News-Info-Alerts

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Re: Book Review - No Peace, No Honor

Date: August 09, 2001

"Out of the Past 'No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in
Vietnam' by Larry Berman

_____Online Extra: Chapter 1_____

• This feature allows you to read the first chapter of a new book. This week's selections are "Fire on the Beach" by David Wright and David Zoby, "No Peace, No Honor" by Larry Berman and "What You Owe Me" by Bebe Moore Campbell.

Reviewed by Stanley I. Kutler Sunday, July 29, 2001; Page BW05

NO PEACE, NO HONOR Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam By Larry Berman Free Press. 334 pp. $27.50

History is fast diminishing the reputations of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. The emerging documentary record is effectively challenging their extravagant claims of achievements. Nixon, like Winston Churchill, believed that for history to favor him he had to write the record himself. Both he and Kissinger certainly have tried, delivering extensive memoirs and self-serving books to enhance their reputations. Nixon fought desperately to keep his papers and tapes out of the hands and minds of historians; Kissinger deeded his papers to the Library of Congress, with very restricted access during his lifetime.

Larry Berman's No Peace, No Honor resurrects the agonizing, painful end of the Vietnam War. We negotiated the end -- our end -- and in a large sense abetted North Vietnam's ultimate victory, leading to unification of the country, a goal that the United States vigorously had contested with blood and treasure for more than two decades. Berman probes hitherto classified sources and documents, measures them against Nixon's and Kissinger's version of events, and demolishes their accounts as utterly lacking in credibility.

The American leaders lied to and abandoned their South Vietnam client, in the face of repeated assurances that they would not. When Gen. Thieu came to San Clemente to visit his alleged patrons in March 1973, John Negroponte, one of Kissinger's top aides, told him, "We really screwed you guys." Nixon devoted much of his post-Watergate writing to desperately trying to explain away what had happened. He even resorted to classic stab-in-the-back notions. He won the war; "Congress," he maintained, "destroyed our ability to enforce the Paris Agreement and left our allies vulnerable . . . . If it sounds like I'm blaming Congress, I am." Kissinger put a slightly different spin on things, claiming much for the Peace Accords but then complaining that the tragedy was "domestic," as the administration was "castrated" after Watergate.

Yet 20 years after the Accords, Nixon, the maestro of playing both sides of the street, sheepishly admitted that the "biggest flaw" was allowing the North to keep troops in the South. Nixon's lies engulfed him, brought him down, and linger to assail his historical record and reputation. Following the collapse of the South Vietnam government and the unification of Vietnam, President Gerald Ford said that "History must be the final judge of that which we have done or left undone . . . . Let us calmly await its verdict."

Berman carefully traces Nixon and Kissinger's lengthy negotiating efforts to end our Vietnam involvement. He has combed the enormous documentary record that both men left, including transcripts of the secret Paris meetings between Kissinger and North Vietnam's Le Duc Tho. His conclusion is devastating: Their efforts amounted to a "massive historical shell game called 'peace with honor.' " Building on his earlier Vietnam studies, as well as others', especially Jeffrey Kimball's Nixon's Vietnam War, Berman delivers a crippling blow to the exorbitant claims of the president and his foreign policy consigliere.

After the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973, Nixon characteristically baited his media critics. "We finally have achieved peace with honor. I know it gags some of you to write that phrase, but it is true." He instructed Kissinger to emphasize "the lonely & heroic image" of the president to Joseph Alsop, a friendly columnist. But Nixon's Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt -- certainly not the kind of critic Nixon anticipated -- later wrote: "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's evidence clearly gives the verdict to Zumwalt. Peace? The Accords provided for the total withdrawal of American troops, the return of the prisoners of war and the release of civilian political prisoners. But the agreement pointedly ignored the reality of North Vietnamese regulars remaining in the South, thereby signaling that the North could resume its war of unification without American interference.

Honor? The government of South Vietnam collapsed in short order; so much for Nixon's repeated, pious assurances that we would not abandon our ally. No decency, and not much of an interval.

Honor? Berman conclusively demonstrates that Nixon and Kissinger ultimately deceived the American people. They operated in secrecy, but Berman's unraveling of the record reveals their true intention to resume the war. Although they ignored the North's military presence in the South, they fully realized that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam planned to resume the war.

Nixon and Kissinger believed that the peace agreement provided "legal" authority to resume extensive bombing raids to maintain our South Vietnamese clients -- no matter what Congress thought, no matter what a large part of the nation (if not a majority) thought, no matter whether it would be effective. And then Nixon would not, as he often insisted, "lose" this war.

The common wisdom is that Watergate deterred Nixon from carrying out his clearly intended policy. But renewed bombing might have solidified antiwar sentiment in Congress. In any event, we ought to be worried that Nixon's penchant for secrecy almost carried the day. With his vast corps of PR-oriented White House staffers, he easily deluded the media and then the public into thinking that he indeed had secured peace with honor.

Throughout these negotiations, the administration subordinated policies, such as they were, to the politics of Richard Nixon's self-interest. Nixon established the tone, with his passion for secrecy, grand strategizing, petty jealousies and peevish behavior. Kissinger fit quite well in all this; it was a match made in heaven. Nixon and Kissinger believed that they could play either the Soviet or Chinese cards to bend the Vietnamese. The vaunted policy of "linkage" similarly proved powerless to resolve the Vietnam conflict. Had they paid attention to history, and particularly to the record of the previous 20 years, they might have gained an insight into how to treat their enemy. Nixon's "Vietnamization" policy -- whereby U.S. troops would gradually be supplanted by South Vietnamese soldiers -- clearly was a chimera throughout these negotiations.

Yet he clung to the illusion for more than two years, and more than 20,000 American soldiers lost their lives during his peace charade; several hundred thousand Vietnamese, North and South, perished as well. The years of peace negotiations brought increased casualties, more American POWs, more deterioration of the South Vietnamese government and Kissinger's tortuous dealings with Le Duc Tho, which achieved precious little.

So much effort went for such meager results, as Berman demonstrates. We are in his debt. Somehow, the Accords generated Nobel Prizes for Kissinger and Tho, an outcome that only confirms Voltaire's dictum that if we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities. Their work failed the basic test: It offered no peace; it offered only an appearance of peace accompanied by not-so secret plans to continue the war. Tho maneuvered for the day of renewed conflict and the eventual unification of Vietnam; removing the United States from Indochina offered the quickest, least costly way for him and his colleagues to gain their ends. Nixon and Kissinger sought to extricate the United States from that conflict, secure our POWs and then prepare for further war.

Some peace. Richard Nixon, that self-styled man of peace, resented his exclusion from the Nobel awards, an exclusion that probably spared him even further embarrassment. For whatever reason, Tho never accepted his award; Kissinger should have the grace to return his. "

Stanley I. Kutler is the author of "The Wars of Watergate" and editor of "The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War."."