11

effect sold out the Communists in Cambodia on whom the Chinese
were relying for nothing.

JLS. Dick Solomon told me about he went to China with
Senator Warren Magnuson of Washington who told Xhou Enlai how
wonderful we were to stop the bombing.

HAK. That's right he went there with Senator Magnuson
and he said, 'Don't worry about the bombing we are going to stop
it for you and Xhou Enlai nearly went bananas. Magnuson thought
he went bananas because of the bombing and kept saying, ' But
we'll stop it.' And everytime he did Xhou Enlai went ever
crazier.

I was supposed to go to China in August to consummate that
agreement and immediately after that Congressional action they
cancelled my trip and cancelled the arrangements. Just take my
book for that it is absolutely accurate. And read the appendices
they have a lot of documents in them.

JLS. At what point did you think it was all over. Was it
after the fall of Hue and Da Nang in 1975.

HAK. I became very pessimistic after the bombing cutoff but
I didn't put any particular time on it. I thought it was all
over before the fall of Hue and Danang. I thought it was all over
when we couldn't get the supplemental from the Congress in early
1975 that we had promised--- the $300 million. But I was hoping
that we could keep it going for another year or so and fight the
presidential campaign on it.

JLS. Ford did not want to do that. He had people who urged

CJA

12

him to divorce himself from the Vietnam war.

HAK. Because those fools thought that Ford could get credit for ending the Vietnam war.

JLS. Who was the leader, Bob Hartman, Don Rumsfeld?

HAK. Nessen, Rumsfeld, Hartmann. You know the one thing Ford would not get credit for was ending the Vietnam war, no matter what he did.

JLS. His position was fascinating because Scowcroft said his decision to help evacuate the Vietnamese at the end was done at considerable political risk, given the atmosphere.

HAK. Ford's position was heroic and noble. All his advisors except Scowcroft and I were urging him to dump the Vietnamese.

JLS. Was there any serious consideration to bombing again.- One of the things that is very interesting is that the Weyand report makes the case very skillfully for B-52 bombing to create a pause.

HAK. It was illegal. We would have had to go to Congress.

JLS. Under the war powers act the President could have bombed for a week or two and..

HAK. There was a specific prohibition against it. I must say I was in favor. When did I think the real end had come? When the retreat from the highland started. Whenever it was that Weyand came back I was convinced it was over. But I was also convinced that we should give every aid. It you look at the record I am the only senior administration person who testified day after day.

13

JLS. What happened to our contingency plans like the Seventh
Air Force at Nakorn Phanom in Thailand. Did that just evaporate
as a result of Congressional action?

HAK. Yes. I don't know of any serious consideration
being given to interfere with military force.

JLS. Schlesinger says he told the President after the fall
of Danang and Hue that the only military course of action would
be the use of tactical nuclear weapons.

HAK. If he did I wasn't present. I don't believe it.

JLS. Ford answered that one very skillfully. He said that
well, if that was his recommendation he never put it on paper as
his recommendation or the recommendation of the joint chiefs of
staff.

HAK. Absolutely correct. He never expressed it in a way that I understood. He certainly never expressed it in an inter-departmental meeting. I can't tell you what he may have said to Ford privately.

JLS. Haig says that he came back in February after seeing
Nguyen Phu Duc in Brussels. Duc brought a message from Thieu: "If
you knew then what you know now would you still have urged me to
sign the Paris Accords?" Haig says he was upset that he came back
to Washington, came to see you and urged that the two of you go
to see Ford and discuss the situation. Haig said you declined to
go with him and he went to see Ford alone and told Ford that he
should go up on the Hill and give a Truman type speech.

HAK. (interrupting) Amidst so much nobility it's hard to

LYJ

14

know how I survived.

JLS. He wasn't too hard on you on that one. He's running for President.

HAK. Let's ask Eagleburger. It couldn't have happened in February I was in the Middle East most of the time. Unless I've totally lost my marbles... I was fighting like crazy to get the aid program through.

JLS. His argument was that Ford had to tell Congress we had a commitment to South Vietnam.

HAK. Ask the Ford people. This incident I don't remember at all. I certainly wasn't all priding themselves on it... Nessen in his memoirs prides himself on the fact that they kept me from getting the President to go all out in front of the Congress for economic aid. My whole argument was I would never have based things on the secret commitments to Thieu. The secret commitments to Thieu in my view added next to nothing to the existing situation. When we sign an agreement with a country that ends a war and that country flagrantly breaks it we have to enforce the agreement otherwise as peace agreement with the United States is equivalent to unconditional surrender. What's the meaning of a peace agreement if you don't enforce it?

JLS. The answer to that is if you are going to make foreign policy work you have to have a consensus and you should have shared those secret commitments with Congress.

HAK. We had absolutely no intention of betraying Thieu. There are a lot of people who say all we wanted to do was to get

[Y]

15

out. That was not our perception.

JLS. But his perception was that everything was fine until you agreed to let the North Vietnamese have a standstill ceasefire and retain their troops in the South

HAK. Its absolute... If he analyzes that it is total nonsense. I feel for Thieu. We had offered a standstill ceasefire in October 1970. We had offered a standstill ceasefire publicly in January 1972. We had offered a standstill ceasefire in May 1972, all publicly.

JLS. But Thieu's understanding...

HAK. But just a minute... Our perception was that in early October 1972 when Le Duc Thou had more or less accepted what we had publicly offered in May, and in January, that we had two choices we could either improve it secretly or we would reject it and he would publish the original offer in which case the Congress would certainly impose it on us. Here they offer return of prisoners, a standstill ceasefire, all the things we had said we wanted for two years; on what grounds were we going to reject it? Moreover, our analysis was, rightly or wrongly, that we had written so many provisions in the agreement, such as no reinforcements, replacement only on a one by one basis that if that had been observed their forces in the South would have atrophied. In Laos they were supposed to withdraw. They didn't withdraw from Laos and they didn't keep their agreement in the South, but our judgment was we didn't think they would necessarily observe it. We thought we could enforce one as well

16

as the other. That was our analysis of the problem, but the stand
still ceasefire had been on the table since October 1970 with
his approval. It was a public offer. The people who had been
accusing us for years of being too soft on Thieu are now accusing
us of being too hard on him. The standstill ceasefire that we had
no possibility of rejecting.

If somebody wants to make the argument that we should have
gone for victory in 1969, that I think is correct. We should have
gone for victory in 1969. That was our big mistake. We should
have done in 1969 what we did in 1972. ( Here Hak is referring to
the mining of Haiphong and the bombing of the North.) That was
out biggest mistake. We should have done in 1969 the mining, the
bombing. We should have said we will not lose. That's what we
should have done.

JLS. In the spring of 1969, shortly after you took office
you had the KC-121 downed over Korea. You deal with that to a
great extent in your book. Nixon deals with it too. Haig says that
one of the options that you discussed and considered was to take
a page out of Eisenhower's book and that the idea was to bomb the
airbase in North Korea, quickly, and send a signal to the North
Vietnamese and the Russians that if the North Vietnamese didn't
negotiate, the United States was prepared to take stern action
against North Vietnam, and that that would have been a signal
that you meant what you said. Haig says that Nixon told him that
that was the most serious mistake of his presidency, including
Watergate.

17

HAK. I don't agree with that. Haig is right, he and I were in favor of a bombing attack on North Korea. The rest of the government was violently opposed. We were in favor of it to show that we were willing to run big risks and that we would have followed it with a message. I don't think that was as bad a mistake. I think the bad mistake was that we did not respond to the offensive in February and March 1969, the mini-Tet, when we had 500 casualties, more or less the way we did in 1972.

I think, in retrospect, starting unilateral withdrawals -- that was a mistake, and you'll see I wrote that at the time. Well, I constantly tried to do that, for which I don't want to take too much credit because I didn't do it with great conviction. I tried to formulate one final proposal to the North Vietnamese, after which we would back down on them. That's why I wanted to send Vance there, the Vance mission in April of 1969. That's why I had that Duck Hook planning. Again, I never really fought for it. I did planning for it, but I never went day after day. And I wrote memos for it, and if Nixon had accepted the memos it would have happened, but anyone knowing Nixon knows that unless you kept at him, he wouldn't necessarily do it, so I don't claim that I ...

HUNG. That plan would call for escalating?

HAK. Duck Hook. Mostly mining, mostly mining of North Vietnam, and some bombing, yes.

JLS. Now, the Christmas bombing. Going to that, its pretty clear, even that all the material isn't out, that we destroyed

[Y]

18

their SAM capacity at the end of the bombing. You know people argued that we had changed the strategic situation and yet in the tactical negotiating situation we didn't take advantage of it.

HAK. Well, first, but simultaneously the Democratic caucus had voted to withhold funds for the war, and we needed a huge supplementary budget to pay for what we had already done in 1972, and our nightmare was that we couldn't get it. Nixon made the political judgement that whatever was done militarily had to be done by January 1st. He could not crank up another big military operation after January 1st. So, that was the reality. And he was probably right. I'm not hiding behind Nixon when I say he made that political judgement.

JLS. How do you look back on Laird's role in this whole thing? He positions himself as the person who was sensitive to Congress and to the body politic.

HAK. That's correct. And that's a fair statement. But the question is whether you can conduct a war like this, by... you see, and I even had sympathy for this. All my friends, all the people that meant anything to me were on the liberal and doveish side. People say I deliberately fooled them -- I didn't deliberately fool them -- those were my friends. The fact that I disagreed with them didn't affect my preference for them over other people. In retrospect, I think they were not placatable, and if you are in such a war, you either win or you lose, and you get no awards for losing with moderation. Laird's political judgment was probably correct. What was, in any one situation,

CJA

19

was to believe, was the failure to understand that by this policy of constant concession we were cutting the ground out from those who were willing to support the war and not gaining support from those who opposing it, because every concession we made to them, we thought we would at some time get a platform, in which they would say, enough, you've done what we asked, but that never happened. So, step by step they drove us into, in disrespect, I think, Laird's role, while understandable was part of that process, and so was mine, in a different way.

JLS. So where does Schlesinger's role come in on this?

HAK. Oh, Schlesinger was not a major player until the war was already ended.

JLS. And he wanted to get out. He seemed to be concerned about NATO, and...

HAK. Well, I don't know what Schlesinger's position was until the very end. I don't think he ever took a position that I can remember. Now, if he produces documents that he did, then he must have written them, but I don't remember that he ever took a position until the end. At the end, when things were collapsing, he could not get out fast enough, and there was a big difference between him and me. I wanted to stay in until the last possible second to save as many Vietnamese as I could, and therefore there were constant clashes between Schlesinger and me, because I wanted to prolong the situation.

JLS. Martin seems to feel at the very end, up to the, almost the very end, that somehow once Thieu left and General Min

CYJ

20

took over perhaps there wouldn't be total victory,
that there'd be some kind of period there...

HAK. I was wondering, I was absolutely convinced. He seemed to think that it was possible to construct some sort of coalition government. I didn't believe that for a minute. If we weren't willing to have a coalition government, well, first of all, when I negotiated with Le Duc Tho, whenever I asked him to define a coalition government I never heard of anybody in the coalition. I thought that by assembling so much power there, in their paranoia, they might agree to a long enough coalition government, and with Russian support, to enable us to get a few hundred thousand more Vietnamese out. That was my principle concern at that point.

JLS. Did you imagine that the Chinese were going to be as big a loser as they were? It seems to me that one of the arguments that you could make is that the Chinese really are the big losers. They've got the Russians at Cam Ranh Bay and they've got a potential war with the North Vietnamese.

HAK. I didn't think that the Soviets would wind up getting bases in Vietnam. I thought the Vietnamese were too nationalistic to permit Soviet bases on their soil. But I thought, geopolitically, the Chinese would be losers if, I thought that the Chinese national interest should have wanted the same outcome we wanted, namely, a divided Indochina.

JLS. Well, that was certainly their strategy, to support the NLF and the PRG.

21

HAK. And I think that the Chinese never believed that it
was possible for the United States to collapse so ignominiously.
I must say, I never believed that myself. I would never have
made an agreement if I had thought we wouldn't defend it.

HUNG. From the very beginning though you must have had very
strong suspicions about the North Vietnamese motivations.

HAK. I had no doubt about the North Vietnamese motivations.
I thought it was easier for us to defend a peace agreement than
to continue the war. I thought that if we hit the North Vietname-
se once or twice after the peace was signed that then they would
be quiet for the rest of the Nixon administration and I thought
in that period we might be able to build up Vietnam strongly
enough to bring about a Korean situation.

JLS. That was your concept.

HAK. That was the concept. We thought that the South
Vietnamese would be able to handle what was in the country. That
we would handle massive infiltrations and massive violations. In
addition maybe the North Vietnamese would start rebuilding and
economic aid would be another restraint.

JLS. That all fell apart too.

HAK. That fell apart too.

HUNG. The North Vietnamese insisted on remaining in the
South you realized there was no way to get them to leave the
South through negotiations. Didn't you wonder about the necessity
or usefulness of such an agreement.

HAK. We had no choice in 1972 in my view. In '72 just ask

22

yourself or let Jerry tell you. Look at the agreement Le Duc Tho submitted to me on October 8 (1972) and ask yourself what would have happened in America if we had turned it down and he had published it. Then compare the October 8th agreement with what we negotiated and you'll see what we negotiated is a considerable improvement over what he submitted. If we had turned it down it would have led to...It would have looked as if everything we had asked for publicly with the agreement of Thieu had been agreed to. We had never asked for the withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops since October 1970.

JLS. Well, that's...

HAK. You show me one document in which it had been asked for.

JLS. In all your briefings we asked does that mean the North Vietnamese have to withdraw their forces and both you and the president in his press conference said....

HAK. When?

JLS. After we dropped the phrase mutual withdrawal the language gets softened and press says 'well what does that mean?' The interpretation is that all foreign troops have to leave and that means the North Vietnamese. The public perception was that the North Vietnamese had to take their troops out.

HAK. We had agreed to a ceasefire in place in October 1970.

(Eagleburger comes in and HAK asks him if Haig came back to Washington in early 1985, January or February and asked HAK to

23

see President Ford with him. ) I was in the Middle East most of the time. Just say I don't have any such recollection or record of that. I also did not believe that we could do any bombing.

JLS. Haig's argument was that President Ford should resume the bombing to show that he was a man of principle and the United States would stand by its commitments to South Vietnam.

HAK. If that happened I can't believe that I would have forgotten about it.

JLS. Ford remembers it. He remembers Haig going to see him and telling Haig that the public just wouldn't accept it. The country just wouldn't stand for it, he told Haig.

HAK. I don't remember his going to me.

JLS. How would you describe your relationship with Ford on Vietnam. In retrospect he described his record on Vietnam as a being a major supporter of the war.

HAK. I think Ford was heroic. Ford until the very last days of that war accepted my recommendations to give full support for the South Vietnamese. He permitted me to string it out as long as possible against the opposition of the Defense Department which went so far as to fly empty planes in and out of Saigon to make sure that if any American got hurt it would be my fault. So there have been a record so that if they did a NASA type investigation there would have been a record that there were seats available on airplanes which I refused to fill and I wanted to keep some American there so that we could take Vietnamese out.

I also was afraid that if we moved too many Americans out the

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24

South Vietnamese army might turn on us.

JLS. What about the basic argument that Thieu made to you early on that you and the United States should not really negotiate for them?

HAK. He was right, but that was the way it was being done.

JLS. That's the way it was being done?

HAK. That's the way it had been done from the beginning.

That was probably a mistake. Although given our domestic situation that is easier said than done. And Thieu, although he had many great qualities, subtle negotiating was nor his forte. So we had the domestic problem of doing enough for the peace movement to keep it quiet and doing enough threatening things with North Vietnam to make clear that we still had teeth. In the end it was an unmanageable combination. Every move we made towards the peace movement encouraged Hanoi. Every attack on Hanoi inflamed the peace movement. So that was our fundamental strategic error, for which we are not being criticized.

JLS. Even in retrospect you don't get many people criticizing the North Vietnamese.

HAK. What I find incomprehensible is that the intellectuals and the opponents who got us into this mess, nobody says, *T*s haven't found one who says, 'You may have made your share of mistakes but we were totally wrong in our assessment of what the North Vietnamese wanted. You know that most of your colleagues thought that all they wanted was a coalition government in the South. All they wanted was a neutral government they didn't want.

25

Communist domination of that government. That the idea of a blood
bath was a joke. That we had invented. That we had missed great
opportunities and so on and so forth. They have invented torturo-
us explanations that bombing the sanctuaries in Cambodia
explains why the Cambodians murdered three million of their own
people. It is just like saying that the British are responsbile
for Auschwitz because if they hadn't resisted the Germans there
wouldn't have been a war. So nobody criticizes the North Vietnam-
ese systematically and nobody criticizes Pol Pot until the
Vietnamese took him over. If you read Shawcross he is defending
Pol Pot in Sideshow. It is only after the North Vietnamese turned
on him that he attacked them.

HUNG. On television for the tenth anniversary the NOrth
Vietnamese were given free time on American television to spread
their propaganda.

HAK. The funny thing is if you listen to foreign MInister
Thac...They asked him what about this terrible B-52 bombing and
he said, 'Most of it was in the jungles.'

when it didn't do any damage.

JLS. Where is North Vietnam now? I feel they are desperate
to normalize relations with us.

HAK. Why? Because they are broke. They have learned that
the Russians are no help in developing an economy and I think
there is something indecent to let them sell us a few bones. They
must have a warehouse of bones out of which they produce a few
examples every few months. What we have to keep in mind is the

EYD

26

impact of this on the Chinese. Whether we normalize or don't
normalize I would judge this from its impact on the Chinese.
What do we get out of it? What can the North Vietnamese do for
us?

JLS. Why did you take Ali McGraw to Saigon with you on
one of your trips?

HAK. I didn't take Ali McGraw to Saigon with me. I would
have loved to take Ali McGraw with me.

JLS. The Vietnamese say you took her with you.

HAK. They are sick.

JLS. Not true?

HAK. Absolutely.

JLS. It must have been one of the secretaries who was
mistaken for her.

HAK. I wish I had a secretary that looked like her.

HUNG. In reflection don't you think you put too much
emphasis on negotiation.

HAK. No, I had no choice.

HUNG. You had no choice at that time?

HAK. It was the negotiations that kept us going. We had two
choices we either could have sought victory in 1969 or early 1970
or we had to go the route we took. Once we went the route of
Vietnamization we had to couple it with negotiations. Once the
North Vietnamese agreed to the basic proposals of May 1972 we
had to accept it. None of this would have been fatal if Saigon
had received $2 billion worth of aid indefinitely and we had

C.Y.J.

27

bombed in the spring of 1973 I believe Saigon could have
survived. But when the aid went down the oil prices went up the
American capacity to intervene was destroyed. When you had to
economize on ammunition and everything else then the morale of
the army had to collapse mathematically. I believe we could
have managed the agreement if we had been willing or able to
enforce it at a level of less than $1 billion worth of aid with
rising oil prices no american military support, and a congress
determined to destroy Indochina.

JLS. How do you feel your efforts to get the Russians to
play a role worked?

HAK. I did what we did in '71 and '72 when we were strong
we helped demoralize the North Vietnamese, especially what we did
with the Chinese and secondarily what we did even with the
Russians. In '75 that did not work particularly because too many
things had happened. We had the Jackson-Vanik amendment. We had
had Vladivostok falling on its face. We had no carrot and stick
left and the Russians had learned that we were a paper tiger. So
in '75 the best we could do was to try a bluff to see if we
could get a month's extension. That's really what it was.

JLS. What about in April 1972 when you went to Moscow?

HAK. This has consistently been misrepresented. In 1972
they claim, the Hersh type people claim that---he picks it up
from everybody else---we made a new proposal to the Russians in
Moscow, namely that the North Vietnamese could keep their force
there (in the South). Total baloney. We never made a new proposal

[YJ]

28

to Hanoi via Moscow. We always when we told Moscow something it was always six weeks after we had told Hanoi. The proposal we made in Moscow was the same proposal we had made the previous July when we discussed the seven points. What we did was to sharpen it. In the previous summer of '71 we had told them they could keep the forces there but not increase them. In April '72 we told the Russians they had to pull out the additional forces they put in during the invasion. But that we had already told the Vietnamese. The visit to Moscow had the primary utility to warn the Russians that we were going to do serious things.

I didn't expect much. Nixon may have expected more. I didn't expect much from Brezhnev.

1

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

[YJ]

2

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...

LYJ

3

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?

CYJ

4

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.-

CJD

5

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 reinforcing 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

6

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.

C.Y.J.

7

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

C.Y.J.

8

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

9

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"

CYS

10

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

11

[YJ]

12

HAK. There was a specific prohibition against it. I must say I was in favor...When did I think the real end had come? When the retreat from the highland started. Whenever it was that Weyand came back I was convinced it was over. But I was also convinced that we should give every aid. It you look at the record I am the only senior administration person who testified day after day.

CYJ

13

JLS. Haig says that he came back in February after seeing Nguyen Phu Duc in Brussels. Duc brought a message from Thieu: "If you knew then what you know now would you still have urged me to sign the Paris Accords?" Haig says he so upset that he came back to Washington, came to see you and urged that the two of you go to see Ford and discuss the situation. Haig said you declined to go with him and he went to see Ford alone and told Ford that he should go up on the Hill and give a Truman type speech.

CYJ

14

know how I survived.

HAK. Ask the Ford people. This incident I don't remember at all. I certainly aren't all priding themselves... Nessen in his memoirs prides himself on the fact that they kept me from getting the President to go all out in front of the Congress for economic aid. My whole argument was I would never have based things on the secret commitments to Thieu. The secret commitments to Thieu in my view added next to nothing to the existing situation. When we sign an agreement with a country that ends a war and that country flagrantly breaks it we have to enforce the agreement otherwise as peace agreement with the United States is equivalent to unconditional surrender. What's the meaning of a peace agreement if you don't enforce it?

15

[Y]

16

17

18

19

20

CJA

21

HAK. I had no doubt about the North Vietnamese motivations. I thought it was easier for us to defend a peace agreement than to continue the war. I thought that if we hit the North Vietnamese once or twice after the peace was signed that then they would be quiet for the rest of the Nixon administration and I thought in that period we might be able to build up Vietnam strongly enough to bring about a Korean situation.

JLS. That was your concept.

JLS. That all fell apart too.

HAK. That fell apart too.

HUNG. The North Vietnamese insisted on remaining in the South you realized there was no way to get them to leave the South through negotiations. Didn't you wonder about the necessity or usefullness of such an agreement.

22

JLS. Well, that's...

HAK. When?

23

24

HAK. What I find incomprehensible is that the intellectuals and the opponents who got us into this mess, nobody says, *Ts* haven't found one who says, 'You may have made your share of mistakes but we were totally wrong in our assessment of what the North Vietnamese wanted. You know that most of your colleagues thought that all they wanted was a coalition government in the South. All they wanted was a neutral government they didn't want

CJD

25

when it didn't do any damage.

26

HAK. I didn't take Ali McGraw to Saigon with me I would
have loved to take Ali McGraw with me.

HAK. They are sick.

JLS. Not true?

HAK. Absolutely.

HAK. No, I had no choice.

CJD

27

bombed in the spring of 1973 I believe Saigon could have
survived. But when the aid went down the oil prices went up the
American capacity to intervene was destroyed. When you had to
economize on ammunition and everything else then the morale of
the army had to collapse mathematically. I believe we could
have managed the agreement if we had been willing or able to
enforce it at a level of less than $1 billion worth of aid with
rising oil prices no american military support, a congress
determined to destroy Indochina.

HAK. What we did in '71 and '72 when we were strong
we helped demoralize the North Vietnamese, especially what we did
with the Chinese and secondarily what we did even with the
Russians. In '75 that did not work particularly because too many
things had happened. We had the Jackson-Vanik amendment. We had
had Vladivostok falling on its face. We had no carrot and stick
left and the Russians had learned that we were a paper tiger. So
in '75 the best we could do was to try a bluff to see if we
could get a month's extension. That's really what it was.

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