Imperial Stars 3-The Crash of Empire (12 page)

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.