Part I - The Late Vietnam War

1 Nixon’s War

Antoine Coppolani

A consideration of the four-year period that began with Richard Nixon’s ascension to the presidency of the United States in January 1969 and ended with signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973 raises several important questions about the Vietnam War. Could an agreement comparable to the 1973 deal have been secured earlier? If so, who bears responsibility for the delay? What was the impact of the antiwar movement on Nixon’s Vietnam policy? Was the war’s expansion into Laos and Cambodia necessary or criminal? Were the constraints on Nixon’s prosecution of the war evidence of the functioning of democracy or of the weakness of the American system, which jeopardized and discredited US foreign policy? Did international opposition to the war hinder Nixon’s efforts to achieve “peace with honor” and make full use of the US military to support his diplomatic initiatives? Or, on the contrary, did it prevent escalation and even greater bloodshed by denouncing the “immorality” of the conflict? In short, under what circumstances did the January 1973 peace agreement come about?

Three major milestones marked Nixon’s relationship with Vietnam, the rest of Indochina, and Southeast Asia generally between 1969 and 1973. Although Nixon did not have a “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam when he took office, he gradually put a strategy in place. In this respect, 1969 was a year of trial and error, of failure and deadlock. Certainly, important processes were underway, such as Vietnamization and secret negotiations, though the latter were, at the time, largely unproductive. Subsequently, Vietnamese communist policymakers would claim that in initiating the phased withdrawal of their forces in 1969, the Americans in fact weakened their bargaining position. Thus, by the turn of the new decade, the United States remained unable to achieve “peace with honor.” To overcome these aporias, Nixon, assisted by National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, tried to move from the local to the global, transposing and adapting his strategy in the broader context of the opening up of China and détente with the Soviet Union, two initiatives that, in Kissinger’s words, restored Southeast Asia to its true scale: that of a “small peninsula at the end of a huge continent.” But this so-called triangular diplomacy still failed to end the war. Therefore, Nixon redoubled the military pressure on Hanoi in 1972 until reaching a peace agreement that failed to deliver the peace it promised. To what extent was all this a cowardly “decent interval” snatched by the United States before the inevitable collapse of Saigon, Phnom Penh, and Vientiane? Or was it proof of a real and credible will to maintain the political status quo in the region?

Historians Go to War

“History will treat me fairly. Historians probably won’t, because most historians are on the left,” stated Richard Nixon on Meet the Press in 1988.¹ Nixon, as well as Kissinger, did not rely on leftist historians to write the history of the end of the Vietnam War. Their own memoirs, books, interviews, and articles abundantly presented their versions of the end of the war. In No More Vietnams, to illustrate, Nixon argued that the United States lost the war in Southeast Asia on the political front only, not the military one. He attributed the political defeat to the media and especially to the peace movement, which he described as variously “misguided, well-meaning, and malicious.”² For Nixon, the peace movement was the deciding factor in prolonging the war.³ Kissinger, for his part, emphasized the importance of public opinion on the course of military operations, as well as on the war’s political dynamics. He drew a comparison with French President Charles de Gaulle’s management of the Algerian War. The United States was faced with the same problem de Gaulle confronted: withdrawing by political choice, not by defeat. However, the nature of the opposition to the leaders was quite different in France and in the United States. In the first case, de Gaulle was faced with hardliners who demanded victory. This gave him some leeway with the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), since any alternative to Charles de Gaulle would have been worse for the rebels. In the United States, on the other hand, the opposition Nixon and Kissinger faced came from those who wanted a quicker, even immediate, withdrawal. This major distinction ruined, for Kissinger, any prospects for successful bargaining with Hanoi. For this reason, Kissinger considered it “a real political tour de force” to have been able to persevere with disengagement over four years and “to have achieved a solution of compromise and balance of power, however precarious, in Vietnam.”⁴

Such theses were defended by not only Nixon and Kissinger. Several members of their administration, who at the time did not always agree with the two men, endorsed their stance. Alexander Haig, for example, said in retrospect that he was “absolutely, categorically convinced that if we had done in 1969 what we did in 1972, the war would have ended, we would have got our prisoners back, and our objectives would have been achieved.”⁵ Former Secretary of Defense and architect of Vietnamization Melvin Laird attacked in Foreign Affairs “the revisionist historians” for quite conveniently forgetting that the United States had not lost the war when it pulled out of Vietnam in 1973. “In fact, we grabbed defeat from the jaws of victory two years later when Congress cut off the funding for South Vietnam that had allowed it to continue to fight on its own.”⁶

This version of events has been challenged by several historians, including Marilyn B. Young, Tom Wells, George C. Herring, and Jeffrey Kimball.⁷ In Nixon’s Vietnam War, Kimball accused Nixon of having distorted the debate regarding the causes for, meaning of, and end of the war.⁸ He suggested in veiled terms that Nixon was on the edge of actual madness at the time the war ended.⁹ He concluded, first, that the tragedy of the Vietnam War was that it was “a wrong war, in the wrong place, and against the wrong enemy” and, second, that Nixon and Kissinger’s version of the end of the war was deeply ideological and aimed at exonerating them.¹⁰ Historian Pierre Asselin has disputed some of Kimball’s claims. “Ironically,” he writes, “Kimball’s characterization of Nixon as an angry and impulsive man who may have had some sort of personality disorder runs contrary to what documentary evidence suggests, namely, that Nixon and Kissinger’s Vietnam policies were products of lengthy deliberations, careful calculations, and realistic considerations.”¹¹ Lien-Hang T. Nguyen and Larry Berman offer a radically different angle of criticism.¹²

In Search of a Strategy

When Nixon took office, ending the Vietnam War was his priority.¹³ He had campaigned on the theme of “peace with honor,” implying that he had a secret plan to end the war, a plan he could not yet reveal unless he made it invalid. He promised to end the war within six months. The electoral promises and objectives were very optimistic, given the then-current catastrophic situation of the war. In January 1969, 540,000 American troops were in Vietnam; more than 30,000 of them had already died, including 14,500 in 1968 alone. The cost of the war reached $30 billion in fiscal year 1969. Prospects for the future were bleak. It soon became clear that the Nixon administration was caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, Nixon and his transition team quickly rejected the option of immediate military escalation, whether it was a massive resumption of bombing, a threatened invasion of the North, or, most importantly, the two decisive strikes that could have led to a military victory: the destruction of the North’s levee system, which Nixon said would have led to flooding “causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people,” or the use of tactical nuclear weapons. Both options, he wrote later, “would have caused such an uproar at home and abroad that they would have given my term in office the worst possible start.”¹⁴

Withdrawal from Vietnam at once, which would have appeased the war’s opponents, offered hope for the return of prisoners of war (POWs), and shifted the blame for the war on the Democrats, was also rejected by Nixon. It would have resulted in the abandonment of 17 million Vietnamese in the South and ruined the credibility of the United States vis-à-vis its other allies.¹⁵ Early on, in fact from the transition period, the Nixon administration embarked on a course not unlike that of the previous administration: there would be no additional troops sent to Vietnam; President Lyndon Johnson’s cessation of bombing of the North would be respected; and the Paris negotiations would continue. According to Robert Schulzinger, Nixon’s policy toward Vietnam in 1969 contrasted sharply with the rest of his foreign policy, generally innovative and dynamic, which brought him the support of Congress.¹⁶

Did that mean Nixon did not have an original policy to implement in Vietnam, and no “secret plan” to apply? Not really. Nixon had a strategy, which was gradually put in place throughout 1969. First, there was the element of coercion, illustrated by the bombing of Cambodia, which began on March 18, 1969 under the code name MENU and continued until April 1970. Although revealed on May 9, 1969 by a New York Times journalist, William Beecher, the secrecy of the operations was as much a result of Nixon and Kissinger’s taste for clandestine operations as of the need not to stir up reactions on American soil.¹⁷ Second, no doubt overestimating Soviet influence in Hanoi, Nixon initially intended to put pressure on Moscow by connecting any further progress in bilateral relations between the two superpowers to Moscow’s assistance in solving the Vietnamese conflict. He felt Sino-Soviet tensions could serve as another incentive for Moscow to indulge him. After Hanoi responded favorably to President Johnson’s proposal to open peace negotiations in Paris in April 1968, Beijing was livid. Its stance was that the United States could only suffer a military defeat in Vietnam, coupled with humiliation. There could be no negotiations. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, supported Hanoi’s decision to diplomatically engage the Americans. This disagreement fueled the Sino-Soviet dispute. After Moscow crushed the Prague Spring in 1968, the Chinese felt that they could be the next victims of the “Brezhnev Doctrine” and accused Moscow of “socialist imperialism.” One of the major fears of China, then in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, was American–Soviet collusion directed against it. The Paris negotiations and the apparent Soviet–Vietnamese rapprochement, in short, aggravated China’s isolation. It was only in November 1968 that, not without reluctance, Mao resolved, when receiving Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) Premier Phạm Vӑn Đồng, to recognize the negotiations as part of Hanoi’s strategy of “negotiating while fighting.” The Americans were aware of all this. During a meeting with Soviet Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Dobrynin on June 11, 1969, Kissinger pointed out that 85 percent of Hanoi’s military resources came from the USSR.¹⁸ However, even if they had wished for it, the Soviets were not really in a position to impose an ultimatum on Hanoi.

In March 1969, Nixon’s strategy expanded to incorporate the idea of “de-Americanizing” or rather “Vietnamizing” the conflict.¹⁹ Nixon intended to find a way that would allow him to both “de-Americanize” the conflict and push Hanoi to negotiate faster. As a matter of fact, as the negotiations with the DRVN would amply demonstrate, these two proposals were antithetical. Unless the South Vietnamese Army could undergo proper training, be well-equipped, and be ready to take the place of the United States, the “de-Americanization” process would surely weaken the US position, an intrinsic flaw of the strategy that Kissinger denounced from the start.²⁰ Nixon spoke of the need to “de-Americanize” the war while Melvin Laird instead suggested the term “Vietnamization,” which got the president’s approval.²¹ An inexorable process had been set in motion: that of the unilateral withdrawal of the United States from Vietnam.

Next, Nixon counted on the secret talks with Hanoi brokered with the help of the former French delegate general there, Jean Sainteny, whose wife was a former student of Kissinger.²² In July, Nixon had secretly written to Hồ Chí Minh to reaffirm “in all solemnity his desire to work for a just peace.”²³ On August 4, 1969, the first secret meeting took place between Kissinger and DRVN envoy Xuân Thủy in a Paris suburb.²⁴ On August 25, Hồ Chí Minh’s reply to Nixon’s letter arrived. It made clear there would be no great breakthrough. While Nixon had begun his letter with “Dear Mr. President,” Hồ Chí Minh did not return the courtesy and began with “Mr. President.” In substance, Hồ Chí Minh merely denounced the “American aggression against his people, violating their national rights” and repeated the demands of Hanoi’s emissary in Paris, namely a unilateral withdrawal by the United States.²⁵

In his memoirs, Nixon writes that as soon as he received Hồ Chí Minh’s letter, he knew that he “had to prepare myself for the tremendous criticism and pressure that comes with stepping up the war.” While pursuing Laird’s Vietnamization policy, Nixon simultaneously hoped to launch the “mad bomber strategy” to force the North Vietnamese into submission. According to White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman, Nixon had considered such a strategy during a walk on a beach in 1968:

I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that, “for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry – and he has his hand on the nuclear button” and Hồ Chí Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.²⁶

Kissinger intended to give weight to Nixon’s “mad bomber strategy” and, in any event, use it as a military tool to help the negotiations with the North. For these purposes, he created the “September Group” mandated to study the possibility of military action to have a “maximum impact on the enemy” in order to bring the war to a “rapid conclusion.” It was before this group that Kissinger is said to have stated that “I refuse to believe that a small fourth-rate country like Vietnam does not have a breaking point. … It will be the mission of this group to study the option of a savage and decisive strike against North Vietnam. You will begin your work without preconceived ideas.”²⁷ The group did not work in uncharted waters. Since the spring, General Earl Wheeler, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), and his staff had been working on one such plan called Duck Hook. On September 9, Kissinger met with Wheeler before discussing the plan with the president. Kissinger had asked Wheeler to keep this plan a secret, that is, strictly limited to a few military personnel and excluding the secretary of defense.²⁸ The plan was officially presented to Nixon on October 2. Duck Hook consisted of an intensive attack on North Vietnam concentrated over four days, a period that could be extended, depending on weather conditions. Several similar series of attacks would then follow, after a pause to assess the results of the first attack and give the North Vietnamese an opportunity to reformulate their peace proposals. The DRVN’s deep-water ports would be mined to suffocate the country. Rail links to China would be rendered impassable. Twenty-nine targets were identified: five complexes in the Hanoi metropolitan area; six power plants; four airports; three factories; five storage areas for high value-added materials and transport equipment; three bridges; two railroads; and, last but certainly not least, the dike system in the Red River Delta.²⁹ The draft plan came with a draft speech that the president would have given to the American nation on November 3 to reveal the existence of secret negotiations with Hanoi, their failure, and announcing the beginning of Duck Hook operations.³⁰ Nixon wavered between wanting to take a hard line on Hanoi and Moscow, and considering domestic parameters that made it difficult to implement Duck Hook.

Ultimately, Nixon gave up on Duck Hook, probably at the end of October. He never even attempted to introduce it to his National Security Council (NSC). Instead of delivering the speech prepared by the “September Group” in which he was to announce the start of the “decisive” strikes against the North,³¹ he addressed the American people, asking for their support, on November 3, 1969, in the famous “Silent Majority” speech.³² In reality, Nixon had acted under political duress, caught in a vice between two important demonstrations against the Vietnam War: on October 15, Moratorium Day, and November 13–15, when new mass demonstrations were announced. Nixon had arguably won a victory over his domestic opponents with the November 3 speech, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. In the aftermath of the “November days” (Mobilization against the War), his own advisor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, acknowledged that “white middle-class youth” had appeared calm and level-headed in their opposition to the war, and, as a result, the Administration’s case against them as unpatriotic would be short-lived.³³ Beyond that, Nixon had appeared like a paper tiger to the Soviets and the North Vietnamese. The nuclear alert he had decided to launch to panic them had left them unmoved.³⁴ So, the war would continue. In this sense, the fall of 1969 was a critical turning point in Nixon’s conduct of the war. All hopes for peace in the short term were dashed. The president’s strategy from then on would be to take a long-term view.

Figure 1.1 Richard Nixon speaking with soldiers at Dĩ An Base Camp during his only visit to South Vietnam (July 30, 1969).

Source: Michael Ochs Archives / Stringer / Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images.

Negotiating while Widening the War

In early 1970, Nixon ordered B-52 strikes on communist supply lines in northern Laos. These particularly violent bombings were supposed to prevent a massive offensive in the spring while demonstrating Nixon’s resoluteness to achieve “peace with honor.” Nixon and Kissinger simultaneously stepped up the war in Cambodia. The ruler there, Norodom Sihanouk, had practiced a delicate balancing act, seeking to alienate neither the South Vietnamese and their American allies nor the National Front for the Liberation of Southern Vietnam (NLF, or Viet Cong) and their North Vietnamese and Chinese allies. Thus, the NLF was supplied from the Cambodian port of Kampong Som (Sihanoukville) and, thanks to Chinese aid, bought part of the Cambodian rice crop. Sihanouk knew that North Vietnamese units were stationed on his territory, since Cambodia was crossed by the Hồ Chí Minh Trail. The situation started to deteriorate when local Cambodian communists – the Khmer Rouge – launched an insurgency against the Cambodian regime in 1968. Sihanouk responded with airstrikes on communist bases belonging to both the Khmer Rouge and the North Vietnamese. By early 1970, Sihanouk’s position had become untenable. On March 18, while Sihanouk was in Moscow, General Lon Nol and royal family member Sirik Matak, with the consent of parliament, issued a decree that announced Sihanouk’s removal. The new government ordered the closure of the port of Sihanoukville to ships supplying the NLF and attempted to hinder traffic on the Cambodian portion of the Hồ Chí Minh Trail.

Lon Nol’s coup took the Americans by surprise. There is no evidence that Washington had a hand in it. However, it did not take long before Nixon ordered increased support for the new regime. The arrival in power of Lon Nol and his firm attitude toward the North Vietnamese (tainted, it is true, by a notorious reputation for corruption, if not incompetence) offered the possibility of loosening the stranglehold on South Vietnam. By the time of the coup, Nixon felt that B-52 bombings from Guam were no longer enough: an incursion into Cambodia was necessary to disrupt Vietnamese communist sanctuaries. The president announced his decision on April 30 from the Oval Office. For Nixon, Cambodia had become a top priority, the place where US foreign policy could succeed or fall apart. As a sign of his immense interest in the region, he even ordered that he not be bothered with other issues, including the political situation in Chile.

Operation Lam Sơn 719, in Laos, was conducted by Vietnamese troops beginning February 8, 1971. It turned into a debacle as fighters of the South’s army, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), were evacuated in a hurry by US Army helicopters. Kissinger admitted in his memoirs that “the operation, conceived in doubt and faced with scepticism, continued in confusion.”³⁵ There was no confusion, however, as to the consequences of the offensive on the course of the war. On May 14, 1971, the Hanoi Politburo made the decision to launch an offensive in the spring of the following year. Not only were the North Vietnamese convinced of their superiority over the army of the South, but public opinion in the United States seemed to be convinced of the impossibility of a military victory in Indochina. In these conditions, the North Vietnamese Politburo confirmed in July its intention, still secret, to take advantage of the prospects offered by 1972, an election year in the United States.

Reversal of Alliances?

At the very moment, in 1971, when Hanoi prepared to deliver what it hoped would be the final blow to its enemies, profound changes were taking place within the international system. A twofold process was at work, which de facto stood to undermine the DRVN’s position and strengthen that of the United States: Sino-American rapprochement, on the one hand, and a growing divide between Beijing and Hanoi, on the other. Sino-American rapprochement was delayed for a while by the American intervention in Cambodia in 1970, but it became a reality in the spring of 1971. On April 21 of that year, Zhou Enlai sent an official letter of invitation to the American president, which Nixon answered favorably, via Pakistan. Upon receiving Zhou’s letter, Kissinger told Nixon: “If we make this deal, we will end the Vietnam War this year. The mere existence of these contacts, in and of itself, guarantees it.”³⁶ He was not wrong. In July 1971, Beijing announced that Nixon would visit China the following year.

The “week that changed the world,” as Nixon himself called his February 1972 visit to China, changed the landscape of the Vietnam conflict considerably. Although Beijing had a nuanced, even ambivalent policy regarding its involvement in the Vietnam War, Hanoi harbored deep apprehensions about Nixon’s historic trip. Certainly, since the beginning of the struggle against the Americans, North Vietnam had benefited from the competition between China and the Soviet Union, each communist giant refusing to allow the other to have a monopoly on assisting in an anti-imperialist struggle. Zhou Enlai told his American interlocutors that China’s military aid to Vietnam would continue and that it was in any case the minimum necessary to avoid a deterioration of relations with Hanoi. Zhou expressed his dissatisfaction with the intensity of military cooperation between Hanoi and Moscow. (Yet China had authorized the transfer of Soviet weapons to the DRVN through its territory.) All in all, the Americans left Beijing convinced that China would place its rapprochement with the United States above its support for Hanoi. The Shanghai Communiqué, containing a clause opposing the efforts of any country or group of countries to dominate the Asia–Pacific sphere, constituted an implicit condemnation of Soviet intentions, as well as of Moscow’s alliance with the DRVN. Nixon’s China visit removed one of the key reasons for US intervention in the Vietnam War: to isolate China and stem the spread of Maoism.³⁷

From this point on, China granted more latitude to US actions in Vietnam, although its support for Hanoi did not waver. In 1968, when Hanoi had entered into negotiations with the United States, China had reduced its military assistance to show its disapproval. Four years later, Beijing increased its military assistance as an incentive to negotiate. Appearances were deceptive, however. The increase in Chinese military aid was only a consolation prize offered by Beijing to Hanoi, a sort of meager compensation for Beijing’s rapprochement with the United States, which constituted a clear diplomatic defeat for the North Vietnamese. Still, for the Americans, the effort paid tangible dividends. Thanks to triangular diplomacy, a Kissinger aide later wrote, the United States was “at last free to use all our forces to end the war.” With a touch of exaggeration, the phrase was accurate.³⁸ Since President Johnson had suspended sustained bombings in November 1968, North Vietnam had remained virtually free of airstrikes. During an NSC meeting on May 8, 1972, in which the president decided on the mining of Hải Phòng and bombing in the Hanoi area, his close advisor, Treasury Secretary John Connally, said in support of these actions: “It is inconceivable to me that we have fought this war without inflicting damage on the aggressor. The aggressor has a sanctuary.”³⁹

On March 30, 1972, Hanoi launched its so-called Spring or Easter Offensive, as three divisions, supported by three hundred tanks and Soviet-made 130mm recoilless guns, moved into South Vietnam from bases in North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Of the DRVN’s thirteen divisions, twelve would eventually be involved in the operation. It was a trident attack, on almost every possible front. It was also a conventional, army-on-army attack that broke with the guerrilla warfare structure that had characterized the conflict until then. For these two reasons, it quickly became apparent that that offensive might determine the outcome of the war.

Nixon was now determined not to hold back any longer. “We must punish the enemy in ways that he will really hurt at this time,” he wrote to Kissinger. “I intend to stop at nothing to bring the enemy to his knees.”⁴⁰ Operation Linebacker, in at least two respects, was an opportunity to reuse old strategies and plans. First, as in the case of Rolling Thunder, the objective was to attack military targets to break the North’s military capabilities. The fundamental difference with Rolling Thunder was that the hesitations, restrictions, or pauses that had characterized the earlier campaign would be lifted. Nixon summarized his thinking in a memorandum to Kissinger on May 10:

We have the power to destroy the war-making capacity [of North Vietnam]. The only question is whether we have the will to use that power. What distinguishes me from Johnson is that I have the will in spades. If we now fail it will be because the bureaucrats and the bureaucracy and particularly those in the Defense Department, who will of course be vigorously assisted by their allies in State, will find ways to erode the strong decisive action I have indicated we are going to take. For once, I want the military and I want the NSC staff to come up with some ideas on their own which will recommend action which is very strong, threatening, and effective.⁴¹

Launched on May 10, Operation Linebacker started under the name Rolling Thunder Alpha and lasted until October 22, 1972. It consisted of more than 9,000 sorties (air missions) during which 17,876 bombs were dropped, or approximately 150,000 tons of explosive. This represented a quarter of the tonnage that had been dropped in three years of Operation Rolling Thunder.⁴² B-52 strategic bombers went into action on June 8 and carried out an average of thirty flights daily until October. An important technical innovation was the use of so-called smart bombs, guided by laser and dropped by F-4 and F-111 aircraft. In his memoirs, Kissinger described the decisions of May 1972 as “one of the finest hours of the Nixon presidency.”⁴³ Following the onset of the bombing, a surprised DRVN official noted that “Nixon managed to do in ten days what Johnson had taken two years to accomplish.”⁴⁴

The American president’s boldness paid off. Linebacker shattered the communist offensive, which for all intents and purposes ended in June. By then, the North Vietnamese troop presence below the 17th parallel had grown considerably, accentuating a “leopard-skin” situation in the South, but neither Huế nor An Lộc had fallen, and a counteroffensive was underway in Quảng Trị, which was retaken by ARVN forces in early September.⁴⁵ A ranking communist official felt that as the summer progressed it became apparent that the losses of the North and its NLF allies were prodigious and that territorial gains could not be held. Questioned by members of the French Communist Party in the aftermath of all this, Hanoi Politburo member Lê Đức Thọ explained that Hanoi had been caught completely off guard by the firmness of Washington’s military response: “We had considered this possibility, but we finally dismissed it as impossible during the year of trips to Beijing and Moscow and the presidential elections.”⁴⁶ Adding insult to injury for Hanoi, the Chinese and the Soviets themselves reacted only mildly to Nixon’s dramatic escalation of the air war. In Thọ’s view, underestimating Nixon had been “a mistake, but not a catastrophic one.” To repair it, Hanoi had to slow the pace of military operations and, to achieve a “political victory,” intensify diplomatic operations. The military stalemate, the impossibility of winning by arms, and the determination of the North Vietnamese to reunite the peninsula under their rule forced them to consider this prospect as possibly inevitable.

Kissinger met with Lê Đức Thọ in France on three separate occasions between July 19 and August 14, 1972. At each meeting, Kissinger found his interlocutor in a much better mood and far more open to a negotiated solution than previously. Thọ no longer insisted on a halt to American bombings of the North before the finalization of an agreement; he merely mentioned that such a gesture would facilitate the peace process.⁴⁷ Kissinger proposed a four-month ceasefire, to be overseen by an international commission. During this time, a final settlement would be negotiated between and among the parties. An American withdrawal would come as soon as the commission was formed. Northern forces were to remain in place in the South, indefinitely. On July 19, during the longest negotiating session ever held – lasting six and a half hours – Thọ gave up the demand to see Thiệu’s regime deposed. He also dropped the demand for a deadline for the withdrawal of American forces. However, he persisted in demanding a coalition government, not just a tripartite election commission.⁴⁸ This last demand frustrated Nixon, who suddenly questioned the usefulness of negotiations. Unlike Kissinger, the president came to believe that the United States would negotiate from a stronger position after the upcoming November 1972 presidential elections. Nevertheless, he allowed Kissinger to continue the negotiations until then.

Operation Linebacker continued despite the resumption of peace talks. Nixon refused to repeat the mistakes of his predecessor, who had repeatedly paused the strikes in hopes that that would encourage Hanoi to negotiate earnestly. Even as the meetings between Thọ and Kissinger were in full swing, the United States intensified Linebacker operations, including in Route Package 6B, that is, the Hanoi area. The deployment to Thailand of forty-eight F-111s capable of delivering laser-guided bombs added another extra weapon to the American arsenal in September 1972.⁴⁹

It was in this context that Kissinger and Thọ reached a first tentative agreement. On October 8, Thọ presented Kissinger with a complete draft agreement. Such a document had never been presented before by either side. Entitled “Agreement to End the War and Restore the Peace,” it contained significant concessions. Most importantly, Hanoi dropped its demand for the removal of South Vietnamese President Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu before a ceasefire took effect and, along with that, its demands for, first, a coalition government and, second, a veto over the composition of the transitional government in the South. In return, Thọ insisted on the establishment of an “administrative structure” called the National Council for National Reconciliation and Concord (NCNRC) to oversee the implementation of the agreement after the ceasefire. On October 13, in light of Hanoi’s flexibility in the peace talks, Nixon ordered the de-escalation of the bombing of the North and, a few days later, halted entirely strikes above the 20th parallel as a gesture of goodwill. A total halt to bombing of the North, Nixon insisted, would only take place after the two sides reached a final agreement.

After the North, the South

Kissinger subsequently described his October meeting with Lê Đức Thọ at Gif-sur-Yvette, at the former home of painter Fernand Léger bequeathed to the French Communist Party, as the most moving moment of his career:

Most of my colleagues and I understood at once the significance of what we had just heard. I immediately asked to adjourn the meeting, and [Winston] Lord and I shook hands and said, “We did it.” Haig, who had served in Vietnam, said with emotion that we had saved the honor of the men who had fought, suffered, and lost their lives there. To be sure, there were still many unacceptable elements in Lê Đức Thọ’s draft. And some of my colleagues, such as John Negroponte, were sure to point this out during the half hour that followed his presentation. However, I knew that this program was based on a cease-fire, the withdrawal of U.S. forces, the release of prisoners, and an end to infiltration – that was the basic program we were offering and that we have called essential since 1971.⁵⁰

Before returning to Washington from Paris, Kissinger jokingly but presciently told Thọ that the men were now bound to succeed, although it might take a little more time. At a minimum, they might succeed in uniting all the Vietnamese factions against the US national security advisor. To an extent, that is what happened. Unlike Nixon, Kissinger underestimated and miscalculated Thiệu’s reaction to news of the draft settlement. By then, Kissinger was much more eager to reach an agreement than Nixon, who still felt it was preferable to wait until after the upcoming elections. The president warned Kissinger that the agreement “could not be a forced marriage” for President Thiệu. As it turned out, the latter was revolted by news that an agreement had been reached behind his back. American emissaries in Saigon, including Kissinger himself, did their best to convince the South Vietnamese president that the deal was a good one, to no avail. At one point, Thiệu confided to an aide that he wished he could punch Kissinger “in the teeth.”⁵¹ Seeking to reassure Thiệu, Kissinger claimed that Washington did not seek a face-saving “decent interval,” that is, a short period between the time US forces left and Saigon inevitably collapsed; this was a “decent agreement.”⁵² Admittedly, the Americans had blundered. For example, Thiệu first found out about the October draft agreement not from the Americans, but through documents captured from the enemy. Thiệu especially opposed the idea of a reconciliation council and, above all, Hanoi’s right to keep its own troops in the South after a ceasefire.

Nevertheless, the mass of declassified materials attests to the very extensive efforts made by the Americans to win Thiệu’s consent. From this point of view, one can agree with Pierre Asselin’s analysis: if Nixon had wished to create nothing more than a decent interval between the withdrawal of US troops and the fall of the Saigon government, he would have ignored President Thiệu’s refusal and signed a bilateral agreement with Hanoi. Nor would he have ordered Kissinger to resume negotiations with Hanoi in November and submit to Thọ no fewer than sixty-nine modifications desired by Saigon (which Kissinger himself thought was “a major error”!). Thus, concluded Asselin: “Nixon and Kissinger did not seek an agreement that would provide them with a decent interval before the collapse of the South, but an agreement that gave them hope, at the very least, of maintaining the status quo.”⁵³

US–DRVN negotiations in November and early December ended in stalemate, leading an exasperated Kissinger to call the Vietnamese, in front of Nixon, “a bunch of disgusting shits” who made the Russians “look better, just as the Russians make the Chinese look better when it comes to responsible and honest negotiation.”⁵⁴ On December 14, 1972, concluding that the political price to be paid would be the same for high- or low-intensity airstrikes, a vexed Nixon ordered the resumption of US bombings of the DRVN north of the 20th parallel. He also sanctioned the use of B-52s over Hanoi and Hải Phòng. The proposed campaign of renewed bombings, code-named Linebacker II, had two main objectives: on the one hand, to destroy the will of the North Vietnamese to fight, and, on the other, to demonstrate to Saigon that, in accordance with what had been promised on many occasions, the United States was determined to strike the North very severely in the event of noncompliance with the clauses of the agreement. Between December 18 and 29, the “Christmas Bombing,” as the press dubbed Linebacker II, resulted in the dropping of approximately 15,000 tons of bombs on the North by B-52s, while fighter-bombers, including F-111s, dropped another 5,000 tons.⁵⁵ On December 26, while condemning the “extermination bombings,” Hanoi contacted Washington to resume the negotiations. The First Secretary of the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP), Lê Duẩn, later admitted that Linebacker II had succeeded in destroying the economic foundations of his country. On the American side, heavy losses, including several B-52s, made the continuation of hostilities similarly unsustainable. When negotiations reopened in January 1973, both sides were desperate for an agreement, any agreement.

The Paris Peace Accords

The Agreement to End the War and Restore the Peace in Vietnam was signed on January 27, 1973 in Paris. Fundamentally, it called for the withdrawal of all US forces from Vietnam, the release of all POWs, the continued presence of North Vietnamese troops below the 17th parallel, the preservation of the Saigon regime, and the resolution of all remaining political matters by the Vietnamese parties themselves after the ceasefire took effect. The keystone of this “Phony Peace” was the threat of US reintervention in the event of noncompliance by Hanoi and its armies. The bombing of Cambodia, which continued until it was banned by Congress in August 1973, was intended as much to fight the communist Khmer Rouge as to demonstrate to Hanoi the costs of violating the agreement. None of that mattered in the end, as the agreement was violated before the ink on it had even had time to dry.⁵⁶

In retrospect, it is necessary to underline the considerable weight of the internal determinants and parameters that Nixon had to consider to achieve his objective of “peace with honor.” Nixon’s policy was altered at crucial moments by various domestic constraints: in 1969, the peace movement, and in 1972–3, Congress. By making the choices he did in 1969, Nixon condemned himself to a long war. Under the conditions thus created, he then achieved a peace that was undoubtedly the least bad possible. However, by using the military tool to advance diplomacy, Nixon ended up falling, in a way, into the trap he had always wanted to avoid. Like Johnson, he ultimately proceeded to escalate gradually in Vietnam. In 1969, Duck Hook and another planned bombing campaign called Pruning Knife were cancelled, and Nixon then expanded the war into Cambodia and Laos. Linebacker was launched in 1972, not as an initiative, but as a reaction to the communist Spring Offensive. Prior to that, the Americans had chosen not to carry out preemptive strikes, in part so as not to alienate public opinion. It is true that, thanks to triangular diplomacy and Vietnamization, which in the end weakened the antiwar movement, Nixon and Kissinger succeeded in creating conditions that enabled them to use all the conventional air firepower at their disposal. Linebacker II, the “December blitz,” as the press liked to call it, was the culmination of a gradual escalation. From this perspective, it is hardly possible to say that Nixon and Kissinger struck first and then negotiated. Rather, the opposite occurred.

Therefore, one must go further than one of Pierre Asselin’s central theses. Asselin disputes the ironic and famous criticism of the American diplomat John Negroponte, for whom the United States bombed its Northern enemies until they were forced to accept their own concessions. This judgment, Asselin wrote, reflects an ethnocentric view of American diplomatic history and the idea, in this case, that the United States acts and other peoples and nations react. This was not the case during the Vietnam War, where the aspirations of both Thiệu and the South were taken into account. More generally, the United States, in many respects, including and especially in the conduct of military operations, reacted, and its policy was shaped by domestic determinants (the antiwar movement, growing opposition from Congress, etc.) or external ones such as Hanoi’s Spring Offensive and Thiệu’s demands for a ceasefire agreement. In launching Linebacker II, Nixon and Kissinger knew that they had to reach an agreement before the new legislature began, as the November elections had significantly strengthened the ranks of antiwar opponents in Congress. By then, ironically, the antiwar movement in the United States had all but disappeared. The spring 1971 mass demonstrations against the intervention in Laos were the last of their kind. But now Nixon’s foreign policy faced two other domestic determinants: the increasingly intractable opposition of Congress, on the one hand, and the Watergate scandal, on the other.

The return of the last American POW from Vietnam on March 27, 1973 deprived Congress of a core reason to keep supporting the war. That same month, the United States resumed bombings on the Hồ Chí Minh Trail in Laos and Cambodia. Even as Nixon proclaimed that he was ready to bomb the North again, in the spring his legal advisor, John Dean, began to work with prosecutors on the Watergate case. On June 29, 1973, the appropriations bill passed by Congress, and then signed by a weakened Nixon, prohibited the use of funds to “directly or indirectly support combat activities in or over Cambodia, Laos, North Vietnam and South Vietnam or off the coast of Cambodia, Laos, North Vietnam and South Vietnam.” The Appropriations Act also prohibited the use of funds released by any other enactment for these purposes after August 15, thereby removing any credibility from Nixon’s threats to use force to enforce the Paris Agreement.⁵⁷ Senator George McGovern later said that June 29 was “the happiest day of his life.”⁵⁸ Political scientists called that same day “the Bastille Day of the Congressional Revolution,” the day when “the President of the United States recognized the right of Congress to end US military involvement in Indochina.”⁵⁹ Finally, on November 7, 1973, Congress overrode Nixon’s veto of the War Powers Act, effectively ending the “imperial presidency.”⁶⁰

Conclusion

What can we learn from all of this? In The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy, Jussi Hanhimäki drew a harsh assessment of the war’s exit orchestrated by Nixon and Kissinger. Hanhimäki admitted that their policy deprived the Vietnam question of its status as a major element of American political life, especially after the return of the POWs in 1973 and in the context of détente and the opening-up of China. While the nation was on the verge of civil war, Nixon and Kissinger had brought back calm. But at what cost? Hanhimäki speaks not of a “peace with honor” but of a “peace with horror.” In his eyes, American policy resulted in a loss of credibility and a bitter taste of betrayal. Why? Because Nixon and Kissinger’s planetary vision of international relations led them to consider local conflicts only through the prism of triangular diplomacy and the superpowers, even if it meant trying to get rid of them by all means if they interfered with their global aims. With dramatic consequences:

The Americans left behind a situation ripe for further turmoil rather than even a tentative peace. After the American withdrawal, the entire subcontinent gradually descended into a new vortex of violence that would only temporarily be concluded two years later. With the American presence gone, the competing interests of the various warring parties in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, as well as the growing Sino-Soviet interest in safeguarding their respective influence in the region only added fuel to the subcontinent’s fire.⁶¹

Did the Americans, however, create the conditions for this chaos? Maybe. Hanhimäki’s assessment seems to add credence to the domino theory. Indeed, with the “fall” of Saigon in April 1975, communism extended its bloody grip on the region. Can we affirm, as William Shawcross did, that by intervening in Cambodia in 1969 the United States paved the way for the Khmer Rouge genocide?⁶² Kissinger himself has vehemently opposed this idea. In the last volume of his memoirs, for example, he wrote that the idea that the American bombings in Cambodia were responsible for all the evils of Cambodia can probably be explained by the fact that they were the only ones in Indochina that were not initiated by either Kennedy or Johnson, and that, in any case, it is as absurd as the one that would make the British bombing of Hamburg the cause of the Holocaust.⁶³

In Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger undoubtedly arrived at the least bad possible solution, as some authors, including William Bundy, grant them. In A Tangled Web, Bundy writes of the Paris Agreement, not without wisdom, that despite its imperfection “almost certainly, no better terms could have been reached. Among the many writings on the war, very few have attempted to establish how well the task was accomplished.”⁶⁴ By January 1973, Southeast Asia had, very temporarily, regained its true scale for US policy: a small peninsula at the end of a huge continent. The “Phony Peace,” however, would soon turn into open warfare.

2 US Military Strategy in the Nixon Era

Gregory A. Daddis

“In retrospect, it appeared like a large chess game of moves and counter moves.” So read a 101st Airborne Division “lessons learned” report from fighting near the A Shau Valley, a strategic corridor linking South Vietnam to the Laotian border and Hồ Chí Minh Trail beyond. It seems unlikely, however, that the American soldiers defending Firebase Ripcord in the summer of 1970 felt they were playing chess. Charged with protecting a small hilltop at valley’s edge, accessible only by helicopter, they endured People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) ambushes, mortar barrages, and artillery fire for nearly a month. When the siege of Ripcord ended, seventy-five Americans lay dead. Games normally do not come at so high a cost.¹

To senior US military commanders, the fighting near A Shau surely made operational sense. The valley had long been a conduit for Hanoi to send critical manpower replacements and supplies into South Vietnam. The 101st Airborne had seen heavy fighting there in 1969, most infamously at “Hamburger Hill” in May. One year later, troubled US commanders again were reading intelligence reports suggesting enemy forces were on the move. They feared the “Warehouse Area,” the valley’s nickname, might serve as a launching pad for strikes into South Vietnam’s coastal lowlands and population centers. With these concerns in mind, Operation Texas Star took shape. The 101st would conduct “protective reaction” missions in the A Shau region, with newly established firebases providing artillery cover to US and South Vietnamese infantry troops on the valley floor below. Ripcord was the pivotal base along this protective chain.²

Almost immediately, though, the Americans met resistance while establishing their firebases. Commanders called in airstrikes in late March to “soften up the area,” and by early April, Ripcord was turning into a heavily bunkered stronghold. Yet neither airstrikes nor patrols drudging through the valley’s jungles made any headway in dislodging enemy forces from the mountaintops surrounding the firebase. By July, Ripcord was under siege. As North Vietnamese mortar and artillery shells descended on American GIs, US commanders ultimately decided to postpone a planned offensive into the valley and evacuate the area. For the second time in two years, American forces had fought hard in A Shau, only to cede bloodied ground back to the North Vietnamese. As B-52 bombers flew in to obliterate what was left of Ripcord after its abandonment, one US officer laconically stated that “we didn’t want to leave anything behind that the enemy could use.”³

With the Nixon administration already withdrawing from a long and costly war, the fighting around Ripcord would rank among the last major ground combat operations conducted by the US armed forces in South Vietnam. Yet larger questions remained as the Americans departed the A Shau valley. Were operations there successful? Who had “won” given that so much American blood had been spilled for a plot of land almost immediately abandoned? Officers would argue then and later that the “occupation of Ripcord provided a barrier to possible [North Vietnamese Army, NVA] plans to attack the coastal lowlands” and “absorbed considerable NVA strength and military stores.” Others were far less charitable in their assessments. Writers in Newsweek described the Ripcord fighting as a “painful” operation and wondered aloud why “American soldiers had been asked to set up a fire base in the midst of an enemy stronghold to begin with.” Indeed, some soldiers felt they had been left “hanging” as “bait.” That the US command in Saigon discouraged reporters from visiting Ripcord did little to foster a sense of optimism about what lay ahead.⁴

The A Shau valley fighting in 1970 serves well as a microcosm for evaluating the enduring problems Americans faced as they withdrew from their war in Vietnam. At all levels, from tactical to strategic to political, uncertainty persisted over how the conflict would end. Military commanders had to consider not only troop withdrawal rates, but the level of enemy activity and the prognosis of Vietnamization, the phrase used for gradually handing the war over to their South Vietnamese allies. Diplomats had to balance peace negotiations with the Nixon administration’s larger aims of rapprochement with China and the Soviet Union. All the while, the White House sought to end its war on terms that preserved US credibility around the globe.⁵ In all these areas, the terms “victory” and “defeat” remained imprecise and constantly in flux. Indeed, a setback in one area might hold lasting consequences elsewhere. No wonder the US Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) worried that “adverse publicity” from Ripcord “might well have jeopardized the entire Vietnamization program.”⁶

These uncertainties matter because they influenced the timing of and ways in which US forces withdrew from a conflict that would not be terminated once Americans departed South Vietnam. Near war’s end, evaluating the progress and effectiveness of US strategy proved as bewildering as it had been nearly a decade earlier. Every new initiative seemed only to produce a frustratingly new state of equilibrium. Any successes in pacification seemed only to increase the Saigon government’s dependence on American aid. Any accomplishments in Vietnamization seemed only to hasten calls for US troop withdrawals, leaving an exasperated Henry Kissinger in Paris to argue he was losing leverage over his North Vietnamese negotiating partners. And, ultimately, the flawed strategic process of exiting Vietnam’s war set the foundation for future debates over whether the American armed forces could claim victory, be forced to acknowledge defeat, or concede they had achieved, at most, a costly stalemate against a determined enemy.⁷

“One War,” but a Winning One?

By mid-1968, American ground combat forces had been operating in South Vietnam for three full years. Despite massive efforts – US troop strength had reached 485,600 by the end of 1967 – the best that the Americans, the South Vietnamese, and their allies could achieve against their communist foes was a bloody stalemate. It was not for lack of trying. General William C. Westmoreland, MACV’s commander, had developed a comprehensive political–military strategy that sought to parry enemy military offensives, support Saigon’s pacification efforts, train South Vietnamese defense forces, and build a logistical infrastructure to sustain a major ground and air war. Still, neither side could break the deadly impasse. When Hanoi launched its Tet Offensive in early 1968, seeking a decisive military victory and popular uprising in the South, the result was only a continued stalemate. True, the Southern communist infrastructure had been nearly destroyed, but the devastation to the countryside and displacement of some 600,000 South Vietnamese civilians surely offset any credits to the allied ledger.⁸

With the transition to a new MACV chief in the summer of 1968 came hopes of a fresh strategic approach yielding improved results. Westmoreland’s West Point classmate, Creighton Abrams, had amassed an impressive resumé, from his service with Patton in World War II to becoming MACV’s deputy commander in 1967. One year later, he took over a war that appeared to many Americans no longer worth fighting. Yet expectations rose, if only briefly. As one fellow officer recalled, “Abe” possessed that “rare quality, common sense, the knack of going straight to the heart of the problem, and insisting on a simple and workable solution.” But Abrams also bristled under the political restrictions placed upon him after the bloody Tet battles. Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford, for instance, correctly gauged the political winds and knew military commanders in Vietnam would have to keep casualties down if they were to maintain popular support back home. The loss of over 14,500 American lives in South Vietnam during 1968, though, suggested Abrams might not have the ability to singlehandedly manipulate events as his enthusiasts predicted.⁹

The new MACV commander certainly spoke in terms that appeared pioneering. He espoused a “one war” approach, in which the allies would respond to an enemy working along numerous “levels” or “systems.” Abrams could not ignore the military aspect of the war. But he also had to bring the South Vietnamese armed forces to an “acceptable level of proficiency,” all while supporting pacification and countering communist “attempts to subvert people in remote areas.” As the general instructed his subordinate commanders, “All types of operations are to proceed simultaneously, aggressively, persistently, and intelligently … never letting the momentum subside.”¹⁰ Such language fit Abe’s forceful personality. Yet just below the surface, the “one war” approach bore strong resemblance to Westmoreland’s own “balanced” or “two-fisted strategy.” Both commanders realized they were fighting a complex war, the outcome of which depended upon political matters as much as military ones. In truth, few truly innovative strategic concepts emerged during Abrams’ tenure as MACV commander.¹¹

Champions of the Massachusetts native, though, long have advocated that Abrams turned the war around in short order. With hagiographic grandeur, historian Lewis Sorley, for example, has argued the general changed tactics “within fifteen minutes” of taking command, fought a “better war,” and ultimately achieved victory in the spring of 1970. To Sorley, MACV abandoned the misguided “search-and-destroy” concept – and the grisly body-count metrics – to instead focus on “clear-and-hold” operations aimed at pacifying the countryside.¹² But adulation makes for bad history. In reality, Abrams, at best, altered US military strategy along the margins. Search-and-destroy operations remained a vital component of MACV’s approach, and new scholarship demonstrates clearly that Abrams’ attitude toward pacification was “just as reliant on heavy firepower and main-force operations as it was under Westmoreland.” In short, there was “no fundamental change in strategy.” The new MACV chief may have thought of the war as a single yet multifaceted conflict, but the “one war” term did not herald a major shift in the war’s prosecution.¹³

Nor did MACV operations prove any more successful than those directed by Westmoreland. Abrams surely emphasized pacification efforts inside South Vietnam, taking advantage of casualties suffered by the National Front for the Liberation of Southern Vietnam (NLF, or Viet Cong) and its armed wing, the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF), in particular during the 1968 Tet battles. And Hanoi did acknowledge that, after Tet, the “political and military struggle in the rural areas declined and our liberated areas shrank.” Yet the allies came up decidedly short in achieving their 1969 Combined Campaign Plan goals. Thanks to increased communist infiltration rates along the Hồ Chí Minh Trail, MACV was unable to “inflict more losses on the enemy than he can replace,” for years a goal of the Americans and South Vietnamese.¹⁴ (Abrams also had to contend with political fallout from costly military engagements, like the one suffered at Hamburger Hill in May 1969.) Senior US officers grumbled that combined operations between the two allies remained “superficial” at best. The US ambassador to South Vietnam, Ellsworth Bunker, additionally worried about the Saigon government’s post-Tet “crisis of confidence.” All the while, Abrams continually looked over his shoulder for the first announcement of American troop withdrawals he knew was coming soon.¹⁵

The rising infiltration rates along the Hồ Chí Minh Trail – over 100,000 fresh troops entered South Vietnam in 1970 alone – intimated the war’s changing character to more conventional operations. Still, Abrams sensed an opportunity to strengthen a key pillar of his “one war” approach. With the NLF’s armed forces dispersed and demoralized after Tet, their credibility damaged, MACV initiated an “accelerated pacification campaign” in hopes of recovering lost ground. As in the past, though, such plans relied on brutal tactics which seemed only to further unravel South Vietnam’s social fabric. Those living in rural areas saw their homes destroyed and crops demolished, while refugee numbers surged and food shortages increased. In Abrams’ headquarters, senior military planners were coming to a grim realization. Temporary gains in violent pacification were one thing; long-lasting successes in genuine security and nation-building, quite another.¹⁶

The inconclusive returns on pacification investments denoted unresolved issues in assessing the political aspects of this vital program. How could MACV nurture and evaluate the political loyalties of the rural population, not to mention those living in urban areas? Senior US officers never reached consensus. While one general argued that “by 1970 we had really begun to make pacification work,” others were far less sanguine. One corps commander thought that socioeconomic development was “the area of greatest failure” within pacification programs, while another three-star general believed the campaign against the insurgency’s political infrastructure was “somewhat disappointing.”¹⁷ Moreover, diminishing popular support for the NLF did not necessarily translate into increased cooperation with South Vietnam’s government. Coercive pacification may have damaged the communist insurgency’s political network, the so-called Viet Cong infrastructure, but it did not help cultivate bases of support for the Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu regime in Saigon. All told, it is difficult to accept Nixon’s claims that pacification “worked wonders in South Vietnam.”¹⁸

North of the demilitarized zone, Hanoi also faced uncertainty after its failure to achieve a decisive military victory in 1968. Lê Duẩn, the Politburo’s general secretary, grudgingly embraced a more restrained “talking while fighting” policy that accentuated the war’s diplomatic aspects. With the NLF/PLAF losing 80 percent of its fighting force during the Tet battles, he had little choice. Thus, in 1969, the communists reverted to guerrilla operations and terrorist attacks, forcing Abrams to adjust by increasing small-unit patrolling across much of South Vietnam. Moreover, communist party leaders now had a morale problem on their hands. A political cadre wrote of a situation that had “deteriorated alarmingly, just like soap bubbles exposed to the sunlight.”¹⁹ Another admitted that “1969 was the worst year we faced. … There was no food, no future – nothing bright.” No wonder that summer communist cadres launched a “wave of political training” to help maintain the revolutionary spirit. If Hanoi was going to sustain the war effort, military actions needed to be more cautious while Politburo leaders reemphasized the struggle’s political dimensions.²⁰

A sense of renewed stalemate pervaded both sides as the long Tet Offensive played out through 1968 and began anew with a fresh, though much diminished, communist offensive in early 1969. As bad as the struggle in South Vietnam appeared from the NLF perspective, there were few bright spots within MACV assessments. US casualties throughout the post-Tet period remained high. Indeed, in February 1968 alone, there were 2,124 Americans killed in action, the highest monthly total to that point in the war. Worse, Department of Defense analysts concluded that after the 1968 offensives, the “communists held the basic military advantage in South Vietnam because they could change the level of American battle deaths by changing the frequency and intensity of their attacks.” If Abrams truly was fighting a better war, it seems worth asking why the communists continued to hold the tactical initiative despite major setbacks during and after the Tet Offensive.²¹

By early 1969, Abrams also had to confront major political decisions leading to the first withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam that spring. While MACV focused on improving the capabilities of South Vietnam’s defense forces, White House officials pressed Abrams for plans to redeploy his soldiers back home. The ensuing debates over how best to “de-Americanize” the war ultimately would pit Abrams against the Nixon administration and bring to surface civil–military tensions that would bedevil American leaders for the war’s remainder. Perhaps the most vocal advocate for Vietnamization was Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird. A former Wisconsin congressman, Laird realized the limits of domestic public support sustaining the administration’s Vietnam policies. Both he and the president realized, in Nixon’s words, the “reality” of “working against a time clock.” Not surprisingly, Abrams campaigned for more time – for pacification efforts to take hold; for improvements in training South Vietnamese regional and popular forces; for more military operations against communist forces. The White House, however, only became increasingly frustrated with a senior general who appeared to be dragging his feet.²²

Care should be taken in judging Abrams too harshly here. Neither he nor his chief subordinates were able to evaluate accurately how well South Vietnamese forces would perform once their American allies departed. After Tet, as Abrams reported, all they understood was that there were “major changes in the relationship between supported and supporting.” One senior officer recalled that a “confusing ambiguity surrounded the concept of Vietnamization.”²³ All the while, and much to Abrams’ chagrin, the CIA and MACV staffs reached vastly different conclusions over how well their Vietnamese partners were progressing. It did not help matters that neither agency accurately could predict the pace of US withdrawals or changes to the enemy’s military strategy. To a concerned Abrams, it appeared as if the Americans were departing faster than their allies could improve. He was not alone. A 1974 survey of over 170 US Army generals found that a full 25 percent were “doubtful” that South Vietnam’s armed forces would survive a “firm push” by communist forces in the near future.²⁴

Such misgivings put into question how well MACV was accomplishing its Vietnamization mission. Laird most certainly wondered. In the summer of 1969, he encouraged revising Abrams’ mission statement to better reflect changes in Nixon’s policies and to better show “what our forces in Southeast Asia are actually doing.” In mid-August, the administration handed MACV new orders. Instead of defeating the enemy and forcing its withdrawal from South Vietnam, as had been the objective during the Johnson years, MACV now would provide “maximum assistance” to its Vietnamese allies. The goal no longer was military victory. Rather, Abrams would provide support – to Vietnamization, to pacification, and to reducing the flow of supplies to the enemy – so South Vietnam’s people could “determine their future without outside interference.” As one veteran recalled, Abrams was taking on an “unenviable job.” Far from MACV headquarters, US soldiers and marines still out on combat missions began speculating how their continued exposure was worth the risks if victory no longer remained the goal.²⁵

Abrams’ first year in command left fundamental problems unresolved and a crucial question unanswered – how durable was the Saigon regime? No one knew. As the New York Times reported in June 1969, the “South Vietnamese armed forces appear to be doing a better job in battle now than ever before, but the day when they will be able to stand alone does not seem to be in sight.” A chasm remained between rural and urban areas, holding vast social consequences for a Thiệu government searching for some sense of political stability. Indeed, photojournalist Larry Burrows found that an “extraordinary cynicism pervades South Vietnam.”²⁶ Nor could any senior US officials find consensus over the true level of security in the Vietnamese countryside. In one province alone, Quảng Trị, MACV identified at least nine communist infantry regiments in June 1969. Thus, either from a social, political, or military standpoint, these early years of what Abrams deemed a “rearguard action” left Americans no closer to determining whether or not they ultimately would achieve “victory” in Vietnam.²⁷

Nixon’s Turn: Expanding a War to Withdraw from It

Richard M. Nixon recalled that when he first entered office, he “knew a military victory alone would not solve our problem” in Vietnam. Intent on changing the United States’ relationship with China and the Soviet Union, the new president recognized he could not simply abandon the long-standing US goal of supporting an independent, noncommunist South Vietnam. Yet both Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, understood the stalemated Southeast Asian conflict was doing little more than exhausting American resources. (The war’s cost then was approaching $30 billion annually.) These inherent tensions, if not contradictions, would be a hallmark of Nixon’s Vietnam strategy. The president sought to combine diplomatic initiatives with “irresistible military pressure” to win the war, yet simultaneously disengage from a conflict no longer central to United States foreign policy.²⁸

Hoping to alleviate these policy tensions, Kissinger established a special studies group evaluating the war while Nixon issued National Security Study Memorandum 1 (NSSM 1) directing key agencies to report on their prognoses. The results were far from encouraging. None of the key respondents – the Department of State, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCF), the CIA, or MACV – agreed on much. Optimists believed the enemy had suffered crippling losses over the past two years, providing the United States an advantage in any forthcoming peace negotiations. Skeptics saw a stalemated conflict from which a compromise settlement was the likeliest outcome. Only on one major point did the agencies concur. The South Vietnamese armed forces would be unlikely to withstand a concerted enemy attack without continued American support. Kissinger admitted the NSSM 1 process shed light on the underlying “perplexities” of assessing the war in Vietnam and came to a grim conclusion: “There was no consensus as to facts, much less to policy.”²⁹

Nixon, however, did not wait for Kissinger’s results before laying out a comprehensive strategy. The president believed time favored the communists, who, despite losing the battlefield initiative, could continue the war and keep inflicting casualties on American forces. Worse, as US News & World Report surmised in June 1969, little evidence existed that Hanoi intended to abandon the fight. As Nixon told his National Security Council (NSC) staff that March, “We must move in a deliberate way, not to show panic.” Deliberate he was, at least in design. The president’s resultant five-point plan covered a wide range of initiatives – Vietnamization, pacification, diplomatic isolation of North Vietnam, the gradual withdrawal of US troops, and peace negotiations. As Nixon recalled, his strategy aimed to “end the war and win the peace.”³⁰ Yet the very comprehensiveness of such an approach generated its own set of problems. Foremost among them, how could Abrams successfully balance the competing demands of such an all-encompassing strategic construct?

Kissinger shared Abrams’ concerns over US troop withdrawals, fearing cuts in combat strength might weaken his negotiating position with Hanoi diplomats. (They treated negotiations only “as an instrument of political warfare,” Kissinger fumed.) Nixon squared this strategic circle by quietly expanding the war outside South Vietnam’s borders. In March, he authorized the “secret” bombing of North Vietnamese sanctuaries inside Cambodia. Congress was not consulted for fear of igniting protests at home. For the next fourteen months, B-52 bombers dropped more than 100,000 tons of munitions on the nominally neutral country. To keep Operation Menu covered, the administration falsified military records. On May 9, 1969, though, William Beecher of the New York Times broke the story. While Nixon was “pressing for peace in Paris,” the new president also was “willing to take some military risks avoided by the previous administration.” Beecher failed to mention that both Nixon and Kissinger worried how a lack of progress in Vietnam might damage US credibility abroad, a key component, they believed, in altering Cold War relationships with China and the Soviet Union.³¹

If Abrams hoped the Cambodian bombing meant Nixon would allow him to settle the war on the battlefield, he soon would be disappointed. During a June trip to Midway Island, Nixon announced his decision to withdraw the first 25,000 American troops from Vietnam. The following month, now in Guam, the president declared his “Nixon Doctrine,” arguing that the United States must avoid “the kind of policy that will make countries in Asia so dependent upon us that we are dragged into conflicts such as the one that we have in Vietnam.” The announcement left little doubt over where the larger political currents were leading. If the United States was not disengaging from Asia, it certainly was expecting allies there to manage their own security problems. Later in the year, the president addressed the nation on his Vietnamization plans. During a November speech, Nixon was clear – the “primary mission of our troops is to enable the South Vietnamese forces to assume the full responsibility for the security of South Vietnam.” Though he proclaimed the United States would neither betray its allies nor let down its friends, Nixon’s address hardly inspired confidence within the Thiệu regime. Sooner, rather than later, the Americans were leaving South Vietnam behind.³²

Still, grave concerns over the long-term viability of South Vietnam’s government and armed forces convinced Nixon to go on the offensive. Cambodia proved an inviting target. The overthrow of Prince Norodom Sihanouk by Marshal Lon Nol in March 1970 served Nixon well, for the president could argue he was assisting Cambodia in aligning more closely with the United States. In truth, Nixon hoped to destroy North Vietnamese supply caches and troop sanctuaries along the Hồ Chí Minh Trail just outside of South Vietnam’s borders. Naturally, these goals were related to the president’s withdrawal plans. As the MACV command history relayed, the Cambodian operation was “a catalyst allowing the U.S. to meet more readily its 1970 goals … to continue to Vietnamize the war, lower the number of U.S. casualties, withdraw U.S. forces on schedule, and stimulate a negotiated settlement of the war.” This regionalization of the conflict came not just from Nixon’s fears that “North Vietnam was threatening to convert all of eastern Cambodia into one huge base area,” but from a consensus among Americans that a continuing military stalemate was undermining the entire Vietnamization effort.³³

Figure 2.1 Richard Nixon points to a map of Southeast Asia during a nationwide broadcast on the Vietnam War (April 1970).

Source: Hulton Archive / Stringer / Archive Photos / Getty Images.

On April 30, 1970, American and South Vietnamese forces, part of a joint “spoiling attack,” assaulted into the bordering Parrot’s Beak and Fishhook regions of Cambodia. Though expecting the communists would stand and fight to defend their supply caches, the allies quickly found the evasive North Vietnamese retreating farther into Cambodia. Hopes of a decisive military victory quickly evaporated. Disappointed, the allies took comfort in the massive quantities of enemy supplies they had uncovered and destroyed. By MACV accounts, they had captured over 22,000 individual weapons and some 14 million pounds of rice. Nixon believed the operation “dealt a crushing blow to North Vietnam’s military campaign,” while senior military officers judged the incursion “extraordinarily successful.”³⁴

Other indicators suggested far more mixed results. Despite the operation’s successes, MACV admitted “problems in security persisted” and that “the enemy was not directly affected by the Cambodian incursion.” Lê Duẩn agreed, reporting in July that “our position on the whole battlefield has been maintained.”³⁵ Worse for Nixon, a political firestorm erupted back home when the president addressed the nation as the operation began. A reignited antiwar movement swept across college campuses, with Ohio National Guardsmen killing four students at Kent State and police killing two others at Jackson State University in Mississippi. Congress responded by prohibiting the use of US ground troops outside South Vietnam’s borders, repealing the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and forcing Nixon to set a June 30 deadline on operations inside Cambodia. In the Senate, Frank Church (D-Idaho) protested that “the Nixon administration has devised a policy with no chance of winning the war, little chance of ending it, and every chance of perpetuating it into the indefinite future.”³⁶

Unrest on the homefront, however, did not subvert worries inside the White House or MACV headquarters over the strategic balance within South Vietnam, leading to plans for yet another expansion of the war, this time into Laos. Abrams, in particular, hoped an attack on the Hồ Chí Minh Trail would disrupt communist designs for future offensive operations. Yet few policymakers asked how such an assault would solve more pressing problems. As Abrams’ own command historian noted, the challenges of 1971 – “the need to stabilize the economy, the need to continue progress in restoring security and tranquility to the countryside” – were “crucial” to Saigon’s existence. Would an attack into Laos resolve these internal, existential crises? Nor did contemporary military observers grant how rising enemy activity just outside South Vietnam’s borders revealed the temporary nature of allied achievements in Cambodia. Rather, senior commanders like Abrams seemed preoccupied with protesting Nixon’s decision to speed up troop withdrawal timetables to help quiet dissent at home. Once more, civil–military relations were wearing thin.³⁷

The subsequent incursion into Laos in early 1971, dubbed Operation Lam Sơn 719, only heightened questions about Vietnamization’s long-term prospects. Maneuvering alone – the 1970 Cooper–Church Amendment forbade US troops from fighting inside Cambodia or Laos – South Vietnam’s armed forces struggled against tenacious PAVN defenders. With rising casualties and over Abrams’ fierce opposition, President Thiệu prematurely halted the offensive, while American aircrews and artillery batteries did their best to cover what journalists soon were calling a “rout.” Nixon, then and later, railed against an unaccommodating media. But soldiers throughout the allied command structure knew they had been dealt a serious blow. One senior US officer reported to Abrams in April that enemy activity remained a “hindrance” to Saigon’s pacification efforts. A South Vietnamese general admitted Lam Sơn had created a “disquieting impact on the troops and population alike.” One young American GI offered a more prosaic critique. To him, the South Vietnamese “got their ass kicked and they are hightailing it back. It’s like us saying, ‘Pack up and run for your life. Everything is going according to plan.’”³⁸

That plan – a “splendid project on paper,” Kissinger later quipped – certainly sought additional time for Vietnamization to take hold and cover the ongoing American withdrawal. Larger assessments of the incursion, however, were not necessarily linked to the pace of these US troop redeployments. Indeed, no one seemed to agree on the outcome. Abrams told the press that Lam Sơn 719 was a “milestone in the development of the Armed Forces of the Republic of Vietnam.” Yet senior officers believed the operation “demonstrated exactly the opposite.”³⁹ General Donn A. Starry, a member of Abrams’ staff, recalled instead a sense of stalemate, arguing the “year 1971 was not successful to either side.” The disparity in opinions proved inconsequential. In mid-March, Secretary Laird announced that the administration considered itself “committed” to “at least the current rate of troop withdrawal from Vietnam through late 1972.” As the Washington Post reported, Laird did not tie the withdrawal rate to “progress on the battlefield or at the Paris Peace Talks.” The announcement should have elicited a fundamental inquiry. Did the incursions into Cambodia and Laos matter if Nixon was bringing troops home regardless of their results?⁴⁰

Observers in Hanoi thought so. To hawks like Lê Duẩn, Lam Sơn 719 highlighted stark deficiencies within South Vietnam’s armed forces, despite years of American tutelage. That summer, the Politburo debated a strategic offensive aimed at defeating Nixon’s Vietnamization policy, gaining a “decisive victory in 1972,” and forcing the American “imperialists to negotiate an end to the war from a position of defeat.” Yet Hanoi policymakers also had to account for the US rapprochement with China. Would Beijing pressure their North Vietnamese neighbors to accept a compromise peace settlement, given its new relationship with the United States? Thus, all signals pointed to a renewed offensive posture. Abrams had only 158,120 US troops at his disposal by the end of 1971. The South Vietnamese seemed like paper tigers. Antiwar activity on the American homefront apparently provided leverage in diplomatic negotiations. And Nixon’s overtures toward Beijing threatened to neutralize a key ally. Ultimately, Lê Duẩn had little difficulty convincing Politburo members of the need to strike sooner rather than later.⁴¹

Hanoi intended its 1972 Easter Offensive to deal South Vietnam’s armed forces a crippling blow, forcing the United States to accept a negotiated settlement and a complete withdrawal from Vietnam. Unlike the 1968 Tet Offensive, the North Vietnamese would not seek a general uprising in Southern cities. Rather, the more conventional assault would occur in three phases. On March 30, communist forces struck South Vietnam’s northern provinces, followed soon thereafter by an attack into the Central Highlands. Lastly, PAVN troops would charge across the Cambodian border into Bình Long province and toward the provincial capital of An Lộc. While the communists struggled to coordinate three separate, slashing offensives, deep-rooted problems surfaced within the South Vietnamese ranks. American officers complained of the defense being “hampered by command and control difficulties.” Vietnamese officers refused to report bad news, impeding an effective response to the communists’ assault. Worse, from Abrams’ standpoint, the only remaining, reliable weapon at his disposal was American air power. The Easter Offensive’s opening rounds did not portend well for the future of South Vietnam.⁴²

As a deadly spring wore into summer, the situation inside South Vietnam began to stabilize. American air power took a deadly toll on the North Vietnamese invaders. One likened B-52 carpet-bombing to a “typhoon with trees crashing down and lightning transforming night into day.” Nixon once more escalated the war, launching an aerial assault against Hanoi and mining the northern port city of Hải Phòng. Once more, civil–military relations frayed as Abrams and the president clashed over the best use of air power. And once more, disparate assessments followed in the wake of battlefield actions. William Colby, MACV’s chief of nonmilitary programs, believed the South Vietnamese had met the test. “On the ground in South Vietnam,” he claimed, “the war had been won.” Yet contemporary accounts suggested otherwise. Abrams believed his allies’ force structure was “not adequate” to accomplish its mission without continued American support. Senior US advisors were dismayed by their counterparts’ leadership throughout the Easter Offensive. Perhaps most importantly, the communists now controlled more of South Vietnam’s territory than they did before the campaign began.⁴³

As Kissinger parried with Hanoi envoys in Paris that summer, there seemed little doubt Saigon would struggle in a future without direct US assistance. According to Kissinger’s military aide, Alexander M. Haig, President Thiệu’s intransigence at the negotiating table came from “being asked to relinquish sovereignty” over a large portion of his country. In fact, Hanoi’s diplomats sought a “standstill ceasefire” that would leave their troops in South Vietnam after the Americans departed. (They succeeded.) Moreover, the Nixon administration quietly altered its long-range goals, with Kissinger recommending to the president that their aim should be to “give the South Vietnamese [a] reasonable chance” to meet future attacks. The national security advisor failed to offer any guarantees.⁴⁴

Far from the White House that summer, rural South Vietnamese were asked by US advisors when they thought the war might end. Over 50 percent of respondents replied they did not know. Apparently, not only the Americans were unable to determine how their war would conclude.⁴⁵

Soldiering on toward an Uncertain End

Ever since the 1968 Tet Offensive – which many onlookers claimed was a military victory yet political defeat for the Americans and their allies – US soldiers and marines in Vietnam were asking similar questions about who was winning or losing. Nixon’s decision to initiate troop redeployments only exacerbated their uncertainties. One senior officer expressed a “great deal of reservation” about the “yardsticks” MACV was using to measure success. Another described the war as “a continuing crisis up to the bitter end.”⁴⁶ Meanwhile, troops in the field, watching their friends head home for good, wondered if any progress was being made at all. An advisor in Hậu Nghĩa province believed rural development plans were going forward, “but it is only occupation, not pacification.” Farther to the north, in Phú Yên province, another advisor, Major Eugene E. Fluke, described the local security apparatus as “more sieve than shield.” All the while, attitudes among the rank and file seemed to be shifting. As one Special Forces officer recalled, the emphasis became “Let’s get the damn thing over. Let’s close it out, with as much dignity as we can, but let’s just back off and come home.”⁴⁷

Without a clear grasp of the war’s trajectory, soldiers increasingly turned sour on a conflict many came to despise. Abrams fretted to his staff about maintaining the “fighting spirit” of remaining combat forces, while MACV’s command historian indicated that redeployment schedules were generating heightened morale problems. A December 1970 Newsweek editorial suggested “it might be a good idea to accelerate the rate of withdrawal,” in large part to alleviate mounting disaffection among the ranks. Only one month later, the 101st Airborne Division’s commander reported he had to direct “more time and energy to problems of morale and discipline.” Thus, while officers worried about maintaining a “keen combat edge,” soldiers and marines still on the front lines gradually began to turn against a war that, to them, was only “dragging on.” If Abrams indeed was fighting a “better war,” those under his command were not persuaded.⁴⁸

Leadership concerns over indiscipline in the ranks quickly made their way into the press. The New York Times reported on mounting drug use, citing surveys which suggested one in six enlisted men were “habituated users of marijuana.” John Steinbeck IV, son of the great novelist, went further, arguing in his 1968 article “The Importance of Being Stoned in Vietnam” that 75 percent of soldiers regularly got high.⁴⁹ Three years later, Newsweek editorialized on the “troubled” army in Vietnam, beset by an “increasingly lax attitude” among the men and soaring rates of fratricide. Incidents of “fragging” – termed from lobbing fragmentation grenades at “overly aggressive” officers – entered the war’s lexicon. In fact, in 1971 alone, an extraordinary 222 assaults took place. Along with rising desertion rates, such numbers suggested that enlisted men were losing faith in their chains of command with the war winding down. Officers might blame “permissive” civilian attitudes as the army “tried to cope with changing societal attitudes,” but even Abrams knew MACV had a “real problem” maintaining combat effectiveness.⁵⁰

Moreover, a sense of political consciousness among young draftees, coupled with potent domestic antiwar sentiment, gave rise to the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). The grassroots organization boasted more than 25,000 members by the end of 1972 and forcefully countered claims of the war’s successful prosecution. Their sentiments were difficult to ignore. Prowar advocates might dismiss a long-haired “hippie” at Woodstock. It was harder to scorn a disabled veteran throwing away his medals in front of the US Capitol, as some 800 veterans did in the spring of 1971. The VVAW gained national attention, and influence, as it staged protest marches across the country, coordinated activities with other antiwar organizations, and voiced its concerns to members of Congress. Nixon claimed antiwar activists were “not acting out of moral convictions,” but VVAW dissenters clearly spoke with authority. When Lieutenant John Kerry presented testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971, he cogently argued that policymakers were engaging in “the height of criminal hypocrisy” by alleging US national security was threatened in South Vietnam.⁵¹

The linkages between stateside and front-line resistance also could be found in matters of race. Clarence Fitch, an enlisted African American marine, expressed the porous boundaries between the civil rights movement at home and the war in Southeast Asia. “We weren’t living in no vacuum in Vietnam. There was a certain growing Black consciousness that was happening in the States, and also over there in Vietnam.” Fitch was right, and senior military leaders knew it. Many winced at the visible symbols of racial pride, the Black Power flags, the “dap” hand gestures among “brothers,” and the penchant for racial separation in the barracks and off duty.⁵² Not surprisingly, those same leaders, most of them white, believed the army’s race problems were caused either by civilian influences or by a “hard core of militants” like the Black Panthers. By late 1969, senior Pentagon officials investigating racial unrest found a “pervasive problem throughout the armed forces.” While white officers tended to blame civilian society for their ills, most Blacks in the enlisted ranks pointed to the discriminatory administration of military justice as the greatest source of systemic racism.⁵³

Certainly, racism was not confined within the US armed forces, as several Americans lashed out against Vietnamese civilians in ways clearly undermining MACV’s pacification and civic action plans. Hyperaggressive basic training techniques and Cold War cultural norms both contributed to beholding the Vietnamese as “other,” an “uncivilized” people not warranting the sacrifices of young GIs fighting on their behalf. These racial pressures led to some US troops employing the “Mere Gook Rule,” suggesting that any dead Vietnamese, friend or foe, could be counted as communist and added to that day’s body count. Americans even cast aspersions on their own allies, many viewing South Vietnamese soldiers as “losers” who “didn’t have any initiative whatsoever.” “They were a joke,” one GI recalled. “I despised the whole lot of them.” Looking back, it is no wonder pacification remained such a violent affair as US soldiers and marines tried to establish a sense of control in their areas. Envisioning the Vietnamese as inhuman, if not savage, facilitated violence against the civilian population.⁵⁴

From these attitudes, it was not a far step for some Americans to commit war crimes. The most infamous of these transgressions occurred in March 1968 with the Tet Offensive still raging throughout most of South Vietnam. The massacre of perhaps as many as 500 civilians at Mỹ Lai by soldiers from the US Army’s 23rd Infantry Division remained undisclosed until late 1969 when journalist Seymour Hersh broke the story. To critics, the murders highlighted the bankruptcy of US policy in Southeast Asia. Apologists, however, argued the mass killing symbolized the “brutalization that inevitably afflicts men at war.” In fact, Lieutenant William Calley, Jr., the only participant convicted of wrongdoing, garnered a wave of national support. According to one Newsweek poll, nearly 70 percent of Americans thought Calley a “scapegoat for the actions of higher officers.” Few, though, had access to the lieutenant’s psychiatric reports, in which Calley stated “he did not feel as if he were killing humans but rather that they were animals with whom one could not speak or reason.”⁵⁵

It would be wrong, however, to argue the Mỹ Lai massacre proves that US troops were ordered to “kill anything that moves” or that command policies directed them to exterminate civilians. Historians likely will not achieve consensus on the number of Americans who perpetrated war crimes in Vietnam. Still, it seems safe to agree with veteran Larry Fontana: “There were questionable soldiers serving there, but, by far, the majority of the infantrymen were good, decent men who were doing their jobs the best way they could.” While heavy-handed military operations like “Speedy Express” gained national attention for their focus on body counts, most GIs followed in the footsteps of veteran–novelist Tim O’Brien. O’Brien’s unit experienced the same frustrations as Calley’s, in the same locale, yet “never crossed the axiological line between rage and homicide.”⁵⁶

Nor had the armed forces in Vietnam completely collapsed in these final years, despite the pressures placed on them. Contemporary critics, seeking blame for a war they feared had not been won, hammered away at leaders and enlisted alike. Two former officers maintained “the Army in Vietnam had literally destroyed itself under conditions of minimal combat stress.” Another claimed that soldiers made it through their year by “shirking, loafing, playing, going AWOL, and refusing to enter combat.” Recent scholarship, however, finds these stories of collapse overblown. The army was not a cesspit of deserters, addicts, or murderers. Combat refusals, like those at Firebase Pace in the fall of 1971, certainly occurred during the withdrawal period. But, all told, the vast majority of GIs performed their duties in admirable fashion, even if many of them griped about fighting a war they saw as a “bad joke.”⁵⁷

Still, the countryside remained a dangerous space for those Vietnamese navigating through a decades-long civil war. Americans may have been contemptuous of their allies, but few understood the crushing weight of sustaining an “atrocious and endless” conflict that was “threatening Vietnamese society with total destruction.” As the war dragged on, South Vietnam’s economy was racked by inflation, leaving many soldiers feeling exploited by a corrupt government while their families suffered. In truth, many Southern-enlisted troops, without clear political ties to Thiệu’s regime, turned inward to protect loved ones in their home villages rather than outward to defend their embattled state. GIs may have seen their allies as “undependable,” but they lacked historical context. As one Southern general put it, with “the war lasting almost continuously since 1946, most Vietnamese, though considering it a scourge, had come to regard it as part of their lives.”⁵⁸

Perhaps this uncomfortable fact added to Americans’ uncertainty as they finally departed Southeast Asia. The Vietnamese, Northern and Southern alike, not they, ultimately would answer the question of how victory or defeat would be defined. Reflecting on his tour in early 1972, Major General John H. Cushman noted that “self-doubt” was “essential equipment for a responsible officer in this environment.”⁵⁹ His peers may not have wished to agree, but Cushman proved insightful. As the Americans withdrew from Vietnam, there was plenty of self-doubt to go around.

Conclusion

Creighton Abrams departed Vietnam in June 1972, the Easter Offensive fighting not yet concluded. That October, Congress confirmed him to replace Westmoreland as the US Army’s chief of staff. In Paris that same month, Henry Kissinger believed he finally had secured a negotiated settlement, but his public declaration that “peace is at hand” proved premature. In many ways, President Thiệu stood as the chief obstacle, fearing that his American allies had betrayed him and that he would be “committing suicide” if he signed any agreement leaving PAVN troops inside South Vietnam. Nixon, infuriated with the delays, once more launched an air campaign, Linebacker II, to serve as a warning to Hanoi and a pledge of support to Saigon. When the Paris Peace Accords were signed in January 1973, few South Vietnamese leaders were exultant. Vice President Nguyễn Cao Kỳ called the agreement a “sellout,” while Ambassador Bùi Diễm thought the Americans simply “wanted to wash their hands of the whole business and run.”⁶⁰

Kỳ and Diễm were not alone in their harsh appraisals. The war’s immediate legacy left many Americans wondering whether the United States had departed Vietnam as victor, vanquished, or just bloodied combatant from a dissatisfying stalemate. Newspaper editorials might have lauded Nixon for achieving “peace with honor,” but any applause was muted. In fact, no peace came to Vietnam. Within forty-eight hours of the Paris Agreement’s signing, the PAVN attacked over 400 Southern villages and hamlets. As the Boston Globe reported in April, “none of the Vietnamese are unloading their magazines or disarming their guns.” Territory once considered “pacified” quickly reverted to communist control. It soon became clear that Kissinger had neither obtained substantive concessions from Hanoi’s leaders nor convinced them to abandon their goal of unifying Vietnam under communist control.⁶¹

Even before Saigon’s final collapse in April 1975, American political and military leaders were condemning others for their perceived failures. Nixon roared that Congress had snatched “defeat from the jaws of victory.” Retired generals cast blame on the media and antiwar activists. Others vented aspersions on unworthy South Vietnamese allies who supposedly lacked the will to fight. One senior admiral, U. S. Grant Sharp, even claimed that the communists had not won the war, but, rather, Washington politicians had lost it. It would become a common refrain within military circles for decades to come. And yet when army generals were surveyed after the peace agreement, nearly one-third believed the war’s results not worth the effort. Might it be that Abrams and his command, in fact, had not secured victory as they departed Vietnam?⁶²

The painstaking American withdrawal from Vietnam raises important questions for those evaluating US strategy in the final years of a long, bloody conflict. Why was it so difficult for civilian policymakers and senior military officers to accurately determine their progress during the war’s final stages? What were the implications when commanders and their troops were incapable of appraising whether they were winning or losing? Did alterations to MACV tactics and operational approaches influence, in any way, the final outcome? And, finally, how could commanders like Abrams convince their soldiers, and the larger American public, that their sacrifices were making a difference?

Back in late July 1970, Associated Press writer Michael Putzel offered a postmortem on the defense of Firebase Ripcord. Using words like “abandonment” and “retreat,” the story hardly extolled American military performance in the A Shau valley that summer. Putzel concluded with a tactical synopsis, arguing that the North Vietnamese, by “choosing the battlefield and measuring the objective against their probable casualties, could force the Americans or the South Vietnamese out of another, and yet another, of these mountaintop bases.” Ripcord, then, might be seen as a microcosm of the American war effort in Vietnam. In the end, it was the Vietnamese communists who retained the battlefield initiative, the capacity to influence the political–military situation inside South Vietnam, and the diplomatic leverage to shape a final negotiated settlement forcing the Americans from the war.⁶³

3 The US Congress and the Vietnam War

Robert David (KC) Johnson

At first look, Vietnam might seem to represent the apex of Cold War congressional activism. On no other foreign policy issue between 1947 and 1989 did Congress – especially the Senate – devote so much effort both to reining in executive power and to challenging the principles underlying Cold War foreign policy. In another respect, however, the legacy of Congress and Vietnam is one of failure. The legislature largely deferred to the executive during the Johnson and Nixon administrations, after forfeiting its greatest chance to shape Vietnam policy by paying insufficient attention to Southeast Asia before the US military commitment significantly escalated.

The congressional response to the conflict is divided into three eras. Until 1964, members of Congress approached Vietnam mostly as one of several controversial foreign aid issues, rather than as a burgeoning military intervention or a foreign policy crisis. This approach peaked in 1963, when Congress devoted considerable attention to Southeast Asia. The second period, from 1964 through 1968, featured deep divisions on partisan, institutional, and ideological grounds. Liberals – mostly Democrats and mostly in the Senate – sought to use the institutional power of Congress to force Lyndon Johnson to modify his Vietnam policy but struggled to perform an effective oversight role. Between 1968 and the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975, the response to Vietnam functioned as part of a broader congressional challenge to executive primacy in international affairs, with the legislature mostly employing the power of the purse to accomplish its aims. Even here, however, Congress proved less successful in contesting executive power on Vietnam issues than regarding policies elsewhere.

The most influential works on Congress and Vietnam remain biographies of key members – especially from the Senate – who shaped the institution’s response to the war. The role of Republican senators, traditionally understudied, is the focus of an important book from Andrew Johns. There are a few institutional histories of Congress and foreign policy that cover the conflict. Works on the House of Representatives – either individual biographies or institutional studies – remain much rarer.¹

The Foreign Aid Revolt

One of the first senators to express consistent concerns with US policy toward Vietnam was Allen Ellender (D-Louisiana). A protégé of Huey Long, Ellender’s foreign policy beliefs combined a skepticism toward overseas spending, a generic hostility to communism, and a racist sense that nonwhite peoples could not effectively govern themselves. This combination prompted him to criticize the Eisenhower administration’s decision to extend economic and military assistance to Ngô Đình Diệm’s newly formed regime in South Vietnam. “Personally,” he recalled a decade later, “I went on record as far back as 1954 against U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, and advised President Eisenhower against it.” In 1957, the Louisiana senator suggested the United States was trying “to do too much too fast,” citing South Vietnam as an example of where it “appears obvious that our [foreign] aid effort … is being used to fill the coffers of the Vietnamese government.”²

No one would confuse Ellender with a deep thinker on international affairs. He was best known for annual international tours, purportedly inspecting US foreign aid projects for wasteful spending, which he would then promote with amateurish home-made movies upon his return to Washington. The New York Herald-Tribune joked that his efforts demonstrated that “every American possesses among other freedoms the freedom to make a fool of himself.”³

Despite Ellender’s reputation as a lightweight, he correctly recognized Vietnam as an example of foreign aid abuses and interpreted the problem as a foreign aid issue rather than as a military intervention. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, senators from various positions on the ideological spectrum shared their colleague’s concerns. They stand out because, as a general matter, the Senate during this period supported the foreign aid program. In 1959, for example, J. William Fulbright (D-Arkansas) criticized “defense support and special assistance, such as is involved in Viet Nam.” Two years later, Albert Gore, Sr. (D-Tennessee) questioned what “more of the same thing would accomplish” in terms of US military aid to South Vietnam. Wayne Morse (D-Oregon) likewise cited “the cumulating evidence that the Government of South Vietnam is not a democratic government.”⁴

The most significant such move came in December 1962, when Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Montana) led a Senate delegation to South Vietnam. The former history professor, generally considered among the Senate’s most knowledgeable members on East Asian matters, had tended to support the regime of Diệm, a fellow Catholic. But he returned from the 1962 trip convinced that the United States needed to “make crystal clear to the Vietnamese government and to our own people that while we will go to great lengths to help, the primary responsibility rests with the Vietnamese.” Privately, Mansfield suggested “that our chances may be a little better than 50-50.” He released a report questioning the effectiveness of US aid to South Vietnam; after all, he noted, “seven years and billions of dollars later” since his previous visit to the country, he heard “the situation described in much the same terms.” The head of the British Advisory Mission to Vietnam relayed the report’s “depressing effect” in the field.⁵

The US role in South Vietnam gradually evolved from an economic aid initiative in the mid-1950s to a mixed economic and military aid program in the late 1950s, to a military aid program accompanied by a small military commitment during the Kennedy years. But because each of these structures remained, at its core, a foreign aid program, it required an annual congressional authorization and appropriation, funded through foreign aid rather than the Pentagon budget – ensuring a major role for Representative Otto Passman (D-Louisiana), whose Foreign Operations Subcommittee had jurisdiction over the foreign aid program’s funding level. Dubbed “Otto the Terrible” by foreign aid supporters, the Louisiana congressman considered the entire program both wasteful and unnecessary.⁶ And he reflected broader attitudes toward foreign aid in the House.

Quite apart from the specifics of his agenda, Passman was an extraordinarily difficult person with whom to interact. (Lyndon Johnson, fuming that the congressman had “a real mental problem,” doubted Passman’s having acquired much “information or knowledge or wisdom” in “the swamps of Louisiana.”) Passman rejoiced in “the limelight” on foreign aid, boasting of his ability, despite having dropped out of school at a young age, to perform the task: “You don’t need a diploma to do this. All you need is common sense.” As he informed one foreign aid official, “I don’t smoke and I don’t drink. My only pleasure in life is kicking the shit out of the foreign aid program of the United States.” Described by reporter Tim Creery as “cadaverous, twitchy, and intense,” Passman spent time on few other legislative issues, and his knowledge of the intricacies of the aid program, unsurpassed in Congress, often exceeded that of senior foreign aid administrators who had only served a few years in their position. Peace Corps Deputy Director William Haddad summarized the general sentiment of officials from three administrations: “Passman’s a sick, sick man.”⁷

Between 1954 and 1962, these two patterns – Passman’s vitriolic hostility to foreign aid in general, though without a specific focus on Vietnam, and the sporadic concerns of Senate Democrats (liberals as well as conservatives) with the execution of the Vietnam aid program – did not intersect. During these years, despite his power in the House, Passman could not obtain a large enough reduction in the program to affect the Vietnam aid package. Senate liberals were more repelled by Passman’s anti-aid posture than by individual aid packages that contradicted their ideals. That situation changed in 1963. Passman was at the zenith of his power, and a backlash among Senate liberals against aid to military regimes (mostly in Latin America) produced a wider reconsideration of foreign aid. US News & World Report dubbed the situation as the “foreign aid revolt,” and, at least in theory, it threatened the underpinnings of the US role in South Vietnam before a substantial number of US combat troops were stationed there.⁸

In fiscal year 1963, around one-eighth of the entire foreign aid budget, or nearly $500 million, went to South Vietnam. As the year began, the White House feigned at cooperation with Passman, but neither side had much interest in working together. In the House, Passman prevailed, securing a $1.728 billion reduction in Kennedy’s request for a $2.802 billion appropriation. The president lamented that the cuts had gotten into the “deep muscle” of the program. National Security Council (NSC) staffer Robert Komer worried that unless the Senate reversed Passman’s cuts, the United States would not “be able to sustain the kind of effort in Southeast Asia which is now costing us well over half a billion [dollars] a year.”⁹

Unfortunately for the administration, as the foreign aid bill moved to the Senate, adverse diplomatic and military developments – a political crisis caused by tensions with neutralist Buddhist factions, which culminated in the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk, the military setbacks for Diệm’s forces, the diplomatic tensions between Diệm and Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, and the internal divisions over policy within the Kennedy administration – highlighted attention on Vietnam. Speaking for several of his colleagues, Stephen Young (D-Ohio) described the Agency for International Development (AID) as “terrifically overstaffed” in Southeast Asia, making the region an obvious target for funding cuts. Ernest Gruening (D-Alaska) deemed the situation “a disaster … a trap of our own making.” The Senate’s most searing indictment of Kennedy’s Vietnam policy came in closed committee hearings, from Albert Gore. While conceding that he was not “an expert on the situation in Vietnam,” Gore suggested that the Buddhist crisis had given the United States a “legitimate excuse” to cut its losses and withdraw. Even though such a move likely would yield a communist victory, “from our expenses there it might be good riddance.”¹⁰

While Gore challenged the administration’s intellectual rationale for Vietnam, the best-known Senate overture in 1963 came from Idaho Senator Frank Church. Operating from the premise that “the present government” might not be the “kind of regime” that could “conduct successfully the war effort,” Church suggested diplomatic protests to Diệm, keeping in mind that if the Saigon regime were recalcitrant, “we are in a position to go further withholding certain kinds of aid.” The Idaho senator introduced a sense of the Senate resolution affirming that “unless the government of South Vietnam abandons policies of repression against its own people and makes a determined and effective effort to regain their support, military and economic assistance to that government should not be continued.”¹¹ While the Senate never formally voted on the measure, similar wording eventually was incorporated into the text of the 1963 foreign aid bill.

On paper, then, it appeared as if Congress might significantly restrict the Vietnam intervention. But limitations existed as to how far critical senators were willing to go. Declining to follow his report’s arguments to their logical conclusion, Mansfield asserted in summer 1963 that “we are stuck” with the involvement “and must stay with it whatever it may take in the end in the way of American lives and money and time to hold South Viet Nam.” Gore, meanwhile, assured Kennedy officials that he had deliberately confined his criticism to private comments, and that he had “made no public statement on the current crisis in Vietnam. None whatsoever.” And while Church’s sense of the Senate resolution was the strongest formal congressional offering on South Vietnam during the Kennedy years, it was hardly a bold challenge to executive authority. The Idaho senator, who described himself as “fully in accord” with Kennedy’s goals in South Vietnam, closely coordinated with administration officials. His efforts also deflected attention from a far more ambitious proposal, from Kenneth Keating (R-New York), for a comprehensive Foreign Relations Committee investigation of the South Vietnam aid program.¹²

During the Cold War, Congress could, and often did, influence foreign policy through informal means, procedural gambits, or indirect committee or subcommittee pressure. So the initiatives described above were far from insignificant. But they also were notable for what they failed to accomplish. Unlike other aspects of the 1963 foreign aid revolt, congressional action on Vietnam avoided funding cuts or amendments that restricted policy, and even the Church resolution reflected a more moderate parliamentary strategy than the Keating amendment, which the administration opposed.

Two reasons explain the generally passive role Congress took toward Vietnam in the foreign aid era. First, as late as 1963, most members of Congress – even those who spent considerable time on international issues – knew relatively little about Vietnam. (Mansfield, an exception to this limitation, focused on his tasks as majority leader, and participated only sporadically in foreign aid hearings.) Hubert Humphrey (D-Minnesota) typified the problem of legislative ignorance, admitting in November 1963 that he was “really not very well informed” about “such a confusing area.” Closed Foreign Relations Committee hearings often served as a kind of travelogue, with senators musing about possible (if unknown) comparisons between Vietnam and Thailand or Malaya. Comments about substance were even odder. Based on a single trip to South Vietnam in 1959, Bourke Hickenlooper (R-Iowa), the Foreign Relations Committee’s ranking Republican, dismissed reports that Diệm had mistreated Buddhists, and pressed the CIA to uncover evidence that the Buddhist priests who engaged in self-immolation really “were subject to drugs or other dulling or deadening devices, hypnosis or other types of human control.”¹³

This level of congressional ignorance sharply contrasted with Latin America, with which many members of the upper chamber – on both sides of the issue – had been deeply engaged in policy since the late 1950s. As the Senate considered the 1963 bill, senators, already with a relatively limited amount of time for floor debate on foreign aid, tended to focus on the region of the world they knew best (Latin America) and steered clear of areas with which they were less comfortable.

Second, while legislators could have taken the time (as many eventually did) to familiarize themselves with Vietnam, in 1963 other regions of the world yielded more fruitful opportunities to criticize Kennedy’s foreign aid policies. As a result, legislative tactics dictated that senators (and, critically, Passman) look beyond Vietnam in their attacks on the foreign aid program.

In the House, for instance, Vietnam represented perhaps the only aspect of the foreign aid program in which Passman knew less than the witnesses he was questioning. He (and his staff) combed through often-obscure publications, seeking unreported or underreported quotations from executive branch officials revealing waste in the program. That these quotations were “generally out of context,” as a Kennedy administration study noted, did not minimize their effectiveness. Passman browbeat low-level witnesses, looking for embarrassing statements that could be exploited on the House floor. He overwhelmed witnesses with a barrage of figures, hoping to extract incorrect answers that he then could use to challenge the administrators’ expertise.¹⁴

During subcommittee hearings about South Vietnam, however, Passman confronted not the mid-level bureaucrats to which he was accustomed but instead Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and AID administrator David Bell. A “gotcha” moment seemed unlikely, while critiquing aid to South Vietnam threatened his standing with anticommunist conservatives. While Passman did not avoid Vietnam entirely in 1963, he had sufficient alternative grounds for attacking the foreign aid program to stay relatively clear of Southeast Asia.

For Senate critics of foreign aid, events in Vietnam also were an awkward fit, though for ideological rather than tactical reasons. In the early 1960s, with events in Latin America providing the frame of reference, safeguarding existing democracies, especially from the threat of military coups, was the chief focus of Senate liberals.¹⁵ This is why the Alliance for Progress, which funneled military aid that Latin American generals then used to oust democratically elected regimes, aroused such concern. Diệm, by contrast, did not fit neatly into a protect-democracies paradigm. He clearly was not a democrat. Nor, however, had he come to power via a military coup. So for protect-democracy liberals, critiquing aid to his regime – as opposed, say, to the Dominican Republic or Honduras after 1963 military coups in those nations – carried less ideological appeal.

Even the November 1963 coup that toppled Diệm produced disparate reactions in Congress. Gore (once again, in private) recommended severing ties with South Vietnam, lest “this constant and repetitive identity of the United States with military coups and repressive regimes … erode the image of the United States in the world.” Church, on the other hand, welcomed “the thing that I certainly had hoped for, because it was becoming increasingly evident the incompetence and corruption of this regime was going to lose the war against the Communists.”¹⁶

In short, amidst a complex debate about the future ideological and financial direction of foreign aid, critics of the program, from both the right and the left, searched for particular issues they could exploit to demonstrate the wisdom of their overall critique. Since the South Vietnam aid package was less on-point for these critics than aid to other regions, it received less attention than it deserved.

The lengthy Senate floor debate ensured that the foreign aid bill had not cleared Congress by the time of Kennedy’s assassination. This delay theoretically allowed Congress to reevaluate conditions in Vietnam in the aftermath of the coup. No such examination occurred. Instead, the final stages of the 1963 foreign aid bill fight revolved around a battle between Passman and Lyndon Johnson over the funding level (Passman prevailed) and the new president’s frantic and ultimately successful efforts to block a politically inspired amendment to force him to publicly report whenever he authorized emergency aid to a nation in the Eastern Bloc. Reflecting on Passman’s conduct with Texas Congressman Jack Brooks, Johnson bitterly concluded, “If I ever walk up in the cold of night and a rattlesnake’s out there and about ready to get him, I ain’t going to pull him off – I’ll tell you that.”¹⁷

At the time, it might have seemed that Congress would have ample opportunity to return to Vietnam and examine the issue more closely. But instead, the next two times Vietnam came before Congress, it did so in crisis situations – the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 and an emergency defense appropriations measure in 1965. The 1963 foreign aid debate thus would provide Congress with its best opportunity to fully explore Vietnam policy before US troops were irrevocably committed to the region. In the end, it failed to do so, poorly serving both the public and itself.

The Limits of Oversight

The first high-profile congressional vote on Vietnam policy, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, came in August 1964. The first high-profile vote on funding for the conflict occurred the following year, for a supplemental defense spending measure. In both instances, the parliamentary situation (declining to support a retaliatory attack that had already occurred, declining to appropriate money for troops that were in the field) discouraged congressional assertiveness. And in both instances, Congress approved the president’s request with only a handful of dissenting votes.

These vote tallies did not accurately reflect the state of opinion on the war in Congress, at least in the Senate. Almost without exception, during late 1963 and early 1964 Senate Democrats opposed widening the war, while their Republican colleagues, sensing a campaign issue against the popular new president, advocated a more aggressive approach to Vietnam. Bourke Hickenlooper typified the GOP’s public rhetoric when he claimed that the Kennedy–Johnson policy meant that “our fighting man is fighting in effect with one arm tied behind his back, under artificial restrictions.” National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy would later complain that, on Vietnam, Republican legislators sought “to have it both ways,” criticizing Johnson’s policies while offering only an all-out war in their place.¹⁸

Despite minimal enthusiasm for the war among Senate Democrats, most also were inclined to give the Johnson administration the benefit of the doubt, and in the first seven months of the new administration, congressional activity on Vietnam waned. The vacuum was filled by the two most radical members of the Senate caucus, who delivered a series of speeches demanding a reversal of US policy in the region.

In September 1963, Ernest Gruening privately remarked that if his son were killed in Vietnam, “I would not feel that he was dying for the defense of my country.” He made these sentiments public in a March 1964 Senate address (surprising colleagues, the New York Times reported, “by his choice of strong words”) – while also recommending withdrawal, given that defeat was “ultimately inevitable, in impossible terrain, for people who care not.” Morse expressed similar sentiments in a series of speeches deeming the conflict an undeclared war that violated the Constitution.¹⁹

When NSC staffer James Thomson surveyed sentiments in the Senate in spring 1964, he discovered that “although Morse and Gruening appear to have made no admitted converts during this period, they have encountered little rebuttal from their colleagues,” with “a growing number of Senators … privately sympathetic with the Morse–Gruening position.” That list included several Southern conservatives. At the same time, however, the duo’s rhetoric made it politically problematic for other senators to fully endorse their position. Their willingness to publicly resist did have some impact. In May 1964, when CIA Director John McCone predicted easy passage of a congressional resolution expressing blanket support for the administration’s handling of Southeast Asian affairs, McGeorge Bundy replied, “Convert Morse first.”²⁰

If Morse and Gruening upped the price for the administration introducing a general resolution of support, this did not mean the idea was rejected out of hand. Indeed, in June 1964, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs William Bundy deemed the question of whether to offer such a resolution an “immediate watershed” issue. An excuse came on August 2, 1964. After a US-supported South Vietnamese naval raid on its coast, North Vietnamese forces fired on the USS Maddox, which was inside North Vietnam’s territorial waters. The Defense Department almost immediately doubted reports of a second attack two days later, but the administration failed to communicate these concerns to Congress. Instead, Johnson promoted the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, whose text approved the retaliatory raids he already had launched against North Vietnam and authorized him to “take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.”²¹

A bill to grant the president advance commitment to use force was hardly a novel tactic. Eisenhower had secured two such resolutions (to respond to the Taiwan Straits Crisis in 1955 and events in the Middle East in 1957) and Kennedy one (during the Cuban Missile Crisis). In Johnson’s case, however, political concerns also furthered the idea of a resolution, as a way of neutralizing GOP presidential nominee Barry Goldwater’s attacks on administration weakness in Southeast Asia.

The presence of US troops in Southeast Asia and the measure’s explicit endorsement of armed retaliation that already had occurred gave the administration insurmountable leverage when Congress considered the bill. No negative votes came in the House, where the only major criticism, offered by Ed Foreman (R-Texas), focused on Johnson’s decision to announce the retaliatory raids before rather than after they had occurred. Citing the president’s desire for an announcement to occur before midnight Eastern Time, the El Paso congressman accused him of “shooting from the lip.”²²

In the Senate, as expected, only Morse and Gruening voted no. Morse, receiving word from Pentagon contacts that the second attack likely never occurred, denounced the measure for providing an “alibi for avoiding congressional responsibility.” Gruening attributed the North Vietnamese attack to US escalation of the conflict, and contended, in any case, that the “allegation that we are supporting freedom in South Vietnam has a hollow sound.” Fulbright prevented any additional negative votes by privately assuring skeptical liberals that the president would never use the authority conferred by the resolution but would benefit politically from its adoption.²³

Despite the unanimous House vote and an 88–2 tally in the Senate, Johnson was displeased he received any criticism at all. Shortly after the vote, he denounced Gruening as “no good” and someone who failed to appreciate all the things he had done for Alaska, termed Morse “just undependable and erratic as he can be,” and blasted the “shitass” Ed Foreman.²⁴

Thanks in part to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Vietnam played only a minor role in the fall campaign. But as the US military presence in Southeast Asia increased in early 1965, a handful of Senate liberals joined Morse and Gruening in criticizing US policy. One of this number, Stephen Young (D-Ohio), was an accidental winner in both 1958 and 1964, and carried little weight in the Senate. But younger liberals, such as George McGovern (D-South Dakota) and Frank Church, had more influence; the two World War II veterans urged a greater emphasis on diplomacy and criticized the initiation of a bombing campaign against enemy-controlled areas. It was no secret, columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak reported, that Democratic attacks on the president’s Vietnam policies were “both galling and embarrassing him” – to such an extent, the duo reported, the president purportedly told Church, “Frank, the next time you need a dam out in Idaho, go see Walter Lippmann about it.”²⁵

Through the spring of 1965, Johnson considered introducing another Gulf of Tonkin–like resolution, but rejected the move lest it trigger an intraparty debate in the Senate. With this option foreclosed, the president chose another route – transforming a vote on funding the troops into a de facto endorsement of his policy. As both he and his critics recognized, such a proposal would be almost impossible for members of Congress to oppose. On May 4, the president requested a $700 million supplemental appropriation for military operations in Vietnam, to communicate “that the Congress and the President stand united before the world in joint determination that the independence of South Vietnam shall be preserved and the Communist attack will not succeed.” The House passed the measure 408 to 7, with both parties’ leadership deeming the vote an endorsement of Johnson’s Vietnam policy.²⁶ Morse and Gruening, joined by Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, cast the only negative votes in the Senate. Armed with this second endorsement of his handling of Southeast Asian events, Johnson approved a June 1965 request to more than double the US military presence in the region.

Lacking any chance of blocking Johnson through funding reductions or legislation, Senate skeptics of the war increasingly turned toward oversight. As Church privately told Morse in June 1965, it was “absolutely vital for the Senate to continue to discuss the alternatives to a widening war in Southeast Asia.” Fulbright soon agreed: admitting that he had not acted promptly enough because he did not “realize the seriousness of the situation until recently,” he sought to shape US public opinion through public hearings, which ran from January 28 through February 18, 1966. Witnesses included leading figures in the development of Cold War foreign policy, with Dean Rusk and General Maxwell Taylor defending administration policy and George Kennan and General James Gavin questioning it. The flailing administration response – Johnson pressed CBS not to televise the hearings, Taylor smeared Morse by saying his antiwar remarks would be good news to Hanoi – only heightened the hearings’ impact.²⁷

Fulbright’s leading biographer, Randall Bennett Woods, has acknowledged that while the hearings appear in retrospect to be a turning point in how Congress responded to the war, at the time only 37 percent of respondents knew of them. Nonetheless, they set the stage for more aggressive future Senate oversight. What Newsweek called their “superb drama” – especially sharp questions from committee members Fulbright, Morse, Gore, and Church, coupled with the difficulty of pro-administration witnesses in responding to them – made it easier for both ordinary Americans and the media to question the tenets of the administration’s policies. Because the Senate’s most influential prowar voices did not serve on the committee, the hearings presented a more one-sided view of Senate opinion than actually existed. Johnson certainly noticed: the president opened one White House dinner for senators by remarking, “I am delighted to be here tonight with so many of my very old friends as well as some members of the Foreign Relations Committee.”²⁸

Senate critics of the war nonetheless struggled to sustain momentum throughout 1966 – Fulbright, for one, recognized the “new role for me, and not a very easy one under our system.” That Morse and Gruening continued to press colleagues to enter what Church ridiculed as their “‘never-never-land’ of radically ineffectual dissent” made it difficult for the antiwar bloc to develop a consistent legislative strategy. Fulbright, Church, and McGovern preferred a more calculated approach, Morse and Gruening a more confrontational one, and in the end, the two sides could not agree. The year’s major Senate votes on Vietnam – a Gruening amendment allowing draftees to decline to serve in Vietnam and a Morse amendment to rescind the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution – attracted only five votes apiece, effectively providing, as Fulbright lamented, “a reaffirmation of the President’s power.”²⁹

At a minimum, the overwhelming defeats of the Morse and Gruening offerings seemed to prove the wisdom of antiwar senators relying on oversight to influence Johnson. But a vision of congressional power based primarily on oversight rather than legislation could work in both ways. With the Foreign Relations Committee becoming the center of antiwar sentiments in Congress, the Senate Armed Services Committee used similar tactics to champion a more aggressive US position in Southeast Asia. Though chaired by longtime Johnson confidant Richard Russell, the committee’s major figure on Vietnam matters was its second-ranking Democrat, John Stennis (D-Mississippi). Stennis also chaired the Preparedness Investigation Subcommittee (PIS), the Armed Services body responsible for conducting oversight investigations. Hearings in January 1966 – which Stennis hailed as “historic” – featured an array of prowar Democrats denouncing the administration for not sufficiently “fighting to destroy the enemy.”³⁰

The next year, PIS hearings explored what Stennis termed “the overall policy and public philosophy governing and controlling the conduct of the entire war.” Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was the sole civilian witness; military testimony deflected blame to civilian policymakers. Stennis denounced a bombing pause as “a tragic and perhaps fatal mistake”; his colleague, Henry Jackson (D-Washington), urged an expanded bombing campaign. The hearings had a dramatic policy effect. Johnson became keener to approve strikes against previously denied air targets in their aftermath.³¹

The only Democrat to serve on both the Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees was Stuart Symington (D-Missouri). Secretary of the Air Force before winning election to the Senate in 1952, Symington earned the nickname “Senator from the Air Force” both for his consistently pro–air force approach and his efforts to funnel government contracts to Missouri-based McDonnell Douglas. (One administration staffer observed that Symington was “obviously more interested in plugging for the air force than for the Administration generally.”)³² This worldview initially made him strongly supportive of the military campaign in Vietnam. But Symington grew increasingly skeptical about the war as the 1960s progressed. As a participant in the Fulbright Hearings, he suggested that “without question we must take another look” at the basic policy if conditions in South Vietnam did not improve. A balanced-budget Democrat, the Missouri senator worried about the long-term economic effects of the war. Most importantly, he concluded that the administration’s secrecy was frustrating the ability of Congress to perform its oversight tasks.³³

Symington’s evolution into an antiwar senator began elsewhere in Southeast Asia. While he initially did not challenge the commitment in Vietnam, he opposed an expanded war as too costly and too likely to raise constitutional concerns. The tough questions Symington posed for William Bundy, who represented the administration, was the most notable development from late 1966 Foreign Relations Committee hearings on the US military presence in Thailand. The Missouri senator in particular focused on transparency issues, wondering whether “we are being so secretive about such an obvious operation” due to possible parallels between the mid-1960s situation in Thailand and mid-1950s conditions in Vietnam. Symington dismissed as “ridiculous” Bundy’s claim that “sophisticated” citizens could obtain sufficient information about Thai affairs in the New York Times. All of a sudden, this formerly predictable senator had become a wild card in the upper chamber’s debates about Southeast Asia, giving critics of the war in Vietnam credibility on military and national security matters they previously had lacked.³⁴

Despite their growing numbers, during the mid-1960s, an oversight strategy provided significant limits on what antiwar Democrats could accomplish. Their strength remained, as Fulbright admitted, in educating the public, not in exercising formal legislative powers. In the end, this strategy did little to prevent the dramatic expansion of US involvement in the war between 1964 and 1968.

Figure 3.1 General William Westmoreland, commander of US troops in Vietnam, speaks to the United States Congress (April 28, 1967).

Source: Bettmann / Contributor / Bettmann / Getty Images.

The Power of the Purse and the Limits of Congressional Power

The 1966, 1968, and 1970 elections changed the composition of Congress in subtle but ultimately significant ways. The 1966 midterms brought to the Senate three Republicans – Mark Hatfield (Oregon), Charles Percy (Illinois), and Edward Brooke (Massachusetts) – who to varying degrees questioned the wisdom of how Johnson had handled Vietnam. Their arrival coincided with more veteran Republicans criticizing the war effort more aggressively. The most noteworthy, Clifford Case (R-New Jersey), in 1967 denounced Johnson’s “misuse,” “perversion,” and “complete distortion” of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. The comments drew sharp criticism from conservatives in both parties; Stennis accused Case of unintentionally giving “comfort, encouragement, and hope to the enemy.”³⁵ But the development was critical – antiwar Democrats could hope to command a Senate majority only if they obtained some Republican support. In 1966, that seemed unlikely; by 1968, such an outcome seemed more promising.

Elections also altered the Vietnam-related composition of the Senate Democratic caucus, making it more open to working with more moderate Republicans. In 1968, several prominent critics of the war – Church, McGovern, Nelson, Gruening, Morse, and Joseph Clark (D-Pennsylvania) – were standing for reelection in what now would be described as red or purple states.

The group employed differing strategies regarding how to reconcile their positions on the war with the political realities of the states they represented. Church, McGovern, Clark, and Nelson sought to moderate their positions, to appease moderate or conservative voters at home. For instance, all four endorsed a public letter (coordinated by Church) opposing unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam. Fulbright, who faced only token opposition, signed on to give cover to Church, who was running in strongly Republican Idaho. McGovern, elected to the Senate by only 597 votes in 1962, aimed to neutralize resolutions condemning him passed by the South Dakota Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion. The South Dakota senator privately told Gruening that he had not stood “100% on all your efforts because of the extremely conservative nature of my state and my forthcoming campaign, but my heart is always with you even when I have not been able to vote with you.”³⁶ The approach worked: not only were Church and McGovern reelected, but they increased their margins from 1962, even as GOP presidential nominee Richard Nixon easily carried their state.

Gruening and Morse, by contrast, did not in any way retreat. Gruening, if anything, grew more extreme. Beyond advocating unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam, he started opposing all defense appropriations, contending that Congress needed to be more confrontational in seeking to bring the troops home. Along with his advanced age (81), this voting pattern, representing a state heavily reliant on defense spending, heightened Gruening’s vulnerability. Two strong Republicans declared for the seat but, in the end, the incumbent failed to make it out of the primary, falling to Mike Gravel, a 38-year-old former state legislator.

His position on Vietnam likewise eroded Morse’s political standing. Morse had crossed party lines in 1966 to endorse Mark Hatfield against his prowar Democratic opponent, Representative Robert Duncan. Duncan then turned around to challenge Morse in the 1968 primary. With covert support from the Johnson administration, he held Morse to 49 percent of the vote. (A third candidate siphoned 5 percent of the vote and probably cost Duncan the victory.) A weakened Morse then narrowly lost the general election to Republican Bob Packwood.³⁷

Two years later, the Nixon administration’s number-one Senate target was another Democrat weakened by his early opposition to the war, Albert Gore. The Tennessee senator was ideologically out of step with his state – he managed only 51 percent in the 1970 Democratic primary – but also had antagonized both Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew. (In late 1969, Agnew said that Gore needed “to be removed to some sinecure when he can simply affect those within the sound of his voice and not the whole State of Tennessee”; in 1970, he ridiculed Gore’s “mistaken belief that Tennessee is located somewhere between New York City and Hartford, Connecticut.”) Gore’s opponent, Bill Brock, linked him with such liberal critics of the war as Fulbright, McGovern, and Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts). Near the end of the campaign, Gore admitted that his antiwar stance had gone “against the grain of the prevailing sentiment in Tennessee. Show Tennesseans a war and they’ll fight it.” Despite campaigning gamely, Gore lost by around four points.³⁸

The political reporter Don Oberdorfer regarded Gore as the Senate’s “most compelling leader against the Administration” on the war.³⁹ In his final years in the Senate, the Tennessee senator became more aggressive in his criticism – joining the likes of Morse, Gruening, and Stephen Young. The unsuccessful reelection bids of Gruening, Morse, and Gore, coupled with Young’s retirement, meant that, by 1971, relatively little difference existed between the tactics or belief systems of antiwar Senate Democrats and Republicans, mostly eroding the partisan distinction that had existed over the war during most of the Johnson administration.

After 1970, then, a more cohesive and bipartisan Senate antiwar bloc formed. These senators largely abandoned the Johnson-era tactic of focusing on oversight and instead aimed to use the appropriations power – by targeting military spending itself rather than, as in the early 1960s, the foreign aid program. And they increasingly found at least some support in the House of Representatives, which during the oversight era had tended to go along with Johnson’s Vietnam policies.

Richard Nixon’s promise to honorably end the war in Vietnam largely immobilized congressional action in 1969. But the president’s failure to promptly deliver on his promise generated what was then the most serious congressional effort to end the war. An amendment cosponsored by George McGovern and Mark Hatfield sought to cut off appropriations for all military operations in Vietnam except those related to the pullout of US troops, with a full withdrawal required by June 30, 1971.

Discussion of the amendment consumed the summer of 1970, its fate sealed when two moderate Republicans, George Aiken (R-Vermont) and John Sherman Cooper (R-Kentucky), came out against it, arguing that it could undercut the troops in the field. In his final speech on the measure, McGovern described “every senator in this chamber” as “partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave, this chamber reeks of blood.”⁴⁰ That sort of rhetoric – when offered by Morse or Gruening in the mid-1960s – alienated colleagues and isolated the speaker. By 1970, however, the center of opinion in the upper chamber had shifted, and though McGovern–Hatfield went down to defeat, its 55–39 margin was respectable.

By this point Senate critics had shown they could obtain majority support for using the appropriations power to shape debate, at least when the focus was not Vietnam itself. On April 30, 1970, without congressional authorization, Nixon sent US combat troops to neutral Cambodia, seeking to disrupt North Vietnamese supply lines and fortify the South Vietnamese military position. The move, which Fulbright deemed “the most serious constitutional crisis we’ve ever faced” apart from the civil war, generated fierce criticism in the Senate. Within weeks, fifty senators had publicly criticized the administration’s actions, with fewer than a quarter of the body coming out in support. With Majority Leader Mansfield terming the Senate as the “only hope” of Americans who wanted to restore constitutional order, Church and John Sherman Cooper introduced an amendment to cut off funds for the operation.⁴¹

In response, White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman searched for “inflammatory types to attack Senate doves – for knife in back disloyalty – lack of patriotism.” He found a few takers: Hiram Fong (R-Hawai’i) wildly claimed that “under the Cooper–Church theory, allied forces should never have invaded occupied France to get at the German Nazis in World War II.”⁴² But the administration’s Senate allies mostly recognized that the amendment would pass when brought to a vote, and so concentrated on stalling, introducing amendments designed to delay progress of the measure.

Bob Dole (R-Kansas) futilely proposed giving Nixon authority to override any restrictions imposed by Cooper–Church if he considered doing so necessary for the national interest. An unsuccessful Robert Byrd (D-West Virginia) amendment sought to apply Cooper–Church only to actions the president did not consider necessary to protect US troops in South Vietnam. (One Cooper aide denounced Byrd as a “king’s man” who believed “that the President should not be restrained by legislative action in matters of foreign affairs and national security” – an accurate appraisal at the time, but ironic in light of Byrd’s jealous defenses of legislative prerogatives late in his career.)⁴³ A proposal from Robert Griffin (R-Michigan) sought to authorize US arrangements with third parties, such as Thailand, to serve as mercenaries in Cambodia. Each of these offerings narrowly lost, consuming debate time on the Senate floor as the troops completed their action in Cambodia. Pressed by Majority Leader Mansfield, Cooper and Church added a compromise provision deeming their amendment consistent with the president’s authority as commander-in-chief. That decision gave the amendment enough support to easily pass, 58–32 – though the House still rejected the offering.

The Cooper–Church outcome provided a reminder that any congressional effort to address the war based on funding restrictions rather than oversight hearings would require support from both chambers rather than only the Senate. That realization highlighted the importance of House efforts to grow opposition to the war. The first significant House antiwar amendment came in 1971, when Representatives Charles Whalen (R-Ohio) and Lucien Nedzi (D-Michigan) offered an amendment to cut off funding. The amendment failed, 158–254. For the first time, however, a majority of House Democrats (135–106) supported an end-the-war amendment. Nedzi’s role, moreover, provided a House counterpart to Symington – a prominent member of the Armed Services Committee who took a high-profile role against the war.

In the Senate, meanwhile, McGovern and Hatfield revived their efforts. Bob Dole ridiculed their backers as “a Who’s Who of has-beens, would-be’s, professional second-guessers, and apologists for the policies which led us into this tragic conflict in the first place.”⁴⁴ Seeking to broaden their support from 1970, the duo agreed to an amendment sponsored by freshman Lawton Chiles (D-Florida) to link a cutoff of the funds to the release of all American POWs. (National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger nonetheless complained about antiwar senators introducing “one amendment after another, forcing the Administration into unending rearguard actions.”) Four senators who had voted against McGovern–Hatfield in 1970 – Democrat Everett Jordan and Republicans Ted Stevens, Milton Young, and Charles Percy – backed the Chiles offering, which went down to defeat, 52–44 votes. This total was the highest number of votes for any antiwar measure until that time.⁴⁵

By 1971, then, the pattern was clear: each year, more and more senators were willing to vote to cut off funds for the war. The question was whether events or an appropriate legislative vehicle would emerge to bring the total to a majority. The time was right in late 1971. The release of the Pentagon Papers, a classified study of Vietnam escalation during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, raised doubts about the justification for the war. Mansfield used the opening to introduce an amendment declaring a pullout within nine months to be national policy – a more moderate offering than either the McGovern–Hatfield or Chiles amendments, since it did not explicitly authorize a date to withdraw funds for the war. The Mansfield amendment easily passed, 61–38, consolidating support from even conservative Democrats and attracting support from four Republican opponents of the McGovern–Hatfield amendment.

Given such results, Symington privately speculated that 1972 “could be the ‘year of decision,’” in which the Senate firmly established its power to shape Vietnam policy. A few months later, the Times’ John Finney correctly noted that “much of the energy and organization had gone out of the antiwar effort in the Senate.” The key reason was the surprising success of George McGovern’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, which unintentionally revived the more explicitly partisan lens through which the Senate had approached Vietnam policy in the mid-1960s. The prominent role that his antiwar legacy played in McGovern’s campaign complicated efforts to woo Republican backers for antiwar measures. Even in this environment, however, the Senate for the first time approved an amendment (cosponsored by Church and Cooper) to cut off funds for the conflict, although the overall military aid bill to which the amendment was attached then went down to defeat. Absent the withdrawal secured by the Paris Peace Conference, it seems likely Congress would have dramatically curtailed or terminated altogether funding for the war in 1973, especially given results of Senate elections in Iowa, Colorado, South Dakota, Delaware, and Maine, each of which replaced a prowar Republican with an antiwar Democrat.⁴⁶

Conclusion

In 1973, the new Congress did address one legacy issue from Vietnam – an effort to restrain the war powers of the executive. But advocates were, metaphorically, fighting the last war. Looking for a mechanism to prevent another president from abusing measures like the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution or the 1965 appropriations bill, the act required notification of Congress within forty-eight hours of sending troops into harm’s way and required the troops’ withdrawal after ninety days, absent a congressional authorization to use force. Some liberals criticized the latter provision as effectively granting a president some authority to send troops abroad without congressional authorization; some conservatives viewed the law as an infringement on the president’s power as commander-in-chief. The measure easily cleared the House, and a cross-ideological coalition put together by its chief sponsors – Stennis, Jacob Javits (R-New York), and Tom Eagleton (D-Missouri) – ensured necessary support in the Senate. Both chambers then narrowly overrode Richard Nixon’s veto. Whether the War Powers Act had any more actual power than a sense of Congress resolution, however, remains very much open to debate; it is unclear whether the act even would have posed a significant obstacle to Johnson’s militarization of the war in 1964 and 1965.

Leverage provided one critical element in the story of how Congress responded to the Vietnam War – between 1964 and 1973, the executive had the leverage, forcing Congress to react to external developments (Tonkin Gulf) or face accusations of undermining the troops in the field (the 1965 defense appropriations bill, McGovern–Hatfield). The final element of congressional involvement in the war, however, featured Congress with leverage, as the new administration of Gerald Ford unsuccessfully sought to procure emergency aid to forestall the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975. After abandoning plans for a massive infusion of military aid to Saigon, the administration called for humanitarian assistance for the South Vietnamese, as well as congressional authority to evacuate remaining US nationals.

The proposal cleared the House after a tumultuous debate in which newly empowered Watergate Democrats, deeply suspicious of any grant of executive power, worried about another Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. (Michael Blouin, a moderate Democrat elected in 1974 from an eastern Iowa district, reflected on the day: “If people think panic reigns in Saigon, they should have checked the tempo of this floor.”)⁴⁷ The House vote proved irrelevant. In the Senate, freshman Foreign Relations Committee member Dick Clark (D-Iowa) championed what he deemed a compromise, under which the aid would be released only when Ford committed to respecting the congressional power to declare war in any evacuation plan. Discussions were still ongoing over the proposal when the South Vietnamese regime collapsed.

The chaos associated with the final, failed aid package provided a reminder of the reactive nature of how Congress responded to Vietnam once funding for the war shifted from the foreign aid program – which allowed for more effective oversight – to the defense budget. While individual legislators, such as Symington, were able to exercise significant influence during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and congressional activism played some role in challenging the expansion of the war during the Nixon years, the legislature struggled to wield its power as Johnson made the key decisions to expand the war in the mid-1960s.

4 US Antiwar Sentiment and International Relationships in the Late Vietnam War

Jessica M. Frazier

In December 1970, white women’s liberationist Ellin Hirst voiced the clear frustration of many activists in 1960s social movements who felt pressured to choose between issues, ideologies, and tactics when she declared:

I want a movement that is for me and my head in its entirety. I don’t want to be boxed up and have my mind in drawers. I don’t want to have to leave women, the people who I am, in order to do things which I, as a woman, want to do. … Because we understand our own oppression, does that supersede the knowledge that we already had of the evil that the US visits daily on black people, on Vietnamese, Chicano, Puerto Rican, Brazilian, Palestinian, on every people? When we say that we want freedom and liberation does that deny that want in others? Does my liberation mean not your liberation? Is there competition for freedom, for struggle?¹

In the summer of 1969, the New Left organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) imploded at its national convention when Black Power, women’s liberation, and revolutionary youth activists quarreled with one another and could not find a compromise. Nevertheless, Hirst’s desire for unity, if not uniformity, was not unique, but rather representative of many who wanted to force a change in US society and foreign relations, including putting an end to US involvement in Vietnam. Unfortunately, many activists and organizations did not agree on tactics, proposed solutions, or even the underlying problems. This diversity of opinion within antiwar circles grew out of 1950s peace, civil rights, and Old Left movements, each of which focused on different aspects of US foreign and domestic policies, and eventually incorporated strategies and ideas that stemmed from New Left, Black Power, Asian American, Chicano, and women’s liberation movements. Instead of coalescing or forming a singular voice, by the end of the 1960s, activists’ and organizations’ arguments against the American war in Vietnam ranged from pacifist principles against all war to revolutionary statements in support of a Vietnamese victory over “US imperialism.” What they had in common was that each of these movements tied US action abroad with domestic policies at home; that is, the war remained a salient touchstone in activists’ and organizations’ drive to create a more just society regardless of why or how they protested the war or injustice.

The tangle of 1960s activism can easily restrain the historian’s ability to capture the breadth of antiwar sentiment and protest during the US–Vietnam War years. The desire and need to limit and categorize participants in histories of civil rights, antiwar, and feminist movements, for example, have led scholars interested in anti–Vietnam War activism to pay more attention to groups, people, and demonstrations geared primarily or solely toward opposing US intervention in Vietnam. These histories, although valuable, do not fully reflect the complexity of antiwar sentiment prevalent throughout US society. Many scholars of 1960s social movements know that activists crossed movement and organizational boundaries to protest US involvement in Vietnam as well as to support the social and economic rights of communities of color and to call attention to women’s unequal status. Although the 1960s antiwar, civil rights, and feminist movements each have hundreds of volumes dedicated to their study, the time is ripe to uncover the cross-fertilization between movements. Some scholars, particularly those studying civil rights movements, have begun this work by researching antiwar activism in communities of color or by analyzing women of color feminisms.² Building off of this work, this chapter considers the relationship of a myriad of 1960s social movements to antiwar arguments and actions.

Beginning such a project (and writing a brief account of it) is a daunting task, but here, the 1960s North Vietnamese government steps in to help. President Hồ Chí Minh believed that Hanoi needed to foster people-to-people relationships with American citizens (as well as citizens of other nations) who might oppose US military and government actions.³ The initiation of these kinds of relationships with Americans began well before the US war years; in 1945, the Vietnamese–American Friendship Association formed “to enable the two peoples to make a thorough acquaintance of the other’s culture and civilization,” but soon the mission was suspended when the United States supported France during the French Indochina War.⁴ Twenty years later, during the American war in Vietnam, Hanoi officials renewed efforts to establish ties with American citizens in the hope that by informing the American public about the bombing of nonmilitary targets in North Vietnam, the use of nonconventional weapons, and the deaths of civilians, American citizens would pressure the US administration into withdrawing US troops.

On the American side, limited press coverage early on during the war created a vacuum of information that drew activists to communicate with Vietnamese to find out more about the situation on the ground.⁵ One of the first such contacts occurred in May 1965, just two months after US bombing over North Vietnam began, when white peace activists Lorraine Gordon and Mary Clarke visited the North Vietnamese Embassy in Moscow and accepted an invitation to travel on to Hanoi to meet with members of the Vietnamese Women’s Union (VWU).⁶ The VWU fell under the leadership of the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP) in North Vietnam and was charged with establishing people’s diplomatic ties with women’s organizations around the world. This initial meeting between American citizens and Vietnamese set the stage for about 200 anti–Vietnam War activists, from a variety of 1960s social movement circles, to travel to North Vietnam during the US war years.⁷ Some Americans traveled to South Vietnam, and many more met with Vietnamese at antiwar conferences held around the world. There, Americans learned of antiwar efforts happening in other countries, exchanged notes on effective protest strategies, and planned international antiwar actions.

American delegations to Hanoi and to international conferences were often diverse. North Vietnamese officials made a point of inviting participants from a variety of social movement circles to Hanoi because they knew that in order for people’s diplomacy to work, Hanoi needed to reach a cross-section of the American population. Indeed, “Vietnamese communist leaders … adapted their antiwar messages to appeal to different audiences in the global antiwar movement,” according to historian Lien-Hang T. Nguyen.⁸ Americans also wanted to build a united antiwar front and worked with their Vietnamese counterparts to invite civil rights, feminist, and other activists to Hanoi or to international antiwar conferences. A few established peace activists, such as Dave Dellinger and Cora Weiss, suggested and recruited American citizens to travel to Vietnam or to attend meetings elsewhere. They, as much as the Vietnamese, had a desire to include American activists who might increase efforts to protest the war. Looking at a few of these delegations provides a window onto the variety of antiwar activity and sentiment, indicates the transnational dynamic of opposition to the Vietnam War, and shows the cross-fertilization that occurred between movements. Ironically, travel to an enemy nation – an act that one might assume only the most radical of activists would have undertaken – is a means to create a sample of the breadth of antiwar sentiment and activism.

Civil Rights Influences on Antiwar Sentiment

Activists involved in pacifist and nuclear disarmament campaigns of the 1950s and early 1960s were, unsurprisingly, some of the first to speak out against US involvement in Vietnam, but from the earliest days of antiwar protest, some civil rights advocates also made known their opposition to the war. Indeed, immediately following the deployment of US ground troops in Vietnam in the spring of 1965, editors of the civil rights periodical Freedomways published an op-ed calling the war “one of the most tragic and morally unjustifiable adventures in our nation’s history” and asking for “fuller cooperation between the grass-roots participants and leaders of the Peace Movement and Civil Rights Movement.”⁹

Cooperation would not come easy, however. Indeed, in November 1965, some 1,500 activists met at a contentious convention hosted by the National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Viet Nam (NCCEWVN). There, participants agreed on future dates for demonstrations, but little else – tactics, goals, and strategies remained contested. The few civil rights activists in attendance “dismissed the convention as irrelevant.”¹⁰ By the spring of 1966, the “breadth and vitality” of antiwar sentiment was clear, but no single organization or central directorate could encompass or fully harness it.¹¹ Nevertheless, some antiwar leaders sought to build broadbased support to end the war, and civil rights advocates described their stance on the war as stemming from a position of “moral conscience.”¹²

Both Hanoi officials and white American antiwar activists wanted to make full use of the opposition of civil rights leaders to the war to forward their cause. Thus, when the VWU looked to host a delegation of American women in Hanoi in the winter of 1966, evidence suggests that members of the North Vietnamese government asked white antiwar activist Dave Dellinger, who visited Hanoi in the fall of 1966, for names of women in peace and civil rights organizations.¹³ Ultimately, a group of four women – African American Diane Nash, known for her role in organizing 1960 sit-ins in Nashville, Tennessee; Puerto Rican Grace Mora Newman, sister of one of the Fort Hood Three, a group of soldiers who refused to serve in Vietnam; white pacifist Barbara Deming, who had visited Saigon in the spring of 1966; and white Southeast Asian scholar Patricia Griffith – traveled to North Vietnam in December 1966, in the midst of heavy bombing.

Besides all participating in this extreme undertaking, the four women had little in common, according to Diane Nash. They disagreed on everything “from childcare and men to politics and nonviolence”; like many who held antiwar stances, they simply all opposed the war.¹⁴ For Nash’s part, she told reporters she had traveled to Hanoi because she had seen a photograph of a “distraught [Vietnamese] mother holding a wounded or dead child” and wondered whether the depiction was accurate.¹⁵ To find out the truth behind the photograph, she and her three companions visited hospitals, surveyed recently bombed-out buildings, and met with important political figures, including Hồ Chí Minh.

Judging from an article Nash penned following her trip, the prevalence of civilian casualties particularly struck her. In it, she included gruesome details told to her during interviews with recent victims of US bombings. These testimonies complemented what she observed in and around Hanoi, as well as what she heard in meetings with doctors, municipal officials, and religious leaders. Citing all of these sources, Nash testified that conditions for civilians were worse than she had imagined – widespread bombing frequently killed women and children, in contradiction to official reports about the war coming from US government sources. Her observations of life in Hanoi led Nash to sum up her view of the war as “using murder as a solution to human problems”¹⁶ – terms repeated by her husband, civil rights leader James Bevel, at the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam in April 1967, an action meant “to encourage cooperation between the peace and civil rights movements.”¹⁷ Indeed, observers noted the diversity of both the crowd and march leaders, who included renowned white pediatrician Benjamin Spock alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. James Bevel proclaimed a simple purpose for that rally: to protest “the mass murder of people, period.”¹⁸

The potential double meaning of Bevel’s comment should not go unremarked: it connected the, at times state-sanctioned, violence met by nonviolent civil rights protestors to the violence enacted upon Vietnamese civilians by US military action. Bevel’s statement echoes the above-mentioned 1965 editorial in Freedomways that “connect[ed] Selma and Saigon,” declaring that, “the very day that 3,500 U.S. troops were landing in Vietnam, the Negro citizens of Selma, Alabama, were being beaten, tear-gassed, and smoke bombed by Alabama State police for trying to march in peaceful protest against being denied the right to vote.”¹⁹ The piece further argued that the United States’ refusal to uphold the civil rights of African Americans directly related to its abandonment of free elections in South Vietnam.²⁰ A 1966 statement made by members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and other articles written by civil rights advocates made similar points linking violence and injustice faced by Blacks in the United States with violence and injustice in South Vietnam.²¹

Figure 4.1 Dr. Benjamin Spock (seated) holding a press conference with leaders of the Spring Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam (April 1967). James Bevel is on the far right.

Source: Bettmann / Contributor / Bettmann / Getty Images.

Similarly, Hanoi and the National Front for the Liberation of Southern Vietnam (NLF, or Viet Cong) made use of racial unrest in the domestic United States in an attempt to illustrate the comparable treatment of Vietnamese and African Americans at the hands of the US government. Western news outlets provided much of the content for these portrayals; in fact, people’s diplomat Pham Van Chuong stated in 2015 that part of his mission as a correspondent in Eastern and Western Europe during the war years was to monitor Western news sources and disseminate bulletins about recent events.²² Hanoi and the NLF may have also incorporated information shared by American activists to influence the word choices in their English-language propaganda – one activist recalled Vietnamese at an international antiwar conference asking for suggestions on slogans meant to encourage GIs to desert.²³ Regardless of the source of information, Hanoi’s and the NLF’s French- and English-language periodicals, Vietnam Courier and South Viet Nam in Struggle, respectively, carried stories about race riots in the United States as a way to convince readers that the US government acted unjustly toward its own people as well as toward the Vietnamese. Many activists recalled Hanoi officials claiming that the US government, not the American people, was the enemy, and this line of reasoning asserted that Hanoi could rely on civil rights activists for support.

Civil rights leaders also wondered whether African Americans were being sent to fight in Vietnam to deflect charges of racism as a motivation for the war – that is, the presence of Black GIs in Vietnam would disrupt images of the United States as an all-white nation invading a country composed of people of color.²⁴ In the context of the growing draft resistance movement,²⁵ Diane Nash and other civil rights advocates pointed out the disproportionate number of African American GIs serving in Vietnam, thereby adding a racial component to the heated debate over military service.²⁶ At the 1967 Spring Mobilization, civil rights speaker Stokely Carmichael “quipped that the draft was ‘white people sending Black people to make war on yellow people to defend land they stole from red people.’”²⁷ For her part, Diane Nash argued that it would be better for African American youth to refuse to serve and face prison terms than to risk their lives in a fight against other people of color.²⁸ Vietnamese officials must have caught wind of the debate over African American military service because in the late 1960s the NLF produced a number of pamphlets geared toward persuading Black GIs to desert.²⁹ Some of the pamphlets referenced specific events, such as Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in 1968, while others featured more general arguments depicting racial discord within the United States. Taken together, all of the propaganda produced with an African American audience in mind made the point that Black Americans’ fight was at home against the US administration and American racism, not in Vietnam.

Hanoi’s courting of civil rights activists came at a moment of heightened debate within the Black Freedom Struggle. Namely, the SNCC, under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael, began to turn to more militant tactics and revolutionary rhetoric, popularizing the term “Black Power” and expelling whites from the organization.³⁰ Although the SNCC as an organization did not weather the storm that followed this transition, some activists, particularly those who included themselves in the emerging “Third World Left,”³¹ embraced the idea of revolution as they identified themselves as anti-imperialists struggling alongside peoples of color in decolonizing nations.

At the same time, the US administration blamed antiwar protestors for a potential US military failure, and red-baiting continued to be a tactic to discredit activists. For instance, in his November 1969 “Silent Majority” speech, President Richard Nixon tapped into Americans’ fear of losing the war and found a scapegoat when he asserted that “North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.”³² More broadly, anticommunism permeated domestic debate over the war, causing distrust of antiwar actions and activists. Indeed, in 1965, when community organizers for SDS in Cleveland made known their antiwar stance, local community members, both Black and white, charged them with being communists.³³ Again, in the spring of 1970, members of Congress argued that the United States must be leery of any united front against the war because broadbased antiwar coalitions allowed for communist infiltration and exploitation.³⁴ Organizations that had survived red-baiting tactics in the 1950s remained on guard as they tried to maneuver around assumptions that they were communists who thought that “everything the United States does is wrong and everything Hanoi does is right.”³⁵ While some activists and organizations tried to work within the constraints of contemporary American society, others saw victory for North Vietnam as central to their struggle for social and economic justice in the United States.

Anti-imperialist Perspectives on US Intervention

As Asian American Alex Hing, minister of information for the Red Guard Party of San Francisco, explained in 1970, “If we take an anti-imperialist stand, then we clearly support the liberation struggles of the people of the world. In fact,” he continued, “we want the Vietnamese to win against US imperialism.”³⁶ The Black Panther Party agreed and put forward an image of themselves as having a unique bond with the Vietnamese as revolutionaries. This kind of alliance between African Americans and Asians was not new: during the early Cold War, such prominent African American activists as W. E. B. DuBois and Robert Williams expressed solidarity with the Chinese, and the Chinese government reciprocated. They defined their shared struggle as against US imperialism, racial discrimination, and economic injustice.³⁷ The Black Panthers, founded in 1966, built upon this foundation by citing Asian socialists as ideological visionaries, and in August 1970 Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver led an eleven-member Anti-imperialist Delegation, which included Alex Hing, on a three-month tour of North Vietnam, North Korea, and China. The Anti-imperialist Delegation was, in part, a way to create more tangible ties between the Black Panthers and Asian nations. The Vietnamese responded by hosting an International Day of Solidarity with Black Americans during the delegation’s visit. Vietnamese coverage of the commemoration praised the Black Power movement for meeting “violence with violence.”³⁸

As the presence of Alex Hing on the Anti-imperialist Delegation attests, the “Third World Left” in the United States extended beyond Black Power circles to include Asian Americans. Hing’s activism had roots in the recent identification of Asian Americans with the Vietnamese as a people sharing a common racial identity. Prior to the 1960s, Asian American communities within the United States usually grouped themselves by ethnicity, thus undermining the possibility of racial solidarity.³⁹ In the 1960s, with a generation of Asian American youth attending college in unprecedented numbers and joining student protest movements, they forged interethnic relationships based on common experiences as Asian Americans. Activists noted that American society often treated all people of Asian descent in a similar manner – either considering them as “Asians in America” or ignoring them altogether.⁴⁰ In the context of the Vietnam War, Asian Americans faced racial discrimination – for example, being called “gook,” a racial epithet used against the Vietnamese – that identified them as “the enemy” and cemented a racial bond.⁴¹ In turn, some activists developed particular antiwar narratives by adopting the idea that they were uniquely connected to the Vietnamese. Describing the war as “genocide” against Asians, they claimed it was a mere accident of birth that they themselves were living in the United States, not dying in Vietnam alongside their “Asian sisters and brothers.”⁴² For some activists, their movement for social justice and their antiwar work became inseparable; the American war in Vietnam brought Asian Americans together for a common cause, but soon the war itself was seen as a symptom of the larger issue of US imperialism and anti-Asian racism. Activists folded antiwar protest into their push for social and economic justice for the “Third World” at home and abroad.⁴³

In a similar fashion to Black and Asian American activists, Chicanos incorporated antiwar protest into their social justice activism. Opposing the Vietnam War marked a historic shift in tactics for Mexican Americans. During World War II and the Korean War, Mexican Americans largely supported US war efforts and saw military service as a way to assimilate into white society. The discrimination Mexican American soldiers faced upon their return to the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, however, dampened enthusiasm for serving in the Vietnam War.⁴⁴ By 1970, the Chicano movement rejected Mexican American participation in the military as a means to gain equality and instead insisted that the Mexican American fight was at home in the United States, not in Vietnam, echoing statements made by civil rights advocates and Vietnamese propagandists. For some activists, the argument went no further, so while the war in Vietnam made them pause to reconsider how to gain social justice in the United States, their objection to the war did not greatly alter established antiwar slogans.

For other Chicano activists, however, US involvement in Vietnam paralleled the history of US imperialism in the Southwest. Contributors to the Chicano periodical El Grito del Norte, published in New Mexico, championed this portrayal of the war by directly likening the Vietnamese to Mexican Americans trying to preserve their culture and connection to ancestral lands. Given that the newspaper was dedicated to covering the land grant struggle of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, such a depiction may have helped to explain to readers why editor-in-chief Elizabeth “Betita” Martínez chose to cover the American war in Vietnam in its pages at all.⁴⁵ But for Martínez, the reason was simple: she believed there was “a great big connection between colonialism and racism.”⁴⁶ Thus, with Martínez at the helm, El Grito covered struggles for independence happening all over the world.

When she had the opportunity to visit Hanoi in the spring of 1970, Martínez did not hesitate to witness the war herself. In North Vietnam, she paid particular attention to issues that paralleled those facing Mexican Americans – that is, the treatment of ethnic minorities, the availability of bilingual education, and the prosperity of agrarian communities. Upon her return, Martínez depicted the Vietnamese as peasants fighting for their land just like Mexican Americans in the Southwest. This portrayal repeated claims made by other El Grito contributors covering the US war in previous issues.⁴⁷ But Martínez also felt encouraged by the Vietnamese example: they seemed to have succeeded in creating self-sufficient cooperative communities, and she looked to incorporate what she had learned in Vietnam into the Chicano struggle in the Southwest by writing about it.

Women’s and Feminist Voices in Antiwar Circles

The previous examples make clear that international organizing against the war often found productive soil when rooted in transnational identities based on race, but the VWU also nurtured relationships specifically between women. Many women’s organizations reciprocated by creating an international antiwar network based on gendered assumptions about women – that is, as mothers, their utmost desire was to care for children and, in order to care for children, they had to end war. The Soviet-influenced Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), for instance, hosted conferences about the Vietnam War and invited VWU members to speak to international audiences that included American observers. At these and other women’s conferences, VWU members described the woes of Vietnamese mothers and children as they simultaneously vilified the US government by showing how US actions destroyed families.⁴⁸ Telling compelling stories in speeches, open letters, and the VWU’s own periodical, Women of Vietnam, Vietnamese women provided easily adoptable and adaptable narratives to share with audiences around the world. The unique harm that women, as mothers, suffered seemed to be a safe argument that women from all nations could make to protest the war.

Maternalist arguments against war were neither new nor unique,⁴⁹ so what is more interesting is that, for some American women who had not originally seen their antiwar activism as based in their identity as women, their interactions with Vietnamese brought these possibilities to light. For 21-year-old white SDS member Vivian Rothstein, her attendance at an antiwar conference that took place in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia in September 1967 marked the moment she first became aware of her potential role as a woman protesting the war, thanks to the VWU. At first glance, the conference between about forty American activists and twenty North Vietnamese and NLF representatives seems an unlikely place for Rothstein to have made such a discovery. American historians have labeled the conference an embarrassment to the antiwar movement,⁵⁰ despite the praise it originally received in contemporary reports and in Vietnamese accounts.⁵¹ The conclusion of American scholars stems from conference organizer Tom Hayden being quoted in Newsweek as stating something like, “Now we’re all Viet Cong,” an assertion that lacked any subtlety, played into charges that communists led antiwar organizations, and alienated mainstream Americans.⁵² The larger issue was the seemingly uncritical and naive acceptance of Vietnamese propaganda by these activists. Indeed, many American participants at the Bratislava conference, as well as antiwar activists more generally, had difficulty criticizing the Vietnamese, especially in public. Even so, in private, Americans admitted that direct contact with Vietnamese led to new understandings of them as people (who had faults), not simply victims.⁵³ Regardless of Hayden’s alleged impolitic statement, the Bratislava conference was one of the first transnational meetings between Americans and Vietnamese,⁵⁴ and it successfully brought together a variety of American activists representing religious, Black Power, academic, pacifist, and other groups, at a time when such alliances were strained.

In the preceding months, some antiwar activists, particularly those who took part in the counterculture, began to see resistance, disruption, and civil disobedience as necessary tactics not only to end the war in Vietnam, but also to create a new society. Other antiwar activists, such as those in the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), wanted to continue to rely on legal and peaceful protests to push for “democratic means to bring about change.”⁵⁵ Events leading up to the October 1967 March on the Pentagon, a demonstration of 100,000 Americans in the nation’s capital, illustrate this split even as a coalition of organizations decided to hold two simultaneous demonstrations – one that included civil disobedience and one that did not – as a compromise. Countercultural influence on aspects of the October 1967 March – which included levitating the Pentagon to exorcise its demons – brought a realm of the absurd to the demonstration, to the consternation of many. In contrast, face-to-face meetings with Vietnamese brought a sense of urgency and responsibility to antiwar activism.

For Vivian Rothstein, the significance of the Bratislava conference stems from her attendance at an all-woman session – this was only the second time she had participated in such a meeting, and she had not initially seen any point in separating women from men. But the Vietnamese had urged such a meeting because they believed that women were particularly effective at communicating antiwar messages, and they wanted to be sure to share Vietnamese women’s experiences of the war with American women.⁵⁶ Consequently, when the Vietnamese invited a smaller number of Americans from the Bratislava conference on to Hanoi, they insisted that women be included on the seven-person delegation. Rothstein firmly believes that only because of this request, she and Carol McEldowney, white SDS member and community organizer in Cleveland, soon found themselves on a plane headed toward a war zone.⁵⁷

In Hanoi, the VWU again requested Rothstein and McEldowney meet with them separately in order to discuss women’s concerns. Despite her hesitancy to attend the all-woman session in Bratislava, in North Vietnam, Rothstein came to see the VWU as an example of a successful broadbased women’s coalition. At meetings in Hanoi and in the surrounding countryside, Rothstein learned about the organization of the VWU – women at the village and provincial levels held workshops, opened childcare centers, and established health clinics to support community members. At the national level, the VWU had a voice in the Politburo. The purpose of the VWU, which was founded in 1930, was to educate and empower women in North Vietnam; a 1965 issue of Women of Vietnam demonstrated just how successful the organization had been since 1945, when Hồ Chí Minh declared independence, by providing statistics on the increased number of day-care centers, women’s educational opportunities, and women’s political appointments. The VWU inspired Rothstein to form the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (CWLU) upon her return to the United States. Her hope was to create a similar political force made up of American women that would have an expansive agenda. As she envisioned it, the CWLU would take up such issues as childcare needs and women’s empowerment.

Despite the new direction in which Rothstein found her activism headed, she continued her antiwar efforts, giving hundreds of talks and working in antiwar organizations. Rothstein felt significant pressure placed on her by her Vietnamese hosts, who made it clear that “they depended on us.” “It was a big deal,” she explained, “for adults to invest that kind of hope and responsibility in us. For me,” she continued, “it was transformative.” So, although the Vietnamese example inspired her to become “an organizer of women,” she continued her antiwar activism.⁵⁸

Rothstein’s experiences were in many ways representative of other white women’s liberationists of her generation. Although the VWU’s reliance on maternal and familial language to appeal to women around the world was off-putting to some young American women seeking to remake traditional gender roles and family structures, others somehow forgave Vietnamese women for such “old forms” of performing gender.⁵⁹ Perhaps the fact that the VWU promoted Vietnamese women fighting for “women’s liberation” and national liberation simultaneously provided enough of a commonality that members of this younger generation could look past incompatibilities between the groups.

Indeed, according to a Vietnamese proverb, “proper” womanhood married women’s loyalty to family with their loyalty to the nation; this meant that women could take up arms to defend the nation as part of their role as good wives and mothers. It declares, “When war strikes close to home, even the women must fight.”⁶⁰ During the US war years, the VWU fleshed out this doctrine by putting forward the “three responsibilities”⁶¹ of Vietnamese women – to take up arms to defend villages, to produce food and goods in men’s absence, and to care for children. By the late 1960s, this prescription of Vietnamese womanhood came to be paired in US and transnational antiwar circles with an image of a Vietnamese woman holding a rifle in one hand and a baby close to her breast in the other arm. This depiction of the “woman warrior” was recreated in publications geared toward white women’s liberationists, Chicanas, Black activists, and Asian American women alike. It spoke to each of these constituencies in a different fashion, however. For instance, for many Chicanas, such illustrations showed that women could join the revolutionary struggle and maintain their femininity as mothers – an important ideal in many Mexican American communities.⁶² This interpretation of the “woman warrior” related fairly closely to the Vietnamese ideal, but those who wanted to shake off the shackles of marriage or motherhood would have seen ways in which the Vietnamese version of “proper” womanhood fell short, if they had looked closely. In fact, some Vietnamese expressed surprise when they learned of the sexual revolution taking place in the United States that separated sex, marriage, and procreation.⁶³ But it seems that neither VWU members nor American women’s liberationists wanted to scrutinize the other side too closely; instead, “they look[ed] for those ways in which we are the same.”⁶⁴

Young American women, regardless of their race, and their Vietnamese counterparts seemed to agree that the image of the “woman warrior” would attract a base of female support to oppose the war. In 1969, “following the death of Hồ Chí Minh,” writes historian Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, “leaders in Hanoi sought to present a new face of the Vietnamese revolution.”⁶⁵ They chose Nguyễn Thị Bình to act as foreign minister for the Provisional Revolutionary government of the Republic of Southern Vietnam (PRG) at the Paris Peace Talks because she could embody the “woman warrior” on the international stage. Besides, she had the right credentials. Bình came from a revolutionary family: her grandfather, Phan Châu Trinh, resisted French colonialism in the late nineteenth century and supported reformation of Vietnamese society. In 1945, Bình joined the Việt Minh in resisting the French and was arrested in 1951. After her release in 1954 and after the signing of the Geneva Accords splitting Vietnam in two along the 17th parallel, Bình regrouped to the North, where she married, had two children, and studied at the Nguyễn Ái Quốc Political Academy. When the NLF was formed in 1960, Nguyễn Thị Bình took up a new post, concentrating on people’s diplomatic efforts. That meant that throughout the early 1960s, Bình attended international conferences where she promoted the NLF’s cause. When Bình became foreign minister of the PRG in 1969, Lien-Hang T. Nguyen argues, her position advanced Hanoi’s portrayal of Vietnam as a woman warrior in contrast to the United States, which was presented as a masculine invader in Vietnamese propaganda.⁶⁶

Such a depiction resonated with women’s liberationists in the United States who analyzed gendered aspects of US involvement in Vietnam. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, women’s liberationists grappled with how to create a movement that spoke to their desire to end all forms of oppression, as seen in the statement by Ellin Hirst that opened this chapter. Hirst was a white member of the feminist collective Bread and Roses in Boston, and was connected to a network of women’s liberation organizations across the country. In July 1969, she attended a women’s antiwar conference in Canada hosted by two women’s peace organizations, where she met people’s diplomat Nguyễn Ngọc Dung. Ngọc Dung worked closely with Nguyễn Thị Bình and traveled to Canada with two other Vietnamese women to inform American audiences about their perspectives on the war and its effects on their lives. During the conference, Ngọc Dung met separately with a group of women’s liberationists and spoke of the difficulties women in the resistance movement faced in terms of male chauvinism. She informed the young American women that once Vietnamese women showed how useful they could be in terms of reconnaissance and village defense, however, they earned men’s respect. Nevertheless, the fight for equality continued in terms of political representation and would continue long after the war ended, Ngọc Dung predicted. For Hirst, this conversation reassured her that fighting for women’s liberation was not divisive or selfish, but part of the necessary steps needed to form a revolutionary society. “It was really important to have our movement and our feelings seem legitimate,” Hirst concluded.⁶⁷

Ellin Hirst’s determination came at a key moment in antiwar dissent. In the summer of 1969, two newly formed antiwar coalitions, the Vietnam Moratorium Committee (VMC) and the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (the New Mobe), took contrasting stances on whether antiwar activists and organizations should focus on multiple issues or on the single issue of the war. While leaders in the New Mobe sought to form a broadbased and radical antiwar coalition that would transform US society, the VMC committed to focusing on the single issue of the war and holding local demonstrations. Despite their divergent methods and purposes, both coalitions organized successful protests that fall. On October 15, 1969, an estimated 2 million Americans took part in VMC-sponsored events across the country, calling attention to widespread antiwar dissent. Historians have since credited these protests with preventing President Nixon from increasing US military intervention in Vietnam that November.⁶⁸ One month later, the two coalitions cooperated in organizing complementary actions, which included over 45,000 protestors participating in the somber March against Death that passed the White House, where each demonstrator, in turn, said either the name of an American soldier killed in action or the name of a Vietnamese village razed during the warfare. With participants marching in single file, the demonstration lasted thirty-six hours. Neither demonstration, however, called explicit attention to the ways in which the US war reflected or exacerbated domestic issues.

Having been encouraged by Vietnamese women, women’s liberationists active in the New Mobe set about theorizing why the war was a feminist issue. Information coming out of South Vietnam helped them make connections between women’s objectification and militarism. By the late 1960s, Vietnamese people’s diplomats and North Vietnamese periodicals made the case that US involvement in South Vietnam led women in Saigon to turn to prostitution as a means of survival, caused birth defects because of the spraying of chemical defoliants, and allowed rape and sexual assault perpetrated by American GIs and US-supported Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) soldiers to go unpunished.⁶⁹ Women’s liberationists repeated these claims as evidence of the gendered nature of war and the problematic role the US military played in creating a degenerative society in South Vietnam.

By contrast, the twin narrative of women’s accomplishments in North Vietnam seemed to illustrate to American women that the North was moving on a path toward creating a revolutionary and egalitarian society.⁷⁰ Contrasting North and South Vietnam meant comparing women’s situation under socialism and capitalism. Believing that women in the North were close to achieving women’s liberation, unlike their “sisters” in the South, American women’s liberationists blamed capitalism and imperialism for women’s inequality. The US war and the way it was waged were argued to be a symptom of patriarchal and capitalist society.⁷¹ Thus, American women’s liberationists formed feminist analyses of the war and its connection to US society in a way that informed their antiwar narratives and feminist activism.

Conclusion

The American war in Vietnam served as a touchstone for many activists in the 1960s and 1970s as they came to analyze the US government through a new lens. It was neither just the war nor just their own community’s problems – the two were intertwined and were both symptoms of underlying diseases in US society. Cross-over between groups occurred as representatives of different organizations attended the same meetings and met with the same Vietnamese people’s diplomats. Although individual activists and organizations disagreed on the best strategy to end the war and the best tactic to oppose it, peace activist Barbara Deming’s assertion that “we are all part of one another” speaks to the hopes and frustrations of many antiwar activists.⁷²

Gaining firsthand perspectives on the war remained central for many American activists throughout the US war years as they tried to develop nuanced narratives “to explain the war and its consequences at home and abroad.”⁷³ While these kinds of arguments attracted some segments of the American population to see the war as a salient issue to their communities, others continued to see it as an aberration or, indeed, as necessary. Regardless, evidence suggests that growing antiwar sentiment undercut Washington at a few key moments. For Hanoi, widespread antiwar dissent in the United States could boost domestic morale in North Vietnam at the same time that evidence of social and economic injustices in the United States undermined Washington’s portrayal of the war as supporting freedom and democracy. Both American and international audiences came to see the deterioration in South Vietnamese society as evidence of the unjustness of US intervention, as well as being related to domestic injustices. Transnational alliances forged with Vietnamese created opportunities for American activists involved in a web of social movements to see their antiwar work as a central component of their activism toward a more just American society.

5 Saigon War Politics, 1968–1975

Sean Fear

As the year 1968 drew to a close, Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu, the president of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN), could take satisfaction from the previous twelve months’ progress. That spring, communist forces had launched an all-out assault on South Vietnam’s cities and provincial capitals, gambling that urban Southerners would join them in toppling Thiệu’s fledgling administration. Instead, the urban South largely spurned the communists, recoiling in horror from the violence that the Tet Offensive had unleashed. Seizing upon the shift in momentum, American and South Vietnamese units counterattacked. Although characterized by inordinate disregard for civilians caught in the crossfire, the US–South Vietnamese retaliation campaign exacted a heavy toll on the Southern Communist National Front for the Liberation of Southern Vietnam (NLF, or Viet Cong), prompting NLF and North Vietnamese forces to retreat and regroup, and exacerbating North–South tensions within the communist movement. Meanwhile, Thiệu capitalized on the Tet attacks to consolidate power at the expense of his vice president and arch-nemesis Nguyễn Cao Kỳ. Dismissing Kỳ’s backers within the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), Thiệu used accusations of poor performance during the Tet Offensive as a pretext to replace them with loyalists of his own. Though fear of a Nguyễn Cao Kỳ–led military coup would preoccupy Thiệu for the remainder of his term in office, his position as head of state and military commander was secure by the end of the year.

No less significant than Thiệu’s triumph in Saigon’s internecine military squabbles, however, was that the new, year-old constitutional system known as the “Second Republic” had survived the communist attacks intact. Formally inaugurated in April 1967, the Second Republic was founded upon a new constitution with provisions to hold nationwide elections for president, and for representatives in a new National Assembly consisting of a Senate and a Lower House.¹ These constitutional reforms were intended to stabilize South Vietnam’s turbulent political scene, wracked by years of military infighting, religious conflict, street demonstrations, and a series of regional uprisings following the assassination of former President Ngô Đình Diệm during a military coup in November 1963. Behind the scenes, the South Vietnamese military retained de facto power, which many civilian critics acknowledged to be necessary given a surge in communist momentum following President Diệm’s death. But South Vietnam’s anticommunist political constituents nonetheless hoped that the Second Republic would compel Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu’s military government to address civilian grievances and bind it to the rule of law.² And, at a time when voters in the United States were increasingly beginning to question the prospects and the purpose of intervention in Vietnam, the 1967 reforms also served to alleviate American concerns over chronic instability in Saigon.

Initially, the reforms had been a disappointment in the eyes of the very constituents they were meant to win over. Anticommunist civilian political observers were dismayed, if hardly surprised, by the military’s blatant interference via ballot-stuffing and intimidation to administer the outcome in its favor. But in the aftermath of the brutal Tet campaign, when urban centers directly encountered the violence to which the rural South had long been subject, the legal and political framework ushered in by the Second Republic served as a rallying point for citizens stirred into action by the attacks. Far from evincing public sympathy, the communist offensive instead achieved the unlikely feat of uniting long-antagonistic parties and factions in their outrage and determination to resist a North Vietnamese takeover. A wave of anticommunist solidarity swept through South Vietnam’s cities and provincial towns. Bitter political and religious rivals set aside their differences and formed coalitions to serve in the new National Assembly. ARVN forces took advantage of NLF weakness to expand the Saigon government’s presence into communist-dominated areas in the countryside. This post-Tet spirit of resolution arguably marked the zenith of anticommunist cohesion in Vietnam. And for a time, it appeared plausible that the balance in Vietnam’s decades-long political conflict might be tipping in Saigon’s favor. But as we shall see, in the years that followed, the Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu government squandered this uniquely poised opportunity by moving to monopolize political power at the expense of civilian parties and institutions. Thiệu’s authoritarian turn betrayed the constitutional order on which the state’s legitimacy was based, in turn deflating post-Tet enthusiasm, accelerating American funding cuts, and catalyzing the state’s abrupt collapse from within during a final communist offensive in the spring of 1975.

To date, English-language scholarship on this decisive time period has largely focused on American strategic deliberations and domestic political debates over US troop withdrawal, or diplomatic maneuvering between Washington, Hanoi, Moscow, and Beijing. South Vietnamese political events such as elections, economic reforms, or legislative debates, on the other hand, are rarely afforded much attention in accounts of the war’s final stages. Many historians have dismissed the South Vietnamese state as an American puppet regime, with little autonomy, ideological basis, or popular support. And its ultimate failure has often been regarded as preordained from the outset.³ This chapter, however, proposes that, far from American pawns, South Vietnamese political actors played a critical role in determining the outcome of the conflict, pursuing a range of competing agendas and confounding the US Embassy’s attempts to orchestrate events in Washington’s favor. It also asserts the significance of South Vietnam’s volatile political sphere between 1968 and 1975, when anticommunist resolve after the Tet attacks gave way to outrage and despair following President Thiệu’s authoritarian crackdown. In so doing, it suggests that well into the late 1960s, the fate of the Saigon government remained contingent rather than fixed, and that the state’s rapid disintegration in 1975 stemmed largely from the breakdown in domestic political legitimacy that preceded and facilitated the final communist attacks. Despite a sincere if short-lived post-Tet spirit of commitment, the military government ultimately failed to contend with the communists’ formidable rural political network, much less rally and unite urban anticommunists behind a coherent ideological vision. These internal political failures would prove insurmountable, paving the way for the war’s fateful denouement in the spring of 1975.

A Complex Political Landscape

Perhaps the most serious shortcoming in many English-language accounts of the Vietnam War has been a dramatic oversimplification of South Vietnam’s intricate and evolving political geography. Accustomed, perhaps, to regarding Vietnam as merely a component part in the broader Global Cold War, many early historians portrayed the war as a simple binary struggle pitting the Vietnamese communists against the United States and its Vietnamese collaborators. But this approach belies the South’s overlapping political, ethnic, religious, and regional schisms, as well as the extent to which the balance of power between its competing political authorities and parties fluctuated over time. To a far greater extent than in North Vietnam, where the departure for South Vietnam of over 800,000 political and religious émigrés in 1954 facilitated communist consolidation, the South’s political, regional, and cultural heterogeneity posed a considerable challenge to any central authority seeking to enforce state power. An appreciation of this complexity is necessary in evaluating the challenges facing the Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu government as it sought to capitalize on the failed communist Tet attacks.

First, consider the political impact of religion. Perhaps the Saigon government’s most formidable opponents, apart from the communists themselves, were activist Buddhist political groups, particularly the faction led by Thích Trí Quang and associated with the Ần Quang pagoda in Saigon. Representing adherents throughout southern and especially central Vietnam (or northern South Vietnam), the Ần Quang Buddhists drew inspiration from early twentieth-century Buddhist revival movements in South Asia and asserted that Buddhism should be predominant in Vietnamese politics and culture. They were willing and able to stage large-scale rebellions against the central government, hastening former President Ngô Đình Diệm’s downfall in 1963 and temporarily wresting much of central Vietnam from Saigon’s control three years later. This set them apart from a more moderate Buddhist faction headed by Thích Tâm Châu, which was more influential among newly arrived Northerners and more willing to compromise with the South Vietnamese military state.⁴

Vietnamese Catholics, meanwhile, were even more divided by regional tensions. Politically active Southern Catholics were in general more likely to consider peace negotiations and coalition government with their Southern counterparts in the NLF. Often looking to the reformist spirit of the Second Vatican Council (1962–5) for inspiration, they were prominent in South Vietnam’s liberal opposition to military rule and outspoken against Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu’s perceived reliance on hard-line anticommunist Northerners. Northern Catholics, on the other hand, had arrived in the South en masse after 1954. Often informed by firsthand experience of the North Vietnamese state’s own autocratic tendencies, they fiercely resisted compromising with the communist side and could tolerate Thiệu’s mounting authoritarianism, provided he appeared capable of keeping Hanoi at bay. Tightly organized at the parish level, they also wielded disproportionate influence in the Second Republic’s bicameral legislature thanks to a network of disciplined voting blocs.⁵

Elsewhere, in the Mekong River Delta, two small but locally dominant syncretic religious movements, the Hòa Hao and Cao Đài, were regional players in their own right. Subdued by the South Vietnamese military in 1955, they each nonetheless retained a substantial degree of authority over their respective heartlands, where they proved rather more adept than ARVN forces at resisting communist infiltration. Though both were hindered by perpetual infighting between regional and political factions, they wielded considerable influence over large swathes of the Mekong Delta. During the Second Republic, the military government maintained patronage ties with competing Hòa Hao and Cao Đài sections, granting covert cash payments and ceding de facto autonomy in exchange for assistance contesting the communists and delivering votes during national elections.⁶

Further south were the Khmer (ethnic Cambodians), the Mekong Delta’s largest ethnic minority. Resident in the region long before the first ethnic Vietnamese settlers arrived beginning in the seventeenth century, Khmer identity crystallized in the nineteenth century in response to the expansionist and assimilationist policies of the Vietnamese Emperor Minh Mạng. More recently, the French Indochina War (1945–54) had witnessed an explosion of violence between the Khmer and various rival ethnic Vietnamese political and religious groups, resulting in enduring mutual suspicion and animosity. During the Second Republic, most Khmer constituents in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta retained the Khmer language, practiced a different form of Buddhism (Theravada) from their ethnic Vietnamese counterparts (Mahayana), and looked more to Phnom Penh than Saigon as a center of cultural, if not political, authority. Less militarized and with weaker political structures than the Hòa Hao or Cao Đài, they too fought to protect local autonomy in the face of perceived Vietnamese encroachment from both sides of the Cold War divide.⁷ Less numerous but also significant was South Vietnam’s ethnic Chinese population, largely concentrated in Saigon and the towns of the Mekong Delta. Historically dominant in the rice trade, they too retained their cultural and linguistic identity, and were regarded with suspicion by military officials, who feared their allegiance was to Beijing or Taipei rather than Saigon.⁸

To the north, meanwhile, in the Highlands, where central Vietnam meets Cambodia and Laos, a diverse coalition of ethnic minority communities likewise struggled to preserve their cultural and territorial integrity from the competing Vietnamese states centered in Hanoi and Saigon. Loosely united under the mantle of FULRO (United Front for the Struggle of Oppressed Races),⁹ military representatives of the Highlands minorities launched uprisings in 1964 and 1965, protesting the South Vietnamese state’s efforts to assert sovereignty over this strategically vital region by flooding it with ethnic Vietnamese settlers. The rebellions were violently subdued, exacerbating divisions over strategy within the FULRO ranks. Still, given their relative strength in numbers, ability to deliver votes to the highest bidder, and willingness to take up arms if provoked, the Highlands minorities were also a force to be reckoned with.¹⁰

And then there were the political parties, every bit as fragmented into regional and ideological factions, but still capable of challenging state power, albeit if only within specific provincial districts. Most prominent among them were the Đại Việt (“Greater Vietnam”) Party, and the Vietnamese Nationalist Party (Việt Nam Quốc dân Đảng, or VNQDĐ), loosely modeled on the Guomindang founded by Sun Yat-Sen in republican-era China. By now too weak to replicate the communists’ mass popular movement, the Đại Việts and nationalists instead exerted power by infiltrating the South Vietnamese military and civil service, coming to dominate clusters of towns and rural districts, especially in coastal central Vietnam. That said, by the late 1960s each party was badly divided into antagonistic northern and southern branches, further fragmented in turn into quarreling local leadership factions. Nonetheless, despite their internal divisions, these parties were also significant regional actors, such that district- and province-level appointments and promotions within the South Vietnamese military state were often selected to curry favor with the Đại Việts or VNQDĐ.¹¹ Rounding out the picture was a medley of mostly urban civil society groups, including competing trade unions, politicized student organizations, and military veterans’ associations. In common with virtually every other noncommunist entity in the South, these elements were also riven with schisms and infighting. But they too had the power to create chaos when they took to the streets and could leverage the sympathy of influential counterpart organizations in the United States to advance their causes.

Making matters even more challenging for the government in Saigon was the rapid fragmentation of the countryside that resulted from the war’s escalation after President Ngô Đình Diệm’s death in 1963. During the First Republic (1955–63), the writer Võ Phiến described a rural milieu where “newspapers were widely disseminated and went deep into the rural area. … Books would reach as far as the reading rooms of the district offices … and newspapers could go all the way down to the hamlets.”¹² But as communist momentum swelled, beginning in the early 1960s, transportation and communication between Saigon and the countryside grew increasingly precarious. With control over rural territory now violently contested, official travel between provinces, if not districts, was fraught with peril. Even months after the Tet Offensive, a ground voyage from Saigon to Tân An, the nearest provincial capital to the west, was considered unthinkable for US officials without accompaniment by a military escort.¹³ The result was a rural environment where Saigon’s authority was tenuous and decentralized, and where local officials’ whims took precedence over instructions from the increasingly distant capital. News from Saigon – when it arrived at all – was transmitted more often by rumor through rural grapevines rather than formal public information channels.¹⁴ These conditions played into the hands of the communists, whose disciplined rural political network allowed them to exert disproportionate power across the countryside at a time when their political rivals were factionalized and confined to isolated regions. Despite being regarded by most American analysts as commanding no more than a plurality of public support in the South, the communists enjoyed a considerable advantage as the country’s only political institution with a nationwide presence, save the South Vietnamese military itself.

Suffice it to say, even as he consolidated his authority over the South Vietnamese military state, President Thiệu still found himself facing a litany of domestic challenges. Worse still, the shock of the Tet Offensive – a clear military defeat for the communists – had shaken the American public’s confidence in the war, with the scale of the attacks casting doubt on years of White House promises that victory was near. The scope and duration of Washington’s commitment was called into question throughout the 1968 US presidential election campaign, which South Vietnamese political observers followed intently. Indeed, should peace candidate Robert Kennedy so much as win the Democratic Party primary, South Vietnamese Intelligence Director Linh Quang Viên warned, it would “weaken the will to fight of the anti-communist people of Vietnam … [and] demoralize our soldiers before the battle is even over.”¹⁵ True, the communists’ failure during Tet left the South Vietnamese state in a stronger position than it had been since the days of Ngô Đình Diệm’s regime. But even with the NLF on the back foot, South Vietnam remained, to borrow a phrase, an “archipelago state” whose sovereignty was contested across a bewilderingly complex political terrain.¹⁶ Dominant in cities, scattered military outposts, and a patchwork spread of provincial towns, the government was elsewhere reliant on patronage-brokered alliances of convenience with locally preeminent religious, ethnic, and political groups, united only by their shared aversion to communist rule. Thiệu’s challenge then was to unite these quarrelsome factions and rally them behind a constructive political program capable of surmounting the chronic divisions that rendered anticommunist Vietnam far weaker than the sum of its many parts – and from there, to extend the fledgling Second Republic’s pluralistic constitutional vision into the countryside, building the mass political support necessary to breathe life into its legal structures and to counter the communists’ superior organization, legitimacy, and nationalist appeal.

The Promise of Post-Tet Reform

Given the depth and complexity of the South’s internal divisions, the heartfelt outpouring of anticommunist solidarity after the Tet Offensive was all the more striking. The weeks that followed witnessed a flurry of political organization and engagement. South Vietnamese military recruiters noted a brief but unprecedented wave of volunteer enlistment, particularly among previously indifferent Saigon youths. And political luminaries of all stripes came together to decry the violence. On February 9, for instance, ninety-three intellectuals and cultural figures – including prominent critics of the Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu government – published a statement condemning “the treachery and inhuman action of the Viet Cong, who have dissipated all hope of peace in the people.”¹⁷ Among anticommunist leaders, the Tet attacks inspired a renewed sense of purpose, and reinforced the urgency of political reform to sustain anticommunist cooperation and momentum.

To that end, representatives from the South’s rival factions took it upon themselves to explore new multiparty coalitions, conscious that in its divided state anticommunist Vietnam was no match for the communists’ rural political machine. Nearly a dozen such efforts burst onto the scene in the spring of 1968, many seeking sanction, if not patronage, from the military government in exchange for grandiose pledges to rally and unite the Southern masses. Among the most prominent was the National Social Democratic Front (NSDF), a loosely organized network that brought together delegates from: two northern Catholic parties; the Central Vietnamese Đại Việt movement; one of two rival Hòa Hao political parties; one of six VNQDĐ splinter groups; and the newly established “Free Democratic Force,” itself a coalition simultaneously negotiating to form a rival bloc, the aptly named “Coalition” [Liên Minh] – an equally intricate confederation connecting the largest trade union with three smaller subcoalitions. Merely to list these overlapping associations and their ever-changing constituent parts was to demonstrate the scale of the challenge anticommunist leaders faced in their bid to forge coherent political institutions. Still, however unwieldy in their execution, these attempts to build working relationships between once-irreconcilable factions were a notable first step in harnessing post-Tet resolve toward constructive ends.¹⁸

For other aspiring statesmen, however, the most promising approach to fulfilling this post-Tet urgency was not byzantine coalitions but new mass political parties altogether. By far the most successful was the Progressive Nationalist Movement (PNM), led by law professor Nguyễn Vӑn Bông and diplomat Nguyễn Ngọc Huy, the latter a member of the South Vietnamese delegation to the ongoing negotiations between the United States, South Vietnam, North Vietnam, and the NLF in Paris. No party or political organization better embodied the liberal constitutional order promised by the Second Republic than the Progressive Nationalists. Founded in 1969, the PNM was South Vietnam’s most outspoken champion of the 1967 political reforms. It took pains to portray itself as the government’s “loyal opposition,” pledging to support the president on foreign policy and security while offering constructive domestic policy suggestions in the spirit of overall cooperation. Almost uniquely in anticommunist politics, it strove to promote a set of political ideals rather than to represent ethnic, regional, religious, or personal interests. For party elders, the PNM was not primarily a means of wielding power, but rather a vehicle for introducing the broader constitutional system to rural constituents, and for persuading a wavering American public that South Vietnam still merited prolonged support. Though its hierarchy was largely composed of professionals – lawyers, doctors, teachers, journalists, and civil servants – in Saigon and prosperous Mekong Delta towns, the party was committed to building a mass rural base. It also published Progressive [Cấp tiến], among the South’s more reputable daily newspapers, and party cofounder Nguyễn Vӑn Bông even penned an annotated guide to the new constitution, aimed at persuading general readers to embrace the promise of the Second Republic.¹⁹

To be sure, these efforts were preliminary, and belated. As one PNM organizer conceded, “it takes years to train a doctor and just as long to train a politician. The communists have been training themselves for a long time, and we have only just begun.”²⁰ Still, these overlooked examples of organization and resolve after Tet delivered tangible, if ultimately temporary, results. Perhaps the most significant – and unexpected – political development was the abrupt shift in the Ần Quang Buddhists’ approach to the military state. Ần Quang’s protest campaigns had twice brought the Saigon government to its knees, in 1963 and 1966, the latter campaign helping compel the military to concede on civilian demands for elections and a new constitution the following year.²¹ But after Tet, as the intensity of the communist attacks grew clear, the group’s lay hierarchy reconsidered its position relative to South Vietnam’s military authorities. The communist massacre in the city of Huế, in Ần Quang’s central Vietnamese heartlands, had a galvanizing effect, disabusing Ần Quang leaders of the notion that their religious autonomy would be respected under communist rule.²² While there was no love lost between Ần Quang and the Saigon generals, whom they regarded as venal, heavy-handed, and incompetent, the Buddhist group increasingly favored its prospects under Saigon’s weak and uneven dominion, rather than risking the communists’ far more capable authoritarianism. Accordingly, Ần Quang surprised political observers by fielding a successful slate of candidates in the 1970 elections for the Senate, an institution it had boycotted in protest three years earlier.²³ This was a tactical calculation rather than an endorsement of the constitution’s integrity or the state’s legitimacy. But it nonetheless reflected the promise of the South’s brief experiment with constitutional pluralism, as a means of reconciling bitter adversaries behind a working political consensus.

In comparison with the tumultuous years after President Ngô Đình Diệm’s assassination, when religious partisans clashed on the streets, disaffected generals plotted coups, and regional movements sought to escape Saigon’s authority altogether, the change in political atmosphere following the Tet attacks was dramatic. Yet mutual efforts to cooperate were merely the first step, and even then, the process was rarely smooth sailing. Managing functional multiparty coalitions proved more challenging than proclaiming them in the first place. And negotiating a program of political and economic reforms revealed that divisions among South Vietnam’s legislators were nearly as intense as the aversion to communist rule that united them.

Perhaps the most significant area where these long-simmering tensions manifested was the clash between Thiệu and the National Assembly over land reform. Dubbed the “Land to the Tiller” program, the government’s bold nationwide land reform campaign served as a yardstick of its legitimacy, both at home and abroad. Intended to coax war-weary rural constituents back to the fold, it also beguiled South Vietnam’s supporters in the United States, who, then and since, saw land reform as a panacea for the state’s corruption, uneven administrative performance, and thin base of support in much of the countryside. More than any other endeavor, the Land to the Tiller campaign demonstrates both the depth and the limitations of the Second Republic’s reform ambitions. It was also first and foremost a Vietnamese initiative. While popular with American members of Congress, Saigon’s land reform proposals were met with skepticism by American analysts in Vietnam, who feared the fiscal and administrative burden would overwhelm the state’s stretched bureaucracy. Vietnamese officials led by Minister of Agriculture Cao Vӑn Thân were the driving force in designing and implementing the program, belying the notion that South Vietnam was merely an American puppet creation. On paper, Land to the Tiller proposed a radical reordering of the rural economy, breaking up landed estates and redistributing the fields to their former tenants, in turn creating a class of smallholding farmers theoretically beholden to the regime.²⁴

A program of this scale required legislative consensus, however, and Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu’s relationship with the Assembly was deteriorating. Recognizing that American congressional aid was increasingly contingent on the progress of the Saigon government’s reforms, the Assembly’s constitutionalists dug in their heels, hoping to extract promises that the president would respect legislative authority in exchange for Land to the Tiller’s timely passage. Matters were not helped when Thiệu then ordered the arrest of three sitting Lower House representatives, breaching their constitutional immunity from prosecution on the grounds that they had offered covert support to the communists. Few legislators were convinced, suspecting that the arrests were politically motivated, if not the product of Thiệu’s personal vendettas against the accused. Deliberations on land reform ground to a halt for months as elected representatives instead used their Assembly pulpit to excoriate the president.²⁵ Finally, the legislature relented, and Land to the Tiller was belatedly ratified in March 1970 – albeit over a year after initially intended and with little to show for the delay.

While clearly a constructive offering to rural constituents, Land to the Tiller’s political and economic impact fell short of its proponents’ exuberant aspirations. Indeed, perhaps its most perceptive feature was its restraint. Acknowledging that the communists had long since implemented their own popular land reform experiments in the South, the Saigon government quietly enshrined its adversary’s earlier redistribution efforts, appending legal titles in de facto acknowledgment of prior communist land allocations. This approach wisely defused the animosity certain to ensue should the state dispossess beneficiaries of communist redistribution from land they had long regarded as their own. But it meant that Land to the Tiller’s effect was titular rather than transformative in former communist-held areas, merely reinforcing farmers’ claims to land the enemy had already bestowed on them. And it was not without controversy. Upholding the status quo in contested areas was a bitter pill for the government’s most ardent rural supporters, who, having endured years of violent civil war, now felt that the authorities in the capital were rewarding families who had backed the other side. Military veterans, often compelled away from their land by the government’s own conscription regime, were particularly disaffected, fueling a growing veterans’ protest movement in South Vietnam’s largest cities. Beyond these conceptual complications, implementation of the program was slow and often marred by corruption. Government communications were inconsistent, and, as a result, some farmers continued paying rent to landlords for land they themselves now legally owned. Others complained of land allocations in remote or communist-held areas, where the South Vietnamese military had neither the aptitude nor desire to enforce ownership claims. For ethnic minority groups, particularly in the Central Highlands, the program was a pretext for Vietnamese settlement on their traditional lands. And farmers on the less arable central coast objected to valuations based on the more fertile Mekong Delta, which disadvantaged them relative to their southern peers.²⁶ Finally, in addition to land redistribution, the program also introduced new pest- and weather-resistant strains of rice, theoretically capable of boosting crop yields. These necessitated greater quantities of imported fertilizer, however, and skeptics questioned whether increasing farmers’ exposure to currency fluctuations and precarious supply chains was prudent during a brutal ongoing war. Sure enough, as the 1973 Oil Crisis sent fertilizer prices soaring, farmers found themselves at the mercy of their creditors, while unscrupulous officials hoarded fertilizer to sell on the black market or pocketed funds intended to subsidize rural loans.²⁷

Figure 5.1 South Vietnamese President Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu, center, with Prime Minister Trần Thiện Khiêm, right (September 15, 1970).

Source: Bettmann / Contributor / Bettmann / Getty Images.

Despite these shortcomings, the Land to the Tiller campaign was a noble effort, testament to the Second Republic’s ambition and early promise. Many farmers benefited, particularly where the program did not overlap with the communists’ earlier interventions. But its political effects were limited, and the economic impact fell short of proponents’ often fanciful expectations. If anything, the greatest beneficiaries were absentee landlords, the recipients of American-backed windfall compensation payments for the expropriation of rural holdings they had little hope of reclaiming.

The Point of No Return

By the end of 1968 the cooperation and purpose that characterized the post-Tet period were already beginning to waver. Anticommunist Vietnam was at its most coherent when facing an imminent communist threat. And as the violence receded, with Hanoi laying low to wait out unilateral American troop withdrawals, the centrifugal forces that had long conditioned politics in the South returned to the fore. The government’s bid to achieve broad legitimacy was threatened by the growing rift between President Thiệu and more moderate elements of anticommunist civil society, including elected legislators, journalists, civil servants, professionals, and other constituents from a largely urban middle class. Bickering between the Assembly and the president on land reform generated resentment and long delays, in turn fueling concerns that Thiệu was isolated, authoritarian, and aloof.

Corruption was another source of mounting alarm. Given poor tax collection rates, persistent inflation, a large fixed-income civil service, and a torrent of American capital pouring into the country, corruption was endemic during the Second Republic. Citizens might be willing to make allowances for poorly paid minor officials, but were incensed at senior figures seen as profiting from the war; as one opposition politician fumed, South Vietnam was “a system whereby a policeman goes to jail for receiving a 100 piastre bribe while a general is exiled to Hong Kong for stealing millions.”²⁸ Reducing corruption was therefore an urgent objective during the Second Republic, which even included constitutional provisions for an independent anticorruption inspectorate. Initially, Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu’s dismissal of his rivals’ protégés could charitably be interpreted as a step in the right direction. But his appointment as prime minister of Trần Thiện Khiêm, a well-connected former general whose family controlled Saigon’s ports, signaled to advocates of the constitution that Thiệu was interested merely in building an illicit patronage network of his own. Revelations of state complicity in narcotics-trafficking or the siphoning of military pension funds began to appear in local and overseas headlines. And the anticorruption inspectorate was soon dismissed as little more than a vehicle for silencing Thiệu’s critics.²⁹ The situation steadily deteriorated, and by the mid-1970s, as former Foreign Minister Trần Vӑn Đỗ lamented, “Corruption was rampant … the postmen were so corrupt they would steal stamps off the envelopes and resell them. The tax collectors were so corrupt you had to bribe them to accept your tax payments … even a license plate for a vehicle was unobtainable without a bribe.”³⁰

Thiệu’s personal excesses in this regard might have been forgiven, had he been seen as responsive to constituents’ concerns, and willing and able to rally anticommunist Vietnam behind a constructive vision. But representatives from the newly formed post-Tet political coalitions soon complained of insufficient presidential direction, much less enthusiasm, and these once-promising alliances quickly lapsed or disintegrated altogether. In fact, as one of Thiệu’s closest advisors later admitted, American funds to promote the NSDF and other multiparty networks had instead been plundered for government officials’ personal use.³¹ Rather than mend fences with Assembly moderates following the bruising land reform confrontation, the president continued lashing out, arresting the legislature’s most outspoken critics on trumped-up charges in defiance of their constitutionally mandated immunity. The incarceration of Lower House representative Ngô Công Đức in May 1971 went too far even for the reliably progovernment newspaper Political Discussion [Chính Luận], which denounced his detention as “a black scar on our so-called legally based democracy.”³²

Quietly, Thiệu was already plotting to subvert the Assembly, opting for short-term expediency ahead of popular legitimacy and consensus. During the 1970 midterm elections, most observers focused on the race for Senate where, by all accounts, the contest proceeded relatively free from government interference.³³ Arguably, the Senate elections represented the high-water mark for electoral integrity in Vietnam, then and since. But Thiệu and his advisors had noted that though the Senate enjoyed more prestige, it was the weaker of the two chambers in practice, as its resolutions could be overturned with a two-thirds majority in the Lower House. With attention focused on the Senate, Thiệu made his move, seizing de facto control of the Lower House through a torrent of bribery and behind-the-scenes manipulation of its leadership elections. Well-regarded and generally progovernment independent Nguyễn Bá Cẩn was ousted as Lower House Chairman, replaced by Nguyễn Bá Lương, whom the US Embassy described as “totally subservient to the wishes of the executive.” Amidst further allegations of bribery published in the PNM’s newspaper, Progressive, Thiệu’s preferred nominees in the Supreme Court also prevailed, paving his way to rewrite the rules of the upcoming 1971 presidential election as he saw fit.³⁴ Liberal constitutionalists began to despair. In 1971, Nguyễn Vӑn Bông, the man who, as cofounder of the PNM, was perhaps most closely associated with the aspirations of the Second Republic, updated his annotated guide to the constitution. His new preface struck an ominous tone: “The essence of the constitution has not been fostered,” he warned, “and going further, democratic spirit has not become ingrained in the consciousness of our ruling class. The people’s voice is critical in the struggle for a democratic environment, but our actions and thoughts have not yet transcended the childish maladies of colonial times.”³⁵

It was hardly a surprise, then, when Thiệu, brandishing control of the Lower House and the Supreme Court, imposed legislation tailor-made to deliver his reelection. Unlike the chaotic, if relatively unrestricted, 1967 contest, the opposition was now deemed eligible only after securing at least 40 or 100 endorsements respectively from Assembly representatives or province-level councilors. As Thiệu had personally appointed or purchased the loyalty of most potential signatories, the law was seen as tantamount to a presidential veto against his prospective opponents. It was met with howls of outrage, such that the Political Discussion newspaper speculated whether constitutionally minded senators might demonstrate in front of their own Assembly against the “childish and despicable” bill.³⁶ Merely winning reelection, however, was just the first step for Thiệu and his advisors. The 1971 contest was their opportunity to radically transform South Vietnamese politics, streamlining decision-making under the authority of a powerful executive and neutralizing the opposition’s ability to interfere. The early post-Tet attempts at multilateral consensus were discarded, to be replaced by a covert network of loyalists operating from within the military bureaucracy. And the first test of their abilities and commitment was to administer for Thiệu a decisive victory. To that end, the president’s team tasked rural henchmen with “mobilizing the election of the president and supporting Lower House candidates.” Key to the operation were Thiệu’s “submerged” partisans, encouraged to “corner and paralyse the opposition blocs by exploiting blemishes … [such as] undesirable behaviour that can be used to threaten potential recruits with prosecution.” Opposition supporters were to be harassed, threatened, or even forcibly relocated away from their villages as a means of “forcing them to follow us, or at least preventing them from daring to work for the opposition.” Teachers, civil servants, soldiers, and police were to be targeted, with the latter considered especially effective at “submerged activities, in particular, cornering and paralysing the opposition.”³⁷

But copies of Thiệu’s vote-rigging instructions inevitably leaked, prompting one province chief to bemoan that the president had “put in writing what should have been done orally.”³⁸ Rather than dignify a contest whose outcome was clearly prearranged, the two opposition candidates, Dương Vӑn Minh and Thiệu’s longtime nemesis, Nguyễn Cao Kỳ, both dropped out in protest. Thiệu was undeterred, rebranding the one-man election as a referendum on his fitness to rule. The US Embassy howled with disapproval. Political moderates joined students and veterans on the streets to express their outrage. And some of Saigon’s most committed American allies withdrew their support in disgust, including arch anticommunist Senator Henry Jackson. In a sign of things to come, the US Senate pointedly shot down a proposed $565 million supplemental aid bill for South Vietnam, just days after the uncontested reelection. Thiệu’s ambassadors in Washington had warned for years that congressional support was conditional, and limited; now, the bill for his authoritarian turn was coming due.³⁹

With reelection now inevitable, Thiệu accelerated his consolidation of power. Using the pretext of renewed communist attacks in the spring of 1972, he deployed the Lower House to ram through sweeping emergency legislation, effectively proscribing independent political parties and chastening opposition newspapers with the threat of debilitating legal challenges. Then, in late 1972, Thiệu’s “submerged” political structure went public, formally inaugurated as the “Democracy Party” – though the descriptor was hardly apt. Critics condemned a compulsory membership scheme for government workers, and its structural similarities to the Vietnamese Communist Party were widely noted. Civil servants and soldiers who refused to participate faced dismissal, if not prosecution, on trumped-up charges; civilian bureaucrats were threatened with military conscription or transfers to insecure communist-controlled areas. A wave of public officials resigned in protest, including well-regarded military commander Nguyễn Bé, who excoriated the Democracy Party as “intended simply to perpetuate President Thiệu in power … [with] no greater national purpose and no independent ideology that will appeal to the Vietnamese people.”⁴⁰

Growing revulsion toward Thiêu’s authoritarianism helps explain the markedly different response in urban South Vietnam to renewed communist violence in 1972. Unlike the 1968 Tet attacks, which, as we have seen, inspired a fleeting burst of cooperation and engagement with the state’s new political institutions, North Vietnam’s 1972 Offensive instead aggravated the South’s internal divisions. Perhaps counterintuitively, political tensions mounted even as the South Vietnamese military performed well in isolated instances. At the town of An Lộc, situated on a strategic corridor connecting Saigon with northeastern Cambodia, ARVN forces unexpectedly held the line as overwhelming American firepower ground down the communist advance on the capital.⁴¹ But the government struggled to deploy An Lộc as a rallying cry, not least owing to the poor quality of its public information. State censorship of ARVN setbacks such as the fall of Quảng Trị province “has become a subject of ridicule to Saigonese,” the US Embassy reported, and even staunch government supporters despaired as the state’s credibility eroded. “No one believes government radio and TV any more,” lamented Thiệu-loyalist Phạm Anh, Chair of the Lower House Foreign Affairs Committee. “People [get] most of their news from Voice of America, BBC, and rumor.”⁴² Cynicism and distrust abounded, compounding Thiệu’s efforts to again invoke the 1968 Tet Offensive to his advantage.

With the prospect of a peace settlement looming, Thiệu’s sacrifice of popular legitimacy for the expediency of authoritarian rule left South Vietnam exposed on multiple fronts. By now, American military withdrawal was nearly complete. Political observers in Saigon looked anxiously toward Washington, anticipating a diplomatic breakthrough with Hanoi in time to secure Richard Nixon’s reelection in November. Excluded from secret US–North Vietnamese negotiations, the South was always vulnerable to unilateral American concessions. And sure enough, the United States blinked first, allowing North Vietnamese troops to retain their positions in South Vietnamese territory as a precursor to securing a peace deal. Thiệu’s inner circle was incensed. But while the president and his entourage were taken aback by Washington’s terms, they could hardly claim to have been surprised. Indeed, advisors like Hoàng Đức Nhã – at Thiệu’s side during the confrontation with Kissinger – had warned for years that action on “corruption and social justice” was imperative for “improving the attitudes of the American people towards Vietnam.”⁴³ After all, as Father Trần Hữu Thanh, the militantly anticommunist leader of the dissident People’s Anti-Corruption Movement, had warned, “Foreign aid to Vietnam is being withdrawn because the aid does not go to the people and does not truly help the nation, as it is completely siphoned off by corruption. No country wants its good will to enrich an oppressive minority, and no country is satisfied pouring money into a bottomless pit.”⁴⁴ Thiệu stalled for time until after Nixon’s reelection. North Vietnam feared a ruse and withdrew from the negotiations. Nixon responded with a widely condemned American bombing campaign against Hanoi, meant to reassure Thiệu as much as punish the communists. But he also threatened South Vietnam with devastating aid cuts, lest Thiệu remain defiant. With little choice but to relent, Saigon begrudgingly submitted, to terms which disappointed American negotiators. As one US official recalled, “We bombed the North Vietnamese into accepting our concessions.”⁴⁵

Sweeping congressional cuts to American military aid soon followed – an explicit response to Thiệu’s unopposed reelection and moves against the legislature, judiciary, independent parties, and the press. Between fiscal years 1973 and 1974, United States military assistance to South Vietnam shrank from $3.3 billion to $941 million, a 72 percent reduction. Yet the scale of the cuts notwithstanding, American contributions to Saigon’s war effort remained substantial: $941 million in military aid for fiscal year 1974 was still 42 percent more than what the United States had provided in fiscal year 1967. And if Congress was no longer willing to indulge a bloated and authoritarian military government in Saigon, it remained generous in allocating funds to causes it deemed more worthy. Nonmilitary economic aid to South Vietnam was expanded by 23 percent during fiscal year 1974, including a ten-fold increase in support for internally displaced civilians. Moreover, cuts to military assistance beginning in 1973 had been preceded by equally dramatic spikes, with an overall increase of 112 percent from fiscal year 1970 spending levels.⁴⁶ In 1972 alone, the Nixon administration gifted some $2 billion worth of fuel, supplies, and military hardware, to compensate for looming congressional spending cuts. Intended to coax Thiệu into accepting Nixon’s peace terms, the splurge also helped him reinforce his command over the military by enabling lavish patronage distribution, tempering political fallout from the American settlement with North Vietnam. But in military terms, it was not American firepower but Vietnamese leadership that was needed. Despite now boasting the world’s fourth-largest army and air force, and fifth-largest navy, thin leadership, poor morale, rampant desertion, and insufficient technical expertise meant that, relative to the communists, South Vietnam remained, according to one Pentagon official, “an expansion team going against the league champs.”⁴⁷

The Vietnamese communists, on the other hand, were – whatever else – tenacious and ruthlessly effective rural organizers. Following the peace settlement, they stepped up infiltration of the South and competed for control of the rice harvest. Before long, villages assumed to be safely under Saigon’s control were revealed to have sustained covert communist networks all along. One official spoke of his chilling experience, on awaking one morning, of witnessing the houses in every hamlet in his officially “secure” district now suddenly displaying a communist flag.⁴⁸ Equipped for mechanized, high-tech warfare, South Vietnamese forces often struggled to respond to their adversary’s revised tactics. Their massive American weapons transfers were ill-suited for rural political competition and, if anything, reinforced the worst tendencies of the ARVN top brass. Where communist cadres were nimble, calculating, and frugal, ARVN relied on gratuitous firepower, an approach that proved both counterproductive and wasteful. Oriented and equipped for battlefield confrontation, the South Vietnamese military state too often lacked the aptitude and civic institutions required to prosper in rural political competition. Had Thiệu succeeded in assembling a mass rural organization, he might well have withstood the communist challenge and the dissolution of his urban support base. But his assumptions about the countryside were romantic, if not grandiose, and he overestimated his influence over and appeal to rural citizens. An aspiring authoritarian populist, he lacked moral authority and was unpopular. As we have seen, the political impact of the state’s much-trumpeted land reforms was tepid. Soaring fertilizer prices in the mid-1970s further immiserated the rural South. And with farmers abandoning government-controlled urban slums and returning to their fields after the 1973 peace settlement, the assumption that Thiệu’s rural agenda had achieved lasting loyalty to the state proved largely illusory.

Conclusion

Five years after the failure of the 1968 communist Tet Offensive, the Saigon government’s momentum had been squandered. An initial outpouring of urban resolve had long since dissipated, giving way to fury and despair over Thiệu’s obliteration of the 1967 constitutional order. Thiệu consoled himself by imagining a captive base of support in the countryside. But the political impact of his agrarian reforms was limited, and the state had made little progress building grassroots institutions with which to contest the communists by attracting rural constituents to its side. Meanwhile, across the border, the North Vietnamese military was busy preparing yet another all-out offensive against the South. They were not expecting an easy victory. Mounting tensions with the Soviet Union and especially China meant that future military aid to Hanoi was uncertain. And despite inconsistent leadership, poor morale, chronic desertion, and the rapid depletion of its ammunition stocks, the South Vietnamese military remained large and well-equipped, at least on paper. When the North Vietnamese Politburo met in October 1974 to plan the invasion, they anticipated that success in the South would require at least two years of intense fighting – and even this projection was based on the most favorable assumptions.⁴⁹

What followed in the spring of 1975 was less a battlefield defeat than the disintegration of the South Vietnamese state from within. Communist forces began by probing remote South Vietnamese outposts in the Central Highlands, testing the Saigon government’s capabilities and intentions. The ARVN defenders wilted, and, no less important, there was no indication in Washington that the United States might intervene. Then, on March 11, Thiệu issued fateful orders. Reasoning that ARVN forces were overstretched, he announced a tactical withdrawal from the Highlands, to prioritize protecting the more densely populated central coast. But the retreat quickly deteriorated into a rout. Low on confidence and lacking faith in the government’s ability to deliver, ARVN forces and their commanders panicked. Discipline broke down, prompting thousands of civilians to join the departing soldiers in their flight for the coast. Indiscriminate communist artillery fire added to the mounting sense of terror. As news of the debacle in the Highlands reached the coast, ARVN soldiers abandoned their posts, discarded their uniforms, and melted away into the convulsing civilian crowds. In Đà Nẵng, the second-largest city in the South, an estimated 60,000 people perished while attempting to flee, many after drowning in the clamor to board makeshift escape boats.⁵⁰ “Đà Nẵng was not captured,” one observer recalled, “it disintegrated in its own terror.”⁵¹ Fear and anarchy cascaded south, along the coast. ARVN forces held out bravely at Xuân Lộc, along the main highway east of Saigon, but it was not enough.⁵² On April 20, Thiệu himself jumped ship, resigning during a tearful televised press conference before departing to Taiwan. Ten days later, communist tanks crashed through the gates of his palace, bringing the decades-long conflict to a dramatic end.

South Vietnam’s turbulent political trajectory after the Tet Offensive has been largely overlooked in most early English-language accounts of the Vietnam War. Yet it was during these decisive years that the political fate of the South Vietnamese state was sealed. Far from an American puppet regime, the South was led and contested by a diverse range of Vietnamese protagonists, divided by religion, ethnicity, and partisan affiliation, but determined to assert themselves, often in defiance of the United States. Nor, until the final weeks, did its astonishingly abrupt internal collapse ever seem preordained. Far more than on the battlefield or in diplomatic negotiations, the outcome of the conflict hinged on the state’s failure to achieve political legitimacy, even in the eyes of its most committed anticommunist constituents. Extravagant corruption and unwillingness to abide by constitutionalist principles corroded public trust. And when civilians and soldiers alike lost faith in Thiệu’s ability to marshal the state in their defense, the ensuing nationwide erosion of political confidence precipitated Saigon’s rapid military capitulation.

6 Hanoi’s Politburo at War, 1969–1975

Pierre Asselin

This chapter considers the war’s latter stages from the perspective of the main decision-making body in Hanoi, the Politburo of the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP).¹ Under the thumb of First Secretary Lê Duẩn, a hardened former revolutionary and admirer of Stalin, the Politburo directed the “anti-American resistance for national salvation,” as it branded its war against Saigon, the Americans, and other forces allied with them. The armed forces of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN, or North Vietnam), the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), answered to its core leaders. The same was true of the Southern-based “Viet Cong,” namely the National Front for the Liberation of Southern Vietnam (NLF) and its armed wing, the People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF). Claiming to constitute an autonomous entity for political reasons, the NLF reported to Hanoi, which set its operational guidelines.

The Vietnamese communist leadership displayed a remarkable degree of ingenuity and resourcefulness in its quest to drive out the Americans, finish off the regime in Saigon, and win the conflict by achieving national reunification under its exclusive aegis. At times, it proved callous to the extreme, making choices it understood might result in massive death and suffering for its people. Increasingly reliant over time upon military and other aid from socialist allies, most notably China and the Soviet Union, it still jealously guarded its autonomy, refusing even to consult those allies about major strategic matters. The audacity and temerity of the Hanoi Politburo were matched only by its impenetrability and staunchness. In the end, it prevailed over its enemies owing less to their shortcomings than to the merits of its masterfully crafted and carefully calibrated strategy of “struggle” on three separate, yet closely intertwined, fronts.

Interestingly, the story of those who opposed the regime in Saigon and its foreign, including American, allies remains largely untold in the West. Decades ago, analysts including Douglas Pike, Carlyle A. Thayer, and David Elliott, as well as historians such as William Duiker, related part of that story on the basis of captured communist documents, Rand Corporation interviews with PAVN, NLF, and PLAF prisoners and defectors, and other available sources in Vietnamese, French, and English.² The opening of Vietnam in the early 1990s prompted a new generation of scholars to scrutinize the strategies and tactics employed by Vietnamese communist authorities to eventually win the war. Lien-Hang T. Nguyen, Ang Cheng Guan, Tuong Vu, and Pierre Asselin focused on decision-makers in Hanoi.³ Meanwhile, Robert Brigham, David Hunt, and others turned their attention to Southerners and the NLF/PLAF specifically.⁴ All things being equal, neglect of the Vietnamese communist viewpoint and experience is as tragic as it is stupefying. After all, how can we ever hope to understand the war and its outcome if we cannot even get a sense of what those resisting Saigon’s and Washington’s policies and armies were thinking and doing during the conflict?

Economy of Forces

The Tet Offensive and follow-up “mini-Tet” campaigns of 1968 paid major political and diplomatic dividends, but also dealt a devastating military and psychological blow to the Politburo’s war effort. Thereafter, its highly dogmatic and steely First Secretary, Lê Duẩn, and other core leaders had to reconcile themselves to the idea that victory – which they defined as the unconditional surrender of the regime in Saigon and attendant withdrawal of all US and other foreign forces allied with them from Indochina (i.e., Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) – was not within their grasp and was, in fact, unlikely to be achieved any time soon, by force of arms, at least. In failing to engage in the “general uprising” that the Politburo assumed would surely follow the large-scale coordinated attack by communist-led forces, the South Vietnamese masses and those in cities in particular had made clear their reluctance to buy into the anti-American, anti-Saigon revolutionary effort. Not only that, but scores of Southerners suddenly rallied to the government of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam) under President Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu, so dejected were they by the devastation wrought upon their country below the 17th parallel by those same communist-led forces.⁵

In the face of this bleak situation caused by its own impetuousness and overconfidence, the VWP Politburo reassessed its strategies and tactics. Since ordering the onset of major combat operations in the South and deploying the first PAVN units there in late 1964, it had predicated its strategy on three carefully calibrated “modes of struggle”: military – to confront, attrite, and overcome enemy forces on Southern battlefields and in the skies above North Vietnam; political – to develop the party apparatus and recruit fighters in the South, encourage the defection of troops from the South Vietnamese army (địch vận), and organize “front groups” of women, Buddhists, intellectuals, students, and urban laborers against Saigon and US intervention (dân vận); and diplomatic – to secure maximal material support from socialist allies while rallying world opinion against “US imperialist aggression” and in support of the “national liberation” cause. After Washington proceeded to “Americanize” the war in spring 1965 by committing large numbers of its own combat forces and initiating continuous bombings of the North, the Politburo sustained all three modes of struggle. However, it hedged its bets on and prioritized military struggle, determining it was most likely to deliver “decisive victory” in a reasonable period.

Somewhat humbled by losses suffered over the course of 1968, nearing 40,000 PAVN and PLAF troops killed in action and tens of thousands more wounded, to say nothing of the decimation of the NLF’s infrastructure, the Politburo revised its approach. It decreed that, moving forward, its armies would pursue a policy of “economy of forces,” meaning that for the time being they would scale back the scope and frequency of their attacks against enemy outfits and positions. This, Lê Duẩn and his comrades hoped, would give both the PAVN and PLAF time to regroup, reorganize, and rebuild. Meanwhile, and largely to buy time for its armies to recuperate, the Politburo agreed to expand ongoing semipublic peace talks by allowing RVN diplomats to join DRVN and US representatives in Paris, on condition that a NLF delegation was admitted as well. That did absolutely nothing to make the talks more productive, but it did serve to enhance the international prestige and legitimacy of the NLF.

In 1969, low-level guerrilla operations became the order of the day for communist-led armies as the Politburo suspended “mass combat operations” below the 17th parallel. PAVN/PLAF regular forces did their best to avoid contact with large units of American, South Vietnamese, and allied forces thereafter. They reverted to hit-and-run, ambush-type operations against smaller outfits in remote parts of the South, as Southern guerrillas had characteristically done before the North-Vietnamization of hostilities in 1964–5. Since several PLAF units had not recovered from losses suffered the year before, Hanoi ordered the PAVN to lend them some of its own troops. The partial Northernization of PLAF units was the only way to keep that army afloat, though it also served the Politburo’s purposes by making its control over the resistance effort in the South more complete.⁶

As it hit the reset button and scaled back military activity in the South, the Politburo leaned more heavily on the diplomatic mode of struggle to advance its resistance. To win over hearts and minds internationally while demonizing US President Richard Nixon, it invited sympathetic foreigners, including Americans, to visit North Vietnam and witness first-hand actual and alleged war crimes perpetrated by US air forces against its people. Meanwhile, DRVN and NLF delegations of women and students attended international conventions to spread a carefully scripted message intended to generate sympathy and support for the struggle against Saigon and the Americans. Delegations of writers, filmmakers, singers, dancers, and other artistic guilds contributed to this international charm offensive by exercising their talents at festivals and commemorative events worldwide, including in Western countries. Interestingly, traditional forms of artistic expression considered variously as feudal, bourgeois, and reactionary by the Politburo and therefore banned in the DRVN were showcased and on full display overseas as demonstrations of the richness and sophistication of Vietnamese culture! Collectively, these and related initiatives generated greater and wider moral, political, and material support for Hanoi’s travails by fostering the illusion that the anti-Saigon, anti-American cause constituted a veritable “people’s war” inspired and driven by the ardent nationalism of Vietnam’s people. That obfuscated the reality that committed Marxist-Leninists in fact engineered everything, which was sure to prove a liability in the effort to win over friends and allies beyond the socialist camp.⁷

The Politburo also expanded its diplomatic engagement with Washington. As the semipublic peace talks in Paris stopped producing meaningful propagandistic dividends, it accepted a White House offer to open a secret “backchannel” with Nixon’s national security advisor, Henry Kissinger. Removed from media scrutiny, this forum allowed more frank and less bombastic discussions about ending the war through a negotiated settlement. Hanoi was not at that point desperate enough to give up on its core objective of securing complete victory. It was, however, keen on “probing” the Nixon administration, on getting a better sense of the US president’s goals in Indochina and of his resolve to achieve them. In the Politburo’s own formulation, it was prepared to engage in “talks” (tiếp xúc) but not “negotiations” (thương lượng) to uncover what Nixon really meant when he spoke of securing “peace with honor” in Southeast Asia. The secret channel offered an ideal opportunity to learn just that.⁸

None other than First Secretary Lê Duẩn’s longtime comrade-in-arms and most trusted ally inside the Politburo, Lê Đức Thọ, assumed the role of head DRVN negotiator in the secret talks. He and Kissinger met over a dozen times over the next few years at undisclosed locations in France, usually the private residence of common acquaintances to maintain the veil of secrecy. Despite Hanoi’s reservations about them, the secret talks produced tangible dividends, including establishing the contours of a diplomatic settlement between Hanoi and Washington. In a breakthrough in 1971, Washington agreed to allow PAVN troops already in the South to remain there after a ceasefire took effect in exchange for Hanoi’s acquiescence in returning all US prisoners of war (POWs) in its and the NLF’s custody. Over time, the talks also helped Thọ and Kissinger establish a healthy rapport that served their respective governments well once the latter settled on peace, later. Until then, the main sticking point in their talks – beyond the obduracy of each government – remained the political future of South Vietnam and the fate of President Thiệu. While the Politburo insisted on the latter’s abdication and the formation of a new, neutralist regime in Saigon before a ceasefire, the Nixon administration maintained that such matters were for the Vietnamese themselves to decide after hostilities ended and prisoners were returned. In other words, Washington sought a diplomatic settlement covering military matters only, while Hanoi wanted one addressing political matters as well.

As this diplomatic dance went on in France, Hanoi engineered the creation of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Southern Vietnam (PRG, Chính phủ Cách mạng Lâm thời Cộng hòa miền Nam Việt Nam). Formally established in June 1969, the new entity sought to further enhance the international legitimacy of the NLF by suggesting it exercised formal authority over sizable portions of the area below the 17th parallel and, by extension, that the power of Thiệu’s regime was waning. In reality, the PRG was a government in name only, created to advance Hanoi’s diplomatic struggle through enhancing the image and global footprint of the NLF. Consistent with these aspirations, the Politburo made Nguyễn Thị Bình the public face of the PRG overseas.⁹ The grandniece of the famous nationalist leader Phan Châu Trinh, Bình was a seasoned diplomat who had previously assumed various postings around the world as a member of the NLF’s foreign service. In her capacity as head of the NLF delegation to the semipublic Paris talks, she had gained a measure of notoriety. Intelligent, articulate, capable, and worldly, she excelled at relating to non-Vietnamese, including Westerners. In public appearances, she typically wore either a form-fitting áo dài, Vietnam’s traditional female dress, or a “Mao suit” of sorts with her trademark checkered scarf. She quite consciously indulged and captured the foreign imagination as both Vietnamese woman and guerrilla fighter, unable to be the former without the latter. She became a media sensation who reshaped perceptions in the West. The so-called Viet Cong, she demonstrated, were more than simple-minded Southern Vietnamese men and women in black pajamas fighting with rudimentary weapons. They were human beings with a keen sense of social justice. In hindsight, the Politburo’s decision to appoint her leader of the NLF/PRG delegation in Paris was a stroke of genius. As it turned out, she had no authority of her own in the negotiations: her positions were dictated by Hanoi, and North Vietnamese advisors surreptitiously wrote or vetted all her position papers.

The Politburo’s diplomatic offensive of 1969 was impressive, to say the least. Not to be outdone, Washington also took a series of steps intended to improve its prospects in the post-Tet 1968 context. The first major move to that end came when President Nixon announced the first of what became a series of incremental withdrawals of US forces from Indochina. In July 1969, he confirmed that henceforth his administration would reduce the number and scale of US military commitments in Southeast Asia and elsewhere and expect allies to do more to ensure their own security. That meant, to borrow from the formulation of former US President Lyndon Johnson, that from now on Saigon could no longer count on American boys to do what South Vietnamese boys ought to do for themselves. To offset the departure of US forces, the Nixon administration pledged dramatic increases in military and other aid to Thiệu’s regime in Saigon. By popular accounts, the application of the so-called Nixon Doctrine to Indochina translated into a “Vietnamization” of hostilities. In fact, the Vietnam War was always, at its core, a Vietnamese affair. By that rationale, incremental withdrawals of US forces simply meant that that affair, Americanized in 1965, would reassume its pre-1965 civil-war character.¹⁰

Publicly, the Politburo celebrated the Nixon Doctrine, claiming that the attendant Vietnamization of the war attested to the failure of the American enterprise in Indochina. Privately, it feared that the resumption of pure civil war would make it more difficult to market its war effort as a resistance against American imperialism, a central theme of its diplomatic struggle. To be sure, Hanoi took great offense when the Western press portrayed its indigenous enemies and other detractors as anything other than “puppets,” “lackeys,” and “reactionaries.” These “traitors” worked against – on behalf of first the French and now the Americans – Vietnamese nationalism, which only Hồ Chí Minh and the VWP, by extension, incarnated. As the war thus proceeded, responsibility for its continuation fell increasingly on Hanoi. In their efforts to rally domestic and world opinion, DRVN authorities had insisted all along that the United States must disengage from the South in order to enable Southerners to decide their own fate for and by themselves. As Washington complied with that exigence and pulled its troops out of South Vietnam, Hanoi became a prisoner of its own rhetoric and faced mounting pressure, including from its own socialist allies, to do the same. Vietnamization troubled the Politburo for other reasons. Increased fratricidal violence meant more bad blood among Vietnamese, presaging long-standing rancor likely to compromise postwar reconciliation, reconstruction, and development. Such violence also tarnished Vietnam’s image as a model of the possibilities of national liberation, dear to Hanoi. More pressingly, expansion of the South Vietnamese armed forces, a core aspect of Vietnamization, hampered NLF/PLAF recruitment efforts, already challenging.

Soon, Vietnamization was not the only thing keeping Hanoi leaders up at night. To improve Saigon’s prospects in the context of de-Americanization, Washington sanctioned major military operations against communist sanctuaries in Cambodia in 1970 and Laos the following year. Preceded by a coup in Phnom Penh that overthrew the neutralist government of Norodom Sihanouk and replaced it with a pro-American, “reactionary” junta under Lon Nol, the Cambodian incursion dealt a significant political and logistical blow to Hanoi. The primary target of the incursion, the Politburo’s nerve center in the deep South known as the Central Office (Directorate) of South Vietnam (COSVN), escaped destruction. Its work, however, was severely disrupted. While Sihanouk had turned a blind eye to the Politburo’s use of Cambodian territory to move men and supplies into South Vietnam, his successors were less accommodating. Suddenly, communist cadres and forces were no longer virtually immune to enemy ground attacks in Cambodia. The incursion into Laos spearheaded by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) in February 1971 could have been equally devastating for Hanoi. But thanks to local and international press reports announcing it, the PAVN had enough time to beef up its military presence there. Unsurprisingly, its forces of 36,000 heavily armed regulars inflicted heavy casualties on ARVN units involved in the attack. Soon thereafter, the widely circulated photograph of a South Vietnamese soldier allegedly deployed into Laos and hanging from the skids of a returning US helicopter suggested that this first test of Vietnamization, as observers at the time called it, had been a dismal failure, making the victory of communist-led forces a moral one as well. As it turned out, heavy American bombardments and a gritty ARVN performance during the campaign killed some 15,000 PAVN troops, making this a pyrrhic win for the Politburo, much like the Tet Offensive.¹¹

In hindsight, the enemy incursions into Cambodia and Laos did not gravely impair the Politburo’s war effort. Still, they were costly in various respects and, therefore, cause for concern. Since the onset of major combat operations in 1964–5, Hanoi had largely dictated the terms of the ground war, including when, where, and how to fight it. Suddenly, it seemed, the enemy had claimed the military initiative, compelling the Politburo to react, to fight on the defensive, and to tailor strategies and tactics accordingly.

As its armies fended off the enemy in Laos and Cambodia, the Politburo confronted an assault of a different kind on the diplomatic front. It turned out that expansion of the war across the rest of Indochina was not the only trick Nixon had up his sleeve to ratchet up the pressure on Hanoi: he also made a series of friendly overtures toward each of its main allies and suppliers of aid, namely China and the Soviet Union. Nixon was clearly trying to take advantage of existing cleavages and war fatigue in the socialist camp to serve his goals in Vietnam while undermining Hanoi’s own. That deeply unsettled the Politburo, which understood that, at this late juncture in the war, Beijing and Moscow might each be seriously tempted to sacrifice Vietnamese interests for the sake of healthier relations with Washington. The Sino-Soviet dispute had reached new heights following a brief but violent border clash in 1969. Neither Moscow nor Beijing wanted frosty relations with two large powers at once. Having recently identified the Soviet Union as the primary threat to its national security, China felt particularly vulnerable; the Politburo rightly assumed it would not pass on an opportunity to endear itself to the Americans.¹²

In 1971, the US national table tennis team made a very mediatized visit to Beijing that set the stage for a secret visit to the Chinese capital by Henry Kissinger shortly thereafter. Following that visit, Zhou Enlai arrived in Hanoi to brief the Politburo on that and other recent events. Sensing the Chinese had committed themselves to rapprochement with the United States, Politburo members became livid when Zhou informed them that Beijing had invited Nixon to a summit with Mao in 1972. The Americans aspired to undermine the Sino-Vietnamese alliances, the members felt, and Beijing was falling for it. Zhou’s assurances that the warming of Sino-American relations would have no bearing on China’s Vietnam policy fell on deaf ears. In Vietnamese eyes, Beijing’s reciprocal entreaties toward Washington amounted to nothing less than a betrayal of their cause. They were “a torpedo” aimed directly at Vietnam’s anti-American resistance.¹³

The Politburo’s protests were to no avail; Beijing had made up its mind about the Americans and its own need for rapprochement. While Lê Duẩn and his comrades seethed in anger privately, they subsequently acted vis-à-vis Beijing as if they had moved on because they recognized they had to. Their armies still desperately needed Chinese military support and, in light of severe flooding in August 1971 resulting in significant crop losses in parts of the DRVN, their people needed food as well. Besides, condemning Beijing for its duplicity in the context of renewed Sino-Soviet tensions might be interpreted by leaders there as indicative of DRVN alignment with Moscow in their dispute, likely to produce a total aid cutoff. In hindsight, Sino-American rapprochement damaged the Sino-Vietnamese alliance beyond repair. That alliance had witnessed its fair share of ups and downs since the heydays of 1963–4. But the events of 1971 irreversibly changed it. Mutual trust and respect gradually but surely gave way to mutual enmity and mistrust, shaking Hanoi’s confidence in its ability to continue the war much longer.¹⁴

That confidence suffered another major blow when Moscow made clear its own desire for improved relations with the United States and, in October 1971, invited Nixon to visit the Soviet Union the following year as well. If both China and the Soviet Union had evidently had enough of the Cold War and of the war in Vietnam by extension, it stood to reason that the rest of the socialist camp felt the same. Suddenly time was no longer the Politburo’s ally. In the new international context, the longer the conflict dragged on, the more likely Hanoi was to suffer losses of material, political, and moral support. Nixon had upped the military pressure by going after communist sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos and then the diplomatic one by courting Chinese and Soviet leaders. Unless it did as its own allies were doing, and constructively engaged Washington with a view to ending American involvement on terms satisfactory to the American President, the Politburo would likely face punishing military and diplomatic consequences.

As it happened, Chinese leaders welcomed Nixon to Beijing in February 1972. By the terms of the Shanghai Communiqué announced at the summit, Washington recognized Taiwan as part of China, and both governments pledged to keep working toward establishing full diplomatic relations. Privately, Chinese leaders promised Washington to lean on Hanoi to end the war by negotiations. Lê Duẩn and his comrades deeply resented this meddling in their affairs. “The basis for all of China’s actions is Chinese nationalism and chauvinism,” grumbled one DRVN official. Others speculated that China had never been genuinely interested in their revolution, that it had only sought to bleed the United States in Vietnam “to the last Vietnamese.” In acting as it did, Beijing had forfeited its right to be recognized as a revolutionary vanguard. China’s leaders were not real revolutionaries, a dejected Lê Duẩn exclaimed privately, but “traitors to the interests of the revolutionary forces of the world.”¹⁵ Mao had replaced disgraced Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev as the leading Marxist-Leninist revisionist and threat to international communist solidarity, Politburo members thought. The Soviets, meanwhile, prepared to roll out their own red carpet for Nixon. But because of the closeness of their relationship in recent years, the Politburo found Beijing’s behavior much more frustrating and unsettling. Soviet–American détente was disgraceful, but it amounted in Vietnamese eyes to no more than a renewed commitment to the policy of peaceful coexistence introduced more than a decade and a half ago by Khrushchev. Since then, Hanoi had made its peace with Moscow’s revisionist tendencies, inasmuch as those tendencies had never precluded Soviet support for the DRVN in the American War.

Figure 6.1 Lê Duẩn, the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Vietnamese Workers’ Party, visiting the crew of an anti-aircraft unit in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (1967).

Source: Sovfoto / Contributor / Universal Images Group / Getty Images.

Going for Broke, Again

Facing mounting pressures domestically and internationally as a result of Nixon’s schemes, the Politburo set out to reclaim the initiative, to put itself back in the driver’s seat. After heated and contentious internal deliberations, it settled on another major offensive in the South of a magnitude comparable to the 1968 Tet Offensive. The central objective of this latest effort would be routing and demoralizing the ARVN by crushing its main-force units and achieving “total victory” within ten to fifteen months. “The time had come to lay all cards on the table” and finally “sweep away the Saigon forces and regime” all the way to Saigon, Lê Duẩn believed.¹⁶ Given recent military and diplomatic setbacks and the fact that communist-led forces in the South were still recovering from manpower and materiel losses suffered in their last big offensive, the plan was risky. However, 1972 was a presidential election year in the United States. Even if things did not go as planned militarily, the Politburo felt it would still reap political and diplomatic dividends, just as it had four years before. At a minimum, the new offensive would disrupt and quite possibly derail entirely Sino-American rapprochement and Soviet–American détente, including the upcoming Brezhnev–Nixon summit scheduled for May. Hanoi leaders were convinced that the renewal of major hostilities in the South would leave Moscow and Beijing no choice but to rally behind Hanoi and take some distance from the Americans.

The Quang Trung Offensive, named after the leader of an army that had defeated a Chinese invasion in 1789, began on March 30, 1972. On that day, five PAVN divisions comprising approximately 120,000 men crossed into the South from bases inside the North and sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia. Unlike the Tet Offensive, this was a conventional-style invasion involving armored and heavy field artillery units. Anti-aircraft units previously assigned to the defense of Northern cities and largely idle since the suspension of US bombings of the DRVN in late 1968 accompanied the invading force. Hanoi expected a heavy air response by the United States, less against the North itself than against its forces in the South and their supply lines running through Laos and Cambodia.

The offensive proceeded well at the onset, with PAVN forces conquering large swathes of the South’s northern tier. Heavy US bombings, including raids on supply lines, slowed but did not stop the offensive. In early May 1972, Washington extended the bombings to the area above the 17th parallel, effectively resuming the air war against the DRVN suspended four years earlier. To the Politburo’s consternation, the Americans also mined Northern harbors, including Hải Phòng, to dissuade foreign ships from docking, and thus curtail the flow of aid arriving by sea. The impact was almost immediate. In conjunction with sustained attacks on supply lines in the South, the bombing and mining campaigns severely hindered the transfer of men and materiel to the invading force in the South. Smelling blood, ARVN forces mounted a series of successful counteroffensives, eventually reclaiming Quảng Trị City in a highly symbolic victory. By September, communist-led forces were running out of steam. Later that month, Hanoi decided to cut its losses and indefinitely suspended the Quang Trung Offensive.

To the Politburo’s astonishment, Moscow and Beijing only mildly condemned the bombing of the DRVN and the mining of its ports by the Americans. Adding insult to injury, each ally proceeded as before with its engagement of Washington. Moscow did not even postpone the Brezhnev–Nixon summit, which occurred as planned in May in an atmosphere so cozy and friendly as to make Hanoi leaders reel. When the Soviets turned down its request for assistance in de-mining North Vietnamese harbors – as only they possessed the necessary hardware – the Politburo knew its struggle was on life-support. The Quang Trung Offensive constituted the third “go-for-broke” effort launched by Hanoi during a US presidential election year that failed to meet its intended objective. This latest setback was especially devastating, as the losses in men and materiel incurred were such that they called into question the long-term prospects of the Marxist-Leninist Vietnamese revolutionary project. While equally costly militarily, the 1968 Tet Offensive had at least produced tangible political and psychological dividends, including the end of Johnson’s presidency. Nothing of the sort resulted from the 1972 campaign. Admittedly, the PAVN now enjoyed a larger troop presence below the 17th parallel, but that offered little solace to those forces and their leaders at the time. Yet again, Lê Duẩn and his Politburo had gambled big, and lost big.

As it had a habit of doing when the military situation turned disadvantageous, the Politburo at once turned to diplomacy. In the fall, it agreed to the resumption of bilateral talks in Paris between Kissinger and Lê Đức Thọ. No longer secret since Nixon revealed their existence during a January 1972 televised address, the Kissinger–Thọ negotiations remained private and the most viable channel for serious discussions and reaching a settlement. In the official DRVN account, by acting as it did in late 1972 the Politburo shifted from a “strategy of war” to a “strategy of peace.”¹⁷

In the days prior to a negotiating session scheduled for early October, the Politburo convened to decide on a course of action. Acknowledging the imperative need to de-escalate the conflict and arrive at an accommodation of sorts with the Americans, if only to give communist-led forces a chance to recuperate, it decided to drop the long-standing demand calling for the removal of RVN President Thiệu as a precondition to a ceasefire. The decision had the desired effect. When Thọ informed Kissinger, the latter was ecstatic, because he recognized this was the breakthrough needed to bring their talks to a successful conclusion. Over the ensuing days, the two men and their respective teams of assistants worked assiduously to finalize a comprehensive draft agreement. Consistent with American wishes, the resulting draft agreement settled pressing military matters and left more problematic political issues, including the future of South Vietnam, to be resolved among the Vietnamese parties themselves after the cessation of hostilities and the withdrawal of remaining US forces. Peace, Kissinger would state publicly shortly thereafter, was finally “at hand.”¹⁸

Optimism gave way to gloom after Washington informed Saigon of the terms of the draft deal. Never a party to the secret/private talks, nor apprised of their progress, Thiệu’s regime had ample reason to object. Pressed for specifics by the Americans, the RVN president explained that his government could not abide the continued presence of PAVN forces in the South after a ceasefire. Unless the agreement was revised to address that and a series of other, less grave matters, Thiệu would never endorse a deal. If Washington still wanted one despite his objections, then it could sign a bilateral agreement with Hanoi, he boldly told the Americans.¹⁹

Once it got word that something was amiss between Saigon and Washington, the Politburo sought to capitalize on the situation. During a private negotiating session in November 1972, Thọ informed Kissinger that the Politburo had no intention of revisiting the terms of its agreement with Washington, which it considered finalized. It remained obdurate even after Nixon won reelection in a landslide victory that seemed to validate his military and diplomatic maneuverings. In another round of discussions with Kissinger in early December, Thọ remained intransigent. With the talks at an impasse, Kissinger notified Thọ that Nixon might resort to extreme measures to bring about the finalization of a deal satisfactory to all parties, including Saigon, sooner rather than later. That included another campaign of sustained bombings of the North, the likes of which Hanoi had never seen, the American warned his North Vietnamese counterpart.

Upon returning to Hanoi, Thọ relayed Kissinger’s threat to the other members of the Politburo, doing his best to impress its seriousness upon them. Immovable at first, Lê Duẩn and like-minded Politburo hardliners eventually agreed with Thọ that finalizing an agreement that was not ideal but at least provided for the end of all US military activities and the withdrawal of foreign forces was, at that juncture, preferable to the continuation and, possibly, escalation of hostilities. Unfortunately, by the time the Politburo was ready to inform Washington of its decision, Nixon had run out of patience and ordered the start of a new campaign of sustained bombings of the North.

As Kissinger had warned Thọ, Linebacker II, the “Christmas Bombing” campaign initiated on December 18, turned out to be the most savage and intense waged by the United States against the DRVN. Seeking to cripple his enemies militarily as well as psychologically, Nixon sanctioned for the first time the use of large strategic B-52 bombers to attack targets in and around Hanoi and Hải Phòng, heretofore off-limits to such aircraft. The loss of substantial anti-aircraft assets, including equipment and personnel, in the Quang Trung Offensive made the North quite vulnerable. That is not to say its air-defense system and forces were impotent. Quite the contrary, they mounted a surprisingly spirited and lethal resistance to the renewed air war, especially during its opening days. The problem was that they were not prepared for, nor did North Vietnamese military planners anticipate the possibility of, such a sustained and high-intensity effort by Washington at this late stage in the war. Partly as a result, by the end of the first week of bombing anti-aircraft units across the North were running out of assembled, ready-to-use surface-to-air (SAM) missiles, severely diminishing their capabilities. By the time Nixon suspended the campaign on December 29, the Americans were attacking with increased impunity. No wonder, then, that the Politburo caved in, informing Washington through a backchannel on December 26 that it agreed to resume negotiations once the bombing ended.

Privately, the Politburo regretted not indulging Nixon sooner and sparing the country another round of bombing and attendant devastation. Publicly, however, it claimed that Washington had unconditionally suspended the bombing because it could no longer sustain such high losses in men and equipment as those inflicted by DRVN defenders. In support of that premise, Hanoi launched a public relations campaign predicated on the notion that these “twelve days and nights” (mười hai ngày đêm) of bombing constituted no less than a “Điện Biên Phủ of the skies” (Điện Biên Phủ trên không) for the US government. Just as a valiant campaign by communist-led forces had delivered an epic triumph in the remote northwestern valley back in 1954, a similarly heroic effort had achieved victory in the skies above North Vietnam in late 1972. This constituted a gross exaggeration, to be sure, but Hanoi exercised full control over the production and dissemination of information across the DRVN, rendering its claims credible domestically if only because it was impossible to disprove them. Hanoi’s cause in this instance was also served by the international community, which loudly and angrily denounced and protested this latest escalation of the war at a time Washington was supposed to be ending it. Some of the harshest condemnations of the bombing came from Americans themselves – from journalists as well as some members of Congress in particular.²⁰

When Thọ met again with Kissinger in Paris early in 1973, he knew that he had to end the war once and for all. Hanoi simply could no longer endure the military pressure of the United States. Their first meeting on January 3 got off to a rough start, as he angrily castigated Kissinger and his government for so savagely and unnecessarily attacking the DRVN in December. Once he was done with his rant, Thọ and Kissinger got to work. Within days they completed another draft agreement that took into consideration some of the issues Thiệu had previously raised, and that had precluded the finalization of a deal in October–November. The most contentious matter remaining at the time of the December bombing was the language in the agreement concerning the status of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the two Vietnams. At Thiệu’s insistence, Kissinger had sought language that could be read to imply that the DMZ was not just a military but also a political marker between the two Vietnams, which the Politburo rejected because it considered Vietnam’s territorial integrity sacrosanct. In January, however, it consented to the same language Kissinger had proposed earlier. That concession, inconsequential – a “cosmetic change” – in the eyes of many scholars, was in fact extraordinarily telling of the state of mind of the Politburo at the time and, above all, of its eagerness to end the war.²¹

Finishing Off Saigon

The “Agreement to End the War and Restore the Peace in Vietnam” was signed by representatives of the four parties – the United States, DRVN, PRG, and RVN – in Paris on January 27, 1973. Presumably inaugurating an era of peace, none of its signatories harbored high hopes for its prospects. The agreement resolved a number of issues, mostly as they concerned the American military presence in Vietnam. The matters at the heart of the conflict, namely the competing political ideologies and orientations of authorities in Hanoi and Saigon, were not covered by the agreement, which merely encouraged their resolution through subsequent negotiations among the Vietnamese parties themselves. At the time of signing, the two rival Vietnamese governments remained as far apart on those issues as they had been since the beginning of “big war” in 1964–5.²²

As expected, it did not take long for hostilities to resume. No sooner had the United States ended its military involvement and pulled out the last of its combat forces – at which point a good part of the international community lost interest in the situation there – than the two sides started fighting again. While Thiệu surprised no one by refusing to abide by the letter and spirit of the agreement, the Politburo had few qualms about answering Saigon’s provocations in kind and reprising the war. Its forces and people had been driven to the point of exhaustion in 1972. However, now that the Americans were out of the picture, it was confident they could bear a continuation of hostilities. Besides, it was never in the habit of sparing its citizens from hardship, and the latter were by now accustomed to giving more just as they thought they had nothing left to give.

In July 1973, VWP leaders convened to discuss and formulate a better response to developments in the South since the de-Americanization of hostilities in late March. Although that had constituted a significant milestone in their reunification struggle, they worried that the Americans might reintervene, since peace had failed to eventuate. From their perspective, that was because Thiệu refused to abide the continued presence of PAVN troops below the 17th parallel, sanctioned under the terms of the Paris Agreement on Vietnam. Since its signing, ARVN units had aggressively and violently moved against PAVN/PLAF-controlled areas, often with great success. That situation could not continue, the assembled leaders surmised. The problem was that a forceful response at that juncture could prompt Nixon to resort to bombing, either of the North or of communist strongholds in the South, and possibly even both. The latter was a long shot, to be sure, but the Politburo had learned by now never to underestimate Nixon’s resolve to salvage his country’s honor and not abandon Saigon. The good news was that the American Congress appeared to be working on various legislative measures that precluded further US combat operations in the region.²³

Taking account of both domestic and international circumstances, the Politburo endorsed Resolution 21 calling for resuming armed struggle in the South but strictly to preserve existing positions there and otherwise reclaim territory lost to Thiệu’s armies since the signing of the agreement. The Politburo did not want its forces to do anything beyond that, for fear it might precipitate a military response from Washington leading to partial US reengagement. If the Americans did not respond, then it would consider adopting a more proactive stance. Besides, communist-led forces in the South remained too weak and disorganized to go on the offensive. Restraint was for the time being the order of the day.

The ensuing back-and-forth between Saigon’s and Hanoi’s armies produced full-blown war across much of the South by the fall of 1973. Resolution 21’s “cautious formulation” was “enough to give the green light to commanders in the South to take more aggressive measures as they saw fit,” one observer noted.²⁴ The escalation of hostilities caused concern in Hanoi, as it afforded the Nixon administration an ideal pretext to come to the defense of its embattled ally. But then, in November, Congress adopted the War Powers Act, which set limits on the presidential authority to deploy US military forces overseas. Around the same time, the Watergate scandal erupted, consuming Nixon. The Politburo interpreted all this to mean that Nixon would find it next to impossible to offer succor to the regime in Saigon. The road ahead was getting brighter.

By 1974, communist-led forces were in the best shape they had been in years and making meaningful, albeit slow, gains across the South, thanks to increased aid deliveries from Moscow. Hanoi was clearly gaining the upper hand over Saigon, whose problems were compounded by severe cuts in aid from Washington. In March, the Politburo began making preparations for another general offensive. If all went as planned, Lê Duẩn predicted that “big and decisive victory” could come within three years. Then, in August 1974, Nixon resigned as president of the United States. Encouraged by the news, the Politburo surmised its armies might be able to complete the liberation of the South in one big, final push by the end of 1976. Absent Nixon, the United States was unlikely to intervene to save Saigon. Vietnam had been his cause; his successor would not want to assume that burden. The Americans would not return to Vietnam “even if you offer them candy,” one Hanoi official estimated. That, plus Thiệu’s growing tribulations and declining support in the South, made the present an ideal time for escalation.

Communist-led forces went to work in November–December 1974. Their mission was simple: annihilate enemy forces and conquer all major cities, including Saigon. Unlike the Tet Offensive, when urban enclaves were targeted simultaneously, in this campaign they were assaulted in sequence, one-by-one, from various staging areas. The campaign got off to a promising start, with PAVN/PLAF forces scoring a series of rapid and relatively easy victories. In mid-December, they attacked strategic Phước Long province, north of Saigon, and crushed their opposition. Washington took no meaningful action in response to these developments in spite of Thiệu’s desperate pleas for assistance. In the aftermath of Phước Long, the Politburo concluded that circumstances were propitious for completing the “liberation” of the South not by the end of 1976, as originally projected, but before the onset of the next monsoon season, in April–May 1975. According to Lê Duẩn, Hanoi enjoyed an “opportune moment” to launch “the strongest and swiftest attack possible” to achieve “a complete, total victory.”²⁵ This was not the first time Lê Duẩn sought to capitalize on such a moment. The years 1968 and 1972 had also been “opportune moments” for achieving decisive victory, he thought. Given significantly reduced aid, including weapons and deliveries from China, communist-led forces could hardly afford to suffer another defeat in yet another major, all-out offensive.

The prospects for victory were better this time. Communist-led forces made significant progress through the early part of 1975. Their enemies fought valiantly but suffered from low morale and a lack of air support, which they had grown accustomed to in the era of Americanization. In March, Hanoi launched a coordinated offensive against the strategically important city of Ban Mê Thuột in the Central Highlands, a core theater of the war. The city was overrun within days, along with a good portion of the rest of the region thereafter. As PAVN units prepared for their next move against Pleiku, another important Central Highlands city, President Thiệu ordered the evacuation of ARVN forces from the region and their redeployment closer to the capital.²⁶

The withdrawal of South Vietnamese forces was a major break for Hanoi and, in retrospect, a key reason its ambitious plan for taking Saigon before the onset of the rainy season came to fruition. Everything unraveled for Saigon after Thiệu made the call to pull his troops out of the Central Highlands. For many Southerners, the call presaged Saigon’s surrender to the communists. A sizable number of ARVN troops lost what will they had left to fight and surrendered, defected, or simply shed their weapons and uniforms and went home. While most remained loyal to the regime and kept performing their assigned duties, they proved no match for advancing communist armies made stronger by vast quantities of weapons and other hardware, including armored vehicles and heavy artillery, left behind by fleeing enemies. In late March 1975, with broad swathes of the South under the firm control of its armies, the Politburo gave them the go-ahead to move against Huế and Đà Nẵng, the South’s largest cities after Saigon, which fell spectacularly fast. Recognizing that his days were numbered, Thiệu resigned as RVN president on April 21 and fled the country.

The last major battle of the war, the Hồ Chí Minh Campaign, as the Politburo branded it, began on April 26. Its objective was the seizure of Saigon, the ultimate prize. Supervised by former Kissinger counterpart in the secret Paris talks and Nobel laureate Lê Đức Thọ, the campaign unfolded at lightning speed. As communist-led forces advanced toward the capital, remaining American personnel evacuated, taking with them orphans plus tens of thousands of South Vietnamese closely tied to the regime in Saigon, along with their families. In all, more than 150,000 Southerners left their country on or just before that day, becoming the first of what would become millions of Indochinese refugees. By some accounts, Hanoi voluntarily delayed the advance of its forces on to the capital to give the Americans time to complete their evacuation and thus avoid a complicated situation for both governments.²⁷

Conclusion

Around noon on April 30, a PAVN tank bearing the NLF flag crashed through the front gate of Independence Palace in Saigon, the South Vietnamese president’s official residence. Newly invested President Dương Vӑn Minh offered his government’s surrender to the highest-ranking PAVN officer on site, only to be told by that officer that he, Minh, had nothing to surrender. Interestingly, communist troops in Saigon celebrated cautiously that day, concerned about a possible repeat of what they had endured in the Tet Offensive, when they had easily seized several key cities only to be driven out of each of them after the enemy savagely counterattacked. This time, only peace ensued.

Thus ended the Vietnam War, or the American war in Vietnam in communist parlance, and Vietnam’s thirty-year-long civil war along with it. Hanoi scored a total, albeit in the final analysis extremely costly, victory. The Politburo finally had its moment of triumph – and vindication for the millions of lives lost or shattered because of the war it had so desperately wanted and had been instrumental in precipitating more than a decade before. Its armies had performed valiantly but endured astonishingly heavy casualties because of their own leaders’ hubris and miscalculations on the one hand, and the superior firepower of their enemies on the other. Despite those casualties, which included approximately 1 million PAVN and NLF/PLAF personnel killed according to the official communist record, the Politburo prevailed because it did not limit its efforts to the military front, and simultaneously struggled politically to win hearts and minds at home and diplomatically to rally public opinion against its enemies and behind its own cause overseas. Ultimately, the Politburo waged a better, more sophisticated, war, and won.

7 The Vietnam War and the Regional Context

Wen-Qing Ngoei ^*

In 1965, the US Department of Defense produced a film entitled Why Viet-Nam? to explain to American soldiers their nation’s escalating military involvement in that country. The film asserted that Hanoi’s “war of liberation” threatened not just the South (which sought only “peace” and economic reconstruction), but also the rest of Southeast Asia. Per the film’s narrator, any failure on America’s part to resist North Vietnam’s aggression would parallel Neville Chamberlain’s disastrous appeasement of Adolf Hitler in 1938, emboldening the Vietnamese communists and their Chinese and Soviet patrons to gun for the entire region. At one point in the film, US President Lyndon Johnson’s voice boomed over images of National Front for the Liberation of Southern Vietnam (NLF, or Viet Cong) forces, declaring that these Southern insurgents were “guided by North Vietnam [and] spurred by communist China” to “conquer” the South and help Beijing “extend the Asiatic dominion of communism.”¹

Johnson had long believed, as his predecessors had, that the United States must intervene in Southeast Asia or else face the prospect of bearing witness to the toppling of countries there to communism one after the other, like a row of dominoes. In early 1965, he ordered aerial bombardments of North Vietnam and began deploying US forces to conflict zones in the South. By the end of that year, there were around 180,000 American troops in Vietnam, a number that swelled to some 450,000 two years later.² The Vietnamese communists – with Beijing’s and Moscow’s support – never buckled. In 1969, the administration of President Richard Nixon began withdrawing US forces from Vietnam, having neither scored a clear military victory nor established a sustainable government in Saigon. The US retreat from Vietnam was completed in early 1973, followed closely by a banner year for the communists of Indochina. In 1975 alone, the Khmer Rouge took Cambodia, North Vietnam captured the South, and the Pathet Lao swept to ascendancy in Laos.

The remaining dominoes of Southeast Asia did not follow Vietnam into communism. Major studies concerned with the US debacle in Vietnam thus insist that the domino theory was invalid; that the stakes of American intervention in Vietnam had been exaggerated; and that Southeast Asian nationalism had driven the European and American empires from the region.³ But the broader patterns of Southeast Asian history during the Cold War cannot be extrapolated from just the US experience in Vietnam. The region’s nationalists did not roundly reject the Western powers. In fact, when Lyndon Johnson Americanized the Vietnam conflict, Southeast Asia’s anticommunist nationalists had already entered the US orbit to ward off both communist revolutions at home as well as Chinese and Soviet influence in the region. Furthermore, five of these anticommunist states – Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand – held most of Southeast Asia’s peoples, resources, and wealth.⁴ In 1967, these five states formed the regional organization known as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which a senior Singapore diplomat, years after the fall of Saigon, reminded his US counterparts had always been “on your side.”⁵

This chapter traces Southeast Asia’s overall pro-US trajectory from before and through the American war in Vietnam, a process in which the region’s anticommunist nationalists collaborated with the United States and Britain to gain, and remain in, power. Between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, indigenous anticommunist elites in Thailand and the Philippines rose to political dominance with US assistance; in Malaya and Singapore they did so with British support. The United States and Britain, with their Malayan and Singaporean allies, also influenced developments within Indonesia that precipitated the Indonesian Army’s rightwing coup of 1965, a transformative event that removed the left-leaning President Sukarno from power and led to the eradication of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), the third-largest communist party in the world. As US involvement in Vietnam deepened, these five anticommunist Southeast Asian states pursued increasingly intimate political, military, and economic links with the United States and each other. They offered the United States political support for the Vietnam War, namely troops and military bases in their countries, or pleaded their vulnerability as teetering dominoes to acquire more US assistance. In so doing, they correctly anticipated that their US ally would draw them deeper into the American sphere of influence and, where necessary, render them aid against homegrown rivals inspired by Hanoi and Beijing. Indeed, though US leaders despaired over their own efforts in Vietnam, they nevertheless persisted in a broader regional strategy, underwriting their ASEAN allies’ rightward tendencies, and forging a geostrategic arc of anticommunist states that effectively encircled Vietnam and China, and also frustrated Soviet ambitions in Southeast Asia. This anticommunist arc would outlast the US military withdrawal from Vietnam and Indochina’s embrace of communism.

The Failures of Southeast Asian Communists before 1965

In the waning days of the Johnson administration, US intelligence officials concluded that the “Communist parties in Southeast Asia [had] fared poorly,” that communist insurgency was by 1968 “less a threat in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines than 20 years ago.”⁶ For these analysts, the gloomy pall that had settled over the American war in Vietnam did not obscure how regional developments over the longer term had served US Cold War objectives. By the mid-1950s, for example, the United States’ oldest regional ally, the Philippines, had already crushed the Hukbalahap Rebellion (abbreviated as Huk), a peasant uprising with deep links to the Communist Party of the Philippines (PKP) and legitimate grouses against the Philippine elite’s long-standing monopoly of political power and resources.⁷

The Huks had waged guerrilla warfare against Japan’s occupying forces during World War II, much like the Việt Minh in Indochina and the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) in Malaya and Singapore. Sensing that the Filipino elites who still dominated their country after independence planned to keep hoarding wealth and power, the Huks launched their military campaign in 1947. Three years later, when Huk offensives had the US-backed Philippine government on the ropes, Washington and Manila began taking actions that soon overcame the rebels. From August 1950, the charismatic Philippine defense minister (and, later, president from 1953 to 1957), Ramon Magsaysay, reorganized the national armed forces to execute a deadly counterinsurgency program against the Huk guerrillas. Capitalizing on the influx of American military equipment, as well as US assistance in psychological warfare, Magsaysay’s forces went after the rebels so effectively that Huk leader Luis Taruc felt compelled to surrender in 1954, bringing the uprising to an end.⁸ Though Magsaysay did not proceed to snuff out the PKP, the organization without its Huk guerrillas would never again pose an existential threat to the Philippine government, nor prevent its charter membership in the anticommunist Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), nor evict the Americans from Clark Air Base and Subic Naval Base, the largest US military installations outside the United States.

By the mid-1950s, too, Britain and its Malayan allies had hobbled the MCP guerrillas. The conflict had not started out that way, however. Malayan communists enjoyed some potential advantages over British colonial authorities when they undertook their armed revolt in June 1948. The MCP was almost 95 percent ethnic Chinese (local and foreign born) and popular with many Malayan Chinese, who comprised nearly 40 percent of the population. The MCP, like the Huks, had formed the backbone of the anti-Japanese resistance on the peninsula. Owing to World War II, about half a million of Malaya’s ethnic Chinese had been displaced and were residing in makeshift dwellings (the British called them “squatters”) all around the country’s jungles. The MCP made good use of the Chinese “squatters,” drawing some into their ranks and obtaining supplies and food from others, sometimes by intimidation. Malaya’s jungles covered four-fifths of the peninsula, providing MCP fighters an almost impenetrable cover for their many hideouts.⁹

In addition to these challenges, British leaders’ great fear was that the MCP and Malaya’s Chinese population would serve as a fifth column for Beijing and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). For decades, all colonial powers in Southeast Asia had worried to varying degrees about China’s influence over its diasporic networks. After the CCP took mainland China in 1949, Anglo-American Cold Warriors in particular eyed the region’s Chinese populations with mounting suspicion.¹⁰ To be sure, Beijing’s determination to marshal its diaspora against the Western powers did not exist only in British and American imaginations. The CCP in the immediate wake of its victory over Chiang Kai-shek and the Guomindang (GMD) formally resolved to expand communist influence in Southeast Asia via its diaspora. US intelligence learned in 1950 that CCP propaganda organs and cultural outreach, along with vigorous campaigns to secure political power through courting ethnic Chinese, were active throughout the region, even in Burma, despite its small ethnic Chinese population.¹¹

In fact, many Southeast Asian Chinese did laud the CCP’s win over the corrupt US-backed GMD, taking it as a triumph of Chinese nationalism after a humiliating century of Western and Japanese imperial domination. However, by the mid-twentieth century, many of the region’s Chinese had also planted deep social and economic roots in their adopted countries. Also, many Chinese families had resided in Southeast Asia for centuries and intermarried with the indigenous communities (contributing to a process that scholars have termed “Southeast-Asianization”).¹² In Malaya, the British-educated Asians, along with middle-class and wealthy ethnic Chinese who believed that the MCP would treat them as class enemies, firmly supported Britain’s anti-MCP campaign and the peaceful transfer of power from Britain to anticommunist nationalists who readily aligned independent Malaya with the West.¹³

At any rate, the CCP appears to have been less committed to the MCP in Malaya (and Singapore) and keener instead on building relations with and supporting the Vietnamese Communist Party and the PKI.¹⁴ Beijing must have quickly recognized that aiding the MCP would win them no great advantage. After all, Britain’s counterinsurgency tactics took only a few years to turn the tide against the MCP guerrillas. To address the fact that the MCP sustained itself by exploiting the squatters, British colonial authorities forcibly resettled all the squatters into “New Villages” – purportedly, the inspiration of South Vietnam’s “strategic hamlets” – to wall them off from the MCP. Consequently, MCP guerrillas had to infiltrate the heavily guarded New Villages to acquire food, monies, and medicines, a perilous task that left them vulnerable to attacks from British and local forces, as well as exposing the paths to MCP hideouts. British officials, by providing some level of security and economic welfare for the squatters, also ensured the MCP (which could not offer the same) looked far less appealing in the struggle for postwar Malaya. At the same time, British officers routinely brutalized New Villagers they suspected were in cahoots with the MCP to learn the whereabouts of the guerrillas’ refuges. By 1955, British and local forces had eliminated thousands of MCP personnel, cadres, fighters, and sympathizers.¹⁵ US officials judged a few years later that British methods, brutal and unorthodox as they were, had reduced the MCP to “nuisance status, with less than 800 ‘hard core’” guerrillas – one-tenth of their original numbers – hiding at the Malay–Thai border.¹⁶

Malaya rose to independence in 1957, led by a class of reliably anticommunist and pro-Western leaders, unencumbered by MCP rivals. The Malayan prime minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman, a Cambridge-educated member of the Malay royalty, would maintain close economic and military links with Britain. But the Tunku also recognized that British power was fading and looked to the United States as a new patron.¹⁷ Under his leadership, Malaya began cultivating close ties with the United States, allowed Britain to use Malayan military bases for its commitments to SEATO, supported the failed US–British covert operations to bring down Sukarno in 1957 and 1958, and trained South Vietnamese forces in counterinsurgency tactics. The Tunku would also work with Filipino and Thai leaders to establish the Association of Southeast Asia (ASA) in 1961, a regional organization that made no secret of its anticommunist leanings and that, in time, became the foundation for ASEAN.¹⁸

Like the Philippines and Malaya, Thailand’s authoritarian military government, led by Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram (known to Western leaders as Phibun), steered a pro-US course during the 1950s. As a lieutenant colonel in the Royal Siamese Army in the 1930s, Phibun had collaborated with French-educated lawyer Pridi Phanomyong in a bloodless coup against the Siamese monarchy, coercing the king into becoming a constitutional ruler. Phibun became prime minister in 1938, renamed the country Thailand in 1939, and three years later (over Pridi’s objections) allied with the then-ascendant Japanese empire. Phibun was forced to resign when the Allies prevailed over Japan. Pridi, on the other hand, cooperated with the Allies throughout the war, assisting the underground anti-Japanese “Free Thai” movement that had been trained and supported by the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS, predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA]). He also attempted to guide postwar Thailand toward civilian government and democratic elections, and, for a brief period in 1946, assumed the position of prime minister to stabilize the country. Pridi voluntarily stepped down after ushering the country through a general election.¹⁹

In 1947, a military coup put Phibun back in power. And though US leaders bemoaned the demise of Thailand’s democratic government and deplored Phibun’s prior compact with Tokyo, the Americans quickly resolved, owing to Cold War exigencies, to court Phibun’s military-dominated regime. Communist factions were in armed revolt in Burma, Malaya, and Vietnam in mid-1948. And Thailand was located strategically at the center of the mainland Southeast and therefore was vital to US aims of containing communism there. Washington desired a stable, conservative Thai administration, and Phibun’s government fit the bill.²⁰

The relationship ran both ways. By early 1950, Phibun also felt the need to cleave to the United States. Beijing had singled him out for criticism in Chinese newspapers, attacking him for ill-treating ethnic Chinese in Thailand. (As prime minister, Phibun had in fact forced Thai Chinese out of major labor and industrial sectors in the 1930s.) As Daniel Fineman notes, the Shanghai paper Dagong Pao announced that the “Fatherland is now behind” the “overseas Chinese,” implying that China planned to support the revolt of its diasporic communities in Thailand. It was unclear if Beijing would make good on this threat. But Phibun believed it had become imperative to secure military and economic aid from the United States and consolidate his regime by suppressing local Chinese and leftist rivals, as well as defend against China’s apparent bent toward expansion into Southeast Asia. He believed he could loosen the spigots of US aid by officially recognizing Bảo Đại, the former Annamese emperor that France had cynically installed as a figurehead to lead Vietnam, and whom the Americans had endorsed as an alternative to Hồ Chí Minh and the communists. Of course, Phibun knew that the uncharismatic Bảo Đại was unpopular in Vietnam, but shunted aside his reservations to make a bold overture to the Americans, a decision that proved a turning point in Thai history. Thereafter, US aid flowed copiously to Phibun’s government, causing his prestige in military circles to soar, while enabling him to crush and otherwise silence his political rivals.²¹

Phibun was so eager to prove his support for US containment policy that, with minimal prodding from Washington, he rammed a resolution through parliament in July 1950 that would send Thai expeditionary forces to aid the United Nations (UN) coalition in the Korean conflict. Phibun’s move, buoyed by military officials who anticipated more American arms as a reward for upholding US aims (Phibun had stoked their expectations), easily ran roughshod over civilian opposition within parliament. The civilian wing of the Thai parliament, which had barely survived Phibun’s return to power in 1947 and had been slowly whittled away, had advocated good relations with powers on both sides of the Cold War divide, insisting this would give Thailand a wider range of diplomatic options. In response, Phibun and the military elites treated as dissidents all the civilian leaders, activists, and journalists who questioned the pro-US bent of Thai policy. He launched a crackdown on them in 1953 that effectively made Thailand a police state. US leaders, for their part, tolerated such repression as long as it ensured Thailand remained a loyal Cold War ally. Indeed, Thailand joined SEATO in 1954, and Bangkok served as the headquarters of the organization.

It would not be plain sailing for Phibun, though. Internal rivalries within the Thai military elite troubled his authoritarian regime, sparking abortive military coups against him. His luck ran out in 1957, when he was finally deposed. But this did not disrupt the US–Thai relationship. Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat assumed power and pursued even closer ties with the United States. In fact, Sarit’s armed forces became almost completely reliant on American military equipment. Sarit, like Phibun, cottoned on to American hints (emanating from the Eisenhower administration) that US aid would accompany the complete elimination of Thailand’s leftists and neutralists. Desperate for more of that aid, Sarit proceeded to repress all opponents of his authoritarian rule. By the time of his death in 1963, Thailand had become locked within a self-perpetuating pattern of military governments in league with America. Sarit’s successor, Field Marshal Thanom Kittikachorn, was the same, and under his leadership Thailand assisted US covert operations in Burma and Laos in the 1950s and 1960s, while Thai air and naval bases provided US airmen platforms to launch punishing raids against North Vietnam. By the late 1960s, US intelligence officials judged that Thailand’s military regime had absorbed too many billions in aid from the United States and set itself so decisively against China that Thai leaders had little latitude for trying a different superpower patron.²²

Even so, when President John F. Kennedy entered the White House in January 1961, it might have been difficult for US officials to discern how developments in Southeast Asia had started to tilt in America’s favor. The states of Indochina certainly did not give this impression. President Dwight Eisenhower, for one, offered ominous parting words to Kennedy about the Laotian crisis. Laos was wracked by a civil war between the Pathet Lao, a neutralist front, and the US-backed Royal Lao government (RLG). Eisenhower warned Kennedy that losing Laos to the communists would topple all the Southeast Asian dominoes.²³ US insecurities about Laos would never go away. For though Kennedy hammered out an international agreement to keep Laos neutral, the CIA conducted a destructive and doomed secret war by training and equipping Hmong tribes to fight the Laotian communists.²⁴ The Kennedy administration was also frustrated by Cambodian leader Prince Norodom Sihanouk, whose determination to keep his country nonaligned did not preclude him gravitating toward China and allowing the North Vietnamese Army to use his country for sanctuaries, as well as sustaining the Hồ Chí Minh Trail. At the same time, Ngô Đình Diệm’s anticommunist government in South Vietnam seemed in grave danger, a consequence of Diệm’s repressive rule, his intensifying unpopularity, and gathering pressure from North Vietnam and the NLF. The fatal military coup against Diệm in November 1963, subtly abetted by the Kennedy administration, sent South Vietnam spiraling into further instability.²⁵

But while Indochina festered, the governments of Malaya, the Philippines, and Thailand grew closer to Washington. In September 1963, a new independent Southeast Asian state, Singapore, joined them. Two years before, the Tunku, British policymakers, and Singapore’s anticommunist Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew had agreed to merge Malaya and Singapore – to be joined by Sabah and Sarawak in British Borneo – into an enlarged federation called Malaysia. This arrangement would grant Singapore full independence from Britain, but within the Malaysian Federation. Complications riddled the Malaysia Plan, not least the fact that the federation would have two prime ministers, the Tunku for the federation and Lee for Singapore. But Britain, along with Lee and the Tunku, prized the expediency of the Malaysia Plan. By relinquishing Singapore, Sabah, and Sarawak, the British could tout to observers worldwide that Britain was truly liquidating its empire in Asia. In reality, the British government had agreed with Lee and his colleagues that Britain would retain control of its massive military installations in Singapore, thereby perpetuating the British imperial presence in Southeast Asia. For the Tunku and Lee, creating Malaysia offered a solution to the thriving socialist movement in Singapore. The Tunku was convinced that Lee’s leftist rivals could potentially seize power from Lee and turn Singapore into a “Cuba in his Malayan backyard”; he longed to employ Malaya’s internal security apparatus (tried and tested on the MCP) toward squashing all the politicians and unionists that one former official of the US State Department had labeled the “Singapore Reds.”²⁶

The Tunku ultimately grew impatient and demanded that Lee deal with his opponents even before Singapore joined Malaysia. And Lee, yearning to secure independence for Singapore and his place in the country’s history, summarily incarcerated his enemies (without trial and for years) in February 1963 with the repressive tools he had inherited from the British colonial administration, the same instruments that the Tunku had been itching to use. Lee and his People’s Action Party (PAP) were dominant in Singapore politics from that moment onward.²⁷ Like the Tunku, Lee promptly showed himself an ardent supporter of the US presence in Southeast Asia and the American war in Vietnam, contributing to the region’s broader rightward turn. If somewhat dimly, the Americans did perceive that this geostrategic shift was underway. As one Kennedy official predicted in late 1962, the formation of Malaysia “would complete a wide anticommunist arc enclosing the entire South China Sea.”²⁸ A few months later, the New York Times echoed that position, describing Malaysia as a “strong bulwark against communism” that produced a “1,600-mile [2,500-km] arc … from the border of Thailand to the Philippine archipelago.”²⁹ To all intents and purposes, the pro-Western nations of Southeast Asia encircled the “compromised” states of Indochina.³⁰

Indonesia’s New Order and ASEAN

Just south of the so-called “anticommunist arc,” however, was the left-leaning Sukarno regime of Indonesia. In the early 1960s, Sukarno had swung definitively to China’s side in the Cold War, a turn in Indonesian foreign relations that traced its roots to the prior decade. Senior policymakers of the Eisenhower administration were irked by Sukarno’s neutralism throughout the 1950s, viewing the Indonesian leader as alternately playing for economic and military aid from the United States, the Soviet Union, and China, or being highly susceptible to communist blandishments. All three Cold War powers avidly wooed Sukarno anyway, not least because Indonesia was the fifth-most populous nation in the world and home to a vast trove of natural resources. Here, Beijing began to enjoy a slight advantage in cultivating Indonesia, treating Sukarno to such a warm reception on his visit to China in 1955 that he came away enamored of the Chinese leadership. (His trips to the United States and the Soviet Union the next year, despite American and Soviet efforts, did not have a comparable effect on his political predilections.) While Sukarno had abjured communism as an ideology, he nevertheless held communists in high esteem for their revolutionary ardor and nationalist vigor.³¹

More to the point, Washington and its anticommunist allies – Britain and Malaya – were the ones that contributed significantly to Sukarno’s decisive tilt toward Beijing. US and British leaders, already concerned about Sukarno’s burgeoning admiration for China, were further alarmed when, in the mid-1950s, he courted the well-organized PKI as a counterweight to local conservative army elites who were mostly anticommunist in their worldviews and deeply suspicious of the PKI’s links to China. The United States, not yet attuned to the golden opportunity of cultivating the rightwing elites of the Indonesian military, instead collaborated with Britain and Malaya, and also used British military bases in Singapore, in futile operations to topple Sukarno. (In time, Washington would switch tack toward cultivating the Indonesian Army and its anticommunist elites, training, equipping, and funding army officers, thereby building the army’s capacity to take control of the country.) For the moment, however, US, British, and Malayan subversive actions against Sukarno embittered the Indonesian leader, steeling his resolve to embrace the PKI; crucially, these subversive actions also paved the way for deeper Sino-Indonesian ties.³² By mid-1961, as Britain, Malaya, and Singapore began negotiating the formation of Malaysia, Sukarno’s political sympathies lay firmly with Beijing’s bellicose anti-imperialist stance.

Little wonder, then, that Sukarno vehemently opposed the creation of Malaysia, calling it a British neocolonial scheme that endangered Indonesian security. The Tunku had, after all, backed the Anglo-American plot against Sukarno. And by Sukarno’s reckoning, Britain’s military installations in Singapore remained an obvious threat to Indonesia. Furthermore, Sabah and Sarawak, on the border of Indonesian Borneo, when integrated into Malaysia, could certainly be utilized to continue US and British efforts against Sukarno. In 1963, Sukarno’s truculent response to Malaysia crystallized as Konfrontasi (Confrontation), a politico-military campaign to “crunch up Malaysia and spit out the pieces.” Radio Peking added its voice to this, quoting its junior partner, PKI Chairman D. N. Aidit, that Malaysia was obviously a “quarantine station” against all socialist nations of the region.³³

US officials, already vexed by their failing policy in Vietnam, were leery of Konfrontasi dragging the United States into another conflict via treaty obligations to Britain through SEATO, or to Australia and New Zealand under the ANZUS (Australia, New Zealand, United States) Security Pact. The Kennedy administration hoped its aid packages might entice Sukarno away from China and have him climb down from his aggressive stance against Malaysia.³⁴

In contrast, Britain and its regional allies had no qualms about taking the fight to Indonesia. What Sukarno foresaw came true. British and Malaysian officials secretly aided Indonesian secessionist groups to destabilize Sukarno’s regime; British troops simultaneously conducted clandestine cross-border raids well into Indonesian Borneo to keep the Indonesian military on the defensive. Additionally, some 60,000 British military personnel were mobilized for the conflict, and more than a quarter of the Royal Navy was involved in operations against Indonesia.³⁵ Striking from a different angle altogether, diplomats from Singapore, Sabah, and Sarawak visited seventeen African heads of state from January through February 1964 to convince them that creating Malaysia served authentic local aspirations, not British neocolonialism, and that Sukarno was an unreasonable aggressor who should be censured and opposed. In this endeavor, the Malaysian diplomats did remarkably well. Almost all the African leaders they met agreed that Sukarno’s allegations of British neocolonialism were unfounded. Furthermore, President Camille Alliale of the Ivory Coast expressed “grave disapproval of the Indonesians” and promised, like Kenyan Prime Minister Jomo Kenyatta, to support Malaysia’s candidacy in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC).³⁶ With endorsement from the Ivory Coast and Kenya, Malaysia easily clinched nonpermanent membership within the UNSC in January 1965, gaining acceptance as a legitimate political entity and vindicating its cause against Indonesia. Outplayed and enraged, Sukarno withdrew Indonesia from the UN. Of course, he did try to claim victory in August 1965 when Singapore was ejected from Malaysia after months of fractious Sino-Malay tensions and disagreements between Lee, the Tunku, and their respective political parties.³⁷ But Singapore did not dissolve into chaos; instead, it rose quickly to become the richest state in the subregion, due in no small measure to its military procurement contracts with the United States, which, after 1965, readily fed the American war in Vietnam.³⁸ Absent Singapore, the Malaysian Federation remained otherwise stable and intact. Sukarno’s campaign to “crush Malaysia” had achieved little of what he had hoped.

As Konfrontasi ground on, Indonesia’s rightwing army elites grew worried about their nation’s low-grade conflict with Britain and Malaysia escalating into full-scale war. They had also become frustrated with how their forces were bearing the brunt of Sukarno’s foreign policy excesses and lost all patience with Sukarno’s close ties to the PKI and China, an attitude reinforced by the Indonesian Army’s burgeoning relationship with the United States. As such, the army’s rightwing elites began weighing their options for seizing power. But in an unexpected turn, Aidit and select PKI members launched a preemptive move on October 1, 1965, with the help of sympathetic left-leaning military officers, hoping to protect Sukarno from the army’s rightwingers.³⁹ Supporters of the so-called Thirtieth of September Movement (which unfolded a day later than its name suggests) assassinated six Indonesian army generals that Aidit and his collaborators presumed to be the core of the rightwing group opposed to Sukarno. Though Aidit caught his patrons in Beijing by surprise, the Indonesian Army found it easy to capitalize on this opportunity. Major General Suharto accused Aidit and the PKI of mounting a treasonous coup against Sukarno, mobilized a propaganda campaign that with US support insisted that Chinese communists were in on the plot, and with the full force of the army’s machinery and personnel annihilated the PKI and many noncommunists within a few months. The death toll was catastrophic, with estimates at half a million or more dead. Suharto’s troops located and killed Aidit in December.⁴⁰ Bereft of the support of the PKI, Sukarno could not stop Suharto from assuming dictatorial powers. The latter relegated him to the status of figurehead and, two years later, formally took the presidency from him.

Indonesia’s momentous shift to the right in late 1965 reinforced the West-leaning tendencies of Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore. This represented, after all, the biggest blow to international communism in the entire Cold War period. And it was not long before Suharto’s New Order made its regional influence felt. In August 1967, with a substantial push from Indonesian Foreign Minister Adam Malik, the leaders of the five anticommunist nations created ASEAN. The regional organization both succeeded the ASA and retained its pro-West stance.⁴¹ Assistant Secretary of State William Bundy greeted the formation of ASEAN with optimism, though he and other officials refrained from lauding ASEAN too publicly, worried that such an endorsement could undermine ASEAN’s claims that it sprang from genuine Southeast Asian aspirations and not, like SEATO, from the American mind.⁴²

Indonesia continued to please the Americans when it broke its diplomatic relations with Beijing in October 1967, withdrew Indonesian personnel from China, and sent Chinese ambassadorial staff home.⁴³ That same month in Foreign Affairs, presidential aspirant Richard Nixon praised the Indonesian Army’s “countercoup” for “rescu[ing] their country from China’s orbit.” Nixon believed that Washington had now scored Southeast Asia’s “greatest prize”: Indonesia’s “100 million people and 3,000-mile [4,800-km] arc of islands containing the region’s richest hoard of natural resources.”⁴⁴ The Johnson administration, for its part, certainly believed it urgent to integrate Indonesia into the US-dominated world system. US economic aid had begun flowing freely into the country; US oil companies were inking deals with Indonesian officials; Washington and Jakarta were steadily reinforcing their military ties.⁴⁵

Suharto and his close advisors understood that throwing Indonesia’s weight behind US Cold War causes would bring rewards from the United States, a familiar dynamic also central to Washington’s relationships with Thailand and the Philippines.⁴⁶ By the end of 1967, US officials noted Indonesia’s “hardening of attitude toward Hanoi,” which was coupled with Malik’s assurance to US officials that Indonesia supported the American war in Vietnam and even escalation of the conflict to involve Cambodia. In November 1969 and January 1970, Indonesian military leaders secretly invited their likeminded anticommunist counterparts from the Cambodian military to study how Suharto and his group had ousted Sukarno. In March, Cambodian General Lon Nol seized power from Prince Sihanouk and immediately received support from an Indonesian military mission. The next month, the United States invaded Cambodia on the pretext of preventing the country from becoming North Vietnam’s launchpad for attacks on South Vietnam.⁴⁷ Indonesian leaders then went full tilt in support of Lon Nol when Nixon tripled the Military Assistance Program to Indonesia a few weeks later and encouraged Suharto to “play a big role in Southeast Asia.” By July, Indonesia had sent Cambodia 25,000 AK-47 rifles, drawn up training programs for Cambodian troops, and readied an Indonesian brigade to be “projected into trouble-spots” on the Asian mainland, with US air and amphibious support.⁴⁸ Indonesia did not prevent Cambodia from falling to the Khmer Rouge years later, but, more importantly, the US–Indonesia alliance grew ever stronger.

In January 1969, the State Department reported that “on the whole” the US “record in Asia has been good.” In effect, the State Department had begun to entertain notions that US frustrations in Vietnam were offset by developments elsewhere in the region. Its report emphasized that a “new spirit of regional cooperation in Southeast Asia” was building sturdy bonds between the United States and its Asian allies. In particular, the State Department noted how ASEAN countries had pursued “multilateral undertakings” with such groupings as the Japanese-led Asian Parliamentarians Union, which linked ASEAN nations to other West-leaning countries such as Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea; and the avowedly anticommunist ASPAC (Asian and Pacific Council), which was formed in 1966 with Australia, Taiwan, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Korea, South Vietnam, and Thailand. These “undertakings” entwined ASEAN with other pro-West security frameworks such as ANZUS.⁴⁹

Even the grasping Philippine president, Ferdinand Marcos, bolstered US power in the region whenever he sought personal profit from the Vietnam War. Marcos had solicited tens of millions of dollars in US economic and military aid by promising Johnson that he would raise Philippine battalions for Vietnam. Sending only a small force to Vietnam, Marcos instead channeled the bulk of what monies he received from the United States toward reinforcing his increasingly authoritarian and unpopular rule. These schemes made Marcos’ political prospects ever more reliant on US patronage and left his nation ensconced within America’s sphere of influence well after the US withdrawal from Vietnam.⁵⁰

Map 7.1 By the late 1960s, anticommunist states in Southeast and East Asia had completely encircled Vietnam and China.

Source: Map by author.

ASEAN countries were not the only ones in the region that leaned toward the United States. Nonaligned Burma (now Myanmar) under its isolationist junta also entered a “delicate” relationship with the United States, sustained by US economic and military aid. Throughout the Vietnam War, though Burmese leader General Ne Win turned increasingly dictatorial, the United States accommodated itself to his repressive excesses to preserve its ties with Burma. In contrast, Sino-Burmese relations blew cold rather than hot. Ne Win, resistant to Chinese influence, reportedly described Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai as a “bastard” in 1965 for presuming that Burma would readily subordinate itself to China. Burma certainly could not be counted as a firm friend of the United States, but it was by no means a member of the Chinese or larger communist camp.⁵¹

Buying Time for US Hegemony in Southeast Asia

By the late 1960s, therefore, a nascent US hegemony loomed beyond Indochina across much of Southeast Asia. Why, then, did the United States remain for several more years committed to the flailing Saigon government? There are some well-trodden explanations. President Johnson’s defense secretary, Robert McNamara, for one, admitted decades later that he along with the best and the brightest – ironically named, in hindsight – had simply not grasped how the rise of Suharto diminished the US stake in Vietnam.⁵² In fact, the Nixon administration did attempt to extricate the United States from the war. But its peace talks with North Vietnam broke down repeatedly over such issues as the timetable for the withdrawal of troops, and what form the South Vietnamese government would take after a ceasefire. Also, senior US policymakers believed (in vain) that sustained military force, while unable to rout the communists, might somehow pressure Hanoi into letting Saigon remain noncommunist. US leaders were loath to withdraw from Vietnam without even this paltry victory. Even when Nixon’s triangular diplomacy saw China and the Soviet Union pledge to encourage Hanoi to end its war by means of a diplomatic solution, Hanoi fought on ferociously to extend the war and whittle away any advantages the Americans could bring to the negotiating table.⁵³

No doubt, the above reasons and others similarly focused upon the interactions of the United States, China, the Soviet Union, and the two Vietnams help us to understand the protraction of America’s military fiasco in Indochina. But situating the firestorm of the Vietnam War in its peculiar regional context actually illuminates another critical reason that the United States continued to run the gauntlet in a state supposedly devoid of strategic significance to US aims. Indeed, the United States continued to fight the Vietnam War because US leaders and their Southeast Asian allies sought time to bind their fates even more tightly together, to reinforce the existing geostrategic arc that both ran through the ASEAN states and had already contained the influence of Vietnam, China, and even the Soviet Union.

Nixon’s 1967 Foreign Affairs article had recommended a course of action roughly along these lines. He had asserted that US forces in Vietnam had “diverted Peking” and “bought vitally needed time” for Asia’s noncommunist states to stabilize their economies and develop their militaries.⁵⁴ This notion at first blush may not sound novel. Johnson’s National Security Advisor Walt Rostow and ASEAN allies such as Lee Kuan Yew had argued before that the Vietnam War was “buying time” for precisely these purposes.⁵⁵ The crucial distinction, however, was that Nixon believed that that precious time had already been “bought,” that anticommunist Southeast Asia was now primed for much more. To be sure, even Lyndon Johnson, while still in the White House and burdened by the Vietnam War, had at much the same time begun to speak of the “domino theory in reverse” across Southeast Asia, inspired by Indonesia’s explicit anti-China stance in October 1967.⁵⁶ In like vein, Nixon’s article urged US policymakers to “look beyond Viet Nam,” not for insecure and wobbling dominoes needing US protection but to appreciate instead the “extraordinary set of opportunities” now open to America. Most Asian countries saw China as a “common danger,” thought of the United States “not as an oppressor but a protector,” and supported US policy in Vietnam, he insisted.⁵⁷ He was making an argument for consolidating a strategic advantage that the United States already enjoyed.

From outside the White House, Nixon had the luxury of making bold and optimistic statements about “opportunities” and proposing the United States turn its gaze away from the Vietnam War. But he had certainly discerned how Indonesia’s titanic shift to the right decisively tipped the regional balance of power toward the United States. After a whirlwind visit to the region in April 1967, Nixon intuited that the Vietnam War had further intertwined the US anticommunist project in Southeast Asia with pro-US ASEAN leaders’ desire to check Chinese influence and maintain power at home. As US intelligence officials emphasized some months after Nixon’s article, ASEAN leaders harbored a “traditional fear of China [and] distrust of communism as an antinationalist and pro-Chinese movement.”⁵⁸ For these reasons, most of Southeast Asia’s conservative elites had by the early 1960s (as demonstrated above) tied their destinies to the US containment project; South Vietnam’s instability merely increased the urgency of augmenting US predominance in the region as a prophylactic against Chinese penetration. Indeed, the Tunku worried about a Chinese invasion led by a Vietnamese vanguard, and that ragtag bands of the MCP might become reanimated by Hanoi and NLF victories. Lee wanted to ensure that neither North Vietnam nor its Chinese patrons could galvanize any leftist sympathies lying dormant within Singapore’s majority Chinese population. Suharto, having eradicated the pro-Chinese PKI, was determined to not allow Beijing any sway over Indonesia. Thai and Filipino leaders were already in deep with the United States.

But prolonging an already unpopular war to consolidate the US presence in Southeast Asia, a war that had attracted few public endorsements and troop contributions from many of America’s other allies, would take some doing.⁵⁹ The stakes could not have been higher for the ASEAN leaders, and in different ways they threw themselves into the task even before Nixon became president. Malaysia and Singapore proved formidable apologists for the American war in Vietnam, especially after they transitioned into the US orbit to compensate for Britain’s surprise decision – following its expensive campaign against Konfrontasi – to withdraw completely from Southeast Asia. In July 1965, the Tunku addressed all the US foreign policy thinkers that might oppose Johnson’s decision to intervene in Vietnam, publishing an article in Foreign Affairs that underscored how Malaysia “look[ed] northward” with “anxiety,” for Beijing and Hanoi were menacing the Saigon government by “infiltration, subversion and open aggression.” He stated that “we in Malaysia fully support Washington’s actions” in Vietnam.⁶⁰ In 1967 the Tunku took this message international, lashing out at critics of the war at the Conference for Commonwealth Heads of Government in London. He declared that “had the Americans not gone to the assistance of South Vietnam … it was only a matter of time before they [the communists] marched through and militarily occup[ied] all of Asia.”⁶¹

With aplomb, Lee conducted his public diplomacy along similar lines. In a speech in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 1965, Lee described how, if Vietnam were to fall to communist forces, Cambodia and Thailand would follow, with Malaysia next on the chopping block.⁶² At the Institute for Strategic Studies in London in June 1967, Lee told his audience firmly that he was a “believer in the domino theory,” that “if American power were withdrawn [from Vietnam], there could only be a Communist Chinese solution to Asia’s problems.”⁶³ In October that year, he pledged Lyndon Johnson his “unequivocal” support for the Vietnam War and promised to work on American and international opinion-makers whenever and wherever he could.⁶⁴

ASEAN leaders’ defenses of the Vietnam War, as they circulated in American and international discourse, gave Johnson the means to defy detractors while continuing to prosecute the war. In early December 1967, at a foreign policy conference for concerned American business executives, Johnson could thunder with confidence at critics of the domino theory that “Communist domination is not a matter of theory for Asians … Communist domination for Asians is a matter of life and death.”⁶⁵ After all, Lee had only weeks before appeared on the NBC (National Broadcasting Company) television program Meet the Press, wherein he had quipped darkly that if Vietnam collapsed, Thailand and Malaysia would succumb, which meant the communists would soon have him “by the throat.”⁶⁶

ASEAN leaders would find Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger just as eager to fill their quiver with whatever words from their Asian allies that could legitimize the Vietnam War. For example, the administration warmly welcomed Lee’s services as a “neutral” Asian leader who could publicly valorize US goals in Vietnam.⁶⁷ To the same end, Kissinger recorded on July 1, 1970 that Suharto’s officials expected the fall of South Vietnam would see all the ASEAN leaders but Indonesia racing to accommodate the Chinese.⁶⁸ Because Southeast Asian leaders had declared that they believed in the domino theory, Nixon had ammunition to deflect his opponents. In a television interview broadcast live on the same day that Indonesian leaders spoke with Kissinger, Nixon invoked the fact that ASEAN supported the Vietnam War, attacking his critics for not even having “talked to the dominoes … to the Thais, to the Malaysians, to the Singaporans [sic], to the Indonesians, to the Filipinos.” He stated that he, on the other hand, had been “talking to every one of the Asian leaders,” finding that all of them believed that the fall of South Vietnam meant that they “might be next.”⁶⁹

Of course, simply invoking the words of ASEAN leaders did not enable US leaders to overturn the groundswell of domestic and international opposition to the Vietnam War. For Johnson and Nixon, deploying the ASEAN leaders’ endorsements of the war was more about deflating critics than converting them. Indeed, Johnson and Nixon’s modus operandi was to repeatedly dismiss all critics of the Vietnam War by deriding how opponents of US military intervention in Indochina, safely removed from Southeast Asia, had no right to question ASEAN leaders’ genuine security concerns or their lived reality of the domino theory so proximate to Vietnam. These rhetorical flourishes bought time, if only a little, not for Southeast Asian regimes at risk of communist domination to gain stability, but instead to magnify the de facto US hegemony in the region already upheld by the pro-US ASEAN states.

Conclusion

Except in Indochina, the surge in Southeast Asian nationalism after 1945 had not ejected Western power from the region. Rather, anticommunist nationalists collaborated readily with the United States, which had adverse repercussions for Soviet and Chinese influence in the wider region. True, the Soviet Union could boast that its resources and guidance had enabled Hanoi to humble the United States. But apart from its alliance with Vietnam, Moscow from the 1950s onward had not lent significant support to other communist parties in the region. Soviet leaders had doubted that Southeast Asia’s other communist groups could succeed and, in the shadow of the nuclear arms race, sought peaceful coexistence with the United States. To enlarge the Soviet Union’s political presence in Southeast Asia, the Soviets instead nurtured relations with the region’s noncommunist nationalists who had (as Moscow anticipated) gained power by the late 1950s. This nondoctrinaire approach to the emerging Third World had some purchase with newly independent states of Africa and the Middle East but backfired in Southeast Asia. The region’s anticommunist nationalists had already picked the United States as their patron. Certainly, they traded with the Soviet Union, but their economic ties were more extensive with the United States and Western Europe. And when Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev sent feelers to ASEAN leaders in the late 1960s about assembling a Moscow-led regional security system, the proposal elicited no favorable response. Worse for the Soviets, most of Southeast Asia’s communist groups (besides the Vietnamese) had aligned themselves with China, disappointed by the Soviet Union’s neglect but inspired by Chairman Mao Zedong’s call to aggressive anti-imperial struggle.⁷⁰

From the late 1960s through the early 1970s, Soviet officials had become increasingly resigned to the fact that their influence had not advanced beyond Indochina. Even Soviet hopes of filling the vacuum left by Britain’s withdrawal from its bases in Singapore and Malaysia were dashed when both countries concluded a defense arrangement with Australia, New Zealand, and Britain. Furthermore, Malaysia and Singapore, like their ASEAN counterparts, fell squarely within the US orbit. Soviet diplomats would even divulge to American officials that they preferred the United States dominating the region so long as it precluded Chinese expansionism. No wonder, then, that when Nixon and Kissinger successfully executed rapprochement with China between 1971 and 1972, Soviet leaders felt compelled to pursue détente with the United States.⁷¹

China’s policy toward Southeast Asia had fared little better than that of the Soviet Union while the Vietnam War raged and the US–ASEAN relationship deepened. Like the Soviet Union, China’s influence in the region was scant beyond the borders of Indochina. To be clear, China’s capacity to compete against US and British power in Southeast Asia had once seemed bright because of the PKI and Sukarno’s pro-China inclinations. But Suharto’s New Order abruptly ended China’s clout over Indonesian politics in late 1965. And it made little difference that other communist parties, such as those in Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines, ascribed to China’s revolutionary vision. In these three ASEAN states, pro-US factions had prevailed in the 1950s and remained firmly in control; in contrast, these communist groups had become terribly weak after muffed bids for power, or remained marginal entities without much political weight in their own countries.

Premier Zhou Enlai himself grasped the limited prospects for Chinese foreign policy in Southeast Asia. In March 1969, US intelligence officials learned that Zhou saw China “encircled” and “isolated.”⁷² It is likely that Zhou perceived how deeply entwined ASEAN had become with other anticommunist and West-leaning multilateral organizations and security networks. When he was more at ease with Kissinger some years after their first meeting in 1971, Zhou shared how he believed that the “institutions” for containing China in Southeast Asia were “more numerous than any other area in the world.”⁷³ Adding to these frustrations for Chinese ambitions in Southeast Asia, years of Sino-Soviet rivalry had bloomed into violent confrontations in early 1969, while the excesses of Mao’s Cultural Revolution had decimated the nation’s political infrastructure and international reputation.⁷⁴ This combination of crises had crippled Chinese diplomacy. Once Nixon offered to thaw relations with China, Zhou and Mao knew that détente gave China a reprieve from fighting a losing battle against America.

Neither the failures of US policy in Vietnam nor the caving in of pro-US governments in Cambodia and Laos to local communist forces could stymie the rise of American hegemony in broader Southeast Asia. Nixon’s rapprochement with China, geared among other things toward reducing Cold War tensions in East and Southeast Asia, was undertaken from the position of US predominance in that very region. Before Lyndon Johnson Americanized the Vietnam War, anticommunist nationalists in Malaya, the Philippines, and Thailand had defeated their communist rivals, with British and US support, in the 1950s. Also, before US forces were even deployed to Vietnam, the creation of Malaysia in the 1960s led to the strangling of Singapore’s socialist movement and sparked the ill-fated Konfrontasi campaign which led to the downfall of Sukarno and the PKI. Thus, throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, the unstable anticommunist governments in South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos proved striking contrasts to the overall rightward shift of Southeast Asia. In fact, Indochina’s slide toward communism bound the United States and ASEAN closer, with US economic and military aid extending the lifespans of ASEAN’s pro-US authoritarian regimes well past the end of the Vietnam War. As one senior ASEAN official reminded the international press in 1970, the broader region was not simply “Vietnam writ large.”⁷⁵

8 Moscow, Beijing, and Détente

Lorenz M. Lüthi

The period from the Tet Offensive in 1968 to communist victory in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in 1975 revealed the close links between regional developments in the Indochina conflict and global changes in the Sino-Soviet–American relationship. Even while the United States and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN, or North Vietnam) negotiated in Paris for almost five years from May 1968 to January 1973, they engaged in some of the most intensive and bitter military battles during the whole Indochina conflict. Simultaneously, the Sino-Soviet split came to full fruition during border clashes in 1969, followed by the parallel developments of Sino-American rapprochement and Soviet–American détente in the early 1970s. Although the Indochina conflict itself was firmly rooted in regional developments dating back to the interwar period, it occurred against the background of the Global Cold War. The American intervention after August 1964 amounted to the first full-scale attack by a capitalist power against a socialist state. Interestingly, it did not lead to greater fraternal cohesion among the socialist states but shattered the unity of the socialist world instead. In the second half of the 1960s, the Sino-Soviet–American relationship thus was characterized by trilateral hostility. While antagonism between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Soviet Union, on the one side, and United States, on the other, had been a characteristic of the Global Cold War since the late 1940s, the Sino-Soviet fallout occurred at a moment when the DRVN needed to rely on fraternal unity. Even worse, as the Indochina conflict reached its apex with another round of escalations under the incoming administration of President Richard M. Nixon, the United States sought rapprochement with the PRC and détente with the Soviet Union. Even if the dual American policy of engaging with the two communist great powers had its roots in unrelated considerations, the Indochina conflict certainly was an additional motivation, but simultaneously also a complicating factor, for the United States.

Despite the enormous quantity of publications about the American involvement both in the Indochina conflict and the Global Cold War, our knowledge about Beijing’s and Moscow’s goals and policies on either level of analysis is remarkably scant. The continued lack of access to many archival holdings in Vietnam, China, and Russia forces historians to work with public sources, a relatively small amount of secondary literature published in any of the three countries, and sources from secondary archives throughout the world. This includes archives in countries of the former socialist world, neutral nations, and states that were involved in the war in various capacities, like Canada as a member of the International Commission for Control and Supervision (ICCS), Great Britain as an American ally that refused to participate in the war, and Australia as a US cobelligerent. The available puzzle-pieces thus produce a general, though not detailed, picture of the developments between 1968 and 1975 in the North Vietnamese–Sino-Soviet–American relationship. On the whole, they show Hanoi as a master of its own policies, Beijing and Moscow as loyal allies, even if they pursued policies of compromise with Washington, and rapprochement and détente as complicating factors for, but not obstacles to, the North Vietnamese goal of national unification.

The Tet Offensive

Following the US escalation in the wake of the Tonkin Incident in August 1964, Moscow and Beijing, given both their ideological disputes and increased Chinese security fears, vehemently disagreed on the appropriate policy of support of the DRVN. While the Sino-Soviet competition for North Vietnamese allegiance led to greater military and economic aid from both, it also caused bitter disputes among the three and led to Chinese policies of obstructionism of Soviet aid deliveries via the country’s railroad network.¹ As early as May 1965, Phạm Vӑn Đồng complained to the Soviet government about China’s unhelpful policies, and, by August, the North Vietnamese leaders started to move away from their previously pro-Chinese positions toward a political stance in the middle. In an internal report from mid-1966, North Vietnamese leaders bemoaned “the deep dissension between Russia and China … [that had] ruined the consistency of action of the pro-Vietnamese socialist bloc.” The Cultural Revolution further disturbed the Vietnamese communists, not only because of its radical political character and the internal chaos which it caused, but also because it politically and organizationally undermined the war effort against South Vietnam and the United States.²

The North Vietnamese leaders did not inform their Soviet and Chinese comrades about their plans for the Tet Offensive, although diplomats from the Soviet Union and socialist Eastern Europe noticed military preparations in the second half of 1967. Ahead of the offensive in late January 1968, the PRC rejected both negotiations with the United States on ideological grounds and an escalation of the war by the DRVN owing to security concerns. Still, Beijing endorsed Hanoi’s military initiative once the offensive had started but sharply criticized the North Vietnamese decision to accept the American offer of negotiations soon thereafter. Chinese leaders stressed that the only proper policy was to continue fighting for several years until the complete defeat of American imperialism on the battlefield. Moscow, too, had not expected a major military effort by Hanoi in late 1967; on the contrary, it believed that the DRVN was exhausted from three years of war. After the start of the Tet Offensive, the Soviet Union concluded that it was a last-ditch effort to change the balance on the battlefield ahead of negotiations with the United States, which, as Moscow believed, the Vietnamese communists had hoped would result from their military effort.³

After some months of fighting, Hanoi concluded that the Tet Offensive had not led to a decisive change on the battlefield, and thus embarked on a policy of negotiating while fighting. Against the background of the publicly stated need for a worldwide “united front” with “the socialist countries, the international workers’ movement, and the national liberation movement[s]” that would support the struggle in Indochina, the DRVN grew concerned about what it considered the “ideological confusion” in the socialist world that had emerged with the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968. North Vietnamese leaders proposed as early as April fraternal help, with the goal of preventing “imperialist forces” from detaching that Eastern European country from the “ranks of the socialist countries.” Unsurprisingly, Hanoi welcomed the military intervention by the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact in Czechoslovakia in August 1968 as an act of preserving worldwide peace.⁴

Given its decision to negotiate with the United States in Paris, the DRVN pushed in the summer of 1968 for the withdrawal of the remaining Chinese troops, which had been stationed on the basis of a four-year-old agreement; the last Chinese soldiers left two years later. At the same time, the blockade and even plunder of Soviet military supply trains transiting the PRC by Red Guards, that is, radicalized young Chinese high school and university students, continued. Even if China’s supreme leader, Mao Zedong, had just called for a lessening of revolutionary fervor in the country’s foreign relations, because it had isolated the PRC on a global scale, the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia led to increased conflict between Beijing, on the one side, and Moscow and Hanoi, on the other. Of all occasions, China’s Prime Minister Zhou Enlai chose the twenty-third anniversary of the declaration of independence of the DRVN, September 2, to denounce Soviet “socialist imperialism” in Czechoslovakia, to accuse Moscow of imperialist collaboration with Washington on a worldwide scale, and to demand Hanoi continue fighting US imperialism on the battlefield and abrogate negotiations in Paris.⁵ Four weeks later, Zhou went even further by equating the recent Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia with the four-year-old American intervention in Vietnam. North Vietnamese leaders subsequently complained to East German officials about Chinese accusations of ideological revisionism in the DRVN, although they simultaneously admitted that the PRC had not caused any problems in negotiating a new military aid agreement for the following year. Anyway, Hanoi was convinced that the worsening of the relationship with Beijing would be only temporary, and thus was willing to work for a relaxation of relations. By mid-November, against a background of increased Chinese fears of the Soviet threat following the events in Czechoslovakia, Mao eventually endorsed the North Vietnamese policy of fighting while negotiating with the United States in a conversation with Phạm Vӑn Đồng.⁶

Sino-Soviet Border Clashes and Cambodia

The latent Sino-Soviet border conflicts that turned into military clashes at Zhenbao/Damansky Island on the Ussuri River in March of 1969 troubled the North Vietnamese leaders greatly. As early as October 1968, Hanoi had raised its concerns about a possible military escalation between Beijing and Moscow over territorial disputes. Shortly after the clashes, Hồ Chí Minh offered to mediate between the PRC and the Soviet Union, largely because the DRVN feared that the conflict among the two communist giants would have a negative impact on its negotiating position in the ongoing Paris negotiations.⁷ Unsurprisingly, in his last will of May 10, 1969, Hồ expressed his grief “at the dissensions that are dividing the fraternal parties” and called for socialist unity instead. In concurrent talks with East German diplomats, North Vietnamese officials insisted on a middle position between the PRC and the Soviet Union, stressing that the military and economic aid they received from both was equivalent. During Hồ’s funeral in early September, the North Vietnamese leaders tried to bring Zhou and his Soviet counterpart, Aleksey Kosygin, together. After some bureaucratic slips, the two eventually met at Beijing airport on September 11, but their talks did not lead to any agreement. Chinese mistrust and continued veiled Soviet threats of a nuclear strike drove the PRC into a war scare by October. This eventually led to the clandestine Sino-American contacts in Warsaw at the turn of year that ultimately would end in rapprochement in 1971.⁸

But the embryonic Sino-American rapprochement suffered a setback following the coup against Cambodian Prince Sihanouk by his pro-Western prime minister, Lon Nol, on March 18, 1970, and the subsequent South Vietnamese and American military interventions in that country. Sihanouk himself ended up in exile in Beijing, where he swiftly formed an alliance with his erstwhile domestic enemies, the Khmer Rouge (the Communist Party of Kampuchea), and called for armed resistance to the new government. His Chinese hosts promised political support – largely to strengthen their position with regard to the Soviet Union and the DRVN – but hesitated to offer economic and military aid, while delaying the cut of all diplomatic relations with the new government in Phnom Penh for one and a half months.⁹ In comparison, North Vietnamese leaders considered the pro-American coup in Cambodia an outright military and political disaster, since it threatened to eliminate an important theater of military operations in the war against South Vietnam. The resulting hardening of Hanoi’s positions at the Paris negotiations taxed relations with Moscow, which had pushed for a diplomatic end to the war for years. North Vietnamese officials saw their policy toward Cambodia in terms of Soviet policy toward Czechoslovakia two years earlier – as a means to fight “counterrevolution” and American imperialism. In this context, DRVN leaders quickly supported Sihanouk’s plan to form a liberation army against Lon Nol’s government.¹⁰

On April 24 and 25, 1970, representatives of the DRVN, Laos, and Cambodia’s government in exile met in Nanning to form a united front designed to struggle against US imperialism in all of Indochina. Beijing was aware that Sihanouk sought rapprochement with the DRVN after years of difficult relations but simultaneously wanted to prevent North Vietnamese domination of all of Indochina. Even if the conference had been Sihanouk’s initiative, it was organized by the PRC and occurred in southern China.¹¹ In the wake of the trilateral conference, Mao publicly placed the anti-American struggle in Indochina into the context of an international anti-imperialist movement that eventually would overthrow “fascist rule in the United States” itself. On May 20, he ordered the suspension of any further steps toward Sino-American rapprochement. Later that month, Sihanouk traveled to Hanoi for talks with North Vietnamese and Laotian leaders on the details of collaboration. Excluded from the rapid developments in Southeast Asia, the Soviet Union downplayed China’s alliance with the “dead man” Sihanouk and tried to convince itself that Lon Nol needed the presence of the Soviet Embassy in Phnom Penh to prove his independence from the United States.¹²

Against the background of public, mutual Sino-American signaling about the resumption of rapprochement between July 1970 and March 1971, Sihanouk’s close relationship with the PRC deteriorated. Throughout this period, Western and socialist diplomats alike noted the reduction of ideological fervor and the rise of pragmatic tendencies in China’s foreign policy. Consequently, Sihanouk tried to establish a closer relationship with Hanoi’s leaders in early 1971, despite his continued disagreement with the DRVN over the presence of North Vietnamese troops in his home country.¹³

Sino-American Rapprochement

The first half of 1971 witnessed three major changes in the tangled web of Sino-North Vietnamese–American relations. The military failure of a combined American–South Vietnamese intervention in Laos in early 1971 reconfirmed the commitment of the Nixon administration to withdraw ground troops in the long term through complete “Vietnamization” of the war, while exploiting disagreements within the socialist world to negotiate an end to the conflict. In comparison, the unexpected military success of its own and allied troops in Laos persuaded Hanoi that the Saigon regime was an empty shell and Washington’s previous policy of Vietnamization had shortcomings. By May, it decided on launching a Tet Offensive-like military operation – the so-called Easter Offensive – during the US presidential election year of 1972, with the goal of damaging a sitting US president as the Tet Offensive had four years before. The DRV hence requested additional military assistance from the PRC and the Soviet Union.¹⁴ Simultaneously, the Sino-American signaling that had restarted in July 1970 led to informal contacts between the Chinese and US teams at the table tennis world championship in Japan in the spring of 1971. It continued with ping-pong diplomacy in April, Kissinger’s famous visit to the PRC on July 9–11, and the announcement of Nixon’s visit to Beijing, scheduled for February 1972, shortly thereafter.¹⁵

Although the Nixon administration had hoped to use rapprochement with the PRC to obtain Chinese leverage over the DRVN in the Paris negotiations, Zhou refused to abandon North Vietnam or to make any concessions on Indochina during Kissinger’s visit, even if such a rigid policy meant that the Taiwan issue would remain unresolved for many more years. Yet the very fact that the visit had happened put pressure on both the Soviet Union and the DRVN, as Nixon and Kissinger had hoped. Moscow hurriedly pushed for a summit with Washington, preferably even before Nixon’s visit to Beijing, but had to settle for one in May 1972. And Hanoi was enraged about what it considered Beijing’s sabotage of its war effort against Washington and political support for Nixon’s reelection bid in 1972. During a visit to the North Vietnamese capital on July 13, Zhou emphasized continued Chinese military and political support as well as his country’s principal commitment to unconditional American withdrawal from Indochina above all, but his hosts warned him of how Sino-American rapprochement would harden US positions in the Paris negotiations.¹⁶

Kissinger’s and Phạm Vӑn Đồng’s consecutive visits to Beijing in October and November, respectively, did not remove any of the disagreements. During Kissinger’s call, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly granted membership to the PRC and expelled the Republic of China on Taiwan – a direct consequence of his visit five months before. Even if Washington continued to expect diplomatic assistance from Beijing in the Paris negotiations with Hanoi, the PRC remained steadfast in refusing to lend any support. Disappointed, the Nixon administration accused the Soviet leadership of fomenting North Vietnamese intransigence and even threatened a deterioration of bilateral relations ahead of the Moscow Summit. Afraid of being excluded from developments in Indochina, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev in late January 1972 offered to help overcome the deadlock in the Paris negotiations.¹⁷

Zhou and Đồng similarly talked past each other in late November. Hanoi wanted Beijing’s unconditional commitment to a military solution in Indochina that would lead to the global humiliation of Washington, and thus demanded the cancellation of the Nixon visit. Disagreeing with what he considered an unrealistic maximalist strategy to seek victory only on the battlefield, Zhou in the talks with Đồng pushed for a negotiated end to the war and unconditional American withdrawal, while he publicly made commitments to North Vietnamese positions in the Paris negotiations. Throughout Đồng’s visit, the DRVN continued planning and preparing for its military offensive in the spring of 1972. Shortly after his return home from Beijing, Hanoi issued orders to the National Front for the Liberation of Southern Vietnam (NLF, or Viet Cong) to prepare for the spring offensive.¹⁸

Figure 8.1 Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai and President Richard Nixon toast each other (February 1972).

Source: Pictures from History / Contributor / Universal Images Group / Getty Images.

Nixon traveled to China on February 21 in a pessimistic mood about Vietnam. In 1967, even before he had become a presidential candidate, he had proposed to look beyond the Vietnam War to all of Asia, because China in good time would become a great power in its own right. But in the year before his visit to the PRC, he eyed China mainly as a potential lever to extract the United States from the Indochina conflict, and immediately before his departure from Washington he even questioned the value of his (now famous) visit, given Beijing’s firm commitment to Hanoi. During a week of talks, Nixon twice raised the Vietnam War, but Zhou Enlai remained firm on Chinese support for North Vietnamese demands on unconditional American withdrawal.¹⁹

Hanoi was deeply dissatisfied with Nixon’s visit, even if Beijing had promised beforehand not to give even an inch in the talks with the guest from Washington. North Vietnamese leaders were convinced that the visit would help Nixon to win the presidential election in 1972 even if he was unable to fulfill his four-year-old campaign promise to withdraw from Vietnam in his first term. Zhou traveled to Hanoi in early March to report on Nixon’s visit. While he again emphasized China’s support for North Vietnamese negotiating positions in Paris, he warned of illusions about another Tet Offensive–like campaign that he believed was unlikely to succeed. His hosts left him with no doubt about their belief that the Nixon visit had provided the United States with a morale boost that would make the Paris negotiations more difficult for the DRVN.²⁰

Easter Offensive, Détente, and Peace

In mid-March, Hanoi was overly optimistic about the impact on the Paris negotiations of the offensive, which was scheduled to start at the end of the month. In talks with East German diplomats two months later, North Vietnamese officials called unified Vietnam’s independence a “minimal goal” of the offensive but even hoped for a global defeat of US imperialism. Yet Soviet leaders reacted with irritation about the offensive, which occurred between Nixon’s visit to Beijing and his trip to Moscow in late May. In the face of Soviet charges of North Vietnamese attempts to undermine the Moscow Summit, the DRVN claimed that it had informed both the PRC and the Soviet Union in 1971 about its military plans, and had even requested – and received – military aid. It is likely that Beijing and Moscow knew about Hanoi’s plans, but probably were not aware either of the exact timing or of its Tet-style scale.²¹ Once the Easter Offensive had faltered by June, however, Hanoi did not hesitate to blame its communist allies for insufficient military support. Yet during the first weeks of armed operations, the PRC had stood firm on its military and political commitments to the DRVN, while Moscow denied any prior knowledge of Hanoi’s plans in communications with Washington. Still, the Soviet Union asked for a reduction in American retaliatory airstrikes in exchange for mediation between the DRVN and the United States.²²

Before Brezhnev received Nixon in Moscow in late May, he had to defeat a challenge by Soviet hard-line rivals who demanded a cancellation of the summit because of the recent escalation of fighting in Vietnam. In the first meeting with the American president, the Soviet leader clearly emphasized that détente and the bombing of North Vietnam were “incompatible.” After the signing of the sibling treaties on strategic arms limitation (SALT) and antimissile defense (ABM) – two major symbols of Soviet–American détente – on May 26, the two sides found common ground on Vietnam. Nixon was willing to make compromises on US positions on the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam) in the Paris negotiations, while Brezhnev promised to send a delegation to Hanoi to mediate.²³ DRVN leaders were deeply frustrated that yet another of their socialist allies had hosted the American president, but they also realized that Vietnam was one of many problems the Soviet Union faced as a global power – and not even an important one at that.²⁴

By early June, it had dawned on Hanoi’s leaders that the Easter Offensive had failed to achieve a breakthrough. The casualty rate on the battlefield was immense, and the RVN was no closer to collapse. In many respects, the offensive had been a last-ditch effort to improve the military and diplomatic situation in Indochina and Paris, respectively. Even before its launch, North Vietnam’s population and economy had been exhausted after seven and a half years of war. On June 1, Hanoi ordered the mobilization of its last reserves in the vain hope of maintaining the offensive long enough to damage Nixon’s reelection chances. North Vietnamese leaders continued to blame the military failures on the lack of support by their communist allies – which in turn allowed them to demand more military aid – rather than on their own maximalist expectations and miscalculations.²⁵ Moscow, however, was irritated by Hanoi’s accusations, continued demands for military aid, and the general lack of a Marxist-Leninist analysis of the national and international situation.²⁶

By mid-1972, the DRVN had decided to resume negotiations in Paris. In early July, Zhou traveled to Hanoi to convince the North Vietnamese leaders to give up on their maximalist strategy of humiliating US imperialism globally through a military victory in Vietnam, and to settle instead on a fast American withdrawal and to delay national unification for some years into the future. Yet Hanoi believed until August that it could influence the presidential election and use this as a lever in negotiations in Paris. As it became evident by late August that the North Vietnamese people were completely exhausted by the continued war and that Nixon would win by a landslide, the DRVN changed track in order to get a final agreement in Paris before the presidential election in early November, so that Nixon could not escalate afterwards.²⁷ Yet by the same logic, the American president did not need such an agreement to win the election, and thus slowed down the negotiations in the hope to escalate it after his electoral victory to extract greater concessions from the DRVN. Both Beijing and Moscow were exasperated by Washington’s machinations, but their lack of diplomatic coordination deprived them of any leverage. The renewed US escalation of the war in December met with bitter North Vietnamese, Chinese, and Soviet criticism. Yet it was neither of the three communist countries but the decision of the American Congress to cut funding for the war that forced Nixon to negotiate a final agreement in Paris in late January 1973.²⁸

Indochina

In the two and a half years after the Paris Agreement on Vietnam, the situation in Indochina and the Global Cold War changed dramatically. By late March 1973, the last American troops had left Vietnam. Two years and one month later, the DRVN defeated and conquered the RVN, while the Khmer Rouge toppled Lon Nol’s government, and by August the communist Pathet Lao had taken control over all of Laos. Despite Brezhnev’s visit to the United States in June 1973, Soviet–American détente crumbled. After Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 in the wake of the Watergate scandal, his foreign policy was discredited to such a degree that his successor, Gerald Ford, even prohibited the use of the term “détente” in his administration. Simultaneously, Sino-American rapprochement stalled, to Mao’s great frustration, largely because Nixon had used it as a lever in achieving détente with the Soviet Union.²⁹ And despite the collapse of détente and rapprochement, Sino-Soviet relations did not improve. Yet at the Southeast Asian nexus of all these developments stood communist Vietnam’s attempt to dominate Indochina, which forced Beijing, Moscow, and Washington to readjust their respective policies toward the region.

Some Vietnamese communists had pursued hegemonic policies toward all of Indochina since the 1930s, though with long interruptions. As described above, Indochinese solidarity had returned to the political agenda following the coup against Sihanouk in March 1970. In view of Sino-American rapprochement and its own preparations for the Easter Offensive, the DRVN had returned by late 1971 to stressing Indochinese solidarity in the joint struggle against US imperialism. With Soviet political support, North Vietnam tried to increase its influence on the Cambodian government in exile, particularly the Khmer Rouge, at the expense of China.³⁰ In response, Beijing stressed its support for a united front in Indochina and the world for the struggle against US imperialism, despite the impending Nixon visit to the PRC. Regardless of Sihanouk’s continued, though rocky, relationship with the PRC, he traveled to Hanoi during Nixon’s visit to demonstrate North Vietnamese–Cambodian solidarity against the United States.³¹ The Sino–North Vietnamese tug-of-war for influence in Cambodia extended into the spring, with the DRVN making political commitments to the noncommunist Sihanouk (to the chagrin of the Soviet Union), and the PRC making public commitments to the struggle of all Indochinese people. According to foreign diplomats in Beijing, the Chinese leaders were not only convinced of the meager prospects of the Easter Offensive, but actually feared that its success would increase the influence of the DRVN in all of Indochina at the expense of the PRC. As the offensive faltered in the summer of 1972, the Sino–North Vietnamese competition for influence in Cambodia and Laos was suspended temporarily.³²

The struggle for influence in Indochina resumed after the Paris Agreement on Vietnam in early 1973. During a visit to the PRC in February, Kissinger discussed with Zhou and Mao steps to prevent Soviet hegemony in Asia and, by extension, the possible domination of Cambodia by pro-Soviet North Vietnam.³³ In turn, Moscow and Hanoi were concerned about alleged Sino-American agreements on Indochina as a whole and on Vietnam in particular. The Soviet Union was particularly anxious about the future development of Cambodia, because pro-Chinese and pro–North Vietnamese factions within the government in exile were fighting for dominance.³⁴ Yet, by comparison, Hanoi was optimistic about the revolutionary developments in both Laos, where internal conflict had ended with an agreement shortly after the Paris Agreement on Vietnam, and Cambodia, where it tried to increase its influence by reconciling the warring factions in the government in exile. But for much of 1973 and 1974 the struggle for dominance in Indochina remained undecided, as Soviet–American détente, Sino-American rapprochement, and Sino–North Vietnamese relations (due to unrelated territorial disagreements) faltered.³⁵

The North Vietnamese decision at the end of 1973 to use military means to achieve national unification had long-term consequences for the balance of influence in Indochina. The conquest of South Vietnam and the final Khmer Rouge campaign to overthrow Lon Nol’s government in Cambodia occurred roughly at the same time (January to April 1975), although they were not coordinated. Exploiting the deterioration of Sino–North Vietnamese relations, the Khmer Rouge managed to gain support from the PRC – at the expense of the DRVN and despite purges of Sihanouk’s pro-Chinese supporters in its ranks. Still Sihanouk celebrated the fifth anniversary of the North Vietnamese–Laotian–Cambodian meeting in Nanning in late April as a manifestation of fraternal solidarity.³⁶ Already in May of 1975, on the basis of the communist double success in Vietnam and Cambodia, North Vietnamese officials forecast more victories for socialism in Laos, Thailand, and the Philippines in the near future that would lead to the complete expulsion of US imperialism from all of Southeast Asia. Whether or not communist-led, unified Vietnam returned to ideas of an Indochinese confederation in 1975 is unclear. In any case, its attempt to establish relations with the new regime in Cambodia ended in failure.³⁷

The rapid changes in Indochina surprised the great powers, particularly the PRC. Afraid of losing all influence in Indochina, Beijing stepped up ideological propaganda against US imperialism in Asia and Soviet socialist imperialism worldwide in mid-spring. In talks with foreign diplomats, however, the PRC’s foreign minister, Qiao Guanhua, stressed the importance of US military bases in Asia to contain Soviet influence after Vietnamese reunification. Beijing feared not only an encirclement by the Moscow–Hanoi alliance, but also problems arising from the Vietnamese treatment of ethnic Chinese in recently occupied South Vietnam. This probably was why the PRC sent military aid and political advisors to Cambodia shortly after the overthrow of Lon Nol’s regime in order to freeze out Vietnamese and Soviet influence.³⁸ The Soviet Union, by comparison, placed the changes in Indochina into the larger context of a worldwide, victorious socialist advance against imperialism and capitalism. By the summer, Moscow was convinced that Hanoi had replaced Beijing’s influence in the new Indochina, but then was irritated that its longtime Vietnamese ally chose to stress its political independence from the fraternal socialist countries by becoming a member of the nonalignment movement by late summer.³⁹

By August, the Sino-Vietnamese struggle for Cambodia and Laos continued. During a visit to Phnom Penh early in the month, Lê Duẩn tried to improve the relationship, particularly with regard to territorial disputes that had emerged lately, but seemingly to no avail. A Cambodian state visit led by Khieu Samphan to the PRC in mid-August cemented the budding relationship with a technical agreement, mutual commitments for the struggle against Soviet and Vietnamese hegemonism, and an arrangement for Sihanouk to return to politics in Cambodia in some formal capacity.⁴⁰ Hanoi was happy about neither Beijing’s increased sway in what it considered its own sphere of influence nor the extreme domestic policies that the new regime in Phnom Penh imposed. At least, by August, the DRVN could celebrate the victory of its Laotian ally, the Pathet Lao, which had exploited the political insecurity in its country that had emerged after the rapid changes in Vietnam and Cambodia in the spring.⁴¹

The last months of 1975 revealed how much the relationship among all the players in Indochina had changed. During Lê Duẩn’s visit to Beijing in late September, the PRC announced that it would reduce its economic aid to the DRVN. Disagreements over the Soviet role in Asia convinced the Vietnamese leaders that the PRC had ceased being a socialist state. A month later, Lê Duẩn and the Soviet leaders cemented the bilateral relationship in Moscow, stressing the importance of the DRVN as an outpost of socialism and anti-imperialist revolution in Southeast Asia.⁴² In early December, the PRC hosted US President Gerald Ford. Mao started by complaining about the lack of progress in Sino-American rapprochement and Nixon’s instrumental use of the bilateral relationship to establish the now faltering Soviet–American détente. Still, the two countries agreed to coordinate their policies to forestall Soviet expansionism on both a global and regional scale. On December 7, on the thirty-fourth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the president announced at a speech in Honolulu his “Pacific Doctrine,” which sought stability and peace in East and Southeast Asia on the basis of the American alliance with Japan and close bilateral collaboration with the PRC in economic and security matters.⁴³ The DRVN and Laos replied by denouncing the new doctrine as yet another attempt at American intervention in Indochina, warning of a Sino-Japanese–American alliance that represented only the interests of a few in the Pacific basin, and demanding a normalization of relations on the basis of the Paris Agreement.⁴⁴

The Sino-Soviet split, Sino-American rapprochement, and Soviet–American détente all influenced the North Vietnamese conduct of the war in the late 1960s and early 1970s, although not to the extent that DRVN leaders claimed at the time and in retrospect. The split made coordination of socialist aid in the second half of the 1960s difficult, but also resulted in Sino-Soviet competition for aid that enabled North Vietnam to launch the Tet Offensive in early 1968 in the first place. Rapprochement convinced the DRVN to launch the Easter Offensive – a second Tet Offensive – in the spring of 1972. Détente eventually forced North Vietnam to rethink its maximalist strategy of trying to win a victory against the United States on the battlefield in Indochina and humiliate the superpower at the global level in the process. Despite Moscow’s and Beijing’s sustained loyalty throughout the conflict in the late 1960s and early 1970s, neither shared Hanoi’s commitment to maximalist goals during the last years of the war. The Soviet Union had always preferred a negotiated solution to the conflict, while China jettisoned its world revolutionary positions in the 1970–2 period and instead counseled North Vietnam to settle for a negotiated agreement on American military withdrawal that would eventually open up the possibility for national reunification within a few years.

The realignment of Sino-North Vietnamese–Soviet relations in the 1968–73 period had a major long-term impact on the Cold War in East Asia. In the first half of the 1960s, the Sino-Soviet split had once more strengthened the Sino-Vietnamese communist concord of anti-imperialism and national liberation that dated back to the 1920s. The radicalism of the Cultural Revolution, which started in 1966, forced the DRVN to take up a middle position in between the PRC and the Soviet Union. Sino-American rapprochement in the early 1970s even augured closer Soviet–North Vietnamese collaboration. Sino-North Vietnamese competition for the allegiance of the Khmer Rouge after mid-1970 further accelerated the worsening of the mutual relationship. By the turn of 1978–9, the Soviet–Vietnamese alliance and Sino-American concord clashed during the Third Indochina War.

9 The Easter Offensive and the Second Air War

Stephen P. Randolph

North Vietnam’s strategic Spring Offensive in 1972, known in the United States as the “Easter Offensive,” originated in North Vietnamese strategic planning in the aftermath of the South Vietnamese incursion into Laos in early 1971. The offensive was designed to create a change on the South Vietnamese battlefields sufficient to force the United States to accept a diplomatic settlement favorable to North Vietnam. If all proceeded as planned, these terms would include: a complete US withdrawal from the war; communist forces remaining in place in South Vietnam, with no regrouping or return north of the demilitarized zone (DMZ); a coalition government providing a political role for the communists in South Vietnam, which would lead to a communist takeover in the near future; and reparations from the United States.

The offensive continued from late March until October 1972. It triggered a furious response from President Richard Nixon, leading to a massive reinforcement of US air and naval power, a widening of the air war in Operation Linebacker, US Navy operations to mine North Vietnam’s ports and waterways, and eventually to the climactic B-52 raids on the North Vietnamese heartland in December 1972. Nixon’s refusal to accept the prospect of military defeat in Vietnam enabled US and South Vietnamese forces to stymie the offensive, which ended in a military stalemate. The People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) offensive did, however, lead eventually to a negotiated settlement in which the United States agreed to a complete withdrawal of its forces from South Vietnam. It was thus a major step toward the final North Vietnamese victory in 1975.

Planning and Preparation

Planning for the offensive by North Vietnam, formally known as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN), took place in the context of the US troop withdrawal from the conflict, well underway by 1971. The withdrawal constituted a major element in the complex series of processes by which President Richard Nixon and his key advisor, National Security Advisor Henry A. Kissinger, sought to extract the United States from the conflict in Indochina while maintaining an independent, noncommunist South Vietnam (Republic of Vietnam, or RVN) with President Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu in power.¹

From the outset of the administration, Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird championed a steady and rapid withdrawal of US troops from a combat role in Vietnam, with the US withdrawal balanced by a simultaneous buildup of South Vietnam’s military capability. Laird and General Creighton Abrams, commander of the US Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV), worked to define and build a program that would equip, expand, and train the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), enabling them to pick up the roles of the departing US forces. Laird emphasized Vietnamization, and in fact invented the term, both for domestic political and fiscal reasons: the war in Vietnam was a political liability to the administration, and the drain of US military resources in Indochina jeopardized higher-priority programs essential to countering the ongoing buildup of arms in the Soviet Union. Kissinger argued more than once against these unilateral troop withdrawals because the United States could not then use such withdrawals as bargaining chips in negotiating with North Vietnam. Kissinger’s argument gained little traction with Nixon, and the US troop withdrawals quickly accelerated, propelled by the expectations of the American public.

The four-party negotiations in Paris, opened by the Johnson administration on the eve of the 1968 elections, quickly assumed the role of propaganda theater. There was no prospect of useful diplomacy in that open forum. In August 1969, therefore, the United States and North Vietnam opened secret negotiations in Paris. By August 1971, the negotiators – Kissinger for the United States, and Politburo member Lê Đức Thọ for North Vietnam – had conducted ten rounds of talks. The positions of the two nations gradually converged through unilateral concessions by the United States, but both sides knew that the final decisions would have to await the results of military action. By that same period in mid-1971, the Nixon administration was quietly pursuing closer diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union and an opening to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), expecting these diplomatic steps to exert pressure on the North Vietnamese, who were nearly completely reliant on their communist allies for the supplies needed to carry on the war.

Nixon twice directed cross-border operations to throw the PAVN off balance and buy time for the Vietnamization program to mature – first directing a US–South Vietnamese attack into Cambodia in April 1970, and then sending South Vietnamese forces, heavily supported by US logistics, air support, artillery, and helicopters, into Laos in February 1971. Code-named Operation Lam Sơn 719, the incursion into Laos quickly ground to a halt. The North Vietnamese had anticipated the attack, had deployed forces and logistics in anticipation of its arrival, had built campaign roads, and had developed command structures and defensive strongholds. The South Vietnamese force, facing annihilation, retreated back into South Vietnam, abandoning much of its equipment in a disorderly withdrawal.²

Lam Sơn 719 shaped the final phase of the American war in Indochina. Among its immediate effects, Nixon lost all confidence in his theater commander, General Abrams, reaching the point of deciding to relieve Abrams from command for his mismanagement and lack of urgency in directing the operation. The president backed away from this decision, deciding the political price was not worth it, since the US ground war was nearing its end. The South Vietnamese felt that their support from the United States had been inadequate, and the US combatants felt that their often-heroic support of the attacking South Vietnamese forces had been unappreciated. The offensive thus widened the rift between the coalition partners, a rift that would continue to widen as the conflict continued. On the political front, Nixon and Kissinger had planned to use the offensive as the basis for a diplomatic initiative in the secret talks with Hanoi, and met with Xuân Thủy, the titular head of the DRVN delegation to the Paris Peace Talks, on May 31 to offer a prisoners of war (POWs)-for-withdrawal deal. The Politburo, led by Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP) First Secretary Lê Duẩn, rejected the offer, continuing to demand the deposition of South Vietnamese President Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu and communist participation in a coalition government.

But the most lasting effect of the Lam Sơn 719 incursion, perhaps, was its influence on North Vietnamese strategic decision-making. The military logic was straightforward: if the South Vietnamese military performed so poorly with massive American support, how could they possibly pose a threat to PAVN operations once the United States completed its withdrawal? But there were other, far more complicated factors at play as the Politburo planned its campaign strategy for 1972. On the positive side, the United States would conduct a presidential election in November 1972, and North Vietnam had seen in two earlier presidential elections how domestic political events could constrain US military options. That optimistic prospect, though, was overshadowed by the advent of Nixon’s triangular diplomacy, which posed a deadly threat to North Vietnam’s relationships with its superpower sponsors in Moscow and Beijing. Those relationships, which US diplomacy had now placed at risk, would be more vital than ever if the DRVN were to unleash a major offensive.

A PAVN general offensive the following year would inevitably entail great cost and risk in blood and treasure, and possibly in political support from allies. Little is known of the Politburo’s decision-making that led to the offensive, though in conversations with French communists in May 1972, Lê Đức Thọ summarized these discussions as contentious, finally settled by a majority vote. The French Communist Party’s representative in Hanoi, Theo Ponco, had reported back to the party that “unanimity of opinion had not been reached” on the offensive, and that Hanoi’s senior military leader, General Võ Nguyên Giáp, “had reservations … in the event that the destruction of the Hồ Chí Minh Trail made it no longer possible to get the material into the south … despite all the supply buildup precautions taken by the high command.” Thọ summarized that:

we finally reached our decision within the party, and although I cannot tell you how the voting went, the decision was finally made only as a result of a majority vote. It must be said that the young do not see the problem in the same terms as the old, and because of this, differences of opinion are inevitable.

Thọ implied that the decision had been reached under Chinese communist pressure, though this seems doubtful in the face of other evidence that by mid-1971 China was urging the DRVN to accept a negotiated settlement. Asked if North Vietnam could hold out a long time under the bombing and mining operations that by then were underway, Thọ replied:

The situation will be arduous, life will be hard, but we have come through other tests. We are organized to go on for a long time – which does not mean that we enjoy it. What we hope to achieve is President Thiệu’s departure. He, and he alone, stands in the way of the implementation of our plans, which have not changed since 1945.³

These risks notwithstanding, the Politburo issued planning directives for the offensive on May 14, 1971. Military planning completed the following month fleshed out the operational concept for the nationwide offensive. The main blow would consist of three combined-armed offensives, each executing a multidivisional attack. The primary blow would come north of Saigon, presenting a direct threat to South Vietnam’s capital. Secondary attacks would be conducted in the Central Highlands and along the DMZ. Once the all-out conventional offensive had knocked South Vietnam’s defenders off balance, the North Vietnamese planners expected to launch attacks on the RVN pacification program, contesting South Vietnam’s control over rural areas, especially in the highly populated Mekong River Delta.⁴ If all went as planned, the third strategic blow would fall in the cities, with uprisings against the Thiệu government.

The campaign was designed to bring a decisive end to the war; the Politburo listed its goals as:

to fundamentally defeat the enemy’s “Vietnamization” strategy, to destroy or cause the disintegration of the bulk of the puppet armed forces, to liberate most of the rural countryside, to intensify the political struggle and the mass uprisings in the cities, and, in coordination with the diplomatic struggle, to force the enemy to admit defeat and accept our demands so that we can secure a decisive victory.

The DRVN leadership noted the integral tie between military action and diplomacy, summarizing that “The battlefield is where victory will be decided. On the basis of the victories we win on the battlefield, we will be able to reach a successful resolution at the negotiating table.”⁵

This operational concept demanded a wholesale reconstruction of the DRVN armed forces, extending from doctrine and organization to battlefield weapons. There was little time to train in the new combined-arms doctrine or with the new weaponry, especially since the new weapons to be assimilated into the PAVN would need to be approved and provided by the Soviet Union, at the end of a supply chain extending back to Moscow. The new weapons – most notably heavy artillery, wire-guided antitank weapons, and shoulder-fired surface-to-air (SAM) missiles – began to reach North Vietnam in November, nearly simultaneously with the opening of the annual infiltration of men and materiel down the Hồ Chí Minh Trail toward the battlefields in South Vietnam.

The challenging climate and topography of Indochina, and the steadily increasing technology and firepower of the combatants, shaped the annual battle along the Hồ Chí Minh Trail. The Laotian dry season extended from November until March and therefore set the timing of the infiltration campaigns. Year after year, North Vietnamese forces extended the road network along the Trail, while their opponents in the US forces increased the sophistication and firepower of the aircraft interdicting the Trail. For the 1971–2 campaign, designated Commando Hunt VII, the US planners brought to bear the massive firepower of B-52 Stratofortress bombers, tactical fighter-bombers from air and naval forces, and increasingly sophisticated gunships, developed from cargo aircraft and armed with varying aerial artillery. The AC-130E gunships fielded in 1971 quickly proved the most effective foe of the movement down the Trail, with night-vision devices, low-light television, infrared and electromagnetic sensors, and with 20mm, 40mm, and 105mm cannon. PAVN sources testify to the effectiveness of the AC-130E, noting its “modern equipment and its logical and intelligent tactics,” and attributing to it about 60 percent of the 4,228 trucks destroyed during the infiltration campaign.⁶

As the PAVN buildup continued, it became increasingly clear to the Nixon White House and to MACV that North Vietnam was planning a major offensive, though its scope, nature, and timing remained unclear. By February 1972 indications of this major offensive led Nixon to direct a reinforcement of B-52s and tactical air forces into theater, add a fourth carrier to the naval force offshore, and remove all sortie restrictions for the tactical air forces and B-52s operating in South Vietnam. These deployments were meant both as a reinforcement for theater forces and as a warning to North Vietnam. Requests by MACV Commander Abrams to conduct airstrikes against PAVN forces moving toward their assembly points, however, were denied by the White House to avoid complicating ongoing diplomacy with the PRC and with the Soviet Union. Nixon and Kissinger were especially intent on minimizing risks to the upcoming summits, planned for Beijing in mid-February and in Moscow in May. In mid-March, Kissinger denied a second request from Abrams, fearing damage to US–PRC relations in the immediate aftermath of the Beijing Summit.⁷

While policymakers in Washington assessed the political–military landscape, so did those in Hanoi. In mid-March, the PAVN General Staff reviewed plans and preparation for the pending campaign, identifying shortfalls in their forces’ capability to attack fortified cities and in the state of the logistics buildup. In a significant late change to earlier plans, the North Vietnamese shifted the primary axis of attack from north of Saigon – Eastern Cochinchina, in DRVN nomenclature – to the area south of the DMZ. This decision reflected the logistics considerations that came into play with the mechanized offensive the PAVN was planning. For the North Vietnamese, resupply of mechanized forces operating north of Saigon would demand a long, contested journey down the Hồ Chí Minh Trail, and there could be no guarantee that sufficient supplies could feed a major attack in that area. While the area south of the DMZ did not pose so immediate a threat to South Vietnam, PAVN forces operating in that area could be more readily resupplied and reinforced. And so the General Staff made an extraordinary decision, shifting priorities in an operation that had been under development for nearly a year. In late March, PAVN forces moved into position for the attack.

As in Washington and Hanoi, leaders in Saigon watched the PAVN buildup and prepared for the offensive to come. From north to south, the RVN stretched over 720 miles (1,160 km) of varying terrain, with enemy forces based all along the RVN’s borders with North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The exposed borders created an unsolvable vulnerability for the South Vietnamese, stretching their military and enabling the PAVN to select the time of and place for attack. This vulnerability grew as American forces withdrew, leaving South Vietnamese forces to face the relentless pressure of PAVN attacks.

The RVN based its command system on four “Military Regions,” each largely autonomous, each with its distinctive terrain and challenges, and each with a corps command to protect the region. Military Region I (MR I) lay along the DMZ and southward. It encompassed the provincial capital of Quảng Trị, the old imperial city of Huế, and the major port and airfield at Đà Nẵng. The region was defended by General Hoàng Xuân Lãm’s I Corps. Under Lãm’s command were the 3rd ARVN Division along the DMZ, the 1st ARVN Division to the west of Huế, and the 2nd ARVN Division defending the southern three provinces within the region. In addition, the 3rd ARVN Division exercised operational control over two marine brigades stationed in the northwest sector, protecting the region against a flanking attack from the rough terrain around the border with Laos.

MR II, under the command of Lieutenant General Ngô Du, defended the Central Highlands, as well as several provinces on the coastal lowlands from Binh Định province south to Bình Thuận province. The two ARVN divisions defending the corps tactical zone were the 22nd, responsible for the northern part of the region and based in Kontum, and the 23rd, responsible for the southern section and based in Ban Mê Thuột. MR II forces also included eleven Ranger battalions along the Cambodian border.

MR III encompassed the area surrounding Saigon; its order of battle contained three divisions: the 5th, 18th, and 25th, along with three Ranger groups. MR IV bore responsibility for security of the Mekong Delta, the most populous area of the country and its agricultural breadbasket. Three ARVN divisions – the 7th, 9th, and 21st – were under IV Corps command, along with 200,000 territorial troops, by far the largest force of its kind in the four Military Regions.

While ARVN divisions formed the backbone of the corps’ defense capability, they were territorial forces, trained to fight in a given area. Rarely were they called upon to operate outside their normal territories, and invariably such deployments paid a high price in effectiveness. South Vietnam complemented these territorial capabilities with a strategic reserve of elite forces – marines, Airborne, and Rangers – personally allocated by President Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu to meet emergencies as they arose on the battlefield.

Opening of the Spring Offensive

The offensive opened on March 30, 1972 with a devastating artillery and infantry assault by the 304th and 308th PAVN Divisions, spearheaded by tanks, on ARVN outposts along the DMZ. The blow fell on the ARVN 3rd Division, constituted the previous October, inexperienced and in the midst of a troop rotation ordered by the divisional commander, Brigadier General Vũ Vӑn Giai, to orient his new division to its operating area. By the evening of April 1, General Giai had been forced to order a general withdrawal of his forces south of the Cửa Việt River to establish a new line of defense. That line failed the following day when the 56th ARVN Regiment surrendered at the linchpin of the defensive perimeter, Camp Carroll.⁸

The second arm of the PAVN offensive moved into action north of Saigon on April 2, with a diversionary attack against Tây Ninh. Two days later, the PAVN 5th Division followed with an attack against the district military base at Lộc Ninh, overrunning the base on April 6. Meanwhile the PAVN 9th Division moved toward its assault on the provincial capital, An Lộc, while the PAVN 7th Division established blocking positions on Route 13 south of the city. Thiệu reinforced the garrison with a brigade of paratroopers from the strategic reserve, but in early April it appeared that PAVN forces would sweep up An Lộc and move on to pose a direct threat to Saigon.

During that same period in early April, the PAVN opened their offensive in the Central Highlands with assaults on the firebases shielding the western flank of the major bases in the region – Pleiku and Kontum. John Paul Vann, the senior military advisor to ARVN General Du, responded personally, ferrying in supplies to the bases under attack, establishing a hands-on direction of the battle that would define his role throughout the campaign.

Nixon considered the North Vietnamese offensive a direct threat both to his foreign policy objectives and to his domestic political future, and responded decisively once the PAVN invasion was confirmed. As news of the PAVN attacks arrived, he declared to Kissinger that “we’re playing a much bigger game – we’re playing a Russia game, a China game, and an election game and we’re not gonna have the ARVN collapse.”⁹ His response to the offensive was heightened by his mistrust of the senior officials in the Defense Department and the military chain of command. After years of working with US Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird on force withdrawals and theater strategy, Nixon had no confidence in Laird’s willingness to respond vigorously to the PAVN attacks. Similarly, the president had lost confidence in theater commander Abrams during the previous year’s major campaign, Lam Sơn 719, in terms of both reacting effectively to changes in the battle and keeping the White House informed accurately on the course of the fighting. Convinced that Abrams had been in command too long, that he was “tired, unimaginative,” Nixon sent Air Force General John Vogt out to Saigon in command of 7th Air Force. Meeting with Vogt on April 6, Nixon sent him out to his new position with the presidential direction that “What’s going to determine this is not what Abrams decides, because he’s not gonna take any risks at this point, but what you’ll decide.”¹⁰ Therefore, through the months that followed, Nixon, Kissinger, and increasingly Deputy National Security Advisor Major General Alexander M. “Al” Haig managed the White House response to the PAVN offensive through the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, often placing Moorer in an uncomfortable position between the White House and his direct supervisor, Secretary of Defense Laird. Upon his arrival in Saigon on April 10, Vogt managed the air war and, at Moorer’s request, ensured that the White House was kept informed of the results of ongoing air operations.¹¹

While restructuring his chain of command to and in MACV, Nixon took direct control over the American military response, ordering airstrikes on SAM sites in the area just north of the DMZ. He further authorized a sustained air offensive in the North Vietnamese panhandle up to the 18th parallel, later extended further north to the 20th parallel and named Operation Freedom Train. For the North Vietnamese, surprised at Nixon’s rapid and aggressive response, this return to sustained bombing north of the DMZ, beginning with a highly successful attack on SAM defense forces on April 6, marked the opening of the Second Air War.

Nixon’s most significant decision in the immediate response to the offensive, however, was to order a massive reinforcement of air and naval forces in Indochina – tactical fighter units, aircraft carriers, naval gunfire support, and B-52s. When the offensive opened in late March, the navy had two carriers conducting operations off Indochina. Within weeks, there were six carriers on the line. The February deployment ordered by Nixon had dispatched twenty-nine B-52s to Andersen Air Force Base, Guam. With the invasion underway, the president sent another forty-eight of the heavy bombers into the conflict. Meanwhile, marine and air force fighter squadrons returned to recently closed bases in Thailand. Air force sorties doubled with the reinforcing aircraft, from an average of 204 sorties a day in March to an average over 400 a day in late April.

For Nixon, the direct response to the North Vietnamese forces was only one play in his bigger game. Beyond stymying the PAVN attack, the president thought it imperative to send a message of strength and commitment to Hanoi and to Moscow, and to send it with the most powerful weapon available: B-52 strikes in North Vietnam. Nixon believed these strikes to be a vital part of his great-power diplomacy and, as Kissinger later summarized, “a warning that things might get out of hand if the offensive did not stop.” General Abrams, however, considered these strikes a dangerous diversion of his most precious resource, the B-52s that he used as a mobile reserve, compensating for the combat power lost as US ground forces withdrew from the conflict. Worse still, each B-52 raid demanded extensive support by air force and navy fighters providing escort, chaff corridors, and defense suppression, reducing the number of attack sorties available to Abrams. Nixon overrode Abrams’ protests, and B-52s struck the North on April 10 and 13.

The president then directed a massive raid against Hải Phòng to coincide with Kissinger’s trip to Moscow on April 16. Abrams again vehemently opposed the strike, summarizing with the comment that “In my view the risks have remained unchanged and they are grave.” Nixon considered this a means of Abrams ensuring that the president would receive the blame if the PAVN offensive succeeded, and he and Kissinger decided to cancel the strike with the bombers airborne, an hour from their target area. However, Admiral Moorer intervened with the argument that “The military people out in Vietnam already think we are crazy. If we scuttle this flight and have them jettison the bombs … then if there were any doubts about us being crazy then they would be convinced of it.”¹² Nixon concurred, and the B-52 raid proceeded against Hải Phòng as scheduled. The following day, US forces attacked Hanoi for the first time since 1968. The dispute with Abrams was enough to persuade Nixon and Kissinger to send Haig to Indochina, to make clear to Abrams the broader purposes behind the B-52 strikes against North Vietnam. Additionally, Haig would serve as Nixon’s eyes in theater, providing the White House an independent assessment of the conflict. While the immediate crisis between the president and the theater commander subsided, at least on the surface, the issue continued to exacerbate the already weak relationship between them as the White House directed two more B-52 attacks in April, both against the Thanh Hóa area.¹³

On the Southern battlefronts, after the initial surges across the DMZ and against An Lộc, PAVN forces stalled, unprepared to take advantage of success. It was a pattern they would repeat on all fronts during the offensive. The PAVN’s inability to exploit opportunities reflected several factors: a rigid planning and command structure, logistics limitations, limited training in combined-arms tactics, and the increasing effectiveness of US air attacks. That pattern caused a fatal delay to PAVN efforts to take An Lộc quickly. As the PAVN 9th Division deployed into position for an attack that would exploit the early weakness of the ARVN garrison, it hesitated for nearly a week, awaiting resupply. The attack finally opened on April 13, only to be halted by ARVN forces, leaving the city divided between ARVN forces in the south and PAVN in the north. Two days later the PAVN launched another attempt at overrunning the city, but this attack failed as well, and PAVN forces settled into a siege of the city, denying both road access and aerial delivery of supplies to the defenders as they awaited reinforcements.

That same pattern of early success followed by a hesitant follow-up similarly afflicted PAVN forces along the DMZ. Seemingly unstoppable during the first days of the offensive, by early April they were at a halt, awaiting the supplies and reinforcements necessary to overcome the reconstituted ARVN defenses along the Cửa Việt River, under nearly continuous air attack by air force and navy fighters and B-52s. South Vietnamese forces on the defensive, however, failed to take advantage of the PAVN pause, instead exhausting the troops along the DMZ with futile attempts to take the offensive.

Meanwhile, as Thiệu committed South Vietnam’s strategic reserve forces into the battle in MR I, the divisional command structure under General Giai became increasingly ineffective. Ironically, it was the flow of reinforcements deployed under Thiệu’s orders that overwhelmed General Giai’s command. Formally, Giai commanded two regiments from the 3rd Division, and exercised operational control over two marine brigades, four Ranger groups, one armored brigade, and the territorial troops in the area. In a long-standing practice across the RVN’s armed forces, the marines and Rangers only formally acknowledged Giai’s authority, in practice reaching back to their headquarters in Saigon for direction. This deeply embedded practice led not just to inefficiency, but to corrosive mistrust and confusion, leading finally to a breakdown in the ARVN defenses.

The gradual deterioration in the South Vietnamese defenses accelerated in late April, as the PAVN resumed their offensive with a flanking attack on April 27, intended to cut off South Vietnamese forces from their supply routes to the south. By April 29, the defenses had contracted to a narrow corridor along Route 1; the following day, the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces (RVNAF) defenses collapsed, with RVNAF forces streaming south along Route 1. On the afternoon of May 1, American advisors evacuated the provincial capital, Quảng Trị, by helicopter, and the PAVN overran the city. For the first time in the war, the communist forces had taken a provincial capital. Worse, it appeared that the path was open to a rapid advance to the south and the fall of the ancient imperial city of Huế, portending the success of the PAVN offensive in MR I and perhaps the fall of Thiệu, with disastrous consequences for the RVN and the war effort.

Those days in late April saw the PAVN offensive in the Central Highlands close on the major ARVN bases, culminating in an attack by the PAVN 2nd Division on Tân Cảnh on April 24. There the PAVN unveiled another relatively advanced weapon, the Soviet AT-3 wire-guided missile, as they opened their attack. The impact of the AT-3 warhead on the command bunker incapacitated the 22nd Division commander, Colonel Lê Đức Đạt, and through the rest of the day he took no part in the defense of his garrison. That night the PAVN deployed medium tanks on the attack, the first time the North Vietnamese had used armored forces in MR II. The shock of these advanced weapons again disintegrated the ARVN defenses. Tân Cảnh fell that night, as helicopters evacuated the US advisory team. The way now lay open to Kontum, if the PAVN could seize the opportunity.

With the 22nd Division effectively out of action, Thiệu took the extraordinary step of deploying the 23rd Division northward into Kontum, with ARVN Colonel Lý Tòng Bá commanding a force of ARVN infantry, four battalions of Rangers, an Airborne brigade, and sector forces. Vann set to work summoning US air support, buying time for RVNAF forces to restore their defenses. Meanwhile he sent a stream of reports to Abrams focusing on corps commander Lieutenant General Ngô Du’s deficiencies in command, and on the disintegration of command cohesion in MR II.

The Path to Linebacker

As April turned to May, North Vietnam had reached the high-water mark of its Spring Offensive. South Vietnam’s forces had been routed in MR I, with the PAVN moving south to threaten Huế, and with the ancient capital in a state of panic. Kontum and An Lộc each lay under siege, both awaiting PAVN attacks threatening to deliver the coup de grâce once siege warfare had sufficiently weakened the RVNAF garrisons.

General Abrams had sent periodic assessments of the situation back to Washington since the opening of the offensive two months earlier, uniformly optimistic through late April. With the fall of Quảng Trị on May 1, however, the MACV commander submitted a somber summary of the battle, summarizing that:

I must report that as the pressure has mounted and the battle has become brutal the [ARVN] senior leadership has begun to bend and, in some instances, break. In adversity it is losing its will and cannot be depended on to take the measures necessary to stand and fight. … In light of this there is no basis for confidence that Huế or Kontum will be held.

Abrams and the US ambassador to South Vietnam, Ellsworth Bunker, took the same message to President Thiệu, who as a result replaced General Lãm as MR I commander on May 3 with General Ngô Quang Trường. Trường had expected the appointment, and responded rapidly, decisively, and successfully in bringing calm to a chaotic situation. He did so by restructuring the defenses north of Huế, by developing an effective system to allocate the vast quantities of firepower offered by US air and naval support forces, and most of all by infusing new spirit and determination into the city and its defenders.

The military crisis in Indochina played out against a backdrop of high-stakes political and diplomatic activity, critical to the success of Nixon’s foreign policy and political survival. Three weeks ahead loomed the Moscow Summit, the keystone of Nixon’s goal of reshaping superpower relationships among Moscow, Beijing, and Washington. Beyond the summit stretched the electoral campaign that would consume the attention, and limit the options, of the White House until the November 9 election. Always committed to acting from a position of strength, Nixon decided to order a massive strike against Hanoi for early May. Over time and in consultation with Kissinger, that idea gradually evolved into a blockade of North Vietnam, and finally to a plan to mine North Vietnam’s harbors.

On May 4, Nixon gathered with his most trusted advisors – Kissinger, Haig, and Secretary of the Treasury John Connally – to talk through his options. Nixon decided to order an all-out air offensive against North Vietnam and to mine the North Vietnamese ports. The air campaign would be designed to isolate North Vietnam from its sources of supply in the Soviet Union and China, and cut off the flow of supplies from North Vietnam to the combat zones in South Vietnam.

The conversation culminated with Admiral Moorer being summoned to the White House and directed to update the long-existing plans for mining North Vietnam’s ports, and to do so without either consulting or informing the secretary of defense or the MACV commander. The process by which this momentous decision was reached was a remarkable testimonial to the concentration of decision-making in the Nixon White House, and the dysfunctional relationship between the president and the military chain of command. Nixon convened the National Security Council (NSC) to discuss the situation in Indochina on May 8, and that afternoon ordered the mining of North Vietnam’s ports and the opening of a sustained attack on North Vietnam’s transportation system.

Linebacker and Pocket Money

Nixon addressed the nation on May 9 to announce his decisions, carefully timing the speech to occur simultaneously with the mining operation closing the port of Hải Phòng. In a somber tone, he summarized his strategy: “There is only one way to stop the killing. That is to keep the weapons of war out of the hands of the international outlaws of North Vietnam.” He followed with the stunning announcement of the mining of North Vietnam’s ports, and the sustained attack on the DRVN’s road and rail systems. But obscured by the tough tone and military measures, Nixon offered new negotiating terms that earlier would have been considered a surrender: upon the return of American POWs and an internationally supervised ceasefire, the United States would withdraw its forces from Vietnam within four months. Finally, Nixon spoke directly to the leadership in the Soviet Union, emphasizing that “We, the United States, and the Soviet Union, are on the threshold of a new relationship that can serve not only the interests of our two countries, but of world peace.” Nixon made clear that if the Soviets decided to derail that new relationship, the responsibility would be theirs.

As Nixon spoke, half a world away navy A-6s and A-7s mined Hải Phòng Harbor. In succeeding days, the navy shut down every port in North Vietnam and extended the mining operations to North Vietnam’s inland waterways. The navy conducted the mining of the ports through Operation Pocket Money, periodically replenishing the mines through the following months, and supplementing the mining with patrolling by ship, aircraft, and helicopter. The operation would continue until the following January.

Nixon and Kissinger were intent on avoiding the creeping incrementalism of President Lyndon Johnson’s earlier air offensive, Operation Rolling Thunder, and immediately after the mining operation ordered attacks taking the war directly into the enemy’s heartland. Kissinger called Moorer on the evening of May 8 to suggest a B-52 raid on Hanoi immediately after the mining operation. Moorer assured him that there was already a plan in motion, that Vogt had suggested a mass raid with precision bombs against Hanoi. The conversation set in motion the greatest air battle of the war.

On May 9, the CJCS named the air campaign Operation Linebacker, replacing the earlier Operation Rolling Thunder Alpha designation. The new name was designed to emphasize the differences between this campaign and Lyndon Johnson’s predecessor. Nixon expected this air campaign to apply relentless, ceaseless pressure to North Vietnam’s government, populace, and military forces, especially the logistics system. There would be no gradual escalation, but an immediate and overwhelming series of attacks. The highly centralized and episodic targeting process used under Johnson would be replaced by military decision-making, enabling the commanders in theater to shape the campaign and select the targets. Moreover, Linebacker would take advantage of precision-guided weapons, which offered orders of magnitude more effectiveness against fixed-point targets than the visually aimed ordnance used in Rolling Thunder.

On May 10, the air force launched a major strike against Hanoi, and the navy launched three successive waves against Hải Phòng and the ports to its north. The Vietnam People’s Air Force (VPAF) responded aggressively to challenge the US strikers. Two US fighters were shot down, but at a prohibitive cost to the North Vietnamese of eleven aircraft. In its aftermath, DRVN Defense Minister Võ Nguyên Giáp reviewed the day’s activities and directed a change in tactics for the VPAF, toward “secret, surprise attacks sure to achieve victories.” There would be no more mass confrontations between American and North Vietnamese fighter forces.

The day’s strikes set patterns for the US Air Force and Navy that would persist until the end of the Linebacker operation, months away. Under the direction of General Vogt, the air force structured its strikes around laser-guided weapons, now used for the first time in heavily defended areas. Vogt orchestrated these air force strikes with layered defenses for the strike aircraft – fighter escorts, chaff corridors to blind DRVN radars, aircraft to suppress SAM defenses, standoff electronic intelligence, and jamming support – flown from bases all across Southeast Asia. Conceptually powerful, these packages were complex and fragile, susceptible to breakdowns in coordination in the chaotic and dangerous environment over North Vietnam. By contrast, navy strikes, flown from carriers offshore, were generally formed from aircraft from a single air wing, simplifying planning and orchestration of the attacks. However, the navy had not yet adopted the laser-guided weapons that were so critical to air force attacks.

Operation Linebacker encountered many of the difficulties faced in the earlier Rolling Thunder campaign. Admiral Moorer decided to retain the system of route packages, or packs, that had shaped Rolling Thunder. They were designed to provide separation between air force and navy strike forces, but, in doing so, they practically eliminated any prospect of coordinated or massed attacks by US air forces. Route Pack 1, just north of the DMZ, would be the responsibility of MACV. Route Packs 2, 3, and 4, extending northward along the North Vietnamese panhandle, would be the domain of the navy. Route Pack 5 in the northwest would fall to the air force, operating out of Thailand. Route Pack 6 extended northeast out of Hanoi, covering the main logistics ties to China, and would be divided between the air force and the navy. Although defended by Laird and Moorer, the Route Pack structure constantly irritated the White House, where Nixon and Kissinger considered it a victory of service parochialism over military effectiveness.

The Linebacker operational environment proved to be as demanding as in Rolling Thunder. Indochina’s weather patterns precluded the sort of relentless attacks envisioned by Nixon, and the use of precision weaponry brought additional complexity and sensitivity to weather conditions. The demand for air support in the still-intense battles in the South created a continual tension with the requirements for strikes in the North, with Vogt trapped between Nixon’s urgency for Linebacker sorties there and Abrams’ demand for air-support sorties in the South. North Vietnam’s logistics networks were widespread and redundant, and the North Vietnamese government would spare no effort in mobilizing the population to ensure the effectiveness of their transportation system.

The diplomatic play defined by Nixon’s “triangular diplomacy” began immediately after the May 9 strikes. North Vietnam appealed to the Soviet Union to cancel the upcoming summit with Nixon and to send a flotilla into Hải Phòng Harbor in a direct military challenge to the American mining. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev convened the Soviet Politburo to address the decision. In the end, the Soviet Union decided to proceed with the summit, prioritizing its budding relationship with the United States over its relationship with its troublesome ally in Hanoi. The PRC faced no similar pressure, with its summit with Nixon already accomplished, but confined its response to routine diplomatic protests and to sending minesweepers to assist North Vietnam. In Nixon’s phrase, the communist superpowers decided that they had “bigger fish to fry” in their warming relations with the United States. Although the Soviet Union and PRC continued to provide the DRVN with weapons and supplies, they would not jeopardize their larger strategic interests.

North Vietnam’s offensive crested in mid-May, just as the Linebacker air campaign was gathering strength. North of Saigon, the PAVN siege of An Lộc was broken on May 4, at least partially, when the US Air Force developed tactics for high-level airdrops into the city. A week later, US and RVNAF intelligence provided warnings of a pending climactic attack on the city by the besieging PAVN forces. The attack opened on May 11 with a massive predawn artillery barrage, followed by deployment of a small armored force and a massive infantry assault. Taking full advantage of advance warning, Senior Advisor Lieutenant General James Hollingsworth marshaled massive, nearly continuous B-52 strikes, continuing the strikes throughout the day. Support by US gunships, B-52s, and tactical air bludgeoned the assault into a standstill, with the PAVN seizing two new sectors in the city but posing no threat to dislodge the ARVN defenders. A weaker attack two days later served only to add to the number of casualties on both sides. The PAVN called off the offensive on May 15 and adopted a blocking strategy designed to occupy RVNAF forces, drawing them away from populated areas to permit attacks on the pacification program. While An Lộc would stay in South Vietnamese hands, the terrain north of the city would remain under communist control until the end of the war, and through the ceasefire that followed.

Figure 9.1 A US Air Force team refueling on its way to North Vietnam during Operation Linebacker (October 1972).

Source: Pictures from History / Contributor / Universal Images Group / Getty Images.

In the Central Highlands, during the weeks of late April and early May, PAVN forces deployed into positions around Kontum, preparing for an armored attack to overwhelm the city’s defenders, who were led by the incompetent General Du. On May 10, President Thiệu replaced him with armor commander Lieutenant General Nguyễn Vӑn Toàn. By that point the defenses had been reestablished under Colonel Lê Đức Đạt, while Vann had personally assumed control of the B-52 sorties sent to MR II. The PAVN launched its first major assault on May 14, halted that night by a B-52 attack. The PAVN continued its attacks intermittently until May 29, but effective ARVN defenses, buttressed by B-52, gunship, and tactical air support, gradually weakened PAVN forces, allowing Vann to terminate the tactical emergency on May 31. Vann, who died in a helicopter accident on the night of June 10, had played a prominent role in the defense of Kontum and the combat in the Central Highlands.¹⁴

The DRVN Responds to the Second Air War

As these events transpired in the South, the North Vietnamese struggled to respond to Nixon’s all-out air war. North Vietnamese leaders had seriously underestimated Nixon’s response to their offensive, and the DRVN was unprepared for Operation Linebacker. The Politburo directed an assessment of the situation after the initial air attacks, measuring current stockpiles, the state of the transportation system, and the measures that would be required to continue the struggle through the coming months.¹⁵ The report was ready a week later, and its assessment was grim: “Our stock levels are low and we must be very economical in our expenditures of them if they are to last us through the next several months.” Gasoline and food stocks were critical and would require careful rationing.

The assessment stressed the overriding priority of the transportation system: “At present the work of supporting transportation and supply operations is our central, Number One priority. This work is of the greatest importance for us on all fronts: military, economic, political, and diplomatic. It is one of the conditions that will decide our success or failure in production and in battle.” Air defenses would be deployed to protect the transportation network, especially the roads and rails bringing supplies from China, and the routes from the heartland down to the battle area. The DRVN leadership persuaded the PRC to deploy oil pipelines to the DRVN border, to connect with other pipelines constructed by Hanoi to move the fuels southward toward the DRVN heartland and the battle area. Once finished, this network would remove a major load from the DRVN’s transportation network and facilitate the truck-borne traffic southward toward the battle areas. Meanwhile, both communist superpowers agreed to provide defensive weaponry to the North Vietnamese. Finally, the regime intensified civil defense measures, evacuating the population of Hanoi except for those involved in production, defense, or administration, and conducting a massive effort to build air-raid shelters for those remaining in the city.

North Vietnam’s lack of preparedness for the air offensive extended to its air defenses as well. In the years since Rolling Thunder, experienced SAM operators had rotated to other assignments. Additionally, PAVN air-defense forces had not kept abreast of the evolution of US electronic jamming equipment; nor were they familiar with a new generation of tactical aircraft and tactics in US air operations. In response, the DRVN accelerated upgrades to its air defenses, adopting optical guidance systems to counter the new American jamming systems.

As the air offensive battered the DRVN transportation network, especially on the northeast corridor toward China, the North Vietnamese developed a shuttle system integrating road and rail transport, working around the devastation caused by the air attacks. As the attacks continued, truck traffic shifted to predominantly night operations, and the North Vietnamese established a major storage and transshipment depot near the Chinese border. The DRVN mobilized its workforce even more thoroughly than earlier in the war, taking advantage of the manpower freed up by the destruction of most industries, and used this workforce to keep the roads open. At the outset of the campaign, the United States had estimated it would take four to six months for the DRVN to shift its logistics system away from the ports and onto roads and rail. As often happened, US planners underestimated the adaptiveness and organizational capacity of the DRVN bureaucracy: the massive effort to transform the logistics system took weeks, not months.

But there were many miles from the logistics depots at the Northern border to the battlefields in the South, and US air forces and naval gunfire contested every mile. Air force and navy air attacks steadily pounded the infrastructure and movement of supplies down the North Vietnam panhandle south of Hanoi. It was war by attrition, with the North Vietnamese air defenses destroying many of the attacking aircraft, but at the cost of heavy losses of their own in men and materiel.

By late May, the PAVN thrusts in the Central Highlands and north of Saigon had been countered, leaving the battlefields north of Huế as the last active arm of the DRVN’s great Spring Offensive. With the threats to the South now quieted, the United States could concentrate its firepower against PAVN forces in MR I, and Thiệu could commit the RVNAF’s strategic reserve to defend Huế. Nonetheless, the Politburo, intent on the political basis of the battle, insisted on continued attacks. Finally, on June 26, the last PAVN attack on the defenses of Huế failed quickly. In its aftermath, South Vietnamese forces, supported by massive US naval and air support, launched a counteroffensive to retake Quảng Trị. This city, reduced largely to rubble, was purely a symbolic and political target, but it became the focus of a months-long campaign steadily reinforced by both sides. On September 16, South Vietnam reclaimed the city, and the only provincial capital to fall in the DRVN’s offensive was back in South Vietnamese hands.

South Vietnam’s victory at Quảng Trị forced the DRVN Politburo to reassess its negotiating strategy and its objectives, setting the course for the settlement that would end the American role in the war. With the stagnation of the Spring Offensive and the loss of its most visible triumph, the Politburo’s subcommittee responsible for advising on the peace negotiations recommended that the Politburo lower its demands for the peace settlement. In a subsequent Politburo meeting, First Secretary Lê Duẩn argued that the DRVN needed to focus on its primary objective, America’s complete withdrawal from the war, contending that this achievement would inevitably lead over time to the collapse of South Vietnam. The Politburo agreed to a “loosening” of the political terms of the settlement, no longer demanding that Thiệu be removed from office and a coalition government established.

Kissinger met with North Vietnamese negotiators in July, August, and September, with both sides working to reach an agreement before the November 7 presidential election.¹⁶ The sides made measurable progress toward agreement during these rounds, and both expected major movement when they met in October. As the October talks neared, Nixon and Kissinger discussed their strategic goals for the endgame of the war and with respect to South Vietnam. Nixon emphasized that “we cannot continue to allow Vietnam to inhibit us in any way as we develop and play our big game out – the game with the Russians and the Chinese and the Japanese and the Europeans – and the big game now becomes enormously important.” He and Kissinger concluded that South Vietnam had perhaps a 25 percent chance of survival after the United States withdrew, and that in that context the most important thing, to quote Nixon, was “the bigger subject: How does the United States look in the way it handles this goddamn thing?” The United States would have to be seen to have “gone the extra mile” in supporting South Vietnam, but in the end would have to withdraw from the war and avoid a postwar entanglement in Indochina in order to achieve Nixon’s higher-priority international goals.¹⁷

As both sides had anticipated, the October round of negotiations led to an agreement between North Vietnam and the United States, as Lê Đức Thọ tabled a draft settlement that would permit Thiệu to remain in office. The North Vietnamese political concessions allowed Kissinger and Lê Đức Thọ to agree to peace terms on October 20, 1972, and Nixon to suspend Operation Linebacker on October 22. American air forces would continue to attack North Vietnam but would be limited to targets below the 20th parallel. Ironically, Nixon issued this directive on the same day that South Vietnamese President Thiệu forcefully rejected the terms reached by Lê Đức Thọ and Kissinger.¹⁸

Linebacker II: The “Christmas Bombing”

Thiệu’s rejection of the peace settlement in late October set the stage for a protracted search for an agreement that both North and South Vietnam would accept, with the United States – or more specifically, Kissinger – now trapped between the Vietnamese parties. Kissinger and Lê Đức Thọ underwent two arduous negotiating rounds after the presidential elections, from November 20–4 and again December 5–13, coming close to a settlement but with the negotiations finally foundering on essentially symbolic issues.

Nixon met with Laird and the JCS on November 30 to direct planning for two contingencies: for a North Vietnamese refusal to sign a peace agreement, and for a North Vietnamese violation of the settlement if an agreement was reached. On December 6, Haig forwarded Nixon’s direction that the JCS form a “tightly controlled planning group” for “an immediate target-planning effort for North Vietnam.” Haig provided the planning framework for the strikes, emphasizing the psychological effects of the bombing:

The strike plan … must be so configured as to create the most massive shock effective in a psychological context. There is to be no dissipation of effort through scattered attacks against a number of varied targets, but rather a clear concentration of effort against essential national assets designed to achieve psychological as well as strategic results.¹⁹

On December 13, Kissinger and Lê Đức Thọ agreed to suspend the peace talks and return to their respective capitals for consultation. Nixon, Kissinger, and Haig met in the Oval Office the following morning to decide on their next moves. Angry and frustrated with both Vietnamese parties, Nixon reluctantly agreed to an all-out bombing campaign against North Vietnam, employing B-52s for the first time over North Vietnam’s heartland. This coercive assault against the North would be coupled with a less vivid but equally powerful campaign of coercion against South Vietnam, as the White House threatened to cut off diplomatic, economic, and military support for its long-term ally. The United States, to use Nixon’s phrase, had found it necessary to “turn on both sides” to find an exit from the war. Nixon and his advisors decided to conduct an all-out bombing campaign against North Vietnam until December 28, and if there was no progress toward a settlement by then, to transition to a bilateral deal with the North Vietnamese. In return for the release of the American POWs held by North Vietnam, the United States would end the bombing and withdraw its forces.²⁰

North Vietnam’s political and military leadership had long expected B-52 raids against Hanoi and Hải Phòng, and as early as January 1969 issued a defense plan against such attacks. But when the B-52s attacked the North at the opening of the Easter Offensive, the DRVN’s air defenses proved unable even to detect the B-52s, given the intense jamming and chaff that shielded the bombers. At that moment the nation was helpless in the face of a B-52 attack against the heartland. Consequently, North Vietnam’s Air Defense Service performed a rigorous self-assessment and study of the situation, and then began a systematic, nationwide search for solutions to the problems of detecting, tracking, targeting, and engaging the heavy bombers. By September the General Staff had approved a defense plan outlining projected American tactics and objectives in a sustained B-52–led offensive, and the forces to be used in defending Hanoi. Over the following months, the DRVN continued to study B-52 jamming patterns, developed radar and missile engagement tactics to counter the jamming, and deployed an integrated visual and radar network to provide warning of an attack, updating its air-defense campaign plan in September and again in November. As the negotiations continued and stalemate neared in mid-December, the DRVN evacuated the nonessential population from major cities.

Nixon’s decision to send the B-52s against Hanoi triggered detailed planning and preparation throughout the US military. Target lists for the attacks were developed by the JCS and White House; detailed mission planning was conducted at the Strategic Air Command (SAC) headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska. Attacks by B-52s stationed on Anderson Air Base (Guam) and U Tapao Air Base (Thailand) would be supported by 7th Air Force fighters, by Task Force 77 naval forces operating off Indochina, and by air-refueling aircraft stationed on Okinawa and in the Philippines. The B-52s would conduct night attacks to counter North Vietnamese fighter defenses; 7th Air Force and TF 77 fighter-bombers would conduct day attacks to maintain the pressure on PAVN defenses and to wear down both the air defenders and the populace.

The bombers struck on the night of December 18, 1972. It was the first night of an air campaign formally designated “Operation Linebacker II” and informally remembered as the “Christmas Bombing.” SAC planners, operating from a long history of rigid centralized control, constructed an attack plan consisting of three waves of attacks, hours apart, all following the same ground track and flying at the same altitudes and airspeeds. Overall, 129 bombers attacked the Hanoi area, waves arriving throughout the night. North Vietnamese SA-2 missiles brought down three B-52s during the attack.

The second night of the offensive saw the same pattern of stereotyped, predictable, and repetitive tactics, though all the bombers made it back safely. The third night, however, proved catastrophic for the attacking bombers. Six were destroyed, with another damaged beyond repair. Concerns that had existed since the first raid now reached the highest levels, both civilian and military. The stereotyped tactics violated every principle of warfare, providing stark evidence of a command and planning system that had no feel for the existing conditions on the battlefield. The protracted cycles of planning and mission preparation prevented the lessons learned from being applied for days, trapping the air offensive in an ineffective series of highly predictable attacks. Two more bombers were destroyed the next night, December 21–2, in a raid against Hải Phòng. There were no bombers lost the next two nights, as the missions struck targets outside the concentrated defenses of the Hanoi–Hải Phòng area.

Christmas Day brought a bombing halt ordered by the White House. It was a welcome respite for both sides. For the US forces, it provided the aircrews and maintenance forces an opportunity to restructure air operations, to adjust tactical planning responsibilities and processes, and repair and service their hard-used aircraft. The North Vietnamese air-defense crews likewise took full advantage of the pause in the fighting. Despite their exhaustive preparation for the air offensive, North Vietnam’s air-defense forces had proved deficient in two respects: the density of the defenses covering Hanoi, and the number of missiles ready for use. The pause enabled them to redeploy and reposition missile batteries, and build up an inventory of missiles ready for combat. The US bombers returned to Hanoi and Hải Phòng with a massive single-wave attack on December 26, losing 2 of the 120 bombers engaged in the attack. The bombers continued with the single-wave attacks for three more nights, losing two more aircraft. The campaign closed with raids conducted on the night of December 29, with Nixon then restricting attacks on North Vietnam to 20 degrees north in response to an agreement with North Vietnam to resume negotiations.²¹

The United States and North Vietnam had continued to communicate throughout the bombing, and agreed on December 28 to resume negotiations “based on the principles of the October draft embodying the textual changes agreed upon during the meetings in November and December.” This agreement constituted a diplomatic victory for the North Vietnamese side, confirming that while North Vietnam would agree to some adjustment to the terms agreed earlier, the primary issues addressed in the October agreement would remain untouched. The massive bombardment ordered by Nixon had been sufficient to meet his diplomatic and political requirements, but did not provide the basis for any significant change in the settlement. As Kissinger aide John Negroponte famously remarked, the United States had bombed North Vietnam in order to “force them to accept our concessions.” South Vietnam’s President Thiệu continued to resist the peace settlement until the final days of January, finally accepting the settlement on January 23. The agreement was signed in Paris on January 27, 1973.

Conclusion

The bitter combat of Linebacker II and its outcome reflected the conflicting strengths of the combatants. The United States brought to bear unmatchable firepower and technology, propelled by Nixon’s sense of urgency. The North Vietnamese countered these qualities through national mobilization, careful study and preparation for the campaign, and their ability to adapt rapidly to the circumstances of the air battles as they occurred.

In the end, the escalatory cycle begun by the North Vietnamese offensive, then countered by Nixon with massive reinforcements, the mining of North Vietnamese ports, and the Linebacker air campaigns, led to a bloody stalemate. Neither side proved able to establish military dominance sufficient to dictate the terms of peace. The Paris Peace Accords signed on January 27, 1973 reflected that stalemate. The United States recovered its POWs and withdrew from the war; the North Vietnamese secured their position in South Vietnam and the withdrawal of their most formidable foe, but failed to achieve the political outcome that had been the whole point of the war.

In the aftermath of the settlement, the North and South Vietnamese never suspended the conflict, with both sides aggressively violating the ceasefire. In early March 1973, Nixon considered ordering retaliatory air attacks on the North Vietnamese, but he turned against the idea. Over the following months, the North Vietnamese extended and upgraded their logistics network, rebuilt the forces that had taken so severe a beating during the Easter Offensive, and reorganized to address the operational shortfalls that PAVN forces had demonstrated during the 1972 campaign. These measures, combined with the decline of US financial and military support in the aftermath of the ceasefire, enabled North Vietnamese forces to overrun South Vietnam in a lightning offensive in March–April 1975.

10 The Second Civil War, 1973–1975

George J. Veith

The signing of the Paris Peace Accords on January 27, 1973 brought neither peace nor a halt to the war. Although both Vietnamese antagonists had suffered tremendous physical damage during the 1972 offensive, their irreconcilable political visions prevented them from creating peace. Each state desperately needed the accords: their economies had been devastated, and hundreds of thousands of civilians and wounded soldiers needed care. Yet despite Hanoi’s written pledge to end the fighting, it remained determined to conquer Saigon and unite the country under its flag.

There are four main reasons for the defeat of South Vietnam: North Vietnamese abrogation of the Paris Peace Accords, dire South Vietnamese economic conditions, the reduction of US aid and its debilitating effect on the South Vietnamese military, and Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam) President Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu’s strategic military blunders. The first three forced Thiệu into an impossible predicament, which led to the fourth. The outcome was the fall of South Vietnam.

The 1973–5 period, important as it was, has received scant attention from Western scholars. For most, the war ended when the Americans left. The volumes that provide the best overview from the communist perspective are Hoàng Vӑn Thái, The Decisive Years, and Võ Nguyên Giáp, The General Headquarters in the Spring of Brilliant Victory.¹ Perhaps the best-known is Vӑn Tiến Dũng’s Our Great Spring Victory, but Dũng’s account begins in the February 1975 time frame, skipping the crucial lead-up to the main offensive.² Also well-known but focused mainly on the B-2 Front in South Vietnam is Trần Vӑn Trà’s Vietnam: History of the Bulwark B2 Theatre.³ All of these volumes have been translated into English. For the South Vietnamese and American perspective, see Henry Kissinger, Ending the Vietnam War, William E. Le Gro, Vietnam from Cease-Fire to Capitulation, Cao Vӑn Viên, The Final Collapse, Frank Snepp, Decent Interval, and George J. Veith, Black April.⁴ There are also several excellent books by journalists.⁵

The View from Saigon

With the accords completed, on January 23, 1973, President Thiệu set several key domestic policy goals. First, mark all houses, buildings, and territory with South Vietnamese flags to assert government control. Second, develop an economic plan to rebuild the destruction caused by the 1972 offensive, and return thousands of refugees to productive lives. Some 600,000 people were still housed in temporary camps, of which 400,000 were in Military Region (MR) I.⁶ Third, carefully guard against communist political or military attacks. Fourth, open talks with the Provisional Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Southern Vietnam (PRG) in Paris to create a National Council for National Reconciliation and Concord (NCNRC) that had been mandated by the Paris Accords to organize an election in three months.

Despite the strictures against further warfare, both sides continued the fighting. Shortly before the signing of the Paris Accords, communist forces launched numerous small-scale attacks across South Vietnam to seize hamlets, block roads, and capture key pieces of terrain. Called Landgrab 73 by the Americans, the goal was to occupy government-held land and seize population. The communist units then awaited the arrival of teams from the International Commission for Control and Supervision (ICCS), a body created by the accords to monitor the ceasefire. The communists believed the teams, comprised of military officers from four separate countries, would then affirm communist control over the seized territory. However, allowing the communist units to maintain these positions would cripple South Vietnam. Consequently, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) counterattacked to drive out the communist units. The ARVN continued fighting past the ceasefire, scheduled for 8:00 a.m. on January 28, 1973. By February 7, all hamlets had been retaken and the roads had been reopened. Both sides suffered heavy casualties, and the physical damage was widespread.

In addition to the smaller skirmishes, two large battles also erupted, both in MR I, the northernmost part of South Vietnam. Several hours before the ceasefire, a task force composed of South Vietnamese marines and armor attacked and broke through the North Vietnamese defenses in northern Quảng Trị province. They moved quickly and captured the small river port of Cửa Việt. The People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), fearful that the South Vietnamese could block supplies to its units, drove out the marines. At the same time, the PAVN launched an assault on the day of the ceasefire and captured the small port of Sa Huỳnh in southern MR I. The ARVN recaptured the town but only after almost a month of heavy fighting. Just as the ARVN could not allow the communists to expand their territory, General Võ Nguyên Giáp could not permit the South Vietnamese to disrupt Hanoi’s hard-won gains from the 1972 offensive.

More ominously, despite the accords prohibiting the further infiltration of men and equipment into South Vietnam, Hanoi increased the flow of soldiers and war materiel into the South. The commander of Group 559, the unit responsible for the Hồ Chí Minh Trail, writes that, on February 5, the PAVN High Command ordered him to “step up its transport tasks, delivering about 80,000 tons of goods to various battlefields.”⁷ The accords had begun under a dark cloud.

By mid-February, the fighting had slowed, but it did not completely stop. Given Hanoi’s ongoing infiltration, Thiệu ordered his commanders to hold all ground. This decision left his military badly overstretched and tied down in static defenses. It was a defensive posture dictated by the accords’ stricture on no further fighting, but was also to ensure that Saigon continued to control the vast bulk of the population and territory. Thiệu’s postwar choice reinforced his earlier, uncompromising formula known as the “Four No’s”: no political recognition of the communists; no neutralization of South Vietnam; no coalition government; and no surrender of territory. Paramount for Thiệu was no coalition government. This was the crux of the issue. Known as the “political solution,” many outsiders had advocated a coalition as the only possible resolution to the long war. Thiệu, however, held an unwavering conviction that the presence of enemy troops on South Vietnamese soil made any coalition a slippery slope to defeat.

Although Thiệu strongly opposed an alliance with the PRG, he had offered a national election with them several times in 1969. His main conditions were that the PRG renounce violence and that its candidates did not run as communists, since the RVN constitution barred any communist or neutralist candidates. The PRG had turned him down each time. In late 1972, aware that the accords would require both sides to participate in an election, Thiệu used the temporary decree powers that had been granted to him by the National Assembly in June 1972 to prepare for a possible future electoral contest with the PRG. He gutted the existing Political Party Law (#9/69, June 19, 1969). Thiệu sought to force the multitude of smaller nationalist parties to coalesce either with his own newly formed political organization called the Democracy Party or into an opposition party. In mid-1972, over twenty parties were legally operating under the previous law. Most were small and urban-based. Only a few, like the Progressive Nationalist Movement (PNM) or the Farmer–Worker Party, had even a modicum of a national presence.

Thiệu feared this proliferation of noncommunist political parties would fragment their vote in a political competition with the PRG. The new law was deliberately designed with tough operating requirements. Each party now needed a chapter in at least half of the provinces, plus one in Saigon. Each chapter must have 5 percent of the registered voters and have branches in 25 percent of the villages in that province. Each party had until March 27, 1973 to meet the validation conditions. Otherwise, the Ministry of the Interior would disband the party.

After the presidential election in 1971, Thiệu had decided to form a political entity called the Democracy Party. It was designed to win elections by using the existing governmental structure in the countryside to mobilize and convince the population to vote for nationalist candidates. By November 1972, organizational efforts had been completed. By early 1973, party leaders claimed they had enrolled several hundred thousand civilian supporters. By mid-March 1973, Thiệu’s Democracy Party had met the legal requirements. An opposition organization called the Social Democratic Alliance, composed of several of the major opposition parties, had also been established, but it did not yet meet the new law’s prerequisites. Thiệu ordered the Ministry of the Interior to allow the new party to conduct organizational activities, hoping it could coalesce into a viable opposition.

Concurrently, Thiệu ordered his minister for the economy to create a plan to resettle the refugees and improve the economy. For Thiệu, fixing the latter was key to convincing the South Vietnamese people to vote for him in an election against a PRG opponent. Beginning in 1970, he had taken steps to reform the South Vietnamese economy, and a combination of new financial programs and a massive land reform had sparked economic growth. Despite this progress, the RVN budget deficit had doubled over the previous several years. Thiệu had greatly expanded the South Vietnamese military to replace departing US troops, the process known as Vietnamization. The sizable increase in government spending had kept inflation percolating at high levels despite efforts to contain it with increased US economic aid. The 1972 offensive had only accelerated that trend. Inflation had increased by 24 percent in 1972, the piaster’s value had dropped, critical American economic aid was being reduced, and US military in-country spending was about to cease. To resettle refugees, pay for reconstruction, and feed a million soldiers and their families, Thiệu had to spend even more money, but he needed to accomplish that without making inflation worse or destroying the piaster’s value. To achieve these goals, he desperately needed peace and more US economic aid.

Reaching agreement with the PRG on a process for elections quickly proved troublesome. On March 19, the negotiations to form the National Council began at a chateau called La Celle-Saint-Cloud outside of Paris. The Paris Accords had not specified what type of elections, whether for the presidency or a National Assembly, leaving it to the RVN and PRG to determine. The RVN’s proposal was to form the National Council, hold presidential elections, and demobilize troops. The PRG countered by demanding Saigon first establish democratic liberties, form the council, and hold elections, in that order. The PRG insisted that ensuring “democratic liberties” (meaning the release of any civilians currently held in RVN jails on suspicion of communist sympathies) was “fundamental and must be resolved before there can be progress on the other issues.”⁸ The PRG also demanded elections for an assembly rather than for the presidency. Moreover, a Third Force, comprised of Vietnamese who supported neither side, was supposed to be included on the National Council. As on the other items, neither side could agree on who would comprise the Third Force.

To break the deadlock, on April 25 Thiệu offered significant political concessions. He agreed to general elections for an assembly and promised to remove the constitutional prohibition against communist political activity within thirty days. After sixty days, both sides would convene the National Council to discuss the election and demobilize a portion of their troops. Within ninety days, the council would enact an election law, and, a month later, a national election would be held that included all parties. The vote would be internationally supervised. Thiệu proposed that if the PRG approved and strictly implemented the ceasefire, Saigon would also “abolish the restrictions to the democratic liberties due to the war situation.”⁹ The PRG refused and instead offered its own six-point proposal, which Thiệu declined. The negotiations were stalemated and would never reach agreement on any issue.

The View from Hanoi

Why would the communists turn down Thiệu’s offer? First Secretary Lê Duẩn in Hanoi certainly faced issues as difficult as those Thiệu confronted. After signing the accords, the Politburo also sought to focus initially on economic revival. As General Giáp notes: “Some people thought that the priority then was to preserve peace, achieve national concord, [and] create stability for about five or ten years.”¹⁰ North Vietnam urgently needed a respite from the war. After years of US bombing, particularly during the 1972 offensive, its limited infrastructure was in ruins. Roads were potholed with bomb craters, many bridges were damaged or unusable, and industrial output was barely functioning. Moreover, the PAVN had suffered heavy casualties in 1972, and a significant amount of its Soviet- and Chinese-supplied equipment had been destroyed. To conclude the Paris Accords, Hanoi had seemingly abandoned its long-standing demand for the removal of Thiệu and the formation of a coalition government before agreeing to a peace agreement.

Despite this concession, the Politburo viewed the settlement as providing three key advantages. First, the withdrawal of US forces. Second, an in-place ceasefire that allowed its troops to remain and that legitimized a communist political presence in South Vietnam. Third, their belief that the ceasefire was conditional on the accords’ being successfully transformed into a political contest. That did not mean elections, but that the United States would force a power-sharing agreement on Thiệu.

By late March 1973, however, Hanoi was confronted by a major propaganda problem. For years it had bandied the slogan “Americans out, puppets collapse.” Although the Americans were leaving, Saigon showed no signs of disintegration. Consequently, on March 27, the Politburo met to review the first two months of the accords. Some Politburo members, like Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) Premier Phạm Vӑn Đồng, wanted to emphasize reconstruction rather than new military adventures in the South. Lê Duẩn, who had lobbied for the 1968 and 1972 offensives, remained determined to conquer South Vietnam. He opened the session by claiming that South Vietnam had massively violated the accords, which was partially true, since the ARVN had continued fighting past the ceasefire date to remove the communist units that had seized territory during Landgrab 73. Lê Duẩn recommended that the Politburo begin planning for another offensive. General Giáp supported Lê Duẩn – a significant change, since he had been against both the 1968 and 1972 offensives. With the US withdrawal, however, Giáp believed that his military was stronger than the RVN’s armed forces. In early April, Giáp formed a top-secret team named the Central Cell that would devise a plan to conquer South Vietnam by 1976.

Giáp spent the next two months gathering information from his commanders in the South to prepare for another Politburo meeting in May. His goal was simple: use their reports to sway those Politburo members who were reluctant to approve another offensive. On May 24, the Politburo held its meeting. According to Giáp, Lê Duẩn again began by claiming that the South Vietnamese were still massively violating the ceasefire and were encroaching on communist territory. He demanded the army fight back, proclaiming that “The revolution must march forward through the path of violence. By doing so, we are sure to win victory.” Giáp then provided an overview of the military state of affairs, outlining the situations in the various regions. He postulated that the primary reason for the South Vietnamese success in seizing communist territory was the PAVN’s refusal to fight back. Giáp offered the following sharp assessment: “If things continue like this, the situation will leave us at a tremendous disadvantage.”¹¹ The two men’s exhortations convinced the others, and the Politburo voted to return to war, even though public speeches continued to declare Hanoi’s priority was economic reconstruction.

On July 6, 1973, the Central Committee rubber-stamped the Politburo’s decision. Giáp wrote that “Nobody thought any longer in terms of respites … The combat, we realized, would drag on.” It was, he felt, “not possible to stop in mid-journey.”¹² On October 4, the Central Committee formally approved Resolution 21, which codified the Politburo’s decision to militarily conquer the South. The ramifications were immediate. On October 20, the PRG announced a decision to “fight back … in order to defend the liberated zone.”¹³ The accords were dead, although only Hanoi knew it.

The American Effort

Despite the continuing fighting, many provisions of the accords were still carried out. In Saigon, the communists were allowed to establish a delegation at Tân Sơn Nhất Air Base to coordinate the various procedures created by the accords, such as the return of prisoners and the demarcation of territory. The ICCS teams arrived in-country and began carrying out their duties, although the communists strictly limited their access within their territorial zones. Hanoi began returning US and ARVN prisoners but balked at forcing the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia to account for missing Americans or to convince them to begin negotiations for a peace settlement. Politburo member Lê Đức Thọ told Henry Kissinger that they were unable to influence them, which at the time seemed doubtful, given Hanoi’s material support to its revolutionary allies. His plea, however, would later prove accurate. The communist Pathet Lao group did enter into negotiations with the Lao government, and a ceasefire was agreed and a peace settlement was signed by the two parties in April 1973.

On February 1, US President Richard Nixon had sent a secret letter to Phạm Vӑn Đồng offering over $3 billion in aid to help North Vietnam and the rest of Indochina recover from the war. The financial package, which Kissinger had discussed in October 1972 with Lê Đức Thọ, but which Nixon had not coordinated beforehand with Congress, was designed to induce Hanoi to comply with the accords. Kissinger visited Hanoi in mid-February to discuss future relations and to establish a Joint Economic Center to manage any forthcoming aid. Nixon, however, had provided strict instructions to Kissinger that any aid would be directly tied to Hanoi’s rigorous compliance with the accords. In particular, Kissinger sought answers on Americans still missing in action, insisted Hanoi halt its infiltration, and demanded an end to the fighting. Phạm Vӑn Đồng deflected Kissinger’s arguments and instead condemned Saigon’s behavior. Although little was accomplished at these meetings, and Hanoi maintained its infiltration of men and equipment into South Vietnam, the US continued its withdrawal. By the end of March, the last American troops had departed. All that remained in Saigon of the once formidable American presence was the US Embassy and a small military team called the Defense Attaché Office (DAO) to coordinate ongoing military aid to the RVN.

Several days later, Thiệu departed Saigon to convene with Nixon in San Clemente, California to discuss future American support. His goals were to acquire significant new weapons for his military, gain new infusions of economic aid until South Vietnam could achieve self-sufficiency, and confirm Nixon’s intentions for when – not “if,” in his mind – Hanoi once more attacked the South. He was deeply worried about US military reactions to enemy incursions. Meeting on April 2, Nixon asked Thiệu for his analysis of the situation. Thiệu thought Hanoi might launch another offensive later that summer. He asked Nixon what his response would be if Hanoi attacked again. Since Nixon had already publicly threatened Hanoi about its numerous violations of the accords, the US president reaffirmed that “in the event of a massive communist offensive the American reaction would be sharp and tough.”¹⁴ To keep Hanoi guessing – and fearing congressional wrath – Nixon refused to go beyond his vague warnings. Thiệu was not reassured by Nixon’s comments, but he did not insist on a more forthright statement.

Regarding aid, Thiệu said that South Vietnam “faced pressing emergency problems.” These included resettling refugees and rebuilding the shattered economy. “We have to solve these problems,” Thiệu said, “in order to ensure political and social stability.” Saigon’s “goal is to achieve self-sustained growth … in the shortest time [to reduce] the present excessive dependence … on external assistance.”¹⁵ Thiệu asked for $1.5 billion a year for three years, or $4 billion spread over eight years. Nixon, under heavy pressure from both the growing Watergate scandal and the increasingly antiwar stance of Congress, could only promise to review Thiệu’s financial appeal. Although Thiệu returned home believing he had secured future US military and economic support, renewed fighting quickly soured his mood.

The fighting, however, was not the only issue. Ignoring Nixon’s warnings and the strict ban against further infiltration, Hanoi continued to pour men and equipment into the South. Nixon had delayed a military riposte until all US prisoners had been released. Moreover, Nixon had little support in Congress for further military action in Vietnam. Yet, given the obvious flouting of the accords, Nixon could no longer look the other way. Although he had declared that the US reaction would be “sharp and tough,” in mid-April he sent US aircraft to strike targets in Laos along the infiltration routes. It was a weak response compared with the massive bombing that had helped turn back the 1972 invasion, but Hanoi did agree to a request for Lê Đức Thọ to meet with Kissinger in Paris in mid-May to review and solve the ongoing issues.

After tense negotiations between all three sides, they finally concluded a joint communiqué, called Ceasefire II, that was issued on June 14. Among its components, it ordered a halt to the fighting, prescribed that zones of control be determined between the opposing armies, and instructed the release of civilian prisoners and the formation of the NCNRC. None of these agreements were fulfilled. Although the fighting diminished, it did not end. Most prisoners were released, but no zones of control were delineated. North Vietnamese infiltration continued at a high pace, and the talks in Paris between the two Vietnamese sides remained deadlocked. For South Vietnam, the failure of Ceasefire II would mark the beginning of its decline, highlighted by a contracting economy and sinking morale.

Shortly thereafter, Graham Martin arrived on July 17 to replace the highly esteemed Ellsworth Bunker as the US ambassador to the RVN. Martin was a tough, hard-line anticommunist. Nixon’s mandate to Martin was to save South Vietnam, but despite the new ambassador’s frantic efforts, after years of war that had cost thousands of American lives, billions of dollars, and caused serious discord in US society, many congressional representatives had turned profoundly antiwar. The 1972 elections in the United States had given the antiwar opponents in Congress a majority, and they intended to legislate a halt to American involvement, regardless of its effect upon South Vietnam. Consequently, the attack on the infiltration routes in Laos in April, combined with the recent revelation that the United States had been secretly bombing PAVN troop concentrations and logistic bases in Cambodia since 1969, sparked a congressional reaction.

On June 4, as Kissinger and Lê Đức Thọ were in Paris discussing a new agreement, the Senate passed the Case–Church Amendment to ban any funds for US military operations in Indochina. The House agreed in late June, and with his congressional opponents holding a veto-proof majority, Nixon was forced to sign the bill. It set August 15 as the terminal date for any US military activity in Southeast Asia without the express consent of Congress. To deter any effort by Nixon to circumvent this restriction, Congress passed the War Powers Act in November 1973, which required the president to seek congressional approval to send armed forces into combat anywhere in the world. Nixon’s promise to respond forcefully to communist violations was now subject to congressional authorization, which would not come. Saigon’s last, best hope to defend itself was ongoing military and economic aid. That, too, was about to disappear.

A New Year – 1974

After the PRG announcement in October 1973, heavier fighting resumed. For Thiệu, speaking in the city of Cần Thơ on January 4, 1974, he declared that the war had begun again. It could not have come at a worse time, as the economy, despite Thiệu’s plans, had sunk into a near depression. Shortly after the summit with Nixon in April 1973, the RVN ministry of trade and industry had proposed a short-term program “to get the economy moving toward recovery and development by the end of 1973.” The only way to achieve Thiệu’s reconstruction goals to resettle refugees and rebuild destroyed infrastructure was to increase the 1973 budget by 55 billion piasters.¹⁶

Thiệu hoped Nixon’s promised aid would fill the budget gap, but the plan failed for two reasons. First, the United States cut aid instead of increasing it. Second, inflation in South Vietnam suddenly soared in the summer of 1973, triggered by a shortfall in rice, the country’s most important food commodity. Even with increased miracle rice production in the Mekong River Delta, the country’s breadbasket, South Vietnam could not overcome its food deficit. The growing urban population, the 1972 offensive that had prevented crops from being planted, South Vietnam’s large military, plus thousands of refugees who needed to be fed and who were concurrently not farming, contributed to the sudden shortfall. Rice shortages had become so drastic that the first week of July 1973 saw the second-highest price increase on record. At precisely the same time, the RVN government in Saigon, desperate for revenue, had enacted a new 10 percent tax on all sales. By mid-July, prices had risen 31 percent since the beginning of the year.¹⁷

Public outrage forced Saigon to partially relent on the tax, but rice shortages combined with an acute surge in world commodity prices continued the inflationary uptick. By the end of 1973, a dreadful blend of increased warfare, low economic activity, and high unemployment had drained South Vietnam’s financial coffers. Thiệu’s earlier hopes to revitalize the South Vietnamese economy with a massive jolt of US aid were also crushed, as he did not receive the amounts he hoped for. Thiệu’s reconstruction and economic revival plans were dead. Worse, American military aid, which his armed forces completely depended on, was also being drastically reduced just as enemy attacks were mounting.

The American official responsible for managing military aid to that war-torn land was Major General John E. Murray, who headed the DAO. The US Army had suddenly informed Murray in mid-December 1973 that all operational funds were frozen until the next fiscal year, which began in July 1974. Murray asked Ambassador Martin’s permission to inform the South Vietnamese command so it could manage its remaining supplies, but Martin denied his request. He hoped Congress would grant more aid. Instead, Congress slashed the following year’s budget even more, reducing it to $1.126 billion from the previous $2.1 billion.

After the vote, Martin allowed Murray to inform the South Vietnamese of the dramatic reduction. Thiệu was shocked: his military had been burning through supplies defending themselves against communist attacks without knowing that their logistic requests were going unfilled. On June 1, 1974, Murray wrote a prophetic cable to the Pentagon detailing the likely effects of the congressional action. He claimed that “In the final analysis, you can roughly equate cuts in support to loss of real estate.” If there was a further reduction to a level around $600 million, Murray stated, the United States should just “write off [South Vietnam] as a bad investment and a broken promise.”¹⁸ Murray was proposing that aid cuts were destroying South Vietnam’s territorial integrity because the military could not defend the country against the enemy’s growing attacks.

Since Congress was unaware that Nixon had secretly promised Thiệu to provide robust aid in exchange for South Vietnam’s signature on the Paris Accords, in late July the joint House–Senate conference voted to further reduce the amount of military aid to Vietnam. The congressional action was both an attempt to force Thiệu to politically compromise with the PRG, which he had attempted to do (only to be rebuffed), and a desire to extricate the United States from propping up what many antiwar leaders claimed was a repressive dictatorship. Congress further reduced the amount from $1.126 billion to $1 billion. Then, Senator John Stennis (D-Mississippi) decided to consolidate all money for Vietnam into one fund, called the “Defense Assistance Vietnam” (DAV) program. Everything was to be allocated to the DAV. All costs, including many not previously charged to the Vietnam budget, such as the packing and crating of ammunition and the DAO operating costs, now had to be expensed to the DAV.

The grim aid situation for South Vietnam only grew progressively worse. In early August, the House voted to appropriate only $700 million of the $1 billion authorized. Since all costs were to be charged to the DAV, by subtracting American operating expenses from the budget, the practical effect was to lower the $700 million to only $500 million for the South Vietnamese. This was below Murray’s cutoff level where the South Vietnamese could adequately defend themselves. With $500 million, Saigon could barely afford ammunition and fuel, let alone other critical supplies.

The effects on Saigon’s military performance were demoralizing. South Vietnamese military commander General Cao Vӑn Viên briefed Thiệu on the aid reduction. The president ordered the commander to “fight a poor man’s war,” but he repeated his earlier assessment that “giving up any real estate creates psychological problems for the [RVN government].”¹⁹ Viên was forced to drastically reduce artillery ammunition usage and air force flight time, and he made deep cuts to other essential items like bandages and weapons.

While the aid cutbacks, the crumbling economy, and the ongoing war were lowering morale, at the same time Prime Minister Trần Thiện Khiêm was pressing Thiệu to remove the Democracy Party from government policy. The senior leadership of the party had begun to exert undue influence over the provincial chiefs, and Khiêm wanted it stopped. After several internal battles, in June 1974 Thiệu publicly ordered all military personnel and civil servants to no longer participate in political activity. It was a seismic change from the frantic days of late 1972 and early 1973, when he was laser-focused on building a state party for a potential future political contest against the PRG. By November, US Embassy representatives in MR III found that the Democracy Party “is totally inactive” and “there are no meetings, no activities,” and party headquarters “are deserted.”²⁰ Thiệu’s design to build a government party to mobilize the masses to win an election had also failed.

While Congress was cutting aid to South Vietnam, Hanoi’s allies had also cut its aid to North Vietnam. For example, after the 1972 offensive, the PAVN had a critical shortage of artillery shells, which the Soviets had not replenished. According to official PAVN statistics, from 1973 to 1975 China and the Soviet Union supplied a total of “724,512 tons, consisting of 75,267 tons of logistics supplies and 49,246 tons of weapons, ammunition, and technical equipment. Of this total, the Soviet Union provided 65,601 tons, China provided 620,354 tons, and the other socialist countries provided 38,557 tons.”²¹ This aid was primarily small arms and food, and the amounts were significantly lower than the 1969–72 period.

Despite its own aid issues, Giáp’s Central Cell planning team had been carefully monitoring the battlefield situation and devising strategies to conquer South Vietnam. At a meeting in March 1974, the Cell reported to the High Command that the PAVN had regained the initiative on the Southern battlefields. Consequently, the High Command decided to step up attacks to wear down the ARVN and force it to burn supplies. According to PAVN Senior General Hoàng Vӑn Thái, all of this was designed for one purpose: “When the comparison of forces between ourselves and the enemy underwent a fundamental change, when the US was encountering many difficulties at home and abroad, when our preparations had been completed, we would … win victory.”²²

Major combat broke out west of Saigon and in the Central Highlands, but the largest clash since the ceasefire erupted in MR I at the town of Thượng Đức, a remote district headquarters west of Đà Nẵng. Elements of two PAVN divisions seized the town and a mountain commanding the approaches known as Hill 1062, and appeared poised to strike at Đà Nẵng. The South Vietnamese sent elements of the Airborne Division to retake the town and hilltop. After two months of fierce fighting, by November the Airborne had retaken the hill but could not recapture the town.

The stalemate at Thượng Đức had ramifications for both Saigon and Hanoi. The population in MR I believed that the Airborne Division had saved Đà Nẵng, and it was critical for their defense. Equally important, ARVN casualties for 1974 were the second-highest on record, leaving the army exhausted and its supplies drained.

The Politburo had met earlier in October to hear the latest plans and updates from the Southern battlefields. General Hoàng Vӑn Thái briefed them that the aid cuts had badly weakened the ARVN and that economic difficulties had eroded troop morale. Moreover, a combination of Nixon’s resignation as president in August from the deepening Watergate scandal, growing opposition to Thiệu’s rule in Saigon, and the fact that the PAVN’s strength had recovered from the 1972 offensive had all coalesced at precisely the right time for Hanoi. When news came of the “victory” at Thượng Đức, the Politburo was ecstatic. General Giáp concluded that if his regular troops could hold their own against South Vietnam’s best, the war had definitely swung in his favor. Consequently, Lê Duẩn ordered him to finalize the plan to conquer South Vietnam by 1976, and he also approved large-scale attacks in MR III that had been devised by the local PAVN commander, Lieutenant General Trần Vӑn Trà. Although Giáp had at first been reluctant to allow Trà to use his few remaining tanks and heavy artillery, Lê Duẩn approved Trà’s proposal.

In early December, Trà’s forces launched a major attack against the thinly populated and remote province of Phườc Long, situated on the Cambodian border. Local PAVN commanders concentrated two infantry regiments against several lightly defended towns. They quickly overran both towns, and by late December they had captured most of the province except the capital city. Trà’s command brought in more infantry, armor, and heavy artillery. A tough street battle raged for over a week as the ARVN defenders, mostly local militia and some elite 81st Airborne Rangers who had been flown in at the last minute, tried to hold off tank-led infantry assaults. On January 5, the PAVN overwhelmed the badly outnumbered and outgunned defenders and seized the town, making it the first province completely captured by communist forces during the war.

Ambassador Graham Martin immediately cabled Kissinger to demand action: “We have arrived at a turning point in the history of the Paris Agreement.” North Vietnam, he wrote, is “determined to use whatever military force is required to gain its objective of conquering South Vietnam. The US reaction to the North Vietnamese conquest is thus of critical importance for the success or failure of our policy in Indochina.”²³ Gerald Ford, who had replaced Nixon as president, attempted to convince congressional leaders to approve more aid, but most remained against increasing funding. Congressional hearings were held on January 30 to review Ford’s request. While administration spokesmen provided detailed information about the dire situation caused by the aid cuts, few congressmen changed their position.

Figure 10.1 Fighting continues in South Vietnam despite the ceasefire (June 5, 1974).

Source: Evening Standard / Stringer / Hulton Archive / Getty Images.

The loss of Phườc Long and the lack of an American military response convinced the Politburo that a major offensive in the spring of 1975 might badly wound the South Vietnamese, enabling them to win the war in 1976. Plans were developed to launch assaults in each MR. The offensive would commence with an attack against the city of Ban Mê Thuột in the southern part of the Central Highlands. Like Phườc Long, the town was also isolated. With the United States cutting aid, and Ford unwilling to challenge Congress over the War Powers Act and launch airstrikes against the gathering communist forces, the South Vietnamese were on their own. They would need national unity and well-developed plans to defeat the expected communist spring offensive. They had neither.

The Final Year – 1975

To prepare for the looming attacks, Thiệu chaired a two-day meeting in early December 1974 to develop the defensive plan for 1975. The South Vietnamese Joint General Staff estimated that there would not be a coordinated countrywide offensive similar to 1972, but that the PAVN would follow a pattern like 1974: short but intense regional attacks, probably beginning in late March. South Vietnamese General Cao Vӑn Viên stated that if Hanoi did not send into battle any of its reserve divisions stationed in North Vietnam, he could defeat them with only limited loss of territory. He surmised that the communists would strike in the Central Highlands first “in an effort to drain our reserves” before making their main attacks in the northern part of South Vietnam and around Saigon.²⁴ However, Viên felt that if the PAVN reinforced the northern front with its reserve divisions stationed in North Vietnam, the ARVN would be forced to retreat to Huế and Đà Nẵng. His analysis would prove prescient.

The impending attack was not Thiệu’s only concern. South Vietnamese society, which had always been a quarrelsome collection of religious divisions, regional animosities, ethnic dislikes, and political feuds, had begun to fracture. After the coup in 1963 against President Ngô Đình Diệm, these societal rifts had almost torn South Vietnam apart. But since the presidential election of September 1967, and particularly after the 1968 Tet Offensive, the South Vietnamese had attempted to overcome their differences. The US withdrawal under Nixon’s Vietnamization program had further muted rampant factionalism.

By 1974, however, the poor economy and the ongoing peril had reawakened old schisms. Several religious and ethnic groups in South Vietnamese society became restless. Two religious sects, the Hòa Hao and the Cao Đài, located in the western part of the Delta and in Tây Ninh province, had decided to seek greater autonomy. At the same time, a resurgent rebel faction of Montagnards (tribal people from the Central Highlands) began raiding Vietnamese farms and attacking logging companies, and demanded that the tribes be allowed to form their own nation. Thiệu dispatched the police to forcibly disband an armed Hòa Hao gang protecting army deserters, and he sent the army to hunt down the Montagnard insurgents. While he maintained the country’s political integrity, beneath the surface, simmering economic resentment was also coming to a boil.

While the terrible economy had not sparked any urban-based protests, corruption – long the bête noire of South Vietnam – soon became the vehicle for expressing popular dissatisfaction. In the summer of 1974, a Catholic priest named Father Trần Hữu Thanh had formed a group called the People’s Anti-Corruption Movement. Although Thiệu had recently fired numerous military officers for corruption, on September 8, 1974 Father Thanh and a group of several hundred people launched a demonstration in Huế against corruption. When the local authorities teargassed the crowd, protests in other cities immediately erupted. Father Thanh then accused Thiệu and his family of corruption and called for his resignation. While many people sympathized with Father Thanh’s demands for anticorruption efforts, insisting on Thiệu’s resignation was too much. Many feared that the president’s removal would disrupt the country and leave it easy prey for the communists. By February 1975, Thanh’s movement had died out, but the combination of protests, continuing economic dislocation, and ethnic and religious feuds showcased Saigon’s weakness.

In the United States, after the failure of the January hearings on aid, President Ford asked congressional leaders to form a delegation to visit South Vietnam and report on conditions. Ford hoped that the report would sway enough legislators to restore funding. Choosing the members was badly delayed, and the group did not depart until late February. It returned to the United States in early March, and while some members were sobered by conditions, others remained adamantly against increased support. Despite the president’s hope, the delegation’s report failed to sway Congress to grant more money. Even if it had, it might have been too late. The PAVN was gathering in the jungles and mountains to strike the next blow.

Although the High Command and the Politburo had debated where to mount the opening attack for the spring campaign, after further study, by late January 1975, they had chosen the town of Ban Mê Thuột. The city straddles the key crossroads of Route 14 and Route 21 and was less well-defended than either Kontum or Pleiku, the other main towns in the Central Highlands. The High Command sent Senior General Vӑn Tiến Dũng to command this assault. Giáp dispatched a reserve division from North Vietnam, plus other units, including armor, anti-aircraft guns, and heavy artillery, to attack the city. The assault on Ban Mê Thuột would signal the advent of the spring offensive.

Although the ARVN acquired some intelligence that indicated that the PAVN intended to attack the town, the commanding general of South Vietnam’s MR II, Major General Phạm Vӑn Phú, refused to accept it. He believed the enemy would strike Pleiku, the capital of the Central Highlands, and he did not reinforce Ban Mê Thuột. As the PAVN units were secretly surrounding Ban Mê Thuột, the first blow came when communist troops attacked on March 4 and blocked the three main roads in the Highlands. By severing land communications between Pleiku and Ban Mê Thuột, and between both towns and the coast, each city was cut off from reinforcements, except by air.

In the early hours of March 10, a PAVN sapper regiment seized several key targets in Ban Mê Thuột. Shortly thereafter, five columns of infantry and armor burst from the surrounding forest and made a mad dash into the town. By the next morning they had captured Ban Mê Thuột. The ARVN attempted to retake the city, but its counterattack was defeated.

The loss of Ban Mê Thuột set in motion a series of decisions that triggered the spectacular collapse of the RVN. With the fall of the city, the roads in the Highlands blocked, and enemy forces also making strong attacks across the country, Thiệu faced the most serious military situation since the grim early days of the 1972 offensive. On March 13, given the strong enemy attacks and no US response, Thiệu made a drastic change in strategy. He would no longer attempt to defend every inch of territory but instead pull his army divisions back into more defensible positions. Consequently, he ordered the return of the Airborne Division to Saigon, a plan he called “Light at the Top, Heavy at the Bottom.” The idea was to protect the more populous and economically important sections of South Vietnam. At the same time, he told Phú to meet him on March 14 in Cam Ranh Bay to discuss their next move. At the meeting, Thiệu ordered Phú to retake Ban Mê Thuột. With the main roads cut, Phú proposed to move his forces out of Pleiku along a little-used and badly maintained road to the coast, and then turn west along Route 21 to recapture Ban Mê Thuột. Thiệu agreed, and he ordered Phú to begin immediately.

With little planning, Phú’s troops began the movement the next day. They quickly encountered serious difficulties. The road was barely traversable, and when they reached the Be River, they had to stop and build a bridge to cross it. Worse, the civilians living in Pleiku, including the families of the military men who had just left, bolted as well. Military units lost cohesion as fleeing civilians intermingled with them. Although initially caught off guard, the PAVN recovered and attacked the retreating troop column and the civilians mixed in among them. By late March, the bulk of the ARVN forces in MR II were dead, captured, or scattered.

In MR I, ARVN units had initially held their ground, but Thiệu’s order to send the Airborne Division back to Saigon left Lieutenant General Ngô Quang Trưởng, the commander of MR I, with few reserves. When the PAVN finally managed to cut Route 1 south of Huế, blocking any retreat south to Đà Nẵng, Trưởng ordered a withdrawal from Huế. He attempted to rescue his troops by sea, but it was a catastrophe. Soon, a combination of the departure of the Airborne, news of the disastrous retreat from the Central Highlands, the rout in Huế, and a malicious rumor that Thiệu intended to cede MR I to the communists generated panic among the civilian population. Hundreds of thousands of people fled to Đà Nẵng to escape the advancing communists. Horrific scenes occurred at Đà Nẵng port as terrified civilians and deserting soldiers attempted to cram on board a few Vietnamese Navy ships sent to rescue them. By March 29, the once formidable I Corps had collapsed, and PAVN troops easily entered Đà Nẵng.

With the downfall of the two northern MRs, Lê Duẩn ordered Giáp to conquer the rest of South Vietnam. Giáp began sending almost all of his remaining reserve divisions south. These units moved along the Hồ Chí Minh Trail on the western side, while in Đà Nẵng the PAVN commanders organized a massive convoy, called the Coastal Column, to advance on Route 1 on the eastern side of the country. By early April, both convoys were making steady progress toward Saigon to join in the final battle to capture the South Vietnamese capital.

Near Saigon, PAVN Lieutenant General Trần Vӑn Trà attempted to take Saigon with his own units. He launched a three-division attack on April 9 against the 18th ARVN Division at the small town of Xuân Lộc, some 40 miles (64 km) northeast of Saigon. Believing that ARVN morale had collapsed due to the disasters in the north, Trà expected an easy victory. He was wrong. The 18th ARVN, led by Brigadier General Lê Minh Đảo, threw back the enemy and, over the next several days, inflicted heavy casualties. The 18th held out for ten days, but it was surrounded, and with the massive Coastal Column closing in, he was ordered to retreat. The 18th ARVN broke out to the south and executed a masterly nighttime withdrawal. Despite the 18th ARVN’s valiant fight, the arrival of the Coastal Column and the reserve divisions meant that most of the PAVN was now menacing Saigon from all directions. Giáp and Vӑn Tiến Dũng had marshaled almost 300,000 soldiers near Saigon in less than a month, an incredible logistical feat.

Politically, the fall of Đà Nẵng created numerous calls for Thiệu to resign. Thiệu managed to fend off attempts by his former vice president, Nguyen Cao Kỳ, to replace him. However, when the PRG in Paris announced that it would negotiate a ceasefire only if Thiệu resigned and was replaced by former ARVN General Dương Vӑn Minh, Ambassador Graham Martin visited Thiệu on April 20 to urge him to resign so that this faint glimmer of diplomacy might be tried. Bowing to the inevitable, Thiệu resigned the next day, but, rather than turn power over to Minh, he turned it over to his vice president, Trần Vӑn Hương. The PRG, however, would not negotiate with Hương. Despite Thiệu’s resignation, on the morning of April 26 Dũng launched his attack against Saigon. Shortly thereafter, Hương also resigned, and the National Assembly voted to install Minh as president, hoping that negotiations might stall the PAVN assault.

It was too late. With PAVN troops poised to enter the city, the US Embassy was ordered to evacuate. Thousands of Vietnamese and the few remaining US personnel were moved from the embassy and other nearby sites by helicopter to US ships at sea. After heavy fighting on the outskirts, by the morning of April 30 PAVN units entered the city. Around 10:00 a.m., tanks and infantry captured Independence Palace. Minh announced over the radio the surrender of South Vietnam. The long war had ended.

Conclusion

The seeds of the destruction of South Vietnam were sown in the final days of 1972. Hanoi had refused to remove its troops from the country after the offensive, and despite a signed agreement not to continue infiltration or resume the fighting, it had promptly broken the accords. When an exhausted United States withdrew and left behind a badly damaged South Vietnam, Saigon was not able to recover. With South Vietnam’s economy in tatters and its army fighting on all fronts, both sides interpreted the aid reductions as the United States shedding itself of South Vietnam. With morale crushed on the one side and the other side emboldened, the PAVN executed a well-planned and brilliant attack that caused Thiệu to shift his strategy. His risky maneuver collapsed, which enabled Hanoi to finally achieve what previous onslaughts had failed to accomplish: final victory.

11 Cambodia at War

T. Christopher Jespersen

Cambodia sits in the middle of the Southeast Asian peninsula, with Thailand along its western and northern border, Laos to the northeast, and Vietnam along its eastern border all the way from Laos to the Gulf of Thailand. Cambodia’s size makes it a little larger than Washington State. In 1960 its population came to almost 5.5 million; by 1970 it had grown to just over 7 million.

Because of its geographical location, and considering its neighbors and various historical forces, over the centuries prior to French colonization in the mid-nineteenth century Cambodia faced pressure from the Thais when the Thai kingdom was strong and well run. Conversely, Cambodia also faced pressure from the east when the Vietnamese were aggressive and expansionist. Cambodia, much like Poland in Europe, has struggled over the centuries to maintain its independence and territorial integrity in the face of strong neighbors on both sides.¹

It is important, however, not to equate Cambodian–Thai relations with Cambodian–Vietnamese relations. There were major differences. Thai–Khmer relations were both influenced by Indian history and culture, whereas Khmer–Vietnamese relations were filled with greater tension and animosity in large part because the Vietnamese were influenced by China, and not India, and looked at Khmer people as barbarians. By one formulation, Cambodians have been “possessed by fear that not only their country but also the very existence of the Khmer people are in mortal danger, and they are convinced that the Vietnamese are their hereditary, implacable enemies, who hypocritically hide their true, rapacious intentions with words of false friendship.”²

Cambodia fell victim to colonialization in the nineteenth century when France made the territory a protectorate within its broader mission civilisatrice efforts in Southeast Asia. Indochina, which encompassed Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, was the larger prize, but Vietnam was the primary focus, and because of that, Cambodia benefited in some ways. Cambodia, for example, never felt the heavy hand of the French colonial administration and was never asked to provide the same amounts of raw materials. In short, France never exerted the same level of intrusion into Cambodian affairs. On the other hand, this relative neglect came with a price: Cambodian society was never developed to the same degree as was Vietnamese, and that meant fewer schools, less infrastructure, and a lower commitment to building Cambodia’s administrative services.

Map 11.1 Cambodia.

Source: © 123rf.com

The French did, however, involve themselves in the selection of Cambodia’s head of state. At the time of their arrival, the French encountered King Norodom. When Norodom died in 1904, the French moved the crown to a competing royal family, the Sisowaths, who were seen to be more agreeable to French rule. The French then moved the crown back to the Norodoms in 1941 in the form of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, then 18 years of age, because of his pliability. Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak was especially displeased, as he had expected to inherit the throne, and not his cousin.³

Years of Escalation: 1953 to 1968

The young Sihanouk served as prince during World War II. As had been the case for much of the period of French colonial rule, Cambodia was not as affected by events during the war as was Vietnam. “Vichy rule was in some ways more flexible, in others more repressive and certainly more ideological” because of the need to appease the Japanese after France’s capitulation.⁴ Cambodia did not suffer excessively from the Japanese occupation, and there was no great famine as the war ended. The French had a much lighter footprint in Cambodia after the war, as their energies were focused on reestablishing control in Vietnam. Sihanouk cooperated with the French, but when a rebel movement appeared to develop, the French negotiated a temporary agreement in January 1946 allowing Cambodia to hold elections in September. Sihanouk was able to proclaim the first Cambodian constitution in 1947, and by the end of 1948 Cambodia became an independent state within the French Union.

Sihanouk gave up his royal title in 1953 to become more involved in national politics and assumed the function of prime minister. By then, the United States was involved as it sought to bolster French efforts against the Việt Minh led by Hồ Chí Minh. American aid to France between 1950 and 1954 totaled $2 billion, all of it designated to assist French efforts in Vietnam. By contrast, Cambodia received $7.8 million. It was not much, but it was a beginning. After his father died in 1960, Sihanouk resumed his position as head of state. Between 1941 and 1970, Sihanouk ruled over Cambodia as “King, Chief of State, Prince, Prime Minister, head of the main political movement, jazz-band leader, magazine editor, film director and gambling concessionaire.”⁵ The prince had an array of interests, it turned out, many of which did not actually involve governing Cambodia. Still, he was hugely popular among peasants. He was also incredibly vain and could be both petty and brutal in the way he treated those he deemed insufficiently loyal.

Although his first dozen years as king could be overlooked as the product of France’s seemingly complicated and neglectful designs, his rule, under various titles, from 1953 to 1970 was a testament to his diplomatic savviness in balancing Cambodia’s interests relative to a fading France, a China that grew increasingly central to the Cold War in Asia, and the United States, the most powerful of them all. He also demonstrated enormous internal political skill, and his popularity with Cambodian peasants, representing close to 85 percent of the population, allowed him to retain his standing as head of state despite a certain amount of turmoil and unhappiness amongst the small coterie of educated Cambodians.

In 1949–50, under President Harry Truman, the United States began committing itself to Southeast Asia. The initial aid took the form of military assistance to France. In January 1953, Truman was succeeded by Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower continued the assistance to France but balked in 1954 at providing American troops to rescue the besieged French garrison at Điện Biên Phủ. Despite the French defeat, the Eisenhower administration refused to abandon Indochina. Instead, the United States supported Ngô Đình Diệm to serve as eventual head of a new Vietnamese government south of the 17th parallel.

Figure 11.1 Cambodia’s King Norodom Sihanouk embraces an old woman in Battambang province (December 1953).

Source: Bettmann / Contributor / Bettmann / Getty Images.

Diplomatically speaking, Sihanouk kept Cambodia out of the situation in Vietnam, much to the annoyance of the Eisenhower administration and especially Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Dulles abhorred neutrality almost as much as he despised communism, and he told Sihanouk that he could not be neutral. “You cannot be a Switzerland in Asia,” Dulles told him, “you have to choose between the free world and the Communist camp.” For his part, Sihanouk thought Dulles was unpleasant and arrogant, and he denounced the 1954 Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO).⁶ Sihanouk did, however, allow for US military assistance to begin under the Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) in 1955, which continued until 1963. Shortly after the assassination of South Vietnamese leader Ngô Đình Diệm and his brother-in-law, Ngô Đình Nhu, on November 2, 1963, Sihanouk ended all US military and economic aid, and he forced the Americans to close their embassy, though he did not formally break relations. In addition to the shock of Diệm’s assassination, Sihanouk worried that some of his more conservative officers were becoming too chummy with, and too dependent on, the United States. Such dependency had not boded well for Diệm.

Sihanouk also recognized the growing power of North Vietnam, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN), and wished to make a typical Cambodian accommodation to that reality. Sihanouk’s position became more precarious in the 1960s when first the Kennedy administration, and then the Johnson administration, escalated the war in Vietnam by increasing the number of US advisors and then troops in South Vietnam and initiating sustained bombings of the DRVN in Operation Rolling Thunder. Sihanouk reached such a point of frustration as the war escalated that he broke off formal diplomatic relations with the United States in May 1965. His decision did not change American policy one bit, and with the diplomatic cutoff, combined with the end of American aid, circumstances changed for those Cambodians, almost entirely located in the capital, Phnom Penh, who had become dependent on US spending. But Sihanouk was committed to preserving Cambodia’s neutrality, even at the cost of alienating Washington.

The United States and Cambodia were not entirely cut off from each other. Australia agreed to represent US interests in Phnom Penh as France represented Cambodia in Washington. The two sides thus continued to communicate when circumstances necessitated. When former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy wished to visit Cambodia in 1967, Sihanouk readily agreed and proved a gracious host. Sihanouk’s overriding concern during this period was to get as many countries as possible, including and especially the United States, to respect Cambodia’s neutrality and its current territorial boundaries. During the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, both sides made gestures toward improving relations. Johnson tasked a National Security Council (NSC) official with investigating ways to improve relations, despite opposition from the Pentagon. Sihanouk, for his part, spoke more favorably about the United States (or least less negatively) and even went so far as to support an American proposal regarding international negotiations, a position neither Beijing nor Hanoi favored. A border aerial assault by US forces that killed several Cambodians – and was witnessed by international observers, as well as members of the American media – put all progress on hold.

As the war escalated, American military leaders uniformly expressed negative views of Sihanouk. They disliked his insistence on Cambodian neutrality, since they wanted to use military force against North Vietnamese forces in Cambodia.⁷ Sihanouk responded by quipping, “Americans attract Communists like sugar attracts ants.”⁸ He had no intention of acquiescing. Still, Sihanouk worried about becoming too close to the Chinese communists and sought ways to keep open relations, or at least the possibility of discussions, with the Americans. Whatever steps both the Americans and Cambodians took toward healing the rupture, the war pushed them asunder. American military leaders continued aggressive actions into Cambodia, and Sihanouk continued to object. And yet, the escalation of the war, and the mounting North Vietnamese and National Front for the Liberation of Southern Vietnam (NLF, or Viet Cong) encroachment into Cambodia, put Sihanouk into an increasingly precarious position. How could he govern over territory occupied by communist-led Vietnamese forces or wantonly attacked by the Americans?

In July 1968, after Johnson had endured the Tet Offensive and announced his decision not to run for reelection in March, an American landing craft vessel, LCU 1577, traveled up the Mekong River. Thinking they were still in South Vietnam, the crew made a wrong turn into Cambodia, and the vessel and its crew of eleven were captured by Cambodian government forces. Johnson worried this could become a repeat of the US vessel Pueblo that had been taken hostage in January 1968 by the North Koreans. The administration made immediate overtures to have the crew returned. For various reasons, it took six months, but the crew was released in December, in time for everyone to return to the United States before Christmas. It all happened without Sihanouk insisting on American concessions. By the end of Johnson’s time in office, Sihanouk sought better relations because he worried about the growing power of political leftists in Cambodia, especially those ideologically aligned with Beijing and Hanoi. That led him to conclude that renewed relations with the United States would be to his strategic advantage. Standing in the way were continued US-led cross-border military incursions into Cambodia, so-called Daniel Boone raids, part of a reconnaissance effort that resulted in scores of Cambodians losing their lives in 1967. Before leaving office, Johnson officials approved direct compensation to Cambodians whose family members had been killed or injured as a result of American actions.

Henry Kamm, a New York Times correspondent who spent considerable time in Cambodia interviewing the principal actors, noted of Norodom Sihanouk that, whatever his shortcomings and idiosyncrasies, he was driven by a remarkably consistent view, one that derived “largely of his leading a desperately weak country tossed about by upheavals caused by more powerful neighbors and by great outside forces pursuing their own interests.”⁹ Historian Kenton Clymer expressed the same sentiment a bit differently, observing that Sihanouk “had to maneuver carefully in a web of conflicting pressures.”¹⁰

Despite bilateral efforts, relations did not improve enough, and they were not normalized before Johnson left office. Issues surrounding a border declaration (something the Thais and South Vietnamese opposed because of the consequences for their own borders) and continued loss of Cambodian life and destruction of Cambodian property in American attacks across the border prevented a reconciliation. After some time, however, the Cambodian government finally announced on June 11, 1969 that it was prepared to resume diplomatic relations. Lloyd “Mike” Rives reopened the US Embassy in Phnom Penh on August 15 as chargé d’affaires.

The Bombing Begins: 1969

While efforts were moving forward on the diplomatic front, American military leaders were busy with their own plans for how to integrate Cambodia into the war effort. US Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) Commander General Creighton Abrams had wanted to bomb suspected Vietnamese communist sanctuaries in Cambodia since taking over from William Westmoreland in 1968. He argued that such action was necessary to destroy or degrade the North Vietnamese and People’s Liberation Armed Forces (PLAF, the armed wing of the NLF) troops attacking American units and then crossing the border and hiding in sanctuaries just inside Cambodia. The Johnson administration had limited American actions to “hot pursuit,” with notable exceptions and plausibly deniable errors, but in January 1969 Richard Nixon became president, and he viewed things differently.

A conniving politician and at the same time a deeply insecure and suspicious individual, Nixon had campaigned on the promise of having a plan to end the war. Now that he was president, Nixon worried about real and imagined political enemies, as well as appearing weak, about secrecy, about getting proper credit for his actions, and much more. And when the DRVN launched an offensive shortly after he took office, Nixon took it personally and viewed North Vietnamese actions as testing his leadership, if not his manhood. So, when General Abrams requested, yet again, to bomb Cambodia, Nixon agreed. The initial request came in February, but it took a month for permission to work its way through the system and be granted. It was not until March 13, 1969 that the first strike of forty-two B-52 bombers was sent with an objective of disrupting and degrading Hanoi’s central office in South Vietnam, given the acronym COSVN (Central Office [Directorate] of South Vietnam). The elusive central office was not destroyed in the attack. American military advisors should have anticipated as much, for in the previous year, in the immediate aftermath of one of the Daniel Boone raids, a team visited the bombing site shortly afterwards to assess the damage and was promptly met with a hail of gunfire. Another team had to be dispatched to rescue the first team.

The Vietnamese troops in Cambodia were thus not cowed, but they were put on alert. When the first bombing run proved ineffective, the decision was made to initiate a sustained bombing campaign, just as Washington had in 1965 against North Vietnam. Over the next year, the United States conducted 3,695 bombing raids in Cambodia, a number that came to represent 16 percent of all bombing being conducted by American B-52 forces in Southeast Asia. The net impact was to radicalize the Cambodian peasantry and push Vietnamese units farther into Cambodia. The sustained campaign took on the code name Operation Menu, and the specific targets became Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, Supper, Snack, and Dessert. Because of the Nixon administration’s intense desire to maintain secrecy about the bombing, especially as regarded the media, Congress, and the American public, two sets of flight logs were created: one laid out the actual bombing targets in Cambodia, the other, official log put the targets in South Vietnam.¹¹

Arnold Isaacs indicated what the problem was from the outset: “American policy makers perceived Cambodia only through lenses that were focused on Vietnam.” But as he correctly pointed out, Cambodia was different. “Its culture, politics, history, and needs were different.” And that meant that the war would also be different, something completely ignored by the Nixon administration and military leaders. “Possibly for that reason, American actions there were enveloped from the start in ambiguity of purpose, official untruths, confusion, and controversy. In a sense, the act of deceit that began the American war in Cambodia – the secret B-52 bombing – set the pattern for everything that would follow.”¹²

The initial and continuing justification for bombing was the search to destroy COSVN. As Isaacs noted,

COSVN was to occupy a bizarre place in the evolution of America’s Cambodia strategy. It was offered, like Eve’s apple, every time the military leadership sought to expand American actions there; in 1970 it became a famous, if chimerical, objective when Nixon himself called it one of the targets of the US “incursion” into the Cambodian sanctuaries.¹³

But the Cambodian invasion was a year away. Nixon agreed to the bombing as a response to a new DRVN offensive in South Vietnam. He thought the North was testing him.

Overthrowing Sihanouk: 1970

The Nixon administration thus began the extensive and indiscriminate bombing of Cambodia in March 1969. Norodom Sihanouk faced a dilemma: he could object and thus alienate any possibility of reconciling with the Americans as a way of counterbalancing the growing North Vietnamese strength, or he could acquiesce by remaining silent and see the eastern portion of his country devastated by American ordnance. By choosing the latter, Sihanouk gave later cover to Nixon administration officials to claim that not only had Sihanouk known about the bombing, he had approved it, even though there was no evidence of any such agreement.

The bombing proved destructive to Cambodia but largely ineffectual in hampering North Vietnamese military actions in South Vietnam. Conditions in Cambodia deteriorated, and Sihanouk’s commitment to American actions came into question by members of the Nixon administration. Given the growing domestic discontent, Sihanouk erred in deciding to leave Cambodia in early 1970 to seek medical treatment in France. He was scheduled to be gone for two months. He would not return. The length of his rule, the severity with which he treated those he deemed insufficiently loyal, the way in which he humiliated or stifled those who challenged him, all came home to roost. “The Prince’s conniving at corruption, the authoritarian arbitrariness and economic incompetence of his rule,” Henry Kamm wrote, “his spiteful intolerance of those who would not be sycophants outweighed in the minds of educated Cambodians his principal achievement – warding off the ever-present menace of being drawn fully into the war of Indochina.”¹⁴

The National Assembly voted unanimously to strip Sihanouk of his title on March 26, 1970. Although the initial thrust within the Cambodian government was to move Sihanouk toward a more aggressive policy against the North Vietnamese, when it became clear he had no such intention, and even more disconcertingly for those in the government, that Sihanouk planned to return and punish those who were advocating such a policy, what had begun as a movement to curb the prince’s power quickly became a full-blown coup d’état. Sihanouk compounded the situation by deciding to travel to Moscow and Beijing, instead of returning to Phnom Penh to confront his critics.

The announcement in Cambodia of Sihanouk’s ouster was greeted with great enthusiasm by the wealthy, the educated, and the middle class, as small as those groups were in Cambodian society. They had grown weary of kowtowing to Sihanouk or serving as flunkies in order to stay on his good side. “Among the educated, Sihanouk had clearly suffered an ever-spreading erosion of support that was inevitable after he had run the nation like a one-man show for a quarter-century. That he had led Cambodia imaginatively and peacefully to the restoration of its independence in 1953 lay too far in the past to matter much in 1970.”¹⁵

Sihanouk was replaced by his prime minister, Lon Nol, who had been a loyal follower, but who seized the opportunity and promised economic reforms, had political prisoners on both sides of the political spectrum released, and made sure that his military supporters knew that his ascension portended a return of American military aid. Prince Sirik Matak also abetted the coup, but he had personal reasons for wanting his cousin ousted, considering that he believed he should have been appointed to rule by the French in 1941. Predictably, the response in the countryside was much different. Peasants, farmers, and fishermen still adored Sihanouk, and rioting against the coup broke out in Kampong Cham. In one particularly grizzly scene, one of Lon Nol’s brothers, Lon Nil, was captured by the crowd, killed, and then cut into pieces, including having his liver cooked and then diced at a nearby restaurant with the pieces distributed to members of the crowd.

Lon Nol: 1970–3

Lon Nol was an unlikely war leader. Like so many in the Cambodian military, Lon Nol had originally been a civil servant at the time of Cambodia’s independence, and he had been given military rank by Norodom Sihanouk. As a reward for his loyalty, Lon Nol was promoted. He also had a younger brother, Lon Non, who also received military rank. Unlike the coup against Ngô Đình Diệm in South Vietnam in 1963 in which the Kennedy administration was explicitly involved, the extent of the Nixon administration’s involvement in the coup against Sihanouk is less clear. Lon Nol and Sirik Matak had complete confidence that the Americans would support them and acted accordingly. And they were right: the United States immediately recognized the new government and moved instantly to provide support.¹⁶

Within weeks of Lon Nol taking over, the Nixon administration decided to involve Cambodia more fully in the war. The military justification to invade Cambodia in 1970 was the same as it had been to initiate the secret bombing the previous year: to degrade North Vietnamese troop strength in the sanctuaries on the border and disrupt the elusive COSVN as a way of protecting the American flank as Washington pursued the so-called Vietnamization of the war and withdrew its troops from South Vietnam. The invasion also served as a way of demonstrating American resolve to continue supporting the South Vietnamese government led by Nguyễn Vӑn Thiệu and the new regime in Cambodia even as the United States scaled down its direct involvement in Indochina. South Vietnam remained the first priority; Cambodia was secondary.

But there was another reason for the invasion. April 1970 was a difficult month for Nixon. He had two Supreme Court nominees rejected by the Senate, and his mood darkened. He watched multiple showings of the movie Patton, starring George C. Scott, in which the actor portrays the World War II general as a brilliant and driven, if mercurial and misunderstood, leader. The gloomy, self-pitying Nixon felt an increasing need to demonstrate his authority and decisiveness to Congress, and invading Cambodia became the act by which he would do that, regardless of the costs. The initial plan was to use only South Vietnamese troops, but Nixon wanted more and a greater show of toughness, so he added American troops. Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and Secretary of State William Rogers were largely kept in the dark to ensure secrecy, especially since the State Department was seen as a major source of leaks by the White House. A suggestion was made to have General Abrams make the announcement as part of a regular briefing and as a way to emphasize the operation as something routine, but again Nixon was having none of that and wrote his own speech, which he delivered in prime time on the evening of April 30.

Figure 11.2 President Lon Nol of Cambodia reviews troops (1973).

Source: David Hume Kennerly / Contributor / Archive Photos / Getty Images.

Nixon began with a brief history of Cambodia by mentioning the 1954 Geneva Accords and then claiming, “American policy since then has been to scrupulously respect the neutrality of the Cambodian people” – except for the secret bombing, of course, which went unmentioned. Nixon offered a semantic clarification: “This is not an invasion of Cambodia.” Instead, it was an “incursion” designed to clear out sanctuaries that the North Vietnamese had created and been using to attack American and South Vietnamese forces. “We take this action not for the purpose of expanding the war into Cambodia but for the purpose of ending the war in Vietnam and winning the just peace we all desire.” Nixon explained that he made his decision in order to put “the leaders of North Vietnam on notice that” the United States would “be patient in working for peace”; he added, “we will be conciliatory at the conference table, but we will not be humiliated. We will not be defeated.” The speech then took a dark and gloomy turn, revealing more of the president’s mindset than perhaps he intended. “My fellow Americans,” he began, “we live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home. We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilization in the last 500 years.” He spoke about the systematic destruction of the great universities in the United States, an obvious reference to student protest against the war. Finally, Nixon inveighed, “If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.”¹⁷ Nixon went full Nixon, thinking that the “incursion” represented another one of his seminal moments, just like the ones he had described in his book, Six Crises. Nixon wanted to reassure the American people (but especially his critics) that he was up to the challenge.

Lon Nol was not consulted, let alone informed, prior to the invasion. Neither was the US Mission in Phnom Penh, which only found out by listening to Nixon’s address on radio. Lon Nol was officially briefed when US chargé d’affaires ad interim in Cambodia, Lloyd M. (Mike) Rives, rushed to visit him. Lon Nol was not happy and later spoke of the violation of Cambodia’s territorial integrity, but he did nothing. The invasion of Cambodia exacerbated and reinforced past relationships, both personal and institutional, and hardened opposing sides. The domestic reaction to the invasion drove Nixon even further into the depths of his darkest views about those who opposed him or those he suspected of insufficient loyalty. He visited the Pentagon the morning after the invasion and delivered a tirade that shocked his audience, which included the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCF) and the defense secretary. Nixon used “locker-room language” and spoke of “bold decisions,” and specifically cited Theodore Roosevelt charging up San Juan Hill during the Spanish–American War. General Westmoreland, now the army chief of staff, cautioned against unrealistic expectations, noting that the sanctuaries were not something that could be completely erased. Nixon dismissed him by replying, “Let’s go blow the hell out of them.”¹⁸

Far from “electrifying people” in the way he had envisioned, Nixon’s actions divided Americans even further. Student protests erupted around the country and caused many college campuses to close before the spring semester was completed. The worst incidents occurred at Kent State University, where Ohio National guardsmen shot fifteen students, killing four, and Jackson State College, where city and state police killed two students and injured twelve others. Tensions mounted, and Nixon’s siege mentality worsened. In the early morning of May 9, Nixon made a visit to the Lincoln Memorial, where he spoke to a bewildered group of college students about football. Kissinger later claimed Nixon was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The situation in Cambodia worsened in obvious and predictable ways. Communist forces moved west, farther from the border and deeper into Cambodia. Lon Nol and the Cambodian Army were powerless to stop them. Of the Cambodian peasantry in the area, those who were not killed fled and became radicalized in the process. A Cambodian lieutenant captured by the Khmer Rouge who escaped after six weeks commented on who was doing the fighting: 70 percent were Cambodians, despite the government’s denial. “Their motivation was simple …: escape from the steady bombing, strafing, and napalming by American, South Vietnamese, and Cambodian planes, which were causing heavy civilian casualties. Yet the government steadfastly maintained that the Vietnamese met little success in recruiting Cambodians.”¹⁹

Lon Nol issued a meaningless ultimatum to the North Vietnamese troops that they must leave Cambodia within seventy-two hours, an absurd demand. However futile Lon Nol’s declaration was, it stoked long-standing Cambodian animosity against ethnic Vietnamese living in Cambodia, who numbered approximately 400,000. The wholescale scapegoating of the ethnic Vietnamese began in March 1970, and the pageantry that surrounded it reminded one observer of his time growing up in 1930s Germany: “In its strident chauvinism and xenophobia,” verbal attacks on the Vietnamese “stirred in me unpleasant reminiscences from my childhood among the Nazis.” The situation only went from bad to worse. Those peasants from the countryside who were not killed, or did not join Khmer Rouge forces, fled to the cities, in particular Phnom Penh. A city of roughly 600,000 in 1970, Phnom Penh had a population of between 2 and 3 million by April 1975. In addition, the traditional economy collapsed. The military situation was no better. Khmer Rouge forces closed to within striking distance of the capital. They used mortars and 122mm rockets to strike at Pochentong airport and destroy the tiny Cambodian Air Force. When Cambodian troops initiated an assault to relieve the city of Kampong Thom, located north of Phnom Penh, in October 1971 as part of Operation Chenla II, the battle was initially declared a great victory when government troops took the city. And then North Vietnamese forces counterattacked, inflicting heavy losses. Lon Nol, who earlier in the year had spent two months in Hawai’i recovering from a stroke, and who was quite frail, visited the battlefield but then issued a set of contradictory orders. Sirik Matak and the leader of the group called the Khmer Serei tried to get Lon Nol to step down for the good of the country, but Lon Nol refused, and he continued to enjoy the full support of the Nixon administration.

In spring 1972, Hanoi launched a major offensive against South Vietnam, the so-called Easter or Spring Offensive. The massive effort meant that North Vietnamese troops were, for the most part, no longer in Cambodia. At that point, the war inside Cambodia became a primarily internecine affair, with the Khmer Rouge troops facing the Cambodian National Army. By year’s end, the Khmer Rouge army had grown to approximately 50,000 men. And just as importantly, the Khmer Rouge could, and did, act independently.

Paris Peace Agreement on Vietnam: 1973

The Paris Peace Agreement on Vietnam was signed on January 27, 1973, ending the direct American participation in the war in Vietnam. Article 20 of the agreement dealt with Laos and Cambodia. It stipulated that “foreign countries shall put an end to all military activities in Cambodia and Laos, totally withdraw from and refrain from reintroducing into these two countries troops, military advisors and military personnel, armaments, munitions, and war material.”²⁰ While that all sounded well and good, it set no deadline. The Nixon administration used that loophole to justify its resumption of the bombings of Cambodia in February 1973. Kissinger met with the American ambassadors to South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia on February 8 in Bangkok. He explained that all bombing strikes would be coordinated through the embassies in secrecy. This meant Cambodia, since the Paris Agreement on Vietnam prohibited American military activity in South Vietnam, and the situation in Laos had stabilized. Despite working with the ambassadors, Kissinger failed to involve Secretary of State William Rogers. “The Paris agreement did not bring even a fictitious peace to Cambodia,” one journalist commented at the time. Instead, “it brought a new paroxysm of violence and devastation.”²¹

Over the next six months, the American bombing was carried out with a ferocity previously unknown, as Nixon sought to project the notion that he was a little crazy, a “madman,” with the expectation that this would compel the North Vietnamese, as well as the Khmer Rouge, to negotiate. Just as importantly, the savage bombing was a key component of Nixon and Kissinger’s idea about creating a “decent interval” between the time of the American withdrawal and the collapse of the South Vietnamese government. And now Lon Nol’s government became part of the equation. During the entire twelve months of 1972, US bombing of Cambodia came to 37,000 tons. In March 1973 alone, the amount came to 24,000 tons, followed by 35,000 tons in April, and 36,000 tons in May. B-52s were now unleashing monthly onto Cambodia what they had once dropped annually.

The bombing was designed to bolster Lon Nol’s government and the performance of his forces. It did no such thing. Corruption, known as “bonjour” to the Cambodians, remained rife in the form of officers padding payrolls with ghost soldiers and officers selling rice and equipment on the black market. Inflation skyrocketed, troops deserted, and morale sank as Lon Nol held firm to his mystical views of the whole situation, a view informed by monks who saw in the Cambodian civil war a long-prophesied challenge to the survival of Buddhism. The monks considered the Khmer nation to be the divinely chosen defender of the faith and saw in Lon Nol a savior of sorts. The Cambodian government was falling apart, and Lon Nol remained as aloof as ever. “Lon Nol’s ever-deepening belief in what monks told him of the future became the despair of those who had to deal with him about the present, both Cambodians and Americans.”²²

In March 1973, strikes led by teachers and students broke out in Phnom Penh. Lon Nol responded with force, using the secret police commanded by his younger brother to attack strikers. He closed newspapers critical of the government and even went so far as to place Sirik Matak under house arrest. Despite these circumstances, the Nixon administration never wavered in its support for Lon Nol. Congress began to think differently. When the Senate Foreign Relations Committee sent two experienced staffers to evaluate the scene, they reported that the political, military, and economic performance of Lon Nol’s government had reached an all-time low. What the two staffers also began to uncover was the extent of renewed US bombing of Cambodia and the lengths to which the Nixon administration had gone to conceal that bombing – even from key members of the administration like Secretary of State William Rogers.

Overshadowing all this was the specter of Watergate, and that specter came into fully realized form on April 30, as Rogers was about to go before Congress to answer questions about the bombing. Nixon announced the resignations of his two top aides, John Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman, as well as that of the attorney general. Up to this point, Watergate had been a nuisance; now it became a crisis, one that would dog the president until he resigned fifteen months later.

Nixon and most members of his administration believed in a Khmer Rouge largely directed from Hanoi and Moscow. That was not the case. As the bombing had begun in 1969, and then intensified from 1970 to 1973, the Khmer Rouge had become more independent. The DRVN provided logistical support through 1972, but since the Paris Agreement on Vietnam, Hanoi had been looking out for itself, and Khmer Rouge military activities threatened to jeopardize the economic aid promised by Nixon as a separate, secret codicil to the Paris Agreement. Diplomatic efforts to negotiate a ceasefire throughout 1973 failed for these reasons; the leverage simply was not there. Nixon, and especially Kissinger, blamed Congress. Upon learning of the secret bombing, and as the Watergate revelations became front-page news, Congress began to aggressively investigate the situation in Cambodia. The administration responded by lying and falsifying documents. That only made the situation worse. Congress pressed even more with additional hearings, and the administration’s façade began to crack. Congress tried to cut off funds for the bombing immediately, but the administration pushed back, arguing it would jeopardize negotiations and undercut American policy. Eventually, a compromise was reached: bombing could continue for six weeks. Nixon agreed and signed legislation on June 29, 1973 that gave the administration until August 15 to bomb.

Negotiations between Sihanouk, Zhou Enlai, representing the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and the Nixon administration went nowhere. Kissinger blamed the congressional decision to halt the bombing, but the parties were simply not going to agree. Kenton Clymer summed up Kissinger’s machinations nicely: “Kissinger’s diplomacy always offered too little and was too late and too secretive.”²³ Perhaps even more important, the Khmer Rouge were determined to achieve victory. By June 1973, the Khmer Rouge had turned on their North Vietnamese supporters and were evicting any remaining advisors. Hanoi, Khmer Rouge leaders believed, was focused on overthrowing the Thiệu regime, not on aiding the Khmer Rouge. But the Khmer Rouge leadership went further. In what was a preview of the post-1975 relationship between Cambodia and Vietnam, it pressed Vietnamese residents whose families had lived in Cambodia for decades, if not longer, to leave as well.

The Watergate scandal finally forced Nixon to resign on August 8, 1974, leaving it to Gerald Ford to assume the presidency. Ford, by his own admission, had been a hawk on the Vietnam War, and he indicated to members of Congress that he had no intention of changing now that he was in the White House. Toward that end, he followed Kissinger’s lead and once again requested emergency aid for Cambodia and South Vietnam. There had been reason for some optimism, given the way the Cambodian government had fought throughout 1974. Phnom Penh, for example, was no longer being attacked by Khmer rockets, and in some areas government troops had pushed back Khmer forces. It was not to last. Corruption, desertion, and a lack of supplies ravaged the Cambodian Army. Organizationally, Khmer Rouge forces grew stronger and controlled most of the countryside, as well as the roads and rivers. The Ford administration vainly sought a diplomatic solution through Sihanouk and the Chinese only begrudgingly and far too late. Instead, in January 1975 the administration pushed for initially another $1.5 billion in aid, which Congress reduced to $1 billion and then $700 million in military and economic assistance.²⁴ Congress reluctantly agreed to send a fact-finding mission to Cambodia, but time was running out. By February, it was clear the Lon Nol government was no longer tenable.

The evacuation of Phnom Penh, unlike the one that would occur in Saigon two weeks later, began on April 8 and went smoothly. Operation Eagle Pull involved helicopters from the USS Okinawa in the Gulf of Thailand landing on a soccer field next to an abandoned hotel and whisking away all remaining Americans and any Cambodians deemed to be at risk should Phnom Penh fall to the Khmer Rouge. Some of the latter, like Sirik Matak and Lon Non, elected to remain and became some of the first victims of the Khmer Rouge’s murderous rampage, which began after Phnom Penh fell to its armies on April 17, 1975. In assessing what caused the collapse, Henry Kamm wrote, “The way in which the Khmer Republic was born in 1970 – last-minute improvisations, borrowed forms devoid of meaningful content, and destructive blunders in the execution of plans – marked its life of four and a half years.” To make matters worse, “At the time the republic was proclaimed, about half of its territory was already occupied by North Vietnamese troops, Cambodian guerrillas organized by the Vietnamese, and, gaining strength rapidly, purely Cambodian units formed by the Khmer Rouge leadership.” In short, it was doomed from the start. Kamm added two additional causes, one internal and one external, for Cambodia’s collapse. “First was the unfathomable mélange of mysticism and dictatorial nonleadership of Lon Nol, combined with the relentlessly ambitious and divisive machinations of Lon Non.” Those two brothers oversaw an administrative structure that was both brutal and incompetent. “And second was America’s cruel exploitation of Cambodia’s uncomprehending, blind confidence that the United States would protect it and never let it down.”²⁵

The US withdrawal from Cambodia was quickly overshadowed by the dramatic end to the South Vietnamese government and the rush to evacuate all Americans, and as many South Vietnamese who had worked with the United States, as possible, at the end of April. Whereas the Cambodian operation had been handled without much drama beyond what would be expected under the circumstances, in South Vietnam thousands of Vietnamese crammed into boats of all sizes or took their chances at the airport, pressing against fences and holding children aloft. The final scene of an American helicopter atop a building when the airport became untenable, and the long line of Vietnamese stretching down from the roof on the stairway, spoke to the chaos that engulfed that ignominious departure. There was a coda, of sorts, to the American involvement in Cambodia: on May 12, the merchant ship SS Mayaguez was captured by Cambodian gunships, now manned by Khmer Rouge sailors, while traveling from Hong Kong to Sattahip, Thailand. They took the vessel and its crew to the nearby island of Koh Tong. With Kissinger’s encouragement, Ford made scant effort to negotiate the crew’s release and instead sent in marines on May 15. Although the crew of the Mayaguez was safely rescued, more marines lost their lives than there were members of the Mayaguez’s crew, and the crew was actually released by the Khmer Rouge troops and taken on a Thai fishing vessel to an awaiting US warship as the assault got underway. Despite the losses, Ford was enthusiastic about the operation, and his popularity rose with the American public.

Khmer Rouge Rule and Afterwards

When the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh, they already had indicated how they intended to rule. Led by a group of Cambodians educated in France during the 1950s, these individuals had returned to Cambodia only to face Sihanouk’s persecution. They fled to the countryside, where they began organizing. The Khmer Rouge was still very small in 1969, but as the US bombing ravaged the countryside, they found a growing supply of peasants ready to join their cause. They also became more radicalized. The leadership included Pol Pot (head of the party and originally named Saloth Sar), Ieng Saray (who served as diplomatic secretary), and Khieu Samphan (who served as military commander and who had written a doctoral dissertation while studying at the Sorbonne in 1959).

Figure 11.3 Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot in the Cambodian jungle.

Source: Bettmann / Contributor / Bettmann / Getty Images.

Figure 11.4 Khmer Rouge Foreign Minister Ieng Sary.

Source: Kaku KURITA / Gamma-Rapho / Getty Images.

Prior to their capture of Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge had depopulated other cities they captured. Now in control of Cambodia’s largest city, one that had swelled to over 2 million inhabitants, they implemented this policy for practical as well as ideological reasons. There was simply no way to effectively administer so many refugees in a city that only five years previously had had a population of 600,000. But there was much more to it than that. The Khmer Rouge leadership had a vision for Cambodian society that was strictly egalitarian (except when it came to them, of course), agricultural, and brutally enforced. People were forced out of the cities and marched into the countryside, regardless of age or physical condition. Thousands died and were left along the roadside.²⁶

Figure 11.5 Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan.

Source: Alex Bowie / Hulton Archive / Getty Images.

In proclaiming Democratic Kampuchea, the Khmer Rouge leadership insisted it was the dawn of a new society. Gone was the past royal Cambodian society with its princes and kings, and along with it any vestiges of that age, including schools and governmental offices. Private property was abolished. Material goods were confiscated. The population was forbidden from wearing bright clothes. Personal relationships now came under the province of the government. Land was redistributed. And thousands upon thousands of people, real and imagined enemies of the Khmer Rouge revolutionary project, were tortured and executed.²⁷

The Khmer Rouge also amplified the anti-Vietnamese sentiment already running deep among Cambodians. Many of the 400,000 ethnic Vietnamese who were living in Cambodia in 1970 had fled or been killed by 1975–6, so the Khmer Rouge focused their attention on villages in Vietnam along the border with Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese government also disagreed over offshore islands. Relations with Hanoi deteriorated rapidly after 1975, reaching their nadir in 1977–8. Following a series of Khmer attacks on Vietnamese villages, Hanoi responded by invading Cambodia in December 1978. “Distrust eventually snowballed into paranoia,” Stephen Morris wrote. “This condition later led to Hanoi’s false belief that Beijing was instigating Khmer Rouge attacks upon it.”²⁸ This, in turn, led to a retaliatory invasion of Vietnam by China in February 1979. As Chinese paramount leader Deng Xiaoping explained to President Jimmy Carter and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski while visiting the United States in January, China planned on teaching the Vietnamese a lesson.²⁹ The Chinese quickly discovered what the French and Americans had experienced: the Vietnamese were formidable foes on the battlefield.³⁰

In Cambodia, the Vietnamese clearly had the upper hand. Their troops were battle-tested after more than two decades of fighting US, South Vietnamese, and other allied forces. Their army was well supplied with Soviet and captured American equipment. The Khmer Rouge soldiers had no chance, and the government quickly fled Phnom Penh to the dense jungles along the border with Thailand. The Vietnamese then installed, in January 1979, a puppet government led initially by Heng Samrin and later by Hun Sen. And then the accounting began. Early testimony by fleeing refugees in 1975 had initially been disregarded by Western observers. Later, it became clear just how repressive and genocidal the Khmer Rouge government was, but after the Vietnamese invasion, the sheer magnitude of the horrors inflicted by Pol Pot’s regime emerged: estimates range from between 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians, including ethnic Vietnamese residents and members of other minority groups, killed between April 1975 and December 1978.

In what has to be one of the strangest twists, the United States, under President Carter’s leadership, backed the Khmer Rouge. Known as a champion of human rights, Carter supported the genocidal Khmer Rouge for entirely geopolitical reasons. After unification in April 1975, Vietnam had hoped to receive the economic aid promised by the Nixon administration.³¹ Nixon had fallen victim to his own paranoia and illegal actions and resigned. President Ford never took up the matter, and so when Carter entered office, one of his first goals was to establish diplomatic relations with Vietnam. For their part, the Vietnamese wanted what Nixon had promised. Carter balked. By December 1978, the Carter administration announced the reestablishment of diplomatic relations with the PRC, the biggest supporters of the Khmer Rouge. Vietnam then signed a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union, and Brzezinski, putting on his best Henry Kissinger imitation, argued that continued recognition of the Khmer Rouge, despite the atrocities, was in the best interests of the United States and a way to stick it to the Vietnamese. As Henry Kamm acidly commented on the decision of the West, and particularly of America, to back the Khmer Rouge,

Faced with a choice between upholding the most tyrannical and bloodthirsty regime since the days of Hitler and Stalin, or a puppet regime put in place by an invader, it backed the tyrant’s claim to legitimacy. The elevation of sovereignty to the pinnacle of international virtue is a damning comment on the sincerity of the Western democracies’ constantly proclaimed advocacy of human rights.³²

Conclusion

The Vietnamese paid a price for their actions. Although the killing had stopped and they could now enjoy some basic human rights, Cambodians were not about to express their gratitude to being occupied by their historic rival. And the Vietnamese depended on assistance from the Soviet Union, so when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 and decided on a new course, Vietnam had to change as well, including opening its economy and negotiating an end to its occupation of Cambodia.

By the time the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, Vietnam was out of Cambodia, and the latter became the focus of United Nations’ (UN) negotiations through the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) that ultimately resulted in elections in May 1993. The royalist party led by Prince Norodom Ranariddh, son of Norodom Sihanouk, won and formed a coalition government that included Hun Sen, but that coalition was forced on the royalists as the price for avoiding widespread violence instigated by Hun Sen and his followers, who were in no mood to give up actual power.³³ In September that same year, Norodom Sihanouk returned as head of state when the constitutional monarchy was restored, but, again, this was symbolic and little more. A personal account of the UN’s failure to ensure the integrity of the elections was offered by Benny Widyono. He served as a senior official for UNTAC during the election and remained in Cambodia as the UN secretary general’s personal representative until 1997.³⁴

David Chandler provided a historian’s perspective: “Cambodian history since World War II, and probably for a much longer period, can be characterized in part as a chronic failure of contending groups of patrons and their clients to compromise, cooperate, or share power. These hegemonic tendencies, familiar in other Southeast Asian countries, have deep roots in Cambodia’s past.”³⁵ The decade of the 1990s was no different, but at least after another round of elections in 1998, Cambodia was at peace and had become a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Conditions remained stark for millions, but there was no war, and the future had a tinge of brightness to it.

12 Laos at War

Ian G. Baird

It is hard to know where to start when writing about “Laos at War,” as the conflict there was complicated and persistent over decades, although with varying circumstances in different parts of the country. Still, it is generally recognized that the war in Laos occurred between around 1959 and 1973. It can be considered to be part of the Second Indochina War, or the Vietnam War, as Americans know it.

This chapter is particularly focused on what is now often referred to as the “Secret War in Laos,” which began after the Second Geneva Accords of 1962 were signed, and ended with the signing of the Vientiane Agreement in 1973, which was designed to lay the groundwork for national reconciliation through establishing a coalition government. However, it instead eventually led to the Pathet Lao takeover of the country, and from then little-known but persistent armed conflict between communist forces and anticommunist insurgents continued.

Some background is required regarding the period prior to 1959 and 1962, at least starting from the end of World War II in 1945, when the Lao Issara (Free Lao) nationalist organization was formed to resist the return of the French colonial government. Later, one faction of that group of nationalists, led by Souphanouvong, the so-called “Red Prince,” became allied with Hồ Chí Minh and other communists in North Vietnam. Similarly, “after” the war (though fighting actually continued), it is important to at least briefly examine the fall of Laos to communism in 1975. Even though the Americans largely withdrew from Laos in 1975, royalists, democrats, nationalists, and neutralists continued to politically oppose and wage guerrilla war against the new government of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR), even if the nature of the conflict changed dramatically. The anti–Lao PDR insurgency emerged beginning in 1975 and continued into the 1980s, 1990s, and beyond, albeit weakening considerably in recent years. This conflict is what I call the Really Secret War in Laos.

This chapter is intended to provide readers with a summary review of the conflict in Laos. The overall goal is to briefly summarize the important circumstances associated with the war in Laos, something that has apparently not been done before.

Between World War II and Điện Biên Phủ

During World War II, the Japanese inspired anti-French colonial ideas in Laos; thus, upon their defeat in August 1945, Lao nationalists, with the urging of the departing Japanese, formed the Lao Issara. They were not, however, militarily developed enough to resist the return of the French, who sent aircraft to bomb the central Lao town of Thakhek, killing a large number of ethnic Vietnamese and Lao civilians and forcing Prince Souphanouvong to flee across the Mekong River by boat, after he was shot by a French airplane, and take refuge with Tieng Sirikhan, a key Seri Thai (Free Thai) leader from northeastern Thailand.¹ Lao Issara in other parts of the country also fled across the Mekong River to Thailand, including the leader, Prince Phetxarath, Souphanouvong’s half-brother. The Thai government, led by Prime Minister Pridi Banomyong, was sympathetic, as the northeastern faction of Pridi’s Seri Thai had cooperated with the Lao Issara during World War II.² However, in 1947, Field Marshall Phibun Songkhram led a coup d’état against Pridi, forcing him into exile in China. The new Phibun regime was less willing to support the Lao Issara, and pressured them to resolve their dispute with the French. The French also took the opportunity to institute some reforms in Laos, including granting partial independence to the country, although without giving up control over key institutions, including the security services. But the push-and-pull factors were enough to lead many Lao Issara to reconciliation in 1949, when most returned to Laos. However, Prince Souphanouvong refused to reconcile with the French. He joined the Việt Minh and, over time, the Lao Issara became the communist Pathet Lao. They were strongly under the influence of North Vietnamese communists, who sent advisors to Laos to help recruit Lao people to the Pathet Lao, and also provide them with political and military training.³ The Việt Minh initially had little recruiting success in Laos, but after they changed their strategy and “went native” – meaning that they made serious efforts to learn local languages, adopt local cultural practices, and generally integrate themselves with the local population – they gained more allies, especially in remote areas where they were able to gain the trust of many ethnic minorities, although less so in major population centers.⁴ Fighting occurred, but it was not nearly as intense as it would become in the 1960s and early 1970s.

The French were defeated by the Việt Minh in 1954 during the decisive battle at Điện Biên Phủ and were thus forced to negotiate their departure from French Indochina, which included Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The French Indochina War had come to an end. During the Geneva Accords of 1954, Vietnam was divided into communist North and noncommunist South Vietnam, while Houaphanh and Phongsaly provinces in northern Laos were categorized as Pathet Lao regroupment zones, and Laos was recognized as a neutral state. There were, however, hopes that the divisions in Laos would be temporary, and that future negotiations would allow for the integration of the communist Pathet Lao and the Royal Lao government (RLG) into a single governing administration. However, the Geneva Accords left the procedure for reintegrating the two provinces into the national system contingent on future negotiations between the RLG and the Pathet Lao.

The outcome of the Geneva Conference constituted a clear political gain for the Pathet Lao. By being allotted regroupment areas, it won an internationally recognized base area from which to wage political struggle, and within which to gain valuable administrative experience.

Failed Reconciliation

Negotiations occurred in 1956, and on November 12, 1957 a joint communiqué announced that an agreement had been reached. Soon after, a coalition government was formed, with two Pathet Lao ministers joining the government in Vientiane. The Pathet Lao also continued to administrate Phongsaly and Houaphanh provinces in northern Laos.⁵

In May 1958, elections were held; despite allegations that the US CIA-backed rightists rigged some of the elections, and that the Americans dropped food in a number of places in advance of elections in order to try to influence the results, the Neo Lao Hak Xat Party won thirteen of twenty-one seats. However, the official election results in Attapeu province, in the deep south, gave the rightwing Front Uni Party candidate 20,692 votes, as compared with Kaysone Phomvihane, who represented the communist Neo Lao Hak Xat, who officially received just 1,968 votes.⁶ Arthur Dommen reported the results of this election uncritically, stating that “he [Kaysone Phomvihane] was defeated in the National Assembly elections” in Attapeu.⁷ However, official Lao PDR historiography claims that boxes of votes for Kaysone were thrown into the Xekong River, which seems plausible, since Kaysone was thought to have some support in the outer-lying areas of the province. Some have even gone as far as to claim that Kaysone obtained 100 percent of the vote, although this is almost certainly inaccurate. The alleged rigging of voting forced the Pathet Lao, including Kaysone Phomvihane, to return to the forests to fight against the RLG. Thus, the war in Laos was not simply an extension of what was happening in neighboring Vietnam, but also had its own particular political trajectory. General Phoumi Nosavan became the dominant rightwing influence in the military and government.

In May 1959, the second of the Pathet Lao’s two battalions – one of whose leaders was the Hmong Thao Tou Yang and had been based on the Plain of Jars – refused to integrate into the Armée Nationale Laotienne, after the RLG refused to allow as many Pathet Lao officers into the Forces Armées du Royaume (FAR) as requested by the communists. This was regarded as a rebellion by the leadership of the RLG in Vientiane. On May 14, 1959, the RLG issued an ultimatum that the renegade Pathet Lao battalion integrate. In May 1960, after the Pathet Lao leadership was initially put under house detention, the rightist prime minister, Phoui Sananikone, ordered the arrest of the Lao Patriotic Front leadership. However, they were famously able to escape from Phonkheng jail, outside of Vientiane, ten months later, before regrouping in Houaphanh province.

Before the Second Geneva Accords

On January 22, 1959, the US military launched the Hotfoot Project, which would eventually transform into being the White Star Program on April 19, 1961. Hotfoot sent US regular military to Laos to arm and train anticommunist militias. They went to various parts of the country, including the north, and central and southern Laos. The White Star Program expanded the number of people in Laos, from 154 in spring 1961 to 402 by October 1961, but was ended once the Second Geneva Accords on Laos of 1962 were signed. The 433 US military personnel were withdrawn from Laos.⁸

On August 9, 1960, Captain Kong Le, who was just 26 years old, led the 2nd Paratrooper Battalion to conduct a coup d’état in favor of neutralism and against foreign interference in Lao affairs. Although it is widely rumored that the French secret service, particularly the French policeman Jean Deuve,⁹ helped Kong Le plan for the coup, Kong Le denied any involvement of any French agents in the coup planning, including when I interviewed him in 2009 in Paris.¹⁰ In any case, Kong Le brought Souvanna Phouma back from exile in Cambodia to become the neutralist prime minister of Laos.

Later in the year, however, the Thai and US governments supported Phoumi Nosavan’s forces, who had regrouped in Savannakhet in southern Laos, where they established a parallel government with Prince Boun Oum, the prince of Champasak, as its leader. Phoumi’s forces were able to retake the capital of Vientiane from the south during the battle of Vientiane, which continued from December 13 to December 16, 1960, with artillery support from the Thai Army. The Soviets dropped air supplies to Kong Le’s Forces Armées Neutralistes in Vientiane, but they were still forced to retreat to the north, first to Vang Vieng and then to the Plain of Jars in Xieng Khouang province. The neutralists soon split into two factions, one loyal to Kong Le eventually rejoining the FAR. Another faction, the Patriotic Neutralists, became aligned with the Pathet Lao communists and stayed in Pathet Lao–controlled areas for years. In July 1959, the Armée Nationale Laotienne, the Lao Navy, and Laotian Aviation had been put together by the RLG to create the Forces Armées Laotiènnes (which would be renamed the [abovementioned] Forces Armées du Royaume or FAR in September 1961).

During the time Kong Le was in power, the CIA sent Bill Lair, an American agent who had already been working for the CIA in Thailand, and five teams from the Police Aerial Resupply Unit (PARU) operating from Thailand to work with General Phoumi Nosavan to launch a countercoup against Kong Le. Their support was crucial, and thus Bill Lair and his Thai PARU colleagues were asked to stay in Laos after Vientiane was retaken. Bill Lair ended up flying to Tha Vieng in northeastern Laos, on the advice of Phoumi’s government, in order to meet the Hmong military leader, Lieutenant Colonel Vang Pao, in early January 1961, thus beginning what would become a legendary collaboration between the two men, since Bill Lair, representing the CIA, started to provide military and training support to Vang Pao’s anticommunist soldiers, a force that gradually gained strength. Operation Momentum helped Vang Pao establish a number of bases surrounding the Plain of Jars. The government of Thailand also established Operation 333 in 1961, in order to provide military assistance to the RLG against the communist Pathet Lao.

On April 24, 1961, a ceasefire between the FAR and the communist Pathet Lao was agreed upon, but on June 6, 1961 the communists violated the ceasefire by attacking and overrunning Vang Pao’s base at Pha Dong, leading to a retreat to Pha Khao. It also led to the first large number of Hmong refugees to flee to Vientiane before being eventually airlifted to a resettlement site at Nam Hia in Xayaboury province in northwestern Laos.¹¹ By May 1961, it had become clear that the ethnic Hmong Highlanders led by Vang Pao were the principal military instrument of RLG presence in northeastern Laos, as large numbers were recruited to former CIA-supported paramilitary units. In 1962, (by then) Major General Vang Pao moved out of Pha Khao and set up headquarters in Long Tieng, where he would be based until the fall of the RLG in 1975.

Between January and May 1962 fierce fighting occurred in the northern Lao province of Luang Namtha. Known as the battle of Luang Namtha, the conflict between the FAR and the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) from North Vietnam and Pathet Lao communists ended with the noncommunist forces retreating 90 miles (150 kilometers) southwest across the Mekong River into Thailand via Houay Sai. Phoumi’s disastrous military defeats in Luang Namtha reduced American confidence in him. Washington exerted pressure to form a coalition government. The hope then was that the neutralist party of Prince Souvanna Phouma would moderate and unite the two extremes.

The Secret War in Laos: The Early Years

The Secret War in Laos can be said to have begun on July 23, 1962, the day that the Second Geneva Accords confirmed Laos as a neutral country. The US Programs Evaluation Office (POE) funded the FAR, but the Secret War in Laos gained its name because the CIA funded the Special Guerrilla Units (SGUs), since the United States did not want to acknowledge that it was no longer following the Second Geneva Accords, which guaranteed Laos’ neutrality.

It appears that initially, following the Geneva Accords of 1962, the US government intended to withdraw all regular military personnel from the country, including those who had been working with White Star. The US ambassador to Laos, Leonard Unger, who took on his position in Laos on July 25, 1962, just two days after the accords had been signed, claimed that his assignment was “to do whatever was feasible to carry out the provisions of the 1962 Geneva Accords and to avoid a renewal of warfare in Laos.”¹² However, the job soon came to be how to appear to be following the accords, when actually not doing so. Indeed, the US government realized that thousands of North Vietnamese troops were not leaving the country. Thus, the United States started looking for options to defend the RLG, but without openly defying the Second Geneva Accords. This all led the CIA to become tasked with supporting military operations in Laos – with the permission and cooperation of the RLG, but secret from the rest of the world.

In April 1963, the Patriotic Neutralists attacked Kong Le’s neutralists, probably with North Vietnamese support, although North Vietnam denied their involvement at the time. The attacks caused Kong Le’s forces to give up their positions on the Plain of Jars, although they were able to reorganize themselves at Muang Soui and to the south at Vang Vieng. The dire overall circumstances in Laos at the time led Arthur Dommen to describe the Second Geneva Accords of 1962 as “worthless.”¹³

During the first half of the 1960s, Bill Lair was in charge of the CIA’s paramilitary strategy with regard to Military Region (MR) II¹⁴ in central and northern Laos, where he worked closely with Vang Pao, who eventually became a general and the military commander of MR II. Lair hardly did any work regarding the road-watching and other operations directed against the Hồ Chí Minh Trail in southern Laos, but he is well-known for his work setting up and supporting the Hmong anticommunist forces.

Figure 12.1 Hmong militia during the American Secret War in Laos (1962).

Source: Pictures from History / Contributor / Universal Images Group / Getty Images.

The Secret War Escalates

The Secret War in Laos involved two major arenas of conflict. The first was in northeastern Laos, especially the Plain of Jars in Xieng Khouang province, but also other areas, and was between the Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese communists, on the one side, and the FAR, with support from the CIA and (later) Thai “volunteer” forces, on the other. The second was the Hồ Chí Minh Trail, which was first established by the North Vietnamese military in 1959 and went from Khammouane province south to the border between Laos and Cambodia and into Cambodia itself. Essentially, the North Vietnamese were using territory in Laos to send North Vietnamese troops, equipment, and other supplies to the south, so as to bypass the demilitarized zone (DMZ), which divided North from South Vietnam, but without receiving permission from the RLG.

On May 21, 1964, Souvanna Phouma, the prime minister of Laos, first authorized US bombing in the country. From then until 1973, Souvanna Phouma played an important role in approving bombing missions in Laos. Indeed, he was at times hawkish on bombing, which was also broadly supported by some Lao elites, including King Sisavang Vatthana, as the RLG believed that such bombing was justified by the fact that the North Vietnamese had violated the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country by sending large numbers of troops into Laos.¹⁵ According to Ryan Wolfson-Ford, on July 31, 1964, Souvanna Phouma approved, in principle, the use of US aircraft for stopping the North Vietnamese from using the Hồ Chí Minh Trail.¹⁶ Then, on September 30, 1964, Leonard Unger, the US ambassador to Laos, reported for the first time, in a memo, that Souvanna Phouma “concurred in principle to corridor [Hồ Chí Minh Trail] air strikes.”¹⁷ However, Unger also reported that “in various ways – some known to me and some not – Souvanna sought to block this traffic [along the Hồ Chí Minh Trail], but in such a way that Laos would not find itself sucked into the Vietnam maelstrom, and that its hard-fought-for neutrality would not, in the larger context, be abandoned or jeopardized.”¹⁸ It has also been suggested that the United States’ first priority was to bomb the Hồ Chí Minh Trail, but that they needed to provide bombing support for the war in northern Laos as well, since that was the priority for the RLG, even though this quid pro quo was later denied by Unger’s successor as US ambassador to Laos, William Sullivan, during testimony he made to the US Congress on October 21, 1969.¹⁹

The aerial bombardment of Laos by US aircraft mainly based in Thailand, but also in Vietnam and Guam, gradually escalated. On March 30, 1965, Souvanna Phouma reportedly agreed to plans to intensify air operations in southern Laos, although he insisted that he be briefed regularly on bombing results, and also that the US Air Force liaise closely with the Royal Lao Air Force. Souvanna also insisted that civilian casualties be avoided. In fact, Souvanna Phouma was very concerned that villages in Laos not be bombed, and this eventually led Sullivan to put specific restrictions on bombing operations. This, in turn, sometimes put Sullivan at odds with the senior leadership of the US military in Vietnam, including General Westmoreland and others. The US Air Force used various means to increase the accuracy of bombing, including employing Forward Air Control Tactical Air Navigation (TACAN) systems at various locations in Laos, Ravens, Thai Forward Air Guides, and Lao and Hmong Forward Air Guides. In addition, Souvanna Phouma was insistent that everything remain top secret. This was partially because the RLG was also receiving some support from the Soviet Union. He did not want to jeopardize his neutralist role, as the Soviets were in a position to encourage Hanoi to send more troops into Laos, or to restrain them. US Ambassador Sullivan agreed with these arguments, as did Washington-based officials.

Over nine years, between 1964 and 1973, the United States would fly 580,000 bombing missions over Laos.²⁰ There were also large quantities of chemicals, including at least over half a million gallons of Agent Orange and other related chemicals sprayed in Laos, primarily on the Hồ Chí Minh Trail. The bombing was intensive and led to severe misery and suffering for the people living in communist-controlled areas. Beginning in October 1965, US Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observation Groups (MACV SOGs), special military units based in Vietnam, also launched small team operations into Laos from Vietnam in order to disrupt enemy movements along the Hồ Chí Minh Trail. Attapeu was of strategic importance to the United States, as it was an ideal location for observing activities along the Trail.²¹

Between 1964 and 1967, Thailand’s support for the RLG, via Operation 333, allowed for 125 Thai personnel to be based in Laos. Most trained Vang Pao’s SGU forces in MR II. In 1969–70 the scale of fighting increased, and Thailand started sending thousands of “volunteer” forces into Laos to assist the SGU. During the battle of Skyline Ridge in 1971–2, when Long Tieng, Vang Pao’s base, was threatened, there were about 1,000 mainly Hmong fighters there, along with 5,000 Thai “Tiger Scouts” from Operation 333 and just a few American CIA advisors. Large numbers of Thais also fought in other parts of the country, including on the Bolaven Plateau in 1971–2. There were up to 20,000 Thai Operation 333 people based in Laos between 1970 and 1974, mainly based at Long Tieng, Xieng Lom, and Pakse.²²

Attempted Coups

There were a number of failed coups d’état in the mid-1960s. On April 19, 1964, Siho Lamphouthacoul, the former national military police chief, attempted a coup with General Kouprasit Aphay, a key military figure in Vientiane. The coup was seemingly initially successful, but then failed when the US ambassador, Leonard Unger,²³ informed the coup-makers that Washington supported Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma. Then, on August 4, 1964, General Phoumi Nosavan attempted a coup, using a training battalion in the capital that he controlled, but the coup-makers were soon crushed by forces loyal to General Kouprasit Aphay, the deputy leader of the FAR, and Phoumi was stripped of his troop command. On January 31, 1965, Colonel Bounleut Saycocie attempted a coup using the battalion that he commanded in Vientiane. It failed, but, crucially, Phoumi Nosavan was accused of orchestrating a simultaneous coup attempt, even though his son, Phoumano Nosavan, who was a lieutenant in the Royal Lao Air Force at the time, and commanded a company, claimed that his father was not involved in the plot. Instead, he claimed that Kouprasit Aphay, with the apparent approval of the CIA, took the opportunity to accuse Phoumi of involvement and force him to flee to Thailand. Once in Thailand, the Thais did not allow him to travel south to try to regroup in Savannakhet, as he had done in 1960. Phoumano reported that Phoumi had recently traveled to China and North Vietnam to try to negotiate peace for Laos, something that the Americans apparently did not agree with. He believes that the Americans asked the Thais to make sure Phoumi went to Bangkok, not to Savannakhet.²⁴ William Sullivan, the US ambassador,²⁵ also admitted later that he did not believe that Phoumi Nosavan was actually involved in the attempted coup.²⁶ General Thao Ma Manosith, the head of the Royal Lao Air Force, launched still another failed coup d’état on October 22, 1966, a week after Kong Le had been “forcibly invited” to leave Laos and take refuge in Indonesia. The FAR wanted to integrate Kong Le’s 12,000 neutralist forces into themselves, which they did.

In July 1966, Ted Shackley became the head of the CIA’s Vientiane office, based at the US Embassy in Vientiane, replacing Douglas Blaufarb, who had worked closely with Bill Lair and the PARU from Thailand. Before Shackley went to Laos, he received specific orders from the CIA’s director, Richard Helms, that the war in Vietnam was the priority. Shackley’s arrival marked a major shift, as he was more interested in full-on military engagement with the enemy, even if that led to major casualties. Major General Vang Pao was apparently a willing partner in this strategic shift from guerrilla to more conventional warfare. Illustrative of the shift, Shackley locked horns with Major General Phasouk S. Rajaphakd, the leader of southern Laos’ MR IV, when Shackley canceled a program in Wapi Khamthong province designed to win the hearts and minds of communists in the area. Shackley remained in his position for more than two years, until he became chief of the CIA station in Saigon in October 1968, replacing William Colby.

Crucially, Shackley was focused on military action, as opposed to intelligence-gathering operations, and, unlike Bill Lair, who favored bringing young college graduates in to work with him, Shackley brought in former marines and other military men.²⁷ Dissatisfied with the idea of using Vang Pao’s forces in MR II for conventional warfare,²⁸ Bill Lair decided to leave Laos. Shackley knew little about Laos or her people and was focused on furthering American interests, seemingly regardless of the impacts on Laos. He was a numbers man and was concerned much more about what people in the United States thought than people in Laos.

Initially, Vang Pao’s forces in MR II realized substantial gains far beyond those of any previous year. In Sam Neua district, Houaphanh province, for example, Vang Pao’s units took control of most areas, except for the capital city of the province, which remained under Pathet Lao control. Over time, the strength of the SGUs grew, and in a report issued on October 31, 1968 it was estimated that there were 39,000 paramilitary guerrilla forces loyal to the RLG, of which 22,000 were in MR II. The majority of those were Hmong. There were also 7,000 in northwestern Laos, mainly ethnic Khmu, Iu-Mien, and Lahu, 2,000 in northcentral Laos, 4,000 in central Laos, mainly ethnic Lao, and 4,000 in southern Laos, mainly ethnic Nya Heun, Brao, and Lao. This compared with 46,000 regular FAR troops, 8,500 neutralist soldiers, 5,000 members of regional defense forces, 1,500 in the Royal Lao Air Force, and 500 in the Royal Lao Navy. SGUs were based in various parts of the country, but the largest number were in the Long Tieng area in MR II. Others were based in Nam Nyou and Xieng Lom areas in MR I, as well as in MR III and IV in southern Laos.

Pakse Site-38 Airfield became the largest SGU base on the Bolaven Plateau and in southern Laos. It was located in an ethnic Nya Heun area on the eastern part of the plateau, and there were more than 1,000 paramilitary soldiers based there. Another paramilitary group established on the plateau was the 1st SGU. This 550-man unit was based on the eastern part of the Bolaven Plateau at Pakse Site-22. There were also other SGU sites on the Bolaven Plateau. In southern Laos, the main US and Lao government effort was to disrupt the Hồ Chí Minh Trail. Missions to the Hồ Chí Minh Trail occurred to gather intelligence and sabotage movement, and efforts were even made to capture Vietnamese officers in order to extract intelligence information from them, with those citizens of Laos who were successful in capturing live Vietnamese officers receiving significant cash bonuses. Highlander road-watch teams were typically airlifted in by helicopter, where they would continue their missions on foot. The SGUs operated from 1967 to 1970, after which time they joined the rest of the ranks of the FAR and fought as line infantry. However, American CIA case officers continued to pay the paramilitaries who worked on American projects, and Americans continued to advise and direct operations involving ethnic minorities. Less well known or documented than the SGU forces on the Bolaven Plateau were the ethnic Brao units based at Kong My, a CIA-supported base in southeastern Attapeu province, located a distance away but still within range of the tri-border area with Vietnam and Cambodia.²⁹

The Secret War escalated, along with the aerial bombardment, in the mid- and late 1960s, and General Vang Pao gradually developed the largest paramilitary force in the country in MR II, with CIA support. Stationed at the mountainous base of Long Tieng, Vang Pao’s forces battled against the North Vietnamese and their Pathet Lao allies, especially in Xieng Khouang and Houaphanh provinces. It was later widely rumored by Hmong veterans in the United States that their support for the CIA would be reciprocated by the US government later, in case they lost the war. As one Hmong man told me at a Veterans Day event organized in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, on November 11, 2012, “Bill Lair said that the US would help the Hmong if they won, and if they lost, they would find a place for the Hmong to take refuge.”³⁰ Bill Lair, however, denied that any such promise was ever made, although it is certainly true that the Hmong were fully funded and advised by the CIA. In any case, many Hmong believe that there was such a promise.

The Nam Bac Valley, in northern Luang Prabang province in northern Laos, was the site of major military engagements during the second half of the 1960s. In August 1966, the FAR moved into the valley to take control from the Pathet Lao, who had previously infiltrated the area. The hope was to block a potential attack on the royal capital of Luang Prabang, and to eventually retake Luang Namtha. One year later, in August 1967, the North Vietnamese besieged the base, leading both sides to reinforce their troops, and then, on January 11, 1968 – almost three weeks in advance of the beginning of the Tet Offensive in Vietnam – the communists launched a major multidivisional attack on FAR positions in Nam Bac. Part of the FAR’s problem was apparently poorly coordinated air support. In any case, the fight was furious, and the FAR generally performed poorly and suffered serious losses. Of the 3,278 royalist soldiers at Nam Bac, only about one-third were able to withdraw and eventually regroup. Casualties were not only from MR I, but also from southern Laos as well. FAR material losses were also heavy, and 600 FAR POWs even switched sides to join the Pathet Lao.

Although Vang Pao’s troops made significant advances in Houaphanh province in 1967, in early 1968 there were serious setbacks, including the fall of Phou Pha Thi, or Lima Site-85 airfield, on March 11, 1968. It was an important TACAN station, and the TSQ-81 bomber guidance system was also located there. Phou Pha Thi was crucial for directing US aircraft engaged in bombing missions in the Hanoi area. Many of its defenders, whether Hmong, Lao, Thai, or American, did not survive the assault. On March 23, 1969, Vang Pao’s SGUs in MR II launched a large-scale attack on the Plain of Jars and in other parts of Xieng Khouang province, supported by the Royal Lao Air Force and the US Air Force; the North Vietnamese counterattacked in June, but by August 1969 the royalists were able to gain back what had been lost. North Vietnam’s 174th Regiment had to withdraw in early September. However, the Vietnamese counterattacked in mid-September, and were again able to retake control of the Plain of Jars.

The Deterioration of the Military Situation in Laos

In 1970, fresh North Vietnamese troops moved into northern Laos, and the Skyline Ridge area was bombed by B-52s while North Vietnam was besieging Long Tieng. B-52 bombers were operating in southern Laos before then, but this was the first time they were deployed in the north. Vang Pao’s SGU reinforcements halted the North Vietnamese advance, and the fighting went back and forth for the rest of the year.

Also in 1970, the military situation greatly intensified in southern Laos, and the situation for the FAR and the SGUs deteriorated. Attapeu and Salavan provinces in southeastern Laos easily fell to the Vietnamese and Pathet Lao in 1970. As the Pathet Lao leader, Kaysone Phomvihane, later wrote, “Thus the efforts to put the Nixon Doctrine into effect in Laos were frustrated … [w]e inflicted a blow on the enemy in the south, in the provinces of Saravane – Attapeu, both of which were almost completely liberated.”³¹ The Nixon Doctrine encouraged US allies to take responsibility for their own security, although with support from the United States when needed. From there, fighting gradually moved west to the Bolaven Plateau in Champasak province in 1971 and 1972, where heavy fighting soon occurred. Some of Lon Nol’s Khmer soldiers from Cambodia assisted the Lao military on the Bolaven Plateau, but did not perform particularly well.

In 1971, Saigon’s Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) attempted to infiltrate into Laos to attack the North Vietnamese and cut off the Hồ Chí Minh Trail in eastern Savannakhet province, in what became known as Operation Lam Sơn 719. The mission began on February 8 and continued until March 25. It was the most intense armed conflict to reach MR III. After some initial successes, the South Vietnamese tried to withdraw to Vietnam beginning on March 9. However, the retreat did not go as planned and soon turned into a rout. Finally, the operation failed. During an April 7 televised speech, US President Richard Nixon claimed that “Tonight I can report that Vietnamization has succeeded.”³² In fact, the situation was much more problematic.

To the north, Vang Pao’s forces continued to battle the Vietnamese, with both sides experiencing heavy losses; territory was lost and gained. The United States had become continually weary of the war and in 1973 strongly encouraged the Lao government to follow on the heels of South Vietnam and sign a peace treaty with their communist adversaries. The Lao neutralists and rightwing factions were initially resistant to the idea, but Henry Kissinger, the US secretary of state at the time, made a secret and unofficial trip to Laos in early February 1973. He met Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma and another senior Lao statesman privately. He convinced them to change their position, but not simply through intellectual persuasion. Essentially, the United States was funding the Lao government and military, and Kissinger threatened to withdraw funding if Souvanna Phouma did not agree to sign a peace agreement. The latter realized that he had no option but to comply.³³ Thus, on February 21, 1973, the Vientiane Agreement was signed, which led to the establishment of a coalition government soon after, and a short period of relative peace. This coalition government would, however, last less than three years, and would begin deteriorating about two years after the agreement was signed.

Beginning in 1973, the Pathet Lao gradually worked to take full control. Some wanted the rightists and neutralists to take a stronger line against the Pathet Lao, and this eventually led to Thao Ma Manosith’s second failed coup attempt, which occurred on August 20, 1973, when he commandeered a T-28 plane and subsequently executed airstrikes on Kouprasit Aphay’s house and office, before finally being shot down, dragged from the airplane badly injured, and shot dead, apparently on the orders of Kouprasit Aphay. In May 1974, Prince Souphanouvong, representing the Pathet Lao, put forward an eighteen-point plan for “National Reconstruction,” which was unanimously adopted. Externally, reconciliation appeared to be moving forward well, but there was actually much more at play.

The Fall of the RLG

In early May 1975, following a series of Pathet Lao–orchestrated student protests, a number of rightwing government ministers accused of corruption fled the country. Then, on May 14, Vang Pao and about 2,500 other MR II leaders and their families were airlifted out of Long Tieng to Thailand. Soon after, the government was gradually taken over by the communist Pathet Lao, as infighting between the noncommunist elite in Laos made it easier for the Pathet Lao to take control.³⁴ In June and July, former government officials and military personnel began being sent away for various forms of political reeducation in different remote parts of the country. The harshest of these camps were located in Viangxay district, Houaphanh province, in the far northeast of Laos, but others were organized in Attapeu, Xepon, and elsewhere. Conditions were poor, and many succumbed during imprisonment. Others escaped; some were killed trying to. In August 1975, the king of Laos, Sisavang Vatthana, was pressured by the communists to resign from the throne, and on December 2, 1975 the Lao PDR was established, following the Vietnamese and Soviet political models. In 1977, the king and most of the rest of the royal family in Luang Prabang were arrested and sent to reeducation camps, where they all died owing to malnutrition and illness.

As the major political transformation occurred, large numbers of people began fleeing across the Mekong River to Thailand. Refugee camps were established there, and some refugees started being resettled in third countries, including the United States and France. Others, especially those previously in the FAR, started militarily resisting the Laos PDR government, some organizing military operations from the borderlands in Thailand. Others were based inside Laos. The Thai government particularly supported the Lao resistance against the Lao PDR government and their Vietnamese supporters, as the Thai government was fearful of a possible communist invasion.³⁵ The Chinese also provided military training and material support to some anti–Lao government resistance groups, especially after 1979, when the relationship between China and Vietnam deteriorated, with Laos supporting Vietnam. Some senior Lao PDR political figures, including Dr. Khamsengkeo Sengsathit and others, also decided to defect to China, where they advocated for political and military resistance against the Lao PDR government.

Initially, military resistance to the Lao PDR government was scattered and poorly organized. Over time, however, resistance increased. Various armed resistance groups emerged, including the neutralists politically led by General Kong Le, and the Hmong messianic group led by Zong Zoua Her and Pa Kao Her, officially named the Ethnic Liberation Organization of Laos (ELOL) but commonly known as the Chao Fa.³⁶

By the mid-1980s, however, the Lao National Liberation Front (LNLF) (known as the Neo Hom in Lao) became the most powerful resistance group, led by Vang Pao and General Thonglith Chokbengboun, and allied with Prince Sanprasith Na Champasak’s resistance organization, which was based in Ubon Ratchathani province, in northeastern Thailand, and operated in the southern-most part of Laos, in the area that was part of Laos’ MR IV. Around that same time, the Chinese stopped supporting the insurgency, including the ELOL and the neutralists, and in 1989 Chatchai Choonhavan, the new prime minister of Thailand, came to power. Unlike his predecessors, he promoted peace with Laos and Cambodia, and promoted the new “Battlefields to Market Places” policy. In the early 1990s this led to the gradual end of support from the Thais for the insurgency.

In the early 1990s, the last official refugee camps in Thailand were gradually closed, thus depriving the insurgency of the refugee population, a crucial source of support for its political and military activities. In the early 2000s, the only significant armed insurgency in Laos were Hmong groups in the mountains of the north. However, this resistance has heavily declined, especially since Vang Pao died in the United States in 2011. However, a few small groups of Hmong are still living in the mountainous forests of north–central Laos, where they continue to resist the Lao PDR government, with political support from the Congress of World Hmong Peoples, a US-based pro–Hmong State group based in Minnesota. However, the Hmong in the forests spend most of their time foraging for food and hiding from the Lao PDR military, as they have been greatly weakened compared to the past.

Conclusion

The conflict in Laos – and what preceded it and followed it – represents a tragedy for Laos and its people, regardless of what side of the political divide one was on. Those from all sides shed blood, and large numbers were displaced owing to military conflict or bombing. Large numbers of people were imprisoned or felt that they had no choice but to flee the country to Thailand after the Lao PDR was established in 1975, later settling in Western countries. The Secret War in Laos stretched for eleven years, between 1962 and 1973, but, as should be clear from this chapter, conflict actually raged, on and off, and to varying degrees in different parts of the country, for over fifty years, beginning in 1945.

For a short period, soon after John F. Kennedy became president of the United States, Laos attracted the interest of the mainstream US media, but since then it has never garnered the attention that the war in Vietnam did. However, there is no doubt that the war in Laos was a crucially important part of the broader conflict that engulfed mainland Southeast Asia, but one that has not received sufficient attention.