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Interview with Henry Kissinger in New York Monday, March 3, 1986

HAK. I have often wanted to call on Thieu when I am in England, but he may be so hostile to me that it doesn't make any sense.

HUNG. He appreciates that you sent him a note and he said that because he did not want to let people know where he was so in principle he didn't write to anyone. But he appreciates the note you wrote to him very much.

HAK. I hope he has seen what I wrote about him in my book, which was very flattering to him I thought.

HUNG. Especially the second one. I made some excerpts for him on that. When I read the Hersh book, I read an account of you in 1968, if it is accurate.

HAK. (interjects) If it is Hersh it is almost certainly not accurate.

JLS. You called Bill Buckley and told him that the Democrats were going to depose Thieu and that if we did this it would prove that to be a friend of the United States is fatal.

HAK. That is true.

HUNG. I got on the phone and said," Mr. President do you know who saved your head in 1968?" He said, "Who?" I said you (HAK) and he was very surprised.

HAK. I admired Thieu. I always defended Thieu. The fact that he and I had differences in '72. I understand his problem. He didn't understand our problem. If I had been in Thieu's place I

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would have done what he did. I understand his problem. What he did not understand is our assessment that the Congress would vote us out of the war, and therefore we preferred to defend Vietnam in the name of a peace agreement and not in the name of a continuing war. That was our basic assessment. Maybe we were wrong in that assessment but that was our assessment.

JLS. Let's go back to the '68 period for a minute. How had you heard that the Democrats were preparing to depose Thieu.

HAK. I didn't read the Hersh book so I cannot comment on that. I did not say I knew they were going to overthrow him. I said he should take care that they wouldn't overthrow him, and that we didn't repeat the '63 experience. I don't recall exactly, but there was enormous animosity towards Thieu at that point.

JLS. From Clifford, you remember Clifford came out, I guess on the 12th of November and said that if Thieu didn't go to Paris the United States should go without him which was...

HAK. Yes, it was that sequence of events. But I have no particular inside information.

JLS. I see. Because I talked to Buckley about it and he made it quite clear that there was no talk about an assassination or anything.

HAK. No.

JLS. I talked with Bob Komer, too, who said there may have been some memos floating around about it but they never surfaced, and of course Clifford denied...

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HAK. My impression was that the mood was very hostile toward Thieu.

JLS. Well, of course, what was fascinating was that when President Nixon went to see LBJ in the White House, LBJ told him, look, we lost the election but I want people to know that I'm serious about Vietnam and insisted that Nixon go along with having the South Vietnamese go to Paris, and that was a surprise to Thieu because he expected that he would get a breathing space and there was a big go-around over that with Anna Chennault and from Senator Dirksen telling him that he had to go. Do you recall that?

HAK. I wasn't involved in that. I was not in favor of settling that issue before the inauguration.

JLS. In '68?

HAK. I was not in favor of signing. Johnson was begging us all the time to get the shape of the table issue settled while he was still in office. I did not want it done, in part for tactical reasons because I thought we needed a success when we came in and I didn't want him to have that success and have us stuck with a deadlock that was probable. So I thought it would have been much better to wait and let us negotiate it - that outcome. And Rogers and LBJ. I was not a dominant figure at the time.

JLS. He said modestly!

HUNG. Did you think it was a mistake to stop the bombing before the elections?

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HAK. In that respect I think it was a mistake to make a bombing halt but I did not think so at the time. In retrospect I think that when negotiating with Communists one should not make concessions to show one's good will without reciprocity and one should not trade the end of military pressure for the fact of a conference, only for the results of a conference.

JLS. Let's go onto Vietnamization. One of the things that emerges is Vietnamization and negotiations were conflicting and and contradictory.

HAK. If you read in the appendix of Volume I, I have several memos to Nixon in which I make that point and I would have preferred to bring matters to a head in 1969. On the other hand, the reason I put them in the appendix where nobody will find them was because when I wrote the memos I did not fight for them with the intensity that maybe in retrospect I should have. The reason why was in part because all my friends from academic life were on the other side and all my colleagues were on the other side and I probably didn't have the stomach for the kind of fight and isolation that it would have required to push it through. It is not a heroic position but I am trying to explain why I didn't.
(HAK goes to find a copy of Volume I, The White House Years.)

JLS. Why didn't we bomb the North Vietnamese when they violated the Paris Accords in the spring of 1973.

HAK. We had decided to bomb. We had picked out targets on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and at Vinh . It was a turkey shoot the roads were jammed with trucks carrying supplies into the South.-

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Nixon did not want to bomb while the North Vietnamese still held American prisoners. He wanted to wait until the prisoners were out. We planned one month of bombing from the end of March until the middle of April. Then we would meet with Le Duc Tho in May. We wanted to show our determination to uphold the Accords with a show of force the North Vietnamese would understand. We were deadly serious about enforcing the agreement, but Watergate interfered. John Dean went to the prosecutor and that was the end of the plan to bomb. Nixon's influence had declined to the point where he could not act on the bombing.

Nixon's knowledge of the moves on Watergate predated mine by at least two weeks. I had no idea that was coming.

The practical thing was that we could not do it (bomb). Nixon from that moment on was totally preoccupied with Watergate. Then he had to fire Haldeman and Erhlichman. Imagine if we had bombed in the middle of this.

JLS. The American prisoners were released...

HAK. The prisoners were released about April 10. We were going to start bombing almost immediately after that because the rainy season was going to come and we wanted to catch the trucks. And about April 12, 13, 14 John Dean went to the prosecutor.

JLS. Thieu came in the middle of that.

Thieu came to San Clemente April 6-10.

HAK. When Thieu came to San Clemente it was not yet--- I think the Ellsberg trial was stopped at that time and Nixon was already getting preoccupied with Watergate. Remember Nixon's

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knowledge of Watergate always predated mine by about two weeks of what was going to happen. I learned it from the newspapers. From April first on Nixon was gradually--- but we still intended at that time.. I still intended, I think Nixon still intended to do some bombing. What does Thieu think? Did Thieu think we were going to do some bombing. I am not clear what we told Thieu at the time.

HUNG. He was convinced that you would bomb.

HAK. We intended to do the bombing.

JLS. It was clear for example when he spoke with us at Blair House during his visit to Washington that he could handle the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong inside South Vietnam but he would need U.S. bombing support to halt the North Vietnamese infiltration from Laos and Cambodia. In that case he would have to rely on United States.

HAK. If you read our public statements of the whole period...There is a lot of nonsense being written about secret commitments to Thieu. We made some secret commitments to Thieu but we said publicly more than we said secretly to Thieu. Richardson said it. I said it. Rogers said it. There is a whole series of statements that we would bomb or that we had the right to bomb.

JLS. IN May Congress said no more bombing of Cambodia and Nixon vetoed that. Congress said it would add amendments until Nixon agreed to stop the bombing.

HAK. But that would never have happened without Watergate.

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JLS. So you think he was being punished?

HAK. I think he was being punished. His position had so declined. If a president who had just won with a 62 percent majority had gone on national television and said 'I had just won a huge mandate against the man who wanted unilateral abandonment of Vietnam and now the Congress is trying to legislate unilateral abandonment of Vietnam and never mind all this nonsense. When we sign an agreement and don't enforce it whatever our disagreement with Thieu we were deadly serious about enforcing the agreement. We didn't want Thieu to go down. We wanted South Vietnam to remain. This was our strategy. I think his influence declined to such a degree that the Communists could do things they would never have dared to do or never have gotten away with against a newly elected president with a huge mandate.

JLS. Even by the spring?

HAK. Spring minus Watergate. Not in my view. How can I prove this?

JLS. Of course the argument is that people like Laird and Schlesinger say that had the President been more forthcoming with Congress about what our commitments were and what we had to do to get the South Vietnamese to sign the Paris Accords that they could have gotten.....

HAK. Baloney. I think the Congress was determined to get Nixon. What was our obligation to South Vietnam? Was it that he had written letters or was it the reality. The United States had

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fought a war and suffered 45,000 dead. Is it the American
position that if we sign a peace agreement at the end of a war
unless there is another legal obligation to enforce it it has no
force. Then any agreement we sign to end a war is unconditional
surrender because all the enemy has to do is to sign whatever
terms he wants to break them and unless we can get a new commitment
we have no right to enforce it. It is a novel international law
doctrine. Usually it is assumed you have a right to enforce a
peace agreement for which you have fought. Our critics say. '
No,you have to make a new agreement to enforce the peace agree-
ment which is ridiculous.

Supposing the Japanese after World War II had started to
rearm would then have had to pass a new law or would we have
said... suppose the Japanese a month later had started building
military airplanes again? Would it then have to be said that
unless the Congress passes a new law and we make a new declarati-
on of war we have no right to enforce it?

JLS. In effect that's what you did when you went back to
Paris in May, wasn't it?

HAK. In Paris you have to understand. Going to Paris in
May was a disaster which showed our weakness because it wasn't
our strategy. Our strategy was to bomb for a month. We figured if
Le Duc Tho comes after being bombed it is a sign of weakness. If
he doesn't come we will continue bombing. We wanted to repeat the
experience of January. Under those conditions a new agreement
would have had some significance. Then, coming to Paris without

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having bombed, having proposed a meeting we couldn't cancel it
on the ground that we didn't bomb since he didn't know that was
our strategy. So we were stuck with a meeting that we didn't
want anymore.

HUNG. Who called that meeting?

HAK. I called the meeting. I sent Le Duc Tho some very tough
notes saying, ' You're insulting our intelligence.' I think some
of them are in Volume II. We then said let's talk in May. We
were going to bomb in the interval. You will agree had we bombed
before the meeting we would have met a different Le Duc Tho then
because either he would have cancelled the meeting and said,' I
won't come until you stop', in which case we wouldn't have
stopped, or he would have come which would have already been a
sign of weakness. And under those conditions getting new condi-
ons would have been meaningful. But as it was I was there naked
and he kept reading me documents about our weakness. But on the
other hand given our weak position at home I could not have the
thing fail. This was our problem in May.

JLS. Nixon simply wouldn't consider resuming the bombing or
he considered the bombing but would not act on it?

HAK. No, Nixon had agreed to do it but we all decided it
couldn't be done after John Dean had gone to the prosecutor,
which became public almost immediately.

JLS. The bombing cut-off came in June with Ford leading the
administration position, but then coming out for a cutoff in Laos,
Cambodia and Vietnam. Haig says there was real "mischief"

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involved in that.

HAK. Absolutely. He handled it so I don't really know
exactly.

JLS. Were you in San Clemente then?

HAK. Yes.

JLS. Haig blames Laird for egging Ford on and Ford says he
was just being realistic about what Congress would accept.

HAK. It was inexplicable to me. Well also you ought to pay
attention to what I described in my book. We had a deal going
with the Chinese. One of the great attributes of your journalis-
ts is that they never report anything. I have this long section
in the book about Cambodia and the agreement with Xhou Enlai
about Cambodia which totally contradicts what Shawcross was
saying, namely that we had the bombing stopped and it was the
???? who prevented this from being consummated. So nobody has
even reported this as an interesting fact. However, after all I
am quoting documents and exchanges and you can assume this is
absolutely true. But nobody has said it isn't true. They have
just ignored it. But the bombing cutoff by the Congress made it
ridiculous. I think it undermined Xhou Enlai. He never recovered
from it.

He must have sold this to Mao. The proposal was that there
be a ceasefire in Cambodia and we would stop our bombing and
there would be a coalition government in Cambodia. He must have
sold this to Mao with my argument that we continue bombing. Then
the Congress legislates us out of the bombing and he has in