Sixty-Six Percent for Six Months

On May 8, 1972 (the exact date is important), President Nixon bet on a sure thing. In a live national address from the Oval Office, he announced “decisive military action to end the war.” Not only was he sending American bombers to attack military targets in the North, but for the first time, he had ordered the mining of all of its ports.1

“It was a difficult decision,” he wrote in No More Vietnams.2 In the drawer of the desk in his hideaway office was something that made it a lot easier: the results of a secret poll commissioned by the Republican National Committee three years earlier. Nixon had to keep this one secret. No president could afford to admit to having a poll done on how to end a war. Two options were clearly unpopular: pressing on until military victory (37 percent in favor); and agreeing to anything to end the war and quickly withdrawing (30 percent). A third got a bare majority: withdrawing over two years while negotiating (51 percent). The fourth option, however, got a massive majority:

The United States would decide to end the war in Vietnam with a compromise settlement within six months. During those six months, we would try to get the other side to agree to terms that are reasonably favorable to us, such as free elections in South Vietnam under international supervision. To do this we would take necessary military actions, such as [a] blockade of the [North Vietnamese] port of Haiphong and, as a last resort, selective bombing of North Vietnam. No additional U.S. troops would be sent.3

Two out of three respondents—66 percent—were in favor of trying to get a compromise settlement out of the North by bombing and blockading it for six months. That’s why the date is so important. May 8, 1972, was exactly six months—less one single day—before the election. The only difference between the most popular strategy in the poll and the one Nixon actually announced was the substitution of mines for a blockade of the North’s harbors. (Nixon himself called the mining a blockade.)4 The lesson of the poll was that bombing and mining would be very popular for a half year, so Nixon did both during the half-year period when he most wanted popularity, the one right before Election Day.

Needless to say, when Nixon publicly discussed his reasons for giving the order, he never mentioned its surefire popularity. Battlefield necessity was the public rationale he gave on May 8, 1972: “Five weeks ago, on Easter weekend, the Communist armies of North Vietnam launched a massive invasion of South Vietnam.”5 He wasn’t exaggerating. Hanoi had sent every division it had (except for a single reserve) into the South during the Easter Offensive.

The headlines told the story: “Foe Sweeps across DMZ; Saigon Troops Fall Back” (April 2); “Half of Province in South Vietnam Lost to Invaders” (April 3); “N. Viet Invasion Stalls as Allies Launch Huge Counteroffensive” (April 4); “Reds Open Front near Saigon; South Vietnam Fights for Life, Thieu Says” (April 5); “U.S. Sternly Warns Hanoi, Readies New Air Buildup” (April 7); “Laird Confirms U.S. Will Bomb until Reds Withdraw, Negotiate” (April 7).6 At this point, American officials estimated that the total force North Vietnam was fielding in the South numbered 100,000.7 In contrast, South Vietnam’s defense forces had grown, with American training and equipment, to more than a million, giving the South a tenfold numerical advantage. But the headlines failed to reassure: “Key Highlands Base Reported Overrun in a Major Offensive by Enemy Tanks” (April 24); “Saigon’s Forces Flee in Disorder toward Kontum; Dakto Reported Abandoned—B-52’s Pound Enemy to Aid Retreating Troops; Attempt to Regroup; Invaders Have Seized More Than Half of 3 Provinces—4 Die in U.S. Copter” (April 25).8

The Easter Offensive had come as no surprise. The North Vietnamese had launched the Tet Offensive in 1968, when LBJ was presumed to be up for reelection, and Nixon expected them to do something like that in his fourth year, too. Intelligence detected a massive troop buildup weeks in advance of the invasion.9 The American death toll in the first week of the Easter Offensive was the highest in six months: 10 dead, 33 wounded.10

Prior to the invasion, Nixon had turned down the military’s request to launch air attacks on anti-aircraft missile sites, preferring to wait until the offensive started.11 Once it began, however, he authorized air and sea attacks on the North. On April 26, he announced the withdrawal of another 20,000 American soldiers. All he had to say then about the air and naval attacks was that the ones he had already authorized would continue.12

Revealingly, the April 26 speech came nearly three weeks after Nixon had Haig draw up a contingency plan to do what the poll said: bomb all military targets in the North and mine its ports. On April 6, when he gave the general this task, Nixon already had a date in mind: “The president ruled that this plan would go into effect May 8 if ARVN”—the Army of the Republic of [South] Vietnam—“showed signs of breaking under the enemy invasion.”13 The signs were showing well before then, but Nixon held off until his preplanned date.

Between Nixon’s April 26 and May 8 speeches, things got much worse: “Fear of Foe Grips People of Pleiku; Hundreds Try to Flee Town in Highlands Expecting the Enemy to Overrun It Soon” (April 29); “Enemy Artillery Batters Quangtri as Ring Tightens” (April 30); “Thousands Flee Kontum in Panic as Enemy Nears” (May 1); “Loss of Quangtri Province Shakes Vietnam’s Morale” (May 3); “ ‘It’s Everyone for Himself’ As Troops Rampage in Hue” (May 4) (the rampaging troops were South Vietnamese, runaways who abandoned Quangtri without a fight and menaced their own people in the old imperial city of Hue, according to the New York Times, “like armed gangsters—looting, intimidating and firing on those who displeased them”); “Enemy Overruns Base near Pleiku, Killing about 80; South Vietnamese Repulsed in Attempts to Open Roads to Anloc and Kontum; Losses Termed Heavy” (May 6).14

With 60,000 American lives at stake, the president told the nation on May 8, “I therefore concluded that Hanoi must be denied the weapons and supplies it needs to continue the aggression.” This, he said, was the purpose of bombing and mining the North: to turn the tide of battle in the South by separating the invaders from their supply of arms.15 Nixon later wrote, “Our best chance of halting the invasion was to take decisive action to stop the shipment of these supplies.”16

Within the White House, the president gave aides a different rationale. Hitting the North would improve morale in the South, he said, and also improve the American position at the negotiating table. Also, it polled very well. “When they see the enemy invading, the American people support the use of airpower to get Hanoi/Haiphong by 70 percent,” Nixon told Haig six days before he announced the bombing and mining. “We polled the goddamn thing. They don’t give a shit about negotiations. They don’t care.” They didn’t even care about the nuclear arms limitation treaty he was going to sign in Moscow in a few weeks. Domestic political considerations, the president said, were “the least important, but not to be overlooked.” Nixon mentioned one more consideration—getting good press: “Speaking domestically, too, at least when you hit the sons of bitches there, that is the news for two or three days, rather than what the enemy’s doing.”

“That’s right,” said Haig.17

To the people who answered the pollsters’ questions, bombing the North sounded like a great idea. General Abrams, however, objected so strongly that he took a step that ultimately cost him his command of the American armed forces in Vietnam. At the time that Nixon wanted to divert American airpower to the North, thirteen of Hanoi’s fourteen army divisions were already in the South, threatening to overthrow the government. Abrams was using the B-52s to stop them. Even if Nixon’s plan to bomb the North slowed the flow of supplies, it would take some time before it had an impact on the battlefields of the South. In April and May 1972, Abrams needed American airpower in South Vietnam to avert imminent disaster. As he put it, the president sent the B-52s “away hunting rabbits while the backyard filled with lions.” When Nixon ordered a B-52 strike on Hanoi and Haiphong in the first week of May, Abrams did an extraordinary thing. The general overrode the president, saying the bombers were needed in the South to defend its army: “We must stay with them at this critical time and apply the airpower where the immediate effect is greatest.”18 Countermanding an order by the commander in chief was a sign of how seriously Abrams viewed the threat to the South—and the importance he placed on American airpower to ensure its survival.

“Abrams flatly refused to go until I ordered him to do it,” Nixon complained to Kissinger.

“Every B-52 strike in the North you’ve rammed down their throats,” said Kissinger. “They didn’t want to do it. We’ve had to order it from here against cables from the Air Force and Abrams telling us not to do it.”19

The president responded by recalling the general from Vietnam.20 “This business of having orders countermanded has got to stop,” said Nixon. “We’ve got to get him out of there.”21 The president moved quickly but quietly, kicking Abrams upstairs to Army chief of staff.

All this may come as a surprise to readers of Lewis Sorley’s A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam. In that work, Sorley casts Abrams as an admirer of Nixon’s bombing of the North. Sorley quotes Abrams as saying: “On this question of the B-52s and the tac air, it’s very clear to me that—as far as my view on this is concerned—that this government would now have fallen, and this country would now be gone, and we wouldn’t be meeting here today, if it hadn’t been for the B-52s and the tac air. There’s absolutely no question about it.”22 Sorley took this quote so far out of context as to make the general’s position appear to be the opposite of what it actually was. It wasn’t until Sorley’s next book, Vietnam Chronicles: The Abrams Tapes 1968–1972, that he put the quote back in its original context: the general was talking about the importance and effectiveness of American airpower he deployed on the battlefields of South Vietnam, not in the North.23 Sorley has written three books on Abrams, including a full-fledged biography, Thunderbolt: General Creighton Abrams and the Army of His Times. Oddly, none of them mentions that Nixon removed Abrams from command, even though this was a pivotal moment in the general’s career and life.

The White House cast the invasion as a test of whether Vietnamization had made the South Vietnamese strong enough to stand on their own.24 Nixon downplayed the American ground role to the point of denial. “There are no United States ground troops involved. None will be involved,” said Nixon on April 26; he restated this claim on May 8: “The role of the United States in resisting this invasion has been limited to air and naval strikes on military targets in North and South Vietnam.”

Not so. American advisers were embedded with South Vietnamese troops. Abrams saw their ground role as essential to his use of American airpower against the North Vietnamese army. A B-52 needs something to bomb. In the Easter Offensive, that meant that the North Vietnamese had to be gathered in sufficiently large numbers and sufficiently dense concentrations to make a “lucrative target.” The way the advisers did that was by giving the North Vietnamese their own “lucrative target”—large numbers of South Vietnamese troops in one place. “Unless the ARVN [South Vietnamese] forces hold on the ground and generate lucrative targets, U.S. and VNAF [South Vietnamese] air power cannot achieve their full effectiveness,” Abrams said.25 The South “Vietnamese, some numbers of them, had to stand and fight. If they didn’t do that, ten times the air we’ve got wouldn’t have stopped them.”26 American advisers used their influence to get the South Vietnamese to stand their ground—and they let reporters know that this remained a challenge.27 Another, equally crucial role of the advisers was coordinating air support—that is, once the North Vietnamese had massed into “lucrative targets,” the advisers told the B-52s where to find them. Abrams considered the advisers crucial to the South’s survival through the Easter Offensive. “Meeting briefly with Vice President [Spiro] Agnew at Tan Son Nhut Airport on 17 May, he observed that if the South Vietnamese rank and file had fought well when properly led, there were, to his mind, only ten generals in the country who were earning their pay,” wrote the military historian William Hammond. “Under those circumstances, the presence of American advisers on the battlefield and the application of unrestricted American air power had been critical in the days following the enemy’s offensive.”28

If it sounds like the South Vietnamese were being used as bait, this approach was originally developed at Khe Sanh in 1968 using American Marines in that role. John Randolph described the tactical breakthrough to readers of the June 30, 1968, Los Angeles Times:

The biggest single tactical problem the allied forces have had in Vietnam is to get the enemy to concentrate in large numbers and then to stay concentrated until allied air and artillery power can hit him.

The idea behind defending Khe Sanh then was that if its Marine garrison looked enough like “bait,” the enemy might concentrate large forces near the base in hopes of storming it, thus making themselves a fat target for air and artillery attacks.

This was a sound idea, and in the end worked out almost as hoped for in the beginning—with a punishing defeat for the Communists.29

Hanoi took the bait, concentrating at least two divisions outside the garrison. The North lost an estimated 2,600 soldiers during the siege. Most died in air strikes. At the same time, almost 300 American Marines died. “It was a definite allied victory,” according to the Times.30 In the Easter Offensive, when Abrams applied this tactic, South Vietnamese troops accounted for the great majority of allied casualties, but the North Vietnamese once again took many times more.

In No More Vietnams, Nixon presented the South Vietnamese performance in the Easter Offensive as proof positive that Vietnamization worked. He pulled a few fast ones.

In the spring offensive of 1972, South Vietnam’s army had held off the North Vietnamese onslaught without the assistance of any American ground combat troops. [American advisers were ground troops, but technically not combat troops, despite their crucial combat role.] Our senior military commanders in Vietnam and Washington unanimously agreed that the South Vietnamese Army had proved that, if properly equipped and led, it could hold its own against North Vietnam’s best troops. [Abrams made it clear that they were “properly … led” by American advisers, not so much by South Vietnamese generals.]

We can never know whether the South Vietnamese could have won without the assistance of American air power. [Abrams saw the aerial assault on the North’s troops in the South as “the only factor which has prevented a major debacle,” and most other observers agreed.] But we know for certain that we could not have won with our air power alone. [Air power required “lucrative targets,” and creating those targets required “bait” on the ground.] Vietnamization had worked. Our ally had stopped the spring offensive on the ground [that is, the South Vietnamese stayed in one place long enough for the North Vietnamese to form bomb-able concentrations around them] and our bombing had crushed it.31

“American air power inflicted the vast majority of North Vietnamese casualties during the Easter Offensive,” Stephen Randolph—a retired Air Force colonel and fighter pilot who at the time of this writing heads the State Department’s Office of the Historian—wrote in Powerful and Brutal Weapons: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Easter Offensive. “All observers acknowledged the critical role of American advisors, both in solidifying South Vietnamese forces and as conduits to U.S. air and naval power; it was unclear whether the South Vietnamese could perform these functions effectively once the advisors were withdrawn.”32

In other words, the Easter Offensive was no true test of whether the South could survive without American soldiers at their side. The American advisers played two crucial roles in the South’s survival at that time, but if Nixon wanted to get a settlement with a ceasefire or just to get the POWs released, he would have to withdraw all of the advisers.

The successes of Operation Linebacker (the code name for the May 8 bombing campaign) are famous; its failures, little known. Linebacker produced results. It made real progress toward the goal of choking off the flow of arms and supplies from North to South. It just didn’t come anywhere close to achieving it.

The successes were spectacular. The mining (Operation Pocket Money) closed Haiphong completely. Not one ship entered or left the harbor once the mines became active. Linebacker closed rail lines carrying supplies from China. It destroyed the North’s small industrial base and knocked out 70 percent of its electrical grid in a couple of months. The statistics were impressive. “For six months,” Nixon wrote, “waves of B-52s and F-4s dropped more than 155,000 tons of bombs.” Naval bombardment added another 16,000 tons. American air and sea operations cut the flow of Communist supplies in half, and then some.33 Nixon imposed a high price on Hanoi.

Not high enough, however, to accomplish the mission. “By November,” he wrote, “we succeeded in crippling North Vietnam’s military effort.”34 Not even close. After four months of bombing and mining the North, the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessed the impact it was having on Hanoi’s troops in the South. DIA and CIA analysts reached the same conclusion: the North could keep on fighting in the South at its current level even if Nixon continued the bombing and mining for another two years.35 Both intelligence agencies agreed that Linebacker had succeeded in hitting its military targets, the New York Times reported, but “it had failed to meaningfully slow the flow of men and equipment to South Vietnam.”36

The bottom line: for Hanoi to sustain both its economy and the war effort, it needed to import 2,700 metric tons of supplies per day. With its main port closed and Linebacker hitting military targets daily, the North still managed to import 3,000 metric tons per day. In other words, according to the CIA’s figures, even with the bombing and mining, Hanoi got 300 more metric tons of supplies per day than were strictly necessary.37

The bombing and mining were tactical successes but strategic failures. They weren’t “crippling” the North, which continued to get more supplies than it needed to continue the fight.38

The strategic failure was predictable—and predicted. Defense Secretary Melvin Laird had warned Kissinger a month in advance that bombing the North would not do the job. Effective interdiction required striking at the source of supplies, Laird wrote on April 6; hitting the distribution system alone wouldn’t cut it. The problem was that Hanoi’s supplies were produced in the USSR and China—two places Nixon wasn’t about to bomb. With the sources of supplies off-limits, Laird wrote, Nixon could only strike at a “diverse and diffused distribution system. The North Vietnamese have demonstrated consistently the ability to substitute new distribution mechanisms for any that are temporarily interdicted.”39

“If the enemy had one Achilles heel,” wrote Nixon in No More Vietnams, “it was his supply system.”40 Hanoi’s ability to move supplies by truck, boat, cart, and foot made its supply lines more like the multiplying heads of the mythical Hydra: cut one off, and two more would take its place.

Internal government doubts about hitting Hanoi went public during the Easter Offensive when Daniel Ellsberg decided to leak NSSM-1.41 Most of the coverage focused on the bombing, the issue of the day. At the start of the Nixon administration, the CIA had warned: “The air war did not seriously affect the flow of men and supplies to Communist forces in Laos and South Vietnam. Nor did it significantly erode North Vietnam’s military defense capability or Hanoi’s determination to persist in the war.”42 The State and Defense Departments agreed with the CIA, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff and General Abrams said bombing the North had been effective during the Johnson years.43 On April 25, 1972, Sen. Mike Gravel, D-Alaska, tried to enter fifty pages of the study into the Congressional Record, saying it proved the president was “pursuing a reckless, futile, immoral policy which he knows will not work.”44

Since bombing wouldn’t work, Laird suggested that the president use his influence with Hanoi’s sources in Beijing and Moscow. Nixon made it sound as if triangular diplomacy had closed the aid spigot when he wrote that Hanoi “asked for increased support from its Communist allies. But Moscow and Peking did not man the battle stations.”45 This is misleading. The North, unlike the South, never asked its allies to man the battle stations; the North Vietnamese could do their own fighting (although Chinese troops did fill support roles in the North, freeing North Vietnamese troops for battle). Neither détente with the Soviets nor rapprochement with the Chinese nor the bombing nor the mining dammed the southward flow of supplies from the North. Hanoi’s official history of the war claimed that the amount of aid it received actually grew: “The volume of military aid shipped to us by land and sea from fraternal socialist countries”—the Chinese and the Soviets—“and the volume of supplies shipped from the North to South Vietnam in 1972 was almost double that shipped in 1971.”46

In No More Vietnams, Nixon characterized the bombing and mining as the war’s “military solution.”47 It was just a political substitute for a military solution.

As much as the May 8 surge failed strategically, it succeeded politically, just as predicted by the secret poll. The pollster Lou Harris reported, “59% of Public Backs Nixon Viet Moves.”48 “The terribly important thing is this,” Nixon told Kissinger on May 19, “that it has generally been getting through here due to the polls and everything else that a solid majority on a magnitude of two- to three-to-one of the American people support what we’ve done. That’s point one.”49

The numbers stayed golden for the six promised months. “Just got Harris’s data. It’s two-to-one for bombing, two-and-a-half-to-one for bombing,” Nixon told Kissinger on September 8. “They want us to be very, very tough, so right now a settlement isn’t very much in our interest, unless we can get a ceasefire.”50 Nixon didn’t credit his electoral success in 1972 to the summits in Beijing and Moscow. A decade later he was advising President Reagan not to follow in his footsteps by negotiating nuclear arms deals. Polls showed that military action boosts a president’s popularity more than diplomacy, Nixon advised Reagan (apparently having overcome his fear that Reagan would blow up the world). After meeting with Reagan in the White House, Nixon dictated a memo: “I pointed out that many people felt my popularity had gone up because of my trip to China. In fact, it had improved only slightly. What really sent it up was the bombing and mining of Haiphong.”51 China and SALT disarmed his critics, but bombs and mines won actual votes.