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And for a time the talks went well enough for his deputy, General Alexander Haig, to return to Washington to prepare to take a completed agreement to Saigon. But then Kissinger raised the DMZ issue for the second time, and Le Duc Tho exploded. Obviously reflecting Politburo decisions, the North Vietnamese angrily retracted concessions made in earlier sessions and flung down new demands.
Kissinger continued to display good cheer for the photographers, but his optimism finally began to fade when Le Duc Tho gave him Hanoi's long-delayed protocol governing the I.C.C. on "the night before I was to leave Paris, six weeks after we had stated what our aim was, five weeks after the ceasefire was supposed to be signed." To the U.S. the proposal was a joke; it called for a force of 250 men to handle a task the U.S. thought would require a force of some 5,000 men.
Far more disturbing to Kissinger—and to Nixon—was a sudden North Vietnamese reversal on the fundamental issue of the return of the American prisoners. In October, the North Vietnamese had agreed to an unconditional return of the P.O.W.s within 60 days. Now they sought to tie the P.O.W. release to a release of thousands of political prisoners in South Viet Nam—a matter that they had earlier agreed to defer to later negotiation among the Vietnamese.
What were the North Vietnamese up to? They might have been hoping to appease the worried Viet Cong by tying the P.O.W. release to the political-prisoner problem. They might have simply decided to agree to no more efforts to tighten the agreement. In any case, Nixon was furious at the P.O.W. reversal and evidently convinced that Hanoi believed he had little room to maneuver. Nixon summoned Kissinger home, interrupting the talks.
DEC. 14. Nixon sent an ultimatum, giving Hanoi 72 hours to resume serious negotiations.
DEC. 18. The bombers flew north.
What happens next? The virtue of the Kissinger plan as it stood in early October was that it really did separate the military issues from the intractable political issues. It is true that the very vagueness of the original draft—not to mention its reaffirmation of Hanoi's "one Viet Nam" position —was highly advantageous to the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong. It is arguable that they won those advantages on the battlefield. But the effect of the Saigon-inspired delay since mid-October has been to weaken, perhaps mortally, the original compromise. Both delegations have been sweating to tie the military and political issues back together in ways that would benefit their own sides. It may be very difficult for anyone to pull the issues apart again.