Roger Morris: How Not to End Another President’s War
[Roger Morris is an award-winning author and investigative journalist who served in the Foreign Service and on the Senior Staff of the National Security Council under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Before resigning over the invasion of Cambodia, he was one of only three officials comprising Henry Kissinger's Special Projects Staff conducting the initial highly secret "back-channel" negotiations with Hanoi to end the Vietnam War in 1969-1970. He is the author of several critically acclaimed books, including Richard Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician, 1913-1952, and the best-selling Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America as well as, most recently, The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America (co-authored with historian Sally Denton).]
“And you and I will end the war.”
In early March 1969, after aides complained they had not yet met the new president, the national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, arranged for Richard Nixon to talk to his National Security Council staff, of which I was a holdover from the Johnson administration. There were only 20 or so of us there, less than a quarter the size of the mini-foreign ministry the council would become under Kissinger and later administrations. We gathered expectantly in the Cabinet Room, hoping for some personal impression of the man now in the Oval Office. We were not disappointed.
Nixon walked in, tanned and smiling after a weekend in Florida, though typically ill at ease as he moved through quick handshake introductions. He began brief remarks with self-conscious ingratiation, commiserating with the staff for having to deal with what he called “all those impossible fags” in the State Department, oblivious that most in the room were Foreign Service officers on temporary assignment. “Ignore the bureaucrats,” he told them after a swift, fluent run-down of international trouble spots. “I want you to handle the rest of the world.” Turning to Kissinger, he added softly, in what seemed as much an intimacy as a boast, “And you and I will end the war.”
For a moment there was guarded silence, as if we had overheard a private confidence. Then the staff broke into warm applause, and Nixon, visibly surprised yet pleased, abruptly left. Many of the men there that day prided themselves on their worldliness. None could have guessed the irony of what they had seen.
The Vietnam war. No hope so followed Richard Nixon into office as the national yearning to end it. No issue would so haunt and consume his presidency from the first hundred days through the next four years. Though the he enjoyed that winter of 1969, a political honeymoon with the press, public and Congress, the war that drove Lyndon Johnson from office raged on, killing 1,200 Americans and untold Vietnamese every month.
Nixon’s 1968 election victory owed much to his ringing if vague promise to stop the war, as well as to the divisions over Vietnam that split the camp of his Democratic opponent, Hubert Humphrey, and the country at large. “We will end this one and win the peace,” Nixon pledged in a constant campaign line, avoiding specifics on grounds of not interfering with a sitting president, but giving the clear impression he had a plan. He seemed under no illusion about his political stakes. “If the war goes on six months after I become president,” he told The Times’s Harrison Salisbury, “it will be my war.” He was determined “not to end up like L.B.J., holed up in the White House, afraid to show my face in the street. I’m going to stop the war — fast.”
After two decades on the national scene, including eight years as vice president and extensive travel abroad, foreign policy was seen as the new president’s forte as well as first priority. His press conference after a February 1969 trip to Europe The Times pronounced a “tour de force” — part of a chorus of national media acclaim, including one editorial headlined “Mission Accomplished.” It was understood from Kissinger background briefings that the European talks dealt with ending the war and the administration was working intensively on “Vietnam withdrawal scenarios.” At a March 4 press conference, the president hinted broadly at United States troop reductions. Asked about reawakened public protest if the war wore on “for months or even years,” he replied offhandedly, “Well, I trust that I am not confronted with that problem, when you speak of years.”
As with most of Richard Nixon’s first hundred days, the reality of Vietnam policy behind the public façade was starkly different. Even as he was treating questions about a prompt peace as if it were a foregone conclusion, Nixon’s private resolve was to win the war — or at least to avoid the appearance of losing it — even if it took as long as the remainder of his term. Soon after they arrived in office, White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman scribbled one of the president’s frequent and typical ruminations:
VN [Vietnam] enemy
Misjudges two things
—the time—has 3 years + 3 mo
—the man—won’t be first P to lose war
“Once Nixon was installed in the presidency, the promised stopping of the war was stood on its head to become one of prolonging it,” wrote Barbara Tuchman in “The March of Folly.” “The new president was as unwilling as his predecessor to accept non-success in the war aim and as fixed in the belief that additional force could bring the enemy to terms.”
Strategy took shape in the first secret “policy reviews” of a National Security Council dominated by Nixon and Kissinger, whose foreign policy dictates were absolute from the outset. To blunt domestic protest, they would begin American troop withdrawals. To coerce and subdue North Vietnam, something Johnson had not accomplished with 500,000 American troops, they would intensify bombing and vastly expand the forces of South Vietnam, a process known as “Vietnamization.”
Early visitors to his basement office in the White House that winter often advised Henry Kissinger not to fall into past errors in Vietnam. “We won’t repeat the old mistakes,” he would reply. “We’ll make new ones.” Typically clever, the quip proved tragically both true and false as they pursued the war for four more years in Vietnam with American forces on the ground, and for years beyond with bombing and billions in aid in conflicts open and covert across Southeast Asia.
As for new mistakes, Nixon and Kissinger would leave their own legacy with the unprecedented bombing in Cambodia as well as Vietnam, the fitful negotiations with North and South Vietnam involving treachery on all sides, an American invasion of Cambodia, a disastrous South Vietnamese invasion of Laos, and at home a bitter reaction to dissent that ultimately led to the ruin of the Nixon presidency.
At the same time, sure that their two-man rule was superior to the conventional foreign policy regime of politicians and bureaucracy they both deplored, they repeated the blunders of America’s past quarter century in Asia. Like their predecessors, they made policy in cultural-historical ignorance of Vietnam, mistaking its place in the geopolitics of the cold war and underestimating North Vietnam’s stake and will in uniting the divided country. Like officials before them, they took a corrupt regime in the South, spawned by war and American money, for a vital interest of the United States, and pursued manifestly failed policies on contrived grounds of strategic necessity, national honor and partisan compulsion.
The inner effects of the war policy were virulent. The administration was scarcely 50 days old when the President ordered the first secret bombing of Cambodia, with successive waves in April and May. There were soon dark hints to Russia and other powers that the United States exit would involve some brutal escalation of the war if North Vietnam were not forced to settle. “The train has left the station,” Kissinger, on Nixon’s instructions, warned Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in one early off-the-record meeting, “and is roaring down the tracks.”
On May 9, The Times’s William Beecher broke the story of the Cambodian bombing, arousing relatively little public reaction but fresh tirades in a White House already enraged at leaks of classified information. As early as April 25, Kissinger had been summoned to the Oval Office to discuss how to stop the leaks with Nixon and F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover — “two maniacs trying to outdo each other,” as Kissinger once described the frequent Nixon-Hoover meetings. Ahead lay the infamous wiretaps on journalists and officials, including Kissinger’s own staff, and a twisting sequence leading to the White House “plumbers” and the crimes of Watergate.
Meanwhile, the inherent inconsistencies in the war policy spiraled out in blood and betrayal. Troop reductions, first announced in June, did not long stay domestic protest, further hardening of the self-destructive siege mentality in the White House. Withdrawal from ground combat did work to reinforce the North’s grim determination to outlast the Americans, despite more punishing bombing. Just as predictably, the drawdown ate at the already infirm morale of South Vietnam, and the political-diplomatic intractability of the Saigon regime grew as its position worsened. By the first anniversary of the Nixon Inaugural, 150,000 American troops would be scheduled to leave over the course of 1970, with more to follow. The war had become, wrote one historian, “a race between Vietnamization and the withdrawals.”
Over the winter of 1969-’70, there would be the first of the ultra-secret Paris talks between Kissinger and the North Vietnamese, negotiations that got far nearer a settlement than any account has ever indicated. Yet they were shattered by a military junta overthrowing King Norodom Sihanouk in Cambodia. It was that coup, along with the United States bombings and May 1970 invasion of Cambodia, that fired the rise of the once-minor Khmer Rouge, ending in the holocaust of the killing fields.
Military escalation, whether in bombing or a quick punitive invasion of Cambodia (what a later era might call a “surge”), was the paradoxical urge of the combined coercion and exit. “Tulips in Arlington,” was what N.S.C. staff members called the Pentagon’s perennial proposals for a military solution to the problem at hand. When Kissinger assembled his own planners in the autumn of 1969 to consider an all-out punishing blow against North Vietnam —“I can’t believe a little fourth-rate power like North Vietnam doesn’t have a breaking point,” he told aides — attack scenarios, including use of a nuclear weapon to close the main supply route from China, were at hand in the files of the N.S.C.’s military liaison officers. It was a reminder that the Nixon-Kissinger policy was never simply the product of two men, however powerful, but of a broader culture in government that either acquiesced in or actively supported their policy.
It was all to climax in a flurry of savage B-52 bombing and serpentine Kissinger diplomacy in the winter of 1972-1973; and then, with Congressional prohibitions on American bombing and aid, the defeat of a collapsing South in 1975, an end far worse than might have been had by negotiation in 1969.
In the meantime, of course, Nixon had been overwhelmingly reelected, his troop withdrawals conquering protest in the end, but then only to suffer his own fall in Watergate, a besieged president holed up in the White House after all. Among his legacies would be more than 20,000 of the 58,195 names on the long black wall of Washington’s Vietnam Memorial. In 1995, Vietnam finally announced casualty figures of four million civilians dead, North and South, and more than a million military, the toll of their own share of wantonness and folly.
For all the obvious differences in men and moment, how Richard Nixon dealt with Vietnam leaves haunting questions for the Obama administration as the new president has announced his own exit from Iraq and a policy review in Afghanistan. Are the policy makers of 2009 in the Middle East and South Asia free of the cultural-historical ignorance that haunted their forerunners in Southeast Asia? Is the new presidency free of the old Washington demons at last — the mistaking of national interest, habits of overreaction, the illusions of omnipotence, the cognitive dissonance at evidence of failure or futility, the military’s preference for the military solution, the absence of reflective thought, the failure to reach out beyond the supposed experts of bureaucracy or establishment for another sensibility and perspective?
Exorcised or not, ghosts of Vietnam hover over the Obama foreign policy, not least in key officials like former National Security Adviser James L. Jones Jr. and the special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke — men whose formative career experiences were in Vietnam, and who have not yet told us what they think of the chilling relevance of that history to what they now face.
One parallel is plain as early as the first hundred days. As with Richard Nixon and Vietnam, Barack Obama’s political fate will be inextricably tied to the wars he inherits.
Read entire article at NYT blog
“And you and I will end the war.”
In early March 1969, after aides complained they had not yet met the new president, the national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, arranged for Richard Nixon to talk to his National Security Council staff, of which I was a holdover from the Johnson administration. There were only 20 or so of us there, less than a quarter the size of the mini-foreign ministry the council would become under Kissinger and later administrations. We gathered expectantly in the Cabinet Room, hoping for some personal impression of the man now in the Oval Office. We were not disappointed.
Nixon walked in, tanned and smiling after a weekend in Florida, though typically ill at ease as he moved through quick handshake introductions. He began brief remarks with self-conscious ingratiation, commiserating with the staff for having to deal with what he called “all those impossible fags” in the State Department, oblivious that most in the room were Foreign Service officers on temporary assignment. “Ignore the bureaucrats,” he told them after a swift, fluent run-down of international trouble spots. “I want you to handle the rest of the world.” Turning to Kissinger, he added softly, in what seemed as much an intimacy as a boast, “And you and I will end the war.”
For a moment there was guarded silence, as if we had overheard a private confidence. Then the staff broke into warm applause, and Nixon, visibly surprised yet pleased, abruptly left. Many of the men there that day prided themselves on their worldliness. None could have guessed the irony of what they had seen.
The Vietnam war. No hope so followed Richard Nixon into office as the national yearning to end it. No issue would so haunt and consume his presidency from the first hundred days through the next four years. Though the he enjoyed that winter of 1969, a political honeymoon with the press, public and Congress, the war that drove Lyndon Johnson from office raged on, killing 1,200 Americans and untold Vietnamese every month.
Nixon’s 1968 election victory owed much to his ringing if vague promise to stop the war, as well as to the divisions over Vietnam that split the camp of his Democratic opponent, Hubert Humphrey, and the country at large. “We will end this one and win the peace,” Nixon pledged in a constant campaign line, avoiding specifics on grounds of not interfering with a sitting president, but giving the clear impression he had a plan. He seemed under no illusion about his political stakes. “If the war goes on six months after I become president,” he told The Times’s Harrison Salisbury, “it will be my war.” He was determined “not to end up like L.B.J., holed up in the White House, afraid to show my face in the street. I’m going to stop the war — fast.”
After two decades on the national scene, including eight years as vice president and extensive travel abroad, foreign policy was seen as the new president’s forte as well as first priority. His press conference after a February 1969 trip to Europe The Times pronounced a “tour de force” — part of a chorus of national media acclaim, including one editorial headlined “Mission Accomplished.” It was understood from Kissinger background briefings that the European talks dealt with ending the war and the administration was working intensively on “Vietnam withdrawal scenarios.” At a March 4 press conference, the president hinted broadly at United States troop reductions. Asked about reawakened public protest if the war wore on “for months or even years,” he replied offhandedly, “Well, I trust that I am not confronted with that problem, when you speak of years.”
As with most of Richard Nixon’s first hundred days, the reality of Vietnam policy behind the public façade was starkly different. Even as he was treating questions about a prompt peace as if it were a foregone conclusion, Nixon’s private resolve was to win the war — or at least to avoid the appearance of losing it — even if it took as long as the remainder of his term. Soon after they arrived in office, White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman scribbled one of the president’s frequent and typical ruminations:
VN [Vietnam] enemy
Misjudges two things
—the time—has 3 years + 3 mo
—the man—won’t be first P to lose war
“Once Nixon was installed in the presidency, the promised stopping of the war was stood on its head to become one of prolonging it,” wrote Barbara Tuchman in “The March of Folly.” “The new president was as unwilling as his predecessor to accept non-success in the war aim and as fixed in the belief that additional force could bring the enemy to terms.”
Strategy took shape in the first secret “policy reviews” of a National Security Council dominated by Nixon and Kissinger, whose foreign policy dictates were absolute from the outset. To blunt domestic protest, they would begin American troop withdrawals. To coerce and subdue North Vietnam, something Johnson had not accomplished with 500,000 American troops, they would intensify bombing and vastly expand the forces of South Vietnam, a process known as “Vietnamization.”
Early visitors to his basement office in the White House that winter often advised Henry Kissinger not to fall into past errors in Vietnam. “We won’t repeat the old mistakes,” he would reply. “We’ll make new ones.” Typically clever, the quip proved tragically both true and false as they pursued the war for four more years in Vietnam with American forces on the ground, and for years beyond with bombing and billions in aid in conflicts open and covert across Southeast Asia.
As for new mistakes, Nixon and Kissinger would leave their own legacy with the unprecedented bombing in Cambodia as well as Vietnam, the fitful negotiations with North and South Vietnam involving treachery on all sides, an American invasion of Cambodia, a disastrous South Vietnamese invasion of Laos, and at home a bitter reaction to dissent that ultimately led to the ruin of the Nixon presidency.
At the same time, sure that their two-man rule was superior to the conventional foreign policy regime of politicians and bureaucracy they both deplored, they repeated the blunders of America’s past quarter century in Asia. Like their predecessors, they made policy in cultural-historical ignorance of Vietnam, mistaking its place in the geopolitics of the cold war and underestimating North Vietnam’s stake and will in uniting the divided country. Like officials before them, they took a corrupt regime in the South, spawned by war and American money, for a vital interest of the United States, and pursued manifestly failed policies on contrived grounds of strategic necessity, national honor and partisan compulsion.
The inner effects of the war policy were virulent. The administration was scarcely 50 days old when the President ordered the first secret bombing of Cambodia, with successive waves in April and May. There were soon dark hints to Russia and other powers that the United States exit would involve some brutal escalation of the war if North Vietnam were not forced to settle. “The train has left the station,” Kissinger, on Nixon’s instructions, warned Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in one early off-the-record meeting, “and is roaring down the tracks.”
On May 9, The Times’s William Beecher broke the story of the Cambodian bombing, arousing relatively little public reaction but fresh tirades in a White House already enraged at leaks of classified information. As early as April 25, Kissinger had been summoned to the Oval Office to discuss how to stop the leaks with Nixon and F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover — “two maniacs trying to outdo each other,” as Kissinger once described the frequent Nixon-Hoover meetings. Ahead lay the infamous wiretaps on journalists and officials, including Kissinger’s own staff, and a twisting sequence leading to the White House “plumbers” and the crimes of Watergate.
Meanwhile, the inherent inconsistencies in the war policy spiraled out in blood and betrayal. Troop reductions, first announced in June, did not long stay domestic protest, further hardening of the self-destructive siege mentality in the White House. Withdrawal from ground combat did work to reinforce the North’s grim determination to outlast the Americans, despite more punishing bombing. Just as predictably, the drawdown ate at the already infirm morale of South Vietnam, and the political-diplomatic intractability of the Saigon regime grew as its position worsened. By the first anniversary of the Nixon Inaugural, 150,000 American troops would be scheduled to leave over the course of 1970, with more to follow. The war had become, wrote one historian, “a race between Vietnamization and the withdrawals.”
Over the winter of 1969-’70, there would be the first of the ultra-secret Paris talks between Kissinger and the North Vietnamese, negotiations that got far nearer a settlement than any account has ever indicated. Yet they were shattered by a military junta overthrowing King Norodom Sihanouk in Cambodia. It was that coup, along with the United States bombings and May 1970 invasion of Cambodia, that fired the rise of the once-minor Khmer Rouge, ending in the holocaust of the killing fields.
Military escalation, whether in bombing or a quick punitive invasion of Cambodia (what a later era might call a “surge”), was the paradoxical urge of the combined coercion and exit. “Tulips in Arlington,” was what N.S.C. staff members called the Pentagon’s perennial proposals for a military solution to the problem at hand. When Kissinger assembled his own planners in the autumn of 1969 to consider an all-out punishing blow against North Vietnam —“I can’t believe a little fourth-rate power like North Vietnam doesn’t have a breaking point,” he told aides — attack scenarios, including use of a nuclear weapon to close the main supply route from China, were at hand in the files of the N.S.C.’s military liaison officers. It was a reminder that the Nixon-Kissinger policy was never simply the product of two men, however powerful, but of a broader culture in government that either acquiesced in or actively supported their policy.
It was all to climax in a flurry of savage B-52 bombing and serpentine Kissinger diplomacy in the winter of 1972-1973; and then, with Congressional prohibitions on American bombing and aid, the defeat of a collapsing South in 1975, an end far worse than might have been had by negotiation in 1969.
In the meantime, of course, Nixon had been overwhelmingly reelected, his troop withdrawals conquering protest in the end, but then only to suffer his own fall in Watergate, a besieged president holed up in the White House after all. Among his legacies would be more than 20,000 of the 58,195 names on the long black wall of Washington’s Vietnam Memorial. In 1995, Vietnam finally announced casualty figures of four million civilians dead, North and South, and more than a million military, the toll of their own share of wantonness and folly.
For all the obvious differences in men and moment, how Richard Nixon dealt with Vietnam leaves haunting questions for the Obama administration as the new president has announced his own exit from Iraq and a policy review in Afghanistan. Are the policy makers of 2009 in the Middle East and South Asia free of the cultural-historical ignorance that haunted their forerunners in Southeast Asia? Is the new presidency free of the old Washington demons at last — the mistaking of national interest, habits of overreaction, the illusions of omnipotence, the cognitive dissonance at evidence of failure or futility, the military’s preference for the military solution, the absence of reflective thought, the failure to reach out beyond the supposed experts of bureaucracy or establishment for another sensibility and perspective?
Exorcised or not, ghosts of Vietnam hover over the Obama foreign policy, not least in key officials like former National Security Adviser James L. Jones Jr. and the special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke — men whose formative career experiences were in Vietnam, and who have not yet told us what they think of the chilling relevance of that history to what they now face.
One parallel is plain as early as the first hundred days. As with Richard Nixon and Vietnam, Barack Obama’s political fate will be inextricably tied to the wars he inherits.