A Bitter Peace

Washington, Hanoi, and the Making of the Paris Agreement

Pierre Asselin

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9780807861233
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Vietnam War
• Index: History

Demonstrating the centrality of diplomacy in the Vietnam War, Pierre Asselin traces the secret negotiations that led up to the Paris Agreement of 1973, which ended America's involvement but failed to bring peace in Vietnam. Because the two sides signed the agreement under duress, he argues, the peace it promised was doomed to unravel. By January of 1973, the continuing military stalemate and mounting difficulties on the domestic front forced both Washington and Hanoi to conclude that signing a vague and largely unworkable peace agreement was the most expedient way to achieve their most pressing objectives. For Washington, those objectives included the release of American prisoners, military withdrawal without formal capitulation, and preservation of American credibility in the Cold War. Hanoi, on the other hand, sought to secure the removal of American forces, protect the socialist revolution in the North, and improve the prospects for reunification with the South. Using newly available archival sources from Vietnam, the United States, and Canada, Asselin reconstructs the secret negotiations, highlighting the creative roles of Hanoi, the National Liberation Front, and Saigon in constructing the final settlement.

CHAPTER ONE

The First Round

1968–1971

By 1968, the United States had been heavily involved in Vietnam for nearly three years. The Vietnamese, on the other hand, had been at war for most of the prior three decades. After World War II, the French attempt to reinstate the colonial regime in Indochina had degenerated into a “dirty war” that reached its denouement in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu. The flawed peace of Geneva and the French withdrawal that followed did little to end the bloodshed. In fact, the ambiguity of the Geneva Accords encouraged a new civil war. After 1954, the Vietnamese divided themselves into those who wanted a Communist regime that was inward-looking and fiercely nationalist and those who preferred a Western-oriented polity and economy.

These differences produced special difficulties in southern Vietnam, where the divisions were acute and the resulting tensions soon led to armed insurgency and brutal repression. By the mid-1960s, the Saigon government and military were incapable of suppressing the insurgency. Their appeals to Washington in the Cold War context resulted in American military intervention, which soon became massive. Although the decision to intervene on such a scale was Lyndon Johnson’s, it was the predictable culmination of years of increasing American involvement in Vietnam. Between 1960, the last year of Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency, and the assassination of his successor, John F. Kennedy, in 1963, the number of American advisers assigned to the Army of the Republic of (South) Vietnam (ARVN) rose from 875 to 16,263. Since the situation showed no signs of improvement from the American standpoint, Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, continued the escalation and, in March 1965, authorized a massive buildup of American forces in South Vietnam.¹

Concurrently, Johnson authorized sustained naval and aerial bombardment of North Vietnam. From Washington’s perspective at the time, the insurgency in South Vietnam was not an indigenous movement but foreign aggression. A 1961 white paper produced by the Kennedy administration had concluded that the main opposition group in the South, the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF), was in fact “Hanoi’s creation.” It was thus “neither independent nor southern,” nor did it seek “what most men would consider liberation.” Since the NLF was an arm of Hanoi in the South, the United States had to take action against the North.² In another white paper in 1965, the Johnson administration maintained similarly that North Vietnam was “carrying out a carefully conceived plan of aggression against the South.” The American purpose in Vietnam, Johnson himself contended, “is to join in the defense and protection of freedom of a brave people who are under attack that is controlled and that is directed from outside their country.”³ Thus emerged a consensus in Washington favoring sustained bombing of North Vietnam until Hanoi reached a “threshold of pain” and ceased subversion in the South.⁴

The air campaign against North Vietnam, code-named Rolling Thunder, had three objectives: to reduce North Vietnamese contributions to the insurgencies in South Vietnam and Laos; to bolster morale among South Vietnamese; and to escalate the pressure until North Vietnam decided that supporting the insurgencies was too costly. The Johnson administration believed that bombing the North would stop the infiltration of men and supplies into the South and, in conjunction with the deployment of American ground forces, decimate the insurgency there.⁵

In January 1959, in response to mounting tensions and appeals from insurgents in the South, the Central Committee of the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP⁶) had approved the pursuit of armed and violent struggle there to precipitate the collapse of the Saigon regime and bring about the reunification of the nation.⁷ Thereafter, the Democratic Republic of (North) Vietnam (DRVN) began the infiltration of troops and supplies into the South via the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a network of roads that ran through Laos and Cambodia. In December 1960, it encouraged the creation of an indigenous southern maquis—the NLF—“to rally all patriotic classes and sections of the people” opposed to the Americans and their “puppets” in the Saigon government.⁸ Though the NLF was more nationalist in character than it was communist, its leaders worked closely with Hanoi and were autonomous only to the extent the northern leadership allowed them to be.⁹

In 1965, after the United States began its direct military commitment, the VWP organized and coordinated an effort it called officially the “Anti-American Resistance for National Salvation” (cuoc khang chien chong My cuu nuoc). This Resistance consisted of three modes of struggle (dau tranh). The military struggle aimed, through a strategy of continued attrition in South Vietnam and active resistance in the North, to render enough of the enemy’s forces combat-ineffective to produce demoralization and capitulation. Known as lam chu de tieu diet dich, tieu diet dich de lam chu, which meant “control to annihilate the enemy, annihilate the enemy to control,” that strategy paralleled the strategy of “search and destroy” adopted by the Americans in South Vietnam after 1965.¹⁰ The political struggle, the second mode, entailed propaganda activity among the South Vietnamese people to recruit and retain partisans. Lastly, the diplomatic struggle consisted of engaging the enemy in public fora and through the media to increase the pressure on Washington to pull its forces out of Indochina. It also meant negotiating secretly with the enemy at an opportune time to ratify the gains achieved through the political and military struggles and expedite the withdrawal of American forces.¹¹

North Vietnamese policymakers, specifically VWP general secretary Le Duan and the rest of the VWP politburo, initially considered diplomacy the least promising of the three modes of struggle. Despite the new context and enemy, they continued to favor armed struggle.¹² Achieving the Vietnamese Revolution’s basic objectives—liberating the South (giai phong mien Nam), building socialism in the North (xay dung chu nghia xa hoi mien Bac), and unifying the nation—was their overriding concern. Given the nature of those objectives, they sought not compromise with the American aggressors and their Saigon collaborators but decisive victory on the battlefield.¹³ Lessons learned from the past reinforced that way of thinking. After the overwhelming victory at Dien Bien Phu, Hanoi had decided not to press the fight against France but to participate instead in the Geneva Conference on Indochina. That strategic blunder meant continued foreign interference in Vietnam. After 1965, the VWP politburo intended not to repeat the mistake, that is, not to betray the revolutionary effort again by negotiating an end to a war it could win through sufficient sacrifice and continued effort.¹⁴ Accordingly, it refused to make diplomacy a primary arena for dealing with the United States, insisting instead that the only acceptable settlement was one amounting to American capitulation. The DRVN first proposed the bases for such a settlement in 1965, when it demanded the withdrawal of American and other foreign forces from Indochina, the removal of the existing regime in South Vietnam, and the replacement of that regime with a coalition government that included pro-Communist and pro-Hanoi representatives. These demands were the Three Aims of the Anti-American Resistance, immutable foundations for achieving the fundamental objectives of the Revolution.¹⁵ Fortunately for Hanoi, after 1965, both Beijing and Moscow provided massive aid to help the Resistance.¹⁶

In these early years of the war, Washington was as ambivalent toward diplomacy as Hanoi. In fact, the Johnson administration considered negotiation with Hanoi undesirable. As a recent study points out, Johnson felt that the credibility of America and of the Democratic Party was at stake in Vietnam. Fearing personal and national humiliation, Johnson rejected negotiations, opting instead for an increased military effort as the most promising means of succeeding in Vietnam. Johnson, the recent study notes, had earlier mourned the “loss” of China and now had no intention of losing South Vietnam.¹⁷ Another factor that encouraged the Johnson administration to dismiss diplomacy was the potentially negative impact negotiations would have on Saigon. Substantive discussions with North Vietnam while the military situation was unsatisfactory might antagonize Saigon and risk “destroying the South Vietnamese government altogether.”¹⁸ Washington, too, had a blueprint for acceptable settlement: it comprised fourteen points and was first presented to the foreign minister of Poland by veteran diplomat Averell Harriman, in December 1965. Predictably, that blueprint was incompatible with the Three Aims.¹⁹

Since neither party was prepared to compromise, or even to negotiate seriously, a diplomatic impasse ensued. Contacts between the two sides were informal, sporadic, and inconsequential. Between 1964 and 1967, Washington and Hanoi had five direct and indirect contacts.²⁰ As long as both parties felt the war would be lost or won militarily, their diplomatic efforts concentrated on mustering foreign support by manipulating world opinion. In January 1967, the Thirteenth Plenum of the Central Committee of the VWP confirmed the secondary role of diplomacy in the war effort. “The military and political struggles in the South,” it resolved, “are essential factors in bringing about victory on the battlefield and creating a foundation for victory on the diplomatic front.”²¹ Party propagandists would thereafter “denounce still more strongly the savage acts of aggression conducted by the American invader, and denounce its scheme to bring peace with bombs.”²² The Johnson administration adopted a similar stance, seeking, with moderate success, international support of its crusade in Southeast Asia.²³ Between 1965 and 1967, diplomacy failed “because each nation refused to give way on the basic issues.”²⁴

In early 1968, NLF forces and their North Vietnamese allies launched Tet Mau Than, the Tet Offensive. That singular development broke the military stalemate that had persisted since 1965. The resulting urban warfare and the shock waves it generated forced both parties to realize that military victory was highly problematic under current or foreseeable circumstances. Although Hanoi and the NLF scored important psychological gains over Washington and Saigon, their casualties were nearly ten times as high. That frightening cost proved that conditions were not ripe for toppling the Saigon government militarily.²⁵ In the United States, the mere fact of a widespread enemy offensive shattered the myth that allied armies were winning the war and fueled domestic opposition to the conflict.²⁶ On 25 March 1968, a group of retired American officials and military officers known as the Wise Men met in Washington to discuss American involvement in Vietnam. They concluded that the involvement would never achieve its objective and recommended de-escalation. That recommendation encouraged Lyndon Johnson’s decision to seek new serious negotiations with Hanoi.²⁷ In a well-publicized television speech on 31 March, Johnson announced that his government sought and would work to achieve a diplomatic solution to the war. He also announced he would not run for reelection and ordered an immediate end to the bombing of North Vietnam above the twentieth parallel.²⁸

In the past, the VWP politburo had rejected American offers for direct negotiations. This time, however, its answer was different. “It is clear that the American government has not seriously and fully met the just demands of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam government, or of progressive public opinion in the United States and the rest of the world,” read its response to Washington on 3 April. “Nevertheless . . . the Democratic Republic of Vietnam government declares that it is prepared to send representatives to meet and to determine with American representatives the unconditional cessation of the bombing and all other acts of war against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam to start the negotiations.”²⁹ The need to relieve the stress on the political and military fronts below the seventeenth parallel and the effects of the war on North Vietnam itself spurred Hanoi’s acceptance of Johnson’s offer to negotiate. After the Tet Offensive, as DRVN special adviser to the Paris talks Le Duc Tho admitted later, resistance forces in the South were so crippled that “we needed to sit and talk.”³⁰

On 13 May 1968, the first encounter between representatives of the DRVN and the United States took place at the International Conference Center of the Hôtel Majestic in Paris. Averell Harriman, a veteran of diplomatic summits since World War II and onetime ambassador to the Soviet Union, headed the American delegation. Joining Harriman were former under secretary of defense Cyrus Vance, former Eisenhower aide Andrew Goodpaster, Vietnam specialist Philip Habib, and National Security Council (NSC) staffer William Jorden, who acted as press spokesman. Former foreign minister Xuan Thuy headed the North Vietnamese delegation assisted by Ha Van Lau, former director of operations of the General Staff of the People’s Army of (North) Vietnam (PAVN) and a participant in the 1954 and 1961–62 Geneva Conferences on Indochina and Laos, respectively. Accompanying Thuy and Lau were Phan Hien, director of the press department of the Foreign Ministry; Nguyen Minh Vy, director of the General Department of Information; and Nguyen Thanh Le, deputy editor in chief of the daily Nhan dan (The People), the central organ of the VWP, who was press spokesman for the delegation. The presence of these representatives of propaganda branches of the VWP and government made it clear that Hanoi was not ready for serious negotiations.³¹

At the opening of the session, Harriman and Thuy shook hands....