Peace Treaty Shenanigans

In Brief

Negotiations for Peace Treaties ought to be solemn, careful enterprises. The foremost negotiator of our time, Henry Kissinger, and his boss, Tricky Dick, were much more busy, er, posturing. No one deserves a Nobel peace prize for worrying about their image with the press or polishing one-liners during debates. But leave it to Nixon and Kissinger to polish their egos and keep sending home the body bags.

Party On

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The end of the Vietnam War began in a sunny conference room in Paris on October 8th, 1972 with a series of stunning concessions by North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho. We are fortunate that the resulting diplomatic endgame was played out by some of the most egotistical, megalomaniacal, petty, and morally bankrupt individuals ever to guide the helm of US foreign policy: Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon. After all, a noble end to the ignoble war might just be too much to ask. We join the story on October 13th with Kissinger's arrival in Saigon to confront South Vietnamese President Thieu with the news that a cease-fire might be imminent.

Following the example of the noble ostrich, Mr. Thieu buried his head in the sand rather than try to come to terms with the fact that the Americans would soon be leaving. Kissinger notes in his memoirs

As had become customary Thieu was unavailable to be briefed: his stalling was now part of every exchange -- last time it had been a tetanus shot, now it was an upset stomach. Nha [his translator] helpfully supplied another reason: Thieu was surprised that the American Embassy was open on Friday the thirteenth. Bunker [US ambassador to Vietnam] replied dryly he had cleared the problem with [Thieu's] astrologer.[1]

Following this charming the-dog-ate-my-homework performance, it should not be surprising that a note sent on the fourteenth also met with no response. This left Kissinger to jet back to Washington where Nixon was already celebrating the victory with steaks and Chateau Lafite-Rothschild. Kissinger cooled his heels for a while before returning to Saigon again on the 18th, where he expected that Thieu would be "overjoyed by the agreement." How else might he react to an agreement that would rob him of all American support and leave hundreds of thousands of North Vietnamese troops occupying his country? Knowing that attacking Kissinger's overdeveloped ego was the best way to tick him off, Thieu refused to see him immediately upon his arrival but rather made him wait for fifteen minutes "in full view of the press!" Once he let the American delegation in, he then insisted on speaking only through his interpreter, Nha, even though all present spoke English. When Dr. Kissinger complained the translator was "condensing [his] remarks to about half their length", the ever-witty Nha stated simply, "I am a master of contraction."

Knowing procrastination when he saw it, he asked Hanoi for more time. None was forthcoming -- in fact the North Vietnamese conceded even more diplomatic ground to stick to schedule. Kissinger needed Thieu come around to the American point of view before Hanoi grew impatient and went public with the negotiations. Dr. Kissinger got the commander of the US forces in Vietnam, General Abrams, the very prop on which the South Vietnamese crucially depended, to urge him to sign the agreement, but to no avail. Thieu was simply unwilling to cut off US support unless someone proved he had to. The next seventy-two hours witnessed a series of debacles that couldn't have been scripted more dramatically. Nha called the American negotiators twice to announce that meetings would be delayed, only to mysteriously hang up. "He must have seen Humphrey Bogart do this in some movie," opined a skeptical Kissinger. Finally, on October 22nd Thieu, weeping openly, rejected the entire American proposal out of hand. Dr. Kissinger was, as they say, S.O.L. He wrote to Nixon that he needed a stick with which to prod Thieu. But no stick came.

An agreement too close to the election might, after all, hurt Nixon. He was campaigning against George McGovern, who had built his platform on the notion of peace at any cost. God forbid, certainly, that the war get ended early no matter who won the election! Kissinger noted the strange silence from across the Pacific in a note to Washington; "I am grateful for the helpful comments that I have been receiving... If I am being told to stop this process, then this should be made unambiguous." No further comments were forthcoming.

In the final calculation, it was Nixon's ego that was stalling the negotiations. Eager to repeat Time's Man of the Year award and not share it with Kissinger, the President was trying to find a way in which he could be seen as the man who brought about the final agreement. Making Kissinger wait in Hawaii for several days before returning, Nixon finally decided to just keep bombing the North Vietnamese until after the election. With his political victory behind him, he decided it was alright to stop the flow of body bags and write the letter to Thieu telling him he must comply or else. The peace treaty came rapidly thereafter in January.

We might perhaps console ourselves by imagining that this too-convenient chronology was simply a result of lengthy, somber deliberation. But an insight from Kissinger's memoirs on a later meeting with the president reveals the context in which much communication took place.

After a minute he suggested we go to the shallow end of the pool and chat about his news conference scheduled for the next morning. It was not the first time that my chief had discussed weighty matters with me in aquatic surroundings. At Camp David in April 1970, swimming in the pool while I walked along the edge, he had communicated his final decision to order American troops into the Cambodian sanctuaries.[2]

Of the treaty he had fought so hard for? Kissinger describes negotiations in late 1973 with Le Duc Tho over treaty violations: "The talks did have an incidental effect... but the substance of the negotiation was a tour de force of effrontery by Le Duc Tho while I polished a few-one-liners." It's good to know that if the leaders of the United States are nearly pure evil, they are at least witty.

Footnotes

1. Kissinger, The White House Years, 1363
2. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, 3

Bibliography

1. Henry Kissinger. The White House Years. Little Brown & Company, 1979.
2. Henry Kissinger. Years of Upheaval. Little Brown & Company, Date.
3. Richard Nixon. Memoirs. Buccaneer Books, 1994.

 
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