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A great deal now depended on our exchanges with Moscow. During a luncheon on April 12, Dobrynin assured me that his leadership was not interested in a showdown. He said that a visit by me to Moscow, which had been discussed since early in the year, was now urgent. The agenda could be Viet Nam, as well as accelerated preparations for a summit meeting between Nixon and Soviet Communist Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev.
The proposition evoked the most diverse emotions in Nixon. He longed for the summit. To be the first American President in Moscow stimulated his sense of history; to go where Eisenhower had been rebuffed would fulfill his ambition to outstrip his old mentor. On the other hand, Nixon was suspicious of a Soviet ploy to delay or complicate our planned military campaign against North Viet Nam. Not the least of Nixon's concerns was how he would explain to Rogers yet another secret mission by his security adviser.
Nixon decided to go to Camp David while I was in Moscow; it would be announced that he and I were reviewing the situation together. From there, he would break the news to the Secretary of State that we had received a sudden invitation from Brezhnev to discuss Viet Nam and that in view of its urgency he had accepted it on the spur of the moment.
Kissinger went to Moscow on April 20. In his meeting with Brezhnev, "I said bluntly that Hanoi's offensive threatened the summit. I went so far as to advance the startling thesis that the Soviets had an interest in preventing a North Vietnamese victory; I doubted that the President would come to Moscow if we suffered a defeat. "After ten hours of talks on Viet Nam with Brezhnev, Kissinger concluded that "we could go quite some distance before the Soviets would jeopardize the summit. " The stage was thus set for a strong U.S. riposte to Hanoi's spring offensive.
Mining the Harbors
Speaking from the Oval Office on April 26, Nixon contrasted our peace proposals with the enemy's steady buildup for a new offensive. Twelve of North Viet Nam's 13 regular combat divisions were in South Viet Nam, Laos or Cambodia. "By July 1," the President said, "we will have withdrawn over 90% of our forces that were in Viet Nam in 1969. Before the enemy's invasion began, we had cut our air sorties in half. We have offered exceedingly generous terms for peace. The only thing we have refused to do is to accede to the enemy's demand to overthrow the lawfully constituted government of South Viet Nam and to impose a Communist dictatorship in its place."
This was the sole remaining issue.
Hanoi answered by launching another offensive, this time in the far north. On April 27, five days before I was to meet again with Le Duc Tho, the North Vietnamese attacked with the heaviest artillery barrage of the war and large numbers of tanks; much of their equipment was Soviet.
My meeting with Le Duc Tho on May 2 was brutal. Contrary to the mythology of the time, the North Vietnamese were not poor misunderstood reformers. They were implacable revolutionaries, the terror of their neighbors, coming to claim the whole of the French colonial inheritance in Indochina by whatever force was necessary. Futhermore, they were never more difficult than when they thought they had a strong military position—and never more conciliatory