No More Vietnams (17 page)

• • •

The speech was the most effective of my presidency. I had told the American people that our cause in Vietnam was just and that our policies would end the war in a way that would not betray our cause. Ours was not the easy way out, but it was the right way out. And the American people showed that they concurred.

The minute I left the air after delivering what came to be known as the “Silent Majority speech,” the White House switchboard lit up, and the calls continued for hours. It soon became the biggest response ever to a presidential speech. More than 50,000 telegrams and 30,000 letters poured in, few of them critical. A Gallup telephone poll taken immediately after the speech indicated that
77
percent of the public approved of it. Congressional opinion soon showed the impact of this outpouring of popular support. By November 12, 300 members of the House of Representatives—119 Democrats and 181 Republicans—had cosponsored a resolution of support for my Vietnam policies. Fifty-eight senators—twenty-one Democrats and thirty-seven Republicans—had signed letters expressing similar sentiments.

With this response, the American people demonstrated that
deep down they understood what was happening in Vietnam better than those who reported on the war in the news media. The American news media had come to dominate domestic debate about the purpose and conduct of the war in Vietnam and about the nature of the enemy. The North Vietnamese were a cruel and ruthless enemy, but news media coverage continued to concentrate primarily on the failings and frailties of the South Vietnamese and of our own forces. Each night's television news reported the fighting battle by battle and, more than in any previous conflict, showed the terrible human suffering and sacrifice of war. But it conveyed little or no sense of the underlying purpose of the fighting. News-media coverage fostered the impression that we were fighting in military and moral quicksand, rather than toward an important and worthwhile objective.

Public-opinion surveys showed that the American people were weary of the war but wanted peace with honor. In March 1965, the proportion who said that we had
not
made a mistake by going into Vietnam was 61 percent. By May 1971, when the pollsters stopped asking the question regularly, the same percentage believed that it
had
been a mistake to enter the war. But this did not mean the American people wanted to cut and run. In the New Hampshire primary in 1968, a large proportion of those who voted for the antiwar candidate, Senator Eugene McCarthy, actually favored military victory in Vietnam. When Johnson failed to provide a plan to win or end the war, the proportion of those who disapproved of his handling of the situation increased steadily, hitting 63 percent in March 1968.1 came into office having promised to end the war and win the peace—to wind down the war without abandoning our allies. Over the four years it took to do so, the proportion of those who approved of my handling of the war averaged 52 percent.

The November 3 speech was a turning point in the war. The approval rating for our Vietnam policy shot up to 64 percent. Now, for a time at least, North Vietnam's leaders could no longer count on dissent in America to give them the victory
they could not win on the battlefield. I had the public support I needed to continue a policy of waging war in Vietnam and negotiating for peace in Paris until we could bring the war to an honorable and successful conclusion.

• • •

On April 20, 1970, I announced the withdrawal of another 60,000 troops from Vietnam in 1970 and another 90,000 in 1971. Ten days later I told the American people that our forces and those of our ally had launched a ground offensive against the North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia. To the public, it seemed like an inexplicable reversal of policy. But events beyond our control had forced our hand.

In 1969, during the secret bombing of the Communist sanctuaries in Cambodia, Sihanouk had begun to tilt his policy toward the United States. But this maneuvering was not enough to satisfy some of his opponents within the Cambodian government. Along with most of the country's deeply nationalistic people, they strongly objected to Sihanouk's acquiescence in North Vietnamese violations of Cambodian sovereignty. Cambodians, whose lands had been confiscated and colonized by the Vietnamese over many centuries, harbored traditional enmities toward their neighbors to the east. North Vietnam's sanctuaries in Cambodia aroused those ancient hatreds. Sihanouk seemed oblivious to the risks he was running by appeasing the Vietnamese Communists. His failure to expel North Vietnam's forces was rapidly eroding his political base.

In March 1970, while he was vacationing in France, Sihanouk lost control of events. Demonstrations broke out to protest the North Vietnamese occupation of Cambodian territory. Twenty thousand youths sacked the North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front embassies in Phnom Penh. Meeting in special session, both houses of the Cambodian Parliament demanded that the government defend its national territory and urged that the army be expanded. Cambodia's Foreign Ministry announced that it had informed the North Vietnamese and the National Liberation Front that they were to withdraw
their armed forces from the country within forty-eight hours.

On March 18, while Sihanouk was in Moscow asking the Soviets to press North Vietnam to remove its troops, the Cambodian National Assembly and Council of the Kingdom voted 92 to 0 to depose him. Marshal Lon Nol, who had played a role in fomenting the protests against North Vietnam, headed the new government. Two days later in Peking, Sihanouk threw in his lot with the Communists, vowing to fight “until victory or death” against the “stooges of American imperialism” who now ruled Cambodia. He did not explain why Lon Nol, presumably the leading “stooge” in Phnom Penh, had served Sihanouk for years as both Defense and Prime Minister.

Lon Nol's coup came as a complete surprise to us. We neither encouraged it nor knew about it in advance. Those who have insinuated that the CIA instigated the coup have managed to overlook the fact that we did not have even one intelligence agent in the country at the time. In fact, our first notice that the
possibility
of a coup existed, which came through a third party, arrived on the very day of Sihanouk's ouster.

My initial reaction was that we should do everything possible to help the new government. Lon Nol made it clear that he wanted to align Cambodia with the United States. He closed the port at Sihanoukville to shipments of supplies from North Vietnam and soon asked us to equip his army with modern weapons so that it could evict the Communist troops from their sanctuaries. These were acts of courage. I thought we should act immediately on his requests. But we held back to avoid giving North Vietnam a pretext to unleash a full-scale invasion of Cambodia. Instead, we undertook initiatives to explore the possibility of restoring the neutrality of Cambodia, all of which were rebuffed instantly by North Vietnam. We should have known better than to hesitate as we did. If there was one lesson that our experience in Vietnam should have taught us, it was that North Vietnam did not require a pretext before invading another country. Through the end of March,
while we showed restraint, North Vietnam geared up for an attack on Cambodia.

In early April the North Vietnamese assault began. After two weeks, Lon Nol's Cambodian forces had been attacked in Svay Rieng, Takeo, Kampot, Prey Veng, Mondolkiri, and Kampong Cham provinces. In the following weeks, the North Vietnamese troops pressed forward with their attacks. A siege of Phnom Penh was becoming an imminent possibility as Communist forces struck within twenty miles to the south of it. They also interdicted key highways linking the capital to the provinces and began harassing shipping on the Mekong River, the city's lifeline. By the end of April, North Vietnam's forces had occupied a quarter of Cambodia's territory and were tightening their noose around Phnom Penh.

Our response was pathetic. Cambodia was in desperate straits. On April 14, Lon Nol declared that “because of the gravity of the situation, it is deemed necessary to accept from this moment all unconditional foreign aid from all sources.” Five days before, he had made his first request for American assistance. He intended to expand his armed forces dramatically and asked for an immediate shipment of 100,000 to 150,000 weapons with ammuniuon and a later delivery of another 50,000 to 150,000. Kissinger and I pushed for action. But our foreign-policy and military bureaucracies delayed and temporized. By the end of April, our total military aid to Cambodia consisted of 3,000 rifles provided covertly.

North Vietnam was threatening to convert all of eastern Cambodia into one huge base area, with convenient supply lines and favorable geography, that would enable its forces to strike at both Phnom Penh and South Vietnam at will. This would have been a disaster. If we had acquiesced in this development, we would have been signing a death warrant not only for Cambodia but for South Vietnam as well. A Communist-dominated Cambodia would have placed South Vietnam in an untenable military situation and would have endangered the lives of thousands of United States troops. I therefore decided
the time had come to take action against the Communist sanctuaries in Cambodia, both to relieve the pressure on Phnom Penh and to reduce the threat these North Vietnamese bases posed to South Vietnam.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff worked out the plan of attack. The Communist sanctuaries were centered in two main areas—the Parrot's Beak and the Fishhook. The Parrot's Beak was a sliver of land that pushed into South Vietnam and reached to within thirty-eight miles of Saigon. One of South Vietnam's strongest divisions was stationed on the border in this area. The Fishhook was a thin, curving piece of Cambodian territory that jutted into the heart of South Vietnam about fifty miles northwest of Saigon. Intelligence reports indicated that North Vietnam's heaviest concentrations were in the Fishhook and that this area was the primary area of operation for the Central Office of South Vietnam (COSVN). COSVN was the Communists' floating command post of military headquarters, supplies, food, and medical facilities. The Fishhook was the nerve center of the Communist forces in the sanctuaries. It would be heavily fortified and strongly defended.

On April 26, acting on the recommendations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, I decided that South Vietnamese units would go into the Parrot's Beak and that a joint United States-South Vietnamese force would go into the Fishhook. Three days later the attack on the Parrot's Beak began. On April 30, I delivered a nationally televised address about the Cambodian incursions at the same time as our troops began the joint assault on the Fishhook. I described the Communist offensive against Cambodia, explained the grave dangers we would face if it succeeded, and emphasized the fact that our forces would stay in Cambodia only sixty days and would go no deeper than twenty-one miles.

On May 1, I went to the Pentagon for a firsthand briefing. Colored pins on a map indicated the positions and movements of the various forces. As the briefers described the initial success of the operation, I noticed the map showed that four other areas besides the Parrot's Beak and Fishhook were occupied
by Communist forces. I began wondering whether between South Vietnam's forces and our own we could mount offensives against the other sanctuaries as well.

“Could we take out all the sanctuaries?” I asked. The Pentagon officials answered that although this was feasible, it had not been offered as an option because of the negative reaction that attacking more than two areas would have produced in the media and Congress. “Let me be the judge as far as the political reactions are concerned,” I said. “The fact is that we have already taken the political heat for this particular operation. If we can substantially reduce the threat to our forces by wiping out the rest of the sanctuaries, now is the time to do it.” I knew we would take just as much political heat for taking out two sanctuaries as we would for taking out six. I then made an on-the-spot decision: “I want to take out all of those sanctuaries. Make whatever plans are necessary, and then just do it. Knock them all out so that they can't be used against us again, ever.”

This was a textbook case of one of the most frustrating problems I had to deal with in conducting the war: the tendency of our armed forces to confuse
military
analysis with
political
analysis. Given the political restrictions imposed on the military during the early years of the war, and given the abuse heaped on them by the antiwar movement and the media, I could understand why they were so tentative by the time I came into office. I could sense that they were surprised and pleased when I directed them to take out all the sanctuaries. More than anyone else, they knew that taking half measures in war is the surest way to lose. The fashionable idea that all military leaders are superhawks who will generally take bold and even rash action has no basis in fact. It has been my experience that professional military leaders are by training and instinct cautious and seldom advise bold action. The Pat-tons and LeMays are not the rule but the exceptions.

Our troops went into Cambodia on schedule and came out on schedule. Yet some critics contended that the United States and South Vietnam had “invaded” neutral Cambodia. That
was fatuous nonsense. We stayed in Cambodia for only two months and advanced to a depth of only twenty-one miles. North Vietnam occupied parts of eastern Cambodia for over five years and reoccupied them after we left. As a British newspaper put it, condemning the United States for invading neutral Cambodia—in the sense of committing an aggressive act—was as absurd as condemning Britain for invading neutral Holland in 1944.

On June 30, the last American troops left Cambodia. Our troops had captured 22,892 individual weapons, enough to equip seventy-four full-strength North Vietnamese battalions; 2,509 big crew-served weapons, enough to equip twenty-five full-strength North Vietnamese infantry battalions; 15 million rounds of ammunition—about what the enemy had fired in South Vietnam during the past year; 14 million pounds of rice, enough to feed for four months all the Communist combat battalions estimated to be in South Vietnam; 143,000 rockets, mortars, and recoilless-rifle rounds, enough for fourteen months of fighting; 199,552 antiaircraft rounds; 5,482 mines; 62,022 grenades; and 83,000 pounds of explosives. And according to an intercepted radio transmission from the COSVN, our forces were at times close to overrunning it.