Decent interval is a theory regarding the end of the
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War (also known by #Names, other names) was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was officially fought between North Vie ...
which argues that from 1971 or 1972, the
Nixon Administration
Richard Nixon's tenure as the 37th president of the United States began with his first inauguration on January 20, 1969, and ended when he resigned on August 9, 1974, in the face of almost certain impeachment because of the Watergate Scanda ...
abandoned the goal of preserving South Vietnam and instead aimed to save face by preserving a "decent interval" between withdrawal and South Vietnamese collapse. Therefore, Nixon could avoid becoming the first United States president to lose a war.
A variety of evidence from the
Nixon tapes
The Nixon White House tapes are audio recordings of conversations between U.S. President Richard Nixon and Nixon administration officials, Nixon family members, and White House staff, produced between 1971 and 1973.
In February 1971, a sound-ac ...
and from transcripts of meetings with foreign leaders is cited to support this theory, including
Henry Kissinger
Henry Alfred Kissinger (; ; born Heinz Alfred Kissinger, May 27, 1923) is a German-born American politician, diplomat, and geopolitical consultant who served as United States Secretary of State and National Security Advisor under the presid ...
's statement before the 1973
Paris Peace Accords
The Paris Peace Accords, () officially titled the Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Viet Nam (''Hiệp định về chấm dứt chiến tranh, lập lại hòa bình ở Việt Nam''), was a peace treaty signed on January 27, 1 ...
that "our terms will eventually destroy him" (referring to South Vietnamese president
Nguyễn Văn Thiệu
Nguyễn Văn Thiệu (; 5 April 1923 – 29 September 2001) was a South Vietnamese military officer and politician who was the president of South Vietnam from 1967 to 1975. He was a general in the Republic of Vietnam Military Forces, Republic o ...
). However, both Kissinger and Nixon denied that such a strategy existed.
Background
Already by late 1970 or early 1971, President
Richard Nixon
Richard Milhous Nixon (January 9, 1913April 22, 1994) was the 37th president of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. A member of the Republican Party, he previously served as a representative and senator from California and was ...
and his National Security Advisor
Henry Kissinger
Henry Alfred Kissinger (; ; born Heinz Alfred Kissinger, May 27, 1923) is a German-born American politician, diplomat, and geopolitical consultant who served as United States Secretary of State and National Security Advisor under the presid ...
"effectively abandoned the hope of a military victory" in the
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War (also known by #Names, other names) was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was officially fought between North Vie ...
. Increasingly, they questioned the premise that the
South Vietnamese Army
The Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN; ; french: Armée de la république du Viêt Nam) composed the ground forces of the South Vietnamese military from its inception in 1955 to the Fall of Saigon in April 1975. It is estimated to have suffe ...
would ever be able to defend its country without American help, especially after the
Lam Son 719 debacle.
Following the
Paris Peace Accords
The Paris Peace Accords, () officially titled the Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Viet Nam (''Hiệp định về chấm dứt chiến tranh, lập lại hòa bình ở Việt Nam''), was a peace treaty signed on January 27, 1 ...
, the Nixon administration claimed that "
peace with honor
"Peace with Honor" was a phrase U.S. President Richard M. Nixon used in a speech on January 23, 1973 to describe the Paris Peace Accords to end the Vietnam War. The phrase is a variation on a campaign promise Nixon made in 1968: "I pledge to y ...
" had been achieved and that South Vietnamese independence had been guaranteed. After the
Fall of Saigon
The Fall of Saigon, also known as the Liberation of Saigon by North Vietnamese or Liberation of the South by the Vietnamese government, and known as Black April by anti-communist overseas Vietnamese was the capture of Saigon, the capital of ...
, Nixon and Kissinger blamed the failure of the accords on the
United States Congress
The United States Congress is the legislature of the federal government of the United States. It is bicameral, composed of a lower body, the House of Representatives, and an upper body, the Senate. It meets in the U.S. Capitol in Washing ...
refusing to continue support to South Vietnam
—in other words, the
Vietnam stab-in-the-back myth
The Vietnam stab-in-the-back myth asserts that the United States' defeat during the Vietnam War was caused by various American groups, such as civilian policymakers, the media, antiwar protesters, the United States Congress, or political liberals ...
.
Publicly, Nixon stated that his goal from the peace accords was for North Vietnam to recognize South Vietnam's right to choose a leader by democratic election. The decent interval theory holds that, privately, the Nixon administration did not plan for the continuation of South Vietnam and was only interested in the release of
United States prisoners of war and maintaining a "decent interval" before South Vietnamese collapse.
[ If a "decent interval" elapsed between the withdrawal of American troops and the fall of the South Vietnamese government, Nixon could avoid the blame of being the first American president to lose a war.
The idea of a decent interval was absent from public debate during the Nixon years and originally advanced in a 1977 book of the same name by former CIA analyst ]Frank Snepp
Frank Warren Snepp, III (born May 3, 1943) is a journalist and former chief analyst of North Vietnamese strategy for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Saigon during the Vietnam War. For five out of his eight years as a CIA officer, he worke ...
. However Snepp does not subscribe to the full theory of intentional abandonment of South Vietnam, but rather that Kissinger, U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam Graham Martin
Graham Anderson Martin (September 22, 1912 – March 13, 1990) was an American diplomat. He was the ambassador to Thailand and as U.S. representative to SEATO from 1963 to 1967, ambassador to Italy from 1969 to 1973 and the last United States Am ...
and others engaged in the same kinds of self-deluded thinking after the Paris accords that had gotten the US into Vietnam in the first place. What Snepp was most outraged over was the haste with which the Americans pulled out in April 1975, abandoning many key South Vietnamese allies and intelligence assets to their fates. Snepp was not party to the high-level negotiations in which the "decent interval" strategy occurred.
Evidence
Historian Ken Hughes
Ken or KEN may refer to:
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* ''Ken'' (album), a 2017 album by Canadian indie rock band Destroyer.
* ''Ken'' (film), 1964 Japanese film.
* ''Ken'' (magazine), a large-format political magazine.
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wrote, "The proof that Nixon and Kissinger timed military withdrawal to the 1972 election and negotiated a “decent interval” comes from extraordinarily rich and undeniable sources—the Nixon tapes and the near-verbatim transcripts that NSC aides made of negotiations with foreign leaders." This is despite "the normal human reluctance to produce self-incriminating evidence", which according to Hughes explains why more details about the strategy are not known.
The first sign of the strategy appears in the Nixon tapes
The Nixon White House tapes are audio recordings of conversations between U.S. President Richard Nixon and Nixon administration officials, Nixon family members, and White House staff, produced between 1971 and 1973.
In February 1971, a sound-ac ...
on 18 February 1971, Kissinger stated that after a peace agreement was concluded, "What we can then tell the South Vietnamese—they’ve got a year without war to build up." According to Hughes, the statement indicates that Kissinger already realized that peace would not last. On 19 March, Kissinger stated that "We can’t have it knocked over—brutally—to put it brutally—before the election", justifying timing the withdrawal of troops to the 1972 American presidential election. Nixon was also privately skeptical of the Vietnamization
Vietnamization was a policy of the Richard Nixon administration to end U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War through a program to "expand, equip, and train South Vietnamese forces and assign to them an ever-increasing combat role, at the same ti ...
program, which he officially stated was "a plan in which we will withdraw all of our forces from Vietnam on a schedule in accordance with our program, as the South Vietnamese become strong enough to defend their own freedom". Hughes writes that Nixon's statements on Vietnamization are unambiguously false and the program to be a "fraud".
In his first secret meeting with Zhou Enlai
Zhou Enlai (; 5 March 1898 – 8 January 1976) was a Chinese statesman and military officer who served as the first Premier of the People's Republic of China, premier of the People's Republic of China from 1 October 1949 until his death on 8 J ...
in 1971, Kissinger explained that the United States wanted a full withdrawal, the return of all POWs, and a ceasefire for "18 months or some period." Kissinger noted that "If the government is as unpopular as you seem to think, then the quicker our forces are withdrawn, the quicker it will be overthrown. And if it is overthrown after we withdraw, we will not intervene." In later meetings, Kissinger used the words "reasonable interval", a "sufficient interval", and a "time interval" to refer to the time that would have to pass after United States withdrawal before the aggression against South Vietnam would not result in a forceful reaction from the United States.
In discussions with Chinese and Soviet leaders, Kissinger stated that the United States would not intervene if more than eighteen months passed since a settlement. A crucial point in the negotiations occurred after the North conceded in its demand for South Vietnamese President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu
Nguyễn Văn Thiệu (; 5 April 1923 – 29 September 2001) was a South Vietnamese military officer and politician who was the president of South Vietnam from 1967 to 1975. He was a general in the Republic of Vietnam Military Forces, Republic o ...
's resignation; according to American intelligence, the South Vietnamese government would quickly unravel without him. On 3 August 1972, Nixon stated, "I think we could take, in my view, almost anything, frankly, that we can force on Thieu. South Vietnam probably can never even survive anyway." Kissinger replied: "We’ve got to find some formula that holds the thing together a year or two."
Two days before the Paris Peace Accords were signed according to chief North Vietnamese negotiator Lê Đức Thọ
Lê Đức Thọ (; 14 October 1911 – 13 October 1990), born Phan Đình Khải in Nam Dinh Province, was a Vietnamese revolutionary, general, diplomat, and politician. He was the first Asian to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, jointly with ...
's proposal (8 October 1972), Kissinger told Nixon twice that the terms would probably destroy South Vietnam: "I also think that Thieu is right, that our terms will eventually destroy him."
Proponents
Historian Jeffrey Kimball supports the decent interval theory and promoted it in various books, including ''The Vietnam War Files'' (2004) and ''Nixon's Nuclear Specter'' (2015). Kimball argued that Nixon Administration adopted the decent interval strategy in the second half of Nixon's first term. According to Hughes, Kimball is "the leading scholar of the 'decent interval'".
In his book '' Henry Kissinger and the American Century'', Jeremi Suri wrote: "By 1971 issingerand Nixon would accept a 'decent interval' between U.S. disengagement and a North Vietnamese takeover in the south. Secret talks with Hanoi would allow Kissinger to manage this process, preserving the image of American strength and credibility."
In a 2003 paper, Finnish historian Jussi Hanhimäki argued that
Hughes is very critical of the decent interval strategy:
According to Japanese historian Tega Yusuke, writing in 2012, decent interval "is becoming the standard explanation" because South Vietnam in fact collapsed in 1975.
Opponents
Kissinger and Nixon both denied that they had used a "decent interval" strategy. Kissinger wrote, "Nor is it correct that all we sought was a 'decent interval' before a final collapse of Saigon. All of us who negotiated the agreement of October 12 were convinced that we had vindicated the anguish of a decade not by a 'decent interval' but by a decent settlement." However, both had a vested interest in keeping the "decent interval" secret.
Based on newly declassified documents, in 2001 Larry Berman wrote a book, ''No Peace, No Honor'' in which he argued that Nixon actually planned for a permanent war in Vietnam, rather than a decent interval before defeat.
Mixed
Luke Nichter, a historian who studied the Nixon tapes
The Nixon White House tapes are audio recordings of conversations between U.S. President Richard Nixon and Nixon administration officials, Nixon family members, and White House staff, produced between 1971 and 1973.
In February 1971, a sound-ac ...
, has argued that, before Nixon's visit to China in early 1972, the decent interval theory did not explain the fluctuating attitude of Nixon and Kissinger to the war, which had sharp ups and downs depending on casualty figures and news reports. Nichter writes, "at times they speak of desiring no interval at all other than the duration necessary to quickly withdraw troops and POWs". After the China visit, "the tenor and content of their discussions seems much closer to support for the idea of a decent interval theory". In his book ''The Nixon Tapes'', Nichter and his coauthor write opposing "scholars hoargue that Nixon and Kissinger’s strategy in Vietnam was never more than securing a ‘decent interval'". However, Hughes considers this to be a misrepresentation because he does not know of any scholars who argue that decent interval characterized the administration's strategy throughout.
Johannes Kadura argues that Nixon and Kissinger "simultaneously maintained a Plan A of further supporting Saigon and a Plan B of shielding Washington should their maneuvers prove futile." According to Kadura, the "decent interval" concept has been "largely misrepresented," in that Nixon and Kissinger "sought to gain time, make the North turn inward, and create a perpetual equilibrium" rather than acquiescing in the collapse of South Vietnam.
Citations
Sources
* Paperback ed.
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*{{cite book, last=Kadura, first=Johannes, title=The War After the War: The Struggle for Credibility During America's Exit From Vietnam, publisher=Cornell University Press, year=2016, isbn=978-0801453960
Historiography of the Vietnam War
Nixon administration controversies