HENRY KISSINGER CAME into the Nixon White House profoundly skeptical about the Vietnam War. He was not a dove; he believed, as Richard Nixon did, that the United States had to find a way to end the war “honorably” or else face a crippling loss of prestige throughout the world. But Kissinger’s criticisms of the war were nonetheless profound and based on firsthand experience. Kissinger’s trip to South Vietnam in late 1965, at the request of Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, had been a free-wheeling two weeks spent talking extensively to Vietnamese and American officials. Among those he impressed was Daniel Ellsberg, who was in the process of becoming a State Department expert on the provinces and districts outside Saigon. Ellsberg gave Kissinger a list of knowledgeable Americans and Vietnamese throughout the country and urged Kissinger to talk with them informally, so they would speak frankly. Robert S. McNamara, Johnson’s Secretary of Defense, had been misled year after year during his visits to South Vietnam, Ellsberg told him, by permitting senior officers to monitor all his briefings. Ellsberg gave the same advice to many visitors, but Kissinger was one of the few who took it.
“He was a talented and incisive questioner,” Ellsberg recalls. “He took notes and listened carefully and did learn an unusual amount.” Just before he left Saigon, in early November, Kissinger had lunch with a small group of American correspondents and expressed his dismay at what he termed the almost total lack of political maturity and unselfish political motivation among current and future leaders of South Vietnam. Specifically included in that denunciation were the current Premier, Nguyen Cao Ky, and the chief of state, Nguyen Van Thieu, who was soon to become President. Kissinger further complained, during the off-the-record luncheon, that the Ky-Thieu government was in no sense democratic or representative, because the peasants, 80 percent of the South Vietnamese population, had little or no voice in the government.I
In 1966, Kissinger visited South Vietnam twice more, as a consultant to a State Department program aimed at finding new ways to induce members of the National Liberation Front, the antigovernment coalition of Communists and nationalists that Hanoi had organized in South Vietnam in 1960, to defect to the South Vietnamese government. The concept, as Kissinger explained it at the time, was to give individual members of the NLF, known to Americans as Vietcong, a chance to participate in government at the provincial or village level. Since the South Vietnamese constitution banned the Communist Party, a way had to be found for Communists to work at equivalent positions as individuals, not as Party members, inside the political structure. As Ellsberg recalls it, Kissinger and a few other farsighted analysts believed the South Vietnamese government might have to give the Vietcong de facto control of some of the rural provinces to induce them to end the war. “This was the right direction,” Ellsberg says, “but the Vietcong were not going to buy it. They weren’t looking for a way to lose the war gracefully, which is what we were offering them.” Kissinger made it clear that he had “no interest” per se in this pacification program, “which he properly read as a loser.”II
Over the next two years, Kissinger’s views sharpened. By 1968 Ellsberg was back in the United States, working in Santa Monica, California, for the Rand Corporation, a leading think tank, and doing some consulting for the Pentagon. In the middle of that year, he attended two conferences on Vietnam at which Kissinger expressed the almost radical view that the only United States objective in Vietnam should be the assurance of a “decent interval” between the final exodus of American troops and a Communist-led takeover of the South Vietnamese government. His analysis came after the seeming success of a major NLF offensive during Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, in February, in which guerrilla forces staged uprisings throughout the country.
In the summer of 1968, just after the Republican convention, Kissinger began work on a lengthy analysis of the Vietnam negotiating dilemma for publication in the January 1969 issue of Foreign Affairs, the distinguished journal of the Council on Foreign Affairs. The article, which he circulated privately before it appeared, served not only to express his views but also to advertise his wares to the next President, whether Nixon or Humphrey.
In the article, Kissinger described the 1968 Tet offensive as the “watershed of the American effort. Henceforth, no matter how effective our actions the prevalent [American] strategy could no longer achieve its objectives within a period or with force levels politically acceptable to the American people.” Tet made the American commitment to a political solution in South Vietnam inevitable. Kissinger also warned that the United States could not and should not rely on the Soviet Union to bring an end to the war. He noted that the United States had done little in reaction to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968; therefore, America “would compound the heavy costs of our pallid reaction . . . if our allies could blame it on a quid pro quo for Soviet assistance in extricating us from Southeast Asia. Washington therefore requires great delicacy in dealing with Moscow on the Vietnam issue. It cannot be in the American interest to add fuel to the already widespread charge that the superpowers are sacrificing their allies to maintain spheres of influence.”III
Thus Kissinger entered the Nixon Administration on record as deeply pessimistic about the Vietnam War, as convinced that the Soviet Union should not be a conduit for negotiations, and as believing that any negotiated settlement had to end the war in an honorable fashion, if only for the sake of American prestige and continued international order. That belief, many of Kissinger’s associates thought, did not necessarily rule out a pro-Communist government in the South, provided a “decent interval” could be guaranteed.
Within a few weeks of the announcement of his appointment as national security adviser, Kissinger telephoned Henry Rowen, president of Rand, and asked him to put together a list of possible options for the Vietnam War. The request was natural: Kissinger had become a consultant there and a friend of Fred C. Iklé, head of the Social Science Division.IV Rowen, a former member of the Kennedy Administration, put Ellsberg in charge. By this time, Ellsberg and the Rand Corporation as a whole were widely regarded inside the bureaucracy as having gone “dovish” on Vietnam. Kissinger had insisted that Rand’s involvement with the policy be kept secret, a condition to which Ellsberg and Rowen agreed.
Ellsberg was fresh from researching a detailed secret history of American involvement in the Vietnam War that had been assembled in the Pentagon, at McNamara’s direction, by a team headed by Morton Halperin and Leslie H. Gelb, then deputy director of the Planning Staff. Ellsberg consulted with Halperin and Gelb on the Kissinger option study, in which he analyzed contingencies ranging from an invasion of North Vietnam to a unilateral withdrawal. The selection of Ellsberg to head the study raised no eyebrows. Kissinger himself had praised his knowledge of Vietnam issues at a Rand seminar shortly after the 1968 election, telling the group, “I have learned more from Dan Ellsberg than from anyone else in Vietnam.” On Christmas Day, 1968, Ellsberg, Rowen, and another Rand official flew to New York to present the options paper to Kissinger, Halperin, and Thomas C. Schelling, a Kissinger colleague from Harvard. Kissinger and Schelling had one immediate criticism of the paper: It did not include a threat option. Schelling also told Ellsberg that the paper did not include a “win” option. “Here we have a set of papers going to a new President,” Schelling said, “and you’re not telling any way that he could possibly win.” Ellsberg recalls telling Schelling and Kissinger, “I don’t believe there is a win option in Vietnam.”
Ellsberg readily agreed to include an analysis of a threat option, but he told Kissinger, “I don’t see how threatening bombing is going to influence the enemy because they have experienced four years of bombing.” Ellsberg remembers arguing that the only effective threat “would be simply a threat to stay there for a long time; not to win, but if you could stay there in terms of domestic politics”—by reducing casualties and financial costs—“that would impress them. You might get some small concessions out of them.” According to Ellsberg, “Henry then said, ‘But how can you conduct negotiations without a credible threat of escalation?’ I said, ‘People negotiate all the time without threatening bombing.’ ”
A few of the early recruits to Kissinger’s NSC staff were surprised to meet Ellsberg during his brief visit to the Pierre headquarters. John C. Court, a former Pentagon analyst who was coming to work under Kissinger, was introduced to Ellsberg and told he was “an old friend of Kissinger’s. I’d heard of Ellsberg,” Court says. “He was a wild man.”
Ellsberg’s options paper was accepted and submitted to the President-elect sometime around the first of the year. In those weeks, Kissinger was obviously learning more about the man he was serving, and what he learned was reflected in a change he ordered in the study. He asked Iklé whether Rand would mind if the withdrawal option was deleted. That option called for the United States to withdraw unilaterally within a fixed period, regardless of events inside South Vietnam. Ellsberg was later told that General Goodpaster had dropped his copy of the study on Kissinger’s desk and said coldly, “I have not commented on the final option [withdrawal], which is not an option.” The option was deleted from the final draft of the study, edited by Iklé, that was turned over to the NSC.
Out of that first study came a second Kissinger assignment for Ellsberg. In the options paper, Ellsberg had summarized some of the intelligence questions about the Vietnam War and its progress that were dividing the bureaucracy. At breakfast with Kissinger at the Hotel Pierre, Ellsberg told him how McNamara had overwhelmed the bureaucracy immediately after taking charge of the Pentagon by ordering the Joint Chiefs of Staff to respond to ninety-six questions. The questions, soon referred to as the “ninety-six trombones,” after the popular show tune “Seventy-six Trombones,” had the immediate effect of letting the military know that he, McNamara, had direct knowledge of many lower-level rivalries and disputes. If the military leaders sought to manipulate him or lie to him in their answers, McNamara was saying, they faced exposure and embarrassment. Kissinger was intrigued, says Ellsberg, and readily agreed that a similar effort to seize and challenge the bureaucracy should begin at once, using the same technique: a list of tough questions. Ellsberg was impressed at Kissinger’s courage in agreeing to expand the questions and to “send them out in the President’s name to all these agencies.” Ellsberg also knew the significance of the current “lull” in Vietnam, with the military insisting that it was a sign the war was being won and other agencies claiming that the lull merely reflected a Vietcong and North Vietnamese desire not to act. With Kissinger’s approval, he expanded his questionnaire for the bureaucracy, and then returned to Rand.
In February, Kissinger summoned Ellsberg back for special White House duty. The answers to the questionnaire, which had been distributed to the bureaucracy as National Security Study Memorandum 1, were flooding in and help was needed to coordinate the answers. Ellsberg spent nearly all of March in Washington, working in secret.
At his suggestion, the questionnaire had posed its questions separately to the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency, and the responses were to be returned separately. Ellsberg’s idea was to allow the President to see firsthand the extent of disagreement in the government about the course of the war. The responses were generally negative and pessimistic. Doubts were expressed about the efficacy of bombing and of pacification, and about the South Vietnamese Army’s ability to stand up to the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong without heavy American air support. The Pentagon also conceded for the first time that the Vietnam War was not even near the point where attrition of enemy soldiers would exceed their replacement, though the so-called crossover point theory had been the underlying basis of the Johnson Administration’s military strategy.
The implications of these replies to NSSM 1 were far-reaching. Even the most optimistic assessment from staunchly prowar military officers was that it would take a minimum of 8.3 years more to completely pacify and control the Vietcong areas of the South. Pessimists, including civilian advisers in the State Department and Pentagon, thought it would take at least 13.4 years. Such responses made it clear that the war in the South could not be won at all without a continuing American presence, at least in the air, no matter how extensively the South Vietnamese Army was augmented and improved. But in fact Nixon and Kissinger never relied on NSSM 1 and its replies except as a method of forcing the bureaucracy to do busywork and removing it from decision making. The documents were kept top secret: The public would have been deeply disillusioned to learn in 1969 that while Nixon and Kissinger had embarked on a policy of building up the South Vietnamese Army—“Vietnamization”—they already knew that the end result, short of a most unlikely capitulation by Hanoi, would be a continuing American Air Force role in the South for years to come. But the conclusions of the NSSM 1 papers—and the man who was responsible for them—would haunt the White House over the next four years.
Kissinger did not permit himself to link NSSM 1’s dreary long-range implications to his innate pessimism about the war. Whatever Nixon believed Kissinger soon found himself advocating. Nixon had won the presidency by telling the American people that he had a plan to end the war with honor. He had not made his plan public; had he done so, he might not have been elected. Nixon’s plan was not merely to end the war but to win it. He and Kissinger agreed immediately on the one overriding principle that would guide Vietnam policy for the next four years: South Vietnam must remain non-Communist forever.
The Nixon-Kissinger plan, as it evolved over the first year, had three basic elements. Most important, the Hanoi government must be shown that the Nixon Administration would stop at nothing—not even the physical destruction of North Vietnam’s cities and waterworks—to end the war on terms it declared to be honorable. Second, the Soviet Union would be warned that its relationships with the United States in all areas, especially foreign trade, would be linked to its continuing support for Hanoi. When these threats failed to force Hanoi to make concessions at the peace table, a third major policy goal emerged: The antiwar movement in the United States would be challenged and neutralized, to gain enough time to pursue complete military victory.
An essential facet of the policy was secrecy. Only without public knowledge and public protests could Richard Nixon carry out his plan to threaten North Vietnam so strongly that it would be forced to sue for peace. In his memoirs, Nixon wrote that shortly after taking office, “I confidently told the Cabinet that I expected the war to be over in a year.” But his Cabinet, like the rest of the government, was kept in the dark about the real reason for his confidence.
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Nixon’s secret policy had its roots in the Eisenhower era.
As the newly elected Vice President in 1953, Nixon watched Dwight Eisenhower fulfill a campaign promise and end the Korean War six months after taking office. In Mandate for Change, 1953-56, Eisenhower revealed what was not said publicly at the time: that he had explicitly threatened to use atomic weapons to end the war. When he took office, Eisenhower wrote, a military offensive in North Korea was being considered by the U.S.-led United Nations forces helping South Korea defend itself: “To keep the attack from becoming costly, it was clear that we would have to use atomic weapons.” Eisenhower decided, as he wrote, “to let the Communist authorities understand that, in the absence of satisfactory progress, we intended to move decisively without inhibition in our use of weapons, and would no longer be responsible for confining hostilities to the Korean Peninsula. We would not be limited by any world-wide gentlemen’s agreement.” According to Eisenhower, word was quietly passed to the Chinese Communists and the Soviet Union, and the end of the war was quickly negotiated. Eisenhower’s long-time assistant and confidant, Sherman Adams, wrote that the President told him later that he had made the threat “sure that there was not the remotest chance we would actually have to carry out our threat; the Communists would simply throw up their hands and the war would be over.”
Along with the nuclear threat, Eisenhower ordered a sharp escalation of the air war over North Korea. In early May 1953, American bombers destroyed hydroelectric power plants on the Yalu River, destroying dams and creating floods that swamped twenty-seven miles of farmland. It was the first deliberate military attack on irrigation targets since Hitler’s Luftwaffe destroyed dikes and dams in Holland late in World War II.V
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Nixon’s attempt in 1969 to emulate Dwight Eisenhower’s methods of extricating America from an unpopular war was not an unconscious act of hero worship but a carefully thought-out strategy. Nixon had spelled out his policy the previous August in what he thought was an off-the-record talk to a group of southern delegates at the Republican convention.VI “How do you bring a war to a conclusion?” Nixon said in response to a question. “I’ll tell you how Korea was ended. We got in there and had this messy war on our hands. Eisenhower let the word go out—let the word go out diplomatically—to the Chinese and the North Koreans that we would not tolerate this continual ground war of attrition. And within a matter of months, they negotiated. Well, as far as negotiation [in Vietnam] is concerned that should be our position. . . . I’ll tell you one thing. I played a little poker when I was in the Navy . . . I learned this—when a guy didn’t have the cards, he talked awfully big. But when he had the cards, he just sat there—had that cold look in his eyes. Now we’ve got the cards. . . . What we’ve got to do is walk softly and carry a big stick. And that is what we are going to do.”
Nixon did not mention nuclear weapons in his talk to the delegates, but before the convention he had told Richard J. Whalen, one of his speech writers and advisers, that if elected President, “I would use nuclear weapons.” Nixon quickly added, as Whalen later recorded, that he did not mean he would use them in Vietnam, only that he would be willing “to threaten their use in appropriate circumstances.”
As President, however, Nixon was aware that his threat could work only if North Vietnam believed he was capable of anything. Sometime early in 1969, he explained his secret strategy for ending the war to Haldeman as they strolled along the beach at Key Biscayne. He told Haldeman about the Eisenhower nuclear threats in 1953 and how those threats had quickly ended the Korean War. Eisenhower’s military career—he had been commander of the Allied Forces in World War II—had convinced the Communists that the threats were real. Nixon said he planned to use the same principle: the threat of maximum force. “I call it the madman theory, Bob,” he said.VII “I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, ‘for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communists. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button’—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.”
There was a basic flaw in Nixon’s “madman theory.” Eisenhower’s threat had been made at a time when the United States had a virtual monopoly on nuclear weapons. That situation did not exist in the late 1960s, and the credibility of Nixon’s threat was reduced by the possibility that the Soviet Union, or even Communist China, would retaliate after an American first use of nuclear weapons. Another drawback was the fact that Richard Nixon did not have Dwight Eisenhower’s military background. Nonetheless, Haldeman wrote, Nixon believed that the Communists regarded him as an uncompromising enemy whose hatred for their philosophy had been repeatedly made clear in his two decades of public life. “They’ll believe any threat of force that Nixon makes because it’s Nixon,” Haldeman quoted the President as saying. Nixon not only wanted to end the war, Haldeman added, he was absolutely convinced he would end it in his first year. “I’m the one man in this country who can do it, Bob,” he told Haldeman.
The administration’s immediate problem was one of technique: how to convey its ominous message to the Hanoi government. It was not that easy. For one thing, such a threat had to be kept totally secret. To do otherwise would trigger renewed antiwar demonstrations and perhaps destroy the traditional honeymoon Nixon was enjoying in the first months of his presidency. The question was how to “signal” the other side that Richard Nixon was prepared to be far more ruthless than Lyndon B. Johnson. The men in the White House found a quick answer.
I. The lunch turned out to be a fiasco for Kissinger. It enmeshed him in an immediate—if private—dispute with the White House, the press corps in Saigon, and Clark Clifford, a distinguished Washington lawyer and former Truman Administration official who would later become Johnson’s Secretary of Defense. Clifford, who was touring Vietnam as a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, had not attended the lunch, but Jack Foisie of the Los Angeles Times, who was there, published a dispatch in which he attributed Kissinger’s expressions of dismay and disappointment to both Kissinger and Clifford. The story caused resentment among the political leadership in Saigon, and Clifford wrote to President Johnson dissociating himself from the incident and stating that he had not met with any journalists during his trip. Bill D. Moyers, the White House press secretary, immediately made the Clifford denial public and pointedly told the press that Kissinger’s views were “his and not the government’s.” Kissinger then wrote to Moyers disavowing Foisie’s article and apparently also suggesting that Moyers had attacked him personally. Moyers’ response to Kissinger, now in the archives at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library in Austin, Texas, provided little solace: “Under the circumstances, Dr. Kissinger, knowing how much pain [Foisie’s] false account had created in Saigon, and not having the opportunity to talk with you before I was questioned on the subject, I did what I felt had to be done . . . not because I wished to attack you but because a dilatory or vague response to the question at my briefing would only have compounded what you have already admitted was the ‘damage done to American policy’ by the views attributed to you.”
II. Kissinger went even further in his criticism after returning to Harvard that fall. Over a sherry one afternoon with Dr. Matthew Meselson, a Harvard microbiologist who was a State Department consultant on arms control, Kissinger expressed profound distress over the war: “Matt, now I know what the good Germans felt.” Meselson came away from the conversation convinced that Kissinger believed the Vietnam War was a moral wrong. Another possibility, of course, is that Kissinger was telling Meselson what he thought the avowedly antiwar scientist wanted to hear.
III. The Foreign Affairs article, widely praised at the time of its publication, is replete with contradictions. For example, Kissinger wrote—correctly, as it turned out in 1975—that “it is beyond imagination that parties that have been murdering and betraying each other for 25 years could work together as a team giving joint instructions to the entire country.” A few pages further on, however, he suggested that “while a coalition government is undesirable, a mixed commission to develop and supervise a political process to reintegrate the country—including free elections—could be useful.” Similarly, in a much-quoted phrase, he cited with approval what he said was a cardinal maxim of guerrilla war: “the guerrilla wins if he does not lose; the conventional army loses if it does not win.” By that definition the North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces were winning the war by 1969 and the United States was losing. But then Kissinger went on to declare that the American military position had begun to improve, and “As a result, we have achieved our minimum objective: Hanoi is unable to gain a military victory.” He did not explain how denying Hanoi a military victory was a measure of success in light of the concept that Hanoi did not need a victory in order to win.
IV. Kissinger’s relationship with the analysts at Rand had been soured in the late 1950s by a scathing review of his Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy by William W. Kaufmann of Rand. Several Rand people were known to have contributed ideas to the review, which was published in World Politics magazine in July 1958 and debunked, at great length, Kissinger’s reasoning and strategy concepts. The review, innocuously entitled “The Crisis in Military Affairs,” accused Kissinger of muddling his facts, arguing inconsistently, and changing his assumptions depending “on what point he is trying to prove.” As for Kissinger’s main thesis, the possibility of waging a limited nuclear war, Kaufmann raised a serious objection: Kissinger “has omitted to consider the precedent-setting effects of initiating the use of atomic weapons and has also overlooked the impact upon allied and neutral nations of our having taken this step. Presumably,” Kaufmann added caustically, “any war that is limited in scope is bound to have a great many interested onlookers.” Kissinger was pained by the review, Kaufmann recalls: “I got one of his six-page letters.” Kissinger eventually revised his views on the viability of limited nuclear warfare, and Kaufmann, who became director of the Social Science Division at Rand in 1961, ended their impasse by offering him a consultancy.
V. An official analysis of the bombings in North Korea, published in the Air University Quarterly Review, described the dams targeted for destruction as responsible for 75 percent of the water supply for North Korea’s rice production. “. . . [T]o the Communists the smashing of the dams meant primarily the destruction of their chief sustenance—rice. The Westerner can little conceive the awesome meaning which the loss of this staple food commodity has for the Asian—starvation and slow death.” The Air Force study concluded that “These strikes, largely passed over by the press, the military observers and news commentators in favor of attention-arresting but less meaningful operations events, constituted one of the significant air operations of the Korean War.”
VI. An enterprising reporter for the Miami Herald apparently persuaded one of the delegates to tape record the session and the Herald published the text on August 7, placing its exclusive story across eight columns on page 1: “What Dick Nixon Told Southern Delegates.”
VII. It is highly likely that Kissinger was responsible for Nixon’s adoption of the phrase “the madman theory.” In 1959, Ellsberg had presented two lectures to Kissinger’s Harvard seminar on the conscious political use of irrational military threats. Ellsberg called the theory “The Political Uses of Madness.” In essence, he described a problem in bargaining theory: what to do when the available threat is so extreme or costly as to make it seem unlikely that a sane and reasonable person would carry it out. On the other hand, since the threat is so extreme, Ellsberg noted, it does not have to be very likely to be used in order to be effective, particularly if the nation posing the threat is making only moderate negotiating demands. Ellsberg postulated that one way of making the threat somewhat credible—which, in this case, was all that would be necessary—would be for the person making the threat to appear not to be fully rational. In effect, an application of this was implicit in Kissinger’s Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, which advocated, among other things, a “strategy of ambiguity” in connection with United States use of tactical nuclear weapons. In his Harvard lectures, Ellsberg cited as his main example Hitler’s conscious use of his reputation as a madman to win victories without firing a shot in the Rhineland, Austria, and Munich before World War II. As his model of Hitler indicated, Ellsberg regarded such a strategy as reckless and utterly dangerous for the world, but a possibility to be anticipated from opponents because, in connection with a nuclear threat, it might work. “I didn’t even imagine that an American president could consider such a strategy,” Ellsberg says.