Shortly after President Johnson’s withdrawal from the 1968 elections and the bombing halt, all sides agreed to meet in Paris to begin talks about ending the war. No one seemed to be in any great hurry to start though. For seven months they debated what shape the table would be. Were the North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese to be created as equals and would they face each other across the table? Would the North Vietnamese-sponsored Provisional Revolutionary Government have full participation in the talks? Who would speak first and who would respond to the first speech?
There is a certain craziness about such things being debated while tens of thousands died. But one theory of negotiation holds that such debates on side issues are very important. They allow the parties to test each other and to move around for position on issues that are not at the heart of the debate, on matters that are not the real cause of differences among the parties. The theory holds that these little matters are easier to solve than the real issues and that once they have been solved, the parties know each other well enough, and their strengths and weaknesses are clear enough, to make it easier to find answers to the real and passionate issues.
This is a fine theory and it may even be true, but it looked ridiculous to the watching world, and it gave no basis for any hope that the talks would produce a just and lasting peace.
In this chapter we will be looking in now and then on those negotiations in Paris. We will move from there to events in Vietnam, because the negotiations affected the war and the war affected the negotiations. Neither event took place or could have taken place in isolation from the other. That may seem clear or it may not. It is tricky point that becomes clearer when you realize that the peace talks were what the war was all about. It is fair to say that because of the way in which the United States fought in Southeast Asia, it could never gain a military victory. Such a victory was possible only through the use of many times more troops than the American political situation would allow-or through invasion of North Vietnam.
It is even truer to say that North Vietnam could not win a military victory in South Vietnam. In the period of American involvement, the North Vietnamese never even won a major battle. The odds in a battle for Saigon, of their beating five hundred thousand American troops plus many more South Vietnamese troops, with the Americans controlling the air, were ridiculously low.
The war was a tie. It probably was always a tic, but it took several years and many lives before that concept was clear to all parties. That is not unusual either. World War I was a tie for most of its course. Thousands of troops died in trenches over gains and losses of but a few square miles of territory. The tie in World War I was broken when millions of American troops joined the battle and tipped the scales.
What do you do if you are in a war and nobody is winning or nobody can win? You have two choices. You can keep fighting until the other side is economically destroyed and can no longer afford to fight, or you can talk peace.
The possibility of economic defeat for either side was very low. The North Vietnamese economy was simple, and its needs were few. In addition, the supply lines to China and Russia were open, and those nations had enough wealth to avoid an economic defeat. The United States could keep on fighting for many years if cost were the only question. The Vietnam War was expensive to America, bur the American economy was at its peak during the war years, and the war was nor going to disrupt the economic life of the average American.
Since the tie was there, the peace talks had to take place. War is one means of gaining national goals. Talking is another. If the parries could not achieve what they wanted through war, they would try to achieve their same goals through discussion. The purpose of the talks was to attempt to solve politically those problems that were being fought over on the battlefield.
But political discussions are very different from military wars. In war fought to the end, like World War II or the American Civil War, someone wins and someone loses. After the victory, the victor may decide to keep the defeated territory or it may do something else. For instance, it may take its wealth or it may make it a colony or it may require it to sign a very favourable trade treaty. But the choice is its, and the losing nation has very little say in the matter.
Peace discussions between two nations caught in a stalemated war (or a war whose outcome neither side is certain of) are a different matter, Deep inside, both sides know that they are not going to win, Neither one would be the first to say that, of course. If you admitted that you could not win at the bargaining table and the other side insisted that it could, what on earth would there be to talk about?
Neither side, then, will admit that the war is stalemated. Both sides pretend that they are winning, but both sides know that both they and the other side are lying. There is a great deal of what is sometimes called posturing. Each side will try to look as strong and as forceful as possible.
At the end, though, there will not be a clear winner and a clear loser. Both sides will have gained some of their goals and neither side will have gained everything.
Each side brings into the discussions a set of goals it wishes to gain. At first they ask for as much as they would hope to gain by a military victory. When both sides do this, they start out with one saying, “Give me everything I want,” and the other side saying the same thing.
The Paris peace talks were more difficult then normal because there were four parties in them with at least three different goals. The Americans looked at the talks as a way of ending their involvement in the war without looking as if they had abandoned a friend. So a key American objective was a cease-fire followed by withdrawal of foreign troops (American and North Vietnamese). The North Vietnamese, the NLF, and the South Vietnamese were more concerned with what happened after the fighting had ended. They had opposing views on the political parts of the talks.
What political decisions would be reached at the talks? Would North Vietnam recognize the government in Saigon? Would they, instead, demand a common election to end the national division, or would they accept a free and open election in South Vietnam in the hope that their southern allies would win and the two nations would gradually be joined?
The Americans wanted peace first. After that, they felt that the political questions could be worked out one way or another. The Vietnamese wanted the political questions answered before they would agree to stop fighting. There was a stalemate at the conference table as well as on the battlefield.
In January of 1969, Richard Nixon became the president of the United States. Shortly after he took office, the North Vietnamese carried out attacks on dozens of South Vietnamese towns much like the Tet offensive a year earlier. More than a thousand Americans were killed in those attacks, and Nixon responded strongly.
He ordered Operation Menu to begin. This involved the bombing of North Vietnamese military targets located in Cambodia. It was believed that the North Vietnamese had one or more secret command posts located near the Cambodia-Vietnam border, and it was hoped that if these were wiped out, the military efforts from the north would weaken. The bombing lasted fourteen months and included 3,650 B-52 raids. It was done entirely in secret.
The raids were probably legal. The North Vietnamese were using Cambodia as a base for war against South Vietnam. The Cambodian government had given some permission to bomb in the area. So why were the raids kept quiet?
There are two reasons. First, the idea that Nixon wished to give the American people was that the war was ending. The raids in Cambodia would have given the opposite idea. Second, the American people had never been asked to commit themselves to this war. There had been no declaration of war. There had been no work done to show that this was America against North Vietnam. From Kennedy, through Johnson, to Nixon, the presidents had all wanted to avoid making a big deal about Vietnam. This approach was all right before 1965, but by that year, and certainly by 1969, America was deep into the war, and everybody knew it. Still, though, no one wanted to say it out loud. Letting everyone know that Cambodia was being bombed would have been an announcement that the war was here to stay for a while. So it was kept a secret.
Secrecy is not itself wrong. War cannot always be fought in public nor announced in press releases. But in an open society like the United States, presidents who hide their actions take a grave risk-that of losing the trust of the people. That trust had already been partly lost in regard to Vietnam, and when the Cambodian bombing was made public, very little faith was left.
As the bombing continued, another event took place, which was to confuse and anger the average American. In May of 1969, while the Vietnamization policy was being carried out, two thousand eight hundred American troops were ordered to take hill number 837, better known as Hamburger Hill. The hill was strongly defended. The Americans made eleven separate attacks on it, aided by a million pounds of bombs and one hundred fifty thousand pounds of fiery napalm: When the hill was finally taken, each side had lost five hundred men. The morning after the victory, the American troops were ordered to withdraw.
Some military basis can be found for these losses as with the earlier battle at Khe Sanh. The enemy suffered heavy casualties and a large number of its troops were tied up for a long period of time. Moreover, the NLF had a major military defeat that the whole world saw. But this was the war America was leaving and few Americans saw the sense in five hundred deaths for some unclear purpose in a war that was supposed to be ending.
Two months later, in July of 1969, the first American cutback in troops began. By the end of the year, the American commitment had been reduced by sixty thousand troops. In August, Ho Chi Minh and Richard Nixon agreed to private and secret peace talks between their two nations in Paris. Le Due Tho represented North Vietnam and Nixon’s National Security Advisor (and later Secretary of State), Henry Kissinger, represented the United States.
The talks were the result of Nixon’s use of the carrot and the stick. The “carrot” was the pullback of American forces. The “stick” included the Cambodian bombing and Nixon’s message to Ho that some movement toward a settlement was needed to avoid “measures of great consequence and force.”
On September 3, 1969. Ho Chi Minh died in Hanoi. Two-thirds of his seventy-nine years had been spent in trying to free his country from foreign control and then to unite its parts. Whether those were his only goals we will never know, though what happened after the end of the war suggest that the ancient Vietnamese hope of ruling all of Indochina was still alive. But we shall see more of that a little later on.
Ho died at the very moment when one could begin to see an end to the war that was the center of his life. In response to the American withdrawals, North Vietnamese activity in South Vietnam slowed a great deal. In 1968, there had been fourteen thousand five hundred Americans killed in Vietnam. In 1969, the number dropped to nine thousand four hundred.
In fact, the ground military action, except for a couple of major incidents, remained very quiet until 1972.
The most important of the incidents took place on April 29, 1970. Earlier that year, the head of the Cambodian government, Prince Sihanouk, was overthrown by General Lon Nol. Lon Nol was much more concerned than Sihanouk had been about the presence of North Vietnamese military bases along his country’s border with Vietnam. That concern grew as American bombing drove the North Vietnamese farther from the border and deeper into Cambodian territory. The United States was giving Lon Nol hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to help him resist the North Vietnamese.
At the end of April, though, the United States took matters into its own hands. Fifteen thousand United States and five thousand South Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia in what was officially described as an “incursion”-a temporary attack. The object, like that of the earlier bombing was to find and destroy the North Vietnamese central headquarters in Cambodia. There was no such base. The North Vietnamese had no Pentagon, but rather a group of small headquarters that were regularly moved.
The attack was useless, but it had very powerful results, Lon Nol denounced the invasion (though he may have been playing to the crowd). More importantly, there was a tremendous outcry in the United States. Demonstrations against the move broke out on college campuses all over the United States. Some four hundred colleges were shut down by students for some period of time. One of those colleges was Kent State University in Ohio. The Governor of Ohio called up the National Guard to avoid possible rioting and a group of young and untrained Guardsmen came to the campus. When they saw a large number of students heading in their direction, someone opened fire. The first shot set off a chain reaction, and when the shooting stopped, four students lay dead on the campus lawns with several others wounded. The response on campuses and throughout the nation was much greater than all earlier protests. The war had come home in a deadly fashion. The Democratic controlled Congress reacted to these events by repealing the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and barring additional American military activity in Cambodia.
But, as we know, the War in Vietnam had grown increasingly quiet. By the middle of 1970, the South Vietnamese government made a fair claim that more than ninety percent of the villages were under its control. President Thieu had begun what seemed to be a serious land redistribution program and President Nixon announced the withdrawal of one hundred fifty thousand more American soldiers.
The year 1971 began with another extension of the war, though. South Vietnamese troops moved into Laos, where they were quickly beaten back. Again there was strong reaction. Bombs were set off in the United States Capitol and Congressional Democrats voted to support an end to American involvement in Vietnam.
These moves into Laos and Cambodia were meant to put pressure on the North Vietnamese to come to a settlement in Paris. Kissinger had secretly gone to Paris many rimes and the talks continued, but there were no signs of progress other than the quiet on the battlefields. While the American public seemed not to turned against the war, Nixon and Kissinger seemed not to care about public opinion. They had an idea of how the war should end, and they were prepared to hold out against popular feeling.
The tide of public opinion turned even more against the war in the summer of 1971. Dr. Daniel Ellsberg had been a Defense Department official who was one of a group former Secretary McNamara had asked to put together a history of American fighting in Vietnam. The documents assembled by this group were not shocking in themselves, but read together, they provided evidence that the American involvement in Vietnam had included a lot of lying and failure.
Ellsberg had made copies of the documents and given them to several newspapers. The Nixon Administration tried to stop the printing of what became known as “The Pentagon Papers,” but the Supreme Court ruled that the newspapers were free to publish them. One strange result of the Pentagon Papers episode was that some government officials ordered a burglary of the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in the hopes of finding something to embarrass him. That crime and the attempt to cover it up became a key factor in the “Watergate” investigations, which were to lead to Nixon’s resignation as president.
Still the secret talks went on. At first, the quiet in Vietnam continued. Neither side wanted to end the talks by using much force while the discussions seemed to be moving. To do so would have set the negotiations back many years. By the beginning of 1971, though, there were other factors involved. First, the talks seemed to have reached an important stage. Both sides had invested too much in them to quit now. Second, it was a presidential election year, and President Nixon could not go into the election without some strong signs of progress.
Early in 1971, Nixon informed the nation that the secret talks had been going on for more than two years and that Henry Kissinger had made some fifteen trips to Paris in secret. He also announced that the number of American troops would be reduced to seventy thousand.
What Nixon did not reveal was his strategy in the talks. Nixon had a history of over twenty-five years in public Life that showed him to be a bitter foe of communism. Kissinger went to Paris with the message that Nixon was a madman; that he could let loose the nuclear monster at any moment. Kissinger presented himself as the reasonable man trying to create a compromise between his crazed leader and the North Vietnamese. (Kissinger won a Nobel Prize for this role; an Oscar would have been just as correct.)
As time went by, the details of a cease-fire were settled and the parties’ attention turned to the harder political issues. North Vietnam had a very strong bargaining chip-hundreds of American prisoners of war. The one factor that could rally the American people was these captive warriors. In the spring of 1972 they sought to gain another chip, that of land. More than one hundred thousand North Vietnamese troops moved suddenly into South Vietnam in March, ending more than two years of battlefront quiet. Nixon was fully prepared for this move. He responded by ordering bombing near Hanoi itself and the mining of Haiphong harbor-the chief northern supply port.
These efforts had a significant effect. The North Vietnamese announced their willingness to accept a cease-fire in place. That is, they agreed to halt the fighting then and there and work out most political issues later. The United States had taken the war to the north in a new and terrifying fashion. The North Vietnamese seemed to accept the idea that American military strength could cause them more harm than talking could.
Those discussions continued into the fall, and the United States and the North Vietnamese reached a basic understanding. However, the South Vietnamese refused to accept the concept of a cease fire in place. They felt that the North Vietnamese controlled too much territory.
One could see this as silliness or as an act of courage. While American ground troops had largely left Vietnam, it is fair to say that the nation’s independence depended on the support of American aircraft in huge numbers. When Thieu rejected the agreement carved out in Paris, he rejected the support of the United States. If that was a matter of great principle, one would have to admire it. However, Thieu’s rejection ignored the interests and the wishes of most of his countrymen. His rejection only helped the wealthy aristocrats, who could flee and would flee at the first sign of real defeat. They had nothing to lose until that moment, and at that moment they had the only means of escape-airplanes-in their control. And you can be sure that no farmers would be invited to join them.
It was election time again in America. Nixon was opposed by Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, who had run a campaign based largely on opposition to the war. McGovern had no real chance of being elected, but as the Watergate incidents had established, Nixon did not want to just win the election; he wanted to win big. An end to the Vietnam War would have guaranteed that, because McGovern’s one real issue would have disappeared.
Hanoi was a close follower of American opinion. When it was informed that South Vietnam had rejected the proposed treaty, it reacted by announcing that a peace agreement had been reached and would be signed on October 31. It had two reasons for doing so. First, it feared that the whole peace plan was a trick designed to influence the November 7 elections in the United States. It meant to expose that trick. Second, it meant to put pressure on Nixon to keep to the agreements by showing him as the breaker of the pact, knowing that such an image would influence the elections against him.
The efforts to put pressure on Nixon failed. The American answer was delivered by Dr. Kissinger, who announced that peace was at hand. Nixon won reelection by an enormous margin. McGovern carried only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.
The talks continued, but there seemed to be no hope of an agreement. With Nixon in office for four more years, everybody’s plans had changed. Hanoi’s position was weak, but it would not admit that. It was a tie again, but a very dangerous one. In order to break the tie, one side had to force the other side to move by some dramatic show of force. The talks collapsed on December 13, 1972, and the show of force was to begin just a few days later.
On December 18, 1972, one hundred twenty-nine B-528 took off from Guam, a Pacific Island thousands of miles from Hanoi. At 7:43 p.m. that night, they arrived over Hanoi and began dropping their bombs. For eleven days they flew in a mission that was named Linebacker II. In that time they dropped one hundred thousand bombs on the cities of Hanoi and Haiphong. Fifteen of these planes were lost during this time and about thirty of their crew members died.
North Vietnamese losses were much greater. The bombs hit one thousand six hundred military buildings, five hundred railroad points, ten airports, and destroyed eighty percent of the electrical power plants in North Vietnam. The number of lives lost was not counted, but it must have been enormous.
The bombing had hit home and had hit hard. It had brought with it outrage as well. The United Nations and the Pope condemned the Christmas bombing.
The North Vietnamese came back to the peace talks as a result. That much is sure, but that was the only gain after so much destruction. When a peace treaty was finally signed on January 23, 1973, North Vietnam got what it wanted-the October terms. The United States had used its most powerful force in its most efficient way and had gained nothing from it at all.
South Vietnamese opposition to the October terms had been overcome by President Nixon’s private written statement that the United States would help again if the North Vietnamese attacked. The South Vietnamese had good grounds to accept that personal promise. After all, Nixon had just been reelected in a landslide and had four more years to serve. What they did not know, and few would have guessed, was that in eighteen months Richard Nixon would resign as president, and America’s attention would have been turned so far away that Asia would not be noticed again for a long time.
The war in Vietnam had ended, at least as far as America was concerned. In March of 1973, the last of the American troops returned home as did the last of several hundred prisoners held by the North Vietnamese.
For those interested in keeping track of such things, it is not clear as to who had the bad luck of being the last American to die in the Vietnamese War. It is likely though that that death took place far from Southeast Asia in the small town of Johnson City, Texas. For there on the night before the peace was signed, the gigantic and deeply saddened heart of Lyndon Baines Johnson gave out, broken from seeing his dream of a just and great society shattered on a foreign shore.