Turning Point, Part 5
The peace talks on ending the war began under Lyndon Johnson. As we have seen, Richard Nixon covertly sandbagged Johnson’s negotiations through the Chennault Affair. So the talks continued under Nixon’s presidency. As with Johnson, there were two sets of talks, one open and observed, the other secret. Under Johnson, the secret negotiator was Averill Harriman. (No Peace, No Honor by Larry Berman, p. 25) Under Nixon, it was Henry Kissinger.
I
As many have commented, North Vietnam handled these negotiations adroitly. And it was all in keeping with their strategy that the long run was important. In other words, the longer they could delay any kind of truce or ceasefire, the more time they would have to attack and infiltrate their men into the south. I could not find anywhere in Turning Point, Parts 4 or 5, where this important issue was delineated. To me it is crucial to understanding how the war was decided. Hanoi also understood that the longer the war dragged on, the more that both Congress and the public would grow simply sick of all the violence. These tactics turned out to be effective.
On the other hand, Richard Nixon had told the Russian ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, “I will not be the first president to lose a war.” (Berman, p. 48). But, as we also have seen, Nixon understood that the war itself was lost. Therefore, with a war that was becoming more unpopular as it proceeded, Nixon decided to turn over the actual fighting of the war to Saigon. And he would incrementally withdraw American combat troops. Nixon’s term for this was Vietnamization. By expanding the war into Laos and Cambodia, and dropping much bomb tonnage, Nixon hoped to make Hanoi understand that he would drive a hard bargain. What he first proposed was a mutual withdrawal of forces and no coalition government in the south. (ibid, p. 53)
The first meant that all American military forces and PAVN forces would leave the south. The second meant that President Thieu would stay on until there were free elections there. In the opening rounds of the 1969 negotiations, it became clear that Hanoi was dead set against the first request and was almost as firm against Thieu staying. It was also clear that they understood that public and political opinion would provide pressure on Nixon. (Berman, p. 66)
Let us explain--which the film does not--why the North would not agree to the first request. Hanoi was well aware that they had defeated the French on the battlefield in 1954. Dien Bien Phu was a terrible blow to not just France, but the concept of European colonialism. But they also realized that they lost the treaty at Geneva. They never should have agreed to an artificial separation of the country at the 17th parallel, and then reunification under free elections two years later. American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had committed hundreds of millions in aid to the French struggle, and he even offered the use of atomic weapons to Paris. With that kind of investment, America was not going to go away easily. Or as he said, it was “best to let the French get out of Indochina entirely and then to try to rebuild from the foundation” ourselves. (Michael Swanson, Why the Vietnam War?, p. 114) Dulles thus subverted the Geneva Accords, and through a series of covert and overt actions, he exchanged French colonialism for American imperialism. (William Blum, The CIA: A Forgotten History, pp. 137-39)
Ho Chi Minh, and later Hanoi leader Le Duan and his chief negotiator Le Duc Tho, were not going to let that happen again. They were not going to settle for less than they had won on the battlefield. So they were not going to agree to remove their soldiers in the south. In fact, they were going to present Nixon and Kissinger with a surprise in that regard.
II
The Easter Offensive took place in March of 1972. Turning Point glances over it and ignores the real importance of the action. The three-pronged attack ended up being a military failure. But it only failed because Nixon had to use an extensive amount of both Air Force bombing and Navy shelling to stop it. In just six months, Operation Linebacker dropped over 155,000 tons of explosives on North Vietnam. This was the first instance of the usage of laser-guided missiles. (Berman, p. 132)
There are two points to be made about this attack. Without American air power, in all probability, it would have succeeded in winning the war. Which meant that Vietnamization was not going to work. Secondly, Kissinger told the Russians that Nixon would now accept a cease-fire in place, and this included leaving PAVN troops in the south--even those from the Easter Offensive. (Berman, p. 125) The film does note the second point; I could not find the first.
There is also an outright clear deception that the film should have noted by Nixon. It is important not just because of the lie, but because it reveals how worried he was that the war was about to be lost. In his pathetic apologia of a book, titled No More Vietnams, he said that he never seriously contemplated either bombing the dikes or using atomic weapons in Vietnam. This was false. As Jeffrey Kimball discovered, Nixon considered doing both at the same meeting with Henry Kissinger. This was during the Easter Offensive when General Giap’s attack was threatening to take Saigon. (Jeffrey Kimball, The Vietnam War Files, pp. 214-19; Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States, p. 386) All of this because Kissinger refused “to believe that a little fourth rate power like North Vietnam does not have a breaking point.” (Stone and Kuznick, p. 363)
I could not detect that crucial quote in the film. But Kissinger turned out to be wrong about it. What happened of course was that the USA had a breaking point. It was the same breaking point that Edmund Gullion warned JFK about back in 1951 in Saigon. And like Gullion warned about France, America could not win a war of attrition in Indochina since the home front would not support it.
After the Easter Offensive, Congress was much opposed to extending more funding for the war. Nixon and Kissinger were very aware of this issue. Because soon, about two months after it was over, the Democratic caucuses were to vote overwhelmingly against more funding. (Berman, p. 221) After the near success of the Easter Offensive, the writing was on the wall. The Saigon regime could not survive without massive and indefinite American intervention. And the Democrats were not going to go along with the continued financing of an endless and futile war.
III
Nixon’s admission to leaving PAVN troops in the south was a tell-tale sign about what he and Kissinger had really planned.
Nixon and Kissinger now began to design their infamous “decent interval”. Knowing that Nixon’s Vietnamization plan would never defeat Giap’s PAVN and the Viet Cong, they began to plan the withdrawal of all United States forces--leaving only a bare bones maintenance mission behind. They only wanted assurances from China that the fall of Saigon would take place at what they termed a “decent interval”, after a peace treaty had been signed--they suggested something like two years. (Kimball, The Vietnam War Files, p. 187) To show how complete Nixon’s abandonment of Saigon and President Thieu was, the South was not represented at the secret Paris Peace talks. President Thieu was not told about them in advance, but only given brief summaries after the fact. (Larry Berman, No Peace, No Honor, pp. 43-44, 69) Nixon’s abandonment was so inclusive that, at the end, he allowed over approximately 150,000 PAVN troops to stay in the south. Combined with the Viet Cong, there were well over 200,000 total enemy troops there after the peace treaty was signed. Many of these were in places Hanoi had secured during the Easter Offensive. This whole “decent interval” strategy is not at all adequately dealt with in the film. Even though Frank Snepp, a former Saigon CIA officer who wrote a book with that title, is in the film.
How badly did Nixon throw over Thieu? As we have seen, in 1968 Nixon had conveyed to President Thieu that if he would boycott Johnson’s peace talks, he would get a better deal from him than he would from LBJ. Nixon gave him many pledges of support. For instance, he gave him his personal assurances that the USA would react very strongly and rapidly to any Hanoi violation of the peace agreement—which he did not. (Berman, p. 187) At Midway Island in 1969, Nixon promised Thieu he would provide 8 more years of support, four as military and four more as economic aid. (Jerrold Schecter, The Palace File, p. 34)
It did not take long for all that to go up in smoke. In fact, when Kissinger handed him a copy of the final agreement, Thieu noted the fact that it did not even mention a separate country of South Vietnam. There were only three countries in Indochina: Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. To rub salt in the wounds, when Thieu was handed the agreement, it was in English. (Berman, p. 163) Quite naturally, he did not want to sign the treaty. In fact, he actually began to speak out in public against it. (Ibid, p. 148) Nixon threatened to enact the agreement without his signature, but he was bluffing.
Thieu had over 60 objections to the proposed ceasefire. Nixon and Kissinger decided to be as fair as they could with him so he would sign. So they actually presented these to Hanoi in Paris. (Berman, 189) Thus began the notorious Christmas Bombing of late 1972. It was due to the demands made by Thieu. When Hanoi’s chief negotiator, Le Duc Tho, said he had to journey back home to get approval, the bombing began. Contrary to conventional wisdom, this did not bring Le Duc Tho back; Nixon had to ask him to return. (Kimball, The Vietnam War Files, pp. 279-80) But even then, he was reluctant to do so. The Chinese convinced him to return. They told him that Nixon had spent his last dollar on this bombing, and his political problems with Watergate were not going to disappear. They told Tho to return, sign the agreement, and they would get everything they wanted in the long run. (Berman, p. 221) The agreement was signed on January 27, 1973; and the Chinese were correct about the long run.
IV
Nixon hailed the signed agreement as one which would determine the future of South Vietnam without outside interference. Secondly, that it was a peace with honor for America. And third, that it had the full support of President Thieu. These were all either extreme hyperbole or knowingly false.
Like President Diem, President Thieu never had any real legitimacy in Vietnam. In fact, Ellsworth Bunker, the next-to-last ambassador in South Vietnam, admitted that his re-election was rigged. (Berman, p. 145) One of the problems he had was the literally tens of thousands of political and military prisoners he held in indefinite detention. How could America be supporting democracy if we were rigging elections and holding that many people in prisons?
Nixon kept Thieu for two reasons. First, he owed him something for the cooperation Thieu rendered in the October Surprise of 1968, the Chennault Affair. Without that subterfuge, it is highly likely that Hubert Humphrey would have won the 1968 election. (Kimball, Nixon’s Vietnam War, p. 60) Secondly, he also understood that Thieu would allow him to apply air power if need be to enforce the peace. Because Thieu had no legitimacy, the two men needed each other. This problem was made even worse because Le Duc Tho was fully cognizant of it—which is another very notable fact that Turning Point severely discounts. Le Duc Tho quite candidly said to Kissinger that Vietnamization was not working; that Nixon’s assault in Laos had been forlorn; that Rolling Thunder had not achieved its objective. He concluded, correctly, that America had failed in Vietnam.
He then delivered his left hook about Vietnamization:
Before, there were over a million US and puppet troops and you failed. How can you succeed when you let the puppet troops do the fighting? Now, with only US support how can you win? (Kimball, The Vietnam War Files, p. 127)
This, of course, was an accurate observation. And Kissinger knew it was so. It is why he and Nixon decided on the decent interval strategy as an endgame. But the absolute necessity was that Saigon had to fall after the 1972 election. In fact, Kissinger had said this to Nixon in August of 1972. All they needed was a way to keep the country together for a year or two beyond the agreement. He then added that afterwards, “Mr. President Vietnam will be a backwater, no one will give a damn.” (Ken Hughes, Fatal Politics, pp. 84-85). In fact, Kissinger had made this agenda clear with the Chinese. (Kimball, The Vietnam War Files, p. 187) It is notable that Ken Hughes is a commentator, but I did not hear him use that rather pungent quote in the film. Hughes also could have stated that both Nixon and Kissinger denied the decent interval strategy in their books, No More Vietnams and The White House Years. But yet it is proven out by the declassified record.
Years later, Alexander Haig, who worked directly with Kissinger on the agreement, explicitly stated that it was all a sham peace. It was designed to deceive the public with the hollow motto that Nixon had gained a peace with honor. Which he had not. As Kissinger wanted, Saigon fell in 1975, two years after the agreement had been signed. The final American evacuation was a disaster, symbolic of the whole experience there. Kissinger had performed poorly at planning the whole exodus, and his ambassador, Graham Martin, was utterly hapless in executing it. The film uses a lot of screen time depicting this debacle and trying to explain Martin’s incomprehensible actions. But I don’t think anyone will ever chronicle this better than Rory Kennedy did in her fine film, Last Days in Vietnam.
V
Although Nixon always used Watergate as his excuse for not enforcing the peace treaty, that was not really the case. Both Congress and the American public had turned against the war by 1973. (Berman, p. 265) For example, the Case-Church amendment effectively cut off funding for combat activities in Indochina in 1973. Thieu was so hapless toward the end that the CIA actually tried to start a coup against him in order to set up a coalition government. Even Martin favored a coup. It was scheduled for April 23, 1975, but Thieu resigned two days before. Like everything else about Vietnam, it came too late since Saigon fell on April 30th. Martin had to be ordered to leave. As the last helicopter departed, about 420 Vietnamese were in the courtyard of the embassy looking skyward. Someone had scrawled on the wall, “Turn off the light at the end of the tunnel when you leave.” (ibid)
This segment gave short shrift to the Holocaust that happened in Cambodia as a result of the Nixon/Kissinger decision to invade that country with a combined USA/ARVN force in mid-1970. This was allowed to occur because Prince Sihanouk had been deposed by General Lon Nol in an overthrow just previously, which incidentally, Le Duc Tho accused Kissinger and Nixon of orchestrating. (Berman, p. 73) In fact there is some evidence that the CIA at least encouraged the overthrow. (William Blum, The CIA: A Forgotten History, pp. 152-53)
Lon Nol allowed the invasion, something Sihanouk would not have done. (William Shawcross, Sideshow, p. 390) In their almost mad objective of weakening Hanoi by going after strongholds in Cambodia, Nixon and Kissinger actually added to the chaos in that country and strengthened Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The chaos began in 1969 with something called Operation Menu. This was the Nixon/Kissinger secret bombing of Cambodia to disrupt the movement of supplies, arms and men through the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which cut through both Laos and Cambodia. Nixon decided that this mission should be utterly secret and disguised in every way. The pilots were not to talk about it; there would be a second set of papers to disguise what they were doing as missions over Vietnam, and there would only be one raid in order to knock out a North Vietnamese headquarters that was allegedly commandeering the entire war effort. (Shawcross, pp. 22-26)
The one raid, in March of 1969, turned into a 14-month air campaign that included 3,630 sorties by B-52 bombers. The idea was to pulverize all of Hanoi’s troops and bases along the border between Cambodia and South Vietnam. Collectively known as Menu, the differing campaigns were called Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and Dessert, among other meal titles. (Shawcross, p. 28) As noted, this was then supplemented by a land invasion. That air/land invasion reduced villages to rubble, killed hundreds of innocent civilians, and the refugees now began a long march away from the B-52s into the countryside. The Cambodian economy had been all but destroyed. (Blum, p. 154)
In 1973, the air war was increased into an operation called Freedom Deal. (Shawcross, p. 215) The Pentagon ended up dropping 500,000 tons of explosives on Cambodia from 1969-73. Due to this, many Cambodians grew disillusioned with Lon Nol and joined the Khmer Rouge. The membership rose from about 4,000 to 60,000 by 1973. (Shawcross, p. 296) Two years later, the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh.
I won’t go into the horrors that now befell Cambodia under Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge machine. Once the city was secured, the mad tyrant ordered everyone out and a march to the countryside. It did not matter if you were in the hospital or a woman who was pregnant. If you stopped, you were shot. The latest estimates from judicial hearings place the total number killed at about 1.7 to 2 million. The killing fields in Cambodia were mass graves, sometimes consisting of 20,00 dead bodies. Sihanouk later stated that “There are only two men responsible for the tragedy in Cambodia today, Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger.” He then added that those two spent 4 billion on the Cambodian campaign, and they achieved the opposite of what they tried to do, including losing all of Indochina. He then added, “…and they created the Khmer Rouge.” (Shawcross, p. 391)
Richard Nixon did all he could to keep his tapes and papers secret until he died. We now fully understand why. Nixon was a very bad president, and what he did in Indochina was even worse than what Johnson did. Johnson did not invade and destabilize two neighboring countries, thus killing over 2 million people.
The Turning Point series is actually worse than mediocre. Any program that is going to comment at length on what Richard Nixon did in Vietnam should feature the work of the foremost scholar on that topic, namely Jeff Kimball. Bill Moyers would have been a very good commentator about LBJ and Vietnam. He is quite old, but there are many tapes of him on this subject. Gordon Goldstein interviewed McGeorge Bundy at length before he passed on, and he would have been good on Johnson also. The two best commentators on Kennedy and Vietnam would have been John Newman and Jamie Galbraith.
But this was not going to be. Luminant Media and director Brian Knappenberger seem to have an agenda from the start. It was first to skimp and to blur how America got into Vietnam in the fifties, which was through Nixon, Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles. Second, to smear Kennedy by blaming him for the war and to eliminate all the evidence of his withdrawal. Third, to then skip over 1964 and how Johnson reversed Kennedy and got the combat troops into Indochina. Finally, if anything, to be kind of soft on Nixon and Kissinger.
With all we know today about Vietnam, there is really no excuse for this. There is almost no doubt today that if Kennedy had lived, Johnson and Nixon would never have been able to do the incredibly evil things they accomplished in Indochina. Even the Pentagon Papers admitted this. In the Gravel edition, there is a chapter entitled Phased Withdrawal 1962-64. One of the aims of that withdrawal was “ to avoid an open-ended Asian mainland land war.” (Part 4 B-4, p. ii) For any program to avoid that historical fact today is rather incomprehensible.
