The Problem

CHAPTER 6

The Problem

 It was in expectation of peace that Nixon was narrowly elected President in November 1968. His inheritance was not enviable. There were 536,000 American soldiers in Vietnam in January 1969 (the peak, to be reached that April, was $543,000). Every week about three hundred bodies were flown back to the States in "reusable metal transfer cases." Domestic opposition to the war had mounted and had exploded in the melodrama of 1968. General Westmoreland's attrition strategy, which sent recruits to the perimeters of Vietnam to find Communists, had failed. By the Pentagon's estimates, Communist combat forces had grown from 56,000 in 1964 to at least 150,000 in 1968. South Vietnamese forces had also been increased by the American effort and now numbered about 819,000 men, but their performance was poor and their leadership inadequate.

By the end of 1968 Nixon had managed to obscure the record of his views on Indochina. He had consistently favored escalation. In 1954 he had advocated sending American troops and bombers to help the French. In 1962 he had encouraged Kennedy to "step up the buildup." In 1964 he had advised that the enemy be pursued into Laos and North Vietnam. In August 1966 he had demanded that half a million American men be sent to Saigon. Throughout he had contributed significantly to the public impression that the war was essential to restrain Peking. Just as Dean Rusk claimed that the war kept "a billion Chinese armed with nuclear weapons" at bay, so Nixon campaigned in New Hampshire in February 1968 on grounds that the Vietnam effort was "the cork in the bottle of Chinese expansion in Asia."

After the impact on American opinion of the Viet Cong's Tet offensive, and when his prospects of victory were increased by Johnson's abdication, Nixon became more cautious. Throughout the summer of 1968 he refused to discuss the war; he claimed that it was too important to be introduced into partisan politics. The Democrats were in disarray, and he was able to evade the issue almost completely. But rumors that Nixon had "a secret plan to end the war" were encouraged, and at the Republican National Convention he promised that "the long dark night for America was almost over." For the Republicans and for about half the American electorate it was enough.

Blame for many of the errors of judgment over Vietnam has been ascribed to the "Munich mentality." Horror of the consequences of appeasement had led to a post-World War II determination to stand firm anywhere, anytime. For both Nixon and Kissinger, the memory of the Korean War was also influential. To Nixon it proved that only coercion could succeed. "How do you bring a war to a successful conclusion?" he asked a group of Southern delegates at the 1968 Republican Convention. "I'll tell you how Korea was ended. We got in there and had this messy war on our hands, Eisenhower let the word go out—let the word go out diplomatically—to the Chinese and the North Koreans that we would not be negotiated. . . . Well, as far as the negotiation [in Vietnam] is concerned that should be our position. We'll be militarily strong and diplomatically strong. . . . We need a massive training program so that South Vietnamese can be trained to take over the fighting—they that can be phased in as we phase out."

To Kissinger, Korea had shown the limits imposed by contemporary strategic thinking. The United States had been far too concerned lest it frighten its European allies and provoke the USSR. "We thought we could not win in Korea despite our strategic superiority, because Russia could not afford to lose," he had written. Similarly, in 1954 the idea of sending United States troops to help the French in Vietnam was dismissed because the British were against it and the risk of provoking the Soviets seemed too great. It was from such considerations that he came to oppose the doctrine of "massive retaliation"—he considered that its fearfulness discouraged intervention. Hence, his notion first of limited nuclear war and then of limited conventional wars in which each side could test its own mettle and the other's resolve. That notion had been applied to Vietnam.

A serious problem of such war is that much more is at stake than the battleground or its inhabitants. The fight is more for myth than for reality, more for credibility than for territory, and the prospect of loss is therefore more disconcerting than the "limited" nature of the war might be thought to imply. McGeorge Bundy wrote in 1965 that a sustained policy of reprisal against North Vietnam was worthwhile as a demonstration of American resolve, even if it failed militarily. Walt Rostow's dictum, "We are the greatest power in the world—if we behave like it," was expressed a little more delicately by Kissinger.

Kissinger had serious misgivings about Vietnam as a battleground. When he went there in 1965 and 1966 he moved away from the platitudinous embassy and military hierarchy, to talk to local Vietnamese officials and to the Americans stationed in the boondocks. He decided that Westmoreland's tactics were abysmal and that the South Vietnamese establishment was as inept as it was corrupt. But he did not conclude that the United States should extricate itself as quickly as possible. He knew that negotiations were "inevitable," but he held that "withdrawal would be disastrous": a "victory by a third-class Communist peasant state over the United States" would "strengthen the most bellicose factions in the internecine Communist struggle around the world," and "demoralize" America's friends in Southeast Asia; and it might encourage Japan or India to move toward Moscow or Peking. "A demonstration of American impotence in Asia cannot fail to lessen the credibility of American pledges in other fields. We are no longer fighting in Vietnam only for the Vietnamese; we are also fighting for ourselves and for international stability," he wrote, in terms hardly different from the famous statement that year of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, John McNaughton, that the present U.S. objective in Vietnam is to avoid humiliation and that risk was not a "friend" (Vietnam), but above all "our reputation as a guarantor."

There was lttle that distinguished Kissinger's views from the Washington consensus, excep perhaps a greater reservation about the capacity of the South Vietnamese. His most in triguing countribution to the Vietnam debate before he assumed office was an article written in 1968 for foreign affairs, published as he and Nixion moved to washington . His analysis of American policy mistakes was cogent, but it would be ignored over the years to come. The basic error, Kissinger argued , was that " we fought a miliary war, our opponents fought a political one . We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for psychological exhaustion, In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war;  the guerrilla wins if the does not lose; the conventional army loses if it does  not win.” He recognized that Tet 1968 had been a political defeat for Washington, even if the Viet Cong infrastructure had been badly maul ed. There was talk in Washington in 1968 of a coalition government as a solution to Vietnam's problems. Kissinger wanted none of it. He thought that it made “as much sense as to attempt to overcome the problems of Mississippi through a coalition between the SDS and the Ku Klux Klan. . . . It is beyond imagination that parties that have been murdering and betraying each other for twenty-five years could work together as a . . .” He was also opposed to giving joint instructions to political discussions between the two sides lest “our pressure may wind up being directed against Saigon as the seeming obstacle to an accommodation.” After he came to office these two sensible warnings were forgotten.

Kissinger proposed parallel talks in which political and military affairs would be strictly separated. The North Vietnamese and the Americans would discuss military matters; the South Vietnamese government and the NLF would negotiate political changes. The American objective would be to avoid military defeat “or a change in the political structure of South Vietnam brought about by external military force.” Washington must try to effect a staged withdrawal of both North Vietnamese and American forces; any discussion of the future political composition of South Vietnam must be left to the Vietnamese.

As a new idea to break the Paris deadlock this may have sounded eminently reasonable in Washington, but it ignored the fact that to the Vietnamese Communists this was a revolutionary struggle in which military and political ends can rarely be separated. The Chinese had acceded to such a separation at Geneva in 1954, but Hanoi was not grateful for the way its allies had then imposed a moratorium on its revolution. (Nor were the Cambodian Communists.) And although the idea of mutual withdrawal might seem an advance on Lyndon Johnson's 1966 offer to withdraw American troops six months after a cease-fire, it disregarded the fact that, for the Vietnamese, this was a civil war.

While he was still at the Hotel Pierre in December 1968, Kissinger had asked Daniel Ellsberg, who had returned from Vietnam to the Rand Corporation, to help draw up a paper discussing the options available to the United States in Vietnam. Ellsberg suggested that the possibility of unilateral withdrawal should be among the ideas considered. Kissinger thought from the beginning that it was a "disaster." But in 1968 he was not prepared to consider whether America's world position, its "honor,"might better be served by an immediate end to it; all the options to be considered involved remaining in Vietnam.

At the Pierre, Kissinger's staff posed questions to be presented to departments as National Security Study Memorandum One. The replies, when they came, were not encouraging; the only point of agreement was pessimism. The Secretary of Defense's office concluded that the South Vietnamese armed forces were unlikely ever to be a match for the Viet Cong. The Joint Chiefs stated that Thieu could not hold out for the whole time; they said both United States troops and United States air power were needed until at least 1972. And the embassy reported that Saigon's "political system, as it now is, is probably inadequate for a political confrontation with the enemy."

But both Nixon and Kissinger believed that the war could quickly be brought to a conclusion that was satisfactory to them. Nixon thought Vietnam only a "short-term problem"; what was needed was a policy that would create political stalemate at home and at least military stalemate on the battlefield. Their plan involved complementary but contradictory features: domestic opposition must be reduced, but at the same time Hanoi must be convinced that this administration was willing to sustain the war and even widen it beyond anything that Johnson had considered. "A prolonged, even if ultimately victorious, war might leave Vietnam so exhausted as to jeopardize the purpose of decades of struggle," Kissinger wrote in Foreign Affairs. "The important point was that whatever errors America had made, 'we are so powerful that Hanoi is simply unable to defeat us militarily' and must therefore eventually be forced to compromise.

The first of the two aims seemed the easier to achive. Both Kissinger and Nixion were convinced that it was the draft, not the long bleeding of Indochina, that was arousing most of the domestic opposition. If American ombbat troops could be withdrawn as Vietnamese battalions were developed, an appearance of progress toward peace could be created.

But while the American people were being persuaded that the war was beig wound down, plausible threats of escalation would have to be made, and the threats would have to be impressive not only to Hanoi but to Moscow. At the Republican National Convention Nixon told the Southern delegates that " critical to te settlement of Vietnam is relations with the Soviet Union... you've got to broaden the canvas, because in Vietnam they have no reason to end that war. It's hurting us more than it's hurting them.

The United States embassy in Saigon reported in January 1969 that there was no evidence that either Moscow or Peking had so far applied any pressure on Hanoi to settle the conflict. But it also concluded that the Sino-Soviet dispute foreclosed the possibility of either nation urging a settlement for fear of being seen as "betraying" its socialist ally. This view was widely shared. Nixon and Kissinger believed, however, that the Soviets could be persuaded to place their own national interests before the notion of revolutionary solidarity. This belief underestimated the extent to which maintaining at least the façade of such solidarity is in itself a Soviet national interest. At his early press conferences as well as privately, Nixon began to hint at the possibility of talks on strategic arms, on Berlin, and on a European Security Conference, if the Russians were helpful to Vietnam. On March 4, 1969, he introduced the first of many public talks to escalate the war if progress toward a settlement were not made. He believed at this time that the Soviet Union shares the concern of other nations . . . about the extension of the war in Vietnam. They recognize that if it continues over a long period of time, the possibility of escalation increases.

The overall concept was given, by Melvin Laird, the ugly and only partially accurate name "Vietnamization." On one level it was an extension of Lyndon Johnson's demand that "Asian boys fight Asian wars," involving the rapid development of Vietnamese combat battalions and the redeployment of American forces. In the theater of the war it also envisaged the extension of another form of American power, bombing, to be used not only to give tactical help to the South Vietnamese but also in a wider strategic sense—to impress Washington's determination upon the enemy.

The use of threats in international affairs is not novel. For Nixon and Kissinger, however, it had a special purpose. Each believed in the value of unpredictability, of appearing "irrational" to one's enemy. Nixon publicly declared that "the real possibility of irrational U.S. action is essential to the U.S.-Soviet relationship." Privately he was more explicit. H. R. Haldeman records that in 1969 Nixon explained to him that "the threat was the key . . . Nixon coined a phrase for his theory which I'm sure will bring smiles of delight to Nixon haters everywhere. . . . He said, I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I've reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to them that "for God's sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can't restrain him when he's angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button"—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.

A problem with this theory is that reputations for irrationality have to be established, and that can be done only by irrational actions.

The idea of invading Cambodia arose not, as Nixon and Kissinger later claimed, after the removal of Sihanouk in March 1970, but at the very beginning of the administration. At this stage, they had decided to embark on what they called a "two-track" policy toward Cambodia. The United States would respond to the overtures to resume relations that Sihanouk had made through 1968, but it would insist that a test of his seriousness be the extent to which he dealt with the Communist "sanctuaries"—or allowed the United States to do so.

On his first day in office, Nixon asked the Pentagon how the United States could "quarantine" Cambodia. The Joint Chiefs forwarded the President's quarantine request to Saigon for Creighton Abrams' advice. It was at that point that the General cabled his own proposal for a single B-52 raid against "COSVN headquarters" in Base Area 353. He knew from the "quarantine" memorandum that his idea would have a sympathetic hearing in the new Washington.

On February 15, as Abrams' request was being considered by "highest authority," the ambassadors in Saigon, Bangkok and Vientiane received a highly classified cable from William Rogers informing them that "the President has authorized a diplomatic course of action which envisages responding to recent Cambodian initiatives by proceeding gradually, with full control and possibility of reversal at all stages, toward resumption of diplomatic relations with Cambodia." At the same time Nixon sent a personal message to Sihanouk, through the Australians, assuring him that the United States would now formally recognize Cambodia's existing borders.

The Chiefs' study on how to quarantine Cambodia was finished in late February. Their conclusions are helpful in interpreting the events of the next fourteen months. They argued that Sihanouk's good faith in his diplomatic overtures toward the United States "can be most easily and profitably put to test and use by a series of steps towards normalization in the border areas," including "acquiescence in the undertaking of short term preemptive operations by U.S. forces."

They thought that a blockade of all Cambodian ports and airports would be feasible, and that it might prevent supplies from getting through to the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. But they understood that it would have to be sustained over a long period and would be widely criticized abroad. Bombing raids and limited invasions of the border areas would be more.

practical. The Chiefs admitted that such "temporary" encroachment on Cambodian territory would carry the same implications of an overt act as blockade operations—but they considered that the sudden speed of the administration—but they considered that the sudden speed of the administration would make this much more acceptable. Any attacks would come after the event, not simultaneously as they would during blockade, and "confrontation with other nations would be unlikely." They asked approval for "preemptive operations" by land and air.

General Westmoreland had asked for similar permission to attack the sanctuaries as they began to grow in late 1967 and then a few months later in 1968. Subsequently, in the diplomatic environment, the President did not approve the operation for execution at that time." This bureaucratic misstep indicates that Johnson considered the advantages of such an operation to be more than offset by the domestic upheaval it would cause; he did not contemplate doing it in total secrecy and the damage it might inflict on Cambodia's fragile neutrality.

On April 8 Kissinger sent Laird a reply to the Chiefs' quarantine proposals. He said that they should be held in abeyance to see if Sihanouk would now "adopt more positive policies and practices concerning the illegal use of his country by Communist forces." In fact, however, one of the “preemptive operations” was being held back; following Abrams' request for an attack on COSVN, bombing of the sanctuaries had already begun with the Breakfast attack on March 18. The records had been falsified, and Sihanouk had made no protest.

In his memoirs Nixon claims that the next attack—code-named Lunch—was mounted in lieu of retaliating against North Korea for the way in which it had just shot down an American EC-121 spy plane. Nixon was intended to impress the Communist leaders of both North Korea and North Vietnam with our resolve to support our allies and not relent. Lunch was the military situation in Cambodia or Vietnam is not immense. Nixon’s desire to demonstrate this at other meals.

Nixon's desire to demonstrate toughness by bombing Cambodia coincided with the organizational requirements of the Armed Services. Many of the sorties flown in indochina, by both tactical aircraft and B-52s, were flown because the services responsible for the aircraft needed to justify theirr existence on station. One senior Pentagon analyst, Thomas Thayer, wrote a classified study in which he likened the use of air power in Indochina to a fire house running under full pressure most of the time and pointed with the same intensity at whichever area is allowed, regardless of its relative importance in the scheme of things.” When Lyndon Johnson decided to cut back the bombing of North Vietnam in November 1968, the Joint Chiefs reluctantly agreed after Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford assured them that the strikes could be redirected against Laos. The statistics help tell the story. In 1968, 172,000 sorties were flown against North Vietnam and 136,000 against Laos. In 1969 the bombing halt reduced sorties against the North to 37,000—the attacks in Laos rose to 242,000. In January 1969, when Nixon and Kissinger arrived in the White House there was capacity to spare for Cambodia.

Kissinger's subsequent claim that the areas bombed under the Menu program contained no Cambodians was untrue, as the figures and the memoranda produced at the time by the Joint Chiefs clearly showed. One such memorandum has already been quoted. There are others. Laird, as has been noted, was opposed to concealing the bombing of Cambodia from Congress, but (as he often was to do during the war) he accepted a policy that he thought incorrect. At the same time, he attempted to control the enthusiasm of the Chiefs and frequently sent them questions about the Menu operations. In one such memorandum he asked, “Are steps being taken, on a continuing basis, to minimize the risk of striking Cambodian people and structures? If so, what are the steps? Are we reasonably sure such steps are effective?” (emphasis added). The Chiefs replied that everything was under control, citing only one attack in which Cambodians were known to have been killed. Their response did, however, indicate how extensively the Communists mingled with the villagers. “If identified as an area of Cambodian habitation, no target boxes are placed closer than one kilometer to this area.” In Vietnam, except in extreme emergency, B-52 boxes were not allowed nearer than three kilometers from American positions. The Chiefs nonetheless considered that meters from American positions had forfeited them “lucrative targets.” Later, however, they admitted publicly that they had no way whatsoever of assessing Cambodian casualties.

After the bombing became public in 1973, both Kissinger and Nixion frequently maintained that it was encouraged by Sihanouk as long as it was kept secret. As evidence, Kissinger citted the visit by Chester Bowles in 1968, a talk between Senator Mansfield and Sihanouk in 1969,a 1969 press conference in which Sihanouk said that he had control over what appened in the order areas , and a series of letterrs between Nixon and Sihanouk during 1969 . These lettters ( reproduced in the Notes ) deal with restoring diplomatic relations; Kissinger said that had Sihanouk wisheed to protest about Menu he could have done so in this context.

It is possible that Prince Sihanouk was indeed a party to the conspiracy. It would have fitted in with his policy of playing enemies off against one another, with his dislike of the Vietnamese and with his move back toward Washington. It is certainly true that while Phnom Penh continued to denounce American defoliant attacks, artillery barrages and tactical airstrikes against Cambodian villages throughout 1969, it made no public protest that specifically mentioned B-52 strikes. Furthermore, in July 1969, after Washington publicly recognized Cambodia's "territorial integrity," diplomatic relations were restored, and Sihanouk allowed an American embassy, a small mission run by a chargé d’affaires named Lloyd "Mike" Rives, to be opened again in Phnom Penh.

But several points about Sihanouk's role need to be repeated. First, as has been noted, his aide Charles Meyer maintains that although (like any other Cambodian) he was happy to see Vietnamese bombed, he was never asked to approve a vast B-52 campaign and never did so. Secondly, if he did indicate his compliance to Washington, it was not regarded as very certain. Throughout Menu, the Joint Chiefs considered each of Abrams' bombing requests individually, and in their replies they always reminded him what to do if the Cambodians made trouble. “After delivering a reply to any Cambodian protest Washington will inform the press that we have apologized and offered compensation.” Thirdly, Sihanouk had no alternative. American violations of Cambodian neutrality were as impossible to prevent as Vietnamese. Each had to be tolerated in the hope the United States—which, Sihanouk knew—would have a devastating impact upon Cambodia—could be prevented.

Most important of all in American terms, the issue that Kissinger has consistently failed to address is that in the context of United States law Sihanouk's attitude was irrelevant. The whims of, and the constraints upon, a foreign prince are not grounds for the President to wage war. The Constitution gives the power to declare war, to make appropriations and to raise and support armies to Congress. By informing only a few sympathetic legislators in a general way of the bombing, the White House was deliberately usurping the Congress' constitutional rights and responsibilities.

The evidence indicates that "the Sihanouk excuse" was merely that; the secrecy, the wiretaps, the burning and falsification of reports, were principally intended to conceal the administration's widening of the war from the American people. Even after 1970 when Menu had ended and Sihanouk, exiled, no longer needed protection, Nixon, Kissinger, Rogers Laird, Elliot L Richardson and other officials all continued to assure Congress, press and public, without equivocation, that the United States had scrupulously declined to attack Communist positions in Cambodia before spring 1970. Official, highly classified Pentagon computer printouts of the bombing of Indochina continued to show " Nil" for Cambodia in 1969.

In 1973, when some of the truth was established, these same officials denied all responsibility for the falsification. Some of them claimed that all those with a "need to know" did know about Menu, no deception had taken place. Others expressed outrage that the procedures, which contravened the United States Military Code of Justice, had been allowed to develop. But no one in the United States government or in the armed services would admit having authorized them. Eventually, unidentified junior officers in the field were blamed for being "overzealous." In fact, the falsifications were the result of Nixon and Kissinger's repeated insistence to General Wheeler that total secrecy must be preserved at all cost. Memoranda from the period show that there was never any question about that. General Brent Scowcroft, who became Kissinger’s deputy and then his successor as National Security Adviser, states that the falsification was done on direct White House orders. In his memoirs Nixon admitted that one reason for the secrecy “was the problem of domestic antiwar protestors. My administration was only two months old, and I wanted to provoke as little public outcry as possible at the outset.”

Kissinger's attitude is probably accurately summed up by Marvin and Bernard Kalb in their admiring biography, written with his full cooperation: “Kissinger had no trouble justifying the deception. He felt that if it became known that the United States was widening the war geographically, extending the bombing into Cambodia, this would prompt a wave of angry denunciations from an increasingly disillusioned Congress and antiwar critics across the country. This kind of nationwide uproar would only complicate the Administration's plans for peace in Vietnam.”

These "plans for peace" did not prevent the Communists from attacking South Vietnam, but in Cambodia, as the Chiefs reported, it forced them to “disperse over a greater area than before.” The raids spread the fighting out from the border areas, where it had been contained, and diminished the main claim that Sihanouk still had to legitimacy—that he had kept his country out of Vietnam’s conflict. The “Madman Theory of War” was being put into practice.