Memo dramatizes Vietnam dilemma

Nearly 200 hours of tape recordings and 90,000 pages of documents were released.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Documents released Tuesday from Richard M. Nixon’s White House years shed new light on just how much the government struggled with growing public unrest over the protracted war in Vietnam.

The National Archives opened nearly 200 hours of White House tape recordings and 90,000 pages of documents.

A newly declassified memo to Nixon from his secretary of defense at the time reflects just how much the administration felt and discussed public pressure — even as it weighed U.S. geopolitical strategy — in anguished internal debate over war policy.

The seven-page document cautions the president against a proposal from military brass to conduct a high-intensity air and naval campaign against North Vietnam.

Then-Defense Secretary Melvin Laird said such a plan would involve the United States in “expanded costs and risks with no clear resultant military or political benefits.”

With peace talks “seemingly stalled in Paris, with combat activity levels reduced in South Vietnam, but with seemingly rising levels of discontent in the United States, we should review the overall situation and determine the best course of action,” the defense secretary writes the president Oct. 8, 1969.

“The sum total of the considerations ... casts grave doubt on the validity and efficacy” of the proposal from the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon, the memo concludes.

At the time, the Nixon administration was secretly conducting a massive bombing of Cambodia to destroy sanctuaries for enemy troops.

In regard to the war generally, “we must ... act in a fashion which will maintain the support of the American people,” Laird wrote. The proposed bombing campaign of the Joint Chiefs sought to drive the North Vietnamese back to the negotiating table. The Nixon administration didn’t go forward with the Joint Chiefs’ plan. But in December 1972, it launched what became known as the “Christmas bombing” of Hanoi when peace talks hit a dead end. The effort stirred anger with the American public. North Vietnam called it a terrorist act.

Laird became the biggest proponent of the concept called Vietnamization, urging Nixon to follow through on a policy of troop withdrawals, putting the burden of fighting the conflict on South Vietnamese troops.

The tape recordings are of Nixon’s White House conversations from November 1972 to January 1973 and cover his re-election that fall, steps to bomb North Vietnam and also to make peace with it.

The “Christmas bombing” was one of the most controversial acts in a divisive war and the most concentrated air attack of the conflict.