Can you tell me how you came to be involved in the Nixon-Kissinger Administration, and above all, when you got there, what were the plans?

I got involved in the Nixon Administration before the inauguration. I had worked with Henry Kissinger at Harvard. I was then working in the Defense Department, among other things on Vietnam, and Kissinger asked me to come to work for him, and then I started working for him at the Hotel Pierre in December 1968.

When I arrived, it was, there may have been a plan in the President’s head. There was nothing written down, and one of the first things that Kissinger asked me to work on during December and January was an options paper on Vietnam, as well as a series of questions on Vietnam, which later became what was called NSSM-1.

What sort of options did you arrive at, and what were the parameters that were pushing you in a certain direction?

Well the attempt in the paper was really to be as comprehensive as possible, that is to give the President and his principal advisors at the National Security Council a kind of menu of military options and political negotiating options and then combinations of military and political negotiating options. So that the only thing that was excluded was the option of a simple, unilateral total American withdrawal. As I recall we had that in at the beginning, and Kissinger said that he thought that was not on the table, and that there was no reason for completeness to include that.

We also I think in the first drafts had not given as much attention to escalation options and really had suggested that they had not been effective, and at Kissinger's direction the escalation options in the paper were beefed up. So the options ranged all the way from various escalation possibilities to troop withdrawal possibilities, to no negotiations to various kinds of negotiations. It was not a, the effort was not to recommend something, but simply to put before the National Security Council all the possibilities that we thought were at all remotely ones that they would want to consider.

When were you aware that escalation was plainly one of the major thoughts that were floating around, and what did it do to you in the way in which you approached the problem?

It made me nervous. I mean it became clear to me when Kissinger’s response to the first paper that we drafted, his response was you have not paid enough attention.

Could you phrase that in a statement?

The issue of escalation, it became clear to me that escalation was being considered seriously when Kissinger responded to the first paper that some of us had drafted of the options in which escalation was given short shrift. His response was that one ought to take that much more seriously as an option, and my response to that was to be quite nervous about it, because I thought it was a mistake, a fundamental mistake, and that it would recreate the illusion that we could somehow win this war. And I tried then and occasionally afterwards to persuade Kissinger that that was not a viable option.

From your reading of the situation, did the drive toward escalation come from Kissinger himself, or was it something that was being breathed on him by the President?

It was always impossible to tell. At least I could never tell, on Vietnam or indeed on other subjects, whether what Kissinger said was his own view or something that he had got from the President, that is he typically would not say, “I know this is not right or doesn’t make sense, but it is what the President wants.” He would simply say, “Let’s pay more attention to the escalation option.”

And you never knew whether it was from Nixon or from Kissinger. I think clearly he became quite comfortable with it, whether initially it was clearly something that Nixon had developed, I don’t know.

I believe you were worried quite early on yourself when you were there about the whole business of the reconnaissance flights and how the reconnaissance flights themselves led to a tweaking up of the whole situation. I wonder if you can set out how that came about, what was the score on the reconnaissance flights anyway when you were in there? What was actually going on?

The issue of reconnaissance flights and how they would affect the bombing of North Vietnam really started in the Johnson Administration, when the decision was made in March of 1968 to cut the bombing of North Vietnam just to the narrow band above the demilitarized zone. The issue immediately came up about whether or not we would do reconnaissance flights over all of the country. I got involved in an effort to persuade people that we did not need to do reconnaissance flights over the North, that we could get just as much information from other techniques.

But it was clear that in that deal that Johnson had made with the Joint Chiefs to get them to go along with the cutback of the bombing, that he had committed himself to permitting these reconnaissance flights, and there was no way to move that issue. And though it seemed to me that within the seeds of that was the scenario through which the bombing might well be resumed, that is, the North Vietnamese quite naturally would shoot at airplanes going over the territory, even if they were simply engaged in reconnaissance flights.

Among other things, they had no way to know whether they would start dropping bombs, and for another they didn’t take very kindly, as no country does to people flying over their country for any purpose. And in fact that’s what ultimately happened during the Nixon Administration. There was things thing invented called protective reaction strikes. Which meant that you would bomb their defense units, on the theory that they were going to be attacking the reconnaissance flights. And ultimately that became the mechanism by which the bombing was resumed.

Could you just go over that last bit again? Because in a sense, it was so Alice in Wonderland that one could barely, I mean these preemptive, preemptive. Is there any way in which you could be more simple about it?

Well, the, I think it’s fair to say that the military were not enthusiastic about limitations on the bombing of the North. Their view was we were at war with the North Vietnamese, and they should be allowed to bomb wherever it made sense militarily to do so. And therefore...

Sorry, we've got a problem.

Can you tell me what sort of — this is very noisy, do you want to stop it? Can you tell me what sort of dangers you thought were likely to come about with the reconnaissance flights? Why would the military be unhappy?

It was clear that the American military were not happy about any limitations on their ability to conduct the war, in particular were not happy about the cutbacks of the bombing of North Vietnam that was ordered by President Johnson in March of 1968. They had gotten out of him an agreement that they could continue reconnaissance flights, the theory being that they would spot a big buildup which then could be used to justify the resumption of the bombing.

But at the same time, those reconnaissance flights were subject to attack by the North Vietnamese, who would respond to the flights by shooting at them, trying to shoot down the airplanes. And the military of course then saw this as a danger, and they wanted to go in and destroy the air defense units, which were being built up during the period of the bombing halt or the bombing pause.

And ultimately were able to persuade the President in the Nixon Administration to engage in what was called by the wonderful title of protection reaction. Meaning that they would not have to wait till an air defense unit fired at them, but could simply go in and destroy air defense units which were a threat to the reconnaissance flights. And they ultimately began to do that and that was the basis under which the bombing of North Vietnam was begun again.

I wonder if you could tell me, as you were there, you were spending a few weeks there, the weeks turned into months, what do you feel about the basic drive of the Nixon-Kissinger cause? I wonder if you can sort of synthesize that. We were in this whole sort of period, troops are being wound down, and the atmosphere is one of it’s all going to be all right. What did you believe?

I think that the Nixon-Kissinger were determined to win the Vietnam war. And they saw that they had to do three things. One was that they had to develop a willingness of the United States to remain in Vietnam indefinitely, that they had to get a support of the American people for some kind of indefinite American involvement in the Vietnam War.

And that meant that they had to destroy the opposition to the war. I think they planned to do that through a combination of things. One was to end the draft, one was to begin the withdrawal of American forces, and one was to disrupt, to discredit, and ultimately destroy the anti-war movement within the United States. So that was the first part of the policy.

Second part was to build up the South Vietnamese army so that ultimately you could have a withdrawal of most of the American forces, thereby substantially reducing the casualties that the United States would face, and therefore make possible the American support of the war, and so the policy which had been called in the Johnson Administration de-Americanization, and was called in the Nixon Administration Vietnamization, the building up, the training, the strengthening of the South Vietnamese army.

The third element was to persuade, first Russia and China, and then Vietnam that if the Vietnamese took advantage of this American withdrawal to escalate the war, that the United States would respond, and that ultimately the United States was prepared to destroy North Vietnam, with conventional weapons, and even perhaps with nuclear weapons, if the North Vietnamese did not permit the South to remain an anti-communist country after there was a substantial American withdrawal.

And that was done by conveying threats, by escalating the war, by conversations, very threatening conversations with both the Russians and the Chinese and was ultimately done by the Christmas bombing, by the invasion of Laos and Cambodia, by the mining of Hai Phong, and so on.

And at some point in this, it was clear that you had to have a negotiated settlement which would get the American prisoners of war back, in return for some kind of agreement to finally withdraw the American troops. But that was seen as not incompatible with the continuation of an American threat of re-intervention, if it was necessary to keep Vietnam anti-communist.

You bring what was to me a startling interpretation of the Nixon plan. The whole feeling that one gets from the media and the [inaudible] there and the guy that basically decided, you know, pull out slowly, the idea matches [inaudible]. How did you come across this? Was this something that you perceived afterwards, or was this something you perceived in the first year? That this was plainly the case, there was no other... How did you arrive at this deduction? That he was determined to win.

Just by what they were doing and what they were saying. I mean because it was clear that if what you wanted to do was simply to get out, get your prisoners back, and give the South Vietnamese a chance to survive on their own, without the certainty that they would survive on their own, that the way to do that was to announce publicly that all American troops would be withdrawn from Vietnam by a certain date, which could have been two years in the future, or three years in the future, or six months away.

And then simply to say, we will of course assume that our prisoners will be returned prior to the completion of the withdrawal, and of course American involvement cannot come to an end until the prisoners have been returned. That position was put to Kissinger, with a substantial amount of vigor, and was not accepted. And he was a sufficiently intelligent person that it was clear that he was not accepting it for reasons that had to do with the effect of that, which was to leave the South Vietnamese in a position where they might well lose, and it was clear to me that he was not, in fact, prepared to do that.

Therefore, the position that he was engaged, the policy that we were engaged in, which was to withdraw the troops without setting a deadline for a total withdrawal, without committing ourselves to a total withdrawal, and in effect, saying that there would be a residual force which we then talked about at 50,000, 60,000 that would remain indefinitely along with the bombing, that, inevitably the North Vietnamese would have to respond to this by an escalation of the fighting, because if they allowed it to happen, if they allowed the war to die down, the casualties to be reduced, while the United States still kept the residual force in the country, then they would be accepting the permanent division of Vietnam, which it was clear to me and I think clear to Kissinger that they would never do unless they, the price was much higher than it then was.

And, therefore, what you were inevitably inviting, was a stepping up of the war by the North Vietnamese, and a stepping up of the war which would lead to their military victory unless we respond to it, responded to it by military force. Kissinger was getting himself into a box, which was fully explained to him which he fully understood and yet which he and Kissinger, did nothing about and, therefore, if one assumed that they knew what they were doing, one had to assume that they had something very different in mind, which I did assume and then it was clear that everything they did was consistent with this alternative theory of what they were about, and, indeed, I published an article soon after I left the government laying this out.

One of the other points you made, you talk about the structure, the destruction of the anti-war movement, the quieting down of public disquiet about the war, you suggested in a way that there was malevolence almost within the Administration to what was going on in the body politic of America. I wonder if you’ve got some concrete example of that from you, yourself, which would illustrate the whole sort of paranoia, fear, anger, what was going on as far as the public was concerned with continued opposition. Could you throw some light on that?

I’m not sure that I do. The, ah, it is clear from everything that Nixon and Haldeman and Ehrlichman and others have said and written that the anti-war movement was viewed as with great suspicion, that there was beliefs carried over from the Johnson Administration that all of this was the creature of the international communist movement. Pressure we know on the intelligence agencies to to investigate, to find the evidence that the anti-war movement was nothing more than a creature of the KGB, and a determination I think to undercut it in various ways.

The Houston plan which involved unleashing the intelligence agencies to look for this evidence through burglaries and wire taps and so on. The very extensive wire tapping that did take place in the Nixon Administration, the warrantless wire tapping, of the anti-war movement. The FBI’s COINTELPRO activities against the anti-war movement, the statements of the president, ahm, in response to the opposition, the Cambodia speech. All of which, I think, make it clear that the Administration looked upon this movement with disdain and with hostility and that it was determined to beat it because it viewed it as a threat to the security interest of the United States as it defined them.

What policy, I mean, would it be possible to win? Do you think their policy would have stood a chance of working? Was it, could you say...?

Yeah. I think that the, that the policy of the Nixon Administration would have worked, but for Watergate. That is, I think Kissinger’s view, and it’s a view that I share. I think it was wrong, I don’t think we should have done it, but I think it would have worked.

That is, I think that the North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese were persuaded that, if there was a major buildup of North Vietnamese forces and the kind of invasion that ultimately took place that the United States would respond to that by destroying North Vietnam. I don’t think the North Vietnamese would have risked that.

I think they would have waited until Nixon would out of office and hoped that he would be replaced by somebody who would not continue that policy, but I don’t think, they had been fighting this war for thirty years, I think they would have waited. I think ultimately it was doomed to failure.

I think that the determination of the Hanoi government to have a unified Vietnam under their control, as compared to the interest in the United States as a society to prevent that from happening was so asymmetrical that ultimately I think there was gonna be a communist Vietnam. But, I think that the policy would have worked for a substantial period of time.

What, of course, interfered with it, as Kissinger has said many times, was Watergate, which first undermined the authority of the president. Kissinger was trying in April of 1973 when Kissinger was preoccupied with firing Haldeman and Ehrlichman to see the president and apparently on that very day to urge a resumption of the bombing in response to some North Vietnamese buildup, to do it early, quickly and decisively in order to demonstrate to the North Vietnamese that we were serious about that policy.

I believe that not for Watergate, the bombing would have been resumed on that date. I think the message would have gotten through. The North Vietnamese were, I think, testing and probing. I think they would have pulled back, and I think you would have and the end of the Nixon Administration.

They would have turned over to Gerry Ford, or to whoever they turn the presidency. I think anti-communist South Vietnam depended for its existence on the willingness of the United States to destroy North Vietnam in the event of an invasion.

Let's cut for a minute.

Was Vietnam really the, the major consideration of Nixon and Kissinger? I say that partly because of the whole business of détente and the signing of the SALT, but also because of the incredible Pauline conversion as far as Nixon’s concerned in relations with China from being a total menace. I wonder if you could talk about that.

The major preoccupation of Kissinger and Nixon was US-Soviet relations. They believed that world peace depended on getting the Soviet Union into a relationship with the United States so that it ceased to do things which threatened American security interests.

That, in their view, required carrots and sticks. The carrots were the SALT agreement, economic relations, acceptance of the Soviet Union as a great power in the world and so on. The stick was that we would use military force effectively against them whenever they tried to expand their influence by the use of military force. And, it was in this context that they approached every issue from the Middle East to China to Vietnam.

Vietnam was important because the United States had made it important. Kissinger was always fond of saying that we inherited 500,000 troops in Vietnam, we didn’t put them there. Meaning that previous administrations had made this a test of the ability of the United States to win if it used military force, and I think they both believed that if we failed in Vietnam, that the Russians would draw the conclusion ah that, while the Americans might resist for a while, that the domestic politics of the United States would enable it to see us through to victory, and, therefore, victory in Vietnam was essential to the policy of persuading the Soviet Union to change its policies.

When you were part of the Administration, were you aware there had been an obvious change of approach in the ways of dealing with China? Was that clear and apparent or did it come about when you were there, or what?

It came about when I was there. It was clear...

Could you...?

The, ah, the change in policy toward China... The change in the Administration’s bond with China came about very early. Clearly in the context of Soviet relations. I’ve always dated it from the Soviet’s decision to recognize what I think was then called the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam. Nixon took that as a signal from the Russians that they were not gonna put pressure on the North Vietnamese.

Sorry, can we stop? We are plainly are going to run out, and I'm going to stop you now.

Could you tell me please when did the change in policy to China come about? How did it come about? What did it mean?

The change in policy towards China brought about by the Nixon Administration, which really was a very fundamental change, came about in the context of their view of the Soviet-American relations.

I think that the event that triggered it rather earlier than I think it might otherwise have occurred was the Soviet recognition of, what was then I think, called the Provisional Revolutionary Government of Vietnam, and I think Nixon took that as a sign that the Russians were not going to deliver Hanoi. That is, that the escalation threats that had been delivered to the Soviet Union were not going to lead the Russians to turn and put pressure on the Vietnamese to cut back on the war, and he, therefore, turned to what has since become, to be called the China Card, ah, viewing relations with China as a way, first of all, to get the Chinese out of the Vietnam War.

That is, to persuade the Chinese that improving relations with the United States was possible and important in their struggle with the Russians, and that the price they clearly would have to pay for that is that they would cease the military supply of Vietnam, that they would put pressure on the Vietnamese to end the war, and that they would make it clear to the Vietnamese that if the escalation brought the extensive bombing of Vietnam that the Chinese would not intervene. The Johnson Administration, the great fear that it prevented the massive escalation was the fear that the Chinese would come in, as they had done in Korea.

The move towards China was designed to persuade the Chinese through carrots and sticks that that was not a good idea, that they should stay out of the war. Ah. And, it also was a way, in a broader context, of beginning to put pressure on the Soviet Union by beginning to establish what will ultimately become a Chinese-American alliance against the Soviet Union.

Were you aware of where the drive for this policy was coming from? Was it coming from Kissinger? Was it coming from Nixon or was it just a synthesis, I mean how did you actually become aware that it was going on?

The first signs that I had of an interest in China policy was the discussions around the development of a paper for the National Security Council on the China issue. There was a paper drafted in the bureaucracy, which, because of the way the bureaucracy is structured, if you ask for a paper on China, the assignment to the East Asian Bureau. The East Asian Bureau is not involved in Soviet relations, and, therefore, the question of how a move towards China will affect US-Soviet relations is not within the competence or the interests of the people writing the paper.

Kissinger response to these papers, as a response to most of them, was that they were no good. But, in this case, he had the particular problem that it did not look at the issue in terms of the trilateral, triangular relationship between the United States, China and the Soviet Union, and I began working on re-drafting and producing an alternative paper, which took account of and raised these issues.

It was clear in those discussions I had with Kissinger and then at the National Security Council Meeting on China, which was held out at San Clemente, I think, during the summer of ’69, that there was an interest in exploring these ranges of issues, and the first sign that we were gonna do something was, came earlier than that, and it was in the, when Kissinger, at the direction of the president, called the State Department and told them to come up with a package of possible gestures towards the Chinese, and, indeed, there were in the spring of ’69 some very tentative moves.

Certain kinds of people were allowed to travel there. We would sell certain kinds of medicine to them and so on, and those came out of initiative from the president, ah, rather than from the bureaucracy, and it was clearly a signal that the president wanted to start sending signals to China that he was interested in exploring a different kind of relationship.

Okay. Cut. Thank you very much.

Can you explain the reaction in the White House and the NSC to the leaking of the articles? To the New York Times about the secret bombing of Cambodia?

The White House was in Florida at the time that the New York Times published the story that the United States was bombing Cambodia, and there was great concern about it. Kissinger told me that he had talked to the President, to the Secretary of State, to the Secretary of Defense and that they were all very concerned because there had been a decision that this had to be kept secret and it was known only to a very small number of people.

And their concern about it was at two levels. One, it was taken as further evidence that there were leaks and leakers in high positions and, therefore, that these people had to be found out. Then we know, of course, that it led to the beginning of a wire tap program of people on the NSC staff and the State Department and in the Defense Department.

The second concern was that there would be a public reaction to this evidence of escalation of the war, that it would undercut the strategy which was to pretend to the American people we were withdrawing while secretly signaling to Hanoi that we were escalating, and the fear was that this would generate public discussion which would force this policy out in the open before the Administration wanted it out in the open.

Did, did you get the impression that the policy was brought about because of pressure from the military or this was the initiative of Kissinger himself?

The decision to start the bombing of Cambodia, I think, clearly was a White House initiative. It’s always hard to tell whether it was Kissinger or Nixon or the two of them together. The military, to be sure, recommended it. They recommended to Nixon all of the things that they had wanted to do under Johnson, and that they had been denied permission to do, not only Vietnam, but everywhere in the world.

I think they did that in a rather pro forma way. I don’t have the sense that anybody thought that Nixon was gonna escalate the war, but the White House almost immediately started sending signals that it was serious about escalation and I think the evidence was clear that the initiative for this particular decision to start bombing really came from a White House request for proposals for escalation of the war.

What did you hear within the NSC about Sihanouk's reaction to all this?

I was not present, nor was I informed about the discussion that took place on the Sunday when the decision was made. I happened to be in the White House, but was not at the meetings, so I don’t know what was said about that.

What about the actual planning for the Cambodian invasion in April? Did you see that a inevitable...

I was gone.

Inevitable...reaction?

Well, I think the escalation, the escalation of the war was, I think, a necessary part of the policy. The escalation signals, in effect, had to be sent to Hanoi. Now whether, I don’t think they required, necessarily, the invasion of Cambodia at the particular time that it occurred, or the invasion of Laos, but, I think, the Administration was determined to make it clear to Hanoi that it would ultimately destroy the north if it had to and that it would signal that by various escalatory measures, including the bombing of Cambodia, and then the invasion of Cambodia.

Fine. Good. Thanks.