When the War Was Over (75 page)

There is an axiom in Washington that a new administration must take its greatest risks the first year in office when voters have plenty of time to forget failures before the next election campaign. Normalizing relations with Vietnam, so recently the enemy, had potential for an enormous backlash in the United States. Carter moved quickly before his opponents had time to block his efforts.

But Carter discovered his problems were not at home, but back in Hanoi, and the Paris negotiations proved to be one of Vietnam's first major mistakes—one with devastating consequences in the war that broke out the next year with Cambodia.

Carter's negotiator at the talks was Richard C. Holbrooke, the thirty-five-year-old assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs. Holbrooke had served as a diplomat in Vietnam and was a protege of Secretary of State Vance. He was committed to reaching an accord with Vietnam because Vance was convinced it was required to ensure calm and stability in Southeast Asia. He did not have the moral commitment to normalization that Carter expressed when talking about binding the wounds of war.

Vance wanted Carter to become a president of peace, and Holbrooke's role was to neutralize any threat that the Vietnamese would disrupt peace. Vance reasoned that the longer Vietnam was treated as an outsider, the more likely old wounds would fester and cause new problems, even new wars.

Holbrooke arrived in Paris in May 1977 confident that he could forge an agreement with the Vietnamese. His counterpart for the discussions was Phan Hien, the deputy foreign minister who had negotiated with Woodcock two months earlier. Holbrooke knew Phan Hien from an earlier round of talks in Paris, when both were young aides at the Paris negotiations of 1968. Holbrooke was pleased to have a familiar opposite. He did not know that Phan Hien's mission would destroy his own. He had been sent by Hanoi not to reach a settlement but to retrieve an honorable and proud settlement for the Vietnamese communists; to make good on Nixon's pledge of $3.25 billion in aid.

The first round of talks was cordial. Serious discussions began at the second meeting. Holbrooke thought he had the ideal package. Carter had authorized him to offer Vietnam normalized relations without preconditions. Vietnam's offer to establish an MIA bureau had been sufficient for
Carter to remove the MIA issue as a problem in the talks. Within one week after the Woodcock commission's return, MIA records had been translated into Vietnamese, as requested, illustrated with Vietnamese maps, and sent off to Hanoi. Publicly, Carter had elevated the Vietnamese gesture to the status of a concession. In response, Carter had told Holbrooke to announce the U.S. intention to welcome Vietnam's admission to the United Nations regardless of the outcome of the talks.

Holbrooke thought his proposition so attractive he did away with any long-drawn-out presentation and made a direct appeal instead. He leaned across the table and said: “May we go out this afternoon and announce normalization? The United States has no preconditions. After our embassies are established we'll lift the trade embargo.”

Phan Hien answered just as simply: “No, without aid it is impossible.”

Silence. Kenneth Quinn, a foreign service officer fluent in Vietnamese who had traveled with the Woodcock commission, was seated with Holbrooke and remembers the moment well. “I realized nothing had changed. They may have ‘separated' the issues for Woodcock but they still demanded aid. I thought what a tragedy the Vietnamese didn't take this opportunity and I also thought the Vietnamese can't blame us this time.”

Holbrooke had not given up. He ended the talks quickly, without recriminations. But the disaster was not to be confined to the four walls of the conference room. Immediately Phan Hien went out to the attendant international press corps, reporters who had been told to expect a major announcement, and read aloud a statement publicly detailing the secret 1973 letter from President Nixon promising the $3.25 billion, a promise Phan Hien said would have to be kept before Vietnam agreed to full diplomatic relations with the United States. Phan Hien had not mentioned the letter to Holbrooke during the negotiations.

Sixteen years of hostility had not ended. Holbrooke was too disappointed to appear before the press; he sent out a spokesman who said only that the United States set no preconditions for relations, that as a sign of good faith the United States withdrew its opposition to the admission of Vietnam to the United Nations. Later that day Holbrooke telephoned Phan Hien to tell him what a “terrible mistake” he had made and to arrange another round of talks in hopes the Vietnamese would change their minds.

Between those sessions, however, Congress intervened. When word of the Phan Hien press conference reached Washington, the House of Representatives immediately passed a bill forbidding any American official even to discuss aid with Vietnam. Members of the appropriate House subcommittee
reiterated their earlier requests to Kissinger and Nixon to appear before them and explain this secret letter. The State Department published the full text of the letter and appendices, which did indeed promise the money, albeit with congressional approval. It was a promise Nixon could not have made without congressional knowledge, and it proved to be the most deadly legacy of the Nixon-Kissinger “honorable peace” in Vietnam.

Carter's desired new beginning was crumbling. The Vietnamese had not only rejected his offer but by trumpeting the Nixon letter they were cutting the ground out from under him. The Vietnamese had failed to appreciate the significant political changes in the United States since 1975. Congress was no longer a liberal institution combating a conservative president; it was the reverse after the 1976 election of Carter. Secondly, overtures to the American public through revelations such as Phan Hien's in Paris were effective during the fighting when American lives were at risk and thousands of Americans wanted the war over before they were drafted. But that public disappeared after the war ended, along with most of the peace movement that would have spread the message. Vietnam was no longer a cause but a sour memory. And after Watergate, Americans were not inclined to feel responsible for a pledge made by the discredited Nixon.

The next round of talks was scheduled for June. The Vietnamese had time to reconsider their position. To outsiders, it appeared as if the Vietnamese had lost their wizardry at propaganda. They looked more and more like doctrinaire communists, far less flexible than during the war years and increasingly unable to understand how to manipulate the United States or American opinion. Part of this apparent personality change was deceptive, the result of the northern communists taking over from the southern activists who had been responsible for the earlier propaganda coups.

In the second round, Holbrooke tried to describe the situation Carter faced in Washington and the changed American political landscape. The anti-war movement was dead. He reminded the Vietnamese that seventeen years elapsed before the United States recognized the Soviet Union and that the United States had yet to cement full ties to the People's Republic of China. He also reminded the Vietnamese that an important section of the United States still saw Hanoi as a belligerent.

During the coffee break, Phan Hien said Vietnam could agree to Holbrooke's offer if the United States would make a secret pledge to pay the $3.25 billion without ever acknowledging this in public.

Holbrooke said such secret pledges were impossible, but Phan Hien went ahead and showed him a detailed list of how the billions would be spent.
The vast majority of the aid would be used to rebuild the north. The Vietnamese said his instructions from Hanoi were to collect the money—publicly or privately. The talks ended.

Carter was true to his word, and in the fall the United States voted to admit Vietnam to the United Nations. Carter's honest if rash attempt at reconciliation had run aground specifically on Vietnam's insistence that the United States pay what amounted to war reparations, although that term was never used. The Vietnamese had proved to be victims of myth as much as the Americans. They believed the American public had turned against the war on moral grounds and hence, out of guilt, would approve of war reparations. They had yet to accept that if unanimity was ever reached by Americans about the war, it was around the judgment that the United States had had no business fighting such a bloody, costly, and losing war.

Not surprisingly, the victorious Vietnamese clung to their mistaken beliefs and did not readjust their position toward the United States until events in their own country forced them to reevaluate what they truly needed from Washington—money or good relations. But by then President Carter's pool of goodwill had begun to evaporate. The Vietnamese had rejected his offer in a public fashion that caused him to lose face. The policies of Vance and Holbrooke had failed, and Carter now listened more attentively to his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was promoting a different policy that would benefit Vietnam's budding enemy, China.

In 1977 the American government also broke its silence over Cambodia—not the administration, but Congress. Representative Stephen Solarz, a liberal Democrat from New York, sparked the first official examination of the Khmer Rouge atrocities. Solarz was one of the anti-war candidates who won election in 1974 and helped block further American expenditures for the regimes in Saigon and Phnom Penh. But unlike most other politicians, he did not let his interest in the area lapse after the 1975 communist victories.

He first heard stories about the Cambodian refugees while a member of the House of Representative's Committee on International Relations. At the end of 1976, he traveled in a delegation to Bangkok. There he heard what the Cambodian refugees were saying in depth. He was briefed by the U.S. embassy's Cambodian expert, Charles Twining. What caught his attention were stories about the second evacuation, in which the new people were sent from the southwest to the northwest. For him, they had a frightening similarity to stories of mass deportations of Jews during the Holocaust. Solarz's district in New York has more survivors of the Holocaust than any other in the United States. The congressman became embroiled in the issue.

In Washington, Solarz had opened his door to Cambodians, trying to find interested politicians to raise the issue of what was happening in their homeland. After his trip to Bangkok he felt Congress had to hold public hearings on the issue. He reasoned that the United States might be powerless to stop the atrocities but the government could at least condemn the Khmer Rouge regime. Moreover, he hoped to generate enough support to change the laws and allow Cambodians in the Thai border camps to come directly to the United States. He feared that they would be caught as the Jews had been in Europe.

The first hearings were convened in May 1977. They succeeded in drawing public attention to Cambodia and spurred the State Department to make stronger public statements against the atrocities in Cambodia. Although Carter had created a new human rights bureau within the State Department, that bureau had issued no reports about the atrocities in Cambodia. The human rights people said their mandate was to investigate countries receiving U.S. aid, and Cambodia did not fall within their sphere. Holbrooke stepped into the breach, and through the efforts of his East Asia experts on Cambodia, the administration spoke out against the human rights violations by the Phnom Penh regime.

Meanwhile Senator Robert Dole, a Republican from Kansas, took interest in the plight of the Cambodian refugees. He heard a Cambodian exile, Chhang Song, speak on the subject and joined Representative Solarz in a bipartisan effort to change refugee laws and enact legislation to allow some 15,000 Cambodians to enter the United States as a group, without the timeconsuming delay of requiring every individual to pass muster as legitimate candidates for refugee status.

By the end of 1977 the United States had joined other nations in compiling documentation of human rights abuses in Cambodia. Indochina was returning to the spotlight. Cambodia was now a major human rights question. Vietnam was a knotty diplomatic issue. The moratorium on discussing “Vietnam”—the American war in Indochina—was moot as the Carter administration tried to grapple with the changing reality in the region.

Then the border war broke out at the end of the year, and National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski entered the policy debate on Indochina. Previously he had shown little interest in Vietnam or Cambodia. He concerned himself with what he considered larger, global issues. But this border war had the potential, in Brzezinski's eyes, of taking on the characteristics of a great power contest. Like Kissinger, his Republican predecessor, Brzezinski tended to see conflicts fitting into larger, generally more sinister configurations
than his colleagues at State. The experts at State traditionally counseled viewing conflicts in their local setting. Brzezinski belonged to the superpower school that elevated conflicts beyond their home setting and transformed them into East-West confrontations.

In his first public statement about the border war, Brzezinski declared that the Soviet Union and China were fighting each other through their client states, Vietnam and Cambodia respectively. This was, he said, the first “proxy war” between communist countries. Moreover, he believed that Vietnam was the aggressor at the instigation of the Soviet Union.

Experts at the State Department were furious. Brzezinski was talking off the top of his head, in their opinion, with no information to back up his provocative statements. Vance and Holbrooke, through briefings by their experts, knew there were ideological underpinnings to the war, somewhat along the lines of the Sino-Soviet conflict, but they were certain the war was primarily rooted in the two countries' own rivalry. Their fear was the contrary of Brzezinski's—that these two countries would pull China and the Soviet Union into a wider war and not vice versa.