"Nixon
and the 1968 Bombing Halt" by Peter W Rodman
from United Press International, September 19, 2000.
A new, and unsympathetic book about Richard Nixon, by journalist Anthony Summers, has revived an old controversy about whether Nixon, as a presidential candidate in October 1968, sabotaged a Vietnam peace initiative of the Johnson Administration.
President Johnson was seeking to organize peace negotiations with Hanoi, on the basis of a halt to the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam and some corresponding Communist de-escalation of the fighting. Candidate Nixon, or people acting on his behalf, allegedly tried to influence South Vietnam's President Nguyen Van Thieu to drag his feet-until after our election was over-before agreeing to the deal.
I have no personal knowledge of what Nixon or his lieutenants did or didn't do. But the allegations cannot be properly assessed without keeping some other key facts in mind.
For one thing, we now have Soviet archives on the subject-the Soviets having mediated between the U.S. and North Vietnam in this diplomatic exercise. The memoirs of Soviet Ambassador in Washington Anatoly Dobrynin, and a book by Russian historian Ilya V. Gaiduk, The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War, both reveal the interesting point that a main purpose of rushing the U.S. bombing halt before the U.S. election on November 5 was to assure that Hubert Humphrey got elected.
With the presidential election only days away and Humphrey trailing in the public opinion polls largely because of his identification with Johnson's conduct of the war, Dobrynin writes, "[Secretary of State Dean]Rusk telephoned on October 31 to inform me that the president would announce the complete cessation of bombing North Vietnam the following day."
The Soviets too, writes Gaiduk, were "apprehensive of the prospects of a Nixon victory. In Moscow's view, Nixon was too unpredictable and reactionary. The Soviets preferred to reach an agreement between Washington and Hanoi before the presidential elections. As a result, Moscow was involved at every stage in resolving the problems that threatened to delay and even to disrupt a settlement. Although Johnson consistently denied it at the time and later, election day, November 5, loomed large in his desire to see negotiations started."
"But the shift in policy came too late to save Humphrey," Dobrynin concludes wistfully, "and Nixon won the presidential election by a narrow margin."
This finagling on the Johnson Administration's side should be the starting point of any debate over the politics of the 1968 bombing halt.
But there are other points that deserve to be made. One has to do with the stupidity of bombing halts in the first place. In no case did the North Vietnamese not cheat on the "understandings" that accompanied them. (We tried it a number of times.) The theory was, you see, that the proof of our good faith represented by a temporary bombing halt would be reciprocated.
But in every case, the North Vietnamese simply exploited the relief from bombing to accelerate their infiltration of troops and weapons into South Vietnam down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It is impossible to measure how many American and South Vietnamese casualties resulted from this, but it's probably a significant number.
The Paris negotiations started up after the November 1968 agreement, but the North Vietnamese manipulated them for political pressure on the United States and showed no interest whatsoever in compromise until years later.
Nguyen Van Thieu did not need secret messages from any associates of Nixon to tell him the bombing halt might be putting his country at risk, for American domestic political ends. Whatever Nixon's people may or may not have done was, without any doubt, redundant.
There was an additional "quid pro quo" for the 1968 bombing halt-a North Vietnamese pledge (testified to by the Soviets) that there would be no attacks on major South Vietnamese cities. Hanoi broke this promise within four months. It launched a countrywide wave of attacks against South Vietnamese cities in February 1969, barely a month into Nixon's term of office.
But the story doesn't end there. Nixon, wrestling with how to respond, decided that resuming the bombing of North Vietnam in response to this shredding of the 1968 "understanding" would trigger a domestic and global uproar more than he could stomach. So he searched for other, less dramatic ways of stepping up military pressure on North Vietnam.
What he settled on was to begin attacking North Vietnamese bases in Cambodia, which Cambodia's Prince Sihanouk had long invited us to do. From these bases the North Vietnamese Army had regularly sallied forth into South Vietnam and killed thousands of Americans and South Vietnamese, then retreated back across the border for sanctuary.
Nixon's campaign to disrupt the North Vietnamese bases in Cambodia, of course, is another whole world-class controversy in itself. I don't have time to go into that one here. Suffice it to point out here that it's another product, in part, of the illusory and politically tainted bombing halt "understanding" of 1968.
(Peter W. Rodman is Director of National Security Programs at The Nixon Center.)