One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon by Tim Weiner Page A
Authors: Tim Weiner
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pleasant day at San Clemente, swimming and walking on the beach with Bebe Rebozo. Then came a message from Kissinger.
Ho Chi Minh had answered his letter proposing secret peace talks. The reply was defiant.
“The longer the war goes on, the more accumulates the mourning and burdens of the American people,” Ho wrote to Nixon, who underlined the last sentence of this passage.
I am extremely indignant at the losses and destruction caused by the American troops to our people and our country. I am also deeply touched at the rising toll of death of young Americans who have fallen in Vietnam by reason of the policy of American governing circles. Our Vietnamese people are deeply devoted to peace, a real peace with independence and real freedom. They are determined to fight to the end, without fearing the sacrifices and difficulties in order to defend their country and their sacred national rights .
Ho Chi Minh—an adopted name meaning “he who enlightens”—was born the son of Vietnamese peasant farmers in 1890, the same year as Eisenhower. He moved to Paris and joined the Communist Party after World War I. He had been an agent of the Soviet Comintern, the global Communist alliance created by Lenin. Moscow helped him establish the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930. At the time of his contact with Nixon, Ho had been fighting for independence for four decades. France had occupied Vietnam and Cambodia and called their colonial land Indochina. Ho defeated the French in May 1954, with military aid from China. That same year, the Americans took up the fight against communism in Vietnam, with small groups of military advisers and intelligence officers. By the time American combat forces invaded Vietnam in 1965, the Soviets, not the Chinese, were Ho’s main military suppliers.
Ho was now seventy-nine, an international symbol of revolutionary warfare, an icon in the Communist world, and, as he wrote to Nixon, “determined to fight to the end” to defeat the United States.
He died three days after Nixon read his letter.
Would Hanoi lose its resolve without its legendary leader? Who would emerge as the enemy’s chief strategist? No one in the White House, the Pentagon, or the CIA had the slightest idea whether Ho’s death would change the course of the war or increase the chance for peace. American intelligence on North Vietnam’s political intentions was at best informed speculation, a fact that drove Richard Nixon mad with rage.
“We tried every operational approach in the book, and committed our most experienced field operatives to the effort to get inside the government in Hanoi,” CIA director Richard Helms wrote long after the war was lost. “Within the Agency, our failure to penetrate the North Vietnamese government was the single most frustrating aspect of those years. We could not determine what was going on at the highest levels of Ho’s government, nor could we learn how policy was made or who was making it.” At the root of this failure was “our national ignorance of Vietnamese history, society, and language,” Helms admitted. Know your enemy is the oldest rule in the book of war; America broke it. Without knowing the enemy’s intentions and capabilities, America’s soldiers and spies were fighting a ghost army in Vietnam—Helms used the word “incubus,” a demon that comes in nightmares—and it stayed shrouded in darkness during a decade of slaughter.
* * *
By the time Nixon returned to Washington on September 9, his resolve to defeat North Vietnam by any means had steeled. “I was ready to use whatever military pressure was necessary to prevent them from taking over South Vietnam by force,” he wrote in his memoirs. “Kissinger and I developed an elaborate orchestration of diplomatic, military, and publicity pressures we would bring to bear on Hanoi.”
The instruments in this orchestra included plans for an all-out attack in Vietnam, a worldwide nuclear alert aimed at the
Ho Chi Minh had answered his letter proposing secret peace talks. The reply was defiant.
“The longer the war goes on, the more accumulates the mourning and burdens of the American people,” Ho wrote to Nixon, who underlined the last sentence of this passage.
I am extremely indignant at the losses and destruction caused by the American troops to our people and our country. I am also deeply touched at the rising toll of death of young Americans who have fallen in Vietnam by reason of the policy of American governing circles. Our Vietnamese people are deeply devoted to peace, a real peace with independence and real freedom. They are determined to fight to the end, without fearing the sacrifices and difficulties in order to defend their country and their sacred national rights .
Ho Chi Minh—an adopted name meaning “he who enlightens”—was born the son of Vietnamese peasant farmers in 1890, the same year as Eisenhower. He moved to Paris and joined the Communist Party after World War I. He had been an agent of the Soviet Comintern, the global Communist alliance created by Lenin. Moscow helped him establish the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930. At the time of his contact with Nixon, Ho had been fighting for independence for four decades. France had occupied Vietnam and Cambodia and called their colonial land Indochina. Ho defeated the French in May 1954, with military aid from China. That same year, the Americans took up the fight against communism in Vietnam, with small groups of military advisers and intelligence officers. By the time American combat forces invaded Vietnam in 1965, the Soviets, not the Chinese, were Ho’s main military suppliers.
Ho was now seventy-nine, an international symbol of revolutionary warfare, an icon in the Communist world, and, as he wrote to Nixon, “determined to fight to the end” to defeat the United States.
He died three days after Nixon read his letter.
Would Hanoi lose its resolve without its legendary leader? Who would emerge as the enemy’s chief strategist? No one in the White House, the Pentagon, or the CIA had the slightest idea whether Ho’s death would change the course of the war or increase the chance for peace. American intelligence on North Vietnam’s political intentions was at best informed speculation, a fact that drove Richard Nixon mad with rage.
“We tried every operational approach in the book, and committed our most experienced field operatives to the effort to get inside the government in Hanoi,” CIA director Richard Helms wrote long after the war was lost. “Within the Agency, our failure to penetrate the North Vietnamese government was the single most frustrating aspect of those years. We could not determine what was going on at the highest levels of Ho’s government, nor could we learn how policy was made or who was making it.” At the root of this failure was “our national ignorance of Vietnamese history, society, and language,” Helms admitted. Know your enemy is the oldest rule in the book of war; America broke it. Without knowing the enemy’s intentions and capabilities, America’s soldiers and spies were fighting a ghost army in Vietnam—Helms used the word “incubus,” a demon that comes in nightmares—and it stayed shrouded in darkness during a decade of slaughter.
* * *
By the time Nixon returned to Washington on September 9, his resolve to defeat North Vietnam by any means had steeled. “I was ready to use whatever military pressure was necessary to prevent them from taking over South Vietnam by force,” he wrote in his memoirs. “Kissinger and I developed an elaborate orchestration of diplomatic, military, and publicity pressures we would bring to bear on Hanoi.”
The instruments in this orchestra included plans for an all-out attack in Vietnam, a worldwide nuclear alert aimed at the
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