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But the main event was in Saigon, where each day Kissinger and Thieu sat down flanked by aides and officials. Sometimes Thieu was backed up by key advisers and members of his cabinet. Kissinger on his side of the table had an unprecedented array of Americans experienced in Vietnamese matters. William H. Sullivan, former Ambassador to Laos and now a top State Department man on East Asian and Pacific affairs, had flown in with Kissinger. From Seoul came Philip C. Habib, the U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, a hardnosed negotiator who had served both in the Saigon embassy and with the U.S. delegation in Paris. General Creighton Abrams, the former U.S. commander in South Viet Nam, left Washington for Saigon on White House orders only hours after he had been installed as the new Army Chief of Staff at a Pentagon ceremony. His mission, said the Pentagon lamely, was to check up on Vietnamization. Also on hand were U.S. Commander Frederick Weyand and Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker.
Some of the men on the American team, notably Abrams, were present because Thieu particularly trusts them, and a great deal of trust and more seems likely to be required before the South Vietnamese President will buy the proposals. In sum they directly violate or potentially compromise his oft-reiterated "four nos": no coalition, no granting of territory to the Communists, no Communist activity in South Viet Nam and no neutralism. They also undercut his insistence that any government change in Saigon take place under the present constitution, whose Article Four outlaws Communist activity of any kind. Beyond all that, of course, they eventually doom his own leadership. Even the prospect of peace undercuts his position, which is almost entirely now supported by the army (see box, page 15).
Kissinger should be well equipped to press the U.S. case, since the plan bears his unmistakable craftsmanship. The provision for a caretaker government was foreshadowed in a 1969 essay in Foreign Affairs in which Kissinger argued that "a mixed commission to develop and supervise a political process to reintegrate the country—including free elections—could be useful." Students of the President's foreign policy adviser will also recognize in the agreement a bow to the brilliant 19th century Austrian Statesman Klemens Metternich, whom Kissinger analyzed in his Harvard doctoral thesis. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Metternich broke down the vast problems of establishing a post-Napoleonic European peace into their practical component parts and set up committees to resolve the smaller issues.
The Kissinger plan appears to be an extraordinarily clever arrangement. It deals subtly but directly with the overriding issue of the war—the control of Saigon—while deftly sidestepping the ideological "issues" that have muddied understanding of the war (especially in the U.S.) from the beginning. It also, like any worthy work of diplomacy, contains substantial concessions by both Hanoi and Washington.