He became Secretary of Defense during the Nixon Administration from 1969-1973. Laird was quoted as the “architect of Vietnamization”, a plan to bring our soldiers home.

I would like to say that I am delighted to have the opportunity to be with you today. I will be glad to answer any of your questions. As you know, I had an interest in Vietnam operations a long time before I was Secretary of Defense. I was very critical of the Johnson administration, as you probably know, and  I felt they had not prepared themselves for the long haul in Vietnam. They kept committing more and more and more. During the Eisenhower administration there were 371 troops, American troops. Kennedy increased that to 18,000. When I became Secretary of Defense at the end of the Johnson administration, there were 540,000 on the ground and 1,200,000 in the area in the Navy and Air Force in Thailand, in the area. So there were around 2,000,000 men and women committed to that war when I took over as Secretary of Defense. They had “Americanized” the war. They had taken it over and said: “No, you Vietnamese stay away, this is going to be our operation”. I was very critical of that and critical of Secretary McNamara, and as the ranking member of the Defense Appropriations Committee because I did not think that war should have been “Americanized”. So I started a new program of “Vietnamization”, every month turning over more of the responsibility to the Vietnamese with the idea in mind that when I finished my term, there would not be a single American combat troop in Vietnam and we prepared the Vietnamese to take over and handle it. At that particular time we were in the midst of the cold war. The Russians were supplying about two and half billion dollars of arms and ammunition either by railroad or by ship into the north of Vietnam and they were the main suppliers. That is why Johnson got in because he felt he had to fight the Russians but he did it the wrong way by “Americanizing” the operation completely and not depending on the Vietnamese to carry out their responsibilities. 

We prepared the Vietnamese to do that and in the Paris Peace Accord of January 1973, you will recall, that there was an agreement made that we would not supply anything but replacement arms and ammunition, replacement helicopters, replacement spare parts and the Russians agreed to the same thing. The only problem was the Russians kept up their flow of arms and ammunition. The Congress in 1975, however, turned down a request for $350 million dollars for spare parts and ammunition for the South Vietnamese forces. That broke the back of the South Vietnamese because there was nobody else who could supply arms and ammunition. We did not have Americans on the ground fighting but they needed the pledge that Kissinger made in January 1973 that they would get the replacement arms and ammunition broke the back of the South Vietnamese and there was no will to fight when they found out the Russians were continuing at the rate of about two billion dollars a year and the United States was not willing to put out anything. 

The Vietnamization program failed the day that vote was held in the Congress of the United States. I have been critical of Secretary Kissinger and I have been critical of Gerry Ford from time to time for not doing more to get a majority vote in the Congress of the United States at that time because we had made that commitment in Paris and we let it go down the drain.  

Now I will be glad to answer any of your questions but I wanted to give you a little background. When I became Secretary of Defense, there were three things I wanted to do. I wanted to get Americans out of Vietnam, I wanted to turn over the responsibility to South Vietnam, and I wanted to end the draft and establish an all volunteer force because the draft had been used by the United States military since 1939. Any time they needed additional people they could just put a draft call and that would put pressure for people to join the Marines, Navy, and the Air Force and the rest they took into the Army. The draft was very unfair and Johnson used it instead of the Guard and Reserve because he thought it would create too much of a political disturbance if we called up these various units from around the United States. It was really not fair to the people that served because people could get college deferments and everything else and these people that were called in to serve; I have the greatest respect and admiration for them. I cannot tell you of my love and affection goes for those people that served in Vietnam during that very difficult period. It was not an easy war and there were a lot of people deferred. I stopped college deferments when I became Secretary of Defense. I set up a lottery system so it would be fair and you would take a lottery number and then I did away with all of the draft and set up the volunteer service which is serving this country well and I think you will find that every secretary of defense since then has supported my position.

What were you critical of in prior administrations?
First, I felt that they were misleading the people on what the war cost. One of the speeches I made in the Congress when I was in the Congress and on the Defense Appropriations Committee. (By the way, Hillary Clinton helped me write that speech, she was interning in my Congressional office and this was before she met Bill Clinton.) It was a speech on how we were robbing from NATO and taking things from all over the world, from our military forces and diverting it to Vietnam and NATO was going down the drain and was not being properly funded. We had taken ten billion dollars worth of stuff to hide ten billion dollars worth of cost as far as the war was concerned and I thought the American people should be advised and told what the war was costing. Not only in human lives, that was the big loss, casualties, but there was also a hidden cost that they didn’t come to the Congress and tell them the cost. Hillary helped on that speech and she is very proud of it.

Did you agree with General Westmoreland’s strategy?
Well, I had some problems with General Westmoreland. General Westmoreland was not a great believer in Vietnamization. I called it “Vietnamization”, he was for giving more and more responsibility to the American forces during that period. As a matter of fact, when President Johnson left office, there was still a request for 200,000 more ground combat forces on the desk of the President and on Secretary Clark Clifford’s desk. That wasn’t the way to go. The American people were fed up with that war and you have to have public support if you are going to pursue any kind of a war successfully. Public support had gone down the drain at that particular time. President Nixon beat Hubert Humphrey in the election of 1968 based on the fact that he would do something about Vietnam. If Hubert Humphrey had broken with Lyndon Johnson and even given some indication of turning over more responsibility to the South Vietnamese, he would have been elected President of the United States cause that was a very close election and Nixon would never have been elected President if Humphrey would have shown some inclination to change the direction of that particular war. It was like the campaign when Ike first ran against Stevenson, you probably don’t remember this but you read about, I’m sure, and he said “I will go to Korea” and we are going to end that war in Korea and that elected Ike by a tremendous majority and Nixon said he had a plan. The Republican platform, which I wrote, said we will de-Americanize that war.

What was it like working for President Nixon?
I had known him for a long time. I was in Congress with him, as you know, and I traveled with him in his campaigns as I traveled with Eisenhower in the 1956 campaign and Nixon was running for vice-president at that time, and I traveled with President Eisenhower pointing out various members of Congress and Senators. My district chair was pretty good to me and they let me take some time off during those campaigns to work with the presidential campaign and I traveled with Nixon during the 1968 campaign on a part time basis, I would be on one week and another person on the next week. Nixon was a very bright and intelligent person. He would have been a great president if he wouldn’t have lied about the cover-up on the Watergate. He didn’t know about the break-in but he lied about the cover-up and when I found that out it was a great disappointment because he lied to me. I put that question to him before I went back over to the White House as his domestic counselor after I left him then. The Presidency of the United States is too important to lie to protect some friend. You shouldn’t lie anyway but if you lie you get deeper and deeper in it and he lied about the cover-up because he knew about the cover-up and the tapes finally proved it. I remember when I first learned about that it was from Fred Buzzard, who was general counsel, I brought him over to the White House. He was my general counsel at Defense and I brought him over to the White House with me and he came to me at the end of May of June and he told me that Nixon had lied. The tapes show that he was involved in the cover-up. That was a great mistake and one of my great disappointments in politics. I could not forgive him for that.

Regarding Vietnam, did you and Nixon agree or disagree on American policy?
We had disagreements. We had disagreements regarding a faster withdrawal at times, I was for the Cambodian bombing but I didn’t want it secret. He and the Secretary of State, Kissinger, insisted on keeping it secret and I thought it would be a terrible thing to do because full disclosure is always the best policy. I had twelve thousand men who knew about the bombing of Cambodia and I was all for taking out those sanctuaries because they were coming over and hitting our people and those sanctuaries in Cambodia were occupied territory of the North Vietnamese. I had no problem hitting them, not a bit, but I had a problem about keeping it secret and when that blew in the New York Times, I think I was right on that. It was a catastrophe as far as public opinion was concerned. Yes, I did have disagreements but you know, I had my chance to make my case and I told them in the White House the day it was authorized that I had twelve thousand people that knew about it, would know about it, and the operation from Guam and Thailand. With twelve thousand people knowing about something, you can’t keep it a secret.

Would you have done things differently?
Well, I felt that full disclosure was the best way to go. The Pentagon papers caused Kissinger to go up the wall and Rogers and President Nixon about those being released. I did not release them, they accused me of releasing them but I didn’t, but that had to do with four previous years and I wanted that information out about what had been happening during the four previous years. I was on a whole different plane because over at the Defense Department, when you are running that department over there and you have three million men in the military, men and women in the military and two million civilians employees, you have a big job, and I had to get the funds from the Congress and everything else for everything we wanted to do and it wasn’t just Vietnam. Vietnam wasn’t the most important but there were other areas of the world that were important, we had just gone through the 1967 war in the Middle East, we had men in Egypt, we had our NATO commitment at the time, we had 200,000 men in NATO at the time, we had 60,000 in Japan, we had 52,000 in Korea, there were other places where the Secretary of Defense also had to pay attention too.

Do you think Vietnam was a winnable war?
I think that it would have been a winnable war if you would have approached it properly back in 1962-63 but it was not a winnable war unless you gave the kind of support to the South Vietnamese so they could win the war. You can’t expect Americans to support that sort of an operation for that many years and they had not prepared the Vietnamese at all, we had started preparing the Vietnamese and then when the Congress pulled the plug on them, we didn’t have any more American combat forces when they pulled the plug.

In 1969 you went to Vietnam. Can you describe the event?
I think that February or March is when I drew up the Vietnamization program with General Abrams, Commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam. I went to all four corps areas to visit the troops and I went from the north down to the Riverine forces. The Riverine forces at that time were commanded by Admiral Zumwald down in IV corps and then I was with each corps commander and I spent a day or two with them.

How was morale at that time?
The morale always was much better than you would expect. You cannot fault that and that is why I disagree so much with McNamara’s book (In Retrospect). He wrote that book and he hasn’t got one good thing to say about a single soldier fighting in Vietnam. There are people who performed a dedicated service and they kept their morale up better than you can imagine. It was not a pleasant place to be. I agreed with Eisenhower and Eisenhower disciplined Nixon. Nixon came out as vice-president and said we should be sending troops in there and Ike said never, never get involved in a land war in Southeast Asia. Ike was so right, he was so right and Nixon had the rug cut out from under him because Nixon thought we should come in and support the French. Ike said that it was not the place to be.

Can you explain more about your trip?
I spent time and tried to seek out different young men and nurses and women in Saigon and tried to spend time individually with them by myself and tried to get a better understanding of the drug problem and the morale problem and I was interested in people. One of the speeches I gave was about people, not hardware, being the most important thing in the Department of Defense. You can have all the airplanes, all the tanks, all the weapons of war you want but the people are what are important. People behind the guns and running the tanks and the people in front of the aircraft, morale is so important.

Was there any certain person that you had a chance to meet that sticks out?
I met over five hundred of them. I could tell you all sorts of stories. The pictures that are on the wall have one that is hand painted. He painted this picture knowing that I was coming. Up in I corps they presented me with a Russian sub-machine gun and a Russian rifle and they were so proud. You can’t imagine how touching that is. It is tough when you are Secretary of Defense and you see those casualties coming in every day and I wanted to cut it back as fast as I could.

Your trip to Vietnam was to set up a program?
I also went to lay out a program that we would follow for the next four years. Abrams was my commander, as you know, and Creighton Abrams was one of the great commanders of our army. He was with Patton during World War II. Do you know Abrams’s history? He was a tank commander with Patton during World War II and he always found a way to do something. Westmoreland was in Washington at that time as Chief of Staff of the Army and he was always saying, you can’t do it. Abrams was always saying you can do it. That was the difference, he was a “can do” general.

He died three years after the war?
He died of cancer. There were a lot of great people over there. I remember a year and half later after the trip I went on and I was sitting there having dinner with Abrams and the commanders of each of the four corps areas and I was getting fed up with what was happening in Laos because the State Department was running that operation along with the CIA and we were putting in a lot of arms and ammunition to those forces up there but there was no accountability for what was going on. I looked down at the end of the table and there was Jack Vessy at that time he was a major general and I said we have to have a military man up there in Laos because this thing is getting out of hand. I asked Vessy if we could spare him to send him to Laos. That night we sent Vessy to Laos and he was there for two and a half years. He came back and later became chairman of the joint chiefs. Vessy and I traveled all over Russia when I went over to Italy for a national intelligence thing and Russia was where we were having trouble with an embassy and Reagan asked me to go and clear it up. I had asked Vessy to go with me and we traveled all over after that.

How did Johnson’s administration deal with the Tet offensive?
The situation regarding Tet was badly handled by Westmoreland and the military command. That was not a great defeat for the American forces, they performed very well over there. I just feel badly that the American troops did not get credit they should have gotten. The only thing I fault was that the Vietnamese depended almost exclusively on the US forces and that was my criticism all the time, you weren’t using the South Vietnamese forces. There weren’t many North Vietnamese in country. I think that public affairs in Tet was handled badly. That was all the more reason why we needed to have a new program and get the South Vietnamese up to speed.

What are your thoughts about the Hmong and the Secret War?
That is one reason why I sent Jack Vessy to handle that in Laos. The Hmong forces were very good fighters and they performed very well when they were given the proper arms and ammunition but you can’t expect the Hmong forces to be responsible for closing off the Ho Chi Minh trail. They weren’t in that league but they performed well and I have nothing but the greatest respect for the Hmong forces. I meet with them from time to time with their leaders. The Lao situation wasn’t handled very well if you want my honest opinion. They left Vessy’s predecessor up there for many years and it finally got turned around when Vessy arrived in 1970.

Can you explain why Cambodia and Laos were off limits?
The reason was that the State Department felt they were independent countries and that you could not invade them or cross their borders because of their independence and that they had not declared any position. They were supposed to be neutral. I did not think it was not right to hit the sanctuaries which were controlled by the North Vietnamese forces and the Viet Cong. I had a disagreement with the State Department over that because they were killing Americans by in and out raids. In March when I was there, I authorized Abrams to carry on and pursue the enemy. I called it “protective reaction” and it drove the State Department up the wall but I did not think it was right for our forces to chase the enemy and then stop after the enemy crossed the border. Those sanctuaries were responsible for a lot of American casualties. I did not support the secret bombing but I supported the bombing and the incursions into Laos. I hope you get the difference.

How long did your meeting with Abrams take to establish “Vietnamization”?
I convinced Abrams what we had to do with public opinion being what it was in the United States and we had to show progress in turning the responsibility to the South Vietnamese and the Americans couldn’t be there forever. You had to make arrangements to get this program going. Abrams, at first, wasn’t gung ho with doing this. I started out the conversation and told him what was going to be. He listened and from then on he was completely cooperative all the way. I didn’t have some team players in the Pentagon but I had a team player in Abrams. They would send back channels to him and Abrams always shared those back channels with me and I had them through a different source. As Secretary of Defense I had the National Security Agency and they reported to me and I put my man in there immediately. I put Admiral Geiler there and never before had anybody been promoted to four stars that had that job and I told him if he did a good job he would be leaving this place wearing four stars. If you do a bad job you will be out of there pretty darn fast. You have to deal that way and he did a great job and I was kept well informed on all channels. I never had a problem with any military or civilian person not keeping me informed with what they were doing. They might disagree with you, like General Westmoreland disagreed with me on the all-volunteer force, Tom Mohr, my chairman didn’t like it but he went along and publicly came along and supported it. I never got Westmoreland to support it 100% but I got General Chapland and five other chiefs on the joint staff to agree with me but it took a while to convince them that this was the way to go. The military thinks it is a lot cheaper to use the draft but the young men and women should be paid on a comparable basis with anybody else in our society.  They were not right now and now they are trying to get up to a level of fireman or policeman and my friend Les Aspin, as Secretary of Defense for nine months, one of the first things he did was try to do away with the retirement program for the military. After twenty years you couldn’t retire but they would be able to, they don’t have to, but he broke the contract and I told him that and I went to the Congress and fought that thing through and they changed it. As long as firemen and policemen have that the military has a far more dangerous job day in and day out. You can’t spend much time with your family. I met with pilots from Northwest and they all came from the military and they were all leaving the military. I asked them why, was it a question of pay? They said it wasn’t just pay but they had been deployed on carriers and in Europe and they didn’t see their families for ten months at a time. At Northwest they are home twenty two nights a month and they are getting paid more but they are home! The wives have an influence on this and you have to take that into consideration. If you use the draft to solve all your military manpower requirements it is not fair and its like a reverse taxation.

In Vietnam, did you notice any problems with whites and Afro-Americans?
From time to time there have been racial issues, there is no question about that. I did everything that I could to have a better understanding of those problems but I cannot say that I did not run into racial issues because I did from time to time. People living that close to each other can create friction but they got along much better than other sections of our society. I am proud of the way the Navy, Army, Air Force, and Marines handled the situation. I always traveled with a great fighter pilot, Chappie James was his name and I had him as one of my public affairs people and he ran our base in Libya and when I became Secretary of Defense I only had sixty days to close that base because Johnson had agreed to it and he had no plan. I called up Chappie and I told him I wanted everything out of Libya. He told me he couldn’t do that because the agreement said everything had to stay. I told him to fly at night and get everything out of there. Chappie was a large black man and he was a colonel, I made him a general, and he was something. He was a fighter pilot from Tuskegee and when he got back I told him he was going to work for me in my office in public affairs. He complained to me that he was a fighter pilot and no public affairs officer. I told him he had been a fighter pilot. From then on we were alright. One time I was at the Council of Churches in Chicago and they had a bunch of murders and there was a demonstration and I was there. My father was a minister and I turned up the microphone because the crowd was chanting and I told them that we will now hear from General James, I had just promoted him, and he will lead us in hymns. Chappie came up there and he was a big guy and he could sing those Negro spirituals and he quieted down the crowd at the Stevens Hotel and I will never forget when Chappie quieted them down.

Tell us your thoughts about the anti-war movement.
I had a son in the anti-war movement. He was a student at Eau Claire and he led the parade and we talked, almost every day. He was on the front page of the New York Times and I told him he had a perfect right to be against the war. I told him I understood completely but I had to do everything I can to terminate our involvement there. I told him I admired him for taking a position and the New York Times had a great editorial about how I handled my son and he later got married in the summer of 1969. He married a girl from Chetek, that’s where the wedding took place, and the whole family was there and they thought that there would be demonstrations but it was a very peaceful thing.

Did the anti-war demonstrations bother you?
Oh sure they bothered me. Nixon didn’t understand the people and the feeling that these young people had. I remember my niece coming into my office, she is now married to Jim Doyle, the attorney general, and she and Jim came to my office and they were there to demonstrate but I heard that they were there and I got in touch with them and had they come to my office. That didn’t bother me but it was good to hear them. I sent my people to listen to the demonstrators. I sent the Secretary of the Navy and others because I think it was good to hear them and if you hear them and let them know that you are interested and that they have a viewpoint that is all you have to do. They are going to demonstrate anyway.

How did you get American troops out of Vietnam?
First you had to set up a training program and you had the primary mission of the US forces to train the South Vietnamese. Train one platoon at a time and get that training program going. Then you had to equip them. That is what we did, train and draw down. Train and draw down. We probably could have drawn down a little faster but not much more. The first withdrawal I recommended was 50,000. That was at Midway and President Thieu was there and he was against any withdrawals. Kissinger was against any withdrawals and Rodgers was against any withdrawals and I was fighting for 50,000. They all said you can’t do that and I said you have to do it. You have to show movement. The President didn’t give me as much as I wanted, 25,000. That was the first withdrawal announced at Midway. The next withdrawal was announced at 90,000. We had to stage it as the South Vietnamese took over. They had not had any responsibility and they did not have the best leadership and you had to quietly get good people in responsible jobs in their military.

Do you think the South Vietnamese could have defeated the North?
I don’t think they would have defeated them but they would not have had to capitulate. There would have been a negotiated settlement between the South and the North, I am sure of that. There was no chance of negotiations with the North when they knew there would be no more support for the South Vietnamese forces. So in 1975 I understand what happened. The South Vietnamese that had really been gung ho wanted to come to the United States as fast as they could. They wanted to get out of there.

Discuss the Christmas bombing in 1972.
The reason for that was Henry Kissinger came back and briefed us that everything was at a standstill. There was no chance of negotiations and we had to do something rather dramatic. On that recommendation it was carried out and they came back to the peace table in early January. I have the pen on my desk that was used to sign the peace treaty.

Tell us about the peace treaty.
One of the most important things for me was assurances on the POWs. I spent regular time with all the wives. They had free access to my office and they were there. I took all the wives and the kids for the Thanksgiving football game with the Dallas Cowboys. I had them brought in from all over the country. I wanted to get publicity for the POW thing because the Johnson administration wanted everything kept secret on the POWs and Harriman, who was negotiating in Paris, even came to see me in January when I announced I was going public on the POW thing and he said that was a mistake. He felt the enemy would want too much for the POWs for their return. That was not my concern. I didn’t think they were being treated properly and the conditions coming out of the Red Cross through the letters in the mail because we had certain ways of reading the letters from the Air Force. They were well trained. That is why we had the Son Tay raid which I authorized. The prisoners had been removed and the Son Tay raid was a beautiful operation. We didn’t lose a single person but the prisoners had been removed. The letters we were getting had a fixed nine month delay. The letters were from the International Red Cross. Photo recon wasn’t much help as they kept things covered up. The prisoners were only let out at night. I wanted the prisoners as a part of the peace accord. Then it was negotiated that the line would be held and the bombing would stop. The South Vietnamese and the North Vietnamese would be responsible for the rest of the negotiations. The United States and the Russians would be removed and the Russians agreed that they would supply only replacement parts and ammunition. The US would do the same. All this was agreed to at Paris on January 31st. I was still Secretary of Defense at that time, I had not left because I didn’t want to stay but my deputy, Dave Packard, and they couldn’t get Elliot Richardson confirmed. It took a couple of months to get him confirmed. As soon as he was confirmed I left.

What was your reason for leaving?
I don’t think people should serve more than four years at that job. I had been critical of McNamara, I remember telling him after he had been there six years with his comments and I sat on a committee hearing the real stories. I told him one day that he needed a good vacation or a rest because the stories are always the same when you return. I told him no secretary should serve more than four years. When I made that statement I felt I had better honor it.

Did you see any of the propaganda coming out of North Vietnam?
We saw all the propaganda and we got everything.

What was on it?
We listened to the broadcasts. We taped all the propaganda that involved our people that came out of Hanoi. They used their names on a regular basis. We had pretty good coverage.

What kind of things did it say? I read John McCain’s book.
We got their [POW’s] letters which we decoded. We knew the P.O.W.S were being treated very harshly. John McCain, in his book, points out that as soon as I went public about their condition things got better. Things got better after the Hanoi raid. The Son Tay raid was a great morale booster for those POWs because they knew we cared about them. John McCain is an interesting person as you know. I served with John McCain’s grandfather in the Pacific and his grandfather was the first naval officer I ever saw in my life when he came to Marshfield. I appointed his father commander in chief of the Pacific and then John came to the House of Representatives. His father was a lobbyist for the Navy, he was the legislative representative for the Navy when he was a young commander and I was on the Defense Appropriations Committee and I had a schedule. I walked over to the committee with Rickover on Tuesdays and McCain walked with me on Wednesday. They would fill me up with questions. I was in the Longworth building and we would walk in the tunnel and they would bend my ear all the way. I knew his old man very well and I knew his mother and his aunt, they were twins you know. McCain’s mother and her sister were twins and they looked exactly alike. His father was home and I was staying with them and I asked how he could tell them apart. His comment was, “that’s their problem, not mine.” I told that to his son and he put it in his book.

How did McCain’s father handle his son’s imprisonment?
Very well. He handled it very well and they were threatening to do things to his son and we were getting that intelligence. McCain in his book points out that he didn’t get any special treatment because of who his father was. You didn’t realize the Marshfield connection with the McCain family. I saw the old man on an island and we didn’t get anything to drink on the ship but when we hit the island, we were allowed four cans of beer. They handed out the beer and he would come and have one and I would tell him about the streets of Marshfield. He remembered Marshfield he made out like he remembered the young kid that followed him.

Can you comment on Agent Orange?
I stopped Agent Orange. The thing that influenced me most was Admiral Zumwald who became chief of naval operations. I knew him before he reached that rank and I passed over a large number of other admirals to.