No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam [Paperback]

Larry Berman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 6, 2002 | ISBN-10: 0743223497 | ISBN-13: 978-0743223492

In this carefully researched, authoritative and highly readable book, Larry Berman unravels for the first time the tawdry endgame in Vietnam. No Peace No Honor takes readers inside the negotiations that lead to the agreement Nixon famously called 'peace with honour' and reveals that the entire process was a sham. Through exhaustive, meticulous research, Larry Berman provides conclusive evidence that Kissenger crafted a deal he and Nixon expected and actually wanted North Vietnam to violate because it would allow them to continue the bombing with no threat of a congressional cut-off. Their secret plans to extend the war, he argues, were aborted only with the onset of the Watergate debacle. Tracing the step-by-step deception of both the South Vietnamese and the American public from initiatives that began as early as 1969, through the disgraceful peace agreement that cost the country it's honour, this extraordinary book is a benchmark in the literature of Vietnam.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Henry Kissinger shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 with North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho for brokering the peace treaty that ended American participation in the Vietnam War in January of that year. Le Duc Tho declined the prize. Berman's eye-opening book makes a strong case although he does not say so that Kissinger should have turned down the prize as well. Making perceptive use of a large cache of recently declassified American and Vietnamese documents, Berman (of the University of California's Washington, D.C., Center) paints a decidedly negative picture of Kissinger's motives and machinations during the four years he negotiated with the North Vietnamese. Kissinger, Berman writes, "was willing to tell one side one thing and the other the opposite, leaving them to sort things out later." Berman's pioneering research indicates also that President Richard Nixon claimed he achieved "peace with honor" while knowing full well that the terms he agreed to would lead eventually to a North Vietnamese military victory following America's withdrawal. Berman also shows that the North Vietnamese were far from blameless during the negotiating. Their leaders regularly deceived the American negotiators and never planned to live up to the peace terms they signed. Surprisingly, the one group of leaders that comes out relatively unscathed is the notoriously corrupt South Vietnamese regime headed by Nguyen Van Thieu, which wound up agreeing to peace terms dictated by North Vietnam and the United States terms that all but ordained South Vietnam's eventual fall to the Communists in April 1975. (Aug.)Forecast: With Christopher Hitchens's The Trial of Henry Kissinger and other books critical of the former secretary of state beginning to crowd the shelves, look for pundits to brandish this carefully argued monograph.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, who participated in the negotiations to end the Vietnam War, observed, "There are at least two words no one can use to characterize the outcome of that two-faced policy. One is 'peace.' The other is 'honor.' " Berman (Lyndon Johnson's War and Planning a Tragedy) confirms Zumwalt and two notable 1998 investigations of the Richard Nixon-Henry Kissinger Vietnam diplomacy: Jeffrey Kimball's Nixon's Vietnam War (LJ 11/1/98) and William Bundy's A Tangled Web (LJ 3/15/98). Berman skillfully navigates recently declassified records to show that Nixon never sought a peaceful solution to the war. Instead, the Paris Peace Treaty, which ended U.S. involvement in 1973 after five years of tortured negotiations between Kissinger and his North Vietnam counterpart Le Duc Tho, was so deliberately ambiguous that Nixon believed he would be able to return with U.S. air power to avoid being blamed for the loss of the war. South Vietnam's President Thieu is portrayed sympathetically as a dupe of Nixon who was forced to sign this "Jabberwocky Agreement," which ensured the downfall of South Vietnam in 1975 as certainly as Watergate destroyed Nixon's scheme to bomb his way to respectability. A worthy choice for academic and most public libraries. Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 334 pages
• Publisher: Touchstone (August 6, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743223497
• ISBN-13: 978-0743223492
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #171,625 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Wide Gap Between Spin and Private Calculations, August 2, 2001

By 

Donald Mitchell "Jesus Loves You!" (Thanks for Providing My Reviews over 110,000 Helpful Votes Globally) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam (Hardcover)

Few readers will fail to be moved by this book, in most cases seeing it as a vindication of their position about the Vietnam War. For hawks, the book makes a case for greater bombing by B-52s and being a stouter ally for South Vietnam. For doves, the book makes a case for lots of loss for little gain during the Johnson and Nixon years. For those who think the diplomacy was cynical, Dr. Kissinger looks quite slippery. For those who think we took the principled route, there was an opportunity to enforce the peace accords with massive bombing that Watergate eliminated.

The book's key strength is that it includes lots of previously classified notes of private meetings made by both the North Vietnamese and the American negotiators. Assembled into a chronological story of how the peace accords were reached, you see a reasonably coherent picture of what was going on in public and behind the scenes at the same time.

Anyone who cares to better understand the U.S. experience in Vietnam will find this book to add valuable understanding. The spin is separated from the reality. I think most people will be more than a little shocked to realize how wide the cynicism was that led people to work on public relations and politics at the expense of solving the problem, however you define it. Foreign governments were trying to influence American election results. The U.S. was trying to influence election results in South Vietnam. "Peace with honor" was proclaimed by President Nixon and Secretary Kissinger at a time when they did not expect peace, and felt that the honor still had to be earned by massive future bombing.

For the North Vietnamese, negotiations and politics were simply tools to help achieve the military victory. If talking could get a bombing pause, a reduction in American troops, or any other concession, that was great. But, they weren't going to give in on achieving the ultimate victory. To assume that they would is like assuming that the American North would have gotten tired of the Civil War and let the South go away at some point.

What the book makes painfully clear is that the United States treated the South Vietnamese government (which we often praised in public) as unimportant to American interests whenever a decision had to be made. When it came to the negotiations, the South Vietnamese were rarely consulted . . . and often not even informed until long after the fact. For example, it was pretty clear that unless the North Vietnamese troops were pulled out that South Vietnam would eventually lose. It appears that no one tried very hard to get them out. By 1970, the U.S. gave up on that key point in negotiations. Many years later, former president Nixon admitted this was a large blunder. Surely, he knew it at the time, as did the Secretary of State. The South Vietnamese leaders raised the point endlessly and accurately.

As interesting as this book is, I graded it down for reading too much into the details it describes. For instance, Dr. Kissinger is described as never telling any two parties the same story during the negotiations. In my experience in observing negotiators, that is not unusual in trying to bring people closer together when they are far apart. By seeing only his words, we don't know what was going on in his mind. There may have been perfectly valid strategies that could have worked, but didn't that are not revealed here. Also, the book argues that the administration felt that it could credibly rely on a large, long-term bombing campaign after the peace accords. That's pretty unlikely. In the last offensive on North Vietnam, the SAMs knocked down 15 B-52s. In any long-term bombing, every one of them would have been lost within months. I'm sure all the Americans understood that. Massive, long-term bombing with few losses was not an option.

The other reason I graded the book down is that is argues too much from a perspective of hindsight. Negotiations in 1954 had led to a relatively fine temporary solution in Vietnam. The Korean War had ground to a halt in much the same way. There were few reasons for the Nixon administration to assume that a similar deal could not be brokered again with the major powers. Most reasonable people would probably agree that it was worth at least two years of negotiations before getting the message that the end wasn't going to be pretty. Some people might have handed South Vietnam over to the North sooner, but they didn't have the chance so we don't know what would have happened if Senator McGovern had been elected. Clearly, most people in the American leadership misunderstood from the beginning what was going on with the North Vietnamese. That was always the real problem.

After you learn from reading this book, I suggest that you think about where else our foreign policy assumptions could be mistaken today. What does it mean to negotiate with our former foes and our former friends? Probably different things from what we think it means. Consider Japan. What are our national goals? It's hard to tell beyond opening up exports to Japan.

Get fully acquainted with the people you're negotiating with before deciding on what your objectives should be.

13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The title says it all, August 11, 2001

By 

J. Van Sant "vansaje" (Birmingham, Alabama United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam (Hardcover)

In 1973, soon after the Nobel Prize Committee announced that Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho had won the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts in bringing about the treaty that ended United States military involvement in Vietnam, former US Ambassador to Japan and Harvard history professor Edwin Reischauer said that the Nobel Committee had apparently changed the award to the "Nobel War Prize." Among other things, Professor Berman's latest book certainly demonstrates that no one deserved a peace prize for the Viet Nam War (what the Vietnamese call "the American War"). That Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon constantly engaged in duplicity with the South Vietnamese government and with the American people is not exactly news today. However, Berman's prodigious research demonstrates beyond all doubt that Kissinger and Nixon knew very well that whatever peace agreement they reached with the North Vietnamese government would be at best temporary, and would result in the collapse of the South Vietnamese government. Furthermore, Berman demonstrates that Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon were only interested in getting the US out of Viet Nam,and were not at all concerned with what would happen to the South Vietnamese people afterwards. "No Peace, No Honor" is an important and readable book on the last years of US involvement in the Viet Nam War, especially the behind-the-scenes negotiations that resulted in America's less than honorable exit from Viet Nam.

39 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Better books have been written on the topic., August 15, 2001

By 

[e-mail] (Edmonton, Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam (Hardcover)

The story that Larry Berman tells of Nixon-Kissinger diplomacy is a familiar and unpleasant one. Just before the 1968 election the Nixon campaign contacted President General Thieu of South Vietnam. In returning for Thieu opposing peace talks that had just started, and subsequently ruining Hubert Humphrey's election chances, Nixon and Kissinger promised him a better deal. Four years later Kissinger, while keeping Thieu largely in the dark, finally came up with an agreement in October 1972. The Americans would withdraw, American prisoners of war would be returned, the North Vietnamese army would allow to keep troops in the south, and instead of being the sole government of South Vietnam, Thieu would now have to share this with the National Liberation Front (NLF). Thieu was extremely upset about this and in order to appease his feelings the United States claimed, falsely, that the North was trying to seek major changes in the agreement. They bombed the North (the infamous "Christmas Bombings"), returned to the negotiating table, made token changes to the agreement, and falsely proclaimed "peace with honor" in January 1973.

Much of this has already been well known, and has been detailed by such writers as Gareth Porter, Seymour Hersh and most recently Jeffrey Kimball in Nixon's Vietnam War. Berman argues something new however. Nixon and Kissinger claimed that they had won a viable agreement which was undermined by Watergate. The collapse of presidential authority let a cowardly Congress ruin their farsighted policy and allow the North to win. By contrast, their many critics claim that Nixon and Kissinger had obtained nothing but a "decent interval," allowing them to extricate themselves knowing that the North would conquer them in a few years.

Berman, by contrast, argues that what Nixon and Kissinger really wanted was a peace agreement that they knew the North would violate. Once they did they could invoke American airpower aggressively and continually until the end of Nixon's term. The agreement was nothing but a sham, only a necessary stage in producing what would be a new Gulf of Tonkin resolution. I am skeptical about this argument. First off, it only really appears in the last 100 pages of the book. The statements that Berman cites from Nixon, Kissinger and Haig can be interpreted in a variety of ways. It could be self-delusion, especially on Nixon's part. It could be simple belligerence designed to buck up their south east Asian allies and their own anti-communist beliefs.

The second weakness with the argument arises from the deal itself. The United States had already conceded a Northern military presence in the South, the essential unity of the country, and some form of NLF presence in the government. Given these concessions it would be tricky to argue that the North had broken them and then get from Congress the blank cheque to attack them. Even more problematic was the fact that the United States and the South also violated the agreement. Thieu had no interest in any kind of national reconciliation, and Berman himself admits that the United States violated the agreement by transferring bases to the South. Berman also notes that neither Kissinger nor Thieu wished to free the thousands of political prisoners in the South. The key point is that if both Thieu and Nixon violated the agreement, they could not reasonably expect to mobilize Congressional support when the North did.

There are other weaknesses in Berman's book. The book is poorly annotated, which becomes increasingly irritating as one goes further into the books and where one wonders what the source of Berman's statements are. It is really appalling that publishers are allowed to show such contempt for endnotes and footnotes. Berman does have access to new documents, but there is a tendency to overquote them. This gives the book a "cut and paste" tendency. Most serious of all is Berman's treatment of the military situation and his attitude towards the Thieu regime. It is less South Vietnam, let alone Vietnam, but the Thieu regime who is viewed as betrayed. Berman's book insinuates that by withdrawing on these terms, Nixon and Kissinger doomed Thieu to inevitable conquest.

Thieu's defeat was probably inevitable, but not for the reasons that Berman suggests. He quotes the right wing critics of the deal, like Admirals Zumwalt and Moorer and Ambassador Negroponte. But he does not explain why Vietnamization failed to rebuild or reinforce the Southern Army. He does mention that the NLF rallied remarkably after the 1972 Easter Offensive (other scholars think they rallied even earlier) but he says little more about them. But as Arnold Isaacs pointed out in his invaluable Without Honor, the South Vietnamese Army always had enough arms to defend itself. Before the final offensive it had the third largest navy in the world and it had twice as many tanks as its enemies. As late as 1974 when already guerilla forces were weakening it, it outshot the enemy by a margin of 60 to 1. What the ARVN lacked of course, was an army with leaders who were honest or competent or courageous (anyone of these qualities would have worked) and an infantry who were willing to fight for their causes. For this failure Thieu was especially responsible, as were for that matter his disgruntled and belligerent countrymen.