DATE

OCT 8 9 2008

CORR. FILE: Schouten, Sky

[Y]

ACTION: Alan Stape Dennis

Jessee: Theresa

Don Amanda Suzanne

COMMENTS:

✓ Given to HAK.

SUBJ. FILE: __________

CROSS REF.: __________

DC OFFICE:
Christie / Jody / Tiffany

INFO COPY TO:

ROUTE CC COPY TO:

TO BE FILED: ✓

New Drafting through October 8, 2003

Sky Schouten

Note:

I have drafted these sections in a new format devised by Charlie Hill, who has been very generous with his time. One aspect of this format is to begin each section with a "Background" section providing context to the general reader. The first "Background" section is long, since it explains to the reader the essence of the Vietnam War; the other introductory sections are shorter.

Contents:

<table><tr><td>"The Paris Talks, the October Bombing Halt, and the 1968 Election"</td><td>p 1</td></tr><tr><td>"Pakistan, the India-Pakistan War, and Bangladesh"</td><td>p 19</td></tr><tr><td>"The Pennsylvania Initiative & American Strikes Against the Paul Doumer Bridge"</td><td>p 8</td></tr><tr><td>"Operation Speedy Express"</td><td>p 12</td></tr><tr><td>"Planning for a Hypothetical 'Operation Duck Hook'"</td><td>p 14</td></tr><tr><td>"The Writings and Statements of Military Jurist Telford Taylor"</td><td>p 16</td></tr></table>

# The Paris Talks, the October Bombing Halt, and the 1968 Election

Drafted 10/02/03 by Sky Schouten

## Background

In 1946, following the breakdown of negotiations over Vietnamese independence, Ho Chi Minh's communist forces battled the French for control of Vietnam. The war divided Vietnam into two *de facto* states: a communist North Vietnam with its capital in Hanoi, and a non-communist South Vietnam with its capital in Saigon.

Beginning with President Harry Truman in 1950, successive American administrations committed the United States to assisting in, and eventually assuming full responsibility for, the defense of South Vietnam. The main threat to South Vietnam's existence was a campaign of political assassination and terrorism orchestrated by Hanoi and carried out by its front organization in the south, the National Liberation Front (also known as the NLF or the "Vietcong"). This campaign began in earnest in 1957 and continued throughout the 1960s.

In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson received congressional authority for a military campaign against Hanoi's forces. President Johnson deployed 500,000 American troops to Indochina, and ordered a sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam, including North Vietnamese troops in Laos and South Vietnam.

Throughout 1967 and 1968, President Johnson offered a unilateral American bombing halt on the condition that Hanoi agree to enter negotiations on ending the war. Confident in its military position, Hanoi initially refused. After repeated American entreaties, the North Vietnamese agreed in the summer of 1968 to enter into a series of preliminary "conversations" about the nature of the bombing halt and the format of the proposed talks.

On November 5, 1968, Richard Nixon was elected president. He appointed as his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, then a professor of international relations at Harvard.

1. <u>Progress of negotiations through October 1968</u>

a. <u>Hitchens</u> asserts that, by virtue of the "terms and conditions... on the table in the fall of 1968,"¹ the Vietnam War "had been settled politically and diplomatically, for all intents and purposes, before [Kissinger] became National Security Advisor."²

*Fact:* At the time Hitchens is referring to, Washington and Hanoi had not yet engaged in any substantive negotiations. Hanoi's consistent position, in both private and public talks, was that the precondition for substantive peace negotiations was a total US withdrawal from Indochina and the overthrow of the South Vietnamese government.

Hanoi reiterated these terms throughout the summer and fall of 1968, culminating in the National Liberation Front's declaration of a "10 Point Peace Plan" along these lines on November 3, 1968. These demands would remain the communist position until the failure of Hanoi's spring 1972 offensive.

2. <u>Saigon's position</u>

a. <u>Hitchens</u> asserts that in the fall of 1968, "every time the North Vietnamese came closer to an agreement, the South increased their own demands."³

*Fact:* What Hitchens refers to throughout his book as an "agreement" on ending the war was in fact an "agreement" to open *negotiations* on ending the war. At the time, Saigon objected to the proposed format for negotiations because it appeared to give the South Vietnamese government the same protocol status as the guerilla front trying to overthrow it. As the American Ambassador to South Vietnam, Ellsworth Bunker, reported:

> The idea of sitting down [in Paris] with the NLF in international negotiations has all along been very troublesome to Thieu and his colleagues. To their mind it gives a degree of recognition and respectability to a tool of Hanoi, and raises the specter of its inclusion in a future government...⁴

¹ Hitchens, p 15.

² Hitchens, p 30.

³ Hitchens, p 12.

⁴ Bunker, cable to Washington, January 1969, as quoted in Bundy, *A Tangled Web*, p 46.

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Under pressure from Washington, President Thieu agreed to send a delegation to Paris in December 1968. Yet Saigon remained wary of any measure that appeared to legitimize the guerillas. A debate over one such issue – Hanoi's insistence in Paris that the Vietcong were "the sole legitimate representatives of the South Vietnamese people" and should thus receive a place at the negotiating table at least equal to Saigon's – further delayed the opening of Paris talks.

b. *Hitchens* further asserts "Thieu pulled out of the negotiations anyway, ruining them just two days before the [American presidential] election."⁵

*Fact:* Under strong bipartisan pressure from Washington, President Nguyen Van Thieu did send a delegation to Paris. It arrived in December, six weeks before the start of formal negotiations.

The Paris sessions opened on January 25, 1969. They deadlocked immediately. With the two communist delegations insisting that actual negotiations could not "start" until the United States overthrew Thieu and withdrew from Indochina, there was little for the plenipotentiaries to do but read set speeches and adjourn to their separate press conferences. 174 such meetings over four years "produced no substantive results."⁶

c. *Hitchens* asserts that President Thieu's November 3, 1968 announcement that Saigon was not ready to attend the Paris talks destroyed the prospect of an American bombing halt. Hitchens laments, "a bombing halt might be announced as soon as 23 October. *And so it might have been.*"⁷ [Italics Hitchens'.]

*Fact:* President Johnson announced a total unilateral bombing halt over North Vietnam on October 31, 1968. The bombing halt was implemented the following morning. It remained in place for 41 months, in the face of numerous communist offensives.

⁵ Hitchens, p 12.

⁶ Pierre Asselin, *A Bitter Peace: Washington, Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Agreement*, p 15.

⁷ Hitchens, p 12.

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