NO PEACE, NO HONOR by LARRY BERMAN

Author:LARRY BERMAN
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2001-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

Peace Is at the End of a Pen

On November 7, Richard Nixon was reelected by beating George McGovern in 49 of 50 states. “If anyone had told me [in 1968] that the war would be waging four years later, with the architects of that war victorious in 49 of 50 states, I would have said he was crazy,” McGovern later said. There were many reasons for the lopsided vote. As a whole the country felt that Nixon had brought some of the worst problems under control, including Vietnam, even if peace was not yet finally at hand. American involvement in the war certainly seemed to be winding down at last.

Nixon’s second term would, of course, be dominated by a scandal that was just beginning to unfold. Watergate would provide Nixon, Kissinger, and others with an unanswerable and one of the most powerful of Vietnam’s what-ifs: What if Nixon had no Watergate and he had been in a strong position when the peace was finally signed? Would he have bombed the communists rather than let them seize Saigon? Although the record offers many hints of an answer—that Nixon fully intended to do so, but Kissinger did not think the public would ever support it—no one can ever fully answer a what-if like this one. What we can say is that every month Thieu stalled and delayed the peace, Watergate’s momentum brought both Nixon’s and more certainly his own downfall.

Through November 1972, relations frayed between Nixon and Thieu, between Le Duc Tho and Kissinger, between the NLF and Politburo, and even between Kissinger and Nixon. Thieu was livid that Kissinger at his October press conference had given the impression that only “details” rather than “principles” remained to be resolved, and he demanded that an unequivocal statement be added to the treaty on the withdrawal of the North Vietnamese army from South Vietnam. He also wanted a clear articulation of the DMZ as separating the two Vietnams. Finally, he wanted it clear that the political problems of South Vietnam were to be resolved by the forces and groups within South Vietnam.

Thieu believed that Kissinger had made major concessions to the communists and he was being asked to ratify concessions that would result in a coalition government, which would lead to the eventual reunification of Vietnam. Thieu viewed the absence of a provision for the withdrawal of North Vietnamese forces as a major concession to the other side. He believed that the lack of a reference to the DMZ would allow for the continuing infiltration of men and supplies, as well as the dilution of South Vietnam as an independent country. He believed that the coalition structure would give the NLF equal weight with his government, something that was outrageous since it had not happened at the polls. The differences between the English and Vietnamese texts only reinforced his suspicions.

Thieu also understood that these concessions would have disastrous effects on the morale of the military and civilian populations within South Vietnam. The South

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