Nixon’s grand plans for altering the geopolitical balance of the world were threatened by the continuing virulence of the war in Vietnam. As 1969 wore on, the Nixon administration attempted both to resolve the Vietnam War and to launch its plan to transform America’s relationship with the USSR. At first the public was unaware of the linkage between these goals. But knowledgeable insiders soon realized that Nixon was pulling troops out of Vietnam even as he was trying to make risky deals with the Soviets. This angered and emboldened those who disagreed with Nixon’s actions. Their reactions would take many forms, some of which would require quite a bit of time to develop before they posed a serious threat to Nixon’s policies and even his hold on his office. But they began that spring.
ON MAY 14, as he prepared the speech in which he would offer a mutual-withdrawal peace plan, Nixon had Kissinger bring Ambassador Dobrynin to the Lincoln Bedroom—where no one could overhear their remarks—to assure Moscow that he did not seek a “military solution to the Vietnam problem,” as Dobrynin put it in his notes. Kissinger repeated that the United States sought “a fairly reasonable interval between conclusion of a [peace] agreement” and the establishing of a nondemocratic governmental system in South Vietnam.
As a new “Hamburger Hill” battle and its casualties offered fresh evidence that the Vietnam War was not going away, antiwar sentiment surged. In response, Nixon became even more determined to withdraw from the war through Vietnamization. After securing President Thieu’s agreement to allow him to withdraw 25,000 troops, he announced the move in June. Nixon was “jubilant,” Kissinger recalled, considering the troop withdrawal “a political triumph [that] would buy him the time necessary for developing our strategy.” That was a realistic assessment. Haig would later say that he had been ideologically opposed to Vietnamization, labeling it in hindsight “as phony as a two-dollar bill,” but at the time he raised few objections.
The American public cared little whether Vietnamization was a political triumph; voters were simply happy to have some troops removed from harm’s way. Most conservatives went along, perhaps hoping the withdrawal of 5 percent of the in-country troops was merely a symbolic cut. Then a former Johnson administration secretary of defense upped the ante. Clark Clifford proposed in an article that the United States withdraw 100,000 troops by year’s end and 200,000 by the close of 1970. Nixon took Clifford’s numbers as a challenge to draw down on an even faster schedule. In a meeting with liberal Republican senators, he forecast near-complete withdrawal in time to positively influence the 1970 midterm elections—prediction the senators immediately passed on to the press. Conservatives protested that the timetable was too hasty. Kissinger later conceded their point, writing that the accelerated timetable had done “serious damage” to the American position versus the North Vietnamese in the secret Paris talks because it “drained of virtually any plausibility” Nixon’s previous insistence that both sides mutually withdraw troops. The North Vietnamese had been demanding unilateral withdrawal of American troops for years; in July 1969 that became U.S. policy.
The notion that Vietnamization could end American involvement in the war gave Nixon another idea, which he introduced at a press conference on Guam after welcoming the Apollo crew back from the first manned landing on the moon. In a question-and-answer session, Nixon first dismissed the dovish notion that the United States should withdraw from Asia entirely, saying that we should continue to play “a significant role” and would keep our treaty commitments to the various countries of the region. But he added that “we must avoid that kind of policy that will make countries in Asia so dependent upon us that we are dragged into conflicts such as…Vietnam.”
Did this mean, a reporter asked, that the United States would not be involved in future Vietnam-type conflicts?
“We are going to handle each country on a case-by-case basis,” Nixon responded, explaining that he was “attempting to avoid that creeping involvement which eventually simply submerges you…. I want to be sure that our policies in the future…reduce American involvement. [Our role will be] one of assistance…in helping them solve their own problems, but not going in and just doing the job ourselves.”
The president had not intended these remarks as a big policy shift. But when news media started referring to them as the “Nixon Doctrine,” he warmed to the idea. Over the next year he refined it, with Kissinger’s help, and made it into a centerpiece of American policy. But while the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 and the Truman Doctrine in 1947 had broadened the sphere of national interest, Nixon’s doctrine redefined America’s national interest downward and made it conditional: “The United States will participate in the defense of allies and friends but…cannot—and will not—conceive all the plans, design all the programs, and undertake all the defense of the free nations.”
This highly pragmatic approach to foreign policy led the United States to increase its backing of surrogate defenders, especially the authoritarian anti-Communist regimes to which Nixon had always been partial. For instance, the United States accelerated sales of military equipment to Shah Pahlavi so that Iran could act as a bulwark against the USSR in the upper Persian Gulf.
The doctrine set the United States firmly on a path toward the “de-militarization of foreign policy,” a decoupling of U.S. foreign policy and American military might. Economic power, sales of military equipment, and diplomatic trade-offs would steadily become more important in our overseas relationships. Demilitarization of foreign policy combined with drastic reductions in the number, posture, and composition of the U.S. armed forces. In the 1970s, the American military would be transformed from one peopled largely by millions of draftees to a new, “all-volunteer” military consisting of a much lower number of paid professionals.
Old-style American anti-Communists saw Nixon’s doctrine as a shocking retreat from John F. Kennedy’s inaugural vow: “We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” In their view, Nixon was asserting that the United States would not go just anywhere to fight—that it would pick its battles, and that the burdens we chose to bear would depend on the moment and the circumstances. Patrick Buchanan, the White House speechwriter and in-house conservative, warned Nixon of “widespread confusion” in the press about the doctrine. Alarmed, Nixon asked Kissinger to assess the damage; Kissinger reported that Buchanan had overstated the case, citing two conservative columnists who praised it. Nixon was relieved.
To Fritz Kraemer, however, the doctrine was anathema. The essence of its failure was its “moral relativism”—its stated goal of weighing political and other pragmatic consequences before using military force to address the ills of the world. Kraemer believed that America’s moral core values, which he identified as freedom, democracy, honor, and resistance to totalitarianism, were integral to its leadership of the world—more important than the raw power and superiority of its military—and that any foreign policy that trimmed the need to adhere to these values was an abomination. As the Nixon Doctrine began to take shape, and as Kissinger emerged as its main elucidator, Kraemer watched in chagrin as his protégé seemed to cast aside the principles they once shared.
NIXON AND KISSINGER had already begun to pin their hopes for ending the war in Vietnam on turning the Chinese and the Russians against one another—a strategy that must have seemed increasingly reasonable as Soviet-Chinese border tensions broke out into open warfare in March 1969 at the Ussuri River, China’s northeastern border. Although American hard-liners had long dismissed the relevance of the Sino-Soviet split, insisting that Communism was monolithic and indivisible, that notion was now contradicted by direct battles between Soviet and Chinese troops that took the lives of hundreds, perhaps thousands. It became clearer that the only thing keeping the two Communist giants in harness was the need to back North Vietnam in its war with the United States.
A paper by Sinologist Allen Whiting, suggesting that China now needed the United States as a counterweight to Soviet moves against its sovereignty, spurred Kissinger to reconsider his previous objections to Nixon’s pet project, an opening to China. The continually rising Sino-Soviet border tensions were on the minds of Nixon and Kissinger during their conversations aboard the presidential yacht Sequoia in early July as they debated how to accelerate the end of the war in Vietnam. Nixon was determined to “go for broke,” to end the war “one way or the other—either by negotiated agreement or by increased use of force.” He wrote to Ho Chi Minh urging peace talks on the basis of his proposals and instructed the intermediary who would hand Ho the letter to say that if no breakthrough had been achieved by November first, “I [Nixon] would regretfully find myself obliged to have recourse to measures of great consequence and force.”
The Hanoi Politburo responded to Nixon by authorizing an attack on a big U.S. base and a hundred additional sorties against towns in the South. These attacks quickly forced Nixon to delay further American troop withdrawals and to give serious consideration to aggressive new U.S. military action. At Nixon’s request, an elated Kissinger directed an NSC team to design a “savage blow” that would force North Vietnam to the bargaining table to sue for peace. The team consisted of Haig, Rem Robinson, Tony Lake, and another Russian expert, Roger Morris. Haig and Robinson jumped into the plan, which became known as “Duck Hook.” Morris recalls viewing contingency plans that included tactical use of nuclear weapons. He and Lake rejected Robinson’s first draft as too timid, too much like the nibbling approach of the Johnson era. Robinson soon submitted a plan with larger and sharper teeth.
Kissinger liked the Duck Hook plan. Nixon, uncertain about using such a drastic military push to end the war, wondered if he should just accelerate Vietnamization and troop withdrawals. Dismayed by the president’s hesitation, Kissinger sent Nixon a memo that was important in its day and that Kissinger still considered relevant in 2006, when he unearthed a copy to use to stiffen the spine of Vice President Cheney in regard to keeping troops in Iraq: “Withdrawal of American troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public: The more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded.”
Kissinger’s ardent plea for more warlike action also featured strong political recommendations drawn from a Sven Kraemer memo on the governance of South Vietnam. Because Thieu’s government provided no “bridge to neutralist figures who could play a role in a future settlement,” Kissinger wrote, “there is not enough of a prospect of progress in [Saigon] to persuade Hanoi to make concessions.” The North would continue its “protracted warfare,” a “low-cost” strategy aimed at “producing a psychological, rather than military, defeat for the U.S.” Therefore, strong U.S. military action was needed now.
The arguments worked; Nixon swung back in line. “To achieve maximum political, military, and psychological shock,” Duck Hook would begin with four days of all-out attacks, bombings, and harbor minings. Originally scheduled to begin November 1, the plan was moved forward two weeks by Nixon so that it would begin before the October 15 antiwar march on Washington.
Part of the plan was to use the threatened attack to pressure the Soviets to help the United States at the negotiating table. On September 27, as Kissinger met with Dobrynin to give him advance word of Duck Hook, the president interrupted their meeting with a prearranged phone call whose message Kissinger then conveyed to the ambassador: “The train had just left the station and…headed down the track.” Dobrynin replied to Kissinger that he hoped it wasn’t a train but an airplane, so that it could still change course.
Nixon’s timing in making an appeal to the USSR was poor. Just a few days earlier, Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin had met at the Beijing airport with his Chinese counterpart Zhou En-Lai during the Soviet’s return journey from Hanoi after attending the funeral of Ho Chi Minh, and in four hours the two men had settled many of their border dispute issues.
The planning of Duck Hook had been kept from Laird and Rogers, but eventually they had to be informed so they could execute details and apprise foreign partners. When they finally got the word, the two Cabinet officers threatened to resign if Duck Hook was triggered, arguing that the United States could not publicly pursue Vietnamization and peace talks while simultaneously escalating on the battlefield.
Nixon thought otherwise; he was fond of simultaneously taking two seemingly antithetical actions. But he could not dispel the potential negative political effect of two Cabinet resignations. He and Kissinger went to Key Biscayne, Florida, to figure out what to do. Nixon had two options, Kissinger said pithily: “to bug out or to accelerate.” His choice: “We must escalate or [the] president is lost.”
Nixon retorted that the presidency could be lost anyway if Duck Hook failed, and that it might well fail.
Nixon’s decisions frequently hinged on how much public criticism he could bear. The combination of the potential fallout from resignations by Rogers and Laird, and from the antiwar “moratorium” rally scheduled for mid-October, convinced Nixon not to begin Duck Hook; instead, he would pursue another way to push North Vietnam. Rather than mount an actual attack, he decreed, the United States would produce a feigned one—similar to those that Wheeler’s staff had dreamed up in early 1969. Nixon wanted precisely the option that Haig, Kissinger, and the Joint Chiefs had previously criticized as the most ludicrous and dangerous of all the feigned options—an alert that looked like a prelude to nuclear war. “It was important that the Communists not mistake as weakness the lack of dramatic action on my part in carrying out the [November 1] ultimatum,” he later wrote. Anxious to prevent a perception of weakness, Nixon instructed Laird to prepare an unprecedented show of force, an exercise that mimicked a high DEFCON level, for October 13–14.
This was not easily accomplished. Haig and Kissinger were furious when Defense seemed not to understand how close to an actual alert the elevated-DEFCON exercise would have to be in order to raise a genuine alarm among the Soviets. Secretary Laird’s military aide, Colonel Robert Pursley, had “shouting matches” with Haig over the matter.
At this important moment, the army threw a curveball at Al Haig. An internal army memo appeared on which Haig’s name had been added to the list of invitees to attend Harvard’s Executive Management course—right away. The assignment would take him out of the White House but would punch his ticket for higher management in the army, something Haig wanted. When Kraemer saw the internal memo, he phoned Kissinger and pleaded with him to squelch the transfer. Kissinger agreed. To lose Haig just then was “absolutely out of the question,” he told Kraemer. “I need him where he is.” Kraemer said he would convey the message to the army brass, and implied that if Kissinger really did need Haig that badly, the White House should recommend Haig for a promotion.
In the weeks that followed, Haig advanced from his assistant’s role to a position in which he was able to directly plan military actions. The vehicle for the promotion was the feigned alert, a plan on which Haig was able to work directly with Nixon and Kissinger.
The trio needed Laird’s help to effect the alert, so Nixon called him in, and to persuade him reminded the defense secretary of President Eisenhower’s use of feigned military activity to pressure the Communists to end the Korean War. But as Nixon’s chief aide, Haldeman, would later reveal, Nixon was also borrowing another, riskier notion of Eisenhower’s: that the president of the United States must never be totally predictable to the country’s enemies. Nixon believed he could achieve his objectives by making the Soviets and the North Vietnamese fear he was slightly mad, mad enough that he might trigger a nuclear war at any time. The prospect of an unhinged president with access to the nuclear button, he felt, should scare America’s enemies to the bargaining table.
In the run-up to the high-DEFCON alert, Haig personally pushed the JCS on one element he knew about from his participation in the Cuban Missile Crisis: He demanded a higher-level ground forces alert ratio than the plan proposed. The demand went up the chain of command, signed off by everyone until it reached JCS chairman Wheeler, who personally vetoed it. That it went so far was a testament to Haig’s growing power.
The high-DEFCON alert was to be an elaborate ruse. It would include strategic stand-downs of the sort that the enemy knew would precede an actual nuclear strike, as well as increased naval activity and surveillance of Soviet shipping, and nuclear-armed B-52s circling Alaska. It had to be completed before November 1, for on that date Hanoi and Moscow would realize that Duck Hook had been canceled, and would also conclude that the alert had been a bluff.
On October 15, the antiwar moratorium march was held. Hundreds of thousands of marchers nearly overwhelmed Washington. Watching them from inside the White House, Nixon instructed himself, “Don’t get rattled—don’t waver—don’t react.” He was writing a speech that he hoped would put Vietnam behind him. The feigned DEFCON alert was another part of that hope.
“K has all sorts of signal-type activity going on around the world to try to jar Soviets + NVN,” Haldeman noted in his diary on October 17. “Appears to be working because Dobrynin has asked for early mtng, which we have set for Monday. K thinks this is good chance of being the big break—but that it will come in stages. P[resident] is more skeptical.” Before the Dobrynin meeting, Kissinger told Nixon in a memo, “Your basic purpose will be to keep the Soviets concerned about what we might do around November 1.” Should Dobrynin bring up the raised military alert activity, Nixon should say it was routine—which would suggest, perversely, that it was anything but.
As Nixon prepared to greet Dobrynin, Kissinger told Nelson Rockefeller he felt the ploy had about a 30 percent chance of success. However, the Soviet ambassador seemed to have understood what game was afoot; in his October 20 meeting with Nixon, Dobrynin never mentioned the upgraded U.S. military activity, though Moscow had made him aware of it. Nixon was reduced to asking again for help with Vietnam, warning the ambassador, “The Soviet Union is going to be stuck with me for the next three years and three months, and during all that time I will keep in mind what is being done right now, today. If the Soviet Union will not help to get peace, then we will have to pursue our own methods for bringing the war to an end.”
After that meeting, Kissinger told Kraemer he felt the plan’s chances for success had dropped to only 10 percent. The plan “has no business succeeding,” he said, “but it may.”
In this moment, when—despite the best efforts of the Nixon-Kissinger plan, and despite the mobilization of the Strategic Air Command bombers and all other signals—Dobrynin ignored the threat from the “madman” in the White House, the Nixon strategy to push the Soviets to pressure the North Vietnamese collapsed.
A few days later, Dobrynin told another U.S. official that such attempts to pressure the USSR—including Nixon’s visit to Romania during the summer and his coy public statements regarding the Sino-Soviet border clashes; Dobrynin did not specifically mention the nuclear alert—would never succeed in persuading the USSR to help the United States end the Vietnam War. “The reaction in the Kremlin to tactics of this kind would always be the opposite of what [Washington] desired.”
EVEN BEFORE THE scrubbing of Duck Hook and the feigned alert, on September 22, Kraemer felt he could no longer remain silent. His unease spurred him to write a five-thousand-word memo to Kissinger, a passionate and detailed dissection of the direction that the Nixon administration was taking. In its alarm, it echoed the concerns of Kissinger’s near-contemporaneous “salted peanuts” memo to Nixon, but it went much further, drawing implications from the troop withdrawals that Kissinger had only hinted at.
Kissinger was so impressed with Kraemer’s paper that he passed it on to Nixon—without Kraemer’s name on it. His cover note said, “Although I do not agree with its every last word, it does define the problem we face—the generally deteriorating strategic position of the United States during the past decade.” Nixon read the document carefully and made numerous notes on its margins, for instance, saying of a cogent paragraph on the relationship between the USSR, China, and the United States, “Good analysis.” The president then directed Kissinger to send copies to Rogers, Laird, and Helms for comment, though without naming Kraemer as its source. Few documents that came to Kissinger in this fashion were treated with this much respect and concern by the administration.
Kraemer’s paper was an expansion of the themes of his June memo. A tour d’horizon in the grand manner, it insisted that advances in communications and transportation had condensed the world and at the same time made it interconnected in ways unknown previously in human history. Therefore, in Kraemer’s view, the modern world must be accepted and dealt with as “a single, strategic theater” rather than as a series of far-flung situations and crises, which was how bureaucrats had been working with it. “The man who daily struggles with the agonizing problem of Vietnam can hardly be expected to pay special attention to the latest coup in Libya, and the person concerned with US aid to Latin America has little time or inclination to consider recent political developments in Czechoslovakia.”
But his job was to be a generalist, Kraemer wrote, and upon weighing the cables and dispatches from everywhere, and reading all those newspapers in many languages, he discerned some immediate adverse results of the still-forming Nixon Doctrine. He cited specific examples of unease in Japan, Indonesia, Singapore, and elsewhere in Asia: the Philippine Foreign Office, he pointed out, had changed its prior references in cables from “Chinese mainland” to “People’s Republic of China” and in other ways was being more accommodating to the Mao regime. Such signals would indicate to any “objective analyst, be he in [Beijing] or Bonn,” that the United States was heading for “an ultimate pull-out, a radical reduction of military commitments…not simply in hotly contested Vietnam but on a worldwide basis.”
Jumping to South America, he told stories of juntas in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia expropriating American military and American oil company properties as they took over their countries. Casting his eye on the Middle East, he boldly predicted that American withdrawals and refusals to act would result in the loss of more Arab states to radical regimes. They would also force India to become closer to the USSR to offset Chinese influence. The West Germans, he noted, were edging toward the USSR, in reaction to having been twice rebuffed in Washington in recent months, and of now being convinced that the United States would shortly remove its troops from their country.
What did it all mean? Trouble for the United States down the road, he predicted.
“The policy on which we seem embarked is very obviously dictated by a conviction that ‘public opinion’ demands it and that, accordingly, the government is essentially helpless to act otherwise,” Kraemer summed up, and concluded with the warning, “Anyone with a sense of history will grasp the tragic elements in this situation.”
ON THE EVENING of November 3, 1969, a year after his election, Nixon gave his most important speech on the Vietnam War. He did not tell the American public of the feigned DEFCON alert, which had had no positive effect, or about his cancellation of the Duck Hook attacks. Instead, to an audience estimated at 70 million Americans, he forthrightly rejected the idea of ending the war so that Johnson’s war did not become Nixon’s war. He had an “obligation,” he said, to think beyond the war’s possible effect on “the next election.” Hitting his stride, Nixon asked rhetorically, “How can we win America’s peace?” and answered that it must be won, because “our defeat and humiliation in South Vietnam…would promote recklessness in the councils of those great powers who have not yet abandoned their goals of world conquest. This would spark violence wherever our commitments help maintain the peace—in the Middle East, in Berlin, eventually even in the Western Hemisphere.”
Nixon’s declaration echoed Kraemer’s warnings about provocative weakness and may have been formulated, in part, as a response to the challenges posed by Kraemer in his “Single Strategic Theater” memo. The United States must win in Vietnam, Nixon argued, because to lose would unleash our enemies. Nixon cited the positive results of American troop withdrawals and South Vietnamese military development, including a reduction in U.S. casualties and in the enemy’s infiltration rate. But he cautioned that “an announcement of a fixed timetable for our withdrawal would completely remove any incentive for the enemy to negotiate an agreement. They would simply wait until our forces had withdrawn and then move in.” The key point in achieving peace, he stated, was that the American “people be unified behind his program. He castigated the “vocal minority” that was telling him to declare the war lost; should they “prevail,” he said, “this nation has no future as a free society.” He asked for the support of the “silent majority” who agreed with his plan for a just peace. “The more support I can have from the American people, the sooner that pledge can be redeemed; for the more divided we are at home, the less likely the enemy is to negotiate at Paris. Let us be united for peace. Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.”
It was, Nixon later judged, his most successful speech as president. It was met by a grand outpouring of support for his plan to end the war—support that was evident at the November 15 “moratorium.” While hundreds of thousands of protesters marched against the continuation of the war, the “silent majority” mounted a number of smaller counter-marches, among them a 15,000-person demonstration by the Young Americans for Freedom. YAF’s national director told a reporter that Nixon “would not be unhappy to see his options on the war expanded by right-wing pressure—and we aim to please.” Demonstrations by “hard-hats” in New York, San Francisco, and other big cities expressed the desire for a “win” in Vietnam, preferably a military one.
Nixon’s poll ratings soared. The House of Representatives passed a resolution—the first regarding the war since the enabling Gulf of Tonkin resolution in 1964—endorsing by a 334–55 vote Nixon’s efforts to achieve “peace with justice.”
Some conservatives argued publicly that Nixon’s success in mobilizing the “silent majority” gave him an opening to take more aggressive military action to push North Vietnam to the bargaining table. Had these conservatives known what had gone on behind the scenes with the run-up to, and then away from, Duck Hook, and with the feigned high alert they would have been apoplectic. They did not know, and so continued to support Nixon’s approach.
AFTER A YEAR in office the tenor of a presidency, and the character of the president, have usually become obvious. But Nixon, that most guarded of men in public, was still an enigma to most Americans. However, after his first year certain things about Nixon and his foreign policies had become quite clear to several critical audiences.
Although the American public did not know about the fake DEFCON alert, North Vietnam, the USSR, and China did, and had likely deduced that the threatened Duck Hook had been canceled. Now able to see through Nixon’s anti-Communist rhetoric, these countries could conclude that he was a maker of empty threats, intent on drawing down American troops, ordering ineffectual bombing, and propping up an inadequate South Vietnamese army—tactics that could only accelerate the Communists’ victory in Vietnam.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff, in particular Admiral Thomas Moorer, who was being considered to replace Wheeler, were alarmed by Nixon’s approach toward American foreign policy. They recognized Nixon’s eagerness to go around them at the drop of a hat and his willingness to deceive them on matters ranging from troop levels to negotiations with the Soviets. And as a result they became determined to keep abreast of what Nixon and Kissinger were planning, to help them prepare to counter any moves they might disagree with. The Joint Chiefs began their program of resistance through small measures—stalling on orders to withdraw troops from South Korea, the Philippines, and Japan, and to reduce the size of the military by a million men. They also seized an opportunity on SALT, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, by letting senators know that they hated the administration’s current proposals: The Senate was unlikely to ratify any agreement that the military felt would adversely affect security.
Kissinger now fully understood that Nixon’s pattern of actions and non-actions offered an opportunity for him to rise in the president’s confidence and to exercise presidential power as his own. He had also learned that the only way to ensure his access to that power was to shelve Kraemer’s absolutist notions and further Nixon’s realist compromises. After the “salted peanuts” memo, Kissinger never again deeply questioned the direction of the president’s policies.
Kraemer’s other protégé, Al Haig, newly elevated to brigadier general, saw his own route to power as an adroit cheerleader for Nixon’s need to voice bellicose thoughts. Haig would never be able to best Kissinger at his own game, but he could develop ways to go around him and to act as a counterweight to Kissinger in Nixon’s mind. As one fellow NSC member would later recall, when Nixon was angry at Kissinger he would not permit Kissinger to present the daily briefing that day and instead would call in Haig for that purpose. Such freeze-outs could last for days until Kissinger had been properly chastised.
At the turn of 1970, Nixon expressed his new confidence in Haig by sending him to Saigon as the leader of an NSC delegation that included Sven Kraemer. Haig came back with a report that purported to be a realistic assessment but was tinged with his own ideology that favored an aggressive continuation of the war on the battlefield. Haig told the president that he saw “hopeful signs” on the ground, citing statistics showing that the Saigon government now controlled four-fifths of the land area of the South. But he dismissed reports of successful Vietnamization as “phony”: Haig reported that the front lines of the ARVN, the South’s army, were staffed only by poorly trained draftees, since Saigon allowed volunteers to stay behind the lines in relative safety. The main threat to South Vietnam, Haig told Nixon, was coming from the Cambodian sanctuaries, which the bombing had not sufficiently destroyed. Sooner or later, the United States, rather than just South Vietnam, would have to take aggressive military action to clean the North Vietnamese out of the area. In Haig’s report were the justifications for the calamitous “incursion” into Cambodia in the spring of 1970.