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The Reasons Why Peace Was Not at Hand
At last, on Oct. 26, Kissinger made his now famous misstatement: "Peace is at hand" in Viet Nam. The world's hopes soared, the stock market leaped upward with Kissinger's declaration: "What remains to be done can be settled in one more negotiating session with the North Vietnamese negotiators, lasting, I would think, no more than three or four days." But between Oct. 26 and Dec. 16, the settlement that both sides had supposedly agreed upon disastrously unraveled. Kissinger blamed the North Vietnamese for the impasse, and in calculated anger, the President unleashed the most massive bombing of North Viet Nam of the whole long war. One top Administration official said last week that Nixon's behavior was influenced by the way in which Dwight Eisenhower ended the Korean War. "You remember," the official said, "that the talks with North Korea were bogged down. Ike took over and immediately ordered massive bombing of North Korea, including the dikes. Nixon was Vice President then, and he says that, however much of a peaceful image Ike struck, his show of strength worked."
In assigning blame, others looked to South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu, who certainly was doing everything within his power to torpedo the proposed agreement. Inevitably, too, the Nixon-Kissinger relationship was scrutinized more earnestly than ever for frictions. It became a journalistic fashion to look for "light between" the President and his adviser. There was some encouragement for this activity from within the White House, notably from Haldeman, who considers himself an extension of Nixon and deeply resents Kissinger's high profile and the fact that Kissinger is not subordinate to him as is everyone else on the President's staff. And it did not escape notice that in his Dec. 16 briefing, Kissinger repeatedly emphasized that it was the President who had to be satisfied with the settlement.
These scraps aside, there is no real evidence of strain be tween the President and his adviser, perhaps because a care ful reconstruction of the chronology of events in Paris and Saigon (see box, page 21) indicates both must share some responsibility for the breakdown in reaching an agreement. Kis singer seems to have underestimated the difficulty of the remaining "details" to be worked out. It was odd for a man of Kissinger's caution to have been so euphoric and expansive as he was on Oct. 26. His anticipation was too great, relying too much on what he called the continued "good will" of Hanoi and Le Due Tho, with whom he evidently got on well. He also underestimated the opposition of Thieu.
For his part, Nixon, who fully understood what Kissinger had brought back from Paris, backed off when Thieu balked. In sending Kissinger back to the North Vietnamese to extract more specific language in the draft on the sovereignty of South Viet Nam, so as to meet some of Thieu's objections, Nixon alarmed Hanoi, which had believed it had a deal. In predictable riposte, Hanoi then began asking for revisions of its own. As Kissinger explained in his Oct. 26 briefing, an