No More Vietnams (14 page)

The Tet Offensive shook the Johnson White House to its foundations. Serious doubts arose in the minds of many of his advisers about whether we could win in Vietnam. When Johnson consulted a group of former high officials he called the “wise men,” all of whom had been strong supporters of our commitment in Vietnam, he found that six favored disengagement in some form, four advocated standing firm, and one straddled the fence. “If they had been so deeply influenced by the reports of the Tet Offensive,” Johnson later wrote, “what must the average citizen in the country be thinking?” On March 31, President Johnson answered his own question by announcing that he would not seek reelection.

• • •

After the Tet Offensive, Johnson's growing pessimism about the war led him to engage in the most wishful exercise of diplomacy in American postwar history: the talks leading to the complete halt in the bombing of North Vietnam on November 1, 1968.

Johnson passionately wanted peace and was shaken by the sharp increase in antiwar sentiment after the Tet Offensive. His advisers told him that North Vietnam was eager to reach a negotiated resolution of the war and that American public opinion would soon no longer support our military efforts in Vietnam. On March 31, in accordance with their advice, Johnson declared a unilateral halt to all bombing of North Vietnamese territory above the twentieth parallel, and later the nineteenth, in the hope that Hanoi would take reciprocal steps toward peace.

But reciprocity was not in character for Ho Chi Minh.
Months before, he had decided to adopt a strategy of “talking and fighting.” He knew that peace negotiations would create high hopes in the United States that would restrict our conduct of the war. It would be harder to escalate our pressure on North Vietnam, because public opinion would perceive it as detrimental to the peace talks. When Johnson announced his partial bombing halt in March, the North Vietnamese responded by saying, “The government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam declares its readiness to appoint its representative to contact a United States representative with a view to arranging, with the American side, the unconditional cessation of United States bombing raids and all other acts of war against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam so that talks may start.” Ho was not offering to talk about peace, or even to talk about starting peace talks. He was offering to talk about his preconditions for sitting down to talk about starting peace talks.

The Johnson administration treated this as if it were a breakthrough. Hanoi was demanding in effect that we lay down our arms before preliminary procedural negotiations could even begin. Johnson appointed Averell Harriman and Cyrus Vance as our representatives. Over the five months of negotiations, our side put forward four conditions for a complete halt to the bombing of North Vietnam: (1) Serious peace talks, which would include representatives of South Vietnam, must begin a few days after the bombing halt; (2) North Vietnam must not violate the demilitarized zone, either by infiltrating troops through it or by firing artillery or rockets over it; (3) Communist forces must not launch large-scale attacks on or fire rockets or artillery into major South Vietnamese cities; (4) North Vietnam must permit unarmed American reconnaissance planes to fly over its territory.

North Vietnam categorically rejected our conditions. But Harriman and Vance convinced Johnson that Hanoi's leaders were serious about wanting peace. Harriman argued that the only obstacle to progress was our demand that the conditions for a bombing halt be part of a formal agreement. Johnson therefore authorized them to accept an implied agreement to
honor our conditions. When Hanoi continued to be obstinate, they gradually reduced our demands as to how firm North Vietnam's pledges had to be.

Finally, on October 11, Harriman and Vance told the North Vietnamese, “It is very important to understand that we are not talking about reciprocity or conditions but simply a fact that after cessation of all bombardment the President's ability to maintain that situation would be affected by certain elemental considerations.” The art of diplomacy has seldom produced such gobbledygook. What we had previously treated as conditions were now, in the words of our negotiators, “a description of the situation which would permit serious negotiations and thus the cessations to continue.”

On October 31, five days before the 1968 presidential election, Johnson announced that all bombing of North Vietnam would stop and that negotiations would begin. Within weeks, Hanoi had violated all the conditions we had originally insisted upon. We did nothing. Ho had called us and found us bluffing. We had traded away our most important negotiating asset—the bombing of North Vietnam—for a set of fuzzy “understandings” that Hanoi had never agreed to and had no intention of honoring. In the end, the bombing halt accomplished nothing except to make a cliff-hanger out of the 1968 presidential election.

Ho, who had made a career of exploiting the weaknesses of his adversaries, did not miss this opportunity. We had limited our intervention to South Vietnam's territory. We allowed North Vietnam to send men and matériel freely down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. We let Ho Chi Minh fight the war at his leisure, on our turf, and on his terms. We ignored the fact that war—particularly guerrilla war—is a question of willpower as much as military power. While we fought a war of attrition against his forces in South Vietnam, he was waging a war of attrition against our will to resist. At the end of 1968, it appeared that time was on his side.

The debate over whether we should expand our intervention in the Vietnam War ended with the Tet Offensive and the
November 1 bombing halt. These foreclosed the option of committing ourselves even deeper. Whatever the merits of our cause and whatever our chances of winning the war, it was no longer a question of whether the next President would withdraw our troops but of how they would leave and what they would leave behind.

On January 27, 1973, when Secretary of State William Rogers signed the Paris peace agreements, we had won the war in Vietnam. We had attained the one political goal for which we had fought the war: The South Vietnamese people would have the right to determine their own political future.

Ironically, though it had led President Johnson to withdraw from the election campaign, the enemy's Tet Offensive in 1968 was one of the war's most important turning points in our favor. As a result of our decisive military victory, we had a window of opportunity in Vietnam. North Vietnam, whose guerrilla forces and infrastructure in South Vietnam were largely destroyed, was forced to turn increasingly to the use of conventional military tactics. South Vietnam began to build up its military strength. The South Vietnamese people united behind the war effort.

But in the United States, the American people were tiring of the burdens of the war, and congressional opposition soon began to build. We had a limited period of time to prevail in Vietnam before the political support we needed to fight the war evaporated in Congress.

South Vietnam's freedom depended on whether our shortterm
military and political advantages in Vietnam could be converted into victory before the long-term erosion of American support for the war undermined our ability to wage it. Our window of opportunity was closing quickly.

• • •

On January 20, 1969, I became the fifth American President in twenty-three years to deal with the problem of Vietnam. For Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy, Vietnam had been a relatively minor irritant. For Lyndon Johnson, the war in Vietnam became the issue that destroyed his presidency.

When I came into office, I had two major long-term foreign-policy goals: to open a new relationship with the People's Republic of China and to develop a new relationship of negotiation rather than confrontation with the Soviet Union. But I recognized that my first priority had to be to end the Vietnam War in a way that would achieve the goal for which we had fought for so long. The war was tearing American society apart. It had been the major foreign-policy issue in the 1968 election. And the way in which the United States met its responsibilities in Vietnam could also be crucial to the Soviet and Chinese assessments of American will, and thus to the success of any new relationships with those two powers.

As I reviewed the record of the previous twenty-three years, I found that each of my predecessors had been motivated by different considerations in formulating his Vietnam policy.

Throughout his presidency, Harry Truman demonstrated that he would take strong action to stop Communist aggression. But he faced a dilemma in Vietnam. While he saw the danger of Communist conquest in Vietnam, he also opposed French colonialism. He believed that unless the French committed themselves to giving independence to the Vietnamese people, France might not be able to defeat the Communists. But Vietnam was a secondary issue for Truman. His primary concern immediately after World War II was to block Communist expansion in Europe. He needed French support to achieve that goal. Consequently, he continued to provide aid to France for
its fight against the Communists in Indochina without insisting that the French give their colonies independence.

Dwight Eisenhower believed that Vietnam was of great strategic importance and that a loss there would lead to the loss of other Southeast Asian countries. But as a military man, he was instinctively opposed to committing ground troops to a land war in Asia. After ending the war in Korea, he did not want to become involved in another war. He was adamant that we not intervene militarily in Vietnam without the participation of our major European allies or without the assurance of bipartisan support in Congress. He seriously doubted that he could obtain either. Consequently, he did not take actions to prevent the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu, and while he provided technical advisers and financial assistance to the government of South Vietnam from 1954 through 1961, he refused to commit any United States combat personnel to the war.

In his inaugural address in 1961, John F. Kennedy declared: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” He followed this up with another strong statement at his March 1961 press conference when he unequivocally indicated that the United States had a vital strategic interest in preventing Communist domination of Laos.

But he backed away from taking strong action to match his strong words. The Bay of Pigs disaster, where we used military power and yet failed to eliminate a Communist beachhead in Cuba, cooled his ardor for taking military action to prevent the Communist conquest of Laos. He agreed to “neutralize” Laos and committed 16,000 combat “advisers” to South Vietnam. Kennedy's advisers convinced him that President Diem's repressive policies and alleged persecution of the Buddhists made the South Vietnamese leader a liability. Kennedy concluded that the problem in South Vietnam was primarily political rather than military and could be solved only by the removal of Diem. He approved the coup that resulted in Diem's
assassination and did not himself live to see the tragic consequences.

Lyndon Johnson inherited the chaos that followed Diem's fall. South Vietnam was swept up in political instability. Communist attacks increased. Johnson was a strong man who believed in strong actions, but like his predecessors, he was torn by conflicting concerns. Throughout his public career, his primary interest had been domestic rather than foreign policy. He wanted his legacy to be the Great Society. He was determined to avoid any actions in Vietnam that would jeopardize public or congressional support for his Great Society programs.

But Johnson was also a dedicated anti-Communist, and he hated to lose. In order to forestall defeat, he increased American combat forces from 16,000 to 550,000 troops over five years. Against his better instincts, however, he refused to give his military commanders the authority to conduct the war in a way that would have won it. He desperately wanted to end the war by negotiations. To demonstrate his desire for peace, he repeatedly ordered pauses in the bombing of North Vietnam—all of which, he ruefully told me in 1969, had been mistakes. Johnson could not bring himself to do enough to win the war against the Communists in Vietnam because he feared it might cause him to lose the war on poverty in the United States.

Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson each saw the war differently. But these four Presidents, coming from different political parties and different backgrounds, were in total agreement on three fundamental points: A Communist victory would be a human tragedy for the people of Vietnam. It would imperil the survival of other free nations in Southeast Asia and would strike a damaging blow to the strategic interests of the United States. It would lead to further Communist aggression, not only in Southeast Asia but in other parts of the free world as well.

I strongly agreed with those conclusions. But I knew that the challenge I faced in seeking to prevent a Communist victory
was formidable. Over a half-million American combat troops were stationed in Vietnam. Three hundred twenty-eight American POWs were held in North Vietnam's prison camps. Over fourteen hundred Americans had been killed or wounded in action during the week before I was inaugurated. No strategy existed either for winning the war or for ending it.

This was not the worst of the legacy I inherited. Johnson had pledged in the bombing-halt agreement of November 1, 1968, that the United States would stop all air strikes against North Vietnam in exchange for the start of negotiations and some vague understandings from Hanoi's leaders that they would not step up the fighting in South Vietnam. In two months the peace talks in Paris had produced no progress except for an agreement on the shape of the negotiating table.

The nation was bitterly divided. Lyndon Johnson had literally been driven from office by antiwar activists. I had been harassed by thousands of antiwar demonstrators, many of them violent, throughout the 1968 campaign. Hubert Humphrey had had the same problem until he came out in support of a bombing halt in mid-October. On Inauguration Day, the Secret Service refused to allow Mrs. Nixon and me to ride in an open car in the parade because hundreds of demonstrators waving Viet Cong flags were lining the motorcade route and scores of threats against us had been received. Even in the closed limousine, we could hear the protesters' chant: “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh. The NLF is going to win.”