The Columbia History of the Vietnam War

The Second Indochina War—that is, the American war in Vietnam—had been under way for more than a decade when Richard M. Nixon was inaugurated president of the United States on January 20, 1969. He subsequently claimed that he had inherited this ongoing and escalating war from two of his predecessors, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson. Nixon’s claim was only partially correct. Before Kennedy and Johnson’s presidencies, Nixon had been vice president under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose policies by 1956 had helped transform the First Indochina War—which had begun in 1946 during President Harry S. Truman’s first term—into the Second Indochina War. As president, Nixon presided over the last phase of the American war, from 1969 to 1973. He paradoxically both escalated America’s role in the war and withdrew American forces from Vietnam, leaving the Vietnamese with the task of concluding the conflict in a final bloody test of arms and will. The Second Indochina War finally ended on April 30, 1975, when the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN, North Vietnamese Army) and the South Vietnamese insurgent People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF, Vietcong) captured the presidential palace in Saigon, concluding their successful Spring Offensive. Nixon had resigned the presidency eight months earlier in order to avoid impeachment for the crimes of the Watergate break-in, leaving Gerald R. Ford to preside over the fall of South Vietnam.

Between 1953 and 1961, as vice president, Nixon participated in the policymaking meetings of the National Security Council, provided counsel to President Eisenhower when it was requested, and represented the administration’s views to the Congress and public. In 1953 and 1954, he privately gave hawkish advice and publicly championed the Eisenhower government’s rationale for aiding France’s colonial war against the nationalist, Communist-led Vietminh (short for Vietnam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi, or League for the Independence of Vietnam), thus helping to draw the United States more deeply into the quagmire of Vietnam.

On his return to Washington, D.C., on December 23, 1953, from a diplomatic tour of Asia, for example, Nixon explained the need for continuing U.S. military and economic aid to the French: “Why should Americans care what happens one-half way around the world? … If Indochina falls, Thailand is put in an almost impossible position. The same is true of Malaya with its rubber and tin. The same is true of Indonesia. If this whole part of Southeast Asia goes under Communist domination or Communist influence, Japan, who trades and must trade with this area in order to exist, must inevitably be oriented toward the Communist regime.”¹

Nixon’s explanation of why the United States should be in Vietnam was one previously developed in the Truman administration and repeated again, on April 7, 1954, when President Eisenhower used the imagery of falling dominos to describe a chain reaction of losses that would take place after a Communist takeover of Indochina. For the next twenty years, this “domino theory” would serve as the U.S. government’s prime public justification for the American war in Vietnam.²

American policymakers like Nixon sought to police the world in order to maintain a global system compatible with and beneficial to their vision of the “American way of life” and its constituent political, ideological, social, economic, and military parts. Defeat in a Communist-leaning country such as Vietnam, they feared, could trigger the falling-domino effect by undermining U.S. counterrevolutionary credibility in other current or potential revolutionary hot spots from Asia to the Middle East to South and Central America, while also indirectly undermining the credibility of the containment policy toward America’s great-power rival, the Soviet Union. In the minds of U.S. policymakers, the concept of credibility was the linchpin of their strategy to defend and expand the American-led global order. The war in Vietnam was not, as it was for the Vietnamese, a struggle for tangible, immediate, vital national interests such as independence, unity, social change, life, and death. For American policymakers, the Vietnam challenge was a symbolic one, which had put their great-power credibility at risk.³

When Nixon returned from his Asian trip in December 1953, French military failure in Vietnam and war weariness on the home front had driven the government in Paris to consider a compromise diplomatic settlement. In early 1954, France’s military position in Indochina continued to deteriorate. In mid-March, the Vietminh launched attacks against French outposts in and around Dienbienphu in northwestern Vietnam, imperiling the French garrison, whose defeat threatened to increase the Vietminh’s leverage in forthcoming negotiations at Geneva. The most urgent question for the Eisenhower administration in this crisis was whether to relieve the siege by committing American forces. Reluctant to become embroiled in another Asian conflict so soon after the Korean War, Eisenhower vacillated, but hawkish advisers such as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) Admiral Arthur W. Radford and Vice President Nixon advised intervention with American airpower, including the possible use of nuclear weapons. On April 26, however, the Geneva Conference got under way, and on May 7 Dienbienphu fell to the Vietminh before two of Eisenhower’s key preconditions for intervention had been met: congressional approval and the formation of a united allied front.

Regretting the loss of the northern half of Vietnam to the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) by the terms of the Geneva Agreements reached in July, the Eisenhower administration aimed to preserve the settlement’s temporary partitioning of Vietnam by creating a secure American-leaning nation in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN), south of the seventeenth parallel. The administration’s repeated, high-profile pledges of support for RVN president Ngo Dinh Diem served to link American honor and credibility to South Vietnam’s survival. Diem’s U.S.-endorsed, violent repression of his opponents in the South—whom he labeled “Vietcong”—soon led to civil strife because nationalists and Communist insurgents in the South and the Politburo in the North felt compelled to fight back. By December 1960, this internecine conflict had evolved into the Second Indochina War.⁴

Although losing the 1960 presidential election to Kennedy, Nixon remained a public political figure through the rest of the decade, taking on the role of a hawkish and outspoken critic of what he claimed was Kennedy’s and Johnson’s insufficient aggressiveness in dealing with the Vietnam crisis. In spite of Kennedy’s dramatically increased military and economic aid to Diem, Nixon charged that the president’s measures were “too little and too late.” Furthermore, after the South Vietnamese generals’ assassination of Diem on November 2, 1963, Nixon asserted that the coup and the Kennedy administration’s involvement in it had produced political and military chaos in Vietnam, which in turn had become, he charged, the underlying cause of escalating American intervention.⁵

After Johnson inherited the war with Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, Nixon was among the most influential and vocal hawks outside of government pressing the new president to continue the fight and escalate the effort. From February 1964, when Nixon claimed that Johnson was preparing Americans for “retreat or defeat,” to December 1967, when he advocated retaliation against China if aircraft based there attacked U.S. armed forces, Nixon’s themes were relentlessly militant. He was critical not only of Johnson, but also of dovish representatives, senators, and the growing antiwar movement. At no time did he advocate disengagement.⁶

Yet he walked a fine line between demanding an intensification of military attacks on the enemy and expressing support for keeping the door open to negotiations. After 1964, during the first phase of his campaign for the Republican nomination for the presidency, he played the role of “unifier and regular party man, … staking out the middle ground and leaning slightly to the right,” as one historian put it.⁷ By the end of 1967, however, he began to express support for “peace efforts,” even though he continued to approach the subject of negotiations warily. He opposed compromise with the southern insurgency on the key question of political power in Saigon, where pro-American, anti-Communist General Nguyen Van Thieu had recently been elected president of South Vietnam. This issue, of course, was what the war was about: political power in Saigon and all it stood for in relation to American global credibility.⁸

During the four years after Johnson had assumed the presidency, several developments produced profound divisions between “hawks” and “doves” in America: Johnson’s escalation of the war; ever-mounting U.S. casualties; deepening domestic discord over social, political, and foreign-policy issues; and the Tet Offensive, which began on January 31, 1968, and heightened the public’s sense of the war’s futility. Hawks favored military solutions, and doves favored diplomatic ones. Yet, by early 1968, an odd confluence developed between the hawks’ and the doves’ expectations: both wanted an end to the war—one through military escalation, the other through military de-escalation. Nixon’s campaign played to this coincidence of expectations and divergence of means. Needing to bridge the gap between supporters and opponents of the war in order to win the election, he walked a tightrope of meaning, using nuanced words and phrases to keep his balance. For doves and moderates, he spoke less of escalating military measures and protecting vital interests and more of taking nonmilitary steps toward peace; for hawks and conservatives, he continued to talk about putting on pressure and winning the peace. For all Americans, he spoke of a peace with honor. Through the dreadful months of 1968, with its wars, international crises, interventions, assassinations, and civil disorder, Nixon miraculously became a peace candidate in the eyes of many—an old Cold Warrior who now wanted to end the Vietnam War honorably while creating a structure of peace.⁹

Among the several factors accounting for Nixon’s narrow popular-vote margin of victory in November over Hubert Humphrey, one may have been his hints during the campaign that he had a secret plan to end the war. Although Nixon and his aides denied that he had a sure-fire “magic formula” or “push-button technique” to achieve peace, during the course of the year he sketched some of the chief features of his rumored secret plan. These features included negotiations with the Soviet Union and China, “greater emphasis” on pacification and Vietnamization, “de-Americanization” (U.S. troop withdrawals), continued air and ground military operations, and threats of using excessive force against North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front in South Vietnam. The latter included a military arm, the PLAF, or Vietcong, and, after 1968, a governmental arm, the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG).¹⁰

It was not a plan, but an outline yet to be fleshed out. This process began soon after Nixon’s election, when he ordered his soon-to-be assistant for national security affairs, Henry A. Kissinger, to start work on the matter. Kissinger commissioned a RAND Corporation study of national security agencies’ views on the current realities of the war and the future prospects and options for “victory” in South Vietnam. On January 21, 1969, the day after Nixon’s inauguration, Kissinger issued National Security Study Memorandum No. 1, which ordered national security agencies and their heads to respond to scores of questions similar to those in the RAND study. The RAND report was ready at the end of December; responses to the memorandum questions were in Kissinger’s hands by mid-February. Meanwhile, on January 27 Nixon ordered the JCS to develop a program of “dramatic” military steps that might “jar” or unsettle and coerce the North Vietnamese into compliance in the Paris negotiations, and on March 13 Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird reported on his recent tour of South Vietnam to examine military conditions.¹¹

Drawing on these studies and reports, Kissinger made his recommendations to Nixon in a memorandum titled “Vietnam Situation and Options” in late March: begin private talks with the North Vietnamese on military but not political issues; announce in June that the United States will withdraw 75,000 troops by December; accelerate Vietnamization; develop a plan to withdraw more U.S. troops if possible but to leave support forces behind; continue current military and pacification operations in South Vietnam; and “develop alternate plans for possible escalatory military actions with the motive of convincing the Soviets that the war might get out of hand.”¹² The last was a reference to what Nixon had earlier named “the madman theory,” or the threat of excessive force and irrational behavior to jar the other side. It was also an indirect reference to another element of the emerging strategy: “linkage” diplomacy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, North Vietnam’s largest supplier. Nixon and Kissinger hoped to link incentives and threats, or carrots and sticks, to encourage the Soviets to cooperate with the United States in pressuring the North Vietnamese to come to terms at the negotiating table. The carrots were offers of deals on issues dividing Moscow and Washington in exchange for Moscow’s cooperation. The sticks of linkage included the denial of such agreements in the event of Soviet noncooperation, various military measures and threats against the Soviets and North Vietnam, and diplomatic ploys such as the “China card,” with which Nixon and Kissinger would threaten to improve U.S. relations with China at the expense of the Soviet Union.

Although Kissinger had called for private talks with Hanoi’s representatives, they were to take place within the framework of the four-party Paris negotiations previously arranged by the United States and the DRV during the last months of the Johnson administration, in which the United States, the DRV, the RVN, and the PRG were to meet publicly. It would not be until August 4, 1969, that Kissinger would hold his first secret meeting with North Vietnamese negotiator Xuan Thuy at a private venue in Paris. Furthermore, Nixon and Kissinger’s insistence on confining these secret, bilateral talks to “military” matters, such as troop withdrawals, and on leaving “political” matters, such as the government in Saigon, to the RVN and the PRG, would prove fruitless, even if it seemed the only way Washington could avoid appearing to sell out the Thieu government. As Nixon and Kissinger well knew, the other side wanted to talk about both political and military issues because the political issues were what the war was all about, and, of course, Thieu for his part did not want the United States to negotiate him out of his presidential position.¹³

Absent from Kissinger’s strategy recommendations was a timetable for the rapid withdrawal of U.S. troops. As Kissinger noted in his March memo to Nixon, withdrawal would take place over “the next several years” and was dependent on conditions in South Vietnam, which, among other things, required the withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops. Even after a withdrawal of U.S. forces, moreover, residual “support troops” would be left behind to assist the South Vietnamese.

Also missing from Kissinger’s list was any reference to the Nixon Doctrine, which many Americans later assumed guided Nixon’s Vietnam policies. But Nixon did not announce the so-called doctrine until June 25, 1969, and even then, as Kissinger’s assistant, Colonel Alexander Haig, privately remarked shortly afterward, it was “a little bit deceptive” to offer “hope to those who are seeking a long-range shift in the overall involvement of the U.S. in internal matters.”¹⁴ The Nixon Doctrine was a political device intended for home-front and allied consumption. It was not a guiding, coherent policy doctrine and thus was absent from Nixon and Kissinger’s unfolding plan. The Communist side saw the Nixon Doctrine not as U.S. troop disengagement, but as “Indochinization”—that is, Nixon’s expansion of the war throughout Indochina by means of surrogates, plus great-power interference in the affairs of smaller countries.¹⁵

The Nixon administration’s policy goal remained that of previous presidents: to keep a friendly government in power in Saigon, while eliminating or neutralizing the South Vietnamese insurgents and winning—through force, diplomacy, or negotiation—the withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops. What had changed since the Johnson administration was not U.S. policy, but U.S. strategy. Nixon and Kissinger believed that their strategy would succeed where Johnson’s had not.

On March 17, before Kissinger had sent his options memo to Nixon, the administration launched Operation Breakfast, the first phase of Operation Menu, a secret and massive B-52 bombing campaign against enemy base camps in Cambodia along the border with South Vietnam. Its primary purpose was to jar Hanoi psychologically and to signal Moscow that the war “may get out of hand.”¹⁶ Its secondary purpose was to offer an indirect response to a countrywide offensive that the PLAF/PAVN had launched on February 22—a response that, as Kissinger put it, would “not have primarily a military objective,” but a “political” one: to deter the other side from believing such attacks would influence negotiations. Breakfast was kept secret from the public and Congress in order to avoid protests against the administration’s escalation and expansion of the war.¹⁷

The administration undertook other aerial escalations throughout Indochina. In South Vietnam, American planes defoliated jungles and bombed villages and rural areas even more widely and heavily than in the past, and in Laos the number of combat sorties increased by 60 percent over that in 1968. Nixon and Kissinger diverted to neighboring Laos the B-52s and fighter-bombers no longer permitted to strike northern North Vietnam after Johnson’s October 31, 1968, announcement of a bombing halt. They augmented continuing air campaigns against Laotian villages and Communist military units in the Plain of Jars and against the complex of logistics highways and jungle paths known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail.¹⁸

These escalations coincided with changes in ground, air, and pacification tactics developed in response to the PLAF/PAVN’s Tet Offensive of 1968. Carried out under the rubric of a “clear and hold” strategy, which General William Westmoreland initiated and his successor, General Creighton Abrams, expanded, the revised approach included ground, artillery, and air operations that incorporated accelerated pacification, population relocation, aerial defoliation, and relaxed restraints on the killing of civilians. The central purpose of the strategy was to bleed the “fish”—the guerrilla infrastructure—and drain the “water” in which they swam—the civilian population, villages, crops, trees, and foliage. Operations extended even into Cambodia, where U.S. aircraft sprayed trees and crops and where U.S. and Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) troops carried out at least 188 covert ground incursions in the first four months of 1969.¹⁹

Even though the Communist-led side had achieved notable successes during the Tet Offensive, PLAF forces suffered significant casualties because of the U.S.–RVN counteroffensive and revised strategy. Despite their losses, PLAF forces, supplemented by PAVN troops, launched a post-Tet offensive in February and March 1969 for the purpose of achieving “decisive victory.” This offensive followed on the heels of more than a dozen American ground operations begun soon after Nixon’s inauguration. Communist planners understood decisive victory in the long term as achieving their ultimate aims, “independence, democracy, peace, and neutrality for South Vietnam [leading to] … the reunification of the country.” Decisive victory in the short term translated into forcing U.S. troop withdrawals, gaining superiority over the ARVN, and winning control of rural and strategic areas. By May, however, additional losses caused the Politburo and strategic planners to revise their assertive strategy in order to reorganize, consolidate their strength, apply counterpacification, and prepare for a prolonged struggle against what they perceived as Nixon’s strategy of intimidating North Vietnam, weakening the PLAF and PAVN in the South, and strengthening the ARVN.²⁰

In April 1969—about the same time that the Politburo was revising its strategy—Nixon and Kissinger were growing concerned that “time was working against us.”²¹ Their bombing of Cambodia and attempts to use linkage and the China card had so far failed to influence the USSR, the DRV, or the PRG. Moscow was unable or unwilling to deliver Hanoi. North Vietnamese and southern guerrilla negotiators at the public talks in Paris held fast to their terms despite U.S. demands. Frustrated, Nixon decided at Kissinger’s urging to authorize a package of negotiating proposals and bombing threats to break the impasse.

Kissinger presented these proposals and threats to his back-channel contact, Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, on April 14, suggesting that high-level U.S. and DRV representatives meet in Moscow to discuss U.S. terms for a settlement. Should Hanoi fail to accept this approach within two months, Kissinger warned Dobrynin, there would likely be no progress in parallel negotiations on other issues dividing the United States and the Soviet Union. Moreover, Nixon would deploy “other measures” against North Vietnam, by which Kissinger meant dramatic and sudden bombing and mining operations.

On the night of April 14, the very day that Kissinger had presented the diplomatic-military package to Dobrynin, news arrived in Washington that North Korean interceptors had shot down a Lockheed EC-121 U.S. reconnaissance plane flying a spy mission off the coast of North Korea over the Sea of Japan. Nixon and Kissinger felt it necessary to cancel their plan to carry out their military threat against North Vietnam, which had been scheduled for June. Thwarted, Nixon substituted another operation in order to signal his supposed toughness: Lunch, the second phase of Operation Menu.

By the beginning of July 1969, Nixon’s hope of disengaging U.S. forces from South Vietnam on his terms by the autumn had dimmed. The Paris negotiations were stalled, the Communist side was defiant, the antiwar movement—having given Nixon a honeymoon respite—was restive, and within the administration there was disagreement about the pace and timing of troop withdrawals. Secretary of Defense Laird and Secretary of State William Rogers continued to push for withdrawals, but Kissinger had by now changed his mind. He wanted to proceed more slowly because he had become “deeply discouraged” that his and Nixon’s “Vietnam plans aren’t working out right.”²² He was now leaning toward military escalation.

Nixon chose a middle course. In the first week of July, he decided on a two-track approach that would keep his options open: continuing de-Americanization and Vietnamization while embarking on military escalation, which would be carried out in two phases.

The first phase was a program of heightened threat making. During July and August, Nixon and Kissinger delivered several direct and indirect messages to Moscow and Hanoi, warning that if by November 1 the North Vietnamese did not agree to compromise on Washington’s terms, Nixon would “take measures of great consequence and force.”²³ If, however, these threats failed to move Moscow to pressure Hanoi into concessions, then the second phase of the military escalation option would begin: a multiphase campaign against North Vietnam consisting mainly of heavy air attacks in the far north of Vietnam and the mining of coastal ports. During the planning for the operation—which was code-named Duck Hook—Nixon, Kissinger, and their staffs also discussed three other options: the incursion of ground troops into North Vietnam, the bombing of dikes, and the use of nuclear weapons.²⁴

Despite these plans and Nixon’s tough talk, the president’s resolve began to wilt in the face of opposition within the administration and his own doubts about prospects for success. Laird and Rogers continued to oppose military escalation. Staff planners for Duck Hook voiced reservations about its potential effectiveness in intimidating Hanoi. Opinion polls indicated growing public impatience with the war, and Nixon worried that if he launched Duck Hook, he might not be able to hold public support for the three- to six-month period the operation required—assuming it would work. Another concern was that the three major antiwar demonstrations scheduled for October 15 and November 13–15 might erode public confidence in his leadership, expand into larger demonstrations, and blunt Duck Hook’s psychological impact on Hanoi. Moreover, linkage diplomacy had thus far failed to leverage Soviet cooperation—a gloomy omen for Duck Hook’s prospects. Nixon came to believe that the North Vietnamese were also unmoved in the face of his military threats. Yet, reduced enemy-initiated fighting in South Vietnam seemed to indicate that Vietnamization might be making progress—a good omen, if true, for it offered Nixon an alternative to Duck Hook.

In early October, Nixon decided against launching Duck Hook. Believing, however, that “it was important that the Communists not mistake as weakness the lack of dramatic action on my part in carrying out the ultimatum,”²⁵ the president, in a bizarre compensatory move, set in motion a series of military steps between October 13 and 30 that amounted to a worldwide nuclear alert. Kept secret from Congress, the public, and allies, it was known only to a small White House inner circle. Its purpose was apparently to try to convince the Soviets and North Vietnamese that the alert was the preparatory phase of Duck Hook, which, of course, the Soviets and North Vietnamese did not yet know had been shelved. The nuclear alert, however, failed to intimidate either the North Vietnamese or the Soviets before the November 1 deadline, although it did have a dangerous and unintended consequence: it caused the Chinese to go on alert—in response either to the U.S. alert or to something the Soviets did in response to the U.S. alert.²⁶

Nixon’s angry address to the nation on November 3 signaled a turning point in White House strategic planning and public propaganda. The president had originally intended the speech to be an announcement and defense of Duck Hook, which he had hoped would have brought about negotiations to end the war on favorable terms. Having cancelled the operation, however, Nixon was now forced to shift his strategic emphasis to one relying more on Vietnamization and pacification coupled with more vigorous political attacks on antiwar critics at home, all of which meant that disengagement from Vietnam would take years, not months. It was a strategy, he knew, that would “make it his war” and no longer “Johnson’s war” in the minds of the citizenry. Thus in his revised televised speech on November 3, he criticized war opponents, announced that his Vietnam policy was consistent with the Nixon Doctrine, and issued a summons to the so-called silent majority to support his policies.²⁷

Although Nixon continued to use linkage diplomacy with the USSR to induce its assistance in helping to pressure North Vietnam, he redoubled his efforts to bring about rapprochement with Beijing in order not only to foster its cooperation in pressuring Hanoi, but also to play the China card against Moscow with greater intensity. Fortunately for Nixon and Kissinger, Mao Zedong concurrently decided that better relations with the United States would help him achieve his own foreign and domestic goals. As before, Nixon intended to buttress his strategy with what he called “big plays”—that is, forceful threats and military measures, which included continued bombing throughout Indochina, threats of expanded bombing against North Vietnam, and, if the opportunity presented itself, major ground operations.

By mid-March 1970, Nixon and Kissinger were moving toward a decision about just such a ground operation into Cambodia. The Menu bombing campaign had driven the Cambodian Communist Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Communists deeper into the interior. The combined effect of these movements and the social disruptions brought on by the bombing had further unsettled the Cambodian political scene. A military coup on March 18, 1970, led by pro-American general Lon Nol against Cambodia’s neutralist head of state, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, had triggered civil strife within Cambodia. There is considerable circumstantial evidence that American officials in Cambodia were aware of the plot and that American military intelligence may have been involved.²⁸

Cambodian civil strife, in turn, caused Nixon, Kissinger, and U.S. commanders to worry that Cambodia might fall to the Khmer Rouge, thus exposing the South Vietnamese southern flank and threatening prospects for the success of Vietnamization. Hawkish strategists had long advocated operations into Cambodia. Nixon and Kissinger now came to believe that the circumstances were opportune. A joint American–South Vietnamese invasion would, they hoped, achieve important political-military results: Lon Nol’s government would be saved; the port of Sihanoukville, through which supplies came for the Communists, would be closed; the Communist sanctuaries along the South Vietnamese border and the troops in them would be destroyed or seriously disrupted; Communist headquarters would be captured; South Vietnamese morale would improve; and pacification and Vietnamization would be protected, at least for a time.²⁹

The president claimed great success in Cambodia after the operation was carried out, but the operation produced mixed and tragic consequences. Although it temporarily disrupted Communist Vietnamese troop deployments and logistics, this result fell far short of the decisive military impact that Nixon had sought. Furthermore, the incursion had brought about an alliance of convenience among Cambodian, Vietnamese, and Chinese Communists; Lon Nol’s government lost control of large sections of the country; and the incursion helped push Cambodia into an abyss of civil war and put the Paris negotiations on hold. On the home front, Nixon was rattled by widespread demonstrations against the incursion, by the killing and wounding of students at Kent State University at the hands of Ohio National Guard troops, and by the intensification of congressional opposition to his direction of the war. The combined strategic consequences were that he would not be able to send U.S. troops again into Cambodia or, in the future, into Laos; he would feel more than before the need to carry out large-scale troop withdrawals from South Vietnam; and whatever hope of bringing the war to a favorable conclusion by the end of 1970 or the beginning of 1971 had been shattered.³⁰ Pressured by the public, Congress, and internal dissenters in the administration, Nixon pulled U.S. troops out of Cambodia on June 30.

In July, Nixon told advisers that he believed “the American people are evenly divided. The establishment is against me, but I’ll see it through if I’m the only person in the country to do it. We’ll see the end of our participation one way or another.” At the same time, Secretary of Defense Laird—pleading congressional budgetary constraints and political pressures to reduce draft calls—was once again pressing for accelerated troop withdrawals as well as decreases in strategic and tactical bombing sorties. As days and weeks passed, Nixon became increasingly concerned about the long-term impact of the war on the solidity of his conservative and right-wing political base as he looked ahead to the 1972 presidential election. When in August several hawkish senators, worried about the forthcoming congressional elections, urged Nixon to end the war quickly, Nixon complained: “We’ve got the Left where we want it now…. All they’ve got left to argue for is a bug-out, and that’s their problem. But when the Right starts wanting to get out, for whatever reason, that’s our problem.”³¹

In light of the diminished military options in Vietnam, citizen impatience with the war, bureaucratic and political pressures, the antiwar movement’s dogged opposition, and Thieu’s growing concern about U.S. troop withdrawals, the president and Kissinger had begun to reevaluate their strategic alternatives at least as early as July. In a memo to the president on July 20, Kissinger summarized their two major alternatives: either withdraw American forces at the administration’s own slow pace until all combat units were out, leaving the political solution of the war to the Vietnamese, or offer the other side a more rapid U.S. withdrawal as an incentive at the negotiating table in an effort to entice them into agreeing to a political settlement acceptable to both the Thieu and the Nixon governments.

The first alternative amounted to unilateral withdrawal followed by continued civil war; the second required political compromise among the United States, the RVN, the DRV, and the PRG, which Kissinger conjectured would also lead to civil war even if the political compromise were “favorable”—that is, a “territorial accommodation,” with Thieu remaining in power. This negotiation route was politically preferable, Kissinger argued, for both Nixon and Thieu. More rapid withdrawals and a negotiated end to the war would politically assist Nixon at home. But these more rapid withdrawals would be paced at a rate that would allow Vietnamization to strengthen the ARVN and pacification to weaken the PLAF. A negotiated political compromise for South Vietnam would give Thieu “the potential for eventual national control and leave the U.S. with a reasonable period after its extrication, during which the final outcome is at least in doubt.”³²

What Kissinger meant was that even if the Communist side won national control in the long run—which was the most likely outcome—this “reasonable-interval” or “decent-interval” scenario would disguise Nixon and Kissinger’s willingness to pursue policies that contributed to the possibility of Saigon’s collapse after a negotiated settlement. The period of time between America’s withdrawal from Indochina and the Saigon government’s possible defeat would be sufficiently long that if and when the fall came, the American public might not notice or care. Nixon and Kissinger would not appear to have been accomplices in the fall. Indeed, they could claim to have striven mightily to avert it. They could claim they had negotiated a “victory” under difficult circumstances, then blame the postponed fall on Saigon itself, Congress, the antiwar movement, the American public, the press, historical fate, or all of the above.³³

Kissinger recommended that for the time being they continue on course—that is, keep both options in play. He advised the president, however, that a choice of one or the other alterative would have to be made by April 1971, when they would reach a “fork in the road”: American troop strength on that date would stand at 284,000, down from the peak of 550,000 in June 1969. Reductions in the six months beyond April would total another 100,000, seriously eroding their bargaining position at the negotiating table.³⁴

The two strategic alternatives Kissinger reviewed meant, of course, that Nixon and Kissinger were rejecting yet another alternative: a negotiated solution and American withdrawal in 1970 or 1971. Their negotiating strategy was to postpone the settlement and prolong a U.S. troop withdrawal into 1972, and then hope for a decent interval. As Kissinger reminded Nixon in late December 1970, “If we pull [U.S. forces] out by the end of ’71, trouble can start mounting in ’72 that we won’t be able to deal with, and which we’ll have to answer for at the elections.” In a conversation with Nixon in August 1972, Kissinger repeated the decent-interval strategy: “So we’ve got to find some [negotiated] formula that holds the thing together a year or two, after which—after a year, Mr. President, Vietnam will be a backwater. If we settle it, say, this October [’72], by January ’74 no one will give a damn.”³⁵

On September 7, 1970, the U.S. and North Vietnamese delegations resumed their secret talks, which the Cambodian invasion had interrupted. For the first time, Kissinger indicated Washington’s willingness to abandon the mutual-withdrawal formula that the Johnson and Nixon administrations had long insisted on; he also communicated his readiness to discuss political as well as military issues. Without demanding a matching withdrawal of PAVN troops, he presented a proposal calling for a twelve-month schedule for the withdrawal of U.S. forces after the signing of an agreement, a promise to leave no residual American forces or bases in South Vietnam after the war, and the formation of a three-party electoral commission that would include members who represented the PRG, the Saigon government, and neutral groups. The North Vietnamese thought the implications of the proposal significant, but they were wary. They knew that the Americans were aware of the preexisting strategic withdrawal of a large number of PAVN troops from the South that had begun in 1969 and that PLAF guerrillas in the South were weaker than in the past, thus giving ARVN and U.S. forces a temporary advantage. They suspected that “the U.S. scheme was to exchange the question of [not demanding formal] North Vietnamese troop withdrawal for our concessions in political issues.”³⁶ Even though the meeting ended without agreement, Kissinger’s omission of the old American demand for mutual withdrawal was an omen of what was to come.

Meanwhile, Nixon, Kissinger, and the U.S. military command suspected that the Communist side would in early 1972 initiate an offensive similar to the Tet Offensive of 1968, followed by a main force invasion in 1973, which might cause the collapse of Thieu’s government without a decent interval having elapsed. To counter and delay this eventuality, they decided in December 1970 to launch their own ground invasion into southern Laos against key Communist logistics bases with the purpose of disrupting enemy preparations. Although preceded on January 30 by U.S. operation Dewey Canyon II in South Vietnam, the ARVN would carry out the ground invasion into Laos alone, without accompanying U.S. troops.

Supported by U.S. artillery and airpower, Operation Lam Son 719 got under way on February 8, 1971, but ended prematurely in late March as the battered ARVN regiments precipitously retreated into South Vietnam. The Politburo had anticipated Lam Son 719, prepositioned its troops, and launched counterattacks. In spite of taking heavy casualties from American bombing, PAVN forces held their ground and, driving out the South Vietnamese, demonstrated the weaknesses of Vietnamization.

Nixon and Kissinger’s “game plan” had been to hurt the North Vietnamese in Laos, get Thieu reelected in October 1971, and then meet with the North Vietnamese in Paris and propose a total U.S. withdrawal within twelve months, accompanied by a cease-fire and a release of American prisoners of war. Thieu would therefore have a year to build up to face the North Vietnamese. Soon after the South Vietnamese had retreated from Laos, however, Nixon and Kissinger reconsidered current military conditions and future prospects. Nixon decided that he would declare the ill-fated Laotian operation a success: although it had not struck a “knockout” blow, it had damaged North Vietnamese capabilities. For the near future, U.S. air sorties would be kept at a high level, but Nixon still wanted to “get the hell outta there.” He had done everything in Indochina that “the military had wanted,” but, as he put it, events were coming down to the “nut-cutting.” He calculated that there was a 40 to 55 percent chance that the other side would want a negotiated settlement. He would use the prospect of leaving residual troops in South Vietnam as a bargaining chip. The task now was to time troop withdrawals to coincide with the 1972 U.S. presidential election and to turn to the “big picture”—great-power triangular diplomacy—for assistance in dealing with Hanoi. Thieu would not be “knocked over easily” in the civil war that would follow American withdrawal, Nixon hoped, and he might even avoid being defeated “brutally” if he continued receiving American aid, especially in the form of U.S. airpower.³⁷

At the Paris talks on May 31, 1971, Kissinger formally offered what he had implicitly proposed at the September 7, 1970, meeting. He dropped the long-standing American demand for the withdrawal of DRV forces from South Vietnam and again proposed the setting of a terminal date for the withdrawal of U.S. forces. The DRV, however, thought the withdrawal period too long. In addition, Kissinger had attached conditions that led the DRV to interpret the proposal as one that was cunningly but obviously designed to preserve Thieu while winning the release of American prisoners of war.

In the period before the next meeting in Paris, the Politburo prepared a counterproposal. On June 26, the DRV’s chief delegate, Le Duc Tho, offered to accept a cease-fire if the United States shortened its withdrawal timetable, stopped its air attacks against the North, agreed to the payment of war reparations, and withdrew its support of Thieu in the forthcoming fall presidential elections in South Vietnam. (This last condition revised previous demands from the DRV and PRG that called for the removal of Thieu and other top officials of the Saigon government from power.)

The talks begun in late May 1971 collapsed in early November 1971, however, despite several meetings between July and September at which the two sides had made important proposals and counterproposals. Washington had spurned the opportunity to withdraw its support of Thieu and had actively assisted in his October reelection. Hanoi had therefore refused to accept a cease-fire that did not include what it considered an acceptable political solution.

The American proposal put forward in August had called for a cease-fire and nine-month withdrawal plan that would have advantaged Thieu over the PRG. It would have permitted the United States to threaten the North with air strikes, to retain residual forces in the South, and to continue supplying, aiding, and advising Thieu’s government. Had DRV negotiators agreed to the plan, it would also have prevented Hanoi from strengthening the PRG’s political position through its primary military option: a ground offensive in the spring of 1972.³⁸

Each side’s strategy in 1971 had been to seek diplomatic concessions from the other while positioning itself for a military-diplomatic showdown in 1972. Washington continued to pin its hopes on the impact of the Laotian invasion, great-power triangular diplomacy, airpower, pacification, and Vietnamization. Between November 1971 and March 1972, as Nixon and Kissinger were preparing for summit meetings in Beijing and Moscow, the Hanoi Politburo prepared for a major, three-pronged offensive in the spring. Its maximum goal was to defeat the South Vietnamese army and drive Thieu from power. Its minimum goal was to regain territory, restore the PRG where it had been weakened, and damage Saigon’s morale, thus preparing the ground for a post-cease-fire struggle between the two South Vietnamese forces.

The so-called Easter Offensive began on March 30, 1972, a month after Nixon’s visit to Beijing in February and almost two months before his scheduled trip to Moscow in May. Nixon reacted with surprise, anger, irritation, and deep concern. He was surprised and angry that Hanoi had launched an invasion of such power and was irritated with Moscow for having been unable or unwilling to restrain Hanoi. He was concerned because the South Vietnamese might be defeated, which in turn might bring about his own electoral defeat in November. Yet if he tried to counter the invasion with a massive bombing campaign against the North, the Soviets might cancel their scheduled summit meeting, which also might lead to his electoral defeat. Nonetheless, against the advice of Secretary Laird and General Abrams, Nixon decided to divert a significant portion of B-52 bombers to Operation Linebacker, a large and sustained bombing and mining campaign in the far north of North Vietnam. With Kissinger encouraging him to signal the enemy that he was “going crazy,”³⁹ Nixon aimed to shock the other side psychologically while damaging its logistical capabilities for 1973, by which time the United States would have withdrawn its forces. During strategy discussions preceding Linebacker, Nixon raised the possibility of dropping a nuclear bomb, but he backed away from this idea and settled on “merely” threatening to use a nuclear bomb.

By autumn, the North Vietnamese offensive had ground to a halt, mainly because extensive American air operations in South Vietnam had counteracted Hanoi’s superiority on the ground. Hanoi had to settle for its minimum goals. Communist forces now occupied more territory, especially in northern South Vietnam and along the Cambodian border of central South Vietnam, and the PRG had been reconstituted in selected areas of South Vietnam, but especially in the Mekong Delta. The offensive had once again demonstrated the weaknesses of Vietnamization, reinforced congressional impatience with the seemingly endless war in Vietnam, speeded up the withdrawal of American forces, and strengthened Hanoi’s hand in the Paris negotiations to take place before Nixon’s reelection. It did not decisively alter the military balance, but it accelerated the diplomatic momentum, serving as a catalyst for all the other causes that pointed toward an armistice agreement.⁴⁰

Each side at last appreciated the reality of military and political deadlock. Both considered their overall prospects with an armistice to be comparatively better than without one. The heavy material costs of the war, the psychological exhaustion of the Indochinese and American peoples, and complex international pressures and constraints now persuaded both groups of leaders to settle. Neither the U.S. nor the DRV/PRG government had relinquished its fundamental goals, but both now turned to minimal, more practical solutions. Both now appreciated the advantage and necessity of a compromise in which each side needed to accept less than its maximum terms because each understood in the summer of 1972 that the war was indeed militarily deadlocked and that its own chances of achieving an acceptable negotiated settlement would be better in October, just before Nixon’s reelection, than after the election.⁴¹

Negotiations resumed in July, but it was not until September that Kissinger and Tho made their first real breakthrough. After several more critical meetings in the weeks following, they reached an armistice agreement on October 22, 1972, sixteen days before U.S. presidential balloting. Among the key concessions and provisions, Hanoi had dropped its demand for Thieu’s outright removal from power, and Washington had agreed to withdraw all its remaining ground, air, and naval forces from Indochina, to recognize the PRG’s legal authority in the territory it controlled, and to acknowledge that Vietnam was one country. Thieu, however, spurned the agreement. Nixon nevertheless won reelection in a landslide on November 7, after which additional negotiations and more bombing took place as Nixon sought revisions that would please Thieu and protect his own credibility as a president who had stood by his client and achieved peace with “honor.”

In Operation Linebacker II, U.S. planes flew 3,420 bombing and support sorties into the heart of the DRV against Hanoi and surrounding areas for twelve days from December 18 to 29, 1972, with a pause on Christmas Day. Although fulfilling Nixon’s madman-theory intention of demonstrating his “brutal unpredictability,” his determination to get out of Vietnam with a bang not a whimper,⁴² and the additional purpose of giving Thieu the gift of damaging North Vietnamese military capabilities, the operation had high costs: twenty-eight U.S. aircraft were downed, including fifteen B-52 bombers, with 121 crewmen killed or captured. In addition, these end-of-war “Christmas bombings” met with sharp criticism in America and abroad. Despite almost 4,000 civilian casualties, North Vietnamese morale held, and the Politburo was not moved to make significant concessions—contrary to Nixon and Kissinger’s claims. Negotiations resumed on January 8, 1973. The armistice agreement reached on January 13, 1973, contained revisions in language that were barely distinguishable from the October draft agreement.

Seventeen months later, on August 9, 1974, Richard M. Nixon chose to resign the presidency rather than endure the agony and embarrassment of impeachment as a result of his responsibility for the crimes and constitutional abuses related to the Watergate scandal. He was therefore no longer president when Saigon fell to the Communists on April 30, 1975—an event that contradicted his and Kissinger’s earlier claim of having achieved peace with honor in the 1973 Paris Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam.

Fighting between the South Vietnamese and Communist forces had begun before the cease-fire agreement had been signed on January 27, 1973, and continued after it was supposed to take effect. The three-party Council of National Reconciliation and Concord called for in the agreement was never formed, and elections were never held. Each side blamed the other for failing to uphold its terms, but the truth was that both had anticipated a civil war, and both had set out beforehand and continued afterward to secure and enlarge the territories they held. American leaders shared and supported Saigon’s expectations, objectives, and actions. As early as 1971, Nixon had told Kissinger, “If they’re willing to leave Thieu in place while we get out, … then let them, let them go at each other afterwards.”⁴³

Nixon and Kissinger had negotiated and signed the Paris Agreement fully expecting postarmistice fighting and fully aware that Thieu’s chances for long-term survival were slim. Despite this reality during the several weeks of fighting before the fall of Saigon, President Gerald R. Ford, Secretary of State Kissinger, selected White House aides, Ambassador Graham Martin, and President Thieu accused the North Vietnamese of having broken the armistice agreement and blamed the U.S. Congress for allegedly failing to provide adequate military, economic, and diplomatic aid to the Saigon regime.

In 1974, Democrats and Republicans in Congress had reduced aid to Saigon from $1.02 billion to $700 million. In March 1975, Congress also refused Ford’s January request for $300 million of aid to South Vietnam, which would have supplemented the unspent balance of $540 million from the $700 million already provided to South Vietnam for fiscal year 1974. But it is pure speculation to claim that Congress’s refusal was the decisive cause of Thieu’s defeat—or even a contributory cause. The Central Intelligence Agency itself had indicated in its intelligence report of March 4, 1975, that there was still hope in the civil war struggle in Vietnam. What was significant, the report concluded, was “not so much the level of military assistance but the relative balance of forces on the battlefield in South Vietnam,” and “given the present military balance in the South, the GVN’s [Government of (South) Vietnam’s] forces will not be decisively defeated during the current dry season.”⁴⁴

There were deeper causes for South Vietnam’s difficulties. Thieu’s government not only exercised poor political and strategic judgment—particularly during the month of March 1975—but also was corrupt. Some of the military equipment previously purchased had been hoarded or had found its way onto the black market. The ARVN suffered from generally poor leadership and intrinsic structural and morale weaknesses. Non-Communist South Vietnamese who were not allied with the PRG were war weary, and many were also unhappy with Thieu’s regime and fatalistic about the final outcome of the struggle. American leaders in the White House were themselves confused about their purposes, whereas Hanoi and the PRG were not about theirs.

Considering the American and Vietnamese lives already lost in the thirty-year war in Indochina, many in Congress thought that additional bloodshed would be in vain. Many thought that additional aid should go not to military assistance, but to humanitarian assistance, and that the administration should concentrate its efforts on timely evacuations of Americans and South Vietnamese supporters of the United States as well as on negotiations for Thieu’s resignation and a cease-fire between the two sides.

Into the last week of April 1975, however, Ambassador Martin in Saigon and President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger in the White House postponed evacuations and negotiations, while putting the onus for collapse in South Vietnam on Congress and opponents of the war. By then, it was too late for many South Vietnamese friends of the United States to escape and too late for cease-fire negotiations, even if they had been possible.⁴⁵ In any case, Ford and Kissinger and other American decision makers in the executive branch failed to brave the tide they criticized, deciding not to intervene militarily, but instead to inveigh against others for the defeat. In scapegoating others, they were following a public-relations attack “line” that Nixon had pioneered during his presidency.⁴⁶

Richard Nixon had run for the office of president in 1968 claiming to be, among other things, a peace candidate. Secretly, however, he intended to deploy several military, diplomatic, and political stratagems that he believed would pry concessions from the Communist side, thereby preserving the Saigon government into the indefinite future and, ipso facto, sustaining U.S. great-power credibility as well as his own presidential credibility. His was a strategy of selective but dramatic escalation for the policy purpose of disengaging with “honor”—that is, forcing a peace on American terms. North Vietnam’s and the southern guerrillas’ determination to throw out neoimperial foreign occupiers, reunite Vietnam, and revolutionize Vietnamese society on their terms, however, meant that Nixon’s strategy and policy required the United States to pay a price for continuing the war that a critical mass of Americans thought too high. At least half, if not most, of the American people, along with a substantial number of political, economic, and opinion leaders, did not believe that the cost in lives, treasure, and social harmony was worth the effort—especially because they did not understand or agree with their government’s abstract arguments in favor of persisting in Vietnam. In addition, decision makers would not or could not tell them how and when the war could be brought to a successful conclusion, and most dissenting Americans believed that the means used to wage the war were immoral. Although Nixon disagreed, he well knew that wars can be sustained indefinitely only with the willing cooperation of a majority of the population. Even hawkish supporters in Congress and the citizenry grew increasingly concerned about the costs of this seemingly interminable conflict.⁴⁷

But Nixon could not bring himself to abandon the goals that had led him and the United States into the quagmire. Like many other American policymakers before, during, and after the war, he was trapped in a counterrevolutionary mind-set of global reach. It was a mind-set reinforced by great-power hubris, sustained by political and bureaucratic pressures, and rationalized by a worldview that placed all matters in the context of America’s Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union and the threat that revolution posed to the expansion of “free enterprise.”

Although a product of this foreign-policy culture, Nixon’s psychology added an unpredictable, chaotic element to the standard American formulas for war and diplomacy. His faith in the virtues of struggle, force, “mad” threats, and secret diplomacy, for example, encouraged him to believe that he could win the objectives he sought in Vietnam despite the conflict’s intractable realities that others had recognized much earlier. His emotions and moods influenced the escalatory tactics he chose, such as the bombing and invasion of Cambodia, the invasion of Laos, and the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong. Even his diplomatic “carrots” were accompanied by the “sticks” of military and economic threat.

In all this, he was aided and abetted by Henry Kissinger. Despite their personality differences and their strained, unequal relationship, both Nixon and Kissinger considered themselves “realists” and thus assumed that nation-states existed in a world of international anarchy where military and economic power were the fundamental determinants of interstate relations. Like many other self-styled realist thinkers, they were critical of what they regarded as the excessive idealism, moralism, legalism, and sentimentality of the American people—ideas they associated with the liberal traditions they rejected. Aided by a talented staff, Kissinger was Nixon’s implementer and tactician, steadier in following the policy on which they had decided and helpful to the president in the way he projected a more moderate image to the press and public. Behind the scenes, however, Kissinger only occasionally advocated restraint, and when he did, it was often for domestic political reasons or to protect his own reputation or diplomatic mission.

Both men knew that the main obstacle to their plans was Vietnamese resistance backed by Soviet and Chinese support of one kind or another. Nixon and Kissinger eventually discovered that they could not crack the resistance or seriously undermine Hanoi’s relationship with the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Their scapegoating of Congress, the press, and the antiwar movement for the defeat of 1975 was therefore disingenuous. In any case, they had already secretly decided to pursue strategies and policies that would have the effect of removing American troops from Indochina through either unilateral withdrawals or negotiations or both. They intended, however, that disengagement in this manner would be prolonged—extended by their desire to strengthen Saigon as well as to ensure that Nixon’s reelection chances in 1972 would not be damaged by Saigon’s collapse. Their final strategy was one of negotiated settlement with the objective of creating a decent interval of a year or more in order that the fall of the Saigon government—if it should fall to the Communists—would not appear to have been caused by Nixon–Kissinger policies.

By blaming others for the defeat of U.S. policy in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger contributed to the enduring legacy of bitterness that divided Americans in the decades after 1975. One of the ironies of this long, bitter, costly struggle, moreover, was that, in the end, America’s procapitalist allies and clients in the developing countries of the Pacific Rim did not become victims of a domino collapse to Communism because, as one of Kissinger’s aides explained, they had no place else to go but to the United States for protection from real or imagined enemies.⁴⁸

No one will ever know whether an earlier negotiated solution to the war would have been possible had Nixon and Kissinger offered in 1969, 1970, or 1971 what they offered in October 1972—or had they accepted Hanoi’s 1971 proposal. In any event, Nixon and Kissinger did not try. By the same token, no one will ever know whether America could have “won” the war. A military victory would have required many more troops, much more bombing, the visiting of greater destruction upon Indochina, the indefinite U.S. occupation of South Vietnam, and perhaps even the invasion and occupation of North Vietnam. Aside from the costs to the Indochinese people, this effort would have required the United States to pay a higher price in lives, treasure, and moral reputation. What we do know from declassified documents is what Nixon and Kissinger actually did in fighting the war and in withdrawing from Vietnam and why.

NOTES

1. Richard Nixon, “Meeting the People of Asia,” U.S. Department of State Bulletin 30 (January 4, 1954), 10, 12.

2. “The President’s News Conference of April 7, 1954,” in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower: 1954 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1960), 382–83.

3. Jeffrey Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), chap. 2; Jeffrey Kimball, The Vietnam War Files: Uncovering the Secret History of Nixon-Era Strategy (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), chap. 2; Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern Historical Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 72–79, 113–25, 149, 166–68, 283–86, 547–48.

4. David L. Anderson, Trapped by Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 1953–1961 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 38, 139–40; John P. Glennon and Neal H. Petersen, eds., Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, vol. 13, Indochina, Part 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1982), 85–86, 947–56, 1137–44, 1269–72; Laurent Césari and Jacques de Folin, “Military Necessity, Political Impossibility: The French Viewpoint on Operation Vautour,” in Dien Bien Phu and the Crisis of Franco-American Relations, 1954–1955, edited by Lawrence S. Kaplan, Denise Artaud, and Mark R. Rubin (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1990), 105–20; Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War, 25–29.

5. “Nixon Backs Kennedy Build-Up of U.S. Armed Forces in Vietnam,” New York Times, February 16, 1962; “Mrs. Nhu and Nixon Discuss Action of U.S. on Ngo Dinh Can,” New York Times, November 7, 1963; Richard M. Nixon, No More Vietnams (New York: Arbor House, 1985), 38, 62–73; Richard M. Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 256–57, 509, 513–14.

6. Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War, 30–31. See also “President Nixon’s Record on Vietnam, 1954–68,” in U.S. Senate, Legislative Proposals Relating to the War in Southeast Asia: Hearings Before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, 92d Cong., 1st sess., April 20–May 27, 1971 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1971), 295–99.

7. Mary Brennan, Turning Right in the Sixties: The Conservative Capture of the GOP (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 122–23.

8. “Nixon Says Asians Back U.S. on War,” New York Times, April 8, 1967; Tom Buckley, “Nixon Urges Halt,” New York Times, April 15, 1967; Tom Buckley, “Nixon Indicates He Seeks Step-Up in War Effort,” New York Times, April 18, 1967; “President Nixon’s Record on Vietnam, 1954–68,” 295–99.

9. Richard J. Whalen, Catch the Falling Flag: A Republican’s Challenge to His Party (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), 25, 135; “Nixon Says Robert Kennedy Is Wrong About the War,” New York Times, March 6, 1968; John E. Mueller, War, Presidents, and Public Opinion (New York: Wiley, 1973), 36, 38, 56; Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War, chap. 3.

10. Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War, chaps. 3 and 5; Kimball, Vietnam War Files, 11–21, chap. 2.

11. Memorandum, Laird to Kissinger, February 21, 1969, attached to memorandum, Alexander Haig to Kissinger, “Memorandum from Secretary Laird Enclosing Preliminary Draft of Potential Military Actions re Vietnam,” March 2, 1969, folder: Haig’s Vietnam File, vol. 1 (January–March 1969), box 1007, Alexander M. Haig Special Files, National Security Council Files (NSCF): Nixon Presidential Materials Project (NPMP), National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Md. Laird was a fiscal conservative concerned about federal deficits; although a hawk, he doubted that the war could be won and believed that the country’s political mood favored disengagement and troop withdrawals.

12. Memorandum, Kissinger to Nixon, “Vietnam Situation and Options,” March [?], 1969, folder 7, box 89, NSCF: Vietnam Subject Files (VSF), NPMP. This memo is undated, but attachments indicate a late March date.

13. Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War, chaps. 4–8; Kimball, Vietnam War Files, 11–24, chaps. 3 and 4; Raymond L. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American–Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan, rev. ed. (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1994), 32–37.

14. Memorandum, Haig to Kissinger, “The President’s Speech,” October 31, 1969, folder 1: Vietnam Speech, box 78, NSCF: VSF, NPMP.

15. Jeffrey P. Kimball, “The Nixon Doctrine: A Saga of Misunderstanding,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 36, no. 1 (2006): 27–42.

16. Memorandum, Kissinger to Nixon, “Breakfast Plan,” March 16, 1969, folder 3, box 89, NSCF: VSF, NPMP.

17. Memorandum, Kissinger to Nixon, “Vietnam Situation and Options,” March [?], 1969. The invasion of Cambodia was long on the list of options preferred by the military; see also memorandum, Haig to Kissinger, “Memorandum from Secretary Laird Enclosing Preliminary Draft of Potential Military Actions re Vietnam,” March 2, 1969.

18. R. B. Furlong Papers, 168.7122-16 and 168.7122-20, Air Force Historical Research Agency, Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Ala.; Thomas C. Thayer, War Without Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1985), chap. 8; Malvern Lumsden, Anti-personnel Weapons (London: Taylor & Francis, 1978), 26–27. B-52s were first used to bomb the Plain of Jars in February 1970.

19. See, for example, David W. P. Elliott, The Vietnamese War: Revolution and Social Change in the Mekong Delta, 1930–1975, 2 vols. (Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 2003), 2:chap. 20; and Kenton Clymer, The United States and Cambodia, 1969–2000 (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), 17–18.

20. Circular and Study, Docs. 61–62 and COSVN Resolution no. 9, July 1969, in Vietnam Documents and Research Notes Series: Translation and Analysis of Significant Viet Cong/North Vietnamese Documents (Bethesda, Md.: University Publications of America, 1991), 2–5, 8, 9, 12–14; Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War, 124–31; Elliott, Vietnamese War, 2:chap. 20; Ang Cheng Guan, Ending the Vietnam War: The Vietnamese Communists’ Perspective (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), 18–22; Military Institute of Vietnam, Victory in Vietnam: The Official History of the People’s Army of Vietnam, 1954–1975, translated by Merle L. Pribbenow (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002), chap. 10.

21. Henry A. Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 264–65.

22. Entry, June 19, 1969, Journals and Diaries of Harry Robbins Haldeman, NPMP.

23. Note, Jean Sainteny to Nixon, July 16, 1969, folder: Mister “S,” vol. 1 [one of two], box 106, Country Files—Far East—Vietnam Negotiations, Henry A. Kissinger (HAK) Office Files, NPMP.

24. Memorandum, with attachments, Kissinger to Nixon, “Contingency Military Operations Against North Vietnam,” October 2, 1969, folder 2, box 89, NSCF: VSF, NPMP.

25. Nixon, RN, 405.

26. William Burr and Jeffrey Kimball, “Nixon’s Secret Nuclear Alert: Vietnam War Diplomacy and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Readiness Test, October 1969,” Cold War History 3, no. 2 (2003): 113–56. Also see Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War, chap. 8; and Kimball, Vietnam War Files, chap. 4, regarding the evolution of strategy in 1969.

27. Kimball, Vietnam War Files, 104–7.

28. Clymer, United States and Cambodia, 17–18, 22–24, 33–34; Ang, Ending the Vietnam War, 43–48.

29. National Security Decision Memorandum 56, April 22, 1970, folder 2, box 88, NSCF: VSF, NPMP.

30. Clymer, United States and Cambodia, 31–35; Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War, 223–25.

31. Quoted in Kissinger, White House Years, 969.

32. Memorandum, Kissinger to Nixon, “Alternative Vietnam Strategies,” July 20, 1970, folder: Vietnam, box 148, NSCF: Vietnam Country Files, NPMP. My thanks to Bill Burr for sharing this document.

33. Kimball, Vietnam War Files, chap. 5.

34. Entry, December 21, 1970, Journals and Diaries of Harry Robbins Haldeman, NPMP; memorandum, Kissinger to Nixon, “Alternative Vietnam Strategies,” July 20, 1970; Thayer, War Without Fronts, 38.

35. Oval Office Conversation no. 760-6, Nixon and Kissinger, 8:28–8:57 A.M., August 3, 1972, White House Tapes, NPMP (transcribed by Ken Hughes, Miller Center, University of Virginia).

36. Luu Van Loi and Nguyen Anh Vu, Le Duc Tho–Kissinger Negotiations in Paris (Hanoi: Thê’Gió, 1996), 151.

37. Oval Office Conversations nos. 466-12, 471-2, 474-1, and 534-3, Nixon and Kissinger, March 11, March 19, March 26, and July 1, 1971, White House Tapes, NPMP (transcribed by the author).

38. Memcon, Kissinger and Thuy, September 7, 1970, folder: Sensitive Camp David, vol. V, box 853, Vietnam Negotiations, For the President’s Files (Winston Lord)—China Trip/Vietnam, NSCF, NPMP; memcon, Kissinger and Dobrynin, as reported by Soviet ambassador Ilya S. Shcherbakov to Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, January [?], 1971, quoted in Loi and Vu, Le Duc Tho–Kissinger Negotiations in Paris, 165–66; entries, November 20, 1970, December 18 and 21, 1970, and February 3, 1971, Journals and Diaries of Harry Robbins Haldeman, NPMP; Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War, 230–36.

39. Executive Office Building Conversation no. 329-42, Nixon and Kissinger, April 15, 1972, White House Tapes, NPMP (transcribed by the author).

40. On the goals and consequences of the Easter Offensive, see Dale Andradé, Trial by Fire: The 1972 Easter Offensive, America’s Last Battle (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1995), 527–38; and Military Institute of Vietnam, Victory in Vietnam, 289–310.

41. Jeffrey P. Kimball, “How Wars End: The Vietnam War,” Peace and Change: A Journal of Peace Research 20, no. 2 (1995): 181–200; Jeffrey P. Kimball, “The Panmunjom and Paris Armistices: Patterns of War Termination,” in America, the Vietnam War, and the World: Comparative and International Perspectives, edited by Andreas W. Daum, Lloyd Gardner, and Wilfried Mausbach (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 105–22.

42. Oval Office Conversations nos. 488-15 and 508-13, Nixon and Kissinger, April 27 and June 2, 1971, White House Tapes, NPMP (transcribed by the author); entry, December 18, 1972, Journals and Diaries of Harry Robbins Haldeman, NPMP; Richard Wilson, “The Unbelievable Scene,” Washington Star-News, August 12, 1974.

43. Oval Office Conversation no. 527-16, Nixon, Haldeman, Kissinger, and Ehrlichman, June 23, 1971, White House Tapes, NPMP (transcribed by the author). On October 12, 1972, Kissinger had advised Thieu to seize additional territory before the agreement was finalized. See Kissinger, White House Years, 1358.

44. Memorandum, “Communist Military and Economic Aid to North Vietnam, 1970–1974,” March 4, 1975, in Declassified Documents Catalog, vol. 20, no. 2 (Woodbridge, Conn.: Research Publications, 1994), microfiche no. 000615.

45. T. Christopher Jespersen, “Kissinger, Ford, and Congress: The Very Bitter End in Vietnam,” Pacific Historical Review 71, no. 3 (2002): 439–73; David L. Anderson, “Gerald R. Ford and the Presidents’ War in Vietnam,” in Shadow on the White House: Presidents and the Vietnam War, 1945–1975, edited by David L. Anderson (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 184–207; Kimball, Vietnam War Files, chap. 7.

46. See, for example, Nixon, RN, 348; Oval Office Conversation no. 474-8, Nixon, Laird, John Connally, David Packard, Thomas Moorer, Kissinger, and Haig, March 26, 1971, White House Tapes, NPMP (transcribed by Ken Hughes); and memcon, NSC Meeting, May 8, 1972, box 998, Haig Memcons (January–December 1972), Alexander M. Haig Chronological Files, NSCF, NPMP.

47. On the waning of hawkish support, see, for example, cable, Nixon to Kissinger, November 24, 1972, folder: HAK Paris Trip 18–25 Nov. 1972 TOHAK [two of two], box 26, HAK Trip Files, HAK Office Files, NPMP; memorandum, Laird to Nixon, “Cease-Fire Agreement,” [December 13, 1972], folder: Cease-Fire 1972, box 7, NSCF: POW/MIA, NPMP.

48. Memorandum, W. R. Smyser to Kissinger, “The Situation in Asia,” July 15, 1975, folder: Southeast Asia (3), box 1, Country File, Ambassador Kintner’s Study … Area, National Security Advisor: Presidential Country Files for East Asia and the Pacific, 1974–1977, Gerald R. Ford Library, Ann Arbor, Mich.