‘On Nicaragua, we are in danger of repeating the same sort of domestic debate--an Administration request hard to reconcile with a definition of vital interests.’ : The Fall of Saigon, a Death of Consensus

T en year ago Wednesday, the war in Vietnam ended with the fall of Saigon. Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger was recently interviewed by Jack Burby, assistant editor of The Times’ editorial pages, and Art Seidenbaum, editor of Opinion, about the events leading up to the defeat and how it has affected U.S. foreign policy, including the current dispute over U.S. conduct in Central America.

‘On Nicaragua, we are in danger of repeating the same sort of domestic debate--an Administration request hard to reconcile with a definition of vital interests.’

Q: In January, 1973, you and Le Duc Tho signed an agreement in Paris that led to a cease fire in Vietnam and the withdrawal of American troops. You have written that you thought the Paris agreement would provide an “interval” for the South Vietnamese government. Stanley Karnow wrote that you told him a “decent” interval.

A: I didn’t tell Stanley Karnow anything of the sort. He is simply repeating a myth he picked up somewhere.

Q: Does the use of the word “interval” mean that you thought in 1973 that the fall of Saigon was inevitable?

A: My associates and I believed that with prudent management the agreement could be maintained for as long as we could see in the future. We never expected Vietnam to collapse.

Q: When, then, did the fall of Saigon first seem inevitable to you?

A: Again you have to remember that outsiders can isolate an event and treat it as if it were the only thing going on. Policy-makers do not have that luxury. From October, 1973, on, we were in an almost non-stop negotiation in the Middle East, we had an oil embargo, we had Watergate and a new President. So there were other things going on and, frankly, in early 1975 we were primarily preoccupied with the Middle East.

In retrospect, what started the ball rolling was a North Vietnamese attack on a provincial capital called Phuoc Binh.

It was in total violation of the agreement. They took this provincial capital and then the question was what were we going to do about it. Well, it turned out that the War Powers Act had been passed and that act prohibited military action.

The new Congress was a heavily McGovernite Congress as a result of Watergate so when we put up a request for a supplemental Vietnam appropriation of $300 million, a huge debate started in the Congress, it must have been early February. And everybody was saying: Will this go on forever? To which the correct answer was: Yes, it will go on forever, as it has gone on forever in NATO, as it has gone on forever in Korea, as it has gone forever in Israel. But then people were saying you have to bring an end to the war.

We were caught in a dilemma. If we said we wanted victory, we would be accused of being intransigent; if we said we wanted a stalemate, we would be accused of an endless war. Then the idea took hold that we should make a terminal grant. And it was very similar to what we now see in Nicaragua, that you start with too little, then you begin compromising in order to get something and pretty soon you forget what it was you set out to do and the passage of this piece of legislation becomes the primary thing.

In March, the South Vietnamese decided that they should hunker down to get through our 1976 elections. All of these divisions had their families with them so there was no tactical flexibility. They were very good when they were defending their dependents. But if you moved them to another area, they became very poor because they wanted to get home. This was a terrible problem because the frontier was very long. South Vietnam President Nguyen Van Thieu attempted to solve this problem by withdrawing from the central highlands and setting up a more defensible line. But the South Vietnamese had no sense of how to move two divisions from the central highlands over back roads with their dependents. So a horrendous traffic jam developed. In the end, all the units in the central highlands disintegrated. From their own accounts, all the North Vietnamese intended to do in 1975 was to improve their position for a big offensive in ’76. But when the central highlands collapsed and then Da Nang fell they decided to send their entire army into the south. The rout was on.

At that point, I was in the Middle East negotiating and on the way back I was told that Quang Tri, the northern provincial capital, had fallen. Then I knew we were in deep trouble. By late March, I knew Vietnam was lost.

On April 1, I told the president that we had to begin planning evacuation. We knew Vietnam and Cambodia were going to fall. Such dominoes as were going to fall were going to fall. But for President Ford, myself and Brent Scowcroft (then assistant national security adviser), the problem was whether the United States should accelerate this process and in the last moment stab its allies in the back or whether we should try to hang on as long as possible to save as many of our friends as possible. Perhaps we could delay long enough to get a transition period that was humane.

If we took the advice of some of our Washington-based associates and the media, just to pack up and bug out, there was a great risk that the South Vietnamese army, still strong around Saigon, might turn on us and we would be accused of having betrayed them; far from getting people out, we might end this whole thing in a horrible debacle fighting our former allies.

We had to stage the withdrawal of some 20,000 Americans over a sufficient time to keep matters calm and to take out a massive number of our friends with us. The Defense Department--with the exception of Deputy Defense Secretary William C. Clements--wanted to get out as quickly as possible and, in fact, was flying empty airplanes in and out of Saigon in order to make clear that if any American was left behind it was my fault, or Ford’s fault. The ambassador in Saigon wanted to stay in as long as possible; the ambassador in Cambodia was urging that we negotiate our way out.

Now anybody who has negotiated with the Indochinese Communists knows they were no joy to negotiate with when there was a stalemate. They had no incentive whatever to negotiate when everything was collapsing and the Congress had already cut off aid.

For us--Ford, Scowcroft and myself--this was a question of saving lives and saving American self-respect and not leaving Indochina with the disgrace that once a defeat had been inflicted all we would think of is ourselves. It was perhaps the saddest period of my governmental service.

Finally we gave the order to reduce the number of Americans in Saigon to what could be evacuated in one day’s airlift and to stay there with that as a calculated, justifiable risk. In this manner we also saved some 150,000 Vietnamese, of which I’m very proud, without losing any Americans. But had any Americans been lost, Ford, Scowcroft and I would have been the villains.

Q: How about Nicaragua right now and this problem of political divisions within government?

A: On Nicaragua, we are in danger of repeating the same sort of domestic debate--an Administration request hard to reconcile with a definition of vital interests. How can something be of vital interest and be only worth $14 million? And Congress saying you must make a compromise; you can have non-lethal aid for the guerrillas. What is the meaning of that? Either it’s not a vital interest or it’s worth more than $14 million, or it’s worth lethal equipment. I don’t want to enter into the merits of that dispute in this interview but the shape of the debate is getting very similar to Vietnam.

Q: Then can a pluralistic society, with strongly held moral convictions added to strongly held political positions, conduct foreign policy on a rational basis?

A: As far as America is concerned, in the last 15 years it hasn’t. We can’t change our political system; we have to be true to ourselves. It is also true that we have not been conducting a serious foreign policy on a pluralistic basis, at least on some issues, because the divisions have become so great.

People always talk about compromise, but it isn’t compromise you need in the design of foreign policy, it is a sense of nuance, a sense of coherence over a long period of time. You can’t say you have a foreign policy when only the President, the secretary of state and the security adviser are for it. The solution is to find some bipartisan consensus again, but that’s much easier said than done.

Q: Did Vietnam lead to the kind of domestic disarray that makes foreign policy so hard to conduct, or did it just intensify trends that were already there?

A: That’s a very good question. I think that even without Vietnam we would have had to reconsider the foreign policy of the postwar period, which was really based on an atomic monopoly and on a huge economic superiority.

One could argue that Vietnam delayed adaptation to new circumstance by confusing the debate and focusing on one corner of the globe, by polarizing our country and destroying the political center; in that sense, Vietnam was a symptom and not a cause of reconsideration.

Q: Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger seems to have taken Col. Harry Summers’ book about Vietnam, “On Strategy,” to mean that you can’t ever involve yourself in a military action unless you have full support of the American public. A lesson from Vietnam apparently. Is that valid?

A: A president is elected to take care of the future of the people and the people will not forgive him for disasters, even if the disasters correspond to their own wishes. After all, Chamberlain had 90 percent of the people with him at the time of Munich and 18 months later Munich became an epithet. So what do you do when a president and his closest advisers are deeply convinced that something is in the overwhelming national interest and they can’t carry the Congress or the media with them? This is one fundamental problem.

What we absolutely need is some kind of consensus of what is a vital interest. If an interest is vital, we have to be able and willing to defend it. We have to be willing to face the fact that the challenge is almost certain to be ambiguous; if you could prove that the danger to us is overwhelming, everybody would agree, but by the time that the danger is overwhelming in the modern period it is too late to do something about it.

But if we commit ourselves, we must prevail. You cannot fight a war for a stalemate; you can only fight a war for a victory and then you can be generous in the settlements. You may be able to make a compromise if you are on the way to victory. But if you proclaim stalemate as an objective, you’re likely to lose or at any rate get into so protracted a conflict that the public will not sustain it.

What we must not do is to slip into a military engagement thinking that it is only a very limited thing to fix one short-term problem and then escalate it to rescue the previous commitment and then escalate it again to rescue the previous commitment because then we are on a treadmill to nowhere.

‘This was a question of saving lives and saving American self-respect . . . . It was perhaps the saddest period of my governmental service.’