Vietnam and the aftermath

There probably has not been a more contentious nor more divisive period in American history since the slavery driven Civil War almost 150 years ago than the involvement of our country in the Southeast Asian conflict of the '60's and '70's. Gabriel Schoenfeld of Commentary Magazine in 1999 wrote a review of Henry Kissinger's memoirs about that period which appears to me to be a definitive analysis for anyone trying to make sense of the chaos before, during and after that awful war. It's hard to find any bias or any agenda in Schoenfeld's piece since it takes to task both sides of the political spectrum. Regretably our defeat did turn loose the hounds of irrationality and defeatism which we are trying to deal with today in the execution of the War on Terror. It is this parallel that renders Schoenfeld's critique worth reading:


Was Kissinger Right?

SERVING AS National Security
Adviser and Secretary of State
to Presidents Richard Nixon and
Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger dazzled
the world for eight years with
his masterful performance on the
diplomatic stage. Over the course of
his term in office, every instrument
of modern statecraft-shuttle diplomacy,
crisis management, squareand
round-table negotiations, global
nuclear alerts-was employed to
stunning effect, if not to approbation,
in the world media and press.
Yet when American voters ejected
the hapless Gerald Ford from office
in 1976 and returned Kissinger
to private life, many were left wondering
whether what they had just
witnessed was nothing more than a
botched circus performance, a highwire
act conducted without a net. In
every direction one looked, America's
standing had plummeted to a
new postwar low and the prospect
was one of further disarray, chaos,
and retreat.
Though the United States had
entered the 1970's as the strongest
industrial power in the world, be-
ginning with the OPEC embargo of
October 1973 a handful of oil-rich
but militarily insignificant states had
managed to put the economies of
the United States and its allies on
the rack. Though Kissinger and
Nixon had bent every effort to extricate
the United States with honor
from the war in Southeast Asia,
in 1975 came ignominious and agonizing
defeat. And though Kissinger,
Nixon, and Ford had striven
to forge a more constructive relationship
with America's most dangerous
adversary, by 1976 detente
was in ruins as the USSR recklessly
ignited brushfires in distant corners
of the globe and raced ahead in a
menacing arms build-up.
Victory, it is said, has a hundred
fathers but defeat is an orphan. In
Years of Renewal, the third volume of
his monumental trilogy of memoirs,*
Kissinger does not rush to
claim paternity for the cascade of
disasters that came to a culmination
in the Ford presidency. In part, as
his very title suggests, Kissinger denies
that the period was a disaster at
all: the Ford administration, he
writes, "could take pride in a long
list of foreign-policy accomplishments."
Yet at the same time he
hardly ignores the inescapable facts.
Instead, while accepting responsibility
for a number of misjudgments
and missteps, he freely points a finger
of blame: at the terrible cards
the two administrations he served
had been dealt by the presidencies
of Lyndon B. Johnson and John F
Kennedy; at the malignant political
legacy left by Richard Nixon's personal
flaws; at the isolationism that
seized the American Left and Congress
as Vietnam dragged on; at the
betrayal of national security by the
leadership of the CIA and its congressional
overseers; at the ineptitude
and weakness of key players on
Ford's White House staff; and at the
failure of American conservatives,
especially including the neoconservatives
around COMMENTARY, to
rally to the flag of his embattled
policies.
Some of the finger-pointing that
one finds throughout Kissinger's
book appears to be transparently
self-serving, the wily Machiavellian
now skillfully manipulating the past
in order to secure his own place in
it. As his account is buttressed, however,
by a wealth of documentation,
one would do well to consider that
much of it may be justified.
SORTING OUT the issues is no easy
task. Years of Renewal ranges widely,
stepping back to traverse ground already
covered in the preceding volumes
of the series while presenting
in close but immensely readable detail
every aspect of the Ford administration's
diplomacy from its maneuvering
through the labyrinth of
the Cyprus crisis to its fumbling in
the dark comedy of the Mayaguez
affair.* Undoubtedly, however, two
of the most important issues it takes
up revolve around the war in Indochina
and U.S. relations with the
USSR.
Consider, to begin with, Kissinger's
account of American policy
toward Cambodia and Vietnam.
When Gerald Ford assumed office
following Richard Nixon's resignation
on August 9, 1974, the Paris
Peace Accords had already been on
the books for a year and a half.
Kissinger contends that he and
Nixon had been clear from the start
about the flaws in this settlement
between North and South Vietnam.
He never harbored any "illusions,"
he writes, that Hanoi's "dour, fanatical
leaders had abandoned their
lifetime struggle." As he warned
Nixon in a memo at the time, only
an American readiness to intervene
could uphold the precarious ceasefire.
But he also expected-"naively,"
he notes here-that the antiwar
movement in the United States
"would be able to find satisfaction
in the ending of hostilities" and that
its agitations against American assistance
to Saigon would cease.
As Kissinger predicted, the
North Vietnamese did flagrantly violate
the 1973 agreement from day
one. But as he failed to predict, the
"peace movement" in the United
States did not die out; as quickly became
evident, it would settle for
nothing less than a complete rout of
America's allies in Indochina. And
by the time that rout did in fact begin,
America's capacity to answer
Hanoi with military power had been
stripped away by events well beyond
Kissinger's control.
One such event was Watergate,
which by the autumn of 1973 had
thoroughly undermined executive
authority and poisoned the American
body politic, destroying in the
process the last vestiges of political
will for further American exertions
in Southeast Asia. Only six months
after the Paris Accords were concluded,
Congress barred the further
use of American force "in or over
Indochina," rendering the agreement
impossible to uphold. Despite
Ford and Kissinger's intensive lobbying,
the provision of supplies that
might have given South Vietnam a
chance to defend itself on its own
was progressively slashed by Congress,
from $2.1 billion in 1973 to
$1 billion in 1974 to a paltry $700
million in 1975 (not all of which was
actually disbursed).
As SOUTH VIETNAM, deprived of
sustenance and support, began to
crumble, even longtime congressional
supporters of the war turned
their backs. Although Kissinger
finds villains across the political
spectrum, he singles out for special
censure the late Democratic Senator
Henry "Scoop" Jackson, "scourge
of d&tente and Ford administration
critic for its alleged softness on
Communism," who in early 1975
abandoned his perduring support
for the war and, to "our immense
surprise and huge disappointment,"
voted to throw South Vietnam to
the wolves just as it entered a last
desperate struggle to survive.
With the United States reduced
to the role of bystander, the fall came
swiftly. Cambodia succumbed first.
As he does also with Vietnam,
Kissinger retells the riveting tale, recounting
how, as the Khmer Rouge
closed in on the capital city of
Phnom Penh in early April 1975, the
United States offered a number of
Cambodian officials a chance to escape.
The reply addressed to the
U.S. ambassador by Sirik Matak, a
former Cambodian prime minister,
and reprinted by Kissinger in full, is
one of the more important documents
of the entire Vietnam-war era.

Dear Excellency and Friend:
I thank you very sincerely for
your letter and for your offer to
transport me towards freedom. I
cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly
fashion. As for you, and in
particular for your great country,
I never believed for a moment
that you would have this sentiment
of abandoning a people
which has chosen liberty. You
have refused us your protection,
and we can do nothing about it.
You leave, and my wish is that
you and your country will find
happiness under this sky. But,
mark it well, that if I shall die
here on the spot and in my country
that I love, it is no matter, because
we are all born and must
die. I have only committed this
mistake of believing in you [the
Americans].
Please accept, Excellency and
dear friend, my faithful and
friendly sentiments.

Immediately after the Khmer
Rouge took Phnom Penh, writes
Kissinger, Sirik Matak was shot in
the stomach and left to die over the
course of three days from his untreated
wounds.
In the beginning, middle, and
end of this episode, Kissinger shows
to telling effect, the barbaric nature
of the Communist Khmer Rouge
was painted over in soothing tones
* This latest volume is well supplemented by
another new book, The Kissinger Transcripts
(New Press, 515 pp., $30.00). Though
marred by the tendentious commentary of
its editor, William Burr, it provides the official
memoranda of Kissinger's highly classified
conversations with Leonid Brezhnev,
Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and other
Communist leaders, offering an indelible picture
of the virtuoso at work and an eye-opening
glimpse of how diplomacy was actually
carried out at the highest levels during some
of the most dramatic moments of the nuclear
age.

OBSERVATIONS
by much of the American press.
The New York Times was the most
flagrant offender. In one dispatch,
its correspondent Sydney Schanberg
described a ranking Khmer
Rouge leader as a "French-educated
intellectual" who wanted nothing
more than "to fight against feudal
privileges and social inequities."
A bloodbath was unlikely, Schanberg
reported: "since all are Cambodians,
an accommodation will be
found." As the last Americans were
withdrawn, another upbeat article
by Schanberg appeared under the
headline, "Indochina Without Americans:
For Most, a Better Life." In
short order, the Khmer Rouge proceeded
to march nearly two million
of their fellow Cambodians to their
deaths in the killing fields. Also in
short order, Schanberg went on to
greater glory and a Pulitzer prize.*
KISSINGER IS at his most bitter
when judging those who contributed
to the tragedy of Southeast Asia,
writing that the period "still evokes
a sinking feeling in me, composed
in equal parts of sadness for the victims
and shame for how they were
abandoned." But if his most poignant
regrets concern Vietnam, he
also does not spare the lash when it
comes to those whom he deems at
fault for the collapse of detente, his
grand strategic edifice aimed at a relaxation
of tensions with the USSR
and thus at easing the American
burden not only in Vietnam but in
the East-West struggle as a whole.
By the time Nixon took office in
1969, Kissinger maintains, the
American public had been "drained
by twenty years of cold-war exertions
and the increasing frustrations
with Vietnam." Under these circumstances,
the challenge was to
find a middle ground between two
dangers: on the one hand, an abdication
of the American responsibility
for containing the Soviet bear
and, on the other hand, a no less
reckless decision to challenge it
frontally. Instead, by means of a
mixture of carrots and sticks, "we
intended," writes Kissinger, "to
nudge the Soviet colossus into
transforming itself from a cause into
a state capable of being influenced
by traditional calculations of reward
and punishment, thereby at first
easing the cold war and ultimately
transcending it."
But as Kissinger also recounts,
such a happy transcendence of the
conflict was not to occur, at least
not on his watch. Although in
Nixon's first term relations with the
USSR had been relatively smooth,
starting in 1972, the year that
marked the apogee of dtente,
things began to unravel. The problem,
in Kissinger's retelling, was not
so much the conduct of Leonid
Brezhnev and company but the unholy
alliance between the American
Left and Right that impeded the administration's
best efforts to keep
the Soviet Union restrained.
Liberals, their program of propitiating
the USSR having been stolen
and embraced by their nemesis
Richard Nixon, now began embracing
causes like human rights
and initiatives on arms control that
were more radical than those the
administration itself was advancing-
with the aim, in Kissinger's
words, of going "where they
thought Nixon could not follow
them." After their triumph at the
polls in the first post-Watergate
elections of 1974, congressional
Democrats proceeded systematically
to deprive the administration of
the implements it needed to punish
the Soviet Union for misbehavior.
The defense budget was progressively
slashed, and the administration
was forbidden by law from aiding
anti-Soviet forces in pivot points
like Angola where the USSR was
demonstrating unprecedented global
reach.
Conservatives, for their part,
perceived Nixon's- conciliatory
rhetoric toward the USSR as both
a betrayal of the anti-Communist
cause and an opportunistic effort to
expand his domestic political base,
and they undertook to check his
Soviet policy at every turn. On the
Center-Right, SenatorJackson and
his highly influential aide Richard
Perle, in part out of an honest disagreement
with policy and in part
for crass political gain-Jackson
planned to seek the presidential
nomination of the Democratic party
in 1976-appeared determined
to throw one wrench after another
into the works. In public and behind
the scenes, these two men
worked skillfully to deprive the administration
of carrots, blocking the
expansion of trade, derailing arms
control through spurious and arcane
objections to administration
proposals, and demanding ever
greater levels of Jewish emigration
from the USSR (even as the Nixon
and Ford administrations were
making progress in this area behind
the scenes).t
Particularly baneful, in Kissinger's
telling, was the unrelenting
hawkishness of Jackson's intellectual
allies, the neoconservatives-here
he singles out by name Irving Kristol,
Midge Decter, and Norman
Podhoretz. These figures, he writes,
were zealots, whose own "defining"
* Although tucking them away in a footnote,
Kissinger also provides the later and second
thoughts of the journalist William Shawcross,
whose highly influential book, Sideshow:
Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of
Cambodia, had placed the blame for the Cambodian
tragedy squarely on the United
States. Wrote a repentant Shawcross in 1994:
"[T]hose of us who opposed the American
war in Indochina should be extremely humble
in the face of the appalling aftermath: a
form of genocide in Cambodia and horrific
tyranny in both Vietnam and Laos. Looking
back on my own coverage for the [London]
Sunday Times of the South Vietnamese war
effort of 1970-75, I think I concentrated too
easily on the corruption and incompetence
of the South Vietnamese and their American
allies, was too ignorant of the inhuman
Hanoi regime, and far too willing to believe
that a victory by the Communists would provide
a better future."
t As The Kissinger Transcripts make clear,
Jackson also served as a useful foil to
Kissinger in carrying out his negotiations
with the Kremlin. He was constantly warning
the Soviet leaders not to engage in behavior
that Jackson might exploit for political
gain.
[57]
COMMENTARY MAY I999
experience of moving from Left to
Right had colored their thinking in
destructive ways:
Tactics bored them; they discerned
no worthy goals for
American foreign policy short of
total and immediate victory.
Their historical memory did not
include the battles they had refused
to join or the domestic
traumas to which they so often
contributed from the radical Left
side of the barricades.
To this reproach, Kissinger adds
the rueful observation that it was a
"pity" the neoconservatives cast
themselves in opposition to his Soviet
policies, since in many respects
his own analysis paralleled theirs:
I shared their distrust of Communism
and their apparent determination
to thwart its aims. I
thought once they realized that
our goal was not to placate but to
outmaneuver the Soviet Union,
we would be able to join forces
in a common cause.
Alas, it was not to be.
WHAT ARE we to make of this
lengthy and eloquent apologia pro
vita sua with its accompanying tua
culpa?
On some matters, Kissinger's account
is not easily disposed of. His
description of President Ford's efforts
to save South Vietnam, for example,
efforts that continued right
up to the horrific end, is a portrait
of heroic perseverance unappreciated
and unremarked. Upon assuming
office in August 1974, Ford
could easily have declared that
America was done with the Indochina
conflict and let the chips
fall where they may; given the atmosphere
at the time, in most quarters
he would have been not blamed
but praised. In this and other matters,
Ford's image as a bumbler out
of his depth is dispelled by Kissinger's
account of a decent man, a
straightshooter, "a Ford not a Lincoln"
in Ford's own self-deprecating
phrase, who chose the honorable
course and paid a great personal
and political price for his
pains.
As for those whom Kissinger
holds directly accountable for the
fall of South Vietnam and Cambodia,
his reckoning of their moral
failure is in many ways the most affecting
portion of this book. One
comes away with a distinct sense of
the agony involved in losing a war
that one had not chosen to start
while being hammered at home
from all sides. In this connection,
though, the fury Kissinger directs at
Henry Jackson seems seriously misplaced.
Jackson, after all, had been
virtually alone among Democrats in
sticking with an unpopular war for
as long as he did. Whatever sins he
committed in the quest for the presidential
nomination of a party that
was turning leftward and away from
Democrats like himself, he cannot
fairly be compared with the liberals
who led the United States into the
Vietnam fiasco in the 1960's and
who then spent the 70's attacking
those bent on getting the U.S. out
without sacrificing every shred of
self-respect.
But neither can Jackson's role be
fairly compared to that of a player
like Richard Nixon, whose conduct
of foreign policy Kissinger here
continues to honor and defend. One
can debate endlessly whether or not
the entire Nixon policy from 1969
to 1974 represented an unnecessary
strategic retreat, or whether or not
the Paris Accords were irredeemably
flawed from the outset, designed
only to secure a "decent
interval" between the U.S. departure
and South Vietnamese collapse.
Some of Kissinger's arguments in
refutation of this latter point, and in
particular the statement of this
supreme realist that he had "naively"
failed to grasp the true aims of
the peace movement, are difficult to
credit. But wherever one comes
down on these matters, the issue of
Nixon's part in the tragic course of
events cannot be blinked.
However great his grasp of global
affairs, however sound or unsound
his geostrategic approach, it
cannot be emphasized enough that,
as Kissinger acknowledges only in
passing in this volume, any chance
the United States had to ensure the
survival of Cambodia and South
Vietnam was destroyed by the Watergate
burglary and the subsequent
efforts to cover it up. Nixon's petty
decisions in the Watergate affair not
only lost him his own tenure in office
and divided our own country
but ended up costing the lives of
millions in faraway lands, men and
women like Sirik Matak whose only
mistake had been to take America at
its word. Nixon may subsequently
have been rehabilitated in the eyes
of some, but if one is to take seriously
Kissinger's own vivid description
of the far-flung and terrible
consequences of the President's abdication
of his basic responsibility
to observe the law, this rehabilitation
has come too soon.
NEXT, DETENTE. Kissinger makes
a very strong case for the proposition
that his policies were not, in
fact, the accommodationist sellout
to the USSR that they seemed to
many on the Right at the time. It
cannot be denied that Kissinger and
Nixon's diplomacy in those years
did reap dividends in some regions
of the world, by, for example, entering
the U.S. variable into the
Sino-Soviet equation at a time when
the risk of a nuclear shooting war
between the two Communist rivals
was curving upward; shutting out
Soviet influence in the Middle East
after the October 1973 Yom Kippur
war; and going some distance toward
defanging the European Left
at a moment when it was infused
with maximum energy from its
campaign against the American
presence in Vietnam.
Kissinger also argues cogently
that, given the tremulous nature of
the times, with America embroiled
in a losing war, executive authority
in a state of collapse, and the American
defense budget being axed even
as Moscow built up its forces, there
was no realistic alternative to the attempt
to establish some sort of
modus vivendi with the Kremlin.
Considering the utter irresponsibility
of Congress in that period-one
has only to recall the passage of the
Tunney amendment barring U.S.
aid to Angola just as the USSR and
Cuba were pouring munitions and
troops into that country, or the
Church Committee hearings that
effectively crippled the CIA-the
notion that the U.S. could have
mustered the political will to compete
successfully with the USSR in
an arms race, even given the growing
constraints on the Soviet economy,
seems dubious in the extreme.
In this light, there is a measure of
merit in Kissinger's complaint that
the neoconservatives exhibited little
"understanding of or sympathy
for the problems before a nonelected
President taking over in the aftermath
of Watergate and facing a
hostile McGovernite Congress." Yet
even as he lambastes neoconservatives
for failing to grasp the essence
of the times, Kissinger concedes a
great deal to them.
For one thing, he concedes the
force of their critique: these targets
of his ire, after all, were merely private
citizens whose efforts to shape
policy were confined to the opinion
columns of newspapers and magazines,
something one might find it
difficult to remember in light of the
many pages Kissinger devotes to refuting
their ideas and complaining
about their influence. Then, too, his
final appraisal of his neoconservative
adversaries is remarkably generous:
they made, he notes, "significant
contributions to American
thinking on foreign policy," especially
in bringing "a much needed
intellectual rigor and energy to the
debate, which helped to overcome
the dominance of the liberal conventional
wisdom."
Most importantly, however, Kissinger
implicitly admits the justice
of a key element of the neoconservative
case when he suggests that
the rhetoric in which the Nixon and
Ford administrations couched their
policies'was flawed. This flaw, indeed,
would not be remedied until
the advent of Ronald Reagan, who
"proved to have a better instinct for
America's emotions by justifying his
course in the name of American idealism."
Even as the Reagan administration
(Kissinger writes) continued
quietly to follow some of the
detente-inspired policies set by
Nixon and Ford-adhering, for example,
to the limits imposed by the
strategic-arms agreements, forging
closer ties with Communist China
at the expense of Taiwan-Reagan
himself
made sure that his policy declarations
resonated with what was,
in effect, classic Wilsonianism
based on democratic virtue. As a
result, he won broader support
for the defense budget and
geopolitical reengagement than
Nixon was able to achieve or
could have achieved in his time.
How to assess this last claim? By
ringing the bell of freedom, Reagan
unquestionably did sway the public
in a way that neither of his Republican
predecessors in the 1970's ever
learned to do. And, as Kissinger is
quick to point out, the Great Communicator
also enjoyed certain other
advantages over Nixon and Ford:
by 1980, Vietnam and Watergate
had receded into the background,
and four years of unpleasant surprises
under the profoundly inept
Jimmy Carter had created a groundswell
of support for a more demonstrative
American posture.
Nevertheless, the undermining of
detente is traceable to far more than
what Kissinger suggests was a mere
rhetoric deficit. The real problem,
visible throughout the entire duration
of the policy, was rooted not, as
Kissinger would have it, in inadequate
oratory or in any other insufficiency
in Nixon and Ford's political
temperament or skills but in the
essence of the strategy itself. This
was illuminated most strikingly in
1974 when Ford provoked an uproar
by declining to receive the Soviet
dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in
the White House. Though only a
minor skirmish in the long domestic
battle over Soviet-American relations,
the episode disclosed a fundamental
contradiction of detente.
In Years of Renewal, Kissinger offers
an entirely plausible and even a
persuasive explanation of how and
why the decision not to receive
Solzhenitsyn was made. He asserts
that if he could do things over again,
he would have attempted to arrange
a "low-key" meeting with Ford. But
the striking fact remains that, in
pursuing the policy of detente, the
United States had maneuvered itself
into a corner from which it could not
openly or enthusiastically hail a man
like Solzhenitsyn, whose spoken and
written truths struck fear in the
mind of our country's most implacable
adversary. The reason for this
was that our government, out of the
weaknesses Kissinger himself describes,
was treating that adversary
as a confrere whose hideous character
flaws could not be discussed.
As Kissinger's memoirs make utterly
clear, there is no easy way to
untangle this knot. Given the circumstances
the United States faced
in those years, a forthright ideological
assault of the sort Ronald Reagan
launched when he called the
USSR "the focus of evil in the modern
world" might well have generated
risks that the country was far
from prepared to run. Ford, argues
Kissinger, simply could not
announce a crusade against a nuclear
superpower two months after
the collapse of Indochina, in
the midst of a delicate negotiation
in the still-explosive Middle
East, and while Angola was erupting,
investigations were paralyzing
our intelligence services, and
Congress was urging reduction
of our forces overseas and legislating
a military embargo against
Turkey, an indispensable NATO
ally.
There is a high quotient of logic in
this position. But there is an equally
high quotient on the other side.
The Soviet Union, after all, never
for a moment ceased to wage ideological
warfare against the American
"imperialists"; by failing to answer
this warfare with our most
formidable weapon-the truth-we
were, along with everything else,
practicing a form of unilateral disarmament
in the political sphere.
More than anything else, this was
the sum and substance of the neoconservative
critique of dtente.
There were truths about the Soviet
Union, and about the United States,
that desperately needed to be told if
there were to be any chance of curing
our country of its weaknesses or
putting into practice a morally honest
and aggressive stance. In this
sense, neoconservatism unquestionably
paved the way for the more robust
American policy-a policy of
deeds, not merely of "rhetoric"-
that followed in the 1980's and that
contributed mightily to genuinely
transcending the cold war by winning
it.
Needless to say, Kissinger applauds
that policy, finally put into
place by Ronald Reagan four years
after he himself had left office. Indeed,
he claims to have prepared
the ground for it. In this, finally,
even a critic of his policies has to
acknowledge that he is in a basic
sense right. Under his stewardship,
the country survived a perilous period
to fight another day. American
foreign policy may have been a
shambles when Ford left office in
1976, and things were to get even
worse under Carter over the next
four years, but in recalling the
frightening downward spiral of the
1970's one cannot simply point a
finger of blame at Henry Kissinger,
an astonishingly brilliant and agile
American diplomat who, whatever
his misconceptions and mistakes
along the way, engaged in a desperate
struggle to right the ship of
state as it was foundering upon the
rocks.
In reconstructing his own very
large part in this long saga in a spirit
of both critical and self-critical inquiry,
and in extensive and endlessly
fascinating detail, he has given us
in this volume, as in the previous
two, the benefit of his undeniable
lucidity and wisdom as well as one
of the most majestically intelligent
books about statecraft to have been
written in this century.
[60]