Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia

Eisenberg recounts the last phase of the U.S. war in Vietnam with new details and caustic moral clarity, based on declassified papers and transcripts of taped conversations between President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. When Nixon took office in 1969, the antiwar movement led by students and disaffected veterans had created the political imperative to find a way out of Vietnam. Eisenberg writes that Nixon and Kissinger “were prone to self-deception.” Their “Vietnamization” policy sought to cover the drawdown of U.S. troops by handing battle duties to a South Vietnamese army that was not willing to fight. They engineered diplomatic breakthroughs with Beijing and Moscow that produced important results but no substantial help in pressuring Hanoi to negotiate. Nixon ordered the bombing of civilians in North Vietnam and neighboring Cambodia and Laos to force concessions from Hanoi, but the resulting tweaks to the peace deal reached in Paris in 1973 did not change the situation on the ground. It was a fig-leaf agreement that foreseeably led to the fall of the feckless South Vietnamese regime just two years later. Peace was achieved, but not, as the administration claimed, “with honor.”