Defense corrects war casualty figure

6/6/00

By Rowan Scarborough

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

U.S. military veterans are preparing to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the start of the Korean War knowing the conflict was not quite as horrific as some historians write.

The Defense Department's Korean War Commemoration Committee is putting out the word that the total number of in-theater deaths from 1950-53 was 36,516 — not the roughly 54,000 cited by some historians, monuments and history books. The 36,516 includes 33,686 “battle deaths” and 2,830 “non-battle deaths.”

“We’re just trying to set the record straight,” said Air Force Maj. Bob White, the committee’s chief historian for the June 25 com-

Only 33,686 killed
in Korean battles

memoration. “It basically became written in stone, literally on many monuments and in books.”

Maj. White said the Pentagon has pegged the in-theater deaths correctly at 36,516. He said the error apparently can be traced to a book called the “Statistical History of the United States.” It published the 36,516 number combined with 17,320 service member deaths that occurred outside Korea during the three-year war. The 54,000 number then began showing up in histories and lectures as the official death toll.

The higher count is engraved on

the Korean War Veterans Memorial on the Mall. Organizers wanted to honor all those who died during the bloody struggle to turn back communist North Korea's invasion of South Korea.

“The battle deaths has never been an issue,” Maj. White said. “That’s been a pretty solid number since the war. What has been an issue is the ‘died elsewhere’ number.”

“I put out a memo to other service historians to be aware there is a bogus number out there that puts battle deaths at 54,000 and that is not the case. With the impending 50th anniversary coming up, we just wanted to be sure the right information was out there ... That’s one of our legacies, to make sure history is correct.”

KAINY

From: fpri@fpri.org on behalf of Foreign Policy Research Institute [fpri@fpri.org]
Sent: Wednesday, May 10, 2000 4:30 PM
To: Henry Kissinger
Subject: Mythed Opportunities: The Truth About Vietnam Antiwar Protests

Foreign Policy Research Institute
WATCH ON THE WEST

MYTHED OPPORTUNITIES:
THE TRUTH ABOUT VIETNAM ANTIWAR PROTESTS
by Adam Garfinkle

Volume 1, Number 8
June 2000

MAY 1 1 2000

This issue of Watch on the West is based on a talk delivered
at FPRI's History Institute on "Teaching the Vietnam War,"
May 6-7, 2000. Adam Garfinkle, a Senior Fellow at FPRI, is
a senior staff member of the National Security Study Group,
part of the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st
Century. He is author of Telltale Hearts: The Origins and
Impact of the Vietnam Antiwar Movement. For a copy of the
conference report, contact fpri@fpri.org or call 215-732-
3774, ext. 201.

FPRI's History Academy, directed by Walter A. McDougall, sponsors an annual History Institute for Teachers. Previous conferences focused on (1) America and the Idea of the West; (2) 200 Years of American Foreign Policy; (3) Teaching History: How and Why; (4) The Cold War Revisited; and (5) Multiculturalism in World History. To support the History Academy, contact Alan Luxenberg at al@fpri.org or 215-732-3774, ext. 105.

by Adam Garfinkle

In the April 23 issue of the New York Times Magazine, there
appeared a letter to the editor signed by one Carl Oglesby,
from Cambridge, Mass., commenting on a remark in the March
19 issue by a Vietnam veteran named Ward Just. It seems that
Mr. Just, although conceding that "of course the war was
unwinnable," had added that "the antiwar protesters were not
much admired, either, at least by me." This irritated Mr.
Oglesby, a former SDS president, who wanted to know why Mr.
Just was willing to leave protest against an unwinnable war
to others while telling us how little he admired those
others.

There is more than meets the eye to this little exchange.
First, by means of this little argument, the editors of the
New York Times Magazine manage to sneak in the presumption
about the unwinnability of the Vietnam War as though it were

an unshakable truth. Second, we hear, yet again, how
unpopular antiwar protests were at the time. And third, we
behold a complete failure (in this case, Oglesby's) to make
the connection between the unpopularity of radical antiwar
protest tactics and their impact — or lack thereof — on
the course of the war.

Encased in this little exchange, therefore, are several
myths about Vietnam War-era protests. Let us unpack them in
turn. When people say nowadays that the Vietnam War was
unwinnable, they are usually making a canonical statement,
not an analytical one. Having sifted through the myth-laden
detritus of the war, they have "learned" that the war was
unwinnable because, well, it wasn't won. Moreover, they have
heard this "truth" so many times that it has transcended the
realms of the debatable to become established doctrine,
passing the lips more smoothly than a ripe mango. That is
why Michael Lind's recent book Vietnam: The Necessary War
(Free Press, 1999) is so much to be praised. It refuses to
take this thoughtlessness masquerading as truth at face
value. Andrew Krepinevich's excellent book The Army in
Vietnam (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985) also made the
argument some years ago that the war was, in fact, winnable,
as did my book Telltale Hearts (St. Martin's, 1995).

But if it means very little to say that the war was
unwinnable, what does it mean to say that it was winnable?
It means that had the U.S. military and its civilian masters
better understood the nature of the Vietnam War, they could
have devised tactics to deal with it. There is nothing
inevitable about stupidity among people in uniform, nor
about feckless secretaries of state or presidents passively
accepting bad advice. The tactics pursued by the U.S.
military between 1965 and 1968 were downright
counterproductive. But even in 1968 it would have been
possible to correct those errors — at a price. (Certainly,
too, since the war at its end resembled not so much a
"people's war" as an old-fashioned conventional war complete
with tanks and artillery, the U.S. Army — had it still been
around for the fight — surely could have stopped the North
Vietnamese army.)

When one speaks of costs, however, one must never leave out
the matter of politics. Because the Vietnam War did not
involve survival interests for the United States, it was
always necessary to consider the price of gaining a
strategically important, but not critical, goal. U.S.
leaders, as politicians are wont to do, chalked up "costs"
not only in terms of casualties and money, but also their
own political fortunes.

In sum, had it not been for a concatenation of bad military
tactics, civilian overseers who failed in their duty to drag
decent advice out of the uniformed military, the wavering of
Lyndon Johnson's Wise Men, Richard Nixon's desire to shape a
quick "opening" to China, and then his self-inflicted
problems over Watergate, the Vietnam War actually could have
been "won" at least to the degree that the Korean War was
not lost.

Regarding the Vietnam protest movement, there are really two
major myths, of which only one is apparent in the magazine

2

exchange noted above. The more obvious one, of course, is
the myth that since the war was unwinnable, protests did the
United States no harm and much good, and were in fact
effective in ending the war. The other myth is the flip side
of that view; namely, that the war could have and would have
been won had it not been for protests that undermined
popular support and led first the Johnson and then the Nixon
administration to pull punches.

But this "hard hat" myth of winnability is wholly different
from the intention of Lind, Krepinevich, and me. What we
meant was that U.S. attrition tactics should have been
junked and a "hearts and minds" strategy adopted; in other
words, a political approach in which reform in Saigon was as
important as strength in the field. What proponents of this
"hard hat" myth have in mind is that the United States
should have used more firepower, not more brainpower. The
belief that the United States was fighting with "one hand
tied behind its back" is completely wrong, of course. Doing
more of the same would not have won the war; it would only
have killed more people — but the result would have been
the same, because the Vietnamese communists (and
nationalists) were more willing to be killed than the United
States as a society was willing to pay a price to kill them.
And that is why, when you hear someone today say that the
war was unwinnable because the enemy was willing to take
such appalling casualties, you know that that person's
thinking has not advanced beyond William Westmoreland's own
views, circa 1968.

The protesters' myth is really more interesting. With every
passing year one gets the impression that virtually all
Sixties types were at antiwar protests. (They were all at
Woodstock, too.) It has become unassailable gospel that the
protests were noble and effective. They may have been nobly
intended, but there is nothing but aging egos and pure wind
to sustain the notion that they were effective in stopping
or shortening the war. There is evidence, however, that the
protests lengthened the war and that more people were killed
on account of them.

How so? Political scientists talk about the phenomenon of a
"negative follower group," which is defined basically as any
group that ticks others off to the point that they become
the friend of that group's enemy. All the data we have from
the time, and since, show that the obscenity, illegality,
and raging anti-patriotism of the antiwar protesters made
them the most hated group in America during the late 1960s
and early 1970s. When police beat up protesters in the park
across from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in
1968, most people who were watching on television
sympathized with the police.

The backlash had significant repercussions on the national
political scene. Without the antiwar protests, which were
associated in the minds of the "silent majority" with a
militarized black power movement that had somehow
metasized from the civil rights movement, George Wallace
could never have become a national political figure, if only
for a while. Nor would Richard Nixon have won the White
House in 1968. Furthermore, the antiwar movement undermined
the Democratic Party and hurt Hubert Humphrey's bid for the

3

presidency in a very tight election.) The political reaction
to the radical antiwar protests aided both the Johnson and
Nixon administrations' efforts to manage growing public
disquiet over the war. More Americans would have vocally
opposed the war sooner had they not been put off by radical
protest tactics.

In fact, the antiwar movement actually helped elect Richard
Nixon to the presidency not just once, but twice. By 1972,
the movement had gained enough power in the disheveled
Democratic Party to see that George McGovern was nominated
instead of a more mainstream candidate who might have kept
the party's labor and middle-class constituency intact. And
who believes that a Humphrey administration or a Humphrey-
like Democratic administration that would have begun in 1969
or 1973 would have fought the war in Vietnam for another
four terrible years, as did the Nixon administration,
looking for a "peace with honor" that fell to ashes on April
30, 1975?

Yes, the American people did turn against the war, but not
because of protests in the streets. They turned against it
because eventually the costs seemed to outweigh the
benefits. Moreover, they turned against it when the
leadership of the country lost its will to continue. Before
Lyndon Johnson's famous March 31, 1968, speech throwing in
the towel — personally as well as in terms of Vietnam
policy — no poll showed that a majority of Americans was
against the war. Indeed, what the administration feared most
was increasing pressure to escalate. As John Mueller put it
in a brilliant book in 1973, the American people basically
followed their leaders into war, and then, when the
leadership changed its mind, followed them back out again
(War, Presidents, and Public Opinion, published by John
Wiley). Moreover, of all the serious survey data done at the
time — the only empirical data base there is to study this
aspect of the issue — not one poll indicated that antiwar
protests were even a tertiary reason in the thinking of
those who turned against the war (see my Telltale Hearts,
chap. 1).

What do these myths and their longevity tell us? First, that
good intentions do not always turn into good consequences.
Anyone surprised by this statement needs a remedial history
course, and possibly a good clap on the ears. Second, that
personal myths, which are born of youth and form the
foundations of adult personalities, are almost completely
immune to the power of facts and logic. Third, that
controversial history — history speckled with blood, that
is — is always read with the needs of the present uppermost
in mind. Fourth, that there is no monopoly in the mistaken
interpretation of any historical event. Many errors, many
myths, can operate simultaneously — each of them serving
"needs" other than truth.

You may forward this email as you like provided that you
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vailed, and Ford's staunch support enabled 130,000 Vietnamese to flee the catastrophe. Now that debate was overwhelmed by events. We had become spectators of a drama we were no longer able to influence, suspended between a pain we could not still and a future we were not yet in a position to shape.

For those who lived through the final day, any account must appear as fragmentary, dominated by the perspective from each protagonist's vantage point as chaos consumed two decades of sacrifice. For those who were spared the anguish, the passions will seem incomprehensible. And historians are no help, since their accounts generally replicate bitter schisms of the period. Radical critics conjure up bloodthirsty American leaders pursuing a war to satisfy their twisted psychologies. The right either ignores the war as a liberal aberration or blames the defeat on lack of ideological zeal (the mantra of "neoconservative" converts who, in reality, were on the antiwar side while the war was going on and have their own reasons for avoiding its memory).

Reluctant to come to grips with the most traumatic experience of the past half century, Americans find it difficult to draw the real lessons from what was done to this country—and what we did to ourselves—during that sad period.

That will be my subject here. For one of the most important casualties of the Vietnam tragedy was the tradition of American "exceptionalism." The once near-universal faith in the uniqueness of our values—and their relevance around the world—gave way to intense divisions over the very validity of those values and the lengths we

should go to promote and defend them. And those schisms have had a profound impact on the conduct of U.S. foreign policy ever since.

## ENTERING INDOCHINA & LEAVING IT

IT WAS THE SO-CALLED GREATEST GENERATION THAT ENTERED Indochina in the heyday of American exceptionalism. It did so in pursuit of the strategy that had already stabilized the post-World War II world, rebuilt Europe, restored Germany and Japan to the community of nations and arrested the Soviet advance into Europe and in Korea. A mixture of the experiences of World War II and a philosophy drawn from the New Deal, this strategy concentrated on stopping Soviet aggression and removing communist opportunities for internal upheavals by promoting economic and social progress in regions under U.S. protection.

Though the American conduct of the cold war is often presented as reflecting a nearly unanimous consensus, there was always significant dissent during this period, especially in the intellectual and academic communities. They argued either that the communist threat was exaggerated or that the United States was associating with too many questionable regimes to sustain its claim as a defender of liberty. But their critique was confined to the wisdom of specific policies, not to the validity of the values on which it was based.

With the advent of the Kennedy administration, this policy

was given its most sweeping formulation in the new president's Inaugural Address—his promise that the United States would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to ensure the survival and success of liberty." At the time there was virtually no opposition to this open-ended commitment, or to the conventional wisdom that Indochina was an essential outpost in the defense of liberty.

As Kennedy was preparing to take office, President Eisenhower recommended that America give military support to Laos if North Vietnamese intervention there continued. Within two months of his Inauguration, Kennedy sent Marines to Thailand, adjoining Laos. He recoiled from intervening directly (though the CIA undertook covert measures). But by December 1961, when Hanoi opened a supply line to South Vietnam through Laotian territory and intensified the guerrilla war, Kennedy sent U.S. military "advisers" to South Vietnam, whose number rose to 16,000 by the end of 1963. President Lyndon Johnson esca-

lated this commitment until it reached more than 500,000 combat troops by the time he left office. Once again, there was no significant opposition, either within or outside the administration, to that massive deployment. Though the decision was blamed on Johnson later on, it was in fact Kennedy's closest advisers—McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk—who urged the escalation.

By the end of the Johnson administration, frustration had set in. The strategy that had worked in every previous American war—of wearing down the

adversary by attrition—could not succeed against guerrillas defending no specific territory and who were therefore in a position to choose when and where to fight. Nor did the non-communist countries of Indochina live up to the standards of democracy of our European allies, throwing into question the moral purpose of the war. For those who had made the decision to send American troops, growing self-doubt compounded despair triggered by Kennedy's assassination.

While America's leaders were seized by emotional turmoil, their critics challenged the very essence of American foreign involvement. The argument that the war was unwinnable and that its cost exceeded its benefits escalated as rapidly as the U.S. deployment. At first the doubters dwelled on how to find an honorable way out. But within months, American exceptionalism itself was called into question. The protesters increasingly argued that the ultimate cause of the crisis was not errors in judgment but moral rot at the core of American life. The victory of the communists in Indochina, which administrations of both parties had sought to prevent for nearly two decades, became for the radical protesters a desirable national catharsis. Critics moved from questioning the worthiness of America's allies to challenging the worthiness of America itself, and of its conduct not only in Vietnam but around the world. Vietnam became the first war in which prominent Americans paid highly publicized visits to the enemy capital to oppose their own country.

By the time Richard Nixon became president, the battle lines

## THE LONELINESS OF COMMAND

After ordering the evacuation of the last Americans, Ford reflects on his decision in the White House family quarters with his wife, Betty

48

NEWSWEEK MAY 1, 2000

DAVID HUME KENNERLY—FORD PRESIDENTIAL LIBRARY

had been drawn. The demoralized establishment, which had
launched us into the quagmire, abdicated from the task of extri-
cation. They left the field to the protesters or joined them in at-
tacks on the alleged shortsightedness and warped mentality of
the Nixon administration. The radical protesters, certain of their
moral superiority, saw no need for restraint in the methods they
used to pursue their ends. Through street demonstrations and
deliberate subversion of all authority, from universities to the
U.S. government, they sought to wreck any policy designed to
vindicate the values on which America's post-World War II poli-
cy had been based.

Nixon, who inherited this impasse, lacked the human qualities to transcend it, if indeed it was possible to do so. Still, for all his railing against the establishment, he, too, was a product of the "greatest generation." And he sought to implement what he understood to be the demand of moderate critics for an honorable withdrawal. Starting with the first negotiations with Vietnamese Politburo member Le Duc Tho, Nixon offered a timetable for American withdrawal and a variety of formulas to permit the people of South Vietnam a genuine choice. What Nixon would not accept—and what, until the end, Hanoi never ceased demanding—was the forcible imposition of a communist regime on the millions who, relying on the words of our predecessors, had thrown in their lot with the United States.

When a negotiated solution proved unattainable, Nixon proceeded unilaterally to implement his campaign promise to extricate America from Vietnam. In the process, he reduced U.S. casualties from 1,200 a month at the end of the Johnson administration to 30 a month at the end of Nixon's first term. And he unilaterally reduced American troops from 550,000 to 30,000.

Many of the stages in this process were highly controversial, and they deserve fuller treatment than this article permits. But it is symptomatic of the schism Vietnam created that so much of the literature focuses on the charge that Nixon needlessly prolonged the war and sacrificed American lives, implying that there was some honorable way out that he refused to take.

The political divide was sharpened by a similar split in the intellectual community. When I was in graduate school, intellectuals rarely achieved high positions in government. If they wanted to affect policy, they had to write lengthy papers on longer-range issues. The Kennedy administration awakened their taste for political power, and they sought to shape immediate policy discussions first within the government and after Kennedy's assassination from the sidelines. In the process they divided into two groups—job applicants and revolutionaries. The job applicants replicated the debates of policymakers; the revolutionaries, the arguments of the protest movement. In either case, they accentuated America's schisms rather than help overcome them. A balanced judgment on Vietnam remains our challenge—not as a question of historical justice toward individual presidents, but of historical truth about a national tragedy.

VIETNAM'S LEGACY

VIETNAM BROKE THE FUSION OF IDEOLOGY AND strategy that underlay American exceptionalism. Though its principles continue to be affirmed by all sides, its application is now subject to profound dispute. Since the Vietnam War, there have been three main schools among American foreign-policy makers:

■ Advocates of adapting the cold-war strategy of the 1950s and 1960s to new circumstances.

■ Members of the Vietnam protest movement, who came to high office in the Clinton administration.

■ And a new generation that does not remember the Vietnam schism and now faces a world radically different from the one that formed either the cold warriors or the Vietnam protesters.

Shaken by the Vietnam experience, many liberals and intellectuals retreated from the field of strategy and redefined exceptionalism in terms of "soft issues" which could be achieved without the use of military power. As a result, traditional American strategy became largely the provenance of conservatives and neoconservatives. Always uncomfortable with commitments on distant battlefields, the American right concentrated on rigorous anti-communism and vigilance in maintaining the strategic balance, especially with respect to arms-control negotiations. And during the Reagan administration, against a Soviet adversary weakened by decades of over-

extension, this group achieved great successes.

Yet with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the need for a national strategy adapted to the post-cold-war world has baffled many conservatives. In the aftermath of Reagan, some of his disciples continue to emphasize his rhetoric while neglecting the hardheaded strategy with which he pursued the 1980s equivalent of containment. They seem torn (especially in the neoconservative group) between searching for a new danger to replace the Soviet Union, in opposition to which all foreign policy can be organized, and the redefinition of American exceptionalism as a global crusade for democracy. China is the target for much of this effort. But it is as yet too weak, its ideology too national and its potential danger too distant to allow foreign policy to be organized around it, especially if we wish to bring allies along with us. To be true to itself, America must always stand for democracy; but to shape the world, it also needs to understand both its interests and their limits, and not recoil from defining either.

The conclusions that many in the Clinton administration—and in the liberal community—have drawn from the Vietnam War present a profound challenge to traditional American foreign policy. They treat the cold war as a misunderstanding, if not an American creation. They recoil before the concept of national interest and distrust the use of power unless it can be presented as in the service of some "unselfish" cause—that is to say, as reflecting no specific American national interest. On many occa-

THE EXITS CLOSE DOWN

The day before Saigon's fall, Kissinger tells Ford that Ton Son Nhut Airport has become unusable. Now helicopters are the only way out.

MAY 1, 2000 NEWSWEEK

49

sions and many continents, President Clinton has apologized for actions of his predecessors that stemmed from what he derogatorily describes as cold-war attitudes. But the cold war was not imaginary; profound issues of survival and national purpose were involved. And this denigration—generally quite inaccurate—of the actions of U.S. presidents from Eisenhower to Bush must raise doubts about American constancy, even on the part of the administration offering the apology.

Apologies for 50 years of U.S. history are matched by uneasiness with the use of American power. In Kosovo, for example, the idea that NATO's actions elevated traditional national interest into universal humanitarian principles was invoked by all leaders as the distinguishing feature of the enterprise. But six months later the same leaders recoiled from applying the Kosovo principles to Chechnya—where civilian casualties were far greater—for fear of Russian power. The foreign policy of the self-proclaimed moralists had returned full circle (and with a touch

of hypocrisy) to the famous maxim that foreign policy is the art of the possible and the science of the relative.

Or consider the difference between the Clinton administration's attitude toward Iraq and toward Kosovo. In December 1998, Iraq inflicted a strategic defeat on us by expelling U.N. inspectors placed there as a condition for ending the gulf war. The administration responded by bombing for four nights. But three months later it bombed Yugoslavia nonstop for 78 days in pursuit of what was perceived as a humanitarian interest. In each case,

the conduct of operations was undertaken with a reluctance to accept casualties that ultimately conveyed to the American public, and to our adversaries, the absence of any vital interest. Yet paradoxically, the fear of domestic convulsions and ambivalence about the decisive use of American power end up making crises more frequent and more difficult to resolve. That is perhaps why the Clinton administration has been drawn into more inconclusive military operations than any previous administration.

IN THE GLOBALIZED ECONOMIC WORLD, THE POST-cold-war generation looks to Wall Street as mine did to Washington. This reflects not only a difference in financial remuneration but, in part, a reluctance to enter a calling more and more marked by vicious personal attacks and the prospect of political disputes that all too often end in criminal investigations.

Vietnam bequeathed a new generation divided into two camps: one in search of riskless applications of our values, another in an erratic quest for a focal point for our national strategy. It is not that this generation is obsessed by the debates over the war in Indochina, with which it is largely unfamiliar. Nor does it have feelings of guilt about a doctrine of self-interest, which it pursues strenuously in its economic activities. But it has little knowledge of history or of national policy and hence lacks a sense of direction in the international political arena. It is tempted by the Clin-

tonian concept of riskless global gratification and the belief that the hardheaded pursuit of economic self-interest will ultimately produce global reconciliation.

Such an approach is possible only because our world has been freed to a large extent from the dangers of general war. In such a world, the post-cold-war generation of American leaders (whether graduated from the protest movements or business schools) finds it possible to imagine that foreign policy consists merely of instructing the rest of the world. This turns our diplomacy into nothing more than demands for compliance with an American agenda. When vast economic and military power is coupled with condescension and righteousness, dominance grows grating and leadership comes to be perceived as hegemony. But hegemonic empires almost automatically elicit universal resistance, which is why all such claimants have sooner or later exhausted themselves.

Economics will not provide a substitute for a national strategy.

The globalized world will emerge only through dislocations and tensions, both within and among societies. The nation-state, which remains the unit of political accountability for solving these crises, is itself in a process of transition. In many regions of the world, it is breaking down, either into hitherto ethnic entities or by joining larger regional groupings. And the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction represents a political challenge faced by no previous society.

If our new generation of national leaders is embarrassed to elaborate a

concept of national interest in dealing with these problems, or to invoke the unapologetic use of power as a last resort, it will achieve not moral elevation but progressive paralysis. Certainly any concept of national interest would not be American if it did not flow from our democratic tradition or concern with collective security. But we must also be prepared to face up to some hard questions imposed by reality. What, for our survival, must we seek to prevent no matter how painful the means? What, to be true to ourselves, must we try to accomplish no matter how small the attainable consensus, or, if necessary, on our own? What wrongs is it essential that we right? Which are beyond our capacity or not consistent with the national interest?

We will not have overcome the shadow of Vietnam—or be able to meet our new challenges—until we can achieve a national consensus on these issues. And this requires mutual respect among the disputants and a conviction, nearly lost in the Vietnam period, that we are engaged in a common enterprise rather than a fight to the finish. Our political leaders may skirt these issues during the presidential campaign that is about to begin. But the winner will not be able to escape them once he enters the Oval Office.

A FEW GOOD MEN
At the White House, Kissinger checks on the status of U.S. Marines who are serving as a rear guard during the evacuation of Saigon

FOR A GALLERY OF PHOTOS BY DAVID HUME KENNERLY OF THE FORD WHITE HOUSE DURING THE EVACUATION OF SAIGON, LOG ON TO NEWSWEEK.COM

50

NEWSWEEK MAY 1, 2000

an evolutionary disaster if
protected the young.

HUBERT B. HERRING

## Giant Settles

Investigating fraud investigation
Bomba/HCA Healthcare Cor-
bas lasted seven years, but
bas have finally won a tenta-
ment. The hospital giant
principal to pay $745 million
alities to resolve allegations
ated federal health pro-
ort the deal will not be final-
s the outstanding criminal
ations are resolved before

KURT EICHENWALD

##icans Vote for Change

The benefits of Latin America's
lowing economy eluding
thousands of Dominicans pulled
in the ruling party in presi-
dencies. Although Hipólito
candidate of the left-center
nary Dominican Party, just
majority, he far outpaced his
Facing an insurmountable
anillo Medina of the ruling
in Liberation Party declined

Casting votes
in the Domin-
can Republic.

Associated Press

to pursue a runoff, Mr. Mejía has
vowed to increase social spending and
help farmers hurt by imports and pri-
vatization.
DAVID GONZALEZ

## This Flag Won't Fly

Visitors to the South Carolina Capitol will no longer see the Confederate flag atop the dome as of July 1, after the state legislature gave in to years of pressure and voted to remove it. But they won't have to look far to see it — a smaller version will now fly in front of the Statehouse.

DAVID FIRESTONE

## ings

The streak with his own in-
vestors. After Mr. Bush told re-
that Mr. Gore had a lot of
stocks, Mr. Gore replied
not invested in the mar-
years for fear of an ap-
of a conflict.

uck-and-forth over money
came as a New York
BS News poll showed that
ers are thinking less about
es' detailed fiscal calcula-
about how nice they seem.

It was favored over Mr. Gore
new poll by 47 percent to 39
and although more re-
s liked Mr. Gore's stands
ues, they liked Mr. Bush
re as a person.

PETER MARKS

## Corrections

The Word for Word column on April 30, about newly declassified documents on the Vietnam War, referred incorrectly to a sequence of events in Henry A. Kissinger's negotiations with North and South Vietnam in 1972. Mr. Kissinger met with President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam on Oct. 22; it was four days later — not ahead of the meeting — that he publicly declared at a news conference in Washington that "peace is at hand."

An article last Sunday about the
average cost of raising children born
in 1999 referred incorrectly to the
amount, $230,680, that would be spent
per child by the year 2016. The figure
was indeed adjusted for inflation —
at 4.3 percent a year.

## E-Mail

The Week in Review's electronic mail
address is review@nytimes.com

the CBS miniseries, "Jesus." Variety's front-page news-
line proclaimed: "'Jesus' Tops Regis." (On Wednesday
the miniseries was toppled by the final episode of
"Beverly Hills 90210.")

At the same time, not one but two behind-the-scenes
dramas about "The Brady Bunch" have surfaced. In the
NBC's drama "Growing Up Brady" which is broadcast
tonight at 9 p.m., viewers immediately learn that Robert
Reed and Florence Henderson, who played the parents
of the six Brady children, didn't like kissing much
because Mr. Reed, who died in 1992, "likes men more
than woman," says the actor playing Barry Williams,
who played Greg, the oldest son. It's that kind of show.
Fox has a show in a similar vein.

In their hunger to lure increasingly fickle audiences away from cable and the Internet, network executives said selecting and scheduling programs was a roll of the dice as well as a blend of considerations. CBS, for example, picked up the medical drama, "City of Angels," about a hospital in Los Angeles for another season despite poor ratings. The show, one of the first dramatic series with a predominately black cast and crew, has been a big disappointment. By all indications, CBS picked up the series for another season partly to avoid the ire of civil rights groups, which pressured the networks last year to accelerate minority hiring.

"We're aware of what our position should be in
terms of minorities, in terms of diversity," said CBS
President Leslie Moonves. (But a decision by CBS not to
add a series about a Mexican-American family in East
Los Angeles to its prime-time lineup, which the network
had been promoting, caused disappointment among
Hispanic groups).

Mr. Moonves, echoing his competitors at NBC and
Fox, was clearly obsessed with the extraordinary suc-
cess of ABC's "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire." The
show dominates the television landscape. (ABC added
only two and a half hours of new series programs to its
fall schedule).

"Millionaire" may prove vulnerable, said Mr.
Moonves, who has placed probably his top new show, the
Bette Midler comedy, "The Bette Show," against the
quiz show. "I lay awake at night thinking how to fight
'Millionaire,'" he said. "And I can't figure it out.

"If 'Millionaire' slips," Mr. Moonves said, "that will
be my one Christmas gift." His colleagues at NBC and
Fox, looking uneasily about toward the new season, are
hoping for the same gift.

Cliff Lipson/CBS

Bette Midler will have a show on CBS this fall.

MAY 26 2000

2

WK

THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, MAY 21, 2000

May 14-20

Giuliani Abandons Campaign
For U.S. Senate Seat

What would a week in New York be without at least one jolting development in the race for United States Senate? So it was that on Friday, four days after Hillary Rodham Clinton was formally designated as the Democratic candidate at her party's convention in Albany, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani quit the race at a packed-to-the-rafters news conference.

In the end, the only real surprise was how long Mr. Giuliani took to make the decision, which came after three weeks in which it was revealed that he was suffering from prostate cancer, that he had struck up a close relationship with a woman who wasn't his wife and that he was seeking a separation from his wife, Donna Hanover, after 16 years of marriage.

Mr. Giuliani said he needed to de-vote all his energy to deciding on a course of treatment and running the city. The Republican Party quickly turned to the future: at week's end,

Associated Press

Rudolph W. Giuliani at City Hall.

The most likely replacement for Mr. Giuliani was Rep. Rick A. Lazio, a Long Island Republican.

ADAM NAGOURNEY

Arrests in 1963 Bombing

Justice delayed may not be justice

Associated Press

Open Wide

Oscar Polanceo, 4 years old, getting his teeth inspected by a friend at the graduation ceremony at Mulcahy City Y.M.C.A. Preschool in Tucson, Ariz.

Wake Up
And Knock
The Lineup

By BERNARD WEINRAUB

It was the most spontaneous — and unexpected — moment at last week's annual “up fronts,” a four-day rite in which network television executives nervously announce their new sitcoms and dramas to advertisers in New York and bring in the casts of current hit shows to meet them. As Scott Sassa, president of NBC West Coast, and Garth Ancier, NBC's president of entertainment, introduced the stars of “West Wing,” the audience at Lincoln Center stood for a prolonged standing ovation, startling both executives and actors.

Whatever the flaws of the Aaron Sorkin dramatic series about a fictional liberal president and his White House staff, the audience was saying, in effect, that a grown-up and unpatronizing show was a source of rare pride to them. The show is successful, too.

But then there was the rest — old and new — that the public will see this fall. And the refrain heard among media buyers, talent agents and managers, and television executives at the elaborate parties around the city was: Is this really the best that network television can offer?

The new shows include appealing comedy series with movie stars like Bette Midler and Geena Davis. Others are simply replicas: The NBC show “Tucker,” about a bright boy living with mother, seems similar to the Fox hit “Malcolm in the Middle.” The CBS series “The Fugitive” mirrors the Harrison Ford film and the 1960’s David Janssen prototype. The NBC series “DAG,” about a secret serviceman guarding a feisty first lady, recalls the 1994 film, “Guarding Tess.” And an Aaron Spelling NBC series, “Titans,” about an over-

president thereafter for United Press International, quit after the financially troubled news service was acquired by a group with links to the Unification Church.

DAVID STOUT

Peru Challenger Drops Out

Using a Mouse to Check for Mice

Vermin. There it was in blue and

of high traffic.

The Washington Post

BOOK
WORLD

THIS WEEK | APRIL 30 - MAY 6, 2000

# Flashback

## Twenty-Five Years of Writing on the Vietnam War

BY DAVID CHANOFF

For 15 years Douglas Pike was the State Department's leading analyst in Saigon. Author of the most authoritative study of the Vietcong and of North Vietnam's army, since 1980 he has been director of the Indochina Archives, a voluminous collection of data on the war, much of which he collected personally. At age 75 Pike has been contemplating the secrets of America's Vietnam experience for the better part of his adult life. "There is," he says, "a . . . consensus that none of us had it right back then. Fifty years from now we'll probably see the issues clearly. But we still won't know the Truth."

Yet the Truth is something my own generation, draft age during the war and politically aware, was convinced we understood. The Truth was in the blind and deceitful arrogance of American leaders that was causing us to ravage a distant land and waste the lives of so many young Americans. The Truth was a moral certainty forged by television, which brought death into our living rooms, and hammered home by a constellation of journalists and veterans who were among the most talented communicators any war ever produced. Phil Caputo, Michael Herr, Al Santoli, Ron Kovic, William Shawcross, Stanley Karnow, David Halberstam, Frances FitzGerald and others—the names still ring familiar. They include Pulitzer- and National Book Award-winners and runners-up, number-one bestsellers, million-copy authors whose works even today line booksellers' shelves and dominate the classroom. Some of these books appeared during the war, some not long after. They taught a generation how to think and feel about the great trauma; they shaped its conscience.

It is 25 years now, to the day, that the last American helicopter took off from the embassy roof, 25 years since North Vietnamese tanks broke into South Vietnam's Presidential Palace where Big Minh, Saigon's last president, waited for someone to accept his surrender. In most lives a quarter century brings change: a cooling

of the blood, an examination of values, reflection on who we have been, what we have believed, and why we have believed it. A quarter century after the Vietnam War, though, it's not clear how far we as a people have gone along this particular path. So deeply did the words, so long ago, of those who fought and those who witnessed the fighting, entwine themselves around the national psyche. The pathos, the brutalization, the hypocrisy, the violation of innocence, the sheer savage meaninglessness of it all—those impressions have had staying power.

"I was an American," says a Navy adviser in *Everything We Had*, Vietnam veteran Al Santoli's searing collection of first-person accounts. "I was party to all this. I was responsible for it. If I wasn't responsible, then who the hell was?" "The war is over," former marine Phil Caputo wrote in his bitter, magisterial *Rumor of War*. "We lost it, and no amount of objecting will resurrect the men who died, without redeeming anything, on calvaries like Hamburger Hill and the Rockpile." We were, he says, "crucified." And yet . . . and yet 25 years later we know enough to make us wonder if maybe, reading Caputo and Santoli, reading Ron Kovic's *Born on the Fourth of July*, we, like Douglas Pike, might not have gotten some of it wrong.

"I've had to live with this parade of horrific memories," says a former recon specialist. "So much blood, so many lives sacrificed. For what?" But this is not an American speaking; it's the hero of North Vietnamese veteran Bao Ninh's *The Sorrow of War*, just one of the convulsive, questioning war novels that have come out of Vietnam in the past years. "So what was all the sacrifice of the Revolution about?" asks Bui Tin, the North Vietnamese colonel who accepted Big Minh's surrender (*Following Ho Chi Minh*). "If Nguyen Du, who wrote our national epic poem at the beginning of the nineteenth century, were still alive, he would weep."

The truth, small t, is that we knew about the futility, the betrayal, the unredeemed sacrifice on the other side even during the war. Draft-dodging and desertion plagued Hanoi's home front as the villages were bled of their young men. "Born To Kill," read one of the popular sayings American soldiers inscribed

SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 1968

on their helmets and flak jackets. On the bodies of Hanoi's troops the tattoos read "Born In The North To Die In The South"—the motto of a generation of North Vietnamese youth wasted by an implacable and pitiless leadership. "They are reflective people, thoughtful people," a CIA psychologist said, discussing a salient personality feature he was finding among POWs and defectors. "They're capable of seeing the other side." More than 200,000 did during the war and came over. Afterward the great refugee boat exodus included many former NVA and Vietcong fighters sickened by the cause they had sacrificed themselves for and hoping to remake their lives in, of all places, the United States.

This, the picture from the other side, was perhaps the great missed story of the war. Our soldier writers, looking inward, couldn't tell it. Our journalists, antiwar for the most part by 1968, weren't interested. Too much insight into the nature of the enemy was not a priority for anyone who believed we had no

business being there.

Of all the high octane conscience-shaping writers, none had the raw power of Michael Herr (*Dispatches*). The rhythm and vividness of his prose, the tenderness and horror, the ghastly surrealism of it have an almost physical impact. He paints a picture of what war is like and somehow manages to shove the reader bodily into the midst of it. Reading Herr, you feel manhandled. It's as if someone took a little Orwell, some Robert Graves, added a pinch of Robert E. Howard, a large unsavory dollop of Hunter Thompson, then laced the whole heartbreaking mess with equal parts angel dust and arsenic. Was he that good, or was he on drugs? Or both?

But in a way that very power was Michael Herr's problem. He was mesmerized, breathless with the unspeakable feel of mortal violence. But other things he didn't see. Read Herr on Tet and you haven't the vaguest idea that it destroyed the Vietcong as a military force, on Khe Sanh and you'd never guess that it became a massive NVA graveyard. Reading Herr you cringe at the cheery obtuseness of American field commanders, but the wisdom of containment policy is not an issue. About the moral balance of totalitarianism and democracy the reader hasn't a clue. The context of it all has gone missing. There is no perspective.

Herr isn't necessarily to blame. The other side wasn't his beat, nor was the big picture. But the impact of his writing, because it dramatized the maiming and dying of young Americans and saw only the false optimism and callous disregard of their leaders, was fervently moralistic. Other influential journalists such as Frances FitzGerald, David Halberstam, and William Shawcross had the same basic take. We were engaged in an unwinnable war, causing only death and destruction all around, clearly a pathological enterprise. What then was wrong with us?

For Frances FitzGerald (*Fire in the Lake*), the answer was in our misbegotten view of Vietnamese communism, which she regarded as the fulfillment of Vietnamese history. She looked forward to "one of those sudden historical shifts, when 'individualism' and its attendant corruption gives way to the discipline of the revolutionary community," and predicted that after the war the Vietnamese themselves would find a Middle Way to govern, and national reconciliation. She could

not fathom, in 1972, that the Middle Way would die with its great advocate, Tran Van Tuyen, in a post war re-education prison, or that her thrice-loved NLF would be sloughed off like dead skin starting the day after the Northern victory. I would be most interested to know FitzGerald's views today (she did not return calls for an interview). Given the aftermath, is she tinged with remorse for what she wrote? Or has she somehow found reinforcement? *Fire in the Lake* is a knowledgeable book, filled with fascinating detail on Vietnamese life, one of the biggest of the books that shaped us. But in history's long view, how desperately naive it seems.

The last thing anyone would accuse David Halberstam of is naivete. He was, when he wrote *The Best and the Brightest*, and still is today simply the best we have at evoking a time, a place, a character. As a young reporter in Vietnam, he started out supporting the war but later grew disillusioned, which led him to explore America's slide into the quagmire. This is the story he spins in *The Best and the Brightest*, subtle, insightful, persuasive, richly satiric, too, loaded with casual denigration. For Halberstam, the reality was that the Saigon government was illegitimate and weak, North Vietnam powerful, indefatigable, essentially undamaged by our massive assault. Under these conditions it was impossible for us to win, and the only rational thing was to end it. Anything else was loony—self-deceptive, hypocritical, and ego-driven. Not many escape Halberstam's tar brush. George Kennan—U.S. diplomat and historian—does, Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles does, the old China hand John Paton Davies—men with more flexible views on the communist/nationalist nexus.

And George Ball, of course, the prophetic dove. But the canvas's focus is elsewhere: Kennedy, unwilling to examine assumptions, he and his people tainted by a "remarkable hubris." The outsized Lyndon Johnson, driven by his insecurities to prove his manhood. Nixon and Kissinger, delusional in their need to win, unable to accommodate themselves to the reality of defeat. And over it all the persistent, malevolent sway of McCarthyism, which demanded a stand-up anticommunism and threatened the soft with defeat and banishment. "We still won't admit why we went in," says Halberstam today, "[it was] because after McCarthy we did not want to lose Washington."

Halberstam insisted recently that *The Best and Brightest* "was not about the morality of it, it was about the politics." But the argument that America's leaders sent more than two million men to war (58,000 of them to die) for self-serving, ignoble, delusional and partisan reasons is undeniably a moral one. A criminal indictment really. If Halberstam today claims differently, it is, I think, because we can now see the Cold War as an immense, sustained act of American moral leadership. And what then do we make of a vision that charges every Cold War administration from Eisenhower's to Nixon's with gross misconduct?

William Shawcross, anyway, doesn't equocate. A persistent critic of Nixon and Kissinger's Indochina policy, in 1979 he published *Sideshow*, a devastating critique of the bombing of Cambodia. Cambodia wasn't mistake, he wrote, "It was a crime." But the years that followed America's defeat have changed him. "Those of us who opposed the war," he says, "should be extremely humble in the face of the appalling aftermath." It was the aftermath, too, that eventually change Bui Tin's mind. "All we knew how to do was destroy," he writes, reflecting on Vietnam sad condition today. "We had no idea how to build." So, too, Truong Nhu Tang, former NLF minister of justice, in the new afterword to his *A Vietcong Memoir*. "History will show that [the Communist Party] liberated Vietnam from its colonial servitude. But in the process they warped the nation's character. They spent untold quantities of blood in pursuit of an inhuman ideology, with no corrections and no second thoughts. Their practiced deception and betrayed their own people, and so created nothing that could be built upon. Their question, the one they cannot bear to ask themselves is: Was it worth it? If they faced that question honestly they would collapse in tears."

What does all this mean then, that the American intervention was noble after all? That for all the ignorance and mistakes and obfuscation, for all the weakness and corruption of allies, the cause of defending 20 million people from totalitarian rule and protecting the Free World's perimeter was worth the sacrifice? So judicious a historian as William Duiker thinks the question is still too loaded for rational analysis. My own opinion is that in another 25 years the question will resolve itself. Historians then will no longer be personally invested. Guilt, anger, righteousness and pride will no longer inform judgments. Then we will see clearly, if not the Truth, least the issues. Vietnam will be studied a battle lost in a war won, but a lost battle which the United States gained some things and one we retreated from in some order, despite our grievous wounds. And we will think of the men who fought and died there, though they were not called the greatest generation, their task was harder. For many of them the meaning of what they did was obvious; to some it brought lasting sorrows. But they bore the burden anyway. And history, I believe, will give them its respect.■

David Chanoff is the author and co-author of numerous books on the Vietnam War, including "Portrait of the Enemy," "Slow Burn" and "The Vietnamese Gulag."

SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 2000

The Washington Post

THE VIETNAM WAR

The View from the Other Side

I was privileged to spend almost 10 years
in close collaboration with Vietnamese
caught up in reflecting on lives that were giv-
en shape in one way or another by the war.
They came from different classes, back-
grounds and geographical regions, and their
politics were often violently opposed. But I'm
taken now as much by what they had in com-
mon—their fierce Vietnamese nationalism—
as by the causes that divided them. Among
them were three whose lives I shared for ex-
tended periods.

In Bui Diem's house in suburban Washing-
ton there is a small silver vase inside of which
rests a single flower, its stalk also silver, its
fragile blossom of beaten silver and gold. The
flower was presented to Diem's great-grand-
father upon his attaining the highest manda-
rin rank. Like others of his status, he had
been invited to choose his favorite flower
from the emperor's inner garden, then re-
ceived its replica in silver and gold. Bui Diem
himself possesses the elegance of mind and
something of the courtly Taoist personality
that must have characterized his mandarin
forbears. His life, though, has had few mo-
ments of detached tranquility. Diem is the
great living link to the vanished world of Viet-
nam's non-communist nationalists. He sur-
vived Ho Chi Minh's 1946 assassination cam-
paign against the Communist party's
nationalist competitors to eventually become
cabinet chief of staff in South Vietnam's last
civilian government, then Saigon's ambassa-

dor to the United States from 1967 on. His
autobiography, **In the Jaws of History** (In-
diana Univ., 1999), is the ultimate insider's
account of the war from the South Vietnam-
ese side, including the appalling story of how

the American intervention actually hap-
pened.

Truong Nhu Tang's **A Vietcong Memoir**
(Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985) is an in-
sider's account from the other South Viet-

name side. Tang was a man whose slight
stature and gentle disposition masked im-
mense inner courage. One of the group that
founded the National Liberation Front, he
served the Revolution as an underground or-
ganizer until his arrest and torture by
the Thieu police. Later, in the NLF's
jungle headquarters, he experienced
the worst of the B-52 bombardments.
As the Provisional Revolutionary Gov-
ernment's minister of justice, Tang wit-
nessed the triumph of the cause he had
given most of his life to, then saw the
NLF and its moderate elements swept
aside in the aftermath of victory. Alone
among his peers, he refused to swallow
his fate and escaped Vietnam as a boat
refugee in 1978. Today he lives in Paris.

From a Vietminh family in the Me-
kong Delta, Doan Van Toai was a bare-
foot peasant boy whose natural intellec-
tual gifts gained him admittance to
Saigon University, where he achieved
notoriety as a leading student radical.
Jailed by the Thieu Ky regime, after the
war he was appointed to the revolu-
tionary government's finance commis-
sion before being disappeared into the
re-education gulag for his democratic
tendencies. Toai was the first articulate
voice from post-war Vietnam. His **The
Vietnamese Gulag** (Simon & Schus-
ter, 1986) tells the story.

—David Chanoff

FRANK JOHNSTON—COURTESY OF UPCORPUSANDRASHETMAN

A battle weary Marine and a Vietnamese mother and child watch as helicopters come onto the landing zone in Danang, May, 1967

4 BOOK WORLD

SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 2000

# EXPERT'S PICKS: Books on Vietnam
By David Chanoff

If you wanted to fill a shelf with the best books on the Vietnam War, you'd do well to ask an expert for advice. Our guide is David Chanoff, author of many books on the War.

BY JOURNALISTS, HISTORIANS, POLICYMAKERS

## FIRST-HAND ACCOUNTS, FICTION AND NONFICTION, BY AMERICAN PARTICIPANTS

**Phil Caputo.** *Rumor of War* (Holt Rinehart Winston, 1977; paperback, Owlet, 1996). First-person account by a Marine lieutenant. Vivid battle scenes, affecting depiction of war's absurdity and madness, the archetyp of a recurring Vietnam theme: the brutalization of young Americans.

**James Carroll.** *An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us* (Houghton Mifflin, 1996). A pacifist and former antiwar priest whose father was a leading Air Force general tells of their mutual alienation. A closely examined life by one of the great contemporary literary stylists.

**Stuart A. Herrington.** *Silence Was a Weapon* (Presidio, 1982; out of print). A detailed, insightful picture of the secret war in the villages by an Army intelligence advisor.

**Ron Kovic.** *Born on the Fourth of July* (McGraw Hill, 1976; paperback, Pocket, 1996). The story of a Marine sergeant, desperately wounded, and his transformation into a peace activist.

**Tim O'Brien.** *Going After Cacciato* (Delacorte, 1975; paperback, Broadway, 1999). An Army vet, O'Brien is one of the truly significant talents to emerge from the war. Imaginative, tragic, grotesque and hilarious, this novel is the high standard. *The Things They Carried* (Houghton Mifflin, 1990; paperback, Broadway, 1999). Short takes mixing fiction and fact. The title story is a masterpiece.

**James N. Rowe.** *Five Years to Freedom* (Random House, 1971; paperback, Ballantine, 1991). Rowe was a Green Beret who spent five years as a prisoner of the Vietcong. The story mesmerizes with its humanity and courage.

**Al Santoli.** *Everything We Had* (Random House, 1981; paperback, Ballantine, 1988). The best of the oral histories.

**James Webb.** *Fields of Fire* (Simon & Schuster, 1978; paperback, Pocket, 1991). By a Marine lieutenant who later became Secretary of the Navy. Should be regarded, with O'Brien's *Going After Cacciato*, as one of the enduring war novels.

**Dale Andrade.** *Trial By Fire: The 1972 Easter Offensive*. America's Last Vietnam Battle (Hippocrene Books, 1995; out of print). Detailed account of the least understood of the war's three major communist offensives.

**Peter Braestrup.** *The Big Story* (Westview Press, 1977; out of print). How and why the press got the Tet Offensive so wrong. A landmark in the history of journalism.

**William Duiker.** *The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam* (Westview Press, 1981; paperback 1996). *U.S. Containment Policy and the Conflict in Indochina* (Stanford Univ., 1994). Two thorough accounts by a leading historian. Remarkable for their objectivity.

**Bernard Fall.** *Street Without Joy* (Stackpole Press, 1961; revised, 1994). *Hell in a Very Small Place* (J.B. Lippincott, 1967; paperback, Da Capo, 1988). *Last Reflections on a War* (Doubleay, 1964; reissue, Stackpole, 2000). Respectively, these address France's Vietnam War, the battle of Dien Bienphu, and miscellaneous reflections. Lucid, analytical, moving, Fall is the classic journalist scholar.

**David Halberstam.** *The Making of a Quagmire* (Random House, 1964; paperback, McGraw Hill, 1987). *The Best and the Brightest* (Fawcett, 1969). Respectively, Halberstam's early reporter's reflections and his later history of how we got there. Very different political perspectives, both are first-rate reading.

**Michael Herr.** *Dispatches* (Knopf, 1977; paperback, Vintage, 1991). Gonzo journalism by a master.

**Stanley Karnow.** *Vietnam: A History* (Viking Press, 1983; paperback, Penguin, 1997). Sparse on the post-1973 period and on the South Vietnamese, this is still the best journalistic history, fluent and untendentious.

**Henry Kissinger.** *White House Years* (Little Brown, 1979; out of print). *Years of Upheaval* (Little Brown, 1982; out of print). *Years of Renewal* (Simon & Schuster, 1999). Kissinger's three-volume memoir, one of the great books by a second man. A subtle intelligence facing an almost infinitely complex

dilemma; and both failing and succeeding.

**Don Oberdorfer.** *Tet!* (Doubleay, 1971; out of print). Definitive account of the turning-point battle the United States both won and lost.

**Bruce Palmer.** *The 25-year War: America's Military Role in Vietnam* (Univ. of Kentucky, 1984; paperback, Da Capo, 1990). A professional military history, detailed, technical, yet personal and highly readable.

**Douglas Pike.** *Viet Cong* (M.I.T. Press, 1966; out of print). The application of intelligence and inside information to understanding the Vietcong as a sociopolitical phenomenon. *PAVN* (Presidio Press, 1986; out of print). The story of the North Vietnamese army.

**Neil Sheehan.** *A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam* (Random House, 1988; paperback, Vintage, 1989). Biography of the brilliant but flawed American colonel and later senior civilian advisor, seen by the antiwar journalist as a symbol of American involvement.

**Shelby Stanton.** *The Rise and Fall of an American Army* (Presidio, 1985; paperback, 1995). Vivid battle-writing enlivens this important, analytical history of the U.S. Army's Vietnam experience.

**Harry Summers.** *On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War* (Presidio, 1982; paperback, 1995). The highly influential after-action analysis of what went wrong militarily and what the strategic lessons of defeat were.

**Robert Timberg.** *The Nightingale's Song* (Simon & Schuster, 1995; paperback, Touchstone, 1996). A dramatic, poignant interweaving of the lives of five high profile Naval Academy graduates, four of whom fought in Vietnam. Superb storytelling.

**Thomas Thayer.** *War Without Fronts: The American Experience in Vietnam* (Westview, 1985; out of print). Teaches more and better than most full-scale histories through statistical data simply and plainly presented. An invaluable sourcebook.

## FROM THE VIETNAMESE SIDE

**Bui Tin.** *Following Ho Chi Minh: Memoirs of a North Vietnamese Colonel* (Univ. of Hawaii, 1995). A rarity. A true North Vietnamese insider speaking candidly.

**Van Tien Dung.** *Our Great Spring Victory* (Monthly Review Press, 1977; out of print). The victor of North Vietnam's final offensive. Heroic poetry with interesting sidelights.

**Bao Ninh.** *The Sorrow of War* (Secker and Warburg, 1994). A North Vietnamese soldier's novel. Rough, but authentic and bursting with compressed emotion.

**Tran Van Tra.** *Vietnam: History of the Bulwark B-2 Theater* (JPRS SEA Doc. 82-783, 1983). Tra was the communist military chief for the Mekong Delta and the Saigon area. His postwar history, commissioned by the party, was confiscated for its emphasis on the southern revolutionary achievement.

--David Chanoff

Current
Policy
No. 694

Secretary Shultz

# The Meaning of Vietnam

from Schultz

United States Department of State
Bureau of Public Affairs
Washington, D.C.

State Department photo by Robert Kessler

Following is an address by Secretary Shultz at the Department of State, Washington, D.C., April 25, 1985.

Just a few hundred yards from here stands the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Its stark beauty is a reminder of the searing experience our country went through in its longest war. From a window of my office I can see the crowds of people—veterans, families, old and young—coming to search for names on the black granite slabs, or to search their souls in meditation. It is more than a memorial; it is a living human tribute taking place day after day. This is not surprising. That war left its mark on all the American people.

There are three dozen names that do not appear on that memorial. Instead, they are here in this diplomatic entrance, on our own roll of honor. Many civilians served in Southeast Asia—from the State Department, AID [Agency for International Development], USIA [United States Information Agency], and other agencies. Many of you here today were among them. While the war raged,

you were trying to build peace—working for land reform, for public health and economic progress, for constitutional development, for public information, for a negotiated end to the war. I am here to pay tribute to you.

The 10th anniversary of the fall of Indochina is an occasion for all of us, as a nation, to reflect on the meaning of that experience. As the fierce emotions of that time subside, perhaps our country has a better chance now of assessing the war and its impact. This is not merely a historical exercise. Our understanding of the past affects our conduct in the present, and thus, in part, determines our future.

Let me discuss what has happened in Southeast Asia, and the world, since 1975; what light those postwar events shed on the war itself; and what relevance all this has to our foreign policy today.

## Indochina Since 1975

The first point—and it stands out for all to see—is that the communist subjection of Indochina has fulfilled the worst predictions of the time. The bloodshed and misery that communist rule wrought in South Vietnam, and in Cambodia and Laos, add yet another grim chapter to the catalog of agony of the 20th century.

Since 1975, over 1 million refugees have fled South Vietnam to escape the new tyranny. In 1978, Hanoi decided to encourage the flight of refugees by boat. At its height in the spring of 1979, the exodus of these “boat people” reached over 40,000 a month. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands never made it to safety and today lie beneath the South China Sea. Others managed to survive pirate attacks and other hardships at sea in their journey to freedom. We have welcomed more than 730,000 Indonesian refugees to our shores. The

work of people in this Department has saved countless lives. Your dedication to the refugees of Indochina marks one of the shining moments of the Foreign Service.

In addition to “boat people,” Hanoi has given the world its own version of the “reeducation camp.” When the North Vietnamese Army conquered the south, it rounded up officials and supporters of the South Vietnamese Government, as well as other suspected opponents. Many were executed or disappeared forever. Hundreds of thousands were sent to these camps, suffering hard labor, incarceration, and violent mistreatment. To this day, upward of 10,000 remain imprisoned. They include Buddhist and Christian clergy and intellectuals, as well as former political figures. According to refugee reports, they face indeterminate sentences, receive food rations below subsistence levels, are denied basic medical care, and are punished severely for even minor infractions of camp rules—punishment often resulting in permanent injury or death.

Hanoi has asserted for years that it will let these prisoners go if only we would take them all. Last fall, President Reagan offered to bring all genuine political prisoners to freedom in the United States. Now, Hanoi no longer adheres to its original proposal.

Another communist practice has been to relocate people in so-called new economic zones. In the years after the fall of Saigon, hundreds of thousands were uprooted and forced into these isolated and barren rural areas to expand agricultural production and reduce “unproductive” urban populations. Many have fled the zones, returning to the cities to live in hiding, without the ration or neighborhood registration cards needed to get food or jobs. Indeed, no one in Vietnam may change residence or place of work without permission, and

unauthorized absences open whole
families to arrest.

The 24 million people of South Viet-
nam are now victims of a totalitarian
state, before which they stand naked
without the protection of a single human
right. As Winston Churchill said of
another communist state, they have
been "frozen in an indefinite winter of
subhuman doctrine and superhuman
tyranny."

Compare conditions in Vietnam
under 10 years of communist rule with
conditions in the South Vietnam we
fought to defend. The South Vietnamese
Government accepted the principles of
free elections, freedom of speech, of the
press, and of association. From 1967 to
1971 the South Vietnamese people voted
in nine elections; opposition parties
played a major role in the assembly.
Before 1975 there were 27 daily news-
papers, some 200 journals of opinion and
scholarship, 3 television and 2 dozen
radio stations, all operating in relative
freedom.

No, South Vietnam was not a Jeffer-
sonian democracy with full civil liberties
by American standards. But there was a
vigorous, pluralist political process, and
the government intruded little into the
private lives of the people. They enjoyed
religious freedom and ethnic tolerance,
and there were few restrictions on
cultural or intellectual life. The trans-
gressions of the Thieu government pale
into insignificance next to the system-
atic, ideologically impelled despotism of
the regime that replaced it.

The neutralist government in neigh-
boring Laos was swiftly taken over in
1975 by local communists loyal to Hanoi.
As in Vietnam, thousands of former of-
ficials were sent to "reeducation camps."
Fifty thousand Vietnamese troops re-
main in Laos to ensure the "irreversibili-
ty" of communist control—in Hanoi's
version of the Brezhnev doctrine—and
thousands of Vietnamese advisers are in
place to monitor Laos' own "socialist
transformation."

Hmong villagers in Laos who resisted communist control were suppressed by a military juggernaut that relied on chemical weapons produced and supplied by the Soviet Union in violation of international treaties. Six decades of international restraints on chemical warfare have been dangerously eroding in recent years, and "yellow rain" in Indochina was the first major breach—yellow rain, another addition to our vocabulary from post-1975 Indochina.

Finally, in Cambodia, the worst hor-
ror of all: the genocide of at least 1
million Cambodians by the Khmer
Rouge, who also took power 10 years
ago this month. The Khmer Rouge
emptied the cities and murdered the
educated; they set out to destroy tradi-

tional Cambodian society and to con-
struct a wholly new and "pure" society
on the ruins of the old. A French Jesuit
who witnessed the early phases of com-
unist rule called it "a perfect example
of the application of an ideology pushed
to the furthest limit of its internal logic."
We say at least 1 million dead. Maybe it
was 2 million. The suffering and misery
represented by such numbers are beyond
our ability to comprehend. Our imagina-
tions are confined by the limits of the
civilized life we know.

In December 1978, Vietnam went to
war with its erstwhile partners and
overthrew the Khmer Rouge regime.
Naturally, some Cambodians at first
welcomed the Vietnamese as liberators.
But as the Vietnamese invaders came to
apply in Cambodia the techniques of
repression known all too well to the peo-
ple of Vietnam, resistance in Cambodia
grew.

In 1979, Cambodia was ravaged by
widespread famine that killed tens, if
not hundreds, of thousands. Vietnam
bears much responsibility for this
famine. Its invasion prevented the plant-
ing of the 1979 rice crop; its army
adopted scorched-earth tactics in pur-
suing the retreating Khmer Rouge.
Many will recall how the Vietnamese
obstructed international relief programs
and refused to cooperate with the ef-
forts of the Red Cross and others to
establish a "land bridge" of trucks to
bring relief into the country from
Thailand.

Today, Cambodia is ruled by a pup-
pet regime stiffened by a cadre of hun-
dreds of former Khmer Rouge; it is
headed by Heng Samrin, a former
Khmer Rouge himself. The Vietnamese
shell refugee camps along the Thai
border in their attempt to smash the
resistance.

Hanoi's leaders are thus extending
their rule to the full boundaries of the
former colonial domain, seeking domin-
ion over all of Indochina. Not only do
the Vietnamese threaten Thailand—the
Soviets, with naval and air bases at Cam
Ranh Bay, are now better able to pro-
ject their power in the Pacific, Southeast
Asian, and Indian Ocean regions and to
threaten vital Western lines of com-
munication in all these regions. Cam
Ranh is now the center of the largest
concentration of Soviet naval units out-
side the U.S.S.R.

## Retrospective: The Moral Issue

What does all this mean? Events since
1975 shed light on the past: this horror
was precisely what we were trying to
prevent. The President has called our ef-
fort a noble cause, and he was right.
Whatever mistakes in how the war was
fought, whatever one's view of the
strategic rationale for our intervention,

the morality of our effort must now be
clear. Those Americans who served, or
who grieve for their loved ones lost or
missing, can hold their heads high: our
sacrifice was in the service of noble
ideals—to save innocent people from
brutal tyranny. Ellsworth Bunker used
to say: no one who dies for freedom ever
dies in vain.

We owe all our Vietnam veterans a
special debt. They fought with courage
and skill under more difficult conditions
than Americans in any war before them.
They fought with a vague and uncertain
mission against a tenacious enemy. They
fought knowing that part of the nation
opposed their efforts. They suffered
abuse when they came home. But like
their fathers before them, they fought
for what Americans have always fought
for: freedom, human dignity, and justice.
They are heroes. They honored their
country, and we should show them our
gratuity.

And when we speak of honor and
gratuity, we speak again of our
prisoners of war—and of the nearly
2,500 men who remain missing. We will
not rest until we have received the
fullest possible accounting of the fate of
these heroes.

## Retrospective: The Strategic Price

We left Indochina in 1975, but the cost
of failure was high. The price was paid,
in the first instance, by the more than
30 million people we left behind to fall
under communist rule. But America, and
the world, paid a price.

Our domestic divisions weakened us.
The war consumed precious defense
resources, and the assault on defense
spending at home compounded the cost;
years of crucial defense investment were
lost, while the Soviets continued
the steady military buildup they launched
after the Cuban missile crisis. These
wasted years are what necessitated our
recent defense buildup to restore the
global balance.

For a time, the United States retreated into introspection, self-doubt, and hesitancy. Some Americans tended to think that *American* power was the source of the world's problems, and that the key to peace was to limit *our* actions in the world. So we imposed all sorts of restrictions on ourselves. Vietnam—ard Watergate—left a legacy of congressional restrictions on presidential flexibility, now embedded in our legislation. Not only the War Powers Resolution but a host of constraints on foreign aid, arms exports, intelligence activities, and other aspects of policy—these weakened the ability of the President to act and to conduct foreign policy, and they weakened our country. Thus we pulled back from global leadership.

2

Our retreat created a vacuum that was exploited by our adversaries. The Soviets concluded that the global "correlation of forces" was shifting in their favor. They took advantage of our inhibitions and projected their power to unprecedented lengths: intervening in Angola, in Ethiopia, in South Yemen, and in Afghanistan. The Iranian hostage crisis deepened our humiliation.

American weakness turned out to be the most destabilizing factor on the global scene. The folly of isolationism was again revealed. Once again it was demonstrated—the hard way—that American engagement, American strength, and American leadership are indispensable to peace. A strong America makes the world a safer place.

## Where We Are Today

Today, there are some more positive trends. In Asia, the contrast between communist Indochina and the rest of the region is striking. Indochina is an economic wreck; the countries of ASEAN [Association of South East Asian Nations] are advancing economically. In 1982, their per capita income averaged $770; Vietnam's was $160. ASEAN is a model of regional cooperation. It is now our fifth largest trading partner. In the past 5 years, total U.S. trade with East Asia and the Pacific surpassed our trade with any other region of the world. Our relations with Japan remain excellent and our ties with China are expanding. The regional picture is clouded by the growing Soviet military presence and by Vietnam's continuing aggression. But a sense of community among the Pacific nations is growing. A decade after the war, America is restoring its position in Asia.

At home, the United States is recovering its economic and military strength. We have overcome the economic crisis of the 1970s and once again are enjoying economic growth with stable prices. We are rebuilding our defenses. We have regained the confidence and optimism about the future that have always been the real basis for our national strength. We see a new patriotism, a new pride in our country.

A lot of rethinking is going on about the Vietnam war—a lot of healthy rethinking. Many who bitterly opposed it have a more sober assessment now of the price that was paid for failure. Many who supported it have a more sober understanding now of the responsibilities that rest on our nation's leaders when they call on Americans to make such a sacrifice. We know that we must be prudent in our commitments. We know that we must be honest with ourselves about the costs that our exertions will exact. And we should have learned that we must maintain the ability to engage with, and support, those

striving for freedom, so that options other than American military involvement remain open.

## The Relevance of the Vietnam Experience

That experience has many other lessons. We acted under many illusions during the Vietnam period, which events since 1975 should have dispelled. We have no excuse for falling prey to the same illusions again.

During the Vietnam war, we heard an endless and shifting sequence of apologies for the communists: that they were "nationalists"; that they were an indigenous anticolonial movement; that they were engaged in a civil war that the outside world should not meddle in. As these arguments were proved hollow, the apologies changed. We heard that a communist victory would not have harmful consequences, either in their countries or the surrounding region. We were told that the communists' ambitions would be satisfied, that their behavior would become moderate. As these assertions became less convincing, the apologies turned to attack those who fought to be free of communism: our friends were denounced as corrupt and dictatorial, unworthy of our support. Their smallest misdeeds were magnified and condemned.

Then we heard the theme that we should not seek "military solutions;" that such conflicts were the product of deep-seated economic and social factors. The answer, they said, was not security assistance but aid to develop the economy and raise living standards. But how do you address economic and social needs when communist guerrillas—as in Vietnam then and in Central America now—are waging war *against* the economy in order to maximize hardship? Our economic aid then, as now, is massive; but development must be built on the base of security. And what are the chances for diplomatic solutions if—as we saw after the 1973 Paris agreement—we fail to maintain the balance of strength on which successful negotiation depends? Escapism about the realities of power and security—that is a pretty good definition of isolationism.

And finally, of course, the critics turned their attack on America. America can do no right, they said. Now, criticism of policy is natural and commonplace in a democracy. But we should bear this past experience in mind in our contemporary debates. The litany of apology for communists, and condemnation for America and our friends, is beginning again. Can we afford to be naive again about the consequences when we pull back, about the special ruthlessness of communist rule? Do the American people really accept the notion

that we, and our friends, are the representatives of evil?

The American people believe in their country and in its role as a force for good. They want to see an effective foreign policy that blocks aggression and advances the cause of freedom and democracy. They are tired of setbacks, especially those that result from restraints we impose on ourselves.

## Vietnam and Central America

Vietnam and Central America—I want to tackle this analogy head-on.

Our goals in Central America *are* like those we had in Vietnam: democracy, economic progress, and security against aggression. In Central America, our policy of nurturing the forces of democracy with economic and military aid and social reform has been working—without American combat troops. And by virtue of simple geography, there can be no conceivable doubt that Central America is vital to our own security.

With the recent legislative and municipal elections, El Salvador has now held four free elections in the past 3 years. When the new assembly takes office shortly, El Salvador will have completed an extraordinary exercise in democracy—drafting a new constitution and electing a new government, all in the midst of a guerrilla war. The state of human rights is greatly improved, the rule of law is strengthened, and the performance of the armed forces markedly better. Americans can be proud of the progress of democracy in El Salvador and in Central America as a whole.

The key exception is Nicaragua. Just as the Vietnamese communists used progressive and nationalist slogans to conceal their intentions, the Nicaraguan communists employ slogans of social reform, nationalism, and democracy to obscure their totalitarian goals. The 1960 platform of the communists in South Vietnam promised:

> Freedom of expression, press, assembly, and association, travel, religion, and other democratic liberties will be promulgated. Religious, political, and patriotic organizations will be permitted freedom of activity regardless of belief and tendencies. There will be a general amnesty for all political detainees [and] the concentration camps dissolved . . . [I]egal arrests, illegal imprisonment, torture, and corporal punishment shall be forbidden.

These promises were repeated time after time. We find similar promises in the letter the Nicaraguan revolutionary junta sent to the Organization of American States in July 1979. The junta, which included the communist leader Daniel Ortega, declared its "firm intention to establish full observance of human rights" and to "call . . . free elec-

3

tions." The Nicaraguan communists made the same commitment when they agreed to the Contadora Document of Objectives in September 1983, and when they said they accepted the Contadora draft treaty of September 1984.

What the communists, in fact, have tried to do since they took power in Nicaragua is the opposite: to suppress or drive out noncommunist democratic political forces; to install an apparatus of state control down to the neighborhood level; to build a huge war machine; to repress the Roman Catholic Church; to persecute Indians and other ethnic groups, including forcible relocations of population; and to welcome thousands of Cuban, Soviet, East European, PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization], and Libyan military and civilian personnel. They have formed links with PLO, Iranian, and Libyan terrorists, and are testing their skills as drug traffickers. Like the Vietnamese communists, they have become a threat to their neighbors.

Broken promises; communist dictatorship; refugees; widened Soviet influence, this time near our very borders—here is your parallel between Vietnam and Central America.

Brave Nicaraguans—perhaps up to 15,000—are fighting to recover the promise of the 1979 revolution from the communists who betrayed it. They deserve our support. They are struggling to prevent the consolidation and expansion of communist power on our doorstep and to save the people of Nicaragua from the fate of the people of

Cuba, South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Those who assure us that these dire consequences are *not* in prospect are some of those who assured us of the same in Indochina before 1975.

Particularly today, what can we as a country say to a young Nicaraguan: "Learn to live with oppression; only those of us who already have freedom deserve to pass it on to our children"? What can we say to those Salvadorans who stood so bravely in line to vote: "We may give you some aid for self-defense, but we will also give a free hand from a privileged sanctuary to the communists in Nicaragua to undermine your new democratic institutions"?

The critical issue today is whether the Nicaraguan communists will take up in good faith the call of the church and of the democratic opposition for a cease-fire and national dialogue. This is what President Reagan called for on April 4. What does it tell us about the Nicaraguan regime that it refuses dialogue combined with a cease-fire? What does it tell us about who is prolonging the killing? About who is the enemy of democracy? What does it tell us about the prospects for peace in Central America if the democratic forces are abandoned?

The ordeal of Indochina in the past decade—as well as the oppressions endured by the people of Cuba and every other country where communists have seized power—should teach us something. The experience of Iran since the fall of the Shah is also instructive. Do we want another Cuba in this hemisphere? How many times must we learn the same lesson, and what is America's responsibility?

## America's Responsibility

Today, we remember a setback, but the noble cause of defending freedom is still our cause. Our friends and allies still rely on us. Our responsibility remains.

America's Armed Forces are still the bulwark of peace and security for the free world. America's diplomats are still on the front line of efforts to reduce arsenals, settle conflicts, and push back the danger of war.

The larger lesson of the past decade is that when America lost faith in itself, world stability suffered and freedom lost ground. This must never happen again. We carry the banner of liberty, democracy, the dignity of the individual, tolerance, the rule of law. Throughout our history, including the period of Vietnam, we have been the champion of freedom, a haven of opportunity, and a beacon of hope to op-pressed peoples everywhere.

Let us be true to the hopes invested in us. Let us live up to our ideals and be their strong and faithful champion around the world.■

Published by the United States Department of State • Bureau of Public Affairs
Office of Public Communication • Editorial Division • Washington, D.C. • April 1985
Editor: Colleen Sussman • This material is in the public domain and may be reproduced without permission; citation of this source is appreciated.

Bureau of Public Affairs
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STA-501

HENRY A. KISSINGER

May 4, 2000

Dear Mr. Lelyveld:

The Sunday Opinion section of April 30th described the exchange between
President Thieu and me of October 22, 1972, as follows: "Mr. Kissinger had
declared 'peace is at hand.' But he had not yet explained its terms to South
Vietnam's president."

This is simply not true. The "peace is at hand" press conference occurred on October 26th after my mission to Saigon was concluded. A press conference was made necessary because Hanoi, that morning, had published the exact text of the agreement as it stood. You might wish to correct this.

I am enclosing a text of the October 26th press conference. Your writers might consider it when they create the impression that I ducked out from behind a curtain, said "peace is at hand," and ducked right back. You will see that I explained the terms in great detail so that the listener would draw his own conclusion how imminent peace was.

Mr. Joseph Lelyveld
Executive Editor
The New York Times
229 West 43rd Street
New York, NY 10036

Enclosure

SUITE 1021 • 1800 K STREET, N. W. • WASHINGTON, D. C. 20006 • (202) 872-0300
TELEFAX (212) 753-7248

KAINY

From: fpri@fpri.org on behalf of Foreign Policy Research Institute [fpri@fpri.org]
Sent: Monday, May 01, 2000 2:21 AM
To: Henry Kissinger
Subject: Who Were We In Vietnam? by Walter A. McDougall

WHO WERE WE IN VIETNAM?
by Walter A. McDougall

Volume 1, Number 7
May 2000

We are pleased to bring to your attention an essay that was
first published in The New York Times, April 26, 2000. The
author, Walter McDougall, is directing FPRI's History
Institute for Teachers on "Teaching the Vietnam War" on May
6-7. Forty teachers from 16 states have been selected to
participate in the program; you are welcome to request
copies of the conference report; just send a message to:
fpri@fpri.org or call 215-732-3774, ext. 201.

Walter A. McDougall, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, is
director of FPRI's History Academy, Editor of Orbis, and the
Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations at the
University of Pennsylvania. He served as an army
artilleryman in Vietnam.

WHO WERE WE IN VIETNAM?

by Walter A. McDougall

"Twas in another lifetime, full of toil and blood," began Bob Dylan's "Shelter from the Storm" in 1974, when "blackness was a virtue, and the road was full of mud." The fall of South Vietnam 25 years ago seems to me a scene from another lifetime. I had returned from Vietnam in 1970, earned a Ph.D. in history at the University of Chicago, and just received a job offer from Berkeley (the letter was dated April Fool's Day). I was as sick of the war as anyone and eager to "open up that Golden Gate." But news that the North Vietnamese had launched an invasion more akin to the blitzkrieg of Poland than to a Maoist "people's war," and had overrun my old base camp 30 miles up Thunder Road from Saigon, turned my heart to lead.

I could not deal with it any more than I had the death of my
mother a few years earlier, so I repressed it until, in
1994, a former student invited me to lecture on Vietnam to
his prep school students. Thanks to him, I dredged up and
purged all my anger, disillusionment, fear and pity - for
myself and the Vietnamese -- and promptly worked up a
seminar on the war that I have taught ever since.

No one disputes Vietnam's manifold effects on America. Richard Nixon presided over replacement of the draft with an all-volunteer (and increasingly mixed-gender) force and reduction of the voting age to 18. The Vietnam syndrome and the public's aversion to casualties inspired the strict Weinberger-Powell guidelines for the commitment of forces abroad. Congress attacked the so-called imperial presidency through the War Powers Act, C.I.A. hearings and the movement to impeach Richard Nixon for abuses committed in the name of national security. A loss of trust in the presidency ensued, and the media became adversarial. Yet the turmoil at home also allowed Nixon to pursue the Silent Majority and Southern strategies that paved the way for Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich, and our policies are still perturbed by what candidates did, or did not do, back in the 60's.

Vietnam also completed the integration of the armed forces and launched the careers of thousands of African-American officers and noncommissioned officers, as well as others who returned home to work in law enforcement, government and the professions. The Pentagon itself addressed racial tensions so well after 1975 that the military became a model for civilian institutions.

The war's primary economic effect was "guns and butter" budgets that helped to spark the inflation of the 1970's and hooked the federal government on deficit spending until the 1990's.

But the deepest long-term effect on America may stem from the rich and undeserved contributions made to American life by the Vietnamese refugees who quietly went to work restoring blighted neighborhoods, building businesses and sending their children to college.

The lessons of the war, by contrast, are still up for grabs, as demonstrated by the flow of new books. Was the military derelict in its duty when it promised, then pretended, to win the war, or did arrogant civilians order the military into battle with one hand tied and no clear goals? Was the American effort in Vietnam a sin, a blunder or a "necessary war"? Should it stand as a warning against state-building projects in strange and violent settings, like the Balkans? Or did Vietnam's school of hard knocks teach Americans to do peacemaking and state building right?

Drawing lessons from Vietnam remains a political enterprise. It is also a deeply psychological one for those who designed the war and for the baby boomers who were obliged to wage, resist or just run from it. No one wants to admit being wrong back then, and all want to believe that what happened back then proves they are right today.

Still, post-cold war historians have revealed certain facts that Americans need to digest. One is that there was nothing inevitable about Ho Chi Minh's rise to the status of icon. He spent his mysterious years in Moscow and China doing virtually nothing useful, and was little regarded in the Indochinese Communist Party. What made possible his "triumphant return" in 1941 was Vietnam's premature uprising against the French in 1940 and the decimation of its Communist leadership.

2

We know, too, that Ho promoted the broad-based Viet Minh movement not only to rally the masses against the Japanese and the French, but also to co-opt or eliminate rivals. To be sure, he was a puppet of no one, least of all Vietnam's old nemesis, China. But when Hanoi decided in 1959 to approve armed struggle against Ngo Dinh Diem's regime in Saigon, Ho personified the third world "national liberation movements" that Khrushchev and Mao vowed to support and Kennedy was determined to thwart.

It is easy to chastise Americans for backing the French and then replacing them as patrons of South Vietnam. But we did, and great nations are responsible for their acts. That is why the most shameful aspect of all is how the United States, having adopted the non-Communist Vietnamese, betrayed them repeatedly. The first time was in 1963 when President Kennedy's men sanctioned the overthrow of Diem because he was an authoritarian patriot who refused to play puppet. If they were intent on judging the Saigon regime by different standards than they did South Korea and Taiwan, then they should have pulled out.

Instead, the Johnson administration not only took over the war, but chose means - search and destroy missions in the South and calibrated bombing in the North, without any effort to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail - that were as ineffective as they were destructive. Then Lyndon Johnson just washed his hands of the mess after Tet 1968, when he halted the bombing, begged for peace talks, gave Hanoi time to recoup from the devastating losses suffered by Viet Cong cadres and bequeathed to his successor 540,000 demoralized American troops who knew we "weren't in it to win." That was America's second betrayal of the South Vietnamese.

When Paul O'Dwyer, a New York Democratic Senate candidate, told the 1968 Democratic convention that Democratic voters had registered "an indictment" against the war, it was over so far as doves were concerned. But the people who voted for Nixon and George Wallace were not tired of fighting; they were tired of losing. What is more, Nixon and Henry Kissinger hoped to salvage America's global posture through the China Opening, and soon suspected that the Chinese wanted Americans in Southeast Asia. Beset on their northern frontier by Soviet armies and rocket divisions, the Chinese were loath to see Vietnam unite under the tough pro-Soviet regime in Hanoi. So instead of blaming the Democrats and "bugging out" in his personal interest, Nixon determined to withdraw gradually. That did him in. He was a war president held to peacetime standards of governance, and when Congress cut off aid to Saigon after the 1973 Paris Accords, it was voting for defeat, not for peace. That was America's third betrayal.

A bright student from New York taught me that. Throughout the semester he had criticized United States involvement in Vietnam until, in the penultimate class, he suddenly changed his mind. Later I asked him wryly, "Who are you?" He asked what I meant, and I referred to his flip-flop. He blushed, then said, "Nixon was right!" About geopolitics? No, he said, about honor: maybe we shouldn't have been there, but having created South Vietnam, urged its people to fight for

3

10 years at the risk of exile, prison and death if they
lost, and done so much damage to their country, how could
Americans just desert them? He even likened it to turning
our backs on the Holocaust. Who are you? It seems Americans
will be answering that question for some time to come, with
that other lifetime on their minds.

FPRI bulletins are now transmitted by email to nearly 11,000 key people in 85 countries directly, and they reach thousands more indirectly by postings on the Internet. The bulletins have been quoted in the New York Times and reprinted in the Australian Financial Review and Moscow Times, to name but a few of the many periodicals that have used our material. If you find merit in this effort, we hope you will remember that FPRI is an independent, nonprofit organization (nonprofit with a vengeance!) and relies on public support. May we ask that you consider making a tax-deductible contribution to FPRI to support this extraordinary outreach effort? — Alan Luxenberg, General Editor, FPRI Bulletins

FPRI, 1528 Walnut Street, Suite 610, Philadelphia, PA 19102
Tel. 215-732-3774, ext. 105 Fax 215-732-4401 Email
fpri@fpri.org

4

March 6, 1971

Dear Henry:

The chinese proverb "if you save a man's life
it is your life" can be read many ways. In relationship
with you this is significantly important. The idea is
that we see the difference between the life saved as not one
with us.

The reason we are close is because we share life
together. For me it is a total trust stemming out of a
spontaneous co-experience. This thing I call a total trust
is a mystery. But I know it exists by the fact that I share
certain things with Henry that I could not have known about
before.

In life,

Nguyen Ngoc Luong/The New York Times

# Who Were We in Vietnam?

By Walter A. McDougall

"T was in another lifetime, full of toil and blood," began Bob Dylan's "Shelter from the Storm" in 1974, when "blackness was a virtue, and the road was full of mud." The fall of South Vietnam 25 years ago seems to me a scene from another lifetime.

I could not deal with it any more than I had the death of my mother a few years earlier, so I repressed it until, in 1994, a former student invited me to lecture on Vietnam to his prep school students. Thanks to him, I dredged up and purged all my anger, disillusionment, fear and pity — for myself and the Vietnamese — and promptly worked up a seminar on the war that I have taught ever since.

Walter A. McDougall, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and University of Pennsylvania professor, was an army artilleryman in Vietnam.

Vietnam also completed the integration of the armed forces and launched the careers of thousands of African-American officers and non-Caucasian officers, as well as others who returned home to work in law enforcement, government and the professions. The Pentagon itself addressed racial tensions so well after 1975 that the military became a model for civilian institutions.

> In the end, our allies gave us more than we gave them.

undesired contributions made to American life by the Vietnamese refugees who quietly went to work restoring blighted neighborhoods, building businesses and sending their children to college.

We know, too, that Ho promoted the broad-based Viet Minh movement not only to rally the masses against the Japanese and the French, but also to co-opt or eliminate rivals. To be sure, he was a puppet of no one, least of all Vietnam's old nemesis, China. But when Hanoi decided in 1959 to approve armed struggle against Ngo Dinh Diem's regime in Saigon, Ho personified the third world "national liberation movements" that Khruschev and Mao vowed to support and Kennedy was determined to thwart.

Instead, the Johnson administration not only took over the war, but chose means — search and destroy missions in the South and calibrated bombing in the North, without any effort to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail — that were as ineffective as they were destructive. Then Lyndon Johnson just washed his hands of the mess after Tet 1968, when he halted the bombing, begged for peace talks, gave Hanoi time to recoup from the devastating losses suffered by Viet Cong cadres and bequeathed to his successor 540,000 demoralized American troops who knew we "weren't in it to win." That was America's second betrayal of the South Vietnamese.

Opening, and soon suspected that Chinese wanted Americans in Southeast Asia. Beset on their north frontier by Soviet armies and roct divisions, the Chinese were loath to see Vietnam unite under the control of pro-Soviet regime in Hanoi. So instead of blaming the Democrats and "ging out" in his personal interest, he on determined to withdraw gradually. That did him in. He was a war president held to peacetime standard governance, and when Congress off aid to Saigon after the 1973 PAccords, it was voting for defeat for peace. That was America's first betrayal.

A bright student from York taught me throughout the semester he had cized United States volvemment in Viet until, in the penultimate class, he denly changed his mind. Later I e him wryly, "Who are you?"

He asked what I meant, and ferred to his flip-flop. He blushed said, "Nixon was right!" About politics? No, he said, about it maybe we shouldn't have been but having created South Viet urged its people to fight for 10 ye the risk of exile, prison and do they lost, and done so much damage their country, how could Amer just desert them? He even likening turning our backs on the Holoc Who are you? It seems Amer will be answering that qu estive some time to come, with that lifetime on their minds.

TomP

# Were We in Vietnam?

also completed the inte-
the armed forces and
the careers of thousands of
merican officers and non-
erned officers, as well as oth-
urned home to work in law
it, government and the pro-
The Pentagon itself ad-
cial tensions so well after
the military became a model
institutions.

's primary economic effect
and butter" budgets that
spark the inflation of the
hooked the federal govern-
deficit spending until the

deepest long-term effect on
ray stem from the rich and

the end, our
gave us more
we gave them.

contributions made to
life by the Vietnamese refu-
qietly went to work restor-
d neighborhoods, building
and sending their children

ms of the war, by contrast,
for grabs, as demonstrated
of new books. Was the
rebell in its duty when it
then pretended, to win the
d arrogant civilians order
y into battle with one hand
to clear goals? Was the
effort in Vietnam a sin, a
"necessary war"? Should
a warning against state-
jects in strange and vio-
s, like the Balkans? Or did
school of hard knocks teach
to do peacemaking and
ng right?

Lessons from Vietnam re-
 political enterprise. It is also
 psychological one for those
ed the war and for the baby
who were obliged to wage,
st run from it. No one wants
ing wrong back then, and
believe that what happened
proves they are right today.
It-cold war historians have
ertain facts that Americans
rest. One is that there was
reversible about Ho Chi
 to the status of icon. He
mysterious years in Moscow

and China doing virtually nothing use-
ful, and was little regarded in the
Indochinese Communist Party. What
made possible his "triumphant re-
turn" in 1941 was Vietnam's prema-
ture uprising against the French in
1940 and the decimation of its Commu-
nist leadership.

It is easy to chastise Americans for backing the French and then replacing them as patrons of South Vietnam. But we did, and great nations are responsible for their acts. That is why the most shameful aspect of all is how the United States, having adopted the non-Communist Vietnamese, betrayed them repeatedly. The first time it was in 1963 when President Kennedy's men sanctioned the overthrow of Diem because he was an authoritarian patriot who refused to play puppet. If they were intent on judging the Saigon regime by different standards than they did South Korea and Taiwan, then they should have pulled out.

Instead, the Johnson administration not only took over the war, but chose means—search and destroy missions in the South and calibrated bombing in the North, without any effort to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail — that were as ineffective as they were destructive. Then Lyndon Johnson just washed his hands of the mess after Tet 1968, when he halted the bombing, begged for peace talks, gave Hanoi time to recoup from the devastating losses suffered by Viet Cong cadres and bequeathed to his successor 540,000 demoralized American troops who knew we "weren't in it to win." That was America's second betrayal of the South Vietnamese.

When Paul O'Dwyer, a New York
Democratic Senate candidate, told the
1968 Democratic convention that
Democratic voters had registered "an
indictment" against the war, it was
over so far as doves were concerned.
But the people who voted for Nixon
and George Wallace were not tired of
fighting; they were tired of losing.
What is more, Nixon and Henry Kis-
singer hoped to salvage America's
global posture through the China

A
bright student from New
York taught me that.
Throughout the se-
mester he had criti-
cized United States in-
volvement in Vietnam
until, in the penultimate class, he sud-
denly changed his mind. Later I asked
him wryly, "Who are you?"

He asked what I meant, and I re-
ferred to his flip-flop. He blushed, then
said, "Nixon was right!" About geo-
politics? No, he said, about honor:
maybe we shouldn't have been there,
but having created South Vietnam,
urged its people to fight for 10 years at
the risk of exile, prison and death if
they lost, and done so much damage to
their country, how could Americans
just desert them? He even likened it to
turning our backs on the Holocaust.

Who are you? It seems Americans
will be answering that question for
some time to come, with that other
lifetime on their minds. ☐

travelers complained that things had
gotten even worse. Not only did they
now face the nuisance of dealing with
two different robber barons, but they
said they were paying more for each
trip than they had before.

Herr von Gates himself had undoubtedly been humbled: even the combined income of the baron and his nephew was less than that of the baron alone before the breakup. But this diminished revenue was the result not of lower tolls but of reduced business. Uncle and nephew blamed each other, each charging that the other was being greedy and hence discouraging river traffic altogether.

And both were right. Before the breakup, von Gates had an incentive to exercise restraint in his extortion: better to keep the tolls low enough that river commerce was not impeded. But once he had been forced to give up the downstream castle, the baron knew that any restraint on his part would simply give his nephew an opportunity to raise his own demands — and his nephew made the same calculation. So their combined tolls became too high even for their own good (indeed, they were on the wrong side of the Laffer curve, though barons didn't know about such things).

In other words, whether or not the
baron had in fact abused his power, the
ill-considered imperial response
only made things worse, punishing
not just the baron but everyone else.

I won't try to push this parable
(actually just a colorful version of a
standard textbook model) any fur-
ther. But it is relevant. In the last few
days the Justice Department, out-
raged by the lack of contrition
among Microsoft executives, has ap-
parently decided to seek a "horizon-
tal" breakup of the software compa-
ny — that is, to split it into one
company that sells the Windows op-
erating system (the upstream cas-
tle) and another that sells Microsoft
Office and other applications (the

powe
the si-
that I
to ca-
Of
only
price
seem
on th
WI

stea-
with
soft
Wind
The
AT&T
elec-
com-
serve
right
of
thi
noth
expr
erty
Micro
not
An
pre-
profit
bab
entie-
ing
vant
uni-
kind
Ev
and
ish-
thing
about
Micro

CHANGES IN COMMUNIST POSITIONS ON A POLITICAL SETTLEMENT: 1969 TO 1973

This chart shows the main points of the Communist positions on a political settlement and ceasefire, and the evolution of same from 1969 to the Paris Agreement of 1973. ACRONYMS: DRV=Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam); GVN=Government of the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam); NLF=National Liberation Front (Viet Cong); PRG=Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of South Vietnam (designation of NLF after June 1969)

<table><thead><tr><th></th><th>NLF "Ten Points"<br>May 8, 1969</th><th>PRG "Eight Points"<br>September 17, 1970</th><th>DRV "Seven Points"<br>July 1, 1971</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>STATUS OF<br>GVN</td><td>No progress possible in negotiations until Thieu-Ky government is first replaced by a "peace cabinet" to negotiate with NLF.</td><td>Thieu-Ky-Khiem government must be replaced by administration without Thieu, Ky, and Khiem that "stands for peace, independence, and neutrality."</td><td>Thieu government will cease to exist. Political, social, and religious forces aspiring to "peace and national concord" will form a new administration to replace Thieu's.</td></tr><tr><td>FORMATION<br>OF NEW<br>GOVERNMENT</td><td>Political forces representing various social strata and political tendencies that "stand for peace, independence and neutrality" shall enter talks to set up a provisional coalition government.</td><td>PRG will enter talks with such a new administration on a political settlement, including setting up a provisional coalition government which will consist of:<br>--persons from the PRG<br>--persons from the Saigon administration who genuinely stand for peace, independence, and neutrality, and<br>--persons representing other political and religious tendencies, including persons living abroad, who stand for peace, independence, and neutrality.</td><td>PRG will negotiate with this new administration to form three-segment Government of National Concord, representing:<br>--PRG<br>--persons from Saigon administration without Thieu<br>--others who stand for peace, independence, and neutrality.</td></tr><tr><td>FUNCTIONS<br>OF NEW<br>GOVERNMENT</td><td>Provisional coalition government will implement agreement with U.S. on U.S. withdrawal, achieve broad social unity and democratic freedoms, develop the economy, hold elections for a constituent assembly, work out a new constitution, and install a definitive coalition government.</td><td>Provisional coalition government will ensure national concord and democratic freedoms, improve living conditions, and organize general elections to form a coalition government.</td><td>Government of National Concord will hold power until general elections, which it will organize.</td></tr><tr><td>RELATION<br>TO CEASE-<br>FIRE</td><td>An "integrated whole." Ceasefire could be signed after agreements are signed on all NLF "Ten Points." Political matters must be discussed simultaneously with military matters, and political settlement must be arranged first.</td><td>Ceasefire implemented after signing of political settlement.</td><td>Ceasefire within Vietnam as soon as Government of National Concord is formed.</td></tr></tbody></table>

<table><thead><tr><th></th><th>DRV "Two-Point Elaboration"<br>February 3, 1972</th><th>DRV Position<br>August 1, 1972</th><th>DRV Position<br>September 15, 1972</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>STATUS OF<br>GVN</td><td>Thieu must resign immediately<br>and entire GVN security<br>apparatus must be disbanded.</td><td>Thieu continues in power until<br>signing of final agreement, when GVN<br>is replaced by coalition government.</td><td>Thieu continues in power until<br>signing of final agreement, when GVN<br>is replaced by coalition government.</td></tr><tr><td>FORMATION<br>OF NEW<br>GOVERNMENT</td><td>PRG will negotiate with this new<br>Saigon administration to form<br>three-segment Government of<br>National Concord (as before).</td><td>In meantime, DRV and U.S. will agree<br>to form Government of National<br>Concord composed of three equal<br>segments representing:<br>--PRG<br>--GVN, without Thieu<br>--neutralist political and religious<br>tendencies (chosen by mutual PRG/<br>GVN agreement)</td><td>In meantime, DRV and U.S. will<br>agree to form Provisional<br>Government of National Concord<br>composed of three equal segments<br>(with guarantees that no one side<br>will dominate), representing:<br>--PRG<br>--GVN, without Thieu<br>--other political and religious<br>tendencies (chosen by mutual<br>PRG/GVN agreement)</td></tr><tr><td>FUNCTIONS<br>OF NEW<br>GOVERNMENT</td><td>Government of National Concord<br>will organize general elections,<br>elect a constituent assembly,<br>and work out a new constitution,<br>to set up definitive government<br>in South Vietnam.</td><td>Government of National Concord<br>will have full powers in both<br>internal and external affairs,<br>and organize general elections.</td><td>Both PRG and GVN temporarily remain<br>in existence to administer areas<br>controlled by them, until definitive<br>government is formed. Government<br>of National Concord is called the<br>"central government of all South<br>Vietnam." Committees of National<br>Concord will be formed at all<br>local levels to implement its<br>decisions. Government of National<br>Concord will "stimulate and<br>supervise implementation of signed<br>agreements," organize general<br>elections in 6 months, and organize<br>consultations between the PRG and<br>GVN to settle any differences. All<br>laws contrary to Government of<br>National Concord will automatically<br>be abrogated.</td></tr><tr><td>RELATION<br>TO CEASE-<br>FIRE</td><td>Ceasefire not specifically<br>mentioned.</td><td>Ceasefire immediately after<br>signing of overall agreement.</td><td>Ceasefire immediately after<br>signing of overall agreement.</td></tr></tbody></table>

<table><thead><tr><th></th><th>DRV Position<br>September 26, 1972</th><th>DRV Proposal<br>October 8, 1972</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>1. STATUS OF GVN</td><td>Thieu continues in power until signing of final agreement, when coalition government is formed.</td><td>Thieu and GVN remain in place after agreement.</td></tr><tr><td>2. FORMATION OF NEW GOVERNMENT</td><td>In meantime, DRV and U.S. will agree to form Provisional Government of National Concord composed of three equal segments (with guarantees that no one side will dominate), representing:<br>--PRG<br>--GVN, without Thieu<br>--other political and religious tendencies (chosen by mutual PRG/GVN agreement)</td><td>DRV and U.S. agree to form an Administration of National Concord, at all levels, composed of three equal segments:<br>--PRG<br>--GVN<br>--other political and religious tendencies (by mutual PRG/GVN agreement)</td></tr><tr><td>3. FUNCTIONS OF NEW GOVERNMENT</td><td>Government of National Concord will have 12 members, rotating chair among the three segments; it will take all decisions by unanimity. Both PRG and GVN will temporarily remain in existence to administer areas controlled by them, and maintain their existing foreign relations (consistent with a foreign policy of peace and neutrality). Government is no longer called the "central government" but "a body independent of all the South Vietnamese parties." Committees of National Concord will be formed at all local levels to implement its decisions. Government of National Concord will direct and supervise implementation of the signed agreements, organize general elections for a constituent assembly, and draft a constitution for the assembly's approval. It will review policies and laws of PRG and GVN and stimulate them to amend or abrogate those in conflict with the signed agreements.<br>Upon signature of overall agreement, Thieu resigns, PRG and GVN remain in existence, and Government of National Concord assumes power.</td><td>The Administration of National Concord will direct and supervise the PRG and GVN in implementing the signed agreements, maintaining the ceasefire, preserving peace, achieving national concord, and ensuring democratic liberties; it will organize general and local elections. It will take all decisions by unanimity. The PRG and GVN agree to settle all disputes through negotiation.</td></tr><tr><td>4. RELATION TO CEASE-FIRE</td><td>Standstill ceasefire immediately after signing of overall agreement.</td><td>Standstill ceasefire immediately after signing of overall agreement.</td></tr></tbody></table>

<table><thead><tr><th></th><th>DRV "Two-Point Elaboration"<br>February 3, 1972</th><th>-2-<br>DRV Position<br>August 1, 1972</th><th>DRV Position<br>September 15, 1972</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>STATUS OF<br>GVN</td><td>Thieu must resign immediately<br>and entire GVN security<br>apparatus must be disbanded.</td><td>Thieu continues in power until<br>signing of final agreement, when GVN<br>is replaced by coalition government.</td><td>Thieu continues in power until<br>signing of final agreement, when GVN<br>is replaced by coalition government.</td></tr><tr><td>FORMATION<br>OF NEW<br>GOVERNMENT</td><td>PRG will negotiate with this new<br>Saigon administration to form<br>three-segment Government of<br>National Concord (as before).</td><td>In meantime, DRV and U.S. will agree<br>to form Government of National<br>Concord composed of three equal<br>segments representing:<br>--PRG<br>--GVN, without Thieu<br>--neutralist political and religious<br>tendencies (chosen by mutual PRG/<br>GVN agreement)</td><td>In meantime, DRV and U.S. will<br>agree to form Provisional<br>Government of National Concord<br>composed of three equal segments<br>(with guarantees that no one side<br>will dominate), representing:<br>--PRG<br>--GVN, without Thieu<br>--other political and religious<br>tendencies (chosen by mutual<br>PRG/GVN agreement)</td></tr><tr><td>FUNCTIONS<br>OF NEW<br>GOVERNMENT</td><td>Government of National Concord<br>will organize general elections,<br>elect a constituent assembly,<br>and work out a new constitution,<br>to set up definitive government<br>in South Vietnam.</td><td>Government of National Concord<br>will have full powers in both<br>internal and external affairs,<br>and organize general elections.</td><td>Both PRG and GVN temporarily remain<br>in existence to administer areas<br>controlled by them, until definitive<br>government is formed. Government<br>of National Concord is called the<br>"central government of all South<br>Vietnam." Committees of National<br>Concord will be formed at all<br>local levels to implement its<br>decisions. Government of National<br>Concord will "stimulate and<br>supervise implementation of signed<br>agreements," organize general<br>elections in 6 months, and organize<br>consultations between the PRG and<br>GVN to settle any differences. All<br>laws contrary to Government of<br>National Concord will automatically<br>be abrogated.</td></tr><tr><td>RELATION<br>TO CEASE-<br>FIRE</td><td>Ceasefire not specifically<br>mentioned.</td><td>Ceasefire immediately after<br>signing of overall agreement.</td><td>Ceasefire immediately after<br>signing of overall agreement.</td></tr></tbody></table>

Richard Nixon, 1972

Jan. 25 [21]

selves, and steadily withdrawing Americans, as they developed the capability to do so.

The path of Vietnamization has been successful. Two weeks ago, you will recall, I announced that by May 1, American forces in Vietnam would be down to 69,000. That means almost one-half million Americans will have been brought home from Vietnam over the past 3 years. In terms of American lives, the losses of 300 a week have been reduced by over 95 percent—to less than 10 a week.

But the path of Vietnamization has been the long voyage home. It has strained the patience and tested the perseverance of the American people. What of the shortcut, the shortcut we prefer, the path of negotiation?

Progress here has been disappointing. The American people deserve an accounting of why it has been disappointing. Tonight I intend to give you that accounting, and in so doing, I am going to try to break the deadlock in the negotiations.

We have made a series of public proposals designed to bring an end to the conflict. But early in this Administration, after 10 months of no progress in the public Paris talks, I became convinced that it was necessary to explore the possibility of negotiating in private channels, to see whether it would be possible to end the public deadlock.

After consultation with Secretary of State Rogers, our Ambassador in Saigon, and our chief negotiator in Paris, and with the full knowledge and approval of President Thieu, I sent Dr. Kissinger to Paris as my personal representative on August 4, 1969, 30 months ago, to begin these secret peace negotiations.

Since that time, Dr. Kissinger has traveled to Paris 12 times on these secret

missions. He has met seven times with Le Duc Tho, one of Hanoi's top political leaders, and Minister Xuan Thuy, head of the North Vietnamese delegation to the Paris talks, and he has met with Minister Xuan Thuy five times alone. I would like, incidentally, to take this opportunity to thank President Pompidou of France for his personal assistance in helping to make the arrangements for these secret talks.

This is why I initiated these private negotiations: Privately, both sides can be more flexible in offering new approaches and also private discussions allow both sides to talk frankly, to take positions free from the pressure of public debate.

In seeking peace in Vietnam, with so many lives at stake, I felt we could not afford to let any opportunity go by—private or public—to negotiate a settlement. As I have stated on a number of occasions, I was prepared and I remain prepared to explore any avenue, public or private, to speed negotiations to end the war.

For 30 months, whenever Secretary Rogers, Dr. Kissinger, or I were asked about secret negotiations we would only say we were pursuing every possible channel in our search for peace. There was never a leak, because we were determined not to jeopardize the secret negotiations. Until recently, this course showed signs of yielding some progress.

Now, however, it is my judgment that the purposes of peace will best be served by bringing out publicly the proposals we have been making in private.

Nothing is served by silence when the other side exploits our good faith to divide America and to avoid the conference table. Nothing is served by silence when it misleads some Americans into accusing their own government of failing to do

101

[21] Jan. 25

Public Papers of the Presidents

what it has already done. Nothing is
served by silence when it enables the other
side to imply possible solutions publicly
that it has already flatly rejected privately.

The time has come to lay the record of
our secret negotiations on the table. Just
as secret negotiations can sometimes break
a public deadlock, public disclosure may
help to break a secret deadlock.

Some Americans, who believed what
the North Vietnamese led them to be-
lieve, have charged that the United States
has not pursued negotiations intensively.
As the record that I now will disclose will
show, just the opposite is true.

Questions have been raised as to why
we have not proposed a deadline for the
withdrawal of all American forces in ex-
change for a cease-fire and the return of
our prisoners of war; why we have not
discussed the seven-point proposal made
by the Vietcong last July in Paris; why
we have not submitted a new plan of our
own to move the negotiations off dead
center.

As the private record will show, we
have taken all these steps and more—
and have been flatly rejected or ignored
by the other side.

On May 31, 1971, 8 months ago, at one
of the secret meetings in Paris, we offered
specifically to agree to a deadline for the
withdrawal of all American forces in ex-
change for the release of all prisoners of
war and a cease-fire.

At the next private meeting, on June
26, the North Vietnamese rejected our
offer. They privately proposed instead
their own nine-point plan which insisted
that we overthrow the Government of
South Vietnam.

Five days later, on July 1, the enemy
publicly presented a different package of

proposals—the seven-point Vietcong
plan.

That posed a dilemma: Which pack-
age should we respond to, the public plan
or the secret plan?

On July 12, at another private meeting in Paris, Dr. Kissinger put that question to the North Vietnamese directly. They said we should deal with their nine-point secret plan, because it covered all of Indonesia including Laos and Cambodia, while the Vietcong seven-point proposal was limited to Vietnam.

So that is what we did. But we went
even beyond that, dealing with some of
the points in the public plan that were
not covered in the secret plan.

On August 16, at another private meeting, we went further. We offered the complete withdrawal of U.S. and allied forces within 9 months after an agreement on an overall settlement. On September 13, the North Vietnamese rejected that proposal. They continued to insist that we overthrow the South Vietnamese Government.

Now, what has been the result of these
private efforts? For months, the North
Vietnamese have been berating us at the
public sessions for not responding to their
side's publicly presented seven-point plan.

The truth is that we did respond to the
enemy's plan, in the manner they wanted
us to respond—secretly. In full possession
of our complete response, the North Viet-
namese publicly denounced us for not hav-
ing responded at all. They induced many
Americans in the press and the Congress
into echoing their propaganda—Ameri-
cans who could not know they were being
falsely used by the enemy to stir up divi-
siveness in this country.

I decided in October that we should

102

Richard Nixon, 1972

Jan. 25 [21]

make another attempt to break the dead-
lock. I consulted with President Thieu,
who concurred fully in a new plan. On
October 11, I sent a private communica-
tion to the North Vietnamese that con-
tained new elements that could move
negotiations forward. I urged a meeting
on November 1 between Dr. Kissinger and
Special Adviser Le Duc Tho, or some
other appropriate official from Hanoi.

On October 25, the North Vietnamese agreed to meet and suggested November 20 as the time for a meeting. On November 17, just 3 days before the scheduled meeting, they said Le Duc Tho was ill. We offered to meet as soon as he recovered, either with him, or immediately with any other authorized leader who could come from Hanoi.

Two months have passed since they
called off that meeting. The only reply to
our plan has been an increase in troop in-
filtration from North Vietnam and Com-
munist military offensives in Laos and
Cambodia. Our proposal for peace was
answered by a step-up in the war on their
part.

That is where matters stand today.

We are being asked publicly to respond
to proposals that we answered, and in
some respects accepted, months ago in
private.

We are being asked publicly to set a
terminal date for our withdrawals when
we already offered one in private.

And the most comprehensive peace plan
of this conflict lies ignored in a secret
channel, while the enemy tries again for
military victory.

That is why I have instructed Ambas-
sador Porter to present our plan publicly
at this Thursday's session of the Paris

peace talks, along with alternatives to
make it even more flexible.

We are publishing the full details of our
plan tonight. It will prove beyond doubt
which side has made every effort to make
these negotiations succeed. It will show
unmistakably that Hanoi—not Washing-
ton or Saigon—has made the war go on.

Here is the essence of our peace plan;
public disclosure may gain it the attention
it deserves in Hanoi.

Within 6 months of an agreement:

- We shall withdraw all U.S. and allied forces from South Vietnam.

- We shall exchange all prisoners of war.

- There shall be a cease-fire through-
out Indochina.

- There shall be a new presidential election in South Vietnam.

President Thieu will announce the ele-
ments of this election. These include
international supervision and an inde-
pendent body to organize and run the
election, representing all political forces
in South Vietnam, including the National
Liberation Front.

Furthermore, President Thieu has in-
formed me that within the framework of
the agreement outlined above, he makes
the following offer: He and Vice Presi-
dent Huong would be ready to resign one
month before the new election. The Chair-
man of the Senate, as caretaker head of
the Government, would assume adminis-
trative responsibilities in South Vietnam,
but the election would be the sole respon-
sibility of the independent election body
I have just described.

There are several other proposals in our
new peace plan; for example, as we of-
fered privately on July 26 of last year, we
remain prepared to undertake a major re-
construction program throughout Indo-

103

[21] Jan. 25

china, including North Vietnam, to help all these peoples recover from the ravages of a generation of war.

We will pursue any approach that will speed negotiations.

We are ready to negotiate the plan I have outlined tonight and conclude a comprehensive agreement on all military and political issues. Because some parts of this agreement could prove more difficult to negotiate than others, we would be willing to begin implementing certain military aspects while negotiations continue on the implementation of other issues, just as we suggested in our private proposal in October.

Or, as we proposed last May, we remain willing to settle only the military issues and leave the political issues to the Vietnamese alone. Under this approach, we would withdraw all U.S. and allied forces within 6 months in exchange for an Indonesia cease-fire and the release of all prisoners.

The choice is up to the enemy.

This is a settlement offer which is fair to North Vietnam and fair to South Vietnam. It deserves the light of public scrutiny by these nations and by other nations throughout the world. And it deserves the united support of the American people.

We made the substance of this generous offer privately over 3 months ago. It has not been rejected, but it has been ignored. I reiterate that peace offer tonight. It can no longer be ignored.

The only thing this plan does not do is to join our enemy to overthrow our ally, which the United States of America will never do. If the enemy wants peace, it will have to recognize the important difference between settlement and surrender.

This has been a long and agonizing

struggle. But it is difficult to see how anyone, regardless of his past position on the war, could now say that we have not gone the extra mile in offering a settlement that is fair, fair to everybody concerned.

By the steadiness of our withdrawal of troops, America has proved its resolution to end our involvement in the war; by our readiness to act in the spirit of conciliation, America has proved its desire to be involved in the building of a permanent peace throughout Indochina.

We are ready to negotiate peace immediately.

If the enemy rejects our offer to negotiate, we shall continue our program of ending American involvement in the war by withdrawing our remaining forces as the South Vietnamese develop the capability to defend themselves.

If the enemy's answer to our peace offer is to step up their military attacks, I shall fully meet my responsibility as Commander in Chief of our Armed Forces to protect our remaining troops.

We do not prefer this course of action.

We want to end the war not only for America but for all the people of Indonesia. The plan I have proposed tonight can accomplish that goal.

Some of our citizens have become accustomed to thinking that whatever our Government says must be false, and whatever our enemies say must be true, as far as this war is concerned. Well, the record I have revealed tonight proves the contrary. We can now demonstrate publicly what we have long been demonstrating privately—that America has taken the initiative not only to end our participation in this war, but to end the war itself for all concerned.

This has been the longest, the most

104

Richard Nixon, 1972

Jan. 25 [21]

difficult war in American history.

Honest and patriotic Americans have disagreed as to whether we should have become involved at all 9 years ago; and there has been disagreement on the conduct of the war. The proposal I have made tonight is one on which we all can agree.

Let us unite now, unite in our search for peace—a peace that is fair to both sides—a peace that can last.

Thank you and good night.

NOTE: The President spoke at 8:30 p.m. in the Oval Office at the White House. The address was broadcast live on radio and television.

Before delivering the address, he met with the bipartisan leadership of the Congress.

The President spoke from a prepared text. An advance text of his address was released on the same day, as well as the text of the joint U.S.-South Vietnam peace proposal which read as follows:

1. There will be a total withdrawal from South Vietnam of all U.S. forces and other foreign forces allied with the Government of South Vietnam within 6 months of an agreement.

2. The release of all military men and innocent civilians captured throughout Indochina will be carried out in parallel with the troop withdrawals mentioned in point 1. Both sides will present a complete list of military men and innocent civilians held throughout Indochina on the day the agreement is signed. The release will begin on the same day as the troop withdrawals and will be completed when they are completed.

3. The following principles will govern the political future of South Vietnam:

The political future of South Vietnam will be left for the South Vietnamese people to decide for themselves, free from outside interference.

There will be a free and democratic Presidential election in South Vietnam within 6 months of an agreement. This election will be

organized and run by an independent body representing all political forces in South Vietnam which will assume its responsibilities on the date of the agreement. This body will, among other responsibilities, determine the qualification of candidates. All political forces in South Vietnam can participate in the election and present candidates. There will be international supervision of this election.

One month before the Presidential election takes place, the incumbent President and Vice President of South Vietnam will resign. The Chairman of the Senate, as caretaker head of the Government, will assume administrative responsibilities except for those pertaining to the election, which will remain with the independent election body.

The United States, for its part, declares that it:

- will support no candidate and will remain completely neutral in the election,

- will abide by the outcome of this election and any other political processes shaped by the South Vietnamese people themselves,

- is prepared to define its military and economic assistance relationship with any government that exists in South Vietnam.

Both sides agree that:

- South Vietnam, together with the other countries of Indochina, should adopt a foreign policy consistent with the military provisions of the 1954 Geneva Accords.

- Reunification of Vietnam should be decided on the basis of discussions and agreements between North and South Vietnam without constraint and annexation from either party, and without foreign interference.

4. Both sides will respect the 1954 Geneva Agreements on Indochina and those of 1962 on Laos. There will be no foreign intervention in the Indochinese countries and the Indochinese peoples will be left to settle their own affairs by themselves.

5. The problems existing among the Indo-chinese countries will be settled by the Indo-chinese parties on the basis of mutual respect for independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity, and non-interference in each other's affairs. Among the problems that will be settled

105

March 24, 1987

MEMO FOR HAK

FROM: Rosemary

SUBJECT: *A Palace File* - The Mutual Withdrawal Requirement
Charge and the Cease-fire

Attached is the latest correspondence (and previous) with
Schecter. You reacted to the charge that mutual withdrawal
was always envisaged in the context of the ceasefire.

I am addressing that point in the letter only as you requested
- as I have not yet read the book (which I have just gotten).

I did a scan of the negotiating progress. It is reflected in
the attached chronology, attached to which are the key documents
you mentioned.

As I see it

--Through late summer 1970 mutual withdrawal was implied

--Nixon's October 7, 1970 speech was the beginning of sliding away from that position; in it he announced the concept of a standstill ceasefire. You maintained a public position implying mutual withdrawal, while our position was moving away from that in the secret talks. See chron entry (in yellow) and tab for speech and your backgrounder.

--On May 31, 1971 the linkage was formally abandoned in the secret talks. See chron and tab.

--The *non*-requirement for mutual withdrawal was formally publicly revealed on January 25 and May 8, 1972 (Nixon speeches). Your memoirs note the increasing problem with Thieu on this issue. (Excerpted in my chron)

--The issue of the NVN presence in the South in the context of an agreement was one which concerned Thieu throughout the difficult period of late 1972-early 1973 - per your memoirs.

--The final tab is the peace agreement itself.

Going back to late summer 1970, I noted in Peter's research that it was Bunker who had seen Thieu and who had reported that even the latter - at *that* juncture - felt the requirement for mutual withdrawal was a 'non starter.' This was before Nixon unveiled his approach, somewhat ambiguously, on October 7, 1970. Peter relied on a summary of Bunker's reporting cable, which I gather formed the basis from then on of affirming Thieu's agreement with the new approach. Of course, Bunker is now deceased. My own impression (as not a VN hand) is that Thieu will continue to avow whatever he wants - regardless of the facts.

FEB 25 1987

SCHECTER COMMUNICATIONS CORPORATION

3748 HUNTINGTON STREET NW WASHINGTON, DC 20015
(202) 362-9040

February 15, 1987

Honorable Henry A. Kissinger
350 Park Avenue
New York, New York 10022

Dear Henry:

I was pleased to receive your letter, but sorry to see that
you have not received a copy of _THE PALACE FILE_ which I thought
had been sent to you by Harper & Row. A copy is enclosed.
in
N.Y.

We refer to the Communist Ten Point Peace Point peace plan
of May 9, 1969. You noted in _WHITE HOUSE YEARS_ that " we could
not accept the proposition that like the Ten Commandments they
were graven in stone and not subject to negotiation." Appendix F,
Pages 446 and 447 contains a detailed comparison of the North
Vietnamese Ten Point Program of May 9, 1969 and the Paris
Agreement of January 1973. The similarities are apparent.

The removal of Thieu from office was not one of the ten
basic written negotiating demands. The South Vietnamese believe
that it was only a ploy to be discarded at the appropriate time
in the negotiations. Their basic position is that the U.S. should
never have negotiated on their behalf, a point that you agreed to
in our interview in March 1986.

The ceasefire in-place offers you refer to in November
1970, May 1971 and May 1972 were always coupled with mutual
withdrawal. When you and President Nixon were asked to interpret
the language of our proposals at press conferences and in
background meetings you both said, on numerous occasions, that it
would mean that the North Vietnamese would have to withdraw their
forces from the South because we insisted on mutual withdrawal
to follow a ceasefire.

Thieu insists that he never approved a ceasefire in place
before the provisions for mutual withdrawal had been agreed to in
advance. He told us that he only learned what you had negotiated
in Paris from captured North Vietnamese documents. (See Page 83
THE PALACE FILE.) Thieu does not agree with what you say on Page
1347 of WHITE HOUSE YEARS when you assert that we had abandoned
the provision for the withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops with
Thieu's concurrence. The South Vietnamese believed, until October
of 1972, that there would be no ceasefire in place without a real
mutual withdrawal of North Vietnamese and American forces.

# The Other Paris Accords

## THE PALACE FILE

By Nguyen Tien Hung and Jerrold L. Schecter.
Illustrated. 542 pp. New York:
Harper & Row. $22.95.

By George McT. Kahin.

W RITTEN largely from a Saigon perspective, this book provides significant new data on United States relations with South Vietnam from 1968 to 1975 and fresh insights into the character of Nguyen Van Thieu, the general whom the United States supported as South Vietnam's President from 1967 to 1975. An extraordinary collection of previously undisclosed exchanges of letters between Mr. Thieu and Presidents Nixon and Ford combine with the authors' interviews with many key Americans and Vietnamese to make this an important study.

Nguyen Tien Hung, an American-trained economist who currently teaches at Howard University, was with the International Monetary Fund before being appointed special assistant to President Thieu in 1973. He later became Minister of Economic Development and Planning and one of Mr. Thieu's closest advisers. Jerrold Schecter, author of an earlier book on Vietnam, "The New Face of Buddha," covered Vietnam for Time magazine in the early 1960's; from 1971 to 1975 he was the magazine's White House correspondent and then its diplomatic editor.

The authors of "The Palace File" establish that reluctant Mr. Thieu was induced to support the 1973 Paris accords, which for Americans ended the Vietnam War, because of Mr. Nixon's repeated private promises that the United States would punish North Vietnam with heavy bombing if it significantly violated the agreements, and by his clear threat that American economic support might end if the South Vietnamese President refused to sign them. "For President Thieu and his government, the real agreement in Paris was not what had been signed ... with North Vietnam and the Provisional Revolutionary Government, but the private promises Nixon had made in his letters to Thieu ever since December 1971." Mr. Nixon's commitment and Mr. Ford's somewhat less explicit private assurances, led Mr. Thieu to believe that despite the mount-

George McT. Kahin, a professor of International studies at Cornell University, is the author of "Interven-

ing antiwar mood in Congress the White House could still be counted on to back up the Paris accords with United States air and naval power.

The authors persuasively present a charge of du-plicity, directed primarily against former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, but also implicating Mr. Nixon and ultimately Mr. Ford, who, with his eye on the 1976 election, shied away from greater assistance to Mr. Thieu for fear of "making it his war instead of Nixon's." Mr. Thieu was especially bitter toward Mr. Kissinger: "If Kissinger had the power to bomb the Independence Palace to force me to sign the [Paris] agreement, he would not hesitate to do so."

Mr. Thieu had assumed Mr. Nixon was in his debt for his help in getting Mr. Nixon elected in 1968, for he had refused President Johnson's request to participate in negotiations with Hanol, thereby undercutting Vice President Humphrey's efforts to present himself as a man of peace who could end the war through negotiation. The authors show that Mr. Thieu made a major mistake in his reliance on Mr. Nixon and Mr. Ford and in his fear that he would antagonize them if he released their letters, incorporating their firm commitments, to

Congress and the American public, even after Hanol had begun its 1975 offensive. But they do not provide the facts to warrant their assertion: "The weight of the evidence shows that had the United States kept the promises made in writing to Thieu to convince him to sign the Paris Accords, the Republic of South Vietnam could have survived."

Even if after 1973 Congress had restored earlier levels of economic support and military supplies and agreed to punitive United States bombing of the north, it is doubtful Mr. Thieu's regime could have been shored up much longer. There was too much wrong with it. Sotto voce, the authors acknowledge its weakness — an ineffective, repressive government artificially sustained from the outset by massive American economic support and military supplies, honeycombed with corruption and led by a man whose popular support was so weak that he perceived his "mandate from heaven" as issuing predominantly from Washington. Having earlier helped overthrow Ngō Dinh Diem in an American-supported coup, Mr. Thieu constantly worried that his fate might be similar if Washington became dissatisfied with his own stewardship.

THE book treats the Washington-Hanol dimension of the Paris accords and the negotiations leading up to them less comprehensively than it treats the Washington-Saigon level, and there are some serious inaccuracies in this treatment. For example, the authors write, "Hanol scorned aid offered by the U.S. to 'heal the wounds of war.'" Indeed, in order to consummate the negotiations, Mr. Nixon felt obliged to offer Hanol $3.25 billion in reconstruction aid, and that offer — though never implemented — was certainly not scorned.

As for the 1973 accords, the authors conclude: "Although Kissinger made it appear that the North Vietnamese had made concessions, in fact it was the U.S. which totally backed down on all major issues." As one of his aides referred to the Christmas bombings: "We bombed them into accepting our concessions." And what did the Nixon Administration actually accomplish? "During the nearly four years Kissinger negotiated for an agreement, the bloodshed mounted: 15,000 Americans were killed and 100,000 Americans wounded while hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives were lost." In the end, Mr. Kissinger "arrived at an agreement that was essentially the same as the one the Communists presented to him in May 1969." But he had secured his "decent interval," and Mr. Nixon found it easier to sustain his claim of achieving "peace with honor."

President Nguyen Van Thieu of South Vietnam and President Nixon meet for talks in 1969 on withdrawal of 25,000 American troops from South Vietnam.

April 26, 1986

Honorable Henry A. Kissinger
Kissinger Associates, Inc.
350 Park Avenue
New York, New York 10022

Dear Henry:

Thank you for returning the transcript of our interview. I have made the clarifications. We are finishing the book and we found your comments most helpful in adding the kind of perspective we are hoping to achieve.

Dr. Hung has talked with President Thieu about our meeting and he has provided us with a copy of your undated letter to him written in January 1980 after President Thieu's interview with Der Spiegel. President Thieu appreciated receiving the letter and seemed to be impressed by your efforts toward reconciliation. We found the letter both intellectually and emotionally very strong and we would like to reprint it in full as part of the epilogue for our book. We have President Thieu's permission to reprint the letter and we would be most grateful if you would grant us the same permission.

The letter will appear in the context of the epilogue and will be seen as an effort to understand the history of the Viet Nam war in a spirit of reconciliation. We think your letter adds a graceful and sincere end to your often angry and passionate relationship with President Thieu. The letter points to your often repeated, but not well understood, remarks praising Thieu's courage and dignity. We hope you agree.

We are fast approaching our closing deadline. If you would sign a copy of the letter from me we will proceed. Thank you for your cooperation. We should get together one of these days soon. My best to Nancy.

HENRY A. KISSINGER

Dear Mr. President:

I have just read the interview you gave to *Der Spiegel*. I can understand your bitterness, and indeed sympathize with it. But it is also clear to me that the *Spiegel* interviewers made every effort to create the impression that my book is an attack on you, which is the opposite of the truth.

My book praises you repeatedly for your courage and decency and acknowledges, in essence, that you were right. I am having my British publisher send you a copy of my book so that you may read my account in its entirety. In the meantime, I enclose some of the excerpts that make this clear.

My book attempts to tell, as honestly as I can, the story of events as they appeared to me. I continue to believe that the balance of forces reflected in the Paris Agreement could have been maintained if Watergate had not destroyed our ability to obtain sufficient aid for South Vietnam from the Congress in 1973 and 1974. Had we known in 1972 what was to come in America, we would not have proceeded as we did. (On the other hand, the effect of Watergate would have been equally, if not more, catastrophic if the war had been continuing and there had been no Paris Agreement.)

I agree with you that the cease-fire terms were harsh. Our tragic dilemma in 1972 was that we had reached the limit of our domestic possibilities. Had we attempted to continue the war, the Congress would have imposed in 1973 what was later done in 1975. If it had been President Nixon's and my intention to betray you, we could have done it in 1969.

HENRY A. KISSINGER

Dear Mr. President:

April 26, 1986

Dear Henry:

HAK:

3/19/87

If you haven't seen it, you will probably find of interest the new review by Dick Holbrooke of the Schecter book, *A Palace File*.

I know you are leaving town, but I will be sending you the Vietnam materials you want for your next letter to Schecter.

Rosemary

# PROMISES, PROMISES

## The Palace File

by Nguyen Tien Hung and Jerrold L. Schecter

(Harper & Row, 542 pp., $22.95)

The literature on Vietnam, so scant in the 1960s, when it was most needed, is now swelling toward flood tide. Much of what is being produced is either redundant or merely memoiristic; but one can now add *The Palace File* to the relatively short list of important books on this grim and complicated subject. It is the product of an occasionally awkward co-authorship between an economist who served as a special assistant to President Nguyen Van Thieu during the last years of the Republic of Vietnam and the distinguished former diplomatic correspondent for *Time* magazine. Hung and Schecter's book provides new and valuable information about the doomed alliance between Washington and Saigon. Their contribution has been to cast light upon that alliance from the South Vietnamese point of view. Their study leaves unanswered some profound questions about the American role in Vietnam, but still it is fascinating, and an unusual way of looking at one of the most dramatic events in recent American history.

Just before the end came for the government of the Republic of Vietnam in April 1975, President Thieu sent Hung to Washington to plead for last-minute help. To assist with his argument, Thieu gave Hung photocopies of 31 secret letters written by Presidents Nixon and Ford to Thieu. These hitherto unpublished letters form the connective tissue of *The Palace File*. Interspersed with cross references to previously published memoirs and extensive interviews, Hung and Schecter shift the focus away from our usual obsession with the condition of the Americans toward the ultimate victims of the tragedy, the Vietnamese themselves.

This is the story the way Thieu and Hung want it remembered. Predictably, it differs sharply from the story presented by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in their memoirs. In essence, *The Palace File* advances two theses. First, that Washington's treatment of Saigon from 1969 to 1975 constitutes a "betrayal of an ally unrivaled in American history"; or, as Thieu himself put it, "It is so easy to be an enemy of the United States, but so difficult to be a friend." Second, that had the United States kept its word, South Vietnam would have survived.

In late April 1975 Hung made public two or three of Nixon's letters to Thieu. The full file, placed in the context of other events between 1971 and 1975, does make one sympathetic to at least part of the authors' argument. Nixon's and Ford's letters (presumably written in large part by Kissinger) skillfully combined threats and promises, with the intention of pushing Thieu into accepting a cease-fire agreement that he felt was fatally flawed.

Nixon, Kissinger, and Ford have defended themselves in the past with various explanations and denials: that Watergate prevented the United States from saving South Vietnam; that Hanoi broke the agreements; that liberals in Congress shackled the government with restrictive anti-war legislation; that they regret having treated Saigon so harshly; and so on. Each of these explanations falls short of fully satisfying, and of course they are somewhat contradictory. Still, I do not mean to make light of Nixon's and Kissinger's dilemma. Seeking a way to end America's involvement in Vietnam with-

To paraphrase no significant author's. With all omissions, its and its diminutive, its vulgarization of Hemingway's is a travesty.

out getting blamed for the probable consequences of our departure, they selected a method that required some deception of almost everyone.

To conservatives, they wished to appear tough—hence such actions as the Christmas bombing of 1972. To liberals, and to war-weary Americans in general, they wished to appear to be moving toward the end of America's involvement in Indochina—hence the gradual withdrawal of American troops, and Kissinger's "peace is at hand" statement in October 1972. Yet their slow, deliberate ambiguity in the negotiations was designed more for appearances than for purposes of policy. Kissinger in effect conceded this in his own memoirs: by July 1969 (when Nixon visited Saigon), he wrote, "We were clearly on the way out of Vietnam, by negotiations if possible, by unilateral withdrawal if necessary."

To effect that departure without vast international embarrassment, Nixon and Kissinger had to gain approval from the Thieu government for agreements that were, from Saigon's point of view, deeply worrisome, since they permitted North Vietnam to keep well over 100,000 regular military forces in the South after the cease-fire. This was a major concession by Nixon, and it terrified Thieu. The reciprocal Communist concession, that Hanoi would no longer insist on the prior removal of the Thieu government, was hardly the major negotiating achievement that Nixon claimed it was, in the light of what Hanoi had already gained. Thus, to allay Thieu's fears, Nixon reassured Thieu in private letters with phrases and promises too strong for public consumption. If the North Vietnamese violated the Paris Accords, the president vowed, he would respond. "You have my absolute assurance," Nixon wrote after the 1972 elections, "that if Hanoi fails to abide by the terms of this agreement it is my intention to take swift and severe retaliatory action."

Such a commitment would have been repudiated by Congress, however, and by most of the American public. Thus the existence of the letters was a closely guarded secret. Not even Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, who might have had to implement such an "assurance," knew of them, something that to this day he regards as astonishing and appalling. In fact, the letters had little standing as anything more than personal statements of Richard Nixon's. But Thieu, perhaps confused about the na-

34 THE NEW REPUBLIC

3/19/87

then by Bosch.

*The Garden of Eden* was to have been nothing less than Ernest Hemingway's final summation on art and literature, on the nature of love and the body, on the possibilities of human life. But you won't find any of these strong concepts in the book that Scribner's has

published in his name. To paraphrase the publisher, in almost no significant respect is this book its author's. With all its disfigurements and omissions, its heightening of the trivial and its diminishment of the significant, its vulgarization of the great themes of Hemingway's final years, this volume is a travesty.

## PROMISES, PROMISES

### The Palace File
by Nguyen Tien Hung and Jerrold L. Schecter

Nixon, Kissinger, and Ford have defended themselves in the past with various explanations and denials: that Wartergate prevented the United States from saving South Vietnam; that Hanoi broke the agreements; that liberals in Congress shackled the government with restrictive anti-war legislation; that they regret having treated Saigon so harshly; and so on. Each of these explanations falls short of fully satisfying, and of course they are somewhat contradictory. Still, I do not mean to make light of Nixon's and Kissinger's dilemma. Seeking a way to end America's involvement in Vietnam with-

34 THE NEW REPUBLIC