Listening to the BetterAngels of Our Nature:Ethnicity, Self-Determination,And the American Empire

Chapter Twenty-SevenChina, Korea, and Indochina:Part 4 – Nixon in China,

Kissinger in Paris

David Steven Cohen

In the opening scene of the of the 1987 opera Nixon in China, music by John Adams and libretto by Alice Goodman, U.S. PresidentRichard M. Nixon arrives in Air Force One at the airport outside Beijing, where he is greeted by Communist China’s premier Chou En-lai. The two shake hands, and Nixon then sings about his hopesand fear for the historic visit.

Achieving a great human dream.We live in an unsettled time.Who are our enemies? Who areOur friends? The Eastern HemisphereBeckoned to us, and we have flownEast of the sun, west of the moonAcross an ocean of distrustFilled with the bodies of our lost;The earth’s Sea of Tranquility. . .On this summit, our name is mud.We’re not out of the woods, not yet.The nation’s heartland skips a beatAs our hands shield the spinning globeFrom the flame-throwers of the mob.We must press on. We know we want.1

Act One, Scene One, Nixon in China, 1987,https://kpbs.media.clients.ellingtoncms.com/img/croppedphotos/2011/06/22/gp_nixonchina_t614.jpg?a3ca5463f16dc11451266bb717d38a6025dcea0e

Actual photo of the historic handshake, February 21, 1972.http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-D0Q1zbgI1cI/TVcLkH6g0XI/AAAAAAAAFgQ/vIpccQgxNWA/s1600/Nixon_shakes_hands_with_Chou_En-lai.jpg

According to historian Margaret MacMillan, on the drive fromthe airport, Chou reportedly said to Nixon: “Your handshake came over the vastest ocean in the world—twenty-five years of no communication.” Macmillan says that the handshake was of great symbolic importance, because at the Geneva Conference in 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles refused to shake hands with

Chou. The Chinese had not forgotten the slight. Macmillan says that Nixon was taking a political risk in traveling to China to meet Mao, because he was “the man who had made his name as a dogged and vociferous anti-Communist, was reversing two decades of American policy by traveling to Beijing, into the very heart of Chinese Communism.” 2

“For twenty years,” writes Henry Kissinger, who was a Special Assistant to President Nixon during his first term, “there had been virtual isolation and ideological hostility, punctuated by the war in Korea in which American and Chinese soldiers fought ferociously against each other.”3 In February 1950 Mao signed a Sino-Soviet Treaty of mutual assistance. Mao wanted to invade Formosa, but instead China was drawn into the Korean War, which was started by the Pro-Russian North Koreans who had approved the war with Stalin, but not Mao. In June 1950 after North Korea invaded South Korea, Truman dispatched the American Seventh Fleet to patrol the waters between the island of Formosa and the Chinese mainland both to prevent an attack by China on Formosa and prevent Taiwan from using the island as a base for an attack on the Chinese mainland.When Peking intervened in the Korean Conflict, President Dwight David Eisenhower in his first message to Congress announced that he decided to withdraw the fleet. He stated that while “this order implies no aggressive intent on our part, . . . we certainly have no obligation to protect a nation fighting us in Korea.”4

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After the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 China lost to Japan the island of Taiwan (Formosa) and the Pescadores islands about one hundred miles off the coast of China. Under the Cairo Declaration of 1943 the islands were to be returned to the Republic of China after World War II. However, the Japanese peacetreaty of 1951, which ended Japanese sovereignty over the islands, did not formally cede the islands to either Communist orNationalist China. Quemoy and the Matsus were islands much closerto the Chinese mainland, but when Chiang Kai-shek fled the mainland in 1949, he retained control of these two island groups.He argued that any attack on them would be a precursor to an attack on Formosa and the Pescadores. The Matsus blocked access to the Chinese port of Foochow and Quemoy blocked the port of Amoy. “Again and again in the years following the Chinese Communists’ takeover in 1949,” writes Eisenhower, “fearful observers asked whether we and our ally, Chiang, should be so close to Red China.”5

In February 1954 Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek pledged to attack the Chinese mainland “in the not distant future.” In July President Syngman Rhee of South Korea in a speech before a joint session of the U.S. Congress that the United States join South Korea and Nationalist China in an invasion of the Chinese mainland. In response, Premier Chou En-lai called for the “liberation of Formosa.” The Chinese Communists in September began artillery shelling of Quemoy (Kinman, today), an island offthe coast of China. The United States began to move aircraft carriers from the Pacific Fleet towards the island to rescue the inhabitants in case of a follow-up invasion. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles suggested that the United States take the matter maintaining the status quo to the United Nations Security Council, even though this risked a Soviet veto. Chiang Kai-shek opposed this suggestion thinking that it was a step closer to allowing the United Nations to decide who owned Formosa and whichChina should be represented in the UN. In early December the United States and Nationalist China signed a mutual-defense treaty to “maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack and Communist subversive activities.” However, the treaty limited the agreements only to Taiwan and the Pescadores. In an exchange of letters between Secretary Dulles and Dr. L.C. Yeh, Nationalist China’s foreign minister, Taiwan agreed not to unilaterally attack mainland China.

In January 1955 the Chinese Communists invaded the Tachen islandsand the island of Ichiang, which were about two hundred miles from Formosa but which were occupied by Nationalist troops. Eisenhower announced that neither Ichiang nor the Tachens were vital to the defense of Formosa and the Pescadores. The U.S. Senate passed a resolution, which was signed by Eisenhower, authorizing the President to use the armed forces “as he deems necessary for the specific purpose of securing and protecting Formosa and the Pescadores against armed attack” and this authority included “securing and protecting of such related positions and territories of that are now in friend hands.” Two weeks later Eisenhower signed the Formosa mutual-security treaty.“Taken together, the two documents left no doubt of the United

States’ intention regarding Formosa and the Pescadores,” writes Eisenhower. “[I]n that region we would not be in a situation we had faced in the 1950 Korean crisis.”6

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In issue of Quemoy-Matsu came up in the debates between VicePresident Richard Nixon and Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedyin the fall of 1960. Kennedy was asked whether the line of defense in the Far East should include Quemoy and Matsu. Kennedy answered: “Well, the United States uh - has on occasion attempteduh - mostly in the middle fifties, to persuade Chiang Kai-shek topull his troops back to Formosa. I believe strongly in the defense of Formosa. These islands are a few miles - five or six miles - off the coast of Red China, within a general harbor area and more than a hundred miles from Formosa. We have never said flatly that we will defend Quemoy and Matsu if it's attacked. We say we will defend it if it's part of a general attack on Formosa.”

Nixon responded: “I disagree completely with Senator Kennedy on this point. I remember in the period immediately before the Korean War, South Korea was supposed to be indefensible as well. . . . And Secretary Acheson made a very famous speech at the Press Club, early in the year that k- KoreanWar started, indicating in effect that South Korea was beyond the

defense zone of the United States. . . . Now I think as far as Quemoy and Matsu are concerned, that the question is not these two little pieces of real estate - they are unimportant. . . . It's the principle involved. These two islands are in the area offreedom. The Nationalists have these two islands. We should not uh - force our Nationalist allies to get off of them and give them to the Communists. If we do that we start a chain reaction; because the Communists aren't after Quemoy and Matsu, they're a- they're after Formosa. In my opinion this is the same kind of woolly thinking that led to disaster for America in Korea.”7 Nixon’s position on Quemoy and the Matsus solidified his conservative base. It was one of the reasons the conservative Chicago Tribune listed it as the second reason in its front page editorial “Why We Are For Nixon.”8

“Marxism is internationalism par excellence, it opposes statism, regionalism, and also chauvinism, and is interpreted to aim at establishing an international order rid of states and classes,” writes Ram Naresh Sharma. “However, the two great Marxist system-building of the world, Stalin and Mao Zedong applied Marxism in their respective countries purely in their national interests transforming it into ‘communism in one county’and ‘zinicised Marxism’ respectively.”9 Sharma argues that Mao’s so-called “China Path” was that the Soviet Union, China, and the colonies of the Western Powers after World War II should form a united front on the principle of national liberation. In his essay “Revolutionary Forces of the World Unite,” Mao wrote: “[S]ince the victory of the World War II, U.S. imperialism and its running dogs in various countries have taken the place of fascist Germany, Italy and Japan. . . This enemy still has strength; therefore, all the revolutionary forces of all countries must likewise unite, must form an anti-imperialist united front headed by the Soviet Union and follow correct policies; otherwise, victory will be impossible.”10

After the Korean War, the Soviet Union under Khrushchev embarked upon a policy of “peaceful co-existence” between 1957 and 1960. “Mao wanted to lead not only the socialist camp but also other oppressed nations which were in contradistinction with

imperialism,” writes Sharma. Mao came to believe that the Soviet Union was no longer the leader of the socialist camp. Mao’s approach to economic development was to focus on agricultural reform, which resulted in his disastrous Great Leap Forward in the spring of 1958. The plan was to break up large landholdings and to establish agricultural communes using peasant workers. According to Sharma, this focus on the peasants rather than what she calls “Leninist elitism” represented “the end of Chinese reliance on the Soviet model.”11 Private livestock and plots of land were confiscated and mandatory hours of work were imposed insome cases around the clock. Because of the set-backs during the Great Leap forward, in December 1958 Mao resigned as Chairman of the People’s Republic of China, but he retained his position of Chairman of the Communist Party. By 1959 serious food shortages began to appear in China. Between 1959 and 1960 an estimated 20 million Chinese died of starvation. Another 5 million died the following year. The majority of the Chinese killed under Mao’s regime were the casualties of famine. The Chinese landlords as a class were eliminated and many of them were killed.12

After the first Taiwan Strait Crisis Mao decided to begin a Chinese nuclear weapons program. In 1958 with the help of Sovietadvisers construction began on uranium-enrichment plants in Baotou and Lazhou. In 1957 In exchange for uranium the Soviet Union agreed to provide a prototype bomb and in 1958 two R-2 missiles, By 1960 China had a plutonium facility in Jiuqan and a nuclear test site in Lop Nur. But as part of his policy of “peaceful coexistence,” Nikita Khrushchev told Mao that he planned to discuss an arms control deal with the United States and Britain, and in July 1960 Soviet assistance with the Chinese nuclear program was ended. Nevertheless, in October 1964 China conducted its first nuclear test without Soviet help. In the early 1980s China allegedly provided Pakistan with uranium enrichment technology, enriched uranium, and the design for a nuclear weapon.

In July 1962 Indian troops set up checkpoints on the disputeboundary between Tibet and India’ Northeast Frontier Agency. In October Mao sent 30,000 troops into the region, and by November

they defeated Indian forces there. In the fall of 1965 a conflictbetween India and Pakistan erupted over the disputed province ofKashmir. At the time India was allied with the Soviet Union, and Pakistan with China. India won this conflict, and, says Robert McNamara, “The net effect, geopolitically, was a gain for the Soviets and a loss for the Chinese.” McNamara adds that China also lost influence in Indonesia, when Indonesian Communist Party(PKI) unsuccessfully tried to overthrow the Indonesia leader Sukarno, who previously had been supportive of an alliance between China, Indonesia, North Vietnam, and Cambodia. Sukarno was eventually driven from power, and he was replaced by an Indonesian nationalist named Suharto. “In retrospect, one can seethe events of autumn 1965 as clear setbacks for China, which contributed to its turn inward and the Cultural Revolution the following year.”13

Concerned about revisionist tendencies within the party, in the spring of 1963 Mao launched his Socialist Education Movement in which party members were forced to participate in manual laboralongside workers and peasants. Liu and Deng initially opposed the effort, but Mao prevailed. In January 1967 Mao transformed the effort into what was called the Cultural Revolution, in whichrevolutionary committees were established in various provinces, and young revolutionary activists called the Red Guard forced compliance with the new rules. In May 1965 Chairman Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. It began with a purge of high officials in the government. Students in colleges, high schools, and even elementary schools were organized into vigilante groups known as the Red Guard, and then they attacked their teachers. The teachers were humiliated by having the hair on half their head shaved, being forced to kneel and wear dunce caps, and being forced to parade through the streets. Books, mahjong tiles, playing cards, and foreign cigarettes were piled up and burned.

“With Mao’s Cultural Revolution,” says Margaret Macmillan, “China virtually ceased to have a foreign policy at all, as its diplomats at all, as its diplomats were summoned home to be cleansed of imperfect attitudes. And the United States plunged

headlong into Vietnam. With American troops pouring into South Vietnam and American planes bombing the north, China could not abandon its ally North Vietnam and engage in talks with its enemy.” But, Macmillan argues, by the end of the 1960s both countries became more realistic about their relationships. “The Chinese and, most important, Mao, realized just how isolated theywere in the world. Among China’s neighbors only Pakistan was friendly; the Soviet Union was distinctly hostile, amassing vast armies along the common border and talking, none too quietly, about the possibility of a nuclear strike on China. The United Sates was not as friendless, but it was newly aware of its own vulnerabilities. Vietnam had fueled passionate debate and dissentat home; abroad, it had made both American friends and enemies wonder just how strong the superpower really was.”14

Henry Kissinger writes that: “Sino-Soviet hostility had manyroots. What started as a close alliance soon showed increasingly strains, which were at first papered over. There was an ideological disagreement over China’s claims to have achieved Communism without passing through the state of socialism—a doctrine of Mao Tse-tung’s that implied that Peking was ideologically more pure than Moscow. There was also a national rivalry between two powerful states, and a growing mistrust.”15 In the late 1950s Khrushchev refused nuclear cooperation with China. Then China demanded the return of Siberian territory seized by the tsars in previous centuries. Around 1959 border incidents increased in frequency, and in 1966 the Soviets transferred forces and equipment from Eastern Europe to the Far East, including nuclear surface-to-surface rockets. In January 1966 the Soviet Union signed a treaty of friendship, cooperation,and mutual aid with Mongolia that allowed the Soviets to station troops there.

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The border between the Soviet Union and China ran 4,000 miles mostly along the Argun, Amur, and Ussuri rivers. China maintained the border ran down the middle of Ussuri River, but the Soviets argued that the entire bed of the river was Russian territory. In March 1969 Chinese troops attacked a Russian patrolon an island in the river north of Vladivostok. While both sides withdrew from the island, Chinese demonstrators protested at the Soviet Embassy in Peking, and few days later there was a similar protest at the Chinese Embassy in Moscow. Kissinger writes that “the conflict with China must have occupied much of the attentionspan of Soviet leaders. Serious military clashes along the Sino-Soviet border in March and in the summer prompted a major propaganda battle, probably serious policy debates, and later theopening of border talks.”16

“Impelled by the obvious menace of the Soviet buildup on the4,000-mile common border,” writes Kissinger, “China wanted to reduce the number of its adversaries and to obtain another counterweight to Soviet pressure.”17 “Although Kissinger has since maintained that he and Nixon were always as one on the opening to China,” writes Macmillan, “the initiative clearly came from Nixon.” As early as October 1967 Nixon had broached the idea of a reconciliation with China. Nixon

first broached the idea to Kissinger in February 1969, and according to General Alexander Haig, who was then Kissinger’s aid, told him, “He has just ordered me to make this flight of fantasy come true.” 18 Kissinger later wrote: “Events came to our assistance, but I doubt whether the rapprochement could have occurred with the same decisiveness in any other Presidency. . . . But though I had independently come to the samejudgment as Nixon, and though I designed many of the moves, I didnot have the political strength or bureaucratic clout to pursue such a fundamental shift of policy on my own. Nixon viscerally understood the essence of the opportunity and pushed for it consistently. He had the political base on the right, which protected him from the charge of being ‘soft on Communism.’ And his administrative style lent itself to the secretive, solitary tactics the policy required. . . . Nixon saw in the opening to China a somewhat greater opportunity than I to squeeze the SovietUnion into short-term help on Vietnam.”19

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Robert Dallek says that Nixon chose William P. Rogers, who formerly had been Eisenhower’s attorney general, as his secretaryof state, because he “was determined to be his own secretary of state, with the support of national security advisers.”20 He gave

more authority to Henry Kissinger, who was Nixon’s assistant for National Security Affairs during his first administration. Kissinger was born in 1923 to a middle-class Orthodox Jewish family in the city of Furth in Bavaria, Germany. His first name was originally Heinz. His father was a schoolmaster in the state school in Furth, and his mother came from a wealthy family in thecattle trading business. When Hitler came to power in 1933, his father lost his job, but it wasn’t until 1938 when the Kissinger family moved to the United States, where they settled in the Washington Heights section of New York City. Heinz attended George Washington School and City College of New York. In 1943 Heinz was drafted into the U.S. Army, and he changed his name to Henry and became a naturalized American citizen. Kissinger was sent to Europe five months after the Normandy invasion, where he served as a German translator and then administrator of the city of Krefeld on the Rhine River. He soon was promoted into the Counter-Intelligence Corps.

After the war, he returned to the United Sates and was accepted to Harvard University in 1947 on the G.I. bill. He majored in Government, and his senior thesis was on “The Meaning of History: Reflections on Spengler, Toynbee, and Kant.” After graduating in 1950, Kissinger was offered a job as the executive director of the Harvard Summer International Seminary, which was funded by the Ford and Rockefeller foundations and the CIA. Through this program, Kissinger became acquainted with world leaders as wells as such American notables as Eleanor Roosevelt, columnist James Reston, labor leader Walter Reuther, sociologist David Riesman, and historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. At the same time, Kissinger wrote a Ph.D. dissertation titled “A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace, 1812-1822.” According to Robert Dalleck, “Kissinger saw a fundamental lesson in the European peace fashioned by Metternich:revolutionary states like Napoleonic France and Soviet Russia could not be accommodated by moralistic appeals or idealistic crusade. Only a reliance on balance-of-power diplomacy could defend the interests of nations hoping to preserve an existing world order.”21

In 1955 Kissinger wrote an article in Foreign Affairs in which he argued against the Eisenhower administration’s policy of “massive retaliation” as a deterrence against nuclear war. Instead, Kissinger argued for America to adopt a policy of fighting limited wars against Communist expansion in the Third World. The article resulted in Kissinger being invited by the Council on Foreign Relations to direct a study on how to integrate nuclear weapons into American foreign policy. The studyresulted in a book published in 1957 titled Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy. In it Kissinger argued for the use of tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons instead of massive retaliation. Kissinger came to the attention of Nelson Rockefeller, who was considering running for governor of New York in 1958 and possiblyfor the presidency in 1960. Rockefeller hired Kissinger to becomethe director of a project to develop papers by policy experts on American prospects. In 1957 Kissinger returned to Harvard as a lecturer in the Government Department. “In his eagerness for a White House appointment, Kissinger was cozing up to both Democrats and Republicans,” writes Dallek. “It reflected not onlyhis ambition but also his ambivalence about the candidates.”22 While secretly advising Nixon on foreign policy, he did not want to become part of Nixon’s campaign staff, because Humphrey had promised Kissinger that if won the election he would appoint Kissinger as his National Security adviser. He also had made somedisparaging remarks about Nixon not being fit to be president. All that changed when Nixon defeated Humphrey in the 1968 Presidential election.

The first official meeting between the United States and thePeople’s Republic of China took place in January 1970 in the Chinese Embassy in Warsaw. But there had been 134 previous unofficial meetings. Kissinger writes that “The main point of theprevious 134 meetings had been our relationship to Taiwan: a classic Catch-22 topic: no solution was conceivable so long as US-Chinese hostility persisted, and the hostility would not end so long as the Taiwan issue was unsettled.”23 At Warsaw the United States signaled its willingness to send an emissary to China. In February the Pakistani president, Yahya Khan, through aback channel indicated that that China continued to want indirect

communications with the United States. In October 1970 the Pakistani president Yahya Khan met with President Nixon at the White House prior to Khan’s visit to Peking. Nixon asked Khan to deliver a message that the United States considered a rapprochement with China to be essential. The response came through the Pakistani ambassador to the United States Agha Hilalythat China now as ready to receive in Peking a personal representative of President Nixon.

In April 1971 China announced that it was sending a team to the World Table Tennis Championship to be held in Nagoya, Japan. In what Kissinger called “Ping-Pong Diplomacy” the American players made friends and exchanged gifts with the Chinese players. Then, the Chinese team invited the American team to visit China. At the end of the visit during which Chou En-lai touted the beginning again of the friendship between the Chinese and American people, the American team invited the Chinese team to visit America. It was decided that Nixon would send Kissinger to China as his emissary to arrange a Presidential visit to China. Kissinger says that “[t]he State Department was , of course, unaware of the messages being passed—though it might havesensed that something was afoot from the Ping-Pong diplomacy and the many study memoranda on China policy with which we burdened the NSC [National Security Council] system. The one aspect of China policy unambiguously under its control was the issue of Chinese representation in the United Nations.”24

The Republic of China (or Nationalist China) was a founding member of the United Nations and a permanent member of the Security Council. After the Communist revolution in China in 1949, there was an annual vote in the General Assembly about whether the Republic of China on Taiwan or the People’s Republic of China in Peking should represent China. At first the resolution to decide in favor of Peking was voted down, but the admission of new African and Asian nations to the UN in the 1960smade this majority less likely. So in 1969 the United States and its allies introduced a resolution to make the representation of China an “Important Question” that required a two-thirds vote to pass.

In 1970 Secretary of State William Rogers sent a memo to Nixon stating that it was more and more likely that the pro-Peking nations would obtain their supermajority and perhaps the U.S. should consider changing its strategy to a “dual representation” strategy rather than seeing Peking admitted and Taiwan expelled. “The only thing wrong with dual representation,”writes Kissinger, “was that both Peking and Taipei rejected it and a majority for it was getting harder and harder to assemble.”25 This so-called “dual representation” position endorsed by the State Department would have been opposed by West Germany and South Korea. Nevertheless, in August the United States representative to the UN, George H.W. Bush (later President of the United States) introduced a resolution to admit Peking to the United Nations, but not to expel Taipei, and leaving the Security Council seat question to be settled by the General Assembly. The General Committee of the General Assembly decided to vote first a resolution introduced by the Balkan Communist country of Albania to admit Peking and expel Taipei.

The plan was that Kissinger would travel on what was called an “information” trip to Saigon, Bangkok, New Delhi, Islamabad, and Paris. Once he arrived in Islamabad, he would take a PakistanInternational Airlines plane secretly to Peking. Prior to the trip the United States would liberalize its economic relations with China as a good will gesture. On July 9th Kissinger and his entourage flew to Peking, where he met with Chou En-lai. He returned to Pakistan on July 11, and two days later briefed President Nixon in San Clemente, California. On July 15 PresidentNixon made a television announcement about Kissinger’s trip to China and the fact that Premier Chou En-lai has invited the President to visit China in an effort to normalize relationships between the two countries. In October Kissinger made a second trip to Peking to prepare the agenda for the Presidential visit. At the end of a series of meeting, a joint communiqué was issued,stating that ”[t]he United States acknowledges that that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Straits maintain that there is but one China. The United States Government does not challengethat position.”26 It became known as the Shanghai Communiqué.

While Kissinger and Chou En-lai were meeting, the United Nations passed the Albanian Resolution on October 25th expelling Taiwan and admitting Communist China to the United Nations.

“Events came to our assistance,” writes Kissinger, “but I doubt whether the rapprochement could have occurred with the samedecisiveness in any other Presidency. . . . But though I had independently come to the same judgment as Nixon, and though I designed many of the moves, I did not have the political strengthor bureaucratic clout to pursue such a fundamental shift of policy on my own. Nixon viscerally understood the essence of the opportunity and pushed for it consistently. He had the political base on the right, which protected him from the charge of being ‘soft on Communism.’ And his administrative style lent itself to the secretive, solitary tactics the policy required.”27 In the final communiqué following Nixon’s historic visit to China in February 1972 United States acknowledged that there were outstanding differences between China and the United States on issues related to Korea, Vietnam, and Taiwan, but the two countries agreed to renounce the use of force in settling these disagreements, to promote cultural exchanges and trade with either other.

In March Chou flew to Hanoi to brief the North Vietnamese onNixon’s visit to China. Although he reassured the North Vietnamese that China would continue to support them, he said that if the Indochina problem was not solved it would be impossible for China and the United States to have normal relations. “The Chinese Communists, for all their rhetoric about international revolution,” write Macmillan “tended to look out for China’s interests first. In 1954, because China was apprehensive that the conflict in Vietnam might draw it into a major war with the United States, Chou En-lai pressured the Vietnamese Communists to come to terms with the French and acceptthe establishment of Laos and Cambodia as neutral counties and the temporary division of Vietnam. The Vietnamese agreed, but it rankled ever after.”28 In his first meeting with Kissinger in 1971, Chou said that the Vietnamese must be allowed to choose itsown form of government without outside interference. He said that

it was wrong for Dulles to refuse to hold the elections scheduledfor 1954 and insisted that the United States withdraw all its troops and end its support for the Thieu government in South Vietnam and the Lon Nol regime in Cambodia.

During the 1968 presidential campaign Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic candidate, separated himself from Johnson, but promising to end the bombing of North Vietnam. Nixon, on the other hand, promised to “end the war and win the peace in the Pacific.” But he never said what was his “secret” plan to end the war. In March Johnson decided to cut back on the bombing and began preliminary talks for peace negotiations in Paris, which caused distress in the Nixon campaign. In September 1968, just prior to the Presidential election, Kissinger went to Paris, where he talked to some members of the American delegation. After his return, he secretly told Nixon’s campaign manager John Mitchell (later, his attorney general) that the Johnson administration was considering a bombing halt in an attempt to influence the outcome of the election. In late OctoberHanoi made a major concession in response to the bombing halt of allowing Saigon to participate in the peace negotiations. Nixon responded by pressuring the South Vietnamese government of NguyenVan Thieu to refuse to participate in the negotiations in Paris. In fairness to Nixon, he had been working since July 1968 with Bui Diem, South Vietnam’s ambassador to the United States, and Anna Chennault, the widow of General Claire Chennault, commander of the World War II Flying Tigers in China, to discourage South Vietnam to participate in the negotiations. Nixon then called Johnson and denied that he was doing anything to undercut the peace negotiations.

In the election Nixon defeated Humphrey by a narrow margin. Once in office, President Nixon and his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, decided on a two-prong policy for ending the war. First, the president would try to convince Russiaand China, although at odds with each other, to pressure Hanoi tomake peace. The second was to slowly withdraw American forces, while building up the South Vietnamese army in a policy that became known as “Vietnamization.” Nixon hoped to have American

troops out of the country within six months, but the negotiationswere at a stalemate over such details as the shape of the negotiation table. Furthermore, North Vietnam insisted that SouthVietnam’s president Nguyen Van Thieu resign and it refused to withdraw its troops as the American stepped down. Neither Nixon nor Kissinger had kind words for each other. Nixon called Kissinger his “Jew boy,” and Kissinger called Nixon “that madman,” “our drunken friend,” and “the meatball mind.” In fact, Nixon embraced the “madman” image, telling his chief of staff H. R. Haldeman that it would bring Ho Chi Minh to the negotiating table. “To give credibility to his ‘Madman theory,’ Nixon believed it was essential to increase the military pressure on the Communists in South Vietnam at once, but without provoking a break in negotiations.”29 However, Ho Chi Minh died in September 1969, and Le Duan, the General Secretary of the Central Committeeof the Vietnamese Communist Party, succeeded Ho in power.

In February 1969 the Communists began a new offensive against South Vietnam from sanctuaries in Cambodia. Cambodia’s leader, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, had being allowing North Vietnamto send supplies not only along the Ho Chi Minh Trail but also byway of the port of Sihanoukville on the coast of the Gulf of Thailand. In March the Viet Cong attacked Saigon, and Nixon ordered an air attack on the North Vietnamese headquarters in Cambodia. The air strikes were kept secret so as not to provoke additional anti-war protests in the United States. Two weeks after the air attack, North Vietnam agreed to bilateral talks with the United States in Paris. This convinced Nixon that the air attacks were effective in forcing negotiations. But the negotiations continued to go nowhere, and the administration increased the number of secret air attacks into Cambodia. In April the New York Times broke the story about the attacks, and Nixon and Kissinger were furious about who leaked the informationto the press. Nixon then authorized FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to tape the phones of administration officials suspected of beingthe source of the leaks with obtaining warrants. “Although Nixon justified the tapes as legal and essential to the national interest and in line with what earlier presidents had done,” writes Dallek,

“. . . they had less to do with national security or even politics that Nixon acknowledged. The principal motives for the taps were the Nixon-Kissinger compulsion to exercise as much control over foreign policy as possible, and Nixon’s long-standing animus toward the press.”30

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On May 14, 1969, President Nixon in a national televised speech announced a timetable for unilateral American withdrawal from Vietnam. Meanwhile, Nixon increased the amount of air strikes, not only in North Vietnam, but in Cambodia, where the Communists had supply routes into South Vietnam. The Cambodian attacks at first were kept secret from both American public and Congress. At the time Cambodia was a neutral country. Cambodia’s Prince Norodom Sihanouk had attended the Bandung Conference called by the Chinese Communists in April 1955 to create the nonaligned movement. By joining the neutral nations in the Cold War (along with India) Sihanouk hoped to gain aid from both the West and the Communist countries. In the early 1960s Sihanouk began to think that the Communists were about to achieve victory in Vietnam, so in 1963 he rejected American aid and in 1965 endeddiplomatic relations with the United States. In the same year he signed a military pact with China, allowed Vietnamese Communists to station troops on Cambodian territory.

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In November 1965 General Lon Nol, the chief of staff of the royal Khmer armed forces signed a secret military pact with Chinapermitting North Vietnamese to have safe passage and refuge in the border regions of Cambodia and allowing the transport of supplies from China to Vietnam. In exchange China promised economic aid to Cambodia. “Sihanouk certainly did not sign the treaty because he accepted Communist ideology,” writes Martin. “The West had not responded to his overtures. Besides, the Americans did not recognize Cambodia’s neutrality. Finally, the relation of forces in Vietnam had changed, and the Vietnamese were going to win.” Martin adds: “A turning point in Cambodia’s domestic politics came in 1966. In elections that year the right-wing Lon Nol administration won a majority in the Cambodian legislature.

General Lon Nol had been the governor of the province of Battambang. He had granted land concessions to military officers,but the peasants wanted the land returned to them even though they didn’t have titles of ownership. In early 1967 the peasants in the Samlaut subdivision of Battambang revolted. According to what inhabitants of Samlaut said in 1970, the first initiative for the rebellion was the peasants’ alone. They in no way challenged Sihanouk; they raised their stocks and machetes against the military officers who had taken their lands.”31 In April Lon Nol was forced to resign after a car crash in which he

was injured, and he was replaced in January 1968 by a government presided over by Sihanouk, who tried to suppress the rebellion. Instead the peasants’ rebellion spread to other parts of the country, especially to Ratanakiri province in the northeast, where the Montagnard people, where the government had taken theirland to enlarge rubber plantations. There the Pathet Lao (the Laotian Communists) and the Vietminh had been turning the Montagnard tribesmen against the central government of Cambodia. “Besides, these minorities felt closer to their counterparts living on the other side of the borders, in Vietnamese and Laotian territory, than to Cambodians,” says Martin.32

In 1967 Sihanouk had allowed the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NFL) to establish a permanent mission in Phnom Penh and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (i.e., Communist North Vietnam) to have an embassy there. Thinking that the UnitedStates might win the war in Vietnam, in 1969 Sihanouk condemned the Vietcong using sanctuaries in Cambodia, and in July he resumed diplomatic relations with the United States. However, MaoTse-tung’s Cultural Revolution in China prompted Sihanouk to change his policy, and he sought to resume diplomatic relations with the United States. In March 1970 there also was a coup in Cambodia against Prince Sihanouk, who was on vacation in France. General Nol persuaded the Cambodian assembly to remove Sihanouk from power and replace him with himself. Nol was an anti-Communist with ties to the South Vietnamese government and the United States military. “The role of the United States through these events was hardly as purposeful as some imagine, or as effectual as others pretend,” writes Kissinger. “Preoccupied withLaos for the first three months of the year, and with no intelligence in Phnom Penh, we found our perceptions lagging far behind events. We neither encouraged Sihanouk’s overthrow nor knew about it in advance.”33 The United States immediately recognized the new Khmer Republic. Sihanouk fled to Beijing, where he formed the National United Front of Kampuchea and lent his support to the Khmer Rouge in their effort to overthrow the Lon Nol government.

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“After the 1954 Geneva Agreement, which ended the French presence,’ writes Henry Kissinger, “the peace-loving peoples of Laos had the misfortune of being astride convenient routes by which North Vietnam could invade the South while bypassing the Demilitarized Zone set up by the agreement.”34 This supply route became known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In 1955 as part of Eisenhower’s containment policy, the United States Department of Defense replaced France in support of the Royal Lao Army against the communist Pathet Lao backed by North Vietnam and the Soviet Union. When John F. Kennedy became president in January 1961, Eisenhower told him that it was likely a Communist insurgency in Laos might succeed in overturning the “neutralist” government of Souvanna Phouma. One of Eisenhower’s advisers, Clark Clifford wrote a memorandum about the briefing. “President Eisenhower opened the discussion of Laos by stating that the United Sates was determined to preserve the independence of Laos. It was his opinion that if Laos should fall to the Communists, then it wouldbe just a question of time until South Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Burma would collapse. He felt that the Communists had designs on all of Southeast Asia, and that it would be a tragedy to permit Laos to fall.”35 By 1961 there was a civil war in Laos between the Pathet Lao in the northeast, the neutralist

forces on the Plain of Jars in central Laos, and the right-wing forces along the Mekong River forming the southwest border with Thailand. North Vietnam had more than 6,000 troops supporting thePathet Lao.

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The Special Activities Division of the Central Intelligence Agency began recruiting and training of a “secret army” composed of indigenous Hmong people under the command of General Vang Pao to oppose the North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao troops and to interdict the supplies along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The Hmong arean ethnic group from the mountainous regions of China, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. They speak a language that is part of the Hmong-Mien linguistic family. The Hmong are known for their brightly-colored embroidered textiles known as paj ntau (literally, “flower cloth”). These skirts were worn for courtshipduring the Hmong New Year festivals. They have a vocal musical tradition consisting of spirit invocation songs, wedding songs, invitation songs, weeping songs, and narrative songs used along with story cloths to pass down their history and culture. Their musical instruments consists of various reed and wind instruments, one of the most interesting of which is the nplooj (abanana leaf held over the mouth to make various tones related to the Hmong language). Their traditional religion combined animism,shamanism, reincarnation, and ancestor veneration, although many

were converted to Christianity by missionaries beginning in the early nineteenth century The Hmong are thought of have originatedin the Yellow River region of China, where those who remain are considered by the Han Chinese called them Miao (literally, “barbarian” or “savage”). During the Qing Dynasty in the eighteenth century the Han Chinese persecuted them, and they began to migrate to southeast Asia. Between 1919 and 1921 the Hmong revolted against the French colonial authorities in Indochina in what the French called La Guerre du Fou (“The Madman’s War”) but what the Hmong called Rog Paj Cai (“Paj Cai’s War” named after the rebel leader Paj Cai).

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In May 1962 President Kennedy sent 5,000 U.S. Marines to Thailand as a show of force, and in August an agreement was signed in Geneva, Switzerland, by fourteen nations, including North Vietnam and the Soviet Union, for Laos to establish neutralgovernment under Prince Souvanna Phouma that was to include all three factions. But in April 1963 the coalition fell apart, and the fighting resumed with the North Vietnamese sending additional

troops and the United States pledging its support to Premier Souvanna Phouma. The same policy toward Laos was followed by the Johnson and Nixon administrations. In the words of Henry Kissinger, “Our purpose was to maintain a neutralist government and also to secure Souvanna’s acquiescence in or efforts to interdict the Ho Chi Minh Trail.”36

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In February 1969 Nixon ordered bombing raids on Communist forces in Laos, in order to counter a suspected spring offensive in South Vietnam. In March the New York Times reported that the United States was bombing Laos, and in answer to questions raisedby the Times story, Nixon said that there were no U.S. ground forces in Laos, though there were about a thousand U.S. military advisers there. By the winter of 1970, 84 percent of Americans favored a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam.37 In January 1970 Nixon proposed renewed secret talks in Paris with Le Duc Tho. Kissinger secretly flew to Paris to meet with Le Duc Tho. Intheir meeting North Vietnam dropped a number of their preconditions for negotiations, but by April it became clear thatthe talks were still unproductive. “In my talks in Paris with North Vietnamese emissary Le Duc Tho,” says Kissinger, “he rejected neutrality for both Cambodia and Laos, and emphasized

that it was his people’s destiny not merely to take over South Vietnam but to dominate the whole of Indochina.”38

North Vietnam and the Pathet Lao launched another attempt toretake control of the Plain of Jar in February 1971. As the Pathet Lao began to threaten the capital city of Vientiane, Thai volunteers joined the effort to turn them back. Premier Souvanna Phouma requested that the United State launch B-52 air strikes against the Communists. The Nixon administration approved attackson Communist bases and supply routes in Laos by South Vietnamese troops backed by American artillery and air support. At the same time South Vietnamese troops crossed the border into southern Laos in order to close the supply routes on the Ho Chi Minh trailthere. Up until then the United States involvement in Laos had been kept secret, but there was a public outcry when these bombing raids became known. The Democrats in Congress introduced legislation forbidding United States involvement in and support of the South Vietnamese military action there. The operation became a disaster, as the North Vietnamese repelled the South Vietnamese forces (ARVN), which were forced to retreat to the American air base at Khe Sanh. But Nixon refused to acknowledge the defeat and attacked newspaper and television reporters who stated otherwise. Both Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird and Secretary of State Rogers opposed the action.

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Meanwhile Lon Nol sent Cambodian troops against the Khmer Rouge (the Cambodian Communists) and the North Vietnamese in Cambodia. Sihanouk then formed an alliance with the Chinese, the North Vietnamese, and the Khmer Rouge. Concerned about a possibleCommunist takeover in Cambodia, in April Nixon issued a National Security Directive authorizing an American attack on Cambodia’s Fish Hook region while the South Vietnamese attacked the Parrot’ Beak to the south. When news broke about the South Vietnamese assault on the Parrot’s Beak, Nixon suspected that Laird and Rogers had leaked the information. When American troops crossed into Cambodia, Nixon went on television to explain that his decision in order “to protect our men . . . in Vietnam and to guarantee the continued success of our withdrawal and Vietnamese programs.”39 Congress then passed a law preventing the president from sending any more troops into Cambodia. Students at American colleges responded to the Cambodian invasion with demonstrations,culminating in May with four student protesters being shot and killed by National Guard troops at Kent State University in Ohio.

In June 1971 the New York Times began publishing excerpts fromThe Pentagon Papers, a secret history of the Vietnam War preparedfor Robert McNamara. Nixon initiated an investigation of who was responsible for the leak, and Daniel Ellsberg was implicated as the person who possibly copied the papers at the Rand Corporationin Santa Monica, California. The attorney general, John Mitchell,attempted to stop the Times from continuing to publish the paper,but the Supreme Court ruled that it had a First Amendment right to continue. Nixon also tried to discredit Ellsberg in the press as he had done with Alger Hiss, and he authorized a break-in in Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office.

1972 was the year of a presidential election. Dallek says that “Nixon understood that to win reelection in 1972 he needed to focus less on disgruntled conservatives, who seemed unlikely to desert him, than on the broad electoral center, which principally wanted to end the Vietnam War.”40 In March North Vietnam launched another offensive against South Vietnam by crossing the DMZ to the north, across the Laotian

border against the Highlands, and across the Cambodian border toward Saigon. The United States responded sea and air attacks. According to Dallek, “It is understandable that Nixon and Kissinger saw the collapse of Vietnam in 1972 as impermissible. It seemed certain to undermine Nixon’s reelection bid and furtherdemoralize the country, which had lost over fifty thousand lives in the war, including more than twenty thousand during Nixon’s tenure.” 41In May Nixon decided to mine Haiphong harbor and bombing North Korea’s rail lines.

In the presidential election, the Democratic candidate, George McGovern promised the end the war in Vietnam within ninetydays of becoming president. But Nixon’s China trip and improved relations with the Soviet Union gave Nixon an advantage. Despite this advantage his Committee to Reelect the President authorized a break-in at the Democratic campaign headquarters in the Watergate complex in June, in which the burglars were caught. In September the Democratic National Committee brought a civil suit against the Committee to Reelect the President, but the judge postponed the case until after the November election. Kissinger held a televised press conference in later October in which he stated that that “peace is at hand.” “His object, Henry explainedlater, was to compel Thieu and American conservatives to accept the agreement and to reassure Hanoi that the remaining differences were relatively minor,” writes Dallek. “He had nothing to say, however, about serving Nixon’s election prospectsby convincing voters that the president had honored his promise to end the war.”42 Nixon won the election on November 7th by a wide margin.

Contrary Kissinger’s press conference, peace was not at hand, and negotiations in Paris dragged on. In December the United States resumed massive bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong, but Thieu refused to agree to anything short of the complete evacuation of North Vietnamese troops from the south. When Hanoi agreed to resume talks in January 1973, the United States decidedto halt bombing against the North. Kissinger and Le Duc Tho then reached an agreement on a final settlement, without South Vietnambeing present, and Nixon sent Colonel Alexander Haig, who then

Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, to Saigon to inform Thieu that the United States was prepared to sign the agreement with or without South Vietnam. The agreement permitted the Communists to continue to occupy part of the South.It called for a cease-fire, the U.S. recognition of the “unity” of all Vietnam, the withdrawal of U.S. forces and dismantling of U.S. bases, the return of U.S. prisoners, South Vietnam’s to self-determination, Thieu’s remaining in power until elections, establishing a provisional demilitarized zone between north and south, and allowing North Vietnamese troops to remain in the south. Thieu was forced to accept the deal by the Americans. However, the agreement quickly broke down as fighting resumed between Vietnamese and Communist troops.

Despite the peace agreement, the fighting continued in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge in Cambodia continued to fight to overthrow Lon Nol, and Nixon ordered bombing strikes against North Vietnamese troops who continued to fight in Laos to overthrow Souvanna Phouma’s neutralist government. While the bombing in Laos resulted in a cease-fire inFebruary, North Vietnam didn’t remove its troops from the country. Kissinger flew to North Vietnam to meet with its Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, who promised to implement the Paris agreement. “Hanoi’s objective in encouraging impressions of a durable peace through Henry’s visit and the communiqué,” writes Dallek “was to hold the Americans at bay while it moved doggedly toward conquest of the South and dominance in Indochina.”43 Not only was Hanoi continuing to send supplies to their troops in thesouth, Thieu government continued to fight North Vietnamese troops in violation of the Paris agreement.

Meanwhile, newspaper reports about the Watergate break-in had led to a Senate investigation of the matter chaired by Democrat Sam Ervin of North Carolina. In March James McCord, one of the Watergate burglars told the judge who was about to sentence him to prison that senior White House officials and members of the Committee for the Re-election of the President hadprior knowledge of the break-in. Nixon thereupon in May asked forthe resignation his chief of staff J. R. Haldeman, and he fired

his domestic councilor John Ehrlichman, and his legal councilor John Dean. In June Dean told the Washington Post that Nixon knew about the cover-up of the Watergate break-in. Then in July the Ervin committee learned that there was a secret audio taping system in the Oval Office. Harvard Law professor Archibald Cox, who had been appointed special Watergate prosecutor by Nixon’s new attorney general, Elliot Richardson, subpoenaed the tapes, but Nixon refused to turn them over citing executive privilege. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals then ordered the White House torelease the tapes. In October Nixon ordered Richardson to fire Cox, but Richardson refused and offered his resignation. William Ruckelshaus also refused, but the solicitor general Robert Bork agreed, and he fired Cox and Ruckelhaus in what became known as the “Saturday Night Massacre.” Later that month the House Judiciary Committee chaired by Democrat Congressman Peter Rodino of New Jersey, opened impeachment hearings against Nixon.

“Nixon hoped to press home the theme that foreign affairs were much more important than Watergate. He aimed to replace front-page stories about the scandal with new of William Roger’s resignation as secretary of state and Henry Kissinger’s appointment as his successor,” writes Dallek. Nixon held on to power until August 8, 1973, when he said in a televised speech that as of the next day he would resign the presidency. Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, had resigned in the face of evidenceof wrong-doing when he was the governor of Maryland. Nixon then asked Congress to confirm the Republic House minority leader, Gerald Ford of Michigan, as vice president. October Kissinger andLe Duc Tho were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. “Kissinger believed that Nixon received the news with mixed feelings. He yearned to be seen as a great American peacemaker, but the show of Watergate deterred the Nobel committee from giving Nixon his due. . .”44

Gerald Ford took the oath of office on August 9, but Congress cut financial aid to South Vietnam from $1 billion to $700 million a year. At the midterm elections in 1974 the Democrats took control of Congress and voted to restrict funding and military activities to be phased in through 1975 with a total

end to funding in 1976. In December the North Vietnamese attackedRoute 14 in Phuoc Long Province, and in January 1975 they took control of Phuoc Binh, the provincial capital. President Ford asked Congress for funds to assist the government of South Vietnam, but Congress refused. In the spring of 1975 North Vietnamese troops in violation of the agreement invaded the south, took control of Hue in March, and by April Saigon fell to the Communists. President Thieu resigned, accused the United States of betraying South Vietnam, and blamed Henry Kissinger of forcing him to sign the Paris agreements two years early. Kissinger’s last word on Vietnam was the following: “I believed then, and I believe now, that the agreement could have worked. Itreflected a true equilibrium of forces on the ground. If the equilibrium were maintained, the agreement could have been maintained. We believed that Saigon was strong enough to deal with guerilla war and low-level violation. The implicit threat ofour retaliation would be likely to deter massive violations. . . . Hanoi was indeed instructing its cadres in the South to prepare for a long period of political competition. We would use our new relationship with Moscow and Peking to foster restraint.”45

Prior to the fall of Saigon almost 400 U.S. citizens and 5,600 Vietnamese and other nations were evacuated to U.S. Navy ships located offshore. As many as 130,000 Vietnamese refugees intotal were permitted to enter the United States under the Indochina Migration and Refugee Act of 1975. After the reunification of Vietnam under Le Duan, the Communist government launched a campaign of forced collectivization of farms and factories. About a million South Vietnamese were sent to re-education camps, and between 100,000 and 200,000 South Vietnamesewere executed. In 1979 Chinese troops briefly invaded Vietnam, which forced Vietnam to rely more heavily on Soviet economic and military aid.

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Meanwhile, in Cambodia in April 1975 the Khmer Rouge took control of the capital of Phnom Pen and renamed the country Kampuchea. Prince Sihanouk became the symbolic head of state, butreal power was held by the so-called “Gang of Five”--Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, their wives (Khieu Ponnary and Khieu Thirith, respectively, who were sisters), and Khieu Samphan (no relations to two the sisters). Pol Pot was born in Kampong Thum Province northeast of Phnom Penh. He attended a technical high school in Phnom Penh, and in 1949 went to Paris to study. There he was exposed to the writings of Karl Marx. The Khmer Rouge forced Sihanouk out of office, and he went into exile first in China andthen in North Korea. Fearing that they could not maintain controlover their opponents, the Khmer Rouge took the radical step of forcing everyone in the cities to relocate. The townspeople were forced to work in the rice fields where they had no experience inpart to humiliate them. Their diet was reduced to starvation levels.

The relocation policy was especially hard on the Chinese andVietnamese. The Khmer Rouge also demolished Buddhist pagodas and forced the monks to work in the rice fields. If the monks protested, they were killed. According to Martin, “the Khmer

Rouge simply wanted to transform them into producers and to eradicate Buddhism.” 46 The Muslim Khmers (Chams) were also persecuted. Pigs were raised in their mosques, and the Chams wereforced to eat pork. Following border clashes Vietnam invaded Cambodia in December 1978. It ousted the Khmer Rouge and installed Heng Samrin as the head of the People’s Republic of Kamuchea (PRK). At this point Sihanouk joined forces with the Khmer Rouge in an attempt to force the Vietnamese out of Cambodia. In 1982 Sihanouk attempted to form his own Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK), consisting of his own National Army (ANS), the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front(KPNLF), and the Khmer Rouge.

In Laos the Pathet Lao and the Vietnam People’s Army with Soviet aid took control of the country in December 1975. Under Kaysone Phomvihane the new government renamed the country the Lao People’s Democratic Republic and signed agreements allowing Communist Vietnam to station armed forces and advisers in the country. In 1979 at the urging of Vietnam, Laos suspended its relations in Communist China. In the war between the Pathet Lao and the North Vietnamese, the Meo allied themselves with the United States, resulting in the North Vietnamese invading the Meoprovince of Xieng Khoung. The Kha, on the other hand, were alliedwith the North Vietnamese because the Ho Chi Minh trails crossed the Kha region. Many Laotian and Hmong refugees crossed the Mekong River and sought asylum in Thailand. Beginning in December1975 about 3,500 Hmong refugees were allowed into the United States under the Indochina Migration and Refugee Assistance Act. By 1978 about 30,000 Hmong had immigrated to the United States. The Refugee Act of 1980 allowed for a second wave of Hmong immigrations. Thailand attempted to close the refugee camps within its border by 1996, and the Laotian government was willingto repatriate more than 60,000 refugees, but many refused forcible repatriated. In 2003 the United States agreed to accept 15,000 additional Hmong refugees. Many of the Hmong refugees weremember or relatives of the former-CIA secret Amy. Today, there are about 260,000 Hmong people in the United States, mainly in California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

Yet despite being a Communist countries, Laos and Vietnam realized that free trade would win out over ideology. In 1975 Lao People’s Democratic Republic became a founding member of the Asia-Pacific Trade Agreement (APTA) along with Bangladesh, India,the Republic of Korea, and Sri Lanka. And in 2013 Laos became a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO). In Vietnam at the Sixth National Congress of the Communist Party of Vietnam in December 1986 Vietnamese reformist led by the new general secretary of the party instituted a series of free-market reformsknown as the “Renovation,” under which the planned economy was transformed into a “socialist-oriented market economy.” The United States policy was that it wouldn’t normalize relations with Vietnam until it withdrew if forces from Cambodia, which it did in 1989, leaving hind a pro-Vietnamese government under ex-Khmer Rouge Hun Sen. In 1991 the CGDK and the PRK agreed in Paristo a settlement, and Prince Sihanouk returned to Cambodia, where in 1993 he was reinstated as king. The Khmer Rouge continued as aresistance movement in western Cambodia with bases in Thailand. In 1995 the United States normalized diplomatic relations with Vietnam. In 1996 Pol Pot formally dissolved the organization after a peace agreement. Pol Pot died in April 1998. According tothe U.S. State Department, the market reforms Vietnam instituted in the 1980s “opened up the country for foreign investment, and improved the business climate. It became one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. Vietnam's rapid economic transformation and global integration has lifted millions out of poverty and has propelled the country to the ranks of lower-middle-income status.”47

The United States established a bi-lateral trade agreement with Vietnam in 2001, and in 2008 Vietnam joined the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) along with eleven other Pacific Rim countries including the United States. In July 2015 President Barack Obama hosted Nguyen Phu Trong, the head of Vietnam’s Communist Party, at the White House. According to the New York Times, “The meeting showed Mr. Obama’s strong commitment to building deeper partnerships in Asia. The intent is to balance China’s growing economic, military and political clout and guarantee regional stability. Despite longstanding ties between

Vietnam and China, many Vietnamese are anxious about China’s increasing assertiveness, especially in the South China Sea. . . . Within the last two years, Vietnam has become the United States’ largest trading partner in Southeast Asia, with two-way trade totaling $35 billion last year. That trade is projected to grow to $57 billion by 2020.”48

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Zhou Enlai died in January 1976. Mao died in September of the same year. Within weeks of his death, his wife Jiang Qing wasarrested. In 1978 Deng Xiaoping, who had won a power struggle with Mao Zedong’s successor Hua Guofeng, initiated a Ten-Year Plan for Economic Development. China was just recovering from theeconomic disruption caused by Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which collectivized China’s agriculture. Deng replaced agricultural communes with work groups in which each group would profit from their allotted strip of land, which remained owned by the state. This quickly was transformed into family plots. James Kynge says that there were “similar types of subterfuge” in China’s businessthat were “state-owned on paper but capitalist and privately owned in reality.” The free-market reforms during the 1980s were based, according to Kynge, on “the willingness of local officials

to disobey Beijing.”49 In the 1990s local governments establishedunlicensed development parks by offering investors incentives that were in fact illegal. At first there was an unemployment crisis in the late 1970s as 7 million educated young people who had been sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution returned to the cities. They formed the basis for the small private businesses that developed in the 1980s. In the late 1990sthe Chinese started building a series of expressways that have opened up new markets in the interior of China.

However, China’s rapid development has been at the expense of the environment. The use of agricultural chemicals has polluted China’s waterways, and its coal-fired industries have polluted its air. In addition China has been clear cutting its forests for its furniture and papermaking industries, not just inChina but in Indonesia, Myanmar, central Africa, Siberia, and Latin America. Kynge contrast the Japanese emergence as an economic powerhouse in the 1980s to the Chinese in the 1990s. Japan’s was based on the development of four decades of its brands, such as Sony, Hitachi, Sharp, Toyota, and Honda. Because China’s development was so fast, it did not establish its own brands. Instead it purchased foreign brands, such as the Chinese computer company Lenovo purchasing IBM’s personal computer unit. the exception are the Chinese monopolies, such as PetroChina, China Telecom, and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC). Kynge says that there is an “overarching contradiction” in the fact that “China tries to run an increasingly sophisticated capitalist economy with a political system that wasdesigned to issue crisp commands from a single source of authority, and to be obeyed.”50 An example of this is the fact that China artificially keeps the value of the renminbi (its basic unit of currency) artificially low in order to increase exports. It also follows a protectionist policy towards its own industries.

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In April 1989 demonstrations erupted in Tiananmen Square against nepotism and corruption within the government. In May thegovernment declared martial law, but the military was blocked from advancing into the Beijing. In June more than 200,000 soldiers in tanks and helicopters forcibly went into the city resulting in thousands of casualties. After the Tiananmen Square protests, Deng decided to retire from top positions in the government, and in 1992 he retired completely from politics. He died in February 1997. Following his death, China had a series ofleaders for brief periods.

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In July 1997 Britain turned over its colony of Hong Kong to China, which it had occupied since 1842. Hong Kong had Asia’s third most prosperous economy after Japan and Singapore. China joined the Asia-Pacific Trade Agreement in 2001, and Mongolia in 2013. As of 2014 China has the world’s second largest economy after the United States. It is a member of the World Trade Organization, and it is the world’s largest trading power. In 2009 it was the largest foreign holder of United States public debt. In November 2012 Xi Jinping became the leader of the Communist Party in China and in March 2013 the new president of China. He rejected the policy of his predecessor Deng Xiaoping toseparate the Communist Party from the government. However, in thesummer of 2015 the Chinese stock market experienced turbulence due to a bubble in which speculators borrowed money in order to buy stock.

There are lessons for the present to be learned from the watershed changes resulting from President Richard M. Nixon’s trip to China in 1972 and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s trip to Paris in 1973 to negotiate a unilateral American withdrawal from Vietnam. It took a brilliant Nixon, who had been a strong anti-Communist as a Congressman, Senator, and then Vice President, to see that more important than anti-Communist ideology the growing strategic gulf between the Soviet Union and China created a wedge that might open the door to an American withdrawal from Vietnam. Few realize how far-seeing Nixon was in his breaking with twenty-four years of foreign policy in both Republican and Democratic administrations in whichthe United States supported the corrupt Nationalist government ofChiang Kai-shek on the island of Taiwan and refused to recognize the Communist regime on the mainland.

While Nixon wanted to withdraw from Vietnam ever since his election in 1968, he and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger followed a policy that the only way to bring Communist North Vietnam to the negotiating table was to bomb North Vietnam and the supply route through Laos and Cambodia known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. This failed policy brought down the nominally neutralist regimes in Laos and Cambodia (formerly part along withVietnam of the French colony of Indochina). In doing so, they failed to understand the cultural and historic differences between Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, especially the facts that throughout its history Laos had been invaded by Siam (present-dayThailand) and Vietnam and the Cambodians and the Vietnamese had been traditional enemies.

The tragedy of Richard Nixon was that despite his brave foreign policy decision to recognize Communist China, his tragic flaw, which he eventually came to realize, was that if you hate your political enemies it would destroy you. The Watergate scandal in which a minor break-in of the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington, DC, during the 1972 presidential election (which incidentally, Nixon won) became an illegal cover-up by Nixon’s top aids with Nixon’s knowledge resulted in his impeachment trial and subsequent resignation in August 1973. His successor, Vice President Gerald Ford, was hampered by a Congress dominated by anti-war Democrats, which resulted in the fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese Communists in April 1975, the conquest of Cambodia by the Communist Khmer Rouge in the same month, and the takeover of Laos by the Communist Pathet Lao in December. But strategic interests took precedence over Communism, when Vietnam invaded Cambodia in December 1978 in an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the government of the Khmer Rouge.

What vindicated of Nixon’s foreign policy foresight was thatafter the death of Mao Tse-tung in September 1976, his successor Den Xiaoping embarked upon a policy of a capitalist economy with a Communist form of government. But Deng’s government was characterized by corruption, nepotism, political repression, resulting in the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 followed by

Deng’s resignation. His successors continued his economic policies, including China’s present leader Xi Jinping. In the long run, Communism proved to be unsustainable as an economic system, and these so-called Communists countries of China and Vietnam embraced a form of Communist Capitalism. And yet, despitebecoming the world’s largest economy after the United States, theCommunist China continued to make the same mistakes that unregulated Capitalism made in the nineteenth century, including currency manipulation, copyright infringements, environmental pollution, and stock market speculation.

One lesson from the Cold War is that the nuclear arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States led China, initially with Soviet help before 1960, to develop a nuclear weapon in 1964. Then, the United States, Britain, and Canada supplied India with the technology intended for peaceful uses, but which enabled India to test a nuclear bomb in 1974. In response, China provided Pakistan with the technology that helpedit test its own bomb in 1998. Pakistan then provided the technology that helped Communist North Korea to explode its nuclear device in 2006. Today, the United States is trying to ratify an agreement that would prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon over the next ten years, even though the United States acquiesced to the fact that Israel had developed a nuclearbomb in 1966, which Israel has never admitted to possessing. The only long-term solution to nuclear proliferation is that all nations, including the United States, Russia, China, and Israel, agree to destroy and ban the use of nuclear weapons. This could be enforced by United Nations sanctions against those nations that refuse to comply.

But the most important lesson for today is to understand that the mistake was not America’s unilateral withdrawal from Vietnam, but America’s obsession with stopping the spread of Communism, which put us in the position of inheriting the cause of the French colonialism in opposition to self-determination forthe Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian people. In doing so, the Communists were able to become the champions of national liberation. Today, we face a similar situation. We have allowed

the ideology of a War on Terrorism to put us in a situation of defending borders in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan created by the colonialist powers of Britain and France, which has divided peoples who don’t want to be in the same country. Like Vietnam, the problem is not that we are unilaterally withdrawing from Iraqand Afghanistan, but that we got involved in defending these artificial countries in the first place.

1 Nixon in China: A Opera in Three Acts, music by John Adams, libretto by AliceGoodman (1987),http://cdn.orastream.com/pdf/730099902274.pdf

2 Margaret MacMillan, Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2007), pp. 30, p. 4.

3 Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1979), p. 165.

4 Dwight D. Eisenhower, Mandate for Change, 1953-1956: The White House Years (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1963), p. 123.

5 Ibid., p. 461.

6 Ibid., p. 469.

7 Commission of Presidential Debates, October 7, 1960 Debate Transcript,http://www.debates.org/index.php?page=october-7-1960-debate-transcript

8 “Why We Are For Nixon,” Chicago Tribune (October 30, 1960), p. 1.http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1960/10/30/page/1/article/why-we-are-for-nixon

9 Ram Naresh Sharma, Mao: The Man and His Thought (Patna, India: Janaki Prakashan, 1991), p. 220.

10 Quoted in ibid., p. 226.

11 Ibid., pp. 227, 45.

12 Philip Short, Mao: A Life (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000),pp. 505, 632.

13 Robert S. McNamara with Brian VanDeMark, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1995), pp. 214, 215.

14 MacMillan, op. cit., pp. xix, xix-xx.

15 Kissinger, op. cit., p. 166.

16 Ibid., p. 160.

17 Ibid., p. 685.

18 MacMillan, op. cit., p. 56.

19 Kissinger, op. cit., pp. 163, 164.

20 Robert Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), p. 82.

21 Ibid., pp. 45-46.

22 Ibid., p. 70.

23 Kissinger, op. cit., p. 684.

24 Ibid., p. 719.

25 Ibid., p. 772.

26 Ibid., p. 783.

27 Ibid., p. 163.

28 MacMillan, op. cit., p. 265.

29 Dallek, op. cit., pp. 93, 107.

30 Ibid., p. 124.

31 Martin, op. cit., pp. 110, 93, 113.

32 Ibid., p. 114.

33 Kissinger, op. cit., p. 463.

34 Ibid., pp. 448-450.

35 Quoted in William Appleman Willians, Thomas McCormick, Lloyd Gardner, and Walter LaFeber, eds. America in Vietnam: A Documentary History (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1985), p. 186.

36 Kissinger, op. cit., p. 450.

37 Dallek, op. cit., p. 183.

38 Kissinger, op. cit., p. 433.

39 Dallek, op. cit., p. 199.

40 Ibid., p. 354.

41 Ibid., p. 372.

42 Ibid., p. 428.

43 Ibid., p. 465.

44 Ibid., pp. 505, 516.

45 Kissinger, op. cit., p. 1470.

46 Marie Alexandrine Martin, Cambodia: A Shattered Society, Mark W. McLeod, trans. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 157, 183.

47 “U.S. Relations with Vietnam: Fact Sheet,” Bureau of East Asian andPacific Affairs, U.S. State Department, February 11, 2015, http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/4130.htm

48 “Common Ground for Vietnam and the U.S.,” New York Times Editorial, (July 8, 2015), p. A20.

49 James Kynge, China Shakes the World: A Titan’s Rise and Troubled Future—and the Challenge for America (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), pp. 13, 14.

50 Ibid., p. 183.