The Cold War (64 page)

When Haldeman confronted Kissinger, the national security adviser simply denied the facts. “I have never given a personal opinion different from the pres-ident's,” he claimed, and said he had not given an interview to Reston. Haldeman got him to admit that he had called Reston on the telephone, just before Reston wrote a column stating that Kissinger had opposed the bombing and implying that Kissinger was the one moderate, sensible man among Nixon's advisers. Kissinger concluded his conversation with Haldeman by suggesting that it was time for the president to give him a vote of confidence: a letter from Nixon giving Kissinger backing and credit for the progress in the negotiations.

Nixon went to his home in Key Biscayne, Florida, for Christmas. He ordered a thirty-six-hour halt in the bombing for the holiday. In his diary he complained he was “more and more” a lonely individual. “It is a question not of too many friends but really too few—one of the inevitable consequences of this position.” He received very few Christmas salutations, even from Republicans on Capitol Hill and members of his Cabinet. As a result, he told interviewer David Frost four years later, “it was the loneliest and saddest Christmas I can ever remember, much sadder and much more lonely than the one in the Pacific during the war.” He did make some telephone calls, including one to Ronald Reagan, who complained about CBS News coverage of the bombing and said that under World War II circumstances, the network would have been charged with treason.

The day after Christmas, despite urgings from some of his aides and much of the media that he extend the Christmas Day truce, Nixon ordered the biggest
bombing raid yet, 120 B-52s over Hanoi. Five were shot down, but that afternoon Nixon received a message from Hanoi. The Communists, who had evidently exhausted their supply of SAMs, proposed that the talks resume in Paris on January 9. Nixon replied that he wanted technical talks resumed on January 2, and he offered to stop the bombing of Hanoi if the Communists agreed. Hanoi did so.

General Haig was furious. He did not want to stop the bombing when Hanoi was all but on its knees. He was incensed when he discovered that “every single adviser of the president … [was] calling the president daily, hourly, and telling him to terminate the bombing.” But even Haig realized that Nixon had little choice, because if he continued the bombing after the congressional session began on January 3, “there would have been legislative restrictions which would have been national suicide from the standpoint of ever negotiating a settlement.”

Nixon decided to call off the bombing. On December 29 he announced that he had suspended offensive operations north of the 20th Parallel and that the Paris talks would resume.

So who won the eleven-day battle? The North Vietnamese had shot down fifteen B-52s, and eleven fighter-bombers had gone down. Ninety-three American airmen were missing—thirty-one became known POWs. The enemy had fired 1,200 missiles and lost three MiG jets to achieve these results. Some 40,000 tons of bombs had fallen on Hanoi—40 kilotons, or the equivalent of two Hiroshima-size bombs. However, visitors to Hanoi soon after the battle ended, including Americans, all testify that although great destruction was done to military and industrial targets—such as the airfields, railroad network, and factories—residential areas were mostly untouched.

There was no clear-cut winner. Thus the last American action in the Vietnam War was characteristic of all those that had come earlier: cursed by half measures. From 1964 to 1969, Johnson's actions, as described by Nixon, were always “too little, too late.” That had been true as well as Nixon's ultimatum in November 1969; of his Cambodian incursion of 1970; of his Laotian operation in 1971; of his May 8, 1972, air offensive; and now of his Christmas bombing. He had taken the heat for an all-out offensive without delivering one. It was not that he did not want to, but rather that it was overwhelmingly obvious the American political system would not allow him to do so.

Nixon called Hanoi's willingness to resume the talks a “stunning capitulation,” one presumably brought about by the bombing. But it had been Saigon, not Hanoi, that had created the stalemate in the talks. In his message to Hanoi, Nixon had referred to the October agreements; going back to them represented an American, not a North Vietnamese, concession. Kissinger's reference to “normalization” of relations continued the hints he had been secretly making to Le Duc Tho that when peace came, the United States would aid in the reconstruction of North Vietnam, just as it had helped Germany and Japan after World War II.

On December 30, Senator Henry Jackson, a Democrat from Washington, called Nixon to ask the president to go on television and explain that “we bombed to get them back to the table.” Nixon passed the message along to Kissinger with a note: “He is right—but my saying it publicly would seriously jeopardize our negotiations.”

Nixon had another reason to hesitate over making the claim that Jackson wanted him to make. It would have been extremely difficult to get informed observers to believe that Nixon had bombed Hanoi in order to force North Vietnamese acceptance of terms they had already agreed to. It was much easier to believe that Nixon's real target was not Hanoi but Saigon. And as 1972 came to an end, there was no indication that Thieu was prepared to sign.

On January 2, 1973, the House Democratic Caucus voted 154 to 75 to cut off all funds for Vietnam as soon as arrangements were complete for the withdrawal of American armed forces and the return of the POWs. On January 4 the Senate Democratic Caucus passed a similar resolution, 36 to 12.

Nixon passed the pressure on to Thieu. Initially, he tried to do so through Anna Chennault, the widow of General Claire Chennault, whose influence on the right wing of the Republican Party was considerable. He had her friend John Mitchell, his former attorney general, ask her to use her influence with Thieu, but the “Dragon Lady,” as she was commonly called, refused. There was irony here. In 1968, Mitchell had persuaded Mrs. Chennault to intervene with Thieu to get him to refuse to help Johnson in his election-eve bid for peace, which, if successful, might have given Hubert Humphrey the presidency. Now Nixon wanted her to persuade Thieu to cooperate with the president and accept an unsatisfactory peace. She would not.

Nixon again wrote directly to Thieu. The letter, dated January 5, was less threatening than previous ones and contained a more explicit promise:
“Should you decide, as I trust you will, to go with us, you have my assurance of continued assistance in the post-settlement period and that we will respond with full force should the settlement be violated by North Vietnam.”

Nixon was not in a position to give such a promise. Without congressional appropriations, he could not come to Saigon's aid.

That same day he had a meeting with the leaders of both parties. The atmosphere was cold. He spoke briefly about Vietnam. He said he knew many of the men in the room disagreed with his policies but added that he was determined to persist.

Nixon concluded, “In any event, you have indicated your own positions— some of you—which is in direct opposition. I understand that. I have the responsibility. Gentlemen, I will take responsibility if those negotiations fail. If they succeed, we all succeed.”

On January 6, Nixon went to his retreat at Camp David, where he met with Kissinger, who was flying to Paris the next day. The president said that if Kissinger could get Le Duc Tho to go back to the October 8 agreement, “we should take it.” Kissinger demurred, but Nixon insisted. He did want Kissinger to get some wording changes so that “we can claim some improvement,” but the point was that the war had to end, on whatever terms, in this round of negotiations; otherwise the Ninety-third Congress would force the administration to end it on even worse terms.

The president did agree that Kissinger could threaten the North Vietnamese with a resumption of the bombing of Hanoi if they did not cooperate, but Nixon then warned him that “as far as our internal planning is concerned, we cannot consider this to be a viable option.” As for Thieu, Nixon referred to Haig's report of his December visit to Saigon: Thieu was saying that “it is not a peace agreement that he is going to get but a commitment from the United States to continue to protect South Vietnam in the event such an agreement is broken.” Nixon said that was exactly right.

January 9 was Nixon's sixtieth birthday. In an interview, he gave his formula for living: “Never slow down.” He admitted that he had many problems, “but boredom is the least of them.”

He also wrote by hand a piece of self-analysis: “RN approaches his second inauguration with true peace of mind—because he knows that by his actions, often in the face of the most intense sort of criticism, what he is bringing to the
world is a ‘peace of mind’—that is, a peace formed by the exercise of hard reason and calm deliberation, and durable because its foundation has been carefully laid.” Nixon instructed Haldeman to pass the piece along to the staff and called it “an excellent line for them to take” when talking to the press about the president.

That afternoon Nixon got what he called “the best birthday present I have had in sixty years.” Kissinger cabled from Paris that there had been “a major breakthrough in the negotiations. In sum, we settled all the outstanding questions in the text of the agreement.”

Le Duc Tho had accepted Kissinger's revised wording on the demilitarized zone. But it made no practical difference; the accord that had been reached was basically the same as in October. Kissinger aide John Negroponte was disappointed. He told friends, “We bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our concession.”

Getting the Communists to accept the accord had never been the problem; the problem was Thieu, and that remained. Nixon was eager to have the situation resolved before Inauguration Day, January 20, but he worried that Thieu would refuse to cooperate.

On January 13, Kissinger returned from Paris. He flew down to Key Biscayne to brief the president. They talked until two A
.
M. Nixon walked out to the car with Kissinger to say good night and to tell him that the country was indebted to him for what he had done. Nixon later wrote that “it is not really a comfortable feeling for me to praise people so openly,” but “Henry expects it, and it was good that I did so.” Kissinger replied it was only Nixon's courage that had made a settlement possible. In his memoirs Kissinger wrote that he felt “an odd tenderness” that night toward Nixon.

The next morning they turned their attention to Thieu. Nixon wrote him another letter and told Haig to fly to Saigon to deliver it. The letter was full of threats: “I have therefore irrevocably decided to proceed to initial the Agreement on January 23, 1973, and to sign it on January 27, 1973, in Paris. I will do so, if necessary alone.” There were also promises. If Thieu would sign, Nixon would make it “emphatically clear that the United States recognizes your government as the only legal government of South Vietnam; that we do not recognize the right of any foreign troops to be present on South Vietnamese territory; that we will react strongly in the event the agreement is violated.” Of course, there was a big difference between not recognizing the right of the NVA to stay in South Vietnam and requiring the NVA to leave the country when the American
armed forces left. Nixon concluded, “It is my firm intention to continue full economic and military aid.”

Nixon feared that his words would not be enough, but he was determined to prevail. “Brutality is nothing,” he told Kissinger. “You have never seen it if this son-of-a-bitch doesn't go along, believe me.” To add to the pressure on Thieu, Nixon had Senators John Stennis, a Mississippi Democrat, and Goldwater warn publicly that if Thieu blocked the agreement, he would imperil his gov-ernment's chances of receiving any further aid from Congress.

Still Thieu would not yield. He sent a letter to Nixon raising the same complaints he had made in October—naturally enough, since it was the same agreement. Nixon replied on January 20 with an ultimatum.

On the public relations front, meanwhile, Nixon was also busy. On January 19 he told Haldeman, “We need to get across the point that the reason for the success of the negotiations was the bombing and the converse point that we did not halt the bombing until we had the negotiations back on track.” He instructed Kissinger to brief the staff on the settlement: “The key to this briefing will be to get a lot of people out selling our line.” Nixon wanted “an all-out effort with inspired leaks, etc.”

On January 20, Nixon was inaugurated for his second term. He had hoped to be able to announce that peace had been achieved, but Thieu's intransigence made that impossible. Under the circumstances, the hoopla that ordinarily occurs at inaugurations was distinctly absent, and Nixon's inaugural address was short and somber.

The parade following the ceremonies was marred by small groups of demonstrators chanting obscenities and throwing eggs and debris, but it was nowhere near as bad as four years earlier. If Nixon had not brought peace quite yet, he had gone a long way toward achieving that objective. The madness and hatred that had been so prominent in 1969 had abated by 1973. Sadly, in part it had been replaced by a bitterness because of the Christmas bombing and a suspicion because of the growing furor over the Watergate break-in. If Nixon deserved credit for the gains, he also deserved blame for the bitterness and suspicion.

On January 22 word arrived that Thieu had finally bowed to the inevitable and consented to the agreement. The following evening Nixon went on television to announce that on January 27 the formal signing ceremonies would be held in Paris. A cease-fire would begin at midnight that day.

After this announcement Nixon met with Kissinger. Nixon said he did not want to have any hatred or anything of that sort toward “our enemies”—by which he meant the American doves, not the Vietnamese Communists. “On the other hand,” he continued, Nixon's foes had to recognize that they “are disturbed, distressed, and really discouraged because we succeeded.”

Nixon later wondered whether commentators would appreciate what he and Kissinger had accomplished; he decided “probably not.” He told Kissinger that every success was followed by a “terrific letdown,” and he urged Kissinger not to let it get to him. There were many battles left to fight; he should not be discouraged.