The University of Virginia’s Miller Center

I learned of Nixon and Kissinger’s exit strategy the slow way. The University of Virginia’s Miller Center has scholars listen to the secret tapes of Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, prepare accurate transcripts, and supply the necessary background so readers and listeners can get the most out of these priceless recordings. My first assignment after joining the Miller Center in 2000 was to start listening to the Nixon tapes from day one and write a summary of every Oval Office conversation for review by an editorial board of eminent historians. Before I moved on to a new assignment, I had heard every Oval Office conversation Nixon held from February 16, 1971, through April 15, 1971—in other words, the conversations quoted and discussed at the beginning of this book.

Listening to the Nixon presidency unfold hour by hour (suppression of evidence was not an option), I couldn’t help but notice Nixon and Kissinger’s “decent interval” exit strategy. At the start of the taping, Nixon sounded optimistic, firm, resolute. “We can lose an election, but we’re not going to lose this war, Henry,” he said on February 18, 1971, when the taping system was still new. But Kissinger revealed how little this meant when he summarized their negotiating strategy a few minutes later. Kissinger planned to meet with Le Duc Tho in the fall of 1971 and “tell him, ‘Look, we’re willing to give you a fixed deadline of total withdrawal next year for the release of all prisoners and a cease-fire.’ What we can then tell the South Vietnamese—they’ve got a year without war to build up.”1 Already they realized that a settlement would not bring peace. It would just provide an interruption to the conflict, “a year without war,” during which Nixon would withdraw the last American troops. This withdrawal would enable Nixon to deny responsibility for losing the war.

In reality, however, the withdrawal would lose the war. The tapes prove that Nixon and Kissinger realized South Vietnam would fall without American troops. Leaving meant losing. They concealed that from the American people, but it was the basis of their military and diplomatic strategy. It was the reason they stretched American military withdrawal out for four years. “We can’t have it knocked over—brutally—to put it brutally—before the election,” as Kissinger put it on March 19, 1971.2 Almost two years before the election, Nixon had decided to bring the last troops home sometime between July 1972 and January 1973. Call it the window of opportunism. He preferred to do it a little before the election; Kissinger, a little bit after, but both were determined to keep American troops in Vietnam long enough to keep the Communists from winning until the election had passed.

Vietnamization was not a strategy Nixon seriously pursued; it was a fraud he perpetrated. He told America that Vietnamization was “a plan in which we will withdraw all of our forces from Vietnam on a schedule in accordance with our program, as the South Vietnamese become strong enough to defend their own freedom.”3 His tapes prove that he didn’t believe this for most of the time he was claiming it in public. His actions speak even louder than his recorded words. By keeping American troops in Vietnam long enough to avoid a preelection defeat, Nixon demonstrated by deed as well as word that he expected Saigon to fall without them.

Out of context, some of Nixon’s public statements about Vietnamization sounded more modest, as when he said it would give Saigon “a chance to avoid a Communist takeover.”4 Technically, a snowball has a chance in hell. In that sense, Nixon’s program also had “a chance.” But by that same standard, Saigon had “a chance” to survive on its own in 1971, 1970, 1969, 1968, 1967, 1966, and 1965, when the first American combat troops arrived. The president’s slipperier public comments don’t relieve him of responsibility for the unambiguous—and false—claims he made:

In Vietnamization we have withdrawn our forces as rapidly as the South Vietnamese could compensate for our presence. But we have not withdrawn them so as to allow the North Vietnamese to impose a political future on the battlefield.…

The fundamental question remains: can the South Vietnamese fully stand on their own against a determined enemy? We—and more importantly the South Vietnamese—are confident that they can.5

A postmodernist or a lawyer might be able to find ambiguities in these statements from Nixon’s February 25, 1971, State of the World report. The words, nevertheless, have a plain meaning. Nixon put it this way on another occasion: “Just as soon as the South Vietnamese are able to defend the country without our assistance, we will be gone.”6 He made a clear public commitment: to keep American troops in South Vietnam until it could defend itself without them, and to bring them home once it could. The truth was that he would keep American troops in South Vietnam until he was sure it wouldn’t fall before Election Day, because he did not believe Vietnamization would make Saigon capable of surviving once he brought them home. His public claims about Vietnamization were not just vague or ambiguous; they were dishonest.