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

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.

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.