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SECRETS
Part II
14
Campaign ‘68
***
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)
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