Nixon's Nuclear Specter: The Secret Alert of 1969, Madman Diplomacy, and the Vietnam War (Modern War Studies) Hardcover – May 15, 2015

How does one end a war quickly when negotiations are stalemated? Nixon, remembering how the Eisenhower-Dulles threat to use nuclear weapons against the People’s Republic of China (PRC) had led to securing an armistice in the Korean War, decided to use the “madman” theory. In essence, the unpredictable nature of Nixon would be conveyed to North Vietnamese and the Soviets accompanied by military threats. To force Hanoi to be responsive to Washington’s demands for a treaty, Nixon-Kissinger issued an ultimatum: if progress had not been made by 1 November (the one-year anniversary of LBJ’s bombing halt), then a major military option would be launched.

Was the threat a bluff? For a while, Nixon and Kissinger considered the mining of Haiphong harbor to prevent merchant ships from docking as well as lighter craft from off-loading such vessels. Coupled with this was talk of renewed bombing of North Vietnam, especially roads and bridges as well as the rail lines connecting North Vietnam and the PRC. However, the 15 October 1969 Moratorium protest against the war led the president to cancel a military option. Instead, he and Kissinger decided on a nuclear alert, but one that did not involve a change in DEFCON status.

In the end, the authors conclude, that threat diplomacy did not alter Hanoi’s bargaining position in Paris. However, the military escalation card was not totally abandoned as seen in the invasion of Cambodia in 1970, the incursion into Laos in 1971, and the LINEBACKER bombing campaigns of 1972. The nuclear threat was also used regarding the PLO challenge to Jordan in the fall of 1970 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973 when the Soviets threatened to send conventional forces to the Sinai Peninsula to unilaterally enforce the cease-fire.

With failure of the threat diplomacy, the Nixon-Kissinger policy regarding Vietnam shifted to a “long-road” strategy. American troop withdrawals would continue to take place, while Vietnamization would hopefully create a South Vietnamese military that could defend itself once all American forces were withdrawn. The endgame for Nixon and Kissinger was a decent interval from American withdrawal to the collapse of South Vietnam under attack from the North so that “it would mask the role their policies had played in South Vietnam’s collapse.” (74) A decent interval was preferably five years, but could be as short as two.

This thoroughly researched volume provides a very detailed overview of how Nixon and Kissinger tried to end the Vietnam War during their first nine months in office. What is revealing is the secrecy that both men employed in trying to achieve this goal. The State Department was kept out of the loop and Defense Secretary Melvin Laird was bypassed at every opportunity. The bombing of Cambodia and Laos as well as intensified raids in South Vietnam were done in secret. Even many of the base commanders in the JCS nuclear alert of October 1969 were kept in the dark as to the true motive of the exercise. The authors also paint Kissinger as the hawk and Nixon as a vacillator, going between wanting military action because of the hawks at home and advocating inaction because of the rising anti-war movement at home.

The only drawback to this work is the still classified nature of some of the sources. A number of CIA documents, according to the authors, were heavily redacted. Even more crucial to a complete understanding of the period is the unavailability of Kissinger’s papers, which are closed to all but a few select individuals until five years after his death. The authors write that Kissinger’s “restrictions, possibly the last outstanding abuse of power of the Nixon era, is most likely in violation of federal records laws.” (x) Evidently neither they nor anyone else has challenged the restrictions set in place by the former secretary of state.

This is a must read for anyone interested in the Vietnam War, especially the policies followed by Nixon and Kissinger during their first year in office.

Seeking solace from Trump’s early days I turned to Richard Nixon to get an idea of how bad things had been before. A recent biography of Nixon turned out to be unconvincingly sympathetic. The review of it in the New York Review of Books sent me to this volume. And I must admit I have some sympathy for Nixon’s tragic life. Yes, he really meant to end the Vietnam War. He and Kissinger just could not do it so that it would not seem like a loss for the US even though they knew from the beginning that the war was unwinable. After all the stalemate of Korea did not seem to tar Nixon. But then he and Eisenhower really believed that nuclear threats brought the Chinese to the table when it was really exhaustion. Carrying that idea over to Vietnam was Nixon’s secret plan that he offered in the 1968 campaign. And he meant it but kept it secret. We veterans of the anti-war movement thought he was lying and would just prosecute the war until the anti-war movement forced him to stop. And, as the book shows, we did put pressure on him. In the end the Movement, the utter futility of the war for soldiers, rock music, dope and the invasion of Cambodia produced an army that was unusable. There was really no choice but to bring the troop home or lose them.

This a an incredibly detailed book about the year 1969 and the failure of Nixon and Kissinger to try to convince the Russians and the North Vietnamese that Nixon was a “madman” who would invade, bomb, blockade or nuke the North to win the war. the Soviets never seemed noticed or react to the faux nuclear alerts, the pretend mining or the harassing of Russian freighters. Dobrynin, their ambassador outwitted both Kissinger and Nixon and even found the latter pathetic. Nixon and most of the military and foreign affairs advisors knew the war could not be won but they argued with Nixon because he often did not let them in on his strategy. He almost pled with the Soviets to convince the North to let the Saigon government survive for a couple of years and then the North could take over. Like Johnson, Nixon was not going to be the first president to lose a war. And he wasn’t. Johnson was the second and Nixon the third. (Madison certainly lost the War of 1812 and Ike didn’t win Korea.)

The Vietnam war was eventually lost but it went on for 6 more years and Nixon killed a million more Asians after US troops withdrew. He bombed to allow the South to survive for decent period of time. The book is so intensely detailed for the year 1969 and then what happens afterward is more or less summarized. I wonder if that is because the material which might have let the author write in such detail was unavailable or he just wanted to take on the shorter project because he could more than adequately make his point. I don’t know. But why he went ahead and bombed the North, mined its harbors and invaded Cambodia when he was so hesitant to do so in 1969 because of feared Soviet and domestic reaction, is still somewhat of a mystery to me. He was never going to nuke and never did although he and Kissinger continued to bandy around hints.

From all the detail we find that Nixon, at least, could run the government. Well, he had 8 years as vice-president to learn how to do so. Seeing his use of various military, CIA, State Department and Rand Corp. resources I begin to wonder how Donald Trump is doing. Maybe the deep government of the military, the State Department, the intelligence services and big business is running the show and Donald is merely frothing from the mouth. As Glenn Greanwalt worries, the deep government may be more dangerous than the elected government even if it is now working to keep things from crashing. Nixon certainly negotiated with the deep government. And we know from the magnificent bio of Alan Dulles that they did in JFK. Was Nixon worse than Donald? I don’t know. John Dean, Nixon’s attorney, says that Donald calls out in public what Nixon said in private. I don’t think we have quite reached that point yet. But Trump can’t control himself so hope springs eternal.

This is a book for someone who wants to know the nitty gritty of Nixon’s presidency and both his and Kissinger’s real blindness. Certainly Kissinger was playing Nixon but the reverse was true sometimes although Nixon was not doing it consciously.

One wonders why the North wouldn’t play his game. They would have come to power a lot sooner and many less people would have died. But then they had been betrayed in 1954 so why should they trust capitalist dogs. I am not sure I would have.

Charlie Fisher

William Burt and Jeffrey Kimball have written a magnificent book. Carefully argued and impressively researched, it brings to light the secret nuclear alert of October 1969. It was part of Nixon’s and Kissinger’s “madman” strategy for scaring Hanoi (and Moscow) into ending the Vietnam war on terms acceptable to the United States. Historians and political scientists will welcome Burt and Kimball's convincing revisionist study.

This book is well-researched and authoritative. It documents President Nixon's focus on ending the Vietnam War by sending "signals" and veiled threats of nuclear attacks to try to scare the Russians and get the Russians to pressure North Vietnam to pull back and stop the war. At the same time that he was trying to scare the Russians, he did not want to upset the US public and the anti-war protesters. "Tricky Dick" (not the authors' term) tied to keep his actions in Cambodia and Laos secret from the US public but still scare the Russians and North Vietnamese. He then tried to convince the Russians that he was so "Mad" that he would use nuclear weapons in Vietnam, while keeping the nuclear threat secret from the US public. The result has been called the "Madman Nuclear Alert". The existence of this alert (he called it the JCS Readiness Exercise) was a secret, and its goals were so secret that the US Secretary of State was not told what we were doing, and military commanders did not know how to achieve the goals because they did not know what the goals were! The result was confusion and it is not clear that the Russians understood what it was about, either. A well-documented record of a bungled and dangerous policy. Not easy reading -- but a jewel for true historians.