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Chapter 2:
INDOCHINA
EVEN WHILE COMPELLED to concentrate on brute realities, one must
never lose sight of that element of the surreal that surrounds Henry
Kissinger. Paying a visit to Vietnam in the middle 1960s, when many tech-
nocratic opportunists were still convinced that the war was worth
fighting
and could be won, the young Henry reserved judgment on the first point
but developed considerable private doubts on the second. Empowered by
Nelson Rockefeller with a virtual free hand to develop contacts of his
own,
he had gone so far as to involve himself with an initiative that
extended to
direct personal contact with Hanoi. He became friendly with two
Frenchmen who had a direct line to the Communist leadership in North
Vietnam's capital. Raymond Aubrac, a French civil servant who was a
friend of Ho Chi Minh, made common cause with Herbert Marcovich, a
French biochemist, and began a series of trips to North Vietnam. On
their
return, they briefed Kissinger in Paris. He in his turn parlayed their
infor-
mation into high-level conversations in Washington, relaying the actual
or
potential negotiating positions of Pham Van Dong and other Communist
statesmen to Robert McNamara. (In the result, the relentless bombing of
the North made any "bridge-building" impracticable. In particular, the
now-forgotten American destruction of the Paul Doumer bridge outraged
the Vietnamese side.)
This weightless mid-position, which ultimately helped enable his
double act in 1968, allowed Kissinger to ventriloquize Governor
Rockefeller
and to propose, by indirect means, a future detente with America's chief
rivals. In his first major address as a candidate for the Republican
nomi-
nation in 1968, Rockefeller spoke ringingly of how "in a subtle triangle
with
Communist China and the Soviet Union, we can ultimately improve our
relations with each -- as we test the will for peace of both." This foreshad-
owing of a later Kissinger strategy might appear at first reading to
illustrate
prescience. But Governor Rockefeller had no more reason than Vice-
President Humphrey to suppose that his ambitious staffer would defect to
the Nixon camp, risking and postponing this same detente in order later
to
take credit for a debased simulacrum of it.
Morally speaking, Kissinger treated the concept of superpower rap-
prochement in the same way as he treated the concept of a negotiated
settlement in Vietnam: as something contingent to his own needs. There
was a time to feign support of it, and a time to denounce it as
weak-minded
and treacherous. And there was a time to take credit for it. Some of
those
who "followed orders" in Indochina may lay a claim to that notoriously
weak defense. Some who even issued the orders may now tell us that they
were acting sincerely at the time. But Kissinger cannot avail himself of
this
alibi. He always knew what he was doing, and he embarked upon a second
round of protracted warfare having knowingly helped to destroy an
alter-
native which he always understood was possible. This increases the
gravity
of the charge against him. It also prepares us for his improvised and
retro-
spective defense against that charge -that his immense depredations
eventually led to "peace." When he falsely and prematurely announced
that
"peace is now at hand" in October 1972, he made a boastful claim that
could have been genuinely (and much less bloodily) made in 1967. And
when he claimed credit for subsequent superpower contacts, he was
announcing the result of a secret and corrupt diplomacy that had
originally
been proposed as an open and democratic one. In the meantime, he had
illegally eavesdropped and shadowed American citizens and public
servants
whose misgivings about the war, and about unconstitutional authority,
were mild compared to those of Messieurs Aubrac and Marcovich. In
establishing what lawyers call the mens rea, we can say that in
Kissinger's
case he was fully aware of, and is entirely accountable for, his own
actions.
Upon taking office at Richard Nixon's side in the winter of 1968, it
was
Kissinger's task to be plus royaliste que le roi in two respects. He had
to con-
fect a rationale of "credibility" for punitive action in an already
devastated
Vietnamese theatre, and he had to second his principal's wish that he
form
part of a "wall" between the Nixon White House and the Department of
State. The term "two-track" was later to become commonplace. Kissinger's
position on both tracks, of promiscuous violence abroad and flagrant
ille-
gality at home, was decided from the start. He does not seem to have
lacked
relish for either commitment; one hopes faintly that this was not the
first
twinge of the "aphrodisiac."
President Johnson's "bombing halt" had not lasted long by any stan-
dards, even if one remembers that its original conciliatory purpose had
been sordidly undercut. Averell Harriman, who had been LBJ's chief nego-
tiator in Paris, later testified to Congress that the North Vietnamese
had
withdrawn 90 percent of their forces from the northern two provinces of
South Vietnam, in October-November 1968, in accordance with the agree-
ment of which the halt might have formed a part. In the new context,
however, this withdrawal could be interpreted as a sign of weakness, or
even as a "light at the end of the tunnel."
The historical record of the Indochina war is voluminous, and the
resulting controversy no less so. However, this does not prevent the
fol-
lowing of a consistent thread. Once the war had been unnaturally and
undemocratically prolonged, more exorbitant methods were required to
fight it and more fantastic excuses had to be fabricated to justify it.
Let us
take four separate but connected cases in which the civilian population
was
deliberately exposed to indiscriminate lethal force, in which the
customary
laws of war and neutrality were violated, and in which conscious lies
had to
be told in order to conceal these facts, and others.
The first such case is an example of what Vietnam might have been
spared had not the 1968 Paris peace talks been sabotaged. In December
1968, during the "transition" period between the Johnson and Nixon
administrations, the United States military command turned to what
General Creighton Abrams termed "total war" against the "infrastructure"
of the Vietcong/NLF insurgency. The chief exhibit in this campaign was a
six-month clearance of the Mekong Delta province of Kien Hoa. The code
name for the sweep was Operation Speedy Express. (See pages 30-33.)
It might, in some realm of theory, be remotely conceivable that such
tactics could be justified under the international laws and charters
govern-
ing the sovereign rights of self-defense. But no nation capable of
deploying
the overwhelming and annihilating force described below would be likely
to find itself on the defensive. And it would be least of all likely to
find itself
on the defensive on its own soil. So the Nixon-Kissinger administration
was not, except in one unusual sense, fighting for survival. The unusual
sense in which its survival was at stake is set out, yet again, in the
stark
posthumous testimony of H.R. Haldeman. From his roost at Nixon's side
he describes a Kissingerian moment on 15 December 1970:
K[issinger ] came in and the discussion covered some of the general
thinking
about Vietnam and the P's big peace plan for next year, which K later
told me
he does not favor. He thinks that any pullout next year would be a
serious
mistake because the adverse reaction to it could set in well before the
'72
elections. He favors instead a continued winding down and then a pullout
right at the fall of '72 so that if any bad results follow they will be
too late to
affect the election.
One could hardly wish for it to be more plainly put than that. (And put,
furthermore, by one of Nixon's chief partisans with no wish to
discredit the
re-election.) But in point of fact Kissinger himself admits to almost as
much in his own first volume of memoirs, The White House Years. The con-
text is a meeting with General de Gaulle in which the old warrior
demanded to know by what right the Nixon administration subjected
Indochina to devastating bombardment. In his own account, Kissinger
replies that "a sudden withdrawal might give us a credibility problem."
(When asked "Where?", Kissinger hazily proposed the Middle East.) It is
important to bear in mind that the future flatterer of Brezhnev and Mao,
and the proponent of the manipulative "triangle" between them, was in no
real position to claim that he made war in Indochina to thwart either.
He
certainly did not dare try such a callow excuse on Charles de Gaulle.
And
indeed, the proponent of secret deals with China was in no very strong
position to claim that he was combating Stalinism in general. No, it all
came down to "credibility," and to the saving of face. It is known that
20,492 American servicemen lost their lives in Indochina between the day
that Ni:xon and Kissinger took office and the day in 1972 that they
with-
drew United States forces and accepted the logic of 1968. What if the
families and survivors of these victims have to confront the fact that
the
"face" at risk was Kissinger's own?
Thus the colloquially entitled "Christmas bombing" of North Vietnam,
begun during the same election campaign that Haldeman and Kissinger had
so tenderly foreseen two years previously, and continued after that
election
had been won, must be counted as a war crime by any standard. The bomb-
ing was not conducted for anything that could be described as "military
reasons," but for twofold political reasons. The first of these was
domestic: to
make a show of strength to extremists in Congress and to put the
Democratic
Party on the defensive. The second reason was to persuade the South
Vietnamese leaders like President Thieu -- still intransigent after all
those
years that their objections to a United States withdrawal were too
nervous.
This, again, was the mortgage on the initial secret payment of 1968.
When the unpreventable collapse occurred, in Vietnam and in
Cambodia, in April and May 1975, the cost was infinitely higher than it
would have been seven years previously. These locust years ended as they
had begun -with a display of bravado and deceit. On 12 May 1975,
Cambodian gunboats detained an American merchant vessel named the
Mayaguez. In the immediate aftermath of the Khmer Rouge seizure of
power, the situation was a distraught one. The ship had been stopped in
international waters claimed by Cambodia and then taken to the
Cambodian island of Koh Tang. In spite of reports that the crew had been
released, Kissinger pressed for an immediate face-saving and
"credibility"-
enhancing strike. He persuaded President Gerald Ford, the untried and
undistinguished successor to his deposed former boss, to send in the
Marines and the Air Force. Out of a Marine force of 110, 18 were killed
and
50 wounded. Some 23 Air Force men died in a crash. The United States
used a 15,000-pound bomb on the island, the most powerful non-nuclear
device that it possessed. Nobody has the figures for Cambodian deaths.
The
casualties were pointless because the ship's company of the Mayaguez
were
nowhere on Koh Tang, having been released some hours earlier. A subse-
quent congressional inquiry found that Kissinger could have known of
this by listening to Cambodian Broadcasting or by paying attention to a
third-party government which had been negotiating a deal for the
restitu-
tion of the crew and the ship. It was not as if any Cambodians doubted,
by
that month of 1975, the willingness of the US government to employ
deadly force.
In Washington, DC, there is a famous and hallowed memorial to the
American dead of the Vietnam War. Known as the Vietnam Veterans'
Memorial, it bears a name that is slightly misleading. I was present for
the
extremely affecting moment of its dedication in 1982, and noticed that
the
list of nearly 60,000 names is incised in the wall not by alphabet but
by
date. The first few names appear in 1954, and the last few in 1975. The
more historically minded visitors can sometimes be heard to say that
they
didn't know the United States was engaged in Vietnam as early or as late
as
that. Nor were the public supposed to know. The first names are of the
covert operatives sent in by Colonel Lansdale without congressional
approval to support French colonialism before Dien Bien Phu. The last
names are of those thrown away in the Mayaguez fiasco. It took Henry
Kissinger to ensure that a war of atrocity, which he had helped prolong,
should end as furtively and ignominiously as it had begun.
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