American Experiment (371 page)

In its detail, it was a small step. The Interim Agreement called for no reduction in offensive weapons systems, but simply established a cap on the number of missile launchers each country could build until a permanent agreement could be negotiated. No constraint was placed on the number of independently targeted warheads that could be placed on each missile. But symbolically it was a big step. After years of frustration the nuclear powers had proved that they could negotiate limits on offensive weaponry. “A First Step,”
The New York Times
headlined, “but a Major
Stride.” Once again the presidential party returned to a hero’s welcome, with SALT treaty ratification assured—the ABM agreement was soon ratified by an 88-2 vote—and the President’s reelection prospects further enhanced. Soon the White House promotion team was dramatizing his personal triumph in Moscow.

On the evening of November 7, 1972, Richard M. Nixon stood at the pinnacle of world prestige and domestic power. Even the scattered first returns showed that he was winning a sweeping victory over George McGovern. With Eisenhower, he was only the second Republican in the century to win two presidential elections. Both his mixed batch of liberal-conservative domestic policies and his bomb-and-pull-out Vietnam tactics appeared to be handsomely vindicated in the election returns. He was concluding a year of achievement—the summits in Peking and Moscow, the SALT agreement, the apparent winding down of American involvement in Indochina. Only a week or so earlier Henry Kissinger had told the press, “We believe that peace is at hand.”

But the President did not appear triumphant, or even happy, that night. He had a spell of melancholy, perhaps foreboding. Was it due to some revelations about campaign excesses that had come to light, and the possibility of far more serious disclosures? Or his failure to carry in a Republican Congress? Or the empty feeling that this would be his last campaign, that the conflict and crisis on which he thrived appeared to be over? Or merely the pain of having the cap on a top front tooth snap off while he was listening to the early returns? The next morning, looking cold and remote, he strode into a specially summoned meeting of the White House staff, thanked them perfunctorily, and turned the meeting over to Haldeman, who without ado ordered all staff members to submit their resignations immediately.

The most likely explanation for Nixon’s malaise was Vietnam. Following North Vietnam’s massive “Eastertide” attack across the DMZ in March and Washington’s retaliatory bombing and blockade, Hanoi had continued its heavy offensive for weeks. The President had sporadically taken personal command of the air war, chafing when the weather was poor. “Let’s get that weather cleared up,” he exclaimed to Haldeman and John Mitchell one afternoon in April. “The bastards have never been bombed like they’re going to be bombed this time.” It wasn’t just the weather. “The Air Force isn’t worth a—I mean, they won’t fly.” In May the bombing reached its highest level of the war; the next month American planes
dropped over 100,000 tons of bombs on North Vietnam. Even so the war was grinding down to a stalemate again. Thieu remained in power; the South Vietnamese Army was still largely intact; Hanoi had lost 100,000 men in the attack, perhaps four times Saigon’s losses. On the other hand, tens of thousands of North Vietnamese troops were now ensconced in defensive positions well below the DMZ.

It was this last fact that now produced the single most crucial development in the latter stages of the Vietnam War—a development so carefully concealed from the American public, so muffled in diplomatic bargaining, so obscured in double-talk, that its full nature and import would not be clear for years. This was the signaling by Nixon and Kissinger to Hanoi through Moscow and other channels that the American troop withdrawal would continue even though Hanoi’s troops stayed in place in South Vietnam, that Washington would not exact a troop withdrawal from Hanoi to match its own steady pullout of the ground forces that for years had been the principal support of the Saigon regime. This signal was wrapped in a shroud of self-protective premises and claims: that the South Vietnamese Army was now fortified enough by American arms and training to hold its own, that the North Vietnamese forces would wither away in the south as a result of their isolation from their bases across the DMZ, that the Americans could always return with heavy bombing and even with troops if Hanoi conducted further attacks.

The most remarkable aspect of Washington’s yielding to Hanoi was that Nixon and Kissinger did not deceive themselves—they knew exactly what they were doing. They were at the very least taking an enormous gamble with the future of South Vietnam as an independent nation, at the worst laying the groundwork for a peace bound to collapse—a peace without honor. For few American leaders had warned more often than Nixon that communism was innately aggressive, that Hanoi was insatiably expansionist, that the communist enemy could be stopped only by counterforce, that to yield militarily to communists was to encourage them, not to desist, but to grab more. Kissinger could hardly have been unaware of the teachings of Vietnam’s foremost military strategist, Vo Nguyen Giap—that revolutionary forces must know how to be patient but also when to strike. Indeed, Giap had called only a few months earlier for heavy attacks by combined regular and guerrilla forces.

One man who understood the situation with crystal clarity was President Nguyen Van Thieu in Saigon. When Nixon sent Kissinger’s deputy Alexander Haig to Saigon early in October to urge the South Vietnam regime to go along with negotiations with Hanoi, Thieu had argued, protested, stormed, and finally broken into tears. The President’s reaction to Haig’s
report of this episode, as reflected in Nixon’s memoirs years later, revealed once again the disingenuous cynicism of his attitude toward what the South Vietnamese later would call Nixon’s sellout.

“I sympathized with Thieu’s position,” the President wrote. “Almost the entire North Vietnamese Army—an estimated 120,000 troops that had poured across the DMZ during the spring invasion—were still in South Vietnam, and he was naturally skeptical of any plan that would lead to an American withdrawal without requiring a corresponding North Vietnamese withdrawal. I shared his view that the Communists’ motives were entirely cynical. I knew, as he did, that they would observe the agreement only so long and so far as South Vietnam’s strength and America’s readiness to retaliate forced them to do so. But I felt that if we could negotiate an agreement on our terms, those conditions could be met.” He sent Thieu a personal reassurance that he would agree to nothing without talking “personally with you well beforehand.” Thieu did not want talk— he wanted a guarantee that his ally would not keep withdrawing its troops while his enemy’s troops stayed in place.

Throughout the late summer and early fall of 972, as the President became increasingly involved in campaign chores, Kissinger had been meeting secretly in Paris in a desperate effort to work out an agreement with Hanoi’s negotiator, the redoubtable Le Duc Tho. Although eager to stop the bombing and to get on with their war with the Saigon regime now that their troops were in place, the North Vietnamese were in no great hurry; their intent now was to win the war with as few losses as possible. Kissinger, however, was under heavy time pressures: he wanted to demonstrate progress in the negotiations to help his chief ward off McGovern’s expected peace offensive, to soften public demands that the remaining American troops continue to be pulled out on schedule, and above all to reach an agreement with both Hanoi and Saigon before Congress convened in January and began to slash appropriations for the war in Vietnam. The negotiators spent hundreds of hours on the fine-print questions involving a cease-fire, the return by Hanoi of American prisoners of war, the timing of the withdrawal of the remaining American forces—by August 1972 the last United States ground combat troops had been withdrawn— following the cease-fire, and some kind of tripartite commission that would supervise elections and otherwise help implement the agreement.

There was an Alice-in-Wonderland quality to these discussions: most of the key provisions of the draft agreement, aside from the return of POWs, would be made irrelevant by the transcending legitimation of Hanoi’s presence in force south of the DMZ. And elaborate plans for electoral commissions and the like were preposterous given the deadly hatred that
was bound to remain between North and South Vietnamese and the repeated failures of communists and noncommunists in other lands to agree on electoral arrangements, or even on what an election meant.

In mid-October, as the election campaign back home pounded to the finish, Kissinger wrapped up the final details of an elaborate agreement with Le Duc Tho. Tired but euphoric, he flew back to Washington with what he viewed as “the finest compromise available.” He basked in the thought that McGovern had just put forward a peace program that “asked much less of Hanoi than Hanoi had already conceded to us.” When he and Haig reported to Nixon in the President’s “hideaway” suite across from the White House in the old-time State Department building, Nixon was so pleased that he ordered steak and wine to celebrate the breakthrough.

The last crucial step lay ahead—pressing Saigon into a settlement without risk of “sellout” accusations before election day. Reviewing the terms as he flew to Saigon, Kissinger felt optimistic. The proposed cease-fire in place would leave Thieu’s government in control of 90 percent of the population, Kissinger calculated, and the other provisions were beneficial. To be sure, he had not gained Hanoi’s agreement to withdraw its forces from the south, but he comforted himself with the thought that if a clause forbidding infiltration was honored, attrition would ease the threat to Saigon.

Arriving in Saigon in this mood on October 19, Kissinger confidently explained the details of the agreement to Thieu and his entourage. He was unprepared for Thieu’s response—total skepticism about the agreement, total consternation at the prospect of being deserted by his American ally. Kissinger argued, promised, threatened. All in vain. After five days of fruitless exchanges he urged Nixon to bypass Saigon and sign with Hanoi. This the President would not do. With election day just ahead, he did not want to rouse Republican hawks or in any way jeopardize his expected victory; moreover, he had misgivings about “losing” South Vietnam. While furious with Thieu’s intransigence, he decided that the only hope now was for Kissinger to renegotiate better terms with Le Duc Tho.

Returning to Paris two weeks after the November election, Kissinger found himself in a vise between North Vietnam scenting victory and South Vietnam fighting for its existence. Hanoi, after making “maximum” concessions in October, was hardly disposed to reopen the agreement in any event and was given little incentive to do so. Kissinger’s secret discussions with Le Duc Tho made little progress, as Tho responded to new American demands in kind, by heightening his own demands, retracting concessions, stalling. The White House, meanwhile, pursued carrot-and-stick tactics with Saigon, sending more military hardware to South
Vietnam—in the process making the little country the fourth-largest air power in the world—and assuring Thieu that if Hanoi violated the agreement the United States would immediately retaliate, while threatening to make peace without him if he refused to go along. At the same time only a stick was waved at Hanoi—another massive dose of bombing—if it did not make further concessions.

It was not an edifying moment in the White House. Kissinger, pursuing the negotiations in the now frigid atmosphere of Paris, found Nixon mercurial in mood and tactics, alternately bellicose and conciliatory, often withdrawn and sullen, fundamentally ambivalent in his posture toward the rival camps. Kissinger suspected that he was still fair game for White House rivals gunning for his seat—or at least maneuvering to oust him from it. Nixon for his part was concerned about Kissinger’s emotional state—he was, Nixon noted in his diary in mid-December, “up and down”—under the pressures besetting him, especially after his aide hinted at resigning.

By early December, with the Paris talks deadlocked and Saigon still adamant, Nixon was moving toward a massive “retaliation” strike against North Vietnam. On December 13, the negotiations broke off and Kissinger returned to Washington disillusioned, exhausted, and angry. Gritting his teeth and clenching his fists, as Nixon later remembered, he called Hanoi’s negotiators “just a bunch of shits. Tawdry, filthy shits.” They made the Russians look good, he went on, “compared to the way the Russians make the Chinese look good” when it came to decent negotiating. It was time, Kissinger said, to resume bombing.

Ready for his last roll of the dice, the President ordered bombing in the north as well as the south and the reseeding of mines in Haiphong harbor. Still dubious about the zeal of the Air Force, he told the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, an admiral, “I don’t want any more of this crap about the fact that we couldn’t hit this target or that one. This is your chance to use military power effectively to win the war, and if you don’t, I’ll consider you responsible.”

While Americans were celebrating the long Christmas holiday at home, American bombers ranged over the populous corridor between Hanoi and Haiphong, dropping more than 36,000 tons of bombs in the most intensive attack of the war. While Americans paid tribute to the Prince of Peace, B-52S killed at least 1,600 civilians.

At home the press exploded in indignation. Caught unprepared as a result of the White House penchant for secrecy, filled with hope after Kissinger’s comment two months before that peace was at hand, repeatedly assured that Nixon was winding down American involvement, the
public saw the horrendous scenario being enacted again. Nixon was denounced as a madman “waging war by tantrum.” Republican senator George Aiken spoke of this “sorry Christmas present” for the American people. Newspapers blazoned headlines: “Terror from the Skies,” “New Madness in Vietnam,” “Beyond All Reason,” “The Rain of Death Continues.” Pope Paul VI told a Vatican audience that the bombing of “blessed” Vietnam was causing him daily grief.