Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia

by Carolyn Woods Eisenberg

In a development reminiscent of Lam Son 719, many of the ARVN units seemed reluctant to fight, with one entire regiment deserting to the other side.

Over the span of 48 hours, the possibility arose that, faced with these multiple threats, South Vietnam could collapse suddenly.

They must have known about the buildup right near the DMZ. Why hadn’t they said so? But they had said so, repeatedly.

Nixon’s views kept shifting, but on April 12 he authorized Kissinger to make the trip, with a clear instruction: go to Russia, talk first about Vietnam and, if Soviet assistance was not forthcoming, then leave.

Kissinger understood, but the advantage of hitting Haiphong and Hanoi was primarily “psychological.” By bombing these two cities they were letting the North Vietnamese government and the Russians know how tough and determined the administration was.

Overriding the objections of Abrams, McCain, and Bunker, Nixon ordered that the attacks on Hanoi and Haiphong, designated as Operation Freedom Porch Bravo, proceed on the weekend of April 15–16.

The B-52s alone dropped 1,200 bombs, raining destruction over a wide area and killing many civilians. Nixon had anticipated the possible harm to local residents but regarded this as the inevitable cost of war: “[W]e don’t deliberately aim for civilians but if a few slop over, that’s just too bad.”

New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis wrote that confidence in the “fundamental decency and humanity in our country” had been “sorely tested” in recent years. The bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong had revealed an inescapable truth: “The United States is the most dangerous and destructive power in the world. And its political leadership seems virtually immune to persuasion by reason and experience.”

On select occasions, President Nixon liked to refer to his Quaker background, but the idea of consulting this batch of sentimental do-gooders would be as alien to him as poet Allen Ginsberg’s proposal to Kissinger that everyone “get naked” and discuss American policy.

One heartbreaking example was Pham-thi-Toi, a young woman who had survived the My Lai massacre, which had killed six of her relatives. In its aftermath, the South Vietnamese army had compelled the remaining inhabitants to construct a new Tu Cong (“return to village”) refugee camp elsewhere.27 As the reluctant civilians warned, there were mines in the area, one of which exploded, severing Pham’s arms and legs.28 Over a period of 10 months she was treated in the rehab center, which fitted her with prostheses for her limbs and trained her in their use. Returning to the refugee camp with a small stipend from the Quakers, she and her sister opened a small shop selling foodstuffs and supplies. They were both still there in April 1972, when South Vietnamese soldiers carelessly fired into the camp. Her sister died instantly. Severely wounded in her stomach and the stump of her arm, Pham was sent back to the Quaker Center but, before doctors could operate, she died—a triple victim of an endless war.

Back in January the authorities had arrested Huynh Tan Mam, chairman of the Saigon Student Association, and scores of others. The arrest of one of the most influential university students in the city set off ripples of protest, which were immediately quelled by the police. According to subsequent reports, Mam had been severely beaten, was struggling to walk, and his face was swollen and peeling from hours of close exposure to a 200-watt bulb. Through another arrestee, he passed a note hidden in a cigarette package with a list of other students who were also in prison.

They readily acquiesced in his unusual demands for secrecy and security, which included concealing his presence in Moscow from the US Ambassador Jacob Beam.

By framing the situation in this manner, Kissinger was clearly implying that if enough time elapsed after the removal of troops, the United States was prepared to accept a communist takeover in the South. Brezhnev seemed a bit surprised: Were the North Vietnamese aware of this offer?

Clearly irked, Brezhnev observed that it was not Russia that started the war but the United States, and it was indeed absurd: The war has been going on eight years but for what sake? For what sake is money being squandered, for what sake are so many Americans being killed and thousands of Vietnamese?

Embroidering further, he quoted Brezhnev as saying that his government is “now doing everything to help the President get re-elected.”36 Nixon was not so easily fooled, and when he considered the cable he could readily see that Kissinger was not getting much help from Brezhnev.

In his eagerness to outrun the American arms control team, Kissinger had forgotten to include SLBMs in the May agreement.

High on the list of media fans was columnist James Reston of the New York Times, who saw Kissinger as a beacon of hope in a darkened sky.

In the days following this speech, the enemy continued to advance in the Central Highlands and inside Quang Tri province. The American media was reporting on the poor morale and faulty leadership in ARVN, but Nixon had come to believe his own public relations and viewed these accounts as another instance of media bias.

As promised, the Russians had sent an envoy to Hanoi to convey the substance of the American negotiating position, perhaps implying that it should be taken seriously. Yet the effort had backfired. North Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong had responded angrily: Who allows them to threaten us?

Nevertheless, Kissinger could see nothing odd about demanding their removal as a prerequisite for peace. Neither he nor Nixon had ever accepted the idea that Vietnam was one country, not two. In their fourth year in office, they still thought of the DMZ as an international border to be respected rather than an arbitrary line imposed from the outside.

No Soviet soldiers are threatened in Vietnam. Sixty thousand Americans are threatened.

Since the time of the Cambodian invasion, the antiwar issue had evolved. The threat of the draft had receded, and the face of the war was no longer that of US soldiers fighting an elusive foe in a foreign land, but of American bombs pummeling a peasant nation and shattering the lives of ordinary people.

From the very beginning the prospect that Congress might act had underpinned the Vietnamization policy of both Nixon and Laird. Among other factors, this had necessitated the ongoing withdrawal of American troops, in the president’s words “staying one step ahead of the sheriff.” Out of fear of congressional intervention, Nixon carefully announced that another 20,000 soldiers would be leaving by July 1, despite the 12 North Vietnamese divisions advancing in the South and pressure from MACV for more manpower.

“Your war . . . is quite rightly called a shameful and aggressive war not only by us, but also by most countries in the world,” said Brezhnev. And it is poisoning “the entire international situation.” Nixon might claim that the US bombing campaign was to protect the 60,000 US soldiers still there, but nobody had asked them to come, and they could readily be sent home. “You say you want to end the war, and you calmly put forward this idea, while cruelly bombing not only military targets but also the civilian population. And you call this a method of ending the war? This is a method of destroying a country.”

What was intolerable, the national security advisor continued, was North Vietnam’s “entire policy” being directed “against the domestic structure of the United States.” This peculiar complaint echoed previous suggestions that the North Vietnamese offensive was designed to “humiliate” Nixon in an election year. To outsiders this might be nonsense. However, for the president and his chief advisor it contained a psychological truth: for them the war in Vietnam had ceased to be a Cold War contest, if indeed it ever was, and had become instead a domestic challenge.

Throughout his week in Russia Nixon viewed himself as the heir to Franklin Roosevelt, picking up the threads of a World War II friendship.

Moved by this saga, the president wrote in the guestbook: “To Tanya and all the heroes of Leningrad, I hope it will never be repeated in all the world.”

“Why does Nixon send B-52s to kill our children while they are asleep?” she beseeched Lewis.

With so much accomplished in the international field, Nixon had renewed optimism about his prospects for reelection in November. He was at the pinnacle of his career, with his polls soaring and his reputation as an international statesman at an all-time high. But suddenly he encountered an unexpected threat.

It was unclear to both Nixon and Haldeman the reasons why the Democratic National headquarters had been the target of the burglary and intended bugging.

Nixon’s first instinct had been that the American public “doesn’t give a shit” about such shenanigans, because they would expect political campaigns to spy on each other.

In Haldeman’s view, this was a “beautiful opportunity” to kill two birds with one stone. Mitchell could explain his departure by the need to care for his ailing spouse.13 “He’ll gain great sympathy. The Martha fans will think isn’t that a wonderful thing . . . you know it’s kind of like the Duke of Windsor giving up the throne for the woman he loves. The poor woman hasn’t been well.”

Nixon’s participation in a cover-up, in which he tried to coopt both the CIA and the FBI, occurred less than three weeks after his triumphant return from Moscow. The proximity of these events would later be viewed as a tragic accident: a masterful actor on the international stage undone by petty domestic machinations. Yet the two fields of activity were closely intertwined.

It was Nixon’s pursuit of antiwar dissenters, begun with illegal wiretaps in the spring of 1969 and embodied in the “plumbers” crusade against Ellsberg, which put him at risk. Furthermore, in sabotaging the legitimate functions of governance the president was continuing a pattern in which he and Kissinger had run roughshod over institutional practices.

By late June, the North Vietnamese Army had stalled. Despite vigorous efforts and a huge loss of life, they had been unable to take Hue, Kontum, or An Loc, which Nixon and Kissinger attributed to American airpower.

During this latest escalation of the war, the estimates of civilian deaths ranged from 5,000–15,000, with another 20,000 to 50,000 wounded.

Back in Washington Nixon cynically wondered if this photo was “a fix.”18 Haldeman thought it possible. The picture of “the little girl without any clothes” had certainly given opponents “a hell of a bounce,” he remarked.

US military officials insisted that they were engaged in precision bombing and were not striking civilians. Kissinger himself knew better. When asked by McGeorge Bundy whether such claims were accurate, the national security advisor reminded him of “how it is in this job.” Of course he had received “every assurance” that civilians were being spared, “but I don’t believe a word of it.”

announcing the withdrawal of another 10,000 US troops from Vietnam, leaving only 39,000 noncombat soldiers in the country.25 On the other hand American air attacks in North and South Vietnam were at their peak.

They found some reassurance in the number of South Vietnamese troop casualties. “Whenever I see low ARVN casualties, I know they’re sitting in their foxholes,” the president observed, “but when I see them high, they must be out killing somebody.”

Furthermore, some of these American bombs were falling on Chinese territory.

I believe if a sufficient interval is placed between our withdrawal and what happens afterward that the issue can almost certainly be confined to an Indochina affair.

As realists, the Hanoi leadership could not entirely ignore the changes in international relations.

While praising the North Vietnamese government for its decision to fight and negotiate simultaneously, Zhou encouraged them to be more flexible in considering the future role of General Thieu.

Whatever the appearance, the underlying contradictions in the “national security” policy of the Nixon administration were more extreme than ever. On the one hand, immense violence aimed at North and South Vietnam (along with locations in Laos and Cambodia) and on the other, great cordiality directed toward the communist superpowers that remained Hanoi’s allies and chief suppliers. Cold War logic had been turned on its head, and the exaggerated fears of communist expansionism that might once have underpinned the military project in Southeast Asia had ceased to apply.

But for most Americans the overriding fact was that by late summer, Nixon had brought all US combat troops home, which was no doubt why a Gallup poll found that only 25% of people considered the war to be of major importance. It was Senator McGovern and his antiwar colleagues in both houses of Congress who had forced Nixon to ultimately end American ground combat in Vietnam. Though almost none of the dozens of initiatives they drafted to end the war had passed, they had put so much pressure on the White House that his administration had been compelled to keep withdrawing troops.

In late September while on the campaign trail in Columbus, Ohio, McGovern was walking through the Western Electric plant shaking hands when he was stopped by factory worker Dan Gischler, who demanded: “How come you want amnesty for traitors?” Pointing to a bracelet inscribed with the name of a prisoner of war, the man denounced people “who won’t fight for Vietnam and for America.” McGovern replied that Nixon was actually “keeping him in jail by keeping this war going.”1 Gischler seemed unconvinced, countering that the president was “trying to get him out.” “How,” retorted McGovern, “by bombing the hell out of people?” Gishler insisted that Nixon would get the prisoners out, “every last one of them.” He only wished the president had “bombed a hell of a lot more of them,” because it was necessary to show people that we’re “not just a flunky second-rate country.” While McGovern searched for a reply, another worker chimed in: “We don’t believe in surrendering,” which was why he planned to vote for Nixon. Did either man really think Richard Nixon would end the war? the candidate queried. Gischler retorted that it was Lyndon Johnson who had put 500,000 soldiers into Vietnam, while Nixon was “taking people out.”

This was precisely what Chuck Colson, the White House operative who had in fact stage-managed this seemingly spontaneous exchange, had intended.

One risk of a regime change was that a successor might seek an accommodation with Hanoi and opt out of the war completely. That concern obviously applied to Sihanouk, who was still cooling his heels in Beijing. Although he was the one political figure who retained a significant base of support within the country and could potentially stabilize it, the White House considered his return too dangerous.

According to Elliot, the local cadre had enlisted boys 10 to 12 years of age who, clad in their black pajamas, were “terrifying the villagers.” With so many civilians caught in the middle, there was not much gain for “hearts and minds,” she reflected. “Nobody is winning any popularity contests at this point.”