Unholy Fury (25 page)

In his memoirs, Nixon recounted that the order to renew the bombing the week before Christmas ‘was the most difficult decision I made during the entire war'.
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He told Kissinger to make it clear in his public comments that the ‘North Vietnamese had agreed to a settlement, then reneged on a number of points, and were now refusing to negotiate seriously'. Furious at the logistics and red tape he detected in the Pentagon's plans for the bombing, Nixon personally telephoned one of his senior military chiefs to lay down the law: ‘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 this war, and if you don't, I'll consider you responsible'.
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And as he confided to his personal diary around the same time, the ghost of Winston Churchill hovered over his decision making:

 

I remember Churchill's admonition in his book on World War 1, that one can have a policy of audacity or one can follow a policy of caution, but it is disastrous to try to follow a policy of audacity and caution at the same time. It must be one or the other. We have now gone down the audacious line and we must continue until we get some sort of a break.
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Never mind this nod to Churchillian grandeur, the president was not going to take to the airwaves to explain his policy. Against the advice of Kissinger, Nixon refused to go on television to announce the bombings. He believed that to directly link the resumption of the bombing with the objective of forcing the North Vietnamese back to the negotiating table would be counterproductive: ‘their national pride and their ideological fanaticism would never have allowed
them to accept the international loss of face in caving in to such an ultimatum'.
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As Kissinger explains, ‘we had only two choices: taking a massive, shocking step to impose our will on events and end the war quickly, or letting matters drift into another round of inconclusive negotiations, prolonged warfare, bitter national divisions, and mounting casualties. There were no other options'.
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Historian Jeffrey Kimball's assessment of the bombings remains the most comprehensive:

 

In its purpose, Linebacker II was aimed less at punishing Hanoi into making concessions and more at providing Saigon with incentives to cooperate … But Linebacker II was also motivated by psychological processes and political considerations: as a forceful, symbolic closure to the American war, it would fulfil the promise Nixon had made to himself that he would “not go out of Vietnam whimpering”; and it had the potential of convincing hawks that he had been tough, compelling the enemy to accept an agreement that was in reality an ambiguous compromise, but which he touted as a clear cut victory for his skilful management of war and diplomacy.
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The statistics of the raids tell their own story. Over the eleven days, American bombers attacked key infrastructure sites in Hanoi and Haiphong, including electrical power and broadcast stations, airfields, bridges, ports and railway yards. Over 75 per cent of the bombs were dropped by B-52s, and only 12 per cent of the sorties were against solely military targets. Where previous bombing campaigns were designed to upset North Vietnamese supply lines, this campaign, according to the US Air Force, was also intent on making a ‘psychological impact': in other words, to destroy North Vietnamese morale. Although there was no deliberate carpet bombing, several residential areas in both cities were destroyed, as was a major hospital. The intensity of the bombing, along with the uncertainty of where the bombers would strike, created a scene of terror and carnage on the ground. To return to Kimball:

 

at a time of profound public war-weariness, Nixon was engaged in the most intensive bombing of the long, tragic conflict … carried out mostly by techno-sky-warriors flying the very planes that most symbolised indiscriminate, capital-intensive warfare—all weather, high-flying, instrument-guided, electronic-countermeasure-protected B-52 Stratofortresses.
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‘A TREMENDOUS FUROR'

In his recollections of this period written some years later, Kissinger recalled that ‘no foreign policy event of the Nixon Presidency evoked such outrage as the Christmas bombing. On no issue was he more unjustly treated … his decision speeded the end of the war'. Kissinger was certainly correct about it bringing an end to conflict, as he was about the ‘bedlam certain to follow Nixon's decision'.
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The bombings brought forth a raging torrent of both domestic and worldwide condemnation. Nixon himself wrote that as the criticism mounted, ‘pressure inside the White House became intense'. He could ‘feel the tension in the people I passed and greeted … I knew how sincerely troubled many of them were because of the bombing: I understood how difficult the bombing made it for many of them to face their friends and even their families during what should have been a happy holiday season'.
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Headlines in the United States screamed. Kissinger's memoirs list many of them: almost in wilful defiance of the moral indignation the administration faced and the ‘tremendous furor' he said that it provoked: ‘Terror from the skies'
(New York Times);
‘This will end the war?'
(Chicago Daily News);
‘Terror bombing in the name of peace
(Washington Post);
‘Beyond All Reason'
(Los Angeles Times);
‘The Rain of Death Continues
(Boston Globe).
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Journalist James Reston of the
New York Times
called it ‘war by tantrum' and prominent columnist Anthony Lewis labelled the president a ‘maddened tyrant'.
The Times
in London stated that the bombing was ‘a particular horror because of its massive scale and its indiscriminate character'.
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The message to the public was effectively that Linebacker II was an ‘irrational act of fury representing the belligerence that Nixon felt towards all of
his real and perceived enemies'.
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In Congress, Republican Senator William B Saxbe wondered aloud whether the president had ‘taken leave of his senses', while the Senate majority leader, Democrat Mike Mansfield, labelled the bombings as a ‘stone age tactic'. From Senator Ted Kennedy came the demand that ‘this should outrage the conscience of all Americans'.

Nixon's approval rating dropped by 11 per cent. The size and scale of the reaction drowned out those who came out in support—such as New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Governor of California Ronald Reagan, and Republican senators Howard Baker, Bob Taft and Charles Percy. It might have seemed bizarrely ironic, therefore, that during a quiet moment in his diary on Christmas Eve at his ‘Winter White House' in Florida, Key Biscayne, Nixon recorded his sense of gratitude for the ‘glorious burden of the presidency'. But again his glance was to history and the memory of the great men who had strode the global stage, not the present moment. It was ‘God's great gift' that he now had the opportunity to exert leadership for his country on the world scene, a scene now bereft of the ‘World War II greats'.
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Overseas, the reaction to the December bombings was equally visceral, though Henry Kissinger recalled that even Beijing and Moscow, while certainly critical, were more restrained than Washington's traditional allies in Europe.
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‘Not one NATO ally supported us', Kissinger caustically noted, a fact ‘especially painful from countries who were insisting in their own defences on a strategy involving missile attacks on civilian targets'.
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Former British Labour Party deputy leader Roy Jenkins classified the aerial assault as ‘one of the most cold blooded actions in recent history'. In a meeting in mid January with the British Cabinet secretary, Sir Burke Trend, Kissinger said he had ‘never seen the President so outraged at European reaction to US policy as he was with respect to the recent Vietnam decisions … That the countries whose security depends on our word should turn against us at this very moment—he is furious, literally furious'. Ominously, he added, ‘we will have difficulty maintaining civil relations with the Europeans who turned against us … (as well as) the Germans, for example, who just won an election, Canada and
Australia'. The NATO alliance could not ‘survive many more attacks on us like those in the latest weeks'.
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White House wrath was also directed towards France, Finland, Denmark, Holland and Belgium. Because French President Georges Pompidou had ‘made a little crack at a press conference … one of those snide little digs', Kissinger planned to punish the French by refusing to have Paris as the site for the international conference on Vietnam. But the most vocal foreign critic was the Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme, who compared the bombings to notorious ‘outrages' from World War II, such as the Soviet slaughter of Polish nationals in the Katyn forest and the Nazi extermination of Jews at Treblinka.
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Palme, who for some years had been a stone in Washington's shoe, was forced to deny publicly that he had implied Nixon to be a modern Hitler, but remained unrepentant over his use of history.

US retribution was swift. The coordinator of the Paris peace talks, Ambassador William Sullivan, told Kissinger privately that Palme was simply a ‘bastard', while Kissinger asked that the Swedish ambassador be ‘called in by somebody and given a really brutal dressing down'.
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The White House made it clear that a new Swedish ambassador would not be welcome in Washington; the American chargé d'affaires would not be returned to Stockholm; and all high level meetings and policy exchanges were to be suspended until ‘the Swedes act to improve the situation'. It was, as National Security Council adviser Helmut Sonnenfeldt characterised it, a ‘cold shoulder policy'.
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As Kissinger later explained to Sir Burke Trend, Nixon's ‘mood runs very deep' on the question of public criticism from allies. And when Trend gently suggested that the British prime minister and the president discuss the style and tempo of the new Whitlam government in Canberra, Kissinger's reply was simply incredulous: ‘You want to hear what the President thinks about what Australia did?'
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‘DEAR MR PRESIDENT'

Given the Nixon administration's penchant for secrecy even among close allies, it was not surprising that the Australian government had not been consulted about the resumption of the bombings. Many
in the Labor Party, however, felt they were watching a re-run of American decisions over the last decade. Freudenberg's cynicism at Nixon's justification for the bombings—that it was the last throw of the dice to get agreement on the peace accords and prevent further American loss of life—was probably widely held in the party: the ‘same justification in December 1972', he recalled, ‘had been used to justify every escalation of the war since 1964'.
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Whitlam's response, initially, was to dodge the issue. ‘Naturally', he told a press conference on the day the news of the bombings broke in Australia, ‘we regret that the negotiations for a ceasefire have broken down'. Pressed for a comment on the bombing, Whitlam dodged: ‘No, I don't think a comment would help. We would like to have the negotiations resume. That is all I feel I should say'.
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The course of alliance relations during the initial months of the new government may have run very smoothly had Whitlam stuck to that position. Others around him, though, felt no call of self-discipline.

Jim Cairns had no intention of hitting the rhetorical brakes, and was the first to publicly rebuke the president for the breakdown in peace talks. On the very day that Nixon had ordered the bombings to commence, the Whitlam Cabinet was sworn in at Government House, Yarralumla, and Cairns, now Minister for Trade, was asked by a journalist whether his interest in the Vietnam war had now declined. It had not. As Cairns put it, ‘the whole peace talks arrangement was a fraud by President Nixon to win the election'.
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He had virtually accused the president of rank dishonesty. The outburst was a portent of what lay ahead: a telling example of the inability of some senior Labor figures to make the adjustment from Opposition to government. And it did not go unnoticed in Washington, along with the fact that thirty-five federal and state trade union officials protested the bombings to the American Embassy or directly to government agencies in the United States. Then, as if a ghost of Labor's troubled past on security and intelligence issues had risen suddenly from the grave, a story in the
Canberra Times
appeared detailing the prime minister's refusal to allow certain members of his personal staff to be security cleared by ASIO. According to one journalist, the decision was ‘expected to result in immediate difficulties with US and British
intelligence agencies'. As Graham Freudenberg later reflected, ‘the last thing we needed was a phony security scare'.
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Whitlam may have effected a neat diplomatic sidestep over the bombings, but it could not stifle his underlying intent to redefine the meaning of the alliance in the Australian foreign policy pantheon. Later on the afternoon of his ministry's swearing-in, the prime minister instructed key Australian diplomatic missions around the world to inject a ‘more mature, less adulatory' tone into their dealings with the American government, stressing that he wanted a relationship ‘not of … mindless agreement or friendship simply for friendship's sake'.
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He could not have known that it would be for him to dramatically inaugurate the new policy in the days ahead. Members of his own staff, especially private secretaries Peter Wilenski and Richard Hall, were urging him to write to the American president and formally protest the decision to resume the bombing of North Vietnam.