476 ChaPter^9
Kissinger and Le Duc Tho had agreed. Nixon, by this time, was guaranteed to
win the election so he took a hard line again. Kissinger, who just a week
earlier thought he had a deal with the North and NLF, now called them “just
a bunch of shits. Tawdry, filthy shits.” More viciously, Nixon, on December
18 th, began the Christmas Bombings [a.k.a. Linebacker II] in which fighter jets
such as F-105s, F-4s, and F-111s and over 200 B-52s flew round-the-clock
missions for a week and a half against the DRVN in what Kissinger’s aide
Roger Morris called “calculated barbarism.” Air Force tactical aircraft flew
over 1000 sorties, and the B-52s another 750, and they dropped a combined
total of over 40,000 tons of bombs [or 8 million pounds a day], hitting military
and communications facilities, docks, shipyards, workplaces, residential areas,
and the North’s biggest hospital. In some places, the B-52s left craters with
diameters of 50 feet. The northern Vietnamese had prepared for the raids in
underground shelters and tunnels, and still lost 1600 civilians.
Linebacker II caused serious destruction in the DRVN, but at a great cost.
North Vietnam had over 1000 surface-to-air missiles and downed well over
20 tactical aircraft and 15 B-52s [though Hanoi claimed to have downed 34
and the U.S. Pentagon privately admitted to higher numbers], and also shot
down 44 American pilots. Politically, Nixon’s air attacks were condemned
across the globe, and at home, about two-thirds of U.S. senators opposed the
Linebacker bombings and were threatening to pull funding for the war, while
the president’s approval rating, barely a month after his overwhelming reelec-
tion victory, fell to just 39 percent. Nixon would claim, in 1973 and repeat-
edly thereafter, that the Christmas bombings had forced Hanoi to accept the
treaty that ended the war; in truth, the United States bombed itself into a final
settlement. The Christmas Bombings amounted to a terror bombing cam-
paign, had little, if any, military purpose, and backfired politically. By January
1973, even Richard M. Nixon could see that the war in Vietnam had to end.
On January 20th, 1973, Nixon was again inaugurated as president in
Washington D.C.; two days later his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, died on his
ranch in Texas; the next day, January 23d, Nixon announced that an agreement
to end the U.S. war on Vietnam had been reached in Paris and that a ceasefire
would take effect on the 27th. The final peace treaty was virtually identical
to the October agreement and indeed followed many of the general lines of
North Vietnamese proposals from 1969 onward. American troops would
depart in full while the NLF would remain in the South, which, all under-