[y]

DATE

SEP 2 2 2003

CORR. FILE

Schouten, Sky

ACTION: Alan Stape Dennis

Jessee

Theresa

Don Amanda Suzanne

SUBJ. FILE

CROSS REF.

COMMENTS:

Copy of what Sky put in binder.

DC OFFICE:

Christie / Jody / Tiffany

INFO COPY TO:

ROUTE CC COPY TO:

TO BE FILED

# CHAPTER 1:
## "Curtain-Raiser: The Secret of '68"

1. Assertion:

"On October 12, Kissinger once again made contact [with Nixon's campaign team], suggesting that a bombing halt might be announced as soon as 23 October. And so it might have been. Except that for some reason, every time the North Vietnamese side came closer to agreement, the South Vietnamese increased their own demands."¹ Had Saigon been inclined, the "terms that had been on offer in Paris"² ensured that "the issue of the war had been settled politically and diplomatically, for all intents and purposes, before [Kissinger] became National Security Advisor."³

Facts:

Hitchens' account bears no relation to the actual negotiating record. In October 1968, Hanoi and Washington had not yet engaged in *any* substantive talks – let alone “settled” the war.

Those talks that had occurred – a series of informal “conversations” held in Paris during the summer and fall of 1968 – concerned Washington’s offer of a total unilateral bombing halt in exchange for Hanoi’s commitment to “prompt and productive talks” on ending the war. (Johnson’s advisor John P. Roche later described these Paris discussions as “negotiations about negotiations.”⁴)

Throughout these talks, North Vietnamese representatives consistently *rejected* Washington's proposal, arguing that the existence of "circumstances" in the offer (that is, subsequent "productive discussions") violated Hanoi's demand that the American bombing halt be "unilateral and unconditional."⁵

Instead, Hanoi reiterated the Communist "peace plan," under whose terms the United States was required to withdraw from South Vietnam all U.S. troops, military personnel and weapons of all kinds, dismantle all U.S. military bases there, cancel its "military alliance" with South Vietnam...end its policy of intervention and aggression in South Vietnam...stop its acts of war against North Vietnam, [and] completely cease all encroachments on the territory and sovereignty of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.⁶

Once these tasks were complete, Hanoi pledged it would “consider” negotiating for the return of American prisoners of war. Until then, all other approaches to “the Vietnam problem” were “inappropriate,” and would not be open for discussion.⁷

This was the "agreement" that Hitchens describes North Vietnam as "coming closer to" in 1968: a total American surrender as a *precondition* for negotiations. No American president – let alone any member of the South Vietnamese government – could have made peace on these terms.

¹ Hitchens, p 12.

² Hitchens, p 7.

³ Hitchens, p 30.

⁴ John P. Roche, June 1973 lecture on the Paris agreement, reprinted in Kaplan, et al., *Vietnam Settlement: Why 1973, Not 1969?*, p 134.

⁵ Pierre Asselin, *The Bitter Peace: Washington, Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Agreement*, p 7.

⁶ "Hanoi's Four Points," as articulated by Premier Pham Van Dong, April 8, 1965, reprinted in *Vietnam Settlement: Why 1973, Not 1969?,* pp. 142-144. This would remain the Communist position until the failure of Hanoi's Spring 1972 offensive.

⁷ Ibid.

Hoping to impress upon Hanoi Washington's desire for peace, President Johnson announced a total unilateral bombing halt on October 31, 1968. (Hanoi had not acceded to Washington's formula for "productive talks," but American negotiators opted to infer its "assent by silence."⁸) Johnson's bombing halt was implemented the following morning, and remained in place for 41 months, in the face of three major Communist offensives.

## 2. Assertion:

"Thieu pulled out of the negotiations anyway, ruining them just two days before the election.... We now know why and how that was, and how the two halves of the strategy were knit together. As far back as July, Nixon had met quietly in New York with the South Vietnamese ambassador, Bui Diem. The contact had been arranged by Anna Chennault. Bugging of the South Vietnamese offices in Washington, and surveillance of [Anna Chennault], showed how the ratchet operated. An intercepted cable from Diem to President Thieu on the fateful day of 23 October had him saying: 'Many Republican friends have contacted me and encouraged us to stand firm. They were alarmed by press reports that you had already softened your position.'"⁹

## Facts:

Nixon's overtures to Diem were no doubt unworthy of a presidential candidate, and have been roundly criticized. Yet even those observers most critical of Nixon's conduct have described the initiative as superfluous. In the words of the otherwise unsympathetic Anthony Summers (Hitchens' so-called "smoking gun" on the 1968 conspiracy)¹⁰:

> Thieu had a slew of reasons not to attend.... Nixon cannot be held responsible for the collapse of the Johnson peace initiative. President Thieu would very probably have balked at attending the talks anyway, even without Republican pressure.¹¹

Particularly disconcerting to Thieu was the formal presence at these talks of the National Liberation Front (the "Viet Cong"), a guerilla group proclaiming the South Vietnamese government's overthrow as its "sacred duty."¹² As the US ambassador in Saigon, Ellsworth Bunker, noted in January 1969:

> 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...¹³

What Hitchens fails to mention, however, is that the Johnson administration immediately dispatched a series of envoys to prevail on Thieu to attend. Within weeks, this initiative had succeeded, and the talks were back on track.

The South Vietnamese delegation, led by Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky, arrived in Paris in early December – six weeks before the start of formal negotiations, and while preliminary talks were still stalled over the shape of the negotiating table.

⁸ Asselin, pp 9-10.

⁹ Hitchens, *The Trial of Henry Kissinger*, pp 10-12.

¹⁰ Hitchens, p 13.

¹¹ Summers, *The Arrogance of Power: The Secret World of Richard Nixon*, p 297.

¹² "The Liberation Front's Five Points," Point 3. Reprinted in *Vietnam Settlement: Why 1973, Not 1969?,* pp. 144-145.

¹³ Bunker, cable to Washington, January 1969, as quoted in Bundy, *A Tangled Web*, p 46. Since Hanoi had announced that members of the South Vietnamese government would be barred from participation in the "coalition" it sought to impose, the communist demand for a "coalition government" was in fact a euphemism for a political collapse. For a further discussion of Thieu's predicament, see Kissinger, *Ending the Vietnam War*, pp 52-53.

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Once the Paris sessions began – 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 Vietnam, there was little for the plenipotentiaries to do but read set speeches and adjourn to their separate press conferences.¹⁴ 174 such meetings over four years “produced no substantive results.”¹⁵

### 3. Assertion:

"More than one 'back channel' was required for the Republican destabilization of the Paris peace talks. There had to be secret communications between Nixon and the South Vietnamese, as we have seen. But there also had to be an informant inside the incumbent administration's camp - a source of hints and tips and early warnings of official intentions. That informant was Henry Kissinger."¹⁶

### Facts:

In 1968, Kissinger was a Harvard professor with no operational role in the Johnson administration. Kissinger had participated once, in 1967, in an unsuccessful peace overture to Hanoi; but even during this time, he had had no access to classified information, nor any contact with either of the Vietnamese parties.

In early September, 1968, while the procedural “conversations” between Washington and Hanoi were still deadlocked [cf. Note 1], Kissinger visited Paris en route to an academic conference. There he met up with several acquaintances of his on Averell Harriman's stalled US negotiating team.

Upon returning home, Kissinger told Nixon's campaign manager John Mitchell that "something big is afoot" in Paris, and that he believed "there is [a] better than even chance that Johnson will order a bombing halt at mid-October."¹⁷

Yet Nixon found Kissinger's information "uncomfortably vague," and wondered if the Johnson administration might be using him to spread "phony stories."¹⁸ Eventually, Nixon found "even better sources for what was happening in the Vietnam negotiations, ones that Kissinger knew nothing about. Nixon's aide Bryce Harlow had a close friend in the White House who was passing along information."¹⁹

Perhaps the most rigorous analysis of this episode, and of Kissinger's limited role in it, is that offered by William Bundy in his generally critical volume *A Tangled Web: The Making of Foreign Policy During the Nixon Presidency* (one of Hitchens' cited sources). Bundy, who oversaw Washington's position in the 1968-69 Paris talks in his capacity as Assistant Secretary of State, wrote the following:

> Did Kissinger learn something more concrete about the prospects and convey this to the Nixon people? In 1983 the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh made headlines by leading off his important book *The Price of Power*, which is sharply critical of Kissinger throughout, with the charge that Kissinger got inside information in Paris, conveyed it to the Nixon camp, and followed up repeatedly during October, ingratiating himself with Nixon to secure a high appointment. On a great many other points in his book, I have found Hersh reliable and often

¹⁴ Kissinger, *Ending the Vietnam War*, pp 241-42.

¹⁵ Asselin, p 15.

¹⁶ Hitchens, *The Trial of Henry Kissinger*, p 12.

¹⁷ H.R. Haldeman, relating Kissinger's observations in a memorandum to candidate Nixon. As quoted in Isaacson, *Kissinger*, p 132.

¹⁸ Nixon, RN, pp 324-325.

¹⁹ Isaacson, p 132. See also Nixon, p 326.

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original, showing a solid grasp of problems and issues. But in this case, I believe his charge does not stand up under careful examination. There is of course nothing wrong in offering advice and judgment to a candidate in the hope of preferment. In any presidential campaign, many individuals do so. Such action is open to harsh criticism only if it involves the use of inside government information. Yet that is where the charge collapses.

As of September 18, and until at least the end of the month, not only was the American position unchanged on the terms for a bombing halt and start of negotiations (as it remained throughout), but there was no sign that the North Vietnamese were wavering in their rejection of that position. The most that Kissinger could have picked up was a sense of increased activity and possibly that an effort was being made to engage the Soviet Union. Even if one or more members of a disciplined delegation was ready to confide in a former, there simply was no useful "inside information" at that point.²⁰

### 4. Assertion:

"This meant, in the words of a later Nixon slogan, 'Four More Years.' But four more years of an unwinnable and undeclared and murderous war, which was to spread before it burned out, and was to end on the same terms and conditions as had been on the table in the fall of 1968.

"This is what it took to promote Henry Kissinger. To promote him from being a mediocre and opportunistic academic to becoming an international potentate... Kissinger's global career started as it meant to go on. It debauched the American republic and American democracy, and it levied a hideous toll of casualties on weaker and more vulnerable societies."²¹

### Facts:

Under the "terms and conditions... on the table in the fall of 1968" and articulated by the NLF in its "ten-point peace plan" of November 3, 1968, Washington was required to complete the following tasks as a precondition for substantive peace negotiations:

- overthrow the South Vietnamese government;

- pay war reparations to Hanoi;

- dismantle all American military installations in South Vietnam;

- and withdraw immediately, unilaterally, and unconditionally from Indochina.

With over 500,000 American troops still in Vietnam, and hundreds of American POWs held captive in the North, no American president could have made "peace" on these terms.

The January 1973 "Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam," included for the first time ever the following terms:

- the release of all American prisoners of war;

- the continued existence of the allied South Vietnamese government, army, and police force;

- withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops from Laos and Cambodia;

- prohibition of North Vietnamese infiltration and reinforcement into South Vietnam;

- continued American military and economic aid to Saigon;

- and recognition of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) between North and South Vietnam.

²⁰ Bundy, *The Tangled Web*, p 40.

²¹ Hitchens, *The Trial of Henry Kissinger*, pp 15-16. See also p 7.

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