Where the Domino Fell - America And Vietnam 1945-1995 (44 page)

Two of the president’s closest advisers, John Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman, resigned on April 30, 1973, when they were implicated in the cover-up, and on May 11 a federal judge dismissed charges against Daniel Ellsberg when he learned that the Justice Department had illegally wiretapped his phone, and a rogue group believing itself to be acting on behalf of the government had burglarized the files of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist to “find some dirt” about him. Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina headed up a Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, and the televised hearings dominated the news for the next six months. The testimony indicated that despite his self-righteous denials, Nixon had been personally involved in the cover-up from the very beginning, It was separately discovered that he had tape-recorded most of his White House conversations. The tapings were not in themselves illegitimate: They were a practice the presidency had instituted to provide for history a record of how the executive branch made policy. But it would have been wise of Nixon to remember that they were also catching him in some very damaging moments. Throughout 1973 and much of 1974 Congress, the press, and the special Justice Department prosecutor demanded copies of those tapes, which the administration refused to provide. Late in 1973 the House Judiciary Committee began impeachment proceedings against the president, and when the Supreme Court forced Nixon to hand over the tapes, and the tapes clearly implicated him in the cover-up, he resigned from office. On August 9, 1974, Gerald Ford became the thirty-eighth president of the United States.

During the Watergate controversy, Nixon’s presidential authority had steadily eroded, and he was unable to keep control over Southeast Asia policy. Late in June 1973 Congress attached a rider to a supplemental appropriations bill cutting off funds for American bombing in Cambodia. Nixon vetoed the bill on June 27, but when it became clear that an override was a distinct possibility, he compromised, guaranteeing to Congress that all American military activity in Cambodia would be over by August 15. Congress passed legislation ending all American combat activities in Indochina by that day. Nixon signed the bill on July 1.

By that time there were already signs that the peace agreement was not working. The ending of American bombing of Cambodia and Laos freed North Vietnam to initiate massive increases in the infiltration of troops and supplies, and to provide matériel to the Khmer Rouge guerrillas in Cambodia and the Pathet Lao in Laos. The Soviet Union increased shipments of weapons and financial assistance to North Vietnam by 400 percent. To counter Moscow’s generosity toward Hanoi, the United States funneled $3.2 billion in military aid to South Vietnam. When it became clear in August 1973 that North Vietnam had no intention of abiding by the Treaty of Paris, Canada withdrew from the International Commission of Control and Supervision. Iran became the fourth member nation. The Council of National Reconciliation and Concord was stillborn.

In Laos and Cambodia the prospects were equally dismal. The Khmer Rouge gained ground in Cambodia, and the Lon Nol government seemed impotent. By 1974 the Pathet Lao controlled most of northern Laos. Prince Souvanna Phouma tried to maintain a neutralist government, but the North Vietnamese were making it difficult. He was skeptical of their willingness to keep their cease-fire agreement, entered on February 21, to withdraw their troops from Laos. “If pressure is kept on the North Vietnamese to understand the risk they run from violating the Agreement,” the prince said in an appeal to Kissinger, “then perhaps they will respect the Agreement. . . . Therefore we must count on our great friends the Americans to help us survive. We hope, we dream, that this wish will be granted.” It was a futile plea. Kissinger met with Le Duc Tho in Hanoi on February 10 and learned that North Vietnam would withdraw after a political settlement in Laos between the government and the Pathet Lao, not before. There was nothing Kissinger could do about it.

The continuing fighting in Indochina triggered a movement in Congress to restrict the authority of the White House. In July, Congress began debating a joint resolution requiring the president to report to Congress within forty-eight hours if he committed American forces to a foreign conflict or “substantially” increased the number of combat troops anywhere abroad. Unless Congress approved the deployment within sixty days, the president would have to end it. At the insistence of the Senate, a modification was inserted allowing the deadline to be extended another thirty days if the president certified that more time was necessary to complete the evacuation of American forces. Congress could also order an immediate withdrawal within the sixty- or ninetyday period by passing a concurrent resolution, which could not be vetoed. Congress passed the War Powers Resolution at the end of October. Nixon vetoed it, but on November 7, Congress overrode the veto and the measure became law.

The North Vietnamese were watching Washington politics very closely. The Canadians were right. North Vietnam had no intention of abandoning the dream of unification and independence. Pham Van Dong and Le Duc Tho were cautious about the next offensive. They knew that the Nixon administration was weakening under the pressures of Watergate, but they did not underestimate the president. Le Duc Tho in particular was certain that if Nixon had a chance, he would unleash the B-52s again. Van Tien Dung did not want another Eastertide. He could not afford the casualties. The North Vietnamese leadership watched with interest the political debates in Congress. In mid1974 the legislature limited aid to Vietnam to $1.1 billion, down from $3.2 billion the year before, and the funding for fiscal 1975 was cut to only $700 million, which included shipping costs to South Vietnam. A major American intervention seemed unlikely.

South Vietnam was also facing severe economic problems. Ever since the early 1960s the economy had been driven by massive American aid and the spending power of hundreds of thousands of United States soldiers. Army construction projects alone employed 100,000 South Vietnamese workers. The withdrawal of the troops and the decline in American aid sent the economy fluttering out of control. Inflation hit 65 percent, and urban unemployment reached 40 percent. That the government kept an army of 1.1 million people worsened the economic situation. President Thieu’s support within the general population, never really very high, dropped even further.

The war had forever transformed Saigon. In less than a decade its population had swelled from 1 to nearly 4 million, without any real improvements in housing or city services. People came to the city for homes or jobs, for access to the tide of American money, for the security that was absent in the countryside. It was now a city of prostitutes, pimps, black marketeers, petty thieves, drug dealers, assassins, orphans, refugees, deserters, Vietcong, terrorists, and opportunists. The GIs said they could get anything in Saigon—“laid and way-laid, diarrhea and gonorrhea, drugs and slugs.” For more traditional Vietnamese, especially Buddhists, the worldliness of Saigon was an abomination.

In Saigon the regime of Nguyen Van Thieu became even more authoritarian. In 1971 Thieu abolished village elections and raised Buddhist ire. He established the Dan Chu (Democracy) party in March 1973 and then promptly did the most undemocratic things—forcing all civil servants to join, manipulating the National Assembly elections, abolishing rival political parties, closing down newspapers, and maintaining a state of martial law. A variety of protest movements emerged in 1973 and 1974, the most influential of which was led by Father Tran Huu Thanh, a Roman Catholic priest who accused Thieu of subverting anticommunism in order to line his own pockets. Late in 1974 Thieu tried to deal with Thanh’s increasing power by firing several hundred patently corrupt military and civilian officials, but it was only a token attempt at reform. The regime remained an authoritarian, single-party state.

Le Duan decided the time had come for the final offensive. The United States was out of Vietnam for good. The Arab oil embargo of 1973 had triggered higher unemployment and inflation in the United States. And the Watergate scandal, the corruption in Saigon, the increasing power of the Pathet Lao in Laos and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and the intense congressional opposition to continuing involvement in Indochina guaranteed, as far as Le Duan could judge, that the United States would not be able to save South Vietnam. Planning for the offensive accelerated.

General Van Tien Dung began the campaign, predicting that it could take years to succeed, particularly if the United States intervened with air power. By the end of 1974 he had in place in South Vietnam twentytwo fully equipped infantry divisions, complete with hundreds of tanks and thousands of artillery pieces. Improvements in the Ho Chi Minh Trail gave the North Vietnamese army more mobility than ever before. But rather than an all-out offensive, Dung decided to attack Phuoc Long, a sparsely populated province that bordered Cambodia on the west and at its southern tip was only forty miles from Saigon. Such an offensive would yield two important pieces of information: Was ARVN prepared for serious resistance, and would the United States intervene? If ARVN collapsed, the United States did not intervene, and Phuoc Long fell, North Vietnam would gain a critically important psychological and logistical victory. North Vietnamese troop movements would be unimpeded all the way from Hanoi to within forty miles of Saigon.

Thieu believed that North Vietnam was still too weak in 1975 to launch a full offensive. But Van Tien Dung had already moved the NVA 3rd and 7th Divisions into position. The NVA artillery bombardment began on December 26, 1974. On January 5, the North Vietnamese attacked with two full divisions, T-54 tanks, and 130-mm field-gun batteries. Thieu sent in only one ARVN battalion to defend Phuoc Long, and it was woefully inadequate. Most important was that the dreaded B-52s did not appear over Phuoc Long. Le Duan summed it up in a speech to the Politburo in Hanoi: “Never have we had military and political conditions so perfect or a strategic advantage so great as we have now.”

As a beginning to their next objective, cutting South Vietnam in half by a thrust from the Central Highlands to the South China Sea, Van Tien Dung, Le Duc Tho, and Pham Van Dong planned to attack Ban Me Thuot from their new base at Phuoc Long. Dung spent the next two months moving his troops, tanks, artillery, and supplies into place, and on March 9, 1975, the NVA 316th, Tenth, and 320th Divisions struck. Assuming that North Vietnam would not attack unless as a diversion, ARVN defenders at Ban Me Thuot were unprepared, and the NVA took the city on March 12. Once again, there had been no B-52s overhead or American fighter-bombers from the South China Sea.

The fall of Ban Me Thuot had immediate consequences. Over the opposition of all of his senior military advisers, on March 14 Thieu made the fateful decision to abandon the Central Highlands and redeploy ARVN forces to the major cities—an enclave strategy designed to protect the major population centers. On the same day, General Van Tien Dung resolved to attack up Route 14 and seize Pleiku and Kontum. In the process he encountered hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese refugees fleeing the Central Highlands and tens of thousands of ARVN troops withdrawing. He cut them to pieces with heavy artillery. More than 100,000 civilians and 15,000 ARVN troops died in the wholesale flight out of the highlands.

In Cambodia the Khmer Rouge pushed toward victory. By the end of 1974, the Lon Nol government was dying. The Khmer Rouge guerrillas sealed off the Mekong River as a source of commerce for Phnom Penh, and they surrounded the capital, tightening the noose day by day. They controlled 80 percent of the country. No ground transportation routes into the capital remained open. More than 2.7 million Cambodians crowded into Phnom Penh, and there was no way of supplying them. The American ambassador John Gunther Dean reported that Cambodia was finished. Events in Laos were just as bad. On March 27, the Pathet Lao launched an offensive against the Souvanna Phouma government, attacking Vang Pao and Sala Phou Khoun and then driving south along Route 13 toward the capital city of Vientiane. During the offensive antigovernment demonstrations and riots erupted in Vientiane, and Souvanna Phouma was unable to suppress them. Similar insurgency broke out in other towns and cities throughout the country. The Pathet Lao also infiltrated guerrilla soldiers into Vientiane and towns along the border with Thailand, among them Pakse, Savannakhet, and Thakhek. Like the Khmer Rouge and the North Vietnamese, the Pathet Lao could smell victory.

A week after the ARVN debacle in the Central Highlands, Van Tien Dung surprised South Vietnam again with a major offensive in I Corps. The NVA 341st Division attacked out of Quang Tri Province and headed South along Route 1 toward Hue, while the NVA 324B and 325C Divisions came east out of the mountains of Quang Nam Province and drove to the South China Sea, cutting off Route 1 and isolating Hue. On March 20, 1975, Thieu abandoned Hue, hoping to hold the line at Danang. North Vietnam took Hue on March 24. But no sooner had Hue fallen than the NVA 2nd Division seized Tam Ky on Route 1, isolating Danang. The NVA 711th and 304th Divisions then moved on the city. The South Vietnamese Air Force and Navy evacuated 50,000 refugees and 16,000 ARVN troops before Danang fell on March 29. Left behind were more than 2 million civilians and 25,000 ARVN soldiers, who surrendered. To make sure that the few Americans still in the city got away, North Vietnamese troops refrained from reaching the docks at Danang until March 30. Van Tien Dung was taking no chances on baiting the United States into intervention.

The collapse of South Vietnamese forces in the Central Highlands and in I Corps was speeding the war toward a quicker end than Washington had expected. President Ford and Henry Kissinger, who had replaced William P. Rogers as secretary of state in 1973, went to Congress for emergency assistance. In January they had unsuccessfully lobbied Congress for $300 million for South Vietnam and $222 million for Cambodia, but early in February Ford returned with a request for $1.3 billion for South Vietnam and $497 million for Cambodia. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield reacted angrily to the request: He was “sick and tired of pictures of Indochinese men, women, and children being slaughtered by American guns with American ammunition in countries in which we have no vital interests.” Ford failed. He tried again in April with a new request for $722 million, but he received only $300 million, and it was confined to humanitarian assistance and funds to help evacuate Americans if necessary. South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos were on their own.