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

(3 of 23)

base areas, North Vietnamese forces would launch attacks across the border into South Viet Nam, inflict casualties, disrupt government, and then withdraw to the protection of a formally neutral country. It requires calculated advocacy, not judgment, to argue that the U.S. was violating the neutrality of a peaceful country when with Cambodian encouragement, we in self-defense sporadically bombed territories in which for years no Cambodian writ had run, which were either minimally populated or totally unpopulated by civilians, and which were occupied in violation of Cambodian neutrality by an enemy killing hundreds of Americans and South Vietnamese a week.

Nixon was leaning toward a B-52 strike against the sanctuaries, but on Feb. 22, 1969, the day before he was to leave on a trip to Europe, he decided to defer action. The same day Hanoi launched a country-wide offensive that cost 453 American lives during its first week. "It was an act of extraordinary cynicism, " writes Kissinger; Nixon "was seething." Twice during the next two weeks he ordered the Communist sanctuaries bombed, then reconsidered. Finally, after a rocket attack on Saigon, Nixon decided to go ahead and called together his key advisers.

The meeting on Sunday afternoon, March 16, in the Oval Office was attended by Secretary of State William Rogers, Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, General Earle Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and myself. It was the first time that Nixon had confronted a concrete decision in an international crisis as President; it was also the first time that he would face opposition from associates to a course of action to which he was already committed. He approached it with tactics that were to become vintage Nixon. On the one hand he had made his decision and was not about to change it. On the other hand he felt it necessary to pretend that the decision was still open.

Laird and Wheeler strongly advocated the attacks. Rogers objected not on foreign policy but on domestic grounds; he feared that we would run into a buzz saw in Congress just when things were calming down. After several hours of discussion, Rogers finally agreed to a B-52 strike on the base area containing the presumed Communist headquarters. These deliberations are instructive: a month of an unprovoked North Vietnamese offensive, over 1,000 American dead, elicited after weeks of anguished discussion exactly one American retaliatory raid within three miles of the Cambodian border in an area occupied by the North Vietnamese for over four years. And this would enter the folklore as an example of wanton "illegality." The B-52 attack took place on March 18,1969.

Two months later, mindful that Hanoi had rejected another peace plan and determined to protect the beginning of the U.S. withdrawals, Nixon ordered attacks on a string of other Cambodian base areas, all essentially unpopulated by civilians and within five miles of the border. Originally, says Kissinger, the Administration had planned to acknowledge the bombing if Hanoi or Phnom-Penh reacted to it. But neither capital said a word; in fact, Kissinger maintains that Cambodia's Prince Sihanouk tacitly approved the raids, and he quotes several public statements made by the Prince denying that raids were taking place or that American actions were causing civilian casualties.

We saw no