To this day, I do not know whether Moscow passed the proposal on to Hanoi and, receiving a negative reply, decided that it did not want to admit its impotence or run the risk of some American retaliation. It is also possible that Moscow never transmitted our proposal because the gains were too abstract and the risks of Soviet involvement in case of failure too great. I lean toward the former view. Given Hanoi’s fanatical insistence on its independence and its skill at navigating between Moscow and Peking, Moscow as a site for a decisive negotiation was too risky. Peking might object; Moscow might use the occasion to go along with our maneuver and make concessions in Indochina to strengthen superpower relations. As for Moscow, it could not have been overly eager to host a negotiation for the results of which the respective sides might hold it accountable and which it could not influence decisively. We tried the same approach again in 1971, this time offering me as the negotiator. It was again rebuffed, probably for the same reasons. In the absence of either diplomatic or military pressures the Vietnam negotiations resumed their labored pace.

 

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Return to the Treadmill

 

n May 8, at the sixteenth plenary meeting in Paris, the Communists with great flourish put forward a ten-point peace program. Couched in the by now customary style of an ultimatum, the Ten Points listed what the United States “must” do to end the war. They demanded total, unconditional, and unilateral US withdrawal, abolition of the South Vietnamese government, and American reparations for war damage. They proposed that the South Vietnamese government be replaced by a coalition government to include all “social strata and political tendencies in South Vietnam that stand for peace, independence and neutrality.”

 

The proposal for a coalition government did not sound unreasonable; many unwary Americans read it as simply a demand for Communist participation in the Saigon government. But once we started exploring its meaning we found that the Communists reserved for themselves the right to define who stood for “peace, independence and neutrality.” The operational content of the Ten Points was that after we had decapitated the government of South Vietnam and demoralized the population by total and unconditional withdrawal, we would then collude with the Communists to force the remaining non-Communist elements into a structure containing the NLF and whatever groups the Communists alone would define as acceptable. And that new coalition government was to be only interim; the definitive political structure of South Vietnam was to be negotiated between it and the NLF, backed by Hanoi’s army. Such was the Communist definition of a “just” political settlement. [In July 1971, with Le Duc Tho I went over a list of Saigon politicians, including all known opposition leaders, who might prove acceptable as meeting the test of standing for “peace, independence and neutrality.” Not one passed muster.] Needless to say, when the Communists took over Saigon, no coalition government was established; in fact, even the NLF was excluded from any share in power. All key positions in the South today are held by North Vietnamese.

 

The proposal was one-sided in content and insolent in tone. But the mere existence of a Communist peace plan, however extraordinary in nature, generated Congressional, media, and public pressures not to pass up this “opportunity.” If we were not going to be whipsawed we clearly needed to elaborate a clear-cut position of our own. In late April, I had proposed to the President that he give a speech presenting an American peace plan. On April 25, I called the President’s attention to a remark made by Xuan Thuy: “If the Nixon Administration has a great peace program, as it makes believe, why doesn’t it make that program public?”

 

But the President hesitated. He wanted to wait a little while longer for a reply from Moscow on the Vance mission. He was also inhibited by his uneasiness about the attitude of his Secretary of State. He was convinced that if the State Department saw the draft of a speech, it would either leak it or advance so many additions incompatible with his strategy that he would be made to appear as the hard-liner if he turned them down. As usual, Nixon found a solution as effective as it was devious. He waited until Rogers had departed on a trip to SouthEast Asia on May 12, and then ordered me on the same day to supervise the preparation of a Presidential speech within the next forty-eight hours.

 

On May 14, Nixon went on national television and elaborated for the first time the premises of his Vietnam policy, the steps that had been taken, and a concrete new negotiating proposal. He reviewed the actions of his first four months in office: the blunting of the enemy offensive, the improvement of our relations with the Saigon government, the strengthening of the South Vietnamese forces, and, above all, the development of a coherent negotiating position.

 

He proposed an eight-point program that represented a quantum advance in the American negotiating position over that of the Johnson Administration. Specifically, he abandoned the Manila formula (Hanoi’s withdrawal six months before ours) and advocated simultaneous withdrawal. Yet the North Vietnamese withdrawal could be de facto (by “informal understanding”) rather than explicitly admitted by Hanoi. [I explained in a White House background briefing before the speech, “We do not care whether they acknowledge that they have forces there, as long as they make sure the forces leave there and we will settle for supervisory arrangements which assure us that there are no longer any North Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam.” opportunity to explore the possibilities of a fair political contest. The only conditions it did not meet turned out to be the Communist sine qua non: unconditional withdrawal of United States forces and collusive installation of a Communist-controlled government.] The United States agreed to the participation of the NLF in the political life of South Vietnam; it committed itself to free elections under international supervision and to accept their outcome. The President offered to set a precise timetable for withdrawal, and he offered cease-fires under international supervision. In short, the May 14 speech provided every North Vietnamese negotiator Xuan Thuy initially raised hopes by a relatively mild reaction, delicately noting that there were “points of agreement” between the Ten Points of the NLF and the Eight Points of the President’s May 14 speech. But in the formal negotiations he adamantly refused to discuss them; soon the negotiating sessions reverted to the sterile reiteration of standard North Vietnamese positions. The stalemate continued.

 

And so did our efforts to break it.

 

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The Beginning of Troop Withdrawals

 

fter the May 14 speech outlining our compromise terms for negotiation, we turned to the unilateral withdrawal of American troops. We had inherited, in one of the less felicitous phrases of foreign policy in this century, a general commitment to “de-Americanize” the war. The Johnson Administration had begun the effort to strengthen the South Vietnamese army, but there were no plans for American withdrawals. As Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford had said on September 29, 1968, “the level of combat is such that we are building up our troops, not cutting them down.” In a news conference of December 10, 1968, Clifford reiterated that there were no plans for any reduction. In our innocence we thought that withdrawals of American troops might help us win public support so that the troops which remained and our enhanced staying power might give Hanoi an incentive to negotiate seriously. At the same time, if we strengthened the South Vietnamese sufficiently, our withdrawals might gradually even end our involvement without agreement with Hanoi.

 

Nixon favored withdrawal for both these reasons. In a news conference of March 14, he had laid down three criteria for our withdrawals: the ability of the South Vietnamese to defend themselves without American troops; negotiating progress in the Paris talks; and the level of enemy activity. Nixon’s strategy in the early months, in fact, was to try to weaken the enemy to the maximum possible extent, speed up the modernization of Saigon’s forces, and then begin withdrawals. He thought that would be a public relations coup.

 

General Wheeler at the January 25, 1969, NSC meeting had said he thought President Thieu would probably agree to a small reduction of US forces because it would help Nixon domestically and convey the image of a self-confident South Vietnam. Rogers thought we could buy an indefinite amount of time at home with a withdrawal of 50,000 troops. Laird and Nixon kept their counsel. Thieu expressed confidence publicly on February 6 that a sizable number of American forces could leave Vietnam in 1969. General Goodpaster, then serving as deputy to General Abrams, attended an NSC meeting on March 28 and reported that the South Vietnamese improvement had already been substantial; we were in fact close to “de-Americanizing” the war, he said, but were not at the “decision point” yet. Laird spoke up: “I agree, but not with your term ‘de-Americanizing.’ What we need is a term like ‘Vietnamizing’ to put the emphasis on the right issues.” The President was impressed. “That’s a good point, Mel,” he said. Thus “Vietnamization” was born.

 

On April 10, I issued a directive requesting the departments and agencies to work out a schedule for Vietnamizing the war. Nixon decided the time was ripe soon after his May 14 speech. Whereas he had wanted to deliver his May 14 statement without interference from Rogers, he sought to proceed on troop withdrawals by preempting Laird.

 

A meeting was arranged for June 8 with South Vietnamese President Thieu to win his support. The site was to be Midway Island in the Pacific, chosen because of the fear that a visit by Thieu to the United States would provoke riots. Hawaii was rejected because Lyndon Johnson had held a meeting there with Vietnamese leaders. It was a symptom of the morass into which the Vietnam war had plunged our society that a meeting between the President and the leader for whose country over thirty thousand Americans had died had to take place on an uninhabited island in the middle of the Pacific.

 

On the way to Midway, Nixon convened a meeting in Honolulu on the afternoon of June 7 with Rogers, Laird, General Wheeler, Ambassador Lodge, and myself, in the conference room of the Kahala Hilton Hotel overlooking the Pacific. Ambassador Bunker, General Abrams, and Admiral McCain were also there. The meeting was to take the final decision on withdrawal strategy. It was clear that the military approached the subject with a heavy heart. Deep down they knew that it was a reversal of what they had fought for. However presented, it would make victory impossible and even an honorable outcome problematical. The process of withdrawal was likely to become irreversible. Henceforth, we would be in a race between the decline in our combat capability and the improvement of South Vietnamese forces—a race whose outcome was at best uncertain.

 

Contrary to mythology, the military rarely oppose their Commander- in-Chief, even privately. If they can conjure up a halfway plausible justification, they will overcome their misgivings and support a Presidential decision. It was painful to see General Abrams, epitome of the combat commander, obviously unhappy, yet nevertheless agreeing to a withdrawal of 25,000 combat troops. He knew then that he was doomed to a rearguard action, that the purpose of his command would increasingly become logistic redeployment and not success in battle. He could not possibly achieve the victory that had eluded us at full strength while our forces were constantly dwindling. It remained to sell this proposition to President Thieu.

 

The Midway meeting could not have had a more surrealistic setting. For the space of seven hours this atoll of no more than two square miles was invaded by the Presidential entourage of over five hundred officials, security men, communicators, journalists, and supernumeraries who considered themselves indispensable. The airport hangar was freshly painted; the Commander’s house where the President was to meet Thieu received new furniture and a fresh coat of paint, making this Navy officer the one unambiguous beneficiary of the Midway meeting. Cars to transport the VIPs were flown in, as were supplies for a state luncheon. All this was observed with beady eyes by the gooney birds, who are native to this island and have grown insolent after being protected by the Interior Department for generations. No one has yet discovered the mystic bond between that dismal island and these strange birds, which soar majestically but take off like lumbering airplanes after an extended run. On Midway, the only island they deign to inhabit, they squat arrogantly in the middle of the roads, producing traffic jams to amuse themselves, happy in the knowledge that the Department of Interior will severely punish anyone who gives way to the all-too-human impulse to deliver a swift kick.

 

Thieu’s position at Midway was less enviable than theirs. For days there had been reports (not discouraged by some in our government) that President Nixon would announce the beginning of the withdrawals of US forces and that this in turn would be intended as a warning to Thieu to put his house in order. By this his critics generally meant the early installation of Western-style democracy, if not a coalition government. Just how democratic freedoms might be ensured in a country overrun by 300,000 hostile troops and guerrillas those critics rarely made clear. Thieu was expected to accomplish within months and amidst a civil war what no other SouthEast Asian leader had achieved in decades of peace. He was being asked simultaneously to win a war, adjust his own defense structure to the withdrawal of a large American military establishment, and build democratic institutions in a country that had not known peace in a generation or democracy in its history. His legitimacy as a nationalist leader was to be enhanced by reforms undertaken under pressure from the great power that had connived in the overthrow of his predecessor and thereby left the country bereft of its civil administration.

 

It was a poignant scene as Nguyen Van Thieu, for whose country 36,000 Americans had now died but who was not allowed to visit the soil of his powerful ally, stepped jauntily down the steps of his chartered Pan American plane. I felt sorry for him. It was not his fault that he was the focus of American domestic pressures; he was, after all, the representative of the millions of South Vietnamese who did not want to be overrun by the North Vietnamese army. He came from a culture different from ours, operating by different values. But all Vietnamese have an innate dignity, produced perhaps by the cruel and bloody history of their beautiful land. The Vietnamese have not “accepted their fate” as the Western myth about Asians would have it; they have fought for centuries, against outsiders and against each other, to determine their national destiny. And difficult, even obnoxious, as they can be, they have survived by a magnificent refusal to bow their necks to enemy or ally.

 

There were two sessions. The decisive one took place in the Commander’s refurbished house. It included Nixon and me, Thieu and his personal assistant. In the Officers’ Club there was also an experts’ meeting dealing mostly with economic matters and chaired by the two Foreign Ministers. (It was a pattern that came to be followed in nearly all of Nixon’s meetings with foreign leaders.) Thieu did not act as a supplicant. He conducted himself with assurance; he did not ask for favors. We had been concerned that the projected troop withdrawal would produce an awkward scene. Thieu anticipated us by proposing it himself. We suggested the initiation of private contacts with Hanoi at the Presidential level. Thieu agreed, provided he was informed about any political discussions. Because the five-hour time difference with the East Coast put the media under pressure to file, the two Presidents stepped outside the Commander’s house after an hour-and-a-half discussion and President Nixon announced the first American troop withdrawal.

 

Nixon was jubilant. He considered the announcement a political triumph. He thought it would buy him the time necessary for developing our strategy. His advisers, including me, shared his view. We were wrong on both counts. We had crossed a fateful dividing line. The withdrawal increased the demoralization of those families whose sons remained at risk. And it brought no respite from the critics, the majority of whom believed that since their pressure had produced the initial decision to withdraw, more pressure could speed up the process, and who did not care—nay, some would have rejoiced—if accelerated withdrawals produced a collapse.

 

That June, former Secretary of Defense Clifford, who six months previously had stated that there was no United States plan for withdrawals , published an article in Foreign Affairs that grandly urged the unilateral withdrawal of 100,000 troops by the end of 1969, and of all other combat personnel by the end of 1970, leaving only logistics and air personnel.[65] President Nixon, never one to yield a debater’s point, retorted impetuously at a press conference that he hoped to improve on Clifford’s schedule. Though strenuous efforts were made to “interpret” the President’s remark, the damage was done; our insistence on mutual withdrawal was by then drained of virtually any plausibility. Our commitment to unilateral withdrawal had come to be seen, at home, abroad, and particularly in Vietnam, as irreversible. The last elements of flexibility were lost when the Defense Department began to plan its budget on the basis of anticipated troop reductions; henceforth to interrupt withdrawals would produce a financial shortfall affecting the procurement of new weapons.

 

The North Vietnamese, on the other hand, were interested not in symbols but in reality. They coolly analyzed the withdrawal, weighing its psychological benefits to us in terms of enhanced staying power against the decline in military effectiveness represented by a shrinking number of American forces. Hanoi kept up incessant pressure for the largest possible withdrawal in the shortest possible time. The more automatic our withdrawal, the less useful it was as a bargaining weapon; the demand for mutual withdrawal grew hollow as our unilateral withdrawal accelerated. And the more rapid our withdrawal, the greater the possibility of a South Vietnamese collapse. Thus the North Vietnamese constantly complained that our unreciprocated withdrawals were just “driblets” or that we were not “sufficiently clear” about our ultimate intentions; they never deviated from their position that our unilateral steps created no obligation on their part. Within a year they were demanding an unconditional deadline.

 

These realities dominated our internal deliberations. Laird had prepared five alternative schemes for troop withdrawals in 1969. At the low end was a withdrawal of 50,000 troops, at the high end, 100,000. In between were various numbers and compositions of forces. Rogers supported a figure of 85,000; Laird, conscious of the views of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, officially supported the smallest figure (50,000) but indicated privately that he would not mind being overruled. As for the longer term, Laird offered timetables ranging from eighteen to forty-two months and ceilings for the residual American force—those troops remaining until Hanoi’s forces withdrew—ranging from 260,000 to 306,000. In a memorandum Laird sent to the President on June 2, he offered a “feasible” timetable of forty-two months (stretching our withdrawal to the end of 1971) and a residual force of 260,000. He warned that in the absence of North Vietnamese reciprocity, a more rapid withdrawal would result in serious setbacks to the pacification program, a significant decline in allied military capacity, and the possibility of South Vietnamese collapse.

 

Within the bureaucracy two trends quickly developed. Since the credit (aside from Nixon’s) for implementing the Vietnamization plan went to the Pentagon, the State Department could reach for a share in the glory of ending the war only by redoubling its political efforts. This unleashed a flood of cables on the hapless Thieu to speed up the process of political and economic reform. In fact, a sweeping change in the system of land tenure was put into effect. Our advocacy, however, may have weakened him by making his rather extensive reforms appear to result not from his strength and growing self-confidence but from American pressure. On July 11 Thieu offered free elections in which the Communists could participate, supervised by a mixed electoral commission of Vietnamese, including the Communists, and a body of international observers. Secretary Rogers leaked some of its details in a July 2 news conference, which led Thieu, out of pique, to delay sending us an advance draft of his new program.

 

These issues were to be discussed at a meeting of the President and his senior advisers on the Presidential yacht Sequoia on July 7. Rogers, Laird, Wheeler, Attorney General Mitchell, General Robert Cushman (Deputy CIA Director), and I were present. In the event, the principal topic of discussion was the meaning of an apparent lull in the fighting. Did it result from Hanoi’s exhaustion, from a new negotiating strategy, or from an attempt by Hanoi to achieve de-escalation by tacit understandings? It was symptomatic of the intellectual confusion of the period that in the relief felt when a military lull eased both casualties and domestic pressures, no one asked the question whether the lull might not reflect the fact that our strategy was succeeding and should therefore be continued. Instead, there was unanimity that we should respond by a reciprocal slowdown. It was decided to make a basic change in the battlefield orders for General Abrams. The existing “mission statement” for US forces in SouthEast Asia, inherited from the Johnson Administration, declared the ambitious intention to “defeat” the enemy and “force” its withdrawal to North Vietnam. The new mission statement (which went into effect on August 15) focused on providing “maximum assistance” to the South Vietnamese to strengthen their forces, supporting pacification efforts, and reducing the flow of supplies to the enemy. As it turned out, the President at the last moment changed his mind and countermanded the new instructions. But Laird had already issued them, and they stood. I do not know whether the changed orders—which were quickly leaked—made any practical difference. Given our commitment to withdrawal, they reflected our capabilities, whatever our intentions.

 

On July 30, Nixon made a surprise stop in Saigon on his around- the-world trip. He went there against the advice of the Secret Service, and for security reasons the Saigon stop was not announced until the last moment. Nixon was whisked from the airport to the Presidential Palace in a helicopter that seemed to go straight up out of range of possible sniper fire and then plummeted like a stone between the trees of Thieu’s offices. I never learned how often the pilots had rehearsed this maneuver or how its risk compared with that of sniper fire. Nixon told Thieu that continued withdrawals were necessary to maintain American public support. He also argued that it was important that the reductions appear to be on a systematic timetable and at our initiative. We were clearly on the way out of Vietnam by negotiation if possible, by unilateral withdrawal if necessary.

 

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A Secret Meeting with Xuan Thuy

 

n June I initiated another attempt at negotiations, through my old friend Jean Sainteny, the former French Delegate-General in Hanoi. Sainteny’s wife, Claude, had been a student of mine in the summer of 1953 in the International Seminar I conducted at Harvard for promising young foreign leaders. She was a writer and historian, as beautiful as she was intelligent. After she married Sainteny, I visited them occasionally at their apartment in the Rue de Rivoli overlooking the Tuileries Gardens. Sainteny was an elegant, highly intelligent man who during the years when there was no contact between the United States and Hanoi had given me my first insights into the Vietnamese mentality. He had spent much time with me recounting his experiences in Hanoi and giving me his assessment of our Vietnam involvement. Like many Frenchmen who had served in Indochina he considered our enterprise hopeless—an attitude not untinged with nationalism: How could America presume to succeed where France had failed? Unlike many of his compatriots, he understood the importance of an honorable exit for America and for other free peoples. I did not doubt that he would report our contacts to his government. This was of secondary importance, since this knowledge could confer on France no unilateral benefit; it would satisfy curiosity, not affect policy. I trusted Sainteny’s honor and reliability in doing what he had undertaken. He was trusted by the North Vietnamese as well. No more can be asked of an intermediary.

 

So on June 24, I suggested to the President that we invite Sainteny to America to explore a new initiative: “My reading of the situation is that, in view of Hanoi’s present state of mind, new overtures will probably not make much difference. However, I believe we should make another overture both for the record and because of the lack of real movement in the Paris negotiations.” Sainteny saw the President in the Oval Office on July 15. Since no one knew of his presence in the United States, I had to act as interpreter. Given the shaky level of my spoken French, this surely did not help anybody’s precision in understanding. Sainteny indicated that he would be prepared to visit Hanoi on our behalf and carry a message. Alternatively, he suggested a meeting between me and Le Duc Tho, a key member of the North Vietnamese

 

Politburo who visited Paris from time to time and had participated in private talks with Harriman.

 

We chose the first course. A private letter from Nixon to Ho Chi Minh was drafted. We asked Sainteny to deliver it personally to Hanoi. The letter stressed our commitment to peace; it offered to discuss Hanoi’s plans together with our own. In concluded:

 

The time has come to move forward at the conference table toward an early resolution of this tragic war. You will find us forthcoming and open-minded in a common effort to bring the blessings of peace to the brave people of Vietnam. Let history record that at this critical juncture, both sides turned their face toward peace rather than toward conflict and war.[66]

 

But the North Vietnamese were not to be moved; they refused even to give Sainteny a visa. The letter was handed over to Hanoi’s representative in Paris, Mai Van Bo. Determined to try for a breakthrough, we asked Sainteny to arrange for me to meet North Vietnamese negotiators.

 

At the end of July, I accompanied the President on his around-the- world trip, beginning with the Apollo 11 splashdown and visiting Southeast Asia, India, Pakistan, and Romania. I split off from the President’s party to visit Paris and Brussels while the President flew home. My secret meeting was scheduled for Sainteny’s apartment on August 4. Le Duc Tho having left Paris, my interlocutor was to be Xuan Thuy, Hanoi’s plenipotentiary at the plenary peace talks. This, as I learned later, guaranteed that little would be said other than the stock formulas that had come to dominate those plenary sessions. For Xuan Thuy was not a policymaker but a functionary. Representing the Foreign Ministry and not the Communist Party, he had been sent by Hanoi to read the official line at the public sessions. Tiny, with a Buddha face and a sharp mind, perpetually smiling even when saying the most outrageous things, he had no authority to negotiate. His job was psychological warfare. When Hanoi wanted serious talks, its “Special Adviser” to its Paris delegation, Le Duc Tho, would arrive from North Vietnam. He, too, could be described as flexible only by the wildest flight of fancy. But he, at lEast, had authority, and in the end it was he who concluded the negotiations.

 

The pretext for my visit to Paris was to brief President Georges Pompidou and Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas about President Nixon’s world trip. Late in the afternoon of August 4, I left the American Embassy on the excuse of going sight-seeing, and together with my personal assistant, Anthony Lake, and our military attaché in Paris, General Vernon Walters, went to Sainteny’s apartment not far away on the Rue de Rivoli. At that time I was not covered by journalists; reaching Sainteny’s apartment-unobserved was no great trick. General Walters was present because of his genius as an interpreter and because he was fully trusted by both President Nixon and me. (He was to set up all my early negotiating trips to Paris, as well as some contact there with the Chinese, with infallible precision, imagination, and discretion.) Walters spoke nine languages fluently. His skill at interpreting was phenomenal; he was also a great actor able to render not only the words but the intonation and attitude of the speaker. A fine flair for the dramatic ensured that the translation erred if at all on the side of improving on the original, but the speaker’s composure was not eased by the fact that Walters’s memory was so retentive that he refused to take notes. The meeting with Xuan Thuy lasted three and a half hours, partly because it required double translation. I spoke in English, translated into French by Walters, and then Xuan Thuy’s interpreter rendered this into Vietnamese. When Xuan Thuy spoke, his interpreter went from Vietnamese into English.

 

I had anticipated the meeting with some nervousness. This would be the first negotiation in which I participated as a principal. It would be my first meeting with the elusive North Vietnamese, whom I had pursued without success for a whole summer on behalf of President Johnson. I still half believed that rapid progress would be made if we could convince them of our sincerity. My colleagues and I arrived at Sainteny’s apartment a half hour before the scheduled time. Sainteny ushered us into his living room and showed us where the refreshments were located. His apartment contained some valuable artifacts from his days in Vietnam. “I hope if you disagree you will not throw the crockery at each other,” said Sainteny dryly and excused himself.

 

Xuan Thuy and Mai Van Bo arrived exactly on time. We were seated on sofas facing one another, the American group with its back to the Rue de Rivoli, leaving the view of the Tuileries Gardens to the Vietnamese. As in all my later meetings, I was impressed by their dignity and quiet self-assurance. Here was a group of men who had made violence and guerrilla war their profession; their contact with the outside world had been sporadic and shaped by the requirements of their many struggles. But in meeting with the representative of the strongest power on earth, they were subtle, disciplined, and infinitely patient. Except for one occasion—when, carried away by the early success of the spring offensive of 1972, they turned insolent—they were always courteous; they never showed any undue eagerness; they never permitted themselves to appear rattled. They were specialists in political warfare, determined to move only at their own pace, not to be seduced by charm or goaded by impatience. They pocketed American concessions as their due, admitting no obligation to reciprocate moderation. They saw compromise as a confession of weakness. They were impressed only by their own assessment of Hanoi’s self-interest. They admitted of no self- doubt; they could never grant—even to themselves—that they had been swayed, or even affected, by our arguments. Their goal was total power in South Vietnam, or at least a solution in which their opponents were so demoralized that they would be easy to destroy in the next round. They deviated from their quest for victory only after the collapse of their Easter offensive in 1972 left them totally exhausted.

 

After exchanging pleasantries, mostly about my abortive efforts to meet Mai Van Bo in 1967, I turned to the purpose of the meeting. I expressed my respect for the courage and the suffering of the Vietnamese people. The United States sincerely sought a settlement compatible with the self-respect of both sides. The fact remained that by November 1 the negotiations which had begun with the bombing halt would be a year old. In that period, the United States had made a series of significant unreciprocated gestures: We had stopped sending reinforcements, we had announced the unilateral withdrawal of 25,000 men, and we had promised further withdrawals. We had offered to accept the results of internationally supervised free elections in which the NLF could participate. There had been no response. I was in Paris, I said, to suggest from the highest possible level and in great earnestness that we make a major effort to settle the conflict by the time the negotiation was one year old—that is to say, by November 1. We were prepared to discuss the Ten Points of the NLF, but we could not accept the proposition that like the Ten Commandments they were graven in stone and not subject to negotiation. It was in the long term intolerable for us to be treated at every meeting like schoolboys taking an examination in the adequacy of our understanding of Hanoi’s formal position.

 

I proposed intensified negotiations and an effort to find common ground between the NLF’s Ten Points and Nixon’s Eight Points of May 14. Specifically, the United States was prepared to withdraw all its forces, without exception, as part of a program of mutual withdrawal. We were ready to accept the outcome of any free political process. We understood that neither side could be expected to give up at the conference table what had not been conceded on the battlefield; we believed that a fair process must register an existing balance of political and military forces. As we were not asking for the disbanding of the Communist side, we should not be asked to disband the non-Communist political groupings. Successful negotiations required that each side recognize that its opponent could not be defeated without its noticing it. On behalf of the President, I proposed that we open a special channel of contact. If the negotiations proved serious, the President was prepared to adjust military operations to facilitate an agreement. At the same time, if by November 1 no progress had been made, the United States would have to consider steps of grave consequence. [Nixon made the same point to various host governments on his global trip, and to various leaders on State visits to Washington, in the expectation that these warnings would filter back to Hanoi. They did. But no plans yet existed to implement the threat if no progress resulted.]

 

Xuan Thuy listened impassively without as much as hinting that he had heard a change in the American position. I had in fact presented the most comprehensive American peace plan yet. I had gone beyond the most dovish position then being advocated within the Washington bureaucracy by offering the total withdrawal of all American troops with no provision whatever for residual forces. I had proposed de-escalation of military operations. As was the North Vietnamese custom, he asked a few clarifying questions, especially about the procedures for intensified negotiations, and launched himself into a long monologue. He first recounted the epic of Vietnam’s struggle for independence through the centuries. I was to hear this tale many more times over the next four years. It became a ritual, like saying grace—except that it took much longer. The heroic saga of how the Vietnamese defeated all foreigners was impressive, even moving, although after constant repetition over many years this litany came to test my self-control. Turning to substance after about forty-five minutes, Xuan Thuy denied that the Ten Points were, as I had said, the Ten Commandments; they were, however, the only “logical and realistic basis for settling the war”—a distinction my Occidental mind lacked the subtlety to grasp.

 

According to Xuan Thuy there were two problems, the military and the political. The military solution was the complete withdrawal of United States and what the North Vietnamese called “satellite” forces (troops contributed by allied countries). The United States had been very imprecise on that subject, he said—meaning that we had not given an unconditional schedule for their removal. The political solution required the removal of Thieu, Ky, and Huong (the President, the Vice President and the Prime Minister of our ally) and the establishment of a coalition government composed of the Communist Provisional Revolutionary Government [The “Provisional Revolutionary Government,” or PRG, was after June 1969 the designation of the National Liberation Front.] and the remnants of the Saigon administration as long as they stood for “peace, independence and neutrality.” The two issues, military and political, were linked, said Xuan Thuy; one could not be solved without the other. In other words, not even a unilateral United States withdrawal would end the war or secure the release of our prisoners.

 

Hanoi thus continued to insist that the United States establish a new government under conditions in which the non-Communist side would be made impotent by the withdrawal of the American forces and demoralized by the removal of its leadership. If the United States had the effrontery to withdraw without bringing about such a political upheaval, the war would go on and our prisoners would remain. Over the years we moved from position to position, from mutual to unilateral withdrawal, from residual forces to complete departure. But Hanoi never budged. We could have neither peace nor our prisoners until we achieved what Hanoi apparently no longer trusted itself to accomplish: the overthrow of our ally.

 

We were not prepared to do for the Communists what they could not do for themselves. This seemed to us an act of dishonor that would mortgage America’s international position for a long time to come. Our refusal to overthrow an allied government remained the single and crucial issue that deadlocked all negotiation until October 8, 1972, when Hanoi withdrew the demand.

 

Though Xuan Thuy and I had achieved little except to restate established positions in a less contentious manner, we agreed that either party would be free to contact the other and that another meeting should take place. Xuan Thuy indicated that Hanoi did not like intermediaries from other countries and asked us to designate an American to receive or deliver messages in this channel. I designated General Walters. A summary was sent to Ambassador Bunker in Saigon to inform President Thieu, who had authorized such secret talks at the Midway meeting and who was kept thoroughly briefed on my secret negotiations from the beginning. In the absence of Ambassador Lodge in Paris, his deputy, Philip Habib, was briefed by me.

 

The newly established channel was not used again in 1969. Two days later, on August 6, there was a Communist attack on Cam Ranh Bay, which one could barely explain on the ground that it must have been planned well before the meeting with Xuan Thuy. On August 11, however, Communist forces attacked more than one hundred cities, towns, and bases across South Vietnam, ending the eight-week lull in the fighting. The most generous interpretation could not avoid the conclusion that Hanoi did not believe in gestures, negotiation, goodwill, or reciprocity.

 

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Another Reassessment

 

ixon reacted to the new Vietnam attacks by announcing on August 23 from the San Clemente White House that he was deferring consideration of the next troop withdrawal until his return to Washington. There was an unusually delayed and seemingly uncertain response from the North Vietnamese in Paris. The apparent delay in our unilateral withdrawal had given Hanoi pause—a hint of its respect for American forces and of what might have happened had our domestic situation permitted greater firmness. But it did not. Though Nixon’s decision was exactly in accordance with two of the three criteria for troop withdrawal he had announced in March and frequently repeated (enemy activity, progress in Paris, and improvement of the South Vietnamese forces), the decision was greeted with outrage by the Congress and the media. On August 25, Ho Chi Minh replied to President Nixon’s letter of July 15. (Actually, the reply was received on August 30, three days before Ho’s death.) Ho’s letter, not reciprocating Nixon’s salutation of “Dear Mr. President,” reiterated North Vietnam’s public position in a peremptory fashion:

 

Our Vietnamese people are deeply devoted to peace, a real peace with independence and real freedom. They are determined to fight to the end, without fearing the sacrifices and difficulties in order to defend their country and their sacred national rights. The overall solution in 10 points of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam and of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam is a logical and reasonable basis for the settlement of the Vietnamese problem. It has earned the sympathy and support of the peoples of the world.

 

In your letter you have expressed the desire to act for a just peace. For this the United States must cease the war of aggression and withdraw their troops from South Vietnam, respect the right of the population of the South and of the Vietnamese nation to dispose of themselves without foreign influence. This is the correct manner of solving the Vietnamese problem…

 

Whatever the reason for Ho’s reply—whether it was based on real or feigned outrage—it once again made clear that Hanoi would be satisfied only with victory. It counted on the nervous exhaustion of the United States; it would tolerate no appearance of “progress” in negotiations that might enable us to rally public opinion. A very natural response from us would have been to stop bringing soldiers home, but by now withdrawal had gained its own momentum. The reductions were always announced for a specific period; it was inevitable that pressures, partly public, partly bureaucratic, would build up as the end of each period approached. The August 23 riposte to Hanoi’s belligerence was the last time Nixon tried to halt withdrawals.

 

On September 12, another NSC meeting was convened to discuss the next troop reduction. There was no longer any debate. On September 16, the President announced his decision to lower the troop ceiling by another 40,500 by December 15. The total reduction in the authorized ceiling now amounted to 65,500. This was 15,000 more than had been considered necessary by Rogers at the beginning of the year to convince the public that we were serious about ending the war. After the announcement on September 16 our withdrawals became inexorable; the President never again permitted the end of a withdrawal period to pass without announcing a new increment for the next. Hanoi was on the verge of achieving the second of its objectives without reciprocity: The bombing halt was now leading to unilateral withdrawal. We had come a long way: We had accepted total withdrawal, we had started out of Vietnam unilaterally, and we had de-escalated our military activities—all without the slightest response.

 

I was becoming uneasy about the course of our policy. At the NSC meeting on Vietnam of September 12, I took little part in the discussion but exclaimed toward the end: “We need a plan to end the war, not only to withdraw troops. This is what is on people’s minds.” Two days before the meeting I had sent the President a personal memorandum expressing my deep concern and questioning the assumptions of Vietnamization. Withdrawals would become like “salted peanuts” to the American public; the more troops we withdrew, the more would be expected, leading eventually to demands for total unilateral withdrawal, perhaps within a year (this in fact happened). I argued that our military strategy could not work rapidly enough against the erosion of public opinion and predicted, unhappily rightly, that Hanoi would probably wait until we had largely withdrawn before launching an all-out attack. In short, I did not think our policy would work. My memorandum of September 10 is reprinted in full in the notes at the back of this book.[67]

 

I followed this memorandum with another a day later that outlined the policy options as I saw them and warned once again that a strategy entirely dependent on Vietnamization would not work. A portion of this memorandum is also in the notes at the back.[68]

 

My preferred course was the one that had been at the heart of the proposed Vance mission: to make the most sweeping and generous proposal of which we were capable, short of overthrowing an allied government but ensuring a free political contest. If it were refused, we would halt troop withdrawals and quarantine North Vietnam by mining its ports and perhaps bombing its rail links to China. The goal would be a rapid negotiated compromise. Where the planning for the Vance mission had produced a detailed peace proposal, I assembled a trusted group of members of my staff in the White House Situation Room in September and October to explore the military side of the coin. Our present strategy was trying to walk a fine line, I told my staff, between withdrawing too fast to convince Hanoi of our determination and withdrawing too slowly to satisfy the American public. Assuming the President lost confidence in this policy and that he was not prepared to capitulate, how could he force a rapid conclusion? I asked for a military plan designed for maximum impact on the enemy’s military capability; I requested also an assessment of the diplomatic consequences and a scenario for the final negotiation.

 

The planning was given the name “Duck Hook,” for reasons that totally escape me today. Hal Sonnenfeldt and John Holdridge wrote analyses of the likely Soviet and Chinese responses to a major re-escalation. Legal and diplomatic assessments were prepared. Roger Morris, Tony Lake, [Morris and Lake later resigned, allegedly over the Cambodian operation of 1970; in the fall of 1969, however, they expressed no moral scruple over the much tougher option we were considering.] and Peter Rodman worked on a draft Presidential speech (parts of which were later used on November 3). The Joint Chiefs of Staff devised a plan for mining North Vietnamese ports and harbors and destroying twenty-nine targets of military and economic importance in an air attack lasting four days. The plan also anticipated periodic attacks of forty-eight to seventy-two hours if Hanoi continued to avoid serious negotiation. The target date was to be November 1, 1969, the first anniversary of the bombing halt understanding that had promised us “prompt and productive” negotiations.

 

Our planning proceeded in a desultory fashion. As the scenario took shape, I concluded that no quick and “decisive” military action seemed attainable, and that there was not enough unanimity in our Administration to pursue so daring and risky a course. On October 17, I recommended to the President that he defer consideration of this option until he could assess the rate of North Vietnamese infiltration for the remainder of the year. [This was, actually, an evasion. The strategy implied by the Duck Hook plan should have had nothing to do with the rate of infiltration—in fact, on the basis of my own prognosis infiltration would not pick up until we had reduced our forces much further. The plan should have been linked primarily to the progress of negotiations.] My doubts about Vietnamization persisted, reflecting the insoluble dilemmas of contesting both North Vietnam’s army and domestic critics, of whom a significant percentage objected violently to the very concept of a coherent strategy. On October 30, I wrote another personal memorandum to the President, once again raising my doubts about the assumptions on which our policy was based:

 

We have seen so many Vietnam programs fail after being announced with great fanfare, that I thought I should put before you in summary form my questions about the assumptions underlying Vietnamization. To believe that this course is viable, we must make favorable assumptions about a number of factors, and must believe that Hanoi as well will come to accept them.

 

US calculations about the success of Vietnamization—and Hanoi’s calculations, in turn, about the success of their strategy—rely on our respective judgments of:

 

—the pace of public opposition in the US to our continuing the fight in any form. (Past experience indicates that Vietnamization will not significantly slow it down.)

 

—the ability of the US Government to maintain its own discipline in carrying out this policy. (As public pressures grow, you may face increasing governmental disarray with a growing number of press leaks, etc.)

 

—the actual ability of the South Vietnamese Government and armed forces to replace American withdrawals—both physically and psychologically. (Conclusive evidence is lacking here; this fact in itself, and past experience, argue against optimism.)

 

—the degree to which Hanoi’s current losses affect its ability to fight later—i.e., losses of military cadre, political infra-structure, etc. (Again, the evidence is not definitive. Most reports of progress have concerned security gains by US forces—not a lasting erosion of enemy political strength.)

 

—the ability of the GVN to gain solid political benefit from its current pacification progress. (Again, reports of progress have been largely about security gains behind the US shield.)

 

Our Vietnamization policy thus rests on a series of favorable assumptions which may not be accurate—although no one can be certain on the basis of current analyses.

 

By now my memoranda were growing quixotic. The only real alternatives to Vietnamization were immediate withdrawal or else the escalation that was part of the Vance gambit and Duck Hook planning. Not even the strongest critics in the mainstream of American life recommended immediate withdrawal in 1969. It would have been a blatant betrayal, precipitating the collapse of our ally, giving him no chance to survive on his own. It would have shaken confidence in the United States in Asia, particularly Japan; during the entire period not one European leader urged on us the unconditional abandonment of the war we had inherited. I doubt that our opening to China would have prospered after such a humiliation. China was inching toward us, after all, to find a counterweight to the growing Soviet threat on its borders. It was not even logistically possible to withdraw 500,000 men instantaneously; the Pentagon estimated that a minimum of twelve to eighteen months would be required to remove the numbers that had gone to Vietnam over a period of four years. They would have to be extricated amidst the disintegration and panic our collapse was certain to produce; the South Vietnamese army of close to a million might well turn on the ally that had so betrayed it. There was, moreover, next to no public support for such a course; every poll showed that unilateral withdrawal was rejected by crushing majorities. The public was as ambivalent as the government planners; It wanted us to get out of Vietnam and yet it did not want defeat. Above all, Hanoi had made clear repeatedly that the war could not be ended—or our prisoners released—even by our unilateral withdrawal. We were told throughout that as we exited we also had to remove our allies from power and install a Communist-dominated coalition government.

 

Starting in 1970, though not at first, our critics pressed us to announce a final deadline for our withdrawal. But that was either a variation of Vietnamization or the equivalent of capitulation. If the deadline was arbitrary—that is, too short—everything would disintegrate and it was a formula for collapse. If the deadline was feasible in terms of our own planning for Vietnamization, the only difference was that it was publicly announced. The issue was the tactical judgment whether an announcement would help or hinder our extrication from the war. For better or worse our judgment was that a public announcement would destroy the last incentives for Hanoi to negotiate; it would then simply outwait us. And how would we explain to American families why their sons’ lives should be at risk when a fixed schedule for total withdrawal existed? It is important to remember that most responsible critics, including Clark Clifford, at first only asked for the withdrawal of combat troops by the end of 1970, leaving a large residual force behind. Our own schedule differed from this by exactly four months.

 

Another argument frequently pressed on us was that we should stop giving Saigon a “veto” over our negotiating position; more generally it was an attack on the alleged repressiveness of the South Vietnamese government. It would be absurd to deny that the government on whose territory our forces were located had some influence over our policies. Its self-confidence, legitimacy, and survivability were after all one of the key issues of the war; if we collapsed it by pressures beyond its capacity to bear, we would in effect have settled on Hanoi’s terms. But our influence on Saigon was much greater than the reverse. There is no question that in response to our pressure the Saigon government made extraordinary efforts to broaden its base and to agree to a political contest with the Communists. A significant land reform program was instituted; an electoral commission on which the Communists would be represented was put forward. Saigon’s politics were more pluralistic and turbulent than its American critics cared to admit—and vastly better in human terms than the icy totalitarianism of North Vietnam, which was in fact the alternative at stake.

 

The South Vietnamese government’s internal security problem was not a flimsy excuse for autocracy but the reality of organized terrorism in the cities and almost daily assassinations and kidnappings in the countryside. [The assassinations and kidnappings were usually aimed at the best, not the worst, of Saigon’s officials, including schoolteachers, because they embodied Saigon’s best claim to public support.] The independence and political weight of South Vietnam’s military commanders and their tendency to warlordism were a challenge even to Thieu’s personal authority, not to speak of constitutional government. But the United States shared some blame here, for it was the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, with its resulting massive purge of the civil administration, that made successor regimes so dependent on the military. Obviously, the political practices of a prosperous country with a long libertarian tradition could not be fully applied in an underdeveloped country wracked by civil war; they were not applied by President Lincoln during our own Civil War. Attacking Thieu too often was not an advocacy of concrete reform but an alibi for our abdication.

 

The fact was that the alternatives to simply getting out or dismantling Saigon were escalation or Vietnamization. We finally rejected the military option because we did not think we could sustain public support for the length of time required to prevail; because its outcome was problematical; and because had we succeeded Saigon might still not have been ready to take over. In truth I never examined it more than halfheartedly, largely because I and all members of the Administration not only wanted to end the war but yearned to do so in the least convulsive way. What separated the Administration from its moderate critics was not a philosophy but a nuance. Our course aimed at withdrawal; our desire to retain flexibility and therefore our rejection of a public deadline was due to our lingering hope that Hanoi might at some point negotiate, paying some price to accelerate our total withdrawal.

 

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The Unpacifiable Doves

 

he public atmosphere was hardly hospitable to nuance. For the war had set in motion forces transcending the issues and emotions that went beyond the substance of the debate.

 

A week before Inauguration, on January 12, 1969, the distinguished diplomatic correspondent of the Washington Post, Chalmers Roberts, had perceptively outlined Nixon’s dilemma:

 

At a guess, the country and Congress will give the new President six months to find the route to disengagement with honor from the Vietnam war. But very probably six months, or any limited extension that public attitudes may grant, will not be enough…

 

President Nixon is bound, not so much by his own words as the national mood, to continue on the Johnson course…

 

The election campaign made it very evident that the big majority of Americans want to get out of Vietnam, but in a way that does not make a mockery of the loss thus far of more than 31,000 American lives.

 

This combination of attitudes restricts Mr. Nixon both as to time and substance…

 

So it was. As the months went by in 1969, we were confronted by public protests and demonstrations and quickening demands in the media and the Congress for unilateral concessions in the negotiations. They had one common theme: The obstacle to peace was not Hanoi but their own government’s inadequate dedication to peace.

 

Future generations may find it difficult to visualize the domestic convulsion that the Vietnam war induced. On July 2, 1969, antiwar women destroyed draft records in New York. On July 6, members of Women Strike for Peace flew to the University of Toronto to meet three women representing the Viet Cong. The mayors of two towns petitioned the President to stop sending their sons to Vietnam. Demonstrators launched a mock invasion of Fort Lewis on July 15. There were weekly demonstrations at the Pentagon, including such charming gestures as pouring blood on its steps. On August 14 twelve young soldiers from a base in Honolulu sought refuge in a church as an “act of deep involvement against all the injustice inherent in the American military system.” A group called Business Executives for Vietnam Peace called on the White House on August 28 to inform the Administration that “the honeymoon is over.” While Nixon was on the West Coast in August he was exposed to repeated demonstrations at his residence in San Clemente. On September 3, a group of over two hundred twenty- five psychologists demonstrated outside the White House, protesting the Vietnam war as “the insanity of our times.” Protesters read lists of war dead at public rallies and had them inserted into the Congressional Record. (This turned into a favorite activity of some former members of the Johnson and Kennedy administrations who might have owed their successors something better than to imply that they were indifferent to sacrifices and deaths.) During August leaders of the protest movement announced a series of monthly demonstrations starting October 15 to bring pressure on the government—the so-called Moratorium. All of this was conspicuously and generally approvingly covered by the media. Very few, if any, of the protesters ever appealed to Hanoi for even a little flexibility or were ready to grant that just conceivably their own government might be sincere.

 

As the summer drew to a close and students returned to universities and the Congress ended its recess, the pace of protest quickened. The death of Ho Chi Minh on September 3 was alleged to present a new opportunity for ending the stalemate in Paris, though whatever evidence was at hand indicated the opposite. There was clamor that we propose a cease-fire in deference to the leader who had caused us so much discomfiture, and hope that such a cease-fire would then become permanent as if Hanoi might be made to slide without noticing it into an arrangement it had consistently rejected. In fact we observed a cease-fire on the day of Ho’s funeral and of course it was not extended by our adversaries. As the summer drew to a close, Chalmers Roberts offered a thoughtful analysis in the Washington Post of September 5. He predicted that antiwar passions were just beginning to heat up:

 

[By staying in San Clemente] Mr. Nixon has been able to escape explaining what he is trying to do about the war. With Congress away and the college generation at the beaches… there has been no focus on the war’s opponents.

 

But all this surely is about to change. Mr. Nixon will be back in the White House next Tuesday and by then even the last congressional laggard will be in town. In a few days… the students will be back on campus…

 

Ho’s death is creating calls for new Nixon initiatives. And Ho’s man in Paris, Xuan Thuy, on Tuesday seemed to hint that massive American withdrawals just might move the Paris talks off dead center.

 

Both events are likely to be grist for American doves… The long summer is over and new forces are coming into motion in the area of American public opinion. The President will soon have to say more and probably do more if he wants public support. …

 

Roberts’s prediction proved only too accurate. On September 3, Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine complained that President Nixon’s plan for ending the war was “very ambiguous”; he also questioned whether Nixon was in fact seeking a negotiated settlement rather than a military victory. (“Victory” was turning into an epithet.) On September 5, Senators John Sherman Cooper and Gaylord Nelson suggested that the President use the “opportunity” created by Ho Chi Minh’s death to propose new initiatives to end the war; they did not tell us how or what the opportunity consisted of. On September 6, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield made the same suggestion. On September 18, two days after the President’s announcement of withdrawal of 40,500 more troops, Senator Edward Kennedy attacked the President’s Vietnam policy and branded the Saigon regime as the primary obstacle to a settlement. In an interview on September 21, Cyrus Vance called for a “standstill cease-fire,” suggesting a “leopard-spot federal or confederal solution”[69] (though we had proposed a cease-fire to Dobrynin as part of the Vance gambit and Hanoi had shown no interest in it). On September 25, Congressman Allard Lowenstein of New York proclaimed plans to mobilize public support for another “dump Johnson “-style movement, this time with Nixon as the target. On the same day, Senator Charles Goodell of New York announced that he would introduce a resolution in the Senate requiring the withdrawal of all US forces from Vietnam by the end of 1970.

 

As the October 15 Moratorium drew nearer, Congressional critics from both parties grew more vocal. On October 2, Senator Mansfield called on the President to propose a standstill cease-fire. Senator Eugene McCarthy on the same day announced his support for the Goodell proposal. Senator Charles Percy on October 3 urged the Administration to halt allied offensive operations as long as the enemy did not take advantage of the situation—the same formula that had started the discussions of the bombing halt. Between September 24 and October 15, eleven antiwar resolutions were introduced in Congress. These included Senator Goodell’s resolution to cut off funding for US combat forces by December 1970, Senators Mark Hatfield and Frank Church’s bill calling for a schedule for immediate withdrawal of all US forces from Vietnam, and Senators Jacob Javits and Claiborne Pell’s resolution for withdrawal of combat forces by the end of 1970 and for revocation of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution under which President Johnson had first introduced American combat forces in Vietnam. Public statements by well- known personalities multiplied. On October 9, Kingman Brewster, president of Yale, called for unconditional withdrawal from Vietnam. On October 10, seventy-nine presidents of private colleges and universities wrote to President Nixon, urging a firm timetable for withdrawals. On October 13, Whitney Young of the National Urban League released a strongly worded statement calling the war “a moral and spiritual drain” and contending that it exacerbated racial tensions at home. On October 14, North Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong fed our public debate by an unprecedented open letter to American antiwar protesters in honor of the Moratorium, hailing their “struggle” as a “noble reflection of the legitimate and urgent demand of the American people… the Vietnamese people and the United States progressive people against United States aggression [which] will certainly be crowned with total victory.”

 

The Moratorium demonstrations took place across the country on October 15. A crowd of 20,000 packed a noontime rally in New York’s financial district and listened to Bill Moyers, President Johnson’s former Assistant and press secretary, urge President Nixon to respond to the antiwar sentiment. Thirty thousand gathered on the New Haven Green. Fifty thousand massed on the Washington Monument grounds within sight of the White House. The demonstration at the Monument was preceded by a walk around the city of several thousand people carrying candles. At George Washington University, Dr. Benjamin Spock informed a large gathering that President Nixon was incapable of ending the war because of “limitations on his personality.” The demonstration in Boston, where 100,000 people converged on the Common, appeared to be the largest of all. Thousands spilled over into neighboring streets. A number of speakers, including Senator George McGovern, addressed the huge crowd as a skywriting plane drew a peace symbol in the sky overhead. As each speaker finished, the crowd broke into a chant, “Peace Now, Peace Now.” The common feature of all these demonstrations was the conviction that the American government was the obstacle to peace; that it needed not a program for an honorable peace—a concept evoking condescending ridicule—but instruction on the undesirability of war.

 

Both Time and Newsweek devoted several pages and vivid pictures to the demonstrations in major cities and on college campuses. Time interpreted the Moratorium’s message to President Nixon as follows:

 

What in fact was M Day’s message to Richard Nixon? Many participants demanded immediate and total withdrawal from Vietnam of all US forces. Yet the moratorium by no means constituted a call to the President for that solution—although it evidently gained new respectability and popularity. What M Day did raise was an unmistakable sign to Richard Nixon that he must do more to end the war and do it faster. Unless the pace of progress quickens, he will have great difficulty maintaining domestic support for the two or three years that he believes he needs to work the US out of Vietnam with honor and in a way that would safeguard US interests and influence in the world.

 

Even with the perspective of a decade, it is difficult to avoid a feeling of melancholy at this spectacle of a nation tearing at itself in the midst of a difficult war. By October the Administration had announced withdrawal of over fifty thousand troops, the reduction of B-52 sorties by 20 percent, of tactical air operations by 25 percent, and a change in battlefield orders to General Abrams that amounted to a decision to end offensive operations. The previous Administration had sent 550,000 Americans to Vietnam, had no negotiating proposal except that we would withdraw six months after the North Vietnamese left, and had strongly implied that it would insist on retaining a large residual force thereafter. Yet there was little compunction about harassing and vilifying a new President who had offered total withdrawal within twelve months of an agreement, free elections including the NLF, and mixed electoral commissions on which the NLF would be represented, and who had opened up the subject of a cease-fire.

 

The public malaise raised in a profound way the question of the responsibility of leaders to the public in a democracy. Lucky is the leader whose convictions of what is in the national interest coincide with the public mood. But what is his obligation when these perceptions differ? A shallow view of democracy would reduce the leader to passivity and have him simply register public opinion as he understands it. But such a course is a negation of the qualities that the public has a right to expect of those charged with conducting its affairs. Leaders are responsible not for running public opinion polls but for the consequences of their actions. They will be held to account for disasters even if the decision that produced the calamity enjoyed widespread public support when it was taken. In 1938 the Munich agreement made Chamberlain widely popular and cast Churchill in the role of an alarmist troublemaker; eighteen months later Chamberlain was finished because the Munich agreement was discredited. With the Vietnam war the problem was even more complex. Rightly or wrongly—I am still convinced rightly—we thought that capitulation or steps that amounted to it would usher in a period of disintegrating American credibility that would only accelerate the world’s instability. The opposition was vocal, sometimes violent; it comprised a large minority of the college-educated; it certainly dominated the media and made full use of them. But in our view it was wrong. We could not give up our convictions, all the less so since the majority of the American people seemed to share our perception. At no time in 1969 did the Gallup Poll show support of the President’s conduct of the war below 44 percent (and then opposition stood at 26 percent). At the height of the massive public demonstrations in October, 58 percent of the public supported the President and only 32 percent were opposed.

 

If we were to make progress in the negotiations, it was necessary to convince Hanoi that there were some irreducible conditions beyond which we would not retreat. We needed some program in the name of which to rally support. But as the years went by, every concession produced demands for further concessions. In the face of media and Congressional opposition, there never was any firm ground on which to stand.

 

Criticism of Hanoi was to all practical purposes nonexistent. Deadlocks tended to be ascribed to American shortsightedness if not to the malignity of our government; ending the war was presented as substantially within our control and as deliberately avoided because of psychological aberrations. The impression was created that some magical concession stood between us and a solution, prevented above all by United States rigidity, if not by more substantial moral defects. The issue came to be defined in terms both wounding and misleading: who was for and who was against the war, who liked bombing and who opposed it. A notable exception was the Washington Post, which, contrary to Nixon’s view of its unalterable hostility, was in fact compassionate. It editorialized on October 12:

 

The tragedy is that it is late—that there were no vigilantes in or out of government three or four years ago, organizing a Vietnam Moratorium. For what is going to be hard about Wednesday’s manifestation is not the mobilizing of it; the problem is going to come in the interpreting of it and in the application of a great outpouring of protest in any practical, meaningful way…

 

Even the most anguished people in their prayers and protestations and teachings can give little useful or specific counsel to the President: a loud shout to stop the war, however heartfelt, is not a strategy…

 

It is almost impossible to believe both from what the President is doing and from any reasonable estimate of where his best interests lie, that he is not a charter member of this probable majority (of people desiring an end to the war).

 

But the general pattern can be demonstrated by a rereading of editorial columns of the New York Times. In October 1969 I had Peter Rodman, a member of my staff, trace the evolution of the Times’s editorial position. I did not mean to single out the Times for invidious comparison; it was among the more thoughtful of the critics and saw itself as making reasonable proposals for compromise, not mere demands for our capitulation. Yet the pattern of its proposals is instructive of what we faced.

 

The New York Times in 1969 regularly called for American concessions when the other side seemed conciliatory, in order, it was explained, to seize the opportunity for peace.[70] It also called for concessions, however, when the other side was intensifying the war, in that case because the Communist step-up had demonstrated that our military effort could never bring peace.[71] The recurring call for American concessions regardless of Hanoi’s reactions led the Times into a series of constantly escalating proposals. In 1968 the Times advocated mutual withdrawal by both the US and North Vietnam, but this soon evolved into a recommendation that the United States initiate the process with a token withdrawal, then into a demand for withdrawals regardless of Hanoi’s response, and then into pressures for a fixed and unconditional timetable for the complete evacuation of US forces.[72] As for the scale of American withdrawals, the Times first called for the United States simply to “initiate” or “begin” troop reductions; an editorial in May referred to anticipated US cutbacks of fifty to one hundred thousand men as “substantial.” When Nixon began the withdrawal program at Midway in June, this was first welcomed as “a step toward disengagement”; by September, however, there was grumbling that the withdrawal of 60,000 was “timid” and “token,” and not “significant” or “adequate.”[73]

 

The same escalation of proposals occurred in the political dimension. In May 1969, the Times called for a “coalition electoral commission” to supervise free elections in South Vietnam. But less than four weeks later—a month before Saigon offered to establish just such a joint commission—the position had evolved to the negotiation of “an agreement… on the future government of South Vietnam,” that is, an “interim coalition.”[74] As for military tactics, the Times began calling for a cutback of search-and-destroy missions in April 1969. Its own news columns on July 25 reported that such a reduction was about to take place. Within two weeks, the Times was calling for a standstill cease-fire.[75] Even this proved insufficient. Nixon offered it on October 7, 1970; Hanoi promptly rejected it. The Times continued its criticism.

 

Each of these escalating concessions was advanced as the key to peace and as the only way to get negotiations started.[76] Once made, the concession was briefly applauded, and indeed Hanoi was called on to respond.[77] But when Hanoi ignored the proposals, the result was not a call for American steadfastness but for further US concessions[78] on the ground that the lack of progress was the fault of the United States[79] or of Saigon.[80] The importance of the earlier concession was now disparaged,[81] or else it was argued that Hanoi had in fact reciprocated[82] or that the United States had been hardening its position.[83] These calls for ever further American concessions were regularly explained by the argument that the United States had a special obligation to prove its good faith to the other side and to abandon the quest for military victory.[84] No such obligation was discovered for the other side. This evolution of editorial opinion was not unique. It was, instead, a vivid example of how our critics could rarely be satisfied for long, even by the adoption of their proposals.

 

The pattern was repeated in Congress. For example, Senator William Fulbright reacted to the President’s May 14 speech by saying that although Nixon could have been more forthcoming, he did not “fault the President for not going further.” Yet by June 22—despite an intervening unilateral American troop withdrawal announcement of 25,000—the Senator said that he was disillusioned and would reopen the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on Vietnam.[85] In the same vein Senator Mike Mansfield reacted to the May 14 speech by saying that he was “impressed” and that “there appears to be a lot of room for… give and take.” Two weeks later, he was attacking the Administration because its military strategy gave him no “indication of bringing the war to a conclusion.”[86]

 

There was no civility or grace from the antiwar leaders; they mercilessly persecuted those they regarded as culpable. Walt Rostow was not reappointed to his professorship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; service at the highest level of his government for eight years had obviously reduced his qualifications for a professorship at that august institution. William Bundy’s appointment as editor of Foreign Affairs was greeted by howls of protest. Dean Rusk, after eight years of unselfish, able, and dedicated service as Secretary of State, could find no position for months until his alma mater, the University of Georgia, appointed him to a professorship and gave him a part-time secretary. Hubert Humphrey, that gentle and conciliatory and lovable man, was subjected to harassment in a manner that still moved him to tears years later. Nor has the passage of a decade softened the implacability. In 1979 twenty-four professors of New York University protested McGeorge Bundy’s appointment to the faculty on the ground of complicity in a “genocidal” war. A third of the faculty of the University of Chicago in the same month protested an award to Robert McNamara on the same grounds—ignoring the genuine genocide that has since occurred in Indochina after the Communist victory and that these men sought to prevent. It was never granted that serious men could have been pursuing perhaps misguided but honorable purposes over a decade ago. The doves have proved to be a specially vicious kind of bird.

 

To me the most poignant fate was that of Robert McNamara, who had been forced out by Johnson as Secretary of Defense in 1967 and then served as head of the World Bank. I had first met McNamara in shortly after President Kennedy had named him to head the Pentagon. He struck me as bright, dynamic, cocksure. I applauded his efforts to put our defense policy on a more analytical basis. But I thought that he overemphasized the quantitative aspects of defense planning; by neglecting intangible psychological and political components he aimed for a predictability that was illusory and caused needless strains to our alliances. His eager young associates hid their moral convictions behind a seemingly objective method of analysis which obscured that their questions too often predetermined the answers and that these answers led to a long-term stagnation in our military technology.

 

With all these drawbacks McNamara made substantial contributions as Secretary of Defense. His goal of a systematic approach to defense policy was long overdue; even when I did not agree with some of his answers I thought that he had asked the right questions. But though an outstanding Secretary of Defense, McNamara had proved an unfortunate choice for managing a war. The methods which on the whole had stood him in good stead in getting a grip on that most unwieldy of government departments were less appropriate to the conduct of a conflict whose outcome, too, depended on so many political and psychological intangibles. He managed at one and the same time to be too tough and too ambiguous, too narrowly focused on battlefield considerations and too ready to settle for atmospherics. But above all McNamara did not have his heart in the assignment. He had wanted to relate the awesome power of our nation to humane ends; he had no stomach for an endless war; he suffered from a deep feeling of guilt for having acquiesced in the decisions that made it both inevitable and inconclusive. When I returned from my first trip to Vietnam in 1965 he was the highest ranking member of the Johnson Administration to receive me. I found him tortured by the emerging inconclusiveness of the war; he was torn between his doubts and his sense of duty, between his analysis and loyalties. He knew that he would be able to restore many valued friendships by a dramatic gesture of protest, but he thought it wrong to speak out when he considered himself partially responsible and thought he could promote his convictions more effectively in office than outside.

 

In this, McNamara in the end had become an example of a larger reality. This same ambivalence had come to affect that Administration’s conduct of the war, compelling its tentative character, its oscillation between periods of violence and escapism. McNamara from the beginning urged—nay, pleaded for—a negotiated and not an imposed peace. His door was open to those anguished by America’s frustrations. In the councils of the government he supported the search for diplomatic initiatives more vigorously and consistently than the agencies conventionally charged with the mandate for solutions. In 1967 he had been the principal impetus behind the attempt to negotiate a bombing halt through two French intermediaries. He had been so anxious that he called me on the telephone after every contact with the North Vietnamese, using a cover name so transparent that it must have fooled the intelligence services listening in for all of ten seconds. Shortly after that effort failed, Johnson forced him out, reasoning—not entirely incorrectly—that McNamara’s doubts had made the effective conduct of his office impossible, at the very moment when public denunciation of the Defense Secretary for being a warmonger was reaching fever pitch and he could make no public appearance without encountering the ugliest form of harassment.

 

After his resignation McNamara conducted himself with characteristic dignity. Beginning in 1969, he missed no opportunity to press on me courses of action that those who were vilifying him would have warmly embraced. Though he was physically assaulted on campuses and caricatured in print as a warmonger, he was always too much aware of the anguish of policymaking and of his own responsibility to choose the route taken by some of his previous associates of publicly damning the Administration for a conflict it had not started and thus easing his own personal position. He suffered cruelly but never showed it.

 

In such an atmosphere, communication broke down between an Administration that had inherited the war and which by every reasonable criterion demonstrably sought to liquidate it, and those elements that had formerly felt a stake in the Presidency and the international role of the United States. Part of the reason was the demoralization of the very leadership group that had sustained the great initiatives of the postwar period. The war in Indochina was the culmination of the disappointments of a decade that had opened with the clarion call of a resurgent idealism and ended with assassinations, racial and social discord, and radicalized politics. Our dilemmas were very much a product of liberal doctrines of reformist intervention and academic theories of graduated escalation. The collapse of these high aspirations shattered the self-confidence without which Establishments flounder. The leaders who had inspired our foreign policy were particularly upset by the rage of the students. The assault of these upper middle-class young men and women—who were, after all, their own children—was not simply on policies, but on life-styles and values heretofore considered sacrosanct. Stimulated by a sense of guilt encouraged by modern psychiatry and the radical chic rhetoric of upper middle-class suburbia, they symbolized the end of an era of simple faith in material progress. Ironically, the insecurity of their elders turned the normal grievances of maturing youth into an institutionalized rage and a national trauma.

 

There were other causes having to do with the structure of American politics. The Vietnam war toppled both Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey in 1968, not because the whole country shifted against the war (the Wallace vote and the Republicans, reflecting the majority view, were either pro-intervention or silent), but because the war split their base of power, the Democratic Party. Once out of the White House, the Democratic Party found it easy and tempting to unite in opposition to a Republican President on the issue of Vietnam. Those who opposed the war but reluctantly supported Johnson and Humphrey were now no longer constrained by party loyalty. On the Republican side, Richard Nixon as President was able to reconcile the Republican right to a withdrawal program and an inconclusive outcome for which conservatives might well have assaulted a Democratic President. Thus there was no conservative counterweight to the increasingly strident protests. By tranquilizing the right, Nixon liberated the protest movement from its constraints; the center of gravity of American politics thus shifted decisively to the antiwar side even though the public had not changed its basic view.

 

The basic challenge to the new Nixon Administration was similar to de Gaulle’s in Algeria: to withdraw as an expression of policy and not as a collapse. This was even more important for the United States, on whose stability so many other countries depended. But de Gaulle was fortunate in his opposition; it came from those who wanted victory and who thought he was conceding too much. This gave him a margin for maneuver with the Algerian rebels; they were bound to consider the alternative to de Gaulle as worse. Our opposition came from those who wanted more rapid withdrawal, if not defeat, and this destroyed our bargaining position. Our enemies would only benefit from our domestic collapse. Thus—even though every opinion poll showed the majority of the American public eager for an honorable solution and firmly against capitulation, a sentiment Nixon was able to rally skillfully on many occasions—the momentum of American politics was in the direction of unilateral concessions. For the Nixon Administration to have kept these turbulent forces in harness as we designed a self-confident policy of orderly disengagement was no small feat. Indeed, to have maintained the initiative for four years and brought off a compromise settlement and a balance of forces on the ground in Vietnam, however precarious, was a political tour de force.

 

There is no gainsaying, however, that the ride was rougher than it need have been. The turbulent national mood touched Nixon on his raWest nerve. He had taken initiatives that reversed the course of his predecessor; he had withdrawn troops and de-escalated the war—all steps urged on him by the Establishment groups whom he simultaneously distrusted and envied. And instead of being acclaimed, he was being castigated for not moving more rapidly on the path on which they had not even dared to take the first step. It was not a big leap to the view that what he really faced was not a policy difference but the same liberal conspiracy that had sought to destroy him ever since the Alger Hiss case. Here were all the old enemies in the press and in the Establishment, uniting once again; they would even accept if not urge the military defeat of their country to carry out the vendetta of a generation. And Nixon possessed no instinct whatever for understanding the outburst of the young, and particularly the university students. Having worked his own way through college and law school, he thought they should be grateful for the opportunity of a higher education. He had an exalted view of Ivy League universities. When riots broke out at Harvard in the spring of 1969, he said to me that it might be a good thing, for the greatest university in the country would undoubtedly handle the challenge and thus set an example for all others. He seemed genuinely surprised when I gave him my opinion that under Harvard procedures nobody after three days would know who had done what to whom—which is exactly what happened. Recalling his own youth, he could see in the outrage of those he thought exceptionally privileged nothing but an indoctrination by sinister influences hostile to his person. He had no feeling for the metaphysical despair of those who saw before them a life of affluence in a spiritual desert. If what he was confronting was a political battle for survival, rather than a foreign policy debate, he believed himself justified in using the methods that had already brought him so far. On authentic international issues, Nixon was sensitive to nuance and comfortable with tactics of conciliation and compromise. In political battles he was a gut fighter; he turned without hesitation to uses of Presidential power that he never ceased believing—with much evidence—had been those of his predecessors as well.

 

Such tactics were inappropriate for our national anguish. Bridges needed building and the Chief Executive of the country, the only nationally elected official, should have taken the first step. Yet this is something Nixon just did not know how to do. He was too insecure and, in a strange way, too vulnerable. In fact he showed the protesters the respect in practice for which he never could find the words—by accepting their peace program. Perhaps it was precisely the irony that their program was being carried out by the man who had been anathema to them for two decades that so embittered some of his critics.

 

There is no question that generosity of spirit was not one of Nixon’s virtues; he could never transcend his resentments and his complexes. But neither did he ever receive from his critics compassion for the task his predecessors had bequeathed to him. There was a self-fulfilling obtuseness in the bitterness with which the two sides regarded each other: Nixon’s belief in the liberal conspiracy, the critics’ view that the Nixon Administration was determined to pursue the war for its own sake. Both were wrong. In the process, each stalemated the other while demeaning itself.

 

I agreed with the President’s Vietnam policy; I had designed much of it. If I had any criticism, it was that he procrastinated in facing the painful choices before him. But I thought that America’s domestic problems went much deeper than a contest for political power waged in the name of a quarrel over peace terms for Vietnam. At one background briefing in 1970 I pointed out that

 

If you would look around the world, you will have to come to the conclusion that the turmoil is not caused primarily, or at least exclusively, by the causes that are ascribed to it. There are student riots in Berlin, where the students participate in [university] government, and there are student riots in Paris where they don’t participate in it. There are student riots in Oxford, which has a tutorial system, and there are student riots in Rome, where there are huge lectures. There are riots in this country because of Vietnam, race and slums, allegedly, and there are riots in Holland which has no Vietnam, no race problem and no slums. In other words, we are dealing with a problem of contemporary society, of how to give meaning to life for a generation, for a younger generation in states that are becoming increasingly bureaucratic and technological.

 

For these reasons, my attitude toward the protesters diverged from Nixon’s. He saw in them an enemy that had to be vanquished; I considered them students and colleagues with whom I differed but whose idealism was indispensable for our future; I sought to build bridges to them. I understood the anguish of the nonradical members of the protest movement; humanly I was close to many of them. While convinced that their policies were deeply wrong and their single-minded self-righteousness profoundly dangerous for our world position and domestic tranquillity, I attempted to maintain a serious dialogue between the Administration and its critics. In November 1969 Nixon asked me to comment on a memorandum sent to him by Pat Moynihan, then Counsellor to the President. It described a scene at a Harvard-Princeton football game in which the assembled graduates—worth, according to Pat, at least $10 billion—roared support when the Harvard University band was introduced, in a takeoff on Agnew’s denigrating phrase, as the “effete Harvard Corps of Intellectual Snobs.” Pat warned that while Nixon was right in resisting attempts to make policy in the streets, he should not needlessly challenge the young—because of their great influence on their parents. Nixon had made marginal comments that indicated his own skepticism about his ability to win over “Harvard types”; moreover, he was convinced that his political and financial support came from the South, the MidWest, and California, which were impervious to the shouts of a Harvard crowd. Nevertheless, a warning in Moynihan’s memorandum about the “incredible powers of derision” of the young was significantly underlined by the President. I put some thought into my response of November 15, 1969. It appears here in major extracts:

 

Who are They?

 

They are a very mixed group—in social origin, in political outlook, in potential for help or harm. Of the young Moratorium marchers, some were certainly the offspring of the affluent, and therefore their politics are a sharp departure from their parents. Yet many have fathers who attended college under the GI Bill in the late ‘40s and who went on to vote for Stevenson. A lot of the marchers were undoubtedly the first generation to reach college from predominantly Democratic urban strata. And if Tom Wicker is speaking for himself and his colleagues in claiming that “those are our children” down there in the streets, these are also the offspring of some traditionally Democratic professional elements…

 

Why Do They March?

 

Their motives are also quite varied. In the broader sense, most are casualties of our affluence. They have had the leisure for self-pity, and the education enabling them to focus it in a fashionable critique of the “system.” But the psychological origins are probably irrelevant. Confusion, outrage, or evangelism have absorbed youthful energies in every generation. The group Pat talks about is special in the sheer breadth of its political consciousness and activism. It is drawn, after all, from the largest number of educated young people in history.

 

And to the degree that they are politically conscious, many are substantially anti-establishment simply because that is not only the natural bent of youthful alienation, but also because it is a major thrust of contemporary academic literature. Modern American sociology, psychology, political science, etc., have turned a glaring light (as they should have) on the faults in our society. So too is some of our best modern literature powerful social criticism. All this is bound to fall on fertile ground—and cover more of it than ever before—in a country that sends 8 million kids to college.

 

The practical result is very mixed.

 

A small minority takes refuge (as it always has) in mindless radicalism.

 

But I believe that the overwhelming majority of these young people across the country remain remarkably open in terms of their future political affiliation. Many are bright and thoughtful. They are committed to right wrongs and find themselves. They are eager to participate, impatient for tangible results. They are wary of every answer—ready to suspect that arguments for gradual (realistic) progress (from peace in Vietnam to desegregation) mask some sinister conspiracy against the goal.

 

Their Political Impact

 

…They become formidable by adding to their own votes an enormous outburst of political activism, bound to have an influence on others as well as on their parents. We have ample proof of this in the McCarthy phenomenon.

 

Vietnam is only symptomatic. When that issue is gone, another will take its place. For they are fighting the establishment position as much as a given problem.

 

What Can You Do?

 

I agree with Moynihan that attacking this group head-on is counterproductive. This is not to say that you should be soft on the militants. There is a strong need here for firm leadership, both in psychological and political terms…

 

There are strong arguments for simply neutralizing this potential force by avoiding a collision. This by no means requires appeasement. It does mean that the Administration be seen to take seriously the responsible majority of these young people. The posture would be that they may be wrong on the merits of the argument, but you do not doubt the authenticity and sincerity of their concerns.

 

Can you Gain Anything?

 

Beyond this neutralization, there just might be a chance, over time, to win some of these young people to your side. The old Democratic-Republican quarrels of the ‘40s and ‘50s do not encumber this generation of young Americans.

 

You have something basic in common with many of them—a conviction that the machinery of New Deal liberalism has to be fundamentally overhauled. You also share a concern that America play a more balanced and restrained role in the world. You are, in fact, turning over most of the rocks at home and abroad that these kids want to see turned over.

 

With a concerted and sensitive effort to get across the fresh approach of your Administration, you may well gain some converts among those who now seem irretrievable.

 

Whether Nixon in fact held all the views I ascribed to him or whether—like a good courtier—I sought to influence his behavior by giving him a reputation to uphold, I devoted a great deal of time and effort to meeting antiwar groups. Haldeman opposed my seeing such groups as at best a waste of my time and at worst appearing to give moral support to implacable opponents. I also gave background briefings to the press every time there was a Presidential speech on Vietnam and I traveled around the country with the President in 1970 talking to groups of editors, publishers, and broadcasters. My theme was constant, that the war had to be ended as an act of policy, not in response to demonstrations. At a meeting with a group of business leaders in October 1969 I argued that “capitulation would not terminate the demonstration phenomenon. If confrontation in the streets is to succeed on this issue, it could drastically alter the style of American politics. Some of the leaders are the same people who rioted in Chicago for demands which have long since been met. The true issue is the authority of the, Presidency—not any particular President.”

 

The paradox was that the Administration and its critics could frustrate each other but by doing so neither could achieve what both yearned for: an early negotiated end to the war in Vietnam. All this time Hanoi stood at the sidelines, coldly observing how America was negotiating not with its adversary but with itself.

 

<<Contents>>

 

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Groping for a Strategy

 

e were on a road out of Vietnam, attempting to pursue a middle course between capitulation and the seemingly endless stalemate that we had inherited. Whether we could succeed would depend on our ability to mesh a complicated series of diplomatic, military, and political moves while confronted by an implacable, impatient public protest.

 

Nixon sought to gain ascendancy over our domestic situation by various moves over and above our negotiating posture and de-escalation. On September 19, Nixon and Laird—who had already asked Congress for a draft lottery—announced at a White House briefing that the withdrawals of 60,000 men from Vietnam enabled us to cancel draft calls for November and December. Calls scheduled for October would be stretched out over the final quarter of the year. The Department of Defense began limiting induction to nineteen-year-olds; on November 26, the President signed into law the bill permitting a draft lottery.

 

A campaign on behalf of American prisoners of war in Vietnam was launched in August by demanding North Vietnamese compliance with the Geneva Convention and Red Cross inspection. This was followed by forceful American statements at the Paris peace talks and at the International Conference of the Red Cross in September 1969. Forty Senators signed a statement condemning North Vietnamese brutality against American POWs on August 13; two hundred Representatives signed a similar statement in September. The Johnson Administration, fearing reprisals, had been reluctant to press the issue. The Nixon Administration’s approach proved to have a beneficial effect on the treatment of US prisoners of war. At the outset it rallied support at home, though in later years it was turned against us, as the prisoners became an added argument for unilateral withdrawal and dismantling of the South Vietnamese government.

 

But, as always, Nixon tried to play for all the marbles; and as was not infrequently the case, he began it with a maneuver that appeared portentous though it reflected no definitive plan. In short, he was bluffing. I have already mentioned that in a number of his talks with foreign leaders over a period of months in late 1969, Nixon had created the impression that the anniversary of the bombing halt on November 1 was a kind of deadline. On his world trip he dropped less than subtle hints that his patience was running out and that if no progress had been made in Paris by November 1, he would take strong action. So far as I could tell, Nixon had only the vaguest idea of what he had in mind. (There was certainly no prior staff planning; Duck Hook developed as an implementation of a threat that had already been made.) The first I heard of the deadline was when Nixon uttered it to Yahya Khan in August 1969. And because Nixon never permitted State Department personnel (and only rarely the Secretary of State) to sit in on his meetings with foreign leaders, no one else in our government even knew that a threat had been made.

 

Though Nixon kept referring to the deadline, at the same time he made moves that tended to vitiate his threats, such as announcing further troop withdrawals. In late September he confided to me that he contemplated making “the tough move” before October 15 so that it would not appear prompted by the Moratorium demonstrations. I advised against it, because to preempt his own deadline might confuse our adversaries. He never pursued the threat actively; it was perhaps a way to convince himself—and perhaps the historical record—that he was the tough leader thwarted by weaker colleagues.

 

On September 27, Dobrynin called on me to fish for an invitation for Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko to meet with the President when visiting the US for the United Nations General Assembly. During our conversation, Nixon—by prearrangement—called my office and asked me to tell Dobrynin that Vietnam was the critical issue in US- Soviet relations, that “the train had left the station and was heading down the track” (a favorite Nixon phrase, used, for example, after the Oregon primary in 1968 to encourage wavering convention delegates). I repeated Nixon’s observations and added that the next move was up to Hanoi.

 

On October 6, Nixon met with Rogers and prohibited any new diplomatic initiative on Vietnam until Hanoi responded in some way; for the first time he mentioned his deadline of November 1. Rogers took the threat seriously because, as he told me on October 8, he was convinced the President would in fact make some move on November 1, though he was evidently no clearer than I just what it was. On October 8, I suggested to Nixon that he announce a report to the people for around November 1. This would have the advantage of maintaining and perhaps heightening the sense of deadline in Hanoi and Moscow, for whatever benefit this might bring in unexpected North Vietnamese concessions. On October 13, the White House announced that the President would be giving a major speech to review Vietnam policy on November 3. (The date was chosen because November 2 would be the day of the New Jersey gubernatorial election, and Nixon did not wish to trigger a large turnout of protest votes against the Republican candidate—who, in the event, became the first Republican Governor of New Jersey in sixteen years.) To announce a Presidential speech so far ahead was a daring decision, because it compounded uncertainty and encouraged pressures to sway whatever decision he might be announcing.

 

In the interval, Nixon sought to elicit Soviet support. On October 20, he met with Dobrynin, who had just returned from one of his frequent consultations in Moscow. Nixon pointed out that the bombing halt was a year old; if no progress occurred soon, the United States would have to pursue its own methods for bringing the war to an end. On the other hand, if the Soviet Union cooperated in bringing the war to an honorable conclusion, we would “do something dramatic” to improve US-Soviet relations. Dobrynin was not prepared with any North Vietnamese offers but he did put forth a sort of Soviet concession. After months of sparring we had indicated to the Soviets in June that we were prepared to begin strategic arms talks immediately. Characteristically, even though the Soviets had professed their eagerness for talks for months, once we were committed they evaded a reply. On October 20 Dobrynin informed us that the Soviet Union would be prepared to start the talks by mid-November.

 

It was a shrewd move. Aware of the eagerness of much of our government to begin SALT negotiations, the Kremlin correctly judged that Nixon could not possibly refuse. In the resulting climate of hope, any escalation in Vietnam would appear as hazarding prospects for a major relaxation of tensions; this inhibition would thus be added to the domestic pressures dramatized by the Moratorium just a few days earlier. The Soviets, in short, applied reverse linkage to us. Their calculation proved to be correct. Despite White House efforts to hold up a reply on SALT until after the November 3 speech, Rogers insisted on announcing our acceptance on October 25. Nixon reluctantly agreed because he was afraid that otherwise he would face a week of leaks.

 

As was his habit Nixon sought to compensate for his unwillingness to face down his old friend by escalating the menace to the Soviets. He immediately told me that I should convey to Dobrynin that the President was “out of control” on Vietnam. In serving Nixon one owed it to him to discriminate among the orders he issued and to give him another chance at those that were unfulfillable or dangerous. This one was in the latter category. I knew that Nixon was planning to take no action on November 1. To utter a dire threat followed by no action whatever would depreciate our currency. So I waited to see whether Nixon would return to the theme. He did not.

 

Meanwhile Nixon isolated himself at Camp David to work on his November 3 speech. Its core was provided by my staff and me, but Nixon wrote the beginning and the end on one of his ubiquitous yellow pads and added rhetorical flourishes throughout. It proved one of Nixon’s strongest public performances. Against the recommendations of all of his Cabinet he drew the line and made no concessions to the protesters. I agreed with his course. He took his case to the people, thereby to gain the maneuvering room he needed for what he considered “peace with honor.” The speech had a shock effect since it defied the protesters, the North Vietnamese, and all expectations by announcing no spectacular shift in our negotiating position and no troop withdrawals. It appealed to the “great silent majority” of Americans to support their Commander-in-Chief. For the first time in a Presidential statement it spelled out clearly what the President meant when he said he had “a plan to end the war”—namely, the dual-track strategy of Vietnamization and negotiations. And it made the point that Vietnamization offered a prospect of honorable disengagement that was not hostage to the other side’s cooperation.

 

I had advised the President not to defend the original commitment of troops to Vietnam, which he had inherited, but to present only his strategy for getting out. He disagreed, telling me—I now believe wisely—that the American public would not accept sacrifice for a war that had no valid purpose. The speech, despite its strong tone, did, moreover, mark some subtle changes in our negotiating position. Where the May 14 speech had proposed withdrawal of “the major portions” of our forces within one year, with residual forces left for policing the agreement, the November 3 speech accepted a total American pullout in a year in case of an agreed mutual withdrawal, thus bringing our public position into line with our private one with Xuan Thuy. The May 14 speech spoke of “supervised cease-fires,” to include the possibility of local arrangements as well as general ones; the November 3 speech spoke of “cease-fire” in the singular. I explained in a backgrounder that we would be flexible; we would be willing to negotiate either local or general arrangements for cessation of hostilities. However, as Nixon declared, the issue was not a matter of detail but of basic principle: “Hanoi has refused even to discuss our proposals. They demand our unconditional acceptance of their terms, which are that we withdraw all American forces immediately and unconditionally and that we overthrow the Government of South Vietnam as we leave.”

 

Nixon listed the steps taken to withdraw US troops, reduce air operations, and step up South Vietnamese training. He emphasized that Vietnamization envisaged “the complete withdrawal of all US combat ground forces and their replacement by South Vietnamese forces on an orderly scheduled timetable.” As I had suggested, Nixon disclosed the secret correspondence with North Vietnam prior to Inauguration, the repeated discussions with the Soviet Union to promote negotiations, and the secret letters exchanged with Ho Chi Minh in July and August, the texts of which were released by the White House. He did not reveal my secret meeting with Xuan Thuy. But he explained candidly that “no progress whatever had been made except agreement on the shape of the bargaining table

 

And he stated the fundamental issue:

 

In San Francisco a few weeks ago I saw demonstrators carrying signs reading: “Lose in Vietnam, bring the boys home.”

 

Well, one of the strengths of our free society is that any American has a right to reach that conclusion and to advocate that point of view. But as President of the United States, I would be untrue to my oath of office if I allowed the policy of this Nation to be dictated by the minority who hold that point of view and who try to impose it on the Nation by mounting demonstrations in the street.

 

For almost 200 years, the policy of this nation has been made under our Constitution by those leaders in the Congress and in the White House elected by all of the people. If a vocal minority, however fervent its cause, prevails over reason and the will of the majority, this Nation has no future as a free society…

 

The response to the speech was electric. From the minute it ended, the White House switchboard was clogged with congratulatory phone calls. Tens of thousands of supportive telegrams arrived which rapidly overwhelmed the general critical editorial and television comment. No doubt some of the enthusiasm was stimulated by Haldeman’s indefatigable operatives who had called political supporters all over the country to send in telegrams. But the outpouring went far beyond the capacities of even the White House public relations geniuses. Nixon had undoubtedly touched a raw nerve. The polls showed a major boost in his support. The American people might be tiring of the war; they were not ready to be defeated.

 

Nixon was elated. Professing indifference to public adulation, he nevertheless relished those few moments of acclaim that came his way. He kept the congratulatory telegrams stacked on his desk in such numbers that the Oval Office could not be used for work, and for days he refused to relinquish them.

 

As soon as the public mood became clear, organized pressures began to slack off somewhat, so that for the first time since January the Administration had some maneuvering room.

 

We would need more than this, however, to outwait and outmaneuver the hard and single-minded leaders in Hanoi. In 1969 those leaders engaged in no effort that by even the most generous interpretation could be called negotiation. They refused to explore or even to discuss any compromise proposal—not the free elections or mixed electoral commissions or cease-fire. Unilateral withdrawals of men and planes did not improve the atmosphere; de-escalation did not speed up the negotiating process. Hanoi was determined to break our will at home and to achieve this it could permit not a flicker of hope or the appearance of progress. As the last convinced Leninists in the world, the North Vietnamese had no intention of sharing power.

 

In retrospect the reasoning behind my proposal of the Vance mission in April and my criticism of Vietnamization in September and October was almost certainly correct. Time was not on our side, and piecemeal concessions did more to encourage intransigence than compromise. Analytically, it would have been better to offer the most generous proposal imaginable—and then, if rejected, to seek to impose it militarily. Nothing short of this could have produced Soviet cooperation, for in the absence of crisis there was no incentive for a concrete Soviet step. (When a crisis finally developed in 1972, we induced some Soviet cooperation.) If we had offered at one dramatic moment all the concessions we eventually made in three years of war, and if the military actions we took with steadily declining forces over 1970, 1971, and 1972, in Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam (even without the last bombing assault), had been undertaken all together in early 1970, the war might well have been appreciably shortened—though it is hard to tell at this remove whether Saigon would have been ready to carry the burden of going it alone after a settlement. In the face of the domestic turmoil and the divisions within the Administration I did not fight for my theoretical analysis. I joined the general view that, all things considered, Vietnamization was the best amalgam of our international, military, and domestic imperatives.

 

Once embarked on it, there was no looking back. I knew that it would be painful and long—I had outlined its dangers repeatedly to the President—and that it might ultimately fail. I also believed that it was better than the alternatives that were being proposed to us by our domestic critics.

 

And so it happened that the year ended with two assessments; on the correctness of one, the outcome of the war would depend. The President’s first Foreign Policy Report to the Congress, issued on February 18, 1970, summed up our Vietnam policy in strikingly sober terms. Rarely had a Presidential statement been as candid in admitting doubts and raising questions:

 

Claims of progress in Vietnam have been frequent during the course of our involvement there—and have often proved too optimistic. However careful our planning, and however hopeful we are for the progress of these plans, we are conscious of two basic facts:

 

—We cannot try to fool the enemy, who knows what is actually happening.

 

—Nor must we fool ourselves. The American people must have the full truth. We cannot afford a loss of confidence in our judgment and in our leadership.

 

The report admitted the existence of problems not yet solved and offered a benchmark by which progress could be judged in the future. We admitted that the Administration did not yet know the final answers to all the issues posed by the war—about enemy intentions, the prospects for Vietnamization, and the attitude of the Vietnamese people:

 

—What is the enemy’s capability to mount sustained operations? Could they succeed in undoing our gains?

 

—What is the actual extent of improvement in allied capabilities? In particular, are the Vietnamese developing the leadership, logistics capabilities, tactical know-how, and sensitivity to the needs of their own people which are indispensable to continued success?

 

—What alternative strategies are open to the enemy in the face of continued allied success? If they choose to conduct a protracted, low-intensity war, could they simply wait out U.S. withdrawals and then, through reinvigorated efforts, seize the initiative again and defeat the South Vietnamese forces?

 

—Most important, what are the attitudes of the Vietnamese people, whose free choice we are fighting to preserve? Are they truly being disaffected from the Viet Cong, or are they indifferent to both sides? What do their attitudes imply about the likelihood that the pacification gains will stick?

 

This was not a clarion call for domestic confrontation or military victory; it was the sober reflection and analysis of leaders grown cautious by the disappointments of a decade, serious about basing their policy on reality, and willing to accept reasonable compromise.

 

As Hanoi’s leaders were determined on victory, their perception of 1969 was the opposite of ours; they had no uncertainty about the outcome; nor did they talk of compromise. Hanoi’s goal was a monopoly of political power. This was illuminated by a major policy document of the Communist military and political leadership captured in late 1969, Resolution No. 9 of the Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN), the Southern headquarters of the North Vietnamese Communist Party. It was a directive of guidance to the cadres in the field, which viewed American concessions not as efforts at compromise but as evidence of failure:

 

Their “limited war” strategy has met with bankruptcy. They are caught in a most serious crisis over strategy and have been forced to deescalate the war step by step and adopt the policy of de-Americanizing the war, beginning with the withdrawal of 25,000 U.S. troops, hoping to extricate themselves from their war of aggression in our country…

 

After the great victory of the [1969] Spring Campaign, our army and people launched a new large-scale offensive in the military, political and diplomatic fields: we pushed our summer offensive while introducing the 10 point peace solution at the Paris Conference and proceeding with the convening of the National Congress of People’s Representatives which elected the Provisional Revolutionary Government. Thus the Nixon Administration, already beaten by our staggering attacks of the 1969 Spring Campaign, was dealt additional very heavy blows. Because of these new defeats on the battlefield and at the conference table, Nixon is under heavy attack by the people of the U.S. and of the world, demanding an end to the war of aggression in Viet-Nam… The fact that Nixon was forced to issue the eight-point program, organize the meeting with Thieu at Midway, and begin to withdraw 25,000 troops, reflects the obduracy and guile of U.S. imperialism; on the other hand, it indicates that the crisis and impasse in which the Nixon administration finds itself is developing to a new degree. This is a new opportunity which demands that we make greater efforts in all fields of operations in order to win a great victory.

 

According to COSVN, the strategic objectives for 1969 were the killing of American troops to increase domestic strains in the United States, the weakening of the South Vietnamese Army and pacification efforts, and on this basis forcing the United States to accept a “coalition government working toward reunifying Vietnam”:

 

a. Fiercely attack American troops, inflict very heavy losses on them, cause them increasing difficulties in all fields…

 

b. Strongly strike the puppet army, annihilate the most obdurate elements of the puppet army and administration, paralyze and disintegrate the remaining elements…

 

c. Strive to build up our military and political forces and deploy them on an increasingly strong strategic offensive position …

 

d. Continue to destroy and weaken the puppet administration at various levels; especially, defeat the enemy’s pacification plan; wipe out the major part of the puppet administration… and promote the role of the Provisional Revolutionary Government.

 

e. On this basis, smash the Americans’ will of aggression; force them to give up their intention of ending the war in a strong position, and to end the war quickly and withdraw troops while the puppet army and administration are still too weak to take over the responsibility of the Americans; force the Americans to accept a political solution, and recognize an independent, democratic peaceful and neutral South Viet-Nam with a national, democratic coalition government working toward reunifying Viet-Nam. [Emphases in Original.]

 

The North Vietnamese were cocksure; it was our duty to prove them wrong. I myself pursued the ambiguities of our complex policy with a heavy heart and not a little foreboding. But there was no acceptable alternative. We had the duty to see it through in a manner that best served its chances for success—because a defeat would not affect our destiny alone; the future of other peoples depended on their confidence in America. We would have to fight on—however reluctantly—until Hanoi’s perception of its possibilities changed. And if we stuck to our course, in time Hanoi might sue for a respite, if not for peace. We would have to brave discord in the process, because we would be held responsible for disaster even if it resulted from overwhelming domestic pressures. We considered it our painful responsibility to continue the struggle against an implacable opponent until we had achieved a fair settlement compatible with our values, our international responsibilities, and the convictions of the majority of the American people.

 

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