From Stalemate to Breakthrough
Hanoi’s Discomfiture
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y the time we returned home from Moscow, Hanoi’s offensive had run out of steam. Several factors had contributed. The North Vietnamese did not follow up the capture of Quang Tri with an assault on the old imperial capital of Hué, whose fall might have been decisive. As in 1968, Hanoi opted for psychological rather than military impact by launching a countrywide offensive, which, as then, led to its military defeat. Three fronts proved too difficult to synchronize and even more complicated to supply; hence Saigon was able to switch its small strategic reserve to meet each threat as it developed. The dispersal of effort also meant that the North Vietnamese needed nearly three weeks to bring up reinforcements for the attack on Hué. By then part of the South’s strategic reserve had moved in. Saigon’s airborne division fought both at An Loc and near Hué. The marines were used in both the Central Highlands and in Military Region 1. And the South Vietnamese divisions fought better than in any previous battle. Our massive reinforcement of B-52s, raising the total to over 200 by the end of May, exposed the attacking forces to a formidable concentration of firepower, making mass attacks increasingly difficult. Hanoi’s problems multiplied further because its commanders were not experienced in handling large units. Attacks by tanks, artillery, and armor frequently bogged down as the various elements lost contact with one another. So by the middle of June, with our bombing and mining making themselves felt, the North Vietnamese army was stalled.
On June 9, in an appraisal for the President of what the blockade begun on May 8 had achieved, I said the prospects for South Vietnam looked “substantially brighter.” The blockade had forced all supplies to come by rail, and the railroad lines were being cut by our air attacks. More than 1,000 railroad cars were backed up on the Chinese side of the border. As a result, supplies had to be transferred to trucks, which required time-consuming loading and unloading and encountered extreme difficulties during the rainy season. Enemy communications spoke of ammunition shortages; our pilots reported a noticeable reduction in surface-to-air missile firings, indicating that Hanoi might be rationing its stocks. Radio Hanoi lamented “a number of difficulties” in providing labor for agriculture, industry, and transport. Corruption and black marketeering were provoking angry North Vietnamese exhortations to their people.
Moreover, my memorandum continued, Hanoi could see Moscow’s and Peking’s reactions to our May 8 measures only as exasperatingly circumspect and limited. Soviet refusal to cancel the summit deeply disturbed and angered the North Vietnamese. On the eve of our trip, Hanoi had publicly warned (unnamed) fellow Communists not to “set national interests against the interests of world revolution” (that is, against Hanoi’s interests). Several days later, on May 21—while we were on the way to Moscow—a Soviet spokesman had made clear that Moscow knew who was meant; he warned bluntly that Hanoi was adopting an “extremely arbitrary interpretation” of the Soviet Union’s “duty” to North Vietnam and pointed out that the rest of the Communist world, even including China, favored “peaceful coexistence.” Since the Moscow summit, Hanoi had constantly if indirectly attacked the summit and the agreements reached there.
Our twin summits had undoubtedly engendered a sense of isolation in the North. We were seeing their effects on the morale of the North Vietnamese leadership, population, and armed forces. And they had greatly strengthened Nixon’s domestic position, thus removing Hanoi’s key weapon of leverage on us. In June we received the first inconclusive hints that Hanoi might be engaged in cease-fire planning. During the summer the evidence became clearer. By the middle of September, as I shall show, it was unmistakable.
Morale in South Vietnam had reached its nadir after the fall of Quang Tri. Wild rumors that the United States had agreed to turn over the Northern part of the country to Hanoi—almost certainly disseminated by Communist cadres—had been ended by Nixon’s decision to mine North Vietnamese harbors. With a revived hope and purpose, Thieu rallied his population. We were, in my view, in a strong position to resume secret talks.
Many consider negotiations as a sign of weakness. I always looked at them as a weapon for seizing the moral and psychological high ground. Some treat willingness to talk when there is no pressure as an unnecessary concession; to me it is a device to improve one’s strategic position, because one’s interlocutor is aware that one faces no necessity to make concessions. It was, however, not for theoretical but practical reasons that Nixon approved an approach to Hanoi on June 12. We proposed a private meeting with Le Duc Tho for June 28, when I had a weekend free between a trip to China and a sojourn in San Clemente. Our message invited a repetition of the games of the previous spring by suggesting that the secret talk should precede a plenary session. If Hanoi followed its script of demanding a plenary before a private meeting, we were ready to accept July 13 for a plenary and July 18 for the private talk. Nixon preferred this timing because of the Democratic Convention’s opening on July 10. We would be able to announce that a meeting was about to take place, whereas my own preference of June 29 hazarded announcing a failure of the talks just before the Democrats met.
While we were waiting for Hanoi’s reply, two events underscored North Vietnam’s isolation.
On June 8 I had asked Dobrynin what had happened to Podgorny’s mission to Hanoi, of which we had been told in Moscow. He said the Soviets were still waiting for an official invitation—an explanation that, given my knowledge of the Kremlin’s prickly and obstreperous clients, was clearly plausible. Finally, on June 11, while I was paying a brief visit to Japan, Dobrynin told Haig that Podgorny would leave for Hanoi on June 13 and requested that we stop the bombing of North Vietnam while he was there. We replied, as Nixon had indicated to Brezhnev, that during Podgorny’s stay we would not bomb within ten miles of Hanoi and within five miles of Haiphong; no other restrictions would be observed. On June 22 Brezhnev reported to Nixon that Hanoi’s leadership had listened with “an attentive attitude” to Podgorny’s exposition of the American negotiating position; they were prepared to resume negotiations on a businesslike basis; they did not insist on discussing only North Vietnamese proposals. If accurate, this was a tone we had never heard from North Vietnam. Previously, Hanoi had dismissed any deviation from its various “points” as not “reasonable and logical.” Brezhnev’s letter concluded with the suggestion that the United States should propose a date for the resumption of negotiations.
This was puzzling since we had made precisely such a proposal to Hanoi on June 12. Was Hanoi keeping Moscow in the dark? Or was Brezhnev urging us to reply promptly to a message from Hanoi that reached us on June 20? That reply had turned out to be much milder than usual. Contrary to the assumptions of our critics, bombing and mining had greatly improved Hanoi’s manners. After perfunctorily cataloguing grievances—the bombing and mining and the suspension of plenary sessions—it got to the heart of the problem in near-biblical language: “The DRV side, clothed by its goodwill, agrees to private meetings.” Its goodwill did not, however, extend to abandoning its insistence on a prior plenary session. Hanoi’s message claimed that Le Duc Tho and Xuan Thuy, being “engaged in work previously scheduled in Hanoi,” could not attend a plenary before July 13. This was another interesting sign; Hanoi was not in the habit of giving such explanations. July 15 was proposed for the private meeting; thus Hanoi neatly solved Nixon’s political problem for him by proposing a date after the Democratic Convention.
Hanoi’s isolation was dramatized also by the fact that this message reached me in Peking, where from June 19 to 23 I briefed the Chinese leaders on the Moscow summit, generally to maintain momentum in our new relationship and to discomfit Hanoi. My visit brought no new developments on Vietnam. As always, Chou En-lai showed more interest in a cease-fire than in a political settlement. He understood well enough that a cease-fire was the easier to arrange, and he was eager to remove the irritant of Vietnam from US-Chinese relations. Unlike Moscow, Peking had no interest in a demonstration that the United States was prepared to dump its friends; in its long-range perspective of seeking a counterweight to the Soviet Union, Peking in fact had a stake in our reputation for reliability. And there was always an undercurrent of Chinese uneasiness about Hanoi’s hegemonic aspirations in Indochina. Chou asked pointed questions about Nixon’s May 8 proposal (which was in effect a cease-fire offer), repeated the standard line of China’s historical debt to Hanoi, avoided any implication of any Chinese national interest in the war, and implied that most of China’s supplies to Vietnam were foodstuffs. This paralleled what Kosygin had told us about Soviet deliveries four weeks earlier. Given China’s more rudimentary armaments industry, Chou was the more likely to be telling the truth. Hanoi was not in a brilliant position when its two patrons were in effect telling its adversary that they were no longer supplying military equipment.
On the day of my return (June 23) we replied to the North Vietnamese. We accepted July 13 for the resumption of plenary sessions and suggested July 19 for the private meeting, largely because it fitted in better with Nixon’s travel schedule. We dismissed Hanoi’s complaints curtly: “In order to help create the proper atmosphere for these discussions the US will not respond to the allegations in the DRV note of June 20.” On June 26 Dobrynin came to the White House in his compulsive quest to find out what I had been doing in Peking. In the process he inquired about Vietnam. Our four-day postponement of the private meeting would, he said, arouse profound suspicions in Hanoi. (This implied a new urgency in our adversary, who earlier in the year had procrastinated for four months before setting a date.) Dobrynin gave me his guess that Hanoi might be waiting until American electoral prospects were clearer before making a final decision on whether to conclude the war.
It was a prescient remark. Hanoi was indeed watching our election campaign, though I was not then sure whether it would hold out on negotiation until after the election in November or opt to negotiate seriously just before. It would not decide, I told Nixon in a memorandum on June 26, “until it believes it has a clearer picture of whether or not you will be re-elected.” I sent him a summary of a June 10 article in the Hanoi party newspaper that spoke favorably of McGovern but refrained from flatly predicting his victory. North Vietnam’s anger at its own allies was thinly concealed in the denunciation of Nixon for having remained a hawk even when he “borrowed dove’s wings for distant trips.”
The “hawk” was meanwhile faced with another troop withdrawal decision. Our numbers were now so low that when the deadline came up at the end of June there was no room for any dramatic reductions. But Nixon decided to announce the withdrawal of 10,000 troops over two months—and told Ziegler to add that no more draftees would be sent unless they volunteered. The draft, which had been at the heart of so much campus unrest, no longer threatened students with Vietnam service; when schools reopened in the fall the student protest was over. Nixon enjoyed announcing the resumption of plenaries at a press conference on June 29, one day after the troop withdrawal news, a week and a half before the Democratic Convention. Predictably, the New York Times complained that this coincided with the political calendar. I pointed out to a journalist that Hanoi had picked the date. Hence only two conclusions were possible: Either Hanoi wanted to promote the reelection of Nixon, an unlikely prospect; or else Hanoi wanted to preserve the option of a settlement before the election. And that was exactly the case.
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Testing the Stalemate
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he resumption of negotiations was of considerable symbolic importance: It showed that Hanoi no longer took for granted either a military victory or Nixon’s electoral defeat. If Hanoi had been confident of winning, it would have timed the negotiations to coincide with some spectacular new offensive. If it had believed that it could bring about the political demise of Nixon, it would have stonewalled and published ambiguous peace proposals to stir up our domestic opposition and paint the Administration as an obstacle to peace—as it had done before the Easter offensive. That Hanoi insisted on resuming plenaries, even though they would coincide with the Democratic Convention, was a demonstration of Hanoi’s growing doubt that total victory was possible.
I had reckoned all along that Hanoi’s offensive would culminate in a serious negotiation, whatever happened. If Hanoi were to prevail on the battlefield, Nixon would be forced to settle on Hanoi’s terms; if the offensive were halted and the probable Democratic candidate, Senator George McGovern, looked as if he was winning the election, Hanoi would wait; it would gamble on the extremely favorable terms he was offering. (McGovern’s terms were much better for Hanoi than what it was asking for in our private talks.) If the offensive were blunted and Nixon looked like the probable winner, Hanoi would make a major effort to settle with us. My private prediction also was that if Nixon were more than ten points ahead in the public opinion polls by September 15, Hanoi would substantially change its negotiating strategy and seek an immediate settlement. But to maintain that option Hanoi would have two tasks: It would have to reconnoiter our intentions to find out our objectives; and it would have to try to narrow the differences in the interval so that a final agreement could be put together quickly, if it so chose, in the few weeks remaining until the election.
I did not agree with those of my staff who thought Hanoi would choose protracted warfare after the offensive. Having committed its regular forces, it would find it technically difficult to revert to guerrilla warfare. And such a course would face psychological obstacles as well. It would be an admission that after ten years of bloody warfare which had drained its country, North Vietnam was back to where it had started. Hanoi might adopt such a strategy if everything else failed; it would not choose it if other options were available.
But if Hanoi’s position was militarily precarious, ours was difficult psychologically and politically. The President had gained some maneuvering room with his bold decision to bomb and mine, but if it did not bring results fairly quickly, it would be increasingly attacked as a “failure.” The demands for “political” alternatives would mount. And given the way our domestic debate had evolved, this would mean in practice acceptance of Hanoi’s demand for a coalition government and a fixed deadline for our withdrawals, conditional only on the release of prisoners of war. (And McGovern was prepared not to insist even on the latter as a formal condition, expressing merely the “expectation” that our withdrawal would lead to their release.) May, June, and July saw the height of the favorable public reaction to the combination of the successful summit and the bombing and mining. Nevertheless, in that same period there were nineteen votes in the House and Senate on various end-the-war amendments. Not all of them were equally objectionable. Some contained elements of our position; none embraced it completely. All were variations on offering withdrawal for the return of our prisoners. The difference between supporters and opponents had narrowed to one issue, whether we should insist on a cease-fire or settle simply for the return of our prisoners in conjunction with our withdrawal.
There were three schools of thought in the Senate on that issue. A growing minority (about thirty Senators) favored setting an unconditional deadline for American withdrawal in the “expectation” that this would lead Hanoi to free our prisoners. About forty Senators favored making withdrawal contingent only on release of our prisoners. A dwindling minority favored making our withdrawal depend also on a ceasefire. By the end of 1971 a majority on behalf of the withdrawal-for-prisoners option had developed; it grew through 1972. Requiring a ceasefire before withdrawal had become a conservative proposal; amendments including it in a settlement were consistently defeated in both houses. Thus, the dominant “peace” position in the Senate now was for us to get out of Vietnam even while the war among the Vietnamese continued. We would end ten years of war in return for our prisoners, while leaving our allies to their fate.
We managed to block the various demands for unconditional withdrawal, but by ever-smaller margins. On July 24 a Cooper-Brooke amendment insisting on a withdrawal in return only for the release of prisoners passed in the Senate by five votes; the same day an attempt by Senator James Allen of Alabama to make our withdrawal contingent on a supervised cease-fire as well was defeated by five votes. Sooner or later, one of the amendments to cut off funds would pass. At a minimum Hanoi had every reason to believe that it had a guaranteed safety valve: If it offered us our prisoners, the Congress would probably stop the war. Whatever the parliamentary arithmetic, all of the recurring resolutions, differing as they did from our negotiating position, obviously weakened us for the bargaining that was now inevitable. And we could not go along with the Senate view. We were committed to tying withdrawal to a cease-fire. It remained our view that it would be inhumane, ignoble, and destructive of larger interests elsewhere to withdraw while fighting continued against those who had relied on us. Abandoning our allies to be overrun would mock our sacrifice and discredit our nation’s foreign policy.
We were therefore determined to seek a fair compromise. The military situation was improving, but nothing like total victory seemed in sight. By June, even though Saigon had assumed the offensive, the pace of South Vietnamese military operations offered no prospect of either a drastic or a rapid improvement. Not until the middle of September was Quang Tri retaken; the road to An Loc was never completely reopened, although a fresh division was moved up from the Delta to the area around Saigon. While it had performed well in Military Region 4, the 21st Division conducted itself as any other South Vietnamese formation did when shifted out of the area of its recruitment: It turned sluggish and unenterprising. We were approaching a military stalemate. From the vantage point of Hanoi, so recently sure of total victory, this would be a major setback. But we would be running grave risks if we interpreted it as an augury of total victory.
Still, we entered the negotiations in the best position ever. If my analysis were correct, the public opinion polls during September would tip the balance. No concessions on our part in July, therefore, were very likely to affect Hanoi’s calculations. And, in fact, our margin for concession was severely circumscribed. If we were true to our principles, we could not, except cosmetically, go beyond our military proposals of May 8, 1972 (or May 31, 1971), and our political proposals of January 25, 1972. So I prepared for the negotiations in an optimistic and relaxed frame of mind; the fundamental decisions would have to be made by Hanoi, not by us. Until Hanoi had analyzed the likely electoral outcome, our best strategy would be to stay cool, offer nothing significantly new, and thus hope to intensify the pressures on Hanoi. The critical moment would come only after Hanoi had made its final judgment of Nixon’s electoral prospects.
Later on, the myth developed that Nixon for domestic political reasons was eager to end the war before the election. Nothing could be further from the truth. As I have repeatedly shown, Nixon was exceedingly suspicious of negotiations in general (unless he had a nearly ironclad guarantee of success) and especially with the North Vietnamese. He doubted that anything would ever come of them; as his election prospects improved, he saw no domestic reason to pursue them. In July he still saw some benefit in keeping his Democratic opposition off balance by periodically announcing my private meetings with Le Duc Tho. But after the debacle of McGovern’s Vice Presidential nominee, Senator Thomas Eagleton, Nixon lost interest even in that. As the weeks went by he became convinced that he had narrowed McGovern’s support to a far-out liberal fringe that would oppose him regardless of what he did on Vietnam. On the other hand, settling even on the terms we had earlier put forward publicly might well put at risk his support among conservative groups whom he considered his base. Nixon saw no possibility of progress until after the election and probably did not even desire it. Even then, he preferred another escalation before sitting down to negotiate.
I thought that if things broke right, our election would serve as an unchangeable deadline for Hanoi, the equivalent of an ultimatum. Its fear of what the “hawk” might do with a new mandate for four years might lead it to prefer a settlement before our election. Hanoi might have to abandon its habit of trying to wear us down by propagandistic proposals and mobilizing media and the Congress, and seek a real negotiation. And none too soon, perhaps. For I thought—contrary to both Hanoi’s probable analysis and our own conventional wisdom—that we would actually be worse off after the election. All the polls I had seen suggested that the composition of the new Congress would be substantially the same as of the old or even slightly less favorable—a prospect reinforced by Nixon’s decision to separate his campaign as much as possible from the Congressional race in order to obtain the largest Presidential electoral margin in history. Thus in reality the pressures for ending the war by legislation were certain to resume after November. And the opposition would have a convenient target when we submitted a supplementary budget in January to pay for the costs of reinforcements during the offensive. Laird estimated that we might have to request four to six billion dollars. Nixon already had before him a proposal by Laird to withdraw our augmentation forces after January 1, 1973, to keep the supplementary costs from growing unmanageable. Specifically, Laird proposed withdrawing ninety-eight B-52s and three squadrons of F-4s as of January. Once Hanoi understood that our forces were declining, it could revert to waiting us out. And once the composition of the Congress became clear, Hanoi would resume its psychological warfare.
In any event, I was persuaded that it was not wholly our choice whether to negotiate or not. If Hanoi perceived us as stonewalling, it could “go public.” If it accepted the framework of our proposals and disclosed it (which in effect it finally did in October), this would put us in an impossible position domestically, no matter how big Nixon’s lead in the polls. We would then be repeating the classic syndrome of the Vietnam war, of appearing to be pushed step by step toward concessions, a process that undermined authority whatever the outcome. The war had to be ended, in my view, by a demonstration that our government was in control of events, and this required maintaining the diplomatic initiative. For all these reasons, I proceeded to the negotiations, with Nixon’s acquiescence, if not his enthusiasm.
In June the North Vietnamese were crowing that the return to the plenaries represented a great victory over the United States. And they went back to their old tactics of bringing pressure by inviting to Hanoi those whom they considered leading Americans, in this case labor leaders and journalists. I warned Dobrynin on June 30 that if Hanoi repeated the performance of the previous year—stonewalling in public while talking seriously in private—we would break off the talks. Dobrynin clucked sympathetically (at least I assumed his clucking was sympathetic; in any case there was a good chance the message would be transmitted to Hanoi).
Our basic strategy in the private meetings starting July 19 would be to make no new proposals until Hanoi’s intentions became clearer. I would try to drain Hanoi’s political proposals gradually of operational content, for example, countering their coalition government with our anodyne proposal for a joint electoral commission. If Hanoi played along, we might gradually emerge with the dual-track approach we had offered originally: settling the military issues, and leaving the political issues essentially to future negotiations among the parties. Such a settlement would preserve our allies and give them an opportunity to determine their future—which is in effect what we had always sought.
Early in July we sent Haig to Saigon to assess the war and to consult with Thieu about the positions we proposed to take. Haig saw Thieu on July 3, but he encountered a different leader from the one we had dealt with thus far. Thieu’s army had now been tested in battle; he thought that Hanoi would no longer be able to defeat him, certainly so long as our airpower was available to back him. He calculated—nearly correctly—that he could make our election work for him by playing on Nixon’s often repeated reluctance to repeat Johnson’s pressure tactics of 1968. Moreover, Thieu understood Hanoi far better than we did. Through all the years of the Nixon Administration, the real reason he had never challenged any of our negotiating proposals was that he calculated that all of them would be rejected by Hanoi. He considered them the price he had to pay for continued American support. But in 1972 he smelled compromise even before most Americans did. Like me, he seemed convinced that a serious negotiation was imminent. But our problem and the one he faced were entirely different. A compromise would be the beginning, not the end, of massive problems in South Vietnam. We would withdraw; South Vietnam would remain. Hanoi would never give up its implacable quest for victory; sooner or later South Vietnam would have to fight alone. Going on to total victory seemed more sensible to Thieu and probably no more costly than the compromises now achievable. Unfortunately, that was not our choice. Even if Hanoi did not suddenly accept our proposals, the new Congress would force us to settle on worse terms—withdrawal for prisoners—than those we would seek to negotiate. It was understandable that Thieu would continue to demand victory, which would have required several years of further American as well as South Vietnamese exertion. But we had no margin at home for such a course. We would be lucky if we could obtain the terms Nixon had put forward on May 8 before the Congress voted us out of the war.
All of this emerged only indistinctly during Haig’s visit, like the first rumbles of a distant storm. On July 3, reading from talking points prepared by me and Win Lord, Haig briefed Thieu on the Vietnam discussions of the Moscow summit and my June trip to Peking. He described our new proposal—a cease-fire, the return of POWs, a four-month withdrawal, and Thieu’s resignation two months before a new presidential election. The sole difference from previous proposals was the earlier timing provided for Thieu’s resignation, as Nixon had half-promised Brezhnev. Haig explained our strategy: “The U.S. had been attempting to combine the firm measures taken on the military front with a demonstration of reasonableness on the negotiating front.” He raised to Thieu the possibility preoccupying me, that Hanoi might be considering a softer stance in the near future “on the assumption that President Nixon would win in November and would possibly be easier to deal with before rather than following his reelection.”
Thieu’s response showed that he was not quite on our wavelength. He did not make this explicit because, according to him, Hanoi’s leaders did not feel the pressure to negotiate that Haig was predicting. They would not settle, he argued, unless they obtained a coalition government. A permanent cease-fire would guarantee their defeat because they would never be able to start the war up again—a point Thieu forgot when Hanoi accepted precisely such a cease-fire three months later. Thieu seemed concerned that our bureaucrats might press for a temporary cease-fire during the election period; this, he argued, must be rejected. He opposed an unsupervised cease-fire of any kind; we did not catch the implication—entirely new—that Thieu considered any in-place cease-fire unsupervisable. He was subtly rejecting what we had been offering with his concurrence since October 7, 1970, and what the President had reaffirmed as late as May 8. (Of course, the Senate would soon go on record for a total American withdrawal in return for prisoners without any cease-fire whatsoever.) Thieu had no problem over offering to resign two months before a new election in South Vietnam; he was willing to step down even four months before, if that helped the negotiation. He seemed at one with his brethren in Hanoi in the conviction that whoever controlled the election machinery would win in the end.
Haig promised to convey these thoughts to Washington. In closing, he reassured Thieu once again that “under no circumstances would the United States turn to a solution at the negotiating table which belittled the successes achieved on the battleground, or which offered Hanoi advantages that it could not gain through military action.” Thieu extended his warmest regards to Nixon and me, possibly not realizing that Haig’s final “reassurance” foreshadowed the in-place cease-fire which Thieu had just rejected, for its corollary was that we could seek no advantages beyond the military situation on the ground. Haig had just participated in raising the curtain on one of the most searing dramas in the quest for ending the war in Vietnam.
As I left for Paris on July 19 the differences among the principal actors on our side lay in nuances, in hints whose full import we did not yet grasp. At least in July, Nixon accepted the negotiations largely for their utility in confusing his domestic opponents. Thieu believed that the refusal of a coalition government offered a safe haven from the risks of negotiation and the uncertainty of defending South Vietnam without us. And I did not think any break in the deadlock—which I expected—would occur until the second half of September. Thus we could all rally behind a negotiating strategy that essentially held to established positions and sought to garner whatever concessions Hanoi might offer in seeking to narrow the gap before making its final decision.
I met Le Duc Tho on July 19 in the dingy residence at 11 rue Darthé, which had been the site of all but the first of our previous fourteen meetings. The small dining room overlooking the garden had again been set up with a square conference table covered with green baize. Some at home fancied the North Vietnamese as peace-loving, essentially gentle creatures offended by any demonstration of American power and eager above all to reciprocate gestures of American goodwill. Our experience was otherwise. We knew that the North Vietnamese had wantonly invaded all neighboring countries; that their form of warfare depended in part on terror. Displays of American strength never failed to be taken seriously by them even as they resisted them. Acts of goodwill that did not reflect the existing balance of forces were treated as signs of moral weakness, even as they scorned them. They had been insolent on May 2, when they thought they were winning. They were benign and friendly now, even though in the interval their harbors had been mined and all restrictions on our bombing had been removed.
I began with an analysis of why our previous talks had failed. Hanoi’s refusal to distinguish between what could be settled by negotiation and what had to be left to history guaranteed a war to the end. I proceeded at a very deliberate pace and spoke in largely philosophical terms to remove any thought that we felt under the pressure of an approaching election. I stressed (though I did not in fact believe it) that our situation would improve after the election; I warned that any attempt to manipulate the negotiations to influence our elections would lead to an immediate rupture. I closed my opening remarks with a statement of general principles. We were willing to coexist with Hanoi after the war. We had no desire to retain permanent bases in Southeast Asia. We would not impose our preferences on a freely elected government in Saigon. I withheld any concrete proposals.
Le Duc Tho conducted most of the conversation for the North Vietnamese, an indication that they were serious. This was a different “Ducky”—one I had seen only once before, in the previous July, when he had tried to get us to jettison Thieu during the South Vietnamese election. Now he was all conciliation in substance and in style. He laughed at my banter; he subtly flattered my academic credentials. We were spared the epic poem of Vietnam’s heroic struggle for independence. Instead, Le Duc Tho insisted that Hanoi was eager to settle the war during Nixon’s first term. He asked repeatedly if we would respect whatever agreements were reached, signed or unsigned. He would make a “great effort” to have this meeting become a turning point, he said, provided both sides reexamined their positions—an unprecedented disclaimer of infallibility. Hanoi, he averred, would keep in mind our responsibilities in other parts of the world even though these were of no direct concern to the Vietnamese themselves—another startling departure. He dwelt only briefly and perfunctorily on the bombing and mining; amazingly, he did not even ask us to stop them, resorting instead to the refrain of 1968 that ending these activities would create a “propitious” atmosphere for negotiations. I had been half-persuaded by that proposition in 1968; after four years of experience I now knew the opposite was true.
After sparring for a while, I put forward our May 8 proposal—omitting, however, the part about extending the time limit for Thieu’s resignation. Ducky turned it down, though much less polemically than in the past. He reiterated Hanoi’s standard proposal of a three-part provisional coalition Government of National Concord but modified it in one respect: He implied that once Thieu resigned, the rest of the government could stay and even receive American help, pending a final negotiation with the Communists. Our meeting had lasted for six and a half hours—the longest ever. We agreed to meet again on August 1.
As I left, I told Le Duc Tho that my movements were too well observed now to have the meetings remain secret. There would be too many journalistic inquiries to which we would have to reply either evasively or untruthfully. So I suggested that we announce each meeting after it had been held but give no details. When Nixon had revealed the secret talks in January, Hanoi had declared with bravado that it had only reluctantly and at our urging agreed to keep them confidential. Now, when put to the test, Le Duc Tho grumbled. Obviously, he was loath to give up the advantage of probing our position secretly while depriving our people of hope by stalemating the visible diplomacy. I gave him no choice now. The fact of the talks would be made public. For the remainder of the negotiations we blunted one of the psychological weapons in Hanoi’s arsenal by announcing each meeting. In fact, no serious attempt was made by the media to cover the negotiations or to follow either my movements or Le Duc Tho’s. It was symptomatic of widespread cynicism about peace prospects. Two announced secret meetings in eleven days, coupled with a trip to Saigon, did little to shake the widespread conviction that it was all an electoral maneuver. No one explained why Hanoi would cooperate in playing such a game.
I summed up the results of the first meeting in a memorandum to the President:
While they have said nothing which precludes their returning strictly to their old positions, they were about as positive in this first session as we could expect if they do want to settle, especially since we must have thrown them off-stride by withholding the total package discussed in the USSR.
If they do move, it could be in the direction of a ceasefire coupled with political principles along the lines of our January 25 proposal, but this would not surface before several more meetings at the earliest. The other possibility is their using the talks to elaborate a position which makes Thieu alone the obstacle to a comprehensive settlement…
Upon my return I briefed both Dobrynin and Huang Hua about what had happened. And in the interval between the meetings came another of the periodic media assaults, this time to the effect that we were deliberately bombing North Vietnamese dikes and imperiling millions of lives. It was one of the perennials of the antiwar debate, ready-made for a “credibility gap” and for the implication that no immoral act was beyond the Nixon Administration. If we denied it, Hanoi would produce a bomb crater or two on some embankment; if we “admitted” that a stray bomb aimed at a missile site might have hit a dike by accident, we evoked headlines such as this from the New York Times of July 16: “How to Bomb a Dike But Not Target It.” Nixon in news conferences on June 29 and July 27 and Laird on July 6 firmly denied that our policy was to attack dikes. The assurance should, of course, have been inherently plausible, or the dikes would long since have been destroyed. Nixon also asked on July 27 why there was so much concern about hypothetical attacks on dikes when so little had been said about the 860,000 South Vietnamese made homeless by the most recent North Vietnamese offensive. After a few weeks the dike story went away, not to reappear for the rest of the war.
In the interval, too, we had another exchange with Thieu. It was an indicator of things to come—though once again we took for a tactical misunderstanding what turned out to be a fundamental disagreement. We had told Thieu routinely that we would present during the next plenary session what we had withheld on July 19: Thieu’s proposed resignation two months rather than one month before a new election. We also proposed to insist that the cease-fire go into effect on the signature of an agreement in principle, contrary to Hanoi’s constant insistence that a cease-fire be deferred until agreement on political issues had been reached. We wanted to avoid a trap in which an agreement in principle would turn into a swap of prisoners for our withdrawal, leaving Hanoi free to pursue the war against South Vietnam.
Though Thieu had agreed to the resignation proposal in his conversation with Haig on July 3 (suggesting that he could even agree to resign sooner) and though the second provision for immediate cease-fire seemed to us entirely to his benefit, he now objected to both. He said that we could indicate the two-month resignation interval informally but not in writing. He tied the cease-fire to a withdrawal of all North Vietnamese forces within three months. The first objection would easily be handled by offering a neutral formulation and a specific private assurance. The withdrawal point was new. With his agreement, a cease-fire in place had been proposed publicly on October 7, 1970. With his concurrence also, we had formally abandoned the demand for mutual withdrawal in our secret proposal of May 31, 1971, and Nixon had urged a cease-fire without withdrawal on January 25 and May 8, 1972.
Thieu’s new proposal was unfulfillable. Hanoi would not yield at the conference table what it had not been forced to give up on the battlefield. After having based our whole public position on an unconditional cease-fire, we would never be able to sustain a continuation of the war on this issue; a majority of our Senate was opposed even to making unilateral withdrawal conditional on a cease-fire. On May 31, 1971, we had put forward a proposal prohibiting further infiltration into South Vietnam after a cease-fire. This would have the practical consequence of causing the North Vietnamese forces in the South to atrophy owing to normal attrition. Even this position had next to no public support in the United States, but we were determined to stick to it. Further than that it would be senseless to go; it would just elicit a Congressional resolution forcing us to abandon all conditions. But we did not pursue the disagreement with Thieu since it seemed irrelevant to the deadlocked negotiations.
My August 1 meeting in Paris with Le Duc Tho turned out to be the longest yet; it lasted eight hours. I described it in a memorandum to the President as “the most interesting session we have ever had.” Le Duc Tho was not yet so eager for a settlement as to give up his tactic of opening with an assault on our good faith, concentrating his fire this time on our announcements of the private meetings. Then, after an hour-long wrangle, Ducky yielded to the inevitable. He knew very well that there was no way of keeping the fact of the meetings secret if we were determined to publicize them—unless, of course, he was prepared to threaten to break off the conversations.
And this, it transpired, he was not at all willing to do. For on August 1 Le Duc Tho continued the retreat that he had begun on July 19. I presented our new “plan,” but Le Duc Tho realized that it consisted mainly of cosmetic modifications. For once his charge that I was offering “nothing new” was accurate. After we had consumed nearly three hours, first in haggling and then in going over familiar ground, Le Duc Tho asked for a recess. It lasted an hour and a quarter, the longest interruption yet. The break brought to light an interesting change in atmosphere observed first by Peter Rodman, who, as note-taker, was most in need of sustenance. At previous meetings, the North Vietnamese had laid out modest snacks, which consisted of Vietnamese spring rolls (cha gio) and soft drinks. At the meeting of August 1, fruit, cookies, and a greater variety of light edibles were served, which led Rodman to record for posterity that “the snacks were more lavish and the cha gio somewhat thicker than the previous meeting”—an indication both of Rodman’s legendary appetite and of the tea-leaf reading to which we had been reduced by four years of frustrating negotiations. (On August 14, wine and rice cakes would appear.)
After the recess, Ducky read me a little lecture on the mining and bombing. When I showed impatience he finally came to the point. He had a whole new set of North Vietnamese proposals.
For two and a half years Hanoi had been tormenting us with the unconditional-withdrawal deadline. We were asked to commit ourselves to a withdrawal schedule that would then have to be kept regardless of what else happened in the negotiations. There would be a cease-fire with our forces while the fighting would go on in South Vietnam. We had countered by agreeing on a schedule for withdrawal contingent on other terms, in effect, a general cease-fire throughout Indochina. One-sided, indeed insolent, as was Hanoi’s proposal, it had been gaining momentum within the United States. Several Senate resolutions embodied it; it was McGovern’s campaign position. Now Le Duc Tho withdrew it. He was willing to settle for less than he was being offered by the opposition candidate—a pretty clear indication of how Hanoi was reading the forthcoming election. Le Duc Tho agreed that whatever schedule we agreed upon would not start running until after all issues were settled; the unconditional deadline, which had rent our domestic debate, was dead.
Le Duc Tho began also to modify his political demands. He still insisted on a coalition government, but he put forward two concessions. Hanoi up to now had demanded a provisional coalition government in which the Communists appointed a third of the members and had a veto over the other two-thirds. That disarmed government was supposed then to negotiate with the fully armed Communist shadow government for a definitive solution. Le Duc Tho now proposed making the tripartite coalition government in effect the definitive government; it would not have to engage in additional negotiations with the Communists. Reflecting Hanoi’s sense of urgency, Le Duc Tho gave up, in addition, the veto over the composition of the non-Communist segments of his proposed structure. In the three-part coalition the Communists and Saigon would each appoint their third, and also one-half of the allegedly “neutral” third. In other words, the tripartite coalition had become a fifty-fifty split—with Saigon thus having a veto—rather than a grab for total power. We were opposed to any form of coalition government, but we were certain that we had not seen the last of Hanoi’s flexibility.
Once Le Duc Tho started making concessions, he proved as inventive as he had been obnoxious while stonewalling. He next submitted a procedural proposal for speeding up the negotiation, so complete that it required an advanced degree in metaphysics to understand the bewildering series of forums he was now putting before us. Saigon and the South Vietnamese Communists would negotiate on political issues; the three Vietnamese parties would discuss subjects affecting all of Vietnam; all four parties (including the United States) would treat the questions relating to the cease-fire. To us, the significant feature of this procedural cornucopia was that in each of the forums the existing South Vietnamese government, including Thieu, could participate as an equal. Hanoi was obviously in full retreat from its ancient position that Thieu would have to resign before anything else happened.
I thought Le Duc Tho’s proposals sufficiently serious to send the whole voluminous text to Bunker and Thieu for their consideration. In a memorandum to the President—on which Nixon wrote skeptical marginal comments about the tedium of the exercise—I pointed out that Hanoi’s new formulations could be a first step toward separating the military and political issues, the approach that I had recommended in my 1968 Foreign Affairs article, and that Harriman and Vance had urged on us in the transition period. Le Duc Tho had heretofore adamantly rejected this course. But if it were now the case that North Vietnam was beginning to move, our strategy had to be to continue to reject any coalition government proposal. In time this could end up as some face-saving formulation in which the military issues such as cease-fire, prisoner exchange, and withdrawals would be settled conclusively, while the political issues would be left to prolonged, and possibly inconclusive, negotiations among the various Vietnamese parties.
We were, of course, entering dangerous waters. As long as Hanoi asked us to overthrow an allied government, we were on moral high ground in rejecting it. But with Hanoi now moving toward the gray area of accepting a genuine political contest, the dividing lines would begin to blur. Symbolism and substance would merge. And the former might be more dangerous to our vulnerable allies in Saigon, who would have to remain to fight for their freedom after we had withdrawn, than to us ten thousand miles away. As the private talks—still unnoticed by the media—grew progressively more serious, what emerged more and more as the key issue was something intangible: the psychological resilience of Saigon.
For the time being, we were not compelled to decide. Hanoi had not yet moved far enough to test our consistent position that the only obstacle to a settlement was our refusal to overthrow an allied government. Nixon saw no point in making more concessions because he would just as soon have put the whole negotiating process on ice until after the election. I agreed we should sit tight, because I wanted to conserve for the final push the marginal adjustments in our position we were still capable of making. Hanoi would not make the final decision, in my analysis, until well into September, when Nixon’s prospects would be clearer. This assessment, interestingly enough, was shared by Dobrynin, who seemed well informed on our negotiations. All we should do, I thought, was make minor responses to North Vietnamese initiatives and from time to time submit our own written formulations, which should be just forthcoming enough to deny Hanoi any pretext to go public and trigger another bitter domestic controversy in America. Nixon agreed.
To keep the pressure on Hanoi for further dilution of its political position and to coordinate policy with our ally, Nixon agreed that I should visit Saigon immediately following the next meeting in Paris, scheduled for August 14. This had the additional advantage of supporting our strategy of procrastination; it gave me a pretext to delay a reply to Hanoi’s August 1 proposals for at least another two weeks. If my assessment of the pressures posed by our election deadline was correct, Hanoi would find itself forced to disclose its hand rapidly. For the first time in the war it was our opponents, not ourselves, who were under the compulsion of time.
As it turned out Le Duc Tho, too, was going to travel; he told us that he had been called back to Hanoi. This confirmed that fundamental decisions were in the offing. As a result, the meeting on August 14 turned into a holding action on both sides. I gave the North Vietnamese a number of documents that made up in legalistic complexity for what they lacked in substance: a statement of general principles drawn from the two preceding meetings; a ten-point negotiating document answering the ten points they had put forward on August 1; and a procedural paper accepting the principle of the different forums they had suggested on August 1 but changing the topics assigned to particular groups. The military issues were straightforward; we had been close to settling them during the previous year. We changed the formulation but not the substance. We put forward no political proposals at all; my pending visit to Saigon was the excuse. We agreed to meet again on September 15 on my way back from a long-planned trip to Moscow.
After three meetings, then, there had been significant movement, entirely by Hanoi; it was moving in the right direction but not at a pace that would keep it from reversing course later. Hanoi had given up the demand for Thieu’s immediate removal. It had agreed to negotiating forums in which the Saigon government would participate, thus in a sense recognizing its legitimacy. It had abandoned the absurd demand for an unconditional deadline for the withdrawal of American forces. The proposed coalition government, heretofore a transparent front for a Communist takeover, had been reduced to a fifty-fifty split of power.
Moreover, Hanoi seemed to me to have lost some of its previously sure grasp. Le Duc Tho moved almost too urgently; various proposals succeeded each other so rapidly as practically to tempt me to wait to see what else he might have in reserve. And the procedural plan almost invited delay because it created a plethora of forums, each of which could bog down on technicalities and yet, according to Hanoi, all of which had to finish before a cease-fire could go into effect. This procedure was more appropriate for the side prepared on the whole to wait rather than for the one in a hurry to settle—which was, suddenly, the North Vietnamese.
But Hanoi had left itself plenty of loopholes. The concept of a coalition government, even on the terms suggested by Hanoi, remained unacceptable. It gave the side that controlled perhaps 10 percent of the population 50 percent of the power. And a fifty-fifty split between groups that had been killing each other for two decades was bound to be a sham. It was certain to turn into a starting point for a new contest, and we would have psychologically weakened our allies for that contest through withdrawing and giving their opponents a share of power disproportionate to their real public support. The procedural forums were as compatible with Thieu’s being asked to negotiate his own demise as with accepting his legitimacy. Hanoi had not yet made a decisive choice; it still had a lot of running room.
I reported to the President after my August 14 meeting:
The North Vietnamese will be watching the polls in our country and the developments in South Vietnam and deciding whether to compromise before November. They have an agonizing choice. They can make a deal with an Administration that will give them a fair chance to jockey for power in the South, but refuses to guarantee their victory. Or they can hold out, knowing that this course almost certainly means they will face the same Administration with a fresh four-year mandate that reflects the American people’s refusal to cap ten years of sacrifice with ignominy… During this process we have gotten closer to a negotiated settlement than ever before; our negotiating record is becoming impeccable; and we still have a chance to make an honorable peace.
And Nixon’s real attitude was reflected in the notes he wrote to Al Haig on the margin of my report:
Which means we have no progress in 15 meetings! [Actually, it had been my sixteenth secret meeting with the North Vietnamese.]
Al—It is obvious that no progress was made and that none can be expected. Henry must be discouraged—as I have always been on this front until after the election. We have reached the stage where the mere fact of private talks helps us very little—if at all. We can soon expect the opposition to begin to make that point.
Disillusionment about K’s talks could be harmful politically—particularly in view of the fact that the Saigon trip, regardless of how we downplay it, may raise expectations.
What we need most now is a P.R. game plan to either stop talks or if we continue them to give some hope of progress.
Clearly, Nixon would not have been pained if I had recommended halting all negotiations until after the election. I did not do that because my analysis was different.
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