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By Root 856 0

Nixon responded with a ferocious blow, the notorious Christmas bombing, heaviest American action of the war. In twelve days of December the Air Force pounded North Vietnam with a greater tonnage of bombs than the total of the past three years, reducing areas of Hanoi and Haiphong to rubble, destroying Hanoi’s airport, factories and power plants. One effect blew back. Plane losses owed to North Vietnam’s strong concentration of SAM missile defenses cost America 95 to 100 new prisoners of war and the worrisome price of 15 heavy bombers (or 34, according to Hanoi). The purpose of the Christmas bombing was twofold: to bring about a sufficient weakening of North Vietnam to permit the survival of Saigon for long enough to allow the United States to be gone and, by this proof of America’s determination, to overcome Thieu’s resistance or else to provide the excuse to proceed without him. “We had walked the last mile with him,” according to a later explanation, “and as a consequence we could settle.”

The fierce attack so near the end darkened America’s reputation at home and abroad, enhancing its image of brutality: New members elected to Congress by the revised rules in Democratic primaries promised an approaching challenge, which took visible shape when the Democratic caucus of both Houses voted on 2 and 4 January for an “immediate” cease-fire and cut-off of all funds for military operations in any of the countries of Indochina, contingent only upon release of the POWs and safe withdrawal of American forces. Faced by the long-discounted possibility of revolt by Congress, and with Watergate disclosures rising in Judge John J. Sirica’s courtroom, the Administration proposed to call off the bombing if Hanoi would resume peace talks. Hanoi agreed; negotiations of desperation were resumed; a treaty was drawn and Thieu given an explicit ultimatum that unless he complied, the United States would terminate economic and military support and conclude the treaty without him.

In the final treaty, the two conditions for which North Vietnam and the United States had prolonged the war for four years—overthrow of Thieu’s regime on the one hand and removal of North Vietnam’s forces from the South on the other—were both abandoned; political status of the old Viet-Cong, now metamorphosed into the PRG, was acknowledged, though to spare Thieu’s feelings not explicitly; the DMZ or partition line, whose elimination Hanoi had demanded, was retained but—going back to Geneva—as a “provisional not a political or territorial boundary.” The unity of Vietnam was implicitly recognized in an article providing that “The reunification of Vietnam shall be carried out” by peaceful discussion among the parties, thereby relegating “external aggression” across an “international boundary”—America’s casus belli for so many years—to the dustbin of history.

Thieu gripped refusal with the rigor of death until the last hour of Nixon’s ultimatum, then gave way. Signed in Paris on 27 January 1973, the treaty left the situation on paper no different from the insecure settlement of Geneva nineteen years before. To the physical reality had since been added more than half a million deaths in North and South, hundreds of thousands of wounded and destitute, burned and crippled children, landless peasants, a ravaged land deforested and pitted with bomb craters and a people torn by mutual hatred. The procedures for eventual agreement by the two zones were generally recognized as unworkable and an early resort to force widely assumed. The viability of a non-Communist South Vietnam, for which America had wrecked Indochina and betrayed herself, inspired confidence in no one—unless in Nixon and Kissinger, who convinced themselves that the United States could still retrieve the situation if necessary. What was left standing by the treaty was a temporary screen behind which America, clutching a tattered “peace with honor,” could escape.

In the aftermath, as everyone knows, Hanoi overcame Saigon within two years. When Nixon had been destroyed by Watergate and Congress had finally gathered