“We’ve had another very major development,” Kissinger reported to the president on October 26, 1972, “which we haven’t had a chance to brief you on.”
“Oh. OK. Fine.”
“Uh,” Kissinger said. And. Paused. For. Five. Seconds. “Uh, [North Vietnam] has gone public.” Radio Hanoi was broadcasting the terms of the settlement. The Communists claimed that “so-called” difficulties with Saigon were just an American excuse to postpone peace. “And they demand that we sign it by October 31st as we have promised.”
Nixon refrained from blowing up. He already knew; Ehrlichman had told him. Not that Nixon mentioned that. He let Kissinger squirm a little. The president asked, “Well, what do we have to do?”
“Well, what I thought I’d have to do is—”
“Brief?”
“—brief this morning.”
They had decided this in advance, but now, with Kissinger about to enter the spotlight on the biggest issue of the campaign, the president acted hesitant. “Well, now wait a minute. Let’s just think what we’re doing. What’s the purpose of the briefing?” asked Nixon. “That we set it straight?”
Kissinger auditioned. He rehearsed what he would say to the press. Nixon fed him lines to use: “We shall never agree to imposing a Communist government on the people of South Vietnam.” “The important thing is not whether it comes before or after the election, but that it be the right agreement.” “We are not going to have the sacrifices of the American people to prevent the imposition of a Communist government in South Vietnam [unclear] to have been in vain.”
“I’d just give them a little of that purple rhetoric if you could,” the president said. If they asked about the bombing, Nixon suggested saying, “ ‘You will note, gentlemen, we are continuing the mining.’ I’d put that in.”
“What I wanted to ask you, Mr. President, is, should I say that we offered to have one more meeting with them to clean up the text, and that then we would reduce the bombing?”
“No. No, no, no.” Reports that Nixon had scaled back the bombing to the twentieth parallel were “harmful,” the president said. “Don’t say it publicly. It’ll kill us, utterly kill us.”
“All right,” said Kissinger.
“It’s very, very bad,” said Nixon. “You could be conciliatory toward Hanoi, but I would treat McGovern and his people with utter contempt.”
“Oh, yes,” said Kissinger. (He would neither attack the Democrat nor so much as mention his existence. This was Kissinger’s moment in the spotlight; he would appear to be above politics.)
“Incidentally, you going to let television cover you?” Nixon asked, as if it were up to Kissinger. For four years the White House had kept his voice off the airwaves as much as possible. The stated reason was that no one knew how a German accent would go down with Middle Americans who remembered World War II (or World War I).
“What do you think?” asked Kissinger.
“I would,” said Nixon. “It doesn’t bother you, does it, the television?”
“No.”1
By 11:30 a.m. every seat in the White House Press Room was filled. Overflow reporters crowded the aisles, lined the walls, hunched over the platform at the foot of the podium. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Kissinger said. “It is obvious that a war that has been raging for 10 years is drawing to a conclusion.” He was clearly new at this. His tie hung off-center. He licked his lips. Even worse, he kept clearing his throat every few seconds, with a sound like he was stretching out the last two letters of Bach’s name: ccchhhh. “The President thought that it might be helpful if I came out here and spoke to you about what we have been doing, where we stand, and to put the various—ccchhhhh—allegations and charges into perspective. Ccchhhh. We believe that peace is at hand. Ccchhhh.”
He touched every base. He mentioned that Hanoi had dropped its demand for a coalition government. He explained away South Vietnam’s resistance to signing, saying, “It is inevitable that in a war of such complexity that there should be occasional difficulties in reaching a final solution.” He ran through the provisions, highlighting the popular ones (release of the POWs, ceasefire, American withdrawal), glossing over the less popular ones (North Vietnamese military and political control over parts of the South came out as: “the existing authorities with respect to both internal and external politics would remain in office”), and managing to keep a straight face through the ones that were purely for show (“there is an affirmation of general principles guaranteeing the right of self-determination of the South Vietnamese people and that the South Vietnamese people should decide their political future through free and democratic elections.… [T]he [tripartite election commission] would operate on the basis of unanimity.… [T]hey agree to refrain from using the territory of Cambodia and the territory of Laos to encroach on the sovereignty and security of other countries.… [F]oreign countries shall withdraw their forces from Laos and Cambodia”). He spoke vaguely of America contributing to the reconstruction of Indochina but assiduously avoided the word that Nixon used in private, “reparations.” He denied political considerations.
Reporters questioned the timing, so close to Election Day. What assurances could Kissinger give that the deal would not fall apart after the voting?
“Ccchhhh. We can only give the assurance of our record. We have conducted these negotiations for four years—ccchhhhh—and we have brought them to this point with considerable difficulties and with considerable anguish,” Kissinger said. “And we cannot control if people believe or if people choose to assert that this is simply some trick.”
Question: “Did President Thieu go along with this whole deal?”
“The South Vietnamese agreed with many parts of it and disagree with some aspects of it,” Kissinger said. “And we agreed with some of their disagreement and not with all.”
Question: “What are the main differences between Saigon and Washington now?”
“No useful purpose would be served—ccchhhhh—by going into the details of consultations that are still in process.”
Question: “What concessions did the United States make to get this agreement?”
“The United States made the concessions that are described in the agreement,” Kissinger said. He also answered a question that no one had asked: “There are no secret side agreements of any kind.”2
The three networks literally raced to air Kissinger’s words. CBS had the technological edge: an innovative, miniaturized camera that electronically transferred visual images onto magnetic tape and weighed only sixty pounds. Once a tape was full, a motorcyclist rushed it from the White House to the network studio. CBS managed to get Kissinger’s press conference on the air a mere twenty-five minutes after he finished speaking, while ABC and NBC were still developing their film. All the networks ran specials on the announcement. ABC’s was titled “Peace Is at Hand.”3 The stock market took wing. Newsweek would place a picture of a soldier on its cover, his helmet emblazoned “Goodbye Vietnam.”4
Shortly before midnight, Kissinger’s phone rang.
“Mr. President?”
“Well, Henry, I understand that all the three news shows were about Vietnam then. I wonder why.”
“Heh-heh. Well, Colson called me and he thinks that we’ve wiped McGovern out now.”
“Did he really?” Nixon had complained to Haldeman about Kissinger’s performance: “The P felt that we were getting the wrong twist on this, and that K was getting the play, and that the announcement had been blown, where the P had hoped that he could go before the nation and make the announcement.”5
Kissinger asked about the president’s campaign rallies in West Virginia and Kentucky. “Good god, they practically [took] the roof off,” recalled Nixon. “I suppose the problem we’ve got, which we have to bear in mind, is that it’s just a week early.” He recalled the last week of the previous campaign. “You remember in ’68, after Johnson announced a bombing halt, Thieu blew it.”
“Yeah.”
“Blew the whistle.”
“He hasn’t blown the whistle this time,” Kissinger said. “You got a good reaction.”
Laughing, Nixon said, “Of course, the point is, they think you’ve got peace.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s what they think, but that’s all right. Let them think it.”
“Essentially true, Mr. President.”6
As soon as he hung up, Nixon called Chuck Colson.
“Well, you’ve had quite a full day, Mr. President.”
“I was going to say we sort of knocked Watergate out tonight, didn’t we?” asked the president.
The operative chuckled. “Well, the beauty of it was that the North Vietnamese put it out,” said Colson. “We look tough and hard-line and the North Vietnamese look like they’re coming to us.” And “old George McGovern” looked like he had “a very bad case of indigestion.”7
McGovern had been primed to attack if Nixon agreed to a coalition government. That would have given him the golden opportunity to say that the White House could have achieved as much four years earlier. Now that the world knew that Hanoi had dropped the coalition demand, McGovern faltered.
Rather than question the settlement terms, McGovern expressed “my hope and my prayer that these reports will turn out to be true.”8 He told reporters, “Whatever their motives, if the administration can bring off a settlement of this war, they’ll have my full support and cooperation in any effort that can lead to peace.”9
At the University of Iowa, the Democrat compared the settlement to the 1954 Geneva Accords. In that earlier agreement, Ho Chi Minh committed to withdraw his armed forces from the South and did so. He also agreed to submit to a nationwide election to choose a government for all of Vietnam. (American observers predicted that Ho would win that election as the leader of the victorious anti-French revolution; when Saigon’s leaders refused to take part in such a vote, President Eisenhower sided with them.) With a ceasefire-in-place and elections that would occur only if Communists and anti-Communists agreed unanimously on how to run them, the terms Kissinger outlined were blatantly inferior to those of the Geneva Accords. When McGovern said that the terms Nixon had agreed to “are very similar to those that the French accepted back in 1954,” he probably didn’t mean it as extravagant praise.10 What he did mean, however, was not clear.
McGovern repeated his rhetorical questions from before Kissinger’s press conference—somewhat less effectively, now that the nation knew the answers the White House was giving: “What did either we or the rest of the world gain by the killing of another 20,000 young Americans these past four years?” For one thing, Hanoi’s agreement to drop its demand for a coalition government. One could argue that the settlement would lead to resumed warfare between North and South, that the latter was much more likely to lose thanks to the requirement for complete withdrawal of American forces, and that Nixon’s terms were, therefore, even worse than a coalition government. But McGovern did not make this case.11
Colson reviewed McGovern’s performance for Nixon: “When he was asked about it, God, he looked—he looked pretty feeble.”
With a few hours of perspective, Nixon concluded, “It’s better that Henry announced this than I did.”
“Yes.”
“If I’d done it, it’d look like I was doing it as an election trick,” said Nixon.
“Henry is not looked upon as a political fellow at all,” said Colson. “I mean, he’s looked upon as a professor, really. And more than that now. A great deal more than that now.”12
Conservatives showered Kissinger with praise. The intellectual Right, in the form of William F. Buckley’s brother James, a United States senator elected by New York in 1970 on the Conservative Party line, called to wish Kissinger “the Nobel Peace Prize.”
“I don’t know, but I think we’re going to make it,” said Kissinger.
“May I assume that what has been done will not pull any rugs out from [under] any regime?” Buckley asked.
“Absolutely, totally, 100 percent.”
“Great,” said Buckley.13
The moderate Right, in the form of UN ambassador George H. W. Bush, called to profess “adulation, I’m in your fan club.”14
The populist Right, in the form of Gov. Ronald Reagan, called to quip, “Henry, Nancy and I were thinking of taking a few days off for a little rest and we’ve always wanted to see Hanoi. Would it be all right to leave, say, Sunday?”
Kissinger laughed.
“Listen, this was just wonderful,” said Reagan.
Kissinger placed the blame for reports of a coalition government on “the liberal press.”
“Well, then, there’s nothing to all these stories that he is sitting there balking?” asked Reagan.
“Well, he is going through a complicated maneuver trying to prove to his people that he’s not an American stooge,” said Kissinger.
“Uh-huh, yeah.” During the press conference, Reagan had been at a television station where “they had some prisoner of war wives who were watching, and I went in and spoke to them, and saw them, and I want to tell you, they were smiling through tears.” Even a TV crew guy (“I’m quite sure a Democrat”) said Kissinger was brilliant. Reagan seconded that assessment.
Kissinger thanked him: “It was the support of people like you in the dark periods that made it possible.”15
For conservatives, it was a time for choosing. If they chose to believe Kissinger, then they could see themselves as strong, firm, steadfast Americans whose support for Nixon and the war had finally been vindicated in the face of all the naysayers. They could be heroes in their own eyes.
But what if the South Vietnamese were right? If conservatives listened to the people they longed to think they were saving, then they’d have to see themselves in terms they despised—as people who had supported a president who had waged a no-win war until a politically convenient time arrived to sell out an ally.
The Democrats were hardly more reserved with their praise for Kissinger. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, who had labored in vain for years to pass a bill forcing Nixon to bring the troops home, said, “I thought you did a magnificent job.”
“Aren’t you nice!” said Kissinger.
“Is the president in Saigon the roadblock?”
“No,” said Kissinger.16
McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser to JFK and LBJ, said, “I think what you’ve done so far as it goes is magnificent. I just hope the next few steps turn out to be workable.”
“Well, you know, we are dealing with two maniacal Vietnamese parties.”
“I know it,” said Bundy.17
At a press conference, Sen. Hubert Humphrey tossed aside a question about the settlement’s effect on Democrats with words Nixon could only welcome: “Any loss of votes is better than a loss of life.” If the president could make peace, Humphrey said, “he’ll have my praise and my thanks.”18
The so-called liberal news media, in the form of James “Scotty” Reston, New York Times columnist and primus inter pundits, glowed: “Well, your country owes you a great debt, Henry.”
“Well, you’re a good friend,” Kissinger replied; “it’s really meant a lot to me.”19
Someone at the Associated Press dug up Kissinger’s old Foreign Affairs article from 1969 and noted the resemblance between his proposals then and the settlement he’d described.20 This did not help him extinguish talk of a coalition. The article described “partition”—Communists and anti-Communists governing their own parts of the South, as they would under a ceasefire-in-place—as a form of coalition government.
A formal ceasefire is likely to predetermine the ultimate settlement and tend toward partition. Ceasefire is thus not so much a step toward a final settlement as a form of it.
This is even more true of another staple of the Viet Nam debate: the notion of a coalition government. Of course, there are two meanings of the term: as a means of legitimizing partition, indeed as a disguise for continuing the civil war; or as a “true” coalition government attempting to govern the whole country. In the first case, a coalition government would be a facade with non-communist and communist ministries in effect governing their own parts of the country. This is what happened in Laos, where each party in the “coalition government” wound up with its own armed forces and its own territorial administration. The central government did not exercise any truly national functions. Each side carried on its own business—including civil war.21
The AP didn’t mention that Kissinger had once described the division of the South into Communist and Saigon-controlled areas as “a disguise for continuing the civil war,” not peace.22