HANOI OFFERED THE WHITE HOUSE a chance for a negotiated peace in mid-1971, but the price was too high: an honest election in the South.
Nixon and Kissinger clung to Nguyen Van Thieu, the increasingly repressive and unpopular President of South Vietnam; keeping him in power became a face-saving mechanism more important than ending the war. Stung by the failure of the Laos invasion and fearful about reelection, Nixon agreed in May 1971 to hint at a significant concession in the secret Paris peace talks: North Vietnam would be allowed to keep its troops in the South. Mutual withdrawal, the negotiating stance adopted by the Nixon Administration with so much hope two years earlier, was no longer cited as a precondition for a settlement. But the new White House position did not lead to progress either. Both sides continued to talk past each other. The concession on Hanoi’s troops was never specifically spelled out in Paris in 1971, and Hanoi’s leaders, always wary of American “tricks,” adopted the legal position that the revised proposals hinged on the withdrawal of their troops. In Hanoi’s view, even an explicitly worded commitment that its troops had the right to remain in the South would only concede diplomatically what Washington could not prevent militarily. The White House proposal was still contingent on Hanoi’s willingness to accept a ceasefire in Cambodia and Laos, where Communist gains had been greater and ultimate victory was more assured, as well as in South Vietnam; and it did not provide the National Liberation Front with any guarantee of participation in the political life of the South. In essence, the United States proposed to withdraw its troops from South Vietnam if Hanoi would accept a political defeat and a military stalemate.
But Kissinger also began talking, during six secret meetings in Paris between May and October, of America’s willingness to accept a neutral South Vietnam and political competition among Communists and non-Communists in Saigon. This was something new, and North Vietnam responded that summer with what it considered a significant modification of its demands: The United States would not have to depose Thieu and his coterie, whose ouster Hanoi considered essential if there was to be open political life in the South, but instead could negotiate an end to the war by remaining neutral during the Vietnamese presidental elections, scheduled for October 3, and allowing the South Vietnamese voters to do what Nixon and Kissinger would not—get rid of Thieu. It was a solution the White House never considered. Thus Nixon made a military concession that the other side deemed misleading, and Hanoi made a political suggestion that the White House found untenable. Hanoi was misjudging Nixon’s determination not to lose in South Vietnam as much as Nixon had misjudged Hanoi’s determination not to let his threats and coercion—the “madman theory”—drive it out of the South.
That summer Nixon and Kissinger publicly continued to insist that America’s honor remained synonymous with Nguyen Van Thieu—pending a better offer from Hanoi. The South Vietnamese President had no intention of campaigning honestly and holding a fair election, nor did his benefactors in the White House press him to do so. For them, the 1971 election, called for by Vietnam’s 1967 constitution, which had been shaped by American advisers, was merely an unfortunate nuisance that arose at an awkward time. Nixon and Kissinger repeatedly assured the world that America would remain neutral in the election, but few in Saigon and Washington expected the administration not to do all it could to maintain its man in power in Saigon.
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There was immense irony in the White House’s backing of Thieu, for Hanoi, in seeking a political end to his regime, found itself in league with non-Communist American and Vietnamese critics of the South Vietnamese government, including Vietnamese politicians who were members of the “Third Force” in Saigon, as well as dozens of junior- and middle-level American diplomats assigned to the embassy in Saigon and to district and provincial offices throughout the South. These dissidents shared with Hanoi an understanding that the 1971 elections offered the White House a chance to get out of Vietnam without an immediate Communist takeover. In their view, an honest election, far from endangering the future of South Vietnam, would strengthen the political structure of the government and enable its demoralized military to perform more effectively against the North Vietnamese. They argued that a rigged election would end legitimate political life in the South and make the eventual collapse of Thieu’s regime inevitable. By spring 1971, after the failure in Laos, a military concession by the United States became essential if an agreement was to be negotiated: Hanoi could keep its troops in South Vietnam. The one unresolvable issue in the secret talks thus became Hanoi’s insistence that Thieu be ousted. If the White House would not do it by fiat, Le Due Tho began telling Kissinger, the next-best solution would be to let Thieu take his chances with the people.
Thieu had been challenged by his Vice President, Nguyen Cao Ky, the ambitious head of the South Vietnamese Air Force, but Ky’s candidacy posed no threat; his commitment to continue the war offered little real choice for the electorate. The compromise candidate who became most acceptable not only to Hanoi but to many Vietnamese and American dissidents was General Duong Van Minh, who had been sent to Thailand as South Vietnam’s Ambassador—and kept out of the country until 1968—for his role in the 1963 coup d’état against Ngo Dinh Diem. With his suggestion about an honest election, Tho was telling the White House that, as a minimum, Hanoi was willing to sign a peace agreement on the basis of a divided Vietnam whose political future would be resolved after a decent interval. General Minh, known as “Big Minh” in Saigon, also had the support of many American Foreign Service officers as a candidate of conciliation who could bring together the fragmented political and religious forces in South Vietnam. Equally important was the belief that while Minh was willing to negotiate with the Provisional Revolutionary Government, the Vietcong’s government-in-waiting, he would not accept a peace that would hand over the South to the Communists. General Minh had enlisted in the French Army at the age of twenty-four and risen rapidly through the ranks in the 1940s and early 1950s during the war against the Viet Minh, the Communist insurgents led by Ho Chi Minh, who defeated the French in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu. Many of his associates in 1971 were also retired South Vietnamese officers who had fought for the French against the Vietnamese Communists. His support among the various peace movements in Saigon was genuine; he was perceived as a hero for his role in the 1963 assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem and his equally despised brother, Ngo Dinh Ngu. Minh joined with two other senior South Vietnamese Army officers in the coup, which was carried out with the prior knowledge and acquiescence of the American Embassy and the White House. The job of assassinating Diem and Ngu fell to Minh’s personal bodyguard, who shot both men as they were supposedly being driven to safety. In 1971, the anniversary of Diem’s assassination was still celebrated as a national holiday throughout the South. Minh’s most significant support came from those elements in Vietnamese politics known as the “legal opposition,” or the “Third Force,” which included the influential Buddhist groups. The coalition was highly patriotic and far more interested in obtaining the endorsement of the American Embassy than in negotiating a compromise with the North Vietnamese; nonetheless, Nguyen Van Thieu and many in the American Embassy were convinced that it was little more than a front for the Communists. Minh’s campaign platform in 1971 specifically ruled out negotiations with the National Liberation Front unless it agreed to give up its political and military fight for a neutral coalition in the South and, as Minh declared in mid-June, agreed to “accept the rules of democracy.”I Recognition of North Vietnam, he said, would be “possible only when North Vietnam recognizes the non-Communist nature of South Vietnam and accepts division for the time being.”
None of this seemed to carry any weight with Nixon or Kissinger, who viewed Minh merely as a Communist dupe. In his memoirs, Kissinger complained about the timing of the 1971 elections, which had been fixed by the 1967 Vietnamese constitution: “Thus, at a crucial point in the history of America’s involvement in Vietnam, an event imposed on Vietnam essentially by American choice [in 1967] turned into a new source of turmoil and anxiety. . . . Many in the bureaucracy were hoping that Thieu would be defeated by a candidate prepared to accept a coalition government. I hoped that a democratic election would increase support for an ally.” As for the candidacy of General Minh, “If Hanoi accepted him—which was unclear—it would be because he was the easiest of all candidates to overthrow should he become President.” Kissinger’s disdain for General Minh seemed irrational even to some of his close aides. Richard Smyser, the NSC staff specialist on Vietnam, who was one of the few staff people involved in the secret Paris peace talks, suggested to Kissinger that summer that he and other officials were underestimating Minh, but such views were disregarded. “The United States government always mistrusts our friends,” Smyser says in hindsight. “It also distrusts neutral solutions, because we would lose control.”II
Nixon’s decision in May 1971 to consider the inevitable—North Vietnamese troops in the South—arose from domestic political necessity. Vietnamization may have been working to some degree in the field, but it had failed to provide lasting political benefits in the United States. Every withdrawal of American troops seemed to be offset by a reverse. In early April of 1971, Nixon announced the withdrawal of another 100,000 American fighting men by December 1, 1971, increasing the total withdrawn to 365,000 since mid-1969. The political benefit was more than offset, however, by a renewed media controversy over the My Lai massacre. On March 29, Lieutenant William L. Calley, the hapless officer who took part in the 1968 massacre, was found guilty by a military court-martial of the premeditated murder of twenty-two Vietnamese civilians. The Calley case had created controversy when the atrocity first became known in 1969, with many Americans refusing to believe that the massacre was as deliberate and systematic as the initial news reports said. Calley’s conviction, by a group of Army officers—his peers—was a blow to those Americans who had refused to accept the implications of the My Lai incident, those Middle Americans whose support Nixon and previous presidents had been able to rally by appeals to patriotism. Nixon, with his excellent political instincts, understood the danger of Calley’s conviction and intervened to insure that Calley was not immediately put into an Army stockade, pending his appeal. It was good politics, but not good enough. Senator Edmund Muskie, viewed as the leading contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, had begun to match Nixon’s strength in public opinion polls early in the year; by May, the Harris poll reported that Muskie was running well ahead of Nixon, by a margin of 47 to 39 percent.
Something had to be done about Vietnam. Richard Smyser recalls Nixon’s decision to make a move in the secret Paris peace talks—to find a way to get all the American troops out of Vietnam. “We all understood what we were doing,” Smyser says. “For domestic and political reasons, American troops had to be gotten out of there.”
On April 24, with the outcry over his intervention in the Calley case barely behind him, Nixon authorized Kissinger to renew contact with the North Vietnamese in Paris. There was no immediate response. On April 29, at a news conference, Nixon was asked about growing congressional demands that he set a date for withdrawing all American troops from Vietnam if Hanoi would agree to release the American prisoners of war. In response, he recapitulated his peace proposals, carefully noting that “they included, as you know, a mutual withdrawal of forces. . . .” It was the last time he was to use such language in public. Hanoi, obviously believing it held the upper hand, waited until May 14 before agreeing to secret talks, which were then set for May 31. Between those dates, Kissinger somehow convinced Nixon that the time had come for a military concession.III
There would be a new American peace proposal offered in Paris on May 31, one that did not specifically call for the withdrawal of Hanoi’s troops from the South. That point would simply be left unstated. The decision to drop mutual withdrawal would not be made known in Saigon, where Nguyen Van Thieu was being told as little as possible about the secret talks. Kissinger was optimistic. In his memoirs, he described the new proposal as “the most sweeping plan we had yet offered.” Nixon considered it a “final offer.” The North Vietnamese had a different view. In return for the vaguely hinted-at military concession, they believed the White House had set a high price: America would set a date for total withdrawal, but that withdrawal would not begin until the other side had agreed to a general ceasefire throughout South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The Thieu regime would also be left in place to continue to operate under the 1967 South Vietnamese constitution, which barred Communist participation in the political life of the South. In addition, the American formula would leave the Thieu regime’s police force and army intact while the North Vietnamese and the PRG, having agreed to the ceasefire, were to negotiate the final political solution. Hanoi would already have released its American prisoners of war, one of its main bargaining chips in forcing the United States to withdraw unilaterally.
Hanoi had no way of perceiving it at the time, but there was another unstated assumption in the American proposal: A ceasefire would be buttressed by Richard Nixon’s commitment to return with air power to both North and South Vietnam.
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The new American offer came at a time of lowered military activity in South Vietnam. Kissinger and many of his aides, among them Richard Smyser, were convinced that the South Vietnamese could hold up well on their own, with American air support. In mid-1971, a series of upbeat reports from the American Embassy and the CIA station in Saigon noted that the Thieu regime had been generally able to improve internal security conditions. The North Vietnamese and the National Liberation Front had come to a similar conclusion. In an analysis prepared in early 1971 by the Central Office for South Vietnam, the Communists conceded that “The enemy has achieved some temporary results. . . . During the past two years, the U.S. and puppet focused their efforts on pacifying and encroaching upon rural areas, using the most barbarous schemes. They strengthened puppet forces, consolidated the puppet forces, consolidated the puppet government, and established an outpost network and espionage and People’s Self-Defense Force organizations in many hamlets and villages. They provided more technical equipment for, and increased the mobility of, puppet forces, establishing blocking lines, and created a new defensive and oppressive system in densely populated areas. As a result they caused many difficulties to and inflicted losses on friendly forces.” The analysis, published after a political conference somewhere in the jungles of South Vietnam and known as COSVN Directive 10, nonetheless concluded on an optimistic note, pointing out that the speeded-up Vietnamization program was compelling the Saigon government “to expedite its dictatorial and fascist policies on conscription” in order to send Vietnamese troops to the battlefields “to die in the place of U.S. soldiers.” The directive predicted that as Vietnamization continued, the contradictions between the policies of Saigon and the aspirations of the people “would ripen the political awareness” and force increased demands for the replacement of the Thieu regime. But, as COSVN 10 made clear, the Vietcong and North Vietnamese understood that victory was not around the corner.
The North Vietnamese, their forces on the defensive in the South, were skeptical about the May 31 peace proposal. Any agreement would have to be carefully negotiated. Nguyen Co Thach, Le Due Tho’s aide throughout the secret peace talks, later characterized the new White House offer as “no change. It was a wording change.” Thach’s point was that the May 31 proposal did not explicitly give North Vietnam the right to keep its troops in the South; that concession, he said, was never really spelled out during the talks over the summer of 1971. Legally, Thach said, the United States “stuck to its demand that we withdraw our troops.” What Nixon and Kissinger viewed as a subtle change in their negotiating position was too subtle for the North Vietnamese. The proposal, as published in Kissinger’s memoirs, made no mention of North Vietnam’s right to maintain its troops in the South but simply stated that the Vietnamese and “the other peoples in Indochina should discuss among themselves the manner in which all other outside forces would withdraw from the countries of Indochina.” That was far too ambiguous for the circumspect and suspicious men from Hanoi.IV
What did interest the North Vietnamese, Thach said, was Kissinger’s suggestion, made during a conversation with Le Due Tho on May 31, that the White House was willing to discuss seriously a possible coalition government in Saigon. Kissinger “touched on the question of the ‘decent interval,’ ” Thach recalled. “He said that the withdrawal of American troops would have a big effect on the internal political processes of South Vietnam, and the USA would accept a neutral South Vietnam.” It was the first time such language had been heard in the secret talks. Kissinger guaranteed that the United States would not impose one side on another; he said that he would “accept two sides and both sides will have competition.” Thach said Le Due Tho and the Hanoi leaders were intrigued by the new guarantee, although they did not find it “credible or believable” because of the Nixon-Kissinger insistence that all political competition in the South be “within the framework of the Saigon constitution. They would like to put the PRG into the framework of the constitution of Saigon. This was not possible. We were fighting to abolish this constitution.”
Despite the suspicions that permeated the secret peace talks, Xuan Thuy, Hanoi’s chief delegate at the May 31 meeting, understood that a major new element had been added. A second secret session was agreed upon for June 16, and Le Due Tho came to take over. (Throughout this period, the public peace talks were continuing, and there was no public clue to the intense activity in secret.) Richard Smyser knew there had been a change in North Vietnam’s attitude as soon as he arrived with Kissinger and Winston Lord: “Instead of all of us sitting in easy chairs opposite cocktail tables, we suddenly were sitting on hard chairs opposite a green cloth table. It was something that told us, ‘Okay, folks, this is bargaining.’ ” The North Vietnamese offered a nine-point peace plan, the first concrete proposal that included a change in their demands about Thieu. Instead of demanding that Thieu be ousted, Hanoi asked the Nixon Administration to “stop supporting” him and his allies, so that “a new administration standing for peace, independence, neutrality, and democracy” would be set up.V As a further inducement, Hanoi agreed for the first time to release the American prisoners of war and all civilian detainees simultaneously with American troop withdrawals. Both the withdrawals and the release would be completed on the same date. Hanoi was now telling Nixon and Kissinger that they could get their prisoners of war back in return for the withdrawal of all American troops—a process already under way—and a fair election in the South. In such an election, Hanoi knew, Thieu would be hard-pressed to defeat General Minh, especially if the third major candidate, Vice President Ky, remained in the race. The flamboyant Ky had wide support among the Catholics and the military, two of Thieu’s main constituencies, and he was sure to drain votes from the South Vietnamese President. On July 1, the PRG publicly released a more detailed peace plan, calling for a three-segment “government of national concord” and urging Nixon and Kissinger to “really respect the South Vietnamese people’s right to self-determination.” The proposal also called on the White House to “stop all maneuvers, including tricks on elections, aimed at maintaining the puppet Nguyen Van Thieu.” Washington no longer had to be responsible for the replacement of the Thieu regime, the PRG proposal said; instead, it must “put an end to its interference in the internal affairs of South Vietnam.”VI During this period, the National Liberation Front began urging its supporters not to boycott the presidential elections, as had been recommended in 1967, but to defeat the Thieu regime by voting against it.
After the June 26 meeting, Kissinger thought he and the North Vietnamese were on the verge of an agreement. “In the fairy-tale atmosphere of Vietnam negotiations, after two years of Communist stonewalling and domestic flagellation,” he wrote of Le Due Tho’s proposal, “my colleagues and I were elated that Hanoi had for the first time responded to a proposition by us. . . .” But there was no elation in the White House over the July 1 proposal, for it had been made publicly and raised the possibility—echoed in newspaper editorials across the nation—that a White House decision to withdraw all the troops could bring home the prisoners of war and close out America’s involvement in Vietnam.
On July 7, Anthony Lewis of the New York Times published an interview with Le Due Tho in which the North Vietnamese official reinforced that thesis. Tho declared that the prisoner of war issue could be isolated from the political issue of Saigon’s future if Nixon withdrew his insistence on a total ceasefire in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Hanoi, obviously eager to prod the White House on the election issue, had decided to appeal directly to the antiwar element in the United States. “Once Mr. Nixon sets a date” for total withdrawal of the American troops, Tho told Lewis, “agreement on the modalities of troop withdrawal and prisoner issue will not be difficult.” But, Tho added, if Nixon accepted the offer and insisted on linking it to a ceasefire—which, as Tho knew and Lewis did not, had consistently been done in the secret talks—“then it cannot be settled in that way because the ceasefire throughout Indochina will raise many other problems.” In addition, Tho said, the United States, if it accepted the North Vietnamese proposal, must stop supplying military aid to Saigon and also must renounce the right to use military force in any way in South Vietnam, and thus would be barred from bombing and shelling in support of Saigon’s troops. Tho was, in essence, offering the White House two ways out of the Vietnam War. It could have what its critics in Congress, the press, and the antiwar movement demanded: a total withdrawal of American troops and support elements—including aircraft—by a fixed date in return for the release of the American prisoners of war and a North Vietnamese and Vietcong ceasefire against all Americans to insure their safe withdrawal. If Nixon and Kissinger chose to seek a more comprehensive settlement, involving a political settlement in Saigon and their much-desired ceasefire throughout Southeast Asia, Tho suggested, the United States could take advantage of the presidential elections in Saigon. “The election in South Vietnam will be decided by the United States,” Tho told Lewis. “It is . . . an opportunity for Mr. Nixon to change Thieu. It is a yardstick to show whether Mr. Nixon desires a peaceful settlement to this war or not.”VII Tho’s proposal for a quick end to American involvement, as given to the Times, was obviously unacceptable to Nixon and Kissinger. They feared that without a ceasefire and without the right to use air power, Thieu’s regime would collapse within weeks. Not even the return of the prisoners was worth that; maintaining Thieu in power had become the raison d’être of the war. Hanoi, by making its proposals public, had put the White House on the spot. There was a chance to end American involvement and get the prisoners back without a prior dissolution of the Thieu regime, but the risks were too great for the President and his adviser.
Nixon and Kissinger in their memoirs depicted the Tho interview as being a misleading attempt by the North Vietnamese to suggest to the American antiwar movement that Nixon would not accept a prisoners-for-withdrawal trade, even if one were possible. In the White House view, Hanoi had abused the secret talks.VIII It was in this period that some of Kissinger’s NSC aides first heard talk of making the secret negotiations public. “It was our eagerness for a breakthrough,” Kissinger wrote, “that made us preserve a secrecy which enabled our cynical adversaries to whipsaw us between a public position we dare not rebut and a private record we could not publish.” In their memoirs, Nixon and Kissinger both insisted that they had formally proposed what the antiwar movement sought in mid-1971—a direct prisoners-for-withdrawal trade—and been turned down by Hanoi. In fact, no such deal had ever been offered, in public or in private, by the White House. The American offer of total withdrawal was always preconditioned on an immediate ceasefire throughout Indochina, and it was that offer that had been repeatedly rejected by the North Vietnamese.
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Nixon and Kissinger must have understood the real message of the Le Due Tho interview and the Communist peace offer in mid-1971: There was a way out if the White House insured a fair election in Saigon. They chose not to respond.
The American position was at odds with itself. Kissinger had insisted during the nearly two years of secret talks with Hanoi that a settlement could be reached in the South if North Vietnam’s leaders would agree to abide by the results of an “internationally supervised” election. Now that Hanoi indicated some willingness to chance the electoral process, Kissinger’s attitude underwent a metamorphosis. The United States had no faith in the South Vietnamese electoral process, and those who did, Kissinger wrote, were naive: “In the United States there were many sincere and concerned individuals who thought that a fair democratic process in South Vietnam would unlock the door to negotiations. Why this should be so was never explained.”
The North Vietnamese would come to understand the extent of American manipulation of the election process during the first peace talks in 1971. By late June, when Le Due Tho and his colleagues were suggesting that there was a political way out of the Vietnam morass, the South Vietnamese election had already been fixed. The large CIA station in Saigon, then headed by Theodore G. Shackley, a hard-nosed careerist, had been preparing for more than a year, pouring millions of dollars into Thieu’s private campaign treasury and helping him set up political support groups to give his candidacy the appearance of broad-based endorsement. All this was approved by Kissinger and Nixon, who were receiving the usual backchannel messages from Shackley and others that summer. The CIA and the top layer of the American Embassy, led by Ellsworth Bunker, the senior Foreign Service career officer, who was then seventy-five years old, agreed with the White House that Thieu had to be reelected and that the administration had to do all it could privately to make it happen. The risk of such an undertaking was high, and Bunker and the White House knew it.
In early 1971, the political section of the American Embassy had begun reporting that Thieu would be an easy reelection winner in a two-way race against General Minh, but would be seriously imperiled if Vice President Ky also ran. Thieu’s response was to propose legislation that would require presidential candidates to have the endorsement of either forty members of the South Vietnamese National Assembly or one hundred provincial officials. Once this bill was rammed through the legislature, Thieu, aided by the CIA and its seemingly inexhaustible supply of money, planned to bribe those legislators most likely to support Ky and thus keep him off the ballot. By early spring, the embassy’s political officers, unaware of the Thieu-CIA plotting, were warning of potential trouble if the election was rigged. They predicted that if the Thieu government excluded Ky from the race, the probability was high that General Minh would also withdraw, leaving Thieu unopposed. “. . . [S]uch a situation would intensify Vietnamese cynicism toward the political system,” one classified embassy report said on March 31, “undercut Thieu’s legitimacy and invite plotting against him. The political instability that would ensue could represent a serious threat to American policy objectives.”
The unconstitutionality of Thieu’s election-law gambit further distressed many of the junior pacification and Foreign Service officers in Vietnam, who were convinced that an honest election was essential to the survival of South Vietnam. A small group of AID workers in South Vietnam, who had resigned their government jobs, got together in early 1971 and formed the Vietnam Elections Project to lobby Congress and the White House for honest elections. Headed by Theodore Jacqueney, who had spent eighteen months in the Danang City Advisory Group, the Project meant to convince Washington that the defeat of Thieu in the election would not turn the South pro-Communist. Jacqueney and his colleagues believed that General Minh, if he were the victor in a three-way race with Ky and Thieu, would immediately seek an accommodation with the PRG. But, Jacqueney argued in one analysis prepared in early 1971, Minh “is not a supporter of the [Communist] ‘Front,’ nor is he likely to simply knuckle under to the will of Hanoi.” Later that spring, Jacqueney met with Frank Mankiewicz, the former press aide to the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy who was then writing a syndicated newspaper column with Tom Braden, one of Kissinger’s close friends. Jacqueney wanted advice on where to go with his Project, and Mankiewicz arranged a meeting with Kissinger. “I did it,” Mankiewicz recalls, “because I believed—perhaps naïvely—that Jacqueney might have some impact and that Henry might be scared that these guys would talk openly.”IX
Four members of the Project, which was operating on a shoestring out of Jacqueney’s apartment, attended a session on May 8 in Kissinger’s White House offices. Taking notes for Kissinger was Sven Kraemer, a junior NSC aide who was among the most fervent hardliners on the staff. The naïveté of the former AID workers was considerable. “We thought maybe he [Kissinger] wasn’t in control” and didn’t realize what was happening at lower levels in Vietnam, says Richard Winslow. The men gave the unusually quiet and attentive Kissinger a summary of the importance of the Third Force in Vietnam, and described the ways the United States representatives were working to rig the election in favor of Thieu. “We were telling the guy who made the policy that this was his policy—in case he didn’t know it,” Winslow remembers ruefully. Another participant, Oliver Davidson, describes the meeting as the “high point” of the group’s lobbying activity. “You could really see Kissinger at work. He listened and listened and then he asked very pointed questions to determine whether we had anything he wanted to know.” Kissinger’s goal, as Davidson quickly sensed, was to find out “who we were and what was behind us, who was funding us. He was evaluating first of all the information we were giving him, and second of all who we were, and whether we had any influence on anyone and whether he should pay attention to us.”
Jerry Ruback, the fourth participant, says that Kissinger portrayed himself as “ ‘Here I am lonely and brilliant, holding out against all my peers.’ He seemed to be surprised about what we were telling him, but it was impossible that he didn’t know it.” At one point, Ruback was struck with how theoretical and abstract the issue seemed to Kissinger, who told the group: “You know, of course, it won’t be a perfect election; these people aren’t like us. . . .” The ground rules for the meeting were one-sided: Jacqueney and his colleagues were committed to secrecy, but Kissinger was free to make any use he wanted of the session. The Kissinger meeting was indeed a high point of sorts for the Project, whose members watched dispiritedly as everything they urged not to have happen in the Vietnamese elections did happen, and as they found it impossible to arrange a promised second meeting with Kissinger. Despite commitments from prominent liberal Democrats, funds were hard to come by, and within months the Vietnam Election Project was no more.X
In the late spring and summer of 1971, a stream of official announcements attested to American neutrality in the elections. On April 24, Secretary of State Rogers declared that “we are working diligently on plans to make sure that we are not only fair and impartial, but that we appear to be fair and impartial.” On May 19, Ambassador Bunker issued instructions for American personnel in Vietnam directing them to “avoid implying by word, deed or acts of presence that the United States supports any individual candidate or group of candidates or political party for elective office.” Kissinger, en route to China in early July, visited Saigon for highly visible meetings with Vice President Ky and General Minh. The Washington Post reported that Saigon was “buzzing” with rumors about the real reason for Kissinger’s stopover. South Vietnamese politicians told the Post they did not accept the official explanation that Kissinger had come only to listen, and not to suggest or dictate. “It’s the same old story,” the Post quoted an American official as saying. “The South Vietnamese believe that everything that happens is according to an elaborate American plan. We only wish it were that simple.”
Of course it was. With the tacit concurrence of the White House, President Thieu had been encouraged to utilize all of his government’s apparatus to insure his reelection. The Vietnamese secret police organizations, including the much-feared Phoenix program, were instructed to reach into the hamlets and villages and threaten citizens with arrest or unfavorable reports if they opposed Thieu. Other steps were less dramatic but equally effective; for example, the government simply did not distribute voting cards in the areas where Thieu was not popular.XI Like Richard Nixon, Nguyen Van Thieu ran scared. So did the CIA. Frank Snepp, then a political analyst for the CIA in Saigon, recalled in an interview that the station was deeply involved in aiding President Thieu’s successful attempt to legislate Vice President Ky out of the election. By then, the embassy had informed Washington that Thieu’s insistence on getting rid of Ky would undoubtedly result in a decision by General Minh to withdraw, leaving Thieu unopposed and making a mockery of the process. Despite such warnings, which proved accurate, the CIA became directly involved in bribing members of the National Assembly to insure that the legislation was passed and that Ky could not obtain enough signatures to run. The CIA had a special reason for working against Ky: He was considered an unstable opportunist who could not be controlled. “The antagonism toward Ky was unabating,” Snepp says; the Agency was genuinely afraid of him. By mid-1971, according to Snepp, Theodore Shackley was repeatedly boasting in his backchannel messages to Kissinger—known as “Shackleygrams” in the station—that the CIA’s effort had produced the votes needed for approval of Thieu’s election law. The many junior Foreign Service officers in the embassy and throughout Saigon who were reporting rising discontent with Thieu were apparently cut out of the action. “If Bunker told the [CIA] station to go out and pay people off,” Snepp says, “they did it. The State Department might not even have known what was going on.” The CIA’s role in easing Ky out was known to only a few Americans; even the normally well-informed Kissinger aide Richard Smyser said later that he had been unaware of the Agency’s deep involvement.
The PRG and the North Vietnamese, who had infiltrated most levels of the South Vietnamese government, must have suspected some, if not all, of the American moves. In his memoirs, Kissinger made a feeble effort to cover his tracks: “As the [Saigon] campaign progressed, I thought that Thieu was acting unwisely in using his incumbency to discourage rival candidacies.” It was with that in mind, as well as the Paris talks, that he decided to visit Saigon in early July—“to emphasize our interest in a contested election. . . . But neither Nixon nor I was prepared to toss Thieu to the wolves; indeed . . . there was no practical way to do so.” Kissinger seemed to believe that Hanoi—then heavily involved in the Paris talks—would accept his visit to Saigon at face value and ignore the evidence of American bad faith in the election process. The delusion continued during the next Paris meeting, which took place on July 12, as Kissinger was on the way back from Peking. There were three more hours of detailed and serious negotiations with Le Due Tho that ultimately came down to the question of political power in Saigon. Kissinger quotes Le Due Tho as saying to him: “I tell you in a serious way that you have to replace Thieu. . . . You have many means”—an obvious reference to the pending elections. Kissinger remained convinced that a settlement was in the offing: “For some intoxicating weeks we thought that we might have a simultaneous breakthrough toward peace in Vietnam and toward China; Winston Lord and I on the way back from seeing Le Due Tho [on July 12] had sufficient hubris to speculate on which would be considered historically the more significant achievement.” Kissinger, with his dreams of glory, seemed unable to understand the link between what he and Nixon were doing on Thieu’s behalf in Saigon and the success or failure of the peace talks.
Kissinger and the North Vietnamese agreed upon a fourth meeting in Paris on July 26. In a memorandum delivered to Nixon a few days before the meeting, Kissinger told the President what he wanted to hear: Peace must not come at the price of overturning the South Vietnamese government. “It is obvious that we cannot do their political work for them,” Kissinger wrote. “For all his faults, Thieu has been a loyal ally.” Somehow the two men continued to miss the point: that the election offered a way around the Thieu dilemma. By late July, nonetheless, chances for a contested election in Saigon were becoming remote. Vice President Ky would be forced to withdraw if the South Vietnamese Supreme Court ruled, as the Thieu regime had made sure it would, that he was not eligible because of his inability to collect enough valid signatures, and General Minh announced that he would withdraw if Ky did. This would leave the White House spending millions in covert support of Thieu in a one-candidate election. The July 26 meeting in Paris produced nothing. “Le Due Tho and Xuan Thuy had no interest in an American pledge of neutrality or in a free political process that they disdained,” Kissinger wrote, as if the American promises of neutrality and fair elections were credible.XII
Washington’s response to the stalemate in Paris was more public relations. Much of the political panic of early 1971 was over: Nixon and Kissinger had not only pulled off the backchannel SALT negotiations with the Soviet Union but had delivered China. The President’s popularity climbed dramatically after the July 15 announcement of the China breakthrough, and by September he was running well ahead of Muskie in the Gallup and Harris polls; he would increase his lead steadily until the end of the year. Kissinger was famous as the man who made the secret trip to mysterious Peking. It was the optimal time, both men knew, to tough it out in Vietnam. At a news conference on August 4, Nixon said, “Our position is one of complete neutrality in these elections. We have, under Ambassador Bunker’s skillful direction, made it clear to all parties concerned that we are not supporting any candidate, that we will accept the verdict of the people of South Vietnam.” Such bald assertions always seemed to work—at least in the first term.
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On August 6, to the surprise of no one in the White House, the Supreme Court of South Vietnam ruled that Vice President Ky was disqualified from the campaign. The political situation was ideal for President Thieu and his backers in Washington: a campaign against General Minh, with Thieu in full control of the nationwide election apparatus. Over the next few weeks, the election process became even more farcical. In mid-August, General Minh obtained a twenty-page document, marked “Top Secret,” which outlined a systematic election-fraud scheme on the part of the Thieu regime. It described how the bureaucratic apparatus of the Saigon government, with the police forces and the Army, would insure Thieu’s reelection. Minh met with Ambassador Bunker and demanded that he publicly support his charges of fraud. Bunker refused. “My feeling was that it was not authentic,” he said of the document. There was a very basic reason for his belief, Bunker recalled in an interview: “It wasn’t necessary to write it. [Thieu] had control of the apparatus of government anyway.” Other embassy officials recalled that the CIA was assigned the task of evaluating the document and concluded that it was authentic.
On August 20, General Minh withdrew from the presidential race. Bunker, apparently responding to backchannel orders from the White House, visited Minh at his home and, according to evidence that came to light years later, offered him a bribe of $3 million to remain in the race.XIII Bunker’s visit with General Minh came shortly after the Ambassador’s return from a brief trip to Washington. His orders also apparently included the simple assignment of persuading President Thieu to get the Supreme Court of South Vietnam to reverse itself. After Bunker saw Thieu at the palace, Thieu did order the Supreme Court to change its decision, but it was too little, too late even for Ky, whose tolerance of official corruption was known to be high. Most American journalists seemed resigned to the corruption in Saigon, perhaps because they did not know how deeply Washington was involved in it. In a column published August 24, 1971, Joseph Kraft wrote: “There is no point in getting angry about the fix that has so obviously been put in on the South Vietnamese presidential election. Rigging elections is as usual for Vietnam as hot weather in August.” The White House, in the person of Ron Ziegler, struck an upbeat note: Thieu’s subsequent decision to go ahead with the election and depict it as a vote of confidence, Ziegler told the press on September 2, was an attempt “to introduce an element of popular choice to the election.” Few in South Vietnam agreed. Protest riots broke out in Saigon and Thieu ordered his National Police to “shoot down anyone who attempts to burn vehicles in the street.”
All this was closely watched, of course, by the North Vietnamese, who had listened politely at the fifth secret meeting of the year, on August 16, when Kissinger offered what he termed a “specific proposal for American neutrality” in the Vietnamese presidential elections. The promise of neutrality was accompanied by a restatement of the May 31 proposal with one modification: America now offered to withdraw all its troops nine months after the signing of a final peace agreement. Hanoi was still being asked to agree to a ceasefire throughout Indochina before a final political agreement was reached, and to attempt to carry out its political operations in the South under the Thieu regime and the constitution of South Vietnam.XIV On September 13 the two sides met again, in secret, with the negotiations in deadlock. Le Due Tho had missed the August meeting and chose to stay away again in September, an expression of Hanoi’s contempt for the election process in Saigon. It was left to Xuan Thuy to make clear that nothing could be accomplished.
Nguyen Co Thach later insisted that his government was willing to settle for a coalition government in Saigon in late 1971, at a time when military conditions in the South were not favorable. “At that time we had many, many losses in the South,” he said. “The control of the biggest part of the South was under the South. Our offer was in good faith because we would like to have the withdrawal of the American troops” from South Vietnam. “But Nixon and Kissinger were not wise,” Thach said. “With a coalition government they could have withdrawn with a ceasefire”—the ceasefire that the White House so badly desired throughout 1971. “When the United States refused to let Thieu face an honest election in 1971,” Thach added, “by this we realized that the biggest goal of Nixon and Kissinger was the maintenance of the Saigon government, and not the sharing of power with the PRG. We see that they would like to have all the cake.”
In his memoirs, Kissinger expressed satisfaction with the 1971 election results in Saigon: “We considered support for the political structure in Saigon not a favor done to Thieu but an imperative of our national interest. We weathered the storm. It would be preposterous to maintain that Hanoi lamented the absence of a fair election in Saigon. What bothered it was our refusal to use the election as a pretext to decapitate the leadership of the non-Communist political structure in South Vietnam.” To arrive at that conclusion Kissinger had to overlook the warnings issued not only by the critics but by some of the administration’s leading experts on South Vietnam. On August 17, for example, Samuel D. Berger, the Deputy Ambassador in Saigon, who seemed far less willing than Bunker to go along blindly with the White House’s backchannel directives, cabled in all seriousness that if Thieu decided “to go through with a one-man sham election, he will become subject to growing opposition which would soon require repressive measures. . . . The outlook therefore would be for growing political instability.”XV
Nixon’s concern was not political instability in South Vietnam but in the United States. On September 10, Senator Henry Jackson threatened in a Senate speech to oppose further aid to Saigon if the Nixon Administration did not help arrange a “genuine” election in Saigon. Jackson’s statement was prompted by expediency as much as by morality; as his political aides told the New York Times, his speech represented a new and more liberal approach to the Vietnam problem in his unannounced drive for the Democratic presidential nomination. Jackson was important to the White House; he had been a bulwark for the administration against liberal attempts to cut off funding for Vietnam and against a concerted effort that fall to stop the draft. A week after the Jackson speech, Kissinger warned Nixon that “the momentum for rapid disengagement was rising. We now faced the real danger that Congressional legislation would set an obligatory date for our withdrawals and perhaps limit our assistance to South Vietnam.” He proposed a new offer to the North Vietnamese in Paris: a commitment to a presidential election in the South six months after the signing of a final agreement. The election would be run by an electoral commission that would include Communists, and Thieu would resign the presidency one month before the election. Alexander Haig was sent to Saigon on September 22 and obtained Thieu’s acquiescence, but Haig, carrying out orders, did not tell the South Vietnamese President that the election commission proposal would be presented to the North Vietnamese at the Paris peace talks within a few weeks.XVI Washington’s new offer was submitted in writing to the North Vietnamese by Nixon’s old friend, General Vernon Walters, on October 11, eight days after Thieu’s reelection, reportedly with 94 percent of the ballots cast.XVII Hanoi considered the new proposal insolent. “It was meaningless,” Nguyen Co Thach said. “One month is not enough when they [the Saigon government] are working all the time to decide the election outcome.”
The intent of the Nixon-Kissinger offer on October 11 is open to question. Hanoi’s rejection of the proposal is described in harsh phrases in Kissinger’s memoirs: “. . . Hanoi’s grim and implacable leaders would compromise only as a last resort; protracted warfare was their proposal. . . . They were determined on another military throw of the dice.” But by October it was the Nixon Administration that had decided on another “throw of the dice” and had ordered increased bombing raids over North Vietnam, under the increasingly thin veneer of “protective reaction,” in what Kissinger described as an attempt to punish Hanoi for not responding in Paris. At his meeting in Paris with the North Vietnamese, General Walters formally requested another secret negotiating session for November 1. November 20 was agreed upon, but shortly before then, Nixon and Kissinger were informed that Le Due Tho had “suddenly become ill” and only Xuan Thuy would be available on the twentieth. Xuan Thuy wouldn’t do, and the talks were suspended by Washington. Nguyen Co Thach later acknowledged that—as Kissinger had to know—Hanoi considered further talks after Thieu’s reelection to be useless. “Le Due Tho was sick, really,” Thach said, “and that was one cause. Another cause was that we saw in the context of the time that it was not propitious after the election of Thieu. The Nixon government was going ahead with its plan, and so it was useless of us to meet at this time.” Hanoi’s next move would be military.
If the October 11 peace offer made no diplomatic sense, it did make good domestic politics. With the failure of the 1971 negotiations, Nixon and Kissinger knew that they were going to take the secret peace talks public at a time in 1972 when such a relevation would have the most impact. Both men believed (and apparently still believe, according to their memoirs) that the American peace offers in 1971 were good enough—if not for the North Vietnamese, then at least for the American public. Nixon especially seemed convinced that he and Kissinger had offered a straightforward trade—American troop withdrawal for American prisoners of war—and that Hanoi had turned them down in private, while publicly telling reporters and visiting politicians that they would accept such a deal, if only one were offered.XVIII One early sign of Nixon’s desire to go public may have come at a news conference on August 4 when the President, asked about the peace talks, said: “The record, when it finally comes out, will answer all the critics as far as the activity of this Government in pursuing negotiations in established channels.” By then, NSC aides recall, Kissinger had repeatedly discussed the merits of making the secret talks public. Were that to be done in an election year, the October 11 proposal, with its seemingly bold offer of a one-month presidential resignation by Thieu, would play well in the media. That the offer came eight days after the farcical election in Saigon, the White House correctly foresaw, would not attract much comment.
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By late fall of 1971, Nixon and Kissinger had reason to believe they had weathered another potential crisis in Vietnam. The Vietnamese constitution had been ignored and the White House choice had stayed in power. Politically, Nixon had emerged from the intensive secret negotiations with an ace in the hole: He would go public with the secret negotiations at a time of his choosing, to present the image of a frustrated man of peace who was willing to go more than halfway. The pending summit meetings in Peking and Moscow were essential factors in his political revival. Nixon began a news conference on October 12, just after Thieu’s reelection, by announcing that a date had been set for the summit in Moscow. He had achieved his goal with China and Russia, and those aspects inevitably dominated. Only two questions about Vietnam were asked. At a news conference a month later, Nixon announced another withdrawal, of 45,000 men over two months, reducing the troops that would be left in Vietnam by early 1972 to 140,000. He also warned that American bombing in support of the South Vietnamese would continue indefinitely, “until there is a negotiated settlement or . . . until the South Vietnamese have developed the capability to handle the situation themselves.” The withdrawals dominated the news.
All this had a positive effect on Nixon’s rating in the polls, in which he continued to lead all Democratic challengers, including Senators Muskie and Kennedy. “We had made the two great Communist powers collaborators in holding our home front together,” Kissinger exulted in his memoirs. On his second trip to Peking, in October, Kissinger discussed Vietnam at length with Chou En-lai, and explicitly told the Chinese what he had never said to Le Due Tho. Nguyen Co Thach recalled that a message from Peking came within days of Kissinger’s visit: “The Chinese told us that Kissinger had told them the United States would accept the withdrawal of [North Vietnamese] troops from Laos and Cambodia, but not from South Vietnam.” North Vietnam could keep its troops in the South. Hanoi told Peking, Thach said, that “The Americans must say this directly to us.” Hanoi had been stung by Kissinger’s first secret mission to Peking in July; China, along with the Soviet Union, had been a firm ally and major supplier of food and weaponry during the long war. China’s policy turnaround was difficult for the Hanoi leadership to comprehend, because the Peking government had protested vehemently when North Vietnam agreed to begin the negotiations with the Johnson Administration that led to the November 1968 bombing halt. Hanoi later said that Peking—then at the height of its Cultural Revolution—had even cut back on its flow of military goods in protest. Shortly after Kissinger’s first visit, however, Peking had begun pressuring Hanoi to accept a political compromise in Saigon and thus accept continued control by the Thieu government. China also increased its shipments of supplies after Kissinger’s visit, in an apparent attempt, as Hanoi saw it, to increase its leverage on North Vietnamese decision making.
In November 1971, after Kissinger’s second visit to Peking, Prime Minister Pham Van Dong of North Vietnam agreed to visit the Chinese. He had turned down an earlier invitation, proffered within days of the first Kissinger visit, Nguyen Co Thach recalled. Thach, then the leading specialist on North American affairs in Hanoi, accompanied his Prime Minister. There was a tense meeting with Mao Tse-tung, Thach said. “Mao told my Prime Minister: ‘Your victory has forced Nixon to come to Peking.’ He said Nixon was coming [for the summit meeting in February 1972] to discuss Vietnam and Korean questions.” Discussing the Vietnam War, Mao cited what he said was an old Chinese proverb: “If the handle of your broom is very short, you cannot wipe out a spider high on the wall of a closet. So you must allow it to stay.” Thach supplied the translation: “The Chinese broom is very short and we must let Chiang Kai-shek stay on in Taiwan, and so Vietnam has a short broom and so Pham Van Dong must let Thieu stay on.”
“He was arguing for Nixon,” Thach said. “Mao was telling us to maintain the status quo.” Pham Van Dong replied: “Excuse me, but the handle of the Vietnamese broom is long enough to sweep all of these dogs out of Vietnam.” Mao wasn’t happy, Thach recalled, but neither were the North Vietnamese. Pham Van Dong asked Mao not to receive Nixon, but he was told that the visit was a commitment. Hanoi had also asked its Soviet allies not to receive Nixon, Thach said, but they too declared the visit to be a commitment.
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Nixon and Kissinger were pleased with their triangular diplomacy. If this was Nixon’s secret plan to end the war—bringing political pressure from Russia and China on the North Vietnamese—he got what he wanted. There were other pressures. In November 1971, the Seventh Air Force, then under the control of “protective reaction” General John D. Lavelle, began a series of strikes on strategic targets in the southern parts of North Vietnam, including fuel depots and airfields. Full-scale American bombing raids, authorized by Nixon, took place over a two-day period in December in the same areas. Strongly worded diplomatic notes were also sent that month to Moscow and Peking, warning, as Kissinger wrote in his memoirs, that “an offensive would evoke the most serious retaliation.” The threat strategy was at work again.
Nixon and Kissinger had missed an opportunity to ease Nguyen Van Thieu out of office and negotiate a settlement of the war before Hanoi’s military offensive began. Now they were forced to return to a bankrupt and brutal strategy that offered victory only at the cost of the ultimate destruction of Vietnam by American bombers. Hanoi may have misjudged Nixon once again. He was prepared—perhaps even eager—to respond to an offensive by ordering B-52 bombers to target the most populated areas of North Vietnam. “We knew we would face an offensive in 1972,” Kissinger wrote. “The outcome of the war would then depend on whether the South Vietnamese, aided only by American air power, would be able to blunt the assault.” It was, in truth, not a strategy but a gamble.
In Hanoi, there was distress at the success of the Nixon-Kissinger triangular diplomacy, and anger at what was perceived as American arrogance in passing up a chance for a political solution in South Vietnam by refusing to allow a legitimate election. “Once Nixon went to Peking,” Nguyen Co Thach said, “we knew that he would go also to Moscow and be received, because the question of Vietnam is not the sole question discussed between them. We Vietnamese, we always prepared for the worst. Never did we think things would come in an easy way, and if we are prepared for the worst, and the worst doesn’t come—well, then?” Thach, who spent five hard years in a French prison near Hanoi as a Communist leader in the early 1940s, shrugged fatalistically.
“We reaffirmed our assessment that Kissinger and Nixon could not have good will with Vietnam,” Thach recalled, “and so we must go forward with the offensive. We knew this will get Nixon very angry, because it will spoil his election, and he will return to his threats. But we also knew this one element must be considered: Big bombing [of the North] could not save Nixon in South Vietnam.”
I. There was a constant shuffling of names for the Communist forces and political movements in the South in anticipation of serious negotiations between North Vietnam and the United States. American and South Vietnamese officials repeatedly referred to the opposition as the National Liberation Front, and depicted the NLF as a front group for the Lao Dong Communist Party, whose headquarters were in Hanoi. In 1969, the NLF created its Provisional Revolutionary Government, an alliance of NLF and pro-Communist forces in the South. The PRG was not a political party but an opposition government ready to assume a share of the power in Saigon. Hanoi officials, in their interviews and writings on the 1969-1972 negotiations, described the proposals of the South Vietnam Communists as emanating from the PRG, not from the NLF.
II. Dislike and lack of respect for Minh were widespread throughout the top echelons of the American government. One senior diplomat who served as Deputy Ambassador in Saigon described Minh in a 1981 interview as “a very inferior personality, a nullity with vague ideas. Minh was not a peace candidate, but a patsy for the other side. He was an image created by an unwitting combination of neutralists, Communists, and American press people who disliked Thieu very much.” This official acknowledged that there were many junior officers who had different views, but he had been convinced, he said, that the United States was forced to “put its money on Thieu” in the 1971 elections. Kissinger and Nixon obviously shared that view, and Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, in some of his cables to Washington, seemed to encourage that predisposition. In February 1971, for example, at a time of press speculation in Saigon about the possibility of General Minh’s candidacy, Bunker discussed that issue with Thieu at the palace. “When I asked if he thought that Minh had made up his mind to run,” Bunker cabled, Thieu gave “a most amusing account of Minh’s indecisive character. . . . He described Minh’s way of working. When an operation was contemplated, Minh would call a meeting. There would be briefings, and then Minh would pick out all the weaknesses on his side and all the strong points of the enemies. He would then conclude that ‘the situation is not ideal,’ ‘further study or further action is needed,’ ‘we will have to meet again to consider what to do.’ ” It was left to others in the embassy to report on the significance of General Minh’s candidacy. Bunker’s cable was made available under the Freedom of Information Act.
III. On the crucial issue of how the compromise was agreed upon, Nixon’s and Kissinger’s memoirs are silent. Kissinger’s repeatedly portray Nixon as skeptical and often inconsistent about the Paris negotiations. Once having agreed to a negotiating plan, or a concession, Kissinger wrote, Nixon “would deluge me with tough-sounding directives not always compatible with the plan, and some incapable of being carried out at all. The reason may have been his unease with the process of compromise or the fear of being rejected even in a diplomatic forum.” Vietnam seemed constantly to bring out the irrational in Nixon. In September 1981, I obtained and published in the New York Times a transcript of an Oval Office conversation between Nixon and Haldeman on May 5, 1971, at the height of the May Day antiwar demonstrations in Washington. At one point, the President endorsed Haldeman’s suggestion that “thugs” from the teamsters union be hired to beat up the demonstrators. “They, they’ve got guys who’ll go in and knock their heads off,” Nixon said enthusiastically. “Sure,” Haldeman responded. He added: “Murderers. Guys that really, you know, that’s what they really do . . . it’s the regular strikebuster types and . . . they’re gonna beat the shit out of some of these people. And, uh, and hope they really hurt ’em. You know, I mean go in . . . and smash some noses.” Such talk must have occupied much of Kissinger’s time in the Oval Office. Nixon’s distress over the demonstrations may also have been a factor in his decision later in May to permit Kissinger to hint to the North Vietnamese that they might be able to maintain some of their troops in the South as part of a negotiated settlement. In the May 5 tape recording, the President was almost beseeching Haldeman to see the bright side of the protests, to which the White House had responded with orders for mass arrests: “. . . we may have more goin’ for us than we think here, Bob. Yah. We shouldn’t be frightened about it. . . . Stay firm and get credit for it. That’s my point. . . . I don’t want to be doing on the basis, well, we’re sorta sitting here embattled and doing the best we can. I think the idea here is to lead a noble—it may be that we’re setting an example, Bob, for, uh, for universities, for other cities, and so forth and so. Right? . . . Let ’em look here. These people try somethin’, bust ’em.”
IV. There was perhaps another reason for Hanoi’s caution. Samuel Adams, a CIA official who specialized in analyzing the Vietcong, concluded in a highly classified 1970 paper that there were as many as 30,000 Communist agents permeating every aspect of the South Vietnamese government. Adams recalls that his paper, which was disavowed by everyone in the CIA and the White House, concluded that the Vietcong penetrations in the South “called into question the basic loyalty of the South Vietnamese government and armed forces.” One Vietcong agent, Adams insists, was a high official of South Vietnam’s intelligence service. If Adams’s thesis was correct, the White House’s decision to cut Thieu out of the secret talks may have undermined the May 31 proposal; it would have been difficult for the North Vietnamese to believe that the United States would agree to leave Hanoi’s troops in the South without informing its ally in Saigon.
V. Hanoi’s offer came amid the furor in Washington over the New York Times publication of the Pentagon Papers, which indicates that the publication had no impact on the secret peace talks. One of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s arguments in their campaign against Daniel Ellsberg and the New York Times for its publication of the Pentagon Papers was the threat such leaks posed to secret diplomacy.
VI. Both Hanoi and the PRG stood firm in three important aspects of their mid-1971 peace proposals: The final withdrawal of American troops had to take place before the end of the year; the withdrawals would not be contingent on a prior political settlement in Saigon; and the American prisoners of war would be released as American troops were withdrawn, with both the troop withdrawal and the POW release to be completed at the same time.
VII. In an interview six months later, Xuan Thuy explained that his government was convinced that if the Nixon Administration had agreed to set a precise date for withdrawal prior to the Vietnamese elections, and if an honest election had been held, President Thieu would not have been reelected. It was on the basis of that belief, Thuy said, that Hanoi was willing to separate the military and political issues of the war, and permit the Americans to withdraw and get back their prisoners of war. Thuy, who was interviewed by Richard Barnet and Peter Weiss in early February 1972, shortly after the Nixon Administration made public the secret peace talks in Paris, depicted the 1971 Vietnamese elections as a “farce” and added that the United States did not “seize the opportunity” to get out of the war “with honor.” By early 1972, North Vietnam had again hardened its demands, and insisted that Thieu must be removed before any agreement could be reached.
VIII. Nixon, who spent much of the summer falsely reassuring the American people that the United States would remain neutral in the Saigon elections, seemed to be perpetually surprised that Hanoi would try to interfere directly with his propagandizing. By 1971, it was widely understood among those who knew of the secret peace talks that Hanoi, merely by agreeing to the talks, had provided the White House with a major political asset. Smyser recalls that he was always aware of the leverage such talks gave Nixon and Kissinger, for they could decide to make them public at a time of their choosing, describe them in any manner they saw fit, and reap the political benefits.
IX. Mankiewicz had met Kissinger early in 1968, when Kissinger was working in the Rockefeller campaign. After Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968, Mankiewicz had some further meetings with Kissinger before the Republican convention. “I gave him a few ideas on the [Vietnam] war for Rocky. After Nixon was elected,” Mankiewicz says, “I talked to Henry again because it occurred to me that he was getting no advice on Latin America and didn’t know anything about Latin America.” Mankiewicz had been Latin American director for the Peace Corps before joining Kennedy’s staff. He met secretly with Kissinger throughout the spring and summer of 1969, Mankiewicz recalls, by slipping through a side door in the Executive Office Building and walking to his White House basement office. That relationship ended in the fall, when the Nixon Administration’s policy on Vietnam became clear.
X. For the next eighteen months, Jacqueney continued to lobby Congress and testify whenever asked on the necessity for a coalition government in Saigon, but he got little media attention. He committed suicide in 1979. Oliver Davidson remains bitter about the failure of antiwar liberals to support the Project. “Here we were—all of us out of work—all back from Vietnam; having really put our guts on the line. We were just asking for small contributions to keep the project going. We thought it was doing some good.” At one point, Davidson says, the group visited Sargent Shriver, the former Ambassador to France, who was to be George McGovern’s running mate in 1972. Shriver had encouraged the formation of the Project, and they were distressed to hear him “complain about all the bills and all the obligations he had to meet.” Ironically, the only senior Nixon Administration official who paid the group any attention was Secretary of State Rogers. Jacqueney and his colleagues managed that spring to get resolutions introduced in the House and Senate calling for American supervision of the Vietnamese elections. The resolutions did not pass but won support from Rogers, who seemed to have no idea what the real Nixon-Kissinger policy toward the Vietnamese elections was. On May 24, 1971, Rogers sent Nixon a secret memorandum recommending that the administration “discreetly encourage passage” of the resolutions. If they did not pass Congress, Rogers added, the President should consider the appointment of a “national commission of distinguished citizens” as his personal representatives to demonstrate “the deep and legitimate interest of the US government in the survival of constitutional government in Vietnam.” The President, of course, did no such thing.
XI. American pacification workers, under the supervision of William E. Colby, a career CIA official who later became Agency director, had conducted extensive surveys throughout South Vietnam in an attempt to measure security as well as political support for Thieu. In one such survey, in November 1970, Vietnamese citizens were asked, “What kind of man should be elected next September?” and “What issue will you consider most important in deciding who to vote for in the next election?” The results were classified and submitted to President Thieu and his political advisers, who made use of the information in the 1971 elections. Such overt abuse of the surveys created dissension inside the pacification effort, and eventually led to an exposé in the New York Times in early 1971, written by Gloria Emerson.
XII. At the July 26 meeting, Kissinger wrote in his memoirs, Le Due Tho took him aside and suggested “that if we did not know how to replace Thieu by means of the presidential election, assassination would do admirably.” He protested vehemently, Kissinger wrote, flustering Le Due Tho. Later, when I mentioned the allegation, the men in Hanoi grew very angry. “It’s not true,” Nguyen Co Thach said. “It went something like this: he [Le Due Tho] told Henry Kissinger that they have replaced their stooges many times in many places in the world, so they have enough imagination to do it again. Le Due Tho said nothing about this assassination of Thieu.”
XIII. The most specific documentation for the bribe offer, which was known in Saigon at the time but was heatedly denied by Bunker and others, came in a 1978 deposition taken in a Freedom of Information Lawsuit filed by Frank Snepp, who left the CIA in 1976 and subsequently published a brilliant book, Decent Interval, about the last years of American involvement in South Vietnam. It was widely known that the CIA had wiretapped both Thieu’s private quarters and his office in the Presidential Palace, but the Agency’s efforts—as the lawsuit made clear—also extended to the residence of General Minh. Ambassador Bunker had been careful to speak privately with Minh in August 1971, when the bribe offer was made, but in a deposition in the Snepp case, a CIA official acknowledged that the Agency had tapes “in which Ambassador Bunker offered to finance [national security deletion] race for the Presidency. [deletion] notes that the amount of $3 million was not mentioned in that conversation, although the basic report by Snepp is true.” Snepp alleged in his book, published in 1977, that the bribe offer was $3 million.
XIV. Frank Snepp remembers that at about this point in August the NLF began an unusually large recruitment drive in the Vietnamese countryside, going so far as to lower the age requirement for enlistment. Hanoi had written off the 1971 elections and was planning its 1972 offensive.
XV. In August also, Berger informed the State Department of a constitutional ploy that could be invoked in an effort to avoid a one-man election. Under Article 56 of the constitution, if the nation’s president were to resign from office, new elections could be ordered by the chairman of the Vietnamese Senate. If Thieu could be persuaded to resign, Berger told Washington, “presumably Vice President Ky would be willing to cooperate in the hope that he would be able to present his candidacy under the new election law that would then become necessary.” Although it was totally clear to all involved that Thieu would never agree to such a scheme, Berger and his counterparts in the State Department seriously debated the pros and cons of the suggestion in a series of cables over the next week. The debate came to an end when Bunker returned to Saigon, after his brief visit to Washington, and reported that Thieu would have nothing to do with the proposal. “It has been and remains our view, however,” Bunker added sharply, “that an uncontested election is viewed with greater concern in the US than in SVN [South Vietnam].” Kissinger also got involved in the debate, an NSC aide recalled, and again warned the Saigon embassy to do nothing to undermine Thieu. The State Department cables about Article 56 were declassified in 1981, after a Freedom of Information Act request.
XVI. In his memoirs, Kissinger wrote that although Thieu approved of the revised peace offer, he was not told that it had been presented to the North Vietnamese until shortly before Nixon decided to make the secret talks public in late January 1972. The White House’s handling of the issue led to some “touchy encounters in Saigon,” Kissinger wrote.
XVII. Kissinger cited that statistic, given out publicly by the Saigon government, as a demonstrable fact in his memoirs, and also reported that 87 percent of those eligible voted across the country. Robert Shaplen, the New Yorker magazine’s correspondent in Southeast Asia, noted a few weeks after the election that “Very few observers here, Vietnamese or foreign, believe . . . the official figures. The best estimates are that in the countryside fifty or sixty percent of those eligible voted, and in Saigon and other major cities something like thirty or forty percent.” Shaplen’s statistics raise obvious questions: Did Kissinger know the true results but suppress them in his memoirs? Did he fall victim to his/Thieu’s propaganda machine?
XVIII. In his memoirs, Nixon cited a talk Senator George McGovern had with Xuan Thuy in September 1971. “Afterward,” Nixon wrote, “McGovern told reporters that he had been assured that the North Vietnamese would return all our POW’s as soon as we agreed to set a date for our withdrawal.” The next line, printed in italics for added emphasis, is: “These were exactly the terms that we had offered on May 31, 1971, and they had rejected on June 26, 1981.” Nixon added that when Kissinger asked Xuan Thuy about “this duplicity” at the next secret meeting, Thuy replied, “What Senator McGovern says is his problem.” Nixon believed that Hanoi had somehow been treacherous, but in fact the White House, as noted earlier, always insisted that a ceasefire throughout Indochina accompany any agreement providing for the exchange of prisoners and a complete American pullout. Nixon’s terms called for Hanoi to cease its activities in Laos and Cambodia, as well as in South Vietnam. McGovern remembers that he and his aides found it nearly impossible to get the American press to report that important precondition. “I knew what was going on,” he says, “but it was like beating into a fog. None of this was getting on the network news.” McGovern, one of the leading opponents of the Vietnam War, marveled at the White House’s ability to manipulate the American press: “They orchestrated this thing to the point where they almost had the public convinced we went to see the Vietnamese to bring back some prisoners from Hanoi. Time after time I tried to explain, but somehow they always seemed to be able to market it to the press.”