Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 (43 page)

When Dung assumed control of the North Vietnamese army, he faced a complicated military situation. On August 23, 1972, the last American combat battalion—3rd Battalion of the 21st Infantry—left South Vietnam. ARVN troop strength had reached nearly 1.1 million troops, the highest since the beginning of the war, and with military equipment transfers from the United States, South Vietnam had a state-of-the-art fighting force. It had the fourth largest army in the world, its navy was the world’s fifth largest, possessing nearly 1,500 ships, and at more than 2,000 craft, Saigon had the fourth largest air force. Because during Eastertide Giap had persisted in making repeated frontal assaults into fortified ARVN bunkers protected by massive American air support, fully half of the NVA combat divisions were devastated. More than 100,000 of North Vietnam’s best troops were dead, and Dung estimated it could take three years to restore the army to fighting strength. It was obvious to Dung that North Vietnam would not be able to contemplate a major offensive against South Vietnam anytime soon.

The political situation in the United States did not bode well either. Pham Van Dong and Le Duc Tho had been hoping ever since the Cambodian invasion in 1970 that the antiwar movement would sweep Richard Nixon from office and bring a Democrat to power who would be anxious to complete the American disengagement. They took heart when the Democrats nominated Senator George McGovern of South Dakota as their presidential candidate. A leading political figure in the antiwar movement since 1965, McGovern campaigned for an immediate, unilateral American withdrawal. For their purposes the North Vietnamese could not imagine a better American president. But the McGovern campaign self-destructed. When the press found out that Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, McGovern’s vice-presidential running mate, had once been hospitalized for mental illness and treated by electric shock therapy, the Democrats dumped him from the ticket and replaced him with Sargent Shriver. That, though, made the party look incompetent. And the Republicans were able to portray McGovern as representative of the radical cultural forces that Americans had come to associate with the antiwar movement. At some point, surely, Pham Van Dong and Le Duc Tho came to know that Richard Nixon would be reelected in November.

The military situation in South Vietnam and the political climate in the United States left North Vietnam with only one option: Negotiate a settlement to the war. Van Tien Dung had a central role in convincing the Politburo to return to the talks. Pham Van Dong and Le Duc Tho were more stubborn. Operation Linebacker, like the earlier Rolling Thunder bombing campaigns, fed on their resentment toward the United States. They did not want to give in to what they considered technological terrorism. But Dung saw no point in digging in. He could not launch an invasion of South Vietnam anyway, and no dramatic change appeared in American politics. Why not reopen the talks, secure an end to the Linebacker attacks, rebuild the logistical network, and prepare for the final assault on South Vietnam?

Dung’s logic was compelling, and in August, Kissinger resumed private talks with Le Duc Tho. Both sides wished for an accommodation. North Vietnam wanted an end to the Linebacker raids, and Nixon was looking ahead to the election, hoping to sign a peace treaty before November. In Paris at the end of September, Kissinger agreed to a complete withdrawal of American troops while allowing North Vietnamese soldiers to remain in place in South Vietnam, a major concession to Le Duc Tho. Kissinger had little choice. Ten years of war and the greatest expenditure of firepower in history had not dislodged the enemy. “We could not make it [NVA troop withdrawal] a condition for a final settlement. We had long since passed that threshold.” Le Duc Tho dropped the long-standing North Vietnamese demand that Nguyen Van Thieu resign and a coalition government be created. By the end of September the outlines of a peace treaty had emerged: a mutual cease-fire and an end to American bombing; complete withdrawal of American troops; exchanges of prisoners of war; agreement to allow Vietcong, North Vietnamese, and South Vietnamese troops to remain in place; recognition of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam and the government of Nguyen Van Thieu as legitimate political entities in South Vietnam; and creation of a “council of national reconciliation” to work out the remaining problems.

The settlement was the easy part. Kissinger encountered opposition from the State Department, typical bureaucratic intransigence that, in his opinion, so often foiled modern diplomacy. When several State Department and National Security Council staff officials argued that the United States had caved in to the North Vietnamese position, Kissinger reacted violently, shouting at them in a White House briefing session: “I want to meet their terms. I want to reach an agreement. I want to end this war before the election. It can be done and it will be done. What do you want us to do? Stay there forever?” In Saigon, President Nguyen Van Thieu too perceived a sellout. He was apoplectic in his opposition to the treaty. Leaving fourteen divisions of North Vietnamese troops in South Vietnam and extending political recognition to the Provisional Revolutionary Government were unthinkable. When Kissinger met with Thieu in Saigon in mid-October, the South Vietnamese flatly rejected the proposals, insisting on withdrawal of all North Vietnamese soldiers, recognition of the Demilitarized Zone as a sovereign international boundary, and a public American repudiation of the Provisional Revolutionary Government’s legitimacy. When Kissinger termed the demands “insane and absurd,” Thieu went mute with rage.

When Kissinger returned to Washington with the news that Thieu was going to sabotage the deal, Nixon flew into one of his own rages, ordering Kissinger to fly to Saigon and “tell that little son of a bitch to sign or else.” Kissinger demurred and Nixon reconsidered, hoping that there was some way of finessing Thieu into agreement. On October 22 the United States, which had staged more than 41,000 bombing sorties over North Vietnam since April 1, scaled back the Linebacker raids to targets south of the twentieth parallel. In a press conference on October 24 Thieu denounced the bombing halt and the draft treaty, calling on South Vietnam to “wipe out the Vietcong and North Vietnamese invaders quickly and mercilessly.” Nixon was also hesitating. With the election just two weeks away, he did not want the settlement to appear politically contrived, and he thought that Thieu’s demands might give the United States more bargaining power. Kissinger began another round of talks, which made Hanoi very suspicious. In a political dance inspired by the presidential election and fear of losing the settlement outright, Kissinger promised a group of journalists that “peace is at hand. We believe that an agreement is within sight.”

It was not, not quite yet. On November 7 Nixon won a landslide victory in the election. When Kissinger renewed negotiations with Le Duc Tho after the elections, he presented to the North Vietnamese sixty-nine proposed changes in the treaty, all of them demanded by Nguyen Van Thieu. The North Vietnamese found the proposals unacceptable, and later in the month they began introducing changes of their own. The agreement, which had seemed so close back in October, was disintegrating.

Toward South Vietnam Nixon switched from stick to carrot, promising Thieu that if “North Vietnam violates the agreement and stages offensive operations against you, the United States will take swift and severe retaliatory action.” Thieu knew better than anyone that South Vietnamese survival depended on that retaliation. Only massive American bombing had stopped the Eastertide offensive. Without American air support and military assistance, South Vietnam would not survive another attack. Yet Thieu still would not budge. Pham Van Dong saw the feud between the United States and South Vietnam as an opportunity. If he could stall the talks, raise more procedural issues, and delay a final settlement, North Vietnam might be able to strengthen the air defenses around Hanoi and Haiphong, repair the rail lines to China, and adjust its supply routing to compensate for the American blockade. On December 13 Le Duc Tho suspended the negotiations and returned to Hanoi “for consultations.”

The next day Nixon gave Pham Van Dong an ultimatum: “Resume serious negotiations within seventy-two hours or suffer the consequences.” Nixon was reaching the end of his emotional rope. He wanted a signed peace treaty before the inauguration on January 20, 1973. He was even more blunt to Admiral Thomas Moorer, instructing him to develop immediate plans for massive bombing of North Vietnam: “I don’t want any more of this crap about the fact that we couldn’t hit this target or that one. This is your chance to use military power to win this war, and if you don’t, I’ll hold you responsible.” On December 18, 1972, Moorer followed orders and launched Operation Linebacker II, a final eleven-day bombing campaign that evolved into one of the heaviest aerial assaults of the war. B-52s, F-105s, F-4s, and F-111s flew nearly 2,000 sorties over North Vietnam, employing highly accurate laser-guided, television-targeted bombs—“Christmas bombs”—to strike rail yards, power plants, communications, air defense radar sites, bridges, highways, docks and shipping facilities, petroleum stores, ammunition supply depots, air bases, military installations, and means of transportation.

Early in January 1973 Le Duc Tho indicated a willingness to resume the negotiations. Van Tien Dung had been right all along. It was best to wait for a better opportunity to carry out the final offensive. The only roadblock to a settlement was Nguyen Van Thieu, but Richard Nixon was not about to let a peace treaty slip through his hands again. On January 5, 1973, he secretly communicated with Thieu, sending him a threat and a promise:

Gravest consequences would then ensue if [you] . . . reject the agreement. . . . It is imperative for our common objectives that your government take no further actions . . . that make more difficult the acceptance of the settlement by all parties. . . . Should you decide . . . to go with us, you have my assurance of continued assistance in the post-settlement period and that we will respond with full force should the settlement be violated by North Vietnam.

Thieu got the message. With or without him, Nixon was going to sign a treaty. Refusal to cooperate would mean an end to American military assistance and certain defeat. Stone-faced, his teeth tightly clenched, Thieu told Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker that he would sign. On January 8 Kissinger met with Le Duc Tho in Paris; a week later Nixon halted all military operations against North Vietnam; and on January 27 all four parties—the United States, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam—signed the treaty. The document provided for release of all American prisoners of war and withdrawal of all United States military personnel within sixty days; a cease-fire to be monitored by a four-nation International Commission of Control and Supervision; cessation of all foreign military activity in Laos and Cambodia; American provision of replacement military aid and unlimited economic assistance to South Vietnam; and formation of a Council of National Reconciliation and Concord, composed of representatives from the Saigon regime, the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam, and a neutral body, to resolve outstanding political questions and organize elections in South Vietnam.

The settlement came none too soon. When Congress convened in January, the Democratic caucuses of both houses voted overwhelmingly to eliminate all funds for military operations in Indochina, and polls of the new Congress indicated huge majorities for the end of American involvement in the region. There were only 24,000 American troops still in South Vietnam. Political support for the war in the United States had completely evaporated. Nixon had no choice but to get the treaty signed and sealed. In a national television address, he announced that within sixty days all American troops would be out of South Vietnam and the prisoners of war would be home. “South Vietnam,” he said, “has gained the right to determine its own future. . . . Let us be proud that America did not settle for a peace that would have betrayed our ally.” The speech repelled Nguyen Cao Ky, “so nauseating was its hypocrisy and self-delusion. . . . This is an enormous step toward the total domination of Vietnam and there is no reason why they [the Communists] should stop now. . . . I give them a couple of years before they invade the South.”

There were a few good months before it all started to unravel. On February 12, 1973, the first of 591 American prisoners of war returned home, and the rest were in the United States by the end of March. Nixon and Kissinger hosted them at the White House, and the soldiers paid homage to the president who had ended the war. On February 21 the Royal Laotian government signed a cease-fire with the communist Pathet Lao guerrillas. The International Commission of Control and Supervision, composed of Canada, Indonesia, Hungary, and Poland, went into operation in March. A relieved Henry Kissinger remarked to the press, “It should be clear by now that no one in the war has had a monopoly of anguish and that no one has a monopoly of insight. Together with healing the wounds in Indochina, we can begin to heal the wounds in America.”

But those wounds continued to fester, and the Nixon administration was unable to deliver on its promise to rescue South Vietnam if Hanoi broke the agreement. Richard Nixon’s insecurities and paranoia, his resentment of the press and the eastern establishment, were about to catch up with him. The Watergate scandal enveloped him, and when the final North Vietnamese offensive came in 1975, he would be living in exile in San Clemente.

During the election campaign of 1972, operatives connected with the White House had conducted a series of illegal and unethical programs, all directed at undermining the political efforts of liberal Democrats. On June 22, 1972, police caught several men attempting to wiretap Democratic Party National Headquarters in the Watergate Building in Washington. A few days later, when it was clear that a number of top administration officials were involved in planning and financing the break-in, Nixon ordered a cover-up of the entire affair. Two enterprising reporters from the Washington Post—Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein—eventually exposed the whole story.