When the War Was Over (74 page)

After the war Weiss used her inheritance to support projects that promoted reconstruction of Vietnam, improved U.S.-Vietnamese relations, and provided U.S. aid for Vietnam. At first she also helped promote the Khmer Rouge regime. She brooked no criticism of the new Vietnam. “There are already enough people criticizing the Vietnamese,” she said. “What they do in their own country is their business.”

That attitude pitted her against Joan Baez, one of her old friends and also one of the most famous anti-war figures. The dispute between Weiss and Baez epitomized the rupture in the left and foreshadowed the swift repudiation of the Vietnamese in international opinion a few years later. Baez represented the human rights movement; she was a proponent of nonviolence and a friend of Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1976 Baez was asked to sign a petition against the Hanoi government's violation of basic human rights, and she agreed after examining the available evidence.

Then her telephone started ringing. “There wasn't just a phone call from Cora [Weiss],” Baez said, “there was a direct order—get your name off that list.”

The petition, supported by the International League for Human Rights, was published in December 1976. Baez's name attracted the most attention in news stories that emphasized how the anti-war figures were citing the Vietnamese government for “gross abuses” of civil liberties, including summary imprisonment for people whose religious and political beliefs ran counter to the government's. Baez faulted herself for failing to have considered what she expected to happen in Vietnam and Cambodia after the American war:

“It's a fault of mine, I guess. I don't think enough about structural politics. I think about mothers and babies and napalm. . . . I remember meeting a man in North Vietnam who had spent his entire life fighting to get invaders out of his country and I asked him one day what he would do if we [the Americans] ever left, if there was ever a peaceful moment for him. He lit up and said, ‘Oh, I would take this little boat and I would go all around the islands of Vietnam.' He wasn't talking in political terms either. None of us were when we thought about what to do when the war was over.”

This was of more than academic interest to the Vietnamese. The divisions and reconsiderations within the old anti-war movement left them bereft of celebrity supporters and advocates for their cause. And by 1978, when they faced a war with Cambodia, the Vietnamese came courting to the United States, looking for friendship from the American government as well as the American public. Instead they found a very small “Vietnam lobby” with no ability to rekindle mass support for Vietnam and a government that had grown tired of Hanoi's serpentine strategies.

It should have been easy for the Vietnamese to win support for their cause against the Khmer Rouge, who had been roundly condemned by the U.S. government, if not by the left. But through their own actions they found themselves largely isolated in the United States. The Vietnamese faced the Cambodians in the upcoming Third Indochina War without significant support from any quarter in the United States.

Jimmy Carter, a shrewd ex-governor of Georgia, sensed the stale uncomfortable mood in the country following the end of the Vietnam War and the Watergate affair that toppled President Nixon. He won election in 1976 as
president of the United States with a program to bind all American wounds whether inflicted by war or the spectacle of a cynical, corrupted White House.

The Vietnamese could not have asked for a more supportive U.S. president. Carter campaigned on the promise to seek normal relations with Hanoi. And during his first nine months in office the new president hoped to stun the world by launching a new course in foreign policy as innovative as in the years following the Second World War. One of his first foreign missions in that quest was to Hanoi. The mission's stated aim was to facilitate the complete accounting of American military missing in action, the MIAs. Its larger goal was to persuade Vietnam to normalize relations on terms acceptable to most sectors of the United States.

The history of American negotiations with the Vietnamese communists might have suggested more prudence. Cyrus Vance, Carter's new secretary of state, was well aware of the past record, since he had taken part in the 1968 talks that nearly broke down over the shape of the negotiating table. But Carter's strategy relied, in part, on the breathtaking gesture. He dispatched this commission barely two months after taking office, and he appointed mainly liberal members who had opposed the war vocally The timing and composition of the commission were meant to impress the Vietnamese, much as the president had surprised and pleased the American people by forsaking a bulletproof limousine and walking down Pennsylvania Avenue on the blustery winter day of his inauguration. Carter gambled that the Vietnamese were susceptible to his symbolism of a new beginning.

The commission was headed by Leonard Woodcock, leader of the United Auto Workers Union, which had swayed a significant portion of the labor movement to Carter first in the Democratic primaries and later in the general election when he opposed President Gerald R. Ford. Woodcock was joined by three liberal Democrats and Representative G. V (Sonny) Montgomery, Democrat of Mississippi, who had been a supporter of the American war but also chaired a House select committee on Americans missing in action.

Montgomery's committee had issued a report at the end of 1976 stating that no Americans missing in action could still be alive in Indochina. That finding removed a major problem for Carter. During the campaign, President Ford had defended his tough policy against normalization with Vietnam by claiming it was the only way to force the Vietnamese to account for MIAs. In the postwar period the MIA issue was one of the few that survived as a major American preoccupation. Relatives of the 2,545 Americans listed as missing were a strong lobby supported by government officials, especially in the Pentagon. Moreover, it was the one issue compatible with the prevailing
mixed opinions about the war: Regardless of one's political views, Americans had a responsibility to those who had fought the war.

Carter had promised as full an accounting as possible before negotiating normalization with Vietnam. Montgomery's report proved a godsend: “Total accounting by the Indochinese governments is not possible and should not be expected,” the report concluded, adding a recommendation that the United States normalize relations with Vietnam.

The government in Hanoi could not mistake the Woodcock commission for anything but a peace mission. But when the commission arrived in Hanoi the members quickly discovered that Vietnam had not backed down from its earlier stiff demand that the United States provide reconstruction aid in any normalization agreement. As soon as they had dropped their bags at the modest government guest house, the Americans were summoned to an unscheduled meeting with Vietnam's foreign minister, who delivered what Woodcock subsequently called the “standard line”: The United States was under legal obligation to provide $3.25 billion in reconstruction as promised in 1973 by President Nixon in a then-secret letter to Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong.

The Vietnamese may have been the victors, but the spoils were hardly enough to rebuild the land ripped apart during the war. The bounty was in military hardware: 1.6 billion rifles; 130,000 tons of ammunition; 42,000 trucks; 1,200 armored personnel carriers; 63,000 antitank weapons; and enough jet fighters and other aircraft, along with some 1,000 ships, to make Vietnam one of the foremost military powers in the world.

But the Vietnamese did not have enough food to feed their own people. Industries in the south were producing far below capacity, in part because of Hanoi's new economic programs and also because of a trade embargo imposed by Ford prohibiting the sale of raw material or spare parts to Vietnam. Hanoi's leadership believed the United States was robbing the country of the fruits of victory because of that embargo and refusal to pay the $3.25 billion in reconstruction aid.

In April 1976, the Vietnam government published excerpts from the secret Nixon letter in the official newspaper
Nhan Dan
to shore up its demands: “The U.S. government will contribute to the postwar reconstruction in North Vietnam without any political conditions whatsoever. U.S. preliminary studies show that programs appropriate for a U.S. contribution to the aforementioned postwar reconstruction will amount to about $3.25 billion in nonrefundable aid. . . .”

But Nixon had written the letter without consulting Congress. And he had conditioned the $3.25 billion on congressional approval.

Woodcock was a skillful negotiator in labor relations but an innocent to the determined world of the Vietnamese. He had been shown the Nixon letter during hurried briefings for the trip and had been told Congress would never grant aid under those conditions to Vietnam. The day after the commission's arrival Woodcock met his Vietnamese counterpart, a deputy foreign minister named Phan Hien who was then a rising star in the bureaucracy A genial, soft-spoken man, Phan Hien had been an aide at the failed 1968 Paris talks, where he was remembered as a man who adhered to official policy without offending his negotiating partners. He repeated the demand Woodcock had heard the previous afternoon.

Woodcock countered, as he had been instructed, that the Nixon letter as codicil to the 1973 Paris Peace Accords was null and void because Vietnam had broken numerous sections of the agreement, particularly since the North Vietnamese army had won the final victory. Phan Hien asserted that if the United States made that claim then Vietnam's promise in paragraph 8 of the accords to search diligently for the MIA remains was also void. No “new leaf” had been turned. Woodcock was being treated as the heir to Kissinger's diplomacy, rather than as a counterpoint; he asked Phan Hien for a private session.

“If these were strike negotiations I would predict six more months on the pavement,” Woodcock told his fellow members before sequestering himself with Phan Hien and an interpreter.

Woodcock transgressed the guidelines set down by the president. Carter had told Woodcock not to negotiate, merely to listen, instructions contrary to every instinct in the labor leader's makeup. “The meeting only lasted about twenty minutes, no more,” Woodcock said. “I told him in clear and simple terms it was impossible to continue if he didn't drop his demands.”

He told the Vietnamese, “You are saying in a sense that you will sell us the remains of our MIAs in return for economic aid. No American president or Congress could approve such a deal. If you are truly interested in better relations with the United States you must drop that demand or the day of normalized relations will be put off by years. You are hardly likely to see a more sympathetic delegation here in many years. It's clear where we stood on the war. Separate all these issues recognizing, nonetheless, that further efforts will be made to seek aid for Vietnam later, after normalization. You can't send us away in a negative mood.”

Phan Hien said nothing. Woodcock returned to his delegation. The answer came swiftly Full talks were reconvened with an opening statement by
Phan Hien saying normalization of relations, the MIAs, and economic aid were all separate issues, one from the other, although they were obviously interrelated. The Vietnamese had budged, slightly, and the talks proceeded.

The four commission members were accompanied by American experts on MIAs, and they held separate sessions with their Vietnamese counterparts. A few had sat through years of largely useless discussions on MIAs with the Vietnamese and they wanted to take advantage of this seeming new cooperation from Hanoi. In one expert session the Vietnamese volunteered to set up a separate bureau within their government to receive American records on MIAs and any information within their country on burial sites. The American expert staff had carried detailed files on a number of cases and wanted to hand them over immediately to the Vietnamese. Woodcock said no, for fear it would create a “negative impression.”

“I told them [the staff experts] to go in and be more positive. . . . I was a little sharp,” Woodcock said.

The experts finished their meetings on the MIA issue disappointed that a golden opportunity had been passed up for illusive political gains. Woodcock argued that the United States agreed to the Vietnamese proposal and the files could be sent later. The experts said that such promises in the past were rarely fulfilled. At the end of their stay, the commission members were given twelve small black boxes the Vietnamese believed contained the remains of American MIAs. Retrieving those remains had been one of the reasons for the trip.

The commission left Hanoi for a short visit to Laos to discuss MIA remains there. The commission had hoped to visit Cambodia, too, but the authorities in Phnom Penh did not give permission for a stopover. Woodcock was experienced enough to realize his mission to Vietnam had yielded mixed results, and he refused to characterize it as a success or failure when greeted by reporters at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington. That would be a political decision, left to President Carter after he had been briefed.

To the surprise of many in the delegation, Carter declared the mission a “superb success.” The evidence had suggested a more modest description: Woodcock had come back with promises of a new Vietnamese bureau for American MIA affairs and a verbal agreement to separate the outstanding issues of the MIAs, normalization of relations, and economic aid in future American-Vietnamese talks.

Woodcock also brought back a letter for Carter from Vietnam's prime minister, Pham Van Dong. He suggested new talks aimed at normalizing relations. The invitation tipped the scales for Carter. He agreed enthusiastically
to a meeting in Paris in May, less than four months after taking office. Teams from the two countries could work out what he thought would be a final settlement. He squeezed the interpretation he wanted out of these separate gestures and put the press and public on notice that relations with Vietnam were improving.