“Don’t strike a king unless you intend to kill him”
NIXON BELIEVED that the fate of the United States depended on defeating the nation that Kissinger called “a fifth-rate agricultural power.” It was a question of national survival.
“If we fail we have had it,” the president told the Joint Chiefs, Kissinger, Mitchell, and Laird on October 11, as the big antiwar protests began. Adm. Thomas H. Moorer of the Joint Chiefs wrote in his diary after the meeting, “The President stated that a great power must go on this basis: ‘Don’t strike a king unless you intend to kill him.’” Nixon did not intend to be killed by skinny guerrillas in black pajamas.
When Nixon took the oath of office, Vietnam had been LBJ’s war. It was Nixon’s now. Seeing no path to peace with honor, he was looking for ways to win it and demanded new plans for victory through firepower. At the start of 1970, he contemplated sending the fearsome fleets of B-52s (each equipped to carry sixty thousand pounds of bombs) to strike North Vietnam’s soldiers as they traveled south along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
The Ho Chi Minh Trail was the Communists’ essential supply line—a network of hundreds of interwoven pathways running from North Vietnam through Laos and Cambodia into South Vietnam. Soldiers moved on foot, on bicycles, oxcarts, horses, and occasionally elephants, carrying food, weapons, and military materiel. The trail kept the Communists armed and fed as they went into battle against South Vietnam. As American involvement in the war escalated, the trail system moved westward, away from the border of South Vietnam and deeper into Laos and Cambodia, where canopied jungles provided cover from air attacks and concealment for camps.
The U.S. Air Force had struck the trail since 1965, to little avail. The CIA had been fighting a secret war, alongside Laotian paramilitary fighters, using the tribesmen’s knowledge of the steep terrain and dense forests. They sought to sever the trail, with little success. American war planes had been bombing the Communists’ Cambodian encampments for months. Returning pilots reported that they were blowing holes in the jungle, which seemed an apt image for the air war. The U.S. embassy had no ambassador or CIA officers in Cambodia, so information on what was happening there was scant.
The Ho Chi Minh Trail might have looked like nothing more than a network of primitive footpaths, but it proved to be one of the most potent factors in the war. To sever the trail, and kill the enemy soldiers who traveled on it, American aircraft would have to drop many more bombs in disguised raids beyond the battlefronts of Vietnam, the CIA would have to step up paramilitary missions in Laos, and Communist camps in Cambodia would have to be attacked with ground troops.
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Nixon’s decisions balanced on a knife edge. He could make tangible military gains on the battlefront at an incalculable political cost on the home front. There would be hell to pay if Congress and the American people found out that the war was being fought far beyond the borders of Vietnam.
“We have the following problem,” Kissinger told President Nixon on January 26, 1970. “The North Vietnamese are building up a large concentration in Northern Laos. There are 14,000 troops.” But, Kissinger warned, “we have not used B-52s in Northern Laos before. There were no targets there.”
“What if it comes out?” Nixon asked. Then he answered his own question: “Fighting the war in Laos … that’s the problem.”
Nonetheless, Nixon approved B-52 strikes on February 17. U.S. Air Force bomb-damage assessment teams reported the next day that the dead were too many to count; drinking water was scarce for many square miles as “rotting cadavers had contaminated the region’s streams.” Thousands of soldiers and villagers died; a biblical flood of refugees walked many miles from their homes seeking food, water, and shelter. But “the bombing was basically ineffectual,” said Charles E. Rushing, then the political counselor at the American embassy in Laos. Though the Communists suffered “stunning casualties,” Rushing remembered, “it didn’t stop them.”
The American press in Saigon quickly reported the attack, citing Pentagon sources. Nixon’s wrath at this leak was immense; he tongue-lashed Admiral Moorer, the incoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The president was so angry that the admiral feared Nixon would never authorize another carpet bombing. He was dead wrong.
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One secret stayed secret during 1970: Kissinger’s private negotiations in Paris with Le Duc Tho, a senior leader of the Politburo of North Vietnam, which had accepted the American proposal for clandestine peace talks. No one in the Nixon administration outside the president, Kissinger, and a handful of aides was aware that these meetings, held at a villa outside Paris, were taking place—not the secretary of defense, not the secretary of state, not the director of central intelligence.
Le Duc Tho became, through these talks, the chief representative of North Vietnam after the death of Ho Chi Minh. He was fifty-nine years old, white-haired, black-suited, battle-hardened. He had been a revolutionary for forty years, serving as a soldier, a politician, and a diplomat. On February 21 he made the most straightforward declaration to Kissinger that would take place during their talks, which would continue for three more years.
“In this war we have had many hardships,” Tho said. “But we have won the war. You have failed.”
Kissinger was shocked. “What?” he sputtered.
“We have won the war,” Tho repeated. “You have lost the war, the longest and most costly in your history. This is not just our own view. Americans also think that.”
“If you prolong the war, we have to continue to fight,” he told Kissinger. “If you intensify the war in South Vietnam, if you even resume bombing North Vietnam, we are prepared. We are determined.”
“This is our iron will,” he said. “We have been fighting for 25 years, the French and you. You wanted to quench our spirit with bombs and shells. But they cannot force us to submit. You have threatened us many times.… President Nixon also threatens us.”
“You talk a great deal about peace,” Tho said. “President Nixon talks about peace.… You talk peace, but you make war.”
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The president led a full-scale National Security Council conclave at the White House on February 27. The war council resembled a game of liar’s poker.*
“I want to run through the Laos situation,” Nixon said. “There are no present plans to put in troops.” Laird corrected that misstatement: “We do insert some from time to time on the Ho Chi Minh trail,” he said, referring to highly classified operations that Congress had unearthed but not disclosed.
“That is all right,” Nixon said. “We bomb the Ho Chi Minh trail and we will continue to do so. I say that categorically.”
But the question of combat operations in Laos remained. “Have we lost anybody there?” Nixon asked. Helms replied, “Five CIA men have died; four in helicopters shot down and one by accident.” This was a major misrepresentation of the human costs of the secret war.
The president asked Laird about the level of American bombing in Laos; Nixon did not have the facts at hand. The defense secretary said the number of tactical air raids by fighter-bombers had increased fourfold from 1968 and now stood at 3,428 a month, at a cost of two billion dollars a year.
“We don’t have to stop,” Nixon said. “I don’t care what they say.… There is no problem about getting into a deeper involvement in Laos.”
The president turned to Rogers: “Where do we stand?” he asked him.
“We are heading to a serious problem with Congress,” said the secretary of state. “They are looking for an issue, and this is it. They see in it a repetition of Vietnam. A replay in escalation is occurring. Our sorties have been doubled. B-52 strikes have taken place.”
“We have refused to make anything public,” Rogers said. “How can I defend keeping this secret?”
Mitchell argued against any testimony to Congress: “That just opens Pandora’s box,” he said.
Laird offered a compromise: a presidential statement on the extent of the American war in Laos. “How we handle this is a major issue of credibility of this Administration,” he said. “If we tell a good story here it will quiet down. Why hide everything?”
“We must lay it out,” the president concurred. “There are no ground forces, and there will be none without going to Congress.… We must write in a simple way. There is a lot of confusion on this. I don’t want any questions left.”
After the NSC meeting broke up, Kissinger warned Nixon that it would be difficult to “lay it out” in “a simple way,” given the long and deadly history of covert American operations in Laos. But Nixon waved him off.
“We won’t mention that,” he told Kissinger. “I’ll have to fuzz their capacity. Non-combative and none killed.” Winston Lord, newly appointed as Kissinger’s special assistant, was assigned to draft the presidential white paper on Laos. Kissinger vetted it. On March 6, 1970, President Nixon released it from the Florida White House in Key Biscayne.
“There was a phrase in that paper that no American had ever been killed in combat in Laos over the previous 20 years or so,” Lord remembered. This was an utter falsehood, which Lord blamed on the CIA. But responsibility for this lie ultimately lay with Nixon, who had decided to “fuzz” the issue, and with Kissinger, who knew better.
“I knew it wasn’t true,” Kissinger told Haldeman on March 9. “The President should have never made the statement.”
The truth was that, at that time, American casualties in Laos totaled close to three hundred soldiers, airmen, covert operations officers, and civilian support staff killed, captured, or missing.
America’s secret war in Laos involved a multitude of CIA officers commanding tribal warriors, a chain of CIA civilian contractors who saw combat, and special operations soldiers who planted motion-detecting sensors where they thought the North Vietnamese would be coming south. And, lost to memory, “a lot of very young and very able Air Force officers” were assigned to attack enemy convoys along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, as Kissinger’s trusted aide John Holdridge later recounted. “A lot of these poor guys got shot down, and nobody seems know what happened to them. Out of all the POWs or people who were MIAs I think we only recovered a handful, 10 or 12, something like that, from Laos.”
“The rest just disappeared,” he said. “This is one of the great tragedies of the whole war.”
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Kissinger returned to Paris on March 16 to resume his secret talks with Le Duc Tho. This time he delivered a clear warning that the war might intensify to include American attacks on Communist troops and camps in Cambodia.
“We regard the presence of non–South Vietnamese forces in sanctuaries in neighboring countries as having a direct impact on the war and as being part of the problem—particularly those in camps along and near the borders of South Vietnam,” Kissinger said. The American negotiating position now included a demand that “all the bases in Cambodia and Laos along the frontier and the infiltration trails should be closed.”
Tho was defiant. “It is our firm conviction that so long as you prolong and intensify the war, you will meet defeat,” he said. “If you failed in Laos and Vietnam, how can you succeed in Cambodia?”
President Nixon answered with brute force.