The lessons of Vietnam

Richard M. Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger did not start the Vietnam War, but much death and destruction occurred during their watch. As authors of that carefully choreographed script titled “peace with honor,” they were responsible for the etching of an additional 20,000 names into the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall and the addition of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese names to countless graves and war memorials. Calculate the number of maimed and wounded and the tragedy of this war and its aftermath becomes too much to bear. Despite the passage of time, the Vietnam War remains an enigma: for some, a metaphor for defeat; for others, a moral tragedy of betrayal; and for everyone, a war from which a lesson can be drawn for another American military intervention in a distant land.

Which brings us to this curious book, which appears 30 years after the signing of the Paris Agreement, by Kissinger, its Nobel Peace Prize-winning architect. Why now, after having penned four previous treatises totaling thousands of pages on the same subject (from which Kissinger has extracted almost the entirety of this narrative, albeit with a smattering of what the publisher describes as “new and updated material”), has Kissinger written another book? Is there anything here that he has not already told us?

“Ending the Vietnam War” is Kissinger’s most recent attempt to insist that he and President Nixon ended the war with honor. But the truth is that peace did not come to Vietnam when the Americans went home. Kissinger rejects the oft-made charges that: 1) he made too many concessions, especially with respect to the continued presence of North Vietnamese forces; 2) the Nixon administration should have known Congress and the public would never support the use of American airpower to enforce the agreement; and 3) neither he nor Nixon ever endorsed a decent interval between military disengagement and eventual collapse. Rather, he argues that he negotiated a proper and honorable interval between an American disengagement and the expected subsequent holding of free elections in South Vietnam.

Each of his points deserves careful consideration. When the United States began private talks with North Vietnam in 1969, it did so from the basic position of mutual withdrawal of troops. The United States would withdraw its military forces from South Vietnam and North Vietnam would also withdraw its army from South Vietnam. Such reciprocity was immediately rejected by Hanoi, which refused to acknowledge that it had foreign forces in what it considered its own country. Under the terms of the Paris Agreement, about 150,000 communist troops were permitted to remain in South Vietnam.

Kissinger writes that permitting North Vietnamese troops to remain in South Vietnam was not considered a concession, because this position had already been implicitly accepted in all standstill cease-fire proposals since 1970. South Vietnam’s president, Nguyen Van Thieu, was aware of this. What Kissinger does not say is that in 1970, the balance of forces in South Vietnam was in the United States’ favor, and that over the next two years, Hanoi flooded its troops into the South in anticipation of a complete unilateral American withdrawal. By late 1972, the balance of forces in the South was in Hanoi’s favor, and Hanoi instructed its advisor to the Paris Peace Conferences, Le Duc Tho, that he could concede on the point of Thieu remaining in power. Kissinger never mentions any of this. Instead, he insists that he and Nixon did not impose a political settlement on the South.

Between 1969 and 1973, the secrecy surrounding the talks between Kissinger and Tho was so complete that no one knew of any precise negotiating position agreed upon between the United States and South Vietnam or, for that matter, between the bureaucratic agencies of the U.S. government. Even today, these details are being released slowly and not without a battle involving Freedom of Information Act requests and mandatory declassifications. The slowly emerging declassified record, contrary to the tale Kissinger tells in “Ending the Vietnam War,” makes it clear that Thieu, the Joint Chiefs and the State Department were informed but rarely consulted. Thieu was kept in the dark by Kissinger, who negotiated the future of South Vietnam directly with his North Vietnamese counterpart. Thieu was outraged when he read for the first time the text of an October 1972 draft treaty that allowed Northern forces to remain in the South.

Thieu had wanted all invading armies out of South Vietnam. Kissinger maintains that the key concession was the abandonment of an American residual force. The United States had to withdraw all forces and dismantle all its bases within 60 days of the agreement and this, according to Kissinger, “was the principal weakness of the agreement, far more significant than the continued presence of North Vietnamese forces.” Kissinger writes that he and Nixon wanted to retain a residual force in Vietnam to police the agreement, but domestic pressure dictated otherwise, and this led Nixon to rely on air power as the enforcing mechanism for future communist violations.

Three decades later, this version has an Alice in Wonderland quality to it because Kissinger has invented the concept of a residual force. There is no evidence that such a force was ever contemplated.

In addition, Kissinger told the Joint Chiefs in November 1972: “The agreement does not legalize the presence of North Vietnamese troops in the South. They claim they have none there. This is a lie, of course, but contrary to some misunderstandings, there is no legal basis for them being there. Therefore we can retaliate strongly if they move troops in.” What can he possibly have meant by “retaliate”? In reality, Kissinger and Nixon did not expect the cease-fire to last long, which would guarantee a prompt military retaliation, but neither Congress nor the American people were to be told.

Kissinger writes that the U.S. position rejected a coalition government and favored “free elections to be supervised by an Electoral Commission.” Thieu believed that with Northern troops in the South, free elections would be impossible. Nixon and Kissinger agreed, telling him repeatedly that the timing of the election was up to Thieu. “Without a North Vietnamese withdrawal, there is no reason to risk the political solution,” Kissinger advised Thieu. A National Council of Reconciliation and Concord was created whose purpose was to organize and supervise free elections. Thieu viewed the council as a coalition government in disguise but was told not to take the council seriously. There would be no need to hold elections until the communist troops left South Vietnam. Kissinger is silent on these matters.

If not for Watergate, Nixon would have unleashed the B-52s, as he secretly promised Thieu, in return for unity on the negotiated settlement. As Kissinger writes, “none of us could imagine the collapse of presidential authority” that followed Nixon’s overwhelming 1972 electoral victory. Nixon and Kissinger believed that after American POWs came home, they would be able to rally the American public. “You won’t be able to wave a document at them, whatever is in it,” Kissinger warned. “The North Vietnamese fear is whether the B-52s come again....” Ambassador William Sullivan told the South Vietnamese that the accord was only “a piece of paper.” Nixon added that “more important than any other factor was not the language of the agreement, or a piece of paper, but the United States commitment to enforce the agreement.” No one expected the communists to honor the agreement, and when they violated it, “it won’t be necessary to haggle over proof.”

In December 1972, Kissinger told the South Vietnamese delegation to the Paris peace talks: “Do you think I will believe Le Duc Tho? Of course they will cheat. But if they use the Ho Chi Minh Trail and we bomb the Ho Chi Minh Trail, we have a legally strong position.... You have missed the real issues. The key is whether the American people know they have achieved something. No one knows what the Korean Armistice says. But the people know they have achieved something, and if the North Koreans violate it, the president can defend it.... The major use of the agreement to you is that it links us legally to you on a long-term basis for an indefinite period.” Shortly thereafter, Gen. Alexander M. Haig Jr. told Thieu that “the American people will be willing to make whatever sacrifices are necessary to ensure that the agreement succeeds ... should Hanoi violate the agreement, then the legal, psychological and patriotic basis will exist for brutal U.S. retaliation.”

In “Ending the Vietnam War,” Kissinger writes that “we had a moral duty to our allies in Saigon not to abandon millions who had put their trust in our word.” He describes “one of the saddest experiences of my period in office: the visit of America’s ally, President Thieu, to the United States. There was little about the visit of which America could be proud.” Thieu visited Casa Pacifica, the western White House, before flying to Washington, D.C. According to Kissinger, “Nixon made a polite speech that referred to South Vietnam’s capacity to defend itself -- a dubious proposition if Hanoi launched an all-out attack with Soviet weapons. Thieu fell in gracefully with this fairy tale....”

What Kissinger does not write is that the terms of American disengagement constituted a suicide pact for 20 million innocent South Vietnamese who preferred not to live under communist tyranny. By all rights, Henry Kissinger ought have the decency to return his peace prize.