Nixon's Vietnam War [Hardcover]

Jeffrey Kimball (Author)

Book Description

Series: Modern War Studies | Publication Date: November 1998

The signing of the Paris Agreement in 1973 ended not only America's Vietnam War but also Richard Nixon's best laid plans. After years of secret negotiations, threats of massive bombing, and secret diplomacy designed to shatter strained Communist alliances, the president had to settle for a peace that fell far short of his original aims.

This is the first book to focus exclusively on Nixon's direction of the Vietnam War. Based on extensive interviews with principal players and original research in Vietnam, it goes behind the scenes in Washington and into the minds of America's leaders to provide the most complete and balanced analysis of Nixon's and Kissinger's complex and tortuous strategy and diplomacy.

Jeffrey Kimball has conducted exhaustive research into recently declassified files and has reexamined Nixon's and Kissinger's postwar writings to depict a hidden reality quite different from that previously presented. His absorbing tale traces Nixon's involvement with Vietnam back to 1953 with his advocacy of interventionist policies and demonstrates how the foreign policy lessons he learned before his election served as the basis for the goals he pursued in office. He describes Nixon's struggle to appease his hawkish supporters while making good on his campaign promise to end the war and how in the face of other foreign and domestic problems, Vietnam became the major preoccupation of his presidency.

Kimball explores Nixon's peculiar psychology and his curious relationship with Henry Kissinger to reveal how they influenced his pursuit of globalist goals in Vietnam. He reveals how the Nixon-Kissinger relationship worked--and how it almost fell apart. He also describes the keystone of Nixon's strategy--the "Madman Theory"--which he employed to make the Communist nations think he could be provoked into fits of irrationality that might lead him to use nuclear weapons.

Compellingly written and painstakingly researched, Nixon's Vietnam War combines grand synthesis with new information and revealing insights, including the perspectives of the Vietnamese and their Chinese and Soviet allies. As more is disclosed about the war, it will serve as an indispensable resource for understanding both that tragic conflict and the troubled mind of the leader who ultimately prolonged it.

This book is part of the Modern War Studies series.

Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews

A convincing, devastating deconstruction of Richard Nixons and Henry Kissinger's Vietnam War policies that attempts to explode the ``peace-with-honor'' myth. Nixon spent a great deal of time after his resignation as president making a case for his foreign policy achievements. So, too, has former national security adviser Henry Kissinger. In many books, articles, and speeches, they have argued that they performed heroically in the Vietnam War. They claim they spent four years battling the duplicitous North Vietnamese, our intransigent South Vietnamese allies, a weak-willed, liberal Congress, a biased press, and a self-servingif not communist-inspireddomestic antiwar movement to forge a peace with honor in January 1973. That peace, Nixon and Kissinger contend, was subverted by North Vietnamese treachery and Congress's failure to support South Vietnam after the American troop pullout. Kimball (History/Univ. of Miami) delves deeply into Nixons and Kissinger's interpretations of their decisions on Vietnam, compares them to many primary sources, and finds the Nixon and Kissinger arguments ``incomplete, disingenuous and self-serving.'' Kimball backs up his highly critical judgement in great detail in this heavily documented account, which concentrates on the diplomatic aspects of Nixons and Kissinger's Vietnam policies. Kimball also looks at both men's psychological makeupdescribing Nixon as ``antisocial, paranoid, narcissistic, [and] passive-aggressive''and concludes that Nixon's oft-proclaimed ``peace with honor'' was a myth manufactured by administration spin doctors. Nixon's plan to end the war, Kimball says, was far from the well-organized, ``proactive'' strategy that the late president claimed. Nixon and Kissinger's four years of war-making, in Kimballs view, ``unnecessarily prolonged the war, with all of the baneful consequences of death, destruction and division for Vietnam and America that this brought about.'' Kimball puts Nixon's and Kissinger's Vietnam War maneuverings under a microscope and discovers a malignant cancer on the presidency. (History Book Club selection) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From the Back Cover

"An enormously impressive work that lays bare the real Nixon and, along the way, reduces Nixon's version of the war to a legend of his own making. Will be the standard for understanding Richard Nixon and Vietnam-both central to our contemporary history."--Stanley Kutler, author of Abuse of Power and The Wars of Watergate

"A major accomplishment. Far and away the best study of Nixon's Vietnam policies we are likely to have for some time."--George Herring, author of America's Longest War and LBJ and Vietnam

"Kimball explains, as no historian has before, how Nixon and Kissinger conducted their complicated and devious Vietnam War diplomacy. Making brilliant use of new documentary sources and interviews from the American as well as the North Vietnamese side, he has made a singular contribution to our understanding of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and, even more important, to our understanding of that most fascinating of presidents, Richard M. Nixon."--Melvin Small, author of Johnson, Nixon, and the Doves

"An important contribution to our understanding of a tragic period in American politics and diplomacy."--Herbert S. Parmet, author of Richard Nixon and His America

"The most balanced and comprehensive study of the subject that we are likely to have for some time."--David Anderson, editor of Shadow on the White House: Presidents and the Vietnam War, 1945-1975

"A deeply necessary in-depth look at Nixon. Let us not soon forget."--Oliver Stone

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 496 pages
• Publisher: University Press of Kansas; 1ST edition (November 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0700609245
• ISBN-13: 978-0700609246
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,026,189 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Book, March 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Nixon's Vietnam War (Hardcover)

This much needed Nixon's Vietnam War by Jeffrey Kimball is not only an account of the decisions but also of the illusions which informed Americans foreign policy. One of the most important and distinctive features of this study appears in Chapter "Dragons of Myth and Mind". For far too long, the remarkable part that presidential and leadership personality play in American policy has nmot been of adequate attention. The conduct of the war under Nixon and Kissinger cannot really be understood without the extent to which Nixon's personality governed most of his decisions. He had an unbelievable and overbearing belief in the unrelenting use of military force. Nixons's belief in the capacity of unrelenting forces was such a personal obsession that it made a rational assessment of the situation impossible. Time and again he invokes what he and Kissenger themselves call the `Madman' theory of war.

The second virtue of this study is the evidence from the minutes of meetings and the deliberate exclusion of Cabinet opponents from meetings and from knowledge of military and diplomatic orders in their sphere of responsibility. In short, Kimball's well documented account explores two dimensions of American foreign policy that have long needed to be made known to the American public and understood by the American public for this terrible ordeal. One was that America's credibility was at stake in a war that was actually destroying our reputation. The other was the fact that Russia and China were bitter enemies, neither really stood to gain by a nationalist victory by Hanoi.

This excellelnt book is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the Vietnam War.

21 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Intriguing Examination Of Nixon's Conduct Of War In Vietnam!, March 24, 2001

By 

Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Nixon's Vietnam War (Hardcover)

This smart, incisive, and telling book neatly unzips the clever reconstruction that many neo-conservative authors have bought into regarding the conduct of the Vietnam War by the Nixon administration. While few of us would quarrel with the idea that Nixon accomplished much on the world scene, we still must protest the idea held by many that he was so severely hampered in his prosecution of the war by a combination of internal and external constraints that he was unable to execute the compassionate, intelligent, and objective policies toward southeast Asia that he and Henry Kissinger had so painstakingly devised. Rather, we learn here that his Vietnam policies were as full of the `sturm und drang' contradictions seen elsewhere in his administration. For Nixon, prosecution of the Vietnam War was just another case of "politics as usual", another opportunity to pit conservative against liberal, hawk against dove, for personal aggrandizement and short-term political gain.

Far from flying with the angels, both Nixon and Kissinger bloodied their hands by instituting policies that resulted a dramatic increase in both American and Vietnamese casualties, instituting policies that continued the escalation of the war and its extension to new areas such as Laos and Cambodia. Using the conflict in Vietnam as a key element to engage both the Soviet Union and Communist China, Nixon seemed to lose sight of the need to deal with the specific factors propelling the war even as he became increasingly engaged with it, thinking he could simply "bomb" the North Vietnamese into capitulating regardless of the mounting evidence to the contrary. At times his conduct of the war was not only irrational and extremely counter-productive, but also criminal and unnecessary, as with the incursions into Cambodia in 1970, which spurred an avalanche of student protest and increasing political resistance at home.

Nixon's presidency is a study in contrasts, a reflection of the internal contradictions propelling the President himself. Nixon is truly one of the most fascinating of our modern presidents, a remarkable amalgam of his genius, daring, and all-too human flaws, a man so haunted and tortured by his interior demons that he spent the balance of his post=presidency years attempting to reconstruct the truth about his conduct of the presidency and the war in Vietnam. Here is revealed a man so anxious to gain the presidency that he outrageously influenced the President of South Vietnam during the 1968 presidential campaign to disengage from an effort by sitting President Lyndon Johnson to end the war. How can we expect a man capable of such perverted motives to do "the right thing" to save life and treasure by bringing the war to an "honorable" conclusion?

Instead, we find the same irrational, pseduo-macho tendencies as led to the debacle of Watergate perpetrated onto the war in Vietnam, resulting in thousands of additional deaths and casualties. This is a wonderful book, one that lays bare the truth about the self-serving efforts by Nixon, Kissinger, and a number of over-eager neo-conservatives to reconstruct the truth about the conduct of the war in Vietnam in order to salve their structure of beliefs and also lay blame for the war at the doorsteps of sixties liberals. I found myself engaged and excited by the author's interesting approach, and was quite impressed by the interviews, documents, and research used to present the evidence included in the book. This is one I can heartily recommend, and enthusiastically give a full five star rating to. Enjoy!

6 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Balanced if marginal account, April 7, 2004

By 

Seth J. Frantzman (Jerusalem, Israel) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Nixon's Vietnam War (Modern War Studies) (Paperback)

This was an anticipated read. Here for the first time is an account of the Vietnam war fought by the Nixon administration. Nixon began his experience with Vietnam with more then 500,000 men in Vietnam, and he inherited the massive protests from the LBJ administration. Nixon's first reaction, since the Army had crushed the Vietnamese in the aftermath of Tet, was to break the will of the enemy. Nixon's instincts led him into the Christmas bombing in 72, the bombing of Hanoi, the intervention in Cambodia and the mining of Haiphong harbor. All these acts came just short of crippling N. Vietnam. And then, just as the war was about to be won Kissinger signed the Paris accords. Why? Because Nixon had promised `peace with honor'. Nixon had ended the draft, re-instituted the volunteer army and eventually brought all the Americans back home. But in the end he ensured the end of the freedom of S. Vietnam. This book tries to blacken the Nixon legacy further by showing that he needlessly prolonged the war and that he caused undue destruction of the North.

Yet the book has several gaps. First and foremost it is a political, not a military account, which is unfortunate for anyone interested in the facts on the ground and the truth behind the `Vietnamization' of the war. So we don't learn much about the competence or abilities of newly trained S. Vietnamese units nor do we learn about the successes of programs like Phoenix. Also missing is the truth behind the fact that the protestors were actually looked to by the North as inspiration to keep fighting. In the end this is a necessary addition to the scholarship on the Nixon period 1968-72, but lacks many points.

Seth J. Frantzman