“We won the war in Vietnam, but we lost the peace,” Nixon wrote in No More Vietnams. The Paris Accords depended on “a credible threat of renewed American bombing of North Vietnam.” Congress, however, “destroyed our ability to enforce the peace agreement, through legislation prohibiting the use of American military power in Indochina.”1
So why did he invite Congress to do just that? The explanations Nixon gave don’t quite add up. In his memoirs, he wrote that “it seemed clear that another cutoff bill would be proposed and that I could not win these battles forever.”2
It didn’t seem that way to two of his most experienced vote counters, Ford and Mel Laird, the former defense secretary who had moved to the White House as counselor for domestic affairs. Laird had spent eight terms in the House representing Wisconsin; Ford had led all of Nixon’s previous fights in the House against legislation that would “tie his hands” in Vietnam. These were men who knew the House, and they said that this was a battle Nixon could win.
The night before Nixon offered to let Congress “tie his hands,” June 28, 1973, Kissinger asked Laird whether the administration had to accept a congressional ban on American military action in all of Indochina. The answer was no. Ford had told him the House would stand firm behind limiting the ban to Cambodia and would not impose it until August 15. Kissinger’s secretaries transcribed this phone conversation.3 It’s clear that Laird and Ford thought Nixon had the votes he needed.
Doves had hoped to force Nixon to accept a Cambodian bombing ban with a hardball legislative move. They attached the ban as an amendment onto a continuing resolution, a measure that was needed to avoid a government shutdown since Congress hadn’t passed all the necessary appropriations bills. The Wall Street Journal went so far as to call one such measure passed on June 26 “a practically veto-proof prohibition against continued U.S. bombing in Cambodia and Laos.”4 The Journal was wrong. Nixon vetoed the allegedly veto-proof measure, and Congress sustained him.5
Like Ford and Laird, the New York Times found that Nixon had the votes he needed to win: “There was a majority of votes in both Houses of Congress to attach amendments cutting off bombing funds to fiscal measures that the government needs to continue operating into the new fiscal year starting Sunday. But Congress did not have the two-thirds vote necessary to override presidential vetoes of these measures.”6
While neither the vote-counting experts nor the votes themselves back up Nixon’s claim that he had no choice, he does get support from an unlikely corner: the liberals who thought he would never let Saigon fall. Daniel Ellsberg explains:
Mort Halperin has pointed out to me that without the challenge of Watergate hanging over him, Nixon could almost surely have mustered the one-third-plus-one votes he needed to defeat a congressional attempt to override his veto, in a situation in which he could claim to be “enforcing a signed agreement” by bombing.… But with the [Sen. Sam] Ervin [D-North Carolina] hearings [by the Senate Watergate Committee] approaching, and [former White House counsel John] Dean’s testimony on Nixon’s own obstruction of justice impending, Nixon could not afford to use up political capital peeling off votes against bombing when he would need every vote he could get to fight off impeachment. Therefore, in June Nixon reluctantly reached a deal with both houses whereby all bombing would be ended on August 15. Probably most members of Congress thought of this as affecting only the bombing of Cambodia, which went on openly until that deadline.7
This explanation misreads both the politics and the timing. Nixon not only could sustain a veto after the Senate Watergate hearings and John Dean’s televised testimony, he did. The hearings began in May 1973, Dean testified on June 25 and 26, Nixon vetoed the Cambodia-only bombing ban on June 27, and the House sustained his veto later that day. Also, contrary to Ellsberg’s surmise, the House and Senate debate makes it clear that lawmakers knew the combat ban they voted for on June 29 applied to all of Indochina—it’s why they were baffled at Nixon’s suggestion. The biggest problem with the dove explanation, however, is the notion that the Vietnam issue would deplete Nixon’s political capital. He had just ridden the issue to a landslide victory. He had beaten McGovern’s withdrawal deadline legislation—and then beaten McGovern himself—by successfully charging that a vote for either was a vote for surrender and defeat. He could have made the same charge against any bill banning the use of American airpower in Vietnam and beaten it, too.
Instead, he chose not to fight a battle he could win. Why not?