No More Vietnams (15 page)

• • •

I had begun a reappraisal of our Vietnam policy before I was inaugurated. During the transition, Henry Kissinger, whom I had chosen to be my national security adviser, began reviewing all the possible policies toward Vietnam and distilled them into a full spectrum of specific options, with massive military escalation at one extreme and immediate unilateral withdrawal at the other.

At one end of the spectrum, some hawks argued that we should go all out in pursuing military victory. Because I could not allow my heart to rule my head, I ruled out this option
very early. Opinion polls showed that a significant percentage of the public favored a military victory in Vietnam—but only a victory won by delivering a knockout blow that would end the war quickly. Only two strategies existed that might have won the war in a single stroke. We could have bombed the elaborate system of irrigation dikes in North Vietnam, though this would have resulted in floods that would have killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. Or we could have used tactical nuclear weapons against enemy forces. Like Eisenhower in 1954, I gave no serious consideration to the nuclear option. I also categorically rejected the bombing of the dikes.

By the time I took office in 1969, the only strategy for pursuing a military victory that deserved serious consideration would have been to order a major escalation of the conventional war. We could have resumed the bombing of North Vietnam that Johnson had suspended in November 1968. We could have threatened to invade North Vietnam and thereby tied down North Vietnamese forces along the demilitarized zone. We could have crippled Hanoi's supply lines by mining Haiphong Harbor. We could have authorized the hot pursuit of Communist forces into their sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos.

While we had the resources to pursue these tactics and while they might have brought victory, I knew it would probably require as much as six months and maybe more of highly intensified fighting and significantly increased casualties before the Communists would finally be forced to give up and accept a peace settlement.

None of these options was compatible with political reality.

If we had chosen to go for a knockout blow by bombing the dikes or using tactical nuclear weapons, the resulting domestic and international uproar would have damaged our foreign policy on all fronts.

I decided against an escalation of conventional fighting for three reasons. First, I doubted whether I could have held the country together for the period of time needed to win in view of the numbers of casualties we would be sustaining. As the
close election results demonstrated, Johnson's bombing halt had been enormously popular, and though the Paris peace talks were stymied by North Vietnamese intransigence, the American people still had high hopes for their success. Second, having seen Vietnam paralyze American foreign policy for years, I was determined not to take actions in the war that would destroy our chances of developing a new relationship with the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. Third, I knew a military victory alone would not solve our problem. Assuming that we committed the forces and adopted the tactics needed to win militarily, what would happen after we had won? Unless the South Vietnamese were prepared to defend themselves, they would be overrun by the Communists as soon as we left.

For all these reasons, I decided against pursuing a purely military solution to the war.

Other hawks suggested a different approach. They conceded to the doves that we should not have gone into Vietnam in the first place, but contended that now that we were there, we had no choice but to see it through. Our goal, they argued, should not be to defeat the enemy but to stay long enough so that after we withdrew there would be a “decent interval” before South Vietnam fell to the Communists. I believed that this was the most immoral option of all. If our cause was unjust or if the war was unwinnable, we should have cut our losses and gotten out of Vietnam immediately. As President, I could not ask any young American to risk his life for an unjust or unwinnable cause.

Some doves urged that we simply continue the policy we had inherited. They believed that if we vigorously pressed the peace negotiations in Paris and presented our adversaries with “reasonable” proposals, the North Vietnamese would eventually agree to a cease-fire and a negotiated settlement of the war on terms we could accept. In dealing with the North Vietnamese, I had very little faith in a policy that relied on the negotiating process alone. To seek peace at any price was no
answer to an enemy who sought victory at any price. I was convinced that unless we backed up our diplomatic efforts with strong military pressure, the North Vietnamese would continue their strategy of talking and fighting until we tired of the struggle and caved in to their bottom-line demand: that the United States withdraw unilaterally and acquiesce in the overthrow of the South Vietnamese government in exchange for the return of American prisoners of war. I considered it unthinkable that we would fight a bitter war for four years, lose 30,000 men, and spend tens of billions of dollars for the goal of getting our POWs back.

Finally, other doves urged that we end the war quickly by announcing the immediate withdrawal of all American forces. A compelling case for this option could be made in political terms. Several of my political allies advised me to blame the war on Kennedy, who had sent 16,000 Americans to Vietnam, and Johnson, who had increased their number to nearly 550,000. If I brought our troops home, they argued, I would be a hero regardless of what happened to South Vietnam and its people.

I rejected this option, too. Had I chosen it, the conquest of South Vietnam by North Vietnam would have been inevitable. That was a result I would not accept. As Vice President, I had been a strong advocate of measures that might have prevented this tragedy. As a private citizen, I had emphatically supported the decision to intervene in the war, though I had disagreed just as strongly with the way my predecessors had handled it. As President, I continued to believe that the moral and geopolitical reasons behind our intervention remained valid. Neither my head nor my heart would permit me to sacrifice our South Vietnamese allies to the enemy, regardless of the political costs I undoubtedly would incur by not withdrawing from the war immediately.

As I studied the option papers before my inauguration, I realized that I had no good choices. But Presidents are not elected to make easy decisions.

• • •

When Johnson administration officials briefed me about Vietnam before I took office, they presented no plan for how we should end the war. No progress had been made in the negotiations in Paris. No comprehensive American peace proposal had been announced. No plans existed to bring home any of our 550,000 troops in Vietnam. On the contrary, sending more troops had been under consideration.

In the first months of my administration, we put together a five-point strategy to win the war—or, more precisely, to end the war and win the peace. Our goal was not to conquer North Vietnam but to prevent North Vietnam from conquering South Vietnam.

V
IETNAMIZATION
. Since 1965, the United States had furnished most of the money, most of the arms, and a substantial proportion of the men to help the South Vietnamese defend their freedom. In the chaos following Diem's assassination, we had no choice but to take the lead role in the prosecution of the war. But as a result of this policy, the South Vietnamese military had developed an unhealthy, and unsustainable, dependence on the United States. Now we decided to train and equip South Vietnam's army so that it would have the capability of defending the country itself. This involved more than handing over our automatic rifles and the ignition keys of our tanks. The most optimistic estimates were that it would take at least three years to create a fighting force that could stand up to the North Vietnamese Army. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird carried out this plan and dubbed it, appropriately, “Vietnamization.” Our whole strategy depended on whether this program succeeded.

P
ACIFICATION
. Our defeat of the Tet Offensive had produced a political vacuum in the countryside. Areas that the National Liberation Front had controlled for years were now up for grabs. We knew that whichever side won the race to take control of the hamlets would have won half the battle. We therefore abandoned
the strategy of attrition, which had produced many casualties and few results, and replaced it with one of pacification. Our principal objectives shifted to protecting the South Vietnamese at the village level, reestablishing the local political process, and winning the loyalty of the peasants by involving them in the government and providing them with economic opportunity. General Creighton Abrams had initiated this shift in strategy when he took command of our forces in Vietnam in 1968.1 reemphasized the critical importance of our pacification programs and channeled additional resources toward them.

D
IPLOMATIC
I
SOLATION
. All of North Vietnam's war matériel came from the Soviet Union or Communist China. I had long believed that an indispensable element of any successful peace initiative in Vietnam was to enlist, if possible, the help of the Soviets and the Chinese. Though rapprochement with China and detente with the Soviet Union were ends in themselves, I also considered them possible means to hasten the end of the war. At worst, Hanoi was bound to feel less confident if Washington was dealing with Moscow and Peking. At best, if the two major Communist powers decided that they had bigger fish to fry, Hanoi would be pressured into negotiating a settlement we could accept.

P
EACE
N
EGOTIATIONS
. Our decision to forgo a quick military victory increased the importance of the negotiating process in Paris. I was far less optimistic than some of my advisers about the possibility of quick progress in the negotiations unless we coupled our diplomatic efforts with irresistible military pressure. Ho Chi Minh and his battle-hardened colleagues had not fought and sacrificed for twenty-five years in order to negotiate a compromise peace. They were fighting for total victory. But in the hope that I was wrong, I vigorously pursued the negotiating process. I had another compelling reason for doing so. I knew it would not be possible to sustain public and congressional support for our military efforts unless we could demonstrate
that we were exploring every avenue for ending the war through negotiations. I insisted on only two conditions: I made it clear I would reject any settlement that did not include the return of all our POWs and that did not protect the right of the South Vietnamese people to determine their own future.

G
RADUAL
W
ITHDRAWAL
. The key new element in our strategy was a plan for the complete withdrawal of all American combat troops from Vietnam. Americans needed tangible evidence that we were winding down the war, and the South Vietnamese needed to be given more responsibility for their defense. We were not recklessly pulling out according to a fixed schedule. We linked the pace of our withdrawal to the progress of Vietnamization, the level of enemy activity, and developments at the negotiating table. Our withdrawal was to be made from strength, not from weakness. As South Vietnamese forces became stronger, the rate of American withdrawal could become greater. The announcement of the withdrawal program made another subtle but profoundly important point: While the French had fought to stay in Vietnam, the United States was fighting to get out.

Our new strategy in Vietnam sought to achieve the goal for which we had fought for four years. While the United States was going to end its involvement in the war, it would keep its commitments to South Vietnam. We would continue to fight until the Communists agreed to negotiate a fair and honorable peace or until the South Vietnamese were able to defend themselves on their own—whichever came first.

• • •

All five elements of our strategy needed time to take hold. I knew that we would have enough time only if the level of the fighting remained low. If the war heated up, American casualty rates and, in turn, domestic pressure to get out of Vietnam would increase dramatically. I also knew that the North Vietnamese would negotiate at the conference table only if we convinced them that they could not win on the battlefield.

In February 1969, while we were negotiating in Paris and
preparing a new peace initiative to probe Hanoi's intentions, the North Vietnamese launched a savage offensive in South Vietnam. Communist forces killed 453 Americans in the first week, 336 in the second, 351 in the third. South Vietnamese troops were being killed at a rate of over 500 per week. North Vietnamese forces launched a direct attack across the demilitarized zone and indiscriminately fired rockets into Saigon.

These moves were a deliberate test. If there were any truly binding understandings given in exchange for the bombing halt in November 1968, the North Vietnamese were blatantly violating them. I believed that if we let the Communists manipulate us at this early stage, we might never be able to negotiate with them from a position of strength, or even equality. The only way we could get things moving on the negotiating front was to do something on the military front. I therefore concluded that retaliation was necessary.

Our first option was to resume the bombing of North Vietnam. Ideally, we should have dealt a swift blow that would have made Hanoi's leaders think twice before they launched another attack in the South. But I was stuck with Johnson's bombing halt. I knew that even though we could show that North Vietnam clearly had violated the “understandings,” bombing North Vietnam would produce a violent outburst of domestic protest. This, in turn, would have destroyed our efforts to bring the country together in support of our plan for peace. I decided that the importance of our domestic unity outweighed the need to retaliate directly against North Vietnam.

Our second option was to bomb North Vietnam's military sanctuaries just inside Cambodia along the border with South Vietnam. Cambodia was formally neutral. But its neutrality was a formality. We honored Cambodia's neutrality; North Vietnam trampled it. Since 1965, the Communists had established a string of bases on Cambodian territory because they knew that their forces in these areas would be immune to attack. North Vietnam in effect annexed these territories, expelling virtually all Cambodian civilians who lived in or near
them. Once secured, the bases were stocked with thousands of tons of supplies shipped in through the Cambodian port at Sihanoukville. For four years Communist troops had struck across the border at American and South Vietnamese forces and then escaped back to the safety of their jungle sanctuaries. A classic example of this tactic was their offensive in February 1969. In March we decided to bomb one of these bases in retaliation.