In Saigon between 1965 and 1966, while I was serving as counselor to the American embassy, I lived for about fourteen months in a street called Phan Dinh Phung, a name that had unaccountably slipped my mind, until I came across it again in The Palace File, by Nguyen Tien Hung and Jerrold S. Schecter[Harper & Row, 542 pp., 1986], a recently published history of the last years of the war. I had tried now and then, for one reason or another, to recall my Saigon address, but desultorily; not to the point, say, of going to a library and finding a map of the city. Life is short, there is always too much to do. And here it was, emitting a faint mnemonic pulse, on the very first page of a book I had opened unwillingly—because who wants to go back to all that?—and finally read with bated breath, passionately, as if I did not know how it was going to come out.
Of course I knew, in a general way, how it was going to come out, although the concluding chapters of The Palace File provide no end of details I had failed to register at the time, or registered and then forgot: about how South Vietnam's gold reserves fell into Hanoi's hands; the heroic last stand of the ARVN (the Republic of Vietnam's ground troops) at Xuan Loc; the hopeless attempts to persuade the U.S. Congress to authorize emergency aid, if only to slow down the pace of events and extricate the most endangered people, the most valuable equipment; the beginning of the South Vietnamese exodus.
Hung and Schecter deal briefly and grimly with these incidents, their concern being not so much to wring our hearts as to clinch the argument they have been making, to the effect that in order to get the South Vietnamese to agree to the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon made secret promises (later repeated by Gerald Ford) to President Nguyen Van Thieu that were never kept. This is the central thesis of The Palace File, which is based on a series of hitherto secret communications between the American President and Thieu:
Both President Nixon and Secretary Kissinger promised Thieu that the Seventh Air Force at Nakorn Phanom would be used to bomb North Vietnamese targets if the Paris Accords were violated. [Seventh Air Force chief] General Vogt's oral history clearly demonstrates that his forces were not only a deterrent, but he expected to mount a full-scale response to North Vietnamese violations. Certainly, the letters from President Nixon to President Thieu were commitments that had not been made public or shared privately with the Congress. . . . [F]or the South Vietnamese, however, they were, in fact, part of the understanding.
On April 23, 1975, while the decimated ARVN 43rd regiment was firing its last munitions east of Xuan Loc, holding its ground and inflicting enormous losses on a vastly superior enemy force, Gerald Ford (who had by then succeeded Nixon as President) raised the white flag. In a speech at Tulane University in New Orleans, he said: "America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned." The Vietnamese who heard these words—Hung, for example, who was in Washington, desperately lobbying Congress—were devastated, of course, but not surprised. Nor was there any outcry in the country, so far as I can remember, our people having long since—long before the signing of the "peace" agreement in January 1973—turned its back on Vietnam.
A week later, to be sure, Hanoi's tanks breached the gates of Thieu's palace and a new era—the aftermath—began. For several days, like an unshriven ghost, Saigon came back to lead the evening news. Our troops were long gone, but our embassy staff and other civilians had to be extracted. And then all those unbelievable things happened in Southeast Asia: millions murdered by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia; hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese "boat people" adrift in the South China Sea, raped and despoiled by pirates. Still, a great power cannot lose itself indefinitely in a situation where "all's to be borne and naught's to be done." So the curtain came down.
Few Americans are aware that in the autumn of 1987—more than twelve years after the war's end—the boat people are still coming out at the rate of 1,200-1,500 a month, an astounding exodus for a people whose sense of self is so deeply rooted in the burial places of their families; or that the ethnic Chinese, including tens of thousands who supported Hanoi in the war, have been expelled from Communist Vietnam or interned; or that Hanoi's army is still bogged down in Cambodia defending a puppet government—nguy, the term they once applied so invariably to Saigon; or that the Vietnamese are hungry, even in the bountiful South, hungrier than they have been since the famine that followed the collectivization of the land by the Communists in the North in 1955 and 1956.
The litany goes on, but is anyone listening? Certainly not the "useful idiots" of the Susan Sontag-Mary McCarthy school, that goes without saying—but what about the rest of us? We did the best we could for those people, and the worst; and never learned to distinguish the one from the other. And when the last of our troops left the country in 1973, two years before the fall of Saigon, we had finally reached a consensus: enough was enough.
It still holds, it seems to me, but uneasily. In the fullness of time we built a monument in Washington to mourn our dead. We have had a trickle of novels, memoirs, and films, welling up from many sources, irrepressibly, about mayhem in the jungle and bewildered young men who could not fathom why they were there; and compensatory fantasies of the Rambo type, of course; and even a few attempts, conscientiously financed by foundations and think tanks, to review the historical record on public television. But these, much like the rare works of political and military analysis published in the past few years, have been strangely received, if at all: praised or damned mechanically, as it were, in feeble response to reflexes that have somehow lost their spring. It is as if the Vietnam that once so roiled our body politic, and gave rise to so much reportorial posturing, pop anthropology, and anguished moralism, had been relegated to oblivion, so that we have trouble remembering what it was all about.
And now we have this Palace File, a moving account (and from an unaccustomed angle) of one of the most shattering events of our history. It is a scandalous book, in the biblical sense of the word, producing serious new evidence and argument to prove that we as a nation not only failed our Vietnamese allies but shamelessly betrayed them. It has been available for more than a year now, but—"woe unto him through whom the scandal comes!"— to date I have seen only one review.
Granted, there must be others, beyond my ken, but I think it safe to assume that The Palace File has failed, as they say in the trade, to take off.
This morning's New York Times carries the third or fourth of a series of reports on postwar Vietnam. A number of memoirs and studies of former members or supporters of the Vietcong, now for the most part in exile, have been published by David Chanoff and Doan Van Toai. And most importantly, Ellen J. Hammer has brought out her long-awaited—corrosive and devastating—account of the overthrow and murder of Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, Nhu.[A Death in November, Dutton, 1987]
According to Toai, once a fellow-traveler of the Vietcong and now a research associate at the University of California in Berkeley, there is more ahead; and all this would suggest that the amnesia that followed so hard upon our Vietnamese obsession may be coming to an end. It was never total, and now it remains to be seen whether the larger public, and not just one corner of academia, is ready to go back to "all that." There are always issues more pressing than the past, even the relatively recent past; and this truism is true a fortiori—notoriously—for a people as perennially and programmatically unfinished as ours.
Witness the latest episode in the continuing struggle between the White House and Congress over the direction and management of our foreign affairs. When The Palace File appeared, the welkin was beginning to ring with revelations and rumors about Reagan's faux pas in Iran and Nicaragua and the possibility, so eagerly embraced by his adversaries, that the law had been violated not only by members of the White House staff but by the President himself, so that for the second time in little more than a decade we seemed to be circling around a constitutional crisis—hardly a propitious moment to be digging up old graves in Southeast Asia.
And yet, as the famous rabbi said, if not now, when? If the choice is right the moment is right, by definition. Twelve years have passed since Nguyen Tien Hung left the presidential palace in Saigon with the dossier of top-secret letters from Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford (at least some of them, presumably, drafted by Henry Kissinger) which form the armature of this book. Hung's story needed to be fleshed out, organized, and properly Englished; and Jerrold Schecter, a professional journalist who had covered Southeast Asia for Time, published a scholarly study of political Buddhism, and served a term in our own "palace," the office of the National Security Adviser, during the Carter administration, was well prepared for the job. The result of their collaboration is a remarkable piece of work, always moving if not always persuasive: at once the story of the Vietnamese debacle as seen from inside Thieu's office and a graphic account of the paralysis that overcame American power at the moment of truth—a subject not so far from our present preoccupations, after all.
Near or far, we cannot escape it. The paradox of memory is that it deforms, as it were, truly. We end by becoming a mysterious amalgam of what we remember and what we forget. Hence the significance for me of a Saigon street name, and for our country of the circumstances of Saigon's decline and fall—painful though it be to go back to "all that."
So now I am struggling to summon up the memory of the people who lived in my house on Phan Dinh Phung—of the Vietnamese especially, because I know at least vaguely what has become of my round-eyed colleagues: Levine and Falkiewicz (who will have forgiven me, I hope, for calling them Jacobowsky and the Colonel) and various others who shared these requisitioned digs for a while and then went back to the West and about their business; whereas the Vietnamese have long been beyond my ken: Huong the grumpy cook, Mai the chambermaid, Li the Chinese driver, and the hard-faced security types who hung around day and night, guns bulging under their chinos and floppy sport shirts, and above all my bohemian friend, Tran Thi Do (or Therese, as we called her, using her Catholic name,[Real names have been altered, for obvious reasons.] who shopped and interpreted for us and once prepared a memorable melon soup when Henry Cabot Lodge and some military brass came to dinner, to the enduring mortification of Huong. She showed up briefly in Washington, a year or so after my return, when I was about to leave for my new post at NATO in Brussels; and I saw her in Paris during the peace talks in 1968 to which I was seconded from Brussels, and tried to persuade her to stay. Her mother had a little money in France, and her brother was a doctor in Cannes. But she was, she said, consumed with homesickness, le mal du pays, and insisted on going back and disappeared from view, like so many others.
All these people had visitors, relatives from their villages, sometimes from enemy-infested areas, and Huong—a militant Buddhist who took an equally dim view of the Saigon government and the Vietcong—spent hours talking to them, so that (when there was time and he was willing to distill for me a little of what they said) I sometimes fleetingly had the feeling that I could touch something out there in the mysterious countryside and surmise, if not quite understand, how these people were experiencing the disorder that was roiling the South at that time.
None of this would seem to have much to do with The Palace File, which is the story of the immolation of the republic we helped bring into being after the French left Indochina in 1954—and to which, however imprudently, we pledged "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." No less. The pledge was made and renewed by five successive American administrations, rarely in such resounding rhetoric but perhaps more importantly in deeds, so that when the South Vietnamese began to falter in the early 60's we induced them to fight on by dispatching a half-million of our own troops to their country, building a vast military infrastructure, and organizing a consortium of Asian and Pacific nations to aid them or at least bolster them morally in their struggle.
These early years, however, are only sketchily evoked in The Palace File. The authors focus on the period after 1971, the decline and fall, their purpose being not only to make us feel the "pity and terror" of it but also to assert a thesis, namely, that our behavior during the last years—and specifically our failure as a nation to honor Nixon's promises to Thieu—"constitutes the betrayal of an ally, unrivaled in American history."
The verdict is severe. It is all very well for an old-world country, perfidious Albion, say, to be cynical about its alliances. "England has neither permanent friends nor permanent enemies. It has permanent interests." But this is not for us. We need to think of ourselves as a moral people, perhaps this is the most permanent of our interests. Faced with that terrible sentence from The Palace File, we look for attenuating circumstances, and although these are not hard to find they turn out to be the very same arguments that persuaded us to abandon our friends in Vietnam in the first place. The incompetence and fecklessness of our allies made them difficult, if not impossible, to defend; the costs were staggering, incommensurate with any good we might achieve; a growing number of Americans had come to feel, however wrongly, that the war was immoral to begin with, or had lost its moral sanction because of the manner in which it was fought. Etc.
These arguments—and I have cited only a few—were at least arguable. They could be answered but they were mutually reinforcing and finally overwhelming, unless we were willing to go back to the beginning and carry the war to the North, the source of all our troubles. But this was ruled out because it might embroil us with the Chinese. Or so we believed.
A misbegotten affair, and quite hopeless—such was the view of Sargent Shriver, the American ambassador to France in 1968, long before Nixon wrote his letters to Thieu. He suggested that I should leave the Harriman-Vance delegation to the peace talks in Paris (the open ones that were being conducted while Kissinger and North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho were doing the real negotiating in secret) and do something useful, like coming to work for him. The Vietnam game was over, there was nothing for it but to get out.
Shriver was a good man, amiable and intelligent, but I was dismayed by his readiness to walk away from "all that"—as if the government of a great power could simply repudiate the debts of its predecessors. "So we made a mistake. Let's admit it and cut our losses." But what, then, would happen to the South Vietnamese?
On Phan Dinh Phung I knew no one except the Japanese ambassador who lived across the street and was good enough to invite me to dinner when I moved in; and people to nod to, of course, including an old man who sold pho, a highly seasoned North Vietnamese soup, from a pushcart. A dead ringer for Ho Chi Minh, according to Falkiewicz, but his pho was delicious. Thousands of people lived and doubtless still live on our street, one of those great broad southern French avenues of Saigon that run interminably east and west, plane-tree-shaded and elegant until one approaches Le Van Duyet, where a Buddhist monk made a torch of himself in 1963 and hastened the downfall of Ngo Dinh Diem; turning meaner and more populous as you proceed westward, bearing north toward the air base at Tan Son Nhut where Therese's mother, if memory serves, owned a house, although she lived on Hai Ba Trung. Or south toward the teeming Chinatown of Cholon—the Big Market. The sense of the place comes back slowly, a patchy disjointed sense, because it takes time and leisure to assimilate a great city; and we had almost none of either.
I say we, meaning the embassy people, but I really cannot speak for the mass of Americans. And mass was increasingly the word. Soon after my arrival in Saigon in 1965, and quite apart from the growing plethora of journalists, the city began swarming with motley assortments of Americans, some of whom seemed to have precious little to do: aspiring writers accredited by countercultural publications; hungry photographers without fixed assignments; delegates of various cockamamie committees; pop anthropologists—they brought a 60's atmosphere to the city center, with their guitars and marijuana and Australian bush hats.
Remembering them now it occurs to me that they were a bizarre little fringe benefit, as it were, of our decision to elbow the South Vietnamese aside and take over their war. But was there ever such a decision? If so, it had been deemed too cosmic for my ears when I went through Washington, en route to Honolulu and Saigon; nor had it ever been announced, out of a "decent respect for the opinion of mankind," to "a candid world." Declarations, formalities, national mobilization— these things were long out of style. We had the Tonkin Gulf resolution, to be sure, and we had dropped some bombs on Northern boat docks in August 1964; and then, if memory serves, on enemy concentrations in the South in February 1965, when the "Rolling Thunder" program (of air attacks on the North) was getting under way. The idea was not so much to do serious damage as to warn Hanoi to cease and desist. I remember sitting with Ambassador Maxwell Taylor in the MAC-V (Military Assistance Command-Vietnam) situation room and watching General Westmoreland describe, pointer in hand, how the marines would land on the beaches at Danang.
The South Vietnamese were not consulted on these operations; they were merely informed, usually ex post facto, if at all. They were reeling from a combination of troubles: political chaos in Saigon, increasing infiltration from the North, larger-scale Vietcong attacks. Which brings back an even earlier memory of MAC-V, probably my first, when as a new official at the embassy I was paying a courtesy call and General Richard Stilwell came out of his boss Westmorland's office, shaking his head sadly, and said to a colleague of mine who was steering me toward the exit: "This is it. These little fellows can't hack it." What "it" was I've forgotten; but the words have stayed with me. If the "little fellows" could not hack it, a new term for my lexicon, we Americans of course could.
My point is that this was a pivotal moment. I had been accredited to the Republic of Vietnam, a troubled, weak, misgoverned, and possibly doomed nation. But now Saigon's role, in the scenario we were writing in collaboration with Hanoi, seemed to be fading away. Surely, this was not what we wanted; and yet no one seemed to realize that this was the effect of everything we did.
Sometime during those early days, having occasion to go to the Tan Son Nhut air base, I found the tarmac littered with mounds of personal effects, suitcases, bundles, wall hangings, ceramic elephants, children, dogs, and unhappy wives; and perhaps some happy wives. The families of American personnel were being evacuated. Until then my colleagues had been living the lives of embassy people everywhere, more or less: office and field work, social activities, church, schools, sports—the whole peacetime bit, including ordinary human contact with local people. In the Foreign Service this sort of thing is encouraged, as everyone knows, except in notoriously hostile countries. The Saigonese I first met were anything but hostile, however critical or skeptical they might be about us. Coming from my last post in chilly Geneva, I found them voluble and easy enough to talk to, if not always open and easy to understand. The cultural gap was huge, obviously, if you had never served in Asia; but why should that daunt a proper Foreign-Service type? I engaged a lovely young person who appeared every morning in a pale green ao dai, to teach me some Vietnamese.
Then suddenly, by March or April, all that was gone, or going. The Vietnamese tended, except in their roles as "counterparts" or office help, mysteriously to disappear. More precisely, as I labor to recall that time, it was we who became preoccupied and lost sight of them. No sooner had the marines landed at Danang and army and air-force units begun to settle in all over the country than we became almost exclusively absorbed with one another; and with the media, which proliferated so that our daily briefings began to resemble mass meetings. I made a great fuss about getting the ARVN to hold daily briefings, but it was hopeless; they were hardly attended and it was rare that any news came out of them.
Certain embassy officers, to be sure, kept trying to maintain some semblance of a normal diplomatic atmosphere. They organized and attended receptions, cocktails, dinners, just as they might have done in Tokyo, London, or Rome; they went to the racetrack on Sundays or picnicked on the Saigon River with diplomatic acquaintances and friends or played tennis or swam at the Cercle Sportif, a dilapidated relic of the French colonial days. Not to speak of the liaisons that sprung up, still, with the elegant Vietnamese women one encountered in such places. But not for long. It soon became impossible for such women to dine out with Americans, for fear of being taken for bar girls. The military flood was rising implacably to engulf the official establishment, so that by the end of the summer of 1965 the correspondents, Americans as well as foreign, sometimes had to be reminded that I was still a civilian, and that my boss was not General Westmoreland but Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge.
Not that it made much practical difference. Barry Zorthian, the Information Chief, was also a civilian; and yet he had officers, including at least one general, on his staff, and military briefings were held under his auspices.
Of course, the Southerners did not actually disappear, nor did we really cease to see them. During the so-called "American war"—from 1965 to 1970—they suffered far more casualties than we did. But politically, and in the world's eyes, the struggle was now between us and Hanoi.
Nguyen Tien Hung, the co-author of The Palace File, was a professor of economics who lived in Washington, D.C., with his American wife and children. That he happened to stop at his mother's house on Phan Dinh Phung when he briefly returned to Saigon in the autumn of 1971 is of no particular consequence, except to me. We were there at different times, but some ghostly trace of us (according to a quite plausible Vietnamese superstition) must continue to hover over the place; so now I can think of him as a sort of neighbor.
The American role in the war was winding down in 1971 and Hung, with the candor of an economist, believed that if the South offered to supply the North with rice and other commodities, Hanoi might be induced to leave the republic in peace; and he hoped during his visit to interest Thieu in this idea. Thieu, on the other hand, was eager to hear Hung's views on the mood of the United States, on which his fate depended, just as the North's implacable ambition depended on the supplies it received from the Soviet Union. But the important thing about this meeting was simply that the two men hit it off, and Hung—although initially suspect as a member of a Diemist family—was invited back.
On his next trip, however, in the spring of 1972, he had to wait for some days before he could see Thieu, who was very busy at the South Vietnamese Joint General Staff (JGS). The Communists, on the night of Hung's arrival, had launched their Easter offensive, sending tanks and motorized artillery for the first time massively across the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the demarcation line between North and South established by the Geneva conference of 1954. The South Vietnamese should have been prepared for this but weren't; they were accustomed to operating with the help of Westmoreland's computerized command center, MAC—V, and the JGS was ill-equipped to maneuver and supply their regional and regular forces with the requisite speed. Still, they were learning. Surprised and badly mauled at first, they rallied and drove Hanoi's troops from Quangtri, taking heavy casualties but destroying about half the invading force.
The other half, however, did not withdraw across the DMZ. Despite the vigorous pounding it took from General Truong's artillery and from American aircraft based in Thailand, it remained in the South, rebuilding and augmenting its strength with fresh troops and new Soviet equipment—and signaling ominously that Hanoi was shifting into the conventional mode. The Vietcong had been decimated during the Tet offensive, early in 1968, and all but eliminated as a fighting force thereafter: the peasants and city dwellers of the South had been invited to the General Uprising (foreseen in the Communist scenario as the climactic phase of the class struggle) and failed to come. So the future, Hanoi was saying, belonged to the regular army, and the question of what to do about the North Vietnamese military presence in the South had become—for Saigon, especially—the key issue in the secret negotiations that Henry Kissinger was conducting with Hanoi's Le Duc Tho in Paris—negotiations about which Thieu suspected that he was being told only what Kissinger wanted him to know.
This was a crucial moment. Even in the Vietnamese political context, where prevarication was normal and mistrust a matter of elementary prudence, Nguyen Van Thieu impressed his associates as an inordinately suspicious man—the proverbial paranoiac with ample grounds for his paranoia. In 1963, as a young colonel in command of the Fifth Infantry Division, he had played a curiously ambivalent role in the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem. The affair had left him with a sense of transgression that he never managed to shake off, nor did he ever forgive the officers responsible for murdering Diem and his brother and thus, in his view, turning a political act into a common crime. The cruelest letter in The Palace File, therefore, and surely the most shocking, is the one in which Nixon, exasperated by Thieu's refusal to approve a penultimate draft of the Paris Accords, reminds him of the fate that befell Diem in 1963 and suggests that something of the sort might happen again. But it will take a year of secret diplomacy to bring matters to such a point.
Meanwhile I can imagine Thieu in 1972 plying Hung with questions. What are the Americans up to? Why does Nixon allow that man to talk to the Communists behind my back? Le Duc Tho, who treated Kissinger with a mixture of arrogance and condescension, had broken off the talks in March, as if to say: time out, chum, while you get a load of this; and then produced an offensive which had cost Hanoi 75,000 casualties and mountains of materiel but might well, if the North Vietnamese troops were permitted to remain in the South, win them the war.
To be sure, Thieu received a heartwarming letter from Nixon at this juncture—the sixth item in the Palace File—announcing the mining of Haiphong harbor, which had berthed some 350 Soviet ships during the preceding year, according to the CIA. This would certainly bring Le Duc Tho back to Paris again, even if he had not intended to come back in any case—but to what end? With what agenda? And why, if not to legitimize the present situation, should the Americans talk to him before he withdrew his troops to the North?
It is difficult, knowing what we now know, not to get ahead of this story. Hung, of course, could not possibly be expected to answer Thieu's questions. Nor could anyone else. This was early 1972, remember, and Nixon was still glowing from his February trip to China and looking forward to visiting Moscow in May. Watergate was an apartment complex on the Potomac, nothing more. In his first letter to Thieu, written on the eve of his departure for Peking, Nixon had graciously defined the position he would take if the subject of Vietnam came up: "I want to assure you that I will set forth clearly and forcefully the position of the United States and the Republic of Vietnam that the war in Vietnam must be ended through direct negotiations with Hanoi or, failing that, by the growing ability of the Republic of Vietnam to defend itself against Hanoi's aggression." And a few paragraphs later: "With respect to my visit to Moscow in May, I wish to make it clear that the United States has no intention of dealing over the heads of its friends and allies in any manner where their security interests might be involved." But wasn't this precisely what Nixon had already sent Kissinger to Paris to do?
Alas, the fate of the Smaller Kingdom was at stake, and the lords of the Larger Kingdom seemed increasingly distant and distracted. In raising such questions, as he did repeatedly throughout that fateful year, Thieu was doing what came naturally. He was worrying out loud. Small wonder that he kept Nixon's letters in his desk drawer and reread them, according to Hung, again and again.
Withal, there were omens and signs in these letters that Thieu could not read at all, even with the help of Hung and other American-educated members of his staff. On April 6, 1972, Nixon had written to assure him that the United States viewed Hanoi's Easter offensive as "a flagrant and outrageous violation of both the Geneva Accords of 1954 and the 1968 understandings" (i.e., the bombing halt negotiated by the Harriman-Vance mission in Paris) and to assure him that "the United States . . . will not hesitate to take whatever added military steps are necessary. . . ." So far so good—especially the delphic reference to added steps. They could only be what Ambassador Bunker and General Abrams had already hinted at: aeronaval action against the North.
For Thieu this was a consummation devoutly to be wished. His feeling was that the war was now entering a new and decisive phase. The South was increasingly prosperous and secure, although the departure of more than a half-million Americans would cause some painful economic problems for a time. The Vietcong had largely disappeared, except as a façade for Northern troops. The PAVN, Hanoi's regular army, was now removing the camouflage, as it were, unfurling its banners and preparing to move massively and in its own name. Thieu's instinct as a military man was to seek to spoil these preparations. But how? Bombing Northern railheads and roads had never seriously impeded infiltration, even when the PAVN was losing 50 percent of its men on the way down through the jungle. Something had to be done to interdict the massive Soviet input at the other end. Indeed, the failure to take such measures had always puzzled the South Vietnamese and made them wonder, as they were only too prone to do anyway, about our ultimate intentions. And so, when a letter from Nixon arrived on May 9, announcing that Hanoi's harbors were at last to be mined, it was welcome, to say the least.
But why must there always be a worm in the apple? "The foregoing actions," said Nixon's letter, "will continue until . . . the implementation of an internationally supervised cease-fire throughout Indochina and the release of prisoners of war." And when these conditions were met, "We will stop all acts of force . . . and U.S. forces will be withdrawn from Vietnam within four months."
Now Thieu was reconciled by then to the departure of our ground troops; they had in fact for the most part already left; and he assumed—at that point everyone assumed—that our air and naval power would remain available to intervene in case of need, especially if a cease-fire negotiated and sponsored by us was broken. What bothered him in Nixon's letter was that there was no reference, again, to the presence of the North Vietnamese in the South.
This, for Thieu, was not only a military threat, since the PAVN was bigger and better equipped than his army; it was also a political nightmare. The Southerners were being asked to stake their lives on the assumption that an independent South could and would survive. Would not the presence of the PAVN, combined with the departure of the Americans, undermine that assumption—and even suggest that Washington and Hanoi had made a deal at the expense of Saigon?
To nurture such suspicions, which had the effect of a chemical weapon on the nerves of the Southerners, had always been an essential part of the dau tranh, the military-political struggle—"the scientific application of Leninist principles," a member of the North Vietnamese delegation once told me in Paris, "under circumstances prevailing in our country." To Nguyen Van Thieu, who had fought with the Vietminh against the French and acquired some grasp of Communist tactics, all this seemed too obvious for Nixon to miss—unless, as Thieu thought Nixon's emissary in Paris was doing, Nixon was also looking for an excuse (after the requisite "decent interval") to cut and run.
The odd thing is that in all the wrangling over treaty drafts which now ensued (and went on and on until Thieu was bludgeoned into accepting the Paris Accords in January 1973) a sort of prudery prevented either side from alluding to the obvious fact that the basic problem was not in the text but on the ground. Hanoi, having sacrificed hundreds of thousands of its young men and endured daily bombing for eight long years, was simply not going to remove its troops and give up its designs on the South unless it was forced to do so; and this would require energetic and costly moves by the ARVN and continued American air and naval support, including a sustained effort to interdict the PAVN's lines of supply.
What mattered, then, was the relationship of forces, and what Thieu failed or refused to understand was that the American President, even after his overwhelming electoral triumph of November 1972, was no longer in a position to rethink and refight, even on a much reduced level, a war which the American people expected him to end. The repatriation of our troops had lessened political pressures, to be sure, but it had also in a curious way increased the public's impatience with the situation, its desire to have done with it at last. Initiatives like the Cambodian incursion, or the mining of Haiphong harbor, could be taken only within a perspective of withdrawal; and Nixon would pay a heavy political price for each.
This, of course, was the consequence of the strategies of "flexible response" and "limited war" inherited by Nixon from the Kennedy and Johnson administrations—strategies based on premises (e.g., the political situation in China, the patience of the American people, the Soviet interest in détente) that had proved to be utterly false; and it meant that already in 1972, before Watergate, when Nixon was approaching the apogee of his power, actions that demonstrably "worked" in Southeast Asia were debilitating failures in Washington, since they strengthened the hand of the McGoverns, the Kennedys, and the Abzugs, for whom the victory of Hanoi was inevitable and, in any event, a lesser evil than continued support of the South Vietnamese regime.
For all the hours that Thieu spent poring over Nixon's letter of May 9, one phrase seems to have escaped his notice, or to have been dismissed as inconsequential: the one about prisoners of war. Of course peace would mean an exchange of prisoners, this went without saying. But we know how ardently Nixon dreamed of rescuing our men before the November elections, or at least before his second inauguration. This mixture of motives and feelings is very much in the American vein, as recent events remind us. It never occurred to Thieu, on the other hand, presiding as he did over a country whose casualties were numbered in the hundreds of thousands, that the fate of a few hundred hostages could loom so large in an American President's mind.
Never, that is, until long after the event. Exhaling his bitterness in 1979, in an interview published by the German weekly Der Spiegel, Thieu said: "What he [Kissinger] and the U.S. government exactly wanted was to withdraw as fast as possible, to secure the release of U.S. prisoners. They said they wanted an honorable solution, but really they wanted to wash their hands of the whole business and scuttle and run. But . . . they did not want to be accused of abandoning us. That was the difficulty."
An understandable bitterness, but misdirected and unfair—such was the gist of Kissinger's reaction to the Spiegel interview. And so he privately wrote to Thieu, who now lives in London, in January 1980: "I continue to believe that the balance of forces . . . could have been maintained if Watergate had not destroyed our ability to obtain sufficient aid . . . 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."
There is something moving in this letter—almost (but not quite) a mea culpa from a man little noted for brooding on his own mistakes, although he has repeatedly made the point, as readers of his memoirs will remember, that statesmen are often obliged under the pressure of events to make fateful decisions on the basis of insufficient or uncertain information. But this is not one of the wittily rueful obiter dicta that adorn Kissinger's memoirs; here he is writing to a man who now sees himself consigned to a sort of hell, the ruin of his people, and protesting—sincerely, no doubt—that his intentions were good. The fact remains that both the balance of forces and the American will to provide sufficient aid were profoundly affected, before Watergate, by Kissinger's negotiations (over a period of four years) with Lei Duc Tho.
Thieu, in any event, never replied to Kissinger's letter, although he allowed Hung to include it in The Palace File.
Phan Dinh Phung, after whom "my" street in Saigon was named, was a distinguished scholar, the leader of a 19th-century movement against the French. After the surrender of the boy emperor, Ham Nghi, he stubbornly continued the struggle, was betrayed, captured, and punished, according to Phan Boi Chau's History of the Downfall, in a particularly barbarous manner: the bones of his parents were dug up and burned. This story still causes the Vietnamese to shudder, I am told, despite the many new forms of barbarism they have experienced in more recent times, presumably because something more precious than Phung's corporeal existence was at stake: his spiritual links to home and homeland, to the generation of the departed and the generations to come, symbolized by the graves of his parents and the household altar where the ancestral spirits were enshrined.
To what extent these beliefs still hold I never was able to learn, my friends in Saigon being of different minds on the subject, and there was little time to talk about such things. But it was because of these graves and altars that the Vietnamese were said to be so deeply attached to the villages they have been fleeing from in such surprising numbers since the war.
For outsiders there is nothing more difficult than to understand and measure the persistence of old ways of thinking in evolving cultures, especially in those that are violently invaded by new ideas—first, because the point of departure, the original mind set, remains so foreign to us, and then because it is not a person whose thinking and behavior we are trying to understand, which would be complicated enough, but an infinitely various people who reflect the old and the new in an infinite variety of modes and combinations, so that we are driven to oversimplify what otherwise we would be unable to grasp at all.
This can lead to gross misjudgments, as when Frances FitzGerald in her immensely successful Fire in the Lake (1972) argued that there was a profound harmony, an almost mystical accord, between the praxis of the Vietnamese Communists and the ancient system of values and beliefs—that Communism, in short, was not only the wave of the future in that unhappy country but also, curiously, the wave of the past.
This book created a considerable stir, as I recall, because it was no longer merely saying that our intervention in Southeast Asia was ill-conceived and doomed, which many had said before, but that it would be a good thing if the other side won. But then it did win, and our allegedly wise and prescient adversaries, with their deep roots in Vietnamese tradition, proceeded to wreak such horrors and atrocities on their people, and on the Laotians and Cambodians as well, that the cleansing fire in FitzGerald's lake, the Communist victory in Indochina, must now be seen as it is seen by millions of prisoners and refugees: as one of the worst disasters of our time. (Not that Miss FitzGerald has ever made her apologies to the boat people, as many other former supporters of the Vietnamese Communists have done.)
In Washington, once, I ran into Dang Duc Khoi, who used to serve on the staff of Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky, and asked him to forget Frances FitzGerald's politics and tell me what he thought of her account of the old Vietnamese ethos. Generally, for reasons I feel rather than understand, the Vietnamese are loath to talk about their religion, but in this case Khoi was fairly rabid: "It's bullshit, she's got it all wrong." From which I concluded that Khoi was unable to forget Miss FitzGerald's politics, and let it go at that. Most of Fire in the Lake, after all, despite the promise of the opening chapter, is political: a rehash of the conventional wisdom of the Saigon press corps on the themes I encountered so often (since the correspondents came to see me every day) that I ended by keeping lists of them under such rubrics as VNNDG, meaning the Vietnamese Are No Damned Good, and VCTFT, meaning the Vietcong Are Ten Feet Tall, etc.—such being the foregone conclusions toward which questions, in that atmosphere, were almost always directed.
The point here is not that the conventional wisdom was wrong, or, for that matter, right, but that it was terribly lacking in background and context. Frances FitzGerald at least began with an attempt—practically unique in the journalism of the war—to understand the Vietnamese on something like their own terms. But knowing little to begin with, unable to speak or read Vietnamese, she was obliged to go to France and sit at the feet of Paul Mus, a renowned sociologist who had spent much of his life in Indochina.
There was no American Paul Mus, for the simple reason that we were not interested in the Vietnamese. We became intensely involved with them, perforce, but briefly; and what we learned about them was superficial and functional, as when our "grunts" learned to say dee-dee when they needed to move people in a hurry, or ba-mee-ba, when they wanted a beer. There were exceptions, of course, personal or professional, but on the whole we kept an extraordinary distance from these people, it seems to me now, even as we made our presence felt in every corner of the country. Indeed, the distance grew in direct proportion to our numbers.
That Phan Dinh Phung gave his name to our street is of little consequence to our story, unless it served to remind us that there were other possible paths to national liberation available to the Vietnamese, before and after the rise of Ho Chi Minh's Lao Dong, or Communist party. As Western imperialism ebbed, exhausted by Europe's internecine wars, Asia experienced a rebirth of self-assertion, confused and tentative at first, pulled this way and that by ancient popular traditions and modernizing impulses, so that the Vietnamese in their struggle against the French had access to a wide range of ideas and models, from the Japan of the Meiji restoration to the Japan of the postwar constitution, from the China of the Kuomintang to the China of Mao, not to mention phenomena intellectually if not geographically more distant, from Gandhi to Nehru to Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore.
What we now call Vietnam came under French colonial rule in the heyday of empire and had been subject to French cultural and economic influence for centuries. Vietnam's misfortune—and ours—was that the period of its decolonization coincided with the extraordinary vogue of Marxism among the French intelligentsia after World War II; and that the most talented and charismatic of its anti-colonial leaders, Ho Chi Minh, opted for Leninism early in his career and stuck to it as it evolved into Stalinism, brilliantly adapting its conspiratorial methods to local conditions, emulating (in the movement he forged) the energy and discipline of the Bolsheviks, their patience and also, alas, their peculiar unconcern with the consequences of their action on the people for whom, theoretically, it was undertaken. As they were the instruments of history, their conscience was always clear. Their task was neither to agonize about means nor to indulge in Utopian blue-printing of the future, but to smash the old state and set up a new one, after which they would "proceed to build socialism," as Lenin said on the evening of the October Putsch, with only the foggiest notion of what this entailed.
So the accent of Ho Chi Minh's Lao Dong, or Communist, party was always on how to win, not on what it would do with its victory; and this helps to explain why the state the Communists wound up with in the North after the French gave up and went home remained essentially a war machine, geared and oiled and rigged for further fighting, and not much good for anything else.
But very good for that—especially since the Soviets and the Chinese seemed prepared to fuel the machine forever. It took some hubris to imagine that the soft, slothful, disorganized South could prevail against it or even survive, unless Hanoi could be persuaded to turn its energies elsewhere. But this was unlikely. In his long march to power Ho was known by many other names, and so was the Lao Dong, but the main thrust of their action was always the same: first against their Vietnamese rivals to establish their monopoly of the revolutionary project, so that no nationalist would have anywhere else to go; and only then against the foreigner.
The latter, whether French or American or Chinese, was condemned by the iron law of history; his departure could and should be accelerated by the dau tranh, the movement, but it was inevitable in the long run. The great thing was to ensure that it happened under the leadership of the anointed party, so that there could be no question, afterward, about who was in charge. Thus the Bolshevik praxis, carefully studied by Ho during his long exile in China, Moscow, and Western Europe, not only permitted but required him and his comrades to eliminate other nationalist leaders, even if this meant assassinating them or betraying them to the French police.
The name of the game was power, undiluted, unshared—and unlike the interminable and insufferable chatter of the Frenchified intelligentsia, so busy plotting against one another in the South, it was played for keeps. Indeed, the very existence of an independent South was intolerable, and the major affair of the North, once it had secured its base, was to put an end to it. With military supplies assured and the Northern population thoroughly regimented, only tactical concerns dictated prudence for a time. But all this, as my friend Khoi used to say, was connu et archi-connu, "clear beyond a shadow of a doubt," except to the contemporary versions of Lenin's "useful idiots" in the West.
He might have added that there were useful idiots in Saigon, too. The South was at once indubitably Vietnamese and indubitably different, and the number and quality of Southerners who said vive la difference were such that the Lao Dong was obliged for the moment to concoct an elaborate lie about its intentions, especially after news of how the common folk in the North were faring under Communist rule—stories of famine and bloody repression—began to seep through the bamboo curtain. Hence the creation of the National Liberation Front (NLF) and its military arm, the Vietcong, every unit (as we now know from Hanoi itself) carefully controlled by its core of Lao Dong cadres; and the constantly reiterated promise that the South, until it rallied spontaneously to Communism, would be allowed to go its own way.
Connu et archi-connu! Instructed by experience, the Northerners who had fled to the South—now grown to more than a million—could hardly be expected to fall for this line, but there were others (increasingly as the Diem government disappointed and outraged them) who believed it and others who joined the NLF, or supported it for one reason or another, without believing it or half-believing it or simply hoping that something would happen to make it come true—enough of them to start the war against the South that was as fatal to them in the end as it was to the declared enemies of the Lao Dong.
So much for ancient history—and by way of explaining why the street of Hung's family was called Phan Dinh Phung. Most of the streets of central Saigon were renamed after the French left in honor of the heroes and slogans of the independence movement, ancient and modern, which the Republic of Vietnam claimed to incarnate in defiance of Hanoi. The republic's writ, to be sure, did not run everywhere in the South. During the Buddhist troubles of 1963 it did not always run the full length of Phan Dinh Phung. But now that South Vietnam had got rid of the nefarious and incompetent Diem and his brother—so I was told in Washington and Honolulu when I was briefed for my new assignment—it would pull itself together with our help and offer a haven to the nationalist forces that the Communists had repressed or extinguished in the North: to Catholics and Buddhists, political parties like the Dai Viet and VNQDD, as well as to the Southern sects and ethnic groups, the Cao Dai and Hoa Hao, the Chams and Khmers and Montagnards, that had either survived the age-old drift of the Vietnamese from the Red River delta toward the Mekong, or sprung up during the past hundred years under French imperial rule.
Arriving in Saigon in January 1965, with no inkling of the chaos we had unleashed by sponsoring the overthrow of Diem two years earlier, I thought it a reasonable proposition that, given time and tranquillity, the republic should be able to survive and enhance the world's varietal richness. The South had always been Vietnam's New Found Land or, more recently, its California, offering room and resources for all, and now—the curtain having come down in the North—a promise of freedom. It was a promise as yet more honored in the breach, to be sure, but the republic was barely seven years old and under siege from the day it was born. This much I had gathered from what I had heard and been able to read during the long journey from Geneva to Washington and then to Honolulu and Saigon.
Memory has a way of proliferating; the spirit bloweth where it listeth. The point I was making to begin with was simply that I had forgotten the name of Phan Dinh Phung. And the point of my point, no doubt, was that this was the manner of our involvement in Vietnam. In a few short years, a moment on the scale of history, we went from total obsession to a sort of amnesia. The map of that country was once engraved in our minds, and most of us now can no longer remember whether Hué, the old imperial capital, is north or south of Danang. But of course we cannot leave it at that.
Soon after my arrival, I was shocked to discover that the Communists controlled most of the countryside, in some cases outright, in others functioning as a sort of shadow government alongside the nominal authorities; and they were growing increasingly bold in the cities, where the junta of generals who had overthrown Diem had been pushed aside by Nguyen Khanh, an inept and buffoonish fellow who had been helped to power by an inveterate plotter named Thao.
Under General Khanh the remains of the administration so carefully constructed by Diem and his brother (also murdered in the coup) were dismantled, and any notion that there might be a respectable civilian alternative was rudely put down, so that the Southerners began to suspect with astonishment and terror what was in fact the case: that they were now adrift, and that those who had destroyed Diem's government had done so without the faintest idea of what was to take its place—except, being military men already accustomed to receiving their equipment, munitions, and training from us, that the Americans would provide.
But the Americans, for the moment, had nothing but military assistance to provide. They were willing and at that stage apparently even impatient to wage war, but aside from mouthing platitudes about freedom and justice and winning hearts and minds, and a generous readiness to bear the expense, they had no clue about how to rebuild a South Vietnamese polity. They simply had not thought that far ahead, nor did they think it their business, even now, so that years would pass before a group of the more reasonable army officers—the most capable of whom was Nguyen Van Thieu—would be able to put something viable together.
Two incidents come back to focus the absurd disorder of that time. In the first I am walking down a broad boulevard with Howard Simpson, an embassy officer who (being slated for transfer) is bequeathing to me some of his functions and what little he can of his vast experience, having served several tours of duty in Vietnam, beginning with one in the early 50's. Suddenly down the road comes a column of tanks and armored trucks, with an odd-looking Vietnamese officer standing in the turret of the lead tank, and Simpson stops short at the sight of him.
"Thao, you old bastard," he yells. "What's up?"
The officer, who is wall-eyed, pudgy, and grinning, raises his hand, stops the column, and shouts back: "Howie! How you?"
"Never mind how me! What in hell are you doing?"
"Nothing special, Howie. I am making a coup!"
He pronounced the p in coup, presumably to make it clear to a benighted American. And then the column moved on. What happened to the coup I do not recall. Those first weeks in Saigon were hectic, this being the period when the Vietnamese seemed to be coming up with a new government with each new phase of the moon. But far from being considered an amiable lunatic, Thao—who came of a wealthy Southern Catholic family and had a brother high in the apparatus of the Lao Dong in Hanoi—had an extraordinary talent for ingratiating himself with every faction. And throughout all this Thao held important posts in the South Vietnamese government and remained close to certain elements of the American establishment, especially the CIA—until, after Khanh fell, he was identified as an enemy agent by officers of Thieu's military security, tracked down, and killed. Ten years later the new Communist masters of Saigon confirmed that he had been one of theirs and proclaimed him a national hero, although there are South Vietnamese nationalists, I've been told, who still believe that he was playing a double game: a Machiavellian romantic, they say, who had read too much André Malraux.
What the CIA concluded, if anything, I never found out, but there must have been many in the agency, as there were elsewhere in the American establishment in Saigon, who were not surprised at the rapid disintegration of the republic in 1964 and 1965. These were people—the most eminent being Ambassador Frederick Nolting and General Paul Harkins, the predecessors of Lodge and Westmoreland—who had warned that by intervening as we did, with no assurance that anything better would follow the removal of Diem, we were creating a huge vacuum and assuming a responsibility for which we were quite unprepared. And this of course is exactly what happened. In the confusion that resulted, phenomena like Thao and Khanh flourished briefly while the Vietcong all but completed their conquest of the countryside and began (but still prudently) to strengthen their urban networks.
And this brings me to my second epiphany—a sad little joke told by my old friend Bui Diem, who was later to serve as Vietnamese ambassador in Washington. In his memoirs, Bui Diem[ In the Jaws of History, by Bui Diem with David Chanoff, Houghton Mifflin, 1987] confesses that he had supported the overthrow of Diem in the hope and expectation that it would be followed (at our insistence, if necessary) by the creation of a constitutional government to which, he believes, the great majority of the South Vietnamese would have rallied. Instead, he says, the amorphous junta drifted "from incompetence to incompetence" and the stage was set for "a firm hand at the helm" which Khanh, if only because he was willing to act at that moment, was simply assumed to be:
As a result, Khanh was treated from the start as a strongman who enjoyed America's staunch friendship. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was even sent to South Vietnam to stump the country with him, as a visible symbol that the United States stood beside the new leader. This kind of performance did not come naturally to McNamara. On one occasion he grasped Khanh's hand and declared, "Vietnam muon nam!" Unfortunately, whoever taught McNamara the Vietnamese phrase had neglected to also teach him the proper intonation. So instead of saying "Long Live Vietnam," what he actually said, to the vast amusement of his audience, was "Vietnam, lie down!"
In the face of all this, the failure of the Communists of the North and their Southern allies to win the "hearts and minds" of the city folk is surprising, to say the least. Perhaps it was simply a matter of time. But one reason, precisely, for the vast increase in the urban population that occurred in the early 60's was that the Saigon government, while progressively losing its grip on the countryside, was still able to afford some protection in the towns. From their sanctuaries along the borders, in Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam, the Communists could move forces in and out of the country to collect rice and recruits and to enlarge the "leopard spots" of "liberated territories" almost at will—so that, even if Saigon had a competent administration, the security problem could never be solved, only palliated, unless we did what Lyndon Johnson and Dean Rusk kept assuring the Communists that we would not do: go into the sanctuaries and "widen the war." Instead we relied on attrition to discourage an adversary who was willing and able to take a hundred casualties for every one of ours—and who in fact would sacrifice many hundreds of thousands of men in the coming decade and still field a force of twenty divisions for the final assault on Saigon.
Quite apart from the appeal of their ideology (always limited in the South) and the very real prestige they had acquired in defeating the French, the Communists of the North and their Southern allies were operating from positions of strength. It was the Soviet-Hanoi alliance that was the superpower in Southeast Asia; and the strength of the Communists on the ground was immeasurably bolstered by the sympathy of people everywhere who saw them as victims of imperialism heroically fighting for self-determination and freedom—and the United States in the role of a neocolonialist bully seeking to prop up a puppet regime. They were increasingly adept at generating and exploiting this perception, so deeply rooted in the guilt and self-doubt of the West, whereas the American leadership never learned to take it seriously or to factor it into its calculations. And yet, as we all know now, it was bound to be extremely important—perhaps decisive—in the end.
In short, everything favored the Communist enterprise, and this would have been a good time for us to heed the counsel of prudence and declare not victory, as Senator Aiken of Vermont was to suggest some years later, but defeat: to leave the squabbling Southern generals to their own devices and take our advisers and Green Berets and AID administrators home to ponder the complexities of "nation-building" in Southeast Asia. Such an outcome would have been an unhappy one for the Southerners, but not so devastating as what was to happen ten years later. And it would have spared us an infinite grief.
Nowadays all this is so dreadfully obvious, connu et archi-connu, that one tends to forget how out of the question it was in 1965. Lyndon Johnson would not hear of it. The young press corps in Saigon (including such future antiwar activists as David Halberstam of the New York Times) would not hear of it, either—these being the hawkish fellows who had roused John Kennedy against Diem on the grounds that he was incapable of winning a war for which they, at least, were ready to "bear any burden, pay any price." And at home the great majority in Congress would not hear of it—not in any case without setting off a great national debate about "Who lost Indochina?"
So we sent in our troops and helped the generals sort themselves out and by dint of enormous sacrifices over the next five years created, or more exactly recreated, the situation half-jokingly described by Senator Aiken. By the early 70's, when we were withdrawing the last of our ground forces, the republic had a reasonably competent government and a credible army; and it had been largely freed—after the bloody paroxysm of Tet in 1968 and the joint U.S.-South Vietnamese operation in Cambodia in 1970—from the threat of internal subversion. Thus it was possible for the first time to issue weapons to village self-defense forces in areas once controlled by the Vietcong.
The North had not given up, of course, nor would it in the foreseeable future. But it could be contained as long as the South was willing to fight and we were prepared to supply the means required to maintain the military balance, including the occasional intervention of our naval and air forces.
So this was the upshot of what the Vietnamese think of as the "American war"—from 1965 to 1971. The South lived—dependent upon us, to be sure, but hardly more so than the North was dependent on Moscow. We could therefore now do as the good Senator suggested: declare victory, and go home.
Needless to say, this is not what we did—not quite, and therefore not at all. It is a complicated story, and The Palace File tells it well. Richard Nixon withdrew our armed forces as efficiently and rapidly as they had been inserted by Lyndon Johnson, and with the same sort of consultation with our allies, i.e., none, and meanwhile sent Henry Kissinger to conduct secret diplomacy with Le Duc Tho, which had the effect (however unintended) of assuring the Northerners that the prize would be theirs if they only persisted, and of suggesting to the Southerners that something sinister was afoot. At the end of the so-called peace process we persuaded, indeed forced, South Vietnam to put its head in a noose, the Paris Peace Accords of January 1973, while solemnly swearing that if the trap were sprung we would be there to cut the rope and chastise the villains.
All this was not only explicitly stated in Nixon's letters to Thieu but reinforced by military planning, e.g., inviting the South Vietnamese corps commanders to our air-force headquarters in Thailand to show them how precisely we were planning to target our attacks if the Communists violated the cease-fire. And then, of course, the trap was sprung, in full view of the world, and lo! we were not there.
In our entire history, Hung and Schecter maintain, there is no precedent for such a betrayal. But they immediately mitigate the condemnation by raising, if not settling, some obvious questions. How valid were the commitments of Nixon and Ford? Why were they never made public? Did Nixon and Kissinger cynically betray our allies in the hope of achieving a "decent interval"?
To these questions Kissinger replies, correctly, that it was not the practice in those days to make presidential letters public, and that in any case there was nothing secret about Nixon's determination to enforce the Paris agreement by military action if necessary. Both he and Nixon also indignantly deny that they were being cynical or merely looking for a "decent interval." On the contrary, Kissinger was, and remains, convinced that if not for Watergate, Nixon, with the same willingness that he had shown to take the political heat during the Christmas bombing of 1972, would have responded with air strikes to North Vietnamese violations.
I have no difficulty in believing this: it makes sense and follows logically from Nixon's public commitment to achieve a "peace with honor." But finally, of course, would it have made any difference? Even if we had intervened this time, wasn't Hanoi's victory inevitable in the end? Or would the changing foreign policy of China have brought a new factor into play on the side of an independent South Vietnam?
Etc., ad infinitum—interminable, tiresome, tantalizing questions, begetting more questions, and meanwhile, as Kissinger keeps reminding us in his memoirs, you are obliged to act, whether you have satisfactory answers or not.
Or not to act, which is what it came down to in March 1975. You are Gerald Ford, say, and the North Vietnamese, in open violation of the agreement that Kissinger had spent four years negotiating, are coming straight down over the central highlands to the coast and the highway to Saigon, The Soviets, in contemplation of realizing a return—at last—on a very old investment, have built them a pipeline through Laos and Cambodia, emerging at Loc Ninh, a couple of hours from the coast. But now the United States Congress, led by Jack Kennedy's younger brother and Lowell Weicker and Bella Abzug, has informed the notoriously "authoritarian" and "corrupt" Thieu regime (over your veto) that they will get no more help from us. Not a bullet. The South Vietnamese army is demoralized and crumbling, like the French and British in the face of Nazi Germany in June 1940. In a few days our ambassador and his staff will have to run for it, ignominiously, with at best a handful of our Vietnamese friends.
At this point, say, General Vogt, the commander of our air force in Thailand, flies over the area and reports that he has never seen anything like it: enemy tanks, artillery, half-tracks, personnel carriers, bumper to bumper—since there are only a couple of roads capable of carrying this kind of traffic—all the way down to the outskirts of Saigon. After groping around in the jungle for years, and dropping millions of tons of explosives on trees, we have a target. "A turkey shoot," Vogt calls it. We could make those roads look like the Sinai in 1967, after the Israeli air force destroyed Nasser's motorized columns in the desert.
What would you do? Does the congressional interdiction wipe out your responsibility to provide for the security of our people in Saigon? Would you order the air-force commander and the carriers cruising along the coast to wipe out all that congestion on the highways and give the South Vietnamese a chance to pull themselves together? And thereby, in all probability, even if the American public rallied to your support, open up a constitutional crisis as bitter as the one that almost led to the impeachment of Richard Nixon?
I don't know whether such a notion ever crossed Gerald Ford's mind. I doubt it. In any case, it's all behind us now. A great power cannot afford to throw good money after the bad and lose itself in remorse and introspection. . . . Or can it? Should it?
The last letter in The Palace File is from Thieu, begging for the help he had been promised again and again. It was never answered.
For all that it is born of Hung's sorrow and Schecter's indignation, their book remarkably keeps its cool. It has the tone and gait of a historical narrative, not of a political tract—recounting lucidly what happened to the government and people of the South after we turned away, which each of us did at different times, of course, depending on who we were and how we were related to the situation. In my case, for example, I quit the Paris delegation late in 1969, after Kissinger had begun holding his secret trysts with Le Duc Tho, and retired from the Foreign Service. During the period covered by The Palace File, I forgot the few words of Vietnamese that I had learned and gradually lost touch with my friends in Saigon.
As a national phenomenon, however, the amnesia that befell us can be dated with some precision: the Paris Accords were signed on January 27, 1973, instituting a cease-fire in place and various political arrangements, including an international supervisory commission in which no one believed. For the North Vietnamese this was merely a phase, albeit an important one, in their famous fight-talk-fight strategy. For Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger it was a culmination and a release. Planes could now at last be sent to Hanoi to pick up our prisoners, who had been subjected to torture and ignominy not only by the Communists but also by visiting American literati; and by mid-July the last of our combat battalions was gone from the South. On August 15, ignoring warnings that the Paris agreements would have to be enforced, the Congress of the United States decreed that there would be no more funds for American military action of any kind in Indochina.
Richard Nixon, by then, was in irremediable trouble, although impeachment proceedings were still many months away. For Cambodia the worst was yet to come, as it was for Saigon, but the news media would now be shifting their attention elsewhere—to the Middle East, for example, where Egyptian staff officers were once again bent over maps of the Sinai. "Vietnam," in the words of a well-known survivor of Camelot, "could now return to the obscurity it so richly deserved."
What happened thereafter is told—admirably, in my opinion—from a point of view that strikes us as surprising and rather odd for the simple reason that it is South Vietnamese; and to this we have not been accustomed. The effect is to remind us that we have been experiencing the war in a multitude of ways, "in-country," as we used to say, or out, through the pain and bewilderment of our soldiers, or as a quarrel with others and with ourselves—but always or almost always this dimension has been missing: the people about whom or for whom, allegedly, it was fought. For this alone, and quite apart from the hitherto unpublished letters and skillful narration, The Palace File deserves an attentive reading.
But there is nothing in The Palace File to equal the pathos of Hung's last visit to Washington, as the enemy tanks are closing in on Saigon. Congress is in recess and no one suggests that it might be called back. The idea is absurd. Gerald Ford is playing golf in Palm Springs. Hung wanders down the long empty corridors clutching his letters, which should have been published years ago. Thieu has always refused to publish them or even allude to them because they are marked top-secret and he feared to anger the lords of the Larger Kingdom, his last resort. Now it is too late.
As he walks, Hung encounters two or three departing solons, including the Senator from Massachusetts, younger brother of the President who first committed American troops to South Vietnam. But Teddy is pressed for time, and makes it clear that his celebrated compassion has its limits; he will pay any price, bear any burden, to bring this conversation with Hung to an end.
And then there is Hung's last sad ill-attended press conference which is reported by some surly stringers on remote back pages, if at all. Someone, it seems, thought to ask Henry Kissinger about this obscure Vietnamese who claimed to have some letters which etc., and Kissinger said yes, letters had passed between Nixon and Thieu, but no, there was nothing newsworthy in them (which, although it scandalizes Schecter and Hung, was sadly true in the sense that there had been nothing secret about the promises that we as a nation, speaking through an almost unanimous Congress, were now unwilling to keep, no matter what).
And so it goes. Back in Vietnam, we are overwhelmed with pathetic detail: an incident with some soldiers and a roadblock, a talk with an old peasant woman, desperate attempts to save endangered people and equipment; clues to a situation that we could not deal with honorably and therefore resolved to forget. In this richness of reference and atmosphere the protagonists of The Palace File come alive and we begin to recover, curiously, not only the little we knew about these people, our friends and victims, but much that we surmised and lacked the time or wit or patience to understand. And now there is something odd, different, in this effort to remember what we never properly knew. Is there any point to it? The story, after all, ends no less badly than it did before. Only the configuration has changed—and the moral center. It used to be a story about us. Now it is a story about them.
Nineteen sixty-eight was the climactic year of the American war, or more specifically of the American phase of the thirty-year war, in Indochina. This was the year of the Tet offensive, a pyrotechnic display featuring dramatic scenes of fighting within the American embassy compound in Saigon and the unprecedented ferocity of the struggle for Hué, preceded—by barely more than a week—by the onset of the siege of Khesanh. All these actions ended badly, even disastrously, for the Communist attackers on the ground, but they inflicted heavy casualties, terrified the South Vietnamese population, and profoundly affected American morale.
The Communists, as they have since told us, were now deliberately trading what they called the "blood and bones" of their followers, especially of their Southern followers who might in any case prove troublesome after the war, for political advantage in an arena they saw, quite correctly, as far more decisive than Hué or Khesanh. In Washington, the Defense Secretary had resigned, a month after the storming of the Pentagon by antiwar demonstrators; but the main thing was that this was an election year in the U.S., during which much of the Democratic party would behave as if it were already in opposition while Nixon, the Republican candidate, would mysteriously allude to a "secret plan" to end the American involvement—an echo of Eisenhower's "I shall go to Korea" promise of 1952. The North Vietnamese, who would later offend Henry Kissinger by instructing him on U.S. public opinion, could therefore deduce from the campaign posture of both candidates what they had already learned from the Soviet ambassador in Washington: that American policy—just as it had been based after 1963 on a national decision to stay in—would now have to conform to an equal and opposite consensus in favor of getting out.
On the other hand, the American war had given Thieu a victory of sorts: the Vietcong was finished, the delta increasingly secure, the government of the republic alive and in better shape than at any time since the early days of Diem. So Hanoi's problem was to make haste slowly: to accelerate the American departure sufficiently to deny the South time to consolidate its hold on the countryside and prepare for the PAVN's frontal assault; but not to such a point that the Americans, ceasing to take casualties and bearing a much lighter financial burden, would be able to install themselves in a garrison situation, as in Korea, and thus deprive the North of the prize it had sought for so long and at such great cost.
Richard Nixon, presumably, made similar calculations. For us, too, and for our allies, timing was crucial. Each move we made on the ground would have to be balanced against the effects it produced on our troops and at home. During the first five years of the American war our battle deaths had totaled some 16,000. By the end of 1968 the number had dramatically risen to 30,610. Disengagement began in 1969, but Hanoi saw to it that fighting remained heavy, with the result that another 10,000 Americans died in the course of the year. And the fact that we were now on our way out, in addition to affecting military morale, seemed to galvanize the most radical elements of the antiwar movement—those who were in fact pro-war, but on the enemy's side. In May 1970, for example, a few days after the start of a joint U.S.-South Vietnamese incursion into Cambodia, four students at Kent State University in Ohio were shot and killed by National Guardsmen during a demonstration; and all across the country colleges shut down in protest. Still, the Cambodian invasion vastly improved the security of Vietnam's eastern provinces, including the great rice-growing area south of Saigon; and Thieu had reason to be proud of the conduct of his troops.
So it wasn't easy to draw up a statement of profit and loss. In this instance, my old friend Bui Diem, Thieu's ambassador to Washington, drafted a cable to Saigon to warn that Hanoi, on the whole, had come out ahead politically. So he tells us in his memoirs. But Thieu, with his Mandarin Confucian mentality, refused to take the point. The Cambodian action, he thought, was long overdue—as indeed it was.
However that may be, from the onset of the Nixon administration, as Kissinger began his secret talks with Le Duc Tho, our troops were removed from South Vietnam in increments corresponding (we said) to the growing ability of the South to defend itself—but also, obviously, to political calculations and pressures at home. It was the sort of thing we did well, and the process took on a life of its own. From our peak troop strength of 543,400 in the spring of 1969 we went to 24,200 in 1972; and the last of these were gone in the following year.
The ARVN, meanwhile, increased its complement from 820,000 to 1,048,000—an enormous effort, but insufficient to replace the shortfall in numbers and firepower; and the ARVN had become dependent on certain American command functions—intelligence and communications, especially—that the JGS was still far from being able to replace.
These were technical matters, and most Americans were happy to leave them to the experts. They wanted out, and expected that we would leave in an orderly and honorable way; and this general approval of Nixon's policy as it was understood was repeatedly confirmed by opinion polls and by the landslide Republican victory in the elections of 1972.
For the South Vietnamese, however, everything now hung on a thread. They knew that they could not have come this far without our help; and, having suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties during the preceding decade, they were physically and morally exhausted. Outnumbered, outgunned, with thousands of miles of porous frontiers and seacoast, they found themselves still facing a juggernaut, the PAVN, which could attack at will from sanctuaries in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam, replace its losses from Soviet arsenals, and attack again. They knew that their country, for all the highly publicized faults of the Thieu government, was richer and freer than the North—but of what avail was such knowledge if Enlightened Opinion throughout the world decreed that Hanoi's nationalist credentials were more authentic, since it was Ho Chi Minh who had driven out the French; and if God, in any case, was on the side of the bigger battalions?
To continue to fight under such circumstances, the South Vietnamese had to believe in our ultimate commitment to their survival. This had always been difficult for a variety of reasons, the most obvious of which was that a great many Americans did not believe in it and said so. But of course it was also difficult for the Vietnamese, if not impossible, to interpret the many varieties of opposition to the war. So most of them tended, like Thieu, to shrug the American opposition—Hanoi's hope and comfort—away.
For the Southerners, the core of the problem was elsewhere: they could not see our interest, even when our involvement was at its height; and it became increasingly hard for them to grasp as we began to withdraw. The Vietnamese I knew, or more precisely met, in Saigon and a few years later in Paris, were incomparably more sophisticated than the villagers who made up the great mass of the population; yet even they astonished me by their ignorance of our world—which was almost as great as my ignorance of theirs.
The Southern bourgeoisie was composed for the most part of villagers once or twice removed, with bits of property somewhere in the delta or up north; or Chinese merchants with Vietnamese names; or professional people, lawyers, doctors, teachers, and (for some mysterious reason) an inordinate number of pharmacists. They had been to French schools, usually, and had absorbed a little elementary history, but this did not include the doctrine of containment. Obviously, our intentions were not colonial, as some had hoped and others feared; we built no plantations and did no business, except with each other. The great bases we built at Danang, Long Binh, Camranh Bay suggested a strategic interest, but by the early 70's we were turning these over to the government of South Vietnam. Rumors kept cropping up to the effect that oil, or some other natural resource, had been discovered; but none was confirmed.
Of course, there was our rhetoric, and we had certainly put our money where our mouth was, but this still begged the question—especially now that we were leaving—of why. Why had we come to save them at such horrendous cost in the first place? Why had we, visibly not the most patient of peoples, adopted a strategy that carefully preserved Hanoi's ability to inflict pain on us and prolong the war? And why, since we had now apparently become embroiled in some obscure but important crisis of our own, chez nous, should we continue to concern ourselves with theirs?
I am not talking about peasants, for whom the great thing throughout the centuries of Chinese domination, warring kingdoms, and French colonialism had always been to discern who (in the immediate vicinity) had the "Mandate of Heaven"—i.e., the actual power to recruit their sons and confiscate their rice—but about their city cousins, especially those who had a modicum of education and the prestige that goes with it in Confucian society.
The vast majority of these, including the minority who were or who had been tempted by the NLF, were anti-Communist and anxious to keep Hanoi at arm's length. "Kaplan-oi," I heard them saying. "Is this possible? Are you Americans for real?" And I used to hold imaginary conversations with them, lucidly explaining that the political and military mistakes we had made, appalling as they were, only increased our obligation to set things right; that the American people continued to believe that world peace was threatened if the Communists were allowed to believe that they could extend their empire by military force; and that, as a great power, we could not in any event afford to let the South Vietnamese down, lest we come to be considered more dangerous to our friends than to our enemies.
In fact, however, this subject of our ultimate interest practically never came up, perhaps because it was too important. These people had a way that comes back to me now of tiptoeing around a fateful issue with a sort of superstitious tact. Most, it seemed to me, had simply given up trying to understand. They believed in our commitment, if and when they did, for no rational reason at all: because it was the only alternative to despair. But to carry on they constantly needed reassurance. And in this respect, alas, the manner of our withdrawal was the final disaster.
Secrecy is a normal and necessary mode of diplomacy, but in this case it was counterindicated, as a diplomat might put it, because it played precisely into Hanoi's hands. Quite apart from the unsettling effect it had on the South Vietnamese, it was inevitable that the secrecy of the negotiations leading to the Paris Accords would discourage public interest in the United States—especially after the agreement in principle was signed and the haggling about details began. If there was any chance of committing this country to the responsibilities implicit in the Paris Accords—the culmination, after all, of an enormous national effort—it was in using the presidential pulpit to the utmost and insisting that Congress and the media be informed of the entire process, all along the way.
This is easier to say than it would have been to do, given Hanoi's opposition and Nixon's impatience. And no one could foresee in 1969, when Kissinger first slipped into Paris for a rendezvous with Le Duc Tho, what would happen to the Nixon presidency at the beginning of his second term. Yet, to stand the Clausewitzian formula on its head, the peace could only be "a continuation of the war by other means." An agreement with the Communists, any agreement with the Communists, would have to be enforced. And this meant that the country had to be prepared for a continuing effort, insignificant in comparison with what we had been doing, but irksome; and, as in South Korea, with no end in sight.
To be sure, the mills of Watergate were now grinding, and it was late in the day to commit this country to anything in Southeast Asia, after ten years of a war conducted so incoherently, beyond the stand-off implied in Nixon's formula: an honorable peace. There was no public clamor to know what Kissinger was up to in Paris. It was as if Congress, the press, and the academic world from which he had so surprisingly come were relieved to let him rid them of this tiresome business at last.
Of the negotiations, in any event, nothing or almost nothing was known until 1970. For once there were no leaks from the American side. And thereafter, until Secretary of State Rogers and the Vietnamese foreign ministers were summoned to Paris for the signing, the public knew only that Kissinger was conducting talks with Hanoi on the one hand and with Saigon on the other. It was understood that the latter, on the whole, was being at least as stubborn and difficult as the former; and this fed the growing anti-South-Vietnamese passion that had begun to inhabit certain corners of the Congress. But the details, excepting those that the Communists chose to reveal for the purposes of psychological warfare, remained obscure. For his part, Thieu never went public with his objections to the form and content of Kissinger's talks with Le Duc Tho. One can only speculate about the reasons for his discretion—but who can doubt now that it was a fatal mistake?
In January 1969, as Kissinger was organizing his new office in the White House, the magazine Foreign Affairs appeared with an article in which he—writing as a Harvard professor—makes an elementary point about negotiations with the Vietnamese:
To survive, the Vietnamese have had to learn to calculate—almost instinctively—the real balance of forces. If negotiations give the impression of being camouflaged surrender, there will be nothing left to negotiate. Support for the side which seems to be losing will collapse. Thus, all the parties are aware—Hanoi explicitly, for it does not view war and negotiation as separate processes; we in a more complicated bureaucratic manner—that the way negotiations are carried out is almost as important as what is negotiated.
To which one can only say amen. But the newly appointed National Security Adviser then proceeded to deal directly with Hanoi, just as we in the Harriman-Vance mission had conducted "exploratory talks" a year or so earlier. Only, this time, the South Vietnamese were not even briefed after each meeting; for a long time they were not briefed at all. No serious consideration was ever given to Thieu's insistent demand that, since it was the fate of his people that hung in the balance, his government should be directly involved.
And thus, over the next four years, the Republic of Vietnam, which even the Soviets had once been willing to recognize, was delegitimized, in direct contradiction to what we were saying in South Vietnam and to the world, and indeed to all that we had spent so much blood and treasure to assert since 1965—namely, that Saigon was the rightful government of the South and, given the wherewithal, would eventually be able to take care of itself.
To provide the wherewithal we had a program called Vietnamization. In practice it meant that we left behind hundreds of millions of dollars worth of materiel, much of it useless to Thieu's armed forces because they lacked the facilities for repairing and maintaining it, and said in effect: goodbye and good luck and don't hesitate to call. And for the first couple of years or so there was usually someone, however distracted, at the other end of the line. With the materiel went certain training programs, some of them reasonably effective; and at least two or three South Vietnamese divisions were—by 1972—equipped and organized and led in a manner that made them equal if not superior to any units of comparable size that the PAVN could muster. But they were far too few, and the ARVN was fatally weak (after the withdrawal of MAC-V) at the general-staff level.
Meanwhile the Communists, as expected, began violating the cease-fire immediately, just to make their point: small probing actions at first, increasingly bold as they discovered just how far it was possible to go without eliciting a reaction from us. The Soviets were now giving them the full panoply of their equipment, ineluding helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft; and then there was that ominous pipeline; and the reconstruction of their base areas in Cambodia, from which the Khmer Rouge could be unleashed to attack Phnom Penh and the PAVN to move eastward to control the vital centers of the South.
All in good time. By the spring of 1974 it was clear that Hanoi need not worry about going too far, the Congress and the people of the United States being otherwise engaged. The Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives began its television inquiry into the possible impeachment of Richard Nixon on May 9. Few noticed, two weeks later, when the House voted to gut the budget for military aid to South Vietnam. This was a signal, if any were needed, to both sides.
Still, the war would drag on for another year, until the final spasm which began with the PAVN offensive against Ban Me Thuot on March 10, 1975. Indeed, Hanoi did not anticipate that things would move so swiftly. In January a Northern division had been moved across the river from Cambodia to occupy Phuoc Long—not much of a drive, a few hours, perhaps an afternoon, from my house on Phan Dinh Phung. There was no reaction from our air force and this, when the ARVN began to crumble in the central highlands, must have told the Northerners that they could now drive on to Saigon unimpeded. On the coast, Danang, where our marines had come ashore ten years earlier, fell on March 10. On April 10 President Ford's last pro-forma request for funds was turned down by the House; it was already unlikely that such funds would ever be spent. One last ARVN division held the Communists up before Saigon for a few days, inflicting heavy casualties until its munitions were spent and most of its men were dead. Saigon fell on April 30.
In the last twelve years of Vietnam's thirty-year war, during which we destroyed Diem's republic, which we had helped to create, then encouraged Thieu to set up another that might have survived and even prospered, and finally tired of the whole business and turned it all over to Hanoi, we ourselves had suffered over 300,000 casualties and more than 57,000 dead; inflicted enormous damage on both North and South Vietnam; induced our South Vietnamese allies to hope and fight and suffer even greater—far greater—human losses than our own; spent billions upon billions of dollars in the manner best calculated to distort and inflate our economy for years to come; built a lavish and immensely useful naval base for the Soviets to inherit at Camranh Bay, thus tilting the strategic balance in their favor in the South Pacific; disrupted and almost destroyed civil society and the idea of national service in our own country and—but need I go on? The disaster was and remains incalculable. And yet we turned away from it and went about our business, beginning to forget Vietnam even before it was over.
Amnesia, I am told, is the response of the organism to an intolerable inner trouble. But this is a response that we cannot afford. It deprives us of a vital dimension. Memory, however painful, is better. My old friend Raymond Aron used to say that history, which is after all a form of memory, cannot really help us solve our present problems; we learn nothing from it, he said, but history itself. So much for that old tag that people are forever quoting from Santayana, to the effect that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. But this is not to say that it is useless to think about the past. What we choose to remember, and how, is part of the process by which we become what we are.
So now, I would suggest, it is time to remember what we did and failed to do in Vietnam. We cannot be content with the nightmarish fantasies of combat that our novelists and film-makers have given us. They were part of the experience, to be sure. But books like The Palace File and Ellen Hammer's Death in November remind us that this war was not simply devised as a test of our young manhood or a mindless horror show. There was more to Vietnam than "all that."