Vietnam War Negotiations: Kissinger and Le Duc Tho
Copyright © 2005-6, Henry J. Sage
When President Nixon took office in January 1969, the process of negotiating a peace between the United States and North Vietnam was slowly beginning to unfold. Delegates from the United States and North Vietnam had arrived in Paris in May 1968, and President Johnson had eased the bombing offensive in the hope of getting the peace talks moving forward. Yet Johnson's decision not to run for reelection in 1968 seemed to many to be a tacit admission of the fact that the Vietnam War was virtually unwinnable. Negotiations struck many as an escape route.
In January 1969 representatives of the South Vietnamese government and the Viet Cong joined the peace discussions in Paris, but during the early weeks and months of the Paris meetings, the delegates haggled over such mundane things as the size and shape of the tables where negotiations would take place and who would be sitting where. With President Nixon's inauguration on January 20 the new administration took over repsonsibility for the war and the peace negotiations. By August 1969 President Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, had begun secretly communicating with representatives of North Vietnam in the hope of getting things moving in Paris. Meanwhile, American troops began to be slowly withdrawn from Vietnam.
In February 1970 Henry Kissinger began to meet with North Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho in Paris. The Nixon administration issued various proposals for cease-fires and mutual withdrawals of troops from South Vietnam, but nothing produced positive results. By the end of 1970 American troop strength in Vietnam was down to 280,000 men from it peak of over 500,000.
While the Vietnam negotiations were moving slowly forward, President Nixon and Henry Kissinger were engaged in trying to open diplomatic relations with China. Kissinger insisted that the Vietnam War was only a sideshow, a secondary event compared to larger Cold War issues. President Nixon tried to bring pressure on the North Vietnamese by ordering bombing of the Hanoi and Haiphong areas of North Vietnam. He also approached Soviet leaders in the hope of bringing pressure on Hanoi.
Finally in October 1972 Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho reached a tentative agreement on a number of issues and drafted an agreement to stop the fighting. South Vietnamese President Thieu, however, was opposed to the agreement and the matter remained stalled. Shortly thereafter Henry Kissinger offered amendments to the agreement to satisfy President Thieu and optimistically declared that “peace is at hand.”
Meanwhile President Nixon was re-elected in a landslide over Senator George McGovern, after which Kissinger resumed his talks with Le Duc Tho. In December 1972, trying to force and end to the affair, President Nixon ordered further bombing around Hanoi and Haiphong, and the raids continued for 11 days. The North Vietnamese announced that they were willing to resume the diplomatic discussions in Paris once President Nixon had halted the bombing. Finally, an initial agreement was reached in January 1973, and on January 27 formal cease-fire agreements were signed in Paris.
The last American troops left Vietnam in March 1973 and all American prisoners of war were released from Hanoi by April 1. The American experience in Vietnam was for all practical purposes ended, and President Nixon announced that America had achieved “peace with honor.” Most observers believe, however, that the same agreement could have been reached in 1969, in which case thousands of lives on both sides might have been spared. And although the Americans were no longer involved, the Vietnam War was not yet over.