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The April 20 Troop Withdrawal Announcement .

 

n the surface, the issue was straightforward. The most recent withdrawal (announced December 15, 1969) had been 50,000 over a four-month period ending on April 15, 1970. With 115,000 troops already out, it was clear that the next increment would begin to cut sharply into our combat strength. The dilemma was plain to see. Troop cuts poulticed public sores at home, but they were evaporating Hanoi’s need to bargain about our disengagement. And if Vietnamization was not making good the defensive gaps created by our withdrawals, we hazarded not only the negotiating lever but South Vietnam’s independence and the entire basis of our sacrifices.

 

Though every agency paid lip service to Vietnamization, at least three schools of thought had developed by mid-1970. Secretary Rogers’s experience had been in domestic policy. He was acutely sensitive to public and Congressional opinion. He had less of an instinct for the geopolitical consequences of an American defeat or for what decisions motivated by domestic considerations might do to our negotiating positions. He favored the largest possible withdrawal in the shortest possible time; the military effect he considered beyond the scope of his office. His Department deluged Saigon with a stream of proposals about political reform more attuned to our Congressional pressures than to the realities of a war-torn country with limited democratic traditions, overrun by several hundred thousand enemy troops and guerrillas.

 

Secretary Laird was the most politically subtle of the President’s senior advisers. He understood the public’s ambivalence, shown by every poll. It opposed unilateral withdrawal yet it wanted the war ended, and saw the reduction of our troop strength as a sign of progress. Laird aspired to stay in tune with this mood. He was prepared to give Vietnamization a real chance; for a long time he favored a residual US force of several hundred thousand. But he wanted to reduce to that residual force rapidly, and to maintain public confidence he thought it important to make our withdrawal look as inexorable as possible. He also saw Vietnam as an obstacle to his plans to modernize our armed forces; Congressional pressures to cut his defense budget could be reduced, he thought, if he was identified with troop pullouts. He sought to guarantee his preferred course by gearing the withdrawal rate to the defense budget in such a way that any slowdown of withdrawals was bound to reduce procurement—thus enlisting the support of the services for rapid withdrawal by threatening their cherished new projects.

 

Initially, I had been the most skeptical of the President’s senior advisers, but once embarked on Vietnamization I did my utmost to give it a chance to succeed. Moreover, it was clear to me—if not to all my colleagues—that our commitment to Vietnamization was progressively reducing other options. Had we been prepared to accept Saigon’s collapse we could have adopted any of the many proposals for setting a deadline that had become staples of the public and Congressional debate and that had some support among the middle levels of the Administration. But if we meant what we said about the global consequence of an American collapse, we had to give the South Vietnamese time to replace American forces without catastrophe. And if we wanted to husband negotiating assets, our withdrawal strategy had to provide the President some discretion to accelerate it or slow it down in response to enemy actions. This was also Nixon’s view.

 

These differences of perspective, some of nuance, some of substance, were given added sharpness because each chief actor was acutely conscious of the public perception. Everybody wanted some of the credit for the withdrawal program; nobody desired the blame for failures or defeats it might produce. Memoranda proliferated to be available for later reference; the authors assumed that history would deal kindly with those advocating large withdrawals. The President, eager to garner whatever favorable publicity could be made to come his way, warily kept his own counsel. He feared that if he were more confiding his associates would leak higher withdrawal numbers than he was prepared to authorize and so place him at a disadvantage in the public eye.

 

This was a game in which Laird was not easily bested. He was a patriot whose every instinct was to win the war; he was also a realist who understood that the prospects for doing so were problematical at best. He was a politician to the core. He was perfectly prepared to support a strong policy so long as he was not identified as its principal author. In crises he was redoubtable. In the run-up to them he produced a blizzard of memoranda that would make it next to impossible to determine either his real intentions or—what was more important to him—his precise recommendation.

 

Every troop withdrawal decision set the stage for another of Laird’s amazing tours de force. In 1970 Laird had started early. On February 27 he wrote the President explaining that his budgetary choices in allocating the “increasingly scarce resources” for the US military operations in Vietnam in Fiscal Years 1970-1971 would become more and more difficult. The budgetary situation was “tight by any reasonable standard”; changing combat requirements could also produce new “resource problems” for which reprogramming of funds would “not be an easy chore.” Laird reminded the President that budgetary planning for Fiscal Year 1971 had been based on the assumption of reduced US combat and support efforts, and these constraints “restrict to a considerable degree our ability to impose added operations.” In other words Laird opposed new or expanded military operations but sought to blame any military failures on budgetary constraints that prevented new operations.

 

On March 11 I sought General Wheeler’s views on the relative merits of one four-month withdrawal increment (the largest period then being considered) or two withdrawals over two months each. Wheeler replied on March 20 in an unsigned memorandum, which he passed to the President through Haig, thus avoiding the inconvenience of Defense Department channels and the certainty of Laird’s wrath. Wheeler recommended a “one bite approach,” because the longer period provided greater flexibility by making it possible to retain key units until the end of the period. However, Wheeler added that he preferred “no further redeployment” at all because of the uncertain “overall situation.” He strongly urged holding the next withdrawal decision in abeyance for ninety days.

 

Laird reentered the fray on April 4 with a long memorandum, the thrust of which was to remind everyone that our effort in Vietnam was “large and costly.” He recommended a fixed monthly rate of withdrawal and a reduction in B-52 and tactical air operations in proportion to our withdrawals. Launching an incursion into the province of the State Department, Laird recommended that we seek a diplomatic solution to our dilemma. He urged that we offer a cease-fire in Vietnam and major new proposals for de-escalation in Laos and Cambodia, appoint a new senior ambassador to the peace talks in Paris, or explore a French proposal for an Indochina conference. Other than this, Laird pledged complete dedication to the President’s policies and programs.

 

Laird cannot be blamed for not knowing that these schemes had all been rejected by Le Duc Tho; it was, in fact, a weakness of our method of government that the Secretary of Defense was operating in such a vacuum. But his memorandum raised issues that went beyond the scope of his tactical knowledge. And his military proposals, as I pointed out in a covering memorandum for the President, all assumed that the enemy threat would decline in parallel with our withdrawals. The opposite was more likely.

 

Throughout the war there were many exhortations, from within and outside the government, to eschew a military solution and to seek a diplomatic one. But the raw truth was that this distinction not only was unacceptable to our adversary; it was incomprehensible to him. Every time I met with Le Duc Tho, he spent most of our time depicting the hopelessness of our military position. This was the “objective” factor that he assumed would compel our eventual acceptance of North Vietnam’s demands. There was no purely diplomatic alternative. Unless military and political efforts were kept in tandem, both would prove sterile. Until 1972 Hanoi never gave us a political option; its negotiating position was to demand our unilateral withdrawal on a short deadline and the overthrow of the Saigon government. It did so because it believed itself to be winning; it chose compromise only after a military stalemate had become apparent.

 

I was as committed to a political solution and even more prepared to come up with negotiating formulas than the other senior advisers, but it was precisely for this reason that I urged a military strategy that would persuade Hanoi to compromise and negotiate. Fixed deadlines and automatic withdrawals did not aid a political solution; they dissipated our negotiating assets. We were in danger, I thought, of having a withdrawal program too slow to satisfy our critics but too drastic for military or political effectiveness. This was not a policy but an abdication; it would make collapse inevitable through the very attempt to postpone it.

 

By April 8 General Abrams’s assessment reached the White House. (It had actually been sent nearly three weeks earlier, but because its recommendations did not find favor, it had been held up in the Pentagon for “staffing.”) It supported Wheeler’s recommendation of a ninety-day moratorium on withdrawals. And it seriously challenged Laird’s proposed reduction in tactical air operations and B-52 sorties. Abrams stressed that our withdrawals forced him to use the South Vietnamese forces in a static defense role. The B-52S thus became his sole strategic reserve. On April 15 I sent the President a memorandum arguing that since Vietnamization gains were “fragile” and allied forces were “stretched nearly to the limit of their capabilities,” the sharp cutbacks in air operations implied by the defense budget had disturbing implications. I recommended that the President order a study of what air operations were required to support Vietnamization. Such an order was issued on April 17. It put an end to reductions during the immediate crisis, but the cutbacks in air operations were to resume—almost imperceptibly—in the fall, forcing us to send substantial reinforcements when the enemy offensive broke in 1972.

 

I took seriously Abrams’s and Wheeler’s pleas to maintain troop levels, especially in the light of North Vietnamese offensives in Laos and Cambodia. But I knew also that to stop withdrawals for ninety days would trigger the same public protests as had occurred in the previous summer and make the eventual, inevitable resumption of withdrawals appear as a defeat. I concluded that a primary flaw lay in the apparently immutable timetable. An announcement was expected every few months, always triggering a debate within the Executive Branch as well as in public. These self-inflicted deadlines were sapping our endurance and raising doubts about our purposes.

 

For all these reasons I proposed that Nixon announce a large withdrawal and stretch it over one year. After consultation with General Wheeler, I recommended a total reduction of 150,000 men. This represented a slight increase in the monthly rate of withdrawal; but to compensate for this I proposed that only a very small withdrawal take place over the next ninety days, with the bulk of withdrawals planned for 1971. Nixon understood the strategic discretion this gave him and the favorable public impact. But he was also convinced that if he revealed his intentions to his associates he would rapidly be embroiled in controversy on at least three fronts: They would seek to transform his plan into a fixed monthly rate; they would urge that the rate be increased; and there was in the end the near certainty of a leak arranged in such a way as to create the impression that others had recommended an even larger figure.

 

The result was a complicated bureaucratic chess game whereby Nixon, with my assistance, moved toward a foreordained decision while confusing his Cabinet as to his plans. We first needed Bunker’s and Abrams’s reactions. On April 6 I had sent a backchannel message to both:

 

. . . any announcement which is substantially less than the pattern set heretofore could be the source of major problems with domestic critics. He is therefore considering announcing a decision to withdraw at least 150,000 troops over the next year with just a token withdrawal, if any, over the next few months. I would be grateful for your views on the implications of this formulation.

 

Abrams and Bunker informed me on April 8 that they, and in their judgment President Thieu also, could accept a withdrawal of 150,000 extended over a year provided the bulk of the forces remained throughout 1970. In addition, Bunker and Abrams insisted that B-52 sorties be held at the highest possible level, particularly in the first half of 1971 when troop reductions would be rapid and large.

 

At this point bureaucratic games in Washington reached new degrees of intricacy. The President’s writers began to draft a speech announcing new withdrawals but leaving the numbers and timing blank. On April 11 I notified Bunker and Abrams that the President now needed Thieu’s concurrence. I stressed the need for “absolute secrecy,” since no one in Washington except Nixon and me knew of the President’s intentions; Bunker was to stress to Thieu the importance of preventing any leaks. At the same time the agencies were sending instructions to Bunker based on their own studies and preferences, using figures substantially at variance with those being discussed in backchannels. Bunker and Abrams did an admirable job of keeping their two sets of instructions straight. Thieu concurred with the same provisos about timing and air sorties previously reported by Abrams and Bunker.

 

On April 17 Nixon went to Hawaii to greet the returning Apollo 13 astronauts. In order to keep an eye on Cambodia as well as the maneuvering over withdrawals I did not accompany him. Admiral John McCain, our commander in the Pacific, briefed Nixon at length in Honolulu. This doughty, crusty officer could have passed in demeanor, appearance, pugnacity, and manner of speech for Popeye the Sailor Man. His son had been a prisoner of war in Hanoi for years; this tragedy left him undaunted. He fought for the victory that his instinct and upbringing demanded and that political reality forbade. McCain brought home to Nixon the danger in Laos and Cambodia; he reinforced Nixon’s conviction that the withdrawal schedule had to be flexible.

 

Nixon and I rejoined forces in San Clemente on the evening of April 19. Separated from his Cabinet by three thousand miles, Nixon announced to the press that he would make a speech the next evening on redeployment from Vietnam but declined to give any indication of its content. We were besieged with calls from Washington, especially from Laird. Nixon refused to take them. He instructed me to tell Laird and Rogers the next morning that he was thinking of announcing only a monthly rate but no overall number—it was the exact opposite of the truth. His purpose was to avoid leakage of the total he had already decided upon or of any other figure.

 

Late that afternoon of the twentieth in San Clemente—too late for leaks to the evening newscasts—I called Laird and Rogers with the President’s decision: a withdrawal of 150,000 by the end of spring of 1971, with 60,000 to be withdrawn in 1970 and the remaining 90,000 in 1971. Within 1970 the greater portion of the withdrawals would take place after August 1. Nixon made his surprise announcement on April 20. It was one of the tours de force by which we sustained our effort in Vietnam. It met the political need for a withdrawal schedule and the military necessity to retain the largest possible number of troops during the next three critical months while Hanoi’s forces were assaulting Cambodia and pressing forward in Laos. Whatever the bureaucratic maneuvers or the monthly fluctuations in the withdrawal rate, the fact remained that we had within one year projected a total reduction of 265,500 below the troop ceiling of 549,500 we found when we came into office.

 

Rogers supported the President’s decision, regretting only that by forgoing more frequent announcements, the President deprived himself of periodic respites from public pressures. Laird wanted the withdrawals spaced more evenly; he insisted on an appointment with Nixon. I arranged it for the next day in Washington. Nixon flew back to Washington immediately after his announcement. When they met on April 21, Nixon explained to Laird that “we must play a tough game” for the next two or three months and therefore had to postpone withdrawals. Laird demurred: “I want you to know you have a fiscal problem. You know that, don’t you?” (a favorite Laird phrase, used whether or not one had any way of knowing what he had just communicated—especially when one had not). The President assured him he did know. Laird told the President that he had to take out 60,000 men by the time of the November Congressional election or “you might just as well forget about the election.” Nixon replied that he would be judged not by how many men left Vietnam in a given period but by how we left Vietnam in the end. Nixon said he would “think about” Laird’s warning.

 

When Nixon told a Cabinet member he would “think about” something, it almost invariably meant that he wished to avoid a face-to-face confrontation and that he would confirm his original decision either through Haldeman or by memorandum. So it was. The next day, April 21, the President initialed a short note to Laird:

 

Memorandum for the Secretary of Defense:

 

Following our discussion yesterday afternoon, I want to reiterate my decision that no more than 60,000 troops are to be redeployed this year. A plan to this effect should be submitted to me by May 1.

 

Until I have reviewed the plan, no further withdrawals should be scheduled.

 

Laird accepted the decision with apparent good grace. But he knew his chief well enough to return to the fray at a more propitious moment. In August he persuaded the President that he could dramatize the success of the Cambodian operation best by withdrawing 90,000 by the end of 1970 and 60,000 in 1971—the exact opposite of the President’s original intention. Laird got his way. Nixon acquiesced in part because he hated constant controversy, in part because Congressional elections were imminent.

 

I have discussed the troop withdrawal at such length because of the insight it gives on two related problems: the dilemmas of extricating ourselves from a war we inherited, whipsawed between an implacable domestic opposition and an implacable Hanoi; and the Nixon Administration’s style of government.

 

The dilemmas of our Vietnam policy were reflected in the gulf between our perception of reality and the nature of the public debate. Our reality consisted of enemy offensives in Laos and Cambodia that threatened our military position in South Vietnam. Yet as the objective threats grew, we were required to continue a program of unilateral withdrawal. The public debate focused on the danger that we might slide into a new “commitment” in two other faraway countries. Our reality was that only by preventing a collapse of these countries could we strengthen the South Vietnamese and enable them to take up the slack of our withdrawal without turning it into a rout. The public debate challenged all military calculations on the assumption that military effort was futile and was either unrelated to or inconsistent with our diplomatic prospects. (This would have been news to General Giap.) We had seen enough of Le Duc Tho to know that without a plausible military strategy we could not have an effective diplomacy.

 

As for Nixon’s style of government, he was prepared to make decisions without illusion. Once convinced, he went ruthlessly and courageously to the heart of the matter; but each controversial decision drove him deeper into his all-enveloping solitude. He was almost physically unable to confront people who disagreed with him; and he shunned persuading or inspiring his subordinates. He would decide from inside his self-imposed cocoon, but he was unwilling to communicate with those who disagreed. It was the paradox of a President strong in his decisions but inconclusive in his leadership. Making and enforcing decisions left so many scars on him and others that it sacrificed administrative cohesion on the altar of executive discretion; it perversely created the maximum incentive for strong-willed subordinates to evade his directives. Since Nixon disdained any effort to instill a team spirit and usually kept his designs to himself, his Cabinet was tempted to exaggerate its autonomy. This in turn reinforced his conviction that the bureaucracy did not support him; it surely rarely went out of its way to carry out the spirit of his orders. All this became a vicious circle in which the President withdrew ever more into his isolation and pulled the central decisions increasingly into the White House, in turn heightening the resentments and defiant mood of his appointees.

 

And soon these procedures would be tested by another crisis, with the White House once again in the vortex. The decision on what to do about Cambodia had become inescapable.

 

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The Attack on North Vietnamese Sanctuaries

 

istorians rarely do justice to the psychological stress on a policymaker. What they have available are documents written for a variety of purposes—under contemporary rules of disclosure, increasingly to dress up the record—and not always relevant to the moment of decision. What no document can reveal is the accumulated impact of accident, intangibles, fears, and hesitation.

 

March and April of 1970 were months of great tension. My talks with Le Duc Tho were maddeningly ambiguous. We faced what looked like a significant offensive in Laos; there was the coup in Cambodia soon to be followed by North Vietnamese attacks all over the country; Soviet combat personnel appeared in Egypt—the first time that the Soviet Union had risked combat outside the satellite orbit. Amid all these events, the President was getting testy. Nixon blamed his frustrations on the bureaucracy’s slow and erratic response to his wishes, which he ascribed to the legacy of thirty years of Democratic rule. Haldeman joked that the President was in a “charming mood”; in the course of covering one subject on the telephone Nixon had hung up on him several times.

 

On April 13, just as Cambodia was approaching the decisive turn, an extraneous event occurred that took a heavy toll of Nixon’s nervous energy: the mishap of Apollo 13. Soon after its launch on April 11 it became apparent that there was a severe malfunction and that the astronauts might have to circumnavigate the moon in the cramped and fragile vehicle designed for the brief lunar landing. I learned of the accident around 11:00 p.m. I sought to inform the President but ran into one of the mindless edicts by which Haldeman established his authority: The President could not be awakened without his specific authorization. This he refused to give for what he considered a technical problem involving no foreign policy considerations. I warned Haldeman that keeping the President ignorant would be hard to explain; he insisted that public relations was his province. The next morning Ron Ziegler had to go through verbal contortions to imply, without lying outright, that the President had been in command all night.

 

The rescue of the astronauts absorbed a great deal of Nixon’s attention for the week that the pressures on Cambodia were multiplying. Furthermore, Apollo 13 caused him to travel to Hawaii on April 17 to welcome home the astronauts, who had almost miraculously survived their brush with the infinite. The military briefing by Admiral McCain illuminated the perils we faced in Cambodia and its danger for Vietnamization. It magnified Nixon’s restlessness and helped speed up his decisions. But there were above all pressing objective reasons for Nixon’s state of mind that no one who took Presidential responsibilities seriously could ignore. Later on, during Watergate, Senator Howard Baker asked the famous question: “What did he know and when did he know it?” The question is apt in this case as well.

 

The first two weeks of April had seen a wave of Communist attacks on Cambodian towns and communications. These now escalated further. On April 17, several Cambodian government posts near the provincial capital of Senmonorom were captured by the North Vietnamese. On the same day, a Cambodian military spokesman announced that the enemy had more than doubled its area of control in the preceding two weeks. On April 18, a Cambodian army battalion was badly mauled on the West bank of the Mekong twenty-five miles South of Phnom Penh. Farther South on the Mekong, a Cambodian army headquarters at Hung Loi was besieged for a week by a large enemy force. On April 20, enemy forces unsuccessfully attacked Snuol in Kratie province. In Kandal province, Communist forces temporarily captured the town of Saang, some twenty miles South of Phnom Penh. On Tuesday, April 21, the day after the President’s troop withdrawal announcement, Communist forces struck the town of Takeo and cut the road between it and Phnom Penh.

 

The pattern of Communist military actions was becoming clear (see the map on page 471). General William Westmoreland, Acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in General Wheeler’s absence, reported that the Cambodian armed forces were only “marginally effective” against the superior North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. He wrote: “The enemy objective may well be to isolate the city of Phnom Penh, bring military pressure to bear on it from all sides, and perhaps, ultimately, to bring Sihanouk back to regain political control at the appropriate time.”

 

The Communists were escalating their political pressures as well. On April 21 Sihanouk’s “National United Front of Cambodia” broadcast an appeal to overthrow Lon Nol over the Viet Cong’s clandestine radio. The same day, Sihanouk broadcast a message from Peking in which, according to Radio Hanoi, he urged Cambodians: “You should at once abandon and isolate the clique of the Lon Nol-Sirik Matak reactionaries, you should point your guns at these traitors.”

 

Revisionist history has painted a picture of a peaceful, neutral Cambodia wantonly assaulted by American forces and plunged into a civil war that could have been avoided but for the American obsession with military solutions. The facts are different. Sihanouk declared war on the new Cambodian government as early as March 20, two days after his overthrow, throwing in his lot with the Communists he had held at bay and locating himself in Peking, then still considered the most revolutionary capital in the world and with which, moreover, we had no means of communication whatever. April saw a wave of Communist attacks to overthrow the existing governmental structure in Cambodia. Le Duc Tho on March 16 had rejected all suggestions of de-escalation of military activities and on April 4 had rejected all suggestions of neutralization. He had asserted that the Cambodian, Laotian, and Vietnamese peoples were one and would fight shoulder to shoulder to win the whole of Indochina. By the second half of April, the North Vietnamese were systematically expanding their sanctuaries and merging them into a “liberated zone.” They were surrounding Phnom Penh and cutting it off from all access—using the very tactics that five years later led to its collapse.

 

If these steps were unopposed, the Communist sanctuaries, hitherto limited to narrow unpopulated areas close to the Vietnamese border, would be organized into a single large base area of a depth and with a logistics system which would enable rapid transfer of units and supplies. We would have preferred the old Sihanouk government, I told a group of Republican Senators on April 21. But Sihanouk’s pronouncements left little doubt that this option was no longer open to us. If Lon Nol fell, the Sihanouk who returned would no longer balance contending forces in neutrality but lead a Communist government. His necessities (as well as his outraged vanity) would force him to purge the moderate groups on which his freedom of maneuver between contending factions had previously depended; he would be reduced to a figurehead. Sihanoukville would reopen to Communist supplies. Security throughout the Southern half of South Vietnam would deteriorate drastically.

 

By April 21 the basic issue had been laid bare by Hanoi’s aggressiveness; it was whether Vietnamization was to be merely an alibi for an American collapse or a serious strategy designed to achieve an honorable peace. If the former, neither the rate of withdrawal nor events in neighboring countries were important; in fact, anything that hastened the collapse of South Vietnam was a blessing in disguise. Some of the opposition, like Senator George McGovern, took this position. Though I considered it against the national interest, it was rational and honest. My intellectual difficulties arose with those who pretended that there was a middle course of action that would avoid collapse in Vietnam and yet ignore the impending Communist takeover in Cambodia.

 

There was no serious doubt that Hanoi’s unopposed conquest of Cambodia would have been the last straw for South Vietnam. In the midst of a war, its chief ally was withdrawing forces at an accelerating rate and reducing its air support. Saigon was being asked to take the strain at the very moment Hanoi was increasing reinforcements greatly over the level of the preceding year. If Cambodia were to become a single armed camp at this point, catastrophe was inevitable. Saigon needed time to consolidate and improve its forces; the United States had to pose a credible threat for as long as possible; and Hanoi’s offensive potential had to be weakened by slowing down its infiltration and destroying its supplies. It was a race between Vietnamization, American withdrawal, and Hanoi’s offensives.

 

Strategically, Cambodia could not be considered a country separate from Vietnam. The indigenous Cambodian Communist forces—the murderous Khmer Rouge—were small in 1970 and entirely dependent on Hanoi for supplies. The forces threatening the South Vietnamese and Americans from Cambodia were all North Vietnamese; the base areas were part of the war in Vietnam. North Vietnamese forces that were busy cutting communications had already seized a quarter of the country. The danger of being “bogged down in a new war in Cambodia” was a mirage; the enemy in Cambodia and Vietnam was the same one. Whatever forces we fought in Cambodia we would not have to fight in Vietnam and vice versa. The war by then was a single war, as Le Duc Tho had proclaimed; there was turmoil in Cambodia precisely because Hanoi was determined to use it as a base for its invasion of South Vietnam and to establish its hegemony over Indochina.

 

By April 21 we had a stark choice. We could permit North Vietnam to overrun the whole of Cambodia so that it was an indisputable part of the battlefield and then attack it by air and sea—even Rogers told me on April 21 that if the Communists took over Cambodia, he believed all bombing restrictions should be ended. Or we could resist Cambodia’s absorption, supporting the independence of a government recognized by the United Nations and most other nations, including the Soviet Union. [Curiously enough, one of the most implacable critics of our policy in Cambodia presents the same analysis of what our choices were:

Back in March and April the administration had had freedom of choice in reacting to events in Cambodia. If it had decided not to encourage, let alone to arm Lon Nol, it could have compelled either the return of Sihanouk or, at lEast, an attempt, by Lon Nol, to preserve the country’s flawed neutrality. This would not have been an ideal solution for Washington, it would probably have meant a government dominated by Hanoi and at the very least it would have allowed the Communists continued use of Sihanoukville (which Lon Nol renamed Kompong Som) and the sanctuaries. But as the suppressed National Intelligence Estimate had pointed out, short of permanent occupation the sanctuaries would always pose a military problem for a South Vietnamese government; that was a fact of both geography and revolutionary warfare.[106]

This passage is interesting, first of all, because it combines all the misconceptions about events in Cambodia in 1970. My narrative can leave no doubt that we did not encourage Lon Nol nor even begin to arm him for weeks after North Vietnamese troops were ravaging a neutral country. The option of Lon Nol’s restoring Cambodia’s neutrality did not exist; it had been explicitly rejected by Le Duc Tho. And by then Sihanouk was no longer in a position to be neutralist. He could return only by destroying the Lon Nol faction, which had previously constituted his own government and whose nucleus he would need to balance off against his newfound Khmer Rouge “friends.” The real prospect before us, therefore, was exactly what the quoted paragraph describes as the most likely outcome: the reopening of Sihanoukville, a government in Phnom Penh dominated by Hanoi, and reopened sanctuaries now no longer an isolated strip but comprising all of Eastern Cambodia. Where I differ sharply from the paragraph is in its assertion that we had “freedom of choice.” This is precisely what we did not have, for the prospect it describes would have meant a massive shift in the military balance in Indochina: an overwhelming, insurmountable, and decisive menace to the survival of South Vietnam.

As for the allegedly “suppressed” National Intelligence Estimate, this is another fiction. No intelligence estimate was ever “suppressed” or inhibited by the NSC office. They were routinely distributed to all the principal agencies. The CIA input was an important element of every policy deliberation, including that before the Cambodian decision. Nixon received full briefings from Director Helms at at least three NSC meetings or Cabinet-level discussions in April, and indeed Nixon saw Helms privately on three additional occasions.]

 

There had been no consideration of attacking the sanctuaries before April 21. The final decision was taken on April 28. It is important therefore to review the decision-making process in some detail to know who knew what and when.

 

No doubt Admiral McCain’s briefing of Nixon on April 18 gave focus to his inchoate anxieties about Cambodia. He was sufficiently concerned to ask McCain to come to San Clemente and give me the same briefing on April 20. Unquestionably, the accumulated nervous strain of the previous weeks caused Nixon to become somewhat overwrought; it does not alter the fact that his analysis was essentially right. On the trip to San Clemente to rendezvous with him I had come to the same conclusion. I did not see how we could stand by and watch Cambodia collapse without thereby producing at the same time the collapse of all we were doing in Vietnam. I would have raised the issue with Nixon had not McCain in a sense preempted me. Nixon’s first step on returning to Washington was to schedule a meeting with Helms and me for 7:00 a.m. on April 21 to bring himself up to date. Helms’s briefing showed that the North Vietnamese were attacking all over the country and that Phnom Penh could not long withstand this assault. In discussing the status of our (negligible) response, Nixon discovered that the $5 million for arms for Cambodia approved by the WSAG on April 15 and doubled by him shortly thereafter was still being held up by bureaucratic foot-dragging. Nor had the communications equipment for the CIA, which he had ordered on April 1 and insisted upon on April 16, been delivered. Nixon was beside himself. He ordered an immediate transfer of the money. He called an NSC meeting for the next day to determine overall strategy.

 

In preparation, I asked General Westmoreland about the feasibility of military operations by South Vietnamese forces into the sanctuaries. Westmoreland thought they could be effective, but not decisive without American support. I also sent a backchannel message to Ellsworth Bunker, asking for his and Abrams’s “candid judgment” of the military, political, and psychological consequences of Sihanouk’s return or of a Communist victory in Cambodia. I also requested their suggestions of possible countermeasures.

 

Since February, the South Vietnamese had considered occasional shallow cross-border operations—to a distance of about three miles—into the sanctuaries with our logistical support. A company or less in size, these were designed to discover caches of weapons. General Haig had reported after his January tour of South Vietnam that there were enemy supply caches a few miles over the Cambodian border that could not be safely targeted by B-52s because they were too near populated areas. Laird had authorized General Abrams to give logistical support to South Vietnamese forces for shallow penetrations when he visited Vietnam in February. A cross-border operation by South Vietnamese forces had taken place on March 27. It was reported by the press. A second operation took place the next day and was also reported. White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler had declared on March 28 that American field commanders were now authorized to cross the Cambodian border in response to threats to American forces.

 

Upon learning of the first cross-border operation, I requested a temporary halt to them until we could reach a considered and coordinated judgment in light of the new situation and to avoid giving Hanoi a pretext for expanding the war. I did not want policy determined by the tactical decisions of field commanders. After issuing these instructions I went on a (long-scheduled) vacation for a week. Haig therefore sent the implementing cable to Bunker on March 27:

 

If these operations continue we will be subject to accusation that South Vietnamese Government is drawing US into expanded war.

 

While recognizing that you are not a free agent in this respect, Mr. Kissinger hopes that you can encourage Thieu to refrain from these operations except in situations where current US rules of engagement would apply. Mr. Kissinger wants you to be aware that while President is understanding of South Vietnamese motives, he is concerned that short term military benefits of cross-border operations might be outweighed by the risks posed to our efforts to maintain our current levels of domestic support for our overall Vietnam policy.

 

On March 30, as instructed, Bunker met with Thieu and explained why cross-border operations should be held in abeyance. Our objective was to prevent the expansion of the war, Bunker told him. Thieu accepted our recommendation. On March 31, the New York Times warned that the Cambodian government’s willingness to permit allied cross-border raids against Communist sanctuaries might draw the United States deeper into the war. The Cambodian government thereupon, on March 31. “faithful to its policy of strict neutrality,” formally denied that the United States and South Vietnam were authorized to conduct such raids. That same day. while I was still on vacation, Laird had called on the President to protest the suspension of cross-border operations. I had instructed Haig by telephone to try to delay a response until after my return and in any case not to authorize further cross-border operations before my meeting with Le Duc Tho scheduled for April 4. The President overruled my recommendations. He ordered Haig to instruct Bunker by backchannel to reinstate cross-border operations, provided they were kept to the level of those carried out prior to the moratorium and were coordinated with the Cambodian armed forces. As far as I can determine now, four shallow cross-border operations took place during the first three weeks of April—all after my meeting on April 4 with Le Duc Tho, none lasting more than a day.

 

In the last two weeks of April, Communist forces stepped up assaults on Cambodian towns. On April 22 the border town of Snuol was attacked and the Cambodian government made a new appeal to the United Nations for help in fighting the invaders. It was ignored, as all others, though it would have been difficult to find a more flagrant case of aggression. In Washington, April 22 was the occasion of a major NSC meeting on Cambodia; it also saw a stream of typewritten messages from the President to me that reflected his increasingly agitated frame of mind.

 

In the first message, dictated at 5:00 a.m., Nixon stressed the need for a “bold move” in Cambodia, and expressed determination to “do something symbolic to help [Lon Nol] survive” even though he feared Lon Nol would not be able to do so. He thought we had “dropped the ball” by worrying that American help would destroy Lon Nol’s neutrality and give the North Vietnamese an excuse to come in; the Communists never waited for an “excuse,” as demonstrated in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and in Laos and Cambodia. The President suggested sending Ambassador Robert Murphy to reassure Lon Nol. “In the event that I decide to go on this course,” Nixon wanted me to stress with “some of the lily-livered Ambassadors from our so-called friends in the world” that their posture on this issue would show us “who our friends are.” (The text of this message is in the back.)[107]

 

A second missive later in the day reiterated the same theme—that I should call in the Japanese, French, British, and other friendly ambassadors and stress that we counted on our allies to back us. A third memorandum commented on a recent letter from Sihanouk to Senator Mansfield. Sihanouk had compared the Lon Nol regime with Hitler and said that “the most severe ideology—as long as it is based on social justice—is infinitely preferable to a regime composed of greatly corrupted people and anti-popular reactionaries…” Sihanouk said he was determined to liberate his country, even “at the price of an ideological change in Cambodia.’ Nixon suggested that Sihanouk “parrots the Communist line in every respect,” and asked me to pass the letter discreetly to Rogers and Helms. A fourth message asked me to call in the Soviet charge and warn him that the President had made a “command decision” to react if the Communists moved on Phnom Penh.

 

The pace of events gave me no opportunity to carry out these instructions. In a meeting with the President later in the morning of April 22 I advised against sending Murphy (or Dean Acheson, his later suggestion) to Cambodia because it would just trigger an enormous debate and would probably be overtaken by the decisions at the NSC. The President said, “Well, whatever, I want to make sure that Cambodia does not go down the drain without doing something.” He went on: “Everybody always comes into my office with suggestions on how to lose. No one ever comes in here with a suggestion on how to win.” The President ordered a replacement for our charge, Lloyd Rives, in Phnom Penh and US support for shallow cross-border operations. As with many Nixon orders to fire people, it was intended to show his displeasure; it was not meant to be carried out; it never was at lower levels.

 

Meanwhile, we had received a long backchannel reply from Bunker and Abrams, which sketched dire consequences if Sihanouk returned to power as a Communist figurehead: Viet Cong and North Vietnamese morale would be strengthened; Hanoi’s capacity for protracted warfare would be enhanced; there would be shock waves in South Vietnam; Vietnamization would be jeopardized. Bunker and Abrams recommended both an immediate increase in shallow cross-border operations and combined US-South Vietnamese operations against the key Communist sanctuaries.

 

The NSC meeting was given in effect three tactical options: doing nothing (the preferred course of the State and Defense departments); attacking the sanctuaries with South Vietnamese forces only (my recommendation); and using whatever forces were necessary to neutralize all of the base areas, including American combat forces, recommended by Bunker, Abrams, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

 

Two base areas were of special concern. The so-called Parrot’s Beak, Cambodia’s Svay Rieng province, jutted into Vietnam to within only thirty-three miles of Saigon. It had sheltered North Vietnamese armies attacking the Saigon area and the rice-producing delta region during all the years of the Vietnam war. Farther North was a second area, code-named the Fishhook. Our intelligence analysts believed that COSVN, the Communist headquarters for all operations in the South, was located there; it also was the staging area for the Seventh North Vietnamese Division, which periodically threatened Saigon and always harassed the adjoining Tay Ninh province of South Vietnam. The Fishhook was well defended; we did not think the South Vietnamese army was strong enough to handle both operations simultaneously. Hence, to recommend that the actions be confined to South Vietnamese forces was tantamount to opting for operations against only one base area.

 

Momentous decisions are rarely produced by profound discussions. By the time an issue reaches the NSC it has been analyzed by so many lower-level committees that the Cabinet members perform like actors in a well-rehearsed play; they repeat essentially what their subordinates have already announced in other forums. In the Nixon NSC there was the additional factor that every participant suspected that there was almost certainly more going on than he knew. As usual, there was also an ambivalence between taking positions compatible with their complicated chief’s designs and fear of the domestic consequences. There was a sinking feeling about anything that could be presented as escalation in Vietnam. No one around the table questioned the consequences of a Communist takeover of Cambodia. But we all knew that whatever the decision another round of domestic acrimony, protest, and perhaps even violence was probable. If Cambodia collapsed we would be even harder pressed to pull out unilaterally; if we accepted any of the other options we would be charged with “expanding the war.” There was no middle ground.

 

The initial decision to attack the sanctuaries was thus taken at a subdued and rather random NSC meeting. Rogers opposed substantial cross-border operations even by South Vietnamese, but he took it for granted that unrestricted bombing of Cambodia would follow the overthrow of the government in Phnom Penh. Laird had been the strongest advocate of shallow cross-border operations, but he opposed General Abrams’s recommendation of destroying the sanctuaries altogether. Helms was in favor of any action to neutralize the sanctuaries. Nixon normally announced his decisions after, not during, an NSC meeting; he would deliberate and then issue instructions in writing or through intermediaries. He did this to emphasize that the NSC was an advisory, not a decision-making, body and to avoid a challenge to his orders. On this occasion Nixon altered his usual procedure. He told his colleagues that he approved attacks on the base areas by South Vietnamese forces with US support. Since the South Vietnamese could handle only one offensive, Wheeler recommended that they go after Parrot’s Beak. This led to a debate about American participation; Laird and Rogers sought to confine it to an absolute minimum, opposing even American advisers or tactical air support.

 

At this point Vice President Spiro Agnew spoke up. He thought the whole debate irrelevant. Either the sanctuaries were a danger or they were not. If it was worth cleaning them out, he did not understand all the pussyfooting about the American role or what we accomplished by attacking only one. Our task was to make Vietnamization succeed. He favored an attack on both Fishhook and Parrot’s Beak, including American forces. Agnew was right. If Nixon hated anything more than being presented with a plan he had not considered, it was to be shown up in a group as being less tough than his advisers. Though chafing at the bit, he adroitly placed himself between the Vice President and the Cabinet. He authorized American air support for the Parrot’s Beak operation but only “on the basis of demonstrated necessity.” He avoided committing himself to Fishhook. These decisions were later sent out in writing. After the meeting, Nixon complained bitterly to me that I had not forewarned him of Agnew’s views, of which I had in fact been unaware. I have no doubt that Agnew’s intervention accelerated Nixon’s ultimate decision to order an attack on all the sanctuaries and use American forces.

 

The next day, April 23, began the effort of the various agencies to position themselves so as to deflect on to somebody else the public uproar certain to ensue. Rogers asked for permission to tell Congressional committees of the very large Cambodian aid requests; his reasoning was that this would make the planned operations appear restrained in comparison—indeed, look like a way of avoiding a full-scale military aid program. Laird wanted to make sure that no American ground personnel would enter Cambodia, not even air controllers for the tactical air support approved by Nixon only the day before. I held two WSAG meetings on April 23 to sort out the implementation of Nixon’s decisions. Not surprisingly, the WSAG members echoed the views of their principals. The Defense Department wanted authority for each tactical air strike to come from Washington. It was hard to imagine what targets would hold still long enough for such cumbersome procedures. After two meetings the WSAG members agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to give General Abrams general authority to use US tactical aircraft when needed and authorized US air controllers to accompany the South Vietnamese. Nixon approved both WSAG recommendations on April 24.

 

The North Vietnamese, in any event, were free of such inhibitions. On Thursday, April 23, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces attacked the Cambodian towns of Mimot and Angtassom and captured an important bridge on Route 13 linking the town of Snuol and the capital of Kratie province. The Cambodian military headquarters at Hung Loi in Kandal province, under siege for several days, had to be abandoned on April 23 despite South Vietnamese air strikes. Two bridges West of Svay Rieng on Route 1 were captured by the enemy. Beginning on April 23 and continuing on April 24, Communist forces staged hit-and-run raids on the coastal city of Kep.

 

The Communists escalated politically as well. On April 24, a “Summit Conference of the Indochinese Peoples” was convened at an undisclosed location in the Laos-Vietnam-China frontier area, summoned at Sihanouk’s initiative to coordinate strategy among the three insurgent groups. In attendance were Sihanouk, Prince Souvanouvong of the Pathet Lao, Nguyen Huu Tho of the Viet Cong, and Pham Van Dong, Premier of North Vietnam. A lengthy Joint Declaration published by Sihanouk on April 27 in Peking pledged “reciprocal support” in the “struggle against the common enemy,” that is, “US imperialism.” Sihanouk in his closing speech to the conference hailed the birth of “People’s Cambodia.”

 

The period involved much tension. I did not believe that either Cambodia or South Vietnam could survive unless we reacted to the Communist offensive. But I was painfully conscious of the political upheaval that would certainly follow an attack on the sanctuaries as well as of the divisions on my staff. I had deliberately recruited the ablest young men and women I could find. I thought it important to tap their vitality and idealism; it seemed to me crucial that the concern so many of their contemporaries expressed in protest find an outlet also in the willingness to work on the more mundane matters by which a government gropes for peace. Three of those closest to me were Tony Lake, Roger Morris, and Winston Lord. They had no great use for Nixon; emotionally, each of them would probably have preferred a Democratic President. I worked hard to maintain their commitment because the problems before our country were not partisan and because I was convinced that they had to learn that in some circumstances morality can best be demonstrated not by a grand gesture but by the willingness to persevere through imperfect stages for a better world. Lake and Morris had already told me in February that they had decided to leave; in view of their ambivalences they were no longer willing to work the long hours required. I kept them on in less demanding planning functions until the fall when Lake returned to graduate school and Morris joined Senator Mondale’s staff. Winston Lord stayed; he became an invaluable collaborator and cherished friend.

 

Just prior to the final decision I spent much time with Lake, Morris, and Lord. The best-reasoned and argued objections to the course we were planning came not from the departments but were expressed in a joint memorandum that they wrote me. Ironically, their reasoning accelerated the conclusion to which I was reluctantly moving: that our only realistic option was to destroy the sanctuaries. Their basic diagnosis was the same as mine. One of our major objectives, they argued, had to be to avoid the return of Sihanouk:

 

If he returned, it would be the result of a Communist decision to allow this, which implies meaningful assurances that he would do their bidding… More importantly, Sihanouk’s return as a Communist stooge would have a serious psychological effect in Vietnam and Laos, and would at least provide an issue for Thieu’s opponents against him, especially and dangerously among hard-liners in the Army.

 

Nevertheless, their memorandum opposed American military operations against the sanctuaries. What they favored was

 

a neutral Cambodian government under current or other non-Sihanouk leadership which has reached a private understanding with the Communists that they may use the border areas in the same fashion as earlier. This would mean that the Cambodian government would look the other way but not publicly acquiesce. This would imply the possibility of continuing Menu [the secret bombing] and defensive cross-border operations by the GVN- without active Cambodian opposition to military activity by either of the Vietnamese forces in the limited border area. Although not a good situation, this would be better than a Sihanouk government which actively opposed the GVN and would publicly oppose Menu, etc.

 

In other words, my three young friends and associates regarded continuation of the secret bombing of Cambodia and shallow cross-border penetration of a few miles as essential, but deep penetrations as indefensible—a distinction whose moral significance continues to escape me. Their preferred outcome, restoration of “the status quo ante without Sihanouk,” was attractive but unattainable. To bring it about they urged that we encourage the Lon Nol government to reach an accommodation with Hanoi while warning Hanoi that we would resist by force the imposition of Sihanouk. There was no possibility of such a compromise in the face of Le Duc Tho’s statements of April 4 that Hanoi would never deal with Lon Nol. More likely, the very attempt to arrange such a “solution” would have led to the collapse of Phnom Penh and a Communist victory. Nor could I conceive how the measures to convince Hanoi that we would oppose Sihanouk would have been compatible with a compromise. Cambodia unfortunately had already been polarized, as a result of forces over which we had no control and beyond our capacity to reconcile. The alternatives proposed were, in short, an evasion of our hard choices, a sop to consciences, not a guide to action.

 

I was becoming increasingly restless with the decision at the NSC meeting that was in effect my recommendation: to limit the attack on the sanctuaries to South Vietnamese forces. Agnew was right; we should either neutralize all of the sanctuaries or abandon the project. It was hard to imagine how a limited operation into just one sanctuary, in which South Vietnamese forces had at best strictly limited American air support, could make a decisive difference. We were in danger of combining the disadvantages of every course of action. We would be castigated for intervention in Cambodia without accomplishing any strategic purpose.

 

Before I could present these views to Nixon, there occurred another of those seemingly trivial events that accelerate the process of history. Journalist William Beecher in the New York Times reported the contents of a highly classified cable informing our charge in Phnom Penh that we had decided to provide captured Communist rifles to the Cambodian government. Nixon exploded. Leaks infuriated him in the best of circumstances; this one seemed to him a clear attempt by the bureaucracy to generate Congressional and public pressures against any assistance to Cambodia. To make matters worse, at about the same moment Nixon found out that the signal equipment and CIA representative that he had ordered into Phnom Penh on April 1 and again on April 16 had still not been sent.

 

He flew into a monumental rage. On the night of April 23 he must have called me at least ten times—three times at the house of Senator Fulbright, where I was meeting informally with members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. As was his habit when extremely agitated he would bark an order and immediately hang up the phone. He wanted our charge, Rives, relieved immediately; he ordered Marshall Green fired; on second thought his deputy Bill Sullivan was to be transferred as well; an Air Force plane with CIA personnel aboard should be dispatched to Phnom Penh immediately; everybody with access to the cable should be given a lie-detector test; a general was to be appointed immediately to take charge of Cambodia.

 

In these circumstances it was usually prudent not to argue and to wait twenty-four hours to see on which of these orders Nixon would insist after he calmed down. As it turned out, he came back to none of them. (I did get the CIA communications sent into Phnom Penh by military plane.) But his April 23 outburst did finally propel him to accept Agnew’s advice: to proceed against Fishhook and Parrot’s Beak simultaneously, using American forces against Fishhook. He called a meeting on the morning of April 24 with Admiral Moorer, Acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and Helms and Cushman of the CIA. Nixon wanted to discuss the feasibility of a combined US-South Vietnamese operation against Fishhook, in parallel with the Parrot’s Beak operation. It was a reflection of his extreme irritation at bureaucratic foot-dragging that he excluded both Rogers and Laird, on the pretext that he merely wanted a military and intelligence briefing. Helms and Moorer were both strongly in favor of an attack on the Fishhook sanctuary. They felt it would force the North Vietnamese to abandon their effort to encircle and terrorize Phnom Penh. The destruction of supplies would gain valuable time for Vietnamization. But Nixon was not prepared to announce a decision yet. Instead, he helicoptered to Camp David to reflect further and to figure out a way to bring along his Cabinet on a course toward which he was increasingly tending. In the meantime he left me to manage the bureaucracy.

 

The situation had its bizarre aspects. The departments were still dragging their feet on American air support of a South Vietnamese operation against one sanctuary when the President was beginning to lean more and more toward combined South Vietnamese-American operations against all sanctuaries. I did not think it right to keep the Secretary of Defense ignorant of a meeting between the Acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the President; I therefore called Laird, describing it as a military briefing of options, including an American attack on Fishhook. Laird stressed that it would be highly desirable to avoid authorizing any American operation before Rogers’s testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 27; this would enable Rogers to state truthfully that no Americans were involved in Cambodia. Laird reported that even the usually hawkish Armed Services Committees were restive about American involvement in Cambodia. Laird also argued—as he was to do on several occasions over the next few days—that Abrams and Wheeler were really opposed to the Fishhook operation. I checked with Admiral Moorer, who claimed (in a rough translation from his more colorful naval jargon) that his Secretary was under a misapprehension.

 

Once he was launched on a course, Nixon’s determination was equal to his tactical resourcefulness. He decided to adopt Rogers’s suggestion of scaring the Congress with the prospect of monumental aid requests from Cambodia but to use it to justify American operations in the sanctuaries, which Rogers never intended.

 

At Nixon’s request I asked the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator John Stennis from Mississippi, to meet with me. Stennis belonged to that generation of Senate leaders who, having achieved their position by seniority and being secure in their constituencies, embodied in their accumulated experience a sense of continuity. On domestic issues, especially the race problem, they sometimes lagged behind the moral currents of their time, but on national security and foreign policy they were towers of strength. Many were Southerners, sons of a region that had known its own tragedy. They understood, as most other regions of the country did not, that there can be irrevocable disasters, that mankind is fallible, that human perfection cannot be assumed, that virtue without power is impotent. Courtly, wise, and patriotic, Stennis, like his distinguished colleague Richard Russell, was one of the men who made the separation of powers function despite its formal intractability. Presidents could rely on his integrity; Cabinet members could count on his respect for their efforts.

 

I saw Stennis in the afternoon of April 24 and explained to him our reasoning that a US-supported incursion into Cambodia was a military necessity if Vietnamization were to proceed. I showed him a map with the base areas, which were an integral part of the war in Vietnam. In the middle of our conversation Nixon called my office, by prearrangement. In Stennis’s hearing I summed up my briefing and reported Stennis’s generally favorable reaction. Stennis then took the phone and expressed his support personally to the President.

 

Once again I reviewed the planning with Wheeler and Helms, asking Helms for a contingency study of what might go wrong. I stressed that if he had any hesitations he should tell me; if he developed second thoughts I would transmit them immediately to the President. Helms stood by his previous recommendation. He felt that we would pay the same domestic price for two operations as for one and the strategic payoff would be incomparably greater in the two-pronged attack.

 

I then spent an hour with members of my senior staff who opposed the proposed operation—Bill Watts and Larry Lynn, in addition to Lord, Lake, and Morris—to give them one final opportunity to express their objections. It was a painful session, for they felt deeply about what we were planning. Lake, Morris, and Watts resigned.

 

Since the NSC meeting two days earlier, the Secretaries of State and Defense had not been heard from. They knew of contingency plans involving US forces; indeed. Laird had originally transmitted the JCS plans for an attack on Fishhook. They could not have missed the President’s increasing agitation; but they could not believe that Nixon might seriously decide to authorize a US incursion. They acted as if the problem would go away if they offered no alternative or even a systematic critique.

 

I urged Nixon to call an NSC meeting to give all parties an opportunity to express themselves. As I told Helms: “It is my judgment and strong recommendation that any decision must be discussed with the two Cabinet members—even if the decision has already been made and an order is in the desk drawer. You can’t ram it down their throats without their having a chance to give their views.” The meeting was set for Sunday afternoon, April 26.

 

By now Nixon was determined to proceed; his chief problem was to reduce the inevitable confrontation with Rogers and Laird to a minimum. When he was pressed to the wall, his romantic streak surfaced and he would see himself as a beleaguered military commander in the tradition of Patton. But personal idiosyncrasies aside, Nixon was putting the fundamental question: Could we in good conscience continue a gradual withdrawl from Vietnam with Sihanoukville reopened and all of Cambodia turned into one big contiguous base area? Those within the Administration who balked were mostly concerned about the domestic reaction. No one came up with an answer to the dilemma of how we could proceed with Vietnamization if the entire Cambodian frontier opened up to massive infiltration. Nor would inaction avoid our domestic dilemma. If we resisted, we would be charged with escalation; but if we acquiesced in the Communist takeover of Cambodia, our casualties started rising, and Vietnam began to disintegrate, we would be accused of pursuing a hopeless strategy.

 

On Saturday April 25 Nixon called me to Camp David to review the planning. I walked along at the edge of the swimming pool while he paddled in the water. We discussed the NSC meeting scheduled for the next afternoon. Nixon was determined to proceed with the Fishhook operation; indeed, he began to toy with the idea of going for broke: Perhaps we should combine an attack on the Cambodian sanctuaries with resumption of the bombing of North Vietnam as well as mining Haiphong. The opposition would be equally hysterical either way. I thought that this was one of the musings Nixon tended to put forward to demonstrate his toughness but which he really had no intention of carrying out, although he could use it later to demonstrate to trusted cronies that he had been let down by his staff. Nor did I conceive that the President could rise out a crisis of such magnitude with a divided team. For all these reasons I replied that we had enough on our plate; we could not abandon a strategy announced so recently and emphatically.

 

Nixon dropped the subject after ten minutes and never returned to it. I do not believe that he was seriously considering the option. But in retrospect I believe that we should have taken it more seriously. The bane of our military actions in Vietnam was their hesitancy; we were always trying to calculate with fine precision the absolute minimum of force or of time, leaving no margin for error or confusion, encouraging our adversary to hold on until our doubts overrode our efforts.

 

Perhaps the most difficult lesson for a national leader to learn is that with respect to the use of military force, his basic choice is to act or to refrain from acting. He will not be able to take away the moral curse of using force by employing it halfheartedly or incompetently. There are no rewards for exhibiting one’s doubts in vacillation; statesmen get no prizes for failing with restraint. Once committed they must prevail. If they are not prepared to prevail, they should not commit their nation’s power. Neither the successive administrations nor the critics ever fully understood this during the Vietnam war. And therein lay the seeds of many of its tragedies.

 

In all events, the poolside strategy session at Camp David was not the end of the deliberating for the day. We flew back to the capital and in the late afternoon Nixon invited John Mitchell to join Bebe Rebozo and me for a cruise on the Presidential yacht Sequoia down the Potomac. The tensions of the grim military planning were transformed into exaltation by the liquid refreshments, to the point of some patriotic awkwardness when it was decided that everyone should stand at attention while the Sequoia passed Mount Vernon—a feat not managed by everybody with equal success. On the return to the White House, Nixon invited his convivial colleagues to see the movie Patton. It was the second time he had so honored me. Inspiring as the film no doubt was, I managed to escape for an hour in the middle of it to prepare for the next day’s NSC meeting.

 

On Sunday, April 26, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops gave urgency to our deliberations by attacking commercial shipping on the Mekong River route to Phnom Penh. Communist forces took the town of Angtassom (see map). The rail line leading South from Phnom Penh was cut at several points in Takeo province. Press statements from Hanoi and Peking rejected the proposal, advanced by Indonesia, of an Asian conference to restore the neutrality of Cambodia—a proposal we would have favored.

 

The President met that evening with his principal NSC advisers—Rogers, Laird, Wheeler, Helms, and me—in his working office in the Executive Office Building. Agnew was not included. Even though he was now taking his Vice President’s advice, Nixon was still smarting from Agnew’s unexpected sally and was determined to be the strong man of this meeting. From the outset, the meeting took an odd turn. Helms gave an intelligence assessment that Hanoi was expanding its base areas, linking them together and trying to create so much insecurity in Phnom Penh that the government would collapse. Wheeler described the proposed US operation against the Fishhook complex and a possibility of expanding it to include other base areas. Nixon tried to avoid a confrontation with his Secretaries of State and Defense by pretending that we were merely listening to a briefing. He would follow with a written directive later. To my astonishment, both Rogers and Laird—who after all were familiar with their elusive chief’s methods by now—fell in with the charade that it was all a planning exercise and did not take a position. They avoided the question of why Nixon would call his senior advisers together on a Sunday night to hear a contingency briefing.

 

Nixon was immensely relieved. He construed silence as assent; at any rate, he had managed to avoid controversy. As soon as the meeting was over he called me over to the family quarters and instructed me to issue a directive authorizing an attack by American forces into the Fishhook area. I had it drafted, and he signed it. Just to be sure, the President first initialed the directive and then, beneath his initials, also signed his full name:

 

 

This double-barreled Presidential imprimatur by no means guaranteed compliance. I was chairing a meeting of the WSAG in the Situation Room the next morning to discuss implementation of the directive when I was called out to a phone call from Rogers. He wanted to know whether the directive which had just reached him meant that the President had ordered an American attack on one of the Cambodian sanctuaries. I allowed that there was hardly any other way to interpret it. Rogers said this would put him into a very difficult position with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, since that very afternoon he was planning to testify that there was no American involvement in Cambodia. I suggested that he call the President.

 

I had no sooner returned to the Situation Room when the other senior Cabinet officer called. With his invariable tactic of raising the extraneous issue on which one was most vulnerable, Laird objected to a phrase in the directive that designated WSAG as the “implementing authority.” Laird argued that this violated the chain of command which had to go through his office. I told him to substitute the word “coordinating” or any other suitable phrase he preferred. Laird then turned to what really bothered him. He claimed that the combined Parrot’s Beak and Fishhook operations could cost 800 men killed in action in a week. He argued that Abrams and Wheeler did not think both operations feasible . When Wheeler had spoken on Sunday afternoon of two sanctuary operations, he was, Laird insisted, referring to Parrot’s Beak plus Base Area 704, a sanctuary far to the South (which, as it turned out, served Laird’s purposes very well by being completely waterlogged at this time of the year). I suggested that Laird, too, should call the President.

 

The WSAG meeting had barely resumed when I was called out again, this time by Haldeman, who told me that Rogers and Laird were both on their way to see the President. He invited me to attend, but reminded me to “let the President carry the ball.”

 

The President’s meeting with his senior Cabinet officers did not lack a surrealistic quality. Rogers was above all concerned with his appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that afternoon. He wanted to be able to testify that no Americans were involved in Cambodia; he therefore requested that the President withdraw his directive. Laird was more complicated. He repeated his fear of high casualties; he implied there had been a terrible misunderstanding about Abrams’s recommendation, which really was for the waterlogged Southern base area. Laird reiterated yet again his objections to the phrasing of the directive, a point which (as he well knew) I had already conceded.

 

Nixon said little, and what he said was ambiguous—a sure sign to anyone familiar with his methods that he meant to stick with his decision. He adjourned the meeting, telling his Cabinet officers that they would hear from him shortly. No sooner had Rogers and Laird left than Nixon showered all his frustrations on me. He could not understand why his senior advisers never gave him a strategic argument and wasted his time on their personal political problems. He would not be deflected by this kind of behavior. I recommended that he delay execution of his directive for twenty-four hours; he might even withdraw it temporarily if this eased Rogers’s problems. In the meantime, I would query Bunker and Abrams in his name to verify their views; we had to make sure that there was no misunderstanding about either their recommendations or the casualties they were expecting. I would also ask Laird to send over the cables on which he based his judgment that the field commanders did not favor the simultaneous operations against Fishhook and Parrot’s Beak. Nixon accepted my suggestions. He withdrew the directive, and I informed his Cabinet members that a final decision would be forthcoming within twenty-four hours.

 

In the meantime I sent a backchannel cable to Ambassador Bunker asking his and General Abrams’s views on a number of questions on a most urgent basis: the desirability of a combined US-South Vietnamese attack on Fishhook; whether this should coincide with the Parrot’s Beak operation or follow it; whether comparable efforts within South Vietnam would bring better returns; whether other base areas—like Base Area 704—would be more rewarding; what casualties would be expected. The cable concluded (in the President’s name):

 

I am concerned whether General Abrams really wants to conduct this operation on its merits or whether he favors it only because he assumes it represents my wishes. Therefore, please give me yours and General Abrams’ unvarnished views on the foregoing questions and I will be heavily guided by them. Please show this message to General Abrams.

 

By early evening the memorandum from Laird and the reply from Bunker and Abrams had arrived. Laird restated his earlier position: He opposed the use of US combat troops in Cambodia; hence he favored the South Vietnamese operation against the Parrot’s Beak, supplemented if necessary by an attack on Base Area 704, also to be carried out by South Vietnamese forces. It is to Laird’s enormous credit that once Nixon decided on the American operation he did not participate in the fashionable effort to dissociate himself; nor did this master-leaker of trivialities ever publicly reveal that he had, in writing, opposed the massively important action in Cambodia.

 

As for Abrams and Bunker, they strongly recommended the combined allied attack on Fishhook as the “most desirable,” preferably in parallel with the attack on Parrot’s Beak, which was the second most important target. Base Area 704, Abrams confirmed, “does not rank in importance” with the other two. Bunker and Abrams did not believe that any operation within South Vietnam would produce comparable results. Abrams cagily gave no estimate of probable casualties but pledged to do all he could to keep casualties to “an absolute minimum.”

 

Nothing was heard from Rogers except news reports of his testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that no decision to use American forces in Cambodia had yet been made.

 

As in most decisions with major political consequences, Nixon decided to call in John Mitchell. The three of us spent until nearly midnight going over the memoranda and the pros and cons of the available options. In the end, Nixon decided to reaffirm his original decision and to tell Laird and Rogers in the morning, in Mitchell’s presence. Nixon asked me to prepare a new directive changing the sentence to which Laird had objected so that WSAG would have “coordinating” instead of “implementing” authority. Otherwise the directive was to remain unchanged.

 

The next morning, Tuesday, April 28, Nixon met with Mitchell and me from 9:30 to 10:20 to review the operations once again. Nixon asked me to leave by a side door before his meeting with Rogers and Laird; he thought it desirable that I not become the butt of departmental criticism. In a twenty-minute meeting with Rogers, Laird, and Mitchell, the President then reaffirmed his decision to proceed with the combined US-South Vietnamese operation against the Fishhook. He noted that the Secretaries of State and Defense had opposed the use of American forces and that Dr. Kissinger was “leaning against” it. (This was no longer true; I had changed my view at least a week earlier. In my opinion Nixon lumped me with his two Cabinet members for his usual amalgam of complex reasons. He genuinely and generously wanted to shield me against departmental retaliation; no doubt he also wanted to live up to his image of himself as the lonely embattled leader propping up faltering associates.) Nixon assured them he would dictate a summary of events leading up to the decision that would make clear the contrary recommendations of his senior advisers; they would be on record in opposition; he would assume full responsibility. (Mitchell’s record of the meeting is in the notes.)[108]

 

The final decision to proceed was thus not a maniacal eruption of irrationality as the uproar afterward sought to imply. It was taken carefully, with much hesitation, by a man who had to discipline his nerves almost daily to face his associates and to overcome the partially subconscious, partially deliberate procrastination of his executive departments. It was a demonstration of a certain nobility when he assumed full responsibility. The decision was not made behind the backs of his senior advisers, as has been alleged—though later on others were. Nixon overruled his Cabinet members; he did not keep them in the dark. This is the essence of the Presidency, the inescapable loneliness of the office, compounded in Nixon’s case by the tendency of his senior Cabinet colleagues to leave him with the burden and to distance themselves publicly from him. His secretive and devious methods of decision-making undoubtedly reinforced their proclivity toward selfwill. But his views were well known; the agencies had had many opportunities to argue their case. The fact remains that on the substance of Cambodia, Nixon was right. And he was President. There is no doubt that the procrastination in carrying out direct Presidential directives, the exegesis of clear Presidential wishes in order to thwart them, helped confirm Nixon’s already strong predilection for secretive and isolated decision-making from then on.

 

A confrontation with people who disagreed with him took a lot out of Nixon. After the meeting in the Oval Office he withdrew to his hideaway in the Executive Office Building, not to emerge until he delivered his speech of April 30 announcing the Cambodian incursion. I spent hours with him every day, bringing him up to date on the planning. Pat Buchanan drafted the basic speech from a rough outline supplied by my staff. But its major thrust was Nixon’s. He supplied the rhetoric and the tone; he worked for hours each day on successive drafts.

 

One morning he showed me a ruled paper from a yellow pad on which he had jotted down the various pros and cons; I pulled a similar yellow sheet from my pocket. We had reached practically the identical conclusions, perhaps because we had rehearsed them so often orally to each other. But in the days before announcing this most fateful decision of his early Presidency Richard Nixon was virtually alone, sitting in a darkened room in the Executive Office Building, the stereo softly playing neoclassical music—reflecting, resenting, collecting his thoughts and his anger. The Churchillian rhetoric that emerged reflected less the actual importance of the decision than his undoubted sense of defiance at what he knew would be a colossal controversy over a decision he deeply believed to be right, and in the making of which he received little succor from his associates.

 

I was busy between helping the President and coordinating the implementation of the decision. Once a Cabinet department recognizes that a decision is irrevocable and cannot be altered by artful exegesis or leaks, it can become a splendid instrument, competent, efficient, thoughtful. The WSAG meetings, which in previous weeks had been nightmares of evasion and foot-dragging, now turned crisp and precise. U. Alexis Johnson, the seasoned Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, produced one of those masterful overall plans (called “scenarios” in bureaucratese) that were his specialty, an hourly schedule of tasks for every key individual and department down to and then after zero hour.

 

“Operation Rock Crusher,” as it was labeled, or Toan Thang 42 (“Total Victory”) for the South Vietnamese, was launched against the Parrot’s Beak during the night of April 28. About fifty American advisers accompanied the initial wave, joined by twenty-two more in the first four days.

 

On the fateful day of April 30 the President delivered his speech at 9:00 p.m., explaining to an anxious public that “the actions of the enemy in the last ten days clearly endanger the lives of Americans who are in Vietnam now and would constitute an unacceptable risk to those who will be there after withdrawal of another 150,000.” He opened by explaining, with a map, that the North Vietnamese had begun to threaten Phnom Penh and expand their previously separated base areas into “a vast enemy staging area and a springboard for attacks on South Vietnam along 600 miles of frontier.” We had three options: to do nothing; to “provide massive military assistance to Cambodia itself”; to clean out the sanctuaries. The decision he now announced was a combined US-South Vietnamese assault on “the headquarters for the entire Communist military operation in South Vietnam.” The action was limited, temporary, not directed against any outside country, indispensable for Vietnamization and for keeping casualties to a minimum.

 

Adding rhetoric out of proportion to the subject though not to the stresses of the weeks preceding it, the President emphasized that America would not be “humiliated”; we would not succumb to “anarchy”; we would not act like a “pitiful, helpless giant.” Nor would he take “the easy political path” of blaming it all on the previous administrations. It was vintage Nixon. He had “rejected all political considerations”:

 

Whether my party gains in November is nothing compared to the lives of 400,000 brave Americans fighting for our country and for the cause of peace and freedom in Vietnam. Whether I may be a one-term President is insignificant compared to whether by our failure to act in this crisis the United States proves itself to be unworthy to lead the forces of freedom in this critical period in world history. I would rather be a one-term President and do what I believe is right than to be a two-term President at the cost of seeing America become a second-rate power and to see this Nation accept the first defeat in its proud 190-year history.

 

Afterward, the criticism was made that this was a divisive speech, apocalyptic in its claims, excessive in its pretensions. He would not have to face another election for over two years; no doubt he personalized the issue excessively. Certainly the speech was unsatisfactory to those for whom ending the war in Vietnam was the only aim and who identified this goal with ending all combat operations as rapidly as possible regardless of consequences. Without doubt Nixon should have been more compassionate toward the anguish of those genuinely torn by the ambiguities of an inconclusive war so foreign to our national experience. He played into the hands of his critics by presenting an essentially defensive operation, limited in both time and space, as an earthshaking, conscience-testing event, lending color to their claim that he had exceeded Presidential authority by “expanding” the war. And he added a sentence that was as irrelevant to his central thesis as it was untrue, that we had heretofore not moved against the sanctuaries—overlooking the secret bombing.

 

Yet in all fairness the critics made little effort to go beyond rhetoric to the realities of the decision. For behind the words, at once self-pitying and vainglorious, the merits of the case were overwhelming. We had not encouraged the coup in Cambodia or even known about it. We had done next to nothing to exploit it for four weeks. We were triggered into action when Le Duc Tho linked the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia; when Sihanouk threw in his lot with the Communists; when North Vietnamese forces broke out of the sanctuaries and began plunging deep into Cambodia with the obvious purpose of overthrowing the government and establishing a contiguous area from which the war in the Southern half of South Vietnam could be pursued from a vastly improved logistics base. In these circumstances, either we would have to stop withdrawals or Vietnamization would become a subterfuge for the dismantling of an allied country. That Nixon’s rhetoric was excessive did not change the reality that we had only the three choices he outlined. Doing nothing was the same as allowing the collapse of both Cambodia and South Vietnam. If we were serious about reducing our involvement in Vietnam and not leaving those who had relied on us to their fate, we had to thwart Hanoi’s designs on Cambodia. The incursions into the sanctuaries, in short, were the only course compatible with a controlled retreat from Indochina and any prospect of preventing Hanoi’s domination of the region.

 

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The Elusive Communist Headquarters and Other Battles

 

merican and South Vietnamese forces pushed forward into the Fishhook area at 7:30 a.m. Saigon time on May 1. The same day Nixon visited the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon and—on the spur of the moment—ordered what he had long been considering, an incursion into all other base areas. As a result, twelve enemy base areas were attacked in the first three weeks. Some were combined allied operations; some were conducted by the South Vietnamese alone with US air and logistic support. Some were brief (a week to ten days); some were for the duration of the campaign.

 

Two US naval ships and naval patrol aircraft took up stations off the port of Sihanoukville (by then renamed Kompong Som) outside the twelve-mile limit. They were to watch the port and to effect a blockade if necessary. This terminated on June 13. On May 26, the secret Menu series was formally ended; B-52 strikes continued as open operations in support of the US ground forces in Cambodia. In addition, two days of air strikes were conducted in North Vietnam against three enemy supply bases just North of the Demilitarized Zone. General Abrams had called attention to this logistics complex in late April, considering it the hub of the enemy supply effort.

 

Nixon’s speech had highlighted the presence of COSVN in the Fishhook area and had listed it as one of the targets of our assault. Laird had correctly cautioned against this specific reference in the speech but he did not see the draft until a couple of hours before it was delivered and Nixon was unwilling to change it. The result was one of the famous, self-inflicted credibility gaps irrelevant to the central issue but corrosive of public confidence. The Cambodian Communists confirmed eight years later what some Americans would not believe when Nixon stated it: that COSVN was indeed located in the Fishhook area.[109] In my briefings to the press in advance of the speech J admitted that COSVN was highly mobile and that we did not expect to capture it intact. And in fact, the assault into the Fishhook sanctuary severely disrupted COSVN’s operations and captured or destroyed many of its personnel, supplies, and installations. On May 18, COSVN informed its subordinate units that it was being seriously threatened by allied attacks; it directed all its attendant radio stations to monitor closely since the headquarters would resume communications only briefly when needed. COSVN remained off the air for considerable periods while subordinates tried repeatedly to reestablish radio contact. But since we could not reveal intelligence information, we were naked before the media’s merciless mocking of our pursuit of the elusive Communist headquarters.

 

COSVN aside, there was no doubt about the success. By the end of the first month, five and a half tons of enemy documents had been captured, including vital documentation of the enemy order of battle in Vietnam, its detailed plans for its campaign to overthrow the Phnom Penh government, and bills of lading for shipments through Sihanoukville that went beyond our highest estimates of Sihanoukville’s importance. On May 22, the Defense Department estimated that 12,000 North Vietnamese troops were held up in the infiltration pipeline by our operations. Communist communications lamented these troops’ consumption of stocks, scheduled for later use during the rainy season. The number of defectors from the Communist side increased substantially. In his final report to the nation at the end of June, Nixon listed the quantities of materiel captured:

 

- 22,892 individual weapons—enough to equip about 74 full-strength North Vietnamese infantry battalions and 2,509 big crew-served weapons—enough to equip about 25 full-strength North Vietnamese infantry battalions;

 

- more than 15 million rounds of ammunition or about what the enemy has fired in South Vietnam during the past year;

 

- 14 million pounds of rice, enough to feed all the enemy combat battalions estimated to be in South Vietnam for about 4 months;

 

- 143,000 rockets, mortars, and recoilless rifle rounds, used against cities and bases. Based on recent experience, the number of mortars, large rockets, and recoilless rifle rounds is equivalent to what the enemy shoots in about 14 months in South Vietnam;

 

- over 199,552 antiaircraft rounds, 5,482 mines, 62,022 grenades, and 83,000 pounds of explosives, including 1,002 satchel charges;

 

- over 435 vehicles and destroyed over 11,688 bunkers and other military structures.

 

The military impact might have been even greater had we not withdrawn our forces arbitrarily in two months. The enormous uproar at home was profoundly unnerving.

 

Soon after his April 30 speech, Nixon started pressing for token, and then for substantial, withdrawals from the sanctuaries. The June 30 deadline began as an improvised and very approximate Nixon projection for Congressional leaders of how long the effort would last; it was soon made sacrosanct. At another Congressional briefing he suddenly introduced a limit of thirty kilometers for US penetrations (which was translated inexplicably by the Pentagon to mean twenty-one miles). The President was coming dangerously close to the perennial error of our military policy in Vietnam: acting sufficiently strongly to evoke storms of protest but then by hesitation depriving our actions of decisive impact. The limitations of time and geography placed on our forces’ operations helped only marginally to calm the Congress and the media but certainly kept us from obtaining the operations’ full benefit. The base areas by then extended over hundreds of square miles; hidden caches could not be discovered except by systematic searches; it then took some time to remove what was found. The time limit did not permit a thorough search. And the geographical restraints simplified the enemy’s planning: He simply withdrew his forces and some of his caches to areas declared safe by us. I doubt if we would have attracted much more public hostility by extending our stay for the two or three additional months that a careful search needed. It might have prevented the Communists’ maintaining some base areas from which they eventually prevailed in Cambodia itself. But the inhibitions, though regrettable for full success, did not prevent us from achieving our main goals. The attack on the sanctuaries made our withdrawal from Vietnam easier; it saved lives; even after the sanctuaries were partly reoccupied by the Communists they had been deprived of stockpiles for a sustained offensive.

 

Systems analysts on my own staff estimated that our operations destroyed or captured up to 40 percent of the total enemy stockpile in Cambodia. My own assessment was cautious. In press briefings at the beginning of the operation and in conversations with the President, I had predicted that the disruption of enemy supplies and operations would “buy us” between six and eight months. After a trip to Indochina on our behalf, Sir Robert Thompson thought the Communists would be unable to build up their supplies during the rainy season that year or to complete the restocking during the dry season. Only after the following rainy season could they rebuild their stocks to previous levels. In other words, he thought we had gained as much as two years.

 

Thompson proved to be correct. After 1969 the war in Vietnam had turned into a race between our withdrawals, the improvement of the South Vietnamese army, and the ability of Hanoi to interrupt the process by launching offensives. As the American combat role dwindled, anything that weakened Hanoi’s combat capability was crucial for us. Because Hanoi had to fight far from its home base, interruption of its logistics line and depletion of its stockpiles threw off its calculations as well as its capabilities. Whatever the conclusions of systems analysts, there was no significant combat for nearly two years thereafter in the areas of South Vietnam that had been most exposed to attacks from the sanctuaries. The Mekong Delta and the heavily populated areas were effectively secured. And when Hanoi launched a nationwide offensive in the spring of 1972, its major thrust came across the DMZ, where its supply lines were shortest; its attacks from Cambodia were the weakest and the most easily contained.

 

For Americans, of course, the key criterion was our casualties. During the attack on the sanctuaries they rose briefly though they never reached more than a quarter of the 800 per week that Laird had feared. Afterward, the number of men killed in action dropped to below one hundred a week for the first time in four years. They continued to drop with every month thereafter. For each month beginning with June 1970, the casualty figure averaged less than half of that of the corresponding month of the previous year. By May 1971, a year later, it had fallen to thirty-five a week; in May 1972, ten a week. To be sure, the withdrawal of American forces was a factor; but we had several hundred thousand Americans in Vietnam through 1971, and had Hanoi possessed the capability it could have inflicted substantially higher casualties than it did. That it did not do so was importantly due to the breathing space provided by the Cambodian operation.

 

And in the international arena, the complications with other countries fiercely predicted by some critics did not materialize. The Soviet Union made ambiguous barbs, stopping well short of any specific threat. On May 4, Soviet Premier Kosygin held a tough press conference, asking what trust the Soviets could place in America’s international undertakings given our “violation” of Cambodian neutrality. But he refused to apply this general complaint to the SALT talks. He did not pledge Soviet support to the “Indochinese Peoples’ “ Summit Declaration, or even disavow the Lon Nol government. On May 18, Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Nikolai Firyubin told one of our European allies that the Soviets planned to keep their embassy in Phnom Penh since “there is nothing else to do.” Firyubin described the situation in Cambodia as confused and Sihanouk as a prisoner of Peking.

 

The Chinese, though with more colorful language, were equally prudent. On May a government statement “sternly” warned the United States against its “flagrant provocation.” Reminding everyone of Chairman Mao’s dictum that the United States was a “paper tiger,” China asserted that the “three Indochinese peoples” would “surely” win if they stayed united. A People’s Daily editorial the next day reiterated the same themes, comforting the Indochinese revolutionaries with the thought that “the vast expanse of China’s territory is their reliable rear area.” In other words, as I told the President, “the Chinese have issued a statement, in effect saying that they wouldn’t do anything.” On May 20 an unusual statement was issued in the name of Chairman Mao with the calm title of “People of the World, Unite and Defeat the U.S. Aggressors and All Their Running Dogs!” Mao endorsed Sihanouk’s new government in exile and the “Summit Declaration of the Indochinese Peoples,” and pointed out again that “US imperialism, which looks like a huge monster, is in essence a paper tiger, now in the throes of its deathbed struggle.” My analysis, forwarded to the President on May 23, was that this also offered little to Hanoi except verbal encouragement.

 

Far from hurting our relations with the two Communist giants, the Cambodia operations improved our position by adding another bone of contention between Moscow and Peking. With Moscow recognizing Lon Nol and Peking Sihanouk, the Sino-Soviet split was transplanted into Indochina. By June 10 Dobrynin and I were again exploring negotiations on SALT, the Middle East, and even a US-Soviet summit; tensions with Moscow that developed later in the summer resulted from conflicting interests in other parts of the world. And by the end of June we had received unmistakable signals from the Chinese that they were willing to reopen contacts with us.

 

The crisis was neither on the battlefield nor in our diplomacy but at home.

 

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The Domestic Travail

 

one of these successes had any effect on the eruptions of the spring of 1970, thereby turning the period of the Cambodian incursion into a time of extraordinary stress. I had entered government with the hope that I could help heal the schisms in my adopted country by working to end the war. I sympathized with the anguish of the students eager to live the American dream of a world where ideas prevailed by their purity without the ambiguities of recourse to power. The war in Vietnam was the first conflict shown on television and reported by a largely hostile press. The squalor and suffering and confusion inseparable from any war became part of the living experience of Americans; too many ascribed its agony to the defects of their own leaders.

 

Repellent as I found the self-righteousness and brutality of some protesters, I had a special feeling for the students. They had been brought up by skeptics, relativists, and psychiatrists; now they were rudderless in a world from which they demanded certainty without sacrifice. My generation had failed them by encouraging self-indulgence and neglecting to provide roots. I spent a disproportionate amount of time in the next months with student groups—ten in May alone. I met with protesters at private homes. I listened, explained, argued. But my sympathy for their anguish could not obscure my obligation to my country as I saw it. They were, in my view, as wrong as they were passionate. Their pressures delayed the end of the war, not accelerated it; their simplifications did not bring closer the peace, of the yearning for which they had no monopoly. Emotion was not a policy. We had to end the war, but in conditions that did not undermine America’s power to help build the new international order upon which the future of even the most enraged depended.

 

Nor is it fair to blame the upheaval primarily on Nixon’s inflated rhetoric or even on the events at Kent State. The dialogue in our democracy had broken down previously. The antiwar movement had been dormant since November, awaiting a new opportunity. In mid-April there were protests in some two hundred cities and towns, and the temper was such that the April 28 news of the purely South Vietnamese operation in the Parrot’s Beak evoked condemnation as a major escalation of the war. This was two days before the involvement of American soldiers or Nixon’s speech. North Vietnamese forces had been romping through Cambodia for well over a month, without a word of criticism of Hanoi. Yet the South Vietnamese response was denounced in the New York Times (“a virtual renunciation of the President’s promise of disengagement from South East Asia”), the Wall Street Journal (“Americans want an acceptable exit from Indochina, not a deeper entrapment”) and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (“a shocking escalation”). The South Vietnamese thrust was intended to assist our orderly retreat. But in Congress barriers were being erected almost immediately against helping Cambodia, itself suffering a savage invasion by the same enemies and indeed the identical units that were fighting us in Vietnam. Senator J. William Fulbright, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told NBC news on April 27 after the briefing that had given Rogers so much anticipatory anguish that the Committee was virtually unanimous in the view that assisting Cambodia in its resistance to North Vietnamese conquest “would be an additional extension of the war.”

 

All the critical themes of the later explosion were present before the President’s speech: We were escalating the war. No military action could possibly succeed; hence, claims to the contrary by the government were false. We were alleged to be so little in control of our decisions that the smallest step was seen as leading to an open-ended commitment of hundreds of thousands of American troops. A credibility gap had been created over any effort to achieve an honorable exit from the war. Thus, the press greeted the arguments in Nixon’s speech on April 30 with a simple counterassertion: They did not believe him. It was “Military Hallucination—Again” according to the New York Times: “Time and bitter experience have exhausted the credulity of the American people and Congress.” To the Washington Post it was a “self-renewing war” supported by “suspect evidence, specious argument and excessive rhetoric.” To the Miami Herald “the script in Cambodia shockingly is the same as the story in Vietnam in the days of Kennedy and Johnson. We have heard it all before—endless times.” Debate was engulfed in mass passion.

 

Just as it was burgeoning before April 30, the new increase in tempo had begun with calls for strikes and marches by the student leaders, who had proved their skill in producing confrontation in previous seasons of protest. The President’s statements, oscillating between the maudlin and the strident, did not help in a volatile situation where everything was capable of misinterpretation. His May 1 off-the-cuff reference to “bums… blowing up campuses,” a gibe overheard by reporters during a visit to the Pentagon, was a needless challenge, although it was intended to refer only to a tiny group of students who had firebombed a building and burned the life’s research of a Stanford professor. When on May 4, four students at Kent State University were killed by rifle fire from National Guardsmen dispatched by Ohio Governor James Rhodes to keep order during several days of violence, there was a shock wave that brought the nation and its leadership close to psychological exhaustion.

 

The Administration responded with a statement of extraordinary insensitivity. Ron Ziegler was told to say that the killings “should remind us all once again that when dissent turns to violence it invites tragedy.”

 

The momentum of student strikes and protests accelerated immediately. Campus unrest and violence overtook the Cambodian operation itself as the major issue before the public. Washington took on the character of a besieged city. A pinnacle of mass public protest was reached by May 9 when a crowd estimated at between 75,000 and 100,000 demonstrated on a hot Saturday afternoon on the Ellipse, the park to the South of the White House. Police surrounded the White House; a ring of sixty buses was used to shield the grounds of the President’s home.

 

After May 9 thousands more students, often led by their faculty, descended on the capital to denounce “escalation” and the “folly” of their government. A thousand lawyers lobbied Congress to end the war, followed by thirty-three heads of universities, architects, doctors, health officers, nurses, and one hundred corporate executives from New York. The press fed the mood. Editorials expressed doubts about the claims of success in Cambodia emanating from the Pentagon. Beyond these peaceful demonstrations antiwar students proved adept at imaginative tactics of disruption merging with outright violence. Some two thousand Columbia University students sat down in the road in the rush hour. Fires were set on several college campuses as bonfires for peace. At Syracuse University fire destroyed a new building as twenty-five hundred students demonstrated nearby. Students demonstrated in the financial district of New York City on May 7 and 8. In retaliation, construction workers building the World Trade Center descended on Wall Street and beat the protesters with clubs and other makeshift weapons. The incident shocked some into the realization that a breakdown of civil order could backfire dangerously against the demonstrators. But it did not slow down the pace of protest; it only encouraged Nixon in the belief that the masses of the American public were on his side.

 

Indeed, the Gallup Poll showed considerable support for the President’s action. When people were asked, “Do you think the US should send arms and material to help Cambodia or not?” 48 percent of those questioned responded yes, 35 percent no, 11 percent expressed no opinion, while 6 percent gave a qualified answer. When they were asked, “Do you approve or disapprove of the way President Nixon is handling the Cambodian situation?” 50 percent expressed approval; 35 percent expressed disapproval; 15 percent expressed no opinion. And 53 percent of those questioned expressed approval of the way President Nixon was handling the situation in Vietnam; 37 percent expressed disapproval; 10 percent had no opinion.

 

The tidal wave of media and student criticism powerfully affected the Congress. From not unreasonable criticism of the President’s inadequate consultation it escalated to attempts to legislate a withdrawal from Cambodia and to prohibit the reentry of American troops. On May 13 debate began in the Senate on the Foreign Military Sales Bill, to which Senators Frank Church and John Sherman Cooper proposed an amendment prohibiting the extension of US military aid to, and US military activities in, Cambodia after June 30. On the other hand, an amendment offered by Senator Robert Byrd would have granted the President authority to take whatever action he deemed necessary to protect US troops in South Vietnam. This amendment was narrowly defeated, 52-47, on June 11, in what was seen as a trial heat. Senate debate and parliamentary skirmishing lasted seven weeks, until on June 30 the Senate approved the Cooper-Church amendment in a 58-37 roll-call vote. The Senate had voted to give the Communists a free hand in Cambodia even though in the judgment of the Executive Branch this doomed South Vietnam. The bill then went to a House-Senate Conference. The entire Foreign Military Sales Bill remained in conference for the remainder of 1970, deadlocked over the House’s refusal to agree to the Senate-passed amendment. By then the damage was substantially done; in the middle of a blatant North Vietnamese invasion, the enemy was being told by the Senate that Cambodia was on its own.

 

Whereas the Cooper-Church amendment focused on Cambodia, the McGovern-Hatfield amendment to the Defense Procurement Bill aimed at ending the Indochina war by the simple expedient of cutting off all funds by the end of 1970, later extended to December 31, 1971. The move was finally defeated by the Senate on September 1 by a 55-39 margin. But the pattern was clear. Senate opponents of the war would introduce one amendment after another, forcing the Administration into unending rearguard actions to preserve a minimum of flexibility for negotiations. Hanoi could only be encouraged to stall, waiting to harvest the results of our domestic dissent.

 

All this accelerated the processes of disenchantment. Conservatives were demoralized by a war that had turned into a retreat and liberals were paralyzed by what they themselves had wrought—for they could not completely repress the knowledge that it was a liberal Administration that had sent half a million Americans to Indochina. They were equally reluctant to face the implications of their past actions or to exert any serious effort to maintain calm. There was a headlong retreat from responsibility. Extraordinarily enough, all groups, dissenters and others, passed the buck to the Presidency. It was a great joke for undergraduates when one senior professor proclaimed “the way to get out of Vietnam is by ship.” The practical consequence was that in the absence of any serious alternative the government was left with only its own policy or capitulation.

 

The very fabric of government was falling apart. The Executive Branch was shell-shocked. After all, their children and their friends’ children took part in the demonstrations. Some two hundred and fifty State Department employees, including fifty Foreign Service Officers, signed a statement objecting to Administration policy. The ill-concealed disagreement of Cabinet members showed that the Executive Branch was nearly as divided as the country. Interior Secretary Walter Hickel protested in public. The New York Times on May 9 reported that the Secretary of State had prohibited any speculation on his own attitude—hardly a ringing endorsement of the President. A group of employees seized the Peace Corps building and flew a Viet Cong flag from it. Robert Finch, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, refused to disagree publicly with his President and old friend—as indeed he did privately—and a large number of his officials occupied the department’s auditorium in protest.[110] The President saw himself as the firm rock in this rushing stream, but the turmoil had its effect on him as well. Pretending indifference, he was deeply wounded by the hatred of the protesters. He would have given a great deal to gain a measure of the affection in which the students held the envied and admired Kennedys. In his ambivalence Nixon reached a point of exhaustion that caused his advisers deep concern. His awkward visit to the Lincoln Memorial to meet students at 5:00 a.m. on May 9 was only the tip of the psychological iceberg.

 

Exhaustion was the hallmark of us all. I had to move from my apartment ringed by protesters into the basement of the White House to get some sleep. Despite the need to coordinate the management of the crisis, much of my own time was spent with unhappy, nearly panicky, colleagues; even more with student and colleague demonstrators. I talked at some length to Brian McDonnell and Thomas Mahoney, two young pacifists who announced they would fast in Lafayette Park until all American troops had been withdrawn. I talked in the Situation Room with groups of students from various colleges and graduate schools about the root causes, as I saw them, of their despair, which I thought deeper than anxiety about the war.

 

I found these discussions with students rather more rewarding than those with their protesting teachers. When I had lunch in the Situation Room with a group of Harvard professors, most of whom had held high governmental posts, at their request, I offered to engage in a candid discussion of the reasoning behind the decision, but on an off-the-record basis. Most had been my close colleagues and friends. They would not accept this offer. They were there not as eminent academicians but as political figures representing a constituency at home, a campus inflamed by the Kent State tragedy as much as by the war. They had proclaimed to the newspapers beforehand—but not to me—that they were there to confront me; they announced that they would henceforth refuse any research or advisory relationship with the government.

 

Their objections to the Cambodian decision illustrated that hyperbole was not confined to the Administration. One distinguished professor gave it as his considered analysis that “somebody had forgotten to tell the President that Cambodia was a country; he acted as if he didn’t know this. Had we undertaken a large commitment to Cambodia? If we had, this was rotten foreign policy. If we hadn’t, this was rotten foreign policy.” He was convinced that this action “clearly jeopardized American withdrawals”—though in fact it did the opposite. This professor was prepared to believe, on the basis of no evidence whatsoever, that Secretary of Defense Laird had been unaware of the military operations before the President announced them. He held the amazing view that “it was a gamble that shouldn’t have been taken even if it succeeds on its own terms.” Others said the decision was “incomprehensible,” “more horrible than anything done by LBJ.” “disastrous,” “dreadful.” One professor advanced the extraordinary hypothesis that an operation lasting eight weeks to a distance of twenty-one miles might lead our military commanders to believe that the use of nuclear weapons was now conceivable. Another declared that we had provoked all the actions of the other side.

 

The meeting completed my transition from the academic world to the world of affairs. These were the leaders of their fields; men who had been my friends, academicians whose lifetime of study should have encouraged a sense of perspective. That they disagreed with our decision was understandable; I had myself gone through a long process of hesitation before I became convinced that there was no alternative. But the lack of compassion, the overweening righteousness, the refusal to offer an alternative, reinforced two convictions: that for the internal peace of our country the war had to be ended, but also that in doing so on terms compatible with any international responsibility we would get no help from those with whom I had spent my professional life. The wounds would have to be healed after the war was over; in the event, these were not.

 

Cambodia was not a moral issue; neither Nixon nor his opponents should ever have presented it in those terms. What we faced was an essentially tactical choice: whether the use of American troops to neutralize the sanctuaries for a period of eight weeks was the best way to maintain the established pace and security of our exit from Vietnam and prevent Hanoi from overrunning Indochina. Reasonable men might differ; instead, rational discussion ended. The President’s presentation that elevated his decision to the same level of crisis as some of the crucial choices of World War II was countered by the critics with the image of an out-of-control President acting totally irrationally, who had provoked the enemy and whose actions were immoral even if they succeeded.

 

But it was not the incursion into Cambodia that was the real subject of debate. It was the same issue that had torn the country during the Moratorium the previous year: whether there were any terms that the United States should insist on for its honor, its world position, and the sacrifices already made, or whether it should collapse its effort immediately and unconditionally. A political settlement as urged by Senator Fulbright—other than the quick imposition of a Communist government in Saigon—was precisely what Hanoi had always rejected, as Le Duc Tho had confirmed to me in the most unqualified terms not three weeks earlier. What none of the moderate critics was willing to admit was that if we followed their recommendations of refusing aid to Cambodia, we would soon have no choice but to accept Hanoi’s terms, which none of them supported. Our opponents kept proclaiming an assumption for which there did not exist the slightest evidence—that there was some unspecified political alternative, some magic formula of neutrality, which was being willfully spurned. The panicky decision to set a June 30 deadline for the removal of our forces from Cambodia was one concrete result of public pressures.

 

The insecurity was even greater at the middle levels of government. Here the impact of the public protest was to shift discussion from how to make the operation succeed to an elaboration of various restraints: on the use of tactical air strikes; on South Vietnamese operations in Cambodia after we left on June 30; on the role of American advisers. The ambivalence of the government in Washington was bound to be transmitted to those in the field who soon sensed that Washington was not handing out prizes for imaginative and bold efforts to pursue the enemy in Cambodia. In this sense Cambodia was a microcosm of our whole effort in Indochina.

 

There are no winners when the dialogue in a democracy breaks down so completely. There can be no serious national policy when an attempt is made to coerce decisions by an outpouring of emotion and when those in high office are forced to take measures they do not really believe in simply to calm protests in the streets. Perhaps some of the critics might have been more understanding had they known of my conversations with Le Duc Tho, which were concealed by the Administration’s conviction that secrecy was needed for successful negotiations. And yet it is impossible to avoid the impression that most of the critics did not need Presidential errors other than as a pretext. (They would probably have denounced the operation for jeopardizing all prospects for my negotiations had they known of them.) We were confronted by an undifferentiated emotion that dismissed every explanation as a repetition of excessive claims of previous administrations. The critics rarely addressed our root dilemma: how we could responsibly withdraw forces and reduce military operations—as we were doing—while permitting the enemy to open up a new front.

 

The effort to find a moderate alternative to our policy led to a renewal of pressures for a fixed deadline for our total withdrawal. On June 7, the Los Angeles Times called for an immediate and complete withdrawal from SouthEast Asia: “The time has come for the U.S. to leave Vietnam and to leave it swiftly and without equivocation.” An eighteen-month time period, said the Times without evidence, “would be much less hazardous than the policy the President is presently pursuing.” In July, Life magazine followed suit.

 

Unfortunately, the arguments for a withdrawal deadline had not improved with age. Either the deadline was compatible with Vietnamization, in which case it coincided with our own policy but would deprive us of negotiating leverage. Or it was arbitrary, in which case it was a euphemism for a collapse; and it would have been nearly impossible to justify risking lives in the interval before the deadline expired. So we ended the Cambodia operation still on the long route out of Vietnam, confronting an implacable enemy and an equally implacable domestic opposition.

 

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The Balance Sheet

 

he ultimate victims of our domestic anguish were the gentle people of Cambodia. Years later, when the Cambodian government that we supported fell under Communist rule, those who had demanded for years that we abandon Cambodia acquired a vested interest in trying to evade by any contortion the responsibility for the horrendous consequences that their advocacy had a part in bringing about. There are assertions that the tensions within Cambodia that toppled Sihanouk resulted from the Westward movement of Communist forces allegedly caused by our incursion of May 1970[111] or our bombing since 1969.[112] In reality, as the map on page 471 makes obvious, the Westward drive of the North Vietnamese began in early April, before our incursion, provoked only by a Cambodian government that had the effrontery to ask them to leave Cambodian soil.

 

Without our incursion, the Communists would have taken over Cambodia years earlier. That the rule of these fanatical ideologues would have been more benign under those conditions is not very likely; when tyrants are so remote from their people, so committed to frightful experiments of social transformation, so doctrinaire, no normal criteria apply. These were no misunderstood humanitarians who, in a fit of pique at our actions five years earlier, were driven to massacre their own population. The bizarre argument has indeed been made, with a glaring lack of substantiation, that the cruelty of the Khmer Rouge in victory was the product of five years of American and Cambodian efforts to resist them.[113] No one can accept this as an adequate explanation except apologists for the murderous Khmer Rouge. Sihanouk does not believe this; they were men he had kicked out of Cambodia in 1967 because they were a menace to his country. He told me in April 1979 that the Khmer Rouge leaders were “always killers” from the beginning.[114] The actions of the Khmer Rouge in power were a methodical application of economic theories nurtured in decades of ideological fanaticism. Leader Khieu Samphan in his doctoral dissertation in Paris in the late 1950s had written that the Cambodian economy and social structure had to be transformed by mobilizing “the dormant energy in the peasant mass” against the corrupt cities—a theory applied two decades later with breathtaking thoroughness and brutality, to the point of genocide.[115]

 

That Hanoi would have respected the independence of a neutralist Sihanouk when it later squelched a fellow Communist regime precisely for the sin of independence defies plausibility; it is rebutted by every statement ever made to us by Le Duc Tho. We would have taken our chances on a neutralist Sihanouk. Unfortunately by late April 1970, events and his outrage had put him into a position where he could have come back only as the agent of the Communists. It was Hanoi—animated by an insatiable drive to dominate Indochina—that invaded Cambodia in the middle Sixties, that organized the Khmer Rouge long before any American bombs fell on Cambodian soil; it was North Vietnamese troops who were trying to strangle Cambodia in the month before our limited attack; and it is North Vietnamese troops who have overthrown the Khmer Rouge in 1978-1979. Had we not invaded the sanctuaries Cambodia would have been engulfed in 1970 instead of 1975. If anything doomed the free Cambodians, it was war weariness in the United States.

 

Poor Cambodia gradually turned into the butt of our national frustrations. Our domestic critics, thwarted in their various schemes to legislate an end of the war in Vietnam, were more successful in imposing abdication in Cambodia. Even though the same enemy was using Cambodia as a base, even though Hanoi had no means of reinforcing beyond what it was already doing so that any increase in Cambodian strength was bound to weaken it or put it on the defensive, American advisers were barred by law from Cambodia, and American aid was tightly constrained. The Cambodians tied down much of Hanoi’s manpower in the South, but our aid funds were doled out grudgingly, amounting to about $200 million in 1970, and they were encumbered with the restriction that they could not be expended to “maintain the Lon Nol government”—an astounding policy of helping a country without assisting its government. This reflected both the fear that we might get “bogged down” in Cambodia, as in the other countries of Indochina, and the by now prevalent myth that we were being held hostage by Thieu rather than by Hanoi. It was never made clear how the deterioration of our allies’ position in Cambodia and Laos would make it easier for us to disengage from Vietnam.

 

The Congressional ban on military advisers in Cambodia was taken so literally by our Ambassador that he prohibited our military attaches even from traveling to inform themselves of the conduct of Cambodian units. Cambodia became a backwater; South Vietnamese forces operated in its border area; American planes bombed enemy communications—and the weaker the Cambodian forces were, in large part as a result of the limits on our aid, the more they had to rely on our planes as their only strategic reserve. Not the least irony was that the critics produced what they professed to abhor: increasing reliance on air power. Nothing decisive was permitted; the North Vietnamese were given time to build up the Khmer Rouge forces when they might have been hard pressed early on. The Cambodian army had to live by the doves’ version of the Nixon Doctrine, languishing until its merciless Communist enemy had gathered the strength for an all-out assault and while a doctrinaire America gradually throttled its capacity for resistance.

 

Cambodia’s dilemma touched even two staffers of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Richard M. Moose and James G. Lowenstein, whose annual visits to SouthEast Asia had been the terror of our officials because the two opposed the war and were adept at turning up bureaucratic bungling. Their reports were a semiannual salvo in the Congressional assault on our Vietnam policy. On a visit to Cambodia at the end of 1970, however, Moose and Lowenstein came to conclusions not very different from our own, and had the courage to state them. The thrust of their report was that the United States was really doing very little for Cambodia, that the Cambodian government had broad popular support, and that the United States was letting Cambodia down:

 

It appeared to us that there is considerable support for the government of General Lon Nol among the youth and intellectuals, in marked contrast to the situation in South Vietnam, and among civil servants and members of the Senate and the Assembly… There is an evident sense of national identity and purpose and a determination to defend the country without foreign troops. …

 

Cambodians find it difficult to understand the complicated and involved elements of the American dilemma in SouthEast Asia today. Looking back at the pattern of American behavior in Asia over the past two decades, they seem mystified by the signs of American hesitancy in arming them to defend against an invading force armed by China and the Soviet Union.

 

Whereas the earlier Moose-Lowenstein reports, supporting prevalent preconception, had been printed in fancy booklets and widely distributed, this report was bottled up for several days in committee. Then, apparently under pressure from some members, it was released—but in as inconspicuous a way as possible. Senator Fulbright simply inserted it into the Congressional Record on December 16, 1970, along with a few newspaper editorials, without calling attention to it and without a public reading.[116]

 

Whether to attack the sanctuaries was a close call, on which honest and serious individuals might well differ. But once the North Vietnamese forces had spread all over the country, once a “liberated zone” had been created under Communist control as a step toward overthrowing the non-Communist government in Phnom Penh (all antedating any American response), the die had been cast. Attacking the sanctuaries prevented an immediate collapse of Cambodia but could not remove the long-term threat. Those who had opposed the original decision now sought to undo it by blocking further assistance to the Cambodian government. But this neither undid the decision nor prevented an expansion of the war; all it accomplished was to give Hanoi and the Khmer Rouge a breathing spell to build up for the final assault. It doomed what was left of hope for an independent, free, and neutral Cambodia. Whatever the merits of the 1970 debate, a strong case can be made for the proposition that Cambodia was ultimately the victim of the breakdown of our democratic political process: Both government and critics could block each other’s goals and frustrate each other’s policies, preventing any coherent strategy. From this mélange of North Vietnamese determination, Cambodian rivalries, and American internal conflicts, everything followed with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy until there descended on that gentle land a horror that it did not deserve and that none of us have the right to forget.

 

In June 1970 we did not believe that matters were foreordained to end tragically. We still sought for the balance between firmness and conciliation which would provide the maximum incentive for a negotiation. This is why we asked General Walters to deliver a message on May 8, 1970, proposing another meeting with Le Duc Tho. I did not expect Hanoi to accept immediately. On May 6, Hanoi had “postponed” the scheduled public negotiating session at Avenue Kléber until May 14 and made another statement in support of the Khmer Rouge. But even this postponement was carried out, as my staff put it, “in a somewhat cautious manner” revealing an eagerness to keep the negotiating channel open—if only to give us no pretext to abrogate the bombing halt. Hanoi did not reply for many weeks to the offer to resume secret talks with Le Duc Tho. On June 5 it turned down our proposal for another meeting, calling it a “temporary suspension.”

 

But it was clear that there would be a new round of diplomacy as the dust settled and a new balance of forces emerged on the ground. On May 25 I therefore requested from the departments and agencies a study of diplomatic initiatives the United States might take in Indochina. I also proposed to the President that we appoint a new senior negotiator in Paris. The, North Vietnamese had insistently demanded this in both the public and the private talks. I had never thought that merely naming a negotiator would move the negotiations off dead center; Hanoi’s main interest in the Paris forum was to keep us from resuming bombing the North on the ground that no serious talks were taking place. Nevertheless, I thought that a senior appointment would deprive Hanoi of a propaganda issue. I suggested David K. E. Bruce; Nixon enthusiastically agreed; Bruce accepted with that sense of duty so characteristic of this extraordinary diplomat.

 

I have never met a more distinguished public servant or a finer man than David Brace. Scion of an old Maryland family, he had deep roots in both Maryland and Virginia and had been at different times a member of both state legislatures. He had written about the early Presidents, and his admirers found in him many of the same sturdy qualities. He devoted his life to the public weal. He had proved his courage in the OSS in World War II. Handsome, wealthy, emotionally secure, he was free of that insistence on seeing their views prevail through which lesser men turn public service into an exercise of their egos. His bearing made clear that he served a cause that transcended the life span of an individual; he exuded the conviction that his country represented values that needed tending and that were worth defending. His dignity forswore the second-rate; his understated eloquence confirmed that in persons of quality substance and form cannot be separated. He saw man as uniquely capable of improvement through reason and tact in a world whose imperfections would yield—if only gradually—to patience and goodwill.

 

Bruce never turned down honorable requests by a President; nor did he evaluate them in terms of personal advantage. For thirty years he served Presidents of both parties as Ambassador to London, Paris, and Bonn. He was to work for Presidents Nixon and Ford in the Vietnam negotiations, in Peking, and in NATO—always with distinction. He spoke his mind, if necessary explicitly, but he did not use his own travail as a means of personal advancement. He had, in a word, character.

 

Few men have had a greater influence on me than David Bruce. On some of my most fateful decisions I instinctively turned to him. I did not always take his advice; I never failed to benefit from his judgment, his sense of humor, his unfailing tact. He kept me from taking myself too seriously; he never failed to inspire me with his conviction that our nation’s future was a serious trust.

 

In July 1970, David Bruce, at the age of seventy-two and in fragile health, embarked on a mission in which he knew that his opposite numbers had as their primary objective to wear him down. He understood that debating skill could not substitute for the objective balance of forces on which his interlocutors placed so much stock. There would be little glory for him in Paris; nor did he seek it. But he knew that a nation’s honor is not a trivial matter; we had not come through the centuries to betray those who had relied on our promises.

 

We were on a long road, certain to be painful. But with David Bruce as a companion its burdens would become more bearable. And any effort to which he was willing to commit himself had a strong presumption of being in the national interest.

 

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