266 e lusive v ictories
Kissinger found Th o no more fl exible when parallel private talks com-
menced in January 1970. Moreover, threats to increase the level of vio-
lence against the DRV or expand the war only served to make Th o
more rigid.
As the North Vietnamese had perceived, time worked against the
United States. Hanoi shrewdly grasped that the American position was
weakening in both political and military terms. Th e communist lead-
ership closely monitored public opinion in the United States—and
tried to infl uence it through propaganda and occasional gestures such
as POW releases into the hands of visiting peace activists. If that led
Hanoi at times to overestimate the effectiveness of the antiwar
movement, the signs of fl agging public support for the war were readily
visible, as was the evidence of a growing wish among Democrats in
Congress to disengage from the confl ict. Further, the unilateral with-
drawal of American troops gave the North Vietnamese ever less reason
to agree to a corresponding drawdown of their soldiers in the South. As
Th o pointed out to Kissinger, if the United States could not win with
more than a half million troops in Vietnam, it could not hope to prevail
with fewer.
Th e Nixon administration also erred when it made the return of
American POWs a central U.S. negotiating demand. Th is was unnec-
essary, as prisoner return had always been a feature of postwar settle-
ments. Worse yet, Nixon and Kissinger discovered that they had turned
the POWs into bargaining chips that communist negotiators would use
to extract better terms. Th e public focused increasingly on the return of
POWs as a major condition for ending the confl ict honorably, so much
so that for many Americans the issue surpassed in importance the fate
of South Vietnam.
Patient to the point of ruthlessness, Th o and his Politburo colleagues
let the Nixon administration’s desire for a peace agreement mount until
the Americans made decisive concessions while offering far less in
exchange. Kissinger tried in March 1970 to establish mutual withdrawal
as a nonnegotiable American demand, only to have Th o dismiss the
possibility. Six months later the White House conceded: on October 7,
1970, the president stated in a national address that the United States
would accept a cease-fi re in place, which meant NVA soldiers would
remain in South Vietnam as the American forces departed. Kissinger