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Kissinger is known to believe that the long deadlock was caused, too, by the U.S. style of negotiations before he took over. There was, he has said, too much concern with tactics and not enough "feeling for nuance and for intangibles." Kissinger's own style has been to set aside the detailed questions as much as he can and try to create "a process of evolution that will give the North Vietnamese an option on the future." At the bargaining table, Kissinger has tried to channel the talks to the purely military questions of cease-fire and troop withdrawals, avoiding the emotional issue of the internal structure of South Viet Nam for as long as possible.
If Kissinger's new style impressed the North Vietnamese, however, they did not show it. Since August 1969, when Kissinger slipped off to Paris for the first of the 19 secret sessions he had with Le Duc Tho, the talks until recently had essentially been at an impasse. To be sure, there were occasional indications of "progress." But U.S. cease-fire proposals always looked to the Communists like a strategem to stop the fighting while retaining Thieu in power, and the Communist multipoint proposals always contained a political solution that would topple Thieu. As Kissinger complained last January, when Nixon publicly revealed the existence of the secret talks and their impasse, the North Vietnamese were asking that the U.S. "overthrow the people that have been counting on us."
Rattled. Why have the North Vietnamese decided to negotiate now? It is possible that Hanoi merely finds it advantageous to be seen dealing unilaterally with the U.S. on the theory that it is a cheap way to generate uncertainty in Saigon and thus weaken Thieu's hold on South Viet Nam. But without elaborating, Kissinger had been saying privately all summer that he expected serious bargaining to begin this fall. One element surely is the fact that Hanoi has been under at least some pressure to settle from Moscow and Peking, who are anxious to expand their new relationships with the U.S. Though it rattled Saigon for a while and gave Washington a scare, the Easter offensive not only ended in a standoff but also gave the Administration the excuse and public support to resume full-scale bombing of North Viet Nam and mine the harbors. Though foreigners who have visited Hanoi would argue to the contrary, the Administration seems convinced that the overwhelming U.S. air war—which has been dumping explosives on the North at the rate of two tons every minute—has begun to weaken North Vietnamese resolve.