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Private Letters. Asked for specifics, Jackson said that he trusted his source but did not know the details of precisely what Washington had promised Thieu when the U.S. was trying to coax the Saigon government into a settlement. Other sources close to Jackson claimed that the Washington Senator's source had told him that Nixon may have verbally pledged that the U.S. would respond with the use of its air-power if the North Vietnamese staged a full offensive.
In response to Jackson's speech, Presidential Press Secretary Ron Nessen conceded that Nixon had exchanged private letters with Thieu before the accords were signed. But Nessen insisted that Nixon had not committed the U.S. to anything that he and Kissinger had not also stated publicly. What Nixon wrote Thieu in January 1973, according to Nessen, was that the U.S. would "react vigorously" in the event of wholesale Communist cease-fire violations. Thieu seemed to confirm that, when he used the same terms in contending last week that the U.S. had "pledged that it would react vigorously if the North Vietnamese Communists resumed their aggression and brazenly violated the Paris agreement." Hanoi had done so, Thieu insisted, and the U.S. had violated its "pledge."
Tran Van Lam, South Viet Nam's former Foreign Minister, who had signed the Paris accords and is now President of the South Viet Nam Senate, told TIME Correspondent Roy Rowan last week of an earlier and similar letter from Nixon to Thieu. He said that he had kept a photocopy of a two-page Nixon letter dated November 1972. The essence, said Lam, was that Nixon told Thieu reassuringly, "Don't worry about North Viet Nam. It cannot launch an offensive in the South which we would not react to immediately and vigorously." At the time, Lam explained, "Haiphong harbor was mined, and you were bombing with your B-52s." He said that the term vigorously was, quite understandably, interpreted in that bristling military context.
The argument sent newsmen scurrying to re-examine just what had been said publicly by Nixon and Kissinger back in 1973 (see box). Clearly, Kissinger had repeatedly maintained that "there are no secret understandings." Just as certainly, the Paris peace accords "permitted" each side in the Viet Nam War to replace arms on a "piece-for-piece" basis, and Kissinger had publicly committed the U.S. to doing so for its South Viet Nam ally. Although vast amounts of military aid had been appropriated by Congress to Saigon since fiscal 1973 ($4.9 billion worth), the level of replacing each expended or lost military item had not been maintained.
Kissinger had also kept the possibility of renewed American air assaults open by refusing to entertain "hypothetical" questions about any such contingency plans. Even if there had been an understanding between Nixon and Thieu, Nessen argued last week, it had been rendered "moot" by the congressional limits placed since then on the presidential use of American military power.