Vietnamization, Iraqification - and Salted Peanuts

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As the last bombs of the 1969 Tet offensive were falling on the outskirts of Saigon, Nixon’s Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird arrived in the city, accompanied by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Earle Wheeler; Laird had been sent specifically by Nixon to get a firsthand report on the progress of the war.

He did no such thing. After listening politely to Abrams and General Andrew Goodpaster, the second in command who had been National Security Advisor to President Eisenhower and a friend to Nixon, Laird told Abrams he was determined to bring American troops home and to turn the fighting over to the South Vietnamese. Abrams said they weren’t ready and wouldn’t be ready for two years. Goodpaster seconded this view. Laird responded that Nixon had to get the troops out now, "before the time given to the administration runs out." After Laird had departed for home, Abrams remarked to an associate that the secretary of defense "certainly had not come to Saigon to help us win the war."

Laird compounded his refusal to get a real assessment from the commanders by then hiding from Nixon Abrams’ conclusion that the South Vietnamese were not ready to take over their own defense. And General Goodpaster acquiesced in that endeavor, telling a National Security Council meeting in mid-March 1969 that the South Vietnamese training program was coming along nicely, so the war could be "de-Americanized." Laird took exception to that phrase and suggested the term "Vietnamization." He also gave Nixon an additional rationale for withdrawing U.S. troops — the Vietnamese had become too dependent on us for their defense, and needed to learn to stand on theirown two feet.

Nixon bought the package. He announced that a first contingent of troops would come home, and when a Democrat, former Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford, suggested removing a certain number of troops by the end of 1969, Nixon upped the ante by promising to bring that number home by Thanksgiving and even more by year’s end.

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In September, the idea of troop withdrawals and Vietnamization occasioned the impassioned "salted peanuts" memo to Nixon from National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger.

A terrific memo that Kissinger labeled "pessimistic," it rather accurately predicted what would happen on the Southeast Asian battlefield and at the peace talks over the next several years. But in one important way the memo is a sad excuse — it wasn’t submitted in March, when the decision on Vietnamization was made, but six months later, when the course was already set. In the memo,

Kissinger wrote that he did not believe the war could be won in two years, nor that Vietnamization could work in the 30 months allotted to it, but that "Withdrawal of U.S. troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public; the more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded."

Had Kissinger submitted this memo in March, it might have had a chance of preventing troop withdrawals; submitted in September, it had none. I believe Kissinger in March had been convinced of the folly of unilateral withdrawals, but the administration was then just getting going, and he was still tentative in his relations with Nixon: To have challenged the boss seven weeks after starting the job could have been disastrous for him. By the fall, he was much more secure in his post, and more assertive.

When, recently, Kissinger showed this memo to Vice-President Richard Cheney to stiffen his spine against withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, press stories neglected to mention that the original had been too late, after the decision was made. Echoing that idea are Nixon’s underlinings on the original, which do not include the line about salted peanuts. (You can see it at gwu.edu.)

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Most American troops were out of South Vietnam by the mid-term elections in 1970. As Kissinger predicted, Vietnamization extended the "decent interval" during which the United States would be out of South Vietnam but the country would not have fallen to the Communists. That interval did last from the signing of the peace treaty in early 1973, until April 1975, when North Vietnam overwhelmed Saigon.

Vietnamization was the inescapable result of the majority of Americans’ desire to get out of Vietnam and avoid more U.S. casualties. Withdrawing more slowly, or giving more support to the South Vietnamese through air strikes on the enemy would not have made any difference in the eventual outcome, as the North Vietnamese had repeatedly shown themselves able to sustain enormous troop losses and still carry on the fight.

Nixon’s secret plan did not work. The PRC and the U.S.S.R. never did pressure North Vietnam, even when the United States was actively pursuing what these countries wanted, which was détente with the U.S.S.R. and a rapprochement with the PRC. Vietnamization gave the United States a way out of a war it no longer wanted to fight; it did not change the near-inevitability of the eventual loss of that war.

Today, a policy of Iraqification, on whatever schedule, is unlikely to do any better.