Resignations from the U.S. war on Vietnam, to the U.S. war on Iraq, to the U.S. complicity in the Israeli genocide in Gaza

In the November 21, 2024, weekly newsletter of the Association of Diplomatic Studies and Training  (ADST), the editors included a 1995 oral history interview with William Watts, White House Staff Secretary for the National Security Council (NSC) during President Richard Nixon’s war on Vietnam. 

I had never read of his resignation over Nixon/Kissinger’s decision to invade/massacre Cambodia during the war with Vietnam. 

I was particularly struck by the concise language of Watts’s resignation, in contrast to my rather long, pedantic, but heartfelt, three pages of my resignation letter 21 years ago in March 2003 in opposition to the pending U.S. war on Iraq.  

Watts ends his oral interview with the story of his opposition to the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and being told by General Alexander Haig and Henry Kissinger that, despite his opposition, he would be the NSC staff coordinator for the operation. Upon hearing of the order that he would be the NSC staff coordinator, Watts then colorfully resigned:

“Al Haig told me, ‘You have had an order from your Commander-in-Chief and you can’t refuse.’ I looked at him and said, ‘F**k you, Al, I just have and I am resigning.’”

William Watts, Former White House Secretary for the National Security Council

The background to Watts’s decision to resign was that, a couple of days earlier, President Nixon and Henry Kissinger had already decided. Kissinger told Watts: “We are going into Cambodia, the decision has been made, using fixed-wing aircraft.”

Watts expanded further in his oral history:

“This is something I will always regret that I didn’t say, ‘Yes, but it is also ground troops.’ I didn’t say it, I wish I had. I know that Tony [Lake] knew it, but I don’t know who else knew that. This thing was really handled tightly.

At one point he asked what we thought and I did said [sic], ‘Henry, one thing is that we are going to go into Parrots Beak and Fish Hook [Vietnamese sanctuaries on the Vietnam-Cambodia border], we are going to flush them out of there and they are going to run all the way to Phnom Penh, and that is the end of Cambodia.’

That was Friday night. He called me Saturday night before I left and said, ‘We are meeting tomorrow at 4:30 Sunday afternoon and the President is going to name you as the staff coordinator for this operation.’ I had written a memorandum earlier to Nixon, through Kissinger, about the so-called October Option, ‘Operation Duck Hook,’ which was going to be a massive bombing of Haiphong and Hanoi, opposing it.

In the memo I said that if you go ahead with this, my prediction was that we were going to have massive rioting around the country. That the National Guard was going to be called out and that some students were going to be killed somewhere. My last sentence in that memo was saying that ‘You will have to be prepared to deal as brutally with domestic dissent as you are with the Vietnamese communists.’

Again, it was just read with RN and HK [Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger] initialed on it when it came back. No comment. So, I just sent it back saying, ‘Henry this is it, I said it all right there.’ The next thing I know these guys say I am the staff coordinator.”

Watts continued:

“I just came up out of my chair swinging, I was so damn mad.”

“So, I went home Saturday night and sat up a good bit of the night and went off that Sunday to the office to get ready for this meeting. I don’t think when I left the house I was sure what I was going to do. I went through the day preparing for the meeting and finally I said to myself that I won’t do it….

…At that point Haig then looked at me and used a line that not long afterwards he used with [Deputy Attorney General] Bill Ruckelshaus at the time of the ‘Saturday night massacre’ [when Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox was dismissed by Nixon and Ruckelshaus and Attorney General Elliot Richardson resigned in protest in October 1973], he said, ‘You have had an order from your Commander-in-Chief and you can’t refuse.’ I looked at him and said, ‘F**k you, Al, I just have and I am resigning.’…

…I left. I got home and walked up the walk to my house and my wife opened the door. She didn’t know for sure what I was going to do when I left that morning, and said, ‘You resigned, didn’t you?’ I said, ‘How do you know?’ She said, ‘You are smiling for the first time that I can remember.’

 So, that was the end of my government career….”

Resignations and Relief by No Longer Representing Policies with Which One Strongly Disagrees

I suspect the 13 persons who have resigned from the Biden administration in the past 13 months in opposition to U.S. complicity in the Israeli genocide of Gaza have felt a sigh of relief and a bit of a smile when each made her/his decision to resign over the policy he/she could not represent…and was now free to work on ending the U.S. role in the genocide from outside the government.

Thanks to everyone who has resigned over the U.S. war on Iraq, U.S. complicity in the Israeli genocide of Gaza and all other wars and disastrous policies of our government!!! 

And welcome to those who are in the midst of the decision-making process!

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