After returning to Washington, Marie-Jeanne and I decided to buy a house in an area of D.C. called Foxhall Village—an area that was built up after World War I in English-style architecture. The house cost us only $59,000, which we paid for with the help of a mortgage from Riggs Bank. Prices were still low in the early 1970s. But on the other hand, my salary was just $400 a week–roughly $20,000 a year. But I remember that prices were commensurately low everywhere. I could buy three shirts at a top flight store for $10. We later regretted not buying a more expensive and bigger house, but of course at the end of 1971 we still had no children so the Foxhall Road house was big enough.
It was frustrating covering the State Department in the early 1970s because it was clear to everyone that Secretary of State William Rodgers had no power or major influence in the formulation of foreign policy. President Nixon took care of that by himself with the help of his national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger. But Kissinger and Max Frankel had an arrangement by which any queries from the Washington bureau had to go through Frankel. At the end of 1971, when Frankel was getting ready to move to New York as Sunday Editor of The Times, he arranged a lunch with Kissinger and turned the responsibility for dealing with him over to me.
The big international story at the end of 1971 was the outbreak of serious fighting in what was then called East Pakistan, between Bengal nationalists and Pakistani forces. Eventually, a separate state called Bangladesh emerged and Pakistan was reduced to just its western part. Nixon went off to China, as scheduled, in February 1972, and it was a major success. Frankel won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the trip. But no sooner than Nixon had returned home, a new crisis arose over Vietnam. On Eastern Sunday, April 2, 1972, North Vietnamese troops launched an attack across the demilitarized zone which I wrote was “a clear violation of the 1968 understanding agreed to by the Johnson administration that produced an end to the systematic American bombing of North Vietnam and the start of substantive talks in Paris on concluding the war. These talks had gotten nowhere, but NIxon had been systematically pulling troops out of Vietnam.
In early May, I and a few other correspondents accompanied Rodgers on a trip to Western Europe intended to brief allied leaders on Nixon’s planned trip to Moscow later in May in which there were plans for the signing of a number of agreements including two major arms control accords, SALT-1 and a treaty limiting anti-ballistic missiles to two sites in each country. But Nixon was so angered by the North Vietnamese attacks in the South that he was threatening Moscow with calling off the summit. He sent Kissinger to Moscow to confer with Brezhnev. Kissinger returned, telling Nixon that the Russians were not happy with Hanoi’s actions, but could do little to stop them.Nixon then planned to mine Haiphong Harbor and this did not lead the Russians to call off the summit where the two sides signed a number of accords including the two arms control ones.
This was a period of “secret” diplomacy because most of it was being carried out by Kissinger, Eventually, the Paris peace talks on Vietnam resumed on July 19. In his memoirs, Kissinger says that Le Duc Tho, the North Vietnamese negotiator was extremely conciliatory, He said Hanoi wanted to settle the war in Nixon’s first term which would of course end in January 1973, The North Vietnamese made a series of proposals that were quite conciliatory, Kissinger wrote. But when Kissinger went to Saigon in August, he found that President Thieu had a fundamental philosophical difference from the Americans. Kissinger wrote: “The root fact was that Thieu and his government were simply not ready for a negotiated peace. They had a few vague ideas that amounted to an unconditional surrender by Hanoi. They were not satisfied with survival: they wanted a guarantee that they would prevail. They preferred to continue the military contest rather than face a political struggle.”
The negotiations with North Vietnam reached a denouement on October 8, 1972 in Paris. Again, according to Kissinger’s memoirs, Le Duc Tho said to him: “In order to show our good will and to ensure a rapid end to the war, rapid restoration of peace in Vietnam, as all of us wish for, today we put forward a new proposal regarding the content as well as the way to conduct negotiations, a very realistic and very simple proposal.” its essence was a cease-fire, withdrawal of U.S.forces, release of prisoners, plus no further infiltration—the basic program we had offered and insisted was essential since May 1971 [when LBJ was still president], Kissinger said.
In one of his more lyrical notes in his memoirs, Kissinger wrote:
“I have often been asked for my most thrilling moment in public service. I have participated in many spectacular events: I have lived with power, I have seen pomp and ceremony. But the moment that moved me most deeply has to be that cool autumn Sunday afternoon while the shadows were falling over the serene French landscape and that large quiet room, hung with abstract paintings, was illuminated at the green baize table across which the two delegations were facing each other.At last we thought there would be an end to the bloodletting in Indochina. We stood on the threshold of what we had so long sought, a peace compatible with our honor and our international responsibilities. And we would be able to begin healing the wounds that the war had inflicted on our own society.”
All this good news was unknown to reporters in Washington and indeed, to many top officials.
But on October 26, 1972, Hanoi Radio broadcast in many languages a long text in effect accepting all the major points put forward over the years by the United States, I can remember how shocked we all were in D.C. to think peace might be at hand.
I was one of a few hundred reporters crowded into the White House briefing room to hear Kissinger confirm that a breakthrough indeed had occurred. This was HAK’s first on-the-record briefing. Kissinger said “peace is at hand” in Indochina and that a final agreement on a ceasefire and political arrangement could be reached in one more negotiating session with the North Vietnamese “lasting no more than three or four days.” He said that the remaining details would not halt the rapid movement toward an end to the war. As it turned out, the recalcitrance of the South Vietnamese delayed an accord. Nixon had to give Thieu private assurances that the United States would come to Saigon’s aid if Hanoi broke the accord. In addition, heavy Christmas bombing of Hanoi and its environs by B-52s in months, finally tipped the scales. The Vietnamese peace accord was signed on January 23, 1973 in Paris.
Clifton Daniel, then the Washington buro chief, wanted to reward me for my reporting so he told me to bring Marie-Jeanne with me to Paris. She was then in her first trimester of pregnancy, but she agreed to meet me at the Crillon Hotel in Paris. Unfortunately, because of a pilots’ strike, her plane landed in Germany, and she took a train to Paris. She survived the ordeal. At that particular time, I found myself having to borrow money from the Paris bureau. We also moved to a less expensive hotel on the left bank for our week of vacation in Paris. Flora Lewis, who at that time was the chief European diplomatic correspondent, wrote the story about the signing of the agreement to end the fighting, I wrote about the return of prisoners of war, which included, of course, John McCain, later to become a U.S. Senator/
