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No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam

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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.

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.

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.

Larry Berman is the perfect person to expose President Richard Nixon's duplicity regarding his Vietnam War policy, wherein Nixon sought to promote a peace agreement he and Henry Kissinger both knew would accomplish nothing in thwarting North Vietnam's design to achieve a unified Vietnamese Communist nation. In the typical Nixon fashion, design was preeminent over ultimate reality as he heralded the agreement ending U.S. participation in the nation's most controversial war with the glorious phrase, "Peace With Honor."

"No Peace, No Honor" is the logical sequel to Larry Berman's earlier penetrating work, "Planning a Tragedy," which was a fascinating look inside the Johnson Administration and the mindset which brought about America's entry into the Vietnam conflict. Robert McNamara, despite his earlier assurances, proved to be a naive administrator, making mistake upon mistake in forcing America into an ever deepening hawkish posture. The wise counsel of State Department operative George Ball, who provided the beneficial hindsight input of French president Charles DeGaulle, whose country fought a war in Indo China between 1946 and 1954, was unfortunately spurned.

With Johnson gone and the Nixon Administration taking over in January of 1969, the scene is set for Berman's latest work. Taking advantage of recently declassified government documents, Berman presents a chaotic scene in which Nixon and Kissinger seek to find a way out of the Vietnam morass without conveying the impression that the U.S. was running out on an ally and leaving it vulnerably exposed to a successful Communist insurgency. Despite ferocious bombing, Nixon was ultimately confronted with a situation wherein public support for the war in America had reached its lowest level while his anticipated strategy of helping build Vietnam's fighting forces into a team formidable enough to hold off the insurgency from the North had notably failed. As a result, Nixon sought to convince Americans that the agreement he was able to achieve embodied "Peace With Honor" when Communist troops remained in place in the South, prepared to finish the job and achieve a unified Vietnam. Debate had persisted over the years over whether Nixon and Kissinger were aware of what ultimately would transpire, and that the agreement signed and put into place was nothing other than a facade meant to disguise an ultimate result of which they were well aware. The documents unearthed by Berman demonstrate an awareness of Nixon and Kissinger of the tragic nature of circumstances and the inevitability of a Communist triumph.

William Hare

This stunning, smart, scholarly and incisive book neatly unravels the clever pseudointellectual 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.

Much of what he did and planned were based on domestic political considerations and the fear of being seen as weak on communism. he looked Le Duc Tho eye to eye, and Nixon blinked. For this he never forgave himself, and he was willing to do anything, lie to anyone, dissemble, connive, and betray the American people just to win in Vietnam. 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. indeed, much of the documentary evidence related here shows his entire strategy of seeming withdrawal while simultaneously secretly escalating the air war tells volumes about the levels of deceit and cupidity the Nixon administration had toward the war in Vietnam.

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!

How can "A Peace With Honor" claimed by Henry Kissinger result from a divided nation with 58,000 casualties and an ally with over 2 million dead? The only honor is bestowed upon the men and women who fought for an honorable cause, one that aimed for a free and peaceful South Vietnam. Presidents Nixon and Thieu are dead and Le Duc Tho never accepted his Nobel Peace Prize. The only remaining key player from the 1973 Paris sell-out of South Vietnam is Henry Kissinger. But his true legacy will be locked up for many years in vaults. Thanks to Dr. Larry Berman for this insightful revelation into one of the darkest times in our political history. "Return the Nobel Without Honor" should have been the title for this book...a must read for all Americans.

This book, whose publication I had awaited with great anticipation, was a great disappointment. While the book is the product of prodigious research and is valuable for the new information and documents it contains, in spite of its veneer of objectivity in the end it is just another in a long line of political attacks clearly designed more to denounce Nixon and Kissinger for "crimes" and "atrocities" than to provide an objective historical record. I am no fan of Kissinger's, but this book forsakes logic in its accusations against him. The book is built around two fundamentally contradictory criticisms of Kissinger and Nixon: 1) that they betrayed South Vietnam and its President, Nguyen Van Thieu. 2) that Nixon and Kissinger viewed the peace agreement simply as a device to maintain support for Thieu, resume bombing after the treaty was signed, and continue the war indefinitely. It makes no sense to blast Nixon and Kissinger for conniving to keep Thieu in power AND for betraying him, for abandoning South Vietnam AND for planning to prolong the war indefinitely. Berman's attempt to argue both points simultaneously is confusing and schizophrenic, although that may be the reason his arguments make such eminent good sense to such illustrious minds as Daniel Ellsberg and Seymour Hersch, both of whom wrote laudatory blurbs on the book's back jacket. As for the publisher's claim that Berman had uncovered "..a serio-comic plan by the CIA to overthrow South Vietnam's President Thieu even as late as 1975," Berman provides only rumor, and even that is contradictory. Significantly, the endnotes for this section provide absolutely no supporting documentation for Berman's claims. The charge is simply untrue. One of Berman's primary sources for this book is "Le Duc Tho-Kissinger Negotiations in Paris," by Luu Van Loi and Nguyen Anh Vu, The Gioi Publishers, Hanoi,1996. This publication, an official North Vietnamese account which is available in Vietnam and in specialized libraries in the U.S., is a much more valuable source of information on the Paris peace negotiations than Berman's book. The two North Vietnamese authors, unlike Berman, make no attempt to conceal their political bias.

I found the book to be well written. It did shed a new light on Nixon's actions to get us out of VietNam. I had previously read his book titled "No More Veitnams" and this book made me lose a lot of respect for how the administration acted to make political points out of the war. In Nixon's book he cited the fact that congress had taken away his power to bomb the North as the reason that the war was lost after the military had won it on the ground. We don't seem very capable of negotiating in order to get out of wars that we no longer want to fight. This fiasco mirrors the long negotiations we went through in order to get out of the Korean war as well. I voted for Nixon because of his promise to get us out of Vietnam and never thaught that he would turn his back on the government in the South. As a Vietnam veteran, I was shocked by the revelations in this book.

Professor Berman's latest installment of his Vietnam War trilogy really is a tour de force. What I found particularly fascinating about the book was his research around the whole issue Vietnam Peace Talks and the 1968 election. Past books have suggested the following: A) Candidate Nixon's interference was fuzzy and therefore more rumor than fact; or B) Perhaps it was one of Nixon's surrogates speaking on their own behalf to Thieu and the South Vietnamese. However, Berman's book nails Nixon and Kissinger thoroughly to the wall.

The sad fact is the agreements hammered out in Paris in January of 1973 was roughly identical to what the Johnson Administration was offering to put on the table had peace talks broken out in October 1968. The only difference was by January 1973, the toll in Vietnam had risen to roughly 52,000 American dead. No peace, no honor, indeed.

Professor Berman has written a great book and it should be on the desks of every college student studying how presidential decision-making impacts the foreign arena.

Professor Berman's wonderful book continues his study of the presidency and the war in Vietnam. I have enjoyed his two prior books on the subject and his third effort is also quite good. While other scholars have written about the back channel efforts between Nixon and Thieu prior to the 1968 election, Berman's research is far more compelling than his contemporaries.

The deal hammered out in January of 1973 varied little from what Clark Clifford was willing to offer toward the end of 1968. The only difference is that another 20,000 Americans died while Nixon/Kissenger waited and stalled. That does not sound like "Peace with Honor" to me.

His trilogy of Vietnam should be on the desk of every student who studies presidential politics and policy.