{"id":2114,"date":"2016-08-04T00:26:50","date_gmt":"2016-08-04T04:26:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/?p=2114"},"modified":"2016-09-05T21:24:42","modified_gmt":"2016-09-06T01:24:42","slug":"henry-kissinger-and-the-paris-peace-negotiations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/2016\/08\/04\/henry-kissinger-and-the-paris-peace-negotiations\/","title":{"rendered":"Henry Kissinger and the Paris Peace Negotiations"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Screen<\/a>\u201cHistory presents unambiguous alternatives only in the rarest of circumstances,\u201d writes Henry Kissinger in his memoir, Ending the Vietnam War<\/i>. \u201cMost of the time, statesmen must strike a balance between their values and their necessities or, to put it another way, they are obliged to approach their goals not in one leap but in stages, each by definition imperfect by absolute standards.\u201d<\/p>\n

Henry Kissinger, President Nixon\u2019s National Security Advisor, was the chief negotiator for the United States in its effort to end\u2014or at least, extricate itself from\u2014the Vietnam War. Between 1969 and 1973, Kissinger met several times with North Vietnam\u2019s Foreign Minister Xuan Thuy and Special Advisor Le Duc Tho in Paris in order to negotiate a peace agreement. Kissinger himself, and several scholars since, have portrayed this process as a careful balancing of \u201cvalues and necessities,\u201d resulting in an agreement that, though \u201cimperfect by absolute standards,\u201d was the best possibly attainable. In 1973, soon after the agreement was signed, Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.<\/p>\n

Yet the agreement was not only imperfect by \u201cabsolute standards;\u201d it was imperfect by the only standard that matters: it didn\u2019t work. The only thing it effectively ensured was the United States\u2019 troop withdrawal. The war in Vietnam continued for another two years, and the Government of South Vietnam\u2014after more than a decade of direct U.S. involvement, hundreds of billions of dollars, and over 200,000 U.S. casualties alone\u2014eventually fell.<\/p>\n

\"cvr9780743215329_9780743215329_hr\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Working with Professor Robert K. Brigham, the aim of my Ford project this summer was to study the Vietnam peace negotiations (and Kissinger, their leading character) in order to develop a more complete understanding of the defining motives, methods, and mistakes.<\/p>\n

I began the summer by reviewing the existing literature: Kissinger\u2019s own memoir (as aforementioned), as well as the Vietnamese account by Luu Van Loi and Nguyen Anh Vu, Le Duc Tho-Kissinger Negotiations in Paris<\/i>. I also read secondary texts such as Pierre Asselin\u2019s A Bitter Peace<\/i>; Larry Berman\u2019s No Peace, No Honor<\/i>; and Jeffrey Kimball\u2019s Nixon\u2019s Vietnam War. <\/i>Using these sources, I constructed a timeline of the negotiations and discovered several inconsistencies between Kissinger\u2019s account and the others\u2014suggesting that Kissinger has attempted to rewrite and revise the history, thereby casting himself in a more positive light.<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

At the end of June, Professor Brigham and I travelled to Yorba Linda, California, in order to research at the Nixon Library. In our week there, we found more material than we could\u2019ve imagined\u2014ranging from the State Department\u2019s Vietnam subject files, to National Security Council policy briefs and memoranda, to direct transcripts of the\u00a0 Kissinger\/Tho conversations and years\u2019 worth of transcripts from Kissinger\u2019s telephone calls\u2014much of it recently declassified.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re still sorting through all the\u00a0documents we collected\u2014but sometimes, it is just as important to recognize what isn\u2019t<\/i> there. My personal favorite research discovery was when I found a group of folders that outlined a plan of military escalation against North Vietnam (with the goal of forcing Hanoi to make concessions at the negotiating table). In between two folders that were overflowing with the details of the\u00a0bombing campaign was a folder titled \u201cLegality Considerations.\u201d The folder was empty.<\/p>\n

\"FullSizeRender-2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As we continue to read and analyze all this evidence, one thing is abundantly clear: Nixon and Kissinger were both more concerned with politics and public opinion than negotiating a rapid, legal, and truly reliable peace. In his memoir, Kissinger predicts future criticisms of his negotiating efforts, writing: \u201cIt is always possible to invoke that imperfection as an excuse to recoil before responsibilities or as a pretext to indict one\u2019s own society.\u201d In the wake of the Vietnam war, there exists a \u201ccredibility gap\u201d between U.S. policy makers and the public\u2014\u201cThat gap,\u201d Kissinger insists, \u201ccan be closed only by faith in America\u2019s purposes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kissinger asks us to ignore the result of the peace process, and simply trust<\/i> that the Nixon Administration\u2019s intentions, at least, were pure. My work this summer has only affirmed that (particularly when examining international relations) one should never be so naive\u2014and, more likely than not, the person making such a suggestion is the one with the most to hide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cHistory presents unambiguous alternatives only in the rarest of circumstances,\u201d writes Henry Kissinger in his memoir, Ending the Vietnam War. \u201cMost of the time, statesmen must strike a balance between their values and their necessities or, to put it another way, they are obliged to approach their goals not in one leap but in stages, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4970,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[77487],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ford-2016"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4970"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2114"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2171,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2114\/revisions\/2171"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/fordscholars\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}