Nixon spent the next three months trying to get Saigon to shut up and take the deal.
This required extreme measures. South Vietnam rejected the settlement for the same reason that North Vietnam accepted it—because it would lead to Communist victory, as Nixon and Kissinger themselves admitted in candid, private moments.
Ordinary diplomatic pressure wasn’t going to convince the Saigon government to accept a settlement that would lead to its destruction. The day after his landslide, Nixon sent his “get the hell on board” letter to Thieu: “Your continuing distortions of the agreement and attacks upon it are unfair and self-defeating” and “can only undercut our mutual objectives and benefit the enemy.” With the venom came some meager carrots. While Nixon and Kissinger “consider the agreement to be sound,” they would seek further concessions. One they’d already requested: the “de facto unilateral withdrawal of some North Vietnamese divisions in the northern part of your country.” Another would say North and South Vietnamese soldiers “should be demobilized on a one-to-one basis” and return to their homes. (So much for the notion that the North’s troops would “wither away” from the South thanks to settlement language about closing the Ho Chi Minh Trail.) They would clarify that the election commission wasn’t a government at all and remove the embarrassing reference to there being just “three Indochinese countries.”1 They would ask for language saying that both sides would respect the DMZ.
In short, they would make the agreement look better without doing anything that would enable Saigon to survive it.
For Thieu to continue on his present course “would play into the hands of the enemy,” wrote Nixon.2
On November 20, North Vietnamese negotiators returned once more to the white stucco villa in Gif-sur-Yvette to work on what President Nixon called “details.” Saigon wanted sixty-nine changes to the draft, and Kissinger presented them all—including mutual withdrawal of American “and of all other non-South Vietnamese forces.”
Le Duc Tho laughed: “So these are the technical changes, detailed changes, changes of the details?”3
The North Vietnamese still refused even to acknowledge the presence of their armed forces in the South. “These are not changes of details—these are not technical changes but these are political substantive changes. In consequence we will never accept them,” said Le Duc Tho on November 21. Nixon and Kissinger had expected this. On technical issues, details, and rephrasing of the Vietnamese translation, the North Vietnamese showed willingness to negotiate. They accepted some of the proposed changes, none of them substantive. But they reintroduced a major substantive demand: the release of 30,000 civilian prisoners held by Saigon on suspicion of being Communist supporters.4 The November round of negotiations ended with the two sides farther apart than in October.
Before leaving Paris, Kissinger read the North Vietnamese a cable he’d received from Nixon: “Under the circumstances, unless the other side shows the same willingness to be reasonable that we are showing, I am directing you to discontinue the talks and we shall then have to resume military activity until the other side is ready to negotiate.”5 Although framed as an order from the president, the cable arrived in Kissinger’s hands marked “not a directive.”6 It was written for the purpose of threatening Hanoi.
Back in Washington, Nixon and Kissinger tried to resolve the negotiating impasse by threatening its source: Saigon. They asked that Nguyen Phu Duc (who was, basically, the South Vietnamese equivalent of Kissinger) be dispatched to the White House for a briefing on Nixon’s “final position.” Thieu agreed.
Before the two of them confronted Saigon’s emissary in the Oval Office, Kissinger tried to explain away “that interview by that Italian bitch Fallaci.” L’Europa had published an interview by Oriani Fallaci with quotations by Kissinger that seemed to confirm widespread suspicions about Kissinger’s ego—and Nixon-specific suspicions that his subordinate built himself up with the press at the expense of the president. “I have always acted alone,” Kissinger was quoted as saying. “The Americans love this immensely. The Americans love the cowboy who leads the convoy, alone on his horse; the cowboy who comes into town all alone on his horse, and nothing else.”7 In the Oval Office, Kissinger insisted that he had compared Nixon, not himself, to Gary Cooper in High Noon. As for himself: “I’ve never been on a horse in my life.”
Haig escorted Duc in, and Nixon threatened South Vietnam’s life. “I’ve met these past couple of days with the top leaders of the Senate and the House. Not the doves, the hawks. The tough ones,” said the president. Hawks were the conservative Republican and Democratic supporters of the war. If Thieu didn’t take the deal, Nixon said, the hawks would act when Congress convened in January. “Within ten days the Congress will cut off all aid. Economic and military. There’s no question about it. The reason they will do that is not because they are for the Communists,” said Nixon. It was because they were for the settlement he had negotiated with Hanoi. According to Nixon, the hawks unanimously agreed that the settlement reached in October met his goals of a ceasefire, return of the POWs, and, for the South Vietnamese, “the opportunity to determine their own future without having a Communist government imposed upon them against their will.” Staunch supporters of the war—House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford, R-Michigan, Sen. John C. Stennis, D-Mississippi, and Sen. Barry M. Goldwater, R-Arizona, the 1964 Republican presidential nominee Nixon called “Mr. Conservative”—would lead the fight to cut off aid when Congress convened, Nixon warned. “These people are friends of [South] Vietnam,” Nixon said. “I don’t want all your people to have died, 55,000 Americans to have died, for nothing. But on the other hand, I’m simply saying that if the Congress cuts off the pursestrings, we’ve got no choice.”
This was 1972, the year Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather entered American movie theaters and introduced a new line into the popular lexicon: “I’m going to make him an offer he can’t refuse.” Unlike the Mafia don played by Marlon Brando, the president didn’t resort to euphemisms that veiled his meaning. Nixon was explicit: “Without aid, you can’t survive. Understand?”8
Nixon had seen this kind of threat work before on Saigon. He’d taken part in making it. Lyndon Johnson had forced him to after the 1968 election. The day that LBJ found out that Republicans were secretly encouraging the South Vietnamese to boycott the Paris talks, he told the Tuesday Luncheon (his informal war cabinet) that “Nixon will double cross them after November 5.” Three days after the election, Johnson forced Nixon’s hand, subtly threatening to expose the Chennault Affair (“Now I don’t want to say that to the country, because that’s not good”) unless the president-elect joined with the president in issuing an ultimatum to Saigon. The threat in 1968, as in 1972, was a loss of support in Congress. “You won’t have ten men in the Senate support South Vietnam when you come in if these people refuse to go the conference,” Johnson said.9 In 1968, the ultimatum produced immediate results. The circumstances were different then: Johnson and Nixon were just demanding that South Vietnam sit down and talk with the North. In 1972, Nixon was demanding that it accept a settlement that its leaders considered suicide.
The day after Nixon’s Oval Office ultimatum, Duc said to him, “It would be a choice either to die right now or to make a deal which would make us die.”10 The South refused to accept slow death even when threatened with the fast kind.
Nixon hadn’t yet found a way to make the cutoff threat credible. Would congressional hawks really end American aid to Saigon? It would mean taking responsibility for losing the war.