Kissinger Told China U.S. Could Accept Communist Takeover
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Kissinger Told China U.S. Could Accept Communist Takeover
By Calvin Woodward
Associated Press
Saturday, May 27, 2006; A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/26/AR2006052601926.html
Henry A. Kissinger quietly acknowledged to China in 1972 that
Washington could accept a communist takeover of South Vietnam if that
evolved after a withdrawal of U.S. troops -- even as the war to drive
back the communists dragged on with mounting deaths.
President Richard M. Nixon's envoy told Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai: "If
we can live with a communist government in China, we ought to be able
to accept it in Indochina."
Kissinger's blunt remarks surfaced from a collection of papers released
yesterday by George Washington University's National Security Archive.
The collection, from his years of diplomacy, was made up of documents
available at the National Archives and obtained through the research
group's declassification requests.
Kissinger's comments appear to lend credence to the "decent interval"
theory posed by some historians who say the United States was prepared
to see communists take over Saigon as long as, to save face, that
happened long enough after a U.S. troop departure.
But Kissinger cautioned in an interview yesterday against reaching easy
conclusions from his words of more than three decades ago. "One of my
objectives had to be to get Chinese acquiescence in our policy," he
said.
"We succeeded in it, and then when we had achieved our goal, our
domestic situation made it impossible to sustain it," he said,
explaining that he meant Watergate and its consequences.
The papers consist of about 2,100 memorandums of Kissinger's secret
conversations with senior officials abroad and at home from 1969 to
1977 while he served under Nixon and President Gerald R. Ford as
national security adviser, secretary of state and both. The collection
contains more than 28,000 pages.
The meeting with Zhou took place in Beijing on June 22, 1972, during
stepped-up U.S. bombing and the mining of harbors meant to stall a
North Vietnamese offensive that began in the spring. China, North
Vietnam's ally, objected to the U.S. course but was engaged in a
historic thaw of relations with Washington.
Kissinger told Zhou that the United States respected its Hanoi enemy as
a "permanent factor" and probably the "strongest entity" in the region.
"And we have had no interest in destroying it or even defeating it," he
insisted.
He complained that Hanoi, in negotiations, had made one demand that he
could never accept -- that the United States force out the Saigon
government.
"This isn't because of any particular personal liking for any of the
individuals concerned," he said. "It is because a country cannot be
asked to engage in major acts of betrayal as a basis of its foreign
policy."
In January 1973, the Paris Peace Accords officially halted U.S. action,
left North Vietnamese troops in the South and preserved the Saigon
government until it fell in April 1975.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company