Бранко Панов: СРЕДНОВЕКОВНА МАКЕДОНИЈА III

БОРБИТЕ МЕЃУ ЕПИР, НИКЕЈА И БУГАРИЈА ЗА ГОСПОДСТВО НАД МАКЕДОНИЈА (1215 – 1261 година)*

 

*Оружане борбе македонског народа од V до XX века, изд. Војноисториски институт  - Институт за националну историју – Скопље, Београд 1975, 61-61.

 

По смртта на Стрез (1215 г.) ослабената Латинска империја не била во состојба да наметне целосна и трајна власт во Македонија. Отсега латинските владетенија во Македонија биле изложени и на завладување од грчките држави Епир и Никеја, а повремено и од Бугарите и Србите.

Од 1215 година епирскиот владетел Теодор Ангел Дука Комнин (1215-1230) почнал забрзано да ја проширува својата држава за сметка на Латинската империја. Новоназначениот латински император Петар Куртене (1216 г.) не стигнал ниту да се искачи на испразнетиот престол во Цариград. На патот за Цариград тој бил ликвидиран во албанските теснини од епирскиот владетел. Веднаш потоа епирските војски навлегле длабоко во македонска територија. Голем број градови од Средна и Северна Македонија паднале под епирска власт. Меѓу нив биле и Охрид и Прилеп. Во 1221 година Епирците го зазеле и Серез. Со тоа латинските сили во Македонија биле разбиени. Во 1224 година Теодор Комнин го освоил и Солун и со тоа ставил крај на Солунското латинско кралство. Веднаш потоа Теодор се прогласил за император. Бил крунисан од страна на охридскиот архиепископ Димитрија Хоматијан (1216-1235). Отсега Теодор Комнин почнал се’ повеќе да се претставува себе си за единствен наследник на поранешните византиски императори. Поради тоа и тој и Димитрија Хоматијан се судриле со никејскиот владетел и никејскиот патријарх.

Потчинетата македонска територија Епирците ја вклучиле во рамките на своето воено-административно уредување. Биле создадени повеќе теми кои главно ги опфаќале градовите Скопје, Драма, Дебар и др. Освен на грчки лица Теодор Комнин им доделил високи титули и на лица од македонско, албанско и друго потекло. Овие лица биле главно претставници на феудалната аристократија, на која и се потпирал Теодор Комнин. Меѓутоа, по поразот кај Клокотница 1230 година од страна на Бугарите, Теодор Комнин паднал во ропство и набргу потоа неговата држава се распаднала. Бугарскиот цар Иван Асен II потчинил и српски и албански територии. Тоа се гледа и од камениот натпис од црквата Св. Четириесет маченици во Трново. Во него стои дека бугарскиот цар 1230 година ја разбил „грчката војска“ и ги зел во ропство „царот кир Теодор Комнин Ангел и сите негови болјари“, заедно со „сета му земја од Одрин до Драч грчката и уште албанската и српската“. Дека Македонија и околните земји ги потчинил во овој период Иван Асен II се гледа и од неговата грамота што ја дал на Дубровчаните за слободна трговија низ неговата земја.

По смртта на Иван Асен II (1241 г.) бугарската држава почната забрзано да слабее. Монголските пробиви кон Балканот значително ја засегнале и Бугарија и прилично влијаеле да ослабне нејзината моќ. Таквата сиотуација ја искористила никејската држава. Нерјзиниот владетел Јован III Ватац (1222-1254) почнал се’ повеќе да покажува аспирации спрема Македонија. Во 40-тите години неговите војски навлегле во македонска територија и ги освоиле градовите  Серез, Мелник, Пелагонија, Прилеп, Велес, Велбужд, Стоби, Скопје и др. Во декември 1246 година Никејците го зазеле и Солун. Со тоа доминантна сила на Балканот станала Никејската империја.

Во 1258 година во Македонија продреле и српски војски и ги зазеле Скопје, Кичево, Прилеп. Притоа Србите биле потпомагани од своите сојузници: сицилијанскиот и италијанскиот крал Манфред, владетелот на кнежевството Мореја Вилхелм Вилардуен и епирскиот деспот Михаил II. Но во 1259 година никејскиот император Михаил VIII Палеолог (1259-1283) успеал да извојувал голема победа кај Битола над сојузничките војски. Србите биле протерани од Македонија заедно со другите војски. Не одело многу во 1261 година Михаил VIII Палеолог ја отстранил и власта на Латините од Цариград и ја возобновил Византиската империја. Оттогаш Македонија целосно била вклучена во рамките на нововоспоставената византиска држава.

 

 

СРПСКАТА ХЕГЕМОНИЈА НА БАЛКАНОТ И ПАЃАЊЕТО НА ПОГОЛЕМ ДЕЛ НА МАКЕДОНИЈА ПОД СРПСКА ВЛАСТ (Крај на XIII – средината на XIV век)*

 

*Оружане борбе македонског народа од VI до XX века, изд. Војноисторијски институт - Институт за зационалну историју – Скопље, Београд 1975, 62-66.

 

Обновената византиска држава била само сенка на некогашната Византиска империја. Сепаратизмот на феудалците се’ повеќе земал замав, што е резултат на слабеењето на централаната власт. Поради тоа Византија не била во можност внатрешно да се зајакне за успешно да и’ се спротивставува на надворешната опасност. Нејзината разбиеност и’ овозможила на Србија од крајот н XIII век да и’ одзема дел по дел од нејзината територија и со тоа да израсне во моќна балканска сила.

Од 80-тите години српскиот крал Милутин  (1282-1321) почнал се’ позачестено да навлегува во македонските територии. Притоа тој бил сестрано поддржуван од феудалната аристократија која преку војна настојувала да дојде до нови поседи. Во 1282 година Србите го зазеле Скопје. Архиепископот Данило соопштува дека тогаш кралот Милутин ги освоил „двата Полога, славниот град Скопје, а потоа и Овче Поле, Злетово и Пијанец“. Одовде српските војски навлегле далеку во Источна Македонија и ги опустошиле македонските области се’ до Серез и Кавала. При повлекувањето Милутиновата војска ги освоила „земјата дебарска со сите градови, потоа „земјата кичевска со градовите“, а исто така и Порече.

Со уште позабрзано темпо Србите почнале да ја завладуваат Македонија од почетокот на XIV век. Во овој период на Запад оживеала идејата за обновување на Латинската империја. Главниот иницијатор за тоа бил Карло Валоа, француски принц. Тој дури почнал да се потпишува како „византиски император“. Меѓу Милутин и Карло Валоа биле воспоставени и пријателски односи. По успешно завршените преговори, Милутин написмено добил да ги владее од идниот латински император Овче Поле, областа околу Прилеп и Просек, потоа Кичевската област, Охридско, Дебарско, се’ до реката Мат во Албанија. Во проектот без приговор биле додадени и Скопје, Полог и Пијанец, зашто тие веќе биле сметани за српски територии. Но, 1313 година Милутин ги подобрил односите со Византија, пружајќи дури и воена помош.

Од 20-тите години во Византија започната жестока граѓанска војна. Внукот на Андроник II Палеолог се кренал против него. Оваа војна имала силен одраз во Македонија. Стариот Андроник II морал да му ги отстапи на внукот Андроник Тракија и дел од Македонија. Во 1325 година Андроник III дури бил крунисан за император и совладетел на својот дедо.

За време на граѓанската војна српскиот владетел Стефан Дечански (1321-1331) стоел на страната на Андроник II. По помирувањето на двајцата Андрониковци дошло до судир меѓу Андроник III и српскиот владетел. Во 1328 година Андроник III го зел престолот на својот дедо и веднаш потоа ги засилил нападите против Србите. Во 1329 година неговата војска  се упатила кон Охрид и ја отстранила опсадата  на градот од Србите.

Во екот на траењето на воените операции меѓу византиските и српските војски, бугарскиот цар Михаил Шишман се вмешал во војната и се ставил на страната на Византија. Како резултат на тоа на Андроник III му било овозможено да ги прошири своите напади на српските позиции во Македонија. Андроник III навлегол во Пелагонија и ги зазел тврдините Бучин (близу Прилеп) Дебарца (на патот Припел-Кичево), Железник (Демир Хисар) и Кавадар (можеби Кавадарци). Од изворите се дознава дека на Стефан Дечански по победата кај Велбужд (Ќустендил) му се предале градовите Велес, Просек, Штип, Чрешче и Добрун, а што говори дека и тие пред тоа ги освоил Андроник III. Додека Андроник III ги освојувал српските владенија во Македонија, бугарскиот цар Михаил Шишман дошол до Ќустендилското поле и ја зазел тврдината Землен. До жестока битка дошло на 28 јули 1330 година кај Велбужд. И српската и бугарската војска броеле околу 15 000 души. Бугарите биле страшно поразени. Во битката загинал и бугарскиот цар Михаил Шишман.

По победата кај Велбужд Стефан Дечански навлегол во византиски територии. Отсега Србите доминирале над Македонија. Особено српската сила дошла до израз за време на владеењето на Стефан Душан (1331-1355). Тој го зел престолот на својот татко со помошта на голем број приврзаници од феудалната аристократија. Откако Душан ги отстранил приврзаниците на татко си и склучил мир со новиот бугарски владетел Иван Александар ги продолжил борбите со Византија. Тогаш византиско-српската граница се протегала на југ од Леш спрема Дебар, Кичево, Велес, Штип до Велбужд. Византија ги држела важните погранични тврдини Валона, Берат, Кроја, Елбасан, Охрид, Прилеп, Струмица, Мелник и Серез.

Во 1334 година на страната на српскиот крал поминал и прославениот византиски војсководец Сиргијан. Со негова помош Душан ги зазел Струмица, Радовиш, Охрид и други градови на Македонија. Сега Србите заканувале да го земат и Солун. Андроник III Палеолог го напуштил Цариград и се упатил кон Солун. Во меѓувреме неговиот војсководец Сфранца Палеолог успеал да го убие Сиргијана. Притоа голем дел од прицрзаниците на Сиргијан поминале пак на византиска страна. Набргу потоа бил склучен мир меѓу Душан и Андроник III. Средбата меѓу двата владетели станала „под славниот град Солун“, во август 1334 година. Според договорот на Србија и’ биле отстапени сите територии што ги освоиле Милутин, Стефан Делански и Душан.

Во 1336 година дошло до заострување на бугарско-српските односи. Тоа го искористил Андроник III и ја проширил својата власт во Тесалија. Односите со Србија Византијците се’ уште не ги влошувале. По успесите на Византијците во Тесалија, Андроник III и Душан решиле да се состанат во Бојмија. Меѓутоа, византијскиот император за до изненади Душана со искрено пријателство го посетил во Радовиш. Но во меѓувреме се отцепил од српската држава крупниот феудалец Хрела. Притоа тој ја признал врховната власт на Византија. Седиште му станал градот Струмица; територијата што ја држел под својата власт се простирала од Штип се’ до Серез и Амфипол (кај устието на Струма). Тој располагал со голема наемничка војска. Ова, како и смртта на Андроник III во 1334 година довело до заострување во византиско-српските односи. Душан го раскинал договорот за мир и повторно српските војски почнале во навлегуваат на византиски територии. Новиот византиски император Јован V Палеолог бил малолетен и управувал со регентство. Во овој период во Византија повторно оживеала граѓанската војна. На една страна стоеле приврзаниците на Јован V, а на другата на Јован Кантакузин. Душан го искористил тоа и го опсадил Воден. Но византиската војска успеала да го сочува овој град. Но не одело многу, Јован Кантакузин почнал да трпи порази поради што морал да бара помош од Душана. Со 2000 приврзаници Јован Кантакузин се насочил кон Просек, а оттаму заминал кон Велес и Скопје и во 1342 година се сретнал со Душан во неговиот дворец близу Приштина. По склучување договор за заеднички напад Јован Кантакузин се вратил во Византија. Во овој период во Солун власта ја имале во свои раце претставниците на партијата на зилотите. Во 1343 година Душан го зазел Воден. Во овој период Хрела го зазел Мелник и повторно поминал на страната на Душан. Охрабрен Душан го освоил и Костур, а потоа и Лерин. Наскоро потоа во 1345 година Душан го зазел и Серез. По овие успеси се нарекол цар на Срби и Грци. На 16.V.1346 година тој свечено бил крунисан за цар од страна на новиот српски патријарх, во присуство на охридскиот архиепископ и трновскиот патријарх. Територијата на Македонија, со исклучок на Солун и уште неколку градови, била вклучена во српско-грчкото царство.

Во овој период како во Византија така и во рамките на српската феудална држава се’ повеќе доаѓал до израз сепаратизмот на феудалците. Тоа пак ја слабее силата на Душановата држава поради што тој не можел да преземе напади на Солун и околните градови. Како резултат на тоа Јован Кантакузин можел да и’ ги поврати на Византија дел од градовите во Југозападна Македонија. Феудалниот сепаратизам во српската држава особено дошол до израз по смртта на Душан во 1355 година. За време на Душановиот наследник Стефан V Урош (1355-1371) Србија била разделена на повеќе делови а што овозможило значително да ослабне нејзината моќ на Балканот. Во овој период во Македонија се појавиле повеќе наполно независни феудални владетели. Околу Серез било создадено независно кнежевство од страна на Углеша. Околу Прилеп па се’ до Скопје и Призрен се наоѓале владенија на Волкашин. Сите тие влегувале во рамките на т.н. Прилепско кралство. Меѓу владенијата на Волкашин и Углеша владееле Дејановиќи итн. Таквата феудална расцепканост влијаела српската држава бргу да се распадне. Тоа пак им овозможило на Турците - османлии полесно да ја разбијат силата на балканските држави и Византија и за релативно краток период, од крајот на XIV век, да ги потчинат Бугарија, Македонија, Србија и голем дел од Византија.

 

(Бранко Панов СРЕДНОВЕКОВНА МАКЕДОНИЈА - Том 3: Од Македонската средновековна историја; изд. „Мисла“ – Скопје 1985 год. 86-96 стр.)

 

Даниел Елсберг: МЕМОАРИ ЗА ВИЕТНАМ

Пентагонските документи

SECRETS

Part II

14

Campaign ‘68

 

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Meanwhile the bombing was still going on heavily in the North up to the nineteenth parallel. On August 1 it was reported that American planes had dropped 2,581,876 tons of bomb and rockets in Indochina since 1965. That was 1 million ton added to the total of March 1 – when it had been 1,5 million tons, or as much as we had dropped on Europe during World War II – just since Clifford had replaced McNamara at the Pentagon. In those five months, four of them after Johnson had stopped the bombing of most of North Vietnam and called for negotiations, we had dropped half the total tonnage of World War II, which was 2 million tons. There were, it turned out, nearly three World War IIs to go.

While that persisted, the Hanoi participants in the Paris talks wouldn’t discuss but the unconditional and permanent cessation of the attacks on the North, and Johnson wouldn’t stop those without assurance, and perhaps evidence, of some “reciprocation” by the North Vietnamese. This the Vietnamese refused, on the grounds that the attacks had no legitimate basis and Americans had no right to demand anything in return for stopping them. Ho Chi Minh had even reached back to the same American analogy that I had used in explaining Vietcong terrorism in speeches I drafted for McNaughton and McNamara in 1965; he said that United States was acting like Chicago mobster who offers not to shoot if his target will pay him “protection money”. Hanoi did offer a “reciprocal” assurance that it would not bomb or invade North America, which had a good deal of logic but was treated by the U.S. negotiators as flippant.

McCarthy was still in the race, but curiously passive –perhaps depressed – after the murder of the rival that he hated. Humphrey’s position might not be set in stone; a platform fight lay ahead at the convention. During this interval, I had another discussion with him. At the suggestion of one of his aides I went to a fund-raiser for him in Los Angeles and then rode with them in their limousine to the following appointment, to discuss next steps in Vietnam. Humphrey wanted to come out for an unconditional bombing halt, but he expressed great concern that a halt, if it occurred, might be followed by another wave of attacks, for which he would than be blamed. I couldn’t tell him this was impossible. The best I could tell him was that it seemed to me not very likely, and much less likely than if there was not a halt. I strongly thought the political risk for him was worth taking. He listened, but as we shook hands and parted, he didn’t look any less worried about the prospect than when he brought it up.

The threat for Humphrey didn’t really come from NVA; he faced danger on both sides at home. He might not get the nomination, and he was still less likely to have the party unity that could bring him an election victory. If he didn’t separate himself from Johnson’s position on the war, at a minimum on the bombing (he wasn’t about to call for a coalition in Saigon, the truly important issue). But if he did declare some independence, ever so slightly, he faced a variety of forms of retribution from an enraged president.

Meanwhile the Hanoi regime wasn’t acting as if it were in a great hurry, either, to get our bombing stopped or to end the war by making concessions. Indeed, it was not bluff for either side. Neither party was ready to make any significant concession, and the leaderships weren’t hurting from the continued war no matter how bloody it was for some of their citizens and how sad for their bereft families. So the way to bet was that even if one or both of them had changed their tactics, met the other’s conditions for talking, and started “negotiating”, there would have been no result. Nothing would have changed.

Eventually, in November, both sides did do that. They did get into direct, formal talks, and that was what happened: nothing. The war went on. More than ten thousand Americans were killed in 1969, as many as in 1967, with negotiations going on both publicly and on a secret track; ten thousand-plus also died during the next three years of negotiations. Thus, by itself, “stopping the bombing” of the North altogether, unconditionally, permanently, was something of a false issue, almost a distraction when it came to ending the war. So, for that matter, was “getting into talks”, for which stopping the bombing was seemingly a precondition. Either made sense only as a part of a package of policies designed to resolve the conflict or to end U.S. involvement in it.

Given our past investment in rhetoric, effort, and lives, a policy that could be described as simply cutting and running didn’t look remotely feasible politically. There was little public support in polls or from well-known voices for immediate, unilateral withdrawal of all U.S. ground forces. That policy was proposed by exactly one candidate running form presidency on 1968, Eldridge Cleaver, the Black Panther and former convicted rapist who was running underage on the Peace and Freedom party ticket in New York and California. It was not a mainstream position.

The Kennedy, McCarthy, and Humphrey’s strategists worked out a peace plank for the convention, proposing a total bombing halt and mutual withdrawal of U.S. and North Vietnamese forces and urging the Saigon regime to negotiate directly with the NLF toward a coalition government. The first two points by themselves would have gotten nowhere, but in combination they offered a negotiable basis for ending a war. Humphrey accepted the plan, but when President Johnson bitterly rejected it, Humphrey abandoned it (to his later expressed regret).

So the Vietnam issue went to a bitter and divisive floor fight at the convention. I watched a three-hour debate on TV in Malibu. There was a long demonstration on the floor when Pierre Salinger said that Robert Kennedy would have supported the peace plank if he had lived. But the administration plank, described by Ted Sorensen as “one which Richard Nixon or even Barry Goldwater could run with pleasure”, was rammed through by Johnson’s representatives, 1,527 votes to 1,041.

I didn’t want to watch Humphrey being nominated on that platform. After the vote on the Vietnam plank, I turned off the TV. So it wasn’t till the next morning that I saw the film clips of the police riot in Chicago that night, with McCarthy organizers like Dave Mixner pushed through the plate-glass windows of Hilton hotel and pushed inside by the club-swinging cops; clouds of tear gas drifting up to the McCarthy and Humphrey suites and the improvised first-aid stations for beaten demonstrators, staffers, and journalists on the upper floors of the Hilton; chaos on the floor of the convention, during the voting, as delegates denounced the outside mayhem they were watching on TV screens throughout the hall. I remember that the new portions of the Today show the next morning showed film of demonstrators being tossed through air into paddy wagons. The film was in slow motion so that it looked like a ballet, and, unusually, the producers had added a sound track; it was Frank Sinatra singing slowly in the background, “Chicago, Chicago”. I turned of the TV again, tuned off the campaign, and dropped out.

I didn’t watch another moment of the campaign on television till Johnson actually stopped the bombing on October 31, five days before the vote. I wasn’t very absorbed in my project at Rand either; “the lessons to be learned from Vietnam” were too depressing. I didn’t spent a lot of time at the office and didn’t care much if I was fired. I didn’t care much about anything. It was depressing time form many Americans. Looking back on that summer and fall, I thought we had been in a kind of political depression: The majority of people were out of work politically. There seemed nothing useful to do if you wanted to stop the war. We had two candidates going around the country not talking about ending the bombing. That was not an incentive to help either of them win or even to pay much attention to them.

…

 

15

To the Hotel Pierre

 

For two years after Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to run again for president, from his announcement on March 31, 1968, to Nixon’s invasion on Cambodia on April 30, 1970, the Vietnam War more or less disappeared from the mainstream of American political debate as a major issue. In that whole period, which included the Democratic primaries, the fall election campaign, and the first sixteen months of the Nixon’s administration, it surfaced as a debate, briefly, only twice: during the Chicago convention and in some six weeks of tumultuous protests in the fall of 1969.

The lack of public controversy (except for these two exceptions) reflected a tenacious belief underlying American political discussion: that Johnson’s March 31 announcement, which included his decision to end the bombing of the northern part of North Vietnam and to seek public negotiations with Hanoi, constituted a conscious and decisive turning point toward the prompt ending of major American involvement in the war in Indochina.

The Pentagon Papers themselves – the top-secret “History of U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam , 1945 – 1968” – reflect in their very title the same interpretation. The study, when launched by McNamara in mid-1967, was formally open-ended in terms of content and time period, and work on it continued into early-1969; but its authors and its supervisors decided to end it with Johnson’s speech of March 31, 1968. The choice of this cutoff date for the history of U.S. decision making in Vietnam clearly reflected the fact that those in charge of the study (Morton H. Halperin and Leslie Gelb, under Paul Warnke) shared the public’s belief that the decision announced on that date meant a decisive shift toward U.S. disengagement. A three-page “Epilogue” at the end of the study begins with the April 3announcement by Hanoi that it would negotiate with the United States and goes on: “The first step on what would undoubtedly be a long and tortuous road to peace apparently had been taken. In one dramatic action President Johnson had for a time removed the issue of Vietnam from domestic political contention”.

“For a time” turned to be far most of the next two years.

What was remarkable about this prolonged period of misguided public confidence that peace was at hand was that although some form of talks and eventually formal negotiations were proceeding through interval, so was the war, and at much the same scale of violence as before, especially in the air. After March 1968, U.S. planes were no longer bombing above the twentieth parallel in North Vietnam. After November they were not bombing North Vietnam at all. But they simply shifted their targets to South Vietnam and Laos (and secretly, in early 1969, to Cambodia as well), while dropping a higher total tonnage than before.

For an interval from November 1968 to August 1969, I was as (mistakenly) hopeful as anyone else about the prospects for a negotiated settlement. But I seemed to be among a very small minority who kept the reality of continued large-scale war in mind, along with the possibility that the war might actually go on for a very long time and the recurrent possibility that it might escalate, by deliberate decision in Washington or Hanoi.

 

***

In November 6, 1968, the day after the election, I was back to my regular obsession with Vietnam after ten weeks of determinedly not thinking about it. To read that morning Hubert Humphrey had lost was not a cause for consternation for me. I’d voted for Humphrey for every reason but Vietnam, and that was still a main concern. I knew no reason to think that Nixon would prolong the Democrat’s failed war longer than Humphrey; if anything, as a Republican, he might do the contrary. The bombing of the North had stopped, opening the prospect for real negotiations, and Nixon had supported that publicly. He’d even offered to go to Saigon, just before the election, to urge Thieu to end his refusal to join the Paris talks.

In fact the worst comment I heard on Nixon came from Harvard’s Henry Kissinger, the long time protégé and adviser of Nelson Rockefeller. He visited Rand on Friday, November 8, three days after the election, at the invitation of Fred Ikle, head of the Social Science Department. In a talk that day Kissinger repeated in his deep, somber Germanic drawl a statement he was reported to have made at the Republican National Convention: “Richard Nixon is not fit to be a President”.

It seemed indiscrete remark for someone who was active in Republican politics, especially now that Nixon had been elected president. Anyway, it didn’t stop Kissinger from accepting Nixon’s invitation a few weeks later to be his special assistant for national security.

This was one of Kissinger’s first visits to Rand, after a long period of coldness that had begun in the late 1950s because of Rand’s critique of his advocacy of limited nuclear wars as instruments of U.S. policies in his 1957 book Nuclear Weapon and Foreign Policy. The theme had drawn more favorable attention from Nixon, then vice president. A photograph on the front page of the New York Times showed Nixon holding the book under his arm with the title clearly displayed as he entered a meeting for the National Security Council. I remember thinking it was an unusual book promotion.

But neither Nixon nor Kissinger had made positive public comments about nuiclear weapons for years. In recent years Ikle had befriended Kissinger and patched up his relationship with Rand. And on the subject of Vietnam, I had quite favorable impression on him, going back to discussions in Saigon in 1965, when he’d visited as a consultant to Ambassador Lodge.

He seemed to return the feeling. In that talk in November 1968 he told Rand audience, of which I was a member, “I have learned more from Dan Ellsberg than from any other person in Vietnam.” It was nice thing to hear in front of my colleagues; Kissinger has an engaging habit of saying very flattering things about a person in his or her presence. I guessed what he might be referring to. It was not so much specific information I had given him in our talk in Saigon in October 1965 – I had been no expert on Vietnam at that point, having arrived only a couple of months before – as it was some useful advise on how to learn in Vietnam that I had passed on to him. He had started by asking a good question: how to inform himself quickly.

I had told him to avoid wasting his time at official briefings or in talking to anyone in the presence of his boss or agency head. Instead he should seek out individuals who had spent a long time in Vietnam, who were known to be savvy about the situation – in particular, people who spoke Vietnamese, had knowledgeable Vietnamese friends, and moved into the countryside as well as the cities. He should talk to them privately, ask them for the names of others they respected, and then talk to those people separately. He should especially ask them for the names of Vietnamese to talk to. I’d been lucky enough to get that advice when I arrived, and it was working for me. I gave him a list of Americans and Vietnamese to start him off.

I had told him that so far as I’d heard, McNamara never did any of these things on his frequent trips to Vietnam. The defense secretary got elaborate briefings and talk to the top officials, and when he met with advisers or lower commanders, it was always in the presence of their commanding generals. He never seemed to realize – so I’d been told – how much these practices cost him, how they enabled the embassy and MACV to manipulate him, or how much he was being misled. The same applied to virtually all other high-level visitors.

I was impressed that Kissinger actually acted on my advice, unlike other visitors to whom I said the same things. He did see the people I suggested, and in couple of brief visits he learned a lot. He’s an incisive questioner and a very good listener, who takes notes. Before long he had become realistically skeptical and pessimistic, especially about the character and prospect of the Saigon regime.

In 1967 and 1968 I had been with him in conferences on Vietnam, where he was expressing a point of view that was well in advance of that of any other mainstream political figure at that point. He argued that our only objective in Vietnam would be to get some sort of assurance of what he called a “descent interval” between our departure and a Communist takeover, so that we could withdraw without the humiliation of an abrupt, naked collapse of our earlier objectives. He didn’t spell out how long such an interval might be; most discussions seemed to assume something between six months and two years, Few imagined that the Communists would wait any longer than that or that a government including them could hold together longer once our troops had departed.

How would we get delay even that long? Kissinger’s premise was that the North Vietnamese would be induced to remove their troops in a negotiated mutual withdrawal. That would leave the GVN and ARVN confronting only the NLF. With our continued material and financial aid, they should be able to delay a Communist victory for a year or two or make a deal with them that would hold up that long. Meanwhile they would have time to prepare for the new regime coming, by either emigrating or finding some way to accommodate to it.

Would Hanoi agree to mutual withdrawal? In 1969 and later the answer turned out to be no; over the next six years the North never came close to accepting it.

But that answer was not so obvious, either to me or to the others, in 1968. The proposal hadn’t yet been put forward in negotiation – in fact there hadn’t yet been any serious talk at all – and it seemed to offer enough to the North Vietnamese that there was at least a chance they would accept it. So this proposal seemed to be the right place to start in negotiations. As in 1967, calls for total unilateral U.S. withdrawal, either gradual or immediate, were still left mainly to the radical intellectuals like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky (whom I was just beginning to read), peace activists and agitators like Abbie Hoffman and Dave Dellinger, and the Peace and Freedom candidate Eldridge Cleaver. The only major political figure who had proposed, I later realized, this was Martin Luther King Jr.

The Republican platform for the 1968 campaign was very close to the Johnson-supported plank of the Democrats. Nixon’s people had joined forces with representatives of Nelson Rockefeller, notably Henry Kissinger, to resist the more hawkish position of Governor Ronald Reagan. However, Kissinger’s personal views seemed closer to the peace plank of the Democrats dissenters than to either party’s official platform. In particular, his practical objective of a descent interval seemed less ambitious and more realistic than what anyone else in the mainstream was willing to start publicly. It went well beyond encouragement of a coalition government – the compromise plank that Humphrey has accepted but that Johnson and his forces shot down – to stipulate acceptance of a Communist government in Saigon, not immediately but within a couple of years. No other major figure was saying that publicly.

Of course Kissinger hadn’t yet made his proposal publicly either, but he was presumably already pressing them on his Republican candidate, Nelson Rockefeller. Although mainstream critics calling for an end to the bombing and to U.S. involvement hinted at an acceptance of the eventual Communist government in South Vietnam, they weren’t saying that explicitly, even in private discussion. Kissinger’s willingness to speak of that as an acceptable outcome in the fairly short run was unusual to those circles.

Altogether, than, to wide circle of nonhawkish insiders and academics who knew what Kissinger had been saying in 1968, it was reassuring when Nixon surprisingly picked him for his national security assistant after the election. The heartening inference was that Nixon’s own inclination to “get put of Vietnam” was at least as great as Humphrey’s. This presumption was strengthened when Kissinger’s Foreign Affairs article “The Vietnam Negotiations” appeared in 1969. It finally spelled out and in some detail his formerly private arguments for seeking for no more than a “decent interval” before a Communist takeover.

It was in many respects a valuable contribution to the mainstream debate on Vietnam. But given the timing and context, it seemed to be much more than that. Appearing simultaneously with the inauguration of the new administration, to which his own appointment had been announced two months earlier, the article looked unmistakably like a presentation of a new official view. It was taken for granted that the incoming president must have read the text, or at least known its substance, before making the appointment and that he must approved its publication. An indelible impression was created that President Nixon endorsed Kissinger’s published ideas.

This impression was greatly mistaken and very misleading. So long as he was in office, and even afterward, Nixon never accepted that Saigon should become Ho Chi Minh City under a Communist regime after a “decent interval”, or ever, and he was prepared not only to prolong the war indefinitely but to expand it to prevent that. Kissinger had almost certainly been informed of this by his new boss before his article appeared. But it was a secret, which he kept very well, from everyone outside the White House and most within.

Soon after his appointment by President-elect Nixon, Kissinger asked Harry Rowen, president of Rand, for a study of Vietnam “options” to prepare for his first National Security Council meeting in January. He made the request through Fred Ikle. Harry proposed that I head this project; it was natural choice, given my background. Kissinger approved, though with one reservation, which Ikle came to me to pass on. He told me that Kissinger was happy to have me do the study, but he had one worry about me, my “discretion”.

I was astonished. No one had ever raised such a question before, over the last decade. Mu whole career was based on a well-founded trust in my discretion. (I didn’t believe that Kissinger, or anyone else outside the New York Times, knew about my onetime leaks to Neil Sheehan the previous March.) What could have raised this concern?

Fred answered, “Henry said that he had benefited greatly from your frankness in speaking with him in Vietnam. But now that he was on the other side of the fence, he saw things differently”, meaning his memory of my candor in Saigon – the very basis of his flattering comment weeks before – worried him when it came to taking me on as a consultant. I said to Fred, “But when I was speaking with him then, he was an official consultant to my boss, the ambassador!” No matter; the message was that standards of discretion were gong to be higher now. It turned out Kissinger was sensitive about letting it be known that he had turned for help to Rand, an outside group regarded as relative dovish (by Republican standards) within the defense community. He particularly didn’t want it known that I was associated with the study, since by that time I was known by insiders to be a critic of our involvement. It was a sign of his respect for me that he was willing to have me direct the project anyway. I reassured Fred that Henry needn’t worry.

Personally, however, I had some misgivings about doing staff work like this on Vietnam at this stage of the game. It was obvious that from Kissinger’s point of view, introducing himself both to the president and to the bureaucracy, his presentation would have to be “balanced,” “objective,” just presenting “alternative options” without arguing strongly for one over another. Necessary as that was for him, I didn’t feel easy at this point about suppressing my own hard-won views about various matters on which I felt strongly, in a presentation to be made to the president. If a new president, whether it was Nixon or Wallace, wanted know what I or someone else in Rand with experience on Vietnam actually thought – or even if he hadn’t asked for it, if there was some way to get our views in front of him – that was fine, nothing could be better. But that wasn’t exactly what was being asked for here.

…

(DANIEL ELLSBERG Secrets: A MEMOIR OF VIETNAM AND THE PENTAGON PAPERS; изд. Penguin books 2002 – стр. 221-232)