Special Section: WHITE HOUSE YEARS: PART 2 THE AGONY OF VIETNAM

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more unjustly treated. It was not a barbarous act of revenge. It did not cause exorbitant casualties by Hanoi's own figures; certainly it cost much less than the continuation of the war, which was the alternative. A decade of frustration with Viet Nam, a generation of hostility to Nixon, and—let me be frank—exasperation over his electoral triumph, coalesced to produce a unanimity of editorial outrage that suppressed all judgment in an emotional orgy. Nixon chose the only weapon he had available. His decision speeded the end of the war; I can think of no other measure that would have.

Birthday Breakthrough

"The prediction that the bombing was destroying all prospects for negotiation was as common and as false as the accusation that it was a massacre of civilians," writes Kissinger. "Exactly the opposite happened." Indeed, on Dec. 18, the day the bombing resumed, the U.S. proposed to Hanoi that the talks also resume, and Hanoi agreed on Dec. 30. The date was set for Jan. 8, 1973. Says Kissinger: "I was positive we had won our gamble and that the next round of negotiations would succeed."

On Jan. 8 Le Duc Tho and I met again at Gif-sur-Yvette for what we both had promised would be our last round of negotiations. The breakthrough came on Jan. 9. It was Nixon's 60th birthday. I reported to Washington:

"We celebrated the President's birthday today by making a major breakthrough in the negotiations. The Vietnamese have broken our hearts several times before, and we just cannot assume success until everything is pinned down, but the mood and the businesslike approach was as close to October as we have seen since October."

Nixon flashed back: "If the other side stays on this track and doesn't go downhill tomorrow, what you have done today is the best birthday present I have had in 60 years."

Great events rarely have a dramatic conclusion. So it was in Paris in January. After the issue of the demilitarized zone between North and South Viet Nam was settled (we agreed that the zone is a provisional military demarcation between two parts of Viet Nam—thus recognizing the separate entity of South Viet Nam; no movement was to be permitted across the DMZ by military units, but civilian movement through it would be negotiated), there remained primarily the theological issue of how to sign the documents so that Saigon did not have to acknowledge the Communist-front Provisional Revolutionary Government. We devised a formula according to which neither Saigon nor the P.R.G. was mentioned in the document; the agreement to end the war in Viet Nam has the distinction of being the only document with which I am familiar in diplomatic history that does mention the main parties. The negotiations had begun in 1968 with a haggle over the shape of the table; they ended in 1973 with a haggle in effect over the same problem.

I returned to the U.S. on Jan. 13, stopping in Washington to pick up Haig for the trip to Key Biscayne. I reported to Nixon around midnight; we met until 2:30 a.m. Though I was unhappy with some of Nixon's actions toward me, though I objected to some of his tactics, I felt that night an odd tenderness toward him. He had seen our country through perilous tunes.

He had honored me by his trust, he had sought to sustain our country's strength