They Died for Henry Kissinger’s “Credibility”: The
Real History of our Vietnam Immorality
There was no good answer when John Kerry asked how you ask a man to
be the last to die for a mistake. Here's why
By David MilneOctober 18, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "Salon"
- Détente with the Soviet Union and the opening to China were
significant breakthroughs in their own right. Indeed, a positive
appraisal of the Nixon administration’s foreign policies is
predicated on our viewing them this way. But Richard Nixon and Henry
Kissinger did not view them in isolation at the time. Instead, both
men believed that Moscow and Beijing, keen to extract economic and
strategic benefits from an improved relationship with Washington,
would apply pressure on Hanoi to agree to peace terms permitting a
full American withdrawal. On this topic their reasoning was
misguided. It did not accord sufficient respect to North Vietnam’s
fiercely guarded status as an independent actor, or indeed to the
ideological solidarity that existed on at least a bilateral basis
between Hanoi and its two Marxist-Leninist patrons.
So when the United States withdrew from Vietnam in
January 1973, when “peace” was finally achieved, it came at a
horrendous cost. Cambodia was dragged directly into the fray,
leading ultimately to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and a genocide
that killed approximately 1.7 million people— 20.1 percent of
Cambodia’s population. Hundreds of thousands of North and South
Vietnamese soldiers and noncombatants lost their lives. Of the
fifty-seven thousand American soldiers who died on or above
Vietnamese soil, twenty thousand perished during Nixon’s presidency.
During the 1968 presidential campaign, Nixon had stated his
intention to achieve “peace with honor.” In 1971, a returning
veteran named John Kerry testified powerfully before the U.S. Senate
Foreign Relations Committee. He indicted the war as “the biggest
nothing in history” and posed a powerful question: “How do you ask a
man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
Kissinger’s best answer to Kerry’s question was
“for the sake of credibility.” The national security adviser
understood that the United States could not “win” the Vietnam War
and largely agreed with Kerry that the Americanization of the
conflict had been a mistake. But he was adamant that the nation
could not be seen to “lose” it either. In a widely noted essay in
Foreign Affairs in January 1969 titled “The Viet Nam Negotiations,”
Kissinger placed greatest emphasis not on the tangible ramifications
of withdrawal but on the amorphous psychological ones:
The commitment of 500,000 Americans has
settled the issue of the importance of Viet Nam. What is
involved now is confidence in American promises. However
fashionable it is to ridicule the terms “credibility” or
“prestige,” they are not empty phrases; other nations can gear
their actions to ours only if they can count on our steadiness .
. . In many parts of the world—the Middle East, Europe, Latin
America, even Japan— stability depends on confidence in American
promises.
Henry Kissinger’s plan for a staged withdrawal
from Vietnam was thus sustained by the logic of keeping up
appearances. “We could not simply walk away from an enterprise
involving two administrations, five allied countries, and thirty-one
thousand dead,” Kissinger observed in his memoir, “as if we were
switching a television channel.” More would die to display America’s
continued potency to friends and enemies. The nation would not slink
away under cover of darkness but depart with all guns blazing.
Credibility was important to nineteenth-century
diplomats like Metternich and Bismarck. (The latter established
extensive German colonies in Africa primarily for reasons of
credibility, not because he believed that an African empire added
much to Berlin’s strategic or economic strength.) But its logic was
harder to sell in twentieth-century America, where battlefield
deaths born of prestige-driven actions were tolerated less well by
political elites beholden to mass democracy and subject to media
scrutiny. In Paris in March 1969, President Charles de Gaulle asked
Kissinger, “Why don’t you get out of Vietnam?” Surprised by de
Gaulle’s bluntness, Kissinger answered, “Because a sudden withdrawal
might give us a credibility problem.” “Where?” demanded de Gaulle.
Kissinger specified the Middle East. “How very odd,” said de Gaulle.
“It is precisely in the Middle East that I thought your enemies had
a credibility problem.” De Gaulle understood something that
Kissinger did not: America’s allies—even ambivalent ones like
France—believed Washington’s credibility would be enhanced, not
diminished, by casting aside fictions, cutting its losses, and
pursuing an expedited withdrawal.
Kissinger’s ostensible peace goals were twofold:
that North Vietnamese troops leave South Vietnam at the point of
armistice, and that North Vietnam respect South Vietnam’s
independence after America’s withdrawal. Kissinger was not so naïve
that he believed either goal was realistically attainable. Rather,
as he observed to Hans Morgenthau in 1968, he would “drag on the
process” of withdrawal “for a while because of the international
repercussions.”
This dragging effect would be achieved with
multiple weights and pulleys. First, the withdrawal of American
troops would commence at a steady rate—twenty-five thousand American
troops left Vietnam in 1969 and hundreds of thousands soon followed.
Second, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), whom the
Americans would train and equip to the highest standards, would fill
the gap left by the departing American troops—a strategy described
as “Vietnamization.” Third, the United States would escalate the war
in the most efficient (read destructive) manner possible. As the
ground war was being deescalated, the U.S. bombing campaign
increased sharply in intensity—and secretly, for such actions were
always likely to create a firestorm of protest. Nixon and Kissinger
expanded the U.S. bombing campaign in the spring of 1969 to include
targets in Cambodia. This action caused two of Kissinger’s
assistants, Anthony Lake and Roger Morris, to resign in protest. A
year later, American troops began their “incursion” (read: invasion)
of Cambodia in the hope—forlorn, as it turned out—of destroying
North Vietnamese command facilities.
The bombing of Cambodia encapsulated all of
Nixon’s and Kissinger’s failings regarding transparency, strategy,
and morality. The bombings were conducted in total secrecy and were
falsely designated as attacks on North Vietnam. Congress and the
public were not informed. As per usual, many within the
administration knew as little as Congress: the State Department,
inevitably, and even the secretary of the Air Force. Yet keeping a
large-scale bombing campaign under wraps was impossible. On May 9,
1969, The New York Times ran a front-page story publicizing this
expansion of the war into Cambodia. Nixon was furious, exclaiming to
Kissinger, “What is this cock-sucking story? Find out who leaked it,
and fire him.” Without foundation, Kissinger pinned the blame on
Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and confronted him directly: “You son
of a bitch. I know you leaked that story, and you’re going to have
to explain it to the president.” Laird simply hung up. Kissinger
subsequently conceded that he had accused the wrong man. To identify
the real culprit, he and Nixon requested the director of the FBI, J.
Edgar Hoover, to install a series of wiretaps on three of
Kissinger’s NSC staff: Daniel Davidson, Morton Halperin, and Hal
Sonnenfeldt, as well as one of Melvin Laird’s assistants at the
Pentagon, Colonel Robert Pursley. The number of wiretaps Nixon and
Kissinger authorized on administration staff eventually totaled
seventeen, but none captured anything incriminating. Nixon lamented
that the wiretaps “never helped us,” they merely comprised “gobs and
gobs of material. Gossip and bullshitting.” Only one recording
device captured a detail that led to a high-level resignation. It
was voice-activated and whirred into action whenever the president
opened his mouth.
The bombing of Cambodia killed thousands of people
and destabilized a sovereign nation to little if any discernible
effect. The secret bombing raids—for the administration persisted in
denying their existence in spite of compelling evidence to the
contrary—continued for fourteen months, during which U.S. B-52s flew
3,875 sorties and dropped 108,823 tons of bombs. The objective of
the raids was to destroy North Vietnam’s political and military
headquarters—the Central Office for South Vietnam—and in this it
failed. Kissinger felt no moral qualms about escalating the war in
this fashion. The fact that the primary strategic objective had not
been met seemed not to faze him. This was because the bombing had a
negligible impact on the United States beyond the cost of the
tonnage—and the lives of the airmen who died delivering their
payloads.
Kissinger was as hawkish as Walt Rostow when it
came to bombing, observing, “I refuse to believe that a little
fourth-rate power like Vietnam does not have a breaking point.”
Unsurprisingly, Rostow was on hand to encourage Kissinger to stay
the course, that the bombing was having its desired effect. In
November 1970, he told Kissinger, “On Vietnam, I suggest you give
some thought in light of intelligence coming from Hanoi, that they
are having some difficult morale problems in the field as well as at
home . . . I get word that for the first time in the whole thing
leaflets saying go home, work the farms, grow some rice, raise some
kids—that’s something the army in the field and the people at home
may be ready to listen to.” Rostow’s words were an echo from the
previous administration; he had told LBJ the same story for months
in 1967 and 1968. It is hard to say whether Rostow’s observations
pepped up Kissinger or depressed him.
Throughout this process of escalation, Kissinger
was concurrently engaged in peace negotiations with the North
Vietnamese in Paris. As Le Duc Tho, the chief North Vietnamese
negotiator, well understood, “Vietnamization” was a patchy device
designed to cloak an inevitable U.S. withdrawal. So he was not
particularly amenable to granting concessions prematurely. The South
Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu, was vehemently opposed to
Nixon and Kissinger’s withdrawal strategy and drew only limited
succor from the expansion of the war into Cambodia. Kissinger could
not decide which side he disliked more. Thieu was “this insane son
of a bitch,” and the North Vietnamese were “bastards . . . [who]
have been screwing us.” Broadly speaking, he concluded that his
Vietnamese interlocutors on both sides of the 17th parallel were
“just a bunch of shits.”
Thieu and Le Duc Tho understandably formed a
similar view of Kissinger. Thieu’s South Vietnam was being given up
for dead—this was the reality. The United States was bombing North
Vietnam, meanwhile, to preserve Kissinger’s pool of “credibility”
and as a parting gift to Thieu. In May 1972, the White House tried
to solicit support from George Kennan for an escalation in the
bombing campaign. Kennan’s “I thought it was inordinately costly in
terms both of extraneous destruction and of our international
reputation,” was not at all the hoped-for reply. The Christmas
bombing campaign of December 1972 marked the first occasion that
B-52 bombers, incapable of precision strikes, wreaked destruction on
the centers of Hanoi and Haiphong—the destroyed wing of Bach Mai
hospital was just one example of collateral damage. America’s allies
and enemies universally condemned the campaign.
On the other side of the equation, in order to
secure Thieu’s agreement, Nixon and Kissinger threatened to cut off
all aid to South Vietnam and cast the nation adrift. The pursuit of
“honor” thus played little role in any of Kissinger’s Vietnam
gambits. The peace that came a few weeks later was not so much
sullied as disfigured beyond recognition. On January 8, Kissinger
shook Le Duc Tho’s hand and told him, “It was not my fault about the
bombing.” Tho replied, “You have tarnished the honor of the United
States. Your barbarous and inhumane action has aroused the general
and tremendous indignation from the world peoples.” John Ehrlichman
later asked Kissinger how long South Vietnam was likely to last.
Kissinger predicted, “I think that if they’re lucky, they can hold
out for a year or two.”
For making peace in January 1973, Kissinger and Le
Duc Tho were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize later in the
year. Knowing what was around the corner, Tho refused the award.
Kissinger had no such qualms, although he understood as well as Tho
that the “peace” was stopgap—a sham. Edwin Reischauer, the Harvard
scholar and former U.S. ambassador to Japan, observed that the award
“shows either that the people of Norway have a very poor
understanding of what happened out there or a good sense of humor.”
The critic and humorist Tom Lehrer famously announced his retirement
on the grounds that reality had rendered satire obsolete. Kissinger
and Nixon complained that insufficient respect was being accorded to
what was a significant achievement. On October 17, 1973, Kissinger
asked Nixon if he had seen “The New York Times blasting the Nobel
Prize.” “Why have they blasted it?” asked Nixon. “Because they can’t
bear the thought the war in Vietnam has ended,” replied Kissinger.
After Nixon observed, “that’s amusing,” Kissinger elaborated: “They
can’t bear the thought— you know, Mr. President, when they said the
détente wouldn’t work. They never say the détente enabled us to
settle the Vietnam War because that’s the thing they cannot
bear—with honor.” Nixon replied, “Yeah, that’s right. When we stick
to the honor—that’s the last straw.”
There was in fact a connection between
détente and the settlement of the Vietnam War, and it had
occurred six months previously at the Moscow Summit. Over
the course of a wide-ranging discussion, Brezhnev recounted
to Nixon an earlier conversation he had had with his
national security adviser, during which “Dr. Kissinger told
me that if there was a peaceful settlement in Vietnam you
would be agreeable to the Vietnamese doing whatever they
want, having whatever they want after a period of time, say
18 months. If that is indeed true, and if the Vietnamese
knew this, and it was true, they would be sympathetic on
that basis” to reaching an agreement. Brezhnev had outed
Kissinger’s acceptance of a “decent interval” between
American withdrawal and a North Vietnamese invasion of the
South.This interval lasted a little
longer than Kissinger had estimated. In March 1975, North
Vietnam army regulars crossed the 17th parallel and advanced
rapidly on Saigon, encountering token resistance along the
way. The ARVN collapsed or melted from view, Saigon fell
within a month, and a murderous final reckoning ensued. The
abiding image of those harrowing events is an American
helicopter perched precariously atop one of the embassy’s
auxiliary buildings, a ladder dangling below providing
last-gasp deliverance for a fortunate few. A little farther
down, at ground level, thousands of desperate South
Vietnamese citizens besiege the embassy’s gates, unable to
escape, soon to enter a very different world.
George Kennan was pleased that the United
States had terminated a meaningless conflict and shed an
unreliable ally. “They won. We lost. It is now their show .
. . our attitude should be: you are heartily welcome to each
other; it serves you both right.” The callousness of
Kennan’s appraisal is perhaps mitigated by the fact that his
opposition to the Vietnam War was long and consistently
disinterested in morality. Kissinger’s record is harder to
defend. He had inherited a debacle, the escalation of which
he supported from afar, and had failed to achieve any of his
declared aims beyond a compromised peace agreement and U.S.
withdrawal, on terms similar to those Averell Harriman had
proposed in 1968. American credibility was already low when
the nation took its gloves off and bombed Cambodia and North
Vietnam with few restrictions; the world’s most powerful
nation deploying its heavy bombers against tightly packed
cities did not make for edifying viewing. American
credibility was almost undetectable in 1975 as Saigon
burned.
In an ideational sense, the Vietnam War
combined the worst of two worlds. The conflict was made and
escalated by liberal Cold Warriors—in the name of ideals
that can be traced to Wilson—and was terminated by devotees
of realpolitik at a deliberately glacial pace for reasons of
credibility.
Like the Civil War, Vietnam would cast a
pall over American society, and its foreign policy, for
decades. Like the Civil War, its history and meaning are
fiercely contested to this day. In recent years, orthodox
critics and revisionist defenders of the war have clashed
over issues such as whether the war was ever winnable, and
whether the United States really lost. So Ngo Dinh Diem was
a disaster unworthy of American support; Diem was a heroic
leader whom the United States fecklessly destroyed. South
Vietnam lacked the wherewithal to stand alone; South Vietnam
was pro-Western, growing in strength, and badly betrayed.
LBJ’s bombing campaign was brutal; LBJ’s bombing campaign
was timid. The United States losing the Vietnam War was
inevitable; America would have won had its political leaders
shown greater fortitude. So go the lessons of history—or
not.
Excerpted from
“Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy”
by David Milne. Published by Farrar Straus & Giroux.
Copyright © 2015 by David Milne. Reprinted with permission
of the publisher. All rights reserved.
David Milne is a senior lecturer in
modern history at the University of East Anglia and the
author of "America's Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam
War"