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Sailing into Stormy Seas
On our return to Washington on Oct. 12, Haig and I went to Nixon's refuge in the Executive Office Building. Somewhat exultantly, I told the President that it looked as if he had achieved all three of his major goals for 1972—the first two being the visit to Peking and the Moscow summit. Nixon's principal concern was Thieu's reaction. I was —naively—optimistic.
Nixon was quite positive that an agreement was unnecessary for the election; its benefit would be too marginal to warrant any risks. Haldeman thought that an agreement was a potential liability; he was certain that Democratic Candidate George McGovern's support had been reduced to fanatics who would not vote for Nixon even if he arranged the Second Coming. On the other hand, an agreement might disquiet conservative supporters. The Viet Nam negotiations, in short, were not used to affect the election; the election was used to accelerate the negotiations.
On Oct. 13 a cable arrived from Ambassador Bunker with a warning that whatever the agreement, we might be sailing into stormy seas in Saigon.
That was putting it mildly. "Thieu objected not to specific terms but to the fact of an agreement," Kissinger writes. He did not come right out and say so. "Instead, he fought in the Vietnamese manner: indirectly, elliptically, by methods designed to exhaust rather than to clarify, constantly needling but never addressing the real issue." On the third day of meetings, the Vietnamese presented Kissinger with 23 changes, some major, in the draft peace treaty; later that figure would triple, to 69. Finally the talks broke down completely as Thieu, between tears of rage, accused the Americans of having "connived" to sell him out. "Obviously the negotiations could not continue without his agreement," writes Kissinger. Yet "turning on Thieu would be incompatible with our sacrifice, "he adds. Further, "we had to make Hanoi understand it would not be able to use our differences with Saigon to jockey us at the last moment into doing what we had refused for four years: overthrowing the political structure in South 'Viet Nam. "In any case, Kissinger goes on, "Thieu's reaction guaranteed that the war would not end soon." Kissinger was barely back in Washington when the North Vietnamese, hoping to force Nixon's hand, went public. They broadcast the terms of the proposed treaty, which had been kept secret until then, and accused the U.S. of stalling on its implementation.
"Peace Is at Hand"
The press conference that I held on Oct. 26 came to be denounced as a Nixon electoral ploy to raise hopes for peace during the last stages of the presidential campaign. This misses the mark completely. Once Hanoi had gone public we had no choice except to state our case. I had two objectives. One was to reassure Hanoi that we would stand by the basic agreement, while leaving open the possibility of raising Saigon's suggested changes. The second was to convey to Saigon that we were determined to proceed on our course.
So it happened that I appeared for the first time on national television at the very end of Nixon's first term. The White House public relations people,