, and the 3rd Marine Amphibious Force, the 1st Marine Division, and the 11th Armored Cavalry were schedu
led to leave in a few months. Already North Vietnam was increasing the infiltration of troops and supplies.
The Ho Chi Minh Trail had become a work of art maintained by 100,000 Vietnamese and Laotian workers. It included 12,000 miles of well-maintained trails, paved two-lane roads stretching from North Vietnam to Tchepone, just across the South Vietnamese border in Laos, and a four-inch fuel pipeline that reached all the way into the A Shau Valley. The CIA estimated that between 1966 and 1971 North Vietnam had shipped 630,000 soldiers, 100,000 tons of food, 400,000 weapons, and 50,000 tons of ammunition into South Vietnam along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Abrams wanted to invade Laos, cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and starve the North Vietnamese troops waiting in South Vietnam. But because the Cooper-Church Amendment prohibited the use of American troops outside South Vietnam, Abrams would have to rely on ARVN soldiers. During Nixon’s first two years in office, nearly 15,000 American troops were killed in action.
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