Imperfect Hindsight

By WALTER ISAACSON Walter Isaacson

It is a reliable rule of statecraft that it is hard to win at the bargaining table what you are unable or unwilling to win on the battlefield. Henry Kissinger, a cold-eyed realist and practitioner of power politics, knew this well. During the four years that he negotiated America's exit from Vietnam, he regularly resisted those people -- ranging from Defense Secretary Melvin Laird to the doves in the Senate -- who wanted to speed up troop withdrawals and, in Kissinger's view, undercut U.S. leverage at the Paris peace talks. And after the peace accord was signed in January 1973, he repeatedly advocated military pressure to force the communists to comply with the bargain.

Although Laird and two of his successors, Elliot Richardson and James Schlesinger, testified last week before a Senate committee that some American POWs may have been left behind in Indochina, there is no evidence that Kissinger was callous toward their fate. His critics may be justified in attacking his bureaucratic methods, but they have no reason to impugn his motives. As he pointed out in his Senate testimony last week, there were no reliable reports of live Americans being held in violation of the accord. And he was also persuasive in charging that neither the public nor the Congress was willing any longer to support the bargaining levers -- economic aid, renewed military involvement -- that he considered necessary to force the communists to account for the American servicemen who were still missing.

What Kissinger failed to confront in his testimony was the disjuncture between his explanation that he knew of no POWs still being held and his plaint that he had no bargaining powers to force the issue. Policy involves making trade-offs, and in 1973 a difficult one was made: the Nixon Administration decided that it was best not to scuttle the peace agreement or re-engage in the war despite the fact that some missing Americans had not yet been accounted for. Winston Lord, Kissinger's onetime aide, was the only witness last week willing to discuss this uncomfortable truth, calling the trade-off tough and agonizing. This choice may not have been the right one, but it was an understandable one given the public mood at the time.

But it was partly Kissinger's backchannel methods that made it more difficult to enforce the 1973 treaty and that created the distrust that has surrounded the MIA issue ever since. Kissinger negotiated the Vietnam Peace Accord secretly, cutting Congress and even the State Department out of the process. And on two crucial issues in the final agreement, this furtiveness bordered on deceit.

The first involved the "war reparations" that Hanoi demanded from the U.S. Kissinger offered instead a package of "reconstruction" aid. This was duly noted in the Paris agreement. But Kissinger kept secret a deal he made with the North Vietnamese to send them a presidential letter -- three days after the accord was signed -- spelling out the details of this aid. Even trickier was the deal he cooked up to get around Hanoi's insistence that the letter not say this aid was contingent on congressional approval. To solve that, Kissinger drafted a separate presidential letter saying the aid package would "be implemented by each member in accordance with its own constitutional provisions."

Kissinger and Nixon did not tell Congress of these letters. Instead, in between the signing of the treaty and the sending of the letters, they misleadingly informed Congress that there were "no secret deals" involving economic aid. Congress balked at the aid package and thus removed one of Kissinger's bargaining chips for dealing with the MIA issue.

The same was true on the issue of whether the U.S. would be willing to enforce the Paris agreement by retaliating militarily against violations on the MIA issue and others. Kissinger drafted letters, which Nixon signed, making such pledges to South Vietnam's President Nguyen Van Thieu. "We will respond with full force should the settlement be violated by North Vietnam," read one sent in January 1973, and that helped persuade Thieu to sign the peace accord. But Kissinger and Nixon kept these letters secret from Congress -- and even from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As it turned out, Congress was unwilling to authorize force either to press the MIA issue or to save the Thieu government. When the secret letters became public two years later, an uproar ensued that further undermined Kissinger's credibility.

Kissinger was right: deprived of both the carrot of economic aid and the stick of military retaliation, it was next to impossible to make the Vietnamese communists comply with the agreement. And he did work mightily -- and honorably -- with the few tools left at his disposal to pressure the communists to account for the missing servicemen. But in the end, he was undermined both by the nation's unwillingness to remain engaged in Indochina and by the furtive way he handled the negotiations that led to America's eagerly sought withdrawal from the region.