INDOCHINA RESEARCH MONOGRAPH Ji/t INSTITUTE OF EAST ASIAN STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA • BERKELEY The Search for a Negotiated Settlement of the Vietnam War ALLAN E. GOODMAN INSTITUTE OF EAST ASIAN STUDIES UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY The Institute of East Asian Studies was established at the University of Califor nia, Berkeley, in the fall of 1978 to promote research and teaching on the cultures and societies of China, Japan, and Korea. It amalgamates the following research and instructional centers and programs: Center for Chinese Studies, Center for Japanese Studies, Center for Korean Studies, Group in Asian Studies, East Asia National Resource Center, and Indochina Studies Project. INSTITUTE OF EAST ASIAN STUDIES Director: Robert A. Scalapino Associate Director: John C. Jamieson Assistant Director: Ernest J. Notar Executive Committee: Joyce K. Kallgren Herbert P. Phillips John C. Jamieson Irwin Scheiner Michael C. Rogers Chalmers Johnson Robert Bellah Frederic Wakeman, Jr. CENTER FOR CHINESE STUDIES Chair: Joyce K. Kallgren CENTER FOR JAPANESE STUDIES Chair: Irwin Scheiner CENTER FOR KOREAN STUDIES Chair: Michael C. Rogers GROUP IN ASIAN STUDIES Chair: Lowell Dittmer EAST ASIA NATIONAL RESOURCE CENTER Director: John C. Jamieson INDOCHINA STUDIES PROJECT Director: Douglas Pike The Search for a Negotiated Settlement of the Vietnam War A publication of the Institute of East Asian Studies University of California Berkeley, California 94720 The Indochina Monograph series is the newest of the several publications series sponsored by the Institute of East Asian Studies in conjunction with its constituent units. The others include the China Research Monograph series, whose first title appeared in 1967, the Korea Research Monograph series, the Japan Research Monograph series, and the Research Papers and Policy Studies series. The Insti tute sponsors also a Faculty Reprint series. Correspondence may be sent to: Ms. Joanne Sandstrom, Editor Institute of East Asian Studies University of California Berkeley, California 94720 INDOCHINA RESEARCH MONOGRAPH INSTITUTE OF EAST ASIAN STUDIES A UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA • BERKELEY The Search for a Negotiated Settlement of the Vietnam War ALLAN E. GOODMAN Although the Institute of East Asian Studies is responsible for the selection and acceptance of manuscripts in this series, responsibility for the opinions expressed and for the accuracy of statements rests with their authors. Allan E. Goodman is associate dean of the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and director of the Master of Science in Foreign Service program there. He founded the "Women in Foreign Service" pro gram designed to enhance the operational effectiveness of women in inter national service careers, public or private. Dr. Goodman is also on the faculty of the Foreign Service Institute of the Department of State and is co-director of the Georgetown Leadership Seminar. He serves as a consultant to the Rockefeller Foundation, Levi- Strauss, the U.S. Army's Center of Military History, and the Inter-Matrix Group, and is on the editorial boards of the Asian Survey and World Affairs journals. The author of five books and more than forty articles on international affairs. Dr. Goodman now does a weekly commentary on foreign affairs for the Voice of America's "Viewpoints" program. Copyright © 1986 by the Regents of the University of California All rights reserved ISBN 0-912966-90-4 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 86-81533 Printed in the United States of America Contents Acknowledgments vii Preface ix Map xii I. 1962-1965: First Contacts 1 II. 1965-1968: The Search for Negotiations Protracts the War 9 III. 1968: Fighting while Negotiating 37 IV. 1969-1972: The Nixon Administration's Search for a Negotiated Settlement 47 V. From Breakthrough to Breakdown 75 VI. From the Breakdown to the Christmas Bombing 93 VII. What Went Wrong? 113 Appendix 119 Selected Bibliography 122 Acknowledgments The Lost Peace: America's Search for a Negotiated Settlement of the Vietnam Warwas originally published by the Hoover Institution Press in 1978 and focused on what was known through 1975 about the di plomacy behind the longest, most costly, least successful war in U.S. history. This monograph is an abridgement of my original account and highlights the major forces that shaped Washington's search for a negotiated settlement and motivated Hanoi's repeated rejection of one. I am very grateful to the Institute of East Asian Studies for the chance to publish a text which can be used in today's classroom at a time of renewed interest in the Vietnam war and to the Hoover Insti tution for their permission to draw extensively on the manuscript of Lost Peace. I am also grateful to my students at Georgetown, espe cially Matthew Doyle and Linda Powers who helped check my facts against recent research and who suggested how the story of the negotiations could be presented to a generation for whom the Viet nam War is ancient history. Preface The American conception of negotiation is a process of bar gaining and concession, the outcome of which is compromise. Amer icans expect to bargain, and we expect that a military stalemate will cause our adversaries to do the same. In the case of the Vietnam negotiations, this expectation proved unwise and frustrating. Hanoi used negotiations as a tactic of war fare to buy time to strengthen its military capabilities in South Viet nam and weaken the will of those on the side of Saigon. Rather than serving as an alternative to warfare, consequently, the Vietnam negotiations were an extension of it. In describing the decade-long search for a negotiated settlement of the Vietnam War, it was not my original objective to develop or test theories of negotiation. Looking back today on the experience—and in light of the course I now teach at Georgetown's School of Foreign Service on the theory and practice of international negotiation —I do find that in each phase of the negotiations there is considerable support for the theories of bargaming that underscore the importance of adroit public diplomacy and internal policy coordi nation to effective international negotiation. Where the U.S. govern ment, in particular, fell short on these qualities—and why—is highlighted in the chapters that follow. Butit is alsoimportantto remember that many American policy makers knew at the time that they were negotiating under less than optimal conditions and in ways that raised doubts about the efficacy of U.S. strategy and tactics. Vietnam, thus, is not a case where American diplomats were all too eager to sacrifice vital interests for the sake of an agreement; as U.S. presidents repeatedly demonstrat ed, they were not after a settlement at any price. Instead, the United States consistently sought the status quo ante helium (though fre quently lowering our expectations of what Hanoi was required to give to attain that condition). IX Preface The experience suggests, moreover, that even a high degree of negotiating skill is not a sufficient condition for success. For a nego tiated settlement might still have been unattainable even if U.S. poli cy had been better coordinated, or more adroit at countering Hanoi's tactics, or better able to retard the rapid rise of domestic and interna tional public sentiment against the war. This is not a case of a nego tiation where some commonsense formulas for effectiveness and suc cess should have been applied and weren't. The Vietnam War was just plain difficult to end by diplomacy in the first place, and this most U.S., South Vietnamese and North Vietnamese negotiators knew. In the end, they got in the Paris Agreement a set of terms that allowed each party to continue to try to win by force what they realized they could not achieve through diplomacy. The account that follows is based on interviews in 1974 and 1975 with decision makers in Washington and Saigon and a review of the government documents, officials' memoirs, and academic literature that have appeared since. The reader will note that I draw especially heavily on interviews conducted with virtually all of the U.S. and South Vietnamese officials who participated in the Vietnam negotiations. At these officials' request, the interviews were off the record. I find that even a decade later, I cannot yet identify the source of the quotations without violating the conditions under which I had access to such officials and their viewpoints. Of the more than 75 persons interviewed, only one has died (Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge); many are still on active duty or are quite in volved in the politics of the expatriat Vietnamese communities where they now live in exile. However, I did make a memo of conversation after each interview, and these are contained in twelve notebooks on deposit at the Hoover Institution archives where they can now be in spected by scholars on the condition that they agree not to identify any living person mentioned. In addition, I donated all of the ma terial on which Lost Peace was based to this archive, where it has been catalogued and extensively indexed to facilitate others' research. 100 J04 CHINA^^ CHINA BURMA > ANOI ^KD RIVtR DtLTA LAOS GULF OF TONKIN HAINAN ^lORMER DEMARCATION LINE THAILAND 14 TONLE KAMPUCHEA f MeVcong PHNOM PENiljq VIETNAM Ho Chi Minh CUyi INDOCHINA 1 DAO PHU QUOC (Vietnam) 50 100 150 Miles 0 50 100 150 Kilometers CON SON 104 MCS AND nOUNOARV P^CPRCStNTATION 108 APE NOT MeCESSAWILY AUTHORITATIVE 1962-1965: First Contacts The first diplomatic contacts between Washington and Hanoi did not go well. To avoid giving an impression of weakness, both sides stressed their readiness to fight if talking proved fruitless. Each badly misjudged the other's response to such hard-line rhetoric. Hanoi, in addition, miscalculated that political instability in South Vietnam would dampen U.S.