Known and Unknown (26 page)

I
was still serving as White House chief of staff on April 29, 1975, when America's long and vexing involvement in Vietnam came to a close. A few weeks earlier President Ford had implored the Democratic-controlled Congress to authorize aid to our ally, the beleaguered South Vietnamese. He and Kissinger hoped the funds could bolster the South enough so it could arrange some sort of a truce with the North Vietnamese.

But the U.S. Congress had had enough of Vietnam.

When Ford heard that Congress had rejected his request, he was furious. “Those bastards,” he snapped.
¹
An evacuation of all of our forces was now inevitable.

Vietnam was the first war in our history that the American people were able to watch unfold on television. That fact made a big difference. As such, we were all witnesses to the heartbreaking scene of U.S. forces executing a humiliating exit while our Vietnamese allies of more than a decade of war faced an uncertain future at the hands of the triumphant Viet Cong and North Vietnamese.

Throughout that long, sad day, I was with President Ford at the White House as he monitored the withdrawal. The American ambassador to Vietnam, Graham Martin, updated us on the number of Americans still waiting to evacuate, as well as the number of Vietnamese clamoring to leave. The second number kept growing.

Many of the Vietnamese who had worked with our forces were understandably desperate to flee from the advancing Northern forces, making use of rafts, small boats, whatever they could find to escape. When our Marines temporarily opened the gates to the embassy in Saigon, thousands of local citizens tried to force their way in, only to be physically pushed back. Martin and his team understandably found it difficult to turn our Vietnamese allies away.
²
As Martin's wife departed by helicopter, she reportedly abandoned her suitcase so that space could be made for one more South Vietnamese woman to squeeze onboard.

Eventually it was decided that only American citizens could be airlifted in the short time remaining. The indelible image from that day is the heartbreaking photograph of desperate Vietnamese at a building across from the American embassy, trying to crowd aboard a helicopter departing from its roof. Those who had helped America during the war knew what was coming for them. It was an ignominious retreat for the world's leading superpower.

David Kennerly, the White House photographer who had earned a Pulitzer Prize for his Vietnam War photography and understood the power of images as well as anyone, put it succinctly to those of us gathered in the Oval Office with the President that day. “The good news is the war is over,” he said. “The bad news is we lost.”
³

Secretary of State Kissinger believed that Ambassador Martin would be the last American to leave the country.
⁴
After word was received that Martin had been airlifted out of the South Vietnamese capital, Kissinger announced to reporters, “Our ambassador has left, and the evacuation can be said to be completed.”
⁵
As it turned out, that wasn't quite true.

After hearing Kissinger's statement, Secretary of Defense Schlesinger advised us of the problem. The contingent of U.S. Marines assigned to prevent the panicking Vietnamese from flooding our embassy was still on the ground. Somehow there had been a misunderstanding. Kissinger and Schlesinger each considered the other's department responsible for the miscommunication. The President felt Schlesinger bore responsibility and said he was “damn mad” about it.
⁶
The last thing Ford needed was another public disagreement between his two top national security cabinet officials.

I discussed the issue in the Oval Office with Ford, Kissinger, and Ron Nessen, the White House press secretary. A few in the room felt we should not issue a correction because the Marines were expected to be airlifted out soon, at which point Kissinger's statement would be accurate. I disagreed. What if the Marines were overrun and unable to get out? In any event, what we had told the American people simply was not true. That mattered.

“This war has been marked by so many lies and evasions,” I said, “that it is not right to have the war end with one last lie.”
⁷

The President agreed. He sent Nessen down to the press room to issue a statement saying that the evacuation had not been completed after all.

Kissinger was not pleased about the correction and again vented his anger at Schlesinger. He wanted the Defense Department to be blamed publicly for the miscommunication.
^*
So the war in Vietnam ended in much the way it had been carried out—with recriminations and regret.

Since my years in Congress, I had had concerns about our country's involvement in Vietnam—to the point that both President Nixon and Kissinger viewed me as something of a dove on the subject. I hoped they would find a way to bring the war to an orderly close. It seemed to me that we had lost opportunities to actually win the war. During the Nixon administration, I supported the President's and Defense Secretary Mel Laird's policy of Vietnamization, which put the emphasis on enabling the Vietnamese to take charge of their own affairs. Even in the final days of the war, there was at least a possibility that we might have been able to salvage something worthwhile from the effort had Congress approved the resources to support the South Vietnamese government—and particularly to fund its army—for a longer period.
⁹
But Congress was not ready to go against the strong antiwar sentiment in the country.

With the war's unfortunate end, a great many in our military and among the American people swore they would never again get involved in the tough, bloody business of counterinsurgency. Many wanted to turn inward, ignoring conflicts waged by the Soviet Union and its proxies. Instead of bringing us peace, I feared the chaotic conclusion of Vietnam could result in an even more deadly escalation of the broader Cold War struggle. The withdrawal from Vietnam became a symbol of American weakness—a weakness our adversaries would highlight for years—and an invitation to further aggression.

Even after the pullout from Vietnam, President Ford pleaded with Congress to at least provide military aid to the anticommunists in the region so they could defend themselves. Those pleas, too, were rebuffed. As such, the victory of the Viet Cong was accompanied by the rise of Communist forces in neighboring Laos and Cambodia. Khmer Rouge guerrillas captured the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh and swiftly murdered the members of the prior Lon Nol government and their families. As many as two million people were massacred in Cambodia's now infamous “killing fields,” with the carnage often attributed to America's abandonment of the region.

Y
et only days after the final U.S. helicopter departed Saigon, America was on the verge of being drawn into another conflict in Southeast Asia. On May 12, 1975, at around 7:15 a.m., those of us at the White House received alarming news: Khmer Rouge gunboats had seized an American merchant vessel, the SS
Mayaguez
, in the Gulf of Thailand, which had more than three dozen crew members onboard.

Ford quickly convened an NSC meeting and asked me to attend. With Kissinger and Schlesinger present, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller argued for an immediate, robust military response. I thought that was premature, since we were still trying to locate the captured ship. Kissinger favored “tough talk” and a demand to free the ship.

My first concern was typical of a chief of staff; I thought it preferable to quickly develop a clear range of options for the President. I recommended acknowledging the incident but saying as little as possible so as to preserve those options until he had decided on a course.

The President decided to go with Henry's approach.
¹⁰
Ford publicly declared the capture of the
Mayaguez
an act of piracy. Absent the immediate release of the crew members and the vessel, the President warned, “the most serious consequences” would follow.
¹¹
There was speculation that some, if not all, of the hostages had been taken to the nearby island of Koh Tang, so the President ordered a military blockade around it. Three Cambodian gunboats that chose to defy the blockade were sunk.

As the crisis continued, Ford asked my views on his options. In a meeting on May 14, I presented the President with a memorandum outlining what I saw as the possible courses of action.
¹²

We understood that American forces would need to take the island where we believed the Khmer Rouge held the hostages, but I suggested that we plan to get all American troops out within forty-eight hours to avoid drifting into a longer term presence there. Vice President Rockefeller suggested that B-52s bomb targets on the mainland. I suggested we not use the massive, four-engine bombers, since they were associated with damage inflicted across Vietnam and had caused negative reactions in the region and in America. I thought a better approach would be to see if we could use Navy aircraft from the USS
Coral Sea,
which was headed toward the area. Carrier-based aircraft could strike with precision and reduce the potential of civilian casualties.
¹³

“The longer the delay,” I cautioned, “the weaker the U.S. looks, the greater the danger to the lives of the people, and the greater the likelihood that the critics will get into the act.”

That afternoon the President gave the order for a three-prong attack: a Marine helicopter assault on Koh Tang Island; strikes on the mainland by attack aircraft from the USS
Coral Sea;
and a naval interdiction operation to try to recapture the
Mayaguez.
¹⁴
U.S. Marines stormed the beach on Koh Tang and encountered withering fire from entrenched Khmer Rouge positions.

An hour or two into the operation, we received word from Schlesinger that the destroyer USS
Holt
near Koh Tang had been approached by a Thai fishing boat. The boat held men waving their clothing, in lieu of white flags. It was the crew of the
Mayaguez.
The Khmer Rouge, undoubtedly fearing more reprisals, had released all of the crew.

While the crew was being rescued and the
Mayaguez
recovered, the Marines were engaging the enemy on Koh Tang. By the end of the mission, eighteen U.S. Marines had been killed. The names of the American military who died are etched into the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. The official total of American dead in the entire Vietnam conflict stands at 58,261.

President Ford's actions over the
Mayaguez
were the first steps toward rebuilding American credibility.
¹⁵
When I became his secretary of defense months later, I remembered the
Mayaguez
crisis and its lessons. To our enemies, post-Vietnam America looked like a weakened nation, which encouraged them to act in provocative ways.

A
s I prepared to meet with the members of the Senate Armed Services Committee who would vote on my confirmation as secretary of defense, I telephoned Senator Barry Goldwater for advice. In the years since his unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1964 and our awkward encounter in my congressional district, I'd come to know and respect him. He had become a senior statesman in the Senate and was one of the congressional leaders who, in the final days of Watergate, helped Nixon face the reality that he would have to resign.

I asked Goldwater how he thought my nomination was being received. “Don, it's going to be fine,” Goldwater replied. “I have been talking to some of the senators.”

“Do you foresee any problems?” I asked.

“There are a few who have questions,” he conceded. Some, for example, were worried that as the youngest secretary of defense in history, I wouldn't be tough enough to hold my own against Kissinger.
¹

“Well, what are you saying to persuade those folks?” I asked him.

“Don, I'm telling them the truth,” Goldwater responded, his voice a soft growl. “I'm telling them that you're going to be the best damn secretary of defense they've ever seen, and that if you aren't, I'll kick your ass up between your shoulder blades.”

On Wednesday, November 12, 1975, I entered room 1114 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, which was named for my old Illinois colleague in the Congress, to testify at my confirmation hearing to become the nation's thirteenth secretary of defense.
^*
The hearing was dominated by the urgent national security issue of the day: the Cold War. Millions of Americans have since come of age without knowing the fear of a nuclear exchange between two superpowers. But as I went through the confirmation process, the Soviet Union posed what was widely considered, as President Kennedy had put it, a “clear and present danger.”

In anticipation of a possible nuclear attack, a number of American homes were built with bunkers in which families could seek refuge from nuclear fallout. Children practiced survival drills in schools in the event of a nuclear strike. The U.S. Capitol building had so-called safe areas stored with supplies of food in the event of an attack. Many public officials believed, as I did, that the Soviet Union's ambitions were aggressive, its agents were global, and its supporters were on the offensive.

While America had been preoccupied in Southeast Asia, the Soviets had broadened their empire-building efforts to nearly every continent of the world. The Soviets still held a firm grip on the occupied nations behind the Iron Curtain. They were funneling arms to nations and to anti-democratic revolutionary groups in the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

Around the time of my confirmation, the African nation of Angola took center stage. Supported by money and weapons from the Soviet Union and thousands of Cuban troops, Marxists threatened to seize control of the country. In late November 1975, President Ford and Secretary Kissinger made a strong public push for official support of pro-Western forces in Angola. Congress responded by doing exactly the opposite. They passed an amendment effectively prohibiting the United States from providing assistance to Angola.
²
Ford was outraged.
^†

Without American assistance to fend off the Marxist rebels, Angola became a Communist dictatorship. More worrisome, the Soviet Union came away believing it had a free hand on the continent of Africa, and possibly elsewhere. Nations friendly to America began to wonder, as the South Vietnamese and their neighbors had, whether American assurances of aid and security were reliable. Indeed, within the next few years, South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Nicaragua, Grenada, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan would come under Communist domination. “The general crisis of capitalism is continuing to deepen,” Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev proclaimed in 1976.
⁴

A period of heightened concern over espionage preoccupied our allies in Europe. Intelligence officials saw Soviet influence behind desertions in the Dutch army. There were concerns about reports that Soviet sleeper cells in Western Europe were waiting to be activated by Communist powers in the Warsaw Pact.
⁵
“There is afoot an enterprise of demoralization of armies on a French and European level,” the French Secretary of State for Defense warned.
⁶

Soviet leaders were speaking soothingly, if deceptively, of their hope for reconciling with the West. Brezhnev, for example, had declared in the 1960s, “The Soviet Union is ready to develop Soviet-American relations in the interests of our peoples, in the interests of strengthening peace.”
⁷
Important segments of the American public—including some in Congress, academics, and opinion leaders—believed him. Sympathy for the Soviets was a longstanding sentiment among the American elite.
^*

In the quest for a warmer relationship with the Soviets, a new word entered the popular lexicon: détente, a French word for relaxation or thaw. Though the word became identified with President Nixon and Henry Kissinger, the policy had been introduced earlier, during the mid-1960s, when the Johnson administration sought to reduce tensions with the Soviet Union as America escalated the conflict in Vietnam. Nixon decided it was worth exploring whether détente with the Soviets was a realistic policy. This led to a series of summit meetings and treaty signings. They were public relations coups for both sides, but the photo ops rarely, if ever, resulted in improved Soviet behavior.

Though President Ford was considerably more savvy about the Soviets than he was given credit for, he leaned toward continuing the Nixon strategy Kissinger advocated. Schlesinger, by contrast, was less enthusiastic. Like Schlesinger, I was not necessarily opposed to high-level meetings between Soviet and American leaders. However, I was concerned that projecting a relaxation of tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union could leave the wrong impression with the American people and our allies. It might feed the perception that we could minimize the Soviet Union's global ambitions, which in turn could lead the American people and the Congress to believe that the defense budget could be reduced—even while we knew that the Soviets were increasing theirs.

My confirmation hearing quickly became an airing of differences over détente within the Ford administration, the Congress, and the country. A number of conservative senators wanted to have me on record opposing Kissinger's policy. Others hoped that I'd signal a greater affinity than Schlesinger had for the Kissinger view. I told the members of the committee that I believed détente had become a code word for both the proponents and opponents of the policy.
⁹
The Soviets weren't incapable of reason, but we needed to understand that they looked at the world differently than Americans did. Because they were accountable to no one, the Soviet leaders had no obligation to tell the truth to their citizens, to us, or to the world. It seemed dangerous to me to try to predict their actions or their strategy based on thinking it would be a mirror image of how we in our free system might act if we were in their circumstances. By the end of the hearing, most senators were left with the accurate impression that my views were not dissimilar from Schlesinger's.

Only two senators voted against my confirmation—Jesse Helms, a conservative Republican from North Carolina, and Richard Stone, a Democrat of Florida.
^*
I entered the Department of Defense in 1975 with the feeling that I had good support in the Congress. The department would need that support badly, because, in the aftermath of America's withdrawal from Saigon, the morale of our military was at a low point.

 

T
hough no doubt a large portion of the country remained proud of our military in the aftermath of Vietnam, some of the loudest voices equated members of our armed forces with mass murderers and war criminals. In ways that would have been unheard of during World War II and that would not be countenanced today, some Americans hurled obscenities or spit at men and women in uniform. Even with America's withdrawal from Vietnam, protests and marches continued against the military.

At the forefront of some of the demonstrations were two Catholic priests, the Berrigan brothers.
¹⁰
In the 1960s they had picketed the homes of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. They led efforts to chain themselves to the doors of the Pentagon and to throw blood at the entrance.
¹¹

The week before Easter, 1976, Philip Berrigan brought a group of protesters to our house near the Washington-Maryland border. For days they demonstrated around the clock on the sidewalk, shouting, “Murderer!” We worried about our younger children, Marcy and Nick, going back and forth to school through the aggressive demonstrators. At one point, Joyce opened our windows and played Beethoven's “Ode to Joy” at the highest volume to keep up her spirits and to try to drown out the protesters' chants. When they started digging a grave in our front yard, Joyce called the police. Three were arrested for destroying private property.
¹²

At the Berrigans' trial, Joyce's only support in the courtroom was our eldest daughter, Valerie, who was home from Connecticut College for Easter.
^*
Valerie was conflicted in a way I expect was typical of many young people at the time. She had been part of a student group at college that had invited Daniel Berrigan to speak about the war (although it had not been her choice to invite him). To her surprise, she had found his remarks not unreasonable. But though she walked across the courtroom and shook hands with him at the hearing, Valerie believed the Berrigan brothers' destruction of our property had crossed a line well beyond lawful dissent. A public official ought not to have to serve as a doormat for every malcontent with a gripe against the government. Thanks to Joyce, the protesters were convicted.

 

I
n the grim atmosphere of the post-Vietnam period, the Cold War, and the relentless demonstrations, I tried to lift the spirits of the twenty-three thousand military and civilian personnel who worked in the Pentagon. I made an early effort to take in the daunting physical terrain of the building by walking through it. I found the experience depressing. To save energy, many of the sockets in the long hallways lacked bulbs. Much of the seventeen miles of dark corridors had bare walls, making the atmosphere dreary at best.
¹³
Though they had every reason to be proud of its history and their service, there was little to inspire the men and women of the department into feeling that they were working in a great and historic institution.

I decided to turn on the lights—literally, with new bulbs and bright hallways. I asked that paintings depicting scenes of U.S. military history be dusted off, brought up from basement storage rooms, and hung on the mostly naked walls. We dedicated corridors to commemorate historic moments, missions, and people. My former NATO colleague, Secretary General Joseph Luns, traveled from Belgium to participate in the official opening of a new corridor honoring the NATO alliance.

In an attempt to demystify the Department of Defense, I had the Pentagon opened up for public tours, much like the White House and Capitol building. The tours allowed people from across the world to get a sense of what was taking place there and what the men and women of the armed forces had achieved.

Unfortunately, as I assumed my duties, I did not enjoy the support of outgoing Secretary Schlesinger who, understandably, was hurt by his removal. Our relationship previously had been friendly.
^*
But the inaccurate rumors that I had been involved in masterminding his firing were gathering steam and no doubt contributed to our uneasy relationship.

I also found myself in an uncomfortable relationship with the number two at the department, Deputy Secretary Bill Clements, who had hoped to be appointed secretary of defense himself. Clements had on occasion bypassed Schlesinger in his dealings with the White House and the State Department, even boasting to reporters that he had greater influence at the White House on defense policy than his boss.
¹⁴

Heading into a presidential campaign, I could not make significant personnel changes—particularly with someone as politically well connected as Clements.
^†
Fortunately, the Pentagon at the time had statutory positions for two deputy secretaries, and the second slot was vacant. I recommended former congressman and NATO ambassador Bob Ellsworth to fill it. His principal responsibility would be to deal with DoD's share of issues that resulted from the ongoing congressional investigations of the intelligence community.

 

W
hile some Americans questioned everything the military did, there was another segment of the country that was inclined to do the opposite. There was a tendency to be so proud of the men and women in uniform that we thought of military leaders as infallible. Having served for close to twenty years in the regular Navy and the reserve, I had a healthy respect for the military and an appreciation for military advice.
^*
But as secretary of defense my role was different. “The U.S. Secretary of Defense is not a super General or Admiral,” I wrote in Rumsfeld's Rules. “His task is to exercise leadership and civilian control over the Department for the Commander-in-Chief and the country.”

Control wasn't what a lot of people had in mind, however. I quickly faced what successive secretaries of defense have faced: a powerful set of forces known as the iron triangle—a network of entrenched relationships among the military and civilian bureaucracies in the Defense Department, the Congress, and the defense industry. With more or less permanent positions, those in the iron triangle knew that the secretary of defense and the department's political appointees of either party were temporary. They could delay and simply wait out policies they did not favor. One responsibility in serving as head of the Defense Department is to look as far down the road as possible, point the department in the direction it needs to go, and then, to the extent possible, build momentum that will be hard to reverse.